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Debt Rattle February 26 2022

Feb 262022
 
 February 26, 2022  Posted by at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  72 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Guitar 1925

 

• Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble (Lee Smith)
• Biden Admin Tells Zelenskyy to Stop Negotiating Meeting With Russia (CTH)
• From the Black Sea to the East Med, Do Not Poke The Russian Bear (Escobar)
• The Party of Chaos Blows Its Cover (Kunstler)
• Why Putin Went to War (Lauria)
• EU ‘Moving Forward’ On Russia SWIFT Shut-Out, ‘Not Nuclear Option’ (ZH)
• Here’s Why the Russian Sanctions Are a Dud (Martens)
• ‘This War Will Last’ – Macron (AFP)
• Sean Penn Making Documentary In Ukraine (RT)
• Granny Gets Her Gun – From A Bunch Of Shameless Neo-Nazis (Peter Hitchens)
• Institute On Claims Vaccine Side Effects Massively Underreported (Eugyp)

 

 

 

 

The primrose path

 

 

@PandaTribune: Under Trump, Putin wasn’t Putin troops in Ukraine. Putin was Biden his time until 2020. He knew that the Dem strategy of Putin Biden in a basement (instead of Putin America first) would get Biden Putin the WH. Maybe in ’24 we can Putin a new POTUS, but it might be too late Biden!

 

 

Stephen Cohen

 

 

MPN

 

 

Lukashenko

 

 

“.. exposing the national security establishment’s role in two separate, destructive coups: the first, in 2014, targeting the government of Ukraine, and the second, starting two years later, the government of the United States.”

• Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble (Lee Smith)

Russian President Vladimir Putin chose this war, Joe Biden said in his Thursday afternoon speech to America regarding the conflict in Ukraine. That is true, but U.S. elites also had something to do with Putin’s ugly and destructive choice—a role that Democrats and Republicans are eager to paper over with noble-sounding rhetoric about the bravery of Ukraine’s badly outgunned military. Yes, the Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon, first against Russia and then against each other, with little consideration for the Ukrainian people who are now paying the price for America’s folly.

It is not an expression of support for Putin’s grotesque actions to try to understand why it seemed worthwhile for him to risk hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of thousands of servicemen, and the possible stability of his own regime in order to invade his neighbor. After all, Putin’s reputation until this moment has always been as a shrewd ex-KGB man who eschewed high-risk gambles in favor of sure things backed by the United States, like entering Syria and then escalating forces there. So why has he adopted exactly the opposite strategy here, and chosen the road of open high-risk confrontation with the American superpower? Yes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening.

That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin. While the timing of Putin’s attack on Ukraine is no doubt connected to a variety of factors, including the Russian dictator’s read on U.S. domestic politics and the preferences of his own superpower sponsor in Beijing, the sense that Ukraine poses a meaningful threat to Russia is not a product of Putin’s paranoia—or of a sudden desire to restore the power and prestige of the Soviet Union, however much Putin might wish for that to happen. Rather, it is a geopolitical threat that has grown steadily more pressing and been employed with greater recklessness by Americans and Ukrainians alike over the past decade.

That Ukraine has allowed itself to be used as a pawn against a powerful neighbor is in part the fault of Kyiv’s reckless and corrupt political class. But Ukraine is not a superpower that owes allies and client-states judicious leadership—that’s the role of the United States. And in that role, the United States has failed Ukraine. More broadly, the use of Ukraine as a goad against enemies domestic and foreign has recklessly damaged the failing yet necessary European security architecture that America spent 75 years building and maintaining. Why can’t the American security establishment shoulder responsibility for its role in the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine? Because to discuss American responsibility openly would mean exposing the national security establishment’s role in two separate, destructive coups: the first, in 2014, targeting the government of Ukraine, and the second, starting two years later, the government of the United States.

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“The U.S. wants President Zelenskyy to leave Ukraine, so the State Department can take full control over the narrative. Zelenskyy is refusing to leave.”

• Biden Admin Tells Zelenskyy to Stop Negotiating Meeting With Russia (CTH)

Unfortunately for Zelenskyy, an end to the fighting would be against the interests of the Biden administration. Highlighting the point, the U.S. State Department does not want Zelenskyy and Putin to meet. The Biden administration conveys a very telling message, from their perspective, saying only the United States is permitted to negotiate with Russia on behalf of Ukraine. Zelenskyy needs to stay out of it. “WASHINGTON: Russia’s offer for talks with Ukraine is an attempt to conduct diplomacy “at the barrel of a gun”, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Friday (Feb 25), saying Russia must stop its bombing in Ukraine if it is serious about diplomacy. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said earlier on Friday that Russia was ready to send a delegation to the Belarusian capital Minsk for talks.

Russia had attempted to engage in “a pretense of diplomacy” even as it prepared to invade Ukraine this week, Price told reporters at a news briefing. “Now we see Moscow suggesting that diplomacy take place at the barrel of a gun, or as Moscow’s rockets, mortars, artillery target the Ukrainian people,” he said. “This is not real diplomacy. Those are not the conditions for real diplomacy.”

[…] Responding to reports that the US government had ordered officials to stop most contacts with Russia, Price said the invasion of Ukraine had “fundamentally changed” Moscow’s relationship with Washington and other nations. But US officials would continue to engage with their Russian counterparts on important national security issues, including the talks to return to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, he said. The arrogance and controlling attitude by the U.S. State Dept tells us all we really need to know. The Biden administration has created this crisis between Russia and Ukraine for a convenient purpose, and the White House is not about to let Zelenskyy screw it up and create peace. The U.S. wants President Zelenskyy to leave Ukraine, so the State Department can take full control over the narrative. Zelenskyy is refusing to leave.

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“History loves playing tricks: what was a “gift” to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.”

• From the Black Sea to the East Med, Do Not Poke The Russian Bear (Escobar)

This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born in breathtaking speed. From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a history lesson delivered by President Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to their appeal to President Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process. The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced its paws to pounce – was Zelensky the Comedian, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon. Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American concept invented to launch wars in MENA (remember Libya?) was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass. First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since going to Syria in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation (…) aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine”, as Putin defined it. Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandon any plans to join NATO; negotiate directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarize and declare Ukraine as neutral.

Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters: the Russian demand for “indivisible security”. The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were boxed in as the occupying force of territories of two Russian allies that Moscow had just sworn to protect. So it was Get Out – Or Else. “Or else” came as rolling thunder: the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air Force, Navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.

And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the artillery of one of the Baby Twins, the DPR, that hit the HQ of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops. [..] We could soon witness the birth of an independent Novorossiya – east of the Dnieper, south along Sea of Azov/Black Sea, the way it was when attached to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. But now totally aligned with Russia, and providing a land bridge to Transnistria. Ukraine, of course, would lose any access to the Black Sea. History loves playing tricks: what was a “gift” to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.

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“..what goes on there is none of our business, and never was, until we started meddling in it in 2014.”

• The Party of Chaos Blows Its Cover (Kunstler)

[..] here is what I think is happening and will happen in Ukraine. The Russian aim is to neutralize Ukraine’s military capability — the means for harassing the eastern provinces known as the Donbas. That has been accomplished. Ukraine no longer has an air force, a navy, or a whole lot of weapons and munitions. It is surely in Russia’s interest to complete this operation in as few days as possible to minimize harm to civilian lives and property. The Ukrainians appear to understand that, too. The politicians and NGO organizations groomed by American sponsorship in Ukraine will be deactivated, relieved of their responsibilities, and put out of business. If Mr. Putin is prudent, he will not murder or persecute them. A regime friendly to Russia will eventually be installed.

Keep in mind, Ukraine had been a province of Russia one way or another for more than two hundred years — except for the calamitous past thirty years — and Ukraine doesn’t really represent much more than an administrative and fiscal challenge. Russia’s ultimate interest in this matter is to stabilize its border. We in the USA perhaps can’t appreciate that because our current government shows no interest in stabilizing our own border. (We will in the future, when the Party of Chaos is swept out of power.) I’ll refrain from speculating much on the broader geopolitical repercussions of Russia’s Ukraine operation, since it’s not over and there is still a chance for much to go awry. The general proposition that it represents a milestone in America’s loss of global power and credibility is probably correct.

We have spent the last thirty years since the fall of the USSR invading and harassing one country after another, not always with altogether bad intentions, but always with disastrous results. It looks like we will have to take a break from that activity. We have too much to look after and clean up with our own act. The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was, until we started meddling in it in 2014.

In the awakening underway here and now, Americans will see how so many of the ills and derangements of recent years are products of our own Deep State aligned with a perfidious party of the Left and other global actors. We have harmed ourselves terribly and can’t seem to stop — and we must stop it, beginning with calling off the Covid-19 “vaccine” crusade. That will come any day, I predict, and then the people who brought all of this grief on are going to have to answer for it.

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“We will not make this mistake the second time. We have no right to do so.”

• Why Putin Went to War (Lauria)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a TV address Thursday morning that the goal of Russia’s military operation was not to take control of Ukraine, but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” the country. Moments after he spoke, explosions were heard in several Ukrainian cities. The Russian Defense Ministry said these were “precision” attacks against Ukrainian military installations and that civilians were not being targeted. It said Ukraine’s air force on the ground and its air defenses had been destroyed. [..]

In his 3,350-word speech, Putin laid out in full detail the reasons he decided to take military action and what he hopes it will achieve. The speech is a devastating critique of U.S. policy toward Russia over the past 30 years, which no doubt will fall on deaf ears in Washington. Western media is so far ignoring the speech or superficially dismissing it. But it has to be carefully studied if anyone is interested in understanding why Russia launched this military operation. Just calling Putin “Hitler,” as Nancy Pelosi did Wednesday night, won’t do. Hitler in fact features in Putin’s address. For instance, addressing the Ukrainian military, Putin said: “Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.”

He linked the Nazis’ invasion of Russia to NATO’s threat today, saying this time there would be no appeasement: “Of course, this situation begs a question: what next, what are we to expect? If history is any guide, we know that in 1940 and early 1941 the Soviet Union went to great lengths to prevent war or at least delay its outbreak. To this end, the USSR sought not to provoke the potential aggressor until the very end by refraining or postponing the most urgent and obvious preparations it had to make to defend itself from an imminent attack. When it finally acted, it was too late. As a result, the country was not prepared to counter the invasion by Nazi Germany, which attacked our Motherland on June 22, 1941, without declaring war.

“The country stopped the enemy and went on to defeat it, but this came at a tremendous cost. The attempt to appease the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after the hostilities broke out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of lives. We will not make this mistake the second time. We have no right to do so.”

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Hot air.

• EU ‘Moving Forward’ On Russia SWIFT Shut-Out, ‘Not Nuclear Option’ (ZH)

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is the financial-messaging infrastructure that links the world’s banks. The Belgium-based system is run by its member banks and handles millions of daily payment instructions across more than 200 countries and territories and 11,000 financial institutions. Iran and North Korea are cut off from it. So, given all that, Goldman Sachs’ Allison Nathan asked the question on everyone’s lips: “The removal of Russia from SWIFT – the global electronic payment-messaging system – has been referred to as the “nuclear option” for sanctions. Do you agree with that characterization?”

Eddie Fishman – the former Russia and Europe Lead in the US State Department’s Office of Economic Sanctions Policy and Implementation – responded in a fascinating way: “No – it’s not even close to being the nuclear option… SWIFT is just a messaging service. If the US and Europe decided to cut Russians banks off from SWIFT without imposing full-blocking sanctions on them, they could still transact with US and European financial institutions – they just couldn’t use SWIFT to do so.” Fishman went on to point out a potentially even bigger blowback consequence for the West’s actions: “…and in a perverse way, that may actually increase the demand for SWIFT alternatives, such as Russia’s own System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS).”

Russia could also be tempted to move to China’s financial messaging system, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer told reporters on Thursday. “Suspending Swift “would hurt Russia less than the European Union,” he said. Interestingly, given Germany’s prior comments against SWIFT termination, Bloomberg reports that Germany’s finance minister shocked more than a few marketwatchers this afternoon by saying that ‘we are open to cutting Russia off SWIFT’ with a German government advisor telling RND that “banning Russia from SWIFT is manageable.”

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Big banks.

• Here’s Why the Russian Sanctions Are a Dud (Martens)

While Ukrainian children sleep with their pets in the subways, living in terror of the bombs raining down on them from their Russian invaders, wealthy Russian oligarchs are being comforted by “relationship managers” at banks owned by the very nations that say they are going to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of Ukraine. Noticeably missing from President Biden’s press conference yesterday on expanded sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine was any mention of how the U.S. and its allies were going to deal with the big foreign global banks that conduct banking business for thousands of Russian corporations and millions of Russian individuals. Biden only mentioned sanctions on Russian banks.

That sent a loud message to the MOEX Index at the Moscow Stock Exchange, which as of 2:49 p.m. today in Moscow (6:49 a.m. in New York) had rallied into positive territory from a loss of as much as 45 percent yesterday, when the precise nature of the expanded sanctions were as yet unknown. One of the global foreign banks with large operations in Russia is the French global bank Societe Generale’s Rosbank. According to its website, it has 5 million individual clients in Russia and 9,000 large corporate clients. It posted a reassuring notice to its customers on its website this morning, stating that it “continues to operate in a routine manner.” It noted the following:

“Rosbank retail and corporate clients have full access to financial assets and financial banking services. We are confident in our ability to provide continuous and quality customer service and adapt where necessary, while complying with all applicable regulations.” Another large foreign bank with large operations in Russia is Austria’s Raiffeisenbank, which has been operating in Russia since 1996. It notes on its Russian website that it is “one of 13 systemically important banks in Russia,” that it ranks number 10 by assets and number 8 by the number of retail customers. Its reginal network in Russia includes five branches and 116 outlets. Italy’s UniCredit also has large operations in Russia. A bank spokesperson told Reuters yesterday that it “had very high provisions against possible loan losses and was ‘very liquid and self-funded.’ ” Reuters reports that UniCredit’s Russian bank is the 12th largest bank in the country with 7.8 billion Euros in customer loans at the end of last year.

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Why would he say that? Is it what he wants? Oh wait, elections in April.

• ‘This War Will Last’ – Macron (AFP)

The world must brace for a long war between Russia and Ukraine after Moscow launched an invasion of its pro-Western neighbour, French President Emmanuel Macron warned on Saturday. “I can tell you one thing this morning it is that this war will last,” Macron’s told France’s annual agriculture fair. “This crisis will last, this war will last and all the crises that come with it will have lasting consequences,” Macron added, warning: “We must be prepared”. Macron cut short his visit to the agriculture fair, usually one of the main fixtures on the French political calendar, in order to return to dealing with the crisis triggered by the Russian invasion.


“War has returned to Europe, this was chosen unilaterally by President (Vladimir) Putin, with a tragic humanitarian situation, a (Ukrainian) people who are resisting and a Europe that is there and resisting by the side of the Ukrainian people,” said Macron. Macron has again called an emergency defence council of top ministers and military security officials to discuss the situation in Ukraine which will take place at 1600 GMT, the Elysee said. With the war and sanctions against Russia risking damage for specific sectors in France, notably the wine industry, Macron vowed a “plan of resilience” to help them cope. The French leader was a key figure in efforts to avert conflict, repeatedly speaking to Putin and seeking in vain to broker a summit between the Russian leader and US President Joe Biden. The war has also broken out as the clock ticks down to France’s presidential elections in April.

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What on earth is he doing there? California not in bad enough shape?

• Sean Penn Making Documentary In Ukraine (RT)

Penn arrived in Kiev on Thursday to “tell the world the truth about Russia’s invasion” of its neighbor, with the Office of the President of Ukraine announcing the actor’s arrival. Penn was seen at a press briefing in the presidential office in Kiev on Thursday, and was also briefly featured in an Instagram story posted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian government has expressed gratitude to Penn, writing in a statement: “The director specially came to Kyiv to record all the events that are currently happening in Ukraine and to tell the world the truth about Russia’s invasion of our country. Sean Penn is among those who support Ukraine in Ukraine today. Our country is grateful to him for such a show of courage and honesty.”


The statement went on to contrast Penn’s “bravery” against the inactivity of some of Ukraine’s Western partners in the face of the military operation launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Penn had previously visited Ukraine back in November 2021 to work on another documentary about the Donbass and “Russian aggression.” Back then, he visited the eastern regions of the country and spoke to servicemen. Photos of Penn’s trip were released at the time by the Ukrainian Joint Forces Operation Press Service, where he could be seen dressed in combat gear while filming with his crew.

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From last Sunday.

• Granny Gets Her Gun – From A Bunch Of Shameless Neo-Nazis (Peter Hitchens)

If the BBC found a group of neo-Nazis among some student Tories, or among Trump supporters in the USA, they would surely tell us about it, hot and strong. Quite right too. In fact, the Corporation’s horror and disgust at such people is one of the few things I absolutely share with them. So why did they last week repeatedly broadcast an entire news item, featuring a group of undoubted, shameless neo-Nazis, actually wearing SS insignia on their clothes – and not even notice? The film starred a sweet old great-grandma, Valentina Konstaninovska, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. She was getting lessons from soldiers in how to fight off the Russians with an AK-47 burp gun. Pictures of the doughty 78-year-old also featured in several newspapers last Monday.

But it was only in the film that you could see the shoulder-flashes worn by the soldiers. These display a sinister, jagged symbol called the ‘Wolfsangel’. This is an explicitly Nazi emblem, originally used by Hitler’s ‘Das Reich’ Waffen SS division. This unit is still famous for murdering 200 people in Serbia, for a massacre of 920 Jews in Minsk, now in Belarus, for hanging 99 people in retaliation for French Resistance operations in Tulle. But above all it is notorious for the mass murder in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, in which the SS men machine-gunned or burned to death 642 civilians, including women and children. The Wolfsangel can be seen in archive pictures of the Das Reich division’s tanks.

The patches worn by their Ukrainian fans also carry the word ‘Azov’ and so proclaim that they are members of the ‘Azov Battalion’. Who? An FBI investigator said in 2018 that the Azov Battalion was a ‘paramilitary unit… known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology and the use of Nazi symbolism’. Its defenders now bleat that it has been absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard. This was the pathetic excuse offered by the BBC when I asked them how they had come to fail to report the truth. Bilge. If these men are permitted to wear this repulsive, shameful badge it is easy to work out who is the boss in this relationship. If they were even slightly under the control of civilised people, they would certainly not be allowed to do so, even if their shaven heads were still full of poison and filth.

No proper army would have them at all, even in the direst need. Is it really possible that, in the BBC’s vast and costly apparatus of reporters, editors, producers, fact-checkers and bureaucrats, not one person spotted the problem? If so, we are dealing with Olympic-level incompetence. But it is my suspicion that something else is going on. The generation that kept the BBC relatively impartial is fast dying off. Those who remain have accepted a large number of contentious opinions as facts. One of these opinions is the ridiculous cartoon idea that Russia is like Mordor in Lord Of The Rings, an utterly evil country ruled by a Dark Monster. And that Ukraine, its current enemy, is by contrast a shining Utopia, pluckily defending itself against the orc-like hordes of Moscow. This explains why the BBC were so keen to use this film, in which a Brave Granny Gets Her Gun.

Read more …

Not much Covid today.

• Institute On Claims Vaccine Side Effects Massively Underreported (Eugyp)

The Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, Germany’s vaccine regulator, has responded to Andreas Schöfbeck’s letter (translated here), suggesting on the basis of BKK billing data that officially acknowledged rates of adverse vaccine reactions substantially understate the risk of vaccination. It is not a good response. [..] The argument throughout is that only a subset of vaccine reactions are subject to mandatory reporting requirements, and thus Schöfbeck’s higher numbers, derived from billing data, are unremarkable. This is a very strange and yet also typical bureaucratic response. We want to know whether the vaccines are safe or not, but the PEI functionaries only care about making it clear they haven’t done anything wrong.

Beyond that, I very much doubt we are talking about all that many “local and transient general reactions” here. By definition, these are reactions for which BKK insured sought medical treatment from their doctors. Many of these diagnoses would have been obtained by people who were too unwell to work, and needed to receive physician-certified sick leave.

“The Paul Ehrlich Institute has also begun planning a non-interventional study to comprehensively investigate the long-term safety of the only COVID-19 vaccines available in the EU and thus also in Germany. In the study, which is also supported and funded by the BMG, diagnostic data from the billing data available to the health insurance funds are to be evaluated and linked at the Paul Ehrlich Institute with the vaccination data of the Digital Vaccination Rate Monitoring (DIM data). The study is to be launched in the near future.”

Oh, excellent, so the PEI has begun to plan a study that will look into the issues Schöfbeck has raised. They can force vaccines upon millions of people who don’t want them, and maybe at some point in the future they will begin to think about planning a study on what adverse effects these vaccines might inflict. Public health regulators with something to hide just love studies. You can design them however you want, include whatever data you want, omit whatever you want, so it ends up saying just what you want it to and no more. What they don’t like, is openly available raw data that anyone can study and interpret.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Rogan maims Bill Gates
https://twitter.com/i/status/1497300890226610182

 

 

Jon Stewart MMT

 

 

Highest Ground

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 19 2022

Feb 192022
 
 February 19, 2022  Posted by at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  111 Responses »


Jan van Eijk The Arnolfini portrait 1434

 

• The Unmasking (Jim Kunstler)
• Police Horses Trample Demonstrators At Freedom Convoy Protest In Ottawa (TSun)
• Canada Parliament Axes Friday Plans To Meet Over Emergencies Act (GN)
• Canadian Clergy Rebuke Trudeau For Invoking Emergencies Act (Fox)
• The Democracy Disconnect in Canada (CTH)
• RCMP Orders Blacklist Of 34 Crypto Wallets (CS)
• Ottawa Freedom Convoy Tears Down Illusion of Democracy in North America (Ehret)
• Where Is The Uprising? (Denninger)
• Bill Gates: Natural Infection Doing “A Better Job” Of Bolstering Immunity (ZH)
• Biden Says He’s Convinced Putin Has Decided to Invade (Lauria)
• Putin To Personally Oversee Massive Nuclear Drill On Saturday (ZH)
• Putin Warned The West, But The West Didn’t Listen (RT)

 

 

 

 

Scott Atlas

 

 

 

 

“The unmasked are unmasking their masked antagonists.”

• The Unmasking (Jim Kunstler)

A “People’s Convoy” is assembling around Barstow, California (the capital of the Mojave Desert, where there’s plenty of room to assemble), with a launch date of February 23, next Wednesday, destination: Washington DC. Won’t that be… interesting? What will the government of “Joe Biden” do? Likewise invoke some sort of emergency powers? Declare yet another “insurrection” as with January 6, 2021? Mess with the truckers’ bank accounts, and those of the people who support them? Do they want to inspire a run on US banks at a juncture where the extreme fragility of the global banking system threatens to blow up financial markets? Standing by on that.

The US government, like Canada’s, has likewise been at war with its citizens. At least half the country has awakened to this unappetizing reality — even while somewhat less than half the country still catatonically follows whatever idiotic diktat the despotic bureaucracy spews out. Why, for instance, do so many still go about in face masks even where local regulations are lifted? (And especially in light of the overwhelming evidence that masks don’t work?) Answer: to signify that they are still against Trump, the evil leviathan said to be responsible for all the woes and injustices in the world and who threatens their ”safety”— meaning, their status as oppressed victims of “white supremacy,” including the guilty-and-penitent self-oppressed white people of the Left themselves. Yeah, it’s just that simple because we are in an epic episode of human social hysteria.

[..] The companies who produced the “vaccines’ are even on the run. Pfizer withdrew its application for an emergency use authorization in India, where the public health agency insisted on seeing the safety records Pfizer was obliged to furnish — and refused to. India is a big market for pharmaceuticals, some 1.39 billion. Pfizer’s stock has crashed nearly 10 percent the past two weeks. By the way, some of the states of India are notable for having battled Covid-19 with the mass distribution of early treatment kits containing cheap anti-virals such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, etc. The program was famously successful in reducing deaths there. The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, has sold off $400-million of his own stock in the company and deleted his Twitter account on rumors that all-causes deaths reported by US life insurance companies show a shocking and mysterious rise in mortality that just may be attributed to the “vaccines” causing strokes, heart attacks, cancer cases, and immune system failures. (Moderna’s stock is also sinking.)

Neither the mainstream news media nor the US public health agencies are making any effort to investigate this now well-documented occurrence. We’re in the midst of a tremendous shift of public opinion. Winter is not over but the truth is budding now in a thousand places. The people are done kneeling docilly to be silenced and killed. They will not let this country, and many other nations in the Western Civ club, be destroyed without a fight. The unmasked are unmasking their masked antagonists. Stand by, now, to find out who has been behind all this deadly mischief. We will rip off their masks and the rule of law will be restored.

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“..instead of violence there were bouncy castles, hot tubs, pancake breakfasts, pig roasts, road hockey games, dancing and fireworks displays.”

• Police Horses Trample Demonstrators At Freedom Convoy Protest In Ottawa (TSun)

Turns out the lasting image of the Freedom Convoy protest at Parliament Hill will not be bouncy castles but that of a woman with a walker being trampled by a police horse. The violence the Prime Minister has expressed concern about during the three-week protest in Ottawa didn’t unfold until Justin Trudeau’s Emergencies Act police army was sent in to disperse the crowd. The three major incidents Friday, under a form of martial law, were grotesque. Video of Toronto Police Mounted Unit officers charging into the crowd and at least one horse trampling multiple people — including an elderly woman with a walker — was disturbing. But that was not the only troubling incident.

Another saw a protester behind a police line repeatedly being smashed with an officer’s rifle. And convoy organizer Benjamin Dichter also told the Toronto Sun “one of drivers had his truck windows smashed by Ottawa Police (with) guns drawn and (he was) dragged out of his vehicle by force.” It’s ironic when you think back to three weeks ago. “Of course I’m concerned,” Trudeau told The Canadian Press on Jan. 28. “A number of people are there without wanting to incite violence, but there are going to be, as we’ve heard, a small group of people in there who are posing a threat to themselves, to each other, to Canadians.” But instead of violence there were bouncy castles, hot tubs, pancake breakfasts, pig roasts, road hockey games, dancing and fireworks displays.


While Trudeau tried to pin the online postings of a Swastika and Confederate flag on the truckers, they brought in a crane to rise the Canadian flag and sang O Canada every day. They definitely wore out their welcome while clogging up the parliamentary district of Ottawa, not wearing masks and excessively honking their horns. But they didn’t cause violence. So why the heavy hand in their mission to win back the city? That’s the question Ottawa Police, the Prime Minister, Premier Doug Ford and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson need to answer.

Read more …

Upcoming police action prevents House from discussing the legality of……police action.

• Canada Parliament Axes Friday Plans To Meet Over Emergencies Act (GN)

Friday meetings of the House of Commons and the Senate over the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the so-called “freedom convoy” demonstrations were cancelled due to safety concerns. Government House Leader Mark Holland later confirmed that the debate will resume on Saturday, with Speaker Anthony Rota adding the House will sit from 7 a.m. to midnight Eastern. Debate is still expected to continue Sunday and Monday. Holland said the final vote on the measure will be held Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern. “I am looking forward to the historic and fulsome debate that lies ahead,” he said on Twitter. A note from Speaker Anthony Rota noted Friday’s cancellation is spurred on by an impending police operation set to take place by Parliament Hill and around Ottawa’s downtown core.

“The #HoC will not sit today, Friday, February 18. A police operation is expected in the downtown core of Ottawa. Given these exceptional circumstances, and following discussion with all recognized party leadership, the sitting today is cancelled,” wrote Anthony Rota, speaker of the House, in a tweet on Friday. NDP House Leader Peter Julian confirmed the cancellation on Twitter. “Around 4:30 AM this morning all four of us — the House Leaders in the House of Commons — agreed to cancel today’s House of Commons session that was scheduled to start at 7 AM. It is everyone’s hope that the Convoy will peacefully leave #Ottawa & will end their #OttawaOccupation,” Julian tweeted.

Rota cited concerns from the Parliamentary Police Service (PPS) and noted that all House Leaders were in agreement on the cancellation. “Given these exceptional circumstances, and following discussion with all recognized party leadership, the sitting today is cancelled,” Rota wrote in a letter Friday.

Crackdown
https://twitter.com/i/status/1494890874819551234

Read more …

“..in response to their singing, praying, dancing, candy floss, bouncy castles, speeches about the Constitution and outpourings of patriotic love for the country, your government has not only refused to meet with these citizens to hear their concerns, you have insulted, denigrated and lied about them..”

• Canadian Clergy Rebuke Trudeau For Invoking Emergencies Act (Fox)

A group of Canadian clergy sent an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this week rebuking him for invoking the Emergencies Act to quell the Freedom Convoy and for other actions they described as “tyrannical.” “We are writing to you as representative pastors of Christian congregations from across the nation and as law-abiding citizens who respect the God-defined role of civil government and uphold the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the highest law of our land, which recognizes the supremacy of God over all human legislation,” read the letter, which was signed by 29 clergymen and remains open for other Canadians to sign.

Explaining their repeated, earnest attempts to prayerfully redress their grievances with all levels of government regarding “indefinite suspension of civil liberties, coercive mandates and perpetual state interference in the life, freedom and worship of the church,” the pastors denounced Trudeau for cracking down on the Freedom Convoy instead of hearing them out. They emphasized that members of the clergy are a part of the convoy. “The Ottawa protest has presented your government with a wonderful opportunity to meet with and speak to ordinary Canadians lawfully and peaceably requiring the restoration of their constitutional rights,” they wrote.

“However, in response to their singing, praying, dancing, candy floss, bouncy castles, speeches about the Constitution and outpourings of patriotic love for the country, your government has not only refused to meet with these citizens to hear their concerns, you have insulted, denigrated and lied about them, further dividing a hurting and broken nation.” The pastors went on to rebuke Trudeau and his government for seemingly believing that they have the authority to bestow and remove fundamental rights at will. “Your government does not grant people the right to their bodily integrity, the right to work or earn a living, the right to decide for their children or to be with their families or dying loved ones, the right to gather to worship and obey God, the right to travel in their own land or enter and leave. Civil government exists to protect these pre-political and fundamental freedoms, not bestow and remove them as if it can function in the place of God.”

Read more …

“The Ministry of Peace is established to create war; the Ministry of Truth is established to create lies and propaganda; the Ministry of Love established to justify torture and beatings; and the Ministry of Plenty to control food production leading to starvation.”

• The Democracy Disconnect in Canada (CTH)

When the terms “freedom and liberty” are allowed to be defined as extremist sentiment, what you end up with are Canadian federal police beating people in the streets and arresting citizens who petition their government for freedom. Meanwhile, the ever fearful and politically correct conservatives in Parliament grasp their pearls while simultaneously cowering to avoid labels. Somewhere there is a radical called Saul Alinsky, the trainer of modern revolutionary communists and political leftists – who dedicated his training manual to Lucifer, smiling as he watches the results of his teachings. Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of what is to come from this.


Allow me to highlight the point with two easily referenced examples from Canadian media (infiltrated with ideological stenographers) and contemplate the larger message against government saying we must “defend our democracy” while removing political protest. Notice the evolution of the collective narrative in just a few days. The word “freedom” is extremist (Feb 13) … Conservatives are “extremist” (Feb 18)

When “freedom and liberty” are defined as extremism, conservatives become defined as extremists. See how that works? Yes, linguistic judo and ideological training provided by Saul Alinsky, in his rules for radicals. In essence, Alinsky taught the budding communists to define the opposition, isolate them, ridicule them and marginalize them. Now, if you find yourself having a mental reference to a race of persons as defined during World War II, before Alinsky’s book was even written, your reference point is solid. Whenever we allow any entity, group, or collective echo-chamber to change the terminology, we are making a big mistake.


Orwell wrote about the outcome in his book 1984, where The Ministry of Peace is established to create war; the Ministry of Truth is established to create lies and propaganda; the Ministry of Love established to justify torture and beatings; and the Ministry of Plenty to control food production leading to starvation. These are not simply contradictions in words and terms, these are an earlier version of what David Mamet later described as necessary tools for modern leftists. In order to advance severe ideological positions, they must pretend not to know things. Ignoring contradictions is a feature of modern leftism, not a flaw.

Read more …

“..cryptocurrency donations being collected in relation to illegal acts falling under the scope of the Emergency Measures Act..”

• RCMP Orders Blacklist Of 34 Crypto Wallets (CS)

The Counter Signal has exclusively obtained an order sent by Trudeau’s federal police force, which demands that all FINTRAC regulated companies in Canada cease transacting with 34 cryptocurrency wallets. The wallets are alleged to be associated with the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. The Counter Signal has confirmed at least one wallet which had contained over $1 million worth of Bitcoin as being a part of the HonkHonkHodl campaign to support truckers via cryptocurrency. Whether this demand from police will hamper access to the funds is still unclear. The police order comes via Trudeau’s extraordinary and self-prescribed emergency powers, and affects over 25 Bitcoin, worth approximately $1.4 million dollars.


“The Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are currently investigating cryptocurrency donations being collected in relation to illegal acts falling under the scope of the Emergency Measures Act,” the RCMP order begins. “Pursuant to the Emergency Economic Measures Order, under subsection 19(1) of the Emergencies Act, there is a duty to cease facilitating any transactions pertaining to the following cryptocurrency address(es).” Trudeau’s officers list 29 Bitcoin addresses, 2 Ethereum, and 1 wallet each of Cardano, Monero, and Litecoin. [..] “Any information about a transaction or proposed transaction in respect of these address(es), is to be disclosed immediately to the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at [email protected],” the RCMP pleaded.

Read more …

Mark Carney ready to replace Justin?

• Ottawa Freedom Convoy Tears Down Illusion of Democracy in North America (Ehret)

Who would have thought that Canada would ever be a spark plug for a freedom movement against tyranny? As the editor of a Canadian geopolitical magazine for over 10 years and author of four books on Canadian History, I am a bit embarrassed to say that I certainly didn’t think that Canadians had this in them. The “monarchy of the north” certainly isn’t something that exudes revolutionary sentiment- having been founded on such non-revolutionary principles as “Peace, Order and Good Governance” which have stood in stark contrast to the significantly more inspiring “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” enshrined in the founding documents of our southern cousins.

Even our founding 1867 document (drafted over a champagne fueled month of hedonism in 1864) explicitly calls out the purpose of confederation not as a means of “supporting the general welfare” as was the case of the USA’s constitution in 1787, but rather “to promote the interests of the British Empire”. But here it is.

Countless thousands of patriots have driven across the country to bunker down in Ottawa in peace and high festive spirits which I had to see with my own eyes to believe demanding something so simple and un-tainted by ideology: freedom to work, provide for families and a respect for basic rights as laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (a 1982 upgrade to the embarrassingly oligarchical British North America Act of 1867). Mainstream media and political hacks have been working overtime to paint the Freedom convoy that converged on Ottawa on January 29 as an “insurrectionist movement” full of “white supremacists”, “Russian stooges”, and “Nazis” out to “overthrow the government”.

Even the Bank of England’s former governor (and World Economic Forum Trustee) Mark Carney chimed in on February 7 stating that “this is sedition” and that “those who are still helping to extend this occupation must be identified and punished to the full force of the law”. Carney, the perennial financial darling of Goldman Sachs and the City of London (and Prime Ministerial hopeful) called for a targeting of all those who donated money to this domestic terror operation. Faced with an organic civil rights movement of blue-collar truckers, farmers and tens of thousands of supporters who have convened on Canada’s capital to demand a restoration of their basic freedoms, the current Liberal government has failed to show even an ounce of humanity or capacity to negotiate.

This shouldn’t be a surprise for those who have seen the hypocrisy of neo-liberal “rules-based” order ideologues in action over the past few years who are quick to celebrate the “liberty” of citizens of Ukraine, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang when the outcome benefits the geopolitical aims of detached technocrats hungry for global hegemony.

Schwab WEF

Read more …

“According to the montage, skills are for special, gifted people only. They are learned by those special people quickly and easily. If someone isn’t an expert instantly, they never will be.”

• Where Is The Uprising? (Denninger)

Let’s take a moment and give props to the Canadian truckers who got their government’s and fellow Canadians’ attention. Good for them. They did something, along with those who walked fuel and food to them to keep the protest going. Great use of logistics and tactics, my hat is off to you! Truckers are pureblood allies. There is no argument that the truckers’ actions had an effect on the war. They arrived and fought on the battlefield. The government announced a crack down, so we’ll see how it plays out over the next few days. Contrast with the US: no widespread parking lots, everyone is still in trudge along to get along mode. There’s low level disruptions (keep vacationing in place!) in daily life, most notably in the supply chain. Even fat bitch Karens are noticing higher grocery prices and holes in shelves. But so far, pretty quiet.

Boston, New York City, and Minneapolis allowed vaxports. Vaxports are the equivalent of sucking government cock after it ****s you in the ass. Enjoy the taste of your own ****. The pure bloods haven’t burned the cities to the ground in a mostly peaceful protest. Why is that? What will it take to set things off? I don’t know. There’s two ways this ends: either 1% decides they’ve had enough, or we will be slowly boiled until we are grateful daddy government allowed us to exist in our own homes without a mask on Tuesdays. No, that’s not impossible. Over the past two years, as a people, we’ve demonstrated we will trade our humanity for safety. Tard Karen believes a magic filthy rag wards off a deadly plague. Others wear one for work so they have a place to live. Still others won’t rock the boat to remain part of their group.

[..] The plan isn’t perfect. The leader, the goals, or the tactics don’t align perfectly with yours. Oh no, but if it was, boy howdy, would you get off the couch and join them. This line of thought requires ignoring that the un-pure army produces desired results. One day, when the right allies appear, you’ll join them. One day… They aren’t doing it right. Sadly, an army already on the field is unlikely to recognize you as their Five Star General. If their actions work, support their efforts or shut the **** up and stay on the couch. Don’t derail a functioning battle plan. Those who disrupt working tactics have a special name: traitors. Another set of excuses is due to mindset. Mindset determines success or failure as much as tactics and logistics. Mindset is the result of life experience and it will not change overnight, if at all.

However, we deserve some leniency for not developing a killer, win-or-die mindset. Life hasn’t been trying to actively kill us for long enough soybois and girldicks require a safe space when someone uses the wrong pronoun. On the other hand, peace and ease allowed modern Western Civilization to flourish. But there is one item from pop culture that has destroyed mindset development so much, some evil mastermind is kicking himself for not inventing it: the montage. Yes, the montage. What does a montage imply? It only takes 3:30 to go from zero to hero. Any skill can be mastered in the time it takes to listen to the movie’s hit song. No failure, no missteps, no tangents where a single slice of the skill is drilled and drilled until practice is complete hell. None of that. According to the montage, skills are for special, gifted people only. They are learned by those special people quickly and easily. If someone isn’t an expert instantly, they never will be.

Read more …

Who cares what Bill Gates says?

• Bill Gates: Natural Infection Doing “A Better Job” Of Bolstering Immunity (ZH)

Speaking on Friday during the Munich Security Conference, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder and chairman, discussed how the threat posed by the COVID pandemic had “dramatically lowered”…while making a startling admission: that natural infection and spread was more effective at bolstering human immunity than vaccines. Speaking to CNBC’s Hadley Gamble during the annual conference in Germany, Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told the audience that a potential new pandemic would likely stem from a different pathogen than that belonging to the coronavirus family (maybe Ebola, perhaps?). But he added that advances in medical technology should help the world do a better job of fighting it – if investments are made now.

Girardot Seychelles
https://twitter.com/GirardotMarc/status/1494676665292795909

“We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time,” Gates said. Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Gates said the worst effects have faded as huge swathes of the global population have gained some level of immunity. Its severity has also waned with the latest omicron variant. Amazingly, after years of denial, Gates seemed to acknowledge – albeit in a roundabout way – that the infectiousness of the omicron variant had played the key role in boosting human immunity to SARS-CoV-2.


According to Gates, it’s already “too late” to reach the WHO’s goal to vaccinate 70% of the global population by mid-2022. Currently 61.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine) but that’s okay, however, Gates said, as in many places, the virus itself, which creates a level of immunity, and has “done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.” “The chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure,” he said.

Malone mortality/cancer

Read more …

“Or maybe you are like some Ukrainians, including your president, who thinks this invasion is a figment of Biden’s imagination.”

• Biden Says He’s Convinced Putin Has Decided to Invade (Lauria)

President Joe Biden said Friday he’s convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine in the coming days and that Russia would fail to create a new system in Europe that takes its security into account. “As of this moment I’m convinced he has made the decision” to invade, Biden told a reporter in response to a question at a White House press briefing. Asked how he knows this, Biden said, “We have a significant intelligence capability.” Biden also flatly asserted that the capital, Kiev, would be attacked: “Russian troops currently have Ukraine surrounded. We have reason to believe Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days. We believe they will target the capital Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”

If such a horrific scenario were true, wouldn’t Washington have sent its military to defend its ally? That the U.S. hasn’t, undercuts the credibility of U.S. intelligence. “We also will not send troops in to fight in Ukraine, but we will continue to support the Ukrainian people,” he said, apparently as they are being slaughtered in their beds by Russian bombs — the only conclusion that can be drawn. For Biden, supporting the Ukrainian people translates into $650 million spent by the U.S. in the past year to “bolster Ukraine’s defenses,” and U.S. arms manufacturers’ profits. Even with all this hardware, the Ukrainian military is no match for Russia’s, as the U.S. would be.

“The United States and its allies and partners will support the Ukrainian people,” Biden said. “We will hold Russia accountable for its actions. … The entire free world is united” against Russia and sanctions will be imposed once this invasion happens. If you were Ukrainian, living in Kiev, how would you feel if the president of the United States just said he’s convinced your city will be bombed by a major military power in days and all he’ll do for you is punish your attackers by hitting their finances? Or maybe you are like some Ukrainians, including your president, who thinks this invasion is a figment of Biden’s imagination.

Read more …

Planned.

• Putin To Personally Oversee Massive Nuclear Drill On Saturday (ZH)

The Russian military confirmed on Friday that it will move up nuclear weapons exercises which had been previously scheduled to take place later the year, as a warning to the West as the Ukraine crisis grows hotter. Typically the drills take place in the fall, but will now be part of the current climate of ‘muscle flexing’ as the region remains on the brink. The massive drills of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces will take place Saturday, and President Putin will directly oversee it, according to the defense ministry. There were signs earlier in February that the drills would be moved up in time, as the FT wrote: “Russia generally holds its annual nuclear exercises — which involve testing intercontinental ballistic missiles from land, sea and air — in the fall. But the US believes Putin has decided to hold them earlier this year as a show of strength.”

Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov notified allies as well as Western countries about the Saturday drills in a Friday statement, saying it should be no cause for concern. Likely the maneuvers will center on the Black Sea Fleet out of the Crimean Peninsula, which will be taken by Ukraine and NATO to be highly provocative. A senior Biden administration official responded to the announcement that it was definitely “escalatory”. “Practice launches of ballistic missiles are part of regular training,” Peskov said. “They are preceded by a series of notices to other nations via different channels.”

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has issued an open invitation for Russia to host deployable nukes on Belarusian soil amid the Ukraine standoff, has been personally invited to watch the nuclear drills with Putin. According to Congressional testimony from last week by Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley and director of national intelligence Avril Haines, the Pentagon believes the exercises are a “show of force” aimed at both Ukraine and its Western backers in NATO. Analyst Rebeccah Heinrichs with the hawkish D.C. think tank Hudson Institute described that given Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, “It would be an extremely provocative and harbinger of messages if they did it concurrently with an invasion.”

Read more …

“As for the West, looking back at its self-destructive errors in recent years, one might consider Putin something of a prophet.”

• Putin Warned The West, But The West Didn’t Listen (RT)

[..] it’s worth noting what a Russian invasion of Ukraine would actually mean. For the past 15 years, ever since the Munich speech, Russian officials have been arguing against the unilateral use of force and demanding a UN-centered security system founded on international law. Were we to wake up one day and find that Russian tanks were rolling towards Kiev without any kind of excuse, it would amount to a complete abandonment of 15 years of argumentation as well as a negation of the entire legal/moral position built up by the Russian Federation in that period, a position reinforced just this month in the Putin/Xi statement. It would also be very odd. For you can hardly achieve the objective of a multipolar world based on the principles of UN supremacy and international law by means of a massive breach of those very same principles.


It would be extraordinarily self-defeating. A certain skepticism about the allegedly “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine is therefore due. It’s not impossible, but one has to wonder why, after so many years of consistency, Putin would suddenly change his position in such a drastic way. As for the West, looking back at its self-destructive errors in recent years, one might consider Putin something of a prophet. But if so, it’s a prophet in the guise of the Trojan princess Cassandra who was fated to be always right but never believed. Rather than taking heed of Putin’s warning, Western leaders have bludgeoned onwards, toppling Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, aiding rebels in Syria, attempting (and failing at) regime change in Venezuela, fighting and losing against the Taliban, sanctioning Iran, supporting revolution in Ukraine, and so on. It has not turned out well. We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

THE BIG LIE
https://twitter.com/i/status/1494720463595003905

 

 

Agenda 21
https://twitter.com/i/status/1494714977684439041

 

 

2/22/22 will be a once-in-a 248 year event.

Pluto is going to conjunct (return to) the United States.

The Last time this happened was on July 4th 1776, the exact founding day of America.

Astrologically, Pluto brings Destruction and Rebirth.

Rome fell when Pluto Returned.

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 25 2022

Jan 252022
 
 January 25, 2022  Posted by at 10:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  75 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Female bust 1922

 

• A Real American Hero (Jim Kunstler)
• ‘Obscene’ COVID Policies Serve Big Pharma Not People, Experts Say (CHD)
• Nervous System Disorders After The Jab – A Case Study (Beck)
• BA2 Omicron Variant is Worth Discussing (Chudov)
• Omicron Variant Breaks The Evolutionary Lineage Of SARS-COV2 Variants (GHA)
• Omicron Showing Merits of Targeted Protection, Great Barrington Signers (NW)
• Covid Still ‘Full Of Nasty And Cunning’ Surprises – WHO Official (RT)
• Unvaccinated Staff Are Holding NHS Together Amid Staff Shortages (GBN)
• New York Judge Strikes Down State Mask Mandate (R.)
• “They Can Have [Joe] Rogan or [Neil] Young. Not Both.” (RS)
• The Globalist American Empire (Revolver)
• Russia Planning “Lightning War” To Take Out Ukraine’s Capital: UK’s Johnson (ZH)
• Assange Granted Permission To Take Extradition Case To UK Supreme Court (Haddad)

 

 

 

 

Malone at hearing

 

 

 

 

Ryan Cole

 

 

 

 

Hodkins

 

 

 

 

“..poisoned hundreds of millions of Americans in a medical experiment that has only begun to kill possibly more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of murdering..”

You can try and make someone look bad for wearing a Star of David or using the word Nazis, but then there is a Jewish commentator.

• A Real American Hero (Jim Kunstler)

Sunday, at the March Against Mandates in our nation’s capital, the resistance to Covid vaccine tyranny laid it out, none with plainer eloquence than Bobby Kennedy: “We love the United States Constitution. And we have witnessed over the past 20 months a coup d’etat against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And starting with the censorship. James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson all said the same thing: we put freedom of speech in the first amendment because all of the other rights that we were trying to protect relied on that right. If you give government the license to silence its critics, you have given them the capacity to commit any atrocity they want, and to obliterate all the amendments and rights in the constitution.”

The message is getting through and the tyrants are running scared. They are perhaps having bad dreams involving torches and pitchforks. Naturally CNN took the lead in attempting to defame Mr. Kennedy as an anti-Semite for mentioning the name of Anne Frank in alluding to the Nazi insanity of the last century and people’s desperate efforts to escape it. CNN said: “The son of former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy has a long history of spreading vaccine misinformation…. Sunday’s event, billed as a protest against vaccine mandates, featured speakers repeatedly spreading misinformation about vaccines and showcased several bigoted comparisons to the Holocaust. At least one man was seen displaying a yellow Star of David, which Jews were required by law to wear as an identifier in Nazi Germany.”

So, wearing a Star of David now makes you an insurrectionist in the twisted logic of Wokery. How stupid and confused are they? Anyway, heroes emerge out of adversity. Let them pile it on, insulting history and reality. In fact, Bobby Kennedy stood in the cold at the Lincoln Memorial as a heroic figure for these times, giving a speech that carefully and succinctly denoted the stupendous criminality of the US public health bureaucracy and the corporate-government fascist partnership with Pharma Inc. that has poisoned hundreds of millions of Americans in a medical experiment that has only begun to kill possibly more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of murdering. There has not been a more important public utterance in this land than RFK Jr.’s since this century began.

Read more …

Long write-up of Ron Johnson Senate hearing yesterday.

• ‘Obscene’ COVID Policies Serve Big Pharma Not People, Experts Say (CHD)

Dr. Pierre Kory, pulmonary and critical care specialist and president and chief medical officer of the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, called out the policies of U.S. health systems and their “failed response to this pandemic.” Kory said: “Some of the policies are “so obscene, absurd, illogical and nonscientific that they’re unscientific that they’re almost unspeakable — things like not testing the vaccinated, not recommending vitamin D, not checking vitamin D levels, things that are so fundamentally basic about science and medicine and that they’ve avoided. “If you look at these failed policies, there’s only one way to understand them. They are literally written by pharmaceutical companies. Almost every single policy serves the interest of a pharmaceutical company.”

Kory said there have been numerous successes outside the U.S. using a number of compounds he and his colleagues have identified for effective early treatment of COVID, almost all of which are repurposed or generic drugs, including ivermectin. Yet, in the U.S., ivermectin is regarded as a horse dewormer, horse paste, and is only used by the illiterate, ignorant or unvaccinated, Kory said. Kory pointed to many studies and locations around the world where hospitalizations and deaths were prevented by large percentages through the mass distribution of ivermectin. He said the inexpensive drug eradicated the virus entirely in Uttar Pradesh, India.


Information on ivermectin was buried and suppressed, Kory said. “U.S. health agencies’ structures and policies created over the last 50 years have tightly intertwined the pharmaceutical industry with public health institutions, resulting in repeated policies placing pharmaceutical industry interests ahead of the welfare of U.S. citizens,” he explained. Kory said the industry’s “capture of our health agencies combined with their increasing financial control of most major media, social media and medical journals has led to an ability to widely suppress and/or distort any information which supports the efficacy of repurposed low-cost off-patent medicines.”This “decades-long war on repurposed drugs waged with the ever-pressing goal of protecting the market for novel, patented, obscenely profitable and often barely tested and toxic medications has reached a pinnacle with COVID-19, its an absurdity, its an obscenity and its a crime,” Kory said. “It has to stop.”

Read more …

Scary.

• Nervous System Disorders After The Jab – A Case Study (Beck)

NERVOUS system disorders following Covid vaccination are being recorded in shocking numbers, with reports to the UK’s Yellow Card Scheme of almost 300,000 injuries and 300 deaths. Despite this, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who run the Yellow Card scheme and review all suspected injuries, are sticking with their mantra that Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’. Their message infuriates music manager Georgia-Rose Segal, 34, from Hertfordshire, a previously active fitness fan. Supremely healthy, and at low risk of contracting Covid-19, she was worried about getting the experimental jab, but decided to take it after being reassured by three GPs. She could then travel abroad for her job, about once a quarter, and visit family in Israel to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.

It is a decision she bitterly regrets as she is now a statistic, one of the 100,000 victims suffering with 300,000 neurological injuries reported up to January 5, 2022, which we have analysed in our special report below. After her adverse jab reaction, Georgia, who is articulate, down-to-earth and had clearly made the effort to be well informed, was admitted to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire – a spinal injury specialist – with symptoms which included lack of balance, dizzy spells, tremors, tics, short-term memory loss and brain fog. Georgia had her first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccination on May 13, 2021 at Hemel Hempstead pop-up vaccine centre. It wiped her out. ‘I felt like I could have slept for a year. I felt like that for a couple of days,’ she said. She had her second dose on June 29.

“Within four hours I felt dizzy and light-headed. I fainted that evening, then over the following days, I began fainting up to three times a day. ‘After ten days I developed neurological symptoms. My legs didn’t feel right. I was struggling to move them, and they felt heavy. ‘I was in Tesco, got to the checkout and couldn’t move my legs. My boyfriend Luke [boxing coach Luke Groves, 29] was outside. I went to phone him, but my brain wouldn’t engage with my hand. ‘I realised then I had a bit of a problem.’ Despite this, on Monday July 12 Georgia attended a wedding in Dorset, and realised there was something seriously wrong. ‘The day before the wedding I collapsed in my hotel room. Luke brought me round by splashing me with cold water and I got into bed, then my body went into its first tremor,’ she said.

‘I managed to go to the wedding the next day and got back to the hotel room. I fainted again and hit my head on the floor. My head began to tremor, and my body followed.‘Luke thought I might need food, so we went to the pub. When we got there my legs gave way underneath me for the first time, and that became my new normal.’ At 5am on the Wednesday morning Luke drove her to Stoke Mandeville hospital, where she spent ten days having ‘every test going including MRI and CT scans and blood tests’. They all came back clear, and doctors were sceptical when she told them she thought it was the vaccine. ‘We’re not sure. We don’t have enough information about it,’ they said.

Thomas Renz

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“..calling BA.2 a sub-variant of Omicron may be factually and genealogically incorrect and their relationship may be more sibling-like than parent-like.”

• BA2 Omicron Variant is Worth Discussing (Chudov)

This post offers some news on what will be very important in the coming months. Like many other things, Omicron BA.2 is not on most busy people’s radar, but soon will be the only thing that people talk about. I made a decision to start writing about Omicron very early in the game, and want to write about BA.2 also to keep my readers abreast. Denmark, which was weeks ahead of the UK and US with its Omicron outbreak. Unlike the US and the UK, however, Denmark’s infections are not decreasing, but conversely are shooting up to the sky. The slowdown in Denmark that appeared around Jan 5-8, was quickly overtaken by a rapid rise that offers no signs of slowing down. The same thing happened in France 5 days later. A small drop, quickly overridden by another crazy and relentless case growth.

On a cases-per-million-people, Denmark and France are 2.5 times higher than the US and 3 times higher than the UK. What is going on? A new “variant”, called somewhat incorrectly “Omicron BA.2”, appeared around Christmas and is out-competing, out-infecting, and overall somehow generating even more cases than the original Omicron. In Denmark, Omicron BA2 is already over 50% of all cases, and rising. [..]

BA.2 is considered a sub-lineage of original Omicron (which is now referred to as Omicron BA.1), however these two genetic variants seem to have diverged months BEFORE Omicron actually appeared. BA.2 has 28 more mutations, than Omicron, with no intermediate variants seen between them. This is certainly a genetic oddity, just as Omicron is a genetic oddity with the ancestor that disappeared 1.5 years before Omicron appeared. Both of these oddities raise a possibility that both Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 do not have a natural origin. I said that Omicron (now known as BA.1) may be lab-made on December 2. As they diverged before either of them was introduced, calling BA.2 a sub-variant of Omicron may be factually and genealogically incorrect and their relationship may be more sibling-like than parent-like.

[..] The most disturbing issue here is that even by the time before BA.2 took off in Denmark a week ago, Denmark was likely running out of Covid-naive, uninfected people. What this means is that possibly, BA2 is especially good at REINFECTING Danes and Frenchmen. Not sure if the vaccinated people are more susceptible to reinfection, but it is possible and always seemed to be the case even before Omicron.

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Jean Claude Perez, Valère Lounnas, Pr Luc Montagnier.

• Omicron Variant Breaks The Evolutionary Lineage Of SARS-COV2 Variants (GHA)

We analyzed 15 genomes and Spikes of the new OMICRON variant, on the one hand 7 from the very first 21K lineage (South Africa, USA, Belgium, Canada), on the other hand 8 from the later second sister-clade 21L (USA, Switzerland, UK). We applied, at the scale of the whole genome and the spike gene, the biomathematics method of Fibonacci meta-structure fractal analysis applied to the UA / CG proportions. There appears a total rupture of this variant with respect to all the previous variants, and a strong differentiation between these 2 OMICRON lines.We have evidenced the RUPTURE of OMICRON with respect to ALL the previous variants: D614G, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, DELTA. In particular, we suggest that the mRNA stabilizing secondary structure (“hairpin” conformation) in the spike of all variants is degraded in OMICRON, probably making its mRNA more fragile.

The loss of long-range fractal meta-structures in the OMICRON spike gene are in line with common knowledge on the mechanisms of epidemic ending, involving recombination of heavily mutated RNA fragments of the virus, with the possible inference of a distinct helper virus. This would indicate that the SARS-CoV2 is under very strong evolutionary pressure, possibly marking the end of the pandemic.Remarkably, it is observed that the density of OMICRON mutations in the SPIKE PRION region is more than 8 times that of the rest of the Spike protein. This high density of mutations of the Prion region in OMICRON appears to completely suppress this possible Prion function, unlike the Spikes of the various variants and mRNAs vaccines where this Prion function is observed.

“Science doesn’t tell us where we’re going – that’s the role of art -; it tells us where we are.” Alan TURING

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“The illusion was that to protect the vulnerable, we needed to control disease spread. The disease spread anyway and the vulnerable were exposed because we didn’t protect them.”

• Omicron Showing Merits of Targeted Protection, Great Barrington Signers (NW)

After it was dismissed as a dangerous theory with deadly consequences, the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration believe officials are coming around to the idea of targeted protection now that it’s clear stopping COVID from spreading is an unrealistic goal.Omicron, a highly infectious variant, is spreading rapidly throughout the United States, causing more than 10 million infections in less than a month. While vaccines are extraordinarily helpful at preventing COVID-19 deaths, the assumption that vaccines would make a significant dent in infections has been proven wrong and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, believes Omicron will find “just about everybody.” But officials have bucked a return to lockdowns.

Since the world has missed its opportunity to completely suppress COVID-19 transmission, the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration said policymakers are realizing they have to shift tactics away from population-wide measures. “There’s no question there’s been a sea change in thinking about this,” one of the declaration’s co-authors, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Newsweek. “The illusion was that to protect the vulnerable, we needed to control disease spread. The disease spread anyway and the vulnerable were exposed because we didn’t protect them.”

The Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed in October 2020, called for a lifting of lockdowns to allow those who were at a lower risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19, the young and healthy, to resume life as normal. Keeping the restrictions in place, the co-authors argued, would cause “irreparable harm” particularly with regard to the underprivileged. Many of those reentering the world would likely get infected with COVID-19, but being young and healthy, they were less likely to get seriously ill. Their infections would thereby lower the risk of infection to all, including the vulnerable, according to the declaration.

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A cunning virus?!

• Covid Still ‘Full Of Nasty And Cunning’ Surprises – WHO Official (RT)

Speaking to Sky News on Monday, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Covid-19 special envoy, Dr David Nabarro, warned that the pandemic could still throw up “challenges and surprises” despite the progress that has been made in some parts of the world in tackling the coronavirus. Criticizing politicians who are playing down the threat still posed by the virus, Nabarro said they “should not suggest” that Covid be treated like the flu or that it “has suddenly got incredibly weak.”“We must go on treating it as though it is full of surprises, very nasty and rather cunning,” Nabarro stated, claiming that while “the end is in sight,” it is not known how long it is “going to take to get there” or “what sort of difficulties” will emerge along the way out of the pandemic.


“I do want everybody to do one thing, and that is to go on treating this virus with respect. It has not changed. It’s absolutely not suddenly become a soft thing – it is still very serious,” Nabarro added. Directly addressing UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s recent comments that Covid should be treated like flu, Nabarro said it is “amazing” that officials keep making predictions that “the WHO don’t know,” as “we know there are more [variants] not far away.”The comments appear to directly contradict the WHO’s Europe director, Hans Kluge, who claimed on Monday that the continent is “moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” as Omicron is milder than previous strains. Addressing the potential emergence of new Covid variants, Kluge expressed a different view to his colleague, arguing that, while fresh strains might emerge “towards the end of the year,” it won’t necessarily mean “the pandemic coming back.”

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British humor.

• Unvaccinated Staff Are Holding NHS Together Amid Staff Shortages (GBN)

Dr Kate Goodman told Michelle Dewberry for GB News that after “talking to friends and colleagues around the country, it seems it’s the unvaccinated [NHS] staff that are holding services together” as staff shortages continue to plague the health service. On the evening that Michelle Dewberry launched the #OutdateTheMandate campaign against mandatory vaccinations for health care staff that have face-to-face contact with patients, Dr Goodman said that it was “a shame” that a viewer said they would not want an unvaccinated member of staff caring for their elderly relatives. She said: “I’m a very good doctor, I’m an elder care specialist.”


Dr Goodman went on: “I can understand that people are concerned about their loved ones.”But actually we need to talk more about this.” From 1 April 2022, all health and social care workers in England who have face-to-face contact with patients, will need to provide proof they have been fully-vaccinated, unless they are exempt. The policy applies to those working within the private sector as well as the NHS, and affects workers including doctors, nurses, dentists, porters and receptionists.The deadline for the first vaccination is February 1st 2022.

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The judge literally called it “null, void and unenforceable.” But Reuters doesn’t use that quote.

• New York Judge Strikes Down State Mask Mandate (R.)

A New York judge struck down the state’s mask mandate on Monday, one week before it was due to expire, ruling the governor overstepped her authority in imposing a rule that needed to have been passed by the state legislature. Judge Thomas Rademaker of New York State Supreme Court on Long Island found that the state legislature last year curbed any governor’s ability to issue decrees, such as a mask mandate, amid a declared state of emergency. It was latest setback for executive branch officials at state and federal levels. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden’s vaccination-or-testing mandate for large businesses. A judge in Texas last week ruled that Biden could not require federal employees to be vaccinated.

Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, vowed to fight back, saying in a statement, “We strongly disagree with this ruling, and we are pursuing every option to reverse this immediately.” “My responsibility as Governor is to protect New Yorkers throughout this public health crisis, and these measures help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and save lives,” Hochul said. Disagreements and court action over mandates in a number of states have become a flashpoint of the pandemic response in the United States, often dividing Democrats and Republicans. The requirements in New York state, home to around 20 million people, include wearing masks in schools, on public transit and other public indoor spaces.

Hochul declared a state of emergency almost immediately after the World Health Organization named Omicron as a variant of concern on Nov. 26. At the time, New York state’s seven-day average of new daily cases was around 6,400. That number rapidly rose until peaking at 73,815 on Jan. 10. It has since fallen to about a third of that.

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Easiest choice Spotify ever made.

• “They Can Have [Joe] Rogan or [Neil] Young. Not Both.” (RS)

Neil Young posted a since-deleted letter to his management team and record label demanding that they remove his music from Spotify. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” he wrote. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.” “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he continued. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.” Young is referencing the steady stream of misinformation about vaccines that Joe Rogan has peddled on The Joe Rogan Experience. Last month, 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators signed an open letter asking Spotify to stop spreading Rogan’s baseless claims.

“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.” Young removed most of his music from Spotify several years ago because he felt the sound quality on the service was too low, but he ultimately relented. “That’s where people get music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019. “I want people to hear my music no matter what they have to get through to do it. I’m just trying to make it so they hear a lot more and enjoy it a lot more, but sell it for the same price because music is music.”

Young’s letter was addressed to his manager and a Warner executive. At press time, Spotify hadn’t responded to a request from Rolling Stone asking if they planned to remove Young’s music. It’s still available, but it might be smart to listen to Zuma and Rust Never Sleeps while you still can. They could disappear at any moment.

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“Russia’s population is half of what the USSR’s was 30 years ago.”

• The Globalist American Empire (Revolver)

The NATO question is the only one that Russia has repeatedly insisted upon. If America were inclined to negotiate, it could. Instead, America has taken the position that Ukraine’s eligibility for NATO is entirely non-negotiable. In fact, basically everything about Ukraine is non-negotiable from the perspective of the State Department. The US State Department also insists it will “never” acknowledge Russian annexation of Crimea, even though Western media outlets admit the local population overwhelmingly supports union with Russia. America’s demand, in essence, is that Russia acknowledge a violent revolution (in the name of “democracy”), return Crimea to Ukraine against its will (again, in the name of “democracy”), and let Ukraine become a military satellite of the United States (in the name of of “peace”).

This is deranged. Adding Ukraine to NATO does nothing to improve the security of the United States, or any of its key allies. Even if Russia literally did conquer and annex all of Ukraine (something it has shown no interest in doing), America’s security interests would remain unchanged. Ukraine doesn’t supply the United States with any irreplaceable natural resources. It doesn’t sit alongside a critical trade route or geographical position. It isn’t physically proximate to the United States. Ukraine matters to America’s domestic security as much as Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Venezuela; i.e. not at all. Just like all four of those other countries, a war over Ukraine would have nothing to do with protecting America’s safety, its prosperity, or its values. Instead, it would be a product of a cloistered foreign policy elite that is not content with controlling one country and instead seeks to boss around the entire planet.

“B-but if we don’t stop him in Donetsk, Putin will drive all the way to the English Channel!” Bullshit. No, he won’t. Russia’s population is half of what the USSR’s was 30 years ago. Its military is smaller. Its economy is only the size of that of Texas. Russia’s frontline in any hypothetical war has shifted hundreds of miles to the east. Russia invading and occupying Europe is as plausible as Canada invading and occupying the United States. The idea of Vladimir Putin steamrolling all of Europe like Hitler or Napoleon would be absurd, even if he aspired to do that. But importantly, there is absolutely zero evidence Putin wants to invade. Putin’s Russia has no desire to ideologically control Western Europe. Its external interests have consistently focused on its immediate neighbors, and regions with Russian minorities. Crimea was Russia’s only land grab, and it only happened when the West sought to make Ukraine a satellite.

Tulsi Tucker
https://twitter.com/i/status/1485693277655343107

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No ground troops would be needed.

• Russia Planning “Lightning War” To Take Out Kyiv: UK’s Johnson (ZH)

As we detailed earlier, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell during Monday statements to the press appeared to openly mock the UK and US for their dramatic announcements of embassy personnel evacuations due to threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. He said there’s no need to “dramatize” the situation given there’s high hopes that ongoing diplomacy will prevail. Moscow too has continued to condemn what it called “disinformation hysteria” prevailing in the West, which is fueling the crisis further. But it seems London is content to hype things further, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday citing “gloomy” intelligence from UK intel officials warning that Russia is planning a “lightning war” to take out Ukraine’s capital of Kiev.


Johnson said in a message directed at Russia that an offensive would be a “disastrous step” and “bloody business”. While confirming that some British diplomatic staff have begun to exit the embassy in Kiev and depart of the country, Johnson affirmed “We do think it prudent to make some changes now.” That’s when he said in dramatic fashion… “The intelligence is very clear that there are 60 Russian battle groups on the borders of Ukraine, the plan for a lightning war that could take out Kyiv is one that everybody can see.” “We need to make it very clear to the Kremlin, to Russia, that that would be a disastrous step.” He added during the comments that “from a Russian perspective, (it) is going to be a painful, violent and bloody business.” He concluded with: “I think it’s very important that people in Russia understand that this could be a new Chechnya.”

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The High Court bans the Supreme Court from taking a broader view?! Odd.

• Assange Granted Permission To Take Extradition Case To UK Supreme Court (Haddad)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted permission to take his extradition case against the United States to the Supreme Court, a court ruled on Monday. In a short hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice, also known as the High Court, Lord Chief Justice Ian Duncan Burnett refused to grant Assange leave to appeal—respecting the custom of allowing the Supreme Court to decide for itself which cases it hears—but did pave the way for the case to proceed to Britain’s highest court after “certifying” a point of law. Lord Chief Justice Burnett, Britain’s most senior judge, rejected two grounds on which Assange’s defence sought certification, but accepted that the issue of diplomatic assurances provided by the United States at a late stage of the hearing was of sufficient public importance for the upper-most court to consider.

In a written pronouncement explaining the finding, Burnett said: “The Respondent [Assange] sought certification in respect of three points of law, the first of which centred on the circumstances in which an appellate court may receive assurances from a requesting state concerning the future treatment of a requested person if extradited. “We do not consider that the second or third points raise certifiable points. So far as the first is concerned, although the law in this jurisdiction has long been settled it does not appear that the Supreme Court has considered the question. Assurances are at the heart of many extradition hearings.” Following the finding, Assange lawyers Birnberg Peirce Solicitors issued a statement in which they welcome the decision.

“The High Court found against Mr Assange in its ruling, and relied upon the late assurances, but has certified a point of law of general public importance on the question of the courts’ reception of assurances (frequently relied upon by requesting states in extradition proceedings to overcome defence evidence after it has established a bar to extradition) for the first time on appeal. “The identification by the High Court of the question above for the potential consideration of the Supreme Court, involves concepts of procedural fairness and natural justice. There has long been a general approach by the courts that requires that all relevant matters are raised before the District Judge appointed to consider the case in the Magistrates’ Court.

“What has underpinned a departure from those principles in practice is the categorisation of an assurance as an ‘issue’ as opposed to ‘evidence’ and the developing practice, potentially now consolidated in the decision in this case, whereby an assurance can be freely introduced by the requesting state and considered separately and later. “The defence argument is that despite being as demanding of close evidential scrutiny as the evidence already heard, and despite the content of the assurances being applicable to the testimony of witnesses already heard but not heard again, assurances has been afforded a different procedural position. This issue has become of considerable importance in the predictability and progression of extradition cases.

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The convoy is over 70km long.

 

 

It was reported that Biden called Doocy after calling him an SOB, but apparently that was not to apologize.

 

 

 

 

Yeah,. we had some snow. Paralysis ensues.

 

 

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