May 172024
 


Leonard Misonne Waterloo Place, London 1899

 

Why Trials Like Trump’s Must Be Televised (Alan M. Dershowitz)
Trump Lawyer “Dog Walks” Michael Cohen Through Lie After Lie (ZH)
Trump Believes a ‘Great Silent Majority’ Will Vote for Him in November (ET)
Joe Biden Invokes Executive Privilege Over Special Counsel Recordings (ZH)
Freezing the Arms Shipment to Israel Not an Impeachable Offense (Turley)
Martin Armstrong: ‘West Governments Need War’ (SF)
Zelensky Blames ‘Whole World’ For Ukraine’s Failures In Kharkov (RT)
Slovakia Faces ‘Civil War’ – Interior Minister (RT)
Hunter Biden Loses Bid to Halt Tax Evasion Court Proceedings (ET)
“We’ve Had A Hell Of A Run”: Druckenmiller Sells 441,000 Shares Of Nvidia (ZH)
Biden Should Have Pardoned Trump – Romney (RT)
‘Big Blunder’ To Let China And Russia Get Close – US Strategist (RT)

 

 

Vivek debate

 

 

Ogles

 

 

Xi Putin
https://x.com/i/status/1791264681694556387

 

 

Videos are being transferred from twitter.com to X.com. It is not going seamless. Should improve as the day goes by.

 

 

Moose
https://x.com/i/status/1790990564646609003

tiktokers
https://x.com/i/status/1791220831252595119

 

 

 

 

Spectacle?!

Why Trials Like Trump’s Must Be Televised (Alan M. Dershowitz)

If you were flipping between CNN and Fox News following the cross-examination of Stormy Daniels in the New York criminal case against former President Donald Trump, you would have had the impression that the CNN commentator, who professed to be reporting what happened in the courtroom, described a completely different event from what the Fox News reporter, who was also in the courtroom, described. It was as if they had seen two different witnesses and two different lawyers. The CNN commentator reported that Daniels had done a great job holding up against the incompetent cross-examination of Trump’s lawyer. The Fox News commentator reported that the extraordinarily effective Trump lawyer had totally destroyed Daniels’ credibility. Who were you to believe? The CNN commentator was an experienced lawyer who was purporting to describe accurately what had happened without bias or subjectivity.

The Fox News commentator was a former judge and prosecutor with vast experience, who also claimed to be describing the cross-examination without bias. Neither of the commentators even pretended to paint a gray picture. One was starkly black, the other unambiguously white. No nuance in either account. If the trial had been televised, the dominant color would have been gray. Perry Mason cross-examinations rarely occur in real life, and witnesses like Daniels rarely emerge unscathed from cross-examinations even by mediocre lawyers. We, the American public, however, have been denied the right to judge for ourselves how the case against the once and possibly future president is going. We cannot judge the credibility of witnesses, the fairness of the judge or the effectiveness of the lawyers. We must depend on the subjective and generally biased accounts of often partisan “reporters.”

Polls following the OJ Simpson case suggested that those who personally watched the trial on TV were less surprised by the not guilty verdict than those who only read about it in the media, which generally described it as an open and shut case and predicted a guilty verdict. They downplayed or omitted the gaps in the prosecution case and the mistakes made by prosecutors that may have led jurors to find reasonable doubt. The same may be true of the Trump case, except that everyone is seeing the case through the prism of the reporters, rather than with their own eyes. Those who get their “news” from anti-Trump sources will be surprised and outraged if there is an acquittal or hung jury in this “strong” case. Those who get their “news” from pro-Trump sources will be surprised and outraged by a conviction in this “weak” case.

The result of making us rely on partisan secondary sources rather than our own direct observations is inevitable distrust in the justice system. If “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” lack of visibility is a major source of distrust. Every important trial involving public figures should be televised. Now the trial of Senator Robert Menendez is starting. It, too, should be publicized so that the public can see how the judiciary deals with an important case involving a member of the legislative branch. Even the Supreme Court now permits live audio broadcasts of important appellate cases. Hopefully, they will soon allow telecasting since there is little difference between listening and seeing the justices and the lawyers. The framers of the Constitution intended all judicial proceedings to be public – no secret trials. At the time of the framing, public meant open to print journalists. Today, public means audio and video publication.

The New York trial of Trump is a national scandal. There is no real crime. The judge has allowed testimony that is highly prejudicial and irrelevant. He has made numerous unfair rulings, of which the prosecution has taken advantage. The public has the right to see this abuse with their own eyes, so that we all can judge for ourselves and not allow possibly biased reporters to judge for us. Now the government’s star witness is testifying. Michael Cohen’s credibility promises to be a key factor in the jury’s deliberation. Every citizen should have a right to make his or her own assessment of his credibility or lack thereof. There is no good argument for allowing CNN to tell us whether he is believable, when we might come to a different conclusion based on direct observation with our own eyes.

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Star witness, blindsided by prank calls from a 14-year old.

Trump Lawyer “Dog Walks” Michael Cohen Through Lie After Lie (ZH)

President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen had his “knees chopped out” by Donald Trump’s defense attorneys in cross-examination during Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial. Cohen was grilled by Trump attorney Todd Blanche about a pivotal phone call that connected Trump to allegations that he approved reimbursements to pay porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. In one exchange, Blanche accused Cohen of lying about speaking with Trump on the phone in October 2016 to reassure his boss that he was handling the payment to Daniels. Blanche then confronted Cohen with text messages that contradicted the lie – revealing that Cohen in fact spoke with Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller. Trump attorney Todd Blanche grilled him about a pivotal phone call that had connected President Trump to the allegations at the center of the case.

He accused Mr. Cohen of calling the former president’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to complain about harassing phone calls—not to disclose an update on a plan to purchase the silence of Ms. Clifford. Mr. Cohen said that the prank calls were a part of the conversation with Mr. Schiller. “Now your memory is that you were testifying truthfully on Tuesday, and you had enough time to update Mr. Schiller about all the problems you were having with these harassing calls?” Mr. Blanche asked him. “I always run everything by the boss immediately,” Mr. Cohen said. “It could’ve just been me saying, ‘everything’s been taken care of, it’s been resolved.’” “That was a lie. You did not talk to President Trump that night,” Mr. Blanche said. “You can admit it.” “No sir, I can’t,” Mr. Cohen said. “Because I’m not sure that’s accurate.” “This jury doesn’t want to hear what you think happened,” Mr. Blanche said. -Epoch Times. Cohen appeared blindsided by the line of questioning, and wavered in his recollection of the phone call before blurting out “I believe I was telling the truth!”

Blanche then slapped Cohen around for telling Congress that he didn’t want to work in the Trump administration – only to be confronted with conversations in 2016 in which he expressed disappointment that he was overlooked for the role of Trump’s chief of staff. Cohen also lied about seeking a pardon from Trump, for which his attorneys later had to issue a statement to correct the record. After Cohen had his ass handed to him, CNN pundits were beside themselves. “It was incredible…lawyers want to build a box around the witness & slam it shut–that’s what Todd Blanche did to Cohen…it was an extraordinary cross…Cohen was cornered in…a lie,” said host Anderson Cooper. The network’s top legal analyst said “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically as what just happened with Michael Cohen.”

https://x.com/i/status/1791174382288765323

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“It’s got to come down much more. That’s a lot of inflation, their number they announced.”

Trump Believes a ‘Great Silent Majority’ Will Vote for Him in November (ET)

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he believes he has a “great silent majority” who will vote for him during the 2024 election. While speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt, the former president claimed that he may have the “biggest ever” silent majority, using a term that was popularized by former President Richard Nixon in 1969. He then made reference to the relatively large crowd turnout during last weekend’s rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. “I have a great silent majority … the term was very, very powerfully associated with Nixon, and I didn’t want to be copying the term actually, so it’s the great silent majority,” President Trump said, adding that he believes that 107,000 people attended the Wildwood rally. The Epoch Times could not immediately authenticate that figure. The former president in 2020 made similar claims about a silent majority turning out in droves for him during that year’s election.

But the term was famously used by President Nixon to refer to conservative voters who did not participate in the current political discourse at the time, later resurfacing in the campaigns of former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In his interview with Mr. Hewitt, the former president said that he believes inflation may cause some voters to cast ballots in favor of him, coming after the Labor Department released figures Wednesday showing that the consumer price index slightly eased in April. “It’s a lot of inflation when added to the inflation that we’ve suffered that’s been so bad,” President Trump said, likely referring to years of rising prices since the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s got to come down much more. That’s a lot of inflation, their number they announced.” The former president’s remarks on Wednesday come as a recent poll from Siena College shows that President Joe Biden is trialing the former president in five of six battleground states.

President Trump, notably, is ahead by 6 percentage points in Arizona, 11 points in Georgia, and 13 points in Nevada, the survey revealed. He’s ahead about 3 points in Pennsylvania and 1 point in Wisconsin, while is down by 1 point to President Biden in Michigan. In the 2020 election, races were called for President Biden in all of those states mentioned in the Siena College survey. In a Wall Street Journal poll conducted in April, President Trump garnered a lead of between 2 and 8 percentage points among voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina on a ballot that included third-party and independent candidates. The results were similar in a one-on-one matchup with President Biden, it said.

The former president also was viewed as having better physical and mental fitness for the job by 48 percent of respondents, compared to 28 percent for President Biden, the poll showed. Meanwhile, a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll showed that more Americans believe President Trump would handle the economy better than President Biden. Some 41 percent of respondents in the three-day poll said the former president has the better approach, compared to 34 percent for the current president.

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“Because of the President’s longstanding commitment to protecting the integrity, effectiveness, and independence of the Department of Justice and its law enforcement investigations….

…he won’t let us see any of it…”

Joe Biden Invokes Executive Privilege Over Special Counsel Recordings (ZH)

After the DOJ stonewalled over surrendering an audio recording of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden over his handling of classified documents, the White House has invoked executive privilege to block House Republicans from obtaining it. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland requested that Biden assert executive privilege over the recordings following a subpoena from the House Judiciary and Oversight committees. “Because of the President’s longstanding commitment to protecting the integrity, effectiveness, and independence of the Department of Justice and its law enforcement investigations, he has decided to assert executive privilege over the recordings,” said White House counsel Ed Siskel in a letter obtained by The Hill. The Feb. 27 subpoena requested copies of notes, audio files, video and transcripts related to Hur’s probe, and had a deadline of March 7.

“Americans expect equal justice under the law and DOJ is allowing the Bidens to operate above it,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in an April statement. “Special Counsel Hur’s report outlined that classified documents Joe Biden stashed for years relate to countries where his family cashed in on the Biden brand.” In response to a request for audio of what author Mark Zwonitzer recorded while interviewing Biden, whose two memoirs he wrote, Assistant AG Carlos Felipe Uriarte said there is no need for the department to hand it over because the committees also have transcripts of the interviews. “To go further by producing the audio files would compound the likelihood that future prosecutors will be unable to secure this level of cooperation,” Uriarte wrote.

“They might have a harder time obtaining consent to an interview at all. It is clearly not in the public interest to render such cooperation with prosecutors and investigators less likely in the future.” Uriarte then reiterated that the DOJ has provided ample evidence to the committees. Hur’s 345-page report concluded that no charges should be brought against Biden due to cognitive decline. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. Hur cited 2017 conversations between Biden and Zwontizer, which Hur described as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”

Hur

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“President Trump will not be our last president and what we leave in the wake of this scandal will shape our democracy for generations to come..”

Freezing the Arms Shipment to Israel Not an Impeachable Offense (Turley)

Political analysts on the left and the right have acknowledged that Biden’s hardened stance toward Israel is due to his faltering poll numbers and the threat that he could lose Michigan and Minnesota in the upcoming election. A loss in Michigan, where the state’s large Muslim population has rejected Biden’s past support for Israel, would likely doom his chances for reelection. Even assuming that Biden’s recent changes were motivated by politics in Michigan (which I believe is a fair assessment), it would not be a high crime and misdemeanor. Presidents routinely act out of political interests. Indeed, a democracy involves using one’s voting power to influence politicians like Biden to change policy. The more than 100,000 “uncommitted” votes in Michigan’s Democratic primary clearly spooked the Biden White House.

To impeach presidents for such discretionary conduct would make impeachment a type of “vote of no confidence” device used in countries like the United Kingdom. That is not the purpose of impeachment, which was meant to be a rarely-used measure to address the most egregious forms of presidential misconduct. The recent resolution falls into a type of “just desserts” rationale for impeachment. I testified in the first Trump impeachment and opposed it on constitutional grounds. I warned Democrats that they would rue the day that they lowered the standard and short-circuited the process for impeachment. At the time, I told the House Judiciary Committee: “President Trump will not be our last president and what we leave in the wake of this scandal will shape our democracy for generations to come.

I am concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger. If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president. That does not bode well for future presidents who are working in a country often sharply and, at times, bitterly divided.” After ignoring that warning, Democrats went a step further in the second impeachment in 2021 and used what I called a “snap impeachment” in an attempt to punish Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.It would be an easy thing to say “well, turnabout is fair play, so a pox upon their house.”

The problem is that this is the people’s house and we all are harmed by the destruction of the impeachment process. Democrats were wrong in 2019 and 2021 to impeach Trump, but yielding to the same political motives now is no virtue. Ironically, the new impeachment resolution does precisely what Biden is accused of doing: using constitutionally bestowed powers for raw political purposes. The White House has insisted that this latest effort is “ridiculous.” Except that isn’t ridiculous given Democrats’ past actions. But it is equally wrong.

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“I named my computer model after Socrates because the oracle of Delphi had said that he was the smartest man in Greece.”

Martin Armstrong: ‘West Governments Need War’ (SF)

Your predictive model is based on precise calculations. The cycles of history and the economy thus seem to chase each other along the time span of history. If I’m not mistaken, you compared the current context to the crisis and dissolution of the Roman Empire. Is it correct? History repeats because human nature never changes. The Roman Empire is but one example from history of its success and failures. It lasted longer than anyone because it did not impose cultural regulations. The Christians called them pagans because they had so many Gods. That was the product of their policy of freedom of religion. Athens had Athena, Northern Europe had Thor, so they did not try to change the culture of the lands they conquered. They created a common market where someone in Britain could sell products to someone in Rome. So the freedom of religion, low taxation, freedom of movement, and a common market combined to create the Pax Romana.

Is it still possible to avoid a large-scale world conflict? It is unlikely that we can avoid world war. Governments need war because their debts are no longer sustainable. They will use the war as the excuse for defaults – as was the case for WWII. They will create Bretton Woods II with the IMF digital currency as the reserve. [..] Is it correct to claim that your analysis succeed in covering the intersection of geopolitics, Global Markets and Economic Confidence? Can you explain to us in a simple way how your Socrates predictive model works? By the way, why did you name it just like the Greek philosopher? I named my computer model after Socrates because the oracle of Delphi had said that he was the smartest man in Greece. He tried to prove the oracle wrong and the process proved it to be correct. He was put on trial and sentenced to death because he knew too much. My computer has taught me a lot in geopolitics, we had a major bank in Lebanon in the 1980’s and they asked if I could create a model on the Lebanese pound.

I put the data in the computer and it came out and said their country would fall apart in 8 days. I thought something was wrong with the data. When I told the client, they asked me what currency would be best, and I said the Swiss Franc. Eight days later the civil war begn. Obviously they saw the movement of money themselves and came to me for the timing. The same thing happened with a client in Saudi Arabia who was a big shipper. He called me asking me what gold would do tomorrow because Iran was going to begin attacking shipping in the gulf. So once again, there was advanced information about war. By 1998, I understood how the computer was forcasting such events. I warned in June at our London conference that Russia was about to collapse. The London financial Times had snuck into the back of the room and reported that forecast on the front of their newspaper on June 27th 1998. Russia collapsed about 6 weeks later.

Are unpredictable events, such as the terrorist attack in Moscow, also considered among the parameters of your predictive model? A “black swan” type event can change the course of history and geopolitical relations?” Yes, we saw the capital flows shift a day in advance, up to a week in advance in the case of the attack in israel. The defense stocks began to rise even with 9/11 the government used our model to look at who bought puts on airlines in the days before. Someone always knows when they’re going to do these types of events. And they move their money either to profit or to avoid a loss. The computer is tracking everything. It cannot tell me which person has done it. Just that the move is about to take place.

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The whole world except for himself.

Zelensky Blames ‘Whole World’ For Ukraine’s Failures In Kharkov (RT)

The whole world is to blame for Ukraine’s failure to stop Russia’s recent advances in Kharkov Region and must now help Kiev to change the situation, President Vladimir Zelensky told ABC News in an interview on Thursday. It comes after Russian forces managed to capture several settlements near Ukraine’s second-largest city over the past week. Top military officials in Kiev have admitted that the situation is now “extremely difficult,” and that Ukrainian troops are struggling to hold ground due to being outgunned and outnumbered. Asked if he believes Ukraine’s failures on the battlefield to be the fault of the US, Zelensky told ABC reporters that “it’s the world’s fault,” and accused the international community of giving “the opportunity for Putin to occupy.” The Ukrainian leader said the country “cannot afford to lose Kharkov,” and that “the world can help” Kiev to hold on to the vital city in the country’s northeast.

“All we need are two Patriot systems,” Zelensky said, suggesting that “Russia will not be able to occupy Kharkov if we have those.”ng to source billion-dollar Patriot air defense systems for Ukraine. Last month, Zelensky insisted that Ukraine needs 25 such batteries but later revised that number to “at least seven.” The president also complained that funding that has been approved by the US for Kiev is not actually reaching the country and is instead being spent “in American factories, creating American jobs.” Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited Kiev this week, assured the Ukrainian leadership that Washington was “actively and urgently” trying.

Each Patriot battery comprises a power plant, radar and control stations, truck-mounted missile launchers, and support vehicles, and costs around $1 billion. Ukraine is currently believed to possess at least three Patriots, one of which is stationed near the capital. Last year, one of these batteries was reportedly damaged or destroyed in a Russian hypersonic missile strike. Moscow, meanwhile, has repeatedly stated that no amount of Western weapon systems can change the inevitable outcome of the conflict, and has warned that continuing to arm Ukraine will only prolong the bloodshed and increase the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

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Alright for now.

Slovakia Faces ‘Civil War’ – Interior Minister (RT)

Slovakia appears to be on the brink of a civil war, its interior minister has warned, following the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico on Wednesday. The head of the Slovak government was shot in the eastern town of Handlova, where he had chaired a working meeting. The gunman, identified by the media as an opposition party supporter in his early 70s, acted on political motives, according to Deputy Prime Minister Robert Kalinak. Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok warned that the country was “on the edge of a civil war” over political tensions. Social media is full of “hateful comments” in the wake of the attack, he added. Meanwhile, according to Kalinak, who spoke to journalists outside the hospital in the city of Banska Bystrica, where Fico was rushed for emergency surgery, “the inability to accept the will of some part of the public, which some group does not like, is the result that they have worked towards today.”

Fico, a nationalist and euro-skeptic, assumed office last year, after his Smer-SD party won the parliamentary election in September. He promised to put Slovakia’s interests first, including in the highly-contentious issue of the Ukraine conflict. His refusal to provide more arms to Kiev stood in sharp contrast to the previous government. His victory was a defeat for Progressive Slovakia (PS), which suffered a second electoral upset in April. The presidential candidate endorsed by the pro-EU party was defeated by Peter Pellegrini. PS co-founder Zuzana Caputova is set to complete her term as president next month. Fico has lashed out at comments coming from supporters of the opposition, particularly those upset by the waning power of the Progressives. He has also accused some media outlets of fanning the flames.

Some Slovaks are denouncing supporters of political forces they do not like as “misguided blind folk” that they are ashamed to have as their neighbors, he lamented in a video statement last month. Politicians face obscenities in the streets, he added. ”I expect this frustration to turn so intense that it could lead to the murder of one of the leading government officials,” Fico warned. Many Slovak politicians and foreign leaders have condemned the attempt on Fico’s life. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Slovak leader was a “courageous and strong-spirited man,” and that those qualities would hopefully help him overcome the crisis. Fico’s deputy, Tomas Taraba, said his surgery was a success and that the prime minister is expected to recover.

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It’s alive!

Hunter Biden Loses Bid to Halt Tax Evasion Court Proceedings (ET)

Hunter Biden lost his bid to halt his tax evasion district court proceedings in California on Wednesday after the Ninth Circuit declined to hear his appeal. District Judge Mark Scarsi denied Mr. Biden’s motion for a stay of proceedings in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California pending the outcome of his appeal. The stay had been requested on May 10 after Mr. Biden filed his interlocutory appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit panel ruled in favor of the special counsel and dismissed Mr. Biden’s appeal. This rendered moot a motion filed by Mr. Biden’s lawyers on Tuesday asking the judge for an expedited hearing on his motion to halt proceedings or, alternatively, for the judge to consider his written motion without hearing oral arguments.

“Because the panel’s order moots Mr. Biden’s motion, the Court grants the application to rule on shortened time and denies the motion,” Judge Scarsi wrote in his order on Wednesday Judge Scarsi’s order stated that his prior orders and the trial schedule would remain in place, and that the court would hear any further requests to modify the pre-trial schedule at a conference on May 29. Mr. Biden, who had argued that the district court’s jurisdiction had been divested once he filed his interlocutory appeal, filed his motion for a stay after the judge wrote in a May 9 order that failing to do so would be “at his own peril.”

Special Counsel David Weiss, who is prosecuting the case on behalf of the government, opposed Mr. Biden’s bid to halt proceedings while waiting to hear the outcome from the Ninth Circuit. He argued that any “problems” with scheduling conflicts in both Mr. Biden’s California tax evasion case and his Delaware gun charges case “are entirely of his own making. In his brief asking for an expedited hearing filed on Tuesday, Mr. Biden’s lawyers told Judge Scarsi that he wasn’t aware that failing to file a motion to stay pending appeal would be “at his own peril,” and that he promptly filed his motion to stay the next day after the judge’s order came down.

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“..the AI boom is likely a “mega-trend like we’ve never seen,” with the potential to be bigger than the internet. ”

“We’ve Had A Hell Of A Run”: Druckenmiller Sells 441,000 Shares Of Nvidia (ZH)

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, head of the Duquesne Family Office, sees the artificial intelligence bubble as overextended. He has slashed some of his holdings in “Magnificent Seven” technology stocks, including Nvidia. He’s not alone. Other notable fund managers and company insiders are jumping ship and unloading their shares. A recent 13F filing reveals that Druckenmiller’s family office sold over 441,000 shares of Nvidia Corp. in the first quarter, reducing its stake to only 176,000 shares, or worth just about $158 million. Since 13F filings are backward-looking, the firm may have further divested or adjusted those holdings since the first quarter. We suspect Druckenmiller has not added to his Nvidia holdings.

Early last week, the billionaire investor appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” explaining that his exposure to Nvidia was reduced after it went from $150 per share to $900 in just over a year. “I’m not Warren Buffett,” Druckenmiller emphasized, noting, “I don’t own things for 10 or 20 years. I wish I was Warren Buffett.” Druckenmiller said that when Microsoft-backed ChatGPT soared in popularity, he doubled down on his Nvidia position because it was an obvious no-brainer. “Even an old guy like me could figure out what that meant,” he said, adding the AI boom is likely a “mega-trend like we’ve never seen,” with the potential to be bigger than the internet.

Druckenmiller concluded: “I just need a break. We’ve had a hell of a run. A lot of what we recognized has become recognized by the marketplace now.” Besides Druckenmiller, 13F filings showed David Tepper slashed his holdings in Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms. David Bonderman’s Wildcat Capital Management sold Meta stock, bringing his position to $23.7 million. Michael Platt’s BlueCrest Capital Management dumped Nvidia and Amazon.

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Would Trump have accepted?

Biden Should Have Pardoned Trump – Romney (RT)

US Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has suggested that President Joe Biden blundered politically by allowing his administration to prosecute Donald Trump, his hated Republican rival. “Had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him,” Romney said in an MSNBC interview aired on Wednesday. “I’d have pardoned President Trump. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.” Romney, a former Republican presidential candidate who has clashed repeatedly with Trump, said Biden made an “enormous error” by allowing prosecutors to indict the ex-president last year for mishandling classified documents and trying to block the transfer of power after losing the 2020 election. The two federal cases are among four criminal indictments against Trump, who has accused Biden and his allies of using sham prosecutions to interfere in the 2024 presidential race.

“He should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward,” Romney said. “It was a win-win for Donald Trump. Pressed on the principle of leaving prosecutorial decisions to the Justice Department, the senator said Biden should have led like former President Lyndon B. Johnson. “I’ve been around for a while. If LBJ had been president, and he didn’t want something like this to happen, he’d have been all over that prosecutor saying, ‘You better not bring that forward or I’m gonna drive you out of office.’” Romney, who was defeated by Barack Obama in the 2012 election, has announced plans to retire from the Senate in January 2025, when his term ends. He has criticized both Trump and Biden for running for the presidency again this year, saying they should instead make way for a younger generation of leaders.

Upon announcing his decision last September to leave the Senate, Romney scolded his own party’s voters for favoring Trump. “There’s no question that the Republican Party today is in the shadow of Donald Trump,” he said. “He is the leader of the greatest portion of the Republican Party. It’s a populist, demagogue portion of the party. Look, I represent a small wing of the party. I call it the wise wing of the Republican Party.” Romney, 77, is the son of a former Michigan Governor George Romney and made upward of $200 million during his career in the private-equity business. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002. He has been a leading proponent of prolonging the Russia-Ukraine conflict, saying that using Kiev’s forces to weaken the Russian military “is about the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done.”

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A new world.

‘Big Blunder’ To Let China And Russia Get Close – US Strategist (RT)

US President Joe Biden’s cabinet has made a major policy mistake by driving Russia and China into a strategic partnership, Heritage Foundation fellow Michael Pillsbury said on Thursday. Pillsbury spoke to Fox and Friends as Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing on his first foreign trip since inauguration. “To draw, to push together two nuclear powers, Russia and China, it’s really a blunder of the highest order,” he told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade. According to Pillsbury, China spent much of the past 75 years in conflict with the Soviet Union, “so to see them come together like this to me is just shocking.” It’s one of the biggest blunders we’ll see in my lifetime.”

Pillsbury has helped Washington formulate its China policy since the 1970s. He held a variety of posts at the Pentagon and as a staff member for the US Senate, before settling at China-centric desks at the Hudson Institute and later at Heritage. It has long been a policy objective of Washington to keep China and Russia apart, starting with President Richard Nixon’s detente with Beijing in the 1970s. This policy was in effect as late as 2020, with President Donald Trump trying to use tariffs to pressure China into working with the US, noted Pillsbury. “This would never happen under Trump,” he said. “This was one of Trump’s goals never to allow this to happen.” When Kilmeade suggested that China “needs” the US and EU markets, so the West has leverage over Beijing, Pillsbury pointed out that this “simply isn’t happening under Biden.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also commented on the US attempts to split China away from Russia. In an interview on Thursday, he said that China was “strong enough” to resist the “brazen” attempts at pressure. China and Russia both “defend the principles of fairness and the democratic world order based on the multipolar realities and international law,” Putin said on Thursday, adding that relations between the two countries “are not aimed against anyone.” Putin described the Russo-Chinese cooperation as “one of the main stabilizing factors on the international stage.” Xi agreed, arguing that ties between Beijing and Moscow are a “model of relations between large powers and neighboring states, characterized by mutual respect, trust, friendship and mutual benefit.”

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Horse sculpt
https://twitter.com/i/status/1791077037496799692

 

 

Geert

 

 

Flying cow

 

 

 

 

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May 142024
 
 May 14, 2024  Posted by at 9:18 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  48 Responses »


Vittorio Matteo Corcos Sogni 1896

 

Scott Ritter: The Russians Advance and Ukrainians Can’t Stop Them (Sp.)
One of Russia’s Top Economists is Being Appointed as Minister of Defense (Sp.)
Belousov May Create Problems for Russia’s Adversaries as Defense Minister (Sp.)
Biden Is ‘Surrounded By Fascists’ In Oval Office – Trump (RT)
Biden ‘Doing It All Wrong’ – Ex-Clinton Adviser (RT)
‘Unusually Aggressive’ Anti-Trump Grand Jury Went Rogue With Indictments (ZH)
“I See Dead People”: Bragg’s Case Against Trump Goes Paranormal (Turley)
A Massive Transformation Is Taking Place In Russia (Trenin)
Elon Musk Wins Court Battle Against Australia (RT)
The Coming of BRICS+ Decentralized Monetary Ecosystem (Pepe Escobar)
Putin to Visit China at Invitation of Xi Jinping on May 16-17 – Kremlin (Sp.)
Latest Polls Show Biden Will Need Twice As Many Fake Ballots This Year (BBee)

 

 


“In a society of spectacle, of propaganda and of the totalitarian nature of Western systems, doubt is a fundamental stepping-stone to get out of the cave.”

Daria Dugina

 

 

Watters Cohen

 

 

Turley Trump

 

 

Fitton

 

 

Ed Dowd: “The Only Way Biden Wins Is If They CHEAT”

“We’ve never seen approval numbers like this. So if he wins, if he’s still actually alive, it’ll be theft.” Official reports suggest that Biden’s approval ratings are hovering around 36%. But Biden’s real approval rating is only about 8%, according to economic forecaster Martin Armstrong and an anonymous Big Tech source. Ed Dowd revealed that he has “seen numbers” to suggest that 30% of black men and 15% of black women will vote for Trump in 2024.

“That’s way above the numbers that Trump was getting in 2016 … These numbers just immediately turf the chances of Biden. Just those numbers alone.” When it comes to increasing Biden’s chances, Dowd says, “[War] is the only way to improve his approval rating.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1790055748312986006

 

 

Seinfeld

 

 

 

 

Kharkiv.

Scott Ritter: The Russians Advance and Ukrainians Can’t Stop Them (Sp.)

Russian forces have launched a large-scale offensive towards Kharkov, revealing apparent gaps in Ukraine’s previously proclaimed fortified defenses along the northern border. According to military analyst Scott Ritter, the Ukrainian military, expecting robust defenses including anti-tank obstacles and minefields, was significantly outmaneuvered. As Russian troops continue to push south from the Belgorod area, Ritter notes that the situation exposes a broader vulnerability within the Ukrainian defense strategy. “The Ukrainians are now in a panic, pulling forces from critical fronts elsewhere,” Ritter explained. This reallocation of troops to the north leaves other strategic areas, such as Kherson and Odessa, potentially exposed to new Russian attacks.

Simultaneously, Russia’s military seems to be capitalizing on a lack of Ukrainian reserves, with simultaneous pressures in the Zaporozhye and Donetsk regions contributing to what Ritter describes as “the collapse of Ukraine as a cohesive combat force.” In the midst of these battlefield developments, Russia has appointed a new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov, a move that has sparked discussions and speculation both within Russia and internationally. Belousov, an economist with extensive governmental experience but no military background, steps into a role that seems more focused on managing the defense industry’s growth and sustainability amid the conflict.

Some question the timing and suitability of appointing an economist as defense minister during wartime. However, supporters argue that his economic acumen is crucial for maintaining the efficiency and integrity of the defense sector’s expansion. “This is exactly the kind of person Russia needs,” Ritter states, asserting that the strategic appointment aims to strengthen Russia’s military capabilities indirectly through economic stability and reduced corruption. Meanwhile, General Gennady Gerasimov will continue to oversee the military operations, ensuring continuity in leadership. According to Ritter, this combination of economic and military leadership is far from a sign of Russian weakness. “By bringing in Andrei Belousov, we’re talking about Putin creating tempered steel,” he remarked, suggesting that the West may underestimate Russia’s strategic positioning.

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“..the new minister’s duties might involve issues related to weapon procurement and defense contracts..”

One of Russia’s Top Economists is Being Appointed as Minister of Defense (Sp.)

If economist Andrei Belousov does get appointed as Russia’s newest minister of defense, it would not be the first time a civilian got put into that office, retired Russian naval officer (Captain 1st Rank) and military analyst Vasily Dandykin told Sputnik. “I believe that, first and foremost, he’s a man from the president’s team,” Dandykin commented on Belousov’s candidacy. “He was the first deputy prime minister and he actually knows very well the problems that [Russian] military-industrial complex faces. As always, our supreme commander-in-chief, the President of Russia, supervises all decisions.” Russian military expert and military intelligence veteran Ret. Col. Rustem Klupov pointed out that Belousov is an accomplished economist of a very high caliber who advised prominent Russian statesmen “If he is being appointed as the defense minister, it means that there will be goals of economic nature to complete,” Klupov suggested.

According to him, the new minister’s duties might involve issues related to weapon procurement and defense contracts. “Gerasimov (Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russian Armed Forces’ Chief of General Staff) will conduct military operations and the defense minister will handle his own matters,” Klupov added. Soviet and Russian Army veteran and military journalist Viktor Litovkin also highlighted Belousov’s impressive reputation as a scholar and an economist, noting that the latter also paid considerable attention to the military-industrial sphere and military matters during his career as a government official. “So far, there is no reason to question his expertise. He’s a distinguished man who paid a lot of attention while working in the government to the military-industrial complex and to the connection between the military and the industry.”

Read more …

War economy.

Belousov May Create Problems for Russia’s Adversaries as Defense Minister (Sp.)

While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to replace Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu with veteran economist Andrei Belousov may come as a surprise to some, there seems to be a good motive behind his move. Andrei Belousov’s appointment as Russia’s newest minister of defense may help take Russia’s military-industrial complex and the entire weapon procurement system to a whole new level, argues Russian political analyst Sergei Poletaev. According to him, a de facto grassroots “technological revolution” has happened in Russia over the past two years when groups of enthusiasts supplied the armed forces with repurposed civilian drones worth no more than $300 apiece that could be used to take out enemy military hardware worth millions of dollars. Being a talented economist, Belousov can combine the pros of the two approaches in weapon procurement – the “planned, government” method and the “spontaneous grassroots” method – and weed out their cons, Poletayev suggests.

Many Russian soldiers in the field come up with technological and tactical solutions that could become a boon for the Russian Armed Forces, but there is no streamlined way for them to share their ideas with the higher-ups, he notes. “If Belousov can create a system, a platform to convert this experience into orders that could then be sent to weapon manufacturers who would thus be allowed to better understand what is required and to better react to this input, and then to mass produce the most successful solutions – that would generate a tremendous impulse,” Poletaev muses. He also points out that Russia’s military spending has been steadily growing in recent months, and while the situation is far from critical, it would be prudent for Moscow to ensure that this money does not go to waste. Last weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed the candidacy of Andrei Belousov for the position of Russia’s defense minister.

Belousov is a veteran Russian economist who started off as a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Central Economic Mathematical Institute and later with the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. After being appointed deputy minister of economic development and trade in 2006, Belousov served in several prominent positions in the Russian government before becoming first deputy prime minister in 2020 – an office he held until now.

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”Russia and China we can handle, but these lunatics within our government that are going to destroy our country and probably want to..”

Biden Is ‘Surrounded By Fascists’ In Oval Office – Trump (RT)

The White House has been infiltrated by “enemies from within,” former US President Donald Trump has claimed in a campaign speech, while lashing out at “crooked” Joe Biden. “Joe is weak. He’s only good at cheating on elections – but it’s not him, he’s surrounded by fascists around the Oval Office,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Wildwood, New Jersey, on Saturday. ”The Democrat Party is becoming radicalized. It’s becoming radical left and they’re going to lose our country,” he predicted. Without naming names, Trump said administration’s “enemies from within” are more dangerous for America than foreign adversaries. ”Russia and China we can handle, but these lunatics within our government that are going to destroy our country and probably want to,” he claimed.

The “fascist” label has also been used by high-profile Biden supporters against Trump, with some Democrats suggesting that if he returns to the White House he could push the country toward dictatorship. Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential election, claimed on The View program last year that her former rival was showing “dictatorial” tendencies, remarking that Adolf Hitler “was duly elected” before transforming Germany. “Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word. The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values,” she said.

Trump’s New Jersey rally served as a change of scenery for Trump, who has been spending much of his time attending court hearings in New York, on charges of using campaign funds to pay hush money to former porn actress Stormy Daniels. The Republican is facing dozens of charges in four separate criminal cases against him. He told supporters that “radical left Democrats, Marxists Communists and fascists” were behind the indictments, calling his New York hush money case “a Biden show trial.” Trump has repeatedly claimed that the 2020 election was “stolen.” One of the cases against him relates to his alleged attempt to subvert the election. Hearings are currently on hold pending a Supreme Court decision on whether the former president should be immune to prosecution.

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|”..his campaign is too focused on courting his left-leaning base, while neglecting swing voters..”

Biden ‘Doing It All Wrong’ – Ex-Clinton Adviser (RT)

US President Joe Biden risks losing a potential election rematch with Donald Trump because his campaign is too focused on courting his left-leaning base, while neglecting swing voters whose support could prove decisive, a former adviser to Bill Clinton has warned. In an opinion piece for the New York Times published on Sunday, Mark Penn, who advised the former US leader and his wife, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, from 1995 to 2008, suggested that “Biden is doing it all wrong” when it comes to his reelection campaign. According to Penn, many believe that a high turnout should be a priority for any candidate, because swing voters are fewer in number. In the current US political landscape, Biden and Republican frontrunner Trump each enjoy solid support from about 40% of the nation’s population, with only 20% on the fence, the adviser noted.

However, in a highly polarized political environment, those 20% “have disproportionate power because of their potential to switch,” Penn believes. Despite this, candidates are often convinced that they must feed their bases with “what they want to hear” to get them to the polling stations, the article said. While this may be true in some cases, the Democratic base is highly unlikely to sit idly by at the thought of a Trump victory in November, Penn wrote. At the same time, swing voters in battleground states who are concerned about immigration, inflation, and other major issues “are likely to put Mr. Trump back in office if they are not blunted,” according to the former adviser. “If Mr. Biden wants to serve another four years, he has to stop being dragged to the left and chart a different course closer to the center that appeals to those voters who favor bipartisan compromises to our core issues, fiscal discipline and a strong America,” he added.

Penn believes that most of the 101,000 “uncommitted” voters who refused to back Biden over his policy on the Israel-Hamas war would eventually return to the fold because they have nowhere else to go. At the same time, Biden could potentially seek the support of hundreds of thousands of moderate Republicans who chose to vote for former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley over Trump in the GOP primary. According to a Wall Street Journal poll last month, Trump retains a lead over Biden in six of seven battleground states. Meanwhile, a recent poll by the Financial Times found that Biden’s reelection prospects are being threatened by inflation concerns, with 58% of respondents disapproving of his handling of the economy.

Read more …

Does not smell squeaky clean.

‘Unusually Aggressive’ Anti-Trump Grand Jury Went Rogue With Indictments (ZH)

The Arizona grand jury that recently indicted 18 people for allegedly trying to help former President Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election with so-called ‘fake electors’ went completely rogue and took ‘aggressive steps to haul in witnesses,’ to the point where they ‘even brought charges against some’ who were told by prosecutors that they weren’t under investigation, Politico reports. Their efforts ultimately resulted in a 58-page indictment which has ensnared various national and state Republicans – including one of Trump’s current top advisers, and several individuals who were previously in his orbit – with felony charges. Trump himself was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.

“Documents reviewed by POLITICO reveal that at least two of the 18 people charged — former Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb — were assured by prosecutors that they were not targets of the probe, only to learn that the grand jury indicted them anyway. In fact, a letter that a prosecutor sent to Ellis just days before the indictment appeared to significantly understate her legal jeopardy. One witness who testified before the grand jury said a faction of the panel drove intense questioning that exceeded the limited scope that prosecutors had publicly acknowledged. The probe was led by the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.” -Politico.

Mayes, a Democrat who replaced a Republican in January 2023, has been accused of politically motivated lawfare – however Politico’s sources say that the grand jury was ‘surprisingly independent’ of her prosecutors – and ‘sometimes even hard for them to predict.’ “The State Grand Jury was given leeway to conduct an independent investigation, as it is entitled to do by law,” said Mayes’ spox, Richie Taylor. “I cannot confirm or deny the specifics of grand jury proceedings, and I will note that the investigation remains open and ongoing. I will have to decline to comment further.” Grand juries are empowered to conduct their own lines of questioning in order to reach conclusions which may not necessarily align with the wishes of prosecutors – though they typically defer.

That said, in high-profile cases, they’ve been known to take on more independence. “Every high-profile case that I’ve ever had, which is cases that have necessarily attendant publicity, or a public corruption case, or anything else, grand jurors become interested,” according to former Arizona prosecutor, Paul Charlton. “Ultimately, the Arizona grand jury investigating the 2020 election indicted former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, and close Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn. It also indicted the 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed to be the state’s rightful presidential electors. Arizona is the fourth state — after Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — to bring criminal charges stemming from the efforts of Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 results in states that Biden won. At the federal level, special counsel Jack Smith has also charged Trump himself for the scheme.” -Politico.

“Not a target” (just kidding!)

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“Trump will be allowed to testify. He would be insane to do so..”

“I See Dead People”: Bragg’s Case Against Trump Goes Paranormal (Turley)

“I see dead people.” Before this week, that claim was most associated with the nine-year-old character Cole Sear from the 1999 film “The Sixth Sense.” But now it is one of the talents claimed by former adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her bizarre testimony in Manhattan during former President Donald Trump’s trial. It turns out that speaking to the dead was one of the few relevant things Daniels had to offer in the case, which is now on a collision course with a motion for acquittal before the case even goes to the jury. The Daniels testimony will live in infamy in the annals of criminal justice. For two days, she offered lurid and completely irrelevant details whose only possible purpose was to humiliate Trump. Admitting that she was coached by the prosecution in her testimony, it was clear that she was there not to win a case but to win an election.

Judge Juan Merchan allowed this legal burlesque to unfold in his courtroom, later blaming defense counsel who had vociferously objected to her appearance and the scope of the examination. The cross examination was devastating. It shattered her laughable claim that she had not really been seeking money in shaking Trump down for a non-disclosure agreement, a claim contradicted by her own former lawyer. Daniels also revealed that she had spoken with the dead, and that a ghost had once held her boyfriend under water in a bathtub. She also said that she lived in a haunted house, only to discover later that the spirit haunting it was actually a large possum. In a case based on a dead misdemeanor and a rapidly falling heart rate on the manufactured felony, one can understand the appeal of witnesses who can speak for the dead. Indeed, Daniels’s graphic testimony may prove the moral high point of this trial, since serial perjurer and disbarred attorney Michael Cohen is scheduled to testify Monday.

Cohen recently broke his pledge, midway through the trial, to stop attacking and taunting Trump. Cohen has insisted that he deserves the protection of the gag order by Judge Merchan as a witness, despite serious constitutional concerns. Merchan continues to threaten Trump with jail if he responds to Cohen’s unrelenting attacks. Merchan waited for the weekend before his testimony to suggest that the prosecutors tell Cohen to stop the public antics. But it remains unclear what the order is protecting Cohen from. Not only is he trolling for money on social media with reference to the trial, but he is also widely being attacked by others. It is only Trump who cannot address his attacks, including political opposition to his campaign.

Cohen’s testimony will be the culmination of this travesty of a trial. But Bragg already jumped the shark with Daniels. After three weeks, legal experts are still debating what the crime was that Trump was seeking to conceal by recording payments for a standard non-disclosure agreement as a legal expense. (That is the same characterization used by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for its funding for the infamous Steele dossier.) It is still unclear that Trump even knew how the payments were characterized, and the alleged false record was not even created until after the election was over. Yet he stands accused of using the “false business records” to somehow steal or rig an election that was already over.

After this circus with Cohen is complete, Trump will be allowed to testify. He would be insane to do so. Merchan has already said that he will allow a broad scope to cross-examination, making any appearance unlikely. That is when Merchan will face a key test of judicial ethics. He has failed to protect the rights of the defendant from a baseless, politically motivated prosecution. He could insist that he simply felt Bragg had a right to present his case. He will soon be done and, as expected, it is entirely based on Cohen, a disbarred perjurer who will ask for his former client to be sent to prison for following his own legal advice. After Bragg closes the prosecution’s case, the defense will make a standard motion for dismissal. Merchan should grant that motion.

Read more …

“Russian political culture is returning to its fundamentals. Unlike that of the West, but somewhat similar to the East – it is based on the model of a family..”

A Massive Transformation Is Taking Place In Russia (Trenin)

Two and a half years into its war against the West in Ukraine, Russia certainly finds itself on a course toward a new sense of itself. This trend actually predated the military operation but has been powerfully intensified as a result. Since February 2022, Russians have lived in a wholly new reality. For the first time since 1945, the country is really at war, with bitter fighting ongoing along a 2,000-kilometer front line, and not too far from Moscow. Belgorod, a provincial center near the Ukrainian border, is continuously subjected to deadly missile and drone attacks from Kiev’s forces. Occasionally, Ukrainian drones reach far deeper inland. Yet, Moscow and other big cities continue as if there were no war, and (almost) no Western sanctions either. Streets are full of people and shopping malls and supermarkets offer the usual abundance of goods and food items. One could conclude that Moscow and Belgorod are a tale of two countries, that Russians have managed to live simultaneously both in wartime and peacetime.

This would be a wrong conclusion. Even the part of the country that ostensibly lives ‘in peace’ is markedly different from what it was before the Ukraine conflict began. The central focus of post-Soviet Russia – money – has not been eliminated, of course, but has certainly lost its unquestionable dominance. When many people – not only soldiers but civilians, too – are getting killed, other, non-material values are coming back. Patriotism, reviled and derided in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, is re-emerging in force. In the absence of fresh mobilization, hundreds of thousands of those who sign contracts with the military are motivated by a desire to help the country. Not just by what they can get from it. Russian popular culture is shedding – slowly, perhaps, but steadily – the habit of imitating what’s hot in the West. Instead, the traditions of Russian literature, including poetry, film, music are being revived and developed.

A spike in domestic tourism has opened to ordinary Russians the treasures of their own country – until recently neglected, as a thirst for travel abroad was quenched. (Foreign travel is still available, but difficult logistics make reaching other parts of Europe far less easy than before).Politically, there is no opposition to speak of against the current system. Almost all of its former figureheads are abroad, and Alexey Navalny has died in prison. A lot of former cultural icons who, after February 2022, decided to emigrate to Israel, Western Europe, or elsewhere, are fast becoming yesterday’s celebrities, as the country moves on. Those Russian journalists and activists who criticize Russia from afar are increasingly losing touch with their previous audiences, and are saddled with accusations of serving the interests of countries fighting Russia in the proxy war in Ukraine.

By contrast, nearly two-thirds of young men who left Russia in 2022 for fear of being mobilized have returned, some of them quite embittered by their experience abroad. Putin’s statement about the need for a new national elite, and his promotion of war veterans as the core of that elite, is more of an intention than a real plan at this stage, but the Russian elite is definitely going through a massive turnover. Many liberal tycoons essentially no longer belong to Russia; their desire to keep their assets in the West has ended up separating them from their native country. Those who stayed in Russia know that yachts in the Med, villas on the Cote d’Azur, and mansions in London are no longer available to them, or at least no longer safe to keep. Within Russia, a new model of a mid-level businessperson is emerging: one who combines money with social engagement (not the ESG model), and who builds his/her future inside the country.

Russian political culture is returning to its fundamentals. Unlike that of the West, but somewhat similar to the East – it is based on the model of a family. There is order, and there is a hierarchy; rights are balanced by responsibilities; the state is not a necessary evil but the principal public good and the top societal value. Politics, in the Western sense of a constant, often no-holds-barred competition, is viewed as self-serving and destructive; instead, those who are entrusted with being at the helm of the state are expected to arbitrate, to ensure harmony of various interests, etc. Of course, this is an ideal rather than reality. In reality things are more complex and complicated, but the traditional political culture, at its core, is alive and well, and the last 30 to 40 years, while hugely instructive and impactful, have not overturned it.

Russian attitudes to the West are also complex. There is appreciation of Western classical and modern (but not so much post-modern) culture, the arts and technology, and of living standards to an extent. Recently, the previously unadulterated positive image of the West as a society has been spoiled by the aggressive promotion of LGBTQ values, of cancel culture, and the like. What has also changed is the view of Western policies, politics and especially politicians, which have lost the respect most Russians once had for them. The view of the West as Russia’s hereditary adversary has again gained prominence – not primarily because of Kremlin propaganda, but as a function of the West’s own policies, from providing Ukraine with weapons that kill Russian soldiers and civilians, to sanctions which in many ways are indiscriminate, to attempts to cancel Russian culture or to bar Russians from world sports. This hasn’t resulted in Russians viewing individual Westerners as enemies, but the political/media West is widely seen here as a house of adversaries.

There is a clear need for a set of guiding ideas about “who we are,” “where we are in this world” and “where we are going.” However, the word ‘ideology’ is too closely linked in many people’s mind with the rigidity of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. Whatever finally emerges will probably be built on the values-led foundation of traditional religions, starting with Russian Orthodoxy, and will include elements from our past, including the pre-Petrine, imperial, and Soviet periods. The current confrontation with the West makes it imperative that some kind of a new ideological concept finally emerges, in which sovereignty and patriotism, law and justice take a central role. Western propaganda pejoratively refers to it as “Putinism” but, for most Russians, it may be simply described as “Russia’s way.”

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Civil servants blinded by power. Ugly.

Elon Musk Wins Court Battle Against Australia (RT)

Australian Federal Court judge has decided not to extend an order banning Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) platform from displaying a video of a stabbing attack in a church in Sydney. On Monday, Justice Geoffrey Kennett denied an application by the country’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to extend restrictions on the clip, which she had deemed to be “class 1” material relating to high-impact violence. The judge hasn’t yet provided explanations for his ruling. The initial ban on the video, which was imposed by the Federal Court in Melbourne on April 22, expired on Monday. X had refused to comply with the order, which would have made the clip inaccessible to users worldwide. The platform only agreed to block the content in Australia. Musk insisted back then that one country should not have the power to censor the whole internet. The eSafety commissioner argued that a blanket ban was needed as Australians could still access the video through a VPN.

The clip in question showed a stabbing that took place during a live-streamed sermon at an Assyrian Christian church in the suburbs of Sydney on April 15. Four people, including Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, were injured in what the Australian authorities described as a “terrorist incident.” The footage of the attack was widely shared online and allegedly prompted heated protests near the crime scene. During the hearing on Friday, lawyer for the eSafety Commissioner, Tim Begbie, argued that the refusal to comply with the order by X amounted to mockery of the Federal Court. “What that says about the authority of the court is pretty striking,” he said.

X’s lawyer Bret Walker argued that the platform did not implement the ban on the stabbing video because the commissioner’s initial take-down notice was invalid and “manifestly inadequate” due to the absence of a detailed description of the reasons for the ban. The social media company believes that “global removal is reasonable when X does it because X wants to do it, but it becomes unreasonable when it is told to do it by the laws of Australia,” Walker told the judge. In late April, Bishop Emmanuel supported Musk during a sermon, saying that he wanted the video of the attack against him to remain online because it is “our God-given right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”

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Sounds too much like a promo.

The Coming of BRICS+ Decentralized Monetary Ecosystem (Pepe Escobar)

Get ready for what may well be the geoeconomic bombshell of 2024: the coming of a decentralized monetary ecosystem. Welcome to The Unit – a concept that has already been discussed by the financial services and investments working group set up by the BRICS+ Business Council and has a serious shot at becoming official BRICS+ policy as early as in 2025. According to Alexey Subbotin, founder of Arkhangelsk Capital Management and one of the Unit’s conceptualizers, this is a new problem-solving system that addresses the key geoeconomic issue of these troubled times: a global crisis of trust. He knows all about it first-hand: a seasoned financial professional with experience in investment banking, asset management and corporate matters, Subbotin leads the Unit project under the auspices of IRIAS, an international intergovernmental organization set up in 1976 in accordance with the UN statute.

The Global Majority has had enough of the centrally controlled monetary framework put in place 80 years ago in Bretton Woods and its endemic flaws: chronic deficits fueling irresponsible military spending; speculative bubbles; politically motivated sanctions and secondary sanctions; abuse of settlement and payment infrastructure; protectionism; and the lack of fair arbitration. In contrast, the Unit proposes a reliable, quick and economically efficient solution for cross-border payments. The – transactional – Unit is a game-changer as a new form of international currency that can be issued in a de-centralized way, and then recognized and regulated at national level.The Unit offers a unique solution for bottlenecks in global financial infrastructure: it is eligible for traditional banking operations as well as for the newest forms of digital banking.

The Unit can also help to upend unfair pricing in commodity trading, by means of setting up a new – fair and efficient – Eurasian Mercantile Exchange where trading and settlement can be done in a new currency bridging trade flows and capital, thus paving the way to the development of new financial products for foreign direct investment (FDI). The strength of the Unit, conceptually, is to remove direct dependency on the currency of other nations, and to offer especially to the Global Majority a new form of apolitical money – with huge potential for anchoring fair trade and investments. It is indeed a new concept in terms of an international currency – anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%). [..] The Global Majority will instantly grasp the primary purpose of the Unit: to harmonize trade and financial flows by keeping them outside of political pressure or “rules” that can be twisted at will. The inevitable consequence translates as financial sovereignty. What matters in the whole process are independent monetary policies focused on economic growth.

That’s the key appeal for the Global Majority: a full ecosystem offering independent, complementary monetary infrastructure. And that surely can be extended to willing Unit partners in the collective West.

Read more …

Friends.

Putin to Visit China at Invitation of Xi Jinping on May 16-17 – Kremlin (Sp.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit China at the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, the Kremlin press service said. “At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin will pay a state visit to the People’s Republic of China on May 16-17 as his first foreign trip after taking office,” the statement said. Following the talks, it is planned to sign a joint statement by the heads of state and a number of bilateral documents, the statement read, adding that the leaders will determine the directions for further development of cooperation and discuss most pressing issues. “The program of the visit of the Russian president provides for his meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, during which it is expected to discuss issues of bilateral cooperation in the trade, economic and humanitarian spheres,” the Kremlin said.

Additionally, Putin will visit Harbin, where he will take part in the opening ceremony of the eighth Russian-Chinese EXPO, meet with students and teachers of Harbin Institute of Technology. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will attend a gala evening to mark the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations and the opening of the Russian-Chinese Years of Culture. “During the visit, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin will exchange views on bilateral relations and cooperation in various fields, as well as on international and regional issues of common interest, in the context of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Russia,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.

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“..this year, we’ve got to increase our production of hijinx and substantially raise the output of malarky.”

Latest Polls Show Biden Will Need Twice As Many Fake Ballots This Year (BBee)

As former President Donald Trump continued to build a sizeable lead in a majority of swing states, the latest polls suggest President Joe Biden would need twice as many fake ballots to win the election this year. The startling poll results presented the Biden campaign with a sobering reminder that the standard number of fake ballots used in previous election years needed to be increased significantly for him to win again in November. “We’ve got to double our target number of fake votes this year,” said a Biden campaign insider under the condition of anonymity. “In previous years, we could just coast by with the standard quota of shenanigans, but this year, we’ve got to increase our production of hijinx and substantially raise the output of malarky.”

The polls also led White House insiders to express concern that there may not even be enough dead people casting votes to overcome the deficit. “We need more dead voters,” another insider said. “We’ve always done a good job of turning out the dead vote, but this year it will be even more crucial to get as many deceased people to the polls as possible.” Democrat ballot production centers across the country have reportedly already been notified to ramp up production to have any chance of meeting the demand in November. At publishing time, the Biden campaign was rumored to be in negotiations with foreign countries for permission to use large quantities of the dead voters they use to rig their elections.

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CO2 history

 

 

Stairway to Heaven

 

 

Optimus

 

 

Ashley Biden
https://twitter.com/i/status/1790028497584259097

 

 

Dragonfly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1789665835604406444

 

 

Labrador vs. Border Collie

 

 

 

 

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Jun 012023
 
 June 1, 2023  Posted by at 8:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  37 Responses »


Odilon Redon Wild Flowers in a Vase c1910

 

Zelensky Issues Ultimatum To NATO – FT (RT)
Macron Wants ‘Tangible’ Security Guarantees For Ukraine (RT)
West May Change Aid To Ukraine If Conflict Becomes Protracted – Macron (TASS)
Zelensky and Macron Planning ‘Peace Summit’ Without Russia – WSJ (RT)
US Statements On Moscow Drone Attack Encourage Kiev Terrorists – Envoy (TASS)
Britain ‘De Facto’ At War With Russia – Medvedev (RT)
Russian Forces Wipe Out Last Ukrainian Combat Ship In Odessa (TASS)
Annexation Of Kharkov – Ukraine To Shrink Westward (Helmer)
OPEC Snubs Major Western News Outlets (RT)
Xi Jinping Warns Of ‘Worst-Case’ Situation (SCMP)
The Sultan 2.0 Will Heavily Tilt East (Pepe Escobar)
Epstein Pal Jes Staley Throws Jamie Dimon Under The Bus (ZH)
Jamie Dimon Hints At Run For Public Office; Bill Ackman Endorses Him (ZH)
Six Texas Attorney General Aides Take Leave Of Absence To Defend Paxton (JTN)
Judge Breathes New Life Into Clinton Foundation Whistleblower Case (JTN)
FBI Chief Wray Rolls Dice With Congress Over Contempt (JTN)
Fifty Years Later, Free Speech No Longer Exists In The West (Rabkin)
Australian Garlic Kills Covid-19, Says Doherty Institute (AFR)

 

 

 

 

Nap Macgregor

 

 

 

 

Death wish in disguise- Patrick Moore

 

 

 

 

Dan Bishop


https://twitter.com/i/status/1663891540240900096

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not Zelensky, but the US.

Zelensky Issues Ultimatum To NATO – FT (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky will skip a NATO meeting in Lithuania in July unless the alliance provides Kiev with the security guarantees it wants, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Zelensky has “made clear to NATO leaders that he will not attend the Vilnius summit without concrete security guarantees and a road map for accession,” the newspaper said. Ukraine formally applied to join the US-led bloc in September 2022, arguing that the collective defense it provides to members is necessary for Kiev’s security against Russia. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stipulates that an armed attack against one NATO member “shall be considered an attack against them all.”

While Ukraine’s bid has been strongly endorsed by the Nordic and Baltic states, as well as Poland, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested on Wednesday that Kiev could be offered “something between the security provided to Israel and full-fledged membership.” FT cited four unnamed officials in April as saying that the US and Germany were against offering Kiev “deeper ties” to the alliance, including a potential roadmap. “We will look for ways to support Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations but right now the immediate needs in Ukraine are practical and so we should be focused on building Ukraine’s defense and deterrence capabilities,” Dereck Hogan, the top State Department official responsible for European affairs, said last month.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte, who will host the NATO event on July 11-12, was quoted by Reuters as saying on Friday that it would be “very sad” if anyone could interpret the outcome of the Vilnius summit as “a victory of Russia.” Moscow views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat to its national security and has cited the bloc’s open-door policy as a reason for the military conflict with Ukraine. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said recently that Ukraine’s neutrality was one of the conditions for a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia.

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Macron wants Article 5 without mentioning it.

Macron Wants ‘Tangible’ Security Guarantees For Ukraine (RT)

French President Emmanuel Macron has argued that Ukraine is “protecting Europe” and should be provided security guarantees by NATO. “That is why I’m in favor .. to offer tangible and credible security guarantees to Ukraine,” Macron said on Wednesday at a forum in Bratislava, Slovakia. He added that it would be in the interest of NATO members to provide such assurances while Kiev awaits approval to join the Western military alliance. France and other Western powers have provided billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine since the conflict with Russia began in February 2022. But they have stopped short of offering the blanket protection afforded to NATO members. Article 5 of the bloc’s founding treaty stipulates that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.


“We have to build something between the security provided to Israel and full-fledged membership,” Macron said. The French president, who once described the Brussels-based alliance as “braindead,” said the Ukraine crisis had “jolted NATO awake.” Macron called on the bloc’s members to “intensify” military aid to Kiev so it would have everything it needs for an effective counter-offensive against the Russian forces. While acknowledging that US contributions have been key in enabling Ukraine to defend itself, Macron argued that Europe must build up its own defense industry rather than relying on Washington for protection. Polish leaders have criticized Macron in the past for negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin and suggesting that the West should avoid “humiliating” Russia. Moscow, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that it views NATO’s expansion eastward as a threat and has named Ukraine’s neutrality as one of the conditions for a lasting peace.

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It will. It can’t afford it.

West May Change Aid To Ukraine If Conflict Becomes Protracted – Macron (TASS)

The West may reconsider its aid for Ukraine, if the conflict turns into a protracted one, French President Emmanuel Macron said during the Globsec international security conference in Bratislava, adding that high hopes are being placed on the potential Ukrainian counter-offensive. “We prepare for this conflict to become protracted, to the consequences of such development of events,” he said. “We must prepare the public opinion for long-term support of Ukraine in a high-and medium-intensity conflict in accordance with the situation. To that extent we must reconsider and analyze the nature of our support together with our partners during this summer, and to realize what we need to achieve the desired result.” Meanwhile, the French leader refrained from publicly discussing the perspectives in case of failure of the expected Ukrainian counter-offensive, expressing his hope that it will be successful.

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Everything about this is certifiably nuts. Take this beauty:

“..Zelensky’s top adviser, Mikhail Podoliak, demanded that China “make a choice” to back Ukraine and the West or “lose its influence” in world affairs..”

Zelensky and Macron Planning ‘Peace Summit’ Without Russia – WSJ (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelennsky and his European patrons are organizing a summit to build support for Kiev’s peace plan, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The plan’s demands have been deemed unacceptable by Russia, and the document has been met with indifference by non-Western leaders. French President Emmanuel Macron has offered to host the summit in Paris, while the governments of Denmark and Sweden have also put themselves forward as hosts, the newspaper reported. Although no guest list has emerged, European officials have reached out to Brazil, India, China, and other non-Western countries, with one anonymous diplomat stating that “no Russians” would be invited, “but everybody else will be welcomed.”

“We require a unified plan of the responsible civilized world that really wants to live in peace,” Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, told the Wall Street Journal. Russia has already emphatically rejected Ukraine’s so-called pace plan. Published late last year, the plan demands that Russia hand back the territories of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye to Kiev, while also relinquishing control of Crimea, which voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation in 2014. The plan also demands that Russia pay reparations to Ukraine and hand over its officials to face international tribunals. It is highly unlikely that a European summit to which Russia is not invited, organized by countries currently bankrolling the Ukrainian military, will change any minds in the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated last week that the Ukrainian plan essentially involves “the capitulation of Russia.”

European officials are aware of this, and told the Wall Street Journal that they plan on watering down Ukraine’s plan to “make it more acceptable” to non-Western powers such as Brazil, China, India, and Saudi Arabia, if not to Russia itself. Yermak acknowledged that the peace process “is not possible without the whole world, including the leaders of the Global South,” and Zelensky has recently made overtures to the non-Western world, addressing the Arab League in Saudi Arabia this month and speaking to Chinese President Xi Jinping the month before. However, this outreach has come across ham-fisted at times, with Zelensky accusing Arab League members of succumbing to “Russian influence,” before skipping out on a meeting with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the G7 summit in Japan.

Last month, Zelensky’s top adviser, Mikhail Podoliak, demanded that China “make a choice” to back Ukraine and the West or “lose its influence” in world affairs. China has released its own 12-point peace plan, which despite being rejected by the US and its NATO allies, has found favor in much of the world, including Russia. Lula has backed Beijing’s plan, while a coalition of African leaders has urged Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire followed by peace talks, which Kiev has refused to do unless Moscow’s troops withdraw to Russia’s pre-conflict borders.

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“The United States is consciously and irretrievably descending into the abyss of hostilities in Europe. By the way, to generate confrontation between NATO and Russia is an old-cherished dream of Nazi radicals in Kiev.”

US Statements On Moscow Drone Attack Encourage Kiev Terrorists – Envoy (TASS)

Washington’s statements on the terrorist drone attack on Moscow encourage Ukrainian terrorists, Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said. “We have taken note of Washington’s statements regarding the terrorist attack in Moscow involving drones. In fact, they sound like an encouragement for Ukrainian terrorists,” the envoy said, “Just consider the US officials’ attempts to hide behind the phrase that they are gathering information about what happened! And then they immediately switch to a media attack against our country.” “So really, doesn’t the administration understand that no one believes their slogans about non-support of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory?! Especially, when these words are pronounced somehow bashfully and hesitantly,” the ambassador pointed out,

“The United States is consciously and irretrievably descending into the abyss of hostilities in Europe. By the way, to generate confrontation between NATO and Russia is an old-cherished dream of Nazi radicals in Kiev.” According to Antonov, the abovementioned terrorist attack of the Kiev regime “was senseless from a military perspective.” “The assault was inflicted on the residential buildings of ordinary Russian citizens. This onslaught unequivocally and without exaggeration must be considered as an act of terrorism,” the Russian diplomat pointed out. Ukrainian drones attacked Moscow and the Moscow Region on Tuesday morning.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the attack involved eight unmanned aerial vehicles, five of which were shot down by the Pantsir-S missile system and the remaining three were suppressed by electronic warfare. Two people in Moscow sought medical attention for minor injuries. A number of buildings sustained minor damage. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a regular briefing on Tuesday that the American side does not support Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory with the use of US-made weapons. According to the press secretary, Washington publicly and privately communicates this to Kiev. Jean-Pierre also pointed out that the US is allegedly gathering information on the incident.

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“..based on international law, “including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols,” Britain “can also be qualified as being at war.”

Britain ‘De Facto’ At War With Russia – Medvedev (RT)

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has described the UK as waging an “undeclared war” against Russia. The comment came after Britain’s foreign secretary condoned a large-scale drone attack on Moscow earlier this week. In a Twitter post on Wednesday, Medvedev accused London of being Moscow’s “eternal enemy.” The former leader, who currently serves as deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, claimed that based on international law, “including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols,” Britain “can also be qualified as being at war.” The former president argued that by providing Ukraine with weapons and training, the UK “de facto is leading an undeclared war against Russia.” Medvedev hinted that this could have direct ramifications for “public officials” in Britain.

His tweet cited remarks made on Tuesday by UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who said Ukraine has the right to “project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia’s ability to project force into Ukraine itself.” Cleverly further claimed that striking “legitimate military targets” in Russia is an acceptable part of Ukraine’s self-defense. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, eight UAVs were detected in Moscow’s airspace on Tuesday morning, in what officials described as a “terrorist attack” by Kiev. The ministry reported that three drones were suppressed by electronic warfare measures and deviated from their intended course before crashing, while the other five were shot down by Pantsir-S air defense systems outside the city.

Several residential buildings sustained superficial damage and two people suffered minor injuries as a result of the raid. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused Kiev of launching the attack in an attempt to avenge a recent series of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian airfields, ammunition dumps, and “decision-making centers.” Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed on Tuesday that the headquarters of the Ukrainian military’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) had been among the targets hit in the strikes.

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“The Ukrainian Navy operated about 25 combat ships, including five patrol and six artillery boats before Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine.”

Russian Forces Wipe Out Last Ukrainian Combat Ship In Odessa (TASS)

Russia’s Aerospace Forces destroyed the last Ukrainian combat ship in the Odessa port in the special military operation in Ukraine, Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov reported on Wednesday. “On May 29, the Ukrainian Navy’s last combat ship Yury Olefirenko was destroyed as a result of a strike by the Russian Aerospace Forces’ precision weapons against the anchorage of naval ships in the Odessa port,” the spokesman said. The Ukrainian Navy operated about 25 combat ships, including five patrol and six artillery boats before Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine.


In addition, the Ukrainian Navy’s combat assets included the Gola Pristan anti-saboteur boat and the Svatovo assault boat. Upon Kiev’s attempt to storm Snake Island in the Black Sea on May 9 last year, Russian forces sank three Ukrainian Centaur-class armored assault boats and each of them could have carried a marine infantry platoon. The Ukrainian Navy also operated nine armored gunboats, one of which, the Akkerman, was abandoned by the crew in Berdyansk, according to information of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily. The Vinnitsa corvette and the Yury Olefirenko medium amphibious assault ship were sunk.

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Cato: Carthago delenda est – “Carthage must be destroyed” – was a Roman strategic aim 2,200 years ago. It was regularly repeated in his public speeches by Marcus Porcius Cato in his advocacy of putting an end to the Punic Wars by destroying the Carthaginian adversary entirely, not just militarily, so that it could never rise again to challenge Roman power. The opposition slogan was Carthago servanda est – “Carthage must be saved”. Its author, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, meant don’t rule by force if it can be avoided..

Annexation Of Kharkov – Ukraine To Shrink Westward (Helmer)

Because Russia is the only functioning democracy on the two sides of this war, where military tactics and war aims are openly argued in parliament and the media, the debate between the Cato delenda war aim, and the Corculum servanda war aim is an active one. Sworn to destroy President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and economy, the US, European and western allies misinterpret this debate to be vacillation and vulnerability. Dialectically speaking, this encourages the Cato line faction in Moscow at the expense of the Corculum line faction. In this way the US and NATO axis provokes its own defeat. This process has taken the war well beyond the 300-kilometre range of some of the US, French or British weapons which have been deployed and fired to date. The debate over the 300-km westward defence line was winding up in Russia, not beginning, when winter started last year.

Medvedev made this official last week, following the intensification of artillery, rocket, and drone attacks on Russian cities, including Moscow. This week the governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, went further. Then yesterday President Putin tried to pull Gladkov and Medvedev back in line — that’s the Corculum line, not the Cato line. “We live in a state of de facto war. Whether we like it or not, it’s happening,” Gladkov said on the Rossiya 24 television channel. Asked what can be done to increase public security in the Russian border regions, he said one option is “to attach Kharkov to Belgorod Region. This is the best way to solve the issue of the shelling of Belgorod Region.” That was a public, political challenge to the Kremlin. It was polite compared to those who use other names when they mean to criticize Putin’s conduct of the war.

Governor Gladkov is a southerner by birth, education, and career. Born in the Penza region, he has worked in high administrative posts in Penza, Crimea, Stavropol, and for almost three years now in Belgorod. The first Kremlin reply to Gladkov was Dmitry Peskov’s, the spokesman. He was opposed, he intimated, to annexation of more regions along the front line by repeating the restrictive limits of the war. “This already belongs to the category of issues related to the conduct of Special Military Operation. Therefore, I cannot comment on this in any way.” Peskov said in his piece on Monday morning. On Tuesday afternoon, after Ukrainian drones had landed in Moscow, Putin said more; he also said the same thing. “We all had to respond by launching the special military operation. We are striking at the territory of Ukraine, but with long-range precision weapons, at military infrastructure facilities only, either at ammunition or fuel and lubricants warehouses used for combat operations. We have talked about the possibility of striking at decision-making centres. Of course, the headquarters of Ukrainian military intelligence is one of them, and a strike at this target was carried out two or three days ago.”

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“..Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was behind the exclusion of prominent news organizations..”

OPEC Snubs Major Western News Outlets (RT)

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has refused to invite reporters from Bloomberg News and Reuters to its event in Austria later this week, both outlets said on Wednesday. Correspondents from the Wall Street Journal were also snubbed, according to Reuters and Bloomberg. Though staff from the three media agencies typically cover major OPEC meetings, Bloomberg said that this time organizers decided to send invitations directly to reporters, as opposed to providing accreditation to any journalist seeking to attend an event. “We are disappointed that Reuters has not been invited,” a spokesperson said, adding that the agency has “reached out to OPEC for clarity on the matter.” “We believe that a free press serves readers, markets and the public interest,” the spokesperson added.

Bloomberg said it had contacted the OPEC secretariat, but received no reply. The agencies are still expected to send reporters to Austria, even if they cannot access the OPEC Secretariat, where ministers meet, according to the Financial Times (FT), which noted that it did receive an invitation. The newspaper added that Dow Jones was also denied an invitation. FT cited people familiar with the matter as saying Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was behind the exclusion of prominent news organizations. Reporters from other outlets, including CNBC, as well as pricing agencies Argus and Platts, told Reuters that they were invited to the Vienna event.

OPEC – along with its partners in the broader OPEC+ bloc, which includes Russia – have been under pressure to support Western sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its military operation in Ukraine. OPEC members have worked with Russia to reach an agreement on coordinated production cuts, which drew criticism from Washington. OPEC members will gather on Saturday and Sunday for a regular biannual meeting to determine next steps after US crude prices dropped below $70 per barrel this week. The decline comes despite an agreement to further slash production in April, expanding output cuts initially set last year.

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“No matter how many dialogues, there will be no fundamental improvement [they have said]. I think it is a very honest assessment.”

Xi Jinping Warns Of ‘Worst-Case’ Situation (SCMP)

China is facing more complex and difficult national security concerns, President Xi Jinping warned on Tuesday, in comments analysts said showed the country harboured no “illusions” about the possible damaging effects of its rivalry with the US and had little hope of a lasting improvement in ties. The remarks from Xi came as he chaired a meeting of the National Security Commission, his first since securing an unprecedented third term as leader of China’s ruling Communist Party at its 20th congress in October. Xi heads both the commission and the Chinese military. He said the country’s security apparatus needed to stay “keenly aware” of the complicated and challenging circumstances facing national security, and correctly grasp major related issues, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The national security issues facing China were “considerably more complex and much more difficult” to deal with, Xinhua reported Xi as saying, as he urged officials to be ready to deal with “worst-case and most extreme scenarios”, so that they could withstand “high winds and waves and even perilous storms”. Xi’s remarks come as rival powers China and the United States continue to lock horns on many fronts. Both sides have stepped up national security scrutiny, especially in the technology sector, with the US slapping sanctions on a slew of Chinese companies in the past few years citing security concerns. In March, in a rare public comment on the US tech rivalry, Xi directly named Washington for leading the Western suppression of China. China recently prohibited its key infrastructure operators from buying products made by US memory chip maker Micron Technology, citing “relatively serious” cybersecurity risks.

[..] Xi had also sounded a warning then about choppy waters and “dangerous storms” ahead, as he highlighted the challenges and risks facing the country. According to Xie Maosong, senior fellow at Beijing’s Taihe Institute and a senior researcher at Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, Xi’s latest remarks showed China had “no rosy illusions” about the potentially devastating outcome of the US rivalry and was making serious efforts to prepare for it. “The ‘worst-case scenarios’ might include a nuclear war, a devastating war that ruins China’s coastal economic belts [or] Western sanctions on China’s energy, finance and food supply,” Xie said. [..] Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said Xi’s remarks meant Beijing was convinced that recent minor improvements in Sino-US relations would be short-lived.

“Xi has named the US as the culprit behind China’s problems,” Wu said. “Some mainland scholars have also openly expressed pessimism about the Sino-US relationship, saying the deterioration was due to domestic political dynamics in China and the US. No matter how many dialogues, there will be no fundamental improvement [they have said]. I think it is a very honest assessment.”

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On Twitter Escobar calls him the Sultan of Swing.

The Sultan 2.0 Will Heavily Tilt East (Pepe Escobar)

The collective west was dying to bury him – yet another strategic mistake that did not take into account the mood of Turkish voters in deep Anatolia. In the end, Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it – again. Against all his shortcomings, like an aging neo-Ottoman Sinatra, he did it “my way,” comfortably retaining Turkiye’s presidency after naysayers had all but buried him. The first order of geopolitical priority is who will be named Minister of Foreign Affairs. The prime candidate is Ibrahim Kalin – the current all-powerful Erdogan press secretary cum top adviser. Compared to incumbent Cavusoglu, Kalin, in theory, may be qualified as more pro-west. Yet it’s the Sultan who calls the shots. It will be fascinating to watch how Turkiye under Erdogan 2.0 will navigate the strengthening of ties with West Asia and the accelerating process of Eurasia integration.

The first immediate priority, from Erdogan’s point of view, is to get rid of the “terrorist corridor” in Syria. This means, in practice, reigning in the US-backed Kurdish YPG/PYD, who are effectively Syrian affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – which is also the issue at the heart of a possible normalization of relations with Damascus. Now that Syria has been enthusiastically welcomed back to the Arab League after a 12-year freeze, a Moscow-brokered entente between the Turkish and Syrian presidents, already in progress, may represent the ultimate win-win for Erdogan: allowing control of Kurds in north Syria while facilitating the repatriation of roughly 4 million refugees (tens of thousands will stay, as a source of cheap labor).

The Sultan is at his prime when it comes to hedging his bets between east and west. He knows well how to profit from Turkiye’s status as a key NATO member – complete with one of its largest armies, veto power, and control of the entry to the uber-strategic Black Sea. And all that while exercising real foreign policy independence, from West Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean. So expect Erdogan 2.0 to remain an inextinguishable source of irritation for the neocons and neoliberals in charge of US foreign policy, along with their EU vassals, who will never refrain from trying to subdue Ankara to fight the Russia-China-Iran Eurasia integration entente. The Sultan, though, knows how to play this game beautifully.

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Zero Hedge labels Epstein a “pedophile”??

Epstein Pal Jes Staley Throws Jamie Dimon Under The Bus (ZH)

Former JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley has thrown CEO Jamie Dimon under the bus over the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein – claiming in legal documents that he and Dimon communicated about the convicted sex offender. Dimon maintains he had no such conversations, the Wall Street Journal reports, while Staley claims he knew about Epstein’s sex trafficking operation and that he regrets his friendship with Epstein. According to the filing, Staley says that he and Dimon communicated when Epstein was arrested in 2006 and 2008 when Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution, and served 13 months in a work-release program. Staley also claims that Dimon communicated with him several times through 2012 about whether to maintain Epstein as a client.

“There is no evidence that any such communications ever occurred—nothing in the voluminous number of documents reviewed and nothing in the nearly dozen depositions taken, including that of our own CEO,” said a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, adding that Dimon doesn’t believe such conversations with Staley ever happened. “The one person who claims this to be true is currently accused of horrific acts and dishonesty.” “The statements arose as part of a pair of lawsuits against the bank in a federal court in Manhattan. The government of the U.S. Virgin Islands and an unnamed woman, who said she was abused by Epstein, sued JPMorgan last year, claiming that the bank facilitated Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking. The bank has sought to pin the bulk of the relationship on Staley and sued him claiming he misled executives about Epstein. The bank in its lawsuit identified Staley as the “powerful financial executive” accused of sexual assault by the woman who is suing JPMorgan. Staley’s lawyers have said the allegations against him are baseless.”: -WSJ

“Rather than mislead anyone about what was or was not said, why don’t they just agree to release the whole transcript?” said an Epstein accuser’s attorney, Brad Edwards, referring to Dimon’s deposition. [..] The pedophile, who became a JPMorgan client around 1998 – bringing the bank hundreds of millions of dollars, formed a close bond with Staley, who eventually oversaw JPMorgan’s investment bank. In August 2008, a few weeks after Epstein’s guilty plea, a JPMorgan employee sent an email that suggested Dimon would review the Epstein relationship, according to the U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit. The email states, “I would count Epstein’s assets as a probable outflow for ’08 ($120mm or so?) as I can’t imagine it will stay (pending Dimon review).” The bank has said that there is no record of such a review and that Dimon doesn’t recall one.” -JPMorgan

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“..all that will be needed to avoid long-term “legal complications” will be a check with several zeroes on it… or maybe some political immunity..”

Jamie Dimon Hints At Run For Public Office; Bill Ackman Endorses Him (ZH)

JPMorgan’s CEO may be getting swept up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, but for a billionaire like Jamie Dimon, whose catch phrase is “that’s why I’m richer than you” and may as well be “that’s why I will always be freer than you”, all that will be needed to avoid long-term “legal complications” will be a check with several zeroes on it… or maybe some political immunity. Which may be why the head of the largest US bank is already hinting that after he is done gobbling up all the small and regional banks and gets tired of running JPM, he is considering running for public office. “I love my country, and maybe one day I’ll serve my country in one capacity or another,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview, when asked if he’s ever considered a public office position.

His comments, made at the bank’s annual Global China Summit in Shanghai on Wednesday, come as the US gears up for its 2024 presidential race. For now, he’s focused on his job running the largest US bank, a role he’s “quite happy” in. “I love what I do,” he said. JPMorgan does “a great job for helping Americans, for helping countries around the world.” Dimon also reiterated his view that “business can be a force for good,” and said he’s an American patriot who would follow the US government: “Everyone knows I am a patriot,” he said. “I am a red-blooded, full-throated, free enterprise capitalist.”

As BBG notes, the billionaire Wall Street banker is among a group of long-tenured Wall Street chiefs that also includes Brian Moynihan, 63, who’s led Bank of America Corp. since 2010, and Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman, 64, who became CEO at the start of 2010 and is stepping down within 12 months. Dimon, 67, who has been head of JPMorgan since 2005, has repeatedly said that he plans to remain atop the biggest US bank for five more years. And while in the past, Dimon has been quick to publicly shut down speculation that he planned a presidential run, shortly after the story about Dimon’s “public run” broke, none other than weepy Bill Ackman, who one year ago sold his NFLX impulse buy locking in losses of $400 million when he would have broken even had he sold it yesterday, endorsed Dimon for president in one of his lengthy, trademark Twitter posts.

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He does a good speech.

Six Texas Attorney General Aides Take Leave Of Absence To Defend Paxton (JTN)

Six staffers from the Office of the Texas Attorney General have taken a leave of absence to defend their former boss, Ken Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House on Saturday. Their temporary departure was first reported by The Daily Wire and independently confirmed by Hearst Newspapers. Paxton was suspended from office until the outcome of a Senate trial determines if he returns to or is removed from office. In the interim, First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster is the acting head of the agency. Six employees taking leaves of absence include Solicitor General Judd Stone, Assistant Solicitor General Joseph N. Mazzara, Assistant Solicitor General Kateland Jackson, Senior Attorney Allison Collins, Executive Assistant Jordan Eskew, and Division Chief of the General Litigation Division Chris Hilton, who’s been outspoken in Paxton’s defense.

Hilton attempted to present evidence to the House General Investigating Committee, which refused to interview Paxton or anyone from his staff as part of its investigation. Hilton told reporters last Thursday that the committee was engaged in an “illegal investigation” and a report it issued was “filled with falsehoods and misrepresentations.” One week ago, the committee held a three-hour hearing at which four attorneys hired by the committee presented the findings of their investigation. The attorneys, some of whom are registered Democrats, had all worked in the offices of the Harris County District Attorney and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas in Houston. They presented no sworn testimony and no documentation; no witnesses were interviewed by the committee.

On Thursday, the committee issued 20 articles of impeachment and within 24 hours the full House voted to impeach Paxton by a vote of 121-23. The Texas GOP, Paxton and others argue the impeachment didn’t follow basic due process, was political, illegal, unethical and unjust. An outside law firm also found that Paxton didn’t break any laws or violate procedure. The House has announced its prosecutorial team and the Senate its committee to establish trial rules. The rules are expected to be announced June 20. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said the trial will start no later than August 28.

Paxton
https://twitter.com/i/status/1663727925789589504

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“..The foundation “began acting as an agent of foreign governments early in its life and throughout its existence..”

Judge Breathes New Life Into Clinton Foundation Whistleblower Case (JTN)

Just a few weeks after Special Counsel John Durham revealed significant failures to investigate allegations against Hillary Clinton’s family charity, a U.S. Tax Court judge has once again breathed new life into a years-long whistleblower case alleging IRS improprieties involving the controversial Clinton Foundation. U.S. Tax Court Judge David Gustafson has already once before denied an IRS request to dismiss the whistleblower case, first brought in 2017. And three years ago, he ordered the tax agency to reveal whether it criminally investigated the foundation, citing a mysterious “gap” in its records. The IRS filed a new motion to dismiss, and all parties filed arguments over the last year.

But on Monday, Gustafson postponed ruling on those motions, instead asking for new arguments in light of three recent precedent-setting court rulings, once again frustrating IRS efforts to make the case go away. The three recent rulings in other tax cases “may affect the parties’ positions as to the pending motions,” Gustafson wrote. “We will order further filings so that the parties may address those recent opinions.”The judge gave whistleblowers John Moynihan, a former federal agent, and Larry Doyle, a corporate tax compliance expert, until June 30 to update their arguments and the IRS until July 28 to respond. That means the case will almost certainly stretch on for many more months.

The judge also noted the IRS hasn’t responded to a request to update the court record with new evidence. Monday’s ruling adds new intrigue in a case that first surfaced nearly five years ago when Doyle and Moynihan, two respected forensic financial investigators, revealed the existence of their 2017 IRS whistleblower complaint against the foundation during a congressional hearing. Moynihan and Doyle testified to a House committee in December 2018 that they believed the foundation wrongly operated as a foreign lobbyist by accepting overseas donations, then trying to influence U.S. policy. The foundation “began acting as an agent of foreign governments early in its life and throughout its existence,” Moynihan testified at the time. “As such, the foundation should’ve registered under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act).

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”..he would allow lawmakers to visit FBI headquarters and look at it in a private room..”

FBI Chief Wray Rolls Dice With Congress Over Contempt (JTN)

Just hours after informing Congress he wouldn’t comply with a subpoena and turn over an informant document on the Biden family investigation, FBI Director Christopher Wray hopped on the bureau’s Gulfstream jet and ferried off to the more friendly confines of Las Vegas. The flight manifest for the FBI’s official jet shows Wray left the Washington suburb of Manassas, Va., at about 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday and landed about four hours later in Nevada’s most famous tourist city. Agency officials said the jaunt was for official business and that Wray would be speaking to a conference of counterterrorism officials, meeting with the FBI’s Las Vegas field office, and attending a law-enforcement memorial ceremony.


[..] The trip allows the FBI boss to escape an increasingly hostile atmosphere for himself in Washington, where congressional Republicans announced Wednesday that they would seek to hold Wray in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over a subpoenaed memo that lays out bribery allegations against President Biden. The memo, known as a FD-1023 form, includes information provided to the bureau in June 2020 by a confidential human source alleging a bribery scheme involving Biden when he was vice president. Lawmakers learned about the existence of the memo from FBI whistleblowers.

Wray tried to defuse the situation earlier Wednesday in a phone call with House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, saying that while he would not comply with the subpoena by turning over the memo to Congress, he would allow lawmakers to visit FBI headquarters and look at it in a private room. The two lawmakers, who have been leading an investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, said Wray’s offer was unacceptable and that Congress had every right to demand at the memo be turned over under a subpoena. Comer made clear he plans to seek a contempt vote as early as next week in Congress.


“While the FBI has apparently leaked classified information to the news media in recent weeks, jeopardizing its own human sources, it continues to treat Congress like second-class citizens by refusing to provide a specific unclassified record,” Grassley said. Comer said lawmakers scored one victory Wednesday: Wray confirmed the existence of the FD-1023 memo the whistleblowers identified. “Today, FBI Director Wray confirmed the existence of the FD-1023 form alleging then-Vice President Biden engaged in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national,” the powerful House committee chairman said. “However, Director Wray did not commit to producing the documents subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1663988796600340481

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” .. I was excited by the opportunity to engage in free political debate and to make my contribution as a citizen and a scholar.”

Fifty Years Later, Free Speech No Longer Exists In The West (Rabkin)

Fifty years ago I left the Soviet Union for one reason: My desire for freedom. I was disgusted by the one-sided world view fostered by the banning of foreign publications and the jamming of Western radio stations. The obedient media, toeing the party line, repulsed me and made me laugh. Fear of the authorities (even if they were far more “vegetarian” than in Stalinist times) restricted open discussion of politics to the “kitchen cabinet,” with a small circle of trusted friends. I left behind my hometown (then Leningrad, now St Petersburg), my friends, my brother and the graves of my parents and grandparents. Applying to emigrate meant taking a risk, because you almost always risked losing your job, many friends and even relatives, with no guarantee that you would even be granted an exit visa.

[..] What struck me most in the newspapers and on television was the diversity of opinion. Letters to the editor offered a wide range of viewpoints, some of which not only criticized Western policies but also offered alternatives. It wasn’t long before I began to express my own views, first in letters to publications and then in articles. I was excited by the opportunity to engage in free political debate and to make my contribution as a citizen and a scholar. After all, society had created the conditions for me to share the results of my research and observations broadly. However, things have changed. Today, when it comes to some important issues of international politics, freedom of discussion is severely restricted.

[..] An even more important issue that has disappeared from rational discussion is policy towards Russia. This issue is all the more important because Moscow has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Long before February 2022, when President Vladimir Putin announced the military campaign in Ukraine, most NATO countries (as well as Kiev itself) had restricted access to Russian media, something that did not happen in the West even during the Cold War. Just as the Soviets justified their jamming of Western radio broadcasts with the need to protect against “ideological sabotage,” many institutions have been created in recent years by NATO and its member states to protect citizens from, so-called, “Russian disinformation.”

[..] Freedom of speech is not just a democratic right. It is also a way of defining and weighing alternatives. When conflict becomes an epic struggle between good and evil, rationality is replaced by moral judgment and noble indignation. This undermines all diplomacy and, in turn, exacerbates the danger of nuclear war, the inevitable consequence of which, as US military strategists recognized as early as 1962, is Mutually Assured Destruction, or ‘MAD’. Unanimity, una voce, one-sided debate – call it what you like. But this is about more than just the denial of free speech. The climate it has created threatens the very survival of humanity.

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Maybe Pfizer can grow some.

Australian Garlic Kills Covid-19, Says Doherty Institute (AFR)

Garlic might not just be good for keeping vampires away, but also COVID-19 and the common flu, according to new research being released on Wednesday by The Peter Doherty Institute. Scientists at Doherty have been researching garlic properties over the past 18 months and have discovered a certain Australian grown garlic variety demonstrates antiviral properties with up to 99.9 per cent efficacy against the viruses which cause COVID-19 and the common flu. The world-first research, commissioned by the Australian Garlic Producers organisation, involved in-vitro testing against the SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza type A viruses, using garlic ingredients extracted from exclusive Australian grown garlic varieties.


The most efficacious garlic varieties and their extracted proprietary garlic ingredient are being commercialised. They will be able to be taken as a soft capsule supplement similar to vitamin C or fish oil and are subject to a recently lodged International Patent. Dr Julie McAuley, manager of the Doherty’s high containment facility COVID-19 research lab, said the results were striking. “We wanted to know if these strains had the possibility of killing COVID-19,” she told The Australian Financial Review. “I thought it might fail miserably. We blindly tested over 20 varieties. We found one of AGP’s products could reduce the infectious titre of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza by 3-log-fold (99.9 per cent). We barely detected any remaining virus genome, indicating nearly complete virucidal activity.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1663504437984505856

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Impaw
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Anthill

 

 

Odd couple

 

 


The Taiwan blue magpie is a species of bird of the crow family. Also known as “long-tailed mountain lady”, is considered a rare and valuable species and has been protected by Taiwan

 

 

 

 

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Oct 062022
 


Paul Gauguin The Seine in Paris 1875

 

Politics By Other Means (Big Serge)
Putin Signs Unification Treaties For New Regions (RT)
Russia Sets Out How It Will Financially Support New Regions (RT)
Putin Transfers Europe’s Largest Nuclear Plant Under Russian Control (RT)
Pipeline Terror is the 9/11 of the Raging Twenties (Escobar)
Kremlin Responds To Rumors Over Its Ukraine Op (RT)
EU Agrees To Impose Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)
European Gas Demand Set For Record-Breaking Decline In 2022 (OP)
EU Public Support For Ukraine Drops – Poll (RT)
US Declares War On Russia, Germany, Netherlands And France (Meyssan)
Kharkov and Mobilization (Jacques Baud)
Putin Must Go: Now Is The Time For Regime Change In Russia (John Bolton)
After Russia, Now Turkey Questions Europe’s Territory (Euractiv)
Biden Blasts “Short-Sighted” OPEC+ Cut (ZH)
Media Lying About Climate And Hurricanes (Shellenberger)

 

 

 

 

Saudi Reuters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clausewitz.

Politics By Other Means (Big Serge)

It is often the case that the most consequential men in the world are poorly understood in their time – power enshrouds and distorts the great man. This was certainly the case of Stalin and Mao, and it is equally true of both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Putin in particular is viewed in the west as a Hitlerian demagogue who rules with extrajudicial terror and militarism. This could hardly be farther from the truth. Almost every aspect of the western caricature of Putin is deeply misguided [..] . To begin with, Putin is not a demagogue – he is not a naturally charismatic man, and though he has over time greatly improved his skills as a retail politician, and he is capable of giving impactful speeches when needed, he is not someone who relishes the podium.

Unlike Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or even – God forbid – Adolf Hitler, Putin is simply not a natural crowd pleaser. In Russia itself, his imagine is that of a fairly boring but level headed career political servant, rather than a charismatic populist. His enduring popularity in Russia is far more linked to his stabilization of the Russian economy and pension system than it is to pictures of him riding a horse shirtless. Furthermore, Putin – contrary to the view that he wields unlimited extralegal authority – is rather a stickler for proceduralism. Russia’s government structure expressly empowers a very strong presidency (this was an absolute necessity in the wake of total state collapse in the early 1990’s), but within these parameters Putin is not viewed as a particularly exciting personality prone to radical or explosive decision making.

Western critics may claim that there is no rule of law in Russia, but at the very least, Putin governs by law, with bureaucratic mechanisms and procedures forming the superstructure within which he acts. This was made vividly apparent in recent days. With Ukraine advancing on multiple fronts, a fresh cycle of doom and triumph was set in motion: pro-Ukrainian figures exult in the apparent collapse of the Russian army, while many in the Russian camp bemoan leadership which they conclude must be criminally incompetent. With all of this underway on the military side, Putin has calmly ushered the annexation process through its legal mechanisms – first holding referendums, then signing treaties on entry in the Russian Federation with the four former Ukrainian oblasts, which were then sent to the State Duma for ratification, followed by the Federation Council, followed again by signature and verification by Putin.

As Ukraine throws its summer accumulations into the fight, Putin appears to be mired in paperwork and procedure. The treaties were even reviewed by the Russian constitutional court, and deadlines were set to end the Ukrainian hryvnia as legal tender and replace it with the ruble. This is a strange spectacle. Putin is plodding his way through the boring legalities of annexation, seemingly deaf to the chorus which is shouting at him that his war is on the verge of total failure. The implacable calm radiating – at least publicly – from the Kremlin seems at odds with events at the front. So, what really is going on here? Is Putin truly so detached from events on the ground that he is unaware that his army is being defeated? Is he planning to use nuclear weapons in a fit of rage? Or could this be, as Clausewitz says, the mere continuation of politics by other means?

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Think that’s the final administrative step?!

Putin Signs Unification Treaties For New Regions (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law four unification treaties with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, on Wednesday morning. Earlier the documents unanimously endorsed by the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. The agreements were ratified on Monday by the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, after they were certified as lawful by the country’s Constitutional Court over the weekend. The agreements were signed by Putin and the heads of the four former Ukrainian regions on Friday, after the residents of the territories overwhelmingly backed the idea of joining Russia during referendums held between September 23 and 27. The votes have been firmly rejected by Kiev and its Western backers, who have vowed to never accept their results nor recognize the four regions’ accession. The DPR and LPR split from Ukraine in 2014 in the aftermath of the Maidan coup and the civil conflict in the country’s east that followed. Shortly after launching a military operation in February this year, Russia seized Kherson Region and a larger part of Zaporozhye Region.

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“..an exemption from federal income tax for 10 years and the payment of no more than 13.5% to the regional budget..”

Russia Sets Out How It Will Financially Support New Regions (RT)

Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development announced on Wednesday that it will launch a state financing program to support the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions. According to the ministry’s statement, the territory has “huge economic and industrial potential.” The statement highlighted plans to pass a federal law on the creation of a common free economic zone for the new regions with preferential treatment for investors, with tax and non-tax incentives guaranteed within its framework. These will be similar to the incentives provided in the free economic zone of Crimea and Sevastopol.


“The accession of new territories in the Russian Federation will ensure an increase in nationwide indicators on such main sectors as the metals industry (by 20%), coal sector (by 6%), grain production (by more than 10%), sunflowers (over 20%),” Deputy Minister Sergey Nazarov said. He pointed out that the “gross regional product of new regions will amount to three trillion rubles ($50 billion) within five years.” According to him, the special provisions could see an exemption from federal income tax for 10 years and the payment of no more than 13.5% to the regional budget. On Wednesday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law four unification treaties with the new regions, which overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in referendums in September.

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Logic.

Putin Transfers Europe’s Largest Nuclear Plant Under Russian Control (RT)

President Vladimir Putin has issued an order placing the formerly Ukrainian Zaporozhye power plant under Russian management. A presidential decree on the fate of Europe’s largest nuclear facility was published on Wednesday. The facility will be operated by a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned nuclear power giant Rosatom. For now, the facility will continue to function under Ukrainian-issued licenses until it obtains Russian-issued equivalents, according to the decree. The move comes as Moscow finalizes the accession of four formerly Ukrainian regions – Zaporozhye, Kherson, as well as Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics – to Russia.


The territories overwhelmingly backed a proposal to join Russia in referendums last month. The votes were firmly rejected by Kiev and its Western backers, who denounced them as “sham” votes. In recent weeks, Zaporozhye nuclear power plant has been subjected to repeated missile, artillery and drone attacks, attributed by the Russian military to Ukrainian forces, as well as targeted by saboteurs in apparent attempts to seize the facility from Russian forces. Kiev, along with multiple Western officials, however, has been blaming Moscow for shelling the nuclear facility it controls. The Zaporozhye plant was seized by the Russian military early in the ongoing conflict. Until now, however, it has remained under Ukrainian management.

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“..Russia is getting ready for an all-out collision with the Empire of Lies. Alongside top Eurasian powers China and Iran.”

Pipeline Terror is the 9/11 of the Raging Twenties (Escobar)

There’s no question that future unbiased historians will rank Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address on the Return of the Baby Bears – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia – on September 30 as a landmark inflection point of the Raging Twenties. The underlying honesty and clarity mirror his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, but this time largely transcending the trappings of the geopolitical New Great Game. This was an address to the collective Global South. In a key passage, Putin remarked how “the world has entered a period of revolutionary transformations, which are fundamental in nature. New development centers are being formed, they represent the majority.”

As he made the direct connection between multipolarity and strengthening of sovereignty, he took it all the way to the emergence of a new anti-colonial movement, a turbocharged version of the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s: “We have many like-minded people all over the world, including in Europe and the United States, and we feel and see their support. A liberating, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is already developing in various countries and societies. Its subjectivity will only grow. It is this force that will determine the future geopolitical reality.” Yet the speech’s closure was all about transcendence – in a spiritual tone. The last full paragraph starts with “Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice”.

Post-post-modernism starts with this speech. It must be read with utmost care so its myriad implications may be grasped. And that’s exactly what tawdry Western spin and a basket of demeaning adjectives will never allow. The speech is a concise road map to how we got to this incandescent historical crossroads – where, to venture beyond Gramsci, the old order refuses to acknowledge its death while the new one is inexorably being born. There’s no turning back. The key consequence of a largely documented fact – “a hybrid war is being waged against Russia because it stands in the way of the neocolonial world order” – is that Russia is getting ready for an all-out collision with the Empire of Lies. Alongside top Eurasian powers China and Iran. Imperial vassals in this case are at best collateral damage.

Moreover, it’s quite telling that Putin’s speech followed India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar, stressing the “pillaging of India by the colonial power” at the UN General Assembly. Putin’s speech and Russia’s resolve to fight the – hybrid and otherwise – war against the collective West set up the Macro Picture. The Micro Picture regards the see-saw in the battlefields in Ukraine, and even the blow-up of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines: a desperate gambit, a few days before the result of the referendums and their official recognition on September 30.

Dick Black

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“Certain territories will be returned, and we will continue consulting with the people, who would wish to live with Russia..”

Kremlin Responds To Rumors Over Its Ukraine Op (RT)

Moscow has not rebranded its military campaign in Ukraine as a “counter-terrorist operation” after taking four former Ukrainian regions under its sovereignty, contrary to some expectations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. “This is solely the prerogative of the commander-in-chief, the country’s president,” he told journalists on Wednesday when asked about a possible change of format. “As of this moment, no such decision has been taken. We are talking about the special military operation, which continues,” he added. Some political observers predicted that the Russian government would reclassify the hostilities with Ukraine after incorporating a number of former Ukrainian regions, where much of the fighting against Kiev’s troops is taking place.

Officials in Moscow accused Kiev on multiple occasions of using “terrorist tactics” against people in frontline regions. There was some expectation that Russia would designate the operation against Ukraine accordingly. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law on Tuesday four acts, which designate the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions as new subjects of the Russian Federation. Ukrainian troops are in control of parts of those territories and have recently retaken a number of settlements, which were previously held by Russian forces. Peskov reacted to Kiev’s advances, stating that the new lands “are with Russia forever [and] will be returned.”

The official also commented on the standing issue of the borders of Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions. Peskov described the two new parts of Russia as lands “where the military-civilian administration was in power at the moment of accession.” “Certain territories will be returned, and we will continue consulting with the people, who would wish to live with Russia,” the spokesman said. Kiev declared Russia’s move to accept new territories as legally void and based on “sham” referendums that changed nothing for Ukraine. The Ukrainian government declared that it will oust Russian troops from all lands it considers to be under its sovereignty with the help of the US and its allies.

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What a waste of time.

“The price cap is part of an eighth round of anti-Russia sanctions..”

EU Agrees To Impose Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)

The EU has reached a tentative deal to impose a price cap on the sale of Russian oil to third countries, Politico Europe reported on Tuesday citing diplomatic sources. Cyprus, Greece and Malta had concerns about the potential impact on their shipping industries, but were reportedly promised concessions. The price cap is part of an eighth round of anti-Russia sanctions, which Brussels is expected to roll out this week, citing the conflict in Ukraine. EU ambassadors reached an agreement on Tuesday and expect to approve the final text on Wednesday, Politico reported citing seven diplomats – all of whom wished to remain anonymous. Details of the sanctions still need to be confirmed in writing, and there was a “limited” chance the deal could still unravel, one source reportedly said.

The three Mediterranean members were reportedly concerned about the impact of the restrictions on their commercial shipping, but Brussels offered “concessions” in the form of a “monitoring system” that would propose measures to mitigate the impact of the embargo, in case of “significant loss of business” due to practices such as reflagging of commercial vessels. The EU has already banned the import of coal from Russia, with an oil embargo scheduled to go into effect in December. The price cap seeks to block Moscow’s petroleum exports to third countries using EU-registered vessels, as the bloc has already sanctioned all Russian shipping. Meanwhile, Hungary said it had secured assurances the price cap won’t apply to oil delivered through pipelines.

Anti-Russia measures adopted by the US and its allies have led to a spike in oil prices, leaving Russia with more revenue from exports than before the embargo. The price cap proposed by the G7 seeks to neutralize this. According to the proposal, EU vessels will refuse to carry Russian oil if it is priced above the cap, the value of which has yet to be determined. The sanctions have also resulted in the EU facing severe energy shortages. However, the bloc’s leaders have vowed to support Ukraine indefinitely, no matter what. Moscow has made it clear it will not comply with the price cap scheme, with Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak warning that Russia will simply refuse to sell fuel to countries that seek to enforce or abide by it.

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Industry.

European Gas Demand Set For Record-Breaking Decline In 2022 (OP)

Soaring natural gas prices, demand destruction in the industrial sector, and energy-saving measures are set to reduce gas consumption in Europe’s developed economies by 10% this year, the biggest drop in European demand in history, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its quarterly Gas Market Report on Monday.The forecast of a 10% decline in natural gas demand in OECD Europe reflects the expectation of higher gas prices and the EU’s ambition to reduce gas consumption by 15% between August 2022 and March 2023 compared to its five-year average. “Assuming average weather conditions, gas demand in the residential and commercial sectors is expected to remain below 2021 levels,” the IEA said in its report.

Due to sky-high high prices and a very tight gas market, natural gas usage in the power generating sector in Europe is forecast to drop by nearly 3% this year. Industrial gas demand is expected to plunge by as much as 20%, the IEA said. Energy-intensive industries in Europe, including aluminum, copper, and zinc smelters and steel makers, have already warned EU officials that they face an existential threat from surging power and gas prices. After a record slump in gas demand this year, Europe faces another year of gas consumption contraction in 2023, when OECD Europe’s demand is forecast to decline by 4% amid high prices, according to estimates from the IEA.The agency also noted that “Further potential disruption to the supply of Russian gas provides additional downside risk to this outlook.”

Keisuke Sadamori, the IEA’s Director of Energy Markets and Security, commented on the report: “The outlook for gas markets remains clouded, not least because of Russia’s reckless and unpredictable conduct, which has shattered its reputation as a reliable supplier. But all the signs point to markets remaining very tight well into 2023.” The IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol said last week that the gas market could be even tighter next year compared to already tight LNG markets in 2022.

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The headline says support dropped. Then you learn that the poll is from June, 3 months into the SMO. It is October now. And the authors still say that “measures to support Ukraine in its defense against the war waged by Russia remain popular”.

EU Public Support For Ukraine Drops – Poll (RT)

A EU-wide survey by the pollster Eupinions has suggested a drop in support for sending weapons to Ukraine and accepting refugees from the country among the EU public. However, measures to aid Kiev in its conflict with Moscow are still supported by the majority of respondents, the study shows. The results of the poll, which was conducted throughout June in 27 member states, were released on Wednesday. They showed that 60% of the EU’s population were on board with sending weapons to Kiev. The backing for lethal aid was the highest in Poland, where 84% spoke in favor of it; and the lowest in Italy, where it was supported by just 42%.“In fact, Italy is the only member state where a majority of citizens oppose the delivery of weapons,” the study pointed out.

Meanwhile, 60% of those surveyed believed that the shipments of arms to Kiev should be organized through EU mechanisms, while 54% preferred them to be carried out by their home countries. A similar poll conducted in March showed that 64% in the bloc were in favor of arms deliveries. Moscow has consistently criticized the US, EU and other countries over their shipments of weapons to Kiev, arguing that they only prolonged the fighting and increased the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO. Support for welcoming Ukrainian refugees has declined by 5% in the EU since March and stood at 81%, according to the survey. It was the highest in Germany, Italy and Spain (83%, 84% and 90%, respectively), and the lowest in Poland (77%) and France (76%).

Ukraine was granted EU candidate status shortly after the outbreak of the conflict, with 66% of the population in member states now saying they would like to see Kiev joining the union. The respondents were also asked to name the country they thought was the EU’s most trustworthy ally, with 77% saying that it was the US. As for the economic fallout of the sanctions imposed on Moscow by Brussels, Eupinions pointed out that 46% of EU citizens said their personal outlook on the future was negative, compared to 37% at the same period last year. Overall, the authors of the study came to the conclusion that “measures to support Ukraine in its defense against the war waged by Russia remain popular” in the EU.

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“He did not realize that he was violating the Straussian doctrine by imagining that he was escaping from the US military protectorate.[..] Six days later, Navy Seals blew up the two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, setting Germany back eleven years.”

US Declares War On Russia, Germany, Netherlands And France (Meyssan)

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was elected in December 2021, has made two serious mistakes in a few months. On December 7, he went to the White House where he tried to resist the United States’ demand that he stop accepting Russian gas. Back home, he chose to maintain Nord Stream and block Nord Stream 2, while seeking renewable sources. He thought, wrongly, that he was balancing the warmongering of US strategic thinking, the needs of his industry and the doctrine of the Greens, members of his government coalition. The Chancellor had had a close call: during his press conference with the US President, Joe Biden said that his country could destroy Nord Stream 2 and that if Russia invaded the Ukraine, he would do so.

It was absolutely frightening for Scholz to hear his overlord spit in his face that he could destroy a tens of billions of dollars investment if a third party acted without regard to his dictates. We do not know whether President Biden also mentioned the destruction of Nord Stream 1 during the closed-door talks, but it is not impossible. In any case, according to the German journalists who followed him, the chancellor returned to Germany pale. His second mistake was made on September 16, 2022. His country wanted to get out from under the Anglo-Saxon umbrella and ensure its own security as well as that of the entire European Union. « As the most populous nation, with the greatest economic power and located at the center of the continent, our army must become the pillar of conventional defence in Europe, » the chancellor said.

By specifying that he was only talking about “conventional defence”, he intended to spare the susceptibility of his French neighbor, the only nuclear power in the Union. He did not realize that he was violating the Straussian doctrine by imagining that he was escaping from the US military protectorate. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz signed the Defense Policy Guidance, excerpts of which were published in the New York Times. He indicated that the United States would consider any desire for European emancipation as a cassus belli. Six days later, Navy Seals blew up the two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, setting Germany back eleven years.

At the same time, the Baltic Pipe pipeline was inaugurated with great fanfare, a few hours after the sabotage, by the Polish president, the Danish prime minister and the Norwegian energy minister. It does not have at all the same capacities as Nord Stream, but it will be enough to change the times. Once the European Union was dominated by German industry using Russian gas, now it will be dominated by Poland using Norwegian gas. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki triumphantly declared at the inauguration ceremony: “The era of Russian gas domination is coming to an end; an era that was marked by blackmail, threats and extortion.

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“..the energy to defend this territory was greater than its strategic importance.”

Kharkov and Mobilization (Jacques Baud)

The recapture of the Kharkov region at the beginning of September appears to be a success for Ukrainian forces. Our media exulted and relayed Ukrainian propaganda to give us a picture that is not entirely accurate. A closer look at the operations might have prompted Ukraine to be more cautious. From a military point of view, this operation is a tactical victory for the Ukrainians and an operational/strategic victory for the Russian coalition. On the Ukrainian side, Kiev was under pressure to achieve some success on the battlefield. Volodymyr Zelensky was afraid of a fatigue from the West and that its support would stop. This is why the Americans and the British pressed him to carry out offensives in the Kherson sector. These offensives, undertaken in a disorganised manner, with disproportionate casualties and without success, created tensions between Zelensky and his military staff.

For several weeks now, Western experts have been questioning the presence of the Russians in the Kharkov area, as they clearly had no intention to fight in the city. In reality, their presence in this area was only aimed at affixing the Ukrainian troops so that they would not go to the Donbass, which is the real operational objective of the Russians. In August, indications suggested that the Russians had planned to leave the area well before the start of the Ukrainian offensive. They therefore withdrew in good order, together with some civilians who could have been the subject of retaliation. As evidence of this, the huge ammunition depot at Balaklaya was empty when the Ukrainians found it, demonstrating that the Russians had evacuated all sensitive personnel and equipment in good order several days earlier. The Russians had even left areas that Ukraine had not attacked. Only a few Russian National Guard and Donbass militia troops remained as the Ukrainians entered the area.

At this point, the Ukrainians were busy launching multiple attacks in the Kherson region, which had resulted in repeated setbacks and huge losses for their army since August. When US intelligence detected the Russians’ departure from the Kharkov region, they saw an opportunity for the Ukrainians to achieve an operational success and passed on the information. Ukraine thus abruptly decided to attack the Kharkov area that was already virtually empty of Russian troops. Apparently, the Russians anticipated the organisation of referenda in Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhe and Kherson oblasts. They realised that the territory of Kharkov was not directly relevant to their objectives, and that they were in the same situation as with Snake Island in June: the energy to defend this territory was greater than its strategic importance.

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There’s only one John Bolton. Problem is, there’s 1000s of wannabees.

Putin Must Go: Now Is The Time For Regime Change In Russia (John Bolton)

There is no long-term prospect for peace and security in Europe without regime change in Russia. Russians are already discussing it, quietly, for obvious reasons. For the United States and others pretending that the issue is not before will do far more harm than good. Notwithstanding recent Kyiv’s military advances, the West still lacks a shared definition of “victory” in Ukraine. Last week, Putin “annexed” four Ukrainian oblasts, joining Crimea, “annexed” in 2014. The war grinds on, producing high Russian casualties and economic pain. Opposition to Putin is rising, and young men are fleeing the country. Of course, Kyiv’s civilian and military casualties are also high, and its physical destruction is enormous.

Hoping to intimidate NATO, Moscow is again rhetorically brandishing nuclear weapons, and has sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. Europe worries about the coming winter, and everyone worries about the durability of Europe’s resolve. No one predicts a near-term cease-fire or substantive war-ending negotiations, or how to conduct “normal” relations with Putin’s regime thereafter. To avoid the war simply grinding along indefinitely, we must alter today’s calculus. Carefully assisting Russian dissidents to pursue regime change might just be the answer. Russia is, obviously, a nuclear power, but that is no more an argument against seeking regime change than against assisting Ukrainian self-defense.

White House virtue signaling already empowers the Kremlin, accusing us of “satanism,” to claim America is trying to overthrow Russia’s government even though Biden is doing no such thing. Just to remind, the Kremlin has been doing this to us for many decades. Since we are already accused of subverting the Kremlin, why not return the favor? Obstacles and uncertainties blocking Russian regime change are substantial, but not insuperable. Defining the “change” is critical, because it must involve far more than simply replacing Putin. Among his inner circle, several potential successors would be worse. The problem is not one man, but the collective leadership constructed over the last two decades. No civilian governmental structure exists to effect change, not even a Politburo like the one that retired Nikita Khrushchev after the Cuban missile crisis. The whole regime must go.

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EU is not the same thing as Europe.

After Russia, Now Turkey Questions Europe’s Territory (Euractiv)

A memorandum of understanding for exploring hydrocarbons at sea signed between the government of Tripoli and Turkey openly questions EU territory causing more headaches in Brussels amid an ongoing war in Ukraine. “Ankara’s latest agreement shows that Turkey follows a pattern”, an EU source told EURACTIV ahead of an EU summit this week which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to attend. The preliminary deal on energy exploration was signed between the Libyan Government of National Unity and Turkey and is considered a follow-up of a wider memorandum of understanding between the two countries in 2019. The deal questions Greece’s territorial waters south of the island of Crete and has triggered strong reactions.

The EU, Washington and Athens have all condemned the deal, saying it destabilises the region, infringes upon the sovereign rights of third states, does not comply with the Law of the Sea and cannot produce any legal consequences for third states. Since the Arab Spring, Libya has been facing a fragile political landscape considering that there are two rival governments: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity which signed the deal with Ankara and the Sirte-based Government of National Stability. The latter also slammed the agreement, saying any deal made by an outgoing government is not binding for the Libyan state. Moreover, Ankara is increasingly escalating its rhetoric daily, openly questioning the sovereignty of the Greek islands.

Particularly, the far-right government partner of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Devlet Bahçeli, recently said the sovereignty of the Dodecanese and North Aegean islands are Turkish and not Greek. “We will pull out the eyes of anyone who tries to cover our rights and justice,” Bahçeli said. An EU source told EURACTIV that Brussels is closely following the escalation in the Mediterranean and in no way wants to face another front of instability after Russia’s invasion in Europe’s east. “All Turkey’s moves, both in rhetoric and in practice, show that Erdogan is following a pattern through the repetition of certain moves”, the EU source said. The source emphasised that in 2019 the Turks signed the Turkish-Libyan memorandum with something in mind because they are coming in 2022 to strengthen it in the same sense. “The objective is to question the current status quo”, the source added.

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White House: “It’s clear that OPEC+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement.”

Biden Blasts “Short-Sighted” OPEC+ Cut (ZH)

OPEC+ could be on the verge of one of the largest production cuts in two years, a move White House officials would undoubtedly have a ‘panic attack’ as they attempt to dissuade the 23 crude-producing countries and its allies, such as Russia, from making the cuts. OPEC+ is considering cutting 2 million barrels a day, and on the smaller side, a reduction of 1-1.5 million barrels a day, delegates said. Such a move would be a blow to Washington as the Biden administration has scrambled to unleash record amounts of crude from the strategic petroleum reserve to tame soaring crude prices this summer. “Higher oil prices, if driven by sizeable production cuts, would likely irritate the Biden administration ahead of US midterm elections,” Citi strategists wrote in a note.

Citi strategists appear correct: CNN obtained some of the draft talking points circulated by the White House to the Treasury Department this week and called the prospect of a production cut a “total disaster” and “hostile act.” “There could be further political reactions from the US, including additional releases of strategic stocks,” the strategists added. They said the Biden administration could also push forward with an anti-trust bill targeting OPEC. But that’s not all. According to Bloomberg, White House officials are discussing possible export bans on gasoline, diesel, and other refined petroleum with the Energy Department. People familiar with discussions said administration officials are discussing export bans of refined products with top oil industry leaders as the risk of an OPEC+ reduction could catapult fuel pump prices higher ahead of the midterm elections in November.

[..]Despite Biden’s SPR drain, hitting levels not seen since 1984, the export ban could be the most controversial move yet by the desperate administration to tame pump prices ahead of the midterm elections next month. Biden’s political emptying of the SPR has left it with a record low of just 22 days of supply… Top oil execs and industry experts have blasted the proposed export ban, saying it could backfire and result in even higher gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel prices, while throwing energy markets into turmoil in Europe ahead of winter. In a letter to the Energy Department, Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods wrote last week that “continuing current Gulf Coast exports is essential to efficiently rebalance markets—particularly with diverted Russian supplies.” “Reducing global supply by limiting US exports to build region-specific inventory will only aggravate the global supply shortfall,” Woods said.

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“The increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way.”

Media Lying About Climate And Hurricanes (Shellenberger)

Over the last several weeks, many mainstream news media outlets have claimed that hurricanes are becoming more expensive, more frequent, and more intense because of climate change. The Financial Times reported that “hurricane frequency is on the rise.” The New York Times claimed, “strong storms are becoming more common in the Atlantic Ocean.” The Washington Post said, “climate change is rapidly fueling super hurricanes.” ABC News declared, “Here’s how climate change intensifies hurricanes.” Both the FT and N.Y. Times showed graphs purporting to show rising hurricane frequency using data from the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). All of those claims are false.

The increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way. Consider how much more developed Miami Beach is today compared to a century ago. Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increasing damage. Claims that hurricanes are becoming more frequent are similarly wrong. “After adjusting for a likely under-count of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era,” writes NOAA, “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.” What’s more, NOAA expects a 25% decline in hurricane frequency in the future.

What about intensity? Same story. Explains NOAA, “after adjusting for changes in observing capabilities (limited ship observations) in the pre-satellite era, there is no significant long-term trend (since the 1880s) in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.“ Bottom line? “We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major.”

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Ingraham chemistry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Sep 152022
 
 September 15, 2022  Posted by at 8:49 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  44 Responses »


Salvador Dali Neo-Cubist Academy (Composition with Three Figures) 1926

 

Moscow Outlines ‘Diabolical’ Plan By Washington (RT)
“Prologue To Third World War”: Kremlin Reacts To Security Guarantees For Ukraine (ZH)
US, Ukraine Are In Talks To Transfer Fighter Jets & Longer-Range Missiles (ZH)
The Kharkov Game-Changer (Escobar)
Why Russia Will Still Win, Despite Ukraine’s Gains (Scott Ritter)
Ukraine Has Put World On Brink Of ‘Nuclear Catastrophe’ – Moscow (RT)
Top Hungarian Official Predicts Easing Of Sanctions (RT)
EU May Punish Hungary (RT)
Summit With Putin, Xi Will Showcase Alternative To Western World: Kremlin (AFP)
Ukraine Had A Huge Influence On The Soviet Union (Negopodin)
End of Covid in Sight – WHO (RT)
Why Health Officials Won’t Let Scientists Examine mRNA Vaccine Vials (Mercola)
Denmark ENDS Covid Vaccinations For Almost Everyone Under 50 (Berenson)
Climate Emergency Not Supported by Data: 4 Leading Italian Scientists (DS)
UK Sports Body Tells People Not To Ride Bikes During Queen Funeral (RT)

 

 

Art Berman @aeberman12
The real energy transition is a reduction in energy use. This will never happen VOLUNTARILY. Another slide from my talk last night at Houston Geological Society.

 

 

 

 

Twitter whistleblower

 

 

 

 

The Fibonacci week. How long do the days feel?

 

 

 

 

“..the EU began as a group of nations that banded together for mutual economic benefit through the deregulation of trade. Now “they are being corralled together” so their lives will become “colder, poorer, and harder,” she said.”

Moscow Outlines ‘Diabolical’ Plan By Washington (RT)

Ukraine’s newly published proposal for Western security guarantees is an invitation for the economic self-immolation of the EU, according to Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Russian diplomat believes that the proposed international agreement which Kiev released on Tuesday is an economic trap for EU nations set by the US with Ukraine’s assistance. Most of the measures included in the document “are already being implemented” by Kiev’s backers, but Washington’s EU allies are expected to pledge to keep the Ukraine aid money flowing for the foreseeable future, Zakharova said in an interview on Wednesday. If signed, the ‘Kiev Security Compact’ would mean “harsh slavery” for the bloc which it would not recover from anytime soon, she claimed.

“A total commitment to supporting the Kiev regime would simply mean immolation [for the EU]. And this proposal is addressed to nations that are debating how they can live through the winter,” Zakharova said, in reference to the energy shortages that EU member states are struggling to confront. Developed EU nations face an economic and humanitarian disaster after taking directions from the US on how to respond to the crisis in Ukraine, according to the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. The situation is ironic, she believes, as the EU began as a group of nations that banded together for mutual economic benefit through the deregulation of trade. Now “they are being corralled together” so their lives will become “colder, poorer, and harder,” she said.

This is Washington’s diabolical plan to destroy what was previously called the common European space. The Ukrainian security proposal was prepared by a group co-chaired by Andrey Yermak, the chief of staff of President Vladimir Zelensky, and former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The 10-page document outlines NATO-like security guarantees for Ukraine by the US and its allies that would benefit Kiev until it formally joins the Washington-led military bloc. It also calls for continued military and financial aid for Ukraine by the guarantors.

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“..a “multi-decade” plan of investment, military training, and intelligence sharing to bolster Ukraine’s defensive capabilities as the country pursues full NATO membership.”

“Prologue To Third World War”: Kremlin Reacts To Security Guarantees For Ukraine (ZH)

Ukraine wants a ‘NATO-esque’ bloc which can be called upon to immediately defend borders with Russia, which was proposed by a working group established by President Volodymyr Zelensky. Crucially it would include the United States and other NATO allies providing Ukraine with “security guarantees”. Kiev officials stressed in unveiling the plan Tuesday that it’s not meant as a replacement for NATO, but as a legally binding alliance to be in place while Ukraine eventually pursues full NATO membership, as Newsweek describes of the proposal: “The Kyiv Security Compact (KSC)—proposed by Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, and former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen—would also establish a “multi-decade” plan of investment, military training, and intelligence sharing to bolster Ukraine’s defensive capabilities as the country pursues full NATO membership.”

The Kremlin’s reaction has been swift and fierce, with Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev warning that it is “really a prologue to the Third World War” if it gets enacted. He described that nuclear holocaust would be the end result. According to a translation of Medvedev’s reaction in state media, which had been posted in a statement to Telegram, he blamed “dull idiots” from “stupid think tanks” for concocting such a “hysterical appeal”. Medvedev wrote: “And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy. Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt.”

“Yet still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks, thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots with a classical education.” He said that already the conflict in Ukraine is sliding into unknown, unpredictable territory of escalation due to the West’s “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons.” He added to the statements as follows according to a translation: “The Kyiv camarilla gave birth to a project of “security guarantees”, which are a prologue to the third world war. Of course, no one will give any “guarantees” to the Ukrainian Nazis. After all, this is almost the same as applying Article 5 of the North Atlantic Pact (Washington Treaty) to Ukraine. For NATO – the same shit, only a side view. Therefore, it’s scary.”

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Insanity squared.

US, Ukraine Are In Talks To Transfer Fighter Jets & Longer-Range Missiles (ZH)

The US and its allies are in talks over whether to send Ukraine more advanced weapons in the future, including fighter jets, US defense sources have said, according to the Financial Times. The Kharkiv counteroffensive has apparently emboldened Ukrainian officials to press Washington harder for more advanced and longer-range weapons, now that some degree of success in rolling back Russian forces can be demonstrated. The idea is that if Ukraine’s forces can prove they’ve taken back significant territory with what defense systems the US has provided so far, they can ultimately make the case that the whole of the east and south is within their reach – and even the potential to liberate Crimea while they’re at it – if longer range and more advanced arms are made available.

The Financial Times reports this week that active discussions between the US and Ukraine are underway concerning Kiev’s weapons wish list: “A senior US defense official said Washington and its allies were discussing Ukraine’s longer term needs, such as air defenses, and whether it might be appropriate to give Kyiv fighter aircraft in the “medium to longer term”. To date, the US and its allies have declined to do so. But interestingly and quite tellingly, the report immediately follows with the acknowledgement that Ukrainian leaders are perhaps naturally incentivize to exaggerate battlefield gains at this moment. Here’s more from the FT as the Pentagon offers a “cautiously optimistic” assessment of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensives in the east and south:

“Ukrainian military officials have said in recent days they have taken more than 3,000 sq km of terrain in what has become Moscow’s biggest military setback since it was forced to scrap plans to conquer Kyiv. But late on Monday night President Volodymyr Zelenskyy practically doubled those claims as Ukraine’s forces continued to advance.” Something Ukraine has additionally long been asking for is longer-range missile systems. A Monday Wall Street Journal report detailed that Kiev is now requesting from the Pentagon the Army’s Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a surface-to-surface missile system with the capability of reaching about 190 miles. This would be far and beyond the range of missiles transferred to Ukraine thus far in the conflict.

The Biden administration in the early months resisted sending longer range missiles, admitting its fears that doing so could draw the US and Russia into direct conflict – given longer range munitions means Ukrainian forces would have the capability of hitting inside Russian territory. This has already happened with Crimea, and even recently with bases inside Russia proper near the border. But now US defense officials are looking over a new strategy proposal and weapons request submitted by Valeriy Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s force. WSJ details of the document: They argued that Russia has long-range cruise missiles that greatly outdistance the systems in the Ukrainian inventory. A turning point could come if the Ukrainians also had longer-range systems, they argued, specifically mentioning the ATACMS. “The only way to radically change the strategic situation is, without a doubt, for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to launch several consecutive, and ideally, simultaneous counterattacks during the 2023 campaign,” they wrote.

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“Sooner rather than later, gloves – velvet and otherwise – will be off. Exit SMO. Enter War.”

The Kharkov Game-Changer (Escobar)

Wars are not won by psyops. Ask Nazi Germany. Still, it’s been a howler to watch NATOstan media on Kharkov, gloating in unison about “the hammer blow that knocks out Putin”, “the Russians are in trouble”, and assorted inanities. Facts: Russian forces withdrew from the territory of Kharkov to the left bank of the Oskol river, where they are now entrenched. A Kharkov-Donetsk-Luhansk line seems to be stable. Krasny Liman is threatened, besieged by superior Ukrainian forces, but not lethally. No one – not even Maria Zakharova, the contemporary female equivalent of Hermes, the messenger of the Gods – knows what the Russian General Staff (RGS) plans, in this case and all others. If they say they do, they are lying.

As it stands, what may be inferred with a reasonable degree of certainty is that a line – Svyatogorsk-Krasny Liman-Yampol-Belogorovka – can hold out long enough with their current garrisons until fresh Russian forces are able to swoop in and force the Ukrainians back beyond the Seversky Donets line. All hell broke loose – virtually – on why Kharkov happened. The people’s republics and Russia never had enough men to defend a 1,000 km-long frontline. NATO’s entire intel capabilities noticed – and profited from it. There were no Russian Armed Forces in those settlements: only Rosgvardia, and these are not trained to fight military forces. Kiev attacked with an advantage of around 5 to 1. The allied forces retreated to avoid encirclement. There are no Russian troop losses because there were no Russian troops in the region.

Arguably this may have been a one-off. The NATO-run Kiev forces simply can’t do a replay anywhere in Donbass, or in Kherson, or in Mariupol. These are all protected by strong, regular Russian Army units. It’s practically a given that if the Ukrainians remain around Kharkov and Izyum they will be pulverized by massive Russian artillery. Military analyst Konstantin Sivkov maintains that, “most combat-ready formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are now being grounded (…) we managed to lure them into the open and are now systematically destroying them.” The NATO-run Ukrainian forces, crammed with NATO mercenaries, had spent 6 months hoarding equipment and reserving trained assets exactly for this Kharkov moment – while dispatching disposables into a massive meat grinder.

It will be very hard to sustain an assembly line of substantial prime assets to pull off something similar again. The next days will show whether Kharkov and Izyum are connected to a much larger NATO push. The mood in NATO-controlled EU is approaching Desperation Row. There’s a strong possibility this counter-offensive signifies NATO entering the war for good, while displaying quite tenuous plausible deniability: their veil of – fake – secrecy cannot disguise the presence of “advisers” and mercenaries all across the spectrum.[..] This is an existential war. A do or die affair. The American geopolitical /geoeconomic goal, to put it bluntly, is to destroy Russian unity, impose regime change and plunder all those immense natural resources. Ukrainians are nothing but cannon fodder: in a sort of twisted History remake, the modern equivalents of the pyramid of skulls Timur cemented into 120 towers when he razed Baghdad in 1401.sIf may take a “hammer blow” for the RSG to wake up. Sooner rather than later, gloves – velvet and otherwise – will be off. Exit SMO. Enter War.

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“Winning a battle is one thing; winning a war another.”

Why Russia Will Still Win, Despite Ukraine’s Gains (Scott Ritter)

The Ukrainian battle plan has “Made in Brussels” stamped all over it. The force composition was determined by NATO, as was the timing of the attacks and the direction of the attacks. NATO intelligence carefully located seams in the Russian defenses and identified critical command and control, logistics, and reserve concentration nodes that were targeted by Ukrainian artillery, which operates on a fire control plan created by NATO. In short, the Ukrainian army that Russia faced in Kherson and around Kharkov was unlike any Ukrainian opponent it had previously faced. Russia was no longer fighting a Ukrainian army equipped by NATO, but rather a NATO army manned by Ukrainians.

Ukraine continues to receive billions of dollars of military assistance, and currently has tens of thousands of troops undergoing extensive training in NATO nations. There will be a fourth phase, and a fifth phase … as many phases as necessary before Ukraine either exhausts its will to fight and die, NATO exhausts its ability to continue supplying the Ukrainian military, or Russia exhausts its willingness to fight an inconclusive conflict in Ukraine.

[..] In the end, I still believe the end game remains the same — Russia will win. But the cost for extending this war has become much higher for all parties involved. The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive needs to be put into a proper perspective. The casualties Ukraine suffered, and is still suffering, to achieve this victory are unsustainable. Ukraine has exhausted its strategic reserves, and they will have to be reconstituted if Ukraine were to have any aspirations of continuing an advance along these lines. This will take months. Russia, meanwhile, has lost nothing more than some indefensible space. Russian casualties were minimal, and equipment losses readily replaced.

Russia has actually strengthened its military posture by creating strong defensive lines in the north capable of withstanding any Ukrainian attack, while increasing combat power available to complete the task of liberating the remainder of the Donetsk People’s Republic under Ukrainian control. Russia has far more strategic depth than Ukraine. Russia is beginning to strike critical infrastructure targets, such as power stations, that will not only cripple the Ukrainian economy, but also their ability to move large amounts of troops rapidly via train. Russia will learn from the lessons the Kharkov defeat taught them and continue its stated mission objectives.

The bottom line – the Kharkov offensive was as good as it will get for Ukraine, while Russia hasn’t come close to hitting rock bottom. Changes need to be made by Russia to fix the problems identified through the Kharkov defeat. Winning a battle is one thing; winning a war another. For Ukraine, the huge losses suffered by their own forces, combined with the limited damage inflicted on Russia means the Kharkov offensive is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory, one that does not change the fundamental reality that Russia is winning, and will win, the conflict in Ukraine.

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The IAEA can’t speak. Ukraine=NATO.

Ukraine Has Put World On Brink Of ‘Nuclear Catastrophe’ – Moscow (RT)

Ukraine’s attacks on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant are creating an unacceptable risk, the chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said on Tuesday. Moscow will act to prevent a disaster from happening, while the US does not seem to care about the potential damage to Ukraine and its European NATO allies, the speaker of the Russian parliament has said. “Kiev’s terrorist actions are putting the world on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. We cannot allow this to happen,” Volodin said, opening the legislature’s autumn session. While the US may be far away from the plant, “their NATO allies in Europe stand to suffer” in case of a radioactive release, Volodin noted, adding that the US government and EU parliaments are silent about the threat, but many other states around the world share Russia’s concern about the situation.

Russia has controlled Europe’s largest nuclear power plant since March. Attacks on the facility started in July, with the Russian Defense Ministry documenting more than 30 artillery and drone strikes, as well as two attempts by Ukrainian commandos to storm the plant, one during the visit of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission earlier this month. Kiev has accused Moscow of staging the shelling to make Ukraine look bad, even though its military eventually admitted to targeting the area.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, who personally led the mission to inspect the plant, said on Monday that both Russia and Ukraine are “interested” in a proposal for a local ceasefire and a security zone around the ZNPP. All of its six reactors are currently offline, due to the ongoing artillery threat. Moscow has rejected any notion of withdrawing its troops from the area, however, with the Kremlin saying that the only discussion at this time is “about forcing the Ukrainian side to stop the barbaric shelling” of the premises. In his remarks on Tuesday, Volodin said, “time has once again shown the correctness of the decision” by President Vladimir Putin to send troops into Ukraine in February.

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“The European Commission has reportedly backpedaled on the gas price cap and is currently working on a mechanism to tax the windfall profits of energy companies.”

Top Hungarian Official Predicts Easing Of Sanctions (RT)

The EU will review the sanctions on Russia and could lift some of them as soon as this autumn, Hungarian State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Trade Tamas Menczer predicts. The restrictions imposed on Russian trade to punish it for attacking Ukraine have failed to change Moscow’s behavior and actually rewarded it with increased revenues, after they triggered a spike in energy prices, the MP said during an appearance on M1 TV on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the European countries that imposed the sanctions are facing energy shortages. “Reality knocks on the door of every country,”Menczer said, explaining why he believes the sanctions will be lifted sooner rather than later. Member states are set to review their sanctions policies later in the autumn.


The Hungarian MP confirmed that his country, which criticized the EU’s drive to decouple the economy of the bloc from Russian energy, opposed the idea of introducing a price cap on gas bought from foreign nations. He called the proposal absurd and impractical, citing Moscow’s promises to cut supplies to customers that try to dictate the price. The European Commission has reportedly backpedaled on the gas price cap and is currently working on a mechanism to tax the windfall profits of energy companies. Brussels is also urging EU nations to impose various energy-saving measures to better prepare for peak consumption during the winter. Last week, Hungarian Parliament Speaker Laszlo Kover claimed that the EU is the “loser” in the Ukraine conflict due to the economic damage caused by the sanctions.

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“..as much as 70% of the funding due between 2021 and 2027 may be withheld from Hungary owing to non-compliance..”

EU May Punish Hungary (RT)

The European Commission will recommend withholding funds from the Hungarian government over allegations of corruption in the country, Bloomberg claimed on Wednesday, confirming earlier reports in the Hungarian press. The assessment is expected to be unveiled as soon as Sunday. The EU launched a probe against Hungary shortly after its prime minister, Viktor Orban, shored up his domestic position by winning the April general election in a landslide. The investigation was triggered under a recently adopted EU law that links payments of subsidies to member states to their compliance with the bloc’s rule-of-law norms.According to Bloomberg’s sources, the European Commission is almost ready to release its conclusions. The executive body is to recommend slashing the funding pending improvement in adherence to the norms, senior EU officials told the agency.

The final decision will be made within three months after the report is released, with a qualified majority of votes by the bloc’s members required to adopt it. Brussels may give Budapest a grace period of up to three months to follow its recommendations and to implement a number of measures that the Hungarian government promised to enact to alleviate the EU’s concerns, according to Bloomberg. According to EUobserver, a publication specializing in covering EU policies, as much as 70% of the funding due between 2021 and 2027 may be withheld from Hungary owing to non-compliance. The total sum would amount to over €40 billion, according to the Bloomberg report. The Orban government was blocked from accessing the EU money during the probe.

The anti-corruption measures that Budapest proposed in late August include creating a new authority to oversee the spending of EU funds and amending Hungarian laws on public procurements. The country’s justice minister, Judit Varga, met EU officials last week to discuss the package. The timeline for the release of the graft report was first revealed by the Hungarian newspaper Nepszava on Tuesday evening. Its sources said that 20% of EU subsidies were at risk of being suspended unless Budapest meets Brussels’ demands. The punishment, if implemented, would be the first case of its kind. The EU leadership has voiced concerns about the rule of law in several Eastern European countries, most notably Hungary and Poland.

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Half the world population.

Summit With Putin, Xi Will Showcase Alternative To Western World: Kremlin (AFP)

A regional summit this week where Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet China’s Xi Jinping and other Asian leaders will showcase an “alternative” to the Western world, the Kremlin said Tuesday. Putin and Xi will be joined by the leaders of India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and several other countries for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Uzbek city of Samarkand on Thursday and Friday. The SCO — made up of China, Russia, India, Pakistan and four ex-Soviet Central Asian countries — was set up in 2001 as a political, economic and security organisation to rival Western institutions. The meeting will be part of Xi’s first trip abroad since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and comes with relations between Russia and the West shattered by the conflict in Ukraine. “The SCO offers a real alternative to Western-centric organisations,” Kremlin foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov told reporters in Moscow.


“All members of the SCO stand for a just world order,” he said, describing the summit as taking place “against the background of large-scale geopolitical changes”. The SCO, he said, “is the largest organisation in the world, it includes half the population of our planet”. Putin will hold talks with Xi, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Thursday, Ushakov said, before attending the main session of the summit on Friday. On Friday he will also meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev. “The meeting with Xi is of particular importance, major international and regional topics will be discussed,” including the conflict in Ukraine and growing Russia-China economic ties, Ushakov said.

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History lesson.

Ukraine Had A Huge Influence On The Soviet Union (Negopodin)

Even now, many pages in the history of the Soviet Union remain a mystery. One of these concerns the ethnic composition of the country’s leadership. Such information was not published by the Party’s Central Committee until 1989, and biographies of members of the governing bodies during the entire Soviet period were not released until 1990, just before the dissolution of the USSR. All of these documents confirmed that many of its statesmen, politicians, diplomats, as well as military and intelligence officers, had been born in Ukraine. However, information about their ethnic origin was often omitted. Also, many of those who originated from Ukraine were registered as ‘Russian’ or simply as ‘Soviet’. This is why it is so difficult to assess the full scope of political influence Ukrainians had on the decision-making process in the Soviet Union.

It is true that Ukrainians contributed a great deal to building socialism. If we round them all up, we see that there had always been very large numbers of people from Ukraine in the top tiers of power. Two of them, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, ruled the country as general secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The country’s final ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, was the descendant of Ukrainian peasants who had moved to Stavropol. [..] The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was managed by local elites, which is completely at odds with the modern myth of Ukraine having been an ‘oppressed nation’ in the Soviet Union. Moreover, so many Ukrainians held key positions in the Soviet government that any allegations made by the present-day Ukrainian authorities about the Ukrainian SSR struggling under the yoke of the Russian SFSR and being de facto Soviet Russia’s colony simply don’t have a leg to stand on.

On the contrary, by the 1950s, the Ukrainian SSR had become a full-fledged statelet that had its own constitution and flag and even parliament. In fact, its structure mirrored that of the government of the Soviet Union itself. Ukraine’s policy was determined by the Communist Party of Ukraine with the Politburo being its highest body of power; its legislative branch was represented by the Supreme Council (this later became the Verkhovna Rada); and executive power was wielded by the Council of Ministers.

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But vaccinate!

End of Covid in Sight – WHO (RT)

World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared on Wednesday that the end of the Covid-19 pandemic is close at hand. While the virus is still spreading at the same level as last year, despite mass vaccination, deaths have fallen significantly. “We are not there yet. But the end is in sight,”Tedros said at a press briefing. Claiming that vaccination and other public health measures have reduced the threat posed by the virus, the WHO chief called on governments to push for 100% vaccination of vulnerable people and healthcare workers, and 70% vaccination of the general public.

“A marathon runner does not stop when the finish line comes into view, she runs harder with all the energy that she has left,” he said. “Now is the worst time to stop running.” The impact of vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and other public health measures on the virus’ spread has been a controversial issue, with near-totally vaccinated countries like Singapore still experiencing waves of infection this summer that dwarfed similar spikes in 2021 and 2020. Some 3.1 million cases of Covid-19 were confirmed globally in the week ending September 5, compared to 3.9 million in the same week in 2021, and 1.9 million in the same week in 2020.

Deaths have fallen, however, with 11,000 linked to the virus in the week ending September 5, the lowest weekly total since March 16, 2020. Tedros announced that the WHO would release six policy briefs for governments later on Wednesday, outlining the steps the organization thinks are necessary to avoid “more variants, more deaths, more destruction and more uncertainty.” Among these steps are the aforementioned vaccination push, the maintenance of infection control measures in hospitals, increased testing and sequencing, and the administration of appropriate treatment to patients.

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“However, what it will do very effectively, if you got reasonably intact mRNA, is to cause you significant harm. You are playing a game of chance with your immune system and what is in the bottle.”

Why Health Officials Won’t Let Scientists Examine mRNA Vaccine Vials (Mercola)

A 14-minute video (below) that has been overlooked for nearly two years has now resurfaced, exposing stunning information about the COVID-19 jabs and why health officials don’t want individual vaccine vials examined by independent scientists. The reason, it turns out, is because the vials are all different — and the mRNA in the shots “is not intact.” Both of these pose potentially serious problems. In an Aug. 31 Substack article, Steve Kirsch explains: “Even if you are getting 100% intact mRNA which would be really rare, you’re still not getting anything that resembles the virus. So the efficacy as far as PROTECTING you will be next to nothing. “However, what it will do very effectively, if you got reasonably intact mRNA, is to cause you significant harm. You are playing a game of chance with your immune system and what is in the bottle.”

The video notes that members of the European Parliament were only allowed to read the contracts with the drug makers after they’d been heavily redacted. Why the heavy-handed secrecy, even toward legislators? The finding that the mRNA in the shots was of questionable quality was revealed in a British Medical Journal feature investigation article published in March 2021. As explained by the author, journalist Serena Tinari, cyber attackers retrieved more than 40 megabytes of Pfizer COVID-19 jab data from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in December 2020. The hacked data was subsequently sent to journalists and academics worldwide. It was also published on the dark web. Some of the documents show European regulators had significant concerns over the lack of intact mRNA in the commercial batches sampled.

Compared to the clinical batches, i.e., the shots used in the clinical trial, 55% to 78% of the commercial shots had “a significant difference in % RNA integrity/truncated species.” In one email, dated Nov. 23, 2020, a high-ranking EMA official noted that the commercial batches failed to meet expected specifications, and that the implications of this RNA integrity loss were unclear. In response to the findings, the EMA sent a list of questions and concerns to Pfizer. While we do not know if and how the EMA’s concerns were actually addressed and corrected, the EMA authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 jab Dec. 21, 2020.

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Next please.

Denmark ENDS Covid Vaccinations For Almost Everyone Under 50 (Berenson)

Denmark will bar almost everyone under 50 from receiving more mRNA Covid jabs, the Danish Health Authority said yesterday. Denmark had already ended Covid shots for nearly everyone under 18. The new rules go much further. Danes under 50 will only be allowed to receive the shots if they are “higher risk of becoming severely [emphasis added] from Covid-19.” The Danish Health Authority has not yet defined those groups, but they will likely include only a handful of people, such as those receiving cancer treatments that suppress their immune systems. Pregnant women are unlikely to be included.

Denmark did not explicitly say the risks of mRNA jabs now outweigh their benefits for healthy people under 50. But that view is implicit in the announcement, which does not merely discourage but actually bans shots for those people, even though Denmark expects “a large wave of [Covid] infection” in the next few months. In other words, the health authority is not stopping shots because Covid has ended. It now believes most people are better off getting the coronavirus than taking more mRNA. The Danish move is particularly significant because Denmark has an excellent national health care system and has aggressively collected data on Covid and vaccines.

Denmark was among the first countries to stop giving Covid shots to healthy children and teenagers. Now other European countries are beginning to follow, with Britain ending mRNA shots for almost all children 10 and under. In yesterday’s announcement of the new policies, Denmark explicitly dropped any effort to halt the spread of the coronavirus and said that it will focus only on protecting people at very high risk: “We expect that a large part of the population will become infected with covid-19 during the autumn, and we therefore want to vaccinate those having the highest risk so that they are protected from severe illness.”

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It’s time for science. Before the climate lockdowns come.

Suppose the climate alarms follow the same pattern the Covid ones do. Take it from there.

Climate Emergency Not Supported by Data: 4 Leading Italian Scientists (DS)

Four leading Italian scientists have undertaken a major review of historical climate trends and concluded that declaring a ‘climate emergency’ is not supported by the data. Reviewing data from a wide range of weather phenomena, they say a ‘climate crisis’ of the kind people are becoming alarmed about “is not evident yet”. The scientists suggest that rather than burdening our children with anxiety about climate change, we should encourage them to think about issues like energy, food and health, and the challenges in each area, with a more “objective and constructive spirit” and not waste limited resources on “costly and ineffective solutions”.

During the course of their work, the scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency is stationary in many parts of the world. Tropical hurricanes and cyclones show little change over the long term, and the same is true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity show no “clear positive trend of extreme events”. Regarding ecosystems, the scientists note a considerable “greening” of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Satellite data show “greening” trends over most of the planet, increasing food yields and pushing back deserts.

The four scientists are all highly qualified and include physics adjunct professor Gianluca Alimonti, agrometeorologist Luigi Mariani and physics professors Franco Prodi and Renato Angelo Ricci. The last two are signatories to the rapidly growing ‘World Climate Declaration’. This petition states that there is no climate emergency and calls for climate science to be more scientific. It also calls for liberation from the “naïve belief in immature climate models”. In future, it says, “climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science”.

‘Extreme’ weather events attributed by climate models – somehow – to anthropogenic global warming are now the main staple of the climate alarmist industry. As the Daily Sceptic reported on Monday, Sir David Attenborough used a U.K. Met Office model forecast in the first episode of Frozen Planet II to claim that summer Arctic sea ice could be gone within 12 years. But the likelihood of hardy swimming galas over the North Pole by 2035 seems somewhat remote, not least because Arctic sea ice has been growing in many summers since 2012. According to a recent report from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, at the end of August “sea ice extent is likely to remain higher than in recent years”.

EV-No

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The list of absurdities gets longer.

• 100 staff at Charles III residence sacked
• £200 million tax avoided by Charles on his inheritance
• 1,000 Cancer treatments cancelled for Monday
• Arrests for disapproving of unelected head of state
• Food banks closed on Monday

UK Sports Body Tells People Not To Ride Bikes During Queen Funeral (RT)

British Cycling has U-turned on its previous “strong recommendation” that people should refrain from using their bicycles during the Queen’s funeral next week. Though the UK government had stressed there was no obligation to cancel or postpone any events during a period of national mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last Thursday, some sports such as football have widely postponed matches as a mark of respect to the monarch. Adopting a similar stance, British Cycling released guidance that said it “strongly recommends that anybody out riding their bike on the day of the state funeral does so outside of the timings of the funeral service and associated processions, which will be confirmed later this week.”

This caused consternation among cyclists, with one noting that the funeral on Monday, September 19, clashes with their work hours. “Is it OK with you if I don’t follow your absolutely ridiculous advice and bike to work? Or would you rather I, as a mark of respect, pollute the air with my car? Maybe I can honk the national anthem on my horn?” they asked.British Cycling has since deleted the section of its guidance that says people shouldn’t cycle at all during the funeral for the 96-year-old Queen, but fresh recommendations have insisted that amateur cyclists should not go on rides with their clubs on Monday. “As a mark of respect to Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, British Cycling’s guidance is that no formal domestic activities should take place on the day of the State Funeral, Monday 19 September,” it stated.

“This includes cycle sport events, club rides, coaching sessions and community programs (such as Breeze rides).”With good weather expected which often prompts long rides with clubs, this has also drawn criticism and has seen the organization dubbed a “joke” with conduct “worthy of the Stasi,” in reference to the former German state security service in operation from 1950 to 1990. Some cyclists have threatened to cancel their membership, with one balking that British Cycling is “an embarrassment at a time when hatred towards cycling feels at an all-time high.”

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