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Debt Rattle May 2 2026

May 022026
 
 May 2, 2026  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The girl with the wine glass (Dame en twee heren) 1659


• Trump Issues Letter Rejecting Congressional Oversight For War (ZH)
• Trump’s ‘Assurances’ To Americans as GOP Members Start to Scramble (ZH)
• Iran’s Brutal Test Of Endurance (ZH)
• Indictment-O-Rama (James Howard Kunstler)
• The Comey Memos and the Appointment of Robert Mueller (CTH)
• Another DOJ Investigative Case Against James Comey Happening in Virgina (CTH)
• James Comey Knew EXACTLY What ‘86 47’ Meant (Robert Spencer)
• New Footage of Trump Assassination Attempt Released (Matt Margolis)
• The Real Reason the Democrats Hate President Trump’s Ballroom (Tim O’Brien)
• Remember That Half the Country Once Hated Lincoln (Stephen Kruiser)
• House Ends 76-Day Shutdown (Sarah Anderson)
• Hakeem Jeffries Denounces the Supreme Court as “Illegitimate” (Turley)

 


 

 


 


Does a president need to ask permission for a ceasefire?

• Trump Issues Letter Rejecting Congressional Oversight For War (ZH)

Trump Letter: Doesn’t Need Congressional Approval As Ceasefire Has ‘Terminated’ Conflict


In an acknowledgement that his anti-Iran Operation Epic Fury has indeed hit 60 days, President Trump has issued a formal letter to Congress which argues he does not need their authorization for war. He is arguing the current ceasefire has in effect ‘terminated’ the conflict. Below are his main points via NBC [emphasis by ZH]:

• “On April 7, 2026, I ordered a two-week ceasefire. The ceasefire has since been extended. There has been no exchange of fire between the United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026. The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated,” Trump wrote in the letters, one of which went to the House and one of which went to the Senate.

• “Despite the success of United States operations against the Iranian regime and continued efforts to secure a lasting peace, the threat posed by Iran to the United States and our Armed Forces remains significant,” the president added in the letter, promising to keep congressional leaders updated on further developments in Iran.

• “I have and will continue to direct United States Armed Forces consistent with my responsibilities and pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive,” the president wrote in his letter.

In fresh Friday words to reporters, President Trump says he is not satisfied with the latest proposal from Iran. He further stated that these negotiations “are not getting there right now.”

His main points via Newsquawk:
• Iran wants a deal, but i am not satisfied.
• Iran has no military left.
• Talks with Iran are by phone.
• Made strides in talks with Iran.
• Not sure we are going to get to a deal.
• Not happy with Italy or Spain on Iran.
• Iran leaders do not get along with each other.

Bessent Lists 5 Pressures Iranian ‘Rats’ Facing
US Treasury Secretary Bessent takes to X on Friday to again call Iranian leaders “rats” – which won’t bode well for restarting stalled negotiations. He’s busy boasting on the economic damage unleashed by the ongoing US naval blockade, writing: “It is very difficult for rats in a sewer pipe to know what’s going on in the outside world. Some color for the Iranian Leadership as they literally sit in the dark.” He then lists out the following:

1. The United States has complete control of the Strait of Hormuz.

2. There is a hard currency, i.e. U.S. dollar, shortage.

3. Food and gasoline rationing are in place.

4. The entire international community has turned against you.

5. The BLOCKADE will continue, until there is pre-February 27 Freedom of Navigation.

He also shared a WSJ article proclaiming that the Iranians have ‘failed’ to roll back the US military blockade, and that supposedly the clock is ticking on the government’s ability to rule…

Israel To Renew Bombing if Nuclear Issue Not Dealt With
The Netanyahu government is signaling that it will restart the bombing campaign if the nuclear issue is not resolved. It should also not be forgotten that ‘denuclearizing’ Iran by force has been a multi-decade priority of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hardliners of Israel. These are the latest warnings out of the Israeli military establishment on Friday: An Israeli military official says that if Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% is not removed from the Islamic Republic, the entire latest war will be considered “one big failure.” Israeli officials have said that this stockpile is sufficient for 11 nuclear bombs.

And the Times of Israel underscores further, “The senior officer says that if, as part of negotiations between the United States and Iran, no agreement is reached to remove the uranium stockpile and halt enrichment in the country, the achievements in the 40 days of fighting will have been for nothing.” So this means that “If the nuclear objective is not achieved, then everything we did in Iran will be one big failure. The evil Iranian regime can pounce on the nuclear program,” the official emphasized. And then the threat…

The officer adds that “if the uranium is removed from Iran through diplomatic means, we have done our part.” However, if that does not happen, Israel would need to launch another operation in Iran to achieve the objective, they say. Already Israel has demonstrated its immense influence over the decision to go to war in the first place.

Read more …

Susan Collins (R-Maine) votes with Adam Schiff. Dump her!

• Trump’s ‘Assurances’ To Americans as GOP Members Start to Scramble (ZH)

The Iran war and Hormuz closure remains a game of geopolitical chicken, where each side believes it can inflict more pain on the other while being the one to outlast. But Iran, while being subject to a years long sanctions regimen and recent large-scale US-Israeli bombing campaign, does not operation on 4-year and 2-year election cycles. With next fall’s midterms staring Congressional Republicans in the face, there this increasingly uncomfortable trend: The average price of one gallon (3.8 litres) of gasoline in the United States has reached $4.30, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), up from less than $3 before the February 28 start of the US-Israel war on Iran.


President Trump addressed this in fielding questions in the Oval Office on Thursday,telling reporters that gas prices would “drop like a rock” as soon as the Iran war ended. “The [price of] gasoline and the oil will go down rapidly once the war’s over,” he stated confidently – “like a rock,” he added.

However, the war is about to hit 60-days on Friday and America’s overall strategy and timeline remains anything but clear. Instead, Trump is insisting the Iranians have “nothing” in terms of a military, and yet the crisis in global energy remains, and Operation Epic Fury is still on, the extended uneasy ceasefire notwithstanding…

Meanwhile, an interesting argument (below) from Hegseth this week, as Congress is supposed to vote on a formal war authorization once any foreign conflict hits the 60-day mark, per US law. And the first Republican Senator has ‘switched’ and broken ranks with GOP leaders on Trump’s Iran war and Congressional authorization: Centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Thursday broke ranks with Republican leaders and most GOP colleagues by voting for a war powers resolution sponsored by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to halt military actions against Iran, the first Republican senator to change her position on curtailing President Trump’s military authority.

Rand was over there getting lonely defending the Constitution, but the longer the Iran conflict persists – and Americans feel it at the pump – the more Republican members will likely peel off: Collins joined Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in voting to advance a resolution to withdraw U.S. military forces from the conflict with Iran unless Congress votes to authorize the use of force. She and Paul voted with most Democrats for a motion to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but it still failed by a vote of 47 to 50. It marked the sixth time that Senate Republicans have defeated a resolution under the 1973 War Powers Act to halt further military operations against Iran.

Amid chatter that Israel could be preparing for renewed attacks on Iran, and as Trump is said to be mulling more limited strikes – but while at the same time the USS Gerald R Ford is returning to the United States after a record deployment – Iran is signaling it is ready for a long war and can endure the US naval blockade for a long time to come. However, there are also unconfirmed reports out of Pakistan that another draft peace proposal could be presented by Tehran as soon as this weekend. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has newly said Thursday the blockade is effectively an “extension of military operations” by Washington, despite the extended ceasefire declared by Trump.

Also on Thursday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that the US administration gameplan seems to be to drive Iran into economic ruin, in hopes of triggering some kind of uprising toward regime change. But this was the exact same ‘prediction’ and gameplan in the opening days of the war – which never materialized. One the one hand his below message on X seems to gloat over imposing widescale misery over the bombed-out country, while on the other claiming to help and support the Iranian people, saying they “deserve a new era”.

As we reported earlier, Iran’s currency on Wednesday collapsed to a record low, plunging to 1.8 million rial per dollar amid the prolonged US-Israel war and uneasy ceasefire, also as surging global energy prices hit the economy. The rial began sliding sharply two days prior to this after weeks of artificial stability. In the early phase of the war that kicked off on February 28, the currency held steady due to a near-total halt in imports and limited market activity.

“We think the price was worth it” vibes…

Read more …

The hardship will be dumped upon the people. Don’t let’s forget they killed some 40.000 of their own people even before the US got involved.

• Iran’s Brutal Test Of Endurance (ZH)

Iran’s economy is undergoing one of the most brutal stress tests in its modern history. Official annual inflation has surged to 50% according to central bank figures released shortly after the ceasefire, while the year-on-year rate reached as high as 67% through mid-April, according to the Wall Street Journal. The rial has crashed to a record low of 1.8 million to the dollar, roughly two million workers have lost their jobs, and the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues to throttle the country’s oil exports and critical imports.


Reconstruction costs from bombed infrastructure are estimated near $270 billion – alarmingly close to the country’s entire annual GDP of roughly $341 billion last year. What was already a sanctions-battered, mismanaged economy now confronts a grinding “no war, no peace” stalemate. Tehran is wagering that it can hunker down and endure a protracted war – allowing it to outlast American pressure. The early data and on-the-ground reality suggest that wager is being tested to its limits.

The human impact is immediate and visible in everyday Tehran life. A 56-year-old housewife described to Najmeh Bozorgmehr of the Financial Times how a simple block of cheese rose from 5.2 million rials to 6.7 million rials (about $5.09) in a single week. Comparable jumps have struck rice, eggs, chicken, red meat, and other staples. A popular Peugeot 207 has climbed from 18 billion rials to 25 billion since the conflict began, while officials are preparing to authorize a 40 percent increase in government-mandated cement prices.

The cost of living has soared, with the annual inflation rate reaching 67% in the month through mid-April from the same period a year earlier, according to Iran’s central bank. The subsidized price of red meat, which was mostly imported through sea routes, has gone up to the equivalent of around $3.60 a pound, beyond the reach of most in a country where the minimum wage is around $130 a month. -WSJ

Business consultant Siamak Ghassemi publicly advised Iranians that anything short of a near-doubling of wages would fail to offset the cost-of-living explosion. One small petrochemical-dependent factory outside the capital has already dismissed nearly a third of its workforce. A clothing business owner reported recent costs running 150 percent above sales, bluntly concluding, “This is not sustainable.”

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“Pam Bondi’s era —which paved the way by restructuring the DOJ and navigating the Epstein disclosures— is over. We’re in the Blanche era now.”—Jeff Childers

Indict-O-Rama rolls lightly off the tomgue. Indictment-O-Rama sounds constructed.

• Indictment-O-Rama (James Howard Kunstler)

You might be pleased to know that today’s May Day street actions — rallies, marches, teach-ins, walkouts, demonstrations, and a broad economic blackout (”No Work, No School, No Shopping”) — planned and coordinated by hundreds of activist orgs, is styling itself as “Workers Over Billionaires.”


How do they figure that, exactly, considering the Lefty-left Resistance movement is entirely funded by. . . billionaires? You know. . . George and Alex Soros (the Open Society Foundations), Neville Roy Singham (the People’s Forum, Code Pink), Hansjörg Wyss (the Wyss Foundation), Reid Hoffman (Forward Majority Action, Crowdpac), Sir Chris Hohn (the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation), Alan Parker (Arabella Advisors, Environmental Law Institute) . . . .

Some 3,000-plus actions are planned today in cities all over the country. Last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries framed the Lefty-left’s strategy as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” Will the party’s foot soldiers do his bidding and get frisky out on the streets today. . . a little lootin’ perhaps. . . a fire here and there? Is May Day, as promised by its sponsors, the gateway into another Summer of Love (mostly peaceful riots)?

We’ll have an idea by day’s end. Meanwhile, the Lefty-left’s business-class lounge, the Democratic Party, has suddenly caught a case of the jim-jams over this week’s 6-3 SCOTUS ruling on the racial gerrymandering of Congressional districts, which is: no more snake-shaped districts through the bayous, cotton fields, pine Islands, palmetto scrubs, and Cypress hammocks of deepest Dixieland for the purpose of creating majority-black seats. Observers forecast the loss of up to nineteen Democratic House members going into the 2028 election. It’s not clear how the Party’s billionaires might be able to fix this.

Also, this week, interesting developments in the Lefty-left’s retirement clubhouse. The law (the DOJ’s Eastern District of North Carolina) finally caught up with Jim Comey’s prank of one year ago when he posted on Instagram a curious arrangement of seashells on a Carolina beach saying “86 47.” The cryptic message — “cool shell formation,” Mr. Comey said in the caption — was universally understood to mean get rid of the forty-seventh POTUS, Donald Trump. Because the former FBI Director was well-versed in mob lingo from prosecuting gangsters, it appears he knew exactly what the code stands for: the instruction to go whack somebody. Hence, the question: was Mr. Comey issuing such an instruction to the Lefty-left rank and file?

Mr. Comey suddenly finds himself in a sort of brand-new crossfire hurricane. Turns out, an investigation (said to be at the “pre grand jury stage”) was launched lately in the DOJ’s Eastern District of Virginia concerning Mr. Comey’s use of a “cut-out” messenger, Columbia U professor and BFF Daniel Richman, for leaking a confidential conversation with President Trump to reporter Michael Schmidt of The New York Times back in 2017. This was Mr. Comey’s notorious disclosure in a Trump Tower consultation with the new president that a video existed of Russian whores peeing on a bed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel for Mr. Trump’s amusement. It was, of course, a kick-off for the FBI’s totally fake RussiaGate campaign.

It’s also widely expected that the former FBI Director will be one of the many former officials fingered in the DOJ’s RICO case out of the Southern District of Florida. The grand jury is already seated and hearing the evidence in a Fort Pierce federal courthouse. That case is predicated on the chain of legal attacks against Mr. Trump, running back a decade, amounting to an ongoing coup, a comprehensive campaign of legalistic chicanery disguised as legality designed to overthrow the chief executive.

Observers have started trying to pre-bunk the seashell case, saying there are six ways to Sunday that Mr. Comey can explain it away. Don’t be so sure about that. Mainly, what the DOJ has to demonstrate is Mr. Comey’s mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”), a fundamental concept in criminal law that refers to the mental state or intention a person must have when committing a nefarious act, in order to be held criminally liable. Expect to see bales of written evidence on that.

The beauty of the seashell case is this: It’s quite straightforward and uncomplicated. There might be little room for Mr. Comey’s lawyers to create procedural delays, such as dragging out discovery issues. Which means that in this case Mr. Comey will get exactly the speedy trial that the US Constitution calls for. . . meaning, the courtroom showdown could take place before the midterm election.

Read more …

It’s all one big anti-Trump soup.

• The Comey Memos and the Appointment of Robert Mueller (CTH)

I apologize for the deep weed details, but this stuff will soon become critical. If James Comey is indicted for leaking the “Comey memos” suddenly the door opens wide to see how the Robert Mueller appointment was a coordinated ongoing ‘conspiracy’ effort to target Donald Trump. Back in June 2017 CNN (and other media) filed a FOIA suit to gain the Comey memos. As the lawsuit progressed through a lengthy battle -where the Mueller team did not want to turn over those memos- Mueller’s lead FBI agent, David Archey, made sworn declarations to the court. Those statements became known as the “Archey Declarations”. Inside those declarations agent Archey provided a specific outline of the FBI and the memos.


There are two sets of documents that outline a very specific picture. Robert Mueller’s lead FBI Agent David Archey made sworn declarations to the court. However, at the time of his sworn statement, Archey did not have knowledge of an inside FBI “whistleblower” who provided information to DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz. There is a distinct conflict within the IG Horowitz report on James Comey (and memos) [Available Here] and the David Archey declarations. However, beyond the conflict there’s an even more alarming picture of how Robert Mueller was deployed, when all the information is overlaid in a timeline. A very clear picture emerges; very clear.

Note the date: Agent Archey states the “investigative team” came into full possession of the Comey memos: “on or by May 12th, 2017,”…

The “investigative team” would be Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and then James Baker as lead counsel for the group. The “Director’s staff” would be James Rybicki, who is identified by Archey as having “maintained” possession of the memos. This “small group”, particularly Comey’s Chief of Staff, James Rybicki, is the center of the team. This team is also confirmed by the IG Horowitz report. This team had the memos on May 12th, 2017.

Now we move into the aspect where the motives and ideology become clear as we look at the IG custodial record of the memos, as outlined by the Supervisory Special Agent in charge of Comey’s documents within the IG report, compared to the Archey declarations.The FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in charge of Comey’s document retrieval is the “whistleblower” who eventually went to the IG. I’ll explain why and how below; and to make understanding easier we shall use “SSA Whistleblower” to describe him.On May 10th, the Comey memos were not in Comey’s office [per IG report]. At the time of the search and review of Comey’s office there were no hard copies found by SSA Whistleblower.

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We should have 100 of these cases. So people can read every day what a piece of crap he is.

• Another DOJ Investigative Case Against James Comey Happening in Virgina (CTH)

In the first case against James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress, there was no dismissal; instead, the judge rejected US Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s involvement. After that, the statute of limitations ran out. However, if the report below is accurate, this would represent the third currently active investigation against former FBI Director James Comey, and Lindsey Halligan might get the last laugh.


The first investigative notice to Comey was in mid-March from the Sunshine State. Essentially the ‘conspiracy case’ being reviewed by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida The second investigative case was in North Carolina, where a grand jury released an indictment for threats against President Trump. Now, Bloomberg is reporting on a third investigation against Comey for leaking classified documents to his friend and special government employee, Daniel Richman.

BLOOMBERG – […] The investigation is tied to his dissemination of documents to Columbia University Law Professor Daniel Richman, the individuals added. If successful, it would be the Trump DOJ’s third time indicting Comey since last fall. […] It hasn’t been decided if the department will present an indictment to a grand jury in Eastern Virginia, where Comey resides, or if the case could be pursued in a different location—such as in Richman’s home of New York. It doesn’t really matter whether New York or the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), either location would be the third state where the disgraced former FBI Director Comey would have to defend himself. Again, I remind everyone of ‘pressure points’ in Lawfare.

If the EDVA/NY case proceeds it is based around James Comey leaking his memos to his friend Daniel Richman. In addition to being a close personal friend to James Comey, Daniel Richman is part of the Lawfare network and close friends with Benjamin Wittes, another member of Comey’s tribe. The evidence of this leaking operation is solid, very solid. The only defense James Comey holds in this matter is to claim his memos were not ‘classified’ material.

In fact, several months ago I was told the reason Comey was not yet indicted was due to an internal debate within the DOJ as to the classification status of the Comey memos. To wit I replied, “there is a profound irony in this question the DOJ is asking itself.” You see, in the Mar-a-Lago documents case Jack Smith appealed the ‘classification’ ruling by Judge Aileen Cannon when she appointed a “Special Master” to review the documents and determine the classification status.

The DOJ/FBI Special Counsel, previously said to the Florida court they would not reveal the content of the Mar-a-Lago document information because it was “classified” under “national security” grounds. You might remember President Trump’s legal position was to make the content public because Trump said there was no classified material.To reconcile the issue, during discovery phase Florida Judge Cannon appointed a Special Master to review the “classified” documents. The FBI and Jack Smith balked at the demand and filed an appeal with the 11th Circuit to keep the Trump defense from reviewing what Jack Smith said were “documents marked classified.”

Smith didn’t want the documents made public or revealed to President Trump, so the DOJ/FBI position was that the documents were too sensitive (TSCI) with “national security” implications. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the “classification status” of the Mar-a-Lago documents was whatever the national security apparatus of the federal government (DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community) said it was. The judicial branch could not interfere in the classification status applied by the executive branch.

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“.. the line between speech and crime is – it should be clear, but it’s fuzzy.”

• James Comey Knew EXACTLY What ‘86 47’ Meant (Robert Spencer)

James Comey, former FBI director, former deputy attorney general, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is a friend of presidents and kings, an admired figure who presents himself as a voice of reason and morality, and a pillar of the Washington establishment — or, as the Mafia would put it, a made guy. Surely he would never do something so lawless and undemocratic as threaten the president of the United States, would he?


That’s what Comey contends in response to charges that he was issuing a veiled threat to the president when he posted on his Instagram account a photo of seashells arranged to say “86 47.” “86” is a well-known expression for getting rid of someone, and whether or not Comey meant that Trump should be gotten rid of by assassination, it was an extraordinarily irresponsible statement for him to make at a time when leftist calls for violence against Trump and his supporters are distressingly common.

Those calls have now resulted in three assassination attempts against Trump, and no one knows how many more there will be, but in this climate, only a fool would say that the president will finish out his term without any more attempts to kill him. Comey took the photo down on the same day that he posted it, and explained: “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.”

However, the idea that the former director of the FBI actually “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” strains credulity well beyond the breaking point. That is clear from a potboiler crime novel, FDR Drive, that Comey wrote, or that was more likely ghostwritten for him.

In an unwittingly revealing May 2025 interview with NPR to plug the book, Comey explained that his novel was “about a right-wing podcaster who is trying to motivate his followers to engage in acts of violence against the targets of his vitriol. And it’s about my protagonist, Nora Carleton, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, trying to figure out, how do we stop the violence? And is there a way to hold this podcaster criminally accountable for what he clearly knows he’s doing? And that’s the trick because the line between speech and crime is – it should be clear, but it’s fuzzy.”

All right. So here’s the intrepid FBI director explaining that he wrote a book about a “right-wing podcaster” (after all, who else do leftists think is evil these days?) who “is trying to motivate his followers to engage in acts of violence against the targets of his vitriol,” but he is apparently doing so in a veiled manner, because Comey adds that “he clearly knows” what he’s doing. Comey’s novel, he says, is all about “the line between speech and crime.”

And then Comey would have us believe that he posted a photo on his Instagram account that many of his followers would understand as a call to engage in an act of violence against the target of his vitriol, but that poor, naïve Comey himself didn’t know what he was doing? Sell me a bridge while you’re at it, why doncha?

This becomes all the clearer when the NPR interviewer asks Comey about the “line between free speech and violent incitement and domestic terrorism, ideologically motivated violence,” and Comey says he has had to “grapple with that very issue throughout my career.” Yet he expects us to believe that he didn’t pause to ponder even for a moment whether posting “86 47” might constitute violent incitement and domestic terrorism.

That’s what he’s insisting: “I took a picture and posted it ’cause I thought it was a clever political thing. Never occurred to me that someone would try to say it was associated with violence. I actually still don’t see that. But I took it down because I don’t want – I mean, this is my Instagram account, for God’s sakes. I don’t want anything on there to be associated with violence, even if I don’t get it.” And he didn’t think anyone else would get it, either: “Yeah, I’m not worried, ‘cause there’s no world in which this is an actual threat.”

Of course. So here is a guy who published a novel about veiled calls to violence, claiming that he didn’t know what he posted was a veiled call to violence, despite the fact that it’s common parlance. Sure, Comey. I’ll bet you would still insist you were acting in good faith regarding the Russia hoax, too.

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“The video also includes footage from the day before the attack. Allen can be seen walking the same corridor where the shooting would later occur ..”

• New Footage of Trump Assassination Attempt Released (Matt Margolis)

The friendly fire theory just got buried — on video. For days, questions swirled about whether a Secret Service agent wounded at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had actually been hit by fellow agents in the chaos. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro put that narrative to rest Thursday night. Pirro released new, high-quality security video from the Washington Hilton Hotel showing 31-year-old Cole Allen charging through a Secret Service checkpoint during the April 25 dinner, where President Trump was scheduled to speak. The footage, she noted, had already been submitted to U.S. District Court.


“Today, we are releasing video already provided to U.S. District Court showing Cole Allen shoot a U.S. Secret Service officer during his attempt to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Pirro said in her X post. “There is no evidence the shooting was the result of friendly fire.”

The new video is a significant upgrade from the grainy footage that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. When slowed to 35% speed, it captures something the earlier clips couldn’t clearly show — Allen, armed with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, opening fire at close range on a Secret Service agent as he blows past the magnetometer. Multiple agents return fire almost simultaneously. The wounded agent took buckshot to the chest but was protected by his bulletproof vest.

The video also includes footage from the day before the attack. Allen can be seen walking the same corridor where the shooting would later occur, stopping in the hotel gym to chat with an attendant, and studying the layout. Prosecutors say this is part of a weeks-long pattern of deliberate planning — Allen allegedly researched the event, booked his hotel room nearly a month out, tracked Trump’s schedule in real time on the day of the attack, and even watched a live broadcast of the president’s arrival moments before making his move.

NBC News has more: Investigators believe the man charged with the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump shot a Secret Service officer who was wearing a ballistic vest, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case. Investigators have determined that the Secret Service Uniformed Division officer was not struck by friendly fire from another member of law enforcement, the sources told NBC News on Wednesday. […]

The officer, who was taken to a hospital, was released over the weekend. Allen was charged with discharging a weapon but has not been formally accused of assaulting a federal officer. A law enforcement source said work continues analyzing Allen’s devices, including desktop and laptop computers from his California home, as well as his phone, a laptop and hard drives recovered from his guest room at the Washington Hilton hotel. While Allen already faces federal charges of attempted assassination, prosecutors have signaled that additional charges may follow as the investigation continues.

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Because it’s Trump’s Ballroom

• The Real Reason the Democrats Hate President Trump’s Ballroom (Tim O’Brien)

In the grand scheme of things, a White House ballroom seems to be too trivial a thing to create the level of controversy this one has. There are many reasons the Democrats are attacking the project, but there is only one reason that drives all the hate you’ve been seeing. Sure, the preservationists might say the new ballroom is not in keeping with the way the White House has been designed and carefully modified over the years. Others might take issue with its look, saying it’s too oversized and dwarfs the main building. The aesthetics don’t work for them. Still others say it’s about the money—that taxpayers don’t need to spend a single penny on a project that was never needed in the first place.


These are all fair opinions if held sincerely, but the Democrats are never sincere, so when they express these concerns, it’s all just noise to hide the real reason they despise the idea of President Donald Trump building a new ballroom at the White House. They hate the ballroom because Trump is building it, and once it’s complete, it will be a lasting legacy of the 45th and 47th president, even if he never steps foot in it as president. It’s the Trump ballroom, and it will always be known as just that.That is why the Washington Post, the newspaper that brought you the Watergate investigation, is devoting as much ink and resources to a ballroom story as it did to make “Woodward and Bernstein” household names.

That Washington Post pull quote is pure propaganda. Sure, no one likes waiting in line, but they still have to do that no matter the size of the room. And no one likes going to a White House state dinner and then being crammed in so tight that they feel like they’re sitting in coach in a Spirit Airlines seat, either. Suppose a Democrat takes the presidency two, six or 10 years from now. They can try to erase Trump’s name from the project. They can rename it the Michelle Obama Dance Room and Aerobics Studio, the Lenin Grand Hall, or the Mamdani Mosque. It won’t matter. Everyone will still know it as the Trump ballroom, because it was Trump’s idea and he built it.

And that’s what bothers the Democrats most. Trump gets the last word and the last laugh. Trump has made many good arguments for building the ballroom. It’s embarrassing to be the world’s foremost superpower and be forced to erect tents on the White House lawn to hold events. As Trump noted immediately after the latest attempt on his life, a White House ballroom would provide necessary security for many events the president hosts or attends, which, for current logistical reasons, must take place off-site. By the way, the photo of Princess Diana and John Travolta below was taken in the White House East Wing entranceway, and it could only accommodate 150 people standing.

One of the funny things about the Democrat campaign against the ballroom in the wake of the latest assassination attempt on Trump is that many leftists are pointing out that the Washington Hilton, which hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, has the capacity for over 2,600 attendees, while the planned White House ballroom is designed to hold 650–1,000, and so they say the new ballroom is too small.

At the same time, they say the new ballroom is too big and will overpower the main house.

So, which is it: too small or too big? This is how you know how unserious the Democrats are when it comes to the ballroom. They mean nothing of what they say. All they know is that if Trump is doing it, they’re against it. And they’re willing to go to the wall to defeat it. But the truth is, Trump is several steps ahead of them. The project is well underway. The East Wing is demolished. The project must be finished now, no matter how much negativity the left tries to attach to it. F

rom a public relations and a political standpoint, that’s really all the left is trying to do. It’s the same thing they have been doing to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the same as what they did during those “summer of love” riots back in 2020. They start the chaos. Their billionaire funders pay for the chaos and orchestrate it, and they blame Trump for making them do it. If you want the chaos to stop, you have to get rid of Trump. It’s classic Democrat blackmail.

Since they can’t stop construction of the new ballroom in the end, they want to make enough of a mess of it so they can say that Trump made the mess. Then their narrative will be that they had to clean up after him.mIronically, the more they fight Trump on this, the more closely the ballroom will be associated with his name for decades or longer. Since the ballroom will be a very nice feature, that will only help Trump in a legacy sense. In the end, there will be a big, beautiful White House ballroom one day soon enough. It will be known as the Trump ballroom. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

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“President Trump is on the right side of history. He knows it. We know it. Now they just have to keep him safe. ”

• Remember That Half the Country Once Hated Lincoln (Stephen Kruiser)

Oh, the emotions in the United States of America here in the Year of Our Lord 2026! There’s despair. There’s anger. There’s…well, there’s mostly anger. Heck, I tend to be dead inside and the partisan political acrimony has even been getting to me. In a recent VIP column, I wrote that I was taking a brief break from my workday habit of perusing the Opinion sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post because I’m starting to worry about that kind of crazy being contagious.


That followed a week or two of me venting in various ways about the state of things in American politics. Then I remembered something very important: I’m rather enjoying President Trump’s second term. Seeing the Democrats rend their garments over everything that he does isn’t something I should let get me frustrated. It’s kind of a schadenfreude-filled bonus.

As I began to return to my typical Zen-like state, I decided it would be fun to trigger the lefties by writing a column that not only likened President Trump to President Abraham Lincoln, but likened today’s Democrats to the seditious secessionists (say that three times fast) of the Civil War era. I know I’m not the first conservative pundit to do this. Honestly, I’m surprised at how long it took me to get around to it. I have a lot of lefty trolls and a kajillion prog followers on X; I really should be thinking of triggering them more often.

Even though the circumstances are obviously different, finding parallels between what’s happening now and the America of the 1860s isn’t difficult for conservatives, mostly because we’ve all read history books. I am in no way saying that things are as severe right now — families aren’t killing each other from opposite sides of a war. I just can’t help but think that there are some similarities between the political climate then and now.

Today’s Democrats may not want to secede from the Union in the way that the South did back in the day. They’re far more insidious. The progressive dream that drives modern Dems involves the absolute shredding of any parts of the Constitution that pertain to real liberty. Free speech as we know it will be gone. Gun rights will be gone. Due process? See ya. Goodbye Electoral College, hello every president being elected by California, New York, and Illinois. The execrable 16th Amendment will, of course, be safe.

As I have written many times, they will still be calling it the United States of America, but it won’t resemble the country that we love. True, it’s not secession, but they’re still trying to break up the country in a different way. Now considered the greatest president in American history, Abraham Lincoln was unpopular with a lot of people when he was in office. See if this sounds familiar: during the presidential election of 1864, Lincoln faced intra-party opposition from Republicans who were dissatisfied with his handling of the war. The GOP has had its whiny turncoat problem since its earliest days.

While the Southerners pretended they had a new country, they were all still Americans in the eyes of Lincoln and the Unionists. Because they were. A note for the pedants out there: I know that the Southern states didn’t really make up half the population. I’m an opinion writer, not a journalist, and I sometimes take creative license to make a headline fit. Whatever the exact number, quite a lot of people had Lincoln Derangement Syndrome. You all get the sentiment, though.

When we are talking about support for a president, we’re never really considering the entire population anyway, just the electorate. Right now, a good chunk of that electorate really, really, loathes President Trump. The amazing thing about this second term is that he is not getting distracted by that at all. That’s one of the reasons that the Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers are getting more unhinged by the minute. They’re still spitting nails because they couldn’t put him in jail in 2023 or 2024.

President Trump shares an important quality with President Lincoln: resolve. We can throw vision in there for good measure as well. Both are essential for a leader in troubled times. We may not be at war with each other like we were in the 1860s, but these are most definitely troubled times. Once again, the trouble is coming from the people who are trying to destroy the Republic and are consumed with hatred for the president who is fighting to preserve it. President Trump is on the right side of history. He knows it. We know it. Now they just have to keep him safe.

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Does anyone still wonder why?

• House Ends 76-Day Shutdown (Sarah Anderson)

It only took 76 days.


On Thursday, the United States House of Representatives unanimously approved a Senate-passed bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which will soon end the shutdown that began on February 14 — the longest partial government shutdown in the history of the country. All it needs now is for Donald Trump to sign it into law.

The chamber approved the bill via voice vote and with “little fanfare,” according to CBS. It’s important to note that it does not fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). However, Republicans advanced a separate budget reconciliation package that will provide those agencies with funding for the next three years using only GOP votes. The shutdown only impacted DHS, including critical agencies like the TSA, Coast Guard (civilians), FEMA, Secret Service, USCIS, CISA, ICE, CBP, and more, leaving many of them struggling to pay employees.

Tens of thousands were furloughed, and many worked with delayed pay. Others quit. The shutdown led to long security lines at airports, as well as unpaid bills, delayed contracts, and cyber planning gaps, according to the White House. Shortly before the vote, we learned that active-duty Coast Guard members were using flashlights to see because they couldn’t pay their electric bills. Some were going into debt because they were not receiving payments for their reassignment moves. They were putting money on credit cards and taking out loans. We also had to cancel numerous national security exercises.

The shutdown was triggered by the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by Border Patrol agents in Minnesota earlier this year. Democrats in Congress refused to fund DHS until Republicans agreed to new oversight rules and restrictions on border agents. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson calls it a win for Republicans.

“We got the budget resolution passed. This is very, very important because that will ensure that border security and immigration enforcement will continue today and well into the future, despite Democrat attempts to re-open our borders and protect criminal illegal aliens from removal. The net result of passing our reconciliation bill is that ICE and CBP are funded for three years, and Democrats got absolutely nothing for their political charade and shenanigans out of that.”

Read more …

Let ’em try.

• Hakeem Jeffries Denounces the Supreme Court as “Illegitimate” (Turley)

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais took 36 pages to explain why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is about combating intentional racial discrimination, not allowing racial gerrymandering. However, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrapped it up in one word: “illegitimate.” Jeffries was not speaking of the case, but the Court. The man who would become the next Speaker of the House if Democrats retake power in November has joined other radicals in denying the legitimacy of the nation’s highest court.


Just for the record, the Supreme Court did not strike down Section 2, but said that neither the law nor the Constitution allows legislators to manipulate district lines to guarantee that candidates of a particular race will be elected. It was written not to give any race an advantage, but to prevent a state from creating a disadvantage to voters based on their race. The Act prevents any State from intentionally drawing districts “to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” This is a matter upon which people of good faith can disagree. Many of the justices have been long opposed to racial criteria in areas ranging from college admissions to voting districts.

Chief Justice John Roberts stated it bluntly in 2006 that “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Like others, Roberts abhors racial discrimination but declared in another case that “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”You will find no such distinctions in much of the press where experts declared the death of equal voting laws in America. UCLA Law Professor Richard Hasen dispenses with any nuance and simply ran a Slate column titled “The Slaying of the Voting Rights Act by the Coward Alito.” For years, liberal law professors have been trashing conservative justices, including Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who called them “partisan hacks.”

However, the name-calling has mutated into a movement to scrap the Court or the Constitution, or both. Chemerinsky wrote a book recently titled “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.” There was, of course, no such movement during the decades with a liberal majority that set aside an array of long-standing cases. It was only when a stable conservative majority emerged that law professors declared the Court illegitimate or dangerous, with many calling for packing the Court with an instant liberal majority once Democrats retake power. I discuss some of these voices as the “new Jacobins” in my book Rage and the Republic, figures echoing the radical concepts or means used in France before what became known as “The Terror.”

Law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale have called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Last December, they published a column titled “It’s Time to Accept that the US Supreme Court is Illegitimate and Must be Replaced.” They insist that citizens must be rid of this meddlesome court: “remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised.”

Many Democrats realize that the public is rather attached to both the Constitution and its core institutions. That is why various Democratic politicians and pundits have been pledging to pack the Court once they are back in power. Some have suggested that, if they are going to change the political system and retain power, they will have to do it with the help of a compliant Court.

Democratic strategist James Carville stated matter-of-factly, “They’re going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That’s going to happen, people.” He added recently, “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” To do that, you must first delegitimate the Court. You must attack both the individual justices and the institution itself. You need true rage to get a people to tear apart the core institution of a Republic on its 250th anniversary. Now you have the next possible Speaker of the United States declaring the Supreme Court illegitimate because he disagrees with its interpretation of the law.

What these figures do not mention is that the majority of opinions by the Supreme Court are unanimous or nearly unanimous. A comparably few cases break along strict ideological 6-3 lines. Indeed, just last week, it was President Donald Trump who was denouncing the conservative justices as disloyal and weak for, again, ruling against his Administration. It is not the voting record nor the underlying interpretations that are motivating this campaign of delegitimation. It is power. Former Attorney General Eric Holder explained it most clearly recently in pushing the packing plan after the Democrats retake power: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power, if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”

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https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2049822208969617893?s=20

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 18 2024

Sep 182024
 
 September 18, 2024  Posted by at 8:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  36 Responses »


René Magritte The song of love 1948

 

• 9 Killed, 2700+ Wounded In Israel’s Pager Attack On Hezbollah (ZH)
• Gunman Lurked For 12 Hours Before Trump’s Last-minute Game Of Golf (BBC)
• 26 Million Americans Say Political Violence Against Trump Is Justified (Turley)
• CNN Worries That Trump Assassination Attempts Are HELPING Him Politically (MN)
• Negotiate With Moscow To Prevent Nuclear Devastation (Trump Jr, RFK Jr)
• Secret Service ‘Aware’ Of Elon Musk Post About Harris, Biden (BBC)
• Meta Bans RT (RT)
• Meta’s Ban on Sputnik ‘Very Bad’ and Politicized Decision (Sp.)
• Grocery Rationing within Four Years (Jeffrey A. Tucker)
• Hillary Demands Criminal Charges For Americans “Engaged” In “Propaganda” (ZH)
• Experts Gone Wild (Mike Scanlon)
• Springfield Ohio Is Just the Beginning (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Macron’s Impeachment Clears First Hurdle in Left-Dominated National Assembly (Sp.)
• The EU Retreats Further into a World of Self-Delusion (NC)
• Yemen’s Hypersonic Ballistic Missile Rocks Israel’s Defenses (Nasrallah)

 

 

 

 

Trump ad
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835763816979673208

 

 

Birdie

 

 

Balls of steel
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835824494423769390

 

 

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835746266485276806

 

 

SS Obama Trump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835722737148686485

 

 

Jennings

 

 

Eric Prince: “There’s some indication that shows the Butler shooter and yesterday’s shooter both appeared in BlackRock TV commercials. The statistical likelihood of that being random is impossible.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835654344902942916

 

 

 

 

“The Israeli spy agency placed a quantity of PETN, a highly explosive material, on the batteries of the devices, and detonated them by raising the temperature of the batteries from afar..”

• 9 Killed, 2700+ Wounded In Israel’s Pager Attack On Hezbollah (ZH)

Official Lebanese Health Ministry figures are that nine people were killed in the simultaneous pager explosions, including a young girl, and some 2,750 wounded. The Lebanese government has identified “Israeli aggression” as being behind the attack, while Hezbollah also says it holds Israel “fully responsible”. Israel has yet to issue official comment, but there are several reports from the region that war preparations are underway. There are reports of evening Israeli shelling of Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon. Israel’s Channel 14 is reporting that “senior Israeli military officials are preparing for a third Hezbollah war which is expected to begin almost immediately.” The US State Department has said the US “was not aware of this operation and was not involved” in the attack. The Biden administration says it is “still gathering information”.

The WSJ has offered some initial details on the sophisticated attack, which Lebanese and Arabs have condemned as a major ‘terror attack’. “The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days, people familiar with the matter said,” WSJ writes. “A Hezbollah official said hundreds of fighters had such devices, speculating that malware may have caused the devices to explode. The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.” And more: “Hezbollah said a number of pagers carried by its members exploded simultaneously at 3:30 p.m. It couldn’t immediately be determined what caused the blasts, which were spread out across the country in several areas where Hezbollah has a heavy presence.”

Israeli media says Mossad rigged the pager batteries of a shipment that was imported five months ago: The Israeli spy agency placed a quantity of PETN, a highly explosive material, on the batteries of the devices, and detonated them by raising the temperature of the batteries from afar, the source says. There are initial reports that more European airlines have began cancelling flights to Lebanon and Israel amid more headlines of war plans. Lebanese schools and colleges have announced widespread closures tomorrow. The US administration appears to be standing idly by in the meantime.

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He waited for 12 hours, having no idea if Trump would show up? Hmmm.. Check his phone, I’d say. Oh wait, the FBI has it..

• Gunman Lurked For 12 Hours Before Trump’s Last-minute Game Of Golf (BBC)

A gunman hid for nearly 12 hours in bushes before Donald Trump played an unscheduled game of golf at his oceanfront club in Florida – leaving locals stunned at what authorities say appears to be the second attempt to assassinate the former president in as many months. It was hot and cloudy on Sunday afternoon when Trump and his good friend, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, arrived on the course of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. The former president was on the fifth fairway at 13:31 EDT (17:31 GMT), an area adjacent to busy roads near Palm Beach International Airport, when a member of his protection detail spotted a rifle poking out of foliage by the sixth hole. Trump – who was evacuated unharmed – recounted on Monday night that he heard “probably four or five” shots ring out in the near-distance. A quick-thinking Secret Service agent had opened fire in the direction of the suspect, who was about 300-500 yards away and did not have a clear line of sight to Trump, federal investigators said.

“Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets, and they grabbed me,” said Trump during a live-streamed event on X, formerly Twitter, from his Mar-a-Lago resort. “We got into the carts and we moved along pretty, pretty good. I was with an agent, and the agent did a fantastic job.” The gunman – who investigators say did not fire any shots – was concealed by the well-manicured shrubbery and tall palm trees that line the perimeter of the 27-hole course.He had been lurking there on the public side of a fence since 01:59 local time on Sunday morning, according to mobile phone records, cited by federal officials. The suspect was equipped with two digital cameras, a black plastic bag of food, an SKS-style semi-automatic rifle – a weapon with a range of nearly 440 yards – and a scope to magnify its lens. The Republican presidential candidate’s last publicly scheduled campaign event had been on Saturday evening, on the other side of the country, in the state of Utah.

Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail. But Secret Service director Ronald Rowe said on Monday that the former president was “not even really supposed to go there”, so agents had to put together a security plan at the last minute. The foiled plot has left Trump’s neighbours in Palm Beach with pressing questions. Did the suspect know the former president would be coming to play golf, or was it a guess? How could he have gone undetected for so long, hiding in the bushes with a rifle? The gunman escaped the scene in a black Nissan, ditching his backpack of goods and weapon. A civilian woman was able to take a picture of his licence plate and pass it to investigators, Trump said on Monday night. The gunman made it about 40 minutes before officers pulled over his vehicle on Interstate 95 and ordered him out.

Bodycam footage shows he seemed calm as officers shouted at him to step to the side before handcuffing him without incident. On Monday, the suspect Ryan Routh, 58, appeared in a crowded Palm Beach court, wearing a blue prison jumpsuit and smiling as he chatted with his attorney. He was charged with one count of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and one count of possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. More charges could follow. Routh, a Hawaii resident with a criminal history, had come across the FBI’s radar in 2019 for being a felon in possession of a firearm. The bureau tipped off law enforcement in Honolulu at the time.

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“It was only after she later chased reporters with a machete that the college fired Rodríguez. She was then hired by another college.”

• 26 Million Americans Say Political Violence Against Trump Is Justified (Turley)

A poll released by the University of Chicago via the Chicago Project on Security and Threats offers a chilling account of the growing radicalism in America, particularly after the second foiled assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump, the poll found that 26 million Americans believe “the use of force” is justified to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. As discussed in my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” we have seen an increasing level of rage rhetoric in our political system. For some, violent language can become violent action. There is a normalization that can occur as extreme actions become more acceptable to more and more citizens: “We are living in an age of rage. It permeates every aspect of our society and politics. Rage is liberating, even addictive. It allows us to say and do things that we would ordinarily avoid, even denounce in others. Rage is often found at the farthest extreme of reason. For those who agree with the underlying message, it is righteous and passionate. For those who disagree, it is dangerous and destabilizing.”

With the unrelenting claims of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and others that democracy is about to die in America, some now feel a license to commit criminal acts in the name of “saving democracy.” It is the ultimate form of self-delusion that one saves democracy by committing political violence against those with whom you disagree. We have seen this radicalism spread in past years from higher education into society at large. Years ago, many of us were shocked by the conduct of University of Missouri communications professor Melissa Click who directed a mob against a student journalist covering a Black Lives Matter event. Yet, Click was hired by Gonzaga University. Since that time, we have seen a steady stream of professors joining students in shouting down, committing property damage, participating in riots, verbally attacking students, or even taking violent action in protests.

It is now common to hear inflammatory language from professors advocating “detonating white people,” denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer, strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters and other outrageous statements. At the University of Rhode Island, professor Erik Loomis defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. At the University of California Santa Barbara, professors actually rallied around feminist studies associate professor Mireille Miller-Young, who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display. Despite pleading guilty to criminal assault, she was not fired and received overwhelming support from the students and faculty. She was later honored as a model for women advocates.

At Hunter College in New York, Professor Shellyne Rodríguez was shown trashing a pro-life display of students. She was captured on a videotape telling the students that “you’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.” Unlike the professor, the students remained calm and respectful. One even said “sorry” to the accusation that being pro-life was triggering for her students. Rodríguez continued to rave, stating, “No you’re not — because you can’t even have a f–king baby. So you don’t even know what that is. Get this s–t the f–k out of here.” In an Instagram post, she is then shown trashing the table. Hunter College, however, did not consider this unhinged attack to be sufficient to terminate Rodríguez. It was only after she later chased reporters with a machete that the college fired Rodríguez. She was then hired by another college.

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“Their followers, the people listening to their incessant 24 hour ‘Trump is Hitler’ loop, are literally trying to murder him, yet somehow Trump is the one who needs to tone it down..”

• CNN Worries That Trump Assassination Attempts Are HELPING Him Politically (MN)

A former Obama administration official turned CNN shit talker expressed a concern Sunday that all these pesky failed attempts to assassinate Donald Trump are helping him politically. Yes, really. Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official under Obama, labelled the situation a “problem” and “unfortunate” because it is making Trump more popular. “I really don’t care what you feel about him, or Harris,” Kayyem said referring to Trump, adding “I mean, this is, this is the expectation that he will be safe.” Kayyem continued, “And the reason why this is, you know, in some ways, you know, you said how close the election is, the problem is this is a safety issue that is being thrown into a very intense political environment in which the very fact of an assassination, a constitutional moment, because it’s, it could have impacted voters, will be used for political purposes.” “And that, to me, is, is just as not as a, you know, exceptionally unfortunate, because whatever your beliefs are, we do deserve to have campaigns that are not part that where violence isn’t being used as either a sword or a shield,” she added.

So, the only reason why CNN Democrats believe attempting to murder a political rival is bad appears to be because it could help them in the polls. How unfortunate that Trump keeps dodging bullets fired by radicalised deranged leftists and then… talking about it! CNN’s Wolf Blitzer expressed the same concern that Trump is using the assassination attempts “as a way to rile up his base.” So, the only reason why CNN Democrats believe attempting to murder a political rival is bad appears to be because it could help them in the polls. It’s good to see they have their priorities straight.

The media reaction to this second attempt to shoot Trump to death is just incredible. They’re actually running with the narrative that it is Trump’s OWN FAULT that a blue haired Harris supporter hid in a bush with an AK47 and tried to shoot him in the head.

It’s absolutely fascinating, and hideously disgusting at the same time. Their followers, the people listening to their incessant 24 hour ‘Trump is Hitler’ loop, are literally trying to murder him, yet somehow Trump is the one who needs to tone it down. It’s the equivalent of saying “she got raped because her skirt was too short.” Lets check where we are now on the leftist news cycle: You see, it’s ALL Trump’s fault. These shooters just have unclear political ideologies. It’s not like this latest nutcase just parroted the exact same phrases as the Democrat controlled leftist media while cosplaying as some sort of NGO official coordinating a Ukraine war effort response… is it?

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“There is no remaining step between firing U.S. missiles deep into Russian territory and a nuclear exchange. We cannot get any closer to the brink than this..”

• Negotiate With Moscow To Prevent Nuclear Devastation (Trump Jr, RFK Jr)

The New York Times reported Thursday that the Biden administration is considering allowing Ukraine to use NATO-provided long-range precision weapons against targets deep inside Russia. Such a decision would put the world at greater risk of nuclear conflagration than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. At a time when American leaders should be focused on finding a diplomatic off-ramp to a war that should never have been allowed to take place, the Biden-Harris administration is instead pursuing a policy that Russia says it will interpret as an act of war. In the words of Vladimir Putin, long-range strikes in Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.” Some American analysts believe Putin is bluffing, and favor calling his bluff.

As the Times reported, “‘Easing the restrictions on Western weapons will not cause Moscow to escalate,’17 former ambassadors and generals wrote in a letter to the administration this week. ‘We know this because Ukraine is already striking territory Russia considers its own — including Crimea and Kursk — with these weapons and Moscow’s response remains unchanged.’” These analysts are mistaking restraint for weakness. In essence, they are advocating a strategy of brinksmanship. Each escalation — from HIMARS to cluster munitions to Abrams tanks to F-16s to ATACMS — draws the world closer to the brink of Armageddon. Their logic seems to be that if you goad a bear five times and it doesn’t respond, it is safe to goad him even harder a sixth time. Such a strategy might be reasonable if the bear had no teeth. The hawks in the Biden administration seem to have forgotten that Russia is a nuclear power.

They have forgotten the wisdom of John F. Kennedy, who said in 1963, “Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” We should take this advice seriously. Putin has signaled numerous times that Russia would use nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances. In September 2022, Putin said, “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people — this is not a bluff.” In March 2023, he struck a deal with Belarus to station tactical nuclear weapons there. Earlier this month, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov announced that Russia would be amending its nuclear doctrine in response to Western involvement in the Ukraine war. Imagine if Russia were providing another country with missiles, training and targeting information to strike deep into American territory. The U.S. would never tolerate it. We shouldn’t expect Russia to tolerate it either.

This game of nuclear “chicken” has gone far enough. There is no remaining step between firing U.S. missiles deep into Russian territory and a nuclear exchange. We cannot get any closer to the brink than this. And for what? To “weaken Russia”? To control Ukraine’s minerals? No vital American interest is at stake. To risk nuclear conflict for the sake of the neoconservative fantasy of global “full-spectrum dominance” is madness. The war fever in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is at such a pitch that it is hard to tell whether they believe their own rhetoric. In last Tuesday’s debate, Vice President Kamala Harris conjured up images of Russian forces rolling across Europe. Surely she must know how absurd that is. For one thing, Russia can barely wrest a few provinces from Ukraine, which is by no means one of Europe’s great powers.

Secondly, Russia made its war aims very clear at the outset — most notably Ukrainian neutrality and a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion. Hundreds of thousands of lost lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars later, no one is better off — not Europe, not America and certainly not Ukraine. It is past time to de-escalate this conflict. This is more important than any of the political issues our nation argues about. Nuclear war would mean the end of civilization as we know it, maybe even the end of the human species. Former President Donald Trump has vowed to end this war, but by the time he takes office, it might be too late. We need to demand, right now, that Harris and President Biden reverse their insane war agenda and open direct negotiations with Moscow.

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“..the White House condemned the post, saying that “this rhetoric is irresponsible”. Guys, check out White House rhetoric.

“Turns out that jokes are way less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is in plain text..”

• Secret Service ‘Aware’ Of Elon Musk Post About Harris, Biden (BBC)

The US Secret Service says it is “aware” of a social media post by Elon Musk in which he said that “no one is even trying” to assassinate President Joe Biden or Vice-President Kamala Harris. Mr Musk has since deleted the post and said it was intended as a joke. His post on X, formerly Twitter, came just hours after the suspected attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida on Sunday. The tech billionaire is a close ally of Trump, who has vowed to enlist Mr Musk to run a “government efficiency commission” if he wins a second term as US president. Many X users criticised Mr Musk’s comments – which were accompanied by a raised eyebrow emoji – with some alleging that the post was a form of incitement against the US president and vice-president. In a statement, the White House condemned the post, saying that “this rhetoric is irresponsible”.

“Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about,” the statement said, adding that there should be “no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country”. When contacted by the BBC, the US Secret Service said only that it is “aware” of the post. “As a matter of practice we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence,” the statement added. “We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees.” After deleting the post, Mr Musk tweeted that “one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”

“Turns out that jokes are way less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is in plain text,” a subsequent post read. The controversial tech mogul is considered a close ally of Trump and formally endorsed him in the aftermath of a separate assassination attempt against the former president that took place at a rally on 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania. In that attempt, the suspect fired multiple rounds, injuring Trump and killing an attendee at the rally. Since then, Mr Musk has often tweeted or re-posted messages critical of both Biden and Harris and in support of Trump.

Read more …

“RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan joked that RT had learned from the Americans, rather than from Russian intelligence officers. “Seriously? Did you run out of mirrors?”

• Meta Bans RT (RT)

US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has banned several Russian news networks, including RT. Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Meta has been cooperating with a prohibition on RT imposed by the EU and other individual Western nations. In a statement on Monday, the company said the deplatforming of the media outlets from its apps is due to “foreign interference activity” and would be implemented globally over the next several days. The US government sanctioned RT last week, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken claiming that the outlet is “functioning as a de facto arm of [Russian] intelligence.” Moscow has called the move an act of information warfare, which exposes America’s inability to fairly compete with Russian media.

US officials have expressed frustration with RT’s role in offering an alternative to Washington-backed narratives on international affairs. “One of the reasons – not the only reason – why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be, given that Russia has invaded Ukraine and violated rule number 1 of the international system – is because of the broad scope and reach of RT, where propaganda, disinformation, and lies is spread to millions if not billions around the world,” State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin told journalists on Friday, following Blinken’s remarks.

RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan joked that RT had learned from the Americans, rather than from Russian intelligence officers.“Seriously? Did you run out of mirrors?” she asked, commenting on the American allegations. Meta has faced legal issues in Russia after allowing exemptions in its rules forbidding hate speech. Meta management ruled that Ukrainians were entitled to call for violence against Russians and to hail extreme nationalists fighting against Russia on its platforms. Moscow labeled Meta an extremist organization and banned Facebook and Instagram in Russia.

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“..there’s no excuse or reason for this kind of embargo on foreign information based on the idea that it’s protecting the American people… from whom? From Mark Zuckerberg?”

“..other countries should consider Meta a government agency..”

• Meta’s Ban on Sputnik ‘Very Bad’ and Politicized Decision (Sp.)

A politically motivated move by Meta* to ban Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya and RT news outlets from its apps globally reflects the company’s biased approach, analysts said in separate interviews with Sputnik. “There is a perception in the United States that the flow of Russian information will always be disinformation and that it will be tipped in favor of Donald Trump, even though [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has said that he could deal with Kamala Harris, too. This [perception] is simply untrue. I mean, the idea is to frighten the American people that they don’t know one idea from another. I mean, that’s the smokescreen,” Professor Joe Siracusa, political scientist and dean of Global Futures, Curtin University, told Sputnik. As such, the idea that Russia spends all of its time to propagandize the American public, and that “there is a body of information out there that is going to undermine their faith and their freedom is ridiculous”, Siracusa underlines.

Recently, Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya, RT and “other related entities” were banned from Meta* apps globally over alleged foreign interference activity. This is a “very bad decision, particularly coming from an American company,” the political scientist points out. Meta’s ban on Russian news outlets mean that “they [Meta] are really sort of censoring the news themselves. What they’re saying to the American people is that you’re not mature enough to understand ideas”, per the professor. “This is the kind of game that the Democratic Party plays. I mean, there’s no excuse or reason for this kind of embargo on foreign information based on the idea that it’s protecting the American people… from whom? From Mark Zuckerberg? It’s ridiculous. Meta was in very close cahoots with the Democratic Party the last time around when it went after Donald Trump. So, in a way, it’s already been politicized,” the professor concludes.

In a separate interview with Sputnik, Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig says that as a former Facebook content moderator, he saw firsthand how the company “influenced elections throughout the world.” “Facebook is clearly biased and has an agenda with elections. At a whim, it can make newsworthy exceptions to protect certain politicians. They may as well ban their own app and go after themselves for foreign interference activity,” Hartwig, who is the co-author of “Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship”, points out. When it comes to Facebook’s foreign influence, suffice to mention the elections in Spain, Venezuela, and the US, according to Hartwig. Given the fact that Facebook was being influenced by the FBI “to suppress major stories” like the Hunter Biden laptop saga, “other countries should consider Meta a government agency,” the whistleblower adds. As for the Ukraine crisis, “It’s clear that Meta is acting in coordination with the US government and the US State Department as a proxy for a foreign conflict,” Hartwig concludes.

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“Price controls lead to shortages of anything they touch, especially in inflationary times.”

• Grocery Rationing within Four Years (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

There is a lack of public comment and debate about Kamala Harris’s call for price controls on groceries and rents, the most stunning and frightening policy proposal made in my lifetime. Immediately, of course, people will reply that she is not for price controls as such. It is only a limit on “gouging” (which she variously calls “gauging”) on grocery prices. As for rents, it’s only for larger-scale corporations with many units. This is nonsense. If there really are national price-gouging police running around, every single seller of groceries, from small convenience stores to farmers’ markets to chain stores, will be vulnerable. No one wants the investigation so they will comply with de facto controls. No one knows for sure what gouging is. Don Boudreaux is correct: “A government that threatens to punish merchants for selling at nominal prices higher than deemed appropriate by government clearly intends to control prices. It’s no surprise, therefore, that economists routinely analyze prohibitions against so-called ‘price gouging’ using exactly the same tools they use to analyze other forms of price controls.”

As for rental units, the only result will be fewer amenities, new charges, new fees for what used to be free, less service, and a dramatically reduced incentive to build new units. That will only lead to a pretext for more subsidies, more public housing, and more government provision generally. We have experience with that and it is not good. The next step is nationalizing housing and rationing of groceries because there will be ever fewer available. The more the betting odds favor Kamala, the stronger the incentive to raise prices as high as possible now in anticipation of price controls come next year. That will provide even more seeming evidence for the need for more controls and a genuine crackdown. Price controls lead to shortages of anything they touch, especially in inflationary times. With the Federal Reserve seemingly on the verge of cutting rates for no good reason – rates are very low in real terms by any historical standard – we might see wave two of inflation later next year.

[..] Kamala is wrong that this will be the “first-ever” ban on price gouging. We had that in World War II, along with rationing tickets on meat, animal fats, foil, sugar, flour, foil, coffee, and more. It was a time of extreme austerity, and people put up with it because they believed it was saving resources for the war effort. It was enforced the same as we saw with covid lockdowns: a huge network enlisting state and local institutions, media, and private zealots ready to rat out the rebels. Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8875 on August 28, 1941. It claimed broad powers to manage all production and consumption in the US. On January 30, 1942, the Emergency Price Control Act granted the Office of Price Administration (OPA) the authority to set price limits and ration food and other commodities. Products were added as shortages intensified.

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It is pretty wild that Hillary mentions Mueller to make her point. Talk about propaganda.. Hillary should be indicted over Russiagate.

Aaron Mate: “To make her argument against free speech, she invokes the Russiagate scam that itself was the product of her campaign’s own propaganda. Speaking of which, the case that she invokes here — Mueller charging some Russians for social media activity — led to Mueller dropping the case after the Russian company showed up to fight the case in court.”

• Hillary Demands Criminal Charges For Americans “Engaged” In “Propaganda” (ZH)

Amid claims that Trump is a “danger to this country and the world,” Hillary Clinton – the original sinner of ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’-propaganda – has called for anyone spreading “misinformation” to be criminally charged as a “better deterrence” ahead of the election. Specifically, the former Secretary of State told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday that Americans “engaged” in “propaganda” – similar to the type that led to the Russians “boosting Trump” in 2016 – should face criminal prosecution.

MADDOW: Speaking of dictators, the Justice Department and the State Department have taken another of act — a number of actions in the past several weeks, striking actions, to both call out and indict and take action against the Kremlin for their attempts at interfering in this — in yet another presidential election cycle on Trump’s behalf. The State Department has put out a $10 million reward for information leading to — for information about people who are trying to — about entities that are trying to illegally interfere in our election. We have seen these dramatic indictments from the Justice Department, including for paying millions of dollars, the Kremlin paying millions of dollars to pro-Trump influencers.

We have seen the Justice Department seize Web domains, where the Kremlin had set up news sites, what looked like news sites, looked like versions of American news sites, but were secretly operated by the Russian intelligence services or by the Russian government. You feel like the U.S. government is sort of starting to figure out how to do this and taking this seriously enough, or do you still think there’s a far distance to go?

CLINTON: I think there’s a far distance to go. I applaud the actions taken by the Justice Department and the State Department. I think that they’re very important. But, truly, we are just at the beginning of uncovering everything that Russia, but not just Russia, other countries, have done and are doing to influence our election. If you focus on Russia — and I commend you, Rachel, for your new movie — because we are only at the beginning of understanding the whole iceberg here. What the Russians started doing in 2015 and 2016, what they continued doing, they have gotten more sophisticated. They aren’t even pretending anymore.

Their international news operation, Russia Today, R.T., is an arm of the Russian government, an arm of its intelligence operation. It’s basically an extension of their spying efforts. They are using Americans, both those who are witting and willing and those who are unwitting and are just so surprised they’re getting $400,000 a week or $100,000 a podcast to parrot Kremlin propaganda. We know from what even Republicans have said, the chairs of the Intelligence Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee and other Republicans who are currently in office have said that Republicans go to the floor of the Congress and they parrot Russian talking points.

So, I think it’s important to indict the Russians, just as Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States. They’re not going to be going to a country where they can be extradited or even returning to the United States, unless they are very foolish. So I think we need to uncover all of the connections and make it very clear that you could vote however you want, but we are not going to let adversaries, whether it is Russia, China, Iran, or anybody else, basically try to influence Americans as to how we should vote in picking our leaders.

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“..their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”

• Experts Gone Wild (Mike Scanlon)

An ability to win hearts and minds has long been seen by America’s leadership as essential to domestic and international politics and security. For much of the Pax Americana, our government and intelligentsia have poured time, effort, and money into studying how to persuade everyone from allies to enemies and, conversely, how to counter an opponent’s influence campaigns. But something essential has changed since the rise of President Donald Trump as a political force. During the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke up against censorship and for lay readers in the wake of an attempt by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen to eradicate communist books from libraries:

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book . . . . How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? . . . And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”

These days, America’s most educated have grown distrustful of non-experts and their ability to process dangerous ideas. Our elites have launched a campaign to protect the undereducated from themselves. The credentialed class pressures book retailers to stop selling “uncritical” translations of sinister foreign texts, meaning those lacking an accepted authority’s “soberly critical framing, complete with detailed footnotes, contextual commentary, or other forms of annotation.” Journalists writing about controversial topics do not link directly to primary sources but instead filter such news “through multiple layers of condemnation by a shrinking pool of academics trusted to read raw material.”

Our best and brightest unabashedly seek to silence individuals who disagree with their betters and to regulate (or outright suppress) social media sites that allow free (or free-ish) debate about unsafe thoughts. Opinion makers cheer on activists seeking to deplatform or shout down an ever-growing list of enemies, including those who refused to toe the party line on Russia’s war in the Ukraine. Self-proclaimed defenders of press freedom are rallying to safeguard the right of social media companies to collaborate with state actors to squelch wrongheaded arguments and to wall the incorrigible off from the marketplace of ideas. The Biden Administration tried to establish a governance board to combat disinformation. That crusade is not going well.

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“.. [Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela] .. the program had brought up to 30,000 migrants from those four nations into the U.S. every month under two-year work permits..”

• Springfield Ohio Is Just the Beginning (Paul Craig Roberts)

Why does the US government hate the American people? Why does the US government try to destroy us? The Anti-White American Democrats are Incapable of Understanding that an illegal alien does not become part of a national community by unlawfully entering it, any more than a thief becomes an owner of property by stealing it. What has happened to America when the entirety of the media, the entirety of the Democrat Party, the entirety of the universities, Homeland Security (sic) not only welcome but also facilitate the immigrant invasion that is overrunning the United States while Washington, abandoning its own borders, fights for Ukraine’s?

The national print and TV media describe the over-running of Springfield by immigrant-invaders as a restoration of a declining city, restoring property values, and enriching the culture. Every bit of information to the contrary is dismissed as fake news. Wake Up White People. Your Existence Is Being Erased. How is the Department of Homeland Security Protecting Our Security by Flying into Our Country at Our Expense Immigrant-invaders from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela? “DHS restarts migrant flights from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela – weeks after halting program over ‘fraud’ concerns” | 29 Aug 2024 |

The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday it is resuming migrant flights into the US from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — one month after putting the program on pause due to potentially massive “fraud.” Under the Harris-Biden administration, the program had brought up to 30,000 migrants from those four nations into the U.S. every month under two-year work permits, so long as they passed a vetting process. Nearly half a million migrants had already received advance travel authorizations and then made their own arrangements to enter America via the humanitarian parole process before it was paused in mid-July. Around that time, an internal DHS report found thousands of sponsors allegedly committing fraud by listing fake Social Security numbers, home addresses or phone numbers — some of which belonged to dead people.

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Storm brewing..

• Macron’s Impeachment Clears First Hurdle in Left-Dominated National Assembly (Sp.)

France’s lower house of parliament – the Bureau – has approved the draft resolution which must now be approved by the legislative commission before moving to the Senate. “The Bureau of the National Assembly has approved the procedure for removing Emmanuel Macron from power,” newspaper Le Parisien reported on Tuesday.. The Bureau is the highest collegial body of the lower house of parliament. Currently, 12 of its 22 members are representatives of the left. The proposal to remove Macron from power was put forward by the left-wing party La France Insoumise (lit. Unsubmissive France). According to the BFMTV channel, the proposal was supported by 12 votes to 10 during consideration by Bureau members. The party made this move after the French leader excluded left-wing parties from the newly formed government, despite their coalition’s victory in parliamentary elections.

The proposal was submitted under Article 68 of the French Constitution, which allows for the removal of the president in the event of a breach of his duties. The resolution must now be approved by the legislative commission of 73 deputies, where the left holds only 24 seats. After that, it must be passed by two-thirds of the National Assembly (385 deputies) within two weeks. The final two stages must also pass in the upper house of parliament, the Senate, where the left does not have a majority. If the Senate approves the resolution (with 232 votes), both chambers will meet in a joint session, and 617 of the 925 parliamentarians from both houses must support the resolution. If this happens, the president will be forced to resign immediately.

In 2016, the Bureau of the National Assembly ruled a similar impeachment resolution against President François Hollande to be inadmissible. In the July parliamentary snap elections, the left-wing bloc gained the most votes, winning 182 seats out of 577. Macron’s presidential coalition Together for the Republic came in second, with 168 seats in the National Assembly. The right-wing party National Rally and its allies from the Republicans became the third-largest force in parliament with 143 seats. As a result, no political force secured a majority to form a new government. The composition of the new French cabinet, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, is expected to be announced this week.

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“.. the report is trash economics that reads like something out of the late-stage USSR, according to economist Philip Pilkington.”

• The EU Retreats Further into a World of Self-Delusion (NC)

The situation in Europe is getting so bad on so many different levels, the Brussels crowd had to bring in “Super” Mario Draghi to save the day — or at least write a report telling them what to do… Draghi has spent time at Goldman Sachs, the European Central Bank (ECB) during the sovereign debt crisis, and as unelected prime minister of Italy during the early days of the Covid pandemic and runup to Project Ukraine. Depending on where you sit, he could be an odd choice to chart a path forward; while Draghi knows his way around a crisis control center, he’s also plenty experienced at creating them. He was one of the chief architects of the EU’s disastrous economic war against Russia and he’s always been a grim reaper for working class citizens of his native country of Italy. No wonder that for months the neoliberal, war-loving spreadsheet crowd in Brussels has eagerly awaited the report as if it is manna from heaven that will help deliver them from the corner they have backed themselves into.

Curiously, his report was delayed by months, which only increased the anticipation, and it finally dropped last week, conveniently timed at another crisis point. Project Ukraine is quickly unraveling and pressure is coming from all directions for Berlin to give the go ahead for joint EU debt in order to make the EU “competitive” again and buy a bunch of weapons to do something (nobody is too sure of what exactly) about Russia. Indeed, Draghi’s report doesn’t say, nor does it ever consider making nice with Moscow. That’s because the report, “EU Competitiveness: Looking Ahead” is a political document more than economic one intended to not only give cover to the bloc’s disastrous Russia policies, but continue to double down. And it is already being used as more ammunition for those in the Baltics, Poland, the media, US-funded think tanks in Europe, and more who are calling on Germany to support debt for an extended Cold War.

Specifically, they wanted Super Mario to tell them how to get out of the predicament of their own making without changing course on Russia and a host of other issues, and Draghi delivered — as long as you don’t let reality get in the way. His answer? More money. Lots of it. He calls for massive infusions of cash into multiple sectors: green, tech, energy, and of course defense. According to Draghi, the price tag is a minimum of 800 billion euros annually until 2030. Asked if his message was “implement your report, or die?” he replied that “It’s ‘Do this, or it’s a slow agony.’” The EU certainly needs an economic plan, but Draghi’s report never questions whether ongoing belligerence toward Moscow (and loss of pipeline Russian gas) is in the bloc’s best interest and it never mentions Brussels’ obsession with austerity, which is once again being forced on member countries. From a purely economic standpoint, the report is trash economics that reads like something out of the late-stage USSR, according to economist Philip Pilkington.

But it does plug nicely into the political economy of today’s EU, which is being subsumed under Washington and NATO. It is engaged in open economic war and an proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, both of which have hurt working class citizens across the bloc. The austerity-obsessed EU is once again forcing its member states to enact austerity budgets. Draghi’s report was requested by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is working to amass more power to her mostly unaccountable throne, and is one of many voices calling for a defense union and militarization and the ability to borrow and potentially levy taxes to pay for those debts.

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Happened right before the pager attack..

• Yemen’s Hypersonic Ballistic Missile Rocks Israel’s Defenses (Nasrallah)

In the early hours of Sunday, 15 September, a Yemeni hypersonic ballistic missile pierced through the air, striking at the heart of Tel Aviv. Launched on the Mawlid, or birthday of Prophet Muhammad, the missile traveled over 2,000 kilometers, evading the collective defense systems of Israel, the US, and its Arab allies. This latest attack by Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned armed forces “was carried out with a new hypersonic ballistic missile … within 11 and a half minutes, and caused a state of fear and panic among the Zionists,” according to a statement by the movement. The missile strike occurred against the backdrop of mounting Israeli threats of military action against fellow Axis of Resistance member Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to accept a ceasefire in Gaza.

In an interview with The Cradle, Ansarallah’s political bureau and Shura Council member Dr Hizam al-Assad confirmed that “the missile operation confused the enemy’s calculations and drew new rules in the balance of deterrence operations,” pointing out that it is “the first for future operations.” Assad separates the operation from the response to the Israeli aggression that affected Hodeidah, stressing that it will come “deep inside Israel and in what the enemy or those who stand behind the enemy or on his side do not expect.” Regarding the Israeli occupation army’s denial that the missile that hit Tel Aviv was hypersonic, Assad confirmed that “the Republic of Yemen has developed military technologies and entered the path of technological industrialization, including hypersonic missile systems, in addition to drones and other things.”

On Netanyahu’s intention to expand the battle with Lebanon, the Ansarallah official charges that those “threats come from a position of weakness” and warns the Israeli prime minister that “the next will be worse for your forces and settlers.” And Assad doubles down against Israeli attempts to compartmentalize its battles on various fronts, arguing that the Resistance Axis’ military efforts represent a unified front: As for us, within the framework of the support front, we stand by our brothers in Hizbullah, our brothers in the Iraqi front, and the various fronts inside and outside Palestine, and we coordinate and cooperate within the framework of joint and non-joint operations. He concludes by underlining the goal for all parts of the axis: “We will not stop until the aggression on the Gaza Strip is stopped and the siege on its people is lifted.”

Yemen’s bold missile operation on Sunday was a clear message that it, too, holds sway in shaping the future of the conflict, defying Israel’s expectations and altering the strategic calculations of regional players. Crucially, it served as a warning to the occupation state to “expect more strikes and qualitative operations to come – as we are on the threshold of the first anniversary of the blessed October 7 operation – including the response to its criminal aggression on the city of Hodeidah.” Indeed, this is not the first time Yemen has targeted Tel Aviv in support of the Palestinian resistance. In July, representing the “fifth phase” of operations, the armed forces launched a long-range drone attack that resulted in one fatality, prompting the occupation state’s subsequent bombing of the Yemeni port city.

In his Sunday speech to commemorate the Mawlid, Ansarallah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi reiterated the commencement of the fifth phase, stating that the attack that targeted occupied Jaffa “was carried out with a high-tech missile that bypassed the enemy’s systems.” He also stressed that “Yemen’s operations and positions would continue as long as the aggression and siege on Gaza continue” and “until Palestine is cleansed from the clutches of the occupation.”

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1835793692302418144

 

 

Tiger
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835960868615422428

 

 

Electric elephant

 

 

Puppylings
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835993455954166004

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle October 18 2022

Oct 182022
 
 October 18, 2022  Posted by at 8:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  67 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Self-portrait with dark felt hat at the easel 1886

 

• A War Russia Set To Win (Bhadrakumar)
• Borrell Tells EU Members ‘Don’t Worry About Money’ For Ukraine (RT)
• Ukraine Can Retake Crimea By Next Summer, Former Top US Commander Says (ZH)
• Turkish Hub May Solve Nord Stream Problems – Gazprom (RT)
• US Poised For Slowdown In High-end Munitions Deliveries To Ukraine (Fox)
• Musk Compares Crimea To Pearl Harbor
• US To See Winter Spike In Natural Gas Prices (RT)
• Ghislaine Maxwell Breaks Silence On ‘Special Friendship’ With Bill Clinton (CB)
• American Inquisition (Jim Kunstler)
• Devastating Report On PCR Test Covered Up (DAK)
• Boston University Makes New Covid Strain With 80% Kill Rate (PM)
• Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease – Controversial Study (LS)
• Biden Export Controls ‘Wreaking Havoc’ On China’s Chip Industry (ZH)
• Will Comey and Mueller Be Prosecuted for Lies John Durham Uncovered? (ET)
• Why the Jan 6 Committee’s Timing is both Terrible and Telling (Turley)
• The Dark Side of Nuclear Fusion (Pepi Cima)

 

 

Fmr. US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock

 

 

 

 

Oborne
https://twitter.com/i/status/1581943171906519041

 

 

 

 

Bourla
https://twitter.com/i/status/1581650848223924225

 

 

 

 

“Contracted price for long-term Russian supply for Germany used to be about $280 per 1,000 cubic metres as against the current market price hovering around $2,000.”

“Russians will settle for nothing less than the ouster of the Zelenskyy regime.”

• A War Russia Set To Win (Bhadrakumar)

Two massive terrorist strikes misfired spectacularly and a terrible beauty is born in the Ukraine war. These two carefully planned attacks in quick succession — on Nord Stream gas pipelines and Crimean Bridge — were intended as a knockout blow to Russia. According to President Vladimir Putin, people ‘who want to finally sever ties between Russia and the EU, weaken Europe’ are behind the Nord Stream blasts. He named the US, Ukraine and Poland as ‘beneficiaries’. India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order. Last Wednesday, Russia’s domestic intelligence service FSB identified Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, as the mastermind behind the Crimean attack.

The New York Times and Washington Post also pointed fingers at Kiev, quoting ‘sources’. While Nord Stream-1 has been crippled, one of the strings of Nord Stream-2 remains intact. Putin said last week that the pipeline could be restored and Russia could deliver about 27 billion cubic metres of gas. ‘The ball is on the side of the European Union, if they want — let’s turn on the tap,’ he said. But mum’s the word from Brussels. It is a profoundly embarrassing moment for the EU. The triumphalism has vanished as Europe is threatened by years of recession caused by the blowback from sanctions against Russia, where the US insisted on the cut off of energy ties with Moscow.

The EU has now become a captive market for Big Oil and is left to buy LNG from the US at the asking price, which is six to seven times higher than the domestic price in the US. (Contracted price for long-term Russian supply for Germany used to be about $280 per 1,000 cubic metres as against the current market price hovering around $2,000.) Plainly put, the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. India should take note of the US’ sense of entitlement. Basically, the Biden administration created a contrived energy crisis whose real aim is war profiteering. The Crimean Bridge attack of October 8 is much more serious. Zelenskyy has crossed a red line that Moscow had repeatedly warned him against.

Putin has disclosed that there have also been three terrorist attacks against the Kursk NPP. Russians will settle for nothing less than the ouster of the Zelenskyy regime. Russia’s retaliation against Ukraine’s ‘critical infrastructure’, something Moscow refrained from so far, has serious implications. Since October 9, Russia has begun systematically targeting Ukraine’s power system and railways. Noted Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Izvestia that if this tempo was kept up for a week or so, it ‘will disrupt the entire logistics of the Ukrainian military — system for transporting personnel, military equipment, ammunition, related cargo, as well as the functioning of military and repair plants.’

Read more …

Borrell is not a diplomat, even if they call him that. “Diplomat” and “diplomacy” are words that have an actual meaning. He fits none of that.

• Borrell Tells EU Members ‘Don’t Worry About Money’ For Ukraine (RT)

The EU has enough funds to back member nations that send weapons to Ukraine’s military, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell said on Monday. His statement comes amid reports that the EU cannot fully reimburse states that are supporting Kiev’s forces. Speaking prior to a Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, Borrell said “there is enough money, don’t worry about money” before walking away. Despite the diplomat’s assurances, last week, Politico reported that the European Peace Facility, a €1.5 billion fund meant to assist EU countries in replacing weapons sent to Kiev, was unable to satisfy more than half the requests that it received.

According to the report, this angered Poland, which is one of Ukraine’s main backers in terms of weapon deliveries, with Warsaw presenting a bill for €1.8 billion ($1.75 billion). Poland later backed down, agreeing to 46% compensation, the outlet said. Meanwhile, the US and Ukraine have both been pressing the EU to do more to support Kiev financially – and in a more expedient manner. Last week, in an apparent reference to Brussels, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged international donors “to keep stepping up” their aid efforts, stressing that assistance should go in direct cash payments rather than in loans. Speaking to the Washington Post, one former senior treasury official noted that “I know they’re very frustrated” about the slow progress of aid, adding that “US officials want to see Europe deliver far more quickly.”

Earlier this month Oleg Ustenko, a top economic adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky called the delays in EU economic aid “unacceptable,” citing the “extreme high pressure” the finance ministry is under. Last week Zelensky said that his country needs as much as $38 billion to cover next year’s estimated budget deficit and another $17 billion to start to restore critical infrastructure. Meanwhile, Washington has committed $8.5 billion in economic aid to Ukraine, with another $4.5 billion slated to arrive by the end of the year. However, according to the Washington Post’s sources, the EU has pledged €11 billion ($10.7 billion) but has so far only handed over roughly one third of that, which was in the form of loans.

Green screen

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Any first year psychology student can tell you about projection.

“..they are doing everything they can to prolong the war..”

“..young men who are now being conscripted as cannon fodder..”

• Ukraine Can Retake Crimea By Next Summer, Former Top US Commander Says (ZH)

A top US general, now retired, has said he believes that Ukrainian forces can retake the Crimean Peninsula by next summer. Ben Hodges is the former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, and he’s predicting that “Crimea will be free by summer.” He told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in statements published over the weekend, “When I look at the situation, I see that the situation of the Russians is getting worse with every week.” Hodges went on to explain that Ukraine’s military is likely to keep this momentum given “far superior” logistics and motivation to fight. “They say war is a test of will and logistics – and on both counts Ukraine is far superior,” Hodges told the German publication. “The Russians have to lose [the war]; otherwise, they’ll try again in two or three years.”

He said the Kremlin is betting big on its “one hope” that the West and NATO countries will lose resolve in their military support for Ukraine. The ex-top Army commander for Europe also said he expects to see more sabotage attacks against Russian assets and crucial logistics and resource hubs, such as with the recent bombings against the Kerch Strait Bridge and the Nord Stream pipelines: “So they are doing everything they can to prolong the war and spread fear and insecurity in the West. Any means will do: The young men who are now being conscripted as cannon fodder, as well as attacks on infrastructure in the West,” Hodges told FAZ. “I believe that we will therefore see more such acts of sabotage and attacks, or at least attempts, in the coming weeks and months.”

This comes as there’s been stepped up cross-border shelling and missile attacks against the Russian city of Belgorod, which lies just north of the Ukrainian border not far from the major Ukraine city of Kherson. But despite much of the past month witnessing headline after headline declare rapid advances of Ukrainian forces against the Russians in the east, the Kremlin on Sunday has announced significant new successes: Russia’s defense ministry says its forces repelled efforts by Ukrainian troops to advance in the Donetsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, inflicting what it described as significant losses against the enemy. A ministry spokesperson said that “during fierce fighting, units of the Russian army held the positions they held, inflicting significant losses on the enemy.”

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South Stream.

• Turkish Hub May Solve Nord Stream Problems – Gazprom (RT)

Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller said on Sunday that it would be possible to redirect all of the gas supplies halted due to the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines through a Turkish hub. “We are talking about all those volumes that we lost due to acts of international terrorism at the Nord Stream pipelines, so it can be significant volumes,” Miller said in an interview with Russia 1 TV, commenting on the prospects of creating a major energy hub in Türkiye. Miller highlighted that the company’s experience in preparing the South Stream pipeline project could be valuable.


The project, which would have brought an estimated 63 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually through the Black Sea to Bulgaria and onward to other countries in Europe, ended up being canceled and replaced by TurkStream. “Thus, even if we talk about the technical documentation for the route, everything has been done for South Stream back then,” the CEO said. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed building a major gas hub in Türkiye to handle supplies previously directed through the Nord Stream pipelines. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed the idea, adding that both leaders had ordered their respective governments to present construction plans as soon as possible.

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Running out. Raytheon is raising its Christmas bonuses.

• US Poised For Slowdown In High-end Munitions Deliveries To Ukraine (Fox)

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signaled this week that the U.S. and its Western allies are having trouble keeping pace with Ukraine’s demand for the advanced weaponry it needs to fend off Russia’s invasion. That signal reflects dwindling supplies for Ukraine and fear in the White House of escalation that could lead to war between the U.S. and Russia. The risk of reduced U.S. stockpiles of high-end munitions has been reported almost since the U.S. began contributing to Ukraine’s defense. Now, nearly eight months since the start of the war, experts interviewed by Fox News Digital say the U.S. is at or very near the end of its capacity to give. They agreed that Austin’s remarks indicate that the initial rush of high-end munitions like HIMAR rocket launchers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft Stingers and M-777 Howitzers is over.

These sources said there may be two factors at play that are contributing to this reality. One factor is the issue that Austin addressed directly this week – the U.S. is running low on equipment that it can hand over to Ukraine. At a press conference Wednesday, Austin was asked whether the U.S. and other nations are worried about running so low on domestic supplies of critical munitions that they can no longer help Ukraine. Austin dodged the question by stressing that the desire is there to get Ukraine what it needs, but he left unsaid whether Ukraine’s allies can actually deliver. “Well, it certainly is not a question of lack of will,” Austin replied. Austin had just concluded a meeting with officials from dozens of countries about Ukraine’s munitions needs.

As he described that meeting, he again talked about willpower but hinted at strained capacity to provide more for Ukraine, which is using up munitions faster than the world can deliver them. “We will produce and deliver these highly effective capabilities over the course of the coming months — and in some cases years — even as we continue to meet Ukraine’s most pressing self-defense requirements in real time,” Austin said of the most recent commitment to send HIMARS, vehicles, radar systems and other equipment. Mark Cancian is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies who spent seven years working on DOD procurement issues for the Office of Management and Budget. His assessment based on inventory levels, industrial capacity, and information from the Biden administration is that the U.S. has “limited” supplies of HIMARs, Javelins, Stingers and M-777 Howitzers. “There are some areas where we’re basically at the bottom of the barrel,” he told Fox News Digital.

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“From their standpoint losing Crimea is like [the] USA losing Hawaii & Pearl Harbor.”

• Musk Compares Crimea To Pearl Harbor

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk argued on Monday that Russia views Crimea as an integral part of its territory, and that Ukrainian or Western attempts to seize the peninsula could end in nuclear war. While Musk has previously backtracked on pulling his technological support for Ukraine, he has courted controversy for insisting that Crimea is Russia. “If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crimea or using battlefield nukes, they will choose the latter,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “We’ve already sanctioned/cutoff Russia in every possible way, so what more do they have left to lose?” he asked, in response to a commenter asking him whether he reckoned the Ukraine conflict could devolve into a nuclear war.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly stated that he intends to seize control of Crimea, along with the four former regions of Ukraine that recently voted to join the Russian Federation. Crimea overwhelmingly voted to rejoin Russia in 2014, and as such falls under the protection of Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. As President Vladimir Putin has stated, Russia’s nuclear doctrine allows the state to defend itself with “all available means” if its existence is threatened.“Whether one likes it or not, Crimea is absolutely seen as a core part of Russia by Russia,” Musk continued. “Crimea is also of critical national security importance to Russia, as it is their southern navy base. From their standpoint losing Crimea is like [the] USA losing Hawaii & Pearl Harbor.”

Crimea was formally a part of Russia from 1783 until it was gifted to the Ukrainian SSR by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Musk claimed earlier this month that Khrushchev’s decision was a “mistake,” and suggested that Ukraine abandon its claim to the peninsula as part of a future peace deal with Russia.Musk’s peace plan was condemned by Ukrainian officials and their supporters online, with Ukraine’s former ambassador to Germany, Andrey Melnik, telling the billionaire to “f**k off.”Musk then said that he would take Melnik’s advice and stop providing free Starlink internet access to Ukraine, which he said would cost SpaceX $400 million to run throughout 2023.

Elon

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“..the real problem isn’t shortage but pricing.”

This is how the Ukraine is financed.

• US To See Winter Spike In Natural Gas Prices (RT)

Natural gas bills are set to increase in all regions of the United States this winter, with surging demand and colder temperatures potentially forcing Americans to pay nearly 30% more over the previous year, according to projections by the US Department of Energy. A forecast published by the department’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) on Monday predicted a significant price hike over the winter months, suggesting some US households will pay an average of $931 for heating during the cold season – a 28% increase over 2021. Nearly half of all American homes are heated with natural gas.The agency went on to note that the Midwest will see the greatest increase in retail gas prices compared to other regions, though the South, West and Northeast will also experience climbing costs.

While comparatively colder temperatures are expected to contribute to the rising prices, the EIA previously said growing “constraints on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe from Russia” were creating “strong international demand” for American gas. The resulting boost in US exports has used “almost all” of the country’s available gas capacity and driven prices upward, with the US reporting its lowest natural gas storage levels in three years last April. Efforts by some European states to curtail Russian energy imports in retaliation for the war in Ukraine have also prompted fears that residents will be unable to heat their homes come winter. In comments to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Italy’s Energy Minister Roberto Cingolani warned the coming months could be “dominated by fear and uncertainty,” observing that “the real problem isn’t shortage but pricing.”

“Citizens may be unable to pay their bills and businesses risk closing down,” he said, though voiced hopes the continent will “get through the winter fine” barring any “catastrophes” such as exceptionally cold weather or a major spike in energy consumption. EU leaders are expected to meet later this week to discuss a price cap on natural gas for the bloc in an attempt to head off an energy crisis, with the European Commission reportedly planning to create a mechanism allowing it to intervene to force down prices when they surpass a “dynamic” maximum level.

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“..he is another victim, only because of his association with Jeffrey. I understand that he, like others, can no longer consider me as a friend..”

• Ghislaine Maxwell Breaks Silence On ‘Special Friendship’ With Bill Clinton (CB)

Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned former girlfriend of the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker, has broken her silence on those who were close friends. Among those friends was former President Bill Clinton whose friendship she described as “special,” she said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Mail. “It was a special friendship, which continued over the years,” she said of her friendship with the former president. “We had lots in common. I feel bad that he is another victim, only because of his association with Jeffrey. I understand that he, like others, can no longer consider me as a friend. “I said in open court in my statement that meeting Jeffrey Epstein was the greatest mistake of my life,” she said.

[..] She also spoke about her former friendship with Prince Andrew. “Yes, I follow what is happening to him,” she said. “He is paying such a price for the association with Jeffrey Epstein. I care about him, and I feel so bad for him. [..] Earlier this month it was reported that Maxwell, may be getting set to talk and that could mean a world of issues for some famous people. “Bill Clinton should be sweating bullets,” reporter Kari Donavan said for The Republic Brief. “It has long been suspected by court watchers that a notorious list of clientele for Epstein, allegedly including Clinton, would eventually emerge, and they may be right, according to investigators and lawyers who have followed the complex case.

“The shocking warning came out of a new documentary that investigated the role of Britain’s Prince Andrew and his close ties as a client of Epstein’s, when the comments were made that there could be further revelations about other clients of Epstein’s because his madame- Ghislaine Maxwell – who was recently convicted for crimes associated with Epstein has until June 2023 to cooperate with prosecutors, in possibly overturning more names,” she said. In a new documentary, “Prince Andrew Banished,’ Florida-based attorney Spencer Kuvin, who represents some of Epstein’s victims, said that Maxwell has until 2023 to cooperate with authorities to get her free from jail quicker.

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“The board accused her of “fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in her practice, “conduct that evidences a lack of ability or fitness,” and being “an immediate jeopardy” to public health.”

• American Inquisition (Jim Kunstler)

Case in point: the persecution of Meryl Nass, MD, in the state of Maine by its Board of Licensure in Medicine. Dr. Nass is an internal medicine physician and a recognized expert in bioterrorism who famously uncovered the origin of the mysterious “Gulf War Syndrome” as a reaction to the US Army’s own anthrax vaccine. She has testified before Congress and in many state legislatures about vaccine safety. After the emergence of Covid-19, Dr. Nass spoke out and blogged about the dangers of the new vaccines, and in favor of early treatment protocols using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Her outspokeness attracted the ire of Maine Governor Janet Mills, and Mills’s sister, Dora Ann Mills, the “Chief Improvement Officer” at Maine Health, a huge network of twelve hospitals, 1,700 doctors, and 22,000 employees, deeply invested in the Covid vaccine program.

In January of this year, Dr. Nass’s license was suspended by the Licensure Board based on complaints by two “activists” that she was “spreading misinformation” and for her use of early treatment protocols with her own patients. The board compelled Dr. Nass to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation to determine if she was a drug abuser or suffered from mental illness. (Flag that, since it implies official defamation of her character.) The board accused her of “fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in her practice, “conduct that evidences a lack of ability or fitness,” and being “an immediate jeopardy” to public health.

For most of this year, the board refused to entertain any defense by Dr. Nass for her suspension until a hearing held last week, October 11, when she appeared before the Licensure Board with her attorney, Gene Libby. The hearing in its entirety can be watched on video at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense website. (The first two-thirds the board prosecutes its case; the last hour Dr. Nass presents her defense.) Days before the hearing, the Licensure Board withdrew all the “misinformation” charges against Dr. Nass without explanation and now bases its case on Dr. Nass’s use of early treatment protocols.

The hearing was highly instructive on the tactics and strategies for defeating official persecutions against doctors in America (and broadly across all of Western Civ these days), since the Maine licensure Board acted with obvious ignorance and malice that is easily revealed. Dr. Nass’s attorney Gene Libby deftly got the Board on-record attesting to their own deliberate misconduct. For instance, he repeatedly invoked their charges against “spreading misinformation,” forcing the chair, an eye doctor named Maroulla S. Gleaton, to affirm that the charges had been precipitously dropped days before. There was also some lively discussion of the board’s imputations against Dr. Nass’s mental health and insinuations of drug abuse — Dr. Nass testified that she’d never been treated for mental health issues, had never taken pharmaceuticals for them, never took illicit drugs or been accused of it, and, where alcohol was concerned, enjoyed “about five drinks a year.”

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Google translate.

• Devastating Report On PCR Test Covered Up (DAK)

Researcher Dr. Rogier Louwen of Erasmus MC concluded after extensive lab research that the PCR test as it is currently used is “pointless”. But the publication of his research is hindered and Louwen was fired by his employer. The ‘resurgence’ of the coronavirus is once again widely in the news. The number of ‘infections’ is rising, the media report daily. Millions of people are still regularly tested for corona. But how reliable is the PCR test? Since the start of the corona crisis, there has been considerable criticism of the test, as it is used, outside the hospital, without additional diagnostics.

This criticism does not only come from opponents of the corona policy. Marion Koopmans, member of the OMT and head of the virology department of Erasmus MC, acknowledged in November 2020 on NPO Radio 1: “You only test whether someone carries a piece of RNA that can be months old”. RIVM acknowledged on its website that large-scale testing of people with mild or no complaints has no added value. This leads to far too many ‘false positive’ results. Rogier Louwen, assistant professor who has been employed by Erasmus MC for 22 years, decided with a number of colleagues to test what a ‘positive’ result from a PCR test means. That research, subsidized by the EU, has been completed.

Louwen concluded that “indiscriminately using the PCR test in a population without too many complaints, and using it as the basis of the policy, is not useful”. He showed that the test is not only positive for pieces of SARS-CoV-2, but also for the presence of other viruses, bacteria and human DNA. However, Louwen was unable to get these interesting results published. According to him, this is due to active “opposition”. In fact, he was fired on the spot in June. That may also have to do with criticism he expressed about the vaccinations. According to Louwen, his situation is symptomatic of the one-sided way in which corona is approached. An open debate is not possible, he says. “People want to destroy you scientifically and personally.”

RFK: FDA is having an public meeting on Oct 19 to discuss adding COVID-19 Vaccine to the childhood schedule. This would give the pharma companies full liability protection and also likely lead to any school requiring it in the US.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582112199635783680

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Why?

• Boston University Makes New Covid Strain With 80% Kill Rate (PM)

Researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories have created a new strain of the Covid virus, echoing experiments which many believe led to the Covid-19 pandemic. The variant is a hybrid of the Omicron variant which spread over the winter and the original virus that was discovered in Wuhan, with this hybrid killing 80 percent of the mice researchers infected, according to the Daily Mail. Researchers found that when infected with the Omicron variant, a similar group of mice all survived and experienced “mild” symptoms. The new research, which has not been peer reviewed, centers around the role of spike proteins in the pathogenic and antigenic behaviors of the virus.

Researchers extracted Omicron’s spike protein, which binds to and invades human cells, and attached those to the original virus that emerged in Wuhan. Looking at how mice fared against the new hybrid strain, researchers wrote, “In…mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80 percent.” Researchers said that while the spike protein is responsible for rates of infectivity, other changes to the virus’ structure determine its deadliness. In addition to looking at mice, researchers also looked at how different strains affect human lung cells that were grown in the lab.

Researchers found that the new strain produced five times more infectious virus particles than the Omicron variant. Researchers noted that the hybrid virus is likely to be less deadly in humans due to differences in the immune systems of mice and humans. Boston University’s lab is one of 13 biosafety level 4 labs in the US. These labs are authorized to handle the most dangerous pathogens, and conduct experiments that often involve working with animal viruses to advance treatments and vaccines.

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“There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer.”

• Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease – Controversial Study (LS)

Is the common nature of cancer worldwide purely a man-made phenomenon? That is what some researchers now suggest. Still, other specialists in cancer and in human fossils have strong doubts about this notion. Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for roughly one in eight of all deaths in 2004, according to the World Health Organization. However, scientists have only found one case of the disease in investigations of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, researcher Rosalie David at the University of Manchester in England said in a statement. The rarity of cancer in mummies suggests it was scarce in antiquity, and “that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization,” researcher Michael Zimmerman at Villanova University in Pennsylvania said in a statement.

“In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.” Zimmerman was the first to diagnose cancer in an Egyptian mummy by analyzing its tissues on a microscopic level, identifying rectal cancer in an unnamed mummy who had lived in the Dakhleh Oasis during the Ptolemaic period 1,600 to 1,800 years ago. David and Zimmerman also analyzed ancient literature from Egypt and Greece for hints of cancer, as well as medical studies of human and animal remains going back to the age of dinosaurs. They suggested evidence of cancer in animal fossils, non-human primates and early humans was scarce, with a few dozen uncertain examples.

As they analyzed ancient literature, they did not find descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers until the 17th century, and the first reports in the scientific literature of distinctive tumors have only occurred in the past 200 years, such as scrotal cancer in chimney sweepers in 1775, nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761 and Hodgkin’s disease in 1832. One possible reason cancers might have been comparatively rare in antiquity is that the short life span of individuals back then precluded the development of the disease. Still, the researchers did note some people in ancient Egypt and Greece did live long enough to develop such diseases as atherosclerosis, Paget’s disease of bone, and osteoporosis.

David and Zimmerman therefore argue that cancer nowadays is largely caused by man-made environmental factors such as pollution and diet. They detailed their findings in the October issue of the journal Nature Reviews Cancer. “In industrialized societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death, but in ancient times, it was extremely rare,” David said in a statement. “There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer.”

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“..Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship..”

• Biden Export Controls ‘Wreaking Havoc’ On China’s Chip Industry (ZH)

A Twitter thread translated by Rhodium Group China expert Jordan Schneider provides keen insight into the effects of the Biden administration’s new export controls on the chip industry. To review, the Biden administration last week laid out new rules on chip exports based on US concerns that China will use AI to improve military capabilities, support surveillance for human rights abuses and “disrupt or manufacture outcomes that undermine democratic governance and sow social unrest,” according to Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration Thea D. Rozman Kendler. The sweeping regulations will curb the sale of semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to its #1 geopolitical rival – which, as Bloomberg puts it, is “sending shockwaves through the $440 billion industry.”

In a Friday Twitter thread which he translated from Hedgehog Computing Group founder Xinran Wang (@lidangzzz), Schneider lays out the carnage in English: “To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship,” Schneider writes, adding “One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump.” Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight.One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump. — Jordan Schneider (@jordanschnyc) October 14, 2022

Although American semiconductor exporters had to apply for licenses during the Trump years, licenses were approved within a month. With the new Biden sanctions, all American suppliers of IP blocks, components, and services departed overnight —— thus cutting off all service [to China]. Long story short, every advanced node semiconductor company is currently facing comprehensive supply cut-off, resignations from all American staff, and immediate operations paralysis.This is what annihilation looks like: China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry was reduced to zero overnight. Complete collapse. No chance of survival.

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That’s a lot of lies.

• Will Comey and Mueller Be Prosecuted for Lies John Durham Uncovered? (ET)

While special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko appears to be headed toward acquittal, Durham has used the trial to make public a number of revelations that cast the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative in a fresh light. Most prominently, Durham revealed that on Oct. 3, 2016, the FBI had offered dossier author Christopher Steele up to $1 million to provide any information, physical evidence, or documentary evidence that could back up the claims in his dossier. But despite the huge reward on offer, Steele did not provide any such information.Crucially, despite Steele’s failure to back up his dossier, a mere 18 days later the FBI proceeded to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page.

In its application to the FISA court, the FBI used the Steele dossier—specifically, its claim that Page was acting as an agent of Russia—as evidence.Then, after Donald Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community, which included the FBI, began drafting an intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the election. The ICA was issued in early January 2017, claiming that Russia had helped Trump win the election.The assessment included a summary of the dossier, claiming that it had been partly corroborated. The inclusion of Steele’s dossier in an official U.S. intelligence community product gave the dossier the credibility it had lacked up until that point.

It also gave the media, which had held back from reporting on the dossier between July 2016 and January 2017, the excuse it needed to start doing so. For the next several years, the dossier and its lurid claims became the centerpiece of the media’s campaign against Trump. As Durham has now made public, the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA was based on a lie.Another major revelation exposed by Durham in a pre-trial motion was that Danchenko had been on the FBI’s payroll between March 2017 and October 2020 as a confidential human source (CHS). By bestowing this coveted status on Danchenko, the FBI was able to conceal the existence of Danchenko from congressional and other investigators.

This was crucial, as Danchenko had told FBI investigators in January 2017 that the dossier was based on rumors and gossip made in jest. The admission that the Steele dossier was nothing more than bar talk needed to be concealed if the FBI was to continue its investigation of Trump. Appointing Danchenko as a CHS had another benefit for the FBI. As Danchenko’s handler, FBI agent Kevin Helson, confirmed in court last week, because he was an incoming CHS, Danchenko was directed to scrub his phone. Conveniently, that also meant scrubbing evidence of Danchenko’s alleged lies to the FBI, evidence that Durham now lacks.

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“Why, then, wait until the last hearing, especially if the House may flip to GOP control in a matter of weeks?”

• Why the Jan 6 Committee’s Timing is both Terrible and Telling (Turley)

The Jan. 6 committee had a noble mandate but failed to use it to offer a credible investigation for citizens across the political spectrum. From the first to the final hearing, it presented a one-sided narrative in a tightly scripted, packaged production. No defense or alternative explanations for key events or statements were allowed; witnesses were largely asked specific questions to get them to repeat what they said in previously recorded interviews, as members read from a teleprompter. The committee could have been so much more. It could have followed the type of balanced inquiry that pursued allegations tied to the Pearl Harbor attack or Watergate. Even without Republican-appointed members, it could have insisted on balanced hearings with witnesses and dissenting views.

Nevertheless, the committee revealed important, often disturbing details. It was important for Americans to hear from figures like former attorney general Bill Barr and White House lawyers who struggled to counter unfounded advice given to Trump by outside lawyers on challenging the 2020 election. There were painful scenes of Capitol police overwhelmed at barricades and members of Congress hunkered down in offices. Yet, the focus on a single approved narrative gave the hearings the feel of an infomercial selling a product that most of us bought two years earlier. Subpoenaing Trump on the final scheduled hearing only reaffirmed how the committee was driven by political rather than investigative priorities. Indeed, the timing was embarrassingly transparent.

While Trump could appear without a challenge or the Democrats could retain the House, few experts are predicting either outcome. For more than a year, the committee said its investigation was focused on Trump’s intent and actions. Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) explained that the subpoena was essential because “he must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions on Jan. 6. So we want to hear from him.” Why, then, wait until the last hearing, especially if the House may flip to GOP control in a matter of weeks?

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Via Ugo Bardi.

• The Dark Side of Nuclear Fusion (Pepi Cima)

Reading what was written by the scientists who worked in nuclear fusion in the early years of the “atomic age” shows that the development of an energy source for peaceful use, energy “too cheap to meter”, is what motivated them more than anything else. The same arguments were brought forward by Claudio Descalzi, CEO of ENI, a major investor in fusion, addressing the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR) in a hearing of December 9th 2021: fusion will offer humanity large quantities of energy of a safe, clean and virtually inexhaustible kind.

Wishful thinking: with regard to “inexhaustible,” we cannot do anything in fusion without tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) which is nonexistent on this planet and most of the theoretical predictions, no experiments to date, say that magnetic confinement, the main hope of fusion, will not self-fertilize. Speaking of “clean” energy, Paola Batistoni, head of ENEA’s Fusion Energy Development Division, at reactor shutdown envisages the production of hundreds of thousands of tons of materials unapproachable by humans for hundreds of years. However, the problem I am worried about here is a military problem, mostly ignored, even by COPASIR, the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic. There are many reasons to worry about nuclear fusion: the huge amount of magnetic energy in the reactor can cause explosions equivalent to hundreds of kilograms of TNT, resulting in the release of tritium, a very radioactive and difficult to contain gas.

On top of it, with the neutrons of nuclear fusion, it is possible to breed fissile materials. But the risks that seem to me most worrisome in the long run will come from new weapons, never seen before. To better understand this issue, let’s review how classical thermonuclear weapons work, the 70-year-old ones. Their exact characteristics are not in the public domain but Wikipedia describes them in sufficient detail. For a more complete introduction, I recommend the highly readable books by Richard Rhodes. There exist today “simple” fission bombs, which use only fissile reactions to generate energy, and “thermonuclear” bombs, which use both fission and fusion for that purpose. Thermonuclear bombs are an example of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where everything happens so quickly that all the energy is released before the reacting matter has the time to disperse.

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Fetus heart

 

 

Canada GHG
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582068398368096256

 

 

 

 

Olympic

 

 

 

 

Free water

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Some Heroes You Got There!

Jun 152022
 
 June 15, 2022  Posted by at 5:15 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky Constantinople in Moonlight 1846

 

 

We associate the term “mass psychosis” with the reaction(s) to Covid, but I would argue it’s been around a lot longer, and broader. At least since 2015, and the media coverage (if you can even call it that) of Donald Trump, his campaign and his presidency. I have no special sympathy for Trump (though some people doubt that), but that episode, and the “coverage” of it, did wake me up -even more- to how the media -and US “intelligence”, and Trump’s various opponents- influenced the way they wanted people to think.

And perhaps the best way to illustrate this is the “heroes” they have been promoting ever since. It’s not just Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during the “Trump days”, this model is still used to date. They make people like, and thereby trust, certain characters, and we’re off to the races. One thing that sticks out is how in the cases of Trump-Russia, Covid, and Ukraine-Russia, there are these personae that were getting adorned with celebratory candles and stuff like that.

The first person we saw that with was Robert Mueller. He did a 2-year “investigation”, which resulted in absolutely nothing -other than some vague allegations he had no proof of either-, and which he should have halted at least a year before he did, something nobody ever called him on. At his “closing” testimony he even claimed he had never heard of Fusion GPS, one of the key components in his own “investigation”, so we wondered if he ever had any control of this probe, or if it were perhaps Andrew Weizmann and the other 40-odd lawyers, paid god knows how many millions, and had god knows what other resources.

Robert Mueller turned out to be an utter disgrace to the whole nation, and he was never called on it. Nor was anyone else involved in the Steele Dossier, or any of the other false papers in the Trump persecution. This is a pattern. And you cannot and will not have a healthy country if these things do not happen, if the invented out of whole cloth falsehoods can be swept under the carpet. The complicity of US intelligence, moreover, means that nobody will ever know. They won’t investigate themselves. Or the Democratic party that ran the whole thing. Here is Mueller on July 24, 2019. Watch and weep.

 

 

Another main character in the Trump era was Adam Schiff, who repeated numerous times that he had “ample evidence” of collusion between Russia and Trump. But who, like Mueller, never showed one single shred of evidence for it. And now Schiff is back in the January 6 committee. Look, the guy lied in Congress and the Senate, so many times he would put Pinokkio to shame, but he’s still a Congressman, and he gets to do it all over again. You cannot have a functioning society, or political system, if people get away with lying incessantly, and there’s no penalty for that.

But still, here we go again. Legal expert Jonathan Turley noticed the exact same thing:

Schiff: House Select Committee Has Evidence That Trump “Engaged in Likely Multiple Criminal Acts”

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) went on CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight” to tout the work of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6th riot. In that interview, Schiff declared that the Committee has enough evidence showing former President Donald Trump “engaged in likely multiple criminal acts.” While vague on the specific crimes, Schiff emphasized that the Justice Department did not have to wait any further to launch a criminal investigation based on what has already been disclosed.


While the Committee has disclosed new evidence in the form of videotapes and testimony, it has not presented new material evidence of criminal acts in my view. That could still come but the first two hearings largely focused on a “conspiracy” to challenge the election certification and allegations that Trump knew the there was no compelling evidence of widespread election fraud.

 

 

And from the Trump investigation disgrace for America, we moved on seamlessly to Covid. Another bizarre freak show, and another media-appointed hero for whom candles were dedicated and burned: Anthony Fauci. We’re two years and change after Fauci caught the limelight, and we now know nothing, absolutely nothing, he said was true. Face masks don’t work, they instead risk making people sicker, if anything; lockdowns: same thing, and the vaccine injuries have only just started. Saw the first study today that says unvaccinated people have less risk of severe Covid, which is the 180º opposite of the last alleged positive effect the jabs were supposed to bring. Game over.

What an insane story. But Fauci, and the FDA, and all these “experts”, are preparing to jab babies. Which puts them at great risk, who have no risk from Covid . Because it puts their immune systems in danger. For life. For Pfizer and Moderna profits. How many people were killed by lockdowns? How many by vaccines? We will never know. Your grandchildren are not going to believe you allowed it to happen. But yeah, go burn a candle for Tony. And for all his brethren in all other countries. They will try again this fall. Based on no other “proof” than that provided by Pfizer. Clown world. Latest EU vaccine deaths number is 44,348. That Eudra Vigilance number, like the US VAERS system, catches maybe 1 in 10 adverse effects. If that. But we saved so many lives! No, you did not. You were killing people, under coercion, all along. For money.

 

 

Today, then, we have the Russian Special Military Operation, totally unprovoked, unless you ask Pope Francis I. And again, the media present you with a hero for whom, again, celebratory candles are consecrated. And y’all fall for it again: Vlod Zelensky. Who’s doing the most elaborate PR campaign we’ve ever seen, dozens of media appearances per day, while hundreds of his people are dying daily in a “war” effort that has zero chance of succeeding.

Sending him more weapons will only mean killing more of his people, but that doesn’t appear to be his main concern, does it? How strange! Zelensky is the alleged -but not actual- leader of one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and certainly the no. 1 in the “west”. But he provides the western arms industries with a theater in which they can test their new weapons, while at the same time raking in huge profits for old and new systems. And as the only casualties are Ukrainians and Russians, but no Americans or Germans, Raytheon and Boeing couldn’t have asked for a better set-up.

And do remember that Zelensky has also claimed that the Russians want to eradicate the entire Ukrainian population, obliterate their whole culture, kill as many Ukrainians as they can, and that Russians kill Ukrainians just for fun. Among many other things. While the reality is that Russia has sacrificed the lives of many of its soldiers in order to prevent many more Ukrainian deaths. Russia could have taken Ukraine much faster than they have without that. That is, the consideration that they are brotherly people. But that reality does not fit the west’s picture.

We are a utterly sick culture, and we don’t have much time left to wake up from that and repair it. Our real heroes have been silenced, banned, imprisoned or murdered. We will not be able to live like this much longer.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 23 2022

May 232022
 
 May 23, 2022  Posted by at 8:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  25 Responses »


Eugène Delacroix Pietà 1837

 

• Want To See The Scale Of DC Corruption? (CTH)
• Apparently Mueller and Weissmann Never Interviewed Robby Mook (CTH)
• Sussmann Peddled Anti-Trump Claims To CIA After The Election (WT)
• Baker Says FBI Investigated Sussmann Alfa Bank Claims: Nothing There (Fox)
• Azov Surrenders. Who Will Be The Sacred Martyr Now? (Milacic)
• Operation Z – Dumb Bombs Go To School (Sonar21)
• Germans ‘Schwedt’ Hard For Russian Oil (Vilches)
• Is Subject #12312982 the Key to Proving Pfizer Vaccine Trial Fraud? (JJ)
• Rubio Accuses Google of Election Bias, Censoring Campaign Emails (ET)
• Bullwhip Effect: Why Prices Are About To Fall Off A Cliff (ZH)
• How the United States Conquered Inflation Following the Civil War (FEE)
• Pressure Mounts on Patel Over Assange Decision (Lauria)

 

 

 

 

Pepe Press Project

 

 

Twitter thread by “sundance”. The swamp is deep and smelly.

• Want To See The Scale Of DC Corruption? (CTH)

Want to see the scale of DC corruption?… Start with this question: Why did Andrew Weissman release the Carter Page FISA application in July of 2018? At the apex of the special counsel cover-up operation, Andrew Weissman released the Carter Page FISA application, using the ridiculous justification of a FOIA request. No one asked “why”? Everyone was so intoxicated by the first ever release of a TSCI FISA, they never paused to ask the question. However, the answer reveals just how brutally corrupt the special counsel cover up operation was. The FISA application was released, because it was the central focus of the James Wolfe criminal indictment. Senate Intel Committee Security Director James Wolfe was busted leaking material from SSCI SCIF. Wolfe leaked the FISA application to journalist Ali Watkins.

The Wolfe leak of the FISA application was a very serious problem for both the special counsel and the SSCI. So, before the DC US Attorney could put those charges into the official court record, Weissman found out and publicly released it. Thereby the special counsel proactively undermined any criminal charge that would be levied against Mr. Wolfe, and subsequently, importantly, protected the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Why did the Special Counsel need to protect James Wolfe from the consequences of his leaking the Carter Page FISA application? Because James Wolfe was told to leak the Top Secret Classified FISA application by Senate Committee Vice-Chairman, Senator Mark Warner. Why did Senator Mark Warner originally tell James Wolfe to leak the Carter Page FISA application to Ali Watkins? ANSWER: Because SSCI Vice-Chairman Warner was trying desperately to get enough pressure in DC to appoint a special counsel.

The leak took place on March 17, 2017, amid the DC furor to get a Trump-Russia special counsel at all costs. The special counsel was appointed, in part, due to the public pressure created by the open admission of an internal FBI investigation of President Trump, which *importantly* at the time of the leak (3/17/17), was still being denied. It wasn’t until (conveniently & not coincidentally) three days later on March 20, 2017, when FBI Director James Comey admitted before congress that yes, President Trump was actually under an open FBI investigation. Fast forward to late 2017, early 2018, and the Wolfe FISA leak is now part of a criminal investigation and criminal indictment (unsealed June 7, 2018)

As soon as the Wolfe indictment was unsealed, the special counsel jumped into action to remove the most explosive element, the FISA leak, from any potential courtroom. The fear was Wolfe wasn’t about to go to prison for leaking a document he was told to leak. The ramifications were tremendous for everyone, including the special counsel. The revelation of a coordinated multi-branch effort to target Trump would crush the Weissman agenda. Wolfe’s lawyers knew how to leverage the fear within DC to get the best outcome for their client. Cunning Weissman knew by publicly releasing the FISA application, using the goofy and easily dismissible justification of a FOIA request, he could remove that element from the criminal case. Which is exactly what happened.

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WSJ op-ed (see below): “The Russia-Trump narrative that Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country. It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere. Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.”

• Apparently Mueller and Weissmann Never Interviewed Robby Mook (CTH)

Special Prosecutor John Durham found the truth behind the creation of the Trump-Russia hoax, and through the trial of Sussmann is now diligently passing out the bitter pill ‘I toldyaso’s’ to the small group of rebellious researchers who found this exact trail of evidence years ago. The Clinton campaign lying is politics. The Clinton campaign selling lies to the media is slimy, but nonetheless politics. The media pushing those lies only showcases how corrupt they are in supporting their political allies. However, the Clinton campaign selling those lies to the FBI is a bit more problematic; thus, the trial of Sussmann. Having said all that; while also accepting this grand game of pretense; there’s an 800lb gorilla in the room that no one seems bothered by.

How did Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann spend 2 years investigating Trump-Russia; with a team of 19 lawyers, $40 million in resources, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and 500 witnesses; and not find out that Hillary Clinton created the hoax they were investigating? [..] The 2017, 2018 and 2019 special counsel probe, led by the nameplate of Robert Mueller, was a DC cover-up operation for FBI and DOJ misconduct. The best defense is a good offense, so they attacked President Trump by maintaining the hoax.

Media people often forget, or perhaps -again- need to pretend not to know; however, the exact same group of FBI and DOJ staff level investigative officials that originated the Trump investigation in 2016, transferred into the Robert Mueller investigation in May 2017. It was the same people, doing the same investigation, under a different title. The Mueller team originally consisted of the same FBI officials who received the Alfa-Bank hoax material from Michael Sussmann. Andrew Weissmann and a group of 19 lawyers joined the effort and pulled in more resources. Yet if we are to believe the current narrative, you would have to believe those same investigators never talked to any Clinton campaign people, or Fusion GPS, or Rodney Joffe, or Marc Elias, or Michael Sussmann?… but wait, I mean, they did.. talk to Sussmann… because….. that’s what this trial is about….


WSJ op-ed

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They wanted a special counsel.

• Sussmann Peddled Anti-Trump Claims To CIA After The Election (WT)

Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann peddled his false theories about former President Donald Trump to the CIA in the early days of the Trump administration, two former CIA officials testified Friday. Retired CIA officer Mark Chadason told jurors that he met with Mr. Sussmann for breakfast at a Northern Virginia hotel on Jan. 31, 2017, roughly two weeks after Mr. Trump had been sworn in as president. Mr. Chadason and another retired CIA officer known only as Kevin P. testified in the trial of Mr. Sussmann, who is charged with one count of lying to the FBI when seeking to spur investigations of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. From the witness stand in a federal courtroom in Washington, Mr. Chadason testified that Mr. Sussmann said he was representing “an engineer with a number of patents” and “a Republican” who had some anti-Trump allegations.

He also described Mr. Sussmann as appearing “frustrated,” and threatened to take his claims to The New York Times if the CIA wasn’t interested. Prosecutors say Mr. Sussmann lied to the FBI in September 2016 when he told bureau lawyer James Baker that he was not representing any client as he turned over documents promoting a false story about Mr. Trump’s link to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The prosecutors accuse Mr. Sussmann of working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, saying he later billed the campaign for his time at the bureau. It is the first trial stemming from special counsel John Durham’s probe of the origins of the FBI’s investigation of Trump-Russia collusion to sway the 2016 presidential election. Defense attorneys say Mr. Sussmann didn’t lie and his connections to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party were well known to the FBI and Mr. Baker.

After the FBI concluded the allegations were meritless, Mr. Sussmann then turned to the CIA, the officers said. Kevin P. testified that Mr. Sussmann met with him and another CIA officer, known as Steve M. in February 2017. He said that Mr. Sussmann said the Alfa Bank allegations came from “contacts,” not a client. Kevin P. told jurors that during the meeting, Mr. Sussmann noted his contacts with the Democratic National Committee, but made it clear they weren’t involved in the allegations. Mr. Chadason also said that Mr. Sussmann didn’t try to hide his ties to the Clinton campaign and DNC. He later wrote in an email to the CIA that Mr. Sussmann was a “partisan lawyer” and he wasn’t sure what “the real story is here.”

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And there are Comey and McCabe…

• Baker Says FBI Investigated Sussmann Alfa Bank Claims: Nothing There (Fox)

The FBI found that “there was nothing there” after investigating the information brought to the bureau in September 2016 by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann alleging a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, former FBI General Counsel James Baker testified Thursday. Baker’s testimony came on day four of the Sussmann trial – the first criminal trial stemming from Special Counsel John Durham’s years-long investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI when he told Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the presidential election, that he was not doing work “for any client” when he requested and attended a meeting where he presented “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communicates channel” between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin.

Durham’s team alleges Sussmann was, in fact, doing work for two clients: the Hillary Clinton campaign and a technology executive, Rodney Joffe. Following the meeting with Baker, Sussmann billed the Hillary Clinton campaign for his work. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty to the charge. Baker testified Thursday that the FBI began an investigation into the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations, which lasted “several weeks, maybe a month, maybe a month and a half.” “We concluded there was no substance,” Baker testified. “We couldn’t confirm it. We could not confirm there was a surreptitious communications channel.” Baker added: “There was nothing there.” In testimony on Tuesday afternoon, FBI Special Agent Scott Hellman also said the data revealing the alleged covert communications channel between Trump and Russia that Sussmann brought to the FBI turned out to be untrue, and said he did not agree with the narrative.

Hellman testified that whoever drafted the narrative describing the DNS data was “5150,” and clarified on the stand that meant he believed the individual who came to the conclusions “was suffering from some mental disability.” Baker on Thursday did testify, however, that when Sussmann brought the allegations to him on Sept. 19, 2016, the FBI “was already conducting an investigation into alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russians at this point in time.” Baker said he briefed then-FBI Director James Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe on the Sussmann allegations shortly after they were brought to him. “Here was another type of information between Trump and Russia that had come to me,” Baker said. “It seemed to me of great urgency and great seriousness that I would want to make my bosses aware of this information.” He added: “I think they were quite concerned about it.”

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“..the fact that the best Ukrainian troops surrendered to the Russian army represents a strong psychological blow to the entire Ukrainian army..”

• Azov Surrenders. Who Will Be The Sacred Martyr Now? (Milacic)

On the night of May 17, after brief negotiations, Ukrainian army units, blocked by Russian troops at Azovstal in Mariupol, began to surrender. Initially, it was announced that the Ukrainian military wanted to hand over to Russia their wounded whose condition in the cellars of a huge factory was hopeless. However, it soon became clear that the entire “Mariupol garrison” as the remnants of the nationalist volunteer regiment “Azov” and the units of the Ukrainian army that had joined it were called by the Kiev-controlled media, were laying down their arms. So, on the morning of May 17, 90 wounded soldiers were pulled out of the basements and were joined by more than 250 healthy, albeit exhausted and filthy fighters. In a few days, that number reached 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers.

That’s why we wonder, what fate awaits them and other members of the Ukrainian army who surrender to Russian troops? For President Zelensky and his team, Azovstal was a kind of a sacred symbol of Mariupol’s resistance. Many hopes were pinned on the Azov Regiment, considered a terrorist organization in Russia. First of all, those in Kiev believed that the nationalists would hold out to the end and die as heroes, especially since in Russia they face a trial. And they will be lucky if it is in Russia, because in the DPR, unlike in the Russian Federation, they have the death penalty. And still, the Azov fighters began to surrender. In the morning, Russian social networks exploded with indignation after it became known that the militants leaving Azovstal had negotiated a bunch of conditions.

No prosecution, priority exchange, no video footage and respectful treatment. The fuming Russian patriots soon calmed down though. First, because the video with the prisoners almost instantly appeared on TV channels, and second, the State Duma adopted an appeal demanding that new prisoners be carefully filtered out and all those involved in war crimes be brought to justice. In addition, the surrender negotiations went too quickly to discuss exchange conditions and other terms at the highest level. The heroes of “Azov” are also human and just want to live. Even behind bars. This creates very big problems for Kiev, though. The commanders of the Azov Regiment, Svyatoslav Palamar and Denis Prokopenko, two leaders of Ukrainian ultranationalists, also surrendered to the Russian army. In this way, they publicly humiliated all Ukrainian ideology.

Until yesterday, they were celebrated as immortal heroes, who swore that they would lay down their lives for Ukraine in the fight against the Russian occupiers. And despite all that – they surrendered to the Russian army. For official Kiev, only two options were acceptable. The first to liberate Palmar and Prokopenko, along with other Ukrainian soldiers. While the other option was “glorious death”. That is, Palmar and Prokopenko would die in the fight with the Russian army. That would enable Kiev to make Ukrainian anti-Russian heroes out of them. Thus, the fact that the best Ukrainian troops surrendered to the Russian army represents a strong psychological blow to the entire Ukrainian army, especially to the Ukrainian forces in Donbas.

Azov tattoos

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Doohickey.

• Operation Z – Dumb Bombs Go To School (Sonar21)

Suppose you knew – to a really high degree of precision – what your altitude was, what your ground speed was, precisely where you were and where the target was. Imagine if you had a set of satellites up there that could tell you all these things. And you also knew a lot of other esoteric things (like the glide characteristics of your bombs) and you had the best possible weather information over your target. All this and every other scrap of information you needed. If you knew all this, and had a computer to work it out, then you could just drop your dumb bomb when the computer told you to and it would passively glide to the target. And that is what the Russians have done. Explained here with more detail but by now you have the idea. The Russian global positioning system – GLONASS – gives them the necessary data, the computer doohickey in the plane calculates and drops the dumb bomb at exactly the right time.


All the data inputs are known to a very high degree of accuracy. The bomb is just as dumb as it ever was but the doohickey on the plane makes it fall at precisely the moment when its dumbness doesn’t matter. For the American solution communication has to be continuous – break the link and Mr Smart Bomb’s IQ drops into single digits. For the Russians, it doesn’t matter – gravity and inertia will get Mr Dumbo to the target – fly in the general direction, push the button, let the computer do the work and forget it. Therefore, Russia doesn’t have any more dumb bombs because it’s figured out a way to make them all smart; and one thing Russia has learned from the World War 2 experience is that you can’t have too much ammunition – there are lots of bombs. But, maybe this is too complicated for our generals – computer game, whatever.

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“Europe and Germany have been forewarned. They better know what they are doing.”

• Germans ‘Schwedt’ Hard For Russian Oil (Vilches)

Some may think that refinery feedstocks are like dog food, even interchangeable. Not true. Refineries are very closely matched and subtly calibrated/configured to very specific feedstocks difficult and time-consuming to substitute. Changes can and have been made but it requires lots of effort, money, dedicated facilities, experimentation, mistakes, trial & error, specific expertise, risk, and most importantly fixed, unchanging new feedstocks always complying with specs. Substituting the quality and humongous quantity of Russian oil feeds has never ever been attempted. This means that Russia today supplies Europe with exclusive Urals grades of very precise and constant homogenous physical & chemical characterization that would be impossible to get from third parties fast enough and cheap enough in continuous enormously large quantities from different reservoirs wherever. So it´s a very delicate and tight matching already achieved between Schwedt and the Russian Urals blend, that most probably cannot be substituted.


Banning Russian oil means many things. Some are known to require — among other things — time, money, expertise, human resources, etc.etc. But some others are unknown and very complex. For example, finding many new different oils – from many new unproven vendors – that collectively and in a coordinated fashion ( ?? ) would constantly offer into the future — rain or shine, come hell or highwater — the very same homogenized profile of delivery, quality, quantity, price, service and enlargeability of feedstocks that Russia has reliably provided Europe for decades at low cost. Anything less and Europe will no longer be or perform or deliver as we know it. Skeptics please easily find the 6 (six) criteria that such oil feedstocks mandatorily need to meet at Ref #11. Europe and Germany have been forewarned. They better know what they are doing.

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“..that’s how Pfizer made cases of myocarditis and pericarditis disappear, by sweeping them under the rug of COVID-19..”

• Is Subject #12312982 the Key to Proving Pfizer Vaccine Trial Fraud? (JJ)

Subject # 12312982 in Pfizer study C4591001 is Augusto Roux, a 35-year old lawyer from Buenos Aires, Argentina who volunteered for Pfizer’s stage 3 trial of its COVID-19 vaccine (or whatever you want to call it) in order to protect his mother with emphysema. His story and some of the shenanigans surrounding the Argentinian trial site have been amply covered by Dr. David Healy in three sprawling but extremely important blog posts. The first one was published March 1st, but it was only last week that I caught on to this story, so I’m assuming most of you probably aren’t familiar with it. So please share this — we’ve got to get the word out, because Augusto Roux may very well hold the key to bringing down the Pfizer vaccine trial, or a least proving fraud at the largest trial site that was home to over 10% of the participants in the trial.

[..] On the way home after his second dose on Sept. 9, 2020, he began feeling unwell, developed a high fever and felt terribly ill until he fainted on Sept. 11 and finally went to the hospital on Sept. 12 (not the one where the trial was being run). They did a thorough work-up, including a CAT scan of his chest that showed an abnormal collection of fluid around the outside of the heart. Basically he had pericarditis. On Sept. 14, he was discharged. The doctor wrote in his chart that he had suffered an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Augusto was told by hospital staff they there had been a huge influx of people from the clinical trial coming to the hospital (there were 2,981 subjects enrolled in the trial before Augusto), so his experience was not new to them. (The trial site managed to enlist several thousand subjects in just a few weeks.) One nurse estimated they had seen around 300 people.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting, and we know all of this because Augusto, a lawyer, successfully sued to get his medical and trial clinical records, even though it took him over a year. Even though Augusto had a negative PCR test at the hospital, and even though the doctor at the hospital wrote that his condition was due to the vaccine, when Augusto called the trial site on Sept. 14 to notify them he was in the hospital, they wrote down in his clinical trial record that he had been admitted for a bilateral pneumonia that had nothing to do with the “investigational product” — even though that was not what he told them.

On October 7, the clinical trial notes that “at the request of the sponsor” (AKA Pfizer), the adverse event code was update to COVID-19 disease. And that’s how Pfizer made cases of myocarditis and pericarditis disappear, by sweeping them under the rug of COVID-19. Moreover, the diagnosis of COVID-19 would not count against the efficacy calculations, since those required a positive PCR test to confirm diagnosis.

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No love lost for Rubio, but still insane.

• Rubio Accuses Google of Election Bias, Censoring Campaign Emails (ET)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is accusing Google of filtering his emails to supporters in the run-up to the midterm election this fall, describing on May 21 his current situation as being in “purgatory.” The Florida Republican said in a tweet that up to 90 percent of his campaign emails to supporters with a registered Gmail address never reach their inboxes but go to their spam folder. He said that has occurred since his likely Democratic opponent in the November general election, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), announced a year ago she would run against him. “Marco Rubio for Senate is in @Google purgatory. Since a Pelosi puppet announced she was running against me, they have sent 66% of my emails to REGISTERED SUPPORTERS with @gmail to spam,” Rubio wrote on Twitter on May 21.


“And during the final weeks of finance quarters, it climbs to over 90%,” the post reads. Rubio, who is running for a third term in the U.S. Senate, is likely to face off against Demings, a former Orlando police chief, in Florida’s 2022 general election on Nov. 8. Ahead of the Sunshine State’s primaries on Aug. 23, the Republican senator holds a lead of 9 points over Demings in an average of polls among registered voters. Republicans filed a joint complaint on April 27 with the Federal Election Commission to investigate Gmail’s algorithm—which “makes it much harder for Republicans to reach their supporters” than Democrats and stifles GOP fundraising efforts—as claimed by researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU).

Read more …

Too much inventory?!

• Bullwhip Effect: Why Prices Are About To Fall Off A Cliff (ZH)

It was exactly a year ago, when Deutsche Bank strategist Luke Templeman said that amid the panicked scramble by US wholesalers to stock up on scarce inventory as a result of snarled supply chains, it was only a matter of time before the US economy was roiled by a “bullwhip” (or whiplash) effect. Some details for those unfamiliar with this concept: the bullwhip effect occurs when a drop in customer demand causes retailers to under stock. In turn, wholesalers respond to a lack of retail orders by understocking themselves. That then causes manufacturers to slow production. Eventually the reverse occurs. As customer demand comes back, retailers quickly order more goods, often too much, and wholesalers and factories are caught short. Shortages occur, prices increase. Eventually production ramps up at levels that are far beyond equilibrium levels and this cascades down the chain. These violent swings in availability of goods then continue back and forth until an equilibrium is eventually established.


Last May, the beginning of the bullwhip effect was seen in the way retailers and wholesalers managed their inventory levels since the outbreak of covid. Specifically, retailers kept a supply of inventory at a relatively constant level, above that of wholesalers. As covid hit, supply chains from Asia were cut which caused a fright amongst retailers in the West who immediately began to put in orders for more inventory. A whole lot more of it. Subsequent lockdowns saw demand plummet and inventories along with it. In both cases, the actions of wholesalers followed those of retailers by a month or so. In the context of a starting bullwhip effect, Templeman’s conclusion was accurate: “As inventory levels have fallen to multi-decade lows at retailers, there are likely many businesses that will not have enough inventory to satisfy customers as economies recover and pent-up demand is unleashed. This is particularly the case as retailers are far more reliant on just-in-time supply chains than they were in decades past.”

Read more …

Gold.

• How the United States Conquered Inflation Following the Civil War (FEE)

According to the most recent polling data, the American public’s approval of Congress stands at a dismal 21 percent. Almost four times as many people disapprove of the job it’s doing.That’s par for the course in recent decades. It’s the major reason the Washington sausage grinder earns so little praise. To be fair, though, let’s review an occasion when lawmakers got something right. I’m prompted to share this story now because its lessons are especially relevant considering today’s concerns about rising price inflation. The year was 1875. The Civil War (1861-65) produced a disastrous hyperinflation in the Confederacy and considerable currency depreciation of paper greenbacks in the North as well.

A decade after Appomattox, Congress still had not made good on its promise to make its paper money redeemable in gold. But in January 1875, alarmed by the rise of pro-inflation agitators (the “greenbackers,” later to become “silverites”), Congress passed the Specie Payment Resumption Act, which President Ulysses S. Grant later signed into law. Politicians often break their promises, and this was yet another opportunity to do so. Congress could have declared, “We don’t have the gold necessary to honor our pledge, so we’ll pay gold for greenbacks at 50 cents on the dollar.” But lawmakers chose to be honest for once, and to meet their obligations fully. The Act provided that all paper greenbacks would be redeemable on demand “at par” (100 percent of the earlier promise), beginning on January 1, 1879.

When Rutherford B. Hayes succeeded Grant as President in March 1877, he knew his administration had less than two years to prepare the Treasury and the nation’s banks for redemption. He and his Treasury officials believed the best way to avoid a run on the banks in January 1879 was to shore up the country’s gold reserves. They did so largely by selling bonds to Europeans in exchange for gold. Redemption Day came amid rumors that people would flood the banks with their paper greenbacks and demand the promised gold, but just the opposite happened. Hardly anybody showed up at bank teller windows asking for the yellow metal. Why? Because the Treasury had accumulated more than enough gold to take care of convertibility, and the public knew it. The lesson? When people have good reason to believe their paper money is “as good as gold,” they prefer the convenience of paper.

Former United States Circuit Judge Randall R. Rader writes, “The year 1879 brought the resumption of the redeemable currency. The consumer price index stabilized at 28 in that year. For more than three decades thereafter (World War I interrupted the price tranquility), the index never rose above 29 or dipped below 25. The index remained at 27 for a decade. Never did it rise or fall more than a single point in a year. The gold standard worked throughout that entire period to keep prices remarkably stable.”

Read more …

There will be more court hearings.

• Pressure Mounts on Patel Over Assange Decision (Lauria)

At some point during the next nine days, British Home Secretary Priti Patel will decide whether or not to extradite imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges for publishing accurate information revealing U.S. war crimes. Pressure is building from both sides on the home secretary. Press freedom and human rights organizations, a Nobel laureate, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, journalists and Assange supporters have appealed to Patel to let Assange go. While it would be deemed improper for outside influence to be brought on judges, it would not be fanciful to imagine that behind the scenes Patel is getting the message from the U.S. Department of Justice and possibly from U.S. and U.K. intelligence services about what is expected of her.

The home secretary should know without prodding what the U.S. and British governments want her to do. Patel is a highly-ambitious politician who no doubt will calculate how her decision will impact her career. “Politicians think about their next election, they think about their voters … that’s what makes them tick,” Kristinn Hrafnnson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, told Consortium News at a protest outside the Home Office in London last Wednesday. “For the first time it’s in the hands of a politician, and Priti Patel, if she wants to think about her legacy … she should do the right thing.” “Politics is a strange beast,” Hrafnsson said. “Anything can happen. I’m hoping this is something that will be taken up in the Cabinet here. Let’s not forget that Boris Johnson was a journalist. He was part of the media community and should have better understanding of this case than many others.”

Patel is acting after the U.K. Supreme Court refused to hear Assange’s appeal of a High Court decision to overturn a lower court ruling barring Assange’s extradition on health grounds and the danger of U.S. prisons. The High Court decided solely on conditional U.S. promises that Assange would be well treated in custody. With the courts no longer involved and the decision solely in Patel’s hands, the case now is purely political, meaning political pressure can be brought to bear on the home secretary. “The home secretary has the discretion to block this extradition, and there is a lot of pressure from civil society and press freedom groups for her to do so,” said Stella Assange at film screening on Thursday.

If Patel decides to extradite Assange it’s not the end of the legal road for Assange. He has the option of launching a “cross” appeal to the High Court. Though he won in magistrate’s court on health grounds and the condition of U.S. prisons, the judge ruled on every other point of law in Washington’s favor.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 16 2021

Jul 162021
 
 July 16, 2021  Posted by at 8:17 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  65 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Bridge in the rain (after Hiroshige) 1887

 

• Biden Admin ‘Flagging Problematic Social Media Posts’ (PM)
• Question Everything (Ballan)
• Spain’s Top Court Rules Lockdown Unconstitutional (BBC)
• Long Covid Has Over 200 Symptoms And Leaves 1 In 5 Unable To Work
• Huge Study Supporting Ivermectin For Covid Withdrawn Over Ethical Concerns (G.)
• Top General Feared Trump Would Attempt A Coup After Losing The Election (DM)
• Kremlin Papers Appear To Show Putin’s Plot To Put Trump In White House (G.)
• Kremlin Says Guardian Claims Are ‘Fundamentally Untrue’ (RT)
• Russia Accuses US Of ‘Staging’ Anti-Government Protests In Cuba (RT)
• Illinois Becomes First State To Prohibit Police From Lying To Kids (JTN)
• 59 of 96 Phones Assigned To Mueller Probe Missing (JTN)
• Bill Clinton Took Two More Trips On The Lolita Express (DM)
• Capitol Police To Use Army Surveillance Gear To Monitor Americans (AMN)

 

 

Which country will recover faster?

 

 

Why am I getting the idea that we no longer comprehend just how bizarre this is? That our minds have become so blunted by censorship we do not recognize it as such any longer?

• Biden Admin ‘Flagging Problematic Social Media Posts’ (PM)

After Biden administration Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory urging big tech companies to “impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki used it to call for big tech companies to crack down harder on social media users with “fact-checks” on “misinformation.” A reporter requested that Psaki expand a bit more on “the request for tech companies to be more aggressive” as regards “misinformation. Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies and are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation, because we’ve seen from the start there’s not a lot of action on some of these platforms.”

“Sure, well first, we are in regular touch with the social media platforms and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team. Given as, Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation specifically on the pandemic,” Psaki said. “In terms of actions… that we have taken or are working to take from the federal government. We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect two connected medical experts who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content.

“So we’re helping get trusted content out there. We also created the COVID Community Corps to get factual information into the hands of local messengers. And we’re also investing in the President’s, the Vice President’s and Dr. Fauci’s time in meeting with influencers who also have large reaches to a lot of these target audiences who can spread and share accurate information. “We saw an example of that yesterday, I believe that video will be out Friday,” Psaki said. “There are also proposed changes that we have made to social media platforms including Facebook, and those specifically four key steps:

“1) That they measure and publicly share the impact of misinformation on their platform. Facebook should provide publicly and transparently data on the reach of COVID-19, COVID vaccine misinformation. Not just engagement, but the reach of the misinformation and the audience that it’s reaching. That will make sure we’re getting accurate information to people. This should be provided not just to researchers but to the public so that public knows and understands what is accurate and inaccurate.
“2) We have recommended, proposed, that they create a robust and enforcement strategy that bridges their properties and provides transparency about the rules. So… there’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of anti-vaccination misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook despite some even being banned on other platforms, including ones that Facebook owns.
“3) It’s important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms. Sometimes it’s not accurate, and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts, posts that are within their policies for removal often remain up for days. That’s too long. The information spreads to quickly.

“Finally,” Psaki said, “we have proposed they promote quality information sources in their feed algorithm. Facebook has repeatedly shown that they have the leverage to promote quality information, we’ve seen them effectively do this in their algorithm over low-quality information and they’ve chosen not to use it in this case. That’s certainly an area where we have an impact.” She said that Facebook “certainly understands what our asks are.”

Psaki
https://twitter.com/i/status/1415728046930268160

Read more …

“Fear is not good for us. It’s not good for our immunity, our health or our ability to think rationally. To calm the fear, we need to know that cases are meaningless, deaths are overestimated and immunity – whether natural or vaccine-induced – is long-lasting and can protect us from future variants.”

• Question Everything (Ballan)

The WHO flip-flopped on the definition of herd immunity, which is the point at which an infectious disease stops being a cause for concern because most of the population is immune to it. They removed natural immunity from the definition and limited herd immunity to that reached via vaccination only. After this meddling caused an uproar, they went back again and included both forms of immunity as contributing to herd immunity. Furthermore, they changed their recommendations about the PCR test, first allowing very high cycle thresholds of 45 (which is the number of times the genetic material of the virus is multiplied until it is detected) and recommending that cases are diagnosed based on a positive PCR test, regardless of symptoms – previously unheard of in medicine.

Patients are usually diagnosed with a disease if they are sick. Later the WHO rectified their stance, clarifying that the diagnosis of cases requires clinical symptoms and that high cycle thresholds lead to false positives. Why did the WHO make recommendations contrary to established medical practice for infectious diseases? The PCR test was not designed to diagnose infectiousness. It merely detects viral genetic material, dead or alive. Studies indicate that 25 cycles are enough to detect an infectious virus. How much have the false positive results affected the number of cases and in turn the number of deaths? How many deaths were wrongly attributed to COVID instead of other diseases?

Science doesn’t flip-flop like that. Politics does. Science has become politicized. We need to decouple science from politics. It is being manipulated to serve corporate and political agendas. Anyone criticizing ‘The Science’ is silenced harshly. People are smart and if given accurate information they can make the right decisions for themselves and their communities. Unfortunately, people are being misinformed and fear-mongered with non-stop death reports, apparently vanishing immunity and the threat of new variants. Fear is not good for us. It’s not good for our immunity, our health or our ability to think rationally. To calm the fear, we need to know that cases are meaningless, deaths are overestimated and immunity – whether natural or vaccine-induced – is long-lasting and can protect us from future variants.

Variants are not unique to COVID. All respiratory viruses mutate. The variants are so minutely different from each other that our immune system will recognize them and protect us. It’s like your friend wearing a cap. Can you still recognize him? In the same way, your immune system also recognizes the variants. How much longer should we let those variants haunt us?

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After the flood.

• Spain’s Top Court Rules Lockdown Unconstitutional (BBC)

Spain’s top court has ruled that last year’s strict coronavirus lockdown was unconstitutional. The ruling leaves the door open for people who were fined for breaking the rules to reclaim the money they paid. But the court said it would not accept lawsuits from people and businesses who want to sue the government because they lost money due to the lockdown. The government declared a state of emergency on 14 March 2020 to curb the first wave of Covid-19 infections. At the time, coronavirus cases and deaths were rising and hospitals were quickly becoming overwhelmed. Since then, more than 81,000 people in Spain have died with coronavirus.


Spain has three levels of emergency: state of emergency, state of exception, and the highest level, state of siege. Under the emergency rules almost all people in the country were ordered to stay at home, and were only permitted to leave for essential reasons. All but essential businesses were closed. The laws were in place until June 2020, though some restrictions were reinstated later in the year when the country faced a second wave. But Spain’s Constitutional Court said in a statement that it had voted, by a slim majority of six to five, to find that the state of emergency was not enough to give the restrictions constitutional backing. This is because the rules were equivalent to a suppression of fundamental rights, it said.

Read more …

There’s a stiff competition between long covid and vaccines for the number of symptoms.

• Long Covid Has Over 200 Symptoms And Leaves 1 In 5 Unable To Work

There are more than 200 symptoms associated with long Covid spanning 10 organ systems—including memory loss, hallucinations, tremors and fatigue—according to a new study published Thursday, providing one of the most comprehensive insights yet into the lingering and debilitating illness that can affect patients for months or years after infection. Covid long haulers reported a total of 203 different symptoms in the seven months between Dec. 2019 and May 2020, ranging from rashes, peeling skin and digestive issues to muscle spasms, hearing loss and tinnitus, according to research published in the Lancet’s E Clinical Medicine journal.


The study, based on surveys from nearly 4,000 people from 56 countries, identified fatigue, brain fog and post-exertional malaise (where symptoms worsen after physical or mental effort) as the most common symptoms. On average, patients suffered from 56 different symptoms and those still suffering after six months—nearly two-thirds of participants taking the survey—were still experiencing an average of 14 symptoms. Almost half (45%) of the study’s participants reported needing a reduced work schedule on account of their illness and around one-fifth (22%) were unable to work at all. Dr. Athena Akrami, a neuroscientist at University College London and senior author of the study, said it highlights “a clear need to widen medical guidelines” to assess a wider range of symptoms than respiratory and cardiovascular issues for long Covid.”

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They take one study and use it to discredit 80 others. The Guardian for you.

• Huge Study Supporting Ivermectin For Covid Withdrawn Over Ethical Concerns (G.)

The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”. The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November. It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.

The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%. But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were. A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.

It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said. The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.

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Not sure what Trump did this time, but they want him again. Is it his lawsuit vs Big Tech?

• Top General Feared Trump Would Attempt A Coup After Losing The Election (DM)

The country’s top military officer was so convinced that then-President Donald Trump would attempt a coup after his election loss to Joe Biden that he and other senior generals made plans to stop him, according to a new book. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his deputies reportedly pledged to resign en masse if they were given an order by Trump that was illegal or unconstitutional. ‘They may try, but they’re not going to f***ing succeed,’ Milley told his deputies. ‘You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. ‘We’re the guys with the guns.’ The dramatic quote excerpted by CNN was revealed in a new book authored by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig titled I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. The book is scheduled for release next week.

Days before the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, Milley warned confidantes of a ‘Reichstag moment’ facing the country. According to the book, his concern stemmed from the fact that Trump was preaching ‘the gospel of the Führer.’ Milly referred to Trump supporters at a march to protest the election as ‘brownshirts in the streets.’ In 1933, after Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, the Nazis used a fire at the Reichstag building, home to Germany’s parliament, as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and consolidate power by claiming the country was under threat from communists. The brownshirts were Nazi paramilitaries who helped Hitler rise to power. ‘Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military,’ Rucker and Leonnig write.

The joint chiefs chairman was especially worried by the fact that Trump purged the Defense Department of those who raised objections to his ideas and replaced them with loyalists after the November election. Days after the election, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and replaced him with Christopher Miller. Other deputies to Esper were also fired and replaced with those who shared the then-president’s views. In December, Attorney General William Barr resigned after he refused to endorse Trump’s claims of rampant voter fraud. The departures of Barr and Esper left Milley concerned, according to the book. Milley reportedly told friends that he felt he needed to be ‘on guard’ in anticipation of what might happen.

Read more …

Luke Harding was one of the people at the Guardian working with Julian Assange on releases of WikiLeaks files back in 2009/10. He wanted to write Assange’s biography, but Julian declined. Then the revenge started. First, Harding and David Leigh published a secret password in a book, then a preposterous lying story of Paul Manafort visiting the Ecuador embassy multiple times followed, which conveniently combined anti-Assange with anti-Trump, and now there’s more hollow filth.

• Kremlin Papers Appear To Show Putin’s Plot To Put Trump In White House (G.)

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents. The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present. They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.


Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature. By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory. Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin. The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.

Read more …

Why on earth react?

• Kremlin Says Guardian Claims Are ‘Fundamentally Untrue’ (RT)

Moscow has reacted furiously to a series of claims, backed up with anonymous and unverifiable sources, that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his security officials to support Donald Trump’s campaign to become US president. In comments made exclusively to RT on Thursday evening, Putin’s spokesman slammed the report, published in the UK’s Guardian newspaper earlier that day. “This is total fiction,” Dmitry Peskov remarked. “Strictly speaking, it is complete nonsense. Of course, this is the hallmark of an absolutely low-quality publication. Either the newspaper is trying to somehow increase its popularity or is sticking to a rabidly Russophobic line.”

The article, authored by British journalist Luke Harding and two other staffers at the outlet, claimed that Putin had “Personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, during a closed session of Russia’s national security council.” The bombshell revelations were purportedly based on “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.” Harding has a history of publishing false stories related to the so-called “Russiagate” conspiracy theory, which became popular after Trump was elected to America’s highest office. In 2018, for instance, he published a completely fake tale about dissident publisher Julian Assange and the American lobbyist Paul Manafort supposedly having met in London.

The article was also based on anonymous ‘sources.’ Although the allegation has been thoroughly debunked, the Guardian has refused to correct the record. While working in Moscow in 2007, Harding was accused of plagiarism by The Exile, a small, independent and now defunct magazine. His employer issued an apology at the time.

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Duh!

• Russia Accuses US Of ‘Staging’ Anti-Government Protests In Cuba (RT)

Wide-scale protests and rioting that have rocked the Caribbean nation of Cuba are, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, part of an orchestrated campaign by American officials to oust the country’s socialist government. In a statement issued on Thursday, one of Moscow’s top diplomatic representatives, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, blasted American “impudence” for suggesting that the demonstrations were a result of the Cuban government’s own mistakes. Instead, she described the approach a part of “yet another political staging.” “Washington’s cynicism is shown by the fact that throughout the entire period of the existence of revolutionary Cuba, it purposefully pursued a strategy of strangling the country, discriminating against its people and destroying the economy,” she went on.

“Their thinking here is simple – it has already been repeatedly deployed by Washington in different situations. But in every case, there is the same goal – sparking ‘color revolutions’ in response to unwanted regimes.” The approach, the official added, hinges on applying sanctions and provoking tensions by worsening the socio-economic situation in the country. Zakharova said that the idea authorities in Havana alone were to blame for fomenting discontent was patently false. “Despite all the measures taken by the central Cuban authorities to support the country’s economy and provide assistance to the population, it is they who are accused by Washington of the current crisis situation,” she said. “At the same time, the Americans, as always, keep silent about their own subversive actions and opportunistic aspirations.”

She went on to compare the incident to scenes in Washington in January, when supporters of then-President Donald Trump forced their way into the seat of government in protest of his election defeat. “Where were their concerns about humanitarian values, political pluralism and democratic freedoms,” she asked, “when those who stormed the Capitol… were detained across America, accused of ‘domestic terrorism’ and are now facing criminal charges?” Earlier this week, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the circumstances that led to tens of thousands of protesters taking to the streets were down to the “actions and inactions, mismanagement, corruption of the Cuban regime” and not because of “anything the United States has done.” “We are always considering options available to us that would allow us to support the Cuban people, to support their humanitarian needs, which are indeed profound,” Price told reporters.

Read more …

How about adults?

• Illinois Becomes First State To Prohibit Police From Lying To Kids (JTN)

Illinois has become the first state to ban law enforcement officers from lying to juveniles during interrogations. The law was part of a package of criminal justice reform measures put forth by the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker Thursday. Senate Bill 2122, which prohibits the use of deceptive tactics by all law enforcement when interrogating a minor, takes effect on Jan. 1, 2022. “It is time that we move towards a new era of public safety,” said state Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, a co-sponsor of the bill. “Public safety for all, public safety by the people, public safety that belongs to us.” Also attending the bill signing was Terrell Swift, one of the so-called “Englewood Four.” Swift served 15 years in prison for rape and murder before he was released in 2012 after it was ruled that his confession as a 17-year-old was coerced by Chicago police.

That confession led to his conviction despite no evidence tying him to the crime, and the city eventually paid Swift $7 million in a settlement after his release. “This bill, I truly believe, could have saved my life,” Swift said. Along with SB 2122, Pritzker signed three other bills: Senate Bill 64, which encourages the use of restorative justice practices by making statements during these practices privileged.Senate Bill 2129, which allows the State’s Attorney of a county in which a defendant was sentenced to petition for re-sentencing of the offender if the original sentence no long advances the interests of justice. Senate Bill 3587, which creates the Re-sentencing Task Force Act to study ways to reduce the state’s prison population through re-sentencing motions.

In February, Pritzker signed a criminal justice reform plan which eliminates cash bail within two years, makes it easier to decertify police officers by eliminating signed affidavits of complaint, and mandates the use of police body cameras for all officers by 2025. Law enforcement officials statewide condemned the reform plan as hindering police from preventing crime, ultimately emboldening criminals and threatening police officers.

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“..not all the phones were subject to record preservation.”

• 59 of 96 Phones Assigned To Mueller Probe Missing (JTN)

Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to the Justice Department Wednesday asking for more information regarding missing phones used by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during the Russian collusion investigation. The senators sent the letter after finding out the Justice Department “could not locate 59 of the 96 phones used by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team,” according to Grassley’s website. The two senators wrote to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General in September 2020 regarding allegations that cell phones assigned to “multiple people on then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team were ‘wiped’ for various reasons during [the Russia investigation].”

In a response on May 11, 2021, the OIG reported that 59 of the 96 phones assigned the Special Counsel’s Office were unaccounted for. That report showed that in June 2019, the DOJ took possession of 79 of 96 phones that belonged to members of Muller’s team to be reviewed for official records. The records included notes and text messages, which were then sent to DOJ or FBI email systems for preservation. However, not all the phones were subject to record preservation. The two lawmakers are now following up with requests for further information including:

• the names of SCO employees whose cell phones were not reviewed for official records
• what, if any, actions are being taken by the DOJ to recover the 59 phones the department has been unable to locate
• whether the DOJ reviewed the phones to ascertain “whether they were used to leak sensitive or classified information.”

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Oh, how lovely.

• Bill Clinton Took Two More Trips On The Lolita Express (DM)

Bill Clinton took two trips with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein – including one on the pedophile’s private jet – that have not been previously disclosed. A new podcast reveals that the former President flew on Epstein’s jet, which was dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’, in February 2005 while visiting Japan, Taiwan and China. Clinton also flew on a private jet owned by billionaire Ron Burkle with Maxwell as a passenger during a trip to India in November 2003. That visit was part of Clinton’s work with the Clinton Foundation, his philanthropic initiative, to lower the cost of AIDS drugs. According to journalist Vicky Ward, Maxwell was part of the official Clinton party and even stayed at the same hotel as him. Ward reveals the details in her new podcast ‘Chasing Ghislaine’, which is available from Thursday on Audible Originals.

The podcast claims that Maxwell used Clinton for her ‘escape’ from Epstein in the 2000s when her relationship with the financier was cooling. Maxwell was considered by Clinton’s personal staff to be ‘just as important’ as Epstein for raising money for the Clinton Foundation and was the ‘go-to person’ when it came to asking for donations from the pedophile. The claims put new focus on the friendship between the former President and Epstein, who hanged himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Flight logs showed that Clinton took at least 26 trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express’ — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights between 2001 and 2003. The period where Epstein and Clinton were closest – the early 2000s – coincides with the period that Epstein was charged with running a sex trafficking ring.

Clinton has always denied any involvement in any criminality and has claimed that has never visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean as some reports have suggested. But the connections between the two appear to have been strong and there were financial as well as social links lasting many years. Maxwell is currently awaiting a November trial for allegedly procuring and trafficking underage girls for Epstein, charges she denies. Ward has reported on the Epstein case for nearly two decades, first for Vanity Fair and now in her role as a CNN journalist. She wrote a profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003 but the details of his alleged abuse of two young sisters was left out after Epstein contacted her editor, Graydon Carter, she claims.

According to ‘Chasing Ghislaine’, during the 2000s Maxwell was trying to escape the ‘sick partnership’ she had built with Epstein, who she dated during the early 1990s and allegedly abused underage girls with. In the podcast, Ward says: ‘Ghislaine used former President Bill Clinton for her escape. ‘Remember, Clinton’s post-presidency was an exciting, very attractive place to be. He and an entourage went on fascinating trips to Europe, to Asia, to Africa and he met with extremely interesting people. ‘Now, records I’ve seen recently show that in 2003, Ghislaine visited the Taj Mahal with Bill Clinton and a group of around 20 others. This trip has not previously been reported. Jeffrey wasn’t on it. And that was key in cementing Ghislaine’s rise as a VIP in her own right in Clinton World, according to sources close to Bill Clinton’.

Read more …

J6 has turned them into a national force. But why exactly?

• Capitol Police To Use Army Surveillance Gear To Monitor Americans (AMN)

U.S. Capitol Police will start using Army surveillance equipment to monitor Americans as part of a larger effort to improve security and turn the force into “an intelligence-based protective agency” in the wake of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Last week, the USCP took possession of eight Persistent Surveillance Systems Ground – Medium (PSSG-M) units, fulfilling a request that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved on June 2. The units capture high-definition video and include night vision, but do not feature facial recognition capabilities. “This technology will be integrated with existing USCP camera infrastructure, providing greater high definition surveillance capacity to meet steady-state mission requirements and help identify emerging threats,” the Pentagon said.

The same technology was used by troops during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to observe large areas day and night. The Army will install the units and train Capitol Police on how to operate the systems, the Pentagon said. In a statement last week, the USCP called the technology “state-of-the-art campus surveillance technology, which will enhance the ability to detect and monitor threat activity.” The Capitol Police did not provide further details regarding how or where the surveillance equipment would be used, and didn’t provide information on whether data collected would be stored or distributed. These latest efforts by the Capitol Police have raised some concerns relating to Americans’ privacy rights.

Last month, a federal appeals court found similar surveillance technology used by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violated the constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. A New York University School of Law independent audit of the systems used by the BPD found the technology allowed the department to track individuals for multiple days. William Owen, a member of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said the Capitol Police’s new technology is cause for concern. “These so-called improvements that the Capitol Police have implemented after the insurrection represent an expansion of police power and surveillance that STOP cautioned against in January,” he said, according to The Washington Times.

Read more …

 

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Biden IS the Swamp

Nov 082020
 
 November 8, 2020  Posted by at 4:22 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Jasper Johns Three flags 1958

 

 

Since the US has no official institution to call an election soon after the polls have closed, and people want a result fast, it has befallen on the media to make the announcement. And by and large, this hasn’t been that big a deal. But when those same media have for 4 years relentlessly hounded one of the two candidates, it should be obvious that this “system” should not be applied. If only because it has no legal status whatsoever.

However, people both in the US and abroad don’t appear to be aware of this. So when the New York Times et al declare a winner, this is seen as an “official” announcement. It is not. That won’t come until the Electoral College gathers in December (8-14th?!). And at least until then, Trump will have every right to contest the election in court. Still, “world leaders” are congratulating the “next president”. Do they really not know how this works?

The idea behind it all is obvious, of course: to make Trump look like a sore loser, and Biden the president-elect, a title the media claim they can bestow upon him. Do remember that both Biden’s and Kamala’s campaign were considered dead in the water at one point, before they were magically resurrected by the party machine, which ensured that =two people very unpopular in their own party now lead the ticket. Be careful what you wish for.

In that light. I found this intriguing. Twitter adds a warning to this Trump tweet: “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted”. I haven’t seen one instance where they attached the same warning to tweets about Biden winning and being President Elect. But wouldn’t that be the same thing?

 

 

No, I don’t particularly mind Biden winning, Washington is a shit hole whoever occupies the White House and other posts, but this is not about Biden. It’s about the people behind him. About the people who elected him to be a candidate, and that’s not his voters; it’s the DNC, the FBI and media that made him possible.

Everyone in the MSM is talking about Trump’s alleged lies, as they have for 5 screeching years, main news networks on Thursday even cut off/short a speech by the President of the United States -that must be a first-, but nobody reflects on the 5-year neverending constant lies they have all told ABOUT Trump, on the entire Russiagate episode, the Mueller report based on only lies, the whole shebang.

The DNC that paid for the Steele dossier without which there would never have been a Mueller special counsel, commissioned by Rod Rosenstein when he was Deputy Attorney General, which was based on lies, exclusively, the FBI that used the Dossier to falsify FISA applications, people like Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi who kept on lying about having evidence of Russian collusion.

And still these are the people accusing Trump of lying. And they feel they can get away with it, because their media also incessantly repeated their lies, and is still doing that. Forget for a moment about what you think about Donald Trump, and tell me how you feel about an attempt to unseat an elected American president with nothing but lies.

Do you think that will be a one-off? If so, you’re blind. If Joe Biden and his handlers ever get into the White House, respect for the Office of the Presidency will still be gone, and it will be for a long time, decades. That’s the price the American people pay for the attempt to unseat Trump based on lies only. Do you really feel that’s a price worth paying? I suggest you give that some serious thought.

 

 

With Biden you don’t get Biden, you get the entire cabal that went after Trump, the Democratic Party, the media, the intelligence agencies. And yes, Biden was and is very much part of that cabal. How people do not find that a whole lot scarier than Donald Trump is beyond me.

If -and no that is not when- Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20 2021, that cabal will take over the country. And we’ve seen plenty indications that they intend to make it impossible for the Republicans to ever get one of their own elected as president again. Moreover they will not be investigated for what they concocted over the past 4-5 years.

How the Hillary campaign and the DNC leaked things to the FBI, and the FBI to the MSM, how they lied in courtrooms to get FISA applications on Trump campaign people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. How they set up Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn so he wouldn’t be Trump’s National Security Adviser, because Flynn knew too much.

It’s a scheme so full of illegal actions that it will be devastating for the entire American political system if it is never investigated, or even if it isn’t investigated very very thoroughly, by an impartial party. And it won’t be if Biden becomes president.

The cabal wants you to think this is about Trump, and any given way to get rid of him is justifiable no matter what, but that is a very dangerous way of thinking. If crimes have been committed, they must be brought into daylight and before a court.

Problem is, of course, that at least half the nation has no idea of what’s been going on. Because they get their news and information from those media that are in on the whole deal. They won’t know that the DNC paid for the Steele Dossier, or that is was just a bunch of lies, or that the FBI knew this even before Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel. All that has been kept away from them.

 

 

And yes, 4 years ago Trump said he would fight the swamp, but landed right in the middle of it. Early in his presidency he found himself surrounded by the likes of McMaster, John Kelly, Tillerson, and many other swamp creatures, and today he still has people like Mike Pompeo. But at least Trump is an outsider, and if anything can ever be done to drain the swamp, it will have to come from an outsider. That it may take more than 4 years is something we have to take for granted.

The swamp has fought back, and they may yet win. Joe Biden is the face of that. But people who celebrate that victory should think again, whether they like Trump or not. The swamp is not good for you, and it’s not good for your country, your rights, your freedoms. Its entire MO is to take all these away from you. This is not a partisan thing; the fat ass of the swamp easily fits and sits across the divide.

Joe Biden is not Joe Biden, the man doesn’t stand for anything other than holding on to power while getting richer off that power. He’s done it for 47 years. Term limits are desperately needed in Washington, but the only people who can make that decision are those who profit most from not having term limits. If there’s one area where McConnell and Schumer and Pelosi and Lindsey Graham agree, it’s that.

And meanwhile, Trump, unlike Joe Biden, is just Trump. He doesn’t represent a cabal, or a swamp. Even if he’s surrounded by them. Trump is not the biggest threat to America, that’s just something they’ve been wanting you to think for the past 4 years. Successfully, too, for millions of Americans.

The swamp is the biggest threat, whether their handpuppets come in a Democratic or Republican disguise. But to recognize that, you would have to be able to think for yourself, and if you read or watch the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, you simply can’t do that. You just think you can.

 

 

 

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Trump, COVID and Your Mental Health

Nov 032020
 
 November 3, 2020  Posted by at 2:08 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


David Hockney Nichols Canyon 1980

 

 

There are two things happening simultaneously in the world today that affect the lives of many millions of people, but that we are told we cannot talk about: Hunter Biden and a second wave of lockdowns. As if the US presidential election and COVID19 are not in and of themselves stressful enough, now we also may not discuss them, other than to “parrot the party line”. This is having a severe impact on our mental health, though nobody apparently wants to talk about that either.

The whipped up fully one-sided frenzy for clickbait in the MSM on the topic of Donald Trump Orange Man Bad, aligned with RussiaRussia, Julian Assange and anything that can be mixed in in order to keep the narratives flowing, have split America, and much of the rest of the western world, in half, though probably not exactly down the middle, as we will find out after the election is done. And there, too, the MSM is sure to whip up more frenzy. Because it sells to pit people against each other.

So we find ourselves with Glenn Greenwald leaving his The Intercept because his own organization refuses to let him discuss Hunter Biden, though he is undoubtedly a newsworthy subject. Even if the entire MSM attempts with all its might to deny this, joined recently by Twitter and Facebook.

As I said a few days ago: “A strong sign of what US media has become, that Greenwald needs to go to Fox to be able to tell his story.” But that’s what this has turned into. Of course now you have people saying: “look who Greenwald’s hanging out with these days”. Well, he’s with the only people who won’t censor him. And say what you will, but Greenwald is as eloquent as ever. You may not like what he says, but that is still undeniable. Which, combined with his track record, means censoring him is nuts. As Matt Taibbi described:

Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept

Greenwald, after commenting pointedly about the reaction by press and Democratic Party officials to the New York Post story, reached out to Intercept editor Betsy Reed to float the idea of writing on the subject. The first hint of trouble came when Reed suggested that yes, it might be a story, if proven correct, but “even if it did represent something untoward about Biden,” that would “represent a tiny fraction of the sleaze and lies Trump and his cronies are oozing in every day.” When Greenwald retorted that deciding not to report on one politician’s scandals because those of another politician are deemed worse is a “corrupt calculus” for reporters, Reed expressed concern. Based on this, on his comments on Twitter, and other factors, she worried that “we are headed for a conflict over the editing of this piece.”


Greenwald insisted he wasn’t planning an overwhelming amount of coverage but wanted to do a single article, reviewing the available facts and perhaps asking the Biden campaign to comment on the veracity of the Post story. Reed agreed that he should write a draft, then they could “see where we are.” An aside: when reporters and editors interact, they speak between the lines. If an editor only ever suggests or assigns stories from a certain angle, you’re being told they don’t particularly want the other angle. If your editor has lots of hypothetical concerns at the start, he or she probably won’t be upset if you choose a different topic. Finally, when an editor lays out “suggestions” about things that might “help” a piece “be even stronger,” it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through.

Tucker Greenwald
https://twitter.com/i/status/1322003267182682113

 

 

In exactly that same vein, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, turned to the Daily Mail to express her views on lockdowns. Because nobody else wants to listen.

A Contagion Of Hatred And Hysteria

Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way. That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent. I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration. As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas. But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal.


The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me. I am not a politician. The hurly-burly of political life and being in the eye of the media do not appeal to me at all. I am first and foremost a scientist; one who is far more comfortable sitting in my office or laboratory than in front of a television camera. Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail. I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.

 

 

And Trump advisor Scott Atlas went to RT for the same reasons, only to be “forced” into a cowardly mea culpa for having talked to a “propaganda network”. Well, the real propaganda networks are the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN etc. We’ve seen that an awful lot these last few years, people accusing others of exactly what they themselves have done. Which is precisely what makes Hunter Biden a newsworthy story.

Trump COVID Adviser Atlas Forced To Apologize For RT Interview

Trump administration Covid-19 adviser Scott Atlas ripped public-health officials for “egregious” policy failures – only to be forced to apologize after mainstream media deflected his points by attacking him for appearing on RT. On Saturday, the Stanford University doctor, who has emerged as President Donald Trump’s top adviser on responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,” while speaking with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground show. “The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Atlas told RT.


“The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept they were wrong – were wrong, refused to accept they were wrong, didn’t know the data, didn’t care. And it became a frenzy of stopping Covid-19 cases at all costs, and those costs are massive,” he said. “The argument is undeniable: The lockdowns are killing people.” Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. One study showed that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown”, he said.

Further on the lockdowns topic, Howard Beckett tweeted on Sunday about the UK: “Governments own stats have 4% of cases arising from hospitality, 20% from the workplace and a whopping 36% from education. So we shut bars & restaurants and keep schools & universities open.”

I’ve said earlier that a lockdown when days get shorter and nights get colder is a dangerous game. It’s a mental health issue, plain and simple, and one that very much MUST be discussed.

Last but very much not least, “At 10:04 PM on the night before an election, we discover that as part of his investigation into DNC hacking/election interference, Mueller declined to indict Assange and WikiLeaks due to a lack of evidence and First Amendment concerns.” But Buzzfeed, which reported the story, still keeps talking about hacked emails. There never were any. It’s the same thing Mueller himself did when he kept accusations against Assange and 12-13 Russians in his final report. The man should be investigated.

Mueller Declined To Indict Assange And Wikileaks Due To Lack Of Evidence

Prosecutors investigated Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone for the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers as well as for possible campaign finance violations, but ultimately chose not to charge them, newly released portions of the Mueller Report reveal. Although Wikileaks published emails stolen from the DNC in July and October 2016 and Stone — a close associate to Donald Trump — appeared to know in advance the materials were coming, investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing. In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump’s election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous.


The fresh details of special counsel Robert Mueller’s decision not to charge Assange, WikiLeaks, or Stone for their role in influencing the 2016 election come just a day before voters head to the polls for the 2020 presidential election. The material sheds new light on the seriousness with which the special counsel investigated the hacks of Democratic party computers. In July 2018, Mueller indicted 12 Russian officers belonging to the Kremlin’s intelligence directorate, the GRU, for the theft and distribution of those emails. The role that Stone and Assange may have played in the hacks or their distribution has been the subject of much speculation. Little, however, was known about how intently the special counsel focused on those individuals as possible targets for prosecution during the two-year investigation into Russian election interference.

In order to maintain or regain your mental health, you need today to either ignore all news all the time, or you have to make sure you are well-informed. You might even say you have a right to that. But it has become an awful lot harder the last 5 years. Because your formerly trusted media have been selling you out for profit. You have all become clickbait targets instead of respected readers and viewers.

If Trump might lose the election today -or next week, next year, who knows- this entire model will be dead in no time. The media may try to carry on on the back of supposed litigation against him, but that will only go so far. They have bet on one horse, and then tried as hard as they could to cripple it, and now find themselves with nowhere left to turn.

In a way, that’s a good thing. No matter who wins the election, we will end up with better media. If Biden wins, the entire circus will just fizzle out, and if Trump wins, they will be found out. It’s high time. Unfortunately, the brains and minds of countless people will be scarred by the double whammy of Trump Derangement Syndrome and ever more lockdowns for a very long time to come.

But, you guessed it, we cannot talk about that.

 

 

 

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Try 2021

Oct 282020
 
 October 28, 2020  Posted by at 7:46 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Henri Rousseau The Flamingoes 1907

 

 

Had a little email exchange with Dave Collum this week. We go way back, more than two weeks even. It’s been a while though, Twitter cut me off from Dave’s tweets ages ago for some reason, and that’s just one person I know they did that with; how many others, no clue. My Twitter followers, @AutomaticEarth, have been just below the same certain number for years.

Regularly a few hundred are shaved off, and then they slowly revert back to just below that number. I don’t even care anymore. No more than I care about Facebook shutting down our account without any explanation. Let them be. We should not depend on these people, that’s just a bad idea.

Anyway, so Dave was reacting to a mail I sent him of the October 26 Debt Rattle -he’s always remained on one of my mailing lists- and that’s how we started talking again. Dave:

I have never spent a year so completely baffled by the world as this year. Nothing makes sense to me without invoking some seriously bizarre thinking (which I am not averse to doing.)

My reaction:

The game hasn’t even started yet. We’re still just warming up. Still, baseball is not the right analogy, that’s a civilized sport, this will feel much more like gladiators in the Forum fighting to the death. Biden has neither the energy not the -killer- instinct for that.

Yes, Dave, like Jim Kunstler, and like me, and many other people, have changed our views and positions on American politics quite a bit over the past 4-5 years. Mostly independently of each other. We just recognize the same patterns. I think it’s fair to say that we all realize that there may be a million things wrong with Donald Trump, but there’s a lot more wrong with collusion to unseat a fairly elected president.

And that is what we all have faced. The FBI, and Robert Mueller, opening a years-long investigation based on a report that they already knew was fake, paid for by the DNC and Hillary campaign, relentlessly edged on by the -former- “media” sympathetic to that same campaign, and ending in absolute crickets, trying to save face by accusing Julian Assange and 13 Russians.

We have reached whole new depths with Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann. So, yes, sure, we all feel a bit vindicated when it turns out that the collusion was not on the Trump side, but on the DNC one, and very much on the Biden family’s one. That the DNC media refuse to report on that hardly matters anymore.

They’ll have huge problems if Biden wins, because their day-to-day coverage has been based exclusively on Trump and scandal and intrigue for 5 years now, and they don’t remember how they used to make money without that, with just reporting honestly on what is going on. Trump is their golden goose. What will they do, report on Joe hiding in the White House basement? “Today, Joe slept only 12 hours!” Truman Show.

They will have even bigger problems if Trump wins, since that means his supporters will come after the entire DNC/FBI etc. cabal, including the media. I’ve often said that Michael Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell will not be satisfied anymore with a full exoneration of her client, and her legal team is sure to have accumulated an entire library of fabricated media pieces against him on top of FBI and Judge Sullivan “mishaps”.

And whatever side of politics, or even the law, you’re on, and no matter who wins the election, the judicial system will still churn on. She won’t stop, she won’t wave a white flag, guaranteed. Trump must have offered Flynn a full exoneration many times, but every one of his refusals of the offers must have been more stern than the last one.

 

 

And now, 6 days before the election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and Google’s Sundar Pichai are testifying in front of a congressional committee. While, from what I’ve seen, half of US eligible voters have already cast their vote. 50% of the social media job is done. And no-one on Capitol Hill will dare touch them. Because they are the new arms and tools of US intelligence, and you don’t mess with that.

Trump wins, we’ll see a huge increase in the violent street parties dressed up as “peaceful protests” we’ve become accustomed to over the past 6 months. Just last night, like it’s some kind of warning shot, things got way out of hand in New York and Philadelphia.

Biden wins, the right wing will come looking for what’s been taken away from them over the past 4 years, with the president they elected under constant investigation based on nothing other than party political gossip – and that’s putting it nicely. The Hunter and Joe Biden files that have been revealed so far give them ample reason to do just that.

To get back to Collum’s “Nothing makes sense to me without invoking some seriously bizarre thinking”, I think we should all prepare for just that. Unless there’s a landslide win for either side, which looks impossible, there doesn’t seem to be any way to know who will win in six days, before the new year. While the “peaceful protests” rage on.

And then we end up in the Supreme Court and Amy Handmaid Barrett casts the deciding vote. That’s not her fault, it’s everybody else’s. Everything about American politics has gotten out of hand, on all sides of all aisles. We don’t want the most qualified judges anymore, or the most qualified presidents, we instead want people in all these positions who agree with everything we think is right, which we know because our media has told us.

Collum: “I have never spent a year so completely baffled by the world as this year.”

My friend, you’re in for a treat. Try 2021.

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 18 2020

Sep 182020
 
 September 18, 2020  Posted by at 9:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Fred Stein Paris evening 1934

 

• COVID – Why Terminology Really, Really Matters (Kendrick)
• Biden Nearly 5 Times More Likely than Trump to Win Election (NW)
• Where Is Biden’s Ground Game? (TMI)
• In 2016 Call Joe Biden Risked National Security To Sabotage Trump (Fed.)
• Lindsey Graham: Comey To Testify Before Senate, Mueller ‘Declined’ (Fox)
• Investigation Into Princeton After President Says Racism ‘Embedded’ (WE)
• Wray: Russia Actively Interfering In 2020 Election To ‘Denigrate’ Biden (CNN)
• China Only G20 Country With Positive Economic Output This Year – OECD (SCMP)
• China ‘Acknowledges Scale Of Xinjiang Camps’ As US Applies Pressure (SCMP)
• World Bank Warns Recovery Could Take “Five Years” (ZH)
• Assange Hearing Day 11 (Craig Murray)
• Assange Court Hears About History Of Prosecutions Under Espionage Act (Gosztola)
• I Found Assange Paranoid, Crazy–Then His Methods Became Standard Practice (TH)
• Noam Chomsky: World Is At The Most Dangerous Moment In Human History (NSM)

 

 

Global new daily cases continue to rise. The US has less than have as many new daily cases as India does.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And they say Trump’s a liar….

Biden: All the people would still be alive. Look at the data!

 

 

Carson on Biden 1987

 

 

Excellent. Must read, all of it. Not that I agree there should never have been a lockdown, but it always should have been short. And now we know much more than 6-7 months ago, lockdowns are less appropriate.

But instead now what we see is not a single politician has any idea what to do anymore, so there’ll be more lockdowns, the only thing they know. And that leads to reaction.

• COVID – Why Terminology Really, Really Matters (Kendrick)

Whilst everyone is panicking about the ever-increasing number of cases, we should be celebrating them. They are demonstrating, very clearly, that COVID is far, far, less deadly then was feared. The Infection Fatality Rate is most likely going to end up around 0.1%, not 1%. So yes, it does seem that ‘the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.’ Wise words, wise words indeed. Words that were written by one Anthony S Fauci on the 28th of February 2020. If you haven’t heard of him, look him up. Critically though, eleven days after this, he rather blotted his copybook, because he went on to say this “The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent. This (COVID) has a mortality rate of 10 times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”

The mortality rate Dr Fauci? Could it possibly be that he failed to understand that there is no such thing as a mortality rate? Did he mean the case fatality rate, or the infection fatality rate? If he meant the Infection mortality rate of influenza, he was pretty much bang on. If he meant the case fatality rate, he was wrong by a factor of ten. The reality is that, no matter what Fauci went on to say, severe influenza has a case fatality rate of 1%, and so does COVID. They also have approximately the same infection fatality fate of 0.1%. It seems that Dr Fauci just got mixed up with the terminology. Because in his Journal article eleven days earlier, he did state… ‘This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza… [and here is the kicker at the end] (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).’

You see, he did say the case fatality rate of influenza was approximately 0.1%. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong… wrong. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. With influenza, Dr Fauci, the CDC, his co-authors, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health and the New England Journal of Medicine got case fatality rate and infection fatality rate mixed up with influenza. Easy mistake to make. Could have done it myself. But didn’t. You want to know where Imperial College London really got their 1% infection fatality rate figure from? It seems clear that they got it from Anthony S Fauci and the New England Journal of Medicine. The highest impact journal in the world – which should have the highest impact proof-readers in the world. But clearly does not.

Imperial College then used this wrong NEJM influenza case fatality rate 0.1%. It seems that they then compared this 0.1% figure to the reported COVID case fatality rate, estimated to be 1% and multiplied the impact of COVID by ten – as you would. As you probably should. So, we got Lockdown. The US used the Fauci figure and got locked down. The world used that figure and got locked down. That figure just happens to be ten times too high.

Read more …

Forever amazing that the polling industry got just about everything wrong in 2016, and hasn’t lost a beat. They might as well get things wrong on purpose now, what’s the difference?

• Biden Nearly 5 Times More Likely than Trump to Win Election (NW)

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is the odds-on favorite to win the U.S. election against President Donald Trump, according to an average of 7 different forecast models released on Thursday. Presidential elections in the U.S. are not decided by who gets the most votes. In order to actually win the contest, a candidate must receive a majority of votes in the Electoral College. There are a total of 538 individuals from each state who decide which candidate becomes president. Candidates need at least 270 Electoral College votes to clinch the presidency. While those electors often follow the popular vote, that has not always been the case. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Trump, gaining 48.2 percent of the vote to Trump’s 46.1 percent.


However, Trump picked up 306 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 232 votes, making Trump the president. In each of Thursday’s seven election forecast models, Biden was projected to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College. As averaged together by the website Election Dice, those models predicted that Trump has a 17.9 percent chance of winning while Biden has an 81.8 percent chance of winning. Biden’s odds of victory are projected to be nearly five times greater than that of President Trump’s. Data from The Economist showed Biden holding an 8-point lead over Trump, 54 percent to 46 percent respectively. Biden was projected to get 335 votes in the Electoral College, more than the 270 votes needed to become president. Trump was projected to receive 203 electoral votes.

Read more …

This has puzzled me for a while, the story keeps on popping up. No ground game.

• Where Is Biden’s Ground Game? (TMI)

As Joe Biden’s campaign faces questions about its lackadaisical outreach strategy, the former vice president’s campaign manager boasted on Tuesday about the campaign’s growing volunteer program. But Biden’s volunteer operation is still smaller than the one built during the primary by Bernie Sanders, with just seven weeks to go until the general election. Democrats in swing states have started voicing concerns that the Biden campaign has not opened any standalone offices in battleground states and — unlike down-ballot Democrats — isn’t knocking doors. Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon defended their outreach program on Tuesday in a live interview with Politico.

“We spend so much time talking about tactics, but, fundamentally, knocking on a door and not reaching anyone doesn’t get you much except leaving a piece of lit behind,” O’Malley Dillon said. “You might as well send a piece of mail.” She added: “We have 2,500 new volunteers that join the campaign every day.” Like the Sanders campaign, the Biden campaign organizes its volunteer network over Slack in several channels, including one for general intake, one for texters, and another for phone bankers. Screenshots obtained by TMI show the campaign’s volunteer Slack was still lagging behind the Sanders program as of Tuesday. The Biden volunteer slack had roughly 62,000 in the general intake channel, 16,000 in the text channel, and 23,000 in the call channel on Tuesday.

The numbers represent a substantial increase from early this month, when there were 37,000 volunteers in the Biden general intake channel — but still well short of the Sanders slack, which still had about 71,000 volunteers, even though the progressive senator officially dropped out of the presidential race in April. The Biden campaign has not exactly made volunteering easy. Last Wednesday, actress and activist Susan Sarandon pointed out that the volunteer section on the campaign’s website was badly outdated. As Sarandon noted, the “organizing tool kit” had been rolled over from the primaries and was not updated for the general. The campaign updated the site to fix the issue last Thursday.

Polls have consistently shown Biden ahead of President Donald Trump both nationally and at the state level as well as in terms of favorability. But below the surface, the numbers are less secure — the races in most key swing states are still close. Throughout his campaign Biden has struggled to generate voter enthusiasm — a metric which proved vital in 2016. Leading into the conventions, Biden trailed Trump by 30 points in terms of enthusiasm, although the gap had been steadily narrowing. Following the conventions, the difference shrunk to 9 points, though Biden did not get a post-convention polling bounce. Biden’s support among Latino voters is lower than Clinton’s was and young voters remain largely unenthusiastic about their choices in November. The youth vote was critical to former President Barack Obama’s winning coalition and youth participation in politics has been trending upwards.

Read more …

Biden and Ukraine. Someone should ask the Ukrainians what happened.

• In 2016 Call Joe Biden Risked National Security To Sabotage Trump (Fed.)

A recently leaked phone call between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko directly after the 2016 presidential election shows that Biden sought to sabotage the incoming Trump administration before Donald Trump even took office, and much worse. During the course of the call, Biden badmouthed the incoming administration, saying, “The truth of the matter is that the incoming administration doesn’t know a great deal about [Ukraine]” and that they were unprepared for the transition. This in itself is inappropriate, but it was meant to set the stage for Biden’s next statement and future plans. Biden then told Poroshenko, “I don’t plan on going away. As a private citizen, I plan on staying deeply engaged in the endeavor that you have begun and we have begun.”

In a matter of moments, Biden undermined the incoming administration, branded them as not knowing anything about Ukraine, and attempted to set up a foreign policy backchannel for himself after he left office as a private citizen, which could violate the Logan Act. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in U.S. foreign policy, although its constitutionality remains questionable and no person has ever been convicted of violating it since it was signed into law in 1799. Ironically, this is the same act that, at Joe Biden’s suggestion, the FBI accused National Security Advisor Michael Flynn of violating as a result of a discussion Flynn had with the Russian ambassador to the United States around nearly the same time as Biden’s call with Poroshenko.

To fortify his position and to make Poroshenko more confident that he should continue to deal with Biden once he left office, in the call Biden also intimated that there is a problem with the incoming administration: “The reason I bother to tell you that is I have been somewhat limited on what I am able to tell their team about Ukraine.” While Biden blamed this on a late start to the transition process, we now know he said this at the same time the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies were conducting a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, known as “Crossfire Hurricane,” of which Ukraine was a part.

Since it was leaked by a Ukrainian member of Parliament, the phone call was obviously recorded by the Ukrainians, and almost certainly by Russian intelligence services. Biden would have been aware of this from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president.

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Not sure that Graham is the one you want to do the investigation, but let’s see.

• Lindsey Graham: Comey To Testify Before Senate, Mueller ‘Declined’ (Fox)

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., announced Wednesday that former FBI Director James Comey has agreed to testify on his own volition before the panel in regard to “Crossfire Hurricane” — the counterintelligence investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election. Graham told “Hannity” that Comey will appear September 30th without necessitating a subpoena: “The day of reckoning is upon us when it comes to Crossfire Hurricane,” he said. “I appreciate Mr. Comey coming before the committee and he will be respectfully treated but asked hard questions. We are negotiating with [former Deputy FBI Director Andrew] McCabe; we are hoping to get him without a subpoena — time will tell.”

Graham however expressed dismay that the former special counsel behind the Russia investigation’s published report, ex-FBI chief, Robert Mueller, refused to appear on his own accord. “Mueller has declined the invitation to the committee to appear to explain his report,” Graham said. “[Mueller] says he doesn’t have enough time.” Host Sean Hannity asked whether Graham will accept that Mueller declined his invitation, noting recent reporting that Justice Department records showed the special counsel’s team’s cell phones were “wiped” during the Trump probe. The records show at least several dozen phones were wiped of information because of forgotten passcodes, irreparable screen damage, loss of the device, intentional deletion or other reasons — before the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) could review the devices.

Graham called that development “fishy as hell” and added he will call on the DOJ and its inspector general to look into the incidents. “We’ve invited [Peter] Strzok to come — he’s selling a book,” he added of the September 30 hearing. “[W]e will see if he will come without a subpoena. But I look forward to this hearing and I think it will be important to the American people.”

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Oh, really? Let’s see some examples. And then link those to things you’ve said in the past.

• Investigation Into Princeton After President Says Racism ‘Embedded’ (WE)

The Department of Education has informed Princeton University that it is under investigation following the school president’s declaration that racism was “embedded” in the institution. President Christopher Eisgruber published an open letter earlier this month claiming that “racism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.” According to a letter the Department of Education sent to Princeton that was obtained by the Washington Examiner, such an admission from Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declares that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Eisgruber’s letter branding the 274-year-old university racist came after a summer of unrest rife with race riots and an open letter from hundreds of Princeton faculty members who wrote, “Anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup.” The admission was followed by dozens of “anti-racist” policy change demands. Among them were calls for select faculty race quotas and to “reconsider” the use of standardized testing for admissions. Now, the Education Department has sent a formal records request as it pursues its investigation. Its main point of contention is whether Princeton has lied to the public with its marketing and to the department in its promise not to uphold racist standards, in accordance with receiving federal funds.

“Based on its admitted racism, the U.S. Department of Education (“Department”) is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its Program Participation Agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false,” the letter reads. “The Department is further concerned Princeton perhaps knew, or should have known, these assurances were false at the time they were made. [..] What the department seeks to obtain from its investigation is what evidence Princeton used in its determination that the university is racist, including all records regarding Eisgruber’s letter and a “spreadsheet identifying each person who has, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, been excluded from participation in, been denied the benefits of, or been subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance as a result of the Princeton racism or ‘damage’ referenced in the President’s Letter.”

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While Iran and China do the same with Trump. No American voter is safe. Or something in that vein. Evidence? Sorry, that’s classified.

• Wray: Russia Actively Interfering In 2020 Election To ‘Denigrate’ Biden (CNN)

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday that Russia has been “very active” in its efforts to influence US elections, with the primary goal being to “denigrate” Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, Wray told lawmakers that Russia is primarily interfering through “malign foreign influence in an effort to hurt Biden’s campaign” — echoing the intelligence community’s public assessment on Moscow’s meddling efforts issued last month. Wray’s comments come as President Donald Trump and several other top administration officials have recently attempted to play up the theory that China is meddling to get Biden elected, while downplaying well-founded reports that Russia is trying to help Trump win again, like it did in 2016.

Foreign election interference efforts differ from what was observed in 2016, when there was also an effort to target election infrastructure, Wray said. “We have not seen that second part yet this year or this cycle, but we certainly have seen very active, very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” he added. According to Wray, Russia is using social media, proxies, state media and online journals to sow “divisiveness and discord” and “primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.” Intelligence officials have said they have uncovered evidence that Russia is currently interfering in the election to hurt Biden’s campaign.

Separately, some evidence has already emerged about Moscow’s efforts, including Facebook’s announcement earlier this month that a troll group that was part of Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 election is trying to target Americans again. But while the intelligence community has assessed that China and Iran prefer Trump to lose in November, officials have offered no indication, to date, that either country is acting on that preference in the same way as Russia, according to public statements issued by the intelligence community and sources familiar with the underlying evidence.

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Michael Pettis:: “There is a very important point buried in this article. In June the OECD (like many others) calculated that China’s GDP would shrink sharply in 2020 – by 3.7% in their case. They are now projecting that it will grow by 1.7%.”

My question: how much of this is due to overproduction, the Silk and Road to nowhere?

• China Only G20 Country With Positive Economic Output This Year – OECD (SCMP)

The rapid speed with which China tackled the coronavirus outbreak domestically allowed for the timely easing of strict confinement measures and the reopening of businesses, helping the Chinese economy rebound more quickly than originally expected, according to the latest forecast by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). While a gradual recovery of the global economy is projected to continue for the next 18 months, the pace will vary from nation to nation, with a significant upwards revision to the growth outlook for China. The intergovernmental economic organisation predicted that China’s economy will expand by 1.8 per cent in 2020, and 8 per cent in 2021.

The group attributed this to a better-than-expected recovery, with activity returning quickly to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the second quarter, fuelled by strong infrastructure investment. That is a significant upwards revision from its June’s projection that the Chinese economy would contract by 3.7 per cent this year and grow by 4.5 per cent in 2021. “China is the only G20 country in which output is projected to rise in 2020,” OECD chief economist Laurence Boone said, referring to the organisation of finance ministers and central bank governors from 19 individual countries and the European Union. He pointed to China’s “rapid control of the virus and the policy support provided to enable a quick rebound in activity”.

[..] Boone cautioned that China’s recovery will be less of a driver for global growth than in the 2008 financial crisis, “because China is now much less export-driven and is importing much less capital. It is resting much more on consumption as a driving force. So, this means that the countries that used to export to China would do less in this recovery”. Nevertheless, the Paris-based policy forum said a gradual global recovery was under way after the unprecedented shock. For example, household spending on many consumer durables, including cars, has bounced back relatively quickly, as pent-up demand accumulated while strict confinement measures were in force. China’s pickup in demand has helped strengthen commodity prices while improving risk appetite in financial markets, OECD said. But uncertainty remains high, and consumer confidence is still weak.

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“..provided “vocational training” to nearly 1.3 million workers..”

• China ‘Acknowledges Scale Of Xinjiang Camps’ As US Applies Pressure (SCMP)

China released a white paper on Thursday claiming that its far western Xinjiang region has provided “vocational training” to nearly 1.3 million workers every year on average from 2014 to 2019. It comes as Beijing is facing mounting criticism from Western countries and human rights groups over its policies in the region, where it is believed to have detained at least 1 million Uygurs and other ethnic Muslim minorities in internment camps. China has been accused of subjecting detainees to political indoctrination and forced labour in the camps, but it has denied the allegations and insisted they are “vocational training centres” where people learn language and job skills. Observers said the white paper from the State Council, China’s cabinet, could be the first time the authorities had “indirectly” confirmed the scale of the camps.


Titled “Employment and Labour Rights in Xinjiang”, the white paper said the regional government had organised “employment-oriented training on standard spoken and written Chinese, legal knowledge, general know-how for urban life and labour skills” to improve the structure of the workforce and combat poverty. It had provided vocational training to an average of 1.29 million urban and rural workers every year from 2014 to 2019, the white paper said, apparently not using the Chinese government’s five-year planning period as the reporting time frame. Of those workers, about 451,400 were from southern Xinjiang – an area it said struggled with extreme poverty, poor access to education and a lack of job skills because residents were influenced by “extremist thoughts”.

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It could also be 2, or 20. It’s just that we have so many high-paid economists on our payroll, we need to come out with something from time to time, or people might start thinking we’re completely irrelevant.

• World Bank Warns Recovery Could Take “Five Years” (ZH)

Global economic activity around the world has stabilized in mid-September, though far below pre-COVID-19 levels as recoveries risk reversing if monetary and fiscal stimulus is not continued at rates seen in the first half of 2020. We noted Wednesday, a new OECD report offered some hope the global downturn is not as severe as previously thought but is still viewed as an “unprecedented” decline. We also noted the OECD report is problematic for policy-makers who have unleashed easy-money policies during the pandemic to artificially inflate economies and boost risk assets, as policy support in the second half of the year might not be as great as what was seen earlier in the year (as is currently playing out in Washington with the prospect of a slimmed-down stimulus bill getting slimmer).

So with waning support from central banks and fiscal stimulus from governments, the quick rebound seen in the global economy has likely stalled, and the shape of the recovery will no longer resemble a “V” but more of a “W” or “U” or “L.” For more color on the shape of the global recovery, or rather perhaps how long the recovery will last, chief economist of the World Bank, Carmen Reinhart, warned Thursday, a full recovery could take upwards of five years, reported El País. “There will probably be a quick rebound as all the restriction measures linked to lockdowns are lifted, but a full recovery will take as much as five years,” Reinhart said, while speaking at a conference in Madrid, Spain. Reinhart said (as quoted by Reuters), “the pandemic-caused recession will last longer in some countries than in others and will increase inequalities as the poorest will be harder hit by the crisis in rich countries and the poorest countries will be harder hit than richer countries.”


“Central banks have tried to provide liquidity to avoid affecting more households. But as much as central banks give support, there are businesses that will not return, there are closed restaurants or stores that will not reopen, there are homes that will take a long time to find employment, there are airlines or hotels that will not survive a long period without normal mobility. There are going to be a lot of bankruptcies: if you look at the credit rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s, Fitch, the amount of reduction in credit quality that has been seen since the beginning of the year, both at the corporate and sovereign levels, has been a record. And central banks are not all-powerful either: no matter how much credit support is given, at some point you have to face the deterioration in the financial system, and that is not a criticism: it is inevitable because of the deep drop in the economy. Under these conditions, we have to think about cuts that allow new credits for recovery,” she said.

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“Whatever the rules of evidence may say, Baraitser and Lewis have here contrived between them a blatant abuse of process. It is a further example of the egregious injustices of this process.”

• Assange Hearing Day 11 (Craig Murray)

Yet another shocking example of abuse of court procedure unfolded on Wednesday. James Lewis QC for the prosecution had been permitted gratuitously to read to two previous witnesses with zero connection to this claim, an extract from a book by Luke Harding and David Leigh in which Harding claims that at a dinner at El Moro Restaurant Julian Assange had stated he did not care if US informants were killed, because they were traitors who deserved what was coming to them. This morning giving evidence was John Goetz, now Chief Investigations Editor of NDR (German public TV), then of Der Spiegel. Goetz was one of the four people at that dinner. He was ready and willing to testify that Julian said no such thing and Luke Harding is (not unusually) lying. Goetz was not permitted by Judge Baraitser to testify on this point, even though two witnesses who were not present had previously been asked to testify on it.

Baraitser’s legal rationale was this. It was not in his written evidence statement (submitted before Lewis had raised the question with other witnesses) so Goetz was only permitted to contradict Lewis’s deliberate introduction of a lie if Lewis asked him. Lewis refused to ask the one witness who was actually present what had happened, because Lewis knew the lie he is propagating would be exposed. This is my report of Lewis putting the alleged conversation to Clive Stafford Smith, who knew nothing about it:

“Lewis then took Stafford Smith to a passage in the book “Wikileaks; Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy”, in which Luke Harding stated that he and David Leigh were most concerned to protect the names of informants, but Julian Assange had stated that Afghan informants were traitors who merited retribution. “They were informants, so if they got killed they had it coming.” Lewis tried several times to draw Stafford Smith into this, but Stafford Smith repeatedly said he understood these alleged facts were under dispute and he had no personal knowledge. This is my report of James Lewis putting the same quote to Prof Mark Feldstein, who had absolutely no connection to the event:

Lewis then read out again the same quote from the Leigh/Harding book he had put to Stafford Smith, stating that Julian Assange had said the Afghan informants would deserve their fate. James Lewis QC knew that these witnesses had absolutely no connection to this conversation, and he put it to them purely to get the lie into the court record and into public discourse. James Lewis QC also knows that Goetz was present on the occasion described. The Harding book specifies the exact date and location of the dinner and that it included two German journalists, and Goetz was one of them. It is plainly contrary to natural justice that a participant in an event introduced into the proceedings should not be allowed to tell the truth about it when those with no connection are, tendentiously, invited to.

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“Shenkman did not hesitate to tell her she was wasting his time and the magistrate court’s time.”

• Assange Court Hears About History Of Prosecutions Under Espionage Act (Gosztola)

“There has never, in the century-long history of the Espionage Act, been an indictment of a U.S. publisher under the law for the publication of secrets,” declared Carey Shenkman, an attorney who has co-authored a first-of-its-kind peer-reviewed book on the Espionage Act. Shenkman testified during WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition trial and added, “There has never been an extraterritorial indictment of a non-[United States] publisher under the Act.” “During World War I, federal prosecutors considered the mere circulation of anti-war materials a violation of the law. Nearly 2,500 individuals were prosecuted under the Act on account of their dissenting views and opposition to U.S. entry in the war,” Shenkman added.

Assange is accused of 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense. The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the United States government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world. Shenkman previously was an associate for Michael Ratner, an esteemed human rights attorney who was the president emeritus for the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner was part of the WikiLeaks legal team until he tragically died from cancer in 2016.

Prosecutor Clair Dobbin attempted to disqualify Shenkman because he worked for Ratner when he represented Assange. She also frittered away the time that she had to cross-examine by insisting Shenkman provide hypothetical opinions on statements in past cases with outcomes favorable to the prosecution. Few of the prosecution’s questions had anything to do with his testimony for the court on the Espionage Act, as it is being applied to Assange, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which Assange is also accused of violating. Shenkman did not hesitate to tell her she was wasting his time and the magistrate court’s time.

Ellsberg

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“Goetz said he had managed to find the 13 CIA agents who kidnapped, beat and sodomised El Masri – using flight logs and hotel records to track the men to North Carolina – and the investigation became the cover story for Der Spiegel. ”

• I Found Assange Paranoid, Crazy–Then His Methods Became Standard Practice (TH)

A renowned investigative journalist has spoke of how he found Julian Assange “paranoid and crazy” when they first met – only for his methods to become standard journalistic practice a number of years later. John Goetz, an investigations editor with the German public broadcaster NDR, was among a handful of prominent journalists to be invited to the Guardian’s offices in London in the summer of 2010 – WikiLeaks had just received upwards of 100,000 sensitive documents that were leaked from the U.S. military. The classified cache of documents later came to be known as the Afghan War Logs – revealing torture, assassinations and CIA kidnappings. Goetz rubbished the American government’s assertion that Assange “recklessly endangered lives” at the second week of the WikiLeaks publisher’s U.S. extradition proceedings on Wednesday (September 17).

The Berlin-based reporter, who had then been a senior investigative journalist for Der Spiegel, spoke of those seminal 2010 meetings and how even veteran journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian and his publication found Assange to be ultra-obsessed with security. “I remember being frustrated by the constant emails and reminders that we needed to be secure and that we needed to use encryption on everything,” Goetz said. “It was the first time I had touched a crypto-phone. The amount of precautions were enormous. “I thought it was all paranoid and crazy, but it became standard journalistic practice.” Goetz, who had had a background on reporting on Afghanistan and the U.S. military, gave an inside look of how WikiLeaks transformed investigative journalism.

He detailed how the technology Assange and his whistle-blower organisation had built helped him substantiate allegations of serious wrongdoing that was previously considered unfathomable – namely in the case of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri, a dual German-Lebanese citizen, had approached Goetz with his story five years before Goetz had ever come into contact with WikiLeaks. Goetz said: “It was interesting because at that point in time, very few people believed what he was alleging. He said he had been kidnapped, drugged, dumped in Afghanistan and ended up in some forest in Albania. “He said it was Americans and that he was taken to an American military base after we was kidnapped in Macedonia. All the allegations have since been proven in the European High Court.” Goetz said he had managed to find the 13 CIA agents who kidnapped, beat and sodomised El Masri – using flight logs and hotel records to track the men to North Carolina – and the investigation became the cover story for Der Spiegel.

You want to oppose Trump?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1306748514324668416

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Chomsky as a partisan shill is not a pretty sight.

• Noam Chomsky: World Is At The Most Dangerous Moment In Human History (NSM)

Noam Chomsky has warned that the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history owing to the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and rising authoritarianism. In an exclusive interview with the New Statesman, the 91-year-old US linguist and activist said that the current perils exceed those of the 1930s. “There’s been nothing like it in human history,” Chomsky said. “I’m old enough to remember, very vividly, the threat that Nazism could take over much of Eurasia, that was not an idle concern. US military planners did anticipate that the war would end with a US-dominated region and a German-dominated region… But even that, horrible enough, was not like the end of organised human life on Earth, which is what we’re facing.”

Chomsky was interviewed in advance of the first summit of the Progressive International (18-20 September), a new organisation founded by Bernie Sanders, the former US presidential candidate, and Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, to counter right-wing authoritarianism. In an echo of the movement’s slogan “internationalism or extinction”, Chomsky warned: “We’re at an astonishing confluence of very severe crises. The extent of them was illustrated by the last setting of the famous Doomsday Clock. It’s been set every year since the atom bombing, the minute hand has moved forward and back. But last January, they abandoned minutes and moved to seconds to midnight, which means termination. And that was before the scale of the pandemic.”

This shift, Chomsky said, reflected “the growing threat of nuclear war, which is probably more severe than it was during the Cold War. The growing threat of environmental catastrophe, and the third thing that they’ve been picking up for the last few years is the sharp deterioration of democracy, which sounds at first as if it doesn’t belong but it actually does, because the only hope for dealing with the two existential crises, which do threaten extinction, is to deal with them through a vibrant democracy with engaged, informed citizens who are participating in developing programmes to deal with these crises.”

Chomsky added that “[Donald] Trump has accomplished something quite impressive: he’s succeeded in increasing the threat of each of the three dangers. On nuclear weapons, he’s moved to continue, and essentially bring to an end, the dismantling of the arms control regime, which has offered some protection against terminal disaster. He’s greatly increased the development of new, dangerous, more threatening weapons, which means others do so too, which is increasing the threat to all of us.

Having lived through 22 US presidential elections, Chomsky warned that Trump’s threat to refuse to leave office if defeated by Democratic candidate Joe Biden was unprecedented. “He’s already announced repeatedly that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election he won’t leave. And this is taken very seriously by two high-level military officers, ex-military leaders, who’ve just sent a letter to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, reviewing for him his constitutional duties if the president refuses to leave office and gathers around him the paramilitary forces that he’s been using to terrorise people in Portland. “The military has a duty in that case, the 82nd Airborne Division, to remove him by force. There’s a transition integrity project, high-level people from the Republicans and the Democrats; they’ve been running war games asking what would happen if Trump refuses to leave office – every one of them leads to civil war, every scenario that they can think of except a Trump victory leads to civil war. This is not a joke – nothing like this has happened in the history of parliamentary democracy.”

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Accordion Trump
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Tucker color revolution
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