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Debt Rattle February 25 2025

Feb 252025
 
 February 25, 2025  Posted by at 10:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  38 Responses »


Tintoretto The crucifixion of Christ 1568

 

• No Way Out (James Howard Kunstler)
• Liberals Panic Over ‘Politicized’ FBI After Bongino Appointment (ZH)
• Musk Warns Fed Workers – Return To Office Or Be Placed On Leave (ZH)
• Trump Officials Push Back Against Musk Initiative (RT)
• Judge Blocks Education Department, OPM From Sharing Data With DOGE (ET)
• US Adopting ‘Russian Narrative’ – EU’s Kallas (RT)
• EU’s Chief Diplomat Backs Zelensky’s Refusal To Hold Elections (RT)
• Germany Must Become ‘Independent’ From US – Bundestag Election Winner (RT)
• Income Tax vs Tariffs (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Zelensky Has ‘No Chance’ Of Winning A Fair Election – Putin (RT)
• Russia Ready To Work With US On ‘Rare Earths’ – Putin (RT)
• Putin Weighs In On Europe’s Participation In Ukraine Peace Talks (RT)
• The Ukraine War Will Only End On Russia’s Terms, Lavrov Says (ZH)
• EU Spending On Russian LNG Imports Quadruples (RT)
• Xi Backs Russia On Ukraine Peace Efforts – Kremlin (RT)
• West Knew NATO Push For Ukraine Was Risky – Wikileaks (RT)
• UK In Secret Plot To Extract Personal Data From 2 Billion iPhone Users (VF)
• Displaced Disinformation Experts Are Seeking New Opportunities (Turley)

 

 

 

 

Witkoff
https://twitter.com/i/status/1893733497568706786

Transgender

MSNBC: it costs them nothing

Bongino

ID

 

 

 

 

“Mr. Bongino has documented the worst blob crimes of recent years in a series of books that comprehensively presents the entire tapestry of lawlessness in microscopic detail. He knows the whole sordid, epic story, all the names, and all the money trails in every obscure corner of the worst aggregate matrix of scandals in US history. Believe me when I tell you, this is like a death sentence for the blob.”

“The Democratic Party was the political enabling partner in all this sedition and treason and it is hard to see how it comes out of this alive.”

• No Way Out (James Howard Kunstler)

CBS’s 60-Minutes show was at it again Sunday night in the most prime primetime weekend news slot on the old broadcast spectrum — Sunday at 7:00, the power-hour of national mind-fuckery — with blob PR-agent Scott Pelley singing the blues over the systematic disassembly of the rogue bureaucracy. Trouble is, fewer and fewer minds are susceptible to the argument that the blob exists to “save our democracy.” You’re supposed to go boo-hoo because the Department of Justice is under new management. Now get this: since 2015 the Department of Justice and its step-child, the FBI, have devoted their vast and savage powers to manifold acts of sedition, treason, malicious political prosecution, obstruction of justice, suborning perjuries, and countless other abuses of law in an ever-widening gyre of ass-covering operations as year-by-year their crimes multiplied.

RussiaGate was initially a cover-up op for the Clintons’ many acts of mischief and moneygrubbing when Hillary ran for President, just as the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation was a cover-up for the crimes committed by the DOJ and FBI after Hillary lost to Mr. Trump, just as Impeachment #1 was a cover-up for the Ukraine money laundry and its role in RussiaGate, and Impeachment #2 was a coverup for the 2020 election ballot hijinks that got rid of Mr. Trump, and just as the Mar-a-Lago raid was a cover-up to retrieve evidence of all-the-above that Mr. Trump had archived, and just as the flurry of Trump prosecutions in 2024 was the final (and amazingly inept) effort to put the Golden Golem of Greatness out-of-business forever.

But somehow, perhaps an act of Providence, he prevailed over all that adversity, like some paladin out of the ancient myths, and is suddenly back in charge — to the abject horror of all those lawyers and spooks behind the aforesaid ops, now nervously awaiting subpoenas in their Beltway McMansions. You will learn shortly that there is a difference between “justice” based on fraud and fakery and justice served by way of fact-patterns and evidence. And so late Sunday evening after the 60-Minutes pity party, came the pretty astounding news that former Secret Service agent and now podcaster Dan Bongino is appointed Deputy Director of the FBI. Astounding because Mr. Bongino has documented the worst blob crimes of recent years in a series of books that comprehensively presents the entire tapestry of lawlessness in microscopic detail.

He knows the whole sordid, epic story, all the names, and all the money trails in every obscure corner of the worst aggregate matrix of scandals in US history. Believe me when I tell you, this is like a death sentence for the blob. For instance, Mr. Bongino is acutely aware of what went down on J-6, 2021, when a supposed pipe-bomb was “found” at the DNC headquarters, the part it was supposed to play in the larger J-6 op to rid Washington of Mr. Trump, and the lying confabulations of former FBI Director Christopher Wray afterward. Now he is in a position to compel current and former FBI officials to answer questions about that, and much more, from the Crossfire Hurricane scam to the shenanigans in Judge Juan Merchan’s court last summer.

Those investigations will require a whole dedicated division of new FBI agents while Kash Patel attends to the latest grifts uncovered by the DOGE, the threats against public order and safety posed by countless military-aged illegal aliens ushered into the country by “Joe Biden” and Alejandro Mayorkas, the turpitudes of former AG Merrick Garland, and the crimes committed by officials in the CDC, FDA, and other public health agencies around Covid-19, and lingering monstrosities such as the Jeffrey Epstein capers, the huge fortunes mysteriously amassed by US senators and congressmen, the 1960s assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, the censorship operations conducted by the combined FBI / CIA, State Department, and dark offices of the Pentagon, the theft of US largess given over to Ukraine, and the infiltration of American institutions by China.

The Trump admin knows that it will have to strike hard and fast in all these matters and more. Cases will have to be prepared briskly and removed to federal courts outside the blob-controlled DC district. A great many political figures will have to be taken out of circulation. It will be helpful to finally understand the bizarre capture of the old legacy news media so, for instance, it becomes clear why an outfit such as CBS’s 60-Minutes ended up on the dark side, committed to burying the truth and distorting reality at every opportunity.

The Democratic Party was the political enabling partner in all this sedition and treason and it is hard to see how it comes out of this alive. Expect to see a lemming stampede of resignations out of Congress and the Senate. And some of them, like Sen. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Eric Swalwell could end up in prison. You saw the fear in their public antics the past two weeks as the cabinet confirmations mounted. They know what’s coming. They are desperate, but the power they once wielded is now in other hands. There’s no way out. On a bright note, it was heartwarming to see that Joy Reid got “axed” from her primetime perch at MSNBC over the weekend. (Nobody axed me, but I approve!) She’ll be doing a must-watch farewell show this coming week. Don’t miss it!

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“..you know who should be panicking right now? Adam Schiff…”

• Liberals Panic Over ‘Politicized’ FBI After Bongino Appointment (ZH)

Sunday night’s panic within the FBI has quickly morphed into “utter despair” among liberals, “who had already grown fearful of a highly politicized FBI,” according to (formerly USAID-funded) Politico, which is rich considering that the FBI under Biden spent four years as a “highly politicized” weapon to go after conservatives.

Rolling Stone (of pedo coverup fame), framed Bongino’s appointment with the “bad cops” tag, which is followed by an unhinged screed.

The once-great activist rag writes: “The FBI will officially be headed by two men with no experience in the bureau, and a lot of blind loyalty towards President Donald Trump.” During the first weeks of Trump’s second administration, Bongino has hyped up the president’s power grab and revenge tour against his political opponents. Earlier this month, the radio host urged Trump to ignore a court order blocking the administration’s attempt to place a widespread freeze on federal funding. -Rolling Stone. Terminally TDS’d Stephen King deleted all of his interactions with Bongino:

And you know who should be panicking right now? Adam Schiff…

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It appears that Musk was just weeding out the dead. And see what else pops up. Bit of a coarse way to do it.

• Musk Warns Fed Workers – Return To Office Or Be Placed On Leave (ZH)

The Department of Government Efficiency’s Elon Musk wrote on X early Monday that starting this week, federal workers who fail to return to the office will be placed on administrative leave. “Those who ignored President Trump’s executive order to return to work have now received over a month’s warning,” Musk wrote, adding, “Starting this week, those who still fail to return to office will be placed on administrative leave.” Musk is referring to the “Return To In-Person Work” executive order Trump signed on day one of his second term, which states: “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”

Musk quoted a post by Ralph Norman, US Representative for South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, who posted a video of his latest interview on Fox News, describing the direct insubordination of some federal workers still refusing to return to the office. On Saturday, Musk wrote on X that federal workers received an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week,” adding, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” The deadline is Monday. By late Sunday, there was pushback on the ‘accomplishments’ email from several federal agencies, including the Pentagon, FBI, State Department, and various parts of the Intelligence Community… An insider at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland, said Monday will be chaotic as employees rush into the office, given the limited availability of parking spaces. The Department of Government Efficiency’s latest move appears to create harsh working conditions that will make federal workers more inclined to quit voluntarily. As the old saying goes: “Welcome to Serbia.”

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Everyone can feel protected by their department heads. That’s not a bad thing…

• Trump Officials Push Back Against Musk Initiative (RT)

An instruction by Elon Musk, US President Donald Trump’s government efficiency czar, for federal workers to summarize their weekly activities or risk termination has reportedly prompted resistance among senior officials. On Saturday, Musk announced on X that all government employees must outline what work they had done over the week, warning that failure to comply might be interpreted as resignation. Emails sent to the 2.3 million federal workers reportedly requested that five bullet points detailing their activities be submitted by the end of Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) devised the request after Trump urged him to “get more aggressive” in targeting perceived waste.

The emails were distributed via the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR arm. However, some department officials responded by instructing employees to ignore the emails, with directives coming directly from Trump appointees, the New York Times reported on Sunday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard ordered her staff not to respond, citing the “inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work.” FBI Director Kash Patel informed employees that the agency “is in charge of all our review processes,” directing them to “pause any responses.” The Pentagon took a similar stance, the newspaper reported, citing an email from Darin S. Selnick, the acting head of personnel. Employees at the Department of Health and Human Services received conflicting guidance regarding Musk’s request.

Musk was appointed as a special official in the Trump administration tasked with cutting waste and fraud from government spending. Critics argue he aims to dismantle significant parts of the federal government, paving the way for a corporate takeover of corresponding functions. Trump has expressed support for Musk’s efforts amid the backlash surrounding the weekly report requirement. Musk downplayed the controversy, calling the email a “very basic pulse check” and sharing a meme that compared his job security threats to vaccination mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Judges pretending that DOGE is not part of the government.

• Judge Blocks Education Department, OPM From Sharing Data With DOGE (ET)

A federal judge on Feb. 24 blocked two agencies from sharing sensitive information with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staff. “The U.S. Department of Education; Denise L. Carter, the Acting Secretary of Education; and their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys are ENJOINED from disclosing the personally identifiable information of the plaintiffs and the members of the plaintiff organizations to any DOGE affiliates,” U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman wrote in a 33-page order. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and its employees are also forbidden from disclosing the same information to DOGE workers, the judge said. The temporary restraining order is in effect until March 10 as the case proceeds. It could be extended, converted into a preliminary injunction, or allowed to expire.

The American Federation of Teachers and other groups recently asked the court to block officials with the OPM, U.S. Department of Education (DOE), and U.S. Department of Treasury from conveying sensitive records to DOGE employees. Allowing DOGE access to the records endangers the privacy rights of veterans and other people represented by the groups, the organizations said in their request to the federal court in Maryland. Government lawyers argued that the judge should reject the motion for a restraining order because government officials have not violated the plaintiffs’ privacy.“At the heart of Plaintiffs’ theory is the baseless allegation that ‘DOGE representatives’ at the Defendant agencies are somehow outside the category of federal employees, or outside the category of federal employees in their respective agencies,” the lawyers wrote in a filing.

“Neither criticism withstands scrutiny. The Privacy Act therefore expressly allows disclosure of information protected under that statute in the circumstances of this case.” Boardman said that even if officials have been sharing information only with other government employees, it still violates the plaintiffs’ right to have their sensitive personal information kept private if the employees are not authorized to access the data. “Education and OPM possess a significant amount of detailed information about the plaintiffs’ lives,” the judge wrote. “To say that the plaintiffs suffer no cognizable injury when their personal information is improperly disclosed to government employees would nullify their interest in preventing unlawful government intrusion into their private affairs. The unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiffs’ sensitive personal information is an injury in fact.”

Although plaintiffs cannot receive relief under the Privacy Act, the judge said later, they can under the Administrative Procedure Act, which bars the government from taking steps that are not in accordance with the law. “The plaintiffs have shown that Education and OPM likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent,” Boardman said. The act prohibits agencies from disclosing “any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.”

In addition to the American Federation of Teachers, a union that represents some 1.8 million people, the plaintiffs in the case are the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, and the National Federation of Federal Employees.The order expressly names Adam Ramada, a DOGE employee who said in a declaration filed in the case that he and five other DOGE employees have been working with the DOE to audit contracts, grants, and programs “for waste, fraud, and abuse.” “In addition, we help senior Department leadership obtain access to accurate data and data analytics to inform their policy decisions at the Department,” Ramada said in the filing.

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When she succeeded Borrell, I already said she’d been picked solely for her Russophobia and Putin hatred. Terrible selection criteria.

• US Adopting ‘Russian Narrative’ – EU’s Kallas (RT)

Washington has fallen for “Russia’s narrative,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Monday. The accusation comes amid recent efforts by Washington and Moscow to begin resolving the conflict. “If [we] look at the messages that come from the US, then it is clear that the Russian narrative is there, very strongly represented,” Kallas told journalists in Brussels, stressing that the bloc is planning to “support Ukraine right now more than ever.” Kallas took office in Brussels as the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, replacing Spain’s Josep Borrell in December last year. A pronounced foreign policy hawk who, while she was Estonian prime minister demanded in 2023 that “all business with Russia must stop,” Kallas faced resignation calls over revelations her husband held a 25% stake in a logistics company that provides services in the sanction-hit nation.

Since the Ukraine conflict escalated in February 2022, both the EU and the US have implemented multiple rounds of sanctions in an effort to isolate Russia. The penalties included disconnecting the country from the Western financial system, suspending nearly all trade and energy ties, and freezing Moscow’s foreign reserves—a measure condemned as “theft” by the Kremlin. On Monday, the EU adopted its 16th package of Ukraine-related restrictions, marking the anniversary of the launch of the Russian military operation against Kiev’s forces in February 2022. However, shortly after assuming office in January US President Donald Trump pivoted Washington’s stance on Ukraine. Trump recently claimed that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky is responsible for the conflict’s escalation, and said that his presence at Washington’s meetings with Russia is unnecessary.

Meanwhile, media reports emerged that US envoys to the G7 and the UN have pushed for more cautious language in official statements, suggesting the use of “Ukraine conflict” instead of “Russia’s war of aggression.” The first meeting of Russian and US officials in three years occurred last week in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The talks have ignited a backlash within the EU with member states accusing the White House of reopening dialogue with Kremlin without prior consultation and sidelining Brussels from the negotiations.

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No diplomacy.

• EU’s Chief Diplomat Backs Zelensky’s Refusal To Hold Elections (RT)

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas has announced that she supports Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s refusal to hold a presidential election. Although Zelensky’s five-year presidential term expired in May 2024, no new elections have been held, with Zelensky claiming that it is “not the right time,” and citing martial law. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that he no longer considers Zelensky a legitimate head of state. Speaking on Monday ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Kallas said that “there is no need to hold elections” during wartime. She noted the public feud last week when the US president claimed that Zelensky is “a dictator without elections” and accused him of funneling US aid into a “war that couldn’t be won.”

Trump also claimed last week that Zelensky’s approval rating was at 4% and suggested that an election should be called. “He refuses to have elections. He’s low in the real Ukrainian polls. How can you be high with every city being demolished?” Trump said, adding that in the meantime, the US is “successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia.” Zelensky responded by claiming that Trump is “living in a disinformation space” created by Moscow. In tune with Zelensky, Kallas declared that “it’s clear that the Russian narrative is very strongly represented” in Trump’s statement. She stressed that for any peace deal to be effective, it would need to involve the Europeans and the Ukrainians.

She was referring to recent high-level US-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia, which frustrated the EU. Member states criticized Washington for sidelining Brussels and Kiev during the negotiations. “You can discuss whatever you want with Putin, but if it comes to Ukraine and Europe, then Ukraine and Europe also have to agree to this deal,” Kallas told journalists. Last week, reports suggested that the EU is preparing a military aid package worth at least $6.2 billion for Ukraine. The package is expected to include 1.5 million artillery shells and air defense systems – one of the bloc’s largest military aid commitments since the escalation of the conflict in 2022. Russia considers Zelensky “illegitimate” and recognizes only the Ukrainian parliament and its speaker. Russian officials have warned that any treaties he signs could be challenged and questioned his ability to conclude lasting agreements.

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Germany got stuck in small change. Not enough.

• Germany Must Become ‘Independent’ From US – Bundestag Election Winner (RT)

Germany must gain real independence from the US, Friedrich Merz, the projected winner of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, has said. According to German media, Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), are projected to receive 28.5% of the vote, which means that he will likely become the next chancellor.Speaking to reporters on Sunday night, Merz criticized US President Donald Trump’s handling of the Ukraine conflict. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic, drastic, and ultimately outrageous than the intervention we saw from Moscow,” Merz told reporters on Sunday night, according to the news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

“The Americans, at least those in the current government, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe,” he said. The conservative politician went on to argue that Germany must boost its defense and “gradually achieve independence from the US.” “I would have never thought that I would have to say something like that on a TV show,” he said. Trump has demanded that America’s allies in Europe pay “a fair share” in defense spending and contribute more to NATO. He also sidelined Ukraine and the EU when he reversed the Biden administration’s policy of “isolating” Russia and reopened direct talks with Moscow.

One of Trump’s most noteworthy allies, billionaire Elon Musk, has endorsed the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is projected to become the second-largest party in the Bundestag. Trump, nevertheless, has congratulated the CDU on the victory. “Much like the USA, the people of Germany got tired of the no-common-sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration, that has prevailed for so many years,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

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Former Assistant Treasury Secretary: “President Trump’s idea of replacing the income tax with tariffs is sound and a great advancement in the restoration of freedom..”

• Income Tax vs Tariffs (Paul Craig Roberts)

Prior to 1913 the US government was financed by tariffs. It was under tariffs, not free trade, that the United States industrialized and became a manufacturing nation. Indeed, the Union invaded and destroyed the Confederacy in order to impose the Morrill Tariff on the South that enabled the North to industrialize. The North could not compete with British industry and required the protection of a tariff. It is extraordinary to me that it has gone unremarked for 112 years that the income tax, which required a constitutional amendment, resurrected slavery. In actuality, white people voted to impose slavery on themselves. Americans did not realize what was happening. The income threshold for being subject to the tax was so high that few qualified to be taxed.

Moreover, the first tax rate was 1% and the progression halted at 7%. To be taxed at 7% you had to have a phenomenal amount of income for those days of more than $500,000, the equivalent of multi-millions today. In the US in the 1900s a person who made $70,000 a year was considered extremely wealthy. When Henry Ford’s innovation of the moving assembly line was introduced in 1913, he raised his workers’ pay from $2.34 per day to $5, producing an annual income of $1,300. Only 3% of the US population was subject to the income tax. Many years ago I wrote an account of how the income tax amendment passed. In Georgia the state legislative leader said Georgia had no objection to the amendment as no one in the state of Georgia had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.

Everyone overlooked that once an income tax was in place, the thresholds could be lowered and the rates raised. By 1918, that is, within 5 years, the top tax rate had jumped to 77%, dropping to 25% in 1925. When the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, slavery was resurrected. Historically, the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves did not own their own labor. Serfs were not owned by feudal lords, the the lords had use rights to as much as 30% of a serf’s labor. The labor of an enslaved person belonged to the slave’s owner. An income tax establishes government ownership over part of your labor. How much depends on your income and the tax rate at the time.

If you fail to deliver the government’s share of your income, you are severely punished and can spend many years in prison. Every American income taxpayer is partly enslaved and partly free.A tariff is a tax on consumption, the preferable means of taxation according to the classical economists. It establishes no government ownership rights in your income. An income tax not only gives government a part ownership of your working time, it is also a tax on factors of production — labor and capital. Taxing factors of production reduces economic growth and Gross Domestic Product. It is a counter-productive tax that suppresses output. The substitution of a tariff for an income tax is a pro-growth policy that will produce higher incomes and raise living standards. Free labor is always more productive because you are working for yourself and your family.

Out-of-date neoliberal economists argue wrongly that tariffs violate free trade and reduce economic growth. In the Lionel Robbins Lecture in 2000, published by the MIT Press, Ralph E. Gomory and William J. Baumol proved that the case for free trade was false and that at best the notion that free trade was mutually beneficial was an occasional special case. Paul Samuelson found their proof convincing, but overall the economists have preferred their free trade indoctrination to the effort it takes to master a new understanding.The information from DOGE of the enormous fraud, abuse, and self-dealing that the US budget contains as a slush fund for insiders and for bribing foreign politicians and overthrowing foreign governments indicates that sufficient reductions are possible to establish a tariff at a reasonable rate. To rescue Americans from the slavery of an income tax would be one the greatest achievements in history. Let’s achieve it.

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“They are equal to zero. Unless, of course, something is grossly rigged, but this is also bad for him – it will be very noticeable..”

• Zelensky Has ‘No Chance’ Of Winning A Fair Election – Putin (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that Vladimir Zelensky has “absolutely no chance” of winning a fair election due to his low approval ratings and the internal political situation in Ukraine. Zelensky’s five-year presidential term expired in May 2024, but he has refused to hold new elections, citing martial law. The question of his popularity was raised last week by US President Donald Trump, who branded Zelensky a “dictator without elections” who is “down at a 4% approval rating.” Speaking on Monday, Putin noted that Zelensky’s popularity is significantly lower than that of potential rival General Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander of Ukraine’s armed forces. In an interview with journalist Pavel Zarubin, Putin suggested that if other political figures backed Zaluzhny, Zelensky’s chances of reelection would be “absolutely zero.”

“They are equal to zero. Unless, of course, something is grossly rigged, but this is also bad for him – it will be very noticeable,” Putin stated. “The fact is that the current head of the Kiev regime is becoming a toxic figure for the Ukrainian armed forces because he gives absurd orders dictated not by military considerations, but by political ones, and it is unclear what they are based on,” Putin said. He added that Zelensky’s leadership had resulted in “unjustifiably large or catastrophic losses,” making him “toxic for society as a whole.” “Therefore, [Zelensky] is a factor in the disintegration of the army, society, and the state. President Trump certainly understands this and is pushing him toward elections,” Putin said, adding that Trump apparently “wants to improve the political situation in Ukraine, consolidate society, and create conditions for the survival of the Ukrainian state.”

Putin has repeatedly said that he no longer considers Zelensky the legitimate head of state. Trump has also recently questioned the former comedian’s leadership, accusing him of mismanaging the conflict with Russia and misusing American financial aid. Zelensky accused Trump of falling for “Russian disinformation,” citing a January poll that allegedly indicated 57% of Ukrainians trusted him. However, data cited by The Economist last week suggested that Zelensky would lose to Zaluzhny by a wide margin if elections were held today, as many Ukrainians are “clearly frustrated with their war leader.” According to Putin, Zelensky – who has banned himself from talks with Moscow – is actively sabotaging any peace process, as it would require lifting martial law, which allows him to remain in power. Without martial law, the country would be compelled to hold elections, a scenario Putin believes Zelensky is determined to avoid.

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Just no American troops…

• Russia Ready To Work With US On ‘Rare Earths’ – Putin (RT)

Moscow is ready to work with Washington in developing rare earth mineral deposits, including in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. The ‘rare earths’ deal US President Donald Trump’s administration is pushing for with Ukraine “doesn’t concern” Moscow, Putin said in an interview with Russia 1 TV journalist Pavel Zarubin on Monday. The actual value of Ukraine’s rare earth mineral deposits remains to be seen, the Russian leader noted. Moscow will be concentrating on its own development of rare earth minerals, given their importance in multiple sectors of the economy, he said. “We would be ready to offer this to our American partners… if they showed interest in working together,” Putin said, stressing that he meant both private and government companies.

As one of the global leaders in terms of its rare earth mineral wealth, Russia is willing to work with international investors in developing its deposits, he said. “This includes the new territories,” Putin added. “Our new historical territories, which were returned to the Russian Federation, also hold significant reserves.” The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions joined the Russian Federation following referendums in 2022. While Forbes estimated the total value of mineral deposits of Ukraine at nearly $15 trillion in 2023, nearly half of the total mineral wealth lies in the Russia’s Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

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“Europe’s participation in the negotiation process on Ukraine is essential, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. However, European representatives cannot demand anything from Russia..”

• Putin Weighs In On Europe’s Participation In Ukraine Peace Talks (RT)

Europe’s participation in the negotiation process on Ukraine is essential, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. However, European representatives cannot demand anything from Russia, he added in an interview published on Monday. Putin commented on last week’s talks in Saudi Arabia, which were focused on restoring trust between Moscow and Washington, and excluded Ukrainian and EU leaders. Putin explained that “to resolve complex and even acute issues”, including the Ukrainian crisis, Russia and the US had to “take the first step”, which is “building trust”. “That is precisely what we were doing in Riyadh. That will also be the focus of our future contacts. Without this, it’s impossible to resolve any issue, especially one as complex and urgent as the Ukrainian crisis. But what do the Europeans have to do with this? This is a matter of bilateral Russia-US relations,” the president said.

Putin also claimed that the Ukrainian crisis itself “was not substantively discussed”, and Moscow and Washington agreed “that we would approach this matter in due time”. In this regard, Russia doesn’t oppose the participation of European representatives, Putin stressed. ”But I want to emphasize that we respect the position of our friends, particularly those within BRICS, who have established a group of peace advocates”, the President said, adding that he has just spoken with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, discussing the matter. “He informed me that this [BRICS] group will convene soon in New York to discuss the issue”, Putin said. He emphasized that Moscow is grateful to all its partners “who strive to achieve peace”. “Not only Europeans but other countries as well have the right to participate, and we respect that,” Putin concluded.

The US State Department praised the high-level discussions, calling it a significant step toward resolving the Ukraine conflict. This was the first such meeting since the conflict began in 2022. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was part of the delegation, noted that the meeting in Riyadh was initiated by the Russian and US presidents, who also agreed to begin preparations for a summit. Putin has previously said he would be glad to meet with his US counterpart Donald Trump, though he called it too early to name a specific date for a summit. He added that a simple “coffee hour” would not be enough to remedy relations between the two nations, and both sides need to thoroughly prepare. Moscow and Washington nevertheless “do not need any mediators” to sort out their differences, he added.

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“The Europeans continue on the path of a sanctions nosedive, on the path of conviction in the need to continue the war..”

• The Ukraine War Will Only End On Russia’s Terms, Lavrov Says (ZH)

It’s been three full years since the full-on Russian invasion of Ukraine kicked off on February 24, 2022. At this point, it’s become clear to all that Russian forces control the battlefield, amid steady ongoing gains in the Donbass region. Even as talks with the US progress, Moscow has made clear on Monday that it will only accept a peace settlement which “suits” its interests. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued the words while on an official visit to Turkey, and warned that European countries are trying to sabotage Trump efforts at peace. He emphasized that Moscow stands ready and willing to negotiate with Ukraine, Europe or “any representatives who in good faith would like to help achieve peace.” “But we will stop hostilities only when these negotiations produce a firm and sustainable result that suits the Russian Federation,” he said alongside his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan.

Among the proposals that might stymie progress on negotiations is the possibility of a European army of some 30,000 to patrol a buffer zone inside Ukraine. Moscow has consistently rejected that NATO troops would be present along the war-torn border. Trump himself has shown interest in such a peacekeeping force, especially as US troops would not be part of it. Put Putin will likely fear this is just recipe for another potential future showdown. In separate statements Monday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday charged Europe with obstructing good faith peace efforts. “The Europeans continue on the path of a sanctions nosedive, on the path of conviction in the need to continue the war,” Peskov said in reaction to the EU imposing a new round of sanctions on Moscow. “This conviction of the Europeans completely contrasts with the mindset of finding a settlement on Ukraine, which we are now doing with the Americans,” he added.

Reuters reviews of the new punitive action: The European Union’s latest sanctions against Moscow include a ban on third-country airlines flying to the 27-nation bloc if they carry out domestic flights in Russia, the European Commission said, opens new tab on Monday. The EU’s 16th sanctions package against Russia includes a ban on primary aluminum imports and the sale of gaming consoles, while also listing a cryptocurrency exchange and dozens of vessels of the so-called shadow fleet used to evade sanctions. At this point both the US and Russian sides plan to continue conducting the talks which began last week in Riyadh. Presumably neither Ukrainian nor European representatives will be at the table for the next rounds. Each side appeared satisfied with how the first engagement went, with the Kremlin hailing the ‘successful’ betterment of relations, which has involved more staff returning to each respective embassy.

Read more …

“..in the fourth quarter of 2024, the volume of LNG imported from Russia was 18% higher than in the first quarter of 2021..” “..the value of these imports surged by 274%..”

• EU Spending On Russian LNG Imports Quadruples (RT)

The cost of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchases for the EU has nearly quadrupled in three years due to soaring prices and increased import volumes, according to Eurostat. Data released on Monday in a report titled ‘EU trade with Russia’, shows that in the fourth quarter of 2024, the volume of LNG imported from Russia was 18% higher than in the first quarter of 2021. Over the same period, the value of these imports surged by 274% due to the energy crisis. European gas prices rose dramatically following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, alongside the EU’s commitment to phase out Russian energy dependence. While pipeline gas imports from Russia have mostly ceased due to sanctions and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, EU nations have continued purchasing record volumes of LNG from the country.

According to Eurostat, Russia’s share of the EU’s LNG imports grew from 11% in Q4 2022 to 22% in the last quarter of 2024. The US remained the bloc’s top supplier, accounting for 36% of its overall LNG imports. In June, Brussels targeted Russian LNG for the first time, banning re-loading operations, ship-to-ship transfers, and ship-to-shore transfers with the purpose of re-exporting to third countries via the EU. The sanctions came with a nine-month transition period. The EU’s 16th package of sanctions, introduced on Monday, further tightened restrictions on Russian energy. However, the bloc stopped short of imposing a full ban on the country’s LNG. According to data by analytics firm Kpler, imports of Russian LNG by EU member states are now at an all-time high.

The bloc has boosted imports of super-chilled fuel from the country following Kiev’s suspension of pipeline gas transit through Ukraine. Ukraine refused to extend a five-year transit contract with Russia’s energy giant Gazprom at the end of 2024, cutting off some EU countries from Russian pipeline gas. Currently, the only remaining Russian pipeline gas reaching the EU flows through the TurkStream pipeline, which runs via Türkiye and Greece. The Eurostat report highlights that EU pipeline gas imports from Russia have continued to decline, dropping by over 60% in volume in Q4 2024 compared to Q1 2021. However, due to soaring prices, the overall value of these imports decreased by only 9% over the three-year period, according to data.

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“The leaders have stressed that the Russian-Chinese foreign policy tandem serves as a factor of stabilization in world affairs..”

• Xi Backs Russia On Ukraine Peace Efforts – Kremlin (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has told his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, about Moscow’s latest contacts with Washington, the Kremlin reported on Monday. Beijing has expressed support for the renewed dialogue and new potential for resolving the Ukraine crisis, the statement said. Putin and Xi spoke on the phone to “share opinions on issues of immediate interest” for bilateral cooperation and the global agenda, describing the exchange as “warm and friendly.” “The leaders have stressed that the Russian-Chinese foreign policy tandem serves as a factor of stabilization in world affairs. Its strategic nature is not affected by external influence and does not pose a threat to any third party,” the statement said.

The Chinese description of the phone call said it was requested by Moscow, adding that during the talk, Xi expressed approval of the fact that “Russia and relevant parties have made positive efforts to resolve the crisis.” US President Donald Trump has reversed attempts to “isolate” Russia which were pursued by the previous administration. Now Moscow and Washington are working to restore normal diplomatic relations. Senior officials from both countries have said that this could lead to a resolution of the Ukraine conflict.

Members of the new US government had previously criticized President Joe Biden’s approach, arguing that it pushed Moscow into a position of a “junior partner” with Beijing, harming US interests. Conversely, Russia and China have described their relationship as a “no-limits partnership” based on mutual respect and shared views on how the world should be governed. Moscow and Beijing have criticized the US for allegedly fueling chaos around the world in an attempt to undermine competition.

Read more …

Wikileaks issued a large series of cables. Problem is, they’re all pre-2010.

• West Knew NATO Push For Ukraine Was Risky – Wikileaks (RT)

US and European officials were long aware of the high risk of conflict stemming from Kiev’s NATO ambition, Wikileaks revealed on Monday. Citing a trove of documents it obtained, the publisher detailed how Washington looked for ways to overcome some countries’ opposition to the idea despite warnings from Western envoys.Moscow repeatedly warned the diplomats that Ukraine’s accession to the US-led bloc could trigger a civil war or destabilize the whole region, forcing Russia to make a decision it “does not want to have to face,” according to a 24-minute-long video published by Wikileaks on X. The organization also cited a February 2008 cable from then US ambassador to Moscow William Burns, who warned that Russia saw NATO expansion as a security threat.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” he wrote.That sentiment was shared by some NATO allies in Europe at the time, another document suggests. A 2005 cable documenting a meeting between the then US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, Daniel Fried, and several high-ranking French officials said that Paris was concerned about Ukraine’s NATO trajectory sparking an armed conflict on the continent. “If there remained one potential cause for war in Europe, it was Ukraine,” the document said, citing French presidential diplomatic adviser Maurice Gourdault-Montagne. He cautioned that the US and its allies were intruding upon Russia’s “core zone of interest,” which could provoke a strong response.

Fried acknowledged at the time that Ukraine lacked a national consensus on NATO membership, but dismissed concerns over a violent internal split or Moscow’s reaction. Despite the repeated warnings, Washington still pushed for Ukraine’s entry, and intended to “pursue western integration and NATO enlargement deliberately, but quietly,” while “firmly” disagreeing with Russia, according to a September 2009 cable by the then US ambassador to Moscow, John Beyrle. Russia has consistently cited Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO and the prospect of the bloc’s military infrastructure appearing in the neighboring state as one of the main reasons for the conflict. Moscow has also repeatedly described it as a “proxy war” against Russia, being waged by the West via Ukraine.

Read more …

X thread by Vigilant Fox.

• UK In Secret Plot To Extract Personal Data From 2 Billion iPhone Users (VF)

They were this close to your “encrypted” data. This story begins when the UK govt hit Apple with a secret gag order, forcing them to either backdoor encrypted data for billions of users or face criminal charges if they refused to comply. Apple couldn’t even talk about it. The order demanded Apple create a vulnerability in its iCloud encryption, which would have given the UK government a back door to financial information, health records, and private conversations—not just of UK citizens but of two billion iPhone users worldwide. Remember, the UK government has already tried to threaten and extradite individuals outside the UK for violating British censorship laws—including US citizens over their online posts. So what happens when governments push to punish you not just for what you say publicly but for what you say privately?

Rather than handing over the data of 2 billion iPhone users to the UK government, Apple chose to pull its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the UK—removing the option for UK users to enable encryption. Existing UK users must now disable encryption, and new users won’t have the option at all. US citizens and people in other countries remain unaffected by the UK government’s dystopian push to surveil and censor speech—for now. The UK government was this close to surveilling you, too—but luckily, Sayer Ji, Elon Musk, and The Wall Street Journal exposed this privacy nightmare. In another disturbing development, Imran Ahmed of the CCDH—one of the leading architects of the UK’s war on speech—is being awarded for his Orwellian efforts with a $300,000 prize this May.

@sayerjigmi has put together a petition to oppose this absurd aggrandizement of someone who has worked tirelessly to annihilate personal freedoms and silence dissenting voices. You can sign that petition here: https://change.org/p/urge-elevate-prize-foundation-to-reexamine-award-for-imran-ahmed

Read more …

Entire platoons of Nina Jankowicz’s are spreading across the globe…

• Displaced Disinformation Experts Are Seeking New Opportunities (Turley)

President Trump’s election has brought about mass layoffs among federal employees and contractors, including some who have sued and others who have protested. But one group — that of America’s would-be censors — is taking its cause worldwide. During the Biden administration, a massive industry took root, seeping up billions in taxpayer funds to research, target and combat those accused of misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation.” Although the exact number is uncertain, many trained censors are now facing unemployment. These self-described “disinformation experts” have become the modern equivalent of ronin, the Japanese samurai who found themselves without a master and wandered the land looking for a new use of their skill set. They are finding precisely that calling in academia, not-for-profit groups and, most importantly, Europe.

A speech-regulation industry that was booming under Biden has gone bust under Trump. Over the last four years, massive amounts of money were poured into universities, non-governmental organizations and other groups in an unprecedented alliance of government, academia and corporations. The media lionized many in the industry as “saving democracy” by controlling, targeting and suppressing others’ political speech. Not only did federal agencies fund these efforts, but they also coordinated censorship of groups and individuals with opposing views, even objecting to jokes on the internet. Universities cashed in on this largesse as well. It was popular with most liberal administrators and lucrative for academics. The sudden shutoff of the federal spigot comes as a blow, but it does not mean the speech warriors will simply convert their censor-shields into plowshares.

Many will follow in the footsteps of Nina Jankowicz, briefly the head of a now-defunct disinformation governance board. After the outcry over the board, Jankowicz quickly found her skills were in demand in Europe. Free speech has been in free-fall in Europe for decades. Germany has long enforced a robust system of speech criminalization that began with Nazi symbolism but steadily expanded to include inciteful speech, insults and merely “disinformative” statements. The United Kingdom and France showed the same insatiable appetite for the inexorable expansion of censorship and prosecutions. The European Union has also been ground zero for the anti-free speech movement’s aggressive use of the Digital Services Act, which bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.”

When it passed over the objections of free speech advocates, European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager was perfectly ecstatic, declaring it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now, it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.” That is why Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent speech in Munich was so historic. For the free speech community, Vance went into the belly of the beast and denounced the anti-free-speech movement in the heart of Europe. The response to the Vance speech has been nothing short of panic in the anti-free-speech community. Many are assembling in conferences in Europe, including the upcoming World Forum in Berlin. Bill and Hillary Clinton will be in attendance. (I will also be speaking at the conference.)

It was Hillary Clinton who, after Elon Musk purchased Twitter with the pledge to dismantle the censorship system, called upon the EU to force him and others to censor her fellow U.S. citizens. She embraced the infamous Digital Services Act, which seeks to impose a global system of speech control. She has also suggested the arrest of those spreading disinformation. Immediately after the speech, familiar European and American voices denounced Vance and doubled down on the need for Europe to hold the line against dangerous free speech. For the free speech community, there could not be a better place for this debate to unfold. Germany has demonstrated the false claims of the anti-free-speech community over the years. Indeed, you might call their arguments “disinformation.” Vance and others who have challenged the European censorship systems have been attacked as Nazi enablers or sympathizers. Many of those who have fostered this attack are part of the regulator ronin. Others simply repeated the narrative without thought or support.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Democrat
https://twitter.com/i/status/1893692576659566765

 

 

Gender-affirming

 

 

Ride
https://twitter.com/i/status/1894016982191648775

 

 

Dogs and horses
https://twitter.com/i/status/1893565572555645271

 

 

Tommy

 

 

Ice
https://twitter.com/i/status/1893702373542916265

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 7 2025

Feb 072025
 
 February 7, 2025  Posted by at 11:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  54 Responses »


René Magritte The conquerer 1926

 

• USAID Media Payments Could Be ‘Biggest Scandal In History’ – Trump (RT)
• Politico Pleads Innocent (ZH)
• WikiLeaks: USAID Has Been Funding Over 6,000 Journalists Worldwide (ZH)
• ‘Leaked’ Plan: Trump To ‘Force’ Zelensky To Agree On Ceasefire By Easter (ZH)
• Trump Envoy Responds To Zelensky’s Nuclear Weapons Demand (RT)
• White House Softens Aspects Of Gaza ‘Takeover’ – No Boots On The Ground (ZH)
• What is Trump Really Thinking About Gaza? (Larry Johnson)
• The Greatest Showman’s “Inside Out” Political Solution (Alastair Crooke)
• How the Democrats Became the Party of Puppets (Pinsker)
• Investor Demand For X Debt Upsized, Musk Sees Revenue Improving Rapidly (ZH)
• Rubio To Boycott G20 Meeting in South Africa (RT)
• FBI Official Accused of Defying White House Reform Efforts (Turley)
• EU Plays Trump Card To Advance Its Globalist Agenda (Villamor)
• What Is Really Destroying Europe? The EU (Godefridi)
• What to Know About US Withdrawal From the WHO (ET)
• ‘Gov’t Is the People’s Business’: A Tribute to Ronald Reagan (Salgado)

 

 

 

 

Evo
https://twitter.com/i/status/1887475768508252227

Mike Benz exposes USAID for 11 straight minutes

Sen. Kennedy

3rd temple

Alwaleed

 

 

 

 

Sounds like a bombastic headline. But is it? Do (re)check the Nicole Shanahan clip below that I opened with yesterday. She explains that DOGE has a super search engine for files (data mining research), that finds in seconds/minutes what would otherwise take days or weeks. The USAID “library” is vast and complex but “He did that over the weekend”. USAID is just the start.

• USAID Media Payments Could Be ‘Biggest Scandal In History’ – Trump (RT)

Billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID and used to pay for positive media coverage of Democrats, US President Donald Trump has said. The claim comes in conjunction with a White House announcement that it will stop “subsidizing” Politico. In January, the Trump administration initiated significant changes to the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump ordered a near-total freeze on foreign aid, aiming to align assistance with his “America First” policy. Trump took to Truth Social on Thursday to warn that “the biggest scandal in history” was brewing, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that American taxpayer money had been used to subsidize government subscriptions to Politico and other media outlets. Leavitt was referring to Politico Pro, a premium legislative and regulatory tracking service used by multiple government agencies.

Politico Pro subscriptions are reported to cost up to $10,000 annually. ”Looks like billions of dollars have been stollen [sic] at USAID, and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the democrats. the left wing ‘rag,’ known as ‘Politico,’ seems to have received $8,000,000,” Trump wrote. He questioned whether The New York Times and other outlets were also receiving “payoffs.” Politico said it had “never been the beneficiary of government programs or subsidies” and that the “overwhelming majority” of subscriptions come from the private sector.

Some conservative commentators online claimed that Politico, The New York Times and the Associated Press were receiving “government funding” or “grants,” from USAID and other agencies. Kyle Becker, a former Fox News producer, dug into public records on USAspending.gov and discovered that the government paid Politico $8.2 million in the last 12 months. However, only about $24,000 of this total came from USAID, with the largest contributor being the Department of Health and Human Services. Elon Musk, who oversees the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), called the payments “a huge waste of taxpayer money.” “Many media outlets are going to experience a mysterious drop in revenue,” he warned on X on Wednesday.

The outlets in question denied receiving government subsidies, stating that agencies purchased subscriptions like any client, and insisted on their editorial independence. CNN went as far as to decry the accusations as “a false right-wing conspiracy theory,” and accused Leavitt of elevating a “bogus claim.” The freeze on USAID funding has led to the suspension of numerous senior officials, layoffs of contractors, and the halting of various international aid programs. Legal experts have questioned the legality of dismantling USAID without congressional approval. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed as the acting administrator of USAID, with plans to merge it into the State Department. Elon Musk criticized the agency as a “criminal organization” that should “die.”

Read more …

What exactly is the role of German publisher Axel Springer?

• Politico Pleads Innocent (ZH)

During Wednesday’s White House presser, spox Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Politico has been getting ‘more than $8 million taxpayer dollars,’ which has ‘gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions.’

* * *
On Tuesday, staffers at Politico were notified that a ‘technical error’ had prevented paychecks from going out. Many joked that this had something to do with the Trump administration putting a freeze on USAID funding. And while there’s no evidence the two are linked, the suggestion prompted internet sleuths to look into Politico’s sources of funding. What they found was absolutely shocking. According to government spending tracker website USASPENDING.gov, Politico – which laundered the Hunter Biden ’51 intel officials’ propaganda during the 2020 election – received up to $27 million (and by some counts $32 million) from various US agencies during the Biden years. In one instance, roughly $500,000 was spent on 37 Politico ‘pro’ subscriptions. Of note, Politico was sold to German media giant Axel Springer (which also owns Business Insider) for $1 billion in 2021, meaning US taxpayer dollars have been flowing to the German media giant to prop up their US propaganda rags.

Read more …

That’s a large chunk of the media.

• WikiLeaks: USAID Has Been Funding Over 6,000 Journalists Worldwide (ZH)

Yesterday’s report that the US government has been funding outlets such as Politico, the Associated Press, the BBC, and others raised more questions than it answered – though the obvious implication is that the US government has effectively been propping up regime-friendly media, which then peddles regime-friendly coverage – and spent years attacking independent outlets such as ZeroHedge, The Federalist, and many unlucky ones who have since been starved out of business. And while funding for Politico and others has come from all over the federal government – WikiLeaks, citing a RSF report, highlighted that USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 “media” NGOs, which includes 90% of the reportage out of Ukraine.

According to RSF, the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid – roughly $268 million earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information,” has ‘thrown journalism around the world into chaos.’ “Almost immediately after the freeze went into effect, journalistic organizations around the world that receive American aid funding started reaching out to RSF expressing confusion, chaos, and uncertainty. The affected organizations include large international NGOs that support independent media like the International Fund for Public Interest Media and smaller, individual media outlets serving audiences living under repressive conditions in countries like Iran and Russia.

…
USAID programs support independent media in more than 30 countries, but it is difficult to assess the full extent of the harm done to the global media. Many organizations are hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks. According to a USAID fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023, the agency funded training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media. The 2025 foreign aid budget included $268,376,000 allocated by Congress to support “independent media and the free flow of information.”

Note the recurring use of the term ‘independent media.’ Of course, the RSF report, and another from the Columbia Journalism Review are sounding the alarm over the ‘silencing of independent media’ around the world. The critical context they omit, however, is that USAID – despite the best of intentions when it was formed, has been corrupted into a deep-state slush-fund.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1886764407700472231

And so, no matter how ‘independent’ these USAID-funded media outlets are around the world, they’re all eating fruit from the same poisonous tree.

Read more …

“The EU will reportedly be asked to assist Ukraine in its reconstruction efforts, which may cost as much as $486 billion over the next decade..”

• ‘Leaked’ Plan: Trump To ‘Force’ Zelensky To Agree On Ceasefire By Easter (ZH)

As of the start of this week, the Kremlin said ‘no progress’ had been made in arranging peace talks on Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Rumors and speculation abound, given that US diplomats under Trump are without doubt working behind-the-scenes to arrange something, with the possibility that talks could be hosted in a ‘neutral’ location like Saudi Arabia or the UAE. A Thursday Daily Mail report has just added immense fuel to the fire of speculation, presenting the allegedly leaked Trump ceasefire plan which he intends to present for Russia’s consideration. The report says Trump will try to ‘force’ Ukraine’s President Zelensky to agree to a ceasefire by Easter, which is on April 20 this year.

The Trump administration is seeking to end the war within 100 days. “The unconfirmed plans, reported by Ukrainian outlet Strana, have been doing the rounds in ‘political and diplomatic circles’ in Ukraine, and will include a ceasefire by April 20 that would freeze Russia’s steady advance, a ban on Ukraine from joining NATO, and a demand for Kyiv to accept Russian sovereignty on annexed land.” While still very much unconfirmed, the headline is having an immediate impact on oil prices. Zelensky’s office has vehemently denied the legitimacy of reports of the peace plans being reported and floated. On top of these alleged key aspects of a ban on NATO admission, freezing the front lines, and agreeing to Russian sovereignty over the four annexed territories in the east, the leaked report says the following is also included in the proposal:

• On top of this, Ukrainian troops will be made to leave Russia’s Kursk region, where it launched a counteroffensive in August, while a contingent of European soldiers, which could include British troops, would be asked to police a demilitarised zone. American troops will not be involved in this contingent.
• The EU will reportedly be asked to assist Ukraine in its reconstruction efforts, which may cost as much as $486 billion (£392 billion) over the next decade according to the German Marshall Fund thinktank.
• The plans will reportedly begin with a phone call between Zelensky and Vladimir Putin in early February, a meeting between the two warring leaders in late February to early March and an official ceasefire declaration of a ceasefire by April 20.
• A declaration on the agreed parameters for ending the war would then be released by May 9, after which Kyiv would be asked not to extend martial law or mobilize troops.

This essentially gives Moscow most everything it wants – particularly the ban on NATO admission – and so if true the plan is likely to be entertained positively by Putin. Zelensky has been complaining that talks about Ukraine between the US and Russia must never happen without Kiev’s representation and input, but Zelensky it seems is being left behind. He’ll likely reject the above ‘leaked’ plan, but for Moscow and Washington that probably won’t matter too much. [..]

* * *
Ceasefire by Easter:
• NATO Membership: Ukraine would be barred from joining NATO under the plan.
• Territorial Concessions: Kyiv would recognize Russian sovereignty over annexed lands and withdraw troops from Kursk.
• Demilitarized Zone: European, possibly British, troops would police it; no U.S. involvement.
• Reconstruction: EU assistance sought for Ukraine, estimated at $486 billion over a decade.

Timeline:
1) Early February: Zelensky-Putin phone call.
2) Late February to early March: Leaders’ meeting.
3) April 20: Ceasefire declaration.
4) By May 9: Agreement terms released, no further martial law or mobilization.
5) Additional Support: Continued U.S. military aid for Ukraine, with a pathway to EU membership by 2030.

Read more …

“Let’s be honest about it, we both know that’s not going to happen..”

• Trump Envoy Responds To Zelensky’s Nuclear Weapons Demand (RT)

US President Donald Trump’s envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, has brushed aside Kiev’s demand for nuclear weaponry, stating that it is “not going to happen.” Kellogg made the remarks on Thursday while speaking to Fox News Digital. He was asked about the latest call by Vladimir Zelensky for “nuclear weapons” and “missile systems” from Kiev’s Western backers. “The chance of them getting their nuclear weapons back is somewhere between slim and none. Let’s be honest about it, we both know that’s not going to happen,” Kellogg said.The idea of arming Ukraine with nukes goes against “common sense” and is not something the Trump administration would consider, Kellogg stated. “Remember, the president said we’re a government of common sense. When somebody says something like that, look at the outcome or the potential. That’s using your common sense,” he explained.

Zelensky, speaking to British journalist Piers Morgan earlier this week, said that Ukraine must either be fast-tracked into the US-led NATO bloc or given more weaponry to “stop Russia.” “Give us back nuclear weapons, give us missile systems. Partners, help us finance a one-million army, deploy your troops to the areas of our country where we want to stabilize the situation,” he stated. While the Ukrainian leader has raised the issue of nuclear weaponry before, including shortly ahead of the escalation of the conflict in February 2022, he has done so increasingly in recent months. Zelensky has expressed regret that his country surrendered its portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal after the collapse of the USSR in exchange for security guarantees in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In 1991, Ukraine possessed some 1,700 warheads, which however, remained under Moscow’s operational control.

Russia insists that Ukraine never possessed any nuclear weapons of its own, as the assets belonged to Moscow as the sole legal successor of the Soviet Union. The 1994 memorandum also envisioned Ukraine’s neutral status, which has been undermined by NATO’s eastward expansion and Kiev’s aspirations to join the US-led bloc, Russian officials maintain. In November, Russian President Vladimir Putin explicitly stated that the any procurement of nuclear weaponry by Kiev was non-starter and would compel Moscow to use all available means to destroy it. “What do you think – on the level of common sense – if the country with which we are essentially now engaged in military operations becomes a nuclear power, what should we do? In this case, use all – I want to emphasize this – precisely all the means of destruction at Russia’s disposal,” the president said.

Read more …

For Trump and Gaza, do watch this lady first:

• White House Softens Aspects Of Gaza ‘Takeover’ – No Boots On The Ground (ZH)

Israel announced Thursday it has begun preparations for the departure of large numbers of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip following President Trump earlier this week publicly backing a controversial mass resettlement plan in neighboring Arab countries. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump’s plan for Gaza as “remarkable” in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity published Thursday. “The actual idea of allowing Gazans who want to leave to leave. I mean, what’s wrong with that? They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back. But you have to rebuild Gaza,” Netanyahu said.In the face of fierce condemnation and pushback from an assortment of countries like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Ireland, as well as the United Nations – Trump has still doubled down in a Thursday Truth Social post.

He explained that “the Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel” after the end of hostilities. He reiterated that Palestinians could be relocated to “far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” and would “actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free.” The president said the that the US would oversee development teams from across the world, which will “slowly and carefully” begin the construction of what would become “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.” That’s when he emphasized the following: “No soldiers by the US would be needed! Stability for the region would reign,” Trump wrote. Given that it’s an active war zone, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad are still openly displaying their weapons in battalion-sized displays and deployments, it seems doubtful any of this could happen without serious military intervention.

Trump said all of this after on Tuesday he declared he wants to the US to “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip. Some aspects have been softened or walked back by the White House, however. When pressed for clarification on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “They need to be temporarily relocated out of Gaza for the rebuilding.” Thus the plan has changed to a non-permanent resettlement, apparently, though it’s hard to see the logistics and politics of all of this actually playing out. Leavitt continued, “It’s been made very clear to the president that the United States needs to be involved in this rebuilding effort to ensure stability in the region for all people.” “That does not mean boots on the ground in Gaza. That does not mean American taxpayers will be funding this effort,” she added.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also sought to distance the administration from criticisms that this looks like a potential major foreign military intervention. He said the idea was of “temporary” relocation, and said the proposal “was not meant as hostile. It was meant as, I think, a very generous move — the offer to rebuild and to be in charge of the rebuilding.” And Trump’s envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, echoed something similar. He said the US doesn’t want to put any US troops on the ground, and that no US dollars should be spent. He acknowledged that Trump had been “gestating” on the idea for a while.

Read more …

“..while many interpreted his remarks as catering to the Zionists, the language he used was just the opposite. He did not say that Gaza was Israel’s.”

• What is Trump Really Thinking About Gaza? (Larry Johnson)

I am not making excuses for Donald Trump. I fully understand why many have interpreted his scripted remarks yesterday during the joint-press conference with Bibi Netanyahu about relocating the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the US taking control of Gaza as insane or heartless or both. I want you to entertain another possibility — maybe Trump is really trying to secure a deal that does not cater to the Zionist vision of occupying all territory from the river to the sea.

We are 16 days into the second Trump administration and the flurry of activity coming out of the Oval office is akin to a Category Five hurricane. It is clear that Trump did not spend the last four years in political exile moping and despairing of the lawfare tsunami unleashed by his political opponents. He tacitly conceded that he was totally unprepared to confront the monster of the Deep State when he entered office in January 2017. He did not make that mistake this time. The day after securing his election victory in November he began executing a plan for governing that has left his political opponents and the Washington establishment reeling. This is akin to a military blitzkrieg. He is attacking across a broad front.

With this in mind, let me suggest another way of looking at what he said about taking control of Gaza during the Tuesday press conference with Netanyahu. First, he was reading from a script. This means it was drafted and vetted in advance, most likely with Michael Waltz taking the lead. Second, while many interpreted his remarks as catering to the Zionists, the language he used was just the opposite. He did not say that Gaza was Israel’s. He said that the US should take control of Gaza and oversee the rebuilding. However, he did not propose a specific plan for doing so and made it clear that someone other than the US would foot the bill for the rebuilding. Would Trump entertain a Saudi offer to rebuild Gaza with its funds? I think so, but it would likely be part of a broader agreement to resurrect the Abraham accords.

It is true that Netanyahu has publicly embraced Trump’s plan, but in announcing this proposal, Trump has made it almost impossible for Netanyahu to abandon the ceasefire agreement, at least the second phase, which he reportedly promised finance minister Smotrich he would do. If the Zionists decide to launch a fresh offensive on the Palestinians in Gaza, this would be a direct slap in the face of Trump. Scott Ritter reminded me during the roundtable with Danny Haiphong of Trump’s crazed, insulting remarks about Kim Jong-Un that preceded his face-to-face negotiations with Kim. It is a classic Trump negotiating tactic — bombast and insult up front followed by diplomacy and deal making. Is this Trump’s plan with respect to re-framing the Palestinian issue? I think it is a possibility. I also could be wrong (and I’m sure many of you will let me know).

Trump’s heated rhetoric regarding Iran also appears to be another example of his bad-cop-good-cop routine. Steve Witkoff reportedly is negotiating with the Iranians on orders from Trump. I think it is highly likely that Iran, despite press reports to the contrary, is not pursuing a nuclear weapon, primarily because of the security treaty they signed with Russia on January 17. If Witkoff succeeds in crafting an agreement with Iran then Trump will be able to claim that his tough guy approach created the conditions that made a deal possible. Okay. You are now free to tell me why I am full of crap.

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“Netanyahu at this juncture is utterly dependent on Trump. The PM’s wiles will not be enough to get him off the hooks: Trump has him where he wants him.”

• The Greatest Showman’s “Inside Out” Political Solution (Alastair Crooke)

Dissing Putin as a loser in Ukraine perhaps was more addressed to the U.S. Senate and its ongoing confirmation hearings. Trump made these comments days before Tulsi Gabbard faces Senate hearings. Gabbard already is criticised by U.S. ‘hawks’ for allegedly holding ‘pro-Putin’ sentiments, as well as being subjected to a media slur campaign by the deep state. Was Trump’s apparent disrespect toward Putin and Russia (which caused anger in Russia) said primarily for the ears of U.S. Senators? (The Senate is home to some of the most ardent ‘never-Trumpers’). And were Trump’s egregious comments about ‘cleansing’ Gaza’s Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan (co-ordinated with Netanyahu, according to an Israeli Minister) intended primarily for the ears of the Israeli Right? According to that Minister, the issue of encouraging voluntary Palestinian migration is now back on the agenda, just as the Right-wing parties have long wanted – and many in Netanyahu’s Likud had hoped. Music to their ears.

Was it then a Trumpian pre-emptive move, designed to save Netanyahu’s government from imminent collapse over the ceasefire’s second-stage, and the threat of a walk-out by his Right Wing contingent? Was Trump’s target audience in this case then Ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich? Trump pointedly confuses us – by never making it clear to which audience he is addressing his ruminations at any one time. Is there nonetheless some substance sedimented within Trump’s comment that any Palestinian state must be resolved ‘in some other way’ than the Two-State formula? Maybe. We should not discount Trump’s strong leanings towards Israel. Netanyahu faces harsh criticism for mis-handling both the Gaza and Lebanese ceasefires. He has been guilty of promising one thing to one party and the opposite to the other (an old vice):

He has promised the Right a return to war in Gaza, yet committed to the unequivocal end to war in the actual ceasefire agreement. In Lebanon, Israel was committed to withdrawal by 26 January on the one hand, yet its military is still there, provoking a human wave of Lebanese returning to the south, hoping to reclaim their homes. Consequently, Netanyahu at this juncture is utterly dependent on Trump. The PM’s wiles will not be enough to get him off the hooks: Trump has him where he wants him. Trump will get ceasefires, and will tell Netanyahu,no attack on Iran (at least until Trump has explored the possibility of a deal with Tehran). With Putin and with Russia, the opposite is the case. Trump there has no leverage (the favourite word in Washington). He has no leverage for four reasons:

Firstly, since Russia steadfastly refuses the idea of any compromise that “boils down to freezing the conflict along the line of engagement, that will give time to the U.S. and NATO to rearm the remnants of the Ukrainian army – and then start a new round of hostilities”. Secondly, because Moscow’s conditions for ending the war will prove to be unacceptable to Washington, as they would not be susceptible to being presented as an American ‘win’. Thirdly, because Russia holds the clear military advantage: Ukraine is about to lose this war. Major Ukrainian strongholds are now being taken by Russian forces without resistance. This ultimately will lead to a cascade effect. Ukraine may cease to exist if serious negotiations do not take place before summer, the head of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov recently warned. But fourthly, because history is not reflected at all in the word leverage. When peoples who occupy the same geography have different and often irreconcilable versions of history, the western transactional ‘split the power spectrum’ simply doesn’t work. The opposed sides will not be moved – unless some solution recognises and takes account of their history.

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“..because they don’t know what the heck else to do, the Dems are kneejerk opposing EVERYTHING..”

“.. There’s more “breaking news” in one day of Trump than six months of Biden. Team MAGA is churning through news cycles faster than a jackrabbit on Red Bull.”

• How the Democrats Became the Party of Puppets (Pinsker)

“There’s nothing new under the sun” is found in Ecclesiastes 1:9. But if the statement is correct, then the idea itself must be older than Ecclesiastes; otherwise, that would be something new under the sun. (Right? Or is my Vulcan-like grasp of logic experiencing carpal tunnel? Yeah, I think I’m right.) For the statement “There’s nothing new under the sun” to be truthful, by definition, someone else must’ve already made a similar observation. Which makes sense: Life gets tedious after a while. We all get into ruts of the same-old, same-old. Life is cyclical. If you live long enough, it’s pretty easy to identify all the different cycles. So maybe there really is nothing new under the sun. Heck, as one PJ Media reader pointed out, even my (seemingly original) idea to relocate the Palestinians to Greenland was a blatant rip-off of “The Golden Girls”: (My apologies to Ms. Rose Nylund and/or all the good people of Saint Olaf.)

Perhaps it’s the monotony of life that gives older folks a nagging, unavoidable sense of “been there, done that.” Like Jerry Seinfeld noted, once we realized we could make our own people, we lost interest in the rest of you: But political parties don’t have the luxury of avoiding the real world. Nor do they ever get to suspend operations for a few months and try a soft reboot. They’re always on, always engaged, always connected to current events. It’s less like a play — with actors, actresses, and a well-written script — and more like a never-ending conga line. New faces appear when old faces exit, but the choreography itself never changes. Too much institutional momentum. They’re not the only ones, of course. The GOP has its conga line as well; all political parties do. If politics can be analogized to a dance, then D.C. is a crowded, competitive, cutthroat dancehall.

But the difference today is, the Democrats want us to lead. This hasn’t happened since the early days of the George W. Bush administration, nearly 25 years ago. It’s a generational opportunity for the Republican Party. Usually, even when the Democrats are voted out of power, they shamelessly push their own agenda, manipulating the mainstream media to reframe every news cycle in pro-Democratic terms. They never interpret an electoral defeat as a repudiation of their ideas; instead, the culprit must be misinformation, or Russian interference, or the racist, sexist, homophobic voters. And so, they double down and keep on pushing forward. Not anymore. Not since Donald Trump walloped them in 2024, capturing an electoral landslide. They’re simply too shell-shocked.

It won’t last forever but right now, they’ve given up on their agenda. All they can do is follow Donald Trump’s lead: whatever he supports, they oppose. Which means, Donald Trump has a generational opportunity to rebrand the Democratic Party. Part of their rebranding is already underway. Because Trump is such a kinetic whirlwind of manic activity, he’s firing ideas and initiatives at a million miles a minute. (Those poor Democrats are drinking out of a firehose!) And because they don’t know what the heck else to do, the Dems are kneejerk opposing EVERYTHING. This might’ve worked if Trump moved as slowly as Biden, but Trump is still the Great Disruptor. There’s more “breaking news” in one day of Trump than six months of Biden. Team MAGA is churning through news cycles faster than a jackrabbit on Red Bull.

For the audience at home, the volume and content far exceed their bandwidth. They have lives of their own and can’t keep track of everything. So, from their perspective, Trump is constantly trying SOMETHING… and the Democrats are opposing EVERYTHING. And there’s a whole lot of “everything.” Which is why the Democrats are being rebranded as the party of pearl-clutching. WAH! They’re the party of crybabies.

Whatever Trump says or does, Democrats cry and scream and soil themselves. Every molehill is a mountain; every Republican is “literally Hitler” and “a threat to democracy.” There’s more Democratic “hysteria” than anything Def Leppard did in the 80s. Knowing this, Trump could do one helluva troll move: He can turn the Democratic Party into his puppets. By structuring his agenda specifically and methodically, he can pull their strings and walk them off the cliff. Trump can get ‘em to do whatever he wants — simply by doing the opposite. They can’t help themselves. They’re just too proud and stubborn to change. Once again, the Bible was eerily prescient: “Pride goeth before the fall” (Proverbs 16:18). So maybe there really isn’t anything new under the sun.

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He won.

• Investor Demand For X Debt Upsized, Musk Sees Revenue Improving Rapidly (ZH)

Investors want a slice of X as Elon Musk’s social media platform becomes the epicenter of news distribution, while corporate leftist media outlets and their government-funded censorship cartel face a fiery demise (see: Politico). This follows a multi-year advertiser boycott led by mega-corporations and relentless lawfare by an army of leftist nonprofits in their attempt to destroy the platform. However, those efforts have failed, and Musk has gone on the offensive, positioning X for a year of success. In the latest report from The Wall Street Journal, top banks finished up a sale of debt backed by X. Sources familiar with the debt deal stated that the banks initially planned to sell around $3 billion in debt at 95 cents on the dollar. However, due to surging demand from large high-yield fund managers, the deal was upsized to $5.5 billion.

Buyers of the debt included Pimco and Citadel, who agreed to pay 97 cents on the dollar. The floating-rate debt carries an interest rate of 11%, with borrowing costs several percentage points higher than some of the riskiest loans on Wall Street. The upsized sale of X debt marks the end of the multi-year doom loop for Musk’s social media company. Since purchasing the platform in 2022, Musk has faced relentless advertiser boycotts and endless lawfare from shadowy leftist billionaire-funded nonprofit groups. However, X’s ability to circumvent the Biden-Harris regime’s censorship cartel and play a key role in the Trump-Vance presidential victory has placed Musk in Washington as a special government employee leading DOGE efforts. This, in return, has strengthened Wall Street’s confidence in X.

Additionally, Trump’s executive order on “restoring free speech and ending federal censorship” is expected to provide additional tailwinds for X and other alternative media platforms. This is yet another key driver of soaring optimism around X. Last Friday, X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Morgan Stanley bankers presented prospective investors with metrics showing the social media platform’s financial health was set to rebound in 2025.

“Revenue should improve rapidly this year, as the advertising boycott winds down,” Musk told one X user. WSJ noted: “Financial documents reviewed by investors showed that the artificial-intelligence company transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to the social-media company, the people said. That money has helped X pay its bills and stay current on its obligations, the people said. Growing advertising revenue at X should mean fewer transfers in the coming months and years, the people said.” The financial documents said X now holds a 10% stake in xAI, valued at around $5 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The AI company last year was valued at $50 billion. Musk had previously posted that X investors would own 25% of xAI.

X also reported to the investors 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion. Investors said that was a better picture than they had expected and that X’s finances hit an inflection point a few months before the November election. In 2021, Twitter reported adjusted Ebitda of about $682 million and about $5 billion in revenue. That was the last full year before Musk took the company private.-WSJ . X’s debt sale is a big relief for banks…

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“South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote solidarity, equality, & sustainability. In other words: DEI and climate change..”

• Rubio To Boycott G20 Meeting in South Africa (RT)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he will not attend a meeting of the G20 group in South Africa later this month because Pretoria is “doing very bad things.” The decision by the top American diplomat on Wednesday comes amid US President Donald Trump’s feud with the African country’s government over a new land ownership reform. South Africa will host the G20 foreign ministers’ summit in Johannesburg on February 20-21. Last December, Pretoria officially assumed the rotating presidency of the intergovernmental forum, which it will hand over to the US in November 2025. In a speech during the launch of Pretoria’s chairmanship in Cape Town, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the group of 20 major economies has enough “shock absorbers” in place against an ‘America First’ policy by the Trump administration.

Ramaphosa promised to advance Africa and the Global South’s development priorities, including addressing the impacts of climate change. However, Trump has repeatedly opposed international cooperation on climate issues. Ramaphosa also announced that he has invited Trump to South Africa for a state visit and to the G20 summit in late 2025, where the US leader will take on the chairmanship role. “I will not attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg. South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote solidarity, equality, & sustainability. In other words: DEI and climate change,” Rubio wrote on X. “My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism,” he added.

In response, South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said on Thursday that Pretoria’s “G20 Presidency, is not confined to just climate change but also equitable treatment for nations of the Global South, ensuring equal global system for all.” President Trump said on Sunday that he is halting funding to South Africa, accusing the country’s government of “confiscating” land and “treating certain classes of people very badly.” The US leader declared that Washington “won’t stand” for Pretoria’s “massive human rights violation.” The threat followed the passage of the Expropriation Act by Pretoria aimed at addressing racial disparities in land ownership, a long-standing issue in Africa’s most advanced economy since Apartheid ended in 1994.

The government has set a target of transferring 30% of farmland from white farmers, who still own the majority of it, to their black counterparts by 2030. President Ramaphosa has defended the reform, saying his government “has not confiscated any land.” Foreign Minister Lamola also denied the US allegations on Thursday, stating that “there is no arbitrary dispossession of land” or private property under the new legislation. “This law is similar to the eminent domain laws,” he said, referring to US legislation that authorizes the federal government to acquire property for public use. On Monday, Ramaphosa’s office said he spoke with Trump’s close ally, South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, to clarify “issues of misinformation and distortions” after he also accused Pretoria of having “openly racist ownership laws.”

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“.. the Administration is moving far more aggressively in this second term. If Trump wanted to defibrillate the federal system and shock the status quo, he is succeeding in doing so.”

• FBI Official Accused of Defying White House Reform Efforts (Turley)

Last week, some of us discussed concerns over the demand of the Trump Administration for the names of all FBI agents involved in January 6th cases. While noting that we did not have all of the details, I wrote that this would be a critical test for the Administration between reform and revenge. Line FBI agents should not face punishment for carrying out the orders of their superiors or courts. Now, the Trump Administration has offered additional information, alleging an alarming defiance by a high-ranking official in sharing information. If true, the controversy involving Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll is reminiscent of the entirely improper conduct of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove released a statement stating that FBI agents were never being rounded up or targeted for their work on the cases. A reported force of over 5,000 agents was assigned to these cases.

According to Bove, Driscoll refused to turn over the “core team” involved in Washington, D.C., in the cases as part of its review of the weaponization of the legal system under the Biden Administration. Bove’s memo stated that:“That insubordination necessitated, among other things, the directive in my January 31, 2025 memo to identify all agents assigned to investigations relating to January 6, 2021. In light of acting leadership’s refusal to comply with the narrower request, the written directive was intended to obtain a complete data set that the Justice Department can reliably pare down to the core team that will be the focus of the weaponization review pursuant to the Executive Order.”Bove dismissed allegations of a purging of the ranks:

“Let me be clear: No FBI employee who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner concerning January 6 investigations is at risk of termination or other penalties. The only individuals who should be concerned about the process initiated by my January 31, 2025 memo are those who acted with corrupt or partisan intent, who blatantly defied orders from Department leadership, or who exercised discretion in weaponizing the FBI.” Again, we have not heard Driscoll’s side. Yet, I cannot understand the basis for an FBI official to refuse to share such information with his superiors in the Administration. One can raise concerns over the motivations or even the legality of measures taken against line agents. One can also object that there is no reason to collect the broader information after being allegedly denied the narrower request. However, the Administration has every right to such information, particularly as part of its long-promised review of the agency during the campaign.

The alleged defiance brought back memories from the start of the first Trump term. As previously discussed, Yates was lionized for her stance in the media. She was then selected as one of the featured speakers at the Democratic National Convention in 2020 and presented as the personification of a new Justice Department’s commitment to the rule of law. Yates declared: “I was fired for refusing to defend President Trump’s shameful and unlawful Muslim travel ban.” The problem is, she wasn’t. She was fired for telling an entire department not to defend a travel ban that ultimately was upheld as lawful. I was critical of the initial memorandum supporting the travel ban, particularly its failure to exempt lawful residents. However, I also said Trump’s underlying authority would likely be found constitutional. Despite revisions tweaking its scope and affected countries, opponents insisted it remained unlawful and discriminatory.

They continued to litigate on those same grounds all the way to the Supreme Court, where they lost two years ago. The Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Hawaii that the president had the authority to suspend entry of noncitizens into the country based on nationality and had a “sufficient national security justification” for his order. It also held that, despite most of the banned countries being Muslim-majority, the ban “does not support an inference of religious hostility.” That is why Yates deserved to be fired. Yates issued her order shortly after learning of the travel ban and despite being told by Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel it was a lawful order. She never actually said it was unlawful, only that she was not sure and was not convinced it was “wise or just.”

Rather than working to address clear errors in the original ban, she issued her categorical order as she prepared to leave the department in a matter of days. Yates maintained afterward that she believed the ban might still be discriminatory, even with revisions. The courts rejected those claims. Yates was due to retire from Justice within days when she engineered her own firing. It made her an instant heroine and allowed her to denounce Trump at the convention for “trampl[ing] the rule of law, trying to weaponize our Justice Department.” But that’s precisely what she did when she ordered an entire department not to assist the recently elected president. It is not clear what transpired between Bove and Driscoll, but I cannot imagine a basis for refusing to share personnel information and records with the Trump Administration.

The initial coverage of the request clearly omitted this context and led to the usual media stampede declaring a purging of the ranks by political commissars. The irony is that, once again, the true story may be even more interesting in an alleged defiance of the Trump Administration within the FBI. We have seen recently the actual locking out of Trump officials from agencies like US AID, leading to a security official being placed on leave. As someone who covered the first Administration, this is a very different profile and approach. Trump learned in his first term how officials could stymie and delay reforms. That process has begun anew, including a plethora of lawsuits designed to slowdown such efforts. However, the Administration is moving far more aggressively in this second term. If Trump wanted to defibrillate the federal system and shock the status quo, he is succeeding in doing so.

I have no problem with officials raising concerns over possible personnel action against agents who were only carrying out their assigned tasks. These officials have a duty to advocate for their agents and insulate their institution from concerns over political retaliation. However, if the FBI refused to supply personnel information, it would move the matter from internal deliberation to outright defiance of a lawful order.

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Putin is no longer Brussels’ enemy no. 1. Trump is.

• EU Plays Trump Card To Advance Its Globalist Agenda (Villamor)

The reappearance of Donald Trump on the international political scene has left Brussels in a state of panic. Considering the current international context, it could well signify a revolution within the European Union. However, the European Union, under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, is using the American magnate’s return to power as a golden opportunity to strengthen its own supranational integration agenda, further weakening the sovereignty of member states and promoting a centralized vision of the European bloc. If the last term was an example of the ‘new Europe’ designed for us, the next four years will bring more of the same, but now tinged with a particular European patriotism in the face of the expansionism of the ‘Eagle Empire.’

During her speech at the Davos Forum in January this year, von der Leyen made the EU’s new approach clear: continuing climate policies and protecting “our European way of life” (whatever that means to EU leaders) against external threats, particularly those stemming from Donald Trump’s United States and China—after years of declaring that the main enemy was Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “The world is in a ‘race against time’ to tackle global challenges such as climate change and seize the opportunities of AI,” she stated during her speech at the World Economic Forum. Brussels’ stance is clear: continue decarbonizing at any cost. “Europe will continue to seek cooperation and is ‘open for business’ to those who wish to improve clean technology and expand digital infrastructure.”

It is no coincidence that this rhetoric aligns with Brussels’ attempts to reform the EU’s founding treaties, granting even more powers to European institutions at the expense of member states. Although the call on the Commission to initiate these reforms passed in the Parliament with only a paper-thin majority, there’s no doubt the efforts will continue in both institutions. Among the reforms under discussion is the elimination of the unanimity principle in the European Council, the only tool blocking Brussels from making key decisions without the consensus of all member states. There is also talk of creating new powers in taxation, defense, and energy policy, which would significantly curtail the autonomy of countries reluctant to follow the European Commission’s lead.

After Trump’s ascent, the U.S. is continuously being portrayed as an ‘imminent threat’ to European stability, enabling the EU to strengthen its control mechanisms and discipline countries that resist its directives. The European Commission is now promoting a narrative in which only a stronger and more united Europe can withstand the ‘winds’ of populism, protectionism, and the so-called far right. However, this strategy is not only aimed at consolidating power in Brussels. It also serves as a weapon to weaken patriotic and sovereignist movements that have gained strength across the continent. Growing public outrage over mass immigration, draconian climate policies, and the imposition of ideologies alien to national traditions has led to the rise of parties challenging the EU’s globalist consensus.

In response, the European establishment has intensified its offensive: any movement that questions Brussels’ agenda is immediately labeled as “far right”, “fascist”, or even “Nazi”. This phenomenon is not new but has become more aggressive in recent years. Censorship attempts, media persecution, and the systematic exclusion of dissenting voices from public debate have become normalized. Anyone opposing the EU’s policies is presented as a threat to democracy when, in reality, what is at stake is the ability of European peoples to decide their future—if such a possibility even exists today. The tactic is cheap but at least transparent: use the figure of Trump as a scarecrow to justify the centralization of power in Brussels and delegitimize political movements that challenge the EU’s ideological hegemony.

What we are witnessing is, in essence, a perfect excuse to push forward a project of forced integration that many Europeans have neither voted for nor approved. The supposed fight against populism is nothing more than a strategy to consolidate a political elite that refuses to accept that European societies are changing and that more and more citizens reject the progressive dogma imposed by Brussels. This is not the first time the EU has taken advantage of an external crisis to strengthen its control. It happened with the euro crisis when centralized austerity measures were implemented, with the COVID-19 pandemic, which facilitated the expansion of bureaucratic control, and with the war in Ukraine, which was used to justify energy and military policies without the necessary widespread consultation. Now, Trump is the new excuse. Will it also be an opportunity for change in the Old Continent?

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“The European Left, like the American Left, devotes unlimited antagonism to anything that does not think like it, talk like it, dream, eat or work like it.”

• What Is Really Destroying Europe? The EU (Godefridi)

The founding idea of the European Union was to build, through shared prosperity, solidarity and a sense of shared destiny among the nations of Europe. That was why three communities were formed: the economy, coal and steel, and nuclear energy. Until around 2000, in terms of growth and innovation, the European economy, year in, year out, was on par with the American one. Of that initial — and fairly brilliant — gesture of “peace through prosperity,” literally nothing remains. None of the EU’s current leaders cares about the financial well-being of Europeans. Coal is regarded as the devil’s fuel, and nuclear energy is abhorred by Europe’s elites, who say they prefer the inefficient and erratic wind turbines. Since 2000, the European economy has been mired in stagnation, which has worsened since 2008 and threatens to reach its height in the coming years — ending in the destruction of Europe.

Green Deal
The EU is a web of institutions with which an American would find nothing familiar, so let us just say that this web is dominated by one institution: the European Commission. It is a kind of European “government'” with a monopoly on legislative initiatives. Nothing is voted on in the EU without the Commission’s assent. The Commission makes no secret of the fact that its absolute priority is the Green Deal: to turn Europe into a “Carbon Neutral Society” by 2050. This means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gas emissions produced and those absorbed by natural or technological carbon sinks. The EU’s key strategies to achieve this balance include reducing emissions by massively increasing the use of “renewable energy” sources such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles and industries, and moving towards low- or zero-emission industrial processes, particularly in steel, cement and chemicals.

They also aim to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to absorb and store CO2 from combustion sources or from the air. Carbon dioxide captured is typically stored in geological formations such as depleted natural gas fields, or old coal mines. In Europe, the North Sea seabed serves as an ideal location for carbon storage. The problem is that these CCS technologies are extremely expensive. Imposing them in the gigantic way that zero-carbon requires implies additional costs that are impossible for any developed economy to digest. That is probably why these fantastical CCS technologies play such a marginal role in Europe. The truth is that the reduction in CO2 emissions in Europe is almost exclusively due to industry leaving Europe. That is the dirty little secret of the Green Deal: Europe is reducing its CO2 emissions to the extent and in proportion to the destruction of its industry.

[..] If there is one reality that leaders whose power is founded on myths abhor, it is transparency. Whereas in 2020, the power of the American legacy media still allowed it to make people believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, over the last few years, this power was been reduced to shreds. The same shift is happening in Europe, under the influence not of European social media networks, because they do not exist, but of American ones, such as X. The EU elite has lost control of the narrative. Europeans are turning away from the lies and myths of the Green Deal en masse. This is what the EU cannot tolerate. By adopting the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU wanted to give itself an instrument with which to subdue the American platforms, and are obliged to fund hordes of censors to hunt down content that disagrees with the European Queen-Commission. The EU has been requiring a fine of 6% of worldwide revenue from social media companies, which would inevitably kill off the platforms.

These faceless censor-hunters, who are accountable to no one, are supposed to remove all content that is hateful, discriminatory or transphobic. None of these vague terms can be rigorously defined. Given the absence of precise definitions, the censors do whatever they want. The arbitrariness is total. In practice, these censors massively quash so-called “right-wing” content, while leaving the abundant anti-Semitic, Islamist and Marxist literature untouched. That, apparently, is the whole point. The European Left, like the American Left, devotes unlimited antagonism to anything that does not think like it, talk like it, dream, eat or work like it. By introducing legislation such as the DSA, Europe is asserting itself as a major player in the censorship camp, following the example of China, Iran, Russia and Islamist countries, and contributing to the de-civilization of the European continent. After all, isn’t freedom the definition, the reason for being and the sole distinguishing criterion of Western civilization?

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Milei took Argentina out as well yesterday.

• What to Know About US Withdrawal From the WHO (ET)

On the first day in office of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), making good on a project from his first administration. Trump’s Jan. 20 order halted U.S. funding to the United Nations body, citing the WHO’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China,” as well as other global health concerns. Negotiations with the group about a pandemic agreement and the International Health Regulations will be suspended while the withdrawal is taking place.Because of the 1948 joint resolution by Congress, the United States has the right to withdraw from the WHO, but it must give a one-year notice. The resolution also requires the United States to fulfill “financial obligations” to the WHO for the current fiscal year.

The United States is currently the largest WHO funder, contributing about $1.28 billion during 2022–2023, the last reported year on the organization’s website. That equates to almost half of the WHO’s joint external evaluation missions for the last fiscal year. The 2024–2025 fiscal year is shaping up similarly, with the United States serving as the largest donor by far, contributing an estimated $988 million, or roughly 14 percent of the WHO’s $6.9 billion budget. Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that the United States covers about 95 percent of the WHO’s work on tuberculosis in Europe and about 60 percent in Africa and the Western Pacific, and that the WHO’s Europe office is more than 8 percent reliant on U.S. contributions. Additionally, U.S. funding provides “the backbone of many of WHO’s large-scale emergency operations,” covering up to 40 percent of that funding.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described relations with the United States as “a good model partnership” during a press briefing in Geneva in December 2024. “[We] have been partnering for many years, and we believe that will be the case. And I believe the U.S. leaders understand that the United States cannot be safe unless the rest of the world is safe,” he told reporters. Following the announcement of Trump’s decision to remove the United States from the organization, Ghebreyesus spoke out, asking world leaders to push the White House to reverse the decision. The WHO chief said during a closed-door meeting with diplomats that the United States would miss out on critical information about disease outbreaks, The Associated Press reported.

George Kyriacou, the agency’s finance director, said if the WHO’s spending continues at its current level without funding from the United States, the organization would be “very much in a hand-to-mouth type situation” regarding cash flow for at least portions of 2026. Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have ordered agency employees to stop working with the WHO, effective immediately. John Nkengasong, the CDC’s deputy director for global health, sent a memo to agency leadership on Jan. 26 calling on staff to cease collaborating with the WHO immediately and wait for further guidance. CDC staff also are not allowed to engage with the WHO, virtually or in person, and staff members are not allowed to visit the WHO offices.

Some public health experts, including Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine and global health at UCLA who works with the WHO on sexually transmitted infections, have voiced concern about halting the collaboration.“Stopping communications and meetings with WHO is a big problem,” Klausner said. “People thought there would be a slow withdrawal. This has really caught everyone with their pants down.” The Trump administration said the WHO was not able to demonstrate independence from the “inappropriate political influence” of member states and had failed to “adopt urgently needed reforms.” The president’s executive order also cites “unfairly onerous payments” by the United States that Trump said are “far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments.” “China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO,” the order stated.

This is Trump’s second attempt to withdraw from the WHO. The president began the process in 2020 because of frustration over the WHO’s reaction to China’s coverup of details surrounding the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The House Oversight and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report in December 2024 on the WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, calling it “an abject failure.” According to the report, the WHO is accused of bending to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placing “China’s political interests ahead of its international duties.” As part of the alleged failure, the WHO reportedly ignored warnings by Taiwan on Dec. 31, 2019, about “atypical pneumonia cases” in Wuhan, which it asked the WHO to investigate. “The initial mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic not only potentially caused the further spread of the virus, but it created a situation where people lost trust in the global public health organization,” the report stated.

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“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

• ‘Gov’t Is the People’s Business’: A Tribute to Ronald Reagan (Salgado)

On this day (Feb 6) in 1911, a boy was born who would go on to be one of the greatest American presidents: Ronald Reagan. “Government is the people’s business, and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid,” Reagan said. It is unfortunate that some even in his own party no longer value his legacy much, framing him as a status quo president. He was not — he was a fighter, a reformer, and a great man hated by domestic leftists and foreign Communists alike but beloved by the Americans to whom he brought morning again in America.

Of course, he didn’t just bring America out of the horrible economic and political nightmare of the Jimmy Carter years; he also brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. Rejecting short-sighted pleas to drop the line, he stood fearlessly in front of the Berlin Wall, the physical divide between the free West and the authoritarian East, and cried, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” When the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, in spite of the naysayers and petty dictators, in the same year Reagan had left office, it was Reagan’s victory as much as it was a victory for all the Germans and other Europeans who had defied Soviet tyranny.

There were leftists who sneered at Reagan because he had been an actor, and there were leftists who hated him because he was a Republican not afraid to challenge corrupt politicians. But not even a bullet could stop him. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most successful presidents in American history. And Americans knew it so well that in the 1984 election, he won 49 out of 50 states. Like those of so many other great men, Reagan‘s words are not only applicable to his own day but often applicable to ours. America will always be fighting authoritarians, both foreign and domestic; we will always have to struggle to preserve our constitutional republic. Or, as Reagan himself put it, even years before he became president:

Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again. How true it is that freedom is a fragile thing! Many individuals and groups, most notably the Democrat party, have been trying to limit or destroy our freedom for centuries now in America. Think how great the contrast has been between the Biden-Harris administration and the first couple weeks of the Trump administration.

Reagan knew what so many other politicians deny, that the rulers of America are supposed to be its citizens. “With all the profound wording of our federal Constitution, probably the most meaningful words are the first three, ‘We, the People,’” he said, in his same gubernatorial inaugural address quoted above. “And those of us here today who have been elected to constitutional office and to the legislature are in that three-word phrase. We are of the people, we are chosen by the people to see that no permanent structure of government ever encroaches on the people’s freedom or assumes a power beyond that which has freely been granted to us by the people. We stand between the taxpayer and the tax spender.”

The Founding Fathers would approve, but not the bureaucrats and political hacks who get into government only for their own benefit. It seems somewhat ironic that this address was originally delivered in California, when Reagan was becoming governor there. How far woke California has come from those days. Reagan must also have made his opponents squirm as he added, “Now, it is inconceivable to me that anyone could accept this delegated authority without asking God’s help. And I pray that we of the legislature and the administration can be granted the wisdom and the strength beyond our own limited powers. That with divine guidance we can avoid easy expedience. That we can work to build a state where liberty under law and justice can triumph, where compassion can govern and wherein the people can participate and prosper because of their government and not in spite of it.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Dana

 

 

Sunglasses

 

 

Queen

 

 

Mariana
https://twitter.com/i/status/1887327855882735634

 

 

Chirodectes

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 8 2021

Oct 082021
 
 October 8, 2021  Posted by at 8:58 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Swimming 1908

 

• Why Is Pfizer Pushing An Untested Vaccine On Children? (TF)
• Judge Orders Gov’t To Provide Evidence To Justify Vaccinating Children (TE)
• Moderna: A Company “In Need Of A Hail Mary” (Whitney Webb)
• Molnupiravir Was Made Possible By Government-funded Innovation (STAT)
• Myocarditis Adverse Events in VAERS (SD)
• Stop This NOW (Denninger)
• The Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic (Taibbi)
• The Problems With Censoring Doctors Over Their COVID-19 Stances (RCS)
• Biden Keeps Pushing Nonexistent Worker Vaccine Mandate (CTH)
• Poland’s Top Court Rules Polish Law Takes Presedence Over The EU (ZH)
• Prosecution Of Alleged WikiLeaks Vault 7 Source Hits Multiple Roadblocks (Y!)

 

 

 

 

Biden speech

 

 

“Boys between 16 and 19 years of age had the highest incidence of myocarditis after the second dose . . . The risk of heart problems in boys of that age was about nine times higher than in unvaccinated boys of the same age.”

• Why Is Pfizer Pushing An Untested Vaccine On Children? (TF)

The face of Pfizer – Pfizer board member (and former FDA commissioner) Scott Gottlieb, MD – was on CBS Face the Nation today estimating the upcoming availability of the Pfizer vaccine for kids aged 5-11. His key quote: “The FDA has said the review is going to be a matter of weeks, not months. . . that could give you a vaccine by Halloween.” Perhaps more concerning is the fact that Gottlieb is confident Pfizer will get FDA approval. This concern is based on the questionable safety and effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine for kids aged 5-11, as well as questions over whether there is a need for an emergency use authorization for that segment of the American population.

Pfizer tested the vaccine on a small sample of “2,268 participants 5 to <12 years of age.” Pfizer concluded that the results demonstrated “strong immune response in this cohort of children one month after the second dose.” Pay attention to that last part: “one month after the second dose.” Is that it – is Pfizer pushing this vaccine on children after just one month of efficacy data? (The benefit of the emergency use authorization – studies can be limited.) By now it’s clear this is Pfizer’s pattern: they say the vaccine’s “duration of protection” is “unknown” while data demonstrates its effectiveness wanes over time. Compare the Comirnaty Fact Sheet to the latest reporting on the Pfizer vaccine: One would rightfully assume that the effectiveness of the vaccine will wane in children as it has done in other populations.

One would also be correct to assume this is the rationale for Pfizer to submit its current (one month) data to the FDA, hoping for approval from its friends in government before its study group shows the vaccine has diminishing returns. All that has to do with effectiveness. Now we get to the question of safety. This has always been a pandemic of the oldest among us. According to CDC data, children aged 5-14 years-old have accounted for only 161 COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic. In comparison, this same group has experienced 194 pneumonia deaths. To put these numbers into perspective, the CDC cites over 530,000 COVID-19 deaths for the ages 65 years and up. As New York Magazine observed, “The Kids Were Safe from COVID the Whole Time.”

Those numbers are important when we start to look at the necessity of a vaccine for kids. As with all vaccines, there is a cost-benefit analysis that must be made: do the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the cost? (This is something the FDA and CDC have drilled to the American public – that the benefits of the vaccines outweigh the costs.) Looking at the data, a 17 year-old teenager might properly disregard the vaccine while a 75 year-old might seriously consider it. This is expected. Considerations of costs and benefits get us to the safety of the vaccine for kids aged 5-12. Pfizer proudly announces the vaccine’s side effects for 5-12 year olds is “generally comparable to those observed in participants 16 to 25 years of age.” That’s not good. If you’ve been paying attention, you know why those numbers (ages 16-25) matter. It’s because young people – especially young men – in that age range have an increased risk of developing heart problems after the second Pfizer dose. The younger they are, the greater the risk: “Boys between 16 and 19 years of age had the highest incidence of myocarditis after the second dose . . . The risk of heart problems in boys of that age was about nine times higher than in unvaccinated boys of the same age.”

Read more …

“..since teens over the age of 15 had been given the Covid-19 vaccine deaths among the age group had increased by 47%..”

• Judge Orders Gov’t To Provide Evidence To Justify Vaccinating Children (TE)

A Judge has ordered the UK Goverment to submit evidence that justifies Covid-19 vaccination of children, giving them a deadline of Monday 11th October. The order from The Hon. Mr Justice Jay is most welcome after we exclusively revealed Thursday 30th September that since teens over the age of 15 had been given the Covid-19 vaccine deaths among the age group had increased by 47% compared to the same period in 2020. We also then delved back into the Office for National Statistics data due to a suspicion we would find the majority of those deaths had been among teenage boys due to the risk of myocardtis, inflammation of the heart muscle, associated with the Pfizer vaccine and mainly occurring in younger males, as well as a correlation with a rise in emergency calls requesting an ambulance due to cardiac arrest, found in Public Health England data.

Unfortunately our fears were confirmed, as we exclusively revealed on Monday 4th October that deaths among teenage boys have increased by 63% in the UK since they started getting the Covid-19 vaccine. To add to that we then exclusively revealed on Tuesday 5th October that Chris Whitty’s decision to overrule the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation and advise the Government to offer the Covid-19 vaccine to all healthy secondary school children, has so far led to a 400% increase in deaths among male children compared to the same period in 2020. (See here) However, people have been fighting in court to overturn the decision of the Chief Medical Officer for England that children should be given an experimental Covid-19 injection, but unfortunately to no avail so far.


The ‘Covid-19 Assembly’ and lawyer Francis Hoar had an application for an urgent hearing to pause the Covid-19 roll-out to under 18’s denied for a second time on September 2nd. The Claimants had asked for just half a day for the Court to listen to oral argument to consider whether to pause the roll out of injections of experimental mRNA vaccine technology, producing increasing reports of clotting and other adverse effects including death, still under emergency authorisation and never before given to humans, to the whole of the healthy population of children aged 12-17. The Court’s view was that to delay consideration of the Claimants’ application for 14 days to allow the government to prepare its response was not in fact a refusal. However, that delay had the practical effect of denying the urgent relief sought and left the full resources and machinery of the state to be put into gear.

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“..without the approval of its booster, which has caused great controversy even among the country’s top vaccine officials, Moderna faces a massive financial reckoning.”

• Moderna: A Company “In Need Of A Hail Mary” (Whitney Webb)

Not only did the COVID-19 crisis obliterate hurdles that had previously prevented Moderna from taking a single product to market, it also dramatically reversed the company’s fortunes. Indeed, from 2016 right up until the emergence of COVID-19, Moderna could barely hold it together, as it was shedding key executives, top talent, and major investors at an alarming rate. Essentially, Moderna’s promise of “revolutionizing” medicine and the remarkable salesmanship and fund-raising capabilities of the company’s top executive, Stéphane Bancel, were the main forces keeping it afloat. In the years leading up to the COVID-19 crisis, Moderna’s promises—despite Bancel’s efforts—rang increasingly hollow, as the company’s long-standing penchant for extreme secrecy meant that—despite nearly a decade in business—it had never been able to definitively prove that it could deliver the “revolution” it had continually assured investors was right around the corner.

This was compounded by major issues with patents held by a hostile competitor that threatened Moderna’s ability to turn a profit on anything it might manage to take to market, as well as major issues with its mRNA delivery system that led them to abandon any treatment that would require more than one dose because of toxicity concerns. The latter issue, though largely forgotten and/or ignored by media today, should be a major topic in the COVID-19 booster debate, given that there is still no evidence that Moderna ever resolved the toxicity issue that arose in multi-dose products.

In this first installment of a two-part series, the dire situation in which Moderna found itself immediately prior to the emergence of COVID-19 is discussed in detail, revealing that Moderna—very much like the now disgraced company Theranos—had long been a house of cards with sky-high valuations completely disconnected from reality. Part 2 will explore how that reality would have come crashing down sometime in 2020 or 2021 were it not for the advent of the COVID-19 crisis and Moderna’s subsequent partnership with the US government and the highly unusual processes involving its vaccine’s development and approval. Despite the emergence of real-world data challenging the claims that Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective, Moderna’s booster is being rushed through by some governments, while others have recently banned the vaccine’s use in young adults and teens due to safety concerns.

As this two-part series will show, safety concerns about Moderna were known well before the COVID crisis, yet they have been ignored by health authorities and the media during the crisis itself. In addition, in order to stave off collapse, Moderna must keep selling its COVID-19 vaccine for years to come. In other words, without the approval of its booster, which has caused great controversy even among the country’s top vaccine officials, Moderna faces a massive financial reckoning. While the COVID-19 crisis threw the company a lifeboat, the administration of its COVID-19 vaccine, in which the US government has now invested nearly $6 billion, must continue into the foreseeable future for the bailout to be truly successful.

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Yup, it’s a horse drug. Priceless.

Barron’s behind paywall:
Beware of the new Merck drug: Wall Street Cheered Merck’s Covid Pill. Some Scientists Are Highlighting Its Potential Dangers. Researchers say the drug could integrate itself into patients’ DNA, theoretically leading to cancer. Merck says its tests show that isn’t an issue.

• Molnupiravir Was Made Possible By Government-funded Innovation (STAT)

The story behind molnupiravir is intriguing and a testament to government-funded innovation. Molnupiravir, also known as EIDD-2801 or MK-4482, came out of Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory (DRIVE), a not-for-profit LLC owned by Emory University. It had previously demonstrated broad-spectrum activity against other viruses such as influenza, Ebola, and the Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. The work goes back to 2004, when Emory researchers were studying a related compound known as EIDD-1931/NHC. Before it was tested for Covid-19, EIDD-2801 had accrued millions of dollars of federal funding. In 2019, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) gave the Emory Institute for Drug Development a $16 million contract to test the drug for influenza.

It had previously garnered funding from several other NIAID grants, as well as funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), as disclosed by Emory. When attention turned to Covid-19, Emory received pledges of more than $30 million from NIAID and the Department of Defense to cover development of the drug. Jumping on an opportunity to develop a promising drug therapy for Covid-19, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics licensed the drug from DRIVE in March 2020. Ridgeback was founded by Wayne and Wendy Holman, both former investment managers. Within just three months, Ridgeback licensed worldwide rights for EIDD-2801 for Covid-19 to Merck, for which Ridgeback received an undisclosed upfront payment plus milestone payments and shared profits.

But before signing on with Merck, Ridgeback had tried to negotiate a deal with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), one that was specifically mentioned in the explosive whistleblower complaint by Rick Bright, the former director of BARDA. In his complaint, Bright wrote that George Painter, the CEO of the Emory Institute for Drug Development, and Ridgeback cofounder Wendy Holman sought a contract first from ASPR Next and then from BARDA to develop EIDD-2801 for $100 million, and they personally lobbied the authority to get more financial aid. BARDA denied the request due to a lack of adequate documentation for the request. Even before 2020, Bright had been reluctant to give BARDA funding to EIDD-2801, saying they already had $30 million of support from NIAID and the Department of Defense.

Merck eventually backed Ridgeback and took on development of the drug. Molnupiravir then received even more federal funding: In September 2021, BARDA procured 1.7 million courses of the five-day regimen for $1.2 billion, or $700 per treatment course.

Read more …

Exhaustive study by Jessica Rose and Peter McCullough.

• Myocarditis Adverse Events in VAERS (SD)

The fact that the VAERS reporting of myocarditis is 6X higher in 15-year-olds following dose 2 may be indicative of a cause-effect relationship. If we assume that following dose 1, a certain percentage of healthy young males who lack co-morbidities or co-factors experience cardiac-related AEs mild enough so as not to dissuade them from receiving dose 2 (ie: pallor, chest pain and shortness of breath, for example), then it is not difficult to imagine that they may have been experiencing symptoms of myocarditis. If a percentage of young males had experienced primary damage to the heart as a result of inflammation following dose 1, then dose 2 may have induced a much more noticeable clinical impact, or cardiac ‘insult’.


In other words, these young males may receive a definitive diagnosis of myocarditis only following dose 2. What this implies, based on these assumptions, is that if there is a causal relationship then it might manifest with overlooked/unreported AEs following dose 1 and a diagnosis of myocarditis following dose 2. It is noteworthy that ‘Vaccine-induced myocarditis’ was in fact used as the descriptor by medical professionals as the reason for the myocarditis in the VAERS database. During phase III clinical trials for the mRNA COVID-19 products, safety was assessed based on a maximum observation period of 6 months. This is not adequate to assess long-term safety outcomes as it is a requirement, even in an accelerated timeline setting, to spend up to 9 months in Phase III trials.

Read more …

Karl’s take on that study.

• Stop This NOW (Denninger)

VAERS is known to materially under-report adverse events. We do not know what the multiplication factor for these findings is as a consequence of that. Note that in the context of all prior years this basically never happens statistically. The average over the three previous years associated with any vaccination is four. Further, an extraordinary level of cardiac adverse events are associated with these jabs. This is not uncommon or “rare” as claimed; there are in fact, as of July 9th, nearly 130,000 such reports for Covid-19 jabs. If we accept the CDC’s numbers for the number of Americans jabbed this puts the rate of cardiac adverse events are right around one in a hundred! What’s nasty is that while the myocarditis incidence is skewed heavily toward males under 30 the cardiac incidence is not; it is centered in the 20-70 range, or roughly “right up the middle” for the people in the nation as a whole.

Indeed, given the known under-reporting in VAERS a 1-in-100 incidence for a category of serious adverse events is extraordinarily significant. There is every reason to believe we may be causing cardiac injury to as many as one in 25 people who get these shots! Whether those injuries spontaneously resolve without permanent compromise or worse, degenerate progression is completely unknown as nobody is following up these individual cases to measure blood levels (e.g. troponins, EKGs, etc.) in an attempt to determine whether these events are transient or result in permanent impairment or worse. “The only way to understand how common myocarditis is after COVID-19 vaccination, is to perform a prospective cohort study where all vaccinated individuals undergo clinical assessment, ECG, and troponin measurement at regular intervals post-administration.”

Which is not being done, on purpose. Incidentally the markers indicating potential trouble were present in the original studies. They were not followed up and the reason for not doing is obvious: It would have prevented issuance of the EUAs on the original desired schedule. As a result the firms involved and the FDA deliberately ignored that signal in the original studies and we have now jabbed somewhere around 200 million Americans — and may have screwed as many as several million of them with irreversible, or even worse degenerate cardiac damage. We do not know because we intentionally did not look. “COVID-19 injectable products are novel and have a genetic, pathogenic mechanism of action causing uncontrolled expression of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein within human cells. When you combine this fact with the temporal relationship of AE occurrence and reporting, biological plausibility of cause and effect, and the fact that these data are internally and externally consistent with emerging sources of clinical data, it supports a conclusion that the COVID-19 biological products are deterministic for the myocarditis cases observed after injection.”

Again, as we knew and as I have documented before these jabs were first released for widespread use — and again, deliberately ignored. While this paper describes a specific risk with regard to myocarditis in young people the larger issue of cardiac events must not be ignored. While it is certainly true that it in healthy young people the risk from Covid-19 infection itself is minuscule and thus appears on the data to be outweighed by the risks of the jab even without accounting for incomplete reporting in my opinion the 900lb Gorilla in the china shop does not simply lie there.

Read more …

It’s a sales job. Always has been.

• The Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic (Taibbi)

Yesterday, I ran a story that had nothing to do with vaccines, about the seeming delay of the development of a drug called molnupiravir (see the above segment with the gracious hosts of The Hill: Rising for more). In the time it took to report and write that piece, conventional wisdom turned against the drug, which is now suspected of ivermectinism and other deviationist, anti-vax tendencies, in the latest iteration of our most recent collective national mania — the Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic. The speed of the change was incredible. Just a week ago, on October 1st, the pharmaceutical giant Merck issued a terse announcement that quickly became big news. Molnupiravir, an experimental antiviral drug, “reduced the risk of hospitalization or death” of Covid-19 patients by as much as 50%, according to a study.

The “first draft of history” stories that rushed out in the ensuing minutes and hours were almost uniformly positive. AP called the news a “potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic,” while National Geographic quoted a Yale specialist saying, “Having a pill that would be easy for people to take at home would be terrific.” Another interesting early reaction came from Time: Vaccines will be the way out of the pandemic, but not everyone around the world is immunized yet, and the shots aren’t 100% effective in protecting people from getting infected with the COVID-19 virus. So antiviral drug treatments will be key to making sure that people who do get infected don’t get severely ill. This is what news looks like before propagandists get their hands on it. Time writer Alice Park’s lede was sensible and clear. If molnupiravir works — a big if, incidentally — it’s good news for everyone, since not everyone is immunized, and the vaccines aren’t 100% effective anyway. As even Vox put it initially, molnupiravir could “help compensate for persistent gaps in Covid-19 vaccination coverage.”

Within a day, though, the tone of coverage turned. Writers began stressing a Yeah, but approach, as in, “Any new treatment is of course good, but get your fucking shot.” A CNN lede read, “A pill that could potentially treat Covid-19 is a ‘game-changer,’ but experts are emphasizing that it’s not an alternative to vaccinations.” The New York Times went with, “Health officials said the drug could provide an effective way to treat Covid-19, but stressed that vaccines remained the best tool.” If you’re thinking it was only a matter of time before the mere fact of molnupiravir’s existence would be pitched in headlines as actual bad news, you’re not wrong: Marketwatch came out with “‘It’s not a magic pill’: What Merck’s antiviral pill could mean for vaccine hesitancy” the same day Merck issued its release. The piece came out before we knew much of anything concrete about the drug’s effectiveness, let alone whether it was “magic.”

Bloomberg’s morose “No, the Merck pill won’t end the pandemic” was released on October 2nd, i.e. one whole day after the first encouraging news of a possible auxiliary treatment whose most ardent supporters never claimed would end the pandemic. This article said the pill might be cause to celebrate, but warned its emergence “shouldn’t be cause for complacency when it comes to the most effective tool to end this pandemic: vaccines.” Bloomberg randomly went on to remind readers that the unrelated drug ivermectin is a “horse de-worming agent,” before adding that if molnupiravir ends up “being viewed as a solution for those who refuse to vaccinate,” the “Covid virus will continue to persist.”

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“Your hospital is reluctant to change their well-established protocols. Most of your intubated patients are dying. What do you do?”

• The Problems With Censoring Doctors Over Their COVID-19 Stances (RCS)

Everyone has a right to their opinion. The question is: does everyone have a right to voice their opinion? Increasingly, in these strange times, it seems that we physicians have the right to voice only certain opinions, when it comes to discussing Covid-19. Wanting to hit the mute button on physicians who choose to challenge the public health narrative, especially in regard to vaccination for Covid-19, is understandably tempting. We carry a bit more authority than lawyers or statisticians when we share our thoughts about medical matters; and quite a few physicians seem to have little interest in toeing the party line. However, appealing as it might be to silence these voices, succumbing to the temptation of censorship might end up costing our society more than it gains.

Imagine this: you’re a physician in charge of opening an intensive care unit in New York City for Covid-19 patients in March 2020 as the disease is tearing through the city. You notice that the standard protocols your hospital follows for intubated patients seem to be failing, perhaps injuring, your patients with Covid-19. Rumblings from Chinese intensivists, and publications from Italian physician Luciano Gattitoni, imply that intubation and ventilator management should be reconsidered in this new disease. Your hospital is reluctant to change their well-established protocols. Most of your intubated patients are dying. What do you do? Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell experienced this dilemma — and then posted a video on YouTube on March 31, 2020, watched nearly a million times, in which he described his experiences caring for Covid-19 patients in respiratory failure.

In the video, Kyle-Sidell shared that existing treatment protocols for patients with severe pneumonia did not seem to apply to Covid-19 patients with dangerously low oxygen levels — they could be intubated later, and their lungs were less stiff and required lower ventilation pressures, than typical severe pneumonia patients. His warning was part of an alarm that was raised by others, as well, which did indeed lead to a rapid shift in management of severely ill Covid-19 patients. He also ended up stepping down from his leadership of the ICU due to disagreement with hospital management; and some of those hundreds of thousands of viewers of his YouTube video concluded that his perhaps poorly-worded comparison of Covid-19 lung disease to high altitude sickness was cause to consider the pandemic a hoax.

Was Dr Kyle-Sidell a hero for sticking his neck out and challenging the prevailing dogma, in a sincere attempt to improve outcomes for severely ill Covid-19 patients? Or should his video have been censored, and perhaps his medical license threatened, for questioning the conventional narrative in ways that could be co-opted by conspiracy theorists?

Read more …

“..without an actual policy or regulation visibly in place, state attorneys general cannot file a lawsuit or request an injunction..”

• Biden Keeps Pushing Nonexistent Worker Vaccine Mandate (CTH)

Joe Biden did it again today. A month after the first announcement, the White House occupant claimed again a Dept of Labor rule (via OSHA) is forthcoming, yet no such process appears to be taking place. This ploy now seems very purposeful, because without an actual policy or regulation visibly in place, state attorneys general cannot file a lawsuit or request an injunction. As long as Biden keeps threatening a DOL worker vaccination rule sometime in the future, many employers will take action to require worker vaccination. This seems to be the actual strategy; bolstered by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki caught off-guard last week when asked about it. Psaki had no idea how to answer the question about any OSHA activity not taking place.

Obviously Psaki didn’t expect the question, but it was also obvious that no background conversation had ever taken place amid the White House communication team. Perhaps responding to an awakening on that issue, Joe Biden gave a speech today begging people to get vaccinated and again warning that a federal vaccine mandate for all workers was coming: TRANSCRIPT – […] The Labor Department is going to shortly issue an emergency rule — which I asked for several weeks ago, and they’re going through the process — to require all employees [employers] with more than 100 people, whether they work for the federal government or not — this is within a — in the purview of the Labor Department — to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or face testing at least once a week. In total, this Labor Department vaccination requirement will cover 100 million Americans, about two thirds of all the people who work in America. These requirements work. […] And as the Business Roundtable and others told me when I announced the first requirement, that encouraged businesses to feel they could come in and demand the same thing of their employees.”

Biden then went on to praise companies who are doing it on their own. Others are starting to notice as this article in the Federalist notes: […] According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements. Despite what you may have been falsely led to believe by the media fantasy projection machine, press statements have exactly zero legal authority.

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“The primacy of constitutional law over other sources of law results directly from the Constitution of the Republic of Poland..”

• Poland’s Top Court Rules Polish Law Takes Presedence Over The EU (ZH)

In a stinging rebuke to Europe’s unelected bureaucrats, and a major escalation in the rule of law crisis between Warsaw and Brussels, Poland’s constitutional court ruled on Thursday that Polish law can take precedence over EU law amid an ongoing dispute between the European bloc and the eastern European member state. The decision by the Constitutional Tribunal came after Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki requested a review of a decision by the EU’s Court of Justice (ECJ) that gave the bloc’s law primacy. Two out of 14 judges on the panel dissented from the majority opinion. “The attempt by the European Court of Justice to involve itself with Polish legal mechanisms violates … the rules that give priority to the constitution and rules that respect sovereignty amid the process of European integration,” the ruling said, in an outcome that could have wide-reaching consequences for Europe when the next crisis hits.

Meanwhile, Brussels considers the Constitutional Tribunal illegitimate due to the political influence imposed upon Poland’s judiciary by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). As the FT’s Henry Foy notes, it is “Hard to overstate the importance of this ruling.” He goes on to note that “Poland is *the* EU success story of eastern enlargement, and the biggest recipient – by a long long way – of EU taxpayer money since 2004. And now it is saying that it refuses to recognize a fundamental part of the whole project.” As DW reports, the court had looked specifically at the compatibility of provisions from EU treaties, which are used by the European Commission to justify having a say in the rule of law in member states, with Poland’s constitution.

A ruling by the ECJ in March said that the EU can force member states to disregard certain provisions in national law, including constitutional law. The ECJ says that Poland’s recently implemented procedure for appointing members of its Supreme Court amounts to a violation of EU law. The ruling from the ECJ could potentially force Poland to repeal parts of the controversial judicial reform. Meanwhile, the EU is withholding billions of euros of aid for post-pandemic rebuilding in Poland over concerns that the rule of law is being degraded in the country. “The primacy of constitutional law over other sources of law results directly from the Constitution of the Republic of Poland,” PiS government spokesman Piotr Muller wrote on Twitter after the court’s decision. “Today (once again) this has been clearly confirmed by the Constitutional Tribunal.”

However, the EPP group, the center-right bloc in the European Parliament to which PiS belongs, come out strongly against the court’s ruling: “It’s hard to believe the Polish authorities and the PiS Party when they claim that they don’t want to put an end to Poland’s membership of the EU. Their actions go in the opposite direction. Enough is enough,” Jeroen Lenaers, MEP and spokesperson for the group, said. “The Polish Government has lost its credibility. This is an attack on the EU as a whole,” he added. Previously, the European Parliament called on Morawiecki to cancel the court case in a resolution passed last month. It stressed the “fundamental nature of primacy of EU law as a cornerstone principle of EU law”, which however now is put in doubt.

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Scapegoat?

“Schulte, who had worked at an elite CIA hacking unit, said that whoever leaked the Vault 7 documents “deserved to be executed” and that “no traitors ever came from Texas”..”

• Prosecution Of Alleged WikiLeaks Vault 7 Source Hits Multiple Roadblocks (Y!)

The prosecution of the former CIA operative accused of providing WikiLeaks with the biggest theft of agency documents in U.S. history continues to be mired in delays and legal issues, drawing out a painful chapter for the agency. WikiLeaks’ publication in 2017 of documents that included CIA hacking tools, which it called Vault 7, so enraged some senior officials, including then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, that it sparked discussions within the agency and the Trump White House about kidnapping or even killing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a Yahoo News investigation. The first trial of Joshua Schulte, the former CIA programmer accused of transmitting the documents to WikiLeaks, ended in a hung jury in March 2020. (Schulte was, however, convicted of related minor charges and remains jailed.)

It was a stinging defeat for federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District, who vowed to retry the former agency operative. The retrial, which has already been repeatedly postponed, was last scheduled for late October. In September, Schulte, who is now representing himself in court, asked for another delay. The parties are now supposed to confer on a new trial date by Nov. 1, as Inner City Press first reported, but it is unclear precisely when the alleged WikiLeaks source will face another jury. WikiLeaks began publishing Vault 7 documents in March 2017. The leak was “instantly devastating,” said the prosecutor in the case, causing “critical intelligence gathering operations all over the world” to come to “a crashing halt.” Agency investigators later called the leak “the largest data loss in CIA history.”

Before WikiLeaks began publishing the Vault 7 materials, the CIA had no idea they had even been taken. The leak set off a furious search for the culprit. The CIA would soon determine that the files had been stolen in the spring of 2016 by Schulte, a disgruntled agency employee who quit his job within the CIA four months before WikiLeaks began releasing Vault 7 materials. FBI officials, who code-named Schulte “Kinetic Piranha” or “Kinetic Panda,” confronted him in March 2017 in the New York City office lobby of his new employer, Bloomberg LP. In subsequent interviews with bureau officials, Schulte, who had worked at an elite CIA hacking unit, said that whoever leaked the Vault 7 documents “deserved to be executed” and that “no traitors ever came from Texas” (he is a native of Lubbock, Texas).

Schulte has continued to deny any wrongdoing. Interviewing him at a restaurant across from Grand Central Terminal, FBI agents presented Schulte with a grand jury subpoena and a separate subpoena to seize his phone. Bureau personnel then also executed a search warrant of his apartment. Schulte was first arrested in August 2017 after investigators said they had found “approximately ten thousand images and videos of child pornography” while searching his electronic devices. In June 2018, prosecutors charged him with providing the materials to WikiLeaks.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Veritas Pfizer fetal tissue

 

 

 

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

 

Debt Rattle September 27 2021

Sep 272021
 
 September 27, 2021  Posted by at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  87 Responses »


M. C. Escher Symmetry Drawing 1948

 

• Natural Immunity Emerges As Potential Legal Challenge To Vaccine Mandates (Y!)
• Lancet Covid Origins Panel Disbanded Over Ties To Peter Daszak (DM)
• Dear Idiot: I Will Laugh (Denninger)
• We Are All Cattle Now (Eugyppius)
• The NBA’s Anti-Vaxxers Are Trying to Push Around the League (RS)
• How The US Vaccine Effort Derailed And Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised (G.)
• Treating Antisocial Elements For What They Are (K.)
• Inside The CIA’s Secret War Plans Against Wikileaks (Y!)
• CIA Was Ready To Wage Gun Battle In London Streets Over Assange (RT)
• Mike Pompeo And The CIA’s War On WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (Gosztola)
• CIA’s Assange Abduction/Murder Plan Raises Questions For Australia (Crikey)

 

 

“Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left”
– Aldous Huxley

 

 

No infections, lots of excess deaths. Why?

 

 

 

 

O’Looney

 

 

Launch 1,000 cases.

• Natural Immunity Emerges As Potential Legal Challenge To Vaccine Mandates (Y!)

The argument that natural immunity against COVID-19 is an alternative to vaccination is emerging as a potential legal challenge to federally mandated vaccination policies. Vaccination is already required for certain workers and some college students. The federal government, despite steeper legal hurdles to imposing vaccination, has also invoked the U.S. Department of Labor to mandate inoculation for health care workers and is expected to roll out a larger policy effectively mandating vaccination for a majority of U.S. workers. The stated goal behind mandatory vaccination policies is to protect against the spread of disease, meaning that the crux of any policy is immunity.

The notion that a previous COVID-19 infection provides natural immunity that can be at least as good as vaccination in some people is something a judge would likely need to consider in a challenge to a mandatory policy, especially against a government actor. “I think that a judge might reject a rule that’s been issued by a body, like the U.S. Department of Labor or by a state, that has not been sufficiently thought through as it relates to the science,” Erik Eisenmann, a labor and employment attorney with Husch Blackwell, told Yahoo Finance. Some recent research, which looks at hundreds of thousands of cases in Israel and has yet to undergo peer review, indicates that natural immunity might be at least as effective as vaccination in certain people.

Other peer-reviewed research cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which looks at dozens of cases in the U.S., indicated that certain people who suffered from a COVID-19 infection did not create antibodies (ie, natural immunity) at all. In August, the CDC published a study of 246 Kentucky residents, concluding that vaccination offers higher protection than a previous COVID infection. The CDC said the study went through a “rigorous multi-level clearance process” before submission, though analysis was conducted before the Delta variant became prevalent in the U.S. The CDC says the Kentucky data indicates that vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone, and medical professionals widely recommend vaccination for everyone who is eligible — including those who have experienced a prior COVID-19 infection.

Legally challenging COVID-19 vaccine mandates involves both science and law. The scientific arguments are based on certain studies over the past year, including the Israel study, and studies out of Cleveland Clinic and Washington University. A June study that tracked 52,238 Cleveland Clinic employees found that within 1,359 previously infected and unvaccinated people, none contracted a subsequent COVID-19 infection over the five-month study. The findings led authors to conclude that prior infection makes a person “unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.” Nevertheless, Cleveland Clinic stated afterwards that it continued to recommend vaccination for people previously infected, stressing that the research was conducted in late 2020 and early 2021 before the emergence of the Delta variant.

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I don’t trust Jeffrey Sachs.

• Lancet Covid Origins Panel Disbanded Over Ties To Peter Daszak (DM)

The chairman of a COVID-19 origins task force affiliated with the Lancet scientific journals has disbanded the commission over its ties to controversial researcher Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance. Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that he was concerned with the links to Daszak, who led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June. Daszak, who lives in New York, devoted his career to championing so-called ‘gain of function’ research to engineer coronavirus to be more deadly to humans, arguing that it was the best chance to detect and prevent a global pandemic. Shocking documents released this week revealed his 2018 proposal to help the Wuhan Institute of Virology engineer bat coronaviruses to be more deadly, by inserting genetic features that are similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2.

There is still no conclusive proof as to whether COVID-19, a coronavirus linked to bats, first jumped to humans from a wild animal or in a lab setting. But from the early days of the pandemic, Daszak has made every effort to paint the lab origin hypothesis as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ including masterminding a letter in the Lancet that established a veneer of scientific consensus that natural origin was the only possibility. If the virus did emerge from a lab performing the experiments he championed, it would be a crushing blow to Daszak’s research. Natural origin, on the other hand, would vindicate his life’s work seeking to prevent the next pandemic. Several members of the disbanded Lancet task force have collaborated with Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on projects in the past.

‘I just didn’t want a task force that was so clearly involved with one of the main issues of this whole search for the origins, which was EcoHealth Alliance,’ Dr. Sachs told the Journal. Sachs said a new Lancet Covid-19 Commission would continue studying the origins for a report to be published in mid-2022, but broaden its scope to include input from other experts on biosafety concerns, including risky laboratory research. It comes just days after the release of bombshell documents showing Daszak’s 2018 funding request to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeking $14.2 million to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

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“Their data, official public health data, says that (1) the jabs wear off, (2) those who were jabbed are spreading the disease and (3) you who got jabbed are at high risk of getting ****ed.”

• Dear Idiot: I Will Laugh (Denninger)

So The Miami Herald — and Yahoo — think they can print this without consequence? “That’s why we were glad President Biden stopped asking nicely, started requiring vaccinations everywhere he had power to do so. We were also glad when employers followed suit. And if that’s a problem for you, then, yes, goodbye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios and adieu. We’ll miss you, to be sure. But you’re asking us to choose between your petulance and our lives. And that’s really no choice at all.” Is that so? Well here’s a bit of science for you, *******: The jabs don’t work. In fact you admit they don’t work. If you believed they did work you wouldn’t care about us. You might call us stupid, but that’s the end of it right? You’re safe, we’re not. So what? You live your life and if we kill ourselves, so be it. You don’t ban beer because I can drink myself to death, right?

So why are you all up in arms? There’s only one answer: You know you did something stupid and put yourself in a worse position rather than a better one when you got vaccinated! So now, having done something that you know is dumb you insist others join you in your ritualized suicide cult, headed by Biden, Fauci and Rochelle. Have a look at Scotland if you think I’m wrong on this. Their data, official public health data, says that (1) the jabs wear off, (2) those who were jabbed are spreading the disease and (3) you who got jabbed are at high risk of getting ****ed. Not a little ****ed either. Indeed you traded what was 18 months to get rid of the extra 100lbs for a non-sterilizing, lightly-tested jab that on the history was very unlikely to work out well. It never had before for any coronavirus, so why would you believe, without years or even decades of evidence, that “this time its different”?

So when — not if, when — you get a so-called “breakthrough” infection the evidence is you will get screwed faster, harder, and more-certainly than someone never vaccinated. You’re at least as likely to die. Indeed, if you talk to clinicians they will tell you point-blank that once you get into the hospital being vaccinated has no statistical benefit on outcome. Oh sure, it appears being jabbed comes with a lower risk of death close in to your vaccination date, but remember, when you got vaccinated you also took a wildly-elevated risk of myocarditis which, on the data, progresses to heart failure a frightening part of the time within five years and which is asymptomatic until there is nothing you can do about it because the root, PAH, is not detectable from outside the body by non-invasive means.

If that turns out badly five years down the road you either get a heart transplant (at six-figure cost, permanent disability and permanent dependence on anti-rejection drugs) or you’re dead. Never mind those people who took the first jab, got hammered by it, couldn’t go back for the second due to the risk of immediate death and now are stuck with permanent compromise from infection and wildly elevated risk of mortality. By the way that’s in the data too and your demands and screaming are why those people are screwed. Just in case you missed that let me say it again: You screwed them. Many among us, myself included, calculated that the risk from infection was less than the risk from being jabbed. I was right. I got infected, placed no burden on the health care system, survived, recovered, I have no apparent bad lasting effects, my exercise tolerance is back to where it was and I gained durable, broad and deep immunity which the jabs do not confer.

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“Coronavirus vaccines have been used in animals for years, with extremely unimpressive results.”

• We Are All Cattle Now (Eugyppius)

There is nothing surprising about the failure of our vaccines. In fact it was totally predictable. Coronavirus vaccines have been used in animals for years, with extremely unimpressive results. The problem is that coronaviruses infect the mucosal surfaces of the lungs, at what is basically the very edge of the reach of our immune systems. You could say that this their grand strategy. They work their way in from our least protected borders. Typically, nasal spray vaccines are preferred in animals to stimulate immunity in the mucosa. Unfortunately, even the sprays achieve immunity that „is often short-lived, requires frequent boosting, and may not prevent re-infection.“ This is after decades of vaccine development and the considerably reduced safety standards observed in veterinary medicine.

Our own SARS-2 vaccines, despite their fancy mRNA and virus vector technology, are entirely of a piece with veterinary standards. They have a poor side effect profile, they provide only temporary and partial protection against infection, and they are deployed on a vast scale with no regard for the evolutionary pressure they place on the virus or their broader consequences for infection dynamics. These are normal standards in the context of industrial livestock, where most animals are not raised to live very long in any event, and the risk of occasional accidents — inadvertently favouring or even causing lethal superstrains, or inflicting widespread vaccine injuries — can be weighed against the economic loss associated with mortality from infections.

Of all animal coronavirus vaccines, the most successful is that which prevents IBV, or infectious bronchitis virus, in chickens. IBV is mainly deadly to chicks, who are vaccinated almost immediately after hatching with a live, attenuated virus vaccine. These kinds of vaccines are preferred over deactivated virus vaccines in animals, because they elicit a better immune response. The reason is simple: The weakened vaccine virus actually infects you and your immune system remembers the event accordingly. Some SARS-2 attenuated virus vaccines are even in development for humans, but it is unlikely they will ever be used, because they are very dangerous. The attenuated virus, because it replicates in the cells of the vaccinated, can reacquire its prior virulence via mutations. This happened with early attenuated vaccines against poliovirus in humans.

And there is an added danger, that the recently vaccinated might come into contact with the wild virus, and recombination events might then combine splice together the genomes of both, yielding unpredictable, potentially very lethal, mutant strains. IBV vaccines protect the chickens from infection for only about nine weeks. That‘s long enough for the chickens destined to be eaten, but those raised for their eggs require constant boosters. They receive two or three attenuated virus vaccines at first, and then periodic deactivated virus boosters thereafter, to maintain their protection. Adenovirus vector vaccines have been tried in chickens, with efficacy similar to that induced by the attenuated virus vaccines. This is very likely an unstated reason that vaccine vector and mRNA messenger technology were used for our own SARS-2 jabs. It was known from experience with animals that deactivated virus vaccines would not work nearly as well, and that attenuated viruses were too dangerous.

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You sure it’s not the league trying to push the players around?

• The NBA’s Anti-Vaxxers Are Trying to Push Around the League (RS)

One by one, the basketball players — non-vaccinated star here, fully-inoculated veteran on mute down there, a full-on anti-vaxxer front-and-center — logged into the video conference. The annual summer meeting of the powerful NBA union had gone virtual again on August 7, and high on the agenda for the season ahead was a proposed mandate from the league office that 100 percent of players get vaccinated against Covid-19. One response echoed from squares across the screen, according to players and an executive on the call: “Non-starter. Non-starter.” The NBA had relied on science above all to lead the sports world through the Covid nightmare, from the league’s outbreak-driven shutdown to a pandemic-proof playoff bubble in Disney World to game after game with fans back in the stands.

But after two plagued seasons of non-stop nasal swabbing, quarantining and distrust, unvaccinated players were pushing back. They made their case to the union summit: There should be testing this year, of course, just not during off-days. They’d mask up on the court and on the road, if they must. But no way would they agree to a mandatory jab. The vaccine deniers had set the agenda; the players agreed to take their demands for personal freedom to the NBA’s negotiating table. This month, league officials caught a break: Two of America’s most progressive cities, New York and San Francisco, would require pro athletes to show proof of one Covid-19 vaccination dose to play indoors, except with an approved medical or religious exemption. Which meant that one of the NBA’s biggest stars — one known for being receptive to conspiratorial beliefs — would be under heavy pressure to get a shot. And if Brooklyn Nets superstar Kyrie Irving could be convinced to take the vaccine, then maybe, just maybe, the whole league could create a new kind of bubble together.

When asked directly about Irving’s vaccination status — or his plans to change it — multiple people familiar with his thinking declined to answer directly. But one confidant and family member floated to Rolling Stone the idea of anti-vaxx players skipping home games to dodge the New York City ordinance… or at least threatening to protest them, until the NBA changes its ways. “There are so many other players outside of him who are opting out, I would like to think they would make a way,” says Kyrie’s aunt, Tyki Irving, who runs the seven-time All-Star’s family foundation and is one of the few people in his regular circle of advisors. “It could be like every third game. So it still gives you a full season of being interactive and being on the court, but with the limitations that they’re, of course, oppressing upon you. There can be some sort of formula where the NBA and the players can come to some sort of agreement.”

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“..vaccine misinformation campaigns overwhelmingly popular in conservative circles..”

• How The US Vaccine Effort Derailed And Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised (G.)

The cause of flagging vaccine uptake in the United States has flummoxed national health authorities, who in May loosened mask guidance in hopes it would encourage more people to get vaccinated, in July again recommended masks because of the Delta variant, and hoped August’s full FDA approval of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine would increase vaccine mandates. In a September speech, just days before the US slipped behind Japan, Joe Biden channeled national exasperation: “Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated even though the vaccine is safe, effective and free.” He called for vaccine mandates impacting 100 million Americans, two-thirds of US workers.

However, all these strategies have failed to encourage more than 900,000 Americans per day to get vaccinated in recent weeks, far lower than nearly 3m doses administered per day in April, the height of the vaccination push. Finally, in mid-September, the country’s slow progress allowed Japan to surpass the US both in terms of vaccination rate per 100,000 people and percentage of the total population with one or both shots. There are very specific, well-documented reasons that Americans are hesitant to take vaccines. They vary from the troubling way the medical system treats people of color, to vaccine misinformation campaigns overwhelmingly popular in conservative circles, to logistical challenges.

But population health researchers, whose work considers how society as a whole is fairing, said low vaccine uptake may be looked at another way: as the predictable outcome of a campaign subject to entrenched social forces that have diminished American health and life expectancy since the 1980s. “When I look at this I do see a very familiar pattern,” said Dr Steven Woolf, a prominent population health researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University. “When Operation Warp Speed came out I thought I was just seeing a modern example of this old problem where the scientific community developed the vaccine at ‘warp speed,’ but the implementation system for getting it out into the community was inadequate”. Woolf calls this “breakthrough without follow-through”. In that light, the plodding vaccination campaign could be seen as one more aspect of the American “health disadvantage”.

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“These and others in the anti-vax movement are basically enemies of society and need to be treated accordingly, without hesitation…”

• Treating Antisocial Elements For What They Are (K.)

Day-to-day life in Greece is excessively determined by people defying laws, rules and reason; it’s disappointing and extremely frustrating. But this, as former prime minister Kostas Simitis once said, is Greece and it doesn’t look like it’s changing much. It’s exhausting for citizens yearning for basic normalcy to be assailed by the prevalent delinquency and to feel that their quality of life is being constantly undermined, often with the tolerance of the state apparatus. Right now, events are being defined by our fellow citizens who refuse to get the Covid vaccine and by the obstinacy of deniers of all stripes. Whether they’re jerks, kooks, nitwits, thugs, vote-mongers or religious fanatics is neither here nor there. They are a swarm that is endangering the lives of the rest of us, having a negative impact on the quality of everyday life and obstructing the vital functions of society.

The state, therefore, has an obligation to all the “normal” people in this country to decisively deal with such antisocial elements. Admittedly, there are more antisocial Greeks out there. There are the unconscionable priests and monks who preach against the vaccines, the lawyers exploiting the anti-vax movement, the judges approving the exhumation of Covid victims, the relatives suing doctors for a payout, the parents calling the police on teachers implementing the law, the nurses and other state workers who refuse to be vaccinated but expect to keep getting paid… These and others in the anti-vax movement are basically enemies of society and need to be treated accordingly, without hesitation. Especially given that the overwhelming majority of the political world claims to support vaccinations.

The truth is that the antisocial behavior we are seeing right now is not the result of the pandemic. It may appear so, but is, in fact endemic and manifests in all sorts of ways: violence in the soccer arena and on the streets; interminable protest rallies and marches; sit-ins at schools and universities; increasingly aggressive and unruly driving; sound pollution; nasty graffiti; posters pasted willy-nilly on public walls; grimy bowls of water and food scattered here and there for strays; and, of course, in the inability or indifference of the state to these and so many other such phenomena. And even in the favorable decisions and amendments passed by every government to accommodate those breaking the rules and shirking their obligations. At the end of the day, it’s the suckers who dream of a different kind of Greece who end up paying the price.

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Edward Snowden @Snowden: “Stop what you’re doing and read this. The CIA developed plans to kill or kidnap an award-winning journalist whose work they did not like — before they charged him with a crime. The case against Julian Assange must be dropped—and condemned.”

• Inside The CIA’s Secret War Plans Against Wikileaks (Y!)

In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.” The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.

While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.” President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”

The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials. This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

Isikoff

Read more …

With the Russians….

• CIA Was Ready To Wage Gun Battle In London Streets Over Assange (RT)

At the peak of preparations for hostilities in 2017, the CIA was allegedly expecting Russian agents to help Assange flee the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. In such a contingency, the Americans, together with the British, were planning to engage in street battles against the Russians, potentially starting a firefight, ramming a Russian diplomatic vehicle, or shooting at the tires of a Russian plane to prevent it from lifting off, the story said. The attempt to spring Assange was reportedly expected on Christmas Eve. “It was beyond comical,” a former senior official told the outlet regarding the situation in the vicinity of the embassy at the time. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services – whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”

The CIA was also deliberating plans to kill Assange and other members of WikiLeaks, the report said. Alternatively, the agency was considering snatching him from the embassy and bringing him to the US, or handing him over to the British authorities. At the time, the UK wanted Assange for skipping bail in an extradition trial on a request from Sweden – a case that has since been dropped. The possibility of carrying out a successful rendition or assassination were described as “ridiculous” by one intelligence official, because of the location. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt – we’re talking about London,” the source was quoted as saying. There was also resistance in the Trump administration because such an operation might be deemed illegal under US law. A source said using CIA powers meant only for spy-versus-spy activities would be “the same kind of crap we pulled in the War on Terror.”

As far as the CIA was concerned, WikiLeaks prompted these extreme measures after the so-called ‘Vault 7’ publications, which exposed a cyber-offensive toolkit used by US agents. The leak of those tools was a major humiliation for US intelligence, so “Pompeo and [then-Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange,” Yahoo was told. Pompeo had to do some legal maneuvering so the agency could go more aggressively after Assange and WikiLeaks without having then-president Donald Trump sign off such operations. When, shortly after taking office, he infamously called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” during a public speech, it was more than just rhetoric, according to the report. Designating in that way allowed the CIA to file its snooping under “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which it’s allowed to conduct on its own volition. “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” a former official said.

Credico Isikoff

Read more …

Twitter thread.

• Mike Pompeo And The CIA’s War On WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (Gosztola)

Journalists for Yahoo! News finally confirmed a narrative around Mike Pompeo and the CIA’s war on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, which I outlined back in October 2019. It’s an important report. WikiLeaks’ publication of “Vault 7” materials from the CIA was hugely embarrassing. Even though the CIA had increased spying operations against WikiLeaks, they still were surprised the media organization obtained a trove of the agency’s extremely sensitive files.

CIA director Mike Pompeo was afraid President Donald Trump would learn about the “Vault 7” materials and think less of him. “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know.” But it was too important. Trump had to be informed.

[..] Recall, CIA director Mike Pompeo’s speech at CSIS, a Washington think tank, where he labeled WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” That was all to fuel a climate for aggressive action targeted against Assange, WikiLeaks staff, and associates. The CIA could not prove WikiLeaks was working at the behest of the Russian government. So rather than claim authority to target WikiLeaks that way officials sought to reframe the organization as a “hostile entity.” Then it wouldn’t matter that they weren’t working for Russia.

Read more …

Australian media are useless too.

• CIA’s Assange Abduction/Murder Plan Raises Questions For Australia (Crikey)

Revelations by a large number of former US officials, reported by Yahoo! News, that the CIA planned to abduct and render Julian Assange to the United States — and contemplated murdering him — raise more uncomfortable questions for the Australian government and its policy of trying to pretend Assange doesn’t exist. Yahoo’s investigation relies on accounts from eight former officials about the plan to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, among dozens of other sources about the Trump administration’s determination to go after Assange and WikiLeaks. The Trump administration went where even the whistleblower-hating Obama administration refused to go and launched a prosecution for espionage and conspiracy, but until now it was widely thought its plans were limited to legal extradition.

It is now clear the CIA — under Republican Mike Pompeo, who would go on to be Trump’s secretary of state — developed plans to abduct Assange and illegally render him to the US via a third country. There was discussion “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration of murdering him. There was also scenario planning about what violent measures US and UK agents might take to thwart a hypothetical Russian attempt to help Assange escape to Russia. The most obvious question for the Australian government is whether the CIA discussed with Australian intelligence officials its plans to abduct or murder an Australian citizen, or whether Trump administration figures — some of whom were alarmed by the CIA’s planning — alerted the Turnbull government at a political level.

It would say much about how unimportant Australia was, and how little we have spoken up for Assange, if the entire process was conducted without anyone bothering to raise it with the Australian government. The extent of Australian knowledge of the plans for Assange is likely never to be clarified because Australia’s intelligence agencies are able to operate behind a bipartisan wall of secrecy far stronger than that which applies to US agencies, where independent congressional oversight, a better-protected media, a stronger whistleblower culture and better disclosure laws mean much more scrutiny for intelligence agencies. In Australia there’s virtually none, with limited parliamentary oversight, brutal gag laws for intelligence officials, vexatious prosecutions and police raids on journalists willing to try to pierce the secrecy.

But there’s another angle that is also important. What sparked the CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks and set it to planning to kidnap or murder Assange was that WikiLeaks in 2017 revealed a trove of CIA software exploits, known as “Vault 7”, which had been stolen from the intelligence agency. That release was followed, within months, by news that the National Security Agency had had some of its own trove of software exploits stolen, which led to Microsoft publicly criticising intelligence agencies for failing to alert companies to exploitable software faults. The two cases illustrated how Western intelligence agencies were a key threat to our cybersecurity by intentionally leaving security weaknesses in commonly used systems so they could exploit them — leading to other states, or organised crime, to exploit them as well, in some cases using the very software tools bought or developed by intelligence agencies.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 27 2020

Oct 272020
 
 October 27, 2020  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


Henri Matisse Bathers by a River 1910

 

• Hillary Clinton Says Trump & Russian Media ‘Stole’ Election From Her (RT)
• Meacham Attacks Trump Supporters As Lizard Brains (Turley)
• Supreme Court Rules Wisconsin Ballots Must Be Received By Election Day (Fox)
• Biden’s Parade of Horribles For Changing The Supreme Court (Turley)
• Debt-To-Income Ratios Are Worse Than They Appear (RIA)
• Confirmed Influenza Cases Hit Rock-Bottom, Puzzling Experts (JTN)
• China Moves To Legalise Digital Yuan, Ban Competitors (SCMP)
• China Launches Crackdown On Mobile Web Browsers, ‘Chaos’ Of Information (R.)
• Social Media’s Erasure Of Palestinians Is A Grim Warning For Our Future (Cook)
• The Revelations Of Wikileaks: No. 9 – Opening the CIA’s Vault (CN)
• ‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason (Ron Paul)
• US Pulls Plan To Give Early Vaccine To Santa Claus (BBC)

 

 

Making Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation an election issue may not be the smartest move ever for the Dems.

But not as bad as Hillary again blaming her loss on the Russians. Look, people don’t like you. Go home. Stay home. Like Joe.

 

 

 

 

Lincoln Project

 

 

Strassel Hunter

 

 

Nothing is ever my fault.

• Hillary Clinton Says Trump & Russian Media ‘Stole’ Election From Her (RT)

Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is claiming Trump “basically stole the election” from her four years after her loss, a statement that is earning her plenty of ridicule on social media. In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast for the New York Times Opinions network released on Monday, Clinton spoke about losing in 2016 because of a “disinformation campaign” run by then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and “Russian media.” She even claimed the election was “stolen” from her. “I think that Trump and a lot of the people around him know that his victory was not on the up and up. They had an extensive campaign to suppress black voters. We now know much more about that than we did,” the former secretary of state said.


She also blamed third party voters who handed Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein historic results for their parties and claimed they were “boosted” by “Russian media.” “They had third party candidates boosted, particularly by Russian media. And the lies and ridiculous stories made up about me were meant to either keep you at home, or drive you third party if they couldn’t get you to vote for Trump,” she said. Trump, she said, holds a presidency that has an “air of illegitimacy,” something she has said many times over the past four years. She now drives Trump and Republicans “crazy” because “I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from.”

Read more …

Here, have some more deplorables.

• Meacham Attacks Trump Supporters As Lizard Brains (Turley)

We recently discussed how Vanderbilt professor and historian Jon Meacham gave a quiz in his course on the 2020 Election in which students were asked “Was the Constitution designed to perpetuate white supremacy and protect the institution of slavery?” You had to answer “yes” or get points deducted. It appears that the final exam in the class could prove even more demanding for any intellectually honest student if Meacham asks about the voters themselves. The NBC analyst this week declared that President Trump and his supporters are examples of being controlled by what is called “the lizard brain”. It only got worse from there.

Meacham addressed a simple question of whether Trump helped himself with his base in the second presidential debate Thursday night. It is impossible on NBC, however, to refer to Trump voters without some derisive or insulting precursor. Meacham did not disappoint his audience. “I think Trump did himself good with his base tonight,” Meacham said. “The question for America is how big that base is. There is a lizard brain in this country. Donald Trump is a product of the White man’s, the anguished, nervous White guy’s lizard brain.” Meacham was referring to a primitive part of the brain in psychological literature: “Many people call it the ‘Lizard Brain,’ because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.”

Of course, even with the lead held by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the polls, roughly half of this country still supports Trump (or at least rejects Biden, who Meacham has endorsed). That is a lot of lizard people. What is striking is that Meacham is supposed to give what NBC, MSNBC and PBS present as neutral, scholarly analysis. But his comment about Trump supporters having lizard brains captures why conservative or independent voters view the networks as biased and gratuitously insulting. Indeed, these comments show that networks like NBC are now focusing entirely on Democratic and liberal viewers — writing off half of the American people as gag lines.

[..] I have watched the stereotyping of Trump supporters at media conferences for years. It suggests that roughly 63 million people in this country who voted for Trump in 2016 are knuckle-dragging racists. The media have simply never tried to see any nuance or gain any insight into what is motivating Trump supporters. It is easier to dismiss them as a whole as racists and lizard people. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has declared that Trump supporters as a whole are racists. That common stereotyping of Trump supporters is uncontested, even as the media object to Trump’s generalizations about other groups. Miami Herald columnist and NBC analyst Leonard Pitts wrote a column headlined: “No, it’s not the economy, stupid. Trump supporters fear a black and brown America.”

Read more …

I know we use the term ‘election year’, but I don’t think it was ever meant to be used in this sense. It was always ‘election day’.

• Supreme Court Rules Wisconsin Ballots Must Be Received By Election Day (Fox)

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against a request by Wisconsin Democrats to allow an extension for mail-in ballots that are received after Election Day. In a 5-3 ruling, the justices refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the Nov. 3 election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold. Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic makes it necessary to extend the period in which ballots can be counted. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s hot spots for COVID-19, with hospitals treating a record high number of patients with the disease.


Republicans had opposed extending the Nov. 3 deadline, saying that voters have plenty of opportunities to cast their ballots by the close of polls on Election Day and that the rules should not be changed so close to the election. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services said that more than 201,000 people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Monday. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals had approved a six-day extension of a deadline for absentee ballots to be received in Wisconsin. Absentee ballots postmarked on or before Election Day would have been counted as long as they came in before Nov. 9. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with his conservative colleagues. Justice Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Read more …

“He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election..”

• Biden’s Parade of Horribles For Changing The Supreme Court (Turley)

The vote on Monday to make Judge Amy Coney Barrett the 115th Supreme Court justice will be more than a confirmation. It will be a dispensation, according to former Vice President Joe Biden and various Democratic senators. They have cited the vote as relieving them of any guilt in fundamentally changing the court to manufacture a liberal majority. Like school kids daring others to step over a line as an excuse to fight, Democrats insist that filling this vacancy will invite changes ranging from “packing” the court to stripping it of authority to rule in certain cases. The problem is that the line the Senate will step over is set by the Constitution, while the proposals by Democrats would retaliate against the use of a power granted by the Constitution. Democrats are floating a parade of horribles to “reform” the Supreme Court and negate its growing conservative majority.

Biden said this week that the court is “out of whack” and, as president, he would assemble a commission of “experts” to explore “a number of alternatives that go well beyond packing.” The commission would report to him 180 days after his inauguration. Polls show almost 60 percent of Americans oppose the court packing scheme supported by Democrats, including Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. One person not polled was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who denounced such a scheme as guaranteeing the court’s destruction. A New York Times and Siena College poll found only 31 percent favor court packing. That is a familiar figure: For the last four years, the same 30 percent of both parties have supported the most destructive political measures and rhetoric.

Those extremes continue to control our politics, while the vast majority of us in the middle watch in disbelief as virtually every Democratic senator embraces one of the most reviled tactics in American history. Those senators are not alone. A host of professors (who likely will be on the short list for Biden’s commission) are giving credibility to court packing. Harvard professor Michael Klarman attacked the foundations of Congress before attacking the foundations of the court. Klarman condemned a “malapportionment” in the Senate that he believes gives Republicans greater power, and referred to their refusal to vote on Obama court nominee Merrick Garland as “stealing a seat.” While controversial (and I was among those calling for a vote on Garland), that decision was clearly constitutional.

Yet Klarman illogically calls it “court packing” to justify any act of retaliation: “Democrats are not initiating this spiral. They are simply responding in kind.” He then says not to worry about Republicans responding with their own court packing when they return to power. He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election,” at least not without abandoning their values. Of course, Klarman concedes “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described” so the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur. Here are some of the other wacky ideas to get the court back into “whack.”

Read more …

Only needed to read the headline to understand why.

• Debt-To-Income Ratios Are Worse Than They Appear (RIA)

I recently published an article discussing why “recessions” are a good thing by reverting debt buildups excesses during expansions. The argument against debt reversions is always the same in that “debt-to-income” ratios low. To wit: “One reason (of many) we don’t need a debt reversion is that household debt service costs (interest etc.) as a % of household incomes are currently at a 40 year low.” – S. Porter If you look at a chart, it certainly would seem that would be the case. But, like most data from the Federal Reserve, you have to dig behind the numbers to reveal the real story. So let’s do that, shall we?

Every year, most Americans go further into debt just to “sustain” their standard of living. To wit: “In 1998, monetary velocity peaked and began to turn lower. Such coincides with the point that consumers were forced into debt to sustain their standard of living. For decades, WallStreet, advertisers, and corporate powerhouses flooded consumers with advertising to induce them into buying bigger houses, televisions, and cars. The age of ‘consumerism’ took hold.“

The idea of “maintaining a certain standard of living” has become a foundation in society currently. The average American believes they are “entitled” to a specific type of house, car, and general lifestyle. Such includes living necessities such as food, running water, electricity, and the latest mobile phone, computer, and high-speed internet connection. (Really, what would be the point of living if you didn’t have access to Facebook every two minutes?) However, maintaining this “entitled” lifestyle requires money, and as shown above, when income and savings run short, debt fills the gap.

Read more …

Are all COVID patients tested for flu?

• Confirmed Influenza Cases Hit Rock-Bottom, Puzzling Experts (JTN)

Even as worries persist over increasing COVID-19 cases in the United States, cases of another virus — influenza — have plummeted relative to their number a year ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluView influenza tracker lists an influenza-positive test percentage of 0.3% for week 42 of 2020 — a total of 33 positive tests out of 10,809 specimens. That’s down sharply from 2.4% during the same week last year. Visits to healthcare providers for “influenza-like illnesses” during week 42 were also down this year from the last, though not as sharply: This week that rate was 1.2% of all such visits, while last year it was 1.7%.

Sharp drops in influenza have also been observed elsewhere throughout the world over the past several months. World Health Organization global flu surveillance shows a severe dropoff in flu cases starting in early April; whereas in past years flu cases are sustained at a steady plateau over the mid-year months — driven by the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season — WHO observation has cases more or less disappearing from April onwards. “Globally, influenza activity remained at lower levels than expected for this time of the year,” the WHO wrote earlier this month, “though increased detections were reported in some countries.”

[..] Some experts have, perhaps unsurprisingly, cited the still-ongoing lockdowns, mitigation measures, mask mandates and social distancing orders as possible explanations for reduced flu rates worldwide. “It does seem that the rates are lower,” Phyllis Kanki, an infectious disease professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Just the News. “I think COVID mitigation measures are likely to lower levels. Some of these mitigation measures may have been particularly effective for high-risk groups for flu, like the elderly and immunosuppressed.” Nevertheless, she acknowledged, at this point there are “more questions than answers.”

[..] Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, is skeptical about the conventional wisdom that COVID mitigation efforts suppressed this year’s flu. “I think we can dismiss out of hand that that masks and social distancing are responsible for the decline in flu incidence this season,” he told Just the News, while also confessing to being uncertain as to why levels were so low. “First, why would they work for the flu, but not for COVID? Second, there is randomized evidence that those interventions do not work to suppress influenza incidence.” Bhattacharya was referring to a substantial body of evidence indicating that masks do not stop the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization review from last year found “no evidence” that masks helped to stop influenza transmission.

Read more …

Does this mean they’ll ban Bitcoin?

• China Moves To Legalise Digital Yuan, Ban Competitors (SCMP)

China is inching closer to the launch of its own sovereign digital currency by giving it a legal foundation in an upcoming law revision, while the central bank is also addressing problems that emerged in pilot tests for the digital yuan. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) published a draft law on Friday that would give legal status to the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) system, and for the first time the digital yuan has been included and defined as part of the country’s sovereign fiat currency. The draft law would also forbid any party from making or issuing yuan-backed digital tokens to replace the renminbi in the market.

Mu Changchun, head of the central bank’s digital currency research institute, said on Sunday at the Bund Summit in Shanghai that the DCEP will be allowed to circulate and be converted like physical banknotes and coins. “Its centralised management will be good to fight against cryptocurrencies and global stablecoins and prevent their erosion of currency-issuance rights,” he said. China released its design framework for the digital yuan soon after Facebook unveiled its ambitious Libra token project in the summer of last year, with plans for a two-tier issuance structure and a focus on small retail application scenarios. China appears to be the front runner in the race to issue the world’s first digital currency, having conducted a series of trials in four cities – Suzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xiongan – as well as at venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.


Earlier this month, a district in Shenzhen, just across the mainland border from Hong Kong, gave away 50,000 digital “red packets”, totalling 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million), to local residents in the largest-scale test so far. The central government has made it clear that the goals of the DCEP include replacing cash, maintaining government control over the currency and creating as many small retail application scenarios as possible. China is also looking to internationalise the yuan by enhancing its use in international settlements.

Read more …

“..dissemination of chaos by ‘self-media’“. Don’t think I’ve seen that term before.

• China Launches Crackdown On Mobile Web Browsers, ‘Chaos’ Of Information (R.)

China’s top cyber authority said on Monday it would carry out a “rectification” of Chinese mobile internet browsers to address what it called social concerns over the “chaos” of information being published online. China’s strict internet censorship rules have been tightened numerous times in recent years and in the latest crackdown, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has told firms operating mobile browsers that they have until Nov. 9 to conduct a “self examination” and rectify problems. The problems include the spreading of rumours, the use of sensationalist headlines and the publishing of content that violates the core values of socialism, it said in a statement.


“For some time, mobile browsers have grown in an uncivilised way … and have become a gathering place and amplifier for dissemination of chaos by ‘self-media’,” the CAC said, referring to independently operated social media accounts, many of which publish news. “After the rectification, mobile browsers that still have outstanding problems will be dealt with strictly according to laws and regulations until related businesses are banned.” The campaign will initially focus on eight of the most influential mobile browsers in China, including those operated by Huawei, Alibaba Group Holding’s UCWeb and Xiaomi Corp, it said.

Read more …

We all heard of Big Brother. We just never understood who he is.

• Social Media’s Erasure Of Palestinians Is A Grim Warning For Our Future (Cook)

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them. But if we wish to understand where this ultimately leads, there is no better case study than the very different ways Israelis and Palestinians have been treated by the tech giants. The treatment of Palestinians online serves as a warning that it would be foolish indeed to regard these globe-spanning corporations as politically neutral platforms, and their decisions as straightforwardly commercial. This is to doubly misunderstand their role. Social media firms are now effectively monopolistic communication grids – similar to the electricity and water grids, or the phone network of a quarter of a century ago.

Their decisions are therefore no longer private matters, but instead have huge social, economic and political consequences. That is part of the reason why the US justice department launched a lawsuit last week against Google for acting as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet”. Google, Facebook and Twitter have no more a right to arbitrarily decide who and what they host on their sites than telecoms companies once had a right to decide whether a customer should be allowed a phone line. But unlike the phone company, social media corporations control not just the means of communication, but the content too. They can decide, as the Hunter Biden story shows, whether their customers get to participate in vital public debates about who leads them.


The Hunter Biden decision is as if the phone company of old not only listened in to conversations, but was able to cut the line if it did not like the politics of any particular customer. In fact, it is even worse than that. Social media now deliver the news to large sections of the population. Their censoring of a story is more akin to the electricity company turning off the power to everyone’s homes for the duration of a TV broadcast to ensure no one can see it.

Read more …

At least Merkel said she was angry. But after that, crickets.

• The Revelations Of Wikileaks: No. 9 – Opening the CIA’s Vault (CN)

As its publisher remains in prison awaiting judgment on his extradition case, we continue our series of looking at WikiLeaks’ significant revelations contributing to the public’s right to know. On Feb. 6, 2017, WikiLeaks released documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s espionage program in the months leading up to and following France’s presidential election in 2012. The agency used spies and cyberweapons to infiltrate and hack into the major political parties with competing candidates — the Socialists, the National Front and the Union for a Popular Movement. Their candidates — respectively François Hollande, Marine Le Pen and incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy — were also spied upon individually, as were many other prominent political figures.

The objectives of the program included ascertaining the contending parties’ political strategies and platforms, their views of the U.S., and their relations with the European Union, with other European nations (Germany, Britain) as well as Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, and others. The CIA’s French operation lasted 10 months, beginning in November 2011 and enduring until September 2012, several months after Hollande won the election and formed a Socialist government. WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the agency’s project bears a special irony: It was just as WikiLeaks published this material in 2017 that the CIA helped propagate unsubstantiated (and later discounted) “intelligence” that Russian hackers and propagandists were interfering with France’s presidential election that year.


Similar allegations (similarly lacking in evidence) were floated as the European Union held parliamentary elections in May 2019. As WikiLeaks reported at the time of the releases on the CIA’s covert activities in France, those revelations were to serve “as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.” WikiLeaks’ apparent intent was to display a CIA’s hacking operation in action. Vault 7, the subject of this latest report on the history of WikiLeaks disclosures, stands as the most extensive publication on record of classified and confidential CIA documents. Never before and not since have the agency’s innumerable programs and capabilities been so thoroughly exposed to public scrutiny.

Read more …

“People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts.”

• ‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason (Ron Paul)

The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out. Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential. Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories.

Publication of the “Iraq War Diaries” showed us all the brutality of the US attack on Iraq. It told us the truth about the US invasion and occupation of that country. This was no war of defense against a nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. This was no liberation of the country. We were not “bringing democracy” to Iraq. No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the US attack was a war of aggression, based on lies, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured. We learned that the US military classified anyone they killed in Iraq as “enemy combatants.” We learned that more than 700 Iraqi civilians were killed for “driving too close” to one of the hundreds of US military checkpoints – including pregnant mothers-to-be rushing to the hospital.

We learned that US military personnel routinely handed “detainees” over to Iraqi security forces where they would be tortured and often killed. Ten years after Assange’s brave act of journalism changed the world and exposed one of the crimes of the century, he sits alone in solitary confinement in a UK prison. He sits literally fighting for his life, as if he is successfully extradited to the United States he faces 175 years in a “supermax” prison for committing “espionage” against a country of which he is not a citizen. On the Iraq war we have punished the truth-tellers and rewarded the criminals. People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts. In fact, they got off scot free and many even prospered.

Julian Assange explained that he published the Iraq War Diaries because he “hoped to correct some of the attack on truth that occurred before the war, and that continued on since that war officially ended.” We used to praise brave journalists not afraid to take on the “bad guys.” Now we torture and imprison them.

Assange 10 years later

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Read it twice, still can’t decide if it’s serious.

• US Pulls Plan To Give Early Vaccine To Santa Claus (BBC)

The US has cancelled plans to offer Santa Claus performers early access to a coronavirus vaccine in exchange for their help in promoting it publicly. Those who perform as Mrs Claus and elves would also have been eligible for the jabs. The festive collaboration was part of a $250m (£192m) government campaign to garner celebrity endorsements of vaccinations once they are approved. But health authorities confirmed the advertising campaign had been scrapped. Ric Erwin, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, called the news “extremely disappointing.”


“This was our greatest hope for Christmas 2020, and now it looks like it won’t happen,” he told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has since confirmed the existence of the Santa plan to the New York Times. The idea was initially conceived by Michael Caputo, a former assistant secretary at the department. Mr Caputo announced last month that he would be going on leave, shortly after posting a video to Facebook where he accused government scientists of engaging in “sedition” against President Donald Trump.

Read more …

 

 

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The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement “this is my last cigarette” holds true.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

 

 

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

 

 

 

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Julian Assange and the Conservative Press

Sep 132020
 
 September 13, 2020  Posted by at 6:17 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Rembrandt van RIjn A Woman Standing with a Candle c.1631

 

 

To be honest, I didn’t think it would ever happen, even though it’s been so obvious for so long. But all of a sudden, the conservative voices questioning the Russia collusion narrative and all the investigations that followed from it, are finally figuring out that those behind that narrative and all that resulted from it, are the same people who have been chasing down Julian Assange for many years.

And that to get to the bottom of the hunt for Trump by the DNC, Clinton campaign, US intelligence and last but not least the media in their pockets, the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN et al, they will have to take a much closer look at what happened to Assange. If they don’t they will never understand. How do we know it’s starting to dawn on them? Look at this illustration at the Last Refuge site yesterday. More on them later.

Note: the mostly left wing Assange supporters would do good to consider the same thing: they in turn must look into the RussiaRussia Trump collusion stories, much as they may not like the president. Because those stories are why Assange has been chased down like so much roadkill. And because the right win of America is their best chance at getting him pardoned/released. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, to put it bluntly. Sometimes you need blunt.

 

 

As I’ve pointed out countless times, the Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign -and presidency- may have come up glaringly empty, but the report they issued maintained that “13 Russians” and Julian Assange were responsible for hacking DNC emails. There is no proof of this, but since none of the “accused” can speak out, the report make the claim, and did.

Actually, a source connected to the “13 Russians” that was also named, the firm Concord Management, linked to Internet Research Agency, both owned by “Putin’s cook” Yevgeniy Prigozhin, one of the 13 Russians, did speak out and hired lawyers in the US. The case was quietly dropped when it became clear Mueller had nothing on them. The rest didn’t speak, and hired no defense, so that part of the report, nonsense as it may be, still stands.

Mueller et al could simply have met with Assange, he wasn’t going anywhere as they knew, but they didn’t, because A) the last thing they wanted was confirmation that “the Russians” did not provide any information to WikiLeaks, since that was what little was left of what the entire report was based on, and B) they wanted to make Assange look like an enemy of the US. Meeting with him would have blown both A) and B) out of the water, and he wouldn’t have been any use to them, or the DNC, or the FBI/CIA/DOJ. Assange was useful to them exactly because he could *not* speak.

 

The wake up call for the right must have been Tucker Carlson’s interview with Glenn Greenwald about Assange this week. Of which I said: “Bless Tucker Carlson for providing the platform. Bless Glenn Greenwald for his eloquent statement. Don’t miss this.” But still, as I also said: “Wonder why it took the right wing so long to wake up to how Julian Assange is linked to the whole machine. Did they really need Tucker Carlson for that?”

Greenwald said Trump could pardon Assange, and Snowden too, and there’s “widespread support across the political spectrum for doing both” (something I never heard anyone confirm, btw), and “the only people who would be angry would be Susan Rice, John Brennan, Jim Comey and James Clapper, because they’re the ones who both of them exposed”. Well, there’s your people. Those are the people who’ve been after both Trump and Assange since at least 2015.
Do both sides realize what they have in common now?

 

 

I don’t want to make this too long, and there’s more ground to cover. First, take a look at what Paul Craig Roberts had to say recently. He knows the territory. He worked extensively both as a journalist before that became a tainted term, and served under Ronald Reagan as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Like his views on economics or not, he knows a thing or two about DC. Here’s what he had to say 3 days ago, which ties right into the Assange/RussiaRussia/Mueller/CIA tall tale :

The United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left

To stop Kennedy they assassinated him. To stop Trump they concocted Russiagate, Impeachgate, and a variety of wild and unsubstantiated accusations. The presstitutes repeat the various accusations as if they are absolute proven truth. The presstitutes never investigated a single one of the false accusations. These efforts to remove Trump did not succeed. Having pulled off numerous color revolutions in which the US has overthrown foreign governments, the tactics are now being employed against Trump. The November presidential election will not be an election. It will be a color revolution.

[..] the CIA has controlled the prestige American media since 1950. The American media does not provide news. It provides the Deep State’s explanations of events. This ensures that real news does not interfere with the agenda. The German journalst, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote a book, Bought Journalism, in which he showed that the CIA also controls the European press. To be clear, there are two CIA organizations. One is an agency that monitors world events and endeavors to provide more or less accurate information to policymakers.

The other is a covert operations agency. This agency assassinates people, including an American president, and overthrows uncooperative governments. President Truman publicly stated after he was out of office that he made a serious mistake in permitting the covert operations branch of the CIA. He said that it was an unaccountable government in itself. President Eisenhower agreed and in his last address to the American people warned of the growing unaccountable power of the military/security complex. President Kennedy realized the threat and said he was going “to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but they killed him first.

It would be easy for the CIA to kill Trump, but the “lone assassin” has been used too many times to be believable. It is easier to overthrow Trump’s reelection with false accusations as the CIA controls the American and European media and has many Internet sites pretending to be dissident, a claim that fools insouciant Americans.

Indeed, it is the leftwing that the CIA owns. The rightwing goes along because they think it is patriotic to support the military/security complex. After the CIA overthrows Trump, they will use Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and their presstitutes to foment race war. Then the CIA will ride in on the Pale Horse, and the population will submit.

And yes, you are right, Julian Assange got in the way of that. Not because he hated Hillary Clinton, though he detested what she and Obama did to Libya, but because Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning provided him with material that bore witness to the crimes committed by the US intelligence “cabal”. In Snowden’s case, it was the NSA spying on -the- American people, in Manning’s it was war crimes executed overseas.

The way the “cabal” reacted to all that material -there was/is a lot- was to link Assange to a fictitious story about Russia meddling in US elections, a very convenient link because it tied into what they were already constructing to get rid of Trump.

Here is lawyer “sundance” at the Conservative Treehouse (aka The Last Refuge). The -recommended- article has a lot more info, not just on Assange, but also on the set-up of the “cabal”; he’s been digging for a long time. I know, it’s right wing media. But nobody else will cover this. And we want to get Assange released, don’t we?! So take a listen to how similar this is, written yesterday, to what I, and others, have been saying about the case for a long time.

Again, I have no idea why it took so long for people like “sundance” to catch up, but it’s people like him who may well be our best shot at keeping Assange alive. And people like Tucker, of course; you can bet Trump is watching him, and has seen the Greenwald interview by now.

 

What’s Behind The DOJ Aggression Toward Julian Assange

Nancy Pelosi previously labeled all Trump supporters as “enemies of the state.” Similarly we note the apparatus of the administrative state labels Julian Assange the same. There’s a good argument that the reason why Assange is considered such a threat to the U.S. is specifically because he could expose the lies of the administrative state.

As a consequence the U.S. intelligence apparatus has targeted the WikiLeaks founder and the Bill Barr DOJ is being extremely aggressive in their effort to get control of him. Tucker Carlson discussed this dynamic last night; albeit stopping short of the brutally honest part. To understand the risk Julian Assange represents to the administrative state, it is important to understand the extent of CIA, FBI and DOJ operations in 2016.

[..] On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the EDVA. From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018. On Tuesday April 15th more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to…. The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time.

The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019. Why the delay? What was the DOJ waiting for? Here’s where it gets interesting…. The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.” [..]

Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017. Within three months of the grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018.

The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe was ongoing. As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London<, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed.

As a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17; this timing against Assange is just too coincidental. It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.

This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.

The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.

The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative. Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.

This Russian “hacking” claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus…. Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public. Now, if we know this, and you know this; and everything is cited and factual… well, then certainly AG Bill Barr knows this.

 

That is a lot of information in one go, and not much of it is new, at least to me or to regular readers of the Automatic Earth. What is new is that the Conservative press are figuring out that if they want to defend Trump against the “cabal”, they need to look much more deeply into the role Julian Assange has played in the whole story, especially over the past few years.

And as I said above, it would be good if the “Free Assange” side would so something similar, reach out, because the Conservative press may well be the best ally there is for their cause. It’s not about how you feel about Trump, it’s about the “cabal” targeting Trump through Assange, and the other way around.

And in the end it’s real simple: Trump has the power to pardon Assange and set him free, him and Snowden. Would you rather *not* appeal to that power, and leave Julian to rot in Belmarsh and g-d knows where next, or do you think you now understand how the game has been played, and will be going forward? Your pick. But remember: it will take Trump overruling Bill Barr and the DOJ, and the right wing can’t do that alone.

 

One last thing, something I’ve also tried to explain umpteen times: Whenever you see someone claim that Assange plays to his personal political choices, or that he has something anything to do with the Kremlin, or that he lies about anything at all, please remember this: Julian Assange has always been acutely aware of the one weakness of WikiLeaks which is simultaneously its main strength:

That is, he cannot lie, he cannot align with a political side, he cannot align with any one country or ideology (I would almost write: ”he could not” instead of he cannot, but thank God Julian is alive, so I will not).

The reason for this is that people like Snowden and Manning and many others, who are in possession of highly sensitive evidence of government or intelligence malfeasance, must be sure the material will not be used for -party- political purposes, or to make a country look good, and first and foremost that it is not distorted or lied about in any way, shape or form.

Because if Julian Assange would ever do any such thing, the bond of trust would be broken, for every single potential future source and/or whistleblower, and for all time. He would never be able to repair that. It would be the end of WikiLeaks, right there. Julian would never have allowed that to happen to his brainchild; he would die first. And they all know it, the entire “cabal”; that’s why you read in the press what you do, that’s why the smear campaigns are there. None of which are even remotely true.

A last last thing: Julian Assange is so skilled at the digital side of things that no secret service in the entire world, no matter how many people they put on it, has ever come close to hacking or breaking into WikiLeaks. That should make us all feel safer, and that is why there are all these attempts to make us feel the opposite.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 11 2020

May 112020
 
 May 11, 2020  Posted by at 11:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  26 Responses »


Andre Derain Boats at Collioure 1905

 

• Wuhan Reports 5 New Coronavirus Cases, Its Highest Surge In 2 Months (RT)
• New Zealand To Reopen Malls, Cafes From Thursday As Virus Curbs Eased (R.)
• How New Zealand Put Coronavirus On The Brink Of Elimination (Wired)
• Men Have High Levels Of ACE2 Enzyme Key To COVID-19 Infection (R.)
• Inside House Democrats’ $1.2 Trillion+ Coronavirus Relief Proposal (Axios)
• 43 Million Americans Could Lose Health Insurance Amid Pandemic (G.)
• Unemployment Numbers ‘Will Get Worse Before They Get Better’ – Mnuchin (NPR)
• A 6.4 Million Discrepancy In The Employment Report (Mish)
• Schumer Calls On VA Dep. To Explain Use Of HCQ (AP)
• Number Of Hydroxychloroquine Prescriptions Explodes In France (F.)
• Zinc Hope In Coronavirus Fight (Telegraph India)
• Guaidó’s Mercenary Hit Contract On Maduro Mirrors Official US Bounty (MacLeod)
• AG Barr’s Office Shreds Chuck Todd For ‘Deceptive Editing’ (DW)
• DNI Has Communications Between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks For 4 Years (GP)

 

 

• For the first time since March 10 (!!!), Italy reported less than 1,000 new cases of coronavirus.

• The US had +20,329 new confirmed coronavirus cases today, the lowest number since late March, bringing the total to 1,367,638, of which 1,030,515 are still active.
 


Click to enlarge in new tab

 

 

 

• Cases 4,200,957 (+ 79,179 from yesterday’s 4,121,778)

• Deaths 284,150 (+ 3,282 from yesterday’s 280,868)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

 

 

From Worldometer

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

Open up!

• Wuhan Reports 5 New Coronavirus Cases, Its Highest Surge In 2 Months (RT)

Original hotspot of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Chinese city of Wuhan, has reported five new indigenous cases as the number of infections across mainland China has slightly grown as well. China reported seventeen new cases of the novel coronavirus on Monday – three more than the day before. Of the newly-detected cases, seven are linked to overseas travel, and 10 are believed to be the result of local transmission. In addition to five indigenous cases in Wuhan, three other came from Jilin province, one from Liaoning, northeastern Chinese province bordering North Korea, and another one from Heilongjiang province, bordering Russia.

While the figure might not sound that alarming, considering that China was adding thousands of cases mid-February, when it was going through the peak of the pandemic, it still marks the nation’s biggest jump in confirmed infections since April, 28. The latest data from Wuhan, which just late last month celebrated the recovery of the last patient with severe Covid-19, can be seen as a worrying sign as well since it the most significant increase in cases for the pandemic ground zero in two months. Last time Wuhan reported more than five new cases in a single day (8) was on March 11. However, it was not before the beginning of April when the last remaining travel restrictions imposed on the city, as it was fighting the outbreak, were lifted after 76 days of lockdown.


Around the same time, Wuhan for the first time reported zero daily deaths from the disease. Considering the steady drop in the number of new coronavirus patients, Beijing has gradually relaxed coronavirus measures across the country, on Thursday declaring the whole territory of China as ‘low risk” in terms of coronavirus. Apart from Hubei, there has been a surge in infections in Shulan, in the northeastern Jilin province, where all of the new cases are believed to be traced to a single woman. Concerned about the possible second wave of the desease, local authorities raised the risk level from low to medium last week.

Read more …

Lockdowns work. In principle. That says little about their execution, but I already covered that. If people want to be skeptical of something, at least make sure you know what you’re skeptical about.

• New Zealand To Reopen Malls, Cafes From Thursday As Virus Curbs Eased (R.)

New Zealand businesses including malls, cinemas, cafes and gyms will reopen on Thursday after some of the tightest restrictions in the world to stop the spread of the coronavirus were further loosened on Monday. The Pacific nation was locked down for more than month under “level 4” restrictions that were eased by a notch in late April. It has continued to enforce strict social measures on many of its citizens and businesses, helping prevent widespread community spread of the virus. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the staggered move to “level 2” restrictions will mean retail, restaurants and other public spaces including playgrounds can reopen from Thursday.

Schools can open from next Monday while bars can only reopen from May 21, Ardern said. Gatherings would be limited to 10 people. “The upshot is that in 10 days’ time we will have reopened most businesses in New Zealand, and sooner than many other countries around the world,” Ardern told a news conference. “But that fits with our plan – go hard, go early – so we can get our economy moving again sooner, and so we get the economic benefit of getting our health response right.” Businesses will be required to have physical distancing and strict hygiene measures in place. Air New Zealand announced it would resume seven more domestic routes when the country enters alert level 2.


International travel, however, would not be possible as borders will remain closed except for returning New Zealanders. The measures would be reviewed again in two weeks, Ardern said. The government plans to introduce a new law that would allow authorities to enforce physical distancing and control gatherings of people after questions were raised about the legality of lockdown rules. Three new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed on Monday, the health ministry said in a statement. The cases – two hospital nurses and one related to overseas travel – bring New Zealand’s total confirmed COVID-19 infections to 1,147, the ministry said, adding that 93% of all confirmed and probable cases have recovered.

Read more …

New Zealand is 2,500 miles, 4,000 km, from Australia, its nearest neighbor. Amid all the hosanna, that must not be forgotten. European countries, for instance, have no such advantages.

New Zealand can simply close its doors. But yeah, they did it along with a strict lockdown.

• How New Zealand Put Coronavirus On The Brink Of Elimination (Wired)

On February 28, the news emerged of New Zealand’s first case of Covid-19. For Michael Baker, a government advisor and epidemiologist at the University of Otago in Wellington, the following weeks would be a time of extreme anxiety. While New Zealand is now regarded as a global success story in containing the coronavirus – as of May 7 it has reported just 1,489 cases and 21 deaths amongst a population of five million – this did not always appear such a likely outcome. Indeed, scientists believe that without the right strategies being swiftly implemented at crucial times, the country could have experienced more than 1,000 cases a day, overwhelming its fragile healthcare network.

When the news arrived that Covid-19 had reached New Zealand’s shores, Baker had already been monitoring the seemingly inexorable global progression of the pandemic since early January. He was well aware of the devastation wreaked by the virus in Wuhan, and grim reports were already filtering through of the worsening outbreak in Italy. While New Zealand’s relative geographical isolation had provided some protection thus far, he knew how swiftly the tide could turn. “It was the most intense period of my working life,” he says. “The distant drumbeat was getting louder and I felt we were on a knife edge in terms of what would happen.”

A member of the Ministry of Health’s technical advisory group, Baker had read the report of the World Health Organisation’s joint mission to China at the end of February. “It showed that the Chinese had done the almost impossible, they’d stopped a pandemic in full flight which was remarkable,” he says. “This showed that it was containable.” Inspired by this, and reports from fellow island nations such as Taiwan who had also managed to contain the outbreak, he realised that if New Zealand acted swiftly and strongly, it could prevent a disaster before it had even begun. He started calling for an approach to eliminate, rather than merely suppress the virus.

At that point – like most other countries – New Zealand was applying the same action plans for Covid-19 as with a bout of pandemic influenza, steadily ramping up their response as the pandemic progressed to try and mitigate it and flatten the curve. But while the rate at which influenza is transmitted means it is nigh impossible to stop, the data showed that Covid-19 was different. “The fundamental difference is that the virus incubation period is longer for Covid-19,” said Baker. “For influenza, it’s one to three days depending on what strain, and with Covid-19 it’s about five days on average. This means that contact tracing and quarantining contacts really does work if you do it quickly enough.”

Epidemiologists began advising the government to change strategy and implement a preventative full lockdown. This involved completely shutting the borders, and enforcing a maximum containment policy where the entire population bar essential workers were required to stay at home unless for medical reasons or food supplies. “We recommended going early and hard,” Baker says. “There are two advantages to that. First you prevent a lot of cases and deaths, and also if you control it early, there’s fewer chains of transmission that have to be stamped out and so your lockdown is likely to be for a shorter period of time.”

Read more …

Not new, and this take reads a bit too much like a Big Pharma ad. And what does this mean: Inhibitors don’t lead to higher concentrations? Would be bad if they did, no?

“..widely-prescribed drugs called ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) did not lead to higher ACE2 concentrations ..”

• Men Have High Levels Of ACE2 Enzyme Key To COVID-19 Infection (R.)

Men’s blood has higher levels than women’s of a key enzyme used by the new coronavirus to infect cells, the results of a big European study showed on Monday — a finding which may help explain why men are more vulnerable to infection with COVID-19. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is found in the heart, kidneys and other organs. In COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, it is thought to play a role in how the infection progresses into the lungs. The study, published in the European Heart Journal, also found that widely-prescribed drugs called ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) did not lead to higher ACE2 concentrations and should therefore not increase the COVID-19 risk for people taking them.

ACE inhibitors and ARBs are widely prescribed to patients with congestive heart failure, diabetes or kidney disease. The drugs account for billions of dollars in prescription sales worldwide. “Our findings do not support the discontinuation of these drugs in COVID-19 patients,” said Adriaan Voors, a professor of cardiology at the University Medical Center (UMC) Groningen in The Netherlands, who co-led the study. [..] Death and infection tolls point to men being more likely than women to contract the disease and to suffer severe or critical complications if they do. Analysing thousands of men and women, Voors’ team measured ACE2 concentrations in blood samples taken from more than 3,500 heart failure patients from 11 European countries.


The study had started before the coronavirus pandemic, the researchers said, and so did not include patients with COVID-19. But when other research began to point to ACE2 as key to the way the new coronavirus gets into cells, Voors and his team saw important overlaps with their study. “When we found that one of the strongest biomarkers, ACE2, was much higher in men than in women, I realised that this had the potential to explain why men were more likely to die from COVID-19 than women,” said Iziah Sama, a doctor at UMC Groningen who co-led the study.

Read more …

• Inside House Democrats’ $1.2 Trillion+ Coronavirus Relief Proposal (Axios)

House Democrats could bring their phase 4 coronavirus relief package (CARES 2) to the floor for a vote as early as this week — but, for now at least, it’s going nowhere. The state of play: Democrats have crafted a $1.2 trillion+ package without input from the White House or Hill Republicans, congressional aides familiar with their plans tell Axios. • GOP leadership says it’s still waiting for billions of aid allocated in the first $2.2 trillion CARES Act to go out the door. • The White House says it wants to evaluate the economic impact of reopening before passing another large stimulus package. But House Democrats see the proposal as a way to lay down a marker of their priorities and prod congressional Republicans and the White House toward more economic relief for individuals, state and local governments, and the U.S. Postal Service.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her caucus also want to show voters that they’re still working, despite members remaining in their districts. Those optics could be important politically given the Senate’s decision to return to Washington last week. (House Republicans have been chiding Democrats for staying home in their districts when, they say, they should be at work.)

Details: The legislation, which is still being drafted and is subject to change, is expected to include:
• Roughly $1 trillion for state and local governments. They want to split this money into separate revenue streams to ensure each community can access it.
• More money for hospitals and COVID-19 testing.
• Roughly $25 billion to keep the U.S. Postal Service afloat.
• Expanded nutritional benefits, Medicaid funding and unemployment insurance (which they call “paycheck guarantee”).
• Another round of direct payments to Americans.

House leadership is also working on narrowing down the guidelines for how these funds are allocated to ensure that people aren’t “double dipping” into the different pots of money, a senior Democratic aide told Axios. For example, they do not want someone who is receiving more unemployment money to also receive money through the Paycheck Protection Program. However, it’s still unclear whether the PPP fund will be replenished. “We’re trying to limit the amount of overlap so people aren’t abusing the system,” the aide said. The package will not include liability protection for businesses, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said is a top priority for Republicans.

It also will not include a payroll tax cut, something President Trump has insisted on. House Democrats have said both of these proposals are nonstarters. The backdrop: This comes as the pandemic continues to choke the U.S. economy — which shed 20.5 million jobs in April as unemployment hit 14.7%.

Read more …

Want to keep a pandemic going? Make sure people fear seeking treatment.

• 43 Million Americans Could Lose Health Insurance Amid Pandemic (G.)

As many as 43 million Americans could lose their health insurance in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute. Prior to the pandemic, 160 million Americans, or roughly half the population, received their medical insurance through their job. The tidal wave of layoffs triggered by quarantine measures now threatens that coverage for millions. Up to 7 million of those people are unlikely to find new insurance as poor economic conditions drag on, researchers at the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation thinktanks predict. Such enormous insurance losses could dramatically alter America’s healthcare landscape, and will probably result in more deaths as people avoid unaffordable healthcare.

“The status quo is incredibly inefficient, it’s incredibly unfair, it’s tied to employment for no real reason,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “This problem exposes a lot of the inadequacies in our system.” If the pandemic results in a 20% unemployment rate, as some analysts expect, researchers at the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) predict anywhere from 25 to 43 million people could lose health insurance. Many will use social safety nets to obtain insurance, including Medicaid, the public health insurance program for low-income people. However, eligibility criteria varies from state to state, with more restrictions in Republican-led states.“It’s incredibly segmented and every state has a different story,” said Hempstead. “There’s 50 different experiences.”


[..] Of those who lose employer-based insurance, an estimated 7 million Americans will remain uninsured, and will lack access to healthcare during the worst pandemic in a century, RWJF predicted. Another 30 million people lacked insurance even before the pandemic, according to the Urban Institute. “You have people who think they have an infectious disease, but they don’t want to come forward to get tested or get treatment because they’re so worried about what kind of financial liabilities they will have,” said Hempstead. “This problem exposes, really, a lot of the inadequacies in our system.”

Read more …

Steven has no idea how much worse.

• Unemployment Numbers ‘Will Get Worse Before They Get Better’ – Mnuchin (NPR)

The worst of the nation’s historic job losses are yet to come, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who told Fox News Sunday that “the reported numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better.” Mnuchin’s comments followed Friday’s report from the Labor Department showing the U.S. lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, bringing the jobless rate to its highest level since the Great Depression — 14.7%. But even that figure fails to account for the millions of workers who have stopped searching for jobs or those considered “underemployed.” Asked by host Chris Wallace whether the nation’s true unemployment rate was close to 25%, Mnuchin responded, “we could be.”


“This is no fault of American business, this is no fault of American workers, this is a result of a virus,” he said before warning, “You’re going to have a very, very bad second quarter.” Two weeks ago, Mnuchin’s outlook was more optimistic — he told Wallace that the economy would reopen through June and “bounce back” over the summer. On Sunday, he said the economy would “have a better third quarter,” followed by “a better fourth quarter, and next year is going to be a great year.” The Trump Administration is considering additional stimulus measures, including a payroll tax cut, according to Mnuchin, who also said on Sunday, “We’re not gonna do things just to bail out states that were poorly managed.” But he said the White House would wait a “few weeks” before considering another relief bill.

Read more …

The BLS doesn’t have the data, so they release a report they know is false.

• A 6.4 Million Discrepancy In The Employment Report (Mish)

There is a 6.4 million discrepancy between the change in employment level and the change in unemployment level. Such is a new all time record discrepancy between employment and unemployment in the Household Survey that measures the unemployment rate. I created the lead chart as follows: Discrepancy = Change in Employment Level – (-1 * Change in Unemployment Level)

Confirmation
• The number of employed fell by 22.369 million.
• Those unemployed only rose by 15.938 million.
• Employment discrepancy is 22.369 – 15.938 = 6.431 million

Negligible Labor Force Discrepancy
• Change in Labor Force: -6.431 Million
• Change in Not in Labor Force: +6.570 Million
• The labor force discrepancy is 6.570 – 6.431 = 0.139 million

Discrepancy Comparison
• Employment Discrepancy Percentage: 28.8%
• Labor Force Discrepancy Percentage: 2.1%

Unemployment Rate Formula
• Unemployment Rate = (Unemployed / Labor Force) * 100 Therefore, the unemployment Rate = (23.078 / 156.481) * 100 = 14.7% That is how the BLS calculated the unemployment rate.

Factoring in the Employment Discrepancy
• Unemployment Rate = ((23.078 + 6.431) / 156.481) * 100 = 18.6%

Read more …

They’re not going to rest until there’s an anti-hydroxychloroquine law.

• Schumer Calls On VA Dep. To Explain Use Of HCQ (AP)

The Senate’s top Democrat on Sunday called on the Department of Veterans Affairs to explain why it allowed the use of an unproven drug on veterans for the coronavirus, saying patients may have been put at unnecessary risk. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York said the VA needs to provide Congress more information about a recent bulk order for $208,000 worth of hydroxychloroquine. President Donald Trump has heavily promoted the malaria drug, without evidence, as a treatment for COVID-19. Schumer’s request comes after a whistleblower complaint filed this past week by former Health and Human Services official Rick Bright alleged that the Trump administration, eager for a quick fix to the onslaught of the coronavirus, wanted to “flood” hot spots in New York and New Jersey with the drug.

Major veterans organizations have urged VA to explain under what circumstances VA doctors initiate discussion of hydroxychloroquine with veterans as a treatment option. “There are concerns that they are using this drug when the medical evidence says it doesn’t help and could hurt,” Schumer said in an interview with The Associated Press. He said given the fact the malaria drug, despite being untested, had been repeatedly pushed publicly by Trump, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie must address whether anyone at the department was pressured by the White House or the administration to use hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

Schumer said Wilkie also should answer questions about a recent analysis of VA hospital data that showed there were more deaths among patients given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, including how much patients knew about the drug’s risks before taking it. Wilkie in recent weeks has denied that veterans were used as test subjects for the drug and that it was instead administered at government-run VA hospitals only when medically appropriate, with mutual consent between doctor and patient. Still, Wilkie has repeatedly declined to say how widely the drug was being used for COVID-19 and whether the department had issued broad guidance to doctors and patients on the use of the drug.

In a weekly call with veterans’ groups this past week, Wilkie continued to defend VA’s use of hydroxychloroquine. He dismissed the recent analysis of VA hospital data showing no benefits to patients, suggesting the poor outcomes were because the cases involved older, very sick veterans. He has not said whether the department will continue to use the drug. “Use of this medication for treatment of COVID-19 is considered ‘off label’ — perfectly legal and not rare,” he wrote in an April 29 letter to veterans’ groups.

Read more …

Meanwhile in the real world…

Maybe this should read “French Doctors Attempt Mass Cull Of Their Patients”.

• Number Of Hydroxychloroquine Prescriptions Explodes In France (F.)

Despite the warnings around taking hydroxychloroquine to combat the symptoms of COVID-19, prescriptions in France have increased by as much as 7,000% in certain parts of the country since the pandemic began. As reported by La Provence, a study looking at the 466 million French prescriptions written since the pandemic began in France, show a huge spike in doctors prescribing the drug. In the last week of March, for instance, over 10,000 people were prescribed hydroxychloroquine in Marseille alone. In France and the U.S., the use of hydroxychloroquine has been fraught between those who think the risks are small enough to warrant widespread use and those who think that more research is required before widespread prescription.

Following research conducted in China, a French doctor, Didier Raoult–head of the IHU, the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Marseille–claimed at the beginning of March that he had successfully treated patients suffering from coronavirus with the drug. Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug also used to treat people suffering from lupus. It is sold under its trader name of Plaquénil in France. Shortly afterwards, President Trump, tweeted the same news, that a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin could work with patients. The latter is an anti-bacterial drug, given in tandem, to eliminate the risks of bacterial infection.

Health professionals were quick to point out that no one should be using the drug without further research showing clear evidence that the drugs do work under a peer-reviewed clinical trial. Dr Anthony Fauci, Trump’s advisor downplayed the drug’s impacts as purely “anecdotal” and others issued warnings that the drug can cause severe health impacts if taken in an unsupervised capacity, such as heart problems. Before the pandemic, an average of 50 prescriptions were written each day in Marseille for hydroxychloroquine. The day after Didier Raoult announced his findings in Marseille, this had jumped to 450 per day. On March 18th, that figure had spiked again and there were 5,000 prescriptions in just one day across the whole of France.

The research authors believe that 41,000 people were given the drug between March 16 and April 19. Prescriptions have been higher in Paris and Marseille (where Didier Raoult heads the IHU, the Institute of Infectious Diseases). The study also noted that most people who were granted access to the drug across France were from higher socio-economic groups.

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Indian doctors in New York. “In the absence of options such as remdesivir being available..” Well, we’ll take care of that..

• Zinc Hope In Coronavirus Fight (Telegraph India)

Doctors have reported that adding zinc sulfate, a dietary supplement, to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin may benefit patients with coronavirus disease, adding a twist to the controversy over the rationale for prescribing hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. Doctors at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine have found that adding zinc sulfate to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin already given to Covid-19 patients decreased the need for ventilation or admission to intensive care units, and lowered mortality. Their study provides the first evidence through patients that zinc sulfate in combination with the other two drugs may have a role in the treatment of Covid-19, the doctors said.

Their study was posted on Friday in a database for medical research but has not been peer-reviewed yet. “The latest evidence suggests against much benefit from hydroxychloroquine, but this study raises the question of possible benefit of zinc and hydroxychloroquine together,” Joseph Rahimian, the doctor who led the research, told The Telegraph via email. The findings could be relevant to India where experts with the Indian Council of Medical Research and other institutions have introduced the hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin combination for the treatment of Covid-19 patients. Rahimian and his colleagues introduced zinc sulfate to Covid-19 patients as New York entered the ranks of cities hit the hardest by the pandemic.


They tracked the outcomes of the infections in 521 patients who received hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and 411 who received zinc sulfate in addition to the two drugs. They observed that adding zinc sulfate was associated with a “most striking” decrease in mortality among patients who did not require intensive care. The association was not significant among patients who were treated in intensive care, implying that the addition of zinc should be considered early during treatment. “The benefit is likely to be more pronounced with its earlier use,” Rahimian said. “In the absence of options such as remdesivir being available, zinc with hydroxychloroquine may be a consideration. A randomised trial of the two versus placebo would help clarify whether there is a clear benefit and (the) extent of any potential benefit,” he added.

Read more …

https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1258888363593150466

• Guaidó’s Mercenary Hit Contract On Maduro Mirrors Official US Bounty (MacLeod)

Juan Guaidó was expecting to be in Venezuela’s Presidential Palace by now. But the comically bungling May 3 invasion attempt by US mercenaries and opposition members was the latest indication of the desperate measures he and his cronies have resorted to. The fighters hired under his name were immediately overpowered in the sleepy coastal village of Chuao by disgruntled members of the House of Socialist Fishermen, and some of the highly trained mercenaries appeared to literally wet themselves in terror when apprehended. Now, a 41-page contract outlining the details and conditions of the coup attempt has been leaked. It sheds new light on the arrangement between Guaidó and Silvercorp, the American private security firm he hired,.

The self-declared President of Venezuela promised to pay Jordan Goudreau, founder of the Florida-based firm, $212.9 million to capture, detain or “remove” President Nicolas Maduro and install him in his place. The contract goes into detail about who the mercenaries were allowed to engage in “kinetic strikes” (i.e. assassinate and kill). It first names a number of paramilitary organizations like the Colombian FARC, and bizarrely, Hezbollah, but also on the list are a number of “illegitimate Venezuelan forces,” that include any armed supporters of Maduro and Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello. Maduro and Cabello happen to be the same figures placed at the top of a US Drug Enforcement Agency hit list.

The US offered $15 million and $10 million respectively for their capture, effectively putting a bounty on the heads of the elected president and the head of his country’s main legislative body. The contract signed by Guaidó and Silvercorp also enables the killing of anyone they deem to be “armed and violent colectivos.” For a sector of Venezuela’s upper-class opposition, the term “colectivo” is a dehumanizing, oft-used catch-all term applied to any working-class person. Trade unionists, pro-government protestors, even anyone riding a motorcycle is presumed to be part of an armed and dangerous gang in the lurid fantasies of the light-skinned elitists of Eastern Caracas. Therefore, the contract essentially permits Silvercorp to kill any member of the government’s popular support base with impunity.

Perhaps more worrying, however, is what Silvercorp envisaged its role to be after a successful coup. The contract stipulates that the mercenary organization would “convert to a National Asset Unit that will act under the direction of the Administration [Guaidó] to counter threats to government stability, terror threats and work closely” with other security forces. Their missions would include, but not be limited to, surveillance, covert operations and target programming. In other words, Silvercorp would transform into a private paramilitary squad answerable only to Guaidó, crushing any opposition to his dictatorship, in much the same way death squads in Colombia and other Latin American countries have operated for decades.

Read more …

Chuck Todd is a far-left TV host? Boy, you Americans really have no idea what left and right is anymore.

This is insane al the same. He should be fired.

• AG Barr’s Office Shreds Chuck Todd For ‘Deceptive Editing’ (DW)

Attorney General William Barr’s office slammed far-left NBC News host Chuck Todd on Sunday for “deceptive editing” after Todd took remarks that Barr made out of context and used the distorted remarks to smear the Department of Justice (DOJ). On “Meet The Press,” Todd used a deceptively edited portion of Barr’s interview last week with CBS News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge. Todd focused in on the following exchange between Barr and Herridge:

HERRIDGE: In closing, this was a big decision in the Flynn case, to say the least. When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written? What will it say about your decision making?
BARR: Well, history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history. But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.

Todd only played the first two sentences of Barr’s comments where Barr said, “Well, history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.” Todd then launched into an attack on Barr, saying, “I was struck … by the cynicism of the answer. It’s a correct answer. But he’s the attorney general. He didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.” Todd’s comments were false because the very next thing that Barr said, which Todd did not show his viewers, was: “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.”

Barr spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded to the segment by posting screenshots on Twitter of the transcript from what Todd said and what Barr said in his CBS News interview last week, writing: “Very disappointed by the deceptive editing/commentary by @ChuckTodd on @MeetThePress on AG Barr’s CBS interview. Compare the two transcripts below. Not only did the AG make the case in the VERY answer Chuck says he didn’t, he also did so multiple times throughout the interview.”

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NSA, FBI, DNI have all been lying about Seth Rich for 4 years; hard to believe Mueller wasn’t in on it.

Why? They all knew the correspondence would kill off the Russian hacking story, and exonerate Assange. Couldn’t let that happen.

• DNI Has Communications Between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks For 4 Years (GP)

Recently, transcripts of a conversation between George Papadopoulos and a confidential informant believed to be Stefan Halper were released by the DOJ. This transcript confirms that Papadopoulos was spied on and recorded, two things Papadopoulos was not told at the time of the case made against him by the Mueller gang. We know from our previous reporting that a Deep State Anti-Trump former Assistant US Attorney claimed under oath that the FBI did examine Seth Rich’s computer and that she met with an FBI Agent and prosecutor from the Mueller gang. This indicates the meeting should have been recorded in a form 302 but the FBI continues to claim no records related to Seth Rich are available!

We reported in mid-February how Attorney Ty Clevenger, who represents a client who is being sued for his comments about Seth Rich, reported to the courts that despite numerous assurances from the FBI that they had no information related to Seth Rich, emails related to Seth Rich were identified and provided to Judicial Watch. It looked like the FBI was lying to Clevenger all this time. Attorney Clevenger sent a letter to ADNI Rick Grenell that he should receive by this Monday. According to Ty, the NSA, knows exactly who sent the records to Wikileaks. So does the FBI. Seth Rich is the last shoe to drop, and the Trump Admin needs to hurry up and drop it. Clevenger goes on to state the most shocking statement related to the Russia collusion sham to date:


“I am reliably informed that the NSA or its partners intercepted at least some of the communications between Mr. Rich and Wikileaks. Before elaborating on that, however, I should first note the extent to which the “deep state” has already tried to cover up information about Mr. Rich. In an October 9, 2018 affidavit submitted in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, FBI section chief David M. Hardy testified that (1) the FBI did not investigate any matters pertaining to Mr. Rich, and (2) the FBI was unable to locate any records about Mr. Rich. Both claims were unequivocally false.” We now know there is no evidence Russia hacked the DNC and sent the hacked emails to WikiLeaks. Crowdstrike admitted this under oath and the Mueller Report backs this up. Attorney Ty Clevenger asserts the DNI has been covering up for 4 years the fact that they have communications between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks.

Read more …

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Debt Rattle February 18 2020

Feb 182020
 
 February 18, 2020  Posted by at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  18 Responses »


Jack Delano Entrance to colored drivers’ lunchroom at truck service station on U.S. 1 (New York Avenue) 1940

 

• 338 Americans Flown Home From Cruise Ship, Including 14 With Coronavirus (R.)
• US Breaks Cruise Ship Quarantine (ZH)
• Virus Kills Chinese Film Director and Family in Wuhan (Chow)
• Disease Modelers See The Future Of COVID-19 (STAT)
• China Faces Back To Work Concerns As Firms Report Coronavirus Infections (SCMP)
• Apple Unlikely To Meet Revenue Guidance Due To Coronavirus Impact (R.)
• American Factories In China Unable To Staff Production Lines (SCMP)
• At Stake (Jim Kunstler)
• Senate Braces For Fight Over Impeachment Whistleblower Testimony (Hill)
• NYC Taxpayers Spend Millions on Cyber Center with Ties to Israeli Intel (Webb)
• WikiLeaks Locked Out of Twitter Account One Week Before Assange Hearing (GP)
• Doctors Call For End Of Assange ‘Torture’ (AAP)
• Julian Assange Must Be Freed, Not Betrayed (John Pilger)
• Amazon’s Bezos Pledges $10 Billion To Climate Change Fight (R.)

 

 

Actually saw a Reuters headline that said “Coronavirus Infections Slow In China…”, and I thought: why would you say that, the number of new cases is still above 2,000, in spite of all the measures and containment and quarantines in the country.

But it was probably because of the second part of the headline that said “…As Apple Warns Of iPhone Shortages”. That’s what it took for people to take notice, though iPhones are a poor indicator of the economic consequences of the virus; the Big Hurt won’t be in the biggest firms. Look around your home and your stores and see how much stuff come from China. iPhones are but a blip on that radar.

Obviously, another matter people notice is the evacuation of Americans and other people from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama. If only because it allows CNN and BBC to endlessly lament the “terrible ordeal” their compatriots have endured. As entire families in Wuhan have been wiped out, and people are banned from any social activities.

 

• Cases 73,433 (+ 2,103 from yesterday)

• Deaths 1,873 (+ 98 from yesterday)

 

 

 

 

The Westerdam cruise ship unwind is even crazier than the Diamond Princess, and that’s saying something.

• 338 Americans Flown Home From Cruise Ship, Including 14 With Coronavirus (R.)

More than 300 Americans who had been stuck on a cruise ship affected by the coronavirus were back in the United States on Monday, flown to U.S. military bases for two more weeks of quarantine after spending the previous 14 days docked in Japan. Among those repatriated on a pair of U.S.-chartered jets were 14 people who tested positive for the fast-spreading virus, seven on each plane. The Diamond Princess cruise ship held by far the largest cluster of cases outside China, with more than 400 people infected out of some 3,700 on board. The coronavirus outbreak has killed 1,770 people in China and five elsewhere, with Chinese officials reporting another 2,048 cases on Monday, raising the total to 70,548.

Washington previously flew hundreds of Americans from China to military bases in the United States, and then arranged to bring back the 338 cruise ship passengers once their 14-day quarantines on board had expired. Another 60 Americans remained in Japan for monitoring, State Department officials said. A further 200 U.S. citizens were stuck in Cambodia, among them 92 still on board another cruise ship, the Westerdam, that was also affected by the virus. The Diamond Princess was ordered to stay under quarantine at Yokohama port on Feb. 3 after an 80-year-old Hong Kong man, who was on board from Jan. 20 to Jan. 25, developed the virus. U.S. officials previously pledged to keep infected Americans in Japan for treatment. But they said they were forced to change plans after the passengers disembarked and were on their way to the airport when Japanese officials informed them that 14 of those in transit had tested positive.

“It was only when they were loaded onto these buses that we were made aware these positive results had come back from the government of Japan,” Dr. William Walters, a senior medical official for the State Department, told a news briefing. “They were then taken off the bus, moved into the aircraft and that dedicated isolation area, which was the safest place for them to get away from the rest of the passengers and give us time to make decisions,” Walters said. The infected passengers were isolated in specialized containment areas aboard the two chartered jets. They were exposed to other passengers for about 40 minutes during the bus ride.

Read more …

The US accuses Japan of utter failure, but never in those words. Main ally.

• US Breaks Cruise Ship Quarantine (ZH)

[..] the Princess Cruises ship was carrying 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew when it set sail and was quarantined after 10 cases of coronavirus were reported Feb. 4. Since then the number of cases on board has exploded, and on Monday alone, Japan announced an additional 99 infections on the Diamond Princess, raising the ship’s total number of cases to 454. And since most of the people on the ship have yet to be tested, the real number of infections may not be known for days. Where things gets problematic, is that whereas until now most of those on board the cruise ship had remained in isolation, the self-imposed quarantine is now over, and on Sunday, fourteen evacuees from the Diamond Princess were allowed to fly back to the United States Sunday despite testing positive for coronavirus, the U.S. State Department and Health and Human Services said in a joint statement.


Why were they released? Because supposedly they were not symptomatic, and in a very ominous twist, they had tested negative initially! “These individuals were moved in the most expeditious and safe manner to a specialized containment area on the evacuation aircraft to isolate them in accordance with standard protocols,” the statement, published Sunday, read. The State Department was unaware the individuals had coronavirus when they were being removed from the ship; they had tested negative just a few days before, Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, said on a phone call with reporters. “If those results had come back four hours earlier before we’d started to disembark the ship and before these people were evacuees within an evacuation system, then it would’ve been a different discussion.” Dr. William Walters, director of operational medicine at the U.S. Department of State, said on the call.

In other words, the quarantine that had isolated the biggest incubator of coronavirus cases outside of Wuhan was broken simply because an initial test had given a false negative, and subsequents test confirmed that at least 14 indeed had the coronavirus. Kadlec said that individuals received multiple screenings when moving from ship to bus to plane and a more extensive medical assessment upon arrival. In any case, the Diamond Princess quarantine is now broken, and two charter flights carrying at least 14 infected passengers landed at military bases in California and Texas overnight, starting the clock on a 14-day quarantine period to ensure those passengers don’t have coronavirus. In total, approximately 380 Americans were on board the Diamond Princess ship for the duration of the cruise and quarantine at sea.


[..] Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told the USA TODAY editorial board and reporters Monday that the original idea to keep people safely quarantined on the ship wasn’t unreasonable. Yet where the entire story falls on its face is that even with the quarantine process on the ship, virus transmission still occurred. One can only hope that there are proper precaution pathways in place to prevent transmission now that at least 13 infected cruise passengers are now on US soil. “ The quarantine process failed,” Fauci said. “I’d like to sugarcoat it and try to be diplomatic about it, but it failed. People were getting infected on that ship. Something went awry in the process of the quarantining on that ship. I don’t know what it was, but a lot of people got infected on that ship.”

Read more …

Mild? Mildly contagious? One wonders.

• Virus Kills Chinese Film Director and Family in Wuhan (Chow)

A Chinese film director and his entire family have died from the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. Chang Kai, a film director and an external communications officer at a Hubei Film Studio subsidiary, died in hospital on Feb. 14 from the virus now called COVID-19, according to a statement from the studio. He was 55. But Chang’s death was not the first in his family—the Chinese media reported that Chang’s father and mother were infected and died one after the other. Chang and his sister, who looked after their parents at home, were both infected with the virus as a result. His sister died just hours later. Chang’s wife is also infected, still alive, and is still battling the virus in an intensive care unit.


A note written by Chang, said to be his last words, has gone viral on the Chinese Internet. Chang wrote that his father succumbed to the illness on the first day of the Lunar New Year (January 25). “My father had a fever, cough and trouble breathing. [We] tried to send him to the hospital but none of the hospitals we visited took him, because they had no more beds,” he wrote. Instead, Chang brought his father home where ha died a few days later, having passed on the virus to the other family members. Chang’s note said that he and his wife were denied the opportunity to be treated early. Wuhan built a new hospital in six days, but capacity to handle the virus remains strained. Chang bade farewell to his family, friends and his son, who is reportedly studying in the U.K.

Read more …

Too many unknowns. Too easily lost in various favorite interpretations.

• Disease Modelers See The Future Of COVID-19 (STAT)

At least 550,000 cases. Maybe 4.4 million. Or something in between. Like weather forecasters, researchers who use mathematical equations to project how bad a disease outbreak might become are used to uncertainties and incomplete data, and Covid-19, the disease caused by the new-to-humans coronavirus that began circulating in Wuhan, China, late last year, has those everywhere you look. That can make the mathematical models of outbreaks, with their wide range of forecasts, seem like guesswork gussied up with differential equations; the eightfold difference in projected Covid-19 cases in Wuhan, calculated by a team from the U.S. and Canada, isn’t unusual for the early weeks of an outbreak of a never-before-seen illness.

But infectious-disease models have been approximating reality better and better in recent years, thanks to a better understanding of everything from how germs behave to how much time people spend on buses. “Year by year there have been improvements in forecasting models and the way they are combined to provide forecasts,” said physicist Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University, a leading infectious-disease modeler. That’s not to say there’s not room for improvement. The key variables of most models are mostly the same ones epidemiologists have used for decades to predict the course of outbreaks. But with greater computer power now at their disposal, modelers are incorporating more fine-grained data to better reflect the reality of how people live their lives and interact in the modern world — from commuting to work to jetting around the world.

These more detailed models can take weeks to spit out their conclusions, but they can better inform public health officials on the likely impact of disease-control measures. Models are not intended to be scare machines, projecting worst-case possibilities. (Modelers prefer “project” to “predict,” to indicate that the outcomes they describe are predicated on numerous assumptions.) The idea is to calculate numerous what-ifs: What if schools and workplaces closed? What if public transit stopped? What if there were a 90% effective vaccine and half the population received it in a month?

“Our overarching goal is to minimize the spread and burden of infectious disease,” said Sara Del Valle, an applied mathematician and disease modeler at Los Alamos National Laboratory. By calculating the effects of countermeasures such as social isolation, travel bans, vaccination, and using face masks, modelers can “understand what’s going on and inform policymakers,” she said.

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Said it a few times before: factories become petri dishes too, the virus loves those.

• China Faces Back To Work Concerns As Firms Report Coronavirus Infections (SCMP)

Cracks have appeared in China’s eagerness to resume economic activities amid the coronavirus outbreak, with a number of work-related cases reported. Gree Electric, the country’s biggest air-conditioner manufacturer located in the city of Zhuhai in Guangdong province, was forced to take emergency action last week to check and quarantine its employees after a bus driver was found to have had close contact with a suspected case, according to a notice published by the company’s labour union on its social media account. The contracted driver, surnamed Feng, had been driving employees to and from work last week until Saturday, with Gree now “intensely” checking the condition of employees who had travelled on the bus.

In addition, Feng was found to have had a meal with three colleagues last week, which was against his company’s policy concerning coronavirus control. According to the statement, Gree recommended that the contractor sack all four drivers despite the quartet, plus Feng’s son, later testing negative. The Gree statement, which was later removed, did not provide details on how many workers have been placed under quarantine. Gree was one of the first to resume production in Guangdong, with provincial party secretary Li Xi visiting the plant last week, two days after 11,000 workers – around one third of the total workforce – resumed operations, according to a report by the official Nanfang Daily.

In another case in Chongqing, more than 130 employees of Chongqing Titanium Industry, a unit of Pangang Group, had to be quarantined and the factory was again forced to halt production after two members of staff were confirmed as being infected at the start of last week, according to a notice by the local industrial estate where the plant is based. In Guangzhou, an employee tested positive for coronavirus, forcing the company to quarantine its remaining members of staff since Friday.

Read more …

This sinks the “markets”. And shows how dumb the people in them are.

• Apple Unlikely To Meet Revenue Guidance Due To Coronavirus Impact (R.)

Apple warned on Monday it was unlikely to meet a sales target set just three weeks ago amid lost production and weakening demand in China from the coronavirus outbreak. The illness has killed 1,770 in China and stricken some 70,500 people, with millions of others confined to their homes and factories slow to reopen after the Chinese New Year holiday break was extended due to the virus. Manufacturing facilities in China that produce Apple’s iPhone and other electronics have begun to reopen, but they are ramping up more slowly than expected, Apple said. That will mean fewer iPhones available for sale around the world, making Apple one of the largest Western firms to be hurt by the outbreak.


Some of its retail stores in the country remain closed or are operating at reduced hours, which will hurt sales this quarter. China accounted for 15% of Apple’s revenue, or $13.6 billion, last quarter, and supplied 18% of revenue in the year-ago quarter. In late January, Apple had forecast $63 billion to $67 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in March. It did not offer a new revenue estimate nor provide a profit forecast on Monday. “The magnitude of this impact to miss its revenue guidance midway through February is clearly worse than feared,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote in a note. Apple’s stock is expected to face a knee-jerk reaction on Tuesday, when Wall Street reopens after the Presidents Day holiday, Ives said.

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It’s irresponsible to open most of these factories.

• American Factories In China Unable To Staff Production Lines (SCMP)

As China tries to put its economy back to work amid a novel coronavirus outbreak that has left swathes of the country on lockdown, American manufacturers have warned that they do not have enough staff to man their production lines. The Lunar New Year holiday was officially extended until February 10 in a bid to stem contagion, but factories begun reopening last week across the country, with differing rules applying across China’s almost 3,000 counties.
A survey of 109 companies in the manufacturing powerhouse of the Shanghai region found that while two-thirds of factories were up and running by the end of last week, 78 per cent did not have enough workers to kick-start full production. Almost half, meanwhile, said that their global operations have already been hit by the spread of the coronavirus.


Companies in the area, which includes Suzhou, Nanjing and the wider Yangtze River Delta, had to apply for permission to reopen, and of those that were granted a licence, just 58 per cent were permitted to open all of their production lines, according to the survey conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai between February 11 and 14. “The biggest problem is lack of workers as they are subjected to travel restrictions and quarantines, the number one and number two problems identified in the survey. Anyone coming from outside the immediate area undergoes a 14 day quarantine,” said Ker Gibbs, AmCham Shanghai president. “Therefore, most factories have a severe shortage of workers, even after they are allowed to open. This is going to have a severe impact on global supply chains that is only beginning to show up.

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A convenient list of names.

• At Stake (Jim Kunstler)

I have a theory about the McCabe case: The Attorney General has taken the rinky-dink “lying to the FBI” charge off the table. It has become a liability, virtually the emblem for government misconduct, and Mr. Barr is getting rid of it in these matters. It has already caused too much mischief, insulted Americans’ sense of justice, and damaged the DOJ’s standing. Note, Andrew McCabe has been let off only on this charge, stemming from only one particular IG referral; he may well yet be liable for more serious charges-to-come. From here on, there will be no more rinky-dink lying charges against any of those implicated in the coup, only the most serious charges, and only those that add up to a solid case.

The coup has been so broad, deep, and thick that I predict cases will have to be brought under the RICO statutes in batches for different groups in separate agencies and branches of government. For instance, there is the Intel Mob, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intel (DNI) James Clapper, current Intel IG Michael Atkinson, so-called whistleblower (he that cannot be named, E*** C**********) and International Man of Mystery Joseph Mifsud. There is gang from the State Department who helped engineer UkraineGate, including former Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, former Sec’y of State John Kerry, and others. There is that big herd of rogue lawyers in the DOJ and its stepchild, the FBI, the names widely disseminated by now, Comey, Strzok, Baker, Boente, Carlin, Clinesmith, et. al.

There’s Robert Mueller and his henchpersons, Andrew Weissmann, Jeannie Rhee, et. al. There’s another a band of seditionists in Congress that includes Mark Warner of the Senate Intel Committee, the now notorious idiot Adam Schiff over in the House, and staffers who worked for both. There’s a bunch in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment that paid over a million dollars to Alternate International Man of Mystery (actually, CIA asset) Stefan Halper to run entrapment schemes against people working for Mr. Trump. There’s a swarm from Barack Obama’s White House, including Valarie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, Alexandra Chalupa, former Vice-President Joe Biden and the former President himself.

And finally, there is the 800-pound-gorilla over in the Democratic Party thicket, namely Hillary Clinton, and those connected to her and her charity fraud, the Clinton Foundation, which is the real and actual predicate for the whole sordid affair — a list that includes Viktor Vekselberg of Russia’s Skolkovo Project, $25-million donor Russian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, and Dmitri Alperovich of CrowdStrike, (Russian collusion, anyone?) as well as rascally freelancers such as Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, lawyer / Lobbyist Adam Waldman, and Hillary errand boys Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. The stories behind those names are all over the web, in case you want to hjedify yourself.

Read more …

The networks are bent in a strange pretzel to justify keeping the long known identity “secret”. It’s not about the identity, it’s about having an excuse not to let him testify.

• Senate Braces For Fight Over Impeachment Whistleblower Testimony (Hill)

Senators are reviving the fight over the whistleblower complaint at the center of the months-long impeachment effort against President Trump. With Trump’s trial in the rearview mirror, the Senate Intelligence Committee is quietly shifting its attention back to its investigation into the complaint process after hitting pause on the inquiry as the impeachment effort consumed Washington. The probe will force senators to decide if, and how, they speak with the whistleblower — a controversial call that could test the bipartisan reputation the Intelligence panel has maintained even amid deeply partisan fights in Congress. Asked by The Hill if he was willing to formally compel and subpoena the whistleblower to testify, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) didn’t rule out the possibility.

“I think you can rest assured that I’m prepared to do whatever we have to to interview the whistleblower,” Burr said. The renewed interest in speaking with the whistleblower comes after committee staff and lawyers for the individual hit a stalemate late last year over potential questioning. Lawyers for the individual made offers at the time to both the House and Senate Intelligence committees that their client was willing to provide written answers under oath, but Burr rejected that offer. The North Carolina senator indicated no progress had been made since then in trying to reach a deal on testimony and that while he hadn’t spoken recently with Mark Zaid, one of the whistleblower’s lawyers, his plan is “an interview with committee staff.”

[..] A Democratic committee source said that protecting the whistleblower’s safety and anonymity “is a top priority.” “We do not expect to be asked to cooperate with any effort that might endanger his or her safety,” the source said. The prospect of calling the whistleblower to speak with the committee has been talked up most recently not by a member of the panel but by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close ally of the president. “The Senate Intel Committee under Richard Burr has told us that we will call the whistleblower,” Graham said earlier this month during a Fox News interview. He added in a subsequent interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the “whistleblower episode needs to be investigated by Richard Burr” and in an interview with Fox News Radio that “the Intel Committee should be looking at whether or not the whistleblower had a bias.”

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Whitney with a new angle. Includes some Epstein.

• NYC Taxpayers Spend Millions on Cyber Center with Ties to Israeli Intel (Webb)

Early last week, the city of New York launched — with little media scrutiny — one of two new massive cybersecurity centers that will be run by private Israeli firms with close ties to Israel’s government, the so-called “Mega Group” tied to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and prominent pro-Israel lobby organizations operating in the United States. The centers were first announced in 2018 as was the identity of the firms who would run them: Israel-based Jerusalem Venture Partners and SOSA. As MintPress has reported on several occasions, all three of these entities have a history of aggressively spying on the U.S. federal government and/or blackmailing top American politicians, raising concerns regarding why these companies were chosen to run the new centers in the heart of Manhattan.

The news also comes as Israeli cybersecurity companies tied to Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 were revealed to have access to the U.S. government’s most classified systems and simulating the cancellation of the upcoming 2020 presidential election. The new cybersecurity centers are part of a new New York City public-private partnership called “CyberNYC” that is valued at over $100 million and officially aims to “spur the creation of 10,000 cybersecurity jobs and make New York City a global leader in cyber innovation.” CyberNYC is an initiative of New York City’s Economic Development Corporation. However, the companies that will be responsible for creating those cybersecurity jobs will benefit foreign companies, namely Israeli and most of the jobs to be created will go to foreigners as well, as media reports on the partnership have quietly noted.

Those reports also stated that, while the stated purpose of the centers is to create new jobs, the Israeli firms chosen to run them — Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and SOSA — view it as an opportunity to provide Israeli cybersecurity companies with a foothold into the American market and to see Israeli cybersecurity products adopted by both small and medium-sized American businesses, not just large corporations and government agencies. [..] the founder of JVP and former Knesset member, Erel Margalit, told the Jerusalem Post that “the center we are setting up [in New York] will assist Israeli hi-tech companies in collaborating with customers and companies in the US and around the world.”

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I think I saw it’s been restored. Twitter saying it had been compromised or something like that.

• WikiLeaks Locked Out of Twitter Account One Week Before Assange Hearing (GP)

WikiLeaks has been locked out of their Twitter account just one week before Julian Assange’s extradition hearing is scheduled to begin in the UK. WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson tweeted on Monday that “all attempts to get it reopened via regular channels have been unsuccessful. It has been impossible to reach a human at twitter to resolve the issue.” A source familiar with the situation explained to the Gateway Pundit that WikiLeaks social media admins received an automated email on February 9 saying that they needed to reset their password to regain access, but were not able to do so. They were unsure about the reason for the email in the first place — whether it was a glitch from Twitter, a targeted effort, or a hack.

The source said that when the WikiLeaks admins attempted to change the password and log in they received responses from Twitter saying that they were unable to verify them as the owner of the account and that the email on file did not match the one that they were using. WikiLeaks maintains that they are indeed using the same email that has been associated with the account for years. Efforts by WikiLeaks to reach someone at Twitter, since the 9th, have been unsuccessful. Assange’s extradition hearing is scheduled to begin on February 24 at Belmarsh Magistrates Courts, which is a court under the jurisdiction of South London Magistrates Courts.

Assange faces charges under the Espionage Act in the United States for his publication of the Iraq and Afghan War Logs. If extradited and convicted, he could face a maximum sentence of 175 years for the “crime” of publishing material that the US government did not want the public to know. On Monday evening, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to The Gateway Pundit that the “account was locked due to indicators it was compromised.”

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February 14 is the next hearing.

• Doctors Call For End Of Assange ‘Torture’ (AAP)

A group of 117 doctors and psychologists has called for an end to what it calls “the psychological torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange”. WikiLeaks founder Assange is being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison awaiting a hearing on February 24 which could see him extradited to the US. In a 1200-word letter published in the medical journal The Lancet, the Doctors For Assange group expresses concern over his fitness for the legal proceedings. The letter says that “Assange is in a dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy in London and Belmarsh Prison, where he has been arbitrarily detained according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

“Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (Nils Melzer) has warned, he will have effectively been tortured to death,” the letter states. “Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors’ watch. The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds.” The first hearing into the United States’ request for Assange’s extradition was held on May 2, 2019. When asked by the judge if he consented to the extradition, Assange said: “I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people.”

A copy of the Doctors For Assange letter has been sent to the Australian minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, following up on a previous letter sent on December 16, calling on Ms Payne to bring Assange home to Australia for urgent medical care. A copy has also been sent to the UK Government, which the doctors accuse of violating Assange’s human right to health. The letter condemns what it calls the “torture” of Assange and “the denial of his fundamental right to appropriate healthcare”. It adds: “Politics cannot be allowed to interfere with the right to health and the practice of medicine.

“Abuse by politically motivated medical neglect sets a dangerous precedent, ultimately undermining our profession’s impartiality, commitment to health for all, and obligation to do no harm. “Our appeals are simple: we are calling upon governments to end the torture of Mr Assange and ensure his access to the best available healthcare, before it is too late.” The letter is signed by Stephen Frost, Lissa Johnson, Jill Stein and William Frost on behalf of 117 signatories.

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“..the “damage done personally to you” by Julian Assange.”

• Julian Assange Must Be Freed, Not Betrayed (John Pilger)

WikiLeaks has informed us how illegal wars are fabricated, how governments are overthrown and violence is used in our name, how we are spied upon through our phones and screens. The true lies of presidents, ambassadors, political candidates, generals, proxies, political fraudsters have been exposed. One by one, these would-be emperors have realised they have no clothes. It has been an unprecedented public service; above all, it is authentic journalism, whose value can be judged by the degree of apoplexy of the corrupt and their apologists. For example, in 2016, WikiLeaks published the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, which revealed a direct connection between Clinton, the foundation she shares with her husband and the funding of organised jihadism in the Middle East — terrorism.


One email disclosed that Islamic State (ISIS) was bankrolled by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, from which Clinton accepted huge “donations”. Moreover, as U.S. Secretary of State, she approved the world’s biggest ever arms sale to her Saudi benefactors, worth more than $80 billion. Thanks to her, U.S. arms sales to the world — for use in stricken countries like Yemen — doubled.

[..] Revealed by WikiLeaks and published in The New York Times, the Podesta emails triggered a vituperative campaign against editor-in-chief Julian Assange, bereft of evidence. He was an “agent of Russia working to elect Trump”; the nonsensical “Russiagate” followed. That WikiLeaks had also published more than 800,000 frequently damning documents from Russia was ignored. On an Australian Broadcasting Corporation programme, Four Corners, in 2017, Clinton was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson, who began: “No one could fail to be moved by the pain on your face at [the moment of Donald Trump’s inauguration] … Do you remember how visceral it was for you?” Having established Clinton’s visceral suffering, the fawning Ferguson described “Russia’s role” and the “damage done personally to you” by Julian Assange.


Clinton replied, “He [Assange] is very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And he has done their bidding.” Ferguson said to Clinton, “Lots of people, including in Australia, think that Assange is a martyr of free speech and freedom of information. How would you describe him?” Again, Clinton was allowed to defame Assange — a “nihilist” in the service of “dictators” — while Ferguson assured her interviewee she was “the icon of your generation”. There was no mention of a leaked document, revealed by WikiLeaks, called Libya Tick Tock, prepared for Hillary Clinton, which described her as the central figure driving the destruction of the Libyan state in 2011. This resulted in 40,000 deaths, the arrival of ISIS in North Africa and the European refugee and migrant crisis.

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1) Be as destructive as you can and get rich off your efforts. 2) Spend 1-2% of your dirty wealth and expect to be hailed as a philantropist.

• Amazon’s Bezos Pledges $10 Billion To Climate Change Fight (R.)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will commit $10 billion to fund scientists, activists, nonprofits and other groups fighting to protect the environment and counter the effects of climate change, he said on Monday. Cutting emissions will be challenging for Amazon. The e-commerce company delivers 10 billion items a year, has a massive transportation and data center footprint, and has faced criticism from within its own workforce. Bezos, the world’s richest man, is among a growing list of billionaires to dedicate substantial funds to battling the impact of global warming. “Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” Bezos said in an Instagram post. “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.”


The Bezos Earth Fund will begin issuing grants this summer as part of the initiative. “It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals,” Bezos said. Counteracting climate change has become a popular cause for U.S. billionaires in recent years, with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and hedge fund manager Tom Steyer counted among the world’s wealthiest environmental philanthropists. Last year, Bezos pledged to make online retailer Amazon net carbon neutral by 2040 – the first major corporation to announce such a goal – and to buy 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from U.S. vehicle design and manufacturing startup Rivian Automotive.

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Debt Rattle November 24 2019

Nov 242019
 
 November 24, 2019  Posted by at 9:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) 1943

 

• Does Trump Have Bunch Of ‘Losers’ To Thank For Growing Economy? (Charlie Hall)
• Phase 2 of the Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)
• Britain’s Carmakers Fear The Wheels Are Coming Off (G.)
• Brick & Mortar Melts Down as Ecommerce Jumps by Most Ever (WS)
• Ukraine, Trump, & Biden – The Real Story Behind “Ukrainegate” (Zuesse)
• Yes, Ukraine Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election (Levine)
• Internal OPCW E-Mail (WikiLeaks)
• New Sexed-Up Dossier Furore: The Leaked Email In Full (DM)
• How The Firm Lost Its Grip (O.)
• Met Faces New Questions Over ‘Trafficked’ Teen In Epstein Case (G.)
• Pilger Blasts ‘Cruel’ Media Coverage Of Julian Assange (RT)

 

 

Good friend Charlie Hall on America’s reality. Shale losses keep on coming.

• Does Trump Have Bunch Of ‘Losers’ To Thank For Growing Economy? (Charlie Hall)

U.S. oil production originally peaked in 1970, and gas in 1973, but declined through 2007, when production was revitalized by the process of lateral drilling and “fracking.” This technological miracle allowed us to exploit deposits formerly considered low-grade. Now the United States produces more oil than it ever has, and is, with Saudi Arabia and Russia, one of the top three oil producers in the world. Fracking has also reversed the long decline of U.S. natural gas production, allowing the substitution of gas for coal and a proliferation of cheap plastics. But, curiously, this renaissance of petroleum in the United States has not led to a resurgence of profits in the oil and gas industry.

Quite the opposite, because almost none of the companies that have invested in fracking are turning a profit. Investors in this industry are losing a lot of money, some $83 billion since 2008, according to oil analyst Arthur Berman. This situation means that relatively cheap oil and gas are keeping the U.S. economy strong. But this cheap oil and gas is being partially subsidized by investors who are either losing money or receiving a poor return on investment. In this respect, President Trump has these financial “losers” to thank for a large part of the current health of the U.S. economy. This relation among oil supplies, prices and the political winds is not new and works both ways.

Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were in office during the economically disastrous increase in the price of oil from less than $4 a barrel in 1972 to more than $35 in 1979. Both lost in their reelection bids. In 1980 and 1984, Ronald Reagan ran on a platform of “Let’s make America Great again” and “It’s morning again in America,” which coincided with the decline in oil prices during the 1980s. In the U.K., Margaret Thatcher was floundering in popularity in 1980, but then received most of the credit for the remarkable recovery of the U.K. economy. Was it her conservative management style, or the development of the North Sea oil, which occurred on her watch? Now that the North Sea oil boom is over, the U.K. economy is struggling again.

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And there’s more. Chesapeake is but one example.

• Phase 2 of the Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)

In 2019 through third quarter, 32 oil and gas drillers have filed for bankruptcy, according to Haynes and Boone. Since the end of September, a gaggle of other oil and gas drillers have filed for bankruptcy, including last Monday, natural gas producer Approach Resources. This pushed the total number of bankruptcy filings of oil and gas drillers since the beginning of 2015 to over 200. Other drillers, such as Chesapeake Energy, are jostling for position at the filing counter. Chesapeake has been burning cash ever since it started fracking. To feed its cash-burn machine, it has borrowed large amounts and has been buckling under its debt for years, selling assets to raise cash and keep drilling for another day.

But its debt is still nearly $10 billion. Its shares [CHK] closed on Friday at 59 cents. On November 5, in an SEC filing, it warned of its own demise unless oil and gas prices surge into the sky asap: “If continued depressed prices persist, combined with the scheduled reductions in the leverage ratio covenant, our ability to comply with the leverage ratio covenant during the next 12 months will be adversely affected which raises substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.” In early 2016, during Phase 1 of the oil bust — which had started in mid-2014 — Chesapeake had already used the threat of bankruptcy to push its creditors into accepting a debt restructuring. At the time, it was the second largest natural gas producer in the US.

The debt restructuring reduced its debt burden somewhat and pushed maturities out, which then allowed it to borrow new money from new investors with a series of bond sales. This coincided with the Wall Street floodgates reopening to the oil and gas sector, when PE firms, hedge funds, and distressed-debt funds piled billions of dollars into the sector, and many of the oil and gas drillers were able to raise more cash to burn. Chesapeake’s series of bond sales that it then undertook included, in January 2018, $1.25 billion of senior unsecured convertible notes with a coupon of 5.5%, due in September 2026. It issued those bonds at a discount, but by July 2018, a few months before Phase 2 of the oil bust set in, the bonds were trading at 103 cents on the dollar. On Friday, the last trade was at 45 cents on the dollar, giving these bonds a yield of over 21%:

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But still fascinated with Musk. Why?

• Britain’s Carmakers Fear The Wheels Are Coming Off (G.)

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders is due to release numbers this week on car, commercial vehicle and engine manufacturing – figures that so far this year have been in reverse. At its last outing, the SMMT said that UK car production had fallen by a “bitterly disappointing” 3.8% during September, adding to a turbulent year-to-date in which political and economic turmoil, softness in key markets and operational changes have been blamed for a 15.6% slump. Unsurprisingly, the SMMT’s boss, Mike Hawes, warned that the industry was most worried about “the continued threat of a no-deal Brexit”, which is said to have caused “international investment to stall” and cost hundreds of millions of pounds, “money that would have better been spent in meeting the technological challenges facing the global industry”.

Hawes’s comments dovetail with a different announcement from earlier this month, when Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, said that the electric carmaker would be building its first major European factory on the outskirts of Berlin. “Brexit made it too risky to put a Gigafactory in the UK,” the entrepreneur said, to the delight of Remain campaigners. “[Boris] Johnson’s super-hard Brexit plan would see new trade barriers with our European partners,” wrote Lib Dem deputy leader Ed Davey in the Financial Times. “This will drive down already stagnant business investment … We must take seriously Mr Musk’s announcement.”

If he could be persuaded to comment on Tesla, Johnson would surely say the uncertainty will disappear as soon as we Get Brexit Done™. But Musk’s decision still seems like a missed opportunity, as he’s previously expressed an admiration for UK manufacturing – and F1 nous in particular. “We have a lot of respect for the British automotive engineering talent,” the billionaire told the Daily Telegraph in 2016. “Just look at Formula One – it amazes me how much British talent there is in that. We are likely to establish a Tesla engineering group in Britain at some point in the future.”

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So where will the kids meet now? Online only?

• Brick & Mortar Melts Down as Ecommerce Jumps by Most Ever (WS)

Ecommerce sales in the third quarter 2019 spiked 17.3% from a year ago to $145.7 billion, not seasonally adjusted, according to the Commerce Department. On a seasonally adjusted basis, sales hit $154.5 billion. Ecommerce sales will exceed $600 billion in 2019, double the amount five years ago. In dollar terms, ecommerce sales jumped by $20.4 billion in Q3 compared to a year ago, the biggest dollar-jump in the history of ecommerce:

[..] Ecommerce is wiping out department stores one by one. The long-cherished destination for American shoppers is doomed. Sears is just the latest example of a long list of examples. Others will follow. Sales at brick-and-mortar department stores in Q3 fell 5.7% year-over-year to a new multi-decade low of $33.8 billion (seasonally adjusted). They’ve collapsed by 41% from the peak in Q4 2000 and by 20% from the beginning of the data series in 1992. People who still think that this trend is somehow going to turn around are fooling themselves. This is the brick-and-mortar business Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Sears are in:

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An enormous effort by Eric Zuesse. This is just a small sample. Impossible to choose from all the material.

• Ukraine, Trump, & Biden – The Real Story Behind “Ukrainegate” (Zuesse)

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with neoconservatives. There’s not much distance between his policies toward Ukraine versus Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s. However, after Trump becomes impeached in the House (if that happens) and the impeachment trial starts in the Republican U.S. Senate, there will then be a perfect opportunity for Trump to embarrass the Democratic Party profoundly by exposing not only Joe Biden but Biden’s boss Obama as having caused the war in Ukraine. In order for him to do that, however, he’d also need to expose the rot of neoconservatism. Nobody in Washington does that, except, perhaps the rebelling Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, and she’s rejected in the national polls now by the public within her own Party.

Neoconservatism is the uniform foreign-policy ideology of America’s billionaires, both Republican and Democratic, and this is why Washington is virtually 100% neocon. In America, wealth certainly doesn’t trickle down, but ideology apparently does — and that’s not merely neoliberalism but also its international-affairs extension: neoconservatism. Nonetheless, if a Trump re-election ticket were Trump for President, and Gabbard for Vice President, it might be able to beat anything that the Democrats could put up against it, because Trump would then head a ticket which would remain attractive to Republicans and yet draw many independents and even the perhaps 5% of Democrats who like her.

Only Sanders, if he becomes the Democratic nominee (and who is the least-neoconservative member of the U.S. Senate), would attract some of Gabbard’s supporters, but he wouldn’t be getting any money from the 607 people who mainly fund American politics. The 2020 U.S. Presidential contest could just go hog-wild. However, America’s billionaires probably won’t let that happen. Though there are only 607 of therm, they have enormous powers over the Government, far more than do all other Americans put together. The U.S. Supreme Court made it this way, such as by the 1976 Buckley decision, and the 2010 Citizens United decision.

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“Back in 2016, no one thought that Trump would win the presidency. So why bother hiding it?”

• Yes, Ukraine Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election (Levine)

Let’s start with a fact: Meddling in the 2016 election by Ukrainian politicians and government agencies happened. The above is true and no amount of denial is going to change that. What’s more: Ukrainian nationals didn’t just meddle on their own, they also worked with Americans — including Ukrainian-American political operatives on the payroll of the Democratic Party. Not only did all this happen, it was written up as fact by establishment papers and outlets as varied as Yahoo, Politico, and the Financial Times in 2016 on the eve of the election. The involvement of Ukrainian pols and officials in all of this has never been secret. It was acknowledged at the time. The principle actors openly talked and bragged about their exploits in the press. And why not? Back in 2016, no one thought that Trump would win the presidency. So why bother hiding it?

One of the best examples of this is the plot to take down Paul Manafort — the sleazy Republican political consultant who had long worked in Ukraine and who headed Donald’s Trump campaign. In 2016, Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and an anti-corruption activist (who got embroiled in his own corruption scandal), coordinated the release of a handwritten ledger. The document purported to show off-the-book payments made to Manafort from the Party of the Regions — the political arm of the Viktor Yanukovich, the Ukrainian President who had been overthrown in a coup-type revolt by a much more western-friendly political faction. The ledger itself was released by NABU, a Ukrainian government anti-corruption organization set up as result of prodding by the Obama Administration and which was run with the backing and financial support of the FBI.


(As an aside: NABU — which also got embroiled into its own political corruption scandal — also happens to be at the heart of an internal Ukrainian political fight that sucked in ex-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. But that’s a different and complicated story. And then there’s the weird angle of the FBI being so closely involved with NABU at a time when this Ukrainian anti-corruption agency decided to involve itself in an American election.) Anyway, Leshchenko — a foreign politician — made clear that his objective at the time was to kill off Trump’s candidacy. That’s a direct admission of meddling. As Oleksiy Kuzmenko has documented so well, Leshchenko repeated this statement in various ways in both English and Ukrainian over and over again.

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We’ve known this for a while. The OPCW is a cesspool.

• Internal OPCW E-Mail (WikiLeaks)

Wikileaks today publishes an e-mail, sent by a member of an OPCW fact-finding mission to Syria to his superiors, in which he expresses his gravest concern over intentional bias introduced to a redacted version of the report he co-authored. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons sent a team of experts to investigate allegations that a chemical attack took place in the Syrian city of Douma on the 7th of April 2018. The author of the e-mail was a member of that team and claims the redacted preliminary version of the report, misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground. The e-mail is dated 22nd of June. It is addressed to Robert Fairweather, Chief of Cabinet, and forwarded to his deputy Aamir Shouket and members of the fact-finding mission to Douma.

He says this misrepresentation was achieved by selective omission, introducing a bias which undermines the credibility of the report. Further it is claimed that crucial facts, that have remained in the redacted version: “…have morphed into something quite different to what was originally drafted.” This is said to have been done at the behest of the Office of the Director General (a post that was held by Turkish diplomat Ahmet Üzümcü at the time, he has since been replaced by Spaniard Fernando Arias). The attack in question was widely attributed to the Syrian Army, based on reports by rebel forces that were present in Douma at the time, and this assertion was backed up by the United States, British and French governments. These three countries carried out air strikes against Syrian government targets in response, on the 14th of April 2018.

This was before the fact-finding team had gained access to the site in Douma, the mission there was delayed for nearly two weeks by entrenched rebel fighters and subsequent clashes between the rebels and government forces that moved into the area. Upon arrival the team found much of the physical evidence, including the bodies of the deceased, was no longer available. It was alleged that 49 had died and up to 650 had been seriously affected by a weaponized chemical gas released in a specific area of rebel-held Douma on that day in April. Rebels claimed the gas came from cylinders dropped from aircraft, clearly implicating Syrian government forces who had complete air superiority.

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The actual email, part of a long article by Peter Hitchens for the Daily Mail of all places.

• New Sexed-Up Dossier Furore: The Leaked Email In Full (DM)

Dear ******,

I wish to express, as a member of the FFM (Fact Finding Mission) team that conducted the investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April, my gravest concern at the redacted version of the FFM report, which I understand was at the behest of the ODG. (Office of the Director General). After reading this modified report, which incidentally no other team member who deployed into Douma has had the opportunity to do, I was struck by how much it misrepresents the facts. Many of the facts and observations outlined in the full version are inextricably interconnected and, by selectively omitting certain ones, an unintended bias has been introduced into the report, undermining its credibility. In other cases, some crucial facts that have remained in the redacted version have morphed into something quite different to what was initially drafted. If I may, I will outline some specific aspects to the redacted report that are particularly worrisome.

The statement in paragraph 8.3 of the final conclusions ‘The team has sufficient evidence at this time to determine that chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical, was likely released from cylinders’, is highly misleading and not supported by the facts. The only evidence available at this moment is that some samples collected at Locations 2 and 4 were in contact with one or more chemicals that contain a reactive chlorine atom. Such chemicals could include molecular chlorine, phosgene, cyanogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen chloride or sodium hypochlorite (the major ingredient of household chlorine-based bleach). Purposely singling out chlorine gas as one of the possibilities is disingenuous. It is also worth noting that the term ‘reactive chlorine-containing chemical’ used in the redacted report is, in fact, inaccurate. It actually describes a reactive chemical that contains chlorine which itself (the chlorine) is not necessarily reactive e.g. chlorophenol. The original report uses the more accurate term ‘a chemical containing reactive chlorine’.

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Pedophilia will do that. Time to get rid of the lot.

• How The Firm Lost Its Grip (O.)

Future historians may conclude that Prince Andrew’s defining achievement was to gift the nation a new verb. Following a tumultuous week when his car-crash interview shook the House of Windsor so vigorously it seemed its palaces were in danger of losing their crenellations, the Duke of York now finds himself banished from duties. His fate is the 21st-century equivalent of that which befell the difficult minor royals of previous eras who were locked up in asylums, away from the public gaze. “Prince Andrew has been de-royaled, if there is such a word,” said the historian and biographer Robert Lacey, an adviser to the acclaimed Netflix series The Crown.


Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

“At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I really would compare it to 1936 and the abdication of Edward VIII. What we are talking about is effectively the removal of a member of the royal family as a result of public opinion.” The duke can take some comfort from the knowledge that if he had been around a few hundred years ago, things could have been worse. “One can even compare it to 1649, when Charles I was executed,” Lacey said. “This is a reminder that what was an institution of absolute power now depends ultimately on the consent and approval of the communities it seeks to represent, and Prince Andrew failed in this respect.”


Princess Diana’s bombshell Panorama confession did huge damage to the royal family. Prince Charles’s decision to admit to adultery via a television interview greatly reduced his standing in the eyes of the public. “Andrew is a bit of a plonker, everybody knows that,” said one source close to the palace. “There’s no way he should have been allowed to do that interview. They should have just sent him off to Australia. That would have been a bloody good idea. Out of sight, out of mind.”

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They knew about Andrew and kept quiet. Time to get rid of the lot.

• Met Faces New Questions Over ‘Trafficked’ Teen In Epstein Case (G.)

The Victims’ Commissioner is demanding that the Metropolitan Police explain its decision not to pursue a full investigation into claims a teenager was trafficked to the UK to have sex with Prince Andrew. The Observer understands that Dame Vera Baird QC, a former solicitor general and chair of the Board of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, has taken a close interest in the allegations, first examined by Scotland Yard in 2015. Baird, who has focused on protecting victims of sexual and domestic abuse throughout her career, is currently observing election purdah and cannot speak to the media. However, prior to the election she made her views known to a victims’ rights campaigner, telling him that she would be requesting a meeting with the Met once purdah was over.


“Before the election was called I spoke at length with the Victims’ Commissioner and we both find it extraordinary that this matter was not proceeded with,” Harry Fletcher said. The Met has said that its investigators reviewed all “available evidence” after receiving a complaint relating to claims that were made in court documents. It was alleged that in 2001 a 17-year-old, now known to be Virginia Roberts, was “forced to have sex with Prince Andrew”, purportedly at the London home of socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, the one-time girlfriend of the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. His victims are now bringing claims for damages against his estate. It is understood that lawyers for Roberts also independently contacted the force in 2016. But the Met chose not to pursue a full investigation.

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“..the right to suck up to power..”

• Pilger Blasts ‘Cruel’ Media Coverage Of Julian Assange (RT)

In a wide-ranging dismantling of mainstream media reporting on Julian Assange, award-winning journalist John Pilger has blasted the Guardian for its coverage of the WikiLeaks founder. Pilger took aim at a Guardian editorial published this week, which made the case for not extraditing the Australian to the US, where he could face 175 years behind bars for possession and dissemination of classified information. The BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker has offered his interpretation of what the editorial actually meant “What the Guardian was really saying was this: ‘We are the fourth estate, the bearers of true liberal principles, the guardians of sacred rights. Such as the right to suck up to power. The right to invade countries and the right to smear those who expose our double standards and, if necessary, the right to destroy them,’” he said.


If Julian were to succumb to the cruelty he has endured, week after week, month after month, newspapers like the Guardian would share the responsibility. Pilger is one of the contributors to a new book titled ‘In Defense of Julian Assange,’ and he made the comments at the book’s launch in London on Saturday. Writer and activist Tariq Ali, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, actress Pamela Anderson, and former diplomat Craig Murray are among the other high-profile names who contributed to the book, which is an essay compilation on the prosecution of Assange and freedom of speech.

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Things November 6 2019

Nov 062019
 
 November 6, 2019  Posted by at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


Dorothea Lange ‘We’re bound for Kingfisher (OK wheat) and Lubbock (TX cotton). We’ll be in California yet. 1938

 

• ABC Stopped Jeffrey Epstein Report ‘Amid Palace Threats’ (BBC)
• MSM Execs Part Of ‘Network Of People’ That Covered For Epstein – O’Keefe (RT)
• Roger Stone, Trump Friend And Alleged Tie To WikiLeaks, Faces Trial (NPR)
• Amid 2016 Election, State Dept Saw Burisma As Joe Biden’s Issue (Solomon)
• Sondland Reverses Himself On Ukraine (Pol.)
• Ryanair Grounds Three Boeing 737s After Cracks Found (G.)
• Boeing Whistleblower Raises Doubts Over 787 Oxygen System (BBC)
• The Recession In The Auto Industry Is Tanking The Global Economy (ZH)
• China Signs Nearly 200 Deals For New Silk Road Projects (RT)

 

 

The BBC turns on Andrew?

• ABC Stopped Jeffrey Epstein Report ‘Amid Palace Threats’ (BBC)

Leaked footage shows a US TV anchor complaining that editors “quashed” a story about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein due to pressure from the Royal Family. ABC’s Amy Robach is seen in the clip griping that her interview with an alleged victim of Epstein and Prince Andrew never made it to air. “The Palace found out,” she says, “and threatened us a million different ways.” An ABC news executive said there was “zero truth” to the assertion. Epstein, a wealthy and well-connected financier, was found dead in a jail cell in August while awaiting trial for sex crimes. His death was ruled a suicide by investigators. In the video, Ms Robach vents frustration that her 2015 interview with Virginia Giuffre – formerly Virginia Roberts – was never broadcast.

The clip was leaked on Tuesday by Project Veritas, a group that seeks to expose perceived liberal bias in the mainstream media. Ms Giuffre, 35, alleges she was abused by Epstein and was ordered to have sex with powerful men including Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. In court documents she said she was forced to have sex with the British royal on three separate occasions while she was under the legal age of consent. Prince Andrew has denied having “any form of sexual contact or relationship” with Ms Giuffre. In 2015, a judge ruled that the allegations made by Ms Giuffre regarding Prince Andrew were “immaterial and impertinent” and ordered them to be removed from a claim against Epstein.

“I’ve had this story for three years. I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts,” says Robach, speaking to someone off-camera. “We would not put it on the air. First of all, I was told, ‘who’s Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.’ “Then the Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. “We were so afraid that we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will. “That also quashed the story,” the host of ABC’s 20/20 programme added. Robach also says that the interview included allegations against former US President Bill Clinton. “We had everything,” she continues. “I tried for three years to get it on, to no avail. “And now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations and I freaking had all of it.”

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“They’re fine airing the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, or [President Donald] Trump, or anybody else, but when it comes to Bill Clinton and some of these folks who are mentioned by Amy in this hot mic tape, they say they just didn’t have enough corroboration..”

• MSM Execs Part Of ‘Network Of People’ That Covered For Epstein – O’Keefe (RT)

ABC and other mainstream media outlets refused to cover accusations against sex predator Jeffrey Epstein because “a network of people” that includes their executives were implicated, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas told RT. The Disney-owned network has doubled down on its insistence that anchor Amy Robach’s story on Epstein three years ago lacked “enough corroboration” and thus wasn’t aired. This was after Project Veritas released a “hot mic” video of Robach slamming the decision to quash the story. The conservative filmmaker told RT on Tuesday that he believes ABC’s refusal to budge from that explanation backs up Robach’s claim that “a network of people” – including the executives running her channel – are “covering up for this” because they are somehow “implicated.”

Robach had interviewed Epstein’s alleged sex slave Virginia Roberts Giuffre and other victims and claimed to have pictures and other proof to back up her story. The never-aired exposé was such a bombshell that it provoked intimidating calls from “the [UK royal] palace, which threatened [ABC] a million different ways,” and Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz – and the media establishment, O’Keeffe said, is very susceptible to such threats. Mainstream media’s decisions to suppress major stories like Epstein or the allegations of sexual assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein have contributed to a wholesale abandonment of trust in the media by the American people, O’Keeffe continued.

“It’s quite telling that this insider leaked this tape to Project Veritas and not the Washington Post, New York Times, CBS or CNN, because they seem to want to protect the people that were working with Jeffrey Epstein,” he added. They’re fine airing the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, or [President Donald] Trump, or anybody else, but when it comes to Bill Clinton and some of these folks who are mentioned by Amy in this hot mic tape, they say they just didn’t have enough corroboration,” O’Keefe said, recalling that Robach had specifically mentioned that “we had [Bill] Clinton.”

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The advantages of silencing Assange: people can claim anything at all that would support any claim at all no matter how absurd. Assange and Wikileaks have denied any link to Stone, and he himself has too. But it no longer matters with Julian locked up in solitary. And now they use Stone’s empty braggadocio in an actual trial?!

Literally nothing in this report from NPR is true. But who cares anymore?

• Roger Stone, Trump Friend And Alleged Tie To WikiLeaks, Faces Trial (NPR)

Stone and some of his associates may have been links in a chain that connected Trump in New York City with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London, who at the time had confined himself in the Ecuadorian Embassy there. Assange, in turn, was in contact with Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, which had stolen a trove of embarrassing material from political targets in the United States. WikiLeaks released many of those emails and other documents with disruptive effects on political life in the U.S. — and enjoyed public encouragement by Trump and his campaign. What Mueller’s investigation revealed was how much Trump and aides worked to get more.


The campaign built into its plans the expectation that there would be more damaging revelations about Hillary Clinton, and Trump’s campaign bosses also sought contact with some people connected with the interference over the course of the election season. Charging documents in Stone’s case describe a message from one of Stone’s contacts depicting the person in a photo taken outside the Ecuadorian Embassy — implying that he’d visited Assange — and other messages in which Stone and associates discuss the prospect of more “dumps” from WikiLeaks.

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Solomon rules.

• Amid 2016 Election, State Dept Saw Burisma As Joe Biden’s Issue (Solomon)

In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the Obama years, with the former vice president suggesting he didn’t even know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings. There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice president’s account, including Hunter Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father. There also was a December 2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.

But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the 2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue. Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.” In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer. “Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.” The Q&A is consistent with other information flowing out of State. As I reported yesterday, when a Burisma representative contacted State in February 2016 to ask for the department’s help in quashing the corruption allegations, Hunter Biden’s role on the company’s board was prominently cited. And a senior State Department official who testified recently in the impeachment proceedings reportedly told lawmakers he tried to warn the vice president’s office that Burisma posed a conflict for Joe Biden but was turned aside. There are no laws that would have prevented Hunter Biden from joining Burisma, even as his father oversaw Ukraine policy for the President Obama..

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400 pages means hours and hours of testimony, but he ‘forgot’ to mention the one thing he knew very well was key to it all? And now, after talking to “the right” people, he suddenly remembers? I’d give Sondland an F- on credibility.

• Sondland Reverses Himself On Ukraine (Pol.)

In his revised testimony, released Tuesday by House impeachment investigators, Sondland said that during a Sept. 1 meeting in Warsaw, Poland, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised his concerns to Vice President Mike Pence about the suspension of military aid. Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, added that he later told Andriy Yermak, a top Ukrainian national security adviser, the aid would be contingent on Trump’s desired investigations. “After that large meeting, I now recall speaking individually with Mr. Yermak, where I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland wrote in his addendum, which was released alongside a nearly 400-page transcript of his testimony.


Sondland revealed the exchange in supplemental testimony he submitted to House impeachment investigators on Monday, saying he had failed to recall the episode when he testified in person last month. Sondland, who had a direct line to Trump and was a major donor to his 2016 presidential campaign, had previously indicated he was unaware of any effort to connect military aid to Trump’s demand for politically motivated investigations. Sondland was eager to maintain that public posture, even with other U.S. officials working on Ukraine policy. Eight days after privately telling Yermak that military aid was contingent on Trump’s desired investigations, Sondland wrote in a text message to William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that Trump had been “crystal clear” that there was no quid pro quo involving military aid and publicly announced investigations.

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It’s all over now, baby blue.

• Ryanair Grounds Three Boeing 737s After Cracks Found (G.)

At least three Ryanair Boeing 737s have been grounded due to cracks between the wing and fuselage but this was not disclosed to the public, the Guardian can reveal. The budget Irish airline is the latest to be affected by faults in the “pickle fork” structure, which has sparked an urgent grounding of 50 planes globally since 3 October. While other airlines, such as Australia’s Qantas and America’s Southwest, have disclosed the number of their planes affected by the cracks, Ryanair – which operates the largest fleet of 737s in Europe – has previously refused to confirm how many of its planes have been affected. Last Thursday, the airline told the Irish Times it “does not expect” the global pickle fork issue would “have any impact upon our operations or fleet availability”.


The Guardian can now reveal three of their planes have been affected by the issue. It is understood that experts do not regard the presence of the cracks as a safety issue as long as appropriate checks are carried out. The grounded planes have the registration numbers EI-DCL, EI-DAL and EI-DCJ. All three are more than 15 years old. Flight tracking site Flight Aware shows that DCL and DAL are both currently in a known plane repair site, the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California. The third plane, DCJ, is in storage at Stansted airport in London. A copy of internal Ryanair engineering logs, seen by the Guardian, lists all three as having “pickle fork cracks”. “AOG [aircraft on ground] – R/H pickle fork crack – on repair in VCV [Victorville],” the logs for DAL read.

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Boeing’s response and defense: “safety, quality and integrity are at the core of Boeing’s values”. Maybe try another line next time.

• Boeing Whistleblower Raises Doubts Over 787 Oxygen System (BBC)

A Boeing whistleblower has claimed that passengers on its 787 Dreamliner could be left without oxygen if the cabin were to suffer a sudden decompression. John Barnett says tests suggest up to a quarter of the oxygen systems could be faulty and might not work when needed. He also claimed faulty parts were deliberately fitted to planes on the production line at one Boeing factory. Boeing denies his accusations and says all its aircraft are built to the highest levels of safety and quality. The firm has come under intense scrutiny in the wake of two catastrophic accidents involving another one of its planes, the 737 Max.

Mr Barnett, a former quality control engineer, worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement on health grounds in March 2017. From 2010 he was employed as a quality manager at Boeing’s factory in North Charleston, South Carolina. This plant is one of two that are involved in building the 787 Dreamliner, a state-of-the-art modern airliner used widely on long-haul routes around the world. Despite early teething problems following its entry into service the aircraft has proved a hit with airlines, and a useful source of profits for the company. But according to Mr Barnett, 57, the rush to get new aircraft off the production line meant that the assembly process was rushed and safety was compromised. The company denies this and insists that “safety, quality and integrity are at the core of Boeing’s values”.

In 2016, he tells the BBC, he uncovered problems with emergency oxygen systems. These are supposed to keep passengers and crew alive if the cabin pressurisation fails for any reason at altitude. Breathing masks are meant to drop down from the ceiling, which then supply oxygen from a gas cylinder. Without such systems, the occupants of a plane would rapidly be incapacitated. At 35,000ft, (10,600m) they would be unconscious in less than a minute. At 40,000ft, it could happen within 20 seconds. Brain damage and even death could follow.

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Best news ever for the climate movement.

• The Recession In The Auto Industry Is Tanking The Global Economy (ZH)

The global economy continues to grind to a halt and the culprit has never been clearer: the auto industry. For the better part of almost 2 years now, we have been reporting monthly on marked slowdowns in key auto markets like China, North America and Europe. Now, the slowdown in this massive industry is what’s helping spur an overall global economic slowdown, according to FT. The reaches of the auto market go deep, with long supply chains and large consumption of raw materials, textiles, chemicals and electronics. The industry is home to millions of jobs and last year, the sector shrank for the first time since the global financial crisis. The IMF is estimating that this fall in output accounted for more than 25% of the slowdown in the global economy between 2017 and 2018.


The sector may also be responsible for up to 33% of the slowdown in global trade growth over the same period, the IMF said. Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, deputy director of the IMF’s research department said: “The car sector has been weighing heavily on manufacturing activity and growth.” And the fund’s forecast of a small lift in global trade in 2020 is dependent on a recovery in the auto sector. Conversely, the fund’s analysis also notes the potential further damage that could occur if the auto sector becomes the focus of the ongoing U.S./China trade war.

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But who pays? And in what currency?

• China Signs Nearly 200 Deals For New Silk Road Projects (RT)

China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as “One Belt, One Road,” has already attracted nearly 170 participants, Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced, vowing to further develop the project. “To date, China has signed 197 documents on Belt and Road cooperation with 137 countries and 30 international organizations,” he said in the opening speech at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai on Tuesday. The development of the initiative, which is aimed at boosting trade connections across the world and linking China with other countries, is a central part of plans to open up the Chinese market, according to Xi.


Other proposed measures include boosting investment and imports, lowering tariffs, developing free-trade zones, improving business environment as well as deepening bilateral and multilateral cooperation. “Standing at a new historical starting point, China will open its door only wider to the world,” Xi stated, calling for other countries to “stand firm against protectionism and unilateralism.” The ambitious BRI, launched in September 2013 by President Xi, could cost Beijing up to $1.3 trillion by 2027, according to Morgan Stanley’s estimates.

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