Sep 202022
 
 September 20, 2022  Posted by at 8:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  75 Responses »


Salvador Dali Cadaques 1923

 

Russia Is Seeking Swift End To Ukraine Conflict – Turkey (RT)
Ukraine is Not a New Afghanistan (Batiushka)
German Politician Predicts Fate Of Nord Stream 2 (RT)
< Germany Boosting Russian Imports – Trade Mission (RT)
The European Union Is About to Rupture (Malinen)
French Warned Of Winter Blackouts (RT)
Dire Winter Scenario In Sight For EU (RT)
UN Chief Supports Moscow’s Aid Proposal (RT)
The Unintended Consequences Of The EU Energy Emergency Plan (OP)
Ukraine Claims Missile Hit Area Near Nuclear Power Plant (RT)
Why the World Economic Forum’s Plutocracy Should Be Dissolved (Shurk)
Whistleblower: FBI Uses Jan. 6 Cases To Create Illusion Of National Crisis (JTN)
A Walk on the Wild Side (Kunstler)
Why So Many Cling to Covid Panic (Oshinskie)

 

 

At least hundreds of Canadians have posted their life stories with the #TrudeauMustGo hashtag. He now calls them Putin puppets. It’s hard to show less respect for your own people. Twitter is now shadowbanning the hashtag.

 

 

 

 

Devine
https://twitter.com/i/status/1571879054936100866

 

 

 

 

Veneto, the richest region in Italy.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1570650331595542528

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erdogan the peacemaker. Lovely.

Russia Is Seeking Swift End To Ukraine Conflict – Turkey (RT)

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin wants to see a swift conclusion to the conflict in Ukraine, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday in an interview with the PBS NewsHour program. Erdogan said he held “extensive meetings with Putin in Uzbekistan” during last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. “I realized that they are actually trying to finish this as soon as possible. This situation is a big problem,” the Turkish leader said, referring to the conflict in Ukraine. Erdogan, who is in New York for the UN General Assembly, said he wants Putin and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to talk directly, in order to find a solution to the conflict, which has been underway since late February. “We have a persistent desire to bring these leaders together. Let’s bring them together. I want to hear everything from them. We haven’t succeeded yet, but I’m not without hope,” he stated.


The Turkish president claimed to have told both Putin and Zelensky that a negotiated end to the fighting is needed because “nobody will be winning at the end of the day.” The Kremlin earlier said the Russian and Ukrainian leaders should only meet to sign concrete agreements prepared for them by their negotiators. Turkey has maintained contacts with both Moscow and Kiev throughout the hostilities. It condemned the use of force by Russia, but at the same time refused to join the international sanctions against Moscow and continued dealing with the country. Ankara was also involved in the UN-brokered deal to allow export of grain from the Ukrainian ports, achieved between Russia and Ukraine in July. Russia recently complained that the part of the agreement, which calls for removing obstacles for shipments of its food products, remained unfulfilled by Western countries.

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“There’s an east wind coming all the same. Such a wind as never blew…. It will be cold and bitter….and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

– His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, October 1917

Ukraine is Not a New Afghanistan (Batiushka)

[..] we have two quite different and incomparable countries: Afghanistan at the centre [of the Eurasian Heartland] and the Ukraine on the Western margins – which is what its very name means. The Afghans live in inaccessible mountains, the Ukrainians on open steppes. The Afghans have a very strong identity, even if, like other mountain-dwellers, as in the Scottish Highlands or the Swiss Alps, they are divided into fiercely different and warring tribal clans and different languages according to the valley they live in. However, the Ukrainians in their open land are swayed one way and another, largely depending on who makes the best offer, on what way the wind blows and the tide flows.

The USA has constantly tried to chip off, occupy and control marginal pieces of Eurasia, islands like Iceland, the British Isles and Ireland, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, peninsulas like South Korea, South Vietnam and Western Europe. In 1975 it was humiliated and chased out of South-East Asia when Saigon was at last liberated. Other areas it occupies, like Taiwan and Korea, are under threat. In 2021, after it had dared to occupy not a marginal area, but the very centre of the Eurasian Heartland in Afghanistan, it was humiliated and chased out. It was a classic example of hubris and overreach. ‘We’re American, we can do anything’. Actually, you can’t.

Now the USA is trying to cling on to Western Europe by shoring up its literal borderland, the Ukraine. This is one of the last US attempts to keep power in Eurasia. The USA fears Eurasia, for Eurasia is much stronger than it and the USA is isolated on its big island, placed, as if for quarantine, between the Atlantic and the Pacific. One day it will reluctantly be forced to admit that Eurasia is geographically indivisible, however much it tries to divide it politically and occupy it militarily. Then it will retire to its isolation on its big island, rejected by Afro-Eurasia, Oceania and Latin America, and start doing some very serious soul-searching about its own history. It is called repentance.

The USA has been expanding eastwards across the Atlantic for over three generations now. It has controlled the UK since 1942, from where it invaded the rest of Western Europe in 1944 and invaded Central Europe since 1989, using puppet elites, making assassinations and fiddling elections. Portugal under Salazar, Spain under Franco, Italy under every possible fraudster, Greece under the Colonels, France after it deposed the Last Frenchman, De Gaulle, the UK under the Conservatives, are only examples of its manipulations. [..] Exactly a generation after taking over Central Europe in 1989, since 2014 the USA has been trying to expand into Eastern Europe. We are now at an irreversible point. History books will be written as events ‘Before 2022 and After 2022’.

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“..this cooperation is irrecoverably destroyed”. “..Stephan Weil said Berlin would never be able to trust Moscow again as a reliable energy supplier..”

But Berlin is a reliable customer?! Can you even hear yourself?

German Politician Predicts Fate Of Nord Stream 2 (RT)

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was intended to pump gas from Russia to Germany, is doomed to remain idle indefinitely, the head of Germany’s Lower Saxony region has suggested. Stephan Weil said Berlin would never be able to trust Moscow again as a reliable energy supplier. In an interview with Germany’s DPA news agency published on Monday, Governor Weil said the pipeline project would not be revived even after Russian President Vladimir Putin leaves office. “The loss of trust is so fundamental that there will never again be a situation in which a German federal government can rely on energy from Russia,” the official noted. According to Weil, the “Nord Stream 2 will never go into operation.” The governor claimed that the Kremlin has burnt its bridges and that “this cooperation is irrecoverably destroyed.”

Weil concluded by proclaiming that the “West will recover from [the situation] faster than Russia.” The construction of the second leg of the existing Nord Stream pipeline began in May 2018. The project was expected to double Russian gas supplies to Germany. Despite opposition from the US and some EU member states, the German government staunchly defended the project, and the pipeline was completed. However, Berlin put its launch on hold indefinitely on February 22, after Russia recognized the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, days before Moscow launched its offensive against Ukraine.

In July and August, Russia incrementally reduced gas supplies to Germany via Nord Stream 1, before shutting it down altogether in early September. Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom cited technical issues caused by Western sanctions. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has made it clear that the pipeline will not resume operation until Western sanctions are lifted. sMeanwhile, Berlin has accused Russia of weaponizing gas supplies. Soaring prices coupled with the closure of the Nord Stream 1 saw the German government put in place emergency measures to ensure the country has enough energy to survive the winter. Earlier this week, President Putin suggested the West should give the green light to the Nord Stream 2 “if it’s that bad.”

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Yeah, yeah: “..this cooperation is irrecoverably destroyed”.

Germany Boosting Russian Imports – Trade Mission (RT)

The volume of German imports from Russia has risen over the first seven months of this year by 32.6% in annual terms, amounting to $27.9 billion, the Russian Trade Mission in Berlin told RIA Novosti on Monday, citing data from Germany’s federal statistical office, Destatis. According to the Russian trade representative in Germany, Andrey Sobolev, the rise in imports of fuel and energy products through July was 40.5%. Purchases of Russian gold have risen more than tenfold, while the volume of silver imports jumped by almost five times. The EU country has also boosted purchases of other metals from Russia, including copper, aluminum, and nickel.


The report also indicated that German exports to Russia decreased by 43.6% to $10.2 billion compared to the same period last year. Declining exports caused a $17.7 billion trade imbalance for Germany. The trade representative explained that, despite the general decline in exports to Russia, “there was an increase in supplies from Germany of pharmaceutical products, seeds and fruits.” Russia accounted for 2.3% of total German foreign trade and was the fourth most important country for German goods outside of the EU in 2021. In April, US analytics firm S&P Global warned of a possible financial shock if there’s a “trade rupture” between the two countries.

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It has become a prison.

The European Union Is About to Rupture (Malinen)

The functioning of the EU has, until recently, been built on two political pillars that now appear to be crumbling. Primarily, German growth has made possible the joint financing (through low-cost debt, the EU budget, and the central banks’ clearing system) of unsuccessful economies without the EU forcing them to commit to politically unacceptable reforms. Beneficent global developments have made possible the concentration on economic integration while going slow on the much more contentious integration of cultural, social, and foreign policies. The deterioration of the global economy, together with EU policies, now threaten industry and living standards in EU member states, reduce the scope of joint economic support, and force member states to rapidly evaluate their readiness for possibly radical reductions in their political self-determination.

This is most evident in Italy. The yields of Italian sovereign debt have reached levels that can be considered unsustainable, given the country’s high indebtedness and low rate of economic growth. For example, the yield of the Italian 10-year bond breached the 4 percent line late this past week. The maturity structure of Italian debt is also rather unfavorable. At the end of June, for example, Italy had issued only 52 percent of its needs for external financing in 2022. In addition, 35 percent of her outstanding debt will come due already in 2024. Half of her total debt will come due within five years. Without active country-specific support from the ECB, which the newly introduced Transmission Protection Instrument is designed to facilitate, Italian debt is unsustainable at current yields.

Disagreements among member states on the wisdom of filling the ECB with Italian bonds is bound to weaken the glue keeping the EU together as before. The energy crisis is also sowing seeds of serious inner conflict. The politics in the EU are becoming less forgiving as difficulties mount. Both Hungary and the Czech Republic have objected to the plans for a price cap of Russian gas, which now looks unlikely to be enforced. The European Commission is also planning to cut funding for the Hungarian government of Victor Orban due to “rule-of-law concerns.” This is unlikely to increase the incentives of Hungary to stay in the union. More generally, as funding is made conditional on countries meeting the test of adhering to “European values,” one can expect the list of such essentially political requirements to grow as economic conditions worsen and demands for uniform policies grow.

For example, Poland is fed up with constant extra demands from the EU, like the demand to walk back from the changes Polish government was planning to the judicial system, considering the distribution of funds from the Recovery Fund to its government. Krzysztof Sobolewski, the governing party’s secretary-general, has warned that without a clear change in the actions of Brussels, “We will have no choice but to pull out all the cannons in our arsenal and open fire.” Since a number of contentious decisions still require unanimity, such a threat might be unwise to take lightly. [..] Reports state that Russia is preparing a first shipment from its new liquefied natural gas plant to Greece. Hungary, as an outlier, is buying additional gas from Russia in accordance with their new agreement. It will be interesting to see what Germany may choose to do if the impact of energy scarcity on its economy and population is as large as some reports suggest.


CPI lags PPI: “German Consumer Prices (CPI) are likely to rise further after Producer Prices (PPI) increased by almost 46% in August, the strongest increase since 1949.”

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“We thought that we could gradually replace nuclear energy with renewable energy sources, but now we understand that we will need more energy. We need both sources..”

French Warned Of Winter Blackouts (RT)

Private households in France may face power outages this winter in the event of severe frosts, the head of the energy regulator CRE, Emmanuelle Wargon, told France Info radio on Monday. “Under no circumstances will there be gas shutdowns in private homes. But on the electrical side, we may be faced with having to make difficult decisions about limited shutdowns,” she said, adding “These can last for several hours and will be very local – at the commune or district level – with prior notification to citizens.” The regulator noted that shutdowns would not affect critical infrastructure, including hospitals. Extreme measures could be avoided if the winter is relatively warm, she added.


Wargon also admitted that the decision to close the Fessenheim nuclear power plant, decommissioned in 2020, “could not have been taken in the current crisis.” “We thought that we could gradually replace nuclear energy with renewable energy sources, but now we understand that we will need more energy. We need both sources,” she stressed. France relies on nuclear energy more than any other European country, generating about 70% of its electricity that way. However, about half of its 56 nuclear reactors have been shut down for maintenance, notably to repair corrosion problems.

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“..70% of nitrogen fertilizer production capacities in the EU have already been stopped, aluminum production has been reduced by 25%, and steel production by 5%.”

Dire Winter Scenario In Sight For EU (RT)

Reducing dependence on Russian natural gas supply is impossible for the European Union in the coming year without a massive production halt, RBK business daily reported on Monday, citing a study by McKinsey’s former Russian division, consulting company Yakov & Partners. Their research showed that, despite reports that EU stores are full, the bloc has not yet overcome its reliance on Russian energy and will not be able to get through the coming winter and next year “without maintaining gas supplies from Russia or a [effecting] significant reduction” in consumption.

The report outlined that, in order to meet their needs until the end of 2022, European countries will either have to maintain imports from Russia or reduce gas consumption by an additional seven to 12 billion cubic meters, “which is possible only with a complete or partial shutdown of a number of industries.” The deficit may grow to 20-30 billion cubic meters if China’s demand for LNG recovers or if the winter is cold and long, or in the event of disruptions in supply chains, it adds. Yakov & Partners indicated that 70% of nitrogen fertilizer production capacities in the EU have already been stopped, aluminum production has been reduced by 25%, and steel production by 5%. The authors of the study suggested that the decline in production is likely to continue “even in the event of a mild winter.”

“In the perspective of 2023, the rejection of Russian gas means a deficit of 40-60 billion cubic meters for European countries even while maintaining the current rate of gas savings for the whole of 2023,” said Elena Kuznetsova, a partner at the company. She explained that 60 billion cubic meters of gas is comparable to the annual gas consumption of France and Poland combined, or the total annual gas consumption of such industries as fertilizer production, petrochemistry, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, and all engineering. Stopping these industries will further affect other related industries, from agriculture to services, Kuznetsova warned.

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Guterres is doing some good work.

UN Chief Supports Moscow’s Aid Proposal (RT)

The UN chief has pledged to help Russia donate some 300 tons of fertilizers stranded in European ports to developing nations. “If Russia wants to provide fertilizers free of charge to developing countries, I believe the World Food Programme will be able to implement that desire,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in an interview with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which was published on Monday. He acknowledged that EU nations will first have to be convinced to allow free the export of Russian fertilizers through their ports. The offer to donate an estimated 300 tons of Russian fertilizer, unable to leave EU ports due to anti-Russian sanctions, came last Friday from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In late July, the UN co-mediated an arrangement with Ukraine and Russia, which allowed the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea. As part of the deal, the organization pledged to help ease Western restrictions on international trade that Russia says prevent it from exporting its food products and fertilizers. “This week I had an intensive series of contacts with the leaders of the EU. And I hope there will be a positive change with regard to the possibility of distributing Russian grain and fertilizers without obstacles through Europe to other markets,” Guterres told RIA Novosti in another part of the interview, which was published on Saturday.

Putin previously criticized the grain deal, saying that while it was touted as a way to help poor countries deal with surging global food prices, in practice Ukrainian exports mostly went to rich EU nations. The abundance of grain and other food products from Ukraine on European markets has apparently angered local producers, who are struggling to compete with the cheaper imports, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. The EU previously had quotas and steep tariffs for Ukraine trade, protecting its own farmers and forcing Ukrainians to export most of their produce to other places. But the restrictions were lifted after Russia attacked the country in February, and European governments rushed to support Kiev with various forms of assistance.

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“..the last three years included two pandemic years when a lot of companies in the oil and gas industries struggled to stay afloat, let alone post a profit..”

The Unintended Consequences Of The EU Energy Emergency Plan (OP)

This week saw the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen do something that would have probably been considered the opposite of democracy just a few years ago. She proposed that governments impose a ceiling on certain energy producers’ revenues and add a windfall profit for Big Oil majors. Called “a solidarity contribution” or “a crisis contribution,” the windfall tax’s aim is the same as the aim of the revenue ceiling: manage energy costs in a runaway inflation environment and get some additional money to, according to the plan, distribute among those who most need it. Like all grand plans, however, unintended consequences abound with this one, and one of the gravest is the discouragement of oil and gas investments at a time when global oil and gas investments are already lower than they should be in light of demand projections.

JP Morgan’s head of global energy strategy said it this week in an interview with Bloomberg. “If you’re planning your capital budget, you have to think twice now that you have a new risk,” Malek told Bloomberg. “It encourages majors to return cash to shareholders as they use that free cashflow that could have been used in investment.” Per plans, the EU seeks to “raise” some $140 billion from windfall taxes on non-gas electricity generators and oil gas, and coal companies for their “extraordinary record profits benefiting from war and on the back of consumers,” to quote Von der Leyen. Reaction from the industry was swift. Austria’s OMV said the consequences of such measures could be huge, adding that it was unfair to base the windfall levy proposal on oil companies’ profits from the last three years since these were not normal times, Reuters reported, quoting CEO Alfred Stern.

“We will keep an eye on that, as it can already have a massive impact,” Stern told media, noting, however, that the exact impact was difficult to glean because the proposal has yet to be fleshed out. Per von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech, in which she listed the windfall tax among measures to cope with the energy crisis, the idea is to tax oil and gas companies with 33 percent of any current-year profits that were 20 percent above the company’s average earnings for the last three years. OMV’s Stern noted that the last three years included two pandemic years when a lot of companies in the oil and gas industries struggled to stay afloat, let alone post a profit, with oil prices falling as low as $25 per barrel.

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Different plant, same tactics.

Ukraine Claims Missile Hit Area Near Nuclear Power Plant (RT)

A missile has hit a location in Ukraine’s Nikolaev Region close to the South Ukraine nuclear power plant, President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed. The incident happened early on Monday morning, according to the president. The projectile landed some 300 meters from the facility, causing damage to windows and briefly disrupting power supplies to the grid, he wrote on social media. Zelensky posted surveillance footage purportedly showing the strike. The video shows a powerful explosion against the backdrop of the night skyline and was apparently filmed by a malfunctioning digital camera. The frames appear to be out of order, and the timestamps go back and forth. The president’s post also included photos of broken windows, presumably caused by the blast.


Zelensky accused Russia of “endangering the world” and said it should be “stopped, before it is too late”. The South Ukraine nuclear power plant is located near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk, deep inside Ukraine-controlled territory in the south of the country. The facility has been operating since 1982 and has three VVER-1000 reactors. Zelensky’s accusations against Russia add to a long list of nuclear-related allegations. Kiev and Moscow have for weeks been pointing the finger at each other over attacks on the Russian-controlled city of Energodar, which hosts the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visited the facility earlier this month, confirming damage caused by multiple shelling incidents, but declining to attribute them to either side.

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100 years ago, the battle was for sharing the surplus. Now, it is for sharing the lack of it.

Why the World Economic Forum’s Plutocracy Should Be Dissolved (Shurk)

Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, appeared with David Gergen in 2017 at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and openly boasted of his influence over many national leaders: “I have to say when I mention names like Mrs. Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they have all been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, but what we are really proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, the President of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau, and I know that half of his cabinet or even more are Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum…. It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now….”

When the chairman of an international economic body publicly brags about his leverage over the leaders of sovereign nation states, he can hardly be mistaken as defending the merits of “democracy.” In a somewhat farcical display of the World Economic Forum’s control over individual nations, it has become eerily commonplace these last two years to hear the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States all parroting the same “Build Back Better” slogan propagated by Klaus Schwab’s economic club. With wealth and political power bonded densely into such haut monde cabals, the insular prerogatives of the WEF have succeeded in dominating government policies throughout the West.

Both in their immediate handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and their planned response to the harsh economic repercussions dovetailing from prolonged lockdowns, Western nation states have taken many of their cues directly from the World Economic Forum’s policy edicts. Whatever vestige of “democracy” still casts a shadow across North America, Europe, and the South Pacific, it has become unmistakable that plutocracy — rule by a wealthy elite — is fast assuming total control over the West’s future. Notably, today’s plutocrats have little interest in truly free markets. Unlike J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and other late-nineteenth-century industrialists and business magnates who made their fortunes in the heyday of economic growth before the massive expansion of the regulatory State, those with great wealth today often champion government intervention in markets.

The World Economic Forum, for instance, demands governments take urgent action to combat or address climate change, cybersecurity, online misinformation, artificial intelligence, overpopulation, the use of hydrocarbon energy, farm ownership, food supplies, the elimination of private vehicle ownership, and the imposition of citizen-control protocols to defend against future pandemics. Regulation of people and markets is now of paramount importance to those with wealth and power.

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“manipulative case-file practice”

Whistleblower: FBI Uses Jan. 6 Cases To Create Illusion Of National Crisis (JTN)

The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee said Monday a whistleblower has come forward detailing how the FBI is manipulating cases related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to create “the illusion” that domestic violent extremism is a widespread problem in the United States. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray that the “manipulative case-file practice” was being conducted by the bureau’s Washington field office, which was instructing local FBI offices to open up cases on their books that were in fact simply related to the Capitol breach. “The FBI’s case categorization creates the illusion that threats from DVE are present in jurisdictions across the nation, when in reality they all stem from the same related investigation concerning the actions at the Capitol on January 6,” Jordan wrote.

“Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” he added. The Republican lawmaker said the whistleblower’s description is “consistent with disclosures we have received from other whistleblowers that high-ranking FBI officials — including a senior WFO official — are pressing front-line agents to categorize cases as DVE matters to fit a political narrative.” The activity comes as President Joe Biden and his team try to make the case that supporters of Donald Trump are creating a crisis of extremism in the United States, a case he made in a widely panned speech in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago.

Jordan said the FBI’s shifted focus is coming at the expense of other crimes, including the investigation of child sex exploitation. “The whistleblower disclosed that the FBI is sacrificing its other important federal law-enforcement duties to pursue January 6 investigations,” Jordan wrote. “The whistleblower recalled, for example, being told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.

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“Ultimately, the Left will choke to death on its many crimes and we can return to being a people who confidently know the difference between right and wrong.”

A Walk on the Wild Side (Kunstler)

What is the answer when faced with a large-scale religious disturbance in society, especially one displaying all the earmarks of overt, archetypal evil? You call in an exorcist. That has been Donald Trump’s true role in this millenarian mega-crisis. He is seeking to cast out evil spirits afflicting this sore-beset national community and the evil spirits are frantic to stop his ministrations by any means. He is, of course, a most untoward avatar in this war of good against evil. He came out of the infernal circle of New York real estate development. The assumption all along is that he must be tainted by dirty dealing with the mobs who ran the construction unions, but after six years of relentless investigation by the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the legions of hell came up with… nothing.

How was this possible? Well, they tried their darndest, and now they’re trying again with some double-jeopardy maneuvers. The law, to these degenerates, is just an instrument of their own will-to-power. Chugging toward the 2022 mid-term elections, Mr. Trump is out there giving moral support and focus to so-called “domestic terrorists” seeking to crush the Woke demonic religious persecution. He leads the substantial demographic of Americans who are determined to not play along with Woke absurdities, and they love him for it. Mr. Trump may or may not be the Republican nominee in 2024, but he is helping the country with a literal House-cleaning in advance of that, and it will open the door to a deluge of corrective truth-telling about what has gone on the past several years, in everything from the Covid 19 scam to the Green New Deal aimed at wrecking what’s left of Western Civ’s economies.

Americans, except for the very old, are not disposed to attending church, meaning they are not reminded at regular intervals, and formal rituals, that good and evil exists in all of us, and that we have a duty to our sacred consciousness to tend to the right side, to “the better angels of our nature,” Lincoln put it. Ultimately, the Left will choke to death on its many crimes and we can return to being a people who confidently know the difference between right and wrong.

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For the same reason they cling to believing in Santa.

Why So Many Cling to Covid Panic (Oshinskie)

The government and media have spent the past 30 months disingenuously building Corona fear and implementing a range of talismanic measures like lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and shots to convince us that they were magically—yet always “Scientifically!—” protecting us all from death. Just as any thinking six-year-old figures out that Santa simply can’t put all of that toy freight into one sleigh, any thinking adult should have known that none of the hoary Corona crew: neither the elfin Fauci’s, Birx’s nor Biden’s rhetoric or theater made any sense, either in theory or in real-life outcomes; nor did similar alarmism or interventions by younger, hipper “liberal” governors, mayors and prime ministers. But just like my parents’ efforts to preserve the Santa myth, governments won’t let go of the Corona theater—especially the shots—and the media desperately continues to portray as experts those who “masterminded” the mitigation.


All of the empirical data have corroborated what was known on Day 1 of the lockdowns—namely that this virus threatens almost no one but the very old and infirm, that none of these interventions works and that each of these have caused–and will continue to cause–widespread, terrible secondary and tertiary damage. Instead of admitting this, governments and media persist in their campaign of terror, lies and bogus zero-Covid measures. Because to stop lying now would be to admit that it’s all been a delusion. And politically and morally, they can’t bring themselves to do that. A five-year-old might not know a scam when they see it. But even a ten-year-old does. Or at least should. They’re counting on adults to be like five-year-olds. It might work.

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Biden 8.3

 

 

Stop calling it clean energy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Aug 302022
 


Henri Matisse Open window, collioure 1905

 

Europe Warned Of Danger For Many Winters To Come (RT)
Europe’s Economic And Social Suicide (MoA)
Western Europe Headed For ‘Energy Collapse’ – Hungary (RT)
One In Four Britons Won’t Turn On Heating This Winter (RT)
‘A Horrible Winter Lies Ahead’: Next PM Will Inherit An NHS On Its Knees (G.)
White House Sets Date For First ‘Hunger Conference’ In Decades (RT)
Zelensky Promises To Recapture Donbass (RT)
Ukraine’s Attempt At Counter-offensive Has Failed – Russia (RT)
Ukrainian Drone Downed Over Nuclear Plant – Russia (RT)
Moscow Urges ‘All Nations’ To Pressure Kiev Over Nuclear Site (RT)
Kissinger And The WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program (UH)
How Dick Cheney Created Anthony Fauci (Unherd)
The Wild West (Jim Kunstler)
Trump Calls for New Election Immediately (Celente)
Third of Pakistan Under Water – Official (RT)

 

 

 

 

 

 

German/Soviet deaths

 

 

[..] from 16th Aug, the UK Govt removed advice for pregnant & breastfeeding women to be vaccinated against #COVID19. Source:
https://gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approval-of-pfizer-biontech-vaccine-for-covid-19/summary-public-assessment-report-for-pfizerbiontech-covid-19-vaccine

 

 

 

 

Tasmania funeral director
https://twitter.com/i/status/1564178692787818499

 

 

 

 

“The real threat to the world is global cooling. Otherwise known as winter.” – Carlson

Europe Warned Of Danger For Many Winters To Come (RT)

Europe could face gas shortages for several winters as a result of the Russian supply cut, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden told a news conference on Monday, as reported by Reuters. “I do not think this crisis is going to be limited to just one winter. It may well be that we will have a number of winters where we have to somehow find solutions,” van Beurden said. The chief executive pointed out that Europe will remain under pressure as it takes steps to scrap Russian gas supplies by 2027. “If there was no Russian gas supply at all… life would be very hard,” van Beurden noted, adding “We should all be very mindful and responsible when it comes to that.”


According to the Shell CEO, the expectation of a swift resolution to Europe’s energy crisis “is a fantasy we should put aside.” European gas and power futures contracts rocketed to record highs last week, with prices reaching around 10 times above the levels where they were a year ago. The rally followed Russian energy giant Gazprom’s announcement of an upcoming shutdown due to maintenance of the only operational turbine on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Gas transit via the route will be entirely suspended from August 31 to September 2.

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“..The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership..”

Europe’s Economic And Social Suicide (MoA)

The U.S. has, out of purely egoistic reasons, dragged Europe, and especially Germany, into a trap that will lead to its economic and social destruction. Instead of recognizing the danger, and taking the necessary countermeasure, the European and the German ‘leaders’ committed themselves to help with the process. The best thing for Europe and Germany would of course have been to avoid the crisis. That failed because of a lack of insight and effort. But now, as Europe is deep down in a hole, the politicians should at least stop digging. It is in Europe’s and especially Germany’s obvious interest to keep the crisis as short as possible. But the lunatics who are ruling over Europe are still doing the opposite:

“Germany will keep up its support for Kyiv “for as long as it takes”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday, calling for an enlargement of the European Union to eventually include Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia…. Germany had undergone a “fundamental change of heart” in recent months on its military support for Ukraine, he said. “We will keep up this support, reliably and, above all, for as long as it takes,” he told the packed university audience. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed the “as long as it takes” promise to Kyiv in a speech in Slovenia, calling for “a new strategic thinking” to uphold European values.

As those ‘leaders’ seem to see it, affordable energy, warm homes, sufficient food, jobs and pensions of Europe citizens are not part of the ‘European values’ they intend to uphold. The economic and financial breakdown of Europe will be much faster than the obviously necessary political change of its third rate leadership. The only political sector that will not be damaged by all this, at least in France and Germany, is the far right. That in itself is also a danger.

Von der Leyen

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The solutions are obvious. They’re both called Nord Stream.

Western Europe Headed For ‘Energy Collapse’ – Hungary (RT)

Western Europe’s policy of rejecting Russian energy, even in the absence of suitable alternatives, could lead to systemic collapse when the public is left without heat this winter, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto warned on Monday. “All these statements … from Western Europe on the issue of energy supply simply do not work at all with winterr approaching,” Szijjarto explained to a meeting of his country’s diplomats, according to the Sputnik news agency. The Foreign Minister pointed out that while“ideological, political, communication statements with effective support from the international media can easily inflate balloons that cover people’s eyes,” all the ideology in the world won’t keep EU citizens warm when winter approaches.

It is very difficult to explain to someone in winter that they are not cold when there is no heating. Insisting that Hungary had not yet fallen into this trap, he warned that pressure from other EU governments would only get worse, as the current world order “is approaching a huge collapse, almost at the speed of an asteroid.”Russian sources are integral to European energy security, he argued, implying that without them, social discontent could lead to systemic collapse. Not only will Hungary not entertain talk of sanctions on Russian energy, but other nations will quietly back it on the matter – even if they won’t do so publicly, Szijjarto told the ambassadors.

While Budapest has pushed back against bloc-wide calls for an embargo on Russian oil and gas since the notion first began circulating among EU politicians, other states that once demanded Moscow be punished over Ukraine have quickly realized that no other source of energy can make up for the loss of Russian supplies. Electricity costs in Germany and France shot up to record heights on Friday, driven by Moscow’s threat to shut down the last operational turbine on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for three days’ maintenance. Those countries are far from the only ones to feel the bite of sanctions that were supposed to punish Russia, however, and Europeans of all nationalities are stockpiling what fuel they do have – whether it’s firewood or coal – for the long winter ahead.

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“..placing the blame on the “zombie Government in Westminster, and two leadership contenders living on another planet.”

One In Four Britons Won’t Turn On Heating This Winter (RT)

Nearly one in four adults in Britain do not plan on turning on their heating this winter as energy bills are set to skyrocket, The Independent reported on Monday, citing researcher Savanta ComRes. According to a survey conducted by the firm on July 29 and 30, before the new price cap was announced, the figure is even higher for parents with children under 18. The study shows that 23% of those polled (more than 2,000 adults) said they will not turn their heating on at all. Seven in ten (69%) indicated they would switch their heating on less, and one in ten (11%) said they would take out a loan, with the latter figure rising for those with children under 18 (17%).The research comes amid warnings of a dire winter, as the energy price cap is set to rise 80% by October, pushing the average household’s yearly bill up from £1,971 to £3,549 ($2,300 to $4,150).


According to The Independent, the Liberal Democrats, which commissioned the survey, warned that British families are being forced to make difficult choices, with the country “on the brink of the worst cost-of living-crisis in a century.” “Families and pensioners across the country are making heartbreaking decisions because the Government has failed to save them,” the Liberal Democrats’ Cabinet Office spokesperson, Christine Jardine, said, adding, “It is a national scandal that parents are having to choose between heating their homes and feeding their children. It shouldn’t be like this.” Jardine warned that an “economic catastrophe”is “just a month away,” placing the blame on the “zombie Government in Westminster, and two leadership contenders living on another planet.”

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Is it only this bad in Britain?

‘A Horrible Winter Lies Ahead’: Next PM Will Inherit An NHS On Its Knees (G.)

In a television studio in Stoke-on-Trent last month, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak traded blows over everything from credit card economics to Channel migrants to the accessories chain Claire’s. The list of issues the pair clashed over was dizzyingly long. There was one glaring omission, however. In the hour-long debate there was not a single mention of the NHS – despite being engulfed in its biggest ever crisis. The NHS now shares the same traits as many of those relying upon it to keep them alive and well: it is elderly, has multiple comorbidities, and is in dire need of emergency care. Summer has left it on its knees. Worse is expected this winter.

“The new prime minister will inherit an NHS in its worst state in living memory,” says Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents the healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. “There is no escaping that the NHS is in a state of crisis.” The facts, he says, speak for themselves. “There are 105,000 vacancies. A&Es are overcrowded. Around one in seven hospital beds are occupied by patients who can’t be discharged. Some patients have had to wait over 40 hours for an ambulance. Care is being put at risk by neglected buildings due to underinvestment. And then there’s the waiting lists, which stretch into the millions across elective care, mental health and community care.”

Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the health and social care committee, is equally concerned. “The new PM will inherit an NHS facing the most serious crisis in its history,” he warns. “A&Es, ambulances, general practice and social care are in serious peril across the country.” The overriding problem for the new Downing Street incumbent is that, while in previous years problems in the NHS centred on specific areas, today the entire house is on fire. “The NHS has never been as challenged as it is now,” says Alastair McLellan, the editor of Health Service Journal. “There is not one area of NHS provision that isn’t really struggling … There is literally nowhere where it isn’t bad, and in some cases really bad.”

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Some things need to be read more than once.

“We will announce a national strategy at the Conference that identifies actions the government will take to catalyze the public and private sectors to drive transformative change and address the intersections between food, hunger, nutrition, and health,”

White House Sets Date For First ‘Hunger Conference’ In Decades (RT)

The White House has announced when it plans to hold the first Hunger, Nutrition and Health conference in over 50 years as the US continues to deal with rampant inflation, which is affecting food prices throughout the country. Set to be held on September 28 in Washington, DC, the conference will supposedly bring together “government leaders, academics, activists and Americans from all walks of life” to focus on issues affecting millions of citizens who are faced with food insecurity amid surging prices. “We will announce a national strategy at the Conference that identifies actions the government will take to catalyze the public and private sectors to drive transformative change and address the intersections between food, hunger, nutrition, and health,” a statement by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reads.

President Biden’s administration says it aims to improve food access and affordability, empower people to make healthy food choices and enhance food security research in areas experiencing destitution. Washington has claimed it plans to eradicate hunger in the US completely by 2030. “I’ll be convening the White House Conference with Hunger, Nutrition, and Health to bring together anti-hunger and nutrition advocates, food companies, local state governments, tribal and territory committees to lay out our plan to combat hunger and improve nutrition for every American,” Biden said in a video statement back in May. The meeting will come as inflation has put a noticeable strain on the food budgets of many American families as grocery store prices have gone up some 12.2% since last year, according to the Consumer Price Index.

Inflation has reached a 40-year high under the Biden administration, hitting 9.1% in June and currently sitting at 8.5%. With prices of food, fuel, and consumer goods rising, the Biden administration has continued to spend lavishly, with the president allocating more than $54 billion since February for military and economic aid to Ukraine and passing a $739 billion climate, healthcare, and tax reform bill earlier this month. While the bill is named the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, the Congressional Budget Office has noted that it will saddle middle-class Americans with around $20 billion in additional taxes over the coming decade, whilst having a “negligible” impact on inflation.

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Mad man.

Zelensky Promises To Recapture Donbass (RT)

President Vladimir Zelensky said in his daily evening address on Sunday that Ukraine will recapture Donbass, which is now almost fully seized by Russian forces. “We have not forgotten and will not forget any of our cities and any of our people,” he said. “Now Donbass is almost destroyed by Russian strikes, devastated. The proud and glorious Ukrainian Donetsk was humiliated by the Russian occupation and robbed. But Ukraine will return. For sure. Life will return. The dignity of the people of Donbass will return. The ability to live will return. The opportunity to live safely and happily,” the president added.


According to him, this is what the Ukrainian flag will symbolize “when we set it up in Donetsk, Gorlovka, Mariupol, in all cities of Donbass, Azov area, in all areas under Russian occupation – in Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Kherson regions. And definitely in Crimea.” “Ukraine remembers everything,” Zelensky said. The US may be helping Ukraine prepare for an impending counteroffensive against Russia, the Washington Post claimed in a piece published this week, pointing to the type of weaponry making up the latest batch of military aid pledged to Kiev by the Pentagon. Last month, a number of top Ukrainian officials suggested that the country’s military would launch a counteroffensive in the south of the country in August to retake the city of Kherson.

Stephen Cohen RIP

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“Kiev has been talking about a “Kherson counteroffensive” all summer, while soliciting more weapons and ammunition from its Western backers.”

Ukraine’s Attempt At Counter-offensive Has Failed – Russia (RT)

Ukraine’s much-heralded “counter-offensive” in Kherson has “failed miserably,” the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday, listing the losses suffered by Kiev at the end of the day. Ukrainian forces attempted to attack in three directions on orders of President Vladimir Zelensky but made no gains, Moscow said. Russian troops caused “great losses” to the Ukrainian attackers during the day’s battles, including 26 tanks, 23 armored fighting vehicles, nine more armored vehicles, two SU-25 ground-attack jets and more than 560 troops, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Monday evening. The enemy’s another attempt at offensive actions has failed miserably.


Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian outlet Suspilne quoted Southern Command spokesperson Natalia Humeniuk as saying that “offensive actions in various directions” had begun, “including in the Kherson region.” She offered no details, however, saying only that “any military operation needs silence.” By Monday evening, however, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine mentioned only a Russian attack near the village of Potemkino. Kiev has been talking about a “Kherson counteroffensive” all summer, while soliciting more weapons and ammunition from its Western backers. In a video address to the people on Sunday, Zelensky vowed that “Ukraine will return” to Donbass – as well as Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Kherson and “definitely in Crimea.”

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“Ukrainian artillery launched at least eight large-caliber shells at the city on Sunday, with two of them landing near the nuclear power plant, according to the report.”

Ukrainian Drone Downed Over Nuclear Plant – Russia (RT)

Russian forces on Sunday shot down a Ukrainian drone that was apparently on a mission to strike the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, the Russian military said on Monday. The drone was shot down by small arms fire and fell on the roof of one of the buildings at the nuclear site, the Russian Defense Ministry said during a daily briefing. The building in question serves as storage for nuclear fuel and waste, it said. The crash didn’t cause any significant damage, the statement added.


The incident was described as part of a pattern of Ukrainian attacks against the Russia-controlled facility and the city of Energodar, which hosts it. Ukrainian artillery launched at least eight large-caliber shells at the city on Sunday, with two of them landing near the nuclear power plant, according to the report. The Ukrainian staff at the facility “ensures the technical condition and operation” of the Zaporozhye plant, the Russian ministry added. It said there was no evidence of radiation leaks from the site.

https://twitter.com/A__Alimov/status/1564187762177331200

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“We’ve been waiting for this mission for a long time. We believe it to be necessary,” the Kremlin spokesman said..”

Moscow Urges ‘All Nations’ To Pressure Kiev Over Nuclear Site (RT)

Making Ukraine cease its attacks on the Russian-controlled Zaporozhye nuclear power plant will require a joint effort from the whole international community, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has said. “We still believe that all countries are obliged to put pressure on the Ukrainian side, so that it stops endangering the European continent by shelling the territory of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant and adjacent areas,” Peskov told the media on Monday. The statement came hours after International Atomic Energy Agency head Rafael Grossi announced that IAEA experts would visit the nuclear plant this week to assess the security situation and establish a permanent presence at the facility.

“We’ve been waiting for this mission for a long time. We believe it to be necessary,” the Kremlin spokesman said, adding that Moscow was ready to cooperate with the UN atomic agency. He assured that Russia would provide the necessary security to the IAEA inspectors once they reach the plant from Ukrainian-held territory. Peskov also commented on a suggestion by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the crisis at Europe’s largest nuclear power station could be resolved by setting up a demilitarized zone around the perimeter. “No, there’s no talk about it,” the Kremlin press secretary said when asked about the proposal.

Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine of targeting the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant and the nearby town of Energodar with artillery and drones, warning that it could trigger a disaster that would eclipse the 1986 Chernobyl incident. Ukraine, meanwhile, has claimed that Russian forces have turned the nuclear plant into a military base and that they’ve been shelling the facility themselves to pin the blame on Kiev. Moscow, which has denied those accusations, has been insisting on a visit by the IAEA to the site.

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From Whitney Webb’s outlet.

Kissinger And The WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program (UH)

When the World Economic Forum began their Global Leaders for Tomorrow initiative in the early 1990s, Klaus Schwab’s organization implemented a program of recruitment and training for global leaders which was almost indistinguishable from Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. Schwab was treading in the footsteps of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, and it was the Dan David Foundation, while Kissinger was seated on their board, which eventually awarded Schwab with the initial funding required to create the current iteration of the program, the Forum for Young Global Leaders. The World Economic Forum has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers, business leaders, entrepreneurs and other powerful actors, through their Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders initiatives.

Schwab has even spoken openly on how his organization has gone on to “penetrate the cabinets” of supposedly sovereign states, and we should not be naive, as he has been planning on doing exactly this for at least three decades. However, it isn’t the thousands of participants who have completed these programs who we should be most concerned about. Our real concern should be with the billions of democratic voters who have been tricked into believing that any of the leaders produced by either Schwab or Kissinger have their best interests at heart.

Klaus Schwab became the heir to Henry Kissinger’s most important project, the infiltration of individuals and organizations in countries around the world with the aim of creating globalist-aligned governments built within the framework of an outdated and soulless conceptualization of American imperialism. Klaus Schwab’s activities since his time at Harvard can be seen as simply a direct continuation of Kissinger’s work during the 1950s and 1960s, and it would be naive of us to believe that there is not someone else, already groomed and trained, who is ready and willing to pick up Kissinger’s political baton from Schwab and continue in their joint mission towards globalist governance.

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Fauci’s been there since Reagan.

How Dick Cheney Created Anthony Fauci (Unherd)

Few people in America today are as powerful and polarising as Anthony Fauci. For the Left, Fauci is a consummate cool-headed scientist, emblematic of the essential role of government. On the Right, he is a Deep State operative who destroyed the lives of countless people to serve a hidden agenda, all while mysteriously taking home a bigger paycheck than any other of the country’s two million federal employees (including their collective boss, the President). The reality is that both narratives fundamentally misunderstand the position Fauci occupies in American government. Far from being a public health expert, Fauci sits at the very top of America’s biodefence infrastructure. And contrary to the notion that he is a Deep State string-puller of the Democratic party, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who not only put Fauci there but created the very framework that the immunologist-physician commands.

This in part accounts for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Fauci, loathed by President Trump, was never fired by the notoriously vengeful politician who galvanised his brand with the phrase “You’re fired!”. But Fauci’s untouchability raises an even more perplexing question: Why did the media beatify him as the country’s beneficent, infallible Covid saviour rather than look into the reality of his position and the source of his nearly limitless authority? To understand the rise of Fauci, and his legacy as he retires this year, we must return to the first months of the 2000s, when a hawkish new administration was settling into power. While George W. Bush had come to Washington touting a new brand of “compassionate conservatism”, Cheney came carrying decades of Defense Department experience, including a term as Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush during Operation Desert Storm.

Bush’s interest in biodefence and pandemic preparedness is frequently traced back to a 2004 book, The Great Influenza. The reality, however, is that the administration came to power with biological weapons and infectious disease very much top of mind, with Cheney seeking to address the gaping hole in America’s national security left by the country’s lack of a coherent biodefence strategy. But if biodefence wasn’t already a priority for the Bush White House, that swiftly changed a week to the day after the 9/11 attacks, a mere eight months into Bush’s first term, when the United States suffered the most serious biological weapons attack in its history. On September 18, 2001, a number of national media outlets, including CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, the New York Post and the National Enquirer, received a series of letters containing a dry white powder.

Three weeks later, a second round of letters was sent to the offices of senators Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority leader, and Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Twenty-two people were infected with anthrax, five of whom died. Already in a state of unprecedented military alert, the United States was sent into near-chaos by the anthrax attacks, which, by essentially weaponising the postal system with one of the world’s most lethal pathogens, engendered a sense that the country was under attack by an unseen enemy with unfathomable capabilities.

Hilton Fauci

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“This is the third time in a hundred-odd years that Germany has attempted suicide, and this time it looks like it’s going to work.”

The Wild West (Jim Kunstler)

The West’s biggest project these days, the war it provoked over Ukraine, turned out to be a giant Acme land-mine under the West’s collective Wile E. Coyote ass. As Russia advances implacably there and financial sanctions fizzle, behold the scramble in Europe now among citizens desperate to not freeze to death in the months ahead. This is the third time in a hundred-odd years that Germany has attempted suicide, and this time it looks like it’s going to work. Farewell nice German cars, machine tools, and other symbols of industrial might. In feckless Poland, the folks are out gathering lumps of coal and scouring the forest floor for firewood — they’re forbidden by law from cutting standing timber. Mr. Macron tells France she must accept “reduced living standards.”

Looks like Brexit did not go far enough as the UK holds hands with the rest of NATO tromping into economic oblivion. Think the USA is doing better? The summer rally in financial markets was just another frame in the Loony Tunes festival that American life has become. The Fed Chair, Mr. Powell, said all the parts out loud at the annual Jackson Hole banker meet-up last week: look out below, we’ve decided to take this sucker down (in the immortal words of George W. Bush), since pretending to stoke prosperity via Modern Monetary Theory only results in, duh, ruinous inflation. This raises the question, though, as to which is more politically damaging: inflation or depression? It is really only the difference between having plenty of worthless money or having no money at all.

The institutional rot eating away at our national underpinnings got more exposed last week when Mark Zuckerberg stupidly blurted to Joe Rogan that, yes, in the fall of 2020 the FBI warned Facebook — “came to the folks on our team,” he put it, smarmily — about a Russian disinformation campaign underway, wink wink. And so, Facebook turned the volume down to zero on certain news about a laptop belonging to one Hunter Biden stuffed with selfie porn (prostitutes included), video evidence of narcotics use, and deal memos about worldwide influence peddling involving the whole dang Biden family.

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‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ”

Trump Calls for New Election Immediately (Celente)

Former President Donald Trump took to social media on Monday to call for an emergency presidential election after the latest developments on the Hunter Biden laptop story. “This is massive Fraud & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our country. REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new election.” The move came after Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, told podcaster Joe Rogan about how his company handled the Hunter Biden story and its interactions with the FBI. “Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “

‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ” The New York Post noted that when Rogan asked the tech head if the FBI had told Facebook to “be on guard specifically for our story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg claimed, rather unconvincingly that he did “not remember . . . specifically” but “it basically fit the pattern.” Claiming it was a hoax and never existed, The New York Times reported in March that it was able to finally authenticate emails from Hunter Biden found on a laptop just before the 2020 election, but was snuffed out by Big Tech and mainstream media companies.

[..] The New York Post, citing invoices on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, reported that Burisma Energy in Ukraine, paid the Biden boy $1 million a year while his father was vice president—or about $83,333 per month. The holding company cut his pay in half when his father exited office, the report said. Twitter decided to block the Post’s story—at the height of the election season—due to its “Hacked Material Policy.” On Sunday, Trump called on FBI agents to stand up to their bosses. “When are the great Agents, and others, in the FBI going to say ‘we aren’t going to take it anymore,” much as they did when James Comey read off a list of all of Crooked Hillary Clinton’s crimes, only to say that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute.,” Trump said.

“The wonderful people of the FBI went absolutely “nuts,” so Comey had to backtrack and do a FAKE INVESTIGATION in order to keep them at bay,” he wrote. “The end result, we won in 2016 (and did MUCH better in 2020!). But now the ‘Left’ has lost their minds!!!”

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With only 33 million of 242 million affected?

Third of Pakistan Under Water – Official (RT)

The country is faced with a crisis of “unimaginable proportions,” climate change minister Sherry Rehman says. A third of Pakistan is under water as a result of flooding caused by record monsoon rains, the South Asian country’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, has said. “It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out,” Rehman told the news agency AFP on Monday. Pakistan spans 881,913 square kilometers (340,509 square miles), which makes it the world’s 33rd-largest country by area, ahead of the likes of Turkey, France and Germany. Inhabited by almost 242 million people, it’s also the fifth most populated nation in the world. What’s happening in Pakistan now is “very far from a normal monsoon – it is climate dystopia at our doorstep,” the minister said.


The flooding has created a crisis of “unimaginable proportions” in the country, she added. In a separate interview with Deutsche Welle, Rehman claimed that “we’ve had to deploy the navy for the first time to operate in Indo-Pakistan” because such vast areas are being covered with water. The death toll since mid-June from the monsoon rains had reached 1,061 as of Monday, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. More than 3,000 roads have been destroyed, with 130 bridges and 495,000 homes damaged by flash floods, the agency said. Rehman estimated last week that the disaster had affected around 33 million people in the country.

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Reverse racism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Ali in Paris

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Jul 302022
 
 July 30, 2022  Posted by at 8:27 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  54 Responses »


Claude Monet Impression, sunrise 1872

 

Europe Hypnotized Into War Economy (Vilches)
Russia Claims Ukraine Had A Reason To Kill Its Own POWs (RT)
Russia and Ukraine Trade Blame Over Prison Blast (BBC)
Ukraine and Russia Trade Blame For Attack Killing Mariupol Prisoners (WaPo)
Ukraine Is ‘Shooting Blind’ – Top Official (RT)
A Panicking Biden Administration Seeks Talks With Russia (MoA)
West Prepares To Plunder Post-war Ukraine (MP)
Gazprom Explains Gas Flow Reduction To EU (RT)
American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama (Michael Hudson)
Playing Chicken with the Fates (Kunstler)
David Lynch Tells ‘Zelensky’ To Have A Beer With Putin (RT)
Trump Warns Something Worse Than Recession Is Coming (ET)
Health Care Workers Settle COVID Shot Mandate for $10.3 Million (Bridle)
Triathlete, 27, Becomes 5th Toronto Area Doctor To Die In July (TSun)
Meta from 5th Most Valuable Stock to 11th In 10 Months. $647 Billion Lost (WS)

 

 

Read at least twice.

 

 

Winter is coming
https://twitter.com/i/status/1552787710187917312

 

 

Share of countries with 6%+ CPI

 

 

Bro Bridle
https://twitter.com/i/status/1552918465312342017

 

 

CannoneerMarine thread

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jorge Vilches has it exactly right. Europe is shedding infrastructure and deals for which they have zero replacement: “without which Europe as we know it will cease to exist.”

Europe Hypnotized Into War Economy (Vilches)

Thirty two years ago Germans enthusiastically took down the Berlin wall. Now, captured by cunning Anglo-Saxon global elites, Germans are helping other European “useful idiots” to erect a much higher and thicker wall to cut themselves off from Russia leading them into a war economy. But as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has warned… “the approach has clearly failed — sanctions have backfired — and our car now has 4 four flat tires” … Question: vehicles don´t carry more than 2 spare tires on them, do they? So, one quick and innocent way to explain such unfathomable European miscalculation is to assume the EU leadership is immersed in a deep hypnotic trance and just blindly following US-UK instructions under Stoltenberg-Johnson war-mongering policies.

The supply lines that up to 2022 successfully linked Europe and Russia took decades of very hard work to develop. This now means that almost all of such over-abundant contracts necessarily have no effective substitute because (a) no other vendors have such high quality at low price plus decades of vetting and proven experience + (b) the un-replaceable short freight distance and shipping time from nearby Russia. So, by definition, both (a) + (b) mean that today no equivalent supply lines could ever be found no matter how much Europe tried simply because it would be either too soon or too far …and always too hard and too pricey. So short cuts will be taken and corners rounded-off…. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

The impact of the above cannot be overstated though as the now-broken Euro-Russian supply lines were essential for the Just-In-Time strategy that Europe and world markets still require and cannot wait years to develop and iron out. Logistics 101: proven experience and performance with excellent price plus quick delivery from nearby sources cannot be substituted fast enough, or possibly ever. On purpose, Europe´s worst enemies couldn´t have inflicted worse harm than what a US-UK mesmerized Europe (what else ?) is doing to itself. So EU sanctions are now cutting off dozens of key and highly varied Russian produce without which Europe as we know it will cease to exist. This involves foodstuffs, minerals of every sort, energy re oil & gas & coal & refined products thereof, etc., etc., plus key technologies and products from space rocket engines to nuclear fuels.

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It’s quite simple. If the attack was done with HIMARS, it’s the Ukraine. WaPo fantasizes that Russians transported HIMARS pieces from elsewhere to the crime scene, but Ukraine was shelling this site for months. Only now, they have the HIMARS to do it with.

• Elena Evdokimova @elenaevdokimov7· May 17!!
Ukrainian artillery has been shelling the DPR village of Elenovka with BM-21 Grad. It is the settlement, where the prisoners have been transported from Azovstal. Looks like the deliberate attempt to destroy their own surrendered units.

• Azov POWs are extremely high value assets to Kremlin propagandists. Capturing Azov neo-Nazis & putting them on trial to justify Russia’s invasion has been a top propaganda priority from start. It’d be bizarre for RU to bomb & eliminate their prized pr assets before show trials.

• So they’re really going with the theory that Russia shelled a prison on DPR territory to kill Azov militants whom they could have just as easily publicly hanged to the thunderous applause of virtually everyone in Russia & half of Ukraine?!

Russia Claims Ukraine Had A Reason To Kill Its Own POWs (RT)

Kiev’s forces shelled a detention center holding Ukrainian POWs early Friday morning to “threaten” their own troops who may want to surrender, the Russian Defense Ministry has claimed. “A large number of Ukrainian servicemen are voluntarily laying down their arms, and know about the humane treatment of prisoners by the Russian side,” the ministry said, calling the attack “outrageous.” Authorities in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said that the death toll in the missile strike has grown to 53, while 75 were wounded. DPR Deputy Information Minister Daniil Bezsonov posted a graphic video on his Telegram channel, which shows multiple mutilated and charred bodies inside the destroyed building. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry and local authorities, Ukrainian troops used US-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launchers to strike the detention center near the village of Yelenovka.


The ministry said the facility held members of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, whose fighters surrendered to Russian and Donbass forces during the siege of the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol. The battalion is notorious because it includes fighters with nationalist and neo-Nazi views. Speaking to Russia’s TV Channel One, DPR head Denis Pushilin claimed that the Ukrainians “deliberately” targeted the detention center in order to kill Azov members who had been providing testimonies about possible war crimes by their commanders. The Ukrainian military released a statement on Friday, accusing Russian troops of shelling Yelenovka. Moscow destroyed the prison in order to pin the blame on Kiev, as well as to “hide the torture of prisoners and executions,”the statement alleged.

HIMARS
https://twitter.com/i/status/1552948606214225920

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“Russia accuses Ukraine of being willing to massacre its own prisoners of war, saying Kyiv insisted that prisoners from the Azov Battalion be housed in this particular warehouse.

Russia and Ukraine Trade Blame Over Prison Blast (BBC)

Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for a rocket attack that killed dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war in the occupied part of Donetsk region. Ukraine says the prison was targeted by Russia in an effort to destroy evidence of torture and killing. For its part, Russia said the prison camp in Olenivka was hit by Ukrainian precision rockets. Unverified Russian video footage of the aftermath shows a tangle of wrecked bunk beds and badly charred bodies. An adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky said the scene looked like arson, and that a missile strike would have scattered the bodies. Those detained are said to have included members of the Azov battalion, who were the last defenders of Mariupol and whom Russia has sought to depict as neo-Nazis and war criminals.


Ukraine’s new Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin said he had opened a war crimes investigation into the blast. His office added that it believed about 40 people were killed in the strike and 130 were injured. Daniil Bezsonov, a spokesperson for the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, said the strike had been a “direct hit on a barracks holding prisoners” and the number killed might increase. Russia’s defence ministry said the strike had been carried out with US-made Himars artillery and it accused Ukraine of a “deliberately perpetrated” provocation. The ministry produced fragments of what it said were rockets fired by the Himars system.

HIMARS
https://twitter.com/i/status/1552992046402658311

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I include the BBC and WaPo takes mostly to illustrate how they have manipulated the perceived views.

The neo-nazis are now “the famed Azov Regiment”“whom Russia has sought to depict as neo-Nazis and war criminals.” , and the HIMARS systems “are helping shift the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor”.

Ukraine and Russia Trade Blame For Attack Killing Mariupol Prisoners (WaPo)

Dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war from the famed Azov Regiment were killed Friday in a strike against their detention center in the Russian-occupied eastern region of Donbas, but it was unclear how the attack happened or who carried it out. At least 53 POWs were killed and 75 injured in the strike, according to Darya Morozova, an official for the Donetsk People’s Republic, the pro-Russian breakaway region where the prison is located. Ukraine and Russia traded blame for the strike, with each saying the other had carried it out to silence the prisoners. All or most of the POWs were members of the Azov Regiment who had surrendered when Russian troops captured the city of Mariupol in May after a two-month siege. Their fate had been the focus of fraught prisoner-exchange negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of carrying out the attack using U.S.-supplied HIMARS — High Mobility Artillery Rocket System — launchers, which are helping shift the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor. The ministry framed the incident as “a bloody provocation” intended to discourage Ukrainian soldiers from surrendering. Russian media commentators suggested that Ukraine hit the detention center to stop the prisoners from providing testimony to interrogators about war crimes committed by Ukrainian forces. Ukraine denied any involvement and accused Russian forces of carrying out the attack, which it called a war crime. Ukraine did not conduct any shelling or artillery strikes Friday in the vicinity of Olenivka, the town where the detention center is located, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a post on its Facebook page.

Rather, the General Staff said, it was Russia that staged the attack and used it “to accuse Ukraine of committing war crimes as well as to cover up the torture and execution of prisoners.” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, in a posting on his Twitter account, called on the world to condemn what he called a “petrifying war crime” and a “brutal violation of international humanitarian law.” Ukrainian officials also questioned whether the incident had been caused by an artillery strike at all. Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, tweeted that explosives specialists who had examined images of the burned-out detention center believe that the destruction may have been caused by an explosion or fire “inside the building itself, rather than the result of shelling.”

Videos of the aftermath of the blast broadcast by Russian media outlets show a tangle of twisted, burned metal bunks inside a blackened warehouse-like structure with a large hole in its roof. Charred bodies and body parts are strewn around the wreckage Russian media outlets also posted photos showing what they claimed were fragments of HIMARS rockets found at the scene. It wasn’t immediately possible to verify that the shards had been fired by HIMARS launchers, but a senior Defense Department official in Washington pointed out that Russia could have gathered them from attacks elsewhere. “The Russians have a lot of pieces of HIMARS. The Ukrainians have been sending a lot of HIMARS their way,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief the media. He cautioned against reaching any conclusions on the limited information available.

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“..Kiev needed about 50 HIMARS for effective defense, and a least 100 for “an effective counteroffensive.”

Ukraine Is ‘Shooting Blind’ – Top Official (RT)

US-made HIMARS are “a good first step,” but Kiev needs the means to take accurate shots, a senior Ukrainian official has said The deliveries of US-made HIMARS rocket systems are “a good first step”, but the West did not provide Kiev with the necessary technologies to accurately hit targets, a high-ranking Ukrainian official complained in an interview published on Thursday. “HIMARS and heavy artillery are a good first step, but if we do not have the technology to find and correct targets for artillery strikes, then we’re just shooting blind,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser at the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, told Newsweek magazine.

Earlier this month, Vadim Skibitskiy, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Directorate of Intelligence at the Ministry of Defense, claimed that Kiev views the Crimean Peninsula as a legitimate target for long-range weaponry, including US-made M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS, supplied by Western powers. His words were echoed by Alexey Arestovich, a top aide to President Vladimir Zelensky, who said that the Ukrainian military would target the Crimean Bridge as soon as Kiev obtains the capability to carry out such a strike. Russia pushed back on these threats, with Mikhail Sheremet, an MP who represents the region in the Russian parliament, warning Kiev that retaliation will be so harsh that Ukraine will never be able to recover from it. In his telling, the would-be strike will be followed by “a crushing blow to decision-making centers in Kiev, military infrastructure and arms-supply logistics channels.”

[..] On Friday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense and DPR authorities accused Kiev of having used HIMARS to target a prison holding POWs, killing 53 and wounding scores more. Ukraine rejected the claim and pinned the blame on Russian troops. According to the Pentagon, as of July 22, the US has provided Ukraine with 16 M142 HIMARS systems, while the UK has provided another three launchers capable of firing the same munitions. Earlier this month, Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov said that Kiev needed about 50 HIMARS for effective defense, and a least 100 for “an effective counteroffensive.”

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“..Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov was too busy to talk with Mr. Blinken now.”

They did talk yesterday. But Blinken is not very important.

A Panicking Biden Administration Seeks Talks With Russia (MoA)

The New York Times reports of a potential prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russia: “[T]he Biden administration has proposed trading the merchant of death for the imprisoned basketball player as well as a former marine held in Russia on what are considered trumped-up espionage charges. In the harsh and cynical world of international diplomacy, prisoner exchanges are rarely pretty, but unpalatable choices are often the only choices on the table. Whether the swap would go through remained unclear. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made the offer public in part to reassure the families of Brittney Griner, the basketball player, and Paul N. Whelan, the former marine, that the administration is doing all it can to free them. Russian officials, who have long sought the release of the arms trafficker Viktor Bout, confirmed the discussion on Thursday but said Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov was too busy to talk with Mr. Blinken now.”

Typically prisoner swaps are not talked about publicly before they happen: “Some veteran hostage negotiators were perplexed that Mr. Blinken made the offer public. “It is baffling why the U.S. would announce this proposal in the midst of the negotiations,” said Rob Saale, the former head of the F.B.I.-led Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell. “If you’re in sensitive negotiations why would you want to air this out publicly? It makes me wonder if the Russians haven’t already declined the deal.” Mr. Saale suspicion was justified as the Washington Post now reports:

“The Biden administration disclosed publicly that the United States had made “a substantial offer” to Russia to secure the release of two American prisoners because closed-door negotiations had stalled, an administration official said Thursday. The administration hopes public pressure will lead Moscow to engage in negotiations resulting in basketball star Brittney Griner and security consultant Paul Whelan being released from Russian prison, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. U.S. officials say they have tried for weeks to broker the releases of Griner and Whelan. But the lack of progress, and the prospect of Griner soon facing conviction and sentencing on drug charges, prompted the administration this week to make the negotiations public.”

I do not understand why the administration had started such negotiations even before the Griner court case has been closed. In general such prisoners will only be pardoned and released to the other side after they have been sentenced. Anything else would raise accusations of executive interference in the judicial process. The Brittney Griner case, over admitted smuggling of cannabis oil, is still in court. The Russian government will obviously refrain from doing anything about her before the judicial process has ended. One suspects that the prisoner exchange is much more about Paul Whelan, who likely is a CIA asset.

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They’ll have to settle for what Russia leaves them. And that’s not what they counted on.

West Prepares To Plunder Post-war Ukraine (MP)

While the United States and Europe flood Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars of weapons, using it as an anti-Russian proxy and pouring fuel on the fire of a brutal war that is devastating the country, they are also making plans to essentially plunder its post-war economy. Representatives of Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland this July to plan a series of harsh neoliberal policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.” Ukraine has been destabilized by violence since 2014, when a US-sponsored coup d’etat overthrew its democratically elected government, setting off a civil war. That conflict dragged on until February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded the country, escalating into a new, even deadlier phase of the war.

The United States and European Union have sought to erase the history of foreign-sponsored civil war in Ukraine from 2014 to early 2022, acting as though the conflict began on February 24. But Washington had sent large sums of weapons to Ukraine and provided extensive military training and support over several years before Russia invaded. Meanwhile, starting in 2017, representatives of Western governments and corporations quietly held annual conferences in which they discussed ways to profit from the civil war they were fueling in Ukraine. In these meetings, Western political and business leaders outlined a series of aggressive right-wing reforms they hoped to impose on Ukraine, including widespread privatization of state-owned industries and deregulation of the economy.

On July 4 and 5, 2022, top officials from the US, EU, Britain, Japan, and South Korea met in Switzerland for a so-called “Ukraine Recovery Conference.” There, they planned Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and performatively announced aid commitments – while salivating over a bonanza of potential contracts. New NATO candidates Finland and Sweden committed to assure reconstruction in Lugansk, roughly 48 hours after Russia and separatist forces announced the region had fallen fully under their control. But the Ukraine Recovery Conference was not new. It had been renamed to save the expense of a new acronym. In the previous five years, the group and its annual meetings were instead referred to as the “Ukraine Reform Conference” (URC).

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Siemens has eliminated no more than a quarter of the identified malfunctions at the Nord Stream turbines. Correspondence regarding the repair of engines will be made public via media.
– Deputy Chairman of Gazprom Markelov

Gazprom Explains Gas Flow Reduction To EU (RT)

Gazprom has published some of its correspondence with Siemens as it blames the German company for a reduction in gas flow Russia had to reduce its gas flow to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline due to turbine malfunctions, Gazprom Deputy Chief Executive Vitaly Markelov said on Friday. The issues are due to Germany’s Siemens company – which produces the turbines – failing to fulfill its commitments, he told the Rossiya 24 TV Channel.
Siemens has so far eliminated only one-fourth of the total number of discovered malfunctions affecting its turbines, Markelov said. On Wednesday, the Nord Stream 1 operator Gascade reported that gas flow through the pipeline had been reduced to one-fifth of its maximum capacity. A day before that, Gazprom warned that it would have to stop the operation of its second Siemens turbine for an overhaul.

After the switch-off, gas flow through Nord Stream 1 was not expected to exceed 33 million cubic meters per day. The move came as the energy giant was still waiting for another turbine for the pipeline that was due to arrive from Germany after undergoing maintenance in Canada. “Our European partners accuse us of reducing gas supply to Europe without sufficient reasons. Yet, nothing can be further from the truth,”Markelov said, adding that it was the company’s Western partners who “fail to fulfill their obligations – contractual obligations – for the compressor station maintenance.” According to an earlier report by business daily Kommersant, several turbines at the Portovaya compressor station located on Russia’s Baltic coast are in need of servicing.

The current licensing agreement allows Siemens Energy to accept five more turbines for maintenance work before the end of 2024. “We call on our partners to resolve their own issues as soon as possible,” the deputy CEO said, adding that the gas supply to Europe would then “go back to normal in no time.”Markelov added that his company planned to release part of its correspondence with its Western partners to the public. Some documents were published hours later. The reduction of supply from Russia has led to a spike in gas prices in Europe, which rose by more than 20% to over $2,500 per thousand cubic meters on Wednesday. European leaders then blamed Russia for the gas price hikes.

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“What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education.”

American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama (Michael Hudson)

As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society. What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear.

Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19th and early 20th century. Clausewitz popularized the axiom that war is an extension of national interests – mainly economic. The United States views its economic interest to lie in seeking to spread its neoliberal ideology globally. The evangelistic aim is to financialize and privatize economies by shifting planning away from national governments to a cosmopolitan financial sector. There would be little need for politics in such a world. Economic planning would shift from political capitals to financial centers, from Washington to Wall Street, with satellites in the City of London, the Paris Bourse, Frankfurt and Tokyo.

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“Turns out that Agent Brian Auten was also involved in favorably vetting the Steele Dossier when it was used to justify FISA court warrant..”

Playing Chicken with the Fates (Kunstler)

How is it that the Hunter Biden laptop, stuffed with incriminating memoranda of bribery, treason, and diverse felonies, and in the FBI’s possession for two-and-a-half years now, just sat gathering dust in some sub-sub-basement cubby-hole — while “Joe Biden,” the putative president (or, more likely, the enigmatic claque behind him) was allowed to carry out a demolition of America’s economy and culture? The answer is one Brian Auten, FBI Senior Analyst, who engineered a scheme to label Hunter’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” which allowed FBI Director Christopher Wray to throw a switch that turned off any further inquiry in the matter beginning in August before the 2020 presidential election.


In turn, other senior FBI officials had all the documents pertaining to the decision process on that matter locked up in a special file that would never see the light of day. Auten’s action led to the release of a letter signed by “fifty former intelligence officials” labeling the laptop as a Russian disinfo op — which became the basis for social media to conspire to censor any discussion of the laptop and its contents. And so it was that a political puppet deeply in the pay of foreign interests got shoehorned into the White House. Well, that and widespread election fraud. Turns out that Agent Brian Auten was also involved in favorably vetting the Steele Dossier when it was used to justify FISA court warrants against figures in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, part of the RussiaGate operation that disordered and disabled President Trump’s entire four-year term. Well now you know. Perhaps Special Counsel John Durham knows this, too. (If he didn’t before, he must now.)

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Lynch is not as crazy as Stephen King.

David Lynch Tells ‘Zelensky’ To Have A Beer With Putin (RT)

Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky should have a beer with his Russian counterpart Putin and talk peace, American filmmaker David Lynch insisted in an “interview” with Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus. The first fragment of the interview was published on the Russian video hosting website RuTube on Thursday, while the full-length version is expected to be released in the coming days.= Speaking to whom he thought was the Ukrainian leader, the Twin Peaks director insisted that the only way to end the ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine was through peace. Lynch said it was his “job”to inform Zelensky about “technologies” that exist for achieving a lasting peace and that these methods were far more effective than “war and murder,” referring to letters he had previously sent to the Ukrainian president.

“Now is the time for peace, and the technology to achieve true peace exists. You need to use them and form such groups of experts on a peaceful settlement in the interests of Ukraine,”he noted. Vovan and Lexus, posing as Zelensky, asked the filmmaker whether he thought there should be direct talks with Putin in the interest of reaching peace, to which Lynch emphatically replied “Yes!”, stressing that there were a number of ways to do so, such as an ordinary telephone call or a virtual dinner with a couple of beers. Lynch insisted that during the conversation over beer and dinner the two presidents could come to a mutual realization that they are both human beings and would be able to discuss the problems between their countries.

“Think peace, think friendship” urged the filmmaker, calling on Zelensky to “stop” the current crisis, talk to Putin, and think about how to get along and help each other. The conversation with Lynch comes a week after the duo’s prank with American horror writer Stephen King, whom they also tricked into believing he was talking with Zelensky. During the call, King praised WWII-era Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stepan Bandera as a “great man” and compared him to US founding fathers Washington and Jefferson. The writer later admitted that he was pranked and claimed that he didn’t actually know who Bandera was or what he had done.

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Depression.

Trump Warns Something Worse Than Recession Is Coming (ET)

Former President Donald Trump has warned that America’s economy is on track for a bigger disaster than a recession, with his remarks coming shortly before government statistics showed GDP printing negative for the second consecutive quarter, which is a rule-of-thumb definition for a recession. “Where we’re going now could be a very bad place,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona last week. “We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem.” The former president singled out the collapse in Americans’ real wages, a historically depressed labor force participation rate, and the Democrat push for the Green New Deal that he said would crush economic growth.

“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression,” the former president said. Trump’s remarks came several days before the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released data showing that real U.S. GDP fell by an annualized 0.9 percent in the second quarter after contracting 1.6 percent in the first quarter. Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.

[..] In his remarks, Trump also took aim at President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, blaming him for soaring inflation. “Biden created the worst inflation in 47 years. We’re at 9.1 percent, but the actual number is much, much higher than that,” Trump said. While the former president didn’t provide his own estimate for the true rate of inflation, an alternative CPI inflation gauge developed by economist John Williams, calculated according to the same methodology used by the U.S. government in the 1980s, puts the figure at 17.3 percent, a 75-year high. Trump also said that persistently high inflation combined with an economic slowdown has put the country “on the verge of a devastating” spell of stagflation, which is a combination of accelerating prices and slowing economic growth.

Inflation is “going higher and higher all the time,” Trump said, adding that it’s “costing families nearly $6,000 a year, bigger than any tax increase ever proposed other than the tax increase that they want to propose right now.” In Trump’s first full month in office in February 2017, the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at 2.8 percent in annual terms. While the CPI measure fluctuated during his tenure, the highest it ever reached was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent. Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.

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$25,000 each. Hmm. Still, this may spread like wildfirre.

Health Care Workers Settle COVID Shot Mandate for $10.3 Million (Bridle)

Today, Liberty Counsel settled the nation’s first classwide lawsuit for health care workers over a COVID shot mandate, for more than $10.3 million. The class action settlement against NorthShore University HealthSystem is on behalf of more than 500 current and former health care workers who were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions from the COVID shot mandate. The agreed upon settlement was filed today in the federal Northern District Court of Illinois. As a result of the settlement, NorthShore will pay $10,337,500 to compensate these health care employees who were victims of religious discrimination, and who were punished for their religious beliefs against taking an injection associated with aborted fetal cells.

This is a historic, first-of-its-kind class action settlement against a private employer who unlawfully denied hundreds of religious exemption requests to COVID-19 shots. The settlement must be approved by the federal District Court. Employees of NorthShore who were denied religious exemptions will receive notice of the settlement, and will have an opportunity to comment, object, request to opt out, or submit a claim form for payment out of the settlement fund, all in accordance with deadlines that will be set by the court. As part of the settlement agreement, NorthShore will also change its unlawful “no religious accommodations” policy to make it consistent with the law, and to provide religious accommodations in every position across its numerous facilities. No position in any NorthShore facility will be considered off limits to unvaccinated employees with approved religious exemptions.

In addition, employees who were terminated because of their religious refusal of the COVID shots will be eligible for rehire if they apply within 90 days of final settlement approval by the court, and they will retain their previous seniority level. The amount of individual payments from the settlement fund will depend on how many valid and timely claim forms are submitted during the claims process. If the settlement is approved by the court and all or nearly all of the affected employees file valid and timely claims, it is estimated that employees who were terminated or resigned because of their religious refusal of a COVID shot will receive approximately $25,000 each, and employees to were forced to accept a COVID shot against their religious beliefs to keep their jobs will receive approximately $3,000 each.

The 13 health care workers who are lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit will receive an additional approximate payment of $20,000 each for their important role in bringing this lawsuit and representing the class of NorthShore health care workers. Liberty Counsel will receive 20 percent of the settlement sum, which equals $2,061,500, as payment for the significant attorney’s fees and costs it has required to undertake to sue NorthShore and hold it accountable for its actions. This amount is far less than the typical 33 percent usually requested by attorneys in class action litigation.

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Not sure if No. 6 is also from Toronto.

“In all four cases, their hospitals made it clear their deaths “were not related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” Made it clear how? Where are the autopsies?

Triathlete, 27, Becomes 5th Toronto Area Doctor To Die In July (TSun)

The fifth GTA doctor to die in July “radiated positivity” and “lived a vibrant and active life.” But what the world lost in the sudden and tragic death of Dr. Candace Nayman was a woman who had dedicated her life to the health of children. The 27-year-old, who was a resident doctor at McMaster Children Hospital in Hamilton, collapsed while swimming as she competed in a triathlon on Sunday. She subsequently died on Thursday. Friends kept an around-the-clock prayer vigil for the much-loved Nayman who lost her fight and, at her request, had her organs donated to help others.She was “the loving daughter of Nicole and Gary, and the sister of Lauren, her twin, and Maurice, as well as partner to Seth Kadish,” reads an obituary on the Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel.

A triathlete, Dr. Nayman routinely commented on social media about her love of training and racing. “Candace Brooke Nayman passed away Thursday, July 28, 2022 competing and doing what she loved,” her obituary states. Family, friends and peers gathered Thursday for her funeral, which has not only shaken her family but rocked the already shaken medicine fraternity. “Everyone in the pediatrics department here at McMaster University and McMaster Children’s Hospital is devastated by the loss of Dr. Candace Nayman.” said Dr. Angelo Mikrogianakis, the chief of pediatrics at Hamilton Health Sciences’ McMaster Children’s Hospital and St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. “Candace was an aspiring pediatrician who exemplified hard work, radiated positivity, lived a vibrant and active life, and had a positive impact on her fellow residents, colleagues, faculty and patients.”


[..] Four other local doctors have died this summer. Trillium Partners staff physicians Dr. Jakub Sawicki, Dr. Stephen McKenzie and Dr. Lorne Segall died last week, just days after the tragic death of North York General Hospital’s Dr. Paul Hannam, an Olympian who died during a run at 50 years old. In all four cases, their hospitals made it clear their deaths “were not related to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

6 Canadian doctors

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Zuckerbucks.

Meta from 5th Most Valuable Stock to 11th In 10 Months. $647 Billion Lost (WS)

Despite the rally on Friday, the shares of Meta Platforms lost more ground, falling 1.0% to $159.10 at the close, and more after-hours, same price where the shares had first been on July 13, 2017. Five years of nothing, with an exciting roller-coaster-ride in between. Four years and two months up, 10 months down. Since the peak in September 2021, the shares have plunged 59%. Meta still doesn’t qualify for my growing list of Imploded Stocks, for which the minimum requirement is a 70% plunge from the peak, but it’s working hard to get there (data via YCharts):

The market value plunged from $1.077 trillion in September to $431 billion today. So, $647 billion have vanished in 10 months. This is no biggie obviously because people who bought the shares at the IPO for $38, and thereby participated in the biggest tech IPO in US history at the time, still made 318% at today’s price, and the shares could fall another 50%, and they’d still make a ton of money. Those who bought in 2021, OK, win some, lose some. And this dump in market cap caused something else to happen over the past two days: While other stocks surged, Meta fell out of the top 10 most valuable companies in the US, into 11th place, behind Visa (data via YCharts):

Back in September 2021, Meta, with a market cap of $1.077 trillion, was the fifth most valuable stock by market cap in the US. Easy come, easy go (data via YCharts):

Despite the summer rally, the Nasdaq composite is still down 23.6% from the peak in November, and lots of stocks slid, skidded, and plunged, and this re-arranged the deck a little among the top 11, but left the top four in the same position. There are a host of reasons for Meta’s plunge, including that the shares should have never shot up in this crazy manner in the first place. But hey, this was the pandemic, the Fed was printing money hand over fist, the Fed’s interest rates were near 0% even as inflation had begun to rage, and nothing mattered, everything shot higher. To the moon!

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Tamara Lich

 

 

Dutch farmer

 

 

Holland

 

 

It would be good if the farmers, or someone else, can keep the WEF forum out of Holland.

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Jul 092022
 


Salvador Dali Apparition of My Cousin Carolinetta on the Beach at Rosas 1934

 

EU Will Be Held Responsible For Starving Millions Around The World – Tycoon (RT)
Ignition… Lift-off! (Kunstler)
Western ‘Economic Blitzkrieg’ Has Failed – Putin (RT)
Neo-Feudalism: Klaus Schwab, the WEF, and The Great Reset (Rawles)
By Making China The Enemy, NATO Is Threatening World Peace (Cook)
US, China Top Diplomats Voice Cautious Hope In Rare Talks (Barron’s)
EU Has Shipped Millions Of Tons Of Ukrainian Grain – Borrell (RT)
The EU Doesn’t Have A Plan For Life Without Cheap Russia Energy (Blankenship)
Note from Maria Zakharova (Saker)
Army Cuts Pay, Benefits From 60,000 Unvaccinated National Guard, Reserves (Fox)
Trudeau’s Nitrogen Policy Will Decimate Canadian Farming (TCS)
Today’s America: An Economy of Shortages (ET)
The Tale of Hunter Biden’s Payments To Alleged Russian Prostitutes (JTN)
Musk Tells Twitter He Wants Out Of Deal To Buy It (CNN)

 

 

 

 

Repeat the line

 

 

 

 

16-year old Jouke whom the police tried to kill. Gov’t now says it was a error of judgment, and the cop is at home sick feeling very bad. But look where the bullet hole is. As Jouke says here, they could have shot at the tires, huge targets, and you stand still within seconds.

 

 

Note how the cause of death was put on its head, from respiratory to heart failure.

Blind eye

 

 

 

 

“Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”
– Lu Xun (Chinese writer) 1921.

 

 

 

 

EU Will Be Held Responsible For Starving Millions Around The World – Tycoon (RT)

Sanctions imposed on Russian and Belarusian fertilizer producers are akin to weapons of mass destruction in the scale of the damage they will likely cause over the next few years, the founder of chemical giant EuroChem has claimed. “The EU sanctions mean suffering, famine and migration flows for many hundreds of millions of people,” Andrey Melnichenko said in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche on Thursday. “Sanctions targeting food and energy are economic weapons of mass destruction. They hit innocent people the worst. I have no doubt that billions of people will feel its effects,” he warned. Suffering people will want to hold those responsible accountable, and the EU won’t be able to shift its culpability, the businessman added.

It was not Russia or the US, but EU members like Lithuania and Estonia, and also European leaders Germany, France and Italy, which chose to disrupt the operation of his chemical empire with sanctions, he explained. EuroChem, a leading fertilizer producer, is headquartered in Switzerland, where Melnichenko also lives with his family. The EU and Switzerland targeted the company and its owner with sanctions aimed at hurting the Russian economy in retaliation for Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine. Melnichenko argued he personally was unjustly punished for being a rich Russian, dismissing claims that he had any influence on the Russian government. He warned of the catastrophic consequences that the “carpet-bombing” of the Russian economy will cause over a few years.

He assessed that EuroChem products helped feed almost 274 million people. With its fertilizers not produced and sold due to sanctions, the effect would be far worse than what is happening now over the cut in grain exports from Ukraine, he said. “The G7 countries, with their one billion citizens, see themselves as the world’s moral leaders. But they have overridden the interests of the other seven billion people,” he said. Russia and its ally Belarus, another target for Western sanctions, account for 17% of global fertilizer supply, the tycoon said. Exports from those two countries dropped by 30- 40% amid the stand-off with the West, and it’s the most vulnerable people, who are paying the price, he warned. “We don’t know whether people in the third world are already dying, or if they are ‘just’ starving and migrating away,” he said. With social tensions skyrocketing over hunger and fuel shortages, there will be a surge of violence, he predicted. “Perhaps jihad will raise its black flag again. These are not wild theories, but facts.”

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“.. the Russians sent in their junior varsity and systematically wiped up the floor with Ukraine’s 250,000-man, NATO-trained (ha!) army of neo-Nazis..”

Ignition… Lift-off! (Kunstler)

It looks like someone has called room service in a certain Swiss Fortress of Solitude and ordered der Schwabenklaus’s ass to be handed to him on a platter with a side of sauerkraut. The assisted suicide of Western Civ, Euro division, has been interrupted by peasant uprisings, first in the Netherlands, now spreading to Germany, Italy, and Poland. The farmers are on the march. They are coming for you, Klaus, and your World Economic Forum’s legion of implanted government goblins. The governments of virtually all the nations of Western Civ have become enemies of their people. It’s been obvious in the USA for quite some time, but our preposterous attempt to turn Ukraine into a forward NATO missile base next door to Russia finally revealed the villainous rot in Euroland, too.

Cut yourselves off, Germany, from Russian oil and natural gas? Whose bright idea was that? (Hint: Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who else? He supposedly runs that joint, doesn’t he?) Plan B, you Deutsches Volk now realize, is to burn your furniture to stay warm at Christmas. America’s gambit to goad Russia into a Ukrainian quagmire turned into such a mighty fail that the US news media doesn’t even report on the doings there anymore. Which are: the Russians sent in their junior varsity and systematically wiped up the floor with Ukraine’s 250,000-man, NATO-trained (ha!) army of neo-Nazis. That is not an empty pejorative, by the way. They really are explicitly true believers in old Adolf’s mid-20th century program of exterminating the Russ people next door. Mr. Putin wasn’t kidding around when he highlighted that feature of his operation.

So, now the heart of Euroland looks forward to a new era without energy and without modern industry, meaning what? Well, without modern life (maybe without life, period). Der Schwabenklaus outlined that pretty clearly, too, with the by-now shopworn slogan that “You vill own nussing and you vill be heppy.” It was such an absurd maxim that many who pretend to think took it as a sort of joke. And, let’s face it, Klaus really does appear to be a comic figure — the weirdo tunic he sometimes wears, the Hollywood B-movie accent. But not so many are laughing now as the lights go out from Galway Bay to the Gulf of Riga.

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“They treated our warnings so dismissively. This is exactly the situation that we have warned about, this is happening today..”

Western ‘Economic Blitzkrieg’ Has Failed – Putin (RT)

Western nations have failed in their attempts to destabilize the Russian economy with sanctions, President Vladimir Putin said at a government meeting on economic issues on Friday. “As a result of the actions of the Central Bank, as a result of the measures that were taken in a timely manner by the government … a lot was done. And the so-called blitzkrieg that our ill-wishers attempted in relation to Russia, the economic blitzkrieg, of course, has failed,” he said. The president, nevertheless, acknowledged that the restrictions have hurt the country’s economy and “many risks still remain.” Putin has urged that in response to the current challenges associated with Western sanctions, Russian energy companies should work for the long-term perspective.

Gasification of the country’s regions and diversification of exports should be the key tasks for the government, he stressed. According to the Russian leader, the government is already considering options for developing railway, sea and pipeline infrastructure for the supply of Russian oil and oil products to friendly countries, as well as gas transportation infrastructure to increase gas supplies to Asia and the domestic market. Talking about the general economic situation, he pointed out that the world markets “are still in disarray due to the West’s calls to abandon Russian energy resources.” Putin recalled that the price of Brent oil surged to $130 per barrel amid fears of a possible shortage, but in recent days prices have fallen by $20-$30 due to projections of a global economic slowdown.

The Russian president reminded his audience that he had repeatedly warned European leaders about the current situation on the global energy market, but no one listened. “They treated our warnings so dismissively. This is exactly the situation that we have warned about, this is happening today,” he noted. Putin also indicated that if Western countries continue their sanctions policy it could lead to catastrophic consequences for the global energy market. Anti-Russia sanctions cause much more damage to those who introduce them, he said. At the same time, the situation on the Russian energy market is stable despite the sanctions regime, the president explained. According to him, oil and gas condensate production in June reached 10.7 million barrels per day, which is 500,000 barrels more than in the previous month. Overall, Russia’s oil output jumped 3.5% since the start of the year. Gas production for the period from January to May decreased slightly, by merely 2%, the president added.

Putin threats?!

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“In all, these and other dictatorial regimes killed more than 133 million people in the 20th Century..”

Neo-Feudalism: Klaus Schwab, the WEF, and The Great Reset (Rawles)

Men have always sought to dominate and forcefully order the lives of others. This is part of human nature. It dates back to before the days of Noah. Early empires sought power and wealth, by conquest. Monarchies and feudalism dominated the Middle Ages in Europe, South Asia, and East Asia. Then, in a consolidation of monarchist power, colonialism was rampant from the 1550s to the 1950s. Only a few large and economically strong colonies broke away from their parent countries, before 1900. As colonialism began to wane, collectivism started to re-shape the world, mostly after 1916. Ponder the far-reaching effects of these brutal collectivists: the Soviet Union (1917-1991), Nazi Germany (1933-1945), Cambodia (1967-1978), Cuba (1959 to present), and Communist China (1943 to present).

In all, these and other dictatorial regimes killed more than 133 million people in the 20th Century, imprisoned hundreds of millions, and placed billions of people under the yoke of contrived collective economic systems, confiscating their wealth and land. Most of this killing and suffering was at the hands of communists or socialists with grand utopian visions of the future (with special status just for themselves) or a “new world order”. To their way of thinking, this justified taking the lives and property of their countrymen, and often also those in other countries, through invasions.The latest in a long string of socialist despots is coming to the fore. This time it is with the new excuses of “protecting the environment” and preventing or reversing “climate change”. Many of them use the blanket term “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) to encapsulate their plans.

In effect, they want to control every aspect of human life, all around the world, to fulfill their supranational socialistic goals. These are globalists. As a key enabling tool, they want to implement a global electronic currency, with every transaction tracked. In toto, they have is a bigger plan of action than that of the multi-national Marxist-Leninist communist conspiracy of the 20th century. Most of the 20th Century communists wanted to keep nation-states intact. But the 21st Century globalists want a true world government, with all state and national governments subsumed for “the greater good.” The level of collectivism and redistribution of wealth that they covet is much larger than their Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist predecessors ever attempted. These new “green” socialist schemers want The Whole Enchilada: a reset to global government, with themselves at the top.

Schwab

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“Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [Nato] has not yet abandoned its thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’..”

By Making China The Enemy, NATO Is Threatening World Peace (Cook)

As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat. That is part of the reason why Nato issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia. Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step by Nato on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous mission statement, issued in 2010, Nato advocated “a true strategic partnership” with Russia.

According to a report in the New York Times, China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not been for Germany and France. They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their trade and technology links with China. In response, Beijing accused Nato of “maliciously attacking and smearing” it, and warned that the alliance was “provoking confrontation”. Not unreasonably, Beijing believes Nato has strayed well out of its sphere of supposed “defensive” interest: the North Atlantic. Nato was founded in the wake of the Second World War expressly as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The ensuing Cold War was primarily a territorial and ideological battle for the future of Europe, with the ever-present mutual threat of nuclear annihilation.

So how, Beijing might justifiably wonder, does China – on the other side of the globe – fit into Nato’s historic “defensive” mission? How are Chinese troops or missiles now threatening Europe or the US in ways they weren’t before? How are Americans or Europeans suddenly under threat of military conquest from China? The current Nato logic reads something like this: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February is proof that the Kremlin has ambitions to recreate its former Soviet empire in Europe. China is growing its military power and has similar imperial designs towards the rival, breakaway state of Taiwan, as well as western Pacific islands. And because Beijing and Moscow are strengthening their strategic ties in the face of western opposition, Nato has to presume that their shared goal is to bring western civilisation crashing down.

Or as last week’s Nato mission statement proclaimed: “The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.” But if anyone is subverting the “rules-based international order”, a standard the West regularly invokes but never defines, it looks to be Nato itself – or the US, as the hand that wields the Nato hammer. That is certainly the way it looks to Beijing. In its response, China argued: “Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [Nato] has not yet abandoned its thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’ … It is Nato that is creating problems around the world.”

Shinzo Abe

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Blinken’s attempt to drive a wedge between China and Russia. Way too late.

US, China Top Diplomats Voice Cautious Hope In Rare Talks (Barron’s)

The top diplomats from the United States and China voiced guarded hope Saturday of preventing tensions from spiralling out of control as they held rare talks on the Indonesian island of Bali. Neither side expected major breakthroughs between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, but the two powers have moderated their tone and stepped up interaction at a time when the West is focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “In a relationship as complex and consequential as the one between the United States and China, there is a lot to talk about,” Blinken said as he opened discussions at a resort hotel in Bali, where the pair attended a Group of 20 gathering the day before.

“We very much look forward to a productive and constructive conversation,” Blinken said. Wang said that President Xi Jinping believed in cooperation as well as “mutual respect” between the world’s two largest economic powers and that there needed to be “normal exchanges” between them. “We do need to work together to ensure that this relationship will continue to move forward along the right track,” Wang said in front of US and Chinese flags before a day of talks that will include a working lunch. Daniel Kritenbrink, the top US diplomat for East Asia, earlier said that Blinken will seek “guardrails” in the US rivalry with China and do “everything possible to ensure that we prevent any miscalculation that could lead inadvertently to conflict”.

It is Blinken and Wang’s first in-person meeting since October. They are expected to prepare for virtual talks in the coming weeks between Xi and President Joe Biden. After a long chill during the pandemic between the two countries, since last month their defence, finance and national security chiefs as well as their top military commanders have all spoken. China’s state-run Global Times, known for its criticism of the United States, wrote that the growing diplomacy “underscored the two sides’ consensus on avoiding escalating confrontation”.

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What are the “solidarity lanes”?

EU Has Shipped Millions Of Tons Of Ukrainian Grain – Borrell (RT)

The European Union has accelerated the export of Ukrainian grain, almost doubling the volume of shipments in June, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell reported in his Twitter on Friday. According to him, 5.8 million tons of grain have been transported by the EU from Ukraine via so-called “solidarity lanes” since April. Borrell also wrote that “1.2 billion people are severely exposed to the combination of rising food and energy prices and tightening financial conditions.” He once again accused Moscow of “blocking millions of tons of grain in Ukrainian storage facilities, using food as a weapon of war.” Western nations have repeatedly blamed Russia for blocking Ukrainian ports, making it impossible to ship the country’s grain.


Moscow has responded that it would guarantee safe passage for grain shipments if Kiev clears its ports of mines. Last month, President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is not impeding exports, and criticized the West for its “cynical attitude” towards the food supply of the developing nations, which have been worst affected by soaring prices. He said rising inflation in the West was “a result of their own irresponsible macroeconomic policies.” Ukraine, a major agricultural producer, has been unable to export its grain by sea due to the ongoing conflict, with an estimated 22 million to 25 million tons of grain currently stuck in the country’s ports.

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“..this goes to show just how destructive blindly following Washington’s foreign policy is, time and time again, for Europe.”

The EU Doesn’t Have A Plan For Life Without Cheap Russia Energy (Blankenship)

One solution on the table is for the EU to import liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States. However, shipments of American LNG to the EU and UK have already increased since the political tensions between Europe and Russia began. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the US exported 74% of its LNG to Europe in the first four months of 2022, which is up from 34% the previous year. But this was apparently not enough to keep European energy prices stable. This raises a fundamental issue, which is whether the European Union can actually afford to maintain its sanctions on Russia.

Members’ economic models are simply not compatible with the reality that their sanctions are creating, and this is already hurting people’s wellbeing and leading to social and political unrest. The European Union’s foreign policy is supposed to follow the doctrine of “strategic autonomy,” but what is happening is neither strategic nor an act of autonomy. No doubt the situation in Ukraine is horrifying and has led Europeans to question the existing security architecture of the region, but, if the latest strategic concept of NATO is any suggestion, the shots are being called from Washington.

Famed international relations scholar John Mearsheimer recently lamented in a speech that, “History will judge the United States and its allies with abundant harshness for its foolish policy on Ukraine.” In fact, the prevailing allied policy on Ukraine is doing everything to ensure that the conflict becomes protracted – which has the dual threat of destroying Ukraine and hurting Europe’s future economic prospects. That’s because the longer the conflict continues, or if it continues indefinitely, it means the bifurcation between Russia and the West will be permanent. And it logically follows that this will impact the economic model of European countries, particularly of Germany. If that is the eventuality we are headed for, then the EU’s fate becomes a question.

Already, people in the Czech capital of Prague are beginning to joke that in a few years Europe will be nothing more than a summer holiday spot for the Americans and Chinese. But are there really enough jobs in the tourism industry for all of us here? And can we all withstand the winter off-season? Jokes aside, I believe that Germany’s trade deficit is significant. In a few days, the trend could be more pronounced if other industrial European countries report similar deficits. At the very least, this should sound the alarm on exactly what the European Union’s long-term plans are vis-á-vis Russia and whether or not European industry can feasibly survive with sanctions on Russian energy. My bet is that it can’t. And this goes to show just how destructive blindly following Washington’s foreign policy is, time and time again, for Europe.

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“..the G7’s plan to boycott Russia at the G20 failed. Nobody supported the Western regimes. That is why they are fuming now.”

Note from Maria Zakharova (Saker)

Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: “The fact that the Russian Foreign Minister spent most of his time during the talks not in the room, but outside it, highlights the fact that the Russian government is not a single millimetre closer to having talks.” Can you even make any sense out of what she said? Outside what room? Utter nonsense. The German public should be aware of the fact that their Foreign Minister Annalena is lying to them. Lavrov was among the audience the moment the G20 meeting started and about two hours later he began to hold bilateral talks with his colleagues who attended this forum in a room next door. This is what other ministers did as well, since in-person forums are held exactly for the purpose of holding meetings and having contacts.

Otherwise, everyone would have gone online or sent out their speeches. Or, maybe Baerbock thinks that the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil and other countries also were in the wrong room? On the other hand, Germans are already beginning to realise who is in power in their country. More than half of the German citizens (58 percent) believe that German Foreign Minister Baerbock should have personally met and held talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial which is taking place on the Indonesian island of Bali. On Friday, Der Spiegel published a survey by Civey pollster to that effect.

Now, the truth about Baerbock. She said this because the G7’s plan to boycott Russia at the G20 failed. Nobody supported the Western regimes. That is why they are fuming now. Lavrov made his schedule in advance, including in it the G20 meeting and a dinner on behalf of the hosts, as well as numerous bilateral contacts and communication with international media. The materials, photos and videos are available on the Foreign Ministry’s website and on social media. And neither Annalena nor anyone else can change reality with their lies.

https://twitter.com/mission_russian/status/1545412521900785664

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“..servicemen who remain dubious on the merits of the vaccine will feel the repercussions of disobeying a directive..”

Army Cuts Pay, Benefits From 60,000 Unvaccinated National Guard, Reserves (Fox)

The U.S. Army on Friday said that roughly 40,000 National Guardsmen and 22,000 Reservists who have refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will be barred from their duties, effectively cutting their pay and benefits. “Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” an Army spokesperson said in a statement to Military.com. The announcement comes one week after the deadline for the Army National Guard passed that required soldiers to get the shots in their arms.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in November said that members of the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard who refused to get vaccinated would be barred from participating in trainings and their pay would be blocked. Austin also warned that the continued refusal to get vaccinated could result in “separation” or expulsion from the service. The move reportedly comes as servicemen prepare for annual summer trainings that help them hone their military skills and ensure they are ready should they need to be deployed. Though servicemen who remain dubious on the merits of the vaccine will feel the repercussions of disobeying a directive, Army officials said they will continue to work with soldiers to keep them in the service — whether through informing them on the benefits of the vaccine or in rare cases making sure they qualify for exemption status.

“We’re going to give every soldier every opportunity to get vaccinated and continue their military career,” Director of the Army Guard, Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, said in a statement to Military.com. “We’re not giving up on anybody until the separation paperwork is signed and completed.” Roughly 13 percent of the Army National Guard and 12 percent of Army Reservists remain unvaccinated — a margin that could prove crippling to the ranks as the service struggles with low recruitment.

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Nitrogen=fertilizer=crop yields.

Nitrogen is also cars and planes. We’re sacrificing our food for traffic.

Trudeau’s Nitrogen Policy Will Decimate Canadian Farming (TCS)

In December 2020, the Trudeau government unveiled their new climate plan, with a focus on reducing nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer by 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. “Fertilizers play a major role in the agriculture sector’s success and have contributed to record harvests in the last decade. They have helped drive increases in Canadian crop yields, grain sales, and exports,” a news release from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada reads. “However, nitrous oxide emissions, particularly those associated with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use have also grown significantly. That is why the Government of Canada has set the national fertilizer emissions reduction target, which is part of the commitment to reduce total GHG emissions in Canada by 40-45% by 2030….”

This is a tacit admission that any attempt to lower admissions by reducing nitrogen fertilizer will consequently lower crop yields over the next decade, hurting the Agriculture sector and, more importantly, hurting farmers. And indeed, according to a report from Fertilizer Canada: “Total Emission Reduction puts a cap on the total emissions allowable from fertilizer at 30% below 2020 levels. As the yield of Canadian crops is directly linked to proper fertilizer application this creates a ceiling on Canadian agricultural productivity well below 2020 levels…. It is estimated that a 30% absolute emission reduction for an a farmer with 1000 acres of canola and 1000 acres of wheat, stands to have their profit reduced by approximately $38,000 – $40,500/ annually. In 2020, Western Canadian farmers planted approximately 20.8 million acres of canola. Using these values, cumulatively farm revenues from canola could be reduced by $396M – $441M on an annual basis. Wheat famers could experience a reduction of $400M.”

Moreover, Fertilizer Canada doesn’t believe that forcibly decreasing fertilizer use will even lower greenhouse gases but could lead to carbon leakage in other jurisdictions. Nonetheless, Trudeau’s government is moving forward, with farmer’s groups speaking to Farmers Forum now wondering if he’s intentionally trying to cause a food shortage — which Trudeau previously told Canadians to prepare for. “We’ve seen from the global pandemic to the war in Ukraine significant disruptions of supply chains around the world, which is resulting in higher prices for consumers and democracies like ours, and resulting in significant shortages and projected shortages of food and energy in places around the world,” Trudeau said. “This is going to be a difficult time,” he continued, “because of the war, because of the recovery from the pandemic. And Canadians will do what we always do: we’ll be there for each other.”

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“As with prior shortages, this one is due to government policies.”

Today’s America: An Economy of Shortages (ET)

For the first time in over 40 years, the U.S. economy is dealing with widespread shortages. Parts are unavailable for manufacturers when they need them. Airlines abruptly cancel flights. Railroads and trucks are cutting shipments. Food shelves in some areas are depleted with some areas reporting a lack of meat supplies, milk, or other essential food items. Shortages and empty shelves are characteristic of economies where governments control and allocate resources. They are not characteristic of America’s free-market economy. The only other times America has faced shortages were during World Wars or during the 1970s. Government-imposed price controls were directly responsible for shortages in the early 1970s. When businesses were unable to raise prices to sell their goods at a profit, they stopped producing, which created the shortages.

Once the price controls were removed, the shortages ended. Also in the 1970s, government price controls on oil and gas led to severe shortages on both. By the end of the decade, there were long lines of cars waiting at gas stations and purchases were rationed to ten gallons of gas. As soon as President Reagan removed price controls, the shortages of oil and gasoline ended and prices declined. Free-market economies seldom experience shortages. This isn’t because everything is always plentiful. Bad weather can destroy crops. Disease can kill herds creating a shortfall in meat. Labor disputes or international shocks also disrupt markets. While shortfalls in some items are inevitable, a free-market economy adjusts and corrects for such events.

In free-market economies, shortages are rare because the market is remarkably efficient at raising prices of items that are in short supply. Sharply higher prices for scarce items, limit their use to the most efficient uses of the items and encourages the use of substitute items. Doing so enables the economy to adjust to potential shortages and shocks in the most efficient way possible. In the current situation, the wide range of shortages highlights a serious problem. As with prior shortages, this one is due to government policies. While the federal government has not placed direct price controls on the economy, it has distorted markets in a number of indirect ways.

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“Should Americans be concerned that a presidential son was texting and exchanging wire transfers with alleged prostitutes using a Russian email address?”

The Tale of Hunter Biden’s Payments To Alleged Russian Prostitutes (JTN)

As his father was ramping up his 2020 presidential run, Hunter Biden was busy texting a woman with a Russian email address about finding a way to evade bank suspicions so they could complete a wire transfer. “Email with .ru flags wires,” Hunter Biden texted the woman named Eva in early January 2019, according to evidence two members of Congress have sent the Justice Department. “Too much red flag for bank,” Hunter Biden texted another time when wire coordinates for the payment to the woman were sent. “That its [sic] what got my accounts frozen and reviewed by bank. Send me Julia and I will give her the cash.” The text messages — first reported in the news media and now recounted in an official letter from Congress to DOJ — raise a tantalizing question: Should Americans be concerned that a presidential son was texting and exchanging wire transfers with alleged prostitutes using a Russian email address?

Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, two Republicans who have spent more time than any investigating the Biden family’s overseas business dealings, believe the answer is a resounding “Yes.” “These findings of potentially criminal behavior must be thoroughly investigated by law enforcement entities according to the highest ethical standards,” the senators wrote this week to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Chris Wray and U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss in a letter pleading for action. The letter provided a pointed reminder that Hunter Biden was aware banks had suspicions he was engaged in wrongdoing, flagging his accounts for reviews, and was in his own words trying to evade those suspicions.

Johnson and Grassley have disclosed that dozens of financial transactions involving the president’s son and his business deals were flagged to the U.S. Treasury Department by banks that filed Suspicious Activity Reports. Just the News has confirmed that one former executive of a bank has filed a whistleblower complaint to the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commissioner suggesting there is far more to the Hunter Biden story than what is public. And documents obtained by Just the News show Hunter Biden was warned repeatedly starting in 2016 that he had failed to pay taxes on money he had earned from one of his more controversial business clients, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. It a picture now well documented in the public but frequently blacked out by a Democrat-led Congress and news media unwilling to ask the hard questions, Grassley and Johnson argue in their letter.

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“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”

Musk Tells Twitter He Wants Out Of Deal To Buy It (CNN)

Elon Musk moved Friday afternoon to terminate his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter — the latest twist in a whirlwind process in which the billionaire Tesla CEO became the company’s biggest shareholder, turned down a board seat, agreed to buy the social media platform and then started raising doubts about going through with the deal. The next chapter in the saga is almost certain to be a court battle. A lawyer representing Musk claimed in a letter to Twitter’s top lawyer that he is ending the deal because Twitter (TWTR) is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the original agreement, which was signed in April, according to a regulatory filing Friday evening.

Musk has for weeks expressed concerns, without any apparent evidence, that there are a greater number of bots and spam accounts on the platform than Twitter has said publicly. Analysts have speculated that the concerns may be an attempt to create a pretext to get out of a deal he may now see as overpriced, after Twitter shares and the broader tech market have declined in recent weeks. Tesla (TSLA) stock, which Musk was planning to rely on in part to finance the deal, has also declined sharply since he agreed to the deal. “The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” Twitter board chair Bret Taylor said in a tweet Friday, echoing earlier statements by the company that it planned to follow through with the deal. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

[..] Still, Musk’s lawyer alleged in the Friday letter that Twitter has “not complied with its contractual obligations” to provide Musk with sufficient data, and said Twitter “appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied” when agreeing to the deal. “For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,'” the Friday letter reads. “This information is fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance and is necessary to consummate the transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement.”

It continues: “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”

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Pie: “A Shakespearian tragedy written by monkeys on type writers”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1545069360477192193

 

 

James Caan

 

 

 

 

 

 

MegaVac

 

 

 

 

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Jul 072022
 
 July 7, 2022  Posted by at 8:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  38 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The rescue 1936

 

‘Western’ Media Spread Copium To Prolong The War In Ukraine (MoA)
Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany Touts Nazi War Criminal As A Hero (AT)
Why Doesn’t Africa Support The West In Sanctions War Against Russia? (Lumango)
China Queues Up to Join the Davos Beatdown (Luongo)
US-Led Naval Escort To Break Russian Blockade Could Risk Wider War (RS)
U.S. Should Leave NATO, Marjorie Taylor Greene Says (Celente)
Medvedev Warns US Against Pressing For War Crimes Court (AP)
The Empire Is Not Done Torturing Afghanistan (Escobar)
Interview With Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (Bannon)
Hambro: BIS, Central Banks Are Rigging Gold Market Using Paper Gold (BStar)
Lab-Designed GMO “Carbon Capture Plants” to Replace Pastures (Chudov)
Cassidy Hutchinson Broke Every Rule Of Being A DC Aide (Van Buren)
The CDC Is Breaking Trust in Childhood Vaccination (Tablet)
Vanishing Vaccine Mandates (Spec.au)
TWICE as Many Vaccine Deaths as Covid Deaths in US Households (DS)

 

 

 

 

The “Golden Pin-up Boys For Klaus Schwab”

 

 

“Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
-Mark Twain

 

 

Comedian

 

 

 

 

“Russia needed some 25 BTCs to cover the frontline on June 21. It now needs only 5 BTC to cover the current line.”

‘Western’ Media Spread Copium To Prolong The War In Ukraine (MoA)

The war in Ukraine is clearly progressing in Russia’s favor. That is why I am appalled by the incompetent descriptions in ‘western’ media of past and current operations in that war. Consider this June 21 map of the Lysichansk cauldron as it was developing. The frontline extended over 125+ kilometers (78 miles).

Fourteen days later and the map looks like this.The frontline has been shortened to 25 kilometer (15 miles). On Sunday the Russia Defense Ministry announced that it troops had ‘liberated’ 184 square kilometer over the last 24 hours.

When I was in the military my tank battalion was expected to operate on a generally five kilometer (3 miles) wide frontline. That was of course just a rule of thumb depending on the terrain and other circumstances. But we can expect that a Russian Battalion Tactical Group (BTC) has similar abilities of frontline coverage. Russia needed some 25 BTCs to cover the frontline on June 21. It now needs only 5 BTC to cover the current line. There were and now are of course additional reserve troops and some BTC are rotated out as rested ones come in just as Russia’s president has ordered them to do: “Shoigu told Putin that “the operation” was completed Sunday after Russian troops overran the city of Lysychansk, the last stronghold of Ukrainian forces in Luhansk. Putin, in turn, said that the military units “that took part in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk “should rest, increase their combat capabilities.”

In a week or two those BTCs which now rest and resupply will be back. They will create a new cauldron around Siversk and maybe Bakhmut, decimate the Ukrainian forces within it to then capture the whole area. Despite this obvious path to progress for the Russian side the Associate Press headlines: “High Cost Of Russia Gains In Ukraine Could Limit New Advance” The only purported evidence of high Russian costs are the assertions of a ‘military analyst in Ukraine’ who claims that some Russian units lost half of their soldiers. I have seen nothing that would support such a claim. The AP writer then adds this: “The limited manpower has forced the Russian commanders to avoid ambitious attempts to encircle large areas in the Donbas, opting for smaller maneuvers and relying on heavy artillery barrages to slowly force the Ukrainians to retreat.”

Please. Look at the above maps. What did Russia just do? It had made an ambitious attempt to encircle a large are in Donbas and succeeded with the effort in just a few days. The Ukrainian army threw everything it had available into the cauldron and lost thousands of men while the Russian army avoided direct men against men fighting to minimize its own casualties.

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Scary dude.

Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany Touts Nazi War Criminal As A Hero (AT)

In Europe, the past never goes away, and that’s certainly true in Central and Eastern Europe. We’ve already heard about the openly Nazi brigades in the modern Ukraine army. Now, to make it worse, the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany just touted as one of Ukraine’s greatest freedom fighters Stephan Bandera, who helped murder 800,000 Ukrainian Jews and 40,000-100,000 Poles. That didn’t surprise me at all. It’s what I expected. From the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, I’ve been ambivalent. On the one hand, I was horrified as all people of conscience must be when they see a military power brutally attack an innocent civilian population.

On the other hand, having some familiarity with both Ukrainian and Russian history, I knew that (a) this was a fight going back centuries, (b) that we had no business getting involved in a regional war, and (c) that I don’t have particularly warm feelings for either combatant. Both Ukraine and the USSR behaved horribly during WWII, including allying with the Nazis. Ukraine was especially gleeful as it joined the Nazis in slaughtering Jews within its territory. It did so with such vigor that even the Nazis were shocked. Nor does it matter to me that the current President of Ukraine is nominally Jewish. So were the Kapos in the concentration camps and George Soros. The worst antisemites in the world have been Jews (see, e.g., Karl Marx, whose father had him convert as a small boy, and who went on to bake antisemitism into the socialist cake).

That’s why I wasn’t at all surprised to read David P. Goldman’s article about Andrej Melnyk, who insisted during an interview with Germany’s Die Welt that Bandera was nothing more than a freedom fighter: Germany’s leading center-right newspaper Die Welt posted a banner headline at the top of its page last Friday evening just before Shabbat came in here in New York: “[Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andrej] Melnyk’s statement trivializes the Holocaust.” In a radio interview last week, Melnyk compared Ukrainian Nazi leader Stephan Bandera to Robin Hood and vehemently denied—in the face of massive historical documentation—that Bandera had helped to murder 800,000 Ukrainian Jews during World War II. The Banderites also helped to murder between 40,000 and 100,000 Poles.

[..] Melnyk said, “Not just for me, but for many, many Ukrainians, he personifies the freedom fighter… and of course a freedom fighter… There are now written laws for those who fight for freedom. Robin Hood is also respected by everyone, and he also did not work according to the law current at the time.” The astonished German interviewer said, “And you admit that he and his men were involved in the murder of 800,000 Jews?” “No, he was not involved,” said Melnyk The interviewer protested, “But it was his army. That’s what his men did. There is no doubt about that.” Melnyk retorted, “You say, ‘No doubt,’ but there is no evidence. He was not convicted.”

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Because of the past. And the future.

Why Doesn’t Africa Support The West In Sanctions War Against Russia? (Lumango)

1. Historical memory of colonisation and the struggle for national liberation: Russia, heir to the Former USSR, supported ideologically, politically, economically, and militarily the national liberation struggles of several African countries, which after the achievement of independence, followed the communist model as the basis of their political, social and economic construction. Even though they later adopted Western capitalism, the mentality of the African cosmos is still of Soviet influence, because it was there that most of them did their military and political training and received economic support to finance the liberation wars to put an end to Western colonisation, with direct and indirect help from Cuba as an intermediary in some cases.

The cold war between the USA and NATO against the USSR led to civil wars in African countries to conquer the spaces of influence. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the resurgence of Russia, Westerners looked at the situation as an absolute victory. Despite this, the African cosmos has not forgotten colonisation, the interference of Western countries in their internal affairs, and the rigged processes of massive indebtedness of their economies as a way of controlling their strategic natural resources.

2. Recent memory of wars at the beginning of the 21st century: Beyond colonial issues, the African cosmos has been following since 2001 the behaviour of the West (US, NATO, and EU) in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, sweetened by the Arab Springs, attempted coups in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tunisia, Egypt, etc., without forgetting the massacre in Rwanda and the war in Somalia and Yemen. These wars and coups have destroyed thousands of human lives, social infrastructure, jobs, etc. It was a catastrophe for the entire continent and nearby territories like South East Asia.

The existing wars in Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique, DRC, Ethiopia, etc, allow the African cosmos, even those with strong ties to the West like Morocco, for example, not to act frontally against Russia, a fact verified in the recent votes of the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council which suspended it. The expulsion of French forces by the military junta in Mali and their replacement by the Russians through the Wagner group, like the construction of a port for the Russian Nave Arms on the Sudanese Red Sea coast, could be a revealing symptom.

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“..disastrous G-7 Summit where the biggest collection of unserious buffoons gathered to ban the sale of Russian gold and contemplate a global price cap on oil..”

China Queues Up to Join the Davos Beatdown (Luongo)

Fungal Joe is going to lift the Trump tariffs on Chinese imports this week to buy votes by hoping inflation moderates. I’m okay with him doing this trying to right the ship. Tariffs are never the answer, just like sanctions. Notice also this has zero to do with monetary policy and everything to do with supply disruptions caused by government diktat. This change by China signals an intention by the CCP to open China back up to tourism and business development that isn’t likely to be reversed. I expect this to be real and for China to make even more little moves like this as the summer drags on and markets churn in the West.

With that change, capital inflow lessens the pressure on both the Hong Kong dollar (HKD) and the Hang Seng while giving China more cover to loosen monetary policy without necessarily raising rates and creates another place for capital to flow now that the ECB has capitulated. Christine Lagarde’s recent statements about fighting inflation being “more art than science” is just saying the quiet parts out loud. But it was what came out of the ECB’s emergency meeting a couple of weeks ago that finally signaled the end for the euro in the minds of investors. Not only is Germany’s industrial base being literally destroyed gleefully by its government, now the ECB is going to sell German debt to buy Italian and Spanish debt to keep from drowning. This is akin to bailing water out of one end of the boat only to throw it in the other end.

Couple these things with the frankly, disastrous G-7 Summit where the biggest collection of unserious buffoons gathered to ban the sale of Russian gold and contemplate a global price cap on oil. … words fail me. Honestly, after this G-7 the rush into the BRICS Alliance as well the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) will be unstoppable. What serious investor with real capital appreciation goals is going to look at this group of committed (and committable) lunatics and think, “Yes! I can trust my money with Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Ursula Von der Leyen!” No, they are looking at this crap and opening up Tradestation. The fact that Justin Trudeau was even invited should have been your sell signal. While the BRICS were talking about a new trade settlement currency and adding members, the G-7 was talking World War III while getting caught spending more time on photo ops than substantive dialogue.

[..] When you look at the fragility of the EU, the UK, and Canada you realize that the only thing propping up global markets at this point is the hope that the U.S. mid-terms are a complete refutation of the Davos agenda. If that doesn’t happen, if somehow Soros and Davos steal enough seats and put a bunch of RINOs back into Congress and the Senate to freeze any reform of Washington D.C. the collapse of the West will accelerate very quickly.

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“..these ideas have been wrapped in humanitarian language. But in reality, they amount to a call for highly risky U.S.-led military action.”

US-Led Naval Escort To Break Russian Blockade Could Risk Wider War (RS)

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, relatively few in the Western commentariat have been willing to call for the United States to engage in direct war against Moscow. The reasons for this caution are obvious — Russia is a nuclear state, and has a military that, its recent underperformance notwithstanding, is still vastly more formidable than any recent target of U.S. military intervention. Yet despite — or perhaps because of — this general resistance to direct U.S. involvement, many commentators and politicians have come up with more underhanded proposals for American military intervention. Most notably, this began with widespread calls for the United States and NATO to establish a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine early in the war.

In spite of its innocuous and legalistic name, the Biden administration soundly rejected this proposal as its enforcement would rather obviously entail shooting down Russian aircraft, which in turn would lead to a wider war. More recently, as the danger of a global food crisis made worse by the loss of grain exports from Ukraine and Russia has increased, new calls have emerged for the United States and allies to use naval power to ensure that Ukrainian grain can safely transit the Black Sea. Similar to demands for a no-fly zone, these ideas have been wrapped in humanitarian language. But in reality, they amount to a call for highly risky U.S.-led military action.

Versions of the proposal have been put forward by Lithuania’s foreign minister, retired U.S. military leaders including admiral James Stavridis, general Wesley Clark, and general Jack Keane, as well as Democratic representative Elissa Slotkin and the editorial boards of the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal. While these proposals vary in detail, all invoke the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention to justify and legitimize the action. The Wall Street Journal calls for a U.S.-led naval escort to be “planned and pitched as a humanitarian operation.” Stavridis referred to his plan as a “humanitarian grain mission” while Slotkin simply called for a “humanitarian escort.” The Boston Globe called its proposal a “human-rights mission” while the Lithuanian foreign minister deemed it a “non-military humanitarian mission.”

Most strikingly, both the Lithuanian foreign minister and the Wall Street Journal have referred to the nations participating in this hypothetical naval escort as a “coalition of the willing,” and odd choice given that phrase’s association with the U.S. war on Iraq and the Bush administration’s efforts to give a veneer of multilateral legitimacy to its illegal invasion.

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“..just 8 percent said the U.S. should “ensure a defeat of Russia in Ukraine.”

U.S. Should Leave NATO, Marjorie Taylor Greene Says (Celente)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican from Georgia, came out against the U.S.’s involvement in the Ukraine War and called on Washington to pull out of the Alliance. “The American people do not want war with Russia, but NATO and our own foolish leaders are dragging us into one,” she said in a tweet. Greene said the U.S. is waging a proxy war with Russia that no country can win and can escalate into a nuclear confrontation. There has been near-universal bipartisan support for sanctions against Russia coupled with military aid to Ukraine to fight off the Russian invasion. But Greene, who is considered a firebrand in the party, has been more critical of Ukraine’s role before the war. She said in March that the West was agitating Russia by “poking the bear” with NATO expansion.

She also did not buy the media’s claim early on in the war that Moscow would lose. She broke from her party and said Russia was “very successful” in its invasion. President Joe Biden has worked to present NATO as a united front for good against Russia. His support for Ukraine has no limit. On Friday, the U.S. said it will send Kyiv an additional $820 million in military aid. The U.S. has given Ukraine some $57 billion since the war started on 24 February. This latest injection will go to additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), up to 150,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition, and four additional counter-artillery radars.

Despite the support from Congress, war with Russia is not a popular position among Americans. A YouGov poll found that 40 percent say the U.S. should be less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world. The Ukraine War is also not something that is on the mind of everyday Americans. The poll found that 38 percent think Washington should tackle the surging costs of living while just 8 percent said the U.S. should “ensure a defeat of Russia in Ukraine.” Greene posted on Twitter: “The American people do not want war with Russia, but NATO and our own foolish leaders are dragging us into one. A war that no one will win. Escalation over Ukraine, a non-member nation, risking nuclear war is a power-play endangering the entire world. We should pull out of NATO.”

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“That’s why the rotten dogs of war are barking in such a disgusting way.”

Medvedev Warns US Against Pressing For War Crimes Court (AP)

A top Kremlin official warned the U.S. Wednesday that it could face the “wrath of God” if it pursues efforts to help establish an international tribunal to investigate Russia’s action in Ukraine, while the Russian lower house speaker urged Washington to remember that Alaska used to belong to Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, denounced the U.S. for what he described as its efforts to “spread chaos and destruction across the world for the sake of ‘true democracy.’” “The entire U.S. history since the times of subjugation of the native Indian population represents a series of bloody wars,” Medvedev charged in a long diatribe on his Telegram channel, pointing out the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan during World War II and the war in Vietnam.


“Was anyone held responsible for those crimes? What tribunal condemned the sea of blood spilled by the U.S. there?” Responding to the U.S.-backed calls for an international tribunal to prosecute the perceived war crimes by Russia in Ukraine, Medvedev rejected it as an attempt by the U.S. “to judge others while staying immune from any trial.” “It won’t work with Russia, they know it well,” Medvedev concluded. “That’s why the rotten dogs of war are barking in such a disgusting way.” “The U.S. and its useless stooges should remember the words of the Bible: Do not judge and you will not be judged … so that the great day of His wrath doesn’t come to their home one day,” Medvedev said, referring to the Apocalypse. He noted that the “idea to punish a country with the largest nuclear potential is absurd and potentially creates the threat to mankind’s existence.”

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“War crimes were duly perpetrated – some of them denounced by an organization led by a sterling journalist who was subsequently subjected to years of psychological torture by the same Empire..”

The Empire Is Not Done Torturing Afghanistan (Escobar)

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not far away, the Empire of Chaos launched the so-called “War on Terror” against an impoverished cemetery of empires at the crossroads of Central and South Asia. In the name of national security, the land of the Afghans was bombed until the Pentagon ran out of targets, as their chief Donald Rumsfeld, addicted to “known unknowns,” complained at the time. Civilian targets, also known as “collateral damage,” were the norm for years. Multitudes had to flee to neighboring nations to find shelter, while tens of thousands were incarcerated for unknown reasons, some even dispatched to an illegal imperial gulag on a tropical island in the Caribbean.

War crimes were duly perpetrated – some of them denounced by an organization led by a sterling journalist who was subsequently subjected to years of psychological torture by the same Empire, obsessed with extraditing him into its own prison dystopia. All the time, the smug, civilized ‘international community’ – shorthand for the collective west – was virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. Afghanistan was occupied by over 40 nations – while repeatedly bombed and droned by the Empire, which suffered no condemnation for its aggression; no package after package of sanctions; no confiscation of hundreds of billions of dollars; no punishment at all. At the peak of its unipolar moment, the Empire could experiment with anything in Afghanistan because impunity was the norm.

Two examples spring to mind: Kandahar, Panjwayi district, March 2012: an imperial soldier kills 16 civilians and then burns their bodies. While in Kunduz, April 2018: a graduation ceremony receives a Hellfire missile greeting, with over 30 civilians killed. The final act of the imperial “non-aggression” against Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that did not hit “multiple suicide bombers” but instead eviscerated a family of 10, including several children. The “imminent threat” in question, identified as an “ISIS facilitator” by US intelligence, was actually an aid worker returning to meet his family. The ‘international community’ duly spewed imperial propaganda for days until serious questions started to be asked.

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Steve Bannon via Robert Malone’s site.

Interview With Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (Bannon)

YOUR EXCELLENCY, after the psycho-pandemic, we now have the Russian- Ukrainian crisis. Are we in “phase two” of one single project, or can we now consider the Covid farce to be over and concern ourselves with the increase in energy prices?

If in the last two years we had been faced with a true pandemic, caused by a deadly virus for which no other cures existed except for a vaccine, we would be able to think that the emergency was not intended. But this is not what happened: the SARS-CoV-2 virus is nothing but a seasonal flu that could have been cured with existing treatments and effective prevention based on strengthening immune defenses. The prohibition of treatment, the discrediting of the effectiveness of drugs that have been in use for decades, the decision to hospitalize the elderly who became sick in nursing homes and the imposition of an experimental gene treatment that has been demonstrated not only to be ineffective but also harmful and often fatal – all this confirms for us that the pandemic has been planned and managed with the purpose of creating the greatest damage possible. This is a fact that has been established and confirmed by the official data, despite the systematic falsification of that same data. Certainly, those who wanted to manage the pandemic in this way are not disposed now to yield easily, also because there are billionaire interests behind all of it. But what “they” want does not always necessarily happen.

In your opinion, Your Excellency, was the pandemic managed in this way due to inexperience? Or was it due to the corruption of those in positions of control who are in a conflict of interest because they are paid off by the pharmaceutical industry?

This is the second element to consider: the response to the pandemic was the same all over the world, where health authorities slavishly adapted to health protocols that were contrary to the scientific literature and medical evidence, instead following the directives of self-proclaimed “experts,” who have a record of sensational failures, apocalyptic predictions completely divorced from reality, and very grave conflicts of interest. We cannot think that millions of doctors all over the world have lost their basic knowledge of the art of medicine, believing that a flu should be allowed to evolve into pneumonia and then be treated with tachypirin or by placing patients on ventilators. If they have done this, it is due to pressure – even to the point of blackmail – by health authorities over medical personnel, with the help of a scandalous campaign of media terrorism and with the support of Western leaders.

Most of these leaders are members of a lobby – the World Economic Forum – that trained them and placed them at the highest levels of national and international institutions in order to be certain that those who govern would be obedient. Klaus Schwab has publicly boasted, on many occasions, of being able to interfere even with religious leaders. These too are documented facts in all the nations that followed the directives of the WHO and the pharmaceutical companies. There is clearly a single script under a single direction: this demonstrates the existence of a criminal design and the malice of its creators.

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“The only way to achieve the cover is by smashing the price of physical gold by the alchemical production of ‘paper gold’.”

Hambro: BIS, Central Banks Are Rigging Gold Market Using Paper Gold (BStar)

The trigger for Peter Hambro’s article is a recent chart from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which due to a data reclassification starting in Q1 2022, now shows the massive extent to which bullion banks such as JP Morgan have amassed precious metals derivatives contracts to hold down the gold price.. Hambro describes this manipulation of the gold price using derivatives as a ‘tinder-box’, which ‘disinformation [has] for many years kept the lid on”.

But who, you might ask, is directing this disinformation and this gold price manipulation? According to Hambro’s bombshell, its the BIS in Switzerland, i.e. the central banks’ central bank. Hambro drops the bombshell that: ”since 2018 the Financial Stability Desks at the world’s central banks have followed the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) instruction to hide the perception of inflation by rigging the gold market.” But since the central banks ‘need cover’ and ‘cannot be seen’ to be rigging the gold price, Hambro continues: “The only way to achieve the cover is by smashing the price of physical gold by the alchemical production of ‘paper gold’.” If this has now got your attention, read on, since Hambro elaborates:


“With the help of the futures markets and the connivance of the Alchemists, the bullion traders – yes, that includes me, I was Deputy Managing Director of Mocatta & Goldsmid – managed to create an unshakeable perception that ounces of gold credited to an account with a bank or bullion dealer were the same as the real thing. “And much easier, old chap! You don’t have to store or insure it”. The gold credit which Hambro is referring to here is the LBMA’s infamous ‘unallocated gold’, with ‘the futures markets’ being the COMEX.

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WEF.

Lab-Designed GMO “Carbon Capture Plants” to Replace Pastures (Chudov)

The World Economic Forum has a new proposal (archive): engineered crops whose roots DO NOT ROT when the plants die, and “capture carbon”.

Their plan (per article) is as follows: • Make us stop eating meat: “Decreasing the amount of land devoted to livestock will reduce methane emissions” • Plant genetically engineered crops in place of pastures, that would capture carbon. “By using a molecule found in avocado and cantaloupe skins, these engineered roots can better resist decomposition, minimizing carbon escape.” So, after we stop eating meat, they plan on liquidating pastures and planting those genetically engineered “carbon-capturing” plants on the pasture land. The plants would have genetically altered polymer roots (archive) that will not decompose. Think of these roots, for the purposes of discussing decomposition, as being made of plastic polymers, like plastic fibers or ropes.

Thus, the WEF plan goes, these GM plants would grow in former pastures, grow polymer roots, and die every year, BUT THE ROOTS WILL NOT DECOMPOSE. Since the roots do not decompose, the soil will gradually become firmly permeated by a thickening tangle of never-disappearing polymer roots. Those roots would hold CO2 forever. Great right? Except that I have some questions: • Will this pasture soil be basically permanently condemned to hosting these genetically modified plants, since no other plants could penetrate the tangles of plastic-like polymer roots until the jammed soil no longer supports any growth at all?

• What will happen to the diversity of native pasture plants that never evolved to grow on soil which is blockaded by these genetically modified, never-rotting plants? • What will happen to insects such as bees, living off native pasture plants and their pollen? • What will happen to worms, no longer able to move through the soil? • What will happen to the birds, who eat those insects and worms? • What will happen to burrowing animals, who no longer would be able to burrow in the tangles? • What if, like Sars-Cov-2, these soil-clogging, never-rotting plants escape and outcompete wild plants everywhere else? Before you dismiss that, please realize that these plants have to outcompete natural pasture plants to take root in the former pastures.

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“You don’t violate the rules of being a staff aide without consequences, after all.”

Cassidy Hutchinson Broke Every Rule Of Being A DC Aide (Van Buren)

Trump’s movement away from his January 6 speech went badly. The former president wanted to go to the Capitol but his Secret Service detail felt it was unsafe and, in a rare gesture, overruled him. Trump was upset and took it out on the two guys in charge, Tony Ornato and Bobby Engel. Back at the office, the guys dutifully recounted what happened, with Cassie all ears (Rule 5: as staff aide, you’re not well-briefed enough to overhear things and make sense of them). She heard what may have been a bit of macho exaggeration by the guys, Trump grabbing the steering wheel and all, perhaps a bit of bravado as everyone was cooling down. She misunderstood what she heard (Rule 6, it happens), setting the story in The Beast, the massive armored stretch Cadillac limo that is the official presidential ride, when whatever happened happened in a Secret Service SUV per video records.

A Secret Service agent would never misremember an SUV for The Beast but an aide would. When the January 6 Committee came ’round, Cassie thought she had a tale to tell, Trump out of control in the vehicle and later throwing his lunch during a tantrum, his ketchup dripping down the wallpaper. The thing is, Cassie did not see either happen. She was repeating a Secret Service war story in the first instance and imagining the details in the second (she actually saw the ketchup dripping but not the throw). Any first-year law student will know those are examples of hearsay and secondhand information, immediately inadmissible as evidence. The Secret Service is ready to call Cassie a liar; Trump already did.

Cassie also claimed to have written a note about a potential Trump statement meant to quell the rioting. In fact, the note was written by White House attorney Eric Herschmann, according to his spokesman. “All sources with direct knowledge and law enforcement have and will confirm that it was written by Mr. Herschmann.” Rule 1 again: Cassie isn’t important enough to write notes for the president. Cassie thought this was her big break, the staff aide who was going to change history. Never mind that she must have come across the definition of hearsay somewhere in her education; never mind that steering wheel grabbing and plate throwing are neither criminal nor impeachable offenses. She broke all the rules for her few minutes on TV, allowing herself to be used by a committee that knew damn well she had not witnessed anything and that swearing “under oath” to the truth of something you don’t know first-hand is impossible.

That leaves Cassie in violation of another rule, one most people learn on the playground: nobody likes a snitch. Anyone check in on how Monica Lewinsky’s career in Washington went? After a quick round on the late night shows, Cassie will disappear from DC-land. You don’t violate the rules of being a staff aide without consequences, after all.

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Not just childhood vaccines.

The CDC Is Breaking Trust in Childhood Vaccination (Tablet)

On June 18, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially recommended Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for all children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the agency responsible for authorizing emergency use of vaccines, it’s the CDC that crafts subsequent messaging, makes specific recommendations, and prioritizes who can, should, or should not get vaccinated. In her briefing, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky strongly urged all parents of the nearly 20 million American children in this age group to vaccinate them as soon as possible. For some parents, Walensky’s briefing came as a huge relief. But if polling from May is anything to go by, a larger number of parents likely greeted the recommendation with skepticism.

Even before the underwhelming trial results came out, only 18% of surveyed parents reported that they planned to vaccinate their babies and toddlers. Nationally, uptake in minors between the ages of 5 and 11 as of June 22, 2022, was 29% receiving two doses, and 36% receiving one, but vaccine requirements for sports, camps, and other activities likely drove an unknown percentage of vaccination in this age group. There remains, moreover, no solid consensus among physicians about the importance of vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19. A survey from December 2021 indicates that as many as 30%-40% may not be recommending COVID vaccination for children ages 5 to 17, to say nothing of infants. A recent editorial in The Lancet expressed uncertainty about whether the benefits of vaccinating healthy 5- to 11-year-olds outweigh the risks, especially in those with a history of infection.

The gap between the CDC’s enthusiasm for vaccinating all children against COVID and that of parents and health care providers is unlikely to be bridged by approval under Emergency Use Authorization. Approval for the COVID vaccines in infants and toddlers is based on two trials that used changes in antibody levels as an estimate of efficacy, but did not assess protection from severe disease, hospitalization, or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), important outcomes that parents worry about. In a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) meeting on June 28, Pfizer Vice President for Viral Vaccines Kena Swanson even acknowledged that “there is no established correlate” between antibody levels and protection from disease.

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“..it has damaged the health of the vast majority of Australians by making them more vulnerable to infection with Covid..”

Vanishing Vaccine Mandates (Spec.au)

This week, with hardly a whisper from its chief public health officers, Australia largely abandoned its vaccine mandates. For the most part, they remain in force only for those working in health and aged care or with those with disabilities. There has been no explanation given as to why unvaccinated workers can now be ‘welcomed back’ into workplaces. There has been no apology to those who lost their jobs for refusing to be jabbed, or who lost their lives, or their good health, following vaccination. So far, 889 deaths have been reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) which may have been caused by vaccination and almost 133,000 people have reported a vaccine injury including more than 140 heart attacks, 360 myocardial infarctions, 500 strokes, 1,400 cases of deep vein thrombosis and 1,500 pulmonary embolisms.

So, why the sudden change in policy? Here’s one possibility. An Israeli study of 5.7 million people, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June, shows that unvaccinated people who gained immunity through infection, were far better protected from Covid than people who were double vaccinated. And while the study did not have enough cases of severe Covid to be definitive, it showed that unvaccinated people with natural immunity were also better protected from severe Covid. Thus, after more than two years of advising premiers to abandon their pandemic plans and paralyse the entire country until everyone was immunised with experimental vaccines, it seems that our public health officers were wrong.

Oops. Not only has Australia wasted billions of dollars on lockdowns, it has damaged the health of the vast majority of Australians by making them more vulnerable to infection with Covid. Increased vulnerability to infection might explain why, in NSW, teachers who were forced to be double vaccinated to retain their jobs were off sick for a combined 430,351 days in the first six months of this year, an increase of 145,491 days compared to pre-pandemic levels. It might also explain why excess mortality continues to run at a record high. Excess deaths in March were still almost 10 per cent above the historical baseline and deaths for the first three months of the year were 17.5 per cent higher than the historical average.

This spectacular public health failure was undoubtedly exacerbated by the failure to heed the lessons of early treatment of Covid-19. This time last year, on 26 June, NSW entered its long Delta lockdown. At that time, India was just emerging from its Delta spike. On 26 June 2021, Covid deaths in India were 284 per million, while in Australia they were only 35 per million. A year later on 26 June, deaths per million in Australia and India are identical – 376 per million. What happened?

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But yeah, let’s have aother mandate…

TWICE as Many Vaccine Deaths as Covid Deaths in US Households (DS)

More than twice as many Americans have lost a household member to a Covid vaccine injury as have lost one to Covid. That’s the shocking finding of a new poll of 1,500 Americans carried out by the polling company Pollfish. While 3.6% of respondents said someone in their household had died from COVID-19, 7.9% said one had died as a result of Covid vaccination. The poll also found that 8.5% said they had been injured by their vaccination, 5% that they had sought medical help and 3.3% that they had been hospitalised, the same proportion who said that as a result of vaccination they were no longer able to work a full day or at all. These are percentages of all respondents. If we look only at the 74.3% vaccinated with at least one dose then the figures, as a proportion of vaccinated persons, are 11.5% injured, 6.8% needing medical help, 4.5% hospitalised and 4.5% unable to work.


While these figures are self-reported and there is no control group, since the unvaccinated were not asked about adverse events, they are still alarmingly high. The poll also found that, among those who reported a Covid death in their household, more than twice as many reported that it occurred after the person was vaccinated than before (2.4% vs 1.1%). The proportion who said they had contracted Covid before their vaccination (17.5%) was very similar to the proportion who said they contracted it afterwards (15.7%). These figures are not indicative of a highly effective vaccine against either infection or death. The people polled were a randomly selected, representative sample of the U.S. public, of whom 74.3% were vaccinated, so the sample was not biased towards or against the reporting of vaccine problems.

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Hunter

 

 

 

 

Djokovic

 

 

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

 

 

 

May 122022
 


Banksy Monkey Parliament 2009

 

Finland Announces Plans To Join NATO In Historic Move (CNBC)
Nothing to Celebrate? (Tweedie)
We Will Win (Batiushka)
Russian-Captured Ukrainian Territories Will Soon Ask To ‘Join Russia’ (ZH)
Blinken, Austin Past Ties to Investment Firms Forgotten by Media (Celente)
Garland Allowing ‘Mob Rule’ In US – GOP (Fox)
Efforts To Codify Roe vs Wade Fail In The Senate (ET)
FDA Refuses To Reopen Biggest Baby Formula Plant in US (DM)
Acting NIH Director Admits Appearance of Conflict of Interest in Payments (ET)
Top US Scientist Warned Chinese Of US Investigations Into Wuhan Lab (DC)
Trudeau Government Gave $3 Million To WEF And $1.6 Billion To UN In 2021 (TNC)
Prepare For More Chinese Capital Controls As Exodus Worsens (BBG)
Oath Keepers Rescued 16 Police Officers On Jan 6 (ET)
Feds Open Investigation Into Elon Musk (DW)
Al Jazeera Accuses Israel of Killing -American- Journalist (CD)

 

 

Finland wants to join NATO.

Russia says NATO missiles in Ukraine would be too close to Moscow. Check the distance from the Ukraine border to Moscow. Then from the Finland border to St. Petersburg.

 

 

Tulsi armageddon

 

 

 

 

Zero covid

 

 

“Finland shares a 830-mile border with Russia..”

When NATO was founded, they did’t even dare.

Finland Announces Plans To Join NATO In Historic Move (CNBC)

Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Thursday that the country should apply to join NATO “without delay.” Finland has had a decades-long policy of military neutrality that would come to an end if it becomes a full member of the military alliance. Thursday’s announcement is the strongest sign yet that Finland will make a formal application to join NATO. The government will debate the issue over the weekend and the Finnish parliament is expected to give its final approval to the application as early as Monday. At the same time, there is a risk the move from Helsinki could spark aggression from Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has expressed his opposition against NATO’s enlargement.


Finland shares a 830-mile border with Russia; if it joins the military alliance, the land border that Russia shares with NATO territories would roughly double (Russia has land borders with 14 countries and five of them are NATO members: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway). Finland has been reviewing its security policy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which showed the Kremlin is willing attack a neighboring nation. Finland has been invaded in the past — in 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland in what became known as the Winter War.

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Ukraine will become a landlocked “country”.

Nothing to Celebrate? (Tweedie)

On May 8, when Victory in Europe (VE) Day is celebrated in the West, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN that Russia had “nothing to celebrate” on its own Victory Day on May 9. Her reasoning, faithfully transcribed on the US mission’s website, was that “They have not succeeded in defeating the Ukrainians.” Given that Victory Day and VE Day both specifically commemorate the allied defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Thomas-Greenfield’s comments were like saying the US, Britain and France had nothing to celebrate this year because they got chased out of Afghanistan by the Taliban last August. The ambassador is either an apologist for Nazism or merely too ignorant to do her job. She should at least read some objective reports about the conflict in the Ukraine.

In fact Russians had two immediate military victories to celebrate that Monday. Russian and Lugansk People’s Republic troops captured the town of Popasna, a lynchpin in the Ukrainian army’s defensive line that it had held for eight years. Meanwhile Kiev, apparently desperate for a victory of its own to rain on the parade through Moscow’s Red Square, launched an airborne and marine assault on the now-famous Zmeinyy (Snake) Island off the coast of Odessa oblast. Some sources say the Russians withdrew their small force holding the island as bait for a trap, but either way it went horribly wrong for the Ukrainians. They lost four jet fighters and strike aircraft, up to 10 helicopters, a corvette and three infantry landing craft. More than 60 of their personnel were killed, of which 27 were abandoned on the island.

The Ukraine is like a bull elephant that has been shot right in the heart in mid-charge. The beast keeps on bellowing and rampaging around, not yet realising that it’s already dead. It becomes clearer by the day that the Ukrainian army attempting to occupy the remains of the Donbass republics, newly recognised by Russia just as the West ‘recognised’ its creations of Kosovo and South Sudan, is dead on its feet. Its navy, air force, artillery, tanks and transportation are almost destroyed. Its casualties are replaced with boys and old men press-ganged off the streets of Kiev and Lvov, some without proper boots. Its senior officers are fled or dead.

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“..the Russian Federation is a very unequal and corrupt society because of these oligarchs, who simply repeat the Western oligarch model..”

We Will Win (Batiushka)

Russia before 1917 was rotten from the inside, a house of cards. The whole ‘Revolution’ was a story of the treachery of the elite, the aristocrats, including many Romanovs, the politicians, the generals and the new bourgeoisie. Having lost their faith, they replaced all loyalty to the Faith, the Tsar and Home with pure greed. The same thing happened with the USSR. A generation after the people’s war won by those trained in the Tsar’s Army, the Soviet Union turned into a State in whose official Communist ideology nobody believed any more. The elite had lost faith in it and so the USSR also fell. After 1991 the Russian Federation was handed over to the future oligarchs, the new aristocrats, just as before the Revolution the Russian Empire had been far too much in the hands of the past oligarchs, the old aristocrats.


Whoever says oligarchs automatically says corruption. And when the rich have enough riches, they next want power and betray to get it. Like the rest of the world, the Russian Federation is a very unequal and corrupt society because of these oligarchs, who simply repeat the Western oligarch model. Have no illusions: Oligarchs rule the Western world. It is illusory to think otherwise. In France Pompidou was and Macron is a Rothschild banker (the ones who own The Economist and much of the rest of the media). French conglomerates stand beside them. In Germany banks and huge automobile and chemical industries put up their political candidates. In the UK all candidates are vetted by the financial sharks of the City. As for the USA, think of Trump or Hoover, and all is clear. Follow the money.

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“He stressed it would be “up to local residents” and that the process would be “absolutely clear and legitimate”

Russian-Captured Ukrainian Territories Will Soon Ask To ‘Join Russia’ (ZH)

Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency is reporting for the first time Wednesday that the Russian military occupied southern Ukrainian city of Kherson will soon petition the Kremlin to become part of the Russian Federation. It was in late April that a pro-Moscow “military-civilian administration” was installed after Kherson fell to the invading forces, complete with a local transition to the Russian ruble. While the news hasn’t been officially confirmed by the Kremlin, it’s significant that the report surfaced through RIA and not Ukrainian or opposition sources, suggesting such referendums or even simple declared annexations in captured regions could be imminent.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has in his latest statements invoked Crimea – which came under Russian control due to a Kremlin-backed ‘popular referendum’ in 2014 – as a model for what could happen regarding Kherson’s political future. He stressed it would be “up to local residents” and that the process would be “absolutely clear and legitimate”. Additionally, according to The Moscow Times, “Occupied Kherson, as well as the Pryazovske region on the Sea of Azov, reportedly began trading with Crimea shortly after Russian forces installed pro-Moscow administrations in the area.”

And Reuters writes of more signs of annexation of the city coming soon as follows: “TASS cited the Russian-controlled administration as saying that pension bodies and a banking system would be created from scratch for the region, and that branches of a Russian bank could be open there before the end of May,” according to its report. However, some correspondents are saying there won’t be a referendum, or possibly just the appearance of one as a pretext…

Lavrov

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It’s not even a revolving door anymore.

Blinken, Austin Past Ties to Investment Firms Forgotten by Media (Celente)

Top officials in the Biden administration who have been the most vocal backers of providing Ukraine with more arms than Kyiv knows what to do with have deep ties to consulting and investment firms that has raised concerns in the past about the government’s revolving door with the defense industry. The Presstitutes no longer discuss these ties because they are on the same team as the government when it comes to Ukraine. More weapons, more weapons, more weapons. Two of the biggest names in the Biden administration with these past ties are Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They have been some of the top proponents of donating weapons to Ukrainians.

BLINKEN: “Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding. Russia has sought, as its principal aim, to totally subjugate Ukraine, to take away its sovereignty, to take away its independence. That has failed.” AUSTIN: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

One of the names that kept popping up about a year or so ago was Blinken and Austin’s ties to a little-known investment firm called Pine Island Capital Partner. In December 2020, Pine Island Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company that claimed to have “unusual access to information” said in its SEC filings that it was “well-suited to take advantage of the current and future opportunities present in the aerospace, defense and government service industries.” (Austin also sat on the board of Raytheon Technologies in 2020, according to OpenSecrets.org. Forbes estimated that Austin’s net worth is about $7 million after serving on boards in retirement.)

From CNBC in December 2020: Pine Island’s team includes Tony Blinken, Biden’s choice to be secretary of State, and Ret. Gen. Lloyd Austin, his nominee for Defense secretary. Austin was listed on the original SPAC proposal, while Blinken was left off as he took a leave of absence from the firm when he joined the Biden campaign. Axios reported a month earlier that Pine Island was formed in 2018 by John Thain, the CEO who reportedly got his office renovated for $1 million while his Bank of America Merrill Lynch took a major loss in 2009; Phil Cooper, the former Goldman Sachs buyout big, and Clyde Tuggle, ex-Coca-Cola executive.

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“So, I know that there’s an outrage right now, I guess, about protests that have been peaceful to date, and we certainly continue to encourage that outside of judges homes..”

Garland Allowing ‘Mob Rule’ In US – GOP (Fox)

Nearly 50 House Republicans pressed Attorney General Merrick Garland Wednesday to prosecute those protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices over an anticipated ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Led by Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., the members of Congress cite a federal law that makes it illegal to “picket or parade” outside a courthouse or a judge’s home “with the intent of influencing … the discharge of his duty.” “We therefore ask a simple question: as Supreme Court Justices are being illegally targeted at their homes, do you intend to enforce the law?” the Republicans wrote. “Your failure to act is a shameless and implicit endorsement of mob rule in America.”

Forty-seven House Republicans signed the letter, including House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.; GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson; and R-La., Byron Donalds, R-Fla. They join a chorus of voices, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who are condemning the protests at the justices’ homes. Over the weekend, protesters picketed outside the homes of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. People protested outside of Justice Samuel Alito’s home Monday.

“The right to peaceful assembly is among the most sacred rights we hold as Americans,” the GOP members wrote. “Yet our sacred right to peacefully assemble has never permitted Americans to intimidate judges, jurors or officers of the court. “We urge you to enforce the laws of the United States and stop the mob,” they added. “You should send the clear and unmistakable message to all Americans — regardless of party or political affiliation — that the intimidation of justices and the judicial process will not stand.”

The White House isn’t explicitly condemning protests outside the justices’ homes. But White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday intimidation is not acceptable. “@POTUS strongly believes in the Constitutional right to protest. But that should never include violence, threats, or vandalism,” Psaki tweeted. “Judges perform an incredibly important function in our society, and they must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety.” “So, I know that there’s an outrage right now, I guess, about protests that have been peaceful to date, and we certainly continue to encourage that outside of judges homes,” Psaki elaborated Tuesday. “And that’s the president’s position.”

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Filibuster had nothing to do with it.

Efforts To Codify Roe vs Wade Fail In The Senate (ET)

The Senate voted on May 11 to filibuster the Democratic-sponsored Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), which would have codified the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling into federal law as the Supreme Court appears intent on striking down the precedent. The 51–49 procedural cloture motion vote was mostly party-line, with all Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) voting against the measure. The measure failed as expected because Democrats didn’t meet the 60-vote filibuster threshold needed to advance the legislation in the upper chamber. According to a draft opinion leaked to Politico and published on May 2—written by Justice Samuel Alito and confirmed as genuine by the court—a majority of the justices have agreed preliminarily to overturn Roe v. Wade.


The court hasn’t yet issued a final opinion. Under the 1973 standard, states are prohibited from imposing restrictions on abortion in the first trimester, during which SCOTUS ruled that the mother’s right to privacy outweighed state interest in protecting life. The move effectively overturned existing abortion laws in more than two dozen states, and since then, pro-life advocates have fought to return the power to regulate abortion to the states. Democrats decided immediately after the draft was leaked to try again on the WHPA, which the Senate failed to advance in February. A different version of the legislation was passed by the House of Representatives in September 2021 in a party-line vote, with Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), a pro-life Catholic, being the only Democrat to oppose it.

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“..there was not an outbreak caused by products from the facility..”

FDA Refuses To Reopen Biggest Baby Formula Plant in US (DM)

The biggest baby formula supplier in the U.S. has denied its Michigan plant is responsible for the deaths of two children despite the FDA closing it down. The plant was shutdown nearly three months ago after a bacterial infection caused the deaths and other serious illnesses. In mid-February Abbott Laboratories issued a nationwide baby formula recall and ceased operations at its plant in Sturgis, Michigan amid reports of babies contracting bacterial infections from its products. An Abbott spokesperson told DailyMail.com Tuesday that ‘thorough investigation’ by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Abbott revealed ‘infant formula produced at our Sturgis facility is not the likely source of infection in the reported cases and that there was not an outbreak caused by products from the facility’.


However, despite the findings of the investigation, the plant remains shuttered nearly three months later, fueling the nationwide baby formula shortage. The FDA – which said it found food safety violations at the plant, as well as five strains of Cronobacter, a bacteria that can cause blood infections and meningitis – has refused to say when the plant can resume operations. Abbott claims they are ‘working closely with the FDA to restart operations’ at the plant, with the spokesperson noting: ‘We continue to make progress on corrective actions and will be implementing additional actions as we work toward addressing items related to the recent recall’. The FDA told DailyMail.com it was holding discussions with ‘Abbott and other manufacturers to increase production of different specialty and metabolic products’ but refused to say when the Sturgis plant could reopen.

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“..he conceded that they don’t look ethical..”

Well, no. 1, they were secret. Isn’t that enough?

Acting NIH Director Admits Appearance of Conflict of Interest in Payments (ET)

Undisclosed royalty payments estimated at $350 million from pharmaceutical and other firms to Dr. Anthony Fauci and hundreds of National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists do present “an appearance of a conflict of interest,” according to the agency’s acting director. Dr. Lawrence Tabak, who took over as NIH director following the December 2021 resignation of the agency’s long-time leader, Dr. Francis Collins, told a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee that federal law allows the royalty payments, but he conceded that they don’t look ethical. “Right now, I think the NIH has a credibility problem and this only feeds into this, and I’m only just learning about this,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) told Tabak.

“People in my district say, ‘Well, so-and-so has a financial interest,’ or they don’t like ivermectin because they aren’t benefitting from that royalty. “You may have very sound scientific reasons for recommending a medicine or not, but the idea that people get a financial benefit from certain research that’s been done and grants that were awarded, that is, to me, the height of the appearance of a conflict of interest.” In response, Tabak said NIH doesn’t endorse particular medicines. “We support the science that validates whether an invention is or is not efficacious, we don’t say this is good or this is bad. … I certainly can understand that it might seem as a conflict of interest,” he said. Moolenaar seemed taken aback by Tabak’s response and, while pointing to Fauci, who was also testifying, said that “truthfully, I would say you’ve had leaders of NIH saying certain medicines are not good.”

Tabak said such statements by NIH are based on clinical trials that are supported by the agency. Moolenaar then asked Tabak, “But if the agency is awarding who is the beneficiary of the grant, who is doing the trial, and there is somehow finances involved, that there is a financial benefit that could be accrued if someone’s patent or invention is considered validated, do you not see that as a conflict or at least the appearance of a conflict of interest?” After conceding that there’s an appearance of a conflict of interest, Tabak suggested to Moolenaar that “maybe this is the sort of thing that we can work together on so that we can explain to you the firewalls that we do have because they are substantial and significant.”

[..] The $350 million in royalty payments were made between 2010 and 2020, according to Open the Books, the nonprofit that took the NIH to court when it refused to acknowledge the group’s FOIA request for documents. Collins received 14 payments, Fauci received 23 payments, and his deputy, Clifford Lane, received eight payments, according to Open the Books. Adam Andrzejewski, founder and president of Open the Books, told The Epoch Times on May 11 that NIH continues to withhold important information about the royalty payments, including the names of particular payers and the specific amounts paid to individuals at NIH.

Glenn Beck

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And got a fine reward.

Top US Scientist Warned Chinese Of US Investigations Into Wuhan Lab (DC)

The head of a U.S. national laboratory in Texas accepted a position at a Chinese university roughly one year after warning Chinese scientists about potential congressional investigations into COVID-19’s origins, according to emails obtained by Judicial Watch. In an April 2020 email chain, Dr. James W. Le Duc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), warned top science officials in China, including a director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), about Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s interest in investigating the pandemic’s origins. In April 2021, emails show Le Duc accepted a position on the “Biosafety Advisory Committee” at China’s Westlake University, a private research university with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“These startling documents show that China had partners here in the United States willing to go to bat for them on the Wuhan lab controversy,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a statement. Judicial Watch obtained Le Duc’s emails through a public records request to the University of Texas Medical Branch. Judicial Watch’s investigation follows years of mystery surrounding COVID-19’s origins. Early on, the theory that COVID leaked from the WIV was roundly dismissed by government officials and prominent scientists; at one point a New York Times reporter even claimed the Wuhan-origin theory had “racist roots.” However, scientists and experts increasingly consider it the “most likely” origin for the virus, and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul has even accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and other top U.S. scientists of covering-up their own culpability in a possible Wuhan lab leak.

Le Duc first sent his warning to Shi, whose controversial research is at the center of the COVID origins debate, and other Chinese scientists in a series of emails beginning in April 2020. “I wonder if you would have time for a phone call sometime soon… The email below is relevant,” Le Duc wrote to Shi on April 16, 2020. Le Duc’s email linked to a Forbes report on Sen. Rubio’s interest in investigating COVID’s origins. Le Duc’s email also included a message he’d received from a former commander at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, warning that Rubio was pushing for a Wuhan lab investigation.

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“The controversial WEF has received renewed attention in the Conservative leadership race after candidate and MP Pierre Poilievre committed to boycotting the organization.”

Trudeau Government Gave $3 Million To WEF And $1.6 Billion To UN In 2021 (TNC)

The Liberal government funnelled more than a billion-and-a-half taxpayer dollars into various United Nations bodies, and millions into the World Economic Forum (WEF) last year, public accounts data shows. According to the transfer payments section of the 2020-2021 Public Accounts of Canada, the WEF received $2,915,095 from Canadian taxpayers in the form of grants and contributions. Funding was provided by two departments – the Department of Environment and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. The largest of the transfer payments to WEF was a $1,141,851 contribution from the International Development Assistance for Multilateral Programming. WEF also received another $1 million grant under the same program. Other payments were cited as “contributions in support of conserving nature” and for the “establishment and management of conservation measures.”

The Trudeau government also generously funded the UN to the tune of $1.576 billion in the form of financial support, contributions and grants. Funding came primarily from Global Affairs, although other departments including Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship also gave the UN money. Six UN-affiliated organizations received transfer payments worth more than $100 million each. The largest payment was given to the United Nations Children’s Fund, totalling $543 million. Meanwhile UN peacekeeping operations saw contributions worth $235 million, while the UN High Commissioner for Refugees received $139 million. Other large recipients include the UN Population Fund and the United Nations Organizations.

[..] According to Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation Franco Terrazzano, the Trudeau government needs to do a better job accounting for its funding of international organizations like the WEF, while Canada deals with a debt of over $1 trillion. “That’s a lot of money, and we can’t just keep sending a ton of tax dollars to international organizations because we’ve been doing it for years,” Terrazzano told True North. “The feds are more than $1 trillion in debt, so it’s on the government to make a clear case for every cent it sends to international organizations, and if it can’t make the case then we need to see reductions.” The controversial WEF has received renewed attention in the Conservative leadership race after candidate and MP Pierre Poilievre committed to boycotting the organization.

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Money flees..

Prepare For More Chinese Capital Controls As Exodus Worsens (BBG)

Strict capital controls made it impossible for several European companies to send dividends abroad and a Japanese beverage maker could not get paid due to “tougher restrictions on cross-border wire transactions.” This is not Russia in 2022, but China in late 2016 and early 2017, when the yuan plunged toward 7 per dollar. Those types of curbs could soon be brought back as part of Beijing’s arsenal to manage currency depreciation, especially in a context similar to 2016-17: Once again, the Fed hikes and capital flees. Besides the headline exchange rate, how much and how quickly money can leave China will become equally, if not more, important. Global portfolio managers, foreign businesses and the local rich are either leaving China or bringing much less capital onshore.


The nation suffered an unprecedented outflow from bond and stock investors in March and net selling continued into April, according to estimates from the International Institute of Finance. Total capital outflows, including errors and omissions, may surge to about $300b this year from $129b in 2021, IIF said in a report last week. While that figure is well below $725b, IIF’s estimate for 2016, Beijing’s options for combating it are much narrower this time around. Trade wars, Covid and supply-chain disruptions were not on the minds of foreign executives back then. In 2022, however, 52% of 121 companies polled by the American Chamber of Commerce in China have either cut or delayed investments. With only 1% planning to increase local investment, authorities have a daunting task to boost foreign direct investment as long as China sticks to its Covid Zero strategy.

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What a stupid story this has become.

Oath Keepers Rescued 16 Police Officers On Jan 6 (ET)

Video footage widely circulated in 2021 that shows a Capitol Police lieutenant asking members of the Oath Keepers for rescue help at the U.S. Capitol blows a hole in the seditious conspiracy charges brought against the group by federal prosecutors, two defense attorneys say. In the footage, Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson asks a group of men to help him get more than a dozen trapped Capitol Police officers out of the Capitol and through a tightly packed crowd of protesters on the building’s east steps. It was widely reported in January 2021 that Johnson wore a red Make America Great Again cap on Jan. 6 as a ruse to “trick” supporters of President Donald Trump into helping him rescue fellow officers from the Capitol.

He was later suspended for wearing the MAGA cap. Johnson is a registered Democrat, according to online records. The men who answered the call to help were members of the Oath Keepers, a nationwide group of current and former military, law enforcement, and first responders who have been targeted by federal prosecutors for allegedly conspiring to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The video is at least the second example showing the Oath Keepers coming to the aid of Capitol Police inside the building that day. Would a group of men seditiously plotting an attack on the Capitol, allegedly to prevent certification of Electoral College votes, rush into the building to extract police trapped inside—all while being followed by a filmmaker?

“The prosecutors’ narrative has more holes than Swiss cheese, but it [the video footage] does directly refute their claim,” said Jonathon Moseley, who previously represented Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs. Prosecutors “just keep ignoring the self-contradictions in their stories.” The video footage was shot by part-time filmmaker Rico La Starza. One of several versions of the video footage posted online includes an introduction by La Starza. He said the video shows “me helping a group of Oath Keepers help Capitol Police get out. They looked scared and tired.”

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Just trying to scare him.

Feds Open Investigation Into Elon Musk (DW)

The U.S. government has reportedly opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s business dealings surrounding his recent $44 billion purchase of Twitter. “The Securities and Exchange Commission is probing Mr. Musk’s tardy submission of a public form that investors must file when they buy more than 5% of a company’s shares,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “The disclosure functions as an early sign to shareholders and companies that a significant investor could seek to control or influence a company.” The report said that Musk’s April 4 disclosure filing was at least 10 days late, a move that is believed to have saved him more than $140 million because share prices could have been higher if the public knew about his ownership of 5% of the company.

“The case is easy. It’s straightforward,” Daniel Taylor, a University of Pennsylvania accounting professor, said. “But whether they’re going to pick that battle with Elon is another question.” The report noted that a lawsuit against Musk from the SEC would likely not stop him from taking over Twitter since the company’s board of director’s unanimously approved to be acquired by Musk and the SEC may lack the power to do so. Musk’s purchase of Twitter is also reportedly being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Musk said this week that he will reverse Twitter’s permanent ban on former President Donald Trump if and when the sale is finalized.

“I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country, and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice,” Musk said, adding that the decision was “morally bad.” “That doesn’t mean that someone gets to say whatever they want to say,” Musk said. “If they say something that is illegal or destructive to the world, then there should be perhaps a timeout, temporary suspension or that particular tweet should be made invisible or have very little traction.” “I would reverse the permanent ban,” Musk added.

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Murdering American citizens in broad daylight. Try that in Kiev.

Al Jazeera Accuses Israel of Killing -American- Journalist (CD)

The media outlet Al Jazeera accused Israeli forces of “deliberately targeting and killing our colleague” on Wednesday after journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the face while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. In a statement, the Al Jazeera Media Network said that Abu Akleh — who worked as the publication’s Palestine correspondent — was wearing a press jacket that clearly identified her as a journalist when Israeli forces shot her “with live fire.” Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, called the attack “a blatant murder,” saying Abu Akleh, 51, was “assassinated in cold blood.” The statement continued:

“Al Jazeera Media Network condemns this heinous crime, which intends to only prevent the media from conducting their duty. Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government and the occupation forces responsible for the killing of Shireen. It also calls on the international community to condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable for their intentional targeting and killing of Shireen. The Israeli authorities are also responsible for the targeting of Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samudi, who was also shot in the back while covering the same event, and he is currently undergoing treatment. Al Jazeera extends its sincere condolences to the family of Shireen in Palestine, and to her extended family around the world, and we pledge to prosecute the perpetrators legally, no matter how hard they try to cover up their crime, and bring them to justice.”

The Israeli government initially denied responsibility for killing Abu Akleh and wounding al-Samudi, claiming that they may have been shot by “Palestinian gunmen.” “There is a considerable chance that armed Palestinians, who fired wildly, were the ones who brought about the journalist’s unfortunate death,” said Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. But al-Samudi, speaking to the Associated Press following the incident, dismissed the Israeli government’s narrative as a “complete lie.” “He said they were all wearing protective gear that clearly marked them as reporters, and they passed by Israeli troops so the soldiers would know that they were there,” AP reported. “He said a first shot missed them, then a second struck him, and a third killed Abu Akleh. He said there were no militants or other civilians in the area — only the reporters and the army.”

Shireen Abu Akleh

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Fazer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1524553912463806464

 

 

 

 

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May 082022
 


Edgar Degas L’absinthe (In a café) 1875-76

 

“The Bitter Truth Is: Putin Can Win The War” (Blick)
Megalopolis x Russia: Total War (Escobar)
CIA: No ‘Practical Evidence’ Russia Is Preparing To Use Nukes (AMNA/FT)
The Third Patriotic War (Batiushka)
Biden Was ‘Livid’ Over Leaks About American Intel Used by Ukrainians (Celente)
Ukraine Is None Of America’s Business! (Zuesse)
White House Yields To A National Rage Addiction (Turley)
VP of Pfizer Arrested After #Pfizerdocuments Get Released (VT)
Vaxxed Hospitalised for Non-Covid Reasons at 5 Times the Rate of Unvaxxed (DS)
Preventable Deaths and Vitamin D3 (Malone)
Attenuated Viruses In Vaccines Cause Rise In Deadly Hepatitis In Children (DE)
Fully Vaccinated Are Developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DE)
Study: Masks Might Make Covid Worse (CS)
This Is The List Of WEF Graduates (Malone Institute)
Mexico Calls for Latin American Lithium Alliance (RKC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kheriaty

 

 

Why did it take you so long to invent this link?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google translate from German.

The more bitter truth is the Ukraine can NOT win.

“The Bitter Truth Is: Putin Can Win The War” (Blick)

Russia appears to be making little progress with its invasion of Ukraine. But appearances could be deceiving. Because according to Markus Reisner, Austria’s top military strategist, Ukraine’s situation is much worse than is believed in the West. Putin’s tanks aren’t making any headway, Russian soldiers are surrendering, and soon Russia can no longer afford the war. Again and again breakdowns in the Russian military are known. It almost seems as if Ukraine can win the war. But the impression could be hugely deceptive. Russia is probably much stronger than people think in this country. At least the Austrian colonel and top military strategist Markus Reisner is convinced of this: “We need an objective picture of the situation. It doesn’t help us if we talk ourselves into the fact that the Russian attackers are in a bad state,” he explains in “Welt”.

“Because that belies how the situation really is.” Reisner expects further escalations in the Donbass in the next two to three weeks. According to him, these fights will be particularly fierce “because the Russians are now trying to bring about a decision”. The Ukrainians could defend themselves with American drones, among other things. But according to the military strategist, that will hardly be enough. «Ukraine urgently needs new weapons. The arms deliveries from the West are now a race against time,” Reisner believes. Because the western deliveries of heavy weapons had started too late. And in addition, Russia would capture or destroy a “not inconsiderable part” of the arms deliveries. In the meantime, the Kremlin has even published manuals on how to operate the captured weapons and how to use them against Ukraine.

“And that has already happened,” said the military expert. “According to US information, the weapons that the West brings to Ukraine within a week are used up within a day, i.e. used immediately by the Ukrainians or captured or destroyed by the Russians.” According to Reisner, Russia now wants to form two pincers in the Donbass near Izyum and Donetsk in order to encircle the Ukrainian troops. “The problem is that the positions of the Ukrainians in this area are not as strong as on the old contact line, i.e. in the east of Kramatorsk,” the Austrian fears. In the past, Ukraine has also had success using special forces to ambush Russian soldiers. But this tactic no longer works.

Reisner: “It worked elsewhere for the first six weeks, but now the Russians are prepared and the Russian special forces (Spetsnaz) are chasing the Ukrainian special forces and unfortunately destroying them quite often.” According to Markus Reisner, don’t let the slow progress of the Russians fool you. The Russians are now advancing “slowly, broadly and with massive infantry support, with the tanks being secured to the right and left by further armored trains.” Although the attackers can only manage about 1.5 kilometers per hour, they can avoid being ambushed.

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“..Russia’s superior engineers is why their hypersonic weapons are at least two or three generations ahead of the U.S…”

Megalopolis x Russia: Total War (Escobar)

Russia, based on purchasing power parity (PPP), is the 6th economy in the world, right behind Germany and ahead of both the UK and France. Its “hard” economy is similar to the U.S. Steel production may be about the same, but intellectual capacity is vastly superior. Russia has roughly the same number of engineers as the U.S., but they are much better educated. The Mossad attributes Israel’s economic miracle in creating an equivalent of Silicon Valley to a base of a million Russian immigrants. This Israeli Silicon Valley happens to be a key asset of the American MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex), as indelibly named by Ray McGovern.

NATOstan media hysterically barking that Russia’s GDP is the size of Texas is nonsense. PPP is what really counts; that and Russia’s superior engineers is why their hypersonic weapons are at least two or three generations ahead of the U.S. Just ask the indispensable Andrei Martyanov. The Empire of Lies has no defensive missiles worthy of the name, and no equivalents to Mr. Zircon and Mr. Sarmat. The NATOstan sphere simply cannot win a war, any war against Russia for this reason alone. The deafening NATOstan “narrative” that Ukraine is defeating Russia does not even qualify as an innocuous joke (compare it with Russia’s “Reach Out and Touch Someone” strategy). The corrupt system of SBU fanatics intermingled with UkroNazi factions is kaput. The Pentagon knows it. The CIA cannot possibly admit it.

What the Empire of Lies has sort of won, so far, is a media “victory” for the UkroNazis, not a military victory. Gen Aleksandr Dvornikov, of Syria fame, has a clear mandate: to conquer the whole of Donbass, totally free up Crimea and prepare the advance towards Odessa and Transnistria while reducing a rump Ukraine to the status of failed state without any access to the sea. The Sea of Azov – linked to the Caspian by the Don-Volga canal – is already a Russian lake. And the Black Sea is next, the key connection between the Heartland and the Mediterranean. The Five Seas system – Black, Azov, Caspian, Baltic, White – enshrines Russia as a de facto continental naval power. Who needs warm waters?

Gonzalo Poland

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The most credible voice in the West. Putin has no reason to “contemplate losing”..

CIA: No ‘Practical Evidence’ Russia Is Preparing To Use Nukes (AMNA/FT)

CIA does not have any “practical evidence” that Russia is getting ready to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, its director, Bill Burns, said Saturday. Burns, a veteran diplomat, was speaking at the “Weekend Festival” organized by the Financial Times in Washington, DC. But, he added, “we can’t take lightly those possibilities” given Russia’s saber-rattling. Russia had announced shortly after its invasion of Ukraine began, on Feb. 24, that it had placed its nuclear deterrence forces under heightened alert and Russian President Vladimir Putin had threatened a “swift retaliation” on any third party intervening in the war. Burns said he believed Putin is determined to pursue the war and cannot contemplate losing. “[Putin] is in a frame of mind in which he doesn’t believe he can afford to lose; so the stakes are quite high in this phase,” he said.


“I think he’s convinced right now that doubling down … will enable him to make progress,” he added. The CIA Director also said that China is closely following developments in the Ukraine to find lessons in its own strategy to gain control of Taiwan. China has never made a secret of its belief that it considers Taiwan an integral part of its territory, adding that China was also “dismayed” by “the fact that what Putin has done is driving Europeans and Americans closer together.” “It strikes us … that (Chinese President) Xi Jinping is a little bit unsettled by the reputational damage that can come to China by the association with the brutishness of Russia’s aggression against Ukrainians [and] unsettled certainly by the economic uncertainty that’s been produced by the war,” Burns said.

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“If Russia does not win, the Russian Federation will be humiliated and dismantled and become just another group of colonies for Western asset-strippers and slavers.”

The Third Patriotic War (Batiushka)

Russia must win this War against NATO. However, the last thing Russia wants is a nuclear war, however much some fools in the West talk that up. And however tempting as targets the 1,000 or so US bases around the world may be, Russia certainly does not want the war to spread outside the current Ukrainian territory. If Russia does not win, the Russian Federation will be humiliated and dismantled and become just another group of colonies for Western asset-strippers and slavers. Then the British dream for its 1917 coup d’etat, turned into a nightmare because the stupid dream permitted Bolshevism to come to power, will become real.


After that, China will fall next and then the rest of the still free, if for the moment impoverished and exploited, world will fall just like dominos into neo-colonial Western hands. And that will be the end of the world under a US Global Dictatorship, euphemistically known as ‘the Unipolar World’. We are not ready for that. We prefer to fight. As President Putin has said, a world without Russia is not one we wish to live in. As we have said before, this is our ONLY chance to work towards a Union of Sovereign (NOT Soviet) Social (NOT Socialist) Republics and an Alliance of countries which favour Prosperity and Justice, not Poverty and Injustice.

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I don’t think Biden is capable of being livid over anything anymore. Even if he’s known for a mean temper.

Biden Was ‘Livid’ Over Leaks About American Intel Used by Ukrainians (Celente)

President Joe Biden was furious that senior U.S. officials went to the media about Washington sharing intel with Ukrainians that may have resulted in the sinking of Russia’s flagship and the killings of about a dozen Russian generals, according to a report. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote Friday that his sources in D.C. implied that the leaks were not “part of any thought-out strategy,” and Biden was “livid” when he learned about them. Friedman said Biden got on the phone with the head of national intelligence and CIA to demand that these leaks end because it was inching the U.S. closer to conflict.

Friedman wrote: “Vladimir Putin surely has no illusions about how much the U.S. and NATO are arming Ukraine with material and intelligence, but when American officials start to brag in public about playing a role in killing Russian generals and sinking the Russian flagship, killing many sailors, we could be creating an opening for Putin to respond in ways that could dangerously widen this conflict — and drag the U.S. in deeper than it wants to be.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last week called out Pope Francis for hinting that NATO shared some of the blame for the Ukraine war when he accused the Alliance of “barking at Russia’s gate.” Anyone with even an elementary understanding of what happened in Ukraine knows that the U.S. refused to negotiate in good faith with Russia over Moscow’s security concerns about Kyiv joining the Alliance.

So it was not unreasonable to hear the pope point that out. But the Journal took several issues with the pope, including his hope to meet with Putin. The paper wrote: The Pope said he has requested an audience with Mr. Putin but hasn’t heard back. Asked whether he’d visit Kyiv, he said he must go to Moscow first: “If Putin decided to leave the door open . . . ” This is a pattern. Recall that the Pope declined to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2020, at least partly because of America’s opposition to the Vatican’s egregious deal-making with the Chinese Communist Party. The paper seems to take personal offense that Francis believes it would be a more important trip to meet with Putin than the comedian, like all the political whores from the West.

America The Jesuit Review wrote that Francis explores this idea in his book “Evangelii Gaudium.” When looking at conflict, the pope explains, some people ignore it while others get sucked into it. But imagine a third way: Face the problem head-on and make it the start of a new process. As the pope reassures us, “Trust what God is doing through you.”

Biden salad
https://twitter.com/i/status/1522679779065057281

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“The heads-of-state of U.S.-and-allied countries should therefore be removed and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in order to halt WW III before it reaches the nuclear stage.”

Ukraine Is None Of America’s Business! (Zuesse)

Russia never coup-grabbed Mexico, but in February 2014, America coup-grabbed Ukraine. That was an act of war against Russia (in order to steal Russia’s naval base in Crimea and in order for America to become able to place U.S. nukes in Ukraine only a five-minute missile-striking-distance away from obliterating Moscow), and Russia responded to America’s blatant aggression by allowing the residents in the region of Ukraine that the Soviet dictator had transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, Crimea, to vote on whether they should remain in Ukraine or be returned to Russia. Over 90% of them voted to return to being Russians.

For this democratic response by Russia to America’s Ukrainian coup (and to America’s attempt to grab Russia’s naval base in Crimea to transform it into a U.S. naval base there), America and its vassal nations repeatedly sanctioned Russia — another step in America’s World War III aggression against Russia — and refused even to consider Russia’s demand that Ukraine must never be a member of America’s anti-Russian military alliance NATO or otherwise become a staging-area for a possible U.S.-and-allied invasion of Russia (a modern-day version of Adolf Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” blitz-attack to grab Russia). The heads-of-state of U.S.-and-allied countries should therefore be removed and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in order to halt WW III before it reaches the nuclear stage.

If this would violate any laws, then it still must at least be attempted, in order to force the ‘news’-media in those countries to report on what is really at issue in the ‘war between Russia and Ukraine’, which is America’s empire and its world-endangering war against Russia (now using Ukraine as America’s proxy-soldiers and WW III introductory battleground). That is “aggressive war,” not any sort of defensive war by America and its vassal-nations. As such, it violates the U.N. Charter; and if the non-U.S.-allied nations won’t do everything they possibly can to defeat America at this stage in its global war of aggression against Russia, then the consequences of their collective failure in this matter will assuredly be the elimination of the entire world as we know it.

A post-WW-III world would be far worse for its survivors than it would be for its billions of non-survivors. The burden of guilt now is, consequently, not only upon the regimes that are seeking to expand yet further the American empire, but it is also upon the bystander nations, whose fates are also on the line in this matter. The fate of everyone is. And this is why everyone — and not ONLY the U.S. and its vassal-nations — must become actively involved here, to prevent the nuclear phase (which would be its final phase, and would be completed in considerably less than an hour). Imperialism must finally meet its match, to end it, for all time, before it ends all of us.

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Yield? They actively use it.

White House Yields To A National Rage Addiction (Turley)

Nearly 70 years ago, a little-known lawyer named Joseph Welch famously confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy (D-Wis.) in defense of a young man hounded over alleged un-American views. Welch told McCarthy that “I think I have never really gauged … your recklessness” before asking: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It was a defining moment in American politics as Welch called out a politician who had abandoned any semblance of principle in the pursuit of political advantage. This week, the same scene played out in the White House with one striking difference: This was no Joseph Welch to be found.

After someone in the Supreme Court leaked a draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a virtual flash-mob formed around the court and its members demanding retributive justice. This included renewed calls for court “packing,” as well as the potential targeting of individual justices at their homes. Like the leaking of the opinion itself, the doxing of justices and their families is being treated as fair game in our age of rage. There is more than a license to this rage; there is an addiction to it. That was evident in March 2020 when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood in front of the Supreme Court to threaten Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Schumer’s reckless rhetoric was celebrated, not condemned, by many on the left, even after he attempted to walk it back by stating that “I should not have used the words I used … they did not come out the way I intended to.” What occurred at the White House this week is even more troubling. When asked for a response to the leaking of a justice’s draft opinion, White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to condemn the leaker and said the real issue was the opinion itself. Then she was asked about the potential targeting of justices and their families at their homes, and whether that might be considered extreme. It should have been another easy question; few Americans would approve of such doxing, particularly since some of the justices have young children at home. Yet Psaki declared that “I don’t have an official U.S. government position on where people protest,” adding that “peaceful protest is not extreme.”

Magnetic doors
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487517697961345025

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Can’t see what he’s been charged with, if anything.

VP of Pfizer Arrested After #Pfizerdocuments Get Released (VT)

Rady Johnson, the executive Vice President of Pfizer, has been arrested at his home and charged with multiple counts of fraud by federal agents. He was taken into custody and is awaiting a bail hearing. This comes as 1,000s of classified documents from Pfizer were released, showing the true risks of the experimental vaccine. As a result of Rady’s arrest, the hashtag #pfizerdocuments has started trending on Twitter. Multiple celebrities are now calling for other employees at Pfizer to be arrested.


Since joining Pfizer in 1994, Rady held multiple high level positions in the company. Rady previously lead the Regulatory Law practice group as well as the Corporate Regulatory and Healthcare Law Audit functions. Keean Bexte, an independent journalist formerly employed by Rebel News, pointed out how 1,223 people died within the first 28 days after taking the Pfizer jab. There are reports that the vaccine killed all the animals during the trial. A judge has granted a media blackout on request of Rady’s lawyers, and Google is suppressing search results. Rady faces life in prison if convicted.

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Your immune system went out the window.

Vaxxed Hospitalised for Non-Covid Reasons at 5 Times the Rate of Unvaxxed (DS)

Over the past 15 months we’ve had a barrage of statistics presented to us shouting about how great the vaccines are at preventing hospitalisation from (or with) Covid. However, these statistics have been light on detail on how they were calculated and we’ve not seen much sight at all of the raw data that the statistics were based upon. Until now. In April, a paper was published by the UKHSA (currently in pre-print, which means that it hasn’t yet undergone the usual peer-review process) on its statistical analysis of a selection of hospitalisation data by vaccination status. The intent of this paper was to support its statements that the vaccines prevent hospitalisation. However, the paper also includes the raw data upon which the UKHSA statistics were derived, and these data tell a very different story to that presented by the UKHSA. The data show:


• Far higher accident and emergency admission rates for reasons other than Covid in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated.
• Much higher rates of hospitalisation due to non-Covid acute respiratory illness in the vaccinated.
• Even higher A&E admissions and hospitalisations in the double-vaccinated (not boosted).
• Even where the data suggest that the vaccines offer some protection (the risk of admission to intensive care resulting from Covid infection) the results look like they might be an artefact created by the assumptions used by the UKHSA.

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Hope everyone’s taking their 5,000 IU daily, and not just for Covid.

Preventable Deaths and Vitamin D3 (Malone)

We had an inexpensive life-saving solution both before and during the pandemic… The inconvenient truth is that even at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a very simple, inexpensive and effective treatment was available that could have saved the majority of lives lost. All that the WHO and public health bureaucracy had to do was to recommend and support people taking sufficient Vitamin D3. This failure to act traces back to the unscientific bias and pro-vaccine obsession of Dr. Anthony Fauci. And once again the legacy media, while being paid by the US government and the pharmaceutical industry to promote vaccination, acted by censoring, defaming and suppressing the ability of physicians to inform people of scientific truth. The disease you suffered, the loss of life among your family and friends, could have been greatly reduced by simply getting enough Vitamin D3. This is another example of what happens when unelected bureaucrats are allowed to control free speech. Crimes against humanity.

The effectiveness of Vitamin D3 as an immune system-boosting prophylactic treatment for influenza and other respiratory RNA viruses was first discovered in 2006. Despite that fact that this treatment is amazingly effective for preventing death (by strengthening your immune system), it has never been investigated by the NIH, promoted by the CDC or by the US government for the treatment of influenza. One major issue has been that uncontrolled variables of dosing, timing of dosing and disease status have resulted in inconsistent clinical trial results (much as we have seen with the Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine COVID trials). However, when Vitamin D3 is given prophylactically at sufficient doses, there is clear and compelling evidence that Vitamin D blood levels of around 50 ng/ml will substantially reduce symptomatic infection, severe disease and mortality.

Longstanding worldwide public health policy is that Vitamin D should be taken at sufficient levels (typically supplemented in milk products) to prevent the bone disease called rickets. But this is just a minimal level to prevent a very obvious debilitating disease. The recommended Vitamin D levels in our milk are not sufficient for the more subtle immune system-boosting effects of this critical vitamin. Our bodies’ way of normally producing Vitamin D requires a lot of sunlight, but life in the modern world and northern latitudes make this difficult- particular in winter months which is often when the respiratory viruses cause the most disease and death. In a sense, disease and death from Influenza and other respiratory RNA viruses are a lifestyle disease. Just the way things are. Largely avoidable unnecessary death.

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Trojan virus.

Attenuated Viruses In Vaccines Cause Rise In Deadly Hepatitis In Children (DE)

The mystery hepatitis cases have recently been recorded in 14 states across America. Doctors in Ohio have reported 7 cases in children as young as 18 months, and North Dakota confirmed their first case on 5th May. As of the same date, six children have required a liver transplant and one has died. Could the actual reason for essentially banning the use of the Janssen vaccine instead have something to do with medicine regulators’ fears that the accentuated adenovirus it contains has gone rogue? Both the J&J and AstraZeneca Covid-19 injections are viral vector gene therapies. Both allegedly work by doing the following – First, the DNA instructions to create the SARS-CoV-2 antigen (spike protein; not the full SARS-CoV-2 virus) are inserted into a modified virus (adenovirus).

Then after the “vaccine” is injected into an individual, the viral vector delivers the spike protein DNA instructions to cells resulting in large amounts of the spike protein antigen. The resulting immune response to SARS-CoV-2 allegedly helps mimic what occurs during natural infection and results in a cellular immune response. The current theory, however, is that the adenovirus now circulating has been born from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Which would suggest the FDA have suspended the Janssen jab to prevent it from doing exactly the same thing. But that doesn’t mean the J&J jab isn’t the actual culprit.

The UK was the first country to roll-out the adenovirus based AstraZeneca Covid-19 injection en masse in January 2021, and it was also the first country to report an unusual increase in hepatitis cases of unknown cause among children. Just a coincidence? The theory behind the AstraZeneca virus going rogue is that the virus contained in the vaccine combines with the E1 gene from another circulating adenovirus, of which there are many. The result is a replicating ChAdOx1 virus.

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Hard to explain, because people think AIDS=HIV.

Fully Vaccinated Are Developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DE)

Official data made available by the U.S. Government and Centers for Disease Control strongly suggests that fully vaccinated Americans are developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. But they are not alone, because further data made available by the UK Government and the Government of Canada suggests the vaccinated population in both of these respective countries are also developing the debilitating condition. It’s a common misconception that Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is only caused by the HIV virus. This simply isn’t true. Acquired (or secondary) immunodeficiency is one of the major causes of infections in adults. These immunodeficiency disorders affect your immune system partially or as a whole, making your body an easy target for several diseases and infections. When immunodeficiency disorders affect your immune system, your body can no longer fight bacteria and diseases. Several factors in the environment can cause secondary immunodeficiency disorders.

Some common ones are:
• Radiation or chemotherapy, which can lead to a secondary immunodeficiency disorder known as neutropenia
• Infections due to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can result in acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)
• Leukaemia, a cancer that begins in the cells of the bone marrow that can lead to hypogammaglobulinemia—a type of secondary immunodeficiency
• Malnutrition, which affects up to 50% of populations in underdeveloped countries and leaves people vulnerable to respiratory infections and diarrhoea


But some of the less common causes include Drugs or medications. So it’s perfectly possible for a medication or drug to cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and data published by the U.S Government and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) strongly suggests the Covid-19 injections should be added to the list. For months on end, official data coming out of both the UK and Canada has strongly insinuated that the vaccinated population are developing a nee form of AIDS. This is because the Covid-19 injections are proving to have a real-world negative effectiveness, implying that they are causing damage to the natural immune system.

Geert

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Large study.

Study: Masks Might Make Covid Worse (CS)

In the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Cureus, Dr. Beny Spira reviewed every European country with at least 1 million people between October 2020 – March 2021, when “the entire continent was undergoing an outburst of COVID-19.” Mask mandates and compliance across these countries varied significantly, from 5 per cent to 95 per cent. By comparing each respective country’s infection and death statistics, along with these mask-wearing percentages, Spira drew two conclusions: “While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission.


Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.” Of course, previous studies draw contrary conclusions, but Spira argues they falsely attributed mask mandates as having efficacy when in reality, they were implemented at the tail end of COVID waves.

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Download xls. list from inside the article.

This Is The List Of WEF Graduates (Malone Institute)

The WEF graduates and members are Foreign Agents. The full title of the US Foreign Principal Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) is “An Act to require the registration of certain persons employed by agencies to disseminate propaganda in the United States and for other purposes.” Citing Wikipedia, “The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (2 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.) is a United States law requiring persons engaged in domestic political or advocacy work on behalf of foreign interests to register with the Department of Justice and disclose their relationship, activities, and related financial compensation. Its purpose is to allow the government and general public to be informed of the identities of individuals representing the interests of foreign governments or entities. The law is administered and enforced (or not…) by the FARA Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD).”


The Malone Institute (primarily Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone and Anita Hasbury-Snogles), in collaboration with the Pharos foundation and Pharos Media Productions in Sweden, has invested months of time and hundreds of labor hours to mine existing and historic publicly available data sources to develop a detailed summary of graduates from two WEF training programs; the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow (a one-year program that ran from 1993 to 2003) and Young Global Leaders (a five-year program started 2004/2005 and still running). These people have been intentionally and internationally deployed as foreign agents representing the interests of the WEF members to “penetrate the global cabinets of countries” as well as a wide range of key business sectors including banking/finance, other business sectors (including health and biotechnology), academia and health, media, technology, logistics, arts and culture, sports, politics and government, think tanks, telecommunications, real estate, financial investment/holding companies, a variety of non-governmental organizations, energy, aerospace and military, food and agriculture.

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You think they’ll let you keep it?

Mexico Calls for Latin American Lithium Alliance (RKC)

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, expressed his intentionto form an alliance with Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, in order to promote mutual collaboration on lithium. “There has been communication with the president of Bolivia (Luis Arce), he, in turn, has a relationship, like us, with the president of Argentina (Alberto Fernández), who also has lithium, and with the president of Chile (Gabriel Boric), with the purpose of creating an association to help each other mutually,” said the Mexican president during his morning press conference today. In April, Mexico’s Congress approved a reform to the Mining Law of that country which launched the nationalization of lithium and the creation of a public body that is in charge of everything related to exploration, exploitation, and industrialization.


He pointed out that in the case of Chile and Argentina, private companies are in charge of exploiting the resource, but Mexico is still interested in collaborating in this work. “In the case of Bolivia and Mexico, lithium is nationalized, but there are shared interests [with Chile and Argentina] and we are going to work together, we are already doing it,” said López Obrador. In recent days, Bolivia celebrated the five-year anniversary of the state company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB). It was created by the government of Evo Morales with the aim of industrializing lithium and manufacturing value-added products within the country.

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2022

 

 

Central bank assets

 

 

 

Gonzalo Saudi

 

 

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Mar 192022
 


Salvador Dali Eggs on the plate (without the plate) 1932

 

Shadows Within Shadows (Jim Kunstler)
The Dominance Of The US Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes (QTR)
All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold (Escobar)
Dollar Dominance Is Going To Be With Us For Decades To Come (Fickling)
Ukraine Adopts WEF Proposals (Armstrong)
NATO Calls up 100s of 1000s of Troops Ready to Begin WWIII (Armstrong)
The Times Finally Admits: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real (NYP op-ed)
How Dem Officials, The Media And Big Tech Buried The Hunter Biden Story (NYP)
Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine (ZH)
Russia Blocks Ships Carrying Grain Exports (DW)
“Died Suddenly” Solved (Chesnut)
UK will HIDE Vaccinated Cases and Deaths (Chudov)
Two UK Residents Died of Blood-Clotting Disorders Linked to AstraZeneca (CHD)
CDC Removes 24% of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others (ET)
Fauci Says He’s Considering Stepping Down (ET)

 

 


Fresco in Prague, dedicated to the children of Ukraine

 

 

Hungry people are dangerous

 

 

 

 

Rickards

 

 

Safe and effective

 

 

“How do we propose to get these things into Ukraine? Fly the stuff in on USAF C-17 Globemaster transport planes? To what airfield, exactly?”

Shadows Within Shadows (Jim Kunstler)

The regime behind “Joe Biden” appears to relish the prospect of dragging out this crisis as long as possible, despite the fact that we have about zero national interest in the fate of Ukraine, except perhaps for our fears about the dark secrets that reside there…. Amid an all-out campaign of contrived World War Three hysteria, our country aims to send about $14-billion in aid to Ukraine post-haste, including more javelin anti-tank missiles and weapons described as “kamikaze drones,” posing some thorny questions for curious observers. How do we propose to get these things into Ukraine? Fly the stuff in on USAF C-17 Globemaster transport planes? To what airfield, exactly? And with what assurance that they can make delivery without encountering, shall we say, induced mechanical failure before landing?

Drive the weapons across the border from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, or Moldova? Do you not suppose that Russia has satellite surveillance of the limited number of road crossings along that frontier, and will be watching for truck convoys. More likely, that dollar number and the weaponry talk are fantasies intended to propitiate the roughly thirty percent of Americans whom, pollsters report, are avid for an apocalyptic nuclear showdown with Russia. Thirty percent, by the way, is the estimate by psychologists of any given population susceptible to mass formation psychosis — the transfiguration of anxiety-and-anomie-driven persons from something like harmless grasshoppers into ravaging human locusts.

That group derangement phenomenon has been managed artfully by America’s Deep State in recent years starting with the Russia Collusion hoax against the alleged monsterdom of Mr. Trump, then shifted to the frenzy around Covid-19 virus, with all its sickening rituals of obedience and submission, and now segued seamlessly to the melodrama of Vladimir Putin cast as King Kong manhandling Fay Wray as personified by Ukraine. Readers assure me that Russia is “getting its ass kicked” in that sore-beset, yawning expanse of wheat and mud that has been, one way or another, a domain of Russia longer than the USA has been nation — except the past thirty-odd years when it has been a playground for homegrown oligarch-looters, US State Department and CIA gamesters, and grift-seeking rogues such as Mr. Hunter R. Biden and the relatives of John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi.

Read more …

Three articles on the USD. I still tend to side with No. 3, I don’t see what could replace the dollar. Certainly not the yuan, not as long as Xi demands full control of it.. There’s gold, and bitcoin, and SDR, and then maybe a fiat basket of currencies. Whatever comes, it will take a long time.

The Dominance Of The US Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes (QTR)

Saudi Arabia, which is a nation of major consequence economically due to its significant oil and gas reserves, has reportedly embraced the idea of accepting Yuan instead of dollars for Chinese oil sales. Not unlike Russia and China’s plans to de-dollarize, that date back nearly a decade, the Saudis have been considering this idea for six years already. And not unlike Russia and China’s new economic tie-up, the catalyst for speeding up the process has been U.S. foreign policy: Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia.

The talks with China over yuan-priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years but have accelerated this year as the Saudis have grown increasingly unhappy with decades-old U.S. security commitments to defend the kingdom, the people said. The consideration by Saudi Arabia is consequential. It shows that other nations, when forced to choose sides between the U.S. and its foes, don’t feel obligated to commit to the U.S. dollar, further undermining the world’s perception about the dollar’s strength. Not unlike Russia, Saudi Arabia is a country that, regardless of how much its currency may “devalue” versus a fiat basket of currencies, is still backed by finite resources. This gives the country and its currency intrinsic strength. Russia seems to understand this. In fact, just this morning, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, likely alluding to this fact, said that economic sanctions against Russia make the country “stronger”.

Saudi Arabia is now another serious name on the list of contenders who have the currency bite to back up the economic rhetoric bark of challenging the dollar. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the Saudis have “traded oil exclusively in dollars since 1974, in a deal with the Nixon administration that included security guarantees for the kingdom.” The U.S. dollar’s ties to oil have been crucial in helping prop up the currency’s demand globally. These ties have also helped drum up the psychological buy-in necessary for the world to collectively accept that “the next guy” is going to want their U.S. dollars. But given the alliance between Russia and China – and the newfound alliance between Saudi Arabia and China – it looks as though that confidence game might be coming to an end right before our very eyes.

Read more …

Love Pepe, but this does’t sound credible.

All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold (Escobar)

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system. Saudi Arabia – perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU – is advancing the coming of the petroyuan. India – third largest importer of oil in the world – is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism. Riyadh’s oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals – Japan, South Korea, EU – will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.

Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: “If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns.” Unicorns are a trademark of the massive NATOstan psyops apparatus, lavishly illustrated by the staged, completely fake “summit” in Kiev between Comedian Ze and the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, thoroughly debunked by John Helmer and Polish sources.

Poznar, a realist, hinted in fact at the ritual burial of the financial chapter of the “rules-based international order” in place since the early Cold War years: “After the end of this war ‘money’ “will never be the same”. Especially when the Hegemon demonstrates its “rules” by encroaching on other people’s money. And that configures the central tenet of 21st century martial geopolitics as monetary/ideological. The world, especially the Global South, will have to decide whether “money” is represented by the virtual, turbo-charged casino privileged by the Americans or by real, tangible assets such as energy sources. A bipolar financial world – U.S. dollar vs. yuan – is at hand.

There’s no surefire evidence – yet. But the Kremlin may have certainly gamed that by using Russia’s foreign reserves as bait, likely to be frozen by sanctions, the end result could be the smashing of the petrodollar. After all the overwhelming majority of the Global South by now has fully understood that the backed-by-nothing U.S. dollar as “money” – according to Poznar – is absolutely untrustworthy. If that’s the case, talk about a Putin ippon from hell.

Read more …

Thread.

“..would take decades to come to fruition. And that only gets you to the point where the yuan is as important as, say, the euro or the yen.”

Dollar Dominance Is Going To Be With Us For Decades To Come (Fickling)

I regularly scoff about the wild claims about the yuan replacing the dollar as a global currency. But every time I look at the data I’m still *amazed* at just how irrelevant the yuan is: Banks *in China itself* still use the greenback for more than two-thirds of their cross-border claims. Just 14% are denominated in yuan.

As is often pointed out, the Swiss Franc and Canadian and Australian dollars are used in more FX transactions than the Chinese yuan. It’s likely the yuan is more used down than in this 2019 data, but also consider that much of those flows will be with the Hong Kong dollar.

Which however you look at it is not exactly a global monetary transaction. The key thing that I think people fail to understand about the dollar’s global importance is that it’s founded not so much on the U.S. dollar regulated by the U.S. Federal Reserve, but the eurodollar, an instrument that few people know about and fewer understand. Are eurodollars money? Well, kinda. They owe their value to the fact that they’re freely convertible with U.S. dollars, on the balance sheets of banks in the U.S. But they are created on the balance sheets of banks outside the U.S. and not subject to Federal Reserve regulation. Eurodollars were the crypto of their day — a way to create money out of sight of government regulation. Their origin was in the dollar deposits of Communist countries after World War II, which the kept in Europe so that the Fed wouldn’t be able to freeze their assets.

It’s absolutely true that the Fed’s post-2008 swap lines, and the growing use of the dollar to extend the reach of Washington’s secondary sanctions, and the action against the central bank of Russia last month, start eroding the eurodollar’s autonomy. But compare it to assets in a country like China with a closed capital account and sweeping asset forfeiture rules like China’s so-called anti-sanctions law last year, and money based on the eurodollar is still the closest thing the world has to unregulated global finance.

If China opens up its capital account, starts running up huge budget deficits to provide more of a supply of safe assets, and establishes a solid reputation for rule of law, it might start to chip away at the edges of this edifice. But any one of those conditions on its own would be an epic, extraordinary policy change, and would take decades to come to fruition. And that only gets you to the point where the yuan is as important as, say, the euro or the yen.

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WEF AND crypto?!

Ukraine Adopts WEF Proposals (Armstrong)

Zelensky has just signed into law the first steps of Schwab’s Great Reset. He announced he is introducing a Social Credit Application combining Universal Basic Income (UBI), a Digital Identity & a Vaccine Passport all within their Diia app. He also says that because so much money is coming into Ukraine as he has become an international celebrity, he has legalized cryptocurrencies in Ukraine. He will allow foreign and Ukrainian cryptocurrencies exchanges to operate legally, according to the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. So far, he has taken in over $63 million in cryptocurrency donations.

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100,000 US troops sent to Europe to NOT start a war.

NATO Calls up 100s of 1000s of Troops Ready to Begin WWIII (Armstrong)

The pressure to start World War III is on. NATO now expects that there will be a major war with Russia and the confrontation may come even in a few weeks. The NATO Secretary-General announced an increased war alert for hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Stoltenberg issued a joint statement with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, stating that hundreds of thousands of NATO troops were placed on high alert along with 100,000 US troops. The problem with war is that BOTH sides lie and twist the facts to support their own agenda. They paint their adversary as evil to stir up the troops to go fight and risk their lives typically for fake stories and agendas.

The Press is deliberately trying to create World War III and is engaged in using photos of children hurt and others from events unrelated to Ukraine. This is all to beat the war drums to create World War III without any honest understanding of what that will mean. Despite the hatred and demonization of Putin, he has been trying to take the high road. Zelensky has been following his orders and refusing to compromise on anything. As a WEF Young Global Leader, he is showing the same authoritarian approach as Trudeau in Canada as well as Australia and New Zealand who are all on board with this Great Reset. We may see this crisis turn into a confrontation as soon as the week of April 18th going into the first week of May based upon our computer models.

But the real crisis may come in August and turn global in 2023. I am glad I spent a fair portion of my life in Europe to see all the historical monuments before these people feel the need to destroy the world over two provinces in Ukraine. I fear this time, the monuments will not survive. Pray for civilization for we have madmen leading the West into World War III all so they can Build Back Better as they did following World War II with Bretton Woods II, but this time we are facing a completely different war with biological and nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the press will NEVER tell us the truth or explain just why people are expected to lose their lives for some noble cause that is always some propaganda to support a political agenda. This time, the bombs will be wiping out American cities unlike World War I and II not to mention Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or other clandestine operations. You may not be watching it on TV but out your own window. Well, we get what we deserve. America voted for Biden, Britain for Johnson, Canada for Trudeau, and Ukraine for Zelensky. There is no peacemaker and certainly no statesman among the crop of world leaders today. To even question what is going on they cancel you now as a Putin supporter to once more not have to explain the truth. There is NEVER truth to be found in the propaganda of war for either side.

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Censoring the laptop story was for domestic consumption. But Russia, China, India watch this unfold and see a corrupt rogue state that cannot be trusted.

The Times Finally Admits: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real (NYP op-ed)

Now we’re 16 months away from the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s safely in the White House, and the Times finally decides to report on the news rather than carry the Biden campaign’s water. And they find that hey, Hunter Biden’s business interests benefited from Joe Biden’s political status to a suspicious degree. Perhaps this is a topic worthy of examination. How did the Times “authenticate” the laptop? It doesn’t say. Unlike The Post’s reporting, which detailed exactly how we got the files and where they came from, the Times does a hand wave to anonymous sources. No facts have changed since fall 2020. They knew the laptop was real from the start. They just didn’t want to say so.

There’s never any shame with these 180s. Sorry that we wrote a “fact check” that turned out to be bull! Sorry we wrote a piece claiming something wasn’t a story and you were stupid for thinking so! Twitter banned us for supposedly publishing “hacked materials” that weren’t hacked. The company’s CEO apologized, but by that point, they had accomplished what they wanted. Like the Times, they cast enough doubt to avoid making their preferred candidate look bad. Readers of the Times have discovered in March 2022 that Hunter Biden pursued business deals in Europe and Asia, and may have leveraged his father’s position as vice president to do it. Hunter also may not have properly registered with the government or declared all his income. All legitimate topics of discussion about a presidential candidate’s family, no?

Readers of The Post have known this since October 2020. We also have a much better sports section. We’ve authenticated it.

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Special counsel. It’s the only approach.

How Dem Officials, The Media And Big Tech Buried The Hunter Biden Story (NYP)

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.” But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions. These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

It was infamously snuffed out on Twitter, as was The Post’s Twitter account, because of a policy about hacked materials that only seemed to apply to this one case. Twitter didn’t bar the New York Times’s stories about Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have come from hacked materials for all we know, and almost certainly were the product of a criminal act (leaking tax returns is against the law), but the Times never even told us how it got the returns, so we don’t know. The Post acted with transparency in explaining to readers how it got the Laptop from Hell. Moreover, nobody on Team Biden denied The Post’s report, because they knew or suspected it was true. Every news outlet in the country should have fronted the story at that point: “Biden team refuses to deny Hunter Biden laptop story.” A few months later, Hunter himself said the laptop “certainly” could be his, and the media shrugged instead of apologizing.


Even in the presidential debate where the matter came up, Joe Biden’s comments were not a denial but simply a deflection, and everybody who reported that he denied the laptop story was guilty of propagating fake news all over again. What he actually said was, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.” Joe (who later said “Yes, yes, yes” when a reporter asked him if he “believed” the laptop was Russian disinfo — the question allowed him all the wiggle room in the world) pointedly wasn’t denying the laptop belonged to Hunter, and wasn’t denying the material on it was genuine.

He was simply referring to the now-infamous Politico whitewash of October 19, 2020, which was fake news about fake news: The headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intelligence Officials Say” didn’t even accurately relate what was in the story. Those officials simply said they were “suspicious” about Russian involvement, admitted they had no evidence for this and pointed out (this was buried in the 10th paragraph of Politico’s story), “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not.” In other words, the notorious liar James Clapper et al. (as far as I can tell, every signatory who made his opinion known about the election was a Biden supporter) were simply peeing in the dark. Their rank speculation was unworthy of being published.

Read more …

Watch Africa.

Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine (ZH)

On Friday, Jakob Kern, an emergency coordinator at the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP), warned Ukraine’s food supply chains were collapsing as Russia bombed key infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and trains. “The country’s food supply chain is falling apart. Movements of goods have slowed down due to insecurity and the reluctance of drivers,” Kern told a Geneva during a video conference from Krakow, Poland. “Inside Ukraine our job is in effect, to replace the broken commercial food supply chains,” he added, describing the rebuilding task as a “mammoth” one. Ukraine’s top agricultural export products are corn and wheat. Before the invasion, Ukraine was the second-largest supplier of grains for the European Union and one of the largest suppliers for emerging markets in Asia and Africa.

Breaking down the numbers, Ukraine produced 49.6% of global sunflower oil, 10% of global wheat, 12.6% of global barley, and 15.3% of global maize. Estimates via Black Sea research firm SovEcon show Ukraine’s 2022 corn harvest could plunge as much as 35% from 41.9 million tons last year to 27.7 million tons this year because of all the disruptions. Farmers are already reporting diesel and fertilizer shortages. Wheat harvests are also expected to decline. Some have even pointed total crop output in the country could be halved. “With global food prices at an all-time high, WFP is also concerned about the impact of the Ukraine crisis on food security globally, especially hunger hot spots,” he said, warning of “collateral hunger” in other places like Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey that rely heavily on Ukraine imports.

All of this has fueled the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization to warn global food prices could rise another 8-20% from current levels due to the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, also warned today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may cause a global surge in malnutrition and famine. “For the last three years, global rates of hunger and famine have been on the rise. With the Russian invasion, we are now facing the risk of imminent famine and starvation in more places around the world,” Fakhri said in a statement.

Read more …

“Russia blames the stoppage on the high risk of mines, which it said had been laid by the Ukrainian Navy.”

Russia Blocks Ships Carrying Grain Exports (DW)

Wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, which make up a vital part of the world’s food supply are still being blocked by Russia from leaving the Black Sea, Germany’s largest agricultural trader BayWa said this week. “Zero [grain] is currently being exported from the ports of Ukraine — nothing is leaving the country at all,” Jörg-Simon Immerz, head of the grain trading at BayWa, told dpa news agency. He added that the export activity on the Russian side is “very limited.” Immerz’s assessment was backed up by the Panamanian Maritime Authority, who said on Wednesday that the Russian Navy was preventing 200-300 ships from leaving the Black Sea — most of them were carrying grain. Other reports suggest around 100 vessels are blocked.

Noriel Arauz, the administrator for the authority, said three Panamanian-flagged ships have come under Russian fire since the invasion of Ukraine started. One of the ships sank and two others were damaged, while no one was injured. British newspaper The Guardian reported that several other ships have been struck since the invasion began on February 24, including from Bangladesh and Estonia, which killed one person. Russia blames the stoppage on the high risk of mines, which it said had been laid by the Ukrainian Navy. Questions have been raised about how much grain Ukraine will be able to produce this year due to the conflict. At the same time, Russia has vowed to retaliate against Western sanctions that have crippled its economy.

Curbs on wheat and fertilizer exports are presumed to be high on Moscow’s list, which could have further consequences for the world’s food supply and food price inflation. Russia produces close to 80 million metric tons of wheat a year and exports close to 30 million tons, while Ukraine exports about 20 to 25 million tons a year. BayWa, meanwhile, believes there is no reason to fear a wheat shortage as much more wheat is harvested in the EU than is consumed. “The EU exports about 30 million metric tons of wheat annually, and Germany is also an exporter in normal years,” Immerz said. But that is not true for all types of grain. “We rely on imports for corn,” he added.

[..] Meanwhile, a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned about the impact of the war on the food situation in Africa. Between 2018 and 2020, Russia accounted for nearly a third of wheat imports to the continent, while around 12% come from Ukraine. The UNCTAD report said up to 25 African countries, especially the least developed economies, relied on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine.

Read more …

Thread. SUDEP- Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

“Died Suddenly” Solved (Chesnut)

BUILDING: MY MOST IMPORTANT FINDING TO DATE: DIED UNEXPECTEDLY SOLVED. SUDEP AND “DIED UNEXPECTEDLY” – THE SPIKE PROTEIN, FIBROSIS AND THE BRAINSTEM. PART I “A SILENT ENTRANCE”. As you recall, the original spike caused a loss of the sense of smell, the medical term is Anosmia.

The olfactory (sense of smell) system happens to be a DIRECT ROUTE TO THE BRAINSTEM. Indeed, when we look at autopsies, the Spike Protein is a very frequent “guest” in the Brainstem. Pathological immune responses or SARS-CoV-2 invasion of the brainstem is suspected. An autopsy study has isolated 32 brain sections from 16 victims of COVID-19 and found concentrated SARS-CoV-2 RNA (>5 copies/mm3) in three sections from the olfactory nerves and the brainstem’s MEDULLA. More convincingly, in another autopsy study of deceased COVID-19 patients, SARS-CoV-2 RNA and proteins (nucleocapsid or SPIKE) were detected in 50% and 40% of brainstem samples, respectively.

Similarly, another autopsy study has found SARS-CoV-2 RNA and SPIKE PROTEINS in the olfactory mucosal-neuronal junction and brainstem’s MEDULLA in 67% and 19% of samples, respectively. In sum, these autopsy studies have provided evidence for SARS-CoV-2 tropism FROM THE OLFACTORY SYSTEM INTO THE BRAINSTEM. OK. We know the Spike Protein invades the Medulla of the Brainstem. So, what does this mean? Well, those who suffer from Epilepsy are prone to sudden death. In fact, it is because of PATHOLOGIC CORRELATIONS IN THE MEDULLA that they suffer what is known as SUDEP- Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) likely arises as a result of AUTONOMIC DYSFUNCTION around the time of a seizure. In vivo MRI studies report volume reduction in the MEDULLA and other brainstem autonomic regions. Rostro-caudal alterations of medullary volume in SUDEP localize with regions containing respiratory regulatory nuclei. They may represent seizure-related alterations, relevant to the pathophysiology of SUDEP. Now, this heretofore rare event is now becoming all too common. The “One-Two Punch” of aberrant spike protein brainstem signaling (remodeling) combined with spike protein cardiac remodeling has virtually recreated the EXACT ENVIRONMENT OF SUDEP!

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“..cases in week 7-10 among the unvaccinated barely increased by 1%, from 59,904 cases to 60,372. For the boosted, cases increased by 14%..”

UK will HIDE Vaccinated Cases and Deaths (Chudov)

The infamous UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report started as a great tool by the vaccinators to showcase incredible successes of Covid Vaxx. But, as time went on, success was no longer in the cards, and the reports displayed grimmer and grimmer failure of vaccines in the UK. As I said many times, the bad news from the UK in no way should be interpreted as the UK being somehow a bad country. To the contrary, the UK had an amazing statistical agency that (up until now) honestly reported the goings in the vaxxed world. Finally, it seems, just as Scotland did, the UK will discontinue case reports by vaccination status. They gave the lamest excuse of “ending free Covid testing” that somehow makes them unable to add up vaccinated vs unvaccinated cases? Come on.

The so called “free Covid testing” is likely ending for similarly sinister reasons, specifically because they want to downplay cases as they keep increasing in the UK. Well, these UKHSA reports were good while it lasted. The truthful cases by vaccination status reports, showing the ignominous ending of the UK vaccination campaign, will be available no more starting April. [..] Before I describe what is it that they are trying to hide, let me mention my methodology: I keep a spreadsheet that I update week by week, with counts of vaccinated vs boosted case rates and death rates. I do NOT include under-18s in my data because they are (were) overtested in schools, do not actually die of Covid, thankfully, and really are not the same population as adults.

What they are trying to hide is that the pandemic among the unvaccinated is essentially over, whereas it is just getting started among the boosted. Look at the numbers: Compared to week 6-9, cases in week 7-10 among the unvaccinated barely increased by 1%, from 59,904 cases to 60,372. For the boosted, cases increased by 14%, from 543,809 to 617,982! For the vulnerable 60-69 year old category, the boosted 60-69 year olds get sick 4.25 TIMES as much as unvaccinated 60-69 year olds. Take a minute to let that sink in. Far from being protective, boosters make 60-69 year olds four times more vulnerable to infections!

Deaths similarly show a sad picture. 90% of Covid deaths in the UK, in weeks 7-10, were among the vaccinated!

Read more …

The “potentially fatal blood-clotting issue” was not known, because it was never tested.

Two UK Residents Died of Blood-Clotting Disorders Linked to AstraZeneca (CHD)

UK coroners in two separate cases this week concluded individuals who received AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine died from blood-clotting disorders caused by the vaccine. Kim Lockwood, a 34-year-old mother from South Yorkshire, died in March 2021 of a catastrophic brain bleed nine days after getting the AstraZeneca shot. Lockwood complained of an excruciating headache eight days after getting the vaccine. Her condition quickly deteriorated and she was pronounced dead 17 hours after being admitted to the hospital. South Yorkshire Coroner Nicola Mundy, calling Lockwood “extremely unlucky,” recorded the cause of death as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).


Separately, a Sheffield County inquest on Monday concluded Tom Dudley, a 31-year old father of two who received the Astra-Zeneca vaccine on April 27, 2021, died of a vaccine-induced brain hemorrhage on May 14, 2021. The UK’s National Health Service on May 7, 2021, changed the guidance for the AstraZeneca vaccine, suggesting healthy individuals under 40 should avoid it due to possible blood-clotting complications. Assistant coroner Tanyka Rawden said that at the time of Dudley’s death the potentially fatal blood-clotting issue “was not a known and recognized complication of this vaccine. It seems to me that the guidelines have been changed,” she said. “They were changed very, very quickly after Tom had his vaccination.”

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After big decisions had been based on precisely those numbers.

CDC Removes 24% of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others (ET)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had listed in those under 18 years old. The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15. “Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC says on the site. The CDC relies on states and other jurisdictions to report COVID-19 deaths and acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete. But the statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited the tracker’s death total in November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5- to 11-years-old. Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates. The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000. The CDC previously adjusted its death count in August 2021 “after the identification of a data discrepancy.”

“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue. It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID,” Krohnert told The Epoch Times in an email. Some journalists and doctors have been citing the tracker data while others use a tally that is managed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has been described by the agency as more reliable. The NCHS tally, which is compiled from death certificates, currently lists 921 deaths involving COVID-19 among children and some 966,000 deaths involving COVID-19 among other age groups.

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“I have said that I would stay in what I’m doing until we get out of the pandemic phase, and I think we might be there already..”

2 days after he warns of another wave….

Fauci Says He’s Considering Stepping Down (ET)

Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a new interview that he is considering stepping away from the position he’d held since 1984. Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked during a podcast released March 18 whether he was mulling retirement or transitioning to a less-demanding job. “I certainly am because I’ve got to do it sometime,” Fauci, 81, said. “I can’t stay at this job forever, unless my staff is going to find me slumped over my desk one day. I’d rather not do that,” he added. Fauci was appointed to his position in 1984 during the Reagan administration. Fauci’s comments came after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) failed in his effort to get support for a measure that would eliminate the NIAID and create three new institutes in its stead.

Paul, who has clashed with Fauci during multiple congressional hearings, said Fauci has become has become a “dictator-in-chief.” “No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” Paul, a doctor, said. Fauci and his agency had not responded to requests for comment on the measure. Paul and other Fauci critics have taken issue with how the doctor misled the public on his agency’s funding for the Chinese lab located near the first cases of COVID-19 were recorded, his support for harsh measures during the pandemic, and his admission that he lied about the effectiveness of masks because of worries there wouldn’t be enough for health care workers.

Fauci, who has also been preparing for investigations Republicans have pledged into the COVID-19 response, has called Paul a partisan whose accusations aren’t rooted in facts. Without mentioning Paul, the podcast host asked Fauci in the new interview whether he would leave his post soon, noting that besides Dr. Francis Collins, who exited from his position as director of the National Institutes of Health in late 2021, Jeffrey Zients was stepping down as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator. “I have said that I would stay in what I’m doing until we get out of the pandemic phase, and I think we might be there already,” Fauci said. “If we can stay in this, then we’re at a point where I feel that we’ve done well by this. But I don’t have any plans right now to go anywhere, but you never know.”

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Mar 182022
 
 March 18, 2022  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Marcel Duchamp Sad young man on a train – Nude study 1911-12

 

Hunter Biden’s Infamous Laptop Confirmed In New York Times Report (NYPost)
Sure Seems Joe Biden Knowingly Lied about the Hunter Biden Laptop Story (NR)
The NYT Now Admits The Biden Laptop Is Authentic (ZH)
While You Weren’t Paying Attention (QTR)
NY Times Admits Hunter Laptop Authentic, Possible Basis for Charges (Turley)
German Chancellor Scholz: NATO Will Not “Intervene Militarily” In Ukraine (DW)
Putin Lays Out Demands For Cease-Fire In Call With Erdoga (ZH)
U.S. Dept. of State Thinks It’s an Authority on Fake News (RCP)
A Terrifying Monster To Blood Vessels – And Neurons (Chesnut)
Voice of Doom Dr Fauci Warns US Could Face More Covid Lockdowns (DM)
Covid Immunity Declines Steeply In Care Home Residents In England (G.)
Stagflation Trap Will Lead To Universal Basic Income And Food Rationing (Smith)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gonzalo

 

 

Tucker Macgregor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1504720080675954690

 

 

The New York Post deserves a Pulitzer. And Joe Biden needs to step down. Or Washington’s credibility is shot.

Hunter Biden’s Infamous Laptop Confirmed In New York Times Report (NYPost)

A comprehensive report about the ongoing federal probe into Hunter Biden’s tax filings published by the New York Times on Wednesday night confirmed the existence of the first son’s infamous laptop. In October 2020, The Post exclusively reported on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that he ditched at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019. The laptop’s hard drive contained a trove of emails, text messages, photos and financial documents between Hunter Biden, his family and business associates — detailing how the president’s son used his political leverage in his overseas business dealings. The repair shop owner reported the laptop to the FBI, which seized the device and its hard drive.

As part of their investigation into Hunter Biden, the Times reports, federal prosecutors have looked into emails between the first son and his former business associates that were recovered from the laptop. Some of the scrutinized correspondence was between Hunter Biden and Devon Archer, who had served with the first son on the board of Ukraine energy company Burisma, the report said. Archer, who was sentenced last month in an unrelated fraud case, has “cooperated completely” with the feds in their probe into Hunter Biden, The Post has reported. According to the Times, the emails between Hunter Biden, Archer and others regarding their international business activity came from files the publication obtained that “appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.”

People familiar with the emails and investigation confirmed their authenticity to the Times. The laptop confirmation was included in the Times report that also revealed how Hunter Biden paid off a tax liability of over $1 million — a year after he announced he was under investigation for defrauding the IRS. Hunter Biden has been under investigation for failing to pay taxes since his father was vice president, but the inquiry broadened in 2018 to look into how his international business dealings intersected with President Biden’s political career.

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“He must have known full well that the story wasn’t “a bunch of garbage.” He must have known full well that it wasn’t “a Russian plant.”

Sure Seems Joe Biden Knowingly Lied about the Hunter Biden Laptop Story (NR)

Next time President Biden speaks about . . . well, about anything really, remember that he knowingly lied to your face about the Hunter Biden laptop story — which the New York Times confirmed today, and which Joe Biden must have known was entirely true when it was first published in 2020 by the New York Post. In 2020, Joe Biden responded to Donald Trump bringing up the Post‘s story by saying on live television: There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.


This was a lie. Joe Biden is Hunter Biden’s father. He must have known full well that the story wasn’t “a bunch of garbage.” He must have known full well that it wasn’t “a Russian plant.” He must have known full well that Rudy Giuliani wasn’t the only one who believed it. Hell, he knew full well that Hunter Biden himself hadn’t denied the account, and instead had said that the laptop “absolutely” may have been his. And yet, when pressed, Biden said otherwise, because he assumed that the press and Silicon Valley would back him up in the lie. Which, of course, they did.

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“..pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.”

The NYT Now Admits The Biden Laptop Is Authentic (ZH)

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president. The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience: We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s validly despised class of media employees. Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post’s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

Russia Russia

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Turn it into a movie.

While You Weren’t Paying Attention (QTR)

It turns out that the party who spent four years accusing President Trump of Russian collusion performed a massive cover-up for Joe and Hunter Biden heading into the 2020 election that they have yet to be held accountable for. Go figure. I remember speaking to my father around the time of the election about the Hunter Biden laptop story, where presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son’s laptop was found to contain proof that the former Biden sold his influence to China while his father, the latter Biden, was Vice President of the United States. And in the midst of an ongoing media cover up of that story, I also remember talking to my father about former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski coming forward and blowing the whistle on the Bidens in an effort to get the public to take notice.


Instead, Bobulinski was only given airtime by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and was otherwise shunned and ignored by the rest of the left-leaning media. We both had watched Bobulinski’s interview and found him to be extremely credible. I remember my father saying that the censorship of the story and the story itself could, combined, be the biggest political scandal of all time. This caught me by surprise because my father, who has voted both Democrat and Republican over the last handful of elections, has lived through quite a few scandals. But now I understand what he was getting at. Selling your influence to China while running for President is a big deal. The media covering up that story completely in the United States in the midst of the election? An even bigger deal.

Because when you step back and objectively examine the issue of Joe Biden’s business dealings in China, it appeared that he was actually engaged in the types of conflict of interest that his party spent four years accusing President Trump of. Again, go figure. And then there was the laptop. After the New York Post broke what should have been a Pulitzer worthy story that Biden’s son had a laptop filled with incriminating evidence (in addition to dick pics taken while smoking crack with hookers), the story was promptly blackballed in the mainstream media and was talked about nowhere other than conservative news outlets. In fact, the mainstream media didn’t even give the story one shred of an objective chance. Half of the liberal media organizations covered the story as Russian disinformation, while the others didn’t carry it at all. The story was literally laughed off of TV and television as some kind of conspiracy theory.

And then a funny thing happened when the nation didn’t have access to what would turn out to be highly credible information: Joe Biden got elected president and, several months later, Politico reported that some parts of the laptop, including emails at the “center” of the controversy, were credible – a far cry from writing off the laptop as Russian disinformation.

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Let’s see those charges.

NY Times Admits Hunter Laptop Authentic, Possible Basis for Charges (Turley)

Last year, National Public Radio admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic and not Russian disinformation. It appears to have taken the New York Times even longer to move along that journalistic path of the Kübler-Ross process of grieving. The Times has now expressly and unambiguously stated that the laptop was abandoned by Hunter Biden, contains authentic emails, and is part of the basis for the ongoing investigation of Biden by federal authorities. Even with this admission against interests, the Times is downplaying the possible criminal charges in coverage strikingly different from its coverage of Trump officials charged on the same grounds. For those of us who have written about the laptop for two years, it has been a constantly barrage of criticism of spreading “Russian disinformation” or discussing manufactured emails.

Notably, the Biden family never outright denied that the laptop belonged to Hunter. They just kept repeating that it was Russian disinformation. It did not matter that recipients of the emails confirmed the authenticity of the messages detailing extensive influence peddling schemes by the Biden family. The Biden campaign assembled the usual list of experts to shut off debate by declaring that this was all false. It was a mantra from President Biden to a legion of reports. As Biden stated “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. [F]ive former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.” The press ran with that account despite the early determination of American intelligence that it was not Russian disinformation.

Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid wrote said the quiet part out loud by telling the media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” Let that sink in for a second. It does not matter if these are real emails and not Russian disinformation. They probably are real but should be treated as disinformation even though American intelligence has repeatedly rebutted that claim. It does not even matter that the computer has seized the computer as evidence in a criminal fraud investigation or that a Biden confidant is now giving his allegations to the FBI under threat of criminal charges if he lies to investigators.

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“NATO has a responsibility to prevent this conflict from escalating further,” Stoltenberg said..”

German Chancellor Scholz: NATO Will Not “Intervene Militarily” In Ukraine (DW)

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Thursday, as the war in Ukraine entered its fourth week. The meeting came just after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the German Bundestag via video link. Scholz opened his remarks alongside Stoltenberg by praising Zelenskyy for his “impressive words.” But the German leader reiterated NATO’s refusal to intervene militarily in Ukraine. “One thing must also be made clear: NATO will not intervene militarily in this war,” Scholz said. Scholz’s view matched statements repeated by Stoltenberg on Thursday that the military alliance’s involvement in Ukraine would increase the likelihood of the war spreading.


In Berlin, the NATO chief said the alliance’s job is to de-escalate the conflict. “NATO has a responsibility to prevent this conflict from escalating further,” Stoltenberg said. “That would be even more dangerous and cause more suffering, deaths and destruction.” Stoltenberg also met with German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during his visit to Berlin. Beside Lambrecht, Stoltenberg called Germany’s new defense commitments of a special fund of €100 billion ($111 billion) and plans to commit 2% of GDP to its defense budget “impressive.” Baerbock said Germany is considering stationing more troops on NATO’s eastern flank.

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Consistent.

Putin Lays Out Demands For Cease-Fire In Call With Erdoga (ZH)

In a Thursday conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly outlined the conditions for ending his invasion of Ukraine. According to a BBC report, a Turkish official who listened to the call between the two leaders said that Putin would end his invasion if several conditions are met including a promise that Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO. Erdogan’s leading adviser and spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, said Russia is also calling for Ukraine to undergo a disarmament process to mitigate threats to Russia in the future as well as legal protections for the Russian language in Ukraine. Additionally, Putin reportedly desires promises related to the “Denazification” of Ukraine.


Putin, according to the report, is also asking for face-to-face negotiations with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hammer out his demands which Zelenskyy has previously stated he is not opposed to. According to Kalin, there were other conditions Putin listed that he did not go into much detail about but he believes they will involve territories that have broken away from Ukraine in the eastern Donbas region. The report states that it is “assumed” Putin will ask Ukraine to give up territory in the east and formally recognize that Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, is a part of Russia. The demands are in line with previous reporting that stated Putin has told Ukrainian officials he will end his invasion if six major conditions are met. News of Putin’s willingness to negotiate an end to the war comes as his invasion enters its fourth week.

Macgregor to Celente: Ukraine War Will End Sooner Than You Think

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And they are. Just not on someone else’s.

U.S. Dept. of State Thinks It’s an Authority on Fake News (RCP)

Some say America has a fake news problem. They might be on to something. Americans’ trust in our media is at one of its lowest points, and social media has made disinformation easy to spread. But as America is tackling its own fake news problem, our government is pretending to be experts on it in Zimbabwe. In fact, the U.S. is sending $100,000 to Zimbabwe to help that country tackle fake news, according to a grant notice from the U.S. Department of State. The grant description states that the goal of the grant is, “To improve and promote adherence to international best practice in implementing fundamental freedom of speech and the press freedom.”


It encourages a three-pronged approach: Strengthening public understanding of freedom of speech and press freedom, improving media literacy to combat disinformation and increasing media sustainability, innovation and professionalization. The idea that the U.S. is an expert on disinformation, free speech, and combating censorship, and that it should be teaching them to other countries, is absurd. Between domestic debates on big tech censorship, the increasing polarization of news outlets, and increasing disinformation on social media, the U.S. has no business telling other countries the right way to do such things, let alone spending tax dollars to do so.

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@parsifaler thread: MOLECULAR MIMICRY.

A Terrifying Monster To Blood Vessels – And Neurons (Chesnut)

OMNIPOTENT TROPISM; OMNIPOTENT MOLECULAR MIMICRY: A Terrifying Monster To Blood Vessels – AND NEURONS! Most Likely More. I don’t quite know how to say this. But I am shaking as I write this. I was smoking a cigar and contemplating a DM an amazing (and famous) doctor sent me. The DM was about Pericytes and the Spike Protein. And I just kept thinking about it. Slowly, it dawned on me. And now I am shaking as I write this. Spike in Endothelium. Spike in Pericytes. Spike in Basement Membrane. Spike in Myelin Sheath. Spike in Axon. Spike distributed through Blood Vessels. Spike distributed through Axons. Inducing Fibrosis. Inducing Autoimmunity. Don’t you see? It is an omnipotent burrower! And why? Because of its massive TROPISM!

And then I remembered a paper I had read from 2005. It talked about how Coronaviruses cause MS via molecular mimicry. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain how a viral infection could lead to an autoimmune disease. Amongst these mechanisms is molecular mimicry. According to this model, a non-self agent first activates an immune cell. Then, the cell recognizes a self-element that shares antigenic conformation with the pathogen and directs a response towards it. Individuals who are genetically predisposed to respond to this antigenic determinant of a pathogen having a similar conformation to a determinant on a self-antigen could develop an autoimmune response following infection. Shared sequences or similar determinant conformations between coronavirus and myelin proteins such as myelin basic protein (MBP) and proteolipid protein (PLP) have been identified.

Molecular mimicry provides a unifying mechanism that could explain both the genetic and environmental aspects in the triggering of MS. So, if an ORDINARY Coronavirus can induce MS. What about one whose Spike Protein has a SIXTY-FOLD increase in peptide sharing? A massive heptapeptide sharing exists between SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein and human proteins. Such a peptide commonality is unexpected and highly improbable from a mathematical point of view, given that, as detailed under the “Methods” section, the probability of the occurrence in two proteins of just one heptapeptide is equal to ~ 20-7 (or 1 out of 1,280,000,000). Likewise, the probability of the occurrence in two proteins of just one hexapeptide is close to zero by being equal to ~ 20-6 (or 1 out of 64,000,000). That’s right. The odds of TWO shared peptides occurring is 1 IN 1.28 BILLION. It may be that everything the Spike Protein touches is either attacked by the body, turns to scar tissue, or both. My God. Stop this MADNESS!

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Shoot him into space.

Voice of Doom Dr Fauci Warns US Could Face More Covid Lockdowns (DM)

America’s top infectious-disease expert warned that the country could face more COVID-19 lockdowns if cases go up once again due to the latest variant, even as the most cautious begin to shrug off their virus fears once-and-for-all. Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and adviser to President Joe Biden, said easing restrictions, the waning protection from vaccines and the rise of the BA.2 subvariant around the world could bring on another wave of rising infections to the U.S. ‘If in fact we do see a turnaround and a resurgence, we have to be able to pivot and go back to any degree of mitigation that is commensurate with what the situation is,’ Fauci said in a CNN interview on Thursday. ‘We can’t just say, ‘We’re done. We’re going to move on.’ We’ve got to be able to be flexible because we’re dealing with a dynamic situation.’


Fauci added that the variant, which has seen a spike in the UK, could cause a surge in the U.S. as it appears to be as infectious as Omicron, but less fatal. ‘The overall mortality is actually down,’ Fauci said. ‘It’s a very interesting situation where the cases are going up, but it does not, at this point in time, appear to be any degree of severity.’ ‘We generally follow what goes on the UK by about two to three weeks,’ he added. ‘I would not be surprised in the next few weeks, given the fact that we’ve begun to open up, and we have an increase in the BA.2 variant, that we’ll be seeing an increase in cases.’ The warning came as COVID restrictions have been lifted all across the country amid a sharp drop in daily cases after the Omicron surge earlier this year.

Fauci returns

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The vaccines still don’t work. What a surprise.

Covid Immunity Declines Steeply In Care Home Residents In England (G.)

Immunity declines steeply among care home residents in the months after Covid vaccination, a study has found, leading to calls for regular boosters for the most vulnerable. The study of more than 15,000 care home residents found that protection against hospitalisation and death fell by one-third three to seven months after vaccination. The decline is far sharper than that seen in younger people, where immunity against infection wanes, but protection against severe illness appears to be robust. “What we’re seeing is that they are at increased risk of infection, hospitalisation and death as immunity wanes, and those increases look quite big,” said Prof Laura Shallcross, a public health expert at University College London and author of the paper. “That’s not good news at all.

“It suggests annual boosters in residents may not be enough,” she added. From April, a second booster (fourth dose), is being offered to adults aged 75 and over and residents in care homes. Further boosters could be rolled out in the autumn, depending on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the health secretary, Sajid Javid said this week. The latest findings, which have been published as a preprint, could be influential in shaping this decision. They come from the Vivaldi study, funded by the UK Health Security Agency, which monitored Covid in staff and residents in 331 care homes across England from December 2020 to December 2021.

The researchers found that two vaccine doses were effective at preventing 85% of hospitalisations and 94% of deaths among care home residents between two and 12 weeks after the second dose. But this protection fell to 54% of hospitalisations and 63% of deaths at three to seven months after vaccination. The trajectory looked very different in the 19,000 staff who were also tracked in the study. In staff, with an average age of 45, protection against infection fell just slightly from a 50% to 42% reduced risk after three months. There appeared to be no substantial waning in immunity against severe disease for staff, with very few hospitalisations occurring after vaccination.

Read more …

WEF.

Stagflation Trap Will Lead To Universal Basic Income And Food Rationing (Smith)

This past week during a conference discussing Biden’s “Build Back Better” scheme House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was confronted with questions on skyrocketing inflation. After referring to higher gas prices as the “Putin Tax”, she went on to offer perhaps the dumbest (or most insidious) denial on the causes of inflation that I have ever heard. She stated: “When we’re having this discussion, it’s important to dispel some of those who say, well it’s the government spending. No, it isn’t. The government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt. It is not inflationary.” Anyone with a basic understanding of economics and how central banks operate must have felt their brains explode when they heard this, I know I did.

But before I get into the numerous reasons why this claim is completely false in every way, I want to give a warning – It’s very easy in this situation to assume that Pelosi and even Biden are making these arguments because they are too stupid to grasp the fundamentals of debt creation, money velocity and fiat. That said, never mistake evil for mere ignorance. All higher level representatives of the White House are briefed by economic experts (spin doctors) well before they answer any questions on inflation, and the things they say have been carefully scripted. It’s possible Pelosi mixed her lies up a little bit, but the narrative the establishment is trying to promote is well planned. Asserting that money creation is a counterbalance to inflation instead of the cause is not brilliant, but it’s not designed to convince many people, only create confusion.

Let’s not forget that only last year these same people were telling the public that inflation was purely “transitory” and that there was nothing to worry about. Now they are trying to cover their tracks and the culpability of the Federal Reserve. I believe the goal here is to simply stall for time until the stagflationary collapse unfolds. They have the perfect scapegoat as they launch an economic war with Russia (and likely China in the near term), and the effects of this war will hurt the US and Europe far more than many realize.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Ukraine injured
https://twitter.com/i/status/1504656592830185474

 

 

 

 

John C. Reilly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1504579880851226634

 

 

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Mar 052022
 


Vincent van Gogh On the outskirts of Paris 1887

 

Russia “Recommends” Fertilizer Makers To Halt All Exports (ZH)
No More Russian Dressing For You! (Jim Kunstler)
Ukraine’s NATO Membership ‘Will Not Take Place’: German Chancellor (ET)
Zelensky Slams NATO Over Refusing To Implement No-fly Zone Over Ukraine (Hill)
How Ukraine’s Jewish President Zelensky Made Peace With Neo-Nazis (GZ)
Zelenskyy Losing Ground (CTH)
Zelenskyy Is Tied To Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, And Other Global Elites (LSN)
Bill Clinton Relaunching Clinton Global Initiative (Fox)
Western Media Are Acting As Cheerleaders For War (Cook)
War-Profiteering Gangsters Will Kill Us All Unless We Unite (Roger Waters)
Grave New World: The Soft Tyranny of Tomorrow (Charles)

 

 

Really?

 

 

Ukrainian family
https://twitter.com/i/status/1499915842477248515

 

 

Where’s Tony Fauci?

 

 

@RT_com’s account has been withheld in Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Germany, Greece, Romania, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Austria, Luxembourg, Latvia, Denmark, Lithuania, Croatia, Estonia, Cyprus, France, Spain, Belgium in response to a legal demand.

 

 

Here’s our real problem. $1,000 monthly grocery bills.

“Complete food cycle collapse”.

Watch the bottom video.

Russia “Recommends” Fertilizer Makers To Halt All Exports (ZH)

Those who have it, are no longer giving it away, and those that don’t will soon find themselves in the middle of an epic food crisis. Just hours after we reported that Russia effectively banned exports of fertilizers, moments ago Hungary – one of Europe’s most grain rich nations – has circled the wagons and realizing which way the wind is blowing, just announced that it will banning all grain exports effective immediately, in a statement . Expect wheat prices, already at record highs, to promptly double from here in the next few weeks as the world realizes the extent of the global food crisis that is coming. Our suggestion: buy flour, rice, barley and any other grains you can now, rather than waiting one month to buy them because you have to.

This morning we listed some of the countries that are dangerously (and almost exclusively) reliant on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat imports, highlighting Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and others… which are facing an “Arab Spring” style food crisis (and potential uprising) in the coming weeks unless the Ukraine conflict is resolved. And unfortunately, we can now confidently predict that the coming food crisis will strike every country that is using food fertilizer – which is all – because moments ago, Russian Interfax reported that as part of Moscow’s countersanctions, Russia has recommended fertilizer makers to halt exports, a move which will sent not only fertilizer prices orbitally higher, but all food prices will soon follow.


*RUSSIA RECOMMENDS FERTILIZER MAKERS TO HALT EXPORTS: IFX *RUSSIAN MINISTRY CITES LOGISTICS ISSUES ON FERTILIZERS: IFX. Worse still, natural gas is required in the manufacturing process for most nitrogen/fertilizer products and so the recent surge in European NatGas prices to record highs will only exacerbate the cost of fertilizer from any halt from Russia… all hell is about to break loose not only among food producers, but soon, in your local grocery store once US consumers realize that food prices are about to double, triple and x-ple more

 

 

Complete food cycle collapse

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“Covid-19? A mega-crime of mass homicide spawned by a matrix of pharmaceutical racketeers, corrupt government officials, and accomplice news organizations.”

No More Russian Dressing For You! (Jim Kunstler)

Who in the US government, from our founding in 1789 to 1991 — while Ukraine was part of Russia in one way or another — gave a passing thought to Ukraine? Answer: nobody. And then, after the crack-up of the USSR, Ukraine was “in play,” culminating in the 2014 CIA-sponsored “color revolution” that ousted then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who was inclined to join Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union of trade relations rather than the US wished-for NATO or EU. And ever since then it has been one American intrigue after another — including a brisk trade in grift and bribery by the Biden family, the Clinton syndicate, the next-gen of Kerrys, and other entitled elites from over here selling their influence.

And now the economic sanctions on Russia, which are sure to blow back on the countries issuing them. Europe has to pretend that it doesn’t need Russian oil and gas, that it doesn’t need cheap uranium to run their nuke power plants, that they don’t need the Baikonur Cosmodrome to launch their satellites, and so on. More likely, these moves will accelerate the collapse of Western Civ’s banking system, stock and bond markets, and erode the US dollar’s role as the global reserve currency — a longstanding “exorbitant privilege” for getting stuff from all over the world in exchange for promises to pay some Tuesday in the distant future. The reader may ask: why does this blog appear to take Russia’s side in the current conflict against the US and our supposed allies?

Answer: Why would you trust a government (ours) and its captive news media after years of their blatant lying and tyrannical over-reach? These parties appear to be at war against their own people, that is, against us — certainly more than Russia is. Especially in the historic moment when all our mendacious “narratives” are being exposed as false? Russian Collusion? Indictments underway and more to follow. Covid-19? A mega-crime of mass homicide spawned by a matrix of pharmaceutical racketeers, corrupt government officials, and accomplice news organizations. Stolen elections? Don’t, for Gawd’s sake, even try looking at the slime trail of evidence. I won’t bother listing the many transgressions of Wokery against our culture and history. And all of sudden, it appears a lot of American citizens have had enough of being fucked around. I’m with them.

Now consider this: What if it turns out that Russia can complete its Cleanup-in-Aisle-Four operation relatively quickly, with a minimized loss of life and damage to the everyday infrastructure of Ukraine, and arrange things there afterward so that Ukraine is not a menace to anyone, either Russia or the West? I sincerely believe this is their intention — just as I sincerely believe that their leadership is actually sane, and ours appears not to be. Perhaps Russia will even offer Ukraine (or its re-arranged regions) assistance in recovering from the foolishness it played along with to its own sorrow? What if Russia actually has no intention of starting World War Three? Will we keep trying to start it anyway?

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Or EU.

Ukraine’s NATO Membership ‘Will Not Take Place’: German Chancellor (ET)

Ukraine’s membership is not on The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s agenda, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Friday. “I also made it clear in Moscow and in my visit that this option [Ukraine’s membership of NATO] is not on the table and will not take place,” he said during an interview with German public broadcaster ZDF. “I said publicly that we all know that Ukraine’s NATO membership is not on the alliance’s agenda today,” he added. “That was understood by the American president, that [was] also understood by the French president.” Scholz said he shares Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security concern and clarified to Putin that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO.

“The Russians were worried about the control issue of their security. [Putin was worried] that NATO has a military setup and rockets in Ukraine targeting Russian territory. That is why we tried to make it clear that this will not occur,” he elaborated. Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership appeared to be one of the core disputes that caused the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. In February 2019, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a constitutional amendment committing the country to becoming a member of NATO and the European Union after the parliament passed the bill. Poroshenko told the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine days after he signed the amendment that joining NATO was a guarantee of security for Ukraine.

On the Russian side, Putin says Russia needs to lay down “red lines” to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO saying that Ukraine’s growing ties with the alliance could make it a launchpad for NATO missiles targeted at Russia. The United States and other Ukraine alliances have tried to avoid war by deescalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine. However, the Kremlin criticized the United States and NATO for failing to address the fundamental security concerns of Moscow, demanding that NATO stop its eastward expansion and that strike weapons not be deployed near Russia’s borders.

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No-fly zone equals WWIII. Someone would have to shoot down Russian planes. Ukraine has no planes to do it with.

Zelensky Slams NATO Over Refusing To Implement No-fly Zone Over Ukraine (Hill)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday slammed NATO as being “weak” and “underconfident” for refusing to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine as his country fights in “the worst invasion since World War II.” In a Facebook video shared and translated by Axios on Friday, Zelensky said Ukrainians have fought fearlessly against Russians invading their country — and will continue to — but have been thrown into “nine days of darkness” without assistance from NATO. “Knowing that new strikes and casualties are inevitable, NATO deliberately decided not to close the sky over Ukraine,” Zelensky said in an emotional video address. The president urged NATO to think about “all those people who will die because of you.”

“Because of your weakness, because of your disunity, all the alliance has managed to do so far is to carry fifty tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine,” he said. “Is this the alliance you were building?” A no-fly zone, implemented to prohibit enemy aircraft from flying into a region and attacking, would cut off Russian air support and blunt the advance of Russian troops toward Kyiv. The Biden administration, along with the NATO security alliance, has so far rebuffed Ukrainian calls to establish a no-fly zone over fears that it could spark a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. “It would require, essentially, the U.S. military shooting down Russian planes and prompting a potential direct war with Russia, the exact step that we want to avoid,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday.

In his video address, Zelensky disputed the fact that it would result in a direct confrontation between NATO countries and Russia, calling it “self-hypnosis.” “I do not know how you can protect and whether you can protect NATO countries,” Zelensky said. “You will not be able to buy us off with liters of fuel for liters of our blood.” NATO is adamantly opposed to dragging out a large-scale war in Europe. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said “the only way to implement a no-fly zone is to send NATO fighter planes into Ukrainian airspace, and then impose that no-fly zone by shooting down Russian planes.” “We understand the desperation, but we also believe that if we did that, we would end up with something that could end in a full-fledged war in Europe,” the NATO chief continued.

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“..Russian troops bear down on cities like Mariupol, which is effectively under the control of the Azov Battalion..”

How Ukraine’s Jewish President Zelensky Made Peace With Neo-Nazis (GZ)

Back in October 2019, as the war in eastern Ukraine dragged on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Zolote, a town situated firmly in the “gray zone” of Donbas, where over 14,000 had been killed, mostly on the pro-Russian side. There, the president encountered the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units keeping up the fight against separatists just a few miles away. Elected on a platform of de-escalation of hostilities with Russia, Zelensky was determined to enforce the so-called Steinmeier Formula conceived by then-German Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier which called for elections in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation,” Zelensky encountered a wall of obstinacy.

With appeals for disengagement from the frontlines firmly rejected, Zelensky melted down on camera. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky implored the fighters. Once video of the stormy confrontation spread across Ukrainian social media channels, Zelensky became the target of an angry backlash. Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,” vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelensky pressed any further. Meanwhile, a parliamentarian from the party of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko openly fantasized about Zelensky being blown to bits by a militant’s grenade.

Though Zelensky achieved a minor disengagement, the neo-Nazi paramilitaries escalated their “No Capitulation” campaign. And within months, fighting began to heat up again in Zolote, sparking a new cycle of violations of the Minsk Agreement. By this point, Azov had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military and its street vigilante wing, known as the National Corps, was deployed across the country under the watch of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and alongside the National Police. In December 2021, Zelensky would be seen delivering a “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascistic Right Sector in a ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament. A full-scale conflict with Russia was approaching, and the distance between Zelensky and the extremist paramilitaries was closing fast.

[..] Hours before President Putin’s February 24 speech declaring denazification as the goal of Russian operations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “asked how a people who lost eight million of its citizens fighting Nazis could support Nazism,” according to the BBC. Raised in a non-religious Jewish family in the Soviet Union during the 1980’s, Zelensky has downplayed his heritage in the past. “The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults,” he joked during a 2019 interview in which he declined to go into further detail about his religious background. Today, as Russian troops bear down on cities like Mariupol, which is effectively under the control of the Azov Battalion, Zelensky is no longer ashamed to broadcast his Jewishness. “How could I be a Nazi?” he wondered aloud during a public address. For a US media engaged in an all-out information war against Russia, the president’s Jewish background has become an essential public relations tool.

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“..two attempts may have involved anvils dropping from cliffs, though one of them could have been a piano.”

Zelenskyy Losing Ground (CTH)

Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly survived three, yes three, assassination attempts in the past 48 hours, per Fox News and Lindsey Graham’s BFF, Sean Hannity. According to U.S. officials, a shadowy Kremlin-linked squad known as the Wagner Group, were behind the objective. While details from the U.S. intelligence community are sketchy, two attempts may have involved anvils dropping from cliffs, though one of them could have been a piano. The third attempt appears loosely connected to the notorious Acme TNT gang who have been directly linked to Wile E Coyote; a dubious conspirator currently being investigated by Interpol.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration, along with the NATO security alliance, has rejected Zelenskyy’s demands to establish a no-fly zone over fears that it could spark a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. This has angered the modern Churchill in a T-shirt, who railed against NATO after the last refusal: WASHINGTON DC – […] “Knowing that new strikes and casualties are inevitable, NATO deliberately decided not to close the sky over Ukraine,” Zelensky said in an emotional video address. The president urged NATO to think about “all those people who will die because of you.”


“Because of your weakness, because of your disunity, all the alliance has managed to do so far is to carry fifty tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine,” he said. “Is this the alliance you were building?” (read more) Meanwhile, the 20-mile-long Russian convoy of heavy equipment that was a few miles outside of Kyiv a week ago, is still a 20-mile-long Russian convoy of heavy equipment that is still a few miles outside of Kyiv. The Washington Post is now reporting, tomorrow a 20-mile-long Russian convoy of heavy equipment will be located just a few miles outside of Kyiv.

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“..Kaleniuk is not just a journalist, but a member of the WEF and runs initiatives backed by Soros throughout Eastern Europe.”

Zelenskyy Is Tied To Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, And Other Global Elites (LSN)

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was one of the reasons he got into politics. After leaving his career as a comedian and entertainer and becoming Ukraine’s president in April 2019, Zelenskyy hailed Trudeau as “one of those leaders who inspired” him “to join politics,” when he became Ukraine’s president in 2019. While Zelenskyy has shot to stardom from relative obscurity from the perspective of the West since the Russo-Ukrainian conflict became international news last week, his admiration for Trudeau comes as less of a surprise when looking into his background.

Like Trudeau, Zelenskyy is an acolyte of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, the globalist organization behind the now-infamous “Great Reset” agenda, which tells the world that by the year 2030, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” The ubiquitous support for Zelenskyy by the elite, including support from “defund the police” and Black Lives Matter leftist mega-donor George Soros, Trudeau, American President Joe Biden, and all sides of mainstream media, has led many to question the true motivation behind the West’s condemnation of Russia and a concern that a push for yet another foreign war involving the West is underfoot.

On Tuesday, for example, Ukrainian journalist Daria Kaleniuk made an emotional demand to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, asking him to instruct NATO to enter the war in Ukraine. After the event was praised in Western media, reports surfaced showing that Kaleniuk is not just a journalist, but a member of the WEF and runs initiatives backed by Soros throughout Eastern Europe. While many are skeptical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his former ties to the KGB, scrutiny of the other side of the conflict seems absent in mainstream outlets which has worried many considering the radical nature of the WEF and their Great Reset goals.

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The zenith of cynicism?

Bill Clinton Relaunching Clinton Global Initiative (Fox)

Amid the Russian war on Ukraine and the coronavirus, former President Bill Clinton announced Friday that the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) is resuming full operations after largely shuttering in early 2017. Clinton made the announcement in an open letter in which he also announced a meeting in New York City in September for members of the “CGI community.” He said the pandemic and the Russian war on Ukraine are the two major events that spurred him to bring back the initiative that’s been effectively dormant for years. “The COVID-19 pandemic has ripped the cover off of longstanding inequities and vulnerabilities across our global community,” Clinton said.


“The existential threat of climate change grows every day. Democracy is under assault around the world, most glaringly in Ukraine where Russia has launched an unjustified and unprovoked invasion that has put millions of lives in grave danger.” The CGI faced scrutiny during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for its significant international donations – which some said could create conflicts of interest. Clinton lost the 2016 election, but the Clintons still followed through on mass layoffs of their foundation’s employees in January 2017. “A new chapter of the Clinton Global Initiative is beginning,” a video teasing the restart of the charitable effort said Friday. “And the need for cooperation and coordination has never been more urgent.”

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Well, that’s news…

Western Media Are Acting As Cheerleaders For War (Cook)

Britain and other European states have chosen to fuel the fires of resistance in Ukraine by sending it weapons that can only lead to greater loss of life, especially of civilians caught in the crossfire. One might have expected the British media to examine the ethical implications of such a policy, and the hypocrisy. But not a bit of it. In fact, much of the media have not only been acting as lobbyists for more weapons to be sent to the Ukrainian army, they have whipped up support for civilians in the UK to get more involved in the fighting. That has been the case even after No 10 distanced itself from comments by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, that Britons should be encouraged to volunteer for Ukraine’s so-called “international legions”, supposedly to defend Europe.

Her position was in conflict with usual government practice, which has treated those heading off to fight in war zones in the Middle East as terrorists. Shamima Begum, who went to Syria aged 15, has been stripped of her British citizenship and denied the right to return for doing what Truss has proposed in Ukraine. Nonetheless, that did not dissuade the BBC from travelling to Essex to meet “Wozza”, a supplier of surplus British army kit he has been selling cheaply to Ukrainians in Britain so they can head off to the battlefront. Wozza was shown tearing off Union Jack insignia from uniforms so Ukrainian militiamen could use them.

Compare that with the treatment of an entirely peaceful form of resistance by westerners in solidarity with the Palestinians, the international Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement. It has been treated as barely better than terrorism, with bans on support for BDS across Europe and the US. It is hard to remember in all the media agitation over Ukraine that this sympathetic coverage flies in the face of its reporting conventions. It is inconceivable, of course, that Britain would ever send arms to help, for example, Gaza liberate itself. For that reason, the media will never have the opportunity to exercise their vocal chords in outrage at such a development.

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“That, of course means standing with the Russian people and the Ukrainian people, the Palestinian people, the Syrian people, the Lebanese people, the Kurds, African Americans, Mexicans, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, South African miners, Armenians, Greeks, the Inuit, the Mapuche and my neighbors the Shinnecock, to name but a few.”

War-Profiteering Gangsters Will Kill Us All Unless We Unite (Roger Waters)

I figured something out after tossing and turning all night. We on the left often make the mistake of still looking upon Russia as a somewhat socialist enterprise. Of course, it isn’t. The Soviet Union ended in 1991. Russia is an unadulterated neoliberal capitalist gangster’s paradise, modelled during the time of its horrific restructuring under Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) on the United States of America. It should come as no surprise that its autocratic, and possibly unhinged leader, Vladimir Putin, has no more respect for the UN Charter and international law than recent presidents of the United States or prime ministers of England have had. (For example, remember George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the Iraq invasion.) I, on the other hand, do care about international law and the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and can unequivocally state that if I had been eligible to vote in the General Assembly on March 2, I would have voted with the 141 ambassadors who supported the resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw its armed forces.


Would that mean the General Assembly had a mandate to govern, sadly it doesn’t, which means it’s even more beholden on all us freedom-loving, law-abiding anti-war activists to stand shoulder to shoulder with all our brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of race, religion, or nationality, in pursuit of elusive peace. That, of course means standing with the Russian people and the Ukrainian people, the Palestinian people, the Syrian people, the Lebanese people, the Kurds, African Americans, Mexicans, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, South African miners, Armenians, Greeks, the Inuit, the Mapuche and my neighbors the Shinnecock, to name but a few.

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Hmmm. Moderna’s 70% shareprice loss is real. Their realm looks over. Same with Pfizer. See: Thomas Renz, Edward Dowd.

Grave New World: The Soft Tyranny of Tomorrow (Charles)

The Frankfurt School predecessor and Marxist author Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the curious transformations of capitalism from the mid-to-late 1800s, when Marx wrote, to the early 20th century of Benjamin’s day. In the industrial era Marx observed, commodities were primarily viewed as raw materials and basic goods. Marx focused on production. By Benjamin’s time commodities had been transformed into “objects of consumption.” Objects of desire, in other words. Benjamin had discovered something: consumerism had been born as a primary driver of capitalist production. Commodity fetishism had fundamentally changed, coming to resemble the consumption-driven manias we see today. Benjamin’s biographer called the evolving commodity fetishism, “a delusional expression of collective utopian fantasies and longings.”

With the advent of advertising, consumer packaged goods lifted capitalism to new heights. Benjamin witnessed a sea-change. And yet what has happened since Benjamin’s death in 1940 has been nearly as convulsive as that which the German philosopher saw. The pandemic has illustrated the value of two very basic functions of modern consumer capitalism that evolved after Benjamin: one is planned obsolescence and the other is artificial need. The former is most evident in the cycle of vaccinations that have descended on the population. First, it was two doses of a single vaccine. Once it was shown that protection waned quickly, and the vaccine neither prevented infection nor provided enduring immunity–both promised by authorities in the run-up to the rollout–a further booster shot was introduced.

In some cases, Israel for example, two boosters were recommended, the final one belatedly shown to be barely effective. Big Pharma likely knew this was going to happen. The other vaccine targeting a respiratory virus, the flu shot, provides only modest protection. Non-sterilizing vaccines are said to wane rapidly in their efficacy for a variety of reasons. Some would also argue that these vaccines have created an artificial need as well, for healthy people. The overall Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is less than one percent, raising the question of why there has been such a push to immunize the world against such a mild respiratory virus. Big Pharma was well aware of this, too, but happily sponsored mainstream media stories that ratcheted up popular fears to the level of hysteria and mass hypochondria.

It is no surprise that a rolling calendar of immunizations is being introduced for the global population. Pfizer has noted profits of $18 billion in 2021 and projects $34 billion in 2022. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are likewise in the pink. Some 37 vaccinations are already on the books for healthy children. Endless upgrades and novel technologies are introduced that obsolete previous versions. Payments to biddable media outlets ensure artificial needs are generated to provide a large consumer market.

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