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Debt Rattle October 4 2024

Oct 042024
 
 October 4, 2024  Posted by at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  73 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Juan-Les-Pins 1920

 

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

 

 

 

 

Trump signs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841535009100107822

 

 

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

 

 

Sondland

 

 

Latest death toll: 215. Still hundreds missing.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841676424958058876

 

 

Dore

 

 

JD Vance

 

 

Emhoff

 

 

Trump tariffs

 

 

 

 

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

• Will Trump Make It to Election? (Jim Rickards)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From the home of Tim Walz.

• Trump’s Opportunity for a Knockout (RCW)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Biden-Harris’ Mysterious Nationwide Migrant Network (ZH)

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

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

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

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

CBP One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Israel Planning Major Attack on Iran (Antiwar)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Musk Slams US Democrats Over Freedom Of Speech (RT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The picture changes. You can no longer trust Telegram.

• Telegram Shares User Details With Governments – Durov (RT)

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cow

 

 

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

 

 

Cat yoga
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841710618346176745

 

 

Shells

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle May 2 2024

May 022024
 
 May 2, 2024  Posted by at 8:58 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Edvard Munch Separation 1896

 

• Student Protests Among ‘Biggest Things’ in US in Decades – Scott Ritter (Sp.)
• ‘All Because Columbia Refuses to Divest’ (CD)
• The US Student Intifada: Palestine’s New Soft Power Leverage (Cradle)
• Google Workers Fired Over Israel Protests File Federal Labor Complaint
• Weissmann: “One Vote Away from … the End of Democracy” (Turley)
• The Death of Ireland and Replacement of the Irish People (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Ukraine Conflict Is Spinning Out of Control (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Ukraine Must Defeat Russia To Join NATO – Zelensky (RT)
• China Humiliated Blinken But Blinken Kept Begging (Chang)
• Trump Campaign Slams Commission’s Refusal to Hold Earlier Debates (ET)
• Appeals Court Denies Trump’s Bid to Have Judge Merchan Recused (ET)
• BRIC-O-Rama: On The Road In Brazil, With An Eye On Russia-China (Pepe Escobar)

 

 

 

 

Watters

 

 

KJP

 

 

Kash Patel
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785699469457023055

 

 

LA
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785716980361625956

 

 

Model 3

 

 

The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money. – Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

 

Scott Ritter: “I think these student protests right now are some of the most important things to have happened in American society in many, many decades..”

I didn’t know. Let’s see.

• Student Protests Among ‘Biggest Things’ in US in Decades – Scott Ritter (Sp.)

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video address that the protests against his country on American universities that had then only recently sprung up were “antisemitic mobs” that had “taken over” college campuses. He called on US authorities to do more to stop them. The growing student protest movement against the continued bombardment of Gazans by the Israeli government is among one of the most important things to happen in the US in “many, many decades,” former UN inspector and military expert Scott Ritter told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Tuesday. “If you were an American like myself, who is not inclined to go out and protest and hold signs and disrupt things, man, we have to wake up,” he explained. “I have to wake up. We have to join these students one way or another and join their cause in letting the government know that we will not stand silent in the face of police oppression of the right of American citizens to speak out, to assemble, to hold their government [to] account.”

“I think these student protests right now are some of the most important things to have happened in American society in many, many decades,” Ritter emphasized. Tuesday night, what appeared to be hundreds of officers with the New York Police Department entered Columbia University in riot gear and military-grade vehicles, arresting approximately 300 people, according to New York City Mayor Eric Adams. That raid came after similar raids across the country, including in Texas, where 79 people, including some faculty members who joined students, were arrested. Meanwhile, a 65-year-old professor, Steve Tamari, was hospitalized after an officer at Washington University in St. Louis slammed him to the ground, breaking multiple ribs and his hand, according to a statement he put out from the hospital. More than 100 people were arrested in that protest. Colleges being a place for the free exchange of ideals is a critical part of our society, Ritter argued, adding that he believes the crackdown is designed to end this.

“As somebody who has taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States… I respect not only [the] students’ constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of assembly, I also recognize that college is one of the great zones of developing good citizens,” Ritter said. Over the weekend, presidential candidate Jill Stein was arrested at a protest. Stein says she was told she was being charged with assaulting an officer, but clarified in a later interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald that was not on her paperwork. Part of the purpose of colleges is “to create an incubator for the development of good citizenship, not compliant zombies,” Ritter explained, arguing that the US needs, “citizens who think, who empower themselves with knowledge and information and express that individually and collectively.”

At University of California, Los Angeles, a group of pro-Israeli protesters reportedly fired pepper spray and fireworks at student protesters during clashes. Witnesses claim that while the police were standing by, they did not intervene for hours. Ritter noted the US government is doing “just about everything possible wrong,” underscoring that the US “needs these students to come out and they’ve picked an issue, Gaza, which is the manifestation of the totality of all we do wrong as a government.” “When you go to university, we need you to become radical. We need you to think. We need you to exercise your brain and your spirit and your conscience. And [the government is] trying to suppress them because apparently we don’t want good citizens anymore,” the analyst concluded.

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Overkill.

• ‘All Because Columbia Refuses to Divest’ (CD)

Hundreds of New York City police officers descended on Columbia University Tuesday night to arrest dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters and dismantle a Gaza solidarity encampment that inspired campus protests across the United States, with demonstrators calling on their schools to divest from companies profiting off Israel’s devastating war. Police, some wearing riot gear, entered Columbia’s campus at the request of the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, who authorized the NYPD to “clear all individuals from Hamilton Hall and all campus encampments.” Video footage shows officers entering a campus building that students occupied hours earlier, renaming it “Hind’s Hall” after a 6-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces earlier this year. The Columbia Daily Spectator, the university’s student newspaper, reported that “as they entered the building, officers threw down the metal and wooden tables barricading the doors and shattered the glass on the leftmost doors of Hamilton to enter with shields in hand.”

“Several officers drew their guns, according to footage posted by NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry,” the newspaper added. “At around 9:37 pm, officers led dozens of protesters out the entrance of Hamilton. The protesters’ hands were zip-tied behind their backs. The arrested individuals chanted, ‘Free, free Palestine’ as they were led away from the building.” Other footage shows NYPD officers forcing their way through students who locked arms in front of the occupied campus building. One cop is seen kneeing a student on the ground. Students reported that police used tear gas, which is banned in war, on demonstrators. “Tonight, my university called in a militarized police force—armed in riot gear, with guns drawn, deploying weapons banned under international law—to attack teenagers,” Lea Salim, a student member of Jewish Voice for Peace-Columbia/Barnard, said in a statement. “All because Columbia refuses to divest from the Israeli military and its genocidal campaign on the people of Gaza.”

As police set up barricades around the perimeter of the campus, onlookers gathered and chanted, “Let the students go!” in solidarity with the arrested demonstrators. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said he was “outraged” by the police presence at both Columbia and the City College of New York, writing on social media that the “militarization of college campuses, extensive police presence, and arrest of hundreds of students are in direct opposition to the role of education as a cornerstone of our democracy.” “I call upon the Columbia administration to stop this dangerous escalation before it leads to further harm,” Bowman added, “and allow the faculty back onto campus so that all parties can collectively come to a solution that centers humanity over hate.”

In a letter to the New York City Police Department on Tuesday, Shafik—who is facing mounting calls to resign—requested that officers maintain a presence on Columbia’s campus “through at least May 17, 2024 to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished.” The police crackdown on Columbia students is part of a broader wave of repression against campus protests that have emerged across the country in recent weeks as Israel’s assault on and forced starvation of Gaza civilians continues with no end in sight. Police actions, approved by the leaders of some universities and cheered on by right-wing government officials, have drawn international rebukes. In a statement Tuesday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he is “concerned that some of law enforcement actions across a series of universities appear disproportionate in their impacts.”

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“..soft power can be more effective than hard power in achieving political outcomes, because it influences the preferences of others rather than forcing them to change through coercion.”

• The US Student Intifada: Palestine’s New Soft Power Leverage (Cradle)

On 18 April, students at Columbia University in New York initiated a sit-in on the campus lawn, protesting the Ivy League institution’s ongoing financial links to companies connected to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its brutal war on Gaza. The demonstrations quickly spread to other top US universities, including New York University, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of North Carolina, as demands intensified for an end to both the war and support for the occupation state. This growing wave of US and global student activism is of vital importance: it represents the soft power ripple effects of the resistance‘s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and as with other historic, mass US student movements against South African apartheid and the Vietnam war, will likely begin to fray at American support for Israeli aggressions. For decades, the US has portrayed Israel as a beacon of democracy in a region dominated by authoritarian regimes, often citing it as “the only democracy” in West Asia to justify its unwavering support.

However, recent shifts in public perception, particularly among western youth, now increasingly portray Israelis as “terrorists” and “colonizers.” This sea change in the discourse, driven by the global spread of information and activism, will have a significant impact on the Zionist entity. Israel’s global reputation had already been tarnished by the time South Africa filed genocide charges against the state in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) earlier this year, the first time Israel has faced such accusations at this level. In March, the ICJ demanded that Israel take immediate, effective measures to ensure the entry of essential food supplies to Gaza’s residents, emphasizing the severe famine conditions already present. “Soft power” is defined by Joseph Nye as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or pressure.”

Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, argues that “soft power can be more effective than hard power in achieving political outcomes, because it influences the preferences of others rather than forcing them to change through coercion.” This form of influence arises through culture, values, and policies that are universally attractive and morally legitimate – and, therefore, harder to contain. Decades of Tel Aviv’s “nation branding” or soft power initiatives in the west, geared at deeply entrenching the notion of Israel as “the only democracy” in West Asia that shared the occident’s “Judeo-Christian values,” aimed to justify Washington’s unconditional support for the occupation state. It took a show of Palestinian hard power, however, to unlock that narrative stranglehold in the west. Within weeks of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, western populations began for the first time to see the real face of Zionism – unleashed in an overwhelming military assault on Gaza’s hospitals, universities, infrastructure, and civilian populations.

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No Tech for Apartheid

• Google Workers Fired Over Israel Protests File Federal Labor Complaint

Dozens of Google workers who were fired for protesting the tech giant’s cloud deal with the Israeli government filed a complaint on April 29 with the National Labor Relations Board over their termination. The complaint, obtained by The Washington Post, alleges that Google violated the workers’ rights by “terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work.” The workers are seeking reinstatement of their jobs and back pay, alleging that Google “unlawfully retaliated” against them for engaging in “peaceful” protest, Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, was quoted as saying by the New York Post.

No Tech for Apartheid, the group organizing the protests, claimed that Google fired more than 20 workers on April 23, including bystanders who were not participating. This adds to the 30 workers fired last week for their involvement in sit-in protests at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, bringing the total number of terminated workers to more than 50. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The protests targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus that provides artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the Israeli government. The fired workers contend that the system is being lethally deployed in the Gaza war. “Google’s aims are clear: the corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them,” the group said in an April 23 statement. “In its attempts to do so, Google has decided to unceremoniously, and without due process, upend the livelihoods of over 50 of its own workers.” The activist group has vowed to continue organizing until Google meets their demands: that it “drop Project Nimbus and stop powering Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza now.”

Project Nimbus was signed in 2021. It involves joint cloud computing and AI services provided by Google and Amazon to the Israeli government. Google has said that the program is not being used for military or intelligence purposes. Google has said that it fired the workers after gathering details from coworkers who were “physically disrupted” and it identified employees who used masks and didn’t carry their staff badges to hide their identities. Google didn’t specify how many were fired. In a blog post on April 18, Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted that workers will be on a short leash as the company intensifies its efforts to improve its AI technology at a pivotal moment in the industry and, potentially, history. He did not openly refer to a specific incident. “But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Mr. Pichai wrote. “We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally.”

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Weissmann ran the Mueller probe.

• Weissmann: “One Vote Away from … the End of Democracy” (Turley)

When Robert Mueller appointed Andrew Weissmann as one of his top advisers, many of us warned that it was a poor choice. Weissmann seemed intent to prove those objections correct in increasingly unhinged and partisan statements. This week, he ratcheted up the rhetoric even further in claiming that the nation is “one vote away” from the end of democracy if the Supreme Court does not embrace the sweeping claims of Special Counsel Jack Smith. At the time of his appointment, many Republicans objected to Weissmann’s status as a democratic donor, including his reported attendance of the election night party for Hillary Clinton in 2016. My objection was not to his political affiliations but to his professional history, which included extreme interpretations that were ultimately rejected by courts. Weissmann was responsible for the overextension of an obstruction provision in a jury instruction that led the Supreme Court to reverse the conviction in the Arthur Andersen case in 2005.

Weissmann then became a MSNBC analyst and a professor at New York University. In his book, he attacked prosecutors for refusing to take on his extreme views. Weissmann called on prosecutors to refuse to assist John Durham in his investigation. Now he is predicting the end of democracy if the Court remand the immunity case for further proceedings. Weissmann told MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki on Sunday: “I think that it’s important to remember that at the outset, the court had already given Donald Trump the win that he was seeking, which is the delay of the DC trial.” So going into this, this was all upside for him. I mean, I think he had to be thinking, I’m making this really outlandish argument, with ramifications that couldn’t possibly be squared with the text and history. The text of the Constitution or the history of the presidency? So it’s all upside if the court would actually bite on this.

And so what was surprising is that there were justices who actually were taking this seriously. And it just was, frankly, shocking. Remember, going into this, the given was that private conduct was certainly not, immunized from criminal liability. What everyone’s talking about now is, hey, maybe they think that some of this is private and they can go forward, but that was what was given going into this. And the reason people are thinking that is because there seem to be four justices who were really taking Donald Trump’s claim of criminal immunity seriously. And we are. I mean, I know it sounds like hyperbole, but I think your opening is so correct that we are essentially, as Neil put it, one vote away from sort of the end of democracy as we know it with checks and balances. And to say it’s an imperial presidency that would be created is, it’s frankly saying it would be a king, he would be criminally immune. And that that is what is so shocking is how close we are.

And we are really on the razor’s edge of that kind of result. But for the chief justice. Just for the record, it sounds less “like hyperbole” than hysteria. The justices were exploring the implications of the sweeping arguments on both sides of the immunity question. What they were not willing to do (as does Weissmann) is simply dismiss any arguments of official status on the part of the accused. That would establish a dangerous ambiguity for the future as prosecutors claim that political statements are private matters for the purpose of prosecution. Ironically, Weissmann’s lack of concern for the implications of such an interpretation is reminiscent of his prior sweeping arguments as a prosecutor that led to the stinging defeat in the Anderson case.

Of course, there is another possibility is that the justices were not seeking the end of democracy. The Court was honestly trying to get this standard correct not just for this case but future cases. To do so, it will require a record on the underlying actions rather than the categorical threshold judgment made by the district court. The argument showed justices exploring how to avoid a parade of horribles on either extreme with a more moderate approach. As I previously noted, it has been almost 50 years since the high court ruled presidents have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. That protection applied to acts taken “within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”

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The Conquest of Ireland and the UK Nears Completion

• The Death of Ireland and Replacement of the Irish People (Paul Craig Roberts)

Gaza is not the only genocide. Genocide is taking place all over Europe and in the US. All over Europe and the US governments prefer immigrant-invaders over their own citizens.“The migrants are eligible for free accommodation, free social welfare, free medical care, food, clothes, and various other perks. Whilst at the same time that the Irish government is facilitating mass immigration there are 14,000 Irish homeless people on the streets.” And many more homeless Irish citizens are on the way. Migrants are given free accommodation in hotels and country estates throughout the land, while the Irish people are seriously struggling to make ends meet in a rigged inflationary system, with a never-ending story of sky-high rents, high taxes, inflation, and an ongoing extremely serious accommodation crisis. Many young Irish citizens are left with little option but to live with their parents or emigrate to countries such as Australia as they cannot afford to live in their own country.

This is an extremely important article. It shows that the West is being intentionally destroyed by its own governments. The threat that all citizens in the West face comes not from Russia, China, Iran, but from their own government. Irish citizens who peacefully protest their replacement by immigrant-invaders are brutally beaten–even mothers and children–by police, which emphasizes the second class status of Irish ethnicity. “Many of the Irish police in balaclavas that are enforcing these tactics against the Irish people are not Irish at all, but are more akin to non-Irish hired mercenaries, or more like an EU army.” “The stark reality is the Irish government is not really the Irish government it is just a puppet of the EU bureaucracy. Ireland has been a fully controlled vassal state of the banker-controlled EU, in particular since the controversial (and rerun) Lisbon referendum 14 years ago, which hammered a nail in the coffin of Irish sovereignty.”

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“..they are walking into Armageddon by betting that Washington is rational..”

• The Ukraine Conflict Is Spinning Out of Control (Paul Craig Roberts)

In my effort to awake humanity to its extinction in the nuclear war that is advancing upon us, I have pointed my finger at Putin and Xi’s mistaken belief that the way to avoid it is to ignore provocations and wait for Washington to come to its senses. This shows diplomacy at its highest level, but it is mistaken. The ignored provocations encourage more and worst provocations. The Asia Times, if the story can be believed, reports that NATO has begun deploying troops in Ukraine’s defense. “NATO is starting to deploy combat troops to Ukraine. Soldiers from Poland, France, the UK, Finland and other NATO members are arriving in larger numbers.“ Although Russia says there are over 3,100 mercenaries in Ukraine, these newly arriving troops are not mercenaries. They are in uniform, home country proclaimed via insignia.

They mostly are concentrated in the western part of the country, although in some cases they are close to the actual fighting in the east. “NATO is putting out the word these are not combat soldiers but are in Ukraine to operate sophisticated western hardware. But if they are firing at the Russians the only proper way to interpret their presence is that they are playing an active part in the shooting war.” It is the same plan as Washington’s intervention in Vietnam. What will the sequel be? Putin and XI are diplomats. But they have no comprehension of Washington. Their naiveness has blinded them to reality. Consequently, they are walking into Armageddon by betting that Washington is rational.

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Cut it out.

• Ukraine Must Defeat Russia To Join NATO – Zelensky (RT)

Ukraine needs to defeat Russia on the battlefield in order to be admitted to NATO, President Vladimir Zelensky has said. The US-led alliance has made it clear earlier that Kiev cannot become a member while the fighting is ongoing. “I believe that we will be in NATO only if we win. I don’t think that we will be admitted to NATO during the war,” Zelensky said on Tuesday during a meeting with a group of military officers in Kiev. He explained that the admission of Ukraine would require unanimous approval by the alliance’s 32 members. Some members are reluctant to admit Ukraine in the midst of an ongoing armed conflict because “they feel the risks, while others are simply skeptical,” Zelensky argued. “Therefore, for Ukraine to be accepted into the alliance, we need victory.” He went on to add that eventual membership would secure Ukraine’s security and independence.

Ukraine formally applied to join NATO in September 2022. While NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and individual members agree that Ukraine should someday become part of NATO, Kiev has not been presented with a concrete timetable. It is widely understood that the country will not be admitted until the conflict with Russia is resolved.v Stoltenberg, who visited Kiev on Monday, admitted to Reuters that the delays in promised weapons deliveries had “put a dent into the trust” between Ukraine and its foreign backers.

While the EU is struggling to find enough arms and ammunition for Ukraine’s wartime needs, the newest aid package from the US had been stuck for months in Congress due to political wrangling. The delays sparked worries in Kiev, with Zelensky openly warning that Ukraine would lose if ammunition shortages are not remedied. Ukrainian officials have blamed the slowdown of deliveries for last year’s failed counteroffensive, as well as more recent losses of cities in the east to the Russian army. Russia, for its part, has cited NATO’s continuing expansion eastward and the bloc’s military cooperation with Ukraine as one of the root causes of the conflict. Moscow considers NATO a threat to its national security and insists that Ukraine must become a neutral country.

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“In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.”

• China Humiliated Blinken But Blinken Kept Begging (Chang)

It is not clear whether a Chinese official was at the Beijing airport to bid farewell to Secretary of State Antony Blinken as he ended his three-day visit to China on Friday, but the send-off was in any event low-key and Chinese leader Xi Jinping slighted America’s top diplomat at the end of his troubled stay. Also, China, literally and figuratively, did not roll out the red carpet for his arrival in Shanghai on Wednesday. Only a low-level official was on hand to greet Blinken as he stepped off the plane. “The Chinese government flouted international protocols at the airport on the secretary of state’s arrival in Shanghai and departure from Beijing,” Charles Burton of the Prague-based Sinopsis think tank told Gatestone. “It was petty.” “This was more than a slight,” Burton, a former Canadian diplomat who served in Beijing, said. “Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore.”

Blinken was in China to discuss the growing list of disagreements between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, he did not accomplish anything there other than register America’s complaints on matters such as Beijing’s support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and unfair treatment of U.S. companies. On every major issue, the U.S. and China take different sides, and the Chinese have clearly dug in. Blinken was reduced to begging. As a result, America is resorting to the dialogue-is-progress narrative. “I think it’s important to underscore the value—in fact, the necessity—of direct engagement, of sustained engagement, of speaking to each other, laying out our differences which are real, seeking to work through them, as also looking for ways to build cooperation where we can,” Blinken said to Chen Jining, Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, ahead of his talks in the Chinese capital.

After the end of fruitless sessions in Beijing—Blinken met with, among others, President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi—all the secretary of state could do is highlight new dialogue issues. “I’m pleased to announce that earlier today, we agreed to hold the first U.S.-PRC talks on artificial intelligence to be held in the coming weeks,” he said at a press availability on April 26, as he wrapped up his trip to China. “We’ll share our respective views on the risks and safety concerns around advanced AI and how best to manage them.” Blinken’s comments repeated those of President Joe Biden after his November 15 meeting with Xi Jinping in Woodside, California. In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.

There is no question that AI is an important topic, especially when it comes to the control of nuclear weapons. Yet this does not mean the U.S. should seek an agreement with China on that topic. “The latest shambolic display by the Biden administration comes in the form of Secretary of State Antony Blinken groveling before China’s Ruler-for-Life Xi Jinping for a new set of protocols for governing the development of artificial intelligence between America and China, the two nations contributing the most to both the advancement of AI and its weaponization,” Brandon Weichert, a national security analyst at The National Interest, told Gatestone. “Although creating such protocols may sound like a good idea, it seems like a bad idea for Washington to unilaterally agree to limit its own activities.”

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“..the first debate scheduled for Sept. 16 “will be the earliest televised general election debate ever held.”

• Trump Campaign Slams Commission’s Refusal to Hold Earlier Debates (ET)

The Trump campaign on Tuesday issued a rebuke of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) refusal to move up its debate schedule until after millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, calling it “unacceptable” and a “grave disservice” to the electorate. In a statement, former President Donald Trump’s campaign representatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles intensified criticism of the body that sponsors all general election presidential debates. Previously, they had requested debates to be held “much earlier” than the commission’s planned first debate in mid-September. The Trump campaign repeated its argument that voters deserve to hear from both candidates before they begin casting their votes.

“The Presidential Debate Commission’s schedule does not begin until after millions of Americans will have already cast their ballots. This is unacceptable, and by refusing to move up the debates, they are doing a grave disservice to the American public who deserve to hear from both candidates before voting begins,” the statement read. The statement comes after the nonprofit commission told Fox News that it would stick with its debate schedule, which was released last November. Four debates are planned: three presidential and one vice presidential.The first presidential debate takes place on Sept. 16 at Texas State University in San Marcos; the second takes place on Oct. 1 at Virginia State University in Petersburg; and the third takes place on Oct. 9 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The commission said that it “is proceeding with production and broadcast plans at its four debate sites as also announced on November 20, 2023.” Responding to the criticism, the CPD issued a statement on Wednesday, clarifying its decision-making process regarding the schedule for the 2024 debates. The commission noted that the first debate scheduled for Sept. 16 “will be the earliest televised general election debate ever held.” The selection of debate dates aimed to ensure accessibility for the American public, taking into account factors such as religious and federal holidays, early voting, and state ballot closing dates, according to the CPD.

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“It’s a disgrace to our Country — They’ve taken away my Right to Free Speech.”

• Appeals Court Denies Trump’s Bid to Have Judge Merchan Recused (ET)

A New York state appeals court denied a request from former President Donald Trump to have his so-called “hush-money” judge removed. Lawyers for the former president sought a stay in the proceedings and the recusal of Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the trial that will likely last for at least another month. Both the application for his recusal and for a stay in the case were denied on Tuesday without explanation by the New York State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division for the First Department. His lawyers had argued that the trial judge should be removed because he had acted out of his jurisdiction by refusing to recuse himself and restricting the number of docket entries, among other matters. “Now, upon reading and filing the papers with respect to the motion, and due deliberation having been had thereon,” Tuesday’s court order stated. “It is ordered that the motion is denied.”

In April, before the jury selection process started, Judge Merchan himself denied a request from President Trump’s attorneys to step down. Several days before that, the former president’s lawyers said in a hearing that the trial should be delayed, which the court also denied. “The unconstitutional effects of Justice Merchan’s rulings are causing ongoing, irreparable constitutional harms to Petitioner and the voting public and, if not stopped, will prevent Petitioner from receiving a fair trial,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche wrote in an application to the court. A judge, Ellen Gesmer, denied the application. Also last month, the state appeals court rejected another bid to stay the trial while the defense tried to move the trial away from Manhattan, arguing that they were concerned that the jury pool would be tainted. The court also rejected an appeal to pause the trial while President Trump appealed a gag order that was handed down by Judge Merchan earlier this year.

On Tuesday morning, Judge Merchan fined President Trump $9,000 for nine separate posts he made online that he believes violated the gag order. He further warned President Trump that he could be incarcerated if he continues to make the posts. Previously, President Trump and his attorneys argued that the gag order, which prohibits the former president from commenting on most people connected to the case, is a violation of his First Amendment rights. In a social media statement after the fines were handed down, President Trump wrote: “This gag order is not only unique, it’s totally unconstitutional. I am the Republican Candidate for President of the United States.” “This is a total Witch Hunt. Hours of sitting down and listening to nothing except EXONERATION AND LIES,” he continued. “The Trial is going like a speeding bullet, because the Judge is working hard to make all of his friends happy. Merchan is Rigged, Crooked and above all, and without question, CONFLICTED. It’s a disgrace to our Country — They’ve taken away my Right to Free Speech.”

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Pepe left Asia.

• BRIC-O-Rama: On The Road In Brazil, With An Eye On Russia-China (Pepe Escobar)

I have just been immersed in an extraordinary experience: a mini-tour of conferences in Brazil encompassing four key cities – Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte. Full houses, sharp questions, fabulously warm people, divine gastronomy – a deep dive into the 8th largest economy in the world and major BRICS+ node. As much as I was trying to impress the finer points of the long and winding road to multipolarity and the multiple instances of frontal clash between NATOstan and the Global Majority, I was learning non-stop from an array of generous Brazilians about the current inner contradictions of a society of astonishing complexity. It’s as if I was immersed in a psychedelic journey conducted by Os Mutantes, the iconic trio of the late 1960s Tropicalia movement: from the business front in Sao Paulo – with its world-class restaurants and frantic deal-making – to the blinding beauty of Rio; from Salvador – the capital of Brazilian Africa – to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the third-wealthiest state in the Federation, Minas Gerais, a powerhouse of iron ore, uranium and niobium exports.

I learned about how China chose the state of Bahia as arguably its key node in Brazil, where Chinese investment is everywhere – even if Brazil is not yet a formal member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In Rio, I was presented with an astonishing work on Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes by essayist Ciro Moroni – delving among other issues into the equivalences between Stoic theogony/theology and the Hindu Vedanta – the tradition of culture, religion and sacred rituals in India up to the Buddha era.

And in a sort of psychedelic synchronicity, I felt like Zeno in the Agora as we debated the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine at a lovely round pavillion – a mini-Agora – in fabled Liberty Square in Belo Horizonte, across the street from a fabulous exhibition of Treasures of Peruvian Art. Much to my astonishment, a Peruvian, Carlos Ledesma, flew in from Lima especially for my conference and the exhibition; and then he told me about the Chancay port being built south of Lima, owned 70% by COSCO and the rest by private Peruvian capital; that will be a sister port of Shanghai.

Chancay-Shanghai: APEC in action across the Pacific. Next November, there will be three nearly simultaneous key events in South America: the G20 in Rio, the APEC summit in Lima, and the inauguration of Chancay. Chancay will be boosted by no less than five rail corridors that may eventually be built – certainly with Chinese investment – from the agribusiness Valhalla in the Brazilian Center-West all the way to Peru. Yes, China is all over the place in its largest trade partner in Latin America – much to the despair of a Hegemon sending lowly functionary Little Blinken to Beijing to hear the letter of the new law by Xi Jinping himself: it’s cooperation or confrontation, a “downward spiral”. Your downward spiral.

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Markkula

 

 

Horse herd
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785657926448820571

 

 

Bugs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785832474494279693

 

 

Rebel
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785599235297075474

 

 

Transform
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785594023543238942

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 17 2020

Aug 172020
 
 August 17, 2020  Posted by at 10:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  27 Responses »


Claude Monet The Wooden Bridge 1872

 

• One-Second Coronavirus Test Achieves 95% Success Rate (JP)
• Biden and Trump Matchup Tightens As Enthusiasm Hits New High (CNN)
• Mueller Aide Weissmann Tells DOJ Attorneys Not To Help Investigators (Turley)
• The Manufactured Hysteria Over Mail Delivery (PJM)
• A Reality-Based Look At Trump And The Post Office (York)
• Washington’s Successful Vote-by-Mail System Wasn’t Built Overnight (CC)
• Adam Schiff’s Inaccurate Russia Tweets Raise Double-Standard Question (JTN)
• Japan’s Economy Shrinks At Record -27.8% Annual Rate (AP)
• UK Housing Market Has Busiest Month In More Than 10 Years (G.)
• New Zealand Delays General Election By A Month Amid COVID19 Outbreak (G.)
• The Roots Of Wokeness (Sullivan)

 

 

What do you think about the post office narrative? Which side is trying to use it to influence the election?

How about the CNN poll that says all of a sudden Trump has closed the double digit gap to Biden? Is that the Kamala effect, or did CNN wake up to the realization that those huge gaps make people less likely to vote?

How about CNN’s -implied- claim that Biden voters are mpre enthusiastic than Trump voters? Does that ring true?

 

 

Can we move new global cases under 200,000? US new cases at the lowest since June 23. US deaths at “just” 522, but that complies with a weekend pattern.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can anyone at all explain why these tests are not used all over the world? There are many rapid tests with comparable success rates. What are we waiting for? Does anyone understand why these tests are much more useful than the standard CPR ones? This is presented as a breakthrough, but it isn’t, really.

• One-Second Coronavirus Test Achieves 95% Success Rate (JP)

An initial clinical trial of a coronavirus-testing technology that is believed to detect viruses in a fluid sample in less than a second has achieved a 95% success rate, according to data released last week from the trial performed at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer. The test was designed by Newsight Imaging, a Ness Ziona-based start-up firm, and centers on a device that is about the size of a computer mouse, which can identify and classify evidence of a virus in the body in less than a second, using a sample of fluid – blood serum or saliva – inserted into a disposable test cuvette. In spectroscopy, a sample is tested with a broadband light source, Newsight CEO Eli Assoolin told The Jerusalem Post last month when it first received Sheba Medical Center’s IRB Ethics (“Helsinki”) Committee approval to conduct a pilot program for rapid COVID-19 detection tests.


The light that returns from the sample is analyzed to determine its wavelength content. “We collect the spectral signature after the light is absorbed in the sample, and then we can analyze the content of it,” he said, noting that spectral-analysis technology has already been used to identify certain human diseases and abnormalities. “Basically, on one side, you have the source of light, and on the other side, you have the sensor chip – a sensitive and fast camera that can see different wavelengths. In the middle, you put the sample,” Assoolin said. Prof. Eli Schwartz of the Center for Geographic Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba said that under laboratory conditions, the research team was clearly able to differentiate between COVID-19 samples that were positive and those that were negative, with a 95% accuracy rate. “For a new AI-based technology such as this, the results are quite encouraging,” Schwartz said.

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As the virtual Dem convention starts, CNN is in a bit of a bind. They’ve been reporting on various polls that all show Biden leading Trump by double-digit margins, but even their viewers haven’t forgotten how they predicted Hillary had a 95% chance of winning in 2016. And of course the problem with those wide margins is they make people wonder why they should vote, if the outcome is so clear.

So now there’s a poll that shows Trump is fast catching up (the Kamala effect?) , but not without adding the rather curious notion that “Among the 72% of voters who say they are either extremely or very enthusiastic about voting this fall, Biden’s advantage over Trump widens to 53% to 46%.”

Is there anyone who believes that Biden voters are more enthusiastic than Trump voters? Doesn’t that contradict everything we’ve seen?

• Biden and Trump Matchup Tightens As Enthusiasm Hits New High (CNN)

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump among registered voters has significantly narrowed since June, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, even as the former vice president maintains an advantage over the President on several top issues and his choice of California Sen. Kamala Harris as a running mate earns largely positive reviews. And on the eve of the party conventions, a majority of voters (53%) are “extremely enthusiastic” about voting in this year’s election, a new high in CNN polling in presidential election cycles back to 2003. Overall, 50% of registered voters back the Biden-Harris ticket, while 46% say they support Trump and Pence, right at the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Among the 72% of voters who say they are either extremely or very enthusiastic about voting this fall, Biden’s advantage over Trump widens to 53% to 46%. It is narrower, however, among those voters who live in the states that will have the most impact on the electoral college this fall. Across 15 battleground states, the survey finds Biden has the backing of 49% of registered voters, while Trump lands at 48%. The pool of battleground states in this poll includes more that Trump carried in 2016 (10) than were won by Hillary Clinton (5), reflecting the reality that the President’s campaign is more on defense than offense across the states. Taken together, though, they represent a more Republican-leaning playing field than the nation as a whole.


The movement in the poll among voters nationwide since June is concentrated among men (they split about evenly in June, but now 56% back Trump, 40% Biden), those between the ages of 35 and 64 (they tilt toward Trump now, but were Biden-leaning in June) and independents (in June, Biden held a 52% to 41% lead, but now it’s a near even 46% Biden to 45% Trump divide). Trump has also solidified his partisans since June. While 8% of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents in June said they would back Biden, that figure now stands at just 4%. And the President has boosted his backing among conservatives from 76% to 85%.

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Weissmann likely doesn’t know what Clinesmith agreed to tell Durham in his guilty plea.

Weissmann’s your typical dirty cop/dirty lawyer. Rumor has it he was in charge of the Mueller probe, not Mueller himself. And yes, he has strong links to the Dems and Hillary.

• Mueller Aide Weissmann Tells DOJ Attorneys Not To Help Investigators (Turley)

I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work. I was among those who expressed concern when Mueller selected Weissmann due to his history of controversial prosecutorial decisions, including a pattern of prosecutorial overreach in the Enron litigation.

Weissmann’s recent statements (made before the release of his new book on the Russian investigation) have only served to reaffirm those concerns. Recently, Weissmann wrote an extraordinary and disturbing New York Times op-ed (with former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman). In the column, he appeared to call on Justice Department lawyers to undermine the Durham investigation as well as the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Bash’s investigation into the “unmasking” requests by Obama administration officials. They wrote “Justice Department employees in meeting their ethical and legal obligations, should be well advised not to participate in any such effort.”

Consider that line for a moment. Weissmann is openly calling on attorneys to refuse to help on investigations that could raise questions about his own decisions. Durham is looking at a pattern of errors, false statements, bias, and now criminal conduct in the Russian investigation. There is obviously overlap with the Mueller investigation which discussed many of the same underlying documents and relied on work by some of the same individuals. The failure to address misconduct, bias, or criminal conduct by such individuals would be embarrassing to both Weissmann and Mueller. Despite that obvious conflict of interest, Weissmann is calling on attorneys to stand down. It is the same troubling position that was once taken by Sally Yates, who told an entire federal agency not to assist the President in his travel ban.

[..] I believe that the public needs to have a full and transparent account of what happened in the Russian investigation on both sides. Like many, Weissmann would like transparency on only one side and to shutdown the Durham investigation despite Horowitz referring matters for criminal investigation and finding a host of false statements, errs, and professional misconduct. Even the addition of a criminal plea has not stopped Weissmann from denouncing this investigation. For years, I have criticized Weissmann’s record of dubious prosecutorial judgment, bias, and overreach. However, that case against Weissmann is not nearly as powerful as the case he is making against himself.

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What a crazy story.

• The Manufactured Hysteria Over Mail Delivery (PJM)

That dastardly Donald Trump is at it again. He is either the evilest man ever to hold the office of president or the dumbest. He is either a Machiavellian genius manipulating the media and his hypnotized followers or a bumbling know-nothing idiot. Trump is being accused of sabotaging the November elections because he won’t give the postal unions and incompetent managers in the postal service $25 billion to play with. The money will stave off catastrophe for about a year at the rate the USPS is burning through cash. Without that money, we’re informed by those in the know, thousands — no, tens of thousands — no, millions of voters who wait until the last minute to mail in an absentee ballot might not have their votes counted because, well, Trump.

The procrastinators in America are up in arms and plan a demonstration to show their outrage. But it probably won’t happen until after the election since that’s when they’ll eventually get around to it. The “crisis” in postal delivery presupposes that, prior to Trump’s shenanigans, the USPS was doing fine — nothing that a few tens of billions of taxpayer dollars couldn’t fix. In fact, that’s what the postal unions are saying. In a statement released on Saturday, the letter carriers and postal workers’ unions assure the public that even without the money, they can do the job. [..] So what’s all the hubbub about? The letter carriers say they can deliver the ballots on time. The postal employees claim they don’t need the extra cash. Where, pray tell, is there a “crisis”?


Nancy Pelosi knows. In fact, she’s about to call the members of the House of Representatives off the campaign trail and back to Washington to deal with the “crisis.” Politico: “Pelosi and other top Democrats, including House Majority Leader Steny Democrats are looking to address organizational issues at the Postal Service in the coming weeks, not to provide additional funding at this time, according to sources familiar with the discussion.” Nothing says “crisis” in Washington quite like pulling politicians away from their campaigns for a political stunt like holding an “emergency” session of Congress.

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The USPS has been a mess for decades. Nothing to do with Trump. But yes, he does think the issue risks being used against him.

• A Reality-Based Look At Trump And The Post Office (York)

The idea that the Postal Service will not be able to handle the volume of mail in the election, or not be able to handle it within normal Postal Service time guidelines, does not make much sense. According to its most recent annual report, last year, in fiscal year 2019, the Postal Service handled 142.5 billion pieces of mail. “On a typical day, our 633,000 employees physically process and deliver 471 million mailpieces to nearly 160 delivery points,” the report says. This year, that number is higher, given the Postal Service’s delivery of census forms and stimulus checks. Those alone added about 450 million additional pieces of mail.

In 2016, about 136 million Americans voted in the presidential election. The number will probably be a bit higher this year. If officials sent ballots to every single American registered to vote — about 158 million people — and then 140 million people returned ballots, the roughly 298 million pieces of mail handled over the course of several weeks would be well within the Postal Service’s ability to handle. Of course, officials will not send a ballot to every American registered to vote, and not every voter will vote by mail. Whatever the final number is, the ballots that are cast by mail will not cripple a system that delivers 471 million pieces of mail every day.

There are, of course, compelling examples of election dysfunction, most notably the mess New York made of some of its congressional primaries this summer. But rather than representing a Postal Service problem, that was because some states are unprepared for a dramatic increase of voting by mail. The states have to prepare the ballots, address them, and process and count them when the Postal Service delivers them. That is the focus of the entirely legitimate fears of a possible vote-counting disaster this year. But it’s not the Postal Service.

[..] The Postal Service is not funded by a regular appropriation. It is, instead, an “independent agency” and is expected to support itself, beyond a yearly appropriation of about $55 million to cover the costs of mail for the blind and overseas balloting in elections. The Postal Service has lost money for a very long time. In fiscal year 2019, it had operating revenues of $71.1 billion and operating expenses of $79.9 billion, leaving it with a deficit of $8.8 billion. At the moment, Postal Service officials have told Congress, it has about $14 billion in cash on hand, putting it on the road to fiscal insolvency (without further aid) in late 2021. In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, the $2 trillion relief measure passed in March, Congress gave the Postal Service a $10 billion borrowing authority. After the bill became law, there were negotiations between the Postal Service and the Treasury Department on the terms of the borrowing; a deal was announced in July.

The ability to borrow $10 billion, the postmaster general said, would “delay the approaching liquidity crisis.” [..] The House HEROES Act would give $25 billion to the Postal Service in what is essentially a bailout. The bill mentions nothing about helping the Postal Service handle the upcoming election or any other election. Indeed, the only stipulation at all placed on the $25 billion is that the Postal Service, “during the coronavirus emergency, shall prioritize the purchase of, and make available to all Postal Service employees and facilities, personal protective equipment, including gloves, masks, and sanitizers, and shall conduct additional cleaning and sanitizing of Postal Service facilities and delivery vehicles.” If the House Democrats who wrote and passed the bill intended the money to be spent specifically for elections, they did not say so in the text of the legislation.

Jie Boden

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From April, but highly appropriate. We’ve discussed this in the Comments, and I keep thinking that one, or a few, states having a working model doesn’t mean it’s endlessly scalable.

• Washington’s Successful Vote-by-Mail System Wasn’t Built Overnight (CC)

State officials across the nation are turning to Washington state for advice on how to set up a vote-by-mail system before the November presidential election, but officials say that question is just the first of many they should be asking. Secretary of State Kim Wyman, who is in charge of Washington’s election system, and King County Elections Director Julie Wise, who runs elections in the county where more than a third of Washington voters fill out a ballot, said the list of questions other states need to answer in order to effectively implement vote-by-mail is long and complicated. And mid-April may be too late to start making the switch from a mostly in-person system to a vote-at-home configuration, said Wise, who worked on in-person voting for a decade before moving, along with the state of Washington, to vote-by-mail elections in 2011.

“We’ve been at it for a decade. It’s not an easy lift to make that transition,” said Wise, between meetings to plan for a November election that could change dramatically — even in one of the nation’s five vote-by-mail states — because of the ongoing threat of the coronavirus. “You’re cutting it very short,” was her response to recent inquiries from other states and counties, in addition to sharing a packet of information about how King County votes by mail, from the technology to the people. Among the questions other states and municipalities should be asking, according to Wyman and Wise:


• Do we need to buy new equipment to count the votes? • Do we have current addresses of our voters? Have we tried to mail them anything recently? • How recent are the signature cards from voters? Do we need to ask millions of people to fill out new ones? • Do we have a place to count votes that can accommodate the people needed to verify ballots and count them, while allowing for social distancing? • What state laws would we need to change in order to allow for most votes to be cast by mail? • Will we provide free postage? • How much will that cost? • Will we provide drop boxes and, if so, how many? • Do we need to set up some in-person sites for people to vote or register and how can you do that while accounting for social distancing? • How much will this transition cost? Where will the money come from? And that’s just the beginning of the list.

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It’s not just his tweets. Schiff and the Dems have been getting away for so long with utter falsehoods they themselves may not even recognize them as such anymore. And who’s going to call them on it now? The MSM have been getting away with the exact same thing. But what use is it to go for a soft touch approach like this from John Solomon? Just say Schiff’s a blatant liar. Because he is. And opther people, like a journalist, may claim innocence, but the chair of the House Intelligence Committee can definitely not.

• Adam Schiff’s Inaccurate Russia Tweets Raise Double-Standard Question (JTN)

Twitter has on more than one occasion appended or flagged President Trump’s tweets as misleading. But so far, it has not done the same with several posts by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff that are demonstrably false or misleading, raising questions of a double standard. For instance, Schiff tweeted in July 2018 that “the release of the Carter Page FISA application makes clear, once again, the FBI acted lawfully and appropriately” in reference to the surveillance warrant the bureau used to spy on the Trump adviser during the Russia collusion probe. In fact, the FISA application that Schiff referred to in the tweet contained 51 statements that were inaccurate, misleading or undocumented, and included 17 violations of FBI rules ranging from false and unverified information to omissions of exculpatory evidence of innocence, the Justice Department inspector general reported last December.

Likewise, DOJ officials withdrew two of the four Page FISA applications, and the chief judge of the FISA court ruled in March that the FBI has misled the court. “There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said. And last week, an ex-FBI lawyer agreed to plead guilty to a felony and admitted he falsified a document to deceive the court. In other words, the FBI acted unlawfully and inappropriately in the Page FISA debacle. And to date, Twitter hasn’t flagged or appended Schiff’s tweet even though he has enormous influence on the platform with 2.4 million followers.

Just the News identified more than a dozen tweets that Schiff has posted since 2017 that are inaccurate or misleading based on the declassified information that has been made public over the last year by the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence community. Earlier this month, for instance, Schiff tweeted out a claim that Trump had not taken action to stop Russia from interfering in elections. “Donald Trump has never deterred Russia from interfering in U.S. elections. Far from it. The sum total of Trump’s words and actions has only encouraged Russian meddling in our elections,” Schiff wrote.

[..] Several times, Schiff has tweeted claims that there is evidence Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election. For instance, the California Democrat posted a tweet in April 2018 accusing Republicans of ignoring “when in plain sight — evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Multiple investigations ranging from the Senate Intelligence Committee to Special Counsel Robert Mueller have concluded there is no evidence any Trump campaign official – or any other American – colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. “The investigation did not establish that members of the trump campaign conspired to coordinate it with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller wrote, saying extensive contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians did not amount to a conspiracy.

Then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr last year came to a similar conclusion. “We don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia,” he announced.

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Again, it’s not the lockdowns:

“Private consumption dipped at an annual rate of nearly 29% as shoppers stayed home, leaving malls and restaurants nearly empty of customers. That was without any full shutdown of businesses to contain coronavirus outbreaks [..]”

• Japan’s Economy Shrinks At Record -27.8% Annual Rate (AP)

Japan’s economy shrank at annual rate of 27.8% in April-June, the worst contraction on record, as the coronavirus pandemic slammed consumption and trade, according to government data released Monday. The Cabinet Office reported that Japan’s preliminary seasonally adjusted real GDP, the sum of a nation’s goods and services, fell 7.8% quarter on quarter. The annual rate shows what the number would have been if continued for a year. Japanese media reported the latest drop was the worst since World War II. But the Cabinet Office said comparable records began in 1980. The previous worst contraction, a 17.8% drop, was in the first quarter of 2009, during the global financial crisis.

The world’s third largest economy was already limping along when the virus outbreak struck in China late last year. It has weakened as the pandemic gained ground, leading to social distancing restrictions and prompting many people to stay home when they can. “In April, May, a state of emergency was issued, it was a situation where the economy was artificially stopped so to speak, and the impact was severe,” said Yasutoshi Nishimura, minister Economic and Fiscal Policy. “These are tough numbers but they bottomed out in April and May, we would like to put all our efforts into returning to a growth trajectory,” Nishimura told reporters.


[..] The economy shrank 0.6% in the January-March period, and contracted 1.8% in the October-December period last year, meaning that Japan slipped into recession in the first quarter of this year. Recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction. [..] Japanese economic growth was flat in July-September. Growth was minimal the quarter before that. [..] For the April-June period, Japan’s exports dropped at a whopping annual rate of 56%. Private consumption dipped at an annual rate of nearly 29% as shoppers stayed home, leaving malls and restaurants nearly empty of customers. That was without any full shutdown of businesses to contain coronavirus outbreaks [..]

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In a bit of a dip? No panic, let’s blow another housing bubble. The instrument this time is a stamp duty holiday.

• UK Housing Market Has Busiest Month In More Than 10 Years (G.)

The housing market has had its busiest month in more than 10 years in July, with the traditional summer lull replaced by a flurry of activity from buyers and sellers, according to the property website Rightmove. The site, which typically lists about 95% of homes for sale in the UK, said the “rulebook has been rewritten”, with the boom fuelled by pent-up demand during lockdown accelerating as the summer has progressed. It said the number of monthly sales agreed in Britain had been the highest since it started tracking the figure a decade ago, up by 38% on the same period last year and worth a combined total of more than £37bn. Would-be sellers were also active, with more properties coming on to the market than in any month since 2008.

Asking prices have fallen by an average of 0.2% across mainland Britain, but this has been driven by a 2% drop in London, where the number of homes coming on to the market is up by 69% year-on-year. In seven regions, asking prices hit record highs as sellers sought to make the most of the demand. The housing market was closed in lockdown and reopened in mid-May, sparking a flurry of activity. July brought a stamp duty holiday on homes costing up to £500,000 in England and £250,000 in Wales and Scotland, which further fuelled activity.


Last week figures from the UK’s largest estate agency firm, Countrywide, showed that demand for homes costing between £500,000 and £750,000 had soared since the tax break was announced, and Rightmove’s figures suggest a similar effect for other agents. The number of sales agreed for large homes was up by 59% annually, while for first-time properties the rise was 29% and on homes with three or four bedrooms, excluding four-bed detached properties, it was 38%.

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She didn’t want to do it.

• New Zealand Delays General Election By A Month Amid COVID19 Outbreak (G.)

New Zealand is to delay its general election by a month due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in Auckland, the country’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said. Calls had been growing from opposition parties for the election to be moved, with opposition leaders saying it wasn’t “just and fair” to hold an election while an outbreak was underway and level 3 restrictions were in place in the country’s largest city, prohibiting campaigning. Ardern said after consulting with every political party in parliament, as well as the electoral commission, she had decided to move the general election from 19 September to 17 October. She said her first suggestion of moving it by two weeks had been rejected by the Electoral Commission as not enough time to prepare logistics such as venues.

“The Electoral Commission, via the Ministry of Justice, has advised me that a safe and accessible election is achievable on this date,” Ardern said. “Moving the date by four weeks also gives all parties a fair shot to campaign and delivers New Zealanders certainty without unnecessarily long delays.” Ardern said Covid-19 would be with the world “for some time to come” and repeatedly pushing the election date would not lessen the risk of disruption to voters and parties. “This is why the Electoral Commission has planned for the possibility of holding an election where the country is at level 2, and with some parts at level 3. I will not change the election date again.” New Zealand is in the midst of its first outbreak since eliminating the disease in June, with dozens of people infected and held in quarantine in Auckland, a city of 1.5 million.


On Monday nine news cases of Covid-19 were reported, bringing the total number of cases related to the south Auckland cluster to 58. Maori and Pasifika people have been disproportionately infected by the latest outbreak. Five people were in hospital being treated for the disease, and the source of the outbreak remained a mystery, the ministry of health said. “We still don’t have any particular clues as to the origin of the outbreak,” director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said.

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Must read for today. How do new words enter our lexicon? To what extent are they propagated, and by whom, and for which purposes? Ever heard of critical theory?

In my view, this typifies the institutionalization of education and knowledge. Which claims that the only things that you can learn that are of any value are to be found in schools. Say that often enough and nothing of value can be found there anymore. Knowledge as a monopoly doesn’t work.

• The Roots Of Wokeness (Sullivan)

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives.

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy. What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

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Debt Rattle July 24 2019

Jul 242019
 
 July 24, 2019  Posted by at 9:04 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Marie-Thérèse Walter 1937

 

• Mueller In Last-Minute Request For Aide To Be With Him During Testimony (NBC)
• Questions for Mueller (Aaron Maté)
• Robert Mueller, The ‘Magician Of Omission’ On Russia (Solomon)
• Mueller Deputy Andrew Weissmann’s Offer To An Oligarch Could Hurt DOJ (Solomon)
• The Clown Is Crowned As The Country Burns In Hell (G.)
• Deutsche Bank’s Problem Derivatives Cloud Recovery (R.)
• Deutsche Bank Flagged Epstein’s Overseas Transactions To US Watchdog (CNBC)
• Berkeley First US City To Ban Natural Gas (G.)
• Libra Scams Are Already Popping Up On Facebook (F.)
• Big Tech Faces Broad US Justice Department Antitrust Probe (R.)
• MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia (John Helmer)
• Ralph Nader Says Boeing 737 Max Should Never Fly Again (CNBC)

 

 

From what I understand Zebley will be sworn in for the Intelligence Committe part, the last part, but not the Judiciary Committee, the first 3 hours. Hints at them knowing at least some of what’s going to be asked.

• Mueller In Last-Minute Request For Aide To Be With Him During Testimony (NBC)

One of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s longtime aides will appear alongside him during his highly-anticipated testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, a spokesperson said Tuesday, but is not expected to be sworn in. Mueller’s team made a last-minute request that Aaron Zebley be sworn in and testify with him during his scheduled hearings before Congress on Wednesday, a congressional source familiar with the request told NBC News. Mueller is slated to testify on his report into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the country’s influence on President Donald Trump for three hours before the House Judiciary Committee, take a break, then appear for at least two additional hours before the House Intelligence Committee.

For the first hearing, Zebley will sit alongside Mueller as his counsel, according to the Judiciary Committee spokesperson. The committee, however, is not updating its guidance to include Zebley as a witness. This means that Zebley will not be sworn in. Mueller can confer with him as he is questioned by the panel, according to committee rules, but cannot answer questions. The ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, said Tuesday that GOP members had “not gotten assurances from the House Democrats on the committee that he [Zebley] will not speak.”

“He’s not supposed to speak in that role to anyone on the committee or asked questions. And we’re asking, and, frankly, that that be confirmed before the hearing. So we don’t have to waste time with it tomorrow,” Collins said. Jim Popkin, Mueller’s spokesperson, disputed the idea that Zebley’s presence at the hearings amounted to an 11th-hour addition. “Aaron Zebley was the Deputy Special Counsel and had day-to-day oversight of the investigations conducted by the Office,” Popkin said in a statement Tuesday. “He will accompany Special Counsel Mueller to the Wednesday hearings, as was discussed with the committees more than a week ago.”

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Mueller’s people asked Barr for guidance on what he can talk about. Wonder how many times they will refer to that guidance when not answering questions. Sort of like taking the fifth.

• Questions for Mueller (Aaron Maté)

”For two years, Democrats have waited on Robert Mueller to deliver a death blow to the Trump presidency,” The New York Times observed on July 20. “On Wednesday, in back-to-back hearings with the former special counsel, that wish could face its final make-or-break moment.” The very fact that Democrats had to subpoena Mueller in order to create this final moment should in fact be the final reminder of what a mistake it was for Democrats to have waited on him. If Mueller had incriminating information yet to share, or had been stymied from doing his work, or if Attorney General William Barr had somehow misrepresented his findings, then it stands to reason that Mueller would be welcoming the opportunity to appear before Congress, not resisting it.


The reality is that Mueller’s investigation did not indict anyone on the Trump campaign for collusion with Russia, or even for anything related to the 2016 election. Mueller’s report found no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, and even undermined the case for it. That said, there are unresolved matters that Mueller’s testimony could help clarify. Mueller claimed to have established that the Russian government conducted “a sweeping and systematic” interference campaign in order to elect Trump, yet the contents of his report don’t support that allegation. The Mueller report repeatedly excludes countervailing information in order to suggest, misleadingly, that the Trump campaign had suspect “links” and “ties” to people connected with Russia. And Mueller and other intelligence officials involved in the Russia probe made questionable investigative decisions that are worthy of scrutiny.

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Horowitz has to finish his report first before Durham can do anything. Today’s hearings are far from the last thing on the topic.

• Robert Mueller, The ‘Magician Of Omission’ On Russia (Solomon)

While most of the political world focused its attention elsewhere, special prosecutor John Durham’s team quietly reached out this summer to a lawyer representing European academic Joseph Mifsud, one of the earliest and most mysterious figures in the now closed Russia-collusion case. An investigator told Swiss attorney Stephan Roh that Durham’s team wanted to interview Mifsud, or at the very least review a recorded deposition the professor gave in summer 2018 about his role in the drama involving Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election. The contact, confirmed by multiple sources and contemporaneous email, sent an unmistakable message:


Durham, the U.S. attorney handpicked by Attorney General William Barr to determine whether the FBI committed abuses during the Russia investigation, is taking a second look at one of the noteworthy figures and the conclusions of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report. The evidence I reviewed suggests Mueller’s handiwork may be exposed for glaring omissions that, when brought to public light, leave key questions unanswered, especially about how the FBI’s unprecedented probe of the Trump campaign started. Durham is focused on determining whether any government or private figures who came in contact with the Trump campaign in 2016 “were engaged in improper surveillance,” a U.S. official told me when asked about the Mifsud overture.

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Is someone going to question Weismann at some point?

• Mueller Deputy Andrew Weissmann’s Offer To An Oligarch Could Hurt DOJ (Solomon)

At the time, pressure was building inside the DOJ and the FBI to find smoking-gun evidence against Trump in the Russia case because the Steele dossier — upon which the early surveillance warrants were based — was turning out to be an uncorroborated mess. (“There’s no big there there,” lead FBI agent Pete Strzok texted a few days before Weissmann’s overture.) Likewise, key evidence that the DOJ used to indict Firtash on corruption charges in 2014 was falling apart. Two central witnesses were in the process of recanting testimony, and a document the FBI portrayed as bribery evidence inside Firtash’s company was exposed as a hypothetical slide from an American consultant’s PowerPoint presentation, according to court records I reviewed.

In other words, the DOJ faced potential embarrassment in two high-profile cases when Weissmann made an unsolicited approach on June 4, 2017, that surprised even Firtash’s U.S. legal team. To some, the offer smacked of being desperately premature. Mueller was appointed just two weeks earlier, did not even have a full staff selected, and was still getting up to speed on the details of the investigation. So why rush to make a deal when the prosecution team still was being selected, some wondered. Second, Weissmann’s approach was audaciously aggressive, even for a prosecutor with his reputation.

According to a defense memo recounting Weissmann’s contacts, the prosecutor claimed the Mueller team could “resolve the Firtash case” in Chicago and neither the DOJ nor the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office “could interfere with or prevent a solution,” including withdrawing all charges. “The complete dropping of the proceedings … was doubtless on the table,” according to the defense memo.

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“So we beat on, against the sun, borne back ceaselessly into hell.”

• The Clown Is Crowned As The Country Burns In Hell (G.)

Well, here we are then. Someone who could easily be rejected as a Guess Who character for looking too ridiculous is now to lead the country. A man whose DNA profile is the exact same as a Bernard Manning joke. A man who mentioned the 20 hustings he had taken part in, approximately 30 seconds after Conservative party chairman Brandon Lewis talked of the 16 hustings held. With 8,000 members of the Johnson family watching on – and Jeremy Hunt, looking for all the world like a sub who’s never gonna get off the bench and knows it – Boris Johnson was announced as the new leader of the Conservative party, and, in short order, the new prime minister. Elected by a staggering 0.2% of the nation, we can’t say it isn’t the will of the people.

It’s quite extraordinary, isn’t it, when the new leader of the country opens his inaugural speech with: “There may be people here who wonder quite what they have done!” – having to address the fact that many people in the room are coming to terms with the fact they’ve got shit on their shoe. “Do you look daunted?!” he boomed, “You don’t look remotely daunted to me!” Which was met with a Spectoresque wall of silence, a number of faces as white as Elizabeth I’s, and a solitary cry of: “No!”.

[..] I don’t really know what to say myself. I don’t understand how a man can lie his way about bananas and condoms to high office. I don’t understand how a man whose entire prep for anything seems to consist of drawing a cock and balls – but in Latin! – on a sheet of paper, ends up in high office. I don’t understand how a man can be recorded offering to facilitate the assault of a journalist and reach high office. I don’t understand how a man can be fired twice for cavalierly making stuff up and reach high office. I don’t understand how a man whose entire personality is a job-lot sold off from a closing down joke shop can reach high office. A racist, an inveterate liar, a man who makes Machiavelli look misunderstood and Pinocchio button-nosed. It’s 33C outside in London. You can’t tell whether people are crying or sweating. We can’t do anything until we get a say – which, this time, we did not. So we beat on, against the sun, borne back ceaselessly into hell.

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There will not be a recovery. The only thing they can so is prolong the agony.

• Deutsche Bank’s Problem Derivatives Cloud Recovery (R.)

Deutsche Bank’s turnaround strategy rests in large part on shedding 288 billion euros of unwanted assets. Three bank insiders said it will take years, tying up capital that could have generated income of 500 million euros ($557 million) a year. The opportunity cost of holding the assets, which has not been previously reported, underscores the challenges facing Chief Executive Christian Sewing as he attempts to turn around the bank and restore confidence among investors who have seen the value of their shares decline by 75% in the past four years. Sewing said earlier this month that Deutsche, Germany’s largest lender, would set up a bad bank to house the assets, which include equity, credit and interest-rate derivatives.


The bank said it wants to offload most of its derivatives by 2020. Executives managing the book can either sell positions or allow them to gradually wind down over time, depending on which is more profitable. The bank is planning an auction of its short-dated equity derivatives book, having already received “significant expressions of interest,” the sources familiar with the matter said. However, its long-dated interest rate and credit derivatives are expected to be much harder to offload, the sources said. Deutsche Bank has held on-and-off talks with potential buyers of some of those assets over the past two years, three people said. The sales did not happen because the prices offered would have resulted in hundreds of millions of euros in losses for the bank, they said.

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What, laundering as well?

• Deutsche Bank Flagged Epstein’s Overseas Transactions To US Watchdog (CNBC)

Deutsche Bank notified U.S. financial watchdogs about suspicious transactions by accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — a customer of the bank — according to a new report Tuesday. The transactions, which involved Epstein moving money out of the United States, were flagged after Deutsche Bank discovered them while looking for indications that the wealthy financier was using his money for sex trafficking, The New York Times reported. Epstein had been a client of Deutsche Bank’s private banking division since at least 2013, five years after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges involving a teenage girl filed by Florida state prosecutors, the Times noted.


That guilty plea led to Epstein — a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton — being required to register as a sex offender. According to the new article, an anti-money laundering compliance officer in Deutsche Bank’s office in New York and Florida raised concerns about the bank’s relationship with Epstein in 2015 and 2016. Those officers also reportedly put together a suspicious activity report on potentially illegal activity in an Epstein account at the time, which had moved money outside of the U.S. The Times said it was not clear if that report was ever filed with the financial crimes division of the U.S. Treasury Department. But the latest suspicious transactions were reported this year, according to the article.

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But but.

• Berkeley First US City To Ban Natural Gas (G.)

Berkeley this week became the first city in the United States to ban natural, fossil gas hook-ups in new buildings. The landmark ordinance was passed into law on Tuesday, after being approved unanimously by the city council the previous week amid resounding public support. Although Berkeley may be pushing the vanguard, the city is hardly alone. Governments across the US and Europe are looking at strategies to phase out gas. In California alone, dozens of cities and counties are considering eliminating fossil fuel hook-ups to power stoves and heat homes in new buildings, while California state agencies pencil out new rules and regulations that would slash emissions. Natural gas, it seems, has become the new climate crisis frontline. Berkeley’s ordinance, which goes into effect on 1 January, will ban gas hook-ups in new multi-family construction, with some allowances for first-floor retail and certain types of large structures.


The reasons behind the decision are multifold. Energy use in buildings accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions in California. If the state is to meet its goal of 100% zero-carbon energy by 2045, the gas will have to go. For decades, gas was considered among the preferred energy sources for buildings and embraced as a bridge from dirtier fossil fuels to a green energy future. “There’s been a lingering perception that burning gas was cleaner than electricity, which might have been true 20 years ago when electricity came from burning coal,” said Pierre Delforge, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council . “When we look at electrification policies, we need to think about what the grid will look like in 10 or 20 years, not what it looked like yesterday.”

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Not the Onion.

• Libra Scams Are Already Popping Up On Facebook (F.)

As Facebook faces skepticism from regulators that it can handle launching its cryptocurrency Libra, a raft of fake accounts and scams purporting to sell Libra have cropped up on its own platform, according to the Washington Post. At least a dozen fake pages and websites on Facebook and Instagram claim to be associated with Facebook’s Libra, which has yet to be officially launched. One video offered a discount on Libra coins that have been distributed to early investors. Another linked to a realistic-looking fake website called “buylibracoins.com.” The website remains online. The scams even spread to YouTube and Twitter, according to the Washington Post. Facebook says Libra will allow people to send money to each other without a traditional middleman, such as a bank.


A digital wallet, called Calibra, will also be available as a stand-alone app on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. A Facebook spokesperson told Forbes that it “removes ads and Pages that violate our policies when we become aware of them, and we are constantly working to improve detection of scams on our platforms.” Key Background: In 2018, Facebook banned advertisements involving cryptocurrency or initial coin offerings to combat the proliferation of scams and bogus ICOs cropping up as the price of Bitcoin soared. Over the last few months, Facebook has been softening the ban in the run up to the announcement of Libra—and it appears scammers are taking advantage. Libra scams may not help Facebook convince lawmakers and regulators that it can protect user privacy and prevent the digital currency from being used in criminal activity.

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I’ll believe it when I see it. Because Big Tech=CIA.

• Big Tech Faces Broad US Justice Department Antitrust Probe (R.)

The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday it was opening a broad investigation of major digital technology firms into whether they engage in anticompetitive practices, the strongest sign the Trump administration is stepping up its scrutiny of Big Tech. The review will look into “whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers,” the Justice Department said in a statement. The Justice Department did not identify specific companies but said the review would consider concerns raised about “search, social media, and some retail services online” — an apparent reference to Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Facebook Inc, and potentially Apple Inc.


[..] The announcement comes a day before the Federal Trade Commission is set to announce a $5 billion penalty to Facebook for failing to properly protect user privacy. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said the Justice Department “must now be bold and fearless in stopping Big Tech’s misuse of its monopolistic power. Too long absent and apathetic, enforcers now must prevent privacy abuse, anticompetitive tactics, innovation roadblocks, and other hallmarks of excessive market power.” In June, Reuters reported the Trump administration was gearing up to investigate whether Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google misuse their massive market power, setting up what could be an unprecedented, wide-ranging probe of some of the world’s largest companies.

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The FBI tried to steal the black boxes, but Malaysian secret service had already ‘smuggled’ agents into the Donbass ahead of other countries. Oh, and literally everybody has been caught lying. What a story this is becoming,

• MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia (John Helmer)

A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the FBI to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian — Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister’s Department and Malaysia’s National Security Council following the crash on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia’s OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.

The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because the airline manifest does not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US. The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT; in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia’s exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium’s inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained.


The film reveals the Malaysian Government’s evidence for judging the JIT’s witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea. The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government’s opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27.

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Not the first time he’s said it, but this time it’s directly to the FAA.

• Ralph Nader Says Boeing 737 Max Should Never Fly Again (CNBC)

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader on Tuesday urged the Federal Aviation Administration to permanently ground Boeing’s 737 Max jet. “The plane cannot be refixed,” said Nader, whose grandniece was killed in a March crash of a 737 Max jet in Ethiopia. “It has to be recalled” and permanently taken out of service, he said. Regulators worldwide ordered airlines to ground their 737 Max planes in mid-March after the crash in Ethiopia and one in Indonesia that occurred within five months of one another, killing a total of 346 people. Since then, Boeing has been preparing to get the Max back in the air. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights due to the grounding and are planning to do so until at least November, a move that Boeing said it took a $4.9 billion charge for in its second quarter.


But the planemaker needs to “take their losses” on the jet, Nader said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” Crash investigators have pointed to an issue with the jets’ software, for which Boeing said it has developed a fix, as the cause behind the two fatal crashes. But once a software upgrade is submitted to the FAA, it will likely take at least another month before the planes are back in operation. On the software fix, Nader said it shouldn’t be trusted since executives are “stuck in their bad decision” and are “ignoring preventable aerodynamic design.” “It’s a new plane; they can’t say it’s just a little bit changed,” he said. “It needs full certification.”

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