Oct 042024
 


Pablo Picasso Juan-Les-Pins 1920

 

Will Trump Make It to Election? (Jim Rickards)
Trump ‘Resorted To Crimes’ To Overturn 2020 Election: Jack Smith (BBC)
Trump’s Opportunity for a Knockout (RCW)
CISA Chief Says Foreign Interference Won’t Much Alter US Election Results (ET)
Court Refuses to Throw Out Andrew Weissmann Defamation Lawsuit (Turley)
Biden-Harris’ Mysterious Nationwide Migrant Network (ZH)
19 GOP AGs Launch Probe Into ActBlue Over Money Laundering Allegations (AmG)
US Port Workers Agree To End Strike After Accepting 62% Wage Increase (ZH)
Israel Planning Major Attack on Iran (Antiwar)
Lebanon: Nasrallah Agreed To Temporary Ceasefire Just Before Assassination (ZH)
‘Iron Dome Proved to Be a Bust’: Larry Johnson (Sp.)
‘Who Do You Want to Win?’ (Patrick Lawrence)
Musk Slams US Democrats Over Freedom Of Speech (RT)
EU Car Industry Faces ‘Horror Fall’ – Bild (RT)
Another Right-Wing Election Winner Is Sidelined in the EU (Marsden)
Telegram Shares User Details With Governments – Durov (RT)

 

 

 

 

Trump signs

 

 

Butler
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841645637504217376

 

 

Sondland

 

 

Latest death toll: 215. Still hundreds missing.

 

 

Dore

 

 

JD Vance

 

 

Emhoff

 

 

Trump tariffs

 

 

 

 

“We only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” In other words, the assassination attempts will keep coming.”

Will Trump Make It to Election? (Jim Rickards)

MSNBC and CNN and the rest of corporate media put out these lies about Trump as a form of propaganda. The lies are aimed at a target audience of Trump-haters and progressive lightweights. Routh was the target audience. Corporate media are too cowardly to take direct action against Trump. But by putting out propaganda, they hope to trigger those who are prone to such action. The triggering propaganda was not limited to the media. Kamala Harris said of Trump, “Does one of us have to come out alive? Ha, ha, ha, ha!” Joe Biden said, “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.” Tim Walz’s wife, Gwen Walz, said, “Buh-bye, Donald Trump.” Democratic member of Congress Dan Goldman said about Trump, “He is destructive to our democracy and… he has to be eliminated.” I could offer 100 similar quotes but you get the idea. The media class and the political class are calling for Trump to be killed. It’s just a matter of triggering someone to do it. In Routh’s case, he was completely triggered.

Then he picked up his rifle. Just as the USSS are responsible for letting these assassinations happen, corporate media and many Democrats are responsible for triggering unstable individuals to conduct the assassination attempts. It’s not a stretch to say the USSS, corporate media and many Democrats are all out to kill Trump. They simply rely on mentally ill zealots to do their wet work. Routh told the court on Monday, Sept. 16, that he had no material financial assets and owned no property. The court has appointed a public defender to represent Routh. If he has no assets, how was Routh able to afford his move to Hawaii? His travels to Ukraine? How did he finance his recruiting effort while in Ukraine? Where did he get the rifle? How could he afford to travel to Florida to carry out the assassination plan? It seems clear that Routh has a hidden source of financial support. The CIA typically deals in cash while running covert operations. Was Routh a CIA asset turned loose on a rogue mission with a predictable outcome?

I worked for the CIA for 10 years in various capacities, including special operations. Ukraine has been a CIA outpost since 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation. Ukraine is riddled with CIA operatives, bioweapons labs and forward-deployed assets intended to destabilize Russia. It’s impossible that a high-profile American like Routh could run around Ukraine recruiting mercenaries without coming to the attention of the CIA and coming in direct contact with CIA assets. This likely scenario strongly suggests that Routh may have been financed and otherwise assisted by the CIA to carry out his assassination plan. The fact that Routh was using a Russian-designed rifle (which would have been plentiful in Ukraine as Cold War surplus) is another tell. The parallels with Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a U.S. defector to the Soviet Union and who later returned to the U.S. and had contacts with anti-Castro Cubans working for the CIA, are too obvious to ignore.

As for Trump’s so-called protection, why was the golf course not secure? How did Routh set up a sniper’s nest on the sixth hole of the course without being detected until minutes before Trump came into sight? Routh stayed in his sniper’s nest for over 12 hours before he was confronted. Why was that area not swept several times in the period? How did Routh even know Trump would be playing golf there that day without a leak from Trump’s security detail? These and many other questions need to be answered quickly before the cover-up goes much further. The FBI official in charge of the Florida assassination attempt investigation is Jeffrey Veltri, a notorious Trump-hater who was ordered by the FBI director to scrub his social media accounts of anti-Trump posts. One bit of good news is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will be conducting his own state-level investigation with full subpoena power and expert forensics.

The corporate media, Democrat politicians, the USSS and other branches of the deep state are largely to blame for these two assassination attempts because of their constantly repeated lies about Trump’s character, political platform and ostensible “threat to democracy.” Calling Trump “Hitler” (as the media continually do) offers deranged individuals like Routh a license to kill. In Routh’s case he apparently took up the challenge and almost succeeded. Saying the assassination attempt failed is not a source of comfort. One is reminded of the IRA’s near assassination of Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in 1984. After the bombing, the IRA boasted to Thatcher: “We only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” In other words, the assassination attempts will keep coming.

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Guess they will swear this is not election interference… This is one month before the election. DOJ always said 60 days minimum. 165 pages where 45 would be “normal”.

Jack Smith focuses on instances where he thinks he can plausibly claim Trump was not the president, but a private person. Because that’s the “niche” the Supreme Court left open.

Zero Hedge has a longer version on the topic. I stuck with BBC.

Trump ‘Resorted To Crimes’ To Overturn 2020 Election: Jack Smith (BBC)

Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” while trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, and should not escape charges, prosecutors say. A new court filing challenges Trump’s claim that he should avoid a trial thanks to a recent landmark US Supreme Court ruling. This said American presidents should be immune from prosecution when acting in an “official” capacity. Trump was president when the alleged offences were committed – but prosecutors say he was acting in a “private” capacity, not an official one. In response, Trump has repeated false claims that the 2020 vote was “rigged” and suggested the timing of the filing’s release was designed to hurt his 2024 campaign. In an interview with NewsNation, he also criticised Special Counsel Jack Smith, the lead prosecutor in the election interference probe who submitted the filing. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan released the document – filed by Mr Smith last week – with redactions on Wednesday.

This is one of four criminal cases Trump has faced since being voted out in 2020 – another of which led to a historic conviction in New York. He is accused of seeking to illegally block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but denies wrongdoing. The new 165-page document presents the clearest view yet of how Mr Smith’s team would pursue their case, having tweaked the wording of their charges after the Supreme Court’s intervention. It gives details of Trump’s alleged scheme, including his actions when his supporters rioted at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. It also outlines the efforts of Mike Pence, the vice-president at the time, to talk him down. The issue remains prominent in US politics almost four years later, ahead of the 2024 election in November, which will be contested by Trump and Kamala Harris. It came up in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, during which JD Vance refused to answer whether Trump, his running mate for 2024, lost in 2020.

The court filing may represent Mr Smith’s last chance to set out his case against Trump. The case has been frequently delayed since charges were filed by the Department of Justice (DoJ) more than a year ago. Trump will not face trial before November’s election – and he may seek to have the case dropped if he wins. Trump’s lawyers fought to keep the latest filing sealed. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has called it “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional”. In the newly-released document, Mr Smith and his team try to navigate the summer Supreme Court ruling – which dented their case – by narrowing their scope. The Supreme Court ruling did not apply immunity to unofficial acts. The prosecutors argue that although Trump was still in office when attempting to overturn the 2020 vote, his attempts related to his campaign and his life as a private citizen. They call it a “private criminal effort”.

The court should therefore “determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as he would any other citizen,” the filing says. The filing lays out several instances in which Pence, expressed doubt about his boss’s voter fraud claims and tried to persuade him to accept he lost the election. In the court document, prosecutors say Trump was not upset when he learned his vice-president had been rushed to a secure location as rioters stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. “So what?” he allegedly said, when informed of the scenes. Pence would later go public about his falling out with Trump in the wake of the storming of Congress, when some rioters shouted “hang Mike Pence” because the vice-president refused to obstruct the certification of election results.

The filing also alleges that Trump always planned to declare victory no matter the result, and laid the groundwork for this long before election day. It also accuses him of knowingly spreading false claims about the vote that he himself deemed “crazy”. Mr Smith also provides several new details about the Trump campaign’s alleged role in sowing chaos in battleground states, where a large number of mail-in ballots were being counted in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the Democratic stronghold of Detroit, Michigan, when a large batch of ballots seemed to be in favour of Biden, a Trump campaign operative allegedly told his colleague to “find a reason” that something was wrong with the ballots to give him “options to file litigation”.

The filing also claims that Trump and his allies, including lawyer Rudy Giuliani, sought to “exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” on 6 January 2021 to delay the election certification. They allegedly did this by calling senators and leaving voicemails that asked them to object to the state electors. Trump said on Wednesday that the case would end with his “complete victory”. A trial date has not been set.

Trump lawsuit
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841569926844477847

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From the home of Tim Walz.

Trump’s Opportunity for a Knockout (RCW)

In a very significant development — I am almost prepared to say the most significant development in the current presidential contest — it has recently been revealed that Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College and a leader in the development of Minnesota’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum, explicitly called for the “overthrow of the United States.” This goal has demonstrably shaped Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, according to which students are taught as early as kindergarten that America is evil. The video recording of Lozenski was made two years ago but was taken down the day after it was spotted by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This finding is pertinent to the national electorate because Lozenski is one of many anti-American ideologues contributing the “liberated” ingredient to Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s new ethnic studies requirements for public education in Minnesota.

These requirements are decisively shaped by Critical Race Theory (CRT), of which ethnic studies is a variant. As Kurtz aptly puts it, “…Essentially, ethnic studies is a kind of anti-civics in which students are taught to reject and replace America’s system of government.” CRT, of course, is part of the ideology Harris-Walz bring with them from the catastrophes of California and Minnesota straight to every schoolhouse in America. Kurtz has provided a good overview of Walz’s education policies and the Lozenski connection. As Kurtz writes: In a 2020 piece, “The Black Radical Tradition Can Help Us Imagine a More Just World,” Lozenski touts the work of Cedric Robinson and Robin D. G. Kelley — leading thinkers of the radical ethnic-studies movement — as the answer to Minnesota’s education woes. To Lozenski, the George Floyd “uprising” of 2020 presages the “inevitable death” of the current “social order.”

Lozenski oozes contempt for “the egoistic pursuits of U.S. society and its desperate cling to individualism.” Educationally, he adds, transforming the social order requires reforms like agitation for defunding the police and an end to all standardized testing. Shockingly, other than the Center of the American Experiment and Kurtz, this topic has been lightly covered, though the Trump campaign is aware of it. We shall probably know in the upcoming Vance/Walz debate whether the Trump campaign will highlight this issue. If it doesn’t, others must. There is a real danger that this issue will vanish down the memory hole. To make as explicit an assertion as did Lozenski is extremely rare; indeed, I have never seen or heard such an admission. The destructive intent of ethnic studies or CRT has been very apparent and much commented upon for many years by the conservative commentariat.

But Lozenski’s open, cavalier articulation makes the destructive nature of ethnic studies virtually impossible to deny. Defenders of ethnic studies may claim that Lozenski is an outlier, but as he is the leading figure in Minnesota’s ethnic studies movement and the prime mover of Minnesota’s ethnic studies initiative, it will not be possible to sustain such an denial. Although Democrats might try to stonewall until the election, the Republicans and the conservative media must not allow it. Lozenski not only admitted the goal of ethnic studies is American destruction, but also chastised his many fellow travelers for not revealing their purpose. Again, this is no surprise to those who have been paying even the slightest attention.

Lozenski is tethered to Governor Walz. Walz’s Education Department appointed Lozenski to the ethnic studies “implementation framework” committee and ethnic studies is a critical initiative for Walz. In 2021 he introduced what he called his “Due North” education plan, which featured funding for a major ethnic-studies initiative. Speaking about the initiative during his State of the State address, he said: This plan would tackle the racial and geographic opportunity gap by dramatically reforming school financing, expanding access to rigorous coursework, and ensuring our curriculum and teacher workforce better reflect our increasingly diverse student body.

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But but… Hillary, Mueller, Weismann, Adam Schiff!

In reality, it’s not FOREIGN interference that’s the problem.

CISA Chief Says Foreign Interference Won’t Much Alter US Election Results (ET)

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said that America’s election systems are so secure that foreign adversaries will be unable to manipulate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in a “material” way. Easterly made the remarks in an Oct. 2 interview with The Associated Press, in which she said that foreign powers are actively seeking to influence U.S. voters and sow discord but that they lack the ability to interfere with core election infrastructure such as vote casting and ballot counting. “Malicious actors, even if they tried, could not have an impact at scale such that there would be a material effect on the outcome of the election,” Easterly told the outlet. U.S. intelligence agencies continue to raise concerns about disinformation and influence operations by foreign powers ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

A recent update from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) warned that countries such as Russia, Iran, and China are ramping up the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to shape public opinion in the United States. According to the ODNI report, AI has accelerated foreign influence operations. Russia’s efforts include the use of AI to produce misleading election-related content, from fake audio and videos to fabricated narratives. Iran has focused on generating fake news articles and social media posts to stoke divisions among U.S. voters. China’s efforts have been more indirect, aiming to shape global perceptions of its own policies while amplifying U.S. domestic issues such as illegal immigration and drug policy. Easterly acknowledged these attempts to influence public opinion in the United States, noting that China is “very interested” in swaying the 2024 election. However, she stressed that no cyber activities targeting America’s voting systems had been detected thus far.

“We have not seen specific cyber activity designed to interfere with actual election infrastructure or processes,” Easterly said. Several surveys have pointed to concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections, including doubts about their honesty and openness and the potential impacts of AI or foreign interference. One survey, carried out by the Public Affairs Council found that just 37 percent of Americans believe the 2024 election will be “honest and open.” Another survey from the University of South Florida found that a majority of U.S. voters think the federal government hasn’t done enough to deter foreign actors from interfering with this year’s presidential election. And a survey published in May by the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University found that 78 percent of Americans think the upcoming election will be influenced by “abuses” related to AI-generated content that spreads on social media.

“Many aren’t sure they can sort through the garbage they know will be polluting campaign-related content,” Lee Rainie, director of the Digital Future Center, said in a statement. In March, The Epoch Times reported on the rising influence of political memes on election discourse. At the time, Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, told The Epoch Times that deep fakes—which are realistic images, videos, and audio typically created by generative AI software—can and do effectively fool people Rutledge said that even if the content is obviously fake or of low quality, the messages can still be persuasive if they confirm people’s political biases.

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Andrew Weissmann effectively ran the Mueller investigation. Mueller was just a figurehead.

Court Refuses to Throw Out Andrew Weissmann Defamation Lawsuit (Turley)

We previously discussed the defamation case against NYU Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann. He is being sued by lawyer Stefan Passantino after Weissmann said that he coached former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to “lie” to Congress. At the time, I wrote that “it is hard to see how Weissmann can avoid a trial.” U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan apparently agrees. She just rejected Weissmann’s motion to dismiss the case. The controversial former aide to Special Counsel Robert Mueller (and NYU law professor) is being sued after declaring that attorney Stefan Passantino (who represented Hutchinson before Congress) told her to lie. Weissmann’s controversial commentary was not a surprise to many critics.

Many of us questioned Mueller hiring Weissmann given his reputation for stretching legal authority and perceived political bias. Weissmann reportedly congratulated acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered the Justice Department not to assist President Donald Trump on his immigration ban. The Supreme Court would ultimately affirm Trump’s underlying authority, but Yates refused to allow the Justice Department to assist a sitting president in defending that authority. Weissmann gushed in an email to her, writing “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” As noted earlier, Weissmann seemed to respond to those criticisms by aggressively proving them true. Weissmann has only become more controversial as an MSNBC analyst. He called on Justice Department officials to refuse to assist in the investigation of abuses in the Russian collusion investigation. While opposing investigations involving Democrats, he has seemingly supported every possible charge against Trump or his associates.

What Weissmann often lacked in precedent, he made up for in hyperbole. That signature is at the heart of the current lawsuit. On September 13, 2023, Weissmann was referring to Judy Hunt and noted on Twitter (now X) that “Hunt also is Cassidy Hutchinson’s good lawyer. (Not the one who coached her to lie).” In making this claim against Passantino, Weissmann actually triggered the “per se” defamation standard twice. These are categories that have been treated as defamatory per se. The allegation against Passantino would not only constitute criminal conduct but also unethical professional conduct. Passantino denounces the statement as an “insidious lie” and “smear.” AliKahn noted that “At her fifth deposition, Ms. Hutchinson discussed a line of questioning from her first deposition about the January 6 incident in the Presidential limousine,” AliKhan wrote.

“She explained that, during a break after facing repeated questions on the topic, she had told Mr. Passantino in private, ‘I’m f*****. I just lied.’ Mr. Passantino responded, ‘You didn’t lie. . . . They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you [sic] saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.’” Hutchinson repeatedly confirmed that Passantino “never told me to lie,” “didn’t tell me to lie,” and “He told me not to lie.” While Judge AliKhan on Monday tossed out the second count in the complaint as lacking foundation for the claim of financial harm, she refused to dismiss Passantino’s defamation claim and moved the case forward toward trial. That could prove embarrassing as Passantino’s team searches for evidence of malice in his emails and other communications.

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There’s a lot of money in illegals these days. “I don’t want to say it’s a gold rush, but business is very good.”

Biden-Harris’ Mysterious Nationwide Migrant Network (ZH)

Large staffing companies that thrived during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars under the Bush-Obama years retooled their business models as the US involvement and war funding in the Middle East wound down. Now, these staffing firms seem to be profiting off the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border migrant invasion by providing essential services, such as private security, transportation, and many other services, to ensure the fed’s migrant network nationwide operates smoothly. These companies are likely awarded handsome federal contracts, paid for by the US taxpayer. Bussing and housing millions of illegal and legal aliens is big business for staffing companies and non-profits. Americans have to realize their tax dollars are paying for all of this while the migrants displace and replace blue-collar workers in small-town factories nationwide.

The folks in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, know firsthand just how devastating globalist open border policies can be for them. Real America’s Voice host Ben Bergquam posted on X, “More breaking footage of the Democrats harboring illegals in Chicago. Now using unmarked brand new hotels like this Holiday Inn at [XXXXXXX] to disguise Kamala and Biden’s illegal invasion operations.” Bergquam’s video of the Holiday Inn filled-migrant hotel in the Chicago metro area is very intriguing. First, the security guards appear to be sourced from staffing firm GardaWorld.

Second, a person who seems to be another worker said the Holiday Inn is “federal property.” The focus should be on industrial-sized staffing companies that provide security and other services to keep the fed’s migrant network operational. But let’s take a step back and realize that some of these staffing companies could be part of the DC swamp that profited off the endless wars in the Middle East. In 2012, the head of GardaWorld told Reuters that Middle East conflicts had kept the staffing firm “busier than ever and has never been greater,” adding, “I don’t want to say it’s a gold rush, but business is very good.” Sticking with the staffing companies, just recently, Muckraker’s Anthony Rubin dropped a bombshell in a report titled “Finding The Feds’ Missing Children | CHILD TRAFFICKING IN AMERICA.” He provided intel that MVM, a private security contractor with ties to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Homeland Security, was caught moving unaccompanied migrant children around the country.

[..] when the war funding dried up in the Middle East, like GardaWorld, MVM pivoted to catering to the federal government’s next big globalist idea: profiting off the migrant invasion by providing migrant solutions. Their website reveals their ‘Mission Solutions,’ which include “Transportation and care for vulnerable populations [migrants].” MVM has operated a migrant bus network nationwide. Even though we cited only two large staffing companies that profited off Middle East wars and pivoted to providing domestic migrant solutions to the Biden-Harris administration, smaller staffing companies are operating nationwide, providing transportation for migrants, and even some firms are providing housing solutions. Taxpayers must realize the feds are funneling their monies to support open borders and operate a complex network of transportation and housing for millions of migrants. Blue-collar workers across the country are waking up to the fact that the feds are perfectly okay with displacing and replacing them with low-cost migrants at factories across small town America.

CBP One

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James O’Keefe has been on top of this. “..millions of dollars in campaign donations to Act Blue that have been laundered through unwitting small donors..”

19 GOP AGs Launch Probe Into ActBlue Over Money Laundering Allegations (AmG)

A coalition of 19 Republican state attorneys general have launched a criminal investigation into the Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue over allegations of money laundering. As American Greatness reported in April, multiple independent investigative journalists, including O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) and Election Watch have uncovered what appears to be illegal activity involving millions of dollars in campaign donations to Act Blue that have been laundered through unwitting small donors. The process of breaking up large donations and submitting them under the names of small donors to cover up illegal contributions has been dubbed “smurfing.” Suspicions that ActBlue routinely engages in this type of illicit fundraising have dogged the outfit since at least Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020.

The Committee on House Administration, chaired by Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.), launched an investigation into Act Blue in November of 2023 to look into reports that the fundraising giant was skirting campaign donation laws and allowing rampant fraud on the site. The committee widened its probe in August 2024. In a letter sent to top officials on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on August 5, Steil urged them to “immediately initiate an emergency rulemaking to require political campaigns to verify the card verification value (‘CVV’) of donors who contribute online using a credit or debit card, and to prohibit political campaigns from accepting online contributions from a gift card or other prepaid credit cards.”

In September, Steil sent letters to five states, urging them to launch criminal investigations into ActBlue’s alleged illicit activities, citing three specific areas of concern:
– Donations significantly disproportionate to an individual’s net worth or previous giving history.
– Uncharacteristic donations from party-affiliated registered voters suddenly contributing to candidates of the opposing party.
– Unusually frequent donations from elderly individuals or first-time donors.

The number of GOP AGs involved in the effort has since swelled to 19. On Tuesday, the 19 Republican Attorney’s General sent a letter to ActBlue CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones demanding information and explanations regarding the suspicious donations.

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“This is the first strike in 50 years—these people know how to get to yes,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said Thursday [..] “They just need to get to yes.”

US Port Workers Agree To End Strike After Accepting 62% Wage Increase (ZH)

Late on Thursday, 45,000 striking dockworkers at US East and Gulf coast ports agreed to return to work after port operators sweetened their contract offer, ending a three-day strike that threatened to disrupt the American economy. The International Longshoremen’s Association and port operators, in a joint statement, said they had reached a tentative agreement on wages and union members would return to work. They said the agreement would extend the prior contract, which expired at the start of this week, through Jan. 15, 2025 while the two sides negotiate on other issues, including automation on the docks. The breakthrough came after port employers offered a 62% increase in wages over six years, the WSJ reported citing people familiar with the matter. The new offer, up from an earlier proposed raise of 50%, came after the White House privately and publicly pressed the large shipping lines and cargo terminal operators who employ the longshore workers to make a new offer to the union.

The agreement ends a strike that had closed container ports from Maine to Texas and threatened to disrupt everything from the supply of bananas in supermarkets to the flow of cars through America’s factories, and cost the US economy billions each day in lost commerce. The latest offer would raise the base hourly rate for ILA port workers to $63 from $39 over six years. One of the people said the offer is being made on the condition that dockworkers go back to work and agree to efficiency gains. The offer is less than the union demand for an increase of 77% over the term of the contract but a far larger increase than most major labor contracts, including a contract reached last year covering the separate union representing West Coast longshore workers. Many U.S. dockworkers currently earn more than a $100,000 a year, with baseline hourly wages boosted by work rules and overtime requirements.

The strike came about five weeks from a presidential election where both main candidates are wooing working-class union voters. Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have voiced support for the workers, stressing that the carriers are mostly foreign-owned. Top White House aides have been in frequent contact with the employers, reiterating that Biden doesn’t plan to use his federal power to break the strike. “This is the first strike in 50 years—these people know how to get to yes,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said Thursday, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One. “They just need to get to yes.” The walkout had shut down some of the country’s main gateways for imports of food, vehicles, heavy machinery, construction materials, chemicals, furniture, clothes and toys. Many manufacturers and big retailers, with their busy fall shopping season just starting to kick in, said they could withstand a short strike because they brought in products earlier than usual this year and diverted other cargoes to West Coast ports.

But executives said a walkout lasting a week or longer would push up shipping costs and might trigger product shortages. The International Longshoremen’s Association said it had agreed to extend the contract until Jan. 15 and work will resume. Container ports from Houston to Miami and up to Boston have been closed since the labor contract between the ILA and the US Maritime Alliance, which represents terminal operators and shipping lines, expired on Tuesday. Dozens of ships carrying containers and autos have anchored off the coast of major trade hubs including New York, South Carolina and Virgina over the past few days. It remains to be seen if other US labor union will also go on strike hoping to repeat the staggering wage gains that were just handed to the Longshoremen. If so, watch as the color drains out of Powell’s face as wage inflation hits double digits in the coming months.

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“..G7 leaders agreed to impose new sanctions on Iran, which will have little impact since Iran is already under so many.”

Israel Planning Major Attack on Iran (Antiwar)

Israel is planning to launch a “significant retaliation” attack against Iran over the Iranian missile barrage that targeted Israel on Tuesday, which was a response to several Israeli escalations in the region. Israeli officials acknowledged to Axios that the situation could lead to a full-blown regional war, which would involve the US. According to the Axios report, Israel could target oil production facilities inside Iran or other strategic sites. Israeli officials say that if Iran hits back, then all options will be on the table, including strikes on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. “We have a big question mark about how the Iranians are going to respond to an attack, but we take into consideration the possibility that they would go all in, which will be a whole different ball game,” an Israeli official told Axios. Other options being considered are attacks on Iran’s air defenses or targeted assassinations. Israel has a history of killing people inside Iran, including the July 31 assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh.

Israel would likely need US military support to launch significant strikes on Iranian territory, and the Israeli officials speaking to Axios say they are coordinating with the Biden administration. Israel wants more US support if it provokes another Iranian attack. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that the US would work with Israel to ensure Iran faces “severe consequences.” President Biden has also said he is working with Israel on a response but said Wednesday that he wouldn’t support strikes on Iran’s nuclear facility. “All seven of us agree that they have a right to respond, but they have to respond proportionally,” he said, referring to the Group of Seven nations. He said G7 leaders agreed to impose new sanctions on Iran, which will have little impact since Iran is already under so many.

Israel acknowledged on Wednesday that Iranian missiles made an impact on several military bases but claimed there was no significant damage. Israel is also claiming there were no major casualties, with only two Israelis suffering minor injuries. One Palestinian was killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank when shrapnel from an intercepted missile hit him. Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran and the Israeli killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas Nilforoushan, an IRGC commander who was killed alongside Nasrallah.

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The US plays dumb: “..it was never communicated to us..” Not credible. It was their own proposal. Communication lines were open.

Lebanon: Nasrallah Agreed To Temporary Ceasefire Just Before Assassination (ZH)

In hugely surprising remarks given on American television this week, Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib has stated that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah issued his agreement to a US and French-proposed 21-day ceasefire with Israel just before Israel killed him by targeting a secretive meeting in south Beirut last Friday. Habib revealed the agreement in a PBS interview. He told PBS/CNN host Christiane Amanpour that “They told us that Mr. Netanyahu agreed on this, and so we also got the agreement of Hezbollah on that. And, you know what happened since then.” An incredulous-looking Amanpour asked: “are you saying that Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a ceasefire just moments before he was assassinated?” “He agreed, he agreed–yes, yes. We agreed completely.”

The top Lebanese diplomat then followed with: “The Lebanese House Speaker, Mr Nabih Berri, consulted with Hezbollah and we informed the Americans and the French about the agreement. They told us that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu also agreed to the statement issued by both presidents.” This is all in reference to a Sept.25th joint statement by the US, France, the European Union, Saudi Arabia and other nations urging an immediate 21-day ceasefire during which a more permanent diplomatic solution would be worked out. CNN writes of the interview: “White House senior adviser Amos Hochstein was then set to go to Lebanon to negotiate the ceasefire, Habib continued. “They told us that Mr. Netanyahu agreed on this and so we also got the agreement of Hezbollah on that and you know what happened since then,” the foreign minister added.”

If the Lebanese government account is true, this would have huge implications. However, no specific further evidence that Nasrallah agreed to ceasefire has yet emerged. Reuters’ top foreign correspondent, Idrees Ali, has called the revelation “Pretty stunning.” Further reporting from CNN could point to the accuracy of FM Habib’s statements: “A Western source familiar with the negotiations also said Hezbollah had agreed to the temporary truce shortly before the US released the proposal last week. The source didn’t say whether the decision had come directly from Nasrallah, but said that for the movement to agree, they would have needed his approval. A second source familiar with the talks agreed that the US was aware that Hezbollah was agreeing to the ceasefire.”

But on an official level, the White House is denying all of this. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller didn’t rule it out entirely, but said that the Hezbollah chief agreeing to a deal is “not something we have heard before. If true, [it] was never communicated to us.” “I can’t speak to whether he ever agreed to it and told somebody inside Lebanon. Obviously, that could be something that happened that we wouldn’t be aware of. I can tell you that, if that’s true, it was never communicated to us in any way shape or form,” Miller said in a Thursday press briefing. Critics of Israel have accused PM Netanyahu of deliberately sabotaging efforts at peace in his drive to decimate Hamas, Hezbollah, and ultimately to weaken archnemesis Iran – all while prolonging his power and rule at home.

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“Israel is not in a position to fight a multi-front war and it does not have the strategic depth to fight wars of attrition. And that’s exactly what it’s got itself into now..”

‘Iron Dome Proved to Be a Bust’: Larry Johnson (Sp.)

Iran launched a significant retaliatory attack against Israel late Tuesday night, ending months of speculation about how or whether the country would strike back after its provocative killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. The United States reportedly provided Iran with assurances after the attack against Haniyeh in July that Israel and the US would move constructively towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, ending Israel’s military aggression against its neighbors and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where over 42,000 have died according to figures reported by the territory’s health ministry. Tel Aviv’s deadly attack against Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon last week dashed hopes of a cessation of violence as Israel claims it is preparing for a broader invasion of Lebanon. “I’ve seen the videos and you can see the missiles continue to rain down and hit targets. Israel is imposing a news blackout,” former CIA analyst Larry Johnson said.

“They don’t want the knowledge out there about what happened. But Iran made sure that it was not going to hit and run the risk of killing hundreds or thousands of Israeli civilians.” “They were not going to act like the Israelis,” the analyst claimed. “They really consider themselves, if you will, more humane, more honorable, and by virtue of their action, I think they can make that case.” Johnson claimed Iran was forced to strike Israel after false assurances from the United States that Israel would cease attacks on its neighbors after its killing of Haniyeh. Iran previously launched a retaliatory attack on Israel in April after Tel Aviv’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria killed two Iranian generals. The codename Operation True Promise was announced for the strike. Iran’s Tuesday attack, dubbed Operation True Promise II, appears significantly more substantial than April’s strike in which the vast majority of Iranian missiles, rockets and drones were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome.

Iran was reportedly able to successfully strike Israeli military targets Tuesday, including an Israeli air base where multiple US-provided F-35 aircraft were hit. Johnson claimed Israel’s attack against Nasrallah would’ve been launched from an F-35; the fighter jet would be key to any Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The commentator compared Israel’s Iron Dome to the US Patriot missile system, claiming the US is unable to replenish the defense system rapidly enough to allow Israel to fight a long war of attrition.
“Lockheed Martin… can make about one and a half, one and a quarter [missiles] a day,” said Johnson. “I think Israel’s in a similar situation… [Iran] put Israel on notice, ‘If you launch any further strikes against us in any retaliation, we’re going to hit you harder next time and with more lethality.’ So this right now has a chance to really get out of control.”

“I cannot rule out that Israel is going to try to launch some conventional weapons at Iran, but I think they’re going to be defeated,” Johnson claimed. “Israel may be tempted to try to use a nuclear device against an Iranian target,” he warned. “If that happens then we’re going to really be into another dimension, and this is going to get very, very serious. It’s already a serious situation, but it will get absolutely dangerous.” The analyst suggested Israel would not be able to support military engagement against multiple enemies, even with the United States backing it up. “Israel is not in a position to fight a multi-front war and it does not have the strategic depth to fight wars of attrition. And that’s exactly what it’s got itself into now,” Johnson pointed out. “It’s not going to be able to finish off Hezbollah in a week. It couldn’t even finish off Hamas in 12 months. It’s not going to be able to finish off Syria, finish off the Houthis or finish off Iran… That’s what Israel fails to understand.

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“..symptomatic of logical deficiencies—deficiencies encouraged by those shaping and executing the West’s collective foreign policies—such that most of us have very little grasp of the world in which we live..”

‘Who Do You Want to Win?’ (Patrick Lawrence)

A friend in England, a dweller in bucolic Somerset along with the Black Angus herds and the sheep, forwards a piece by a Times of London columnist that merits careful consideration. Matthew Syed, who has distinguished himself as a ping–pong champion, titles his commentary, “Israel–Hezbollah conflict hinges on a crude question: Who do you want to win?” Syed, who has also done well writing high-end self-help books (You Are Awesome, 2018; Dare to Be You, 2020) has posed a crude question. He is right about this, if little else. And because it is crude, an essentially unserious question, we must take it seriously. As I read Syed’s column it seemed to me symptomatic of logical deficiencies—deficiencies encouraged by those shaping and executing the West’s collective foreign policies—such that most of us have very little grasp of the world in which we live. Ours is a world, so we are urged to think, divided eternally into two.

There are good guys and bad, the benevolent and the malevolent—democrats and autocrats in the Biden regime’s terms. And so there must be winners and losers, just as Matthew Syed supposes. It is hopeless, or nearly. Such a view of our world misses the point most of humanity, 24 years in, wishes to make about the 21st century. Two points, actually. One, the 20th century, a century of binary enmities, is indeed over. We must finally leave it behind. Two, the thought of winners and losers is beyond retrograde. In our time we will all win or we will all lose. Matthew Syed is wholly representative of those who simply cannot grasp these realities. Israel must win, Hezbollah must lose. And as Israel’s long-running hostility toward Iran drifts toward the war the Zionist state has long sought, the Israelis must win, the Iranians lose. To dispense quickly with a minor matter of logic, the intensifying conflict between terrorist Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and armed resistance movement, does not hinge in the slightest on which side you or I want to emerge the victor.

The outcome depends on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli and Lebanese forces, the wisdom or otherwise of their political leaders, the sense or otherwise of their military and diplomatic strategies, and, not least, the extent to which either side has the support of other powers. To suggest the great “you” Matthew Syed addresses will determine how Israel’s regional confrontations will turn out is the very height of narcissism. And the narcissism prevalent in the West is one of the problems Syed’s commentary requires us to confront. Syed is unambivalently a clash-of-civilizations man. And like others of this persuasion, he does not think we ought to look at matters too closely. He proposes we consider Israel’s barbarities—in Lebanon, Gaza, the Occupied Territories, who knows where next—as another case of the West against the rest.

Russia will invade Europe when it finishes in Ukraine. China is “an ancient and impressive civilization now run by a totalitarian clique.” Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. This is all we need to know as we address the question Syed’s headline poses, who do we want to win? He writes: “So perhaps you’ll forgive me for saying something that doesn’t get into the details of any single dispute, doesn’t opine on the precise logic of Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah or its broader response to the October 7 attacks, doesn’t get into the weeds of Western policy over Ukraine; instead, it makes a simpler but, I hope, not simplistic point. In the conflagration that is coming, I back Israel 100 per cent, the West 100 per cent, civilization 100 per cent, progress 100 per cent. “There are hinge moments in history,” Syed writes to round off his point, “where simplicity is an asset.”

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They don’t see the benefit to themselves. Of the Constitution, SupremeCourt, democracy…

Musk Slams US Democrats Over Freedom Of Speech (RT)

Tech mogul Elon Musk has accused the US Democratic Party of trying to stifle free speech in the country by claiming to combat hate speech and misinformation. The billionaire made the comment following Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate between Democratic candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, where they discussed a number of issues, including free speech and censorship. Walz stated during the debate that he does not believe that hate speech, threatening language or misinformation is protected under the First Amendment, which grants US citizens the right to free speech. “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, that’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said, referring to a 1919 quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Writing on X on Wednesday, Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, warned that “the Democratic Party openly wants to take your freedom of speech under the guise of what THEY deem to be ‘hate.’” During the debate, Vance argued that censorship, which was being carried out by Big Tech companies and supported by Kamala Harris and US President Joe Biden, was a “much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen in the last four years,” including the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, which the Democratic Party has repeatedly cited as proof of the threat to democracy posed by Trump. “We do have a threat to democracy […] It’s big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens, and it’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation,” Vance said.

The Republican VP hopeful also accused the Biden-Harris administration of trying to get Americans banned from platforms like Facebook for criticizing government mask mandates for toddlers amid the Covid-19 pandemic. “That’s not yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, that is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American,” Vance argued. Back in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration had pressured Facebook to “censor” some Covid-19 content, and that the FBI had ordered the platform to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

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“The company management did not specify how many of the company’s 120,000 employees in Germany would be laid off.”

EU Car Industry Faces ‘Horror Fall’ – Bild (RT)

EU automakers are facing their worst months since the Covid-19 pandemic, the German tabloid Bild reported on Thursday, citing a prominent industry expert. Car sales within the bloc have fallen by 200,000 vehicles in the first eight months of 2024 compared to the same period last year and things are set to get worse, Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer told the outlet. Dudenhoeffer is the founder and former director of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) – a private institute specializing in industry analysis and transport policy. Sales of electric cars are down 8.3% from last year, the economist pointed out, with 140,000 fewer models sold through August. ”Important large car markets such as Germany and Italy were already slightly down in the first eight months of the year,” he noted, warning that things “are not getting better.”

According to Dudenhoeffer, car manufacturers are now seeking to compensate for their losses by increasing prices. The 20 most popular gasoline-powered car models are already approximately 10% more expensive, he told Bild. “The next few months will be very difficult for the industry. Worse than it was during [the Covid-19 pandemic],” he predicted. Germany is about to be hit particularly strongly, according to the expert, with the market not expected to recover before 2026. Last month, the EU’s biggest carmaker – Volkswagen – announced that it would consider plant closures or layoffs in Germany for the first time in its 87-year history. The company also announced it would be forced to end its employment security program, which had been set up to postpone all job cuts until at least 2029.

In early September, Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume called the situation the automobile market was facing “highly challenging and serious,” adding that the possibility of “plant closures are no longer excluded.” The company management did not specify how many of the company’s 120,000 employees in Germany would be laid off. Germany had already suffered a recession in late 2023. Europe’s largest economy also contracted in the second quarter of this year, according to official statistics. Weakness in the automotive sector became the main driver behind the decline in the country’s industrial production in July, Reuters reported in September, adding that the nation could face another recession.

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“..see it as their duty to defend democracy by ensuring that the party that gets the most votes gets completely sidelined. Why? Because, Hitler. Duh.”

Another Right-Wing Election Winner Is Sidelined in the EU (Marsden)

The elites in Austria, like elsewhere in Europe, see it as their duty to defend democracy by ensuring that the party that gets the most votes gets completely sidelined. Why? Because, Hitler. Duh. According to the Associated Press, Austria’s Freedom Party secured the “first far-right national election win since World War 2.” And we all know which famous Austrian is synonymous with the Second World War. How subtle. “EU rocked as far-Right party founded by Nazi WW2 veterans storms to victory,” noted one British tabloid, the Express. “Herbert Kickl’s Freedom Party is on for a huge victory in Austria according to early projections.” Interesting how Nazi history is omitted entirely when Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov movement runs around with Nazi symbol flags and tattoos to kudos from the same establishment.

For those looking for a different way to smear Austrian voters other than comparing them to Hitler, there’s apparently also the opportunity here to compare them to the Führer’s World War 2 enemies: Russia. NBC is calling this “far-right” vote by average Austrians fed up with the establishment’s antics a “boost for Putin.” Looks like all the “bad guy” bases are covered across the entire spectrum of Western establishment propaganda. So how did this party actually win? The former Austrian minister who took the helm of the Freedom Party in 2021 constantly spoke of the average citizen suffering from an inability to pay for basic life necessities, like electricity and food. Doesn’t he understand that if Austrians are able to put food on the table, then Putin wins? Apparently not. And it doesn’t seem like voters get it either. And since this this guy and his party are increasingly resonating with voters’ objective reality while the elites dissociate from it, it’s translating into electoral wins.

It’s as simple as voters taking a look around at their lives and coming to the conclusion that his assessment aligns with their own more than the version presented by the establishment parties. Another big issue for Austria has been the large number of refugees per capita, one of the highest in Europe, with the issue resonating through incidents like the Islamic State threats to the Taylor Swift concert in Vienna over the summer, police raids ahead of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US, and refugee riots on Halloween a couple of years ago. The asylum issue in particular is one that Kickl, the former interior minister who now leads the Freedom Party, would be well-positioned to tackle. What exactly about his past could possibly qualify him for that in the minds of voters?

Maybe the fact that he was forced to step down from the job in 2019 for saying that he wanted to test the parameters of European human rights rules that “prevent us from doing what’s necessary” with asylum seekers – a subject that even the establishment left had to admit was an issue, but only saying that they’d merely reduce asylum applications. There’s considerable daylight between the positions of “we’re full” and “get out”, with the latter already being the actual position staked out by the so-called bleeding heart leftists, who only managed to get 21% of the vote.

Obviously a large number of Austrians didn’t clutch their pearls at Kickl’s remarks like the Austrian establishment did, awarding him nearly 29% of the popular vote. Kickl has called Ursula Von der Leyen, the unelected European Commission president, a warmonger. And, well, Austrian voters also handed his Freedom Party the most votes in the European parliamentary elections earlier this year. Nice little throne-warming gift, there. The party’s mandate from voters seems clear: to take on the national and European establishments that have made such a mess of things. Just like everywhere else in Europe where anti-establishment parties have been surging, particularly on the right. So who are they going to form a government with, in respect of the people’s choice? According to the establishment-right chancellor, no one. Because, well, screw them.

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The picture changes. You can no longer trust Telegram.

Telegram Shares User Details With Governments – Durov (RT)

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov revealed on Wednesday that the messenger service has been complying with privacy policies in several countries and has been disclosing information about criminals to authorities for the past six years. The Russian tech billionaire has remained unable to leave France after he was arrested in Paris in late August and charged with multiple offenses, such as operating a platform used for organized crime and refusing to cooperate with French authorities. Last month, Durov, who is also a co-founder of the company, announced an update to the platform’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which he said would make it clear that IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate the messenger’s rules “can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.”

In a follow-up post on his Du Rove’s Channel on Wednesday, the Telegram CEO noted that the new policy does not constitute a “major shift” in how the platform works and that it had already been sharing with relevant authorities the details of criminals abusing it. “Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities, according to our Privacy Policy in most countries,” Durov explained, noting that whenever the platform received a “properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines,” it would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals. Durov revealed that in Brazil, for example, Telegram had disclosed data for over 200 legal requests since the start of the year, and nearly 7,000 in India over the same period.

He also noted that there has been an uptick in the number of “valid legal requests” in Europe in recent months, suggesting that this could be attributed to the fact that more EU authorities have started to use the correct communication line for such requests. Durov explained that the recent update to the platform’s privacy policy was only meant to streamline and unify it, and stressed that Telegram’s core principles have not changed. “We’ve always strived to comply with relevant local laws – as long as they didn’t go against our values of freedom and privacy,” he said, adding that Telegram was built to “protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations” and has never allowed criminals to abuse the platform or evade justice.

Durov was detained after landing at a Paris airport in late August and released on bail several days later. He was charged on 12 counts, including complicity in distributing child porn, drug dealing and money laundering. The charges stem from the accusation that Telegram’s lax moderation rules allow for the widespread misuse of the messenger service. The businessman has vehemently denied the accusations, stressing that Telegram has always strived to work with state regulators to establish “the right balance between privacy and security.” He also noted that the platform takes down “millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” and publishes “daily transparency reports” about actions taken against the dissemination of illegal content.

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1841651197264199766

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cow

 

 

Cat win
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841588065321591132

 

 

Cat yoga

 

 

Shells

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 012024
 


Pablo Picasso Sleeping peasants 1919

 

Israel Launches Ground Invasion Of Lebanon: Operation Northern Arrows (ZH)
The Lands of Islam Get Ready To Channel Their Rage (Pepe Escobar)
Biden And Harris Called Out Over Botched Hurricane Response (ZH)
Democrats May ‘Destroy’ US Constitution If They Win Elections – Musk (Sp.)
MTG Warns ‘Most Dangerous Phase’ in 2024 Election Has Begun (HUSA) /span>
Heroes and Villains (Kunstler)
Letitia James May be Winning the Lawfare but Losing the War (Turley)
US Port Strike Could Begin Tuesday (ZH)
Life, Pre-empted (Scott Ritter)
Britain Goes Full Orwell Accusing Putin of Imperialism (Amar)
The Pentagon Goes to School (Hartung)
Zelensky Ready To Fire Spy Chief – Media (RT)
Will The Suffocating Cage of Leviathan Be Avoided? (Alastair Crooke)
The End of the Skripals (Helmer)
Pavel Durov, The Superfluous Man (Karganovic)
The Case Of Pavel Durov Ends On A French Letter With A Loophole (Helmer)

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

Flynn

 

 

Starlink

 

 

Devine
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840390154931913081

 

 

Duda

 

 

 

 

The mental state is Middle Ages, the weapons are not.

Israel Launches Ground Invasion Of Lebanon: Operation Northern Arrows (ZH)

Update(1630ET): The Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon has begun, with various regional news correspondents saying IDF tanks have been spotted breaching areas earlier deemed ‘closed military zones’. “Israeli forces have launched limited incursions in Lebanon, the United States said, as Israel vowed to keep fighting Hezbollah and sealed part of the border after killing the Iran-backed militants’ leader,” AFP reports. “This is the moment,” Retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Aviv Amiri has told CNN. The southern areas were reportedly subject to carpet bombing raids within the hours prior to the border breach. “We cannot create terms for Israelis to return to their homes without pushing Hezbollah out of South Lebanon, certainly at minimum eight miles, which would be anti-tank missile range,” Amiri has said. Israel’s military has also issued new warnings telling Lebanese civilians in the southern suburbs of Beirut to evacuate, ahead of more imminent airstrikes on Hezbollah locations.

Thus a ground war has begun in Lebanon a mere month before the US presidential election. Meanwhile neither President Biden nor VP Kamala Harris have had much to say. Quite the opposite: they might prefer to hide from the media. There are meanwhile reports that it was a US-provided 2,000 pound bomb which killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last Friday. Israel’s use of the US-supplied “bunker busters” has been described Monday as follows: A video published by the Israeli military on Saturday showed jets it said were used to carry out the attack carrying at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the US-made BLU-109, according to Trevor Ball, a former senior explosive ordnance technician for the US Army who reviewed the footage for CNN. Biden has meekly called for ceasefire, while simultaneously backing the high level assassination.

Update(1908ET): Israel has named the new cross-border offensive “Operation Northern Arrows”. Below is an early description by the IDF as posted to Telegram and other government channels: “IDF troops have begun limited, localized and targeted raids against Hezbollah terror targets in the border area of southern Lebanon In accordance with the decision of the political echelon, a few hours ago, the IDF began limited, localized, and targeted ground raids based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon. These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.

The IDF is operating according to a methodical plan set out by the General Staff and the Northern Command which IDF soldiers have trained and prepared for in recent months. The Israeli Air Force and IDF Artillery are supporting the ground forces with precise strikes on military targets in the area.” Some Lebanese accounts have claimed that Hezbollah has already killed and wounded some invading Israeli soldiers, but these reports will remain hard to verify within the opening hours of the campaign and amid the fog of war. Heavy strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs during the night hours (local).

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“..instances of entities which cannot be really qualified as proper nation-states. They are more like severe bacteriological infections. The only thing they specialize in is kill, kill, kill..”

The Lands of Islam Get Ready To Channel Their Rage (Pepe Escobar)

A symbol was shattered. A legend is born. The Resistance, more than ever, won’t back down. That was framed not by a Shi’ite, but by a Lebanese Christian leader, encapsulating how a true Political Islam icon is capable of transcending all – artificial – borders. This decade, that I defined as The Raging Twenties, started with a murder: the – all-American – targeted assassination of Quds-Force leader Gen Soleimani and Hashd al-Shaabi commander Abu Mohandes just outside Baghdad airport. Gen Soleimani, more than a symbol, was the conceptualizer of the Axis of Resistance. For all its setbacks, especially in the past few weeks, the Axis of Resistance is much stronger now than in January 2000. Soleimani – the martyr, the legend – left an unparalleled legacy that will never cease to inspire all the West Asian nodes of the Resistance.

The same will happen to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. More than a symbol, he was the Face of the Axis of Resistance, extraordinary popular and respected all across the Arab street and the lands of Islam. For all its setbacks, especially in the past few weeks, the Axis of Resistance will be much stronger in the next few years than in September 2024. Nasrallah – the martyr, the legend – leaves a legacy comparable to Soleimani’s, to whom, incidentally, he was always in awe in military matters, and always learning. As a politician though, as well as a fatherly, spiritual source of wisdom, Nasrallah was peerless. Now let’s descend from the stars to the gutter.

An unredeemable serial war criminal and psychopathic genocidal, violating scores of UN resolutions, popped up at the UN General Assembly in New York and then ordered, from inside the building, yet another war crime: wiping out an entire block in southern Beirut with dozens of American bunker buster bombs, including the BLU-109 with a JDAM precision guiding system – leaving countless civilians still unaccounted for under the rubble, including Sayyed Nasrallah. As the war criminal addressed the UN General Assembly, over half of the delegates staged a mass walkout: the hall was de facto nearly empty of real Global South diplomats. The remaining audience was presented with yet another trademark display of IQ-impaired “maps” featuring the “blessed” – Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, UAE – and the “cursed” – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen.

A rabid, lowly interloper from Polish extraction – a complete fake – passing judgment on ancient civilizations does not even qualify as gutter-level trash. History is replete with instances of entities which cannot be really qualified as proper nation-states. They are more like severe bacteriological infections. The only thing they specialize in is kill, kill, kill. Preferably unarmed civilians – as a terrorist tactic. Terribly dangerous, of course. History also tells us the only way they must be dealt with.

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There’s only one real president.

Biden And Harris Called Out Over Botched Hurricane Response (ZH)

When natural disasters strike in the United States, the president and VP have historically responded immediately – offering support, condolences, and generally letting the public know that the situation is – or will soon be – under control. After making landfall Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region, Hurricane Helene proceeded to tear through several states – resulting in 116 deaths and causing devastating floods in Western North Carolina. Yet, it took three days for the White House to get their act together. On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris posted a photo on Air Force Two – in which she appears with blank pieces of paper and unplugged headphones (maybe she was using her earrings?) to ‘respond’ to the disaster.

And on Monday, President Biden read a teleprompter response to the disaster, claiming that he’ll visit the affected areas on Wednesday.

Trump, meanwhile, is in Georgia to help support victims and their families… “We are now heading to Valdosta, Georgia, in order to pay my respects and bring lots of relief material, including fuel, equipment, water, and other things, to the State,” Trump posted to X, adding “I was also going to stop into North Carolina, which has really been hit hard. I have a lot of supplies ready for them, but access and communication is now restricted, and we want to make sure that Local Emergency Management is able to focus on helping the people most affected, and not being concerned with me.”

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No Supreme Court and no Constitution. That’s the idea.

Democrats May ‘Destroy’ US Constitution If They Win Elections – Musk (Sp.)

US entrepreneur Elon Musk said that he considers Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s statement that the US Constitution prevents fighting “disinformation” to be a threat to the country’s main law, adding that the Democratic Party will “destroy” the constitution of the US if they win the November 5 elections. Kerry expressed his concern earlier that the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, poses an obstacle to fighting “disinformation” on social media. The envoy also stated that the Democrats need to win elections in order to have the opportunity to make changes without precising the particular changes.

One of X users posted a screenshot of the headline of an article about Kerry’s speech and said that if the Democrats won, it would be the last elections. “And they will destroy the Constitution,” Musk added on X, reposting the publication. The US presidential election will be held on November 5. The incumbent vice president, Kamala Harris, a Democrat, and former US President Donald Trump, a Republican, are both running for the country’s top job.

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Is this an echo?: “..some Democrats face accusations of potentially refusing to certify the results should Trump win the presidency.”

MTG Warns ‘Most Dangerous Phase’ in 2024 Election Has Begun (HUSA)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene issued a stark warning on Saturday about “the most dangerous phase” of the 2024 presidential election. With President Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris in several polls, Greene suggested that Democrats “will do anything to stop him,” later emphasizing, “Anything.” In a grim post on X, Greene wrote, “The momentum shift has happened and Trump is leading and his support is rapidly accelerating.” She then added, “They’ve already been trying to put him in prison and literally assassinate him.” Greene then ominously questioned, “What comes next?” hinting at further “assassination attempts” or potential efforts to “delay the election.” She urged Americans to be “prepared” for the future. Greene’s comments come just two weeks after Trump survived a second assassination attempt by Ryan Routh, a Democratic voter and donor.

This follows an earlier shooting on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump narrowly escaped the bullets of gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, a Democrat donor. Beyond assassination attempts, Democrats had previously tried to bar Trump from appearing on primary ballots, claiming he was unqualified over his alleged role in what they claimed was an insurrection on Jan. 6. The Supreme Court had to intervene earlier this year, ruling that Trump remained eligible. Meanwhile, Trump faces criminal cases on several fronts. Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, indicted Trump over Jan. 6 and the dispute over classified documents with the National Archives. The Supreme Court intervened again in the Jan. 6 case, ruling that Trump enjoys presidential immunity for acts carried out while in office. In a separate ruling, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the documents case, declaring Smith’s appointment unconstitutional.

On the civil side, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the Trump Organization, accusing Trump of inflating property values to secure generous loans. A New York appeals court is currently reviewing the case. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has also indicted Trump on charges related to falsified business records tied to payments made to Michael Cohen. This case has drawn criticism, even from some Democratic legal scholars. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis—a Democrat who came under fire for holding an affair with the prosecutor she hired to go after Trump—accused Trump of illegally questioning the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. During his tenure as president, Trump was impeached twice by Democrats, an effort they planned since he was first inaugurated. Now, with the 2024 election approaching, some Democrats face accusations of potentially refusing to certify the results should Trump win the presidency.

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“..the “danger” Mr. Trump poses is to them personally and directly, certainly not to “our democracy,” their phony war-cry..”

Heroes and Villains (Kunstler)

Just yesterday, former Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking of Mr. Trump returning to office, told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki: “They will use the mechanisms of the DOJ to go after people who are their political foes. This is something that has never really happened in the history of this republic.” Mr. Holder may have been born at night, but probably not the night before last. Apparently, he has not noticed the uses to which current AG Merrick Garland has put “Joe Biden’s” DOJ, bending heaven, earth, and the law to put Mr. Trump behind bars and bankrupt him — not to mention the scores of Trump-adjacent lawyers prosecuted in cockamamie cases based on their efforts to pursue ballot fraud in the 2020 elections.

Hillary Clinton was similarly on-point last week with Margaret Hoover on PBS’s Firing Line, declaring: “The press needs a consistent narrative about the danger that Trump poses.” Of course, she asserts this incessantly — and the media parrots her — without ever specifying what that danger is. So, I will tell you: Hillary Clinton and hundreds of Democratic Party affiliated officials past and present fear that they will be subjected to legal process in crimes ranging all the way up to treason for their conduct the past decade, including the mass murder and injury of millions with their Covid policy, their deliberate abetting of millions crossing the border illegally, their use of several government agencies to abridge the First Amendment, their abuse of DOJ and FBI power in malicious prosecutions, their shell games funneling taxpayers’ money to hundreds of crony NGOs, and their use of Ukraine as a money laundry for the entire Beltway criminal cartel. Surely even more than that.

It was the last item on that list that prompted impeachment No. 1 of Mr. Trump, who came uncomfortably close to inquiring about it in that fateful 2019 phone call to President Zelensky. And, of course, it was exactly in that maw of corruption that the Biden family helped itself to millions of grifted dollars while Joe was out-of-office, and his bagman-crackhead son gamboled about the globe shaking loose more millions from exotic money-trees wherever he landed. All of which is to say that the “danger” Mr. Trump poses is to them personally and directly, certainly not to “our democracy,” their phony war-cry. So, now you know.

Many of these players have gone to ground the past year or more. You don’t hear much these days from the likes of Jim Comey, John Brennan, Jim Clapper, Andy McCabe, Tony Fauci, Peter Hotez, and many more who were so active shooting their mouths off on cable news after the blob managed to install “Joe Biden” as its “beard” in the Oval Office. Now, they all lie low in terror as the immense battery of lawfare against Mr. Trump failed spectacularly to stop him from running again, and the first two attempts on his life went awry. Meanwhile, Garland, Mayorkas, Christopher Wray, remain in the trenches, reduced to stonewalling every and all efforts to get straight answers out of them as to how badly they are running things. And out in front of all of them you have their supposed protector, Kamala Harris, the most feckless candidate imaginable. No wonder they’re so desperate.

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“How do you tether the amount that was assessed by [Engoron] to the harm that was caused here where the parties left these transactions happy?”

Letitia James May be Winning the Lawfare but Losing the War (Turley)

In an age of lawfare, New York Attorney General Letitia James has always embraced the total war option. Her very appeal has been her willingness to use any means against political opponents. James first ran for her office by pledging to bag Donald Trump on something, anything. She did not specify the violation, only that she would deliver the ultimate trophy kill for Democratic voters. James follows the view of what Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz said about war, law is merely politics “by other means.” Yet, the political success of James in weaponizing her office has been in stark contrast with her legal setbacks in courts. James earlier sought to use her office to disband the National Rifle Association, the most powerful gun rights organization in the country, due to self-dealing and corruption of executives. James notably did not target liberal groups accused of similar violations. The ridiculous effort to disband the NRA collapsed in court.

It did not matter. James knew that such efforts were performative and that New York voters did not care if such attacks failed. She will continue to win the lawfare battles, even if she loses the war. This week, two of James’s best-known campaigns were struggling in court. James is best known for her fraud case against Trump, in which she secured a $464 million fine and a ban on Trump from the New York real estate business for three years. That penalty, which has now risen to $489 million with interest, was in a case where no one had lost a dime due to the alleged inaccurate property valuations in bank loans secured by the Trump organization. Not only where the banks fully paid on the loans and made considerable profits, but they wanted to make additional loans to the Trump organization. In appellate arguments this week, James’s office faced openly skeptical justices who raised the very arguments that some of us have made for years about the ludicrous fine imposed by Judge Arthur Engoron.

Justice David Friedman noted that this law “is supposed to protect the market and the consumers — I don’t see it here.” His colleague Justice Peter Moulton told her office “The immense penalty in this case is troubling” and added, “How do you tether the amount that was assessed by [Engoron] to the harm that was caused here where the parties left these transactions happy?” The answer, of course, is the case was never about markets. It was about politics. The fact that the banks were “happy” is immaterial. Happiness in New York is a political, not legal calculus. The justices did not rule this week, but an opinion could be issued within a month. In the same week, James faced a stinging defeat in another popular cause. James had targeted pro-life organizations for spreading supposed “disinformation” in not just opposing the use of mifepristone (the abortion pill used in the majority of abortions in the United States), but in advocating the use of reversal procedures if mothers change their minds before taking the second drug in the treatment regimen.

Critics charge that, while there are some studies showing successful reversal cases, the treatment remains unproven and unapproved. It remains an intense debate. James, however, wanted to end the debate. She targeted pregnancy centers and was then sued by two pro-life ministries, Summit Life Outreach Center and the Evergreen Association. Judge John Sinatra Jr. blocked James‘s crackdown as a denial of free speech. Notably, these centers were not profiting by sharing this information or advocating such reversal treatment. James merely declared that people advocating such reversal treatments are engaged in “spreading dangerous misinformation by advertising…without any medical and scientific proof.” It is a familiar rationale on the left and discussed in my latest book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

It is the same rationale that led to the banning and blacklisting of experts during the pandemic for views that have now been vindicated on the efficacy of masks and other issues. They were silenced by those who declared their viewpoints as dangerously unproven or unapproved, but who were themselves wrong.

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Has anyone blamed Trump yet?

US Port Strike Could Begin Tuesday (ZH)

Time is running out for the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the US Maritime Alliance (USMX)—a coalition of port operators and carriers—to form a new labor contract as the existing one expires at midnight. A no-deal scenario would mean thousands of longshoremen at three dozen facilities across 14 Gulf and East Coast ports would begin striking at 12:01 am EST. Tuesday would mark the beginning of a major supply chain storm (inflation surge) in a no-deal scenario. Goldman analyst explained last week that a walkout by ILA members would jeopardize $5 billion in daily international trade coming into the Gulf and East Coast ports.

Goldman’s Jordan Alliger told clients, “Upwards of $4.9bn per day is at risk in international trade along the East and Gulf coasts, along with the potential for supply chains to likely become less fluid due to emergent congestion, which in turn could result in a re-emergence of transport price inflation.” “The biggest wild card in the presidential election that nobody’s talking about? The looming port strike that could shut down all East and Gulf Coast ports just 36 days before the election,” Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen wrote on X earlier this month. On Monday morning, with just a little over half the day left, a team of Goldman analysts led by Brooke Roach provided clients with the “current state of the supply chain and freight environment for the retail industry.”

What is happening: The International Longshoreman Association and US Maritime Alliance contract is set to expire on September 30th. Our US transports analyst, Jordan Alliger, detailed the potential ramifications should labor disruption arise at East / Gulf Coast Ports in this note published on 9/26. While we take no view on the likelihood of any outcome, our team has fielded an increased number of investor queries focused on potential disruption to US retail as a result of potential congestion, which could come at a critical shipping period for US retailers ahead of the holidays.

Comments from retail associations: The American Apparel and Footwear Association estimates that 53% of all US apparel, footwear, and accessories imports are routed through the East and Gulf Coast ports. The AAFA also noted risk from East Coast / Gulf port disruption to impact West Coast port operations, creating strains/delays across the supply chain. Separately, the Retail Industry Leaders Association has also stated that while retailers have activated contingency plans to mitigate potential effects of work disruption, it becomes harder to mitigate the longer a work stoppage goes on.

Our view on potential impact: We surveyed our hardlines and softlines coverage universe to assess exposure, and we found the majority of companies who responded pointed to the following: (1) A higher rate of reliance on West Coast ports for their primarily Asia-sourced product; (2) Proactive rerouting and other plans ahead of potential disruption to ensure critical product arrives on-time for holiday; (3) Other contingency plans in place, including airfreight for select items. Many companies indicated they were already planning for higher freight expense in 2H due to a variety of risk factors, with port contract negotiations one factor alongside ongoing Red Sea disruption and higher rates on spot product. That said, we note that the magnitude of potential disruption is likely a function of the length of any work disruption and subsequent port congestion (which could likely impact both West and East Coast ports). Historically, a longer period of congestion for retailers has typically been associated with a higher risk of delayed product arrival, which can be a headwind to full-price sales for holiday or seasonal items.

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“Last week we came closer to a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Today we are even closer.”

Life, Pre-empted (Scott Ritter)

What would you do to save Democracy? To save America? To save the world? How will you vote in November? If you’re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you’re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news. Last week we came closer to a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Today we are even closer. Most scenarios being bandied about in the western mainstream media that involve a nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States have Russia initiating the exchange by using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in response to deteriorating military, economic, and/or political conditions brought on by the US and NATO successfully leveraging Ukraine as a proxy to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia. Understand, this is what both Ukraine and the Biden administration mean when they speak of Ukraine “winning the war.”

This is a continuation of the policy objective set forth by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in April 2022, “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” meaning that Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that it loses in Ukraine. This policy has failed; Russia has absorbed four new territories—Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk—into the Russian Federation, and the Russian defense industry has not only replaced losses sustained in the Ukrainian conflict, but is currently arming and equipping an additional 600,000 troops that have been added to the Russian military since February 2022. It is the United States and its NATO allies that find themselves on their back feet, with Europe facing economic hardship as a result of the extreme blowback that has transpired because of its sanctioning of Russian energy, and the United States watching helplessly as Russia, together with China, turns the once passive BRICS economic forum into a geopolitical juggernaut capable of challenging and surpassing the US-led G7 as the world’s most influential non-governmental organization.

As a result of this abysmal failure, policymakers in both the US and Europe are undertaking increasingly brazen acts of escalation designed to bring Russia to the breaking point, all premised on the assumption that all so-called “red lines” established by Russia regarding escalation are illusionary—Russia, they believe, is bluffing. And if Russia is not bluffing? Then, the western-generated scenario paints an apocalyptic picture which has a weak, defeated Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in a last, desperate act of vengeance. According to this scenario, which the US and NATO not only war-gamed out but made ready to implement when these entities imagined that Russia was preparing to employ nuclear weapons back in late 2022-early 2023, the US and NATO would launch a devastating response against Russian targets deep inside Russia designed to punitively degrade Russian command and control, logistics, and warfighting capacity.

This would be done using conventional weapons. If Russia opted to retaliate against NATO targets, then the US would have to make a decision—continue to climb the escalation ladder, matching Russia punch for punch until one side became exhausted, or preemptively using nuclear weapons as a means of escalating to de-escalate—launch a limited nuclear strike using low-yield nuclear weapons in hopes that Russia would back down out of fear of what would come next—a general nuclear war. The Pentagon has integrated such a scenario into the range of nuclear pre-emption options available to the President of the United States. Indeed, in early 2020 US Strategic Command conducted an exercise where the Secretary of Defense gave the launch instructions for a US Ohio class submarine to launch a Trident missile carrying W-76-2 low yield nuclear warheads against a Russian target in a scenario involving Russian aggression against the Baltics in which Russia used a tactical nuclear weapon to strike a NATO target.

The insanity of this scenario is that it ignores published Russian nuclear doctrine, which holds that Russia will respond with the full power of its strategic nuclear arsenal in the case of a nuclear attack against Russian soil. Once again, US nuclear war planners believe that Russia is bluffing.

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“..as if trying to outdo his infamous German colleague Annalena ‘360 Degrees of Anti-Diplomacy’ Baerbock..”

Britain Goes Full Orwell Accusing Putin of Imperialism (Amar)

There are intriguing and disappointing – though not surprising – continuities between Great Britain under the conservative Tories and the current iteration under a hardly less rightwing version of the Labour party. Crony corruption scandals that reveal the British political elite as comically greedy and petty are already erupting again. Ordinary people still face an unforgiving search for “austerity”; indeed, given recent Labour moves on the budget, for instance on the winter fuel allowance, affecting over ten million frequently vulnerable pensioners, the so-called “Left” is now outdoing the Right in cruelty toward the common man and woman. And the fairly new prime minister, Keir Starmer, is already as deeply unpopular as his predecessor Rishi Sunak was when he called the elections that predictably finished him off.

And then there is foreign policy. There as well, it is hard to spot a difference. It is true, we have just learned that, once, former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seriously considering an “aquatic raid” (say that with a Churchill growl, please) on the Netherlands, a NATO ally, to seize Covid vaccines. We have not yet heard of similarly exotic plots laid by Starmer. But otherwise, same old, same old. The UK elite remains fatally addicted to a blind loyalty toward its special relationship with the US that sometimes could make even the Germans blanch with envy. And they know a thing or two about absolute submission.

London also won’t let go of its position as Europe’s hottest cheerleader for the proxy war against Russia via Ukraine, at least outside the Baltics. Officially, the British government is still promoting the idea of co-launching Western-supplied missiles from Ukraine deep into Russia. Never mind that Moscow has made it clear that it will consider such a policy as bringing all of NATO and Russia into direct military conflict – not (barely) indirect as up until now. Moreover, the Russian leadership has also put the West on notice that cut-out games won’t work. The core point about its recent revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine is that not only the ostentatious direct attacker state but its supporters as well are fair game – as they should be – for retaliation.

There may well be an element of fairly cheap theater in London’s posturing as a missile street tough. Think of a dog madly barking behind a closed gate, precisely because it knows the gate is closed and it won’t have to act on its ferocious threats. The role of the gate is played by Washington, which fails to allow the brilliant British-Ukrainian Armageddon-Come-and-Get-Us plan to go ahead, as the Telegraph has just bemoaned. How convenient: We’d be (insanely) brave, really, if only we didn’t have to be so obedient, too. Yet, at least as far as stentorian rhetoric is concerned, the UK’s government will certainly not be outdone. The problem with all the big talk, though, is that it can easily veer off into declarations so unusually hyperbolic and absurd that they backfire. Think of this current British mood as the very opposite of that fine understatement for which the island’s culture used to be famous.

An example of this kind of self-defeating bombast was recently delivered by Foreign Secretary David Lammy. Trying to reach an international audience, especially in a Global South that has long given up on the West, Lammy launched into a rant – there really is no other word – about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The whole thing was rather cringe, as if trying to outdo his infamous German colleague Annalena ‘360 Degrees of Anti-Diplomacy’ Baerbock in demeaning his own office. Lammy, for instance, apparently felt no shame denouncing Moscow’s “disinformation” – that, from one of the West’s worst deniers and enablers of Israel’s many crimes, including its Gaza genocide and devastation of Lebanon. Frankly Russia, at this point: just wear it with pride.

But the perhaps most stunningly grotesque moment occurred when Lammy sought to make opportunistic use of the horrific history of modern slavery. “As a black man,” he stated, “whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved” he had a special knack for recognizing “imperialism.” By that he meant, of course, Russian imperialism. Since then, be assured, there has been much head scratching, perhaps especially in that Global South that Lammy tried so desperately to impress with his rhetorical kamikaze attack. Was not the British – cough, cough – Empire (as in imperialism) one of the worst participants in the Atlantic slave trade that produced 10 to 12 million Black victims?

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“In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding..”

The Pentagon Goes to School (Hartung)

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight. Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research. And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry. Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million.

And here’s a surprise: two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M. In 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy. Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology.

Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer. Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products. In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically black college.

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Power struggle.

Zelensky Ready To Fire Spy Chief – Media (RT)

Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov could soon be forced to resign, and his successor is likely to have already been chosen, the New Voice (NV) news site reported on Sunday, citing a law enforcement agency source. Rumors of Budanov’s possible dismissal began to circulate shortly after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky sacked half of the cabinet in early September. The purge included then Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba and the Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Olga Stefanishina. It has also been also reported that there have been “serious tensions” between Budanov, the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), and Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak – described by The Times as the de facto ruler of Ukraine – which could be a factor in his potential removal.

Commenting on the rumors that Budanov will be fired, the NV’s source said that this “option exists.” However, the source denied reports that the intelligence chief would follow Ukraine’s former top general, Valery Zaluzhny, by being appointed as an ambassador abroad. According to the source, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Oleg Ivashchenko, is likely to succeed Budanov. There have been no official statements from the HUR so far. Budanov was appointed as military intelligence chief in 2020, and previously served as deputy director of the Department of Foreign Intelligence. While it is typical of Zelensky to conduct purges after battlefield setbacks, some view the recent mass firing of ministers as an attempt by Yermak to concentrate power.

A member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Sergey Rakhmanin, told the NV last week that the talks about Budanov’s possible dismissal were “precisely a sign” that his relationship with Yermak had deteriorated. “As a rule, as soon as rumors start to appear that someone might leave their position, confirmation soon follows that, for one reason or another, either the person has quarreled with the head of the office or their relationship has worsened,” he added.

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“..unlike in the Classical World, Trump seems to have no aristocracy behind him, following in his train. Will this work? How will it turn out?”

Will The Suffocating Cage of Leviathan Be Avoided? (Alastair Crooke)

As the ousted ‘Emperor’, Biden made his ‘final walk’ from the dias at the UN; he was not the Emperor of yore, brimming with the bravura that the U.S. is back, and ‘I’m running the world’. For as the Middle East explodes, and the Ukrainian bubble deflates, the White House continues to urge restraint on all parties to dial back the violence. But no one is listening. With his era stumbling to an inglorious close, Biden may have loved the idea of pulling the levers of coercive soft-power influence, only subsequently to discover that the wires connecting those levers to the real-world railway ‘points’ were gone. Influence had flown; imperial coercion increasingly was met with disdain. Diplomacy had failed across the board. So what does today’s surge in turmoil, war in the Middle East, and Ukraine collapsing, signal for the future – as seen from the long arc of history (and following the lead of Mike Vlahos and John Batchelor’s Ancient world analogy)?

A stumbling ‘Emperor’ has been overthrown. There is no real crown prince; only an ‘adopted daughter’. It is deliberate. The Power-oligarchy (the ‘Senate’, if we follow the Ancient analogy), seems indifferent to the lacuna. It is intent to rule, as the Washington Post reports – outing the Oligarchic thinking: rule via a consensus of ‘democracy-supporting’ institutions as a kind of ‘permanent secretariat’ (a notion that has been kicking around since the 2016 election ‘loss’.) Yet nonetheless, there is an imperial succession issue. Every Empire needs an Emperor, beyond an Aristocracy/Senate, because the factious powerful in society need to have some pillar to which they can resort for settling their internecine feuds. Every ‘Empire’ needs too, a common substantive culture to make strong decisions of general interest.

In the European past there were two: Catholicism and the Enlightenment. They clashed. And both now have been marginalized for the benefit of libertarian arbitrariness, intended to free the individual from all constraints of communal norms. Post-modern culture makes people “mad because individual freedom no longer accepts objective truth”. The virtual world kills the sense of the real – to replace it with imagined reality. The art of governing becomes that of administering an imposed pretence; one which people can clearly observe about them is not real, yet they are obliged to pretend that ‘narrative’ is the objective real. This tension leads to existential insecurity and exploding reports of people in poor mental health.

Yet by contrast, in most places, David Brooks writes, “people are formed within morally cohesive communities. They derive a sense of belonging and solidarity from shared moral values. Their lives have meaning and purpose because they see themselves living in a universal moral order with permanent standards of right and wrong, within family structures that have stood the test of time, with shared understandings of, say, male and female”. Fiona Hill, formerly of a member of the U.S. National Security Council, propounds the counter-view: that since U.S. interests, described mostly as ‘threats’ which are long term, “the structures to address those threats must also be long-term, too”. (She illustrates the point by quoting ‘the long-term threat from Russia’). Hill is saying ‘the Aristocracy’ will rule long-term, via institutionalised, ‘inter-agency’ world order prescription.

This then, is the Aristocracy’s solution to the Imperial succession lacuna: Leviathan. “Leviathan – whose promise and project is straight forward – cancel all powers except one, which will be universal and absolute”. The implicit aim is to ‘Trump-proof’ policy prescriptions. This implicit objective however, underlines its flaw. There will be no participation. People will not participate; nor do they feel that they participate – because they don’t. The mood amongst the World Order back-room strategists is that selecting political candidates by voting has become ‘a bug’ and is no longer a feature. Voters do not know, let alone grasp, the import of the deep-seated policy structures on which U.S. hegemony is built. Participation is a glitch. It is at such a point in history that a ‘Big Man’ often emerges into the arena; one who challenges the emperor. The ‘Big Man’ is perceived to speak for the people, whose participation in political life has been dulled out, and who are angry. The Big Man always tells this betrayal story well.

The ‘Big Man’ is happening today, mainly because the traditional practice of swapping out of one ruling entity (party) for the other, to produce a look-alike (Uniparty) leader, has ruptured. It was engineered as if a card trick, with the spectator (the voter) always ‘happening’ to choose the ‘right card’ – the very card that the magician always intended would be chosen. Magic! And all the cards selected inevitably turn-out to be from the same suite! This card trick became obvious in recent months. Everyone could see its mechanics. Trump is not the ‘right card’, in the view of the U.S. power-élites; the Joker should have been pulled from the pack. What is unusual about today’s emergence of the ‘Big Man’, however, is that unlike in the Classical World, Trump seems to have no aristocracy behind him, following in his train. Will this work? How will it turn out?

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Not heard from for 6 years.

The End of the Skripals (Helmer)

And so it has also come to pass — more uniquely than ever before in English legal history, more than even Dickens can have imagined — that a retired English judge named Anthony Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — has put on public display his personal combination of all three — Bumble, Bumbledom, and the law as an ass. Hughes did this in a five-page ruling he issued on September 23. Hughes is directing the secret inquiry into two events on the British Government’s road to war against Russia in the Ukraine — the alleged Russian Novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess of June 2018, following the alleged Russian Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal of March 2018. Sturgess died; the Skripals survived. The book tells the full story.

Hughes has ruled the Skripals will not and must not be called to give evidence, neither in open court, nor by remote videolink, nor in tape-recorded voice, nor even in the written transcript of what English police claim the Skripals said under questioning in 2018. The two survivors of the only Russian Novichok poisoning ever alleged to have occurred outside Russia will not now be subjected to cross-examination or to any form of forensic questioning that is the requirement of the English criminal law, nor to their physical appearance in court that is their fundamental right under the English legal doctrine of habeas corpus. “I have concluded that neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal will be called to give oral evidence,” Hughes has announced. “I have no doubt that the public exposure which would follow these witnesses being called would be intrusive and uncomfortable and would risk disrupting both their daily personal and family lives and those of people connected to them in many different ways…

“The overwhelming risk, which quite alters the position in the present case, is of physical attack on one or both of the Skripals. There is every reason to be satisfied that an attack similar to that which appears to have taken place in 2018 remains a real risk, either at the hands of persons with the same interest as the 2018 attackers, or via others interested in supporting the same supposed aim, if either Sergei or Yulia can be identified and their current whereabouts discovered.” Hughes has come to judgement here — days before he commences what he calls open proceedings — on what the entire process of his inquiry has yet to substantiate in evidence and to decide. Hughes has ruled that the Russian state, through its agents, attacked and attempted to kill the Skripals, and aim to do so again if Hughes lets the Skripals appear before him in any form at all.

Verifiable evidence of what the Skripals themselves believe – if they are alive — is to be substantiated only by their police guards. It is this police and MI6 record – compiled in the absence of lawyers representing the Skripals — which Hughes has now ruled to accept in violation of all the British rules of the admissibility of evidence.

“Having considered the representations of those responsible for their present security,” Hughes has judged, “I am more than satisfied that it would simply not be possible to maintain proper security if either of them were to be called to give evidence. That would be so whether they gave evidence from an open witness box, or by means of some electronic link from a remote room. In either case their present integrated security arrangements could not be maintained consistently with the necessity of being brought to a suitable location which is itself secure and which has an electronic link which is immune to interception. Moreover, if they were to be seen, or their voices heard, there could be no proper control of the likelihood that people who may have dealings with them (however casual or innocent) would recognise them and that that recognition would become more widely known, whether through social or other media or otherwise.”

As Bumble said, “if the law says that, the law is a ass.”

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“..the Superfluous man is characterised also by a distinguishing spiritual condition: lack of a purpose in life in the form of a higher ideal.”

Pavel Durov, The Superfluous Man (Karganovic)

Telegram owner Pavel Durov’s detention in Paris over a month ago provoked a flurry of attention and animated comments. But soon thereafter the case strangely vanished from the radar screen. The high profile affair, which initially stirred enormous public interest on account of its privacy and freedom of expression ramifications, suddenly went cold after the French authorities published a lengthy list of grave criminal charges against Durov and released him provisionally on a 5-million- euro bail. In Paris, where Durov presumably was staying whilst waiting for the resolution of his case, not even the paparazzi exhibited much interest in catching up with him.

The unusual silence was finally broken the other day with an announcement confirming what the savvier observers had suspected all along. Behind the scene intense negotiations between the Telegram owner and the prosecutors were taking place and a deal had finally been reached. It has now been disclosed that contrary to Durov’s initial assurances that he would never betray the trust of his platform users or renege on his commitment to freedom of expression, he has in fact conceded to the authorities key demand and will share data about his users with one or more of the interested governments.

This is an extraordinary but not wholly unexpected reversal. Since Telegram has nearly a billion users world-wide, it will have a significant impact on privacy in communications. But it is not strange at all if it is understood not as an individual aberration but as the modernised expression of the Russian literary archetype, the Superfluous man. What are the main characteristics of this archetype and how do they line up with what Pavel Durov has revealed about himself? How does it interface with the segment of Russian society that Durov epitomises, which consists predominantly of ambitious young people who look to an imaginary concept of “the West” as the model to emulate, and which emerged after the demise of the Soviet Union?

Literary critics define the Superfluous man as a talented and capable individual who does not care much for social norms and marches to the beat of his own drum. That is Pavel Durov to a T. Besides a disregard for the values of his society, the Superfluous man may also be afflicted with such traits as cynicism and existential boredom. Perhaps, but we do not know Durov personally well enough to say whether that is the case. The Superfluous man is typically indifferent or unsympathetic to the concerns of the society that surrounds him, he may even scoff at them, and he will often use the resources at his disposal to act in furtherance of his own comfort and security. He can be highly intelligent and capable, even engaging, but at bottom he is self-absorbed and narcissistic and shows little interest in being charitable or using his position for the sake of some greater good. Here we see glimpses of Durov once again. The most altruistic act he is known to have done was to anonymously share his semen with about a hundred women in the expectation that this will result in the conception of genetically superior little geniuses like himself.

Beyond the particular traits that may define him, the Superfluous man is characterised also by a distinguishing spiritual condition: lack of a purpose in life in the form of a higher ideal.

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“Let’s bet that at the next dinner in town, Mr Macron won’t snub him again…”

The Case Of Pavel Durov Ends On A French Letter With A Loophole (Helmer)

A plea bargain for the Russian Telegram owner Pavel Durov has been arranged in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron by their common friend, Xavier Niel, a French internet billionaire with a history of his own internet sex business, including paedophilia, which also ended in a plea bargain with all charges dropped. Durov issued his announcement of changes in Telegram’s terms of internet service and user privacy on September 23. “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests. These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods.” Durov claimed that Telegram’s search feature “has been abused by people who violated our terms of service to sell illegal goods.

Over the past few weeks [his staff had used artificial intelligence to ensure that] all the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. We won’t let bad actors jeopardise the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.” Four days later on September 27 in an interview on a television channel owned by one of Niel’s business partners, he claimed the credit for supporting Durov after Durov had telephoned him for help. Niel had come to the rescue, he explained, because Durov was his “copain”. “First of all, for me he didn’t cross the line because he wasn’t convicted. What I know is that, once you have been in prison for having had legal problems, everyone disappears. Everyone disappears in this setting. Me, when I have a buddy [copain — chum, mate, pal, friend] who is in difficulty and who makes a phone call to me and well, here I am, here I am.”

Niel has not disclosed the extent of the behind-the-scenes discussions held with Macron, who has revealed his own special interest in the case after it was initiated, not by the French internet regulators or prosecutors, but by the foreign intelligence agency, Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE). [..] In his regular Antipresse publication, Slobodan Despot writes: Between buddies. A slimy epilogue to the Parisian adventures of the Chevalier du Rove (see Antipresse 457 and Antipresse 458). The founder of Telegram has finally given in after being held in police custody. His platform will now provide information such as the IP address and telephone number of users suspected of criminal activity, if required by the courts. As we recall, he had refused the same service to his home country, but it is true that Russia did not have the idea of grilling him in prison.

On the evening of his arrest, Pavel Durov had given priority to one person: Xavier Niel. The French oligarch has confessed to having come to the aid of his ‘buddy in trouble’. He may well have taught him how to climb above all those pesky prosecutors. Look at his own platform, Free, which may have hosted half the paedophile files on the net for years, with impunity. To do this, of course, it helps to become buddies with the President of the Republic. That’s what the Chevalier du Rove tried to do the other Saturday [August 24], before being arrested. Let’s bet that at the next dinner in town, Mr Macron won’t snub him again…

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Climate scam

 

 

Seal

 

 

Ball
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840700694115803260

 

 

Statue

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Sep 232024
 


M. C. Escher Doric columns1945

 

Trump Confirms 2024 Is His Final Presidential Campaign (RT)
741 Deep Staters Join Cheneys, Iran, Putin In Endorsing Harris (ZH)
AG Garland Says He ‘Won’t Allow DOJ To Be Used As Political Weapon’ (RCW)
Zelensky Launches Attack On J.D. Vance (RT)
Just Days Left Until A Crippling Port Strike Paralyzes The East Coast (ZH)
Scramble to Tighten Europe’s Borders (Sp.)
Everything You Need to Know about the Conflict in Ukraine (Paul Craig Roberts)
Who Seeks Russia’s ‘Defeat’ Should Remember Napoleon, Hitler – Schroeder (Sp.)
Russia Has No Alternative to Victory in Ukraine Conflict – Kremlin (Sp.)
Talk of Nuclear Red Button ‘Inappropriate’ – Lavrov (RT)
US Actions Against RT Are ‘Terrorism’ – Russian Human Rights Chief (RT)
US Crackdown On RT To Fall Short of Expectations – NYT (RT)
Scott Ritter: Israel’s Collapse Is Imminent Amid Escalation In Lebanon (MPN)
Secret Service Agents to Be Disciplined Over July 13 Trump Shooting (ET)
Congress Reaches Shutdown Deal Without ‘Proof Of Citizenship’ SAVE Act (ZH)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Megyn

 

 

Undecided

 

 

Hillary

 

 

Stossel

 

 

If you’re going to film Amish, of course you do it … in front of a gas station.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1837532788683092395

 

 

Trump health

 

 

Trump racist

 

 

Elon communism
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837984119092883605

 

 

 

 

“No, I don’t. I think that that will be it. I don’t see it all..”

Trump Confirms 2024 Is His Final Presidential Campaign (RT)

US Republican candidate Donald Trump has said that he would not seek another re-election bid if he loses the White House to Vice President Kamala Harris in November, During an interview on the TV show Full Measure on Sunday, Trump was asked whether he would consider launching another campaign in four years if he is unsuccessful this time around. “No, I don’t. I think that that will be it. I don’t see it all,” the former president replied, adding that he remains optimistic about winning the election this year. “I think that hopefully we’re gonna be successful,” he said. Trump earlier ruled out participating in another presidential debate with Harris, after CNN announced that the Democrat had accepted an invitation for a showdown on October 23. Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s candidate due to growing concerns over Biden’s electability given his age and the disastrous televised debate with Trump in June.

“The problem with another debate is that it’s just too late,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, explaining that the “voting has already started.” He previously slammed the ABC debate he had with Harris on September 10 as “dishonest” and “totally rigged,” while many allies claimed that the moderators were biased in favor of the Democrat. Trump argued that Harris only wants a rematch “because she lost” and said that he would only consider another face-to-face debate hosted on a “fair network.” Trump was elected in 2016 by beating Hillary Clinton. He lost the presidency to Biden in 2020 and has since insisted that the election was rigged. While the US Constitution bans a person from serving as president for more than two terms, Trump had floated the idea of somehow “negotiating” a third term if he gets re-elected.

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“Vice President Harris has all the leadership qualities needed to be a strong commander in chief. She’s prepared. She’s strategic. She’s understands all sides of an issue..”

741 Deep Staters Join Cheneys, Iran, Putin In Endorsing Harris (ZH)

In a surprise to no one, 741 ‘high-ranking national security officials’ have endorsed Kamala Harris’ bid for the White House – with some suggesting that former President Trump has a “scary authoritarian streak.’ Our endorsement of Vice President Harris is an endorsement of freedom and an act of patriotism. It is an endorsement of democratic ideals, of competence, and of relentless optimism in America’s future. “Vice President Harris has all the leadership qualities needed to be a strong commander in chief. She’s prepared. She’s strategic. She’s understands all sides of an issue,” Navy Rear Admiral Michael Smith told The Hill. “We saw as much during the debate.” “As we’ve seen for nearly a decade, however, former President Trump has none of those qualities, and he has a scary authoritarian streak,” Smith continued.

The Deep Staters join the likes of Dick Cheney and, more recently, an IRS-affilliated union in their support of the VP. They’re also in alighment with Iran – which offered ‘stolen, non-public’ Trump material to the (then) Biden-Harris campaign. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently joked that he’s thrown his support behind her as well.

“We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles,” reads the letter from the NatSec officials. “First, we believe America’s national security requires a serious and capable Commander-in-Chief. Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable.” “Each generation has a responsibility to defend it,” the letter continues. “That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.” The signatories praise Harris for her contrast to Trump, who they call “impulsive and ill-informed,” citing his relations with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. “Our endorsement of Vice President Harris is an endorsement of freedom and an act of patriotism. It is an endorsement of democratic ideals, of competence, and of relentless optimism in America’s future,” the letter concludes.

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It is only ALL the DOJ has been doing for 4+ years..

AG Garland Says He ‘Won’t Allow DOJ To Be Used As Political Weapon’ (RCW)

The Justice Department continues to allocate resources to the special counsel’s office; recent financial disclosures show Smith and DOJ spent more than $35 million in the first 14 months of the special counsel’s investigation. That figure likely could double by the time his appointment ends, which is at the discretion of the attorney general, or include the amount spent on the dual investigations before Smith was appointed. Smith’s continued pursuit of Trump has drawn renewed scrutiny and skepticism since the Supreme Court challenged his original indictment as a broad attack on presidential immunity. On July 1, the court published its decision in Trump v. United States. Authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the 6-3 opinion for the first time in history established three categories of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution: official acts, outer perimeter acts, and private acts.

Official acts, the court held, are covered by immunity while outer perimeter acts – such as Trump’s communications with Vice President Mike Pence related to the J6 indictment – are what Roberts described as “presumptively immune.” On that score, Roberts continued, “it is ultimately the Government’s burden to rebut the presumption of immunity.” The court further concluded that former presidents are not immune from prosecution for “unofficial” or private acts. In order to hew to the decision, Smith filed a superseding indictment on Aug. 28 that partially gutted his original indictment, which had been handed up a year earlier. Since the Supreme Court determined Trump’s interactions with DOJ officials fell safely within the core constitutional authority of a sitting president, Smith had to cut nine pages of evidence and drop a co-conspirator, former Assistant Associate Attorney General Jeffrey Clark.

Although the watered-down indictment contains the same four counts as the first version, the case remains on uncertain legal ground given the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling and opinion in the Fischer case. But the special counsel, presumably with the consent of Attorney General Garland, is reinvigorating the case to coincide with the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign. Long-standing DOJ rules preventing the department from interfering in national elections are once again being ignored as Smith reappears in the headlines as early voting begins this month in several states including Virginia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In early October early voting commences in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Nevada.

Smith found a like-minded ally in Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the Obama appointee presiding over the unprecedented case. It was Chutkan’s 2023 order denying Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution that the Supreme Court overturned and sent back to her for further proceedings. Chutkan, who has a record of making anti-Trump statements in court and who imposed a gag order on the former president last year, told Trump’s lawyers at a Sept. 5 hearing that the election is not a factor in her calculation as to the next steps. “I understand there is an election impending, and I’ve said before and I say again that the electoral process and the timing of the election and what needs to happen before or shouldn’t happen before the election is not relevant here,” Chutkan informed John Lauro, Trump’s lead attorney in the J6 case. “This court is not concerned with the electoral schedule,” she added.

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“Washington’s current “policy is ‘throw money at this problem, hope the Ukrainians are able to achieve a military victory’ that even the Ukrainians are saying ‘we can’t achieve..’”

Zelensky Launches Attack On J.D. Vance (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has slammed former President Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, as “too radical” in his views on ending Kiev’s conflict with Moscow. Zelensky’s comments were published as he arrived in the US, where he is expected to attend the UN General Assembly in New York and meet with President Joe Biden at the White House. Speaking to The New Yorker, the Ukrainian leader suggested that “Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.” When asked about Trump’s vice presidential pick, Zelensky replied: “He is too radical.” “His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice,” Zelensky said. “This brings us back to the question of the cost and who shoulders it. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine’s expense is unacceptable.”

“This would be an awful idea, if a person were actually going to carry it out, to make Ukraine shoulder the costs of stopping the war by giving up its territories,” Zelensky said. He argued that such a concession would not end the fighting, and dismissed the Trump team’s promise to end the conflict as “just sloganeering.” Vance, a senator from Ohio, opposes the continued US funding of Ukraine and voted against a $61 billion aid bill that Congress passed this year. He argued that the money sent to Kiev was only fueling “the most corrupt leadership and government in Europe,” without achieving the goal of ending the conflict. Washington’s current “policy is ‘throw money at this problem, hope the Ukrainians are able to achieve a military victory’ that even the Ukrainians are saying ‘we can’t achieve,’” Vance told former US Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan in an interview earlier this month.

In 2022, Vance said that he did not “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” stating that he was more focused on domestic issues like illegal immigration and the fentanyl crisis. Vance has backed Trump’s claim that he would end the fighting purely through diplomatic means. He suggested that the settlement could resemble the “current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine” and include “a demilitarized zone.” He also argued that Russia should receive a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine, and that Kiev should renounce plans to join NATO.

The Republican senator’s vision is a sharp contrast with the current US administration, which believes that a peace deal with Moscow should be made on Kiev’s terms. Biden’s White House has insisted that the US should support Ukraine with weapons and money for “as long as it takes.” Zelensky, meanwhile, has maintained that a peaceful solution is only possible if Russia recognizes its 1991 borders. Moscow has repeatedly said that such a demand is completely unacceptable.

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“A stoppage – the first since 1977 -..”. 36 days before the election.

Just Days Left Until A Crippling Port Strike Paralyzes The East Coast (ZH)

Late last week, the CEO of Flexport – one of largest US supply-chain logistics operators – warned that “the biggest wild card in the presidential election that nobody’s talking about? The looming port strike that could shut down all East and Gulf Coast ports just 36 days before the election.” With just over a week to go until D-Day, authorities are gearing up as a threatened strike by dockworkers at ports along the East Coast and Gulf Coast draws closer. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is “coordinating with partners across the supply chain to prepare for any impacts” from a possible work stoppage by workers represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association as they negotiate with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), a Port Authority spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch on Friday.

“We urge both sides to find common ground and keep the cargo flowing for the good of the national economy,” added the spokesperson, noting that $240 billion in goods move through the two ports each year and that such trade supports more than 600,000 local jobs. According to the union, a strike would affect ports from Maine to Texas, and cripple supply-chains worse than the immediate aftermath of the covid shutdown. A stoppage – the first since 1977 – could involve up to 45,000 workers at ports that account for roughly 60% of U.S. shipping traffic, leading to a major disruption of shipments, Oxford Economics said in a report. “Even a two-week strike could disrupt supply chains until 2025,” Grace Zwemmer, associate U.S. economist with Oxford, said in the report. As Rabobank’s Michael Every adds, “US businesses could miss the key Black Friday/Cyber Monday peak sales period.

Port trade is around $2.12trn, and 72% would grind to a halt, a one-day strike reportedly taking six days to recover from, a one-week strike in October creating bottlenecks until mid-November, not factoring in Red Sea disruptions caused by the not-terrorist Houthis.” If goods are then forced to shift to the US West Coast ports, Rabobank speculates that Asia-US freight rates could leap to $20,000, far above the peak seen in the last supply-chain crisis. That would mean firms with low margins might opt not to import at all, creating empty shelves. The ILA has threatened to strike if a new labor agreement with East Coast port terminal and shipping companies represented by the USMX is not reached by the time the current contract expires on October 1. Although the sides continue to negotiate, the odds of a rare strike that threatens to shut down some of the nation’s busiest ports are rising.

“There will be a shutdown, assuming that there’s is no intervention, at midnight on Monday the 30th,” Bethann Rooney, director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the nation’s second-busiest port, told a briefing earlier in the week. Should that occur, all activity loading and unloading cargo containers and automobiles would come to a standstill, while cruise ships would continue to operate, Rooney said. The Port Authority isn’t involved in the bargaining between the ILA and USMX, bur rather leases space at the ports to shipping companies. Terminal operators and ocean carriers are “working to bring in as many ships as possible” ahead of a potential walkout, said Rooney.

Those steps include “working with truckers and the rail carriers to get as much cargo out as humanly possible, as quickly as possible,” the port director said. The two ports are currently unloading about 20 large container ships a week, and they expect 150,000 containers to be unloaded ahead of the strike deadline, Rooney said. “At the same time, ocean carriers are beginning to put essentially embargoes on export cargo “so that it doesn’t come into East and Gulf coast ports and then wind up sitting there,” she said. Container ships carrying imports bound for Newark and Elizabeth in New Jersey and Staten Island in New York City will end up moored at specified spots in New York Harbor or off the coast during the strike, or remain at sea until they can come in. The Coast Guard and U.S. customs and Border Protection would oversee arriving ships at the port facilities once a strike was over.

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The European elites have beaten themselves. Holland will “officially ask the European Commission for an opt-out on EU asylum and migration policies”. So will Hungary. Others will follow. Schengen’s open borders are gone. Germany has border patrols now. Others will follow.

Scramble to Tighten Europe’s Borders (Sp.)

The scramble to tighten border policies in some EU countries is a sign that politicians are desperately “trying to play catch up” with public concern, Dr. George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, told Sputnik. Europe’s migrant crisis was imposed by the elites on their own population, he stressed. It was part of a “fateful alliance among the big corporations that want cheap labor and the kind of multicultural advocates who think that that’s a good thing for Europe to be more diverse,” Szamuely noted, stressing that this is “what’s causing this intense political feeling because people don’t really want it. This is something that the elites had desired.”After Germany instituted sweeping checks at its borders and stronger deportation laws, the new Dutch government announced it was aiming to set in place “the strictest admission rules in the EU.”

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said on Friday that the government would officially ask the European Commission for an opt-out on EU asylum and migration policies. “We cannot continue to bear the large influx of migrants to our country. People are experiencing an asylum crisis,” Schoof said. Echoing the same sentiments, Hungary is also going to request an opt-out from the European Union’s migration policies, Hungarian Minister for EU Affairs Janos Boka said in a post on X. As it is, Hungary has traditionally opted for a tougher migration policy than the rest of the bloc. During the 2015 European migrant crisis, Prime Minister Viktor Orban rejected the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees coming from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by NATO warmongering.

Geert Wilders, the right-wing leader of the PVV (PfE) – the party that came out on top in the last national elections in the Netherlands – described the Dutch official request to opt out of EU migration policy as a ‘mini-Nexit’ in a nod to Brexit. “Tens of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers come into Europe and then make their way into the most prosperous parts of Europe, becoming an additional huge burden on countries,” underscored George Szamuely.Europe is witnessing “complete abuse of the asylum seeker scheme,” said the researcher, adding:“It is a combination of these anxieties, and the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties that is leading to the stricter measures or, at least, demands for stricter measures throughout Europe,” noted Szamuely.

Regarding the opt-out of EU rules, the expert noted that such an outcome is very difficult to achieve, as it requires renegotiating the treaty and “that’s not something that’s easily doable, and could take a long time […] because EU rules are supposed to be binding on all member states.” The issue of immigration is besetting one country after another, and results of elections in European countries are starkly reflecting this. The issue of unrestrained immigration helped Wilders and his populist right Freedom Party win a plurality of seats in the Netherlands’ House of Representatives last November. In Germany, the success of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in regional elections piled pressure on the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz to tackle the migrant issue and close its borders, temporarily ending the Schengen-Visiting Zone.

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“Putin has accepted insult after insult, provocation on top of provocation in order to avoid a war that means death for humanity. No one gives Putin credit for this.”

Everything You Need to Know about the Conflict in Ukraine (Paul Craig Roberts)

For unknown reasons except perhaps surprise–Putin was at the Sochi Olympics– Putin did nothing to prevent Washington’s coup. For eight years Putin relied on the Minsk Agreement, which the West used to deceive him, while Washington built up a Ukrainian army capable of overthrowing the Donbas republics that broke away and resisted Ukraine’s persecution and murder of the Russian population. When Putin and Lavrov’s efforts during December 2021 and February 2022 to achieve a mutual defense agreement with the US and NATO were cold-shouldered by Washington, NATO, and the EU, Putin had no choice but to intervene in order to protect the Donbas, a former Russian province attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders, from massacre, as the Israelis are doing in Gaza and the West Bank. The West disingenuously called Putin’s “limited military operation” confined to Donbas an “invasion of Ukraine.”

It was no such thing. The fact that it was not an invasion and conquest of Ukraine was Putin’s mistake. It is the limited nature of Putin’s intervention that is the cause of the possible explosion of the conflict into a nuclear war. Putin, being a mid-20th century American liberal, had trusted diplomatic relations and good will between nations and did not understand that the West was at war with Russia. He and his Foreign Minister kept stressing their “American partners” and belief in negotiations, while the West organized its attacks on Russia. These attacks now include attacks deep into Russia far removed from the battle front. Russia has suffered many attacks from low-flying drones that evade air defense systems. As I write, Nato Secretary Stoltenberg and the UK prime minister are urging the Biden regime to give approval to US/NATO firing long range missiles into Russia. Putin has said that this is the final red line that will force him to acknowledge that Russia is at war with the West.

NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg says the West does not need to pay attention to Putin’s threat, because “There have been many red lines declared by Putin before, and he has not escalated.” We have reached the point that I said we would reach. Putin by his failure to act in response to aggression now has his back to the wall. He has three choices: He can surrender. He can end the Ukraine conflict with force, which puts the West on notice that the West is at risk if the conflict continues, or he can continue to ignore reality, thereby leaving the initiative in the West’s hands where it has been throughout the conflict. We are faced with Putin’s mettle. Is he a warrior or an out-of-date American liberal? I agree that this question is unfair. Putin is the only statesman the world has at this crucial time when the world’s continued existence is in question.

Putin has accepted insult after insult, provocation on top of provocation in order to avoid a war that means death for humanity. No one gives Putin credit for this. Stoltenberg, a nonentity, mocks Putin. Biden, a nonentity, insults him. Zelensky, a nonentity, vows to defeat him. We can see Satan’s hold on the West when the only leader determined to preserve human existence is demonized. Despite his honorable characteristics, Putin is failing because he cannot recognize the extreme evil that confronts him and the country he represents. As England’s ambassador Craig Murray has reported, the Western world is criminalizing free speech. Washington’s investigations of Scott Ritter, Dimitri Simes, and others indicate that those who talk with Russians are being criminalized for aiding and abetting Russian disinformation, which is being equated with espionage. How can the dangerous situation be resolved when talk is prevented?

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“The Ukrainian crisis has served to consolidate Russian society, with Russians “convinced that the West is only using Ukraine as a spearhead to bring Russia to its knees..”

Who Seeks Russia’s ‘Defeat’ Should Remember Napoleon, Hitler – Schroeder (Sp.)

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has taken flak from the political class of his home country over his support for continued dialogue between Russia and Europe amid the Ukraine crisis. The Social Democrat politician was the architect of the German ‘economic miracle’ of the 2000s, facilitated by boosting energy cooperation with Russia. Anyone dreaming about “defeating” Russia militarily needs a history lesson, Gerhard Schroeder has said. “I recommend that everyone who believes this look at the history books. From Napoleon to Hitler, everyone failed because of this,” the veteran statesman told German media. The Ukrainian crisis has served to consolidate Russian society, with Russians “convinced that the West is only using Ukraine as a spearhead to bring Russia to its knees,” Schroeder added.

The 80-year-old politician, who participated in the Istanbul peace talks in the spring of 2022, said that contrary to claims in Western media at the time, “peace was in reach,” and included a rejection of Kiev’s aspirations to join NATO. The Ukrainian government was not able to agree to the deal, with “more powerful circles” behind it blocking peace in the hopes that continuing the conflict would strategically weaken Russia or even trigger regime change, Schroeder said. Schroeder believes the West underestimates the risks of the Ukrainian crisis escalating into a wider conflict. “We Germans in particular should behave cautiously and constructively against the background of the Second World War and the crimes committed in the name of Germany,” he said. He called on the European Union to tie whatever aid it provides to Kiev with demands for serious and realistic scenarios for peace.

“This war will have to be ended through negotiations. In any case, it cannot be decided militarily. It will take compromises,” the former chancellor believes. A well-known critic of Donald Trump over his administration’s efforts to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project with Russia in 2019-2020, Schroeder said he has nevertheless found himself linking his hopes for peace in Ukraine with the Republican candidate, saying he trusts him to end the conflict before his inauguration if he wins, as Trump has repeatedly promised. It is in Germany’s and Europe’s interests to see the Ukrainian conflict end, because after Ukraine, the former have been “among the biggest losers” of the current crisis, according to Schroeder. Unfortunately, he says, the solidarity between major European powers Germany and France that existed ahead of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is lacking today, as is the recognition that there are situations in which European and US interests conflict with one another.

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It’s Existential.

Russia Has No Alternative to Victory in Ukraine Conflict – Kremlin (Sp.)

Russia has no alternative to achieving victory in its military operation in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “For Russia, there have been no other alternatives in history, and there is no alternative to our victory now,” Peskov said in an interview with Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin published on his Telegram channel. Russia should regard the West’s stance seriously, given its intentions to defeat the country both “strategically and tactically,” the spokesman added. “They openly say that their goal is to defeat Russia strategically and tactically. This obliges us to take this position very seriously, to shape our actions in consideration of this threat and to continue the special military operation in order to achieve all our goals, fulfill all set objectives and achieve victory ourselves,” Peskov said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkmen counterpart, Serdar Berdimuhamedow, reaffirmed their commitment to bolstering the strategic partnership between the two countries during a phone conversation, Peskov said. “During the phone conversation, Russian President Vladimir Putin warmly congratulated Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov on his birthday. The mutual commitment to further comprehensive strengthening of the Russian-Turkmen strategic partnership was confirmed,” the Kremlin said in a statement. The two presidents discussed preparations for the upcoming Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) summit in Moscow and the BRICS summit in Kazan, the statement said.

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“If we are talking about long-range missile weapons, it is clear to everyone that the Ukrainians themselves will not be able to use them..”

Talk of Nuclear Red Button ‘Inappropriate’ – Lavrov (RT)

Russia has no wish to start a nuclear war and considers it “inappropriate” that its warnings of an escalation in the Ukraine conflict are being portrayed as an intention to use atomic weapons, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Fears of an escalation between Russia and NATO have been intensifying in recent weeks, as Western states have stepped up discussions about allowing Ukraine to conduct missile strikes deep in Russian territory. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month warned that such permission would be taken as the West’s direct involvement in the conflict and would be met with an appropriate response. His words were taken by some to mean Moscow was ready to deploy nuclear weapons. In an interview with Sky News Arabia, Lavrov was asked whether this was the case.

The minister responded that while Russia indeed has “weapons that would have serious consequences for the handlers of the Ukrainian regime” – meaning the US and its Western allies – it has no wish to use them. “We talk about red lines, counting on the fact that our assessments and statements will be heard by smart, decision-making people. To claim that if tomorrow someone doesn’t do what we ask, we will press the ‘red button,’ is inappropriate,” the minister stated, adding that he believes Western decision makers understand this, because “nobody wants a nuclear war.” Lavrov stressed that Moscow also does not want an escalation of the Ukraine conflict that would drag the West in as a direct participant, but reiterated that this would inevitably be the case if Kiev is allowed to use long-range weapons deep inside Russia.

“It would be a direct war of NATO against Russia… NATO is already waging a war against Russia, but it is a hybrid war through the hands of Ukrainians. If we are talking about long-range missile weapons, it is clear to everyone that the Ukrainians themselves will not be able to use them,” he stated, explaining that tasks such as target guidance, data collection from satellites and forming flight assignments can only be carried out by specialists from countries that produce a particular weapon. Lavrov went on to accuse Western officials who are seriously considering allowing Ukraine to make indiscriminate attacks on Russia of having the “mindset of a child” playing with matches.

While there are still limitations on Ukraine’s use of some Western-made long-range weapons systems, Kiev has already repeatedly used them to target Russian territory, mainly striking civilians in Crimea and Donbass. In the past month, however, the US and UK have suggested they might allow these weapons to be used to strike targets deeper into internationally recognized Russian territory. The European Parliament earlier this week adopted a resolution calling on the EU to allow Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with Western-supplied weapons.

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“..the public has not been provided with “a single piece of evidence” to prove their accusations against RT..”

US Actions Against RT Are ‘Terrorism’ – Russian Human Rights Chief (RT)

The actions taken by US authorities against RT can be qualified as terrorism and a violation of media freedom, Russia’s top human rights official Tatyana Moskalkova has said. Moskalkova was commenting on a statement by the US-based Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), which has demanded that President Joe Biden’s administration provide the public with evidence to support their claim that the Russian channel was “engaged in information operations, covert influence, and military procurement.” On Thursday, FPF said the information released to justify new sanctions against the news channel, “did not include declassification of the underlying documents, but only their findings.” Writing on Telegram on Saturday, Moskalkova argued the public has not been provided with “a single piece of evidence” to prove their accusations against RT, but “the repressive mechanism has begun to work.”

The United States is cracking down on Russian media, and some journalists have had to leave the country for safety reasons, Moskalkova wrote. She also mentioned an incident in which an RT employee was searched and interrogated by FBI agents. “It is outrageous when 20 FBI agents burst into a woman’s house in the morning, arrange a search and a five-hour interrogation, seize mobile devices, and examine personal correspondence,” the official explained. Such actions “cannot be qualified otherwise than as terrorism and infringement of media freedom by the United States, contradicting the fundamental principles of democracy, which is so often talked about by the US authorities,” she emphasized.

Earlier in September, Washington announced new sanctions against several Russian media outlets, including RT, claiming they are attempting to undermine democracy in the US and elsewhere and eroding global support for Ukraine. Following the new restrictions, US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, banned several Russian news networks, including RT, citing their alleged “foreign interference activity.” On Saturday, video-sharing platform TikTok deleted the accounts of RT International and several branches of the Sputnik news outlet.

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“State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin blamed RT for the fact that “so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be.”

US Crackdown On RT To Fall Short of Expectations – NYT (RT)

The latest US crackdown on RT will ultimately not prevent it from bringing alternative viewpoints to audiences in the West and elsewhere, but will somewhat damage its outreach to new followers, the New York Times reported on Saturday, citing experts. Last week, the US announced a new raft of sanctions targeting several Russian outlets, after Washington claimed they had been trying to covertly “undermine democracy.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused RT of “functioning as a de facto arm of [Russian] intelligence.” State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin blamed RT for the fact that “so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be.” Following the move, US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, banned several Russian news networks.

Moscow has condemned the restrictions, labeling them a crackdown on free speech and an outright “aggression.” Several media experts told the NYT that while the sanctions “will sharply reduce the network’s audience numbers” in the short term, RT “can move to other outlets for distribution,” adding that “the Kremlin, when thwarted in the past, has quickly devised new ways to get its message out.” The paper recalled the impact of EU and Canadian sanctions on RT following the start of the Ukraine conflict, noting that while viewership fell off a cliff for a time, the outlet soon started operating through new resources. “If you are a really hardcore RT follower, you’ll find a way to access it,” Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund told the NYT, adding that the sanctions, however, “really hurt… their ability to span platforms, to reach new audiences.”

RT relies heavily on messaging that portrays the West as “an imperialist aggressor,” the paper said, helping to explain why it is “extremely popular” in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. “A big part of Russia’s PR strategy is to tap into criticism of America… and right now they have the easiest time in the world in that regard because American policy when it comes to Israel and Gaza is incredibly unpopular worldwide,” said H.A. Hellyer, a nonresident scholar on Middle East politics at the Carnegie Endowment. According to the NYT article, RT also has a variety of means for getting its message out through mirror sites, Reddit, or other platforms like Telegram, X, and WhatsApp.

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“Hamas right now, in my opinion, is winning this conflict. They are winning it strategically. They are paying a horrible price for it.”

Scott Ritter: Israel’s Collapse Is Imminent Amid Escalation In Lebanon (MPN)

Anybody with any shred of common sense will immediately throw away their Western-made electronic device and source one from a country such as China, where Israel is not going to be able to infiltrate and corrupt the integrity of the electronic device to achieve either intelligence collection goals or assassination [goals].” While the Israeli military is vastly better armed and funded than Hamas, Ritter claimed that it was actually the Palestinian force that has come out on top after 12 months of fighting, stating: “Hamas right now, in my opinion, is winning this conflict. They are winning it strategically. They are paying a horrible price for it. But on October 6, nobody was talking about the creation of a Palestinian state. Today, it is on the tip of the tongue of so many people around the world. Why? Because the world has seen the truth about Israel.”

Not only that, but Israel is eating itself from within. Its military is seriously depleted; its economy has been shattered by rocket attacks, and by 12 months of war economy; and its society is beginning to fragment. The United States, too, has been damaged. It is increasingly isolated on the world stage, and its prestige is slipping. Fewer nations look to Washington for leadership and, instead, see organizations such as BRICS as the future. Later this month, a BRICS summit will be held in Kazan, Russia, bringing its core member nations together with its new invitees. Palestine will be a key issue, and no doubt countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will be put under pressure to stop covertly aiding Israel and come to a solution to end the war.

BRICS has already succeeded in helping to lessen tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and it is possible that the new bloc can act to bring about peace in a manner that many hoped the United Nations would be able to do. Whatever happens, it is clear that October 7 fundamentally changed the situation for Israel and Palestine forever.

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Secret Service internal report..

Just a few rotten apples..

Secret Service Agents to Be Disciplined Over July 13 Trump Shooting (ET)

Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said Friday that some Secret Service agents who were involved in securing the July 13 rally site where former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt face discipline. In a Friday news conference in Washington, Rowe did not go into details about the staff or possible punishments that could be meted out. He said, however, that he hasn’t “asked for anybody to retire,” adding that reports saying otherwise “are false.” The “disciplinary process” will “be handled in accordance” with the Secret Service’s “table of penalties” and headed by its internal office of integrity, Rowe said, adding that he cannot comment publicly on specific details. Rowe’s statements followed the Secret Service’s release of a report on Friday that details a series of “communications deficiencies” before the shooting by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot by a Secret Service counter-sniper after firing eight rounds in Trump’s direction from the roof of a building less than 150 yards from where Trump was speaking.

A breakdown in security at the rally site was especially problematic for Trump’s protective detail, “who were not apprised of how focused state and local law enforcement were in the minutes leading up to the attack on locating the suspicious subject,” the report said. Had they known, the report says, they could have made the decision to relocate Trump while the search was in process. The report makes clear that the Secret Service knew even before the shooting that the rally site posed a security challenge, Rowe said. “While some members of the advance team were very diligent, there was complacency on the part of others that led to a breach of security protocols,” he said. “[It’s] important that we hold ourselves accountable for the failures of July 13th, and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another failure like this again,” Rowe said, calling it a “mission failure.”

In the midst of the July 13 shooting and an alleged assassination attempt targeting Trump earlier this week, the “threat environment” is elevated and “is not going to evaporate anytime soon,” Rowe said. “We’re in the risk mitigation business,“ he said. “We are not in the risk elimination business. And so we have to be able to have the personnel, the assets, and be able to spread those out for an indefinite period of time” in case a similar situation emerges, he said. The Secret Service’s own investigation is one of numerous inquiries, including by Congress and a watchdog probe by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office. Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned in July after she faced criticism over the incident and an hours-long session in front of a congressional panel.

Rowe has said the July shooting and Sunday’s episode, in which 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested after Secret Service agents detected a rifle poking through shrubbery lining the West Palm Beach, Florida, golf course where Trump was playing, underscore the need for a paradigm shift in how the agency protects public officials. The protective agency has started to increase its security around Trump, Rowe said on Friday, noting on multiple occasions that the former president is receiving the highest levels of Secret Service protection. Both Democrat and Republican lawmakers have called for more Secret Service resources.

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“..despite Donald Trump calling on Congressional Republicans not to pass a spending plan without “every ounce” of the proposal..”

Congress Reaches Shutdown Deal Without ‘Proof Of Citizenship’ SAVE Act (ZH)

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Sunday unveiled a 90-day band-aid to avoid yet another government shutdown which fails to include the SAVE Act, which would have required proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration – despite Donald Trump calling on Congressional Republicans not to pass a spending plan without “every ounce” of the proposal. So, instead of playing chicken over the key issue of election integrity, the new continuing resolution (CR) – negotiated by bother parties – would keep the government funded at current levels through Dec. 20, setting the stage for yet another funding fight before Christmas recess. It includes an additional $231 million to help the Secret Service protect candidates during this election season and into next year after Donald Trump was almost assassinated twice.

“There’s no doubt they need additional resources, but additional funding and resources is not going to solve the problem between now and Election Day,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), the top Democrat on a bipartisan task force established to look into the first assassination attempt. “We can’t mass-produce Secret Service agents,” Crow added while speaking with ABC’s “This Week,” noting that some agents are working 80 to 90 hours per week to cover various demands for protection. According to the Treasury Department, the US has spent around $6.3 trillion in FY24, which ends Sept. 30. Defending his missing spine, Johnson wrote in a Sunday letter: “While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” adding “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”

“Since we fell a bit short of the goal line, an alternative plan is now required.” On Friday, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said that talks were going well.”So far, nothing has come up that we can’t deal with,” he said. ““Most people don’t want a government shutdown and they don’t want that to interfere with the election. So nobody is like, ‘I’ve got to have this or we’re walking.’ It’s just not that way.” “While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” said Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, adding “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the MAGA way and wasted precious time.” Johnson caved after a bipartisan majority of the House voted last week to reject his plan which included the SAVE Act. In the ensuing days, Johnson went limp over the issue and dropped his demands.

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Tesla
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837620320615698815

 

 

Dylan

 

 

Kirsch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837541598315663396

 

 

Gecko
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837910246666211679

 

 

Family

 

 

Trap

 

 

Cats and dogs

 

 

Transform

 

 

 

 

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