Dec 082024
 


Alfred Sisley Snow at Louveciennes 1878

 

Syrian Army Informs Officers Of Regime Change – Reuters (RT)
‘Not Our Fight!’: Trump Weighs In On Syria’s Unraveling (ZH)
Ukraine ‘Would Like To Make A Deal’ With Russia – Trump (RT)
Meeting With Trump And Macron Was ‘Productive’ – Zelensky (RT)
Megyn Kelly Warns Deep State Is Coming For Hegseth, Gabbard, RFK Jr (ZH)
The Clintons Need Biden’s ‘Blanket Pardons’ More Than Other Democrats (Sp.)
Musk Spent $260 Million On Trump (RT)
Prosecutor Blocks Lawsuit Against Ursula von der Leyen Over Pfizergate (Sp.)
How Russia Plans To Win In Ukraine (Dmitry Trenin)
Teenagers Preparing To Flee Ukraine – The Times (RT)
The Syria Tragedy and the New Omni-War (Pepe Escobar)
Russia Warns Against Geopolitical Use of Terrorists in Syria’s Conflict (Sp.)
Russia, Iran Call For ‘Internal Dialogue’ To Resolve Crisis In Syria (Cradle)
Romanian Presidential Frontrunner Claims He’s Victim Of Coup D’état (RT)
France Is A Perfect Example Of Centrist Elites Wrecking The West (Amar)
Pop Art: The Value of Hunter Biden’s Art Expected to Collapse (Turley)
Durov Subjected To First Detailed Questioning In Court (RT)

 

 

 

 

Alina

Leavitt

Tulsi

McEnany

 

 

 

 

The speed at which the Assad regime unraveled provokes a whole new additional set of questions. Where were Russia, Iran, China? Were they ever going to help? There was hardly any resistance from Syrian troops, no fighting.

Syrian Army Informs Officers Of Regime Change – Reuters (RT)

The Syrian Army command announced on Sunday that President Bashar Assad’s 24-year rule has come to an end, according to a Syrian officer who spoke to Reuters. The announcement follows a rapid offensive by jihadist forces in the capital. The jihadists claim that Damascus is “now free of Assad” and are expected to make their first public statement via state TV, Reuters reports, citing two anti-government sources. In response to the political uncertainty, Prime Minister Mohammad al-Jalali stated that he is “ready to cooperate with any leadership chosen by the people,” as quoted by Al Jazeera. He added that he remains at home and is inclined to support the continuity of government.

Ahmed Al-Sharaa, a prominent commander for the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has issued orders prohibiting all militant forces in Damascus from approaching public institutions or firing weapons into the air. He went on to say that government institutions will remain under the supervision of the “former prime minister” until they are officially transferred to the new authorities. Over the weekend, HTS fighters and other anti-government militias entered Damascus, effectively taking control of the capital. Flight tracking websites indicate that Assad’s plane has left the city.

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“HTS, the group backed by NATO member Turkey and leading this anti-Assad onslaught, is a US-designated terror organization..”

‘Not Our Fight!’: Trump Weighs In On Syria’s Unraveling (ZH)

President-elect Donald Trump has weighed in on the rapid-moving events in Syria, where jihadist groups backed by Turkey are entering the outside environs of the capital of Damascus. The embattled President Bashar al-Assad still appears to be in residence, but his future is far from certain. “Opposition fighters in Syria, in an unprecedented move, have totally taken over numerous cities, in a highly coordinated offensive, and are now on the outskirts of Damascus, obviously preparing to make a very big move toward taking out Assad,” he began the statement on Truth Social.Trump emphasized that Washington should stay completely out, calling the situation a “mess” and that it is “not our fight”. He posted the same message on X.

It alludes to Russia’s inability to continue protecting Syria, given it is bogged down in the nearly three year long Ukraine war, while also blasting former President Obama’s past Syria policies and that he laid down ‘red lines’. Below is the full statement: “Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years. This is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment of protecting the RED LINE IN THE SAND, and all hell broke out, with Russia stepping in. But now they are, like possibly Assad himself, being forced out, and it may actually be the best thing that can happen to them. There was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

It must be remembered that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group backed by NATO member Turkey and leading this anti-Assad onslaught, is a US-designated terror organization. A big question is: what comes next? While HTS has morphed from Syrian Al-Qaeda, it is trying to present to the West a softer image, claiming that it will protect minorities including Christians. However, its recent past clearly demonstrates that it rules territories under its control with Taliban-style force and brutality. Much of the nation’s population until now has stuck with Assad given the alternative is Somalia-style fracturing and rule by competing jihadist warlords. One thing is for sure: Trump will inherent dealing with an absolute tragic mess in Syria, the heartland of the Middle East, upon his opening days in office. Currently, US forces still occupy one-third of Syria, in the oil and gas areas of the northeast. During Trump’s first term he expressed an effort to “bring the troops home” but it’s widely reported he was stymied by his generals and national security officials.

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600,000 Russian soldiers vs 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers?

Ukraine ‘Would Like To Make A Deal’ With Russia – Trump (RT)

Ukraine “would like to” make a peace deal with Russia, US President-elect Donald Trump has signaled after meeting with Vladimir Zelensky in Paris. In a post on his Truth Social platform on Sunday, Trump called for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations between Moscow and Kiev. Trump’s remarks came after reports emerged of a regime change in Syria, Russia’s ally in the Middle East, where jihadists claimed to have taken over the Syrian capital Damascus and toppled President Bashar Assad’s 24-year rule. Trump speculated that this happened because Assad’s “protector,” Russia, “was not interested in protecting him any longer.”

“[Russia] lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever, Trump stated, claiming that Russia is currently “in a weakened state… because of Ukraine and a bad economy.” “Likewise, Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness. They have ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers, and many more civilians. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin,” the President-elect said, adding that if the conflict is not resolved, “it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse.”

Notre Dame

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It was suggested Trump shook Macron’s hand so hard, the latter needed a chiropractor.

Meeting With Trump And Macron Was ‘Productive’ – Zelensky (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has met briefly with French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky in Paris. No joint statement was released after the trilateral talks, but Zelensky hailed the conversation as “good and productive.” Trump arrived in Paris on Saturday to attend the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, extensively damaged in a fire in 2019. The trip was Trump’s first foreign visit since he defeated Kamala Harris in last month’s presidential election, but he nevertheless arrived at the Elysee Palace 40 minutes late, French media reported. Trump and Macron shared a warm embrace outside the palace, and speaking to reporters inside, Macron said that it was a “great honor” to host the incoming US president. Trump returned the compliment, before declaring that “the world seems to be going a little crazy right now.”

Zelensky, who was originally due to hold a one-on-one meeting with Macron, arrived nearly an hour later, before the three met for roughly 35 minutes, according to BFMTV. The three men did not speak to the press afterwards, and left for Notre Dame separately after posing for pictures. In a post on X, Macron said that the meeting was focused on “common action for peace and security.” Zelensky, also posting on X, described the talks as “good and productive.” “President Trump is, as always, resolute. I thank him,” Zelensky wrote. “We all want this war to end as soon as possible and in a just way,” he continued. “We spoke about our people, the situation on the ground, and a just peace.” “We agreed to continue working together and keep in contact. Peace through strength is possible,” he concluded, using a catchphrase regularly deployed by Trump to describe his foreign policy.

Throughout his campaign, Trump repeatedly promised that he would end the Ukraine conflict within “24 hours” of taking office, without offering any specifics on how he would achieve this beyond pushing Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin into negotiations. Recent media reports suggest that he intends to ‘freeze’ the conflict along the current line of contact, using the threat of a reduction in US aid to force Zelensky to negotiate, and the threat of increased aid to Kiev to pressure Putin into talks. Zelensky insists that his ten-point ‘peace formula’ is the only viable path to what he calls a “just peace” with Russia. However, the Kremlin has dismissed this document as “delusional,” with its demands that Russia restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders, pay reparations, and surrender its own officials to war-crimes tribunals.

Moscow maintains that any settlement must begin with Ukraine ceasing military operations and acknowledging the “territorial reality” that it will never regain control of the Russian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, as well as Crimea. In addition, the Kremlin insists that the goals of its military operation – which include Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification – will be achieved.

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“If you don’t think they’re going to do this to RFK Jr., you haven’t been paying attention,” Kelly urged.

Megyn Kelly Warns Deep State Is Coming For Hegseth, Gabbard, RFK Jr (ZH)

As Pete Hegseth – president-elect Trump’s pick for SecDef – runs the gauntlet of the nomination process, amid a cornucopia of media amplified unsubstantiated accusations against him, Sirius XM host Megyn Kelly has warned that the political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, are attempting to derail Trump’s second term before it has even begun by targeting his cabinet picks. As Steve Watson writes at Modernity.news, Kelly pointed to Pete Hegseth, who who is fighting to stay in the running for Secretary of Defense amid a cornucopia of media amplified unsubstantiated accusations against him. Kelly warned that if Hegseth falls like Matt Gaetz did, then RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and anyone else Trump picks will likely be next. “If you don’t think they’re going to do this to RFK Jr., you haven’t been paying attention,” Kelly urged.

“I realize that Pete has his belly exposed. He has not led a perfect life, and there’s plenty if you want to start attacking his character in terms of his marital history and so on,” Kelly noted. “But as he said to me yesterday, he found around 20, I think it was 18 or so, he found his two J’s: his wife, Jen and Jesus, and started changing his life in a profound way,” she further explained. The host continued, “Let’s say they get Pete’s scalp like they got Matt Gates’s scalp, Bobby Kennedy’s history makes Pete look like the consummate Boy Scout. He looks like he’s ready to enter the priesthood.” “He’s a lot older, with a lot more of a checkered past… It’s not going to be pretty at all. So we are really at a crossroads here about whether we are going to sacrifice these nominees because of checkered personal pasts or not. It’s not going to get easier after Pete,” Kelly emphasized.

But, as Gery Berntsen writes at American Greatness, when Pete Hegseth is confirmed as Secretary of Defense, he will be a forceful agent of change for the betterment of the United States of America. The abridged version of a famous Machiavelli quote, “Nothing is more difficult or dangerous than to attempt to change the order of things,” is in full view as we watch the process of confirming President Trump’s Secretary of Defense. When Pete Hegseth is confirmed as Secretary of Defense, he will be a forceful agent of change for the betterment of the United States of America. President-elect Trump’s nominee, retired Army National Guard Major and Fox News host Peter Hegseth, is receiving considerable fire amid allegations of misconduct while CEO of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA).

I am writing this article because I was one of the founding members of CVA. I am an Air Force veteran and retired senior operations officer and chief of station in the Central Intelligence Agency. While at the CIA, I held major field command positions and was a senior manager in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC). I led the CIA’s largest paramilitary element on the ground during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, seizing Kabul, initiating the battle of Tora Bora, and leading teams around the globe in several dangerous crises. I worked hand in glove with the most important elements of the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the FBI to secure and safeguard American interests. Based on 30 years of this experience and my personal knowledge of Pete Hegseth, I have no doubt that he will excel as Secretary of Defense.


Megyn Kelly is joined by The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles

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“The Trump administration, working with Chris Rufo, a new IRS chief, and [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi, could raise hundreds of billions of dollars merely by enforcing the strict rules and laws pertaining to nonprofit organizations..”

The Clintons Need Biden’s ‘Blanket Pardons’ More Than Other Democrats (Sp.)

After President Joe Biden issued an unusual blanket pardon for his son, Hunter, Democratic Congressman Ed Markey has urged the president to extend “preemptive pardons” to other top Democrats whom Donald Trump believes “harmed him” and might otherwise be treated by him in a “fascistic way.” “After nearly four years of weaponizing US government resources against perceived enemies of certain dynastic political families, Markey and Biden have some nerve suggesting that the Trump administration will be engaging in ‘fascist’ retaliation starting January 20, 2025,” Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel tells Sputnik, referencing Biden’s prosecution of January 6 protestors and labeling MAGA supporters as “extremists.” US journalist Jonathan Martin reported on December 4 that Biden’s senior aides are debating the issue, and the alleged pardon list might include Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, former COVID czar Anthony Fauci.

“The public has yet to learn how deep the rot became across America ever since 1988, when elites embraced unregulated globalism and a turbocharged spoils system where trillions of dollars in spending that is not audited (by design) can be pilfered or diverted to fund political campaigns and multiple-mansion lifestyles,” Ortel says.According to the analyst, the political trajectories of the Biden, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Pelosi, and Cheney dynasty families warrant close scrutiny for alleged influence-peddling and other questionable conduct. “Those who howl loudest now anticipating Trump’s return likely include many with guilty knowledge of their own roles perpetrating a raft of crimes, believing the system will remain rigged to protect them,” he notes. As Joe Biden’s White House reportedly considers “preemptive pardons” for some top Democrats, Ortel suggests that the Clintons might be on the list.

“‘The Clinton Foundation’ (in quotes because I challenge an informed lawyer to demonstrate that it validly and lawfully exists as a public charity) has yet again issued false and materially misleading public filings as it continues to solicit donations in various ways across state lines and national boundaries,” says Ortel, who has conducted a private investigation into the charity’s alleged fraud for several years. In 2018, two forensic investigators-turned-whistleblowers, John Moynihan and Larry Doyle, testified before the US Congress that the Clinton Foundation does not operate as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization but acts as a foreign agent and owes the US government between $400 million and $2.5 billion in taxes. Additionally, Special Counsel John Durham’s probe indicated that Hillary Clinton and her team played a significant role in shaping and promoting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

According to Ortel, this hoax was used to prevent Trump from investigating the Clintons’ apparent pay-to-play schemes, mishandling of classified information, and alleged money laundering. “The Trump administration, working with Chris Rufo, a new IRS chief, and [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi, could raise hundreds of billions of dollars merely by enforcing the strict rules and laws pertaining to nonprofit organizations. Many of these ‘elite’ entities have brazenly abused the law in countless ways, especially the Clintons since October 23, 1997,” Ortel says. “[One] report notes that the Biden family may now have greater exposure since Hunter can no longer readily invoke the Fifth Amendment,” Ortel points out. The Washington Free Beacon reported on December 3 that Hunter will no longer be able to rely on his Fifth Amendment right to silence regarding any potential federal crimes for which he’s been pardoned, according to two former House general counsels.

The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination; however, with Hunter no longer at risk of federal prosecution for the period between January 2014 and December 2024, he appears to be ineligible for this protection. The newspaper alleges that Republican lawmakers should jump at the opportunity to subpoena Hunter Biden for new information about his family’s knowledge or involvement in his apparent influence-peddling schemes. There are a lot of questions concerning the Biden family’s conduct in post-coup Ukraine where Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Pentagon bio-reseach contractor, and where he got a hefty salary from Bursima gas firm. “Finally, offering Hunter pardons for federal crimes back to January 1, 2014 raises suspicions that Joe may know of illegal activities in which Hunter engaged, years before crimes alleged in the indictments in the gun (2018) and tax (2019) cases,” Ortel stresses.

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“The value of shares in his electric vehicle company, Tesla, rose by 80% in the past month.”

Musk Spent $260 Million On Trump (RT)

The world’s richest person, entrepreneur Elon Musk, spent at least $260 million to get Donald Trump re-elected as US president, various media outlets have reported, citing Thursday’s filings with the Federal Election Commission. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has emerged as a top Republican donor and one of the most prominent members of Trump’s inner circle, noted the Washington Post. Some $238 million of the donations went to a political action committee (PAC) that Musk founded this year, America PAC, CNN said, citing the filings. Other groups backing Trump benefitted as well, with the entrepreneur giving $20.5 million to RBG PAC, and $3 million to the MAHA Alliance.

According to the Washington Post, Musk spent $232 million supporting Trump and other Republican candidates before the election. After the vote and through November 25, he gave nearly $45 million more to America PAC, taking his total political spending to at least $277 million. Following the election victory, Trump appointed Musk as his government efficiency adviser. The entrepreneur will oversee a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, aimed at cutting government spending. The billionaire has pledged to audit the entire US government, aiming to cut up to $2 trillion in spending.

The entrepreneur’s influence has led to the media and some conservatives dubbing him the “co-president of the United States” and “the Soros of the right,” referring to billionaire investor and prolific liberal donor George Soros. Musk is the world’s richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated total net worth of $362 billion as of December 6. The value of shares in his electric vehicle company, Tesla, rose by 80% in the past month. The world’s most valuable carmaker is expected to benefit from streamlined regulation on self-driving cars during the new Trump administration.

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This is how rotten the EU is. Secret deals for €35+ billion kept secret. Zero accountability.

“The prosecutor secretly contested the case, arguing that von der Leyen should be immune from prosecution due to her official duties..”

Prosecutor Blocks Lawsuit Against Ursula von der Leyen Over Pfizergate (Sp.)

A Belgian court was unable to review the charges against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen due to the intervention of the European Prosecutor’s Office, according to activist and prosecution representative Frédéric Baldan. A lawsuit against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been postponed indefinitely by a Belgian judge. The postponement follows a hearing that took place on Friday at the Liège Palace of Justice, focusing on potential violations in the procurement of coronavirus vaccines by von der Leyen. The hearing was closed to the public and von der Leyen is currently abroad. “The European Prosecutor’s Office made a move that effectively blocked the court proceedings,” Baldan told Sputnik. The prosecutor secretly contested the case, arguing that von der Leyen should be immune from prosecution due to her official duties. As a result, the judge postponed the hearings indefinitely.

The issue of whether von der Leyen’s immunity applies to the charges will be addressed on January 6. Baldan believes the European Prosecutor’s Office acted in her favor. In 2021, The New York Times reported that von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla exchanged SMS messages discussing a massive vaccine procurement contract. The deal, which could be worth up to €35 billion, raised suspicions about von der Leyen’s direct influence on negotiations, sparking a media scandal dubbed “Pfizergate.” Despite calls to release the text messages, the European Commission refused to make them public in June 2022. In October the same year, the EU’s Public Prosecutor’s Office announced it was investigating the centralized procurement of vaccines on behalf of EU member states, though details remain confidential. Additionally, a separate investigation was launched in Belgium after Baldan filed a lawsuit against von der Leyen, claiming her actions caused economic harm to the country.

In March 2024, it was reported that the case had been transferred to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which confirmed it is continuing its investigation, though it refused to disclose further details. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg is also reviewing a complaint filed by The New York Times, which had requested von der Leyen’s communications with Pfizer but was denied access. The European Commission argued that these messages were not official documents and could not be retrieved. A ruling is expected in the coming months. During the pandemic, the European Union mainly purchased vaccines from the BioNTech-Pfizer consortium, along with other pharmaceutical companies. These procurements, involving billions of euros, have been the subject of ongoing scrutiny and legal disputes due to delays in supply and lack of transparency.

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Oreshnik = no nukes needed.

How Russia Plans To Win In Ukraine (Dmitry Trenin)

The Ukrainian crisis exposed a troubling reality for Russia: its concept of strategic deterrence proved incapable of preventing enemy aggression. While it has successfully deterred a massive nuclear attack by the United States or large-scale conventional aggression by NATO, it has failed to address a new and insidious form of conflict. Washington and its allies have gambled on inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia through a client state—one they control, arm, and direct. Moscow’s nuclear doctrine, designed for a very different set of circumstances, proved inadequate. It failed to prevent Western intervention at the outset and allowed its escalation. In response, the Kremlin has recognized the need to adapt. In the third year of the operation, a long-overdue update to the doctrine has been announced. This summer, President Vladimir Putin outlined the necessary changes.

By November, the new document—entitled Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence—was in place. The updated doctrine represents a profound shift in Russia’s nuclear policy, transforming it into a proactive deterrent. Previously, nuclear weapons could only be used in conventional conflicts when the very existence of the state was at risk. The threshold was set so high that it effectively allowed adversaries to exploit it. Now, the conditions have been broadened significantly. One key addition is the recognition of “joint aggression.” If a non-nuclear state at war with Russia operates with the direct support of a nuclear power, Moscow reserves the right to respond, including with nuclear weapons. This sends a clear and unmistakable message to the United States, Britain, and France: their facilities and territories are no longer immune to retaliation.

The doctrine also explicitly accounts for scenarios involving massive aerospace attacks, including drones and cruise missiles, as well as aggression against Belarus. Another important change is the expanded list of threats deemed unacceptable to Russia’s security. These changes collectively signal a more assertive posture, reflecting the reality of today’s conflict and deterring potential Western miscalculations. Western reactions to these updates were predictable. Media hysteria painted Putin as reckless, while politicians feigned calm, claiming they would “not be intimidated.” The military and intelligence communities have remained largely silent, quietly drawing their own conclusions. These updates come against an increasingly grim backdrop for the West. Realists within NATO understand the war in Ukraine is effectively lost. The Russian army holds the initiative across the front and is advancing steadily in the Donbass.

The Ukrainian armed forces are unlikely to turn the tide in the foreseeable future, if ever. Consequently, Western strategists are now eyeing a ceasefire along the battle lines as the only viable option. Notably, there has been a subtle shift in the narrative. Articles in Reuters and other Western outlets suggest that Moscow, too, may consider freezing the conflict. However, such a scenario would need to align with Russian interests. For Moscow, anything less than full victory equates to defeat, and such an outcome is simply not an option. The administration of US President Joe Biden, despite the Democrats crushing election defeat, has apparently decided to ‘help’ Donald Trump stay on course. The authorization to use US and British long-range missiles to hit targets in the Kursk and Bryansk regions is both a defiant challenge to Putin, and a ‘gift’ to the president-elect.

Likewise the transfer to Kiev of anti-personnel mines banned by the Ottawa Convention, a new batch of anti-Russian sanctions (including against Gazprombank) and an attempt to ‘push’ the latest Biden aid package for Zelensky through Congress. Russia’s response to the escalation has not been limited to updating its doctrine. The recent test of the ‘Oreshnik’ intermediate-range hypersonic missile under combat conditions marked a pivotal moment. By striking the Yuzhmash missile factory in Dnepropetrovsk, Moscow signaled to NATO that the vast majority of its European capitals are within range of this new weapon. ‘Oreshnik’ carries both conventional and nuclear warheads, and its speed — reportedly reaching up to Mach 10 — renders existing missile defense systems ineffective. Although still experimental, its successful deployment paves the way for mass production. The message is clear: Moscow is not bluffing. This shift from verbal warnings to decisive actions underscores the seriousness of the Kremlin’s resolve.

The West has long convinced itself that Putin would never strike NATO countries. With the advent of ‘Oreshnik,’ that belief has been shattered. The United States and its allies continue to escalate recklessly, betting on provoking a Russian overreaction. The authorization of long-range missile strikes on Russian territories like Kursk and Bryansk, combined with the transfer of banned weapons and the constant drumbeat of sanctions, reflects their desperation. More dangerously, there are whispers of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership or even the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kiev. While the latter remains unlikely, the risk of a “dirty bomb” cannot be ruled out. The West’s hope, however, is that Russia might strike first with atomic weapons, handing NATO the moral high ground. Such an outcome would allow Washington to isolate Moscow globally, undermining its relationships with key players like China, India, and Brazil. Yet Moscow has countered these provocations with calculated precision, refusing to take the bait.

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Blinken: “Getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary..”

Putin: [Zelensky] has “no right to push people to their death and drive them into battle.” The orders that Zelensky gives are “criminal..”

Teenagers Preparing To Flee Ukraine – The Times (RT)

Many Ukrainian teenagers are planning to leave the country and never return as the US increases pressure on Kiev to lower the mobilization age, the Times has reported. Earlier this week, outgoing US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said it was not right that “18 to 25-year-olds are not in the fight” against Russia. “Getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary,” he stressed.In an article on Thursday, the British paper quoted a teenager from the city of Kharkov, who said that “many” of his friends are now choosing to study abroad because “it is safer there.”“There is no risk of being taken into the army at a foreign university,” he explained, adding that he plans to study in Poland, and may not return after graduation.

“When I have finished, I will decide whether to return to Ukraine or stay there. It will be safer there, there are no bombs falling and there is no danger that I will be mobilized for the war without my consent,” he said. Another teenager who spoke to The Times said he also wants to attend higher education in a foreign country. Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandra Ustinova told the paper that a decision to lower the mobilization age to 18 would be met with “huge opposition inside Ukraine and we would not get the results [on the battlefield] that we want because this is not such a large amount of people.”“It would also be a clear signal for families to get their children out. So, if we want to lose our future generation, then, yeah, this is the thing to do,” Ustinova stressed.

The number of men aged between 18 and 25 in Ukraine is estimated to be at least 300,000.According to UN data, at least 6.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country and become refugees since the escalation between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. Most of them are women and children, as men of fighting age are banned from travelling abroad.Since the start of the conflict, officials in Moscow have repeatedly accused the US and its allies of wanting “to fight to the last Ukrainian” in their effort to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, who canceled a presidential election earlier this year, has “no right to push people to their death and drive them into battle.” The orders that Zelensky gives are “criminal,” Putin stressed.

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“..a Final Confrontation – with several overtones ranging from expanding lebensraum to provoking the Apocalypse.”

The Syria Tragedy and the New Omni-War (Pepe Escobar)

Until recently, a serious geopolitical working hypothesis was that West Asia and Ukraine were two vectors of the standard Hegemon modus operandi, which is to incite and unleash Forever Wars. Now both wars are united in an Omni-War. A coalition of Straussian neo-cons in the US, hardcore revisionist Zionists in Tel Aviv and Ukrainian neo-nazi shades of grey is now betting on a Final Confrontation – with several overtones ranging from expanding lebensraum to provoking the Apocalypse. What stands in their way is essentially two of the top BRICS: Russia and Iran. China, self-protected by their collective lofty dream of “community of a shared future for mankind”, warily watches on the sidelines, as they know that at the end of the road, the true “existential” war by the Hegemon will be against them. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran need to mobilize for Totalen Krieg. Because that’s what the enemy is launching.

The total destabilisation of Syria, with heavy CIA-MI6 input, now proceeding in real time, is a carefully engineered gambit to undermine BRICS and beyond. It proceeds in parallel to Pashinyan removing Armenia from the CSTO – based on a US promise to support Yerevan in a possible new clash with Baku; India being encouraged to ramp up a weapons race with Pakistan; and across-the-board intimidation of Iran. So this is also a war to destabilize the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), of which the three major protagonists are BRICS members Russia, Iran and India. As it stands, the INSTC is totally geopolitical risk-free. As a top BRICS corridor-in-the-making, it carries the potential to become even more effective than several of China’s cross-Heartland corridors of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The INSTC would be a key lifeline for a great deal of the global economy in case of a direct confrontation between the US/Israel combo and Iran – with the possible shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz leading to the collapse of a multi-quadrillion pile of financial derivatives, economically imploding the collective West. Turkiye under Erdogan, as usual, is playing a double game. Rhetorically, Ankara stands by a genocide-free and sovereign Palestine. In practice, the Turkiye supports and funds a motley crew of Greater Idlibistan jihadis – trained by Ukrainian Neo-nazis in drone warfare and with weapons financed by Qatar – who have just marched on and conquered Aleppo, Hama, and possibly beyond. If this army of mercenaries were real followers of Islam, they would be marching in defense of Palestine.

At the same time, the real picture inside the corridors of power in Tehran is extremely murky. There are factions favoring getting closer to the West, which clearly would have ramifications for the Axis of Resistance’s ability to fight Tel Aviv. On Lebanon, Syria never wavered. History explains why: from the point of view of Damascus, Lebanon historically remains a governorate, so Damascus is responsible for the security of Beirut. And that’s one of Tel Aviv’s key motives to propel the current Salafi-jihadi offensive on Syria – after smashing virtually every communication corridor between Syria and Lebanon. What Tel Aviv could not accomplish on the ground – a victory over Hezbollah in southern Lebanon – has been replaced by isolating Hezbollah from the Axis of Resistance.

Wars in West Asia are a complex mix of national, sectarian, tribal and religious vectors. In a sense, they are endless wars; controllable to an extent, but then back again. The Russian strategy in Syria seemed to be very precise. As it was impossible to normalize a completely fragmented nation, Moscow opted to free the Syria that really matters – the capital, the most important cities, and the Eastern Mediterranean coast – from the Salafi-jihadi mobs. The problem is that freezing the war in 2020, with direct implication by Russia, Iran and (reluctantly) Turkiye, did not solve the “moderate rebel” problem. Now they’re back – in full force, supported by a vast Rent-a-Jihadi mob, with NATOstan Intel behind them. Some things never change.

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Too late now?!

Russia Warns Against Geopolitical Use of Terrorists in Syria’s Conflict (Sp.)

The offensive by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)* terrorist group in Syria has been long in the making, and Russia will oppose attempts by the militants to alter the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. Moscow has called for restraint from all parties in the unraveling conflict in Syria. “The situation has sharply escalated in recent days due to the clearly premeditated aggressive offensive on government forces by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (former Al-Nusra Front*), an organization designated by the UN Security Council as a terrorist group, which has been joined by several smaller factions,” Lavrov said during a press conference following his visit to Doha. He emphasized the urgent need to stop the hostilities and said that Russia would actively oppose any attempts by HTS militants to change the situation on the ground in Syria.

“We are absolutely convinced of the inadmissibility of using terrorists like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to achieve geopolitical goals, as is happening now with the organization of this offensive from the Idlib de-escalation zone,” Lavrov explained during a session at the Doha Forum. The main task now in the situation surrounding Syria, according to Lavrov, is to halt the clashes. UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen has promised to involve influential external actors to stop the fighting and resume negotiations between the government and opposition, Lavrov added. The top Russian diplomat also reiterated Moscow’s efforts to counteract terrorism in Syria: “We are doing everything to prevent terrorists from gaining the upper hand, even if they claim that they are no longer terrorists.” “On the military front, Russia is helping the Syrian army with support from the [Russian Aerospace Forces], based in Khmeimim, and we assist the Syrian army in repelling terrorist attacks,” he added.

Additionally, Lavrov stated that Russia, along with Iran and Turkiye, will take steps to ensure that calls for de-escalation in Syria are heard. The terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, along with several armed factions from the so-called Syrian armed opposition, launched a large-scale operation on November 29, advancing from northern Idlib towards the cities of Aleppo and Hama. By the following day, November 30, the second-largest city in Syria, Aleppo, along with its surroundings, including the international airport and the Kuweires military airbase, came under the control of the terrorists. This marked the first time that the militants had fully taken over Aleppo since the beginning of the Syrian crisis in 2011. Until late 2016, the armed opposition controlled only the eastern part of the city, which was recaptured by the Syrian army with Russian air support.

After the capture of Aleppo, the terrorist units attempted to advance towards the city of Hama, capturing the town of Maaret al-Numan. The Syrian army fought off heavy terrorist attacks in the Hama province from three directions for several days, preparing for a counteroffensive. However, on December 5, the SAR military command officially announced the redeployment of its units from the city of Hama. The city of Hama, located in central Syria, has been under the control of the Syrian army throughout the conflict, which began in the spring of 2011. Hama holds strategic geographic importance, lying between the provinces of Homs and Damascus and connecting through mountain ranges to the Latakia province. The last attempt at an armed insurgency by radical Islamist underground forces, supported by the Muslim Brotherhood*, in Syria’s fourth-largest city took place in 1982. At that time, thanks to prompt action by the Syrian military command, the city was freed from terrorist groups, and control was restored to official authorities.

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They must have known what would happen.

Russia, Iran Call For ‘Internal Dialogue’ To Resolve Crisis In Syria (Cradle)

The Foreign Ministers of Russia, Turkiye, and Iran on 7 December called for an immediate end to hostilities in Syria and for ‘”internal dialogue” between the Syrian government and the “legitimate opposition.” “We called for an immediate end to hostile activities … and for this purpose called for the dialogue between the government and legitimate opposition,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during talks in the Qatari capital, Doha. “We stated, all of us, that we want the [United Nations] Resolution 2254 to be fully implemented,” Lavrov added. Resolution 2254 calls for a commitment to the “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity” of Syria and an end to the conflict through “an inclusive and Syrian-led political process.” Lavrov did not specify which opposition forces Russia regarded as legitimate but made clear it considered Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) a terrorist group.

HTS is led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a former deputy of the notorious ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Formerly known as the Nusra Front, HTS now claims it is no longer a sectarian Salafi-Jihadi group and welcomes ethnic and religious diversity in Syria. Western media is now promoting HTS, which includes many foreign fighters and remains on the US terror list, as moderates that will protect Syria’s religious minorities. During the US-led covert war on Syria that began in 2011, the Nusra Front and ISIS carried out large numbers of massacres of Christians, Shiites, Alawites, Yezidis, and even Sunnis who were supportive of the governments of Iraq and Syria. HTS and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched an invasion of the Aleppo countryside on 27 November. In the past ten days, they have captured two of Syria’s largest cities, Aleppo and Hama.

HTS and SNA militants are now gathering their forces at the edge of Homs City in preparation for an assault. In Doha, Foreign Minister Lavrov stated further, “It’s inadmissible to allow the terrorist group to take control of territory in violation of agreements.” Asked how the situation in Syria would develop and what would happen to Russian military bases there, Lavrov said he was “not in the business of guessing.”

Russia has an airbase in Latakia and a key naval base in Tartous. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi similarly called for “political dialogue” between the Syrian government and the “opposition groups” that are now threatening Damascus. Araghchi said that the parties in Doha agreed to initiate “political dialogue between the Syrian government and the legitimate opposition groups.” For its part, a Turkish foreign ministry source emphasized the importance of restarting the Syrian political process during the talks with Russia and Iran in Doha. The source added that the talks were constructive.

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He’s right. Exposing the real EU.

Romanian Presidential Frontrunner Claims He’s Victim Of Coup D’état (RT)

The invalidation of Romania’s presidential election results by the country’s top court is a formalized coup d’etat, according to independent candidate Calin Georgescu, who clinched a surprise win in the first round last month. Georgescu outperformed the other candidates in the first round of the election with 22.94%, beating out liberal leftist candidate Elena Lasconi, who received 19.18%, and the country’s Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, who finished third with 19.15%. On Friday, Romania’s Constitutional Court dismissed Georgescu’s victory, citing a clause in the nation’s laws that emphasizes the need to ensure the correctness and legality of the election. The judiciary body announced that the whole process would be resumed later.

“Essentially, this is a formalized coup d’etat. The rule of law is in an induced coma, and justice subordinated to political orders has practically lost its essence. It is no longer justice, it obeys the orders,” Georgescu, a known critic of Romania’s pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine policy, said on Friday, as cited by Realitatea TV. The politician also stressed that the court’s decision represents more than a legal controversy, adding that “the corrupt system in Romania showed its true face by making a pact with the devil.” Georgescu also said that the power of the people is the basis for a democratic state, and the authorities are obliged to respect the results of the national vote. He stated that the current Romanian government is afraid of losing power and facing revelations.

Earlier this week, Western media outlets reported that declassified information from Romania’s intelligence agencies had revealed that the sudden rise of Georgescu in the first round of the election was “not a natural outcome.” According to the claims, his win emerged thanks to a coordinated social media effort, most likely orchestrated by a “state actor” meddling in the candidate’s mostly Tik-Tok-based campaign, helping to get his message out to the voters. The annulment came amid accusations that Moscow had assisted Georgescu’s campaign, which Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has dismissed as “absolutely groundless.” She said that Romanian elections are carried out in a climate of “an unprecedented surge of anti-Russian hysteria” that is set “to influence the consciousness and will of the country’s citizens.” Washington, meanwhile, has praised the move. On Friday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that the US reaffirms its “confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence.”

Calin

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“It’s an epic battle of light and darkness, Hobbits and Orcs, almost as if lifted straight from a fantasy novel..”

France Is A Perfect Example Of Centrist Elites Wrecking The West (Amar)

In the most immediate terms, Macron’s reckless early-election gamble in the summer and his devious and undemocratic maneuvering to keep out the victorious Left after his party’s predictable trouncing, has left France, in effect, ungovernable. Barnier’s predictable failure makes no difference to that fact. Fresh parliamentary elections, once again, would probably not help either. And anyhow, they are ruled out by the constitution before next summer. Macron will now try out yet another prime minister, number six since he became president. That is a high attrition rate: In 7 years, the would-be embodiment of “institutional stability” has gone through as many heads of government as De Gaulle in 19 years. It’s also an accelerating attrition rate: Macron’s prime ministers get used up ever faster. The future will show if this trend can be broken. If so, then not because of but despite the president’s baneful influence.

As a French commentator noted, he won’t provide a solution, but he can still cause a lot of problems. There are good reasons for declaring this moment the death of Macronism. Its core project of leaving behind the politics of left and right and replacing them with a combination of Centrism and a “Jupiterian” (Macron’s own, early term) personality cult now lies in tatters. Specifically, Macronism’s claim to, at the very least, stave off the populist right of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) is a sad joke: No matter what you think about the RN, there is no doubt that its power has never been as great as now, and its chances of capturing the presidency, with or without Marine Le Pen in the lead, have never been better. Macron has become the Biden of France: in both cases, while building their rule on a promise to keep out right-populist challengers, the two presidents’ incompetence and egotism has facilitated the rise of those challengers.

And how do the French feel in the midst of all of this? Spoiler alert: Not grand. According to French newspaper Le Monde’s summary of comprehensive polling by Ipsos, France is a “country anxious and discontent, hit by a political crisis,” and bereft of trust in its “political personnel and institutions.” In terms of their individual experiences, only 50% are content, 70% believe that the conditions of their life are “less and less favorable,” and 55% say they find it hard to make ends meet. Regarding their country as a whole, a whopping 87% consider it in decline, which is 18% worse than when Macron was elected for the first time in 2017: National slow claps for “Jupiter.” But the rest of the political elites don’t look much better: Solid, even preponderant majorities consider them “corrupt” (63%), “not representative” (78%), and out for their own, personal good (83%).

In principle, there’s a difference between being miserable and being afraid. But the two states of mind go together really well, too: Almost all of the French (92%) have a bad feeling they are living in a “violent society”, and almost a third think “very violent” is the more precise term. You may say things could hardly get worse. Yet the French firmly believe they can: 89% see violence on the rise, and the majority of those respondents (61%) think it is rising “a lot.” In sum: A selfish boss from hell (who could fire himself but swears he won’t), no functioning government, a tanking economy, and a mood like there’s no tomorrow. How did that happen to the “Grande Nation”? This is where we get back to the third factor mentioned above: the overarching historic trend. Let’s zoom out from unhappy France and small-minded, selfish Macron, and what we are seeing is an exemplary case of Centrism ruining a country.

True, you would never guess that if you relied on, for instance, The Economist. There, the same old, tired, and dim story is relentlessly told: How a heroic “center” and its stalwart defenders are resisting (or not so much) dastardly attacks from the “populists” and “extremists.” It’s an epic battle of light and darkness, Hobbits and Orcs, almost as if lifted straight from a fantasy novel. It even features glorious last stands: For the New York Times, Britain’s Keir Starmer, “one of the last centrist leaders on the global stage” is “trying to fight populism from the lonely center.” “Remember the Alamo,” I guess.

And yet, look at the real world: Clinton, Biden, Harris, Scholz, Macron, to name only a few – What do they all have in common? They stand for the failed, rejected project of elitist Centrism, dragging down their countries. For a stubborn, snobbish, and manipulative style of politics, complete with lawfare, mass media campaigns of calumny and disinformation, incipient authoritarianism and police-state methods, a dead-end foreign policy of blaming others (Russia and China most of all) for their countries’ problems and decline, and a resolute surrender to the forces of “the market,” which, here, is simply code for globalized capitalist interests.

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1/ Pop=Joe.

2/ Pop goes the value.

Pop Art: The Value of Hunter Biden’s Art Expected to Collapse (Turley)

We have previously discussed the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s art sales. Many viewed the art as another avenue for political allies to funnel money to the Bidens. That was reinforced when it was discovered that the lucrative sales heralded by Hunter’s allies were found to have been largely the results of purchases by his “sugar bro” Kevin Morris. Now, experts say that whatever value is left in Hunter’s art will likely collapse with his father’s departure — the clearest indicator of the actual value of the art for “investors.” Hunter’s art appears to be moving from an impressionistic to a harsh realism period. Georges Bergès, Hunter Biden’s art gallerist, contradicted claims of the White House on the handling of the art. Hunter reportedly knew who purchased roughly 70% of the value of his art, including Democrat donors Morris and Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali.

While Biden allies hyped the sales to show that Hunter was a legitimate artist, Bergès admitted that Morris actually purchased most of the art. Morris has reportedly given Hunter millions to cover unpaid taxes and expenses. Hunter only sold paintings to ten people for $1.5 million, according to congressional testimony from 2024. Morris bought 11 works for $875,000 in total. The drop in the value of art reflects not the volatile art market but the fluctuating influence peddling market. The Bidens are finally cashing out of Washington. In the meantime, Hunter is facing a bizarre claim from one of his debt holders that, in return for allegedly walking out on over a year of rent, Hunter sent him art made with his own feces to sell. Shaun Maguire claims that Hunter rented his $4.25 million home in California in 2019. When Hunter’s lawyers denied the story, he posted pictures on social media.

Without getting into the merits of this claim, the question is whether Hunter will sue for defamation. I was previously threatened with a defamation lawsuit for discussing the scandal involving Morris. I continued to write about the allegations (and the threat of a lawsuit) but was never sued. It was an example of the scorched Earth approach of the Hunter team. This is such a bizarre story that it is hard to imagine that it could be true. Conversely, Maguire must have known of the litigious reputation of the Biden team when he decided to go public with this claim. If this story is untrue, it could constitute defamation per se as a statement that impugns his professional and business reputation. A simple testing of the art would tend to establish the truth of the matter. However, there is no indication of any demand for a retraction or notice to sue. Hunter generally has two years for such a lawsuit, but California has a shorter one-year period.

In the meantime, Hunter has pledged to continue to do his art after his father granted him a sweeping pardon for any crimes committed in the last ten years. Given his past excessive spending on a lavish lifestyle, the art alone does not appear to be a viable source of income. However, Morris has helped create a new movie based on his life. Hunter reportedly celebrated the pardon by watching an early showing of the film. In the end, Hunter’s work may be the ultimate Pop art, work that only holds value so long as Pop is in power. Of course, if Nietzsche was right that “the essence of all beautiful art…is gratitude,” Hunter has much to be grateful for. For past and prospective buyers, perhaps less so.

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Regretting his French passport more than ever…

Durov Subjected To First Detailed Questioning In Court (RT)

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has been questioned by a Paris court for the first time on the charges against him, more than three months after his arrest, AFP news agency reported on Friday, citing an unnamed source. Previous court hearings had focused on procedural issues relating to the terms of the tech billionaire’s detention. The charges against Durov relate to the alleged involvement of the messaging platform in a wide range of criminal activities. Durov reportedly arrived at the court accompanied by two lawyers, David-Olivier Kaminski and Christophe Ingrain. The entrepreneur said he “trusts French justice,” but refused to comment on the progress of the case or the charges against him. The Russian national, who is also a citizen of France, the UAE and Saint Kitts and Nevis, was arrested after landing in Paris on August 24.

Durov was charged with multiple offenses, including complicity in distributing child pornography, and enabling drug dealing and money laundering. The charges stem from accusations that Telegram’s lax moderation rules allow for the widespread misuse of the messenger service. The billionaire was later released on bail of €5 million ($5.5 million), but has been barred from leaving France while his case is ongoing. Some of the charges against him could carry sentences of up to ten years. Durov has vehemently denied the allegations. In October, the entrepreneur revealed that the messenger service had been complying with privacy policies in several countries, and had been disclosing information about criminals to authorities for the past six years.

According to one of Durov’s lawyers, as cited by the French news agency, it was “absurd” to think that his client was “involved” in crimes committed via the messaging platform. An unnamed source close to the investigation told AFP that the entire legal procedure was having a positive effect in France and elsewhere, as Telegram has begun responding to legal requisitions more actively. Commenting in August on Durov’s detention, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov highlighted the absurdity of holding the entrepreneur accountable for crimes committed using his network. Peskov quipped that Paris could use the same grounds to arrest the CEOs of Renault or Citroën, as terrorists use cars.

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McCullough RFK

 

 

Cancer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1865082844680175821

 

 

AOC

 

 

Sand cat

 

 

 

 

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Apr 212019
 


Rembrandt van Rijn The deposition 1632-33

 

Yellow Vests Back In Action Despite ‘Unifying’ Notre Dame Disaster (RT)
Mueller Team Ignored Findings Of Former US Intelligence Officials (SP)
The Deep State vs. WikiLeaks (Escobar)
Julian Assange Put Through ‘Hell’ At Embassy, Says Former Diplomat (Sky)
UK PM May To Be Told To Quit By Top Conservative (R.)
London Home Prices Had Biggest Monthly Drop Since Lehman (DQ)
Battle To Save Amphibians From Global Killer Disease (G.)
Emissions From Thawing Arctic Permafrost 12 Times Higher Than Thought (Ind.)
Climate Change: The Facts – Our Greatest Threat, Laid Bare (G.)
Climate Change – The Facts (David Attenborough)

 

 

I predicted Macron would use the Notre Dame fire against the Yellow Vests, and he delivers. “We have to unify under our great leader, Me!”

Curious numbers here, 6 cops for every protester:

“The total number of people who took to the streets on Saturday reached 9,600, with 6,700 of them protesting in Paris, the Interior Ministry said.”

“Some 60,000 police officers were deployed across the country..”

Yellow Vests Back In Action Despite ‘Unifying’ Notre Dame Disaster (RT)

Yellow Vests protests brought clashes and tear gas back to the streets of Paris, despite politicians’ calls for “unity” in the wake of the Notre Dame fire. For protesters, the response to the fire only showed more inequality. Saturday’s protests mark the 23rd straight weekend of anti-government demonstrations, but the first since Notre Dame de Paris went up in flames on Monday. Officials were quick to criticize the protesters for returning to the streets so soon after the disaster. “The rioters will be back tomorrow,” Interior Minister Christophe Castaner told reporters on Friday. “The rioters have visibly not been moved by what happened at Notre-Dame.”


Joan of Arc monument, Toulouse

For many of the protesters, grief over the destruction of the 800-year-old landmark has made way for anger. With smoke still rising from Notre Dame, a group of French tycoons and businessmen pledged €1 billion to the cathedral’s reconstruction, money that the Yellow Vests say could be better spent elsewhere. “If they can give dozens of millions to rebuild Notre Dame, they should stop telling us there is no money to respond to the social emergency,” trade union leader Philippe Martinez told France 24. Some 60,000 police officers were deployed across the country, while a security perimeter was set up around Notre Dame in Paris.


A planned march that would have passed the site was banned by the authorities, but sporadic incidents of vandalism and looting took place across the city, with at least one car torched. There were also clashes between protesters and gendarmerie in the capital. The police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse the crowd, arresting 189 people, according to France Info. Yellow Vest rallies also took place in Nantes, Pau, Caen, Montbeliard, Bordeaux, Lyon and other French cities. The total number of people who took to the streets on Saturday reached 9,600, with 6,700 of them protesting in Paris, the Interior Ministry said.

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“How many of you wouldn’t be scared shitless by the head of the CIA declaring you the next target?”

Mueller Team Ignored Findings Of Former US Intelligence Officials (SP)

A group of former military and intelligence officials, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), conducted their own forensic tests that received a bit of attention in the United States press because they were some of the first people with prior backgrounds in government to question the central allegations of hacking into DNC servers. They asserted their examinations of the files showed DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were leaked, not hacked. However, the Mueller report makes no mention of the claims made by VIPS over the past two to three years—not even to debunk them.

The report stated, “Unit 26165 officers appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks in July 2016.” But “appear to have” indicates the team did not have incontrovertible proof. They could only speculate. “The Office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries, who visited during the summer of 2016,” the report acknowledged. “For example, public reporting identified Andrew Müller-Maguhn as a WikiLeaks associate who may have assisted with the transfer of these stolen documents to WikiLeaks.”

Yet, this is wildly misleading. The source for this example is a 2018 profile of Müller-Maguhn by journalist Ellen Nakashima that was published by the Washington Post. Müller-Maguhn told Nakashima it “would be insane” for him to hand deliver sensitive files, especially when the CIA has labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” “How many of you wouldn’t be scared shitless by the head of the CIA declaring you the next target?,” he said.

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Comey didn’t want Assange’s knowledge to get public, because it would have killed the “Russians hacked the DNC” narrative. And that would be a threat to the whole Russiand-did-it story Mueller kept in his report. These guys are just story tellers, it’s fiction.

The Deep State vs. WikiLeaks (Escobar)

[..] it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic; that’s when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA’s vast hacking/cyber espionage repertoire. This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart. WikiLeaks got Vault 7 in early 2017. At the time WikiLeaks had already published the DNC files – which the unimpeachable Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) systematically proved was a leak, not a hack. The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was that “the Russians” hacked the DNC servers.

Assange was always adamant; that was not the work of a state actor – and he could prove it technically. There was some movement towards a deal, brokered by one of Assange’s lawyers; WikiLeaks would not publish the most damning Vault 7 information in exchange for Assange’s safe passage to be interviewed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ). The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI director James Comey killed it. The question is why. Some theoretically sound reconstructions of Comey’s move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew – via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it was a leak.

Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources; one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel. There was nothing for Comey to “investigate”. Or there would have, if Comey had ordered the FBI to examine the DNC servers. So why talk to Julian Assange? The release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in “Grasshopper” and the “Marble Framework” were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran, or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework “destroys this story about Russian hacking.”

No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”, usually manipulated by Russia. Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7, has not faced a US court yet. There’s no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he aggress to testify against Julian Assange. It’s a long and winding road, to be traversed in at least two years, if Julian Assange is ever to be extradited to the US.

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Moreno is a corrupt criminal.

Julian Assange Put Through ‘Hell’ At Embassy, Says Former Diplomat (Sky)

Julian Assange was always respectful but went through “hell” in the Ecuadorian embassy as officials tried to “break him down”, according to a former senior diplomat. Fidel Narvaez worked at the London embassy for six of the seven years the WikiLeaks figurehead lived there and says they became friends. Assange was evicted a few weeks ago after a change of government in Ecuador. Its new president, Lenin Moreno, publicly criticised the whistleblower and gave the impression the government ended his stay after growing tired of his alleged bad behaviour.


Assange birthday party, Ecuador embassy, July 2015

Speaking to Sky News, Fidel Narvaez disputed claims that Assange had assaulted guards, didn’t clean up after himself, didn’t take care of his pet cat and even smeared human excrement on the walls of the embassy. He said: “Julian had a respectful relationship with staff, diplomats and administrative staff. I don’t recall a single incident when he disrespected someone until I left in July 2018. “He was 100% respectful. Clean and tidy? What is clean and tidy? Did he put the dishes in the dishwasher? Probably not at weekends. Is that a crime?”


Mr Narvaez worked at the embassy in Knightsbridge in central London between 2010 and 2018 as consul and first secretary. Assange went into the embassy in June 2012 and did not leave until he was carted away by British police a few weeks ago with the agreement of the authorities in Ecuador. Mr Narvaez said: “The last year was hell for Julian in that embassy. “I was there the first months of the last year and I witnessed when Julian was told that he would no longer be allowed to have internet or access to the phone and wouldn’t be able to have visitors. “The strategy was very clear – break him down. The government didn’t know how to end the asylum and face the catastrophic historical shame for doing that.”

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Oh, that’s right, Brexit!

UK PM May To Be Told To Quit By Top Conservative (R.)

A top member of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party will tell her in the coming week that she must step down by the end of June or her lawmakers will try again to depose her, the Sunday Times reported, without citing sources. May survived a vote of no confidence in December and although party rules mean lawmakers cannot challenge her again until a year has passed, lawmaker Graham Brady will tell her the rules will be changed unless she quits, the newspaper said.


Brady, who chairs the Conservative Party’s influential 1922 Committee of backbench lawmakers, will tell her that 70 percent of her members of parliament want her to resign over her handling of Brexit, the Sunday Times said. Britain was originally due to leave the European Union on March 29, but that deadline was pushed back to April 12 and then again to Oct. 31 as May failed to break an impasse in parliament on the terms of Brexit.

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Third world real estate.

London Home Prices Had Biggest Monthly Drop Since Lehman (DQ)

London home prices in February took their biggest one-off hit since the dark days of the last crisis, according to data published Thursday by the UK’s Office of National Statistics. The average price of a residential property in London tumbled 2% in February from January, the sharpest monthly drop since November 2008, when the City was grappling with the fallout from the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. For the 12-month period, the average price dropped 3.8%, the sharpest year-over-year fall since August 2009, during the Global Financial Crisis. The average home in London is now worth £459,800 ($600,000), down 5.9% from the peak in July 2017:

But it’s still more than double the median UK home price (£225,000). In other words, while prices may have moderated somewhat they’re still well beyond the reach of average Londoners. Here are some more standouts from the ONS report: The slowdown is spreading out from London. Home prices in the south east of England recorded an annual decline (-1.8%) for the first time since 2011. Prices also fell in the North East and remained virtually unchanged in Yorkshire and the Humber. Home price annual growth is slowing in England; prices tick down in Scotland.


Prices did increase in a few places. Home price growth was strongest in Wales and the North West, increasing in both regions by 4.1% in the year to February 2019. It’s a very different story in the capital, which during the first decade and a half of this century enjoyed much faster home price growth than the rest of the country but which is now suffering a much sharper slowdown.The most exclusive boroughs of the city center — often referred to as Prime Central London — have been hit hardest, with prices falling an estimated 14% from their 2014 peak.

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It’s all interconnected and we are killing it all.

Battle To Save Amphibians From Global Killer Disease (G.)

Frogs, salamanders, and toads across the world are now under attack from a widening range of interacting pathogens that threaten to devastate global amphibian populations. That is the stark warning of leading zoological experts who will gather this week in London in a bid to establish an emergency plan to save these endangered creatures. “The world’s amphibians are facing a new crisis, one that is caused by attacks by multiple pathogens,” said Professor Trent Garner of the Zoological Society of London, which is hosting the conference. “We desperately need to devise strategies that can protect them.”


The golden toad of Costa Rica, which is now considered to be extinct. Photograph: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

Thirty years ago experts noticed that amphibian populations were plunging in different areas of the world as an emerging fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis, or simply chytrid, began taking its toll of frogs and toads. At least 100 species have since been wiped off the face of the planet. These include the golden toad in Costa Rica (Incilius periglenes); the southern gastric-brooding frog of Australia (Rheobatrachus silus); and Arthur’s stubfoot toad (Atelopus arthuri) in Ecuador. Hundreds of other amphibian species have also suffered severe declines – as a result of chytrid infections.


But scientists also know chytrid is not the only cause of the amphibian deaths now occurring around the world. Another pathogen known as the ranavirus, which exists in at least four varieties, has been observed killing amphibians. In addition they found that there are at least two species of chytrid, and within these, many different genetic types.

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Nitrous oxide emissions, that is. But the article says nothing about amounts, so what to make of it? How much of the stuff is there?

Emissions From Thawing Arctic Permafrost 12 Times Higher Than Thought (Ind.)

Emissions from thawing Arctic permafrost may be 12 times higher than previously thought, scientists have discovered. Permafrost is a mix of soil, rock or sediment that has been frozen for at least two years which is mostly found in the uppermost areas where temperatures are rising more quickly than the rest of the world. When it thaws because of global warming, it releases large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise and creating a perpetual cycle where more permafrost melts. Nitrous oxide, a third greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, stays in the atmosphere for an average of 114 years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).


It has “conventionally been assumed to have minimal emissions in permafrost regions”, according to a fresh study published in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journal. However the research team behind the study, led by Harvard University scientists, has found that nitrous oxide emissions are 12 times higher than previously thought and therefore more of a threat. The group used a small plane with a probe on its nose to measure greenhouse gases over 120sqm of thawing permafrost in the North Slope of Alaska. They found that nitrous oxide emissions reached what was previously thought to be the expected yearly limit within just one month in August 2013. Nitrous oxide also poses a second threat because “up in the stratosphere, sunlight and oxygen team up to convert the gas into nitrogen oxides, which eat at the ozone”, Harvard University said in a statement.

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Attenborough trying to make up for lost time.

Climate Change: The Facts – Our Greatest Threat, Laid Bare (G.)

You sense that Our Planet was unfortunately timed for the BBC. In Climate Change: The Facts, the gloves are now not so much off as thrown to the floor in a certain rage. It’s right there in the title, bold and stark. This hour-long documentary, part of the Our Planet Matters season, is wide-ranging yet concise, easy to understand, not blighted by the ego of, say, An Inconvenient Truth, and it is designed to do for climate change denial what 2017’s Blue Planet did for single-use plastic. That’s not to say it should be Attenborough’s responsibility to get the wider public to pay attention, nor that it is down to the BBC. It isn’t.

But Climate Change: The Facts is a rousing call to arms. It is an alarm clock set at a horrifying volume. The first 40 minutes are given over to what Attenborough calls, without hyperbole, “our greatest threat in thousands of years”. Expert after expert explains the consequences of rising CO2 levels, on the ice caps, on coastal regions, on weather and wildlife and society itself. The most powerful moments are in footage shot not by expert crews who have spent years on location, but on shaky cameras, capturing the very moment at which the reality of our warming planet struck the person holding the phone.

In Cairns, Australia, flying foxes are unable to survive the extreme temperatures; rescuers survey the terrible massacre, and we learn that while 350 were saved, 11,000 died. A man and his son talk through their escape from raging wildfires, over the film they took while attempting to drive through a cavern of blazing red trees. These are horror movies playing out in miniature. It is difficult to watch even five minutes of this and remain somehow neutral, or unconvinced.

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After -how many?- too many years of silence, David Attenborough finally speaks out in his 90s. A very late wake-up. By now he’s so old, it’s not going to hurt him much, he won’t be around to see it. What if he’d done this 20-30-30 years ago? He’s THE voice on planet issues. And hey, he’s got the best camera people on the topic, so yeah, go full screen for the entire hour this doc lasts (click YouTube, bottom right corner).

Climate Change – The Facts (David Attenborough)

After one of the hottest years on record, Sir David Attenborough looks at the science of climate change and potential solutions to this global threat. Interviews with some of the world’s leading climate scientists explore recent extreme weather conditions such as unprecedented storms and catastrophic wildfires. They also reveal what dangerous levels of climate change could mean for both human populations and the natural world in the future.

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Apr 172019
 


Jacques-Louis David Coronation of Napoleon in 1804 in Nôtre-Dame Cathedral 1805-7 (10 metres wide, 6 metres tall)

 

World Trade Suffers Biggest Collapse Since Financial Crisis (ZH)
Iran Parliament Declares US Central Command A ‘Terrorist Organization’ (RT)
CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump (MoA)
Affidavit Tries To Put WikiLeaks In Cahoots With The Taliban (ZH)
Suzie Dawson on Julian Assange’s Mistreatment (Unity4J)
Jesus Christ, Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies Of The State (JW)
First They Came For Assange (Varoufakis)
Macron Commits To Rebuilding Notre Dame Within Five Years (Ind.)
May Has ‘No Chance’ Of Avoiding EU Elections (Ind.)
Tory Deregulation Agenda Is Stalling Brexit Talks – Corbyn (G.)
Not In It To Win It: The Dirty Little Secret Of The Democrats’ 2020 Battle (G.)
Six-Decade Plankton Study Charts Rise Of Ocean Plastic Waste (G.)
Mark Carney Tells Global Banks They Cannot Ignore Climate Change (G.)
The Kids Aren’t Nearly Angry Enough (Spiegel)

 

 

The financial crisis is 11-12 years old. But the deception is brilliant: everybody thinks it’s over.

World Trade Suffers Biggest Collapse Since Financial Crisis (ZH)

The recent collapse in world trade volume is the worst since the financial crisis and as dangerous as during the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, according to The Telegraph. Data from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis revealed that world trade volume dropped 1.8% in the three months to January compared to the preceding three months as a synchronized global downturn gained momentum. “An industrial slump has been triggered by a perfect storm of factors, including China’s slowdown, the car industry downturn, Brexit paralysis and Donald Trump’s attempt to upend the international trade system with tariffs on European and Chinese goods,” explained The Telegraph.

A further escalation of the trade war between the U.S. and China could spark a world trade recession. Already, Washington has imposed steep tariffs on Chinese imports worth $250bn in a tit-for-tat battle with industrial centers in Asia and Germany experiencing sharp drops in trade in recent months. The Telegraph describes the sudden loss in trade momentum is equivalent to the months after the dot com bubble imploded in 2001 when trade volumes sank as much as 2.2%. Today’s current move is the biggest fall since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 when global trade plummeted, diving as much as 12.7%. The IMF warned last week that this is a “delicate moment” for the global economy as many countries are in the midst of a severe slowdown.

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“We” are losing to Iran all over again.

Iran Parliament Declares US Central Command A ‘Terrorist Organization’ (RT)

The US Central Command (CENTCOM) has been designated as a “terrorist organization” by the Iranian parliament, in a mirror response to Washington’s blacklisting of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard. All organizations, institutions and forces under CENTCOM command were acknowledged to be “terrorists” by the overwhelming majority of the Iranian MPs, who approved the contents of the bill, which also condemns the US move to blacklist the IRGC, an official military branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Armed Forces. “The Islamic Republic of Iran’s government and Armed Forces are required to adopt preventive actions and preemptive defensive measures whenever necessary, to deter any hostile US forces’ use of any possibilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests,” the bill states, according to Fars news.


Anyone offering military, intelligence, financial, or any other support to CENTCOM and its affiliate forces will be considered supporters of terrorism. The 13-article legislation also mandates the general staff to begin gathering intelligence about CENTCOM activities so that the material can be used in Iranian courts to prosecute specific individuals. The bill, however, does not mention the exact mechanisms through which Americans are expected to be brought to justice under Iranian laws. Last week the US, for the first time ever, designated an official foreign military institution –the IRGC– as a terrorist organization, as tensions between the states were pushed to the limit following President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iranian Nuclear deal (JCPOA) and the reintroduction of sanctions that followed.

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Ducks and babies. We kid you not.

CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump (MoA)

An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel, torture queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more aggression against Russia. In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the alleged ‘Novichok’ poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries. The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration’s relation with Russia: “The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration s increasingly hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “

Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel’s relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA’s position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: “Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian intelligence agent. London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. …

[..] During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the strong option was to expel 60 diplomats. Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.

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Can we throw in Pol Pot next? I’ll see your Bin Laden and raise you a Stalin.

Affidavit Tries To Put WikiLeaks In Cahoots With The Taliban (ZH)

The document uses maximal and hyped language to describe “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States,” yet struggles to ascertain whether “illegal agreement that Assange and Manning reached” specifically led to the release of the document trove (obviously crucial for charges against Assange to hold up). Concerning a potential extradition to the US, “probable cause” is cited to be the hundreds of messages sent between Manning and Assange on the Jabber platform. The argument is that Assange and Manning understood that it “would cause injury to the United States,” especially with US forces active on the ground in Afghanistan.

But on this point of whether the leaks did actual harm and damage to US efforts, the document is left reaching, trying to spin and insinuate a narrative that puts WikiLeaks and terrorist groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda in cahoots. It starts by claiming that “after the release of the Afghanistan War Reports, a member of the Taliban contacted the New York Times.” The supposed Taliban member said, “We are studying the report… If they are US spies, then we will know how to punish them.” This strange and somewhat comical example is meant to support the notion that Assange ultimately aided America’s enemies with the leaks. [..] Worse, the affidavit makes Osama bin Laden — killed in a 2011 raid by US Navy Seals while living comfortably in an Abbottabad, Pakistan compound — out to be a WikiLeaks fan, given letters had been found instructing an al-Qaeda member to “gather” the publicly available material leaked by Manning.

Somehow this is meant to imply WikiLeaks in a round-about way assisted al-Qaeda’s mission. The FBI is perhaps left grasping with this “bin Laden benefited” theory given the relative flimsiness of evidence to support the original “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” aspect on which the case originated.

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Brilliant argument: “The question is not whether Julian is a journalist, the question is whether THEY are journalists.”

Suzie Dawson on Julian Assange’s Mistreatment (Unity4J)

Suzie Dawson powerfully expresses her feelings of righteous indignation on witnessing Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean Embassy, and reflects on his mistreatment by the establishment and their propaganda arm, the complicit corporate media.

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So let that Pope of yours stand up for Julian. Do something useful with the $600 million already donated for the Notre Dame. THAT is what your Jesus would have done.

Jesus Christ, Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies Of The State (JW)

And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him. Indeed, it is fitting that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the police state of his day. A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle.


In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire. Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day had all of the characteristics of a police state: secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state. For all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.

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Yanis has this completely upside down, like so many other well-meaning people:

“Let’s join forces to block #Assange’s extradition from any European country to the #US so that he can travel to Stockholm & give his accusers an opportunity to be heard”.

The accusers, if they are real, which is by no means clear, have been silenced by the Swedish government for a reason. And to say now that you can’t speak on the allegations because you too are a man, only reinforces that reason.

Assange has offered for years to talk, and for his accusers to be heard. That never needed to take place in Stockholm, and it does not now. It wouldn’t help anyone.

First They Came For Assange (Varoufakis)

My meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange all took place in the same small room. As the intelligence services of a variety of countries know, I visited Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy many times between the fall of 2015 and December 2018. What these snoops do not know is the relief I felt every time I left. I wanted to meet Assange because of my deep appreciation of the original WikiLeaks concept. As a teenager reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I, too, was troubled by the prospect of a high-tech surveillance state and its likely effect on human relations. Assange’s early writings – particularly his idea of using states’ own technology to create a huge digital mirror that could show everyone what they were up to – filled me with hope that we might collectively defeat Big Brother.

By the time I met Assange, that early hope had faded. Surrounded by bookcases featuring Ecuadorian literature and government publications, we would sit and chat late into the night. A device on top of a bookshelf emitted mind-numbing white noise to counter listening devices. As time passed, the claustrophobic living room, the badly hidden ceiling-mounted camera pointing at me, the white noise, and the stale air made me want to run out into the street. Assange’s detractors have been saying for years that his confinement was self-inflicted: he hid in Ecuador’s embassy because he jumped bail in the United Kingdom to avoid answering sexual assault allegations in Sweden. As a man, I feel I have no right to express an opinion regarding those allegations. Women must be heard when reporting assault.

Only the violence that men have inflicted upon women for millennia is viler than the disrespect and denigration to which women are subjected when they speak up. I recall saying to Julian that, had it been me, I would want to confront my accusers, and listen to them carefully and respectfully, regardless of whether official charges had been brought. He replied that he, too, wanted that. “But, Yanis,” he said, “if I were to go to Stockholm, they would throw me in solitary and, before I got a chance to answer any allegations, I would be bundled into a plane heading for a US supermax prison.” To drive the point home, he showed me his lawyers’ offer to Swedish authorities to go to Stockholm if they guaranteed that he would not be extradited to the United States on espionage charges. Sweden never considered the proposal.

During Assange’s years in Ecuador’s embassy, in circumstances that the United Nations deemed “arbitrary detention,” many friends and colleagues mocked his fear – and lambasted me for believing him. Last September, the historian and feminist intellectual Germaine Greer summed up that belief on Australian public radio: “He won’t be extradited to the United States,” she said derisively, blaming Julian’s lawyers for misleading him into fearing such an extradition while collecting his book’s royalties.

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Make that 50. Jesus himself would have to help. Alternatively, we can see this as a sign that Macron doesn’t expect to last as president for 5 years.

Macron Commits To Rebuilding Notre Dame Within Five Years (Ind.)

French president Emmanuel Macron promised that Notre Dame will be renovated within five years and will be “even better than before” after the devastating fire that ravaged much of the building. Investigators have already begun assessing the damage and questioning people to try to establish what started the blaze that consumed the roof and spire of the 850-year-old Gothic masterpiece. More then €600m has already been raised for rebuilding and restoration and the UK has said it stands ready to help. Firefighters battled for 14 hours to extinguish the flames, as onlookers feared the entire structure would be wrecked. But Parisians breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear the twin medieval bell towers had been spared and later when fire investigators revealed that “most precious” treasures have been saved.


They included the Crown of Thorns, a relic venerated by Christians and believed to have been worn by Jesus Christ, as well as the cathedral’s 18th-century organ and a number of artworks. European Council president Donald Tusk called on the European Union’s member countries to help, saying the site in central Paris is a symbol of what binds Europe together. The fire, which began on Monday evening, is thought to have been caused by an accident rather than arson, the Paris public prosecutor said. Architects warned repairs could take decades but in a televised address to the nation Mr Macron said: “We will rebuild Notre Dame even more beautifully, and I want it to be completed in five years, we can do it.”

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“..experts have concluded..”

May Has ‘No Chance’ Of Avoiding EU Elections (Ind.)

Theresa May has “no chance” of passing her Brexit deal in time to pull the UK out of the European parliament elections and avoid a likely devastating defeat, experts have concluded. Time has already effectively run out on attempts to ratify the agreement by 22 May, they say – despite the prime minister insisting talks with Labour can still deliver a compromise before the deadline. The verdict puts the Conservatives on course to lose most of their MEPs, polls suggest, as Leave voters protest at the failure to deliver Brexit, a disastrous result that would trigger huge pressure on Ms May to resign. The staging of the elections will also be a personal humiliation for the prime minister, who repeatedly told MPs they should not take place, three years after the Brexit referendum.


More talks with Labour are planned, as No 10 claims the complex (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill – required to ratify EU withdrawal – can clear parliament before voters go to the polls on 23 May. But two respected think tanks have told The Independent the timetable is a fantasy, with one suggesting it will take “several months” to approve the legislation, which could involve up to 100 votes. Unlike the simple meaningful vote, the full legislation will trigger lengthy and gruelling parliamentary trench warfare, with echoes of the bitter battles over the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties. Approval of Maastricht took 41 days in 1993, while Lisbon required 25 days in 2008 – but there are only 17 sitting days planned before 22 May.

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There is no way they could ever agree.

Tory Deregulation Agenda Is Stalling Brexit Talks – Corbyn (G.)

Jeremy Corbyn has said Brexit talks with the government are stalling because of a Tory desire for post-withdrawal deregulation, including as part of a US trade deal. Corbyn said Labour had been putting forward a robust case for a customs union during the talks over the past week but suggested he feared the two sides would not find common ground. “There has to be access to European markets and above all there has to be a dynamic relationship to protect the conditions and rights that we’ve got for environment and consumer workplace rights,” he said. “We’ve put those cases very robustly to the government and there’s no agreement as yet.”


Meetings are scheduled this week between ministers and shadow ministers on environmental protections, security and workers’ rights, which Corbyn described as “quite interesting, quite long technical discussions, particularly on environment regulations”. However, there will be no discussion before Easter on the big issues of a customs union or a confirmatory referendum. Corbyn underlined again that an agreement could only be reached if Theresa May was prepared to accept Labour’s central demand for a common external tariff policy with the EU. “The government doesn’t appear to be shifting the red lines because they’ve got a big pressure in the Tory party that actually wants to turn this country into a deregulated, low-tax society which will do a deal with Trump. I don’t want to do that,” he said.

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The Delusional Party.

Not In It To Win It: The Dirty Little Secret Of The Democrats’ 2020 Battle (G.)

Political scientists are quick to point out two reasons why a record number of candidates is running for president on the Democratic side in 2020. One: the Republican president, Donald Trump, is vulnerable with a low-40s approval rating, so the Democratic nominee has a good shot at winning the White House. Two: there’s no bigfoot candidate this time around – no incumbent, no Hillary Clinton – to dissuade other potential candidates from running. Those conditions have lured 15 major candidates so far into the race for the Democratic nomination, with as many as half a dozen more potentially getting in, including former vice-president Joe Biden, who has yet to officially declare. The previous record for major candidates in a presidential primary field was 17, on the Republican side in 2016.


But analysts also nod to a third factor inflating the gigantic 2020 Democratic field, a not-quite-dirty little secret about presidential politics. The fact is, not all of the people running for president are actually running for president. “There is almost always at least a few candidates in these kinds of fields that are either there to push an issue agenda, or these are candidates who are interested in building their name recognition, building their stature and status within the party,” said John Sides, professor of political science at George Washington University and editor-in-chief of The Monkey Cage politics analysis site.

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How much plastic is inside of you?

Six-Decade Plankton Study Charts Rise Of Ocean Plastic Waste (G.)

A trove of data showing when the Atlantic began choking with plastic has been uncovered in the handwritten logbooks of a little-known but doggedly persistent plankton study dating back to the middle of the last century. From fishing twine found in the ocean in the 50s, then a first carrier bag in 1965, it reflects how the marine refuse problem grew from small, largely ignored incidents to become a matter of global concern. The unique dataset, published in Nature Communications, is based on records from the continuous plankton recorder, a torpedo-shaped marine sampling device that has been towed across more than 6.5m nautical miles of ocean over the past 60 years.


Bryozoans, nudibranchs, crabs, and barnacles live on a clear plastic bottle in the ocean. Photograph: Justin Hofman/Greenpeace/PA

Based firstly in Hull, then Edinburgh and Plymouth, the long-running programme was initially designed to collect pelagic plankton, which are an indicator of water quality and also a source of food for whales and other marine life. But the operators have also kept a chart-and-counter track of entanglements that disrupted their work: what snared the equipment, where it happened and when. This has proved a valuable source of data on plastic waste, according to contemporary researchers. “This consistent time series provides some of the earliest records of plastic entanglement, and is the first to confirm a significant increase in open ocean plastics in recent decades,” the paper notes.

The start of the problem was so slow it was barely noticed. The log shows strands of fishing twine found off the east coast of Iceland in 1957, then a carrier bag in waters to the north-west of Ireland eight years later. The paper states this was a couple of years before the first reports of turtles and seabirds becoming ensnared in plastic. Over the following decades the problem grew steadily. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, fewer than 1% of tows were disrupted by entanglements with synthetic materials. By the 90s it was almost 2%, and in the first decade of this century the increase “was of an order of magnitude”, according to the paper. The figure is now hovering somewhere between 3% and 4%.

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Note: if you find yourself agreeing with Carney, and you fail to see the absurdity in this, seek treatment. Carney is a full-time douche. He’s saying going green is a profit opportunity.

Mark Carney Tells Global Banks They Cannot Ignore Climate Change (G.)

The global financial system faces an existential threat from climate change and must take urgent steps to reform, the governors of the Bank of England and France’s central bank have warned, writing in the Guardian. In an article published in the Guardian on Wednesday aimed at the international financial community, Mark Carney, the Bank’s governor, and Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Banque de France, said financial regulators, banks and insurers around the world had to “raise the bar” to avoid catastrophe. They said: “As financial policymakers and prudential supervisors we cannot ignore the obvious physical risks before our eyes. Climate change is a global problem, which requires global solutions, in which the whole financial sector has a central role to play.”


The warning comes as concern over the impact of climate change and the lack of urgent action is increasing, reflected in the Extinction Rebellion protests and schoolchildren’s strikes across the world. The heads of two of the world’s most influential central banks urged other financial regulators around the world to carry out climate change stress tests to spot any risks in the system, while also calling for more collaboration between nations on the issue. They warned that a “massive reallocation of capital” was necessary to prevent global warming above the 2°C maximum target set by the Paris climate agreement, with the banking system required to play a pivotal role. “If some companies and industries fail to adjust to this new world, they will fail to exist,” Carney and De Galhau said.

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Apr 162019
 
 April 16, 2019  Posted by at 8:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  12 Responses »


Charles Negre ‘The Vampire’, Henri Le Secq stands next to Stryge grotesque, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris 1853

 

Notre Dame ‘Saved From Total Destruction’ (CNBC)
The Notre Dame Fire And The Future Of History (Wired)
Notre Dame Was Built To Last Until The End Of The World (Mason)
Salma Hayek’s Husband Pledges €100 Million For Notre Dame Rebuild (Fox)
Redacted Mueller Report To Be Released To Congress & Public On Thursday (ZH)
Uncle Tom’s Empire (Hopkins)
Why Isn’t Assange Charged With ‘Collusion With Russia’? (Andrew McCarthy)
Assange Suffered Severe Psychological And Physical Harm – Doctors (IC)
Useful Idiots on Parade (Kunstler)
Respecting the Other (Dmitry Orlov)
Fed’s Rosengren Says Central Bank Should Target An Inflation Range (R.)
Free Our Marbles From British Museum’s ‘Murky Prison’ – Greek President (R.)
Winds Carry Microplastics Even On To Remote Mountaintops (G.)

 

 

The Notre Dame is first and foremost a work of art designed to make one marvel at what people can build with their hands.

Notre Dame ‘Saved From Total Destruction’ (CNBC)

Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral has been saved from “total destruction,” according to a French fire official, after a massive fire ripped through the structure on Monday and caused the roof and main spire to collapse. The blaze burned for eight hours, but has now been largely extinguished, according to firefighters. One official was quoted as saying the two iconic rectangular towers have been saved, which will come a relief after one of the towers caught fire earlier in the evening. Earlier, a French Interior Ministry official had said that firefighters might not be able to save the cathedral. “The worst has been avoided, but the battle isn’t fully won yet,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement outside of the cathedral.


He also expressed his sympathies to Catholics around the world, the people of Paris and the people of France. The fire broke out just days before Easter. “We will rebuild the cathedral together,” Macron said, adding that France will start an international fundraising campaign to raise money for the renovations. President Macron is treating the fire as a national emergency. Residents living close to the cathedral were evacuated in case the building collapsed, said Paris Mayor Anne Hildago. The area surrounding the cathedral, Paris’ Ile de la Cite, was also evacuated, according to Reuters.

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Our Lady in the cloud.

The Notre Dame Fire And The Future Of History (Wired)

Some of the wood that burned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on Monday was put in place in the year 1160. The beams and exterior of the roof over the nave, the long main section of the building, date from between 1220 and 1240. Nearly a millennium ago it was forest; today, after a catastrophe that cuts to the heart of French culture and human history, it’s ash. “It was one of the oldest—until today—surviving roofs of that kind,” says Robert Bork, an architectural historian at the University of Iowa. “It’s incomparable.” [..] By Monday night, the art and treasured objects kept in the cathedral had been saved, it seemed. But architectural historians around the world were emailing each other frantically: If the lower three-quarters of the building resist, if the stone walls stand, it’ll be possible to imagine restoring Notre Dame.

“If the fire burns out while the stone vaults are intact, then the repair is a repair,” Bork says. “If the vaults start to crack and fall down, then the building is going to be lost. We’d be talking about rebuilding, not a repair.” Parisian fire brigades held the line. They kept the fire from spreading into the towers of the western face of the cathedral. The wood—itself an architectural treasure—was lost. “Cathedrals like Chartres had all burned off,” Bork says. “This was quite special, and it was from the time that they were really developing roof techniques.” But the rest of the building seems to have been spared. [..] because it survived largely intact into the digital era, Notre Dame lives on in the virtual world, too—and that may make its restoration all the more complete.

For the last half-decade or so, an architectural historian named Andrew Tallon worked with laser scanners to capture the entirety of the cathedral’s interior and exterior in meticulous 3D point clouds. His billion points of light revealed a living structure; the magnificent flying buttresses had indeed held the walls true, but the Gallery of Kings, statues on the western facade, were a foot out of plumb, Tallon told National Geographic in 2015. Just as it had in Victor Hugo’s day, the entire building had in fact fallen into disrepair by then. In 2017, the problems became too serious to ignore. The New York Times reported on stacks of masonry, fallen or removed, in the gardens. Gargoyles had given way to plastic pipes to drain away rainwater. A remodel was imperative, though as Time reported, it wasn’t clear who would pay for it.

This is the renovation project that was underway when the fire started, and architects now hope that Tallon’s scans may provide a map for keeping on track whatever rebuilding will have to take place. Tallon died late last year, and his mentor, a pioneer in using modern engineering forensics in historic architecture named Robert Mark, died in early 2019. “Both of them loved this building,” Bork says. “I’m just glad they didn’t have to see this.”

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“By the time it is rebuilt, as a partial replica, most people alive today will already be dead.”

Notre Dame Was Built To Last Until The End Of The World (Mason)

I’m writing this because I have to. The first time I saw Notre Dame was in 1980. Summertime, early morning, before the bakeries were open. The slanted light made the reliefs on the doors stand out. The second time I saw it, a year later, somebody (I have now been reminded it was Bill Ford) read out to me a complete analysis of the three doors of the façade. Deliberately assymetrical, each one contains a moral universe. As I write it will be lucky if they survive. The spire is gone, the stained glass is gone, the wood of the roof timber is gone. By the time it is rebuilt, as a partial replica, most people alive today will already be dead. Notre Dame was -and will be- a monument to civilisation. In an age when there were no information storage devices other than handwritten books, giant stone buildings were society’s hard drives.

This is like losing the hard drive of medieval Paris. Every inch had meaning – not just the meaning imbued by the carpenter and the stonemason, but the meaning imbued by the student, the monk, the penitent -and then by the emergent French bourgeois society. I know almost nothing about architecture, but I do understand music. And the music composed in Notre Dame during the high period of feudalism is some of the most complex, beautiful and emotionally expressive you will ever hear. Understanding the music helped me understand the building. Andrieu’s requiem dirge for Guillaume de Machaut, O Fleur des Fleurs, seems to be on loop inside my head. The challenge was to make it as complicated as possible but as directly expressive.

The one time I did the full tour of the inside was in 1986, before mass global tourism took off. I didn’t understand its vastness even then. If you have ever seen it, you have to hold those memories close now, because you will probably never in your lifetime see the whole thing rebuilt. Last year I went to Tito’s birthplace in Croatia. A small village of wood huts. A tank could have destroyed it in half an hour. It was a reminder that, until the mid 20thcentury, most of the world was built of wood, thatch and fragile bricks. Notre Dame was built to last until the end of the world, out of stone, glass and vast forests of thick timber frames.


Picked up on Twitter: Brooke Windsor – I took this photo as we were leaving #NotreDame about an hour before it caught on fire. I almost went up to the dad and asked if he wanted it. Now I wish I had. Twitter if you have any magic, help him find this

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Let’s do some gossip.

Salma Hayek’s Husband Pledges €100 Million For Notre Dame Rebuild (Fox)

Salma Hayek’s husband, the French billionaire François-Henri Pinault, pledged almost $113 million to rebuild Paris’ historic Notre Dame Cathedral after Monday’s devastating fire. Pinault announced Tuesday that he will draw almost $113 million in funds from his family’s investment firm, Artemis, “to participate in the effort that will be necessary for the complete reconstruction of Notre-Dame,” the French newspaper Le Figaro reported. Pinault, 56, who is the chairman and CEO of Kering, a Paris-based luxury group behind brands including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, married the Mexican and American actress Salma Hayek in Paris in 2009, Yahoo News reported.


The couple owns a residence nearby the destroyed 12th-century medieval Catholic cathedral. “As many others I’m in deep shock and sadness to witness the beauty of Notre-Dame turn into smoke. I love you Paris,” Hayek said on Instagram, sharing an image of the cathedral ablaze. Pinault’s father, the 82-year-old Francois Pinault, is worth $37.3 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. The family’s contribution is the first major donation to reconstruction efforts after the fire engulfed the historic structure, leading to the collapse of the structure’s main spire.

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Get ready for more of the same Russiagate. Just look at that cartoon.

Redacted Mueller Report To Be Released To Congress & Public On Thursday (ZH)

Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec announced this morning Attorney General William Barr is expected to send Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to Congress and make it public on Thursday (ahead of the long weekend’s news cycle). Those following Mueller’s investigation will pore over the report’s almost 400 pages for any new disclosures of contacts between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian operatives who interfered in the 2016 election, as well as evidence that the president sought to obstruct justice by interfering in the probe.


But, as Bloomberg reports, readers also will puzzle over sections that Barr has said he’ll blank out. He’s said the redacted material will be color-coded to indicate whether it involves classified material, grand jury information or damage to the reputation of a private citizen “peripheral” to the investigation. One key question the report may answer is why Mueller decided not to make a recommendation one way or the other on whether to charge Trump with obstructing justice.

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Brilliant absolute must read.

Uncle Tom’s Empire (Hopkins)

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but, given the arrest of Julian Assange last week, and the awkward and cowardly responses thereto, I felt it necessary to abandon my customary literary standards and spew out a spineless, hypocritical “hot take” professing my concern about the dangerous precedent the U.S. government may be setting by extraditing and prosecuting a publisher for exposing American war crimes and such, while at the same time making it abundantly clear how much I personally loathe Assange, and consider him an enemy of America, and freedom, and want the authorities to crush him like a cockroach.

Now I want to be absolutely clear. I totally defend Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle of freedom of the press, and whatever. And I am all for exposing American war crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes, or inconvenience them in any way). At the same time, while I totally support all that, I feel compelled to express my support together with my personal loathing of Assange, who, if all those important principles weren’t involved, I would want to see taken out and shot, or at least locked up in Super-Max solitary … not for any crime in particular, but just because I personally loathe him so much.

I’m not quite sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never actually met the man. I just have this weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a horrible, disgusting, extremist person who is working for the Russians and is probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like that feeling I had, back in the Winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which he was going to give to those Al Qaeda terrorists who were bayonetting little babies in their incubators, or the feeling I still have, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed, and who is going to set fire to the Capitol building, declare himself American Hitler, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews.

I don’t know where these feelings come from. If you challenged me, I probably couldn’t really support them with any, like, actual facts or anything, at least not in any kind of rational way. Being an introspective sort of person, I do sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings are the result of all the propaganda and relentless psychological and emotional conditioning that the ruling classes and the corporate media have subjected me to since the day I was born, and that influential people in my social circle have repeated, over and over again, in such a manner as to make it clear that contradicting their views would be extremely unwelcome, and might negatively impact my social status, and my prospects for professional advancement.

Take my loathing of Assange, for example. I feel like I can’t even write a column condemning his arrest and extradition without gratuitously mocking or insulting the man. When I try to, I feel this sudden fear of being denounced as a “Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a “Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and unfriended by all my Facebook friends. Worse, I get this sickening feeling that unless I qualify my unqualified support for freedom of press, and transparency, and so on, with some sort of vicious, vindictive remark about the state of Assange’s body odor, and how he’s probably got cooties, or has pooped his pants, or some other childish and sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I might have had of getting published in a respectable publication goodbye.

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Because then they would have to prove it.

Why Isn’t Assange Charged With ‘Collusion With Russia’? (Andrew McCarthy)

So . . . I have a few questions. First, why was there no Sanders-Russia probe? Why, when President Obama directed John Brennan, his hyper-political CIA director, to rush out a report on Russia’s influence operations, did we not hear about the WikiLeaks-Russia objective of helping Sanders win the Democratic nomination? Brennan & Co. couldn’t tell us enough about our intelligence-agency mind readers’ confidence that Putin was rootin’ for Trump. Why nothing about the conspirators’ Feelin’ the Bern? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think there is any basis for a criminal investigation of Senator Sanders.

But there appears to have been no criminal predicate for a “collusion” investigation of Donald Trump, either — not a shred of public evidence that he conspired in the Putin regime’s hacking, other than that presented in the Clinton-campaign-sponsored Steele dossier (if you can call that “evidence” — though even Christopher Steele admits it’s not). Yet, Trump was subjected to an investigation for more than two years — on the gossamer-light theory that Trump stood to benefit from Moscow’s perfidy. Yes, of course, this cui bono claim was amplified by what were said to be Trump’s intriguing, if noncriminal, ties to Russia.

To my knowledge, however, the mythical pee tape of Steele lore has never been located; it is unlikely, then, that there are any Trump photos that compare, intrigue-wise, to a shirtless Bernie boozing it up in the Soviet Union. Surely that should have been worth a FISA warrant or four. A more serious question: Why hasn’t Assange been indicted for criminal collusion with the Kremlin — the same hacking conspiracy for which Mueller indicted the Russian operatives with whom Mueller says Assange collaborated? The same conspiracy for which the president of the United States, though not guilty, was under the FBI’s microscope for nearly three years?

The most striking thing about the Assange indictment that the Justice Department did file is how thin it is, and how tenuous. Leaping years backwards, ignoring “collusion with Russia,” prosecutors allege a single cyber-theft count: a conspiracy between Assange and then–Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning to steal U.S. defense secrets. This lone charge is punishable by as little as no jail time and a maximum sentence of just five years’ imprisonment (considerably less than the seven years Assange spent holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid prosecution).

This is very peculiar. Manning, Assange’s co-conspirator, has already been convicted of multiple felony violations of the espionage act — serious crimes that the Assange indictment says WikiLeaks helped Manning commit . . . but which the Justice Department has not charged against Assange. Why? Probably because espionage charges are time-barred. Which brings us to the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that Assange will never see the inside of an American courtroom.

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Who’s going to sue the politicians responsible?

Assange Suffered Severe Psychological And Physical Harm – Doctors (IC)

In an April 8 letter sent to both U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet and Dunja Mijatovic, the commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe, Crosby added that during her February visit to the embassy, the conditions of Assange’s confinement had significantly worsened since her first visit in 2017. Her letter noted the severe psychological toll Assange suffered in his prolonged and indefinite confinement. “Mr. Assange’s situation [inside the embassy] differs from a typical prisoner in a conventional prison,” she wrote in her letter. “In fact, his position is worse than a conventional prison in many respects. His confinement is indefinite and uncertain, which increases chronic stress and its myriad of chronic physical and serious psychological risks, including suicide.”

During seven years of confinement, Assange had suffered “a number of serious deleterious effects of sunlight deprivation,” she wrote, including “neuropsychological impairment, weakened bones, decreased immune function, and increased risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer.” He also displayed physical and psychological symptoms as a result of “prolonged social isolation and sensory deprivation.” “I believe the psychological, physical, and social [aftereffects] will be long-lasting and severe,” Crosby wrote.Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested by British authorities on April 11, three days after her letter was sent to the U.N. and the Council of Europe. [..] Crosby wrote in her letter to the U.N. and the Council of Europe that Assange suffered from “multiple medical conditions” that had become “more complex and urgent” over the two years she had evaluated him.

“He has no ability to access necessary medical care, and he does not have access to the outdoors and sunlight. Even minimum standards for prisoners dictate at least one hour of sunlight daily and access to natural light.” While the British government and Assange’s many critics say that it was his choice to stay in the embassy, Crosby argues that Assange was denied the fundamental right to health care that should have been afforded to him as a refugee.In her April 8 letter, Crosby wrote that the “highest priority” for Assange’s medical care was his “critical need for an oral surgery procedure,” adding that “the severe daily pain” from his dental condition is “inhumane.” She had consulted with a dentist who had examined Assange, she wrote, and learned that the dental surgery could not be performed in the embassy. In her letter, Crosby says that the British government had repeatedly rejected requests to give Assange safe passage to a hospital for treatment.

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Jim illustrates the demise of Slate.

Useful Idiots on Parade (Kunstler)

There is probably a good reason that US government authorities did not essay to make Mr. Assange a witness on-the-record: because his testimony would have prevented Mr. Mueller from bringing his bullshit charges against the Russian internet trolls he indicted — who will never have to come to trial in the USA in any case, and thus never refute The Narrative so earnestly promoted by the Mueller team — until it all fell apart on March 24. But these are not terms that the Slate Political Gabfest chose to follow in their analysis of Julian Assange and his activities. Rather we got the following, transcribed verbatim:


Bazelon: “Assange is so detestable it’s really tempting to get as far away from him as possible. One look at him and I feel that way about him.” Plotz: “Do you think Joe Biden would get a little handsy with him?” Bazelon: “He’s far creepier.” Dickerson: “You don’t find that Dickensian beard alluring?” Bazelon: “It’s awful. But I always thought he was clean-shaven yucky.” Such are the Deep Thoughts of America’s leading Wokester political analysts. One also might ask why Mr. Assange has not been charged by the US with espionage, if that’s what their beef with him really is. In the meantime, behold the disgraceful episode of American journalists pimping for the leviathan state’s privilege to suppress the free flow of news and their own freedom of the press. Imagine them subjecting Daniel Ellsberg to such a hazing.

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I miss Dmitry.

Respecting the Other (Dmitry Orlov)

One of my old friends’ father was at one time something of a Cold Warrior: he did something or other for the US defense establishment—nuclear submarine-related, if I recall correctly. This work activity apparently led him to develop a particularly virulent form of Russophobia; not so much a phobia as a pronounced loathing of all things Russian. According to my friend, her father would compulsively talk about Russia in overly negative terms. He would also sneeze a lot (allergies, perhaps), and she said that it was often difficult for her to distinguish his sneezes from his use of the word “Russia” as an expletive. But perhaps she was trying to draw a distinction without a difference: her father was allergic to Russia, his allergy caused him to sneeze a lot and also to develop a touch of Tourette’s, thus his sneezes came out sounding like “Russia!”

What had caused him to develop such a jaundiced view of Russia? The reason is easy to guess: his work activity on behalf of the government forced him to focus closely on what his superiors labeled as “the Russian threat.” Unfolded a bit, it would no doubt turn out that what Russia threatened was Americans’ self-generated fiction of overwhelming military superiority. Unlike the United States, which had developed any number of plans to destroy the Soviet Union (of which nothing ever came due to said lack of overwhelming military superiority) the Soviet Union had never developed any such plans. And this was utterly infuriating to certain people in the US. Was this truly necessary, or was this an accident?

We could take into account geopolitical, military or economic considerations, consider the (no longer relevant) clash of socialist vs. capitalist ideologies or any number of other irrelevancies. Or we could find hints of what’s really behind this syndrome from certain efforts to combat it. Consider this lyrics from Sting’s 1985 debut solo album “The Dream of Blue Turtles.” Sting sang soulfully: “I hope the Russians love their children too.” From what mystical source sprang Sting’s forlorn hope? That the Russians may be a race of soulless automatons hell-bent on wanton destruction of all life on Earth, but that perhaps there is just a tiny streak of humanity running through their character—they love their children too—and that it will hold them back? Sting’s Russia is almost pure evil, but not quite, and a tiny speck of goodness is what keeps the world balanced on the edge of destruction.

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The Fed should do no such thing; it should close its doors before there’s no economy left.

Fed’s Rosengren Says Central Bank Should Target An Inflation Range (R.)

The U.S. Federal Reserve should shore up its ability to fight economic downturns by committing to let inflation run above 2% “in good times,” a top policymaker said on Monday. The comments by Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Fed, echoed remarks made earlier in the day by another Fed policymaker who cited the U.S. economy’s falling a bit short on the central bank’s inflation target as a problem. The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, is currently at 1.8%. Rosengren said he supports an approach that would see the Fed, which is “forced to accept” inflation below its 2% target during recessions, commit to achieve above-2% inflation “in good times.” Policymakers, for instance, could target a range of 1.5-2.5%.


“My own preference would be an inflation range,” because hitting the current target will only get harder with rates as low as they are, Rosengren said at Davidson College in North Carolina. “Even though we’re only missing by a little bit it actually does matter if you miss by a little bit on a regular basis.” The remarks come ahead of a broad policy review being conducted by the Fed this year. How the Fed meets its inflation target is one of the key topics. The president of the Chicago Fed, Charles Evans, said earlier on Monday that the U.S. central bank should embrace inflation above its target half the time and consider cutting rates if prices do not rise as fast as expected.

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What I always like most about this is the Brits’ defence is they bought them legally from an occupying force.

Free Our Marbles From British Museum’s ‘Murky Prison’ – Greek President (R.)

Greece’s president called on Monday for Britain to free the Parthenon marbles from the “murky prison” of its national museum, upping the rhetoric in a near 200-year-old campaign for the sculptures’ return. President Prokopis Pavlopoulos spoke at Athens’ own glass-fronted Acropolis Museum, which campaigners hope will one day house the classical reliefs and figures taken by a British diplomat in the early nineteenth century. “Let the British Museum come here and make the comparison between this (Acropolis) museum of light and the murky, if I may say, prison of the British Museum where the Parthenon Marbles are held as trophies,” Pavlopoulos said. There was no immediate response from the British Museum.


Britain’s Lord Elgin removed the 2,500-year-old sculptures from the Acropolis temple in Athens during a period when Greece was under Ottoman rule. They have been placed in a gallery inside the British Museum in London, lit by a long skylight. Greece has repeatedly requested their return since its independence in 1832, and stepped up its campaign in 2009 when it opened its new museum at the foot of the Acropolis hill. That building holds the sculptures that Elgin left behind alongside plaster casts of the missing pieces, lit by the sun coming through a glass wall looking over the original site. “This museum can host the Marbles,” Pavlopoulos said. “We are fighting a holy battle for a monument which is unique.” The British Museum has refused to return the sculptures, saying they were acquired by Elgin under a legal contract with the Ottoman empire.

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How much plastic is there inside of you?

Winds Carry Microplastics Even On To Remote Mountaintops (G.)

Microplastic is raining down on even remote mountaintops, a new study has revealed, with winds having the capacity to carry the pollution “anywhere and everywhere”. The scientists were astounded by the quantities of microplastic falling from the sky in a supposedly pristine place such as the French stretch of the Pyrenees mountains. Researchers are now finding microplastics everywhere they look; in rivers, the deepest oceans and soils around the world. Other recent studies have found microplastics in farmland soils near Shanghai, China, in the Galápagos Islands, a Unesco world heritage site, and in rivers in the Czech Republic.

Humans and other animals are known to consume the tiny plastic particles via food and water, but the potential health effects on people and ecosystems are as yet unknown. However the ubiquity of the pollution means it needs to be taken very seriously, said Steve Allen, at the EcoLab research institute near Toulouse and who led the new work in the Pyrenees: “If it is going to be a problem, it is going to be a very big problem. I don’t think there is an organism on Earth that is immune to this.” About 335m tonnes of plastic is produced each year – while it degrades extremely slowly, it can be broken into smaller and smaller pieces.

Microplastic pollution in rivers and oceans is now well known but just two previous studies have looked at its presence in the air, one in Paris, France, and another in Dongguan, China. Both found a steady fall of particles. The new study, published in Nature Communications, is the first to show microplastic is raining down just as hard in remote environments and that it can travel across significant distances through wind. The team collected samples from high altitudes in the Pyrenees that were far from sources of plastic waste – the nearest village was 6km away, the nearest town 25km, and the nearest city 120km.

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