Jun 152021
 


Wassily Kandinsky Moscow Red Square 1916

 

COVID-19 Natural Immunity vs Vaccine Immunity (CureHub)
CDC: Heart Inflammation In Young Men Higher Than Expected After mRNA Jabs (R.)
University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics (WSJ)
California Removes Most Restrictions But Newsom Keeps Emergency Powers (JTN)
Coronavirus Outpacing Vaccine Effort, Says WHO (G.)
Live Bats In Cages Kept In Wuhan Institute of Virology (News.au)
Zuckerberg Group Funnels 6 Figures To Wuhan Lab Partner (NP)
Vladimir Putin: ‘Don’t Be Mad At The Mirror If You’re Ugly’ (AP)
Putin: US Destroyers In Baltic, Black Seas a Missile Threat to Russia (Rozoff)
Chinese Nuclear Plant Warns Of ‘Imminent Radiological Threat’ After Leak (Hill)
Hunter Biden Invested Millions In Owner of Nuclear Plant Experiencing Leak (NP)
The Three-way Squeeze (Kunstler)
Reality Winner Released From Prison For ‘Exemplary Behavior’ (RT)
Babylon Bee Forces New York Times To Retract Calling Them ‘Misinformation’ (RT)
In Honor Of Pride Month, Biden Will Also Sniff Men’s Hair (BBee)

 

 

NBC: Do you remember your last meeting with Biden?


Putin: Well, I don’t recall our exact conversation, but I’m sure he has a good memory.

 

 

 

 

“With all three vaccines your immune system is only exposed to S RBD, therefore S is the only target available for an immune response. However, during natural infection your body is exposed to the entire virus, which includes the other 4 proteins coded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.”

COVID-19 Natural Immunity vs Vaccine Immunity (CureHub)

The work presented here, in combination with other reports about immune protection in recovered individuals, provides justification for including natural immunity in COVID-19 herd immunity stats. It is important to remember the immune system is complex and has redundant and overlapping mechanisms. Antibody production against both the SARS-CoV-2 N and S proteins is just one example. The vaccines are indeed very effective, but so too is the human immune system. It would therefore be anti-science, and anti-data, to ignore the role that recovery from COVID-19 plays in protecting against reinfection and ongoing viral spread. Especially when deleterious decisions are being made in order to mitigate COVID-19 risk.


[..] COVID-19 vaccines are effective and induce a strong immune response. Cure-Hub’s own data shows high neutralizing antibody levels after vaccination, especially after the second mRNA dose. In fact, two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can push antibody production higher than natural infection. However, this does not mean vaccine induced immunity is superior to natural immunity. Below we provide evidence that recovery from natural infection generates a more diverse immune response. There are 5 proteins encoded in the viral genome: Nucleocapsid (N), Spike (S), Hemagglutinin esterase (He), Membrane (M) and Envelope (E). The most important protein is S, which the virus uses to enter human cells. By blocking S, SARS-CoV-2 cannot bind to the human ACE2 receptor and cannot cause an infection.

Due to S protein’s critical role in COVID-19 infection, it is the target for Pfizer, Moderna and J&J COVID-19 vaccines. Specifically, those vaccines are designed against the S protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which is the part that interacts with human ACE2. After vaccination your body produces antibodies that bind to S RBD. As a result you are protected from infection because the virus is neutralized before viral replication occurs. People who recover from a natural infection are also protected, because they too produce antibodies against S RBD. In fact, that is the immune system’s dominant target after infection. The key difference between the Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines, and natural immunity, is the immune system’s starting material. With all three vaccines your immune system is only exposed to S RBD, therefore S is the only target available for an immune response. However, during natural infection your body is exposed to the entire virus, which includes the other 4 proteins coded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

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Oh well, at least it’s reached Reuters now, even if they’re not sharp.

CDC: Heart Inflammation In Young Men Higher Than Expected After mRNA Jabs (R.)

A higher-than-expected number of young men have experienced heart inflammation after their second dose of the mRNA COVID-19 shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, according to data from two vaccine safety monitoring systems, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday. The CDC and other health regulators have been investigating heart inflammation cases after Israel’s Health Ministry reported that it had found a likely link to the condition in young men who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. read more The agency said it is still assessing the risk from the condition and has not yet concluded that there was a causal relationship between the vaccines and cases of myocarditis or pericarditis.

While some patients required hospitalization, most have fully recovered from their symptoms, the CDC said. More than half of the cases reported to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after people had received their second dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines were in people between the ages of 12 and 24, the CDC said. Those age groups accounted for less than 9% of doses administered. “We clearly have an imbalance there,” Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, said in a presentation to an advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration meeting on Thursday. The overwhelming majority of the cases have occurred within a week of vaccination, Shimabukuro said.

There were 283 observed cases of heart inflammation after the second vaccine dose in those aged 16 to 24 in the VAERS data. That compares with expectations of 10-to-102 cases for that age range based on U.S. population background incidence rates, the CDC said. Shimabukuro said there was a predominance of males in younger age groups among the reported heart inflammation cases. The median age of patients who experienced the inflammation after a second vaccine dose was 24, according to the VAERS data. Just under 80% of the cases were in men.

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“College students aren’t guinea pigs.”

WSJ, so behind a paywall, which I don’t do, but this much is free. And it’s important that the WSJ writes on it.

University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics (WSJ)

Some 450 U.S. colleges and universities—including our institutions—have announced policies mandating that all students be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 before the fall semester, with some requiring vaccination now for the summer term. Schools have for decades required vaccination against infectious diseases, but these mandates are unprecedented—and unethical. Never before have colleges insisted that students or employees receive an experimental vaccine as a condition of attendance or employment.

Even soldiers, whose rights are constrained when they join the service, aren’t being compelled to take a Covid vaccine. In a case involving a vaccine against anthrax, a federal district judge held in 2004 that “the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs” absent informed consent or a presidential waiver of service members’ legal protections. The following year the judge held that an emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration was insufficient to meet the legal test.

The FDA has issued such authorizations for three Covid vaccines, but it hasn’t fully approved any of them. Students at Notre Dame (for example) resume classes on Aug. 23, and freshmen arrive on campus Aug. 18. The Pfizer vaccine—first in line for approval—requires three weeks before the booster shot, so it would have to be approved by July 28 for students to meet the school’s deadline without making themselves experimental subjects. Pfizer applied to the FDA May 7 for “priority review,” a process that usually takes six months.

Universities might counter that—as with elementary schools requiring pediatric vaccinations—immunization is for students’ own good. But children can be at significant medical risks from the illnesses that we vaccinate them against, particularly when community vaccination rates are low. Not so with Covid. For those under 30, the risks of serious morbidity and mortality are close to zero. By contrast, early indications from passive surveillance systems (which call for follow-up investigation) and a June 10 review by the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee indicated an excess risk for heart inflammation, especially in men 30 and younger.

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“I believe it is time for him to hang up his crown and restore our democracy. In California, we don’t grow bananas, so there’s no need for a banana republic.”

California Removes Most Restrictions But Newsom Keeps Emergency Powers (JTN)

Even though Californians will be able to fill stadiums, concert venues, bars and restaurants, Gov. Gavin Newsom says the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over. Newsom signed orders rescinding mask mandates, business restrictions and the tiered reopening phases that ebbed and flowed with infection and hospitalization rates, beginning Tuesday. “California is turning the page on this pandemic, thanks to swift action by the state and the work of Californians who followed public health guidelines and got vaccinated to protect themselves and their communities,” Newsom said earlier this month. The state’s “Beyond the Blueprint” doesn’t include Newsom relinquishing his emergency powers, which were bestowed to him by a declaration signed in March 2020 and repeatedly renewed since. “The emergency remains in effect after June 15,” Newsom said at a news conference.


“We’re still in a state of emergency. This disease has not been extinguished. It’s not managed. It’s not taking the summer months off.” What that means is that Newsom keeps his hand on the levers of government restrictions, including business closures and mask mandates, even though the consistent decline in infections and hospitalizations are at lows not seen since the beginning of the pandemic. It also opened Newsom, a Democrat facing a recall election, to criticism from Republicans who have labeled his restrictions as heavy-handed. “If Newsom believes the state is safe enough to reopen, then it’s safe for people to be able to make decisions for themselves without his arbitrary and capricious rules,” Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, said in a June 4 statement. “I believe it is time for him to hang up his crown and restore our democracy. In California, we don’t grow bananas, so there’s no need for a banana republic.”

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That’s the same WHO that lied about everything including bats in cages in Wuhan.

Coronavirus Outpacing Vaccine Effort, Says WHO (G.)

The World Health Organization has warned that Covid-19 is moving faster than the vaccines, and said the vow by G7 countries to share a billion doses with poorer nations was simply not enough. “This is a big help, but we need more, and we need them faster. Right now, the virus is moving faster than the global distribution of vaccines,” World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists. “More than 10,000 people are dying every day … these communities need vaccines, and they need them now, not next year.” Global health leaders also warned the pledge was too little, too late, with more than 11bn shots needed. Faced with outrage over disparities in jab access, the Group of Seven industrialised powers pledged during a weekend summit in Britain to take their total dose donations to more than a billion, up from 130m promised in February.


While people in many wealthy nations have some sense of normalcy thanks to their vaccination rates, the shots remain scarce in poorer parts of the world. In terms of doses administered, the imbalance between the G7 and low-income countries, as defined by the World Bank, is 73 to one. Many of the donated G7 doses will be filtered through Covax, a global body charged with ensuring equitable vaccine distribution. Run by the WHO, the Gavi vaccine alliance and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), it has so far shipped more than 87m vaccine doses to 131 countries – far fewer than anticipated. The WHO wants at least 70% of the world’s population vaccinated by the next G7 meeting in Germany next year. “To do that, we need 11bn doses. The G7 and G20 can make this happen,” said Tedros.

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“..new footage has revealed that live bats were kept in cages inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology – despite claims from the WHO that such a possibility was a “conspiracy”..”

Live Bats In Cages Kept In Wuhan Institute of Virology (News.au)

As G7 countries increase calls for a “phase two” investigation into the origins of Covid-19, new footage has revealed that live bats were kept in cages inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology – despite claims from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that such a possibility was a “conspiracy”. The infamous lab is at the centre of a theory – first spruiked by the likes of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo – that Covid-19 wasn’t, as many scientists believe, transmitted from bats to people via an unknown intermediary, but was instead leaked, intentionally or not, from the institute. A joint WHO/China investigation into the origins of the disease first worked to dispel this line of thinking, calling the chance of a laboratory leak “extremely unlikely” and the idea that bats were held at the institute “an error”.

“No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. That’s not how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them,” a member of the WHO team, zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, wrote in a December tweet. “This is a widely circulated conspiracy theory. This piece describes work I’m the lead on and labs I’ve collaborated with for 15 years,” he wrote in another. “They DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened. It’s an error I hope will be corrected.” But an official May 2017 video from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, obtained by Sky News, shows bats held in a cage at the institute four years ago and a scientist feeding a worm to one of the creatures.

Earlier this month, Dr Daszak appeared to walk back his earlier denials, writing on Twitter that the WHO team had not asked the institute if they housed bats. “We didn’t ask them if they had bats. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like many other virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony,” he wrote. “I know it’s happening in labs here and in other countries. You’re right, labs in US & around (the) world are trying to keep bats to test viral immune responses etc. “None are successfully doing this at scale like lab mice & animals are always screened virus-free before expts, (sic) so even if WIV were trying this, it’s prob irrelevant for origins.”

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Well, look who’s here…

Zuckerberg Group Funnels 6 Figures To Wuhan Lab Partner (NP)

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative – the funding group behind much of the unlawful election changes of 2020 – gave nearly half a million dollars to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The university counts Wuhan lab collaborator and gain-of-function proponent Dr. Ralph Baric as a lead researcher. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Professor – who has also attended conferences at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is described by the lab’s “bat woman” as her “longtime collaborator” – received the grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic group in July 2020.

“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) recently awarded a $433,000 grant to UNC for laboratory equipment that will accelerate research to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” a press release notes. “This grant represents a new collaboration between the West Coast philanthropic organization CZI and UNC in search of a global solution to the pandemic,” a summary adds before detailing how the grant was used: “The grant covers the purchase of a “liquid handler” — a robotic arm that can pipette fluids much more quickly and accurately than humans can — and supporting instruments, including another robot that detects active virus particles in samples and a machine to sequence RNA. Together, these tools increase the rate of testing compounds by 20-fold.”

The grant allegedly helped produce a study – currently awaiting peer review – entitled SARS-CoV-2 infectious virus, viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swabs, and serostatus of symptomatic COVID-19 outpatients in the United States. “Here, we provide a comprehensive analysis of demographic, immunologic, virologic, and clinical disease factors associated with infectious virus isolation and levels of viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swab samples in the largest study of symptomatic outpatient adults with COVID-19 to date,” the summary notes.

A slide from a Baric presentation on the matter also listed support from Gilead Sciences, the National Institutes for Health, and Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Dr. Fauci recently attempted to cover-up his relationship with Zuckerberg by telling MSNBC host Chuck Todd he had “no idea” what Senator Marsha Blackburn was getting at when discussing the pair’s leaked e-mails.

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Running circles around Biden and his entire admin. Prepare for crazy media angles.

Vladimir Putin: ‘Don’t Be Mad At The Mirror If You’re Ugly’ (AP)

Vladimir Putin has accused the US of ‘persecuting political opinions’ for arresting the MAGA mob at the Capitol siege, ahead of his summit with Joe Biden on Wednesday. The Russian president was asked about his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an interview filmed in Moscow last week before his meeting with Biden in Switzerland. And he replied by hitting back at the US, equating the arrest of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol with his treatment of Navalny. He said: ‘We have a saying: ‘Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly,'” he said. “It has nothing to do with you personally. But if somebody blames us for something, what I say is, why don’t you look at yourselves? You will see yourselves in the mirror, not us.’

‘You are presenting it as dissent and intolerance toward dissent in Russia. We view it completely differently,’ he told US broadcaster NBC News. He then pointed at the January 6 MAGA raid on the Capitol, saying: ‘Do you know that 450 individuals were arrested after entering the Congress? … They came there with political demands.’ Putin also reiterated denials that the Kremlin was behind last year’s poisoning of Navalny with a nerve agent that nearly killed him. ‘We don’t have this kind of habit, of assassinating anybody,’ Putin claimed. ‘Did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?’ Putin said, referring to Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through a window that led to the House floor.

Putin also sharply dismissed allegations that Russia is carrying out cyberattacks against the United States as baseless. ‘Where is the evidence? Where is proof? It´s becoming farcical,’ Putin said. ‘We have been accused of all kinds of things – election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth – and not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof, just unfounded accusations.’ In April, the United States announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and new sanctions connected to the so-called SolarWinds cyberattack in which several U.S. government branches experienced data breaches. U.S. officials blamed the Russian foreign intelligence service.

In May, Microsoft officials said the foreign intelligence service appeared to be linked to an attack on a company providing services to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Putin also laughed off Joe Biden’s claim he’s a ‘killer’ – heaping praise on Donald Trump before branding his successor a career politician. He was asked by the NBC interviewer Keir Simmons, ‘Mr President, are you a killer?’ Putin avoided directly answering, instead replying: ‘Over my tenure, I’ve gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretext and reasons and of different calibre and fierceness, and none of it surprises me.’ ‘So as far as harsh rhetoric I think this is an overall expression of US culture. Of course in Hollywood, there are some underlying deep things in Hollywood – macho, which can be treated as cinematic art. But that’s part of US political culture, it’s considered normal. By the way, not here, it is not considered normal here.’

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“That’s how wars and that’s how a nuclear catastrophe beyond a healthy mind’s powers of comprehension can occur. Sleepwalking into Armaggedon.”

Putin: US Destroyers In Baltic, Black Seas a Missile Threat to Russia (Rozoff)

In comments that got past editors in the Western news media, President Vladimir Putin in a recent Russian television interview accused the West of abusing what were good relations at the time (1999-2004) to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders. And in doing so, he specified, violated verbal pledges made by American officials to then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, adding that the latter is alive and in good health and can confirm what he was told. In a candid assessment of the matter, Putin added, “I do not want to use harsh words, but they simply spat upon our interests and that’s that.” Lengthy excerpts of his comments were published on the English-language site of the government news agency TASS on June 9.

The most significant, and most alarming, aspect of the interview is the Russian president’s warning of Ukraine joining NATO, which contrary to what he acknowledged is a dismissal of that prospect by many experts in Russia and in the West he takes seriously, especially in regard to its membership providing the U.S. and NATO with new missile sites. Without naming them he mentioned that Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) missile defense (so-called) interceptors in Romania and Poland could strike Moscow in 15 minutes if a warhead was added to them; which, although the West denies its intent to do so, could be easily done. Russia has not been invited to inspect the missiles, for example. Paraphrasing the head of state, the TASS report disclosed the above threat is eminently practicable “because the missile defense launch systems stationed there can be used to carry out strikes as well.”

Installing SM-3s in Ukraine, Putin warned, would reduce the time needed to strike Moscow to 7-10 minutes. “Is it a red line for us or not?” he asked. He also drew the inevitable comparison with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when he estimated Soviet missiles on that island nation could have hit Washington in 15 minutes, adding another parallel: “To lower this flight time to 7-10 minutes, we should station our missiles on Canada’s southern border or Mexico’s northern border. Is it a red line for the US or not?” Though perfectly transparent and accurate in all regards, his comments have been ignored and, if brought to people’s attention, would be dismissed. That’s how wars and that’s how a nuclear catastrophe beyond a healthy mind’s powers of comprehension can occur. Sleepwalking into Armaggedon.

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“..an “imminent radiological threat”, but “..environmental readings of the plant and the surrounding area are reported normal.”

Chinese Nuclear Plant Warns Of ‘Imminent Radiological Threat’ After Leak (Hill)

An operator of a Chinese nuclear plant has warned U.S. officials of an “imminent radiological threat” after a leak at the plant, multiple news outlets reported on Monday. In a letter obtained by CNN, the French operator of the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant, Framatome, told U.S. officials that Chinese authorities had raised radiation limits outside of the plants to avoid a potential shutdown. U.S. officials told Framatome that they don’t deem the current situation to yet be at a crisis level, according to CNN, but the National Security Council has already held meetings on this situation. Framatome issued a statement on Monday saying that they will support a resolution to the ongoing crisis at the plant.


“Our team is working with relevant experts to assess the situation and propose solutions to address any potential issue.” The owner of Framatome, Électricité de France, also issued a statement saying that they were informed of the rise of “certain rare gases,” even suggesting a board meeting to present data on the crisis The report comes as the U.S. joined other countries in the Group of Seven summit in the United Kingdom over the weekend, with China being one of the main focal points of the summit. The Taishan Nuclear Power Plant released a statement on their website on Sunday adding that the environmental readings of the plant and the surrounding area are reported normal.

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Well, look who’s here…

Is that why reports on the leak are so soft?

Hunter Biden Invested Millions In Owner of Nuclear Plant Experiencing Leak (NP)

A nuclear power plant believed to be experiencing a leak posing an “imminent radiological threat” is run by China General Nuclear Power Corporation: a state-owned firm that has enjoyed millions of dollars in investment from President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Problems at the facility were exposed via a CNN report, which revealed that the plant’s French partner reached out to the White House for assistance: The warning included an accusation that the Chinese safety authority was raising the acceptable limits for radiation detection outside the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong province in order to avoid having to shut it down, according to a letter from the French company to the US Department of Energy obtained by CNN.


Despite the alarming notification from Framatome, the French company, the Biden administration believes the facility is not yet at a “crisis level,” one of the sources said. The Biden team’s lack of concern comes as the primary operator of the China-based plant – China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) – counts millions in investment from Hunter Biden. BHR Partners – the private equity firm where Hunter Biden served as a director since 2013 – was a $10 million cornerstone investor in CGN’s initial public offering. Occurring in 2014, the IPO was the second largest of the entire year, valued at over $3 billion. The company, which Hunter Biden reportedly retains a sizable stake in, still lists GCN as part of its portfolio on its website.

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Jim also has a good take on the vaccines etc. (he reads TAE), but this is even more poignant:

“..you can see the horizon on the “Joe Biden” administration, with sunset probably due this fall. How it will play-out is anybody’s guess. Mine is that, one way or another, some military caretaker administration may have to interrupt the 232-year-long cavalcade of governance led by legitimately-elected presidents.”

The Three-way Squeeze (Kunstler)

For now, many places are supposedly caught up in the exuberant reopening of daily life activities: restaurants, travel-and-leisure businesses, big league sports. Sounds good, maybe, but the frothy feeling is belied by the still-boarded-up shopfronts and the expanding homeless campgrounds of the big cities and by the noises made by big corporations laying off thousands of employees. One narrative says that many service jobs go begging because too many people still receive government handouts that add up to more than such jobs pay. And some businesses, such as restaurants, say they are offering much higher wages than they used to in a desperate effort to keep operating.

Okay… but consider how long you can run a restaurant paying dishwashers $25-an-hour, for example, especially considering how much of the population is too broke now to eat in restaurants that charge a third-again as much for dinner as they did before Covid-19. What you’re actually looking at is a broken business model for much of the service industry. Sometime this summer, that pretty big problem will be acknowledged, and the nation will see that we are not in a recovery at all, but rather a permanent contraction that will be labeled “a depression.”

Actually, it will not be a “depression,” either, exactly, which implies a cyclical dip, even a big one, because the cycle itself is broken — and to understand that, you must delve into the nature of the long emergency: the energy resource and capital scarcity quandary facing techno-industrial societies. The direct implication of this broken cycle will be even more social distress, which is being aggravated by the racial provocations ginned up by the Woke “Joe Biden” regime, and which will blow up in its face if there is another summer of riots, burning, and looting.

So, to conclude this unusually long edition of the CFN blog, you can see the horizon on the “Joe Biden” administration, with sunset probably due this fall. How it will play-out is anybody’s guess. Mine is that, one way or another, some military caretaker administration may have to interrupt the 232-year-long cavalcade of governance led by legitimately-elected presidents. Perhaps we’ll run a re-do of the last election. Or maybe we’re in for a new phase of the American project, a more uncertain and less appetizing one, featuring dictators and despots. Or maybe we’ll get through this very dangerous defile of history and land in a much lower-key but more coherent disposition of things recognizably American. Stay tuned for developments.

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“President Biden owes Reality gratitude because Reality’s actions directly contributed to the fact that the 2020 elections were the most secure presidential elections in American history..”

Reality Winner Released From Prison For ‘Exemplary Behavior’ (RT)

Reality Winner, the former US intelligence specialist who was imprisoned in 2018 for leaking classified National Security Agency information to media outlet the Intercept, has been released from prison on good behavior.
Winner’s attorney Alison Grinter Allen announced her release on Monday, revealing that, though Winner is “still in custody in the residential re-entry process,” her family and friends are “relieved and hopeful.” “Reality and her family have asked for privacy during the transition process as they work to heal the trauma of incarceration and build back the years lost,” Allen said, adding that Winner’s “release is not a product of the pardon or compassionate release process, but rather the time earned from exemplary behavior while incarcerated.” The attorney said her client was prohibited from making public statements or appearances and thus could not comment on the matter.


Winner was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 for leaking an NSA intelligence report to the Intercept that claimed Russian hackers had attempted to interfere with the US elections. The Intercept came under heavy fire at the time and was accused of improperly handling Winner’s confidentiality, which critics claim led to her arrest. Last week, Winner’s sister Brittany called on President Joe Biden to pardon the former intelligence specialist, arguing that Biden was only president “because of Reality Winner’s actions.” “President Biden owes Reality gratitude because Reality’s actions directly contributed to the fact that the 2020 elections were the most secure presidential elections in American history,” she said. “Mr. Biden is president because of Reality Winner’s actions and, therefore, he should pardon her.”

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Onion squared.

Babylon Bee Forces New York Times To Retract Calling Them ‘Misinformation’ (RT)

The Babylon Bee is in fact a satirical site and not a “far-right misinformation” one that “feuded” with Facebook and fact-checkers, The New York Times has finally conceded after being threatened with a defamation lawsuit. “This is huge. The NY Times was using misinformation to smear us as being a source of it,” Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweeted on Monday, calling it “malicious” behavior. “We pushed back hard and won. Thanks to everyone who voiced and offered their support. We don’t have to take this nonsense lying down. Remember that,” Dillon added. An article about Facebook censorship of irony in March, authored by the Times’ tech reporter Mike ‘Rat King’ Isaac, described the Bee as a “far-right misinformation site” that sometimes trafficked in fake news disguised as satire to avoid censorship from Big Tech.


It was the only example offered, too. After the initial complaint from Dillon, the Times edited the article to say that the Bee, “a right-leaning satirical site, has feuded with Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes over whether the site published misinformation or satire.” That, too, was wrong. The update is every bit as damaging (and false) as the original,” Dillon tweeted at the time, and explained that Snopes has actually retracted their insinuation about the Bee’s motives, and even created a whole new label for satire. Snopes has also discontinued their fact-checking partnership with Facebook, in early 2019. A correction dated June 10 – of which the Times notified the Bee on Friday – now says the earlier version of the article “imprecisely” referred to the “right-leaning satirical website,” and that Facebook and Snopes have since dropped the claims the Bee ever trafficked in misinformation.

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Misinformation?!

In Honor Of Pride Month, Biden Will Also Sniff Men’s Hair (BBee)

In a televised address this week, President Biden voiced support for the LGBTQ community and promised to honor them with a commitment to not only sniff women’s hair, but also men’s hair. “Look– I’ve been sniffing the hair of women and girls for many decades,” said Biden. “It’s time for me to recognize the accomplishments of the LGBT folks. I’m maybe gonna get in trouble for this, but if you’re a man, I just may sniff your hair. That’s because I’m not homophobic. I ain’t afraid to sniff a dude! Come on, man!” Biden was then quickly led off the podium by his wife before he could say any more.


“Every gender! I’ll sniff ’em all!” Biden yelled, protesting as he was dragged out of sight of the crowd. According to sources, no gay men have taken up Biden on his offer to sniff their hair. However, hundreds of straight male journalists have lined up outside the White House clapping and cheering, hoping for their chance to be sniffed by the President. Brian Stelter went to bed crying, as he had no hair for President Biden to sniff.

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Map of North America in 1702

 

 

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Jul 212020
 


LOOK Detroit’s 1960 look. Sneak preview of the new models, Dodge Polara 1959

 

Chinese and UK Vaccine Trials Produce Immune Responses (SCMP)
Reality Winner, 500 More Women Test Positive For COVID-19 in Texas Prison (D.)
US Autonomy Act Opens ‘Pandora’s Box’ For Hong Kong Dollar Peg (SCMP)
Jack Ma’s Ant IPO Signals Start Of De-Dollarization (Xe Yie)
EU Leaders Seal Deal On Spending And €750bn COVID19 Recovery Plans (G.)
No One’s Flying, Millions Of Jobs Might Be Lost as Airlines Took Billions (RT)
What Lies Ahead (CP)
NY Dems Created McConnell’s Corporate Immunity Template (SIrota)
The Left is Now the Right (Matt Taibbi)
Is Thinking Cancelled? (Jim Kunstler)
German Weapons Exports Have Flouted EU Rules For Decades (RT)
Alleged Salas Family Assailant Linked To US/Israeli Intelligence (Webb)
Steele ‘Primary Subsource’s’ Guide to Russiagate, as Told to the FBI (RCI)

 

 

I was waiting for the British RussiaRussia report, but the parliamentary committee had basically only this to say: “Committee members said they could not definitively conclude whether the Kremlin had or had not successfully interfered in the Brexit vote because no effort had been made to find out.” Though they do know that “Russia sees the UK as one of its “top targets” in the west”. Sure guys, you’re really important. Yawn.

The EU reached a €750 billion COVID deal (and a long-term new budget deal) by engaging in horse trading: European Commission head Michel offered Dutch PM Rutte an additional €350 million annual discount on the Dutch contribution to the EU from 2021-2027, and then all principles went AWOL.

Meanwhile, rumors about vaccines move entire “markets”, something PR firms for Big Pharma and the CCP are all too eager to encourage.

Oh, and after today there really is nothing at all left of the credibility of the Steele dossier. Which leaves us asking why Robert Mueller was ever hired as Special Counsel. Who was behind that?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bianco WA-OR

 

 

 

 

This infomercial was brought to you by Big Pharma and the CCP. Designed to move “markets”. And it worked.

Chinese and UK Vaccine Trials Produce Immune Responses (SCMP)

A coronavirus vaccine under early development by Chinese researchers produced a significant immune response for hundreds of volunteers, in one of two new studies offering hope as scientists race to develop a vaccine to counter the global pandemic. The Chinese scientists have completed phase two of their trial, published in The Lancet medical journal on Monday, which found that one injection of either a low or medium dose of the vaccine “induced significant neutralising antibody responses to live Sars-CoV-2”, the name for the novel coronavirus. An earlier phase-one trial of the vaccine had produced immune responses, but the latest trial was widened to include individuals aged 55 or older, given their higher risk of death from the Covid-19 virus.

“Single-dose immunisation with the vaccine induced rapid onset of immune responses within 14 days, and significant humoral and cellular immune responses within 28 days in the majority of the recipients,” the team of Chinese scientists, led by Zhu Fengcai from the Jiangsu Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Guan Xuhua from the Hubei Provincial CDC, wrote. [..] Most of the participants given the vaccine at a centre in central China’s Wuhan reported mild or moderate reactions, most commonly fatigue, fever and headache. Seventy-four per cent of the 129 individuals who received the lower dose and 72 per cent of those who received the medium dose reported at least one negative reaction but none had serious adverse reactions.

Scientists from Oxford University’s Jenner Institute also published findings from an early vaccine trial on Monday in The Lancet. In that trial 543 participants were injected with an experimental coronavirus vaccine, produced with the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. The vaccine produced both humoral and cellular responses against Sars-CoV-2, with antibodies for the virus peaking 28 days after vaccination and continuing to remain high up to two months later, the scientists said. The most common side effects from the Oxford vaccine included fatigue, which was reported by 70 per cent of participants, and headache, reported by 68 per cent. Other reactions included muscle ache, malaise and feeling feverish but there were no serious adverse events.

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Assange is not the only one.

Reality Winner, 500 More Women Test Positive For COVID-19 in Texas Prison (D.)

More than 500 women imprisoned at Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, have tested positive for COVID-19. The facility has the second-most cases out of all federal prisons in the United States, and one of the prisoners who has tested positive is NSA whistleblower Reality Winner. Last week, The Dissenter reported that COVID-19 cases tripled at Carswell in one week. The article included comments from Winner’s sister Brittany Winner. Staff at Carswell apparently read the story, and according to Brittany Winner, she is experiencing retaliation for our reporting. “Reality is being retaliated against for speaking out about the conditions in the prison, but she won’t stop fighting for better treatment for herself and her fellow inmates,” Brittany Winner declared.

“She will continue to update us, and I want everyone to know that we are watching and won’t stop being her voice.” Brittany Winner continued, “I am terrified that she will develop severe symptoms and require urgent medical care, but with the huge swell of cases in FMC Carswell and the likelihood that the region’s hospitals are already overwhelmed, I have no confidence that she will receive the care she needs.” “She belongs at home where she can be safely quarantined and receive medical care,” Brittany Winner contended. It took at least five days for Reality Winner to receive the results of her COVID-19 test, and fortunately, she has not exhibited symptoms of the virus yet.

Reality Winner is waiting on the 11th Circuit to rule on an appeal that she filed after a lower court denied her request for compassionate release. As her attorneys warned in May, “The entire basis for Reality’s motion—and so many like hers—is that she cannot afford to wait until she is removed from FMC Carswell in a stretcher, or worse, before she is afforded relief.”

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I think perhaps it’s more of a Schrödinger’s box.

US Autonomy Act Opens ‘Pandora’s Box’ For Hong Kong Dollar Peg (SCMP)

US President Donald Trump’s decision to take action against Beijing over its imposition of a new security law on Hong Kong is unlikely to undermine the city’s dollar peg system or its role as a financial hub in the short term, but escalating conflict between the US and China raises questions about the long-term outlook, according to analysts. Trump last week issued an executive order ending the city’s special economic treatment and enacted the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which paves the way for punishment of Chinese and Hong Kong officials accused of curbing the autonomy of the ex-British colony, as well as the financial institutions that do business with them. The US State Department has 90 days to designate individuals or entities in contravention of the law, after which banks will have one year to cease business relations.

Only a few banks are expected to be targeted, and they would be allowed to appeal for removal from the US government’s sanctions list, analysts said. This has eased worries over a full-blown US-China financial war, as well as other extreme scenarios in the short-run, said Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at French investment bank Natixis. Carie Li Ruofan, an economist at OCBC Wing Hang Bank, said the biggest worry had been the threat of financial sanctions on banks. “But since the president has given leeway for a lot of time to identify these banks and to impose the actual sanctions, there isn’t a real market impact and there aren’t excessive concerns for the time being,” she said.

Trump’s executive order did not mention limiting Hong Kong banks’ access to the US dollar payment system as a way of punishing China, which would undermine the currency peg system that has allowed the city to remain a global financial hub. The Hong Kong dollar has been pegged to the US dollar since October 1983, but has been allowed to trade between 7.75 and 7.85 since 2005. Due to China’s draconian capital controls that restrict the use of the yuan globally, the freely convertible and stable Hong Kong dollar is especially important to China for attracting foreign investment and in turn allowing Chinese companies to easily raise hard currency in the city. Economists estimate that investment flows through the city account for more than 70% of China’s international funding.

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There we go again. Let’s see the HK dollar peg gone.

Jack Ma’s Ant IPO Signals Start Of De-Dollarization (Xe Yie)

Back in China, the biggest news overnight was that Jack Ma’s Ant Group is seeking a valuation of more than $200 billion as it goes public in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It could seek to raise more in its IPO than Saudi Aramco’s record $29 billion haul, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The significance of this deal is multifold:
• It would be the biggest IPO ever on mainland exchanges, smashing the record $10 billion debut by Agriculture Bank of China in 2010.
• It signifies the rise of New China in the form of private high-tech companies, as opposed to the Old China dominated by state-owned banks and energy giants.
• And it lends much needed credibility to the Shanghai stock exchange’s STAR board, which is designed to harbor tech startups.

More importantly, the choice of Shanghai and Hong Kong for listing signals China’s deliberate efforts to reduce its reliance on the U.S. capital market for fund-raising amid the tension between the two countries. Already, Chinese and Hong Kong exchanges accommodated the world’s biggest four public listings this year, including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and JD.com. In the debt market, China’s borrowing in foreign currencies seems to have also peaked. The external debt was little changed at $1.3 trillion last year, after rising 16% in 2018 and 22% in 2017. Dollar-denominated debt accounted for 83% of the total foreing debt outstanding, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Considering everything from the U.S.’s threat to delist Chinese companies, to moves to strip Hong Kong of its special status, it’s more than clear that China is starting its process of de-dollarization and furthering the internationalization of its own currency.

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Yes, there is some common borrowing. Yay! But in reality it’s just more raw horse trading. EC head Michel gave Rutte 100s of millions in incentives to sign up. Nothing to do with principles. You don’t find that in the Anglo press. But the Dutch report it, and with pride.

EU Leaders Seal Deal On Spending And €750bn COVID19 Recovery Plans (G.)

EU leaders have reached a historic agreement on a €750bn coronavirus pandemic recovery fund and their long-term spending plans following days of acrimonious debate at the bloc’s longest summit in nearly two decades. As the meeting reached its fifth day, the 27 exhausted heads of state and government finally gave their seal of approval to a plan for the EU to jointly borrow debt to be disbursed through grants on an unprecedented scale, in the face of an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression. The end of the tortuous process was announced by the European council president, Charles Michel, who had been chairing the leaders’ long debates, with a single word on Twitter: “Deal!”

The euro rose against the dollar on the news to stand at $1.145. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, described it as a “historic day for Europe”. Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, said that the more than 90 hours of negotiations had been “worth it” and that the EU could not be accused this time of doing “too little, too late”. Negotiations for the hard-won deal pitted north against south and east against west as governments haggled over the terms of both the bloc’s seven-year budget and a one-off economic stimulus. The summit, stretching from Friday morning into the early hours of Tuesday, was so prolonged that two leaders, Xavier Bettel of Luxembourg and Ireland’s Micheál Martin, briefly returned home before coming back to Brussels.

Despite initial opposition from the so-called frugal states of the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and Denmark, agreement was finally found, following a final 5.15am session of the 27 on Tuesday morning, to disburse vast sums in the form of non-repayable grants to countries most stricken by the coronavirus pandemic. The breakthrough followed a new proposal from Michel for the EU to pay out €390bn in grants and €360bn in loans from the new economic reconstruction fund. The “frugal” states had been pushing for the original proposal by the European commission for €500bn in grants to be reduced to €350bn, to the evident frustration of Macron and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, had at one stage warned his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte, who led the way on reducing the level of grants, that he might become a hero at home but that he faced being blamed by the rest of Europe for his lack of solidarity. But Michel’s new formulation, emerging out of hours of bilateral talks with the leaders on both sides of the debate outside of the full plenary sessions of the leaders, finally received the unanimous support it required.

Italy vs Facebook

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Mitch Feierstein states the obvious.

No One’s Flying, Millions Of Jobs Might Be Lost as Airlines Took Billions (RT)

The airlines frittered away billions in stock buybacks – American Airlines alone spent $13 billion on share buybacks. Airlines received at least $50 billion in government bailouts that taxpayers will be on the hook for when they go bankrupt. As I explained (here), American Airlines’ CEO Robert Parker was paid 150 million dollars to crash the airline that will cost tens of thousands of jobs – jobs that will be gone forever. The mainstream media is reporting on the 25,000 jobs AA is preparing to furlough, but is failing – or refusing – to see the macroeconomic big picture and the reality that MILLIONS of jobs could be on the line. [..] It is clear that the business and the ancillary supply-chain businesses (leases and purchases from Boeing, airplane parts, airline maintenance, jet fuel, food services, employees to clean planes and airports) are not returning anytime soon.

We are talking MILLIONS of jobs across the airline supply chain that will never return. Will airlines go bankrupt? YES! Why wasn’t Parker fired and the board sacked? Why did the government fund $10 billion in bailouts when 25,000 people are about to be sacked? What caused the current global economic depression and are the governments being honest about it? The credit crisis that began in earnest back in 2008 was caused by too much debt, credit and leverage. Then it hit high gear with Boris Johnson’s top adviser shrieking “2.2 million Americans and over half a million Brits will die from coronavirus.” This statement was the shot that ended democracy around the world, and it came from Dr Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College “models” funded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

New York City’s economy is in the tank. It is estimated that over fifty percent of the small businesses that closed due to Covid-19 will never reopen. This means millions of jobs are gone forever, and it will cause more vacant commercial real estate to come onto an already over-supplied property market. Property prices in cities will collapse and, as job losses continue, we will see a catastrophic increase of defaults on residential mortgages that will cause a broader collapse in all property prices. The global economy is in an economic depression, illustrated and compounded by massive unemployment, contracting gross domestic product, staggering amounts of private and public debt and a wealth inequality gap that has rocketed to stratospheric new highs. Central Banks, aka rogue hedge funds, have printed trillions of dollars. These funds have re-inflated asset bubbles to wildly grotesque levels of valuation that have never been seen.

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“A second wave of job layoffs is going to strike at the same time that rent forbearance expires.”

What Lies Ahead (CP)

As of mid-July no fewer than 33 million are receiving unemployment benefits, with another 6 million having dropped out of the labor force altogether and no longer even being counted as unemployed. Unemployment therefore remains at what will likely be a chronically high number, at around 40 million—with about 25% of the US labor force unemployed—as renewed service-retail sector layoffs, plus new permanent layoffs, both loom on the horizon. Added to the growing problem of renewed service layoffs and the 2nd wave of permanent layoffs in the private sector is the growing likelihood of significant layoffs in the public sector, as states and cities facing massive budget deficits are forced to lay off several millions of the roughly 22 million public sector workers in the US.

[..] There is an imminent crisis in rents affecting tens of millions. At the peak in April, it is estimated that roughly one-third of the 110 million renters in the US economy had stopped making rent payments due to the COVID-related shutdowns of the economy. The CARES ACT, passed in March, provided forbearance on rental payments, although perhaps as many as 20 states failed to enforce it. That forbearance directive expires at the end of July, with as many as 23 million rent evictions projected in coming months. A major housing crisis is thus brewing, as well as the second wave of job layoffs.

A combined education-child care crisis is about to occur almost simultaneously. The K-12 public education system is approaching chaos, as school districts plan to introduce remote learning on a major scale in order to deal with the renewed COVID-19 infection and hospitalization wave. The heart of the crisis is that tens of millions of US working class families dependent on two paychecks to survive economically cannot afford to accommodate school district practices for remote learning—especially for young children in the K-6 grade levels. Even if such families could afford to pay for expensive child care, the current US child care system is far from being able to accommodate them. Many minority and working class households, moreover, lack the computers and networking equipment, or even the requisite skills to set it up, to enable their children participate in remote learning.

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David Sirota worked in Bernie’s campaign until the latter was thrown out again. Tulsi Gabbard was muzzled by the DNC and removed. Why do people like them still hang around this hornet’s nest?

NY Dems Created McConnell’s Corporate Immunity Template (SIrota)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial legislation granting nursing home CEOs legal immunity during the COVID-19 pandemic became a template this week for Washington Republicans, who are reportedly finalizing a national version of the liability shield for corporate executives. Now, new campaign finance records show that the landmark provision in New York was inserted into the state’s budget by Democratic legislators as they were benefiting from a boost in campaign cash from the health care industry lobbying group that sculpted the provision. Those same New York legislators may now face a vote on legislation to repeal the immunity language, or water down that repeal.

Meanwhile, the same health care industry lobbying group has been funneling millions to Democratic lawmakers in Washington, who could soon face votes on the federal version of the New York initiative. In the first half of 2020, the Greater New York Hospital Association — which said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision — funneled $260,000 to Democratic state lawmakers’ that control the New York legislature, according to newly released campaign finance records. That represents more than double the amount the group gave those committees in the same reporting period during the 2018 election cycle.

In all, GNYHA delivered more than $450,000 to Democratic and Republican party committees in New York since the beginning of the year. The Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS) — another lobbying group whose members benefit from the immunity law — delivered an additional $69,000 to New York legislators in the same time period. In an investigative report co-published in Jacobin and The Guardian, TMI previously broke open the news that when Cuomo first proposed the immunity legislation, state party committees that he controls had already raked in more than $1 million from GNYHA. This new data from the first half of 2020 show that the largesse extended to the state legislators whose support Cuomo and GNYHA needed in order to pass the provision into law.

New York’s immunity provision, which passed in April, is one of the farthest-reaching in the nation. It not only shields frontline health care workers from lawsuits during the coronavirus outbreak — it extends such legal immunity to the executives, board members and other corporate officials who operate health care facilities, and whose staffing and medical policy decisions govern entire nursing homes and hospitals.

Read more …

Matt’s stream of consciousness.

The Left is Now the Right (Matt Taibbi)

The old Republican right’s idea of “humor” was its usual diatribes against Bad People, only with puns thrown in (are you ready for “OxyClinton”?). As a result the Fox effort at countering the Daily Show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour — a string of agonizing “burns” on Bush-haters and Hillary — remains the worst-rated show in the history of television, according to Metacritic. The irony gap eventually spelled doom for that group of Republicans, as Trump drove a truck through it in 2016. However, it’s possible they just weren’t as committed to the concept as current counterparts. Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.


The National Museum of African American History and Culture created a graphic on “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture” that declared the following white values: “the scientific method,” “rational, linear thinking,” “the nuclear family,” “children should have their own rooms,” “hard work is the key to success,” “be polite,” “written tradition,” and “self-reliance.” White food is “steak and potatoes; bland is best,” and in white justice, “intent counts.” The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White People parodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking” are white values?).

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How did the country ever end up in this mess?

Is Thinking Cancelled? (Jim Kunstler)

General Flynn, the American Dreyfus, remains twisting slowly in the wind despite the DOJ dropping charges against him. Judge Emmet Sullivan is busy destroying the credibility and authority of the federal bench with bad faith procedural shenanigans underwritten by Ben Wittes’s Lawfare claque of Beltway shysters maneuvering in the background to protect Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Is it not past time for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to force Judge Sullivan to end the case, or admonish and remove him? Beyond all the legalese bullshit, an innocent man’s life is stuck unfairly and unjustly in limbo after three years of a malicious prosecution.

Why has the attorney general not preferred charges against Gen. Flynn’s chief prosecutor, Brandon Van Crack — or, for that matter, against Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann and the whole Special Counsel staff — for withholding evidence and plenty of other obvious prosecutorial mischief? Mr. Barr has stated plainly more than once that the agency he took charge over in 2019 “us[ed] the criminal justice process as a political weapon.” Is that against the law or not? Does it injure this society to leave that question unanswered, month after month?

In a better society, the newspapers would have rushed to Gen. Flynn’s defense. Except our leading newspapers are so vested in years of their own untruth that they don’t dare to cover the story. Where is the consequence for Dean Baquet, editor of The New York Times, since Times staffer Bari Weiss disclosed his failure to control the ideological bullying, coercion, and hostility to fair play in his newsroom? Mr. Baquet has not just wrecked an institution; he’s made the whole business of covering reality look like a hustle. Does The New York Times’s board of directors not care about its reputation? Maybe the message is: why should anyone care about his or her reputation? And what kind of culture grows out of that code?

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Arms sales are the best: profits are huge, and the press dare not touch them.

German Weapons Exports Have Flouted EU Rules For Decades (RT)

Berlin has systematically broken EU guidelines by selling weapons to bad actors across the globe, a new study says. It alleges that German-made arms and military hardware have led to more violence on the ground. Over the years, Germany has been selling both weapons and munitions to “countries affected by war and crisis, to countries with human rights violations and to regions of tension,” a new study by the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) says. According to the EU criteria, the recipient of arms must respect human rights and international law, as well as maintain peace and stability in the region. However, since 1990, Germany has repeatedly struck deals with nations with a poor human rights record, such as Algeria, Egypt, and Indonesia, oftentimes selling off old Bundeswehr hardware, PRIF notes.


In many instances, the equipment ended up in war zones, as happened in Indonesia, where German-made ships were spotted transporting soldiers during an insurgency in Indonesia’s Aceh region. The research raises particular alarm over Berlin’s long history of supplying military technology to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. In 2019, German-made Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks were used in Ankara’s invasion of Syria, and Riyadh has been waging a bloody air war in Yemen since 2015. Despite mounting reports of mass civilian casualties on the ground, the German government has approved arms sales worth €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) to Saudi Arabia since its bombing campaign began, the study said. It noted that even the UK-supplied Tornado and Eurofighter Typhoon that carry out air strikes on Yemeni cities “contain parts produced in Germany.”

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And thereby Epstein.

Alleged Salas Family Assailant Linked To US/Israeli Intelligence (Webb)

The news of the shooting of the husband and son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to oversee the Jeffrey Epstein – Deutsche Bank case, caused shock and confusion while also bringing renewed scrutiny to the Epstein scandal just a week after Epstein’s main co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was denied bail in a separate case. The case Salas is set to oversee is a class action lawsuit brought by Deutsche Bank investors who allege that Deutsche Bank “failed to properly monitor customers that the Bank itself deemed to be high risk, including, among others, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” The case came after the New York state Department of Financial Services had settled with Deutsche Bank over the bank’s failure to cut ties with Epstein-linked accounts, resulting in Deutsche Bank paying a $150 million fine.

Deutsche Bank, unlike other financial institutions, failed to close all of its accounts linked to Epstein until less than a month prior to his arrest last year, even though the bank had identified him as “high risk” yearsbefore. Beyond the tragedy of Sunday’s shooting, which claimed the life of Salas’ only child, the quick discovery of the death of the main suspect, Roy Den Hollander, of a “self-inflicted” gunshot to the head before he could be arrested or questioned by authorities has led to speculation that there is more to the official narrative of the crime than meets the eye. With law enforcement sources now claiming that Esther Salas was not the intended target of the attack and some media reports now suggesting that Den Hollander’s motive was related to his dislike of feminism, it appears there are efforts underway to distance Sunday’s tragic shooting from Salas’ recent assignment to the Epstein case, which occurred just four days before the tragic shooting.

The most likely reason for any such “damage control” effort lies in the fact that both U.S. law enforcement investigations and mainstream media reports have consistently downplayed the connections of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and financial crimes to intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Israel. Similarly, Roy Den Hollander previously worked for a New York firm has been described as a “private CIA” with ties to those countries’ intelligence agencies and, also, ties to Deutsche Bank.

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Without the Steele dossier, paid for by the DNC and FusionGPS, there would never have been a Mueller investigation. Both have now been more than fully discredited. Question remains: who drove this?

Steele ‘Primary Subsource’s’ Guide to Russiagate, as Told to the FBI (RCI)

Much of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald Trump was built on the premise that Christopher Steele and his dossier were to be believed. This even though, early on, Steele’s claims failed to bear scrutiny. Just how far off the claims were became clear when the FBI interviewed Steele’s “Primary Subsource” over three days beginning on Feb. 9, 2017. Notes taken by FBI agents of those interviews were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday afternoon. The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted.

From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos. Steele’s operation didn’t rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource’s account. He described to the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: “Do you know [about] Manafort? Find out about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes.” The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI “that he was ‘clueless’ about who Manafort was, and that this was a ‘strange task’ to have been given.” The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia – he didn’t have a network of sources, according to his lawyer, but instead just a “social circle.”

And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get together with his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with the Manafort question and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about Manafort and fed them back to Steele. Also in his “social circle” was Primary Subsource’s friend “Source 2,” a character who was always on the make. “He often tries to monetize his relationship with [the Primary Subsource], suggesting that the two of them should try and do projects together for money,” the Primary Subsource told the FBI (a caution that the Primary Subsource would repeat again and again). It was Source 2 who “told [the Primary Subsource] that there was compromising material on Trump.”

Read more …

 

 

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The New York Times threatens to publish Tucker Carlson’s home address, after he was forced to move with his wife and four kids two years ago following severe threats.

 

 

The best way to teach your kids about taxes is to eat 30% of their ice cream
– Bill Murray

 

 

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”
Simple.
To even out the good things that happen to bad people.

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Oct 232019
 


Salvador Dali Portrait of my father 1920

Bernie Pledges To End Prosecuting Whistleblowers Under Espionage Act (IC)
Everyone Is a Russian Asset (Matt Taibbi)
Hillary, Acknowledge the Damage You’ve Caused (Tulsi Gabbard)
Graham To Introduce Resolution Condemning House Impeachment Inquiry (Hill)
The 2020 Election Is Shaping Up To Be An Expensive Run (ZH)
EU Moves Towards Brexit Delay As Johnson Seeks Election To Break Impasse (R.)
Facebook Probe By US States Expands To 47 Attorneys General (R.)
US States Plan Google Antitrust Meeting Next Month In Colorado (R.)
Boeing Ousts First Senior Executive As 737 MAX Crisis Grows (R.)
Trump Approves $4.5 Million In Aid To ‘White Helmets’ In Syria (RT)
The Medicare for All Cost Debate Is Extremely Dishonest (Dayen)

I kid you not, Bernie doesn’t know who Reality Winner is. While AOC has only heard her name, it seems.

These are the people who should protect Julian Assange. They’re just posturing.

Bernie Pledges To End Prosecuting Whistleblowers Under Espionage Act (IC)

As President, Bernie Sanders would end the practice of using the controversial Espionage Act to prosecute government whistleblowers, the Vermont senator told The Intercept in an interview on Saturday ahead of a major rally in New York. The century-old law had largely gone out of fashion until it was deployed heavily by the Obama administration, which prosecuted eight people accused of leaking to the media under the Espionage Act, more than all previous presidents combined. President Donald Trump is on pace to break Barack Obama’s record if he gets a second term: He has prosecuted eight such whistleblowers, five of them using the Espionage Act, according to the Press Freedom Tracker. Asked if it is appropriate to prosecute whistleblowers using the Espionage Act, Sanders said, “Of course not.”

The Espionage Act, which was passed in 1917 to suppress opposition to World War I and now considers leakers to effectively be spies, makes a fair trial impossible, as relevant evidence is classified and kept from the defense, and the bar for conviction is low. The law also comes with stiffer criminal penalties and longer sentences than more obvious charges that might be leveled, such as mishandling classified intelligence. During the interview, The Intercept noted that Trump has referred to White House officials, who provided information to the whistleblower who went through legally sanctioned channels and alerted Congress of Trump’s Ukraine activities, as “spies.”

Democrats widely condemned Trump for the comparison, though those same Democrats have not generally objected to the Justice Department’s use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to journalists, suggesting that the media is being treated tantamount to a foreign adversary. “Whistleblowers have a very important role to play in the political process,” Sanders said in response. “And I am very supportive of the courage of that whistleblower, whoever he or she may be.” Asked if he would give a second look at the record-setting length of the sentence doled out to National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner, Sanders demurred, saying that he was supportive of whistleblowers but unfamiliar with her case.*

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who joined Sanders during the interview, agreed. “I don’t want to speak out of turn when it comes to Reality Winner, but I just think that the prosecution of whistleblowers is frankly against our democracy. We rely on whistleblowers, we rely on journalists, in order for us to hold our systems accountable.”

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“Trump’s campaign was a clown show. He had almost no institutional backing. His “ground game” was nonexistent: his “campaign” was a TV program based almost wholly around unscripted media appearances. [..] He didn’t prepare a victory speech, for the perfectly logical reason that he never expected to win.”

Everyone Is a Russian Asset (Matt Taibbi)

Democrats now are assuming the role once played by Republicans of the Tom Delay era, who denounced everyone opposed to the War on Terror as “Saddam-lovers.” In the midst of this in 2003, the Washington Post protested the way American journalism was “infected with jingoism and intolerance.” That was after Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post ran a headline, “Don’t aid these Saddam-lovers” about “appeasement-loving celebs” like Laurence Fishburne, Tim Robbins, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Penn, Danny Glover, and Susan Sarandon. Today, the New York Post is the paper crying out against the “sad, sick conspiracy theories” about Gabbard (an “Assad-lover” instead of a “Saddam-lover”), but some of the other players are the same.

Sarandon is regularly denounced now by Democrats instead of Republicans, this time for having supported Stein in 2016, an act seen as equivalent to having tongue-kissed Putin on live TV. She was also one of a handful of celebrities noted for a “controversial” political donation in the Daily Beast’s red-baiting May article about the suspicious contributors to Gabbard’s campaign. The #Resistance has come up with all sorts of words for such fifth-columnists and deviationists: they are “false-balancers” or “false equivalencers,” “neo-Naderites,” “purity-testers,” “both-sidesists,” “whataboutists,” “horseshoe theorists,” “Russia skeptics” or “Russia denialists,” and “anti-anti-Trumpers.” Such heretics are all ultimately seen as being on “team Putin.”

This witch-hunting insanity isn’t just dangerous, it’s a massive breach from reality. Trump’s campaign was a clown show. He had almost no institutional backing. His “ground game” was nonexistent: his “campaign” was a TV program based almost wholly around unscripted media appearances. Trump raised just over half the $1.2 billion Hillary pulled in (making him the first presidential candidate dating back to 1976 to win with a funds deficit). He didn’t prepare a victory speech, for the perfectly logical reason that he never expected to win. Even if you posit the most elaborate theories of Russian interference (which I don’t, but of course I’m denialist scum), what happened in 2016 was still almost entirely a domestic story, with Trump benefiting from long-developing public rejection of the political establishment.

Rather than confront the devastating absurdity of defeat before an ad-libbing game show host who was seemingly trying to lose – a black comedy that is 100% in America’s rich stupidity tradition – Democrats have gone all-in on this theory of foreign infiltration. House speaker Nancy Pelosi even said as much in a White House meeting, pointing at Trump and proclaiming: “All roads lead to Putin.” All? Seriously? Is this ever going to end?

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Tulsi pushes on as rumors of Hillary entering the race get louder.

Hillary, Acknowledge the Damage You’ve Caused (Tulsi Gabbard)


Hillary, your foreign policy was a disaster for our country and the world—resulting in the deaths and injuries of so many of my brothers and sisters in uniform, devastating entire countries, millions of lives lost, refugee crises, our enemy al-Qaeda/ISIS strengthened, increased Iranian and Russian influence in the region, Turkey emboldened, and exacerbated the problem of nuclear proliferation by overthrowing Gadhafi in Libya. Yet despite the damage you have done to our country and the world, you want to continue your failed policies directly or indirectly through the Democratic nominee.


It’s time for you to acknowledge the damage you have caused and apologize for it. It is long past time for you to step down from your throne so the Democratic Party can lead with a new foreign policy which will actually be in the interests of and benefit the American people and the world.

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Senate 180º opposite the House. Lovely.

Graham To Introduce Resolution Condemning House Impeachment Inquiry (Hill)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is planning to introduce a resolution condemning the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry process, and argued that any articles should be dismissed in the Senate without a trial. “This resolution puts the Senate on record condemning the House. …Here’s the point of the resolution: Any impeachment vote based on this process, to me, is illegitimate, is unconstitutional, and should be dismissed in the Senate without a trial,” Graham told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. President Trump and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill have lashed out at how House Democrats are handling the impeachment inquiry, arguing they should hold a vote to formally launch the investigation.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has argued the rules don’t require a vote. But Republicans say it would give them more leeway to call their own witnesses, and put swing-state Democrats on the record on launching the impeachment inquiry. Graham added on Tuesday night that Trump should get “the same rights that any American has if you’re giving a parking ticket to confront the witnesses against you: can’t be based on hearsay.” “We cannot allow future presidents and this president to be impeached based on an inquiry in the House that’s never been voted upon that does not allow the president to confront the witnesses against him, to call witnesses on his behalf, and cross-examine people who are accusing him of misdeeds,” he added.

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That’s a given in every next election.

The 2020 Election Is Shaping Up To Be An Expensive Run (ZH)

President Trump has more cash on hand than any single Democratic primary candidate, a product of his unorthodox campaign that started amassing money his first day in the White House, a move no other president in U.S. history has done. While President Trump is gearing up for the general election, there are still 18 Democratic candidates who are fighting to become the party’s nominee in the primary. As Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, Senator Bernie Sanders has the most cash on hand, followed closely by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Mayor Pete Buttigieg rounds out the three leading Democrats by cash on hand. All top three Democratic hopefuls have over double the cash that former Vice President Joe Biden has on hand. Former Vice President Joe Biden has a moderate $9 million in cash, a number that hasn’t changed much since last quarter.

The amount of cash on hand includes money from fundraising, and any funds from any previous presidential, senate, or congressional campaigns. The cash on hand metric provides insights into how much wiggle room campaigns have to grow their staff, expand their operations, and develop their advertising strategy. Candidates need to do all three to gain traction in early primary and caucus states. Many of the middling and cash-strapped candidates will be in danger of running out of funds, or not meeting the DNC’s stringent fundraising threshold to make the next debate stage. The fundraising requirement involves getting 130,000 donors, 400 of whom need to be from at least 20 states.

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From what I understand the Withdrawal Agreement Bill did not pass parliament, as many claim. It merely passed the second reading, the step before being debated in both houses. Then Boris delayed it.

EU Moves Towards Brexit Delay As Johnson Seeks Election To Break Impasse (R.)

EU leaders should delay Brexit after Prime Minister Boris Johnson paused legislation on his deal following a parliamentary defeat, EU Council President Donald Tusk said on Tuesday, as Britain spins towards a possible election to break the impasse. As the clock ticks down to the deadline for Britain’s departure on Oct. 31, Brexit is hanging in the balance as divided lawmakers debate when, how and even whether it should happen more than three years since the 2016 referendum. In another day of Brexit drama in the 800-year-old Westminster seat of power, lawmakers handed Johnson the first major parliamentary victory of his premiership by signalling their support for his deal in an early legislative hurdle.


But that was overshadowed just minutes later when lawmakers defeated him on his timetable to rush the legislation through the House of Commons in just three days, prompting the government to say it would pause the legislative process. Tusk recommended late on Tuesday evening that the leaders of the remaining 27 member states back a delay. “In order to avoid a no-deal Brexit, I will recommend the EU27 accept the UK request for an extension,” he said on Twitter. [..] On Tuesday, lawmakers did vote by 329 to 299 in favour of the second reading of the legislation for the Brexit deal – still no guarantee of success since the bill could be amended by lawmakers who want changes. They then opposed by 322 to 308 votes Johnson’s extremely tight timetable.

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Will it lead anywhere?

Facebook Probe By US States Expands To 47 Attorneys General (R.)

A New York-led probe into allegations that Facebook Inc put consumer data at risk and pushed up advertising rates has expanded to include attorneys general from 47 U.S. states and territories, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement on Tuesday. The investigation of Facebook announced in September had included Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia. It now includes most U.S. states as well as the U.S. territory of Guam. Facebook shares closed down 3.9% at $182.34 on Tuesday. The statement provided a list of states involved in the probe and added that other states “cannot confirm their participation in pending investigations.” California, the largest state by population, was not on the list.


Some states, particularly New York and Nebraska, have raised concerns that Facebook and other big tech companies engage in anti-competitive practices, expose consumer data to potential data theft and push up advertising prices. Facebook said that its users had multiple choices for the services that the company provides. “We understand that if we stop innovating, people can easily leave our platform. This underscores the competition we face,” said Will Castleberry, vice president, state and local policy, at Facebook. “We will work constructively with state attorneys general and we welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate.” Facebook also faces probes by the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

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They should investigate the links between CIA and Facebook/Google.

US States Plan Google Antitrust Meeting Next Month In Colorado (R.)

U.S. state attorneys general probing Alphabet’s Google plan to meet next month in Colorado to discuss a probe into whether the search giant’s business practices break antitrust law, according to three sources knowledgeable about the meeting. The meeting, which is being planned for Nov. 11, would be similar to a gathering this week in New York where state and federal enforcers from the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission discussed their probe of Facebook, according to one of the sources. A second source said that this meeting would touch on organizational issues and was likely to be one in a long series of gatherings to discuss the probe.


The investigation of Google appears to be well underway since Texas sent the search and advertising giant a subpoena asking for information about its ad business. As of earlier this month, Google began sending data to the attorneys general. The investigation, which involves all state attorneys general except Alabama and California, seeks to dig into the opaque business of online digital advertising, where Google is a dominant player. Attorneys general for the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico are also part of the investigation.

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The first of many, we may hope.

Boeing Ousts First Senior Executive As 737 MAX Crisis Grows (R.)

Boeing Co on Tuesday ousted the top executive of its commercial airplanes division, Kevin McAllister, marking the first high-level departure since two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX jets. The company said it named veteran Boeing executive Stan Deal to succeed McAllister effective immediately as president and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA). Deal had led Boeing’s Global Services division. The world’s largest planemaker faces a growing crisis over the eight-month safety ban of its previously best-selling flagship single-aisle jet prompted by crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.


Tuesday’s announcement, a day before the company was due to report quarterly financial results, shocked some Boeing employees, with one insider calling McAllister a “scapegoat” and pointing out that he came to the helm of BCA later in the 737 MAX development. It ends a relatively unusual experiment at Boeing of handing an outsider a prominent position, and places the crucial commercial airplanes division in the hands of a long-serving Boeing insider who has formed relationships with some important customers, such as Singapore Airlines. McAllister, a regular figure at industry conclaves, had formed deep relationships with key airline customers forged during his previous position selling services for General Electric Co.

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The Deep State rules supreme: “Last May, the Trump administration had announced it would stop funding the White Helmets, only to backtrack a month later and send the group $6.8 million.”

Trump Approves $4.5 Million In Aid To ‘White Helmets’ In Syria (RT)

US president Donald Trump has authorized $4.5 million in aid to the so-called Syrian Civil Defense (SCD), aka “White Helmets,” calling their work “important and highly valued.” The group’s critics point to its terrorist ties. “Over the course of the 8-year conflict in Syria, the SCD has rescued more than 115,000 people, including many ethnic and religious minorities,” the White House said, announcing the aid on Tuesday. However, the source of this figure is the group itself, and it has not been independently verified. Likewise, the organization has only been around since 2014. Washington pledged $5 million in aid to the group at a conference back in March. Last May, the Trump administration had announced it would stop funding the White Helmets, only to backtrack a month later and send the group $6.8 million.

The group’s name is highly misleading, as the White Helmets have operated solely in areas controlled by anti-government militants, such as the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front, now called HTS. The actual Syrian civil defense is part of the government, and has been subjected to US sanctions as such. Currently the White Helmets operate solely in the parts of Idlib province controlled by the militants. Photographs of armed militants with “White Helmets” insignia, participating in the Turkish-backed ‘Operation Peace Spring’ against the Kurds in northern Syria, have appeared on social networks over the past two weeks. Still, the US continues to encourage “allies and partners” to join in its support of the White Helmets, and “efforts to protect civilians, religious and ethnic minorities, and other innocent victims of the Syrian conflict,” according to the White House.

In December 2018, the Russia-based Foundation for the Study of Democracy presented evidence of their investigations in Syria, showing the group to be engaged in staging false chemical and other attacks, harvesting organs of the people they pretended to rescue, and looting the bodies of the fallen, among other things.

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Time to clean up the debate.

The Medicare for All Cost Debate Is Extremely Dishonest (Dayen)

Over the weekend in Indianola, Iowa, Elizabeth Warren announced that she would soon roll out specific details for financing Medicare for All, the culmination of a week of “but how will you pay for that” demands from the media and rival presidential candidates. That a nation with millions of uninsured people and tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths from lack of access to health care is consumed with talking about taxes, rather than the revolution in human rights that would come from universal coverage, tells you a lot about life in the United States, and why we still suffer from a broken system.

But this triumph of budgetary scolding is being applied unevenly. If we want to talk about “paying” for universal coverage, we should expand the discussion to all the candidates who claim to support it. While Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and others have howled about cost, there’s a deception at the heart of their own plans: either they put just as much health care costs on the federal government as the Warren-Sanders single-payer model, or they’re effectively useless. Biden and Buttigieg have separately proposed public options that would compete with private insurance. In Biden’s plan, even those with employer-sponsored insurance could opt out and choose the public plan.

Buttigieg would offer subsidies to help people pay for the public option, capping the cost of insurance at 8.5 percent of income. Both explicitly pitch this as a cheaper way to establish universal coverage. But that claim relies on a hide-the-ball scenario. Biden or Buttigieg’s public option, over time, will either serve as a weak alternative to private coverage, with high premiums and substandard coverage. Or, backed by government bargaining power, it will outshine private insurance and gradually supplant it. Buttigieg himself talks about his plan as a “glide path” to Medicare for All.

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Places with mass protests : Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Barcelona, France, London, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Iraq, Guinea, Bolivia, Algeria, Haiti, Egypt, Pakistan, Brazil, Sudan

New addition today: Azerbaijan.

Despite the name, snow leopards and clouded leopards are not closely related to leopards.

Sep 272019
 


Salvador Dali Self-portrait in the studio 1919

 

These Once-Secret Memos Cast Doubt On Joe Biden’s Ukraine Story (Solomon)
Democrats Reveal the Real Purpose of the Impeachment Investigation (PCR)
Chelsea, Reality Hope New Approval Of Whistleblowers Will Set Them Free (Onion)
Wall Street To Dems: We’ll Sit Out, Or Back Trump, If Warren Nominated (CNBC)
Fed Will Need To Grow Its Balance Sheet ‘Permanently’ – Morgan Stanley (CNBC)
US Annual Health Insurance Costs Hit Record High Above $20,000 (BBG)
Quarter Of UK Rural Businesses ‘Could Be Bankrupted By No-Deal Brexit’ (G.)
China’s Giant $400 Billion Iran Investment Complicates US Options (F.)
Yemen’s Houthis Are Bringing Down A Goliath (Escobar)
Spanish Security Company Spied On Julian Assange In London For US (El Pais)
Trump Administration Proposes Historically Low Refugee Limit (AP)

 

 

John Solomon’s account is really important in the impeachment hearings.. And everything he says is documented.

Watched quite a lot of the House hearing yesterday, and thought: this is a circus. Everyone knows Trump is guilty or not before they’ve seen anything, just depending on what party they belong to. And no, no fan of Adam Schiff.

These Once-Secret Memos Cast Doubt On Joe Biden’s Ukraine Story (Solomon)

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine. He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job. There’s just one problem. Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.

And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. [..] Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. [..] the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. [..] In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation.

“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified. “On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.

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“..keeping him under investigation, at least through the November election, will increasingly erode the support of both Trump and the Republican party brand..”

Democrats Reveal the Real Purpose of the Impeachment Investigation (PCR)

The Democrats know that there is no impeachable offense. What they intend to do is to use the investigation to look into every aspect of Trump’s life and try to make dirt out of things unrelated to his talk with the Ukrainian president. This “impeachment investigation” is a political act to help their candidate win the next presidential election. Democrats themselves describe it in this way. For example, here is how Rob Kall, the director of one of the progressive Democrat websites, described the purpose of the investigation: “The idea should be to keep the impeachment going as long as possible, with new testimonies and new releases of disclosures of alleged corruption and treason on a regular basis.

“Looking at impeachment as a process for removing the president is the wrong way of thinking about it. Looking at it as a key that gives access to investigative tools is the smarter, more strategic, way of looking at it. “Ideally, it will get so bad for Trump that the Republicans will end up putting up someone else to run in the general election. “But keeping him under investigation, at least through the November election, will increasingly erode the support of both Trump and the Republican party brand, making a Democratic takeover of the Senate and the White House, and an increased control of the House even more likely.” In other words, it is a political power play.

The outcome depends on whether Americans see the impeachment investigation as another orchestrated hoax like Russiagate or whether they fall for the hoax as they iniatially did with the Russiagate investigation. The United States does not have a media. It has a propaganda ministry that helps the ruling elites control the explanations that Americans are given. Polls show that Americans have lost confidence in the media. If so, the impeachment investigation will backfire on the Democrats.

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Personally, I’m very much torn between tragedy and comedy.

Chelsea, Reality Hope New Approval Of Whistleblowers Will Set Them Free (Onion)

Following a CIA officer’s much-applauded decision to disclose evidence that President Trump urged his Ukrainian counterpart to interfere in the 2020 election, former intelligence analysts Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner expressed confidence Thursday that the nation’s newfound appreciation for whistleblowers would get them out of jail. “Now that everyone really seems to like it when wrongdoing is exposed, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before they clear my name and let me go,” Winner said by phone from a federal prison in Texas, echoing the sentiments of Manning, who told reporters she expected not only to be released from jail but also to be allowed to return immediately to active duty in the Army.


“Americans recognize that what this anonymous whistleblower did was both courageous and patriotic, so I’m sure to be commended for releasing a report on interference in the 2016 election, right? I was ahead of my time, really. I’m not saying there will be a parade in my honor, but I sure wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll be out of here in a day or two, and then, who knows? Maybe I’ll even run for public office.” At press time, sources confirmed a chipper Edward Snowden had informed officials in the Justice Department that he was finally ready to leave Moscow and fly back home.

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The differences in fund-raising amounts are scary. The DNC is going to need Tulsi just for that.

Wall Street To Dems: We’ll Sit Out, Or Back Trump, If Warren Nominated (CNBC)

Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination. In recent weeks, CNBC spoke to several high-dollar Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community and found that this opinion was becoming widely shared as Warren, an outspoken critic of big banks and corporations, gains momentum against Joe Biden in the 2020 race. “You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump,’” said a senior private equity executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity in fear of retribution by party leaders.

The executive said this Wednesday, a day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump. During the campaign, Warren has put out multiple plans intended to curb the influence of Wall Street, including a wealth tax. In July, she released a proposal that would make private equity firms responsible for debts and pension obligations of companies they buy. Trump, meanwhile, has given wealthy business leaders a helping hand with a major corporate tax cut and by eliminating regulations. Warren has sworn off taking part in big money fundraisers for the 2020 presidential primary. She has also promised to not take donations from special interest groups.

She finished raising at least $19 million in the second quarter mainly through small-dollar donors. The third quarter ends Monday. Trump, has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars, putting any eventual 2020 rival in a bind as about 20 Democrats vie for their party’s nomination. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have raised over $100 million in the second quarter. A large portion of that haul came from wealthy donors who gave to their joint fundraising committee, Trump Victory. In August, the RNC raised just over $23 million and has $53 million on hand. The Democratic National Committee have struggled to keep up. The DNC finished August bringing in $7.9 million and has $7.2 million in debt.

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No Greyerz yesterday, MS today. People do understand. But nobody acts.

Fed Will Need To Grow Its Balance Sheet ‘Permanently’ – Morgan Stanley (CNBC)

The Federal Reserve’s asset purchases likely will total $315 billion over the next six months as it seeks to stabilize overnight funding markets and contain the movements of its target interest rate, according to projections from Morgan Stanley. Those permanent moves will be necessary because the current temporary purchases likely won’t be enough to stabilize the market for overnight purchase agreements, or repos, the bank said. The Fed just a month ago halted a process that saw a more than $600 billion reduction of the balance sheet, which consists mostly of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities that it had acquired in its efforts to pull the U.S. economy out of the financial crisis.


“We maintain that these temporary repo operations will not prove to be a sufficient long-term solution to the recent funding pressure,” Morgan Stanley strategist Kelcie Gerson said in a note. “Ultimately, the Fed will need to increase the size of its balance sheet permanently.” The Morgan Stanley forecast is a bit smaller than one recently from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which estimated balance sheet expansion at $400 billion this year. The balance sheet currently stands about $3.9 trillion, pushed by three rounds of asset purchases in a process known as quantitative easing. Starting in October 2017, the Fed started allowing some proceeds from its maturing bonds to roll off each month, with a corresponding decrease of bank reserves that has taken the total down to about $1.5 trillion, the lowest in more than eight years.

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Another issue that nobody acts upon.

US Annual Health Insurance Costs Hit Record High Above $20,000 (BBG)

The cost of family health coverage in the U.S. now tops $20,000, an annual survey of employers found, a record high that has pushed an increasing number of American workers into plans that cover less or cost more, or force them out of the insurance market entirely. “It’s as much as buying a basic economy car,” said Drew Altman, chief executive officer of the Kaiser Family Foundation, “but buying it every year.” The nonprofit health research group conducts the yearly survey of coverage that people get through work, the main source of insurance in the U.S. for people under age 65. While employers pay most of the costs of coverage, according to the survey, workers’ average contribution is now $6,000 for a family plan.


That’s just their share of upfront premiums, and doesn’t include co-payments, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing once they need care. The seemingly inexorable rise of costs has led to deep frustration with U.S. health care, prompting questions about whether a system where coverage is tied to a job can survive. As premiums and deductibles have increased in the last two decades, the percentage of workers covered has slipped as employers dropped coverage and some workers chose not to enroll. Fewer Americans under 65 had employer coverage in 2017 than in 1999, according to a separate Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of federal data. That’s despite the fact that the U.S. economy employed 17 million more people in 2017 than in 1999.

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Yeah, it’s the Guardian, and yeah, it may be a little less bad than they say, but the Tories’ lack of preparedness for what they themselves promote is nuts regardless.

Quarter Of UK Rural Businesses ‘Could Be Bankrupted By No-Deal Brexit’ (G.)

As many as one in four rural businesses could be left facing bankruptcy in a no-deal Brexit, and the staunchly Conservative rural vote may be in doubt as a result, the head of the UK’s landowners’ group has warned on the eve of the Tory party conference. Farmers are particularly vulnerable to a no-deal Brexit because tariffs would be levied on exports, imports of cheap food could flood the market, and because decisions must be made now which will have an impact for the next year. Arable farmers are putting crops in the ground now for spring, and livestock farmers are preparing to breed sheep and other livestock for next year.


Tim Breitmeyer, president of the Country Land and Business Association, said farms and the rural businesses that rely on them were not in a position to absorb the shock of Brexit, and estimates suggested a large number would be in danger. “Agriculture is not making very much money. In many cases, they’re losing [money] without the single farm payment [subsidy]. If you have a tariff to add to your problems, if you have increased costs to add to your problems, it’s only going to make matters worse and tip some businesses over the top,” he told the Guardian. “Now I don’t know whether that’s 15% or 25% but I’m absolutely sure there will be quite a few farming businesses for which it actually just tips them into receivership.”

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China was never going to let Iran fall. But now Trump’s sanctions policies drive it straight into Beijing hands: “Chinese firms will maintain the right of the first refusal to participate in any and all petrochemical projects in Iran, including the provision of technology, systems, process ingredients and personnel required to complete such projects.”

China’s Giant $400 Billion Iran Investment Complicates US Options (F.)

Amidst historic U.S. – Iran tensions, Beijing is doubling-down on its strategic partnership with Tehran, ignoring U.S. efforts to isolate the Islamic Republic from global markets. Following an August visit by Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to Beijing, the two countries agreed to update a 25-year program signed in 2016, to include an unprecedented $400 billion of investment in the Iranian economy – sanctions be damned. The capital injection, which would focus on Iran’s oil and gas sector, would also be distributed across the country’s transportation and manufacturing infrastructure. In return, Chinese firms will maintain the right of the first refusal to participate in any and all petrochemical projects in Iran, including the provision of technology, systems, process ingredients and personnel required to complete such projects.


According to an exclusive interview with Petroleum Economist, a senior source in Iran’s petrochemical sector had this to say about the new agreement: “The central pillar of the new deal is that China will invest $280 billion developing Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals sectors… there will be another $120 billion investment in upgrading Iran’s transport and manufacturing infrastructure, which again can be front-loaded into the first five-year period and added to in each subsequent period should both parties agree.” This comes at a time when Washington is exerting its so-called ‘maximum pressure’ strategy against Iran, which aims to change its international behavior by bringing oil exports down to zero.

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Makes me think of how Britain fought back vs Germany, and Viernam vs the US. Once your entire economy moves into self-defense mode, -almost- anything is possible.

Yemen’s Houthis Are Bringing Down A Goliath (Escobar)

“It is clear to us that Iran bears responsibility for this attack. There is no other plausible explanation. We support ongoing investigations to establish further details.” The statement above was not written by Franz Kafka. In fact, it was written by a Kafka derivative: Brussels-based European bureaucracy. The Merkel-Macron-Johnson trio, representing Germany, France and the UK, seems to know what no “ongoing investigation” has unearthed: that Tehran was definitively responsible for the twin aerial strikes on Saudi oil installations. “There is no other plausible explanation” translates as the occultation of Yemen. Yemen only features as the pounding ground of a vicious Saudi war, de facto supported by Washington and London and conducted with US and UK weapons, which has generated a horrendous humanitarian crisis.

So Iran is the culprit, no evidence provided, end of story, even if the “investigation continues.” Hassan Ali Al-Emad, Yemeni scholar and the son of a prominent tribal leader with ascendance over ten clans, begs to differ. “From a military perspective, nobody ever took our forces in Yemen seriously. Perhaps they started understanding it when our missiles hit Aramco.” [..] “Past Yemeni governments had missiles, but after 9/11 Yemen was banned from buying weapons from Russia. But we still had 400 missiles in warehouses in South Yemen. We used 200 Scuds – the rest is still there [laughs].”

Al-Emad breaks down Houthi weaponry into three categories: the old missile stock; cannibalized missiles using different spare parts (“transformation made in Yemen”); and those with new technology that use reverse engineering. He stressed: “We accept help from everybody,” which suggests that not only Tehran and Hezbollah are pitching in. Al-Emad’s key demand is actually humanitarian: “We request that Sana’a airport be reopened for help to the Yemeni people.” And he has a message for global public opinion that the EU-3 are obviously not aware of: “Saudi is collapsing and America is embracing it in its fall.”

On the energy front, Persian Gulf energy traders that I have relied upon as trustworthy sources for two decades confirm that, contrary to Saudi Oil Minister Abdulazziz bin Salman’s spin, the damage from the Houthi attack on Abqaiq could last not only “months” but even years. As a Dubai-based trader put it: “When an Iraqi pipeline was damaged in the mid-2000s the pumps were destroyed. It takes two years to replace a pump as the backlogs are long. The Saudis, to secure their pipelines, acquired spare pumps for this reason. But they did not dream that Abqaiq could be damaged. If you build a refinery it can take three to five years if not more.

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“The secret probe is the consequence of a criminal complaint filed by Assange himself, in which he accuses Morales and the company of the alleged offenses involving violations of his privacy and the secrecy of his client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.”

Spanish Security Company Spied On Julian Assange In London For US (El Pais)

Undercover Global S. L., the Spanish defense and private security company that was charged with protecting the Ecuadorian embassy in London during the long stay there of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, spied on the cyberactivist for the US intelligence service. That’s according to statements and documents to which EL PAÍS have had access. David Morales, the owner of the company, supposedly handed over audio and video to the CIA of the meetings Assange held with his lawyers and collaborators. Morales is being investigated for this activity by Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional.

The judicial investigation into the director of UC Global S. L. and the activities of his company were ordered by a judge named José de la Mata, and they began weeks after EL PAÍS published videos, audios and reports that show how the company spied on the meetings that the cyberactivist held in the embassy. The secret probe is the consequence of a criminal complaint filed by Assange himself, in which he accuses Morales and the company of the alleged offenses involving violations of his privacy and the secrecy of his client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.

Morales, a former member of the military who is on leave of absence, stated both verbally and in writing to a number of his employees that, despite having been hired by the government of then-Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, he also worked “for the Americans,” to whom he allegedly sent documents, videos and audios of the meetings that the Australian activist held in the embassy. “We are playing in another league. This is the first division,” he told his closest colleagues after attending a security fair in the US city of Las Vegas in 2015 where he supposedly made his first American contacts. Despite the fact that the Spanish firm – which is headquartered in the southern city of Jerez de la Frontera – was hired by Senain, the Ecuadorian intelligence services, Morales called on his employees several times to keep his relationship with the US intelligence services a secret.

The owner of UC Global S. L. ordered a meeting between the head of the Ecuadorian secret service, Rommy Vallejo, and Assange to be spied on, at a time when they were planning the exit of Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy using a diplomatic passport in order to take him to another country. This initiative was eventually rejected by Assange on the basis that he considered it to be “a defeat,” that would fuel conspiracy theories, according to sources close to the company consulted by this newspaper. The meeting took place on December 21, 2017 in the meeting room of the diplomatic building and was recorded both on video and audio by cameras installed by Morales’ employees.

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This is absolutely nuts. You need 100,000 at the very least, or mayhem will ensue. And the US can easily absorb those numbers. There are a million people coming, minimum, each year.

Trump Administration Proposes Historically Low Refugee Limit (AP)

The Trump administration wants to cap the number of refugees admitted into the United States to the lowest number since the resettlement program was created in 1980. A State Department proposal released Thursday would put a cap on the number of refugees at 18,000 for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. Of those refugee admissions spots, 5,000 would be set aside for persecuted religious minorities — an attempt to bolster President Donald Trump’s heightened focus on global religious freedom — and 1,500 would be set aside for nationals of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, who are seeking asylum in the United States in far greater numbers.


Last year, the administration placed the cap at a record low of 30,000. The historically low limits have drawn protests from human rights groups as well as government officials. “To cut the number of refugees the U.S. will accept to this low of a number reflects nothing more than this administration’s attempts to further hate, division and prejudice in a country that once valued dignity, equality and fairness,” said Ryan Mace, Grassroots Advocacy and Refugee Specialist at Amnesty International USA. The group dismissed arguments that the U.S. lacks the capacity to adequately vet and settle refugees, calling this “a purely political decision.”

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Whistleblowers: WikiLeaks has never revealed a source.

 

 

 

 

 

Aug 262018
 


Vincent van Gogh Starry night over the Rhône 1888

 

The Real John McCain (Kerwick)
Steele or Assange: Who Really Deserves 1st Amendment Protection? (Machon)
Trump: 5-Year Prison Sentence for Whistleblower Reality Winner ‘Unfair’ (TIME)
Cohen’s Plea Deal Is Prosecutor’s Attempt To Set Up Trump (Hill)
Europe Must Save The British From Themselves On Brexit (IT)
Ending The Fiscal-Monetary Tug-o-War (NEF)
Greece’s “Bailout” Was a Disaster for Greece (Klein)
Greece Remains A Debtor’s Prison, The EU Won’t Let Go Of The Keys (Varoufakis)
US Study Shows How Austerity Devastated Greece’s Health (UoW)
Italy Disembarks Stranded Migrants, Salvini Under Investigation (R.)
Time Is Running Out For The Pope To Pacify The Faithful’s Anger (O.)

 

 

I was going to leave McCain in peace. I strongly believe in not kicking a man when he’s down, and besides there’s already so much anger out there. I’ve always thought that perhaps as a POW he suffered some kind of brain damage. But I still can’t get the image out of my head of him singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” And then seeing people refer to him as an “unparalleled example of human decency”. It’s too much.

The Real John McCain (Kerwick)

McCain is not alone in having their blood on his hands. Yet in a Regime, a Government-Media-Complex, comprised of warmongers, McCain enjoys the dubious distinction of being the warmonger par excellence. On the false pretense that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat against the United States via the “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) that he never possessed, McCain urged as loudly and tirelessly as anyone for war. Those libertarians and old right conservative sorts who exposed holes in the WMD narrative and forecasted the disaster to which such a war would lead were dismissed, ignored, or mocked. Estimates of casualties vary, but today, some 14 years after McCain got his way, anywhere between 195,000 and possibly one million Iraqis are dead.

The Iraq Body Count project found that during the decade following the invasion, 174,000 Iraqis were killed. Of this number, 112,000-123,000 were civilian noncombatants. At present, the number is closer to 200,000 civilian noncombatant deaths. Between 2003 and 2014, nearly 5,000 American service members lost their lives in this war that McCain and his ilk cooked on the basis of a lie. Yet contractors, aid relief workers, and journalists are also among those who lost their lives. While we can tabulate numbers, the pain, suffering, and trauma endured by the loved ones of those killed is incalculable. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and American corpses that McCain and his comrades left in the wake of their rush to war, there are that many more who have lived but who suffer daily.

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Annie Machon is a former MI5 agent. She makes some very good points. One of them: Assange doesn’t get 1st amendment protection because he’s not American. Steele does get it even though he’s British.

Steele or Assange: Who Really Deserves 1st Amendment Protection? (Machon)

Steele has won a legal case in the USA, where he had been sued by three Russian oligarchs who claimed that the ‘Dirty Dossier’ traduced their reputations. And he won on the basis that his report was protected by First Amendment rights under the constitution of the USA, which guarantees US citizens the right to freedom of expression. Despite the fact that Steele is British. “But Judge Anthony Epstein disagreed, writing in his judgment that “advocacy on issues of public interest has the capacity to inform public debate, and thereby furthers the purposes of the First Amendment, regardless of the citizenship or residency of the speakers.”

This is the nub of the issue: Steele, a former official UK intelligence officer and current mercenary spy-for-hire, is granted legal protection by the American courts for digging up and subsequently leaking what appears to be controversial and defamatory information about the current US president as well as various Russians, all paid for by Trump’s political opponents. And Steele is given the full protection of the US legal system. On the other hand, we have an award-winning journalist and publisher, Assange, whose organization WikiLeaks has never been found to report anything factually incorrect in more than 10 years, being told that if he were to be extradited from his current political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to face the full wrath of a vengeful American establishment, he is not entitled to claim the protection of the First Amendment because he is an Australian citizen, not an American.

[..] On a slightly tangential note, there has been some speculation, suppressed in the UK at least via the D Notice censorship system, that MI6 informant and Russian traitor Sergei Skripal, the victim of the alleged Novichok poisoning in the UK earlier this year, remained in contact with his alleged handler Pablo Miller, who also is reported to work for Orbis Business Intelligence. If this were indeed the case, then it would be a logical assumption that Orbis, via Miller, might well have used Skripal as one of its “reliable sources” for the Dossier.

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Winner is definitely not a fan of Trump.

Trump: 5-Year Prison Sentence for Whistleblower Reality Winner ‘Unfair’ (TIME)

President Donald Trump said NSA whistleblower Reality Winner‘s five-year prison sentence for leaking a classified document to the media was “unfair” – and he used the assertion to again attack Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In a Friday morning tweet, Trump called Winner’s leaks “‘small potatoes’ compared to what Hillary Clinton did,” referring to his repeated accusations that his rival in the 2016 election had broken the law in her use of a private email server while Secretary of State. The tweet also marks the second time in two days that Trump has lashed out at Sessions, following remarks he made Wednesday saying his Attorney General “never took control of the Justice Department.”

“So unfair Jeff, Double Standard,” Trump wrote Friday. The attacks on Sessions come directly after Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and implicated the President in campaign financing crimes.Winner, an ex-NSA contractor, leaked classified government information to a news organization in 2017. That news organization was never officially identified in court proceedings, however on the same day Winner was arrested the investigative site The Intercept released a report detailing a Russian attempt to influence voting in the 2016 election. Trump’s apparent support for Winner is contrary to his insistence that Edward Snowden, another former NSA employee who leaked secret information to the media, is a “traitor.”

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No agreement on whether Cohen violated anything other then laws linked to his own business. Payments to mistresses may be perfectly legal.

Cohen’s Plea Deal Is Prosecutor’s Attempt To Set Up Trump (Hill)

Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the Paul Manafort bin reserved by the special counsel for squeezing until the juice comes out. We are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.

The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who does not try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump to corporations for millions of dollars while acting as his lawyer, and did not pay taxes on millions.

The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures. That is true for both candidates we like and candidates we do not. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs. They would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion.

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Germny, Greece, UK.

Europe Must Save The British From Themselves On Brexit (IT)

[Keynes in 1919 on the Treaty of Versailles] : “The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable – abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.”

[..] Just as British civil servants, especially in the treasury and foreign office, never thought for a second that Germany would meet the demands of Versailles, I can’t believe anybody at the ECB or IMF thinks there is a chance that they will get back what Greece apparently owes them. According to some experts, Germany ended up paying back less then one-sixth of what was demanded in 1919. The withdrawal agreement that the United Kingdom may or may not negotiate over the next few weeks will not bear such close resemblance to those postwar reparations. At least Germany – and, more recently, Greece – tried to limit the damage being inflicted by the other side of the table.

Today the UK negotiators turn up for talks goaded by the Brexiteers to do as bad a deal as possible, to inflict as much damage as they can on themselves. If Keynes were alive today he would write another scathing polemic. The EU has a big call to make. Having crushed the Greeks, does it now do the same to the British? Does it accede to their weird demands for a dreadful deal? How much should it punish the Brexiteers for their idiocy?

Brussels is looking at opponents squabbling over whether to shoot themselves in the foot or the head. Are EU leaders, unlike their 1919 counterparts, able to see that the time for (limited) generosity has arrived? They have the opportunity to save the British from themselves. Why would they do this? The Versailles negotiators couldn’t see that it was in their own interests not to overly punish the Germans. Europe today runs too many risks from an enfeebled and resentful UK. Europe needs to remind itself of the civilising zeal of the EU’s founders and the values of the Enlightenment. Or, at the very least, the value of enlightened self-interest.

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The Bank of England and the Treasury move in opposite directions.

Ending The Fiscal-Monetary Tug-o-War (NEF)

For some time now our two most influential economic institutions -the Bank of England and the Treasury – have been pulling in opposite directions. The Bank has tried to do its job of boosting aggregate demand (spending), but the Treasury has been running fiscal austerity, which has the opposite effect. The great irony is that through its monetary policy stimulus the Bank of England has opened up significant ‘fiscal space’. ‘Fiscal space’is a term used by the IMF to describe the extent to which national governments can take on more public borrowing without harming their economy. This begs the question whether the Treasury has acted irresponsibly by not taking full advantage of the fiscal potential the Bank affords it?

Without fiscal cooperation, the Bank is left trying to stimulate the economy on its own by indirectly influencing the borrowing and spending behaviour of the private sector. To this end, the Bank has lowered interest rates to historic lows, and has injected £445 billion and £125 billion of new money through so called Quantitative Easing (QE) and the Term Funding Scheme (TFS), respectively. In doing so, the Bank has helped keep the economy afloat – but at what cost? Standalone monetary policy has reduced the number of safe assets in the market, supported more risk taking, encouraged households to take on more debt (to record levels), fuelled asset price bubbles, and promoted inequality. To boot, very little of the new money created by the Bank has trickled down into productive investments and household incomes.

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We are finally waking up. But it’s way too late.

Greece’s “Bailout” Was a Disaster for Greece (Klein)

Had Greece been a country with its own currency, such as the Czech Republic or New Zealand, the central bank could have plugged the funding gap and prevented an abrupt collapse in spending. Membership in the euro area removed that option. The government and the banks owed debt in a currency the Bank of Greece could not print, and the ECB was not keen on helping. The textbook response would have been for the government to default on its debt and get a loan from the International Monetary Fund to help smooth out the adjustment. The amount of money required to buy time after a restructuring would not have been large compared with the nearly €300 billion that ended up being lent.

That option was blocked, however, by a coalition of Greece’s “European partners” and the U.S. They were still traumatized by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and had come to believe that its default had made the financial crisis far worse than it otherwise would have been. The result was a firm commitment to avoid any reduction in what the Greek government owed. Their concern was not about what a default would do to Greece, but about what it would do to them. In addition to the €230 billion in potential losses on government debt, which by itself might have been enough to wipe out the capital of many large European banks, foreigners had another €120 billion in exposure to Greek banks. Greek banks did not have much exposure to Greek government debt—only about 8% of total assets in 2009—but it was still more than their total capital and loan-loss reserves.

Restructuring the government’s debt would therefore have required either the partial liquidation of the Greek banking system or an explicit bailout of Greece’s banks paid by someone else. Again, this should have been doable, but U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet were terrified about how it might affect the still-fragile Euro-American financial system. [..] There was no political will in 2010 to spend hundreds of billions of euros to bail out Dutch, French, and German banks. To Greece’s eternal misfortune, however, there was enough “solidarity” to launder that Northern European bank bailout through the Greek government.

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“..it was decided that the Greek government could not be allowed to tell the truth..”

Greece Remains A Debtor’s Prison, The EU Won’t Let Go Of The Keys (Varoufakis)

On the European continent, a far worse drama was unfolding due to the EU’s odd decision, back in 1998, to create monetary union featuring a European Central Bank without a state to support it politically and 19 governments responsible for salvaging their banks in times of financial tumult, but without a central bank to aid them. Why this anomalous arrangement? Because the German condition for swapping the deutschmark for the euro was a total ban on any central bank financing of banks or governments – Italian or Greek, say. So, when in 2009 the French and German banks proved even more insolvent than those of Wall Street or the City, there was no central bank with the legal authority, or backed by the political will, to save them.

Thus, in 2009, even Germany’s Chancellor Merkel panicked when told that her government had to inject, overnight, €406bn of taxpayers’ money into the German banks. Alas, it was not enough. A few months later, Mrs Merkel’s aides informed her that, just like the German banks, the over-indebted Greek state was finding it impossible to roll over its debt. Had it declared its bankruptcy, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal would follow suit, with the result that Berlin and Paris would have faced a fresh bailout of their banks greater than €1tn. At that point, it was decided that the Greek government could not be allowed to tell the truth, that is, confess to its bankruptcy.

To maintain the lie, insolvent Athens was given, under the smokescreen of “solidarity with the Greeks”, the largest loan in human history, to be passed on immediately to the German and French banks. To pacify angry German parliamentarians, that gargantuan loan was given on condition of brutal austerity for the Greek people, placing them in a permanent great depression. To get a feel for the devastation that ensued, imagine what would have happened in the UK if RBS, Lloyds and the other City banks had been rescued without the help of the Bank of England and solely via foreign loans to the exchequer. All granted on the condition that UK wages would be reduced by 40%, pensions by 45%, the minimum wage by 30%, NHS spending by 32%. The UK would now be the wasteland of Europe, just as Greece is today.

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How to devastate an entire population.

US Study Shows How Austerity Devastated Greece’s Health (UoW)

A new study by a School of Dentistry faculty member and dozens of other researchers from the University of Washington and around the world has found that Greece’s population health declined markedly and death rates rose sharply after harsh austerity measures were imposed on Greece by the European Union and the International Money Fund in 2010. “This study is important because it provides a framework for health surveillance on a national level following major socioeconomic changes,” said Dr. Georgios Kotsakis of the School of Dentistry’s Department of Periodontics, one of the study’s authors. The study, which was published this week in the British journal The Lancet Public Health, reported that government health spending fell sharply and that the causes of death that increased the most were largely those that could have been addressed by health care.

The researchers noted that Greece’s reduced health spending, required as part of the austerity measures, had been criticized for omitting measures to protect the country’s National Health System. They said that health policymakers should place a special focus on ensuring that Greece’s health-care system is equipped to meet the needs of the country’s citizens. The researchers identified an increase in the pace at which Greece’s population was aging as another important concern and wrote: “The increase in total deaths in children younger than 5 years and older adults with increase in causes sensitive to resource availability (e.g., access to screening and urgent care) suggest that the health system requires substantial restructuring to cope with the effects that the financial crisis has had on resource availability, resource allocation, and population structure.”

They reported that while the country’s overall death rate rose by about 5.6 percent from 2000 to 2010, it jumped by about 17.7 percent in the six years that followed, after austerity measures were imposed. The rate rose three times faster than the rate in Western Europe overall, and came at a time when mortality rates were actually declining worldwide. The largest increase came among people 70 and older, while the very young also saw a disproportionate increase.

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Yeah, but it’s only until the next ship tries to dock.

Italy Disembarks Stranded Migrants, Salvini Under Investigation (R.)

Italy on Sunday disembarked all 150 migrants from a rescue ship that had been docked for five days in a Sicilian port, ending the migrants’ ordeal and a bitter stand-off between Rome’s anti-establishment government and its European Union partners. The migrants, mainly from Eritrea, had been stranded in the port of Catania since Monday because the government refused to let them off the boat until other EU states agreed to take some of them in. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Albania had offered to accept 20 of the migrants and Ireland 20-25, while the rest would be housed by Italy’s Catholic Church “at zero cost” to the Italian taxpayer.

“The church has opened its heart and opened its wallet,” Salvini, from the right-wing League party, told supporters at a rally in Pinzolo in northern Italy on Saturday evening. Salvini, who has led a popular crackdown against immigration since the government took office in June, also announced that he had been placed under investigation by a Sicilian prosecutor for abuse of office, kidnapping and illegal arrest. “Being investigated for defending the rights of Italians is a disgrace,” he said. On Saturday, the United Nations called for reason from all sides after a meeting of envoys from 10 EU states in Brussels a day earlier failed to break the deadlock. “Frightened people who may be in need of international protection should not be caught in the maelstrom of politics,” the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement.

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The Vatican is a huge business empire disguised as a religion. That why there will never be a thorough investigation.

Time Is Running Out For The Pope To Pacify The Faithful’s Anger (O.)

Wave after wave of scandal concerning decades of abuse by priests and cover-up by bishops has crashed at the doors of the Vatican this year. The issue threatens to derail Francis’s papacy unless he can belatedly show that he does not just understand the scale and systemic nature of the problem but is willing to take concrete action to deal with it. The past few weeks alone have seen the publication of a shocking grand jury report into clerical abuse and its concealment in Pennsylvania, the resignation as a cardinal of a former archbishop of Washington over alleged sexual assaults, a police raid on the Catholic church’s HQ in Chile, the sentencing of an Australian archbishop convicted of covering up child abuse, and a growing clamour from Irish survivors for the pope to take responsibility for these failings.

More scandals and revelations may be looming. Cardinal George Pell, the third-ranking official in the Vatican and an ally of Pope Francis, is facing legal proceedings in Australia relating to allegations of historic sexual offences. Early next year, the trial will begin in France of two cardinals on charges of concealing sexual abuse. “This is a potential tipping point, not just for Francis’s papacy, but in the Catholic church writ large,” said John Allen, editor of the Catholic magazine Crux and a Vatican expert. “Ordinary Mass-going Catholics are saying that when this first blew up, and for a long time afterwards, they stuck with the church, because people in power were saying, ‘we understand how awful this is, it has to be fixed and we’re going to fix it’. What is punching Catholics in the gut right now is the thought that what they were told about the determination to get this sorted simply wasn’t real.”

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