Nov 032024
 


Vincent van Gogh Field with Flowers near Arles 1888

 

“The American System” Made America Great (Rickards)
Elon Musk Asks Ron Paul To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency (ZH)
House Speaker ‘Really Bullish’ Washington Will Be All-GOP Town In January (JTN)
House Speaker Plan: Moving Bureaucrats From DC To Reshape Government (JTN)
Candidates’ Final Tours: A Flustered Harris, And A Joyful Trump (Whedon)
People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is (Matt Taibbi)
Trump, Vance Take Aim At Renewable Energy, Many Communities Already Did (JTN)
Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale: “Absolutely No Political Agenda” (ZH)
Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future (ZH)
Kiev Officials ‘Ready’ For Potential Trump Presidency – WaPo (RT)
West’s Rules-Based Order To Collapse Soon – Medvedev
West Sees Red Over Failed Second Color Revolution In Georgia (SCF)
Novichok: UK Government Sedated The Skripals To Stop Them Talking (Helmer)
Brutally Murdered 13 Years Ago, Gaddafi Is Only Growing More Beloved (Fetouri)

 

 

 

 

Maher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852565201515630859

In the bag

Tucker

Fulton County

RFK

Dec. 5?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852539432395845815

Tulsi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852686204921426042

Baris

Jesse

 

 

Tucker Grand Finale With President Donald Trump in Glendale, AZ (start at 1.12?!, Trump at 1.38)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Donald Trump recently did an interview with John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s top editor and a former editor of The Economist. Micklethwait made the tired point that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices and be bad for Americans.”

“The American System” Made America Great (Rickards)

Most of us have been taught that free trade is good and that tariffs are bad. And on the surface it certainly seems true. The theory of free trade based on comparative advantage was advocated by British economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Ricardo’s theory said that trading nations are endowed with attributes that give them a relative advantage in producing certain goods versus others. These attributes could consist of natural resources, climate, population, river systems, education, ports, financial capacity or any other factor of production. Nations should produce those goods as to which they have a natural advantage and trade with other nations for goods where the advantage was not so great. Countries should specialize in what they do best, and let others also specialize in what they do best. Then countries could simply trade the goods they make for the goods made by others.

All sides would be better off because prices would be lower as a result of specialization in those goods where you have a natural advantage. It’s a nice theory often summed up in the idea that Tom Brady shouldn’t mow his own lawn because it makes more sense to pay a landscaper while he practices football. For example, if the U.K. had an advantage in textile production and Portugal had an advantage in wine production, then the U.K. and Portugal should trade wool for wine. But if the theory of comparative advantage were true, Japan would still be exporting tuna fish instead of cars, computers, TVs, steel and much more. The same can be said of the globalists’ view that capital should flow freely across borders. That might be advantageous in theory but market manipulation by central banks and rogue actors like Goldman Sachs and big hedge funds make it a treacherous proposition.

The problem with this theory of comparative advantage is that the factors of production are not permanent and they are not immobile. If labor moves from the countryside to the city in China, then suddenly China has a comparative advantage in cheap labor. If finance capital moves from New York banks to direct foreign investment in Chinese factories, then China has the comparative advantage in capital also. Trump understands this, Micklethwait doesn’t. Trump didn’t just make polite conversation in the interview. He called out Micklethwait by saying, “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Ouch! Micklethwait certainly isn’t alone. Listening to hysterical commentary from the mainstream media about Trump’s tariffs, one would think his policies were in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Nothing could be further from the truth. By advocating tariffs, Trump actually wants to return to what made America great in the first place. In fact, tariffs are as American as apple pie. From 1790–1962, the United States pursued high tariff policies under a program known as the American System. It was created by George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who drafted a report to Congress called the Report on Manufactures presented in 1791. Hamilton proposed that in order to have a strong country, America needed a strong manufacturing base with jobs that taught skills and offered income security. To achieve this, Hamilton proposed subsidies to U.S. businesses so they could compete successfully against more established U.K. and European businesses. These subsidies might include grants of government land or rights of way, purchase orders from the government itself or outright payments. This was a mercantilist system that encouraged a trade surplus and the accumulation of gold reserves.

Hamilton’s plan was later proposed on a broader scale by Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay. This new plan began with the Tariff of 1816. Later on, Abraham Lincoln adopted the American System as his platform in the election of 1860, and it became a bedrock principle of the new Republican Party. It was affirmed by William McKinley at the end of the 19th century and by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a heyday of the American System. This period was characterized by enormous economic growth and population expansion by the U.S. The American System was also accompanied mostly by low inflation or even deflation (which increases the purchasing power of everyday citizens) despite occasional financial panics and some inflation during the Civil War. The key takeaway is that America grew rich and powerful from 1787–1962, a period of 175 years, using tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to trade to nurture domestic industry and protect high-paying manufacturing jobs.

Read more …

Ron Paul was made for this.

Elon Musk Asks Ron Paul To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency (ZH)

With just two days left before the presidential election, Libertarians are waking up Saturday to a bunch of buzz on X about a potential “Ron Paul Revolution” in the White House—only possible if Donald Trump wins next week. On Friday evening, AFpost wrote on X, “Ron Paul says he wants to join Elon Musk to cut government waste in second Trump administration.” Musk chimed in on X: “It would be great to have Ron Paul as part of the Department of Government Efficiency!” Ron Paul responded: “I’d be happy to talk with you about it, Elon.” X users instantly went bananas on the prospect that Musk would give Ron Paul a role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, only if Trump wins. For months, Musk and Trump have been discussing DOGE, which the billionaire would serve as “Secretary of Cost-Cutting” – a government agency that doesn’t exist yet…

Musk would basically take his skills as a successful manager – in which he slashed 80% of the Twitter workforce a few years ago to make the ‘free speech’ social media platform operate more efficiently. In August, Musk said the goal of DOGE was to cut wasteful spending by the federal government and roll back massive regulations that stifle the economy. Musk recently said DOGE could identify “at least $2 trillion in cuts” as part of a formal review of federal agencies. This would also mean tens of thousands of job cuts—if not more—across the federal government. Just imagine if Trump wins, Musk and Ron Paul would wind down unneeded federal agencies like a scene from Argentina’s Javier Milei.

You hear that, Libertarian… Deal of a lifetime. And Libertarians, even Trump’s VP JD Vance, is coming around to Ron Paul’s argument on the Federal Reserve. Ron Paul had fun on X in the overnight hours. Delayed over the years … but now entirely possible. For decades, Ron Paul has proposed a smaller government by eliminating several wasteful federal agencies, ending foreign wars, eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, eliminating the estate tax, and—everyone’s favorite—abolishing the Federal Reserve. This has become true over the years. The only problem is when federal government spending accounts for 22.7% of the US GDP (in fiscal year 2023), reducing this spending could spark a recession. However, if Trump wins, DOGE could be messaged to the American people as a way to curb sky-high inflation sparked by disastrous ‘Bidenomics.’

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“..Hispanics are no longer a Democrat bloc, that they have become free agent voters..”

House Speaker ‘Really Bullish’ Washington Will Be All-GOP Town In January (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Just the News on Thursday he is increasingly confident that Republicans will sweep control of Congress and the White House in next Tuesday’s election, saying Hispanics, Blacks, Jews, union workers and other Democrat-leaning constituencies are switching parties over frustration the country is moving in the wrong direction. “I feel really bullish,” Johnson said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast when asked about the GOP’s chances for a clean sweep of Washington D.C. “….I believe we’re going to win unified government with Republicans back in the White House and controlling the Senate, and we grow the House majority.” Johnson said the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris presented a rare moment in U.S. history where voters could choose between two White House holders – a former president and a current vice president – based on their records and not just their promises.

“I genuinely believe we’re going to have an historic demographic shift in this election,” he said. “I think when all the analysis is done on the other side of this, they will see that we had a record number of Hispanic and Latino voters, for example, coming into the Republican Party, a record number of Black and African-American voters, Jewish voters, union workers. I mean, people who have not traditionally been in our camp are coming now. “And the reason is because they’re desperate for change, and they know the unique thing about this presidential contest is that both of these persons have had an administration. This isn’t theoretical…. They know what life is like under Harris and Biden, and they know what it was like under Trump, and I think that has a big effect across the board and all the way down the ballot,” he said.

Johnson’s comments follow several recent polls noting demographic shifts toward Trump by several Democratic constituencies even as Harris holds a commanding leading with female voters. The Speaker also reacted to comments the new CEO of the Spanish-language TV network Univision, Daniel Alegre, made on the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday that Hispanics are no longer a Democrat bloc, that they have become free agent voters driven by issues and are shifting this election toward Trump and the GOP.

“Hispanic and Latino voters are just like everybody else, and they they’re so fed up and fired up about the cost of living and rising crime rates in all their communities.,” Johnson said, adding that border security has become another compelling concern for Latino voters. “And then also, on top of that, remember that Hispanic and Latino voters are very family oriented,” he added. “Many of them have deep religious traditions and beliefs, and they see the Democratic Party abandoning all of these sort of foundational principles. And they’ve had enough, and I think they have the same frustration everybody else does. I think that’s why they’re coming into our camp.”

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” I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment..”

House Speaker Plan: Moving Bureaucrats From DC To Reshape Government (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans have an ambitious plan to reshape and shrink federal government if they win the election. That vision includes a plan to deport tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America. In a wide-ranging interview this week with Just the News, Johnson said he and other GOP leaders wants to move federal agency offices, personnel and assets from the nation’s capital to bring them closer to the people they serve and farther from the monied special interests that often hijack policy and spending. “There’s a lot of talk about uprooting, you know, these entrenched bureaucracies and putting them out elsewhere around the country,” Johnson told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

He explained such a re-invention of the monstrous federal bureaucracy with more than 2 million federal workers and contractors would integrate with former President Donald Trump’s plan to name billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency office and also tie to fiscal conservatives’ vision to eliminate federal bureaucracies and send monies to the states in the form of block grants. The Louisiana Republican said the deportation of Washington bureaucrats would also create a natural shrinkage in the size and cost of government, “That accomplishes a lot of important goals but the first would be that you don’t have all these career civil service law protected bureaucrats,” he said. “Some of them have been camped out of these agencies for decades. They’re nameless, faceless. We don’t know who to hold accountable,” he said.

Johnson continued, saying “The idea is, if you move the agency to, you know, northern Kansas or southwest New Mexico, or wherever it is around the country, then some of the swamp dwellers they will not desire to follow the job to the new, less desirable location,” he added. “They love the swamp. You know they want to stay. They’ll turn them into lobbyist or something to stay in D.C.” The mass transfer and departure of bureaucrats then leads to a “business reorganization proposition” for federal government, he said. “You’ve got agencies that you can scale down because you have empty cubicles and … almost all the agencies are bloated and inefficient,” he said. “So you can scale that down. And then in the cubicles that you do need to fill, we’ve had America First Policy Institute and some of our other think tanks that have been working to develop a notebook full of highly qualified, previously vetted, limited government conservatives who have expertise in these areas.”

Johnson’s comments were the most sweeping he’s made about a congressional vision for shrinking the budget and reshaping the budget. He said the process would take a “blowtorch” to the regulatory state and align government agencies in the aftermath of a historic Supreme Court ruling this summer that reversed a decades old “Chevron doctrine.” Under the new ruling, federal bureaucrats can’t make up or interpret their own regulations and simply must enforce those authorized by Congress. “We have a once in a lifetime, yeah, once in a lifetime opportunity to really claw back article one authority to the legislative branch under the Constitution and have an administration that is in tune with that whole agenda. So look, I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment,” Johnson said.

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“We’ve done something that’s unprecedented, and we’ve had fun, but now we have to get, hopefully, to work.”

Candidates’ Final Tours: A Flustered Harris, And A Joyful Trump (Whedon)

With the election just days away, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in the final stretch of their campaign tours, but the tones of each couldn’t contrast more, with Trump on offense and on message and Harris playing defense against the political far-left at her own rallies. Though Harris initially attempted to portray her campaign as one of “joy”, Trump has taken on an almost jovial tone as polling and betting odds increasingly paint him as the favorite. His recent Madison Square Garden rally, moreover, was an offensive play in the heart of Democratic territory and saw tens of thousands of people gather in the Big Apple for what he later deemed a “love fest.” Polling data shows a tight contest, with Trump holding a 0.3% lead in the RealClearPolitics average. That outlet currently projects Trump to win 287 electoral votes to Harris’s 251. Polymarket betting odds also favor Trump to win with a 61.1% chance to Harris’s 39.0%.

Though the race remains in tossup territory, the Trump campaign is quite optimistic. Campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio, this week, released a memo highlighting the difference in polling between this election and 2020. The key point was that, in every swing state, Trump is polling better than in 2020 by a significant margin. “I point this out NOT to stoke overconfidence or complacency, but to illustrate just how close this election is and that victory is within our reach,” he wrote. “It is crucial we do not get distracted by the media noise and remain focused on our closing message, persuading the few remaining undecided voters and turning out our base.” The Trump campaign appears to have taken his words to heart. Kicking off the week with his blowout rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump proceeded to hold event after event all across all the key battlegrounds, often doing two rallies per day.

Election weekend will see him go beyond that and hold three rallies each on Saturday and Sunday, with four more scheduled for Monday. While two are set for North Carolina, Trump plans to appear in Salem, Va., as the Old Dominion appears competitive. His Saturday events come off of Friday rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin. His Sunday will feature rallies in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia while his Monday will see him hold four more, two in Pennsylvania and one each in North Carolina and Michigan. Trump opened his Michigan rally, by applauding the crowd sizes and positive energy of his events, including stunts such as driving a garbage truck after President Biden called his supporters “garbage.” “They’ll never be anything like what we’ve done,” he said of Democratic rallies. “We’ve done something that’s unprecedented, and we’ve had fun, but now we have to get, hopefully, to work.”

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“It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.”

People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is (Matt Taibbi)

The cycle was the usual nonsense. At a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan a comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to croak, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The Internet exploded. Reporters were dispatched around the country to gauge how much more pissed off everyone was now. ABC’s take interviewing Harris supporters in Pennsylvania was, “Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity.” They quoted humans-in-the-street, who all felt strongly. “I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, while Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, opined, “I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies.” ABC summed up the cultural divide: “Interviews with voters in battleground states reveal that it’s only growing deeper and more insurmountable.”

Surely people know it, but this is all a trick. First, campaign writers only talk to people at campaign events, so the pool of quotes is automatically pared to holders of Very Strong Political Opinions. Second, the odd “Who cares?” answer is instinctively culled by campaign writers as commercially/politically unhelpful. Non-voters or even just people who care more about other things than Harris/Trump — UFOs, knitting, the girl in biology class — ruin the suspension of disbelief. You end up reading copy that hugely over-represents that strange subset of people who define themselves by their votes. When I was first sent to cover campaigns in 2004, a year in which 40% of eligible voters didn’t bother, I was troubled by the absence of non-voters in coverage.

A Rolling Stone editor with whom I rarely worked rolled eyes and said, “We don’t cover them because they’re not part of the fucking story,” which I instantly knew wasn’t true, but I was new and to my shame I didn’t say anything. The numbers of non-voters exposed how inconsequential presidential politics was for most people. It measured the number of people left behind or out, and leaving the non-enthused out of the shot was journalism’s way of covering the holes in the charade. Two years later I was embedded with a group of Oklahoma reservists sent to work as MPs in Iraq. Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson was the team commander. He wore a tattoo on his foot with an arrow pointing to his big toe that read, TAG GOES HERE. His nickname was “Stretch-Nuts” because it was said he could balance a Heineken bottle on his ball-skin. On my first day he asked what I do. I cover presidential elections, I said. He made a jerk-off gesture. That was the last mention of politics on the trip.

In the roughly twenty years since the act of not voting, or even just not really really caring about presidential politics, has been villainized. Now the emotionally healthy person, the one who has a life and isn’t consumed with fears about the Next Hitler, is assumed to harbor secret sympathies, as bad as the worst MAGAT. This is different from the old scam. Now the person who shrugs and says “Who cares?” is called a liar. Everyone must care the way they do, and if you don’t care in that right way — every waking minute, with chewed nails and a carefully weeded social circle to match the correct vote and attitude set — you’re garbage. Many of us have seen in recent years what this hounding has done even to friends or relatives, turning them to Flatland characters, two-dimensional nerve cases scanning everyone for signs of unsuitability. Whatever happens next week, I don’t ever want to be that. It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.

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“In 2014, one wind project was canceled. Since then, the total number has grown to 464 wind projects shot down, as well as 281 solar projects.”

Trump, Vance Take Aim At Renewable Energy, Many Communities Already Did (JTN)

While it’s been difficult for voters to determine exactly where Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris truly stands on energy, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, each discussed their views at length on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Vance, who appeared on the podcast Thursday, spent several minutes discussing energy with host Joe Rogan. Vance said he and his wife took a road trip through Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas and for miles all they could see were wind farms. “This is beautiful American countryside that used to be green rolling hills, and now you have these disgusting, dystopian wind turbines. I’m sorry. They are ugly. I will die on this hill. They’re ugly. I don’t want them in American society,” Vance said. The wind energy industry is running up against more and more opposition. Much of it comes from grassroots efforts at the local level.

Energy watchdog Robert Bryce maintains a database of renewable energy projects that have been scrapped, most often because of community opposition. In 2014, one wind project was canceled. Since then, the total number has grown to 464 wind projects shot down, as well as 281 solar projects. The wind industry doesn’t appear to believe these community concerns are valid. The Associated Press reported on comments wind energy lobbyists made at a conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey Tuesday, claiming that concerns about wind projects are driven by “misinformation.” The industry is vowing to fight against it. Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, told the Associated Press that she has trouble predicting “what crazy thing they’re [wind energy opponents] going to come next.” Bryce told Just the News that, while lobbyists the Associated Press quoted are dismissive of communities’ concerns, developers are going to find it harder and harder to get a welcoming response.

“The public acceptance of wind energy is exhausted. People don’t want to live near these massive turbines, and they are expressing that in many [places] across the country, from Maine to Hawaii,” Bryce said. Among the concerns that wind lobbyists described as “misinformation” was the claims that offshore wind is killing whales. During his appearance on the Rogan podcast, Trump commented on these concerns. “I wanna be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales fricking crazy. And something happens with them, but for whatever reason, they’re getting washed up onshore and you know, they’re ignored by these environmentalists. But they don’t talk about it.” Trump said. The Associated Press, which has received millions of dollars from political advocacy groups that promote the wind and solar industry, reported that these claims are “unsubstantiated” based on the fact that federal agencies tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris goal of building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind have denied any connections between offshore wind and whale deaths.

While it’s true that wind turbines aren’t directly killing whales, whale advocates argue that the noise of the construction causes harm that results in the animals swimming into vessel traffic. Robert Rand, founder of the acoustics consultancy company Rand Acoustics, has surveyed noise levels from pile driving and sonar survey vessels. Both studies found that the incidental harassment authorizations — permits that offshore wind developers are required to obtain to conduct activities that may adversely affect marine animals — don’t impose sufficient mitigation requirements to protect marine animals. Rutgers professor Apostolos Gerasoulis performed a statistical analysis and found a strong correlation between where whales are dying and offshore wind development.

Besides growing opposition to offshore wind, especially after a blade broke off a wind turbine near Nantucket and scattered debris across multiple beaches, the offshore wind industry is struggling financially. An offshore lease sale in the Gulf of Maine netted only 4 bidders on 439,096 acres that were offered, and the bids came in at $50 per acre. A 2022 auction for a lease area off the coast of New York and New Jersey sold 6 leases on 488,000 acres for $8,955 per acre. The sale may be the last for at least a year, as a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act prohibits offshore wind lease sales without offering up oil and gas lease sales. The Department of Interior’s five-year offshore oil and gas lease shale program offers the fewest leases in the program’s history.

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“..leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one.”

Be that as it may, there have been some major shifts at Polymarket. Overnight, Trump has fallen from 67% to 55%. Wisconsin and Michigan are now Harris. The House has gone Democrat.

Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale: “Absolutely No Political Agenda” (ZH)

While still guarding his anonymity, the mysterious man who’s bet more than $30 million on a Trump election victory via the Polymarket prediction marketplace has come forward to assert that his wagers aren’t intended to sway the election, but simply to profit from an outcome he’s highly confident in. “My intent is just making money,” said the man who describes himself as a Frenchman and former US resident who was a trader for American banks. In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal via Zoom, he used the pseudonym “Théo,” saying he wanted to remain anonymous out of a desire to conceal the extent of his assets from his children and friends. The Journal said he was “sport[ing] a short, neatly trimmed beard” and spoke English with a small accent. Here’s how the Journal described the precipitation of the interview, and the paper’s process to ensure it wasn’t talking to an imposter:

“Théo emailed the Journal after the publication of an Oct. 18 article about his wagers. To prove that he was behind the Polymarket wagers, the Journal asked him to place a bet on whether Taylor Swift would announce that she is pregnant in 2024—one of the many small, nonpolitical wagers available on the platform. Minutes later, Polymarket’s website showed that one of the four accounts, Theo4, had placed a small bet on Swift’s pregnancy. ” In that original Oct. 18 article, the Journal gave some credit to the idea that the concentrated bets may represent some form of intentional narrative-control scheme meant to benefit Trump. Théo emailed the Journal to refute that theory, writing, “I have absolutely no political agenda.” In his subsequent interview, Théo told the Journal he’s a veteran trader with a history of risking tens of millions of dollars when he discovers a high-confidence trade — and said that’s what he sees in the chance to wager on a Trump victory.

When news broke of the whale’s huge wagers on Trump, Polymarket engaged outside experts to scrutinize transactions in presidential election betting, an unnamed source told the Journal at the time. Last week, Polymarket said it had contacted the whale and confirmed it was a French citizen with an extensive financial services and trading background. “Based on the investigation, we understand that this individual is taking a directional position based on personal views of the election,” the firm said. Théo said his conviction on a Trump victory rests on pollsters’ failure to capture the full extent of Trump’s support in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and his belief that the “shy Trump voter effect” still endures in 2024. “I know a lot of Americans who would vote for Trump without telling you that,” he said, while also scoffing at the possibility that pollsters have improved their methodologies this time around. Having been previously accused of trying to shape the election, Théo dished out an accusation of his own, saying leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one.

Théo thinks Trump is poised to rout Harris, which is why he has more than $30 million on Trump reaching 270 electoral votes, with the potential to receive $80 million if he’s right. He says his $30 million on Trump represents most of his liquid assets. Théo also has bets on a Trump popular-vote victory, along with bets on various swing-state wins. He also gave some insights into how he’s been trading: He started quietly in August by betting several million dollars on Trump, using an account with the username Fredi9999. At the time, Trump and Harris had roughly even chances on Polymarket. Théo spread out his wagers over multiple days and weeks to avoid causing a price spike. Still, as his bets grew, Théo noticed other traders were backing away from quoting prices when Fredi9999 was buying. That made it harder for Théo to get attractive prices. He created the other three accounts in September and October to obscure his purchasing, Théo said.

Single-handedly accounting for 25% of the contracts on a Trump electoral college win and 40% of the bids on a popular vote victory, Théo would have a hard time pulling money off the table without pushing the value of his contracts down. Speaking of which, the electoral college version of a Trump win peaked on Wednesday at 76 cents (with a dollar payoff if Trump wins). However they’ve taken a big dive since — plunging to 57.5 cents as this is written in the wee hours of Saturday morning. [..] If you’re itching to buy the dip, note that Americans are officially barred from Polymarket. You can thank your all-powerful, all-knowing, Constitution-violating federal government for protecting you from yourself: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the platform in 2022 for allegedly providing illegal trading services, prompting Polymarket to bar Americans going forward.

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“JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI?”

Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future (ZH)

The secret to understanding the average progressive mind is to first realize that everything they do revolves around a deeply ingrained fantasy world in which they are rebels; righteous underdogs fighting against “the system” or “the patriarchy.” Leftists cannot function within their collectivist ideology without first creating a fascist bogeyman to revolt against. If they were to ever realize that they are, in fact, the establishment and the authoritarians, their entire world view would collapse. This is why you will continue to see content like the election propaganda video below, no matter how ridiculous the premise might be. Leftist activists create these narratives, not because they are necessarily convincing to most people, but because they need to convince themselves that they are still the good guys.

JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI? Global warming destroying the planet and creating a Mad Max future in which the homeless are forced into concentration camps? The only thing missing is the forced birthing ceremonies from The Handmaid’s Tale. The video credits cite a handful of progressive NGOs as references for donations (including Vote.org) but little on who specifically made it. The relevant issue is the insight this gives into the insanity of left activists. They cling to so many assumptions they have been proven wrong about time after time (global warming), and they also imagine a world in which conservatives are the elites searching for immortality. They seem to be projecting the habits and hobbies of the very globalists that fund leftist groups today.

One could argue that perhaps this is gaslighting – They’re accusing conservatives of scheming to rule the world when they are the people that actually want control. That could be, but the conspiracy theories surrounding “Project 2025” suggest a Q-Anon level of delusion going on that feeds directly into bizarre narratives like those in the video. Leftists have to believe they’re fighting the good fight, even though they’re actually useful idiots for the establishment. This desperate need to take on the role of “freedom fighter” doesn’t mesh very well with reality. Keep in mind, for nearly two decades progressives have enjoyed expanding political and social power, with nearly every western government, every major NGO, every corporation, every legacy media outlet and every Big Tech platform dominated by woke ideology. From ESG to DEI to LGBTQ+ and beyond, Americans and much of the west have been endlessly bombarded from every angle by leftist propaganda.

Their war on conservative principles and individual freedom nearly came to a crescendo during the covid pandemic when they claimed the power to take away people’s access to the economy if they refused to accept an experimental vaccine and follow the mandates to the letter. Surveys showed a disturbing number of Democrats supported the outright destruction of constitutional freedoms in the name of forcing people to adhere to medical mandates based entirely on lies. Leftists also supported the widespread censorship of conservative voices on everything from the covid vaccine, to the lockdowns, to climate change, to Hunter Biden’s laptop. This censorship was spearheaded by the Biden Administration acting in violation of the constitution as they worked closely with Big Tech companies to shut down dissent. They aren’t fighting “the man”, they are the man. Ridiculous AI generated political videos like the one above are not going to change that.

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“There is optimism in Zelensky’s office that he could forge a personal bond with Trump..”

Kiev Officials ‘Ready’ For Potential Trump Presidency – WaPo (RT)

Officials in Kiev reject the notion that an election victory for Donald Trump would spell disaster for Ukraine, despite his criticisms of US aid to Kiev and pledges to quickly end the conflict with Moscow, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Two unnamed members of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s team told the paper that the Republican presidential candidate’s “negative” messaging on Ukraine was “just campaign rhetoric” that will not necessarily correlate with his actions if he wins the election on November 5. There is a belief in the Kiev government that Trump would not want to look weak on the global stage by turning his back on Ukraine and, as a result, might make more decisive moves to support Kiev, WaPo said.

“With Russia advancing on the battlefield for the past year,” the Ukrainian officials believe that the status quo, which is likely to be maintained if Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris prevails in the race for the White House, is “not working,” the report read. Because of this, they suggested that “a drastic change” in US policy towards Ukraine could actually “be good” for Kiev. There is optimism in Zelensky’s office that he could forge a personal bond with Trump and eventually turn him into a supporter of Kiev, WaPo said. However, some Ukrainian officials, who talked to the paper, acknowledged that there is a “higher potential for a downside” if Trump wins a second term, and expressed concern that he would pressure Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for peace.

Last month, Trump said on the PBD Podcast that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was “a loser” and that Zelensky “should never have let that war start.” He described the Ukrainian leader as “one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen,” referring to his ability to persuade the Biden administration to provide him with more military aid every time he comes to Washington. The Republican presidential candidate also reiterated his claim that he “will settle the Russia-Ukraine [conflict], while I am president-elect,” but did not reveal how he might achieve this. Back in June, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on media reports of that Trump’s team was developing a roadmap for settling the Ukraine conflict, and stressed that “the value of any plan lies in the details and whether it takes into account the situation on the battlefield.” Peskov reiterated that Moscow remains ready for negotiations, but only if Ukraine recognises the realities on the ground.

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“.. the rules-based order is actually what that the West believes “is right”, adding that “once you are out of this order, you’re a perpetrator.”

West’s Rules-Based Order To Collapse Soon – Medvedev

The so-called rules-based order imposed by the US and its allies on the global scene is an unstable structure, which is about to fall apart, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said in an exclusive interview with RT. Creating crises such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in various places is how the US is trying to rule the world, Medvedev, who now serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, told the broadcaster on Saturday. “So, the more crises they create, the better, they think, the situation is for America… It makes money from weapons, supplies, and by allocating money to its defense industry,” he said. “The Americans are getting what they want at the price of more blood and casualties. This is why the Americans are engaging in feeding the war. But that system is coming to an end,” the former president warned.

The authorities in Washington “feel the world is falling out from under their feet and they are resisting it in every way possible,” he said.This is why the Americans see BRICS and other unions currently being created around the globe, in which the US has no say, as “hostile,” Medvedev explained. Washington and its allies accuse the members of those groups of “violating the rules-based order,” but, at same time, cannot explain what this order is,” he said. “I have carefully picked through the legal text and studied it: it is incomprehensible. It is not clear what the order is and who approved it. It is really just an idea of the US and its allies, while mostly in NATO, of how best to do business in the world,” the former president stressed. According to Medvedev, the rules-based order is actually what that the West believes “is right”, adding that “once you are out of this order, you’re a perpetrator.”

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“Western media reported that “Western pollsters” claimed that there were voting irregularities. What were Western pollsters doing in Georgia in the first place?”

West Sees Red Over Failed Second Color Revolution In Georgia (SCF)

The United States and European Union are threatening consequences for Georgia after its citizens voted “the wrong way” – for peaceful relations with Russia and traditional moral values. Farcically, this is while the U.S. heads into presidential elections that are mired in chaos and recriminations over vote rigging and buying of votes by oligarchs and big businesses. Welcome to Western-style democracy where if you vote the way the powers-that-be want, it’s a fair election. If you vote the wrong way, it’s a rigged, flawed result that should be ignored or, worse, overturned. Such was the heated reaction from Western states to the electoral victory of the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party last weekend in the South Caucasus nation. The party campaigned on a strong, clear platform for pursuing peaceful neighborly relations with Russia.

GD also declared support for traditional social and moral values, rejecting the Western pseudo-liberal agenda of promoting gender-bender LGBTQ+ identities, which was espoused by the Western-backed Georgian opposition parties. At the end of the day, Georgian Dream won a stunning victory, taking nearly 54 percent of the vote, translating into obtaining 90 out of a total of 150 parliamentary seats. Four opposition parties, which touted closer integration ties with NATO and the EU and acclaiming LGBTQ+ rights, won less than 38 percent of the vote. The Georgian people are to be commended for asserting their democratic rights in the face of massive Western interference in the election. Western money and NGOs amplified the opposition parties. If they had won, the new pro-Western administration would have turned Georgia into a second war front against Russia in conjunction with the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime.

Georgian and Ukraine have been at the center of the Western policy of expanding NATO around Russia’s borders. Both countries were declared future members of the military bloc as far back as 2008, although NATO membership is a red line for Russia. Fortunately, Georgian voters were aware of the geopolitical stakes and rallied to the cause of prioritizing peaceful regional relations and rejecting the notional security privileges of NATO. Western recriminations were fast and furious after the result. Western media reported that “Western pollsters” claimed that there were voting irregularities. What were Western pollsters doing in Georgia in the first place? Such entities sound more like a plant to stir post-election trouble.

As it turns out, there were indeed incidents of vote buying, ballot stuffing, and intimidation at polling stations. But videos showed that the incidents were agitprops organized by the Western-sponsored opposition parties. However, thankfully, such malfeasance was relatively minor and did not invalidate the overall final result. Georgia’s Central Election Committee declared the process to be free and fair. The authorized election invigilating body has given its verdict, and that should be the end of it.

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“As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.”

Novichok: UK Government Sedated The Skripals To Stop Them Talking (Helmer)

The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way in London, they are still incommunicado, either in prison or dead. The evidence revealed in the published witness statements and transcript of testimony in four days of hearings at the Sturgess Inquiry October 28-31 shows that British Government officials have lied in public and lied on oath in the courts to conceal what they have been doing to accuse Russia of Novichok poisonings in the Salisbury area in 2018. The Inquiry records show that the chairman and judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), and the lawyers working for him are actively working to protect the lies and prevent contradicting evidence from becoming public. .

Surprise testimony by Dr Stephen Cockroft, the doctor who cared for Sergei and Yulia Skripal on their admission to Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) on March 4, 2018, has revealed that the British Government kept them heavily sedated in order to tell the courts and media that they were unconscious and unresponsive when they had revived. Government officials ordered the hospital to punish Cockroft from talking directly to Yulia Skripal when she came out of her coma on March 8, 2018. Cockroft’s evidence of March 8, 2018, directly contradicts the evidence given on oath in the High Court in London on March 20-22, 2018, by state officials and an SDH “treating consultant” – the name was kept secret in the published court report — that “Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Mr Skripal is unable to communicate in any way. Ms Skripal is unable to communicate in any meaningful way.”

Cockroft’s disclosures also contradict the script which Yulia Skripal read out at a MI6-supervised and Reuters-filmed appearance for two minutes at a US bomber base in the UK in May of 2018. Skripal claimed then “after 20 days in a coma I woke to the news that we had both been poisoned.” In fact, Yulia woke from her coma after four (4) days. On July 18, 2024, Cockroft told the Inquiry which questioned him for a second witness statement: “An untoward event took place on Thursday 8 March 2018. A colleague (Dr James Haslam) had ordered all sedation to be discontinued temporarily to Yulia Skripal. This is quite a common practice on Intensive Care Units (ICU) and we refer to it as a ‘sedation hold’ and would normally be planned and discussed with the team. Unfortunately, having ordered the sedation hold, Dr Haslam left the ICU without advising me. I was present on the ICU treating another patient. As a consequence, Yulia Skripal regained consciousness very quickly and was confused, frightened, trying to get out of bed and was pulling at her various vascular access lines and breathing tube.

Cockroft then revealed that because the sedation had been stopped and Yulia was no longer comatose, Cockroft was punished by Blanshard, the hospital’s chief doctor. “I tried to feedback my concerns to Dr Haslam, but he was of the opinion that nothing untoward had occurred, but when these events were reported back to the Medical Director (Christine Blanshard) she had a very different opinion and I was summoned to a meeting with her on Monday 12 March to discuss my management of the incident. There is no formal record of that meeting [sic], however I was suspended from working on the ICU with immediate effect until Yulia and Sergei had either been discharged or died. Apparently by having had a conversation with Yulia Skripal I had been unprofessional and should have left such a conversation to the security services. I was warned by Dr Blanshard that I should not discuss any aspect of the poisonings with colleagues or other individuals and advised that any such discussion would be treated as serious misconduct. As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.”

The Salisbury hospital official who collaborated with government officials and police to conceal the condition of the Skripals in hospital; to threaten and sanction the medical staff; and to intervene in the treatment of the Skripals, was the SDH medical director, Dr Christine Blanshard. By enforcing sedation on the two patients for the government’s political purpose, without their consent when they were conscious, out of coma, and capable of communicating, Blanshard violated her Hippocratic Oath.

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“..the strongest military alliance in human history had just launched its first war in North Africa since France was defeated in Algeria in 1962..”

Brutally Murdered 13 Years Ago, Gaddafi Is Only Growing More Beloved (Fetouri)

October marked 13 years since Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a NATO-supported mob of rebels in circumstances still buried under a barrage of deliberate disinformation. Yet 13 years on, Gaddafi is probably the most popular figure in the North African country. Is it just nostalgia that makes the general public yearn for a man who has long been dead, or is there something else that goes beyond mere nostalgia as a human emotion? On September 23, 2009, in his first and only speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Muammar Gaddafi described the UN Security Council as council of “horror.” He explained that the council, by the UN charter, is responsible for peace in the world but has only brought “more wars and sanctions.” What he did not know at the time was that the same UN organ would, less than two years later, authorize his removal and ultimately his murder by adopting resolution 1973, which gave the green light to all UN member states to interfere in Libya as long they notified the UN Secretary General of their intention to do so.

Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, was the UNSC response to public demonstrations that engulfed parts of Libya in the previous month, in which people demanded better living conditions, housing, and jobs. By the time the issue was deliberated at the UN, what had been peaceful and legitimate public demonstrations had turned into an armed revolt led by various stakeholders, including Islamists and former terrorists, against the legitimate government. The wave of public discontent in Libya was part of wider public awakenings that began in neighboring Tunisia before moving to Egypt. In both countries, the West attempted to save President Ben Ali in Tunisia and later his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, but failed. There were no calls for military intervention to “protect” civilians in either country. With Libya, it was a completely different matter.

Faced with armed groups seeking to destabilize the country, the Gaddafi government responded, just like any other respected government would do, by using force against the armed rebellion. Under Gaddafi, Libya had seen similar events in the previous four decades, where Western-supported attempts were made not only to kill Gaddafi but also to bring about regime change by force. The government used force to contain the demonstration, but specifically targeting the armed groups that had sprung up among the peaceful demonstrators. In this chaos, many innocent people were killed and wounded, but nowhere near the inflated figures reported in Western media and publically talked about by Western politicians in their quest to widen the rift between the Libyan authorities and its citizens and to sow discord among the Libyans who were divided between supporters of Gaddafi and supporters of what became known as the February 17 Revolution.

William Hague, the UK’s foreign minister at the time, for example, told the world’s media that Gaddafi had already fled the country and was on his way to Venezuela, when in fact Gaddafi never left Tripoli – so Hague misled public opinion, which further inflamed the situation. Under pressure from veto-wielding permanent superpower members, the UNSC passed resolution 1973 under the pretext of the ‘Right to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine that, controversially, allows the UN to use military force to protect civilians when their government fails to do so. Paragraph 4 of the resolution called on all world countries to “take all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, impose a no fly zone, and urged all UN member states to tighten the embargo already imposed on the country by UNSC resolution 1970, passed on February 26, 2011, referring the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC), to investigate the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly being committed on a large scale in Libya on the orders of Gaddafi himself, who was one of three officials indicated by the court.

Resolution 1970 was not passed based on concrete independent investigative reports of facts but, mainly, based on biased media reports. Neither the UN nor any of its relevant institutions investigated events on the ground to be able to lay blame, and the first official UN mission arrived in Libya in March and reported to the UNSC in April 2011. This means the UNSC adopted its two resolutions, 1970 and 1973, based on unverified media reports, unreliable witness statements and biased civil organizations accounts. By the time the UNSC adopted resolution 1973, Libya was already in a full-swing civil war between the armed rebels and government forces that, in being dehumanized by biased Western media, were called “Gaddafi brigades.” The rebels were actually a mix of terror organizations and locals who chose to fight the government.

They included groups such as Al-Qaeda, Ansar Al-Sharia, Al-Qa’ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and remnants of other groups and Afghan war veterans who infiltrated the country. By mid-March 2011, Libya was consumed by internal violent strife, its government boycotted by most countries, its voice drowned under the barrage of media lies and fake news, its officials banned from travel, and its leader being hunted day and night. The rebels fighting the government were being supplied, financed, armed, trained, and directed by the West and several Arab countries such as Qatar, Jordan, and United Arab Emirates. The stage was set for NATO to take over the military intervention. In fact, France, the US, and UK had already started bombing Libya by launching the first wave of missile strikes on Libyan air defense sites and radars in order to prepare the ground for imposing a no-fly zone. Even civil security forces, manning checkpoints around Tripoli, were bombed.

By the end of March 2011, Libya has become a “theatre of operations” and NATO launched “Operation Unified Protector” with an around-the-clock bombardment. That meant that the strongest military alliance in human history had just launched its first war in North Africa since France was defeated in Algeria in 1962. By the end of its operation, NATO had killed hundreds of Libyan women and children, destroyed private properties and infrastructure, all in the name of reinforcing international law and protecting civilian while the real agenda was far more sinister. The scenes of chaos, destruction, displacements, and killings continued from March to October, in which the Libyan army managed to hold back the rebels on the ground while facing NATO air bombardments. On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was murdered in gruesome scenes and his body, alongside the bodies of his son and his defense minister, displayed for the horrified public to see.

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Rogan Fetterman

 

 

Eva
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852419256232636518

 

 

Dog fight

 

 

Dog kitten
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852392683748372979

 

 

Awesome

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Nov 012024
 


Paul Klee Carnival in the snow 1923

 

White House Overrode Stenographers, Altered “Garbage” Transcript (ZH)
Is the Left Preparing for War If Trump Wins? (Lee Smith)
Kamala Harris’ Bizarre Marketing Campaign Appeals To The Worst In Humanity (ZH)
FBI Ran ‘Honeypot’ Operation On 2016 Trump Campaign – Whistleblower (RT)
Facebook Files Reveal the Coordinated Effort to Bury the Laptop Story (Turley)
RFK Jr. Explains Plan for Reforming the CIA (HUSA)
Lawsuit Over $1 Million Giveaways on Hold After Elon Musk’s Legal Maneuver (ET)
Why the Cancel Campaign Targeting Jeff Bezos Could Backfire (Turley)
County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth ‘Glitch’ Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala (ZH)
Voter Confidence Rattled As Voting Machines Malfunction Across Illinois (JTN)
Biden Goes On Baby-Mouthing Spree At White House Halloween Party (ZH)
BRICS post-Kazan: A Laboratory of the Future (Pepe Escobar)
BRICS Grows, Adding 13 New ‘Partner Countries’ (Norton)
In Georgia and Moldova, it’s Oxi for NATO and the EU (Karganovic)
Genocidal Scorecard (Chris Hedges)
Israel’s Attacks On Iran Were An Apocalyptic Error By Netanyahu (Jay)
Tightening Russian Oil Sanctions Threatens Global Economy – Le Monde (RT)

 

 

 

 

This IS genuinely funny
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851781793524879778

RFK

J6

Rogan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851849883986137583

Elon

Kamala

Discord

O’Reilly

Go Vote
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851835337783357821

A warning from Mike Maloney

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..any edits to the official transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of the stenographer’s office – who was unavailable.”

White House Overrode Stenographers, Altered “Garbage” Transcript (ZH)

In a mad scramble to cover for President Biden calling half of the country “garbage,” White House press officials altered the official transcript, overriding official stenographers who objected to the alterations, the Associated Press reports. According to the pre-altered transcript, Biden said “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” However White House press office added an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” in order to peddle the falsehood that Biden was criticizing comic Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the US island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP.

The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.” -AP According to the email, the press office demanded that stenographers quickly produce a transcript of Biden’s call with Latino activists to discuss Hinchicliffe’s comments, while Biden’s social media team posted on X that he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage – and that he was specifically referring to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.” The two-person stenography team on duty that evening, a “typer” and a “proofer” said that any edits to the official transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of the stenographer’s office – who was unavailable.

Because of this, the White House press office went ahead and published an altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to the press and social media in a mad scramble. The supervisor did not like that… “If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” wrote the supervisor, adding “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.” The supervisor, a career White House employee, raised concerns about the alteration in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and other officials. “Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” he wrote.

The alteration was done as the White House scrambled to respond to a cascade of press inquiries over Biden’s comments – which completely upstaged Kamala Harris’ closing argument speech outside the White House. As journalist Michael Shellenberger points out, it was likely illegal. Biden’s comment was a gift to the Trump campaign, which immediately capitalized on it – fundraising off the quote, while Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck on Wednesday.

Harris also moved to quickly distance herself from Biden’s comments, telling reporters “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” Meanwhile, House Republicans have been discussing launching an investigation into the fabrication – with House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-(NY), and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-(KY), on Wednesday accusing the White House of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks, and called on White House counsel Ed Siskel to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the transcript. “White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that it may have been a violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

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“Thus, it is best understood in the context of recent accounts promising, or urging, violence after the November vote.”

Is the Left Preparing for War If Trump Wins? (Lee Smith)

The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country. As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration.

Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss. By vilifying Trump as a despotic madman who must be stopped before he can commence his reign of terror, the regime’s propaganda apparatus not only slanders Trump but also pre-emptively threatens the reputation, as well as the livelihood and perhaps the liberty, of current military personnel. The point is to push the military against Trump: When the time comes to act, will you stand for democracy or side with a tyrant who sees the military only as an instrument to advance his personal interests?

For instance, last week the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoted former Trump administration officials claiming that the Republican candidate is contemptuous of America’s armed forces and, according to Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, wishes he could command the same respect that Hitler commanded from his general officers. This is not the first time that Trump has been compared to Hitler or that Kelly, a retired Marine general, turned on his former commander-in-chief. Kelly was the key source for a story published before the 2020 election, also in the Atlantic and also by Jeffrey Goldberg, that alleged Trump had called American WWII soldiers buried in French cemeteries “suckers and losers.” The veracity of Kelly’s latest revelation that Trump admires Hitler must of course be judged against the fact that he waited five years to disclose it, even if it is unlikely to have much effect on the current election cycle.

The military, and veterans of the Global War on Terror in particular, overwhelmingly support the candidate opposed to waging endless and strategically pointless foreign wars. Moreover, Trump has weathered far more damaging fabrications — like the false allegations that he had been compromised by Russian intelligence — that only galvanized support for him. The purpose of the Hitler narrative is not to alter the electoral preferences of left-wing media audiences already solidly in the anti-Trump column, but rather to justify taking extreme measures against the Republican candidate and the America First movement and ensure that the bulk of the military sides with the anti-Trump plot. Thus, it is best understood in the context of recent accounts promising, or urging, violence after the November vote.

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“If a woman or a minority votes conservative, Democrats assert that it’s because they’ve been brainwashed into it.”

Kamala Harris’ Bizarre Marketing Campaign Appeals To The Worst In Humanity (ZH)

You can tell a lot about a political candidate and their party by their marketing campaigns. Most importantly, do they explain the views of their candidate and their policies? Or, do they simply seek to manipulate voters into believing something that’s not true? The Kamala Harris campaign has actually gone one step further in the past month with a bizarre series of ads that, when examined altogether, showcase an ideological degeneracy that appeals to the worst in humanity. While Donald Trump and conservatives are often accused of being “mean” or blunt in their rhetoric, at least it’s sincere and speaks to actual issues rather than subconscious desires. On the other hand, if you’re looking for any kind of class in a candidate, there’s none to be found among the Democrats.

Taking a page from the Edward Bernays school of advertising that taps into the grimy recesses and narcissism of the dregs of society, the marketing for Harris has been odd – It encourages dishonesty among families, relies on shaming techniques instead of critical thinking and it’s often sexually charged in the ugliest way. Some of these ads are not directly created by Harris operatives, but generally speaking most ads are approved by the candidate or political party officials before they’re released. In her most recent campaign, Harris ads attempt to sow discord among married couples, suggesting that women should hide their political views from their husbands and vote for Harris without them knowing. Or, the goal is to suggest that American men are somehow controlling their wives and coercing them into voting for Trump. In the Democrat fantasy world the only reason a woman would vote for Trump is because her husband is forcing her to. It’s a rather insulting portrayal of women, but it also taps into the leftist assumption that all minorities and women are their political property.

If a woman or a minority votes conservative, Democrats assert that it’s because they’ve been brainwashed into it. Beyond that, any man who has been married for even a short period of time is well aware of his wife’s political ideals and will not be surprised how she votes. It’s strange that the Harris camp is trying to portray voting as if it should be treated like an extra-marital affair. Of course, this is the kind of behavior that progressives commonly encourage women to engage in, it’s just weird to see it so blatantly promoted in a campaign ad. Then there’s the efforts to shame men into voting for Harris which have clearly not gone over so well. Her support among men is dismal, even among Gen Z, and this can be attributed directly to the decade long propaganda war on masculinity perpetrated by leftists. Men remember, and they’re certainly not going to vote for the same people that have called them “incels” or “rapists” or “toxic” for years.

Shaming is a traditionally feminine psychological tactic. This ad gives us an example of the reality that Democrats operate from a highly estrogenated world view and they don’t understand men in the slightest. By extension, Democrats may have made an epic blunder with this grotesque ad featuring a man masturbating in bed while watching porn, only to be disrupted by a cliche Republican invading his privacy and telling him he’s not allowed to punish his porpoise anymore. The ad itself is far creepier than the Republican it tried to lampoon, insinuating that masturbation is on the ballot and that this is something the average male voter should be focused on. For progressives, everything is about sex.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1850349884223652182

A root obsession of narcissists, sexual gratification is a core value for them and sexual identity a proxy making up for a lack of any legitimate personality. Furthermore, the conservative efforts against pornography are specifically aimed at enforcing age limits online so that children don’t have access (a pervasive problem in the digital era). It’s a reasonable position, but Democrats desperately want kids to have access to sexual content for some reason. Sticking with the theme of sexual gratification, let’s not forget this little gem of an ad which features a black man trying to match with women on a fake dating show, only to be denied by all of them because he says he’s not voting. The message? Vote for Harris or you won’t get laid.

The marketing is also aimed at women, much like the voting in secret ad, teaching them to treat men like the enemy unless those men vote Democrat. There are dozens of other ads like this beyond those listed here, with a host of Dem candidates following Kamala’s lead. This is truly the dark side of political content, reducing voters down to their most base animal instincts and avoiding any mention of actual policy. To be sure, Democrats understand the mentality of their core supporters well, but these ads would not appeal to anyone outside of the most rabid leftist activists. For posterity, the Harris marketing campaign should be studied as a window into the progressive mind; future generations should be dissecting this material for decades to come as an example of one of the most unsettling chapters in American political history.

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“Trump had just announced his first presidential campaign and neither he nor anyone on his campaign team was suspected of any crimes. Nevertheless, Comey ordered two “honeypot” agents to infiltrate Trump’s team..”

FBI Ran ‘Honeypot’ Operation On 2016 Trump Campaign – Whistleblower (RT)

Former FBI Director James Comey personally ordered “honeypot” spies to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to an agency whistleblower. The off-the-books operation was described by the agency insider as a “fishing expedition” to find wrongdoing among Trump’s team. The operation was “personally directed” by Comey and launched in June 2015 without any case file being created in the FBI’s database, according to a whistleblower report handed to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and seen by the Washington Times. At the time, Trump had just announced his first presidential campaign and neither he nor anyone on his campaign team was suspected of any crimes. Nevertheless, Comey ordered two “honeypot” agents to infiltrate Trump’s team on the campaign trail with the aim of extracting damning information from adviser George Papadopoulos, the report claimed.

A “honeypot” agent refers to an attractive woman who uses a sexual or romantic relationship to gather intelligence from a target. Comey’s operation took place a year before the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged contacts with Russia, which later morphed into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year ‘Russiagate’ probe. According to the whistleblower, the honeypot operation was kept “off the books” to conceal it from the US Justice Department’s inspector general, who later determined that Comey knowingly lied when submitting evidence to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump’s campaign. Papadopoulos was eventually questioned by the FBI and in 2017 pled guilty to making false statements to agents regarding his alleged contacts with Russia the year before.

He served 12 days in federal prison in 2018, and has claimed ever since that he was entrapped by FBI agents posing as Russians with damaging information on Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. He complained about sloppy FBI agents “dropping information in my lap that I did not want regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails in the hands of the Russians” during the Crossfire Hurricane probe, and claimed to have been targeted by at least one “honeypot” beforehand. However, Papadopoulos thought that the woman was working for the CIA and “affiliated with Turkish intelligence,” he said in 2019. The operation was canceled when a newspaper obtained a photograph of one of the agents and was about to publish it, the whistleblower claimed.

The FBI allegedly contacted the newspaper claiming that the woman in question was an informant, and not an agent, and would be killed if the photo was released, successfully preventing its publication. One of the agents was then allegedly transferred to the CIA so she would not be available as a potential witness. “The FBI employee personally observed one or more employees in the FBI being directed to never discuss the operation with anyone ever again, which included talking with other people involved in the operation,” the report states. The Judiciary Committee told the Washington Times that it “plans to look into” the report. Trump fired Comey in 2017, describing him as a “liar” and a “slimeball.”

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“When we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections, we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the U.S. government] to plan for it.”

Facebook Files Reveal the Coordinated Effort to Bury the Laptop Story (Turley)

In a new report released by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, Facebook executives are shown following the lead of the FBI, which gave them prior warnings to prepare to spike such stories before the election. The FBI knew that the laptop was authentic. They had possession of the laptop, and American intelligence concluded that it was not Russian disinformation. One Microsoft employee wrote, “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” However, these communications also show a knowing effort to appease Biden and Harris and effectively assist them in their election efforts. Facebook’s then-Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg reportedly wrote to Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, “[o]bviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”

One of the most interesting communications came from a Facebook employee who recognized that they would be accused of seeking to influence the election: “When we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections, we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the U.S. government] to plan for it.” The Facebook files go beyond influencing the election. At one point, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, asked, “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made.” The Vice President in charge of content policy responded, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”

Notably, Democrats opposed every effort to seek this information, and Facebook only recently relented in turning over its files years after Elon Musk ordered the release of the “Twitter files.” I raised this issue during the NCC event to counter the glowing self-appraisal of Meta over its record. Despite its claims of transparency, it refused calls from many of us for years to release these files. When finally forced by the House to do so, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a perfunctory apology and moved on. As shown at the NCC event, it is now spinning its record as a defense of free speech.

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“RFK called Pompeo a “neocon” and said he disagreed with him on many policies, but also said he admired him, calling the former agency director brilliant.”

RFK Jr. Explains Plan for Reforming the CIA (HUSA)

Former President John F. Kennedy threatened to “splinter [the CIA] into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” before he was assassinated in 1963. JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wants something perhaps less dramatic. In a Trump campaign event with Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday, RFK explained his idea for reforming the CIA. According to him, reforming the CIA is as simple as splintering the “espionage” and “plans” divisions, which handle matters of intelligence and paramilitary operations, respectively. Those divisions are referred to today as the Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations. RFK said the two divisions need to be reorganized so the intelligence/espionage area has oversight of the paramilitary operations. He said his father had a similar plan when he was Attorney General.

“My father had a reform plan … Break up espionage division from the plans division, which is paramilitary division that fixes elections, buys newspapers, assassinates foreign leaders and so on,” he said. “I would break up those divisions and … put espionage division oversight of plans division.” Such a plan may seem tepid for a man who’s accused the CIA of being involved in the murder of his uncle. But RFK’s been surprisingly cordial with the agency. His daughter-in-law and campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was a CIA officer for 10 years. RFK also revealed at Saturday’s campaign event in North Carolina that he had dinner with former Trump-era CIA Director Mike Pompeo. RFK called Pompeo a “neocon” and said he disagreed with him on many policies, but also said he admired him, calling the former agency director brilliant.

RFK said Pompeo told him that “The worst mistake of my public lie was not fixing CIA. I could have but I didn’t do it.” “The entire upper echelon of that agency is made of individuals who don’t believe in the institutions of the United States of America,” RFK said.

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“..has been placed on hold after lawyers for the billionaire removed the case to federal court..”

Lawsuit Over $1 Million Giveaways on Hold After Elon Musk’s Legal Maneuver (ET)

A lawsuit brought against Elon Musk over his $1 million giveaways to randomly selected registered voters who sign a petition supporting the First and Second amendments of the Constitution has been placed on hold after lawyers for the billionaire removed the case to federal court. Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Judge Angelo Foglietta said on Oct. 31 that he was placing the case on hold after Musk’s lawyers late on Oct. 30 removed it to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Foglietta said during a hearing at Philadelphia’s City Hall that he was divested of jurisdiction because of the move. Musk celebrated the result with a post on social media platform X, which he owns, that read “American Justice FTW [for the win].” Removing cases filed in state courts to federal court is not uncommon and is done at the prerogative of defendants under federal law. One of the requirements is that removal of a case must happen within 30 days of the filing of a complaint.

Federal judges who are assigned to the removed cases can decide whether to keep them in federal court or remand them back to state courts. Foglietta said that he would be available later in the day if the case were remanded back to him. Musk’s lawyers said in their removal notice that the case brought by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner involves significant federal issues and should thus be adjudicated by a federal judge. “While the Complaint purports to raise only state-law claims relating to public nuisance and consumer protection, D.A. Krasner’s claims, as evident on the face of the Complaint, turn principally on the allegation that Defendants are somehow unlawfully interfering with a federal election,” the lawyers said. Krasner sued Musk and his America PAC, or political action committee, recently over their daily $1 million giveaways to registered voters in Pennsylvania and other swing states. The scheme, Krasner claimed, constitutes an illegal lottery.

Krasner asked a state court to stop Musk and the America PAC from continuing the giveaways. Musk’s lawyers said in the new filing: “Plaintiff is seeking emergency relief which, in and of itself, would require judicial intervention into the progress of an ongoing federal election. This, however, a state court cannot do, as the issue of whether a federal political action committee like America PAC—which is focused on making independent expenditures to influence campaigns for federal office, not state or local offices—is exclusively governed by federal law and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Krasner was present in court, but another attorney, John Summers, argued for the district attorney’s office. Summers said that the case was one about state law and should proceed in the claims court and that Musk’s attempt to remove the case was cowardly and irresponsible.

Musk, Summers alleged, was attempting to use procedural maneuvers to run out the clock and avoid accountability because the law and facts weren’t on his side. Summers also cast doubt on the idea that Musk’s giveaway was random, noting that at least four recipients have come from Pennsylvania. If the giveaway were random, Summers said, it was definitely a lottery. The PAC, he alleged, was luring people in to give it their personal information. The type of personal information it sought, he said, was often bought and sold among tech companies. A lawyer for Musk argued that his client wasn’t a proper defendant in the case and that the prosecution should focus on America PAC instead of one of its donors. Summers responded in part by highlighting Musk’s role in announcing and promoting the contest. “The 800-pound gorilla here is actually Elon Musk,” Summers told Foglietta.

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“Bezos could do for the media what Musk did for free speech..”

Why the Cancel Campaign Targeting Jeff Bezos Could Backfire (Turley)

It is not every day that you go from being Obi-Wan Kenobi to Sheev Palpatine in twenty-four hours. However, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos now has the distinction of having Luke (Mark Hamill) lead a boycott of his “democracy dies in darkness” newspaper as the daily of the darkside. Figures like former Rep. Liz Cheney announced she was canceling her subscription as a boycott movement led a reported 200,000 to give up their subscriptions. Some like George Conway even seemed to target Bezos’ Amazon. It is a familiar pattern for many of us (on a smaller scale) who used to be associated with the left and faced cancel campaigns for questioning the orthodoxy in the media or academia. Then something fascinating happened. Bezos stood his ground. The left has made an art form of flash-mob politics, crushing opposition with the threat of economic or professional ruin. Most cave to the pressure, including business leaders like Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg.

That record came to a screeching halt when the unstoppable force of the left met the immovable object of Elon Musk. The left continues to oppose his government contracts and pressure his advertisers over his refusal to restore the prior censorship system at X, formerly Twitter. Now, the left may be creating another defiant billionaire. This week, Bezos penned an op-ed that doubled down on his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate now or in the future. Some of us have argued for newpapers to stop all political endorsements for decades. The encouraging aspect of Bezos’s column was that he not only recognized the corrosive effect of endorsements on maintaining neutrality as a media organization, but he also recognized that the Post is facing plummeting revenues and readership due to its perceived bias and activism.

I used to write regularly for the Post, and I wrote in my new book about the decline of the newspaper as part of the “advocacy journalism” movement: “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.” Bezos previously brought in a publisher to save the Post from itself. Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis promptly delivered a truth bomb in the middle of the newsroom by telling the staff, “Let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” The response was that the entire staff seemed to go into vapors, and many called for Lewis to be canned. Bezos stood with Lewis. Now, resignations and recriminations are coming from reporters and columnists alike. In a public statement, Post columnists blasted the decision and said that while maybe endorsements should be ended, not now because everyone has to oppose Trump to save democracy and journalism.

The statement produced some chuckles, given the signatories, including Phillip Bump and Jen Rubin, who have been repeatedly accused of pushing false stories and reckless rhetoric. (Rubin later denounced Bezos for his “Bulls**t explanation” and said that he was merely “bending a knee” to Trump.). Bezos could do for the media what Musk did for free speech. He could create a bulwark against advocacy journalism in one of the premier newspapers in the world. Students in “J Schools” today are being told to abandon neutrality and objectivity since, as former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “all journalism is activism.” After a series of interviews with over 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Few can stand up to this movement other than a Bezos or a Musk. However, the left has long created their own monsters by demanding absolute fealty or unleashing absolute cancel campaigns. Simply because Bezos wants his newspaper to restore neutrality, the left is calling for a boycott of not just the Post but all of his companies. That is precisely what they did with Musk.

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“…isn’t it ‘funny’ how these ‘glitches’ are never in Trump’s favor?”

County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth ‘Glitch’ Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala (ZH)

Earlier in the day, a video went viral of voters in Kentucky having ‘issues’ with an electronic voting machine that selected “Kamala Harris” when the voter had pressed on “Donald Trump”… Admittedly, we have seen a few of these style of clips over the past few weeks and viewed it with the same level of skepticism we usually do. However, this time is different because the local County Clerk just issued a statement on Facebook confirming the issue “did occur”… but not before he had denied it occurred. According to the Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, the machine was taken out of service while waiting for a rep from the AG’s Office. So, the initial reaction was: “There is no vote rigging here. It’s just a vast right wing conspiracy.” Then, 3 hours later… “Ok, the voting machine was busted, but it really was just a “ballot marking device” and as long as you triple checked everything, you must have caught the error..”

Here’s the full statement: “The Attorney General’s office has been to the vote center to check the device that has been shown across social media today. In full disclosure, after several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario, it did occur. This was accomplished by hitting some area in between the boxes. After that we tried for several minutes to do it again and could not. Since this is going out across the USA and the world, I want to explain to everyone that this is a ballot marking device. You insert your blank ballot into it to vote your specific ballot for your precinct. It shows you who you have chosen for each race and notifies you if you didn’t make a selection in a race before it allows the voter to continue to the next page. When you come to the end of the ballot it shows you how you voted in every race and issue.

It confirms with each voter that they are satisfied with their selections twice before printing the ballot. Once you receive your ballot back from the ballot marking device you can review your choices again before placing it into the scanner. If you made a mistake, you may spoil that ballot and receive another one, Kentucky Law allows two spoiled ballots only. Once you are satisfied with your ballot you may place it into the scanner, and it verifies that it has been counted.

These ballot marking devices are set for a voter to touch Inside the whole box with the name of the candidates. In the video posted you can see us going back and forth through the names with no issues. This is the same machine used by the voter in the video. It remained at its location in the vote center and was set face down until the representative from the Attorney General’s Office arrived to investigate. There were no claims of any issues with the device prior, and none since it went back into service. The voter who posted the video did cast her ballot which she said was correct. I hate that this has occurred here in Laurel County. We strive to have accurate, secure and safe elections that we are proud to provide to our citizens. I hope all can get to the polls and make your voice heard November 5th. If you read through this entire post, thank you very much for your time.”

…isn’t it ‘funny’ how these ‘glitches’ are never in Trump’s favor?

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’don’t worry, we’ll just put it in the box, and we’ll make sure we scan them all tonight,’ uh, when everybody leaves..”

Voter Confidence Rattled As Voting Machines Malfunction Across Illinois (JTN)

Voter confidence has been shaken with voting machines malfunctioning in several Illinois jurisdictions. In McLean County, 34 ballots were placed in what the County Clerk Kathy Michael called “an emergency bin,” which is located underneath the voting machine used to tabulate ballots. At the Eastland Mall, an early voting location, the machine “glitched” for 30 minutes. Affected voter Wayne Henrichs called the clerk’s office after putting his ballot in the bin and was connected with an assistant county clerk. “She indicated that they [the ballots in the emergency bin] are considered mail in ballots and they will be counted on election day rather than being counted early,” said Henrichs. Mclean County Elections Director Mark Senger said any ballots placed in the “emergency” bin will be tabulated after the early voting sites close. Senger said the ballots were tabulated after they closed on Tuesday, Oct. 22.

“The thing that concerned me was one: Is that really secure? Two: we are voting early for a reason and that’s to bank those votes,” said Henrichs. Such ballots are to be tabulated and witnessed by Democratic and Republican election judges, according to state law. In viral social media posts, voters say they walked out of a Schaumburg early voting site after the ballot scanner stopped working. One Schaumburg voter posted a video saying he didn’t cast his ballot after election judges told him to put his ballot in a box to be scanned later. “Well, so much for early voting. Their scanner’s broken, and they said, ’don’t worry, we’ll just put it in the box, and we’ll make sure we scan them all tonight,’ uh, when everybody leaves,” the voter said.

In another video posted on social media, election judges can be seen addressing a group of about 50 voters. A man wearing what appears to be an election judge badge made an announcement. “We have one scanner and the one scanner is broken,” the man said. “No one is going to open that [the emergency bin] up until tonight, and that’s us who take care of it. You know us, you have our badges,” said another election judge. McLean County GOP Chair Dennis Grundler was at the Eastland Mall trying to vote early on Tuesday. He said he was told to put his ballot in the emergency bin and he asked the judges for their names. The election judges didn’t give him their names. The McLean County Clerk’s Office said the law states for security purposes judges now use a letter designation instead of their name. According to the law, judges must initial ballots and they use their name/initials.

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Is there any way this is not embarrassing? For any grown up man? Let alone for the man who’s got the nuclear codes?

Biden Goes On Baby-Mouthing Spree At White House Halloween Party (ZH)

One night after punching a new hole in the sinking ship that is the Kamala Harris campaign — and with no political future of his own to tamp down his impulse to put his mouth on children — President Joe Biden went on a baby-biting binge at a White House Halloween party on Wednesday night, leaving the internet collectively mortified. For anyone who’s somehow unaware, Biden has a long, rich history of mouthing, sniffing and grabbing children and women. This video gives just a small sampling of Biden’s uninvited touching that has fully earned him the nickname “Creepy Joe”: After multiple women came forward to say Biden had made them uncomfortable with his touching, Biden issued a video apology in 2019, saying, “Social norms are changing. I understand that, and I’ve heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful of personal space in the future.”

However, with no second term on the line Wednesday night, Biden gleefully abandoned his personal-space pledge. Given his record, it would have grabbed major attention if Biden only mouthed a single baby. However, like an alcoholic falling off the wagon with great abandon, he indulged himself over and over. No doubt realizing this would be one of the last such opportunities he will ever have, the 81-year-old lame duck proceeded to mouth baby after baby that parents served up to him in a receiving line. Those parents appeared to politely tolerate their offspring being christened with presidential saliva, but we can imagine his handlers facepalming as Biden gave way to his compulsion to bestow oral affections.

[..] The baby-mouthing blitz capped quite a 24-hour stretch for Biden. On Tuesday evening, just as Kamala Harris was delivering her highly-promoted “closing argument” speech on the Capitol Ellipse, Biden undercut his replacement on the Democratic ticket by telling an audience that “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” The White House scrambled to claim that Biden was stuttering, and that there should be a possessive apostrophe (supporter’s) — supposedly indicating he was singling out an insult comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally who likened Puerto Rico to a pile of garbage — many people aren’t buying it, and the Trump campaign is using the gaffe to enormous advantage. Meanwhile, social media lit up over Biden’s creepy Halloween display, including a positively ghastly yet somehow fully appropriate horror-movie treatment:

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“The collective west’s incomprehension of what transpired in three historic days in Kazan only highlighted their astonishing arrogance, stupidity, and brutality..”

BRICS post-Kazan: A Laboratory of the Future (Pepe Escobar)

Apart from establishing the 13 new partners – constituting a large, transcontinental, de facto BRICS zone – Kazan advanced two key platforms: BRICS Clear and the BRICS (Re)Insurance Company. BRICS Clear is a multilateral settlement/clearing system for both BRICS trade and trade between BRICS and their partners (as it stands, applying to 22 nations). The key aim, once again, is to bypass SWIFT. BRICS Clear will use national currencies for international trade. Everything will be transacted via a stablecoin – a unit of account – managed by the NDB, the Shanghai-based BRICS bank. As top French economist Jacques Sapir has pointed out, “trade requires insurance services (for both the contract itself and transportation); these insurance services involve reinsurance activities. With the BRICS (Re)Insurance Company, BRICS is building its independence from western insurance companies.”

BRICS Clear and BRICS (Re)Insurance, in the short to middle term, will have enormous consequences for global trade and the use of US dollars and euros. Trade flows, intra-BRICS and between BRICS partners – already at least 40 percent of the global total – may rise exponentially. In parallel, western-controlled insurance and reinsurance companies will lose business. That’s de-dollarization in practice – arguably the BRICS Holy Grail. Of course, India and Brazil never refer to de-dollarization in the manner of Russia, China, and Iran, but they do support BRICS Clear. Sapir predicts that up to 2030, the BRICS Clear effect may result in the dollar share in Central Bank’s reserves falling “from 58 percent to around 35-40 percent.” Significantly, that would imply “massive sales of Treasury bonds, causing a collapse of the public bond market and significant difficulties for the US Treasury in refinancing United States debt.” The Hegemon will not take that lightly, to say the least.

These BRICS geoeconomic breakthroughs – call it lab experiments – mirror diplomatic coups such as India and China, mediated by Russia, announcing on the eve of Kazan their drive to settle bilateral troubles in the Himalayas to advance the unifying, pan-cooperation BRICS agenda. Solving geopolitical issues among member-nations is a key BRICS priority. The China–India example should translate to Iran–Saudi Arabia when it comes to their involvement in Yemen and Egypt–Ethiopia when it comes to the controversial building of a major dam in the Nile. BRICS sherpas openly admit that BRICS needs an internal institutional mechanism to solve serious problems among member-states – and, eventually, partners.

And that brings us to the ultimate incandescent tragedy: Israel’s military offensives in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. BRICS sherpas revealed that two scenarios were being actively discussed in the closed sessions, as well as the bilateral meetings. The first foresees an Iran–Israel Hot War, with Lebanon turned into a major battleground, leading to a “chain reaction” involving several Arab actors. The second scenario foresees a pan-West Asia crisis, involving not only neighboring nations but what would coalesce into coalitions – one pro-Arab, the other pro-Israeli. One wonders where dodgy actors such as Egypt and Jordan would fit in. It’s unclear how BRICS, as a multilateral organization, would react to both scenarios.

Dreadful realpolitik did not stop in its tracks to watch the BRICS high-speed train leave the Kazan station. Israel staged its puny strike on Iran immediately afterward, and the collective west pronounced the elections in Georgia null and void because they did not like the result – even though the OSCE issued a rational report about it. The collective west’s incomprehension of what transpired in three historic days in Kazan only highlighted their astonishing arrogance, stupidity, and brutality. That’s precisely the reason why the BRICS matrix is working so hard to come up with the lineaments of a new, fair international order, and despite an array of challenges, will continue to flourish.

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Thought a list might be useful.

BRICS Grows, Adding 13 New ‘Partner Countries’ (Norton)

The Global South-led organization BRICS is growing. More and more countries support the group’s mission: to build a multipolar world, with alternative economic institutions that are more representative and democratic, not dominated by the Western powers. BRICS held a summit in Kazan, Russia in October 2024, where 13 new “partner nations” were accepted. At this historic meeting, China’s President Xi Jinping referred to BRICS as “a vanguard for advancing global governance reform” and “reform of the international financial architecture”. Bolivia’s left-wing President Luis Arce argued that “the shield of BRICS and multipolarity” can protect formerly colonized nations, helping them resist “Western unipolarity and the tyranny of the dollar”. The organization was first formed as BRIC in 2009, by Brazil, Russia, India, and China. South Africa subsequently joined in 2010, turning the group into BRICS.At the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, several more members were invited to join.

As of October 2024, BRICS has nine members and 13 partner countries:

5 original members:
Brazil
Russia
India
China
South Africa

4 new members (invited in August 2023; officially admitted in January 2024):
Egypt
Ethiopia
Iran
United Arab Emirates

13 partner countries (accepted in October 2024):
Algeria
Belarus
Bolivia
Cuba
Indonesia
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Nigeria
Thailand
Türkiye
Uganda
Uzbekistan
Vietnam

The expansion of BRICS has made the group into even more of a geopolitical and economic powerhouse. Together, the nine BRICS members comprise more than one-third of world GDP (measured at purchasing power parity). They have well over 40% of the planet’s population, and make up roughly 30% of global oil production. By contrast, the G7 nations comprise less than 10% of the world population and under 30% of GDP (PPP), and their share of the global economy is shrinking over time, whereas that of BRICS is increasing.

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Not at all what EU and US wanted. Or even expected.

In Georgia and Moldova, it’s Oxi for NATO and the EU (Karganovic)

In Greek, “Oxi” means “no.” October 28 is celebrated in Greece and Cyprus as “Oxi Day.” On that date in 1940 Mussolini’s plenipotentiaries presented an ultimatum to the Greek Government to allow Axis troops to occupy its territory. The Greek Prime Minister at the time, Metaxas, replied to the brazen demand with a single word, “Oxi.” The rest is, as they say, history. Now it is the people of Georgia and Moldova, in elections and a referendum held last week, who have sent an essentially identical message to the arrogant hegemons of our day. Both Georgia and Moldova were earmarked to serve as sacrificial lambs in the collective West’s relentless war against Russia. For Georgia, a particularly self-destructive role had been envisioned. Its government was expected by the collective West to commit an act of national suicide arguably even more catastrophic than that of Germany and the associated vassal states of the European Union.

Facing an obvious military debacle in Ukraine, Western strategic thinkers came up with the brilliant idea of mending the situation by using Georgia to open a second front against Russia. The Georgian army, which in 2008 was trounced by Russian armed forces when the last attempt was made to use it in a similar hare-brained scheme, was to be thrust into battle once again as cannon fodder for the benefit of foreign interests. The strategic thinkers had overlooked an important detail that cast a long shadow over the feasibility of their scheme. In 2008 it was their stooge Saakashvili who was running Georgia. Today, the situation is fundamentally different. Whilst their puppet, French-born EU citizen Salome Zourabichvili, is President, Georgia is governed by sovereignist patriots whose litmus test for judging policies is what is best for their country. Such a policy standard, of course, is utterly abhorrent to the globalist mindset. The elections in Georgia have gone terribly wrong from their point of view. The ruling sovereignist party, Georgia Dream, won with 54% of the vote. The result was duly certified by the electoral commission.

The seriousness with which the current Georgian government views non-interference in its sovereign affairs was demonstrated not long ago. Anticipating last weekend’s elections, Prime Minister Garibashvili proposed, and by a comfortable margin Parliament approved, a law mandating transparency in the financing of foreign sponsored “NGOs,” of which about 20,000 are said to be active in Georgia. Forthwith, the foreign sponsored cabal whose machinations the transparency law was designed to make public lost their nerve. President Zourabichvili, a foreign citizen herself and former French Foreign Ministry functionary whose spoken Georgian is no better than Zelensky’s Ukrainian, is herself a prime candidate for the law’s rigorous application. Foolishly, she gave the game away by refusing to exercise the presidential duty of signing the duly passed foreign agent transparency legislation so that it could go into effect. That unladylike attempt at obstruction, however, came to naught. The law was signed in her stead by the president of the Georgian Parliament.

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“..accompanied by calls from Israeli officials to “renew settlements in Gaza” and encourage the “voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens” to other countries.”

Genocidal Scorecard (Chris Hedges)


Bibi on Board – by Mr. Fish

United Nations report, published on Monday, lays out in chilling detail the advances made by Israel in Gaza as it seeks to eradicate “the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine.” This genocidal project, the report ominously warns, “is now metastasizing to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” The Nakba or “catastrophe,” which in 1948 saw Zionist militias drive 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, carry out more than 70 massacres and seize 78 percent of historic Palestine, has returned on steroids. It is the next and, perhaps, final chapter in “a long-term intentional, systematic, State-organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians.” Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, who issued the report, titled “Genocide as colonial erasure,” makes an urgent appeal to the international community to impose a full arms embargo and sanctions on Israel until the genocide of Palestinians is halted.

She calls on Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire. She demands that Israel, as required by international law and U.N. resolutions, withdraw its military and colonists from Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. At the very least, Israel, unchecked, should be formally recognized as an apartheid state and persistent violator of international law, Albanese states. The U.N. should reactivate the Special Committee Against Apartheid to address the situation in Palestine, and Israel’s membership in the U.N. should be suspended. Short of these interventions, Israel’s goal, Albanese warns, will likely come into fruition. “This ongoing genocide is doubtlessly the consequence of the exceptional status and protracted impunity that has been afforded to Israel.” she writes. “Israel has systematically and flagrantly violated international law, including Security Council resolutions and [International Criminal Court] ICJ orders. This has emboldened the hubris of Israel and its defiance of international law.

As the ICC Prosecutor has warned, ‘if we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions of its complete collapse. This is the true risk we face at this perilous moment.’” The U.N. report comes amid an Israeli blockade of northern Gaza where over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to be killed. Israel’s ground and aerial assaults are centered on Jabaliya, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of recent strikes and their crews have been attacked.

Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.” “Displaced people have been systematically chased down and targeted in shelters, including in United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools, 70 percent of which Israel has repeatedly attacked.” In May, Israel’s Rafah invasion caused the displacement of nearly one million Palestinians, driven into southern Gaza because of Israeli evacuation orders, into “uninhabitable wastelands of rubble, sewage and decomposing bodies,” Albanese notes. By August, 90 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians were displaced “under dire conditions,” according to the U.N.

The months of “relentless shunting of weakened humans from one unsafe area to another — fleeing bombs and bullets, with minimal chances of escape, amid loss, fear and grief, and with little access to shelter, clean water, food and healthcare — have inflicted incalculable harm, especially on children,” the report reads. “The movement of displaced Palestinians resembles the death marches of past genocides, and the Nakba. Forced displacement severs connection with the land, undermining food sovereignty and cultural belonging, and triggering further displacement. Communal bonds are broken, the social fabric shredded and reserves of resilience depleted. Systematic forced displacement contributes to ‘the destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself.’” The constant displacement — many Palestinians have been displaced nine or 10 times — from one part of Gaza to another is accompanied by calls from Israeli officials to “renew settlements in Gaza” and encourage the “voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens” to other countries.

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“..the IDF can’t provide one single shred of video evidence to back up such ludicrous claims..”

Israel’s Attacks On Iran Were An Apocalyptic Error By Netanyahu (Jay)

Netanyahu is desperate to keep wars on all fronts alive simply so he can remain relevant. But what is hardly talked about is the state of Israel itself, with an economy in pieces. Just how far will the next U.S. president go in supporting Israel’s new war with Iran, both in terms of military spending and breathing new life into the economy which has seen 40,000 businesses go under since October 7th 2023 and almost a million Israelis leave the country. Netanyahu now is like a poker player who has used up all his IOUs at the table and is holding two pairs. How can he even believe he can take on Iran when even in Gaza and in Lebanon he is losing soldiers at a rate which should worry him and his generals. Yes, he has struck Hezbollah and reduced its capabilities but by no stretch of the imagination has he taken out the Iranian proxy which is still sending missiles and drones into Israel making the Israelis run to their air raid shelters even to this day.

The decision to strike Iran was surely out of an act of a gross political dilemma. However, the act itself has backfired on a level that neither he nor his entourage could imagine. Most of the targets were not even significantly damaged with a very low percentage of Israel’s missiles getting through Iran’s air defence which is so efficient that even Israel’s air force were too afraid actually fly into Iran’s airspace. Many in the west will be taken in by the spin from Israel’s lobby and impressive PR machine that it was a great victory and many sites were taken out, regardless of the fact that the IDF can’t provide one single shred of video evidence to back up such ludicrous claims, as it did previously in Gaza and Lebanon.

But the real defeat for Israel under Netanyahu is yet to come. Iran now has all the hard evidence it needs to strategize and hit Israel even harder than before. The erroneous strike on Iran by Netanyahu is not so much measured by the minor harm it did to a couple of weapons sites. It is by how now the myth of Israel’s military strength has been debunked once and for all. For decades Israel claimed superiority to everyone else, including Iran, and this was taken for granted by partisan western journalists who kept the dream alive. Remarkably, the strike on Israel by Iran on October 1st showed even Israelis that their air defence systems were hopelessly inadequate against Iran’s hypersonic missiles. That should have been enough to cool down the hot heads which straddle Netanyahu. At this point, the message he delivered at the UN, that there is “no place in Iran which Israel’s missiles cannot reach” should have been taken at face value and interpreted literally. Reaching Iranians sites is one thing. Actually taking them out is another.

Now, as the dust settles and Israel now waits for Iran’s response, the second myth that Israel’s strike capability was highly effective against Iran’s air defences is also blown. It seems like now Netanyahu’s folded as he has no more bluffs to play at the poker table. Unless of course he is deliberately coaxing his own country into a suicide strategy where Iran will completely desecrate Israel’s military leaving the U.S. little choice but to install itself on a grand scale. This so-called suicide strategy can’t be ruled out but seems hard to believe. The truth is that until Israel struck Iran, it didn’t know whether its own missiles and aircraft had the capability to penetrate Iran’s air defence system, supported heavily by Russia which sent it S-400 systems in August.

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“Income from oil exports jumped by 63% in January-July this year compared to the same period in 2023..”

Tightening Russian Oil Sanctions Threatens Global Economy – Le Monde (RT)

Attempts to further tighten Western sanctions on Russian oil could undermine the global economy, French newspaper Le Monde wrote on Wednesday. The report indicated that tightening sanctions on one of the major oil-producing countries could send fertilizer prices soaring and would ultimately lead to higher global food prices. “The rise in oil prices would disproportionately affect the poorest countries, potentially pushing them into a humanitarian crisis,” US economist Catherine Wolfram was quoted as saying. Such a scenario could discredit the West in the eyes of the Global South and encourage them to strengthen ties with Russia, she suggested. Meanwhile, the CEO of US-based ClearView Energy Partners, Kevin Book, told Le Monde that sanctions could have worked at a time when most companies specializing in oil transport insurance were located in the West. “This is not the case today,” he emphasized.

Western governments have hit Russia with a barrage of sanctions over the Ukraine conflict. Among other measures, they have introduced a price cap along with an embargo on Russian seaborne oil in an attempt to hurt the country’s economy, while at the same time keeping Russian crude flowing to global markets so as not to trigger price hikes. The measures were imposed in December 2022, and were followed in February 2023 by similar restrictions on exports of Russian petroleum products. They ban Western companies from providing insurance and other services for shipments of Russian crude, unless the cargo is purchased at or below $60 per barrel, a level below the current market price. In response, Moscow banned Russian enterprises from complying with the cap and rerouted most of its energy exports to Asia, particularly India and China.

“While some measures have long-term effects, such as the ban on the export of spare parts that hinders the maintenance of military equipment, the opposite is true for oil,” Le Monde wrote, suggesting that Moscow has been successful in sidestepping the restrictions while the price of the country’s flagship Urals crude had mostly remained above the Western price cap. Reuters calculations based on traders’ data showed that prices of October Urals crude oil were trading above $65 a barrel at Russian Baltic and Black Sea ports. In July, Russian crude traded at around $80 a barrel. According to a recent report by the independent economic think tank Institute for Energy and Finance Foundation (FIEF), Russia’s energy revenues may reach record levels this year, buoyed by high export oil prices. Income from oil exports jumped by 63% in January-July this year compared to the same period in 2023, totaling 6.4 trillion rubles ($66 billion), the paper said.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Atlas

 

 

Vaccines
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851960889986937244

 

 

Cancer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851811296297259397

 

 

Pro-Trumper
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851764519825019081

 

 

Grok

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 302024
 


Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

 

Trump Supporters Are ‘Garbage’ – Biden (RT)
I’m The Opposite of a Nazi – Trump (RT)
Whoopi: Trump Will Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport The Non-Whites (MN)
‘World’s Most Accurate Economist’ Predicts US Election Outcome (RT)
Musk Denies Allegations He Worked Illegally in America (ET)
Chaos and Crime: Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies (Mark Green)
Steve Bannon Released From Prison After Serving 4 Months (ET)
Secessionism and Polarization on Rise in US (Sp.)
Jay Bhattacharya Receives Prestigious Award for Intellectual Freedom (Turley)
Assange’s Father on Von Der Leyen: EU Falls to Bits Under ‘Frau Genocide’ (Sp.)
When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays (Paul Craig Roberts)
Ex-President Warns of Growing Ukrainian Anger Over Military Draft (RT)
Support For New UK PM collapses (RT)
Delusions Of Adequacy: How British Ambassadors Became A Joke (Jay)
A Heroic Preference For Self-Destruction Takes Hold In Israel (Alastair Crooke)
Mass Industrial Strikes Begin In Germany (RT)

 

 

 

 

Lethal

Bret

Georgia

PA fraud

MEP
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851213588695826440

RFK

Elon

Tucker Dore

Jocelyn

 

 

 

 

He said it while Kamala was doing her final speech at the Ellipse. That got no attention because of it. Was that the intention?

Trump Supporters Are ‘Garbage’ – Biden (RT)

The supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are “garbage,” outgoing US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. He later claimed that he misspoke and meant to condemn a specific speaker at Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden rally. Biden made his comments during a Zoom call organized by the Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino. He began by bringing up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who made a joke on Sunday comparing Puerto Rico to “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” “Just the other day, a speaker at [the Trump] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage,” Biden said, adding that Puerto Ricans are “good, decent honorable people.” “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden stressed. “It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

The president went on to accuse Trump of trying to “divide the country based on race,” and insisted that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, “will be a president for all of America.” Biden later took to X to clarify that he had “referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage.” “That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation,” Biden wrote. The president’s remarks were quickly condemned by Trump’s allies. “He’s talking about everyday Americans who love their country,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said, urging the Biden campaign to apologize. “We are not garbage, we are patriots who love America,” Rubio said during a Trump rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Hinchcliffe himself had accused Democrats of overreacting to his set at the Madison Square Garden event. “These people have no sense of humor,” he wrote on X on Sunday, claiming that the Harris team had taken the joke out of context “to make it seem racist.” Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently accused each other of hateful rhetoric and demonization. Some conservatives have drawn a parallel between Biden’s ‘garbage’ comment and that of Hillary Clinton, who described Trump supporters in 2016 as a “basket of deplorables.” Trump himself has been recently criticized for labeling his opponents an “enemy from within.”

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“Trump explained that his father taught him to never use either “Nazi” or “Hitler” as a slur..”

“..the US soldiers who took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 would have been offended [..] If you think those brave men were fighting for an open border and sex change surgeries for illegal aliens, the proper term for you is ‘dips**t”

I’m The Opposite of a Nazi – Trump (RT)

US Republican candidate Donald Trump has lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for comparing an event he held in New York’s Madison Square Garden last week with a rally of Nazi supporters at the same venue in 1939 at which speakers praised Hitler’s Germany. At the recent Trump event, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage,” triggering a wave of rebuke from across the political spectrum. A senior advisor for the Republican campaign told the press that “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump” and his team. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz jumped on the gaffe, telling a rally in Henderson, Nevada of a “direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.”

Trump responded by telling a crowd of backers in Atlanta, Georgia: “The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi. We’re Nazis.” “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he stated. Trump explained that his father taught him to never use either “Nazi” or “Hitler” as a slur. Both words, among many other insults, have been hurled his way, he said. “They call me everything from a mad genius looking to take over the world to a very very stupid person,” according to Trump. While proclamations that Trump is a new Hitler who seeks to abolish democracy are nothing new, such language was only recently adopted by the Harris campaign. The vice president publicly called her rival a “fascist” last week, citing the opinion of retired General John Kelly, who served as the chief of staff in the Trump administration.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, meanwhile, said at the same rally that “I imagine that nearly every person in this room has a relative who served in the Second World War. Our families actually went and defeated the Nazis. To call us Nazis is a disgrace.” Vance claimed that the US soldiers who took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 would have been offended by the policies proposed by the Democratic campaign. “If you think those brave men were fighting for an open border and sex change surgeries for illegal aliens, the proper term for you is ‘dips**t’,” he declared.

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Completely gone. As is Mika.

NOTE: JD Vance’s wife is “non-white”.

Whoopi: Trump Will Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport The Non-Whites (MN)

The media continues to make absurd assertions against Donald Trump in a desperate effort to derail his campaign just a week out from the election. The latest came via Whoopi Goldberg on The View who claimed that Trump plans to break up interracial married couples and deport the person who is not white. Not only that, but Golderberg also claimed that Trump would then “put the white guy with someone else.” It’s completely absurd claim that resides only in her warped reality. “He’s not gonna be – he’s not gonna say, ‘Oh, you’re with a white guy, I’m gonna keep you from being deported,’” Goldberg blurted. “No, he’s gonna deport you and put the white guy with someone else,” she ridiculously asserted.

“The man is out there!” she screamed wide eyed. Who is “out there” exactly? Who are the ones fomenting division? If this is what they’re like now, imagine what’s going to happen when Trump wins. As if that wasn’t enough batshit crazy, The View then wheeled out “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski who literally started crying and saying all Trump supporters are Nazis. “These are the final hours,” she warned, adding “I come with such dire warnings, and I mean them from the bottom of my heart!” asserting that we are witnessing the “descent into fascism.”

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“..the most probable outcomes are: Trump victory; GOP clean sweep.”

‘World’s Most Accurate Economist’ Predicts US Election Outcome (RT)

Republican candidate Donald Trump will “most probably” win the US presidential election next month, economist Christophe Barraud, ranked by Bloomberg as the top forecaster of the American economy, has said. With one week to go until the election, Democratic candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris leads Trump by less than one percentage point, according to the New York Times, which has reported that the gap is narrowing and that battleground states remain “extraordinarily tight.” Making his prediction in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, Barraud wrote: “Looking at different metrics such as betting markets, polls, election modelers’ forecasts, financial markets, as of now, the most probable outcomes are: Trump victory; GOP clean sweep.”

Barraud is chief economist and strategist at Market Securities, and has been awarded the title of Top Forecaster of the US Economy by Bloomberg every year bar once since 2012. He also presented several possible scenarios of the US election outcome in an interview with Business Insider earlier this week. “A Trump win with a Republican sweep” and a majority in the Senate would enable the new president to implement tax cuts for corporations and households, as well as focus more on domestic rather than foreign policy, Barraud said. It would also have a short-term positive impact on US economic growth, creating a GDP boost between 2.1% and 2.3% in 2025, he added.

Among the other scenarios is a Trump victory with a divided Congress, according to the expert. This would limit his ability to cut taxes, forcing him to focus on foreign policy, likely by implementing trade restrictions and tariffs, Barraud said. The outcome would hurt global growth and slow the US economy in the long term, he added. If Harris wins with a divided Congress, there will be minimal changes to economic policies, according to Barraud. Earlier, Allan Lichtman, known as the “Nostradamus” of US elections for accurately predicting nine of the last ten presidential outcomes since 1984, said Harris will win the November 5 vote.

Trump Political Director

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“I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records..”

Musk Denies Allegations He Worked Illegally in America (ET)

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has denied allegations that he worked illegally in the United States in the early days of his career. An Oct. 27 report from The Washington Post alleges that Musk began his career working illegally in the U.S. for a period in 1995 while he was building a Silicon Valley startup, Zip2, which sold for about $300 million four years later. The outlet cited company documents, former business associates, and a past CEO of the company who said investors were worried that Musk could be deported if discovered. In a series of posts on social media, Musk denied the allegations. Responding to a video of President Joe Biden referencing the Post’s claims, Musk said he had authorization to work in the United States.

In another post, he provided more details about his immigration status. Musk says he was initially on a J-1 visa for international students to pursue academic training or research, then transitioned to an H1-B visa allowing temporary employment for specialty occupations. “I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records,” Musk said. Musk was born in South Africa. At age 18, he immigrated to Canada after gaining Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He attended Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. Musk moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but dropped out after two days and co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

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Rep. Mark E. Green, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, represents Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District.

Chaos and Crime: Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies (Mark Green)

Upon being inaugurated, one of the responsibilities Joe Biden and Kamala Harris assumed was to keep the American homeland secure and safeguard our sovereign borders. Nearly four years later, looking at the catastrophic, unprecedented border crisis that has unfolded on their watch, can anyone say with a straight face they have fulfilled that obligation? The answer, unequivocally, is no – and Americans are the ones paying the price. From the beginning, Biden, Harris, and other key officials in their administration were determined to end President Donald Trump’s effective border security policies – regardless of the consequences. They also refused to enforce long-standing immigration laws that administrations of both parties have enforced.

According to a new report by my committee, the incoming Biden-Harris team was warned by current and former Department of Homeland Security law enforcement during the presidential transition of what would happen if they embarked on this path – and yet, they chose to do so anyway. This dereliction of duty has led to disastrous outcomes in the realm of public safety. Under Biden and Harris’ leadership, our borders are wide open and ripe for exploitation, and interior enforcement has fallen off a cliff. The numbers bear this out. Since Fiscal Year 2021, the Border Patrol has recorded more than 55,000 arrests of illegal aliens with criminal histories, compared to just around 22,000 from FY2017-2020. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens has said that “[h]ardened criminals often hide in smuggled migrant groups.” According to one Border Patrol deputy chief patrol agent, “any crime that can be committed, we do encounter people who have committed them.”

The problem of criminal aliens is not just limited to the border. Between FY2017-2020, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 480,000 aliens with criminal convictions or pending charges on their record. By contrast, in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, such arrests dropped to just around 165,000, despite the historic numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border. Likewise, the Trump administration removed more than 604,000 criminal aliens from FY2017-2020, while the Biden-Harris administration only removed around 158,000 from FY2021-2023 (ICE data for FY2024 has not yet been publicly released). Additionally, removals of gang members last year were down 40% from their peak during the Trump administration.

These numbers have dropped because the Biden-Harris administration tied the hands of law enforcement. According to guidance issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September 2021, ICE personnel cannot “rely on the fact of conviction … alone” in deciding whether to detain a suspected criminal alien, a statement that one federal judge ruled in 2022 “flips the presumption of detention on its head.” It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s Non-Detained Docket has exploded to well over 7.4 million individuals – up from just around 3.2 million at the end of FY2020. Among these millions are nearly 650,000 aliens with criminal backgrounds, including more than 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 with sexual assault convictions, and more than 62,000 convicted of assault.

The consequences of this policy of non-enforcement have been deadly. One need only ask the families of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and many others whose lives have been taken or otherwise irrevocably shattered at the hands of those here illegally.

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No, the US has no political prisoners…

Steve Bannon Released From Prison After Serving 4 Months (ET)

Steve Bannon, who served as a top White House adviser early on in the Trump administration, was released from prison on Oct. 29 after serving four months for contempt of Congress. “The four months in federal prison not only didn’t break me, it empowered me,” he said during his “WarRoom” podcast. “I am more energized and more focused than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” Bannon, 70, was serving time in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. His release comes after a federal judge on Oct. 22 denied his request for early release. Bannon entered prison in July after the Supreme Court refused to take up his request to avoid his four-month sentence. When he began serving his sentence in July, Bannon called himself a “political prisoner.” “I am proud of going to prison,” he said at the time, adding that he was standing up to Attorney General Merrick Garland and what he called a “corrupt” Justice Department.

A jury convicted him in 2022 for two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with requests from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Bannon, 70, claimed that former President Donald Trump had extended executive privilege over his testimony. Bannon’s attorney, David Schoen, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the district court had wrongly excluded evidence surrounding another attorney advising Bannon that he didn’t have to comply with the subpoenas because Trump had invoked that privilege. “At a bare minimum, it’s required that the defendant know or understand that his or her conduct was unlawful or wrong,” Schoen told the court in November 2023. “Mr. Bannon acted in the only way he believed and understood from his lawyer that the law permitted him … to behave in response to the subpoena.” The appeals court said that under its precedent, Bannon’s advice-of-attorney defense “is no defense at all.”

“As both this court and the Supreme Court have repeatedly explained, a contrary rule would contravene the text of the contempt statute and hamstring Congress’s investigatory authority,” Judge Brad Garcia said, writing for the court. “Because we have no basis to depart from that binding precedent, and because none of Bannon’s other challenges to his convictions have merit, we affirm.” Bannon faces other criminal charges in New York, where a judge has set Dec. 9 as the start date for the trial in his border fundraising case. Prosecutors allege that Bannon helped funnel more than $100,000 to a co-founder of the nonprofit WeBuildTheWall Inc. who was allegedly getting a secret salary after Bannon and others had promised donors that every dollar would be used to help construct a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges, calling them “nonsense.” In 2021, Trump pardoned Bannon in a federal case similar to the one he’s currently facing from New York prosecutors.

That case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which also prosecuted Trump for alleged election interference involving a payment to adult performer Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels. Trump similarly pleaded not guilty. Bannon entered prison the same month that another former Trump White House adviser, Peter Navarro, exited under similar circumstances. Navarro claimed executive privilege in defying a congressional subpoena, but D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta said he hadn’t shown enough evidence the privilege was asserted. Trump is facing potential prison time for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but has successfully avoided trial in Washington. His appeal on presidential immunity resulted in a landmark Supreme Court case and a lengthy delay of the pre-trial process for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of him.

Bannon

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“..It is “the overreach of the Biden-Harris administration”, starting from anti-Trump lawfare and ending with transgender propaganda, that has fuelled the division dramatically..”

Secessionism and Polarization on Rise in US (Sp.)

The election integrity dispute surrounding the 2020 vote reportedly reinvigorated secessionist sentiment across the US which is continuing to grow ahead of election day. The Texas Nationalist movement, which advocates for Texas to secede from the US, is gaining momentum amid the southern border crisis. The Lone Star state is not the only one where activists are pushing for independence: around 25 US states are “ready” to leave, according to the Daniel Miller, the president of the secessionist Texas Nationalist Movement, in April. It is “the overreach of the Biden-Harris administration”, starting from anti-Trump lawfare and ending with transgender propaganda, that has fuelled the division dramatically, according to Michael Shannon, a Conservative political commentator and Newsmax columnist.

“Things like that and then the federal government mandating that men who think they are women can compete in women’s sport, arresting abortion protesters, people praying quietly in front of abortion mills, the political manhunt against the January 6th rioters that has extended even down to grandmothers, all of this really concerns Republicans, conservatives and I guess the few independents who still respect the rule of law. And so that’s what started this real division,” Shannon told Sputnik. The US political commentator noted that Texas secession is unlikely to happen any time soon. Still, he does not rule out that some red states could strive to leave the nation if Harris wins. “If there becomes a real split, it’ll probably start with Ron DeSantis in Florida, who will begin by refusing to cooperate with any federal agency that tries to, and this is assuming Harris wins, any federal agency that tries to impose these, frankly, totalitarian edicts from Washington,” Shannon noted.

The YouGov February poll indicated that 23% of Americans would support their state seceding from the US, whereas 28% would support a state other than their own leaving. While 51% of American respondents firmly oppose secession, 27% remain unsure. A separate YouGov survey shows that the divide across the nation comes along party lines: Democrats and Republicans think they have little in common, unlike their peers a decade ago. Last February, House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene called for nothing short of a “national divorce” between Republican and Democratic states. The Trump-Harris race is very close, making the country almost evenly split, Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, told Sputnik. Bottom line is that one side is going to be very disappointed by the election results no matter who wins, according to the pundit.

“If Trump wins, you’re going to have almost 50% of the country where Democrats are very disappointed,” Jewett said. “And if Kamala Harris wins, you’re going to have all those Republican Trump fans, almost 50% of the country. They’re going to be very upset as well. I think in the short run, it’s definitely going to exacerbate, make it worse.” Therefore, the question is whether the winner would try to pull people together, or whether half of American voters will remain alienated, the academic noted, drawing attention to the fact that presently there is some big difference between Democratic and Republican states.

“We’ll have to see how the leaders on both sides react if they react as normal or the winner is gracious and the loser is gracious, and then maybe those partisan divides won’t be so bad. But if they do not, if they question the election results, or if the winner really rubs it in and says ‘okay, now I’m going to do everything I want and I’m only representing the people that voted for me’ – that’s not going to be great for American society overall.” The professor warns that partisan divisions might get worse potentially in the longer run.

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“It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.”

Jay Bhattacharya Receives Prestigious Award for Intellectual Freedom (Turley)

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award. The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. [Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya] has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats. That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics. All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area. It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses. Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.” Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence. Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government. Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.”

Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics. Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs. I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions. They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture. Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists? Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.” Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.” None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed. There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him. The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

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“If they’re worrying about Julian Assange, well, they ought to get a new job..”

Assange’s Father on Von Der Leyen: EU Falls to Bits Under ‘Frau Genocide’ (Sp.)

The European Union is “falling to bits” under the leadership of the head of the European Commission Ursula Van der Leyen, who is commonly called “Frau Genocide,” John Shipton, an Australian activist and the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in an interview with Sputnik. “The EU is falling to bits. Everybody within the EU is squabbling. The commissioner of the EU, Van der Leyen, we call her Frau Genocide – it is very popular. I mean, everybody despises her. She’s an authoritarian figure. In Germany the GDP [growth] last year was 0.2%. That’s not even 1%, it’s two-tenths of 1%,” Shipton noted. In December 2023, Clare Daly, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Ireland, called von der Leyen “Frau Genocide” and said that she was responsible for the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Immediately after the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, von der Leyen, who took a pro-Israeli position and for some time ignored the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the deaths of civilians, was harshly criticized in the media, which accused her of “double standards,” recalling her statements on the conflict in Ukraine, and warned against making statements on behalf of the entire EU. Later, the European Commission press service and the European External Action Service had to correct von der Leyen’s one-sided statements, explaining that the opinion expressed “is her personal and does not reflect the position of the entire EU.” The United States does not like and does not accept the truth about itself, John Shipton, an Australian activist and the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in an interview with Sputnik.

In July, Assange was released from a British prison after many years of imprisonment and returned to Australia following a plea agreement with the US authorities. According to Shipton, Washington “took very strong measures against Julian for publishing the truth.” “And also they put Chelsea Manning in jail for 35 years. And Edward Snowden had to have asylum in the Russian Federation. So it is clear that they do take very strong exceptions to the truth about themselves being published. They don’t like the truth about themselves,” the activist said about the US actions. However, Shipton said Washington had “too many problems” to continue worrying about the Assange case. “If they’re worrying about Julian Assange, well, they ought to get a new job,” Shipton advised the US authorities.

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“Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.”

When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays (Paul Craig Roberts)

On two previous occasions Israel sent its vaunted army into southern Lebanon only to be driven out by the Arab militia, Hezbollah, operating without tanks, without an air force, without air defense. It appears that it has now happened again. Israel has been stopped cold on the ground, causing the Israeli defense minister to announce an end to the ground operations. The Israeli Army is only good at killing women and children from the air, as in Gaza. Israel’s war against Hezbollah has been replaced with Israeli air strikes against civilian residential areas in Beirut, which provides more evidence that the only function of the Israeli military is to murder women and children from the air. The obvious conclusion is that the Israeli military doesn’t fight; it commits war crimes against civilians. The reason civilian neighborhoods in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon and not Hezbollah territory, are being destroyed from the air is that Iran and Russia permit it by not providing air defense systems to Lebanon.

Iran and Russia are “maintaining peace” by permitting Israel to slaughter Lebanese women and children and destroy schools and hospitals from the air. It is a paradox that Washington, Putin, and Iran are equally indifferent to Israel’s slaughter from the air of civilians in Gaza and civilians in Lebanon. Any one of the three countries could stop the murder of civilians, but not one of them will do anything. Putin has placed his bets on BRICS, but that is an economic organization that might or might not succeed. Its success is handicapped by the fact that the Russian and Chinese economists are indoctrinated by the American neoliberals, and, therefore, are not merely worthless to their countries but positively harmful. If Washington wanted the Israelis’ murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to stop, Washington would stop providing Israel with the weapons. Clearly, Israel is doing what Washington wants.

But why do Russia and Iran want Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to be massacred when either country can stop it? It is beginning to look as if it is not merely Washington and Israel that Satan has in his grasp, but Russia and Iran as well. Every time Putin gets off-focused from Russia’s only threat–Washington–he finds himself with a mess on this hands. With Putin focused on the Olympics in China, Washington sent the Georgian army into South Ossetia. With Putin focused on the Sochi Olympics, Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government and brought war to Russia. Now Putin is focused on BRICS and Washington is stirring up a color revolution in Georgia to regain the former Russian province as another beached against Russia. The opposition parties and the President of Georgia do not accept the election results, which are favorable to Russia.

I think that Putin by refusing to use power is losing credibility. I don’t think Putin understands the ideological character of the Democrat Party and the ideological woke liberal-left that controls it. If the Democrats manage to retain control over the government, I don’t think Putin is prepared for the consequences. Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” That is as true of Russians as of Americans. Reality conflicts with hopes, aspirations, and plans, and when ignored upsets all of them. Putin’s Ukraine conflict which has greatly widened, the brewing color revolution in Georgia supported by Washington, and Iran’s demonization and isolation are all self-inflicted disasters caused by ignoring reality.

When powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran stand aside from genocide, they destroy their own reputations. The world is crying out for someone with the means to stand up for humanity, for justice, for truth, and there are no takers. In Gaza children undergo amputations without anesthesia. The little water available is polluted. Everyone is sick. Washington keeps sending the weapons used from the air against purely civilian populations. Disease and starvation will finish the job for the Americans and the Israelis. It is America that has enabled this genocide. And Americans, in their insouciant existence, think they are the salt of the earth.

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They’re calling up another 160,000.

Ex-President Warns of Growing Ukrainian Anger Over Military Draft (RT)

Ukrainian society is growing increasingly resentful of Kiev’s mobilization campaign and is now plagued by divisions, former President Leonid Kuchma has said. In an interview with Interfax on Monday, Kuchma, who held office between 1994 and 2005 and led Kiev’s delegation during talks to settle the Donbass crisis between 2014 and 2020, lamented that Ukraine’s internal unity has eroded since the escalation of hostilities with Russia in February 2022. According to Kuchma, the army, society and the leadership initially managed to set their differences aside and became a “monolith.” “Even in politics, the infighting disappeared for a while. Today it is no longer the case,” he said, adding that Ukrainian elites “have renewed the rat race of their petty interests.” In wider society, there is also dissatisfaction “with the army’s demands for increased mobilization,” Kuchma added.

“The government blames society for not being ready to stand up for the state, while society urges the authorities to lead by example and start with themselves. There are many such contradictions,” he said. The former Ukrainian leader said that while the country remains “united by hatred of the enemy,” there is “less mutual understanding” among people and that this “postpones victory” for Kiev. Ukraine’s foreign policy is beset by a similar problem, Kuchma claimed. A kind of pluralism appeared in our global communication,” he stated, contrasting it with the early stages of the conflict, when Kiev signaled it would “fight to the end” and called for help from nations around the world. This comes from a need to hone separate narratives for different international partners depending on how hawkish they are on Russia, Kuchma said.

“Some are defenders of fundamental Western values, others are supporters of ‘business as usual’ with Russia. Some are determined ‘hawks’, others are cautious ‘peacemakers’,” Kuchma said. Kiev announced general mobilization after the escalation of hostilities with Russia, barring most men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country. This spring, faced with mounting losses, Kiev lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, and significantly tightened mobilization rules. Videos showing recruitment officers attempting to catch eligible men in various public places, often resulting in violent clashes, have since appeared online. Ukrainian frontline troops interviewed by Western media consistently complain of a lack of manpower, leading to long rotation, extreme exhaustion, and gradual retreat under Russian pressure.

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“..the largest post-election drop in approval rating of any British prime minister in modern history..”

Took him just 4 months. Who’s next?

Not long ago, Elon Musk predicted civil war in the UK. To what extent was he wrong?

Support For New UK PM collapses (RT)

Keir Starmer has suffered the largest post-election drop in approval rating of any British prime minister in modern history, according to a recent poll. Starmer is now more unpopular than his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, was when he resigned in July. Starmer rode to power in July on the back of a landslide general election victory for the Labour Party. Seeking to distance himself from the leftism of the party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer promised to drag Labour back to the centrism of Tony Blair, and to deliver “good government, national security, secure borders, and economic stability.” Less than four months into his premiership, Starmer’s approval rating has plummeted from a post-election high of +11 to a dismal low of -38, according to a survey of 1,012 adults carried out by More in Common. This 49-point drop in approval is “unprecedented” in modern history, More in Common Director Luke Tryl told the Telegraph on Monday.

According to the poll, Starmer is less popular than Rishi Sunak was when he resigned as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party following July’s election. Sunak had an approval rating of -37 when his party was wiped out by Labour, which has since risen to -31. Blair enjoyed a +60 approval rating following Labour’s landslide 1997 election win, which took three years to fall into negative territory. Tryl told The Telegraph that two key decisions have cratered Starmer’s popularity. “If you ask what people have noticed, by a country mile it is the decision on the winter fuel allowance and the early release of prisoners,” he explained, adding that controversy over Labour donor Waheed Alli’s gifts to senior officials, including Starmer, has also dented the PM’s standing.

Last month, Starmer’s government tightened eligibility rules for winter fuel payments, effectively denying around 10 million pensioners payments of up to £300 ($390) toward heating their homes. Days earlier, it was announced that thousands of prisoners, including convicted killers and kidnappers, would be released after serving just 40% of their sentences, in a bid to ease prison overcrowding. As images of career criminals celebrating their release and publicly thanking Starmer emerged, the PM said that he “shares the public’s anger,” but insisted that “there was no choice.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of people have been jailed for taking part in anti-Islam and anti-immigration riots across the UK in late July and early August. More than two dozen people have been handed prison sentences for online offenses, including a Conservative councillor’s wife who received 31 months behind bars for making X posts calling for migrant accommodation to be burned down. The More in Common poll was published ahead of Starmer’s first budget on Wednesday, which is expected to include tax hikes to fund healthcare and housing spending. Around 68% of respondents said they are worried about the budget, while 70% said that overall, “things are getting worse” in the UK.

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“The shocking part is how the journalists comply with this draconian system which would have made Stalin glow with pride.”

Delusions Of Adequacy: How British Ambassadors Became A Joke (Jay)

The ugly incident at the airport in Moscow with the British deputy ambassador to Russia grabbing at journalists’ cameras and even ripping a press badge off one should be seen as a message to all of us, when talking about British diplomacy. It’s dead. Tom Dodd’s embarrassing few minutes, which will surely haunt him for the rest of his career, could not be a more damning example of what diplomacy was once and what it is now. Like international journalism, diplomacy is barely a shadow of its former self and those who work as diplomats are third grade at best, cardboard cut outs for their predecessors 30 years ago who really had clout and affected how the world operated. The new generation of British diplomats, like Dodd, are not only entirely ineffective and a waste of space and taxpayers’ money but they also come with a number of peculiarities which you wouldn’t normally expect.

Narcissism, arrogance and delusion are the new qualities of this breed and it was all there to see in the video clip of Dodd who was absolutely outraged that journalists could actually approach him with questions. Of course there is quite a great deal of tension between Russia and the UK at the moment as Dodd is now part of a team “inspecting the work of the country’s mission in Moscow in the aftermath of the spy scandal”, reports RT. In mid-September, six British embassy staff were declared persona non grata over their alleged involvement in “subversive activities” and espionage. Dodd is confused though. He broke the unwritten rules of the foreign office. Typically, ambassadors in Africa and Middle East countries manipulate local media for their own needs and generally treat local journalists like their personal servants. Of course, they avoid international journalists like the plague, especially their own.

They basically go native and align themselves with the regime’s own strategy on handling local press. But this ‘rule’ cannot apply in Moscow where, apart from the press there having more freedoms that your average British hack, the UK is considered practically an enemy of the state. And so Dodd was lost by the ambush situation where his requirements as a ‘new generation’ foreign office twerp didn’t extend to dealing with press with tricky questions. His predecessor of 30 years ago would have revelled in the opportunity to deal with the questions with a certain élan and composure. Yet it’s narcissism which is the weakest point which shows. It’s this belief that the individual themselves is the most important subject which shames Britain as a once glorious country, now making it look like a failed state which no longer has any relevance on the world stage.

Todd belongs to a generation of diplomats who consider journalists more or less as stenographers who dutifully write what you tell them to write, on the occasion, and remain silent for the rest of the period. Like rats in a basket which you occasionally shake to amuse yourself. And yet you can hardly blame him. Britain’s own press is such a shambles these days and so embedded in the government’s annals that you can hardly call it the fourth estate any more. Any foreign correspondent who emails a question to the foreign office media team will tell you that. When a reply comes, it is Sir Humphry gobbledygook language which doesn’t even tackle your question. On many occasions, in my own experience, the FCO plainly lies to journalists. That isn’t what is shocking. The shocking part is how the journalists comply with this draconian system which would have made Stalin glow with pride.

The system, which you would normally associate with a regime in West Africa, is supported by the journalists themselves. And Dodd is part of this system. Corrupt, outdated, backward delusional view about Britain and how it should deal with the press. But it’s a pattern which I have noticed is quite typical of British ambassadors. While I was in Lebanon, there was a British ambassador there who agreed to an interview with me. When I didn’t do the ‘local’ thing of writing a shining piece on his achievements but instead wrote objectively about him, the same ambassador turned on me. Tom Fletcher, an effeminate narcissist who posed for a photo shoot as James Bond while ambassador and spent most of his time filling social media with photos of himself and super models with swollen upper lips, defamed me to a group of MEPs who visited Beirut, trying to destroy my credibility – as an act of childish petulance for the interview which touched upon his vanity and lack of knowledge of the region.

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“Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after..”

A Heroic Preference For Self-Destruction Takes Hold In Israel (Alastair Crooke)

The war without limits ideology – purely theoretically – could be a thinkable solution: Ron Dermer, a former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and confidant of Netanyahu, was asked a few months earlier what he saw as the solution to the Palestinian conflict. He replied that both the West Bank and Gaza must be totally dis-armed – “yes”. Yet more important than disarmament, Dermer said, was the absolute necessity that all Palestinians be “de-radicalised”. (This has now been extended to the whole region that must be ‘de-radicalised’). When asked to expand, Dermer pointed approvingly to the outcome of WW2: The Germans were defeated, but more plainly the Japanese were fully ‘de-radicalised’ at the end of the war. ‘De-radicalisation’ therefore means installing a Leviathan-esque “despotism that reduces the majority to total powerlessness, including spiritual, intellectual and moral powerlessness.

The total Leviathan is a unique, absolute and unlimited power, spiritual and temporal, over other humans”, as Dr Henri Hude has observed. Thus, as postmodern culture sinks into the inhuman and favours the Leviathan – with the total annihilation of other peoples and the suppression of their separate identities – the question arises, could ‘war without limits’ work? Could such terror impose on the Middle East an unconditional surrender “that would allow it to change profoundly, militarily, politically and culturally, and to transform as a satellite within Pax Americana?” Hude goes on to note, “The conditions demanded of Japan by the USA were exorbitant, and it was to be expected that Japan would put up a tremendous resistance. The atrocious use of the bomb broke this resistance”. The clear response that Dr Hude gives in his book Philosophie de la Guerre is that war without limits cannot be the solution, because it cannot deliver long-lasting ‘deterrence’ or de-radicalisation.

“On the contrary, it is the most certain cause of war. Ceasing to be rational, despising opponents who are more rational than it is, arousing opponents who are even less rational than it is. The Leviathan will fall; and even before its fall, no security is assured”. The latter gives two insights as to how Hude’s analysis might apply to today’s wars: One is that whenever postmodern culture capsizes into ‘necessary’ violence (which it hyper-culpabilises, since it prioritises life, rather than suffering), it can only justify the violence through evoking a more than absolute evil – the demonized enemy. Secondly, Hude identifies such extreme ‘will to power’ – without limits – as necessarily containing the psyche of self-destruction within it too. For the Leviathan to function, it must remain rational and powerful. Ceasing to be rational, despising opponents who are more rational, and angering opponents who are less rational than it is itself, the Leviathan then must fall.

One respected military observer – Maj. Gen. (Res.) Itzhak Brik, a former senior IDF commander and a former long-serving IDF ombudsman – has warned again of Israel’s looming fall: Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long.

Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us. Israel teeters at the edge: It doesn’t have the necessary forces; it doesn’t have a culture of tolerating persistent suffering; and it will not be able to impose itself over the plurality of resistance that it faces. Reason already is cast aside, its opponents are ridiculed: a ‘heroic’ preference for self-destruction has taken hold. ‘Masada’ is being spoken of.

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No Russian gas.

Mass Industrial Strikes Begin In Germany (RT)

German trade union IG Metall on Tuesday launched strikes in the nation’s metal and electrical industries in an attempt to win higher wages, German media has reported. The action comes amid growing concern about the health of the EU’s largest manufacturing economy. According to the tabloid Bild, employees began walking off the job during the night shift, including at Volkswagen’s plant in the city of Osnabruck, where workers worry the plant may be closed. Elsewhere, around 200 employees of the battery manufacturer Clarios went on strike in Hanover, Lower Saxony, carrying torches and union flags, the outlet wrote. Meanwhile, in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, around 400 employees, including those at Jensen GmbH, KSM Castings Group, Robert Bosch, Waggonbau Graaff and ZF CV Systems Hannover, have reportedly halted operations.

Protests are also expected at BMW and Audi plants in Bavaria. Work is to be stopped nationwide during the course of the day, the tabloid wrote. ”The fact that production lines are now at a standstill and offices are empty is the responsibility of the employers,” IG Metall’s negotiator and district manager Thorsten Groger stated, as quoted by Deutsche Welle. IG Metall is demanding a 7% pay raise compared to the 3.6% raise over a period of 27 months offered by employers’ associations, due to soaring inflation. The companies call such demands unrealistic. The mass strikes come as Volkswagen announced on Monday it would close “at least” three of its ten plants in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and downsize remaining plants in the country.

The measures are part of a cost-cutting drive, the conglomerate said earlier. Oliver Blume, chief executive of the VW Group, has cited a “difficult economic environment” and “failing competitiveness of the German economy” as factors behind the decision. The German Association of the Automotive Industry warned last year that the country was “dramatically losing its international competitiveness” due to soaring energy costs. A recent survey by the VDA auto industry association suggested that the reshuffling of the German car industry could lead to 186,000 job losses by 2035, roughly a quarter of which have already occurred.

Read more …

 

 

 

YMCA

 

 

Little things
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851182802735108492

 

 

Turbo cancers
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851199741276602449

 

 

Kiseki

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Mar 132022
 


Pablo Picasso Studio with plaster head 1925

 

Perfectly Lawful and Legal and Unfortunate (Anna Von Reitz)
Much Wants More And Loses All (GEFIRA)
Boomerang Sanctions (Kadi)
Putin’s Options (Jim Rickards)
Russia’s Long-term Economic Prospects (Milanovic)
Fiat Currencies Are Going To “Fail Spectacularly” (Lawrence Lepard)
‘We Are in a New Cold War’ With China: Ex-US Assistant Secretary of State (ET)
Children in China Diagnosed With Leukemia After Taking Chinese Vaccines (ET)
Hospitals No Longer Required to Report COVID Deaths (Mercola)
Moderna Approved a $926 Million Golden Parachute For Its CEO (DM)

 

 

We see the world through the eyes of Hollywood. There’s good and there’s bad, and WE are always on the good side. But the world is not like that. We know this because the best literature never is either. But who reads literature anymore?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Ritter: We trained Nazis

 

 

“..you are all better off letting Vladimir Putin take out the garbage for you.”

Perfectly Lawful and Legal and Unfortunate (Anna Von Reitz)

When the old Russian Federation broke up, and Russia released the Ukraine as an independent country it came with the proviso that if there was evidence of criminality, genocide, international threats to Russia on Ukrainian soil, etc. Russia could come back in and secure the situation. This is part of Russia’s obligation to the rest of the world as well as a matter of Russian security. So, Ukraine was free to be its own country, with the understanding that they were going to be good little international citizens. And if they got out of hand, Russia would come back in and clean things up. Following Ukrainian independence in 1991, the Usual Suspects piled on. It was like a gold rush. Drug smuggling. Human trafficking. Arms sales. Counterfeiting. Organ harvesting. Oil privateering.

Every sordid nasty dirty business in the world was imported to Ukraine, by all the Agencies, the “US Corp”, the DOD, the Mobs of various nations, and associated corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton and on and on and on. All the Dirty Deal Guys showed up like gangbangers. And everyone including Russia just shook their heads. It was business as usual for the Ollie Norths of the world.[..] So, Russia invoked its treaty proviso and came in to clean the situation up and as Vladimir Putin said, “take the garbage out” — not because they wanted to spend all that money and risk their lives and take all the abuse that the propaganda machine can throw — but because otherwise, they’d have all those stockpiles of chemical and biological weapon on their back door step, along with all the other nastiness that was already going on.

[..] Tough as it is, say, aye, Vladimir Putin. Thank you, Russia. And to the people of Ukraine, we know you are, for the most part, innocent victims of the oligarchs and their western Sugar Daddies. Make it easy on yourselves. Stay home and step back. Let Russia clean out the Vermin for you. You’ll be glad you did. If the US/Ukrainian oligarchy had been allowed to continue, the vicious animals would have come in and used a pretext to engage in war on your beautiful land. They would have done what they did in Iraq and polluted it will dirty bombs and dirty artillery shells and ruined your land for farming for generations.

Then they would have gone home and jerked up the price of food for everyone ten times over, because your produce, your wheat, and everything else wouldn’t be there to compete against them. These mean and diabolical criminals always have ten axes to grind. They always figure to win, if not one way, then by another. Take it from the Americans. We’ve been dealing with them for 160 years. We know what they do. We know how they think. And you are all better off letting Vladimir Putin take out the garbage for you. Believe it or not.

Putin evil plan

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Key: “Russians view the hostilities as a repeat of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.”

Much Wants More And Loses All (GEFIRA)

The collective post-West has been running amok for the last two weeks. The powers that be make believe that they did not expect that events would unfold the way they are unfolding now (though they did their best to make things happen as they are happening) and they make a show imposing sanctions on the aggressor and assuring the populace that the aggressor sooner or later will cave in. There is yet a third aspect to the phenomenon: the same powers that be want the people to forget that merely twenty years back they themselves assaulted Yugoslavia/Serbia, used missiles with depleted uranium, bombed cities and shot at civilians. Of course, that earlier event was a humanitarian action while the current one is a brutal act of aggression, but we digress.

Now there is a big misconception on the part of the post-West about Russia. If the Western media claim the Russian people are against the war or that the Russian people are about to rebel and overthrow President Putin, then they are either delusional or lying through their teeth. Reality is something that refuses to obey our wishes. The Russian people have rallied around their president and and their authorities; the Russian people – unlike citizens of the post-Western countries – are patriotic and ready to sacrifice themselves in defence of their fatherland. Western sanctions? The post-West may withdraw businesses and impose sanctions on Russian oligarchs, which is music to the ears of the Russian people. They resented Western dominance anyway and they will be more than happy to see the oligarchs mopped up from their society.

Russians view the hostilities as a repeat of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Contrary to what has been done to the Western collective mentality, the Russian authorities under Vladimir Putin took great efforts to raise Russia’s citizens in patriotic values. Russians are going to win because they do not care about money so much as the West does. That’s one big misconception that Western people have about their opponents from the East. It is the West that cannot imagine a life without money and the resultant luxuries. Sanctions or no sanctions, Western companies will sooner or later (I bet: sooner) resume business with Russia because – as everybody in the West knows – “money makes the world go round”. No less a person than Comrade Lenin famously said: capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will make a noose to hang them. And so they will, make no bones about it.

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“The current soaring fuel prices at service stations world-wide are not an outcome of the Russian action in Ukraine. They are the outcome of the sanctions.”

Boomerang Sanctions (Kadi)

The current Western sanctions on nations that refuse to follow the directives of the West do not carry any weight at all; or anything that comes close. Non-Western countries can survive without Tesla, Porsche and Ferrari cars. Earth will continue to spin without French perfumes and champaign. With those facts known though unspoken, the USA continues to impose sanctions on other nations by utilizing the power of the Greenback, ie US Dollar of USD for short. But this approach is foolish to say the least, and it is bound to backfire. America is determined to keep the stature of the USD as the single reserve world currency. But to maintain this stature, America must make sure that the rest of the world needs to use the USD and that it has no other alternative.

But when successive American administrations impose sanctions on other nations that prevent them from using the USD, they are effectively shooting their last and only remaining asset in the foot. This is not a complex issue that requires a PhD in macro-economics to understand. It is very simple in fact. You cannot coerce people to do something by way of banning them from doing it. This is a simple logical contradiction that even children can understand. This oxymoronic comedy of errors appears more ludicrous when we see that the USD is the only asset left that the USA can use to impose sanctions with. Do successive American administrations really believe that sanctioned and potentially sanctionable nations, are going to sit idle and starve themselves to death without taking pre-emptive measures to avert this?

If anything, sanctions over the years have taught even small and developing countries like Cuba, Syria and Iran to be self-reliant and innovative. Those countries have produced whole ‘armies’ of technicians who are able to manufacture spare parts even for old American cars. When you see photos of 1950’s Chevvies in Cuba, rest assured that there are hardly any original made-in-America parts left in them. If an American owns such an antique model and cannot find parts for it in the US, he/she may be able to find them in Cuba. [..] The current soaring fuel prices at service stations world-wide are not an outcome of the Russian action in Ukraine. They are the outcome of the sanctions.

These sanctions can only turn back and hurt the hand that created them. They are not arrows aimed at targets. They are boomerangs, but even boomerangs are meant to return to the hand that launched them when they miss the target. But Western sanctions are sharply-pointed boomerangs that can only hit back, and hit with vengeance, and the soaring fuel prices may just be only the beginning.

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“The shooting war may or may not be over soon, but the financial war has just started and will continue after the shooting stops.”

Putin’s Options (Jim Rickards)

There’s no doubt that the financial sanctions put on Russia by the U.S., the U.K., EU members and others are the most severe ever imposed. The U.S. Treasury has announced 15 separate sanctions programs in recent days and no doubt more are on the way. The targets of these sanctions include Russian banks, Russian stocks and bonds and various payment channels. Most significantly, the U.S. froze the accounts of the Central Bank of Russia. That’s the first time a major central bank’s assets have been frozen since the Cold War, and possibly ever. Yet the financial attacks on Russia go far beyond official sanctions. Numerous private companies including Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Shell and some major airlines have ceased their business activities in Russia.

Visa and Mastercard have stopped accepting credit card charges from Russia. Google and Apple have turned off the mobile payment apps on phones held by Russian citizens. Shipping giant Maersk has stopped its vessels from unloading or taking cargo from Russian ports. Stock index funds are pushing Russian companies out of their indexes and the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is divesting Russian stocks. The list of public and private embargoes and boycotts goes on. The financial impact on Russia will be extreme. The Russian economy may be expected to collapse by 20% or more in the first half of 2022, an amount comparable to the economic collapses in the second quarter of 2020 during the first lockdown stage of the pandemic. But Russia has not stood still.

The Central Bank of Russia imposed capital controls so that Russian companies cannot pay interest or principal on international debts. That means those loans and bonds may soon go into default. Many such securities may be stuffed into 401(k) plans of Americans under the umbrella of “emerging markets” funds or ETFs. Even more important is the possibility that interbank lending may start to dry up as Russian banks are frozen and Western banks reduce leverage and shrink balance sheets in order to reduce risk. This will lead to defaults in the West and could even mark the beginning of a global liquidity crisis that can only be contained by Federal Reserve currency swap lines, like we saw in the early stages of the pandemic when markets were collapsing.

But even that technique may not work since there are no swap arrangements in place between the Fed and the Central Bank of Russia. The shooting war may or may not be over soon, but the financial war has just started and will continue after the shooting stops. For that matter, a global financial panic may emerge even before the shooting stops. We all see what’s happening on the surface. Here’s what you don’t see: Someone is on the wrong side of every one of those trades. Hedge funds and banks are losing billions and are sinking. It takes about a week for bodies to float to the surface.

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“US sanctions once imposed are extraordinary difficult to lift.”

Russia’s Long-term Economic Prospects (Milanovic)

When we look at Russia’s long-term economic prospects, it is also useful to begin with some assumptions and to look at historical examples. We can make two assumptions. First, that the current Russian regime, in one form or another, might continue for some ten to twenty years. Second, we can assume that American and Western sanctions will continue throughout the entire period of say, 50 years that we consider here. The arguments for this are as follows. US sanctions once imposed are extraordinary difficult to lift. As of today, there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed against Russia which is more than the sum of sanctions in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. History shows that US sanctions can last almost without any time limit: sanctions on Cuba are more than 60 years old, on Iran, more than 40 years old, and even the sanctions on the USSR (e.g. the Jackson-Vanik amendment) that were imposed for one reason continued on the books during twenty years after the end of the USSR even after the original reason that led to the sanctions (Jewish migration) had entirely disappeared.

When the post-Putin government tries to have sanctions lifted, it will be faced by a such a list of concessions that would be politically impossible to satisfy. Thus, sanctions, perhaps not in the exactly the same form, may be expected to last for the entire duration of what we call the long-term here (50 years). It seems obvious then that Russian long-term economic policy will have to follow two objectives: import substitution, and the shift of the economic activity away from Europe towards Asia. While these objectives are, I think, clear the realization will be extremely difficult. As before, consider the historical precedents. Soviet industrialization can be seen as an attempt to substitute imports by creating a strong domestic industrial base. That process however was based on two elements that would be missing in Russia’s future.

First, Soviet access to Western technology that was at the origin of most large Soviet complexes like the Krivoy Rog and the largest factory of tractors in the world in Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad). The surplus extracted through collectivization, and hunger and death of millions, and even the gold taken from Orthodox churches, were used to purchase Western technology. There was never any doubt among the Bolsheviks, from Lenin to Trotsky to Stalin to Bukharin, that for the USSR to develop, it had to industrialize and to do so it needs to import technology from the more developed countries. (That conscience of relative underdevelopment of Russia was extremely strong among all Russian Marxists who were all modernizers.) The ability to import similarly advanced Western technology that could provide the basis for downstream import substitution, will not exist under the regime of sanctions. Therefore such technology would have to be invented locally.

There is, however, is a huge temporal break. Had anyone proposed import substitution approach in the 1990s, it would have been difficult to implement but not impossible: the USSR (and Russia) had at that time a broad industrial base (production of airplanes, cars, white goods; largest producer of steel etc.). The sector was not internationally competitive but, it could have been improved, and with right investments made competitive. But most of these industrial complexes have in the meantime been privatized and liquidated, and whatever was not, is technologically obsolete. In thirty years after the beginning of the “transition”, Russia has not been able to develop any technologically advanced industry except in the military area.

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“Putin just shot “King Dollar” in the head. We can see it in the financial markets, as the price of everything commodity related is going up relentlessly in dollar terms. ”

Fiat Currencies Are Going To “Fail Spectacularly” (Lawrence Lepard)

What just happened in the last two weeks is enormously important and misunderstood by many investors. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the corresponding Western sanctions and seizure of Russian FX reserves are nothing short of a monetary earthquake. The last comparable event was Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971. Russia, with the backing and support of China, just told the world that it is no longer going to sell its oil, gas and wheat for Western currencies which are programmed to debase. The West in its response just said to all countries around the world: “If you have foreign exchange reserves, held in our system, they are no longer safe if we disagree with your politics.” It is similar to what the Canadians did when they moved to seize the bank accounts of Canadians who had demonstrated support for the truckers without due process of law.

Both of these political moves are blatant advertisements for what I call “non state controlled money without counterparty risk”, like gold and bitcoin. If governments can weaponize their money when they do not like what you are doing, what is the natural defense? The US Dollar has been the reserve currency of the world since WW II and the Bretton Woods agreement. This has given the US an enormous advantage and subsidy from the rest of the world because everyone else needs to produce goods and services to obtain dollars and the US can simply produce dollars at no cost by printing them. Putin is now cast in the role of Charles de Gaulle who complained about the “exorbitant privilege” of the US with its dollar hegemony. As we all know, de Gaulle demanded gold in exchange for France’s US dollar FX surpluses and this outflow forced Nixon to close the gold window.

Recall that post this event, gold went from $35 per ounce to $800 per ounce (23x). Russia’s move will lead to a similar move in favor of gold. Putin could see that the US fiscal and monetary situation was becoming untenable and he decided to use this to create an existential threat to the US and the world financial system. He undoubtedly knows that the West has artificially suppressed the price of gold and that is why he has been building his gold reserves steadily for the past 20 years. Putin just shot “King Dollar” in the head. We can see it in the financial markets, as the price of everything commodity related is going up relentlessly in dollar terms.

Russia is long commodities, long gold and doesn’t need fiat currency. His debt to GDP ratio is low and taxes are low. If the world financial markets collapse on a relative basis, the position of Russia will be improved significantly. This is what I believe he is playing for. If investors do not recognize this they will be caught wrong footed as I believe many are today.

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Seeing the world through US eyes alone may not be sufficient anymore.

‘We Are in a New Cold War’ With China: Ex-US Assistant Secretary of State (ET)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and United States are engaged in a cold war, according to a former senior state department official. As such, the Chinese regime’s burgeoning alliance with Russia has broad implications for the future of the Indo-Pacific region. “People don’t really want to have to ponder things like global devastation, but it’s here and it’s with us,” David Stilwell, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs and retired Air Force Brigadier General, told EpochTV’s “China Insider” program on March 10. “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has nukes and are building out their nuclear arsenal considerably right now,” he said. “We are in a new Cold War.”

Stilwell said that China’s effective alliance with Russia, wherein the CCP has tacitly supported a war of aggression against Ukraine, had already drawn nations throughout the Indo-Pacific closer to the United States hardened their resolve against the CCP. The worsening ties between states like Japan and South Korea with China were unavoidable, Stilwell said, because of CCP leadership’s choice to give cover to Russia’s war in spite of the fact that China previously pledged to defend Ukraine from nuclear threats. “It’s unavoidable,” Stilwell said. “The PRC named themselves … in the negotiations with Russia going into the war. They declared themselves to be basically on board with the invasion of Ukraine and all those things.” “They can’t walk that back. That’s out there. It’s commitment. But, I have to think that China’s rethinking it given how poorly this has gone for the Russians.”

Stilwell said that this strategic rethink was important for CCP leader Xi Jinping’s plans to forcibly unite Taiwan with mainland China, and that Russian failures in Ukraine would likely render Chinese military strategists more cautious in their ambitions regarding Taiwan. The CCP’s initial goal for forcing the unification of Taiwan with the mainland was to be achieved by 2049, Stilwell said. Xi, however, appeared to advance that goal to 2035. U.S. military officials, meanwhile, have warned that it could happen as soon as 2027. Stilwell agreed with that assessment. He said that, should Xi obtain a third term as leader of the CCP later this year, Xi would likely try to solidify his personal legacy by taking Taiwan before that term ends in 2027.

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Sounds just like the west:

“..parents who were reluctant to vaccinate their children have faced pressure to comply. Some said they lost work bonuses or were given a talk by their supervisors. In other cases, their children faced punishment varying from losing honors or even getting barred from attending school..”

Children in China Diagnosed With Leukemia After Taking Chinese Vaccines (ET)

After receiving her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Li Jun’s 4-year-old developed a fever and coughs, which quickly subsided after intravenous therapy at the hospital. But after the second shot, the father could tell something was wrong. Swelling appeared around his daughter’s eyes and did not go away. For weeks, the girl complained about pains on her legs, where bruises started to emerge seemingly out of nowhere. In January, a few weeks after the second dose, the 4-year-old was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. “My baby was perfectly healthy before the vaccine dose,” Li (an alias), from China’s north-central Gansu Province, told The Epoch Times. “I took her for a health check. Everything was normal.”

He is among hundreds of Chinese that belong to a social media group claiming to be suffering from or have a household member suffering from leukemia, developed after taking Chinese vaccines. Eight of them confirmed the situation when reached by The Epoch Times. Names of the interviewees have been withheld to protect their safety. The leukemia cases span across different age groups from all parts of China. But Li and others particularly pointed to a rise in patients from the younger age group in the last few months, coinciding with the regime’s push to inoculate children between 3 and 11 years old beginning last October.

Li’s daughter had her first injection in mid-November under the request of her kindergarten. She is now undergoing chemotherapy at the Lanzhou No. 2 People’s Hospital where at least 20 children are being treated for similar symptoms, most of them between the age of 3 and 8, according to Li. “Our doctor from the hospital told us that since November, the children coming to their hematology division to treat leukemia have doubled the previous years’ number and they are having a shortage of beds,” he said. Li claimed that at least eight children from Suzhou district, where he lives, have died recently from leukemia.

There had been some resistance from Chinese parents when the campaign to vaccinate children first rolled out. They expressed concern about the lack of data about the effects of Chinese vaccines on young people. The vaccines are supplied by two Chinese drugmakers, Sinopharm and Sinovac, which carry an efficacy rate of 79 percent and 50.4 percent, respectively, based on available data from trials conducted on adults. [..] But parents who were reluctant to vaccinate their children have faced pressure to comply. Some said they lost work bonuses or were given a talk by their supervisors. In other cases, their children faced punishment varying from losing honors or even getting barred from attending school, as in the case of Wang Long’s 10-year-old son.

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“It is a very hard statistic to massage since people are either dead or they’re not.”

Hospitals No Longer Required to Report COVID Deaths (Mercola)

With the end of the HHS COVID death reporting system, the only means of tracking COVID deaths will now rely on the collection of data from death certificates at the state level. However, as the unnamed official told the WSWS reporter: “… deaths are reported by the counties/states but the process is very slow and many coroners are actually not wanting to cite COVID as the reason, while hospitals rely on diagnoses.” This last part of the sentence may refer to the hospital incentives for a COVID diagnosis, which increases the potential it would be listed in the ICD codes that were communicated to the HHS. Although the CDC and HHS would like the data to remain hidden, a cost-benefit analysis by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and independent researcher Kathy Dopp revealed the jab is deadlier than the infection in anyone under the age of 80.

The analysis looked at publicly available official data from the U.S. and U.K. for all age groups and compared all-cause mortality to the risk of dying from COVID-19. Seneff and Dopp wrote: “As of 6 February 2022, based on publicly available official UK and US data, all age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID-19 inoculation than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID-19 death. “All age groups under 80 years old have virtually no benefit from receiving a COVID-19 inoculation, and the younger ages incur significant risk. This analysis is conservative because it ignores the fact that inoculation-induced adverse events such as thrombosis, myocarditis, Bell’s palsy, and other vaccine-induced injuries can lead to shortened life span.”

Their analysis is upheld by OneAmerica’s announcement that the death rate in working-age Americans from 18 to 64 years in the third quarter of 2021 was 40% higher than prepandemic levels. This finding is stunning since one of the most reliable data points we have is all-cause mortality. It is a very hard statistic to massage since people are either dead or they’re not. Their inclusion in the national death index database is based on one primary criterion — they’ve died — regardless of the cause. As noted in a (not peer-reviewed) study led by scientist Denis Rancourt, who looked at U.S. mortality between March 2020 and October 2021: “All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting true catastrophic events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge in deaths from any cause.”

South Australia

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“..a 9,751 percent raise from his proposed severance of $9.4 million in 2019..”

Moderna Approved a $926 Million Golden Parachute For Its CEO (DM)

The amount of money that Moderna’s CEO would get if the company is sold and he’s replaced is now a jaw-dropping $926 million, a 9,751 percent raise from his proposed severance of $9.4 million in 2019. Stephane Bancel’s ‘change-in-control’ package was approved at the end of last year by the Massachusetts-based company’s board of directors, CNBC reported. Most of the golden parachute – $922.5 million, to be exact – is in the form of stock, which has yo-yoed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rest includes a cash payment of $1.5 million and a bonus of $2.5 million. Bancel, 49, who is already worth a reported $4.3 billion, would only get the money if the company is sold or merged and he loses his job in the process. Last year, he earned a combined $18.2 million, a 41 percent increase from 2020.


The French-born executive’s last known address is a three-bedroom, 1,537-square-foot apartment in Boston worth an estimated $1.2 million, according to Zillow. Things have changed a lot for Moderna since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. It went from losing $747 million that year to making $12.2 billion in 2021, largely from sales of its two-dose vaccine, its only commercially available product. The biotech company is also developing shots for the flu and other infectious disease. Much of Bancel’s sky-high parachute is tied to Moderna’s stocks, but share prices have gone up and down during the pandemic, making it hard to determine how much they’ll be worth if and when Bancel cashes them out. Moderna shares reached a record high of $497.49 each on August 10, 2021, before tumbling to $253.98 by December 31. On Thursday, one share was worth $139.52.

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meme war 3

 

 

 

 

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Jun 282017
 


James Dean in a photobooth 1949

 

All Companies Hit By Ransomware Attack Used Bootleg Or Unpatched Software (WS)
Yellen: Banks Very Much Stronger; No Financial Crisis In Our Lifetime (CNBC)
There Is No Excuse For Janet Yellen’s Complacency (Steve Keen)
Yellen: “I Don’t Believe We Will See Another Crisis In Our Lifetime” (ZH)
Trio of Fed Speakers Warn on Valuations With Eyes on Tightening (BBG)
Car Loans, Credit Card Debt Push UK Back Towards Another Credit Crisis (Tel.)
UK Banks Ordered To Hold More Capital As Consumer Debt Surges (G.)
ECB VP: Slack In European Economy Looks Worse Than We Thought (CNBC)
Chinese Satellite Data Hint At Ominous Manufacturing Slowdown (ZH)
UK Government Refuses To Pay For Fireproof Cladding (Ind.)
Democrats The Only Thing Standing In The Way Of Single-Payer In California (CP)
Democrats The Only Thing Standing In The Way Of Single-Payer In California (CP)
The Human Tragedy Of Drug Abuse And Car Crashes (BBG)
Search Results Show Why Europe Is Mad at Google (BBG)
‘Google, Facebook Are Super Monopolies On The Scale Of Standard Oil’ (CNBC)
Greeks Work 203 Days Out Of The Year To Pay Taxes (K.)
Greek Garbage Collectors Reject Compromise As Trash Piles Up (AP)
At Least 24 Migrants Die Off Libya in 48 Hours, More Than 8,000 Rescued (R.)

 

 

Wolf Richter explains what happened yesterday. They’re all either thieves or extremely stupid/negligent.

Merck, Rosneft, Ukraine government, Ukraine International Airport, Maersk, WPP (world’s largest advertising agency), Mondelez etc. They’ve all been found to either use bootleg software or not having patched their systems with a readily available Microsoft patch.

All Companies Hit By Ransomware Attack Used Bootleg Or Unpatched Software (WS)

The Petya ransomware attack infected over 2,000 computer systems across the world as of midday today, according to Kaspersky Lab, cited by Reuters. Russia and Ukraine were most affected. Other victims were in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the US. When China starts up its computers, it will suffer the consequences for not staying in bed. The malware includes code known as “Eternal Blue,” which was also used in the WannaCry attack in May. Experts believe the code was purloined from NSA. The ransomware encrypts hard drives of infected machines and then demands $300 in bitcoin in order for the user to regain access. Petya takes advantage of the same vulnerability in Windows as WannaCry. But Microsoft released a patch to fix this vulnerability on March 14.

Patched computers were not affected by WannaCry, and are not affected today. The Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool detects and removes the malware automatically during the updating process. But that update isn’t available for bootleg copies of Windows – hence China’s disproportionate problems with the attack in May. And computers that are running legitimate versions of Windows but hadn’t been updated for whatever reason are vulnerable. Amazingly, when WannaCry hit, plenty of companies were mauled because some dude hadn’t updated their machines. Corporate and government networks were hit. You’d think after the hue and cry in May, all legit corporate systems would be updated, and bootleg copies of Windows would be replaced either by a legit copy of Windows or another operating system. But no. Rinse and repeat.

[..] These are big sophisticated companies, many of them with global operations, and therefore with global IT networks, not mom-and-pop operations. And yet the Windows machines in their networks hadn’t been updated and had remained vulnerable, or were using bootleg copies of Windows that couldn’t be updated, even after all the hoopla in May about this vulnerability. Just sitting here and shaking my head.

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Grandma goes nuts.

Yellen: Banks Very Much Stronger; No Financial Crisis In Our Lifetime (CNBC)

Fed Chair Janet Yellen said Tuesday that banks are “very much stronger” and another financial crisis is unlikely anytime soon. Speaking during an exchange in London with British Academy President Lord Nicholas Stern, the central bank chief said the Fed has learned lessons from the financial crisis and has brought stability to the banking system. Banks last week passed the first round of the Fed’s stress tests to see how they would perform under adverse conditions like a 10% unemployment rate and turbulence in commercial real estate and corporate debt. “I think the public can see the capital positions of the major banks are very much stronger this year,” Yellen said. “All of the firms passed the quantitative parts of the stress tests.”

She also made a bold prediction: that another financial crisis the likes of the one that exploded in 2008 was not likely “in our lifetime.” The crisis, which erupted in September 2008 with the implosion of Lehman Brothers but had been stewing for years, would have been “worse than the Great Depression” without the Fed’s intervention, Yellen said. Yellen added that the Fed learned lessons from the financial crisis and is being more vigilant to find risks to the system. “I think the system is much safer and much sounder,” she said. “We are doing a lot more to try to look for financial stability risks that may not be immediately apparent but to look in corners of the financial system that are not subject to regulation, outside those areas in order to try to detect threats to financial stability that may be emerging.”

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Steve explains that Yellen knows Minsky, but prefers to ignore him.

There Is No Excuse For Janet Yellen’s Complacency (Steve Keen)

Janet Yellen has been reported by Reuters as saying in London yesterday that “she does not believe that there will be a run on the banking system at least as long as she lives”: “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be,” Yellen said at an event in London. The only word I can use to describe this belief is “delusional”. The only way in which her belief could be justified would be in financial crises were truly random events, caused by something outside the economy—or just by a very bad throw of the economic dice. This is indeed the perspective of mainstream “Neoclassical” economic theory, in which Yellen was trained, and because of which she was deemed eligible—and indeed eminently suitable—to Chair the Federal Reserve.

This is the theory that led the OECD to proclaim, two months before the crisis began in August 2007, that “the current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years”, and that they expected that “sustained growth in OECD economies would be underpinned by strong job creation and falling unemployment.”. It is the theory that led her colleague David Stockton, then the Director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Fed, to dismiss the possibility of a recession after the crisis had begun, in December 2007—the very month that the recession is now regarded as having commenced: “Overall, our forecast could admittedly be read as still painting a pretty benign picture: despite all the financial turmoil, the economy avoids recession and, even with steeply higher prices for food and energy and a lower exchange value of the dollar, we achieve some modest edging-off of inflation.” (FOMC, Dec 2007)

So what we are getting from her is not merely her own personal complacency, but the complacency of an approach to economics which has always been grounded in the beliefs that (a) capitalism is inherently stable, (b) that the financial sector can be ignored—yes that’s right, ignored—when doing macroeconomics, and (c) that the Great Depression was an anomaly that can also be ignored, because it can only have been caused either by an exogenous shock or bad government policy, both of which cannot be predicted in advance.

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It’s a really crazy thing to say. Does she expect to be fired soon?

Yellen: “I Don’t Believe We Will See Another Crisis In Our Lifetime” (ZH)

If there was any confusion why the Fed intends to keep hiking rates, even in the face of negative economic data and disappearing inflation, it was put to rest over the past 2 days when not one, not two , not three, but four Fed speakers, including the three most important ones, made it clear that the Fed’s only intention at this point is to burst the asset bubble. First there was SF Fed president John Williams who said that “there seems to be a priced-to-perfection attitude out there” and that the stock market rally “still seems to be running very much on fumes.” Speaking to Australian TV, Williams added that “we are seeing some reach for yield, and some, maybe, excess risk-taking in the financial system with very low rates. As we move interest rates back to more-normal, I think that that will, people will pull back on that,

Then it was Fed vice chairman Stan Fischer’s turn, who while somewhat more diplomatic, delivered the same message: “the increase in prices of risky assets in most asset markets over the past six months points to a notable uptick in risk appetites…. Measures of earnings strength, such as the return on assets, continue to approach pre-crisis levels at most banks, although with interest rates being so low, the return on assets might be expected to have declined relative to their pre-crisis levels–and that fact is also a cause for concern.” Fischer then also said that the corporate sector is “notably leveraged”, that it would be foolish to think that all risks have been eliminated, and called for “close monitoring” of rising risk appetites.

All this followed the statement by Bill Dudley, who many perceive as the Fed’s shadow chairman, who yesterday warned that rates will keep rising as long as financial conditions remain loose: “when financial conditions tighten sharply, this may mean that monetary policy may need to be tightened by less or even loosened. On the other hand, when financial conditions ease—as has been the case recently—this can provide additional impetus for the decision to continue to remove monetary policy accommodation.” And finally, it was Yellen herself, who speaking in London acknowledged that some asset prices had become “somewhat rich” although like Fischer, she hedged that prices are fine… if only assumes record low rates in perpetuity:

“Asset valuations are somewhat rich if you use some traditional metrics like price earnings ratios, but I wouldn’t try to comment on appropriate valuations, and those ratios ought to depend on long-term interest rates,” she said. It was not all doom and gloom. Responding to a question on financial system stability, Yellen said post-crisis regulations (and $2.5 trillion in excess reserves which just happen to be fungible and give the banks the impression that they are safe) had made financial institutions much “safer and sounder.” “Will I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? No, probably that would be going too far. But I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will.”

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There were smokescreeens a-plenty too.

Trio of Fed Speakers Warn on Valuations With Eyes on Tightening (BBG)

When a trio of Federal Reserve officials delivered remarks on Tuesday, the state of U.S. financial markets came in for a little bit of criticism. When all was said and done, U.S. equities sank the most in six weeks, yields on 10-year Treasuries rose and the dollar weakened to the lowest level versus the euro in 10 months. Fed Chair Janet Yellen said that asset valuations, by some measures “look high, but there’s no certainty about that.” Earlier, San Francisco Fed President John Williams said the stock market “seems to be running very much on fumes” and that he was “somewhat concerned about the complacency in the market.” Fed Vice-Chair Stanley Fischer suggested that there had been a “notable uptick” in risk appetite that propelled valuation ratios to very elevated levels.

The Fed officials’ comments came amid a torrent of events that buffeted financial markets Tuesday, from an IMF cut to its U.S. growth forecast, Google suffering the biggest ever EU antitrust fine, a fresh blow to the Republican agenda in Washington and a global cyberattack. Still, selling in U.S shares accelerated around 1:30 p.m. as Yellen delivered her assessment of the market since the central bank raised interest rates June 14. “Asset valuations are somewhat rich if you use some traditional metrics like price earnings ratios, but I wouldn’t try to comment on appropriate valuations, and those ratios ought to depend on long-term interest rates,” Yellen said during a speech in London.

Investors are on guard for signs of a change in its economic outlook that could delay rate increases or when it will begin shrinking its $4.5 trillion balance sheet. Yellen said the Fed’s plans for the balance sheet were “well understood” by financial markets. Officials have said they intend to begin allowing the portfolio to roll off this year. In the end, Yellen made it pretty apparent that that her plans for continued monetary policy tightening haven’t shifted. “We’ve made very clear that we think it will be appropriate to the attainment of our goals to raise interest rates very gradually,” Yellen said.

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All the credit was the only thing that kept the country going.

Car Loans, Credit Card Debt Push UK Back Towards Another Credit Crisis (Tel.)

Banks are “forgetting the lessons” of the financial crisis, increasing the risk of reckless lending which could land them — and the wider economy — in trouble later, Mark Carney has warned. Credit card lending is booming and the Bank of England fears that banks are becoming complacent, assuming the relatively good economic times will continue indefinitely. As a result lenders are cutting down the amount of capital they put aside to keep them safe if those loans turn bad — something that could leave them in financial trouble if there is a recession and customers cannot pay back their debts. “I think it is forgetting some of the lessons of the past, or not fully learning the lessons of the past,” said Mr Carney, the Bank of England’s Governor. He said that the economy overall is performing well and total lending is not getting out of hand, but consumer credit is growing by more than 10pc per year, with credit cards and car loans growing particularly fast.

“Most financial stability indicators are neither particularly elevated nor subdued. Nevertheless, there are pockets of risk that warrant extra vigilance,” he said at the publication of the latest Financial Stability Report. “Consumer credit has increased rapidly. Lending conditions in the mortgage market are becoming easier. And lenders may be placing undue weight on the recent performance of loans in benign conditions.” As well as holding more capital against credit card debt and consumer loans, banks have also been warned that next month the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority will also publish new affordability rules to make sure customers are likely to be able to repay their debts.

The situation is deemed relatively urgent — one part of an annual assessment of the losses which banks could make in a hypothetical recession has been brought forwards this year. Instead of publishing the results in November, the consumer credit part of the so-called stress tests will be revealed in September. That decision reflects the short-term nature of consumer loans. Short-term loans can also pose a threat to financial stability because households take them less seriously than mortgages. Consumer debts only amount to one-seventh of the total of mortgage debt, but they account for 10-times the amount of bad loans which banks write off.

That also has implications for the wider economy — a household in financial trouble will cut spending deeply to make sure it can still pay the mortgage, but is less worried about credit cards. Mortgage lending standards are also under the spotlight. The Financial Policy Committee told banks in 2014 that they should assess whether borrowers could still afford their mortgages if the Bank of England’s base rate went up by three%age points. Most banks calculated this by adding 3%age points to their standard variable rates, but some lenders said that in this scenario they might not pass the full cost onto customers. Officials reject this interpretation and have ordered banks to add the full 3 points to their rates when judging the affordability.

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First you lower rates, then you take measures against the fully predictable consequences.

UK Banks Ordered To Hold More Capital As Consumer Debt Surges (G.)

The Bank of England is to force banks to strengthen their financial position in the face of a rapid growth in borrowing on credit cards, car finance and personal loans. The intervention by Threadneedle Street means banks will need to set aside as much as £11.4bn of extra capital in the next 18 months and is intended to protect the financial system from the 10% rise in consumer lending over the year. The Bank is also bringing forward the part of the annual stress tests on banks that scrutinises their exposure to consumer credit by two months to September. The Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority and the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, will also publish next month how they expect lenders to treat borrowers in the consumer credit market.

The Bank’s half-yearly assessment of risk to financial markets also set out measures to rein in the riskiest mortgage lending, highlighted the risks associated with the UK’s exit from the EU and said commercial property prices were “at the top end of sustainable valuations”. While the Bank found risks to financial stability were neither “particularly elevated nor subdued” it warned that there “pockets of risk that warrant vigilance”. “Consumer credit has increased rapidly. Lending conditions in the mortgage market are becoming easier. And lenders may be placing undue weight on the recent performance of loans in benign conditions,” said Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England.

Carney said the decision to call on banks to hold more capital – which is largely a rejig of their current resources rather than raising new funds – was taken after domestic risks returned to “standard” levels. A year ago, after the Brexit vote, the Bank had relaxed regulatory requirements on banks – using new tools it was given after the financial crisis – and is now reversing that decision.

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“..if we adopt, as in the U.S., a broader concept of unemployment (which in the U.S. they call U6) then unemployment in the euro area is at 18% whereas it is at 9% in the case of the U.S..”

ECB VP: Slack In European Economy Looks Worse Than We Thought (CNBC)

The difference between current and potential levels of output in the euro area economy could be greater than the ECB originally thought, its vice president, Vitor Constancio, warned on Tuesday. “What we see, what we observe is that domestic factors of inflation starting with wage and cost developments and then also price decisions are not responding the way we would expect in view of our more common estimates of this slack. So we have to ask ourselves – are these measures of the slack of the economy correct?,” explained Constancio, speaking to CNBC from the ECB Forum on central banking in Sintra. The board had therefore begun to ask themselves whether other variables should instead be considered to establish a more accurate view of the current economic situation.

“The unemployment rate now is 9.3% according to the normal international standard of measuring employment …. But if we adopt, as in the U.S., a broader concept of unemployment (which in the U.S. they call U6) then unemployment in the euro area is at 18% whereas it is at 9% in the case of the U.S. which would imply that the slack is then bigger than we could judge some time ago,” he noted. “That being the case it justifies fully what the president (Mario Draghi) said at the end of his speech (on Tuesday) that we need persistence. If we want to bring inflation to our target of below but close to 2% then we have to persist in the type of monetary policy that we been adopting,” he added.

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Earlier, we saw Yellen vs Minsky. Here’s China’s Minsky moment.

Chinese Satellite Data Hint At Ominous Manufacturing Slowdown (ZH)

A reading published by San Francisco-based SpaceKnow Inc. which uses commercial satellite imagery to monitor activity across thousands of industrial sites signaled deterioration in the country’s manufacturing sector for the first time since August. The gauge, known as the China Satellite Manufacturing Index, fell to 49.6, below the 50 break-even level. The index incorporates satellite data from thousands of industrial sites across China. Satellite imagery has often proved eerily presceint in the recent past: In the US, satellite data analyzing activity in retailers’ parking lots pointed to significant activity weakness at core US retail locations, even as sentiment indicators were suggesting an uptick in sales following the election. Meanwhile, small- and medium-sized enterprises showed the lowest level of confidence in 16 months, and conditions in the steel business remained lackluster, according to Bloomberg.

Some other indicators have been slightly more sanguine: sales-manager sentiment stayed positive, and outlook of financial experts recovered. Still, data suggest that output in China’s economy slowed during the second quarter after a strong start to the year, with investment slowing, some credit becoming tighter and signs that curbs on the country’s property market are starting to have an impact. Should growth continue to slow, China’s leaders would find themselves in an awkward position, with the country’s twice-a-decade leadership transition expected to occur this fall when the 19th Party Congress convenes to appoint its new senior leadership. It’s widely believed that China’s President Xi Jinping will begin serving his second five-year term.

[..] [That] could be the spark that ignites China’s “Minsky moment” – the financial cataclysm that Kyle Bass and other perma-china-bears have been waiting for when China’s overleveraged market crumbles to dust – might finally be in the offing. Indeed, though China’s markets have been relatively calm recently, the PBOC’s attempts to tighten liquidity have sparked some instability in recent months. Back in March, the central bank had to engage in mini bailouts when a jump in interbank rates caused some small regional lenders to default on their interbank loans after money market rates shot higher. Meanwhile, China’s weakening credit impulse should give any China bulls pause.

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Completely nuts. Feels like they’re looking to get tossed out.

UK Government Refuses To Pay For Fireproof Cladding (Ind.)

Councils face bills running to hundreds of millions of pounds to make tower blocks safe after the Government said it would not guarantee extra money to pay for vital work to prevent a repeat of the Grenfell disaster. Ninety-five high-rise buildings in 32 local authority areas have failed safety tests, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) said yesterday, with hundreds more blocks still to be tested. The findings prompted Theresa May to announce a “major national investigation” into the use of cladding on high-rise blocks, with every sample so far tested in the wake of the Grenfell found to be unsafe. But despite emergency fire safety checks being carried out nationwide under central government direction, councils will not be reimbursed for refurbishment work carried out.

A DCLG spokesperson said there was “no guarantee” of central government funding and that it would be “up to local authorities and housing associations to pay” for the work needed to ensure residents’ safety. The spokesperson said financial support would be considered on a “case by case” basis for those that could not afford to carry out the necessary work, but did not clarify what the criteria for that consideration would be. The announcement was met with severe criticism from some of the councils affected, with local authorities already having their budgets severely squeezed after years of austerity measures. Julie Dore, leader of Sheffield City Council, which is among the authorities to have discovered unsafe cladding, said “starved” councils would be forced to make cuts to other areas, including schooling, if central government did not help with costs.

“Local authorities have been starved of money over the past seven years. Our spending power has decreased,” she said. “There is no way we can afford to reclad our tower blocks. If we have to find that money, it will come from other projects, from investing in the fabric of our schools, capital investment in our infrastructure, the money has to come out of that. And it can’t really be done. “I say absolutely, categorically that the Government should pay. If they can find £1bn to send to Northern Ireland, that gets more spending per capita than anywhere else, to buy 10 votes, then these people, living in high-rise towers, deserve better.”

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There is no serious press left in the US to get to the bottom of this.

Democrats The Only Thing Standing In The Way Of Single-Payer In California (CP)

Nothing better illustrates the political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party—for all progressive intents and purposes—than California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon’s announcement on Friday afternoon that he was going to put a “hold” on the single-payer health care bill (SB 562) for the state, effectively killing its passage for at least the year. The Democratic Party finds itself in a bind in California. They hold the governorship and a supermajority in both houses of the legislature, so they can pass any bill they want. SB 562 had passed the Senate 23-14. There was enormous enthusiasm among California progressive activists, who [..] were working tirelessly, and hopeful of success. After all, Bernie’s people were taking over the California party from the bottom since the election.

I recall a night of drinking last year with an old friend who has been spearheading that effort, as he rebuffed my skepticism, and insisted that this time there would be a really progressive takeover of the California party, and single-payer would prove it. After all, once enough progressive pressure was been put on the legislators, the bill would be going to super-progressive Democratic Governor, Jerry Brown, who had made advocacy of single-payer a centerpiece of his run for President in 1992, saying: “We treat health care not as a commodity to be played with for profit but rather the right of every American citizen when they’re born.” Bernie foretold. Unfortunately, today that Governor is, according to Paul Song, co-chair of the CHC, “doing everything he can to make sure this never gets on his desk.”

And it won’t. Unfortunately, all the Democrats like Rendon, who “claims to be a personal supporter of single-payer,” will make sure that their most progressive governor is not put in the embarrassing position of having to reject what he’s been ostensibly arguing for for twenty-five years, of demonstrating so blatantly what a fraud his, and his party’s, progressive pretensions are. Thus unfolds the typical Democratic strategy: Make all kinds of progressive noises and cast all kinds of progressive votes, while carefully managing the process so that the legislation the putatively progressives putatively support never gets enacted. Usually, they blame Republican obstructionism, and there certainly is enough of that, and where there is, it provides a convenient way for Democrat legislator to “support” legislation they know will be blocked and wouldn’t really enact themselves if they could.

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Phones are as addictive as opioids.

The Human Tragedy Of Drug Abuse And Car Crashes (BBG)

More than 130,000 Americans are killed annually by preventable causes, and the number has been climbing at a faster rate recently because of opioid abuse and car crashes involving drivers distracted by mobile devices. The death count jumped more than 7% in 2015 to about 146,600, according to a report by the National Safety Council Tuesday. The council said lawmakers often overlook simple solutions that could avoid deaths on the roads or in people’s homes, while public attention is focused on events that are relatively rare in the U.S., like terrorist attacks or plane crashes. Vehicle mishaps and poisonings, driven by opioid abuse, killed more than 80,000 people combined in 2015. Preventable accidents cost society about $850 billion a year, according to the group.

“Culturally, we’re numb to these things,” NSC President Deborah Hersman said in a phone interview. “Why are these deaths any less tragic or important? We should be talking about these things every day because they affect our families.” The toll from opioids is worsening, partly because so many patients become dependent on painkillers, often turning to street drugs like heroin. Almost one in four people on Medicaid, the U.S. health program for the poor, received powerful and addictive opioid pain medicines in 2015, Express Scripts Holding Co. said this month. The council said lawmakers should tighten oversight of the distribution of prescription medications and improve access to drugs that can reverse overdoses and treat addiction.

[..] “We need to make distracted driving socially unacceptable,” Tom Goeltz, whose daughter Megan was killed in a car crash last year, said at a news conference held by the NSC Tuesday. “This tragedy could have easily been prevented.” Goeltz, a Minnesotan who works to help industrial companies avoid accidents, said his daughter was pregnant when her car was struck by a distracted driver. “As a safety consultant with over 30 years of experience, I was powerless to save my daughter,” he said. “We all know people that have been killed on our roads. We all know somebody. How is this acceptable to us? We need to do more. You don’t want to be a part of this club.”

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“..Google has 90 days to come up with its own solution [..]. If it doesn’t do that, the EU will fine it up to 5% of the entire company’s daily global revenue.”

Search Results Show Why Europe Is Mad at Google (BBG)

Europe hit Alphabet’ Google with a $2.7 billion fine on Tuesday, saying it broke antitrust laws by favoring one of its search services over rival websites. The case centers around Google Shopping ads, which place color pictures, prices and links to products that consumers have typed into its search engine. The EU’s Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager said Google’s search algorithms should treat its own Shopping service the same way as other price-comparison sites. What exactly does this look like in practice? Here’s a walk-through of what the EU is so upset about. This is for desktop computer searches. On phones, there’s less digital real estate, leaving even less space for competitors. Before we start, it’s important to note that Google argues customers aren’t that interested in clicking through to other price comparison sites and want to go directly to retailers’ sites from Google. It denies any wrongdoing and is considering an appeal.

Google Shopping Today: The screenshot below shows results for a search in Germany for “gas grill.” Five Google Shopping ads take up the most valuable part of the page at the top. No other comparison shopping websites show up in the first couple of links. Scrolling down, you see the first result for a competing price comparison service – Idealo – come in at number six. There’s another at number 11, Moebel24. But that link is listed as an ad, meaning Moebel24 had to pay for that placement, even though it’s near the bottom of the page. The EU says this is bad because consumers click far more often on results appearing higher up in Google’s search results. Even on a desktop computer, the top ten results on page 1 generally get about 95% of all clicks on generic search results (with the top result receiving about 35% of all clicks), the European Commission said on Tuesday.

2014 Proposal: The EU’s Google investigation has been going for years. Vestager’s predecessor tentatively struck a deal with Google in 2014 for a hybrid model that set aside space in those top Shopping search boxes for other price comparison websites. But the agreement fell apart when competitors realized they had to pay for that placement. [..] What could Google do to satisfy Europe’s demands this time? Vestager said Google has 90 days to come up with its own solution, as long as it gives equal treatment to competing price comparison sites. If it doesn’t do that, the EU will fine it up to 5% of the entire company’s daily global revenue. [..] Google would have to sacrifice space currently occupied by its own Shopping ads to make the latter idea work, cutting into a highly profitably and growing revenue stream.

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US anti-trust laws are strong enough to counter this. But you need politicians to apply them.

‘Google, Facebook Are Super Monopolies On The Scale Of Standard Oil’ (CNBC)

Google shareholders won’t be phased by the EU’s $2.7 billion fine against the company for competition abuses related to its shopping business, Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee told CNBC on Tuesday. “As a shareholder of Google you’re looking at this and saying: ‘We won again,'” McNamee said. The venture capitalist spoke hours after EU regulators fined Google a record €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion), ruling that the search-engine giant violated antitrust rules for its online shopping practices. Google said it will consider appealing the decision to the highest court in Europe. “Google, Facebook, Amazon are increasingly just super-monopolies, especially Google and Facebook. The share of the markets they operate in is literally on the same scale that Standard Oil had … more than 100 years ago – with the big differences that their reach is now global, not just within a single country,” he said on “Squawk Alley.”

The fine is not large enough to change Google’s behavior, he added. “The only thing that will change it is regulations that actually say you can or can’t do something.” McNamee said Google’s business model isn’t structured in a way that allows for competition. “The way that Google’s product works makes its anti-competitive behavior much more obvious — but do not underestimate how powerful Facebook’s monopoly has been to boosting Instagram and WhatsApp,” he said. The competition issue with the big tech companies extends beyond the EU into the U.S., he said. “They do stifle innovation. They stifle entrepreneurship. … You can see this even in Silicon Valley it’s very hard for any of the unicorn generation of companies to actually reach successful critical mass because, you know, one of their competitors gets acquired by Google and Facebook and then the category is over,” said McNamee. “I think it’s a big policy question the world is going to have to deal with over the next few years,” he said.

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The problem is not even the duration, France and Belgium are worse. The problem is what Greeks are left with after taxes are paid, which is much less than the others.

Greeks Work 203 Days Out Of The Year To Pay Taxes (K.)

Greeks will work an average of 203 days this year to pay taxes to the state and social insurance contributions, according to research conducted by the Dragoumis Center for Liberal Studies (KEFIM) to raise awareness about tax freedom day – the first day of the year in which a country has theoretically earned enough income to pay its taxes. In the case of Greece, this day will be on July 23, which means that Greeks will have worked 15 days more than last year, when tax freedom day arrived on July 7. The only two European Union countries in which tax freedom day will arrive after that in Greece are France and Belgium. Cyprus celebrated its tax freedom day on March 29, while Malta and Ireland did the same on April 18 and 30 respectively. Bulgaria was next on May 18 before Finland on June 22.

KEFIM, which conducted research into the topic for a third straight year, said citizens are working an increasing number of days each year to meet their tax obligations and, compared to 2006, Greeks now work two months more to this end. Referring to the results of the research, financial analyst and member of KEFIM’s scientific council Miranda Xafa said the “government managed to achieve a primary surplus by tax hikes and not through spending cuts.” Xafa also said that for every 100 euros a self-employed professional makes, 82 go toward tax and and other contributions. New Democracy vice president Adonis Georgiadis said that Greece had “lost another month because of overtaxation.” “Our aim when we become the government is to reverse the trend,” he said.

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Today is day 12 of the garbage strike. Weekend weather forecast up to 44ºC (111ºF). Some judge needs to declare a public health emergency, if Tsipras is too scared to do it.

Greek Garbage Collectors Reject Compromise As Trash Piles Up (AP)

Greece’s municipal garbage collectors on Tuesday rejected a government compromise offer and decided to continue an 11-day protest that has left mounds of festering refuse piled up across Athens amid high temperatures during the key summer tourism season. Municipal workers union head Nikos Trikas said the protest will go on as planned until Thursday at least, after an inconclusive meeting with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. The union is pressing the left-led government to honor a pledge to provide permanent jobs for long-term contract workers, and rejected Tsipras’ proposals as a “slight” but unsatisfactory improvement on past offers. Greek authorities have warned that the uncollected trash poses a public health risk ahead of a heat wave forecast for later this week.

Tourism Minister Elena Kountoura urged the union to reconsider, arguing that the protest “endangers public health, and is bad for tourism as well as the country’s international image.” The Athens Trade Association has also called on the two sides to reach a compromise, warning that piles of garbage would discourage tourists from traveling to the Greek capital. Tourism is a vital source of revenue for Greeces battered economy. Although not technically on strike most of the time, municipal workers have been blockading garages where municipal trash collection trucks operate from, as well as landfill sites across the country. Trikas said that unions will review their position Thursday, when they have called a 24-hour strike. He also pledged to increase emergency crews that the union has on duty to ensure that the garbage mounds do not mushroom out of all control.

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Where are Merkel and Macron? Why are their voters not demanding they tackle the issue?

At Least 24 Migrants Die Off Libya in 48 Hours, More Than 8,000 Rescued (R.)

Red Crescent volunteers recovered the bodies of 24 migrants on Tuesday that were washed up in an eastern suburb of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, as large-scale rescues were made in the Mediterranean. Residents in Tajoura district said the bodies had begun washing up at the end of last week. Several had been partially devoured by stray dogs, according to a local coast guard official. The toll was expected to increase as the flimsy boats used to carry migrants as far as international waters normally carry more than 100 people. Three migrants died in the Mediterranean on Monday night, a German aid group said, during Italian-led rescue operations in which thousands more were pulled to safety.

About 5,000 migrants were picked up off the Libyan coast by emergency services, Italy’s navy, aid groups and private boats on Monday, and rescues were continuing on Tuesday, according to an Italian coastguard spokesman. “Despite all efforts, three people died from a sinking rubber boat” and rescue boats in the area are struggling to cope, German humanitarian group Jugend Rettet said on Facebook. Jugend Rettet (Rescuing Youth) is one of about nine aid groups patrolling seas into which people traffickers have sent more than half a million refugees and migrants on highly dangerous voyages towards Europe over the past four years. “We reached the capacity limit of our ship, while our crew is seeing more boats on the horizon. Currently, all vessels are overloaded,” Jugend Rettet added.

About 72,000 migrants arrived in Italy on the perilous route from Libya between Jan. 1 and June 21, roughly 20% more than in 2016, and more than 2,000 died on the way, according to the International Organization for Migration.

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Dec 242016
 
 December 24, 2016  Posted by at 9:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle Christmas Eve 2016


Alfred Palmer Annette del Sur in salvage campaign, Douglas Aircraft Co., Long Beach, CA 1942

The Connection Between Work and Dignity (B.)
2016 Year In Review: A Clockwork Orange (Dave Collum)
A Week On Jury Duty With Rex Tillerson (Roden)
Putin Shrugs Off Trump’s Nuclear Plans, Says Democrats Sore Losers (R.)
President Xi Open to Growth in China Falling Below 6.5% (BBG)
Barclays Refuses To Settle With US DoJ Over ‘Craptacular Loans’ (G.)
Greek PM in Open Confrontation With German FinMin (GR)
Greece Takes Dig At Lenders With Scrooge Christmas Card (R.)
Is A Big Change Underway In Global Capitalism? (Parramore/Chanos)
Shanghai Water Supply Hit By 100-Tonne Wave Of Garbage (G.)
3.5 Trillion Insects Migrate Over Southern Britain Each Year (CSM)
One of Earth’s Most Dangerous Supervolcanoes Is Rumbling (NatGeo)
Mediterranean Death Toll Is Record 5,000 Refugees, Migrants This Year (R.)

 

 

Best ever case for basic income. And then he doesn’t even mention it!

The Connection Between Work and Dignity (B.)

If we work hard and produce something of tangible value, we tend to feel a sense of self-worth when society rewards us for it with a decent, middle-class life. This was the essence of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal – if you work, you eat. The continuing power of this idea is visible everywhere. Witness Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the city gave homeless people jobs and it made them feel “human again.” Or look at the Job Corps program, where giving poor people jobs made them more likely to get married. If you give people work with tangible, visible value, you give them dignity. This, of course, is a reason the U.S.’s falling labor participation rate is such a concern – so many Americans are out of the workforce and are missing out on the dignity that comes with a job:

So is there work to be done in the U.S. that produces tangible, visible value? Of course there is. To realize this, just take a one-week trip to Japan. Where American sidewalks are cracked and uneven, Japanese ones are neat and beautiful. Where tables in American Starbucks are littered with crumbs and dirt, Japanese Starbucks tables get wiped down after every customer leaves. Where American cities like Chicago and Detroit are full of broken windows and crumbling facades, Japanese cities are clean and modern, with well-maintained, reliable public transit. Before we start complaining about make-work, let’s make the U.S. look like that. Let’s fix the sidewalks and renovate – or knock down and rebuild – all the old buildings. Let’s wipe down every Starbucks table, build quality public-transit systems and hire the workers to make them run on time.

And let’s take care of our people as well as our cities. Let’s provide child care for working moms, and elder care for old people. Let’s hire more teachers to reduce class sizes. These are all jobs that produce real, tangible results. When you fix up a building or build a train station, you can see the fruits of your labors. When you take care of an old person, you can see a real human being benefit. The value created by these jobs is a lot more tangible and clear than the value created by a lot of activities that the market rewards much more, such as high-frequency trading. The free-market age has made the economy more efficient, but it has come at a dramatic price – lost dignity for so many. The U.S. has moved away from the idea of a social compact with work at its core. That’s something that deserves to be reversed.

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I warn you, don’t do it. Don’t even start reading. This innocent-enough looking ‘organic chemical professor’ with his cultivated hobo-under-the-bridge look has one thing in mind, and one only: to ruin your holidays. Being holed up with his review means no valuable and precious time left to spend with your families, letting the turkey burn in the oven (oh, would he like that!) and having no eyes for the beautiful snowy landscape out there. Talk about the Grinch who stole Christmas!

2016 Year In Review: A Clockwork Orange (Dave Collum)

With some notable exceptions, the mainstream media has degenerated into a steaming heap of detritus that is so bad now that it gets its own section. A congenital infobesity has morphed into late-stage disinfobesity. Enter social media—the fever swamp—to fill the void. As we shall see, however, all is not well there either. I sift and pan, looking for shiny nuggets of content that reach the high standards of a rant. Shout-outs to bloggers would have to include Michael Krieger, Charles Hugh Smith, Peter Boockvar, Bill Fleckenstein, Doug Noland, Jesse Felder, Tony Greer, Mike Lebowitz, Mish Shedlock, Charles Hugh Smith, and Grant Williams.

News consolidators and new-era media include Contra Corner, Real Vision, Heatstreet, and Automatic Earth. A carefully honed Twitter feed is a window to the world and the road to perdition. My actions speak to my enthusiasm for Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart at Peak Prosperity. However, if you gave me one lens through which to view the world, I would have to choose Zero Hedge (or maybe LadySonya.com).

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Nice story. Don’t demonize the man. Give him a chance.

A Week On Jury Duty With Rex Tillerson (Roden)

Nine years ago, I showed up to the Denton County Courthouse for jury duty and got myself picked for the job. A young girl had accused her mom’s boyfriend of sexual assault, and the case was being brought to trial. If you’ve ever served on a jury trial before, you understand the almost immediate yet very temporary bond that ties 12 strangers together who are randomly chosen from each of their private lives to fulfill a solemn public purpose. One of our first tasks was to choose our jury foreman. Perhaps it was his business suit, his impressive stature, or his charisma, but almost everyone in that jury room suggested that this middle-aged man with graying hair was likely the most fit for the task. Thanks, but I decline. I’m not interested in the spotlight, he told us. I didn’t think anything of it.

I had just bought my first BlackBerry and used my breaks to catch up on all the emails I was missing from my week at the courthouse. I recall leaving the jury room on a break with this man and remarking how busy I was and how much work I had to do. He smiled as he sat and read the paper. From the first day of jury selection, we all noticed another suited man always present in the courtroom. His presence was intriguing due to the ear piece in his ear. While grabbing lunch at Denton County Independent Hamburger on the square the second day of the trial, we noticed this mysterious man dining with our fellow juror who’d declined the foreman spot. The intrigue grew, and it was the talk of the jury: Who were these men? Finally, during a break in the jury room, one juror had the nerve to ask: “Who are you? And what do you do?”

Our fellow jury member was reading the paper again and pointed out an article with Exxon in the headlines. I work for them, he said humbly. There are a lot of people in this world who hate me for what I do, so they give me and my family guys like that to protect me. I immediately felt embarrassed for complaining about how much work I had to do. It didn’t take long before a few internet searches revealed that I was serving on this jury with the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson. The trial concluded, and it was time for the jury to deliberate. The story was heartbreaking, and the facts of the case were clear enough to make the majority of the jury convinced of the guilt of this sexual offender of a little girl. But the defense did a good enough job to create a couple of hold-outs. As our deliberations came to a close, it appeared we might have a hung jury.

That’s when Tillerson began to speak. Humbly, delicately and without an ounce of condescension toward those who disagreed, he began walking us all through the details of the case. I even recall being moved by his thorough explanation about the nature of doubt and the standards set forth by our justice system. With great patience, this man who strikes multibillion-dollar deals with foreign heads of state brought our scrappy jury together — to bring a sexual predator to justice and to deliver justice for a scared and deeply wounded little girl. A local nonprofit was instrumental in fostering that young girl through this process, providing her counseling and legal help. I was so struck by their mission that I toured their facility the week after the case to learn how I could donate and volunteer to their cause.

On a whim, I decided to reach out to Tillerson to encourage him to do the same. I found an email for him online and sent him a note, touting the role this agency played in our trial and urging him to consider supporting the great work they do. To my surprise, I received an email back thanking me for my note and my jury service, and ensuring me that he would contact the agency. I later received a call from the director of that nonprofit to let me know that Tillerson followed through and gave a generous donation.

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Putin was impressive. Among many other things, he announced cuts in defense spending from 4.7% of GDP in 2016, to 3.3%, and 2.8% in 2019. “If anyone is unleashing an arms race it’s not us … We will never spend resources on an arms race that we can’t afford.”

Putin Shrugs Off Trump’s Nuclear Plans, Says Democrats Sore Losers (R.)

Russia’s Vladimir Putin said on Friday he was unfazed by President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to boost the U.S. nuclear arsenal, praising Trump for being in touch with U.S. public opinion while branding the Democrats sore election losers. Speaking at his annual news conference in Moscow, the Russian president said earlier comments he had made about his country’s own military modernization had been misunderstood in the United States and that he accepted that the U.S. military, not Russia’s, was the most powerful in the world. Putin said on Thursday Russia’s military was “stronger than any potential aggressor”. Trump later tweeted that the United States “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

Asked to clarify his comments on Friday, MSNBC reported that Trump had said: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” But Putin said he did not regard the United States as a potential aggressor and had only been talking about countries he thought might realistically launch an attack on Russia. “I was a bit surprised by the statements from some representatives of the current U.S. administration who for some reason started to prove that the U.S. military was the most powerful in the world,” Putin said, referring to State Department comments from Thursday. “Nobody is arguing with that.” Putin said he saw nothing new or remarkable about Trump’s own statement about wanting to expand U.S. nuclear capabilities anyway. “In the course of his election campaign he (Trump) spoke about the necessity of strengthening the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and strengthening the armed forces. There’s nothing unusual here,” said Putin.

“If anyone is unleashing an arms race it’s not us … We will never spend resources on an arms race that we can’t afford.” [..] Putin dismissed suggestions Moscow had helped Trump to victory in any way however. “It’s not like that,” he said. “All of this (the accusations) speaks of the current administration’s systemic problems.” Putin, who spoke positively of Trump before his election win, said that only Moscow had believed in his victory however. “Trump understood the mood of the people and kept going until the end, when nobody believed in him,” Putin said, adding with a smile. “Except for you and me.” Putin said he would be willing to visit the United States if Trump invited him and expected U.S.-Russia ties to return to normal now, particularly in the security and economic spheres.

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Xi finds an opening to blame lower growth on something other than himself, and dives right in.

President Xi Open to Growth in China Falling Below 6.5% (BBG)

President Xi Jinping isn’t wedded to China’s 6.5% economic growth objective due to concerns about rising debt and an uncertain global environment after Donald Trump’s election win in the U.S., according to a person familiar with the situation. Xi told a meeting of the Communist Party’s financial and economic leading group this week that China doesn’t need to meet the objective if doing so creates too much risk, said the person, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. Leaders at the gathering agreed that the $11 trillion economy would remain stable with slower growth as long as employment stays firm, the person said.

Below-target growth would be in line with analyst projections that the expansion will keep decelerating in coming years from an estimated pace of 6.7% in 2016. The slowdown coincides with the nation’s broad shift from an export-led economy to services, which accounted for more than half of growth last year for the first time, and domestic consumption. Last year, policy makers pledged an annual growth rate of at least 6.5% for five years through 2020. Some economists criticize the growth objective for motivating officials to take risks that may jeopardize financial stability. The IMF is among those that have recommended a lower target.

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Who came up with that word?

Barclays Refuses To Settle With US DoJ Over ‘Craptacular Loans’ (G.)

Barclays is refusing to settle with the US Department of Justice over allegations it deliberately sold mortgage bonds to investors that it knew contained “craptacular loans”. The DoJ’s legal filing outlines an array of colourful descriptions of the types of mortgages that it alleges were used by Barclays to package up in bonds – known as residential mortgage bond securities – which could be sold on to investors. It accuses Barclays of selling investors RMBS “backed by loans it knew were made to borrowers who were not creditworthy and which were supported by house appraisals it knew were inflated”. The DoJ said Barclays was not lending to customers itself but using loans from mortgage lenders Fremont, New Century, WMC, Countrywide, and IndyMac as the basis of the bonds it was selling.

To support its case the DoJ published conversations between bankers which it claimed proved they knew they were selling poor investments. They included: • One Barclays banker in charge of reviewing the deals observed that one loan pool was “about as bad as it can be”. • On another occasion, the same banker said this “scares the shit out of me”. He also remarked about a package of loans from Wells Fargo that “we have to eat their shit loans”. • A Barclays salesperson described “the deluge of Fremont garbage being put out there”, the DoJ said. Barclays, becoming the first major lender to fail to reach a settlement with the DoJ, said it rejected the claims made in the complaint. “Barclays considers that the claims made in the complaint are disconnected from the facts. We have an obligation to our shareholders, customers, clients, and employees to defend ourselves against unreasonable allegations and demands. Barclays will vigorously defend the complaint and seek its dismissal at the earliest opportunity,” the bank said.

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“No matter how big fiscal surpluses some countries manage, they will never reach the surplus of soul that Greek people have..”

Greek PM in Open Confrontation With German FinMin (GR)

“Those who are not at peace with their souls can not cope with the problems of their country, neither Europe’s nor the world’s,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Thursday. The prime minister had in mind the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who said that he can’t show any understanding to the Greek prime minister for accusing the German government of hurting Greek pensioners. Tsipras spoke in Greek parliament in an event dedicated to unescorted refugee children. “Those who shake the finger at us in the name of the agreements, and address Greek people in a condescending way, they must honor their commitments first before they turn to criticize us,” Tsipras said. Schaeuble has repeatedly said in the past that Greece is not implementing the reforms needed to help the economy to recover. “Our efforts aim to Greece so that it stands on its feet again,”he said.

Then the German minister explained further: “Solidarity can only be justified when the aid is limited and leads to change something in a positive direction. In Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus that was evident. After implementing the program, their economies are growing, rapidly for some. Greece is the third program and without the financial help of billions of euros would be bankrupt long ago. Then the Greek citizens would suffer much more.” The Greek prime minister said during his speech that the compassion and solidarity Greece showed during the refugee crisis is more important than state budgets and fiscal targets. “We now open our arms — and I believe this reflects the feelings of the vast majority of the Greek people — to these weak people. Despite our difficulties we keep our dignity and this is much greater wealth and much larger surplus of all budget surpluses. No matter how big fiscal surpluses some countries manage, they will never reach the surplus of soul that Greek people have,” Tsipras said.

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That’ll go down well.

Greece Takes Dig At Lenders With Scrooge Christmas Card (R.)

Greece’s Finance Ministry took a page out of Charles Dickens’s classic “A Christmas Carol” to have a dig on Friday at the international lenders who have imposed unpopular austerity on the country. An e-card from the press office of the Greek Finance Ministry, sent to journalists, showed a picture of a frail, stingy Ebenezer Scrooge warming by the fire during a visit of his former business partner Jacob Marley, the ghost of Christmas Past shackled in chains. “Perhaps all Christmas stories feature a terrifying Ebenezer welcoming the spirits of Christmas in his desolate loneliness, and perhaps our Christmas story is no exception,” the e-card reads. “But dear friends and colleagues, our wishes will prevail over all the Ebenezers of this world. A very happy new year, with health and love focused on those all around us.”

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Lynn Parramore talks to Jim Chanos.

Is A Big Change Underway In Global Capitalism? (Parramore/Chanos)

Jim Chanos: Bush was the MBA president who was going to be pro-business, cut taxes, and deregulate. Meanwhile, he had two recessions on his watch, less employment than when he started, and two bear markets in the stock market — probably the worst president for business since Herbert Hoover. The business guy! Yet, he did tighten up the Justice Department and go after corporate crime. The Ashcroft Justice Department, as bad as it was in lots of other things, went after corporate fraud and accounting fraud, criminally. In 2002, we got Sarbanes-Oxley to curb fraud. I don’t know that all this was Bush’s predilection — remember, his biggest supporter was Enron. But because of Enron and the other dot-com era scandals, he got backed into a corner to go hard on them.

I’ve joked that the only person who put more corporate executives in jail than George W. Bush was his father during the Savings and Loan Crisis. On these issues, I’d rather have Bush any day of the week than Obama. Both Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer of Obama’s Justice Department said in TV interviews and testimony that they factored in non-judicial aspects as to whether to mount prosecutions. I think that this had political costs to the Democrats. The crony capitalism still bothers people — the idea that Wall Street got off scot-free and they are still struggling. That lack of justice applied equally under the law was corrosive, not necessarily for Obama personally, but certainly for the party following him.

LP: How do you see a Trump presidency in this light? JC: You and I have talked about how it has become a cost calculus for lots of corporations and financial institutions to cheat. “If I get caught,” they say, “I’m just going to pay a fine.” How does this change with new faces in Washington? You still have this very pro-corporate group on Capitol Hill whose main bailiwick, in my opinion, is to protect the corporate class and the very wealthy. You’ve got what ostensibly is a proto-populist in the White House with a cabinet that is a mélange of different types, so who knows?

In my overall view, stuff happens to change people. If we go back to Bill Clinton, his “Putting People First” manifesto in ’92 was quite left-of-center, but he didn’t govern that way. If you look at things like NAFTA, Welfare reform, and cutting capital gains taxes — well, in many ways, Ronald Reagan would have been proud of him. Events conspire to derail our perceptions of presidents. When we look at their platforms, we think we know where things are headed. But in modern times, the only two presidents that I can think of who really got their ideas and platforms enacted wholesale were FDR and Reagan. Everybody else has gotten compromised, or has had events overwhelm them.

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“This is so sad, just humanity digging its own grave..”

Shanghai Water Supply Hit By 100-Tonne Wave Of Garbage (G.)

Medical waste, broken bottles and household trash are some of the items found in more than 100 tonnes of garbage salvaged near a drinking water reservoir in Shanghai. The suspected culprits are two ships that have been dumping waste upstream in the Yangtze river. It has then flowed downstream to the reservoir on Shanghai’s Chongming island which is also home to 700,000 people. The reservoir at the mouth of the river is one of the four main sources of drinking water for the country’s largest city, according to local media. China has struggled with air, soil and water pollution for years during its economic boom, with officials often protecting industry and silencing citizens that complain. China’s cities are often blanketed in toxic smog, while earlier this year more than 80% of water wells used by farms, factories and rural households was found to be unsafe for drinking because of pollution.

Officials dispatched more than 40 workers to clean up the mess, but the area around the reservoir will take about two weeks to clear, the Shanghai Daily reported. Shanghai’s water authority claims supplies are still safe to drink, but has stopped the flow coming in while it continues testing, the paper said. Videos circulating on social media showed beaches and wetlands covered in a rainbow of plastic bags. “There’s enough trash to cover several football fields,” a local resident can be heard saying in one video. Catheter bags and used IV sacks are pulled from the water, and in some places only a sea of trash can be seen, completely obscuring the river water. “This is so sad, just humanity digging its own grave,” one commenter on Twitter-like Sina Weibo said.


A tourist surrounded by rubbish on a beach in China. Photograph: Feature China / Barcroft Media

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“..Britain’s overhead populations are probably “close to minimum values” because of the area’s cold and dry climate. The warm, moist skies of the Amazon – or southern California, for example – likely see far more than 3.5 trillion insects each year.”

3.5 Trillion Insects Migrate Over Southern Britain Each Year (CSM)

Three and a half trillion. That’s how many insects migrate over southern Britain in one year, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science. To put that number in perspective, that’s the equivalent of more than 54 bugs for every person in Britain. The team of scientists from Britain, China, and Israel spent a decade tracking insect migration at altitudes between 492 and 3,937 feet using entomological radar and an aerial insect-catching net. “High-altitude aerial migration of insects is enormous,” University of Exeter entomologist and co-author Jason Chapman told Reuters. “These aerial flows are an unappreciated aspect of terrestrial ecosystems, equivalent to the oceanic movements of plankton which power the oceanic food chains.” And the vast quantity was not the only surprising aspect of their study.

The researchers also discovered that insects migrate north and south seasonally (just like birds), and can reach speeds between 18 and 37 miles per hour by choosing wind patterns that are blowing in their chosen direction, Ars Technica reports. The trillions of migrating insects weigh a combined total of 3,200 tons – the equivalent of more than 636 elephants flying overhead each year. But if hundreds of elephants’ worth of bugs were flying overhead each year, wouldn’t we know about them already? No, say scientists: the vast majority of these bugs are super small. Take the marmalade hoverfly, for example. “It’s only about a centimeter long, it’s orange with black stripes, but it’s a hugely abundant migrant, and it actually does some very important jobs” such as pollinating crops and wildflowers, Dr. Chapman told NPR.

And the authors say Britain’s overhead migration is likely modest compared to other regions of the world. In fact, Chapman tells the Los Angeles Times that Britain’s overhead populations are probably “close to minimum values” because of the area’s cold and dry climate. The warm, moist skies of the Amazon – or southern California, for example – likely see far more than 3.5 trillion insects each year. While some bug-averse people might find this study chilling, it is really quite encouraging, say scientists. Healthy insect populations are crucial for a productive environmental landscape. “We could not function without them,” Chapman tells Reuters. The insects pollinate plants, feed birds and bats, and promote healthy soil through decomposition and other important processes.

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Does ‘volatile’ capture it?

One of Earth’s Most Dangerous Supervolcanoes Is Rumbling (NatGeo)

A long-quiet yet huge supervolcano that lies under 500,000 people in Italy may be waking up and approaching a “critical state,” scientists report this week in the journal Nature Communications. Based on physical measurements and computer modeling, “we propose that magma could be approaching the CDP [critical degassing pressure] at Campi Flegrei, a volcano in the metropolitan area of Naples, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, and where accelerating deformation and heating are currently being observed,” wrote the scientists—who are led by Giovanni Chiodini of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics in Rome. A sudden release of hot magmatic gasses is possible in the near future, which could trigger a large eruption, the scientists warn. Yet the timing of any possible eruption is unknown and is currently not possible to predict.

In response to the news, Italy’s government has raised the volcano’s threat level from green to yellow, or from quiet to requires scientific monitoring. In other words, the government is urging a measured response to the study, followed by additional scientific work. Campi Flegrei means “burning fields” in Italian. The volcanic region is also known as the Phlegraean Fields. Like other supervolcanoes—such as the one responsible for the geothermal features of Yellowstone—it is not a single volcanic cone. Rather, it’s a large complex, much of it underground or under the Mediterranean Sea, that includes 24 craters, as well as various geysers and vents that can release hot gas. Supervolcanoes are usually characterized by a large caldera, or depression, that formed from past explosive eruptions. Campi Flegrei’s depression, just west of Naples, is more than seven miles across.

Campi Flegrei is thought to have formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. A massive eruption 200,000 years ago spewed so much ash that it darkened the skies around the planet, triggering a “volcanic winter.” That event is thought to have been the largest volcanic episode in the history of Europe over that time. The volcano erupted again 35,000 and 12,000 years ago. An eruption about 40,000 years ago might have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals, a 2010 study suggested, although that report has been debated. The volcanic area was also known by the ancient Greeks.

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14 per day, every single day. Before you know it, you’re talking real loss of life.

Mediterranean Death Toll Is Record 5,000 Refugees, Migrants This Year (R.)

A record 5,000 migrants are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea this year, following two shipwrecks on Thursday in which some 100 people, mainly West Africans, were feared dead, aid agencies said on Friday. Two overcrowded inflatable dinghies capsized in the Strait of Sicily after leaving Libya for Italy, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said. “Those two incidents together appear to be the numbers that would bring this year’s total up to over to 5,000 (deaths), which is a new high that we have reported during this crisis,” IOM spokesman Joel Millman told a Geneva briefing. The Italian coast guard rescued survivors and had recovered eight bodies so far, he said. IOM staff were interviewing survivors brought to Trapani, Italy, he added.

Just under 3,800 migrants perished at sea during all of 2015, according to IOM figures. UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said the “alarming increase” in deaths this year appeared to be related to bad weather, the declining quality of vessels used by smugglers, and their tactics to avoid detection. “These (reasons also) include sending large numbers of embarkations simultaneously, which makes the work of rescuers more difficult,” he said. The UNHCR appealed to states to open up more legal pathways for admitting refugees. Resettlement programmes, private sponsorship, family reunification and student scholarships would help “so they do not have to resort to dangerous journeys and the use of smugglers”, Spindler said.

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