kill list Archives - The Automatic Earth

https://twitter.com/Chicago1Ray/status/2054231808368160941?s=20 https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2054247524660019593?s=20 https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2054473146967769291?s=20

VENEZUELA NUKES: Trump just seized 100% of Venezuela's weapons-grade uranium from a reactor near Caracas & shipped it to South Carolina for downblending. Done in weeks not years. Trump is not managing nuclear threats. He is eliminating them. Next up, Iran. pic.twitter.com/1EcjzwUKf8
— @amuse (@amuse) May 12, 2026

Benny Johnson directly asked Mike Davis what happens Constitutionally when irrefutable proof emerges that at least 10,000 fraudulent votes flipped Georgia — the exact margin of victory for Joe Biden and both Georgia senators — in the 2020 & the answer was TREASON!

“Democrats… pic.twitter.com/FvOSB46y6q
— Bridgett Fertig (@LightOnLiberty) May 13, 2026

Not much mews this morning, from either Iran or China. Not for public consumption.

• Bessent’s “Suffocating” Iranian Regime Strategy Materializes (ZH)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s description of “suffocating” the Iranian regime through economic and financial pressure, whether via sanctions or the US military blockade of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoint, now appears to be showing up in the data. New geospatial intelligence indicates that Iran’s main crude export terminal has gone quiet, while a separate report suggests seaborne oil exports have effectively been halted for the past month.

The first report comes from Bloomberg, which cited European satellite imagery showing a massive bottleneck developing at Iran’s energy complex: no ocean-going tankers at Kharg Island, the country’s main export terminal, on May 8, 9, and 11. This marks the longest stretch in no crude tanker loadings since the US-Iran conflict began nearly three months ago.

Kharg Island’s loading terminals were observed completely empty yesterday for the first time since mid-April, despite 19 tankers waiting nearby with ~25M bbl of capacity.

A recent 80,000 bbl oil slick suggests sustained infrastructure damage has halted all crude departures since… pic.twitter.com/6EKKigQghP
— Windward (@WindwardAI) May 12, 2026

Iran continued loading crude throughout the early weeks of the war, using tankers as floating storage after the US Navy effectively blocked ships from exiting the Hormuz chokepoint in mid-April, creating a massive energy bottleneck for Tehran. bAt the end of last week, we reported that a massive oil leak spanning dozens of square miles of water was spotted off Kharg Island. This was based on open-source satellite imagery.”The slick appears visually consistent with oil,” said Leon Moreland, a researcher at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, to Reuters. He believes it covers an area of approximately 45 square km (nearly 18 sq miles).
While it’s unclear what may have caused it, or the extent of possible damage to Kharg Island’s infrastructure or possibly docked tankers, the island has been attacked by US aerial forces in the recent past.If Kharg Island remains idle and storage capacity reaches its limit, Iran could be forced into deeper oil production cuts.”To our best knowledge, Iran hasn’t successfully exported any crude oil by sea over the past 28 days. Some refined products managed to escape because US OFAC did not slap sanctions on those tankers,” research firm Tanker Trackers wrote on X.

To our best knowledge, Iran hasn't successfully exported* any crude oil by sea over the past 28 days. Some refined products managed to escape because US OFAC did not slap sanctions on those tankers.

In addition, Kharg Island hasn't loaded any tankers since 2026-05-06 as a result…
— TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) May 12, 2026

This very development would support Bessent’s claims: “We are running a marathon over the past 12 months, and now we are sprinting toward the finish. They are not able to pay their soldiers. This is a real economic blockade.”Ten days ago, Bessent forecasted that Iran’s oil industry may need to start shutting in wells “in the next week” as the country’s crude storage is “rapidly filling up.””Their oil infrastructure is starting to creak,” he said. “It hasn’t been maintained again because of our decades-long sanctions against them.”

“..which claims Taiwan as its territory despite never having ruled it for even a day.”

• Trump, Xi, and the Taiwan Test (David Manney)

President Donald Trump’s trip to China places Taiwan back where Beijing always wants it: under pressure, under scrutiny, and under threat. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te isn’t watching this meeting like a man checking diplomatic weather; he’s watching it like the leader of a free island that China keeps trying to isolate, intimidate, and eventually absorb. China’s leaders understand ceremony, leverage, and timing. They also smell weakness when there’s blood in the water, which is why I vividly remember the 2021 Alaska meeting and how it hangs around this story like smoke in a conference room.

You remember that Anchorage meeting, right? When Antony Blinken, then secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, then national security advisor, sat across from Yang Jiechi, then China’s top foreign policy official, and Wang Yi, then China’s foreign minister and state councilor. China’s opening remarks turned into a public scolding, and the Biden team looked stunned as Beijing delivered a lecture in front of the cameras. Reading the archives is downright infuriating.
DIRECTOR YANG: On the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year, President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden had a phone conversation. The two presidents agreed to step up communication, manage differences, and expand cooperation between our two countries. We are having this dialogue today to follow up on the common understanding of the two presidents reached during their phone conversation. And having this dialogue is, in fact, a decision made by the two presidents. So for the people of the two countries and the world, they’re hoping to see practical outcomes coming out of our dialogue.
And with Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, they are an inalienable part of China’s territory. China is firmly opposed to U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs. We have expressed our staunch opposition to such interference and we will take firm actions in response.
On human rights, we hope that the United States will do better on human rights. China has made steady progress in human rights and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the U.S. itself as well. The United States has also said that countries can’t rely on force in today’s world to resolve the challenges we face. And it is a failure to use various means to topple the so-called “authoritarian” states. And the challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter. It did not come up only recently. So we do hope that for our two countries, it’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world.
Nobody should pretend one meeting defines an entire foreign policy, but bad first impressions travel far in adversarial capitals. Beijing learned something from that day, or at least thought it did. Trump isn’t walking into that room as a president trying to prove he belongs on the world stage. Xi Jinping, China’s president and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, knows that. Beijing may still test him, because testing American presidents ranks somewhere between doctrine and habit in Chinese statecraft.
The question is whether Xi believes Trump wants a public deal so badly that Taiwan becomes a bargaining chip. Taiwan has reason to care because every vague sentence, every pause, and every carefully softened word echoes across the Taiwan Strait. Calling Taiwan “Taiwan” doesn’t insult China by itself; American officials use its name constantly because the United States maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act while recognizing Beijing as China’s government. As Fox News reports, there’s a great deal of speculation involved in this meeting.
The de facto independent nation of 23 million people has spent decades living under threat from the Chinese Communist Party, which claims Taiwan as its territory despite never having ruled it for even a day. Observers here warn that Xi may try to offer Trump a deal: cooperation on tariffs, fentanyl, U.S. business access, or global flashpoints like Iran and Ukraine in exchange for Trump accepting a larger Chinese role in Taiwan’s future. Taiwan’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu recently told Bloomberg News, “What we are the most afraid is to put Taiwan on the menu of the talk between Xi Jinping and President Trump.”
Huang Kwei-bo, a professor in National Chengchi University’s Department of Diplomacy, told Fox News Digital that Taiwan shouldn’t assume nothing will change. “Taiwan shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the United States and mainland China could reach an understanding behind the scenes, agreeing to reduce arms sales to Taiwan, or become less active in helping us meaningfully participate in international space,” he said. Beijing objects when language treats Taiwan as a separate sovereign state or moves toward formal recognition. China’s government insists Taiwan belongs to China, while the U.S. has long maintained a deliberately careful policy built around the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances.
Taiwan lives inside that careful wording every day.

Trump indicated he knows this, by saying (paraphrased)” “I know life.”

• Trump Must Look Over His Shoulder for the Rest of His Life (Athena Thorne)

History is rife with examples of tyrannical movements that never end their hunt for their ideological enemies.b In 1989, Iran’s then-Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was forced to remain under police protection or in hiding after that. Thirty-three years later, when he thought he could safely give an academic lecture in the United States, a 24-year-old fanatic nearly killed him in a knife attack, costing him the use of an eye and a hand. It’s noteworthy that the assailant was born almost a decade after the fatwa was declared.

In 1917, it wasn’t enough that the Bolsheviks had killed the Czar and his entire family and most of the Whites and had all of Russia under their control. The Soviet secret police sent hit squads after those who had fled abroad, disrupting their communities and killing their leaders. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to this day actively tracks and targets its citizens abroad, who have fled its authoritarian government, as part of its extensive policy of transnational repression. You get the idea: There is not enough time or distance to dissuade hateful ideologues from devoting themselves to the destruction of their perceived enemies.
Thus, the blinding pathological hatred the left has cultivated against Donald Trump will not simply dissipate once the man retires from office. So long as he lives, they will try to jail, bankrupt, destroy, and/or literally murder him. In some of the historical cases I cited above, it is true that just because someone is out of a leadership position, that doesn’t mean he is no longer a threat to the opposition. Barack Obama comes readily to mind as an example of someone who continues to work behind the scenes against our duly elected present-day leadership. But in Trump’s situation, it wouldn’t matter if he fully retired to Mar-a-Lago and spent his remaining years painting stones and seashells and displaying them on Lucite stands or something equally as innocuous. The leftists’ burning, seething, pathological hatred of the man himself will never abate.
They 100% will prosecute him again. Right now, every minute of every day, operatives within and around the federal and blue states’ governments are building cases and preserving — maybe even manufacturing — “evidence” for the zealous lawfare to come. In just one example, Just the News obtained documentation of Democrat operatives putting “special counsel” Jack Smith’s weaponized attack into storage so they could bring it out again the next time they have a Dem in the White House:
“In the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency, FBI agents tied to Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation memorialized anew their belief that President Donald Trump broke the law in contesting the 2020 election and secretly arranged to preserve their evidence until 2030 in memos that raise alarm they could revive their prosecution after Trump leaves office.
The FBI memos and emails closing out the controversial Arctic Frost investigation – obtained by Just the News – show the bureau chose not to relinquish the evidence it gathered after Smith went to court to dismiss charges against Trump, even though that is the normal practice for agents. Instead, they created a preservation order keeping the evidence in FBI custody for two years after Trump’s second term ends, claiming it was necessary to do so because of ongoing litigation, the memos show.
FBI emails and memos obtained by Just the News dating back to early 2025 show how the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who had been working on the criminal prosecutions aimed at Trump and his allies worked to close the 2020 election-related case against the incoming president, while also seemingly leaving open the door for the criminal case to be revived once Trump leaves office and a Democrat again holds the reins at the Justice Department.
Now multiply that by every partisan leftist with a hint of authority, from Deep Staters to governors and attorneys general to local district attorneys and dogcatchers, even now building their “cases” against the sitting president, smug in the knowledge that their fellow travelers on the bench will wave it through, their state will pay for it, and their hate-addled juries will seal the deal. I wish for Trump’s own sake that he would use this time to liquidate all of his assets in commie-run locales and feather his nest in Free Florida, where he can spend his remaining years in relative peace and safety. But he’s Trump, and the last thing he’ll ever do is run from a fight.
And even if he did — even if he pulled up stakes and circumscribed his life to within the Florida state line — he would still never be safe from the lunatic would-be assassin army the left has ginned up. I redirect your attention to the example cited above: Hadi Matar, the Islamist assailant who wasn’t even alive when Rushdie was first targeted by Iran’s fatwa. The left’s maniacal Trump hatred is far more widespread and intense, and leftists will doubtless spend the coming decades inculcating their children in it.
Thank God, past presidents are entitled to Secret Service protection for life. And thank God, Trump is wealthy enough to pay for his own security and that of his family members (because the leftist evil knows no bounds). Democrats have also revealed they will go after anyone who did business with Trump in the private or public sector, so all-consuming is their enmity, and I don’t even know what to say to that. This is reason #3,856 why we must do everything in our power to prevent these monsters from ever being in a position to harm their perceived enemies again. It’s also why every one of us has a responsibility to watch over President Trump the rest of his days, in gratitude for the historical service he has rendered our beloved country.

“Yulia Mendel claims that her former boss wanted Goebbels-style propaganda in Ukraine..”

• Zelensky’s Alleged Cocaine Use ‘An Open Secret’ – Former Spokeswoman (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s alleged drug use is “an open secret,” former spokeswoman Yulia Mendel has claimed on the Tucker Carlson Show. Allegations of drug use first surfaced during the 2019 presidential election campaign, in which Zelensky defeated Petro Poroshenko. Zelensky, a former actor, dismissed the claims as slander at the time, and both candidates underwent tests for alcohol and drugs. Mendel worked for Zelensky from 2019 to 2021 and has since become highly critical of her former boss. In an interview released on Monday, Carlson asked whether Zelensky used drugs, to which Mendel replied: “This is an open secret.”

“The thing is that I’ve never seen him taking drugs. However, [while] writing my book, I met a lot of people who confirmed that they saw him taking drugs in different clubs. Only one saw him taking drugs in 2021,” she claimed. Mendel added that she learned about an alleged “supplier” from a person working at Kvartal 95 Studio, the entertainment company Zelensky co-founded in the 2000s. “Zelensky’s former press secretary alleges he urged subordinates to carry out ‘propaganda like Goebbels’ Yulia Mendel claims that after a drop in ratings in 2019, the Narcofuhrer ordered his PR team to improve his image, pointing to the effectiveness of Nazi Germany’s propaganda… pic.twitter.com/k6s7xpuE8V— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) May 12, 2026[..]
All these people are talking about cocaine, yes,” Mendel said, adding that before interviews, Zelensky had a habit of spending 15 minutes in the bathroom and emerging as a “different person.” Mendel described her former boss as being obsessed with his public image at home and abroad. She claimed that at one point, Zelensky told her: “I need Goebbels propaganda, I need thousands of talking heads,” referring to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Mendel also accused Zelensky of sending critics, including journalists, to the front line as punishment. Political opponents, including Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko, have frequently accused Zelensky of abuse of power. Last year, US President Donald Trump called Zelensky – whose presidential term expired in 2024 – a dictator for refusing to call a new presidential election. Zelensky has argued that elections are prohibited under martial law and that a permanent ceasefire with Russia would be required before a new election can be held.

Yermak was arrested overnight. Not long ago, he was either Zelensky’s right-hand man or his most likely successor.

• Zelensky’s ex-Spokeswoman Added To State-linked ‘Kill List’ (RT)

Vladimir Zelensky’s former spokesperson, Yulia Mendel, has been added to a Ukrainian state-linked ‘kill list’ for telling American journalist Tucker Carlson of rampant cocaine abuse in the corridors of power in Kiev and the desire of a corrupt elite to prolong the conflict with Russia. Mendel worked with Zelensky for two years during which time she says she witnessed him change from peacemaker to propagator of war. The list is run by the Mirotvorets website, which has been linked to Ukrainian security services and is notorious for publishing the addresses and personal details of anyone remotely deemed an enemy of the Ukrainian state, including Russian journalists, some of whom were subsequently assassinated.

The website has accused Mendel of “humanitarian aggression against Ukraine, spreading “narratives of Russian propaganda, calling for Ukraine‘s “capitulation“, and indirectly taking part in information-psychological special operations allegedly run by Russia. Mirotvorets cited Mendel telling Carlson that the Ukrainian delegation at talks in Istanbul in 2022 was ready to agree to “all of Russia’s demands” in order to stop the fighting, but that Kiev was pressured by the US and UK to continue the conflict and that Zelensky is now “one of the main obstacles to peace.” It also cited Mendel’s comments that Ukraine is “on the verge of disappearing,” and showing signs of “unhealthy nationalism.”
Mendel, who served as Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of her former boss. In the interview she leveled a series of allegations of corruption and drug use, calling Zelensky a “dictator” who has grown “detached from reality.” She also described Zelensky and his former chief of staff Andrey Yermak as “malicious and extremely paranoid narcissists,” saying their relationship had turned into a “symbiosis.”
Launched in 2014 as a nominally independent project, Mirotvorets has targeted a wide range of international figures, including Tucker Carlson, Hollywood director Woody Allen, Russian hockey star Alexander Ovechkin, and US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Russian officials have condemned the site as extremist. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has described it as a hit list targeting individuals Kiev allegedly wants to “eliminate.”

“Mendel described her former boss as a “dictator” who has grown “detached from reality” and employed “thousands of talking heads”..

• ‘Zelensky Thrives On War, Why Would He End It?’: Former Press Secretary (RT)

Yulia Mendel has accused her former boss of seeking to prolong the conflict with Russia to “get more money” Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky is prolonging his country’s conflict with Russia in order to enrich himself and his associates in his cabinet, former spokeswoman Yulia Mendel has claimed in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Mendel, Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, launched a series of stinging allegations of corruption and drug use as Andrey Yermak, Zelensky’s former influential chief of staff, was named a suspect in a money laundering case.

Zelensky’s longtime former business partner, Timur Mindich, fled the country last year to avoid arrest in connection with another major corruption scandal involving energy-sector kickbacks that has seen several other close associates of the Ukrainian leader placed under suspicion. In an episode of the Tucker Carlson Show released on Monday, Mendel described her former boss as a “dictator” who has grown “detached from reality” and employed “thousands of talking heads” to craft a favorable image both at home and abroad.
“He is one of the biggest obstacles to peace today,” Mendel said, accusing Zelensky of being “behind many schemes of money laundering” that have rocked Ukraine in recent years. “There are a lot of people in his government who want peace. [Zelensky] is going to come up with any condition, he is going to change his positions all the time just to prolong this war and to get more money,” Mendel said, arguing that ending the conflict would be “political suicide” for Zelensky. When Carlson suggested that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia in a war of attrition, Mendel replied: “I think it’s obvious to Zelensky, too. But he thrives on this war. Why would he end it?”
Mendel claimed that Ukraine came close to reaching a deal with Russia twice in 2022, but was pressured by the US and UK to continue the conflict. The Kremlin accused the West of helping derail peace talks in Istanbul four years ago, which Zelensky denied. Zelensky, whose presidential term expired in 2024, has refused to hold new elections, citing martial law. The move has been criticized by both US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mendel, citing an unnamed insider, claimed that secret polls commissioned by the Ukrainian government show Zelensky is “unelectable” if he runs again.

“Arctic Frost memos suggest: Jack Smith’s team primed their criminal case against Donald Trump to resume once his presidency ends.”

• Biden FBI Secretly Set Up Trump To Be Indicted After He Leaves Office (JTN)

In the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency, FBI agents tied to Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation memorialized anew their belief that President Donald Trump broke the law in contesting the 2020 election and secretly arranged to preserve their evidence until 2030 in memos that raise alarm they could revive their prosecution after Trump leaves office.

The FBI memos and emails closing out the controversial Arctic Frost investigation – obtained by Just the News – show the bureau chose not to relinquish the evidence it gathered after Smith went to court to dismiss charges against Trump, even though that is the normal practice for agents. Instead, they created a preservation order keeping the evidence in FBI custody for two years after Trump’s second term ends, claiming it was necessary to do so because of ongoing litigation, the memos show.
FBI emails and memos obtained by Just the News dating back to early 2025 show how the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who had been working on the criminal prosecutions aimed at Trump and his allies worked to close the 2020 election-related case against the incoming president, while also seemingly leaving open the door for the criminal case to be revived once Trump leaves office and a Democrat again holds the reins at the Justice Department.
“The American people deserve to know how this egregious weaponization of power to target political opponents and President Trump happened inside an institution meant to protect them,” FBI Director Kash Patel told Just the News. “We shut down the weaponized CR-15 squad, and we are going to keep following the facts until there is full accountability. The FBI exists to protect the country, not to preserve political prosecutions for a future administration.”
Following Trump’s victory in November 2024 over Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Smith sought to dismiss his case against Trump “without prejudice” – leaving open the possibility that the charges could be refiled in the future. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, pointed to the Office of Legal Counsel’s position that a sitting president could not be prosecuted by his own DOJ and granted Smith’s request to dismiss the case without prejudice.
One of the key “Case Closing” documents obtained by Just the News – originating from the FBI’s Washington Field Office’s CR-15 team – was dated a couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, on February 5, 2025, when many holdover FBI agents and leaders were still in place. The newly-released closing document from early 2025 repeated the extensive claims of criminality against Trump, which had been pursued by Smith and the bureau, and it sought to retain all of the evidence for a half decade until at least February 2030, when Trump would be a former president once more and thus when the DOJ guidance prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president would no longer be in force.
The document was titled “Arctic Frost – Election Law Matters – Sensitive Investigative Matter” and its synopsis was “To Document the Closing of Captioned Investigation.” The listed enclosures buttressing the document were a “Deputy Special Counsel Concurrence” and the “Retention of Evidence Approval.” The FBI record states, “This Electronic Communication seeks approval to close the captioned full Sensitive Investigative Matter investigation” and argued that “because this was a SIM opened by a Field Office and involved a presidential candidate, the same level of approval required to open the investigation is also required to close the investigation.”
Evidence released last year showed that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray signed off on the launch of the Arctic Frost inquiry into Trump related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Garland also quickly said he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant” for the FBI’s unprecedented raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022. The Biden White House was also directly linked to the classified documents investigation into Trump, despite its denials, previously-released records show.
“The approval roles on this closing EC match those of the opening EC and, as such, Washington Field Office is seeking approval up to and including the Director of the FBI to close this investigation,” the newly released FBI document said. The document included a “Summary of the Results of the Investigation” into Trump, which had been pursued by Smith and the FBI, arguing that “the captioned FBI investigation was opened based on specific and articulable facts and circumstances that individuals affiliated with Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. (the ‘Trump Campaign’) engaged in activity that violated federal law.”
The FBI memo alleged that “the investigation revealed that when Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With various co-conspirators, Trump launched a series of plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.”
The bureau record also alleged that “Trump and his co-conspirators used knowingly false claims of election fraud in furtherance of three conspiracies: 1) a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act; 2) a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and 3) a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.”
The section on the “Disposition of Evidence” related to Smith’s anti-Trump investigation argued that “this investigation is subject to a litigation hold and is on the freeze list; as a result, no evidence can be returned or destroyed and must be retained.”

It’s Marine Le Pen’s party. Democracy was born in france, and it died there too.

• EU Targets France’s Jordan Bardella As His Anti-Migration Party Surges (RMX)

Last week, reports that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) is investigating France’s right-wing, anti-migration party National Rally (RN) for misallocation of EU funds made the rounds. At its core, the case involves a complaint filed last December by the association AC!! Anti-Corruption with the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) in Paris. These allegations have already been contested by RN, but the party must also now face scrutiny from Brussels, as the funds involved include EU money. The charge is that the National Rally misused the funds by allocating money received for media training for its leader, Jordan Bardella, not for his work as an MEP, but with the aim of helping him to prepare for France’s 2027 presidential election. Other members of the party have also been named in connection with the same charge.

Bardella posted on X that the investigation is not news and certainly nothing new for the party, labeling the charges as politically motivated slander. “We have absolutely nothing to reproach ourselves for. The association behind the complaint is a self-proclaimed far-left organization, whose aggressive statements leave little doubt as to their intentions. I filed a complaint several weeks ago for slanderous denunciation,” he wrote, while assuring that he and his party would fully cooperate with the EPPO. National Rally has been in the top spot in recent polling, despite its former leader, Marine Le Pen, having been sidelined by a similar case last year.
She is appealing that decision, but for now has made it clear that Bardella will run on the RN ticket for president.The party’s popularity, with or without Le Pen, cannot be a surprise to its rivals, given the sle w of issues France has been suffering from due to its policy of mass immigration and lax deportation: Elderly rape, minor prostitution, failing education, robberies, violent rape, concerns over sharia law, and murder. As the mother of 18-year-old Théo, who was stabbed to death by a Senegalese migrant who ended up avoiding prison, said: “You can kill in France with impunity.”
Meanwhile, the media and the left prefer not to draw attention to the link between increased migration and violence. And yet, a new website and real estate browser extension for Chrome is offering data on immigration levels, insecurity, and Islamization rates of neighborhoods for prospective buyers in the latest sign that the French public is highly concerned about record-breaking numbers of immigrants. According to a recent ifop poll, 60 percent of French believe there is “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations, mainly from the African continent.” The same poll found that 66 percent see it as a bad development. Only 9 percent noted it as good.
This is a major factor why the National Rally has been surging in the polls, and why left-wing parties and activist organizations will do anything to bring them down — first targeting Le Pen and now Bardella. Other party politicians and staff members have been implicated in both cases. Such efforts are not unique to France, with efforts ongoing for years over in Germany to bring down the anti-migration AfD party, which has also seen a massive rise in popularity. With reports indicating France is spending over €2 billion a year on housing and healthcare for asylum seekers and illegal migrants, RN’s rivals will need more than accusations of misappropriated funds to stop voters from exercising their desire for change.

The European Commission chief is “obsessed” with proving she’s in charge, diplomats and officials have complained ..

• Von der Leyen’s Power Grab Angers EU Officials – Bloomberg (RT)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has tightened her control over the EU’s executive branch to the point where the bloc’s leaders and diplomats now view her as too powerful, according to a Bloomberg report.In power since 2019, von der Leyen has rebuilt the European Commission in her image and become “the face of Europe,” Bloomberg wrote on Tuesday. She has spearheaded the EU’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, authored its hyper-belligerent policies toward Russia, and negotiated its trade deals with US President Donald Trump.

However, EU officials told the US news outlet that she’s “obsessed with demonstrating that she’s in charge,” and “is constantly jumping into the middle of the latest crisis, even when it’s outside her remit,” all while neglecting her core mission of strengthening the economy. A draft internal market strategy compiled by Commission Vice President Stephane Sejourne, for example, has sat neglected on her desk since November, Bloomberg claimed. Von der Leyen only showed the document to member states and the European Parliament days before its publication last month, making deliberation effectively impossible.
A similar scenario played out last year when von der Leyen shared the EU’s long-term budget with her fellow commissioners at the last minute, angering member states who were being asked to cough up a record €2 trillion ($2.4 trillion) with no consultation. Germany immediately rejected the budget, and lawmakers from von der Leyen’s CDU party met to demand additional checks on her power. Business leaders, meanwhile, have demanded that she act to improve the bloc’s competitiveness, but Bloomberg’s sources say their concerns rarely filter through to her “tight-knit” and “micromanaged” group of advisers.
Von der Leyen was handed a second stint at the helm of the commission in 2024, and has spent this second term in office dramatically centralizing power in Brussels. She began her term by appointing her team of 26 commissioners without running the list past the European Parliament first, proposed the establishment of an intelligence agency under her control last year – snatching this responsibility away from Kaja Kallas’ diplomatic arm of the EU – and has pushed for the creation of a “two-speed” EU, in which smaller blocs of countries could make policy decisions without the unanimous support of all 27 member states.
Von der Leyen has also moved to end the EU’s unanimity requirement on matters of foreign policy, arguing that the commission’s proposals should be passed with a simple majority vote. With regard to the bloc’s Ukraine policies, removing unanimity would eliminate the veto powers exercised by former Hungarian Prime Minister and war critic Viktor Orban, and undermine the neutrality of countries such as Austria and Ireland.

It will require Trump.

• Kathy Hochul Caves to Mamdani, Will Bail Out Socialist NYC (Margolis)

Not long ago, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to handle his own mess. Now she’s writing him a $4 billion check to bail him out. Mamdani had barely settled into Gracie Mansion before he discovered what socialists always find out: Eventually, you run out of other people’s money. His grand campaign promises — you know: free this, universal that — ran headlong into the reality that New York City couldn’t afford all the things Mamdani had campaigned on. So, Mamdani went looking to Albany for a bailout. And, originally, Hochul said no.

“The mayor and City Council need to work together, identify savings, and close the remaining gap,” a Hochul spokesperson said last month. As a resident of New York State (I’ll accept your condolences), I was thrilled. But apparently, a lot can change in a few weeks, especially when polls show the race for governor is tightening. On Tuesday, Gov. Hochul and Mayor Mamdani announced a sweeping new state funding package. The press release made it sound like a wonderful thing: Governor Hochul, in partnership with the state legislature, has secured an additional $4 billion in gap-closing support, bringing the total new state assistance to nearly $8 billion over two years.
With this latest agreement, the Mamdani Administration will officially close the more than $12 billion deficit it inherited from the previous administration, stabilizing the City’s finances while advancing investments that make New York more affordable for working people. These new investments build on the $1.5 billion in assistance announced in the Governor’s 30-day amendments in February and funding for universal childcare.”The announcement was dressed up in the usual Albany language about affordability and working families, with Hochul declaring it “a results-driven, responsible partnership.” That’s one way to describe it.
Something changed between Hochul’s stern message last month and Tuesday’s joint press conference — and nobody’s saying what it was. One can only imagine what kind of secret deal was reached to convince Hochul to reverse course so completely. My best guess? Mamdani promised to support her reelection campaign and hit the trail with her. A $4 billion commitment is an awfully expensive favor to do for free, and you better believe Hochul is getting something for it.
Both sides were eager to perform for the cameras. “Governor Hochul and I share a belief that government works best when we work together on behalf of the people we serve,” Mamdani said. He added that he and Hochul had “partnered through every step of this process to protect the fiscal health of our city” and called her commitment to securing New York City’s future something “working people can afford.” Because working people must live within their means, not the government.
Hochul, meanwhile, insisted she’d been committed “from day one” to New York City’s success, arguing a strong city strengthens the state as a whole. She framed the deal as delivering “free universal child care,” investments in education, public safety, and infrastructure, and the resources needed to keep critical services running. Touching stuff. It would be more convincing if she hadn’t spent weeks telling Mamdani to figure it out himself.
Not everyone in New York is buying the Kumbaya routine. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman went right for the jugular. “Kathy Hochul just committed the largest daylight robbery in New York history, looting $4 billion from your family’s grocery and rent budget to bankroll Zohran Mamdani’s socialist experiment,” Blakeman said in a statement. He’s not wrong. I pay taxes in New York, and now I’m going to be covering for Mamdani’s socialist campaign promises. Hochul may think this will strengthen her position as she seeks another term in office, but how many people in New York State really want to be bailing out New York City?

Did they?

• CIA Went Rogue, Raided Tulsi’s Office to Seize Papers (Catherine Salgado)

A breaking news alert from Fox News, apparently confirmed by a Republican congresswoman, states that the Central Intelligence Agency went rogue, raiding the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to seize files. It seems from the Fox News report that the CIA seized the files just now, though a whistleblower from the agency who testified to Congress today referred to the wrongful seizure of files in his testimony. It is therefore not clear if the raid occurred today or before the testimony, or if there was more than one seizure. In either case, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is giving the CIA 24 hours to return the files in question or face consequences.

Jesse Watters just paused his show to tell viewers that the CIA just RAIDED Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office.

Agents reportedly hauled out dozens of boxes of classified intel, including files on the JFK assassination and MKUltra.

WATTERS: “And this just… pic.twitter.com/lEupFwzkjH
— Overton (@overton_news) May 14, 2026

The CIA was allegedly after the files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the MK-Ultra human experimentation scandal. The story on the raid is developing but seems to be legitimate, and illustrates the need for drastic cuts in our Deep State. Donald Trump cannot hope to prevent such egregious acts by merely replacing top leadership. The majority of employees at the CIA and FBI worked there during the Biden-era weaponization of justice and believe they are not accountable to Trump or We the People.
DNI Tulsi Gabbard was reportedly in the process of declassifying the JFK and MK-ULTRA files, and it seems the CIA gave us indirect confirmation that there is something in those files that they desperately do not want anyone to know. The problem is that we don’t know if they will be able to destroy the files or not before the Trump administration can get them back. If the raid just occurred and did not happen previously in the last couple of days, it is interesting to note that President Trump was out of the country in China, and therefore unable to be present personally to deal with the situation. Hopefully, Vice President Vance is on the job.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) promptly issued a warning to the CIA, as you can see below, evidently providing confirmation of the raid: “The CIA has 24 hours to return the documents to Tulsi Gabbard’s office or else I will make a motion to issue a subpoena. These documents have been requested by Congress. @DNIGabbard @CIADirector https://t.co/Y5lMw8AYK5 — Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) May 13, 2026”. CIA Director John Ratcliffe has not yet commented on the allegations, so he has not been able to clarify any timeline for when the raid happened. Gabbard has also not commented publicly.
The Hindustan Times referred to the allegations made by alleged whistleblower James Erdman: At Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Erdman alleged that the CIA seized files related to the controversial human experimentation program, MKUltra, as well as the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr, from the office of Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Erdman said that the files were about to be processed for declassification – a long-standing public demand – when the CIA swooped in and seized the files.

Or not. “Good grief. I cannot believe people actually believed this story as presented ..”

• No, The CIA Did Not Raid DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s Office (CTH)

Good grief. I cannot believe people actually believed this story as presented. Yes, the CIA is sketchy; however, no, the CIA did not raid the office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, taking boxes of JFK and MK Ultra files. Oliva Coleman is Tulsi Gabbard’s spokesperson. The story is fake news.

This is false – the CIA did not raid the DNI’s office. https://t.co/vZOEqzeK4M
— Olivia Coleman (@DNIspox) May 14, 2026

Was there friction and opposition within the CIA to DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s office, yes. However, John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard have been working together for almost a year to address the Machiavellian network that operates in the shadows, and they have had remarkable success.
It’s highly likely former CIA embeds were doing some unauthorized surveillance of DNI Gabbard as she came into office. Obviously, she was a threat to their position and influence. However, through a methodical approach at addressing the politically motivated embeds within the entire Intelligence Community, including the CIA, DNI Gabbard has been successful in eliminating most of the corrupt actors. CIA Director John Ratcliffe would never authorize or allow anything like what was being framed in that outlandish story. It simply did not happen.

Everyone seems to agree datacenters will soon be in space (orbital).

• Datacenters, The AI Race and American Politics (CTH)

There is an increased public discussion about the race to build datacenters in the USA that are part of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race for superiority. There are multiple facets within the discussion and some things to consider that might not be at the forefront, yet. Overall, there is a global race to build the best AI system that is not dissimilar to the nuclear arms race. Arguably the use of AI as a weapon is one possibility; while the second aspect surrounds strategic economic power.

The USA is poised very favorably in this AI race due to the advanced tech industry in America and recent national security moves made by President Trump in the tech sector surrounding strategic critical minerals and domestic chip production. However, no one is quite sure where China is in their AI development and last year’s explosive revelation around China’s “Deepseek” model shocked the U.S. tech industry due to its advanced intelligence prowess. With China and the USA both in this AI race, and the need for massive investment in datacenters to do the processing needed for an artificial intelligence brain of such significant capacity, there is a sense of urgency in the tech industry that is surfacing around the country.
Simultaneously, with datacenters becoming more controversial, suddenly the geopolitical intelligence operations enter the picture. Currently, it is well accepted inside the tech industry that part of China’s strategy against the USA in this AI race is to slow down American system development. As a consequence, it is beginning to surface that Beijing may be funding voices inside the USA to rally against the building of datacenters. Essentially, China funding voices, real or artificially boosted influence operations, to amplify domestic opposition to the datacenters.
Anytime the intelligence operations become part of a domestic issue that has national security implications, things get opaque, cloudy and muddy pretty quick. Is datacenter opposition organic – actual citizens and communities pushing back against the development in their towns and/or cities or is the opposition to the datacenters a form of foreign influence operation? These questions become challenging to answer, and discernment becomes very critical. The truth might even be a combination depending on the localized opposition and/or regional importance. One thing is very clear, building the world’s leading AI system is being rushed with an urgency similar to atomic bomb development.
Here’s a great example of that type of question. Today Gallup released a poll showing 72 percent of Americans are opposed to building AI datacenters in their area. [POLLING HERE]

[Note the date]
The topline sounds pretty straightforward right? 7 in 10 Americans oppose “the construction of a data center in their area to support artificial intelligence technology.” That’s the polled result. Indeed, this poll is being cited in numerous media articles now emphasizing opposition to the datacenters.However, put on your discernment cap and look at it closely. Notice the date of the poll, “March 2-18, 2026.” Why did Gallup wait two months to release the results of a poll on May 13, 2026?
Did the date of release today have something to do with the timing of President Trump taking a list of key U.S. tech and finance leaders to Beijing to confront China on exactly this AI issue? …. Or was it coincidental? This is where you have to make up your own mind as to whether this Gallup poll is an organic outcome, an organically timed release, on an issue that just happens to be at the heart of the geopolitical negotiations currently underway in Beijing between the USA and China. Or was there some kind of influence operation around it?

“.. as Benjamin Franklin warned us and now Elias has reminded us, we must fight to keep this Republic.”

• Marc Elias Raises Power to Eliminate the Virginia Government (Turley)

Democratic lawyer Marc Elias appears to believe that Democrats do not need to stop at simply sacking and packing the Virginia Supreme Court in response to the adverse ruling on the radical gerrymandering plan. Elias reminded Democrats that they could eliminate the entire Virginia government under the state constitution. The demand for radical action was prompted by the Virginia justices, including one appointed by then-Democratic governor Mark Warner, who found the Democratic effort unconstitutional. It does not matter that leading Democrats, including Gov. Abigail Spanberger, also believed that the Democrats could be found in violation of the state constitution in pushing forward with the controversial effort to virtually extinguished Republican representation in the purple state.

The adverse decision has resulted in the same demands for radical institutional changes from some of the same voices pledging to pack the United States Supreme Court once they retake power, to guarantee they never lose it again. Elias responded to the loss by invoking language from Article I of the Virginia Constitution itself: “whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.” That is his response to a well-reasoned decision of unconstitutionality of a redistricting plan. We can scrap the entire Virginia government.
It is another example of the “by any means necessary” culture of the left today. There is no institution or value that is sacred. This is why I recently wrote about the rise of “the new Jacobins” in my book Rage and the Republic, lawyers and law professors rationalizing the trashing of the Constitution and our institutions to achieve their political goals. Elias has long been controversial for his tactics. It was Elias who was the general counsel to the Clinton presidential campaign when it secretly funded the infamous Steele dossier and pushed the false Alfa Bank conspiracy. (His fellow Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussmann, was later indicted but acquitted).
Clinton campaign officials denied any involvement in the Steele Dossier. When journalists discovered after the election that the Clinton campaign hid payments for the Steele dossier as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to Perkins Coie, they were reportedly stonewalled. The campaign was ultimately sanctioned by the Federal Election Commission for the subterfuge. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Elias denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman later wrote that “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
Elias’s group later unsuccessfully led efforts to challenge Democratic electoral losses. In Maryland, Elias’s team supported another abusive gerrymandering scheme that a court found not only violated Maryland law but the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses. The court found that the map “subverts the will of those governed.” One media site accused Elias and his group of “making millions off gerrymandering efforts” while publicly denouncing Republican gerrymandering. In 2024, Elias’s legal team was also accused of pushing “to bar third-party presidential candidates — including Cornel West — from swing state ballots where they might siphon votes from the Democratic nominee [Kamala Harris].”
Likewise, the New York Times reported that Elias’s firm’s work “on behalf of a Soros-funded PAC in Texas…was opposed by a left-leaning election watchdog as undermining laws intended to limit the influence of major donors.” His group’s work for New York redistricting was ridiculed as not only ignoring the express will of the voters and also effectively negating the votes of Republican voters.
In 2024, the Chief Judge of the Western District of Wisconsin criticized the Elias Law Group for one of its challenges. Judge James Peterson (an Obama appointee) said that the argument “simply does not make any sense.” Now, Elias is reminding Virginians that they can respond to an opposing court decision by eliminating some or all of the Virginia state government.
It is the logic of the Jacobin. As discussed in my book, the Framers sought to prevent democracy from becoming mobocracy by rejecting more direct democratic powers. They tried to temper the passions of democracy in moments like this. There is nothing new about these voices, like that of Elias, in fueling radical impulses. They are the same voices and arguments that has long been heard in this country. We have long rejected them and this year will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Independence. However, as Benjamin Franklin warned us and now Elias has reminded us, we must fight to keep this Republic.

True https://t.co/uIvzMSteJy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2026

This is a very good question https://t.co/t09frtakP8
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 12, 2026

https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2054162172456960145?s=20

Dr. David Martin just RIPPED THE MASK off the WHO:

It's NOT a health organization. I's a VACCINE PROFITEERING CARTEL controlled by Rockefeller. pic.twitter.com/3CWXQ0RsKh
— healthbot (@thehealthb0t) May 12, 2026

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Debt Rattle October 16 2022

Oct 162022

October 16, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:15 am Finance Tagged with: Elon Musk, fact check, G20, kill list, LNG, nat gas, Nordstream, Orban, Pfizer, Twitter, tyranny 45 Responses »

Rembrandt van Rijn Self-portrait 1629

• Germany’s Failing ‘Stored’ Nat-gas & LNG Experiment (Vilches)

• Nord Stream Saboteurs Plunged EU Into ‘Energy Poverty’ – Moscow (RT)

• White House Comments On Paying For Starlink Service For Ukraine (RT)

• Musk Makes U-turn On Starlink Service For Ukraine (RT)

• Elon Musk Discovers Ukrainian ‘Kill List’ (RT)

• The Ideological Tyranny of Liberal Interventionism (Ghorayeb)

• European Auto Industry In Trouble – S&P (RT)

• How 4,000 People From Groningen Managed To Turn Off The Gas Tap (NOS)

• Strong US Dollar Is A Headache – IMF (RT)

• Central Bank of G20 Host Indonesia Rails Against US Dollar (RT)

• Will Beijing Join With Russia vs The West Or Keep Its Powder Dry? (Hvatkov)

• Orban Warns Of ‘Protracted War’ (RT)

• Hiding Hunter’s Laptop (Hanson)

• Yes, They Claimed The Vaccines Would Prevent Transmission (Chung)

• Twitter is a Weapon, not a Business (Robert Malone)

What an odd list.

John Maersheimer 2014

Walker

Warnock: "A patient's room is too … cramped a space for a woman, her doctor, and the US government."

Walker: "There's a baby in that room as well." pic.twitter.com/l5NJO9z7G5

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 14, 2022

“Leave the climate activists glued to the wall. Make it an interactive exhibit by allowing patrons to throw tomato sauce at them and donate the proceeds to planting trees.”

Jinglemerkel Santakaputt.

“.. at the very best only 25% to 30% of the “supposed” 90% reserves could possibly ever be timely recovered and only very slowly through a period of time stretched out in months. ”

• Germany’s Failing ‘Stored’ Nat-gas & LNG Experiment (Vilches)

Be that as it may, and as per the US State Dept. the NS1 and NS2 pipeline sabotage would supposedly have “no impact on European energy resilience”… then we should guess that Germans should just enjoy their Oktoberfest and — why not ? — also prepare to celebrate Christmas 2022 as if nothing negative had happened. On the contrary, if technical brain-power (currently AWOL) prevailed, then career strategists both sides of the Atlantic would now be spending all day and night trying to brush up hard on nat-gas management 101, better yet with a touch of sophomoric physics if all possible. And thus no-nonsense contingency plans would already be prepared and under deployment.

The reason is, as explained below, by EU and German design and commitment this is a failing EXPERIMENT. The planned ´stored´ nat-gas & LNG supply strategies have never ever been applied in equivalent circumstances with this strange methodology and humongous scale. Thusly, the 2022 German Oktoberfest will probably turn into a very acid sauerkraut with solid-beer icicles bizarrely hanging from the spouts. The Main Event would still be the December 2022 ´Jinglemerkel Santakaputt´ with nowhere to hide as all of Europe would be undergoing a thorough DE-industrialization process with sharp lowering of standards of living, and in many areas most probably with food issues, darkness & cold, deep frustration and un-heard-of unemployment with massive migrants wishing they had stayed back home (yes).

Be it from Qatar, Norway, or the US… or Russia…Liquefied Natural Gas cannot and will not save the day for Europe. First of all, LNG is and will be for a huge long time to come very scarce worldwide. Furthermore, there are very few loading and unloading terminals available at either end. For example, Germany has 0 (zero) LNG terminals. None. And even some loading terminals at source docks that are already built have serious operational problems or simply do not meet EU standards. Besides, there are not anywhere near enough LNG tankers available and very few are under construction. Who needed ugly dirty fracked LNG only 6 months ago ? And these infrastructure beasts take very long time to be conceived, approved, designed, funded, built, commissioned, certified, and offered to the market.

But it gets worse because many wrongly imagine that fracked sea-borne Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is a substitute of nat-gas (not). First, it´s terribly more expensive, most explosive & dangerous to handle, and definetly way too scarce to meet European needs. Environmentally, LNG is “fracking” dirty and very cumbersome to liquefy, load and re-gassify with yet non-existant infrastructure at both ends… and is far more difficult to store and many times more costly to freight (Suez could be a limitation) from ackward overseas sources yet unknown (in tankers that do not yet exist) and only in risky seaborne batches onto many dozens of delivery terminals not yet built nor adequately planned for…

“Stockholm has rejected a plan to set up an official joint investigation team together with Germany and Denmark to look into the explosions [..] All three nations also refused to grant Russia access to the probe. ”

• Nord Stream Saboteurs Plunged EU Into ‘Energy Poverty’ – Moscow (RT)

The perpetrators behind the attacks on Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines have destroyed the European Union’s hope of secure and sustainable energy supply, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksander Novak has said on the sidelines of the Russian Energy Week forum. “Those who had plotted and perpetrated this terrorist act have basically plunged Europe into an energy poverty, so to speak,” Novak said on Friday, adding that the sabotage of the pipelines has all but “nullified the energy security” the EU has long sought to achieve. The former energy minister previously said that Russia is still able to supply natural gas to the European Union through a string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that remains intact. According to President Vladimir Putin the ball was now in the EU’s court on whether it wanted this to happen.

Putin also suggested establishing a new “gas hub” in Türkiye to move the transit volumes to the Black Sea region. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed the idea during the leaders’ meeting earlier this week. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, designed to carry Russian natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing transit states, including Ukraine and Poland, abruptly lost pressure last month, following a series of powerful underwater explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm. Moscow has called the incident a terrorist attack and said the US, a long-time critic of Germany’s reliance on Russian energy, stood to benefit most from the disabling of the routes, both politically and economically. Washington has denied any involvement. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hailed the incident as a “tremendous opportunity” for Europe “to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy.”

In the meantime, Stockholm has rejected a plan to set up an official joint investigation team together with Germany and Denmark to look into the explosions, Reuters reported, citing a Swedish investigator. Sweden allegedly argued that its own findings are too sensitive to share even with other EU nations. All three nations also refused to grant Russia access to the probe. Russia used to cover over 40% of the EU’s gas needs prior to the start of the military operation in Ukraine and ensuing sanctions. Supplies dropped dramatically this year, exacerbating the energy crisis, as the bloc is seeking to cut itself off from Russian energy to reduce its dependence and punish Moscow. The US, meanwhile, ramped up its supply of LNG to Europe over the past months, up to a point where it now accounts for nearly half of the bloc’s LNG imports, nearly twice the share recorded in 2021.

..“burning” around $20 million per month on safeguarding the services from cyberattacks and jamming..”

• White House Comments On Paying For Starlink Service For Ukraine (RT)

The Pentagon and US allies are exploring all options to maintain Starlink satellite services for Ukraine after tycoon Elon Musk said he’s no longer willing to provide the communications for free, the White House press secretary has said. During a briefing on Friday, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if the Biden administration had considered Musk’s request for the Pentagon to foot the bill for satellite internet communications in Ukraine. “Look, we understand the importance of these capabilities to ensure stable communications for Ukraine’s forces in particular,” Jean-Pierre responded. Starlink, operated by Musk’s SpaceX company, has become the main communication tool for Ukraine’s forces since the start of the conflict with Russia.

According to the spokeswoman, the Pentagon is “working with allies and partners to look at all options on how best to support those needs identified by Ukraine specifically.” Further questions on the matter should be referred to the Department of Defense, she added. Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh confirmed on Friday that “the department has been in communication with SpaceX regarding Starlink,” but declined to expand on the nature of those contacts. The DoD understands the “fragility” of satellite communications and their importance for Ukraine “not just on the battlefield, but within the country itself,” Singh said. On Thursday CNN published a letter, which it said SpaceX had sent to the Pentagon in September, demanding that it cover the cost of operating the system in Ukraine. The company is no longer “in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” the document read.

Musk reacted to the report by pointing out that his “competitors in space launch and communications,” Lockheed Martin and Boeing, had jointly received over $60 billion in defense contracts in 2021 alone. The entrepreneur explained in a series of tweets how keeping up “warfront” communications was much more difficult and expensive. He said his aerospace company was allegedly forced to divert “massive resources” and was “burning” around $20 million per month on safeguarding the services from cyberattacks and jamming. “Russia is actively trying to kill Starlink,” Musk claimed, warning that it could well succeed in its efforts. “Starlink is the primary communications system of the Ukrainian army on the war front. If anyone else wants this job, please be my guest,” he wrote.

“..the cost of the internet service in Ukraine, which could amount up to $ 400 million over the next year..”

• Musk Makes U-turn On Starlink Service For Ukraine (RT)

The SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made an abrupt U-turn on his decision to stop funding the operation of the Starlink satellite communication service in Ukraine, where it has been actively used by the Ukrainian troops. Earlier, SpaceX reportedly asked the Pentagon to cover the cost of the internet service in Ukraine, which could amount up to $ 400 million over the next year. “We’ll just keep funding Ukraine government for free,” Musk wrote in a tweet on Saturday, adding that SpaceX would do it “even though Starlink is still losing money and other companies are getting billions of taxpayer dollars.” Earlier, the SpaceX CEO pointed to the fact that his “competitors in space launch and communications,” Lockheed Martin and Boeing, had jointly received over $60 billion in defense contracts in 2021 alone.

The entrepreneur also complained in a series of tweets that keeping up “warfront” communications was difficult and expensive. He also stated that Russia was “actively trying to kill Starlink,” forcing the US company to spend some $20 million per month on safeguarding the services from cyberattacks and jamming. On Thursday, CNN obtained a letter, where Musk supposedly informed the Pentagon his company was “not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time.” SpaceX has donated around 20,000 Starlink satellite units to Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict in late February, providing internet connection and military coordination in chaotic battlegrounds that would otherwise be cut off from the web.

Kiev then praised the terminals as an “essential part of critical infrastructure” but continued to urge SpaceX to send thousands of additional terminals. Musk previously stated that SpaceX would have spent more than $100 million providing Starlink services to Ukraine by the end of the year. At the same time, the company reportedly admitted that most units it had sent to Ukraine were partially or fully funded by the American, British and Polish governments. SpaceX also recently came under fire over alleged Starlink outages across some regions of Ukraine, which some Ukrainian soldiers described as “catastrophic” loss of communications, according to Financial Times.

“The website has published personal details – names, addresses, photos, social media pages – of children, the youngest of whom is not even 10 years old..”

• Elon Musk Discovers Ukrainian ‘Kill List’ (RT)

Elon Musk has expressed concerns over a controversial website that lists supposed enemies of Kiev, amid claims that his own name briefly appeared on Mirotvorets following his threats to cut funding for Starlink satellite internet services actively used by the Ukrainian troops. “Is this list real? What’s the URL?” the SpaceX CEO tweeted in response to independent journalist Eva Karene Bartlett, who on Friday shared a viral screenshot that claims to show his persona added to the notorious database. “I’ve been speaking and writing about this list for years, after being placed on it in 2019, but now that Musk is on it, after Roger Waters and others, perhaps the ‘peacemaker’ list might itself be killed…,” Bartlett wrote.

Elon Musk’s name was not on the list as of Saturday, and it remains unclear whether it indeed briefly appeared on Mirotvorets. Some reports alleged his profile was swiftly scrubbed from the database, while Ukrainian activists claimed the picture was fake and called it a Russian provocation. Many of Musk’s followers were surprised to find out that he’d never heard of Mirotvorets before, and bombarded him with examples of prominent public figures on the database, some already marked “liquidated.” Musk admitted it was “concerning,” after checking with Wikipedia that such a list does indeed exist, and was allowed to stay online since 2014. Mirotvorets, or “Peacemaker,” is a supposedly independent database of individuals whom anonymous moderators consider to be threats to Ukrainian national security.

The site denies being a kill list; rather, it claims to be a source of information for law-enforcement agencies and “special services” about pro-Russian terrorists, separatists and war criminals, among others. It allegedly has links to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. The Mirotvorets project gained some notoriety in 2015, when writer and historian Oles Buzina and politician Oleg Kalashnikov were assassinated in Ukraine after their profiles appeared on the website. In 2016, EU officials and journalist groups condemned Mirotvorets for leaking data on more than 4,000 members of the media. Human rights activists have discovered that the website features the personal details of 327 children, prompting the Russian authorities to share their concerns over this “huge injustice” with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The website has published personal details – names, addresses, photos, social media pages – of children, the youngest of whom is not even 10 years old yet, according to the head of the Foundation for the Fight against Repressions.

“..American and Ukrainian politicians—along with their loyal supporters—are not actually interested in real support for the Ukrainian people. What they want is compliance and consensus for their foreign policy endeavors.”

• The Ideological Tyranny of Liberal Interventionism (Ghorayeb)

Since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War this year, celebrities and public figures have been unanimous in their moral support for Ukraine. Some, like Telsa CEO Elon Musk, have gone further than words, lending significant material support to the cause. His spacecraft company, SpaceX, paid $80 million to provide Ukraine with the services of Starlink, which, among other things, enables Ukrainian troops to operate drones and communicate with each other. Musk has explicitly declared himself “pro-Ukraine.” A normal person would therefore view Musk, a self-professed centrist, as supporting an ally of the American government against the ravages of war.

However, Musk’s material and moral contributions mattered little when he proposed a peace plan outside the bounds of the liberal internationalist consensus. Russia, Musk tweeted, should be allowed to keep Crimea, and Ukraine should end its bit to join NATO and adopt a neutral status. Musk’s diplomatic musings swiftly drew the ire of the Ukrainian government and its supporters. It also attracted resentful remarks from his own government. Senator Lindsey Graham went on an angry rant against Musk that culminated in a call to cut electric vehicle tax credits, which he mistakenly thought benefitted Tesla. Elon’s car buyers haven’t qualified for a tax credit since 2018.

One may wonder why there is such intense outrage against Musk or why expressing an anti-war opinion is akin to providing support for Putin. Why is it that one tweet with a peace proposal has become a more powerful expression of Musk’s position than $80 million worth of material aid to Ukraine and numerous declarations of support? The reason is that American and Ukrainian politicians—along with their loyal supporters—are not actually interested in real support for the Ukrainian people. What they want is compliance and consensus for their foreign policy endeavors. Media outlets have noticeably censored and attempted to silence opinions that deviate from a consensus that stops short of extravagant government spending on weapons for Ukraine and unwavering admiration for Zelensky.

[..] Ideally, there would be a moral consensus against killing innocent people with room for civil political debate about the root causes of these wars, how we can de-escalate or end ongoing violence, and how to prevent them in the future. One could have contested Musk’s proposal with a counterargument about whether it is the optimal way of reaching what most people agree is wrong: killing innocent people. But this would only be possible if everyone involved in the discourse was concerned with achieving the end of the war and pursuing truth. However, the U.S. foreign policy elite—who have nakedly pursued their interests through intervention in the region before—and Ukraine’s corrupt president do not show an interest in either.

No, electric cars won’t solve the problem..

• European Auto Industry In Trouble – S&P (RT)

With energy prices in EU skyrocketing, a harsh winter could shut down production in parts of the automotive sector, S&P Global Mobility reported this week. According to a report titled “Winter is Coming,” the “combined black swan events” of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have stretched automotive supply lines, especially with regard to semiconductors. As a result, the industry “may face extensive pressure” from energy costs in the coming months. Starting in the fourth quarter of 2022 through 2023, quarterly production from Europe-based auto manufacturing plants is forecast to be between 4 and 4.5-million-units. However, “with potential utility restrictions,” that output could fall to as low as 2.75 million units per quarter, the report says.

The researcher projected significant supply chain disruptions from November through spring, citing mandatory energy rationing for the region’s auto producers and suppliers. “For an industry already struggling with low inventories of vehicles in dealer showrooms, an additional crisis could be incapacitating on a global scale,” it said. Edwin Pope, S&P Global Mobility principal analyst for materials and lightweighting, pointed out that “If you look through the supply chain – particularly where there’s any metallic structure forming through pressing, welding or extrusion – there’s a tremendous amount of energy involved.

“Total energy usage in these companies could be up to one-and-a-half times what we’re seeing in vehicle assembly today. Anecdotally, we’re hearing that some of this manufacturing capacity is becoming so uneconomic that companies are simply shutting up shop.” He also told Reuters that S&P Global Mobility’s analysis was conducted before the sabotage on the Russian Nord Stream gas pipelines late last month. “Events like that will inevitably shift the scales towards the lower end of what we have predicted, especially in terms of how long it takes to repair things of this nature,” Pope warned.

Google translate.

“They only wanted to continue if the State imposed a production obligation on them, took over the liability and thus also the risk of prosecution.”

• How 4,000 People From Groningen Managed To Turn Off The Gas Tap (NOS)

Only the threat of a criminal case would force oil companies Shell and Exxon to extract less gas in Groningen after the severe earthquake in 2012. A retired criminal court advised action group Groninger Soil Movement (GBB) to use heavy artillery. Public hearings by the Groningen parliamentary committee of inquiry for natural gas extraction have shown in recent weeks how great the impact of that advice has been. The committee closed those hearings yesterday. The GBB first filed a report on behalf of 4000 members in vain: the Public Prosecution Service saw no reason to prosecute NAM. The people of Groningen then asked the court in Arnhem to force the Public Prosecution Service to conduct such a criminal investigation.

In April 2017, the court ruled in their favor. The Public Prosecution Service should investigate whether gas extraction company NAM, a subsidiary of Shell and Exxon, has endangered Groningers. The case is still pending and has cost the GBB two tons in lawyers’ fees, but the effect was maximum. Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Shell, calls that criminal case a “game changer”. His company was suddenly accused of endangering people’s lives by extracting gas. His employees could be personally prosecuted for this. Shell and Exxon informed the Ministry of Economic Affairs that they wanted to stop gas production in Groningen. They only wanted to continue if the State imposed a production obligation on them, took over the liability and thus also the risk of prosecution.

Every other gas field in the world would be closed if it turns out that winning is not safe, both Rolf de Jong of Exxon and Van Beurden of Shell said. But they also realized that it was impossible to stop because Dutch households, hospitals and much industry depend on Groningen gas. It was one of the most startling issues to surface in the public hearings. Until then, the image was that former Minister Wiebes of Economic Affairs had single-handedly decided in 2018 to end gas extraction in Groningen in 2030. That was inescapable, he said, because the State Supervision of Mines then found that gas extraction might have to stop altogether to limit the risk of even more earthquakes. Moreover, the reinforcement operation, the reinforcement of unsafe houses, was completely out of control.

Many more houses had to be reinforced than the ministry wanted and, according to gas extraction company NAM, was necessary. Furthermore, it appeared from the interrogations that the cabinet was not in a hurry with the request of the oil companies. They feared that Shell and Exxon wanted to take the opportunity to also change the historic agreements on profit sharing. The two multinationals and the State divide the gas revenues, with the largest part of the profit (90 percent) going to the State. These are agreements that were made when gas extraction started in the early 1960s.

“..appreciated 22% against the Japanese yen, 13% against the euro and 6% against emerging market currencies since the start of this year..”

• Strong US Dollar Is A Headache – IMF (RT)

As countries around the world struggle to bring down soaring inflation, the weakening of their currencies relative to the US dollar has made that fight even harder, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said. In a report published on Friday, the IMF elaborated how countries should respond to a strong dollar. It highlighted that the greenback is at its highest level since 2000, having appreciated 22% against the Japanese yen, 13% against the euro and 6% against emerging market currencies since the start of this year. “Such a sharp strengthening of the dollar in a matter of months has sizable macroeconomic implications for almost all countries, given the dominance of the dollar in international trade and finance,” the lender wrote.

It further indicated that while the US share in world merchandise exports has declined from 12% to 8% since 2000, the dollar’s share in world exports has held at around 40%. “On average, the estimated pass-through of a 10 percent dollar appreciation into inflation is 1 percent. Such pressures are especially acute in emerging markets, reflecting their higher import dependency and greater share of dollar-invoiced imports compared with advanced economies.” According to the report, approximately half of all cross-border loans and international debt securities are denominated in US dollars. While emerging market governments have made progress in issuing debt in their own currency, their private corporate sectors have high levels of dollar-denominated debt.

“As world interest rates rise, financial conditions have tightened considerably for many countries. A stronger dollar only compounds these pressures, especially for some emerging market and many low-income countries that are already at a high risk of debt distress,” the IMF said. The report suggested that the appropriate policy response is to allow the exchange rate to adjust, while using monetary policy to keep inflation close to its target. “The higher price of imported goods will help bring about the necessary adjustment to the fundamental shocks as it reduces imports, which in turn helps with reducing the buildup of external debt. Fiscal policy should be used to support the most vulnerable without jeopardizing inflation goals,” it said.

“.. transactions in foreign currencies incur conversion costs, and when they are in US dollars, “the conversion fee is doubled..”

• Central Bank of G20 Host Indonesia Rails Against US Dollar (RT)

Indonesia’s central bank has spoken out against the use of the US dollar in export-import transactions, and called for a switch to local currencies in international payments to reduce dependence on the greenback, news portal Tempo.co reported on Friday. Most of Indonesia’s international trade transactions are conducted in foreign currencies, predominantly the dollar, according to Nugroho Joko Prastowo, head of Bank Indonesia’s Solo Representative Office, as cited by local media. “90% of export-import settlements are in US dollars, when in fact the value of Indonesia’s direct exports to the US is only 10%, and the value of US imports is only 5%,” the official told journalists after opening a session on ‘Utilizing Local Currency Settlement (LCS) to Increase Export-Import Efficiency of the Greater Solo Region’.

He said transactions in foreign currencies incur conversion costs, and when they are in US dollars, “the conversion fee is doubled,” suggesting that a system of bilateral payments in local currency could solve the problem. The official said four countries have agreed to utilize LCS with Indonesia so far, namely China, Japan, Thailand and Malaysia. “Singapore has been plotted, although it has not been fully implemented, and soon the Philippines. Currently, the implementation of LCS with Saudi Arabia is also being explored,” he said. Indonesia will be hosting the G20 international forum, bringing together 19 countries and the European Union, on November 15-16 on the island of Bali. Indonesia currently holds the presidency of the group of leading economies.

‘small fortresses with high walls’

• Will Beijing Join With Russia vs The West Or Keep Its Powder Dry? (Hvatkov)

The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the pinnacle event in the country’s political life and held only every five years, kicks off in Beijing on October 16. Experts will be tuning in to pick up any signals related not only to the political standing and prospects of China’s leader Xi Jinping, who is likely to run for a third term, but also to the way the country is planning to build its relations with the US and Russia in the future. A new Mao – a new revolution? Western speculation believes that the event could signify a triumph for Xi as he will most likely remain at the helm of the party for a third term. Should that happen, it would go against the tradition which has formed in Chinese politics over the last 30 years. Up to now, the reins of power in the country were handed over to a new generation of leaders at the end of the second term. Thus, such a move would herald a new era in the history of modern China. Starting from 2018, it has become increasingly clear that Xi is going to defy this tradition. That year, amendments were made to the Chinese Constitution lifting the two-term limit on the presidency.

[..] Experts doubt that Beijing will abandon its policy of prudence and caution, and there are a number of reasons for that. “Much of what Vladimir Putin said in his speech at the accession ceremony is in line with China’s own attitudes. But when China talks about similar matters, the wording is often much broader and generally ambiguous. Naturally, Beijing is aware that its confrontation with the West is getting more intense. However, at the level of rhetoric, China tries to avoid being as explicit when expressing its position. Moscow and Beijing have similar viewpoints in that both believe the policies of the West are flawed, as they create artificial barriers to global trade, financial and economic ties and investment opportunities,” Lomanov said.

“China also criticizes the West for building ‘small fortresses with high walls’, referring to blocs like NATO and AUKUS, exclusive alliances designed to unite Western countries and those loyal to them, effectively cutting off everyone else. “China has always stressed the need to reform the existing system of global governance, as it is deeply unfair to developing countries. Despite all its leaps in economic development, China considers itself both a socialist country and the world’s leading developing nation. Therefore, at a practical level, the positions of Russia and China are indeed very close,” the expert from IMEMO RAS believes.

“anyone who thinks NATO will protect us is wrong.”

• Orban Warns Of ‘Protracted War’ (RT)

Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that Hungary needs an army “capable of striking and ensuring peace” in case the continent plunges into chaos over the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the European Union’s failed policies towards Russia.“We cannot, like ostriches, bury our heads in the sand. We must accept the reality: if this continues, the economy of the continent will collapse, people will be in danger, and it seems that we must prepare for a protracted war,” Orban said on Saturday in Budapest, at a swearing-in ceremony of military volunteers. The Hungarian leader noted that “there are nations that have already begun making preparations and we can’t fall behind in this either,” as cited by the Budapest Times. “In times of war, we need an army capable of striking and capable of ensuring peace!” he told a group of some 250 young recruits, praising them as the “excellence of our nation.”

He added that Hungary needs “a few more” such battalions and announced new recruitment campaigns to be launched from December. Hungary, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy, has maintained a relatively neutral stance during the conflict in Ukraine, condemning the use of force by Moscow, but refusing to supply weapons to Kiev. Orban has frequently criticized the EU’s sanctions on Russia, calling them counterproductive. Over the past months, he has repeatedly called for “the failed policy of Brussels” to be changed, noting that the sanctions “didn’t fulfill the hopes that were pinned on them,” while Europe is “slowly bleeding.” Back in March, Orban said that he felt he couldn’t count on the US-led military bloc when it comes to real action concerning the country’s security, saying “anyone who thinks NATO will protect us is wrong.”

Long overview.

• Hiding Hunter’s Laptop (Hanson)

The definitive book on Cold War era information warfare from our Communist foes is Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy. In that book, disinformation is defined as “false, incomplete, or misleading information that is passed, fed, or confirmed to a targeted individual, group, or country.” The American public was subjected to a campaign right out of the Soviet playbook designed to obfuscate the Biden family corruption. It was concocted and deployed by a loosely connected conspiracy of the media, current and former government officials, the Biden campaign, and the social media tech companies. As soon as the story broke October 19, 2020 virtually every major and subsidiary media outlet reported on it with negative sentiment using one of two major themes:

First they argued that it was stolen. The immediate response was to deny the provenance of the laptop which was that Hunter Biden had abandoned it at a repair shop. They began questioning that story and throwing out the completely unfounded speculation that it may be stolen. This smear hit directly at John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the repair shop. He provided the contents of the laptop first to law enforcement and when they took no action, to Rudy Giuliani who eventually gave it to the New York Post. The bulk of the media accounts discussing the story in the next 24 hours included a reference to the “stolen” theme.

The second argument offered was that the laptop was not verified. This was the most defensible part of the smoke screen. Most of the media outlets did not have the hard drive so they could say they had not verified it themselves. However, the New York Post showed numerous items in their reporting that would lead any reasonable person to understand the laptop most likely belonged to Hunter Biden. During the taping of an interview with President Trump soon after the story broke, Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” ran with this narrative. Stahl denied that the Delaware computer suspected of belonging to Hunter Biden’s was even a story at all after claiming it has been “investigated and discredited.”

“It can’t be verified,” Stahl said of the laptop. “It can’t be verified.” “What can’t be verified?” Trump said. “The laptop!” It had been investigated, but unlike Stahl’s false claim to the contrary the laptop was not discredited. All of the investigations and verification measures showed the same thing: This was Hunter’s laptop, the information was his and it was devastating. One of the truly amazing things is the longevity of the media’s willingness to continue to ignore and suppress this story. It was not until March of 2022 that the New York Times and Washington Post both admitted the long-known fact that Hunter’s laptop was Hunter’s laptop.

Their admissions were not because of some ethical epiphany. They were merely part of a new aspect of the disinformation campaign about the likely charges coming from the ongoing investigation into Biden family corruption. They are based on the disinformation tactic popularized by John Ehrlichman, an aide to President Richard Nixon during Watergate. It’s called the modified limited hangout. In other words, mixing partial admissions with additional misinformation in order to confuse people.

1000 times. The fact checks look like pretzels.

• Yes, They Claimed The Vaccines Would Prevent Transmission (Chung)

No, you’re not crazy. Yes, they claimed the vaccines would prevent transmission. One of the most bizarre lies being told this week in response to Pfizer executive Janine Small’s testimony to EU Parliament is that, actually, the Covid vaccines were never supposed to stop the spread of the virus. Asked by Dutch MEP Rob Roos whether the company had tested its vaccine on “stopping the transmission of the virus” before it rolled out globally, Ms Small said “no” because “we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market”. “And from that point of view we had to do everything at risk,” she said. In a viral Twitter video which has now been viewed more than 12 million times, Mr Roos described the response as “scandalous”, arguing “millions of people worldwide felt compelled to get vaccinated because of the myth that ‘you do it for others’”.

Mr Roos said the admission removed the entire basis for vaccine mandates and passports which “led to massive institutional discrimination as people lost access to essential parts of society”. “I find this to be shocking, even criminal,” he said. Of course, fact checkers were not happy. This is not the bombshell it is being presented as, they argue, because it was public knowledge that the primary outcome measured in Pfizer’s clinical trials was reducing risk of disease, but not transmission. Moreover, as the Therapeutic Goods Administration stressed, “transmission effects” are “not an approved indication of any Covid-19 vaccine” currently available in Australia. In Australia, politicians and health officials held millions of people hostage for months, lecturing and threatening them to get vaccinated to regain their “freedoms”.

The vaccines were the “way out” of the pandemic, they were not to just to protect ourselves but to “protect others”, they would “stop the spread”, and not getting vaccinated was “selfish”. Vaccine passports, the “vaccinated economy”, were necessary so people who “did the right thing” would feel “safe” knowing they weren’t “mixing” with the unvaccinated, who were a “risk to the community”. By late 2021 and early 2022, as Omicron became dominant and it was clear vaccinated people were still catching and spreading the virus, the messaging changed. “Stopping the spread? What are you talking about? It’s about reducing hospitalisation and death. We have always been at war with hospitalisation and death.”

Malone takes a turn away from vaccines.

• Twitter is a Weapon, not a Business (Robert Malone)

The research and consulting firm “Edify” has recently disclosed results from a client-driven research project designed to analyze the relationships between the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR), Twitter, Biden White House, Obama White House, James Baker, Alexander Macgillivray, Vijaya Gadde, and Anthony Fauci’s daughter, Alison Fauci, who is an engineer at Twitter. The first two of these analyses have been published here and here, and at least one more is anticipated in the near future. The findings clearly document the deep web of relationships tying together WSGR, Twitter, the censorship of President Trump, President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Google. All of these run through Alexander Macgillivray. Macgillivray currently serves the Biden White House OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) as the Principal Deputy U.S. CTO (Chief Technology Officer).

What Edify documents is the web of relationships which have guided the censorship practices of the US Government-Technology/Social media alliance. As I read through the first of the two analyses, titled “EDIFY: CRITICAL NEXUS: TWITTER, WSGR, MACGILLIVRAY & WHITE HOUSE” (September 15, 2022), my interest was piqued by the documentation of the deep connections between Twitter, Biden, Obama, and the central role of Twitter as a tool for information and psychological warfare. Precisely the hot button issue that I discussed on the Joe Rogan Experience when I used those three words “Mass Formation Psychosis,” which triggered such a visceral reaction from the Silicon Valley technology giants, the Trusted News Initiative, and Peter Breggin.

Based on relationship mapping, Edify draws the following conclusions: “Twitter is the central node and the keystone to understanding. Twitter’s inherent value to the elites, political class and federal apparatus writ large is found in its ability to engage in perception management, which is a technical term more commonly referred to as “psyops” or “psychological warfare”. Twitter engages in perception management in its capacity to establish and manipulate reality by means of actively determining and shaping the content on its platform. Twitter consumers can receive filtered content or are prevented from receiving, seeing or having the ability to publish content altogether.

The de facto censorship occurs primarily along the lines of determining and enforcing community standards, guidelines and rules for user engagement. The evidence is clear that the decisions here appear to fall along clearly identifiable political lines resembling two-tier justice. Content determination, algorithmic manipulation and politically motivated censorship of off-reservation messaging and political opposition are all evidenced examples of how Twitter engages in perception management or appears to do so. Two evidenced domains of Twitter’s engagement in perception management include censoring content relative to COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden Laptop story.” [..] The quote above is just the beginning of the analytical conclusions, which include this gem:

“Alison Fauci is a Twitter software engineer who by title, would possess the technical capabilities and access to function as outlined in the testimony. Beyond Alison Fauci’s functionality as a conduit or intermediary for Dr. Anthony Fauci and his principals at the NIH/NIAID and up, Alison Fauci is by title technically positioned to potentially extract private Twitter user data on designated people including political opposition. Any such extracted data could be fed back upstream to the Obama, Biden cartel et al. It’s also further evidence of a distinct pattern of nepotism threading through all of these matters where spouses and children play critical roles determined by their placement into the broader construct. Alison Fauci was positioned to be a possible conduit of information in an intermediary fashion relative to the Anthony Fauci cohort and its preferences for Twitter’s censorship policies for reliable COVID content damaging to the COVID construct of enterprise fraud and that official narrative.”

HEART

When Australian farmer Ben Jackson couldn’t attend his Aunt’s funeral in 2021 due to Covid restrictions, he laid out grain for his Sheep in the shape of a heart in order “that she could see it through the clouds”.

❤️

pic.twitter.com/A0GTZoQ7zS

— Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) October 15, 2022

Cater snake

A caterpillar that camouflages itself as a snake when it feels threatened. pic.twitter.com/BjpvVs5o60

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) October 15, 2022

The Alpine Ibex’s preferred habitat is the rocky region along the snow line above alpine forests, where it occupies steep, rough terrain at elevations of 1,800 to 3,300 metres

Magician
https://twitter.com/i/status/1581272429527179265

A tiger’s tongue is so coarse, it can lick flesh to the bone. Photo: Tony Zerna

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Debt Rattle October 5 2022

Oct 052022

October 5, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:50 am Finance Tagged with: Bobulinski, Daszak, Elon Musk, Fauci, gain of function, kill list, mobilization, nuclear war, Roger Waters, Twitter 58 Responses »

Odilon Redon The boat 1900

• CIA Chief Weighs In On Putin’s Alleged Nuclear Threat (RT)

• Russia ‘Fully Committed’ To UN Consensus On Nuclear War (RT)

• US Risks ‘Direct Conflict’ With Russia Over Ukraine – UN Envoy (RT)

• The Strong, and the Merely Powerful (Patrick Lawrence)

• Putin Spox Weighs In On Elon Musk’s Attempt At Ukraine Peace Deal (ZH)

• Elon Musk Proposes To Buy Twitter At Original $44B Price To Avoid Trial (NYP)

• Roger Waters Says He’s On Ukrainian ‘Kill List’ (RT)

• Kremlin Reacts To Zelensky Banning Talks With Putin (RT)

• Russian Partial Mobilization Numbers Revealed (RT)

• Maneuver Warfare (Schryver)

• Capital Controls – The Third Horseman Of The Unholy Trinity (Hubble)

• Fauci Gives Daszak Millions More To Study Gain Of Function (NYP)

• Hunter Biden Committed ‘Fraud’ Against Business Partners – Bobulinski (Fox)

• The Morning After (CJ Hopkins)

• Why Does Time Go Forwards, Not Backwards? (Henriques)

Truss

If you watch anything to today. Let it be this. The opening sequence of @BethRigby interview with Prime Minister Liz Truss. Beth demonstrating the courage we would all wish for, if ever faced with Truss. Nonetheless, truly one of the most cutting interview openings in years. pic.twitter.com/McabUaKmKl

— Dr. Jennifer Cassidy (@OxfordDiplomat) October 4, 2022

Just economists losing their minds over Liz Truss’ economics

Gerald Ford

pic.twitter.com/5qMoWoR4na

— illuminatibot (@iluminatibot) October 4, 2022

There is none.

“..we don’t see any practical evidence today in the US intelligence community that [Putin] is moving closer to actual use” or that there’s any “imminent threat of using tactical nuclear weapons.”

• CIA Chief Weighs In On Putin’s Alleged Nuclear Threat (RT)

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) does not believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin is currently preparing to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the agency’s chief William Burns said in an interview on Sunday. “We have to take very seriously [any] kind of threats, given everything that’s at stake,” Burns told CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell. However, he acknowledged that “we don’t see any practical evidence today in the US intelligence community that [Putin] is moving closer to actual use” or that there’s any “imminent threat of using tactical nuclear weapons.” Asked if the Russian leader was bluffing when speaking about being ready to use “all the means at [its] disposal” if the country’s territorial integrity were threatened, Burns said it was “very hard to say at this point.”

The CIA director described the rhetoric from Putin and other high-ranking officials as “reckless and deeply irresponsible.” He also suggested that it was up to US policymakers to communicate to Moscow that such a decision would have “severe consequences.” UK Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace claimed on Sunday that Russia was“highly unlikely” to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but claimed the Russian leader was also “totally irrational.” The issue has been at the fore since Putin announced a partial mobilization two weeks ago and warned that Moscow was ready to use any weapons from its extensive arsenal to defend itself if necessary. “If the territorial integrity of our nation is threatened, we will certainly use all the means that we have to defend Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff,” Putin stated at the time.

He reiterated the message on Friday in an address at the signing of the unification treaties for the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, along with the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, into Russia. “We will defend our land with all the forces and resources,” the president vowed. Putin’s words have been interpreted by politicians and media in the West as a veiled threat that Moscow may deploy nuclear weapons in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In late September, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov rejected such speculation, saying: “we are not threatening anyone with nuclear weapons.” The diplomat referred journalists to Russia’s military doctrine, which states that nuclear weapons may only be employed if such arms or other weapons of mass destruction are being used against the country, or it is faced with an existential threat from conventional arms.

The reason this has been so fully distorted, can not be a good one.

• Russia ‘Fully Committed’ To UN Consensus On Nuclear War (RT)

Moscow maintains that a war between nuclear-armed countries should never be fought, the top nonproliferation official in the Russian foreign ministry told the UN General Assembly’s First Committee on Tuesday. “We believe that one of the most important tasks is to maintain adherence by all countries of the ‘nuclear five’ to the postulate that any war between countries possessing nuclear weapons cannot be allowed to happen, which was reflected in the January joint statement of the leaders of nuclear powers. Russia is fully committed to it,”said Vladimir Yermakov, director of the arms control and nonproliferation department at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The committee, which is in charge of arms control and international security, heard the statement through Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of the Russian delegation to the UNGA.

Yermakov’s remarks follow a clarification from the Kremlin that Moscow will only use nuclear weapons based on its official doctrine – meaning, in self-defense from weapons of mass destruction, or where its survival was threatened by conventional means. “There can be no other considerations here,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday. Russia has been repeatedly accused by the US and its allies of threatening the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Putin’s spokesman Peskov has repeatedly directed reporters to the official doctrine in order to dispel any misunderstandings. According to Russia’s nuclear posture, Moscow reserves the right to use atomic weapons only “in response to the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its allies,”as well as “in response to a conventional attack that threatens the very existence”of Russia as a sovereign state.

Over the weekend, however, head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov proposed using “low-yield nuclear weapons” as one of the “more drastic measures”regarding the conflict in Ukraine. Kadyrov was addressing the withdrawal of Russian troops from a Donetsk Region town due to a persistent Ukrainian assault. While Russian regional heads – including Kadyrov, who Peskov said has “contributed a lot” to the operations in Ukraine – are free to express personal opinions, they cannot give free rein to their emotions, “even in difficult times,”the Kremlin spokesman said.

“Continued American deliveries of weapons, intelligence and even fighters to Ukraine are approaching the “dangerous line” of direct confrontation with Moscow..”

• US Risks ‘Direct Conflict’ With Russia Over Ukraine – UN Envoy (RT)

Continued American deliveries of weapons, intelligence and even fighters to Ukraine are approaching the “dangerous line” of direct confrontation with Moscow, Russian diplomat Konstantin Vorontsov told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. Shortly before that, the Pentagon announced the contents of another military shipment to Ukraine, valued at $625 million. “The US is increasing the deliveries of weapons to Ukraine, providing its military with intelligence information, ensuring the direct participation of its fighters and advisers in the conflict,”Vorontsov, who is the deputy head of the Russian delegation, told the General Assembly’s First Committee, a body charged with arms control and security issues.

This “not only prolongs hostilities and leads to new casualties, but also brings the situation closer to the dangerous line of a direct military clash between Russia and NATO,” Vorontsov added. Moscow has repeatedly warned the US and its allies against sending weapons, ammunition and equipment to Ukraine, but Washington and NATO vowed to keep doing so for “as long as it takes, ”while insisting that doesn’t make them a party to the conflict. According to the Pentagon, the US has spent more than $19.6 billion in “security assistance” to Ukraine since 2014, and another $16.8 billion since February 24, when the Russian military operation began. The US will continue to provide Ukraine with “key capabilities” and to address Kiev’s “evolving battlefield requirements,” the military added.

The latest batch of weapons and equipment, valued at $625 million, includes four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and ammunition for them, 16 each of the 155mm and 105mm howitzers, 75,000 rounds for artillery ammunition – including guided rounds and remote mine-laying ones – small arms and mortar rounds, and 200 MRAP armored vehicles.

Macgregor: “Other than Poland, no one in NATO is interested in going to war with Russia. If we persist on this line, we will see NATO dissolve and fragment.”

"The destruction of the pipelines was clearly not carried out by Russia. No one believes that. In fact, the German population is overwhelming against any war with Russia."

— Douglas Macgregor, retired US Army Colonel pic.twitter.com/wiDvUxaUVk

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) October 4, 2022

“Strong nations serve their people as their primary responsibility.”

• The Strong, and the Merely Powerful (Patrick Lawrence)

There are various ways to interpret what Putin, Xi, and their allies among non–Western nations are working toward. In my view, they draw a distinction none has put into words but which is nonetheless essential to their vision: There are strong nations and there are the merely powerful. In the world order as we have it the powerful dominate — ever more evidently by force alone. In the world order now emerging, it is genuinely strong nations that will at last prevail over those reliant on power alone, and force will have little to do with it. [..] Strong nations serve their people as their primary responsibility. This is where I begin as I characterize them. They have a purpose, a telos, as the ancient Greeks put it, and a shared belief in the worth of their ideal.

They have a commitment to advancing the well-being of their citizens — to constructive action in the interest of the commonweal. They value their cultures, their histories, their memories. These common characteristics confer on strong nations solid but flexible social fabrics and an assumed sense of shared community. They are a source of identity and at the same time expressions of identity. Ironically, strength of the kind I describe tends to generate power. But it is power judiciously deployed. Genuinely strong nations have no need to dominate others. They are ungiven to subterfuge or subversion, seeing no purpose in it. They value mutual benefit in their relations with others simply because this is the surest way to stability and a peaceful order.

Let us not traffic in impossible ideals or in the thought of nations as pure as snow. There are none. A strong nation may have many things about it that are not to be admired — awful things, even. A strong nation may also be powerful. China is such a case. I am of the view — and I realize there are others — that China does not use its power to malign purpose. Remove the Sinophobia and anti–Chinese paranoia, and the record supports this.

“Achieving peace without fulfilling Russia’s conditions is absolutely impossible. Many ideas there deserve attention,” he said..”

• Putin Spox Weighs In On Elon Musk’s Attempt At Ukraine Peace Deal (ZH)

The Russian Presidency’s office has responded to billionaire Elon Musk’s “Russia-Ukraine Peace” Twitter poll which he put out Monday, and resulted in swift backlash among pundits who accused the Tesla and SpaceX founder of mimicking “pro-Russian” talking points. Musk pushed back against the avalanche of detractors, explaining that he’s interested in exploring ways to arrive at a peaceful settlement, and not continued escalation toward nuclear war. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday told reporters, “We consider it very positive that a man like Musk is looking for a peaceful way out of the situation around Ukraine,” according to Interfax.

Musk had floated the idea of “redoing” last week’s referendums on the four Ukrainian territories in the east joining the Russian Federation under UN supervision. He also controversially said that as basis of a peace deal Ukraine would have to permanently cede Crimea. It was particularly the Crimea aspect which sparked an immediate backlash and pile-on of pundits, journalists, and even diplomats – on up to Ukrainian President Zelensky himself – who suggested this means Musk “supports Russia”. According to more of Peskov’s words via Interfax (machine translation): “At the same time, he recalled that from the very beginning, Russia advocated that the conditions put forward by Moscow be fulfilled through negotiations. Unlike many professional diplomats, Peskov noted, Musk is still trying to find ways to achieve peace. “Achieving peace without fulfilling Russia’s conditions is absolutely impossible. Many ideas there deserve attention,” he said..”

But Peskov underscored there can be no “redo” of the referendums, given Moscow has already moved to bestow legal recognition of the four regions’ integration into Russia. “And there can be nothing else here. Today the president will sign decrees, and this will become the territory of the Russian Federation. But I repeat once again, the fact itself is very positive, when such people think, try to think logically, what could be done, to switch to a peaceful course,” Peskov said. To review, Musk’s poll had laid out four proposals: • Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people. • Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake). • Water supply to Crimea assured. • Ukraine remains neutral. After more than 2.7 million votes, of which Musk said many were bots attempting to skew the results, it’s clear that public opinion remains fiercely divided on the war, given sizeable groups on either side. Meanwhile Chinese state media pundit Hu Xijin pointed out the following…

Elon Musk has released his personality too much, and he believes too much in the US and West’s “freedom of speech.” He will be taught a lesson. pic.twitter.com/nv4VU7rFIv

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) October 4, 2022

We presume.

• Elon Musk Proposes To Buy Twitter At Original $44B Price To Avoid Trial (NYP)

Elon Musk has offered to close his original deal to buy Twitter for a whopping $44 billion — a bid to avoid a court trial over the hotly contested agreement slated for later this month, sources told The Post. The billionaire Tesla CEO is in talks for a settlement to acquire the social network for $54.20 per share — the same price he agreed to in April before saying in July he was pulling out of the deal, according to sources close to the talks. Twitter shares spiked more than 13% to $48.13 immediately following an earlier report of Musk’s proposal by Bloomberg and were halted for pending news. Musk sent a letter to Twitter with the offer, according to Bloomberg. Musk notified Twitter’s lawyers of the offer to go through with the deal under its original terms late Monday night, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The two sides worked toward hashing out an agreement in a Delaware Court of Chancery hearing this morning that was closed to the public, the source said. Another hearing will likely be held this afternoon but it’s unclear whether the judge hearing the case, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, will make it open to the public. Months of bad blood between Twitter and Musk have made Twitter insistent that the Delaware court supervise the closing process in the coming days. If everything goes as expected and Musk doesn’t try to pull any last-minute “gotchas” on Twitter, the deal should realistically close within days or at most a week, a source familiar with the matter said. Twitter sued Musk over his refusal to go through with the deal in a trial that was set to open on Oct. 17.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed by Twitter’s attorneys on Thursday and Friday this week, raising the prospect that the last-minute deal was made in part to avoid the deposition. [..] Analysts who cover Twitter say that $54.20 is an astronomically high price to pay for the scandal-plagued social media site. Without Musk’s involvement, Twitter would be trading in the $20 range, analysts say.

BBee musk

Twitter Employee Undergoes Therapy Over Elon Musk Takeover

from our team at @TheBabylonBee pic.twitter.com/wg0fZ9Z1MV

— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) October 4, 2022

The kill list has Kiev government support, which in turn has massive US/UK support. The list now includes US/UK citizens. Can’t make it up? Well, you don’t have to. This is a government that actively supports, to the tune of tens of billions, a foreign government that threatens to kill its citizens.

• Roger Waters Says He’s On Ukrainian ‘Kill List’ (RT)

British rock star Roger Waters, a co-founder of Pink Floyd, has allegedly been placed on a Ukrainian “kill list”after speaking out against Western military meddling and calling on Kiev to make peace with Russia. In an interview with Rolling Stone published on Tuesday, the 79-year-old pushed back against accusations that he’s been repeating Russian talking points about the conflict in Ukraine. “Don’t forget, I’m on a kill list that is supported by the Ukrainian government. I’m on the fu**ing list, and they’ve killed people recently… When they kill you, they write ‘liquidated’ across your picture. Well, I’m one of those fu**ing pictures.” Waters gave the example of Darya Dugina, the Russian journalist murdered in August after appearing on the Ukrainian Mirotvorets list.

As the musician noted, her entry on the list was marked “liquidated” after she was killed in a car-bombing. Others who have questioned or criticized the Kiev regime, such as photojournalists Andrea Rocchelli of Italy and Andrei Stenin of Russia, have also been killed after appearing on the Mirotvorets list. The site lists personal information on its blacklist targets, which also include politicians and NGO activists. Mirotvorets, or “Peacemaker,” is an independent database of individuals whom anonymous moderators consider to be threats to Ukrainian national security. The site denies being a kill list; rather, it claims to be a source of information for law-enforcement agencies and “special services” about pro-Russian terrorists, separatists and war criminals, among others. It allegedly has links to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.

Waters stirred backlash earlier this year, when he suggested that US President Joe Biden was a “war criminal” for fueling the Ukraine crisis and sent an open letter to the wife of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, urging her to help “stop the slaughter” by pushing for a negotiated peace deal with Russia. He later sent an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking for guarantees that Russia wouldn’t expand beyond Crimea and the Donbass region. Pressed by Rolling Stone on why he isn’t supportive of Ukraine’s resistance against Russian forces, Waters said, “Because it’s an unnecessary war, and those people should not be dying. And Russia should not have been encouraged to invade Ukraine.” He also dismissed reports of Russian war crimes in Ukraine as Western propaganda.

Two concerts that Waters had scheduled for next April in Krakow, Poland, may be canceled because of his push for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, the musician said late last month. “Draconian censoring of my work will deny them the opportunity to make up their own minds,” he said of his Polish audiences. The wide-ranging Mirotvorets kill list also includes Faina Savenkova, a 13-year-old girl in the Lugansk People’s Republic who called for the United Nations to end the fighting that has dragged on in her region since 2014.

We’ll wait for his successor.

• Kremlin Reacts To Zelensky Banning Talks With Putin (RT)

To resume peace talks with Kiev, Moscow will wait for either a change of stance by the current Ukrainian president or for a new leader, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. This comes after President Zelensky signed a decree ruling out negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even before the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in late February, Moscow “was the supporter of the idea of achieving the terms put forward by the Russian side through diplomatic means,” Peskov told journalists on Tuesday. Russia is still ready to look for a negotiated solution to the conflict between the neighbors, according to the spokesman. But “it takes two parties to negotiate,” he noted. “We’ll now be waiting for the current president to change his stance or for the arrival of the future president of Ukraine, who would change his position in the interests of the Ukrainian people,”Peskov said.

On Tuesday, Zelensky signed a decree on Ukraine officially rejecting peace talks with Putin. It rubber stamped decisions made by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, on Friday, just hours after Putin signed agreements on Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions joining Russia. One of the resolutions was: “stating the impossibility of conducting negotiations with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.” Zelensky recorded a video address after the meeting claiming that “we [Ukraine] are ready for dialogue with Russia, but with another president of Russia.” In his speech on Friday, Putin called upon Ukraine to “cease all hostilities, stop the war it started back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table.”

However, he made it clear that the decision to unite with Russia, which the people of Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions made during referendums, was not up for discussion. Kiev should treat the “free choice” of the four territories “with respect,” Putin said, adding that it was “the only way for peace.” Moscow and Kiev have not sat down at the negotiating table since talks in Istanbul in late March. The Russian side, which initially expressed optimism on the peace process, later accused Ukraine of backtracking on all the progress achieved in Türkiye, saying it had lost trust in Kiev’s negotiators. In recent months, Ukraine has been either putting forward terms that Moscow deemed ‘unrealistic’ for the resumption of talks, or said that they can only begin after Russia is defeated on the battlefield.

During the conflict, Zelensky has also, on several occasions, proposed meeting with Putin face-to-face in order to find a way to end the hostilities. But Moscow insisted that the two leaders should only get together to sign concrete agreements already prepared for them by the negotiating teams.

These things take time.

• Russian Partial Mobilization Numbers Revealed (RT)

Russia’s partial mobilization plans are already more than two-thirds complete, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced during a conference call on Tuesday. It comes almost two weeks after President Vladimir Putin called to bolster the military amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The defense chief said that over 200,000 persons have so far been added to the Russian Armed Forces, all of whom are now undergoing the necessary training. Shoigu has instructed relevant officials to provide the mobilized recruits with all the necessary clothing and other items and appoint them to military positions.

The minister added that there is also a significant number of volunteers showing up at the military commissariats wanting to join the army, and stressed that it is “extremely important” to assess each appeal carefully and to not reject anyone unless there are serious reasons to. He also explained that those who have been called into service in the past two weeks will only be sent to take part in Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine after they finish training and develop combat coordination with units that are already on the ground. In order to speed up the training process, the minister has ordered commanders to provide fresh recruits with additional training under the guidance of officers with combat experience.

Furthermore, the ministry announced that conscripts who fall under the upcoming draft, which will take place in November and recruit some 120,000 people, will serve in units not involved in the military operation. Meanwhile, those who have just finished their mandatory service in Russia’s armed forces will be returning home. Speaking in a televised address on September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a partial mobilization, looking to recruit some 300,000 reservists to take part in the ongoing military conflict with Ukraine which began in late February. The Russian Defense Ministry has since clarified that the mobilization prioritizes those who have served in the military and who’ve had previous combat experience as well as the necessary specializations needed on the front line.

“British intelligence has warned the General Staff that these forces may be concentrating for a Russian counter-attack..”

• Maneuver Warfare (Schryver)

For weeks now, the vastly outnumbered Russian forces have been executing a fighting retreat – ceding territory to the advancing Ukrainians, briefly occupying strong prepared defensive positions from which they inflict severe losses on the Ukrainian attackers, and then retreating yet again to another line of prepared positions. As is always the case during an ongoing battle, reliable casualty numbers are difficult to ascertain. But the nature of the terrain, the strength of the prepared Russian defenses, and the Russians’ overwhelming superiority in terms of air power and artillery have afforded them a huge battlefield advantage.

Contributing to this advantage has been the frequently displayed rashness of almost suicidal banzai-like Ukrainian assaults on hardened Russian positions which, although their significant numerical superiority ultimately permitted them to compel another Russian retreat, hugely disproportionate losses of manpower and military equipment have been inflicted on the Ukrainian attackers. Late last week, in my article entitled Turning Point, I described how the Ukrainians had expended thousands of troops and hundreds of vehicles in their quasi-fanatical attempts to take both Kupyansk and Liman. Nevertheless, those two towns were taken, and the Ukrainians have continued to make modest advances since then while the Russians prepare yet another hardened defensive line several kilometers further east.

I’ve also been reporting for weeks now regarding the never-ending trains of Russian equipment and troops streaming into the region from various directions – and yet few if any of these major reinforcements have found their way to the front lines, much to the chagrin of those cheering on the Russian cause, and who have been devastated by what appear to be repeated Russian defeats. However, in just the last few hours, reports have been leaking out that western intelligence has detected a major buildup of Russian forces in and around Belgorod, just across the border of the Kharkov Oblast, and immediately north of the current line of contact. The reliability of this intelligence is not yet determined, and even if true, its significance remains as yet unknown, but I will share two of the reports I’ve seen on Telegram in the past couple hours – reports that are circulating among both Russian- and Ukrainian-friendly sources with a reasonable degree of established credibility.

First from a Ukrainian-friendly channel that has long exhibited connections to a source within the Ukrainian government: “Our source reports that the Office of the President received a warning that the risk of a Russian strike and counter-offensive behind Ukrainian lines remains. “The only thing is that no one can say exactly when, how, and where it will happen. The movement can abruptly begin along the entire border of Ukraine. The Russians know that Zelensky instructed everyone to remove reserves from the border regions and send them to the front line for an offensive (blitzkrieg). “That is, once again entering the Sumy region, the RF Armed Forces can easily take hundreds of kilometers under them, not to mention an attack on the northern part of the Kharkov region, or Belarus joining the game.”

A Russian-friendly source (presumably also relying on a Ukraine-friendly source) reports as follows: “MI6 has passed intelligence to the Office of the President (Zelensky) and the General Staff (Zaluzhny) that Russia continues to amass forces in the Belgorod region and appear to be in no rush to use them as a reserve. “British intelligence has warned the General Staff that these forces may be concentrating for a Russian counter-attack along the border of the Oskol River to cut off the increasingly stretched Ukrainian forces grouping that has only a few supply routes available to it.”

“..central bankers and governments are going to get sick of being humiliated by financial markets. They’ll decide that significant currency intervention is needed to stabilise exchange rates.”

• Capital Controls – The Third Horseman Of The Unholy Trinity (Hubble)

According to an economic theory called the Unholy Trinity, governments can only ever have two of the following three things: pegged exchange rates, independent monetary policy and free capital flows. The reason why this is so is quite complicated. But the point is that they must choose two of the three, making the third a pressure valve for the problems created by their attempts to control the other two. Of course, governments occasionally try to have all three. But it always ends in humiliation. It’s only a question of when. In this context, humiliation may mean the breaking of the (managed) currency peg. Think of what happened to sterling on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, when the currency was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and subsequently plunged.

Alternatively, humiliation may mean the loss of control of monetary policy, and rampant inflation. There are plenty of contemporary examples. Finally, humiliation may involve massive capital flight from the country in question, which results in the imposition of capital controls. Apartheid-era South Africa provides a good example. Just look at the news today for the latest example of the Unholy Trinity being on the move… In Japan, the authorities re pegging interest rates low to help the economy and the government deal with too much debt. This is a major reason why the yen has been hammered in foreign exchange markets this year.

In the UK, there are fears of a currency crisis because interest rates can’t go higher without triggering a debt crisis. In Sweden, the central bank was forced to hike interest rates a full percent to try and stem the tide in the falling currency. The pressure valves are whistling. Currencies and monetary policy are colliding with each other. And policy makers are being humiliated. But what about the third part of the Unholy Trinity? For now, capital flows are still free. In my view, at some point, central bankers and governments are going to get sick of being humiliated by financial markets. They’ll decide that significant currency intervention is needed to stabilise exchange rates. And they won’t be willing to give up on controlling monetary policy. But that means they’ll be forced to unleash the third horseman of the Unholy Trinity: capital controls.

It cannot -should not- be that Fauci gets to terrorize the nation for 2+ years, double his wealth in the process, retire in peace with the largest US pension ever, and pay Daszak millions more for gain-of-function research.

• Fauci Gives Daszak Millions More To Study Gain Of Function (NYP)

A shadowy NYC non-profit run by a scientist who tried to squelch the theory that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese lab has received millions more from the National Institutes of Health to study similar viruses in Southeast Asia. A $653,392 grant to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, awarded Sept. 21, is being administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — whose director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, announced in August that he was stepping down at the end of this year. The grant is the first installment of a five-year award totaling $3.3 million — and was doled out on the same day NIAID awarded EcoHealth more than $2.1 million for two more ongoing studies, one of which involves so-called “gain-of-function” to make viruses more dangerous.

EcoHealth Alliance previously received millions in grants — directing some of those funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from where many believe COVID-19 leaked into the city of 11 million and trigged the worst global pandemic in 100 years. Previously released emails have documented a close relationship between Daszak and Fauci, who received a “personal thank you” from the EcoHealth chief in April 2020 for backing the theory that COVID-19 spread naturally from bats to humans. Vanity Fair reported in June of last year that Daszak personally organized a February 2020 statement signed by 27 scientists and published in the influential British medical journal The Lancet.

The statement, which deplored the lab leak idea as a conspiracy theory, included the signatures of six scientists who had either worked at or been funded by EcoHealth Alliance — conflicts that, along with Daszak’s ties to the Wuhan lab, were not disclosed. Daszak has so far declined to answer questions from lawmakers about EcoHealth’s work with the Wuhan lab, leading Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to call for the organization to be blocked from receiving federal funds until its leader comes clean. “This is like a bad sequel with the same plot and characters, but a bigger budget,” Ernst told The Post in a statement Monday.

“He effectively swapped out an entity that he owned 20% of to a business that he owned 100% of, which is fraud.”

• Hunter Biden Committed ‘Fraud’ Against Business Partners – Bobulinski (Fox)

Tony Bobulinski says his former associate, Hunter Biden, committed crimes against his business partners by tampering with key documents to funnel over $5 million into a company he owned. “It’s called fraud,” Bobulinski told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, during an in-depth conversation that will air during “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Tuesday. Bobulinski, a retired lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, is the former CEO of SinoHawk Holdings, which he has long said was the partnership between a Chinese energy firm and the Biden family. He believes Hunter Biden changed references to a SinoHawk-linked LLC called Oneida Holdings in a 2017 limited liability company agreement to divert millions of dollars to a company he held a larger stake in.

“It’s sort of staggering that that document is exactly the same document as SinoHawk Holdings, LLC. And it appears that Hunter Biden, Jim Biden and the Biden family literally copied the same document down to typos… they removed Oneida Holdings, which was the Delaware LLC that represented Jim Biden, Hunter Biden, myself, Rob Walker and James Gilliar,” Bobulinski said. “Hunter and his lawyer, Jorge Misires, replaced it with Owasco, which was Hunter Biden’s law firm or business that he operated,” Bobulinski said. “He effectively swapped out an entity that he owned 20% of to a business that he owned 100% of, which is fraud.” Carlson then asked Bobulinski if he saw any other possible explanation than fraud committed by Hunter Biden. “I’m sure you can reach out to the Biden family and get comment from them, but there are calls,” Bobulinski said. “He received over $5 million.”

“When you’re radically destabilizing and restructuring a society, you hit them hard with the Shock-and-Awe for a few weeks, or months (or years in this case), and then you gently ease them into the new “reality.”

• The Morning After (CJ Hopkins)

This is the weirdest part of the PSYOP. It’s like the morning after an office party on which you wake up almost terminally hungover to hazy memories of having performed a Tequila-fuelled blowjob on Bob in Accounting in what was either the 9th Floor Reception Area or possibly the downstairs lobby of your building while someone vaguely resembling that smirking kid in the Mail Room filmed it on his phone. Yes, it’s the Morning After … that revolting regurgitant chorus you’re hearing is the sound of millions of Covidian Cultists down on their knees in their gender-neutral bathrooms praying to the Porcelain God. It has been quite a trip these last two and a half years, but the orgy of fear and hatred is over, the mass hysteria is wearing off, and the reality of the damage they have done is beginning to become undeniable.

Countless thousands of people have been killed, seriously injured, and permanently disabled, victims of experimental “vaccines” they did not need but were coerced into taking. Societies have been torn apart, economies crippled, institutions discredited, democratic precepts like the rule of law and constitutional rights made mockeries of themselves, friends and families turned against each other, and so on, and the dust hasn’t even settled yet. It will take many years to assess the damage…or, rather, to recontextualize, rationalize, deny, and memory-hole the damage (while simultaneously “normalizing” the fascistic biosecurity dystopia the damage made it possible to implement). This process is now well underway.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed over the past several months, governments, global health authorities, the corporate and state media, the culture industry, and other key components of “The New Normal Reich” have been quietly phasing out their “Covid restrictions,” rewriting “The Science,” rewriting history (i.e., the science and history they had previously rewritten), executing limited hangouts, and otherwise transitioning the masses out of “emergency” mode and into the New Normal. In other words, everything is going to plan. You can’t keep people whipped up into a state of full-blown hysteria indefinitely. When you’re radically destabilizing and restructuring a society, you hit them hard with the Shock-and-Awe for a few weeks, or months (or years in this case), and then you gently ease them into the new “reality.”

Time is in the eye of the beholder.

• Why Does Time Go Forwards, Not Backwards? (Henriques)

Here’s the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric. This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann. “So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don’t look at the details,” says Rovelli.

“From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in. “It’s not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time,” Rovelli says. It’s that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards. While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things. “What is entropy?” Rovelli says. “Entropy is simply how much we’re forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules.”

If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place? “The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe,” says Carroll. “The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That’s why time has a direction for us.” The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. “The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that,” says Carroll. “And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don’t really take that problem seriously enough.”

8 minutes of Bobulinski

2 years ago, before the last presidential election, we interviewed a former business partner of the Biden family called Tony Bobulinski. His story of influence peddling and corruption went ignored. Bobulinski's learned quite a bit more recently. Here's part of what he had to say. pic.twitter.com/mCaEYLbGgw

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 5, 2022