Mar 112023
 


Henri Matisse Young Woman at the Window, Sunset 1921

Andrew Korybko:

Reuters reported on Wednesday that “India’s Oil Deals With Russia Dent Decades-Old Dollar Dominance”, which informed their audience that the growing trend of those two using national or third-party currencies like the UAE’s is something significant for everyone to pay attention to. To that outlet’s credit, it also reminded readers that IMF Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath foresaw in the month after Russia’s special operation began that the West’s sanctions “could erode the dollar’s dominance”.

Lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened, with India of all countries accelerating de-dollarization through its non-dollar-denominated energy deals with Russia. About them, Russia has since become India’s largest supplier over the past year and now provides a whopping 35% of that country’s needs, which is also the world’s third-largest oil importer and fifth-largest economy. Their new energy ties, and particularly the growing de-dollarization dimension of their deals, are thus globally important.

None of what was just described is driven by any anti-American animus on India’s part since everything is purely motivated by the pursuit of that country’s objective national interests. Delhi had no choice but to gradually diversify away from dollar-denominated energy deals with Moscow due to Washington’s illegal sanctions. Its multipolar leadership wasn’t going to let the world’s most populous country slip into an economic crisis just to please the US by eschewing the import of discounted oil from Russia.

By defying American pressure upon it to unilaterally concede on those aforementioned objective national interests, India’s economy ended up growing at twice the pace of China’s, which contributed to catapulting that country to the forefront of the global systemic transition to multipolarity. Amidst the impending trifurcation of International Relations, India is now poised to de facto lead the Global South in helping fellow developing countries balance between the Golden Billion and the Sino-Russo Entente.

Had India complied with the US’ illegal sanctions, then the New York Times wouldn’t have recently admitted that those restrictions failed just like the West’s efforts to “isolate” Russia did as well. It was largely due to that South Asian Great Power’s truly independent grand strategy that this latest phase of the New Cold War didn’t decisively end in the Golden Billion’s victory over Russia and the restoration of unipolarity, which would have been detrimental to India and every other developing country’s interests.

India therefore changed the course of history by remaining committed to the pursuit of its objective national interests, which to remind everyone, aren’t driven by any desire to harm the interests of third parties like the US. Its leading role in de-dollarization via its increasing number of non-dollar-denominated energy deals with Russia is also reshaping the global financial system by reducing that currency’s prior dominance and thus leading to a more multipolar state of affairs for everyone.

Even the US itself seems to have finally accepted that it can’t reverse this trend, which is evidenced by former Indian Ambassador to Russia Kanwal Sibal recently telling TASS that “Lately, the discourse from Washington has changed and India is no longer being asked to stop buying oil from Russia. In a recent visit to India, the US Treasury Secretary actually said that India can buy discounted oil from Russia as much as it wants so long as western tankers and insurance companies are not used.”

Nevertheless, radical liberalglobalist ideologues like Color Revolution mastermind George Soros are still desperately clinging to the dream of restoring the US’ rapidly declining unipolar hegemony, hence why he de facto declared Hybrid War against India during the Munich Security Conference last month. It remains unclear whether he and his network have enough support in the Western Establishment to advance that regime change agenda, but his threat is still worrisome and should be taken seriously.

Reuters’ latest report about India’s role in accelerating de-dollarization might fuel interest among likeminded “Western Exceptionalists” in supporting his de facto Hybrid War against that country so observers should closely monitor related developments in order to assess whether this happens. In any case, those who sincerely support multipolarity should loudly applaud India for its indispensable role in comprehensively facilitating this process, especially its financial dimension as described in this analysis.

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Feb 182023
 
 February 18, 2023  Posted by at 10:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The dream 1951

 

Seymour Hersh’s Trinity of Truth (Scott Ritter)
Seymour Hersh Believes Betting On Ukraine’s Victory ‘Suicidal’ (TASS)
‘Ukraine Would Have Wiped Out Donbass Last Year If Not For Russia’ (TASS)
Food For Thought (Gonzalo Lira)
NATO Involvement In Ukrainian Conflict Is Maximal – Zakharova (TASS)
Ukraine ‘Peace Petition’ Backed By Nearly Half A Million Germans (RT)
No Sense In Signing Any Agreements With Zelensky – Medvedev (TASS)
Moscow Warns EU Over Seized Assets (RT)
Oh Lightning, I Command Thee To Smite My Foe! (Kunstler)
George Soros Is Defending The Unipolar World Order, Not Freedom (Blankenship)
EU Parliament Blocks Scrutiny of Von der Leyen Over Pfizer Contract (Pol.eu)
Nancy Pelosi’s Daughter Caught on Tape Refuting J6 Narrative (GP)
Too Slow And Too Secret? Pace of Staley Investigation Undermines Trust (G.)
Trump Announces Upcoming Visit to East Palestine, FEMA Reverses Course {(CTH)

 

 

 

 

Galloway Ritter

 

 

 

 

Putin 2019

 

 

No more boosters in the UK.

 

 

And Idaho is putting it a bit stronger even.

 

 

Maersheimer

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..Sy Hersh, through his reporting, has exposed truths which have the potential of bringing down a presidency, destroying NATO, and proving Russia right in the eyes of the world..”

Seymour Hersh’s Trinity of Truth (Scott Ritter)

I’ve read nearly everything Sy Hersh has written, and am able to put his considerable journalistic output in its proper historical perspective. It is therefore that I feel very comfortable in concluding that, in terms of its potential for bringing about tectonic geopolitical change, Sy’s Nord Stream reporting is his most important work ever. The GOAT has produced what I call the Trinity of Truth. Truth One: The President of the United States, Joe Biden, by conspiring with members of his national security team to deliberately bypass constitutionally-mandated reporting requirements to Congress regarding acts of war undertaken by the United States, has committed an impeachable offense unmatched by any other president in the history of the United States.

Truth Two: The blow-back that will occur inside Germany to the revelations put forward by Seymour Hersh that the United States carried out an economic Pearl Harbor by destroying energy infrastructure critical to the well-being of the German nation has the potential of breaking up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), upending more than eighty years of post-war European security and stability, and resulting in the diminishment of the United States on the world stage as it becomes isolated from long-time European allies that served as the foundation of the global acceptance of the so-called “rules based international order” that has served as the means by which the United States exerted global hegemony.

Truth Three: The decision to attack the Nord Stream pipeline puts a lie to the US contention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked act of aggression, instead underscoring the harsh truth that the United States had a strategic plan which hinged on provoking a conflict with Russia in Ukraine to provide the geopolitical cover for ending Europe’s reliance upon cheap Russian natural gas by demonstrating that every time Russia sought a negotiated end to the crisis, whether before the invasion through implementation of the Minsk Accords, or after in the Istanbul round of talks scheduled for April 1, the United States sabotaged the effort, keeping the conflict alive long enough to implement its major objective—the destruction of Nord Stream. In short, Sy Hersh, through his reporting, has exposed truths which have the potential of bringing down a presidency, destroying NATO, and proving Russia right in the eyes of the world.

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“..It’s impossible to believe how just dumb this leadership was. <…> And then they stick to the war..”

Seymour Hersh Believes Betting On Ukraine’s Victory ‘Suicidal’ (TASS)

The US administration’s hopes for Ukraine’s victory in the conflict with Russia are ‘suicidal,’ US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview with the Consortium News portal. “It was suicidal to think you can win that war, that Ukraine can win that war. There’s just too much corruption. That was a very, very bad decision. We should have been pushing for peace, we should have made an agreement,” said Hersh, who earlier published his findings about explosions targeting Russia’s Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines. “It’s just silly not to right away assure the Russian government that we were not interested in making Ukraine a member of NATO. NATO didn’t want Ukraine anyway because of the corruption. There were just so many bad mistakes made. It’s impossible to believe how just dumb this leadership was. <…> And then they stick to the war,” he said.


On February 8, Hersh wrote in an article, citing sources, that US Navy divers had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the cover of the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022 and Norwegians activated the bombs three months later. According to the journalist, the decision to conduct the operation was made by US President Joe Biden personally, following nine months of discussions with White House security specialists. White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a comment to TASS that Hersh’s account was utterly false and complete fiction.

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“700-800 rounds of ammunition per day flew into the republic.”

‘Ukraine Would Have Wiped Out Donbass Last Year If Not For Russia’ (TASS)

Ukraine would have levelled the Donbass republics a year ago if Russia had not intervened in time by recognizing the Lugansk and the Donetsk People’s Republics and launching its special military operation, Former LPR ambassador to Moscow Rodion Miroshnik said on Friday. “Exactly one year ago, the Ukrainian regime began artillery preparations before attacking Donbass! A 150,000-soldier group, armed and trained by NATO, was preparing to sweep away the Donbass. And if it were not for Russia’s decision to start a special military operation, we would have simply been levelled,” he wrote on his Telegram channel on the anniversary of the beginning of the escalation of the situation in the Donbass, “And neither the UN nor the OSCE would have noticed it.”


Miroshnik recalled that from February 17 to 24, when the Russian Federation began its special military operation, the Ukrainian armed forces fired 551 shells on the LPR territory. At that time, he recalled, “700-800 rounds of ammunition per day flew into the republic.” There were attempts to break through the defense, as well as casualties among civilians. Also on Friday, Miroshnik drew attention to the fact that a year ago, neither the guarantors (of the Minsk agreements) – France and Germany – nor the UN General Assembly had forced Kiev to fulfill its obligations. At that time, the republics understood that the clock was ticking as the Ukrainian military could wipe out the DPR and the LPR cities, so the emergency evacuation began. “But the world prefers not to see this and starts counting from February 24,” he pointed out.

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Twitter thread.

“They see the West as a paper tiger, run by fools and degenerates.”

Food For Thought (Gonzalo Lira)

I’ve been talking to a number of acquaintances in Russia. These are well-educated professionals who speak English fluently, many of whom have lived/worked in the US/Europe. Some are highly critical of Putin, and many were very much opposed to the SMO. Some observations. They are universally shocked at the racist Russophobia, from Europe especially. “I thought they were our friends/partners!” is a common complaint. They don’t understand why Europe destroyed its own economy with the sanctions. (There’s quite a bit of schadenfreude over that. They don’t understand why the Germans are not reacting to the Nord Stream terrorist attack. They see it as self-evident that the Americans did it—an act of war by one of Germany’s closest ally.

They have zero trust in the Europeans—because of the Russophobia and revelations. Hollande and Merkel have publicly bragged about how the Minsk agreements were entered into to buy time to arm Kiev. This has had a huge impact on them. So they won’t accept any negotiations or ceasefire. They all think Russia would be played for fools again by the West. Even the “doves” believe that the conflict can only end in total victory, i.e. complete military occupation of Ukraine. They don’t look forward to this—but they believe it is the only solution to guarantee Russian safety. They all view this conflict as a Russia vs. NATO war. And they all believe this war will last for years. There is a palpable sense of determination and *relief* that they too—like their grandfathers before—are involved in an existential war for the survival of their nation.

They one and all despise the Russians who fled to Europe, Israel and Georgia. They view them as fair-weather friends at best—traitors at worst. They all made it clear that they would not be welcomed back at the end of this conflict. Even the “doves” respect Putin, and they laugh at the idea of “regime change in Russia”. The principal criticism of Putin is that he’s been too gentle, too patient. Many (not all) would prefer a scorched earth, total war campaign, specifically targeting the Kiev leadership. All in all, they are satisfied with their leadership. Lavrov was universally praised, Peskov the one least respected. Shoigu, Gerasimov and Surovikin were all endorsed, though they all took some criticism, mostly because they think the war is going too slowly. Interestingly, I sensed a gnawing anxiety over Russia’s economy, which seems to be going so well—as if it’s too good to be true.

The 2015 sanctions nearly broke their economy—but now, with even worse sanctions, none are experiencing a loss of standard of living. They seem to have lost their respect, admiration—and fear—of the West. Certainly their trust. They all believe that “human rights”, “democracy”, etc. are empty platitudes the West uses to get its way. They see the West as a paper tiger, run by fools and degenerates. This is inevitably a very biased selection of opinions: Highly educated, well traveled, Western-oriented, fairly well-to-do people aged 27–60. So imagine how much more conservative Russian working class people’s opinions would be. Food for thought.

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“Now they directly control the leadership of the Kiev regime, they are all connected.”

NATO Involvement In Ukrainian Conflict Is Maximal – Zakharova (TASS)

The involvement of NATO countries in the conflict in Ukraine is maximal, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Friday. “NATO countries are playing innocent, trying to prove that they are not a party to the conflict [in Ukraine] <…>. The involvement [of NATO countries] is maximal, [they’ve been carrying out] provocative activity for many years. Now they directly control the leadership of the Kiev regime, they are all connected.” According to Zakharova, Moscow also drew attention to media reports that Ukraine might organize joint licensed production of shells and other weapons with the UK and create similar military enterprises with other NATO countries. “It is obvious that big Western capital is behind the pumping of the Ukrainian armed forces, the formation of combat operations,” the diplomat noted.

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“If the fighting goes on like this, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, destroyed country..”

Ukraine ‘Peace Petition’ Backed By Nearly Half A Million Germans (RT)

Almost 500,000 Germans have supported a petition urging Chancellor Olaf Scholz to spearhead efforts for peace negotiations in Ukraine. The appeal is authored by journalist Alice Schwarzer and Sahra Wagenknecht, a prominent member of Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke), and implores officials in Berlin not to provide Kiev with more weapons. The document, which was published last Friday and has since gathered an increasing number of supporters, claims that the conflict in Ukraine has already cost the lives of more than 200,000 military personnel and 50,000 civilians. “If the fighting goes on like this, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, destroyed country,” the authors warn. Wagenknecht and Schwarzer also argue that “a lot of people in Europe fear an expansion of the war.”

The petition asserts that Ukrainians need solidarity from Germany, but questions whether Berlin’s current policies truly reflect the support they require. “What is now, one year on, the actual goal of this war?” the authors ask, citing German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s recent comment about Europe being at war with Russia. The petition expresses skepticism over whether Scholz’s government will keep its word and not provide Ukraine with fighter jets. According to Wagenknecht and Schwarzer, the German chancellor has already crossed multiple “red lines” in recent months. The pair also warn that Russian President Vladimir Putin could unleash a “maximum counterstrike,” should Ukraine retake Crimea – which is among the goals set by senior officials in Kiev.

“Are we then inexorably sliding down a chute leading to a world war and nuclear war?” the petition asks, adding that numerous major conflicts have begun this way, and that another could end up being the last for mankind. The petition stresses that “to negotiate doesn’t mean to capitulate,” but rather to “make compromises on both sides.” The authors claim that half of the German population wants immediate peace talks, and suggest that the government should heed their calls. “We demand that the federal chancellor stop the escalation of weapons deliveries,” the document states, urging officials in Berlin to focus on peace efforts and form an international alliance to this end.

The petition had received 496,008 signatures at the time of writing. Moscow has repeatedly signaled it is open to talks with Kiev, provided that Ukrainian leaders accept Russia’s conditions and recognize what the Kremlin calls the “reality on the ground.” In early October 2022, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky ruled out negotiations with his Russian counterpart. Kiev is insisting on a military victory over Russia, and refuses to make any territorial concessions to its neighbor.

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“..He is not supposed to hold any talks. He is supposed to sign what he is told to sign..”

No Sense In Signing Any Agreements With Zelensky – Medvedev (TASS)

Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday that he sees no point in signing any agreements with Kiev, since it is highly likely that Ukraine’s next leader will annul them. Medvedev drew attention to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s statements that he was not inclined to hold any talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s not news, but there is a nuance he opted not to mention yesterday although he is quite aware of it. He is not supposed to hold any talks. He is supposed to sign what he is told to sign. Although, frankly speaking, this document will not be worth its weight in paper. You can remember the Minsk agreements that were signed by his predecessor,” Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel.

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The west keeps thinking they will be rebuilding Ukraine.

Moscow Warns EU Over Seized Assets (RT)

Any Western attempts to transfer seized Russian assets to Ukraine would be “barbarism,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has claimed. If necessary, Moscow is ready to impose a tit-for-tat response, she added. Speaking at a press briefing on Friday, Zakharova noted that EU nations had invested heavily in Russia, meaning a significant amount of European-owned assets remains in the country. Their value is larger than that of the Russian assets seized by foreign nations, the spokeswoman argued. Zakharova insisted that Russia wants to operate within the law and would give the US and its allies “every last chance” to reconsider any plans to confiscate Russian property. However, she added that Moscow was fully prepared to defend its interests, including through the use of “equal compensatory measures.”

The remarks referred to a new EU working group, established to explore ways to make Russia fund the future reconstruction of Ukraine. “This must be done in accordance with EU and international law, and there is currently no direct model for this,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said, commenting on the new group. Stockholm currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council. Western nations have frozen hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Russian sovereign reserves, as well the assets of Russians whom they consider close to the government. Moscow has branded the measures an act of robbery. Zakharova stressed that property rights should not be subject to the whims and geopolitical needs of a handful of nations, adding that US foreign policy was often prone to wild swings.

She claimed that a case in point is Venezuela, where Washington previously referred to Juan Guaido as the legitimate leader who has the right to manage the nation’s wealth. “Now Western delegations visit [Nicolas] Maduro, whom we always considered the legitimate president, as if nothing happened,” Zakharova said. “So everything they say now about Russia, their accusations, threats, and blackmail… can flip-flop in a moment. Mark my words.” The spokeswoman warned that the international community should oppose the push for the expropriation of Russian property, if not for its own sake. Countries could otherwise find themselves on the receiving end of the “ostensibly impartial” West-controlled financial system, Zakharova cautioned.

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“..Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs..”

Oh Lightning, I Command Thee To Smite My Foe! (Kunstler)

In the meantime, America is rapidly disintegrating on the home front. Is it attempted suicide or murder? It’s a little hard to tell. Things are blowing up from sea to shining sea — food processing facilities, giant chicken barns, regional electric grids, oil refineries. The latest, of course, is a chemical spill from the Norfolk-Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, set ablaze by a conclave of government officials purportedly to keep the toxic liquids from seeping into the Ohio River watershed and beyond. Of course, in the dithering prior to lighting it up, enough vinyl chloride leached into streams feeding the big river to kill countless fish. And then torching the remaining chemical pools sent up a mushroom cloud of dioxin and other poisons that killed wildlife, pets, and chickens in the vicinity before the evil miasma wafted eastward on the wind to the densely-populated Atlantic coast.

One has to wonder whether an army of saboteurs is on the loose across the land. Considering the border with Mexico is wide open, why wouldn’t America’s adversaries send whole wrecking crews over here to mess with our infrastructure? There’s no question that people from all over the planet have been sneaking across the Rio Grande. Surely some of them are on a mission. America is filled with “soft” targets, things unguarded and indefensible — not least, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. Of all the reasons to be unnerved by “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, this one is the least discussed, even in the alt-media. But it seems like a no-brainer for nefarious interests who might want to bamboozle and disable us.

The sad truth of this moment in history is that the USA has too much going sideways with our own business at home now to be dabbling in any foreign misadventures — and we couldn’t have picked a worse place than Ukraine to do it. The sheer logistics are implausible. The geography is lethally unfavorable. The place has been inarguably within Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries and Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs. Peace talks are apparently out of the question for our leaders. Something’s got to give, and that something is probably Western Civ’s financial system. It’s primed to blow anyway, and when it does, we’ll have other things to think about.

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Soros picks DeSantis.

George Soros Is Defending The Unipolar World Order, Not Freedom (Blankenship)

Contrary to the causes Soros claims to champion, his vision is more likely to usher in a third World War – not prevent one. There’s no credible evidence of a Russian regime-change operation in Moldova. China’s global position has little to do with Russia’s success or failure in Ukraine — the two are partners, but not a unified entity, or even allies; their societies and economies are distinct. What Soros was really rambling against wasn’t corruption or anti-democratic behavior — but the emerging multipolar world order, of which India and Türkiye are, to various degrees, becoming a part. I will not waste my time defending the likes of Modi or Erdogan, as their records are, in my opinion, indefensible. But it’s not their autocratic leanings that Soros hates about them — it’s their flickers of independence.


He may, in this respect, ultimately come to be disappointed by Brazil’s turn to democracy, as it will lead to more development in multipolarism and visibility in multilateral institutions. I also believe he seriously underestimates the US Republican Party’s sheer lack of principles and its willingness to tap into even the most wretched sources of untamed hatred for political support. Despite what the aging “philanthropist” desires, the era of unipolar liberal hegemony is over. The world is entering a new era of multilateralism and anti-hegemony. Soros’ speech before the Munich Security Conference may, in this way, be a symbol. A symbol of how the old way of doing things dies with the ramblings of an old man while the emerging multipolar world order is born in the thunderous cry of billions of youth across the Global South.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1626539057684660225

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It’s a closed circuit. The opposite of democratic. They only need the chiefs. The rest have no say.

EU Parliament Blocks Scrutiny of Von der Leyen Over Pfizer Contract (Pol.eu)

The top ranks of the European Parliament have slammed the door shut to a public cross-examination of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over her personal role in negotiating a multibillion euro vaccine deal with Pfizer. Last month, lawmakers in the Parliament’s special committee on COVID-19 proposed to invite von der Leyen to answer questions on the EU’s largest vaccine contract, signed at the height of the pandemic. It was in the run-up to this contract that she is reported to have exchanged text messages with Pfizer’s Chief Executive Albert Bourla. However, at a closed-door meeting Thursday of the Conference of Presidents (CoP) — which includes the heads of all the political groups and the Parliament’s president — leaders refused the request to hold a public grilling.


Instead they decided to ask von der Leyen to answer questions in private at some point in the future, watering down the invitation to almost nothing. “It was agreed that CoP will be able to raise … [the Parliament’s COVID-19 committee’s] concerns in their next regular meeting with the president of the Commission,” said an EU official with knowledge of the confidential discussions. The European People’s Party MEP in the room, Siegfried Muresan, dismissed the suggestion that the group was protecting von der Leyen — also affiliated with the EPP — as a “conclusion in search of an argument.” “The broad consensus was that we’re in dialogue with her [and] that should continue in the formats that have worked so far and that we have established,” he told POLITICO.

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“Nancy Pelosi has contributed to destroying countless lives with her “insurrection” narrative and sham committee – And here is her daughter on camera saying it’s all a crock.”

Nancy Pelosi’s Daughter Caught on Tape Refuting J6 Narrative (GP)

In the video below, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, is meeting with a January 6 defendant she wanted desperately to be in her sham documentary. It is a meeting with this same J6 defendant and his attorney. Alexandra Pelosi asked the defendant numerous times to participate. He politely declined. The Gateway Pundit reached out to the January 6 defendant in this video to confirm the details in the recording. Alexandra Pelosi agreed to be recorded by the defendant. In this video, Alexandra Pelosi is on camera saying many very shocking things. She mocks the idea that January 6th was an insurrection and admits that DC is too biased to hold fair trials and that many J6ers would be found not guilty if their cases were handled anywhere else in the country, and much more.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1626678002602893335

This video has not yet been made public. This is an exclusive video for The Gateway Pundit audience. From our source: “I did a lot of due diligence making sure that the defendant who shot this video had permission to do so. I spoke with his attorney who provided me documentation that Alexandra agreed to be filmed if they met. I wanted to bring this to you before anybody else if you’re interested in featuring it. Nancy Pelosi has contributed to destroying countless lives with her “insurrection” narrative and sham committee – And here is her daughter on camera saying it’s all a crock.” Here are some of the key moments in the video where Alexandra makes some particularly audacious comments.


Key moments:
2:43: Pelosi: “The Shaman did noth(ing)… What did the Shaman do? He stood there.”
4:24: “After the Democrats lose the house, then they get rid of the committee, people may lose I think interest… no one is going to care after the democrats are out of power. And you take Biden out of office- then who cares!?”
4:50: “DC is a lot of people who work for the government. I don’t think they’re sympathetic. If you got it moved (changed trial jurisdiction from DC) you’d totally get off” (laughs while saying this)
6:50: “If there was an insurrection… you were supposed to have a plan!” “It was the sorriest insurrection in history”
8:11: “You’re going to be able to laugh about this one day”
14:53: Pelosi talks about her friendship with Gavin McInnes and laughs at the notion that Proud Boys are white supremacists.

Daughter Pelosi

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Why does the Guardian cover this all of a sudden?

Too Slow And Too Secret? Pace of Staley Investigation Undermines Trust (G.)

Three years after it began, the findings of a City watchdog investigation into whether the former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley gave a full account of his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the bank’s board are still pending. There is a risk that justice delayed may prove justice denied for the British public. Our system relies on the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and other regulators to uphold the integrity and honesty of those who manage our money. The issue came to the fore again this week after the publication of allegations made in a court case brought by the US Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a home, against Staley’s former employer, JPMorgan Chase bank.

It is alleged by Virgin Islands prosecutors that Staley held discussions with Epstein in which they referred to women by the names of Disney princesses, that Epstein procured women for Staley, and that Epstein emailed his friend photos of young women in seductive poses. Staley is not a party to the lawsuit and denies the allegations. JP Morgan declined to comment on the latest allegations. It previously called for the lawsuit to be dismissed, claiming it did not participate in or benefit from sex trafficking by its former client. As allegations about Staley’s ties to Epstein have mounted, so too has the pressure on the Barclays board to justify why they backed him to stay on as chief executive in 2020. The implications of this case are broad, says Simon Learmount, professor in corporate governance at Cambridge Judge Business School:

“This is a really, really important case, not just because of what it may reveal about the Staley-Epstein relationship, but the questions it raises about the Barclays board and boards in general.” Establishing who knew what, and when, and how they responded, is the task that faces the FCA. Its probe not only looked at Staley’s disclosures to the Barclays board, but those the board subsequently made to the FCA. The preliminary findings – which have still not been made public and are subject to legal challenge – therefore speak not only to Staley’s integrity but also the board’s. That includes Nigel Higgins, who received Staley’s disclosures and who is still chair of Barclays. Yet despite the clear public interest in good governance at the top of a British bank of systemic importance, the public may never know the final conclusions of the FCA inquiry. If its preliminary findings are successfully challenged, they will not be disclosed.

[..]Epstein’s luxurious celebrity lifestyle and royal friendships, his death in prison after a previous conviction for soliciting sex from a minor, have all served to keep his name in the headlines. As Epstein’s one-time banker at Wall Street investment bank JPMorgan Chase, Staley has been the focus of attention too. The pair exchanged thousands of messages, many of which were handed over to the UK authorities by US counterparts. A spokesperson for Staley admitted, following an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, that he had made multiple trips to Epstein’s private island, Little St James, in 2020. It was in February that year that the Barclays board decided, following an internal investigation commissioned from the law firm Clifford Chance, which reviewed the emails, that it would stand full square behind Staley. The banker, who had arrived from the US in 2015 with a £10m pay package, had their “full confidence”.

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They’ll blame Trump for the whole thing.

Trump Announces Upcoming Visit to East Palestine, FEMA Reverses Course {(CTH)

The announcement by President Trump with his intent to visit East Palestine next Wednesday, followed moments later by a reversal announcement from FEMA stating they will now offer support to East Palestine, do not seem coincidental. The Biden administration, including the EPA, FEMA and Transporation Secretary, was likely very worried about the optics of getting blasted by President Trump very visibly next week for their lack of urgency and concern. Moments after Trump announces his visit, FEMA reverses their prior denial of aid. lol

Ohio train tracks
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625998479393783809

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Just hours after saying he “[did] not expect” members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be in East Palestine, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine now confirms the government entity will, in fact, be sending a crew to assist with the aftermath of the train derailment in the village. In a joint statement released Friday night, DeWine and FEMA Regional Administrator Thomas C. Sivak said the agency would deploy a Regional Incident Management Assistance Team (IMAT) to Columbiana County starting Saturday, along with a senior response official. The workers will “support ongoing operations, including incident coordination and ongoing assessments of potential long-term recovery needs.”


[…] DeWine had previously requested federal help, and today the Department of Health and Human Services announced toxicologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be journeying to East Palestine to assist with public health testing. However, the governor’s request for FEMA assistance was initially denied, with the agency apparently telling his office the current situation “[did] not quality for assistance.”

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Treehopper
https://twitter.com/i/status/1626574980644499465

 

 


“The incredible Gomesa Jiaho Queen orchid. It’s a hybrid originated by Jia Ho Orchids in 2018, being a cross breed of Gom. Mulattas’ Dancing and Gom. varicosa”

 

 

Black sea nettle

 

 

Frogfish

 

 

Lions
https://twitter.com/i/status/1626569203753926656

 

 

 

 

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Feb 152023
 
 February 15, 2023  Posted by at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  67 Responses »


Edward Hopper Dawn before Gettysburg 1934

 

Palestine, Ohio Train Wreck: It’s The Dioxin (Coppolino)
Russia Wants UN Probe Into Nord Stream Blasts (RT)
Kiev Readying ‘Great Event’ To Accuse Russia Of Violating Nuclear Safety (TASS)
US Wants to Help Ukraine Retake More Territory Before Negotiating (Antiwar)
US Ambitions Mean Destruction Of Ukraine, Huge Loss Of Life – Zakharova (TASS)
Ban On Access To Bakhmut Prelude To Ukrainian Troop Withdrawal? (TASS)
Stoltenberg Denies NATO Involvement In Conflict With Russia (TASS)
Russia Gives High Marks To Serbia’s Balanced Foreign Policy (TASS)
Snow White and the Wicked Queen (Batiushka)
The Bloody Sore On Humanity’s Conscience (Saker)
Nord Stream Terror Attack: The Plot Thickens (Escobar)
NATO Eyes Fighting Two Wars – Bloomberg (RT)
Snowden Calls UFO Craze A Distraction (RT)
How George Soros’ Propaganda Machine Has Corrupted The Media (Livshitz)
‘World’s First’ Unvaccinated Dating Service Launches in Hawaii (ET)

 

 

 

 

Ohio river
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625327940392067072

 

 

 

 

Is this why the White House is absent?

 

 

Tucker Ohio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It happened on February 3rd. 12 days ago. Without Twitter, would we even ever have known?

I’m not sure what is the most dangerous chemical involved. But the intentional “flaring off” of the whole thing feels crazy.

Will anybody ever live there again?

Palestine, Ohio Train Wreck: It’s The Dioxin (Coppolino)

Most coverage of the train wreck in Palestine, Ohio is missing one word: dioxin. There were reportedly 14 tanker cars full of vinyl chloride, a precursor to polyvinyl chloride — that is, vinyl. Burning vinyl is the most serious source of dioxin in the environment — whether from trash incinerators, house fires or chemical spills. This mess of 14 tanker cars (really, many more, but 14 had vinyl chloride) was then set on fire by the government, apparently to make it easier to clear the railroad tracks. This was the worst possible decision. It has turned many, many miles into no-man’s land. Note that dioxin goes by several other names, including TCDD and is sometimes abbreviated 2,3,7,8. Dibenzofurans, or furans for short, are identical in their toxicity but spoken about less often.

This is not a local issue. This massive plume will spread far and wide, and is being blown by the prevailing winds across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York State, toward the population centers of the northeastern U.S. And via land and water, the toxins can spread in many directions, via water, soil movement and air (since the prevailing winds are only an average). And the contamination is so serious that even soil tracking will spread significant amounts. What few people remember is how the town of Times Beach, Missouri was evacuated, purchased by the federal government, leveled and had its zip code removed, from far, far less dioxin contamination. It’s now a state park, though I’m not sure who would want to have a picnic there.


[..] Neil Donahue, a professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University in nearby Pittsburgh, said he worries that the burning could have formed dioxins, which are created from burning chlorinated carbon materials. “Vinyl chloride is bad, dioxins are worse as carcinogens and that comes from burning,” Donahue said. Dioxins are a group of persistent environmental pollutants that last in the ground and body for years and have been one of the major environmental problems and controversies in the United States. Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of George Washington University’s School of Public Health, agrees this is a possible risk, but is more concerned about uncombusted vinyl chloride vapors that could be lurking in the immediate vicinity. “Until there has been a thorough assessment, the soot as well as any other materials should in my opinion be treated as contaminated by vinyl chloride and/or dioxins or other contaminants until proven otherwise,” she said.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1625303244267220992

https://twitter.com/i/status/1625553361641537536

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“..Stoltenberg announced the formation of a new “coordination cell” to work on securing undersea infrastructure..”

Russia Wants UN Probe Into Nord Stream Blasts (RT)

The Russian parliament’s committee for international relations has approved a motion to ask the UN Security Council for an investigation into last September’s explosions on the Baltic Sea pipelines, for which they blame the US. The motion was introduced on Tuesday and is expected to be approved by the State Duma later this week. The proposal describes the blasts as “an act of international terrorism” and a “monstrous sabotage,” calling on the UN to hold accountable both those who gave the order and those who carried it out. The criminal act has threatened the security of all Eurasia, TASS reported, quoting the text of the document. US President Joe Biden’s administration “gave the illegal order and bears full responsibility for the multi-billion-dollar damage to the infrastructure of Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands,” according to the document.

It describes the pipeline sabotage as inflicting long-term damage to the security, economy and environment of the entire region. The lawmakers are referring to last week’s expose by American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who described how the pipelines were damaged in a joint operation between the US and Norway. US actions require “a thorough international investigation, punishment of those responsible and compensation for the damage caused.” The committee has requested putting their proposal on the agenda of Thursday’s session of the State Duma, where it may be up for a vote. A series of explosions heavily damaged both Nord Stream pipelines, which were built under the Baltic Sea to deliver Russian natural gas to Germany and the rest of the EU.

The blasts happened near the Danish island of Bornholm, in an area where the US Navy and its NATO allies conducted BALTOPS 22 exercises several months prior. Last week, Hersh described how American divers planted the explosives under the cover of the naval exercise, saying they were later activated by a Norwegian patrol airplane. When Hersh asked the US government for comment, it denounced the story as “fiction” and “false.” It has received little to no media attention in the West since. On Monday, NATO’s secretary-general – and former Norwegian prime minister – Jens Stoltenberg announced the formation of a new “coordination cell” to work on securing undersea infrastructure.

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No surprise. They call for a special session, just in time for Russia to be accused.

Kiev Readying ‘Great Event’ To Accuse Russia Of Violating Nuclear Safety (TASS)

Kiev, backed by the US, is preparing a provocation (“a great event”) ahead of the 11th special session of the UN General Assembly to accuse Russia of violating nuclear safety during the special military operation in Ukraine, the Joint Coordination Headquarters for Humanitarian Response said in a statement on Tuesday. “The Kiev regime, supported by the US and European countries, is wrapping up preparations of a major media provocation (“a great event”) to accuse the Russian Federation, ahead of the start of work of the eleventh extraordinary special session of the UN General Assembly on February 22, of allegedly ‘gross violation’ of commitments of the Nuclear Safety Convention during the special military operation,” the statement said.

It also said representatives of the Kiev regime planned to provide some “substantial evidence” to the world community, which will purport to prove that “as a result of actions by Russian servicemen at the Chernobyl NPP and in the exclusion zone in February-April 2022, a radioactive contamination of significant territories of Ukraine took place.” The purpose of the provocation is mainly to create a negative background by forcing countries that didn’t support sanctions against the Russian Federation to vote for the Kiev “peace formula” at the upcoming 11th special session of the UN General Assembly. In addition, Kiev is hoping for further initiatives for the illegal confiscation of Russian assets abroad to “support Ukraine” and the creation of an “international tribunal”.

The special session of the UN General Assembly on Ukraine will begin its work on February 22. According to Paulina Kubiak, a spokesperson for the President of the General Assembly, the request to hold the session came from some Western countries on February 10.

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Crime(a).

US Wants to Help Ukraine Retake More Territory Before Negotiating (Antiwar)

The Washington Post reported on Monday that Biden administration officials say they want to help Ukraine retake as much territory as it can from Russia over the next few months before they sit down at the negotiation table with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The report, which cited unnamed Biden administration officials, said that some “optimists” think Ukraine can stop Russian advances in the east, regain territory in the south, and negotiate a deal by the end of the year. But there are “skeptics” who recognize that Russia has been reinforcing its positions with hundreds of thousands of troops. Russia has been making more gains around the eastern Donetsk city of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian forces have been taking heavy casualties.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia has started its long-awaited offensive, but it’s not clear if Russia has launched a major push or the momentum is just on its side in Bakhmut, where Russian and Ukrainian forces have been locked in battle for months. Ukraine’s Western backers, including those in the Biden administration, think Kyiv has been sinking too many resources in the battle of Bakhmut and want them to focus elsewhere. The Post report said that American military analysts and planners think it’s unrealistic for Ukraine to continue defending Bakhmut and launch a spring counteroffensive in another area. The report said that the Biden administration conveyed to Ukraine that it might not be able to receive the massive amount of assistance Washington has provided indefinitely.

“We will continue to try to impress upon them that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” an administration official said. The message to Ukraine is that they face a pivotal moment in the war, and the recent weapons packages and ones that will soon be announced will give them their best chance to turn the tide. The US has recently pledged a series of massive arms packages to Ukraine that include longer-range missiles, Abrams tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles, although some of the equipment could take years to deliver. The report cited conservative Republicans who have said they want to stop providing aid and the fact that it’s not clear how long Europe can support the war as reasons why the assistance might not continue at these levels. This message comes despite constant pledges from the US and its allies that they will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

“‘As long as it takes’ pertains to the amount of conflict. It doesn’t pertain to the amount of assistance,” the administration official said. There are other signs that the US is thinking about an end game for the war, including recent comments from Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), the head of the House Armed Services Committee. Rogers suggested the US and NATO should pressure Ukraine on what victory will look like, which he said should help “drive Putin and Zelensky to the table to end this thing this summer.” Ukrainian officials have maintained their goal is to drive Russia out of all the territory it controls, including Crimea. But officials in the US don’t think taking Crimea is a realistic goal. Any deal that Russia and Ukraine reach in the future would likely involve Kyiv ceding more territory than it would have if an agreement was reached earlier in the war or if the Minsk agreements were implemented before the Russian invasion. The Minsk agreements were drawn up to end the Donbas war and would have involved Kyiv ceding autonomy to separatists in the east, but the region would have remained part of Ukraine.

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“..American neoliberals destroyed Ukraine and are exterminating Ukrainian people..”

US Ambitions Mean Destruction Of Ukraine, Huge Loss Of Life – Zakharova (TASS)

American ambitions have led to enormous fatalities and the annihilation of Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday. “The so-called ‘West’s war against Russia until the last Ukrainian.’ American neoliberals destroyed Ukraine and are exterminating Ukrainian people. American hegemonic ambitions lead to colossal victims,” she wrote on her Telegram channel commenting on a statement by one of the White House officials that the US is pushing Kiev to more active combat.

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“..the Ukrainian military cannot secure even areas in the city that had been considered relatively safe before..”

Ban On Access To Bakhmut Prelude To Ukrainian Troop Withdrawal? (TASS)

The ban on civilian and volunteer access to Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut in Ukraine) imposed by Kiev on Monday could be a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal from the city, the New York Times reported. According to the newspaper, the decision to ban civilians from entering the city may suggest that the Ukrainian military cannot secure even areas in the city that had been considered relatively safe before, such as districts on the western bank of the Bakhmutka River. The New York Times quoted the Russian Defense Ministry as saying that the village of Krasnaya Gora, lying north of Artyomovsk, had been taken by Russian troops.


Ukraine’s Klymenko Time news outlet reported on Sunday, citing a Ukrainian commander who goes under the nickname of Madyar, that the military would close access to Artyomovsk for all civilians, including volunteers, starting on Monday. Only those having a special permit will be able to enter the city, the news outlet added. According to it, the ban is needed to guarantee security to civilians.

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And neither is the arms industry.

Stoltenberg Denies NATO Involvement In Conflict With Russia (TASS)

NATO does not consider itself a party to the conflict with Russia but will keep supplying more advanced and heavier weaponry to Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said upon his arrival at a meeting of the bloc’s defense ministers on Tuesday. “Neither NATO nor NATO allies are party to the conflict. What we do as NATO allies and NATO, is to provide support to Ukraine. Ukraine is defending itself. Ukraine has the right to defend itself. And of course, we have the right to help Ukraine uphold the right for self-defense. So NATO and NATO allies are not party to the conflict, but we support Ukraine in the right of self-defense,” the NATO chief said, replying to a corresponding question. The type of weapons supplied to Ukraine “has evolved as the war has evolved,” Stoltenberg said.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1625406892087320581

“In the beginning there was enormous focus on javelins, on anti-tank, light anti-tank weapons, and then we saw the urgent need for artillery and allies started to step up the delivery of advanced modern artillery. Then air defense has been a main focus and now heavy weaponry…,” he said. As Stoltenberg said, “actually since 2014, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcements of collective defense in a generation, because the war didn’t start in February last year. It started in 2014.” Tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and munitions are now a NATO priority in weaponry deliveries to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said. “So the issue of aircraft is not the most urgent issue now. But it is an ongoing discussion. We have ongoing consultations among allies on the type of systems allies should deliver to Ukraine,” he said. “The urgent need now is to deliver what has always been promised” and this “will be a top issue at the meetings today here at NATO,” Stoltenberg said.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1625404892348137474

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Serbia, Hungary. Expect regime change.

Russia Gives High Marks To Serbia’s Balanced Foreign Policy (TASS)

Russia highly appreciates Belgrade’s balanced foreign policy under complex international circumstances, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a telegram to his Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic sent on the occasion of Serbia’s Statehood Day. According to the Serbian leader’s press service, the telegram was presented to Vucic by Russian Ambassador to Belgrade Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko on Tuesday. “Please accept sincere greetings on the occasion of your country’s national holiday, Statehood Day. Serbia is Russia’s important and reliable partner. We greatly cherish the balanced foreign policy course conducted by Belgrade under the current complex international circumstances.


“We support your efforts directed at defending the country’s territorial integrity and resolving the Kosovo issue. I am confident that the further development of the Russian-Serbian strategic partnership fully corresponds to the interests of our fraternal peoples,” the telegram said. “I sincerely wish you good health and success as well as well-being and prosperity to all Serbian citizens,” the Russian leader said. Statehood Day is marked in Serbia on February 15 and 16 commemorating the First Serbian Uprising (1804-1813) which launched the country’s fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Serbia’s first constitution was approved on February 15, 1835.

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Nice parabel.

Snow White and the Wicked Queen (Batiushka)

Now it came to pass that a Prince who was travelling in the mountains with his soldiers happened onto the Kings’ House, where he sought shelter for the night. He saw the coffin with Snow White in it and read what was written on it with golden letters. Then he said to the Three Kings: ‘Let me buy the coffin from you. I will give you anything you want for it’. But the Kings answered: ‘We will not sell it for all the gold in the world’. Then he said, ‘Then give it to me, for I cannot live without being able to see Snow White. I will honour her and respect her as my most cherished one’. When he said this, the good Kings felt sorry for him and gave him the coffin. The Prince had his soldiers carry it away on their shoulders. But then one of them stumbled over a stone and that freed the piece of poisoned apple which had lodged in Snow White’s throat.

At once she coughed it up, opened her eyes, lifted the lid from her coffin, sat up and was alive again. ‘Good heavens, where am I?’ she cried out. The Prince said joyfully: ‘You are with me’. He told her what had happened, and then said: ‘I love you more than anything in the world. Come with me to my castle and we shall be King and Queen’. Snow White fell in love with him and went with him. When they got to the castle, the people were very happy and they invited the whole world to their wedding feast.Now the Wicked Queen in the West was also invited to the wedding feast and when she had arrayed herself in her most beautiful garments, she stood before her mirror and said: ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Who’s the strongest of them all?’ The mirror answered: ‘You, my Queen, are not strong at all, it is true. And the young Queen is much, much stronger than you’.

The Wicked Queen was furious. Not knowing that the young Queen was Snow White, she went to the wedding to try and kill her. But as soon as she saw her, she realised that she was Snow White. And at once the vain heart of the Wicked Queen filled with the deepest dread and she died in a rage of narcissism. So, at last freed from her wickedness, the Kingdom of the West began to make friends with the Three Kings of the North, South and East. Having forgotten the Wicked Queen completely, he became the Fourth King. The whole Family was together again at last. And soon after that the Four Kings took wives and were very happy. As for the King and Queen Snow White, every year on the anniversary of their freedom from wickedness, they would hold a huge ball to which they invited the Four Kings from the Four Kingdoms of the world and all their families. And there they would all make merry and the music and the feasting and the singing and the dancing and the laughing would last until dawn. And so they lived happily ever after.

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“..the Woke ideology is following Dubya’s “you are either with us or with the terrorists“, but on steroids..”

The Bloody Sore On Humanity’s Conscience (Saker)

Each society, each country has at least two foundational bases: an official ideology and a number of foundational myths (and these myths can be very close to the historical truth or not). In the case of the West (roughly Zone A), the official ideology is “western liberal democracy” (itself based on a lionization of capitalism and “free market values”). However, once we look “under the hood”, so to speak, we see that since its birth in the Middle-Ages the foundational myth of the West has been exceptionalism and its inevitable by-product, imperialism. And it does not matter one bit what verbiage this myth has been wrapped it. It can be the demented claims of universal authority the Papacy, or the so-called “universal values” (aka human rights) of Freemasonry, the racial superiority of the Nazis or globalist agenda of the transnational financiers.

The past two decades or so have, however, seen a very interesting phenomenon: the wholesale abandonment of any “pious” ideology other than the minimal lip-service needed to show a (totally non-existing) loyalty to any values. That is, however, not to say that no ideology currently exists. It does, very much so, but it is one *openly* based on hatred of the “other”. I am talking, of course, of the Woke ideology which is so powerfully expressed by the actions of the “Biden” Administration. The Woke ideology is not different from its predecessors by its underlying hatred of the “other” (all the previous western ideologies were also based on that hatred of the “other”), but by its unapologetic proclamation of this hatred. You could say that the Woke ideology is following Dubya’s “you are either with us or with the terrorists“, but on steroids.

And like all western ideologies, the Woke ideology demands that you not only accept a lie (many lies, in fact), but that you also loudly proclaim it. And, of course, the bigger the lie, the more vociferously it is proclaimed urbi et orbi.Again, this is hardly anything new but, as Hegelian dialectics affirms, quantity can have a quality of its own. We clearly see this today in the post-Christian society all of Zone A lives in: not only are falsehoods proclaimed as “secular dogma”, but the very notion of “truth” has lost any meaning. To repeat, while in the past the rulers of the West did proclaim and even impose ideologies based on lies, today these same rulers have basically retired the very *concept* of “truth” in any other meaning than “in agreement with the official party line/narrative”.

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“..the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO..”

It had nothing to do with the SMO. Or Ukraine. It was about Germany. Who are now silent.

Nord Stream Terror Attack: The Plot Thickens (Escobar)

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”. So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background. In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia. Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].” So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism. And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”. This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.

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“NATO defense ministers will also discuss in Brussels a boost in military spending by member states..”

NATO Eyes Fighting Two Wars – Bloomberg (RT)

NATO is set to adopt a guidance that lays out plans for a scenario in which member states find themselves fighting on the home front and beyond the borders of the alliance at the same time, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. This comes as the US increasingly shifts its priorities to confronting China. The classified document is to be discussed and signed off on by NATO defense ministers during a two-day summit in Brussels that starts on Tuesday, the news outlet reported. Members will be asked to prepare national plans for future military engagements. The guidance will map out ways for NATO to engage in a “high-intensity so-called Article 5 conflict” – defending a NATO nation attacked by a foreign party under the treaty’s mutual defense provision – and “an out-of-area, non-Article 5 event.” The contents of the guideline were revealed to Bloomberg by “people familiar with the matter.”

While NATO bills itself as a defensive alliance, it has an extensive record of engaging in hostilities on foreign soil, including in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and against Libya in 2011. Critics regard the bloc as a tool of US foreign policy that is aligned with Washington’s goals and in rivalry with China and Russia. “The Americans get what they were aiming for,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov remarked in an interview earlier this month, discussing NATO’s increasing reach. “There are military blocs being created against China and Russia in the Asian Pacific region, like AUKUS. There is a drive to drag new members into them.” The ability to fight a two-theater war was at the core of US military planning during the Cold War.

Think tanks and US officials pushed the strategic objective of having a military force strong enough for two simultaneous ground conflicts, arguing for higher Pentagon budgets and against spending cuts. According to Bloomberg’s sources, NATO defense ministers will also discuss in Brussels a boost in military spending by member states. Countries that fail to meet the target of 2% of GDP would be pressured to accept this level as a mandatory floor rather than merely as a recommendation. Such a change may be adopted during a summit of NATO leaders in Vilnius in July, the outlet said. The structure of spending would be pushed towards increased procurement of weapons by European allies, according to the article, since the US “may decide to move some of its assets” from the continent closer to China.

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You don’t say…

Snowden Calls UFO Craze A Distraction (RT)

The media frenzy over “spy balloons” and unidentified flying objects over North America is sadly not about first contact with extraterrestrials, but an engineered panic for political misdirection, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden argued on Monday. “It’s not aliens. I wish it were aliens. But it’s not aliens. It’s just the ol’ engineered panic, an attractive nuisance ensuring [national security] reporters get assigned to investigate balloon bullshit rather than budgets or bombings” such as the Nord Stream, Snowden tweeted. Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story last week describing how the US and Norway blew up the pipelines transporting Russian natural gas to Germany last September. The US government denounced it as false.

Over the next several days, the US military began shooting down “objects” in the sky over North America. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that the US government still doesn’t know who owns the three “objects” brought down over the weekend. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said there was “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity,” however. Kirby had announced the downing of a “high-altitude object” off the coast of Alaska on Friday. US fighter jets brought down an “unidentified, unmanned object” over Yukon in northwest Canada on Saturday. The third “object” was shot down on Sunday afternoon over Lake Huron, as it approached Michigan. “While authorities don’t yet know what the objects are, they are not a threat,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters on Monday.

“They do not present a military threat to anyone on the ground. They do however present a risk to civil aviation and potentially an intelligence collection threat. And we’ll get to the bottom of it,” he added. Austin also said the three “objects” were different from the Chinese “spy balloon” the US shot down over South Carolina last week. The aerostat, which Beijing described as a weather balloon blown off-course by the winds, had passed over most of the continental US before it was destroyed by a F-22 fighter jet. The Pentagon’s reluctance to describe the “objects” or show any debris that may have been recovered has fueled speculation about their possible extraterrestrial origin. Space magnate Elon Musk joked about “friends of mine” stopping by.

Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers have expressed frustration at the lack of official explanations by the White House. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, demanded the Pentagon and the president “tell us what they know – and what they don’t – immediately.” “What in the world is going on?” wondered fellow Kentuckian and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor. “The administration has still not been able to divulge any meaningful information about what was shot down,” he said, asking if the radar sensitivity may have been turned up after the Chinese balloon incident.

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”..Newsbusters lists Project Syndicate as the biggest propaganda platform funded by the Hungarian..”

How George Soros’ Propaganda Machine Has Corrupted The Media (Livshitz)

A new report from the US-based Newsbusters has exposed a vast web of media and activist organizations, funded with millions of dollars, annually, by the billionaire George Soros. The outlet bills itself as “an online rapid-response vehicle for documenting, exposing, and neutralizing liberal bias in the media.” The extensive global influence of the Hungarian tycoon is well-known, and Soros himself has admitted it on countless occasions – including boasts about his efforts in Ukraine. Soros openly declared his role in promoting the 2014 US-orchestrated Maidan coup in Kiev, stating at the time: “I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia [sic]. The foundation has been functioning ever since. And it played an important part in events now.”

In a lengthy interview with the New York Times in October of 2019, Soros explained: “The arc of history doesn’t follow its own course [and] needs to be bent,” and he was “engaged in trying to bend it in the right direction.” The Newsbuster report identifies the hundreds of media, humanitarian, and social justice organizations that Soros funds annually and asserts that his donations allow him to “wield massive power over information in international politics,” and “mold public opinion on practically every continent and in many languages.” Who gets the money? Newsbusters lists Project Syndicate as the biggest propaganda platform funded by the Hungarian. It styles itself as “the world’s opinion page” and has a “global audience” that includes “prominent politicians, policymakers, scholars, business leaders, and civic activists from six continents” and “over 140 heads of state.”

From 2016 – 2020, he funneled at least $1.5 million to the outlet. It actively promoted abortion, criticism of Israel and pushed for global climate lockdowns during this period. The Poynter Institute is also at the top of this list, which Newsbusters condemns as “a global Soros-backed Ministry of Truth.” It received $492,000 during the same period. This money was used to finance Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, which brings together 100 so-called “fact-checkers”. The network includes the controversial PolitiFact, and actively works with major social media platforms to boost their operations, while censoring alternative voices and opinions. Newsbusters argues that these initiatives in reality serve only to restrict opinions on issues like abortion, transgenderism, and COVID-19. The reports also points out that there is significant academic research to suggest fact-checking does not stop the spread of false information online, raising questions about why so many organizations and wealthy individuals pump huge amounts of money into such entities in the first place.

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Unjected. How much for blood transfusions? Donor organs?

‘World’s First’ Unvaccinated Dating Service Launches in Hawaii (ET)

Nowadays, online dating seems less a game of hit or miss than medical truth or dare, given the deal-breaker question, “Are you vaccinated?” Businesswomen Shelby Thomson and Heather Pyle of Maui, Hawaii, found the online dating game a frustrating experience for the un-jabbed at the height of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in 2021. Faced with discrimination and censorship, many unvaccinated people lost jobs and relationships because they chose to remain unvaccinated. The un-jabbed “didn’t have the option to say they were unvaccinated” to potential online dating partners, Thomson said. “They were only allowed to be vaccinated. And you had to have this badge in your [online] profile.” Too often, the unvaccinated would hear on dating sites, “Swipe left”—move on.

In May 2021, the two business partners, moms, and best friends launched “Unjected,” a dating app for the unvaccinated, on the Google and Apple stores. “We started seeing people wanting to find partners,” Thomson said of their unvaccinated friends. However, soon after the app’s launch, Thomson and Pyle started receiving hate emails, then negative publicity in the media. Apple decided to remove “Unjected” from the app store, claiming it provided medical disinformation. “We tailored everything and played this chess game until it [met] Apple standards,” Thomson recalled. But it still wasn’t enough. “It took us until July 31 to get banned.”

When Google threatened to follow suit, Thomson and Pyle pulled the plug on both media giants, and Unjected.com went live using the web domain host GoDaddy in August 2021. “We decided—OK—the big-tech world is not our friend. They don’t want us to exist in this realm. They’ll always go out of their way to ensure we’re censored or taken down.” Thomson said “Unjected” is more than a dating service for the unvaccinated. It’s also a blood bank database and a fertility bank for the unvaccinated. The dating service alone boasts 110,000 subscriptions in 85 countries and 3,000 to 5,000 new clientele every month, Thomson said.


SB99 in TN is a must-pass bill, requiring labeling on all meat that contains mRNA vaccines. Idaho S.1018 is similiar.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Assange

 

 

Chickens

 

 

 

 

Rob Roos
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625513008054128641

 

 

 

 

Man and woman

 

 

Blue ringed octopus
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625563331036606464

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 212023
 
 January 21, 2023  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


Edward Hopper Night in the park 1921

 

Russo-Ukrainian War: The World Blood Pump (Big Serge)
Russia ‘Fights To The End’ – Borrell (RT)
Germany Says ‘Nein’ On Tanks At Allies’ Big Ramstein Meeting (ZH)
Poland Could Send Leopard Tanks To Ukraine Without German Approval (G.)
Pentagon Wants Kiev’s Backers To ‘Dig Deeper’ (RT)
Elon Musk Warns Against ‘Relentless Escalation’ In Ukraine (RT)
Top EU Official Comments On Sanctions ‘Debate’ With Kiev (RT)
Moscow Outlines What West Can Do To Resolve Ukraine Crisis (RT)
UK Finds Loophole To Buy Russian Oil – Media (RT)
A Page Turns (Jim Kunstler)
World Economic Fuck’em (QTR)
Investigation Pulls Back Veil On Soros’ ‘Indoctrination’ Efforts (RT)
I Have No Regrets: Biden Breaks Long Silence With Shattering Admission (Turley)
Men Live Longer (Happier?) Lives Taking Viagra; New Study Finds (ZH)
Medical Board Takes Action Against Misinformation Doc (MPT)

 

 

 

 

Tucker Biden is done

 

 

CNN turns on Biden
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616149123052208131

 

 

 

 

Dowd 23%
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616505902185517059

 

 

 

 

BARDA
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616609901156892673

 

 

Lavrov UN Charter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616412193196474371

 

 

 

 

From yesterday: “United States advises Ukraine to withdraw its forces from Artemovsk (Bakhmut),” Agence France-Presse reports, citing a senior American official.

Russo-Ukrainian War: The World Blood Pump (Big Serge)

At the present moment, the Ukrainians are not encircled, but the continued creep of Russian positions ever closer to the remaining highways is easily discernable. At the present moment, Russian forces have positions within two miles of all the remaining highways. Even more importantly, Russia now controls the high ground to both the north and south of Bakhmut (the city itself sits in a depression surrounded by hills) giving Russia fire control over much of the battle space. I am currently anticipating that Russia will clear the Bakhmut-Siversk defensive line by late March. Meanwhile, the denuding of Ukrainian forces on other axes raises the prospect of decisive Russian offensives elsewhere.

At the moment, the front roughly consists of four main axes (the plural of axis, not the bladed implement), with substantial agglomerations of Ukrainian troops. These consist, from north to south, of the Zaporozhia, Donetsk, Bakhmut, and Svatove Axis (see map below). The effort to reinforce the Bakhmut sector has noticeably diluted Ukranian strength on these other axes. On the Zaporozhia front, for example, there are potentially as few as five Ukrainian brigades on the line at the moment. At the moment, the majority of Russian combat power is uncommitted, and both western and Ukrainian sources are (belatedly) becoming increasingly alarmed about the prospect for a Russian offensive in the comin weeks. Currently, the entire Ukrainian position in the east is vulnerable because it is, in effect, an enormous salient, vulnerable to attack from three directions.

Two operational depth objectives in particular have the potential to shatter Ukrainian logistics and sustainment. These are, respectively, Izyum in the north and Pavlograd in the South. A Russian thrust down the west bank of the Oskil river towards Izyum would simultaneously threaten to cut off and destroy the Ukrainian grouping on the Svatove axis (S on the map) and sever the vital M03 highway from Kharkov. Reaching Pavlograd, on the other hand, would completely isolate the Ukrainian forces around Donetsk and sever much of Ukraine’s transit across the Dneiper.

The bird’s eye view of this conflict reveals a fascinating meta-structure to the war. In the above section, I argue for a view of the front structured around Russia progressively breaking through sequential Ukrainian defensive belts. I think that a similar sort of progressive narrative structure applies to the force generation aspect of this war, with Russia destroying a sequence of Ukrainian armies. Let me be a bit more concrete. While the Ukrainian military exists at least partially as a continuous institution, its combat power has been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times at this point through western assistance. Multiple phases – life cycles, if you will – can be identified:

In the opening months of the war, the extant Ukrainian army was mostly wiped out. The Russians destroyed much of Ukraine’s indigenous supplies of heavy weaponry and shattered many cadres at the core of Ukraine’s professional army. In the wake of this initial shattering, Ukrainian combat strength was shored up by transferring virtually all of the Soviet vintage weaponry in the stockpiles of former Warsaw Pact countries. This transferred Soviet vehicles and ammunition, compatible with existing Ukrainian capabilities, from countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, and was mostly complete by the end of spring, 2022. In early June, for example, western sources were admitting that Soviet stockpiles were drained.

With Warsaw Pact stockpiles exhausted, NATO began replacing destroyed Ukrainian capabilities with western equivalents in a process that began during the summer. Of particular note were howitzers like the American M777 and the French Caesar. Russia has essentially fought multiple iterations of the Ukrainian Army – destroying the pre-war force in the opening months, then fighting units that were refilled from Warsaw Pact stockpiles, and is now degrading a force which is largely reliant on western systems. This led to General Zaluzhny’s now-famous interview with the economist in which he asked for many hundreds of Main Battle Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and artillery pieces. In effect, he asked for yet another army, as the Russians seem to keep destroying the ones he has.

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“It would be absurd to think that Russia has lost the war or that its military is incompetent..”

Ergo: Double down on Hitler and Napoleon’s errors.

Russia ‘Fights To The End’ – Borrell (RT)

EU foreign policy commissioner Josep Borrell said on Friday that the West must keep sending weapons to Kiev, warning those who think Russia has lost or is doing poorly that Moscow has a history of winning long wars. “Russia is a great country, a great nation that is used to fighting to the end, almost losing and then recovering,” Borrell said in a speech in Madrid, bringing up the 1812 invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte’s French empire and the 1941 invasion by Adolf Hitler’s Germany as historical examples of this. “It would be absurd to think that Russia has lost the war or that its military is incompetent,” Borrell added. He claimed that so far Moscow “has been losing the war but it still has enormous strength and capacity to continue [fighting].” Because of this, he said, “now is the time to continue arming Ukraine with the necessary material and military means to wage the kind of war it has to wage.”

He described this as “not only a defensive war but one that allows it to take the initiative and break fronts and prevent Russia from launching a new, very powerful and bloody offensive in a few months.” Borrell’s invocation of Napoleon and Hitler was unusual, as Moscow has repeatedly compared the current efforts by the collective West with the two invasions, known as the Patriotic War and the Great Patriotic War, respectively. Napoleon led a multinational army recruited from all across French-dominated Europe and reached Moscow, but failed to compel Russia’s surrender. The war ended with Russian cavalry on the streets of Paris two years later. Hitler’s effort, also aided by numerous continental allies and vassals, fell just short of Moscow. The Axis armies were savaged at Stalingrad and turned back at Kursk, with Russian soldiers taking Berlin in 1945.

According to Russian estimates, the US and its allies funneled almost $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and supplies to the Ukrainian military in 2022. Despite this unprecedented effort, Borrell on Friday continued to insist the West was not a party to the conflict, and that the EU did everything it could to avoid it. Former leaders of Germany and France, however, publicly admitted that the European-mediated Minsk agreements had been a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for war. The EU’s high commissioner for foreign affairs spoke at Madrid’s Teatro Real, where he was presented with the New Economy Forum 2022 Award. One of the presenters was Javier Solana, Borrell’s predecessor at the EU post and NATO’s secretary general in 1999, when the US-led bloc launched an unprovoked war against Yugoslavia.

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“..we have to be careful because we have a duty to look carefully and intensively at what might be the consequences for anybody in that conflict.”

Germany Says ‘Nein’ On Tanks At Allies’ Big Ramstein Meeting (ZH)

Is that a definitive nein on tanks? New German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius in fresh statements has confirmed that defense leaders gathered for a much anticipated meeting in Ramstein failed to achieve consensus on tanks for Ukraine. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was present for the meeting which reportedly involved top military officials from some 50 nations, most of them NATO, who met to coordinate the path forward in arming Ukraine. There’s been intense, uneasy back-and-forth this week between Berlin and Washington on the question of supplying Western-manufactured heavy tanks to Kiev, namely the Leopard as well as M1 Abrams. Hawks among the alliance have seen Berlin as essentially standing in the way.

“Today, we can all not yet say when a decision will be made about Leopard and what this decision will look like,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said at the end of the Ramstein Air Base meeting. Amid accusations that Germany is waffling and thus weakening Western allies’ resolve, Pistorius continued, “We are not really hesitating we are just very carefully balancing all the pros and contra [cons] — we are not talking just about delivering anything to anybody, this is a new kind of measure we would choose, so we have to be careful because we have a duty to look carefully and intensively at what might be the consequences for anybody in that conflict.” While there was agreement to boost military aid to Ukraine among the allies gathered for the meeting, CNBC underscores that “Germany wavered on further EU tank deliveries despite mounting calls from Kyiv and fellow allies.”

The German defense minister continued, according to the remarks translated by CNBC: “I must say there is very clearly no unanimous opinion. The impression that has occasionally been made that there is a closed coalition and Germany stands in the way of this is wrong. There are many allies who say we share the opinion that I explained here today again, there are good reasons for the delivery and there are good reasons against it.” Going into the meeting it was widely reported days ago that Berlin has told European allies that it will authorize Leopard tanks only if Washington first leads the way with supply its own Abrams tanks. But the Biden administration has shut the door on these heavy, advanced tanks for the time being.

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Abrams tanks: “..three gallons to the mile with jet fuel..”

And then you have to supply that fuel. To battle theaters. And Abrams are prone to breaking down. Get real.

Poland Could Send Leopard Tanks To Ukraine Without German Approval (G.)

The Polish prime minister has said his country would be willing to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine without securing Germany’s approval if Berlin does not agree to their re-export at Friday’s meeting of western defence ministers at Ramstein airbase. Mateusz Morawiecki said in a radio interview on Thursday that “consent was of secondary importance” when it came to German-made tanks, because the key issue was to get military aid to Ukraine urgently. “We will either obtain this consent quickly, or we will do it ourselves,” Morawiecki added, heaping further pressure on Berlin to allow German made Leopard 2s to be sent to Ukraine in preparation for a spring offensive.

His comments came as the US Defense Department formally announced new military assistance for Ukraine valued at up to $2.5bn, including armoured vehicles and support for Ukraine’s air defence. The aid includes 59 Bradley fighting vehicles and 90 Stryker armoured personnel carriers, but not Abrams tanks. Poland, along with Finland, has said it wants to give 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, which would normally require German approval, but it is one of a number of countries trying to force the pace at a time when Berlin is still negotiating. Arvydas Anusauskas, Lithuania’s defence minister, said others could follow suit at the Ramstein meeting on Friday. “Some of the countries will definitely send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, that is for sure,” he said.

Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, met his newly appointed German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, in Berlin on Thursday, but neither mentioned the Leopard standoff in brief commentsbefore their meeting. Previously, German officials signalled Berlin was willing to break the logjam if the US would also agree to send over some of its own Abrams tanks to Ukraine. But the US said on Wednesday it did not want to do that, because the Abrams, which has a jet turbine engine, is fuel inefficient and so requires complex logistics support. Colin Kahl, the US undersecretary of defence for policy, said: “The Abrams tank is a very complicated piece of equipment. It’s expensive, it’s hard to train on, it has a jet engine – I think it’s about three gallons to the mile with jet fuel. It is not the easiest system to maintain.”

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Maybe they can empty our bank accounts?!

Pentagon Wants Kiev’s Backers To ‘Dig Deeper’ (RT)

Nations providing weapons to Ukraine need to double down on their effort because the country is facing a make-or-break moment, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Friday ahead of a key meeting of military donors in Germany. “We need to keep up our momentum and our resolve, and we need to dig even deeper,” the Pentagon chief said in his opening remarks before a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at the US Ramstein air base. He described this as “a decisive moment for Ukraine and a decisive decade for the world.” Austin touted the latest military assistance package announced by the Pentagon this week as an example of Washington’s leadership. The $2.5 billion commitment boosted total US military aid to Ukraine since hostilities with Russia broke out last February to over $26.7 billion, the US official noted.

He praised a number of NATO partners, including Poland, Canada, Germany, France, for their lethal aid to Kiev and urged further arming of the Ukrainian forces. “The Ukrainian people are watching us. The Kremlin is watching us. And history is watching us,” Austin declared. Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov will ask donors at the Ramstein meeting for more anti-aircraft systems, offensive weapons, including tanks, and “systematic ammo supplies,” his department said in a tweet. Whether or not Kiev will be given Western-made tanks has been a point of contention among NATO members. Poland and several other nations have said they were willing to provide German-made Leopard 2 main battle tanks from their fleets, pending Berlin’s consent. The German government has reportedly conditioned its permission on the US leading by example.

The Pentagon declined to include M1 Abrams tanks in its latest package to Ukraine, citing “sustainment issues.” The tank requires jet fuel to operate and is difficult to maintain, so it “just doesn’t make sense to provide that to the Ukrainians at this moment,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told journalists on Thursday. Moscow has accused the US and its allies of prolonging the conflict in Ukraine by forcing Kiev to eschew the pursuit of peace and also pumping it with weapons. It has pledged to achieve its security goals in the conflict regardless of how much support its adversary receives.

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“I am super pro Ukraine, but relentless escalation is very risky for Ukraine and the world.”

Elon Musk Warns Against ‘Relentless Escalation’ In Ukraine (RT)

Billionaire Elon Musk urged caution on Friday following reports that the US is changing its stance on whether it should assist Ukraine in attacking Russia’s Crimean Peninsula. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported, citing sources, that Washington is starting to concede that Kiev needs to have the ability to strike deep into Russian territory, even if this entails the risk of escalation. US officials are said to be “discussing with their Ukrainian counterparts the use of American-supplied weapons, from HIMARS rocket systems to Bradley fighting vehicles, to possibly target … Crimea.” The peninsula overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in 2014 following the Maidan coup in Kiev. Musk responded to a Twitter user who posted a link to the Times article by saying: “I am super pro Ukraine, but relentless escalation is very risky for Ukraine and the world.”


This is not the first time the tycoon has weighed in on the Ukraine conflict. In October, Musk came up with a peace plan to end the hostilities between Moscow and Kiev. According to his proposal, Russia should “redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision,” with Moscow withdrawing from these areas if this is what the people want. He was referring to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, which overwhelmingly voted to join Russia last year. However, the Twitter CEO also suggested that Crimea should remain part of Russia, sparking outrage in Kiev. Ukraine’s former ambassador to Berlin, Andrey Melnik, told him to “f**k off.” Later, Musk noted that Russia views Crimea as an integral part of its territory, and attempts to seize it by a foreign power could trigger a nuclear war. “If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crimea or using battlefield nukes, they will choose the latter,” he wrote at the time.

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“Negotiations regarding further sanctions on Russia with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky are becoming increasingly complicated with each new round..”

Top EU Official Comments On Sanctions ‘Debate’ With Kiev (RT)

Negotiations regarding further sanctions on Russia with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky are becoming increasingly complicated with each new round, European Council President Charles Michel said during a trip to Kiev on Thursday. The statement came after Zelensky urged the EU to impose even tighter restrictions on Moscow. “Each debate on sanctions is much more difficult than the previous one,” Michel told reporters, as quoted by Bloomberg. “We have good debates with President Zelensky, and I will brief my colleagues on what are the Ukrainian proposals and we will consult. I’m confident we will be able to strengthen the pressure on the Kremlin.” Michel added that the EU will adopt a tenth sanctions package on Moscow. “We have to see which additional sectors can be targeted in the future,” he said.

The EU imposed sweeping restrictions on Russia after Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine in late February. Zelensky called on Brussels on Thursday to target Russia’s nuclear industry, including “all entities involved in the Russian missile program.” He also asked for a full ban on Russian energy exports. The bloc’s efforts to completely relinquish Russian oil and gas have been met with resistance from countries such as Hungary, whose economy is heavily dependent on Russian energy. Budapest has managed to gain several carve-outs that allow it to continue receiving supplies from Moscow. “Russian [energy] accounts for 85% of Hungary’s gas consumption and 65% of oil demand. This cannot be changed overnight,” Tamas Menczer, the state secretary for foreign affairs, explained last week.

The Hungarian government shared survey results this month indicating that “97% of Hungarians reject sanctions that cause serious damage.” It added that “the message is clear: the Brussels sanctions policy must be reviewed.” The Kremlin stated last month that the Russian economy has adapted to the sanctions and that it is impossible to deny that the restrictions are hurting the EU countries as well. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West on Wednesday of trying to use sanctions to incite “a revolution” in Russia and assert “the dominance of the US by all means.”

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“Germany, France and Ukraine were playing a swindle game with the Minsk agreements. Now is payback time..”

Moscow Outlines What West Can Do To Resolve Ukraine Crisis (RT)

US-Russia relations are at their lowest point ever amid the crisis in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. As the conflict deteriorates, the only way to reverse it is for Western nations to acknowledge their mistakes and change their policies, he added. Despite initial hopes that under President Joe Biden the US would engage Russia diplomatically, the last two years “have been very bad for our bilateral relations,” the official told journalists. They are now “probably at their lowest point, historically” he added, and “there is no hope for improvement anytime soon.” The Ukraine hostilities – the focus of the confrontation between Russia and Western nations – are in “an upward spiral” according to Peskov.

“We can see a growing indirect, and sometimes direct involvement of NATO nations in this conflict,” he stated. The nations that back Kiev are acting under “a delusion that Ukraine has any chance to win on the battlefield,” he explained. Asked how the vicious circle could be broken, Peskov suggested that the US and its allies had to mentally turn the clock back to the end of 2021, “when Russia was suggesting a discussion of its concerns at the negotiations table” only to be dismissed. Western repentance for its “cynicism” was also in order, he added. “Germany, France and Ukraine were playing a swindle game with the Minsk agreements. Now is payback time,” he said, referring to the roadmap for Ukraine reconciliation, which the three nations signed with Russia in 2015.

Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and Pyotr Poroshenko, the leaders at the time of Germany, France and Ukraine respectively, have since stated that the deal they negotiated with Russia was meant to give Kiev time to rebuild its military. Moscow considers these admissions to be evidence that the negotiations were conducted in bad faith and that the Ukrainian government and its backers had always intended for the Minsk agreements to fail and for the Donbass standoff to be resolved by military means. Russia claimed that its military campaign in Ukraine launched last February preempted an offensive planned by Kiev with NATO’s help. Ukraine, Germany, and France “lied to the people of Donbass, as they had a terrible fate planned for them, which Russia prevented,” Peskov explained.

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I see the name Singapore pop up in these schemes, not just India.

UK Finds Loophole To Buy Russian Oil – Media (RT)

British consumers are indirectly buying Russian oil and petroleum products despite a Western embargo on crude exports from the sanctioned country, OilPrice reported on Monday, suggesting that the bulk of it may come from India. A ban on Russian seaborne oil exports, along with a price cap of $60 per barrel, was introduced by the EU, G7 nations and Australia on December 5. Another embargo banning almost all imports of Russian oil products kicks in on February 5. The UK, which has been among the most vocal advocates of abandoning Russian energy imports, has claimed to be one of the most successful countries in achieving this target. London committed to phasing out Russian oil by the end of 2022, slashing down imports to £2 million ($2.45 million) in October.

However, diesel accounted for 18% of its total demand last year, according to OilPrice, and a number of UK consumers may have replaced direct Russian imports with supplies from Russian-fed refineries. The outlet suggests that the UK has been using India as a “back door,” given a sharp increase in the country’s imports of Russian oil, which hit a record high of 1.2 million barrels per day in December. Prior to last year, India’s imports of Russian crude were insignificant, due to high freight costs. However, the volumes that New Delhi is now buying and re-exporting suggest that some of the refined crude from the sanctions-hit country may ultimately be pumped in UK filling stations.

High diesel prices in Europe and steep discounts on Russian crude offer “a window of opportunity” for Indian refiners, the outlet said. According to tracking data from Kpler, in 2022 the Jamnagar refinery on India’s west coast boosted, by a factor of four, its imports of oil and fuel oil from Russia compared to 2021. Meanwhile, the UK has purchased a total of 10 million barrels of diesel and other refined products from Jamnagar since the beginning of 2022.

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“..We do understand how “Joe Biden” won the 2020 election: via massive fraud engineered by fraud-master Marc Elias, king of the Lawfare trolls..”

A Page Turns (Jim Kunstler)

I’ll never understand — and neither will you — how “Joe Biden” got propelled out of ignominious defeat in the earliest presidential primaries, to sweep the field on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020. Around the same time, all his rivals magically dropped out of the race for the nomination. Some kind of message must have gone out from Deep State Central. Who wanted this licentious old grifter in White House? Well, probably his old boss, Barack Obama, and just about everyone in officialdom connected to the shenanigans in Ukraine dating back to 2014, and then the RussiaGate illegalities that ensued from it, especially former CIA boss John Brennan and his cronies. Under Mr. Obama, the whole US government had become something like a rotten log infested with sowbugs of grift, deceit, and malfeasance. Installing the dotty old bird in the White House would give Mr. Obama a stealth third term. Mostly, it would prevent the dreaded Golden Golem of populism, Donald Trump, from bringing any harm to that cabal and its, ahem, interests.

We do understand how “Joe Biden” won the 2020 election: via massive fraud engineered by fraud-master Marc Elias, king of the Lawfare trolls, who fine-tuned the mail-in ballot operation during the likewise engineered Covid-19 public health ruse. That wicked election business, of course, is just another grave matter requiring the utmost protection to prevent any inquiry from ever gaining traction. And yet all of it, the monumental government crime spree of recent years is all unraveling before our eyes — even before Jim Jordan or anyone else has even said boo from a House committee chair.

It’s all falling apart — along with America’s economy, our institutions, and our culture. The Biden family’s cover stories are collapsing, the government’s censorship and propaganda machine has thrown a rod, the Covid-19 story looks day-by-day like organized mass murder, election fraud issues still stalk the land despite every effort to squash them — and the grim reality coalesces that Russia is going to clean up the mess we made in Ukraine, and, in the aftermath, probably produce a shit-ton of evidence of American corruption and villainy there.

“Joe Biden,” the phantom president, has entered the air-lock, waiting to be jettisoned into the deep space of ignominy, chocolate mint chip ice cream cone in hand. Kamala Harris watches the action offstage in a fugue of anxiety and depression. She does not want to become president — and, guess what, nobody really wants her to be, either. She won’t even have to be induced to step aside. Her hysteria will be so great that not even the hypnotists of the Intel Community will be able to calm her down. She’ll run shrieking from it back to California. The levers of control finally fail. By a caprice of history, and the genius of the founding fathers, Kevin McCarthy lands in the White House. A page turns. The coup is finally over. That’s my fantasy du jour.

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“..authoritarian catnip to the dingleberries that assemble at the World Economic Forum every year..”

World Economic Fuck’em (QTR)

[..] the “Forum” is harboring incredible influence, mostly with “useful” bureaucratic idiots on the left who are happy to take their cues on how to napalm individual rights for betterment of advancing their agendas from anyone who will help, regardless of their motivation. That’s right: gone are the days of joking about The Great Reset, owning nothing and liking it and shifting to a diet of mealworms and crickets.I’ve arrived at a point past that – a point of being sickened by watching people that in no way, shape or form represent me or the people in my life, yammer on about what my future will or won’t look like and what things I stand for are “right” or “wrong”.


It’s right in the WEF’s mission statement: “The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” The truth is no matter how much each narcissistic and likely psychotic guest would love to speak on behalf of millions, or even billions of people, they simply don’t. I don’t expect these people to understand the consequences of painting with a broad brush, nor do I think they care about them. Take the Covid vaccines as an example. Isn’t the idea of jabbing every single person on Earth, regardless of age, health status and lifestyle (lest we forget whether or not they consent to it reckless? Of course it is. But it doesn’t matter – because someone wanted it to be done…and, with that, it was put into action.

Wild, right? This unilateral implementation of mandates during Covid, regardless of what the individual may want for themselves and their families, was authoritarian catnip to the dingleberries that assemble at the World Economic Forum every year. I’m certain it has enabled many participants to think: we did it with vaccines – we cut them off from travel, we put their jobs and their livelihoods on the line and we even arrested and jailed them – now we can do it with anything else. I don’t need to be in Davos this week to understand how little I have in common with the people of the World Economic Forum. I know this because I was recently in Washington DC during the International Monetary Fund’s most recent circle jerk world conference.

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“Maria Zakharova: [..] Should it be proven that the leading US media outlets “received money for adjusting their coverage, all US democracy could be wrapped up in their Constitution and thrown out into the garbage heap of history..”

Investigation Pulls Back Veil On Soros’ ‘Indoctrination’ Efforts (RT)

Billionaire George Soros has links to dozens of prominent media figures in the US and beyond via organizations he funded, a conservative US watchdog claims. In the last report of a three-part investigation, published on Tuesday, MRC Business examined the ties of the Budapest-born liberal mogul, coming to the conclusion that he “cemented himself as one of the most powerful influencers in global politics through his incredible influence in the media.” MRC Business said that it had uncovered at least “54 major figures in journalism and activist media who are connected to Soros-funded organizations.” The list includes CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, and Cesar Conde, the NBCUniversal News Group chairman, who oversees the outlets NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC.

Many of the 54 individuals play prominent roles in institutions funded by Soros. For instance, Amanpour is a senior adviser at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which received $2.75 million from the mogul between 2018 and 2020, while Holt is listed as a board member in the same organization. Conde is a trustee at the Aspen Institute, which received over $1 million from the billionaire between 2016 and 2020. According to MRC, in total Soros has funneled over $32 billion into his organizations in a bid “to spread his radical ‘open society’ agenda on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism.” These efforts have paid off, allowing him to “help indoctrinate millions with his views on a day-to-day basis”, the group claims.

MRC has previously claimed that Soros has financial ties to at least 253 media organizations globally, funding them through his non-profit groups and enabling him to reach viewers and listeners in virtually every corner of the world. Commenting on the report, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted on Thursday that such revelations could be compared to a “nuclear bombshell.” Should it be proven that the leading US media outlets “received money for adjusting their coverage, all US democracy could be wrapped up in their Constitution and thrown out into the garbage heap of history,” she said.

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If his own party goes after him, this is probably how.

I Have No Regrets: Biden Breaks Long Silence With Shattering Admission (Turley)

President Joe Biden has something that he wants the public to know. After the discovery of highly classified material in Biden’s former office, his garage and library, the President wanted to make one thing (and only one thing) perfectly clear: “I have no regrets.” It was a moment that rivaled his disastrous observation that, while classified material was found in his garage, it is a locked garage that also housed his beloved 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. While Biden’s “corvette standard” for storing classified documents was baffling, his declaration of “no regrets” is downright infuriating. It is also remarkably moronic with a special counsel in the field. Either the President believes that Special Counsel Robert K. Hur will paper over the entire affair or he is doing his best to force his hand with a criminal charge.

Biden was miffed to be even asked about the matter after stonewalling the press for days. He ventured out of his White House bunker to tour storm damage in California and used the victims as a virtual human shield: “You know what, quite frankly, bugs me is that we have a serious problem here we’re talking about. We’re talking about what’s going on. And the American people don’t quite understand why you don’t ask me questions about that.” The problem is that recent polls show that, while the President has no regrets, the public overwhelmingly does. Most citizens view his conduct as negligent. Roughly two-thirds believe that Congress should investigate the President, including a majority of Democrats. Sixty percent believe that he acted inappropriately with classified material.

Nevertheless, after days to hunkering down with this aides and polls, Biden decided to stick with total and absolute denial of regret or responsibility. It was not a surprise for many of us who have following Biden and his family through the years. I wrote at the start of this scandal that Biden’s ” silence is hardly surprising. Biden has always been better at expressing revulsion than responsibility. Time and again, he has literally rushed before cameras to denounce others, often without basis, for alleged crimes. He has not waited for investigations, let alone trials.” When it has come to his own alleged misconduct, Biden will deflect, deny, but rarely declare responsibility.”

The comments on Thursday were classic Biden. He first deflected by using the California victims. He then denied any real responsibility. Despite the appointment of a special counsel to investigate his conduct, he shrugged off the entire matter as something akin to finding a neighbor’s borrowed hammer from 2017 in his garage: “We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place. We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department …I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no there there.”

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Hey, it makes the blood flow!

Men Live Longer (Happier?) Lives Taking Viagra; New Study Finds (ZH)

The second study in two years shows Viagra might reduce the risk of heart disease in men. Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) found that men who took the little blue pill experienced a 39% reduction in heart disease. USC researchers gathered data from 70,000 men with an average age of 52 who were diagnosed with erectile dysfunction within the last decade. They believe Viagra increases blood flow and oxygen into the heart and throughout the body. Viagra users also were 17% less likely to suffer heart failure and had a 22% reduction in developing unstable angina. All of those conditions are fatal if untreated. Men who used the drug achieved longer life and decreased the risk of early death by 25%.


“Viagra was associated with lower incidence of [heart complications], cardiovascular death, and overall mortality risk compared to non-exposure,” the researchers wrote. The last study, published in the American College journal of Cardiology and titled “Association of Phosphodiesterase-5 Inhibitors Versus Alprostadil With Survival in Men With Coronary Artery Disease,” showed older men with cardiovascular disease who took the erectile dysfunction pill lived a healthier life. According to the American Heart Association, erectile dysfunction could be an early warning sign of heart disease in otherwise healthy men.

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Straight from the Middle Ages.

Medical Board Takes Action Against Misinformation Doc (MPT)

An Idaho pathologist who previously came under fireopens in a new tab or window for prescribing ivermectin to COVID-19 patients and spreading falsities about vaccines, is facing disciplinary actionopens in a new tab or window by the Medical Commission in Washington state, where he is also licensed to practice. Ryan Cole, MD, is said to have made “numerous false and misleading statements” during public presentations on the pandemic, COVID vaccines, the use of ivermectin to treat COVID, and the effectiveness of masks, according to a statement of chargesopens in a new tab or window issued by the Washington Medical Commission earlier this month. He also allegedly provided negligent care to a number of patients in the prevention or treatment of COVID.

“Due to their specialized knowledge and training, licensed physicians possess a high degree of public trust,” the commission wrote in the statement. “That public trust is essential to effective delivery of medical care. Knowingly false statements or those made in reckless disregard for the truth, such as the medical disinformation statements by respondent … erode the public’s trust in physicians and their medical treatment and advice, and thereby injure public health.” Specifically, at all times relevant to the case, Cole, an anatomical and clinical pathologist, ran an independent medical laboratory that he owns, provided direct care to patients via telemedicine through the website MyFreeDoctor.com, and spoke at public and private forums, as well as on news shows and podcasts, the statement noted.

According to the commission, since March 2021, Cole is said to have made false and misleading comments during his presentations, including, “Children survive [COVID-19] at a hundred percent,” and “A hundred percent of world [ivermectin] trials have shown benefit.” Other public statements Cole is said to have made include that the COVID vaccine is “an experimental biological gene therapy immune-modulatory injection,” in addition to “a fake vaccine … the clot shot, needle rape.”

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Assange

 

 

 

 

Burns

 

 


Percentage of new bonds that mature in one year.

 

 

Sugihara

 

 

Condor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616377887086739456

 

 

Dragonfly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616388910162284546

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 042023
 


M.C. Escher Fluorescent sea 1933

 

Soldiers’ Widows Group Calls On Putin To Order Major Mobilisation (R.)
Putin: West ‘Lied About Peace’ While Planning for War (Celente)
Making Sense Of NATO Strikes Against Russia (Saker)
Japan Starts Official Investigation Into Millions of COVID Vaccine Deaths (NP)
The Wellness Company Requests Damar Hamlin Vaccine Status be Revealed (TWC)
California Bill To Punish Doctors For ‘False’ Covid-19 Information (ZH)
German Doctor Jailed For Illegally Issuing Mask Exemptions (AP)
College of Psychologists of Ontario attempt to Strip Jordan Peterson of his License
Documents Reveal How ‘Russiagate’ Was Used For Twitter Censorship (RT)
Elon Musk Calls for Investigation Into George Soros (TPN)
Twitter Announces Decision On Political Ads (RT)
The Film Scene that Foretold Our Current Moral Catastrophe (Leake)
Lula Halts Privatization Of Brazil’s State Companies (RT)
Switzerland Rejects Gender Ideology, Rules Sex Is Binary (Slay)

 

 

 

 

RFK jr
https://twitter.com/i/status/1610033806005657601

 

 

 

 

Tucker Carlson’s Recommendations For A Flailing Kevin McCarthy
-Release The January 6th Files
-Put @RepThomasMassie In Charge Of A New Frank Church Committee Designed To Discover What The FBI & Intel Agencies Have Been Doing To Control Domestic Politics

 

 

The man needs help.

 

 

McLuhan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Musk Barra

 

 

 

 

The Reuters headline continues “… For Ukraine War”. But the widows talk about “the coming war”.

“The coming war will require completely different resources: human, psychological, economic,” she told Reuters. “Protecting the Motherland is a duty.”

Soldiers’ Widows Group Calls On Putin To Order Major Mobilisation (R.)

A little known patriotic group which supports the widows of Russian soldiers has called on President Vladimir Putin to order a large-scale mobilisation of millions of men and to close the borders to ensure victory in Ukraine. Putin, Russia’s 70-year-old paramount leader, is under intense pressure to deliver victory in Ukraine more than 10 months since he sent troops as part of an operation he says was intended to defend Russians in eastern Ukraine. “We ask our President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, to allow the Russian Army to carry out a large-scale mobilisation,” the Soldiers’ Widows of Russia group said in a post on Telegram. “We ask our President, our Supreme Commander-in-Chief, to prohibit the departure of men of military age from Russia. And we have a full moral right to do this: our husbands died protecting these men, but who will protect us if they run away?”

After ordering what he cast as a “partial mobilisation” on Sept. 21, Russia’s first since World War Two, around 300,000 additional men were drafted, though several hundred thousand more Russian men fled abroad to avoid being called up. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the appeal from the widows’ group. Putin said last month that there was no need for an additional mobilisation. A representative of the widows’ group told Reuters that all fit Russian men should be mobilised to defend the Motherland. “The coming war will require completely different resources: human, psychological, economic,” she told Reuters. “Protecting the Motherland is a duty.”

Putin has for months been casting the war as part of a much wider historical struggle between Russia and the West which the Kremlin chief says wants to carve up and destroy Russia. Western powers deny they aim to destroy Russia. In a grim New Year’s Eve message, Putin said that defending the Motherland was the sacred duty of all Russians and promised victory in Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin has no justification for what they cast as an imperial-style war of occupation. The widows group began work about two months ago to assist the wives of soldiers killed in Ukraine and has contacts with the Kremlin administration, its representative said. “We are in constant contact with the presidential administration, and if necessary, we transmit requests to it in order to receive this or that support,” the representative said.

Invoking Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the group said that now was the time for tough measures to defend against the evil forces coalescing around Russia’s borders. “Today, all the world’s evil has united against Russia – the entire Western world has turned against us,” the group said. “It’s either us or them, there is no other choice.” Stalin in 1942 issued Order No. 227 which became known as the “Not a step back” order. It was an attempt to establish discipline within the Red Army though thousands of Soviet troops were shot by their own side for alleged cowardice. Stalin “did not think about ratings or dissatisfaction among dissidents: he thought only of victory,” the group said. “Now is not the time to be cowardly.”

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“..the main reason for what happened [in the attack] was the turning on and mass use mobile phones by personnel – contrary to the ban – within the range of enemy weapons.”

Putin: West ‘Lied About Peace’ While Planning for War (Celente)

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, addressed the public during his annual New Year’s speech and warned them of a prolonged conflict in Ukraine and blamed the West for tricking the Kremlin that it was seeking peace in the region, while helping Kyiv prepare for war. “The West lied about peace while preparing for aggression. They are cynically using Ukraine and its people to weaken and divide Russia,” Putin said. Putin’s comment came weeks after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel slipped and said the Minsk agreements were an effective ruse to give Ukraine time to “get stronger” for its next conflict with Russia. She said Ukraine used the ceasefire after the two peace deals as a time to get stronger, “as you can see today.”

“The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltseve in early 2015, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine,” she said. The ruse was well-known among the political elite in the region, even before Merkel’s comments. In 2015, Pyotr Poroshenko, the U.S.-backed stooge who became president of Ukraine after the 2014 US-backed coup, told an audience that the Minsk deal was a ruse to buy time for a military build-up. Maria Zakharova, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said Merkel’s comments “horrifyingly” reveal that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” RT reported. She accused the West of employing “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.”

The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday that about 90 Russian troops were killed when a Ukrainian missile detonated at a building in the city of Makeyevka in Donetsk People’s Republic just after midnight on 1 January, RT.com, the Russian news outlet, reported. Lt. Gen. Sergey Sevryukov told reporters it is “already obvious that the main reason for what happened was the turning on and mass use mobile phones by personnel – contrary to the ban – within the range of enemy weapons.” The RT report said the missiles in the attack were launched by a U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket system, which was destroyed in a retaliatory strike.

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“I fully concur with those who, like Macgregor, have been announcing a major combined arms offensive this Spring, but it will happen when Putin decides it, not when NATO wants it.”

Making Sense Of NATO Strikes Against Russia (Saker)

[..] we need to mention a deep cultural difference between the Russian society and the western one: most Russians have a much better understanding of war than the folks in the West. This is true for civilians all the way through the generals. There are many reasons for that, but just to name a few: • Many Russians have military training (basic or more advanced) • Almost every Russian has lost family members during WWII and, therefore, know how ugly war is. Russian culture, from books to movies, is chock full of war stories, and not of the Tom Clancy type, but the real thing. • Wars in Chechnia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Georgia, Syria, Armenia and many more conflicts have “educated” the Russian society about the painful realities of war. Unlike the hallucinations of the (fake) “friends of Russia” in the West, the “Strelkovites” and other assorted “allislosters” in Russia have very little traction or credibility with the Russian general public.

Simply put – Russians trust Surovikin (and Putin!) much, much, more than these hysterical FUDers because they instinctively feel that what is needed is not anger, but focus. [..] NATO is trying really hard to force the Russians into a “NATO schedule” and out of their planned schedule. An added beneficial side-effect from such “for optics only” strikes is to give the morons in Congress a rationale to put even more money into the US MIC. As for forcing Russia to attack in suboptimal conditions, that won’t happen. Neither Putin, nor Shoigu, nor Gerasimov nor Surovikin are the types who will respond to hysterics with “for optics only” actions (just look at their faces, I mean it!). And this also goes for the entire General Staff. I fully concur with those who, like Macgregor, have been announcing a major combined arms offensive this Spring, but it will happen when Putin decides it, not when NATO wants it.

Right now, the Russian meat grinder is inflicting such losses on the Ukraine that it really makes no sense for the Russians to stop it. But, sooner or later, even this will eventually yield diminishing marginal returns and, by then, the Russian forces (there are three of them around the Ukraine) will be fully ready, trained, equipped and poised to attack. The big unknown (to us, the Russians probably already know) is what NATO will do when this offensive happens. You can be sure that the “best” minds (relatively speaking) in the US are working on the following task: how to trigger a continental war without directly and officially involving the United States? I don’t have an answer to this, your guess is as good as mine 🙂 Any suggestions? Andrei

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But we do not?!

Japan Starts Official Investigation Into Millions of COVID Vaccine Deaths (NP)

According to reports, Japanese researchers have been instructed to investgate the mechanisms by which experimental mRNA jabs could be causing deaths and severe adverse reactions. Hiroshima University School of Medicine Prof. Masataka Nagao highlighted how the bodies of vaccinated persons he performed autopsies on were abnormally warm, with upwards of 100 degree F body temperatures. “The first concern was that the body temperatures of the corpses were very high when the police performed the autopsy,” Nagao declared. “The body temperatures were unusually high, such as 33 or 34 degrees celsius (91-93ºF).” Infowars.com reports: In other bodies, Nagao says “temperatures were very high at the time of death. Their body temperatures were above the normal temperature, more like over 40 degrees celsius (104ºF).”

Graphing the data, Nagao’s research team found there were significant changes to the genetic makeup of vaccinated autopsied patients’ immune systems. The research has led Nagao to conclude the vaccine causes immune system abnormalities that prompt inflammation throughout the body, which is likely the cause of the high body temperatures at the time of autopsy. “Based on the data and the circumstances alone, it is not possible to conclude that the vaccine was the cause of the deaths,” Prof. Nagao said, adding, “However, it is impossible to say that the vaccine was not the cause. We can only say that it is doubtful, but we believe that vaccination was sufficiently related to the immune abnormalities.”

In another report, dermatology expert Prof. Shigetoshi Sano of the Kochi University School of Medicine discussed discovering spike proteins at the site of skin lesions and other skin problems on patients who were vaccinated. “The spike protein derived from the vaccine was found in the skin,” Sano explained, highlighting a slide showing a bright green region on a lesion made visible by a special dye. “Spike proteins are locally suppressing the immune system,” Sano told reporters. “As a result, the spike proteins facilitate in reactivation of the herpesvirus.” The process of the spike proteins degrading in the immune system prompts inflammation throughout the body that also leads to blood clots, Sano concluded. “The function of the spike proteins to produce adverse reactions is formation of blood clots,” Sano explained. “And even worse, spike proteins can also locally induce inflammation.”

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He was boostervaxxed Dec 26.

The Wellness Company Requests Damar Hamlin Vaccine Status be Revealed (TWC)

Last night, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest, during his game in Cincinnati. Hamlin required CPR to restore his heart beat and was rushed to UC Medical Center in Cincinnati where he is listed in critical condition. As a result of this shocking injury, the remainder of the Bills-Bengals game was suspended. This morning, much of the sports and medical world is wondering what exactly happened on the field to Damar Hamlin. While the mainstream media has been quick to write off any concern with Hamlin’s vaccination status as a “conspiracy theory,” leading medical experts believe that Hamlin’s vaccination status is certainly relevant and could have played a contributing or even primary factor in his cardiac arrest.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the world’s leading cardiologists, and the Chief Scientific Officer for The Wellness Company said, “I watched the play live both as a fan and a cardiologist and I saw blunt neck and chest trauma, a brief recovery after the tackle and then a classic cardiac arrest. I have communicated to one of the most experienced trainers in the world and we agree that it was a cardiac arrest in the setting of a big surge of adrenalin. If Damar Hamlin indeed took one of the COVID-19 vaccines, then subclinical vaccine-induced myocarditis must be considered in the differential diagnosis.” Dr. Paul Alexander, a Senior Advisor to The Wellness Company, and one of the leading scholars on COVID-19 and the vaccines, wrote in his substack that this, “form of on-field cardiac arrest with exertion, is consistently following COVID gene injection vaccine administration in similarly young athletes.

We await more information yet until I see otherwise, this was vaccine. Was this a rhythm disturbance due to silent myocarditis (that his heart was damaged and not functioning optimally prior to the shot) that the body shot made worse and caused the cardiac arrest? A 24-year old strong young fit athlete like this does not suffer cardiac arrest like this. This was not due to the hit, IMO and I base this on the landscape that has accumulated since February 2021. No matter how many times you look at this on tape. If he took COVID gene mRNA/DNA injection vaccine and near 100% he did (the NFL league mandated it), then this is likely a result of the COVID gene injection (cannot be ruled out and has some role).”

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“.. the state’s Medical Board would categorize dispensing information – such as the effectiveness of Ivermectin, or the Covid-19 vaccine’s rapidly waning efficacy, as unprofessional conduct..”

California Bill To Punish Doctors For ‘False’ Covid-19 Information (ZH)

A bill which allows the state of California to punish doctors over ‘false information about Covid-19 vaccinations and treatments’ went into effect on January 1st. Under the new law (AB 2098) which took effect Jan.1, the state’s Medical Board would categorize dispensing information – such as the effectiveness of Ivermectin, or the Covid-19 vaccine’s rapidly waning efficacy, as unprofessional conduct. The law was challenged in court by two California doctors, who said that it would restrict their free speech in violation of the first amendment, and that it was “vague” under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. However on December 28th, Biden Nominee Judge Fred Slaughter refused to halt the law, ruling that the law trumps free speech claims, and that it falls “within the longstanding tradition of regulations on the practice of medical treatments.”

Another lawsuit, brought by Physicians for Informed Consent, was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California in early December. The plaintiffs, physician LeTrinh Hoang and Children’s Health Defense, are being represented by Rick Jaffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Mary Holland, and argues that the state of California has weaponized the vague phrase “misinformation,” and thereby has illegally targeted physicians who disagree with the government’s public stance on Covid-19.”Expert cardiologist and PIC member Sanjay Verma, M.D., has been tracking and cataloging CDC errors in real time. For the case, he has provided what he calls “a detailed declaration exposing the government’s scientific errors and the constitutional dangers of censoring dissent”:

“To demonstrate these points of vagueness and the general unsuitability of using ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ as a disciplinary criterion, I have prepared a detailed overview of public health response to the pandemic broken down into categories such as Masks and Vaccines (transmission, safety, efficacy of natural immunity). I have also included evidence of what [I testify] would be considered misinformation promulgated by the CDC as well as its withholding of information which led to the then ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ eventually being proven wrong.” -KRON4 “

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“..two years and nine months in prison..”

German Doctor Jailed For Illegally Issuing Mask Exemptions (AP)

A German doctor was sentenced late Monday to two years and nine months in prison for illegally issuing more than 4,000 people with exemptions from wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic. A regional court in the southwestern town of Weinheim confirmed Tuesday that the doctor was convicted of “issuing incorrect health certificates” to people from across Germany, most of whom she had never met or examined. In addition to the prison sentence she was handed a three-year work ban and ordered to pay 28,000 euros ($29,550), the sum she had received for issuing the medical certificates. Her office assistant was fined 2,700 euros.


“The process is more reminiscent of a sale of certificates than a medical procedure,” the court said in a statement. It noted that she was not faulted for providing certificates to her existing patients. During the trial the defendant had argued that wearing masks was harmful to people’s health. The doctor’s lawyer intends to appeal the verdict, public broadcaster SWR reported. Dozens of supporters gathered outside the court in Weinheim, north of Heidelberg, to protest against the verdict and Germany’s pandemic restrictions. Germany ended requirements to wear masks in many indoor settings last year, though they are still compulsory on long-distance trains, in doctors’ practices, hospitals, nursing homes and on some regional public transport.

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“..mandatory social media communication retraining..”

College of Psychologists Attempt to Strip Jordan Peterson of his License (BJD)

Canadian psychologist and author Dr. Jordan Peterson could be stripped of his license to practice clinical psychology over his sharing of political posts on social media. The College of Psychologists of Ontario which regulates the profession in his home province has disciplined Peterson over the sharing of political posts on Twitter. Peterson says he got in hot water with the College because he retweeted posts about PM Justin Trudeau, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, Trudeau advisor, Gerald Butts, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and others. The College has ordered Peterson to undergo mandatory social media communication retraining to “modify his objectionable behavior.” It’s unclear what it is about the Tweets or the sharing of them that may violate the College’s Code of Ethics. Either way, Peterson says he will not comply.

“I have absolutely refused to do so,” said Peterson. The next step for the College is to demand he submit to an ‘in-person’ disciplinary hearing. If Peterson does not satisfy the College and commit to changing his behavior, it could strip him of his license to practice. “Canada has been given over to the commissars,” Peterson said, “something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.” He says he’ll make the issue public in the days ahead. Some of the posts that may be drawing the ire of the College include one on December 24th in which Peterson tweeted out a link to Conrad Black’s column in the National Post: A moral imperative for Trudeau Liberals to resign. Then on December 27th, he tweeted, I learned to watch for people’s psychological age during my years doing intensive clinical work. @JustinTrudeau appears to me to be perpetually 14 yrs old.

Even the German socialists have figure this out. Are you watching, @JustinTrudeau — the man who claimed there was “no business case” for supplying our German allies, in the face of the Russian war, with LNG? Every year that our marionette PM stays in power is a “tough year” for Canadians @JustinTrudeau @theJagmeetSingh (and the latter props him up and complains about doing so constantly) Has Jordan Peterson become The government of Canada’s latest political target for holding the wrong opinion?

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The formatting is still not great. To read Taibbi’s latest you must scroll through endless Twitter threads or subscribe to his Substack. I don’t want to. Keep it easily accessible, Elon!

Documents Reveal How ‘Russiagate’ Was Used For Twitter Censorship (RT)

Internal documents from Twitter made public on Tuesday show how the social media platform was pressured to follow the US intelligence community’s lead on censorship back in 2017. Key Democrats in the US Congress, a British university and two media outlets – Politico and BuzzFeed – played a major role in the process, which revolved around the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, according to research by Matt Taibbi. In a pattern established in just six weeks, from August to October 2017, Twitter went from being on nobody’s radar to agreeing to take orders from US spies as to whom to censor, Taibbi wrote on Substack. “Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside,” he added.

In a 30-tweet thread, Taibbi showed emails and other internal documents he obtained, thanks to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk. Democrats had accused Russia of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was a “dossier” fabricated by a British spy. From there, they insinuated that WikiLeaks publishing internal DNC documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign had something to do with Moscow, while “Russian bots and trolls” posted “misinformation” on social media that somehow undermined the elections. By August 2017, Facebook was purging accounts accused of being “linked to Russia.” Unconcerned, Twitter sent over a list of 22 “possible” Russian accounts to the Senate Intelligence Committee, only to be denounced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat.

By the end of September, Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell was warning that “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and [the] rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” Crowell also noted the Democrats were “taking cues from Hillary Clinton,” and that only Warner and his House counterpart Congressman Adam Schiff were seeking any comments from social media companies. Meanwhile, as Taibbi put it, “a torrent of stories sourced to the [committee] poured into the news,” while several Senators – including Warner but also John McCain, an anti-Trump Arizona Republican – proposed bills that would have cracked down on social media.

A “Russia Task Force” set up by Twitter on October 2 found “no evidence of a coordinated approach” by October 13. The final report on October 23 found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” Of those, only two spent anything close to $10,000 on advertising – and one of them was RT. Policy Director Carlos Monje admits in an October 18 memo that “our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight.” One of these changes was the October 26 ban on advertising by RT and Sputnik. A November 22 internal email accuses the Senate Intelligence Committee of leaking Twitter’s internal report to the media. A Politico story accusing Twitter of deleting files is followed by a BuzzFeed article alleging a German-language bot network with “signs of being connected to Russia.” The committee demands a report based on the story, which Twitter’s Yoel Roth dutifully writes up.

“You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions,” Taibbi wrote. All of this results in the internal instructions to ban anything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” It was the first step in the process that would eventually lead to the FBI and the Biden White House telling Twitter exactly whom to censor.

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“George, please slide into my DMs!”

Elon Musk Calls for Investigation Into George Soros (TPN)

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is calling for an investigation into billionaire George Soros for controlling information. George Soros has been a topic of discussion recently, as various liberal organizations have written a letter urging major American corporations such as Coca-Cola, Disney, and Kraft Foods to boycott Twitter. Interestingly, some of these same groups are financially supported by Soros himself. In light of this, Elon Musk tweeted about the need for a thorough investigation into these organizations. “Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” Musk initially tweeted. He then followed up: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” “Interesting. I wonder if those funding these organizations are fully aware of what the organizations are doing,” Musk added.

The Twitter CEO also unleashed on the Open Society Foundations, an organization funded by Soros himself. “George, please slide into my DMs!” Musk has been exposing liberal elites left and right. Last week, the Twitter CEO exposed Dr. Anthony Fauci and his wife Christine Grady’s corrupt working relationship. The comments from Musk came in a series of tweets where he unleashed on Fauci for his questionable past relating to his so-called “gain-of-function” research. “Fauci bypassed the moratorium on gain-of-function research to fund dangerous projects like EcoHealth Alliance’s work in Wuhan,” said an account on Twitter. “He then worked internally to changed NIH’s definition of GoF to evade culpability. In 2022, he awarded more $ to Peter Daszak for more GoF research.”

““Gain-of-function” should be called “bioweapon” research, as the function referred is death! What was the name changed to this time?” Musk replied. ““Gain-of-function” in this context is just another way of saying “bioweapon”. Some good nuggets in article. Important to note that Fauci authored 2012 paper arguing for gain-of-function research! Obama wisely put this on pause, but Fauci restarted it,” Musk tweeted as he attached an article from Yahoo News. Musk continued, “Despite these glaring issues, Twitter nonetheless had an internal Slack channel unironically called “Fauci Fan Club””

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“align our advertising policy with that of TV and other media outlets”

Twitter Announces Decision On Political Ads (RT)

Twitter is set to relax its ban on political advertising, saying the policy change would take effect in the coming weeks. The announcement follows reports of an exodus of advertisers from the website after Musk’s multi-billion dollar takeover last year. The platform’s Twitter Safety account highlighted the decision on Tuesday, noting that it would soon “align our advertising policy with that of TV and other media outlets” regarding political material. “Today, we’re relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the US. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” it said, adding “We believe cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics.”

Twitter initially banned some forms of political ads back in 2019 – prior to Musk’s acquisition of the company last October – breaking ranks with other major sites such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. At the time, Twitter argued that political influence should not be purchased, but earned through sincere public interest. However, as the site’s new owner, Musk has pushed to scale back content restrictions, vowing to make Twitter a refuge for free speech while ushering in a range of policy changes.

The decision to resume political ads could be part of efforts to gin up new business, as Twitter has reportedly lost around half of its top 100 advertisers and a handful of smaller ones since Musk took over. It is unclear whether those companies will return, as a number of businesses said they would pause their ads temporarily, some citing concerns over the alleged growth in hate speech on the platform under Musk’s leadership. While the exact details of the upcoming rule change remain unclear, Twitter said it would “first ensure that our approach to reviewing and approving content protects people” before any alterations are made, adding that it would reveal more about the move in the coming weeks.

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Crime writer John Leake works with Dr. Peter McCullough.

The Film Scene that Foretold Our Current Moral Catastrophe (Leake)

It’s one of the most memorable scenes in all of cinematic history, and it’s the scene that inspired me to become a true crime author. In 2001 I lived in Vienna, around the corner from the Burgkino (Burg Cinema) which still played the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man on its big screen every weekend. I spent many a dreary winter Sunday afternoon watching the film. Based on the novella and screenplay by Graham Greene, The Third Man is a crime story about Harry Lime—an American running a medical charity in Vienna, who makes a killing selling penicillin on the bombed out, impoverished city’s black market. To increase his profits, he cuts the drug with other substances, thereby destroying its efficacy and causing the patients (including children) to die horribly from their infections.

In the film’s most iconic scene, the good guy (played by Joseph Cotton) meets his old friend Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) on the Giant Ferris wheel in the Vienna Prater amusement park and tries to appeal to his conscience. At the wheel’s apex, the charismatic Harry opens the door, points down to people walking on the ground below, and says: Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. … Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.

I sensed that Graham Greene might have based the story on something he’d witnessed or heard about. Doing some research, I learned that Harry Lime was probably based on the British spy Harold “Kim” Philby, with whom Greene worked in British intelligence during World War II. Greene, it seems, discovered that Philby was a Soviet double agent long before he was exposed as such in 1963. Instead of ratting out his friend, he kept it to himself and left the intelligence service in 1944. Several pieces of evidence suggest that when he wrote The Third Man a few years later, he based it on his conflicted friendship with Philby. John le Carré was also fascinated by Graham Greene and Kim Philby, and his thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—one of my all-time favorites—was inspired by the Philby story.

His novel The Constant Gardener was published in 2001, and I read it with great interest. The story wasn’t set in Cold War Europe, but in Kenya, where a British diplomat’s wife is brutally raped and murdered. Upon closer examination, the diplomat realizes that she was about to reveal a horrifying crime committed by a pharmaceutical company, which murdered her in order to prevent the exposure. The novel’s plot was reminiscent of a controversial drug trial performed by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria in 1996 during a meningococcal outbreak. For the trial of its new antibiotic, trovafloxacin, Pfizer gave 100 children this new drug. The control group of 100 other children received the standard anti-meningitis treatment at the time—a drug called ceftriaxone. However, for the control group, Pfizer administered a substantially lower dose of ceftriaxone than the drug’s FDA-approved standard.

When the reduced dosing in the control group was discovered, it raised the suspicion that Pfizer did this in order to skew the trial in favor of its new drug. Five of the children who received trovafloxacin died, while six who received the reduced dose of ceftriaxone died. Other children apparently suffered grave injuries from the administration of the experimental antibiotic without their informed consent. The investigation and litigation that ensued was the stuff of a thriller, involving private investigators, bribery, blackmail attempts, and disappearing records. Thirteen years later, in 2009, Pfizer settled out of court with the plaintiffs. In his author’s note, le Carré claimed that nobody and no corporation in the novel was based on an actual person or corporation in the real world. But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.

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Bolsonaro is in the US.

Lula Halts Privatization Of Brazil’s State Companies (RT)

Brazil’s newly returned President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has scrapped plans to sell off eight state-run corporate giants, including the oil company Petroleo Brasileiro, known as Petrobras, Brazilian news website G1 reported on Monday. Lula, who was at the helm from 2003 through 2010, was sworn in as Brazil’s president on January 1. Imprisoned for graft in 2018, Lula’s convictions were overturned in 2019, allowing him to defeat Jair Bolsonaro in October’s election. The decision to remove state corporations from the list of state asset sales was one of the first official acts by the left-wing politician. Aside from Petrobras, the order includes Pre-Sal Petroleo, the state firm responsible for the supervision and sale of the government’s share of oil and gas from production-sharing contracts, along with the postal service Correios, and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicacaooperator, which manages the federal government’s broadcast network.


The Brazilian social welfare system’s IT services enterprise Dataprev, state-owned nuclear company Nuclep, IT services corporation Serpro, and the Agriculture Ministry’s National Supply Company are also off the privatization list. The returning president has called for “ensuring a rigorous analysis of the impacts of privatization on the public service or on the market,” adding that state banks and major oil companies such as Petrobras would play a “key role” in the new economic cycle. On Monday, the Sao Paulo stock index shed 3.24%, while Petrobras shares dropped around 6% as Lula’s inauguration speech sparked investor fears of interventionist government policies. The national currency – the real – saw its value slide by 1.5%. Lula’s predecessor, the populist far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, led an administration mired in controversies ranging from corruption to environmental devastation. Lula’s own government was brought down by massive corruption in Petrobras, which led to the impeachment of his hand-picked successor in 2016.

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How silly should I feel for not understanding the sudden push for 3, 4, 5, 26 genders?

Switzerland Rejects Gender Ideology, Rules Sex Is Binary (Slay)

In a landmark move, Switzerland’s government has rejected gender ideology by ruling that sex is binary and people must be referred to as either male or female, with no exceptions. The Swiss government rejected a proposal to introduce a “third gender” or “no gender” option for official records. The nation ruled against the “gender identity” ideology that other European countries have succumbed to. Swiss residents will continue to be entered into the nation’s civil registry as male or female, with no other options. “The binary gender model is still strongly anchored in Swiss society,” the Swiss Federal Council said in response to two proposals from parliament, according to the Associated Press. “The social preconditions for the introduction of a third gender or for a general waiver of the gender entry in the civil registry currently are not there,” it added.


The Associated Press noted that the Federal Council had said that including alternative options for gender markers would require “numerous” changes to the Swiss Constitution and to laws both at the national and state (canton) levels. The process of revising the country’s Constitution is complicated. According to the Swiss Parliament, a partial or complete revision of the Constitution needs to be approved by both a majority of the voters and also a majority of the nation’s 26 cantons. Switzerland’s political system includes four parties whose views range from left to right and frequent referendums are held on a variety of issues. Switzerland’s neighboring countries, Germany and Austria, as well as other Western European countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, have all modified their civil registries to include “third gender” or “no gender” options.

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Max 2006
https://twitter.com/i/status/1610339471269978114

 

 

 

 

SBF pandemic

 

 

Fanta

 

 

 

 

Bubble nets

 

 

Artificial reef

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 262022
 
 December 26, 2022  Posted by at 10:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Saul Leiter Man in straw hat 1955

 

Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO (Bhadrakuma)r
Putin Says He’s Ready To Negotiate ‘With Everyone Involved’ Over Ukraine (Hill)
Putin “Ready” To Negotiate, But West Wants To “Tear Apart” Russia (ZH)
Only One Nation Benefits From Sanctions On Russia – Minister (RT)
Erdogan Accuses West Of ‘Provocations’ Over Ukraine (RT)
West Issues Ultimatum To Serbia – Media (RT)
Ukraine Hits Airbase 300 Miles Deep into Russia (GR)
GOP Senators Blast McConnell For ‘Arrogance,’ Voter Betrayal (JTN)
Rand Paul Savages DC Elites With Epic “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (DCE)
Rep. James Comer Calls For Defunding the FBI (DCE)
The Democrats are Now the War Party (Chris Hedges)
Soros Behind Twitter Operation to Shut Down Hunter Biden Laptop Story (BN)
In Post-Soviet Russia, New Years Remains A Bigger Holiday Than Christmas (RT)

 

 

What happened to us?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1607157558690676736

 

 

 

 

Musk


https://twitter.com/i/status/1606852465751629825

 

 

 

 

Stop now

 

 

Never leaves the human body
https://twitter.com/i/status/1606819520110538752

 

 

Control group
https://twitter.com/i/status/1606524791695237123

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved..”

Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO (Bhadrakuma)r

The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia. To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’ Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine. And the idea that we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world… I’ve spent several hundred hours face-to-face with our European allies and the heads of state of those countries, and making the case as to why it was overwhelmingly in their interest that they continue to support Ukraine… They understand it fully, but they’re not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third World War.”

Biden realised at that point that “I probably already said too much” and abruptly ended the press conference. He probably forgot that he was dwelling on the fragility of Western unity. The whole point is that the western commentariat largely forgets that Russia’s core agenda is not about territorial conquest — much as Ukraine is vital to Russian interests — but about NATO expansion. And that has not changed. Every now and then President Putin revisits the fundamental theme that the US consistently aimed to weaken and dismember Russia. As recently as last Wednesday, Putin invoked the Chechen war in the 1990s — “the use of international terrorists in the Caucasus, to finish off Russia and to split the Russian Federation… They [US] claimed to condemn al-Qaeda and other criminals, yet they considered using them on the territory of Russia as acceptable and provided all kinds of assistance to them, including material, information, political and any other support, notably military support, to encourage them to continue fighting against Russia.”

Putin has a phenomenal memory and would have been alluding to Biden’s careful choice of William Burns as his CIA chief. Burns was Moscow Embassy’s point person for Chechnya in the 1990s! Putin has now ordered a nation-wide campaign to root out the vast tentacles that the US intelligence planted on Russian soil for internal subversion. Carnegie, once headed by Burns, has since shut down its Moscow office, and the Russian staff fled to the West! The leitmotif of the expanded meeting of the Board of the Defence Ministry in Moscow on Wednesday, which Putin addressed, was the profound reality that Russia’s confrontation with the US is not going to end with Ukraine war. Putin exhorted the Russian top brass to “carefully analyse” the lessons of Ukraine and Syrian conflicts. Importantly, Putin said, “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved. This year, the level of modern armaments in the strategic nuclear forces has already exceeded 91 percent. We continue rearming the regiments of our strategic missile forces with modern missile systems with Avangard hypersonic warheads.”

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“..Zelensky has laid out a series of 10 conditions that must be met for peace to be achieved..”

That’s what you do when you’re losing.. You come with conditions.

Putin Says He’s Ready To Negotiate ‘With Everyone Involved’ Over Ukraine (Hill)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he’s ready to negotiate “with everyone involved” in the war with Ukraine. Putin told a Russian news reporter in an interview that aired on Russian media on Sunday that the Kremlin is ready to negotiate but their enemy are the ones refusing to talk. The comments from the Russian leader follow intense Russian shelling on the Ukrainian city of Kherson on Christmas Eve that killed at least 10 people and injured more than 50 others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced Russia as “absolute evil” on Saturday following the deadly strikes, which he said were for “the sake of intimidation and pleasure.” Zelensky and President Biden discussed what a “just peace” would look like when Zelensky visited the United States on Wednesday for his first international trip since the war started in February.


Zelensky has laid out a series of 10 conditions that must be met for peace to be achieved, including total Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory. This would also include a Russian withdrawal from the Crimean Peninsula under the Ukrainian demands. [..] Putin has previously called on Ukraine and the international community to recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which they have been unwilling to do. Putin said in the interview that Russia is defending its national interests and its citizens in the 10-month conflict, The Associated Press reported. But he said Russia is prepared to negotiate “some acceptable outcomes” with all participants in the conflict. Putin called the conflict a war for the first time in a televised news conference on Thursday, saying it is Russia’s goal to end it. He previously only referred to it as a “special military operation.”

Putin direct

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“..we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people..”

Putin “Ready” To Negotiate, But West Wants To “Tear Apart” Russia (ZH)

In a Sunday interview with Rossiya 1 state television, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country is now ready to negotiate an end to the conflict in Ukraine. However, he once again pointed the finger at the West for making any dialogue toward an acceptable end to the fighting all but impossible. “We are ready to negotiate with everyone involved about acceptable solutions, but that is up to them – we are not the ones refusing to negotiate, they are,” Putin said. “I believe that we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people. And we have no other choice but to protect our citizens,” he added. From Moscow’s point of view, a signal of Ukraine’s ‘seriousness’ about talks would likely hinge on Kiev’s willingness to compromise on territorial concessions, especially regarding the Donbas in the east.


Additionally the Ukrainians would likely have to acknowledge Russian control over the Crimea. However, President Zelensky on Wednesday in his speech before Congress pledged “absolute victory” and has of late been vehement in rejecting any talk of letting go of territory as a non-starter, especially as the months-long Ukrainian counteroffensive has met with some significant successes.Also in the interview Putin continued his theme of the US and NATO waging a proxy war using Ukraine as a pawn. He said in the Sunday comments that the West is attempting to “tear apart” Russia. “At the core of it all is the policy of our geopolitical opponents, aiming to tear apart Russia, the historical Russia,” Putin said. “They have always tried to ‘divide and conquer’… Our goal is something else – to unite the Russian people.”

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“..were orchestrated to provide Europe with more expensive liquefied [natural] gas from America.”

Only One Nation Benefits From Sanctions On Russia – Minister (RT)

The sanctions the West has slapped on Russia over the Ukraine conflict are taking a heavy toll on the European economy, while the United States is the only actor profiting from the restrictions, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Saturday. Speaking to Asharq News daily, the minister claimed that Western sanctions had helped the Americans to achieve what they wanted, saying “their supplies of oil and gas to the European market have increased.” Energy shipments from the US, however, have proved costly for Europeans, resulting in skyrocketing inflation and decreased competitive power for European businesses, Siluanov said. According to the minister, both Western sanctions and the blasts that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in late September “were orchestrated to provide Europe with more expensive liquefied [natural] gas from America.”

“America benefits, Europe loses,” he explained. Moscow has called the sabotage a terrorist attack, claiming that the US stood to benefit the most from the explosions. While Washington has denied any involvement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the incident as a “tremendous opportunity” for Europe to wean itself off of Russian energy. Siluanov went on to admit that sanctions have affected the Russian economy. “But they inflicted on the West no less, and perhaps even more pain,” he said, adding that the sanctions rhetoric has now become routine. The minister noted that the EU price cap on Russian oil “will certainly lead to price and market distortions,” reiterating Moscow’s position that it would not provide crude under contracts conforming to Western-mandated restrictions.

Russian oil companies are rerouting their oil shipments from the West in other directions, the minister said. “We will be looking for new markets, looking for new logistics. It is possible that this would be more expensive,” he stated. Earlier this month, the EU, the G7 countries and Australia introduced a price limit on Russian seaborne oil, set at $60 per barrel. The measure also prohibits Western companies from providing insurance and other services to shipments of Russian crude, unless the cargo is purchased at or below the indicated price. Following the move, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov warned that the restrictions would wreak havoc on global oil markets, while Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow was not planning to sell oil to nations supporting the price cap.

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Erdogan plays his cards.

Erdogan Accuses West Of ‘Provocations’ Over Ukraine (RT)

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has praised Türkiye’s role in securing a grain deal between Russia and Ukraine, claiming in a speech on Sunday that unlike Ankara, Western nations did not make any tangible diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict. “Unfortunately, the West has only made provocations and failed to make efforts to be a mediator in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Erdogan said at a youth event in Türkiye’s eastern Erzurum province on Sunday. Türkiye has thus “assumed this mediator role in 2022” and is set to continue its diplomatic efforts next year, building up on the success of the Black Sea corridor created as part of an Istanbul grain deal in July, Erdogan said.

The grain corridor was touted as a way to secure food supplies to the neediest nations as a matter of priority, but Erdogan confirmed Russia’s long-standing concerns, saying on Sunday that some 44 percent of the grain exported from Ukraine went to Europe instead. In the meantime Moscow voiced its readiness to supply African nations with “large volumes” of grain and fertilizers out of its own stocks for free. Ankara adopted a neutral position early in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, refusing to take part in the Western sanctions on Moscow, while continuing its military cooperation with Kiev – including selling a number of Bayraktar attack drones. A preliminary peace agreement was reportedly reached in Istanbul as early as March, but was later rejected by Ukraine under alleged pressure from the West.

The grain deal, touted as a rare victory for diplomacy, was signed in July by representatives of Russia, Ukraine, Türkiye and the UN, with a Joint Coordination Center set up in Istanbul to oversee the shipments. In late October, Russia briefly suspended its participation in the agreement, after accusing Kiev of launching a terrorist attack on the Crimea bridge, and drone strikes on ships involved in securing safe passage for agricultural cargo. Moscow ultimately returned to the accord after receiving unspecified “written security guarantees” from Kiev. Last month, Moscow allowed “a technical prolongation” of the deal, but Russian officials have repeatedly voiced concerns that the deal is not meeting its stated goals, and have also insisted that the provisions on lifting the restrictions on Russian agricultural exports were not being fulfilled. The Turkish president expressed hope that the issue of fertilizer exports and Moscow’s other concerns would be resolved through “more intense” negotiations next year.

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Keep on poking…

West Issues Ultimatum To Serbia – Media (RT)

Several Western countries have “sent an ultimatum” to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, demanding that Serbs in the northern part of breakaway Kosovo end their stand-off with local authorities, news website Pink.rs reported on Sunday. The outlet claims that ambassadors of the Quint group, comprising the US, the UK, France, Germany and Italy, are calling for barricades in the region be removed within 24 hours. If Belgrade fails to ensure this, the Western powers will reportedly let Albin Kurti, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian prime minister, attack local Serbs. Earlier, Kurti warned that the “removal of these barricades cannot exclude casualties.”

Tensions between Belgrade and Pristina flared up earlier this month when Serbs, who make up the majority in the northern part of province, put up barriers to protest against the arrest of a former police officer, accused of attacking a Kosovo law enforcement patrol. After this, Vucic asked NATO’s KFOR peacekeepers for permission to deploy up to 1,000 Serbian troops and police officers in Kosovo, as it is entitled to do under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which put an end to the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999. However, these plans were resisted by the US, with Gabriel Escobar, the State Department’s special envoy for the region, saying Washington had given Kosovo “very firm security guarantees.”

On Sunday, KFOR said that shots had been fired near a NATO patrol in northern part of Kosovo, close to the roadblocks, adding that there were no casualties. It stopped short of assigning blame. However, Serbian media, citing eyewitnesses, claimed that the incident took place when Kosovo’s special forces attempted to clear barricades near a town of Zubin Potok. With no sign of tensions abating, Milan Mojsilovic, Chief of General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces, told local media on Sunday that the situation is complex, and requires the presence of the Serbian military along the administrative line which divides Kosovo from the rest of Serbia. NATO took control of Kosovo in 1999, after bombing Serbia on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists. The province’s provisional government declared independence in 2008, which Belgrade has refused to recognize.

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They’re shot down but still kill.

Ukraine Hits Airbase 300 Miles Deep into Russia (GR)

Ukraine attacked with a drone an airbase in Russia’s Saratov region which lies about 500km (310 miles) northeast of the border with Ukraine. Three Russian military personnel were killed at Engels bomber base Russian news agencies reported, citing the defense ministry. Russian state media agency Tass quotes the defense ministry as saying: “On December 26, at around 01:35 Moscow time (2235 GMT), a Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle was shot down at low altitude while approaching the Engels military airfield in the Saratov region. “As a result of the fall of the wreckage of the drone, three Russian technical servicemen who were at the airfield were fatally injured.”


Russia accuses Ukraine of carrying out a similar attack on the airfield, home to strategic bombers, on 5 December. In that attack three servicemen were also killed by debris from a downed Ukrainian drone, Moscow said at the time. Two aircraft were lightly damaged. According to Reuters, the twin strikes dealt Russia a major reputational blow and raised questions about why its defenses failed, analysts said, as attention turned to the use of drones in the war between neighbors. Ukraine has never publicly claimed responsibility for attacks in Russia, but has said, however, that such incidents are “karma” for Russia’s invasion. As CNN reported recently Ukraine’s state-owned weapons manufacturer Ukroboronprom has indicated several times in the last few weeks that it is close to finishing work on a new long-range drone.

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“..Unfortunately, our supporters aren’t going to buy it either.”

GOP Senators Blast McConnell For ‘Arrogance,’ Voter Betrayal (JTN)

Conservative GOP senators blasted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday for shepherding with Democrats a $1.7 trillion year-end spending bill into law over the objections of House Republicans, saying it was an act of “arrogance” that betrayed promises to voters. “Our party leadership turned on Republican voters, turned on the Republican base, turned on most Republican senators,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told “The Cats Roundtable” and host John Catsimitidas on WABC radio in New York. “It has happened before, but this is one too many times. For me, this is the final straw.” Lee called the omnibus spending bill signed into law Friday “the ugliest spending bill on record” and one that signaled “that voters don’t see much of a defining difference with Democrats.”

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., mocked those of his GOP colleagues who voted for the bill and celebrated its passage. “To declare that a victory, to say that’s a win, that’s like a football team that just lost the game 60 to 0, and they kick a field goal in the waning seconds and say the field goal is a big win,” Johnson told Catsimitidas. “No, we just got our you-know-whats handed to us.” Johnson said that McConnell’s maneuver not only betrayed conservative voters but also undercut House Republicans about to take over in January who had asked for a short-term spending plan. “Unfortunately, the arrogance of our leadership who said, ‘We know better than House members. We’re going to pass this.’ … I’m not buying it,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, our supporters aren’t going to buy it either.”

Other senators took to Twitter to express their disdain for the spending law, warning it will worsen inflation next year. “I voted AGAINST the $1.7 TRILLION spending bill because I promised Florida families I’d fight every day to make Washington work for them,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., tweeted. “This reckless inflation bomb is a disaster for our economy and a slap in the face to Floridians struggling to make ends meet.”

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“The Senators were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of pork danced in their heads. No budget was found, just mischief and debt.”

Rand Paul Savages DC Elites With Epic “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (DCE)

This Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) posted a parody of the classic Christmas poem “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” to this social media, this time directed at the Democrat’s omnibus spending bill — which costs America a whopping $1.7 trillion dollars. “Twas the week before Christmas, and through the Senate and House, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The earmarks were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there,” Paul begins.= “The Senators were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of pork danced in their heads. No budget was found, just mischief and debt. While the taxpayers hung their poor heads and wept. When out on the lawn arose such a clatter — Senators sprang from their oxygen. What was the matter?” Paul added. “Away to the window, they flew like a flash, tore open the shutter when they heard the word cash.”

Then Senator Paul decided to name names — and he was genuinely bipartisan here, scorching high spenders on both sides of the aisle! Note: This article may contain commentary reflecting the author’s opinion. This Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) posted a parody of the classic Christmas poem “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” to this social media, this time directed at the Democrat’s omnibus spending bill — which costs America a whopping $1.7 trillion dollars. “Twas the week before Christmas, and through the Senate and House, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The earmarks were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there,” Paul begins. “The Senators were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of pork danced in their heads. No budget was found, just mischief and debt.

“While the taxpayers hung their poor heads and wept. When out on the lawn arose such a clatter — Senators sprang from their oxygen. What was the matter?” Paul added. “Away to the window, they flew like a flash, tore open the shutter when they heard the word cash.” Then Senator Paul decided to name names — and he was genuinely bipartisan here, scorching high spenders on both sides of the aisle! “With a little old driver so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be Saint Nick. More rapid than eagles. His coursers they came, and he whistled and shouted and called them by name: Now, McConnell! Now, Schumer! Now, Pelosi and Vixen! On Biden! On Stupid! On Dumber and Blitzen! To debt! To bankruptcy! To free money for all”

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“We need to halt everything with the FBI, all funding, until they come forward and explain to Congress exactly what they were doing..”

Rep. James Comer Calls For Defunding the FBI (DCE)

On Tuesday, Rep. James Comer, who is expected to be the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, spoke to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo about the recent revelations from the “Twitter Files” about the FBI’s influence in the silencing of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. When asked about the latest releases of the Twitter files, which outlined the FBI’s cooperation with Twitter to counter “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the social media site, Comer emphasized that the initial discovery proves wrongdoing, but additional investigations will have to be conducted.“Well, it means a lot more evidence of wrongdoing,” he told Bartiromo. “You know, in the beginning, I thought that there were probably two or three rogue employees who were orchestrating this cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story. But now we know the FBI had a division of at least 80 agents.”

“We also know that the FBI paid Twitter over $3 million for their time, all the time they took over the past couple of years in telling them who to suppress, who to ban,” the congressman explained. “You know, it’s just things that the government has no role in. The FBI was never granted the authority to create any type of disinformation task force that policed the social media sites.” “Now, this we know with Twitter, we’ve heard similar stories from Zuckerberg,” the Kentuckian explained referencing Zuckerberg’s admittance that Facebook deemphasized stories at the request of the FBI. “Who knows what went on at YouTube and Google? This is an agency that’s out of control.”

“And the most frustrating thing for me right now, Maria, is the fact that in this omnibus bill, there’s increased funding for the FBI, plus a $1.75 billion headquarters facility for the FBI,” he explained in reference to the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill currently being considered in the Senate. “We need to halt everything with the FBI, all funding, until they come forward and explain to Congress exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who gave them the authority to do it.”

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“..No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big..”

The Democrats are Now the War Party (Chris Hedges)

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested. The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimatley commit suicide.

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

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DNC, FBI, FTX, Twitter, Soros. Nice.

Soros Behind Twitter Operation to Shut Down Hunter Biden Laptop Story (BN)

First Draft News, a now-defunct nonprofit that left-wing billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations funded, played a key role in Twitter’s preparation to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger as part of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.” The Aspen Institute hosted a September 2020 training exercise for members of the media and social media leaders regarding the handling of hypothetical data leaks which were similar to the Hunter Biden laptop report that broke in October, according to Shellenberger. Claire Wardle, former executive director and co-founder of First Draft News, appeared to be an attendee of the exercise, according to an email published by Shellenberger.

The address that apparently belonged to Wardle was one of multiple recipients in an email to top national security reporters, Facebook’s head of security policy and others, according to Shellenberger. The Open Society Foundations, which left-wing megadonor Soros chairs, once funded First Draft News. The organization shut down in June. “Today we are announcing that First Draft is closing its doors to make way for the next chapter — its mission will continue at the newly launched Information Futures Lab, an initiative from Brown’s School of Public Health,” an announcement from Wardle reads.

The Aspen Institute training exercise, titled “The Burisma Leak,” involved a series of hypothetical leaks during October 2020 showing that Hunter Biden had made more money in his role at Burisma than previously disclosed and had communicated with his father about his work there, Shellenberger reported. The exercise was meant to shape how the media covered the eventual leak of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the way social media platforms carried it. The Aspen Institute, a left-leaning think tank funded by massive philanthropic organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, runs the Commission on Information Disorder, an anti-disinformation project that’s drawn ire from conservatives for its alleged far-left partisanship. The commission has urged social media platforms to censor accounts it considers misinformation “superspreaders” through demonetization, the removal of what it considers inaccurate posts and penalties for offending users.

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Pretty brilliant history lesson.

In Post-Soviet Russia, New Years Remains A Bigger Holiday Than Christmas (RT)

Present-day Russia is almost the only major Christian country in the world where New Year festivities are more prominent than those of Christmas. While Westerners are unpacking gifts on December 24th, Russians are still immersed in an atmosphere of their upcoming holiday, which, when it comes around, is filled with age-old traditions and lasts almost two weeks. To understand why the New Year has become a special celebration in Russia and what sets it apart from other countries, we must first dive into the history of the holiday. It was only in 1700 that Russia joined the pan-European tradition of celebrating the New Year on January 1, following a decree by Emperor Peter the Great. Before that, Russians had celebrated New Year’s on March 1, when it was time to prepare for the new season of agricultural work.

However, despite the will of the emperor, Russia did not fully synchronize with the rest of Europe – the country at the time functioned according to the old Julian calendar, while most European countries had already switched to the Gregorian one. Therefore, the new year in Russia began 13 days later. This became a key aspect that influenced the modern traditions of New Year celebrations. Thanks to Peter the Great, the New Year moved closer to the main Christian holiday, Christmas. For the next two hundred years, New Year and Christmas celebrations in Russia were a lot like those in Western Europe. The difference was only in the religious form – Russia followed Christian Orthodox canons, while the likes of France and Germany followed Catholic and Protestant ones.

Everything changed with the October Revolution, the overthrow of the emperor, and the creation of the new state – the USSR. The Bolsheviks carried out several reforms in the first years after the revolution that directly affected how Russia celebrates the New Year today, in the 21st century. On January 26, 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars of Russia issued a decree on the transition to the Gregorian calendar. As a result, the country celebrated the start of the year 1919 simultaneously with Western Europe. In 1929, the celebration of Christmas was officially ‘canceled.’ Although by this time the New Year had become a completely independent secular holiday, Christmas was privately celebrated in many homes.

Even in 1924, shortly before Lenin’s death, a Christmas Tree celebration was held for children. But, after 1929, the most important Christian date was erased from the calendar and remained exclusively in the homes of religious people. At the same time, the Orthodox Church did not switch to the Gregorian calendar, and therefore Orthodox Christmas is still celebrated on January 7, not December 25.

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Ferns

 

 

Peter Sellers

 

 

 

 

Croc

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 072022
 
 December 7, 2022  Posted by at 9:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem 1630

 

Elon Musk Fires Twitter General Counsel James Baker (CTH)
The EU’s Operation Against Musk (Matthieu Buge)
Elon Musk Slams Wikipedia Over ‘Left-wing Bias’ (PM)
Twitter’s “Partner Support Portal” for COVID-19 Related Censorship (AFL)
Are Ukrainians Russians? (Saker)
Ukraine Trying To Drag US Into War – ex-CIA Officer (RT)
A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine (Jeffrey Sachs)
Mosscow Accuses Ukraine Of ‘Nuclear Terrorism’ (RT)
Hungary Raises Alarm Over ‘Critical’ Situation With Fuel Supply (RT)
World Will Still Need Russian Oil – Official (RT)
Private Spying Firm Targets Global Population With Illegal Spyware (GZ)
FTX Crypto Fraudsters Targeted Poor Black Neighborhoods (Shellenberger)
Mask Mandate in Schools Based on Politics Not Evidence (DS)
Soros Bankrolls 253 Groups to Influence Global Media (NB)

 

 

 

 

Comer

 

 


Bob Mankoff, New Yorker, 1981.

 

 

Ron Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


FBI agent Elvis Chan, at the San Francisco field office

 

 

 

 

Baker was scrubbing the Twitter Files before Taibbi and Bari Weiss ever saw them. That’s why the FBI is not mentioned in them.

“Twitter’s former top attorney James Baker was formerly an FBI attorney who passed on fake dirt from the Hillary campaign’s operatives in 2016, alleging a secret online portal from Russia’s Alfa Bank to Trump. Now attempted to shape the “Twitter Files.”

Elon Musk Fires Twitter General Counsel James Baker (CTH)

Yesterday, we speculated publicly the first set of “Twitter Files” released was heavily pre-filtered by internal stakeholders connected to DHS who hold a vested interest in controlling any evidence of Twitter’s former political activity. Knowing there are multiple executives remaining within the company who previously aligned with the intents of government, specifically DHS officials, to control the platform, the prediction was not a stretch. Indeed, it just made common sense. Former FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker, a man of notoriously corrupt disposition, was one of those former government officials who started working for Twitter as general counsel. James Baker (pictured below left) working as a government mechanism for filtration of damaging information was not a leap. Again, just common sense.

Today, as an outcome of internal discoveries that indeed Jim Baker did prefilter internal documents in order to mitigate sunlight and exposure [outline here], Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired legal counsel James Baker. Mr Musk said through his Twitter account, “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today.” Mr. Musk followed up a question about James Baker being asked to explain himself by saying, “His explanation was …unconvincing.” Matt Taibbi provides the context: ” On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay. We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.

The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated. Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @Bari Weiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.” “My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss. The first batch of files both reporters received was marked, “Spectra Baker Emails.” Baker is a controversial figure. He has been something of a Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016, from the Steele Dossier to the Alfa-Server mess. He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into leaks to the press.

The news that Baker was reviewing the “Twitter files” surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to “exit” Baker Tuesday. Big Picture: The Twitter Files are a threat vector to a bigger story. The DHS, DOJ, FBI and ODNI U.S. government elements who operated with control over the social media platform did so as an outcome of the larger surveillance state. That surveillance state was deployed against Donald Trump in 2016 and everything as an outcome of that failed effort, and the ongoing coverup effort, is what surrounds the current DOJ effort to attack and remove the threat Donald Trump represents.

Fitton Musk

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“Now, they have to limit freedom of speech in order to protect freedom of speech – a logic that can, understandably, leave many people speechless.”

The EU’s Operation Against Musk (Matthieu Buge)

After Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the recent reactions of Brussels’ bureaucrats, it has become clear how far the EU is willing to go in order to preserve its own bubble of political agenda. Just as one needs a special dictionary in order to understand Kant’s work and his own understanding of certain terms and concepts, more and more, one needs a special dictionary to understand the language of the EU. And the first entry to look up is ‘F – Freedom’. Its synonym, ‘liberty’, is the first word in France’s motto. And with the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk and the wish of the billionaire to restore total freedom of speech on the platform, we have a new opportunity to try to decrypt it.

Commenting on the French-US partnership during his speech at the White House on December 1, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “Our two nations are sisters in their fight for freedom.” Words that are quite consistent with the EU’s suddenly emerging rhetoric concerning the freedom of the Chinese people facing the zero-Covid policy of the Chinese Communist Party, the freedom of the Uyghurs in the west of China, the freedom of Russians opposing the Kremlin, the freedom of Iranian women to be like Western women… We could go on forever with this list, because it is constantly changing, adapting itself to the context of geopolitics. As a concept, freedom of speech is really an illusion, as it is ruled, like everything else in the world, by balances of power. The EU proved this hard-to-admit fact to be true when it quickly banned RT and Sputnik after the beginning of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

And there is no doubt that this threadbare concept has been used in geopolitics for ages, establishing amusing if not pathetic double standards. But double standards are not really the issue here. What is at stake is pure logic. Thierry Breton, the commissioner for internal market of the EU, talked to Elon Musk in order to make Brussels’ point clear. And then said: “I welcome Elon Musk’s statements of intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA [Digital Services Act]. I am pleased to hear that he has read it carefully and considers it as a sensible approach to implement on a worldwide basis. But let’s also be clear that there is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation, and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising.”

Breton should hand every citizen of EU member states some instructions, or a guidebook, to navigate the EU’s logic here. “To reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech” is like saying “Let’s have lunch together; you’re free to order whatever I tell you to eat.” These unelected bureaucrats threatened to ban Musk’s newly acquired company in the EU if he refused to comply with their rules, and the mainstream media has found a new way to wage war against those who don’t agree with all their narratives and restrictions: The use of the word ‘absolutist’. While Musk himself wears the label of ‘free speech absolutist’, pundits are using it as a way to pillory those they can’t dismiss as ‘conspiracy theorists’. In this context, ‘absolutist’ rhymes with ‘terrorist’, ‘extremist’, or whatever you can imagine could be a threat.

Famed Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson has repeatedly argued that free speech implies that one should be challenged and even offended, that it is a condition of dialectics and progress. This is pure common sense. No more in Europe. During the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to promote their quarantine politics, some European governments said it was necessary to “limit freedoms in order to protect freedom.” Now, they have to limit freedom of speech in order to protect freedom of speech – a logic that can, understandably, leave many people speechless.

Kash
https://twitter.com/i/status/1600344422314430464

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“If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”

Elon Musk Slams Wikipedia Over ‘Left-wing Bias’ (PM)

Twitter owner Elon Musk said that Wikipedia has a “non-trivial left-wing bias” after the encyclopedia site marked the article for the “Twitter Files” for deletion. Editors for the site wrote that the article is a “nothing event about another nothing event.” “There’s not really anything here. Even as a stub it suffers from being unsourced in some places and poorly sourced in others, suggesting a lack of notability,” wrote an editor. “It also doesn’t have a clearly defined topic. Is this about an investigation, or is this about a Substack article?” They continue: “While the title suggests the former and the lede suggests the latter, the content of the article is actually about neither. There is no investigation, and the article lacks any notable information about what the self-published article had to offer.”

Musk noted in his tweet that Wikipedia requires the citation of biased “MSM sources” to “confirm” claims. This is not the first time that Wikipedia has apparently worked to protect the Biden regime. This past summer, Wikipedia changed the definition of “recession” on their site to fit the definition given by the Biden White House. Wikipedia then locked the page, preventing people from updating the website. The White House redefined the definition of “Recession” ahead of the summer economic report, which showed that the US had suffered from two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. This was the standard definition, but the White House declared that the definition should be tied more closely to unemployment numbers.

On the Wiki page that provides the definition of a “recession,” a message pops up when an attempt is made to edit the information, reading: “This page is protected to prevent vandalism.” Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has been vocal in criticizing his creation, saying that it is run by left-leaning editors and that the site is no longer trustworthy. Sanger said that he believes the site is run by teams of Democratic-leaning editors, and that the site lost its neutral nature in 2009. He named topics such as Covid and Hunter Biden as examples of Wikipedia’s bias. “There are a lot of people who would be highly motivated to go in and make the article more politically neutral but they’re not allowed to,” Sanger said. He added, “If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”

Notorious right wingers Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald

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Not just Twitter, all social media.

Twitter’s “Partner Support Portal” for COVID-19 Related Censorship (AFL)

Today, America First Legal (AFL) released the fourth set of shocking documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealing further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of “misinformation.” This nearly 600-page release of documents contains new appalling information. Among these include the fact that Twitter ran a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other “stakeholders” to submit posts that it would remove or flag as “misinformation” on its platform. Documents obtained by AFL show Twitter enrolling one government employee, through their personal Twitter account, into this Portal. We know from other publicly related documents, that Facebook has copied this approach for election-related censorship.


This production also reveals that the U.S. government was actively working to “socially inoculate”–or brainwashing–the public against anything that threatened its narrative. It did so by using aligned Big Tech corporations to monitor and manipulate users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. For example, Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it bragged about censoring more than sixteen million “pieces of content” containing opinions or information the U.S. government wanted suppressed. Finally, the documents reveal the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organization Mafindo” to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia that is funded by Google.

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The Saker’s deep dive into a complex issue.

Are Ukrainians Russians? (Saker)

Seems like a simple question, but in reality it is immensely complex. I will try to outline a few of the issues, assumptions and implications this question involves. Well, for starters, we might want to ask “what is a Ukrainian?” After all, no such nation or country can be found in history books. But we should not stop here, and we also need to ask “what is a Russian?”. Yes, there was a Russian nation and a Russian country recorded in history books, but does that really help us? French history books used to begin with the sentence “our ancestors the Gauls” which even kids on the French colonies had to learn. Some ridiculed the fact that sub-Saharan Africans or the children of Guadeloupe had to learn that and that was self-evidently ridiculous. But what about metropolis French, those who lived in France proper?

Where their ancestors really Gauls and, if so, how much continuity, if any, is there between Vercingetorix and Macron or the people from ancient Gallic tribes to the modern French? What we often overlook is that nationality is a very modern concept born out of the post 1789 ideology of nationalism. In the more distant past, people built their identity around 1) their place of birth/residence 2) their religion and 3) their ruler. Keeping all that in mind, let’s begin by asking the question “what is a Russian?”. But before we go there, I need to mention another pesky issue: the English word “Russian” can mean one of two things: a member of the Russian ethnic/cultural group, in which case the Russian term is roosskii or a citizen of the Russian Federation, in which case the Russian term would be rossiianin.

For the time being, let’s ignore the second meaning and focus on the ethnic/cultural roosski. To try to find a good definition, let’s being by spelling out what a Russian is not. This is not somebody who speaks Russian. There are plenty of folks out there who speak Russian and who are not Russian. This is not somebody born in Russia, because there are plenty of non-Russians born in Russia. How about somebody born from Russian parents? Here we run into a logical problem: if we define as Russian somebody born of Russian parents without defining what Russian means in the first place, this is a completely circular definition. Also, is Shoigu Russian? This father is an ethnic Tuvan. So 50% Russian max? How about Czar Nicholas II? His ancestry was mostly German and Danish. How about Lenin? He had only 1/4 “Russian” blood (whatever that means)

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Philip Giraldi.

Ukraine Trying To Drag US Into War – ex-CIA Officer (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is looking for ways to get the US and NATO directly involved in the conflict, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said, pointing to Monday’s drone attack on two airfields inside Russia as an example of such tactics. “This was a clear attempt by Zelensky, in my mind, to escalate the war,” Giraldi told Judge Andrew Napolitano on Monday evening’s episode of the ‘Judging Freedom’ podcast. “He tried to do that with the missile that was misdirected, possibly, and wound up in Poland and killed two people. He even pushed it and said NATO has to intervene now. This could be another attempt to, shall we say, promote an escalation on the part of the Russians that could possibly be construed as a danger to Poland, danger to troops in Poland, that sort of thing. This is the game that’s being played.”

The missile that struck the village of Przewodow last month was quickly identified as Ukrainian, but Zelensky continued to insist otherwise for several days, until both Warsaw and Washington expressed frustration. Napolitano had pointed out that the US currently has around 40,000 troops in Poland. Their presence creates a “high potential for accidents” and misunderstandings, said Giraldi, noting that Russia would know right away if they made a move to cross the border. On Monday morning, two drones attempted to strike the Dyagilevo airfield in Ryazan Region and Engels airfield in Saratov Region, more than 500 kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled territory. Three Russian servicemen were killed and several more injured, but the attack did not disrupt a strategic aviation strike against Ukrainian logistics later in the day, the defense ministry in Moscow said.

“The whole purpose of this is again political,” Giraldi told Napolitano about the attack. “It’s to escalate the process so that Russia – at least in the hopes of Zelensky and his advisers, many of whom are probably American – does something that is really stupid and provocative in return, and this will provoke the NATO-US reaction that Zelensky wants to see. I am convinced that this is what he’s playing at.” The big question, Giraldi added, is whether the US military and the White House knew of the attack in advance, “and if so, did they approve it?” The US insists it is not a party to the conflict in Ukraine, but President Joe Biden has said he would support Kiev with weapons and money for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia on the battlefield.

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Putin in 2008: “..If you push NATO enlargement, we retake Crimea.”

A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine (Jeffrey Sachs)

From the beginning — and from before the beginning, from 2021, when Putin made clear what the political issues at stake were — but I happen to know this goes back, in many ways, back to 1990, ’91. I was at that point an adviser to the economic team of President Gorbachev, and then, later, President Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Kuchma, so I’ve watched this from the start. There have been a few very important political issues at stake. One is the NATO enlargement. I think it is really the dominant issue, but three others are extremely important. Of course, I should say, equally important is Ukraine’s sovereignty as a sovereign country and in need of security arrangements. But NATO as Ukraine’s security doesn’t work. It’s an explosive brew. So, one needs to find, as President Zelensky himself said earlier this year, before backing off from it, that there needed to be a non-NATO way to secure Ukraine.


And there can be. So, that’s another crucial issue, is Ukraine’s sovereignty and security in a non-NATO manner. The third issue that is very consequential is Crimea. Crimea, the peninsula, people can look on the map, the peninsula in the Black Sea, has been the home to Russia’s naval fleet in the Black Sea, and therefore completely consequential for Russia’s economic and foreign policy and military security since 1783. So, this is, from Russia’s point of view, an absolutely core issue. And incidentally, in 2008, when George W. Bush Jr. was very unwisely pushing NATO enlargement, President Putin said specifically to President Bush in Bucharest at the time of the NATO-Russia meeting, that “If you push NATO enlargement, we retake Crimea.” This was already explicit. And the point is that, for Russia, this is vital.

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It’s up to US/NATO to halt this.

Mosscow Accuses Ukraine Of ‘Nuclear Terrorism’ (RT)

Ukraine is resorting to dangerous tactics by deliberately targeting the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant on Russian territory, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has alleged. Earlier, Moscow said it would not accept any security arrangement that would involve handing the facility over to a third party. Addressing senior military officials on Tuesday, Shoigu accused the Ukrainian forces of firing 33 shells at the nuclear power plant over the past two weeks. The defense minister characterized these actions as nothing short of “nuclear terrorism.” According to Shoigu, Kiev is deliberately seeking to make a nuclear disaster at the site seem likely. “Our units are taking all [necessary] measures to ensure the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant’s safety,” Shoigu said.

Moscow has repeatedly made similar allegations against Kiev, with Ukrainian officials consistently denying they have targeted the power plant, and accusing Russia of the same. On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RIA Novosti media outlet that “there can be no talk of any Russian withdrawal or transfer of control over the plant to some third party.” She insisted that the facility is on Russian territory and is fully controlled by the country’s authorities. She went on to say that only Moscow “can ensure the physical and nuclear security” of the plant. Zakharova’s comment came after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said on Friday that any deal for the protection of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant would involve the withdrawal of Russian weaponry from the premises.

Grossi told Italian journalists that he expects such an agreement will be reached “by the end of the year,” adding that Moscow is “not against an agreement and the principle of plant protection.” The largest nuclear power facility in Europe, the Zaporozhye plant was taken over by Russian forces in early March, days after the Kremlin launched its military operation in Ukraine. This autumn, four formerly Ukrainian territories, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, were incorporated into Russia following referendums. In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree proclaiming Russian ownership over the plant.

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Even though Hungary is already exempted from the price cap.

Hungary Raises Alarm Over ‘Critical’ Situation With Fuel Supply (RT)

The fuel supply situation in Hungary is “critical,” with people queuing up at filling stations across the country due to a sharp surge in demand, the country’s oil and gas group MOL announced on Tuesday. In an email statement, Gyorgy Bacsa, the company’s managing director, said that “panic-buying has started causing shortages” and that the only solution was to create conditions for increased imports. On Monday, MOL reported a shortage of fuel inventories across its entire network of filling stations after many people began stockpiling over the weekend. The company said that a lack of fuel was caused primarily by insufficient imports and a halt of the country’s major refinery due to maintenance. MOL added that it was trying to deliver more products from its processing plant in Slovakia but had “reached the limits of its logistical capacities.”


Earlier, a non-governmental organization called the ‘Association of Independent Petrol Stations’ reported that MOL had not supplied gasoline or diesel fuel to some petrol stations for the third week straight due to supply problems. On Tuesday, Bacsa confirmed to radio Kossuth that “the total capacity of MOL is not enough to meet the needs of the Hungarian market,” adding that about 30% more fuel needs to be imported. The development comes as the EU has introduced a ban on Russian seaborne crude along with a $60 price cap. Hungary, which is heavily dependent on energy supplies from Russia, has been granted an exemption from the price cap scheme. The country is a vocal opponent of Western sanctions and has repeatedly criticized the EU initiative, saying it’s “high time” Brussels realized that measures such as this “hurt the European economy the most.”

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“Global consumption, economic growth in the world must be provided with energy resources..”

World Will Still Need Russian Oil – Official (RT)

Russian oil will still be in high demand despite the latest EU sanctions on the country’s exports, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said on Tuesday. His statement comes as the EU introduced a ban on Russian seaborne crude along with a $60 price cap. The latter measure has received support from G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) and Australia. According to Novak, this type of interference in market instruments will “certainly affect” the work of Russian companies and sales, but Moscow does not see “any tragedy” in this. “Global consumption, economic growth in the world must be provided with energy resources. There is not much oil in the world, and Russian oil has always been and will be in demand. Yes, supply chains will change,” Novak explained.

By imposing a price cap, Western countries will only trigger further energy inflation due to scarce supply, the minister said, adding that Russia views these types of non-market mechanisms as unacceptable. “This can only lead to a global decline in investment and a future shortage of relevant resources. This, in turn, will cause an even greater increase in prices, which we are seeing, including the gas markets, for example, where there was an artificial decision to limit long-term contracts,” Novak said. The official did not rule out a decline in Russian oil production amid the uncertainty following the sanctions, but said that it would not be big, adding that Russia “is doing everything to ensure that the situation is stable.”

The deputy PM noted that Russian oil and gas condensate production rose 2.2% from January to November in annual terms, to 488 million tons. Condensate output in Russia averaged 10.91 million barrels per day in the reported period, according to Reuters’ calculations.

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Nothing personal. It’s just business.

Private Spying Firm Targets Global Population With Illegal Spyware (GZ)

Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal how a smartphone tracking technology tramples over fundamental data protection tenets and international law, while violating the privacy of citizens across the world without their knowledge or consent. The clandestine tool can transform anyone into a potential person of interest to Western intelligence agencies, and thus a target for recruitment, surveillance, harassment, or worse. It is likely most readers will be unfamiliar with Anomaly 6. Its spartan, single-page website is home to the company’s name, a generic email address, and general location – Fairfax, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters – but nothing about its services, personnel, or otherwise. By carving through layers of “anonymized” data, this little-known company unearths reams of sensitive information about any individual it chooses anywhere on Earth.

Anomaly 6’s activities amount to a globe-spanning criminal dragnet, the reach of which could well extend further than even that of the CIA and NSA. As we shall see, its founders are extremely wary of media attention, not least because they fear the “legal basis” of their operations “is unlikely to stand-up to scrutiny” given past successful court actions against state spying agencies, such as GCHQ and the NSA. The company, which was founded by a pair of US military intelligence veterans, surreptitiously embeds software development kits, or SDKs, in hundreds of popular smartphone and IoT apps, allowing it to track a user’s movements and much more besides. This data is then analyzed and the results passed on to private sector and governmental clients.

One confirmed customer is US Special Operations Command Africa, which paid Anomaly 6 $589,500 in September 2020 for a “Commercial Telemetry Feed”. In April, The Intercept reported on a leaked Anomaly 6 pitch for new business, in which the company claimed to be able to simultaneously monitor roughly three billion smartphone devices in real-time. To demonstrate its invasive prowess, Anomaly 6 followed the movements of hundreds of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency employees at once via their smartphones. The anonymous source of the leaked presentation “expressed grave concern” about the legality of the company disclosing “social posts, usernames, and locations of Americans” to US government agencies.

The Grayzone can reveal that it’s not just US citizens, but the world’s entire population, in the firing line of Anomaly 6’s unblinking eye. And the company is secretly selling its hyper-invasive wares to a number of foreign governments, militaries and security and intelligence services. One of the most unsettling Anomaly 6 files reviewed by The Grayzone is a case study, demonstrating the company’s ability to track the “movements of individuals in completely denied terrain.” The firm identified 100,000 separate smartphone users who traveled to North Korea over a 14-month period, among them US citizens, “to show the value of our data” for both counterintelligence and source development purposes.

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“The whole strategy was overseen by Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, a Stanford Law professor.”

FTX Crypto Fraudsters Targeted Poor Black Neighborhoods (Shellenberger)

In the spring of 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, made Chicago its U.S. headquarters, drawing the applause of the city’s mayor. “This is a mechanism and a tool to bring traditionally underrepresented and ignored populations into the world of crypto so they can take ownership and control of their own financial destiny,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot at the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opulent, 9,000 square foot FTX headquarters in May. “I think the sky is the limit.” The reason FTX.US chose Chicago was, in part, to use the city to pilot a cash giveaway program aimed at poor African American residents. FTX was essentially contributing to two ”guaranteed basic income” programs, one run by a nonprofit called Equity And Transformation (EAT), and the other by the city.

Ostensibly a charitable exercise, the program, which FTX also ran in Florida, expanded the market for FTX’s app, and appears to have been a crucial part of a public relations and lobbying effort aimed at winning the support of Democrats for FTX’s agenda to effectively regulate itself. Bankman-Fried was the second largest donor to both President Joe Biden in 2020 and to Democrats in 2022, after George Soros. There is abundant evidence that Bankamn-Fried’s donations bought influence. After Bankman-Fried testified in May to a Congressional committee chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), she blew him a kiss. The episode is a cautionary tale about how powerful financial interests use progressive social justice ideology to advance their business interests at the expense of the communities they claim to be helping.

“We, like most nonprofits, are shocked by this because they presented this ‘effective altruism’ model to everyone and seemed to push for racial equity,” said Richard Wallace, the co-founder and executive director of EAT, one of the cash-giveaway initiatives. The whole strategy was overseen by Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, a Stanford Law professor. I am the first to report that Bankman had been working for FTX from the very beginning. “From the start [of FTX], whenever I was useful, I lent a hand,” said Bankman.

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Teacher’s unions.

Mask Mandate in Schools Based on Politics Not Evidence (DS)

IIn October of 2022, however, after repeated FOI challenges by our team and after the DfE had claimed that its paper trail could not be disclosed because to do so would constrain future policymaking processes, DfE officials have now finally provided access to some of their paperwork. Despite heavy redactions across the documents revealed by the DfE, the picture that emerges, and seemingly now confirmed by Matt Hancock’s diaries, is both astounding and deeply concerning. The first notable revelation is that the first time an evaluation of the masks in class policy was provided to the Education Minister, at that time Nadhim Zahawi, appears to have been on December 30th 2021. That is seventeen months after schools had first been advised by his department to require children to wear masks in schools. There was no assessment of harms for masks in schools under Gavin Williamson.

The second notable revelation is that more than one third of the DfE’s evaluation document supporting its briefing to the Minister was given over to concerns about the risk of teaching unions encouraging their teachers to walk out of schools on the insidious grounds that schools had become dangerous places to work. Those concerns were given materially greater airtime in that December 2021 briefing document than the few paragraphs devoted to the risks of harm for schoolchildren. It is evident that the adversarial approach of teaching unions had a material influence on the DfE’s advice to the Minister. The evaluation document notes that mandating the wearing of masks in school “could help reduce the risk of some teachers invoking section 44 of the Employment Rights Act” (a statutory provision that allows employees, exceptionally, to decline to work in materially unsafe conditions), a provision the NEU and Unison had apparently flagged to their members in January 2021.

It also cited surveys recording that 71% of Unison members had reported in March 2021 that masks in class were thought to be “an important safety measure”, and 79% of respondents to a private schools survey around the same time had “noted benefits of wearing face coverings in the classroom”. The deeply troubling implication of this limited and largely redacted paper trail is that policymaking within the DfE was led not by a rational evaluation of scientific evidence or after a weighing-up of actual and potential risks and harms for children against known or perceived benefits. Rather, the motivation for the August 2020 policy appears to have been a direct response to union-led pressures, and perhaps also to incitements from some elements of the mainstream media, who seemed intent on shutting down schools in order to ‘protect’ teachers and other adults. Any harms to children appear to have been of subsidiary importance to making adults feel safe.

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He’s 92 and proves addiction to power is absolute.

Soros Bankrolls 253 Groups to Influence Global Media (NB)

Leftist billionaire George Soros used his charities to build ties with hundreds of media organizations around the world involved in news and activist media. The journalism and activist media groups Soros supports mold public opinion on practically every continent and in many languages. They also insulate him from inquiry because reporters see him as an ally, not a target for investigation. The 92-year-old philanthropist’s multimillion-dollar efforts promoting his bizarre “open society” agenda encompass some of the most radical leftist ideas on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism.


His global media clout is massive. An extensive analysis by MRC Business discovered at least 253 news and activist media organizations across the world financed by Soros’ philanthropic organizations. These groups wield massive power over information in international politics. This report is the first in a three-part series that reveals the extent of the reach Soros wields over international media to influence the world population. Soros once told The New York Times that he was working to “bend” the arc of history “in the right direction.” He means it.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Lethal vaccination

 

 

 

 

Stossel “Science”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jul 022022
 


Pablo Picasso Femme aux bras leves- Tête de Dora Maar- 1936

 

Does Lithuania Want To Start A War With Russia? (Bandow)
EU to Allow Russia to Resume Transports to Kaliningrad (Spiegel)
Europe Fails With German Help (Vilches)
We Are Z (Batiushka)
The More You Grow Up, The More You Realise The World Is Unfair (Savenkova)
Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster (Sachs)
Independence Day (Jim Kunstler)
Biden Admin Delays Decision On Expanded Offshore Drilling (JTN)
Oil Exec: Biden Admin Breaking The ‘Backbone Of The Energy Revolution’ (Fox)
US Falls Behind In Hypersonic Weapons Race After Another Failed Test (ZH)
Rep. Jim Banks Demands White House Jan 6 Surveillance Logs (Fed.)
Soros’s Connection To US Media Infrastructure And Politics (ET)
28% Of Voters Think May ‘Soon Be Necessary To Take Up Arms’ Vs Government (JTN)
Beet This: Ukraine Wins Fight To Protect Borshch Soup (AFP)
Julian Assange Submits High Court Appeal To Fight Extradition (BBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zelenko
https://twitter.com/i/status/1542607162991693824

 

 

 

 

Jon Voight
https://twitter.com/i/status/1542848913576796162

 

 

 

 

“Washington should privately deliver a clear message to Vilnius and other capitals throughout Europe, especially in the East: Inciting Moscow to strike would relieve the U.S. of any obligation to defend them, even if they are NATO members.” —
@Doug_Bandow

Does Lithuania Want To Start A War With Russia? (Bandow)

In NATO the smallest members tend to be the most aggressive. It’s probably because they know they wouldn’t be called on to fight any wars they caused. They simply are too small to make a difference. So Lithuania, with an army of just 8,850 active-duty personnel and 5,650 reservists, is now enforcing a blockade of sorts against Russia through Kaliningrad. The latter was seized from Germany at the end of World War II and ended up separated from the rest of Russia after the Baltic States seceded from the Soviet Union. Vilnius is forbidding transport of coal, metals, electronics, and other E.U.-sanctioned products to Kaliningrad, whose governor said that roughly half of the territory’s typical imports were on the ban list. Lithuanian officials claimed to be only “following orders,” as it were, from a higher authority.

“We just implement the sanctions, which were imposed on European Union level, and this has nothing to do with the bilateral relations between Russia and Lithuania,” announced Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda. With Russian flights over E.U. territory also prohibited, resupply of the isolated oblast is possible only by sea. For Moscow, blocking internal transit, even transit conducted through a third country, could be a casus belli. Russian officials muttered darkly about retaliation and “serious consequences.” The Russian Foreign Ministry warned: “If in the near future cargo transit between the Kaliningrad region and the rest of the territory of the Russian Federation through Lithuania is not restored in full, then Russia reserves the right to take actions to protect its national interests.”

It seems strange for Lithuania to be waving a red cape at the Russian bear. The Baltic states have spent years wailing about their vulnerability to Russian attack, demanding that NATO and the U.S. do more for them. In fact, some Lithuanian officials have a sense of preemptive martyrdom. For instance, Laurynas Kasciunas, who handles national-security issues in Lithuania’s Siemas, or parliament, asserted: “We are in a sense a modern-day West Berlin.” That reflects a highly inflated sense of international importance—Berlin was a Cold War flashpoint because the U.S. and Soviet Union were sparring over the future of Germany, a once and future dominant continental power. Lithuania’s role? Not so much.

In fact, absent provocation, why would Russia attack any of the Baltics? What benefits would it expect to gain from overrunning three small nations, which lack the historical significance attributed to Ukraine? Especially considering they already are in NATO and an invasion likely would trigger full-scale war. Moreover, Moscow’s difficulties in Ukraine suggest that the Baltic states might not be the easy prey once assumed, though Russia has doubtless learned from its mistakes and likely would seek a decisive result. Still, giving the Putin government cause for war is foolish. Alliance officials acknowledge that, given current deployments, the three states likely would be overrun before meaningful assistance arrived.

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Who’s your daddy?

EU to Allow Russia to Resume Transports to Kaliningrad (Spiegel)

It is a dispute that goes beyond a mere confrontation between the European Union and Russia. Should Moscow be allowed to transport goods like steel and aluminum through EU member state Lithuania to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad – even though those goods are on the sanctions list? DER SPIEGEL has learned that the European Commission intends to publish a clarification on the issue in the coming days. Its key message will be that Moscow will be allowed to use the transit route for all goods, but only limited amounts. The move will put an end to a disagreement that had not only been a significant source of tension between Russia and Brussels – but also exposed deep rifts within the EU regarding the correct approach to Moscow.


Since June 17, Lithuania has been blocking shipments of goods such as construction materials, metal and coal into Kaliningrad on the strength of EU sanctions imposed on Russia in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The ban has affected the rail line between Moscow and Kaliningrad in addition to deliveries by road. Air and sea routes are not affected by the sanctions. In Russia’s view, it amounts to a “blockade,” and it is criticized on a daily basis in the country. Indeed, an all-out military invasion has been among the responses discussed on state television. The European Commission clarification expressly applies to all EU member states, but it mostly only affects the situation in Kaliningrad. According to the document, Russia will be allowed to transport sanctioned goods to Kaliningrad, but only in amounts comparable to pre-invasion deliveries.

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“..the current lower volume of its oil exports at much higher prices thanks to EU sanctions allows the Ruble to become ever stronger while saving Russian oil for sale to others..”

Europe Fails With German Help (Vilches)

And precisely to address the current self-inflicted energy debacle, German Minister Habeck is compounding this ugly all-inclusive European conundrum in at least 14 different ways and has (1) shut down Germany´s nuclear power plants including the domino impact upon the inter-connected European electrical grid without any foresight or consideration whatsoever (2) banned excellent, cheap Russian hydrocarbons and distilled petroleum products thereof to which Europe´s entire economy and energy infrastructure is uniquely matched and tuned for, including the superb, proven, mostly un-replaceable Russian Urals crude oil blend and the most convenient Russian Druzbha door-to-door pipeline rendering 24x7x365 already vetted exceptional performance

(3) shut down and indefinetly cancelled the most-needed NS2 pipeline for delivery of Russian hydrocarbons, with possible partial expropiatory theft yet again beyond bank deposits and other assets (4) fully ignored the very loud Siemens compliance warning regarding the EU ban on return-delivery of NS1 equipment back to Russia under well-known, scheduled and mandatory Canadian maintenance requirements (5) re-introduced the dirtiest of coals, namely brown coal, as feedstock for German and EU coal-fired power plants (6) rationed hot water and fuel consumption including the amount of time that Herr Habeck himself spends in the shower (7) shamefully placed Russia´s Gazprom Germania in a ´trusteeship´ of sorts which will also prove to be a very expensive mistake

(8) promoted a fully counter-productive wind-mill expansion program requiring fossil-fueled equipment for the extraction and transportation of thousands of tons of nickel and rare earths that Europe does not have, plus subsequent movement, erection and maintenance of such wind mills with other fossil fueled equipment that Europe has to import, plus additional fossil fuel power-generating equipment always needed as backstop during low wind seasons such as the last several months, plus tons of fossil-fuel powered equipment to eventually de-commission such wind-mills (9) fast-tracked the LNG Acceleration Act to favor in every possible way the construction of fully unnecessary and super-costly Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in detriment of many other much needed infrastructures so as to many months from now eventually buy über-expensive LNG from the USA which is really the Master Pupeteer behind this anti-Europe Master Plan

(10) with direct benefit to Russia, the current lower volume of its oil exports at much higher prices thanks to EU sanctions allows the Ruble to become ever stronger while saving Russian oil for sale to others (11) pushed for a naïve buyer´s oil price cap cartel in a seller’s market (!!!) (12) seized Russian LNG tankers (13) crashed German nat-gas giant Uniper now ready for bail-out and Lehman moment (14) launched Germany and the EU in the most nonsensical “firehose” oil & gas policies already explained to death and with excruciating details

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“..Where as a result more money is spent on Offence (‘Defence’) than on any basic human needs..”

We Are Z (Batiushka)

The Schloss Elmau, ‘a Luxury Spa Retreat and Cultural Hideaway’ was a very suitable location at the end of June 2022 for the G7 elitists, ‘hiding away’ from the anger of their exploited peoples. Holed up in a castle in Bavaria (sounds familiar?), protected by thousands of paramilitaries, the neo-feudal Gang of 7 of the Western world met and condemned freedom, which is another word for multipolarity. Now freedom is represented by Z. Z means belonging to the Russian World, which is carrying out the existential Special Operation to save itself and the world from the global dictatorship of evil. The Russian World means all who are opposed to the Western/Anglo-Zionist/Globalist/NATO/Nazi ideology and its fake and failed puppet-states, which exist only to ensure the prolongation of colonial oppression and buy overpriced US arms and parrot their propaganda.

We who identify with Z live all over the world, even within the semi-conquered heartlands of the Evil Empire, in the USA, Canada, the UK, the EU, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. Here in Europe we in Z fight against the US-imposed EU Fourth Reich. But everywhere the letter Z is to be drawn as a sign of hope by all free people who still believe in the God, Who is not mocked. We are Z, who do not belong to your world, Where freedom is denied in the name of the tyrannical ‘democratic’ system, in which only one country controls the rest of the world and cruelly exploits it, Where as a result universal traditions of faith, patriotism and family are despised and trampled down, Where as a result more money is spent on Offence (‘Defence’) than on any basic human needs, Where as a result rich countries live in debt at the expense of poor countries,

Where as a result transnational corporations rule and exploit vast tracts of the globe, Where the land, the sea and the air are sullied by complex manmade chemical compounds which destroy life, Where as a result vastly rich individuals are richer than whole nations, Where as a result corruption is so rife that many are murdered or are in prison for no other reason than telling the truth, Where as a result slavery has again become commonplace, Where as a result countries such as Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen suffer genocide at the hands of Western imperialism, Where as a result there is no right to self-determination for oppressed peoples, like those in the Crimea and the Donbass, Where as a result the mainstream media, all controlled by the same hegemon, can only tell lies and oppress, Where as a result one billion are obese and one billion starve, Where the words Freedom and Truth, Justice and Tradition, Humanity and Sovereignty are cynically mocked and heartily detested.

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Faina Savenkova, 13, Lugansk. Good afternoon Mr. Assange!

The More You Grow Up, The More You Realise The World Is Unfair (Savenkova)

The more you grow up, the more you realise that the world is unfair. When the war in Donbass began eight years ago, few could have imagined that instead of the peaceful country of Ukraine, its authorities would make it miserable and torn apart, with a fierce hatred of the inhabitants towards each other. But it happened. That Ukraine – with Russian literature, great achievements and normal attitude towards each other – will never be the same again. Just as there will not be the West, which is the stuff of legends: with history, freedom and people to believe in and strive to be like them. Musicians, actors, presenters, politicians… they are all the same. The world itself is changing. Television replaces your walks in the rain and the Internet replaces your books.

Why read when you can watch a movie? Why be literate at all? Just know how to count to 100 and put an X. It’s been done before. And it’s probably a very comfortable world for some. But not for those who remember what IT is like to ask the right questions. Because asking them can destroy the cardboard world that we are encouraged to think is real. Such was the case with Julian Assange, who has become an example to many. He is one of those who has not been afraid to openly declare that people have a right to know the truth, shattering the known and so familiar illusion. He broke through the breach in this painstakingly built-up cardboard wall at the cost of his “normal” life. Let it not be in vain and others who wish to live in truth push that breach from horizon to horizon. And I will keep trying to push that breach to my horizon in Donbass…

Good afternoon Mr. Assange! I have been thinking for a long time how to start this letter… I have written many letters over the years to presidents, politicians and artists in Europe and the USA. Even to the Pope. I was ignored and dismissed, except for the clerks and small officials who answered with formal replies. But I kept writing and begging. It was all about one thing: to help stop the war in Donbass and to influence Ukraine not to kill children in Donetsk and Lugansk, Makeyevka and Pervomaisk. Many people said I was doing it for nothing. Just wasting my time. But listening to them, I remembered you because you were and are an example to me.

You could have said nothing to the world about what America was doing and simply remained silent and lived quietly, as many journalists did. But the truth is necessary. And the easiest and the most difficult thing at the same time is to tell it to people. You have become an example for many, including me. Thank you for your honesty, for your strength of will and for not breaking under the blows of fate. Thank you for the fact that you were able to give strength to fight injustice. May God bless you and your family.

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Not a fan of Jeffrey Sachs, but this may be useful.

Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster (Sachs)

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the U.S. wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the U.S. and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles.

The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Cohen, Elliott Abrams and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick). The main message of the neocons is that the U.S. must predominate in military power in every region of the world and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge U.S. global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China. For this purpose, U.S. military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the U.S. should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the U.S. only when useful for U.S. purposes.

This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the U.S.-led security network to Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the U.S. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the U.S. would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria and other former Soviet allies.

The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official U.S. policy under President George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to U.S. regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006: “[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the ‘color revolutions’ of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?”

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“..the Green New Deal is dead because even a Democratic majority Congress is too chicken to vote for measures likely to bring down the electric grid..”

Independence Day (Jim Kunstler)

[..] this Party of Chaos is insane, and rejoice this holiday weekend that you are not them. Independence, after all, was not just throwing off the yoke of King George III, but of establishing conditions for a people to thrive and pursue happiness without nefarious interference by vicious authorities of a leviathan state. That was something worth fighting for in 1776 and worth fighting for now. One such battle was decided this week in the US Supreme Court: West Virginia v EPA, about US government agencies under the executive branch usurping legislative and judicial prerogatives — in this case to enforce “Green New Deal” policies on the electric power industry by agency fiat, as if by law. No-can-do, the SCOTUS said in a 6-3 decision.

The ruling will tend to quash the growing tyranny of the unelected federal bureaucracy issuing diktats that nobody has voted for, like the Department of Education’s increasingly insane use of the 1972 Title IX [nine] update of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to jam biological male transsexuals into women’s sports and locker rooms. Much of this agency mischief has emanated in recent years from whoever is in the White House issuing executive orders to get around a recalcitrant Congress. Barack Obama was especially prolific at it and now the junta behind “Joe Biden” is trying to emulate Mr. O. The upshot is that the Green New Deal is dead because even a Democratic majority Congress is too chicken to vote for measures likely to bring down the electric grid and put an end to mass motoring (though current trends suggest exactly that outcome is in the cards even without government action).

The ruling also tends to foil the World Economic Forum’s effort to re-set Western Civ as a transhuman technocratic “green” nirvana. Rather, the USA and Euroland are on the express track to a Palookaville of grubby, post-industrial, neo-medieval hardship. Try to imagine Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse minus reliable electric service. All you’re left with is an ill-dressed schmuck wearing goggles in a dark, empty room. Not to mention the technocrat elite’s wished-for boons of computer-enabled eternal life and never-ending orgasm. Fugettabowdit. Mr. Zuckerberg will be lucky months from now if he can avoid being clamped to a stake and torched by the angered new peasantry he helped to create.

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Damned if you do, doomed if you don’t.

Biden Admin Delays Decision On Expanded Offshore Drilling (JTN)

The Biden administration on Friday issued a nebulous statement on the future of up to 11 offshore oil and gas drilling leases, insisting its final decision could result in the government approving any number of them from zero to all 11. An Interior Department official said government was equally mulling options to allow all, none, or some of the sales, according to The Hill. The previous, Obama-era, offshore drilling plan expired on Thursday. Among the sales in question are 10 sites in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the Cook Inlet near Alaska. It does not include any prospective leases in the Alaskan Arctic or off the Atlantic or Pacific coasts. Any decision by the Biden administration on the plan will not affect current drilling operations, The Hill asserted.

The lack of a decision on the lease comes amid a nationwide energy crunch. The price of gas surpassed $5 per gallon for the first time in U.S. history in early June. While both inflation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have partly fueled America’s energy woes, President Joe Biden has drawn considerable considerable criticism for his resistance to expanding domestic energy production. Biden canceled construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office. Moreover, his decision to offset rising prices by releasing 1 million barrels per day from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve drew sharp criticism from Republicans who demanded the president encourage domestic energy production instead.

Energy policy has become a major talking point for Republicans seeking to capitalize off of voter discontent with the administration’s handling of the economy. Republicans in June drafted a framework to “restore energy dominance” in response to federal policies. On the other side, Biden has faced pressure from environmental groups seeking to obstruct what oil and gas drilling expansions Washington is exploring. A slew of environmental groups on Thursday filed a class action suit over a series of leases in Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, and Utah.

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“What this administration should be actually doing is promoting more American oil and gas development..”

But they want the green vote!

Oil Exec: Biden Admin Breaking The ‘Backbone Of The Energy Revolution’ (Fox)

As the AAA national average for gas sits at $4.84 per gallon heading into the July 4th weekend, one American oil executive is begging the Biden administration to tap into the Permian Basin’s full potential. “The Permian Basin is the most prolific in the United States,” American Petroleum Institute Senior Vice President Frank Macchiarola told “Mornings with Maria” Friday. “It’s really been the backbone of the energy revolution here.” Macchiarola expressed hope that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plan to impose a discretionary re-designation of the Permian Basin, which is located in Texas and New Mexico and accounts for 40% of all oil produced in the U.S., falls through. “What this administration should be actually doing is promoting more American oil and gas development,” the oil executive told FOX Business’ Dagen McDowell.


In response to Biden’s moratorium on federal land and offshore drilling, the American Petroleum Institute introduced a plan to promote and restore U.S. energy independence. “That breaks down the barriers for infrastructure, that lifts the steel tariffs, that promotes LNG exports,” Macchiarola explained. “These are the types of steps that the administration should be taking, not looking to put limitations on the most prolific basin that we have here in the United States.” Pumping 5.2 million barrels per day, or 95 million gallons of gas, the Permian Basin is credited with pushing the U.S. to become the leading producer of oil and natural gas, according to Macchiarola.

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They’ve been behind for a long time.

US Falls Behind In Hypersonic Weapons Race After Another Failed Test (ZH)

America is lagging behind its international competitors in the hypersonic weapons race. This week’s test provided more insight into just how badly the U.S. is behind. Bloomberg was the first to report the Common Hypersonic Glide Body atop a two-stage missile booster that failed after an “anomaly” occurred during launch at the Missile Range Facility in Hawaii. The booster failed to ignite, which would’ve accelerated the rocket in excess of Mach 5, at which the glide body separates and uses speed and an unpredictable path to strike targets without being detected by the most advanced defense shields in the world.

“While the Department was unable to collect data on the entirety of the planned flight profile, the information gathered from this event will provide vital insights,” said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cdr. Tim Gorman in a statement. He didn’t provide additional details about the failed test. Gorman said officials would use data from the rocket’s failures to correct the issue for future tests. Even though the hypersonic weapons program has experienced multiple “fight test anomalies” over the last year, the spokesman was confident the delivery of the weapons to modern battlefields would occur “on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.”

The previous test of the glide body ended early when the booster rocket failed, which prevented the missile from leaving the launch pad. The Navy and Army have jointly been working on developing hypersonic weapons. The Air Force has also been working on a hypersonic weapon. After several failed tests earlier this year, the service successfully tested a hypersonic missile off Southern California in May. It’s no secret the U.S. is falling behind the hypersonic weapons race as the largest military in the world, in terms of size and defense budget, has yet to field hypersonic weapons. Meanwhile, Russia and China have completed successful tests and or fielded super fast weapons on the modern battlefield.

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“..Cipollone was not at the White House that morning. ..”

Why do I get the feeliing Cassidy was/is a plant?

Rep. Jim Banks Demands White House Jan 6 Surveillance Logs (Fed.)

Indiana Republican Congressman Jim Banks is demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disclose White House surveillance records to lawmakers in their investigation of blockbuster claims by the Jan. 6 Committee’s latest star witness. On Tuesday, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, offered sensational revelations in public testimony before the nine-member House panel depicting a president in rage as supporters ransacked congressional chambers. At one point, Hutchinson said President Donald Trump assaulted a Secret Service agent and attempted to hijack the presidential limousine with plans to drive himself to the Capitol.

“The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the f’ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,’” Hutchinson told lawmakers, citing a conversation with then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato in the absence of a firsthand account. Hours later, Hutchinson’s sources disputed the graphic events in question and told news outlets they were prepared to offer on-the-record denials under oath. Days after a centerpiece of Hutchinson’s uncorroborated testimony fell apart, more claims are beginning to fail the credibility test under closer scrutiny. While Trump was intent on going to the Capitol, Hutchinson said, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone allegedly pressured aides to make sure the president remained far from the complex.

“We understand, Ms. Hutchinson, that you also spoke to Mr. Cipollone on the morning of the 6th, as you were about to go to the rally on the Ellipse,” said Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who led Tuesday’s questioning. “Mr. Cipollone said something to you like, ‘make sure the movement to the Capitol does not happen.’ Is that correct?” Hutchinson nodded. “That’s correct. I saw Mr. Cipollone right before I walked out onto West Exec that morning, and Mr. Cipollone said something to the effect of ‘please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol, Cassidy. Keep in touch with me. We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.’ According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of White House staffing on Jan. 6, however, Cipollone was not at the White House that morning.

“Every Trump White House senior staff member knows that Cipollone was not at the White House that morning so that conversation could not have taken place,” one source who spoke on the condition of anonymity told The Federalist. “In Cipollone’s absence, Pat Philbin was filling in for Pat [Cipollone] that morning.” “Besides the fact that Pat [Cipollone] wasn’t there,” they added, “He simply doesn’t speak like that.” To independently investigate Hutchinson’s claims, Banks sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting to “review White House gate logs, surveillance video, and all other records that could indicate which of these senior staff were present at the White House during the times referenced in Ms. Hutchinson’s attached testimony.”

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“The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros..”

Soros’s Connection To US Media Infrastructure And Politics (ET)

Matt Palumbo, author of “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros,” details billionaire George Soros’s connection to American politics, and illustrates how Soros controls not only what is written about him, but also influences how the American public perceives news events. Soros created a financial concept called reflexivity, which Palumbo said is “brilliant,” because it can cause what Soros wants in the finance sector to happen. “But expectations set reality and Soros realized, ‘Well, that’s true of media as well.’ If you tell people what to expect, they’re going to reinterpret reality,” and that can be used to affect how people interpret news events, Palumbo said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” program.

“For whatever reason, if people think something’s going to happen, it actually will happen,” and Soros applied this to media companies’ coverage to make people believe something that did not actually happen, happened, said Palumbo. Soros-backed media agencies use this concept to create false narratives and make people believe in something that did not actually occur. The reason Soros is able to have this level of influence is that he gives tens of millions of dollars to the U.S. media infrastructure. There are many Soros-linked mainstream media organizations including, “ABC, CBS, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, I mean, it is a very long list. Type Soros’s name and just look at how they cover him, and if it’s ever anything negative, it’s ‘anti-Semites say: negative claim,’” said Palumbo, adding that their coverage always seems to favor Democrats and Soros.

A watchdog group called the Media Research Center (MRC) has documented Soros’s ties to media infrastructure. “Soros has spent more than $52 million funding media properties, including the infrastructure of news—journalism schools, investigative journalism, and even industry organizations,” according to an MRC report. Many left-wing groups, including media companies, get funding via Soros’s Open Society Foundation. That group is known to fund progressive initiatives like Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police, as well as political candidates and district attorney campaigns, said Palumbo. Soros’s foundation claims to promote democracy and individualism, but in reality, it supports a more radical agenda, said Palumbo.

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Leading, your honor!

28% Of Voters Think May ‘Soon Be Necessary To Take Up Arms’ Vs Government (JTN)

More than one-in-four U.S. voters are so alienated from their government that they believe it may “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, according to a new survey. Twenty-eight percent of the 1,000 registered U.S. voter in the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics survey released Thursday agreed and said yes to the question. In a partisan breakdown, one-in-three Republicans and Independent voters held that view, compared to one-in-five Democrats, the survey also found. The finding comes amid the televised Democrat-led House committee’s hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which has focused in large part on whether former President Trump and members of his inner circle helped incite the riot. The survey was led by Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson.


The institute said the survey was designed to “probe polarization and its relationship to the news sources upon which Americans rely in a fractionated media environment.” “The portrait that it paints reveals not only the growing divides we have witnessed in recent years but strong sentiments that the majority of media outlets contribute to these divisions by intentionally misleading their audiences to promote a political point of view,” the institute also said. On the issue of new sources, CNN was rated by 47% of respondents as making “a good faith effort to report the news,” while 41% said the cable network intentionally tries “to mislead their viewers to persuade people to take a political point of view.” Only about one-in-three surveyed indicated the Fox News Network passed on the “good faith” test, the survey also found.

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Almost funny.

Beet This: Ukraine Wins Fight To Protect Borshch Soup (AFP)

The UN’s cultural agency on Friday inscribed the culture surrounding beetroot soup known as borshch in Ukraine on its list of endangered cultural heritage, a recognition sought urgently by Kviv after its invasion by neighbouring Russia. Ukraine prizes borshch, a nourishing soup with beetroot as its base, as a national dish even though it is also widely enjoyed in Russia, other ex-Soviet countries and Poland. The Ukrainian culture of borshch cooking “was today inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding,” by a UNESCO committee, it said. The decision was approved after a fast-track process prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “negative impact on this tradition” caused by the war, the agency said.


“People are unable not only to cook or grow local vegetables for borsht, but also to come together” to eat it, “which undermines the social and cultural well-being of communities,” it said, using one of several alternative spellings for the soup. Kyiv hailed the move as a much-needed victory on the cultural front after four months of Russian bombardments. For the first time in history, the nomination jumped the queue and was considered in an expedited fashion given “the military aggression against Ukraine in real time and the real threat to the cultural object,” Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzeppar said on Twitter, adding: “Ukrainian Borsht derussified!”

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From the government back to the courts.

Julian Assange Submits High Court Appeal To Fight Extradition (BBC)

Julian Assange is seeking permission to appeal against a decision to extradite him to the United States. Last month, the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the Wikileaks founder’s extradition to the US. The High Court in London confirmed to the BBC an application by Mr Assange has been submitted. The Australian is wanted by American authorities over documents leaked in 2010 and 2011, which the US says broke the law and endangered lives. The documents are related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Mr Assange had until Friday to decide whether or not to appeal against his extradition.


The Australian is being held at Belmarsh prison in London after mounting a lengthy battle to avoid being extradited. Extradition allows one country to ask another to hand over a suspect to face trial. Previously, Mr Assange’s wife, Stella, said her husband had done “nothing wrong” and “he has committed no crime”. “He is a journalist and a publisher, and he is being punished for doing his job”, she said. The Wikileaks co-founder is wanted by the US on 18 counts, including a spying accusation, after his organisation published confidential military records and diplomatic cables.

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Rogan Real Fauci
https://twitter.com/i/status/1542497337171496961

 

 

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

 

 

 

Jun 072022
 


Pablo Picasso Rest (Marie-Thérèse Walter) 1932

 

Zelensky Says Ukraine is Being Pushed to Make Concessions to Russia (Celente)
Blaming Putin Is Helping Putin (Dmitry Orlov)
Fury In Moscow After Air Closures Block Lavrov Trip To Serbia (AFP)
Your Show of Shows (Kunstler)
The White House Keeps Stoking Covid Fears (Bhattacharya)
COVID-19: Mask Mandates Could Increase Death Rate (Celente)
Florida Surgeon General Openly Questions Safety Of Covid-19 Vaccines (FP)
Elon Musk Threatens To Terminate Twitter Deal (PM)
Biden Admin Quietly Raised Amount of Ethanol Required in Gasoline (CTH)
Soros Spent $40 Million To Elect 75 ‘Social Justice’ Prosecutors (WE)
Exasperated Biden Has Only Himself To Blame For Poll Numbers (Levine)
Why Is Chuck Schumer Trying To Stop Antitrust Reform? (NW)
Ankara Tries To Sell ‘Ottoman Islands’ Theory (K.)
Nils Merzel’s New Book Argues Julian Assange Is Being Tortured (Conv.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuclear warheads
https://twitter.com/i/status/1533811236160290817

 

 

“Zelensky did not specify exactly what parties are beginning to grow impatient..”

Zelensky Says Ukraine is Being Pushed to Make Concessions to Russia (Celente)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday told reporters that he is starting to feel pressure from the West to negotiate for peace with Russia from a current position of weakness. Ukrayinska Pravda reported that Zelensky told reporters: “I do not have any negotiations on any plans (on the peace plan, which is being discussed by the United States, the European Union and Britain – ed.); such negotiations are currently at zero. Everyone really wants to push us little by little towards some result that is definitely undesirable for us, because we have not been asked yet, but beneficial for other parties that have their own interests. Again, different: both financial and political. “Fatigue is growing, people want some kind of result for themselves, and you and I need a result – for us. Thus, I did not discuss with them the structures for resolving the issue of this war with a positive result for us.”

Zelensky did not specify exactly what parties are beginning to grow impatient with the war but some high-profile people have recently said that Ukraine should consider some kind of concessions to achieve peace. Zelensky and his closest advisers have been adamant that they will not cede one inch of the country to Russia, despite Russian forces and separatists now controlling about 20 percent of the country. Zelensky has said earlier that Russian troops must leave the country before there can be any talk of a negotiate peace, which many see as an unfeasible position. Last week, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, called Zelensky’s demand idiotic “and unfeasible in principle,” Newsweek reported.

“Anticipating his inevitable defeat, Ukrainian President Zelensky found a convenient way out of the impasse,” Medvedev said. “No country, no problem. His actions and statements prove that now he is ready to put almost everything on the altar of his political ambitions.”

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“The logical steps needed to make it all Putin’s fault are then obvious: the shortages are because of the war and the war is Putin’s fault.”

Blaming Putin Is Helping Putin (Dmitry Orlov)

The systemic crisis which we are currently witnessing in the West (and in other parts of the world that are too tightly interconnected with the West to avoid experiencing it as well) is objectively being caused by the West itself. But Westerners, being unaccustomed to acknowledging their mistakes (being all superior, indispensable and infallible-like in their own addled minds), are forced to resort to explaining away their epic failures in virtually every sphere by blaming it all on Putin. That is, they don’t even blame Russia in general, but blame Putin personally; after all, Russia can be good and agreeable at times (as it was under Gorbachev and Yeltsin) but Putin makes it misbehave. That’s why it’s all got to be Putin’s fault.

Here’s what it’s come to: an entire President of the United States (or whoever runs his teleprompter), who, in the course of his election campaign, swore up and down that he will take responsibility for whatever happens under his command, now blames “Putin’s Price Hike” so regularly and monotonously that the phrase has become a meme. By now the narrative of “it’s all Putin’s fault” has spread to encompass all of the more sensitive problems: inflation, fuel prices, food price hikes and even… shortages of baby formula! It turns out that the shortages aren’t caused by the discovery of dangerous bacteria in the products of a monopoly producer but by shortages of imported sunflower oil from… the Ukraine. That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, no less! The logical steps needed to make it all Putin’s fault are then obvious: the shortages are because of the war and the war is Putin’s fault.

This wonderful strategy works just fine for the short term, but it has a major vulnerability in the longer term because of a certain mechanism of mass psychology. Superficially, it is simple and seemingly bulletproof: Putin is irrational; he has imperial ambitions, suffers from paranoia, delusions of grandeur, is obsessed with restoring the USSR… Since his motives are irrational, they cannot be dealt with through rational means such as negotiation, diplomacy, compromise and so on. Putin is a crazy dictator with lots of nuclear missiles and so all we can do is suffer. This construct seems good enough for most purposes, such as explaining away social problems, economic issues and failures of leadership. But only in the short term.

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“This was a deprivation of a sovereign state of the right to carry out foreign policy.”

Fury In Moscow After Air Closures Block Lavrov Trip To Serbia (AFP)

Moscow on Monday furiously condemned the rejection by several European countries of a request for Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s plane to pass through their airspace, forcing him to cancel a trip to ally Serbia. “The unthinkable has happened,” Lavrov told an online news conference in Moscow. “This was a deprivation of a sovereign state of the right to carry out foreign policy.” Bulgaria, Macedonia and Montenegro refused a request from Russia for Lavrov’s plane to pass through their airspaces on the way to Serbia because of sanctions imposed over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine. Lavrov had been due to hold talks with top officials in Belgrade, one of Moscow’s few remaining allies in Europe since the launch of the offensive in late February.

Lavrov described the move as “outrageous”, insisting that Moscow’s relations with Belgrade would not be “destroyed”. He said Moscow had invited his Serbian counterpart Nikola Selakovic to visit Russia in the near future instead. The Kremlin also denounced the moves, with President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman calling them “hostile actions”. “We are convinced that such actions will not be able to prevent our country’s continuation of contacts, especially with friendly countries,” Dmitry Peskov told journalists. Lavrov had previously been forced to cancel a trip to Geneva for disarmament talks in late February, after the European Union closed its airspace to Russian aviation.

A Russian diplomatic source told news agency Interfax there had been no choice but to cancel the visit to Serbia. “Russian diplomacy has not yet learned how to teleport,” the source said. The chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament’s upper house, Konstantin Kosachev, suggested NATO was pressuring the three countries. “We are talking about a NATO demarche, and without the United States it could not have happened,” Kosachev said on Telegram.

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“..as a final indignity — actually, an advertisement to the world of our depraved weakness — the US military is hosting drag queen shows at our European air bases.”

Your Show of Shows (Kunstler)

The Party of Chaos certainly doesn’t need to reinforce the mass formation psychosis of its base who maintain that the 2020 election was the fairest-and-squarest in US history. The committee members will chant the talismanic phrase “The Big Lie” ad nauseam to ward off reasonable suspicions that they are the ones doing the lying. Since a kind of maniacal stupidity attends all the party’s doings these days, it could easily backfire on them. Even two years later probes are still pending in several swing states, and only a few weeks ago, the documentary 2000 Mules released time-stamped videocam footage of blatant wholesale drop-box ballot-stuffing around the country. Lawsuits filed lately also claim the committee itself is illegally constituted, since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disallowed (against the rules) the minority Republicans from appointing their own chosen members.

Instead, she did it for them, planting the vehemently hostile rogues Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on it, meaning no witnesses will be called who might refute pertinent details of the “insurrection” narrative already constructed. Much of the testimony presented will be videotaped interviews with Trump White House officials and there will be no accounting for what may be edited out. In other words, you have an obvious setup for a star chamber, a device for disregarding individual rights and fair procedure. The context, of course, as I aver above, is a country that is imploding six ways to Sunday — to paraphrase Chuck Schumer, the Party of Chaos’s Senate leader. At least half the public is already onto the extravagant damage inflicted upon our national life by the beneficiaries of the 2020 election.

Thanks to “Joe Biden,” the dollar is hemorrhaging value, we instigated a war in Ukraine that will lead to global famine and mass refugee events, oil and natgas are unaffordable thanks to our destabilizing of global distribution networks, spare parts are unavailable for every imaginable machine in the land, the business model for farming is broken, real estate is groaning under rising mortgage interest rates, the CDC is still pushing Covid vaccines despite proof that they are ineffective and harmful, cities are overwhelmed with criminal violence and psychotic homeless drug fiends, and, as a final indignity — actually, an advertisement to the world of our depraved weakness — the US military is hosting drag queen shows at our European air bases.

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“..in at least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.”

The White House Keeps Stoking Covid Fears (Bhattacharya)

“I’ve been a huge advocate of keeping schools fully open to in person education since October of 2020,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, tweeted last week. “Still am.” So why is Dr. Jha engaged in scare-mongering about the danger of Covid to children? In a May 30 tweet, Dr. Jha asserted that Covid is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.” He linked to an article by Harvard Medical School instructor Jeremy Faust, which claims that Covid killed more than 600 children in 2021, whereas the flu kills “an average” of only 120 children annually. But Dr. Faust’s data are severely skewed, for three reasons.

First, while flu is seldom tested, everyone admitted to a hospital for any reason gets a Covid test. Between October 2018 and September 2019, 1.4 million flu tests were reported to public-health and clinical labs. As of May 31, 2022, there had been 897 million PCR tests for Covid. Second, evidence from audits of death certificates found that 35% of all pediatric deaths in 2020 “had co-occurring diagnosis codes that could not be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant contributing condition,” according to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Put another way, in at least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.

Third, Dr. Faust relies on a figure for confirmed flu deaths that is well-known to underestimate actual flu deaths by an order of magnitude. Correcting for the lack of flu testing, the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases estimated 1,161 pediatric flu deaths in the 2012-13 season rather than the 142 that Dr. Faust reported. For the White House to amplify a false message of high Covid risk for children undermines public health and erodes public confidence. It foments an erroneous assessment of risk and is the kind of misinformation that leads to more school closings as well as burdensome mask and quarantine mandates.

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“Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths..”

COVID-19: Mask Mandates Could Increase Death Rate (Celente)

A new study out of Kansas found that mask mandates could be associated with a higher rate of death due to the spread of COVID-19. The observational study, which was published in Medicine in February considered “whether mandatory mask use influenced the case fatality rate in Kansas” from August 2020 to October of the same year, Town Hall reported. Dr. Zacharias Fögen authored the observational study titled, “The Foegen Effect: A Mechanism by Which Facemasks Contribute to the COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate.” He wrote the main takeaway was that “contrary to the accepted thought that fewer people are dying due to infection rates are reduced by masks, this was not the case.”


“Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or 50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates,” the German doctor wrote. Fögen’s theory is that hypercondensed droplets caught by masks are re-inhaled and “introduced deeper into the respiratory tract.” The study focused on Kansas because the decision to force masks was up to the 105 counties and 81 refused to impose them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to insist that masks are an effective tool in preventing the spread of COVID-19. President Joe Biden has made mask usage one of the central themes in his administration’s fight against the virus. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order requiring masks on federal property and called for their widespread use for 100 days.

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“How can you force people to take a vaccine in order to stop transmission when that vaccine is not effective at stopping transmission?”

Florida Surgeon General Openly Questions Safety Of Covid-19 Vaccines (FP)

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Friday made some of his strongest statements yet against receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Delivered at a press conference announcing an agreement with the Special Olympics to lift a vaccine mandate, the Florida Department of Health leader went much further. He called into question the efficacy of COVID-19 shots and whether they are even safe to use. “People will say oh, you know, millions of people have taken these vaccines, they must be safe,” he said. “Well, you can’t know the answer to that when it is taboo to talk about having a reaction after vaccines.” Citing only anecdotal evidence, he suggested the vaccine has produced more side effects than others such as flu shots.


“There’s another vaccine that over 100 million Americans take every year, and it’s the influenza vaccine,” he said. “And the stream of adverse events that I’ve heard from people all over this country after these vaccines is nothing like the years of my life when I’ve been in medicine and have been administering the influenza vaccines. There is a difference, and you can’t say that millions of people getting it excuses you from that.” Regarding vaccine mandates, he said those make no sense based on what science now shows about this coronavirus and about vaccines in use now. “Scientifically, it makes zero sense,” Ladapo said. “How can you force people to take a vaccine in order to stop transmission when that vaccine is not effective at stopping transmission?”

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“..Parag Agrawal, current CEO said that for Musk to undertake this count he would need access to information that is not currently public.”

You can buy this car, but you cannot look at the engine…

Elon Musk Threatens To Terminate Twitter Deal (PM)

Elon Musk has accused Twitter of “resisting and thwarting” his inquiries about how many fake, or bot accounts are currently on the Twitter platform. Musk has been trying to get this information since his acquisition process for the platform began. Musk has reportedly called Twitter’s unwillingness to provide the information a “clear material breach” to the terms of the agreement that is still under negotiation. As a result, Musk is reserving his right to not complete the transaction.In the letter to Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Skadden attorney Mike Ringler for Musk said that “Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” according to CNBC.

He said further that Twitter must provide the information that is being requested, and that the merger agreement requires it. Ringler disputed Twitter’s claim that they are not responsible to give that data in order to close the deal. “Mr. Musk is entitled to seek, and Twitter is obligated to provide,” Ringler wrote, “information and data for, inter alia, ‘any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction.'” “At this point,” Ringler continued, “Mr. Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover.”

The letter, submitted to the SEC, posited that “If Twitter is confident in its publicized spam estimates, Mr. Musk does not understand the company’s reluctance to allow Mr. Musk to independently evaluate those estimates. As noted in our previous correspondence, Mr. Musk will of course comply with the restrictions provided under Section 6.4, including by ensuring that anyone reviewing the data is bound by a non-disclosure agreement, and Mr. Musk will not retain or otherwise use any competitively sensitive information if the transaction is not consummated.”

Musk has been adamant throughout the process that he needs to know how many of the accounts on Twitter are actual humans. There is speculation that if the number is higher than Twitter execs have reported, Musk could negotiate a new buying price that’s less than the $44 billion initially offered and agreed to. Musk and his team have been willing to do the calculations themselves, but Parag Agrawal, current CEO who took over after founder Jack Dorsey left in the fall, said that for Musk to undertake this count he would need access to information that is not currently public.

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From 10% to 15%. But small engines and older car engines cannot take more than 10%.

(bio-) Ethanol fulfills its promise as an unmitigated disaster.

But wait, didn’t we have a food problem?

Biden Admin Quietly Raised Amount of Ethanol Required in Gasoline (CTH)

Last Friday the Biden administration raised the mandatory amount of biofuel, specifically ethanol, that must be blended within the U.S. gasoline supply. The previous amount of 10% was raised to 15% by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is likely to lead to two sets of bigger issues, less food and higher gas prices. First issue. – The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is a government mandate, passed in 2005 and expanded in 2007, that requires growing volumes of biofuels to be blended into U.S. transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel every year. Approximately 40 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is used for ethanol. Raising the amount of ethanol required in gasoline will result in the need for more biofuel (corn). With farming costs and outputs already under pressure this could be problematic.

Second issue – The EPA enforces the biofuel standard by requiring refineries to submit purchase credits (known as Renewable Identification Numbers, or RINs) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proving the purchases. This enforcement requirement sets up a system where the RIN credits are bought and sold by small refineries who do not have the infrastructure to do the blending process. They purchase second-hand RIN credits from parties that blended or imported biofuels directly. This sets up a secondary income stream, a trading market for the larger oil companies, refineries and importers. The RIN credit trading platform is similar to what we might expect to see if the ‘Carbon Trading’ scheme was ever put into place. However, now that the biofuel requirements for blended gasoline have gone from 10% to 15%, the price of the RIN credits will likely jump.

This will cost refineries billions in additional expenses,…. which will mean the cost of the gasoline from the refineries will increase,….. which will mean the cost of the gasoline at the pump will go higher. The EPA theory is that RIN credits should be expensive thereby forcing all oil refineries to invest in infrastructure that makes the blended fuel. All of the infrastructure from the refinery to the gas station would need to be modified to facilitate the new 15% RFS standard. Again, higher prices at the pumps as a result of oil companies and refineries needing to spend billions on upgrades. Which brings us to issue number three.

Third Issue – “Ethanol is a valuable source of octane in finished gasoline, but it is chemically different than petroleum gasoline and cannot be used in concentrations above 10 percent in small engines — like outboard boat motors, motorcycles, lawnmowers, generators or chain saws — or in any cars made before 2001. Complicating matters further, most cars on the road today still aren’t warrantied to run on gasoline with more than 10 percent ethanol. Retail stations also must have compatible infrastructure in order to sell gasoline with higher ethanol blends.” This issue is known within the industry as “The Blend Wall.”

Read more …

America’s future is being shaped by a foreigner who will not see that future.

Soros Spent $40 Million To Elect 75 ‘Social Justice’ Prosecutors (WE)

Sky-high campaign donations from liberal anti-police billionaire George Soros and his groups have helped to elect 75 “social justice” prosecutors in whose cities jailings have plummeted and crime has surged, according to a new report provided to Secrets. In a 17-page report compiled by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a decade of spending has put Soros prosecutors in enough big cities that they represent 1 in 5 people, or about 72 million. That includes about half of America’s 50 most populous cities and counties where 40% of U.S. homicides occur. Soros is a well-known proponent of social justice prosecution, which calls for lighter sentences, especially of minorities. The movement, however, has led to higher crime in some cities and has been decried by pro-law-and-order conservatives.


Police have led the charge against liberal prosecutors who have been refusing to file charges that lead to long prison sentences. In a statement to Secrets, LELDF President Jason Johnson hit the Soros funding. “Soros is using that campaign money and the hundreds of millions more for supporting organizations to quietly transform the criminal justice system for the worse, promoting dangerous policies and anti-police narratives to advance his radical agenda,” said Johnson. He added, “Over the past decade, George Soros has spent $40 million to elect 75 of his chosen prosecutors. In campaigns from Houston and Los Angeles to Philadelphia and Orlando, Soros was the campaign’s biggest spender by far — as much as 90% of the dollars spent in some races. Soros isn’t done yet — he’s already spent another million so far this year on his hand-picked district attorneys.”

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“Let Joe be Joe” is the thinking.”

Exasperated Biden Has Only Himself To Blame For Poll Numbers (Levine)

Leaks from the White House suggest that Joe Biden is in a snit over his plummeting poll numbers, now that they’ve sunk below those of Donald Trump. He is exasperated that he is not receiving credit for the great achievements of his administration and feels he is a victim of circumstances beyond his control: inflation, rising fuel prices, the border crisis, Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, school shootings, COVID-19, and so on. Oh, woe is him. So goes the spin. Biden’s solution is to snarl at staff and demand better messaging. First lady Jill Biden and the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, are reported by Politico to be urging him to get out and about more. “Let Joe be Joe” is the thinking.

But isn’t that part of the problem? When Biden goes off script in front of a teleprompter, things go awry very quickly. He blurts out reckless thought bubbles, like when he said Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” or that the US would get involved militarily in Taiwan. The plan is to put the near-octogenarian president on the road to give him more opportunities to connect organically with people and talk up his accomplishments. Perhaps in a sign that he is upping the tempo of his lethargic work output, Biden cut short his weekend sojourn at his Delaware beach house earlier than usual, returning to the White House Sunday rather than Monday morning. But the subtext of the leaks of turmoil in the Oval points to one central grievance: Donald Trump.

The man whose legacy Biden has spent his entire presidency trying to erase just can’t be outstripped. It’s why Biden can’t mention his predecessor’s name, treating him more like Lord Voldemort than a former president. He is “seething,” reports Politico, that his standing in the polls is now worse than that of Trump, “whom Biden routinely refers to in private as ‘the worst president’ in history and an existential threat to the nation’s democracy.” What does that say about his own presidency? Biden’s Trump derangement is “the greatest source of West Wing frustration, coming from behind the Resolute Desk.” Well, no wonder. When you look at the polling comparison between Biden and Trump, there simply is no contest. There is not a single day in which Biden has done better than Trump in his second year in office.

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Money?!

Why Is Chuck Schumer Trying To Stop Antitrust Reform? (NW)

We’re all familiar with the concentrated market power of giant technology companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, which reach into all corners of Americans’ daily lives. For more than a decade, their monopolistic dominance has spawned Justice Department investigations, congressional hearings, civil lawsuits and legal penalties. Over and over again, antitrust bills are discussed and some are introduced—and then they die in the House and the Senate. Now, though, two bills that would begin to rein in the power of companies like these Big Tech behemoths are under consideration in the Senate. They’ve both passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by impressive margins and are ready for a full vote. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been dragging his feet on bringing them to the floor.

Letting these bills die would be a significant failure of the American antitrust movement, signaling to the Big Tech companies that even modest and highly limited restrictions on their behavior are politically impossible to achieve—that despite overwhelming popular support for reform, Washington is simply too intransigent and too bought and paid for to get anything done. A defeat would give these companies the green light to continue stomping all over their smaller competitors and harming consumers by invading our privacy and limiting our choice. But given Schumer’s own ties to Big Tech, his reluctance to bring this legislation to the floor—where it would almost certainly pass—is no surprise.

Schumer has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Tech and its employees over the past decade. Between 2013 and 2018—a time period when tough data protections were adopted in the European Union, and there were broad calls for the U.S. to do the same—these corporate giants gave Schumer more than almost any other member of Congress. In 2016, the technology industry gave Schumer $237,000. In just the spring of 2021, when antitrust legislation was under discussion in Congress, Schumer took $120,000 from Google and Apple executives and their aligned PACs. The ties go beyond campaign contributions. Schumer’s staff has been a revolving door for Big Tech. According to the New York Post, more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms.

And Schumer’s two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram. Alison Schumer also advocated against regulation as a public affairs manager for Airbnb, the technology company that has in many ways distorted housing markets worldwide. Given all that money and those family connections, it’s no wonder that Schumer has been reluctant to take a hard line on the enormous problem of tech market concentration. Indeed, journalists who watch the sector have called Schumer a “quiet but reliable Washington ally” to Big Tech, as well as a “tech booster.” As recently as 2018, he said tech companies were too new to regulate aggressively. He proposed that the companies police themselves—an approach that has clearly failed.

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Lausanne Treaty, 1923. Yes, Turkey is smaller than the Ottoman empire. This is turning into a weird revisionist story.

Ankara Tries To Sell ‘Ottoman Islands’ Theory (K.)

The theory of “Ottoman islands” whose sovereignty has not been given to any country by any treaty is being pushed by Ankara in earnest. Indicatively, the idea has also been picked up and promoted by the Turkish media, targeting specific islands, such as Agathonisi and Farmakonisi. The pro-government Milliyet columnist and director of the Kanal D television network in Ankara, Zafer Sahin, said in an article that “a second Imia crisis is on the brink. This is because the situation has turned into a deep political and military crisis that goes beyond the Imia issue.” Greece and Turkey came close to war in 1996 over the rocky Imia islets.

In his article titled “The Ottoman Islands in the Aegean,” Sahin emphasized that Ankara, in addition to questioning the sovereignty of the eastern Aegean islands that are militarized, is also preparing to raise the issue of the sovereignty of islands whose sovereignty has not been determined, citing Gavdos as an example. “This is located south of Crete and is under a regime whose sovereignty has not been determined,” he said. Turkey has long promulgated theory of “gray zones” regarding the status of 152 Greek islands and islets, but it seems that now there is an attempt to connect them with the Ottoman Empire.

“There are Ottoman islands that have not been transferred to the maps of the US and Great Britain, issued after the Second World War, which appear outside Greek territory,” Sahin claims. These theories began to emerge after the statements of Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu last week, who tried to threaten Greece into demilitarizing these islands. “Otherwise, the debate over sovereignty begins as they have been given [to Greece] under conditions,” he said.

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Not a word so far from the new Oz PM.

Nils Merzel’s New Book Argues Julian Assange Is Being Tortured (Conv.)

It is easy to forget why Julian Assange has been on trial in England for, well, seemingly forever. Didn’t he allegedly sexually assault two women in Sweden? Isn’t that why he holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing charges? When the bobbies finally dragged him out of the embassy, didn’t his dishevelled appearance confirm all those stories about his lousy personal hygiene? Didn’t he persuade Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to hack into the United States military’s computers to reveal national security matters that endangered the lives of American soldiers and intelligence agents? He says he is a journalist, but hasn’t the New York Times made it clear he is just a “source” and not a publisher entitled to first amendment protection? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you are not alone. But the answers are actually no.

At very least, it’s more complicated than that. To take one example, the reason Assange was dishevelled was that staff in the Ecuadorian embassy had confiscated his shaving gear three months before to ensure his appearance matched his stereotype when the arrest took place. That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in The Trial of Julian Assange.What is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture doing investigating the Assange case, you might ask? So did Melzer when Assange’s lawyers first approached him in 2018: “I had more important things to do: I had to take care of “real” torture victims!” Melzer returned to a report he was writing about overcoming prejudice and self-deception when dealing with official corruption. “Not until a few months later,” he writes, “would I realise the striking irony of this situation.”

[..] He received nothing like full co-operation in investigating Assange’s case. He gathered around 10,000 pages of procedural files, but a lot of them came from leaks to journalists or from freedom-of-information requests. Many pages had been redacted. Rephrasing Carl Von Clausewitz’s maxim, Melzer wrote his book as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”. What he finds is stark and disturbing: “The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption. It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.

“It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public. It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.”

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Rubik
https://twitter.com/i/status/1533888946723340288

 

 

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May 062022
 
 May 6, 2022  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Nude on a beach 1929

 

NATO’s New World (Vilches)
Ukraine’s Forces Told To Hold The Line Where Russia Pulverizes Them (MoA)
For Those Who Still Don’t Understand (Sergey Glazyev)
Why is the White House Bragging About Killing Russians in Ukraine? (CTH)
Sleepy Joe’s $33 Billion Abomination (Stockman)
Tulsi Gabbard Bashes Biden For Calling Millions Of Americans Terrorists (Blaze)
Elon Musk Expected to Axe Twitter’s Censorship Team, Become CEO (BN)
Musk Blasts Soros ‘Dark Money Groups’ Threatening Twitter Advertisers (ZH)
Musk Summoned to Parliament for his Pledge to Restore Free Speech (Turley)
Five Steps to Free Speech in Social Media: A Musk Roadmap (Turley)
2000 Mules (AG)
FDA Limits Use of Johnson and Johnson Vaccine Due to Blood Clots (CTH)
McCullough: 30% of US Pilots May Have COVID Jab-Induced Heart Conditions (ET)
UN: Obesity Levels In Europe At ‘Epidemic Proportions’ (AP)
EU Officials Being Trained To Meditate To Help Fight Climate Crisis (G.)

 

 

 

 

Tucker MAGA

 

 

 

 

Psaki abortion

 

 

Celente

 

 

“..per the Führer´s own description, such lebensraum was to be found – oh coincidence — “in the Ukraine and intermediate lands of eastern Europe”

NATO’s New World (Vilches)

UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss recently experienced her 15 minutes of glory with a blatant hissy-fit rant policy speech at a London´s Mansion House banquet. She posited that the collective West now needs “a global NATO” to pursue geopolitics anew. Publically, Ms Liz Truss tapped her well-known Rule Britannia Anglo-Saxon exceptionalistic mind-set which now would badly require a much larger “lebensraum”. By the way, the Rule Britannia lyrics ´clearly clearly clearly´ let the world know that “…at heaven’s command…Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”. No way, slaves will exist, but Britons should make sure it´s the other way around, see ? So beware… With an AUKUS core, the strategic concept is “all for one, and one for all” just like ´The Three Musketeers´ except that the world´s livelihood is for real, not a novel. Liz Truss is not a cartoon character either, she is today´s United Kingdom Foreign Secretary.

Lebensraum Ukraine would only be the starting point says Truss very proud of British colonial history. Actually it´d have to be even far larger than what Adolf Hitler originally foresaw with his Nazi foreign policy dictum left on record in “Mein Kampf”. Unbelievably, and per the Führer´s own description, such lebensraum was to be found – oh coincidence — “in the Ukraine and intermediate lands of eastern Europe”… Mind you readers this is a historical certainty, unfortunately not fiction. Curiously enough, WW2 ended when Germany´s dictator shot his lover and himself in the temple only four years after the Wehrmacht had invaded Ukraine pursuing its much-needed Caucasus´ oil. So paraphrasing Mark Twain, and relating Nazis to Ukraine and oil …with the Russians defending and finally winning… history doesn´t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

But no Sir, what Adolf Hitler conceived 90 years ago today is not large enough at all for NATO, sorry. Per Liz Truss (more on her later) it´d be a flashing new “Network of Liberty” yet global in nature, understand ? The time and place of this new “Global NATO” setting Ms Truss says is (1) right now and (2) throughout the whole world, okay ? Furthermore, in the meantime and so as not to waste valuable time and resources, Liz Truss urges current (limited) “European” NATO to send more “heavy weapons, tanks, and also airplanes” to Ukraine ASAP “digging deep into our inventories and ramping up production”. Her obvious Russo-Europhobic objective is to split Eurasia into fractions according to the very British well-proven ´divide and conquer´ philosophy.

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“The order was given because the ‘west’ has pushed the Ukrainian president to not make peace with Russia. The consequence will be the assured destruction of the Ukrainian military.”

Ukraine’s Forces Told To Hold The Line Where Russia Pulverizes Them (MoA)

The Russian military forces are grinding down Ukrainian ground forces by extensive use of heavy artillery. The Ukrainian artillery has been destroyed or lacks ammunition.The Ukrainian forces have orders to stay in their position and to hold the line. That only makes sure that Russian artillery strikes will destroy them. The order was given because the ‘west’ has pushed the Ukrainian president to not make peace with Russia. The consequence will be the assured destruction of the Ukrainian military. There are claims that the Russian progress in Ukraine has been slow or has even come to a halt:


“The United States assessed last week that Russian troops were making “slow and uneven” progress in the Donbas, often of no more than “several kilometers … on any given day, just because they don’t want to run out too far ahead of their logistics and sustainment lines,” one senior U.S. official told journalists. But in its daily reports, the Institute for the Study of War noted that Russian forces made no confirmed ground attacks on Monday or Tuesday. It said a Ukrainian artillery strike April 30 on a Russian command headquarters near Izium has slowed the Russian push, and noted that, farther north, a Ukrainian counterattack Monday pushed Russian forces back 25 miles east of Kharkiv.”

Those claims do not hold up to reality. As Clausewitz wrote about the Schwerpunkt in ‘On War’: “[N]o matter what the central feature of the enemy’s power may be—the point on which your efforts must converge—the defeat and destruction of his fighting force remains the best way to begin, and in every case will be a very significant feature of the campaign.” Basing our comments on general experience, the acts we consider most important for the defeat of the enemy are the following: “Destruction of his army, if it is at all significant. Seizure of his capital if it is not only the center of administration but also that of social, professional, and political activity. Delivery of an effective blow against his principal ally if that ally is more powerful than he. Accordingly the Russian military is tasked with demilitarizing the Ukraine, Clausewitz’ task one, and that is what it is doing.


Russia is using the best available means to destroy the Ukrainian military. On the ground that means ruthless systematic mass use of artillery. Reports about the high morale of the Ukrainian soldiers who halt Russian advances are copium when compared with the reality of the battlefield. From the preface of the book King of Battle: Artillery in World War: “Artillery dominated the battlefields of World War I. That was seen in various ways, from wounding patterns and doctors’ clinical data, to memoirs, diaries, and letters, through to changed military doctrine after the war. No nation that had experienced significant ground combat would blithely assume morale could replace firepower. Artillery even holds the dubious distinction of causing a new diagnosis, shellshock.”

Azov Mariupol

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“..color revolutions” financed by the Comprador oligarchy under the promise of unfreezing assets seized in the US-European jurisdiction..”

For Those Who Still Don’t Understand (Sergey Glazyev)

A special military operation (SVO) revealed a plan prepared in advance by the US power and financial elite to seize power in Russia. It includes the following components and stages.

1. Wear out the Russian armed forces in a war with well-trained and directly controlled by the Pentagon fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, “stitched” by the Nazis with a vertical of officers appointed by the US and British special services. Turn the population of Ukraine into zombies infected with Russophobia. At the same time, incite the international community against Russia, making accusations of war crimes and genocide against its leadership. On this basis, confiscate Russia’s foreign currency assets and impose total sanctions against it, causing the maximum possible damage. This stage is actually completed.

2. Terrorize the Russian population with shelling of border settlements and military infrastructure, sabotage of transport, and hacker attacks. Hit the public consciousness with a flood of negative fake news and anti-government propaganda through social networks. To impose, through their agents of influence in the financial and economic authorities, an economic policy that blocks the mobilization of resources, including: inflating interest rates, continuing the export of capital, encouraging currency and financial speculation, manipulating the ruble exchange rate, and inflating prices. Thus, the sanctions can be repeatedly aggravated and provoke a collapse in production and a decline in living standards. This stage is in full swing.

3. Provoking protest moods and destructive socio-political actions aimed at overthrowing the legitimate authorities against the background of falling living standards and losses in the course of their activities. The use of the entire arsenal of methods for organizing “color revolutions” financed by the Comprador oligarchy under the promise of unfreezing assets seized in the US-European jurisdiction. At the same time, we are preparing the organizational and ideological foundations for separatist actions in the regions. This stage is under active development.

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“Perhaps because the only historic way out of a deep economic recession is a war or housing starts?”

Why is the White House Bragging About Killing Russians in Ukraine? (CTH)

Does Joe Biden intend to take the U.S. into a direct war with Russia? Perhaps because the only historic way out of a deep economic recession is a war or housing starts? Perhaps, because they need a bigger distraction from the political impact of their own policies? Those questions need to be asked and answered quickly, because the White House is about to flip the switch from a “proxy war” into an actual hot war between the United States and Russia. How do we know? Because the Biden administration is openly bragging about their specific military operations inside Ukraine that are killing Russians. Consider:

NYT: “The United States provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month, another sign that the administration is easing its self-imposed limitations on how far it will go in helping Ukraine fight Russia, U.S. officials said.” NYT:”The United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.”

Why would Joe Biden be bragging about killing Russians in Ukraine if he wasn’t trying to provoke us into a hot war? “The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield and maritime intelligence it is sharing with the Ukrainians secret out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war. But in recent weeks, the United States has sped heavier weapons to Ukraine and requested an extraordinary $33 billion in additional military, economic and humanitarian aid from Congress, demonstrating how quickly American restraints on support for Ukraine are shifting.”

Priest

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“In the target practice galleries of Washington politics, Vlad became the Donald’s avatar.”

Sleepy Joe’s $33 Billion Abomination (Stockman)

Donald Trump has been well relegated to the sidelines of America’s political debate, but the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) lives on, more virulent than ever. The latter is what’s behind Washington’s descent into the current mindless Ukraine war fever—an outbreak of irrationality that makes even the post-9/11 hysteria seem like an orderly discourse. At the center of this madness, of course, is Vladimir Putin, the Devil Incarnate. Prior to February 24th he had attained that designation in Imperial Washington not just because of his rough methods of governance in Russia or small time military forays in the 2008 South Ossetia/Georgia dispute or in putting down alleged terrorists in Chechnya, but because according to the RussiaGate hoax he had thrown the election to Donald Trump in 2016, thereby shockingly interrupting the rule of the bipartisan duopoly.

Accordingly, for the next four years the apparatus of official Washington–including the MSM in cahoots with the national security state—did not cease in its vilification of Putin via the running RussiaGate Hoax, the phony Mueller investigation, the rogue impeachment proceedings and the nonstop MSM linkage of Trump’s unwelcome presence in the Oval Office with the nefarious doings of Vlad Putin. At length, the TDS got so virulent and all-consuming inside the beltway that the resulting enmity toward Donald Trump became coterminous with the demonization of Putin. Consequently, when Trump got ushered off the stage (barely) by the American electorate in November 2020, Washington’s war on the Donald simply got re-focused with fevered intensity on Putin. In the target practice galleries of Washington politics, Vlad became the Donald’s avatar.

Needless to say, with the politicians in both parties foaming at the mouth against Putin, the Deep State and military-industrial complex had a field day hyping Russia into a national security threat that was not remotely justified, but which did massively distort policy. That includes perpetuating the Donald’s insanely bloated national security budget even further to $813 billion in the FY 2023 Biden request; stonewalling Russia’s reasonable proposals of December to reset security arrangements in eastern Europe, which would have precluded the devastation now besetting Ukraine entirely; and, after February 24th, turning the intramural dispute between Russia and its historic vassal and step-child, Ukraine, into a purported history-defining contest between peaceful Democracy and belligerent Autocracy—a struggle that justified launching a global Sanctions War against the very essence of the dollar-based payments and trading system upon which America’s tenuous prosperity precariously rests.

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“You remember when his attorney general said, you know, anyone who holds extremist or anti-authority views will be targeted for investigation and potential prosecution by their domestic terrorist unit..”

Tulsi Gabbard Bashes Biden For Calling Millions Of Americans Terrorists (Blaze)

President Joe Biden lashed out at the “MAGA crowd” and supporters of former President Donald Trump on Wednesday. The harsh and derogatory disparagement against tens of millions of Americans prodded former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to condemn President Biden. On Wednesday, Biden suggested that the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade was a slippery slope. Biden proposed a hypothetical situation, “What happens if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children?” President Biden told reporters at the White House, “Is that legit under the way the decision is written? What are the next things that are going to be attacked?” “Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history,” Biden said, making a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

[..] Gabbard was incensed by Biden’s incendiary remarks and slammed the president during an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity.” “When you look at the President of the United States of America calling millions of Americans, essentially terrorists, people who politically opposed him or voted against him, he’s calling them terrorists in an attempt to intimidate them into silence. And we know this because we’ve heard this before from both him and his attorney general.” Gabbard pointed to the Justice Department’s newly-formed “Domestic Terrorism Unit” that will target the “elevated threat from domestic violent extremists.” “You remember when his attorney general said, you know, anyone who holds extremist or anti-authority views will be targeted for investigation and potential prosecution by their domestic terrorist unit,” Gabbard said.

“So he’s essentially saying that this, quote-unquote ‘MAGA’ crowd are worse than terrorists. This is outrageous.” “And so for every American who’s watching, every American who’s seen this, no matter how you feel about the MAGA crowd, this is an authoritarian assault on our freedom,” the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii proclaimed. “And we need to stand together very strongly against this attempt to intimidate and silence anyone who holds political views that are different from or opposed to what this president and his administration are furthering. This is an assault on our democracy.”

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“I’m on the warpath!” he declared.”

Elon Musk Expected to Axe Twitter’s Censorship Team, Become CEO (BN)

Billionaire tech entrepreneuer Elon Musk is “on the warpath.” Musk is now “expected to serve as a temporary CEO of Twitter for a few months after he completes his $44 billion takeover of the social media company,” according to CNBC’s David Faber. The Tesla founder and CEO has the Woke establishment in full meltdown, even reportedly bringing the Big Tech platform’s Trump-banning chief counsel Vijaya Gadde to tears. She’s now expected to be axed. Musk, known for his cryptic tweets, alluded to shaking up the leadership team; of course, he did it with a meme. The context for the meme was provided by Newsmax’s Benny Johnson. It regards an interview between Tim Pool and the Twitter chief counsel herself.

“So your platform restricts speech?” Pool asked. “Our platform promotes speech unless people violate our rules,” Gadde replied. “In a specific direction,” he said. “In any direction,” she argued. “It’s about a pattern and practice of violating our rules.” Pool pointed out the obvious: “You have a pattern and practice of banning only one faction of people.” Then, Pool cited a report from Quillette. It found that out of 22 high-profile bannings from 2015, “21 of them were only on one side of the cultural debate.” “But I don’t look at the political spectrum of people when I’m looking at their tweets,” she claimed.


Musk has big plans for one of the most influential social media platforms. At the Met Gala on Saturday, he discussed his vision with the Associated Press. “Well, I mean, the goal that I have, should everything come to fruition with Twitter, is to have a service that is broadly — is as broadly inclusive as possible where ideally most of America is on it and talking!” Musk told the AP. “I think just generally, the — I’m looking for something that’s like I said as broadly inclusive as possible, that’s as trusted as possible as a system, and I hope we are successful in that regard,” he continued. “I’ve also vowed this publicly that we have to get rid of the bots, trolls, scams, and everything,” he added. “That’s obviously diminishing the user experience and we don’t want people to get tricked out of their money and that kind of thing.” “I’m on the warpath!” he declared.

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“Twitter risks becoming a cesspool of misinformation, with your brand attached, polluting our information ecosystem in a time where trust in institutions and news media is already at an all-time low..”

Musk Blasts Soros ‘Dark Money Groups’ Threatening Twitter Advertisers (ZH)

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has the world’s elites in panic mode – with the Biden administration launching a “Disinformation Governance Board” days after his announcement…followed by the United States, the EU, and 32 non-EU countries announcing a “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” that includes language to require web services to remove illegal content and prevent ‘harm’ to users – which is code for mean tweets, among other things. Another globalist, Bill Gates, is talking greasy after Musk compared the world’s former richest man to the pregnant man emoji. Musk’s purchase also prompted a constellation of 26 Soros-linked NGOs to sign a letter expressing concern about the plan – writing that “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalized.”


The authors that under Musk’s management, “Twitter risks becoming a cesspool of misinformation, with your brand attached, polluting our information ecosystem in a time where trust in institutions and news media is already at an all-time low,” adding “Your ad dollars can either fund Musk’s vanity project or hold him to account. We call on you to demand Musk uphold these basic standards of community trust and safety, and to pull your advertising spending from Twitter if they are not.” Those advertising on Twitter would risk their company associating “with a platform amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy theorists,” according to the letter. A quick look at the signatories:

Musk responded to the campaign against him by asking “Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” adding “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

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“..Clinton and others hope that the Europeans can replace corporate censorship with good old-fashioned state censorship…”

Musk Summoned to Parliament for his Pledge to Restore Free Speech (Turley)

I previously wrote about Hillary Clinton’s call on European countries to pass censorship laws to force social media companies like Twitter to regulate speech even after Elon Musk’s pledge to restore free speech to Twitter. Now the Parliament has called on Musk to testify and to explain his alarming pledge to restore free speech. The Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board head, Nina Jankowisz, previously called upon Great Britain to impose state censorship rules. That call has grown since Musk’s purchase. Until now, a unified front of corporate censors was able to maintain an extensive system of censorship with the encouragement of politicians and pundits, including Joe Biden and Democratic members .

The head of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Julian Knight has assured her countrymen that they can stay calm and censor on. She issued a letter for Musk to appear before the committee to answer for his terrifying suggestion of free speech: “At a time when social media companies face the prospect of tighter regulations around the world, we’re keen to learn more about how Mr Musk will balance his clear commitment to free speech with new obligations to protect Twitter’s users from online harms.”

Like the EU’s censorship plans under the Digital Services Act, the proposed Online Safety Bill would introduce state censorship through the purview of Ofcom (The Office of Communications), the broadcasting regulator in Britain. It would allow the company to fine firms up to ten percent of their global revenue should they violate ill-defined “harm” standards. If passed, Clinton and others hope that the Europeans can replace corporate censorship with good old-fashioned state censorship. This includes confiscatory fines for anything deemed “grossly offensive.“ The bill would allow countries like Great Britain to impose censorship on the rest of the world.

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“These challenges are difficult but pale in comparison to reinventing space travel.”

Five Steps to Free Speech in Social Media: A Musk Roadmap (Turley)

5. Protect against Surrogate State Censors.

As it became more likely that Musk could buy Twitter, there was a notable shift in the comments of pro-censorship figures. Hillary Clinton, who has long been viewed as hostile to free speech values, went to Twitter to call on the European Union to quickly pass the Digital Services Act in Europe to force censorship “before it’s too late.” That time table appears to be the Musk takeover when the public will suddenly have a free speech alternative to the once solid alliance of censorship among social media companies. Since figures like Clinton cannot count on corporate surrogates to censor, they are returning to good old-fashioned state censorship. If the DSA is passed, they hope to force Twitter to resume censoring material – a warning echoed by EU officials this week. Congress needs to act to blunt such an attack on American companies seeking to restore free speech values.

At the same time, the United Kingdom is pushing its own Online Safety Act and recently Musk was summoned to Parliament to answer for his alarming suggestion of restoring free speech on social media. The British are assuring citizens to “stay calm and censor on” despite Musk’s pledge. It is threatening to take ten percent of the company’s profits if Musk does not censor users. Musk will have to create firewall or siloed systems for countries forcing censorship. These systems should post tweets with a warning that these users are being subjected to national censorship standards while protecting U.S. users from having their free speech reduced to the lower common denominator.

These challenges are difficult but pale in comparison to reinventing space travel. The greatest asset that Musk brings to Twitter beyond a deep pocket and deep faith in free speech is his legendary creativity. He tends to focus on a horizon rather than the obstacles or opponents before him. Free speech remains a horizonal ideal but one that is attainable for someone with unflagging commitment and creativity. This could be the ultimate “moon shot” for Musk to bring free speech back to the Internet.

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Think this was also banned from Twitter.

2000 Mules (AG)

After the 2020 election, government officials and their allies in the media repeated the mantra that the election was the “most secure in American history,” Dinesh D’Souza pointed out before the premiere of his new documentary film 2000 Mules at Mar-a-Lago, Wednesday night. But how would they know that? D’Souza wondered. Even if they couldn’t prove the election was rigged, “it still doesn’t follow that it was the most secure election in history,” he said. “The only way you could prove that would be if you were to compare the amount of fraud in 2020 with 2016, with 2012, with 2008, with 2004, and show that there has been less fraud now than in any of those elections.”

D’Souza’s question is a good one. Did election officials study the security of every election prior to 2020 to make the determination that the 2020 election was “the most secure ever”? Or were they just spinning another false narrative that benefits one side of the aisle? The movie 2000 Mules handily answers that question. Using state-of-the-art technology, the film convincingly makes the case that the 2020 presidential election was perhaps the most unsecure election ever, and was stolen from former President Trump.

The election intelligence organization True The Vote gathered geospatial and temporal data—amounting to a total of 10 trillion cell phone pings—between Oct. 1 and Nov. 6 in the battleground states of Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The researchers looked at data surrounding ballot drop boxes in targeted areas, as well as UPS stores and select government, commercial, and non-governmental organization (NGO) facilities. This data, coupled with the surveillance video of the drop boxes, provide damning evidence of a coordinated illegal ballot trafficking operation across critical swing states. “Without free and fair elections, we are not a democracy, we are a criminal cartel masquerading as a democracy,” D’Souza argues in the movie.

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The vaccines still haven’t done enough harm, apparently.

FDA Limits Use of Johnson and Johnson Vaccine Due to Blood Clots (CTH)

The FDA has limited the use of the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine to only those over 18-years-old due to blood clotting issues. Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine is now limited to adults due to the risk of a rare blood clotting syndrome. FDA – “Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has limited the authorized use of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals 18 years of age and older for whom other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate, and to individuals 18 years of age and older who elect to receive the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine because they would otherwise not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.” (read more)


WHAT CHANGED? – “The FDA and CDC have continuously monitored for and investigated all suspected cases of TTS reported to VAERS. In an updated analysis of TTS cases following administration of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine that were reported to VAERS through March 18, 2022, the FDA and CDC have identified 60 confirmed cases, including nine fatal cases. The FDA has determined that the reporting rate of TTS is 3.23 per million doses of vaccine administered and the reporting rate of TTS deaths is 0.48 per million doses of vaccine administered.”

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“..if every vaccinated pilot were to be screened, there would be somewhere around a 30 percent loss in manpower..”

McCullough: 30% of US Pilots May Have COVID Jab-Induced Heart Conditions (ET)

Are we on the precipice of a major uptick in serious heart problems among otherwise young, healthy Americans due to the mass-disseminated mRNA COVID shots? Observations from several medical experts, including a well-known cardiologist, suggest that we are. Some individuals who appear to be facing worrisome jab-related heart problems are commercial airline pilots. Advocacy groups also say these pilots are being forced to keep mum about their health issues—and that a far greater percentage of them are likely suffering than the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would like to admit. Joshua Yoder is an airline pilot and co-founder of the U.S. Freedom Flyers (USFF), an advocacy group formed to help transportation industry employees maintain their medical autonomy and oppose federal vax statutes.

As noted by the website American Greatness, Yoder recently disclosed in an interview with Vaccine Safety Research Foundation founder Steve Kirsch that the USFF has already received hundreds of reports of pilots experiencing chest pain and other adverse side effects of COVID shots while flying planes. Of course, people experiencing chest pain caused by jab-related pericarditis or myocarditis (heart inflammation) is concerning enough. But to know that men and women are experiencing these issues while flying commercial aircrafts is deeply worrisome, Yoder says. Plus, many of these airline pilots are reluctant to speak out about their health problems because they fear losing their jobs. “I’m afraid if we keep going down this path,” he said in his interview with Kirsch, “at some point, it’s going to end in catastrophe.”

“If passengers actually knew what was going on at the airlines and the FAA,” he adds, “they would be livid, and everyone would be jumping on a class action suit against all of them.” In his interview, Yoder also shared what well-known Texan cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough said to him in a prior conversation: “if every vaccinated pilot were to be screened, there would be somewhere around a 30 percent loss in manpower” due to new jab-related cardiac issues.

Kolakusic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1522255323511369728

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Major US export.

UN: Obesity Levels In Europe At ‘Epidemic Proportions’ (AP)

The World Health Organization says the rates of people who are obese and overweight in Europe have hit “epidemic proportions,” with nearly 60% of adults and a third of children in one of those categories. In a report issued Tuesday, the UN health agency’s European office said the prevalence of obesity among adults is higher across the continent than any other world region – except for the Americas. “Alarmingly, there have been consistent increases in the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the WHO European region and no member state is on track to reach the target of halting the rise in obesity by 2025,” the report said. Among the countries it counts in its Europe region, WHO said the highest rates of obesity were seen in Turkey, Malta, Israel and Britain.

WHO said being overweight or obese is among the leading causes of death in the region and is responsible for more than 1 million deaths every year. Scientists have long warned that being heavy significantly increases the risk of numerous diseases, including respiratory conditions, diabetes and at least 13 cancers. It is also the leading risk factor for disability. “During the Covid-19 pandemic, we experienced the true impact of the obesity epidemic,” WHO Europe director Dr Hans Kluge wrote in the report. He noted that the obese were “more likely to experience severe outcomes of the Covid-19 disease spectrum, including intensive care unit admissions and death.”

Kluge also said that Covid-19 interventions like school closures and lockdowns often raised the risk of gaining weight when people turned to unhealthy diets and were forced to be sedentary. WHO called for countries to adopt policies to improve “environmental factors” linked to obesity, including taxing sugary drinks, restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods to children and efforts to improve physical activity In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says about 74% of Americans over age 20 are obese or overweight.

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There goes my faith in mankind…

EU Officials Being Trained To Meditate To Help Fight Climate Crisis (G.)

Brussels officials are being trained to meditate to help them tackle the climate crisis as part of a new wave of “applied mindfulness” that seeks to take the Buddhism-inspired practice “off the cushion” and into hard politics. EU officials working on the 27-country bloc’s green deal climate policy are attending “inner green deal” courses intended to foster a deeper connection among decision-makers and negotiators tasked with tackling the crisis. The courses incorporate woodland walks near Brussels and meditation sessions, including one that invites participants to feel empathy for trees and animals to boost “environmental compassion”. Some managers have reportedly shown impatience at being asked to meditate and want to “get on with business”.


But early results from the first 80 participants suggest the course has strengthened officials’ motivation to tackle climate problems and overcome personal despair that little can be done. Mindfulness has boomed in the west in recent years through courses, meditation apps and books. But it has drawn criticism that it has become a “religion of the self”, with one critic warning of “McMindfulness”. However, it is recognised by the NHS as an effective treatment for recurrent depression when delivered as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Now advocates of “applied mindfulness” believe it could accelerate consensus-building between climate decision-makers. A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the need for “inner transitions” and the potential of meditation to encourage lower-carbon lifestyles.

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From the Attorney General for Virginia

 

Unparalleled disaster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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