Claude Monet The Magpie 1869
Tucker Elon
Tucker Carlson Says Global Freedom Hinges on the Success of @ElonMusk & @X
"I'm worried about the pressure being brought to bear on X because it's the only huge international free speech platform with hundreds of millions of people."
"The existence of X where anyone around the… pic.twitter.com/WRK7tHrT9X
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) December 2, 2023
The way I see it, there is one huge problem with the cybertruck: everyone will want one. It doesn’t rust. It lasts a lifetime.
Tesla would have to produce a million a year at least, and they don’t have the capacity.
Behind the scenes https://t.co/xytpbvrnFJ pic.twitter.com/K7pZmGnGTv
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) December 1, 2023
Ocampo
Former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Ocampo explains genocide and why Israel and the U.S. are committing genocide in Gaza as defined by International law.
“The siege of Gaza is a genocide”pic.twitter.com/jj0YmPiydO
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 1, 2023
Hannity
Trump posted this video in response to last night's debate between DeSantis and Newsom. pic.twitter.com/rmVNAEU7Ct
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 1, 2023
Ukraine does not have enough Firepower – Douglas Macgregor
Nap Mearsheimer
Taibbi+
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify about the most shocking things they found in the Twitter Files including former FBI officials working with the Aspen Institute, corporate media, and social media to pre-bunk the Hunter Biden laptop story.
.@mtaibbi: "The most… pic.twitter.com/kKrBvu9nfX
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) November 30, 2023
The condemnation of Kissinger after his death is pretty much everywhere. Which makes it interesting that two people who actually knew him, Paul Craig Roberts and Scott Ritter, have their own, different, opinions.
• The Real Kissinger – My Memories of Henry (Paul Craig Roberts)
Henry Kissinger at 100 years of age left the world he temporarily altered for the better after watching the neoconservatives in the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden regimes wipe out his accomplishments. Kissinger and President Nixon were men of peace. They inherited a disastrous war–Vietnam–that they had no hand in making. President John F. Kennedy intended to stop the war before it could get started, which was one of the reasons he was assassinated by the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. The Soviet Threat had to be resisted even at the cost of President Kennedy’s life and the trauma inflicted on what was still in those days a free nation. President Nixon and Kissinger also had to restart the efforts of President Kennedy to defuse the dangerous tensions of the Cold War that both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam war brought to the surface.
The pursuit of detente by the Nixon administration produced the Strategic Arms Limitations Agreement and created a working relationship between Washington and Moscow. Nixon’s opening to China might have prevented another war. Nixon and Kissinger’s achievements in defusing the Cold War were unrivaled until President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev ended the Cold war. The Clinton regime violated the word of the George H.W. Bush administration that in exchange for the Soviet Union permitting the reunification of Germany, the US would not move NATO one inch toward the East. All subsequent US regimes exited from all of the arms agreements that had reduced tensions and created a bond of trust between the nuclear superpowers. This bond is especially important, because of the numerous false warnings from warning systems.
The consequence of unraveling the work of Nixon, Kissinger, and Reagan is the total lack of trust today between the US and Russia. The situation today is far worse than it was in the darkest days of the Cold War.As an insider I well know that the problem of conservative presidents, such as Nixon and Reagan, in easing tensions with Russia is that their conservative base is suspicious of the effort. I well remember that Reagan’s efforts at detente with the Soviet Union were suspected by Reagan’s conservative base. Conservatives worried that a former movie star was not a match for cunning communists, and that America would come out the loser. Nixon faced a worse problem. He was trapped by President Johnson’s regime in a gratuitous war that could not be won. But if he left without winning he would endanger his base of support.
The problem of the conservative base is the reason both Reagan and Nixon spoke aggressively, thus causing the leftwing to see them as warmongers. The dilemma Nixon and Kissinger faced is the reason for the Cambodian bombings. They were desperate to get a situation from which they could exit the war without it being interpreted as a defeat by their political base. They were trying to use force to achieve an honorable exit, but the enemy would not give it to them.The leftwing, of course, unable to comprehend the conundrum, interpreted Nixon and Kissinger as war criminals. This erroneous interpretation has held to the present day. Today I still encounter American conservatives who claim that Reagan won the Cold War. This is nonsense. Reagan told those of us involved that the purpose was to end, not win, the Cold War.
Conservatives justify Reagan as the winner of the Cold War, as the man who collapsed the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed three years after Reagan left office. No one, including the CIA, expected the collapse of the Soviet Union. It caught the US government off guard. The Soviet collapse occurred because hardline members of the Politburo, who feared Gorbachev was liberalizing too rapidly, placed Soviet President Gorbachev under house arrest. It was Gorbachev’s arrest that led to Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“..the consequence of the “breakdown” of the work of Nixon, Reagan, and Kissinger today is “a complete lack of trust between the United States and Russia.”
• How US Broke Kissinger’s Efforts to Improve Relations With Russia – PCR (Sp.)
The collapse of the legacy of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who sought to improve Soviet-American relations, as well as the policy of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, has led to the fact that trust between Washington and Moscow is completely absent today, Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant Treasury secretary, told Sputnik. According to Roberts, who personally knew Kissinger, the achievements of Nixon and Kissinger on the issue of détente between the US and the USSR “were unrivaled” until President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War. “The (Bill) Clinton administration broke its word, given by George W. Bush. The Bush administration said that in exchange for the USSR agreeing to the reunification of Germany, the US would not move NATO’s borders one inch eastward.
All subsequent US administrations have withdrawn from arms agreements that served for reducing tensions and forged bonds of trust between the nuclear superpowers,” Roberts said. According to the former Treasury Department official, the consequence of the “breakdown” of the work of Nixon, Reagan, and Kissinger today is “a complete lack of trust between the United States and Russia.” “The situation today is far worse than even in the darkest days of the Cold War,” Roberts stressed. Kissinger’s death was announced on November 29. The former secretary of state gained fame as one of the most influential political figures in the United States, leaving a significant mark on the history of diplomacy. Despite his advanced age, Kissinger commented extensively on current international events, including the situation in Ukraine.
“..without Henry Kissinger, there probably would have been no INF treaty, no START treaty, no SALT agreements, no ABM treaty—no arms control. Without Henry Kissinger, there would very likely have been a nuclear war.”
• Henry Kissinger: The War Criminal Who Saved The World (Scott Ritter)
To be honest, as I entered the US Marines after graduating college in 1984, I didn’t give Henry Kissinger much thought—he was, from my perspective, a relic of the past, a bad national nightmare who, like his boss, Richard Nixon, was fading into the pages of historical irrelevance. And then, in early 1988, everything changed. I was taken from the deserts of southern California, where I had been perfecting skills associated with the Marine Corps mission of closing with and destroying the enemy through firepower and maneuver, and dispatched to Washington, DC, where I was made part of a team that would implement inspection tasks associated with the implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.
As I learned more about the treaty, and its relationship to the history of US-Soviet arms control, the name Henry Kissinger kept popping up. Kissinger, it turns out, was the Godfather of US-Soviet arms control, the man who crafted the anti-ballistic missile treaty, considered one of the foundational agreements which defined the strategic relationship between the US and Soviet Union. He was also the driving force behind the policy of détente between the US and Soviet Union which led to an end to the nuclear arms race and heralded in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) which eventually turned into the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The INF treaty was a byproduct of the vision set forth by Henry Kissinger. I often speak of the importance of the INF treaty in preventing nuclear war, and remain convinced that without it, a nuclear conflict between the US and Soviet Union was inevitable.
It turns out that without Henry Kissinger, there probably would have been no INF treaty, no START treaty, no SALT agreements, no ABM treaty—no arms control. Without Henry Kissinger, there would very likely have been a nuclear war. Following my assignment as an arms inspector in the Soviet Union, I returned to the Marine Corps, where, from August 1990 until August 1998, my life was defined by Iraq—first through Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and then later, as a weapons inspector with the United Nations tasked with overseeing the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. Once again, Henry Kissinger disappeared into the background, only to reappear in the summer of 1998 as one of the “foreign policy experts” who articulated openly about the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Following my resignation from the United Nations, in August 1998, I received an invitation from Teddy Forstmann, one of the founders of the private equity corporation Forstmann & Little, to fly to Aspen, Colorado, to speak as part of an annual policy discussion forum that brought together the “best and the brightest” in the world under a single roof where the issues of the day would be addressed. Among the notable people present was none other than Henry Kissinger. I had the opportunity to rub elbows with Mr. Kissinger on several occasions during the Aspen forum. We talked, of course, about Iraq—this was pre-9/11, pre-WMD fabrication, where the issues revolved primarily around Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed to regional peace and security. But most of all we talked about arms control, and the importance of preserving the legacy of disarmament that had been started under the Nixon administration, but which seemed to be slipping away under Bill Clinton’s watch.
I last saw Henry Kissinger in May 1999, at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Mr. Kissinger was attended to by a retired Secret Service officer whom I had met at the Aspen event. After the dinner and speeches, he approached my table and told me Mr. Kissinger wanted to speak with me. I was ushered to a side room, where the famous former diplomat was waiting. “I wanted to continue our conversation,” Kissinger said.
“..in less than a year, the Chinese are not only producing that chip, but better chips, because they were compelled to do it themselves..”
• US Pushing Nuclear Arms Race ‘Can Only Have Tragic Ending’ – Scott Ritter (Sp.)
In early November, a scheduled test of an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by the United States ended in failure as the Air Force was forced to prematurely self-destruct the missile in mid-flight. The Pentagon said it was “due to an anomaly” during the test.The nuclear-tipped missile has been in service since 1970, having its service life extended several times after the end of the Cold War in 1990, which caused the US to de-emphasize strategic missile production. A new system, the Sentinel ICBM, is currently being developed to replace the Minuteman III, but isn’t scheduled to fully replace the older missile for another decade.
However, when the Sentinel and other nuclear-capable weapons, such as the B-21 Raider bomber, finally enter service, they’ll already be outclassed by Russian and Chinese counterparts, since those nations have already achieved nuclear superiority over the US, Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, told Radio Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Thursday. Ritter recently authored an article on Consortium News titled: “The End of US Nuclear Superiority.” “The United States has a nuclear deterrence model called the Triad. There’s three legs to the triad: there’s the manned aerial bomber leg that consists of B-52H bombers and B-2 bombers; there is a sea leg, submarine launched ballistic missiles, the Trident IIs carried on board the old Ohio-class submarines; and then there’s the ground leg, which consists of 400 Minuteman III missiles that are loaded into silos across the Midwest of the United States,” Ritter explained.
“The Minuteman III is a very old missile. It’s been refurbished. It’s had its fuel scraped out, new fuel put in. But the bottom line is, it’s reached the end of its usefulness in this test. You know, it’s a test that the Air Force carries out periodically that’s designed to show the reliability of the Minuteman III system. Well, it failed. And so what we have here is a Cold War relic that is on life support and it may not be able to do the job that it’s supposed to do.
“Then you compare and contrast this with the Russian missiles that are being fielded now, two in particular: the Sarmat missile, which is a heavy intercontinental ballistic missile carrying multiple warheads, including the Avangard hypersonic maneuverable warhead. It also can be fired, because of its range, over the South Pole, which means it comes into the United States from a direction that our early-warning radars aren’t situated – all our radars are oriented toward the North Pole, the traditional entry route of Russian missiles if there was to be a war.There’s the Yars missile, which is not only road-mobile, but also could be fired from a silo. And the Yars missile can carry the Avangard hypersonic maneuverable warhead.” “The Avangard is a warhead that’s designed to defeat any missile defense system in the world. It was developed by the Russians in response to the decision by President George W. Bush, back in 2002, to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and therefore begin deploying ballistic missile defense systems that the Russians deemed to threaten the notion of strategic parity, meaning that the United States fielded a missile defense system capable of shooting down Russian warheads and fielded systems that could allow for a preemptive first-strike. The United States may believe they can nullify Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent and therefore push Russia around any way they want. That’s unacceptable to the Russians.”
[..]“Look at The Economist, the hard Russophobic magazine. The cover[says]: ‘Is Russia winning the War?’ Oh, yeah. ‘Did we get it wrong?’ You’re damn right you did. Everybody got it wrong. The Russian defense industry right now is orders of magnitude advanced over ours. They are producing new systems, modern systems, systems that are derived from experiences of less than a year. Like I told you, the B-21 is a 10-to-15 year old design. The Russians are putting out new things. Look what we did with China: we’re trying to strangle their chips, saying they will never be able to develop a certain size chip. And so we cut them off from the lithographic machines from the Netherlands and from this supply and that supply, and in less than a year, the Chinese are not only producing that chip, but better chips, because they were compelled to do it themselves. And they are so far ahead of us in terms of other technologies.” he said.
“Haaretz journalist Chaim Levinson also investigated the claim and said, “I checked. Did not happen.”
• Israeli Army Plants New Fake Hamas Atrocity Story (Cradle)
The Israeli military is seeking to manipulate Israeli journalists to plant false stories of Hamas atrocities in the media. On 28 November, Israeli journalist Yishai Cohen published video of an interview in which an Israeli soldier claimed that dead “Babies and children were hung in a clothes line in a row,” in Be’eri, a settlement near Gaza that was attacked by Hamas on 7 October. Cohen later deleted the video, as the claim could not be confirmed, but the video garnered hundreds of thousands of views on the social media site X during the eight hours it was online. Other X users continued to share the clip after Cohen deleted the post. One X user criticized Cohen, writing, “How do you upload such a video online without having 100% certainty? Why is everything here amateurish and crooked?”
Cohen, a journalist for the Hebrew language Kikar HaShabbat news website, explained his mistake, saying the interview was offered to him by the Israeli army spokesperson. “I did not know the interviewee before. A representative of DoC was present in all the filming and approved the broadcast,” he said. “After posting the promo, there were complaints, so I immediately deleted it within minutes. And yet, even this morning, the IDF [army] spokesman refrained from claiming that this was a false story. By the way, the interviewee insists that the story is accurate and there was even another witness to this.” Haaretz journalist Amir Tibbon criticized Cohen for taking the soldier’s word, and not confirming the story, especially as only one child was killed in the area in the kibbutz in question.
In response, Cohen explained that, “I admit that I didn’t think it was necessary to check the truth of a story brought by a lieutenant colonel, a general officer of the Gaza division, and also accompanied by a representative of the DoC. Why would an army officer make up such a horrific story? I was wrong.” Cohen was among the Israeli journalists who debunked the previous claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies during the 7 October surprise attack. A volunteer from United Hatzalah rescues service, Asher Moskowitz, had claimed he was at the Shura military base when bodies were arriving. He claimed that “Most of the bodies from Kfar Aza were burned, but what I saw with this body— it was relatively complete, but hard like a rock, and on its stomach was the sign of a heating element, like a half a circle or a big chain.”
Moskowitz continued by saying that someone from Chevreh Kadishah [the Israeli military organization that prepares bodies for burial] told him that “based on the signs on the body, it looks like they put him inside the oven alive,” and that “they found the baby dead inside the oven.” However, the Jerusalem Post went on to report that no journalists have been able to verify the claim, including Cohen of Kikar HaShabbat news website. Cohen tried to confirm the story with the Israeli military, another rescue service called Zaka, the Shura military base, and other sources, but was unable to. Haaretz journalist Chaim Levinson also investigated the claim and said, “I checked. Did not happen.”
“..the Americans are being slowly, but surely and very forcefully expelled from the big Eurasia by the Russia-China strategic partnership..”
• US Needs Gaza War to Destabilize BRICS, Greater Eurasia – Pepe Escobar (Sp.)
The Biden administration needs an Israeli victory in Gaza in order to undermine BRICS and other economic integration initiatives led by Russia and China, veteran geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar told the New Rules podcast. “This is an American diversionist tactic to once again go against BRICS multipolarity, especially given the fact that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates now have a very graphic, tangible opportunity to link themselves to the birth of the new Eurasia when they become members of BRICS,” he said. Escobar noted that during the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, the United States and Israel unveiled the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) initiative. The project, Escobar explained, seeks to bypass China’s Belt and Road Initiative and transform Israel into a key energy and logistical hub.
Notably, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at the UN General Assembly later that month, he presented a map of the “New Middle East” without Palestine. This was no accident, according to Escobar. “The impression that [Netanyahu] gave all of us who follow international relations is that they created this IMEC idea on the fly and they needed to start implementing it in some way. And part of it was ‘Okay, let’s rekindle the war in Israel-Palestine because then we offer the Israelis or the Israelis offer themselves the possibility of solving the Palestine problem.’ Because this comes with another element: the Ben Gurion Canal, which is an old idea first floated in the 60s of building a canal where Israel has control and not the Egyptians. So you transfer all the connectivity and all the trade from Suez to the Ben Gurion Canal.”
Escobar predicted that although the Israeli government is facing growing international criticism for its actions in Gaza, the Biden administration is unlikely to abandon the IMEC initiative. “This [conflict] proves once again that the US will never leave West Asia…The region is absolutely essential for the empire, considering that the Americans are being slowly, but surely and very forcefully expelled from the big Eurasia by the Russia-China strategic partnership – by their trade deals, their multilateral organizations and economic integration projects. All that goes completely against American domination of Eurasia.”
“Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed..”
• Tik Tok Under Western Pressure To Censor Pro-Palestine Voices (Cradle)
TikTok’s Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew recently met 40 business leaders, including many from the tech field, who sought to push for the app to take “a more neutral stance” on the campaign of genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip, Bloomberg reported on 30 November. The meeting included other TikTok executives and several investment partners, who forwarded a letter signed by 90 professionals in an effort to get TikTok to “uphold its commitment” to “prevent harm,” according to investment partner Anthony Goldbloom. Signatories of the letter expressed that they felt the app was violating this clause as claims of “antisemitism” have increased since the 7 October Hamas-led Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
TikTok denied political bias in the app’s algorithm. “Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed,” a press release by the app says. “Support for Israel (as compared to sympathy for Palestine) has been lower among younger Americans for some time. This is evidenced by looking at Gallup polling data of millennials dating as far back as 2010, long before TikTok even existed.” The push to silence voices in support of Palestine has been prevalent since the beginning of the war. There has been a slurry of anti-Palestinian propaganda that has been used to justify the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip. Media campaigns like “Facts for Peace” have sprung up to bolster the Israeli image in the public eye by seeking million-dollar donations from some of the world’s biggest names in media, finance, and technology.
Israel, in an act of domestic image boosting, has also banned news outlets like Al-Mayadeen from reporting within its borders, claiming such a thing would “jeopardize” the state image. DeclassifiedUK examined the headlines of multiple legacy papers and found that “the mechanics of the western press’ dehumanization of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine.” “In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis die actively. They are either killed or murdered by Hamas,” the news outlet writes. “Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October; over ten times the number of Israelis killed.”
“It is in Europe’s interest to address this issue out of moral conviction because what we are seeing in Gaza is not acceptable..”
• Israel Irate Over Spanish PM Support For Palestine (Cradle)
Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced on 30 November it was recalling its envoy in Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon, for consultations following remarks made by the country’s prime minister. The Spanish ambassador in Tel Aviv was also summoned in protest to the comments. “Because of the outrageous remarks by the Spanish prime minister, who again repeated baseless claims, I have decided to summon the Israeli ambassador in Spain for consultations in Jerusalem,” Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said. “Israel is acting, and will continue to act, according to international law, and will continue the war until all the hostages are returned and Hamas is eliminated from Gaza.”
While speaking with a local broadcaster on 30 November, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez expressed “serious doubt” that Israel was carrying out its assault on Gaza in line with international humanitarian law, particularly given “growing numbers of children dying.” The Spanish prime minister also called on the EU to recognize an independent Palestinian state. “It is in Europe’s interest to address this issue out of moral conviction because what we are seeing in Gaza is not acceptable,” Sanchez said. The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Spanish premier’s “shameful remark on a day in which Hamas terrorists murdered Israelis in our capital, Jerusalem.” The comments came the same day as a shooting operation in the occupied holy city, which resulted in the deaths of four settlers. The Hamas fighters behind the attack were killed at the scene.
Sanchez’s comments were not his first on the current war raging in Gaza. Last week, the prime minister accused Netanyahu of “indiscriminate killing” and suggested his country may unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. Representatives from several EU countries, including Ireland and others, have strongly criticized Israel’s war on the Hamas movement in Gaza. In October, over 800 EU officials wrote in a letter to the head of the bloc, Ursula von der Leyen, that they “hardly recognize the values of the EU” and reject the “seeming indifference demonstrated … by our institution towards the ongoing massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip, in disregard for human rights and international humanitarian law.”
They knew about it for a year, but they only started making plans after the fact?
• Israel Planning Global Assassination Campaign – WSJ (RT)
Israeli spies are preparing to assassinate Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Türkiye, and Qatar once the war with the militant group is over, officials have told the Wall Street Journal. The operation was reportedly planned more than a month ago, but postponed so that hostage negotiations could take place. The Israeli intelligence services began drawing up plans for the assassination campaign after Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish state, the American newspaper reported on Thursday, citing the anonymous officials. Some reportedly wanted to embark on the campaign immediately, but were ordered to wait so that negotiations to free the roughly 240 hostages held by Hamas could progress. The killings have been authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the officials said, adding that it is now a matter of when, not if, the campaign will begin.
While such operations are usually planned in secret, the Israeli government has explicitly warned that it intends to kill Hamas operatives outside of Gaza. Before the officials leaked the story to the Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu declared last month that he had “instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are.” Answering directly to the prime minister’s office, Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence and covert operations agency, roughly analogous to the American CIA. The agency has a long history of assassinations on foreign soil, some of which have escalated into major diplomatic incidents. Famed for capturing Adolf Eichmann – a Nazi officer and leading organizer of the Holocaust – in 1960, Mossad failed to kill many of the Nazis it hunted in the decades immediately after World War II, despite having an extensive hit list to work through.
The agency launched a letter-bombing campaign against former Nazi scientists working for Egypt’s rocket program in the early 1960s, but the operation was called off by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1963 after multiple targets escaped and at least five Egyptian workers were killed. In a multi-decade clandestine operation launched after Palestinian militants killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, Mossad agents killed 18 people suspected of involvement in the massacre. One of those killed was a Moroccan waiter in Norway, an incident that led to the arrest and sentencing of five Israeli agents by the Norwegian authorities.
More recently, Netanyahu ordered Mossad to assassinate Hamas co-founder Khaled Mashal in Jordan in 1997. The two-man assassination team was captured after one sprayed a toxin into Mashal’s ear, and Jordan threatened to shred its peace treaty with Israel in response. The diplomatic standoff was defused when Israeli agents delivered an antidote to the toxin and Netanyahu agreed to release dozens of Palestinian prisoners, including Hamas imam and co-founder Ahmed Yassin. Mossad agents were also caught using forged Irish, British, and Australian passports for an assassination operation in Dubai in 2010.
How’s that going so far?
• US Aims To Halve Russia’s Oil, Gas Revenues By 2030 (TASS)
Washington is aiming to halve Russia’s oil and gas revenues by the end of this decade, Geoffrey Pyatt, US assistant secretary of state for energy resources, told the Financial Times. Western sanctions on Russia’s oil came into force on December 5, 2022. The International Energy Agency has forecast that its oil and gas exports could fall “by at least 40-50 per cent by 2030” if western sanctions on Russia’s energy industry are maintained, FT said. “This is something that we’re going to have to stick to for years to come,” as long as the Ukrainian conflict continues, Pyatt said. “We’re going to do everything we can to help make that true,” he was quoted as saying.
“The goal of these sanctions is to change Russia’s behavior,” the official added. Sticking to sanctions against Russia “has enormous geopolitical implications in terms of <…> Russia’s ability to use its energy as a strategic asset,” Pyatt noted. In December 2022, the European Union stopped receiving Russian oil delivered by sea, while G7 countries, Australia and the EU imposed a price cap for it, setting the ceiling at $60 a barrel. It is banned to deliver or insure more expensive oil.
“Trump’s lawyers have argued that speeches on “election integrity” are “at the heart of his official responsibilities as president,” and are therefore protected from legal consequences..”
• Trump Can Be Sued For Capitol Riot, Court Rules (RT)
Former US President Donald Trump is not immune from being sued over his alleged role in instigating the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, an appeals court in Washington DC ruled on Friday. Democrats and Capitol Police officers took legal action against Trump in the wake of the violent protest.In a unanimous verdict, the court rejected Trump’s argument that “presidential immunity” forbids him from being held liable for the events of that day, which took place while he was still in power. In a speech to his supporters before the riot, Trump told them to “fight like hell” against his election loss, but to do so “peacefully and patriotically.”In the ruling, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote that the president “does not spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities,” and “when he acts in an unofficial, private capacity, he is subject to civil suits like any private citizen.”
A trio of lawsuits brought by Democratic lawmakers and US Capitol Police officers allege that Trump’s ‘fight like hell’ speech encouraged the mob to storm the Capitol, and should pay damages. Two officers injured during the riot are seeking a minimum of $75,000 from the former president.Four people died during the protest, all of them Trump supporters. One woman, an Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer during a scuffle near the entrance to the House chamber. The court’s decision paves the way for these lawsuits to go ahead, and could also influence the outcome of a criminal case brought against the former president by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
In August, Smith charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights, making the same argument that Trump’s speech provoked the storming of the Capitol. Trump’s lawyers have argued that speeches on “election integrity” are “at the heart of his official responsibilities as president,” and are therefore protected from legal consequences. Trump himself has dismissed Smith’s case as a “pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Trump is currently the frontrunner to take the Republican Party’s nomination for next year’s election. However, the former president faces multiple legal obstacles. Smith is overseeing two criminal cases against Trump, the second concerning his alleged mishandling of classified documents. In addition to the three civil suits concerning the Capitol riot, Trump is being sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly inflating the worth of his business empire, and faces charges in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Finally, Trump is being tried in New York for his alleged misreporting of “hush-money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump insists that all of the cases against him are part of the same overarching, Democrat-led plot to sideline Biden’s leading opponent ahead of the 2024 election.
Flashback: Remember when Trump got interrupted by NBC hack @kwelkernbc for saying the J6 committee 'destroyed all the evidence'?
"The January 6th Unselect Committee of Thugs and Horrible People… destroyed all the evidence," Trump said.
"They say they didn't do that," Welker… pic.twitter.com/UOyKgzZv8g
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 1, 2023
“..James wants dissolution and crippling damages, and that could trigger a higher-court review…”
• The Curious Fraud Case Against Trump Just Got ‘Curiouser’ (Turley)
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Those words from Alice in Wonderland seem the only apt description of the case unfolding in the New York courtroom of Justice Arthur F. Engoron over the alleged fraudulent practices of former president Donald Trump, his family and his business. The charges brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James were curious from the start. James had run for office on the pledge that she would hunt down Trump, a promise that apparently thrilled many New Yorkers. However, she brought a civil case based on Trump over- and under-estimating the values of his properties. As some of us have previously stated, there do appear to have been assets that were inflated or deflated in value. That may be a common practice in New York real estate, but it is not a good practice.
Indeed, I believe a penalty is warranted for such practices, but those should be uniformly imposed and would be a fraction of the fortune sought by James in this case. The evidence shows that banks made money on these loans, which were paid off either early or on time. In fact, none of the banks complained about the Trump organization’s estimations, which were accompanied by a warning that the banks should not rely on those estimates. Moreover, James is seeking to kill a corporation once viewed as iconic in New York, not just by denying the certificates for the Trumps to do business in the city but by imposing $250 million in penalties for money that no one actually lost. That all became curiouser this week when two bankers were called by the defense.
Rosemary Vrablic and David Williams worked on Deutsche Bank loans to the Trumps for years, and they testified that the banks made millions and viewed Trump as a much-sought-after “whale” client — what Vrablic described as a “very high net-worth individual.” Williams testified that net worth is “subjective” in such documents as property valuations and are offered as mere “estimates.” It is not uncommon for a bank’s estimates to differ from a client’s. Vrablic wrote emails at the time about the benefits to the bank in dealing with the Trumps, as well as pitches to the family that the bank was happy to extend conditions which allowed added benefits of “flexibility, rate and service” to get the business relationship. Justice Engoron seemed irritated by the testimony, however, and when Trump counsel asked why the bank was so eager to secure future loans, Engoron snapped back: “They’re trying to make money. Why wouldn’t they be interested?”
The real question here is James’ overriding interest in killing the company. Engoron has already declared that Trump is guilty of fraud, and he is now weighing the massive penalties sought by James — and eagerly supported by many New Yorkers. That eagerness could prove the court’s undoing, however. Some of Engoron’s earlier orders are currently under review. Yet it is James’ demand for the effective dissolution of the corporation and $250 million in penalties that could push this case beyond the curious to the unconstitutional. It is relatively rare for civil damages to trigger constitutional review, and it is still far from clear that this case will rise to that level. The New York law is unique in allowing massive penalties without the loss of a single dollar by a bank. However, James wants dissolution and crippling damages, and that could trigger a higher-court review.
[..] In the Trump case, the banks made money. It would be akin to the car owner’s value going up with the paint job but still hitting BMW with punitive damages. James is known for her embrace of nuclear options when it comes to political opponents or groups. She previously sought to persuade a court to force the dissolution of the National Rifle Association. The question is, what happens if she finally has found an enabling judge in Engoron? The testimony of the bankers highlights how out of proportion this effort has become. One would expect the banks to have sought action as the aggrieved parties if they had suffered losses as a result of Trump misconduct. They did not. While they discontinued working with the Trumps after the start of the New York criminal and civil actions, they have remained silent.
“Years before the Covid-19 fiasco, Mr. Kirsch gave MIT $2.5 million to build a new lecture hall. Then, during Covid-19, Mr. Kirsch asked MIT to allow him to stage a lecture about his findings. The MIT administrators refused to let Mr. Kirsch speak in the lecture hall that he paid for.”
History is a trickster. It unfolds emergently with uncanny creativity, often blindsiding humanity with the unanticipated consequences and non-linear outcomes of previous unfoldings. So, here we are now in a Second Civil War. Really? “Between whom?” you might ask. Between truth and untruth. Between a sociopathic bureaucratic blob steeped in lies and a citizenry obliged to live and die by the blob’s lies.Case-in-point: the emergent evolution of US public health agencies, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, the NIAID and their many fiefdoms, into a gigantic engine of death fueled by incessant and persistent lying. The people running these agencies lied to you about the creation and origin of the novel corona virus, SARS Covid-19. Then they lied about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines created as the sovereign remedy for Covid-19. They also lied about and suppressed actual effective treatments for the disease they invented and loosed on the world and then coerced the whole medical establishment into breaking its Hippocratic oath (first do no harm) to administer vaccines that killed.
They lied about these things knowingly. And through the whole three-year episode, US public health has hidden the data about Covid and the vaccines while aggressively lying about it and punishing American citizens who found ways to expose the truth. The vaccines have killed an estimate 670,000 Americans and 17-million world-wide, consensus figures arrived at by citizens devoted to uncovering the truth. One of these is independent researcher Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley billionaire who invented the optical mouse. In 2021, after noticing a strange pattern of early deaths and injuries in his own circle of acquaintances, Mr. Kirsch devoted himself and his fortune to uncovering the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines. Mr. Kirsch describes himself as “a nerd,” by which he means that he is good at math and at assembling bodies of information using rigorous statistical analysis that present a coherent picture of reality, a.k.a. the truth.
Last night, Thursday, November 30, Mr.Kirsch gave a talk at his alma mater, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts on what the best available statistics tell us about the Covid-19 vaccines (for instance, that so far they have killed more Americans than World War Two). The talk was live-streamed on the Rumble platform (YouTube scrubbed it). There is an interesting story behind Mr. Kirsch’s event. Years before the Covid-19 fiasco, Mr. Kirsch gave MIT $2.5 million to build a new lecture hall. Then, during Covid-19, Mr. Kirsch asked MIT to allow him to stage a lecture about his findings. The MIT administrators refused to let Mr. Kirsch speak in the lecture hall that he paid for. Mr. Kirsch went public with that, embarrassing the university, and under new MIT President Sally Kornbluth, the Institute relented.
Prior to the November 30 talk, Mr. Kirsch sought to share his data with eminent MIT professor Robert Langer, winner of countless awards for advances in the biotechnological sciences. Dr. Langer runs a research program that his MIT webpage describes as follows: “The group’s work is at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. A major focus is the study and development of polymers to deliver drugs, particularly genetically engineered proteins, continuously at controlled rates and for prolonged periods of time.” Sounds like Dr. Langer would be intimately acquainted with the mechanisms of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, especially the development of lipid nanoparticles that facilitate the delivery of the mRNA message into their targeted cells. Dr. Langer declined to see the data or to meet with Mr. Kirsch. At the beginning of his talk, Mr. Kirsch offered some speculation as to why Dr. Langer might demur to see the data or meet with him. Turns out it is because Dr. Langer sits on the Moderna board of directors.
“Ducks are only in a row when in motion” – Isaac Newton
Patrick Moore
Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore, on Net Zero/the Green New Deal: "It's a recipe for mass suicide".
"Why would anyone vote for something that was going to result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth?"
"It would basically begin a process of cannibalisation amongst… pic.twitter.com/0zHvVli2lG
— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) December 1, 2023
Always stay a sucker for the simple things.
A puppy and butterflies.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/jz3QVMSUyk
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 1, 2023
Cat
This woman found an orphaned cat abandoned on the street and look what happened to the older cat pic.twitter.com/ltWvY1A6cM
— Enez Özen | Enezator (@Enezator) December 1, 2023
Self similar
Jim Denevan works with natural materials to create drawings in sand, ice, and soil that are then erased by waves and weather.
This Self Similar, an installation comprising 448 pyramids and mounds adorned with over 1000 solar lanterns.pic.twitter.com/OS5K3riyI1
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 1, 2023
The American yellow warbler is known for its beautiful yellow and greenish-golden plumage. It is generally resident in the mangrove swamps. Roughly 60% of its diet is caterpillars
Short Eared Owl
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