Gaetz Archives - The Automatic Earth

Brilliant!!! The best video@0rf ‼️👏👏👏
Watch Matt Orfalea Bitch Slap Those Who Said The Ukraine Invasion Was "Not About NATO"

The biggest threat in the world is NATO.

NATO exists to solve the problems created by NATO’s existence.

NATO is a military alliance that feeds on… pic.twitter.com/YQ3wtXjWxX

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) October 3, 2023

Ukr nazis

No Nazis in Ukraine they say?

To those who don’t believe Ukraine needed to be cleansed from Nazism.

Compilation of how embedded Nazism is in Ukraine. It’s shocking and horrifying. pic.twitter.com/85UsuV4upA

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) October 2, 2023

Gaetz

Matt Gaetz is an absolute FIREBRAND🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/KkneHv5uaA

— Eric Spracklen🇺🇸 (@EricSpracklen) October 3, 2023

De Gaulle grandson

The grandson of former French president Charles de Gaulle:
"If Russia loses, the world loses"

Which means that America's victory would entail some dark days for everyone.
The economic independence of Europe will be the first victim of the foreign policy of Washington.

This is… pic.twitter.com/lYJ8uWwZUu

— Richard (@ricwe123) October 3, 2023

“That would put him in the solid category of a real Democrat—half a century ago. Times have changed, and dramatically so.”

• RFK Can Become President as an Independent (Jeffrey Tucker)

As predicted two weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears ready to declare as an independent for president. Already polling at 20 percent nationwide, he will announce that he’s severing ties with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). This is because the DNC has set up impossible roadblocks to victory within the party apparatus and the primary process. The Biden administration is denying him Secret Service protection despite apparent attempts on his life. Of all figures in public life today, Mr. Kennedy has the strongest claim to the legacies of his father and uncle, ideologically and culturally. That would put him in the solid category of a real Democrat—half a century ago. Times have changed, and dramatically so.

He started off this campaign with the belief that he would help guide his family’s party back to a principled commitment to the common good. But he has discovered that this isn’t what the party is about anymore, at least not according to the masters at the top. This is a man who believes that America isn’t lost, not foundationally corrupt, not a complete goner. He looks around at the people in this nation and sees goodness, a love of country, a desire for freedom, and a strong devotion to making things right. Conventional American politics, however, seems designed to block real solutions. Because he still wants to make a difference—one senses that he believes it’s his destiny—he will continue his run for president as an independent.

[..] Few people really want to see a Biden/Trump rematch, and those who do are motivated by a burning passion to reverse or reinforce the 2020 election, the results of which are widely disputed thanks to President Trump’s aggressive protests against irregularities. Let’s just say that this constitutes about one-third of the electorate. What about everyone else who would like to see something like normalcy return to this country without the incredible corruption that has invaded our public lives? Mr. Kennedy makes a credible claim that he has the knowledge and ability to begin to clean up the system in Washington, precisely because he has been litigating against it for many years. What else does he have going for him? There’s an authenticity to his language and approach that no other candidate can match. He’s obviously not a professional politician.

He speaks and sounds more like the best professor you ever had, with an incredible and ever-present command of facts and information about a huge range of subjects. His recall seems at times to be photographic concerning names, dates, data, and anecdotes. His speeches often seem more like teaching seminars. In a strange way, we need that now. Regardless of what you think about his views on this topic or that, everyone has to admit that he has an amazing command of all the issues, whether health policy, foreign policy, censorship, or environmental problems. In a startling way, when he doesn’t know something, he outright admits it and seeks out experts to help him. What’s especially beautiful about Mr. Kennedy is his absolute refusal to censor himself. He believes that the CIA was involved in the killing of his uncle and says that, bringing the receipts.

He believes that the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are deeply corrupt, sacrificing American liberty and health in the pay of the legally privileged pharmaceutical industry, and he says that, too. He looks around the country and sees a government/corporate cartel crushing the interests of small businesses, farmers, and the middle class generally, and he says that, too. Most striking of all, none of these points are politically strategic, much less put together by consultants with focus groups. They come from his own mind and heart. He has ruminated on them for many years. Running for president is just his chance to reach a larger audience with a message that’s his alone.

Next: Gaetz, Scalise, Trump?!

Trump is a nice option, but he’ll be in court much of the time.

• US House Removes McCarthy From Speakership in Historic Vote (Sp.)

Over the weekend, Congress narrowly passed a continuing resolution funding the government for another 45 days, to give more time to debate a series of spending bills that form the 2024 budget. After a vote of 216 to 210, the US House of Representatives on Tuesday removed US Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House. It was the first time the lower chamber voted on vacating the speaker’s office in 113 years and the first time it has ever succeeded. The decision came after an earlier motion to table the vote failed, with 11 Republicans voting with Democrats against the motion and allowing it to proceed. “It’s to the benefit of this country that we have a better speaker than Kevin McCarthy,” said US Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who called the vote against McCarthy. “The reason he went down today is because no one trusts him.”

Gaetz said the California representative “is a feature of the swamp … we are breaking the fever now and we should elect a speaker that is better.” Shortly after the motion cleared the congressional chamber, Republican held a closed-door meeting to discuss next steps, specifically who would be put forward to permanently fill the position. At present, it’s temporarily filled by US Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC). McCarthy has since detailed that he will not be making another bid for the speakership. “I will not run for speaker again, I’ll have the conference pick somebody else,” McCarthy said Tuesday evening. “I wouldn’t change a thing.” The former speaker added the country is too great for the small visions of the eight Republicans who voted alongside Democrats to oust him from his post. Moreover, McCarthy said he will look into whether he will remain in Congress.

Matt Gaetz on fire:

"If this country's going down, and if we're losing the dollar, I'm going down fighting. And I don't care if that means fighting Republicans, Democrats, the Uniparty, the leadership, the PACs, the lobbyists. I've had it." pic.twitter.com/Y4HqH2OLQ3

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) October 3, 2023

US President Joe Biden has weighed in on the latest developments and urged the House chamber to immediately elect a new speaker. Democrats are expected to hold a meeting at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday to address the McCarthy fallout. Gaetz has suggested US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) would make a better speaker than McCarthy. The Florida lawmaker is a member of a small GOP faction that has used the party’s slim House majority to push its own agenda on McCarthy. The faction, which is closely aligned with the Freedom Caucus and former US President Donald Trump, allowed McCarthy to become speaker in January only after extracting a series of agreements on policies, such as a willingness to engage in brinksmanship regarding budget cuts.

Even then, McCarthy only became speaker after 15 rounds of voting, with several members of the faction ultimately only agreeing to vote “present” during the vote instead of against the California lawmaker. After McCarthy spent months refusing to raise the debt ceiling in an attempt to force Democrats into agreeing to steep budget cuts – a key demand of the Freedom Caucus – the speaker then agreed to cut a deal with Democrats in late May that provided for some limitations on the forthcoming budget, but well below what hard-liners had demanded. Gaetz and his coterie saw this as a betrayal and the threat to oust McCarthy has hung over the House chamber for months.

McCarthy’s fate was ultimately sealed after he blinked a second time in the showdown with Democrats over the fiscal 2024 budget this past weekend. Without a budget, the federal government would have shut down many of its non-essential functions until new funding could be passed. Republicans made clear they saw this as an acceptable outcome if it meant pressuring the Democrats into large budget cuts, but McCarthy again cut a deal with Democrats at the last minute to pass a 45-day funding extension, giving lawmakers more time to debate the budget without facing a shutdown.

Trump speaker

President Trump is reportedly fielding calls to temporarily become the next Speaker of the House.

Hannity: "I have been told that Trump might be open to helping the Republican party at least in the short term if necessary." pic.twitter.com/bggbesTjFk

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) October 4, 2023

“Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison [sic] R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!”

• Trump Hit With Gag Order After ‘Disparaging’ Attacks Against Court Clerk (Sp.)

The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York issued a limited gag order for the former president and other parties involved in the case, barring them from publicly speaking about his staff. The order came after Trump’s Truth Social account posted about the judge’s principal court while he sat feet from her in court. Judge Arthur Engoron did not mention Trump by name while issuing the order, saying instead that “one of the defendants” posted a “disparaging, untrue and personally identifying post” about his staff. The judge ordered the post deleted, but by that time it had already been shared across the internet. “Personal attacks on members of my court staff are not appropriate and I will not tolerate it under any circumstances,” Engoron said, adding that he warned counsel about the issue previously.

During the trial, Trump’s Truth Social account posted a picture of the clerk, Allison Greenfield, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison [sic] R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” the now-deleted post read, which also shared a link to one of Greenfield’s social media accounts. The photo showed Schumer and Greenfield smiling while standing next to each other. Schumer’s arm can be seen high on Greenfield’s shoulder and the two do not seem to be in any kind of embrace. The image has been likened to photos people take with celebrities or politicians. Screenshots of the post include a comment by Greenfield saying it was taken at a brunch event for the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club Founders. Greenfield also took a photo with US Rep.Carolyn Maloney (D-NC) at that event.

There have been no credible accusations that Greenfield and Schumer have an inappropriate relationship or any relationship at all. Schumer has been married since 1980. Trump was apparently sharing an accusation made by a conservative account on X (formerly Twitter) that started posting about Greenfield shortly before the trial began. The same account previously accused Engoron of drinking on the job. It is not clear if the account, which has less than 500 followers, is satirical in nature. It purports to be “applying the 69th Amendment to the internet.”

“Hunter Biden’s massive spending and addictions would have been a draw for intelligence services..”

• New Messages to Hunter Deepen Concerns Over Chinese Influence (Turley)

Messages from longtime Biden associate Fran Person show the Chinese stepping in to support Hunter’s lavish lifestyle as funds dried up during his divorce. Person wrote Hunter that Chinese businessman Bo Zhang “will help you with what you need.” Fran Person was not just a close aide to Joe Biden for years, but someone that the First Lady Jill Biden described as a member of the family: “Fran has been like a son to Joe and me. For eight years, we traveled the country, shared holidays together … Fran may be leaving the office, but he will always be a part of our family.” Fran left the staff of Joe Biden and went to work with Chinese figures . . . and Hunter. In a July 2017 WhatsApp message, Person told Hunter that Zhang was aware that he was in financial distress during his divorce and would cover his costs.

Hunter sounds desperate for the Chinese support as he gushes money to fund his lavish lifestyle: “100K at least gets me until next month.” Person assures him that Zhang has his back: “He will help you with what you need.” Fox News Digital reported on Person’s messages. They include this assurance: “I talked to Bo previously about the 37K – he didn’t flinch. I will talk to him about 56K and possibly 100K. It really depends on his liquid assets in the US…I will ask. His only problem is getting large sums out of China (especially right now).” Hunter appears in distress and presses Person if he knew whether anything was wired or if they were in a “holding pattern.” Person responds “No holding pattern…he was on his way to the bank this morning. He will be in touch when it’s confirmed.”

“He will help you with what you need. He also mentioned that you should take a trip to China some time this month to just get away for a week or so…just decompress.” Hunter later schedules the trip. The concern is that Hunter was receiving money from figures closely associated with foreign governments and foreign intelligence agencies, including the CCP. These operatives often look for people who are in desperate situations to exercise influence over them. Hunter Biden’s massive spending and addictions would have been a draw for intelligence services. He offered an obvious entry into potential influence or access with regard to Joe Biden. At one point, Hunter offers in July 2017 to have Zhang at his father’s McLean home after Joe Biden left the vice presidency.

Zhang met repeatedly with Hunter Biden, Person, and Eric Schwerin. Person’s message shows him showering Hunter with praise and promises of Chinese funds. In one message, Person told Hunter that he “selfishly want[s] to work” with him “because I know what the hell your capable of, AND I want to learn from you. I’m putting myself out there right now, and I’m learning quickly. But I’d love to be there with you doing some of this stuff. I mention the 500K on 10M raise be I’m about to get started on that, and I could really use your help. We could knock it out together. I’d think that’d help take some bite out, and you wouldn’t feel like your ‘resorting’ to anything…I’ve got one loyalty brother. That’s to my family. Your family.”

Person is obviously going to be busy during this impeachment inquiry. Despite President Biden’s repeated denials that anyone in his family received any money from China, The Washington Post and other media outlets have found those denials to be false. Indeed, at least two transfers of funds to Hunter Biden in 2019 from a Chinese source listed the President’s home in Delaware where Hunter sometimes lived and conducted business. The latest messages reveal how Hunter Biden’s personal and financial distress may have been viewed as an opportunity for foreign interests. Hunter suggests that he was existing month to month on such payments. The question is what he did in return for such foreign generosity in what is clearly an influencing peddling operation.

“..whittle down the squads to three or four men to prevent larger formations from forming that might actually rebel..”

• Ukraine Forbids Troops To Group Together Fearing Mutiny – Macgregor (TASS)

The leadership of the Ukrainian armed forces does not allow its servicemen to gather in large groups for fear of a large-scale rebellion, retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former adviser to the Defense Secretary of Defense under former US President Donald Trump, said.”They (the Ukrainian military leadership – TASS) whittle down the squads to three or four men to prevent larger formations from forming that might actually rebel,” Macgregor said on the air of the YouTube channel Judging Freedom. He pointed out that distrust pervaded a military that sees its leadership send them to their deaths. “It’s a terrible condition. The people (the Ukrainian servicemen – TASS) are simply being fed systematically into the so-called meat grinder. <…> I would expect that to continue and even worsen in time,” the colonel added.

Earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Seymour Hersh said that Ukrainian troops had suffered enormous losses during the counteroffensive and were effectively forced to call it off. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian army has been making unsuccessful attempts to launch a counteroffensive since June 4. On September 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Ukrainian armed forces had lost 71,500 servicemen, 543 tanks and almost 18,000 armored vehicles of various classes. The head of state stressed that the Ukrainian counteroffensive yielded no results.

“..the “big elephant in the room” in Europe is the concern that Washington could abandon Ukraine..”

• No Arms Left For Ukraine In Europe – Politico (RT)

EU countries have given Ukraine all the arms they can without compromising their own defense, Politico has reported, citing a European official. Kiev is facing cuts to both arms supplies and cash injections as “cracks appear”in Western support, according to the outlet. “We cannot keep on giving from our own stockpiles,” the European source said as quoted on Monday. There may still be robust political support, but “we’ve given everything that will not endanger our own security.” The comment was made to Politico as part of its coverage of last week’s International Industries Defense Forum in Kiev, during which the hosts went on a “charm offensive directed at weapons-makers,” as explained in the report. In a separate story on Tuesday, the outlet said that support for funding the Ukrainian government was “showing more cracks than ever.”

The failure of the US Congress last week to allocate aid money in its stopgap budget, the election victory of former Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who vowed to stop assistance to Ukraine on the campaign trail, and Kiev’s ongoing diplomatic row with Poland all send “a chilling message.” The Ukrainian government expects to receive at least $42.8 billion from international donors next year, as outlined in its projected budget. An expected fight over the EU’s joint budget means that “no one dares to predict anything” at this point, a diplomatic source told the news outlet. Another diplomat said the “big elephant in the room” in Europe is the concern that Washington could abandon Ukraine. The event in Kiev was part of its effort to ramp up domestic military production. Germany’s Rheinmetall and the UK-based BAE have made some commitments to open production facilities in Ukraine.

Kiev’s goal is to become “an Israel in Europe – self-sufficient but with help from other countries,” Daniel Vajdich, a Washington-based advocate for Ukraine, told Politico. President Vladimir Zelensky floated the idea of paying for the proposed build-up with “confiscated Russian assets” when he spoke at the forum. Prime Minister Denis Shmygal indicated that the proposed plants would not be safe. He said 37 of Ukraine’s own facilities have been damaged by Russian strikes. Russian officials have stressed that foreign-funded arms manufacturing sites in Ukraine would be treated as legitimate military targets. Denis Pushilin, the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, reiterated the policy during an interview on Monday.

“..other countries do not understand why Europe “has made this conflict global” and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies..”

• EU Incites Ukrainian Conflict and Stigmatizes Peace Talks – Hungary FM (Sp.)

The world outside Europe does not share its position on the Ukraine conflict and does not understand European double standards applied to conflicts in other parts of the planet, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said. “I can say that the world outside Europe is already really looking forward to the end of this war, because they do not understand many things. They do not understand, for example, how it can be that when a war is not in Europe, the European Union, looking down with fantastic moral superiority, calls on the parties to peace, advocates negotiations and an immediate end to violence. However, when there is a war in Europe, the European Union incites the conflict and supplies weapons, and anyone who talks about peace is immediately stigmatized,” Szijjarto said in an interview on Monday. He also said that other countries do not understand why Europe “has made this conflict global” and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies.

Szijjarto added that Hungary’s position on the issue is treated with “great respect” outside the EU, which he was witnessing more than once during the UN General Assembly. Hungary has consistently opposed sanctions on Russian energy resources and sending weapons to Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The Hungarian parliament issued a decree banning the supply of weapons to Ukraine from the country’s territory. Szijjarto explained that Budapest seeks to secure the western Ukrainian region of Zakarpatye, where ethnic Hungarians live, since the supply of weapons through its territory would become a military target for Russia. The country’s leadership has repeatedly emphasized that Hungary stands for the earliest possible start of peace negotiations.

“..so that EU aid to Ukraine doesn’t get blocked at a crucial moment that Washington funding is drying up..”

• EU Wants To Pay Hungary €13BN So Orban Doesn’t Veto Ukraine Aid (ZH)

“The European Commission is preparing to unfreeze around €13 billion in funds for Hungary to try to avoid Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vetoing EU aid for Ukraine, in a move likely to draw criticism from the European Parliament,” Politico reports Tuesday. “The Commission needs the unanimous backing of the bloc’s 27 countries for an update to the EU’s long-term budget, which includes a €50 billion funding pot for Ukraine,” the report adds. Akin to what’s currently going down in Washington with a group of Republicans holding up Ukraine funding, Brussels may soon have its own Ukraine aid blockage problem. EU aid for Kiev which was previously approved runs out in December, hence the urgency for EU leadership in wanting to push through a new package.

A week ago, Orbán gave a speech declaring Hungary will no longer support Ukraine in any way unless certain significant policies are changed both in Kiev and in the European Union. He stressed in the words given before parliament that “Hungary is doing everything for peace” but that “unfortunately the Russian-Ukrainian war continues, tens of thousands of people are victims.” Thus, he continued, “Diplomats must take control back from the hands of the soldiers, otherwise it will be in vain for women to wait for their sons and fathers and husbands to come home.” The Hungarian leader has stood against ratcheting Western sanctions on Moscow, instead choosing to maintain a generally positive diplomatic relationship with the Kremlin. He also a week ago charged that Kiev and its backers have cheated Budapest by “Ukrainian grain dumping” into his country.

He had also laid out, per The Hill: … that he was protesting a 2017 law in Ukraine that limits ethnic Hungarians from speaking their own language, particularly in schools and said Hungary would not support Ukraine on international issues “until the previous laws are restored. Needless to say EU officials are panicking, and are readying a lucrative quid pro quo with Hungary (based on freeing frozen funds related to the prior years’ so-called “rule of law” punitive measures”), so that EU aid to Ukraine doesn’t get blocked at a crucial moment that Washington funding is drying up.

“Ukraine will eventually have to restore its dangerously depleted demographic numbers if it hopes to survive in some form..”

• UK Advises Zelensky to Enlist Young Ukrainian Recruits (Bridge)

On the same day that the party of pro-Russian populist Robert Fico emerged victorious in Slovakia’s parliamentary election, potentially destabilizing European unity for Ukraine, Ben Wallace, the former UK Secretary of State for Defence, penned a zinger of an opinion piece in The Telegram where he argues without a hint of irony that “Ukraine’s counteroffensive is succeeding.” “Whisper it if you need. Dare to think it. But champion it you must. Ukraine’s counteroffensive is succeeding. Slowly but surely, the Ukrainian armed forces are breaking through the Russian lines. Sometimes yard by yard, sometimes village by village, Ukraine has the momentum and is pressing forward.” There’s just one problem with Wallace’s hyperbolic pep talk – it’s absolute malarkey, yet so many people are lapping up the war propaganda and asking for seconds.

Across the line of conflict, the Ukrainians have spent the last four months of their counteroffensive taking one step forward and two steps back in the face of an impenetrable, multilayered Russian defense line, complete with mines, artillery and almost total air superiority. When the Ukrainian forces have succeeded in seizing a village or plot of land – increasingly on foot, as they no longer trust their lives inside the deathtraps of armored vehicles – it almost always turns out to be a self-defeating Pyrrhic victory. Since June, the Ukrainians have lost an estimated 81,000 troops in their efforts to seize Russian acquired territories in the Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kherson regions. At the same time, over 10,000 Ukrainian fighters have surrendered since summer using a special radio frequency set up by the Russian forces. Needless to say, Kiev’s stated goal of ultimately cutting off Russian forces from the land bridge connecting to the Crimean peninsula has thus far proven illusory.

And this is where Wallace’s message to the Ukrainian people takes on a very dark and even sinister tone. While imploring Ukraine to “play its part,” as if it has been sitting on its laurels all this time, the former defense minister lectured Kiev about its mobilization, particularly its lack of young blood. “The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40. I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilising the whole country by stealth. (In fact, there is nothing “stealth” about Russia’s recruitment efforts, as it’s widely known that 300,000 Russians have volunteered for military service since the start of the special military operation in February 2022).”

It is the absolute height of arrogance and cynicism for one country to entreaty another on behalf of a lower military recruitment age, especially when the primary purpose does not seem connected to securing victory, but for sustaining a steady flow of profits for the Western arms manufacturers. After all, no soldiers, no need for expensive weapons systems. And lest we forget, millions of young Ukrainians have already fled their country, never to return. Yet Ukraine will eventually have to restore its dangerously depleted demographic numbers if it hopes to survive in some form, a fact that has conveniently escaped Wallace’s attention.

“..healthcare networks in Europe now consider prior hospitalization in Ukraine to be a critical risk factor for colonization of MDR organisms..”

• ‘Experiments Carried Out’: Ukrainian Soldiers Become Antibiotic-Resistant (Sp.)

Hospitals in several European countries have recorded significant growth of antibiotic resistance among Ukrainians arriving for treatment. So far, the exact cause of this remains unclear. The first case was announced in a research letter for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Germany in August, when a Ukrainian soldier was diagnosed with a number of dangerous infections that were not treatable with antibiotics. Western media recently highlighted that similar incidents were registered in several unnamed European countries, where wounded soldiers and refugees from Ukraine had gone. They cited “hospital and hygiene infrastructure” problems in Ukraine as one of the reasons the diseases spread, making “it harder to take the usual precautions against antibiotic resistance.”

Media also pointed out the absence of tests to determine the correct antibiotic use in Ukrainian hospitals. Therefore, infections and antibiotic-resistance are often found only in Europe. However, experts told Sputnik that antibiotic resistance could be a sign that these people had undergone biological experiments. The German CDC report claims the first case was officially registered in Germany. The wounded Ukrainian soldier was taken from Dnepropetrovsk to Kiev first, and then to an American military hospital in Germany. It was only when he was there that he was tested for infections and the unexpected discovery was made. “Doctors obtained blood, urine, respiratory, and peri-rectal surveillance cultures. Surveillance cultures grew A. baumannii, Enterococcus faecium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and two distinct morphologies of P. aeruginosa.

Blood cultures grew a third P. aeruginosa. By using the Vitek 2 automated system, the gram-negative organisms were found to be non-susceptible to almost every antibiotic tested,” the paper explained. According to the CDC, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Klebsiella pneumoniae can cause pneumonia, meningitis, as well as infections in wounds and in the urinary tract. Ukrainians, both military personnel and refugees, can be carriers of dangerous infections across both Ukraine and Europe. Thus, US researchers warned European countries of an “increased risk” of the spread of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDR): “As a result, healthcare networks in Europe now consider prior hospitalization in Ukraine to be a critical risk factor for colonization of MDR organisms (7,10). Healthcare practitioners treating citizens of Ukraine need to be aware of the increased risk for MDR organism transmission and infection imposed by the conflict in Ukraine and implement appropriate infection control measures to mitigate their spread.”

Also a kind of experiment…

“..almost 42% of adult Americans are obese, compared to 11.6% in 1990. Medical professionals and scholars interviewed by the Post blamed a variety of factors, from lack of preventive care and focus on treatment, to racism.”

• US ‘Failing’ At Life Expectancy – WaPo (RT)

The US is dead last among “peer countries” in terms of life expectancy for its population, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. Months of research and interviews have revealed a widespread problem with obesity, cancer, heart conditions, and diabetes, as well as a growing gap between poor and wealthy Americans. “Among wealthy nations, the United States in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier. And it continues to fall further and further behind,” according to the Post. American life expectancy peaked at 78.9 years in 2014, the same year the Affordable Care Act – also known as ‘Obamacare’ – fully went into effect. It has been declining ever since. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of 2021 it was at 76.4 years.

The Post reporters looked at county-level death records over the past five decades, finding the largest increase in excess deaths among the 35-64 demographic. In that group, chronic diseases kill twice as many Americans as “all the [drug] overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined.” Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, liver failure, and other chronic ailments are the main culprits. Cases of breast, thyroid and colorectal cancer are “mysteriously” rising among Americans under 50. Meanwhile, almost 42% of adult Americans are obese, compared to 11.6% in 1990. Medical professionals and scholars interviewed by the Post blamed a variety of factors, from lack of preventive care and focus on treatment, to racism.

They said advances in medicine, nutrition, and technology have been “overwhelmed by poverty, racism, distrust of the medical system, fracturing of social networks and unhealthy diets built around highly processed food.” While the US medical system is great at treating diseases, “growing healthy people to begin with, we’re the worst in the world,” according to William Cooke, a doctor in Austin, Indiana. Elena Marks, a senior health policy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, argued that the US has built a “health industrial complex” that costs trillions of dollars but focuses on treatment.

“Eighty-plus percent of health outcomes are determined by nonmedical factors,” said Marks, who used to be the health and environmental policy director for the city of Houston in Texas. There is a major “wealth gap” in life expectancy, according to the Post. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the poorest Americans were 61% more likely to die than the richest ones, and had “far lower” life expectancy than poor people in comparable countries. While wealthy Americans enjoyed longer lives on average, they too lagged behind their counterparts in Canada, France, or Japan. The Post also highlighted the racial disparities in life expectancy, with Native Americans coming in dead last at 65 and Asian-Americans leading at 84. Meanwhile, Hispanics were at 78, whites at 76, and African-Americans at 71.

“They were all murdered by June 1943 when the town was declared Judenfrei. Hunka remembered that time as “the happiest years of my life..”

• “The Beasts With A Red Star On Their Foreheads” (Helmer)

Canada’s parliament, the Canadian Armed Forces and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) demonstrate what the other NATO allies keep trying to hide. They aim to reverse the outcome of World War II and resume Adolf Hitler’s operation to destroy Russia. However, the fate of soldier Yaroslav Hunka of the SS Waffen Galician division, whom the MPs, the chief of the Defence Staff, and the RCMP commissioner, saluted a few days ago for his exploits killing Jews and Poles in the Ternopil region of western Ukraine between 1943 and 1945, now rests with two dossiers. One is in the archive of the Polish war crime prosecuting authority, the Institute of National Remembrance, in Warsaw. The second is the Soviet Army intelligence and KGB archives on the operations of Hunka’s unit before it fled a thousand kilometres southwest to Austria in order to surrender to the British Army.

“Beasts in human form with a red star on their foreheads,” Hunka has called the Russians whom he was afraid to fight. His Jewish schoolmates in the Berezhany Gymnasium – 32 of them refugees from Poland – caused him to “wonder why they ran away in front of such a civilized Western people as the Germans.” They were all murdered by June 1943 when the town was declared Judenfrei. Hunka remembered that time as “the happiest years of my life [dreaming] of the company of charming girls.” A year later, the Red Army launched its offensive against Lvov and in four weeks Hunka’s division was destroyed at Brody, 70 kilometres north of Hunka’s home. Of 11,000 of the Galicians with Hunka in the battle of the Brody pocket, less than a third survived. He fled with the retreating Wehrmacht towards Graz, Austria. “It was now every man for himself”, a recent history of the Battle of Brody (lead image, July 14, 1944) has described the outcome for the Galicians.

What Hunka had already done to the “charming” Jewish girls of Berezhany, and what he did when facing the Russians has been described by the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, in a script drafted by the Canadian Foreign Ministry, applauded by General Wayne Eyre, chief of the Defence Staff, as “heroic”. With Hunka as their inspiration, the Canadian military wants to repeat this battle against “the beasts with a red star on their foreheads” — this time with the Canadian Jewish community for allies, one of them the Leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould. But she and her fellow government ministers must now decide whether to block Polish and Russian requests for assistance in documenting Hunka’s war record from Canadian, British and US military intelligence files. If they refuse, they will be protecting Hunka from prosecution for the war crimes in the Ukraine they declare they know nothing about, in order to improve themselves on Hunka’s performance at Brody seventy-nine years ago.

“COVID is just the beginning. And what will likely ensue will be subsequent campaigns to get more mRNA injected into every man, woman, and child.”

• Murderous Work on mRNA Technology Wins the Nobel Prize (VN)

Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on messenger RNA (mRNA). Their collaboration has not only transformed vaccine development but also opened up possibilities for other novel treatments for various diseases. Karikó, a Hungarian-born biochemist, spent a significant portion of her career at BioNTech, the German pharmaceutical company that partnered with Pfizer to create the first COVID-19 vaccine. On the other hand, Weissman, a physician-scientist, holds a prestigious position as a professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Soon, mRNA technology will be coming to flu vaccines. Supporters tout that the adaptability of mRNA technology allows for quicker response times in developing vaccines that can more accurately target circulating influenza strains, potentially making yearly flu shots more effective.

Furthermore, work is being done to apply mRNA technology to “treat” various other diseases. It is being explored as a potential treatment for sickle-cell disease and the autoimmune disorder, multiple sclerosis. Additionally, its application in cancer treatment is under investigation, with the aim of harnessing the immune system to combat malignancies. The fight against HIV, a long-standing global health challenge, is also on mRNA’s radar. Currently, three experimental HIV vaccines, built on an mRNA design akin to the COVID-19 vaccines, are in the early stages of human clinical trials. Dr. Robert Malone, a renowned scientist, medical doctor, and pioneer in mRNA vaccine technology, made some fiery comments on “X.”

He stated, “Kariko and Weissman get the Nobel, not for inventing mRNA vaccines (because I did that) but for adding the pseudouridine that allowed unlimited spike toxins to be manufactured in what could have been a safe and effective vaccine platform, if safely developed.” Malone further criticized the integrity of the award process, suggesting undue influence from pharmaceutical giants. “Pfizer has been campaigning for this since 2020 – at first, they even claimed (as did Kariko) that she invented the mRNA vaccine platform technology. Pfizer donates heavily to the Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel. Science has been hijacked again by big pharma.” The decision to honor Karikó and Weissman while omitting key contributors like Dr. Robert Malone raises questions about the narrative that’s being pushed surrounding mRNA technology. One thing is sure: COVID is just the beginning. And what will likely ensue will be subsequent campaigns to get more mRNA injected into every man, woman, and child.

Kinetic

This kinetic work by artist Choe U-Ram is a ‘ Round Table’ which portrays today's society

Above the table are 3 large black birds watching the struggle play out
pic.twitter.com/dO23nIzpcw

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 3, 2023

Baseball

Someone made a baseball movie montage and it actually deserves an Oscar. Thank you to whoever made this. pic.twitter.com/h0vuT6CBx4

— BaseballHistoryNut (@nut_history) October 3, 2023

Yamyam?!

Any regrets?

Howlin wolf

Wolf pups begin howling as early as 3 to 4 weeks old. As they get older, they learn to use their howls to coordinate with other pack members.

This is what it sounds like.

[📹 Certified Floof]pic.twitter.com/RDqp9EPGL2

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 3, 2023

Cat Python

The average cat's reaction time is approximately 20-70 milliseconds, which is faster than the average snake's one (44-70 ms). The average human reaction time si about 250 ms

Watch this cat protect the kittens from a python attackpic.twitter.com/Hp87fwl4R3

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 3, 2023

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

Debt Rattle October 3 2023

Oct 032023

October 3, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: Gaetz, Garland, Jan 6, Lisbon, Lugansk, McCarthy, real estate, Supreme Court, Trump, valuations 30 Responses »

René Magritte Le Cri du Coeur 1960

• US Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Block Trump in 2024 (ET)

• Now There is Evidence the FBI Planned the January 6 Operation (GP)

• The Donald v. New York (DeMartino)

• Two Democrat Gangsters Try to Steal Trump’s Real Estate (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Overvalued (Jeff Childers)

• Gaetz Files Motion to Remove McCarthy From House Speakership (DeMartino)

• I’m Fighting For Taxpayers (Matt Gaetz)

• AG Garland Promises to Resign if Biden Meddles in Trump Investigation (Sp.)

• The Average Age Of Ukraine’s Army (MoA)

• Zakharova Responds To German Promise To Add Russian Lands To EU (RT)

• US Seems More Worried About Ukraine’s Corruption Than It Admits (Sp.)

• Hungary’s FM Shuns EU Diplomats’ Summit in Kiev (Sp.)

• Why Ukrainian F-16 Trainees Won’t Turn the Tide of Conflict (Sp.)

• Musk Mocks Zelensky Over Aid Demands (RT)

• Three-Way? (Jim Kunstler)

Tucker VDH We’re in the middle of a revolution

Ep. 27 Donald Trump appeared in court today, but it wasn’t a legal proceeding. It was a grotesque parody of the system our ancestors created. Victor Davis Hanson explains. pic.twitter.com/KhTHateWCZ

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 2, 2023

Trump trial

BREAKING – SEE IT: Trump explodes after controversial hearing in New York ahead of 2024 elections, says the Democratic judge has already made up his mind, says "It's ridiculous." WATCH pic.twitter.com/XzPlTh5Y7k

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) October 2, 2023

The Nobel Prize laureates do not trust their own ‘innovation’ and instead rely on…face diapers.
el gato malo: “world: there will never be a nobel prize for medicine worse than in 1949 when antonio moniz won for inventing “the frontal lobotomy.”
nobel committee: hold my beer and watch this…

Vaccine Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

Kanekoa
In 2018, Letitia James vowed to use the law as her weapon to remove Donald Trump from office, dubbing him “an illegitimate president for colluding with foreign powers.” She boldly declared, “We believe he’s engaged in a pattern and practice of money laundering. Laundering the money from foreign governments here in New York State.” “Understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end,” she emphasized, “but we can only do it if all of you exercise the most fundamental right — the right to vote.” Fast forward five years, and what’s the grand finale? Trump is accused of taking out legally obtained loans that he repaid in full with interest. Bravo!

Meanwhile, in a twist worthy of a Hollywood plot, the Biden family has been on a money-laundering spree, washing millions from shady oligarchs in China, Russia, and Ukraine through a tangled web of 20 shell companies. The Treasury Department has a hefty stack of over 170 suspicious activity reports filed by 6 banks, all spelling out how the Biden family “engaged in a pattern and practice of money laundering,” with much of that foreign cash flowing right through the heart of New York City. Congratulations, Attorney General Letitia James!

Letitia 2018

In 2018, Letitia James vowed to use the law as her weapon to remove Donald Trump from office, dubbing him "an illegitimate president for colluding with foreign powers."

She boldly declared, "We believe he's engaged in a pattern and practice of money laundering. Laundering the… pic.twitter.com/h9PcI1atUE

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) October 2, 2023

Charlie Kirk
Donald Trump is facing a civil trial in New York for “fraud.” So, which of his victims is suing him? That’s a trick question: There aren’t any. None of New York’s banks or insurance companies, Trump’s supposed “victims,” are suing him. Trump’s loans are repaid and his accounts are current. Because one judge says Trump “overvalued” his properties, that same judge is empowered to fine him hundreds of millions of dollars, break up the Trump Organization, and seize control of his properties, including Trump Tower, all to remedy a phantom crime with no victims. When this happens in China or Russia, we call it what it is: Lawfare against an enemy of the regime. Normal people do not yet realize how patently insane this is.

First of many. They all hark back to Civil War laws. As if today is similar to those days.

• US Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Block Trump in 2024 (ET)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 2 declined to take a longshot challenge to former President Donald Trump’s eligibility to appear on New Hampshire’s ballots during the 2024 election. John Anthony Castro filed an appeal with the Supreme Court several weeks ago and claimed that the former president should be disqualified under a reading of a section of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Mr. Castro, a Texas lawyer who’s running for president, claimed that President Trump partook in an insurrection against the federal government because of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. “The decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissing Petitioner John Anthony Castro’s civil action on the grounds that he lacks constitutional standing to sue another candidate who is allegedly unqualified to hold public office in the United States pursuant to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution,” Mr. Castro wrote in a petition for a writ of certiorari.

At the same time, he asserted that because he’s a Republican candidate, President Trump’s name appearing on the ballot injures his ability to obtain donations. According to records from the Federal Election Commission, Mr. Castro hasn’t raised any money for his campaign and appears to have given his own campaign $20 million. His petition with the high court comes as a number of left-wing activist groups have tried to block the former president from appearing on state ballots, using a rationale similar to Mr. Castro’s arguments. For example, the left-wing group Free Speech for People wrote to the secretaries of state of Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, and Wisconsin, calling on them to not include President Trump on state ballots. Six Colorado voters also filed a lawsuit in September to block him from appearing under their interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which was written in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War in the mid-19th century.

However, even Democratic secretaries of state appear to have little appetite for blocking President Trump on those grounds. Some legal analysts have also said that the insurrection clause under the 14th Amendment was targeting individuals who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. “We’re not the eligibility police. We are responsible for ensuring that basic facts are met to get someone on the ballot,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who has frequently been critical of the former president, told Axios in September. She was responding to calls from pressure groups to keep the former president from being on the ballot in her state.

[..] Meanwhile, retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz argued over the summer in an opinion article that President Trump can’t be disqualified under the 14th Amendment’s Section 3. That’s because, he wrote, “The amendment provides no mechanism for determining whether a candidate falls within this disqualification, though it says that [Congress can vote to] remove such disability” with a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate “A fair reading of the text and history of the 14th Amendment makes it relatively clear, however, that the disability provision was intended to apply to those who served the Confederacy during the Civil War,” Mr. Dershowitz wrote. “It wasn’t intended as a general provision empowering one party to disqualify the leading candidate of the other party in any future elections.”

“Jurors were informed of this written plan to “fill buildings” “with patriots”—and were left to think it was a plan of Tarrio’s or co-defendants.” It was not. The plan was concocted by the FBI..”

• Now There is Evidence the FBI Planned the January 6 Operation (GP)

In February of this year, The Gateway Pundit’s Cara Castronuovo wrote about a shocking development in the US government’s case against the Proud Boys. it was discovered that the Government itself was the author of the mysterious “1776 Returns” document. The 1776 Returns document is the title of a 9-page paper that outlined strategic plans for the takeover of US government buildings on January 6, 2021. It was confirmed in court that the FBI was behind the document and an FBI operative was the author of the document. The mysterious document was sent unsolicited to Proud Boy Chairman Enrique Tarrio’s Telegram right before January 6th by a “love interest” named Erika Flores. Flores reportedly testified to the January 6th Committee that A GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL was the author of the entirety of the “1776 Returns” and that this FBI and CIA member or associate asked her to share it with Tarrio!

Tarrio was charged with Seditious Conspiracy and was later found guilty along with four fellow members of the Proud Boys. Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for planning the entire “seditious conspiracy.” We now know that it was the FBI who was behind the conspiracy. According to the Motion by attorney Roger Roots: “It appears that the government itself is the author of the most incriminating and damning document in this case, which was mysteriously sent at government request to Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio immediately prior to January 6 in order to frame or implicate Tarrio in a government- created scheme to storm buildings around the Capitol. As such, Exhibit 528-1 and the government’s efforts to frame or smear defendants with it, constitutes outrageous government conduct. This is either entrapment or outrageous government conduct, or both. Equally improper, it is a Brady violation because the Department of Justice must surely have known these revelations before putting Special Agent Dubrowski on the stand on February 9 to introduce this evidence.”

You can’t make this stuff up! The cover to the sketchy and poorly written “1776 Returns” was allegedly created by a Government Official who claims to have been “groomed” to join the CIA or FBI. Apparently, an individual by the name of Samuel Armes is responsible for writing the “1776 Files”. Armes is “a former State Department and Special Operations official” who was also interviewed by the January 6th Unselect Committee. Armes said “he recognized components of the document as ideas he had composed as part of a “war gaming” exercise he did in August or September of 2020. Armes “co-founded a Florida-based cryptocurrency LLC — Government Blockchain Systems” “Armes said that in college he had been groomed to join the CIA and FBI before his stint in the State Department and special operations. . . . In his studies, he often participated in “war gaming” scenarios, skills he used during his stint in government.” (*The J6 Committee was resistant in releasing these documents.)

To reiterate, this government asset, Armes, passed this document off to a “love interest” of Enrique Tarrio named “Erika”, who then testified she forwarded the document AT THE REQUEST OF ARMES to Tarrio via Telegram. “This means that the most damning document in this trial was authored by the intelligence community—someone “groomed” by the FBI itself,” said Roger Roots (the Proud Boys attorney who authored this Blockbuster Motion). “And this CIA and FBI asset requested Tarrio’s friend to share the document with Tarrio just prior to January 6.” According to the Motion- “During Special Agent Dubrowski’s chilling testimony, Assistant U.S. Attorney Conor Mulroe took lengths to emphasize segments of the document describing a plan to lay siege to Capitol Hill by strategically occupying most of the congressional office space around the Capitol. Jurors were informed of this written plan to “fill buildings” “with patriots”—and were left to think it was a plan of Tarrio’s or co-defendants.” It was not. The plan was concocted by the FBI and planted inside the Proud Boys Telegram page days before January 6.

“[The Trump National Doral Miami hotel] would sell for at least a billion dollars. Mar-a-Lago at least a billion,” Habba said. “The value is what someone is willing to pay. The Trump properties are Mona Lisa properties.” “That is not fraud, that is real estate..”

That Trump gave Ivanka the option to buy her rental apartment cheap, now means fraud?!

• The Donald v. New York (DeMartino)

The attorney general’s office alleges Trump inflated the value of properties he owned by the billions between 2011 and 2021 in order to secure favorable loans and insurance arrangements, with some property values reportedly being inflated by over $2 billion. Some of those properties include Trump Park Avenue and the famed Mar-a-Lago Florida resort, which was raided by multiple FBI agents looking to retrieve troves of classified documents that were being stored on the grounds. Trump defense attorney Chris Kise countered in his opening arguments by saying that Trump made his billions by utilizing his real estate knowledge – not by engaging in fraudulent business practices. “President Trump has made billions of dollars building one of the most successful real estate empires in the world,” Kise said. “He has made a fortune literally about being right about real estate.”

Kise also pointed out that while the leading German Deutsche Bank valued Trump’s net worth at $2 billion less than he did, they still underwrote a loan for him. That is evidence, Kise argued, that real estate valuations can vary greatly. The lawyer went on to remark that when is comes down to business in the Big Apple, “this is what happens every day in this city.” In order to ground the argument, reports have indicated that the Trump camp is seeking to call in witnesses from Deutsche Bank. Another Trump defense attorney, Alina Habba, argued that Engoron’s valuations of Trump properties were wildly inaccurate, comparing the estates to the Mona Lisa, which is commonly said to be the most valuable painting in the world. “[The Trump National Doral Miami hotel] would sell for at least a billion dollars. Mar-a-Lago at least a billion,” Habba said. “The value is what someone is willing to pay. The Trump properties are Mona Lisa properties.” “That is not fraud, that is real estate,” she added.

[..] Donald Bender, a former accountant and tax consultant for Trump was called as the first witness in the case, and was promptly moved to be disqualified by the Trump team although Engoron ruled against them. [..] .. in one incident Bender recalled that he pointed out a discrepancy involving the penthouse of Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump. Bender said he corrected the number at least twice. The discrepancies with the penthouse were mentioned in documents in the case. “Ms. Trump’s rental agreement for Penthouse A in Trump Park Avenue included an option to purchase the unit for $8,500,000. But in the 2011 and 2012 Statements of Financial Condition, this unit was valued at $20,820,000—approximately two and a half times as much as the option price, with no disclosure of the existence of the option,” the lawsuit stated.

“Law is a weapon used against those who are not in power. It is nothing else.”

“Lenders go by success, not by valuations, because value is determined by success.”

• Two Democrat Gangsters Try to Steal Trump’s Real Estate (Paul Craig Roberts)

Two New York Democrats, one being NY attorney general Letitia James, a black female helped into office by money from George Soros, who made his billions by manipulating the British pound to the disadvantage of the British population, and the other being NY state judge Arthur Engoron, a Donald Trump hater who was put in office by Trump-hating NY Democrats, have conspired to steal Trump’s real estate empire including Mar-a-Lago. [..] The obvious point is that Letitia James has no idea of the value of Trump’ properties. What she has done is so obviously totally dishonest that she should immediately be removed from office. She has picked low values that are so low as to be ridiculous as a statement of the value of Trump’s holdings. Who correctly valued the properties? Letitia James on her personal vendetta against President Trump, or the sophisticated lenders to Trump?

Ask yourself, if Trump did something wrong, why didn’t his creditors bring the lawsuit instead of a Trump-hating Democrat operative on a personal vendetta? No one was harmed, least of all Letitia James. What is Letitia James’ standing in the case? Nothing, Zero, Nada. That Trump’s property can be confiscated by two Democrats on a vendetta against Trump shows that the rule of law in the United States of America is stone dead. Let’s look at real estate valuations. Traditionally, the lowest appraisal is the tax appraisers. Then the foreclosure value. Then the “market value.” But what is the market value? It is different for different people. Appraisals of value are simply guesses. No lender has anything but their judgment of the borrower as to the success of the loan. If the borrower has a success record, as Donald Trump has, the lender has no interest in the listed value of the properties. Lenders go by success, not by valuations, because value is determined by success.

Letitia James is so ignorant of law that she does not know that law regards an owner’s opinion as admissible evidence of value. Thus, there is ZERO basis for her independent law suit, a suit not joined by any interested party. This example of total incompetence and total corruption of the American legal system is proof that law in America is no longer law. Law is a weapon used against those who are not in power. It is nothing else. Judge Engoran ruled that Trump had “inflated” his property values on his financial statements. Meaning, the judge applied an arbitrary low value as the properties worth and then ruled that Trump committed fraud by using a realistic value. Take for example Trump’s residence, Mar-a-Lago, which the judge determined was worth only $18 million!

Forbes estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value between $200 million and $725 million, based on broker opinions, and ultimately went with “a conservative” $350 million. For comparison, a 5-bedroom home recently sold in the same neighborhood for $75 million. The totally corrupt Democrat “judge” valued Trump’s enormous property at $18 million — $332 million less than Forbes–and convicted Trump of fraud for allegedly overstating its value, whereas the real fraud is the judge’s undervaluation. On the sole basis of an intentionally arbitrary low value the Democrat operative pretending to be a judge confiscated Trump’s property. This is law in Democrat America, a tyranny.

Jeff Childers is an attorney working in real estate. Paul Craig Roberts in the article above links to this article.

“Even though an owner might not be a real estate expert, the law considers the owner well positioned to know the value of their own property.” [..] “..under the law, an owner’s opinion is admissible evidence of value.”

“Nobody would use the tax appraiser’s value to guess at Mar-a-Lago’s selling price. Nobody.”

• Overvalued (Jeff Childers)

This case is right in my wheelhouse; I’ll explain the whole thing. It’s not complicated. The judge’s 35-page decision is, at bottom, only about how President Trump valued his real estate holdings when he was providing his personal financial statement to various people. I am qualified to comment because half of my commercial litigation cases are disputes over real estate. Before tumbling into constitutional and civil rights law, I also had a strong side practice in commercial loan workouts — negotiating for developers with banks — and commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which (at least in Florida) is all about valuing real estate. Principle number one: Real estate valuation is not a science because values are subjective. Every effort to value real estate is just a guess at what someone will eventually be willing to pay for the land. Your dilapidated barn might be someone else’s castle.

Real estate — buildings and land — is worth different amounts to different people. A thousand acres of inexpensive pine forest zoned only for agricultural use could be worth a whole lot more to a developer who’s confident he can get a zoning change. It’s not nefarious. Maybe that developer also owns a half-acre parcel downtown somewhere that the County has long wanted for a park, so he knows he has something to trade the commissioners for rezoning the pine forest to residential. That hypothetical developer would pay a lot more for the thousand acres than anyone else. So what’s the property worth? The price to everyone else or the “highest and best use?” But legal disputes must be resolved and you have to start somewhere. Lawyers think about real estate values in three general categories, depending on who is doing the valuing.

From lowest value to highest, the normal categories are: the tax appraised value (the lowest, and least likely to be accurate), the “forced liquidation” value (think foreclosure sale), and then the highest, the “market” value (determined by professional appraisers who assume that the seller can market the property without pressure or time constraints). Even professional appraisers disagree on land value. Every single one of my cases involves competing appraisals, and the appraisers’ numbers are often wildly different. Lawyers and judges all know that appraisals are just guesses. When I negotiate with bank lawyers, I often offer to bet them a month’s salary that when the appraised property finally sells, it will bring a price at least 15% different than the bank’s appraisal. In all these years, no opposing lawyer has ever taken that bet.

A fourth category of valuation is the owner’s opinion of his property’s value. Even though an owner might not be a real estate expert, the law considers the owner well positioned to know the value of their own property. They probably think about it a lot. They know all the pro’s and con’s. Therefore under the law, an owner’s opinion is admissible evidence of value. The lowest valuation is usually the tax appraised value, which is the amount used by the state to calculate annual property taxes. There’s a good reason why it’s the lowest: tax appraisers calculations are limited in many ways under state law. For example, in Florida tax appraisers can’t increase the value of homestead property — where someone lives — more than a few percentage points at a time. Tax appraisers also can only change the assessment when certain things happen, like when a property is sold.

Judge Engoran ruled yesterday that Trump had “inflated” his property values on his financial statements. Meaning, the judge decided what the properties were worth and then found that Trump overestimated Trump’s values — on paper. Take for example Trump’s residence, Mar-a-Lago, which the judge determined was worth $18 million for the entire ten-year period between 2011 and 2021. That determination was based only on the county tax assessor, who appraised its value between $18 and $27 million. So of course the Judge used the lowest number in that range, $18 million, comparing that to Trump’s value of between $426 million and $612 million: Nobody would use the tax appraiser’s value to guess at Mar-a-Lago’s selling price. Nobody.

“..Gaetz would only need a handful of Republicans to join him in removing McCarthy..”

My guess: the Dems will keep him in place. And down the line he will regret that.

• Gaetz Files Motion to Remove McCarthy From House Speakership (DeMartino)

US Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) officially filed a motion late Monday to call for the removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a move likely to put the lower congressional chamber into chaos just days after a government shutdown was averted. Gaetz has been threatening McCarthy with a “vote to vacate” his position since the deal to avert the government shutdown was made. Gaetz has accused MacCarthy of making a “secret side deal on Ukraine” with Democrats. Gaetz and dozens of other House Republicans have stated their opposition to further funding of Kiev by Washington and aid to Ukraine was ultimately cut from the stop-gap funding bill.

“I rise to give notice of my intent to raise a question of the privileges of the house,” Gaetz said on the House floor while filing the motion. “[It is] resolved that the Office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.” After filing the motion, Gaetz told reporters that he had enough Republican votes to oust McCarthy, unless he gets help from Democrats. “I have enough Republicans where at this point next week one of two things will happen: Kevin McCarthy won’t be the Speaker of the House or he’ll be the Speaker of the House working at the pleasure of the Democrats,” The firebrand representative said. “I’m at peace with either result because the American people deserve to know who governs them.”

The House will have two days to consider the measure, though it could be taken up earlier. A simple majority will be needed to oust McCarthy. Republicans have a slim nine-seat majority in the House. Typically, when House speakers are appointed, the minority party votes in unison against the nomination. If that holds for votes to vacate, Gaetz would only need a handful of Republicans to join him in removing McCarthy.

“.. that agreement includes a vote on term limits, a vote on a balanced budget amendment, single subject spending bills, and the full release of the January 6 tapes.”

• I’m Fighting For Taxpayers (Matt Gaetz)

I know who my bosses are. They aren’t the special interests in Washington, it isn’t party leadership, it’s my voters in Florida. Earlier this month, I sat down with some of my bosses in Destin, Florida for a podcast they host in their driveway. I was there to be held accountable. Congress has yet to achieve the things voters are asking for like term limits and a balanced budget. That’s what this fight in Congress is all about. It’s about making sure the promises we’ve made to voters are fulfilled. The Speaker made promises to me and other lawmakers in January, and I want to hold him to account. To be specific, that agreement includes a vote on term limits, a vote on a balanced budget amendment, single subject spending bills, and the full release of the January 6 tapes.

This isn’t about politics or personality. It’s about sticking to our word, and getting our nation back on track. In Joe Biden’s America, families are having to pinch pennies, so Congress should too. Politicians that have spent decades running up America’s deficit are taking this personally. Rep. John Carter, who has been on the appropriations committee since 2005, recently attacked me as an “idiot” to a reporter. Okay. What’s idiotic is that our nation’s national debt has increased more than $25 trillion since 2005. Some people are desperate to make a policy battle personal, because their policy failures are personally embarrassing. We have to stop the fiscal insanity in Washington and get our spending under control.

I’m not voting for a continuing resolution that funds Jack Smith’s election interference, dangerous chaos on the southern border, and money for the endless war in Ukraine. Just think about what it means for Congress to govern by Continuing Resolution. Every time we vote for a continuing resolution, we make no changes in policy or spending. It’s a vote to continue the status quo. If that’s all Congress is going to do, just replace us with AI bots, because we aren’t doing anything. The hearings are fun, but it’s the budgets where real policy changes are made. Moody’s chief economist recently said that the typical American household is spending $709 a month more than they were two years ago just to buy the same goods and services. That’s nearly $9,000 per year being stolen from Americans through the hidden tax of inflation.

Americans literally cannot afford Washington’s reckless spending. Politicians in Washington DC – on both sides of the aisle – are robbing the American people and their grandchildren to pay for war in Ukraine, drag queen shows in Ecuador, an open border, free stuff for illegal immigrants, and the Biden Department of Justice’s illegal election interference. I came to Washington to be a voice for my voters and fix this once great nation. I’m not here to empower the Democrats’ radical agenda. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit by and do nothing while greed and corruption destroys our great nation.

“The attorney general added that all US Justice Department prosecutors are impartial and do not allow party considerations to affect their decisions.”

• AG Garland Promises to Resign if Biden Meddles in Trump Investigation (Sp.)

US Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday he would resign if US President Joe Biden interferes with investigations into former US President Donald Trump. “I am sure that that [Biden’s interference] will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard. And if necessary, I would resign, but there is no sense that anything like that will happen,” Garland said in an interview. He also said he does not discuss the investigation into the former president with Biden or his administration, adding that the incumbent US president “never tried to put hands on these investigations.” The attorney general added that all US Justice Department prosecutors are impartial and do not allow party considerations to affect their decisions.

Last week, the US news broadcaster reported that Trump would attend first days of fraud trial against him in New York. New York Attorney General Letitia James stated last week that Trump inflated the value of his assets by between $812 million and $2.2 billion over a decade to obtain loans to build a golf resort in Miami and hotels in Washington and Chicago. Currently, the former US president is facing two federal indictments, including on alleged mishandling of classified documents at his house in Florida and an alleged attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“If what Wallace says about the average age on the Ukrainian front is true, 40 years, then the worst assumptions about losses have been far exceeded..”

“A huge loss that will forever haunt that country.” It’s worse, the country won’t survive.

• The Average Age Of Ukraine’s Army (MoA)

Ben Wallace, the former Secretary of State for Defence of the UK, writes in the Telegraph: “Putin is desperately grasping at the final two things that can save him – time and the splitting of the international community. Britain can do something about both. We must help Ukraine maintain its momentum – and that will require more munitions, ATACMSs and Storm Shadows. And the best way to keep the international community together is the demonstration of success. Ukraine can also play its part. The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40.

I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilising the whole country by stealth. Putin knows a pause will hand him time to build a new army. So just as Britain did in 1939 and 1941, perhaps it is time to reassess the scale of Ukraine’s mobilisation. Let us not pause for one day. Let us see this through. The world is watching to see if the West has the resolve to stand up for our values and the rules-based system. What we do now for Ukraine will set the direction for all of our security for years to come.”

Think for a moment what the aside insert “The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40” really means. Can Storm Shadows change that fact? Roland Popp @RoPoppZurich – 5:43 UTC · Oct 2, 2023: “If what Wallace says about the average age on the Ukrainian front is true, 40 years, then the worst assumptions about losses have been far exceeded. Paraguay 1870.”

Paraguayan War – Casualties of the war: “Paraguay suffered massive casualties, and the war’s disruption and disease also cost civilian lives. Some historians estimate that the nation lost the majority of its population.” Ukraine ain’t there yet. But looking at pictures of Ukrainian soldiers at the front Wallace seems to be right. If you are forty or above are you really still able to run, react and fight like when you were twenty? I am not. The young Ukrainians are gone. They either have fled from Ukraine or are wounded, disabled or died. You can not mobilize what is no longer there. A huge loss that will forever haunt that country. End this war now!

“..from Lisbon to Lugansk..” is the state of denial put in words.

• Zakharova Responds To German Promise To Add Russian Lands To EU (RT)

Russia would have to join the EU for German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to fulfill her promise of the bloc spanning all the way “from Lisbon to Lugansk,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. Speaking at an informal meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Kiev on Monday, Baerbock insisted that “the future of Ukraine is in the EU, in our community of freedom, and soon [the EU] will stretch from Lisbon to Lugansk.” Lisbon is the capital of Portugal, which along with Ireland and part of Spain makes up the EU’s western edge. Lugansk is the main city of the People’s Republic of Lugansk, which officially became part of the Russian state last year, together with the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.

The move followed referendums that saw the populace in the four regions overwhelmingly support reunification with Moscow. Ukraine and its Western backers refused to recognize the results of the votes. “It’s either us joining the EU or she forgot about the requirement to turn by 360 degrees,” Zakharova wrote on Telegram in response to Baerbock’s statement. The spokeswoman was referring to the blunder that the German FM made in February when she urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to “change by 360 degrees” his policy on Ukraine, unwittingly urging Russia to maintain the exact course it had been on. Baerbock’s claims about Lugansk being in the EU are a “figment of the sick imagination” of the German FM because the city is and will remain a part of Russia, Dmitry Belik, a member of the Russian Parliament’s Committee on International Affairs, told Izvestia newspaper.

Germany’s top diplomat “continues to add to her collection of absurd statements, which speaks of her incompetence and confirms the difficulty of seeking compromise with such politicians,” Belik added. On Monday, EU foreign ministers held their first ever meeting outside the bloc’s territory. Its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that the high-profile meeting was staged in Kiev “to express our solidarity and support to the Ukrainian people.” Ukraine was granted EU-candidate status in July 2022 amid its conflict with Russia. Sources told Bloomberg last month that the European Commission is expected to shortly recommend that formal talks begin to start the multi-year process of Kiev’s accession into the bloc.

It’s their way out. “You’re too corrupt, and you’re not changing that fast enough..”

• US Seems More Worried About Ukraine’s Corruption Than It Admits (Sp.)

A leaked US strategy document revealed that the Biden administration is far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than it publicly admits, an American newspaper reported on Monday. A high-level corruption could undermine confidence of the Ukrainian public and foreign leaders in the government in Kiev, the report said. The confidential version of the document, named “Integrated Country Strategy,” is about three times longer than its public version and contains many additional details related to the US goals in Ukraine, the report noted. That includes privatizing Ukrainian banks, encouraging the military to adopt NATO norms, and supporting local schools in teaching the English language.

The strategy also stresses that the Ukrainian government can not delay its anti-graft policies because the current situation could cause concern from allies in the West. The newspaper supposed that the fact of the quiet release of the strategy, along with the toughest language in the confidential version, shows the White House’s concerns over the situation in Ukraine. The Biden administration wants to press Ukraine to cut graft. However, excessive attention to this problem may strengthen the opposition of Washington to Kiev and could make European allies think once again about their own role in this process, according to the report.

One US official noted that the American and Ukrainian counterparts have “some honest conversations happening behind the scenes” over the issue. His colleague familiar with the topic of those discussions confirmed that Washington is talking to Kiev about potentially conditioning future economic aid on “reforms to tackle corruption and make Ukraine a more attractive place for private investment,” the report added. However, these conditions are not related to the military support for Ukraine, this official added. The strategy noted that US goals in Ukraine include providing military support and training to confront Russia. The classified version also revealed Washington’s readiness to help Kiev in reforming its national security apparatus, the report said.

Serious cracks. Cue Fico.

• Hungary’s FM Shuns EU Diplomats’ Summit in Kiev (Sp.)

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has met with representatives of German industrial conglomerate ThyssenKrupp, he said in a Facebook* post, and skipped a meeting of European foreign ministers in Kiev. “The task now is to reduce inflation, and for 2024 – to rebuild economic growth. For this, the work has to start now and it requires companies like the German Thyssenkrupp,” Szijjarto wrote. Ties between Budapest and Brussels have been tense of late, with Hungary repeatedly voicing its protest as the EU’s blank checks for Kiev. It was earlier reported that Hungary believes that the EU has spent its share of a funding program on supporting Kiev regime. EU authorities had confessed to freezing over €6 billion intended for Budapest, citing political concerns.

However, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is afraid that the funds were given to Ukraine. “It is possible that some of it [the money] is already in Ukraine. If there is no money to give Ukraine the sums promised before, and we promise to give new sums, and there are people who haven’t received the money, it is reasonable to assume that this money is already gone,” Orban said in an interview to a radio station. The Hungarian premier added that his country will block any funding for Kiev unless Budapest receives the designated funds. Another stumbling block between Hungary and Ukraine is the fate of Transcarpathian Hungarians, whose rights are systematically abused by Kiev.

“..what is happening in Ukraine has been far more similar to a First World War battlefield than anything else..”

• Why Ukrainian F-16 Trainees Won’t Turn the Tide of Conflict (Sp.)

The US Department of Defense has officially announced the beginning of English language courses for Ukrainian pilots as part of the program to train them to fly US-made F-16 fighter jets. The language training is said to be taking place at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. In August, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry estimated that Kiev would get F-16 jets promised by Ukraine’s NATO backers in six-seven months. The Netherlands and Denmark since signaled that they would hand their F-16 fighters to Kiev at the beginning of 2024. However, Gen. James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe, was quoted by the Western press as saying that the delivery of several dozens of the US-made fighter jets “isn’t going to be the silver bullet” for the Ukrainian military.

Previously, ex-Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley also warned Kiev that F-16s won’t be a “game-changer” or “magic weapon” that would change the balance of power on the battlefield. For its part, the Ukrainian military is blaming the failed counteroffensive on allegedly insufficient NATO training and flawed NATO tactics, insisting that the transatlantic alliance prepared them for the “wrong kind of war.” Could the training of Ukrainian pilots and delivery of fighter jets fix the problem? “The questions being asked here are about a decade too late for the US/NATO Ukraine proxy war project, and they certainly should have been considered before over $200 billion in US and NATO military aid has been shipped to Ukraine,” Retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, told Sputnik.

“The US and NATO – to the extent that they have conducted military battles – have done so with combined arms, integrating sea, land and air – and command and control/intelligence — in both offensive and defensive actions. Our last real serious tank battles probably occurred in the early 1990s, with the first US invasion of Iraq. And that war was against a country that had a weak and outdated air force.” “We don’t remember how to fight a land battle from 30 years ago – and what is happening in Ukraine has been far more similar to a First World War battlefield than anything else. Americans in particular do not study lessons learned from the First World War – but that is no excuse in this case.

Ukraine’s ‘strategy’ vis-a-vis Russia has not been designed by Pentagon military strategists – as [Joe] Biden and [Antony] Blinken say, all decisions are [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s. The Pentagon’s role here has been logistics – scraping up goods and services and sending them over – without any connection to complementing an existing Ukrainian defense strategy or designing an effective strategy to push back the Russian forces,” the former Pentagon analyst continued.

Musk has seen enough. Took him a while.

• Musk Mocks Zelensky Over Aid Demands (RT)

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has ridiculed Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky over his demands for more financial support from the US and its allies amid the conflict with Russia. Posting on his X (formerly Twitter) social media platform on Sunday, Musk shared the popular ‘stressed guy’ meme with Zelensky’s face photoshopped onto it and with a caption reading: “When it’s been five minutes and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid.” The post had already gained more than 25 million views and over 350,000 likes at the time of writing. The ‘stressed guy’ meme features an image of a male student whose neck and forehead are bulging with veins while he sits beside a girl in a classroom. The picture is commonly shared for humorous descriptions of frustrating or uncomfortable situations.

pic.twitter.com/W9i9YEM8uA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2023

Musk’s post comes after Zelensky attempted to drum up more support from the US during a visit to Washington in September. According to US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Ukrainian president told him that “if we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war.” The administration of US President Joe Biden has provided Kiev with around $46 billion since the beginning of the conflict with Russia in February 2022. However, no funding for Ukraine was included in the last-minute budget deal struck by Congress late on Saturday which allowed the US to avoid a federal government shutdown. US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was among the Republicans to oppose the Biden administration’s request to allocate $6 billion more to Ukraine, said that the priority must be protecting America’s borders.

The Zelensky government considered Musk among its backers early in the conflict with Russia, when SpaceX donated $80 million worth of Starlink satellite internet terminals to Ukraine. Kiev’s forces have relied heavily on the system for communications. However, the billionaire was involved in a spat with Ukrainian officials and social media users last October after he proposed a peace plan to settle the conflict. Musk suggested that Russia should “redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision,” while Ukraine would commit to neutrality and drop its claim to Crimea. Four former Ukrainian regions voted to join Russia a year ago, while Crimea held a similar referendum in 2014 after a Western-backed coup in Kiev.

Zelensky reacted to the idea by launching a social media poll, asking followers “which Elon Musk” they “like more” – the one “who supports Ukraine” or the one “who supports Russia.” Kiev’s then ambassador to Germany, Andrey Melnik, went further by telling the US billionaire to “f**k off.” A few days after the row, the Ukrainian military reportedly began experiencing problems with Starlink services. Musk’s biography by historian Walter Isaacson, which came out in September, described an indecent last autumn in which the billionaire allegedly told his engineers to shut down satellite internet coverage in Crimea amid an attempted Ukrainian drone assault on the Russian peninsula. According to Isaacson, the tech entrepreneur concluded that “allowing the use of Starlink for the attack… could be a disaster for the world.” Ukrainian presidential aide Mikhail Podoliak claimed that Musk was “committing evil and encouraging evil” with his decision, which he said was the result of “a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”

“The woked-up suburban ladies who comprise the party’s main voting bloc grow moist in anticipation of Gov. Newsome landing on-stage like a demigod out of a Mozart opera..”

“[RFK Jr’s] on a hero’s journey at a moment in history when America dearly needs one.”

• Three-Way? (Jim Kunstler)

“Joe Biden” is now a monumental embarrassment and a liability to our country, let alone to the degenerate party that owns him. Sub rosa efforts must be in motion to persuade him to resign before the impeachment inquiry spotlights all those telltale bank records, but they will fail to overcome his demented pride. He’ll ride this thing out to the bitter end, when he can use the last tool at his disposal to officially pardon everyone involved in his family’s racketeering operation. The longer the party pretends to support him, the closer the party itself skates toward self-destruction. Also consider: if allowed to play out, the impeachment inquiry will implicate the DOJ and the FBI in obstruction of justice — exposing many Deep State blob players to danger of prosecution.

Gov Gavin Newsom dangles himself above the fray as the deus ex machina who can touch down in DC and make all the Democrat’s problems go away. Such an attractive fellow! Great teeth and hair! Tall as a sequoia! And such a smooth talker! The woked-up suburban ladies who comprise the party’s main voting bloc grow moist in anticipation of Gov. Newsome landing on-stage like a demigod out of a Mozart opera. But how do you think he’ll make out in an election when the airwaves are filled with oppo ads showing his toothy and hairy visage inset against scenes of homeless junkies and looting flash mobs? Try blaming that on climate change. What else does he stand for? Censorship? Forced vaccinations? Child sex mutilations? Open borders? News-flash: these are increasingly unpopular, except among an easily-identified depraved elite.

Indeed, the whole Left-Right demon-driven psychodrama is proving impossible to live in as it throbs and pulsates toward something like civil war. And it has obscured the truly potent idea that the nation might actually be capable of solving its problems by facing up to them and changing how we act. That potent idea might be what voters will see in Bobby Kennedy if he can get their attention. Mr. Kennedy would dismantle the heinous partnerships between private corporations and the US government that loosed the Covid-19 op on the world and asset-strips the middle-class. He favors closing the border and a reevalution of immigration policy. He aims to negotiate an end to the ignoble Ukraine war project. He’s determined to disassemble the security state apparatus that’s destroying the US Constitution and citizens natural rights with it.

Mr. Kennedy says he can bring divided Americans together on these dire matters. It’s conceivable that his message might go over with enough rancor-weary voters to pull off a tour-de-force plurality in a three-way race, where nobody wins enough electoral votes to settle the contest, which then moves to the House, like in the old days of Jefferson and Burr. The rest is election mechanics, some of it very sinister when you consider all the election-rigging booby-traps already in-place such as mass mail-in ballot harvesting, no voter ID requirements, and the still-mysterious hookups of vote-counting machines to the Internet. But, at least, Mr. Kennedy running on an independent line will be a hard whap upside the Democratic Party’s thick skull, maybe even a death-blow to the party. They made a big mistake trying to un-person him. He’s on a hero’s journey at a moment in history when America dearly needs one.

Yeadon

Former vice president at Pfizer, Dr. Mike Yeadon: The so-called "pandemic" was planned and co-ordinated in advance, by unelected globalist bodies like the WEF amd WHO, as a pretext to deliberately depopulate the planet via lethal mRNA injections:

"We're facing something much… pic.twitter.com/vdkmRxanf5

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) October 2, 2023

Octopus
https://twitter.com/i/status/1708899128858587197

Jump

This cat making the most precise jump over pic.twitter.com/hB3CxU71go

— place where cat shouldn't be (@catshouldnt) October 2, 2023

Ray

The giant oceanic manta ray is the largest type of ray in the world. It can grow to a disc size of up to 7 m (23 ft) across with a weight of about 3,000 kg (6,600 lb)

[📹 Shiva Selwyn]pic.twitter.com/E63jaDsvE5

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 2, 2023

Camouflage
https://twitter.com/i/status/1709099401413562408

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

Debt Rattle October 1 2023

Oct 012023

October 1, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: Barron, direct involvement, Gaetz, McCarthy, Melania, Orban, Slovakia, surrender, Trump 26 Responses »

Pable Picasso Le Pengouin 1907

• Ukraine Can Use German Missiles To Attack Russia – Bundestag (RT)

• UK Defense Chief Wants To Send British Troops To Ukraine (RT)

• Biden Demands Uninterrupted Cash Flow To Ukraine (RT)

• “More Deceit”: Gaetz Rages Over McCarthy-Ukraine Side Deal To Pass Stopgap (ZH)

• Ukraine Absent From Emergency US Government Funding Deal (RT)

• Thousands of Ukrainian Troops Surrender via Russian Radio Hotline (sp.)

• Pro-Russian ex-PM Fico Wins Slovak Election, Needs Allies For Government (RT)

• Ukraine Conflict A ‘Slavic Fraternal War’ – Orban (RT)

• Ukraine Plan to Stage New Counteroffensive ‘Act of Desperation’ – Analyst (Sp.)

• Abrams Tanks Will Become ‘Mobile Steel Coffins’ for Ukrainian Crews (Scott Ritter)

• Melania Trump Renegotiates Prenup Amid Potential 2nd Term, Legal Troubles (Sp.)

• Prosecutors: Trump May Have Violated Federal Gun Law At Campaign Event (Sp.)

• Trump Plans To Appear At New York Court Hearing In Fraud Case (TASS)

“I am still well but my condition is deteriorating. I am trying with all my strength to keep a small part of myself alive. A small part which I will use when I get out of prison to exist again, to be Julian again. I’m a fighter and I know that’s what I have to do.”
Julian Assange

Tucker must see
https://twitter.com/i/status/1707932271406461168

Blame

JUST IN: CNN poll backfires, when ask who is responsible for the government shutdown.. the largest group of people responded, Joe and the Dems in Congress..

IS AMERICA WAKING UP? pic.twitter.com/9d5Blw9a0w

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) September 30, 2023

U.S. Banks are facing some $600 billion of unrealized losses, roughly 25% of total banking capital, near the highest levels in history

“America is a corpse being devoured by maggots. The Democrats root for the maggots, the Republicans root for the corpse.”

My immediate reaction: what would the Bundestag suggest Russia use to attack Germany? They might as well opine on that too now they just positioned themselves square into the middle of this “conflict”.

• Ukraine Can Use German Missiles To Attack Russia – Bundestag (RT)

The head of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has spoken in favor of providing Ukraine with German-made Taurus cruise missiles. The lawmaker also argued that Kiev has the right to strike targets in Crimea, and on Russian soil in general. So far, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government has been reluctant to supply the long-range rockets to Kiev, despite its repeated requests. In an interview with Berliner Morgenpost newspaper published on Saturday, Strack-Zimmermann argued that Berlin “should now immediately deliver Taurus,” as the deployment of such cruise missiles could help the Ukrainian military disrupt Russian supply lines. When asked if she had any issue with Kiev potentially using these rockets to strike targets on Russian soil, the MP replied in the negative, adding that “that includes Crimea.”

According to the lawmaker, international law gives Ukraine the right to “attack military targets also on the territory of the Russian aggressor,” using any weapons at its disposal, regardless of their origin. The deliberate use of Taurus missiles against civilians would, however, be off-limits, much like the deployment of German troops to Ukraine, Strack-Zimmermann clarified. When asked whether she was concerned over the potential cutting of American aid to Kiev should Donald Trump become president next year, the head of the Bundestag Defense Committee acknowledged that, without Washington’s support, the conflict would develop differently. However, she insisted that, if Europe were united in its effort, it could shoulder the burden of supporting Ukraine alone.

While the UK and France have in recent months provided Ukraine with their respective long-range Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG missiles, the German government has so far been unwilling to follow suit. Explaining this stance, Chancellor Scholz has said that Ukrainian attacks deep into Russian territory could trigger a major escalation. Other German officials have pointed out that the US has yet to make a similar move. The Taurus missile carries a 500-kilogram warhead and has a range of about 500 kilometers (300 miles). Earlier this month, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that, while she fully understands Kiev’s desire to get hold of these rockets, such deliveries are “not something that can be done quickly,” as “every detail has to be worked out beforehand.” Russia, for its part, has consistently warned the West against supplying arms to Kiev, arguing that it only prolongs this conflict, while also risking a direct confrontation between NATO and Moscow.

Are they all aiming to be directly involved now? US next? Is this all part of a big change?

• UK Defense Chief Wants To Send British Troops To Ukraine (RT)

The newly-appointed Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, has unveiled ongoing discussions about expanding the UK-led training program for Ukrainian troops and potentially relocating British instructors into the country itself, as well as offering Kiev unspecified naval support in the Black Sea. “I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well,” Shapps told The Telegraph after a visit to a Salisbury Plain training ground, on Friday. During his trip to Kiev earlier this week, the new defense chief, who got his post in a government reshuffle a month ago, apparently saw an “opportunity” to “bring more things in country.” Shapps explained he meant “not just training,” but also weapons manufacturing, as he praised the British arms giant BAE Systems for its plans to localize in Ukraine.

“I’m keen to see other British companies do their bit as well by doing the same thing. So I think there will be a move to get more training and production in the country,” he added. In his discussions with the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Shapps also reportedly said that Britain’s Navy “could play a role in defending commercial vessels” the Black Sea, according to The Telegraph. The UK military conducted an official operation to train and arm Ukrainian troops since 2015, which has since shifted out of the country. British Royal Marines also conducted several high-risk “discreet operations” in Ukraine last year, according to one general, but officially London never admitted to having any significant presence in the country after the conflict with Russia escalated in 2022.

However, several classified US military documents that leaked online earlier this year suggested that some 50 British special operatives were still active in Ukraine. The open deployment of British military personnel would be yet another escalation, after the UK became the first NATO country to supply Kiev with depleted uranium shells as well as long-range cruise missiles which Ukraine has since repeatedly used in attacks against Russian infrastructure. Moscow has repeatedly described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” while Russian President Vladimir Putin said last year that there are entire military units in Ukraine “under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”

British intelligence experts were also involved in studying ways to blow up Russia’s Crimea Bridge using divers or maritime drones, according to independent news website The Grayzone. Last year’s attack on the bridge was carried out using a truck bomb, rather than the options discussed in the UK analysis, but in July Kiev used two suicide sea drones in a deadly strike that damaged a span of the road and killed two civilians. Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused UK and US intelligence agencies of helping to coordinate the latest Ukrainian strike on Sevastopol, Crimea, which targeted the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

Those days are gone..

• Biden Demands Uninterrupted Cash Flow To Ukraine (RT)

President Joe Biden has welcomed a bipartisan short-time budget deal that will keep the US government open for the next 45 days, but was disappointed that none of the billions of dollars in various aid to Kiev that he had requested made it to the final bill. “We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” Biden said in a brief statement on Saturday night, shortly after the Congress passed the measure. Biden had requested an additional $24 billion for Ukraine in order to ensure an uninterrupted flow of aid to the country, but critics argued that Washington has more important priorities and should have stronger safeguards against the misappropriation of the aid it sends to Kiev.

The US leader, however, blamed “extreme House Republicans” for causing a “manufactured crisis”and “demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans.” “I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment,” the US president added. The Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had to rely on Democrats in order to pass the bill and avert government shutdown as 90 Republicans opposed any short-term funding measures denying him the much needed votes.

As a part of the deal McCarthy increased federal disaster assistance by $16 billion, but had to forgo the border security provisions sought by the GOP. After no new aid to Ukraine made it to the final bill, the House Democratic leadership said in a statement on Saturday that they expect McCarthy to bring a separate Ukraine aid package to vote when the House returns. The Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also welcomed the bill passing, but called on the Congress to “live up to America’s commitment to provide urgently-needed assistance” to Kiev. “America must live up to its word and continue to lead,” he added in a statement published on Saturday.

“If you’re telling the American people with a straight face you will shut down the American government over Ukraine, then shame on you..”

• Ukraine Absent From Emergency US Government Funding Deal (RT)

The US House of Representatives and the Senate both approved a stopgap spending bill on Saturday. The resolution keeps the government open for the next 45 days at the current spending level and adds billions of dollars in funding for US disaster relief – but excludes new aid to Ukraine despite President Joe Biden’s request. The so-called continuing resolution was passed in a 335-91 vote in the House and sent to the Senate just a few hours before the shutdown deadline. The House then adjourned until Monday, meaning the lawmakers did not expect to try something else if the Senate failed to approve the legislation. The Senate approved the bill in a 88-9 vote, and passed it to President Biden, who had decided to stay in Washington this weekend, on standby to sign it. The new plan, branded as a ‘clean’ bill by the Republicans, won the support from more House Democrats than Republicans, with just one Democrat voting against the short-term funding measure.

It ensures that the federal operations are going at the current spending level, but includes none of the $24 billion funding for Ukraine that Biden said was necessary. In a speech on the House floor Saturday, Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) urged his colleagues not to allow the government to shut down simply because the bill excludes aid for Ukraine. “If you’re telling the American people with a straight face you will shut down the American government over Ukraine, then shame on you,” Lawler said. With the government shutdown looming at midnight, the Senate will now face immense pressure to pass the House bill even without aid for Ukraine. The new bill was introduced by the Republicans on Saturday morning, after an earlier plan aimed at steep social spending cuts and tougher border security measures was rejected on Friday.

This may well be it for McCarthy. Gaetz the next Speaker?

• “More Deceit”: Gaetz Rages Over McCarthy-Ukraine Side Deal To Pass Stopgap (ZH)

Update (2155ET): Following the Senate’s passage of the Continuing Resolution, Rep. Matt Gaetz took to Twitter, where he was enraged over a side deal made between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Democrats for Ukraine funding, which Gaetz says he “didn’t tell House Republicans” about until after the vote. Gaetz was responding to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman, who related a message from House Democratic leadership. “When the House returns, we expect Speaker McCarthy to advance a bill to the House Floor for an up-or-down vote that supports Ukraine, consistent with his commitment to making sure that Vladimir Putin, Russia and authoritarianism are defeated. We must stand with the Ukrainian people until victory is won.”

[..] Update (2109ET): The Senate has voted 88-9 to pass the House’s Continuing Resolution stopgap funding bill, which stripped out funds for Ukraine, includes $16 billion for disaster relief, and will keep the US government running for another 45 days. Among the Senate “Yea” votes was Michael Bennet (D-CO), who was absolutely flipping his lid over the lack of Ukraine funding earlier in the day. The bill, which passed the House earlier in the day by a bipartisan vote of 335-91, was passed with just three hours to go before a shutdown. Just before the vote, Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed to keep fighting for more US taxpayer dollars for Ukraine, saying that he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have “agreed to continue fighting for more economic and security aid for Ukraine.”

“We support Ukraine’s efforts to defend its sovereignty against Putin’s aggression,” said Schumer – to which McConnell said he’s “confident” that the Senate can pass more “urgent assistance to Ukraine later this year. But let’s be clear,” that the “alternative,” a shutdown, “would not just pause our progress on these important priorities, it would actually set them back.”

Update (1755ET): After an afternoon of theatrics from Rep. Jamal Bowman (D-NY), it appears that the stopgap legislation to keep the government running through November 17 will now pass at the 11th hour. According to the Wall Street Journal, the bill to keep the government funded past 12:01 Sunday includes $16 billion in disaster relief, but does not include Ukraine funds. “The House voted 335-91 for the funding measure, which includes $16 billion in disaster relief but omits aid for Ukraine. It also excludes border-security measures sought by Republicans. The margin exceeded the two-thirds majority needed to clear the bill through the House, which considered the legislation under special procedures requiring a supermajority of votes. All but one Democrat voted in favor of the measure, while nearly half of Republicans voted against it.” -WSJ

“Unlike in spring when one or two Ukrainian soldiers surrendered, now whole UAF units are laying down the arms; surrendering, there were no company [units]; we even witnessed platoon surrenders..”

• Thousands of Ukrainian Troops Surrender via Russian Radio Hotline (sp.)

Clayton Morris, an American journalist, has expressed his astonishment at a series of videos showcasing the significant surrender of Ukrainian armed forces (UAF) servicemen. This surrender was seen even through the utilization of a newly established Russian radio frequency. “This is amazing. This is a story the Western media does not want you to see,” Morris said on his YouTube channel, referring to “tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers laying down the weapons and surrendering to the Russian troops.” According to a reliable source, recently there has been a significant increase in the number of Ukrainian troops utilizing a dedicated radio frequency to communicate their willingness to disarm. The revelation comes after the individual’s statement was reported by Russian media. The frequency was set up by Russian forces in mid-summer.

“Now more than 10,000 Ukrainian servicemen have already chosen life and used the 149.200 ‘Volga’ frequency to surrender. The captives are well-fed and provided with all necessary medical care,” the source said. According to the insider, the process of UAF soldiers laying down their arms has recently accelerated as Ukrainian troops have begun surrendering in groups rather than individually, particularly around the village of Rabotino, one of the main flashpoints of the Ukraine conflict. After the start of Kiev’s counteroffensive in early June, Governor Yevgeny Balitsky of the Zaporozhye region confirmed that a large number of Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen began surrendering in great numbers. “Unlike in spring when one or two Ukrainian soldiers surrendered, now whole UAF units are laying down the arms; surrendering, there were no company [units]; we even witnessed platoon surrenders,” Balitsky pointed out.

He added that the Ukrainian POWs have decent living conditions and that no one beats or tortures them. The remarks came after a source in the Russian special services told Sputnik that on the Zaporozhye frontline, Ukrainian soldiers are being urged to surrender with the help of leaflets in the form of hryvnias, which are being dropped on UAF positions. “We are working to prevent pointless bloodshed among by Ukrainian soldiers. We are distributing leaflets asking those servicemen to surrender,” the source stressed. The leaflets contain information on how UAF troops can contact the Russian military to discuss the time and place of surrender, according to the insider. Since early June, the UAF has been trying to advance on the Zaporozhye, Yuzhnodonetsk and Artemovsk fronts, not least with the help of combat units trained and armed by NATO instructors.

Fico ran on “not a penny more for Ukraine”.

• Pro-Russian ex-PM Fico Wins Slovak Election, Needs Allies For Government (RT)

Slovakia’s leftist former Prime Minister Robert Fico beat his progressive rival in a parliamentary election after campaigning to end military aid to Ukraine, but he will need to win over allies to form the next government, nearly complete results showed on Sunday. With 98% of voting districts reporting in the Saturday election, Fico’s SMER-SSD party led with 23.37% of the vote. The liberal Progressive Slovakia (PS) followed with 16.86% and the HLAS (Voice) party, which could become the kingmaker for forming the next government, was third with 15.03%.

Former Fico colleague and leftist HLAS leader Peter Pellegrini kept his options open on future coalitions. A government led by Fico and his SMER-SSD party would see NATO member Slovakia joining Hungary in challenging the European Union’s consensus on support for Ukraine, just as the bloc looks to maintain unity in opposing Russia’s invasion. It would also signal a further shift in the region against political liberalism, which may be reinforced if conservative PiS wins an election in Poland later this month.

“..the “deterioration of the economic situation in the West will force countries to stand up for peace..”

• Ukraine Conflict A ‘Slavic Fraternal War’ – Orban (RT)

The Ukraine conflict is a face-off between two Slavic nations in which the rest of the world should not get involved, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. He added that most other Western countries are doing everything they can to spread the hostilities. In an interview with Kossuth Radio on Friday, Orban said the conflict between Kiev and Moscow “is not our war,” but rather a “Slavic fraternal war between two countries.” For this reason, he said other nations should strive to “isolate it, separate it, prevent it from spreading further.” He acknowledged, however, that Budapest and the rest of the Western world have markedly different views on the situation, with the latter intent on globalizing the conflict and seeing it as their war. According to Orban, this approach is mistaken as Western nations are risking severe consequences without having a clear goal.

He attributed this difference in positions to the fact that Hungary directly borders Ukraine, while most of Kiev’s backers are quite far away from the country. The Hungarian prime minister noted that, while “tens of thousands die,” the front lines remain stationary, and there is a “constant danger” of other nations being affected by the conflict. Orban also suggested that it would be a mistake to admit Ukraine into the European Union before the conflict is over. He noted that Kiev and Moscow have territorial disputes, and it is therefore difficult to predict how big or small Ukraine will end up being, and how much of the population will remain when hostilities end. He said these are key parameters for distributing responsibilities and resources within the EU.

The prime minister concluded by claiming that the bloc is short of funds, and currently has to decide between supporting Ukraine or its own less-developed member states, such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Croatia. Earlier this month, Orban predicted that the “deterioration of the economic situation in the West will force countries to stand up for peace,” and they will urge Kiev to negotiate with Moscow. Since the conflict broke out in February 2022, Hungary has been highly critical of Western economic sanctions on Russia, as well as the shipment of increasingly more advanced weaponry to Ukraine.

” I think the majority of Ukrainians want to see the war ended..”

• Ukraine Plan to Stage New Counteroffensive ‘Act of Desperation’ – Analyst (Sp.)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his curators from the US and the UK have reportedly agreed on Kiev’s new counteroffensive in early October in the Kherson and Zaporozhye areas, an informed source told Sputnik. The source argued that a large group of marines from the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) is currently stationed in the Nikolayev region awaiting an order to cross the Dnepr River. Additionally, UAF special forces, who were trained by British military instructors, plan to seize the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, according to the insider. Earl Rasmussen, for his part, told Sputnik that this plan “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” something that can also be described as an “act of desperation.” “This is a catastrophe, this spring/summer/autumn counteroffensive,” the analyst said, referring to Ukraine’s huge death toll.

“The [Ukrainian] army is basically diminished… I think he [Zelensky]’s getting pressure from the West to continue to show some type of progress,” according to Rasmussen. He insisted that “the planned autumn counteroffensive is definitely not a good idea.” The analyst stressed that, “It makes absolutely no military sense, and it’s purely being used to appease some people,” namely, the Zelensky regime’s “Western backers” rather than ordinary Ukrainians. “It is appeasing them and it is because they’re willing to fight to the last Ukrainian as well as Western backers. I do not think that it’s an act to appease the majority of Ukrainians. I think the majority of Ukrainians want to see the war ended,” Rasmussen said.

When asked to comment on the situation when the use of terms such as “war fatigue” and “Zelensky fatigue” is becoming more mainstream among Western politicians, the analyst said that “a lot of people don’t understand ‘Why are we involved with this?’ “They bought into the propaganda over here, the worst censorship that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime… But the censorship is unbelievable with media being shut down, with YouTube lines being blocked,” Rasmussen added.

“This was the case with the German Leopard 2A6, with the Swedish Strv 122, and the British Challenger 2. And it will be the case with the American M1A1..”

• Abrams Tanks Will Become ‘Mobile Steel Coffins’ for Ukrainian Crews (Scott Ritter)

The United States has reportedly begun delivering M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine. These tanks are part of a 31-tank package approved by the Biden administration earlier this year which has seen a significant delay in delivery. The delay in delivering these tanks is attributed to the need to train Ukrainian crews on how to operate and maintain the 68-ton vehicles, each of which is crewed by a four-person team. Around 500 Ukrainian soldiers have undergone an intensive ten-week course on the operation and maintenance of the M1A1 at the US Army’s Grafenwöhr training facility in West Germany. This course is derived from the “Black” phase of the M1A1 operator course conducted at Fort Benning, Georgia, that is designed to train soldiers for the 19K military occupational specialty (MOS), Armored Crewman.

The 19K training includes significant motor pool time, where the trainees are instructed on how to conduct what is known as ten-level (organizational) maintenance, namely the kind of work performed by an operating unit on a day-to-day basis in support of its own operations. This includes lubricating, cleaning, preserving, tightening, replacing, and performing authorized adjustments. The Ukrainians, however, will not be instructed on intermediate-level maintenance, including diagnosis and fault isolation. Such maintenance will be done at a depot facility outside of Ukraine (most likely in Poland). Once the Ukrainian trainees know the basics of how to perform day-to-day maintenance of the M1A1 tank, they are taught about what is expected of them as tank drivers and what steps and actions they must take to prepare the M1A1 for operation.

As part of this training, the soldiers will spend many hours in the Tank Driver Simulator (TDS), a full-scale mockup of the M1A1 driver’s station that gives the trainee a “feel” for how the tank handles before they actually drive one. After time in the TDS, the trainee advances to the Basic Drivers Course, where he learns how to drive an actual tank in road conditions. Once the trainee is qualified to drive the M1A1 tank, he receives training on how to operate the breech and load the 120mm ammunition used by the M1A1. They also learn how to operate the radios and communications system of the M1A1. At the end of the “Black” phase, the trainee will take what is known as the Armor Crewman Test, which covers the tasks involved with preparing the driver’s and loader’s stations. The trainee is also tested on basic maintenance and safety drills.

[..] The Ukrainian soldiers trained by the US Army will possess only the most basic skill levels associated with the M1A1 Abrams. They will lack any tactical or operational skill when it comes to the employment of the tank in combat. Their gunnery skill will be rudimentary (they will more than likely miss their target on the first try, a kiss of death in modern combat), and they will lack the experience and skill necessary to troubleshoot the range of complex malfunctions that occur in the tank turret, electrical, hydraulic, armament, and fire control systems that come with the kind of intensive operations experienced in combat, but not during basic training.

The M1A1, when crewed by an experienced team of soldiers, is a lethal weapon. When crewed by Ukrainians possessing only basic skills—especially when going up against veteran Russian soldiers equipped with modern tank-killing weapons—the M1A1 is little more than a death trap, a mobile steel coffin for the four men inside. This was the case with the German Leopard 2A6, with the Swedish Strv 122, and the British Challenger 2. And it will be the case with the American M1A1.

This is about securing money and assets away from that crazy judge. Just in case.

• Melania Trump Renegotiates Prenup Amid Potential 2nd Term, Legal Troubles (Sp.)

In a discreet move, Melania Trump has reportedly renegotiated her prenuptial agreement with former President Donald Trump, according to insider sources. This latest revision marks at least the third time the couple has adjusted their marital contract since their marriage in 2005. While the specifics of the renegotiation remain undisclosed, it is said to encompass financial assets and property. The primary motive behind this revamped agreement might lie in Melania’s concern for securing a substantial trust for her son, Barron, who is currently 17-years-old, reports US media. Sources suggest that Melania sought to increase her financial security through this renegotiation, with a particular focus on providing for Barron’s future. This renegotiation’s timing is intriguing, as it aligns not only with the possibility of Trump serving a second term but also with his ongoing legal battles.

Donald Trump currently faces potential financial liabilities in a $250 million civil case initiated by New York Attorney General Letitia James against both him and his real estate business. Additionally, he is under a court order to pay $5 million to E. Jean Carroll for defamation, a case he is actively appealing. Thus far, representatives for the Trumps have refrained from commenting on this development. This isn’t the first time rumors of Melania renegotiating the prenup have surfaced. In 2020, a book authored by US media writer Mary Jordan alleged that Melania had sought a prenup revision in 2017, aiming to secure financial equality for Barron, especially concerning opportunities and inheritance compared to Trump’s older children from previous marriages.

Despite previous denials and criticism surrounding such claims, this latest renegotiation underscores Melania’s unwavering commitment to her family’s financial well-being, especially in light of Trump’s ongoing legal entanglements. Melania has been regarded by some as Trump’s “secret weapon” in politics, recognized for providing a stabilizing influence during tumultuous times. However, the full implications of this latest development on the Trumps’ relationship and financial arrangements remain uncertain and will likely continue to fuel speculation and discussion.

Donald Trump is not a small man at 6’3‘‘ (190cm). But his son Barron, at 17 years old, is already 6’8‘‘ (203cm).

Someone shows him a nice gun with his likeness. He says: nice, I should get myself one. They: arrest him!

• Prosecutors: Trump May Have Violated Federal Gun Law At Campaign Event (Sp.)

Special counsel Jack Smith questioned whether the former president violated the conditions of his release at a South Carolina gun shop Monday, forcing his campaign to offer a clarification. The US president’s son Hunter Biden is set to face federal weapons charges Tuesday at a courthouse in Delaware. For a brief moment this week it appeared 2024 contender Donald Trump might be joining him. The controversy started Monday afternoon with a post on the X platform from Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. “President Trump purchases a @GLOCKInc in South Carolina!” posted Cheung, tagging the account of the US gun manufacturer. An accompanying video showed Trump examining a handgun bearing the former president’s likeness.

The campaign deleted the tweet shortly after, clarifying, “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” That didn’t stop prosecutors from weighing in on the controversy, writing, “the defendant either purchased a gun in violation of the law and his conditions of release, or seeks to benefit from his supporters’ mistaken belief that he did so.” Federal law prohibits people facing felony charges from obtaining new firearms; the former president is currently facing 91 felony charges. In addition to pointing out the supposed violation of gun laws, prosecutors have also sought a gag order for Trump, noting his social media comments about retiring Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley and other witnesses in his case.

“No other criminal defendant would be permitted to issue public statements insinuating that a known witness in his case should be executed; this defendant should not be, either,” wrote the prosecutors. Conservative gun rights advocates have questioned the validity of the kinds of restrictions faced by both Trump and President Biden’s son. Expert Stephen Gutowski noted that a federal judge in Texas found the prohibitions to be unconstitutional. However, barring a similar ruling from the Supreme Court or a federal court of appeals, such restrictions currently remain in effect.

Donald Trump before becoming President: 0 CHARGES IN 70 YEARS.
Donald Trump after becoming President: 91 CHARGES FROM 4 SEPARATE INDICTMENTS IN 1 YEAR.

A guy with a strong 50-year career in New York real estate vs a judge who knows very little about it.

• Trump Plans To Appear At New York Court Hearing In Fraud Case (TASS)

Former US President Donald Trump plans to come to New York next week and personally attend the court hearing in the civil fraud case in which he and his company Trump Organization are defendants, Bloomberg reported, citing sources. The start of the trial is scheduled for Monday, October 2. As expected, Trump will at the hearing with his lawyers. The court is ready to provide additional security measures in connection with the arrival of the former American leader and is working with the New York police on this issue, the news agency added. It is noted that Trump also plans to testify in court, but will do so at a later date.

The action of the New York prosecutor’s office against Trump and his company in a civil fraud case was sent to court in September 2022. According to the version of the Public Advocate Letitia James, the company provided false information about the value of assets in order to obtain more favorable conditions for loans and insurance. According to the prosecutor’s office, the value of assets was overstated by $2.23 billion to $3.6 billion. In particular, prosecutors say the value of Trump’s Florida estate, his apartments in Manhattan’s Trump Tower skyscraper, a number of office buildings and golf courses were overstated. Trump’s defense insists the allegations are baseless and that the price of the properties could have changed over time for various reasons. The trial is expected to wrap up in December. The civil cases do not involve jail time or restrictions on political activity.

Mar-a-Lago. Locking up Trump’s money. Damn pic.twitter.com/0Y4kNch5Qf

— Magadonian SouthernSass🇺🇸👊🏼love🍊man (@MsSigSmith) October 1, 2023

@jack

Former Twitter CEO admits banning Donald Trump was 'wrong decision for the world'.

The rats are jumping ship. pic.twitter.com/6qVUTv5UWg

— Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis (@DrLoupis) September 30, 2023

Dowd

🧵 THREAD: What was initially an observation is now measurable: young people are dying at unprecedented rates.@DowdEdward, a former BlackRock portfolio manager and data analyst, has highlighted a concerning surge in cardiovascular deaths in the UK—and the numbers are alarming. pic.twitter.com/xlfFUgjCLr

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) September 30, 2023

Water crisis

World Economic Forum "agenda contributor", Mariana Mazzucato: Our attempt to vaccinate the entire planet failed, "climate change" is "too abstract" for people to understand, but the coming water crisis is something that everyone will get on board with.

Source:… pic.twitter.com/NGrZwGkAWr

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) September 30, 2023

Lift

💪💪😂😂 pic.twitter.com/q8lACABeRx

— Figen (@TheFigen_) September 29, 2023

Monarch

The Monarch butterfly migration is one of the longest-known, multi-generational insect migrations on our planet. Every fourth generation lives 8 times longer than the previous generations and travels 10 times farther

[📹Quin Schrock / everchanginghorizon]pic.twitter.com/xa14OJ0Fcw

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 30, 2023

Narcomedusa

Have you ever seen such a strange animal?

It's a Narcomedusa, it can be found in the Mediterranean in large numbers. The most striking detail of its body are the tentacles

[📹 @MBARI_News]pic.twitter.com/SHPET0jMyI

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 1, 2023

Dana

The Dana octopus squid (Taningia danae) about two metres in length

On two of its arms are giant photophores, the largest light-producing organs in any known animalpic.twitter.com/eCCRlVG5oA

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) September 30, 2023

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Debt Rattle February 9 2023

Feb 092023

February 9, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:43 pm Finance Tagged with: CJR, fighter jets, Gaetz, GB News, Medvedchuk, Nordstream, Seymour Hersh, tanks, Veritas 67 Responses »

Andre Derain Boats at Collioure 1905

• Zelensky Burning Down Ukraine For Western Applause – Medvedchuk (RT)

• How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline (Seymour Hersh)

• Top Russian Security Official Comments On Nord Stream Blast Report (RT)

• Truth About Tanks: How NATO Lied Its Way to Disaster in Ukraine (Scott Ritter)

• Zelenskiy, In London, Wins Pledge To Train Pilots On NATO Jets (RT)

• America Sleepwalks Into War with Russia (Sempa)

• Macron Says Russia Cannot Win Against Ukraine (ZH)

• Why Joe Biden Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump (Fomenko)

• NATO Chief Reveals Size Of Ukraine Funding (RT)

• Colin Powell’s Anthrax Vial Taught The US A Valuable Lesson (Scott Ritter)

• Take A Bow, Columbia Journalism Review (Matt Taibbi)

• Matt Gaetz Steps Out Of Line On Ukraine (ZH)

• Central Bank Gold Reserves See Second-Highest Increase Since 1950 in 2022 (SG)

• Jewish Group and MPs Urge GB News To Stop Indulging Conspiracy Theories (G.)

• James O’Keefe Is on Paid Leave From Project Veritas (NYMag)

• Just How Hard Were We Trolled? (Tucker)

Apologies for being late. What happened was I had a Roger Waters video from Bitchute that took over the entire text column and turned it black. Danny had it figured out in seconds. Not me.

Gonzalo 2023.02.08 The US Has Legalized Theft

“Zelensky slaughtered law and stability for the sake of applause and posturing.”

We should hear much more from Medvedchuk.

• Zelensky Burning Down Ukraine For Western Applause – Medvedchuk (RT)

President Vladimir Zelensky condemned Ukraine to destruction in the name of Western interests because he is too incompetent and ambitious to govern it properly, exiled opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk believes. Zelensky was elected in 2019 as a “peace candidate” who pledged to put an end to the warmongering policies of his predecessor, Pyotr Poroshenko, Medvedchuk, who was the leader of the banned Opposition Platform – For Life, wrote in an article published by RIA Novosti on Wednesday. But instead of becoming “a sentence” for Poroshenko, which was his campaign promise, Zelensky became a sentence for Ukraine, the politician said. The new leader had a mandate to rebalance Ukraine’s political system and make the country neutral and peaceful, Medvedchuk wrote.

But this required a boring routine and difficult work. Zelensky “failed to put the nation in order, and found that blaming Russia rather than his own incompetence for the problems” was easier, he said. By the end of 2020, polls showed a decline in the popularity of Zelensky’s party, and likely defeat in the next presidential election by a candidate proposed by the party led by Medvedchuk, he noted. An escalation of tensions with Russia and later open hostilities saved Zelensky’s career, the politician said. “The country was plunged into a fire for the inflated ego of this man,” Medvedchuk wrote. “Today, the West flatters him at every opportunity. What luck! A ruler who would destroy his country for a photo op, boost his ratings on the blood and suffering of his citizens. Zelensky slaughtered law and stability for the sake of applause and posturing.”

The actual role of the Ukrainian president is that of a “fifth columnist” for his own nation – and Europe, considering that it pays a lot for the Ukraine conflict, Medvedchuk stated. Zelensky hopes that a military victory would wash away all the things he has done to crush his political opponents and to “lease his nation as a battlefield.” But Ukraine has “already lost,” and soon this reality will catch up with him, according to Medvedchuk. The president “acts like a winner, speaks like a winner, poses like a winner. But victory is nowhere near,” he said. Continued conflict is the only thing that delays the reckoning for the president, the politician said. Medvedchuk led the largest opposition political party in Ukraine before the Zelensky government cracked down on it and its senior figures for supposedly being pro-Russian. He now lives in exile, after being charged with treason at home.

Pepe Escobar @RealPepeEscobar: “Sy Hersh rides again. Must read, of course. But, geopolitically, a childish piece. Everyone with a brain knew the Yanks did it. Now we have the “how” and especially “who” – the full chain of command. There WILL be blowback.”

• How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline (Seymour Hersh)

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible. There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Forces Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

[..] The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer? The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures.

To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

“This is utterly false and complete fiction,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told the media in a statement..”

• Top Russian Security Official Comments On Nord Stream Blast Report (RT)

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev has said he has no information on who exactly sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines last September. He was responding to a reporter on Wednesday when asked to comment on a new investigation by American journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed the pipelines were targeted in a US-staged clandestine operation. “If they [the Americans] report that, you can go and ask them. I don’t know who blew it up,” Patrushev claimed ahead of a meeting of security officials in the Kremlin. The report was released by Hersh earlier in the day as the debut piece on his newly-set up blog on Substack. According to an anonymous source with direct knowledge on the matter, the attack on the pipelines was commissioned by the White House and performed by the CIA and US Navy divers.

The task force planted explosives at the pipelines last June, under the guise of a BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise, according to the report. The devices were detonated remotely on September 26 with a signal from a sonar buoy, which had been dropped into the area by a Norwegian reconnaissance plane. The investigation’s conclusion has been strongly denied by multiple US officials. “This is utterly false and complete fiction,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told the media in a statement. Similar messages have been transmitted by the CIA and State Department. Shortly after the blasts, Moscow branded the incident a “terrorist attack.” While falling short of blaming the US for it, the Kremlin said at the time that Washington had benefited from the incident the most, as it greatly advanced efforts to sever Europe from Russia’s gas supply, substituting it with American LNG.

In light of the Seymour Hersh bombshell on the U.S. and Norway blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, let's recall how U.S. officials openly incited against it for months, then blamed… Russia.https://t.co/qp1d7Jx9ry pic.twitter.com/V0Cy2JPSXI

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) February 8, 2023

“..insufficient to the task, resulting in poorly trained crews taking extremely complicated weapons systems into the most dangerous environment in the world for a tank..”

• Truth About Tanks: How NATO Lied Its Way to Disaster in Ukraine (Scott Ritter)

It takes 22 weeks to train a basic American M1 Abrams crewmember. That training just gives the soldier the very basic skill set to be functional. Actual operational expertise is only achieved through months, if not years, of additional training in not just the system itself, but employing it as part of a similarly trained combine arms team. Simply put, even a Ukrainian tank crew experienced in the operation of Soviet-era T-72 or T-64 tanks will not be able to immediately transition to a Western-style main battle tank. First and foremost, the crew size of a Soviet-era tank is three, reflecting the reality that the Soviet tanks make use of an automatic loading mechanism. Western tanks have four crew members because the loading of the main tank gun is done manually. Adapting to these dynamics takes time, and requires extensive training.

Training is expensive. NATO is currently providing Ukraine with three types of Western main battle tank: the British Challenger 2, the German Leopard 2, and the American M1A2. There is no unified training course—each tank requires its own unique training prospectus that is not directly transferable to another system. The decentralized training processes created by such a diverse approach promotes inefficiencies and generates discrepancies in outcome—one crew will not be like another, which in combat, where units are supposed to be interchangeable to promote predictable outcomes if all other circumstances remain the same, is usually fatal.

Moreover, these problems will only be enhanced by the emphasis that will be placed on rapid outcomes. The reality is whatever training programs that are developed and delivered by the nations providing the tanks will be insufficient to the task, resulting in poorly trained crews taking extremely complicated weapons systems into the most dangerous environment in the world for a tank—the teeth of a Russian Army designed and equipped to kill these very same tanks. Tanks are among the most technically challenging weapons systems on a modern battlefield. They are constantly breaking down, especially if not properly maintained. For the M1 Abrams, for every hour a tank is in the field, there are three hours of maintenance time required. This problem only becomes magnified in combat.

Normally an armor unit is equipped with highly specialized organic maintenance crews that can repair most of the minor issues that can sideline a tank. Given the training requirements to produce this level of high-quality mechanic, it is unlikely Ukraine will be provided with this kind of maintenance support. This means that the tanks that are being provided to Ukraine will need to be returned to NATO nations for any significant repairs of equipment that is damaged through simple usage or actual combat. In short, it is highly likely that a Western main battle tank in Ukrainian hands will break down at some point during its operational use by Ukraine, meaning that the total number of tanks available to Ukraine will be far less than the number of tanks provided.

Fighter jets, like tanks, take a long time to learn to operate.

• Zelenskiy, In London, Wins Pledge To Train Pilots On NATO Jets (RT)

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Britain on Wednesday to drum up aid, winning a pledge to train Ukrainian pilots on advanced NATO fighter jets, a big symbolic step up in Western military support. London was his first stop on only his second trip abroad since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. An EU diplomat said Zelenskiy would travel on to Brussels on Thursday, where the European Union is holding a summit. “The United Kingdom was one of the first to come to Ukraine’s aid. And today I’m in London to personally thank the British people for their support and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for his leadership,” Zelenskiy posted on social media, under a picture of himself and Sunak at Stansted Airport. Zelenskiy was also due to meet King Charles III, address parliament and visit Ukrainian troops training in Britain.

“President Zelenskiy’s visit to the UK is a testament to his country’s courage, determination and fight, and a testament to the unbreakable friendship between our two countries,” Sunak said in a statement. Sunak’s office announced additional sanctions on Russia, as well as plans to accelerate the supply of military equipment to Kyiv. For the first time, Ukraine’s air force and marines would now be included in the British training programme. “The training will ensure pilots are able to fly sophisticated NATO-standard fighter jets in the future,” it said. That appeared to signal a notable shift in Western support, as countries have so far held back from providing jets or other weapons capable of striking deep into Russia.

The statement gave no timeframe for the training, and British officials have said teaching pilots to fly British jets takes years. But the first commitment of its kind signals an endorsement of a long-term security relationship with Kyiv, and could pave the way for allies to send planes. Last month, Britain was the first Western country to promise Kyiv advanced battle tanks. It offered just 14, but within two weeks the United States and European allies pledged scores, ending months of debate. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who came under fierce criticism for perceived foot-dragging on approving tank deliveries, said arms supplies should be coordinated confidentially rather than announced by individual countries. “What harms our unity is a public competition to outdo each other,” he told the Bundestag lower house of parliament, according to a manuscript of his speech.

“The new weapons, he asserts, have the potential to “put Kyiv in a position to dictate ceasefire and peace terms to Moscow.”

• America Sleepwalks Into War with Russia (Sempa)

Historians still debate the causes and origins of World War I. George Kennan traced the origins of what an earlier generation called the “Great War” to the end of German Chancellor Bismarck’s European order and the “fateful alliance” between Russia and France. Robert Massie pointed to Germany’s naval challenge to Great Britain. Still others, such as German historian Fritz Fischer, blamed Germany’s hegemonic ambitions. More recently, British historian Christopher Clark argued that Europe’s statesmen “sleepwalked” into the war. This topic has assumed relevance today as the United States and NATO get closer and closer to co-belligerent status with Ukraine. Newsweek reports that 12 NATO countries, including the United States and Germany, have agreed to supply more tanks to Ukraine.

The Biden administration will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks, while Germany is sending 14 of its Leopard 2 tanks. Ukraine’s ambassador to France said that Western countries have agreed to supply Ukraine with 321 tanks. Russia called this latest move a “blatant provocation” and more evidence of “direct involvement” in the war by Western powers. Despite the seriousness of these decisions, some Western observers are acting like Russia’s generals in the lead-up to World War I. The Guardian columnist Martin Kettle claims that the new tanks will give Ukraine “a military advantage” that could transform the war to Ukraine’s favor. The new weapons, he asserts, have the potential to “put Kyiv in a position to dictate ceasefire and peace terms to Moscow.” The Economist opines that sending Ukraine tanks and long-range missiles will enable it to “withstand the next Russian offensive and to take back the territory that is theirs.”

American war hawk Max Boot is confident that the supply of tanks will enable Ukraine to mount a “successful offensive” and to take back its territory. Boot asserts that the tanks along with long-range rockets and advanced fighter planes supplied by the West will “determine the course of the war.” Jeffrey Cimmino and Shelby Magid of the Atlantic Council urge NATO to speed-up production and delivery of even more weapons systems to help Ukraine defeat Russia and integrate Ukraine in Western institutions. Which leads me to ask: Where are the American Count Witte’s? There don’t seem to be any in the Biden administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are all in for co-belligerency in order to preserve the “rules-based international order.” It was Kennan who warned in 1997 that NATO expansion would revive the worst aspects of Russian nationalist and imperialist traditions.

sThat same year, in an open letter to then-President Bill Clinton, a large group of elder statesmen, including Paul Nitze, Fred Ikle, Robert Bowie, Arthur Hartman, Gordon Humphrey, Stansfield Turner, Edward Luttwak, Richard Pipes, and Sam Nunn, voiced opposition to NATO expansion. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock agreed with this sentiment and has urged the U.S. to press for a ceasefire in the war. International relations scholar John Mearsheimer has provided Witte-like warnings about the risks of catastrophic escalation in the Ukraine war. The American Conservative’s Douglas Macgregor and the CATO Institute’s Doug Bandow have written eloquently about the dangers of escalation and the need to avoid greater U.S. and Western involvement in the war. But these modern-day Witte’s are all outsiders. They are not even on the fringes of power like elder-statesman Witte was in 1914. And Witte failed. Are there any Democratic Party elder statesmen who will rise to this challenge? If not, it may soon be too late.

Anytime Macron can get a photo-op that doesn’t make him look diminutive, he’ll take it.

• Macron Says Russia Cannot Win Against Ukraine (ZH)

After a surprise UK visit, Ukraine’s President Zelensky went to Paris immediately afterward in a whirlwind European tour to meet with Western leaders. In Paris he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz Macron asserted during the visit that Russia cannot win the war against Ukraine. “Ukraine can count on France, its European partners and allies to win the war. Russia cannot and must not win,” Macron said before a working dinner among the three leaders at the Elysee Palace. Just ahead of the meeting, Zelensky in an interview with Le Figaro hailed a change of heart in Macron. “I think he has changed, and changed for real this time,” Zelensky said. “After all, it is he who paved the way for the delivery of tanks. And he has also supported Ukraine’s membership to the EU. I think that was a real signal.”

Macron had angered Kiev when in June he said the West must not “humiliate Russia, so that when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” Macron has also come under fire for being among the only Western leaders to hold frequent phone conversations with President Vladimir Putin, in order to attempt a diplomatic breakthrough towards ending the war. But Ukrainian leaders have suggested such diplomatic efforts are a form of ‘capitulation’. As for Macron’s slow pivot away from pursuing a diplomatic offramp, the Associated Press now describes: Macron has said France hasn’t ruled out sending fighter jets but set conditions, including not leading to an escalation of tensions or using the aircraft “to touch Russian soil,” and not resulting in weakening “the capacities of the French army.”

As for Scholz, he was cited in the following on Wednesday: He added that Paris would “continue the efforts” to deliver arms to Kyiv. Mr Scholz also assured the Ukrainian president of enduring allied support. “We will continue to do so as long as necessary,” he told reporters, noting Germany and its partners had backed Ukraine “financially, with humanitarian aid and with weapons”. He added that Ukraine belongs to the European family.

“..with a foreign policy abroad which is dangerously more aggressive than anything Trump ever conceived..”

• Why Joe Biden Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump (Fomenko)

A staple trait of Biden’s presidency is that he repeatedly claims that he is making things better for ordinary Americans. In his own words, he is creating jobs, bringing down inflation and “delivering for families”. He frames himself as an FDR style titan who is reinvigorating the US following troubled times, and, in his words, making it “more competitive” than ever. In reality, his statements could not be further from the truth.The United States is in chaos and the Biden administration faces painfully low approval ratings, crippling levels of inflation, weak 2022 GDP and a looming recession. Whatever the expectations of Joe Biden were, he has proved himself to be the most dangerous and hawkish Democrat leading the US since Harry Truman. As America tears itself apart at home, it is also doing so abroad.

When Joe Biden entered office, many people expected he would be different than Donald Trump. After four years of what the media described as chaos and internal turmoil in America, Biden was heralded as a breath of fresh air who would be normal, sane and moderate. What these arguments actively overlooked was that Donald Trump was not the problem, but rather a symptom of broader American failure and decline. As the world has changed, in particular through the lingering impact of globalized neoliberal capitalism, digitization and shifts in the geopolitical balance of power, the United States has struggled to assert a coherent identity amidst a changing world which has produced deep divisions and large-scale political conflict.

This is the era of “post-truth”, and as a result, Joe Biden is not in fact better than Trump, he is infinitely worse. While Donald Trump was a populist figure who railed against the political establishment, Joe Biden is a long-standing member of the political establishment. As such, he has used his reign in office to reassert its influence and give it “Trumpian characteristics”. That includes the same brand of conceited bragging, populism and political squabbles at home, but with a foreign policy abroad which is dangerously more aggressive than anything Trump ever conceived. America’s increasingly dangerous involvement in the Ukraine conflict is a prime example.

The underlying factor here is the effort by the United States to resuscitate its unconditional hegemony over the rest of the world by force, having sensed that a political shift has taken place. This change is reflected in the anger and resentment of blue collar, white Americans, and a primary driver for Trump’s election. The product of the Trump and Biden administrations has been to project those changes into resentment of China, culminating in events like the recent “Chinese spy balloon” saga that have been hyper-dramatized. China has become the designated enemy, and it appears there is a political consensus in the US around this, irrespective of the consequences.

There are some critical differences between the two administrations in how this is being pursued. While Trump operated US foreign policy on “quid-pro-quo” terms, stressing the “America First” philosophy, the Biden administration sees opportunity not through trade wars or bargaining, but through the escalation of geopolitical conflict. Biden’s team is sacrificing stability on every front for the sake of power. As such, the Biden White House, despite fawning over American jobs and prosperity, has thought nothing about tearing up global supply chains, driving up prices, accelerating geopolitical bloc confrontation, pursuing large scale sanctions and whipping up global uncertainty for hegemonic gain.

“..Ukraine’s own defense minister said Kiev is carrying out a NATO mission..”

• NATO Chief Reveals Size Of Ukraine Funding (RT)

The US-led military bloc has sent the government in Kiev over a hundred billion dollars over the past year, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday in a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington. Since last February, NATO has provided “unprecedented support to Ukraine, around 120 billion dollars in military, humanitarian and financial assistance,” Stoltenberg told reporters at the State Department. While the US has played an “indispensable role,” Canada and the European members have contributed “over half” of the overall assistance, “including tanks, advanced air defense systems” and other weapons, he added.

According to Blinken, the US has contributed “nearly $30 billion” worth of military aid, while other NATO members gave $13 billion, as well as “tens of billions more in humanitarian and economic support.” sBlinken also said that “tilting the battlefield in Ukraine’s favor” is the key to the eventual diplomatic solution of the conflict. After their joint press event, Stoltenberg and Blinken went to meet with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, with even more funding for Ukraine on the agenda. In December, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated that the collective West had provided Ukraine with $97 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and supplies. Moscow has repeatedly warned the West that arming Ukraine only prolongs the conflict and risks a direct confrontation.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements for peace in the Donbass and insisting that its neighbor pledge to never join any Western military bloc. Ukrainian, German and French leaders have since admitted that the Minsk negotiations were a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for war with Russia. Though multiple Western officials have publicly said Ukraine is fighting for their “values” and world order, and Ukraine’s own defense minister said Kiev is carrying out a NATO mission, the US and NATO maintain they are technically not participants in the conflict.

“..– that it can get away with any lie it wants..”

• Colin Powell’s Anthrax Vial Taught The US A Valuable Lesson (Scott Ritter)

Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq. The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care.On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media: “He’s [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don’t work, inspections can’t work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell’s presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame.”

I was 100% correct in my assessment. I was in Japan at the invitation of Japanese activists to generate political opposition to America’s looming war on Iraq. I addressed the Japanese parliament and spoke with several major Japanese media outlets. Shortly after Powell finished speaking, I gave an interview with Kyodo News, where I dismissed Powell’s assertions that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction as “unsubstantiated.” “There’s nothing here that’s conclusive proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” I told Kyodo News. “Everything in here is circumstantial, everything in here mirrors the kind of allegations the US has made in the past in regard to Iraq’s weapons program,” I said. “He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people – and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people.”

Powell’s iconic moment was when he raised a vial of white powder – a proxy intended to simulate dry powder anthrax, a potent biological weapons agent, in an effort to link Iraq with the terrorist attacks in the US in October 2001 where dry powder anthrax was sent through the US postal system in envelopes. Ironically, the anthrax in question was actually produced by the US. Iraq is only known to have produced liquid bulk anthrax, which has a shelf life of only three years, and the last known batch of liquid bulk anthrax was produced in 1991 at a state-owned factory which was destroyed in 1996. “Colin Powell holds up a vial of dry powder anthrax and he makes allusions to the attack in the United States through the letters. That was US government anthrax! It had nothing to do with Iraq,” I said. Powell, I explained, was engaging in “classic bait-and-switch” in his presentation. “Iraq, anthrax, vial, dry powder – what connection do they have? None!”

“..the Times and the Post were so busy self-mythologizing that they untethered themselves from accountability mechanisms that once kept papers out of trouble..”

• Take A Bow, Columbia Journalism Review (Matt Taibbi)

The Columbia Journalism Review stunned many last Monday by publishing “The Press Versus the President,” a 24,000-word autopsy of press coverage in the Trump years, focusing on the the Trump-Russia collusion scandal colloquially known as “Russiagate.” The piece was written by Jeff Gerth, a long-serving New York Times writer who is as credentialed as they come in the legacy press, having among other things won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 (for reporting, incidentally, not commentary or public service). In retirement at the start of the Trump years, Gerth watched with growing alarm as venerable institutions like the Times and the Washington Post continually made high-stakes assertions in headlines that appeared based on thin or uncheckable sourcing.

The pile of such stories was already stacked to skyscraper height, and commemorated by awards like a joint Times-Post Pulitzer, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up an investigation of the matter without indicting Trump or anyone else for the supposed conspiracy. There was no way for Mueller’s probe to have ended the way it did and for years of “worse than Watergate” news reports about Trump-Russian collusion to be true, so Gerth went back to the beginning in search of the real story of what, if anything, went wrong on the coverage side. The result is a long, almost book-length compendium of errors and editorial overreach. It could have been longer. Gerth focused on the would-be investigative reports at papers like the Times and the Post that drove Russiagate, mostly leaving alone the less serious players at cable news and at online journals whose main contribution was making the click-bomb bigger.

A brief note on some issues that were already popping up as problems in the media business heading into 2016-2017, and which are important subtext to Gerth’s piece: All the President’s Men was a great movie, but it may have infected the media world with a delusion. Alan J. Pakula’s atmospheric thriller depicted journalists as modern-day noir detectives, with the bustling Washington Post newsroom replacing the stylish offices of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman giving America a portrait of reporters as sexy young rebels who could topple a president with a keystroke. The job is virtually never like that, but a generation of reporters and editors grew up with this ideal, on the alert for that one great scoop that would lead to lucrative book and movie deals and model-level actors playing them onscreen.

I don’t think it’s an accident that just as journalism was beginning to lose its way, Hollywood began cranking out All the President’s Men homages one after another, from Spotlight to She Said to The Post. Gerth doesn’t say that great papers like the Times and the Post were so busy self-mythologizing that they untethered themselves from accountability mechanisms that once kept papers out of trouble, but it’s implied in the facts he uncovers. Perhaps the most damning scene in the four-part series comes in Part Two, when in an astonishing display of hubris the Times invites a documentary crew to film them for a series called The Fourth Estate. The problem is, the scene they invite Showtime to record is perhaps the biggest screwup in the Russiagate years. This is the journalistic equivalent of Captain Edward Smith inviting cameras to record him snoring away as his Titanic drives into an iceberg.

Why is he a lone voice when he says what most people think?

• Matt Gaetz Steps Out Of Line On Ukraine (ZH)

Rep. Matt Gaetz early this week took an extremely unpopular position within the D.C. swamp, saying just before President Biden’s Tuesday night State of the Union address, “How much more for Ukraine? Is there any limit?” From the swamp’s point of view, he has certainly “stepped out of line”… but from the point of view of average Americans struggling to pay rising grocery, utility, and housing costs as billions of US tax dollars remain flowing to a corrupt foreign government, Gaetz in his lonely but outspoken stance is saying precisely what needs to be said at this late stage. The Florida Republican went off in a House floor speech Monday: “How much more for Ukraine? Is there any limit?” And posed: “Which billionth dollar really kicks in the door? Which redline we set will we not later cross?”

He had earlier previewed Biden’s State of the Union address in saying: “Tomorrow, President Biden will tell us how much more we must do for Ukraine,” Gaetz said. “Look around your house. How much stuff is made in Ukraine, or even Russia for that matter?” “So why Ukraine, a country that just rounded up dozens of senior leaders in its government over overt corruption?” Gaetz asked. “Perhaps the answer is as simple as the Hunter Biden life motto: the grifters gotta grift.” He emphasized the huge risk of D.C. pursuing its policy of arming Ukraine at all costs while inching toward nuclear-armed superpowers clashing, while at the same time most Americans find the Biden administration’s rationale for the unprecedented defense aid for Kiev to be unclear.

“Why should we do more for a country that just rounded up dozens of its senior officials over overt corruption?” he asked the administration and its supporters. For many months now going back to last spring, Gaetz has warned fellow lawmakers and the public of a “bipartisan push to go to war with Russia” – which could unleash nuclear apocalypse. Ironically, Joe Biden himself in so many words has warned of the same thing, in an October speech admitting that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is the highest it has been for 60 years, since the Cuban missile crisis.

Quietly preparing.

• Central Bank Gold Reserves See Second-Highest Increase Since 1950 in 2022 (SG)

Central banks closed out 2022 with reported net purchases of 28 tons of gold in December. Including large unreported purchases, this brought total central bank gold buying in 2022 to 1,136 tons. It was the second-highest level of net purchases on record dating back to 1950, and the 13th straight year of net central bank gold purchases. China officially started buying gold again in November and made another large purchase of 30 tons in December. That raised China’s total gold reserves to over 2,000 tons for the first time. The Chinese central bank accumulated 1,448 tons of gold between 2002 and 2019, and then suddenly went silent. Many speculate that the Chinese continued to add gold to its holdings off the books during those silent years. There has always been speculation that China holds far more gold than it officially reveals.

As Jim Rickards pointed out on Mises Daily back in 2015, many people speculate that China keeps several thousand tons of gold “off the books” in a separate entity called the State Administration for Foreign Exchange (SAFE). The Central Bank of Türkiye (Turkey) continued its consistent buying in December, adding another 25 tons to its swelling gold reserves. Over the course of 2022, Turkey added about 150 tons of gold to its hoard. Croatia bought 2 tons of gold after having not reported any changes in its gold reserves since 2001. After a pause in November, the Reserve Bank of India resumed purchasing gold in December, with a modest 1-ton purchase. India ranks as the ninth largest gold-holding country in the world. Since resuming buying in late 2017, the Reserve Bank of India has purchased over 200 tons of gold.

In August 2020, there were reports that the RBI was considering significantly raising its gold reserves. These purchases were partially offset by large sales by Kazakhstan (29 tons) and Uzbekistan (1 ton). It is not uncommon for banks that buy from domestic production – such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – to switch between buying and selling. December purchases brought the total net increase in central bank gold reserves in Q4 to 417 tons. Through the second half of 2022, central banks bought 862 tons of gold.

The total increase in reserves was a combination of reported buying, along with an estimate for significant unreported buying. Central banks that often fail to report purchases include China and Russia. Many analysts believe China is the mystery buyer stockpiling gold to minimize exposure to the dollar. According to the World Gold Council, “Should more information about this unreported activity become available, these estimates may be revised.” Total 2022 central bank purchases of 1,136 tons represented a 152% increase from 2021. It was the highest level of annual net central bank gold purchases since the suspension of dollar convertibility into gold in 1971, and the second-highest annual total on record. (The record was in 1967.)

They got rid of Mark Steyn, the presenter, but that is apparently not enough. So here comes the anti semite card.

• Jewish Group and MPs Urge GB News To Stop Indulging Conspiracy Theories (G.)

The UK’s leading Jewish organisation and a group of MPs have called on GB News and the media regulator Ofcom to tackle the broadcaster’s indulgence of conspiracy theories, warning that some recent segments and guests risked spreading ideas linked to antisemitism. The criticism comes as the channel faces increasing scrutiny over its mix of serious news with programmes that delve heavily into conspiracies about areas including Covid vaccines and a plot to create a world government. The decision by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism to speak out follows a recent edition of the weekly GB News show hosted by Neil Oliver, the broadcaster and historian.

Oliver, who delivers trademark monologues to camera, used the show last Saturday to discuss what he called a “silent war” by generations of politicians to take “total control of the people” and impose a “one-world government”. The idea seemingly echoes a noted conspiracy theory document called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, supposedly a secret manual for world government found by chance in 1986. This has a long section on the role of the Rothschild banking dynasty, a common antisemitic trope. On the same show, one of Oliver’s guests was a man called William Keyte, introduced as a “constitutional expert”, who is a supporter of a fringe campaign group called the New Chartist Movement. Keyte’s focus is on the supposed primacy of common law over parliament, which has no crossover with antisemitic ideas.

[..] Keyte told the Guardian his interest was in constitutional law. He said: “It seems a shame that rather than focus on the important issues I raised in the interview with Neil in which so many people appear to be interested, you seem to be embarking on a piece about antisemitism. I do not condone antisemitism, but nor do I support the use of the subject to detract from other important issues.” A spokesperson for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said: “It is highly concerning that GB News continues to air a show which embraces all manner of conspiracy theories. Somewhat inevitably, some of those invited on to this show represent organisations that promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. If the channel will not act, we expect that Ofcom will.”

And some more cleaning.

• James O’Keefe Is on Paid Leave From Project Veritas (NYMag)

James O’Keefe, the founder and chairman of Project Veritas, has taken a paid leave from the conservative nonprofit media organization as its board considers whether to remove him from his leadership position, according to current and former employees of the organization.

An internal message sent to Project Veritas employees by the organization’s executive director, Daniel Strack, said that O’Keefe would be taking “a few weeks of well-deserved PTO.” An image of the message was shared by a source familiar with the organization’s internal operations, and its authenticity was confirmed by a current employee. When reached for comment on his personal cell phone, O’Keefe said nothing in response and did not respond to follow-up calls and text messages. Through a Project Veritas spokesman, Strack later released a statement on behalf of the organization. “Like all newsrooms at this stage, the Project Veritas Board of Directors and Management are constantly evaluating what the best path forward is for the organization,” the statement read in part. It did not directly address questions about O’Keefe’s employment status. “There are 65+ employees at Project Veritas dedicated to continuing the mission to expose corruption, dishonesty, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions,” the statement read. “To our supporters: We hear you, we care about you, and we will never give up.”

O’Keefe is his organization’s guiding ideological force and onscreen face, but his status as its day-to-day manager has become uncertain amid reports of internal turmoil, lawsuits from former employees, leaks about its internal workings, and a federal investigation into its conduct in purchasing a diary stolen from Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter. Strack’s internal message to employees made reference to what he called “a distracting time” and said that a board meeting had been held to discuss “the health of the organization” and that while “we have not come up with final solutions yet we have made a few immediate decisions.” The message said two top Project Veritas executives, including the nonprofit’s chief financial officer, had been “reinstated.” Multiple sources said that the pair had recently been fired by O’Keefe.

“They utterly smashed the world as we knew it—violating all human rights—in order to test out a new technology at great profit to themselves. In other words, they treated us all as lab rats.”

“An entire generation of politicians needs to be toppled from power all over the world. The same goes for media professionals, tech CEOs, and public-health officials. They all have to go..”

• Just How Hard Were We Trolled? (Tucker)

What if Dr. Anthony Fauci co-authored an article on vaccines that would have gotten you and me blocked and banned at any point in the past three years? That just happened. His article in Cell—“Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses”—says it as plainly as possible: the COVID vaccine did not work because it could not work. [..] Now, it’s not as if Fauci admits that the vaccine was a complete flop. Of course, he has to engage in the usual incantations of the glories of the COVID vaccination. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid development and deployment of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines has saved innumerable lives and helped to achieve early partial pandemic control.”

Note the word “innumerable.” It means there is no number and no possibility of a number. Exactly. Also note “early partial”—weasel words to cover the reality of egregious failure. If you click through the citation to this dubious claim, it is from April 2021, early in the mutation process when we hardly had any data at all to justify such celebration. Why is Fauci citing a two-year-old piece in defense of the vaccine? Because that’s all there is to cite: two-year-old hagiographies without meaningful data. How precisely can we account for this fiasco? If they knew, and they did know, how is it that they put us through this horrible upheaval? The most dreadful theory is that they knew for sure that the virus would become endemic through exposure.

But the point of “slowing the spread” and “flattening the curve” (lockdowns and masking), while trashing and nearly banning other therapeutics, was to preserve the customer base for the new experimental product. That product was mRNA which is supposed to be a platform for future vaccines. This is why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was taken off market. Under this theory, they wanted to prolong the pandemic for as long as possible so they could collect data on how well the vaccine worked. And they wanted to try it universally, which is why we did not hear much at all about the risk gradient of the vaccine itself. This also accounts for the deliberate drumming up of disease panic and forced distancing. So let that sink in.

They utterly smashed the world as we knew it—violating all human rights—in order to test out a new technology at great profit to themselves. In other words, they treated us all as lab rats. An entire generation of politicians needs to be toppled from power all over the world. The same goes for media professionals, tech CEOs, and public-health officials. They all have to go. And we need a thorough accounting not to mention guarantees that nothing like this will ever happen again. As for Moderna and Pfizer, one could easily make a case for forcing their immediate end as corporate entities.

BREAKING NEWS: Swiss President and the Minister of Health are under investigation, indictment, and prosecution by the Attorney General for Covid Crimes involving lying about the vaccine effectiveness and safety. Thailand convening war crime tribunals to nullify Pfizer Contracts. pic.twitter.com/3RfT4t3puq

— Truth Justice ™ (@SpartaJustice) February 7, 2023

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Debt Rattle February 8 2023

Feb 082023

February 8, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:00 am Finance Tagged with: Anglo-Zionism, balloon, Borrell, Gaetz, Kissinger, nuclear war, OPCW, WWIII 85 Responses »

Johannes Vermeer The glass of wine c 1658-1660

• China Wants its Balloon Back (Celente)

• Let’s Talk About Nuclear War (Naveira)

• Musk Assesses Public Awareness Of WWIII Risk (RT)

• Kiev Inching Closer To Conceding Defeat – Medvedev (RT)

• Kiev Still Conducts Terror Attacks Against New Russian Regions – Shoigu (TASS)

• Anglo-Zionism and the Confederation of Europe (Batiushka)

• China Sees Russia’s Concerns Over NATO Expansion As Premise For Conflict (TASS)

• West Uses OPCW To Justify Its Aggression – Moscow (RT)

• EU ‘Sold Its Soul’ To Russia – Poland (RT)

• EU’s Borrell Can’t Hide His Racist Worldview – Lavrov (RT)

• Ukraine: There’s No Substitute For Victory (Steve Forbes)

• US Rep. Matt Gaetz Calls For End To Funding Of Kiev’s Army (RT)

• Russia Has Lost Confidence In US Dollar – Finance Minister (RT)

• US Lacks Unity Before Modern Challenges – Kissinger (TASS)

• Where Do Things Stand? (Jim Kunstler)

• The Failure of Scientific Journals: the Failure of Science (Ugo Bardi)

Trump SOTU

President Trump’s SOTU pic.twitter.com/DvvKsL4NLG

— James Hirsen (@thejimjams) February 8, 2023

2014

Tucker SOTU

Here is the true state of our union under Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/5z2ZVurxsN

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2023

They’ve “rescued” it, so let’s hear if it’s just a weather balloon.

• China Wants its Balloon Back (Celente)

China’s Foreign Ministry called on the U.S. to immediately return the “airship” that was shot out of the skies last weekend by an F-22 after Washington identified it as a “spy balloon.” Mao Ning, a spokeswoman from the ministry, said during a press briefing Tuesday that the balloon does not belong to the U.S., it belongs to China, according to RT, the Russian outlet. She accused Washington of overreacting and acting in an unprofessional manner with the goal of smearing Beijing. China has insisted that the balloon was a civilian meteorological research airship. Tensions between China and the U.S. are hitting new lows. Wei Fenghe, the Chinese military head, refused a call with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. military chief, on Tuesday.

[..] American F-22 fighters successfully shot down a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast last weekend that the U.S. said was being used by Beijing to “surveil strategic sites.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called the incursion an “unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.” The Defense Department said it began tracking the balloon, which was carrying a payload the size of three buses, over the Aleutian Islands on 28 January. The balloon floated over Alaska, Canada, and then re-entered U.S. airspace over Idaho, a statement read. The U.S. claimed it did not shoot down the balloon over land to prevent “undue risk” to civilians. President Joe Biden said Saturday that he ordered the Pentagon to shoot the balloon down “as soon as possible” on Wednesday. The balloon was eventually picked off by the Raptor which fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder missile that cost We the People of Slavelandia about $400,000.

The statement said, “F-15 Eagles flying from Barnes Air National Guard Base, Massachusetts, supported the F-22.” “Long before the shoot down, U.S. officials took steps to protect against the balloon’s collection of sensitive information, mitigating its intelligence value to the Chinese,” the statement read. China said the U.S. overreacted over a weather balloon. “China strongly disapproves of and protests against the U.S. attack on a civilian unmanned airship by force,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday morning, according to the South China Morning Post. “The U.S.’s use of force is a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice,” the ministry said, before noting that Beijing reserves the right to make “further responses that are necessary.”

“..there is no compromise, a country is either sovereign or a colony..”

• Let’s Talk About Nuclear War (Naveira)

The United States and Russia – the two greatest nuclear powers on the planet – have embarked on a wide-ranging “indirect war”. All that now remains is for them to engage in direct warfare, which will end up happening sooner or later. If later, it will be exactly because both powers are aware that any direct war between them will inevitably escalate into nuclear war, with a good chance of devastating them both. How we reached this point will not be examined in depth here. Very briefly, both parties regard this as a struggle for existence – Russia, in order to continue to exist as a nation (in Putin’s words, “there is no compromise, a country is either sovereign or a colony”), and the United States, to continue to exist as the nation with hegemony over the rest (the US economy has become so reliant on that hegemony that its end would entail the country’s collapse).

Accordingly, both are willing to take the conflict to its ultimate consequences in order to prevail, and thus nuclear war becomes more inevitable with every passing day. Among those responsible for a nuclear war that will be the downfall of all Humankind, there can be no “good guy”. However, when one side is fighting to subsist with autonomy, while the other is fighting in order to dominate the rest, it is not difficult to discern which is most the “bad guy”. Also, if it is still possible, after the hecatomb, to bring the culprits to some kind of justice, it will make all the difference to distinguish who “pressed the button” first (that is, who deliberately chose for millions of people to die) from whoever operated their buttons in retaliation to the incoming attack.

What developments will take place until we finally arrive at nuclear war is also not the purpose of this piece. Once again, to summarise, both are trying to “gain time”, hoping for their adversary to fall over their own feet before direct war ensues: the Russians are counting on an economic and social collapse in the West, while the US counts on a military defeat of the Russians by the Ukrainians, resulting in the fall of the Putin government. It has to be said, however, that thus far the Russians are getting the better of this “war of attrition”.

The US also seeks to draw Russia into war against some other, NATO-member country, prodding Lithuania to blockade land access to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, Romania to provide Moldavia with the means to reincorporate the pro-Russian separatist region of Transnistria, and Poland to occupy the westernmost portion of the Ukraine, so as to force Russia to respond militarily. Under the fifth article of the treaty that set up NATO, an attack on any member state is to be taken as an attack on them all; in that way, the United States would drag all of Europe into a war against Russia. The Russians (as well as these European cannon-fodder candidates) have thus far managed to sidestep this trap.

“Most are oblivious to the danger.”

• Musk Assesses Public Awareness Of WWIII Risk (RT)

The majority of people are not even aware that a new world war may erupt soon, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has stated. The risk of a global catastrophe was highlighted this week by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The UN head said in a speech to the General Assembly on Monday that he feared that humanity was marching toward a “wider war” with its “eyes wide open” and urged preserving peace. “Could we please not do WWIII,” pleaded conservative political commentator Luke Rudkowski, reacting to the speech. Musk responded: “Most are oblivious to the danger.” The Twitter and SpaceX CEO previously warned against “relentless escalation” of the conflict in Ukraine, stating that it was dangerous for the country itself and the world.

Musk won praise for supplying SpaceX Starlink satellite internet systems to the Ukrainian government, with some experts assessing that they were a game-changer in the fight against Russia. But he also suggested that Kiev would have to make concessions to Moscow in order to achieve peace, a notion that prompted some Ukrainian officials to harshly criticize and even insult the businessman. Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, claimed last week that Musk was using his control of Twitter to reduce the reach of Ukrainian official accounts and help “Russian propaganda.” “Maybe a regulator is needed to explain competition rules to the owner?” Podoliak mused. The Ukrainian official offered no evidence to support his claims or explanation of how his regulatory threat could be carried out.

“..Aleksey Danilov, who claimed that Russia is lobbying EU nations to accept a Korean-style split of his nation..”

• Kiev Inching Closer To Conceding Defeat – Medvedev (RT)

Discussions of a “Korean scenario” in Ukraine are a sign that Kiev is on the way to recognizing the reality on the ground and accepting its losses, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said. The idea of a Korean-style division of Ukraine has been discussed by current and former officials in Kiev, who claim that this is what Russia is pursuing. The idea that Ukraine could be divided up the way Korea was after the war in the 1950s is “for domestic consumption” and constitutes “wishful thinking,” Medvedev added, citing unnamed “propagandists” as peddling the notion. What is notable is that “they coyly tested the statement that there can be no victory” and that “being split is the best-case scenario,” the former president said. The ‘Korean scenario’ means that a smaller, US-backed Ukraine could eventually develop to the level of South Korea while maintaining its claims over lost territories, Medvedev explained.

“In essence, this is the first step towards accepting the realities on the ground,” he said. Korea was split into two parts after a three-year civil war, in which the opposing factions in the north and south were backed by the USSR and China, and the US respectively. Both Pyongyang and Seoul claim sovereignty over the entire Korean Peninsula, and each considers the other government to be unlawful. Unlike South Korea, Donbass voted in a referendum to become part of Russia rather than forming a sovereign state, Medvedev said, arguing that a ‘Korean scenario’ is not feasible for Ukraine. The former president currently serves as the deputy chairman of the Russian National Security Council.

The idea was floated to the Ukrainian public last month by Medvedev’s counterpart in Kiev, Aleksey Danilov, who claimed that Russia is lobbying EU nations to accept a Korean-style split of his nation, and stated that Kiev would reject it. The Kremlin dismissed the report as a “hoax. This week, the Korean scenario was also brought up by Aleksey Arestovich, the former aide to the office of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Speaking at an expert panel discussion on Monday, he stated that Ukraine does not have enough manpower to beat Russia on the battlefield anytime soon, and claimed that a Korean scenario may become an acceptable off-ramp for the parties involved. Like Danilov before him, Arestovich claimed that Russia is seeking this type of outcome, while noting that the Western nations which Kiev depends upon “think the same way.”

“..Ukraine’s armed forces have been attacking residential areas, hospitals, and public gathering areas..”

• Kiev Still Conducts Terror Attacks Against New Russian Regions – Shoigu (TASS)

Authorities in Ukraine continue intimidating civilians in Russia’s new regions, with Ukrainian troops attacking residential areas and hospitals there, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday. “While realizing that they won’t be able to inflict a military defeat on Russia, the Ukrainian leadership has been resorting to criminal activity in order to intimidate residents of new Russian regions,” Shoigu said, adding that Ukraine’s armed forces have been attacking residential areas, hospitals, and public gathering areas and committing terror attacks against government and social facilities. On January 28, Russia’s top brass said that the Ukrainian armed forces had launched an intentional attack at around 7:30 am, using rocket-propelled projectiles from the US-made HIMARS multiple launch rocket system, on a hospital in Novoaidar in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).

Fourteen patients and medical employees were killed, while 24 more suffered wounds. The Russian Defense Ministry pointed out that civilian and military health professionals had been providing medical treatment to local civilians and service members at the Novoaidar hospital for many months. Former LPR’s ambassador to Moscow Rodion Miroshnik said last week that Ukrainian forces had shelled four LPR hospitals since the start of the year. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said it’s going to look into the circumstances behind the Novoaidar hospital shelling.

Orthodox priest Batiushka sees the GOP as the Anglos, and the Dems as the zionists.

• Anglo-Zionism and the Confederation of Europe (Batiushka)

[..] the main bastion of Anglo-Zionism is undoubtedly the USA, which the bankers from London seriously colonised during the First World War. specifically during the 1916 turning-point, when it became apparent to the Round Table organisation there would only be one winner, neither Germany, nor Great Britain, but the USA. As soon as Russia had been taken out of the equation through US bankers via their British agents and Russian traitors in Petrograd in early 1917, the first US troops appeared in France less than one month later. All had been pre-planned. Today in the US, the Republican Party represents the Anglos and the Democratic Party the Zionists. The billionaire Trump, like Bush, is a typical White Anglo nationalist WASP: America first.

On the other hand, Biden is a typical Zionist, just like Obama and Clinton before him, though quite unlike Kennedy. An electoral accident, he of course had to be eliminated. And he was.For 250 years the Anglos and the Zionists have worked together in the US, they have had the same self-interested interests – money and power. However, there are now discussions between them regarding the Ukraine. Already half of the Anglo Republicans want out of the Ukraine (1). It is too costly and they want to save the US (and their own fortunes) from its multiple self-inflicted wounds just in case it goes under. But the Zionists are thinking along the same lines. There is only one solution. The Anglos wanted the Ukraine in order to defeat their traditional rival, Russia.

However, for the Zionists the Ukraine had another purpose, it was to destroy White Europe, the same purpose they had in fomenting the First and Second World Wars, so ensuring Zionist domination of the world – ‘Globalism’. Not all neocons are Wolfowitzes, Kagans and Nulands. Many are Anglos. Today, we are already seeing that the Republicans are increasingly beginning to support Zaluzhny, the Kiev military commander, whereas the Democrats still stand behind the Jewish Zelensky, but are now wavering. The Republicans originally wanted to weaken Russia. The Republicans are nationalists, so are the Russians. It is now just dawning on them that Russia does not want to recreate the Soviet Empire or any other sort of Empire, all they want is to protect Russians, not to invade other countries. In any case, they are not going to weaken Russia any more through the Ukraine.

All that they have done so far is to strengthen Russia. The Ukraine has not served its purpose. As for the Zionists, they are happy to kill as many White Europeans, especially Russian and Ukrainians, as possible, but above all they want world power. The interests of Anglos and Zionists coincide. For if the Russians do not want world power after all, then the real rival is China, which has real mercantile power. Therefore, the pivot to China, where there is real money. Once the US has lost in the Ukraine, and Kadyrov confidently predicts that it will be over by the end of 2023, the US will turn its attention to China. But it is already happening. That is what the balloon show was all about. China is a much more interesting option for the money-grubbers, whether Anglos or Zionists. But where does that leave benighted Europe?

“You believe that the NATO expansion does not carry a threat for Russia, but, when [Soviet leader Nikita] Khruschev decided to deploy nuclear weapons on Cuba, what was [US President John] Kennedy’s reaction?”

• China Sees Russia’s Concerns Over NATO Expansion As Premise For Conflict (TASS)

China remains neutral in regards to the conflict in Ukraine, but it understands Russia’s concerns over NATO’s eastward expansion and the plans to include Ukraine in the alliance, which have become the premise for the current conflict, Chinese Ambassador to France Lu Shaye said on the LCI TV channel Monday. “NATO has been posing a threat to Russia’s security for decades, […] the five rounds of NATO’s eastward expansion pose a significant threat for Russia’s security. This is what [Russian] President Vladimir Putin is talking about; he strongly opposes the inclusion of a number of neighboring states to NATO, including Ukraine,” Lu Shaye said, answering a question about the reasons behind the current conflict in Ukraine.

“You believe that the NATO expansion does not carry a threat for Russia, but, when [Soviet leader Nikita] Khruschev decided to deploy nuclear weapons on Cuba, what was [US President John] Kennedy’s reaction?” he continued. When the host noted that, prior to the special military operation, there allegedly were no plans to include Ukraine to the alliance and to deploy NATO missiles on its territory, the diplomat noted that this could happen in the future. “If NATO pushes its borders to Russia’s threshold, it will also deploy missiles,” he noted. The Chinese envoy opined that the actions of the West do not contribute to a prompt end of the Ukrainian conflict.

“China remains neutral in this crisis, but we believe that constant shipments of increasingly heavy weapons to one side of the conflict do not contribute to its prompt end. It is like pouring oil to the flame,” he said. Answering corresponding allegations from the host, the diplomat assured that Beijing does not ship weapons to Russia and “does nothing against peaceful settlement of the conflict.” “Several months ago, European countries refused to ship tanks to Ukraine, and now they do. Today, they refuse to ship warplanes, but, maybe, in several months, they will ship them,” he noted. “Maybe, one day, NATO member states will wonder if they are a side to the conflict.”.

It’s insane that the OPCW still exists. On par with Bellingcat.

• West Uses OPCW To Justify Its Aggression – Moscow (RT)

The latest report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which blames Damascus for carrying out a chemical attack in Douma in 2018, looks like a political hit piece meant to justify the West’s continued military aggression against the Syrian government, says Alexander Shulgin, Russia’s permanent representative to the organization. Speaking to RT, Shulgin vehemently dismissed the report, which was released in late January by the so-called Investigation and Identification Team (IIT). Calling the IIT “completely illegitimate,” he claimed the group’s creation was pushed through by the US and its allies in order to undermine the core principles of the OPCW and international law and replace them with their own “made-up rules.”

The IIT’s report, according to Shulgin, is riddled with inconsistencies and factual gaps, and barely holds together. Furthermore, none of Russia’s or any other country’s “uncomfortable” questions regarding the details of the IIT’s findings were even remotely addressed during an OPCW briefing on the report, the ambassador claimed. Shulgin also noted that the report highlighted the double standards currently present within the OPCW. When Russia presented evidence of a chemical attack in Aleppo back in 2016, every minute detail of Moscow’s findings was heavily scrutinized by the organization, he said. However, when it comes to the attack in Douma, OPCW officials seem to turn a blind eye to basic questions such as how and when the evidence was gathered and presented during the investigation.

“For instance, they referred to the fact that some new sample has appeared, provided by a third party. What is this third party? Nothing is said about it. They just say ‘trust us’,” said Shulgin, noting that the sample in question had never been reported on in previous investigations. “So before, there was no sample, but now, suddenly, it has somehow appeared. Without any explanations,” the ambassador stressed, suggesting its sudden appearance can only be explained by the need for the US, France, and UK to escape international accountability for their aggression against Syria.

The three NATO states launched a series of airstrikes against civilian and military targets in Syria in April 2018 after the so-called ‘White Helmets’ – an NGO operating in rebel-controlled areas of Syria – published a series of videos supposedly showing the aftermath of a chlorine attack on the residents of Douma. Syria has vehemently denied any responsibility for the incident, and both Damascus and Moscow have repeatedly pointed to evidence, including testimonies from alleged victims, that suggests the incident was staged in order to justify a Western attack.

“..Peskov said in December that the EU was only replacing one “addiction” with another while filling Washington’s coffers with billions of dollars…”

• EU ‘Sold Its Soul’ To Russia – Poland (RT)

Europe allowed itself to grow dependent on Russian energy like a drug addict, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Monday. Speaking at a conference in Warsaw on efforts to support Ukraine, Morawiecki suggested that the EU got hooked on Russian natural resources, with Moscow doing its best to enable the addiction. “The dealer always gives the first dose for free or very cheap so that the addict comes for more and agrees to any price,” he said. As a result, the prime minister stated, gas contracts with Russia “turned out to be a pact under which Europe sold its soul.” The continent was “so easily seduced by Russia” not through “demonic abilities,” but rather because of its own weakness, he claimed.

At the same time, Morawiecki said the Ukraine conflict had awakened many countries “from their geopolitical slumber.” As the fighting rages, the West stands at a crossroads: “either the victory of Russia and the defeat of the West, or the renaissance of Western civilization,” he asserted. “Today it is not enough for us to talk about rebuilding Europe, today we have to think about rebuilding Europe so that peace and security become permanent foundations for development for many decades,” Morawiecki stressed. Since the start of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the EU has committed to completely weaning itself off Russian energy by 2030. It intends to double down on the use of green energy and secure oil and gas supplies of non-Russian origin. In particular, the bloc has resorted to importing liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US.

However, in October, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire accused the US of capitalizing on the EU’s economic woes, saying that it sells its LNG “at four times the price that it sets for its own industrialists.” Commenting on the bloc’s push to reduce dependence on Russian energy, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said in December that the EU was only replacing one “addiction” with another while filling Washington’s coffers with billions of dollars.

“Not so long ago he openly spoke about Europe being a garden surrounded by a jungle that threatens it..”

• EU’s Borrell Can’t Hide His Racist Worldview – Lavrov (RT)

Calling African countries easy to manipulate is on brand for Josep Borrell, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday, responding to the EU foreign policy chief’s remarks that accused Moscow of “spreading misinformation.” Borrell had addressed EU diplomats earlier in the day, accusing Russia of using “information manipulation and interference” as weapons of war. Noting that Lavrov was visiting Mali and Eritrea, Borrell called them “easy countries” for Moscow to “spread lies about who is guilty for what is happening” in Ukraine. “So speaks a man who can’t hide the racist essence of his worldview,” Lavrov said when asked about his EU counterpart’s accusations. “Not so long ago he openly spoke about Europe being a garden surrounded by a jungle that threatens it, so the garden needs to be careful with the jungle. That says it all about who actually relates to the needs and interests of African countries, and how.”

“We have nothing to hide or to be ashamed of,” the Russian foreign minister added. “We were at the source of Africa’s liberation from the colonial yoke. The Soviet Union was one of the main initiators of the declaration to grant independence to colonized countries and peoples in 1960. And it was not an imitation, as [former UK PM] Boris Johnson recently called the Minsk agreements, but a real historical act that sealed the end of colonial rule.” Speaking to EU diplomats, Borrell lamented that some African countries do not support the bloc’s position that Ukraine is fighting “for the values on which we are basing our understanding of the world.”

In his view, the current conflict is not only being fought on the battlefield with troops, but “in the information space, trying to win the hearts and minds of people.” For that purpose, the EU is “protecting the freedom of expression” by banning Russian media, while providing support to “independent” outlets that Moscow has designated as foreign agents, he added. While accusing Russia of spreading disinformation, Borrell apparently did so himself – by saying Eritrea was among the “easy” countries Lavrov was currently targeting. The Russian diplomat actually visited that country last month, along with Angola, Eswatini and South Africa. His current trip includes stops in Mali, Mauritania and Sudan.

Well, well, Mr Forbes.

• Ukraine: There’s No Substitute For Victory (Steve Forbes)

The disgraceful dithering—especially by Germany—over sending tanks to Ukraine highlights the hesitation and confusion over what’s at stake in this war with Russia. Since the conflict’s beginning, the U.S. and NATO have provided Ukraine with weaponry, but never in sufficient quantity and quality to win. This hesitation has only stiffened Vladimir Putin’s conviction that despite humiliating battlefield setbacks, he can ultimately triumph, and that as time goes by, the West will tire of the effort and pressure Kyiv into a bad deal.

In Putin’s mind, the best way to achieve the subjugation of Ukraine is to use the same approach that Russia used against Nazi Germany in World War II, when the Red Army relied heavily on massive artillery barrages, tank attacks and unrelenting human wave attacks to beat back the Nazi onslaught—which is why Russian casualties were more than ten times those of the U.S. and Britain combined. Putin is playing for keeps. Russia and our other adversaries still see the U.S. as a country in terminal decline and lacking the stamina it exhibited during the Cold War. Therefore, we should be supplying Ukraine with everything it needs to unmistakably defeat Putin. That means not only many more tanks—especially Germany’s Leopard 2s, which are better suited to the terrain than our Abrams tanks—but also fighter aircraft, including F-16s, antitank and advanced antiaircraft weaponry, drones and much else.

“..foreigners” have come to Washington “to lecture us about spending our constituents’ money on a conflict thousands of miles away..”

• US Rep. Matt Gaetz Calls For End To Funding Of Kiev’s Army (RT)

The US must stop sending billions of dollars to bolster Ukraine’s military, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz said during a speech in the House of Representatives on Monday. He slammed President Joe Biden and both parties, saying the conflict in Ukraine is only benefiting military contractors. “Tomorrow [at the State of the Union address] President Biden will tell us how much more we must do for Ukraine,” Gaetz said, adding that the ongoing hostilities are only lining the pockets of America’s military industry. “Defense contractors need there to be a war going on somewhere. Whether the arms end up in the hands of ISIS, the Taliban, the Azov Battalion, or on the black market,” according to Gaetz. Washington’s support of Ukraine with endless weapons will not end the war but just “prolong the killing,” he said.

“Bandits in the Sinaloa mountains hurt more Americans than the [Russian] men in Crimea,” Gaetz said, adding that the benefits of the conflict to normal Americans are “unclear.” He lamented that “foreigners” have come to Washington “to lecture us about spending our constituents’ money on a conflict thousands of miles away” – a reference to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s visit to the US Capitol in December. He accused Biden of doing “everything possible” to provoke a nuclear war with Russia and called on the White House to pursue a solution through diplomacy. Biden promised 31 US-made M1 Abrams tanks for Ukraine in late January, but said that Washington would not send F-16 fighter jets. Gaetz noted that Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the warplane, was ramping up production in anticipation that there could soon be “third party transfers” of the jets to Kiev.

“..the US dollar, euro, and British pound – the main reserve currencies – had once been considered the top units of account. “The situation has shown that now this [dollar] is a completely unreliable instrument..”

• Russia Has Lost Confidence In US Dollar – Finance Minister (RT)

Russia no longer has trust in the US currency because it has become an unreliable financial instrument, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov stated on Monday. He pointed out that the US dollar, euro, and British pound – the main reserve currencies – had once been considered the top units of account. “The situation has shown that now this [dollar] is a completely unreliable instrument … Therefore, we have no confidence in this kind of unit of account. It is lost,” Siluanov told Russia’s Channel One channel. He also pointed out that Russia has been switching to trade in other currencies, particularly “in rubles and, of course, currencies from other friendly countries, such as the yuan.”

Moscow has been steadily pursuing a policy of de-dollarization in foreign trade. In recent years, Russia and some of its trade partners, including India and China, have been ramping up the use of domestic currencies in mutual settlements in an effort to move away from the dollar and euro. Siluanov highlighted that in 2021 a significant part of financial transactions in Russia were carried out in dollars and euros. “About one third of settlements were then carried out in rubles, while now more than half, about 55%, are conducted in rubles and friendly currencies,” he said, adding that this figure will continue to grow. According to the minister, the economic wellbeing of citizens is more important than exchange rates. “We are most concerned about how the economy will develop, how the income of the population will grow, what kind of employment we will have,” he concluded.

“..Reagan “understood better than anyone how to integrate the elements of power and the elements of conciliation.”

• US Lacks Unity Before Modern Challenges – Kissinger (TASS)

The US lacks unity inside the country amid modern challenges, Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said during the event, dedicated to the 112th anniversary of former US President Ronald Reagan. “Today we again suffer from domestic division and international disorder about arguments about who we are and what we stand for. We find it difficult to muster the domestic cohesion necessary to face the challenges ahead of us,” Kissinger said. He named “China’s ambitions” and the situation in the Middle East, where, in his words, there is a risk of “developing the world’s most devastating weapons.” He also mentioned the Ukrainian crisis that “shows no signs of abating,” and touched upon the issue of development of artificial intelligence that “is transforming human consciousness itself.””Each of these present developments requires a combination of strength and conciliation,” Kissinger said, adding that Reagan “understood better than anyone how to integrate the elements of power and the elements of conciliation.”.

“.. Russia’s war-aim is simple: the elimination of chaos on its border. This rational objective is something that America’s Party of Chaos can’t understand..”

• Where Do Things Stand? (Jim Kunstler)

The Right perceives that its opponents have lost their minds, but there is no arguing with people who are literally insane. What must be done is to wrest political power away from them. In the madness of the Left, power is solely a destructive force, and coercion is a form of pleasure-seeking. Unable to control the dynamics in-play, they seek to wreck the dynamics, to induce as much chaos as possible, so as to punish the non-insane. That is exactly what the Green New Deal does. Unable to control the dynamic disruptive changes in the global oil-and-gas industry that our high-tech economies depend on, the Left pretends that there is work-around “Green” energy system that can replace fossil fuels with wind and solar devices that don’t scale up and which require fossil fuels to make and deploy.

It’s slick and grandiosely hypothetical (i.e., wishful thinking), and the net effect of this major crusade will be to hasten the collapse and impoverishment of our society (ergo: the punishment). Keep all this in mind as you watch the Congressional inquiries now just getting underway. Much as they are likely to reveal the insane and arguably criminal machinations of a panicked bureaucracy, and the figures who run it, the Left will remain impervious to any truthful revelations that emerge. Of course, many of these officials are culpable for actions extremely damaging to the people of this land, and the masses on the Left who supported those actions — such as mandatory vaccinations — will be among the most damaged. These True Believers will find it hard to admit that they did it to themselves. So, the hearings upcoming, such as the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, will probably not change the minds of your friends and relatives stuck in the mass formation of Jacobin-Wokery.

But the hearings will be a step in wresting power away from these maniacs. Part of that step must be to demonstrate the dishonesty of recent elections, so as to remove the implanted mechanisms that enabled that dishonesty: mail-in, no-ID ballots, “motor-voter” laws, electronic vote-counting machines. If that can be fixed, the left can be voted out of power. The hearings will take place against the back-drop of our deteriorating charade over in Ukraine. The Zelensky regime that we employed to foment this conflict with Russia is losing its mojo for creating chaos in that corner of the world. The newly-announced tank caper will amount to nothing. Russia’s war-aim is simple: the elimination of chaos on its border. This rational objective is something that America’s Party of Chaos can’t understand. How will it react when chaos gets cancelled in Ukraine? Probably by attempting to foment chaos in another corner of the world, or on the home front — another reason that power must be wrested away from it.

Covid coverage has hurt scientific journals like nothing ever has.

• The Failure of Scientific Journals: the Failure of Science (Ugo Bardi)

“Biophysical Economics and Sustainability” is a scientific journal that I helped create back in 2016. I still think it was a good idea, but it didn’t work and it couldn’t have worked. So, I resigned from my position as editor of the journal this December. But let me tell the story from the beginning. The journal was the brainchild of Charles W. Hall and David Packer. About Charlie Hall, you may have heard of him, he was the developer of the fundamental concept of EROI (energy return on energy invested). Dave Packer was a senior editor at Springer (now retired). The idea was to create a high-quality journal that could offer a publishing outlet in the field called “biophysical economics,” or also “econophysics.” You may have heard about this field: it is an approach to economics based on the same models used in biology.

The idea was to examine the basic elements of what an economic system is: an entity that transforms resources into products, and then into waste. The main difference with traditional economics is that biophysical economics is focused on physical things that can be measured: energy, mass, materials, and the like. In contrast, economics is heavily focused on money and prices and, often, it loses contact with the physical world. For instance, it is often said in the field of the economics of natural resources that “prices create resources.” The idea is that when a non-renewable resource becomes scarce, prices become higher, making it possible to extract resources that were not profitable before. It is a magic trick supposed to create something out of nothing. No need to say that it doesn’t work in the real world. And it doesn’t work in the biophysical approach, either.

The concept of EROI (Energy Return for Energy Invested) is fundamental to understanding this point. It tells you what’s possible to do with energy technologies, and what’s not possible. But it just does not exist in traditional economics: it is ignored and, as a consequence, plenty of resources are wasted in non-viable energy technologies, biofuels for instance. You may think that it is time to replace the obsolete approach of traditional economics with the more rigorous one of biophysical economics. But it is just not happening. If you look at the number of publications in scientific journals on databases such as “Scopus”, you see that growth has stalled during the past 10 years or so, and now it is going down, as you can see below for a search of the term “Biophysical Economics.” Not only growth stopped about 10 years ago, but the number of published studies remains a minor fraction of the publications in economics.

Democracy

Located in the province of Catania, in the Italian island of Sicily, is the town of Grammichele

No nails
https://twitter.com/i/status/1622959130368524288

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Debt Rattle April 28 2021

Apr 282021

April 28, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:59 am Finance Tagged with: Apple, blood clots, Covid pill, fake news, Gaetz, Google, India, inflation, new world order, supply chains, Wuhan 38 Responses »

Juan de la Corte (1597–1660) Lot And His Daughters Escaping From The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah

• COVID Pill That Cures Body At First Signs Of Infection May Come This Year (JTN)

• Single Dose Of Covid Vaccine Can Nearly Halve Transmission Of Virus (G.)

• The BBC & Bloomberg on India: B Stands For Bullshit. (Slog)

• Oxford Jab ‘Could Be Banned For Under-40s’ After Blood Clot Reports Double (Metro)

• A New World Order Brought To You By COVID-19 (Whitehead)

• Scientists “Debunking” The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Linked to CCP (NP)

• Don’t Look Now (Jim Kunstler)

• Supply Chains Implode As “Price Doesn’t Even Matter Anymore”

• Gundlach Rejects The Fed’s “Inflation Is Transitory” Narrative (ZH)

• CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist (Greenwald)

• The Deep State Targets Matt Gaetz (AG)

• Apple iOS 14.5 Update Includes ‘App Tracking Transparency’ Feature (G.)

• Google Ad Surge Drives Up Profits For Parent Firm Alphabet (Y!)

• Hunter Biden To Guest Teach A Class On “Fake News” This Fall (DM)

I forget who drew my attention to this UK government report, Covid-19 Response Spring 2021, but it paints a very stark and completely ignored reality: only 66% of people can ever be successfully vaccinated and may be protected.

34% either can’t be jabbed for medical reasons, or the vaccines don’t catch on. And that’s assuming full uptake, which of course you’ll never ever get. So the number of not successfully vaccinated will be higher than 34%, perhaps quite a bit, no matter the PR campaigns and threats.

This should put the entire Covid response on its head, but for some reason it doesn’t. Those 34+% would appear to be ineligible for a “vaccine passport” as well, depriving them of basic human rights.

Lemme guess: Pfizer waits until everyone has been vaccinated, and then introduces this pill?

• COVID Pill That Cures Body At First Signs Of Infection May Come This Year (JTN)

The Pfizer pharmaceutical company is conducting trials on an antiviral drug could be ready for public use later this year that is intended to attack the spine of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and result in a cure to the sickness. The oral drug would stop the virus from mutating in the nose, throat and lungs, according to The Telegraph newspaper, ultimately causing the virus to dissipate. The possible home cure is being tested on 60 volunteers ages 18 and 60 at Pfizer facilities in the U.S. and Belgium. “We have designed PF-07321332 as a potential oral therapy that could be prescribed at the first sign of infection, without requiring that patients are hospitalized or in critical care,” said Mikael Dolsten, who leads the company’s worldwide research, development and medical division.

The first phase of the trial looks at the tolerance to the drug including “significant side effects, and how people feel after taking it,” according to documents. The second phase studies the response to several doses, and the third phase looks at food consumption while taking the pill. More trials would be needed to determine how the drug reacts with people who are infected with the virus. Pfizer says if the trials are successful the drug could be available for public use later this year.

VItamin D can do that too. Ivermectin can do more.

• Single Dose Of Covid Vaccine Can Nearly Halve Transmission Of Virus (G.)

A single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine can slash transmission of the virus by up to half, according to a Public Health England study. The PHE finding offers further hope that the pandemic can be brought under control as it indicates that vaccinated people are far less likely to pass the virus on to others. The study found that people given a single dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines – and who became infected at least three weeks later – were between 38% and 49% less likely to pass the virus on to people living in their homes, compared with those who were unvaccinated. Protection was seen from about 14 days after vaccination, with similar levels regardless of a person’s age. Other studies have already shown that both vaccines are highly effective at stopping people getting sick and ending up in hospital.

Experts will now assess whether two doses of vaccine can cut transmission of the virus even further, and more work is being carried out on transmission in the general population. PHE said similar results could be expected in places where the risk of transmission is like in the home, such as shared accommodation and prisons. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “This is terrific news – we already know vaccines save lives and this study is the most comprehensive real-world data showing they also cut transmission of this deadly virus. “It further reinforces that vaccines are the best way out of this pandemic as they protect you and they may prevent you from unknowingly infecting someone in your household.

I’m guessing the truth is somewhere in the middle. India is not doing great right now, but it’s also not collapsing.

• The BBC & Bloomberg on India: B Stands For Bullshit. (Slog)

Unless you made an early getaway to Planet Drongo before the lockdown, you will have read pretty much everywhere that “India sees world’s highest daily cases amid oxygen shortage”. In fact, the BBC tells us that “some people” have died waiting for oxygen, the Indian health service is “completely overwhelmed” and the country now has “sixteen million cases”. So it’s a disaster, right? Well actually, no – it isn’t. The Indian health ministry has already made it clear that the Covid19 variant they’re dealing with this year has “a considerably lower death rate than the previous version”. Go to the Worldometer site, and you’ll see that India’s deaths per million is a minute 134: that’s 7% of the US and French figures, 6% of the UK and Italy’s and the lowest by far of any country in the Top 30 for cases.

Virtually no vaccination has been undertaken in India (only 1.3% are fully vaccinated) and the country is not using lockdowns. The Times of India has just denied the BBC’s ‘deaths from oxygen shortage’ fakery. What India IS doing, however, is employing the anti-inflammatory drugs tocilizumab and itolizumab and the antivirals favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine on a very wide scale. Go to Pharma site/accolyte spaces, and you’ll see all four drugs being rubbished: the Pharmafia and their bureaucratic whores don’t want any signs of a success to get out. But the Truth already is out there: India is doing spectacularly well without either vaccines or lockdown. You won’t find that reality expressed anywhere in the Western MSM, but the facts show that its infection management drugs have delivered one of the lowest case to death rates on the planet.

Not that you’d notice, reading Bloomberg: “India saw the world’s biggest one-day jump in coronavirus cases ever as a ferocious new wave grips the country, overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums and prompting frantic cries for help on social media. The South Asian nation reported 314,835 new infections Thursday, topping a peak of 314,312 recorded in the U.S. on Dec. 21. People took to Twitter and Instagram to call for everything from hospital beds to medicine and doorstep Covid-19 tests. The grim milestone shows how the pandemic crisis has shifted firmly to the developing world, where variants and complacency are threatening containment measures and there’s a lack of vaccines, with supplies dominated by richer nations.”

It’s a pack of lies from end to end. India has a population of 1.4 billion people – so overcrowding is almost generic – and being four times more people than the US, the comparison with America is completely ludicrous. Hospitals do not get overwhelmed when 134 folks out of a million get ill. India’s water purity and basic hygiene measures are very Third World. Yet despite all that, it is doing phenomenally well against Covid….by having and doing respectively none of the advantages and policies of the West.

“..the total number of people in the UK who developed blood clots after getting one dose has gone from 79 to 168 in a fortnight..”

• Oxford Jab ‘Could Be Banned For Under-40s’ After Blood Clot Reports Double (Metro)

Under-40s may be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after blood clot reports doubled, reports claim. The chance of dying from a blood clot after having the jab is about one in one million – with 19 fatalities from around 20 million vaccinations. However, the total number of people in the UK who developed blood clots after getting one dose has gone from 79 to 168 in a fortnight, Medical Healthcare Products and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) data suggests. These new cases have taken the odds of experiencing a blood clot up from one in 250,000 to one in 126,000. The MHRA has reiterated that the benefits of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab outweigh the risks for most people – but is considering offering under-40s the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine given that younger people are more likely to be affected by blood clots, The Telegraph claims.

It comes after the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) decided that under-30s should be offered an alternative to the Oxford jab. Currently, anyone over the age of 45 can get a jab in England. Over-50s in Scotland and Wales are being offered their doses, while Northern Ireland has already started vaccinating over-35s. Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said on April 7 that 0.8 per 100,000 30 to 39-year-olds suffered serious blood clots after getting their Oxford/AstraZeneca jab. This was compared to 2.7 in 100,000 who would be kept out of intensive care by taking the vaccine. But these figures were based on fewer cases and the MHRA is yet to release what these odds are now 168 people have had blood clots.

“The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

• A New World Order Brought To You By COVID-19 (Whitehead)

The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled us into a whole new global frontier. Those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes will find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers. We are about to find our ability to access, engage and move about in the world dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not. “It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times.

“The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.” This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead. Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives. Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

I’m not much into CCP bashing, but also not into too many coincidences.

• Scientists “Debunking” The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Linked to CCP (NP)

Several researchers used by leading corporate media outlets to debunk claims that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have previously attended events or accepted awards from the controversial lab, The National Pulse can reveal. The researchers’ Chinese Communist Party ties – which present a clear conflict of interest – are omitted from the media reports, which instead present the scientists as unbiased adjudicators of COVID-19’s origins. In March 2020, NBC Science Contributor Dr. Joseph Fair called for the Trump administration to “stop blaming China” for the outbreak of the virus, despite mounting evidence – even at the time – that China was hiding information and data, and silencing whistleblowers. Dr. Fair equated called the lab leak theory – now increasingly mainstream – as a “conspiracy.”

Fair spoke at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2013, The National Pulse can reveal. “During the visit, he attended “Ge Hong Elite Forum” and gave an excellent academic report named “Biosafety Level 4 Containment Research and Recombinant Biology: How advances in molecular biology can advance in-vitro product design”. Many teachers and students, including Director Chen Xinwen and researchers such as Hu Zhihong and Wei Hongping, listened to the report,” a summary notes. “Dr. Joseph Fair is now engaged in the rapid diagnosis work of virulent viruses for GVFI and looks forward to cooperating with the Institute in the relevant research field in future,” the description adds. Fair’s Twitter account also contains posts describing WIV researchers as “collaborators,” “colleagues” and friends,” adding “I’ve very much enjoyed working with them over the years.”

Fair has praised the labs “openness with regards to sharing data” despite the institute erasing 16,000 virus samples in late 2019 and continuing to do so throughout the pandemic. Dr. Ian Lipkin, who’s seen his claims that there is “no evidence to suggest that [COVID-19] was created in a lab” amplified by outlets such as CBS and USA Today, also spoke at the WIV, in 2015. “He had given an excellent report on “Small game hunting”, which was presided by Professor Zhengli Shi, to the teachers and students in our institute,” a WIV summary revealed. The unearthed visit follows National Pulse reports highlighting Lipkin receiving awards from the Chinese Communist Party and describing himself as a “consultant” for the communist regime.

“..the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses.”:

• Don’t Look Now (Jim Kunstler)

This was only one of countless mysteries orbiting around the dimming star that is Joe Biden. The biggest one, the planet Jupiter of all puzzlements, is how the guy managed to get elected occupant of the oval office. Or, more to the point, how did others manage to get him elected? I mean, considering those few embarrassing campaign forays from the basement to a bunch of empty parking lots back in the fall of 2020, not to mention the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses. We may be about to find out as Arizona’s State Senate finally got around to approving a full audit of the November 3rd vote in Maricopa County, comprising Phoenix and its asteroid belt of suburbs, which amounts to more than two-thirds of the state’s population.

The Democratic Party tried pretty hard to stop the durned thing, sending its gnarliest Lawfare warrior, one Marc Elias from the Clinton-indentured DC firm of Perkins Coie, and a posse of 70 other attorneys, to bury the proceedings in court orders. But all they got was a weekend pause from an Arizona judge who imposed a $1-million-dollar bond payment on the Democrats to cover expenses for the interruption — which would then be forfeited if the audit went forward. The Dems declined to pay up, so the pause was lifted and the audit goes forward today. The usual suspects in the mainstream media attempted to bury the Arizona vote audit story or denigrate it — for instance the The New York Times, which characterized the inquiry in its Saturday lede as “false claims of a stolen election,” and then “a snipe hunt for skullduggery,” before asserting the boilerplate “baseless theories of election theft” to seal the deal with its avidly credulous readership.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC practically jumped up and down going woo-woo-woo to discredit the audit. What do you suppose they’re afraid of? I’ll tell you: For one thing, if the vote turns out to have been compromised by fraud, Arizona is liable to lose a Democratic senator elected on Mr. Biden’s (possibly) phantom coattails — Mark Kelly (D) who defeated incumbent Martha McSally (R) — which would cancel the Democrats’ current one-vote majority grip on the body. The result of that would be the end of the party’s effort to jam various new laws down America’s craw: DC statehood, the HR-1 voter fraud act, the Supreme Court-packing bill, and, actually, anything else on the party’s Satanic wish-list for disassembling the republic.

“.. it will almost feel like trade is coming to a halt.”

• Supply Chains Implode As “Price Doesn’t Even Matter Anymore”

The number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. Does this mean the capacity crunch in the trans-Pacific market is finally easing? Absolutely not, warned Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” he told American Shipper in an interview on Monday. “What I’m seeing is unprecedented. We are seeing a tsunami of freight,” he reported. “For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded — and we are a growing company that ships a lot of TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units]. Price doesn’t always even matter anymore.”

Poskus said that trans-Pacific import volumes are still rising. He noted that January trans-Pacific imports were up 10% versus 2019 (comparisons to 2020 numbers are skewed by COVID) and 13.5% in February, then jumped 51% in March. “So, we’re now at 1.5 times pre-pandemic levels.” With imports far outpacing retail sales growth, he attributed volumes to inventory restocking. “The restocking is actually affecting the trade even more than growth in demand. That tells me that this will last even longer. Let’s say U.S. consumer demand slows down in Q3 and Q4. That’s not expected, but even if it does, [capacity availability and rates] shouldn’t improve quickly, simply because of the huge restocking demand.”

Poskus also believes there is a growing export backlog piling up each day in Asia, awaiting available ship slots. If that backlog grows too big, he said, “I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.” As a result of the backlog and restocking demand, he thinks “prices will remain high and shipping will probably remain difficult for the rest of this year. And then after that, you have the peak for Chinese New Year in 2022.” He said that the situation today is the worst he’s witnessed — and he believes it’s about to get even more severe. “Buckle up. The month of May will be the worst people have ever seen,” he predicted. Because some shippers will have to wait in line behind the growing backlog in Asia, he expects “what’s going to happen soon is that some importers won’t even be able to get on the boat. For them, it will almost feel like trade is coming to a halt.”

“.. it really depends on just how much manipulation the authorities are willing to do.”

• Gundlach Rejects The Fed’s “Inflation Is Transitory” Narrative (ZH)

Don’t believe your lying eyes, will be the message tomorrow from The Fed’s Jay Powell as he hypnotizes investors to believe that “inflation is transitory” and they have “the tools” to manage it. ‘Bond King’ Jeff Gundlach is not buying that line and told BNN Bloomberg in an interview this morning. “…more importantly, I’m not sure why they think they know it’s transitory… how do they know that?” “…there’s plenty of money-printing that’s been going on, and we’ve seen commodity prices going up massively… home prices in the US are inflating very substantially… so there’s a lot of inflation that’s already baked in to input prices.” Gundlach does admit that Powell has a point in the very near term as the prints were about to see “which could be as high as 4% [for CPI]” are off of year-ago, very depressed levels.

“…what he means by transitory is that the base effect will lead to problems in the next few months but then the base effect will become less problematic.” But, Gundlach adds, “it’s not clear to me that inflation is going to go back down to around 2 to 2.5%… we don’t know, nobody knows… but we’re most concerned with the fact that The Fed thinks they know.” This is worrisome because The Fed’s track record is anything but inspiring… “when I go back to the global financial crisis, when we almost had a complete meltdown of the financial system, Ben Bernanke completely missed all of the problems that led to the crisis.” Bernanke’s infamous “contained to subprime… and subprime is only a sliver of the market” comments could be about to be trumped by Powell’s “inflation is transitory” comments as Gundlach warns “there’s plenty of indicators that suggest inflation is going to go higher and not just on a transitory basis.”

The Fed is “trying to paint the picture” of control, but Gundlach tries to make clear: “they’re guessing.” So, what does that mean for markets? While some fear “we ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of yields rising (and multiple contraction), Gundlach notes that “it really depends on just how much manipulation the authorities are willing to do.” The billionaire fund manager notes that yields are “still very low… well below the current inflation rate… so we have negative yields everywhere on the yield curve.” It’s also “hard to figure out who’s going to buy the bonds,” he notes, “as we are about to see issuance like we have never seen before.” Foreigners have been selling bonds for years and domestically there is little demand, so Gundlach notes the only one left to soak up all this extra supply is The Federal Reserve, which has already expanded its balance sheet massively in the last 12 months.

“Who’s going to buy all these many trillions of dollars of bonds? Foreigners have been selling for years and they’ve accelerated their selling in the last several quarters, domestic buyers are not exactly selling, but they’re not adding to their holdings. So what’s left to absorb all of the spawn supply is the Federal Reserve.“ “Left to true, free markets, bond yields at the long-end would obviously be higher than they are now.”

“Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.”

• CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist (Greenwald)

The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world. [..] On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.

Bertrand’s career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia’s role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable. In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly thereafter, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News.

From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN: the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist. Her final conspiratorial article for The Atlantic before moving to Politico is the perfect illustration of who and what she is. CNN’s new national security star was no ordinary Russiagate fanatic. There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post’s media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims.

Smear sells.

• The Deep State Targets Matt Gaetz (AG)

It’s now been over three weeks since a torrent of sensational headlines about U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) blared from corporate media newsrooms. It sounded about as bad as it could get for the representative from Florida’s 1st Congressional District; breathless claims that he was “under investigation for underage sex trafficking” touched off a media frenzy. No stranger to controversy, Gaetz’s initial instinct was to confront the allegations live on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. While many saw it as a bizarre interview, it may at least have been the right move in terms of staring down a bloodthirsty establishment. As several weeks have passed, though, the controversy seems to have generated more heat than light. Indeed, this might be the longest running “sex scandal” in the nation’s history without an accuser.

But the media has been busy. Since the original story broke, there’s been a drip of follow-on stories at outlets like the Daily Beast, Politico, the Washington Post, and CNN—all using a shady collection of off-the-record and dubious government sources. Unsurprisingly, given that sourcing, none of the stories have contained anything close to serious detail or evidence. Reporters keep dropping tidbits of evidence likely to be emanating from within the Justice Department, yet none of which confirms any of the headline-grabbing allegations. Few of these articles even attempt to deal with the wild allegations first made about the congressman. Writing in Politico on Tuesday, Betsy Woodruff Swan stated: “[Gaetz] has not been charged with a crime, and no women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct in the three weeks since the New York Times first reported on the investigation. He has denied any wrongdoing.”

Note how—after making a sensational media splash for maximum public relations damage—the accusations against Gaetz have shifted, from shocking and unsupported claims of underage sex trafficking and pedophilia to the less scurrilous (and still unsupported) accusation that Gaetz had sex at parties. Crucially, there has not been any evidence of payments, prostitution, or underage girls. As Scott Adams recently said, while some may first cringe at hearing too much about the sex life of a politician, deep down, they’re more likely to be indifferent. CNN even had to note in a recent report: “One of the women who spoke to CNN said she did so in part because the picture of Gaetz as potentially connected to sex trafficking that has emerged in recent days does not align with what she saw. Both women said that they never saw anyone at the parties who appeared to be underage.”

Seems hard to argue against, but sure enough many are trying.

• Apple iOS 14.5 Update Includes ‘App Tracking Transparency’ Feature (G.)

Users of iPhones can now prevent advertisers tracking them across their apps, after the release of the latest software update from Apple introduced the controversial feature despite the protests of Facebook and the advertising industry. The update, iOS 14.5, includes a setting called “app tracking transparency”, which for the first time requires applications to ask for users’ consent before they are able to track their activity across other apps and websites. If users decline, then applications will not be able to access the unique user ID that they need to follow individuals as they live their digital lives. The prompt, which will say “Allow [app game] to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” will show up for apps that request access to the ID number.

They may be able to use other methods, known as “fingerprinting”, to achieve the same goal, but Apple says that doing so could cause them to be expelled from the App Store. First announced last summer, app tracking transparency led to immediate pushback from the wider advertising industry. Initially slated for release in the autumn, Apple delayed its implementation for six months in order to give the industry time to prepare. But the delay wasn’t enough for some, and in December, Facebook launched an all-out assault on Apple, with the company’s head of ads and business products, Dan Levy, claiming that the setting was actually “about control of the entire internet”. “This is about a long-term view that is anti-personalised advertising and we think is trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years,” he added.

Facebook launched a glossy advertising campaign arguing that the real victim of the changes are “your neighbourhood coffee brewery, your friend who owns their own retail business, your cousin who started an event planning service and the game developers who build the apps you use for free”. Those small businesses, the company said, would lose out if they were no longer able to target customers with personalised adverts. The social network is not alone in its opposition: a group of Germany’s biggest media, tech and advertising companies, led by digital publishing house Axel Springer, have filed a complaint with the German competition regulator arguing that the new rules could lead to a 60% fall in advertising revenues for app developers.

Looking at ad reveue here, I can assure you they’re keeping it all for themselves.

• Google Ad Surge Drives Up Profits For Parent Firm Alphabet (Y!)

Google parent Alphabet on Tuesday reported that quarterly profit more than doubled as digital advertising surged with more people relying on the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. Profit in the first quarter leapt to $17.9 billion from $6.8 billion in the same period a year ago while revenues jumped 34 percent to $55.3 billion, led by gains in advertising and cloud computing services. “Over the last year, people have turned to Google Search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained,” said Alphabet and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai. The surge in Alphabet’s earnings comes as the tech giant faces increased scrutiny from regulators regarding its power.

“Google essentially manufactures money; they are almost entirely ads,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group. “There is not a risk of downturn in revenue, it is that regulatory action strips the revenue from them.” Facebook and Google are the “short list” when it comes to scrutiny by regulators in Europe and the United States because of “their broad impact on the political process and almost complete dominance of ad revenues,” the analyst maintained. Google is among internet giants in the crosshairs of regulators and critics concerned about whether it unfairly wields its power to dominate markets and fend off competition.

[..] Alphabet shares were up nearly five percent in after-market trades that followed release of the earnings figures. “Google had an absolute monster quarter with ads leading the way,” said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy. “YouTube grew an eye-watering 49 percent year-over-year, which I attribute to increased YouTube viewing and increased YouTube TV subscribers.”

I must admit I didn’t see this coming. Hunter, that is. That fake news producers would teach on fake news is all too predictable.

• Hunter Biden To Guest Teach A Class On “Fake News” This Fall (DM)

Hunter Biden is helping teach a class on fake news at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana this fall. The course titled ‘Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts’ will include several guest speakers throughout its 10 weeks, including the president’s son. The course description, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by DailyMail.com, says: ‘America’s rapidly advancing partisan divide is fueled substantially by the growing political polarization increasingly evident in our news media.’ ‘This course will explore the current state of the media landscape in the United States and how media polarization, fake news, and the economics of the news business impact public policymaking in Washington, D.C,’ it continues. Hunter, 51, is a Yale-educated lawyer and has never, in any capacities, worked as a journalist, reporter or in the media world.

‘Hunter Biden has no background in media,’ conservative filmmaker Phelim McAleer said. ‘He has never worked for a newspaper or a media outlet.’ ‘Hunter Biden lecturing a class on fake news is like Harvey Weinstein teaching a course to prevent sexual harassment. It shouldn’t be happening. Period.’ the ‘My Son Hunter’ producer continued. Tulane University confirmed the course in a statement to DailyMail.com and confirmed the list of speaker, including:
Hunter Biden
Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Donald Trump
Juan Williams, political analyst for Fox News Channel
Susan Glasser, columnist for The New Yorker
Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post columnist; Kylie Atwood, national security correspondent for CNN
Margaret Brennan, Face the Nation moderator
Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist
Dr. Michael Fauntroy, a professor in the Political Science Department at Howard University.

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Time Lapse

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Debt Rattle April 12 2021

Apr 122021

April 12, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, court packing, COVID, Gaetz, long covid, microchip, Sputnik V, Vitamin D, voter ID, Weimar 57 Responses »

Ernest R. Ashton Evening near the Pyramids 1898

• Pentagon Scientists Reveal A Microchip That Senses Covid-19 In Your Body (DM)

• Report On Addressing Vitamin D Deficiency In Ireland (Oireachtas)

• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost 9 of 10 COVID-19 Deaths (MDPI)

• Doubts Raised About Ethics & Efficacy Behind AstraZeneca “Vaccine” (Slog)

• Verdict In Weimar: No More Masks, No Tests And No More Distance For Students (BZ)

• Ardern To New Zealand Border Staff: Get Vaccine Now Or Be Redeployed (G.)

• New Studies Suggest ‘Long Covid’ More Common Than Previously Thought (F.)

• Austria May Buy A Million Russian Vaccine Doses (RT)

• China Considers Mixing Covid-19 Vaccines To Boost Protection Rate (R.)

• Did Joe Biden Pack The Supreme Court Commission To Simply Fail? (Turley)

• Twitter Censors Criticism of BLM Founder Buying $1.4 Million Home (Turley)

• Due Process, Adult Sexual Morality and the Case of Rep. Matt Gaetz (Greenwald)

• Major Corporations Plan To Oppose Election Integrity Measures (DC)

And here’s your microchip!

• Pentagon Scientists Reveal A Microchip That Senses Covid-19 In Your Body (DM)

Pentagon scientists working inside a secretive unit set up at the height of the Cold War have created a microchip to be inserted under the skin, which will detect COVID-19 infection, and a revolutionary filter that can remove the virus from the blood when attached to a dialysis machine. The team at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have been working for years on preventing and ending pandemics. They assess the issues and come up with ingenious solutions, which at times appear more from a science fiction novel than a working laboratory. One of their recent inventions, they told 60 Minutes on Sunday night, was a microchip which detects COVID infection in an individual before it can become an outbreak.

The microchip is sure to spark worries among some about a government agency implanting a microchip in a citizen. Officials who spoke to the 60 Minutes team said the Pentagon isn’t looking to track your every move. A more detailed explanation was not given. Retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an army infectious disease physician leading DARPA’s response to the pandemic, showed the 60 Minutes team a tissue-like gel, engineered to continuously test your blood. ‘You put it underneath your skin and what that tells you is that there are chemical reactions going on inside the body, and that signal means you are going to have symptoms tomorrow,’ he explained.

He said they were inspired by the struggle to stem the virus’ spread onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where 1,271 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. ‘It’s like a “check engine” light,’ said Hepburn. ‘Sailors would get the signal, then self-administer a blood draw and test themselves on site. ‘We can have that information in three to five minutes. ‘As you truncate that time, as you diagnose and treat, what you do is you stop the infection in its tracks.’ Troops are likely to be highly skeptical of the new invention.

Yeadon

"It literally keeps me awake at night."

Former Chief Scientist of Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon, reveals his biggest fear concerning the COVID-19 response

Full interview: https://t.co/lXu0AoG3UK pic.twitter.com/Vf85ennnYM

— Taylor Hudak (@_taylorhudak) April 12, 2021

Finally a country’s health board supports vitamin D, but then they recommend a far too low daily dose. Sigh…

• Report On Addressing Vitamin D Deficiency In Ireland (Oireachtas)

The Joint Committee on Health, today launched its Report on addressing Vitamin D deficiency as a public health measure in Ireland. The Committee heard evidence that Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent across the population and the report recommends that public health measures are established to address that deficiency. These public health measures are preventative in nature and are recommended to reduce the risk of respiratory and other illnesses such as osteoporosis. The Committee’s report makes four recommendations:

• That daily Vitamin D supplementation of 20-25µg/day should be recommended to the entire adult population as a public health measure, with higher doses recommended for vulnerable groups under medical supervision.

• That a public health policy, which promotes better knowledge of the benefits of Vitamin D, and which encourages Vitamin D supplementation, should be developed in time for consideration in Budget 2022.

• That reducing the cost of Vitamin D supplementation, in order to promote its uptake, should be considered, through the reduction or indeed the elimination of the current VAT rate; and

• That specific measures need to be put in place for vulnerable groups, and for frontline and healthcare workers, so that Vitamin D supplementation is administered on an opt-out basis, and for the duration of this pandemic, people should be offered Vitamin D supplements when presenting at Covid-19 test centres.

Welcoming the publication of the report, Health Committee Chairman Seán Crowe TD said:“As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, international studies, and the experience of Finland in particular, show just how effective daily Vitamin D supplementation can be when it is implemented as part of an enhanced public health policy. This supplementation represents a safe, practical, and effective means of protecting human health. “The State needs to review preventative measures that might have led to fewer mortalities and lower morbidity. In that regard, the role of Vitamin D needs to be addressed as part of an enhanced public health policy to protect the population against respiratory infections and other illnesses. “

And the vitamin D case really is strong.

From November 2020.

• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost 9 of 10 COVID-19 Deaths (MDPI)

Evidence from observational studies is accumulating, suggesting that the majority of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 infections are statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be prevented by vitamin D supplementation. Given the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, rational vitamin D supplementation whose safety has been proven in an extensive body of research should be promoted and initiated to limit the toll of the pandemic even before the final proof of efficacy in preventing COVID-19 deaths by randomized trials.

We read, with great interest, the recent article by Radujkovic et al. that reported associations between vitamin D deficiency (25(OH)D < 12 ng/mL) or insufficiency (25(OH)D < 20 ng/mL) and death in a cohort of 185 consecutive symptomatic SARS-CoV-2-positive patients admitted to the Medical University Hospital Heidelberg, who were diagnosed and treated between 18 March and 18 June 2020 [1]. In this cohort, 118 patients (64%) had vitamin D insufficiency at recruitment (including 41 patients with vitamin D deficiency), and 16 patients died of the infection. With a covariate-adjusted relative risk of death of 11.3, mortality was much higher among vitamin D insufficient patients than among other patients. When translated to the proportion of deaths in the population that is statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency (“population attributable risk proportion”), a key measure of public health relevance of risk factors [2], these results imply that 87% of COVID-19 deaths may be statistically attributed to vitamin D insufficiency and could potentially be avoided by eliminating vitamin D insufficiency.

[..] Although final proof of causality and prevention of deaths by vitamin D supplementation would have to come from randomized trials which meanwhile have been initiated (e.g., [5]), the results of such trials will not be available in the short run. Given the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the proven safety of vitamin D supplementation, it therefore appears highly debatable and potentially even unethical to await results of such trials before public health action is taken. Besides other population-wide measures of prevention, widespread vitamin D3 supplementation at least for high-risk groups, such as older adults or people with relevant comorbidity, which has been proven by randomized controlled trials to be beneficial with respect to prevention of other acute respiratory infections and acute acerbation of asthma and chronic pulmonary disease [6,7,8,9,10], should be promoted.

Ran the story of this report a few days ago, but it warrants repeating.

“The explosive statement there is ‘immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals’”

• Doubts Raised About Ethics & Efficacy Behind AstraZeneca “Vaccine” (Slog)

SP-I-MO stands for Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling. It reports into the SAGE/Secretary of State Number Ten Group. Almost nobody in the UK has ever heard of it, and its pronouncements online are stored in an unexpected place under the “assets publishing service”. What follows aren’t leaks; they’re representative extracts from the latest SPIMO report, issued on March 31st last, and discussed in Downing Street some ten days ago. As far as can be gleaned the data reports are given sporadically….as in, when SPIMO has something to say. [..]

Unsurprisingly – albeit incomprehensibly, given their track-record – SPIMO gives advice entirely on the basis of models. The document under scrutiny here was almost entirely to do with the effects of Boris Johnson’s “roadmap” for exit from lockdown – allegedly a one-way street, but already showing signs of roadworks delays. Taken as a whole, it is at times contradictory and prone to almost surreal conclusions: my IQ is allegedly 142, but having read all 23 pages three times, I confess that, were I the Secretary of State, I’d be utterly confused about what to do. That aside, however, some of the observations are astonishing. This first one below is bare-faced in its admission of failure:

The explosive statement there is ‘immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals’. Five pages later, reference is made to data used to make further modelled projections as follows: ”assuming two doses of AstraZeneca provide only 31% effectiveness against transmission”. So in short, SPIMO is working on the basis of a supposed ‘vaccine’ that fails to stop the spread of infection in more than two out of three cases. This is radically different to the impression government publicity has given us – viz, that “even after vaccination, it may still be possible for you to infect others”. It sounds cautionary and responsible, but asking around a sample of acquaintances yesterday, they imagined a figure of around 80% – not 31%. Under 1 in 3 is, let’s face it, a risible result.

But the initial statement cuts the legs off continuing the vaccination rollout, because it rejects the benefit such might bring with the haunting words, “Immunisation failures account for more serious illnesses than unvaccinated individuals”. So much for “Don’t be selfish, get the jab”. But ever the man obsessed with a bone, Hancock is ploughing forward doggedly with a vaccine programme that simply isn’t justified by the facts. Equally however, it further justifies the claim I made a fortnight ago, that government insistence on a causal relationship between vacination on one hand, and reduced cases and deaths on the other is pure baloney. Fast forward to the “further discussion” promised on this topic, and try to contain your laughter at this gem, referring to an associated chart:

“56. This shows that most deaths and admissions in a post-Roadmap resurgence are in people who have received two vaccine doses, even without vaccine protection waning or a variant emerging that escapes vaccines. This is not the result of vaccines being ineffective, merely uptake being so high.” You couldn’t make this up: even without left-field factors, there’ll be a resurgence after lockdown exit, but this is not Astrazeneca’s fault – the “problem” was high uptake. By vaccinating the vulnerable bigtime, we killed more people, but a drug struggling to demonstrate efficacy had nothing to do with it.

Google translate from Berliner Zeitung.

• Verdict In Weimar: No More Masks, No Tests And No More Distance For Students (BZ)

The Weimar District Court has passed a sensational judgment. The court ruled that the “obligation to wear a mask, to maintain minimum distances and to perform rapid tests in schools pose a threat to the mental, physical or emotional well-being of the child”. And said measures are prohibited. After doubts about the authenticity were initially expressed online, Steffen Dittes, Deputy Chairman of the Left in Thuringia, confirmed the authenticity. The judgment has the file number: 9 F 148/21. In the judgment it is said that the “directors and teachers of the schools” of two children, whose parents went to court, are forbidden to “arrange or prescribe the following for these and all other children and pupils taught at these schools:

In class and on the school premises, to wear face masks of all kinds, in particular mouth and nose covers, so-called qualified masks (OP or FFP2 mask) or others, to maintain minimum distances between each other or to other people that go beyond what was known before 2020, and to take part in rapid tests to determine the Sars-CoV-2 virus ”. The judge justified his decision with, among other things, according to the court, “the lack of use of wearing a mask and the observance of distance regulations for the children themselves and third parties”. In addition, the judge cites the “unsuitability of PCR tests and rapid tests for measuring the incidence of infection” as one of the reasons for his judgment. Steffen Dittes, the deputy chairman of the Left in the Thuringian state parliament, confirmed the authenticity of the judgment on Saturday. Dittes wrote on Twitter: “The decision of the AG Weimar is known.” At the same time, he sharply criticized the judgment.

Can a government or another employer force you to get vaccinated with an unapproved substance when you are perfectly healthy? Where are the legal opinions on this?

• Ardern To New Zealand Border Staff: Get Vaccine Now Or Be Redeployed (G.)

Border workers have until the end of April to be vaccinated before being moved to lower risk roles, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said after a third worker from Auckland’s Grand Millenium managed isolation facility tested positive for Covid-19. “We want everyone to be vaccinated on our frontline,” she told TVNZ’s Breakfast on Monday. “From Monday through until the end of April, that becomes the final window where if people are not vaccinated in that period of time then they are redeployed, they are moved on. And that was always the point we had to get to.” Her comments came hours before it was confirmed that the worker, known as case C, had not been vaccinated, adding to concerns raised last week when it was made public that case B had missed two vaccine appointments.

Case C, a close contact of last week’s case, known as case B, was reported to have the virus late on Sunday. The Ministry of Health said that as they had already been isolating at home there was little additional risk to the community and that they and their partner had now been moved to a quarantine facility. Ardern said 79% of those employed by the security company for which cases B and C worked had so far been immunised, adding that the figure was not good enough. “We believe we have a health and safety obligation to people who are at the frontline in managed isolation,” she said. New Zealand began rolling out its vaccine programme in February, with border staff and managed isolation and quarantine workers at the front of the queue for the Pfizer jab.

Thread on this in yesterday’s comments.

• New Studies Suggest ‘Long Covid’ More Common Than Previously Thought (F.)

A survey earlier this month from the Office for National Statistics in Britain polled more than 20,000 participants who’d tested positive for Covid-19 in the last year and found that one in five survivors reported having symptoms after five weeks—and at 12 weeks, the number was still 13.7% (almost one in seven people). The most common symptoms experienced at five weeks were fatigue (11.8%), cough (11%), headache (10%), and muscle pain (7.7%). (Loss of taste and smell followed, each affecting about 6.3% of participants.) At 12 weeks, the prevalence of symptoms was slightly lower, but still distributed similarly and much higher than a control group who hadn’t had Covid-19.

In terms of the big picture, when the authors extrapolated the numbers to the whole of the UK, they suggest that more than a million residents may have experienced long Covid by the beginning of March 2021. Studies have also shown the striking array of acute effects the coronavirus can have on the body and its organ systems, from cardiovascular to pulmonary to neurological-psychological to kidney and more. That Covid-19 is now considered a multi-organ disease may translate to a wider spectrum of long Covid symptoms than previously understood.

In fact, a new study from researchers at hospitals around the country found that long Covid symptoms included fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, loss of sense of smell or taste, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, headache/migraine, and non-restorative sleep. The authors offer guidelines on how to treat patients with long Covid, and urge a multidisciplinary approach to support both the physical and the mental health of those living with long Covid. “Covid-19 is the first infectious disease that I’ve come across that has such an effect on a wide variety of organs. It’s changed my clinical practice,” said Columbia University’s Elaine Y. Wan in a statement. “No matter what the patient comes in for, I now ask if they ever had Covid-19. It changes the possible range of diagnoses.”

While it seems that people with more severe Covid-19, especially those who were hospitalized, are at higher risk for long Covid (a study from Wuhan found that after six months, three-quarters of these patients still had at least one symptom), this doesn’t mean that people with mild illness are off the hook. A study out last week from the Karolinska Institute reported that among a group of healthcare workers who’d had mild Covid-19, 10% still had at least one symptom severe enough to impact their work, home, or social lives eight months later (the most common symptoms were loss of smell and taste, fatigue, and respiratory problems). While the study was quite small and the results should be interpreted with some caution, other studies have also suggested that even mild initial illness can lead to long-term effects.

“Despite the shortages of coronavirus jabs in the EU, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to be in no hurry to register Sputnik V..”

• Austria May Buy A Million Russian Vaccine Doses (RT)

Austria may soon be purchasing Russia’s Sputnik V jab to give an “additional turbo boost” to its anti-Covid vaccination drive, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told the media in Vienna after negotiations with Moscow concluded. The negotiations on the contract to acquire Sputnik V have “de facto come to an end,” Kurz announced on Saturday. “It’s now possible to purchase it for us in Austria,” he added. A “million” doses of the vaccine from Russia, which boasts an efficacy of more than 91% percent and lacks significant side-effects, would provide an “additional turbo boost” to Austria’s immunization campaign, the Chancellor said, without specifying when those supplies might begin.

Austria, which has a population of almost nine million, has recorded more than 570,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases and over 9,600 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Kurz also promised to ask questions of the European Union regarding the bloc’s inability to be as fast and efficient as the US and UK in acquiring and approving vaccines against the deadly disease. Despite the shortages of coronavirus jabs in the EU, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to be in no hurry to register Sputnik V, despite all the required paperwork being provided earlier this year. EU laws allow member states the emergency use of vaccines even if they haven’t been approved by the EMA. Hungary and Slovakia have already taken advantage of this clause and started giving Sputnik V shots to their citizens, and Austria may well follow their example.

We don’t see much news about China’s vaccination campaigns.

• China Considers Mixing Covid-19 Vaccines To Boost Protection Rate (R.)

China’s top disease control official has said the country is formally considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines as a way of further boosting vaccine efficacy. Available data shows Chinese vaccines lag behind others including Pfizer and Moderna in terms of efficacy, but require less stringent temperature controls during storage. Giving people doses of different vaccines is one way to improve vaccines that “don’t have very high rates of protection”, Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Saturday, without specifying whether he was referring to foreign or domestic vaccines “Inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines is being considered,” Gao told a conference in the Chinese city of Chengdu.

Gao said that taking steps to “optimise” the vaccine process including changing the number of doses and the length of time between doses was a “definite” solution to efficacy issues. Two injections of a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech, when given shorter than three weeks apart, was 49.1% effective based on data from a Phase III trial in Brazil, below the 50% threshold set by World Health Organization, according to a paper published by Brazilian researchers on Sunday ahead of peer review. But data from a small subgroup showed that the efficacy rate increased to 62.3% when the doses were given at intervals of three weeks and longer. The overall efficacy rate for the vaccine was slightly above 50% in the trial.

Ol’ Joe Biden had a farm…

• Did Joe Biden Pack The Supreme Court Commission To Simply Fail? (Turley)

With the establishment of his commission to study the possible packing of the Supreme Court, President Biden has adjoined his name to one of the most inglorious efforts of Franklin Roosevelt. Court packing has long been anathema in the United States, and polls have consistently shown the vast majority of Americans oppose the idea. Biden himself once denounced it as a “boneheaded” idea, but that was back in 1983, when there remained a real space in politics for at least the pretense of principle.

Now Biden and others seem to think the Supreme Court must be canceled for its failure to yield to the demands of our age of rage. Many of us were surprised when he pandered to court packing calls in the 2020 primaries. Some of us have called for expanding the court over a lengthy transitional period, but commentators and some Democrats called for an immediate infusion of new justices to give liberals the controlling majority. Unhappy with conservative rulings, Democrats demanded that the Supreme Court be replaced by a much larger and more reliably liberal body.

Washington already looks like many of our campuses, where opposition of such liberal measures results in isolation and condemnation. Take Justice Stephen Breyer. One would think he would be immune from the mob as one of the most consistently liberal justices in our history. However, this week Breyer warned against any move to expand the Supreme Court. He was swiftly denounced by figures like cable news host Mehdi Hasan who called him “naive” and called for his retirement. Demand Justice, a liberal group calling for court packing, had a billboard truck in Washington the next day telling Breyer to retire. Demand Justice once employed White House press secretary Jen Psaki as a communications consultant, and Psaki was on the advisory board of one of its voting projects.

Corporate Marxism?!

• Twitter Censors Criticism of BLM Founder Buying $1.4 Million Home (Turley)

We have been discussing the expanding censorship on Twitter and social media. The latest example involves the story of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, and her purchase of a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles whose population is reputedly less than 2% black. The professed Marxist received considerable criticism for the purchase, including from Jason Whitlock, an African-America sports critic who has also been a critic of BLM. When Whitlock called out Khan-Cullors, Twitter promptly censored the tweet — leaving a notice that it was “no longer available.” Last week, various sites like dirt.com reported, “A secluded mini-compound tucked into L.A.’s rustic and semi-remote Topanga Canyon was recently sold for a tad more than $1.4 million to a corporate entity that public records show is controlled by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37-year-old social justice visionary and co-founder of the galvanizing and, for some, controversial Black Lives Matter movement.”

It produced a firestorm of critics who noted that Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.” [..] The controversy is illustrative of the age of Internet censors. Tweets, and in some cases Twitter accounts, vanish without explanation. Twitter is notorious for not responding to media inquiries over such censorship and even less forthcoming on the decisionmaking process behind such decisions. [..] The New York Post and other publications have reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties in other locations, including the Bahamas.

However, it is not clear if this money came from BLM which has reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds. She is married to Janaya Khan, a leader of BLM in Toronto, and published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up book. She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda. [..] Indeed, the greatest irony may not be the home purchase by the corporate support. A professed Marxist, Cullors has not only been paid handsomely by corporations like Warner but is being actively protected by corporations like Twitter. When it comes to free speech, I support them both. The question is whether both have an equal opportunity to speak on platforms like Twitter.

Innocent until…

• Due Process, Adult Sexual Morality and the Case of Rep. Matt Gaetz (Greenwald)

That Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is a pedophile, a sex trafficker, and an abuser of women who forces them to prostitute themselves and use drugs with him is a widespread assumption in many media and political circles. That is true despite the rather significant fact that not only has he never been charged with (let alone convicted of) such crimes, but also no evidence has been publicly presented that any of it is true. He has also vehemently denied all of it. All or some of these accusations very well may be true and, one day — perhaps imminently — there will be ample publicly available evidence demonstrating this. But that day has not yet arrived.

As of now, we know very little beyond what The New York Times initially reported about all of this on March 30: that “people close to the investigation” told the paper that “a Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments.” The article also said the DOJ “inquiry is also examining whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and whether she received anything of material value.” Both the NYT and, later, The Daily Beast, indicated the existence of financial transactions involving payments by Gaetz to his associate Joel Greenberg, currently charged with multiple felonies. The New York Times article made clear: “No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.”

That is still true. But no matter. One is hard-pressed to find people willing to urge that his guilt not be assumed before evidence of it is presented (amazingly, just six months ago, many of the same people now treating these accusations as proven fact had no trouble casually asserting or strongly implying that Gaetz was having sex with a 19-year-old male whom he said he had been parentally raising for years, all without the slightest regard for the impact of such innuendo on that other person). So reckless is the discourse around this case that it is now frequently asserted in major outlets that Rep. Gaetz faces “charges” of sex trafficking and sex with a minor, even though that claim is, at least as of now, blatantly untrue.

Still don’t really get why some are so adamant that people should vote without an ID. And that CEOs want to be part of it is another story altogether.

• Major Corporations Plan To Oppose Election Integrity Measures (DC)

The leaders of over 100 major corporations spoke via Zoom on Saturday about how they could combat election integrity laws similar to the one passed in Georgia, according to multiple reports. The executives on the call reportedly expressed concern about legislation that they view as restricting voting rights. They included the owner of the Atlanta Falcons, who also co-founded Home Depot, the chairwoman of the Starbucks board, and the CEO of AMC Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal reported. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor who helped organize the meeting, told the Washington Post that the corporate leaders on the call “felt very strongly that these voting restrictions are based on a flawed premise and are dangerous.”

“There was a defiance of the threats that businesses should stay out of politics,” he continued. “They were obviously rejecting that even with their presence. But they were there out of concern about voting restrictions not being in the public interest.” Corporations including Citibank, Coca-Cola, Delta, and Microsoft criticized Georgia’s new election integrity bill, SB 202. The law expands early voting opportunities for most counties, while expanding voter ID requirements to include absentee ballots. In response to corporate criticism, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell slammed the use of “economic blackmail to spread disinformation and push bad ideas that citizens reject at the ballot box.”

Major League Baseball moved its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in response to pressure from President Joe Biden and corporate leaders over the law. Colorado also requires voters to present identification when they cast in-person and absentee ballots. Prominent Georgia Democrats, including Sen. Jon Ossoff and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, were skeptical of the boycott efforts. Companies involved on the call are expected to release a statement expressing their opposition to election law changes like Georgia’s in the coming days, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Fareed with some honesty on China.

An extraordinary moment of truth and honesty on CNN from @FareedZakaria pic.twitter.com/iVy4yxO6Iv

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) April 11, 2021

Debt Rattle April 4 2021

Apr 042021

April 4, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: antibodies, bitcoin, COVID, dissenting voices, freedom, Gaetz, Jimmy Lai, Neanderthals, Texas, Theia, vaccine passport 30 Responses »

Georgia O’Keeffe New York night 1929

• We Cannot Afford to Censor Dissenting Voices During a Pandemic (Kulldorff)

• Boris Johnson Ditches Plans For Covid Vaccine Passport For Pubs (Sun)

• Policymakers Use Panic To Shift Blame For Covid-19 Onto Us, The People (RT)

• Do We Now Need Permission To Be Free? (Black)

• The Texas Neanderthals Were Right (Spiked)

• Rapid Test Result To Be Confirmed With PCR Amid Hunt For New Variants (Ind.)

• Persistence Of Covid-19 Antibodies Varies Widely From Person To Person (F.)

• JPMorgan Reveals ‘Big’ Bitcoin Price Prediction (F.)

• The Crazy Claims Against Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (NYP)

• ‘Your Life Is Not About Yourself’: Jimmy Lai (HKAD)

• Giant Pieces Of Ancient Alien Planet May Be Lodged Under Earth’s Surface (JTN)

Epic. This same pastor, Artur Pawlowski in Calgary, was fined $1,200 a year ago for feeding the homeless.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1378506465158303747

“If the Prime Minister needs the comfort of company with other politicians, get in touch with Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.”

• We Cannot Afford to Censor Dissenting Voices During a Pandemic (Kulldorff)

The media has been very reluctant to report reliable scientific and public health information about the pandemic. Instead they have broadcast unverified information such as the model predictions from Imperial College, they have spread unwarranted fear that undermine people’s trust in public health and they have promoted naïve and inefficient counter measures such as lockdowns, masks and contact tracing. While I wished that neither SAGE nor anyone else would argue against long-standing principles of public health, the media should not censor such information. During a pandemic, it is more important than ever that media can report freely. There are two major reasons for this: (i) While similar to existing coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus that we are constantly learning more about and because of that, it takes time to reach scientific conclusions.

With censorship it takes longer and we cannot afford that during a pandemic. (ii) In order to maintain trust in public health, it is important that any thoughts and ideas about the pandemic can be voiced, debated and either confirmed or debunked. [..] I hope that the UK Government will quickly reverse course to avoid further unnecessary damage from both COVID-19 and the lockdowns. Why the UK Government and SAGE are not looking at public health more broadly is incomprehensible to me. Chris and Patrick got it right in early March 2020, when they argued for focused protection of high-risk older people without a destructive lockdown for children and young adults. Chris, Patrick, take advice from yourself from a little over a year ago.

You can complement that with the extensive knowledge of epidemiology professors such as Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan at Oxford University, Ellen Townsend at the University of Nottingham, Francoix Balloux at University College London and Paul McKeigue at University of Edinburgh. It should now be obvious to everyone that lockdowns, masks and contract tracing failed to protect older high-risk people, as it could not suppress and contain COVID-19, with far too many deaths as a result. Lockdowns are just a dragged out let-it-rip strategy. That was clear to most infectious disease epidemiologists already a year ago. The fatal logical flaw of the lockdowners has been that we must lock down because COVID-19 is dangerous. The opposite is true. Because it is a very dangerous disease among the old, they should have been properly protected through focused protection.

Instead of continuing to take advice from those who were wrong then, Boris should listen to those who were right. In the UK, you have the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist in professor Sunetra Gupta. She can help implement a focused protection strategy of older high-risk individuals through vaccination and other means, while removing the lockdowns. If the Prime Minister needs the comfort of company with other politicians, get in touch with Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.

Logic is overrated.

• Boris Johnson Ditches Plans For Covid Vaccine Passport For Pubs (Sun)

Boris Johnson has ditched plans to force customers to show a vaccine passport every time they go into a pub. In a major boost for the hospitality trade, the PM will exempt bars and restaurants from new Covid safety rules. Only those attending mass gatherings, such as festivals or major sports events, will be required to provide proof of a jab, test or natural immunity. Landlords, who can reopen outdoors-only a week tomorrow in England, will soon be free to admit anyone who follows existing guidelines on social distancing and mask-wearing. Boris’s change of heart came after an angry backlash from 72 MPs who branded the idea “divisive and discriminatory”. But he will tomorrow announce his determination to press ahead with a “vaccine certification” system for larger venues from next month.

NHS chiefs are developing a new app members of the public will have to show to gain access to sports stadiums, theatres, festivals and nightclubs. Those without a smartphone will get a paper certificate. The system will be trialled at nine pilot events over the next few weeks, where experts will also explore how high-tech ventilation and Covid tests on entry are working. Mr Johnson will study the feedback to help decide how to manage other large-scale gatherings as restrictions are lifted. The PM said: “We are doing everything we can to enable the reopening of our country so people can return to the events, travel and other things they love as safely as possible, and these reviews will play an important role in allowing this to happen.”

Liverpool will be a key test centre for the opening up of the rest of the country — with four pilot events being held at a comedy club, a cinema, a nightclub and a business conference arena from next week. And some fans will be allowed at Wembley for the Carabao Cup final on April 25, the FA Cup final on May 15 and a semi-final on April 18. The World Snooker Championship in Sheffield and a mass participation run at Hatfield, Herts, are also involved.

Ashley Frawley, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at Swansea University and the author of Semiotics of Happiness: Rhetorical Beginnings of a Public Problem.

• Policymakers Use Panic To Shift Blame For Covid-19 Onto Us, The People (RT)

The message is clear: Regardless of who you are, you are at risk. Stay home, clap for the NHS. Or this could be you. This expansion of risk is a common tactic in public health messaging. While risks tend to be patterned, officials find it politically useful to play down patterns and ‘democratise risks’: Take a risk specific to some people and generalise it to everyone so everyone feels equally afraid. This avoids accusations of discrimination against any one group, and officials can never be accused of playing down risks. But it also encourages us to see the world as much riskier and scarier than it is. Is it any wonder that levels of health anxiety have steadily increased, particularly among young people who in many ways have least to fear?

But for policymakers, anxiety is useful. Ideally, citizens imagine any risk, no matter how small, as quite likely to happen and act accordingly. Indeed, a level of crippling anxiety that means you cannot leave the house is the goal. But as we have seen with overblown risks regarding, for example, child abduction, this level of fear cannot simply be switched off. The profound effects on society long outlive the initial panic – which is why children’s unsupervised play has dwindled. Yet as audiences, we knew that in the balance of probabilities, the cropped-headed patient on the gurney would not be us. For all the attempts by government officials to claim that ‘the virus does not discriminate’, it was difficult to deny that, in terms of deaths, it clearly did.

But behavioural scientists viewed people’s level-headed appraisals of risks as another problem to be overcome. In a report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (with the fittingly dystopian acronym ‘SPI-B’), the authors bemoaned the fact that people were comforted by low death rates in their own age groups. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened,” they lamented. In response, they advised governments to ramp up fears. To accomplish this, a different approach was needed. In a series of posters released weeks later, a yellow and red filtered NHS worker in full PPE looks at audiences with a slightly cocked head and serious eyes. Her surgical mask looks more like a gas mask than a protective covering. This grainy, dystopian aesthetic was beamed out on social media with the message:

‘IF YOU GO OUT, YOU CAN SPREAD IT. PEOPLE WILL DIE.’ It is this emphasis on threats to others that became the dominant tactic of the campaign. You are at risk. But more importantly, you are A risk. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ‘look into my eyes’ campaign, where extreme close ups of coronavirus patients in oxygen masks accompanied by messages like, ‘Look him in the eyes. And tell him you always keep a safe distance.’ If things have gone wrong, it is not because of government failures to, for example, protect care homes or stop the virus leaking out of hospitals. No, it must be you.

“You might be wondering why the government has been using the Public Health Act, rather than including a general lockdown clause in the Coronavirus Act, or even using the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which was designed precisely for an emergency such as Covid-19. The reason is simple: to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.”

• Do We Now Need Permission To Be Free? (Black)

As Britain was heading into lockdown on 23 March 2020, UK health secretary Matt Hancock was busy introducing the accompanying legislation in parliament. ‘To defeat [Covid-19]’, he said, ‘we are proposing extraordinary measures of a kind never seen before in peacetime’. He was underselling them. In their repressiveness, their illiberalism and often their sheer arbitrariness, the ‘extraordinary measures’ the government was then about to impose on British society had never been seen before in wartime, either. They exceeded powers granted by the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. And they went beyond those of the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939. These were draconian pieces of legislation, placing people and property at the service of the state. But they certainly didn’t authorise the de facto imprisonment of every single citizen in his or her home.

Because that is what Hancock’s ‘extraordinary measures’ amounted to: the quarantining of everybody, regardless of health. As Lord Justice Hickinbottom described it, the government’s response to Covid represented ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’. Take the Coronavirus Act itself. This hulking 348-page document, rushed through parliament in just four days, was focused mainly on marshalling the nation’s medical resources and authorising the massive public expenditure that was to come. But it still found room to stamp all over civil liberties. It granted the state unprecedented powers of detention, allowing police, public-health officials and immigration officers to detain for up to 14 days those whom they have ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect of being ‘potentially infectious’.

Which gave them the power to detain, well, anyone. The act also invested the government with the powers to close premises, cancel events, prohibit gatherings and ban protests. That act is now halfway through its two-year lifespan, but, troublingly, it can be extended if the government decides ‘it is prudent to do so’. Not that it seems to need the Coronavirus Act to deprive us of our most basic freedoms. No, for this the government has principally used the Public Health Act 1984 (as amended in 2008). This authorises it to create a regulatory regime ‘for the purpose of preventing, protecting against, controlling or providing a public-health response to the incidence or spread of infection or contamination’.

Indeed, it was on the basis of the Public Health Act that the government first created the regulations that, in steadily expanding form, have dominated and restricted our lives for a year, from closing all businesses to confining people to their homes unless they had a ‘reasonable excuse’. You might be wondering why the government has been using the Public Health Act, rather than including a general lockdown clause in the Coronavirus Act, or even using the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which was designed precisely for an emergency such as Covid-19. The reason is simple: to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. General lockdown measures in the Coronavirus Act would have rightly demanded a lot more interrogation. And, under the conditions of the Civil Contingencies Act, regulations have to be put before parliament in draft form before they are issued. And even if approved, they will lapse within 30 days.

Yes, but stop the “vaccine” propaganda.

• The Texas Neanderthals Were Right (Spiked)

In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamed Vanity Fair. Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.

No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’ Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.

Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not. Instead, Biden cited an uptick in new cases nationally to bang on again about masks. ‘I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor, and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate’, he said earlier this week. ‘Please, this is not politics. Reinstate the mandate if you let it down.’ Biden’s plea came on the same day that CDC director Rochelle Walensky warned of ‘impending doom’. Holding back tears, she said: ‘Right now, I am scared.’

Overwrought emotionalism from the head of the CDC is not helpful, to put it mildly. Nor is a president insisting on state-mandated mask-wearing. Biden’s message implied that the latest increase in cases was down to states like Texas that have loosened restrictions on activity, but that is not true. In fact, the national increase was driven mainly by New York, New Jersey and Michigan – states that have imposed the most onerous of restrictions. As it happens, there is no need for alarm in the US. Yes, new cases are up in some states, but far below the January peak. The levels are much too low to talk about a ‘fourth wave’.

With the rollout of vaccines in progress, it is important for any discussion of Covid’s spread to break down findings by age group. And here we find encouraging developments. Nearly three-quarters of those aged 65 and older have been vaccinated, a group that has accounted for about 80 per cent of all Covid-related deaths. Accordingly, hospitalisations and deaths among seniors have been reduced dramatically. The latest increase in new cases is concentrated among younger people. This spread from older to younger was seen in Israel as vaccines were implemented there, but proved to be a temporary phenomenon. Also, we know that younger people are much less likely to be hospitalised or die from Covid. That’s why it is unlikely the latest increase in cases will lead to a corresponding increase in deaths.

Self testing is all the rage suddenly.

• Rapid Test Result To Be Confirmed With PCR Amid Hunt For New Variants (Ind.)

The government is to use standard PCR testing to confirm positive Covid-19 results returned via rapid, on-the-spot tests which are now being used by millions of people every day across the UK. This comes as part of efforts to quickly detect new and emerging “variants of concern”, some of which are partially capable of evading immunity triggered by infection or vaccination. For those people who test positive via a lateral flow device (LFD), which is capable of returning a result in 30 minutes, the result will then be cross-checked using a PCR test. These are more accurate than the LFDs and also make use of new technology, known as genotype assay testing, which could halve the time it takes to identify if a positive Covid test is caused by a variant of concern.

This will allow positive cases to be traced sooner and stop the spread of variants on UK soil, the government has said. Genotype assay testing is compatible only with PCR tests and not LFDs, meaning the latter is unable to detect or trace the spread of variants. The UK has bought millions of LFD tests as part of plans to reopen society. Teachers, schoolchildren and their families without any symptoms are being asked to test themselves using the kits twice a week. Contact tracing will continue to be implemented in the eventuality of a positive LFD result, but will be stopped automatically after receipt of a negative confirmatory PCR test.

NHS Test and Trace has introduced new features that will automatically inform anyone self-isolating from a positive LFD, along with their contacts, to stop isolating if the confirmatory PCR is taken within two days and is negative. Jon Deeks, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, said the new policy was “very welcome”. “This will ensure that the risk that individuals are unnecessarily isolated through false positives is reduced,” he told The Independent. “It is only a shame that it has taken so many weeks for concerns raised by the Royal Statistical Society and others to be addressed, with many children unnecessarily missing school as a result.”

Curious pattern.

• Persistence Of Covid-19 Antibodies Varies Widely From Person To Person (F.)

One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Covid-19 is why the neutralizing antibodies our bodies generate in response to the virus tend to dwindle in number so quickly. A small minority of studies, including one completed in Iceland last summer, have observed lengthier periods of persistence in their participants, but the vast majority—spanning a wide breadth of people and places, from specialized Covid-19 hospitals in China to healthcare workers in Tennessee—concluded that anti-Covid-19 antibodies were fast to fade, so much so that some patients didn’t even appear to develop any, at least not at levels that could be detected by researchers. Another way of interpreting this array of data, however, is that antibody persistence varies from person to person—meaning people with longer-lasting antibodies wouldn’t be outliers, but just one clause of a general rule.

This is the argument made by a new study published in The Lancet last week, which sorted participants into five different categories based on the titer and duration of their neutralizing antibody response. While distribution between them was by no means equal, it ranged enough to beg the question of whether current conceptions of immunity from Covid-19, which influence everything from nationwide vaccine strategies to our individual choices and behaviors, require revision. The subjects of the study were 164 Covid-19 patients living in Singapore. Researchers collected data on these patients using both neutralizing and binding assays over a period of 180 days, then plugged that data into an algorithmic model to predict how long their antibodies would last in the years and even decades following initial infection.

Based on the longevity of their antibody responses, patients were sorted into one of five groups: the negative group, or patients whose antibodies never reached detectable levels; the rapid waning group, or patients whose antibody levels were detectable within 20 days of infection, but dropped in less than 180 days; the slow waning group, or patients who still tested antibody-positive 180 days after infection; the persistent group, or patients whose antibody levels, over many months, showed little to no signs of decay; and the delayed response group, or patients who, against all odds, had a late surge in antibody levels later in their recovery as opposed to after infection.

Earlier immunological research on Covid-19 placed most patients in one of the first two categories—negative or rapid waning. But this study found that the spread between the rapid waning, slow waning, and persistent groups was as close to even as it gets, with about 29.8 percent of participants falling in the rapid waning group, 29 percent in the slow waning group, and 31.7 percent in the persistent group. Just below 12 percent landed in the negative group, with a small sliver—just 1.8 percent—rounding out the curve in the delayed response group.

Table 1. A table based on data from the persistent antibody study. “DYNAMICS OF SARS-COV-2 NEUTRALISING ANTIBODY RESPONSES AND DURATION OF IMMUNITY: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY” HTTPS://WWW.THELANCET.COM/JOURNALS/LANMIC/ARTICLE/PIIS2666-5247(21)00025-2/FULLTEXT

Any self-interest?

• JPMorgan Reveals ‘Big’ Bitcoin Price Prediction (F.)

Bitcoin has won its fair share of Wall Street supporters this year amid a bull run that’s seen it soar around 500%. The bitcoin price hit highs of just over $60,000 per bitcoin last month before falling back slightly but has since made up lost ground. Meanwhile, the broader cryptocurrency market has surged to almost $2 trillion—boosted by decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens. Now, analysts at Wall Street banking giant and former bitcoin skeptic JPMorgan have said bitcoin could climb as high as $130,000 in the long-term if it continues to see its volatility converge with that of gold’s. “Considering how big the financial investment into gold is, any such crowding out of gold as an ‘alternative’ currency implies big upside for bitcoin over the long term,” JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a note to clients this week.

The bank found that a six-month measure of bitcoin volatility appeared to be stabilizing around the 73% mark—suggesting “tentative signs of bitcoin volatility normalization” that could help to “reinvigorate” interest from institutional investors. High volatility “acts as a headwind towards further institutional adoption,” according to JPMorgan. The bitcoin price has soared as institutional investors including London-based asset manager Ruffer and insurance giant MassMutual have bought into bitcoin—with Elon Musk’s Tesla topping off a series of high-profile bitcoin bets. The bitcoin price has climbed from around $10,000 per bitcoin to around $60,000 as a result, but JPMorgan thinks it could still have some way to run. “Mechanically, the bitcoin price would have to rise [to] $130,000, to match the total private sector investment in gold,” JPMorgan analysts wrote.

Quite the story. Stay tuned.

• The Crazy Claims Against Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (NYP)

An alleged orgy with prostitutes. Accusations of sex with an underage girl. A trophy photo of a woman wearing only a hula hoop. And a convoluted extortion plot involving a likely dead American hostage in Iran. Even by Florida standards, the Matt Gaetz saga is downright bizarre – and getting weirder by the day. Before this week, the young Sunshine State congressman and ally of former President Donald Trump was best known, like his mentor, for his ambitious conservatism and promontory coiffure. But this week, the Republican has faced a daily flurry of scandalous ≠headlines. Most seriously, he is being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old girl, and for paying for her to travel with him across state lines, potentially violating federal sex-trafficking laws.

Gaetz denies the allegations – but not the fact of the investigation. Then, on Thursday, CNN alleged that he had shown fellow lawmakers nude photos of women he said he’d slept with, including one photographed wearing a hula hoop, and nothing else. There have also been claims by two of Gaetz’s enemies that the FBI has photos of him in a “sexual orgy with underage prostitutes.” It’s all enough to make his penchant for posing on Instagram without pants, as he did in a July posting he captioned, “Covid work!” seem tame by comparison. This is how the latest Gaetz drama has played out so far: News of the sex-trafficking investigation, launched in the final months of the last administration, broke Tuesday in The New York Times.

The Pensacola bachelor, 38 — whose engagement to Harvard business school student Ginger Luckey, 26, was announced on Twitter by Fox’s Jeanine Pirro in December — immediately denied he had sex with a minor or transported one across state lines. “In the strongest possible terms. I deny that I have ever been with someone underage,” he told The Post on Tuesday. “That is false,” he insisted. [..] Then there’s the Iranian hostage angle. McGee and ex-Air Force intelligence officer Bob Kent didn’t want the money for themselves, necessarily, Gaetz is alleging. They wanted to use the money to free Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent taken hostage by Iran in 2007, and declared dead by his family last year. McGee, meanwhile, has denied Gaetz’s hostage-extortion plot allegations, calling them “a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking of minors,” as he told The Washington Post. And McGee is fighting Gaetz with banner-headline dirt of his own.

Jimmy Lai was just convicted, with 6 others, for organizing a protest. He faces years in prison.

• ‘Your Life Is Not About Yourself’: Jimmy Lai (HKAD)

Lai was born in 1948 in Guangzhou to a family of wealthy landowners, who saw their properties confiscated by the Chinese Communist Party. His father fled to Hong Kong amid political persecution, while his mother was taken to labor camps. As a child, Lai scavenged and sold illegal cigarettes to feed his sisters. When the country was hit by famine in the late 1950s, he escaped to Hong Kong as a stowaway at the age of 12 with only a dollar in his pocket. On the second day of his arrival, he got a job at a glove factory on Fuk Wing Street, beginning his career in manufacturing and working his way up from an apprentice to a manager. In 1975, the 26-year-old set out as an entrepreneur and established his own textile factory along with two partners.

Six years later, he began his foray in the retail industry and founded the Hong Kong clothing brand, Giordano, which rapidly expanded into a chain after a drastic reform. Lai could have retired in his 40s, but the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 set his life on a different trajectory. You must live remembering the shame of June Fourth. Even as the country celebrates its prosperity, you must hold on to this torch in a dark corner, Lai wrote to his children on the 20th anniversary of the event. A year after the bloody crackdown in Beijing, Lai founded Next Magazine in Hong Kong and withdrew his business from China. Because of his belief that a free flow of information would push China towards democracy, Lai started Apple Daily, a newspaper that stands firm on the universal values of democracy and freedom.

The paper remains fiercely critical of the authorities, even as other media outlets in Hong Kong are gradually undermined and bought up by Chinese corporations. Advertising revenues plummeted amid the political pressure and the newsroom was raided by nearly 200 police officers in August 2020, a month after Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong. I will stay and fight till the last day, Lai pledged, even as he was taken away in handcuffs. “If we give up on the fight for freedom and justice, we also surrender our dignity as humans,” he wrote on the 20th anniversary of Apple Daily in 2015. “Your life is not about yourself.” And six years on, the rebel tycoon still holds fast to his belief and remains defiant against oppression, even at the price of his own freedom.

Theia.

• Giant Pieces Of Ancient Alien Planet May Be Lodged Under Earth’s Surface (JTN)

Scientists seeking to explain a series of seemingly inexplicable formations deep within the Earth’s surface may have found an explanation: They came from outer space. Researchers with Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration said in a recently published paper that the “continent-sized Large Low Shear Velocity provinces” identified in Earth’s mantle—essentially giant formations of rock the origins of which scientists have struggled for decades to explain—may have been formed by Theia, the proto-planet thought to have slammed into the ancient Earth billions of years ago.

The collision between Earth and Theia is hypothesized to have ejected a significant portion of Earth into outer space; those fragments would have eventually coalesced under Earth’s gravity to form the Moon. In the paper, the Arizona State researchers argue that “the left-over Theia mantle materials may [have sunk] to the bottom of Earth’s mantle and cause[d] the LLSVPs.” Theia’s geological mantle, they argue, may have been “several percent intrinsically denser than Earth’s mantle,” leading it to sink down through the Earth and form the mysterious provinces. The Theia impact theory is widely regarded as the prevailing explanation for the Moon’s origin.

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Pendulum

a pendulum, double pendulum, 4-, 8-, and 16-pendulum- all with the same total mass. I originally thought in the limit it would behave like a hanging rope — why doesn't it? pic.twitter.com/OcqyHeqtCq

— Matt Henderson (@matthen2) April 3, 2021

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Debt Rattle March 31 2021

Mar 312021

March 31, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: Amazon, fourth surge, Gaetz, ivermectin, minimum wage, Twitter, unvaccinated, WHO 65 Responses »

Pablo Picasso The old fisherman 1895

• Amazon’s Twitter Army Was Handpicked For “Great Sense Of Humor” (IC)

• Twitter Censors Famed Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff (AIER)

• The Fourth Surge Is Upon Us. This Time, It’s Different. (Atl.)

• It’s Time To Talk About Ivermectin (NC)

• The “Unvaccinated” Question (CJ Hopkins)

• In Germany, AstraZeneca Vaccine Only For People Over 60 After 9 Deaths (RT)

• ‘Concerns’ Over Lack Of Data In WHO Report on Covid-19 Origins (RT)

• Tanzania’s Late President Magufuli: ‘Science Denier’ or Threat to Empire? (UH)

• New Minimum Wage Legislation: Millions Of Europeans Will Earn More (AD)

• A Fourth Stimulus Check? Momentum Grows For Recurring Payments (Fox32)

• Biden To Unveil $2 Trillion Infrastructure Proposal (Hill)

• Many Capitol Rioters Unlikely To Serve Jail Time (Pol.)

• Matt Gaetz Claims Former DOJ Lawyer Was Extorting Him (CTH)

Wall-E after Ever Given

Collateral Crucifixion. See video at the bottom of this post.

Lacy Hunt

"Many people who remember Prof. Friedman's words think we should have inflation, but they don't remember his algebra…" #DrLacyHunt and #DiMartinoBooth via RealVision@Quillintel https://t.co/kRKqczObBT pic.twitter.com/OxTl2J5pUy

— Danielle DiMartino Booth (@DiMartinoBooth) March 30, 2021

An army to protect Bezos.

• Amazon’s Twitter Army Was Handpicked For “Great Sense Of Humor” (IC)

Amazon’s small twitter army of “ambassadors” was quietly conceived in 2018 under the codename “Veritas,” which sought to train and dispatch select employees to the social media trenches to defend Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, according to an internal description of the program obtained exclusively by The Intercept. Amazon ambassadors drew attention this week as they responded to a wave of online criticism for the company’s treatment of workers amid a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Anticipating criticisms of worker conditions at their fulfillment centers in particular, Amazon designed Veritas to train fulfillment center workers chosen for their “great sense of humor” to confront critics — including policymakers — on Twitter in a “blunt” manner.

The document, produced as part of the pilot program in 2018 and marked “Amazon.com Confidential,” also includes examples of how its ambassadors can snarkily respond to criticisms of the company and its CEO. Several examples involve Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of the $1 trillion firm who has been targeted by it in recent days. It also provides examples of how to defend Bezos. “To address speculation and false assertions in social media and online forums about the quality of the FC [Fulfillment Center] associate experience, we are creating a new social team staffed with active, tenured FC employees, who will be empowered to respond in a polite—but blunt—way to every untruth,” the project description reads. “FC Ambassadors (‘FCA’) will respond to all posts and comments from customers, influencers (including policymakers), and media questioning the FC associate experience.”

Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said via email: “FC Ambassadors are employees who work in our fulfillment centers and choose to share their personal experience — the FC ambassador program helps show what it’s actually like inside our fulfillment centers, along with the public tours we provide.” In 2018, Amazon admitted that the ambassadors were employees paid to “honestly share the facts” about what working in its fulfillment centers is like. Many Twitter users had at first believed the ambassadors were automated “bot” accounts due to the nearly identical format of their account bios, all of which feature the Amazon smile logo and begin with the handle “@AmazonFC.” But that format was specifically mandated by Amazon, The Intercept’s document shows. “We could also add an emoji to the username to give personality, for example a small box emoji,” the document suggests.

And Amazon is not alone: this is what the Twitter “Great Sense Of Humor” army does.

• Twitter Censors Famed Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff (AIER)

We’ve been witness to Twitter censorship for more than a year, beginning with obviously objectionable extremists then gradually moving to silence people based on merely having an opinion that contradicts lockdown orthodoxy. There have been days when I wondered whether I would cross the invisible line and even whether AIER would itself be silenced. Stanford public health expert Scott Atlas has been censored, and Naomi Wolf, visiting senior fellow at AIER, was put in Twitter jail for a week for landing on the wrong side of the high priests of allowable content. Well, a new line has been crossed. Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff and co-creator of the Great Barrington Declaration, one of the most cited epidemiologists and infectious -disease experts in the world (latest count of citations: 25,290) has been censored by Twitter. His tweet on how not everyone needs a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was not taken down. He had a warning slapped on it and users have been prevented from liking or retweeting the post.

Keep in mind, too, that Dr. Kulldorff serves on the Covid-19 vaccine safety subgroup that the CDC, NIH, and FDA rely upon for technical expertise on this very subject..

So here we have some geeks at Twitter curating science, in areas totally outside the specialization of web nerds, in a way that skews public understanding of the scientific debate. Dr. Kulldorff’s censorship directly coincides with Anthony Fauci making a political push to retain social distancing and mask restrictions and forced separation for children until they are vaccinated. He was all over Sunday TV shows doing that. This attempt to silence accredited experts completely distorts the process of scientific inquiry, discovery, and public opinion. And to what end? Twitter has generally been biased in a lockdown direction. If you want to be cynical about it, you could observe that everyone who works there can get by on laptops and houseshoes for the duration.

Its stock price has more than doubled in the course of lockdowns and user engagement has risen dramatically. It would appear that with this latest act of censorship – we are not talking about political extremism or anything else that violates normal terms of use – we have entered into a new realm. Twitter is now curating the scientific debate in ways that exclude alternative points of view, particularly those that raise doubts about the need for universalized vaccines and vaccine passports. To be sure, Dr. Kulldorff is not an anti-vaxxer (why should I have to say that?) but instead has a nuanced position in light of his professional understanding of the demographics of risk of this virus.

Zeynep Tufekci with an unabashed promo piece on vaccines. She says 100 million Americans may have been infected, and therefore developed the same antibodies a vaccination might provide, but let’s inject them all regardless.

• The Fourth Surge Is Upon Us. This Time, It’s Different. (Atl.)

the United States has had one of the largest outbreaks in the world. This has caused us immense suffering and loss, but it also means that we are now less vulnerable to future waves. So far, 30 million people in the United States have had a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, although the real (unmeasured) number is perhaps as high as 100 million. As expected, those people retain some level of immunity for a substantial amount of time. It’s hard to know exactly how long, because the virus is so new, but for SARS (the related coronavirus that almost sparked a pandemic in 2003), people who were infected retained an antibody response, and thus protection, for an average of two years. Though amazingly, the vaccines appear to provide better immunity than natural infection, those previously infected also gain defenses.

Carefully done studies on large populations show a very low rate of reinfection for this coronavirus: less than 1 percent. Plus, many documented reinfections tend to be mild or asymptomatic, an unsurprising outcome given that in these cases the virus is no longer totally novel for the immune system, and thus not as catastrophic in its consequences. It’s pretty clear that large numbers of people in the U.S. already are, or will soon be, protected from COVID-19’s more severe outcomes, such as death and hospitalization, which the vaccines reduce so close to zero that clinical trials have reported hardly any such cases. And it gets better: Yesterday, the CDC released real-life data showing that, just two weeks after even a single dose, the two mRNA vaccines were 80 percent effective in preventing infection. The effectiveness rose to 90 percent after the second, booster dose.

People in the study were routinely tested regardless of whether they had symptoms, so we know that vaccines prevented not just symptomatic illness—the vaccine-efficacy rate reported in the trials—but any infection. People who are not infected by a virus cannot transmit it at all, and even people who have a breakthrough case despite vaccination have been shown to have lower viral loads compared with unvaccinated people, and so are likely much less contagious. All of this doesn’t mean that there will be zero deaths or illnesses among the vaccinated. The elderly, who tend to have weaker immune systems, are especially prone to having vaccines fail. In nursing homes, even the common cold can cause deadly outbreaks. But for the vaccinated, the risk from COVID-19 clearly has become comparable to “baseline risk”—it’s not zero, but just like the risks presented by the flu and other viruses, it’s not something for which most of us would put our lives on hold.

How do we square all this good news with what happened during a White House briefing yesterday, when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky interrupted the flow, saying, “I’m going to lose the script,” and talked of “the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.” She was visibly emotional and her voice cracked as she said was “scared,” and pleaded with Americans to “hold on a little longer.” I can’t read her mind, but if I were Walensky, I’d be scared because those who are not protected through vaccination or past infection are still at grave risk, a fact that may be overshadowed by all the good news. Even as our vaccines continue to work very well against it, the particular variant we’re facing in this surge is both more transmissible and more deadly for the unvaccinated.

Has been for a long time.

• It’s Time To Talk About Ivermectin (NC)

On December 29th of last year, Mexico’s Institute of Socal Security (IMSS) allowed ivermectin to be prescribed to outpatients with Covid. On the same day the Secretariat of Health of Mexico City and the State of Mexico decided to adopt a protocol in which anyone testing positive at any one of the city’s 250 rapid testing sites would be given ivermectin. As you can see in the graphs below, courtesy of Juan Chamie, a data scientist from EAFIT University in Colombia, based on data provided by Mexico City authorities, the number of hospitalizations due to Covid and excess deaths peaked shortly after the New Year and have been falling sharply ever since. They are now almost back to their prior base line.

Mexico City is the first major global city to adopt what amounts to a test-and-treat approach to covid-19 involving ivermectin. But it was the largely indigenous southern state of Chiapas that led the way last summer. In July 2020, as Mexico was buckling under its first wave of the pandemic, the state decided to distribute ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, having already deployed the medicine in its battle against mosquito-borne RNA viruses such as Zika and Chikungunya. Since October Chiapas has consistently occupied the lowest risk level on the federal government’s coronavirus stoplight map. Thanks to ivermectin’s apparent success in Chiapas, IMSS allowed the medicine to be prescribed nationwide. It also helped launch the pilot program in Mexico City, for which it received a barrage of criticism.

An official group of health experts argued that there’s no scientific evidence that the drug is effective, and called for the immediate repeal of its use. To their credit, both the Secretariat and IMSS have stuck to their guns. Of course, there’s no way of definitively proving that the rapid falloff in hospitalizations and deaths, first in Chiapas and then Mexico City, is due to the use of ivermectin. Correlation, as we well know, is not causation. It’s also true that Mexico City authorities have introduced tougher social distancing measures and travel restrictions since December. But similar dramatic drop offs have been witnessed in other regions and countries where ivermectin has been used widely, including across the length and breadth of Peru and Iran as well as parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic and India.

“You can positive-PCR-test a pawpaw fruit … but you might want to be careful who you tell if you do that.”

• The “Unvaccinated” Question (CJ Hopkins)

Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.) In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.) In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

In the USA, we are being banned by universities. Our children are being banned from public schools. In New York, the new “Excelsior Pass” will allow New Normals to attend cultural and sports events (and patronize bars and restaurants, eventually) secure in the knowledge that the Unvaccinated have been prevented from entering or segregated in an “Unvaccinated Only” section. The pass system, designed by IBM, which, if history is any guide, is pretty good at designing such systems (OK, technically, it was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, IBM’s Nazi-Germany subsidiary), was launched this past weekend to considerable fanfare. And this is only the very beginning. Israel’s “Green Pass” is the model for the future, which makes sense, in a sick, fascistic kind of way. When you’re already an apartheid state, what’s a little more apartheid?

OK, I know what the New Normals are thinking. They’re thinking I’m “misleading” people again. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t really segregation, and certainly nothing like “medical apartheid.” After all (as the New Normals will sternly remind me), no one is forcing us to get “vaccinated.” If we choose not to, or can’t for medical reasons, all we have to do is submit to a “test” — you know, the one where they ram that 9-inch swab up into your sinus cavities — within 24 hours before we want to go out to dinner, or attend the theater or a sports event, or visit a museum, or attend a university, or take our children to school or a playground, and our test results will serve as our “vaccine passports!” We just present them to the appropriate Covid Compliance Officer, and (assuming the results are negative, of course) we will be allowed to take part in New Normal society just as if we’d been “vaccinated.”

Either way, “vaccine” or “test,” the New Normal officials will be satisfied, because the tests and passes are really just stage props. The point is the display of mindless obedience. Even if you take the New Normals at their word, if you are under 65 and in relatively good health, getting “vaccinated” is more or less pointless, except as a public display of compliance and belief in the official Covid-19 narrative (the foundation stone of the New Normal ideology). Even the high priests of their “Science” confess that it doesn’t prevent you spreading the “plague.” And the PCR tests are virtually meaningless, as even the WHO finally admitted. (You can positive-PCR-test a pawpaw fruit … but you might want to be careful who you tell if you do that.)

Canada: under 55. Germany: under 60. How many people will now say: thanks, but no, thank you?

• In Germany, AstraZeneca Vaccine Only For People Over 60 After 9 Deaths (RT)

Germany has restricted the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine as a precautionary measure amid reports the jab is being linked to more cases of suspected adverse effects, some resulting in death. The country’s Standing Vaccination Commission recommended on Tuesday that AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria only be given to men and women over the age of 60, or in exceptional cases. The decision was made due to “available, albeit limited, evidence” concerning the drug’s safety. The commission announced its recommendation hours after the city of Berlin introduced an identical policy. Earlier, two state-owned clinics in the city halted AstraZeneca shots for women under 55 years of age. Munich followed suit with its own rule banning the shot for people under 60.

Health Minister Jens Spahn was scheduled to speak with regional counterparts about the AstraZeneca drug later on Tuesday, a ministry spokesperson announced. Germany had suspended emergency use of the AstraZeneca shot earlier this month, but then lifted the temporary ban after EU regulators deemed it to be safe. The latest restrictions placed on the drug come after Germany’s vaccine regulator, the Paul Ehrlich Institute, disclosed that as of March 29, the country has recorded 31 cases of cerebral sinus vein thrombosis (CSVT), nine of which resulted in death, after people were given the Vaxzevria injection. CSVT is a rare form of blood clot that forms in the brain.

Of the 31 cases of CSVT, all except two involved women between the ages of 20 and 63. Before the new guidelines were issued in Berlin, a district in North Rhine-Westphalia state suspended shots for women under 55 after two women suffered from blood clots. Nearly 2.7 million first doses of Vaxzevria have been administered in Germany. According to official figures, women under the age of 70 make up two-thirds of those vaccinated with the AstraZeneca drug. It’s believed that more women than men have received the shot because nurses were among the first group in Germany to take the jab.

“Two months earlier, the WHO chief praised China’s response to the pandemic..”

• ‘Concerns’ Over Lack Of Data In WHO Report on Covid-19 Origins (RT)

Fourteen countries including the US and UK have expressed “concerns” over a new report into the origins of Covid-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) after the agency’s own chief also highlighted data-access issues. “It is equally essential that we voice our shared concerns that the international expert study on the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data and samples,” a joint statement from the nations read. The signatories included the governments of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, South Korea, Slovenia, the UK and US. The statement also called for a further analysis of the outbreak of Covid-19 that is “transparent”,”free from interference” and “unimpeded.”

A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that China had “offered necessary facilitation for the team’s work”, and warned against “politicizing” efforts to identify the origins of Covid-19. The joint statement echoes comments made by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said that the UN health agency’s scientists had trouble “accessing raw data” while in China. “I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing,” he said during a news briefing on Tuesday, adding he did not believe the report was “extensive enough.” Two months earlier, the WHO chief praised China’s response to the pandemic, adding that President Xi Jinping had “encouraged and impressed” him with his knowledge of the coronavirus.

The 120-page WHO report was published on Tuesday after a team of international scientists visited the Chinese city of Wuhan between January 14 and February 10, 2021. The scientists visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the virus is believed to have spread from. The team did not find the source of Covid-19, but their report effectively ruled out its origin from a laboratory accident, saying it was “extremely unlikely,” while the virus’s introduction through frozen food chains was considered “possible.”

Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb on a virtually unknown Covid story.

• Tanzania’s Late President Magufuli: ‘Science Denier’ or Threat to Empire? (UH)

Less than 2 weeks ago, Tanzanian Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan delivered the news that her country’s president, John Pombe Magufuli, had died of heart failure. President Magufuli had been described as missing since the end of February, with several anti-government parties circulating stories that he had fallen ill with COVID-19. During his presidency, Magufuli had consistently challenged neocolonialism in Tanzania, whether it manifested through the exploitation of his country’s natural resources by predatory multinationals or the West’s influence over his country’s food supply. In the months leading up to his death, Magufuli had become better known and particularly demonized in the West for opposing the authority of international organizations like the WHO in determining his government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.

However, Magufuli had spurned many of the same interests and organizations angered by his response to COVID for years, having kicked out Bill Gates-funded trials of genetically-modified crops and more recently angering some of the most powerful mining companies in the West, companies with ties to the World Economic Forum and the Forum’s efforts to guide the course of the 4th industrial revolution. Indeed, more threatening than his recent COVID controversies was the threat Magufuli posed to foreign control over the world’s largest, ready-to-develop nickel deposit, a metal essential to electric car batteries and thus the current effort to usher in an electric, autonomous vehicle revolution. For instance, just a month before he disappeared, Magufuli had signed an agreement to begin developing that nickel deposit, a deposit that had been previously co-owned by Barrick Gold and Glencore, the commodity giant deeply tied to Israel’s Mossad, until Magufuli revoked their licenses for the project in 2018.

Running afoul of the most powerful corporate and banking cartels followed then by the mysterious onset of sudden regime change would normally garner considerable coverage from anti-imperialist independent media outlets, which recently covered similar events in Bolivia that led to the removal of Evo Morales from power. However, the very outlets that have extensively covered Western-backed regime change efforts for years have been entirely silent on the very convenient death of Magufuli. Presumably, their silence is related to Magufuli’s flouting of COVID-19 narrative orthodoxy, as these same outlets have largely promoted the official narrative of the pandemic.

[..] In contrast to Magufuli, who routinely stood up to predatory corporations and imperialist designs on his country, Samia Suhulhu and Tanzanian opposition politician Tundu Lissu are poised to offer up their country’s resources, and their population, on the altar of the Western elite-driven 4th industrial revolution.

Google translate. It’s not just the US. “..minimum hourly wage to 14 euros. Now that is 9.72 euros (40-hour working week) or 10.80 euros (for 36 hours)”

• New Minimum Wage Legislation: Millions Of Europeans Will Earn More (AD)

At least 24 million employees in 25 of the 27 EU member states will earn more in one punch in two years at the latest. That’s because all of Europe will have a decent minimum wage by then. The two largest groups in Europe, of Christian and Social Democrats, have reached an agreement on this, which they are sending to the rest of the European Parliament today. The Member States, led by the Portuguese socialist António Costa, are also in a hurry. Prime Minister Costa wants to align the member states before handing over his presidency to his Slovenian colleague, the conservative Janez Jansa, on 1 July. The two Parliament rapporteurs, Agnes Jongerius (PvdA) and her German colleague Dennis Radtke (EPP), assume a minimum wage that meets a double threshold across Europe: at least 60 percent of the median (half is lower, half higher) and 50 percent of the average wage.

For the Netherlands, according to Jongerius, this means an increase of the minimum hourly wage to 14 euros. Now that is 9.72 euros (40-hour working week) or 10.80 euros (for 36 hours). The intervention must end a period of thirty years in which the minimum wage has only deteriorated. “Costa has already shown after the banking crisis that the economy will benefit if you increase the minimum wage,” says Jongerius. “Greece went the other way under pressure from Europe and only got extra misery.” She wants a minimum wage “of which you can normally support your family with the occasional extra: a laptop for the children or a vacation”. But we are still a long way from that.

In at least nine Member States, minimum wages fall through the poverty threshold, in many more Member States entire groups are excluded. Jongerius: ,, Corona has made that even worse, especially in low-paid sectors such as retail and tourism. The youths who kept running for us in supermarkets were grossly underpaid. “”

“The measure could include as much as $3 trillion in new taxes and $4 trillion in new spending.”

• A Fourth Stimulus Check? Momentum Grows For Recurring Payments (Fox32)

A growing number of Democrats are calling on President Joe Biden to send recurring stimulus checks for low-income Americans as part of his sweeping infrastructure package, arguing the cash payments are necessary until the U.S. economy fully recovers from the pandemic. In a Tuesday letter addressed to the president, 21 senators – led by Ron Wyden of Oregon – asked the administration to automatically extend unemployment insurance benefits and send recurring direct checks that would be tied to certain economic conditions. Text of the letter first emerged at the beginning of March, but the lawmakers waited until they had received additional support to officially send it to the White House.

In the span of one month, the coalition secured the backing of another 11 Democrats, including Sen. Majority Whip Dick Durbin and moderates like Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Jack Reed, D-R.I. “This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads,” the lawmakers wrote. “Families should not be at the mercy of constantly-shifting legislative timelines and ad hoc solutions.” The senators did not mention many specifics, including the size and frequency of the payments, the income eligibility level for recipients or the economic conditions that would cause the federal government to cut off the money.

The proposal garnered the support of Democrats across the ideological spectrum, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Ed Markey, D-Mass., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis. The expanded financial assistance would be part of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, a wide-ranging plan that aims to make massive investments in infrastructure, revive domestic manufacturing and combat climate change, among other issues. Biden is planning to unveil details of the first part of the package on Wednesday in Pittsburgh, including how he intends to pay for it. The measure could include as much as $3 trillion in new taxes and $4 trillion in new spending.

The senators are pairing their request with a grassroots push from the left-leaning Progressive Change Institute and Economic Security Project, which is calling on other lawmakers to sign the proposal. “These 21 senators have joined the overwhelming majority of the American people in calling for more checks,” Greg Nasif, a spokesperson with Humanity Forward, said in a statement to FOX Business. “This is about more than giving families the support they need. This is about protecting our economy and securing an equitable future.”

Only $2 trillion?

• Biden To Unveil $2 Trillion Infrastructure Proposal (Hill)

President Biden will unveil a $2 trillion infrastructure package on Wednesday as he prepares to pitch his next big-ticket agenda item. Details of the forthcoming plans were shared with lawmakers during a conference call with White House staff on Tuesday. The plan will be funded by raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from the current level of 21 percent as well as creating a global tax on corporate earnings, a source familiar with the call confirmed to The Hill. Biden will travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to formally unveil the plan, which is expected to include funding for roads, bridges and broadband, as well addressing manufacturing, among other things. The plan is part of a larger two-part package.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told Fox News Tuesday that Biden will unveil the second part, which will deal with child care and health care, in April. “What the American people will hear from him this week is that part of his plan — the first step of his plan towards recovery — which will include an investment in infrastructure. We shouldn’t be 13th in the world; I don’t think anyone believes that [of] the wealthiest, most innovative country in the world,” Psaki said. Though infrastructure attracts broad bipartisan support, Republicans are likely to balk at raising corporate taxes to pay for a plan. Democrats have said they want the final product to be bipartisan, but have acknowledged that they are likely to have to go it alone through reconciliation, a budget process that allows certain bills to bypass the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is exploring if Democrats could use the Congressional Budget Act to pass at least three bills under reconciliation, instead of the two Democrats expect to be limited to. They’ve already used one of their opportunities to pass the $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan. Schumer’s staff recently made a case to the Senate parliamentarian that they could use Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act, which green lights the use of reconciliation, to tee up passing at least a third bill this year by a simple majority, an aide for the New York Democrat confirmed on Monday. “Schumer wants to maximize his options to allow Senate Democrats multiple pathways to advance President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda if Senate Republicans try to obstruct or water down a bipartisan agreement,” the majority leader’s aide said.

“..as long as the people who are trying to express their view do not engage in violence, misdemeanors may be more appropriate than felonies.”

• Many Capitol Rioters Unlikely To Serve Jail Time (Pol.)

Americans outraged by the storming of Capitol Hill are in for a jarring reality check: Many of those who invaded the halls of Congress on Jan. 6 are likely to get little or no jail time. While public and media attention in recent weeks has been focused on high-profile conspiracy cases against right-wing, paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, the most urgent decisions for prosecutors involve resolving scores of lower-level cases that have clogged D.C.’s federal district court. A POLITICO analysis of the Capitol riot-related cases shows that almost a quarter of the more than 230 defendants formally and publicly charged so far face only misdemeanors. Dozens of those arrested are awaiting formal charges, even as new cases are being unsealed nearly every day.

In recent days, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys have all indicated that they expect few of these “MAGA tourists” to face harsh sentences. There are two main reasons: Although prosecutors have loaded up their charging documents with language about the existential threat of the insurrection to the republic, the actions of many of the individual rioters often boiled down to trespassing. And judges have wrestled with how aggressively to lump those cases in with those of the more sinister suspects. “My bet is a lot of these cases will get resolved and probably without prison time or jail time,” said Erica Hashimoto, a former federal public defender who is now a law professor at Georgetown.

“One of the core values of this country is that we can protest if we disagree with our government. Of course, some protests involve criminal acts, but as long as the people who are trying to express their view do not engage in violence, misdemeanors may be more appropriate than felonies.” The prospect of dozens of Jan. 6 rioters cutting deals for minor sentences could be hard to explain for the Biden administration, which has characterized the Capitol Hill mob as a uniquely dangerous threat. Before assuming office, Biden said the rioters’ attempt to overturn the election results by force “borders on sedition”; Attorney General Merrick Garland has called the prosecutions his top early priority, describing the storming of Congress as “a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

What an insane story.

• Matt Gaetz Claims Former DOJ Lawyer Was Extorting Him (CTH)

Two people inside the DOJ leaked a story about Matt Gaetz (R-FL) being under DOJ/FBI investigation to the New York Times. The essential elements of the article are that Gaetz had a relationship with a 17-year-old woman, and paid for her to travel; ergo the DOJ/FBI is investigating “sex trafficking.” Presumably AG Bill Barr opened the investigation. However, Matt Gaetz vehemently denies everything about the claims, and instead says the FBI and DOJ were recently conducting a sting operation -with his cooperation- against a former DOJ lawyer named David McGee who was extorting Gaetz for $25 million. According to Gaetz his father was contacted by McGee in March of this year and told he would release the details of a relationship with the woman if Gaetz did not pay $25 million.

Gaetz contacted the FBI, and his father wore a wire in his conversation with McGee where the FBI were recording the extortion attempt. Now that someone has leaked the erroneous background of the investigation to the New York Times, Gaetz is demanding the DOJ release the tapes of the extortion attempt. Tonight Matt Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson to discuss the details of the situation. Apparently there was an FBI sting operation underway which included a payment tomorrow. The New York Times article tipped-off McGee to the sting. Congressman Gaetz denies any wrongdoing, legal or otherwise, and denies paying for a minor to cross state lines to meet him. When Carlson asked Gaetz who was the former DOJ official attempting extortion, Gaetz named David McGee, a former DOJ lawyer currently working for Beggs and Lane lawfirm.

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Collateral Crucifixion

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