Rembrandt van Rijn Small self portrait 1627-28
“I am so disappointed with my Grandpa. He is voting Democrat next week.
When he was alive, he was a staunch Republican.”
Seen this man?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1588920818943557634
Gates
https://twitter.com/i/status/1589050562942844929
“Having suddenly started, the nuclear war ended just as suddenly, destroying everyone. There were no winners or losers.”
• Dead Hand’s Revenge: What Would Happen If The West Strikes Russia? (Duncan)
One of Perimeter’s developers, Alexander Zheleznyakov, described a possible scenario for using the system as follows: “Two hours after the start of hostilities, when it seemed that there was nothing and, most importantly, no one to fight, in the remote Siberian taiga, in the Kazakh steppes, in the swamps of central Russia, the hatches of mine launchers almost simultaneously opened, and dozens of silver giants rushed into the sky. Thirty minutes later, the fate of Moscow and Leningrad, Kiev and Minsk, Berlin and Prague, Beijing and Havana was shared by Washington and New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Bonn and London, Paris and Rome, Sydney and Tokyo. Having suddenly started, the nuclear war ended just as suddenly, destroying everyone. There were no winners or losers.
[..] Is the Dead Hand dead? Yarynich was the one to blow the whistle on Perimeter after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, he spoke cautiously about the key details of the Dead Hand system with American nuclear security expert Bruce Blair, who revealed the existence of the system in a New York Times op-ed, not mentioning the Russian colonel, though his colleagues were well aware who had leaked the information. In 2003, Yarynich himself wrote a book, ‘C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation,’ providing even more details. He had spent the rest of his life fighting for transparency within the nuclear command and control mechanisms of Russia and the US. “Nuclear weapons should not be viewed as a political instrument,” he believed.
“Today, we are facing an obvious absurdity,” Yarynich wrote in the introduction to his book. “On the one hand … the United States and Russia have become unprecedentedly open with each other, exchanging information that used to be completely secret during the Cold War.” “Now publicly accessible computer databases include information about the various types of American and Russian ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, their numbers, characteristics, location, design bureaus and production facilities … The results of such decisive steps is evident: the process of nuclear arms reduction has started and is successfully continuing.” However, Yarynich argued, this isn’t enough: absolute secrecy still reigns when it comes to command and control of nuclear weapons. “Two issues are of greatest importance here,” he explained.
“First, what measures have been taken by the nuclear powers against accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, and how reliable are those measures? Second, what is the ideology for hypothetical authorized deployment of nuclear weapons?” In 2007, Yarynich gave a detailed interview to Wired magazine. In it, he repeated his story about the technical features of the Perimeter, and most importantly, confirmed that the system is constantly being updated, and that he’s proud to have been involved in its development: it successfully managed its task in the Cold War and can continue to serve. All he wanted was for the system to be talked about. Yarynich believed that publicity around the system would be useful to Russia: no one wants to die in vain.
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“..we’re facing the Battle of Stalingrad, the decisive battle in the conflict in Ukraine, the battle for Kherson..”
• Ukraine Conflict Approaching Its Stalingrad – Serbian President (RT)
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has compared the anticipated battle for Kherson between Russian and Ukrainian forces to the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II, warning that aftershocks from the fighting would be felt far outside the conflict zone. “Challenging times are ahead of us. Next winter will be even harsher than this one because we’re facing the Battle of Stalingrad, the decisive battle in the conflict in Ukraine, the battle for Kherson,” Vucic said in an interview with Pink TV on Sunday. Both sides are likely to deploy thousands of tanks, aircraft and artillery pieces in the struggle for the key city, he predicted. “The West [which is backing Ukraine in the conflict and supplying it with arms] thinks it’ll be able to ruin Russia that way, while Russia believes it’ll be able to defend what it obtained at the start of the war and bring it to an end,” the Serbian leader said.
The massive fighting in Kherson “is going to create additional problems everywhere,” Vucic warned. Stalingrad is believed to have been the biggest and bloodiest battle of World War II, and proved to be a turning point in the conflict. According to some estimations, the fighting between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between August 1942 and February 1943 resulted in up to two million casualties, with more than a million dead. The city of Kherson on the Dnieper River came under Russian control just days after Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine in late February. Kherson Region was officially declared part of the Russian state in early October, together with Zaporozhye Region and the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, after people in those territories overwhelmingly supported the move in referendums.
The Ukrainian government has made the recapture of Kherson one of its main goals, having planned a large-scale offensive on the city for months. In recent weeks, the Kiev troops have repeatedly tried to advance in the area, but all of those attacks have been repelled. On Sunday, Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of the regional administration, warned that Ukraine had been “deploying more and more APCs and tanks” near Kherson in what could be preparation for another offensive. Russia has been making plans to defend the city from a possible attack. Last month, the authorities started relocating civilians from Kherson and areas on the right bank of the Dnieper over concerns that Ukrainian strikes on the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric dam could lead to major flooding.
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted that “those living in Kherson must be evacuated from the most dangerous zone of action. The civilian population must not suffer from shelling, any kind of offensive and counter-offensive, and other activities related to military operations.”
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“.. it is democracy or death, gas or grandchildren — you choose.”
• Democrats, Not Democracy, Are In Danger This Election (Turley)
Historian Michael Beschloss’s warning on MSNBC — speculating that “our children will be arrested and conceivably killed” if Republicans win control of Congress — summed up the final pitch by President Biden and fellow Democrats ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. Apparently, it is not gas prices, the economy or crime that once again are the top polling issues for voters. Instead, it is democracy or death, gas or grandchildren — you choose. Biden returned to this theme in what White House chief of staff Ron Klain called his “final warning” to voters. The president ominously cautioned voters who might be thinking of voting for Republicans that, “make no mistake, democracy is on the ballot for all of us.” In other words, be afraid, be very afraid.
Biden was widely criticized for an earlier Philadelphia speech that denounced political opponents as fascists plotting to overthrow democracy. Yet he and others have returned to that theme as Democrats appear to be losing ground even in traditional blue states. Among others, Hillary Clinton warned that the GOP is trying to “steal” the election and that “they’re going after democracy.“ The president’s attacks do not appear to be gaining much traction, with polls showing that most people view him as inciting political unrest. Nevertheless, on almost every network and cable news program, the mantra seems unrelenting: If the GOP prevails in the midterms, democracy could be lost.
Whereas the media once pushed a false Russia collusion claim in the 2016 election, this time it is pushing a claim that the GOP itself represents the threat to our liberties and very lives. As Democratic alarm over a GOP win in both houses of Congress has increased with polling in the past two weeks, so has the alarming rhetoric. Beschloss, for instance, warned that not only may democracy have just a few days left but there may be no one allowed to record its fall: “Fifty years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press — which I’m not certain of, but if that is true — a historian will say what was at stake … was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
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“What if the president is an organo-servo-robot, a senile puppet, backed up by a vice president specifically chosen for being even more feeble-minded?”
• The Trojan Horse Presidency (Dmitry Orlov)
The US midterm elections are nigh and, as I happen to be a good and patriotic Russian national, it behooves me to meddle in them. Election-meddling is an example of Russia’s soft power, which is much nicer than Russia’s hard power, so you should be glad that it’s still on offer. I am on record saying that “The United States is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is president” multiple times in multiple places, and I stand by that statement, which I believe to be a provable statement of fact. Statistics show that there is zero correlation between public preferences and public policy decisions but a strong correlation between business lobby group preferences and pubic policy decisions. Thus the US is not a democracy (rule by the people) but an oligopoly (rule by business groups).
From this it follows that it doesn’t matter who is president because both parties of the Democrat-Republican duopoly are owned by the same set of business groups. And so it doesn’t matter who is president and your vote means nothing? Granted; but then does it matter WHETHER there is a president? Methinks, it does! What if the president is an organo-servo-robot, a senile puppet, backed up by a vice president specifically chosen for being even more feeble-minded? This is an excellent ploy for putting in power an extremist group that is only tangentially related to the usual business lobbies that determine what gets done in Washington. Don’t think of some vast and amorphous “deep state”: executing such a power grab requires tight coordination, some amount of secrecy or, at least, discretion, and, of course, vast sums of money.
Think instead of a singularly well-endowed evil oligarch and his multiple minions whom he has carefully groomed and insinuated into positions of power.The overall goal of such an extremist group may well go far beyond the usual interests of business lobbies, such as preserving shareholder equity, a wider spot at the federal subsidy trough, knocking down transnational barriers to trade and movement of capital, lower business taxes and so on. These zealots may well have an altogether different view of the future in mind, in which a tiny group of ultra-rich owns everything while the rest of us own nothing but, being made tame and docile through all sorts of medical and technical manipulation, feel happy about this state of affairs… like so many animals in a menagerie… not too many animals, mind you: drastic population reduction is likely a key goal of theirs.
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“It’s just so corrupt, it is over the top. It doesn’t matter who wins. Nobody is going to accept this thing, and that is the problem.”
• There May Not Be a 2024 Election – Martin Armstrong (USAW)
Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong says, “The cheating in the midterm election next week is going to be so great that it is almost impossible to make a prediction. . . . In a fair midterm election, the Republicans would win the House and the Senate.” So, what does his Socrates program see for next week? Armstrong, says, “It’s going to be tight, and the Republicans have a shot at taking the House. Technically, they should take the House and the Senate. I am just not sure. The corruption is so bad, it’s crazy. Pennsylvania sent out hundreds of thousands of ballots to people who are not documented or even American. I’ve gotten emails from people in Canada, they are getting mail-in ballots. They mailed them to Canada. .Where this ends up, who knows? It’s just so corrupt, it is over the top. It doesn’t matter who wins. Nobody is going to accept this thing, and that is the problem.”
The cheating is going to be so in your face President Trump may not even be able to run for President two years from now. Armstrong contends, “We may not even have an election in 2024. It is not looking very good, and it’s probably because this election is not going to be accepted. When it is so over-the-top corrupt, what do you do for the next one? The United States will not exist after 2032. After 2028 and 2029, we are going to have to redesign a government from scratch. America is being destroyed. Republics always end in absolute corruption. We just saw the same thing happen in Brazil. They staged a major effort to take Bolsonaro out. . . . This is a worldwide effort. They had to get rid of Trump. The other one who stood in their way is Bolsonaro. Then there is Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China). I think you are going to have historians look back at this 50 years from now, and they will call this period ‘The Climate Change Wars’. .They are trying to take down as much oil energy capacity as possible.”
Armstrong is still seeing very strong signals on domestic violence everywhere. Armstrong explains, “Our computer is showing it’s going to be a rocket launch for volatility and civil unrest next year.” Armstrong also contends there will be a major loss of confidence in government around the world. That means gold will start having big demand from big money. Armstrong also predicts, “The whole monetary system as we know it is collapsing. That was what the bond crisis in the UK was about.”
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Set up well before Feb 24.
• Researchers Find Massive Anti-Russian ‘Bot Army’ (Cronau)
A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable “angst” in the online discourse.
The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets, sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Feb. 24. The researchers looked at predominately English-language accounts. A calculated 1.8 million unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posted at least one English-language tweet. The results were published in August in a research paper, titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war,” by the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Science.The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding the Ukraine war.
The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research on Western disinformation, analysed by Declassified Australia in September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts. The Meta/Facebook research on Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) a fortnight later, looked at only 1,600 Facebook accounts. Reports on the new research have appeared in only a few independent media sites, and on Russia’s RT. The ground-breaking study exposing a massive anti-Russia social media disinformation campaign has been effectively ignored by Western establishment media, showing how stories that don’t fit the desired pro-Western narrative are routinely buried.
The Adelaide University researchers unearthed a massive organised pro-Ukraine influence operation underway from the early stages of the conflict. Overall, the study found automated “bot” accounts to be the source of between 60 to 80 percent of all tweets in the dataset. The published data shows that in the first week of the Ukraine-Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity. Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week. In fact, it was like someone had flicked a switch at the start of the war as pro-Ukraine bot activity suddenly burst into life. In that first day of the war the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag was used in as many as 38,000 tweets each hour, rising to 50,000 tweets an hour by day three of the war.
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“Germany is a beaten, crushed, debilitated US-occupied nation. It should not exist in this form.”
• Scholz‘s 11-hours Visit to Beijing Spells Catastrophe (Pattberg)
[..] the lazy China experts fall over each other on German regime tv, regime press, and anti-Chinese social media, laureating aeriform German stuff like unfreedom, German democracy, and holocaust guilt. And what are they demonizing? Of course, they are demonizing China’s evil trinity of poverty alleviation, superior technologies, and unbelievable material wealth. Mr. Scholz wanted to be the first Western leader to meet Mr. Xi in person. He is a busy man. Mr. Scholz, I mean, not Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi is always in Beijing, fixing his own country and guiding his people. That wanker Scholz, on the other hand, has been, let me see, so far been to…. HOLY MOTHER!…. 47 foreign capitals in 2022 alone! What an Emperor of Man! What a Ruler of the Universe! Stoltz‘s AWESOME!!!
Germany depends on China’s industries A LOT. China might be the only nation that unconditionally keeps up with the German poop and still deals with the neonazis after Berlin started WW III with Russia this summer. If the Middle Kingdom was Middle Earth [an Anglo-Saxon fantasy world], then the Germans would be the Balin dwarves toiling under the mountains. It would be good for cave king Stoltz to discuss steel legions, rare earth mining, and bolt-throwers. But maybe the German mines ran dry and empty, so the Stoltz people crawled back to the surface with this new business plan of… morally harassing orcses, wizards, and little Chinese girls alike. Germany is a beaten, crushed, debilitated US-occupied nation. It should not exist in this form. But the victorious Western allies did not release these poor wretched people.
Instead, they decided to chain them to the BRD regime [Federal Republic of Deutschland] and tell lies about how great it is to change from a glorious 1000-year-old Reich into a homo anal-fixated Iew-worshiping seepage. Watch any US movie and the villains are probably Germans. Also, watch gay porn, German’s best.This century of humiliation went smoothly for roughly 60 years, from 1949 until 2009, before the World Wide Web took off and became unstoppable. Suddenly, Germans could share experiences online, check the facts, and compare historic accounts. Their country, they found, is a US strap dildo. Their mountain,… the misty mountain of Saruman the Schmuel. People started to expose this false US love bombing. Now the BRD regime is in trouble under a mountain of lies and make-beliefs: Deutschland was never a free, sovereign land since 1949.
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“..the encouragement isn’t aimed at pushing Ukraine to engage in actual peace talks with Moscow..”
• US ‘Privately’ Urging Ukraine To Negotiate – WaPo (RT)
The White House is privately asking top Ukrainian officials to show openness to peace talks with Russia, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. Kiev’s public refusal to negotiate with Moscow unless President Vladimir Putin is removed from power in Russia must be abandoned, people familiar with the discussions told the paper. However, the encouragement isn’t aimed at pushing Ukraine to engage in actual peace talks with Moscow to put an end to the fighting, which has been underway since late February, the sources pointed out. The move is more of a “calculated attempt” to make sure Vladimir Zelensky’s government retains the support of foreign nations in which the public have become increasingly concerned about the prospect of the conflict continuing for years, they explained.
“Ukraine fatigue is a real thing for some of our partners,” an unnamed US official told the WaPo. Last month, Zelensky signed a decree, which officially made it “impossible” for him to hold talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The move followed the incorporation of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, into the Russian state as a result of referendums held in those territories. Russia, which has repeatedly invited Ukrainian authorities to come to the negotiating table in recent months, has blamed Kiev for undermining any potential for a peaceful settlement of the crisis. “How can we discuss any possible agreements when there’s no willingness to even talk to us from the other side?”Putin said on Monday. “So, we’ll wait. Maybe the necessary conditions will come about.”
Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov suggested last week that the negotiations should also include the US. Any peace deal with Kiev would have little credibility because it could be instantly rescinded by Ukraine’s backers in the West, he said. “The deciding vote rests with Washington,” Peskov insisted.
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Ukraine demands things they know Russia will not oblige. The only hope for peace appears to be China.
• US Presidential Adviser Sullivan In Confidential Talks With Kremlin -WSJ (RT)
President Biden’s top national-security adviser has engaged in recent months in confidential conversations with top aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to reduce the risk of a broader conflict over Ukraine and warn Moscow against using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, US and allied officials said, Report informs referring to The Wall Street Journal. The officials said that US national-security adviser Jake Sullivan has been in contact with Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to Putin. Sullivan also has spoken with his direct counterpart in the Russian government, Nikolai Patrushev, the officials added. The aim has been to guard against the risk of escalation and keep communications channels open, and not to discuss a settlement of the war in Ukraine, the officials said. Asked whether Sullivan has engaged in undisclosed conversations with Ushakov or Patrushev, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said: “People claim a lot of things” and declined to comment further. The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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“..a contingency plan that anticipates the evacuation of approximately 3 million of its remaining residents..”
• Kiev Prepares For Total Blackout – NYT (RT)
Authorities in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev, are reportedly working on a contingency plan that anticipates the evacuation of approximately three million of its remaining residents, should power supply become completely cut off, the New York Times has claimed. The article published on Saturday quoted Roman Tkachuk, the director of security for the Kiev municipal government, as having warned that the city “may lose our entire electricity system,” if Russia continues striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure. According to the report, Kiev authorities expect that, if worse comes to worst, they would have at least 12 hours’ notice before the grid collapses completely. Tkachuk explained that if there are signs of imminent failure, “we will start informing people and requesting them to leave.”
Should the Ukrainian capital face a total blackout, there would also be no water supply, and the sewage systems would grind to a halt, too, the official warned. He hastened to assure, however, that the situation is currently under control, and there is no exodus of city residents. With winter approaching, Kiev authorities are preparing some 1,000 heating shelters that can double as bunkers during Russian strikes. In a bid to prevent uncontrollable failures, Ukraine’s national energy utility has been imposing rolling blackouts in several regions, including the capital, over the past several weeks. In its statement on Saturday, Ukrenergo explained that the measures were needed to “ensure sustainable balancing of the power system and avoid repeated accidents” affecting the national power grid.
In early October, Moscow launched massive long-range missile and ‘kamikaze drone’ strikes on Ukrainian military, energy and communication facilities. That followed what Russian President Vladimir Putin called a series of “terrorist attacks” masterminded by Kiev on Russian soil, including a truck bombing that damaged the Crimean Bridge, a strategic link connecting the peninsula with the mainland. Such tactics, Putin said, posed a threat to Russia and could not be left without a response. According to Ukrainian authorities, as much as 40% of the country’s energy infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed as a result.
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Supply chain tension.
• Maersk Warns Of ‘Dark Clouds On The Horizon’ (RT)
Danish shipping group Maersk warned this week of slowing demand for transport and logistics and said it had slashed its forecast for container demand for this year.“It is clear that freight rates have peaked and started to normalize during the quarter, driven by both decreasing demand and easing of supply chain congestion,” Maersk CEO Soeren Skou said in a statement.The world’s biggest shipping company, which is often seen as a barometer of global trade, now expects container demand to contract between 2% and 4% in 2022, down from its previous projection of +1% to -1%. “With the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis in Europe, high inflation, and a looming global recession there are plenty of dark clouds on the horizon,”Skou warned. “This weighs on consumer purchasing power which in turn impacts global transportation and logistics demand.
“While we expect a slow-down of the global economy to lead to a softer market in Ocean, we will continue to pursue the growth opportunities within our Logistics business,” he added. Freight rates soared in line with higher consumer demand during the pandemic, resulting in congested ports and delays. Although rates have since come down, it still costs more to ship a container than before the pandemic.Maersk anticipates its average contract rate still coming in higher this year than in 2021, although it now expects the figure to be $200 lower per container than its August forecast. On Wednesday, the company reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $10.9 billion for the quarter, above the analyst consensus projection of $9.8 billion and up by around 60% from the same period a year ago.
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“..the Czech Republic where households saw their energy bills increase tenfold..”
• Energy Disaster Awaits EU After This Winter – Oil CEOs (RT)
The EU is “in good shape” in terms of energy reserves this winter, however, a real risk of a shortfall lies ahead in 2023, major oil and gas executives have warned. The region is facing an unprecedented energy crunch following a drop in imports from Russia. The oil and gas shortages, and record-high inflation, have resulted in an overall cost-of-living crisis across the bloc. But while concerns are focused on the turmoil of the coming winter, it is the next cold season that they should really worry about, CEO of major oil trader Vitol, Russell Hardy, has said. “We’ve got a difficult winter ahead, and subsequent to that we’ve got a more difficult winter in the year ahead of that because the production that is available to Europe in the first half of 2023 is considerably less than the production we had available to us in the first half of 2022,” he said at a conference in Abu Dhabi last week.
Energy prices have gone off the charts and are close to “unaffordability” with many households “spending 50% of their disposable income on energy or higher,” BP CEO Bernard Looney has warned, agreeing with his colleague that the next winter “in Europe could be even more challenging.” Even though the EU has managed to fill its energy stockpiles by 90%, according to IEA data, the reserves are made up mostly of Russian gas. But as the bloc is speeding up the transition away from Russian pipeline deliveries, there will be no supplies from the bloc’s former biggest supplier.
“The issue is not this winter. It will be the next one because we are not going to have Russian gas – 98% [less] next year, maybe nothing,” Eni chief Claudio Descalzi pointed out. Given the demand from China, a major importer of gas, and skyrocketing LNG prices, executives of energy companies are worried about possible social unrest, pointing at some EU countries, like the Czech Republic where households saw their energy bills increase tenfold.
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“..a government trying to juggle energy shortages with climate goals without extending the lives of nuclear power plants.”
• Europe May See Forced De-Industrialization As Result Of Energy Crisis (ZH)
The European Union has been quietly celebrating a consistent decline in gas and electricity consumption this year amid record-breaking prices, a cutoff of much of the Russian gas supply, and a liquidity crisis in the energy market. Yet the cause for celebration is dubious: businesses are not just curbing their energy use and continuing on a business-as-usual basis. They are shutting down factories, downsizing, or relocating. Europe may well be on the way to deindustrialization. That the European Union is heading for a recession is now quite clear to anyone watching the indicators. The latest there—eurozone manufacturing activity—fell to the lowest since May 2020. The October reading for S&P Global’s PMI also signaled a looming recession, falling on the month and being the fourth monthly reading below 50—an indication of an economic contraction.
In perhaps worse news, however, German conglomerate BASF said last month it would permanently downside in its home country and expand in China. The announcement served as a blow to a government trying to juggle energy shortages with climate goals without extending the lives of nuclear power plants. “The European chemical market has been growing only weakly for about a decade [and] the significant increase in natural gas and power prices over the course of this year is putting pressure on chemical value chains,” said BASF’s chief executive, Martin Brudermueller, as quoted by the FT, in late October. Yet it is worth noting that the energy crisis was not the only reason for BASF’s plans to shrink its presence at home and grow abroad. Increasingly tighter EU regulation was also a factor behind this decision, Brudermueller said.
Other industries also seem to have problems with new EU regulations. The trade body for the steel and aluminum industries, which have also suffered significantly from the energy cost inflation, recently proposed that the EU takes a gradual approach with its new Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism, also known as the import carbon tax.
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“We request that you promptly investigate these potential violations and immediately intervene to ensure that the government officials do not abuse their official authority..”
• Biden Press Secretary Under Fire For ‘Mega MAGA Republican’ Comment (ZH)
A government watchdog group has filed a complaint against White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, alleging that she violated the Hatch Act when she made comments about “Mega MAGA Republican” officials. In a Nov. 3 complaint, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) told the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that Jean-Pierre violated the federal law that limits the political activities of federal employees, when she said during a Nov. press conference, “Unfortunately, we have seen mega MAGA Republican officials who don’t believe in the rule of law,” adding “They refuse to accept the results of free and fair elections, and they fan the flames of political violence through what they praise and what they refuse to condemn.”
PPT director Michael Chamberlain said the comments were “disparaging President Biden’s political opponents,” adding that her statements “were clearly made in her role as an employee of the White House and appear to be political in nature, seeking the defeat of her political opponents in the Republican party in the upcoming general election less than a week away on November 8.” As The Epoch Times further notes; “The watchdog group is asking the OSC to “promptly investigate Ms. Jean-Pierre’s conduct as a potential Hatch Act violation based on her use of her official position to advocate for the defeat of a political party.” “We request that you promptly investigate these potential violations and immediately intervene to ensure that the government officials do not abuse their official authority in an attempt to influence the results of the impending 2022 general election.”
“The comments appear to be clearly designed to influence voters in next week’s election,” Chamberlain said in a separate statement. “A quick and complete investigation into these statements would be a good first step in helping to restore the American public’s trust in its government.” PPT in a release said that Jean-Pierre’s statement is an “attempt to sway an election” and is a “direct violation of the Hatch Act’s prohibition” against government employees using their office to influence an election. The group alleges that her statement cannot be attributed to “an insufficient knowledge of the restrictions of the Hatch Act,” in part because her predecessor, Jen Psaki, and White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, have previously been found in violation of the same federal law. Furthermore, Jean-Pierre herself “has on several occasions cited the Hatch Act as justification for avoiding responding to queries from the press corps,” PPT noted.
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Arabella.
• Twitter Ad Boycott Organized By Soros, Clinton, Foreign Networks (Schachtel)
The campaign to pull corporate advertising from Twitter, following its purchase by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is being led by a network of left wing dark money activists with ties to prominent Democrat politicians and mega donors. An advocacy group formed in 2020 called Accountable Tech is organizing the pressure campaign, which has thus far succeeded in having the likes of Pfizer, Audi, General Mills, and other corporations pull their advertising expenditures from the platform. Accountable Tech has taken credit for organizing an “open letter” signed by dozens of progressive groups, which demanded that multinational corporations cease advertising with Twitter immediately.
The far-left activist groups wrote: “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter came with his promise to advertisers like you that the social network would not transform into a “free-for-all hellscape” and would remain “warm and welcoming to all.”The letter continues: “We, the undersigned organizations, call on you to notify Musk and publicly commit that you will cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.” You get the gist of it by now. The parties to this letter are attempting to force Elon Musk to revert Twitter back to its old, state-attached form. Now here’s some background on Accountable Tech.
Accountable Tech is financed by The North Fund, a D.C. nonprofit that is controlled by Arabella Advisors. Yes, there are multiple levels of confusion and separation, and this is on purpose. But the relevant outfit here is Arabella Advisors. “Arabella” is a for-profit “philanthropic consulting company” founded by Clinton confidant Eric Kessler. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jesse Lehrich, another Clinton network operative, is a co-founder of Accountable Tech. The organization also employs former Clinton campaign operative Zach Praiss as its digital director. Arabella is considered the leading “dark money” political outfit in the United States. Yes, it’s much bigger and much more influential than the highly publicized “Koch Network.”
The Arabella network shields the sources of its funding by funneling its cash and political expenditures through 501c4 non profits. However, its for-profit outfit brought in $1.7 billion in 2020, and spent $1.2 billion on the 2020 election cycle. Through its subsidiaries, Arabella has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into projects such as fighting the Kavanaugh nomination and impeaching President Donald Trump. They’ve also financed the “NeverTrump” political advocacy of progressive war activist Bill Kristol.
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“..the contract between Pfizer and the US government prohibits independent researchers from studying the vaccines..”
• Wot’s In The Shots? (Weisser)
What is in the Pfizer vaccines? Recently, Dr David Nixon, a Brisbane GP, decided to find out, putting droplets of vaccine and the blood of vaccinated patients under a dark-field microscope. That’s a more radical decision than it might sound. According to Sasha Latypova, a scientist with 25 years of experience in clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies, the contract between Pfizer and the US government prohibits independent researchers from studying the vaccines. They claim it would ‘divert’ these precious resources away from their intended use fulfilling an ‘urgent’ need. Is that true in Australia? Who knows? All the Commonwealth Department of Health has said about its contract with Pfizer is that it is commercial-in-confidence.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration performs tests on all Covid vaccines for composition and strength, purity and integrity, identity and endotoxins, but it provides scant details other than the batch numbers tested and whether they passed. (Spoiler alert: they did.) In the US, the Centers for Disease Control specifically states that all Covid-19 vaccines are free from ‘metals, such as iron, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth alloys’ and ‘manufactured products such as micro-electronics, electrodes, carbon nanotubes, and nanowire semiconductors’.Notably, this list does not include graphene oxide which has been widely investigated for biomedical applications. Some researchers sing its praises, its ‘ultra-high drug-loading efficiency due to the wide surface area’, its exceptional ‘chemical and mechanical constancy, sublime conductivity and excellent biocompatibility’.
But there’s a catch. ‘The toxic effect of graphene oxide on living cells and organs’ is ‘a limiting factor’ on its use in the medicine. So is there graphene oxide in the Pfizer shots? What Nixon found, and filmed, is bizarre to say the least. Inside a droplet of vaccine are strange mechanical structures. They seem motionless at first but when Nixon used time-lapse photography to condense 48 hours of footage into two minutes, it showed what appear to be mechanical arms assembling and disassembling glowing rectangular structures that look like circuitry and micro chips. These are not ‘manufactured products’ in the CDC’s words because they construct and deconstruct themselves but the formation of the crystals seems to be stimulated by electromagnetic radiation and stops when the slide with the vaccine is shielded by a Faraday bag. Nixon’s findings are similar to those of teams in New Zealand, Germany, Spain and South Korea.
An Italian group led by Riccardo Benzi Cipelli analysed the blood of over 1,000 people, one month after they were vaccinated, who had been referred for tests because they had experienced side effects. They ranged in age from 15 to 85 and had had between one and three doses. More than 94 per cent had abnormal readings, deformed red blood cells, reduced in counts and clumped around luminescent foreign objects which also attracted clusters of fibrin. Some of the foreign objects dotted the blood like a starry night, some self-assembled into crystalline structures and others into spindly branches and tubes. The Italians think the objects are metallic particles and say they resemble ‘graphene oxide and possibly other metallic compounds’. They believe the damaged blood is contributing to post-vaccine coagulation disorders, which in turn contribute to increased malignancies, while graphene-family materials are associated with oxidative stress, DNA damage, inflammation and damage to those parts of the immune system that suppress tumours.
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A flying gurnard fish.
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