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Debt Rattle May 24 2023

May 242023
 
 May 24, 2023  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  36 Responses »


Leonardo da Vinci Ginevra de’ Benci c. 1474-78

 

• ‘Counteroffensive’ Will Begin ‘Very Soon’ – Ukrainian Intelligence (RT)
• Ukraine Can’t Win Against Russia – Orban (RT)
• “Obvious” There Will Be “No Victory For The Poor Ukrainians”: Orban (ZH)
• US Must Make Security Deal With Russia – Hungary (RT)
• Orban Thinks NATO Reluctant To Deploy Own Troops To Ukraine (TASS)
• Kremlin Spokesman Sees No Prerequisites For Ukrainian Peace Process (TASS)
• Serb Leader Explains Why West Doesn’t Like Russia (RT)
• Russia Continues To Supply Gas To EU Via Ukraine – Gazprom (RT)
• Beijing Decries ‘Biggest Threat’ Label (RT)
• China Hopes World Adequately Immune From Debt-Driven US Finance Risks (TASS)
• Pentagon Loses A Million F-35 parts (RT)
• Pentagon Can’t Account For 1000s Of Ultra-Expensive F-35 Parts Globally (ZH)
• Why the Conspiracy Theory About Trump and Russia Won’t Go Away (Chris Hedges)
• Whistleblower Says DOJ Interference In Hunter Biden Probe Dates Back Years (JTN)
• First COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit in US Targets Gov’t, Social Media Giants (CHD)

 

 

 

 

FISA

 

 

 

 

No Ukraine

 

 

 

 

Minsk 2019

 

 


M2 data was released today — it is down -4.63% since last year, the fastest pace of money supply destruction since January 1933. The Fed eased at 100 mph, now it is slamming on the brakes and credit markets are about to fly through the windshield.

 

 

Vladimir Putin : For 9 years, the enemy has been waging war against our people. We are told that Russia started the war. No, Russia, with the help of the SMO, is trying to stop this war against our people, who, due to historical injustice, found themselves outside the borders of our Motherland

 

 

 

 

Zero chance of winning, 100% chance of killing more young Ukrainians. No able bodies will be left to rebuild what’s left of the nation after Russia and Poland take their parts. Halliburton will have to come in to do the rebuilding. If Russia lets them.

They’re going to fire missiles into Crimea. The US just gave them the go-ahead..

• ‘Counteroffensive’ Will Begin ‘Very Soon’ – Ukrainian Intelligence (RT)

Ukraine has the weapons it needs to start its much-anticipated “counteroffensive,” but actually defeating Russia will require more, the head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR), Kirill Budanov, said in an interview on Tuesday. “We already have the necessary minimum of weapons” for the attack, Budanov told the Japanese state broadcaster NHK. “I can only say that it will begin soon.” To successfully pursue a long campaign against Russia, however, Ukraine needs even more, according to Budanov. “We need a large stockpile of weapons and ammunition to successfully continue the operation,” he said. “We need more weapons. We need fighter jets. I hope the international community is ready to really help Ukraine.”

Kiev’s top spy added that he would pay close attention to the progress of military aid from the West after the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, where President Vladimir Zelensky made an appearance as a surprise guest. Over the weekend, Zelensky acknowledged the loss of the Donbass fortress of Bakhmut, known by Russians as Artyomovsk. Kiev responded by launching a raid into Russia’s Belgorod Region, which garnered a lot of social media attention but achieved nothing of military importance. Zelensky has assured his Western backers that the long-anticipated “counteroffensive” would be launched as soon as Kiev had accumulated the minimum of weapons and ammunition necessary for the effort, and that Ukraine needed just a bit more time.

Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has sought to manage expectations as well. Last week, Financial Times reported that Kiev has about “five months” to impress Washington, at which point President Joe Biden’s government will be under too much pressure to negotiate. Multiple Western outlets and experts have warned that Russia’s air campaign targeting Ukrainian supply depots and troop concentrations has already affected the planned offensive, going so far as to describe it as a “game changer.” Budanov waved off the campaign by telling NHK that Kiev had shot down 90% of the incoming missiles. He did not comment on last week’s destruction of the US-supplied Patriot air defense system in Kiev.

Sullivan

Read more …

Some partially overlapping articles today. First, on Orban’s speech in Qatar. Later, on Lockheed and the Pentagon working together to fleece the taxpayer.

“Emotionally, it’s tragic, all of our hearts are with the Ukrainians. But I’m speaking as a politician who should save lives..”

• Ukraine Can’t Win Against Russia – Orban (RT)

It’s “obvious” that Kiev can’t win the war against Moscow, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said, urging for a diplomatic solution to the crisis instead of the West continuing to pour military aid into Ukraine. The PM made the remarks in a Bloomberg interview during the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. “Emotionally, it’s tragic, all of our hearts are with the Ukrainians. But I’m speaking as a politician who should save lives,” Orban stated, noting that Hungary views the ongoing hostilities from a “special angle” that differs from the “mainstream” European position. Hungary itself is “losing lives” daily as well due to the conflict, Orban explained, referring to members of Ukraine’s Hungarian ethnic minority that have been “conscripted” to fight Russia.

He abstained from condemning Moscow for the “invasion” of Ukraine, stating only that the hostilities were due to a major failure in diplomacy. “[The] position of Hungary was, from the very first moment, that this war is the failure of diplomacy, it should have never happened,” Orban stated. “For us it’s obvious that the battlefield solution does not work.” Pressed further on whether, in his opinion, Kiev was able to win the conflict, Orban replied that the course of the hostilities had clearly shown it “obviously” was not possible. The PM also implied neither side could actually win the conflict, adding that it can only end in a “ceasefire” followed by peace talks. “My position is that, looking at the reality, looking at the figures, looking at the surroundings, looking at the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it’s obvious that there’s no victory for the poor Ukrainians on the battlefield.”

Orban’s remarks come as Hungary has opted to block a new €500 million ($544 million) military aid package from the EU’s so-called European Peace Facility (EPF). The fund – which is designed to reimburse the bloc’s own members to send arms and equipment overseas, as well as to finance foreign militaries directly – has been used almost exclusively to pour weaponry into Ukraine. Hungary has taken a neutral stance on the ongoing hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, consistently refusing to provide military aid to Kiev or even allow the transport of military shipments through its territory. Budapest has also opposed the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions, particularly those that would have damaged the country’s own economy, including its nuclear and conventional energy sectors.

Ritter

Read more …

“The war can be stopped only if the Russians can make an agreement with the US. In Europe, we are not happy with that, but it’s the only way out.”

• “Obvious” There Will Be “No Victory For The Poor Ukrainians”: Orban (ZH)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has once again spoken the quiet part out loud, as he continues to be a thorn in the side of NATO and the EU regarding continually escalating arms deliveries to Ukraine, with F-16 fighter jets poised to be delivered to Kiev in the near future. The first day of the annual Qatar Economic Forum (QEF) included a speech and on-stage interview by Orban wherein he bluntly stated that Ukraine can’t win the war against Russia, short of NATO directly sending troops – which it isn’t willing to do, and which Hungary stands against. He also reminded the West that the Hungarian government isn’t part of the “mainstream” European Union approach to the war, but has pursued attempts at peaceful negotiations.

“The only solution is ceasefire, and then after the ceasefire, peace talks should start,” he said. He explained this is the only path forward given Kiev can’t win. As Bloomberg reports, “Hungary was in talks with Qatar to buy gas in an effort to reduce its reliance on Russia for energy and for help to buy Budapest airport,” according to Orban’s words. He had been pressed over the question of Hungary blocking more defense aid to Ukraine, and in that context asserted that ultimately Russia and the US must make a deal to end the war, which is “the only way out”: “Looking at the reality, the figures, the surroundings, the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it is obvious that there is no victory for the poor Ukrainians on the battlefield. That’s my position,” he said, offering an outlook few European leaders would publicly agree with, given their solidarity with Kyiv.

“The war can be stopped only if the Russians can make an agreement with the US. In Europe, we are not happy with that, but it’s the only way out.” His assessment, which is likely going to be deeply unpopular and somewhat divisive in terms of public reception, comes just on the heels of the weekend Russian capture of Bakhmut, which was announced by Wagner Group raising the Russian flag over the strategic city. Despite initial Ukrainian officials rejecting that Bakhmut had fallen, at this point there’s widespread acknowledgement both in international press reports and among Western officials that Russia exercises effective control of the city. Wagner is due to hand captured territory over to regular Russian military forces by June 1.

Read more …

“Orban has repeatedly accused EU leaders of serving American, rather than European, interests by continuing to bankroll Kiev..”

• US Must Make Security Deal With Russia – Hungary (RT)

An agreement between the US and Russia is the only thing that can end the conflict in Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated on Monday. Orban has repeatedly accused EU leaders of serving American, rather than European, interests by continuing to bankroll Kiev. Speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha on Tuesday, Orban reiterated his position that Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield, and that Kiev and its Western backers must pursue peace talks with Russia. “First we should have a ceasefire,” he said. “Then let’s talk about the new security architecture of the European continent.” “The only peace agreement that could close this whole conflict is if it is between Russia and the United States,” he elaborated.

“What is at stake is the future security of Europe. It’s obvious that without the US there is no security architecture for Europe, and now the war can only be stopped if the Russians can make an agreement with the United States.” “As a European I am not happy with that,” he added. “But this is the only way out.” Throughout the conflict, Orban has repeatedly spoken out against the West’s twin policies of military aid to Kiev and sanctions on Moscow, arguing that the former risks escalating the conflict to a global war and the latter harms Europe’s economy more than Russia’s. The Hungarian prime minister has also argued that only Washington has the power to pressure Kiev into peace talks, and that decisions made in Brussels “reflect American interests more often than European ones.”

With the US dragging Europe into a conflict it cannot win, Orban has suggested that “the solution would be a European NATO” without the US as a member. Hungary is currently blocking a €500 million ($540 million) EU military aid package for Ukraine. Apart from his long-standing opposition to escalating the conflict, Orban cited Ukraine’s sanctioning of a Hungarian bank as a reason for the hold up. “If a country like Ukraine would like to get our financial support, they can’t put our companies on a blacklist,” he said on Tuesday. “If you need our money, please respect us.”

Read more …

“We must think of how to save people’s lives. This is my position,” Orban asserted.”

• Orban Thinks NATO Reluctant To Deploy Own Troops To Ukraine (TASS)

Ukraine will not be able to prevail in the conflict with Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Tuesday, noting an unwillingness by NATO to deploy alliance troops to Ukraine and urging that a peaceful settlement be reached as soon as possible. Addressing a public debate at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha on Tuesday, the head of Hungary’s government said, “If you look at how things stand in reality, at the figures, the situation in general, and the fact that NATO is reluctant to send its troops [to Ukraine], you will clearly see that the Ukrainians will be unable to win a victory on the battlefield.” His comment came in response to a question about whether he actually thinks that Ukraine stands no chance of success.


Orban’s speech in Doha, in essence, morphed into an interview with the forum’s moderator and was streamed live on the Hungarian government’s page on Facebook (prohibited in Russia due to its ownership by Meta, which has been designated as an extremist organization). When asked about the conflict in Ukraine, the Hungarian prime minister reiterated that Budapest has favored a peaceful solution from the very start of the conflict while consistently calling for an immediate ceasefire. “We must think of how to save people’s lives. This is my position,” Orban asserted.

Read more …

Talking to Zelensky is no use to begin with.

• Kremlin Spokesman Sees No Prerequisites For Ukrainian Peace Process (TASS)

It would be too early to speak about a peaceful solution of the Ukrainian conflict because no prerequisites for this scenario are currently in place, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has told TASS in an interview. When asked which one of various reconciliation plans, put forward by other countries, would be preferable for Russia and whether Moscow has its own variant, the Kremlin press secretary replied: “It is too early to speak about it. No prerequisites for a peace process are yet in place, evidently.” “The special military operation continues,” he added. Answering to a question of whether the Kremlin was ready to negotiate with anyone from the incumbent Kiev government, Peskov replied: “This is hardly possible, because any negotiations with Russia are prohibited [in Ukraine].” Last October, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky issued a decree banning any talks with Moscow stating that he was not interested in interacting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

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Not “the”, but “a” Serb leader, the president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik. He met with Putin yesterday.

• Serb Leader Explains Why West Doesn’t Like Russia (RT)

Russia has fallen out of grace with the West because it wouldn’t play ball with Europe any longer when it comes to supplying the continent with cheap gas, the president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, said in an interview released on Monday ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Speaking to Russia’s NTV channel, Dodik, who heads one of the regions within Bosnia and Herzegovina that is predominantly populated by Serbs, offered his take on the ongoing Ukraine conflict. He said that “the Russians have been giving cheap gas to Europe and Germany for an unreasonably long time, for years, strengthening their economy.”

“Of course, the West doesn’t like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. How could they like him when he doesn’t give them resources?” he said, adding that the international community should “respect” Russia and understand the role it plays globally. Against this backdrop, Dodik noted that when the hostilities between Moscow and Kiev started over a year ago, Berlin was willing to deliver “only helmets” to Ukraine, but ended up sending Kiev Leopard main battle tanks. “Why should we believe in their good intentions now?” he asked. Dodik went on to point out that while the West is trying to portray itself as a “defender of ordinary people in Ukraine,” it never really cared to protect the population in countries such as Syria, Libya or Yugoslavia. The latter came under “baseless” air strikes conducted by Western countries themselves, he claimed.


Dodik’s remarks come after he held a meeting with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev in Moscow, during which the two discussed regional security. According to the Serb leader, he also informed Patrushev of the challenging conditions Republika Srpska has found itself in due to Western pressure over its refusal to join the sanctions against Russia. Meanwhile, the Republika Srpska leader, who has long promoted his region’s independence, was himself hit by US sanctions in 2017 after Washington accused him of obstructing the 1995 Dayton Accords, which put an end to the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On Tuesday, Dodik is set to sit down with Putin in Moscow, with the agenda expected to revolve around economic cooperation, according to Republika Srpska officials. Dodik said he planned to discuss with the Russian leader “how the world would look in the future.”

Read more …

And Ukraine continues to be paid.

• Russia Continues To Supply Gas To EU Via Ukraine – Gazprom (RT)

Russian energy giant Gazprom continues to supply gas for transit to Western and Central Europe through Ukrainian territory via the Sudzha gas pumping station in amounts approved by Ukraine, the company said on Tuesday. Supplies rose to 41.2 million cubic meters (mcm) on May 23, compared to 40.9 mcm pumped the previous day through the Sudzha entry point, which remains the only operating interconnector in Ukraine. “Gazprom supplies Russian gas for transit through the territory of Ukraine in the amount confirmed by the Ukrainian side through the Sudzha… Application for ‘Sokhranovka’ was rejected,” Gazprom spokesperson Sergey Kupriyanov told reporters.


Ukraine shut down transit through the Sokhranovka station, a key gas transit route which handled around a third of the Russian gas flowing through the country to the EU, in early May, citing “interference by the occupying forces.” Russian gas deliveries to the EU via Ukraine were slashed last May in the aftermath of the bloc’s sweeping sanctions, with shipments plunging to 24 mcm in January this year. Since February, however, daily transit volumes have been gradually increasing. Gas transit through Ukraine remains the only route for Russian supplies to the countries of Western and Central Europe after sabotage attacks in September rendered the Nord Stream pipeline inoperable. Gazprom also exports gas via the TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines to Southern and Southeastern Europe.

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“If China is a threat, then what are some G7 members that go for wars on sovereign states, overthrow legitimate foreign governments, exit multilateral treaties and coerce other countries to sever supply chains?”

• Beijing Decries ‘Biggest Threat’ Label (RT)

The G7 countries will not be able to trick the world into believing that Beijing is undermining global stability, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday. In a series of posts on Twitter, Hua blasted such a stance, writing: “Some G7 members called China ‘the biggest threat to global security and prosperity’. Seriously?” She was apparently referring to remarks by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said during the group’s summit in Hiroshima, Japan, that “China poses the greatest challenge to global security and prosperity in our time,” as he called for decreasing dependence on Chinese supply chains. He added that the UK and G7 were taking steps to prevent Beijing from using “economic coercion to interfere in the sovereign affairs of others.”

“If China is a threat, then what are some G7 members that go for wars on sovereign states, overthrow legitimate foreign governments, exit multilateral treaties and coerce other countries to sever supply chains?” Hua asked. The spokeswoman went on to emphasize China’s place as “the No.1 engine of global economy,” and that Beijing was contributing to global growth more than all G7 members combined while being the second largest donor to UN peacekeeping funding. “The real world will not be brainwashed and fooled,” she said. Sunak’s rebuke of China appeared to be much tougher than G7 joint communique outlining challenges posed by Beijing.

The group’s members, in particular, insisted that they are “prepared to build constructive and stable relations with China,” adding that “we are not decoupling or turning inwards” when it comes to economic ties with the Asian giant. However, the G7 stressed the need for what it called “de-risking and diversifying” and reducing “excessive dependencies in our critical supply chains.” The group also scolded Beijing for “non-market policies and practices, which distort the global economy,” vowing to build resistance to what it termed economic coercion. China’s foreign ministry was not convinced, however, stating that “massive unilateral sanctions and acts of ‘decoupling’… make the US the real coercer” while urging the G7 not to become Washington’s “accomplice” in this regard.

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“Beijing also hopes that “the United States will refrain from harvesting yields around the globe in order to protect its own interests..”

• China Hopes World Adequately Immune From Debt-Driven US Finance Risks (TASS)

China has expressed the hope that the United States, as the world’s largest economy, will not attempt to shift its financial risks onto the international community, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said at a news briefing on Tuesday. “The debt issue is an internal affair of the United States, but given that [the US is] the world’s largest economy, their own situation and political decisions may have critical knock-on effects for the global economy,” Mao said, when asked by a TASS reporter to comment on the ongoing political debate in Washington over raising the US debt ceiling. “Hopefully, the United States will maintain a responsible fiscal and monetary policy and will not shift US risks onto the entire world,” she added. Beijing also hopes that “the United States will refrain from harvesting yields around the globe in order to protect its own interests,” the Chinese diplomat said.


The Global Times reported in March that, as of late January, China was the second largest foreign holder of US debt ($843.7 billion), trailing only Japan, which holds $1.104 trillion in US government securities. The publication mentioned that China has been reducing its holdings of US government debt in recent years. The US government may find itself unable to meet all of its obligations unless Congress agrees to raise the debt ceiling later this month, with technical default otherwise occurring “potentially as early as June 1,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on Monday. Unless a bipartisan compromise on the debt ceiling is hammered out on Capitol Hill in time, she has repeatedly warned, the country may default, which would lead to an “economic and financial catastrophe” for the US that would reverberate across the global economy.

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Two articles on the same topic that -only- partically overlap.

“Only about 30% of America’s F-35 fleet is “fully mission capable” on any given day.”

• Pentagon Loses A Million F-35 parts (RT)

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has been unable to account for about 1 million missing spare parts for its F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, the costliest weapon system in the nation’s history, a government review has found. The lost parts, which include such items as bolts, tires, and landing gear, are valued at about $85 million, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported on Tuesday. Since 2018, the Pentagon has reviewed the circumstances surrounding only 2% of identified parts losses. “Without DOD taking steps to ensure that these spare parts are accountable under a contract, the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) will be unable to either gain or maintain accountability over these spare parts and will not have data, such as locations, costs, and quantities, needed for financial reporting or to ensure that government interests are protected,” the GAO said.

The spare parts are stored around the world for use on the F-35 by the US military and allied nations that have purchased the aircraft, which is made by defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Because the Pentagon’s F-35 JPO lacks a process for tracking losses, Lockheed Martin hasn’t reported on over 900,000 additional spare parts valued at more than $66 million for review, the GAO said. The GAO’s report marks just the latest black eye for the $1.7 trillion F-35 program, which has been plagued by reliability struggles, including an issue with engine vibration that led to a global recall order in March. Only about 30% of America’s F-35 fleet is “fully mission capable” on any given day. US Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Schmidt warned last month that a thin supply of spare parts could jeopardize the ability of American forces to keep the aircraft in service during the country’s next major war.

The GAO report blamed the parts losses partly on the Pentagon’s failure to oversee components that are owned by the DOD and managed by contractors. DOD officials and the contractors haven’t reached an agreement on whether the parts should be categorized as government-furnished property, which hinders the processing of lost inventories. As of last October, the Pentagon had over 19,000 spare parts globally that had been awaiting disposition instructions from the F-35 JPO – for as long as five years in some cases. The GAO said the DOD agreed with its four recommendations on beefing up accounting for the parts pool.

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This is Lockheed’s business model. Nothing is audited, nobody knows where all the parts are, so they have to order again.

• Pentagon Can’t Account For 1000s Of Ultra-Expensive F-35 Parts Globally (ZH)

Just three weeks ago Defense News published an extensive investigative report which posed the question in its headline, Lockheed eyes new F-35 parts deal, but can it handle wartime demands? The report introduced: By the end of the year, a new and unusual deal for the F-35 fighter’s spare parts could be in place — one that would flip the current supply model on its head. If the proposed performance-based logistics contract works the way F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin has promised, it will save the government money, improve the availability of spare parts and give the company greater flexibility on how it assists repairs, such as making it easier to fix a broken part without fabricating a new one. Fast-forward to Tuesday, and the congressional watchdog Government Accountability Office (GOA) released a devastating report which reveals the entire question of “saving the government money” to be laughable and way off.

Bloomberg writes based on the new GOA findings that “The Pentagon can’t account for hundreds of thousands of spare parts worth millions of dollars that are stored worldwide for the US and allies for its costliest weapon, the F-35 jet, according to congressional auditors.” So perhaps the Pentagon should think about simply locating the missing ones first before a giant Lockheed parts overhaul is put into place. Even long before this, going years back, the controversial program to develop the ultra-costly stealth multirole combat aircraft produced periodic headlines like the following in 2020: The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion Accounting Black Hole. The fact that the Department of Defense has failed to pass a DOD-wide audit for the fifth consecutive year has compounded the problem which has been months or years in the making, to the tune of billions lost – which could eventually add up to a one-and-a-half trillion dollars black hole.

This as the GOA report has confirmed the Pentagon’s F-35 program office doesn’t provide oversight for the parts: “Unlike scores of GAO reports and other assessments that analyze the fighter jet’s cost, schedule and flying performance, the new audit delved into the more mundane and largely invisible work of supporting the aircraft once it’s delivered to international customers. The operation and support bill for the F-35 may reach an estimated $1.4 trillion through 2088. Allies don’t own parts and tap into the Defense Department’s worldwide shared pool of spares, including engines, tires, landing gear and items such as bolts, screws and fasteners. The Pentagon’s F-35 program office doesn’t maintain accountability over the parts, “the total value of which is unknown,” the GAO said.” It is manufacturer Lockheed Martin which solely “tracks” the records (supposedly), given the Pentagon has been “unable to provide the cost, total quantity, and locations of spare parts in the global spares pool.”

According to the GOA report: The lack of visibility into the inventory “increases the risk of misstatement on DOD’s financial statements and the risk of mismanagement of the F-35 global spares pool,” it said. All of this comes the same week that multiple media reports and former top US officials have highlighted that contractor price-gouging is common and routine when it comes to the gargantuan defense budget, at taxpayer’s expense of course. For example, former Pentagon insiders told Newsweek that the Biden administration’s ‘blank check’ approach to Ukraine has resulted in a massive arms flow to Kiev “no matter the expense.” Naturally this has resulted in diminished incentive to engage in serious and timely audits for things like expensive jet parts, and to determine where they are globally. Lockheed continues to be front and center in these whistleblower and former DoD official tell-alls…

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“Salacious allegations such as this one would be passed by the Clinton campaign to the FBI and then leaked to the press which would report on the FBI investigations, giving the fabrications credibility.”

• Why the Conspiracy Theory About Trump and Russia Won’t Go Away (Chris Hedges)

All the investigations into Trump’s ties with Russia are unequivocal. There was no collusion. The Steele dossier, financed at first by Republican opponents of Trump and later by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and compiled by former MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, was a fake. The charges in the dossier — which included reports of Trump receiving a “golden shower” from prostituted women in a Moscow hotel room and claims that Trump and the Kremlin had ties going back five years — were discredited by the FBI. Sources, including the one that claimed Trump had long-held ties to the Kremlin, turned out to be fabricated. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller concluded that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Mueller did not indict or accuse anyone of criminally conspiring with Russia.

Durham’s 306-page report, sent to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week, is even more excoriating. It concludes that the FBI engaged in a witch hunt — code named Crossfire Hurricane — orchestrated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that was aided and abetted by senior FBI officials who loathed Trump. The Clinton campaign provided bogus information to the FBI about ties between Trump and Russia, including a charge made by Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias, the General Counsel to the Clinton campaign, that there was a secret channel between the Trump Organization and the Russian Alfa Bank. Salacious allegations such as this one would be passed by the Clinton campaign to the FBI and then leaked to the press which would report on the FBI investigations, giving the fabrications credibility.

For example, the Clinton campaign posted a tweet through Clinton’s Twitter account on Oct. 31, 2016 that read: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based Bank.” The tweet, Durham’s report notes, “included a statement from Clinton campaign advisor Jake Sullivan that made reference to the media coverage of the article and stated, in relevant part, that the allegations in the articles ‘could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow[,]’ that ‘[t]his secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia[,]’ and that ‘[w]e can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.’” The FBI later determined there were no ties between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank.

Tammy Bruce

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The FBI whistleblowers are angry.

“They r being treated like skunks at a picnic under ur watch UNACCEPTABLE u must protect them from retaliation it’s the law.”

• Whistleblower Says DOJ Interference In Hunter Biden Probe Dates Back Years (JTN)

An IRS agent working with federal prosecutors and investigators on the Hunter Biden tax probe is alleging the agency ignored his team’s warnings about years of improprieties by Justice Department officials supervising the case. The allegation appeared in a May 18 letter the agent sent to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, and it was made public Monday evening as part of a whistleblower package his supervisor sent Congress and the Office of Special Counsel, the government’s official whistleblower protection agency. Last week, attorneys for an IRS supervisory special agent (SSA) informed Congress that the DOJ had removed their client and his entire team from the investigation in what they deemed an act of retaliation.

The SSA came forward in late April, alleging that federal prosecutors had engaged in “preferential treatment and politics” to prevent charges from being filed against Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden. The whistleblower further alleged that his entire team had been sidelined after he made protected disclosures. He also asserted that Biden appointees had limited the ability of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to pursue charges against his son by refusing to grant Weiss permission do so within their jurisdictions. That claim appeared to undercut testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had contended that Weiss enjoyed full freedom to pursue the investigation and to bring charges in another jurisdiction should the need arise.

The whistleblower approached IRS internal watchdog late last year with the help of attorney Mark Zaid, who previously represented whistleblowers whose disclosures led to the first impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. A May 20 letter from the whistleblower’s current counsel to Werfel, however, references the May 18 letter sent by one of the supervisory agent’s subordinates. That communication suggests IRS agents have been concerned for years about the DOJ’s conduct in the Hunter Biden probe and felt left “out on an island” because the agency brass would not intervene. Former DOJ lawyer Mark Lytle and former congressional investigator Tristan Leavitt, who now serves as president of Empower Oversight, currently represent the unidentified whistleblower. In the letter, the pair pointed to a protected disclosure from one of the IRS supervisory special agent’s subordinates made directly to Werfel following the team’s removal from the case.

In the disclosure, the case agent, a subordinate of Lytle and Leavitt’s client, recounts his extensive, but unsuccessful efforts to highlight the issues, before contending the agency’s decision to remove him and the team meant the IRS had sided with the officials facing allegations of impropriety. “For the last couple years, my SSA and I have tried to gain the attention of our senior leadership about certain issues prevalent regarding the investigation,” he told Werfel. “I have asked for countless meetings with our chief and deputy chief, often to be left out on an island and not heard from. The lack of IRS-CI senior leadership involvement is deeply troubling and unacceptable.” [..] The latest revelations generated an immediate rebuke of the IRS from Republican Sen, Charles Grassley of Iowa, a longtime champion of whistleblowers. “IRS commissioner Werfel: what r u doing to protect IRS whistleblowers??” Grassley tweeted Monday evening. “They r being treated like skunks at a picnic under ur watch UNACCEPTABLE u must protect them from retaliation it’s the law.”

Hunter

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Many more will follow. And Big Pharma has immunity.

• First COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit in US Targets Gov’t, Social Media Giants (CHD)

Five people injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with a father whose 16-year-old son died from vaccine-induced cardiac arrest, are suing the Biden administration and top U.S. public health officials. In a lawsuit filed Monday, the plaintiffs — including Brianne Dressen who suffered severe nerve damage after taking the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine — allege the U.S. government colluded with social media companies to censor them when they posted stories about their personal vaccine injury experiences. Defendants include President Biden and top-ranking White House officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This is the first lawsuit brought by U.S. citizens injured by the COVID-19 vaccines [..]

Dressen — a preschool teacher from Saratoga Springs, Utah — volunteered to participate in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial for its COVID-19 shot. Now, she says, she is “collateral damage of the pandemic.” Dressen co-chairs React19, a “science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm COVID-19 vaccine adverse events globally.” After receiving the AstraZeneca shot, Dressen experienced extensive adverse effects — including doubled and blurry vision, severe sensitivity to sound and light, heart and blood pressure fluctuations and intense brain fog — that worsened over time. She said Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, GoFundMe, Reddit and Instagram removed content she posted about her injuries.

According to Dressen, the plaintiffs’ experiences of censorship “pale in comparison to the thousands of Americans we know who all have experienced the same thing.” “There is nothing scarier than reaching out for help only to be silenced,” Dressen told The Defender. “It was as scary as the vaccine reaction itself. “Our constitutional freedoms must be protected, regardless of whether or not we are in a national emergency,” Dressen added. Dressen — who now experiences “permanent disability” with “ups and downs” — said she and the other plaintiffs are “not fighting this fight for a select few” but are fighting on behalf of the “tens of thousands who are experiencing the same kind of censorship.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with.
— Isaac Asimov (I Asimov, 1995)

 

 

Antonova

 

 

UN

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fairywren

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 13 2023

May 132023
 
 May 13, 2023  Posted by at 8:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


William Adolphe Bouguereau Girl with a pomegranate 1875

 

• Zelensky ‘Will End Up Like Hitler’ – Medvedev (RT)
• Ukraine Wants To End War By Winter, Says Oleksii Danilov (RT)
• False Claims About Russia Continue To Cloud The ‘West’s’ Vision (MoA)
• Beltway Mediocrities Bumble Toward Armageddon (Eve Ottenberg)
• People In West Are Paying For Their Leaders’ Mistakes – Peskov (TASS)
• ‘Migrant Village’ For Conservative Americans To Be Built In Russia (RT)
• Pentagon Acknowledges Uncertainty in Defending Against Hypersonic Missiles (ET)
• EU Warns China To Use Influence With Russia To End War In Ukraine (SCMP)
• Grain Deal Extension Possible Only If Russian Part Implemented – Peskov (TASS)
• The Smell of Goose Cooking (Jim Kunstler)
• James Woods Rips McCarthy Over Biden Border BS (AW)
• Open Border Catastrophe is the Cloward-Piven Plan to Destroy America (Wayne Root)
• Comer’s Presser And Biden’s Family (Denninger)
• Who Is Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk’s Pick For New Twitter CEO? (Ghaffary)
• “Veganism is Bad for You – Now I Only Eat Red Meat” – Bear Grylls (DS)

 

 

 

 

RFK Russell

 

 

Fenton excess deaths

 

 

 

 

Very fine people

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The creature in green wished death on everyone in the Kremlin. And not by hand. Who will die how, we do not know, because the ways of the Lord are inscrutable. But the drug addict in Kyiv just has a chance to disappear from his own hands. Go nuts by committing cowardly suicide. Like Hitler swallowing dog poison.”

• Zelensky ‘Will End Up Like Hitler’ – Medvedev (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky could suffer the same fate as Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has claimed. The comments came in response to Zelensky’s suggestion that Kremlin officials would meet a “sad end.” “We do not know who will meet which end,” Medvedev wrote on Telegram, before comparing the Ukrainian president to Hitler, who committed suicide during the final stages of World War II as Soviet troops stormed Berlin. The former Russian leader also accused Zelensky of “wishing death to everyone in the Kremlin.” His remarks came in response to an interview published by the BBC on Friday, in which Zelensky stated: “Believe me, those in the Kremlin… it will end badly for them.” The Ukrainian president expressed his desire for the rapid demise of the current Russian leadership, claiming that they “will certainly not die a natural death.”


The interview with Zelensky comes less than two weeks after a drone attack on the Kremlin, which Moscow described as an assassination attempt against President Vladimir Putin and an act of terrorism. The Russian leader was not at the Kremlin at the time of the incident. Russia accused Kiev of orchestrating the attack and said it reserves the right to respond as it sees fit. Ukraine denied any involvement in the incident, although the attack prompted Medvedev to call for the “physical removal” of Zelensky. Kiev’s intelligence chief, Kirill Budanov, later vowed to “keep killing Russians anywhere” until Ukraine’s “complete victory.” The Kremlin branded the statement “truly heinous,” and said it was confirmation that Kiev was involved in orchestrating terrorist attacks.

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Talk is cheap.

• Ukraine Wants To End War By Winter, Says Oleksii Danilov (RT)

By winter, we want to end the war completely, Oleksii Danilov, secretary of the Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, told Report. According to him, the Ukrainian military knows exactly what they have to do: “They are experts and have proven to the whole world that our army is ready for battle, moreover, it is fully creative, and we strike at the enemy from where they least expect it. I think it will be the same this time.” Danilov noted that the main thing is the result: “We must liberate our territories. Taking into account all the factors, the measures will start at the necessary time. We must start on time, not early or late. We have a common plan – to liberate all our territories from the terrorists who attacked us. The only thing left is time. Whether it will be one or more operations depends on many circumstances. We will not be limited by time. We will fight as long as it takes.”

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“Only a realistic assessment and more respect for Russia’s capabilities can correct the mistake of waging and losing a proxy war against it.”

• False Claims About Russia Continue To Cloud The ‘West’s’ Vision (MoA)

The pro-Ukrainian Spectator states correctly that the sanctions on Russia have failed. But its reasoning is dubious: “The West embarked on its sanctions war with an exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world. As we have discovered, non-western countries lack the will to impose sanctions on either Russia or on Russian oligarchs. The results of the miscalculation are there for all to see. In April last year, the IMF forecast that the Russian economy would contract by 8.5 per cent in 2022 and by a further 2.3 per cent this year. As it turned out, GDP fell by just 2.1 per cent last year, and this year the IMF is forecasting a small rise of 0.7 per cent. And that is all in spite of the war in Ukraine going much more badly than many imagined it would in February of last year. The Russian economy has not been destroyed; it has merely been reconfigured, reorientated to look eastwards and southwards rather than westwards.”

Yes, the ‘West’ had an “exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world”. But that is only a part of the problem. The ‘West’ still thinks it is superior to other countries even as at least some other countries have caught up with it and are, in parts, superior in the use of science and technology. Moreover the ‘West’ thought that Russia was inferior to it. In 2015 the late Senator John McCain called it a “gas station masquerading as a country”: “Look, Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” McCain said. “It’s kleptocracy. It’s corruption. It’s a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy, and so economic sanctions are important.” In the early 1990s Russia surely was down. But it wasn’t out. It had a heavy industry and everything it needed to feed it. It had well educated people and large scientific community.

When McCain spoke, 25 years after Russia’s downfall, the country was largely back in the upper league. Its per head production of steel, cement, energy and food was and is higher than in most ‘western’ countries. Those are the basics numbers one needs to judge an industrial country and its capabilities, not some dubious number like the Gross Domestic Product which includes ‘services’ of dubious value. (For example the share of health expenditure in the quite high U.S. GDP is 16.8% with a worse outcome for the general population than in less spending European countries.) As it has now become clear even to the Spectator that the sanctions on Russia have failed one would hope that the ‘West’ would come to a more realistic view of itself and of Russia economic capabilities. Unfortunately that is not yet the case.

Witness Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis who in March 2023 basically repeated McCain’s false claim: “… DeSantis said of Putin. “And so, he’s basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons and one of the things we could be doing better is utilizing our own energy resources in the US.” The ‘West’ will continue to underestimate Russia’s capability as long as such false claims are still believed. Only a realistic assessment and more respect for Russia’s capabilities can correct the mistake of waging and losing a proxy war against it.

Sachs

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“This very unfortunate and wildly provocative legislation mandates “the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over..”

• Beltway Mediocrities Bumble Toward Armageddon (Eve Ottenberg)

Our government is run by second-raters. Mediocrities in the state department and national security apparatus have seized the political steering wheel, because president Joe Biden, like senator Dianne “No Show” Feinstein and many others in our extensive gerontocracy do not inspire confidence. And the results are disastrous for Americans. De-dollarization across much of the planet and the possibility of a two-front, conceivably radioactive war against China and/or Russia. You think these two developments sound far-fetched? Well, the former is already underway, and as for the latter, rabid neo-cons and jingoistic four-star generals have stepped into the vacuum at the top and on your TV screen, and these dimwits can’t imagine losing, so now we move closer than ever before, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to igniting nuclear Armageddon.

Just picture the Ukrainian drone that struck the Kremlin May 3 and ask yourself what would have happened had a Russian drone collided with the roof of the white house? The U.S. might well have launched nuclear missiles – amirite? We denizens of planet earth are all very lucky, and especially those of us who reside in American cities, that Russian leaders were rational enough not to target western metropolises with nuclear warheads. They have made clear that they won’t be further provoked, even by preposterous U.S. media claims that the Kremlin droned itself, claims that reveal yet again two sorry facts: first, our press outlets think we are morons and second, they parrot CIA talking points.

That’s the hot war. Then there’s the economic one. Dollar boosters like Treasury secretary Janet Yellen like to note that it would be very difficult for any other country’s money to replace the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. True enough. But who says the world has to HAVE a reserve currency? What China, Russia and the Global South show, as they stop trading in dollars and dump U.S. Treasuries, is that they can conduct business in their own currencies and will do so, having witnessed Washington’s idiotic sanctions on numerous nations and thus having been terrorized by the imbecilic weaponization of the dollar. So most of the world, aside from the west, now takes steps to abandon the U.S. financially. The dollar’s reign is ending, and soon we Americans will face a radically altered and indisputably grimmer future. All thanks to the stupidity of the very pedestrian people at the top in Washington, starting back in the Clinton administration.

As for the China-Russia alliance, anyone with a brain could see that coming. But not our congressmembers. And those forewarned had not a care in the world. As long ago as 1997, senator Joe Biden proclaimed: “And then the Russians say to me ‘You keep expanding NATO, we’re going to make friends with China.’ I almost burst out laughing. I could barely contain myself, I said ‘Good luck to you guys. If China doesn’t work out, try Iran.’” Well, who’s laughing now? Not the U.S. president, who can’t even get China’s leader to answer his phone calls. Not the American people, who, according to some polls (58 percent, said a Reuters-Ipsos poll in October), worry that this administration of very unexceptional people will enrage the Russia-China colossus and thus stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

Meanwhile congress throws gasoline on this political dumpster fire with its Ukrainian Victory Resolution. In the House, Tennessee Dem Steve Cohen and South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson sponsored this bill. A companion resolution, introduced by senators – Connecticut Dem Richard Blumenthal, liberal darling and Rhode Island Dem Sheldon Whitehouse, and South Carolina Republican Lindsay “Bombs Away” Graham – now percolates through that chamber of the capitol. This very unfortunate and wildly provocative legislation mandates “the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over,” according to Daniel Larison in Responsible Statecraft April 28.

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But their media won’t tell them..

• People In West Are Paying For Their Leaders’ Mistakes – Peskov (TASS)

People in the West should understand that they are paying the erroneous and ineffective policy of their leaders, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. “More and more analysts [in the West] begin to elaborate on the topic of the efficiency of the collective West’s policy, on the topic of the efficiency of the [anti-Russian] sanctions,” he said. “It is rather good than bad.” “We would like people in the collective West to know that they have to reap the consequences of the erroneous, wrong and ineffective policy of their leaders,” the Kremlin spokesman stressed.

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“Today they have 70 genders, tomorrow who knows what,” Beslangurov told the conference. “Many normal people do not understand this, and they want to emigrate..”

• ‘Migrant Village’ For Conservative Americans To Be Built In Russia (RT)

Construction of an “American village” for 200 families of conservative immigrants will start in Moscow Region in 2024, immigration attorney Timur Beslangurov has revealed. Beslangurov, a partner in the Vista law firm, brought up the new settlement at a session of the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum on Thursday. “Basically, they are Orthodox Christians, Americans and Canadians who, for ideological reasons, want to move to Russia,” he said. The regional government approved the construction, but the prospective immigrants are funding the settlement themselves, according to Beslangurov. It will be built in the Serpukhov district, due south of the Russian capital. Tens of thousands of Westerners would like to move to Russia, the attorney claimed, including people with no Russian roots.


“The reasons are known, it’s the imposition of radical left-liberal values in the West, which basically have no limits. Today they have 70 genders, tomorrow who knows what,” Beslangurov told the conference. “Many normal people do not understand this, and they want to emigrate. Many choose Russia, but face a huge number of bureaucratic problems related to the imperfection of Russian immigration laws.” One potential group of immigrants are traditionalist Catholics who are “white Americans with many children,” said Beslangurov, adding that the US government considers them “domestic terrorists.” A FBI memo made public in February referred to “radical-traditionalist Catholic” believers as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” After 19 Republican state attorneys-general demanded of the federal government to stop its “anti-Catholic bigotry,” the FBI disavowed the document.

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In short: they have no idea. For one thing, they can’t test it.

• Pentagon Acknowledges Uncertainty in Defending Against Hypersonic Missiles (ET)

The United States Department of Defense (DOD) is seeking nearly $30 billion in its $842 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) budget request for missile defeat and defense programs across all branches of the military. Right now, the DOD is in a race to develop its own hypersonic missiles and engineer effective defenses against the high-velocity, maneuverable missiles being developed by Russia and, particularly, by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). During questioning by Senate Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chair Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in a May 9 budget hearing, four flag officers said some existing systems have “capabilities” against hypersonic weapons but did not know for sure until they are tested against the evolving missile systems.

King was not happy. “It seems to me that we are spending a lot more money to developing hypersonic missiles than we are developing capabilities to defend against them,” he said. King asked Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Adm. Jon A. Hill if an aircraft carrier could be defended against a hypersonic missile attack. “We have the capability to stop it in two places, in the boost-glide phase” and when the missile re-enters the atmosphere, Hill said, noting the Navy’s SM-6 missiles are “cruise missile killers” designed to track and kill fast-moving, maneuverable targets that can fly high and skim the surface. “It would be defeated by a destroyer defending a carrier.”

Noting Ukrainians claim they shot down a Russian hypersonic weapon last week with a Patriot anti-air missile provided by the U.S., Hill said the Patriot systems, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles (THAAD), and Aegis ballistic defense system all have “capability” demonstrated in tests against hypersonics. “THAAD operates on the edge of the atmosphere,” he said. “We haven’t tested it against hypersonic, but I’m willing to bet there are capacities that we can leverage there.” [..] King said these ant-missile systems are based on technologies from the 1980-90s and asked why DOD is not experimenting with using direct energy weapons to knock down missiles. At $4 to $10 million each, using missiles in a “bullet on bullet approach is an expensive proposition” in defending against other missiles.

Developing a “directed energy” weapon for missile defense has been “a target for a period of time,” Hill said with prototypes being tested in the fleet. “It is scaling its way there. That work is being done today.” King said he’s been lobbying to aggressively ramp up direct energy weapons development for five years without “any sense of urgency” from the DOD. Direct energy is “clearly preferable to a $4 million bullet,” he said. “More investment is required,” Hill said. “It is all science and engineering right now.”

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“EU Warns China” equals: they have no idea what their place in the world is. What are they going to do? Stop imports from China?

First time I’ve seen Borrell claim that “what is happening in Ukraine is an existential threat for us..” He stole that line from Putin. But it obviously doesn’t work. The existence of Russia is not the same as the “existence” of a fleeting political and economic bloc.

• EU Warns China To Use Influence With Russia To End War In Ukraine (SCMP)

The European Union has warned China again to use its influence to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, or their already strained relations will worsen. “Life is complicated,” said top diplomat Josep Borrell at a press conference in Sweden on Friday evening. “If I don’t like your behaviour, you cannot expect to be good friends. It is as simple as that.” He welcomed the news that China’s special envoy for Eurasia would embark on a trip to Ukraine, Russia and other European capitals next Monday in a bid to help resolve the 15-month armed conflict. “It is so important that China understands that what is happening in Ukraine is an existential threat for us, and we expect that China will use its role and its responsibilities. If this is not the case, our relationship will not be so good.”

“We had been asking China to get involved with Ukraine, and this phone call with President Xi [Jinping] was the first small step. And this special envoy is another step towards China using its influence to stop this war,” Borrell told the Post, in a separate conversation. But he added that “we know China is practising pro-Russian neutrality”. “So this [peace] initiative is important for us, because we cannot have a good relationship with China if China is clearly supporting Russia.” Borrell spoke to the Post on the eve of a debate focused on China involving the bloc’s 27 foreign ministers. Wary of leaks and security breaches after a morning discussing Ukraine, ministers were bused off to a 17th century castle on the outskirts of Stockholm. There they were locked in a room with no phones or other electronic devices for four hours to discuss how to recalibrate ties with China.

The conversation was guided by a position paper on China policy written by the bloc’s foreign service, which was sent to member states on Thursday after intense internal haggling about its content. The Spaniard claimed members stood united behind the nine-page document, which calls for continued engagement with Beijing, even as it warned of the growing threat from an increasingly “nationalist and ideological” rival. “The 27 are united behind the music of this text,” Borrell said. “I haven’t seen any concrete disagreement.” [..] However, behind the scenes some diplomats were already pushing back against the assertion that the 27 were on the same page. “It seems that somebody is tone-deaf,” said one, adding that the document conveyed an “apologetic tone” suggesting Brussels was not seriously committed to revamping ties with Beijing.

A second described it as “meandering”, but believed such as the price the EU would pay for trying to accommodate members with such competing interests. “It is a big tent. It has to suit everyone from Lithuania to Hungary,” the official said, referring to the most hawkish and dovish of the bloc’s members regarding China. Arriving at the Stockholm summit on Friday morning, ministers offered mixed reviews on the report. “I underline that unfortunately systemic rivalry has risen significantly in recent years. We have to make that clear together here, we as Europeans can only speak with one voice, which is then heard in foreign policy,” said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, ostensibly approving of the text. “We as Europeans do not want decoupling. We do not want distraction. But we want to minimise our own risks that endanger our security,” she said, highlighting one of the document’s leading themes.

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“..the grain deal will cease to be effective if Moscow does not receive guarantees that its demands will be met by May 18..“

• Grain Deal Extension Possible Only If Russian Part Implemented – Peskov (TASS)

The only chance of the grain deal being extended is if the Russian part of the agreement is implemented, regardless of any phone conversations that take place between the Russian and Turkish presidents, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Friday. “For a [grain] deal to take place, a conversation between the two presidents will not help. In order to seal the deal, the second part of the agreement, which concerns promises to us (the Russian Federation – TASS), must be implemented,” the Kremlin spokesman stressed. Speaking in general about the possibility of a conversation between Putin and Erdogan, Peskov said that it is not on the schedule now, “but it may be penciled in within a few hours if necessary.”

Agreements to enable the export of food and fertilizers to world markets were signed on July 22, 2022 in Istanbul. They were originally meant to last 120 days and were extended for another 120 days in November. Russia announced on March 18 that the deal had been extended for another 60 days, saying this would be enough time to assess the effectiveness of the memorandum signed with the UN. Moscow has said repeatedly that any further extension of the deal hinges on whether the Russian part of the deal is implemented. The lack of progress on this issue jeopardizes the future of the entire initiative.

On May 10-11 representatives of Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the UN met in Istanbul to discuss a potential extension of the grain deal and the implementation of the Russian part of the agreement for supplies of grain and fertilizers. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin told journalists after the negotiations that the grain deal will cease to be effective if Moscow does not receive guarantees that its demands will be met by May 18. They concern the export of agricultural products and fertilizers, the reconnection of the Russian Agricultural Bank to the SWIFT system and some other issues.

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“Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration: “I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source..”

“Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc contains info from a “confidential human source”..”

• The Smell of Goose Cooking (Jim Kunstler)

“Joe Biden could go to jail and The New York Times wouldn’t tell anybody he was no longer president.” — Peter A. Golden

Reality has become so elastic in America now that it stretches to a cosmic event horizon deep in the Twilight Zone where everything is magically transformed into its opposite. Note The New York Times report on Thursday saying that the House Oversight Committee showed “no proof” in its disclosures of the Biden Family’s international money laundering and racketeering operations. In fact, the committee outlined a shit-ton of documentation in the form of bank records detailing exactly how gobs of money from foreign lands were washed and rinsed through a dozen shell companies and disbursed to everyone in the immediate Biden family down to the president’s grandchildren. The committee’s preliminary report was precise as to the money’s exact origins, its journey through the laundering apparatus, and the owners of the bank accounts it landed in. Thus: “No evidence of wrongdoing.”

Meanwhile, another whistleblower from the FBI emerged claiming that an unclassified FBI document called an FD-1023 report exists detailing the Biden Family moneygrubbing scheme. Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc contains info from a “confidential human source” (CHS), and the bureau can’t compromise an investigation, blah blah…. Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration: “I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source. They can pretend that they were monitoring CCP figures in the US and that Hunter was in a position to provide them with counter intelligence. As with Whitey Bulger, the whole business was just a scam to keep him out of jail on legitimate charges.

This would explain why the FBI’s Wray is claiming national secrets now that Comer is closing in on Biden family corruption and influence peddling.” It would also help to explain why Hunter Biden has been untouchable despite clear evidence of firearms felonies, money laundering and influence peddling crimes. All in plain sight for years. This CHS bullshit has been used repeatedly by the FBI and DOJ to shield Democrats and their henchmen from legal jeopardy. Stephan ‘Hamburger’ Halper, Christopher Steele and various other foreign election meddlers have been shielded by the FBI under the pretense of protecting sensitive intelligence, methods and foreign sources. Would they dare pull this one with Hunter? Why not? The DOJ and the FBI spent years sitting on his laptop stuffed with incriminating docs and videos, obviously shielding him.

The people running these agencies must be liable now for a range of crimes running from obstruction of justice to interfering in a presidential election, to acting as accomplices in the Biden Family bribery crimes. Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee has only just started. Soon, they will be hauling in witnesses, and even if the cable news networks and the big newspapers don’t report about them, there are too many alt-news outlets that can only be stifled by a Carrington Event.

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“Just stop talking, for the love of God, and DO SOMETHING.”

• James Woods Rips McCarthy Over Biden Border BS (AW)

Now that Title 42 has officially ended, the humanitarian catastrophe at the nation’s southern border is set to dramatically intensify as hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are expected to swarm into the country, overwhelming already stressed to the extreme Customs and Border Protection agents with the responsibility for the unprecedented mass invasion solely belonging to President Joe Biden, at least according to the union that represents the CBP. Harrowing videos of the sea of humanity descending upon and pouring over the border into El Paso, Texas have been posted to social media, images reminiscent of a third-world country which the nation is now becoming under the stewardship of the nation’s 46th president and CBP professionals are bracing for the situation to become far worse now that the Trump era policy put into place to mitigate the spread of COVID is no more.

On Thursday, the union that represents Border Patrol agents didn’t hold anything back as it laid the blame for the crisis solely at the feet of the Democrat career politician who has repeatedly lied about the consequences of his open borders policies. “This is by far the worst sustained disaster that any BP agent, active or retired, has ever seen at our border,” the NBPC tweeted along with a picture of smiling Joe on Thursday. “And one man is responsible for every single bit of it, with the worst still to come.” “The Biden Administration is absolutely corrupt to its core,” the NBPC stated in another Thursday tweet.

Also singling out Biden was conservative actor James Woods, a legendary Twitter warrior who turned up the heat on feckless Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) whose tough talk has yet to amount to the decisive action that many feel is necessary to right the ship. “Either impeach him or shut up,” the exasperated Woods said in response to a McCarthy tweet. “Just stop talking, for the love of God, and DO SOMETHING.”

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“..My classmate Barack Obama and I graduated on the same day in Spring of 1983..”

• Open Border Catastrophe is the Cloward-Piven Plan to Destroy America (Wayne Root)

This open border disaster is not a “Johnny-come-lately” story. It is a plan that was created many decades ago by leftist radicals intent on destroying America. I should know. I was there. I am a witness. I am a blue collar S.O.B. (son of a butcher) from the wrong side of the tracks- a poor majority-black town on the Bronx borderline. I attended almost all black middle school and high school in Mt Vernon, New York. After I graduated Valedictorian, I was accepted at prestigious Ivy League Columbia University. What I found there shocked me to the core. Columbia University was filled with spoiled-brat, “Lucky Sperm Club,” privileged white kids who were obsessed with hatred for America. These radical nutjobs bragged about being communists and Marxists. They bragged about their hatred of white people (even though they were white themselves).

They bragged about hating rich people (even though they were from rich families themselves). This was one gigantic guilt trip. My classmates hated themselves, their country, their parents, their wealth, and most of all- their whiteness. They talked all day long about their plans to bring America down; destroy the economy; bankrupt white businessmen; and create “equality and fairness” by turning America into a socialist/Marxist/communist country. It’s important to note that one of my classmates at Columbia was Barack Obama. My classmate Barack Obama and I graduated on the same day in Spring of 1983. This very month is the 40th anniversary of our Columbia graduation. These Columbia University radicals (and traitors) had a plan named Cloward-Piven. It was named after two Columbia University professors- the husband-and-wife team of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

The plan was actually simple- get everyone possible in America on welfare, food stamps and a hundred other government welfare programs. Get so many on the government dole that the economy is overwhelmed, destroyed and collapses under the weight of the exploding national debt. Basically, America goes bankrupt. At this point, Americans would be in so much pain and so frightened, they would beg government to save them. And that is how they would “fundamentally change America forever.” Remember those words? They came out of the mouth of Barack Obama. He learned those words and this plan at Columbia. Because of the collapse of the economy and society, Cloward and Piven believed America would be ready for socialism- bailouts, a permanent welfare state, and a monthly universal income check. The goal? Equality, equity, social justice. Recognize those words? Everyone would be in the same boat- dependent on Big Brother for survival.

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“..every member of the Biden family that received any of the funds is implicated AND MUST BE INDICTED..”

• Comer’s Presser And Biden’s Family (Denninger)

Cormer claims that the House Oversight Committee has uncovered a network of of roughly a dozen shell companies that moved money around in various transactions and had no business purpose at all. In other words, other than taking in cash from someone — foreign entities — and distributing those funds through a series of smaller transactions the firms had no offices, no people, conducted no business and produced nothing, whether at a profit or loss. The beneficiaries, that is the final persons, all in Biden’s family, who received the funds did not produce anything in return for same and couldn’t have given the convoluted path the funds took.

The structuring of transactions for the purpose of concealing the source or destination of funds is money laundering — also known as “structuring.” It is a serious felony even if no other criminal charge is proved; the intent is to evade reporting requirements. In these cases the attempt to evade the reporting failed as SARs were filed anyway, but that doesn’t matter. The attempt is illegal. FCPA prohibits taking funds from a foreign entity for corrupt purpose; that is, an effective bribe in exchange for anything of value where the other end of the transaction is outside the United States is illegal. That is also a serious criminal felony and has applied to all US persons since 1977 and, since 1998, to foreign entities as well if the funds or acts touch the United States.

“Specifically, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA prohibit the willful use of the mails or any means of instrumentality of interstate commerce corruptly in furtherance of any offer, payment, promise to pay, or authorization of the payment of money or anything of value to any person, while knowing that all or a portion of such money or thing of value will be offered, given or promised, directly or indirectly, to a foreign official to influence the foreign official in his or her official capacity, induce the foreign official to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty, or to secure any improper advantage in order to assist in obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.”

This is black-letter law folks. Being VP at the time is no defense. There is zero exemption available to anyone irrespective of their position when it comes to this law; indeed, the entire point of it is to prevent US businesses from bribing foreign government entities and to prevent foreign entities from bribing US Government officials and instrumentalities. The structuring of transactions so as to “break them up” and conceal is otherwise a straight-forward payment from one person to another is evidence of knowledge that the act is in fact corrupt and illegal; nobody bothers to conceal a lawful transaction as there is simply no purpose to it. These findings demand a hearing in open court with all the evidence. The FBI apparently has hard evidence backing this they refuse to turn over, although House Oversight has obtained many SARs and bank records and those, standing alone, appear to make a prima-facia case that Biden family members received funds in size in exchange for……. nothing.

What sort of legitimate claim could someone make here that isn’t a criminal enterprise? Are you really going to tell me that unrelated foreign entities gave gifts to a whole list of Biden family members with no expectation of anything in return? Really? C’mon folks. This looks like wild-eyed bribery by foreign entities buying influence from the Vice President of the United States. Calling that “Treason” is factually wrong; Treason is defined in the Constitution and in fact is the only crime that is. However, it is evidence of a series of serious felonies and every member of the Biden family that received any of the funds is implicated AND MUST BE INDICTED. In addition the foreign entities forced to divulge what they were attempting to obtain from the United States Government in exchange for those funds.

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“He’s running product and technology for a 100% software company. What is the CEO in charge of: not paying the vendors?”

• Who Is Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk’s Pick For New Twitter CEO? (Ghaffary)

Elon Musk said he has picked NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO of Twitter. Musk announced on Thursday that he had chosen his replacement as the chief executive of Twitter and its parent company, X, and that “she” (without naming who) will be starting in about six weeks. Musk confirmed his selection on Friday morning. Yaccarino is a seasoned media executive who could help repair Twitter’s relationship with its advertisers, many of whom have quit or cut back from the platform recently because of Musk’s perceived volatility. She has a reputation for being a tough negotiator and was key in the launch of NBCUniversal’s digital Peacock streaming service, according to the Wall Street Journal. She’s also a known Trump supporter, according to sources. In the past few months, Yaccarino has publicly praised Musk, and she interviewed him at a major advertising conference in April — paving her way, in the eyes of media insiders, to take on the role.

[..] But if you think that means the Elon-Twitter story is over, don’t hold your breath. Musk is still very much in control. He will still be the owner of Twitter. Unless he sells the company — or a controlling share of it — he’s the one calling the shots. How much power he gives Yaccarino is entirely at Musk’s discretion. “I can think of no finer way to restore trust in the advertising community than by recruiting Linda Yaccarino for the CEO role,” said Lou Paskalis, longtime ad executive and CEO and founder of AJL Advisory. “But the only way that would work is if she has autonomy from the erratic behaviors of Elon that have undermined his efforts thus far.” Although Yaccarino is not vocal about her political beliefs, it’s well known in the advertising community that she’s conservative, according to several sources. She served on former President Donald Trump’s Council on Sports and Nutrition, and many have noted that she likes and follows conservative accounts on Twitter.

But she’s also drawn flak from the right. Some of the more extreme right-wing Twitter influencer accounts have criticized her for praising diversity in the workforce and for being chair of the Taskforce on the Future of Work at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF), which they view as an elitist organization. Even if Musk follows through with this plan and actually gives up his job as CEO — and this is not at all guaranteed to happen until it happens — the billionaires’s ownership of Twitter means he can essentially hire or fire a new CEO as he pleases. Twitter is now a private company, so Musk has virtually no outside accountability from an independent board of directors to question his decisions.

In a tweet announcing the leadership change, Musk said he “will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.” These roles still represent a major part of the business’s operations. So while Musk could decide to give a new CEO control over some parts of Twitter’s day-to-day business, just how much control he gives up is entirely his choice. In other words, Musk’s critics may be celebrating at the prospect of a new person in charge at Twitter, but it’s not guaranteed how much — especially on the product side — will change, even with someone new at the top. “He’s running product and technology for a 100% software company. What is the CEO in charge of: not paying the vendors?” Jason Goldman, Twitter’s former board member and first head of product, told Vox in a text.

Twittter CEO

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“Veganism is Bad for You and I’m Embarrassed I Promoted it – Now I Only Eat Red Meat,” Says Bear Grylls..”

• “Veganism is Bad for You – Now I Only Eat Red Meat” – Bear Grylls (DS)

Bear Grylls has said he is “embarrassed” by his past support of veganism, which he now says is bad for you and that his health has been transformed by only eating red meat, in the latest blow for the woke fad. The Telegraph has more. The adventurer, whose diet is now mostly composed of red meat and organs, has claimed he was wrong to think that eating a plant-based diet was good for the environment and his health. “I was vegan quite a few years ago – in fact, I wrote a vegan cookbook – and I feel a bit embarrassed because I really promoted that,” the 48-year-old said in an interview with PA. “I thought that was good for the environment and I thought it was good for my health. And through time and experience and knowledge and study, I realised I was wrong on both counts.”

The television star published a cookbook in 2015 called Fuel for Life, which promoted achieving “maximum health with amazing dairy, wheat and sugar-free recipes”. He wrote in the book: “To satisfy our insatiable appetite for meat we have developed very unnatural ways of breeding, keeping and killing animals. This far exceeds our nutritional needs for the health of myself and my family.” But the father-of-three has made quite the U-turn since then, and now completely avoids vegetables as part of his “ancestral way of living”. “For a long time, I’d been eating so many vegetables thinking it was doing me good, but just never felt like it had given me any good nutrients compared to the nutrient density I get from basically blood or bone marrow – red meat,” he said. “I’ve tried to listen to my body more, tried to listen to nature, and I don’t miss vegetables at all. I don’t go near them and I’ve never felt stronger, my skin’s never been better, and my gut’s never been better.”

And despite his once proud advocacy of veganism – he reportedly used to turn his nose up when his filming crew were eating sausages for lunch – Grylls says that embracing red meat and organs has been the “biggest game-changer” for his health. “I’ve found a counterculture way of living, of embracing red meat and organs – natural food just like our millennia of ancestors would have eaten for hundreds of thousands of years. “And out of all the different things I do for my health, I think that’s probably been the biggest game-changer, in the sense of improving my vitality, wellbeing, strength, skin and gut. “It’s just been getting away from the processed stuff and making the predominant thing in my diet red meat and liver and the natural stuff – fruit, honey, that sort of thing. It’s just about finding a more ancestral way of living,” he said.

Kolakusic

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Tucker Max Keiser

 

 

 

 


The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, St Petersburg

 

 

 

 

Rabbit cat

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 25 2022

Nov 252022
 
 November 25, 2022  Posted by at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  126 Responses »


Salvador Dali Figure at a window 1925

 

• Media Serve the Governors, Not the Governed (Lauria)
• Musk Announces Twitter Amnesty (RT)
• Musk Says Granting ‘Amnesty’ To Suspended Twitter Accounts (AP)
• NATO Doesn’t Supersede the U.S. Constitution (McKnight)
• Electric War (Escobar)
• Belarus Paints Grim Picture For Ukraine If It Won’t Negotiate (RT)
• Pentagon Dodges Ukraine Aid Question (RT)
• French Interior Minister Labels Italy Enemy Of France After Migration Row (RMX)
• EU Fails To Agree On Gas Price Cap – Hungary (RT)
• Estonia Warns It Will Veto EU Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)
• Hungary Faces Pressure To Ratify NATO Expansion (RT)
• Oddsmakers Favor DeSantis For 2024 (JTN)
• Climate Policy Makes Europe Too Expensive for Low-Cost EV Manufacturing (CTH)
• Meta Uncovers US Military-Linked Propaganda Campaign (RT)
• You’re Going To Get Robbed (Denninger)

 

 

 

 

Gonzalo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s talk a bit about Twitter and its amnesty policy Elon Musk announced yesterday. Which is basically free speech. Which in turn is something many people feel threatened by. The Constitution itself is a threat to them.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1971:“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy..”

• Media Serve the Governors, Not the Governed (Lauria)

In his 1971 opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote: “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.” That’s what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been doing since 2006: censuring governments with governments’ own words pried from secrecy by WikiLeaks’ sources—whistleblowers. In other words, WikiLeaks has been doing the job the U.S. constitution intended the press to do.

One can hardly imagine anyone sitting on today’s U.S. Supreme Court writing such an opinion. Even more troubling is the news media having turned its back on its mission. Today they almost always serve the governors—not the governed. The question is why. Consolidation of media ownership has increased obedience of desperate journalists; entertainment divisions have taken over news departments; and careerist reporters and editors live vicariously through the power of those they cover, rejecting the press’ unique power to hold those officials to account. It comes down ultimately to lifestyles. Men go to war to protect and further their lifestyles. The press cheers them on for residual material betterment and increase in status. Millions of lives erased for lifestyles.

It used to be accepted in television that news departments would lose money and would be supported by the entertainment division. That’s because news was considered a public service. TV newsmen — they were almost all men in those days— were former wire service and newspaper reporters. But greed has put the presenters’ personalities before public service, as entertainment masquerades as news. Newspapers have sacrificed investigative units to maximize profit. Government is the winner. The abdication of the mainstream media of their constitutional responsibility to serve the governed and not the governors has left a void filled for more than a decade by WikiLeaks.

No longer do today’s Daniel Ellsbergs need to take their chances with editors at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or with their reporters spinning the damning information they risk their freedom to get to the public — no matter how disinterested and distracted the public may be. Now the traditional media can be bypassed. WikiLeaks deals in the raw material, that governments hang themselves with. That’s why they want Assange’s head. They lust for revenge and to stop further leaks that threaten their grip on power. That the corporate media has turned on Assange and WikiLeaks reveals their service to the state and how much they prioritize their style of life — disregarding the carnage they help bring about.

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Twitter “amnesty”. RT provides a factual story…

• Musk Announces Twitter Amnesty (RT)

Twitter boss Elon Musk has vowed to extend a “general amnesty” to an unspecified number of suspended users, a week after reversing former US President Donald Trump’s lifetime ban from the platform. “The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk tweeted on Thanksgiving Day. He added “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” a Latin phrase that means “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” The SpaceX and Tesla CEO launched a Twitter poll on Wednesday, asking if Twitter should “offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” Out of more than 3.1 million users who took part, 72.4% voted ‘yes’ and 27.6% voted ‘no’.

In a separate message Musk also promised to start freeing and offering up for grabs “vast numbers of handles” that had previously been “consumed” by bots and trolls. Since acquiring Twitter for $44 billion last month, Musk has faced growing criticism for laying off hundreds of employees and reversing the permanent suspensions of multiple notable accounts, including former US President Donald Trump following a similar public vote. While critics claimed that Musk’s actions fuel hate speech, harassment and misinformation, he has rejected accusations he was some kind of “right-wing bogeyman” and insisted that Twitter under his ownership has not banned any leftists, not even for “utter lies.”

It remains to be seen how many users would be eligible for amnesty. This week the platform already reinstated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal Twitter account had been permanently banned since early January 2022 for posting “misinformation” about the Covid-19 pandemic. Musk, however, drew the line at Alex Jones, saying he had “no mercy” for someone who used children’s deaths for clout. Musk had vowed to transform the platform and turn it into a bastion of free speech, saying it was “important to the future of civilization” to have a digital town square where a wide range of beliefs could be discussed.

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…but the MSM, in this case AP, sees enormous threats in free speech. And if free speech equals freedom, we know what they’re afraid of. It reminds me of Sartre’s “L’enfer c’est les autres”, (Hell is -the- other people). In other words, if you honor the priciple of free speech, you welcome hell into your world. That sounds like the opposite of what the founding fathers thought. Hell is other people’s freedom.

• Musk Says Granting ‘Amnesty’ To Suspended Twitter Accounts (AP)

New Twitter owner Elon Musk said Thursday that he is granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts, which online safety experts predict will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation. The billionaire’s announcement came after he asked in a poll posted to his timeline to vote on reinstatements for accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” The yes vote was 72%. “The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.” Musk used the same Latin phrase after posting a similar poll last last weekend before reinstating the account of former President Donald Trump, which Twitter had banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Trump has said he won’t return to Twitter but has not deleted his account. Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots. In the month since Musk took over Twitter, groups that monitor the platform for racist, anti-Semitic and other toxic speech say it’s been on the rise on the world’s de facto public square. That has included a surge in racist abuse of World Cup soccer players that Twitter is allegedly failing to act on. The uptick in harmful content is in large part due to the disorder following Musk’s decision to lay off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce, fire top executives, and then institute a series of ultimatums that prompted hundreds more to quit. Also let go were an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation.

Among those resigning over a lack of faith in Musk’s willingness to keep Twitter from devolving into a chaos of uncontrolled speech were Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth. Major advertisers have also abandoned the platform. On Oct. 28, the day after he took control, Musk tweeted that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter formed a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints that would consider the cases. On Tuesday, he said he was reneging on that promise because he’d agreed to at the insistence of “a large coalition of political-social activists groups” who later ”broke the deal” by urging that advertisers at least temporarily stop giving Twitter their business.

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More violations of what the founding fathers bestowed upon us. How did all these things become so normal?

• NATO Doesn’t Supersede the U.S. Constitution (McKnight)

As our government continues to bumble and stumble at full speed towards World War III, the concept of tripwires and the legal authority of Article 5 become required understanding for the vigilant citizen. Last week the American people received the then-breaking news that a missile had landed in Poland and killed two people.Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that this was a purposeful act of war by Russia, and that the West must respond with full kinetic retaliation. He was joined by his amen corner here in the United States, that group of politicians, regime journalists, and paid lobbyists who have sold out their country for the requisite thirty pieces of silver. The War Party immediately jumped into action: this was what they’ve been waiting, praying for. A catalyst to launch the missiles, and sacrifice the world.

Poland, like the United States and nearly all of Europe, is a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (Maybe we should wonder why countries like Poland, Estonia, and Romania are in an “Atlantic” alliance.) A provision of NATO is Article 5, which popular conception treats as a mandatory obligation to go to war when a member of the alliance is attacked. It’s a one way pass into World War III. There were just two things wrong with this narrative. First, as was revealed within forty-eight hours and confirmed by both the Polish government and Biden White House, the missile was Ukrainian, not Russian. Vladimir Putin had not attacked NATO—purposefully or accidentally. Instead, a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to intercept a Russian strike went off trajectory killed two Poles across the border.

All of a sudden “collective security” was no longer threatened, and no one on cable news was talking about how this required NATO retaliation on Kiev. (Surprised?) Secondly, even if it had been a Russian missile, and even if Vladimir Putin himself had aimed directly at that Polish farm, Article 5 obligates the United States to nothing. The NATO Treaty also has an Article 11, which specifies that the provisions of the alliance will be carried out in accordance with the domestic constitutions and processes of the respective members. That means a majority vote of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on a formal declaration of war. Any member of Congress or news talking head saying Article 5 requires an immediate military response without a debate or vote is either lying or woefully uninformed.

And even if the NATO Treaty didn’t have that provision, we’d still rest our argument of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the supreme authority of our laws. We are a sovereign nation, and the American people always have a choice on whether or not to go to war. Any international piece of paper trying to say otherwise be damned. Unfortunately, the War Party doesn’t always make that choice easy. They bribe politicians with weapon contract profits, flood the corporate press with propaganda, and instruct the American people that they must either commit to endless war or lose their liberty. They manufacture themselves consent.

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“..a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII..”

• Electric War (Escobar)

Spare a thought to the Polish farmer snapping pics of a missile wreckage – later indicated to belong to a Ukrainian S-300. So a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII – unleashed via a tawdry plot concocted by Anglo-American “intelligence”.Such tawdriness was compounded by a ridiculous cover-up: the Ukrainians were firing on Russian missiles from a direction that they could not possibly be coming from. That is: Poland. And then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, sentenced Russia was to blame anyway, because his Kiev vassals were shooting at Russian missiles that should not have been in the air (and they were not). Call it the Pentagon elevating bald lying into a rather shabby art.

The Anglo-American purpose of this racket was to generate a “world crisis” against Russia. It’s been exposed – this time. That does not mean the usual suspects won’t try it again. Soon. The main reason is panic. Collective West intel sees how Moscow is finally mobilizing their army – ready to hit the ground next month – while knocking out Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure as a form of Chinese torture. Those February days of sending only 100,000 troops – and having the DPR and LPR militias plus Wagner commandos and Kadyrov’s Chechens do most of the heavy lifting – are long gone. Overall, Russians and Russophones were facing hordes of Ukrainian military – perhaps as many as 1 million. The “miracle” of it all is that Russians did quite well.

Every military analyst knows the basic rule: an invasion force should number three times the defending force. The Russian Army at the start of the SMO was at a small fraction of that rule. The Russian Armed Forces arguably have a standing army of 1.3 million troops. Surely they could have spared a few tens of thousands more than the initial 100,000. But they did not. It was a political decision. But now SMO is over: this is CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) territory. A sequence of terrorist attacks – targeting the Nord Streams, the Crimea Bridge, the Black Sea Fleet – finally demonstrated the inevitability of going beyond a mere “military operation”. And that brings us to Electric War.

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“If they [Kiev] don’t want people to die, and to die in huge numbers … It’s hard, but [the conflict] must be stopped, because the complete destruction of Ukraine will follow..”

• Belarus Paints Grim Picture For Ukraine If It Won’t Negotiate (RT)

Ukraine should do its best to end the conflict with Russia, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Thursday, adding that failure to do so would bring about the total collapse of the nation. Commenting on the hostilities in the neighboring country, the Belarusian leader noted that “everything is in Ukraine’s hands now.” “If they [Kiev] don’t want people to die, and to die in huge numbers … It’s hard, but [the conflict] must be stopped, because the complete destruction of Ukraine will follow,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of the summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Armenia. Lukashenko added that it is not just “the loss of statehood” that is at stake for Ukraine, but its very existence.

He claimed that the Ukrainian people, who are bearing the brunt of the conflict, would eventually force President Vladimir Zelensky into a diplomatic engagement. “In one or two years, the people will be accusing him: ‘What did you do to start this war?’ According to Lukashenko, the situation will “press the Ukrainian leadership – if it is reasonable – into sitting at the negotiating table.” After Russia launched its military campaign against Ukraine in late February, Belarus hosted several rounds of talks between Moscow and Kiev. At the time, however, these diplomatic efforts failed to garner any results. In October, the Belarusian president claimed that while Minsk takes part in Russia’s military operation, its role is limited.

He said that his country is preventing the conflict from spreading into its territory while making sure that “nobody would shoot Russians in the back from the territory of Belarus.” In late September, he also claimed that the conflict could end “in just a few days” if Western powers were to back a peaceful settlement. This statement was to some extent echoed by Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said last week that the participation of Western nations in dialogue could be a “guiding and reinforcing element.” While Moscow has repeatedly signaled that it is open to negotiations, President Zelensky has set some conditions. They include the “restoration of [Ukraine’s] territorial integrity,” “compensation for all war damage,” and the “punishment of every war criminal.”

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“I am not going to take the question because I’m answering your question.”

• Pentagon Dodges Ukraine Aid Question (RT)

The US military has declined to give an exact breakdown for billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine requested by the White House last week, saying it would not discuss funding to replenish domestic arms stocks amid reports of growing shortages. Asked about President Joe Biden’s letter to Congress requesting an additional $37.7 billion in assistance to Kiev, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh refused to offer details. “I would not be able to tell you how much of that… is going back to replenishment,” she told reporters during a Tuesday press conference. “With every security assistance package that we announce, we assess our own readiness and capabilities and also what needs to be replenished.”

Pressed on whether she could take the question back to the Pentagon and provide an answer later, Singh doubled down, insisting: “I am not going to take the question because I’m answering your question.”“I just don’t have a number or a dollar figure for you right now on what that looks like, and I don’t think that’s something that we would broadcast from here,” she reiterated. Though the White House previously said that $21.7 billion of the requested aid would be devoted to both “equipment for Ukraine” and the “replenishment of Department of Defense stocks,” it did not specify how much would go to each. Repeated weapon shipments to Kiev have taken a toll on the domestic stockpile.

Earlier this week, the US Army’s chief of arms acquisition, Doug Bush, said the military was accelerating its process to procure weapons in order to make up for shortages, though Pentagon documents recently seen by the New York Post suggested it will take “multiple years” to resupply the Army. Even as early as March, just weeks after the conflict in Ukraine kicked off, the Defense Department was already scrambling to replenish thousands of shoulder-fired missiles supplied to Kiev. US arms transfers have only increased in the time since, with the Pentagon’s latest fact sheet reporting more than $19 billion in direct military aid approved since February, including over 46,000 anti-armor systems, nearly 200 Howitzers, 38 long-range High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and a litany of other heavy weapons, vehicles and ammunition.

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“She argues that France continues to act like a colonial power, which drives Africans to migrate in the first place.”

• French Interior Minister Labels Italy Enemy Of France After Migration Row (RMX)

Following growing tensions between Italy and France over the issue of boat migrants in the Mediterranean, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has resorted to extremely harsh rhetoric, referring to the Italian government as “enemies of France.” Darmanin made the comment in response to a question from a National Rally MP Mathilde Paris during a Q&A session in the French parliament, saying Italy is “attacking France.” Paris was inquiring why the majority of the migrants aboard the Ocean Viking ship, which France allowed to dock, have been released from the administrative center housing them, despite the minister’s previous assurances that “(they) will not be able to leave the administrative center.” Instead of addressing the question, Darmanin claimed she was an “ally” of the “enemies” of France.

“In fact, madam, you are not patriotic if you ally yourself with the enemies who are attacking France at the moment,” Darmanin said in response to a question by Paris. “You are siding with Madam (Giorgia) Meloni and her government who did not respect international law, instead you are attacking French policemen,” he added. The French government is being criticized for taking in the migrants, and a report shows that 26 of the 44 minors taken in have already escaped the migrant center. The language being deployed by Darmanin is sure to add further tension between the two countries, which has been growing ever since Italy rejected taking 234 migrants from the NGO ship Ocean Viking, which had mostly North Africans on board.

Italy argues that it has already accepted 90,000 migrants in 2022 alone, and even after rejecting Ocean Viking, it still allowed three NGO ships to dock and 600 migrants to disembark. Although French President Emmanuel Macron has labeled Meloni “inhumane” for not taking in the Ocean Viking migrants, at the same time, France has now said it is retaliating by not accepting 3,000 migrants from Italy it had promised to take in. Meloni has responded, pointing to France’s CFA franc program, in which France agrees to print money for 14 African countries in exchange for mint fees, which can go as high as 50 percent. She argues that France continues to act like a colonial power, which drives Africans to migrate in the first place.

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Hopeless. They all want different price caps for different reasons.

• EU Fails To Agree On Gas Price Cap – Hungary (RT)

EU nations have failed to reach an agreement on imposing a price ceiling on natural gas following a Council of Energy Ministers’ meeting, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Thursday. Ministers from the bloc will discuss the proposed measure further during an extraordinary meeting scheduled on December 13, two days before the Summit of European leaders. “Today we started negotiations on the introduction of a ceiling on gas prices. I can say that these are bad proposals, which also threaten Europe’s energy security,” Szijjarto said. “At the meeting, no decision was made that could meet the objectives of the European Commission,” the minister stated, adding that most member states, including Hungary, see such a step as a misguided intervention with work of the natural gas market.


Szijjarto stressed that Hungary, which is heavily reliant on Russian energy imports, is planning to seek exemptions from any EU price caps on oil and gas supplied under long-term contracts. The EU has proposed introducing a cap when prices on the TTF exchange, Europe’s gas benchmark, reach €275 per megawatt hour and when prices are €58 ($59.53) higher than the LNG reference price for ten consecutive trading days within the two weeks. Both conditions need to be met for the cap to be triggered.

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“It is hoped that the price limit would allow Russian production to remain at pre-sanctions levels, but reduce the country’s oil revenue.”

• Estonia Warns It Will Veto EU Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)

A price cap on Russian oil proposed by the European Commission is too high and may be blocked by Estonia, Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Reinsalu said on Thursday, as quoted by Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR). The proposal by Brussels to set a limit of between $65 and $70 per barrel on Russian sea-borne oil is insufficient, he stated, arguing that Moscow would make too much revenue at that price. “Estonia finds that the price horizon’s ambition is too low, considering that the EU has also failed to agree on a ninth sanctions package. The cap seems too high,” Reinsalu said at a government press conference, adding that discussions were ongoing.

Earlier, EU energy chief Kadri Simson confirmed that bloc members had failed to reach an agreement on a Russian oil price cap, but said negotiations would continue. Estonia’s warning came after EU leaders had already watered down the proposed cap by weakening some shipping provisions and delaying the implementation of the measure. Under the updated plan seen by Bloomberg, a grace period would apply to crude loaded before December 5, when oil-related sanctions come into effect, and unloaded by January 19. If approved, the measure would ban Western companies from providing insurance, brokerage or financial assistance to vessels loaded with Russian crude, unless the cargo is purchased below an agreed price.

It is hoped that the price limit would allow Russian production to remain at pre-sanctions levels, but reduce the country’s oil revenue. The proposal was reportedly rejected by Poland along with all three Baltic States, which called the cap “too generous” for Russia and pushed for the price ceiling to be imposed at $30 per barrel. Meanwhile, nations with major shipping industries like Greece and Malta insisted the cap should not be below $70. On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would embargo nations that support the proposed price limit on its oil.

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“I would like to underline that the Swedes and the Finns have not lost a single minute of membership because of Hungary,” Orban said..”

• Hungary Faces Pressure To Ratify NATO Expansion (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has promised that Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bids will definitely be among the first items on the agenda when the country’s parliament reconvenes next year, likely around mid-February.“I would like to underline that the Swedes and the Finns have not lost a single minute of membership because of Hungary,” Orban said, as cited by Euronews, adding that the prime ministers of Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia had nudged him to move forward with the process during their meeting on Thursday.

“We have already confirmed to both Finland and Sweden that Hungary supports the membership of these two countries in NATO, and at the first session of next year, Parliament will put this on the agenda,” the Hungarian PM stated, apparently after facing pressure during a Visegrad Group meeting in Slovakia. Last month, Orban’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said there was a “good chance” the Hungarian parliament would vote before its autumn session ends mid-December. The parliament usually reconvenes in early February. In May, amid Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, Sweden and neighboring Finland broke with their decades-long neutrality stance and formally applied for NATO membership. While the bloc accepted the requests, the Nordic nations’ bids have to be ratified by all 30 member states, and Türkiye and Hungary’s approval is still pending.

Earlier this month, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock rebuked Budapest and Ankara for delaying the ratification process, insisting that there is a “crystal clear basis” for allowing the two Nordic nations to join the military bloc. Hungarian officials have repeatedly stated their support for NATO expansion, and the measure is expected to be easily passed once it comes to the floor. Meanwhile, Ankara is demanding that Stockholm and Helsinki do more to fight “terrorism,” particularly Kurdish groups which are outlawed in Türkiye. Negotiations on the matter are still underway.

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Pence and Buttigieg. What a waste of time.

• Oddsmakers Favor DeSantis For 2024 (JTN)

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is the odds-on favorite to win the 2024 presidential election. Betting website Covers.com currently assigns DeSantis a 30.77% chance of winning the 2024 electoral contest, with former President Donald Trump coming in second with 22.22%. President Joe Biden rounds out the top three with 20% while Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom tie for fourth with 6.67% each. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg each have a 4.35% shot at the nation’s top job. Thus far, only Trump has officially launched his 2024 campaign, though Biden is expected to eventually do so. DeSantis, meanwhile, has declined to fuel speculation about his own potential bid, instead asserting that the GOP should focus on the upcoming Georgia runoff election.

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Want to use less oil? Stop making stuff.

• Climate Policy Makes Europe Too Expensive for Low-Cost EV Manufacturing (CTH)

We have been closely monitoring the signs of a global cleaving around the energy sector taking place. Essentially, western governments’ following the “Build Back Better” climate change agenda which stops using coal, oil and gas to power their economic engine, while the rest of the growing economic world continues using the more efficient and traditional forms of energy to power their economies. Within the BBB western group (identified on map in yellow), the logical consequences are increased living costs for those who live in the BBB zone, and increased prices for goods manufactured in the BBB zone. In the zone where traditional low-cost energy resources continue to be developed (grey on map), we would expect to see a lower cost of living and lower costs to create goods. Two divergent economic zones based on two different energy systems.

This potential outcome just seemed to track with the logical conclusion. The yellow zone also represented by the World Economic Forum, and the gray zone also represented by an expanding BRICS alliance. Against this predictable backdrop we have been watching various events unfold, some obvious and some less so. Today, we get an obvious example: NEW DELHI, Nov 24 (Reuters) – Fiat parent Stellantis (STLA.MI) has concluded it can’t currently make affordable electric vehicles (EVs) in Europe and is looking at lower-cost manufacturing in markets such as India, its chief executive told reporters. If India, with its low-cost supplier base, is able to meet the company’s quality and cost targets by the end of 2023, it could open the door to exporting EVs to other markets, said Carlos Tavares, CEO of the group whose brands also include Peugeot and Chrysler.

“So far, Europe is unable to make affordable EVs. So the big opportunity for India would be to be able to sell EV compact cars at an affordable price, protecting profitability,” Tavares told reporters at a media roundtable in India late on Wednesday. Stellantis is investing heavily in EVs and plans to produce dozens in the coming decade, but Tavares warned last month that affordable battery EVs were between five and six years away. On his first visit to India since taking over as Stellantis CEO, he said the company was still working out a plan regarding EV exports from the country and had not yet taken any decisions.”

Normally we would expect to see market forces determining the ultimate economic outcome. Historically, we would not expect government policy that puts their nation at an economic disadvantage. However, in this WEF controlled new western economic normal we see multinational corporations’ making decisions and government leaders creating policy to support the corporations. There is money to be made by corporations within the climate change agenda, and there is money to be made by producing goods with low-cost wages and cheap materials. Eventually, if you keep following this to its natural conclusion, the entire yellow zone becomes a service driven economy.

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What on earth made them go public with this?

“..the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.”

• Meta Uncovers US Military-Linked Propaganda Campaign (RT)

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week. “Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 Pages and two groups, all for violating the policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It apparently attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia. Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by Washington Post that revealed that the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives. While the original study did not pin blame for the fake accounts on any particular actors, two officials later told the Post that US CENTCOM – the combatant command which oversees forces in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia – “is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny” for its influence operations. At the time, CENTCOM refused to comment on whether any of the suspicious accounts were created by its personnel or contractors, but one official claimed such behavior would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”

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Death, taxes and getting robbed.

• You’re Going To Get Robbed (Denninger)

Read this Twitter thread in full.: Today, we issued a final rule that allows retirement plan investors to take climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into consideration when making investment decisions: Oh really? Did you not just see a prime example of what happens when “ESG” takes over a corporation? Why, you did. It’s called Twitter. Three quarters of the people, all hired with “ESG” in mind, were just fired by Musk who as a private owner has zero obligation to any such so-called “principle.” The various screaming parties in the ESG cult all predicted immediate doom and disaster. No such disaster has occurred; the firm’s only service it provides to the public is running just fine with one quarter of the staffing load — and thus cost — it used to have. If you think Twitter is unique in this regard you’re too stupid to have a retirement and deserve to lose every cent of whatever you claim to be “investing.”

Let’s put this in simple terms: If “ESG” is a net positive for a company then nobody has to exempt anything or make it a separate subject of consideration and in fact doing so is stupid because if it in fact makes the firm more competitive and operating at a lower cost per unit of output it wins all on its own. What the Department of Labor has said by issuing this advisory is that your “retirement plan” can now be disadvantaged to any degree whatsoever, including losing all of it, when (not if) these “ESG” initiatives cause the firms invested in to underperform or fail outright and when that occurs you can’t sue the plan provider for violating their fiduciary responsibility to you as the true owner of the asset.

In other words the Department of Labor is formally admitting that these “ESG” initiatives are not to the benefit of the firm’s operating results and thus are also not to your benefit as an investor. This fact has now become a formal admission by our Federal Government. What’s worse? This “rule” amounts to an admission of collusive price-fixing — albeit indirect — between what are supposed to be competing firms. Under 100+ year old law that is a serious criminal felony. You will get screwed out of trillions of dollars over the coming years as a result of this and you are responsible for that screwing because you have and continue to permit this sort of rank corruption to take place without demanding it stop and backing up that demand with whatever is necessary to eliminate it.

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Steve Kirsch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1595893348035751936

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 30 2022

Sep 302022
 
 September 30, 2022  Posted by at 8:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  109 Responses »


Pavel Filonov The Kolkhoznik (Member of a Collective Farm) 1931

 

• Kremlin Reveals Next Step On Donbass, Kherson, And Zaporozhye (RT)
• Erdogan Speaks On Referendums On Joining Russia (RT)
• Pentagon To Create ‘Ukraine Command’ – Media (RT)
• Russia Mulling Face-To-Face Nuclear Arms Treaty Talks With US (ZH)
• Multipolar World Order – Part 2 (Iain Davis)
• West ‘Clinging To The Past’ – Putin (RT)
• Putin Outlines Goals Of ‘Geopolitical Adversaries’ (RT)
• US Puts Energy Operators On ‘Heightened Alert’ (RT)
• Key Russian Black Sea Gas Pipeline Under Threat (RT)
• Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, While Protecting Their Handlers (Sperry)
• US Offers A New Definition Of ‘Healthy’ (RT)
• NHS Nurses Not Eating At Work In Order To Feed Their Children (G.)
• Cardiologist: The Greatest Miscarriage Of Medical Science (ToI)
• Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion (Oracle)

 

 

 

 

Gervais
https://twitter.com/i/status/1575538121713672193

 

 

 

 

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
– George Orwell, 1984

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russia will officially annex the four regions today. Then Ukraine will no longer be shelling its own -Russian speaking- citizens on its own land. They’ll be shelling Russians on Russian land. Which makes it much easier for Moscow to protect them, something they’re obliged to do. Putin waited 8 years -of constant shelling- to recognize the Donbass republics, and he was’t going to wait another 8. As Gav Don said yesterday at the Saker, htis may be A Possible Strategy For Peace. It may seem a bit contradictory, but it might just work.

• Kremlin Reveals Next Step On Donbass, Kherson, And Zaporozhye (RT) 

The Kremlin has revealed when Russian President Vladimir Putin will sign treaties on the inclusion of the two Donbass republics, as well as the self-proclaimed states in Kherson and Zaporozhye, into the Russian Federation. The move follows referendums held in the respective territories. The ceremonial signing will take place in the St. George Hall inside the Kremlin Palace on Friday at 3pm Moscow time, after which Putin will deliver a“voluminous speech,” according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. The Russian president will also personally meet with the heads of the new territories. The announcement comes after the two republics and two self-proclaimed states made official requests to join the Russian Federation after having held public referendums on the issue between September 23 and 27.

The move was overwhelmingly supported by the local population, according to official results announced late on Tuesday. Peskov separately noted that Putin’s speech on Friday will not be a formal address to the Federal Assembly – the country’s parliament – stating that such a speech will be held in a completely different format and is yet to be announced. As explained by Senator Konstantin Kosachev, the vice speaker of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, signing the treaties is only one of the key steps necessary to officially incorporate the new territories into the Russian Federation. After Putin signs the treaties, they must be submitted to the country’s Constitutional Court to ensure they comply with Russian law.

Once they are cleared, the documents have to be ratified by the lower house, the State Duma, and the upper house of parliament, the Federal Council. Only after that will the DPR, LPR, and the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye officially become integrated into the Russian Federation. The next session of the Federal Council is planned for October 4, according to chairman Valentina Matvienko, who said that if “everything is confirmed” the body will take the treaties on accepting the new territories up for consideration. The EU and the US have repeatedly refused to accept the results of the referendums, calling them a “sham.”Western leaders have also vowed to never recognize “any kind of annexation in Ukraine.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen claimed she was “determined to make the Kremlin pay for this further escalation,”while US State Secretary Antony Blinken stated that Kiev had “every right” to take back the territories that are trying to secede from its rule.

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“Erdogan claimed that Ukraine and Russia may reach a peace settlement only if Moscow returns to Kiev all the lands that it has captured since the beginning of the military operation..”

Not going to happen.

• Erdogan Speaks On Referendums On Joining Russia (RT)

Recent referendums in the Donbass republics and two Ukrainian regions on joining Russia are of great concern, and it would be better to “solve this problem diplomatically,” Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told local media on Wednesday. In an interview with CNN Türk on Wednesday, Erdogan sounded the alarm over the public vote, adding that dialogue would be a preferable option in tackling this issue. “The decision to hold referendums in some occupied regions of Ukraine is quite worrying… There may be an annexation here,” he said, adding that “if Putin, whom I know, has put something in his head, he will do it.” Erdogan said that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had asked for Türkiye’s diplomatic support on the issue of the referendums.

“[He] wants us to convince Putin. I intend to discuss these issues in detail with Putin tomorrow [on Thursday],” he said. He also noted that another major issue on the agenda would be the UN- Türkiye-brokered deal which unblocked Ukrainian grain exports via the Black Sea. According to Erdogan, 80% of grain shipments from Ukrainian ports “unfortunately went to rich countries.” “This has been a serious concern for Putin. We hope that we will be able to send it to poor countries and achieve the result,” he added. However, on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov noted that the Russian leader has no talks scheduled with Erdogan. During the interview, Türkiye’s president also stressed that a possible nuclear war would be “catastrophic.”

“One should not even think about this, let alone talk about it. Solving this issue through diplomacy would be the most appropriate step,” he said. This was an apparent reference to the warning the Russian leader issued to the West last week, saying that those who use nuclear blackmail against Moscow “should know that the wind can turn around.” Last week, Erdogan claimed that Ukraine and Russia may reach a peace settlement only if Moscow returns to Kiev all the lands that it has captured since the beginning of the military operation in late February. During the referendums that were held between September 23 and 27, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics along with Kherson Region and part of Zaporozhye Region overwhelmingly voted to join Russia.

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But they’re not involved in the conflict!

• Pentagon To Create ‘Ukraine Command’ – Media (RT)

The Pentagon is working to create a new military command devoted to arming and training Ukrainian soldiers, US officials told multiple media outlets, suggesting the effort will effectively “overhaul” the current process for weapons transfers to Kiev. The command would be based in Wiesbaden, Germany – where the US Army keeps its European headquarters – and be made up of 300 staffers led by General Christopher Cavoli, who heads up the military’s European Command, according to unnamed officials cited by the New York Times and CNN on Thursday. “The changes, which aim to give a formal structure to what has been improvised since the war’s onset, are roughly modeled on US train-and-assist efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades,” the Times reported.

While the new unit would look to make major alterations to the current train-and-equip program for Kiev, Wiesbaden will remain a key component in the scheme, as most Ukrainian troops currently being instructed on American weapons are doing so in or near the city. Since Russia sent troops into the neighboring country in late February, US military aid to Ukraine has largely been managed from Germany and Poland by Lieutenant General Christopher Donahue, who also oversaw the chaotic evacuation of US forces from Afghanistan last year. However, Donahue and his staff are set to return home next month, creating the need for a specialized command oriented toward training and arming Ukrainian troops. The proposal for the new unit was initially floated earlier in the conflict by General Tod Wolters, with Cavoli ‘fine-tuning’ the idea after taking his place at EUCOM in July, according to the Times.

In late August, the Wall Street Journal similarly reported that Washington was looking to appoint a general to lead the arm-and-train program in Ukraine, suggesting the initiative could receive an official mission name, as well as “long-term, dedicated funding” from the US government. The outlet added that the changes would mark a “shift from the largely ad hoc effort to provide training and assistance to the Ukrainians for years.” The US has authorized nearly $17 billion in arms transfers to Ukraine’s military so far this year, with the vast majority of that aid approved since hostilities escalated in February. Though large quantities of gear and ammunition have come directly from existing stockpiles, the Pentagon is also working with arms contractors to manufacture weapons specifically for Kiev, including 18 brand-new High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) announced earlier this week – one of the longest-range platforms provided by Washington to date.

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In the next room, negotiate peace please.

• Russia Mulling Face-To-Face Nuclear Arms Treaty Talks With US (ZH)

Russia says it is mulling a face-to-face meeting with US officials in order to discuss the New START nuclear arms treaty (Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms). Amid heightened nuclear tensions related to the Ukraine war, in a rare moment of potential good news, given the prior collapse of several US-Russia Cold War era treaties which were meant to avoid confrontation between nuclear armed superpowers. “Within the framework of the [advisory] commission, a remote discussion continues on what organizational and technical problems need to be addressed. Some of them have been removed, while others have made significant progress,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a Thursday press briefing.

But she cited that “a number of significant difficulties remain: the implementation of the treaty’s essentially routine measures is complicated by the unconstructive anti-Russian actions of the United States and its partners,” according to state media. “They continue to introduce new sanctions prohibitions, impede the normal interaction of the parties. We will seek to resolve all problematic issues in the context of the implementation of the Treaty on an equal basis, taking into account our national interests,” Zakharova said of the US administration. In March 2021 the two sides renewed New START for a period of five years, and it will expire in February 2026 if it’s not continued – an increasing possibility given US-Russia relations have deteriorated so fast they are near complete breaking point.

The treaty is intended to limit and reduce nuclear arms on either side, setting a limit of no more than 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 missiles. START I began in 1991, with New START signed under the Obama and Medvedev administrations in 2010 as a successor agreement. Compliance inspections are part of the deal, but that’s precisely a current issue of contention, given that last month Russia informed the US that it was temporarily suspending American inspections of its nuclear weapons sites under the 2010 treaty. “On August 8, 2022, the Russian Federation officially informed the United States via diplomatic channels that our country is temporarily exempting its facilities from inspection activities under the New START Treaty,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in August, adding it also covers “facilities that can be used for demonstrations under the treaty.”

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Everyone wants one. But only if they’re in the middle.

• Multipolar World Order – Part 2 (Iain Davis)

We ask: who wants a multipolar world order? The short answer: everyone. The longer answer: everyone who has sufficient power and influence to change global governance. The multipolar model isn’t being pushed solely by the Russian and Chinese governments, their oligarchs and their think tanks. It’s also being promoted by the erstwhile “leaders” of the unipolar world order. Consider this remark by German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz. His speech, set within the context of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine—which every member of the Western establishment lambastes for the cameras—was given at the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Davos gathering:

“I see another global development that constitutes a watershed. We are experiencing what it means to live in a multipolar world. The bipolarity of the Cold War is just as much part of the past as the relatively brief phase when the United States was the sole remaining global power[.] [. . .] The crucial question is this: how can we ensure that the multipolar world will also be a multilateral world? [. . .] I am convinced that it can succeed – if we explore new paths and fields of cooperation. [. . .] If we notice that our world is becoming multipolar, then that has to spur us on: to even more multilateralism! To even more international cooperation!”

Western central banks, too, have looked toward the multipolar model. In a 2011 round table discussion at the Banque de France, then-French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who subsequently became the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and then was appointed President of the European Central Bank (ECB), said: “Our starting point is to create the conditions to achieve two closely intertwined objectives, i.e. strong, sustainable, and balanced growth, on the one hand, and an orderly transition to a world that is multipolar in economic and monetary terms, on the other. [. .] The G20 reached agreement [to] promote the orderly transition from a world where a small number of economies, with their currencies, represent the bulk of wealth and trade, to a multipolar world where emerging countries and their currencies represent a growing if not predominant share.”

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Well, their future does’t look very bright.

• West ‘Clinging To The Past’ – Putin (RT)

Unwilling to accept the inevitable end of its unipolar hegemony, the West is generating problems and crises everywhere in order to cling to the past, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. “We are witnessing a complex process of a more just world order being established ” Putin told the video conference of intelligence and security chiefs of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). “Unipolar hegemony is inexorably collapsing, this is an objective reality that the West categorically refuses to accept, and we see everything that follows from this.”

The US and its allies “cling to the past and try to dictate policy everywhere, from international relations and economics to culture and sports,” Putin said, adding that the collective West “does not disdain any method of pressuring countries that choose a sovereign path of development, those who do not wish to submit but freely and independently choose their own future, safeguarding their culture, tradition and values.” Washington has accused Russia and China of revisionism and of challenging the “rules-based world order.” The CIS was created in 1991 from the newly independent republics of the USSR. While the West is trying to foment new crises in their territory, Putin noted, there were plenty of real ones dating back to the Soviet Union’s break-up.

The Russian president pointed to the present conflict with Ukraine but also the recent border battles between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, warning that “risks of destabilization are still growing”and threatening to expand to the entire Asia-Pacific. On the other hand, Putin noted, trade, industrial and investment cooperation between Russia and other CIS members has been increasing “in spite of pressure, blackmail and illegal sanctions from the US and its satellites.” In addition to Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan make up the CIS. Georgia left the organization in 2009 and Ukraine stopped participating after the US-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

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“the notorious collective West” was unable to accept the inevitable collapse of the “old unipolar hegemony.”

• Putin Outlines Goals Of ‘Geopolitical Adversaries’ (RT)

Russia’s adversaries in the West are willing to create crises and unleash violence anywhere in the post-Soviet world, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on Thursday. Addressing a meeting with the heads of intelligence for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Putin said Russia’s “geopolitical adversaries” are prepared to turn any country “into a ground zero of a crisis,” and to unleash “bloody massacres.”“We also know that the West is devising scenarios for inciting new conflicts in the CIS. But we already have enough of them,” Putin said by videolink. He pointed to the current military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, as well as “what is happening on the borders of other CIS countries,” an apparent reference to recent border clashes between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan, as well as between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

All such conflicts have resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin said, noting that this was “understandable.” “But the risks of destabilisation are growing again, including the risks of destabilisation in the entire Asia-Pacific region,” he added, claiming that “the notorious collective West” was unable to accept the inevitable collapse of the “old unipolar hegemony.” “We are seeing the difficult process of the forming of a more just world order,” the Russian president said. Putin has long spoken about the end of the so-called “unipolar” world dominated by the United States and its allies. In his infamous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, he slammed Western leaders for deliberately eroding trust and said that a unipolar system was “not only unacceptable but also impossible” in the world today.

Earlier this month, during a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Putin said Western attempts to preserve the existing world order “have taken an absolutely ugly form lately.” The idea of a new “multipolar” world has been discussed in the West, too, most recently by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who told the World Economic Forum at Davos in May that he hopes for “more multilateralism” and “more international co-operation.” Following Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine, however, the West declared its intention to “isolate” Russia and imposed unprecedented sanctions on it. Russia views these actions as another manifestation of Western attempts to “contain” it and maintain the existing world order.

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“With NATO having tested underwater drones near Bornholm this summer, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Washington to “confess” to destroying the pipelines.”

• US Puts Energy Operators On ‘Heightened Alert’ (RT)

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm warned the American energy industry, including LNG tanker operators, to be on “high alert” after a series of explosions disabled Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Moscow has suggested that the US was responsible for the blasts. “Everybody should be on high alert,” Granholm told Bloomberg on Wednesday, two days after the vital Russia-Europe gas conduits were taken out. With the flow of gas to Europe halted for the foreseeable future by the blasts, Granholm said the incident illustrated the risks to European countries of “relying on another entity for their energy.”

Multiple US officials have labeled the explosions, which occurred off the Danish island of Bornholm, as “apparent sabotage,” but have not blamed any one country or group. The attacks came after successive US administrations had been attempting to prevent the completion of Nord Stream 2 and convince European states to swap cheap Russian gas for the more expensive American liquefied natural gas. Furthermore, US President Joe Biden said in early February that the US would “end” Nord Stream 2 if Russian troops entered Ukraine, telling a reporter “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” With NATO having tested underwater drones near Bornholm this summer, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Washington to “confess” to destroying the pipelines.

“The scale of destruction indicates that it really was a sort of a [terrorist] act,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated, adding that such an attack is unlikely to have happened “without the involvement of some state power.” Granholm’s warning suggests that the US is concerned about attacks on its own gas infrastructure, with LNG shipments in particular being a vulnerable point. The Sandia National Laboratories warned in 2004 that a deliberate attack on one of these ships could cause a fireball that would be hazardous to human health as far as 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) away. “Of course” LNG shipments to Europe should take more precautions, Granholm told Boomberg, adding “we have to be on heightened alert.”

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From sanctions.

• Key Russian Black Sea Gas Pipeline Under Threat (RT)

If anything happens to the TurkStream natural gas pipeline, its operator won’t be able to repair the damage, since the Dutch government revoked their license due to EU sanctions against Russia, the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty alleged on Thursday. RFE/RL claimed to have obtained a letter from Oleg Aksyutin, CEO of South Stream Transport BV, informing the company’s managers to stop all work and cancel contracts with Western suppliers. The letter is reportedly dated September 14, and says that the Netherlands where the company is registered – had canceled its operating license, effective September 17.

The suspension affects “all contracts related to the technical support of the gas pipeline,” including “design, manufacture, assembly, testing, repair, maintenance, and training,” according to the US outlet. South Stream Transport operates TurkStream, a pipeline finalized in 2020, which runs under the Black Sea to Türkiye and then on to Serbia and Hungary. It has an annual capacity of 33 billion cubic meters of gas. According to Reuters, SouthStream confirmed on Thursday that their license has been revoked, but said it had requested a resumption of the license and “will continue gas transportation.” While there are no reports about interruptions in the TurkStream supply, RFE/RL noted that much of the pipeline is at the depth of three kilometers, and needs to be constantly monitored for damage due to “seismic activity.”

The revelation comes just days after both Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea were disabled in a series of explosions, venting millions of cubic meters of gas into the water. Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the explosions as an “act of international terrorism” and Moscow intends to raise it before the UN Security Council. NATO said Thursday that the pipelines were damaged in what appeared to be a “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage,” promising to meet any attack on its critical infrastructure “with a united and determined response.” The US, which has long tried to stop NordStream and managed to derail TurkStream’s predecessor SouthStream – which the Dutch-based company was originally supposed to manage – has denied having anything to do with the Baltic Sea explosions.

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Can’t touch the FBI.

• Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, While Protecting Their Handlers (Sperry)

Danchenko’s legal team points out that he turned over an email to the FBI during a January 2017 meeting with agents and analysts that indicated a key dossier subsource may have been fictionalized. Stuart Sears, one of Danchenko’s attorneys, argued earlier this month in a motion to dismiss the charges that investigators “essentially ignored” any concerns they may have had about Danchenko’s sourcing, because they continued to renew the FISA warrants based upon it. Therefore, he argued, any lies his client allegedly told them were inconsequential, making them un-prosecutable under federal statutes requiring such false statements to have a “material” impact on a federal proceeding. While Durham did not dispute the FBI’s apparent complicity in the fraud, he waved it aside as immaterial to the case at hand.

“The fact that the FBI apparently did not identify or address these inconsistencies is of no moment,” he said in his filing. At the same time, Durham acknowledged agents allowed the fabrications to contaminate their wiretap warrants – noting they were “an important part of the FISA applications targeting Carter Page.” But he stopped short of blaming the FBI, even for incompetence. According to Durham, the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency was misled by a serial liar and con man. “He’s painting it as though the FBI was duped when the FBI was more than willing to take the initiative and go after Trump,” Kamenar said, adding that though Danchenko may have been a liar, he was a useful liar to FBI officials and others in the Justice Department who were pursuing Trump.

The special prosecutor’s indifference to the FBI’s role in the scandal is more remarkable in light of what Danchenko admitted in his January 2017 interviews with the FBI. He told investigators that much of what he reported to Steele was “word-of-mouth and hearsay,” while some was cooked up from “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers,” according to a declassified FBI summary of the interviews, which took place over three days. He confessed the most salacious allegations were made in “jest.” Still, the FBI continued to use Danchenko’s claims of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Russia and Trump to convince the FISA court to allow investigators to continue to surveil Page, whom the FBI accused of masterminding the conspiracy based on Danchenko’s bogus rumors.

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Frm the least healthy country on earth..

• US Offers A New Definition Of ‘Healthy’ (RT)

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday proposed a new set of standards that food products must meet to be labeled “healthy.” The new rules would align the definition, which has not been updated since 1994, with “current nutrition science,” the watchdog said in a statement. Under the updated definitions, in order to obtain a “healthy” label, the products should satisfy two criteria. First, they need to contain “a certain meaningful amount” of food from at least one of the food groups or subgroups recommended by the ‘Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025,’ such as fruit, vegetable or dairy. Second, the foods should adhere to specific limits of certain nutrients, such as saturated fat, sodium and added sugars.

The new standards would not only help people to build healthier diets but could also help to improve the quality of food products, the watchdog believes. According to the FDA, in a bid to secure a “healthy” label for their products, manufacturers might include more “fruits, vegetables, dairy and whole grains, and limit saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars” in their products.“Today’s action is just one part of the agency’s ongoing commitment to reduce diet-related chronic diseases and advance health equity,” the FDA, which is part of the Health Department, said. Nutrition-related illnesses are now “the leading cause of death and disability in the country,” according to the agency.

By providing manufacturers with clear guidelines, and customers with clear labels on packaging, the FDA hopes to help people “to build healthy eating patterns” and thus to improve public health in general. The watchdog is suggesting a comprehensive approach to a healthy diet. Under the new rules, some products which currently cannot be labeled “healthy” can eventually get this mark by becoming part of “a diet consistent with current dietary recommendations.” As examples of such products, the FDA cites nuts, seeds, higher-fat fish such as salmon, as well as certain oils.

The public consultations on the proposal will last 90 days. Meanwhile, the FDA is also looking for a new, easily recognizable logo for the labeling of “healthy” products. According to the ‘Dietary Guidelines,’ more than 80% of US residents aren’t eating enough vegetables, fruit and dairy, while most people consume too much added sugars, saturated fats and sodium. The World Population Review this year placed the US in 12th place globally for population obesity, with more than 36% of Americans categorized as obese.

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Well-being pays less than profits.

• NHS Nurses Not Eating At Work In Order To Feed Their Children (G.)

Some nurses are so hard up that they are having to not eat at work in order to feed and clothe their children, research among hospital bosses has found. Lack of money is also prompting some NHS staff to call in sick in the days before they get paid because they can no longer afford the travel costs for their shift. Others are taking a second job outside the NHS in an effort to make ends meet. The impact of the cost of living crisis on health service workers in England has emerged in a survey of chief executives, chairs and other senior figures in health trusts undertaken by NHS Providers, which represents trusts. Miriam Deakin, the director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, said: “There are heart-rending stories of nurses choosing between eating during the day and being able to buy a school uniform for their children at home.


“Increasing numbers of nurses and other staff, particularly in the lower pay bands, are finding they are unable to afford to work in the NHS.” More than a quarter (27%) of trusts already operate food banks for staff, and another 19% plan to open one, to help relieve the acute financial difficulties faced by staff. The survey also found that some staff: Are stopping contributing to their NHS pension in order to free up cash.Cannot fill up their cars because of petrol price rises. Have mental health issues due to the stress of paying their bills. The situation is so serious that some low-paid health staff, such as healthcare assistants, are quitting their jobs in the NHS and taking better-paid roles in pubs and shops instead, NHS chiefs said.

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Malhotra.

• Cardiologist: The Greatest Miscarriage Of Medical Science (ToI)

A personal loss and tragedy made Dr Aseem Malhotra look into the evidence on COVID vaccines, specifically the mRNA vaccines. In his recent research paper, Dr Malhotra, a National Health Service (NHS) trained cardiologist, has ‘critically appraised’ the true benefits and potential harms of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) coronavirus disease (COVID) vaccines. “I suffered quite a personal tragedy with the sudden death of my father in July last year. He was a very fit and well man. He was 73 years old. During the whole lockdown he was walking 10 to 15 thousand steps a day. He was very conscientious of his diet,” he told a media outlet. “I had assessed his heart a few years earlier, and in fact he had actually improved his lifestyle since then,” he adds.

Dr Malhotra has said that his father’s rapidly progressive coronary artery disease and sudden cardiac arrest was most likely due to the mRNA product. “His postmortem findings really shocked me. There were two severe blockages in his coronary arteries, which did not really make any sense. As a cardiologist and intimately knowing my dad’s lifestyle and health,” he says. Not long after that data started emerging on the possible link between mRNA vaccine and increased risk of heart attacks. From a mechanism of increasing inflammation around the coronary arteries. “Re-analysis of randomised controlled trials using the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology suggests a greater risk of serious adverse events from the vaccines than being hospitalised from Covid-19,” writes Malhotra in peer-reviewed Journal of Insulin Resistance.

“Pharmacovigilance systems and real-world safety data, coupled with plausible mechanisms of harm, are deeply concerning, especially in relation to cardiovascular safety,” he writes in the paper and adds that mirroring a potential signal from the Pfizer Phase 3 trial, a significant rise in cardiac arrest calls to ambulances in England was seen in 2021, with similar data emerging from Israel in the 16–39-year-old age group. I was one of the first to receive two doses of Pfizer’s messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine and though my individual risk was small due to my optimal metabolic health, “the main reason I took the jab was to prevent transmission of the virus to my vulnerable patients” writes the doctor in his paper.

To steer clear of what he considered as anti-vax propaganda at that time, he was asked to appear on Good Morning Britain to convince film director Gurinder Chadha, Order of the British Empire (OBE) to take the shot. A research study published in November 2021 in Circulation caught his attention, he says. “In over 500 middle-aged patients under regular follow up, using a predictive score model based on inflammatory markers that are strongly correlated with risk of heart attack, the mRNA vaccine was associated with significantly increasing the risk of a coronary event within fiveyears from 11% pre-mRNA vaccine to 25% 2–10 weeks post mRNA vaccine,” he writes. “I wondered whether my father’s Pfizer vaccination, which he received six months earlier, could have contributed to his unexplained premature death and so I began to critically appraise the data,” he adds.

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Great profits for Fauci.

• Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion (Oracle)

Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion shines a light on Covid-19 vaccine injuries and bereavements, but also to takes an encompassing look at the systemic failings that appear to have enabled them. We look at leading analysis of pharmaceutical trials, the role of the MHRA in regulating these products, the role of the SAGE behavioural scientists in influencing policy and the role of the media and Big Tech companies in supressing free and open debate on the subject.

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Huawei
https://twitter.com/i/status/1575370629536104448

 

 

 

 

Fuellmilch

 

 


The San Francisco Garter Snake has been on the endangered list since 1967, and has been labeled the most beautiful snake in the U.S. Researches estimate only 1-2 thousand remain

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Debt Rattle August 7 2022

Aug 072022
 
 August 7, 2022  Posted by at 9:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  41 Responses »


Edward Hopper Ground swell 1939

 

• Vaccine Deaths Outnumber Covid Deaths in US Households (DS)
• Russian MIL Declares Ukraine Origin of C19 (Clandestine)
• US Prepares New Weapons Package For Ukraine (RT)
• Pentagon Chiefs’ Calls To China Go Unanswered Amid Taiwan Crisis (Pol.)
• Erdogan’s Diplomacy With Russia Alarms West – FT (RT)
• Putin Says EU Should Thank Turkey (RT)
• 100s Of New Mines Required To Meet 2030 Battery Metals Demand — IEA (Mining)
• Sanctions On Russia ‘Irresponsible’, Adviser To Brazil’s Lula Says (RT)
• Elon Musk Accuses Twitter of Fraud: Countersuit (ET)
• Elon Musk Says He Will Buy Twitter On One Condition (RT)
• VP Joe Biden Met With Two Chinese Energy Execs In The West Wing (DM)
• EDF Cuts Output At Nuclear Power Plants As French Rivers Get Too Warm (G.)
• China’s July Coal Imports Surge 24% To Meet Peak Power Load (R.)

 

 

 

 

Roger Waters
https://twitter.com/i/status/1555989512353890304

 

 

 

 

MacGregor China
https://twitter.com/i/status/1555974674357440512

 

 

 

 

Haditsch

 

 

BREAKING: Alex Jones has been ordered to pay an extra $45 million in punitive damages by a Texas Jury.


Robert Barnes @barnes_law: By law in Texas, this is reduced to $750K per plaintiff, so it’s actually $1.5M not $45M. Also, like everything else in the trial, a product of a court that denied Jones any evidence on his side or any witnesses at this stage, and should be set aside by Texas Supremes.

 

 

 

 

Based on Steve Kirsch studies/polls. How can you justify a mandate is the vaccines kill more people than the disease they “protect” from?

• Vaccine Deaths Outnumber Covid Deaths in US Households (DS)

Polls of the U.S. public continue to show that up to twice as many Americans have lost a household member to a Covid vaccine injury as have lost one to Covid. The pooled results of five surveys of the American public, now totalling over 2,500 people, show that while 4.4% of respondents reported that someone in their household had died from COVID-19, 8.9% said someone had died as a result of Covid vaccination. The results also showed that 8.6% said they had been injured by their vaccination, 4.9% that they had sought medical help and 3.2% that they had been hospitalised, while 3.6% said that as a result of vaccination they were no longer able to work a full day or at all.

These are percentages of all respondents. If we look only at the 74.0% vaccinated with at least one dose then the figures, as a proportion of vaccinated persons, are 11.7% injured, 6.7% needing medical help, 4.4% hospitalised and 4.8% unable to work. While these figures are self-reported and there is no control group, since the unvaccinated were not asked about adverse events, they are still alarmingly high. The results also showed that, among those who reported a Covid death in their household, more than twice as many reported that it occurred after the person was vaccinated than before (2.8% vs 1.2%). The proportion who said they had contracted Covid before their vaccination (13.1%) was very similar to the proportion who said they contracted it afterwards (11.7%). These figures are not indicative of a highly effective vaccine against either infection or death.

The people polled were randomly selected, representative samples of the U.S. public, of whom 74.0% were vaccinated, so the samples were not inherently biased towards or against the reporting of vaccine problems, though as in all opinion polls (especially online ones) there may be an issue of self-selection bias.

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FYI

• Russian MIL Declares Ukraine Origin of C19 (Clandestine)

New briefing from Chief of Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defence Forces, General Igor Kirillov, on military biological activities of the United States in the territory of Ukraine. The Russian MIL have been studying biological samples from surrendered Ukrainian soldiers, and what they have been finding is beyond disturbing. Approximately 20% of them carrying West Nile pathogens, which were being studied “by the Pentagon as part of the Ukrainian UP-4 and UP-8 projects”. Suggesting that Ukrainian soldiers are being subject to involuntary biological experimentation and exposure to biological weapons (think Nuremberg). In addition to carrying pathogens, nearly all of the surrendered Ukrainian soldiers carried traces of a wide variety of narcotics and opioids, including Meth and Codeine.

Russia were sure to remind us of the Nazi’s usage of methamphetamines in WW2. I covered this 2 weeks ago, when the left-wing media tried to spin this reality as some sort of X-men mutant conspiracy theory. No, they are just Nazis, and historically, Nazis use drugs. Particularly as an advantage in war. Russia goes on to cite that this methamphetamine Ukraine are using, Pervitin, was also used by US soldiers during Vietnam and Korea. It’s designed to reduce the psycho-emotional burdens of war. However, an intended side effect is excessive aggression, which Russia alleges is one of the main factors for the Nationalist Ukrainian forces displaying “extreme cruelty” to civilians and the shelling of their own people in Donbas. Ukraine are using mind-numbing agents on their forces to make them more susceptible to carrying out heinous acts.

Next, we find perhaps the most explosive slide to date, in which Russia FINALLY comes out and DIRECTLY accuses the US of being responsible for the creation and release of Covid-19. What I have been saying from the beginning, is that this all leads to C-19, which will be the nail in the coffin and the red-pill that wakes up the world. The backlash the US are facing from Russia and the rest of Eastern world, is directly because the world found out THE UNITED STATES CREATED COVID. Specifically the “DNC/Liberal Globalists”, as the Russians allege. Not Trump. Russia clarifies they have record of over 16,000 biological samples, including blood and serum samples, transported from Ukraine to the US, Georgia, European countries.

[..] In conclusion, Russia have now DIRECTLY accused the DNC Globalists of: -creating and releasing new variants of Coronaviruses, and now Monkeypox, intentionally, for the purposes of political control and world domination. -using non-consensual experimentation on citizens of the world to create genome specific biological weapons for ethnic cleansing. -creation and usage of narcotics, such as methamphetamines, on Ukrainian forces to dehumanize them in order to carry out heinous crimes against humanity on civilians in Ukraine. Russia just confirmed my overall narrative; that the war in Ukraine is backlash for the Deep State’s creation and usage of C19. We are already in WW3 and C19 was the first weapon fired. The fact that Russia have now come out and openly called this spade a spade… suggests we are approaching the finish line. Russia claims final dossier will be complete in “Autumn”.

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Another $700 million straight down the drain.

• US Prepares New Weapons Package For Ukraine (RT)

The US government is reportedly preparing its largest weapons transfer to Ukraine to date, with officials ready to authorize another $1 billion in military aid, including advanced rocket and missile platforms and additional ammunition. The new aid package could be announced as soon as next week, Reuters reported on Friday, citing three unnamed officials. It would bring the total US security assistance to Kiev to nearly $10 billion since Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24. While the officials said President Joe Biden has yet to formally sign off on the transfer, the current proposal would see $1 billion in arms shipped to Kiev, including additional munitions for the HIMARS rocket system, NASAMS surface-to-air missiles, and up to 50 M113 armored personnel carriers, allegedly the ‘medical’ variant.


A separate military aid package to Ukraine was announced on Monday, worth around $550 million, and also featured HIMARS rockets. Washington has so far sent a total of 16 HIMARS systems to Ukraine, longer-range platforms capable of striking targets inside Russian territory. Though Moscow has claimed to have eliminated some of the weapons from the battlefield, US military officials have disputed the Russian account, insisting Kiev’s HIMARS remain intact. The new massive arms transfer also comes after a Pentagon decision to allow US military personnel to treat wounded Ukrainian troops at a large US-run hospital in western Germany, though the logistics for that arrangement remain unclear, as the facility is more than 1,000 miles away from Ukraine’s capital and even further from active battle zones in the Donbass region.

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Thanks Nancy.

• Pentagon Chiefs’ Calls To China Go Unanswered Amid Taiwan Crisis (Pol.)

Top Chinese military officials have not returned multiple calls from their American counterparts this week as a crisis erupted in the Pacific over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, according to three people with knowledge of the attempts. Beijing’s ghosting of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley comes as China continues launching missiles and positioning warships and aircraft in unprecedented military drills around Taiwan. Officials and experts say China’s silence is a shortsighted and reckless move that increases the risk of escalation in an already tense situation.

“If the [Chinese military] is operating more aggressively, and in closer proximity to U.S. forces with greater frequency, we’d need these mechanisms even more to promote a safe operating environment,” said Randy Schriver, who served as the top Pentagon official for Asia policy in the Trump administration. U.S. military leaders strive to maintain open lines of communication even with potential adversaries such as China to prevent accidents and other miscalculations that could turn into a full-blown conflict. But the last call Milley had with his Chinese counterpart, Chief of the Joint Staff Gen. Li Zuocheng, was on July 7, the Pentagon said. The two spoke by secure video teleconference about the need to maintain open lines of communication, as well as reducing risk, according to a readout from Milley’s office.

Austin, meanwhile, met in person with Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe in June on the sideline of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. “The secretary has repeatedly emphasized the importance of fully open lines of communication with China’s defense leaders to ensure that we can avoid any miscalculations, and that remains true,” Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon’s acting press secretary, told POLITICO in an email. China on Friday announced that it was halting certain official dialogues between senior-level U.S. military commanders, including the regional commanders, as well as talks on maritime safety. The announcement does not specifically apply to Austin and Milley’s counterparts, and officials said they are still open to communication between those leaders.

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“..a NATO member since 1952 and an EU applicant since 1987..”

• Erdogan’s Diplomacy With Russia Alarms West – FT (RT)

Western officials are “increasingly alarmed” that Turkey, a NATO ally and prospective EU member, is deepening its cooperation with Russia, the Financial Times has reported. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently returned from Sochi vowing to boost trade after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Six unnamed Western officials told the newspaper that they were “concerned”about the plans of Russia and Turkey to cooperate on trade and energy. One EU official said that Brussels was monitoring relations between Ankara and Moscow “more and more closely,” given how Turkey seems to be “increasingly” becoming a platform for trade with Russia. Following a four-hour meeting with Putin on Friday, Erdogan welcomed Russia’s role in building a nuclear power plant in Turkey.

The two nations aim for bilateral trade turnover of $100 billion, and are cooperating against terrorism and toward peace in Libya and Syria. Putin pledged that Russia would supply Turkey with oil, gas and coal “without any interruptions,” after the two leaders agreed that Ankara would pay for some of this gas in rubles. Another official told the newspaper that Erdogan’s behavior is “very opportunistic,”adding that “we are trying to make the Turks pay attention to our concerns.” Although a NATO member since 1952 and an EU applicant since 1987, Turkey has broken with both blocs on several occasions, most recently over the conflict in Ukraine.

Erdogan has described his diplomacy with Kiev and Moscow as “balanced,” and has refused to sanction Russia over its military operation. Turkey is the only NATO country not to impose such penalties. Erdogan also took the opportunity to host peace talks between the countries in March, which ultimately bore no fruit. Since then, however, he has won acclaim for overseeing talks that led to the resumption of grain shipments across the Black Sea from Ukrainian ports. As the Financial Times’ article went online on Saturday, the first ship carrying Ukrainian corn arrived in Istanbul for inspection by Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian and UN officials.

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“The Turkish Stream, unlike all other routes of our hydrocarbon supplies, works properly, works smoothly, without any failures.”

• Putin Says EU Should Thank Turkey (RT)

Turkey has ensured a reliable supply of Russian natural gas to Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, adding that European nations should be grateful to Ankara for that. During a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sochi, Putin named the TurkStream pipeline as one of the most important arteries for delivering Russian gas to Europe. The Russian president praised the reliability of the pipeline, for which the Europeans should be grateful. “The Turkish Stream, unlike all other routes of our hydrocarbon supplies, works properly, works smoothly, without any failures. […] I think our European partners should be grateful to Turkey for ensuring uninterrupted transit of our gas to the European market,” Putin said.


TurkStream consists of two parallel lines running under the Black Sea from Russia and joins Turkey’s gas transportation network and sends Russian gas onward to Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. The route has been unaffected by the developments around Ukraine and the anti-Russian sanctions imposed by the EU but rejected by Turkey. The main pipeline between Russia and the EU – Nord Stream 1, which carries gas to Germany – has been operating at 20% capacity recently due to equipment issues caused by sanctions. Meanwhile, additional routes via Ukraine’s gas transportation network have been restricted by Kiev. Deliveries via the Yamal-Europe pipeline continue, although Gazprom stopped using the Polish leg of the pipeline in May due to sanctions.

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Included the Charles Vance video again. It’s good.

• 100s Of New Mines Required To Meet 2030 Battery Metals Demand — IEA (Mining)

Global battery and minerals supply chains need to expand ten-fold to meet projected critical minerals needs by 2030, a report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found. The report concludes the industry needs to build 50 more lithium mines, 60 more nickel mines and 17 more cobalt mines by 2030 to meet global net carbon emissions goals. Pressure on the supply of critical materials will continue to mount as road transport electrification expands to meet net-zero ambitions. According to the IEA, demand for electric vehicle (EV) batteries will increase from around 340 GWh today to over 3500 GWh by 2030.

“Additional investments are needed in the short-term, particularly in mining, where lead times are much longer than for other parts of the supply chain. In some cases requiring more than a decade from initial feasibility studies to production, and then several more years to reach nominal production capacity,” the report reads. The projected mineral supply until the end of the 2020s is in line with the demand for EV batteries in the ‘stated policies scenario’ of the IEA’s world energy model. But the supply of some minerals, such as lithium, would need to rise by up to one-third by 2030 to satisfy the pledges and announcements for EV batteries in the ‘announced pledges scenario (APS) of the same energy model.


“For example, demand for lithium – the commodity with the largest projected demand-supply gap – is projected to increase sixfold to 500 kilotonnes by 2030 in the APS, requiring the equivalent of 50 new average-sized mines,” according to the report. By 2030, nickel is facing the largest absolute demand increase as high-nickel chemistries are the current dominant cathode for EVs and are expected to remain so. For cobalt, the opposite is true as battery makers continue to thrift to lower cobalt content chemistries (and even potentially cobalt-free chemistries by 2030) to reduce costs and due to environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns. [..] “For the Announced Pledges Scenario, 60 nickel and 17 cobalt new mines are required in 2030, (assuming average annual mine production capacity of 38,000 tonnes for nickel and 7,000 tonnes for cobalt).”

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“..if he is elected, “Brazil will again become a protagonist on the international stage and we will prove that it’s possible to have a better world.”

• Sanctions On Russia ‘Irresponsible’, Adviser To Brazil’s Lula Says (RT)

Celso Amorim, Brazil’s former foreign minister and current foreign policy adviser to presidential frontrunner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has condemned the West’s sanctions on Russia and said that should Lula take office, Brazil would chart a different course. In an interview with Bloomberg published on Friday, Amorim claimed that the West’s response to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine – sanctions on Russia and billions of dollars worth of weapons for Ukraine – have made nuclear war a real possibility. “For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis we see articles about the risk of nuclear weapons published on a weekly basis,” he said, arguing that “it’s irresponsible not to seek peace.”

Amorim’s argument mirrors that of Lula himself. Back in May the former Brazilian leader toldTime magazine that he sees Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky as equally responsible for the conflict in Ukraine, and condemned Washington for encouraging him to oppose Russia. “The United States has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided [the conflict], not incited it,” Lula argued at the time. From the perspective of the US, Amorim questioned the logic of driving Russia into a deeper partnership with China, another economic and military rival of America. “I have nothing against China,” he stated, adding that both are part of the BRICS group, but said that he “can’t understand the interest of the US in strengthening the China-Russia relationship.”

This relationship aside, Amorim told Bloomberg that an economy as large as Russia’s is “too big and strategic” to isolate, and that Lula’s administration would not pursue such policies if the two-term leftist president is elected in October. Speaking to Time in May, Lula said that “many different countries” are having to “foot the bill” for Washington’s hardline anti-Russia policies, and that if he is elected, “Brazil will again become a protagonist on the international stage and we will prove that it’s possible to have a better world.” Lula is currently polling 11 points ahead of incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, according to an aggregate compiled by the US-based Americas Society.

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Hard to read how the judge will see this.

• Elon Musk Accuses Twitter of Fraud: Countersuit (ET)

Elon Musk in a countersuit has accused Twitter executives of fraudulently presenting an undercount of fake users, known as bots. Twitter in July sued Musk for withdrawing from a $44 billion acquisition agreement, alleging he breached the agreement. In the counter-filing, entered under seal last month and obtained by The Epoch Times on Aug. 5, Musk says he relied on statements from Twitter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about key components of the company, such as the percentage of fake and spam accounts and moderation practices. But once Musk entered the agreement, he found that the technology company refused to provide access to the company’s books and records to verify the information. “The more Twitter evaded even simple inquiries, the more the Musk Parties grew to suspect that Twitter had misled them,” the countersuit says.


One key statistic: 238 million monetizable daily active users (users who actually see ads on the platform and thus would be considered monetizable). But that number is an overcount because there are more false and spam accounts on the platform than Twitter says, according to the filing. There are just 173 million monetizable users and most ads are shown to less than 16 million, it says. Twitter has said under 5 percent of its users are bots. Musk, in a meeting in May, attempted to understand how Twitter reached that percentage. He “was astonished to learn just how meager Twitter’s processes were,” the countersuit says. Musk learned that human reviewers look at a sample of just 100 accounts, and that Twitter executives weren’t able to say how the accounts in the sample were selected.

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Clear that Twitter hasn’t been forthcoming with files. Less clear is if they had to.

• Elon Musk Says He Will Buy Twitter On One Condition (RT)

Billionaire Elon Musk would go through with the deal to buy Twitter if the social media platform demonstrates how it checks the authenticity of user accounts, Musk wrote on Twitter on Saturday. Responding to a comment by another user, Musk said the deal to buy Twitter “should proceed on original terms” if the platform shares with him their method for sampling accounts to determine they are genuine. “If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms. However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then [the deal] should not [proceed],” he continued, referring to the regulatory documents that companies must submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the sake of transparency and to provide information on operations.


Musk previously warned he would personally authenticate 100 randomly selected accounts on the platform. In April, the entrepreneur announced his intention to purchase the social media platform, of which he is an avid supporter and frequent user, for $44 billion. Then in May, Musk said he was trying to obtain information that would confirm that fake accounts and those used to send mass advertising messages on the platform comprise less than 5% of the total number of Twitter users. In early July, Musk’s lawyers notified Twitter that he no longer wished to go through with the deal because the company had failed to provide him with this information. Twitter, although initially reluctant to agree to Musk’s acquisition plans, filed a lawsuit against him on July 12 in an attempt to compel him to complete the purchase. On July 29, Musk filed a counterclaim against the company

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A new scandal every day.

• VP Joe Biden Met With Two Chinese Energy Execs In The West Wing (DM)

Two Chinese businessmen with ties to Hunter Biden’s company met with Joe Biden at the White House and followed up with the VP’s son days later with a fawning email and invitation, records reveal. The meeting is the fifteenth to be uncovered between Joe and businessmen linked to Hunter. Executives for Chinese energy company Wanxiang secured a meeting with the vice president in the West Wing in July 2014 with just one day’s notice, according to White House visitor logs. A client of Hunter’s company Seneca Global Advisors partnered with Wanxiang in 2012 on a $1.25billion natural gas plant in China. The ceremony for the signing of the deal between Hunter’s client GreatPoint Energy and Wanxiang was attended by then Chinese vice president Xi Jinping.

Wanxiang is a major Chinese company, and also partnered with the North Korean state for a giant copper mine. Through his firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, Hunter also invested in a car company, Fisker, that was later bought by Wanxiang. After the company went bankrupt in 2013, Hunter was listed as a creditor on its filings. He bought one of its electric sports cars for $142,300. According to the White House visitor logs, Wanxiang America president Pin Ni met with Joe on July 25, 2014. Four days later, Ni emailed Hunter offering help servicing his Fisker sports car. ‘Last Friday when we visited DC, I heard that your Fisker is out of order and could not get serviced. Sorry,’ Ni wrote. ‘It would be our honor to get your Fisker fixed… I would like to give you a call to see what we could do as next step. ‘It would be our great honor to welcome you to visit Fisker or Wanxiang at any time.’

Joining Ni for the White House visit was Wanxiang Resources Co. president Youhong Han. Records show his meeting was at 11am and he left at 12.15pm, after scheduling the meeting with VP just the previous day. Han, 57, appears in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ offshore leaks database, with a British Virgin Islands company called Elegant Sky Investments Limited that has a registered address in Shanghai. Emails between Hunter and his business partners show them monitoring reporting around the $1.25billion Wanxiang-GreatPoint deal. Wanxiang bought Fisker in February 2014. The luxury hybrid cars it makes were bought by celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber.

Read more …

When it rains it pours.

• EDF Cuts Output At Nuclear Power Plants As French Rivers Get Too Warm (G.)

The French energy supplier EDF is temporarily reducing output at its nuclear power stations on the Rhône and Garonne rivers as heatwaves push up river temperatures, restricting its ability to use river water to cool the plants. The majority-state-owned company, Europe’s biggest producer of nuclear energy, said it would extend output cuts at several power stations on the two rivers as the hot spell continues – but that a minimum level of output would be maintained to keep the grid steady. EDF warned of potential output cuts at its nuclear power plants Tricastin, St Alban and Golfech in coming days due to high temperatures in the Rhône and Garonne rivers. It started imposing production restrictions in mid-July at Tricastin, St Alban and Bugey on the Rhône and Blayais at the mouth of the Garonne amid sweltering temperatures.

A spokesperson told the Guardian that the company was lowering production “for a few hours” where possible but not shutting the reactors completely. After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. Temperatures in southern France are expected to reach 40C over the next two days, according to the forecaster Météo-France. Since 2000, production losses due to high river temperatures and low river flows have represented an average of 0.3% of annual production.

However, half of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic, just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a result of the maintenance work, EDF estimates its power output this year will be the lowest in more than three decades. The company issued its fourth profit warning of the year last Thursday when it reported a first-half loss of €5.3bn. The French government, which owns 84% of EDF, is in the process of buying out minority shareholders to take full control of the business.

Read more …

Maybe this happens every year?

• China’s July Coal Imports Surge 24% To Meet Peak Power Load (R.)

China’s coal imports in July rose by nearly a quarter from June to near the highest levels so far this year as power generators increased purchases to provide for peak summer electricity demand. Arrivals of the fuel totaled 23.52 million tonnes last month, up sharply from 18.98 million tonnes in June but 22% lower than a year earlier, data issued by the General Administration of Customs showed on Sunday. Over the first seven months of the year, China imported 138.52 million tonnes of coal, down 18% on the same period of 2021. Daily coal consumption in major coastal regions hovered around 2.2 million tonnes in late July, a similar level to last year, according to Shanghai Shipping Exchange.


A temperature spike across the country drove up the use of air conditioning. The government has vowed to avoid power rationing this year and has urged coal-burning power generators, which supply about 60% of the country’s electricity, to enlarge coal stocks. Data tracked by Refinitiv showed China’s seaborne coal imports from Russia would hit a record high of 7.38 million tonnes in July. However, analysts have expected coal demand will soon begin to ease as temperatures moderate, while industrial activity remains sluggish amid Covid-19 restrictions.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Maher: Fat celebrattion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coke Machine
https://twitter.com/i/status/1555919490017288195

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle April 5 2022

Apr 052022
 
 April 5, 2022  Posted by at 8:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Tulip fields 1883

 

• Zelensky Rejected German Security Proposal Before Russian Invasion (Antiwar)
• Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre (Lauria)
• Pentagon Can’t Independently Confirm Atrocities In Ukraine’s Bucha (R.)
• Russia Threatens to Limit Exports of Ag Products to ‘Friendly’ Countries (ET)
• NATO’s Internal Gold War (Vilches)
• A Theory of the Case (Kunstler)
• Sri Lanka Inflation and Food Crisis Results in Widespread Social Chaos (CTH)
• Clinton, DNC Pay FEC Fines in Effort to Bury Story: Kash Patel (ET)
• Media ‘Caught in a Coverup’ of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story: Sen. Johnson (ET)
• ‘Big Guy’ Reemerges In Hunter Biden Grand Jury (WE)
• White House Won’t Rule Out Pardon For Hunter, James Biden (ZH)
• A Generation of Toddlers Struggling With Speech and Social Skills (SN)

 

 

 

 

Musk Twitter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1511209796531281921

Musk Trump

Bring them all back

 

 

 

 

Who are Zelensky’s handlers?

• Zelensky Rejected German Security Proposal Before Russian Invasion (Antiwar)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected a proposal from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz just days before the Russian invasion. The February 19 offer called on Kyiv to renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality. At the time, Zelensky rejected the security plan saying Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to uphold the agreement. Under Berlin’s plan, Putin and American President Joe Biden would sign the deal and jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security. The Wall Street Journal, which initially reported the proposal, said that Zelensky rejecting the offer “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.”


The day after the meeting, French President Emmanual Marcon appealed to Biden in a call between world leaders to make another push for diplomacy. “I think the last person who could still do something is you, Joe. Are you ready to meet Putin?” Macron said to Biden. However, Washington appeared uninterested in a push for diplomacy. While the full details of the German offer are unknown, it appears similar to proposals Zelensky has outlined in recent weeks. Ukraine’s top negotiator David Arakhamia said Russia had “verbally” agreed to several of Kyiv’s positions. On Sunday, Russia’s top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said the two sides are not close enough to an agreement for a meeting between Putin and Zelensky. “The draft agreement is not ready for submission to a meeting at the top,” the Russian chief negotiator said.

Read more …

“..photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.”

• Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre (Lauria)

Last Wednesday, all Russian forces left Bucha, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. This was confirmed on Thursday by a smiling Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, in a video on the Bucha City Council official Facebook page. The translated post accompanying the video says: “March 31 – the day of the liberation of Bucha. This was announced by Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.” All of the Russian troops are gone and yet there is no mention of a massacre. The beaming Fedoruk says it is a “glorious day” in the history of Bucha, which would hardly be the case if hundreds of dead civilians littered the streets around Fedoruk.

“Russian Defence Ministry denied accusations by the Kiev regime of the alleged killing of civilians in Bucha, Kiev Region. Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and ‘not a single local resident was injured’ during the time when Bucha was under the control of Russian troops,” the Russian MOD said in a post on Telegram. What happened then on Friday and Saturday? As pointed out in a piece by Jason Michael McCann on Standpoint Zero, The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre. Instead, the Times said the withdrawal was completed on Saturday, two days after the mayor said it was, and that the Russians left “behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts.”

The Times said reporters found the bodies of six civilians. “It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded packaging of a Russian military ration was lying beside one man who had been shot in the head,” the paper said. It then quoted a Zelensky adviser, who said: “’The bodies of people with tied hands, who were shot dead by soldiers lie in the streets,’ the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter. ‘These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.’ He included an image of a scene, photographed by Agence France-Presse, showing three bodies on the side of a road, one with hands apparently tied behind the back. The New York Times was unable to independently verify Mr. Podolyak’s claim the people had been executed.’” It is possible that on Saturday the full extent of the horror had yet to emerge, and that even the mayor was unaware of it two days before, though photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.

In Bucha, the Times was close to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose soldiers appear in the newspaper’s photographs. In his piece, McCann suggests that Azov may responsible for the killings: “Something very interesting then happens on [Saturday] 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that: ‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’

The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.” Ukraintsiva was speaking a day after the mayor had said the town was liberated.

Scott Ritter

Read more …

“We have no reason whatsoever to refute the Ukrainian claims about these atrocities..”

• Pentagon Can’t Independently Confirm Atrocities In Ukraine’s Bucha (R.)

The U.S. military is not in a position to independently confirm Ukrainian accounts of atrocities by Russian forces against civilians in the town of Bucha, but has no reason to dispute the accounts either, a senior U.S. defense official said on Monday. “We’re seeing the same imagery that you are. We have no reason whatsoever to refute the Ukrainian claims about these atrocities — clearly, deeply, deeply troubling,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The Pentagon can’t independently and single handedly confirm that, but we’re also not in any position to refute those claims.” The Kremlin has denied accusations related to the murder of civilians in the town.

Escobar

Read more …

“We will supply food and crops only to our friends (fortunately, we have a lot of them, and they are not at all in Europe and not in North America)”

• Russia Threatens to Limit Exports of Ag Products to ‘Friendly’ Countries (ET)

A senior Russian government official has threatened to limit exports of agriculture products to “friendly” countries only amid sanctions from Western nations in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Dmitry Medvedev, who previously served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy secretary of the country’s security council, took to Telegram on April 1 where he warned of the potential move. Medvedev said that many counties depend on supplies of food from Russia, a major global wheat exporter, writing: “It turns out that our food is our quiet weapon. Quiet but ominous,” according to Breitbart. “The priority in food supplies is our domestic market. And price control,” he continued. “We will supply food and crops only to our friends (fortunately, we have a lot of them, and they are not at all in Europe and not in North America). We will sell both for rubles and for their national currency in agreed proportions.”


He then explained that Russia would not supply products and agricultural products to those countries it deems as “enemies.” “And we won’t buy anything from them (although we haven’t bought anything since 2014, but the list of products prohibited for import can be further expanded),” he continued. Russia previously imposed a ban on imports of certain agricultural products from the EU and other Western countries in 2014 after its annexation of Crimea. Russia serves as a major global exporter of several commodities, including sunflower oil, barley, and wheat; the latter of which it mainly supplies to Africa and the Middle East. It is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, having exported $10.1B in wheat in 2020 alone, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic and various supply chain issues.

Lavrov

Read more …

Grand theft. Ominous.

• NATO’s Internal Gold War (Vilches)

Brexitology focused keenly on UK fish but fully ignored the EU´s gigantic gold reserves supposedly still vaulted in custody at the Bank of England. Adding insult to injury, a UK-EU no-deal financial services crash-out divorce went by almost unnoticed… not only without the bang of the still postponed “financial equivalence” protocol… but also without a mere whimper from specialized media and Remainers. Now, the Ukraine crisis with its new payment requirements for the badly needed Russian oil & gas…overlapping with essential yet unfinished Brexit business…will necessarily evolve into a vicious NATO internal gold war. Paraphrasing James Carville spiced with some traditional British flavor, “It´s the bloody gold, stupid”

Rule Britannia As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have it, the physical repatriation of the EU gold supposedly still vaulted in London would “mightily” affect the future of Europe with very deep, high-voltage political impact both sides of the English Channel. In this scenario No.10 Downing Street would easily negotiate the EU gold bullion availability only under specific Brexit conditions favorable to the UK. Actually, doing this could turn out to be absolutely necessary and should go far beyond the enormous intrinsic value of the EU gold supposedly still vaulted at the BoE. Let me explain.

NATO gold in London Russia´s new rubles or gold payment requirements for any of its goods or services will necessarily prompt a major gold war between the UK and the EU probably resulting in NATO´s first-ever internal head-on gloves-off confrontation. After WW2 the idea was to keep Europe´s gold bullion safely away from the former Soviet Union and Josef Stalin, just in case. So decades ago current EU member states deposited most of their gold in custody at the Bank of England (BoE) in London. Now, the UK will dare to weaponize the approval of EU gold repatriation requests and other gold-related issues as a very convincing bargaining tool for lots of still unfinished yet most important Brexit business. So, (a) Whitehall could indefinetly delay the EU gold delivery unless Brexit pending issues are agreed in favor of the UK.

(b) Or, quite simply, the BoE would not ever return such EU gold supposedly kept in custody for the past decades because it has been partially or totally sold off or loaned out or compromised as explained below with former UK Prime Minister James Gordon Brown knowing about it all too well. If history is any guide, hostilities will explode the instant the EU member states individually or collectively rightfully demand a yet-non-existant fully independent world-class functionally detailed audit of the EU gold supposedly still in ´custody´ at the BoE. This should take plenty of time and is the perfect excuse for delaying the whole process always under the exclusive perview of London, not Brussels.

Or unmanageable problems would arise as soon as EU nations require immediate repatriation of at least some of such ´theoretical´ bullion, most probably all of them at the same time in view of circumstances. Then, either (1) some gold could possibly slowly be returned here and there (albeit with great delay ) but only under very vague London terms and changing the unfinished Brexit aftermath to levels yet unheard of, or (2) no gold would be returned as it has been sold off or compromised in different ways as explained hereinafter. And the UK better not decide to pay Russia even with a single gold coin as the EU would rightly wonder who owns it.

Read more …

“Russia has been the all-purpose hobgoblin that every US agency and many political personages turn to when they are caught doing something nefarious.”

• A Theory of the Case (Kunstler)

[..] since the State Department is most of all responsible for the Russian clean-up operation now underway in Ukraine, you can bet that CBS-News is in on the info-grift to protect State, its patron. What Russia had to clean-up was the long-building after-effects of now Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s 2014 engineered Maidan coup against the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. The issue of that bygone day was a tug-of-war between the US and Russia, with Ukraine as the flag in the middle of the rope. Russia wanted Ukraine in the orbit of its economic “customs union” and the US was affecting to pull Ukraine into the Eurozone and NATO — or, at least, use Ukraine as a forward base for NATO, in order to antagonize Russia.

Russia has been the all-purpose hobgoblin that every US agency and many political personages turn to when they are caught doing something nefarious. When Hillary Clinton’s email trove was purloined through her poorly-defended illegal home server, Russia was to blame. That fiasco spawned the multi-year RussiaGate operation that bamboozled half the nation and ended up tainting the FBI, the DOJ, the FISA Court, and both the House and Senate Intel committees. Then, along came Hunter Biden’s laptop, infamously labeled “Russian disinformation” by every retired senior intel spook still drawing a fat pension. The news about the laptop and its lurid contents was strenuously suppressed by every mainstream media company except The New York Post, and its coverage was banished from Facebook and Twitter which so many Americans rely on for news — an obvious and true conspiracy between government, high tech, and the news media.

All this coincided you understand, with the horror-show official response to Covid-19 coming on the scene at exactly the same time: winter of 2019-2020. By then, half the country had already been groomed into a mass formation psychosis over the RussiaGate narrative that declared President Donald Trump was a stooge for Vladimir Putin… thus, Trump derangement.

Read more …

“Food inflation in Sri Lanka reached 30%…. things start immediately collapsing.”

Coming soon to a place near you.

• Sri Lanka Inflation and Food Crisis Results in Widespread Social Chaos (CTH)

I have stated for the past year ‘the absence of food will change things‘. The inflation and food affordability crisis has now surfaced in Sri Lanka. Global media is paying attention, even sending out warnings about what this might represent for other nations. Sri Lanka has a debt to GDP ratio of 120%, approximately the same as the United States. However, Sri Lanka does not have the benefit of their currency being supported as the global trade currency; therefore, the debt and domestic inflation rate are directly tied together. The rate of food inflation in March has exceeded 30%…. the absence of the public being able to afford food has now surfaced and the government is collapsing. Read the news from Sri Lanka through the prism of what could happen in U.S. cities if we lose the dollar as the global trade currency.

(Via Reuters) – Reuters Breakingviews) – “Sri Lanka’s collapse is front of mind for many. Protesters fed up with crippling shortages of essential food and fuel items are on the streets, prompting multiple members of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s cabinet to offer to resign late on Sunday. Social unrest will probably accelerate a restructuring of some $44 billion of international sovereign debt. Though Sri Lanka’s problems follow years of mismanagement, its speedy unravelling is a warning to sturdier economies from Europe to Asia suddenly grappling with a spike in the cost of living.

A current account crisis read more has intensified after the West fired its sanctions bazooka at Russia as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine. Rolling blackouts and a state of emergency are frightening away remaining tourists, a crucial source of foreign exchange. Food inflation hit an eye-watering 30.2% in March. The currency’s 40% depreciation against the U.S. dollar in one month, including a central bank managed devaluation, is blowing out leverage ratios: Public debt estimated by the International Monetary Fund at 120% of GDP is perhaps some 40 percentage points more than might be deemed sustainable, guesses Citi.

[…] It’s a reminder of the political implications of high prices. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, few Asian countries had consumer inflation in double digits. The standouts were Sri Lanka and Pakistan, whose Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday dodged a no-confidence vote and called fresh elections. Poorer countries are more vulnerable to surging global food prices because their populations spend more on food than discretionary items.” Food inflation in Sri Lanka reached 30%…. things start immediately collapsing. Consider the recent projected rate of food inflation in the United States (wave 2, this summer):

Read more …

Admission of guilt?!

• Clinton, DNC Pay FEC Fines in Effort to Bury Story: Kash Patel (ET)

The lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 probe into the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion, Kash Patel, said the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is paying a penalty to Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an admittance of guilt. Clinton and DNC are doing so to bury the narrative and prevent more media coverage of these illegal activities, said Patel. “I think the public sees what that is. It’s their way of burying the narrative, because if they contested what happens, more media coverage, more people start looking into these things,” Patel said. “So the Hillary Clinton campaign is not contesting it, they’re paying the fine. It’s basically admitting that they did this and they’re out is: ‘we just don’t want a protracted legal deal, as if the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC ever shied away from taking something or someone to court,” Patel added.

Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the entities violated federal law by describing payments that ultimately went to the Fusion GPS research group as going toward legal services and consulting. “It shows them how wrong they were to violate the law and spend political campaign dollars on hit job, opposition research pieces for then-candidate Trump, all of which, [to] remind the audience, was then used intentionally by the FBI—even though they knew it was false—to go to a federal secret court and surveil a presidential candidate and later a president of the United States.”

The FEC, which is responsible for overseeing federal elections, including the presidential election, found that the Hillary Clinton campaign broke FEC rules about how donations can be used. “What we knew when we ran the Russiagate investigation, Chairman Nunes and I, we exposed that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, an opposition research hit job. We had proven that some years ago,” said Patel. “What the Coolidge Reagan Foundation did … based on our investigation, said ‘wait a second FEC, you as a political campaign cannot spend political dollars launching opposition research, false or otherwise,’” said Patel.

Dan Backer, an attorney who lodged the complaint with the election commission against the Clinton campaign and the DNC, told The Epoch Times that it’s the first time Clinton “has actually been held accountable for misconduct,” calling the fines “a great step for accountability.” “So they fined them, that’s the FEC’s job. And the Hillary Clinton campaign could have said: ‘We disagree with your finding. We’re going to go to court.’ What did the Hillary Clinton campaign do? … They agreed to the finding of probable cause by the FEC, which means they’re basically agreeing that it happened. … Like we’ve always said, ‘follow the money.’”

Read more …

Make sure he gets re-elected.

• Media ‘Caught in a Coverup’ of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story: Sen. Johnson (ET)

Johnson said that some outlets had participated in “what they call a limited hangout, or in [President Richard] Nixon’s case, a modified limited hangout. You’ve let out just enough information, just enough truth to try to get you by the moment.” A modified limited hangout is a public relations or propaganda technique in which the individual or official involved releases some information that was previously hidden, albeit still retaining important key facts, in an effort to prevent more important details from being exposed. According to former CIA official Victor Marchetti, the technique results in the public being “so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”


“We can’t allow our intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, the FBI, or the media to get away with this,” Johnson said. “This is serious business. This is incredible corruption at the highest levels of government and within our media. “We are all being snookered by them. This has been a—from my standpoint—a massive diversionary operation to, you know, to try to take the American public’s attention away from their wrongdoing, their lies, their cover-ups.” He said that “now we have actual bank records that verify what we reported” and that Hunter Biden’s “laptop is obviously a treasure-trove of additional corroborating evidence as well.”

Read more …

Special counsel required.

• ‘Big Guy’ Reemerges In Hunter Biden Grand Jury (WE)

A grand jury witness was asked to identify the infamous “big guy” mentioned in discussions regarding a Chinese business deal involving the president’s son Hunter Biden, according to a new report. The question came up after this person, who was not identified, was shown a piece of evidence before the grand jury, located in Wilmington, Delaware, a source told the New York Post. The answer that was given was not reported, though some have claimed the “big guy” is President Joe Biden, raising the prospect that the commander in chief could be drawn into a federal criminal investigation. So far, the White House has been adamant in asserting that the president is not involved and that Hunter Biden, 52, did not commit any crimes.

The New York Post has led the charge in reporting on the contents of an abandoned laptop that is believed to have belonged to Hunter Biden. While other major media outlets sought to cast doubt on its authenticity and Big Tech companies even took steps to suppress its spread in the final weeks of the 2020 election, in recent weeks, the New York Times and Politico have come forth with reports saying at least some of the contents on the laptop have been authenticated. At issue is one particular email, dated May 13, 2017, from investor James Gilliar to himself, Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker, and James and Hunter Biden detailing a “provisional” business deal with a Chinese company called CEFC. The email, in part, asks about “10 held by H for the big guy,” as well as “10” for “Jim.” It appears “H” is a reference to Hunter Biden, “Jim” is Joe Biden’s brother, and “10” is a reference to 10%.

Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinski, a Navy veteran, corroborated the authenticity of the email in October 2020 and insisted the “big guy” was then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The Washington Post recently reported on “verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships.” The elder Biden has distanced himself from his son’s foreign business dealings. Over the weekend, a White House official claimed the president is certain his son did not break the law or do anything unethical as it relates to China.

“Of course the president is confident that his son didn’t break the law,” Ron Klain, the president’s chief of staff, said during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “But most importantly, as I said, that’s a matter that’s going to be decided by the Justice Department, by the legal process. It’s something that no one at the White House has involvement in.”

Solomon Hunter

Read more …

No pardon needed without an investigation.

• White House Won’t Rule Out Pardon For Hunter, James Biden (ZH)

The White House won’t rule out granting pardons to Hunter Biden or James Biden, the son and brother of President Joe Biden, as investigations over their international dealings heat up. “That’s not a hypothetical I’m going to entertain,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told reporters last week when asked during the daily press briefing. “I don’t have anything to add from this podium.” Bedingfield was reluctant to address any aspect of the Hunter Biden story, after CNN, The Washington Post, and the New York Times recently published stories about the federal tax probe into Hunter Biden and his foreign business deals. When asked additional questions about Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden, Bedingfield would only reply, “I don’t have anything further to add from this podium.” -Breitbart


Two weeks ago, the New York Times confirmed Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop exists, and is legit – and confirmed several previously reported aspects of the story, including correspondence between Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, both of whom served on the board Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. Contained on the laptop were a trove of emails, text messages, photographs and financial documents. Last week, the Washington Post and CNN piled on – with the post reporting on Hunter’s “multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company,” and CNN running a blistering segment and reporting that the federal investigation into Hunter is ‘heating up.’

Read more …

As their parents have their own vaccine related handicaps.

• A Generation of Toddlers Struggling With Speech and Social Skills (SN)

Lockdown restrictions, including adults wearing face masks, has left a generation of babies and toddlers struggling with speech and social skills, according to an official report. Inspectors working for Ofsted found that infants being surrounded by adults wearing face masks for significant periods of time over the last two years has damaged their learning and communication abilities. Those turning two “will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly,” the report found. “Some providers have reported that delays to children’s speech and language development have led to them not socialising with other children as readily as they would have expected previously,” it added.


The restrictions also left toddlers struggling with crawling, using the toilet independently and making friends. Delays in learning had also regressed some children to the stage where they needed help with basic tasks such as putting on their coats and blowing their noses. “I’m particularly worried about younger children’s development which, if left unaddressed, could potentially cause problems for primary schools down the line,” said chief inspector Amanda Spielman. We previously highlighted another study out of Germany which found that the reading ability of children has plummeted compared to pre-COVID times thanks to lockdown policies that led to the closure of schools. Speech therapist Jaclyn Theek said that mask wearing during the pandemic has caused a 364% increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers. “They’re not making any word attempts and not communicating at all with their family,” she said, adding that symptoms of autism are also skyrocketing.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

French doctor

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 18 2021

Oct 182021
 
 October 18, 2021  Posted by at 7:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


M. C. Escher Meeting (Encounter) 1940

 

• Covid Infection In Vaxxed 40-49 Yr Olds Double The Unvaxxed Rate (DS)
• Over 90% Of A Hospital’s Admissions Were Vaccinated For Covid-19 (Siri)
• What Happens If Israel Fails The Stress Test? (Geert)
• White House Tells Governors to Get Ready to Vaccinate Young Kids (CHD)
• 40% Of California State Workers Are Unvaccinated Despite Newsom’s Order (ZH)
• Pentagon Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Vaccine Mandates (ET)
• Ron Johnson Slams DOJ Probe Of Parents’ School Board Protests (JTN)
• Facebook Announces 10,000 EU Jobs To Build ‘Metaverse’ (Y!)
• MPs Back Challenge To Boris Johnson On Vaccine Passports (Exp.)
• Bare Shelves, No Holidays… At Last, A Biblical Kind Of Christmas (Cumming)
• Who Do You Blame When You’ve Killed The Scapegoat? (Fintan O’Toole)

 

 

Ivermectin works in Tokyo..

 

 

And in Indonesia.


Indonesia ramped up ivermectin production and the government assured national distribution and fair prices. IVM is considered by the government a COVID medicine.

 

 

But Singapore has the same pattern as Taiwan: very low infection rates, but then the vaccines came…

 

 

McCullough
https://twitter.com/i/status/1448336581358665733

 

 

Effectiveness Hits Minus-109%

• Covid Infection In Vaxxed 40-49 Yr Olds Double The Unvaxxed Rate (DS)

In the latest Vaccine Surveillance report from Public Health England (PHE) the Covid infection rate in double-vaccinated people in their 40s went above 100 per cent higher than in the unvaccinated for the first time, reaching 109 per cent. This translates to an unadjusted vaccine effectiveness of minus 109 per cent.

Vaccine effectiveness continues to drop fast in all over-18s, hitting minus 85 per cent for those in their 50s, minus 88 per cent for those in their 60s and minus 79 per cent for those in their 70s. Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and death continues to hold up in all age groups, though with some signs of decline, particularly among older people. There is still nothing from Government sources acknowledging this failure of the vaccines against infection, its implications for policy and analysing what might be behind it.

Read more …

We’ve seen Deborah Conrad.

• Over 90% Of A Hospital’s Admissions Were Vaccinated For Covid-19 (Siri)

A concerned Physician Assistant, Deborah Conrad, convinced her hospital to carefully track the Covid-19 vaccination status of every patient admitted to her hospital. The result is shocking. As Ms. Conrad has detailed, her hospital serves a community in which less than 50% of the individuals were vaccinated for Covid-19 but yet, during the same time period, approximately 90% of the individuals admitted to her hospital were documented to have received this vaccine. These patients were admitted for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to COVID-19 infections. Even more troubling is that there were many individuals who were young, many who presented with unusual or unexpected health events, and many who were admitted months after vaccination.


One would think that after an association was identified by a healthcare professional, our health authorities would at least review this finding, right? Sadly, when Ms. Conrad reached out to health authorities herself, she was ignored. My firm then sent a letter to the CDC and FDA on July 19, 2021 on Ms. Conrad’s behalf (see letter below), yet neither agency has responded. Even worse, when doctors came to Ms. Conrad for assistance with filing VAERS report for their patients, the hospital prohibited her from filing these reports. That the CDC and FDA failed to respond is arguably not surprising – they have been cheerleading this vaccine for months. Admitting almost any harm now would be akin to asking them to turn a gun on themselves. This again highlights the importance of never permitting government coercion and mandates when it comes to medical procedures.

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“..it is reasonable to expect booster injections to only enable the virus to more rapidly evolve resistance to the vaccines..”

• What Happens If Israel Fails The Stress Test? (Geert)

It is well known that, regardless of any induced antigen (Ag)-specific adaptive immune response, all vaccines (including mRNA vaccines) have an adjuvant effect: they stimulate innate immune effectors, some of which have antiviral activity and/or facilitate adaptive immunity (2, 3, 4). Without going into mechanistic detail, there is no doubt that some of these innate, nonAg-specific immune responses have a short-lived antiviral effect. This could already explain why booster doses in the population described above can prevent viral infection while recalling anti-spike Abs. It may also be tempting to assume that these recalled Abs are now responsible for enhanced protection from both infection and disease.

However, from an immunological viewpoint, it is difficult to understand how a rapid recall of the very same anti-S Abs in a previously vaccine-primed population would now all of a sudden enable better protection from infection and disease. If innate immunity is indeed the confounder, then the outcome of long-term surveillance studies would look very different. Given the more potent neutralizing Abs booster shots are generating against variants (5), the S(pike)-directed immune pressure in the population will only continue to rise while still failing to curtail the spread of the predominantly circulating highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant (e.g., Delta variant). On the contrary, it would be reasonable to assume that upon an additional booster shot the more potent Abs further contribute to selecting S-directed immune escape variants and, therefore, turn the previously primed population in an even more fertile breeding ground for the highly infectious Delta variant.

As vaccine-elicited Ab responses have a much longer duration (and can be memorized) than that induced by short-term innate immune activation, and as vaccinal Abs suppress the functional capacity of pre-existing CoV-reactive innate Abs, short-term vaccine-mediated innate immune protection against viral infection or disease does not automatically imply a positive effect of the vaccine on viral infection or morbidity rates in the longer term. Interpretations from scientists who only conduct short-term surveillance studies in vaccinees, the majority of whom are adults or elderly, lead to erroneous, although peer-reviewed conclusions such as: ‘Although vaccines are less effective against asymptomatic disease (*) or against transmission than against severe disease, even in populations with fairly high vaccination rates the unvaccinated are still the major drivers of transmission and are themselves at the highest risk of serious disease’ (6).

This clearly illustrates their lack of understanding of the contribution of innate immunity in providing short-term protection after vaccination, and in the more durable protection of young and healthy unvaccinated age groups. Based on all of the above, it is reasonable to expect booster injections to only enable the virus to more rapidly evolve resistance to the vaccines. This evolution would be dramatically expedited by vaccinating and boosting more and more younger age groups.

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No FDA approval, but “..the Biden administration has already purchased 65 million doses of pediatric COVID vaccines..”

• White House Tells Governors to Get Ready to Vaccinate Young Kids (CHD)

In a private phone call Tuesday with the nation’s governors, the White House told states to prepare to vaccinate children as young as 5 by early November. A White House official said the call was made in anticipation of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine being cleared for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the coming weeks for children ages 5 to 11. According to NBC News, the Biden administration purchased 65 million pediatric doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine — enough to vaccinate an estimated 28 million children who would be eligible should the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve Pfizer’s request to vaccinate the younger age group. In anticipation of a green light from the FDA, the administration began planning vaccination efforts with states, pharmacies and medical groups.

The administration told providers in a planning document last week the vaccine for children will be delivered to thousands of sites within one week of FDA authorization. The pediatric Pfizer vaccine will be distributed in 100-dose packs. Each dose is one-third of what is given to adults, and will be free through sites enrolled in a federal program that guarantees the shots are provided at no cost. Some states are planning to provide the vaccine through schools. “We’ve secured plenty of supply, and we’ll be putting in place an allocation, ordering and distribution system similar to what we’ve used for the other vaccines,” said Biden’s White House COVID coordinator, Jeff Zients, on a phone call, obtained by ABC News, with governors.

“It is distressing to hear that the Biden administration has already purchased 65 million doses of pediatric COVID vaccines,” said Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, pediatric physician and CEO of the Rimland Center for Integrative Medicine. “Vaccinating children is not the way out of the pandemic.” In an email to The Defender, Mumper said she hopes the White House will consider the following data:

• 99.998% of patients under the age of 18 survive COVID
• COVID “vaccines” have not undergone adequate long-term safety studies
• According to the latest available data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, as of Oct. 1, there have been a total of 21,298 reports of adverse events, including 1,284 rated as serious and 22 reported deaths (two of the 22 deaths were suicides) in the 12- to 17-year-old age group
• healthy adolescents given COVID “vaccines” have experienced blood clots, myocarditis, abnormal menses, neurologic symptoms and extreme fatigue
• most COVID cases are spread from adults to children — children are not a significant threat to the elderly and vulnerable

Read more …

“..a third of all hospitals in the state are experiencing critical staffing shortages because engineers, janitorial staff, respiratory therapists, nurses, midwives, physical therapists, and technicians have either staged strikes or have left the job over the mandate.”

• 40% Of California State Workers Are Unvaccinated Despite Newsom’s Order (ZH)

This might come as a surprise, but 40% of California state employees are unvaccinated despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s directive to mandate the jab or be subjected to regular testing. Newsom issued this new directive in July following a surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. At the time, he said, “We are now dealing with a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and it’s going to take renewed efforts to protect Californians from the dangerous Delta variant.” Still months later, less than two-thirds of state workers, or 62%, were vaccinated, according to The Sacramento Bee. The figure is much lower than the state’s overall rate of 72%. Human Resources Department spokeswoman Camille Travis said her agency has only compiled 89% of state employee vaccination status.

She said the data so far suggests some state employees weren’t compelled to get jabbed after Newsom’s directive. Some of the state’s largest departments shared vaccination rates: 52% of California Highway Patrol employees, 60% of Department of Motor Vehicles employees, and 60% of prison employees have received the shots. California Department of Transportation has the highest with 70%. Newsom’s mandatory jab, or be forced to regular testing for state employees, is less stringent than those of health care workers who have been forced to get the vaccine unless they had a medical exemption or religious claim.

One emerging drawback of mandatory jabs, with no consideration for regular testing nor naturally-acquired immunity, are reports that a third of all hospitals in the state are experiencing critical staffing shortages because engineers, janitorial staff, respiratory therapists, nurses, midwives, physical therapists, and technicians have either staged strikes or have left the job over the mandate. Director of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty of the University of California, Irvine, challenged the constitutionality of the hospital’s vaccine mandate regarding individuals who have recovered from COVID and have naturally acquired immunity and was immediately placed on leave. There’s no room to debate science as only the government can decide what’s best for state employees.

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“..Attorneys argued in the suit that no COVID-19 vaccine is available in the United States that has received full licensing and approval..”

• Pentagon Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Vaccine Mandates (ET)

Service members from all five branches of the U.S. military, federal employees, and federal civilian contractors have joined in a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Defense over its COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The 24 plaintiffs “face a deadline under the Federal COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate to receive a COVID-19 vaccine that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs, and have been refused any religious exemption or accommodation,” according to Liberty Counsel, the Christian legal firm that filed the lawsuit. The lawsuit (pdf), filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, lists President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as defendants.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a temporary restraining order (pdf) to prevent the COVID-19 vaccine mandates from taking effect, and ultimately issue an injunction to prevent the Pentagon from enforcing the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Biden on Sept. 9 issued an executive order requiring almost all federal employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of employment. Regular testing isn’t an option. Civilian federal employees and contractors have until Nov. 22 to be fully vaccinated. Austin issued a memorandum on Aug. 24 saying that all military service members must receive a COVID-19 vaccine, after which all the branches of the military announced various deadlines for its troops to be fully vaccinated, regardless of whether they had previously survived a bout of COVID-19, and threatening suspensions or other disciplinary actions if service members don’t have a pending exemption request or fail to comply.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have set a Nov. 28 deadline for their active-duty service members; reservists have until Dec. 28. For the Army and the Air Force, the deadlines for active-duty service members are Dec. 15 and Nov. 2, respectively, and deadlines for National Guard and Reserve members are June 30, 2022, and Dec. 2, 2021, respectively. U.S. Coast Guard members have until Nov. 22 to be fully vaccinated. [..] Attorneys argued in the suit that no COVID-19 vaccine is available in the United States that has received full licensing and approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and as such, cannot be mandated.

Austin, in his memo on Aug. 24 (pdf), stated that the mandatory vaccinations “will only use COVID-19 vaccines that receive full licensure from the [FDA] in accordance with FDA-approved labeling and guidance,” attorneys noted, arguing that “additional military documents reveal that the Department of Defense is not following its own directive” and is using vaccines under emergency use authorization [EUA] “because there is no FDA approved vaccine available.” Austin’s memo came a day after the FDA issued full approval for future Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines, which will bear the Comirnaty label. The latter vaccine wasn’t available in the United States as of Oct. 12, The Epoch Times reported previously.

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“Show up peacefully. Be respectful. But be insistent. Demand that the school boards follow your wishes. Not the wishes of Joe Biden and his cast of characters.”

• Ron Johnson Slams DOJ Probe Of Parents’ School Board Protests (JTN)

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s order to have the FBI investigate parent protests of school policies is “outrageous” and a “method of intimidation.” “He is saying they are intimidating school board members. No, it is the attorney general of the United States that is intimidating people exercising their rights to free speech and the right to petition their government,” Johnson said in an interview aired Sunday on the Cats Roundtable with John Catsimatidis show on WABC radio in New York. Garland announced recently the FBI would be investigating comments made by parents during contentious school board meetings over curriculum issues such as critical race theory and transgender pronouns.


The Wisconsin Republican, who is up for reelection next year, encouraged parents not to be intimidated and to continue to press for the policies they want for their children. “I tell people in Wisconsin, if you don’t want critical race theory; if you don’t want the 1619 project taught to your children, don’t let it be,” he said. “Show up peacefully. Be respectful. But be insistent. Demand that the school boards follow your wishes. Not the wishes of Joe Biden and his cast of characters.”

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“..meetings in a virtual room where they all appear as cartoonish 3D versions of themselves..”

• Facebook Announces 10,000 EU Jobs To Build ‘Metaverse’ (Y!)

Facebook on Monday announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the “metaverse”, a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice in Silicon Valley hype around the idea of the metaverse, which would blur the lines between the physical world and the digital one. The technology might, for example, allow someone to don virtual reality glasses that make it feel as if they’re face-to-face with a friend — when in fact they are thousands of miles apart and connected via the internet. “The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start,” Facebook said in a blog post.


“Today, we are announcing a plan to create 10,000 new high skilled jobs within the EU over the next five years.” The European hires will include “highly specialised engineers”, but the company otherwise gave few details of its plans for the new metaverse team. “The EU has a number of advantages that make it a great place for tech companies to invest — a large consumer market, first class universities and, crucially, top quality talent,” the blog post said. [..] Facebook bought Oculus, a company that makes virtual reality headsets, for $2 billion in 2014 and has since been developing Horizon, a digital world where people can interact using VR technology. In August it unveiled Horizon Workrooms, a feature where co-workers wearing VR headsets can hold meetings in a virtual room where they all appear as cartoonish 3D versions of themselves.

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“If we start down this road the future is dark.”

• MPs Back Challenge To Boris Johnson On Vaccine Passports (Exp.)

Campaigners for the Together Declaration petition, already signed by almost 110,000 people including more than 200 church leaders and representatives of businesses and groups, fear that the UK Government will be pushed into agreeing to a so-called plan B to bring in new restrictions over the winter. It follows warnings by chief medical officer Chris Whitty last week that the NHS will “experience an exceptionally difficult winter” this year. Already this has been taken as an indication that pro-lockdown scientists working for the government will push for vaccine passports which have been introduced by Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland and the Labour government in Wales. Already, Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, which represents backbench Conservative MPs has signed the declaration.

He said: “‘Vaccine passports would set an alarming precedent where our medical records become public and some people are subjected to discrimination as they seek to go about their everyday lives. Surely that isn’t the kind of society that we want to create?” Another senior Tory MP, Sir Desmond Swayne added: “It is contrary to all our values and traditions to have to prove that we have undergone a medical procedure to go about our lawful business. “It is coercive and discriminatory, the abandonment of liberal values; a frightful precedent to set. I am appalled that a Conservative government could contemplate such a measure. If we start down this road the future is dark.” Campaigners will meet former minister Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the powerful Covid Recovery Group (CRG), and other Parliamentarians tomorrow before unfurling a 40m banner in Parliament Square.

[..] Robert Dingwall, former government advisor, and professor of sociology from Nottingham Trent University, who has carried out extensive research on the use of vaccine passports said: “Vaccine passports are a tech industry idea in search of a problem. In terms of public safety, they have little to offer. “Vaccinated people have a high degree of protection from their own vaccination. They also still have a potential to infect other people. By now, anyone who wants to be vaccinated has had an opportunity to do so.

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“There won’t be any turkeys, or at least not dead ones.”

• Bare Shelves, No Holidays… At Last, A Biblical Kind Of Christmas (Cumming)

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” says Jo at the start of Little Women. BoJo is going one better. This Christmas, not only will there be no presents, but there will be no anything. After cancelling Christmas altogether last year, this time around he is creating a kind of half-Christmas, Christmas methadone, to ease us back into the festival. There is nothing the man will not do to get himself compared to Churchill. Thanks to his foresight and the happy accidents of the global economy, we will be able to wallow in our beloved blitz spirit, making do and mending, with a safe low dosage of consumerism to tide us over.

There will be no PlayStation 5 under where the Christmas tree used to be. There will be no jokes in Mrs Brown’s Boys, as usual, but none in the Christmas crackers either. There’s no petrol or HGV drivers, of course, but correspondents also report shortages of tennis balls, merlot, white bread, sardines, M&S chicken kievs, fish sauce, frozen apple strudel, tinned sardines, spring onions, fire alarms, an effective opposition, chocolate Hobnobs, cat vaccines, cat worming pills, bubble bath, Leon fish-finger wraps, marmalade, butter beans, dog-poo bags, goats, crisps, decaf coffee, bulbs (plant), bulbs (light), pigs, blankets, pigs-in-blankets, roofing lead and Harry Potter merchandise, especially wands. The last is hard to take; usually there are more wands than you can shake a stick at.

On the off-chance you manage to get to 25 December with a full tank and are able to dodge Insulate Britain’s armed roadblocks, you’ll arrive at houses that are too expensive to heat. The environmentalists ought to be encouraging the free movement of cars this Christmas; there are few people more persuasive on the subject of double-glazing than a chilly mother-in-law. There won’t be any turkeys, or at least not dead ones. There are plenty waddling around in barns, but there’s nobody to slaughter them. For the handful that do make it to Bernard Matthews’ big barn in the sky, there’s nobody to drive them to the shops. In a delicious irony, there are shortages of everything except shortages. Like it or not, this is what leadership looks like.

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“Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”.

• Who Do You Blame When You’ve Killed The Scapegoat? (Fintan O’Toole)

Last week, Boris Johnson, with his paintbrush and easel at his holiday villa in Marbella, touched up his self-portrait as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, another bodysnatcher, Johnson’s Brexit tsar, David Frost, was also in sunny Iberia. In Lisbon on Tuesday evening, he channelled the intellectual father of modern conservatism, the 18th-century Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke. Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”. His speech was entitled, in imitation of a famous Burke pamphlet, “Observations on the present state of the nation”.

In case his audience somehow failed to make the connection between the former chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association and one of the greatest political thinkers these islands has produced, Frost reminded them – how could they have forgotten? – that he had previously given a speech entitled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe”. Geddit? For those who did indeed get it, the first response was surely to sigh, like the ghost in Shakespeare’s tragedy, “O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there”. The second was the dizzying feeling that the “present state of the nation” is that of a skydiver, free-falling downwards from Burkean conservatism into pure Tory anarchism. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote that “good order is the foundation of all good things”.

Somehow, when his soul was transmigrating to be born again in Brexit Britain, that bit got lost in translation. Disorder is now the royal road to all the good things that will come to those who keep the Brexit faith. Tearing up international treaties is, like the mass culling of pigs and fruit rotting in the fields, merely a manifestation of the creative chaos from which the new universe of “Global Britain” will emerge. It is rather unfortunate that the ground on which this big bang is set to explode, Northern Ireland, is a place that knows all about big bangs and the misery of chaos. And even more so that it is a place held together by one of those documents that Johnson and his government now hold in such contempt: an international treaty, the Belfast agreement of 1998.

Before Frost gave his speech on Tuesday, he knew full well that the EU was about to put forward a generous, sensible and very helpful set of proposals to deal with the difficulties in the practical implementation of the protocol. These proposals, unveiled on Wednesday, give civic and business leaders in Northern Ireland pretty much everything they have asked for to make the new arrangements work smoothly. Anticipating this EU move to calm everything down, however, Frost and Johnson chose to pre-empt the solutions by creating a new problem, one they know to be insoluble. They have hyped up an issue that no one in business or trade in Northern Ireland gives a damn about: the role of the European court of justice (ECJ) in any potential disputes about the interpretation of EU law. Deprived of the movement of sausages as a casus belli, they grasped another dubious foodstuff – the red herring.

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Earplugs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1449965542916374529

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 5 2021

Jun 052021
 
 June 5, 2021  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Brassaï Cat 1945

 

• Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage (CHD)
• Patent Filed For Covid Vaccine Just After Contagion Emerged (NYP)
• Ok, Now We’re Done (Denninger)
• State Department Officials Told Probing Wuhan Lab Opens Pandora’s Box (DM)
• The Pentagon Gave $39 Million To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (DM)
• Daszak In Charge Of The Lancet’s Task Force To Investigate COVID Origin (SN)
• Biden Says He’s ‘Very Confident’ In Fauci After 1000s Of Emails Revealed (Fox)
• The Rise and Fall of Dr. Fauci (Howie Carr)
• What If the “Big Lie” Is the Big Lie? (Kunstler)
• Biden Rejects New Republican Infrastructure Offer (R.)
• US Judge Overturns California’s Ban On Assault Weapons (AP)
• Facebook Faces Antitrust Investigation in EU, UK (HE)
• ‘Over Confident’ US Risks Going Down Same Path As Soviet Union – Putin (EN)

 

 

A rare photo of Schrödingers cat.

 

 

“Research obtained by a group of scientists shows the COVID vaccine spike protein can travel from the injection site and accumulate in organs and tissues including the spleen, bone marrow, the liver, adrenal glands and in “quite high concentrations” in the ovaries.”

• Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage (CHD)

COVID vaccine researchers had previously assumed mRNA COVID vaccines would behave like traditional vaccines. The vaccine’s spike protein — responsible for infection and its most severe symptoms — would remain mostly in the injection site at the shoulder muscle or local lymph nodes. But new research obtained by a group of scientists contradicts that theory, a Canadian cancer vaccine researcher said last week. “We made a big mistake. We didn’t realize it until now,” said Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist and associate professor at University of Guelph, Ontario. “We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen, we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.”

Bridle, who was awarded a $230,000 grant by the Canadian government last year for research on COVID vaccine development, said he and a group of international scientists filed a request for information from the Japanese regulatory agency to get access to Pfizer’s “biodistribution study.” Biodistribution studies are used to determine where an injected compound travels in the body, and which tissues or organs it accumulates in. “It’s the first time ever scientists have been privy to seeing where these messenger RNA [mRNA] vaccines go after vaccination,” Bridle said in an interview with Alex Pierson where he first disclosed the data. “Is it a safe assumption that it stays in the shoulder muscle? The short answer is: absolutely not. It’s very disconcerting.”

The Sars-CoV-2 has a spike protein on its surface. That spike protein is what allows it to infect our bodies, Bridle explained. “That is why we have been using the spike protein in our vaccines,” Bridle said. “The vaccines we’re using get the cells in our bodies to manufacture that protein. If we can mount an immune response against that protein, in theory we could prevent this virus from infecting the body. That is the theory behind the vaccine.” “However, when studying the severe COVID-19, […] heart problems, lots of problems with the cardiovascular system, bleeding and clotting, are all associated with COVID-19,” he added. “In doing that research, what has been discovered by the scientific community, the spike protein on its own is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system, if it gets into circulation.” When the purified spike protein is injected into the blood of research animals, they experience damage to the cardiovascular system and the protein can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause damage to the brain, Bridle explained.

Read more …

Everything about this stinks.

• Patent Filed For Covid Vaccine Just After Contagion Emerged (NYP)

A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report. Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as US scientists, filed a patent on Feb. 24 2020, according to documents obtained by The Australian.

The patent -lodged by the “Institute of Military Medicine, Academy of Military Sciences of the PLA”- was filed just five weeks after China admitted there was human-to-human transmission of the virus, and months before Zhou died under mysterious circumstances, the report noted. “This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much earlier”, Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the paper. Adding to the intrigue, Zhou later died under mysterious circumstances in May last year – something being looked into as part of the international investigation ordered by President Biden, the paper insisted. Despite being an award-winning military scientist, there were no reports or tributes, with him just listed as “deceased” in a Chinese media report in July and a December scientific paper.

Before working for the PLA, Zhou had strong ties to the US, doing postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and collaborating with the New York Blood Center, the report said. Zhou worked closely with the Wuhan lab at the heart of increasing international focus over its possible links to the pandemic, as well as its now-notorious “bat woman” lead scientist, Shi Zhengli, the report said. The close working relationship between the pair supports declassified US intelligence released in January that said the Wuhan lab was conducting “secret military activity,” The Australian said.

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Karl’s take on the article above.

• Ok, Now We’re Done (Denninger)

“A Chinese Communist Party military scientist who got funding from the National Institutes of Health filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February last year — raising fears the shot was being studied even before the pandemic became public, according to a new report. Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as US scientists, filed a patent on Feb. 24 2020, according to documents obtained by The Australian.” So what do we now know? • China’s military was in fact involved at the Wuhan lab. It was not just a civilian operation. • The lab’s scientists knew not only the sequencing of the virus but in addition had a patentable way to create an alleged vaccine before the pandemic was public.

• It takes time to draft patents and figure them out. Quite a lot of time, in fact — not a couple weeks or months. • The PLA, China’s military, did file said patent with Zhou’s name on it. • It takes time to prove up patent material, including in the case of a vaccine. To patent something you must be able to demonstrate it; you cannot patent ideas, only embodiments of ideas. In that case you would have to prove immunogenicity which isn’t instantaneous; it takes weeks or even months to get through original science on this with animals and then humans, which means the date of knowledge was not February 24th it was months or even further before that.

• That means they were working on this even before that time because to work on a vaccine you have to know you must or would want to work on it in the first place. This in turn means they knew damn well there was a virulent virus in the wild prior to that date, or they released it or intended to release it into the wild on purpose. Nobody comes up with a vaccine for a virus you intend to and have confined entirely within a laboratory in animal or cell culture testing; that’s worthless. Without an isolate to create a vaccine for and a virus outside of a lab environment where vaccination becomes a “thing” that might be required and thus have value why would you do the work to create one?

What’s the timeline on all this? Many, many months or even a couple of years. That means either the virus was “out” for many months to a couple of years before February of 2020 (not a month or two) or the Chinese intended to release it in the fall of 2019. In either case the evidence is now overwhelming that this was not a virus that “magically appeared” one fine day in late December. That is not just improbable anymore — it is now, on the manifest weight of the evidence, impossible. Further, the person who filed the patent died under “mysterious circumstances.” Gee, I wonder why? Let me guess — did he shoot himself in the back of the head twice?

Next up is exactly what sort of vaccine patent we’re talking about here? Specifically how is it that the “stiffened” areas in the viral vector and mRNA shots we’re using in the US came to be known and proved up? How did Moderna and Pfizer know they needed to do that? That sort of study takes months if not years too, not days or weeks, to both come up with it and then prove it actually works as expected.

[..] Oh wait — the manufacturers didn’t bother with all of making sure it worked as expected, did they? Nope! It sort of works as expected. Yes, the shots produce antibodies – lots of them. But they also cluster in multiple organs where we were told it would not; we were told it would remain in the deltoid muscle where the injection was delivered. That it remained in the muscle was false; the science was not done and it appears we were just told it would do so without evidence. Now, due to a leaked document out of Japan we know the shots do not stay where intended and they bioaccumulate in other places, including the ovaries and spleen and yet this, which was a direct contravention of the predicate upon which the EUAs issued did not lead to immediate revocation. Oh no, the FDA doesn’t care when claims about where it is contained to in the body turn out to be false!

Read more …

Fauci, Daszak, PLA, CCP, Pentagon, we could go on.

• State Department Officials Told Probing Wuhan Lab Opens Pandora’s Box (DM)

At least four State Department employees said in separate interviews that they repeatedly were ‘warned’ that an investigation into a possible COVID-19 leak from the Wuhan lab would ‘open Pandora’s Box;’ and reveal that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research there. It ‘smelled like a cover-up,’ Thomas DiNanno told Vanity Fair. DiNanno, the former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, was one of four State Department officials who told Vanity Fair they wanted to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 spread after it escaped from the Wuhan lab. The others were David Asher, David Feith and Miles Yu. But they were muzzled by other State Department officials as well as the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and even ‘ostracized,’ Yu told Vanity Fair.


The lab leak was touted by then-President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders, but was deemed impossible by a ‘scientific consensus’ in a letter signed by 27 scientists, published on February 19, 2020 in the medical journal The Lancet. After that, the Wuhan lab theory was considered to be at best a conspiracy – some even considered it racist – so it wasn’t discussed as a realistic origin of COVID-19 until recently. Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, found the government’s and scientists’ silence ‘maddening,’ Vanity Fair reported. He said, ‘Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.’ Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry, told Vanity Fair it became clear that ‘there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy’ inside the federal government.

Read more …

Plus $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.

• The Pentagon Gave $39 Million To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance (DM)

The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals. The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories. The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.

A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA. But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013. Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’ The grant was categorized as ‘scientific research – combating weapons of mass destruction.’ The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.’ EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.

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He gets to lead everything, including the ivestigation into himself.

• Daszak In Charge Of The Lancet’s Task Force To Investigate COVID Origin (SN)

Revered scientific journal The Lancet has created a ‘task force’ to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, yet it has decided to employ as it’s leader the very guy who funded the dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan lab and subsequently allegedly ‘bullied’ other scientists into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak. In the wake of renewed scrutiny of the lab leak hypothesis, the Lancet’s task force will reportedly “focus on analyzing data on all of the theories put forward on the origins of COVID, on the reasons why SARS-CoV-2 was able to break out of Wuhan and spread globally, and on the most plausible strategies to prevent future pandemics.”

It also states that “The Task Force will review thoroughly and objectively all publicly available evidence, particularly the peer-reviewed literature, and conduct interviews with key leaders in science, medicine, policy and civil society.” ‘Objectively’. Right. Dr Peter Daszak, who is heading up this task force, is perhaps the least suitable scientist on the planet to objectively analyse the data, given his track record. Daszak, as President of the EcoHealth Alliance, shovelled at least $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past few years to play around with coronaviruses inside the lab through the now infamous ‘gain of function’ research. Daszak, who also works for the World Health Organisation, is on record admitting that he was involved with manipulating coronaviruses.

Daszak notes that “coronaviruses are pretty good… you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily… the spiked proteins drive a lot about what happens. You can get the sequence you can build the protein, we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in a lab.” No wonder then that Daszak as lead investigator for the WHO investigation determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was ‘nothing to see here’?

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They’re stuck with each other, and with Daszak, PLA, CCP, Pentagon.

• Biden Says He’s ‘Very Confident’ In Fauci After 1000s Of Emails Revealed (Fox)

President Biden said he is “very confident” in Dr. Anthony Fauci amid Republican attacks on his chief medical adviser after the revelation of thousands of his emails from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The president was updating reporters as he departed Rehoboth Beach, Del., and when he walked out of the room, one shouted to ask if he is “still” confident in Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Moments later, Biden popped his head back in the room and said, “Yes, I am very confident in Dr. Fauci.” Fauci’s emails, which are heavily redacted, have prompted Republicans to demand answers from the NIAID director about why he did not more aggressively pursue the theory that coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.


In one February 2020 email, he also said wearing a mask was “not really effective in keeping out the virus,” though the disease expert has already admitted he downplayed the effectiveness of masks in part so that supply would not run low for medical professionals. At the same time, Fox News has confirmed that State Department officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the WIV’s gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcomed attention to U.S. government funding of it. “We’ll let him speak for himself,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday when asked about Fauci’s emails. “He’s been an undeniable asset in our country’s pandemic response,” Psaki said. “It’s obviously not that advantageous for me to relitigate the substance of emails from 17 months ago.”

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“These Fauci emails are certainly revealing, so revealing, in fact, that the Washington Post isn’t posting them.”

• The Rise and Fall of Dr. Fauci (Howie Carr)

“Fauci Lied, People Died.” If you still occasionally run into some unrepentant Karen glaring at your unmasked following-the-science face, just scrawl the above words on your raggedy mask and wear it one final time. Karen won’t bother you anymore, because what can Karen say after the release of all the Fauci emails from last year? Dr. Anthony Fauci, a hack’s hack since 1968, is many things, but on the level is not one of them. Consider his response to a February 2020 email from a Cornell University professor of medicine who wrote him: “We think there is a possibility that the virus was released from a lab in Wuhan.” Fauci responded by forwarding the prescient warning to one of his minions: “Please handle.” A month later, a government-funded physicist sent Fauci a warning that China was sending out false data, among other things.

Once again, Fauci dismissively fobbed off this 911 call to an underling: “Too long for me to read.” Of course it was. You know how hard it is to concentrate on scientific data when you’re in the green room having the makeup applied for your third or fourth TV live shot of the day. Especially when you’re 80 years old. These Fauci emails are certainly revealing, so revealing, in fact, that the Washington Post isn’t posting them. Almost as revealing are the endless redactions, as if there’s some national security issue here when he’s been pitched by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Fauci is still being defended by the Democrat operatives with press passes — the “serious people,” as ABC hack Jonathan Karl described his fellow cheerleaders last week. But the reality is, his upcoming so-called book, which at 80 pages is almost as short as he is (67 inches high), was pulled this week from the two biggest online booksellers, five months ahead of its publication date.

The publisher claimed that “Expect the Unexpected” had been “prematurely posted.” Yeah, right. At least Gov. Andrew Cuomo had his abysmal $5.1-million COVID tome published before he was busted as a total fraud. Fauci’s book got torched before it even reached the public. The publisher’s sell sheet described him as “one of the world’s greatest medical minds,” but now he ends up the same authorial class as O.J. Simpson and Clifford Irving — their faux books didn’t make it out of the gate either. Fauci joins the long list of great anti-Trump saviors who have been, you’ll pardon the expression, debunked. Like, say, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, Omarosa, Mary Trump, Robert Mueller, Christine Blasey Ford, Julie Swetnick, Lt. Col. Vindman, etc.

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“All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense.”

• What If the “Big Lie” Is the Big Lie? (Kunstler)

Maybe now that Dr. Tony Fauci has begun to spill the beans on his doings in service to the Wuhan virology lab, the phrase “conspiracy theory,” flogged by the media as jauntily and incessantly as by the soviet kommissars of yore, will have worn out its welcome. In a sane polity, Dr. Fauci would be cooked. He looks circumstantially like an epic villain of history, who promoted and funded dangerous research activities knowingly, which led to an international disaster that killed millions of people and destroyed countless livelihoods and households, perhaps even the whole global economy, when all is said and done — and he appears to have lied at every step along the way. As a practical matter, what is the “Joe Biden” admin going to do about him? Throw him under the bus? I don’t think they can at this point.

Dr. Fauci has come to represent not just the falsehoods employed around the Covid-19 fiasco but more generally the long campaign against truth itself by a grossly illiberal Jacobin Democratic Party seemingly out to punish and destroy Western Civ. Whether the Covid-19 pandemic was an overt tactic in that campaign, or just the result of Dr. Fauci’s catastrophic bad judgment, remains to be revealed. But at least half the country will conclude that there’s some connection between the terrible losses suffered in the pandemic year and the political bullshit they were force-fed in the four-year effort to defenestrate Donald Trump. All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense. You also have good reason to doubt that Merrick Garland will do anything but look the other way and whistle.

The downfall of Dr. Fauci is a watershed moment. There were so many more authorities caught lying over the past five years, but who got off scot-free — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey (actually, the whole FBI and DOJ E-suites), John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissman, Adam Schiff, and the editors and producers of the news media, plus the execs of social media — who not only disabled the truth at every opportunity, but just about destroyed the public’s grip on reality.

The result has been an utter collapse of authority in this land, so that now nobody who runs anything is credible, from the current pitiful president of the USA, to most elected and appointed officials, judges, corporate CEOs, college deans and presidents, and now “The Science” itself. Just remember: there is still a sizable faction in America of people who are deeply interested in ascertaining the truth about a lot of things. They are aiming to get at it, too, for example, the truth about the 2020 election. Maybe now you can begin to see why this is important.

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Boondoggle.

• Biden Rejects New Republican Infrastructure Offer (R.)

President Joe Biden and Republicans entered the weekend sharply at odds over how to craft an infrastructure deal that could satisfy their camps, imperiling the odds of a bipartisan deal. Democrat Biden shot down a new proposal from the main Republican negotiator on infrastructure, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, that increased spending by about $50 billion over their last offer, the White House said. Biden rejected the offer, saying it “did not meet his objectives to grow the economy, tackle the climate crisis, and create new jobs.” Republicans had previously offered roughly $257 billion in new spending, short of the $2.25 trillion Biden initially offered and suggested he might bring down to as low as $1 trillion.


And while the two sides agreed to speak again on Monday, the White House also strongly signaled that they may seek a path forward with other Republican lawmakers or even with only Democrats. “He indicated to Senator Capito that he would continue to engage a number of Senators in both parties in the hopes of achieving a more substantial package,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement. Up until now, Capito has been Biden’s primary negotiating partner. Monday’s conversation will be their third in a week. Biden is eager to show that he made a good-faith effort at a bipartisan deal, sources said, but he risks creating division among Democrats, some who believe he is giving up too much to Republicans. Democrats hold narrow majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate.

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This guy likes the arms a bit too much.

• US Judge Overturns California’s Ban On Assault Weapons (AP)

A federal judge Friday overturned California’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, ruling that it violates the constitutional right to bear arms. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego ruled that the state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Under no level of heightened scrutiny can the law survive,” Benitez said. He issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of the law but stayed it for 30 days to give state Attorney General Rob Bonta time to appeal. Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the decision, calling it “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period.”


In his 94-page ruling, the judge spoke favorably of modern weapons, said they were overwhelmingly used for legal reasons. “Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle,” the judge said in his ruling’s introduction. That comparison “completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to this weapon,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not backing down from this fight, and we’ll continue pushing for common sense gun laws that will save lives.”

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“Are you watching, America?”

• Facebook Faces Antitrust Investigation in EU, UK (HE)

The United Kingdom and European Union opened formal antitrust investigations into Facebook’s classified-ads service, Marketplace. Both the European Commission and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said Friday they are investigating whether Facebook revamps data gathered from advertisers who buy ads in order to give illegal advantages to its own services, the Wall Street Journal reports. The cases look specifically at how Facebook uses the data it collects, and whether that would put the company at an advantage in the promotion of its own services in neighboring markets. The U.K. is also investigating whether Facebook uses advertiser data to give similar advantages to its online-dating service. “In today’s digital economy, data should not be used in ways that distort competition,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief.


A Facebook spokesman said its services will “continue to cooperate fully with the investigations to demonstrate that they are without merit.” Though the EU has been informally investigating the Big Tech giant for some time, if the Commission or the U.K.’s CMA finds evidence of any wrongdoing, they can then file formal charges. The new cases are part of a new series of antitrust enforcements throughout Europe. The European Commission filed formal charges against Apple last month for abusing its control over the distribution of music-streaming apps, including Spotify. In November, the EU also filed formal charges against Amazon for using nonpublic data gathered from third-party sellers to unfairly compete against them. Are you watching, America?

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“We don’t have any issues with the U.S. But it has an issue with us..”

• ‘Over Confident’ US Risks Going Down Same Path As Soviet Union – Putin (EN)

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused Europe and the U.S. of hypocrisy over criticism of the response to anti-government protests in Russia and Belarus and warned that America was at risk of following the path of the Soviet Union. In a speech at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin discussed Russia’s relations with the U.S. ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden, describing them as “at an extremely low level now.” He criticised sanctions against Russia as well as allegations that Moscow interfered in the U.S. election and said that Washington and Europe had double standards in criticising the police crackdown against protesters in Moscow and Belarus in recent months. “We don’t have any issues with the U.S. But it has an issue with us,” he said.

“It wants to contain our development and publicly talks about it. Economic restrictions and attempts to influence our country’s domestic politics, relying on forces they consider their allies inside Russia, stem from that.” Ties between Russia and the U.S. have sunk to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, accusations of Russian interference in elections, and cyberattacks that U.S. officials allege had Russian origins. Putin reiterated that Russia rejects accusations of interfering in U.S. presidential elections, and he spoke critically of the U.S. response to the Capitol attack, which took place as Congress prepared to certify that Biden had defeated then-President Donald Trump in November.

“They weren’t just a crowd of robbers and rioters. Those people had come with political demands,” he said. Putin pointed out that the heavy charges against hundreds of participants in the attack were filed even as the U.S. and its allies strongly criticized Belarus’ crackdown on anti-government protests. He charged that even as the West has criticized Russian authorities for a harsh response to anti-Kremlin demonstrations, protesters in Europe have faced an even tougher police response, with some shot in the eye by what he mockingly called “democratic rubber bullets.” Later, during a call with journalists, Putin criticised the United States as being overconfident and drew a parallel with the Soviet Union.

“You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a former citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem of empires — they think that they are so powerful that they can afford small errors and mistakes,” he said. “But the number of problems is growing. There comes a time when they can no longer be dealt with. And the United States, with a confident gait, a firm step, is going straight along the path of the Soviet Union.”

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle May 20 2021

May 202021
 
 May 20, 2021  Posted by at 8:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  37 Responses »


Amedeo Modigliani Nu allongé 1917

 

• Government Scrubs Stats on Vaccine-Related Deaths (Mercola)
• Ivermectin Crushes Delhi Cases (DR)
• Amid Concerns Over Effectiveness, Govt Ramping Up Remdesivir Production (BS)
• Rock Music? No. Road Hockey? Yes (LFP)
• Biden Permits Nord Stream 2 (Greenwald)
• Colonial Pipeline Confirms It Paid $4.4m Ransom To Hackers (AP)
• Pentagon Reportedly Running Secret Army Of 60,000 Around The World (NYP)
• Accused Russiagate ‘Spy’ Kilimnik Speaks (Maté)
• Blinken, Lavrov Seek Cooperation Despite ‘Serious Differences’ (R.)
• Germany’s Greens Are Neoliberals With Bicycles (Jac.)
• European Parliament to Suspend Turkey’s EU Accession Talks

 

 

 

 

Plasma: vaccines wipe out antibodies

 

 

Shocking claims from French Nobel prize winner Luc Montagnier…

 

 

“Any other vaccine would have been pulled from the market by now.”

• Government Scrubs Stats on Vaccine-Related Deaths (Mercola)

According to Dr. Peter McCullough, vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center and known for being one of the top five most-published medical researchers in the United States, COVID-19 vaccines are killing “huge numbers” of people and the government is simply ignoring it. In a video interview with investigative journalist and founder of Liberty Sentinel, Alex Newman, McCullough says the U.S. government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and health agencies around the world have all committed to vaccinating the global population while sitting on data showing the COVID-19 “vaccines” are turning out to be the most lethal vaccines ever created. [..] During a recent Texas state Senate Health and Human Services Committee hearing, McCullough noted that, according to available data, early treatment could have prevented up to 85% of COVID-19 deaths. Early at-home treatment also minimizes the spread, as the amount of time you’re infectious can be reduced from two weeks to about four days.

Yet, despite being inexpensive and readily available, early treatments have all been censored and suppressed, apparently in order to secure this global mass vaccination campaign. In fact, as McCullough notes, there’s been no clarified guidance on COVID treatment at all, not even hospital protocols. The entire focus of our health agencies has been on masking, lockdowns and waiting for a gene therapy “vaccine.” The results have been devastating. Five months into the mass vaccination campaign, more than 10,000 in the U.S. and European Union have already died after getting the shots. Any other vaccine would have been pulled from the market by now. For example, in 1976, the U.S. government vaccinated 45 million people against pandemic swine flu. The entire program was canceled after reports of just 53 deaths, according to Fox News. Note: The number of deaths reported after the 1976 inoculation program varies from three to 53, depending on the source.

Now, health authorities are shrugging off more than 3,800 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination as either coincidental or inconsequential. Think about that. Five months into the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, we’re looking at a death toll that is 7,000% greater than during the swine flu vaccination campaign, which was canceled after the vaccine was deemed too risky. The COVID-19 “vaccine” is also on a level of magnitude more dangerous than the seasonal flu vaccine. As reported by McCullough, on average, there are 20 to 30 deaths reported following the seasonal flu vaccine, which is given to about 195 million Americans each year. Compare that to these novel COVID-19 gene therapies. So far, an estimated 124 million Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and the death count is already at 3,837, as of April 30, 2021.

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“Where is a developing country getting the 60 million dollars a day to purchase the Remdesivir?”

• Ivermectin Crushes Delhi Cases (DR)

Just three weeks after adding Ivermectin, Delhi now leads India out of the deadly second surge of the COVID pandemic. Cases that had peaked at 28,395 on April 20 plummeted nearly 80% to just 6,430 on May 15. Deaths peaked May 4, and now they are also down 25%. On May 10, the Indian State of Goa adopted an even more ambitious policy of preemptive Ivermectin for all adults in the state. The Chief Minister of Goa is Dr. Pramod Sawant, a progressive 49-year-old physician persuaded by science. In particular, he read Dr. Pierre Kory’s Dr. Tess Lawrie’s and Dr. Andrew Hill’s robust meta-analyses. As a direct result, Goa has seen a drop in cases from 3,124 the day after the announcement to 1,314 five days later.

Meanwhile, three other Indian states have followed Goa’s lead in adding Ivermectin: Uttarkhand, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh. And, as expected, they have seen a drop in new daily cases as well, with Uttar Pradesh down nearly 75% from a peak of 37,944 just four days after they began following the April 20 AIIMS guidance to just 10,505 on May 16. The tragic story in all this is that the Indian state of Tamil Nadu installed a new leader on May 7, 2021. He suddenly reversed their state’s decision to adopt Ivermectin. Readers of my book all know about Peruvian President Sagasti’s fateful decision to outlaw Ivermectin. Before taking power, the COVID deaths had dropped 14 fold to almost nothing with Ivermectin use. However after Sagasti was elected, Ivermectin was stopped, and deaths roared back at 13 fold.

Peru paid the price in skyrocketing cases and 78,000 preventable deaths. Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister, MK Stalin, also chose to forgo Ivermectin. Instead, he ordered tens of thousands of doses of Remdesivir, a drug that sells for 3,000 dollars per dose. So now Tamil Nadu’s cases are rocketing as well. In contrast to Goa’s young physician Chief Minister who had read the latest science on Ivermectin’s dramatic effect on reducing COVID death, MK Stalin is a 68-year-old non-physician socialist and atheist who is towing the party line by forbidding Ivermectin.

Stalin now requests allocations for some 20,000 daily doses of Remdesivir for the Tamil Nadu citizens despite the science that shows no reduction in COVID death with this drug. [..] Twenty thousand doses of Remdesivir cost 60 million dollars, while 20,000 doses of Ivermectin go for a few hundred. Where is a developing country getting the 60 million dollars a day to purchase the Remdesivir? Why is their leader throwing away a cheap drug, Ivermectin, that has saved lives in other countries? ”

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Remdesivir is the worst choice.

• Amid Concerns Over Effectiveness, Govt Ramping Up Remdesivir Production (BS)

The Indian government, on Wednesday, claimed it has ramped up the production of Remdesivir, an anti-viral drug prescribed for treating moderate-to-critical Covid patients, by 10 times. From 1 million vials per month in April, the Centre claims it will produce 10 million vials this month, as it has increased the number of plants manufacturing Remdesivir from 20 to 60. Meanwhile, reports suggest that Remdesivir may soon be dropped from the Indian Council of Medical Research’s Covid treatment protocol, as experts have questioned its effectiveness in Covid treatment. The news comes just days after plasma therapy was dropped from ICMR’s Covid treatment protocol.

The last few weeks saw a severe shortage of Remdesivir injections across the country, along with an acute shortage of hospital beds and oxygen cylinders, leading to a record rise in Covid fatalities. The Centre said it is monitoring the supply of drugs such as Remdesivir, Ivermectin and Favipiravir, essential for treating moderate to critical Covid patients. The Centre said it had ramped up production of these drugs and imported them in large quantities to ensure uninterrupted supply. A couple of days ago, the Indian government said it had received 530,000 Remdesivir vials as foreign aid from various countries such as the US and France, to help combat the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The availability of these drugs is being monitored by implementing a three-pronged strategy of supply chain management, demand side management and affordability,” the Centre said in a statement. The drugs whose supply is being monitored include those in ICMR’s Covid treatment protocol, such as Remdesivir, Enoxaparin, Dexamethasone and Ivermectin, and non-protocol drugs such as Favipiravir, Amphotericin and Apixaban. The Centre added that it will increase the production of Ivermectin, a Covid protocol drug, by five times, from 15 million 12 Mg tabs last month to 77 million this month.

Read more …

London, Ontario. AI scans.

• Rock Music? No. Road Hockey? Yes (LFP)

There won’t be any music festivals in London this summer, but there will be road hockey. Jones Entertainment Group says it is again postponing Start.ca Rocks the Park until 2022 but will go ahead with HockeyFest — Game On, a three-on-three street hockey tournament, June 25-27. London will be the first of nine cities to play host to the tournament, which will be held across Canada and in parts of the U.S. The London tournament will be at Westmount Shopping Centre and Saunders secondary school. New technology, similar to metal detectors common at airports, will be used to scan all participants for COVID-19 symptoms. Anyone showing symptoms will be tested for the coronavirus to determine whether they can play, coach, referee or watch the games.

“It’s cutting-edge, world-class technology, one more thing to lead the charge into somewhat normal activities,” said Brad Jones, president of Jones Entertainment Group and HockeyFest. “What a better place to start than our own hometown of London? This will be a game-changer in getting back to some sort of normalcy in the sports and entertainment industry.” The new artificial intelligence (AI) technology, called Safe Entry Stations, was developed by Toronto-based Predictmedix and built by another Toronto firm, Juiceworks. It can identify symptoms of infectious diseases and can also be used to detect alcohol or marijuana use.] Predictmedix co-founder and chief operating officer Rahul Kushwah said the new technology was used successfully at this year’s Super Bowl and may become as common as metal detectors at airports, including at work places.

They can be permanently installed or a mobile unit can be leased for events such as concerts. “It’s about creating safe environments, whether it’s a concert or a workplace,” Kushwah said, noting the new technology has a 95% success rate identifying symptoms. “It’s going to help open up our cities. Walking through one of these is analogous to a triage when you walk into a hospital.” Those hockey players who test negative are given a wristband. Those who test positive for symptoms will be given a Covid-19 test and, if positive, will not be allowed to play and will be instructed to leave along with anyone who travelled with them to the tournament.

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Putin for the win.

• Biden Permits Nord Stream 2 (Greenwald)

It is true that Trump, like Obama before him, spoke of the potential to partner with Russia rather than viewing it as an enemy, just as it is true that both presidents imposed sanctions on Moscow. And it is also true, and understandable, that Moscow likely favored a Trump victory rather than having supreme war hawk Hillary Clinton in the White House (the same reason Ukraine worked in 2016 to help Hillary win). But over and over, Trump undermined, not advanced, core Russian objectives. As Obama himself said in 2016, it is hard to imagine doing anything more provocative and harmful to Russian vital interests than sending lethal arms to Ukraine — exactly what Obama refused to do, despite bipartisan pressure. Yet the Trump administration quickly did exactly that: bizarre behavior for a Kremlin asset, to put that mildly.

Trump found one thing even more threatening to the Kremlin’s vital interests than arming Ukrainians: namely, doing everything possible to destroy Russia’s ability to complete construction of its new underwater natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. That new pipeline is designed to double Russian sales capacity to an EU addicted to cheap Russian natural gas, producing massive revenue for the Russian economy and giving Moscow greater leverage when dealing with its European neighbors. But it provides an even more important benefit: it allows Russia to bypass Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, thus avoiding costly transit fees and the risks of political instability or anti-Russian manipulation by outside forces, including the U.S. government.

For all those reasons, few priorities were more important to Putin and the Russian economy than this new pipeline. Yet for at least the last two years of his presidency, Trump — even as he was shrilly depicted as an agent of the Kremlin — was obsessed with stopping the Russian pipeline and thus sabotaging Putin’s key geopolitical project. The Trump administration caused a halt to the project in 2019 when it imposed sanctions on companies working on it. Trump did everything he could to pressure, cajole and even threaten the Germans to pull out of the deal, warning that it would leave a winter-plagued Europe captive to Russian pressure and insisting that Berlin had the obligation to buy gas from the U.S., not Russia, given NATO expenditures to protect Germans. Trump even tried to pull close to 10,000 U.S. troops out of Germany to pressure the Merkel government, but the pro-war alliance of hawkish Democrats and Liz-Cheney-led neocon Republicans voted to defund that effort.

Any minimally rational or honest media would have taken note of these events and instantly realized that their years-long conspiracy theory about Trump being controlled by Putin was sophomoric nonsense, the opposite of the truth. That a Putin-controlled Russian asset would send lethal arms to Ukraine and do everything possible to sabotage Nord Stream 2 is so blatantly absurd that it could be ratified only by a media aggressively committed to spreading disinformation and lies. All of this became even clearer on Tuesday when President Biden reversed Trump’s blockage of the Russian natural gas pipeline. Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported that “the Biden administration will waive sanctions on the corporate entity and CEO overseeing the construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline into Germany,” which “indicates the Biden administration is not willing to compromise its relationship with Germany over this pipeline.” Swan wrote what is clearly true: “the completion of Nord Stream 2 would be a huge geopolitical win for Putin and give him substantial new leverage in Europe.”

Read more …

Bitcoin?

• Colonial Pipeline Confirms It Paid $4.4m Ransom To Hackers (AP)

The operator of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline confirmed it paid $4.4m to a gang of hackers who broke into its computer systems. Colonial Pipeline said Wednesday that after it learned of the 7 May ransomware attack, the company took its pipeline system offline and needed to do everything in its power to restart it quickly and safely, and made the decision then to pay the ransom. “This decision was not made lightly,” but it was one that had to be made, a company spokesman said. “Tens of millions of Americans rely on Colonial: hospitals, emergency medical services, law enforcement agencies, fire departments, airports, truck drivers and the traveling public.”


Joseph Blount, Colonial Pipeline’s CEO, told the Wall Street Journal he authorized the payment because the company didn’t know the extent of the damage and wasn’t sure how long it would take to bring the pipeline’s systems back. The FBI discourages making ransom payments to ransomware attackers, because paying encourages criminal networks around the globe who have hit thousands of businesses and health care systems in the US in the past year alone. But many victims of ransomware attacks, where hackers demand large sums of money to decrypt stolen data or to prevent it from being leaked online, opt to pay. “I know that’s a highly controversial decision,” Blount said. “I didn’t make it lightly. I will admit that I wasn’t comfortable seeing money go out the door to people like this.” “But it was the right thing to do for the country,” he said.

Read more …

Cyber-warriors.

• Pentagon Reportedly Running Secret Army Of 60,000 Around The World (NYP)

The Pentagon is running a 60,000-strong secret army made up of soldiers, civilians and contractors, who travel the world under false identities embedded in consultancies and name-brand companies — without the knowledge of the American people or most of Congress — according to a report. The top-secret army was created by the Pentagon over the past 10 years as part of a program called “signature reduction,” and operates both domestically and internationally using a low-profile force of clandestine warriors who sometimes wear civilian clothes as they carry out their assignments, Newsweek reported. The force is 10 times the size of the covert elements of the CIA, comes with a cost of more than $900 million, and engages about 130 private companies in operations in locales like the Middle East and Africa, the report said.


Despite the undercover army’s size and budget, Congress has never held a hearing on it. About half of the “signature reduction” force is made up of special forces, the highly trained commandos who pursue terrorists around the world, including in Iran and North Korea. Military intelligence specialists comprise the second-largest element inside the force. But the newest and fastest-growing group in the unit is made up of cyber-warriors who use false personas and “nonattribution” or “misattribution” techniques online to disguise themselves so they can track high-value targets, collect “publicly accessible information” and engage in influence campaigns to manipulate social media.

Read more …

So much for Russiagate.

• Accused Russiagate ‘Spy’ Kilimnik Speaks (Maté)

The man cast as a linchpin of debunked Trump-Russia collusion theories is breaking his silence to vigorously dispute the U.S. government’s effort to brand him a Russian spy and put him behind bars. In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, Konstantin Kilimnik stated, “I have no relationship whatsoever to any intelligence services, be they Russian or Ukrainian or American, or anyone else.” Kilimnik, a longtime employee of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spoke out in response to an explosive Treasury Department statement declaring that he had “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during the 2016 election. That press release, which announced an array of sanctions on Russian nationals last month, also alleged that Kilimnik is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.”

Treasury’s claim came shortly after two other accusatory U.S. government statements about the dual Ukrainian-Russian national. In March, a U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment accused Kilimnik of being a “Russian influence agent” who meddled in the 2020 campaign to assist Trump’s reelection. A month earlier, an FBI alert offered $250,000 for information leading to his arrest over a 2018 witness tampering charge in Manafort’s shuttered Ukraine lobbying case, which was unrelated to Russia, collusion, or any elections. Treasury provided no evidence for its claims, which go beyond the findings of the two most extensive Russiagate investigations: the 448-page report issued in 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the 966-page report issued in August 2020 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Treasury has declined all media requests for elaboration on how it reached conclusions that those probes did not. Two unidentified officials told NBC News that U.S. intelligence “has developed new information” about Kilimnik “that leads them to believe” that he passed on the polling data to Russia. But these sources “did not identify the source or type of intelligence that had been developed,” nor “when or how” it was received. “Nobody has seen any evidence to support these claims about Kilimnik,” a congressional source familiar with the House and Senate’s multiple Russia-related investigations told RCI. Despite the absence of evidence, the Treasury press release’s one-sentence claim about Kilimnik has been widely greeted as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC that Treasury’s assertion about Kilimnik proved that Russian intelligence was “involved in trying to help Trump win in that [2016] election. That’s what most people would call collusion.”

Read more …

Biden to meet killer Putin?!

• Blinken, Lavrov Seek Cooperation Despite ‘Serious Differences’ (R.)

Top diplomats from the Biden administration and Russia in their first in-person meeting on Wednesday stressed that the former Cold War foes have serious differences in how they view world affairs but struck an optimistic tone for the talks, saying the two sides can still find ways to work together. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his first meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a veteran diplomat, said it was “no secret that we have our differences” and that Washington would respond to aggressive acts by Russia, but that the world would be safer if the two countries’ leaders worked together. Lavrov, speaking through a translator at the opening of the meeting in Reykjavik on the sidelines of an Arctic Council meeting, said Russia and the United States have “serious differences” but have to cooperate “in spheres where our interests collide.”

Senior U.S. State Department officials said there were no breakthroughs in the meeting, but described it as a “good start” to work on relations between the two countries in “weeks, months and years to come.” Blinken said Biden wanted “a predictable, stable relationship with Russia” and said the two countries could work together on tackling the coronavirus pandemic, combating climate change, dealing with Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs, and the conflict in Afghanistan. “We think that’s good for our people, good for the Russian people and indeed good for the world,” Blinken said. The pair also discussed cyber security and Russia’s troop movements on its border with Ukraine, issues that have tested the already fraught ties this year, senior State Department officials told reporters. They repeatedly insisted that the meeting was “table setting” for future talks.

Wednesday’s meeting, the first high-level, in-person discussion between the Biden administration and a Russian counterpart, lasted one hour and 45 minutes, longer than the expected one hour. Lavrov told Russian state media the talks were “constructive” and that Russia was ready to discuss all issues between the two countries “on the basis of mutual respect.” The two diplomats would prepare proposals for a possible meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lavrov said. State Department officials referred questions about a presidential meeting to the White House, but said there was acknowledgment that “strategic stability” would be discussed.

Read more …

Nice headline. The Greens are set to become a force in German politics.

• Germany’s Greens Are Neoliberals With Bicycles (Jac.)

The Greens’ recent victories notwithstanding, their attempt at balancing highly contradictory interests in the name of ecological pragmatism has already become a strain on the party. Only through the meteoric rise of the Fridays for Future movement have the Greens been able to establish themselves as the strongest party among under-thirty-year-olds. Yet, Habeck and Baerbock have spared no efforts to improve their standing with German industry and shake their old antibusiness image. In 2019, Baerbock gained recognition with the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI), Germany’s leading federation of industrialists and corporations, for putting forward an economic agenda that is especially aggressive against China. She insisted that Germany must be part of a European economic and digital infrastructure that is independent of Chinese corporations such as Huawei.

She added that new climate regulations could actually prove advantageous for German businesses, especially if Chinese competitors who supposedly undercut these regulations were subject to extra taxation. Baerbock’s foray into a sort of Green anti-Chinese economic policy has since been praised by German business representatives. It is not hard for them to accept this — especially given that questions of union rights and worker representation are noticeably absent from this vision. Accordingly, Baerbock has commended initiatives such as Elon Musk’s new Tesla factory in Brandenburg, regardless of the fact that Musk has repeatedly made clear that he will accept neither union representation nor collective bargaining agreements in his new factory.

The Greens have also proven to be very generous partners to German industry — or rather, industrialists — in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Winfried Kretschmann has governed for ten years as the party’s first and so far only state-level prime minister. Baden-Württemberg used to be a stronghold of the CDU but has been won over by Kretschmann with an agenda which adds a green face to conservative, pro-business parties. Kretschmann has since established his party as the strongest in the state — but also continuously irritated its activist base with his stance protecting the interests of automobile manufacturers like Daimler-Benz and Porsche, and his cautious position on the transition to electric cars.

While Kretschmann’s administration has presided over a decline in public infrastructure and a rise in poverty — especially among children and pensioners — it has actively fended off social initiatives such as a popular petition for free childcare and remains committed to conservative fiscal policies. The Greens have also alienated parts of the climate justice movement, for instance when the CDU/Green government in the state of Hesse pledged its support for the controversial extension of the A49 highway and, connected to this, the clearing of the Dannenröder Forest. Protesters who tried to prevent the clearing in November 2020 were met with numerous incidents of police violence — provoking much negative publicity for Hesse’s government and its transport minister Tarek Al-Wazir, a member of the Greens.

Read more …

Hmm. Keep your enemies closer, we were told.

• European Parliament to Suspend Turkey’s EU Accession Talks

Turkey’s accession talks for entry into the European Union were suspended on Wednesday as relations between Turkey and the bloc have become increasingly strained over the last several years. The European Parliament also called for Turkey to implement an immediate change of course regarding the rule of law and human rights as a prerequisite for the country’s accession to the EU. European lawmakers passed the proposal to suspend Turkey’s accession by 480 votes in favor, 64 against and 150 abstentions in a European parliamentary session. Today’s move came after Members of the European Parliament cited many violations of human rights and the rule of law in Turkey. Turkey is one of the countries having been through the longest negotiation process to enter the EU.


It became an official candidate for membership in 1999 at the Helsinki summit of the European Council. Official accession talks started in 2005 but have been stalled since 2016. According to Nacho Sánchez Amor, who drafted the report on the country, Turkey must change course and “put expressions of good will into concrete actions. “The report is probably the toughest ever in its criticism. It reflects all that has unfortunately happened in the country in the last two years, in particular in the fields of human rights and rule of law, which remain the main area of concern for the European Parliament,” he said. The latest report adopted by the Committee of Foreign Affairs states that the Turkish government has deliberately distanced itself from European values and has led its relations with the EU to a “historic low point.”

Read more …

 

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The Grandest Human Experiment In History

May 062021
 
 May 6, 2021  Posted by at 5:23 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  35 Responses »


William Adolphe Bouguereau Girl with a pomegranate 1875

 

 

 

Let’s not beat around the bush any longer, but call things for what they are: we are in the middle of the grandest medical and genetic experiment in the history of mankind, by a mile and a half. The experiment is already so advanced that we can only wait and see its consequences. We don’t know what these will be, and that is exactly the problem with it: we normally run elaborate tests in advance of such experiments to minimize their potential negative effects and their adverse outcomes for our species. This time around, we did not.

There are well-established procedures to test novel substances before they are used in human experiments, which take years – for good reason. We have decided to almost entirely neglect these procedures in the case of Covid “vaccines”, in the same way that we have neglected to look for alternative ways to defend ourselves from the virus. And these two things are closely connected: in case ivermectin or Budesonide or even just vitamin D had shown efficacy in Covid trials, the vaccines could not have received emergency authorization.

Moreover, you will now be punished – in access to travel, work, other activities- for NOT having received a dose of never approved chemicals. The world is upside down, but after months upon months of lockdowns, people think upside down is just how they like it. Anything is better than being locked up/down. Stockholm syndrome writ large.

And now, as we survey the landscape, we see that the proponents of the experiments are already dreaming of much bigger adventures -and profits-. The emergency authorization was all they needed, a full approval was not necessary. Some people behind the companies behind mRNA techniques, such as Moderna and Pfizer, may tell themselves that they are doing mankind a big favor, but they would be the first to know that the well-established procedures are there for good reasons. But yeah, they threaten their short-term profits, we get that.

 

In 1947, a world disgusted by Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments on German prisoners said: never again. Yes, sounds familiar. The Nuremberg Code was drafted:

 

The ten points of the code were given in the section of the judges’ verdict entitled “Permissible Medical Experiments”:

  1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
  2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
  3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
  4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
  5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
  6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
  7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
  8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
  9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
  10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

 

I’ll leave it up to you to decide to which extent the mRNA -and other unapproved vaccines- experiment abides by that code. Which in 1964 was further extended and formalized in the Helsinki Declaration. Meanwhile, there are tons of stories like these:

 

There are so many tragic stories now of loved ones dying after taking an experimental COVID injection, that one has to wonder if people are now starting to become desensitized by all these stories as the public is perhaps being conditioned to accept “death by lethal injection” as part of the “new normal?” A 50-year-old woman in Canada, a 61-year-old woman in Orange, California, and a 58-year-old man in Minnesota are three more casualties following COVID-19 injections.

[..] Lisa Basiuk-Stonehouse passed away May 3, 2021 after her AstraZeneca vaccine. According to her Aunt Shari, blood clots caused a stroke and the matter is still being investigated. Lisa’s husband Morrie passed away two years ago, according to the Facebook post by Lisa’s Aunt Shari Turner. Lisa and Morrie’s daughter Jordan, is now 19 years old. A gofundme account has been created, and as of May 3, 2021 the fundraiser had generated 19k of the 25k goal. It appears Lisa and her family are very loved.

[..] HIBBING, MINNESOTA — A 57-year-old trucker and avid fisherman is dead in one of the more heartbreaking stories we’ve covered on this blog. Mr. John Medved received the experimental Johnson & Johnson viral vector shot on April 1, according to his daughter, Mrs. Rachel Weise. Twelve days later, Mr. Medved was in the emergency room due to extreme shortness of breath. Doctors diagnosed him with a pulmonary embolism, aka blood clots in his lungs. He was placed on a ventilator and in a medically-induced coma the next day as his condition rapidly deteriorated. Doctors then discovered that Mr. Medved had a stroke that damaged the entire left side of his brain. The doctor told Rachel that it was the worst stroke he’d seen in his career.

[..] The Orange County Coroner’s office is investigating the death of a woman who died just days after she received her second dose of the Moderna vaccine. The family says the grandmother was healthy before she got her shot, and that her sudden death came as a shock. A conversation with staff at the Orange County Coroner’s office about Griselda Flores’ death, raised red flags for her son Richard Cardenas and the family. “They made it seem like this was not the first call that they had,” Cardenas said. Assistant Chief Deputy Coroner Brad Olsen says that’s right. Olsen told Eyewitness News a handful of deaths, including Flores’, are under investigation because they happened one to three days after the person got a COVID-19 vaccine dose.

But yeah, the fact that those well-established procedures were ignored completely for the Covid vaccines, leads scientists and drug makers to believe they have a lot more leeway now for the next series of experiments. Some of which are truly unsettling, to me at least. Experimenting on human embryo cells which were never meant to come to full growth is right up there with Mengele in my mind:

 

CRISPR Madness: Welcome to the Age of Genetic Chaos

Body cell, or “somatic,” modification is in line with traditional medical practice, where a sick person undergoes a procedure or takes a drug that may be the best means for saving their life or sparing them a life of misery. It might or might not be successful but is a risk a patient or those responsible for them can reasonably assume. In embryo modification, in contrast, the tissues of the body are pervasively altered as it is taking form in ways that are poorly understood.

Even so-called single-gene traits are established with the participation of dozens or hundreds of other genes often acting in compensatory fashions, leading to the situation that in some individuals a double dose of the most threatening cystic fibrosis or sickle cell gene variants leads to no adverse symptoms at all. Under such circumstances, a single gene change, no matter how accurately administered, is an uncontrolled experiment on a prospective person that may do more harm than good. While errors can be propagated to future generations (leading to the misleading claim that the hazard is primarily through the reproductive cells or “germ line”), damage would also be incurred by the initial experimentally produced person.

All the books under review, from the frankly promotional ones of Isaacson, Kevin Davies and Jamie Metzl, to the more balanced one of Françoise Baylis, accept the baseless premise propounded by many CRISPR researchers that gene modification of embryos can be done safely, as does the reviewer herself. “[I]n ten years or so, we will probably meet the minimum conditions of safety and predictability for editing out single-gene diseases,” de Souza writes, and there is no indication that any of the authors disagrees.

Baylis, the book author most critical of the technology, is similarly concerned with ensuring that the fruits of this powerful, perfectable technology will be distributed equitably, and that enough disparate voices participate in deciding whether the endeavor (i.e., making experimental changes in prospective children; irreversibly changing the human gene pool; bringing human production into the commodity system) is what “we” really want.

 

And wouldn’t you know, as Whitney Webb describes, there a major convergence in this field, with the US government involved, and the Pentagon, Silicon Valley, Big Tech and Big Pharma (and of course the media). All for the benefit of mankind, wouldn’t you know. The mRNA technology, for which Moderna could never get any approval prior to the Covid era, now looks set to be used in many other fields. Cancer and terrorism and preventing crime and reading minds, it’s all here:

 

This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.” Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur.

[..] ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

[..] the flagship program of HARPA would be SAFE HOME, short for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes. SAFE HOME would suck up masses of private data from “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo, and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices, as well as information from health-care providers to determine if an individual might be likely to commit a crime. The data would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms “for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence.”

The Department of Justice’s pre-crime approach known as DEEP was activated just months before Trump left office; it was also justified as a way to “stop mass shootings before they happen.” Soon after Biden’s inauguration, the new administration began using information from social media to make pre-crime arrests as part of its approach toward combatting “domestic terror.” Given the history of Silicon Valley companies collaborating with the government on matters of warrantless surveillance, it appears that aspects of SAFE HOME may already be covertly active under Biden, only waiting for the formalization of ARPA-H/HARPA to be legitimized as public policy.

[..] While nominally focused on “bioterrorist attacks,” TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project also sought to acquire early detection capabilities for “normal” disease outbreaks. Bio-Surveillance and related DARPA projects at the time, such as LifeLog, sought to harvest data through the mass use of some sort of wearable or handheld technology. These DARPA programs were ultimately shut down due to the controversy over claims they would be used to profile domestic dissidents and eliminate privacy for all Americans in the US.

[..] This most recent effort to create ARPA-H/HARPA combines well with the coordinated push of Silicon Valley companies into the field of health care, specifically Silicon Valley companies that double as contractors to US intelligence and/or the military (e.g., Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). During the COVID-19 crisis, this trend toward Silicon Valley dominance of the health-care sector has accelerated considerably due to a top-down push toward digitalization with telemedicine, remote monitoring, and the like.

One interesting example is Amazon, which launched a wearable last year that purports to not only use biometrics to monitor people’s physical health and fitness but to track their emotional state as well. The previous year, Amazon acquired the online pharmacy PillPack, and it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which data from Amazon’s Halo wellness band is used to offer treatment recommendations that are then supplied by Amazon-owned PillPack.

[..] The military is currently being used to pilot COVID-19–related biometric wearables for “returning to work safely.” Last December, it was announced that Hill Air Force Base in Utah would make biometric wearables a mandatory part of the uniform for some squadrons. [..] While of interest to the military, these wearables are primarily intended for mass use—a big step toward the infrastructure needed for the resurrection of a bio-surveillance program to be run by the national-security state.

We continue to forget the lessons of the past. We worship “science” now. Decades of diligence and actual science, which were carefully crafted by our parents and grandparents, have been swept under the carpet under the guise of emergency in matter of months, and “science” takes that to mean all limits are off. Yes, governments and armies etc. would love to experiment on you and I, and tell us it’s for our own best sake. If we just wear a ring or a watch or an app, we will all benefit from centralized medical systems checking our symptoms 1000 times a second and beaming it all into some database, what could be better for us?

And maybe this is indeed inevitable, but it also contradicts a lot of what we, until now, consider to be freedom and liberty, of our decisions about our own existence, without anyone else interfering. And then on top of that they will try to force you into getting another mRNA jab, and then another, until you have very obviously no longer the genetic make-up that you were born with.

We are born into this world as healthy people, and we use our healthcare systems to correct in the still rare instances that we are not. But we will lose that presumption if and when we will be monitored 24/7 from the day we are born. Even while we are as healthy as our ancestors were when they were born. Do we benefit from this? Well, not as long as we remain healthy. Then it’s just more centralized crap.

You might say that we benefit when we get old or sick, sure, but then we must ask ourselves if we want some entity checking on us all the time while we’re just living a life like our parents did. You think that idea, of just living your life, independent from centralized powers, will disappear? I guess it’s possible, but it scares the heebees out of me.

And then you get back to asking what the logic is behind injecting perfectly healthy people, children even for g-d’s sake, with an untested chemical substance. Shouldn’t we leave healthy people alone? Oh, but they can’t prove they’re healthy… That’s the world upside down. And that’s what the mRNA manufacturers count on us to believe. That no-one is a normal healthy human being anymore until and unless they have been injected with an experimental substance. Governments, the Pentagon, Silicon Valley, Big Tech and Big Pharma want nothing more than for you to think that. Because then they got you for life. YOUR life.

 

 

 

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