Jul 302023
 
 July 30, 2023  Posted by at 9:21 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky Constantinople in Moonlight 1846

 

Opera Buffa in Ukraine (Seymour Hersh)
Trump Lashes Out at Biden for ‘Monumental Corruption’ (Sp)
Russia Is Ready For Confrontation With NATO – Putin (RT)
Geopolitical Chessboard Shifts Against US Empire (Pepe Escobar)
Requiem for NATO’s Nightmare (Scott Ritter)
No Better Time For Ukraine Peace Talks Than Now – Hungary (RT)
Biden May Start ‘World War III’ – Oliver Stone (RT)
How To Fight A War With Advertising Slogans (Helmer)
Musk Denied Ukraine Starlink Access Near Crimea – NYT (RT)
Does Ukraine Really Have A Neo-Nazi Problem? US Officials Won’t Say (Forward)
US Rejects Australian Plea To Drop Assange Case (RT)

 

 

Bidens got $50 million
https://twitter.com/i/status/1685095151444905984

 

 

 

 

Macgregor

 

 

Zakharova
https://twitter.com/i/status/1685056299023863808

 

 

Arestovich

 

 

 

 

“Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

Opera Buffa in Ukraine (Seymour Hersh)

Let’s take a look at recent events in the Ukraine war from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should. On July 17 Ukraine attacked for a second time one of Russian President Vladimir’s proudest achievements: the 11.25-mile Kerch Bridge linking Crimea to Russia. The 3.7 billion dollar bridge, with separate spans for auto and train traffic, was opened for auto traffic in May of 2018 and for trucks five months later, with Putin himself driving the first one to make the crossing. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made it clear before the Russian invasion early last year that he considered the bridge a legitimate military target. Ukraine initially attacked the bridge last October, using a submersible drone, but it was fully repaired within seven months.

The most recent attack, by a pair of submersible drones, killed a couple who were driving across when the explosion occurred and injured their child. Damage to one of the auto spans was severe. The Biden administration’s role in both attacks was vital. “Of course it was our technology,” one American official told me. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.” I asked if there was any thought before the bridge attack about the possibility of retaliation. “What will Putin do? We don’t think that far,” the official said. “Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision.”

Putin responded to the second attack on the bridge by ending an agreement that enabled Ukrainian wheat and other vital food crops, stymied by the ongoing war, to be shipped from blocked ports on the Black Sea. (Before the war Ukraine exported more grain than the entire European Union and nearly half of the world’s sunflower seeds.) And Russia began steadily intensifying missile and rocket attacks in Odessa, whose initial target list has expanded from port areas to inner city sites. The official said there was a lot more than grain and sunflower seeds flowing into Europe from Odessa and other Black Sea ports: “Odessa’s exports included illegal stuff like drugs and the oil that Ukraine was getting from Russia.”

At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.” There are some in the American intelligence community, the official said, who worry about Putin’s response to the recent Ukrainian drone attacks in central Moscow. “Will Kiev be next?”

The official depicted the American position on the war in Ukraine as confounding and unrealistic. “The president and [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken keep on saying, ‘We are going to do what it takes for as long as it takes’ to win the war.” He added that the administration has been negotiating for months for the purchase of what may amount to as much as a ten-year supply of 155-mm artillery shells from the Pakistani army that could, ironically, extend the life of a losing war effort. “More people are going to die in this war, and what for?” the official asked. “The American and Ukrainian military are no longer making any predictions” about future success in the current counteroffensive. “The Ukrainian army has not gotten past the first of three Russian defense lines. Every mine the Ukrainians dig up is replenished at night by the Russians.

Read more …

It all connects.

Trump Lashes Out at Biden for ‘Monumental Corruption’ (Sp)

Former US President Donald Trump has once again critiqued the administration of US President Joe Biden, accusing Biden of corruption. “When we win the election a little more than a year from now, I will appoint a real special prosecutor to expose the monumental corruption of the Biden crime family once and for all,” Trump said at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on Saturday. Trump said that the Biden family had profited from Ukraine and now the Biden administration is spending billions of American taxpayer dollars on Ukraine. The former US president once again took personal credit for the lack of confrontation in Ukraine, as well as Taiwan, under his administration. Trump emphasized that now, under Biden, China is “building military installations in Cuba.”

“And less than three years ago, we had Iran, China, Russia and North Korea in check,” Trump said, adding that now, “Russia and China are holding summits together to carve up the world.” If elected, Trump said he would put America first, end inflation, “get total independence from China,” and stop the conflict in Ukraine by getting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to start negotiations. Trump said that Biden wants him arrested because he is successful in his election campaign and stressed that there is “one chance to save” America, and that is the 2024 presidential elections. “We need fair elections and we need borders,” Trump said. He emphasized that globalists must be driven out of the US political system in order to get America to be powerful, wealthy, strong, proud and safe again.

On Friday, Trump said that his possible sentencing would not stop his presidential campaign. Earlier this month, US media reported that Trump’s attorneys were told to expect an indictment against the former president for his alleged role in efforts to overturn the 2020 US presidential election. The indictment would come amid a number of other probes into potential misconduct by Trump, including on his handling of classified documents, as well as in the middle of the 2024 presidential race, in which he has established himself as the Republican Party’s leading candidate.

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NATO is not ready.

Russia Is Ready For Confrontation With NATO – Putin (RT)

Russia is “always ready for any scenario,” President Vladimir Putin told journalists on Saturday, commenting on a potential direct confrontation between the Russian and NATO militaries. The president was answering a question about recent near-collisions involving Russian and American aircraft in Syria. “No one wants that,” the president added, pointing to the existing conflict-prevention lines that allow Russian and US officers to talk directly about “any crisis situation.”That fact that these lines still work shows that no side is interested in a conflict, he added. “If someone wants it – and that’s not us – then we’re ready,” Putin added. The Russian military has reported a total of 23 dangerous incidents involving Russian aircraft and those of the US-led coalition since early 2023, said Admiral Oleg Gurinov, the head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria.


Most incidents took place in July, he added. In 11 cases the Russian pilots recorded being targeted with Western aircraft-targeting systems. Such actions on the part of the US-led coalition led to the automatic engagement of onboard defense systems, which saw Russian aircraft releasing decoy flares, the admiral told journalists.Moscow has also repeatedly warned Washington and its allies about the risks of a potential direct conflict between Russia and NATO, particularly amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Continued Western arms supplies to Kiev only extend the hostilities and make its Western backers engage in the conflict even deeper, Russia said.

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“..the only possible outcome devised by the Straussian neocon psychos who run US foreign policy is unconditional Russian surrender..”

Geopolitical Chessboard Shifts Against US Empire (Pepe Escobar)

The geopolitical chessboard is in perpetual shift – and never more than in our current incandescent juncture. A fascinating consensus in discussions among Chinese scholars – including those part of the Asian and American diasporas – is that not only Germany/EU lost Russia, perhaps irretrievably, but China gained Russia, with an economy highly complementary to China’s own and with solid ties with the Global South/Global Majority that can benefit and aid Beijing. Meanwhile, a smatter of Atlanticist foreign policy analysts are now busy trying to change the narrative on NATO vs. Russia, applying the rudiments of realpolitik. The new spin is that it’s “strategic insanity” for Washington to expect to defeat Moscow, and that NATO is experiencing “donor fatigue” as the sweatshirt warmonger in Kiev “loses credibility”.

Translation: it’s NATO as a whole that is completely losing credibility, as its humiliation in the Ukraine battlefield is now painfully graphic for all the Global Majority to see. Additionally, “donor fatigue” means losing a major war, badly. As military analyst Andrei Martyanov has relentlessly stressed, “NATO ‘planning’ is a joke. And they are envious, painfully envious and jealous.” A credible path ahead is that Moscow will not negotiate with NATO – a mere Pentagon add-on – but offer individual European nations a security pact with Russia that would make their need to belong to NATO redundant. That would assure security for any participating nation and relieve pressure on it from Washington. Bets could be made that the most relevant European powers might accept it, but certainly not Poland – the hyena of Europe – and the Baltic chihuahuas.

In parallel, China could offer peace treaties to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and subsequently a significant part of the US Empire of Bases might vanish. The problem, once again, is that vassal states don’t have the authority or power to comply with any agreement ensuring peace. German businessmen, off the record, are sure that sooner or later Berlin may defy Washington and do business with the Russia-China strategic partnership because it benefits Germany. Yet the golden rule still has not been met: if a vassal state wants to be treated as a sovereign state, the first thing to do is to shut down key branches of the Empire of Bases and expel US troops. Iraq is trying to do it for years now, with no success. One third of Syria remains US-occupied – even as the US lost its proxy war against Damascus due to Russian intervention.

Russia has been forced to fight against a neighbor and kin that it simply can’t afford to lose; and as a nuclear and hypersonic power, it won’t. Even if Moscow will be somewhat strategically weakened, whatever the outcome, it’s the US – in the view of Chinese scholars – that may have committed its greatest strategic blunder since the establishment of the Empire: turning the Ukraine Project into an existential conflict, and committing the entire Empire and all its vassals to a Total War against Russia. That’s why we have no peace negotiations, and the refusal even of a cease fire; the only possible outcome devised by the Straussian neocon psychos who run US foreign policy is unconditional Russian surrender.

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Goodbye to All That

Requiem for NATO’s Nightmare (Scott Ritter)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky emerges as a tragic figure in the unfolding drama that is the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.He was asked to sacrifice the lives of his countrymen in order to be seen by the U.S. and NATO as worthy of joining their club. But when the sacrifice did not produce the desired result (i.e., the strategic defeat of Russia), the door to NATO, which had been left open a crack to tease Ukraine into performing its suicidal task, was slammed shut. Despite NATO’s disingenuous machinations to maintain the optics of potential Ukrainian membership (the Ukraine-NATO Council, created during the Vilnius Summit earlier this month, stands as a prime example), everyone knows that Ukrainian membership in the trans-Atlantic alliance is a fantasy.

Ukraine is now left to pick a poison of its own choosing — accept a peace which makes permanent Russian territorial claims while forever foregoing the possibility, however distant, of NATO membership; or to continue to fight, with the likely outcome of the additional loss of territory and destruction of the Ukrainian nation and people. Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That, does double duty by providing a template for Ukraine as it charts the passing of Europe’s old order — the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance, the European Union, the rules-based international order and all the post-World War II structures, which held the Western world together for nearly eight decades. They are all now crumbling around us.

Graves’ struggle to adapt to post-war England in the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, and his observations of a nation collectively struggling to define itself, is a cautionary tale for what is in store for Ukraine. As Ukraine bids farewell to its former self, it must also part with its dreams of becoming one with a European community whose own longevity is very much in doubt. That is largely because of its disastrous involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Ukraine will never be the same after this war ends. Neither will the NATO alliance. Having defined the proxy war it is waging in Ukraine against Russia in existential terms, NATO will struggle to find both relevance and purpose in a post-conflict world.

The Vilnius summit on July 11-12 in many ways represented the high-water mark of Europe’s old order. The summit was the requiem for a nightmare of Europe’s own creation — the death of a nation, the nullification of a continent and the end of an order which had long ago lost its legitimacy.

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Any time is the best time.

No Better Time For Ukraine Peace Talks Than Now – Hungary (RT)

Conditions for negotiations to end the Ukrainian conflict will only worsen, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto predicted in Budapest on Friday. The two sides, he believes, wouldn’t be in a better position for talks than now. At present, Moscow is prepared to seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, while Kiev and its backers, including the US and NATO, are still refusing to enter such talks. “There will be no better conditions for peace negotiations than the present,” Szijjarto told journalists on Friday following his meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan. “Yesterday’s conditions were better than today’s, and tomorrow’s conditions will be worse than today’s,” the Hungarian minister added.

Budapest still believes that “there is no [military] solution” for the conflict, Szijjarto said. Hungary has emerged as one of the most active advocates of a negotiated solution to the ongoing conflict. Hungarian officials, including Szijjarto and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have repeatedly called for a ceasefire and peace deal in Ukraine, and have criticized the EU for sending arms to Kiev. Budapest has also been adamant that anti-Russia sanctions hurt Europe more than they hurt Moscow. In June, Orban told German tabloid Bild that a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield is “impossible.” This week the prime minister also said that Kiev had virtually “run out of strength” and the only thing keeping Ukraine “alive” was Western financial assistance.

Moscow has repeatedly signaled that it is ready for peace talks with Ukraine. It has also blamed Kiev for the lack of progress in diplomacy, citing a decree signed last year by President Vladimir Zelensky that prohibits talks for as long as Russia’s Putin remains in power. Last month the Ukrainian leader reiterated his stance, that talks with Moscow could only start after Russian forces withdraw from all Ukrainian territory within its 1991 borders, including Crimea. Russia has rejected such demands as unrealistic. Speaking at the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg on Friday, Putin said that the ongoing conflict is rooted in threats posed to Russia’s security by NATO. Washington and its allies “reject negotiations on the issues of assuring equal security,” he added.

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“..he’s dragging us stupidly into a confrontation with a power that is not going to give..”

Biden May Start ‘World War III’ – Oliver Stone (RT)

US President Joe Biden is following a “suicidal” course in Ukraine and may drag the US “stupidly into a confrontation” with Russia, acclaimed director Oliver Stone said during a recent podcast appearance. Speaking on an episode of British commentator Russell Brand’s ‘Stay Free’ podcast released on Friday, Stone blamed the conflict in Ukraine on the “neoconservative movement who started the war in Iraq,” and who still occupy prominent positions in Biden’s government. “Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he really hates the old Soviet Union which he confounds again with the Russian Federation, which is not communist,” Stone continued. “It seems that he’s dragging us stupidly into a confrontation with a power that is not going to give. This is [Russia’s] borders. This is their world. This is NATO going into Ukraine. This is a whole other story.”

Stone revealed that he voted for Biden in 2020, a decision that he now considers “a mistake.” “I was thinking he was an old man now that he would calm down, that he would be more mellow and so forth,” Stone said, adding that he now sees “a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration. Who knows?” Back in 2016, Stone produced a documentary, ‘Ukraine on Fire’, explaining the role of the US in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovich. The film was highly critical of NATO’s eastward expansion, the US’ sponsorship of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and the war on Donetsk and Lugansk waged by Yanukovich’s US-backed successor, Pyotr Poroshenko.

The Euromaidan coup, he told Brand, “was a very deep plan to penetrate the Russian Federation.” Stone has repeatedly expressed this sentiment in the years since ‘Ukraine on Fire’ was released. “Since 2014, Ukraine was no longer neutral but anti-Russian, and that’s what disrupted the balance,” he told the Serbian daily Politika in December, adding that “every war has causes and consequences.” Though Stone was a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump and voted for his Democratic opponent in 2020, his views on the Ukraine conflict align with Trump’s. The former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner has also named the same neoconservatives as key architects of the conflict, while accusing Biden of dragging the US into “a third world war.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1685524595170758656

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You give western Ukraine to Poland and voila!, it’s part of NATO! Article 5!

How To Fight A War With Advertising Slogans (Helmer)

In the advertising Hall of Fame, three of the all-time winning slogans are “Just do it”; “Where’s the beef?”; and “Good to the last drop”. Three Ukrainian army soldiers and a military press officer from Kiev have pressed all three on the Financial Times of London, and they just hit the money, so to speak. “Rather than dart across Russian minefields aiming to punch through enemy lines with Nato armour,” the newspaper is reporting, “Ukrainian forces have moved their focus to pounding Russian defensive positions with heavy artillery fire. Artillery gunners operating multiple-launch rocket systems and howitzers, some loaded with US-supplied cluster munitions, aim to clear pathways for small teams of sappers and infantry units.

These troops then attempt to advance methodically on foot, moving forward one narrow tree line at a time in a select few spots along the 1,000-kilometre front line… The painstaking strategy has raised questions in western capitals about whether Ukraine will be able to maintain it for long, or produce the kind of military breakthrough that would bring Moscow to the negotiating table… But in the short term, the tactic has reduced Ukrainian losses. Casualties and the number of prized western battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles lost in battle are down compared with the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, while Ukraine has made small but steady gains.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday night praised ‘very good results’ on the frontline”, the newspaper added.

This is the advertising to keep the US, the NATO allies, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) just doing it — continuing the $41.3 billion in military beef and $115 billion in cash to the last drop. The battlefield outcome in measurable Russian military terms cannot be a winning tagline because it is irrelevant to advertising success in public and political terms on the US and NATO side. “The so-called counteroffensive,” President Vladimir Putin told a reporter on Thursday, “this broad counteroffensive, started on June 4, 2023. This is an obvious fact, demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have engaged their so-called strategic reserves. As for the past few days, we can confirm that combat action has entered its intensive phase, to a significant extent.

The clashes are primarily concentrated in what they call in the West the direction of the main attack – the Zaporozhye sector. Yesterday, there was serious military action within the area of responsibility of the 810th brigade of the Black Sea’s Naval Infantry and the 71st Regiment from the 42nd division of the Southern Military District’s 58th Army…The enemy has not succeeded in any of the sectors of combat activity. All attempts at the counteroffensive have been stopped. The enemy has been forced to retreat with substantial losses. Today, they tried to recover the damaged assets, as well as pick up the wounded and casualties after leaving them on the battlefield yesterday but were also dispersed. This is the current situation as of this moment.” The men and the materiel are being lost, but not the money. The latter is winning; the former is losing but doesn’t count.

There is also a process of the “Ukraine gaining admission to NATO piecemeal”, as the Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko described it to Putin on July 23. “Tearing off this western piece of Ukraine: under the guise of NATO accession, to mislead the population. They want to chop off western Ukraine and join it to Poland. This is the payment for the active participation of the Poles in this operation, against the forces of the Russian Federation, of course. This is supported by the Americans. I told you this a long time ago, we witnessed this six months ago and discussed it preliminarily. Why am I telling you all this? It is unacceptable to us, Mr Putin. It is unacceptable to tear off western Ukrainian, dismember Ukraine and hand over these lands to Poland. And if, naturally, the western population of Ukraine needs this, we will be supporting them, of course.”

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Not for warfare.

Musk Denied Ukraine Starlink Access Near Crimea – NYT (RT)

The SpaceX co-founder, US billionaire Elon Musk, prevented Ukraine from using his company’s Starlink satellite communications system to strike Russia, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. SpaceX has donated over 20,000 Starlink satellite terminals to Ukraine since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in late February 2022, providing internet access in chaotic battleground areas that would otherwise be cut off. Kiev, however, sought to weaponize the communications system, according to the NYT. At some point in 2022, Ukrainian forces wanted to use the satellite system to launch a maritime drone and strike Russian ships docked at Black Sea ports. Musk refused Kiev’s request to grant its forces access to Starlink near Crimea to facilitate the attack.

In mid-February the entrepreneur said on Twitter that his company would not “enable escalation of a conflict that may lead to WWIII.” He also said that SpaceX would not be “allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes.” He also warned about the risks of a global conflict, adding that most people seem to be “oblivious” to the danger of it. According to the NYT, SpaceX also restricted access to its Starlink systems depending on frontline changes. The company used location data gathered by its service to enforce certain limits on satellite communication access, the media outlet said, adding that such a policy supposedly “caused problems” during Kiev’s counteroffensive attempts.

Starlink was initially hailed by both Ukraine and the US as a gamechanger for the Ukrainian military, providing a reliable communications system that Russia allegedly could not disrupt through hacking. Musk then gradually fell out of favor with Ukrainian officials, provoking the ire of Kiev on several occasions. In autumn 2022, he said that SpaceX could no longer cover the Starlink operation costs in Ukraine out of its own pocket. In October 2022, he revealed that the effort would cost $20 million a month and could not be sustained indefinitely. According to the NYT, about 1,300 Starlink terminals in Ukraine stopped working after Kiev failed to pay the $2,500 monthly fee for each. In December 2022, it secured additional funding from some of its European backers to cover the system’s costs.

The SpaceX CEO also incurred Kiev’s wrath by suggesting a peace plan in October 2022 that would have required Ukraine to make concessions to Russia. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s aide, Mikhail Podoliak, then demanded that the billionaire either side with Ukraine and refrain from seeking “ways to do harm,” or that he be seen as pro-Russian. In June of this year the Pentagon announced it had awarded a contract to SpaceX for Starlink satellite communications services in Ukraine. The US Department of Defense declined to disclose any details about the deal, citing “operational security reasons” and the “critical nature of these systems.”

Read more …

Forward is a Jewish outlet. You’d think they’d know what to make of Bandera et al.

Does Ukraine Really Have A Neo-Nazi Problem? US Officials Won’t Say (Forward)

It’s hard to know if Paul Massaro was oblivious or indifferent to the Nazi origin of the banner he proudly brandished. The flag, sent to him by the Ukraine Army’s Azov Brigade, featured a near-facsimile of the so-called wolfsangel symbol used by the Nazi Waffen SS. It is the unit’s official insignia. But when critics called him out for the selfie he posted on Twitter in February, Massaro — a senior official on a congressional commission that promotes human rights and democracy — was unapologetic. Instead, he lauded the “heroic last stand” that Azov had made against Russia in last year’s siege of Mariupol, and celebrated the Ukrainian government’s decision to formally elevate it to brigade status as new recruits swelled its ranks.

Six days later, Massaro posted a beaming photo of himself with an arm patch honoring Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist whose forces killed tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in multiple pogroms. “Hey, look what I’ve got,” he wrote above the picture. Paul Massaro tweeted a photo of himself wearing an arm patch honoring Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist whose forces killed tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in multiple pogroms. “Hey, look what I’ve got,” he wrote above the picture. Critics erupted — but Massaro dug in. He noted that Ukrainians view Bandera, who collaborated with Nazis in his yearslong struggle against the Soviet Union, “through the lens of the struggle for Ukrainian independence.”

Massaro eventually deleted both posts. But his tweets and the responses exemplify a discomfiting trend: Nearly 18 months into Russia’s war on Ukraine, the West’s tolerance of far-right actors has reached levels not seen since the 1930s. In its existential struggle against Russian invaders, Ukraine, a pro-Western democracy, has elevated some problematic heroes with fascist origins. And its allies — including Jewish leaders and liberal politicians usually on guard against such forces — have largely downplayed or denied this phenomenon. At least 13 members of Congress, for example, have met with Azov Brigade members and their spouses over the last nine months, despite Congress having banned U.S. funding for the unit since 2018 because of its extremist roots. In June, an Azov delegation met with a leader of Human Rights Watch — a watchdog group that in 2015 reported “numerous allegations of unlawful detention and the use of torture” by the unit.

Azov members have also been welcomed twice at Stanford University, where they were lauded by former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and the noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who later told the news website SFGate that he viewed them as “heroes.” And the Anti-Defamation League, the world’s premier antisemitism watchdog, has softened its assessment of the group since Russia’s invasion. Advocates and academics disagree on how much the Azov Brigade and its offshoots have evolved from the group’s extremist roots. But even some of the unit’s critics worry that a clash over the group may lend credence to Russian President Putin’s false narrative that Ukraine itself is a Nazi state and its army a fascist force. “I think we need to speak out,” said Abe Foxman, a former leader of the ADL, “but make sure it doesn’t undermine the nation that is struggling for our system.”

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Not the neo-nazis are the big problem, but Assange.

US Rejects Australian Plea To Drop Assange Case (RT)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has confirmed that Australia has raised the case of Julian Assange’s continued prosecution, but declared that Washington will not stop trying to extradite the former WikiLeaks boss and try him for espionage. Speaking alongside Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Brisbane on Saturday, Blinken said that while he understands “the concerns and views of Australians,” Assange’s alleged actions “risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named human sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

Assange, he said, was “charged with very serious criminal conduct” and had allegedly taken part in “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.” An Australian citizen, Julian Assange is currently being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison. He is fighting extradition to the US, where he faces 17 charges under the Espionage Act and potentially a 175-year prison sentence. Human-rights and press-freedom activists have demanded his release, citing his deteriorating mental and physical health, while Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in May that he was “working through diplomatic channels” to press the US into dropping the case.

The charges against Assange stem from his publication of classified material obtained by whistleblowers, including Pentagon documents detailing alleged US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables exposing the US’ efforts to – among other things – spy on its allies and influence foreign elections. While Assange did not personally steal these documents, he is nevertheless being prosecuted for espionage. He and his supporters argue that WikiLeaks’ publication of this material is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

“We have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long,” Foreign Minister Wong said on Saturday. “We’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the position we articulate in private.”The extradition from Britain to the US of Assange, who is no 52, was approved in 2020 by then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel. He lodged his final appeal against the decision in June, after all eight grounds of a previous appeal were rejected by a High Court judge. Responding to Blinken’s comments on Saturday, Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, said that it is now up to Prime Minister Albanese to make a public appeal for Assange’s freedom during his upcoming visit to the US.

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Pfizer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1685278310618800128

 

 

Jumpback
https://twitter.com/i/status/1685178655226368000

 

 

Mom baby
https://twitter.com/i/status/1685360625856184321

 

 

 

 

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Mar 292023
 


René Magritte Sixteenth of September 1956

 

Vax Report: $147 Billion in Damage, Tens Of Millions Injured, Disabled (ZH)
The Best Way to Protect US Troops in Syria (Ron Paul)
Global Security Dialogue Should Replace Arms Race – Belarus (TASS)
Bolton Issues Warning On Belarus (RT)
Zakharova: ‘Summit For Democracy’ Reflects US’ Neocolonial Practices (TASS)
Russia Knows Why It Fights In Ukraine, Russians Must Be Freed – Lavrov (TASS)
Serbian President ‘Very Afraid’ About Current Situation In The World (TASS)
Ukraine Being Obliterated – Trump (RT)
Drone Incident Hindered US Intelligence Gathering – CNN (RT)
Ukraine Struggles With Starlink Troubles (RT)
US Admits To Another Failed Hypersonic Test (RT)
Bellingcat & Mouse Game: Advance Russian Intel Of Nordstream Attack (Helmer)
Matt Taibbi Says Democrats Ditched Free Speech (ZH)
Jamie Dimon In Hot-Seat As Sworn Deposition Looms In Epstein Lawsuits (ZH)
The Great Food Reset Has Begun (Fazi)
Startling Rise In Testicular Injuries Among Woman Athletes (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Kherson Refugees Reject Western Media Claims of Russia “Kidnapping” Them

 

 

Tucker TikTok

 

 

Todd

 

 

 

 

Note: all these numbers are for 2022 alone.

Vax Report: $147 Billion in Damage, Tens Of Millions Injured, Disabled (ZH)

A new report estimates that 26.6 million people were injured, 1.36 million disabled, and 300,000 excess deaths can be attributed to COVID-19 vaccine damages in 2022 alone, which cost the economy nearly $150 billion. Research firm Phinance Technologies, founded and operated by former Blackrock portfolio manager Ed Dowd, Yuri Nunes (PhD Physics, MSc Mathematics) and Carlos Alegria (PhD Physics, Finance), split the impact of the vaccines into four broad categories to estimate the human costs associated with the Covid-19 vaccine; no effect or asymptomatic, those who sustained injuries (mild-to-moderate outcome), those who became disabled (severe outcome), and death (extreme outcome).


Data on vaccine disabilities and injuries comes directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while the excess death figures are derived from official figures on deaths in the US via two different methods. It’s important to note that people in one category (injured, for example) can move into latter categories of severity – which this analysis does not take into consideration. “We need to remember that not only are these groupings an attempt to characterize different levels of damage from the inoculations, they are not static and could interact with each other,” reads the report. “For instance, there might be individuals who had no visible effects after vaccination but nonetheless could still be impacted.” “Individuals with mild injuries from the inoculations could, over time, develop severe injuries to the extent of being disabled, or an extreme outcome such as death.”

https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/1640734879355682816

Estimating the economic cost: In analyzing each of the above categories, Phinance used absolute excess lost worktime to determine that the direct economic cost of vaccine injuries was $79.5 billion in 2022, and $52.2 billion for those with severe disabilities. For deaths, Phinace used the average yearly absolute rise in excess deaths since 2021, which was 0.05% for the 25-64 year-old demographic, which amounted to $5.6 billion in lost productivity. In total, they found a total “economic cost” of $147.8 billion in 2022 due to the Covid-19 vaccines.

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“Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!”

The Best Way to Protect US Troops in Syria (Ron Paul)

Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of US sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 US troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One US contractor was killed last time. Next time it could be many more Americans. What’s behind the sudden escalation? Fundamental changes in the Middle East over the past month have highlighted how indefensible is the continued US occupation of Syria and Iraq. Take, for example, the recent historic mending of relations between former arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran which was brokered by Washington’s own arch-enemy, China.

US policy in the Middle East has long been “divide and conquer,” dating back at least to the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s. US switching sides in that war guaranteed that the maximum amount of blood was spilled and that the simmering hatreds would continue to prevent any kind of lasting peace. Then the US invaded Iraq twenty years ago and turned Iraq into an Iranian ally. That’s neocon foreign policy for you: a 100 percent failure rate. So this month China, which is interested in creating a regional transportation corridor that would include Iran, came in and instead of bombing, invading, and occupying – Washington’s modus operandi – actually brokered the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Republicans and Democrats in the US both love to attack China, but China has achieved what the US has resisted for years: peace in the region.

Should we be surprised that the continued US occupation is not welcome in the Middle East? The United States occupies that huge chunk of Syria where the oil and agriculture is located and the goal appears to be producing profits for US multinational corporations from stolen natural resources and preventing the natural wealth of Syria to be used to rebuild that country. Is it any wonder why the US is so unpopular in the Middle East? How hypocritical is it that the Biden Administration has spent $100 billion of our dollars to expel Russia from occupying proportionally less territory in Ukraine than Washington occupies in Syria? And Washington claims to stand for the “international rules-based order,” while they decimated an Iraq and Afghanistan that did not attack us, and before that a Serbia that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.

The end of the US occupation of the Middle East is upon us and the sooner we realize that the better. We have no business meddling in their politics, occupying their territory, and stealing their resources. Americans joined the US Military to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have been manipulated by corrupt DC officials into occupying foreign lands and stealing their oil. Maybe this is why the US military cannot meet its recruitment goals? Here’s an easy way to protect US forces in Syria from further “Iran-allied” attacks: Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!

Syria

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“..multilateral disarmament mechanisms, non-proliferation and arms control..”

Global Security Dialogue Should Replace Arms Race – Belarus (TASS)

Minsk is confident that the rhetoric of confrontation and the arms race should be replaced with dialogue on bolstering the architecture of global security, the press service of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry told TASS on Tuesday. “The Belarusian side is confident that to replace the confrontation rhetoric and the escalating arms race, a constructive and mutually respectful dialogue should emerge, directed at strengthening the architecture of global and regional security, multilateral disarmament mechanisms, non-proliferation and arms control, including in the nuclear sphere,” the diplomatic agency said replying to a question by TASS about the outsized reaction by a number of countries to reports on the prospective deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil.


“We have been urging and continue to urge all our partners to [do] this,” the Belarusian Foreign Ministry reiterated. On March 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia, at Minsk’s request, would deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, precisely the way the United States deployed its own nuclear weapons on the territory of its allies. Moscow has already handed over to Minsk the nuclear-capable Iskander system. According to the Russian leader, the construction of a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory would be completed on July 1.

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Belarus wants peace, but Bolton does not.

Bolton Issues Warning On Belarus (RT)

Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton has warned that the Biden administration may not be taking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pledge to move tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus seriously enough. Bolton added that he could foresee Russia and Belarus potentially merging into a single state. “[Putin] may not be bluffing here in the sense he may actually move tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus,” Bolton told CNN on Monday.Putin announced on Saturday that Russia will move some of its tactical nuclear weapons to facilities in Belarus as early as this summer. The Russian president said that he made the decision after the UK announced it would transfer toxic depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine, a move he described as “absolute recklessness.”

While Bolton is taking Putin’s words seriously, the White House has brushed them off. “We haven’t seen any movement of any tactical nuclear weapons or anything of that kind since this announcement,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday. Anonymous US and EU security officials told Politico they haven’t seen any indication that Russia plans on moving the weapons in the immediate future. Bolton’s concerns go beyond the stationing of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus. He told CNN that the possibility of Russia reabsorbing the entire territory of Belarus is “something I don’t think we’ve been paying enough attention to.”

Belarus was made a territory of the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great in the 18th century, and was subsequently united with Russia under the Soviet Union. Since declaring its independence from the USSR in 1990, Belarus has remained a close ally of Russia, with Minsk and Moscow signing the Union State treaty in 1999, establishing a customs union and granting each other’s citizens freedom of movement. Military cooperation between the two states has since deepened, with a 2021 doctrine establishing a joint group of forces stationed in Belarus to deter threats from the West. Russian and Belarusian troops have held multiple military drills since last year, and Russian forces pushed south into Ukraine from Belarusian territory last February. As a result, Belarus has been hit with many of the same Western sanctions as Russia.

Bolton is well known for advocating regime change and military intervention around the world, and last year called for the overthrow of Putin. However, he has persistently warned about the consequences of current US foreign policy. Before cautioning about the growing ties between Russia and Belarus, he warned earlier this month that “the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea and several others are moving to shore up their relations” amid an apparent lack of strategic objectives in Washington.

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Hungary and Turkey are not invited, but that shining model of democratic values, Ukraine, is.

Zakharova: ‘Summit For Democracy’ Reflects US’ Neocolonial Practices (TASS)

The US-conceived ‘Summit for Democracy’ is nothing but a manifestation of Washington’s neocolonial practices, as the summit seeks to legitimize American instruments of control, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday. “The so-called ‘Summit for Democracy’ is a clear manifestation of neocolonial practices in US foreign policy. Behind the efforts to organize the summit is the desire to update and legitimize the American instruments of external control and interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries, forcing everyone to see the world through the prism of the ‘rule-based order’ promoted to serve Washington’s global interests,” the diplomat pointed out in her commentary in connection with the “Summit for Democracy” organized by the United States on March 28-30 under the pretext of supporting democracy in the world.

According to Zakharova, the summit is all about forming an ideological platform for combatting those countries whom the American political elite labels as autocracies, primarily Russia and China. “Washington is trying to consolidate the Western community and bring its rivals over to its side under the slogan ‘combatting autocratic regimes’,” the diplomat stressed. “The US has decided to take thematic sessions to regional platforms and appoint co-chair countries to pretend that its pseudodemocratic summit is universal. At the same time, the whole process is controlled either by the Americans themselves or by large non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These NGOs supervise the compliance of member states with the obligations undertaken by them. Apparently, they know nothing about the principle of sovereign equality of all states based on the UN world order,” Zakharova pointed out.

The diplomat underscored that she regretted the decision of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to take part in such an “unworthy spectacle.” “On the whole, it is hard to expect from the American organizers of the ‘Summit for Democracy’, as well as from their ideological partners, anything other than pompous hypocrisy amid democratic messianism and certainly anti-Russian statements in the context of the Ukrainian crisis. Especially considering the fact that the tone of the summit will be set by a former comedian (Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky – TASS), not a democrat, who is the head of a criminal Nazi regime which deliberately violates all democratic values in his country. The fact that such people are invited to take part in the event clearly demonstrates how far Americans are from their declared goal of promoting democratic values,” she stressed.

As the Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman pointed out, Moscow was against American democracy being imposed as “infallible, the only way.” “The US has no moral right to lecture others amid chronic domestic issues. This binary way of thinking in ‘black-white’ or ‘good guys vs bad guys’ does not work in real life. And it is in no way good for building long-term relations with sovereign countries,” Zakharova emphasized. The diplomat also pointed out that a multipolar world order in international relations was actively being formed with the help of the global majority. “Responsible participants in international communication must not engage in ‘democratization’ and division. The US and its allies have to return to complying with the norms of international law and get involved in creating conditions for peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation,” Zakharova concluded.

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“Now, this has all been thrown to the wind and to the Neo-Nazis, who now run the show in Kiev..”

Russia Knows Why It Fights In Ukraine, Russians Must Be Freed – Lavrov (TASS)

Russia is conducting its special military operation in Ukraine to protect Russians and the Russian-speaking population, which the Kiev authorities oppress in violation of all international norms. Russia wants to free these people from any threat to their lives, traditions and families, the country’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told TASS in an interview on Tuesday. “We <…> are conducting our special military operation precisely for these people who have been oppressed in violation of all possible international norms and principles, in violation of all these norms on which Ukrainian independence is based. Ukraine enshrined in its Declaration of Independence that it wanted to be a neutral, non-aligned state. It promised to ensure the rights of all Russians and Russian-speaking peoples, as well as other ethnic minorities. It was interested in living in peace, in the spirit of good neighborliness and harmony with all its neighbors. Now, this has all been thrown to the wind and to the Neo-Nazis, who now run the show in Kiev,” Lavrov said.


“And that is why we know what we are fighting for. We know that we want to free these people from any threat the current Ukrainian authorities can pose to their lives, traditions, and families,” the top diplomat stressed. Lavrov added that “history and geography cannot be chosen,” that is why Russia has “no right to leave these people to Nazis and racists.” Russian President Vladimir Putin in his State of the Nation Address pointed out that the country’s special military operation was launched to protect the people, ensure the country’s security and eliminate the threat emanating from the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime.

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“As for our little Serbian ship, we will steer it with a firm hand to preserve peace and stability..”

Serbian President ‘Very Afraid’ About Current Situation In The World (TASS)

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on Tuesday that he was ‘very afraid’ about what is going on in the world. “I am not much of an optimist, I am a small leader of a small country. There are many leaders from big countries in Europe who know better about everything,” Vucic said at a joint news conference with Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou. “I fear that the consequences of this will be far worse than what we have seen so far,” he stressed. “But I am a small man from a small country, and I believe that the giants from other countries know better and can solve things. As for our little Serbian ship, we will steer it with a firm hand to preserve peace and stability,” Vucic stressed.


In February, Vucic opined that the conflict in Ukraine would only worsen over the next five to six months, eventually spiraling out of control. The president believes that after the decision to supply tanks to Ukraine, a decision to supply F-16 fighter jets will follow. On March 17, the Slovak government approved the transfer of 13 MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine, Prime Minister Eduard Heger said. At the same time, it was stressed that the fighters were transferred for defense purposes, not for attacking. The country’s Defense Ministry announced that for the shipment of MiG-29 to Kiev, Slovakia expects to be paid back by the European Union in the amount of $900 million. Earlier, Polish authorities also said they were planning to supply MiG-29 to Ukraine.

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“possible we’d be in World War III with these idiots that are doing what they are doing.”

Ukraine Being Obliterated – Trump (RT)

Donald Trump has once again claimed that he would need just 24 hours to negotiate peace in Ukraine. Speaking to Fox News, the former US president warned of a possible nuclear escalation and urged the hostilities to be ceased immediately. “The key to that is that war has to stop now, because Ukraine is being obliterated,” Trump told host Sean Hannity in an interview on Monday. Trump compared footage from the conflict to “hundreds of these demolition sites” that he used to see as part of his construction business. “There was not a building standing,” the former US leader explained. Trump repeated his assertion that he could reach a peace deal in Ukraine within 24 hours if elected back into office. However, he declined to explain his strategy, claiming it would be “very easy” but would not work if revealed prematurely.


Trump suggested that the US presidential election might not even happen next year, arguing it was “possible we’d be in World War III with these idiots that are doing what they are doing.” Such a conflict would make the two previous world wars look like “patty cakes,” he added. The nearly hour-long interview with Hannity was Trump’s first appearance on Fox News since he announced his 2024 presidential run. The former president has a complicated relationship with the leading conservative US news channel, which he has criticized for its positive coverage of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his potential challenger for the Republican Party’s nomination. Hannity has been among the most outspoken Trump supporters on the network.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1640544019729252352

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“The new drone routes have kept the flights more than 40 nautical miles not only from Crimea but the Ukrainian coast as well..”

Drone Incident Hindered US Intelligence Gathering – CNN (RT)

A decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to reroute drone flights over the Black Sea to avoid provoking a direct conflict with Russian forces has curtailed intelligence gathering on the Ukraine crisis, a senior US military official has told CNN. Flying drones at greater distances from the conflict zone and at higher altitudes has reduced the quality of the intelligence that they can gather, CNN reported on Tuesday, citing the senior official without identifying the source. The rerouting was allegedly ordered earlier this month, after a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone was forced down over the Black Sea by a Russian Sukhol Su-27 fighter jet on March 14.

Although the Pentagon was publicly dismissive of Russian complaints about the drone flight, declaring that the US will continue to “fly and operate wherever international law allows,” Washington began routing its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) further south, keeping them at a greater distance from the Crimean peninsula and eastern portions of the Black Sea. The rerouting was done to “avoid being too provocative,” CNN previously cited another US official as saying. However, the outlet said, there is already “an appetite” to resume flying the UAVs closer to Crimea. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on how, if at all, the quality of intelligence gathering in the Black Sea has been affected. “We maintain a robust ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capability in the region and beyond,” he said.

The Pentagon accused Russian pilots of reckless flying, claiming that one of the jets clipped the propeller of the unmanned aircraft, causing it to go down. However, the footage purportedly shot by the drone, only showed a Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet buzzing over it and allegedly ejecting fuel in the process. Russia denied hitting the drone or using weapons against it, and said the US aircraft was flying with its transponder switched off in a no-go zone declared by the Russian military. The new drone routes have kept the flights more than 40 nautical miles not only from Crimea but the Ukrainian coast as well, rather than the 12 miles normally recognized as the limit of a nation’s airspace, CNN said. Having moved the flights further south, it may be more difficult to return to the former routes and assert freedom of international airspace for US aircraft, the senior official said. US Navy vessels have stayed out of the Black Sea since December 2021.

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“The official representative office of Starlink in Ukraine can’t help anyone either, as it has not yet opened – although the Kiev authorities granted it the required license last summer.”

Ukraine Struggles With Starlink Troubles (RT)

Many Starlink users across Ukraine have seen their terminals stop working, the Kiev outlet Strana reported on Tuesday. According to experts who spoke to the outlet, the outage is not some nefarious plan by Elon Musk to harm Ukraine, but the result of criminals trying to scam Starlink parent company SpaceX. The typical scenario is that a terminal stops working and flashes the message “No active account,” Vladimir Stepanets, founder of a Starlink support group, told Strana. “When they contact SpaceX technical support, the terminal owners are told there were signs of fraudulent activity,” he explained. SpaceX provided the Kiev government with a number of Starlink terminals beginning in February last year, which Ukraine has used for military communications.

Musk has objected to the “weaponization” of his technology, and last month restricted Kiev’s ability to use Starlink for remotely controlling drone strikes. When one US senator complained, Musk replied that his company “will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” The current problem is not due to some kind of Musk censorship, experts tell Strana, but rather the consequence of scam artists exploiting the flow of Starlink donations to Ukraine. Because demand for Starlinks has always outpaced their supply, and equipment sold directly by SpaceX costs 30% more than in Poland or Czechia, many “enterprising individuals” buy the terminals there and then resell or donate them to Ukraine.

Stepanets and engineer Oleg Kutkov described the scheme by which the scammers use promotions and discounts to acquire the Starlinks, but then use “chargeback fraud” to not pay SpaceX. “Starlink can be stolen, bought for a promotion for one euro, or listed for return, and the router that comes with it is resold to Ukraine. Then the person who bought it installs the router, and the account is blocked,” Kutkov told Strana. Stepanets said “tens of thousands” of terminals were in effect stolen from SpaceX through chargeback fraud, including many operated by the Ukrainian military.

Ukrainian users have no way of knowing whether their terminal is legitimate or stolen – until it stops working. Because SpaceX blacklists accounts associated with stolen equipment, users also have no way of reloading their subscription balance, while the debt continues to accrue. Stepanets also warned users not to attempt any “life hacks” through the military or the Ministry of Digital Development. “This can have bad consequences not only for you, but for the whole country. And it definitely won’t work,” he told Strana. The official representative office of Starlink in Ukraine can’t help anyone either, as it has not yet opened – although the Kiev authorities granted it the required license last summer.

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It appears to be about the heat-resistant coating of the missiles at Mach 10-15. Only Russia found one.

US Admits To Another Failed Hypersonic Test (RT)

The US Air Force has revealed at least the fourth failed test of a hypersonic missile system made by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, suggesting that it’s more likely to adopt a competing system built by Raytheon. “The one we just had was not a success,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told members of a US House committee on Tuesday. “We did not get the data that we needed from that test, so they’re currently examining that to try to understand what happened.” Kendall was referring to a March 13 test of the AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), a hypersonic attack cruise missile, off the coast of Southern California. He gave no specifics on what went wrong with the launch. His comments may have come as a surprise to lawmakers because the Air Force issued a press release last week indicating that the ARRW test “met several objectives.” The release made no mention of the test’s failure.

The ARRW has been under development since 2018 and was delayed after three failed booster tests in 2021. The Air Force claimed the first successful launch of the missile last May, saying it reached speeds exceeding Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. US forces don’t yet have a fully operational hypersonic missile system, as Washington has fallen behind Russia and China in the race to develop such weapons. Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds over Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable, making them difficult to shoot down. In light of the latest ARRW test, the Air Force is “more committed” to its other hypersonic program, the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM), Kendall told lawmakers. A budgeting decision on whether to adopt the ARRW is expected to be made next year, after as many as two more test launches.

The Air Force reportedly received about $423 million in research and development funding for the ARRW in the past two years, and it has requested an additional $150 million in the budget for its next fiscal year. HACM funding totaled $423 million for the current fiscal year alone, and the Air Force plans an additional $1.9 billion in spending on the program over the next five years. The HACM program has been “reasonably successful” so far, Kendall said. He added, “We see a definite role for the HACM concept. It’s compatible with more of our aircraft, and it will give us more combat capability overall.”

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“The NATO intelligence publicity department known as Bellingcat..”

Bellingcat & Mouse Game: Advance Russian Intel Of Nordstream Attack (Helmer)

The NATO intelligence publicity department known as Bellingcat has just produced new NATO-sourced evidence of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game which the navies and air forces of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and the US played against Russian forces in the Baltic Sea off Bornhom Island in the week before the detonation of explosives on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September 26. Cat and mouse is also the game the NATO propaganda agencies are now playing. The aim of the intelligence, published last week by the quasi-state German media platform called T-Online, and in the Danish offshoot of Bellingcat known as Oliver Alexander, is to accuse the Russian Navy of the pipeline attack, using a mini-submarine and deep-sea divers.

This is based on NATO and US identification and tracking of a six-vessel Russian flotilla several days before the explosions – an intelligence vessel, a deep-sea operations vessel, two tugs, and heavily armed anti-ship and anti-submarine frigate and corvette. “It was precisely such mini-submarines that could have placed the explosive charges attaching it to the pipelines, experts suspected from the very start,” T-Online claims, using the hypothetical followed by a conditional plus three more hypotheticals. “If it was confirmed that the SS-750 was at the scene, the Russian Navy would probably be the prime suspect from then on. ‘It would make absolute sense to use something like the AS-26 for such an attack,” Danish corvette captain and military analyst Johannes Riber told T-Online about this matter.

‘That would be the most plausible explanation so far for what happened to the Nord Stream pipeline.’” T-Online concluded: “In official statements, the activities of the Russian navy in the days before the attacks have so far played no role. Neither the German, Danish or Swedish investigators, nor NATO or the armed forces of the Baltic Sea states wanted to comment on them when asked by T-Online. Thus, the criminal case remains unsolved for the time being, but a chain of evidence has been added. It does not point to the USA or Ukraine. Some tracks now are leading to Moscow.” [..] the evidence Bellingcat is presenting as suspicion of Russian culpability in laying the pipeline charges, should be interpreted as evidence that the Russians had advance intelligence of the pipeline attack operation, and they were investigating what they could at the time — after the charges had been laid, but before they were detonated on September 26.

Viewed in this light, the Bellingcat reports confirm how crowded the crime scene was before the crime was committed – how many naval and air force units were operating, all of them under NATO command coordination – Danish, Swedish, German, Polish, and American. A crime scene full of suspects but empty of the weapon.

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“The modern Democratic Party is not the same one that your parents or grandparents were members of in the past. It’s obsessed with starting World War 3 in Ukraine, eroding the First Amendment, dismantling the Second Amendment, and normalizing ‘woke’ culture.”

Matt Taibbi Says Democrats Ditched Free Speech (ZH)

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi – of recent “Twitter Files” fame – has exposed the fact that civil liberties are no longer popular among Democrats. Taibbi appeared on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” to reiterate his perspective that the modern Democratic Party no longer represents the values of the everyday American. “About all of this — Matt, how do you feel about all of this? I know before you started discovering this bad behavior, you identified as a Democrat, and now you’ve got all of your friends, quote-unquote, in the media attacking you for exposing this,” Bartiromo asked.


“Yeah, it’s funny, I mean, I was raised in a traditional ACLU liberal, I believed in free speech all my life. That was one of the things, frankly, that attracted me to the Democratic Party when I was a kid, the idea that we were the party that believed in letting everybody have a say, and we’ll just make a better argument, and that’s how the system works,” Taibbi said. He continued, “Apparently, something very dramatic has changed in politics in America, and there’s been a shift. There’s no question about it anymore, that now the parties have had a complete reversal on how they read these issues.”

Taibbi leads a team of journalists, including Michael Shellenberger, who have been given access to Twitter Files, revealing a startling network of government agencies, think tanks, and Twitter personnel coordinating efforts to attack the First Amendment. What we’ve learned from the Twitter Files is the ever-expanding coalition of groups working with the government and social media to target and censor Americans, including government-funded organizations. Twitter files are chilling in the details and show how Democrats have weaponized government and colluded with corporations to wage war on the First Amendment.


The modern Democratic Party is not the same one that your parents or grandparents were members of in the past. It’s obsessed with starting World War 3 in Ukraine, eroding the First Amendment, dismantling the Second Amendment, and normalizing ‘woke’ culture. What caused such a significant shift in the party in just a few short years? And what kind of blowback will Taibbi get for telling these truths?

Shellenberger

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“This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite.”

Jamie Dimon In Hot-Seat As Sworn Deposition Looms In Epstein Lawsuits (ZH)

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will be in the hot seat, as he is expected to be deposed under oath regarding his bank’s decision to keep deceased pedophile sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as a client despite public knowledge of his status as a registered sex offender, the Financial Times reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The sworn deposition – the latest development in two combined high-profile cases, is expected to take place in May behind closed doors. The lawsuits claim that JPMorgan, which banked Epstein for 15 years from 1998 to 2013, benefited from human trafficking and ignored several internal warnings about their client’s illegal behaviour. The lender has described the claims as meritless.

The pre-trial process unearthed communications between JPMorgan employees that contained a reference to a “Dimon review” into the bank’s relationship with Epstein. The bank has denied that Dimon had any knowledge of such a review. -FT The US Virgin Islands and a group of Epstein victims claim Dimon had knowledge of Epstein’s activities based on emails exchanged between the late sex offender and former executive Jes Staley using his JPMorgan email address. “Jamie Dimon knew in 2008 that his billionaire client was a sex trafficker,” argued US Virgin Islands attorney Mimi Liu during a March hearing in front of Manhattan US District Judge Jed Rakoff, referring to the year Epstein was first criminally charged with sex crimes, CNBC reports. “If Staley is a rogue employee, why isn’t Jamie Dimon?” Liu said during the hearing to discuss the bank’s efforts to have the USVI lawsuit against the bank dismissed.

“Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew,” Liu continued, noting that there were several cash transfers and wire transfers made by the prolific pedophile (Epstein), including several hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to several women which should have been flagged as suspicious. “They broke every rule to facilitate his sex trafficking in exchange for Epstein’s wealth, connections and referrals,” said Liu, adding “This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite.”

That said, a person familiar with the bank’s internal probe into what Dimon knew says there are no records of any direct communications with Epstein, or records of discussions related to retaining him as a client. Last week Judge Rakoff denied JPMorgan’s request to dismiss the lawsuits, and allowed several claims to proceed against the bank. He also ordered JPMorgan to hand over documents between Dimon and former general counsel Steve Cutler from before 2006, the year Epstein was first arrested.

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Excellent overview from Thomas Fazi: “For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.”

The Great Food Reset Has Begun (Fazi)

France is in flames. Israel is erupting. America is facing a second January 6. In the Netherlands, however, the political establishment is reeling from an entirely different type of protest — one that, perhaps more than any other raging today, threatens to destabilise the global order. The victory of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the recent provincial elections represents an extraordinary result for an anti-establishment party that was formed just over three years ago. But then again, these are not ordinary times. The BBB grew out of the mass demonstrations against the Dutch government’s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in the country’s farming sector by 2030 — a target designed to comply with the European Union’s emission-reduction rules.

While large farming companies have the means to meet these goals — by using less nitrogen fertiliser and reducing the number of their livestock — smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”. It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters.

But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

EvaVlaar
https://twitter.com/i/status/1640787139896942612

[..] Alongside healthcare, agriculture is the main focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances several initiatives whose stated aim is to increase food security and promote sustainable farming, such as Gates Ag One, CGIAR and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Civil society organisations, however, have accused the Foundation of using its influence to promote multinational corporate interests in the Global South and to push for ineffective (but very profitable) high-tech solutions which have largely failed to increase global food production. Nor are Gates’s “sustainable” agricultural activities limited to developing countries. As well as investing in plant-based protein companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Gates has been buying huge amounts of farmland in the US, to the point of becoming the biggest private owner of farmland in the country.

The problem with the globalist trend he embodies is obvious: ultimately, small and medium-scale farming is more sustainable than large-scale industrial farming, as it is typically associated with greater biodiversity and the protection of landscape features. Small farms also provide a whole range of other public goods: they help to maintain lively rural and remote areas, preserve regional identities, and offer employment in regions with fewer job opportunities. But most importantly, small farms feed the world. A 2017 study found that the “peasant food web” — the diverse network of small-scale producers disconnected from Big Agriculture — feeds more than half of the world’s population using only 25% of the world’s agricultural resources.

Traditional farming, though, is suffering an unprecedented attack. Small and medium-scale farmers are being subjected to social and economic conditions in which they simply cannot survive. Peasant farms are disappearing at an alarming rate across Europe and other regions, to the benefit of the world’s food oligarchs — and all this is being done in the name of sustainability. At a time when almost a billion people around the world are still affected by hunger, the lesson of the Dutch farmers could not be more urgent, or inspiring. For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.

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“This new wave of testicular injuries to female athletes has really come out of nowhere..”

Startling Rise In Testicular Injuries Among Woman Athletes (BBee)

A new study indicates a disturbing trend as testicular injuries in women’s sports are increasing at an astounding rate. Researchers are baffled as these statistics have skyrocketed from literally zero reported testicular injuries among female athletes just a few years ago. “This new wave of testicular injuries to female athletes has really come out of nowhere,” said Dr. Ryan Kitchen of Boston College’s Institute of Sports Medicine. “Years ago, there were absolutely no reported testicular injuries that occurred during women’s sporting events. If only we could determine what led to this sudden rise. Such a puzzle!”

Institutions around the world have also noticed the disturbing trend and are pouring research dollars into discovering the cause, which is almost certainly a complicated issue with no easy or obvious answers whatsoever. Critics have argued that it’s not actually possible for a female athlete to suffer a testicular injury. “Yeah, that can’t happen,” said Dr. Adam Kinunen of the Restore Sanity to Sports research group. “Considering the fact that having testicles in the first place means a person is not a female, it would stand to reason that such an injury is impossible. In layman’s terms, these are dudes.”

Trans activist groups have come out in full force against anyone who dares to suggest women cannot have their testicles injured because women can’t have testicles. “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” said Sunshine Fluffsprinkle, spokesperson for Insanity Now, a trans rights group in response to the findings. “BLLRRRAAAWWRRRR FFFRRGGGTHTHTH!” At publishing time, concerned researchers in the field of sports medicine were consulting with athletic equipment manufacturers to design protective athletic cups specifically designed to protect female testicles.

Tucker trans

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This dog was spotted politely waiting by a pizza truck. He doesn’t have to say what he wants. They already know his order. It is pizza.

 

 

Ames window

 

 


There are whales alive today who were born before Moby Dick was written. Some of the bowhead whales in the icy waters off of Alaska today are over 200 years old

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Feb 132023
 


John French Sloan Backyards, Greenwich Village 1926

 

Medvedchuk Sees No Prospects For Minsk-3 (TASS)
US Officials Basically Admit They Blew Up Nord Stream – Lavrov (RT)
JP Morgan Reaches Agreement With Zelenskyy On Rebuilding Infrastructure (Fox)
Hungary Slams EU Push To Arm Ukraine (RT)
Samantha Power is in Hungary, Seeding Another Color Revolution (CTH)
Elon Musk Explains Purpose Of Starlink In Ukraine (RT)
Big Oil Rakes In Record Profits (RT)
Europe’s Spend On Energy Crisis Nears 800 Billion Euros (RT)
Ray McGovern Comments on Sy Hersh (Garland Nixon)
Cashless Society? Not in Switzerland (R.)
Homo implacatus (Jotwani)
UK Holds ‘Secret’ Cross-Party Brexit Summit (RT)
The Pain of Listening To Twitter Censorship Testimony (Naomi Wolf)
I’m forming a Super PAC to Draft RFK Jr. To Run For President (Steve Kirsch)

 

 

 

 

Berlusconi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1624894337283723266

 

 

 

 

Ohio


https://twitter.com/i/status/1624938064207290368

 

 

 

 

Campbell

 

 

 

 

Canberra
https://twitter.com/i/status/1624874491141824512

 

 

A Message to Germans—Nord Stream Bombing

 

 

 

 

If Ukraine were a democracy, Medvedchuk would have a loud voice.

Medvedchuk Sees No Prospects For Minsk-3 (TASS)

Viktor Medvedchuk, leader of the Opposition Platform For Life party, which is outlawed in Ukraine, said on Sunday that he sees no perspectives for signing the third Minsk agreements.”As for possible Minsk-3, I see categorically no perspectives. Regrettably, the Minsk agreements have sunk into oblivion,” he told Belarus’ STV television channel.According to Medvedchuk, peace settlement in Ukraine “is possible only when several conditions are met.” But, in his words, “Ukraine has practically ceased to exist as a state.” “It is impossible to say now what can happen and how, whether there will be any peace talks,” he stressed.The Zelensky regime “has armed itself with a policy of neo-Nazism,” he said.

“The Western ideology, which has been imposed on the Ukrainian people, its authorities since 2005, when [Viktor] Yushchenko came to power, has been fed for all these years by Western money, ideology and democracy, which has led, as we see, to tens of thousands of human deaths, the destruction of Ukraine and the fighting Zelensky continues at the head of criminal authorities, until the last Ukrainian.” These actions, in his words, are evidently geared to create an “anti-Russia.” “To create and popularize the policy of anti-Russian hysteria, untamed Russophobia. And it is not easy to destroy it all,” he said, “Today, it is necessary to explode the myth that this neo-Nazism is supported by Ukrainians. It is not supported by those from nine to twelve million Ukrainians who have fled the country. It is not supported by millions staying in Ukraine, who, regrettably, have been driven under the bench, have been intimidates, threatened with repression, criminal prosecution, torture and violence,” Medvedchuk stressed.

According to the politician, the Other Ukraine political movement has been set up to tell the world community that many Ukrainians want normalization of relations with Russia. “So that, the voice of other Ukraine is heard in the world and is not represented by Zelensky who is traveling around the globe, using all possible venues with only one goal: to show that the Ukrainian people is allegedly consolidated and he is representing this people,” he said. He noted that “millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee the country because of the policy of Zelensky’s criminal regime.” “Today, it is necessary to consolidate those Ukrainians who are against Zelensky’s criminal policy. We want his criminal regime to sink into oblivion. And it implies enormous work we have begun and will do to break the information space which has misted the thoughts and conscience of the Ukrainians filling it with anti-Russian hysteria,” he explained.

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And that will have connsequences.

US Officials Basically Admit They Blew Up Nord Stream – Lavrov (RT)

US officials are basically admitting that they were behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which was perpetrated to prevent rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “The US decided that we [Russia] have been cooperating too well with Germany over the past 20 or 30 years; or rather, the Germans cooperated with us too well,” he said in an interview published on the Foreign Ministry’s website on Sunday. The “powerful alliance” based on Russian energy resources and German technology “began to threaten the monopoly position of many American corporations,” Lavrov explained. So, Washington decided to destroy this alliance between Moscow and Berlin, and did it “literally” by attacking the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, he added.

“American officials are basically admitting that the explosions that occurred at Nord Stream 1 and 2 were their doing. They even speak about it with joy,” the foreign minister stated. Lavrov was likely referring to a confession made by US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland during a Senate hearing in late January. “I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now… a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea,” she said at that time. “The vileness of Western politicians is well known,” Lavrov continued, suggesting that “the plan, which is now being implemented through ‘inciting’ Ukraine against Russia and waging a war by the entire West against Russia by means of Ukraine, is to a large extent aimed at preventing a new rapprochement between Germany and Russia.”

The comments by Russia’s top diplomat come just days after iconic American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released a bombshell report, blaming Washington for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines last year. According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were detonated in late September, rendering the key European energy infrastructure inoperable. US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied the report by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.” No one among high-ranking American officials has even commented on the accusations made by Hersh.

For months, the Russian authorities have been pointing to the fact that the only side to benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream was the US, which has seen supplies of its more expensive liquefied natural gas to Europe increase massively since the explosions.

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He’s selling his country by the pound.

JP Morgan Reaches Agreement With Zelenskyy On Rebuilding Infrastructure (Fox)

J.P. Morgan, the nation’s largest bank, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the eye on attracting private capital for a new investment fund to rebuild Ukraine’s infrastructure that has been destroyed in its war with Russia, FOX Business has learned. J.P. Morgan bankers spent most of last week meeting with Zelenskyy and his senior staff in Ukraine where they discussed the creation of a fund seeded with $20 billion to $30 billion in private capital, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Other ideas discussed with the Ukrainian president were the creation of a bank administered by Wall Street firms that would make investments in oil refineries, roads, bridges and other pieces of economic infrastructure destroyed in Vladimir Putin’s year-long campaign to annex the country and rebuild the old Soviet Union, these people add.

J.P. Morgan bankers were on the ground in Kyiv and other cities, dodging bombs, and witnessing firsthand how the war has crippled the country’s economy. After a series of meetings with various ministers, they met directly with Zelenskyy on Friday night. As a gesture of goodwill on the eve of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the bankers also presented Zelenskyy with a New England Patriots jersey with the number “91,” to signify the year Ukraine gained independence from the old Soviet Union, these people say. FOX Business is the first to report the possible creation of an investment fund and bank to help rebuild the country. People with knowledge of the matter say the plans for a fund or a bank are in the nascent stages and subject to change. J.P. Morgan declined to comment. The big bank is expected to make an announcement about its work in Ukraine on Monday.

[..] Privately, J.P. Morgan bankers met with Zelenskyy for hours last week, providing him with ideas on how to attract private capital. They also recommended that he invite major CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, to the country to discuss economic development and that he meet with GOP lawmakers, such as the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Some Republicans are skeptical about the billions in US aid being sent to the country, these people add. They also said that weeding out corruption and eliminating graft in government will be key to attracting private capital. Zelenskyy was said to be receptive to the advice and understood that at some point the vast amounts of western aid to the country will come to an end and that private capital – which will demand a return for its investment – will be needed to rebuild, these people say.

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“..the tenth sanctions package will only be suitable for causing further damage to us Europeans, similar to the previous nine ones.”

Hungary Slams EU Push To Arm Ukraine (RT)

The European Union’s calls to keep supporting Ukraine with arms shipments will only prolong the conflict with Russia, the Hungarian foreign minister said on Sunday. Speaking to radio Kossuth, Peter Szijjarto commented on recent remarks by the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who pushed for fighter jets and long-range weapons to be sent to Kiev. According to the minister, EU lawmakers’ decisions on Ukraine “have generally caused damage to Europe,” and further weapons deliveries will only worsen the hostilities. He went on to blast the EU legislature, claiming that its “credibility is practically zero.” Szijjarto pointed to a recent graft scandal as proof that the EU parliament is “one of the most corrupt organizations in the world.”


He was referring to the recent arrest of the parliament’s former vice president, Eva Kaili, who has been charged with taking bribes from Qatar in exchange for illegally lobbying the interests of the Gulf state. Szijjarto noted that in Western countries, war rhetoric sounds “incomparably louder than the rhetoric of peace,” while nations outside “the transatlantic bubble” tend to prefer peace to a deadly conflict. The minister went on to question the West’s anti-Russia sanctions. He argued that they have failed to force Moscow to end the conflict, while Europe’s economy has “faced incredible difficulties,” and that “the tenth sanctions package will only be suitable for causing further damage to us Europeans, similar to the previous nine ones.” Since the start of large-scale hostilities in Ukraine almost a year ago, Hungary, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Moscow. It has also refused to support Kiev with weapons, or allow arms transfers across its border with Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1624791254553841665

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And that’s why Samantha Power is in Budapest. They should throw her out.

Samantha Power is in Hungary, Seeding Another Color Revolution (CTH)

Hungary has been in the crosshairs of the Biden/Obama administration ever since Prime Minister Viktor Orban refused to align with the WEF Western Democracies in their quest for regime change in Russia. As the NATO led western alliance assembled to use Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Orban would not join. In early April 2022, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was overwhelmingly reelected, despite the massive efforts against him by the European Union, western and euro-centric multinational globalists. As a result of the victory, Brussels was furious at the Hungarian people. Associated Press – […] “Orban — a fierce critic of immigration, LGBTQ rights and “EU bureaucrats” — has garnered the admiration of right-wing nationalists across Europe and North America.”

Within the statements reported from his 2022 victory speech, Prime Minister Orban warned citizens of the NATO and western allied countries about the manipulation of Ukraine and how he views the Zelenskyy regime: […] “while speaking to supporters on Sunday, Orban singled out Zelenskyy as part of the “overwhelming force” that he said his party had struggled against in the election — “the left at home, the international left, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.”This put Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the crosshairs of the western alliance, specifically the EU and U.S. bureaucrats who use their power, position and intelligence apparatus to manipulate foreign nations. A year later and now we see USAID Administrator Samantha Power in Hungary openly discussing her seeding of the NGO’s and political activist systems in order to generate yet another color revolution.

Samantha Power, the wife of Cass Sunstein, is well known as the Obama/Biden administration’s advance operative who uses her position in U.S. government to influence activism in targeted nations. Hungary is now her target. Why is eliminating Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban now the goal of the Biden administration. Well, a reminder: • Hungary warned citizens of the west about the New World Order, created through Ukraine. • Hungary continued to purchase Russian oil and natural gas. Zelenskyy and the Western alliance were furious. • Hungary said they would continue energy purchases in Rubles if that is what Russia demanded.

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We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.”

Elon Musk Explains Purpose Of Starlink In Ukraine (RT)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed the rationale behind the company’s decision to restrict the use of its Starlink internet system by the Ukrainian military. He doesn’t want the conflict to escalate into World War III, he said. The explanation was part of Musk’s response to astronaut Scott Kelly, who is a vocal supporter of the Ukrainian cause. Kelly urged restoration of full functionality of the system. The restriction announced last week bars the Ukrainian military from using Starlink to pilot drones, which SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell described as “weaponization” of the product. Musk said Kelly was “smart enough not to swallow media & other propaganda bs” and pointed out that Starlink remained available for military communications in Ukraine, even though as a private company SpaceX had the right to switch the terminals off.

“We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question,” Musk stated. “We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” The Starlink system was hailed by US officials as a gamechanger for the Ukrainian military, providing a reliable communication system that Russia allegedly could not disrupt through hacking. But Musk has provoked the ire of Kiev on several occasions, including by proposing a peace plan in October that would have required Ukraine to make concessions to Russia. He faced criticism and insults from Ukrainian officials in response.

Responding to the Starlink change, Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, declared that Musk and Shotwell had only two options: they could either be on Ukraine’s side and not seek “ways to do harm” or be counted as pro-Russian. The same official previously claimed that the Musk-owned social media platform Twitter was limiting the reach of Ukrainian government accounts and helping “Russian propaganda.” Podoliak offered no evidence to support the claim, but threatened regulatory action.

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And if you tax us on them, we will refuse to invest.

Big Oil Rakes In Record Profits (RT)

Oil giants Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies posted a combined profit of $196.3 billion last year, according to the companies’ earnings reports. A record-high result for the oil industry, the sum tops the economic output of most countries. French oil giant TotalEnergies was the last to report on its earnings, announcing on Wednesday that its full-year profit in 2022 was $36.2 billion, double its total for 2021. US oil major Chevron and British giants BP and Shell also reported record-high results earlier this month, while Exxon’s $56 billion-profit marked a historic high for the entire Western oil industry. The record-setting earnings came as a result of a spike in fossil fuel prices last year. However, criticism of the industry for hoarding money while consumers are struggling to pay soaring energy bills has intensified.

“Given that we’re entering a global recession and that most of us know people who are struggling, we must all call out profiteering like this,” Alice Harrison from advocacy group Global Witness, told CNBC, calling for “an increased windfall tax to help those struggling to pay their bills.” Human rights group Amnesty International said the oil majors’ profits are “patently unjustifiable” and “an unmitigated disaster.” “The billions of dollars of profits being made by these oil corporations must be adequately taxed so that governments can address effectively the rising cost of living for most vulnerable populations,” said the group’s secretary general Agnes Callamard. US President Joe Biden called Big Oil’s record earnings “outrageous” in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The head of state noted that the companies invested “too little of that profit” into efforts to stem the surge in energy prices, and proposed raising the tax on corporate stock buybacks four times to boost long-term investment.

Oil companies, however, have been arguing that windfall taxes could hinder investment. “Windfall taxes or price caps simply erode confidence in that investment stability and so I do worry about some of the moves being made. I think there is a different approach that needs to be had which is to really draw investment capital at a time when we need to be able to embed energy security into the broader energy system here in Europe,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said last week. This opinion was mirrored by Amin Nasser, head of the world’s largest energy company Saudi Aramco, who told CNBC that higher taxes are “not helpful for [the companies] in order to have additional investment.” “They need to invest in the sector, they need to grow the business, in alternatives and in conventional energy, and they need to be helped,” he added.

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These are Big Oil’s record profits.

Europe’s Spend On Energy Crisis Nears 800 Billion Euros (RT)

European countries’ bill to shield households and companies from soaring energy costs has climbed to nearly 800 billion euros, researchers said on Monday, urging countries to be more targeted in their spending to tackle the energy crisis. European Union countries have now earmarked or allocated 681 billion euros in energy crisis speding, while Britain allocated 103 billion euros and Norway 8.1 billon euros since September 2021, according to the analysis by think-tank Bruegel. The 792-billion-euro total compares with 706 billion euros in Bruegel’s last assessment in November, as countries continue through winter to face the fallout from Russia cutting off most of its gas deliveries to Europe in 2022.


Germany topped the spending chart, allocating nearly 270 billion euros – a sum that eclipsed all other countries. Britain, Italy and France were the next highest, although each spent less than 150 billion euros. Most EU states spent a fraction of that. On a per capita basis, Luxembourg, Denmark and Germany were the biggest spenders. The spending earmarked by the countries on the energy crisis is now in the same league as the EU’s 750-billion-euro COVID-19 recovery fund. Agreed in 2020, that saw Brussels take on joint debt and pass it onto the bloc’s 27 member states to cope with the pandemic. The energy spending update comes as countries debate EU proposals to loosen state aid rules further for green technology projects, as Europe seeks to compete with subsidies in the United States and China.

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“Now, this was an act of war, pure and simple. Curiously enough, it was against Germany.”

Ray McGovern Comments on Sy Hersh (Garland Nixon)

I know him to be a meticulous reporter, winner of five Polk Awards, Pulitzer Prize, you name it. Back in the day when honest reporters were so honored. This piece has all the earmarks of Sy’s meticulous approach, and he clearly has a very good source who felt a, well, he felt a constitutional obligation to honor his or her oath to the Constitution of the United States, which is the supreme oath any of us take. And that is to make sure that you tell the truth, especially when the Constitution is being violated. Now, this was an act of war, pure and simple. Curiously enough, it was against Germany. And curiously enough, President Joseph Biden, at a press conference in the presence of the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, said this is going to happen if Russia invaded Ukraine. And, of course, he was asked, well, how do you do this? I mean, how can you how can you be so confident that Nordstrom will be killed and Biden said, well, just, you know, trust me, it’s going to happen.

And so she, bilingual, the Reuters reporter, turned to Scholz – and this is not widely available now for obvious reasons – and she said, well, I mean, do you agree with that? I mean, hello, how do you feel about this? And this hack, this political hack said: we do everything together. We do everything together. We will be together on this now. So that’s available now. It’s available. Not Sy Hersh’s piece yet, but that interview is available in Germany. You know, I describe Olaf Scholz as kind of the epitome of the abused spouse. Stands there and is abused not only by his master, Joe Biden, but also by this hack that he has as foreign minister. Her name is Baerbock. She is the the most vociferous of all the people saying that we are at war. That’s what she said. We are at war with Russia.

So the question will be: it has been 90 years, count them, nine zero years since the Nazis were making a push for power in Germany. What happened? The Reichstag, the German parliament building was burned down at the end of January, 1933. What happened? The Germans caved. The Nazis didn’t have a majority, but they scared the living daylights out of German citizens. First of all, Social Democrats gave in. Next to fall, the Zentrum party, the Catholic Party. No one spoke up. We know the rest of the story. All right. Now, sometimes history is replete with ironies. Here it is exactly to the month, 90 years later. Will the German people acquiesce in their industry, and then their bodies being frozen out this winter? Or will they rise up and say: “Look, Mr Scholz, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and neither does Baerbock. Get out of here!”, and replace that government?

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“It is clear that… getting rid of cash not only touches on issues of transparency, simplicity or security… but also carries a huge danger of totalitarian surveillance..”

Cashless Society? Not in Switzerland (R.)

Swiss citizens will get the chance to try to ensure their economy never becomes cashless, a pressure group said, after collecting enough signatures on Monday to trigger a popular vote on the issue. The Free Switzerland Movement (FBS) says cash is playing a shrinking role in many economies, as electronic payments become the default for transactions in increasingly digitised societies, making it easier for the state to monitor its citizens’ actions. It wants a clause added to Switzerland’s currency law, which governs how the central bank and government manage the money supply, stipulating that a “sufficient quantity” of banknotes or coins must always remain in circulation.

There is no evidence of moves towards a cashless society by Swiss authorities. FBS said it had garnered over 111,000 signatures in support of the measure, above the 100,000 needed to trigger a popular vote. Under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy, the proposal would become law if approved by voters, though government and parliament would decide how that law was implemented.

“It is clear that… getting rid of cash not only touches on issues of transparency, simplicity or security… but also carries a huge danger of totalitarian surveillance,” FBS president Richard Koller said on the group’s website. He also views Switzerland as a European standard-bearer for the defence of cash, as pushing through such guarantees in the European Union would entail the “almost impossible” process of securing approval from all 27 member states. Accelerated by the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, the trend towards increased cashless payments was evident as far back as 2017, when an Ipsos study found more than a third of Europeans and Americans would happily go without cash and 20 per cent pretty much did so already.

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“Madness born of greed gets classified as ‘a higher form of civilization’..”

Homo implacatus (Jotwani)

A fairer economy would avoid excessive exploitation and extremes of inequality; it would also avoid any systemic negligence in the upbringing of the next generation. Such an economy would be in harmony with the living economics of nature, which has sustained life on earth from ‘day one’. Sadly, that worthy goal remains out of reach as long as people proclaim loudly that ‘greed is good’. We may consider a specific recent example. The subprime mortgage crisis in the US was caused by the fact that greedy but naïve people were cheated and exploited by greedy and cunning people. Naturally, the former were in much larger numbers, since that is a characteristic of economic exploitation.

That entire episode of ‘mega-greed’ – including the ensuing government bailouts – damaged the overall economy of the country and worsened the deep schisms running through the society. After studying such episodes of ‘mega-greed’, it would be difficult to argue that ‘greed is good’. The so-called ‘modern science’ of Economics is totally out of sync with living economics, which is the true economics of Mother Nature. The ‘fake science’ of Economics keeps inconvenient costs out of its books of accounts, and always comes up with wrong diagnoses and wrong prognoses. Nonetheless, because of the ignorance and greed of political leaders, this ‘fake science’ rules the roost.

We must hope for a smooth transition from the economics of death to living economics. However, far too much psychic energy has already been invested in the unnatural theories which justify exploitation of nature, exploitation of fellow human beings, and economic gain through bloody conflict. A painful denouement, or catharsis, is therefore inevitable – as has happened many times in human history. As before, such periods of violent house-cleaning are followed by rationalizations, often based on hoary books. A competition ensues among ‘scholars’ to show who is cleverer, or which hoary books have been proved right. Madness born of greed gets classified as ‘a higher form of civilization’.

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The damage becomes too large to ignore…

UK Holds ‘Secret’ Cross-Party Brexit Summit (RT)

High-ranking officials from opposite ends of the UK political spectrum have held ‘secret’ discussions designed to navigate a path out of various economic and strategic problems posed by Brexit, according to a report by The Observer. Documents from the meeting obtained by the British newspaper say that the talks were held under the primary topic: “How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?” The newspaper quoted a source who stated it to have been a “constructive meeting” which discussed at length economic problems presented by Brexit which come at a time of rising inflation and energy prices. “The main thrust of it was that Britain is losing out, that Brexit is not delivering, our economy is in a weak position,” the source said.

The summit, which reportedly took place on Thursday and Friday, was attended by members of both the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ campaigns, including senior Tory Michael Gove and several members of Keir Starmer’s Labour shadow cabinet. It also included figures from investment banking company Goldman Sachs and Angus Lapsley, the NATO assistant secretary general for defense policy and planning. Gove, who was a central voice in the ‘Leave’ movement in 2016, is also understood to have been “honest” about problems presented as a result of the vote, though he maintained a position that Brexit will prove to be a good choice long-term. The documents detailing the summit also said that “rejoining the EU will not be on the agenda” but noted that the UK and EU share common goals when it comes to the energy and technology sectors, the relationship with Washington, and “containing Russian aggression”.

They also raised questions about the benefits of closer links between the UK and the 27-member European bloc. The Northern Ireland protocol, which aims to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland without affecting trading ties between the UK and EU, is currently a central issue in Brussels and was also prominently discussed at the summit, The Observer wrote. The matter remains unresolved several years after Brexit came into effect. The nature of the talks reflects wider concerns from within the UK political ecosystem that Brexit will continue to damage the UK economy, as well as its strategic influence across the globe. The Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that Brexit will reduce the UK’s GDP per capita by a factor of 4% over 15 years from 2016.

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Character murder.

The Pain of Listening To Twitter Censorship Testimony (Naomi Wolf)

It is incredible to me, as someone who was raised in an American meritocracy, and who has until very recently believed in American meritocracy, that a group of nonentities in Twitter, in collusion with nonentities at CDC (hi there, Carol Crawford), the White House and the US Dept. of the Census — were able thus so simply, and at such immediate, nuclear scale, to destroy the reputation of someone identified since 1990 as a major American voice. So: this can happen to any American voice. These ill-dressed, ill-spoken, banal careerist ciphers, cost me so much. I re-trained for almost a decade, in the middle of my life, to teach. It is all I had ever really wanted to do with my life. Now I will never be able to be the only thing I ever wanted to be — a Professor of English Literature at a university.

I am now sixty. It’s too late for me. Twitter, in collusion with the Biden administration, cost me my hard-won lifelong dream. I’ve been maligned and censored by Twitter since 2021. Even if the company eventually settles my lawsuit against it, and even though Mr Musk has “let” me back on the platform, that would be, this is, no victory. Twitter has not sent an advisory to all of the news outlets around the world that depicted me, at Twitter’s own direction, as crazy, that they were wrong to have done so; there has been no press release stating that they erred, and that I was right, and that they are sorry for wrongly abusing my reputation — and for destroying women and babies. No, forever I will remain “deplatformed from Twitter for misinformation” in the cybersphere, even though it is finally being established that sadly I was deplatformed for telling God’s truth.

It is unlikely that any university at this point would see past the grotesque imprint on my bio that Twitter, via the White House, CDC and perhaps the FBI, has taken care to embed in my bio, and in articles about me, around the world. It is unlikely, too, that I will ever recoup the six figure investments that investors withdrew from my company when Twitter, colluding with the government, was orchestrating the shredding of my reputation. It is unlikely that a 35 years career and legacy online of what had been seen until very recently as a life of significant accomplishment, can ever be re-established. I try never to complain in public. I try never to show self-pity or weakness, at least not to my enemies. But Twitter’s attacks on me are not over, and I am simply sick of the damage these mediocrities have done to me, and continue to try to do.

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President Kennedy?!

I’m forming a Super PAC to Draft RFK Jr. To Run For President (Steve Kirsch)

The federal agencies are so brain damaged it will take major surgery to fix them. Congress clearly isn’t up to the task. We need new leadership in the White House. I can’t think of anyone more qualified to clean up the mess and unite the country than RFK Jr. So I’m putting together a Super PAC to encourage him to run for President on the Democratic side against Biden. If you’d like to help out, please fill out the form here. There will be both volunteer and paid opportunities available. If you have worked for a Super PAC before, it’s especially helpful to me if you register, even if your time is limited.

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Romania
https://twitter.com/i/status/1624682043555852289

 

 

Distraction

 

 

O’Keefe
https://twitter.com/i/status/1624882242202787842

 

 

 

 

Shrooms

 

 

Seal nose
https://twitter.com/i/status/1624720584243351552

 

 

Octopus

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 192022
 


Salvador Dali Self-portrait in the studio 1919

 

People Who Resisted Covid Jabs Are ‘Superheroes’ (Blanchon)
Russian General In Charge Of Ukraine Operation Speaks Out
US Should Not Listen To Kiev, Former Ambassador To Moscow Says (RT)
Erdogan Still Wants To Bring Putin And Zelenskyy Together (RT)
The End Game (Batiushka)
Russia Destroys Power And Water Infrastructure Across Ukraine (RT)
Cui Bono? The Big Picture (Blair)
EU Won’t Introduce Gas Price Cap For Now As Countries Disagree (Az.)
US Warned Of Winter Blackouts – WSJ (RT)
Lawmakers Seek Emergency Powers For Pentagon’s Ukraine War Contracting (DN)
Pentagon Considering Paying For Musk’s Starlink Network In Ukraine (G.)
Details Of Nord Stream Probe Shared By Media (RT)
Nord Stream 1: First Underwater Images Reveal Devastating Damage (G.)
Germany Facing Retail Collapse – Der Spiegel (RT)
CDC To Vote On Permanently Shielding Pfizer, Moderna From Vaccine Liability (JS)
Joe Biden KNEW of Hunter’s Shady Business Dealings: Whistleblowers (PM)

 

 

 

 

Trump Larry King 1987

 

 

 

 

Malhotra

 

 

 

 

Maher

 

 

 

 

“The text of the tribute letter may have originated with Spanish biologist and film-maker Fernando López-Mirones, or France’s General Christian Blanchon.”

People Who Resisted Covid Jabs Are ‘Superheroes’ (Blanchon)

Even if I were fully vaccinated, I would admire the unvaccinated for standing up to the greatest pressure I have ever seen, including from spouses, parents, children, friends, colleagues, and doctors. People who have been capable of such personality, courage, and such critical ability undoubtedly embody the best of humanity. They are found everywhere, in all ages, levels of education, countries, and opinions. They are of a particular kind; these are the soldiers that any army of light wishes to have in its ranks. They are the parents that every child wishes to have and the children that every parent dreams of having. They are beings above the average of their societies; they are the essence of the peoples who have built all cultures and conquered horizons.

They are there, by your side, they seem normal, but they are superheroes. They did what others could not do; they were the tree that withstood the hurricane of insults, discrimination, and social exclusion. And they did it because they thought they were alone and believed they were alone. Excluded from their families’ Christmas tables, they have never seen anything so cruel. They lost their jobs, let their careers sink, and had no more money… but they didn’t care. They suffered immeasurable discrimination, denunciations, betrayals, and humiliation… but they continued. Never before in humanity has there been such a casting; we now know who the resisters are on planet Earth.

Women, men, old, young, rich, poor, of all races and all religions, the unvaccinated, the chosen ones of the invisible ark, the only ones who managed to resist when everything fell apart. Collapsed. You’ve passed an unimaginable test that many of the toughest marines, commandos, green berets, astronauts, and geniuses couldn’t pass. You are made of the stuff of the greatest that ever lived, those heroes born among ordinary men who shine in the dark.

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“..Ukraine is preparing a massive strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, located on the Dnieper River.”

Russian General In Charge Of Ukraine Operation Speaks Out

Army General Sergey Surovikin on Tuesday spoke to the media for the first time since assuming overall command of the ongoing Russian military operation in Ukraine. Describing the situation as particularly “tense” around the city of Kherson in his statement to the broadcaster Rossiya-24, he added that the military may be forced to make “difficult decisions.” “The NATO command of the armed forces of Ukraine has long been demanding offensive operations in the Kherson direction from the Kiev regime, regardless of any casualties – both in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and among the civilian population,” Surovikin stated. The Russian military is aware of Kiev’s plans to use “prohibited” means of waging war in the Kherson area, Surovikin added.

Namely, Ukraine is preparing a massive strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, located on the Dnieper River, as well as launching massive rocket and artillery attacks on Kherson itself. “These actions can lead to the destruction of the infrastructure of this large industrial center and massive casualties among the civilian population,” Surovikin said. In the ongoing effort to dislodge the Russian military from its positions, Kiev is pouring its reserves en masse into the frontline, the general said. The vast majority of those reserves are “territorial defense units, who have not been properly trained,” Surovikin added. Such troops have low morale, thus they are propped up by “barrier squads”composed of hardline nationalists “who shoot anyone trying to leave the battlefield,” he claimed.

“The enemy’s daily losses amount to hundreds of casualties. We have a different strategy. <…> We are not aiming at fast-paced offensives, we spare every soldier and methodically grind the enemy’s attacking forces. This not only minimizes our own losses, but also significantly reduces the amount of victims among the civilian population.” “The enemy is the criminal regime that pushes Ukrainian citizens towards death. We are one people with Ukrainians and only wish for Ukraine to be a state independent from the West and NATO and friendly towards Russia,” Surovikin said. Surovikin assumed overall command of Russian troops participating in the military operation earlier in October. The general has significant combat experience, ranging from hostilities in Chechnya to the operation in Syria, for which he was awarded the title of Hero of Russia back in 2017.

According to media reports, Surovikin was given the nickname ‘General Armageddon’ by his colleagues over his hardline and unorthodox approach to warfare. His elevation into the new role has coincided with Russia ramping-up aerial bombings across Ukraine, with cruise missiles and suicide drones attacking crucial infrastructure sites in the country.

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“..Washington is in a position to “encourage the Ukrainians to agree to a ceasefire..”

US Should Not Listen To Kiev, Former Ambassador To Moscow Says (RT)

The Ukraine crisis was preventable but now seems doomed to further escalation, the last US ambassador to the Soviet Union has warned. Washington is making the mistake of delegating to Kiev many of the decisions about American involvement, he added. Kiev does “not know best what is in the security interests of the American people, and that should be the primary concern of any American government,”Jack Matlock wrote in an article published on Monday by the website Responsible Statecraft. The Ukrainians, “under the stress of war, may not be the best judges of their own ultimate security interests,” he argued. Matlock cited a situation from his own time as the top US diplomat in Moscow. He recalled a moment in 1990 when the leadership of Soviet Lithuania declared independence from the USSR right before the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, and requested “immediate recognition” from the US.

Washington had never formally recognized the three Baltic states, which were captured during World War II, as parts of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Matlock advised against acting on the Lithuanian request. “I had total sympathy with the Lithuanian aspirations but had to explain that it would be a mistake to do so until Lithuania was in fact free. Why? Because, in 1990, US recognition would almost certainly have precipitated a Soviet crack-down which the US could not counter without risking nuclear war,”he explained. Matlock said it is natural for Americans to admire “the valiant resistance” that the Ukrainians have demonstrated against Russia, but that “does not mean that Ukraine has to recover all the territory it inherited in 1991.” He explained that people in some regions claimed by Kiev may resist a return to its control, given that they consider the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government to be a US-organized coup.

The former ambassador noted that Kiev had multiple opportunities to avert war. He believes that Russia would not have sent troops into Ukraine in February if Kiev “had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO.” Now, however, neither side seems willing to take a pause in hostilities and let diplomacy take hold, he said, adding that the longer the conflict continues, the harder it will be to avoid the “utter destruction” of Ukraine.“The reality is that if the war continues Russia is capable of damaging Ukraine more than Ukraine can damage Russia without risking a wider war,” Matlock said. He concluded that Washington is in a position to “encourage the Ukrainians to agree to a ceasefire” and urged it to do so.

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“..Kalin said that Vladimir Putin wants negotiations now.”

Erdogan Still Wants To Bring Putin And Zelenskyy Together (RT)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan still wants to meet Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Spokesperson of the President of Turkiye, Ibrahim Kalin said, Report informs. Kalin said that Vladimir Putin wants negotiations now – after Russia annexed four regions of Ukraine: “Despite all the difficulties, the door of diplomacy should be kept open. The President of Turkiye can do it.”

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“..we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values are humanity, mercy and compassion.”

The End Game (Batiushka)

The partial mobilisation of 300,000 Russian reservists is nearly complete. Their presence in Donbass will free up the regulars to advance further, although some of the land taken by Kiev forces in September has already been taken back and more is liberated every day. After seven days of aerial attacks (only two days of them reported in the Western media) on Ukrainian infrastructure, especially on power supplies, even Zelensky has today admitted that 30% of the Kiev regime power stations have been destroyed throughout the Ukraine. This is all in response to his terrorism in Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Belgorod, Moscow (Daria Dugina), and on Nordstream and the Crimean Bridge. What else did he expect? France is on strike. Italy is fed up and wants arms deliveries to the Kiev Neo-Nazis to stop.

In the bankrupt UK, to the amazement of all, Truss is still ‘present’, but the Daily Mail website reports that many pubs will have to close for the winter. The landlords cannot afford to pay for heating bills. In Germany, the Health Minister, Karl Lauterbach, has warned of the risk of even hospitals having to close because of the energy crisis. Some ask: But why did the Russian Federation not start the liberation campaign last February by turning up the pain dial there and then? The answer is simple. It is not just that the Federation underestimated the utter stupidity of NATO and the Kiev junta. It is much more than that, it is quite simply that Russia never did wanted to inflict pain on ordinary Ukrainians and on its own Union soldiers. Ordinary Ukrainians have NEVER been the enemy. Russian targeting has always been of the NATO-supplied and NATO-trained Kiev military.

Russians are not Americans who spray the bushes with machine gun bullets and the trees with Agent Orange, or who blast Hamburg and Dresden off the map like the British. They target. They are not terrorists. Have you not read President Putin’s 30 September speech? Please listen again: ‘I want the Kiev authorities and their true handlers in the West to hear me now, and I want everyone to remember this: the people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye have become our citizens, forever.…We call on the Kiev regime to cease fire and all hostilities immediately; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and to return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, as we have said more than once. But the choice of people in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson will not be discussed.

The decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it. …We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our nation.’ Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values are humanity, mercy and compassion.

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Targeted. But the story is they hit apartment buildings at random.

Russia Destroys Power And Water Infrastructure Across Ukraine (RT)

Ukraine said Russia had destroyed almost a third of its power stations over the past week as Moscow stepped up a pre-winter campaign to strike infrastructure, a move the West says is a calculated attempt to disrupt and demoralize. Missiles struck power-generating facilities in a clutch of Ukrainian cities home to millions of people and several people were killed. Moscow acknowledged targeting energy plants, while Ukraine said water infrastructure had also been hit. “The situation is critical now across the country … the whole country needs to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Ukrainian television.


At least one man died when a Russian missile reduced his apartment in the southern river port of Mykolaiv to rubble. “They (Russians) probably get pleasure from this,” said Oleksandr, the owner of a local flower shop damaged in the attack. “They get pleasure from us feeling bad. I think they want us to bomb and shell (their) city buildings. But we won’t do that to be different from them.”

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“..eventually the destabilization of the USA: perhaps with civil war and revolution in the USA, resulting from its own inevitable economic collapse..”

“note: the author is not Russian, knows no Russians and has never been to Russia”

Cui Bono? The Big Picture (Blair)

First of all, we need to be absolutely clear that this insane FUBAR Ukraine situation was 100% concocted, fabricated and engineered by the USA, certainly since the droolin’ Nuland / lamebrained McCain / CIA Maidan coup of 2014, but even dating back before that. There are few situations in life where one party can be found to be 100% guilty and evil and morally bankrupt, and where the other party is 100% acting in self defence and self preservation. However history will show that with respect to this Ukraine situation, the USA was 100% the evil aggressor and Russia was 100% acting in self preservation and in defense of civilian Russian speakers in Ukraine. This is truly a war of good against evil and in case you still haven’t got the message yet, let me repeat: the USA Deep State is EVIL.

This reality is indisputably obvious to any semi-comatose person remotely interested in historical, documented FACTS. For those with any remaining doubts, they need to listen to this comprehensively researched three part podcast summary by a journalist and a military historian (both Anglophones). They actually obtained their information from Western mainstream media sources before those reports and articles mysteriously vanished from the Google search algorithms (or were relegated to 500th priority on the search list) after 24 Feb 2022. It is unfortunate that the stupid sheeple of the West, probably 99% of the “golden billion”, believe the exact opposite of the Truth, which is testimony to the incredible effectiveness of the relentless lying propaganda pooped out from the AngloEuroZionist mainstream media sewer outlets ever since 24 Feb 2022.

Until the two recent terrorist bombings (Nordstream pipelines and Kerch bridge), Russia had been reacting in a highly restrained manner to the US and US proxy aggravations. The US started provocations many years ago and contemptuously rebuffed multiple opportunities for peaceful settlements. Russia will soon end it. How? With the humiliating defeat of Ukraine for sure, but more widely we will see the economic devastation of Europe (apart from those who buy energy in Rubles – eg Hungary and Turkey) and eventually the destabilization of the USA: perhaps with civil war and revolution in the USA, resulting from its own inevitable economic collapse. The latter two eventualities were never Russia’s intended goal, but will be unintended consequences of the malicious actions of the US and EU themselves, blowback or karma if you like.

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Another big plan down the drain.

EU Won’t Introduce Gas Price Cap For Now As Countries Disagree (Az.)

The European Union is unveiling a new emergency package to tackle the energy crunch, betting on steps to bolster solidarity among member states. But the bloc will refrain from immediate gas-price caps amid political divisions and concerns over security of supply, Report informs referring to Bloomberg. The European Commission plans to propose measures to avoid extreme price spikes in energy derivatives and to use the EU’s joint purchasing power as a leverage in negotiations with global gas suppliers, according to a draft document seen by Bloomberg News. The bloc’s executive arm, also wants to launch a new liquefied natural gas index to better reflect the region’s energy reality after a cut in supplies of pipeline gas from Russia. At stake is the future of the bloc’s $17 trillion economy, which the energy crisis threatens to push into recession as companies and consumers reel from high power and gas bills.


The EU is trying to balance demands by more than a half of the EU’s 27 member states to limit gas prices with the need to avoid undermining its single market or deepening economic splits among member states. “This is the moment to act, for this winter and beyond,” according to the draft document. “The current situation causes economic and social hardship, placing a heavy burden on citizens and on the economy. Rising energy costs are leading to reduced purchasing power for citizens and loss of competitiveness for companies.” The EU’s executive arm is also seeking authority from national governments to propose – only as a last resort – price limits on transactions on the Dutch Title Transfer Facility, whose main index is the benchmark for all gas traded on the continent.

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“They also cannot buy US-produced LNG due to the Jones Act, which bans the movement of ships between US ports..”

US Warned Of Winter Blackouts – WSJ (RT)

New England could face blackouts in the coming months as more global shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are being directed to Europe, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing power producers. According to the report, the surging LNG demand across the ocean amid dwindling gas flow from Russia puts the supplies needed to provide electricity to the US’ northeastern region – including Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island – in jeopardy. These states have limited pipeline capacity and rely on LNG imports from abroad for more than a third of their gas supply during periods of peak demand, according to the Energy Information Administration.

They also cannot buy US-produced LNG due to the Jones Act, which bans the movement of ships between US ports.Europe is also a much more attractive buyer for LNG suppliers than New England. According to the news outlet, while the European benchmark price for natural gas was over $100 per one million British thermal units, gas prices in New England rarely climb above $30. Earlier this year, the governors of some New England states sent a letter to US Energy Secretary Jennifer Graholm asking her to dispel the Jones Act and allow for domestic LNG imports to the region. However, there are no reports so far regarding a change in legislation.

The situation in the region is expected to be especially dire if there are prolonged cold spells, as gas volumes would be redirected from power generation to heating homes. According to ISO New England, the region’s power-grid operator, an extremely cold winter could result in the need for rolling blackouts to balance the supply and demand for electricity. Analysts warn that supply shortages may also drive power producers to purchase gas on the spot-market, which would result in larger bills.

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What you’re paying for. Limitless.

Lawmakers Seek Emergency Powers For Pentagon’s Ukraine War Contracting (DN)

Bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate would grant the Pentagon wartime procurement powers, allowing it to buy massive amounts high-priority munitions using multi-year contracts to help Ukraine fight Russia and to refill U.S. stockpiles. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s chairman, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and ranking member, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., proposed the legislation as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill, which the Senate is expected to vote on in November. It was offered instead of the critical munitions acquisition fund that the Pentagon and some lawmakers sought for the same purposes, before Senate appropriators rejected it. The amendment, the text of which was released last week, offers multi-year contracting authorities typically reserved for Navy vessels and major aircraft.

As drafted, it would let the Pentagon lock in purchases of certain munitions made by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, BAE Systems and Kongsberg over fiscal 2023 and 2024, a step aimed at encouraging manufacturers to expand production lines for sought-after munitions. The Pentagon would also be permitted to team with NATO to buy weapons for its members in mass quantities, and for Ukraine-related contracts, the legislation would ease several key legal restrictions on Pentagon procurement through fiscal 2024 – a sign lawmakers see the war dragging on. The intent of the legislation is to spur the Pentagon and industry to move more aggressively by removing bureaucratic barriers, with an eye not only on Russia but the potential for a confrontation with China over Taiwan, according to a senior congressional aide [..]

“Whether you want to call it wartime contracting or emergency contracting, we can’t play around anymore,” the aide said. “We can’t pussyfoot around with minimum-sustaining-rate buys of these munitions. It’s hard to think of something as high on everybody’s list as buying a ton of munitions for the next few years, for our operational plans against China and continuing to supply Ukraine.” If the language becomes law, the Department of Defense would be allowed to make non-competitive awards to arms manufacturers for Ukraine-related contracts, an idea spearheaded in legislation from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and 13 other senators.

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“..25,300 terminals were sent to Ukraine, but, at present, only 10,630 are paying for service..”

Pentagon Considering Paying For Musk’s Starlink Network In Ukraine (G.)

The Pentagon is considering paying for Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network in war-torn Ukraine, Politico reported on Monday, citing two US officials involved in the discussions. The most likely source of funding would be the US Department of Defense’s Ukraine security assistance initiative, designed to support the country as it fights Russia, the report added. Musk had said on Friday that SpaceX could not indefinitely fund Starlink in Ukraine, but backtracked over the weekend to assert the rocket company would continue to fund the service in the country. He said in a tweet on Monday that SpaceX had already withdrawn its request for funding, an acknowledgement that such a request was made.A Pentagon spokesman said the defense department would not speculate on future security assistance announcements before they occur.


A separate report in the Financial Times said the European Union was also weighing funding Starlink in Ukraine, citing three officials with knowledge of the decision. Musk, the world’s richest person and chief executive of Tesla Inc, recently said SpaceX spends nearly $20m a month maintaining satellite services in Ukraine and that the company has spent about $80m to enable and support Starlink there. “To be precise, 25,300 terminals were sent to Ukraine, but, at present, only 10,630 are paying for service,” Musk tweeted on Monday. Starlink has helped Ukraine’s civilians and military stay online during the war, with Ukraine’s vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, last week saying Starlink’s services helped restore energy and communications infrastructure in critical areas.

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“Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that this summer, NATO conducted military drills not far from Bornholm.”

Details Of Nord Stream Probe Shared By Media (RT)

The blasts that ripped through the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines last month were likely caused by sabotage, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing German officials familiar with the investigation. Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that NATO had conducted a military exercise this summer close to the location where the leaks were found. According to the outlet, while German investigators have so far failed to definitively identify the culprits, they are “working under the assumption that Russia was behind the blasts.” Moscow has repeatedly denied that it had anything to do with the incident.

German officials reportedly believe that the alleged attack was not likely to have been conducted by a military submarine, given that the Baltic Sea around Denmark’s Bornholm Island, where the explosions occurred, is relatively shallow. This would make it difficult for underwater vessels to operate without being detected. According to one theory, an explosive device may have been dropped from a ship and detonated remotely, sources told the WSJ. [..] Moscow has denounced the incident as a terrorist attack and called for an investigation into the matter. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that this summer, NATO conducted military drills not far from Bornholm.

She was apparently speaking about the BALTOPS 2022 exercises held in June, in which ‘’deep-sea equipment’’ was used intensively. According to Germany’s Interior Ministry, Sweden rejected a plan to set up a joint investigation team with Berlin and Denmark. Stockholm argued that its own findings are too sensitive to share even with other EU member states, Reuters reported. All three nations have said they will not grant access to the investigation to Russia. This prompted Moscow to summon the German, Danish, and Swedish envoys, while declaring that it would not recognize the results of the probe unless Russian experts are invited to take part.

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“At least 50 metres of the gas pipeline appeared to be missing..”

Well, it’s there somewhere. More interesting: is Sweden, after refusing a joint probe with Germany and Denmark, let alone Russia, now also going to refuse a Gazprom repair of the pipeline?

Nord Stream 1: First Underwater Images Reveal Devastating Damage (G.)

The first underwater images taken of the ruptured Nord Stream 1 pipeline reveal the devastating damage caused by what Danish police have described as “powerful explosions” under the Baltic Sea. Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday published photographs and film footage taken by an underwater drone at the site near the island of Bornholm where the gas pipeline between Russia and Germany ruptured on 26 September. They appear to show long tears in the seabed near the concrete-reinforced steel pipe that was not merely cracked but torn apart in an act of suspected sabotage. At least 50 metres of the gas pipeline appeared to be missing, Expressen said. Three separate investigations are currently trying to assess the full extent of the damage to the two twin pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2, and collect evidence as to who was behind the sabotage.


A German government official on Monday confirmed there would be no joint investigations team working on clearing up the pipeline blast as initially envisioned, but three separate investigations carried out by Danish, Swedish and German authorities would coordinate closely. According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the offer of a joint investigation was rejected by the Swedish side, with a state prosecutor from the country telling Reuters that “there is some information in our investigation that is confidential because it is directly linked to national security”. A preliminary investigation by Danish authorities established the leak had been caused by “powerful explosions”, Copenhagen police said in a statement on Tuesday.

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Getting serious.

Germany Facing Retail Collapse – Der Spiegel (RT)

Germany’s retail industry is in jeopardy amid rising energy costs and a sharp decline in consumption, Der Spiegel reported on Monday, citing the German Retail Federation (HDE). According to the organization’s forecasts, the first to face the risk of bankruptcy are smaller stores in city centers. Retail turnover in Germany started to decrease in August. According to the Federal Statistical Office, sales in real terms fell by 1.3% compared to July, and by 4.3% versus August 2021. Food sales were down 1.7% from July and 3.1% year-on-year, reaching their lowest level since 2017. Textiles and shoes, household appliances, and construction supplies were other segments seeing a decline in sales.


An HDE spokesman said that the financial assistance promised by the German government to ease energy price spikes should be used to support retail stores. “If this does not happen, we will face a disaster in many urban centers,” he said, as cited by the news outlet. However, he thinks the crisis can be avoided through investments and new creative ideas, although this would require cooperation between retailers and the authorities. “In the current acute crisis, everything is becoming a little more difficult. The money pots will certainly not get fuller for the time being… If the concepts are to work, all stakeholders in the municipalities would have to work together – from the top of the town hall to city marketing, retail and gastronomy to cultural providers and citizens,” he stated.

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“By adding the shots to the childhood schedule, the CDC [..] will transfer liability for vaccine injuries to the federal government..”

CDC To Vote On Permanently Shielding Pfizer, Moderna From Vaccine Liability (JS)

A CDC committee will convene this week and likely vote Thursday to deliver permanent legal indemnity to Pfizer and Moderna, through the process of adding the drug companies’ mRNA injections to the child and adolescent immunization schedules. By adding the shots to the childhood schedule, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will transfer liability for vaccine injuries to the federal government’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), allowing for Pfizer and Moderna to finally bring an FDA approved shot to the market without opening itself up to lawsuits. Moreover, it will act as another windfall for companies that have already brought in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues, by requiring these vaccinations for children who attend public schools.

In March 2020, the federal government invoked the PREP Act, which gave Pfizer and Moderna a tort liability shield due to the declared “public health emergency,” which the government is reportedly going to revoke in early 2023. The companies’ emergency use authorization shots have since been protected by the federal government through this 2005 congressional action. [..]The Health Resources & Services Administration has clarified what needs to happen for a vaccine to become liability free. “For a vaccine to be covered, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must recommend the category of vaccine for routine administration to children or pregnant women, and it must be subject to an excise tax by federal law.”

The Dossier has reported extensively on the coordinated effort by Big Pharma and the Biden Administration to delay the rollout of an FDA approved COVID vaccine, with legal experts suspecting the process is in place to protect Pfizer and Moderna from legal liability from vaccine injuries. Once described as the cure to the coronavirus, the novel mRNA shots have resulted in catastrophic failure, with a side effect profile exponentially higher than advertised. Thanks to a fraudulent, deceptive marketing campaign, assisted by top federal officials and high-profile pharmaceutical executives, the drugmakers and the federal government convinced millions of Americans to take shots that were much more dangerous (especially for young men), and much less effective than advertised.

RFK

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“.. the interview summary states that work “remained intentionally uncompensated while Joe Biden was vice president.”

Joe Biden KNEW of Hunter’s Shady Business Dealings: Whistleblowers (PM)

New whistleblower documents obtained by Senator Chuck Grassley have revealed that President Biden “was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.” On Monday morning, Grassley sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss outlining new whistleblower allegations that claim the FBI has “significant, impactful and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and James Biden,” according to Fox News. The whistleblowers allege that the FBI has documents relating to information on Mykola Zlochevsky, who is the owner of Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden sat on the board.

“The documents in the FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden,” Grassley wrote. “These documents also indicate that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them,” Grassley said. The Senator added that it is “unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of the 2020 election.” “It is also unclear whether US Attorney Weiss has performed his own due diligence on these and related allegations,” Grassley continued.

Grassley, alongside Senator Ron Johnson, led an investigation into Hunter Biden starting in 2019, which discovered that officials within the Obama administration “knew” of Hunter Biden’s “problematic” position on the board, saying that it interfered “in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” Hunter Biden joined the board in April of 2014, while his father was serving as vice president and running US-Ukraine relations and policy for the administration. Additionally, Grassley noted an FBI interview with Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner, from October 2020, where he stated that Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, had created a business agreement with foreign nationals connected to the Chinese government during Biden’s vice presidency.

Grassley said that the interview summary states that work “remained intentionally uncompensated while Joe Biden was vice president.” “After Joe Biden left the vice presidency, the summary makes clear that Hunter Biden and James Biden worked with CEFC and affiliated individuals to compensate them for that past work and benefits they procured for CEFC,” Grassley said. Hunter Biden, James Biden, and their business partners created a joint venture, known as SinoHawk Holdings, that would be a “vehicle to accomplish that financial compensation.” The venture was a partnership between the two Bidens, and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming. 50 percent of SinoHawk was owned by Oneida Holdings, which according to the summary, was made up of five evenly divided LLCs, two of which went to Hunter and James Biden, and 10 percent, Bobulinski revealed, was “to be held for Joe Biden.”

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Aluminum

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cockatoo

 

 

 

 

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Oct 142022
 
 October 14, 2022  Posted by at 8:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  49 Responses »


Salvador Dali Pianc 1919

 

Ukraine Has De Facto Joined NATO – Defense Minister (RT)
NATO, Russia to Hold Nuclear Exercises Despite Tensions (Gordon)
The Anti-Nuclear Movement in Review: Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (Hall)
‘It Can’t Get Any Worse’ – Lavrov On US-Russia Relations (RT)
The Thin Red Line: NATO Can’t Afford To Lose Kabul And Kiev (Escobar)
Lies, Lies, Lies (Batiushka)
SpaceX Sends Ukraine Starlink Bill To Pentagon (RT)
Zelensky Shakedown: $62 Billion Before Next Year (Dowling)
EU Concerned Over UN Vote On Ukraine – Borrell (RT)
Why Have a Constitution If You Just Ignore It? (Miele)
Joe Biden Just Interfered In Hunter’s Prosecution On National TV (NYP)
Saudi Arabia Publicly Rejects Biden Demand To Delay Oil Production Cutback (PM)
John Durham Unmistakably Puts FBI On Trial (JTN)
Biden’s ‘Schizophrenic’ National Security Strategy (RSC)
Will Musk “End Twitter As We Know it”? I Sincerely Hope So (Turley)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biden flyweight

 

 

 

 

 

 

Candace

 

 

 

 

 

 

No nukes, no nazis, no NATO.

Ukraine Has De Facto Joined NATO – Defense Minister (RT)

Ukraine is a de facto member of the NATO alliance, despite not having officially joined the US-led military bloc, Kiev’s Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov has claimed. He made the statement in a tweet following a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the bloc’s headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday. “We have come a long way and have de facto joined the alliance,” the minister wrote, while also thanking Stoltenberg for his support for Ukraine amid its ongoing conflict with Russia. “Ukraine is already making significant contributions to the security of the free world,” the minister added.

Reznikov also expressed confidence that victory over Moscow and “successful reforms” domestically would “open up new horizons” for his country, seemingly a reference to Ukraine officially joining the bloc at some point in the future. Russia views NATO’s eastward expansion as a major security threat. When Moscow launched its military offensive against Kiev in late February, one of its key demands was for Ukraine to officially declare itself a neutral country that would never join any Western military alliance. On September 30, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky filed an application to join NATO and called for an accelerated admission procedure for his country.

However, Kiev’s backers in the West have not appeared overly enthusiastic on the issues. Stoltenberg has pointed out that “any decision on membership has to be taken by consensus” by all 30 NATO members and that its top priority right now is to “support Ukraine”militarily and financially during the conflict. Washington voiced a similar stance, with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan saying earlier this month that the question of Ukraine joining NATO “should be taken up at a different time.”A statement in support of Kiev’s bid for swift accession has been backed by just nine member states – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

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“The events are normal..” [..] “But we don’t know, of course, what’s being exercised, whether that is also normal.”

NATO, Russia to Hold Nuclear Exercises Despite Tensions (Gordon)

Russia and NATO will go ahead with large-scale nuclear exercises in the coming weeks despite concern over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hints that the Ukraine war might prompt him to turn to his nuclear arsenal, U.S. and NATO officials said. The NATO exercise, called Steadfast Noon, involves American nuclear-capable B-52 bombers and fighter jets, which will not carry live munitions, White House National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby told reporters Oct. 13. The upcoming NATO exercise involving 14 countries has been long planned, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said delaying or canceling the exercise would send the wrong message about NATO’s resolve in the face of Russian aggression.

“It would send a very wrong signal if we suddenly now canceled a routine, long-time planned exercise because of the war in Ukraine. That would be absolutely the wrong signal to send,” Stoltenberg said. “NATO’s firm, predictable behavior, our military strength, is the best way to prevent escalation.” The U.S. twice put off routine tests of its Minuteman III missile this year, the first time to avoid inflaming tensions with Russia during the Ukraine crisis and the second time to avoid any miscalculation on China’s part as the Chinese military engaged in a show of force near Taiwan. A Minuteman III test launch eventually took place Aug. 16.U.S. officials predicted that Russia would soon go ahead with its own large-scale nuclear exercises.

The Russian drills would be the second since February 2022. Putin oversaw the February exercise that tested sea, land, and air-based ballistic and cruise missiles and other weapons. “We expect Russia to conduct its annual strategic nuclear exercise—they call it GROM—as early as this month,” Kirby added. The Western officials cautioned that the Russian exercise was expected and did not appear to be linked to Putin’s suggestions that Moscow might resort to nuclear weapons in the face of setbacks in Ukraine. In a national address Sept. 21, Putin warned that “Russia will use all the instruments at its disposal to counter a threat against its territorial integrity.” He added, “This is not a bluff.”

“We will monitor that as we always do,” Stoltenberg said of the upcoming Russian exercise. “And, of course, we will remain vigilant, not least in light of the veiled nuclear threats and the dangerous rhetoric we have seen from the Russian side.” Some nuclear policy experts expressed concern that Russian and NATO nuclear exercises might heighten apprehensions as each side seeks to determine what options might be tested. “The events are normal,” said Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists in an interview. “But we don’t know, of course, what’s being exercised, whether that is also normal.”

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“..if a nuclear strike is decided on, it will be directed against the centre, not the periphery…”

The Anti-Nuclear Movement in Review: Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (Hall)

What it seems the Russians are doing in the face of US “nuclear sabre-rattling” is taking a leaf out of Kennedy’s book. Faced with nuclear missiles (or what were claimed to be nuclear missiles) in Cuba, Kennedy was under pressure to invade Cuba to take them out. Khrushchev appears to have been influenced by notions of “nuclear deterrence”. He apparently thought that the US might invade Cuba but that the “nuclear deterrence” exerted by the Russian nuclear arsenal would dissuade the US from threatening the Soviet Union itself. In fact Kennedy defied all his advisors to tell Khrushchev that if he didn’t get his missiles (or “missiles”) out of Cuba, the US would launch a massive nuclear first strike against Soviet cities.


This made Khrushchev lose his nerve and he backed down. Subsequently he and Kennedy embarked on serious negotiations to move towards nuclear disarmament, or at least more effective arms control. Kennedy gained kudos from his brinkmanship, but also made enemies, and not only from peace loving, or “peace loving” ideological opponents. He also incurred the displeasure of leading lsraeli politicians, notably Ben Gurion, through his opposition to Israel having nuclear weapons. So for this and other reasons he was assassinated. What Putin appears to be doing now is similar: faced with the threat of a local conflagration he says that if a nuclear strike is decided on, it will be directed against the centre, not the periphery.

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“..Moscow is, however, still open to dialogue, but that no “sensible” offers have so far been forthcoming from Washington.”

‘It Can’t Get Any Worse’ – Lavrov On US-Russia Relations (RT)

US President Joe Biden’s latest remark indicating his unwillingness to negotiate with his Russian counterpart is unlikely to further worsen an already dire global security situation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. The diplomat noted that Moscow is, however, still open to dialogue, but that no “sensible” offers have so far been forthcoming from Washington. In an interview with Russia’s Rossiya 24 news channel aired on Thursday, Lavrov was asked whether he thought Biden’s reluctance to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin would further complicate tensions in the international arena.“It doesn’t complicate [it] at all, because the state of affairs as it stands today has already been driven, first of all by the US, to such a condition that it can’t get any worse, in my opinion,” the Russian minister replied.

The diplomat pointed out at the same time that Moscow is not shunning dialogue with Washington. According to Lavrov, Russia has “never rejected a single earnest, sensible offer to hold contacts.” However, “no one is putting forth sensible initiatives,” he added. Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that president Biden “has no intention of meeting with President Putin.” The statement echoed a remark made by the US head of state to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. “Look, I have no intention of meeting with him,” Biden said, when asked about his plans for the upcoming G20 summit in Bali.

The US president went on to add, however, that “if [Putin] came to me at the G20 and said ‘I want to talk about the release of Griner,’ I’d meet with him. I mean, it would depend. Brittney Griner is America’s Women’s National Basketball Association star and Olympic gold medalist who was detained at a Moscow airport in February and later sentenced to nine years in prison by a Russian court on drug-possession charges. Presidents Biden and Putin have not spoken to each other directly since before Russia launched its military campaign against Ukraine in late February. Lavrov had made it clear earlier that Moscow would consider such talks should it receive a proposal from Washington.

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“Russia will not allow the Empire to control Ukraine, whatever it takes.”

The Thin Red Line: NATO Can’t Afford To Lose Kabul And Kiev (Escobar)

As the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder is petrified by the startling Double Fail of a massive economic/military attack, Moscow is systematically preparing for the next military offensive. As it stands, it’s clear that the Anglo-American axis will not negotiate. It has not even tried for the past 8 years, and it’s not about to change course, even incited by an angelic chorus ranging from Elon Musk to Pope Francis. Instead of going Full Timur, accumulating a pyramid of Ukrainian skulls, Putin has summoned eons of Taoist patience to avoid military solutions. Terror on the Crimea Bridge may have been a game-changer. But the velvet gloves are not totally off: General Armageddon’s daily aerial routine may still be seen as a – relatively polite – warning.

Even in his latest landmark speech, which contained a savage indictment of the West, Putin made clear he’s always open for negotiations. Yet by now, Putin and the Security Council know why the Americans simply can’t negotiate. Ukraine may be just a pawn in their game, but it’s still one of Eurasia’s key geopolitical nodes: whoever controls it, enjoys extra strategic depth. The Russians are very much aware that the usual suspects are obsessed with blowing up the complex process of Eurasia integration – starting with China’s BRI. No wonder important instances of power in Beijing are “uneasy” with the war. Because that’s very bad for business between China and Europe via several trans-Eurasian corridors.

Putin and the Russian Security Council also know that NATO abandoned Afghanistan – an absolutely miserable failure – to place all their chips on Ukraine. So losing both Kabul and Kiev will be the ultimate mortal blow: that means abandoning the 21st Eurasian Century to the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership. Sabotage – from the Nord Streams to Krymskiy Most – gives away the desperation game. NATO’s arsenals are virtually empty. What’s left is a war of terror: the Syrianization, actually ISIS-zation of the battlefield. Managed by braindead NATO, acted on the terrain by a cannon fodder horde sprinkled with mercenaries from at least 34 nations.

So Moscow may be forced to go all the way – as the Totally Unplugged Dmitry Medvedev revealed: now this is about eliminating a terrorist regime, totally dismantle its politico-security apparatus and then facilitate the emergence of a different entity. And if NATO still blocks it, direct clash will be inevitable. NATO’s thin red line is they can’t afford to lose both Kabul and Kiev. Yet it took two acts of terror – on Pipelineistan and on Crimea – to imprint a much starker, burning red line: Russia will not allow the Empire to control Ukraine, whatever it takes. That’s intrinsically linked to the future of the Greater Eurasia Partnership. Welcome to life at Doom’s doorstep.

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“His murder was bungled, on which Skripal and his daughter were then abducted and ‘disappeared’ (to New Zealand?)..”

Lies, Lies, Lies (Batiushka)

[..] in 1854 Commodore Perry forced Japan by military threat to ‘trade with’ the USA, in order to ‘take it out of its isolation’ and that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who lived in those two cities then much regretted their lack of isolation. And as for the USA? It was itself still in a state of cultural isolation, having learned nothing from age-old Japanese culture, but instead imposing its own anti-culture on all and sundry. Or then there was that war criminal General Curtis LeMay who boasted of his potential to ‘bomb back into the Stone Age’ in order to bring freedom and democracy, when in fact his brain was in the Stone Age and he had no idea what freedom and democracy are.

Or there is the statement that Russia is corrupted by oligarchs, when in reality ‘Russian’ oligarchs (most of them are Jewish) are purely Western creations from the 1990s, following the model of the only system that the Western world has ever practised – Feudalism, with its economic serfdom (2). What are Musk, Bezos, Gates and Buffett, if they are not oligarchs/feudal magnates? This technique was clearly displayed in the 2006 Litvinenko and 2018 Skripal cases in the UK. In the first case, a Russian traitor and British spy was murdered by polonium. Now, if you wanted to murder someone (who presented no threat to you) without incriminating yourself, would you rather not just employ a hired killer who would leave no trace? It would be much cheaper.

Interestingly, polonium is a very rare radioactive substance, but is available to British secret services. In the Salisbury case of the Skripals, involving a retired British spy, who seemed to be wanting to repent for his treason (he had already served his sentence in a Russian prison), and who was poisoned with a substance available in only about three places worldwide, one of which is twelve kilometres away from where he lived in one of the most fearsome chemical weapons establishments in the world. His murder was bungled, on which Skripal and his daughter were then abducted and ‘disappeared’ (to New Zealand?), though an innocent woman did die of the poison. When questions were asked about some very strange aspects of the case, the British media were issued with a ‘DSMA-Notice’, censoring them and forbidding them to report any further on the matter.

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“$400 million over the next 12 months..”

SpaceX Sends Ukraine Starlink Bill To Pentagon (RT)

Elon Musk’s aerospace firm has asked the US military to take over funding for its Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine, saying it is no longer able to foot the cost of operations, according to company documents obtained by CNN. In a letter sent to the Pentagon last month, SpaceX outlined its financial difficulties and asked the government to begin funding Starlink services for Ukraine, claiming it will cost more than $120 million for the rest of 2022, and some $400 million over the next 12 months. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales said in the letter.

SpaceX has donated around 20,000 Starlink satellite units to Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict in late February, providing internet connection and military coordination in chaotic battlegrounds that would otherwise be cut off from the web. Ukrainian officials have hailed the system as “an essential part of critical infrastructure.” Kiev has nonetheless urged the company to send thousands of additional Starlink terminals, with another letter obtained by CNN showing that a top Ukrainian general, Valery Zaluzhny, directly asked for 8,000 units back in July. An outside consultant for SpaceX later wrote that the firm “faces terribly difficult decisions here,” adding “I do not think they have the financial ability to provide any additional terminals or service as requested by General Zaluzhny.”

While Musk has stated that SpaceX will have spent more than $100 million providing Starlink services to Ukraine by the end of the year, the company’s letter to the Pentagon indicates that other parties have helped to bear some costs. The “vast majority” of the 20,000 units furnished to Ukraine have received “full or partial funding” from the American, British and Polish governments, as well as NGOs and private fundraisers, though SpaceX has covered most of the service costs of around $4,500 per terminal each month. More recently, SpaceX has come under fire for alleged Starlink outages across some regions of Ukraine, with the Financial Times relaying reports from Ukrainian soldiers of a “catastrophic”loss of communications last week. The cause of the outages remains unclear, though Ukrainian officials insist the problems were not the result of a technical glitch or cyberattacks, instead suggesting “SpaceX-imposed geographical restrictions.” Service has since resumed in the affected areas, however.

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“George Washington Zelensky hopes to do this with the World Bank and has a role for the IMF.”

Zelensky Shakedown: $62 Billion Before Next Year (Dowling)

The U.S. just approved another 13+ billion for Ukraine after they gave them $1.1 billion and hundreds of millions in weapons the two weeks before. Mr. Zelensky now wants $38 billion to cover their budget deficit, salaries of doctors and teachers, welfare, and pensions. In other words, we will pay their government workers. It sounds like a shakedown. He asked for $33 billion in August. Mind you, we don’t have a budget in the US. Ukrainian President Zelensky also wants $17 billion for critical infrastructure, $2 billion for electric energy infrastructure, and more than $5 billion for gas and coal purchases. Most of the money will come from the US.


He wants new business investments in Ukraine while at war with Russia. He wants a mechanism “to ensure military risks” taken by these businesses. George Washington Zelensky hopes to do this with the World Bank and has a role for the IMF. The Ukrainian president wants a permanent working group to dole out funds promptly. It sounds like this will set up automatic payments. Zelensky also wants to rebuild while the war is ongoing. This demand for funds comes as the US exceeds a $31 trillion debt and trillions in deficit in the year’s expenditures. These expenditures will go on without end as the US hits record-high inflation that shows no signs of stopping. Is there anyone we can shakedown for money? We’ll need a benefactor with the Zelensky burden.

Tucker Ze
https://twitter.com/i/status/1580717198703611904

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Borrell: you lost.

EU Concerned Over UN Vote On Ukraine – Borrell (RT)

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has expressed disappointment that more countries didn’t support the UN’s latest resolution on the non-recognition of referendums on joining Russia in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Speaking at the European Diplomatic Academy on Thursday, Borrell said he was happy that “the system reacted very well” after 143 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to reject the referendums, with only five countries, including Russia, voting against the resolution. “There was a lot of work behind [this result], a lot of outreach to many people in order to be sure that we were above the 140 line,” the top diplomat said. However, Borrell went on to state that he was “worried because there were too many abstentions,” as 45 countries, including China, India, South Africa, Thailand and Cuba, chose to refrain from casting their vote for the resolution.

“When more or less 20% of the world community decided not to support or not to reject the Russian annexation – for me, it is too many,” said the diplomat, adding that “we are happy because the bottle is quite full, but it is a little bit empty.” Borrell insisted that more work must be done to convince more countries to condemn Russia and “make the world reject” Moscow’s military campaign against Ukraine. The diplomat’s comments come as Russia accused the US and its allies of using “diplomatic terror” to force more countries into supporting the UN resolution. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday that Western nations were “twisting the arms of developing countries and threatening them with all sorts of punishments” in order to get them to condemn Russia.

“Only through such undisguised blackmail and threats did they manage to ensure the result. We all understand perfectly. And the statements of the Americans that they are not persuading anyone, and that everyone is voting by themselves, is a lie. And they also know it,” Lavrov said. Before launching its military operation in Ukraine in February, Russia recognized the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, arguing that Kiev had failed to represent and protect people living there. Residents of two other regions, Kherson and Zaporozhye, also voted by wide margins in public referendums to declare independence and join Russia. President Vladimir Putin signed unification treaties with the four new Russian regions on October 5.

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“..our elected officials have not just bounced up against the guardrails enshrined in the Constitution, they have flattened them and are driving the republic off a cliff.”

Why Have a Constitution If You Just Ignore It? (Miele)

In two recent columns, I wrote about the danger of public officials who are either unaware of the restrictions placed upon them by the Constitution they have sworn to uphold or, worse, just don’t give a damn. In the first, I chided President Biden for his sworn intent to pass a law that would “codify Roe v. Wade into law,” namely to pass a federal law that offers protection for abortion nationwide. In the second, I lambasted Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for proposing a bill that would ban abortion after 15 weeks gestation, the point when unborn children are believed to be able to feel pain. So that raises the obvious question: Why have a Constitution if you are just going to ignore it? Democrat Biden and Republican Graham together offer a bipartisan illustration of why our country is dangerously off track.

With the implicit permission of the Supreme Court, our elected officials have not just bounced up against the guardrails enshrined in the Constitution, they have flattened them and are driving the republic off a cliff. It doesn’t matter which side of the abortion issue you are on; we should all be able to agree that in a constitutional republic, lawmakers and presidents cannot just do whatever they want. And there is absolutely no doubt that the U.S. Constitution does not give Congress the power to regulate medical procedures, whether it be an abortion or an appendectomy. That’s just the starting point. Anyone who bothers to read the Constitution knows that Congress was designed to exert limited authority over Americans’ everyday lives. Read Article I, Section 8 if you don’t believe me. You won’t find anything about vaccines or masks, and the whole idea of presidents ordering citizens to do anything is laughable.

Article II, Section 2, which spells out most of the powers of the president, is remarkably brief, and the powers are few. Commander in chief? Check. Negotiator of treaties? Check. Nominator of ambassadors and judges? Check. But from where exactly does the president derive the power to forgive student loans? Or order landlords to stop collecting rent? Maybe this runaway tyrannical democracy could have been avoided if we still taught civics in our elementary and secondary schools. But at this point there is little to be done. We can’t force members of Congress to read the Constitution, let alone understand it. We can’t stop presidents from legislating with their phone and their pen, as President Obama famously called his ability to unilaterally shape America to his wishes through executive order. And we are decades past the point where we could expect courts to rein in the excesses of the other two branches.>

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“That was a clear push for mercy — from the ultimate boss of the Justice Department that’s weighing charges against Hunter.”

Joe Biden Just Interfered In Hunter’s Prosecution On National TV (NYP)

President Biden shouldn’t be talking about his son Hunter’s case, let alone defending him as he did Tuesday night to Jake Tapper. “I’m proud of my son,” who got “hooked on drugs” but has “established a new life,” the prez said: “He’s on the straight and narrow, and he has been for a couple years now.” That was a clear push for mercy — from the ultimate boss of the Justice Department that’s weighing charges against Hunter. As we’ve asked before, how is there no independent counsel in charge of this case, as department rules clearly dictate? It’s pretty clear that Justice has already delayed this investigation.


Then, too, the prez only discussed Hunter’s admitted lies on a federal gun form, not the far more serious tax-dodging charges (or the unregistered-lobbyist issues, let alone the whole “Big Guy” stinkbomb) — and Tapper didn’t push him. Casual viewers might well think mercy is indeed called for, and much of the media will back them up. But the real Hunter case is about selling influence with Joe Biden, quite likely to Joe’s financial benefit. This wasn’t a parent supporting his offspring, but a potential co-conspirator pushing to quash a case that implicates him.

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“Biden then threatened to withhold Congressionally authorized arms sales to Saudi Arabia..”

Saudi Arabia Publicly Rejects Biden Demand To Delay Oil Production Cutback (PM)

The Biden administration urged Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ members to delay announcing oil production cuts until after the November mid-term elections. Gas prices are foremost in the minds of American voters and are expected to play a major role in the control of Congress in the minds of voters. Saudi Arabia refused to go along with Biden’s wishes, saying that they would be reducing their oil production, as would their Russian allies. Biden then threatened to withhold Congressionally authorized arms sales to Saudi Arabia, making the stunning admission during a recent sit-down interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, in which he stated that Saudi Arabia would face “consequences for what they’ve done with Russia.”


Biden asked Saudi Arabia to delay their decision to cut oil production, and to drill more oil in the lead up to the November midterm elections, essentially to boost the Democratic Party by cutting gas prices. The administration has claimed that the ask to Saudi Arabia to delay their cutback on oil production was not at all a political move, however, Saudi Arabia said that it was. They stated further that they are not taking a stance on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and that their decision to cut production was an economic, not a political one. Holding Congressionally authorized foreign funding hostage over a political conflict, or to coerce a nation into behaving according to the wishes of the White House, is exactly what Biden accused former President Trump of doing three years ago, which led directly to Trump’s impeachment.

Tapper seemed oblivious to this conflict, but Human Events Daily Senior Editor Jack Posobiec pointed it out on Twitter, saying “Here is Biden in 2019 calling for Trump to be impeached for the exact same thing Biden is doing right now with Saudi Arabia,” and quoting then-candidate Biden. “Have we caught Joe Biden admitting to coercing a foreign country in furtherance of his own political interest? Yes, we have because he admitted it on live TV,” Posobiec said on Human Events Daily. Biden, he said, “explicitly states that he is going to coerce Saudi Arabia by holding up congressionally approved military aid.” “He’s saying ‘I’ll pull military aid,'” Posobiec said, pulling up Biden’s 2019 tweet.


[..] “Back then it was Trump and Ukraine. Now it’s Biden in the Saudis. So the question is simple: this was only the third impeachment in the history of the United States of America, and it was predicated on this theory of a quid pro quo between the two presidents.” “They know what they’re doing,” Posobiec said. “They all know what they’re doing. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy.” “President Biden can sit there and admit that he’s coercing the Saudis, the same way that he admitted before, but he was coercing the Ukrainians with a $1 billion loan to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired. This guy is the father of the quid pro quo when it comes to modern American government.”

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Very few people left that believe in Durham.

John Durham Unmistakably Puts FBI On Trial (JTN)

Igor Danchenko is the named defendant at this week’s trial, charged with lying as an informant in the now discredited Russia collusion investigation. But with probing questions and searing redirects, Special Counsel John Durham has turned the Russian researcher’s trial in the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria, Va., into an expose of stunning FBI failures and omissions in its now-infamous pursuit of Donald Trump for crimes that turned out to be nonexistent. While the Hillary Clinton-spawned Russian collusion narrative has been the subject of a half dozen exhaustive investigations in the House, Senate and Justice Department, Durham has managed to use his third and widely assumed last trial to drop bombshell after bombshell that other inquiries failed to uncover. Even the most versed in the case have been stunned.

The effort began during pretrial motions. Danchenko, the primary source for the now-debunked Steele dossier, was someone who had both lied to FBI agents and had troubling ties to Russian intelligence. But Durham revealed he was inexplicably hired by the bureau, despite that record, to be a paid confidential human source for three years. Durham followed that with a stunner on day 1 of the trial, getting FBI senior analyst Brian Auten to reveal that the FBI had been unable to confirm a single fact in the Steele dossier by mid-October 2016 but nonetheless grabbed some of its most sensational claims about Trump and stuck them into a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant marked “verified” that authorized spying on the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page.

“On October 21, 2016, did you have any information to corroborate that information?” Durham asked, referring to the Carter Page FISA application submitted on that date. “No,” Auten replied. The bureau was so desperate to find corroboration to justify Steele’s allegations that it offered up to $1 million to former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, a paid researcher for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, if he could corroborate his dossier. Steele did not, Auten told the jury.That revelation even shocked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who conducted the first exhaustive probe that debunked the dossier and exposed FBI wrongdoing. Nunes told Just the News on Thursday he was never told about the $1 million payment despite subpoenaing the FBI.

“I hate to say this, but like a new shoe drops every day,” Nunes told the John Solomon Reports podcast in referring to Durham’s work. “And it’s like every day we find out something new. And I mean, look, I don’t know how you describe this $1 million payment or potential payment to Steele as anything other than what it is. It was a bounty program to get Donald Trump.”

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“The Biden White House even sought a “stable, predictable” relationship with Russia.”

Biden’s ‘Schizophrenic’ National Security Strategy (RSC)

The Biden administration has finally released its long-awaited National Security Strategy, the first such document since 2017. It’s strikingly schizophrenic, alternating — sometimes on an almost sentence-by-sentence basis — between ambitious promises to lead global cooperation in addressing transnational challenges, and depicting a world of near-intractable rivalries. The overall impression is of a foreign policy establishment that seems to understand the need for international cooperation, but also seems helplessly carried along by currents that could divide the world in a way that makes such cooperation impossible. This reflects the journey of the Biden administration itself.

President Biden came into office promising to refocus foreign policy domestically on the needs of the American middle class, to lead global cooperation against the climate crisis, and with apparent plans to lower conflict in global flash points. He planned to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran as a way to ramp down tensions there, and intended to maintain cooperation with China in key selected areas even as the administration maintained much of the Trump administration’s shift toward a hard-edged “strategic competition” with China. The Biden White House even sought a “stable, predictable” relationship with Russia. Its first major foreign policy decision was to disentangle the United States from its two-decade military occupation of Afghanistan.

Two years later, the world instead seems to be teetering on the brink of a new cold war with all the dangers and costs that it implies. Cooperation between China and the United States is in a deep freeze because of a seemingly endless series of tit-for-tat provocations, especially over Taiwan, and the president’s own party is pressuring him to be even more aggressive. Meanwhile, negotiations to restore the Iran nuclear deal are bogged down and during this summer’s trip to the Middle East, Biden seemed to threaten war. In Ukraine, after helping to decisively thwart Putin’s initial bid to conquer the country, Washington seems satisfied to settle in for a long and vicious conflict with no effort to seek a diplomatic way out.

While our core allies in Europe and Japan stand with the United States against both Russia and China, many critical nations in the Global South, including some of the world’s largest democracies in India and Brazil, have failed to join the United States in unequivocally denouncing the Russian invasion. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s rhetoric has shifted from a “foreign policy for the middle class” to calls for a potentially apocalyptic confrontation between “democracies and autocracies.”

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Let’s see him do it.

Will Musk “End Twitter As We Know it”? I Sincerely Hope So (Turley)

The news that Elon Musk wants to go forward with the purchase of Twitter has led to a virtual panic among media, political and academic figures worried that free speech could shortly break out on the social media platform. Former Politico magazine editor Garrett Graff summed up the collective vapors succinctly: “Be afraid, be actually afraid.”I sincerely hope so. While Musk had in recent months wavered on his purchase, he said last week that he wants to move forward with a $44 billion offer to buy the social media platform. On Thursday, the judge presiding over Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk for backing out of the original deal gave the world’s richest person until Oct. 28 to reach an agreement on the purchase. The free speech community hopes that Musk is still committed to his stated commitment to return free speech protections to the social media giant.

In the past 10 years, a censorship culture has not only become deeply embedded at Twitter but also on other social media platforms. The need for censored and limited speech has become an article of faith for many on the left. I have long admitted to being an “internet originalist,” someone who viewed the internet as the greatest development for free speech since the invention of the printing press. However, the rapid erosion of free speech values – from our Congress to our campuses – has been alarming. Led by President Joe Biden, Democratic leaders and media figures have demanded corporate censorship and even state censorship to curtail opposing views on issues ranging from climate change to election integrity to public health to gender identity. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, for example, declared, “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

Now these same figures are fearful of the supposed menace that Musk poses – the prospect that a major social media platform could actually restore free speech protections.It would reverse the anti-free speech policies of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who has pledged to regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”Agrawal’s policy of “who can be heard” offers a reverse model for how to develop a new culture at Twitter. Indeed, his emphasis on the limits of the First Amendment is precisely where Musk should start.

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Christine Anderson

 

 

 

 

Real earnings

 

 

 

 

Naturally grounded

The above clip is from “The Earthing Movie”

 

 

 

 

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Apr 272022
 


Raphael The miraculous draught of fishes 1515

 

A Recap Of The War In Ukraine (Gonzalo Lira)
Possible Romanian-Ukrainian Joint Offensive On Transnistria (T.)
Gazprom Cutting Off Gas Supplies To Poland, Bulgaria (Fox)
Ukraine Is Using Elon Musk’s Starlink For Drone Strikes (DW)
Elon Musk Slams Twitter’s Top Lawyer (DM)
Audio From Internal Twitter Meeting Leaked By Project Veritas (PM)
Durham To Call Former FBI General Counsel James Baker (Fox)
Text Message Makes Case ‘Materially’ Worse For Michael Sussmann (Hill)
Glenn Greenwald on Elon Musk Motives and Purchase of Twitter (CTH)
Denmark Suspends Covid Vaccination Campaign (IP)
Pfizer Seeks Authorization of COVID-19 Booster Shot for Ages 5 to 11 (R.)
Wimbledon Will Allow Unvaccinated Players To Compete – But Not Russians (GBN)
Alfa Bank Hoax Researchers Also Worked For Robert Mueller (Fed.)
Soros-funded Group Works Behind The Scenes With Biden Admin On Policy (Fox)
Financial Records Reveal Joe Biden Had $5.2 Million In Unexplained Income (DM)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alex Jones reinstated
https://twitter.com/i/status/1519022153043218436

 

 

 

 

Twitter thread turned into an article by MoA.

A Recap Of The War In Ukraine (Gonzalo Lira)

Quick recap for those who haven’t followed what’s been going on in Ukraine but want to understand: 02/24: The Russians invaded from the south, south-east, east and north, in a lightning campaign. The Russians invaded with 190K troops—against 250K combat troops from Ukraine. The RF put 30K troops near Kiev—nowhere near enough to capture the city—but enough to pin down some 100K AFU defenders. The RF also launched several axes of attack, with reinforcements on standby (including a famed 40km long tank column), to see where they might be needed. Crucially—the Russian’s blitz on several axes pre-empted an imminent UKRAINIAN blitzkrieg. The AFU had been about to invade the Donbas. This was the immediate motivation for Russia’s invasion: To beat them to the punch and scuttle Ukraine’s imminent invasion—which they did.

Also, by attacking from the north and south, the Russians disrupted weapons supply chain from NATO. Had the RF only attacked in the east to prevent the AFU invasion of Donbas, there would have been an open corridor for resupply from the West. Threatening Kiev stopped that. So the main AFU army was left stranded in east Ukraine, with the rest of the Ukr. forces isolated and pinned down—with no easy resupply from the West. The RF then went about hitting AFU command/control and resupply links, further isolating and immobilizing Ukrainian forces. The Russians soon nominally controlled land the size of the UK in Ukraine—but it was a tenuous control. The south of Ukraine was more fully in Russia’s grip. The AFU around Kherson simply scattered. Mariupol became a clear battleground, as did the Donbas proper.

What the Russians initially wanted was to: • Short-circuit the imminent Donbas invasion – which they did. • Scare the Zelensky regime into negotiating a political settlement – which they failed to do. Kiev had no intention of negotiating a ceasefire because of orders given to them from Washington: “Fight Russia to the last Ukrainian!” Also, the Neo-Nazi goons around Zelensky threatened him if he negotiated and surrendered because they are terrified of the Russians. So Zelensky launched a massive PR and propaganda campaign, primarily to motivate AFU forces to fight to the death. Myths were created (Ghost of Kiev), false flags were carried out (Bucha, Kramatorsk) and relentless media stories were flogged relentlessly.

The Russians kept negotiating and trying to NOT destroy Ukraine infrastructure. In fact at first they were even trying to minimize AFU casualties. The evidence for this is overwhelming: The RF did not hit civilian infrastructure – water, electric, phone, transportation. They did not hit AFU barracks, command centers, government buildings, etc. The Russians’ initial priority was for a *negotiated settlement*. But by late March, they realized this was impossible. This is why the RF withdrew from Kiev. There was no sense putting men near the city when they were not doing what they were supposed to do – putting political pressure on the Zelensky regime to negotiate. This withdrawal was claimed as a “victory” in the “Battle of Kiev”! lmao

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A Telegram entry. Transnistria is “pro-Russian”. Romania is a NATO member.

Possible Romanian-Ukrainian Joint Offensive On Transnistria (T.)

I’ve already posted the translation of Igor Strelkov’s message on the possible Romanian-Ukrainian joint offensive on Transnistrian (“Pridnestrovian”) Moldavian Republic here – https://t.me/ZradaXXII/1898
Yesterday he posted additional info: Information about the joint preparation of the Romanian-Ukrainian coalition for the “cleansing” of Transnistria received additional confirmation. In addition to the units of the Moldovan army that are equipped with Romanian personnel as mentioned in my previous report on this topic, there is information about the training of entire military units on the territory of Romania proper and already disguised as Moldovan military. There is also information about the concentration of Ukrainian units on the border with Transnistria.

The “interest” of the Ukrainian military command is not only to give Kremlin a “political click on the nose”, but also has quite applied goals: the capture of the ammunition depots in Kolbasnaya, where a fairly large amount of ammunition for Soviet-made artillery systems is still being stored. The Moldovan authorities and military are openly afraid of war and do not even really hide their fears. But if (or rather, when) the order is given, absolutely no one will ask them. The Transnistrian army has zero chance to counter the offensive for any significant period of time without external support in the event of an attack from both sides (and this is exactly what is being planned, as the Nazi governor of the Odessa region Marchenko has already hinted).

And the Russian Armed Forces are currently unable to help Transnistria with anything but a certain number of missile strikes at infrastructure facilities. Our sources estimate the probability of the enemy attack on Tiraspol in April-early May already as “high”. https://t.me/strelkovii/2481

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“..deliveries through the Yamal-Europe pipeline would stop Wednesday morning. The Yamal pipeline carries natural gas from Russia to Poland and Germany through Belarus.”

Gas prices in Europe are rising fast as we speak.

Gazprom Cutting Off Gas Supplies To Poland, Bulgaria (Fox)

Polish and Bulgarian officials said Tuesday that Russian energy company Gazprom informed them it was suspending natural gas supplies to the two countries for their refusal to pay in Russian rubles. The suspensions, which would take effect Wednesday, would be the first since Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that “unfriendly” foreign buyers would have to pay the state-owned Gazprom in rubles instead of dollars and euros. European leaders said they would not comply with the rubles requirement, arguing that it violated the terms of contracts and their sanctions against Russia over its military aggression against Ukraine. Only Hungary has agreed to Putin’s demands.


Around 60% of imports are paid in euros, and the rest in dollars. Putin’s demand was apparently intended to help bolster the Russian currency amid the Western sanctions imposed over the war. Poland’s state gas company, PGNiG, said it was informed by Gazprom that its deliveries through the Yamal-Europe pipeline would stop Wednesday morning. The Yamal pipeline carries natural gas from Russia to Poland and Germany through Belarus. Poland has been receiving some 9 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually, fulfilling some 45% of the country’s needs. The Bulgarian Energy Ministry said it was also notified that Bulgaria’s supplies of Russian gas via the TurkStream pipeline would cease on Wednesday.

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Unintended consequences?

Ukraine Is Using Elon Musk’s Starlink For Drone Strikes (DW)

Just after Russia’s invasion began in late February, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov took to Twitter to ask US billionaire Elon Musk to activate his Starlink satellites for use in Ukraine. Musk swiftly tweeted his response: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.” Soon after, a number of terminals and powerful batteries arrived in Ukraine. Others soon followed. Fedorov took to Twitter again to express his gratitude: “Starlink — here. Thanks, @elonmusk.” No secret dispatches, no long debates, no governmental or parliamentary controls: just a very public deal between a politician whose country has been attacked and an enigmatic billionaire who went on to challenge the aggressor, Russian President Vladimir Putin, to “single combat.”

What at first looked like a PR coup now seems to be playing a significant role in Ukraine’s defense. British media have reported that Ukraine’s army is making very successful use of Starlink for drone attacks on Russian tanks and positions. The Telegraph reported that Starlink is of particular military significance in areas where the infrastructure is weak and there is no internet connection. According to The Telegraph, the aerial reconnaissance unit Aerorozvidka is using Starlink to monitor and coordinate unmanned aerial vehicles, enabling soldiers to fire anti-tank weapons with targeted precision.

Only the system’s high data rates can provide the stable communication required, The Telegraph reported. An officer with the Aerorozvidka unit described the system to The Times: “We use Starlink equipment and connect the drone team with our artillery team,” he said. “If we use a drone with thermal vision at night, the drone must connect through Starlink to the artillery guy and create target acquisition.” The Times reported that the Aerorozvidka team runs about 300 information-gathering missions each day. Attacks are then carried out at night, according to the newspaper, because the drones, some of which are equipped with thermal cameras, are almost impossible to see in the dark.

Starlink satellites are intended to provide internet to undersupplied regions far from urban centers. The potential for using satellites to get information to people in regions where the internet is censored had been discussed. Few, however, had imagined that its initial use would be in a European war zone in which one of the aggressor’s first acts at the start of the invasion was to target and destroy power supplies and internet connections. Ukrainians have — or have regained — access to information. According to The Telegraph, Starlink is one of the most popular app downloads in Ukraine, enabling more than 100,000 people to stay updated about what is happening in the war, and to keep in touch with the outside world.

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There’s a story here, or actually more than one. Vijaya Gadde is Twitter’s top lawyer, “Trust & Safety lead”, and ‘moral authority’. But deputy counsel is…. (see below)

Elon Musk Slams Twitter’s Top Lawyer (DM)

Elon Musk has taken aim at Twitter’s top lawyer for censoring stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop after it was reported she’d sobbed at news he’d bought the firm. The tycoon – whose $44bn purchase of Twitter was confirmed Monday – issued a scathing tweet in response to reports Vijaya Gadde, 48, had been crying at news of the deal. He wrote: ‘Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.’ Musk was referring to the suspension of the New York Post’s account for its exclusive about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. Initially dismissed as ‘misinformation’ by liberal outlets and social media networks, the laptop and its contents have since been verified by many of the same publications.

Gadde – who’s described as Twitter’s ‘moral authority’ – broke down in tears on Monday, Politico reported. She did so while briefing her team via videolink on the future of the company under Musk, following his $44 billion deal to takeover the company. Her future at the firm now looks shaky after her latest behavior was brought to the attention of the notoriously ruthless Musk. He is likely to slash Twitter’s policies on hate speech and misinformation, having previously branded himself a free-speech absolutist. Twitter staff have been told their jobs are safe for the six months the transfer of ownership is expected to take. But after that, workers like Gadde are likely to be among the first to get the boot.

She was pivotal in the decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform for inciting unrest, and also played a key role in the decision to remove The New York Post’s account when they tweeted their reporting into Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter initially froze the New York Post’s main account after it published the story and demanded it delete tweets linking to the Biden articles. It justified the ban by citing a prohibition of distributing hacked material, before backing down when the story was proven to be legitimate.

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What a culture.

“Twitter locked down the ability of its employees to make changes to the platform after it was revealed that @elonmusk has reached a deal to buy the company. The lockdown is to prevent activist employees from sabotaging the platform as revenge for the deal”

Audio From Internal Twitter Meeting Leaked By Project Veritas (PM)

Internal audio of Monday’s Twitter meeting leaked to Project Veritas reveals that leadership is fully cognizant of the free speech agenda that new owner Elon Musk wants to bring to the table. Project Veritas obtained a 45 minute recording of a company-wide call during which Twitter employees questioned board member, Bret Taylor, and CEO, Parag Agrawal, about the company’s direction following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform. Taylor began by saying, “I also just want to acknowledge all the emotions of today. It is an emotional day. I want to acknowledge it. By law, we are required to act in the best interest of our shareholders.”

Agrawal echoed the sentiments and said, “It’s important to acknowledge that all of you have many different feelings about what is happening. He continued, “Many of you are concerned, some of you excited, many people here are waiting to understand how this goes and have an open mind.” Agrawal added that the company’s current “content moderation” policies are “fundamental to keeping Twitter safe and growing.” “We’ll be finding a way to have Elon talk with all of you at the soonest possible opportunity…As you’ve heard from all of us, we don’t have all the answers.”

[..] Elsewhere Tuesday, it was reported that Twitter Trust & Safety lead Vijaya Gadde got emotional with company staff in a reaction speech where she said the future of policies on the platform are currently unclear given the change in ownership. It’s unclear which insiders at the company leaked the audio to Project Veritas. But when it comes to company culture, according to a new New York Times piece, that some “employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers have shifted too far to the left side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr. Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up.”

All hands Twitter call

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Yes, Twitter deputy counsel, behind Vijaya Gadde, is James Baker…

The story goes that Sussmann “lied” to Baker. Who would then be whitewashed. Bit covenient? Baker had NO IDEA that Sussman was lying?

Durham To Call Former FBI General Counsel James Baker (Fox)

Special Counsel John Durham plans to call former FBI General Counsel James Baker to testify in the case against former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, who was recently indicted for making false statements to the FBI. During a virtual status hearing Tuesday, government prosecutors on Durham’s team signaled their intention to call Baker to testify as part of the Sussmann case. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal agent. Durham’s indictment alleges that Sussmann told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016 that he was not doing work “for any client” when he requested and held a meeting in which he presented data and evidence of a purported secret communications channel between then-candidate Donald Trump and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin.

The indictment against Sussmann says he lied to Baker when he presented data linking the Trump Organization to a secret server that communicated with Alfa Bank. The indictment indicates Durham may be expanding his investigation to bring separate charges again Sussmann or additional defendants. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper on Tuesday asked both the government and Sussmann’s defense to continue moving forward in their discovery process, which could take months, due to the thousands of pages of classified material involved. During the hearing, government prosecutors said, at this point, that they had provided Sussmann’s attorneys with 6,000 documents – amounting to up to some 80,000 pages.

Earlier this month, in a court filing dated Oct. 20, Durham and his team outlined its first production of discovery to the defense, which included the thousands of documents, and documents received “in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to fifteen separate individuals, entities and organizations–including, among others, political organizations, a university, university researchers, an investigative firm, and numerous companies.” Cooper said he understood that the process would be cumbersome but urged both the prosecution and the defense to come up with a target date for a trial later this year or early next. Both the prosecution and the defense signaled they are aiming for a trial to begin in the spring of 2022. The next court date in the matter is set for a status hearing on Dec. 8 at 2 p.m. Baker, who serves as deputy counsel at Twitter, left the FBI in May 2018 after serving as a top lawyer at the FBI. Baker was also a confidante of former FBI Director James Comey.

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3 weeks ago.

Text Message Makes Case ‘Materially’ Worse For Michael Sussmann (Hill)

On a Sunday night just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, top Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann allegedly texted his old friend, the FBI’s then-general counsel James Baker, to say that he urgently needed to convey “sensitive” information to the Bureau — “not on behalf of a client or company,” but just because he was a good citizen who wanted to help the government. The information, it turns out, was sculpted to portray Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee for president, as if he were in cahoots with the Kremlin. I say “sculpted” advisedly. In reality, according to the false-statements indictment against him, Sussmann was actually representing two clients: Rodney Joffe, an information technology expert, and the Democratic campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Joffe, to whom the Sussmann indictment refers as “Tech Executive-1” and describes as angling for a job in the anticipated Clinton administration, was then working with a team of IT pros to curate records of internet communications. His objective, according to the indictment, was to project the appearance of a communications back-channel between Trump Tower in New York City and Alfa Bank, an important Russian financial institution with ties to Vladimir Putin’s regime. The Clinton campaign reportedly wanted to depict the allegation as so serious that the FBI was investigating it. Sussmann, the Washington insider who was billing his time on the Trump/Russia matter to the Clinton campaign, was the perfect messenger to get the FBI’s attention.

The existence of the critical text message was revealed [3 weeks ago] by prosecutor John Durham, the Justice Department special counsel who is investigating the origins of “Russiagate” — as the FBI’s probe of former President Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia is popularly known. Russiagate appears to have been ignited by bogus opposition research manufactured by the Clinton campaign, whose operatives hyped it to media outlets and government officials.

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Sort of what I said yesterday: he can’t make it any worse.

Glenn Greenwald on Elon Musk Motives and Purchase of Twitter (CTH)

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson previewed a discussion with Glenn Greenwald that will appear in full tomorrow on Fox Nation. In this segment {Direct Rumble Link Here} Greenwald gives his perspective on the motives of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter. Greenwald does a good job encapsulating the essential support most feel for the Musk effort. There are many people still uncertain about how this will all roll out, and Musk has been favorable to Big Govt in his two most famous endeavors, Tesla and SpaceX. Elon Musk’s phase of pushing back against speech and internet control is more recent, and as a result has left many people wondering about it.


As Greenwald notes, there really isn’t a downside for people who are trying to break the totalitarian and monopoly control systems on the internet. The upside benefits to on-line freedom, debate, discussion and the first real effort to stop internet censorship are well worth supporting. Greenwald eloquently puts an appropriate context to the battle.

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May many follow…

Denmark Suspends Covid Vaccination Campaign (IP)

Denmark, which in February lifted all curbs related to the coronavirus pandemic, said Tuesday it was suspending its widespread Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Noting that the epidemic was under control and that vaccination levels were high, the Danish Health Authority said the country was in a “good position.” “Therefore, we are winding down the mass vaccination program against Covid-19,” said Bolette Soborg, director of the authority’s department of infectious diseases. Around 81 percent of Denmark’s 5.8 million inhabitants have received two doses of the vaccine and 61.6 percent have also received a booster.


Denmark noted a drop in the number of new infections and stable hospitalization rates. While invitations for vaccinations would no longer be issued after May 15, health officials anticipate that vaccinations would resume after the summer. “We plan to reopen the vaccination program in the autumn. This will be preceded by a thorough professional assessment of who and when to vaccinate and with which vaccines,” Soberg said. As a wave of the omicron variant hit the country last November, Denmark intensified its immunization campaign, accelerating access to booster shots and offering a fourth dose from mid-January to the most vulnerable.

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Criminal.

Pfizer Seeks Authorization of COVID-19 Booster Shot for Ages 5 to 11 (R.)

Pfizer Inc and its partner BioNTech SE said on Tuesday that they had submitted an application to the U.S. health regulator for the authorization of a booster dose of their COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 years. The companies earlier this month reported data from a mid-to-late stage study showing a third dose of their shot increased protection against the original coronavirus version and the omicron variant among children in the age group. It is unclear how much demand there is for a third vaccine dose in the age group. Just 28% of children aged 5 to 11 years – around 8.2 million – are fully vaccinated, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There has also been some skepticism on the need for boosters in younger children given the reduced risk of severe infection and hospitalization in the age group. Pfizer and BioNTech have filed for the clearance of a 10-microgram booster dose for children 5 to 11 years. Adults receive a 30-microgram dose of the vaccine. The primary two-dose COVID-19 shot from Pfizer and BioNTech was authorized in the United States for children 5 to 11 years in October. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in January authorized the use of a third dose of the companies’ COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 12 to 15. The agency has also authorized a booster shot for children aged 5 through 11 years who are immunocompromised.

Rival Moderna Inc is still waiting for a decision from U.S. regulators on the use of its primary COVID-19 series among age groups under 18 years. It plans to submit an application to the FDA for the authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine among kids six months to five years by the end of April.

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You don’t count anymore if you don’t ban some people.

Wimbledon Will Allow Unvaccinated Players To Compete – But Not Russians (GBN)

Tennis players who are unvaccinated against Covid-19 will be allowed to participate at this year’s Wimbledon Championships, organisers have said. This clears the way for Novak Djokovic to compete, after the Serb was denied entry to the Australian Open earlier in the year due to his vaccination status. Djokovic said earlier this year he would be willing to skip tournaments if he requires vaccination, however officials have confirmed that he will not need to do so in order to compete at the grand slam. The UK Government left Wimbledon with “no viable alternative” but to ban Russian and Belarusian players from this year’s Championships, chairman Ian Hewitt told the All England Club’s spring briefing.

Expanding on last week’s announcement that Wimbledon and the preceding grass-court events would be the first individual tennis tournaments to bar players from the two countries, Hewitt said the club was left with only two options – an outright ban or forcing players to sign declarations condemning the invasion of Ukraine. He said: “The UK Government has set out directional guidance for sporting bodies and events in the UK with the specific aim of limiting Russia’s influence. “After lengthy and careful consideration, we came to two firm conclusions. First, even if we were to accept entries from Russian and Belarusian players with written declarations, we would risk their success or participation being used to benefit the propaganda machine of the Russian regime, which we could not accept.

“Second, we have a duty to ensure no actions we take should put players or their families at risk. We understand and deeply regret the impact this decision will have on all the people affected. “But we believe we have made the most responsible decision possible in the circumstances, and there is no viable alternative within the framework of the government’s position to the decision we have taken in this truly exceptional and tragic situation”.

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What a cesspool.

Alfa Bank Hoax Researchers Also Worked For Robert Mueller (Fed.)

The U.S. Department of Defense and private individuals pumping the Alfa Bank hoax also assisted former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump for supposed collusion with Russia, newly discovered documents suggest. The Georgia Tech researchers embroiled in the Alfa Bank hoax prepared white papers for the U.S. Department of Defense about the Democratic National Committee hack and created a “Mueller List” on the Russian intelligence agency hackers, the newly obtained documents indicate. The white papers were prepared for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a section of the U.S. Department of Defense. A recent dump of documents from Georgia Tech reveals that explosive detail and several other facts connected to the continuing special counsel investigation into Spygate. Here’s a rundown.

Last month, The Federalist first reported that Special Counsel John Durham’s team asked lead Georgia Tech researcher Manos Antonakakis: “‘Do you believe that DARPA should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer_2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?’” Antonakakis responded that that was a question for the DARPA director, an implied acknowledgment that yes, DARPA had asked him to investigate the hack. In response, DARPA’s chief of communications denied any involvement “in efforts to attribute the DNC hack.” “Dr. Antonakakis worked on DARPA’s Enhanced Attribution program, which did not involve analysis of the DNC hack,” DARPA spokesman Jared Adams told the Washington Examiner.

Adams further told the Washington Examiner that “DARPA was not involved in efforts to attribute the Guccifer 2.0 persona, nor any involvement in efforts to attribute the origin of leaked emails provided to Wikileaks.” But now an email obtained by The Federalist indicates Georgia Tech researchers drafted a series of white papers for DARPA, including on the “DNC attack attribution,” and on what they called a “Mueller List” of “domains and indicators related” to DNC hackers. The email dated July 23, 2021 followed Durham dropping a second subpoena on Georgia Tech for more documents related to its investigation of the Alfa Bank hoax and other related issues. (More on that subpoena below). In that email, a lawyer representing David Dagon, the second Georgia Tech researcher involved in the Alfa Bank hoax who also worked on the DARPA Enhanced Attribution program, shared a list of “documents/data sources” Dagon believed would be responsive to the subpoena of Georgia Tech documents.

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Soros keeps shaping the world he’ll never live in.

Soros-funded Group Works Behind The Scenes With Biden Admin On Policy (Fox)

A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show. Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues. “Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.

“Their work gives voice to people often overlooked in a regulatory environment too often dominated by corporate interests,” he continued. “Our support for Governing for Impact’s work is publicly available on our website and we are transparent about our enthusiasm for their victories for American workers and families.” GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached. But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.

The Harvard advert said the group was established to prepare the Biden administration for a “transformative governance” and that it had produced “more than 60 in-depth, shovel-ready regulatory recommendations” for dozens of federal agencies. The listing also contained an email address ending in “@governingforimpact.org,” which is the group’s website that can only be accessed by those who know the URL. According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.

“Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News. “As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.” “Governing for Impact conducts and shares research designed to help ensure that the federal government works more effectively for everyday working Americans, not just for members of industry groups that have long devoted vast resources to pursuing their own policy agendas,” Rachael Klarman told Fox News. “We were founded in 2019 and have developed detailed regulatory recommendations for multiple federal agencies, which are published on our website,” she said.

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“Joe Biden agreed to pay son Hunter’s legal fees for his deal with a Chinese government-controlled company..”

Financial Records Reveal Joe Biden Had $5.2 Million In Unexplained Income (DM)

Joe Biden agreed to pay son Hunter’s legal fees for his deal with a Chinese government-controlled company, emails reveal. The revelation ties the president even closer to Hunter’s overseas business dealings – and makes his previous claims that he never discussed them with his son, even less plausible. Joe was able to pay the bills after earning millions of dollars through his and his wife’s companies after he left office as vice president. Some of the wave of cash came from their book deals and speaking engagements. But the president’s financial filings reveal that he declared almost $7million more income on his tax returns than he did on his government transparency reports, an analysis by DailyMail.com of the president’s financial records shows.

Some of that difference can be accounted for with salaries earned by First Lady Jill Biden and other sums not required on his reports – but still leaves $5.2million earned by Joe’s company and not listed on his transparency reports. The ‘missing millions’ – combined with emails on Hunter’s abandoned laptop suggesting Joe would have a 10% share in Hunter’s blockbuster deal with the Chinese – raise a troubling question: did Joe Biden receive money from the foreign venture? In January 2019, Hunter’s assistant Katie Dodge wrote an email to book-keeper Linda Shapero and Biden aide Richard Ruffner, saying Joe had agreed to pay his hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills. ‘I spoke with Hunter today regarding his bills. It is my understanding that Hunt’s dad will cover these bills in the short-term as Hunter transitions in his career,’ Dodge said.

The assistant attached a spreadsheet of bills with the email, totaling $737,130.61. One of the last items was $28,000 in legal fees for the ‘restructuring’ of Hunter’s joint venture with the government-controlled Bank of China. The spreadsheet listed the bill as ‘Faegre Baker Daniels: BHR Restructuring’ costing $28,382 and due ‘ASAP’. BHR (‘Bohai Harvest RST’) is a private equity firm and one of Hunter’s two major Chinese business ventures. The joint venture was co-owned by the state-controlled Bank of China. Hunter’s personal attorney, George Mesires, is a partner at Faegre Baker Daniels, now called Faegre Drinker. A separate October 2018 invoice from the law firm shows Hunter spent a total $68,933.41 on the ‘restructuring’ beginning in September 2016.

The same year Joe took on these bills from Hunter, he promised that ‘No one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in on meetings as if they are a cabinet member, will, in fact, have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country.’ Yet not only did Hunter hold on to his 10% share of BHR through 2021, confirmed by White House press secretary Jen Psaki last February, the emails also indicate Joe knew about it, and even agreed to pay Hunter’s legal fees for the firm. The bills also include $412,309.23 in unpaid taxes dating back to 2015.

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Getting paid to destroy crops
https://twitter.com/i/status/1518833782790537218

 

 

 

 

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