Menu Icon

Debt Rattle September 17 2024

Sep 172024
 
 September 17, 2024  Posted by at 8:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  35 Responses »


Alfred Eisenstaedt Egyptian Fishing Boats. Suez Canal near Port Said 1935

 

• Beep Beep. Woosh. . . ! (James Howard Kunstler)
• Ukrainian Connection in Trump’s Assassination Attempt Cannot Be Ignored (Sp.)
• Would-Be Trump Assassin Palled Around With Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade In Ukraine (ZH)
• Musk Accuses Democrats of Encouraging People to Kill Trump (Sp.)
• With Fact-Checks Like These, How Does Truth Stand a Chance? (Turley)
• An Anatomy of the Post-Debate Detritus (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Putin Orders Increase In Size of Russian Military (RT)
• Russia ‘Militarily Invincible’ – Kazakh President (RT)
• Poland Vows To Pay For Ukraine’s Ammo (RT)
• Trump’s Promises To End Ukraine Conflict ‘Not Real’ – Zelensky (RT)
• Ukrainian Court To Consider Zelensky’s Legitimacy – MP (RT)
• Closing Hatches Before Rains Founder The Western Vessel (Alastair Crooke)
• 50+ US Lawmakers Hold Military Stocks (CD)
• Sunlight and Clouds, Not CO2, Drive Earth’s Climate (ET)

 

 

 

 

ABC debate

 

 

Routh 2022
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835568043273114091

 

 

Maddow Hitler

 

 

DNC Trump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835451631225151862

 

 

Flynn

 

 

Nuland

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Donald Trump is looking increasingly likely to be the winner of the presidential race. I have long held that the globalists will wrap up an economic collapse or a world war and throw it in Trump’s lap.” — Brandon Smith.

• Beep Beep. Woosh. . . ! (James Howard Kunstler)

This time, the shooter lives to do some ‘splainin’. Do you wonder if he might get around to ‘splainin’ his role with the shady non-governmental orgs (NGOs) supported by the CIA who enabled his travels to Ukraine and his efforts there recruiting global mutts to fight for the Nazi-ish Azov Battalion? Perhaps he might rat-out actual government officials who assisted him in his colorful misadventures? As Ed Snowden remarked on “X”, wannabe Trump assassin Ryan Routh has “something of an Oswald vibe” — meaning, well-groomed by the intel boys, to be used as required.

Perhaps we’ll find out — if nothing fatal happens to befall Mr. Routh while in custody — how exactly he learned Mr. Trump would be on the links that afternoon? The candidate’s round of golf that day was supposedly a snap decision known only amongst his innermost circle. Or how did Mr. Routh figure out the most advantageous fairway to lay at for a clear shot? The FBI is on the case, you may be reassured to know. Things political are speeding up with the autumnal quickening. The blob is truly and deeply a’fright. So many blobsters will be liable to pay for their multitudinous crimes against the people of this country if Mr. Trump squeaks back into power that such a future is unthinkable to them. And yet, nothing has worked to deactivate this. . . this golden golem stalking the land. Nothing to show for the immense catalog of lawfare cases concocted to drain his wealth and stuff him into a prison cell — and astounding how amateurish they all were! Engoron and Merchan, two boobies hatched out of Judicial Error Central. Fani Willis, a walking-talking banana peel! Merrick Garland, saving democracy one abuse of power at a time!

The Butler, PA, head-shot op came awfully close to eliminating their, uh, problem, but no cigar. The Palm Beach golf course ambush had a Peter Sellers vibe, wouldn’t you agree? With the rifle muzzle poking through the shrubbery behind a fence. What next? A pizza with pepperoni, mushrooms, and cyanide? Maybe try to drop an anvil on Mr. Trump’s head from a passing airplane? (Beep-beep. . . woosh!) Somebody do something!!! The blob is shrieking to its minions from the sub-basement bunkers at Langley to the salons of Georgetown, to the US Embassy in Ukraine. Well, there’s always World War Three! And it looks like just such a romp is about to be instigated. You may have seen the photo last week of “Joe Biden” meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a big conference table, talking-up a plan to give Ukraine the green light to rain long-range missiles deep into Russia. Meaning, let NATO technicians work the targeting console to send US or British made rockets any old place over there? Like, Red Square? Or the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg? Find an actual Ukrainian to push the launch button.

How is that not a direct attack on Russia by NATO? Well, of course it is exactly that. Russia’s chief executive, Mr. Putin, clarified it for the Globalist Neocon cohort infesting NATO that such an action would bring. . . “consequences.” That is a word the Neocons are no longer acquainted with; it has been such a long time since they’ve crossed its path, like its boon companion, “truth,” also missing-in-action these days. And, to be fair, Mr. Putin did not specify what the consequences might be, not even a simple metaphor like a mushroom cloud, or an ashtray. How did they even get “Joe Biden” off the beach for that photo op? It is understood by everyone over ten-years-old in America that “JB” is not available for duty anymore. The “out-to-lunch” sign hangs permanently on the doorknob of the Oval Office now.

The USA does not have a functioning chief-of-state for the first time in 235 years. After 2021, some sort of unelected, informal Politburu that self-assembled in the White House, like a clot from a Covid vaccine shot, is running our affairs. Maybe Kamala Harris has a clue who is in that outfit. Or somebody in the news media could ask her (if she ever gets around to holding an actual news conference, where the questions are not previewed or scripted.) Anyone dare ask? Kamala Harris is strangely missing from the front page of The New York Times this morning. Is that a little ominous? The debate is behind her. There will not be another, apparently. There is nothing about her schedule on the official campaign website. Has she entered fade-away mode? Is it all over now except for the ballot harvesting and the, uh, little adjustments to the Dominion vote-counting machines? Has the drinking started again?

Read more …

“It would not shock me at all that there would be some elements inside the government that would get involved in that kind of plot..”

• Ukrainian Connection in Trump’s Assassination Attempt Cannot Be Ignored (Sp.)

The fact that Ryan Routh was “an ardent supporter of the Ukraine and wants to see Russia attacked, and clearly saw Trump as a threat to Ukraine’s future receipt of US military support,” cannot be hidden, says former US State Department official and retired CIA intelligence officer Larry Johnson. “I’m sure that the Kiev regime is going to distance itself from this. The Kiev regime, along with the apparent support of the CIA, has put together a death list of Americans. A list of Americans who ought to be killed. It’s not a list to send them nasty letters. Scott Ritter’s on it, I think Douglas McGregor’s on it. It is not out of line for them to have done this,” Johnson tells Sputnik. He describes the fact that Routh was apparently privy to Trump’s whereabouts as “puzzling”, given the latter does not make his schedule public.

“Who leaked that to him? How did he know? Was there somebody inside the Trump team that told him? Was there somebody inside the Secret Service who told him? Was it a foreign intelligence service? Was the Ukrainian intelligence that alerted? That has to be investigated,” Johnson remarks. According to him, the assassination attempt is going to have a detrimental effect on the support for Ukraine in the United States, at least among Trump’s supporters. Johnson also suggests that many people in the current US government do not want Trump to become president again and would rather see him dead. “It would not shock me at all that there would be some elements inside the government that would get involved in that kind of plot. The Secret Service, I think it’s on notice and the focus is on it in such a way that they can’t afford to allow sloppiness and poor planning and poor security to go unanswered,” he says.

Read more …

“Who was he working with in the US government that was allowing him to do this?”

• Would-Be Trump Assassin Palled Around With Neo-Nazi Azov Brigade In Ukraine (ZH)

Perhaps the most interesting angle to attempted Trump assassin Ryan Routh’s recent history in his Ukraine connection. We documented that when he went to Ukraine to recruit for its International Legion in 2022 he was a Western mainstream media darling for a time, having been quoted on behalf of the cause to get more foreign fighters thrown into the battle against Russia by a who’s who of major media sources from FT to Newsweek to the NY Times. But when he arrived in Ukraine, according to these media reports, the 58-year old Routh himself was considered too old to fight alongside the Ukrainian army. “So plan B,” Routh described to one outlet, “was to come to Kiev and promote the idea of many others coming to join the International Legion. We need thousands of people here to fight alongside Ukrainians.”

“There are about 190 countries on our planet, and if the governments are not officially sending soldiers here, then we civilians should pick up this torch and make it happen,” he described. He had told Newsweek in a video interview from Ukraine that the war with Russia was as simple as “good vs. evil” and essentially the same as good guys and bad guys in the Hollywood movies Americans grew up with. It was not a gray conflict, he described, but “black and white”. In March of 2022, just a month into the Russian invasion, he tweeted that everyone around the globe should be willing to volunteer and “fight and die” in Ukraine. Still, much of his time was reportedly spent in a hotel room in the far western city of Lviv.

Among the more bizarre aspects to his campaigning on behalf of the Ukrainian military’s foreign legion were his efforts to recruit US-trained Afghan special soldiers to go to Ukraine’s front lines. The initiative appeared so large in scale (given Routh was seeking to transfer hundreds, or even thousands, of Afghan fighters – according to his words) – that one commentator questions in light of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump: “Who was he working with in the US government that was allowing him to do this?” In a 2023 interview with the NY Times Routh openly displayed his proclivity toward violent acts by threatening to shoot his critics, and the Times featured the quote almost as if lionizing his commitment to defending Ukraine:

In a telephone interview with The New York Times in 2023, when Mr. Routh was in Washington, he spoke with the self-assuredness of a seasoned diplomat who thought his plans to support Ukraine’s war effort were sure to succeed. But he appeared to have little patience for anyone who got in his way. When an American foreign fighter seemed to talk down to him in a Facebook message he shared with The New York Times, Mr. Routh said, “he needs to be shot.”Surely visibility like this put him on the federal government’s radar… or given Washington’s pro-Ukraine euphoria US officials were possibly even helping him in some way. He had received so much media attention also apparently as head of the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine. Importantly, he has boasted of having “had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.” This raises the question of the degree of his involvement with US government officials at the time.

Read more …

“..[Reid Hoffman] wished Trump to be a “real martyr”, which, in Musk’s opinion, means to be “dead.”

• Musk Accuses Democrats of Encouraging People to Kill Trump (Sp.)

Some high-profile Democrats have actively encouraged people to kill former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, American entrepreneur Elon Musk claimed on Monday. “They [Democrats] have actively encouraged people to kill Trump,” Musk commented on a post on X that called Trump “an evil dictator”. He added that Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn known to be one of the Democratic party’s major donors, told the audience at the Sundance film festival that he wished Trump to be a “real martyr”, which, in Musk’s opinion, means to be “dead.”

The second assassination attempt on Donald Trump occurred on Sunday at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach while the former president was playing golf. Police said Secret Service agents opened fire on the alleged assassin, who was hiding in the bushes. The man fled the scene but was later apprehended. An AK-47-style rifle was found at the scene, along with two backpacks and a GoPro camera. The FBI has joined the investigation, and US authorities are treating it as an assassination attempt.

Read more …

“ABC actually disseminated false information under the mantle of fact-checking, and that’s a real problem..”

• With Fact-Checks Like These, How Does Truth Stand a Chance? (Turley)

ABC News has been widely criticized for the bias of the two moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir. Even liberal outlets acknowledged that the two journalists seemed inclined to “fact check” only Trump. In the meantime, they allowed clearly false statements from Harris to go unchallenged. Three of the unchecked claims are being widely disseminated by supporters, including some in the media. Here are three legal “facts” that are being repeated despite being clearly untrue.

“Crime is down under the Biden-Harris administration.“ One of the most notable slap downs by ABC followed Trump commenting that crime rates have drastically risen during the Biden-Harris administration. Muir immediately balked and declared: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” Harris and her allies have been repeating the claim by ABC. But the actual statistics show that Trump was right. The Justice Department’s released survey found that, under the Biden administration, there has been a significant increase in crime. Violent crime was up 37 percent from 2020 to 2023, rape is up 42 percent, robbery is up 63 percent and stranger violence is up 61 percent. Other reports had shown startling increases such as a doubling of carjackings in D.C. in 2023.

“Harris has not supported transgender operations for undocumented migrants.” Some of the greatest mocking in the media concerned Trump’s statement that Harris has supported transgender conversion treatment for undocumented persons. New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser immediately wrote “What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.” On CNN, Wolf Blitzer declared how “outlandish” it was for Trump to make such a claim. But it’s true. In 2019, Harris told the ACLU that she not only supported such operations but actively worked for at least one such procedure to take place. When it was reported by Andrew Kaczynski on CNN, host Erin Burnett was gobsmacked by the notion of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants. “She actually supported that?” Burnett exclaimed. Even the New York Times later admitted that the “wildest sounding attack line” from Trump was “basically true.”

Harris does not support the right to abortion in the final three months of a pregnancy. Trump also hit Harris on her no-limits position on abortion rights, allowing women the right to abort a baby up to the moment of birth. Trump said Harris supports laws allowing abortions in “the seventh month, the eighth month, [and] the ninth month,” to which Harris retorted: “C’mon,” “no,” and “that’s not true.” The hosts again said that Trump was making up his criticism of late-term abortions, including the risk of babies being born but allowed to die. But in fact, many states, including Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz (D), protect the right of a woman to abort a baby into the ninth month. While it is often said that this is left to the mother and her doctor, the law gives the decision to the mother. Late-term abortions are relatively rare, but they do occur. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report estimated in 2019 that about 4,882 abortions were performed that year at least 21 weeks or later into pregnancy.

More than a dozen states, in fact, allow on-demand abortions after a baby is viable and can even survive outside of the womb. Nine of those states permit abortions throughout the entirety of pregnancy. Harris has supported these state laws and certainly did not answer the question on what limits she would support, other than saying that she supports Roe v. Wade. Clearly, many late-term abortions occur to protect the life of the mother. However, you can have (as both Trump and Harris support) exceptions to protect the life of the mother without allowing abortions up to the moment of birth. To be sure, Trump did not help himself with his wilder claims. These included debunked accounts of Haitian migrants eating people’s pets in Ohio, which Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike Dewine, has denied.

The issue is not fact-checking, but the failure to do so equally and accurately. ABC actually disseminated false information under the mantle of fact-checking, and that’s a real problem. Moderator Linsey Davis admitted later that ABC did not want a repeat of what had happened in the last debate, wherein Trump was given free rein and the moderators limited themselves to asking questions and enforcing time limits. CNN was praised in that debate across the political spectrum for being even-handed.

Read more …

“She pantomimed as if she were prepped by Hollywood actors..” “And in the debate, she presented her nothingness in confident fashion..”

• An Anatomy of the Post-Debate Detritus (Victor Davis Hanson)

When the size of the huge television audience—some 67 million watched the debate—was announced, team Harris naturally assumed her win might bounce her even higher than did her initial July surge after the forced abdication of President Biden from the ticket. But then strange post-debate developments followed. Harris did not receive the anticipated large bounce. In fact, the polls still remain mostly even. She may have arrested Trump’s pre-debate surge a bit, but otherwise, a debate that polled so heavily in her favor oddly still seems to have made little difference in the still up-for-grabs race. Stranger still, Harris, the supposedly clear winner, almost immediately asked for another debate. Her handlers suggested that this demand displayed newfound confidence from her win—as if an assured, second knockout debate would ensure her permanent pull away.

But Trump and others countered that it might have instead indicated the very opposite: that her pre-debate internal polls had shown the race was even or even had Trump leading and thus she still needed a second shot at derailing him, given her own team was not sure her single and transitory debate favorability would translate into any real lead. Then in a day or two, other and far more significant realities emerged, resetting the debate—like a first date’s favorable first impression beginning to sour a day later upon further reflection. As the debate clips were endlessly replayed on television, radio, and the blogosphere over the ensuing week, few, if any, favorable Harris soundbites popped up. Harris, remember, was a veritable political unknown who was running a stealth campaign of media avoidance and running out the clock. She had never really answered any questions addressed to her in the campaign.

And in the debate, she presented her nothingness in confident fashion. But she ignored and snubbed both the toadish moderators and Trump at every turn. Yet the public had tuned in only to receive just three answers from her that she had never previously offered them since her July anointment: Why are you flipping—temporarily or permanently?—on almost every issue from your past positions? If you are the candidate of change, why did you and President Biden as incumbents not make these changes the last three years—or at least promise now to make them in the next four months of your remaining tenures? And what exactly will be your policies as president and the details of their proposed implementation? Every time these questions in the debate were either stumbled upon by the moderators or demanded by Trump, Harris evaded by plugging in her memorized, smiley, and stonewalling non-answers.

Even leftist media outlets could not find video clips that would show a dominant Harris mastering any of these questions. Furthermore, in the recycled visuals of the campaign, when Trump blustered and ranted, viewers now noticed that Harris had deliberately turned to him in scripted posturing. She pantomimed as if she were prepped by Hollywood actors—not just on memorizing canned trivialities but also giving fake moves and poses.

Read more …

Nothing dramatic.

• Putin Orders Increase In Size of Russian Military (RT)

President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree that officially increases the number of personnel in Russia’s armed forces to almost 2.4 million people, including 1.5 million servicemen. The latest increase comes after a similar decree in December 2023, when the president boosted the number of employees in the Russian military to just over 2.2 million, including 1.3 million troops. In his order on Monday, Putin also instructed the Russian government to allocate the necessary funds for the Defense Ministry to carry out the increase, which formally takes the number of personnel in the armed forces to 2,389,130. The last time the president expanded the number of Russian troops, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained that the move was the result of the “proxy war” being waged against Moscow by the West. “The security of our country must be, of course, ensured,” Peskov stated at the time.

“This is connected with the war that the countries of the collective West are waging. A proxy war, which includes elements of indirect participation in military actions and elements of economic warfare, financial warfare, legal warfare, going beyond the legal framework, and so on.” Russia’s Defense Ministry also stated at the time that the expansion of the army would be done through citizens who voluntarily wish to serve under contract. It also explained that the decision to increase personnel numbers was due to the threat posed by NATO’s continued expansion. Members of the US-led bloc have significantly expanded their military presence along the Russian border, deploying additional air defense systems and strike weapons. “An additional increase in the combat strength and numbers of the armed forces is an adequate response to the aggressive activities of the NATO bloc,” the ministry wrote.

Read more …

“Further escalation of the war will lead to irreversible consequences for the entire of mankind..”

• Russia ‘Militarily Invincible’ – Kazakh President (RT)

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has claimed that Russia is “militarily invincible,” warning against any further escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. He also suggested that the path to peace is still open, singling out the Sino-Brazilian peace initiative as a viable option. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities in February 2022, Western leaders proclaimed that they hoped to inflict a “strategic defeat on Russia.” Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that this was the reason for then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson visiting Ukraine in the spring of 2022. This effectively derailed the Istanbul peace deal, which had previously been agreed by representatives of Kiev and Moscow. During a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday, Tokayev said that “it is a fact that in military terms Russia is invincible.”

“Further escalation of the war will lead to irreversible consequences for the entire of mankind, and, first of all, all the countries that are directly involved in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict,” the Kazakh president warned. He claimed that the Istanbul agreement had represented a good opportunity to end the bloodshed at an early stage, but was squandered. However, according to Tokayev, a peaceful settlement can still be achieved. “Various countries’ peace initiatives should be carefully considered and a decision to cease the fighting should be made,” the Kazakh president stated, adding that territorial disputes could be resolved thereafter. “In our opinion, the peace plan [presented by] China and Brazil is worthy of support,” he added. Tokayev described ties between Kazakhstan and Russia as a “strategic partnership,” but added that Astana also maintains friendly relations with Kiev.

Last week, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky dismissed Beijing and Brasilia’s joint six-point peace roadmap as “destructive,” accusing the two nations of siding with Russia. The plan emphasized “dialogue and negotiation” as the only “viable way out of the crisis.” Meanwhile, last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy had urged the Ukrainian leadership behind closed doors to “come up with a more realistic plan.” According to the media outlet, Kiev’s Western backers are concerned that Ukraine’s maximalist plans to restore its 1991 borders “would require the West to provide hundreds of billions of dollars worth of support, something neither Washington nor Europe can realistically do.” Back in July, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated that a “Russian defeat is difficult to imagine,” taking into account the “balance of soldiers, equipment and technology.”

Read more …

“..Warsaw has yet to make any payments towards the scheme, citing temporary obstacles..”

• Poland Vows To Pay For Ukraine’s Ammo (RT)

Poland will fulfill its promise to help finance a Czech initiative to buy ammunition for Ukraine from outside the EU, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has told the European Truth news outlet. The Polish diplomat was responding to reports that Warsaw was the only country among Kiev’s backers that had yet to contribute to the scheme, despite vowing to do so earlier this year. According to the Polish newspaper Wyborcza, as of August this year, over a dozen countries had provided funds to buy more than half a million artillery shells, sourced from manufacturers outside the European Union, with Germany providing the largest share. Sikorski acknowledged that Warsaw has yet to make any payments towards the scheme, citing temporary obstacles.

“We have made a political decision to allocate €50 million this year and another €50 million next year. But there are some technical, administrative and legal issues related to the state agency for strategic reserves,” the foreign minister said. He noted that the foreign Ministry has already done its part, and he now hopes that “colleagues from other ministries will also do everything,” pledging: “It will definitely be done.” The Czech initiative to procure shells for Kiev from around the world was announced back in February, to fill a void after Western manufacturers failed to supply artillery rounds fast enough to meet Kiev’s battlefield demands. Ukraine’s backers have reportedly only able to collectively produce 1.3 million shells in a year, while Russia has been able to make 4.5 million at a quarter of the cost of European and American equivalents.

A total of 18 countries, including Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal, signed up to cover the cost of Prague’s plan. In July, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky stated that 15 countries had made contributions, and that there were enough funds to deliver 500,000 shells to Ukraine by the end of the year. Czech officials have also suggested extending the scheme into 2025. Moscow has repeatedly criticized the West’s continued military support for Kiev, and argued that weapon and ammunition shipments to the country only serve to prolong the fighting and cause more bloodshed, without affecting the eventual outcome.

Read more …

“I had a phone call with Donald Trump, and he said that he’s very supportive and we had a good conversation..”

• Trump’s Promises To End Ukraine Conflict ‘Not Real’ – Zelensky (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has dismissed US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s promise to immediately end the conflict with Russia, calling it typical election rhetoric that is unlikely to materialize. Trump has repeatedly claimed that if he returns to the White House, he would secure a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev “within 24 hours.” “Just get it done. All right. Negotiate a deal,” he said during last week’s presidential debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris retorted that Trump was planning to “just give up” on Ukraine, and went on to list her own efforts to secure military support for Kiev. “My position is that election period and election messages are election messages. Sometimes they are not very real,” he said, adding that while Trump’s remarks “can make us, all our people nervous,” a conversation with the former president two months ago left a very different impression.

“I had a phone call with Donald Trump, and he said that he’s very supportive and we had a good conversation,” he told the host. In April 2022, Kiev and Moscow were close to finalizing a peace agreement in Istanbul, but the talks were broken off due to an intervention by Ukraine’s Western backers. Since then, Kiev has repeatedly stated that any talks should be based on Zelensky’s ten-point peace plan, which states that Russia must relinquish territories held by Ukraine prior to 2014. Moscow has rejected the idea as detached from reality. Last week, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance suggested that Trump’s potential peace proposal would probably involve creating a demilitarized zone around the current line of contact and guaranteeing Ukraine’s neutrality, ideas that align with Russia’s main objectives.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, however, cast doubt on achieving a quick resolution to the conflict, saying that “anyone, who steps forward and says they could solve the Ukraine war in one day from the outside” needs to be questioned as to “whose side are they going to be solving it on.” Moscow has ruled out negotiations while Ukrainian forces remain in Russia’s Kursk Region, citing war crimes committed during the incursion in early August. Previously, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would order an immediate ceasefire if Ukraine were to abandon its NATO ambitions and territorial claims.

Read more …

“A court in Ukraine is to consider a lawsuit by opposition lawmaker Aleksandr Dubinski on Monday [..] Dubinski has been in custody since last November, facing a litany of charges, including high treason..”

• Ukrainian Court To Consider Zelensky’s Legitimacy – MP (RT)

A court in Ukraine is to consider a lawsuit by opposition lawmaker Aleksandr Dubinski on Monday, arguing that Vladimir Zelensky has been illegally holding power since his term expired on May 20. Dubinski has been in custody since last November, facing a litany of charges, including high treason. A presidential election was due to be held in Ukraine on March 31, but Zelensky indefinitely postponed the vote, citing martial law imposed due to the conflict with Russia. Dubinski originally filed his lawsuit in late June, arguing that Zelensky’s actions violated the Ukrainian constitution, and urged parliament to call a presidential election. At a hearing a month later, the court postponed the case until September 16, according to the MP. In a post on his Telegram channel in July, the lawmaker wrote: “I have to state – there is only one citizen and member of parliament in Ukraine that has taken steps to preserve the constitutional order… it is non-attached MP Dubinski.”

Earlier that month, the prosecutor general’s office launched a fourth criminal probe into the politician over his failure to file tax returns while in custody. Last November, the Security Service of Ukraine charged Dubinski with high treason over his alleged “information-subversive activities in the interest of Russia.” The lawmaker has dismissed the accusations, along with two other charges against him, as politically motivated. Earlier this month, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that “de jure President Zelensky now is not the legitimate president” of Ukraine. His comment echoed those made earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in early June, the Russian head of state suggested that presidential powers should have been transferred to the Ukrainian parliament following the expiry of Zelensky’s five-year term in office. By remaining at the helm, the Ukrainian leader appears to be in breach of “Article 109 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code, which says that this should be treated as seizure of power,” the Russian president argued at the time. Putin went on to claim that Ukraine’s Western backers were keeping Zelensky in power with a view to blaming him for upcoming “unpopular decisions,” such as lowering the “mobilization age to 18.” “I think the US administration will force the leadership of Ukraine to make these decisions… and then will get rid of Zelensky,” the Russian president predicted.

Read more …

“..terrorising West Bankers to quit their land; the destruction of social infrastructure in the West Bank (as with Gaza); and through a harsh financial squeeze on Palestinian society..”

• Closing Hatches Before Rains Founder The Western Vessel (Alastair Crooke)

Israel is entering the next phase of its war on Palestine by completing its takeover of the Gaza Strip – from the northern border to the Netzarim corridor. It is likely that they intend for this area to then gradually be made available for Jewish settlement and annexation to Israel. In a piece titled, “Annexation, Expulsion and Israeli Settlements: Netanyahu Gears Up for Next Phase of Gaza War”, the Editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, writes, were the takeover to proceed, “Palestinian residents who remain in northern Gaza will be expelled, as suggested by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, under threat of starvation and under cover of “protecting their lives””. Netanyahu and his supporters will see this move, Benn suggests, as a lifetime achievement: Expanding Israel’s territory for the first time, after 50 years of Israeli withdrawals. This will be the Israeli Right’s ‘Zionist response’ to 7 October.

This extraordinary shift was actuated – not just through military operations – but by the stroke of a pen: the appointment of Col. Elad Goren as head of the humanitarian-civil effort in Gaza, which effectively, makes him ‘Governor of Gaza’ for years to come. Less noted in the western Mainstream media is the harsh reality that, in the course of the twenty months in which the current Israeli government has been in power, Ben Gvir has armed a 10,000 strong settler vigilante movement that has been terrorising Palestinians in the West Bank. The police in the occupied territories already answer to Ben Gvir’s authority. What is missing from this appreciation is that whilst Ben Gvir has been assembling the ‘State Of Judea’s novel army’, Finance Minister Smotrich, who heads the Administration of the Territories, has revolutionized the situation for Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank.

Authority in the West Bank has been turned-over to a closed, Right-wing messianic movement that answers only to a single man: Smotrich (the Governor of the West Bank in all but name). In what Nahum Barnea describes as a stealth pincer-movement deployed by Smotrich, one arm of power has lain with his authority as finance minister; the second arm consists in the power delegated to him in his capacity as second minister in the Defence Ministry. Smotrich’s, and the Israeli government’s objective – laid out in Smotrich’s ‘Decisive Plan’ in 2017 – has not changed: to induce the collapse of the Palestinian Authority; to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state; and to give the seven million Palestinians who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea a choice: to die fighting; to immigrate to another country, or to live forever as vassals in a greater Israeli state.

Have no doubt, ‘the Decisive Plan’ for Palestinians is well underway – terrorising West Bankers to quit their land; the destruction of social infrastructure in the West Bank (as with Gaza); and through a harsh financial squeeze on Palestinian society – as in Gaza.

Read more …

“It’s abjectly terrifying that the personal benefit of any member of Congress is factored into decisions about how to wield and fund the largest military in the world.”

• 50+ US Lawmakers Hold Military Stocks (CD)

At least 50 U.S. lawmakers or members of their households are financially invested in companies that make military weapons and equipment—even as these firms “receive hundreds of billions of dollars annually from congressionally-crafted Pentagon appropriations legislation,” a report published Thursday revealed. Sludge’s David Moore analyzed 2023 financial disclosures and stock trades disclosed in other reports and found that “the total value of the federal lawmakers’ defense contractors stock holdings could be as much as $10.9 million.” According to the report: “The spouse of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, holds between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in each of Boeing and RTX, as well as holdings in two other defense manufacturers. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), another Defense Appropriations subcommittee member, holds up to $50,000 in the stock of Boeing, which received nearly $33 billion in defense contracts last year.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, Sen. John Hickenlooper (Colo.) holds up to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of stock in RTX…” The most widely held defense contractor stock among senators and representatives is Honeywell, an American company that makes sensors and guiding devices that are being used by the Israeli military in its airstrikes in Gaza. The second most commonly held defense stock by Congress is RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome, among other weapons systems. All 13 senators whose households disclosed military stock holdings voted for the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, which, as Common Dreams reported, allocated a record $886.3 billion for the U.S. military while many lawmakers’ constituents struggled to meet their basic needs.

“It is an obvious conflict of interest when a member of Congress owns significant stock investments in a company and then votes to award the same company lucrative federal contracts,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, told Sludge. “Whether or not the official action is taken for actual self-enrichment purposes is beside the point. There is at least an appearance of self-enrichment and that appearance is just as damaging to the integrity of Congress,” Holman added. “This type of conflict of interest is already banned for executive branch officials and so should be for Congress as well. The ETHICS Act would justly avoid that conflict of interest by prohibiting members of Congress and their spouses from owning stock investments altogether.”

Holman was referring to the Ending Trading and Holdings In Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act, introduced earlier this year by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). In the House of Representatives—where the 2024 NDAA passed 310-118, with the approval of over two dozen members who own shares in military companies—House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul’s (R-Texas) household owns up to $2.6 million in General Electric, Oshkosh Corporation, and Woodward shares. Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), who sits on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, owns as much as $100,000 worth of Boeing and General Electric stock.

Other House lawmakers with potential conflicts of interest include Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who owns Leidos shares worth as much as $248,000; Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who owns up to $100,000 worth of RTX stock; and Rep. Patrick Fallon (R-Texas), a member of the Armed Services Committee who holds Boeing stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000. “Every American should take a long, hard look at these holdings to conceptualize the scope of Congress’ entanglement with defense contractors,” Public Citizen People Over Pentagon advocate Savannah Wooten told Sludge. “It’s abjectly terrifying that the personal benefit of any member of Congress is factored into decisions about how to wield and fund the largest military in the world.” “Requiring elected officials to divest from the military-industrial complex before stepping into public service would create a safer and more secure world from the outset,” she added.

Read more …

“..we must stop burning fossil fuel to avoid dangerous climate change. “That is completely wrong.”

“..the warming of the last 24 years was entirely caused by the observed decrease of Earth’s albedo and not by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations..”

• Sunlight and Clouds, Not CO2, Drive Earth’s Climate (ET)

Ned Nikolov, a physical scientist and researcher affiliated with Colorado State University, told The Epoch Times the IPCC is incorrect regarding CO2. “The greenhouse theory claims that atmospheric composition is important,” Nikolov said. “They are arguing that tiny increases of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause global warming and that we must stop burning fossil fuel to avoid dangerous climate change. “That is completely wrong.” On Aug. 20, Nikolov and Karl Zeller, a retired U.S. Forest Service meteorologist, published their study that found that recent warming is not the result of increasing CO2. Instead, after analyzing satellite data, the two researchers concluded that the Earth has warmed because it’s been absorbing more sunlight due to reduced global cloud cover. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Earth’s atmosphere is constantly working to balance the planet’s “energy budget”—the amount of energy entering and leaving it.

After the Sun’s shortwave radiation—sunshine—reaches the Earth, the energy flows back into space as thermal radiation. If this balance is disrupted, and more sunlight is absorbed or not enough heat escapes to space, Earth’s temperature will rise. An imbalance in the energy budget is known as radiative forcing, with the incoming radiation being shortwave and the outgoing radiation being longwave (or thermal). Additionally, Earth’s albedo, the fraction of sunlight reflected back into space, impacts the amount of radiation that reaches the surface. In its Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC states that, due to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration from human greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s energy budget is out of balance—more thermal energy is being trapped, resulting in elevated temperatures and warmer oceans.

It also notes regarding the Earth’s albedo that, between 1950 and 1980, there was “evidence for a widespread decline of surface solar radiation (or dimming),” followed by “a partial recovery (brightening) at many observational sites thereafter.” As to the cause, the IPCC states, “Multi-decadal variation in anthropogenic [human-caused] aerosol emissions are thought to be a major contributor (medium confidence), but multi-decadal variability in cloudiness may also have played a role.” In addition, the IPCC said some studies show that “cloudiness” can play a role in “dimming” and “brightening.” But the contribution of aerosols and clouds to dimming and brightening is still debated, and “the origin of these trends is not fully understood.”That, according to Nikolov, is where his study comes in.

“Climate is controlled by the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the amount of infrared energy emitted to space. These quantities—together with their differences—define Earth’s radiation budget,” NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) website states. Since March of 2000, the NASA team has been collecting satellite data to examine the energy exchange between the Earth and space.Using those measurements and a “novel climate-sensitivity model derived from independent NASA planetary data,” Nikolov and Zeller evaluated how Earth’s decreasing albedo impacted global temperature during the 21st century. “CO2 is an invisible trace gas that does not interfere with sunlight. It’s believed to trap thermal radiation coming from the surface, but that’s a misconception because the absorption of longwave radiation by CO2 and heat-trapping are completely different physical processes.

According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, heat-trapping is impossible in an open system such as the atmosphere,” Nikolov said. He added that while water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, it becomes visible when it condenses and forms clouds. And because clouds “reflect solar radiation back to space,” their impact on the climate is “measurable and significant.” “Cloud formation is partially controlled by cosmic forces. When clouds decrease, the planetary albedo drops and more radiation reaches the surface, causing warmer temperatures.” “In our paper, we show, using the best available observations from the [Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System] platform, that the warming of the last 24 years was entirely caused by the observed decrease of Earth’s albedo and not by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations as claimed by the IPCC.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Jump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835562281695948926

 

 

China 2012

 

 

Flying dogs

 

 

Great white

 

 

Branch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1835674795578474816

 

 

Folding

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 17 2023

Jul 172023
 
 July 17, 2023  Posted by at 9:21 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Andy Warhol Reigning Queens 1985

 

• NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.)
• US, NATO Weapons Stockpiles at ‘Dangerously Low’ Levels: Top General (ET)
• ‘They’re Running Out of Ammo’: Putin on US Sending Cluster Bombs to Kiev (Sp.)
• The Incredible Shrinking NATO (Dmitry Orlov)
• Ukraine Behind New Crimean Bridge Attack – Media (RT)
• Real War To Defeat, Fake Propaganda To Victory – Nato Is In Two Minds (Helmer)
• The Wagner Mutiny (Jacques Baud)
• Cracks in NATO’s Ukraine Project (Hahn)
• Failed Proxy War With Russia Shows US Can’t ‘Pick on Someone Its Own Size’ (Sp.)
• Why Dennis Kucinich Should Now Threaten His Candidate RFK Jr. (Zuesse)
• Hunter Biden Threatens Trump With ‘Legal Trouble’ (RT)
• Almost Half of Millennials Want Jail Time for “Misgendering” (Turley)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden at 29

 

 

 

 

Kerry
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680479725624369153

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until now, we were pointing out that Ukraine was running out of troops, weapons and ammo. Now, it’s all of NATO. 3 articles.

“These are numbers that, unless they announce an all-out mobilization, cannot be provided.”

• NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.)

NATO’s plan to beef up its military presence in Eastern Europe will face “serious” problems because almost no country can muster troops in significant numbers, with Spain no exception, military analyst Juan A. Aguilar told Sputnik. Spain would be able to send only a meagre number of soldiers to reinforce the NATO flank in Slovakia and Romania, he added. In fact, the media impact of the announcement recently made by the country’s President is far greater than the actual size of the forces to be sent on the ground, remarked the director of the strategic research portal Geoestrategia.es. Pedro Sanchez had revealed during the recent NATO summit in Vilnius that Spain will deploy 700 troops in Slovakia and reinforce its presence in Romania by 250 military personnel.

“As a committed member, Spain is going to announce the deployment of Spanish forces in Slovakia to reinforce the eastern front and we are going to reinforce our presence in Romania with a greater number of troops,” Sanchez said, adding that his country would “continue to contribute to the alliance’s effort to achieve the just and lasting peace.” Although the details have not yet been officially specified, Juan A. Aguilar weighed in on the announcement, saying: “I don’t think that more than 300 soldiers can be deployed in three annual rotations, about 1,000 in total, a battalion… There are no more, unless they withdraw from other areas,” said the military analyst. He recalled that although Spain has on paper “some 150,000 troops”, far from all of them are available to be posted to Eastern Europe.

“Out of the 150,000 we have to subtract those integrated into Common Corps, Headquarters, Logistics, the Navy and the Air Force… Then, those of the special units (NBC, UME, Anti-aircraft) and, of course, the garrison troops deployed in the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla”, Aguilar explained. “What’s left?” queried the military analyst, and speculated: “Three light brigades and three armored-mechanized brigades, not at full strength, numbering about 18,000 soldiers. You have to leave a garrison for the country’s capital… There are troops deployed in Lebanon, Iraq, Mali, Turkey, the Baltic countries… And there are at least three rotations a year”.

NATO has been bulking up its military footprint along the alliance’s eastern flank, in countries that share a land border with Ukraine, where Russia is conducting its special military operation. NATO’s multinational battlegroups are currently stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. US President Joe Biden on Thursday approved an executive order authorizing 3,000 US military reserve personnel to augment Operation Atlantic Resolve, which provides rotational deployment of combat-credible forces to Europe as part of the United States’ commitment to NATO. Following decisions made at the NATO summit in Vilnius, allies that have been sending tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the regime in Kiev vowed to maintain up to 300,000 troops in a “state of high readiness”, as part of the NATO Response Force.

However, this comes as many of the afore-mentioned bloc members are worried about their own insufficient ammunition stocks, drained by the US-spearheaded Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Major European NATO powers like Germany, Italy and the UK have all conceded that after splurging on Ukraine, their own military had been “hollowed out” by arms shipments. Moscow has warned repeatedly about the consequences of these actions for regional and global security, only serving to fan the flames of the Ukraine conflagration. As for military manpower along the eastern NATO flank, Juan A. Aguilar told Sputnik: “NATO wants to deploy 300,000 men in Eastern Europe. The US would put up 100,000, but the rest of the countries have to provide a total of 200,000. If they make four rotations a year, 800,000 troops are needed. These are numbers that, unless they announce an all-out mobilization, cannot be provided.

Read more …

“So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War..”

• US, NATO Weapons Stockpiles at ‘Dangerously Low’ Levels: Top General (ET)

The weapons stockpiles of the United States and its NATO allies are becoming “dangerously low,” with no “short-term” solutions, according to a top U.S. Air Force commander. Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, made the remarks at the Chief of the Air Staff’s Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference in London, Breaking Defense reported. The air force general urged NATO allies to think seriously about their stockpiles. “I think it’s very important that we kind of take stock of where we are in our weapons state across the 32 nations of NATO, and we’re getting way down compared to where we were,” Gen. Hecker said, while speaking on a panel with the air chiefs of the UK and Sweden at the conference, the outlet reported.

“And it’s probably not going to get better—well, it’s not in the short term—but we’ve got to make sure in the long term we have the industrial base that can increase what we have,” he said at the July 12–13 event, urging all NATO nations to start making deeper investments. The United States is at “roughly half the number of fighter squadrons” it had compared to when it engaged in Operation Desert Storm, a U.S.-led operation that started in January 1991 as part of a response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, according to the general. He noted that there has been a similar decrease in fighter squadrons for the UK. “So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War,” he said.

“Now you add that we’re giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians, which I think is exactly what we need to do, but now we’re getting dangerously low and sometimes, in some cases. even too low, that we don’t have enough,” Gen. Hecker said. “And we need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going.” The United States has provided Ukraine with more than $41.3 billion in security assistance as of July 7, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to the U.S. State Department. That total encompasses more than $15 billion in weapons and equipment delivered to Ukraine from U.S. military stocks since the Russian invasion.

Read more …

“Until now, we have not used them… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition..”

• ‘They’re Running Out of Ammo’: Putin on US Sending Cluster Bombs to Kiev (Sp.)

The Biden administration unveiled a new military assistance package for Ukraine on July 7, which included cluster bombs. The lethal weapons are banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which has been ratified by 123 countries, excluding the US and Ukraine, and several other nations. The US decided to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine because the Western-fueled proxy war against Russia is running low on ammo, President Vladimir Putin told local media. “They [the United States] are doing this not because of ‘the good life’, but because they are running low on ammunition in general,” the head of state said, answering a question from a Russian journalist. The Russian leader recalled that Washington previously referred to the use of cluster bombs as a “crime.”

“As for cluster munitions, the US administration itself provided an assessment of these munitions with comments by its staff some time ago, when the use of cluster munitions was called a crime by the US administration itself. This is how I think it should be regarded,” he said. Moscow reserves the right to respond accordingly in case of cluster munitions use against the country, emphasized the Russian president. “Of course, if they are used against us, we reserve the right to mirror actions,” Putin said in the interview for Russian television. He underscored that Russia, which has various kinds of cluster munitions, has not yet needed to resort to using the lethal weapons. “Russia has in its possession a sufficient stockpile of various types of cluster munitions. Until now, we have not used them… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition,” Putin noted.

The US-pledged cluster munitions have already been delivered to the Kiev regime, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday. Lt Gen Douglas Sims, Joint Staff J3 director of operations, said that the bombs “have indeed been delivered to Ukraine at this point.” The Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to the Russian military, have previously resorted to the use of the controversial cluster munitions for shelling Donbass, in particular Donetsk. According to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, this indicates that the goal of the Ukrainian military is to kill a maximum number of civilians. Cluster bombs are extremely deadly containing dozens or hundreds of explosive submunitions, or bomblets, and are designed to maximize damage to enemy forces across an area of up to several hundred square meters.

Read more …

“The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second..”

• The Incredible Shrinking NATO (Dmitry Orlov)

NATO is a captive buyers’ club for US-made weapons. That is what vaunted NATO standards, with which the Ukraine must comply before it is deemed worthy to be invited to join NATO, are all about: to comply with these standards, your weapons have to be mostly US-made. That is also the reason for all of the various wars of choice, from Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria: these were demonstration projects for US weapons, with the additional goal of using up the weapons and the munitions so that the Pentagon and the rest of NATO would have to reorder them. The geopolitical rationales for these military conflicts are mere rationalizations. For instance, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years.

What was the geopolitical rationale? Nobody can even remember if there ever was one. But those bombs were about to expire and needed to be used up and reordered to keep the money flowing. In response to such strange inducements, US-made weapons tend to be overly complex (so that their makers can charge more for the useless extra features) and rather fragile (never tested against a peer adversary like Russia or China, or even against Iran), developed slowly (to clean up on R&D funding), built slowly (because what’s the rush?) and very high-maintenance (so that US defense contractors can get even richer delivering spare parts and service). These weapons were supposed to be tested every so gently by giving hell to backward tribesmen armed with old Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

Ukraine is a different story altogether. There, the Ukrainians, with their mismatched hand-me-down Western armor, are being asked to penetrate three lines of hardened Russian defenses. After about a month of effort and staggering losses of men and equipment, they haven’t yet been able to reach the first defensive line. The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second — before their reputations end up completely ruined; hence the unseemly haste with which the entire Ukrainian project is being orphaned.

Read more …

Russia is angry now.

• Ukraine Behind New Crimean Bridge Attack – Media (RT)

The Crimean Bridge was damaged in a joint “special operation”conducted by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and naval forces, media outlets reported on Monday. The Russian authorities have yet to announce the reason behind the incident. According to a source for RBK Ukraina, the key infrastructure linking the peninsula with mainland Russia was attacked by an unspecified number of sea surface drones. “It was difficult to reach the bridge, but finally the task was accomplished,” he said. Ukrainian officials have cheered the incident but have yet to confirm their direct involvement in the reported attack.

Andrey Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, described the Crimean Bridge as a “redundant construction,” but refused to elaborate. Traffic on the bridge was stopped in the early hours of Monday, with Crimean Governor Sergey Aksyonov citing an unspecified “emergency.” Later, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said that a married couple from his region was killed in the incident and their daughter was injured. Russia’s Ministry of Transport said the road surface of one of the tracks was damaged, while the bridge’s supports remain intact.


Ukraine has attempted to target the strategic link in the past, according to Moscow. Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Kiev attempted to strike the bridge with a missile, but failed to penetrate the air defenses. In October last year, the bridge was damaged in a deadly truck bombing, which Moscow said was orchestrated by Ukrainian intelligence services. At the time, Russia responded by intensifying missile strikes on Ukraine’s military and energy infrastructure.

Bridge

Read more …

“..despite the losses, the Ukrainians have so far taken just five of the 60 miles they hope to cover to reach the sea in the south and split the Russian forces in two.”

• Real War To Defeat, Fake Propaganda To Victory – Nato Is In Two Minds (Helmer)

What is new now is that the Ukraine, the US and NATO are losing their war against Russia on the battlefield, and risk losing all the deterrence which NATO has been designing, building, buying, and deploying since 1949. With or without desperation measures, Swiss colonel Jacques Baud tells War of the Worlds, Russia has already won the war. “Colonel Douglas Macgregor hasn’t this courage,” a US NATO veteran comments, referring to the Trump Administration appointee now broadcasting against the Biden Administration. Russian military bloggers and the Defense Ministry in Moscow are reporting that the so-called mosquito tactic of numerous small Ukrainian attacks on the Russian lines, run simultaneously, are resulting in Russian feints followed by artillery counter-fire; ending in heavy Ukrainian losses followed by retreat without territorial gains.

“It is within the realm of possibility that Ukrainian forces have seen losses at this level,” the New York Times quotes a British security analyst, adding that “ a significant level of lost weapons was generally a hallmark of wars of attrition, like the one in Ukraine.” The newspaper adds the claim: “In the first two weeks of Ukraine’s gruelling counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry it sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to American and European officials. The toll includes some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians. The startling rate of losses dropped to about 10 percent in the ensuing weeks, the officials said, preserving more of the troops and machines needed for the major offensive push that the Ukrainians say is still to come.

Some of the improvement came because Ukraine changed tactics, focusing more on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles than charging into enemy minefields and fire. But that good news obscures some grim realities. The losses have also slowed because the counteroffensive itself has slowed — and even halted in places — as Ukrainian soldiers struggle against Russia’s formidable defences. And despite the losses, the Ukrainians have so far taken just five of the 60 miles they hope to cover to reach the sea in the south and split the Russian forces in two.”

Read more …

“This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.”

• The Wagner Mutiny (Jacques Baud)

Clearly, Putin did everything he could to prevent the mutineers from reaching Moscow, where any clashes could have fed into Western propaganda. Playing with Lukashenko’s mediation, Putin reacted with a mixture of firmness (adoption of anti-terrorist measures, trenches on access roads to Moscow, placing territorial units on alert) and magnanimity (offering a way out via Belarus) to calm things down. It should be noted that, despite his tough talk about “treason,” and contrary to the claims of Western propagandists, the indictment of the mutineers does not refer to article 275 of the penal code (treason), but to article 279 (armed rebellion), which is less serious, as explained by John Helmer in an excellent podcast.

That said, Vladimir Putin’s statement on June 27 that Russian forces had “prevented a civil war” seems to have unnecessarily over-dramatized the situation. He probably wanted to give importance to the role of the armed forces in this crisis, but at the same time, he also suggested a greater fragility than the events had shown. As to the idea that the intelligence services had foreseen this mutiny, it is most probably false. In fact, Westerners are watching Russia’s domestic situation for the slightest hint of regime change, which is the ultimate goal of our support for Ukraine. This is why, as early as May, with the first Prigozhin videos, Western services raised the possibility of a coup in Moscow. But, in terms of intelligence methodology, these are not “predictions,” but simply working hypotheses and scenarios.

For an intelligence service, predicting an event implies having indicators and concrete indications on which to draw conclusions. However, neither the Ukrainians, nor the Americans, nor the French had the slightest indication, but only the hope that such a mutiny might take place. As a member of Ukrainian military intelligence told the French channel France 24. In reality, everyone was surprised, and no international actor has been able to exploit in Ukraine or elsewhere what could have been the beginning of a power crisis in Russia. This also shows that Western understanding of the conflict is based exclusively on hypotheses, which are themselves often based on Ukrainian wishful thinking, but very rarely on facts. This is why we are pushing Ukraine towards defeat.

It is very likely that there was no Western involvement in Yevgeny Prigogin’s decision. The USA made every effort to demonstrate its distance from the Prigozhin mutiny. Westerners, on the other hand, saw it as the realization of their “dream” and clearly stirred up the situation in the hope that it would lead to internal conflict. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky tweeted that he might spend his vacation in Crimea. Besides a childish behavior, it shows that he has understood absolutely nothing about the dynamics of events in Russia. In the end, this situation was nothing more than that of a company director trying to save his business and doing so impulsively and thoughtlessly, with potentially dramatic consequences for combatants on both sides in Ukraine. This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.

Read more …

“They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses.”

• Cracks in NATO’s Ukraine Project (Hahn)

Western and Ukrainian expectations and claims regarding the potential of the counteroffensive are exposing the hideously phantasmagorical expectations of most in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev. After six weeks of Ukraine’s highly costly counteroffensive, instead of territorial gains Kiev’s forces are being routed, experiencing enormous casualties, losses of territory on the Oskol river, an operational encirclement of Avdiivka, and successful Russian advances on the Kupyansk-Liman front lines. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed on July 11th that the Ukrainians have suffered 26,000 casualties and lost 3,000 units of equipment, including 1,244 tanks and fighting vehicles as well as APCs, artillery pieces, and mortars, since June 4th when the counteroffensive began.[2]

To put this into the perspective of Ukrainian weapons requests and NATO capacity and willingness (or unwillingness) to meet them, in December 2022 last year Zalyuzhniy told The Economist that he needed “300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers.” In such case, he thought it “completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd.” But the Ukrainians never received anything like this, and the West nevertheless pressed Zelenskiy to underataken the ill-considered idea of a broad counter-offensive against the revived Russian army. The Ukrainians have lost more equipment in just six weeks of the counteroffensive than Zalyuzhniy had requested; this without even reaching the first line of the Russian forces’ three well dug-in defense lines in the south and making even less progress in the east. Ukrainian forces have not been able to take and hold even one small settlement along the entire line of contact extending from Kherson to Kharkov. They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses. Not surprisingly, cracks are appearing in the Ukrainian ranks.[3]

On this background it is hardly surprising that tensions between Kiev and its Western patrons are running high, with each side blaming the other for the military farce. Both Zalyuzhniy and Zelenskiy are at odds with the West for its failure to provide sufficient military equipment for a counteroffensive the West itself has demanded as a kind of test as to whether Kiev deserves continuing military aid. In turn, Zelenskiy made his disenchantment with NATO and the West known both before and during the summit. In a June 30th Washington Post interview, Zalyuzhniy seemed to be airing both his opposition to the conduct of the counteroffensive without sufficient fire power (recall the pre-offensive pressure from Kiev for the provision of F-16s) as well as Kiev’s grievances regarding insufficient arms, thus setting up the West as scapegoat for the counteroffensive’s failure.

[..] Years of successfully pulling the wool over people’s eyes and Western fawning over him since February 2022 led Zelenskiy to overestimate the power of his personality and his communication skills. There was never any chance that the NATO summit in Vilnius would offer Ukraine membership, a membership action plan (MAP), or a shortcut to membership no matter how charismatic Zelenskiy imagines himself to be. These hopes were as delusional as were the repeated Ukrainian decisions not to forego NATO membership before and after Maidan, before and after Minsk, before and after Putin’s proposals on a new European security architecture and his massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders, before and after his February 2022 invasion, and before and after the March 2022 agreement to end the war by Kiev renouncing the goal of NATO membership and returning to the Minsk format.

What kind of policy is it that demands Ukraine’s movement towards NATO membership, backs a coup to achieve it, and then arms the intensely anti-Russian Maidan regime while not offering Kiev NATO membership in the face of decades of protestations from the military and nuclear power next door that it views such actions as a grave threat to its national security? But it is worse than that.

The Washington/Brussels consensus tells us that Putin is a hungry, imperial dictator determined at all costs to conquer ‘all of Ukraine’ and reestablish the former USSR, meaning taking all the Baltic and Transcaucasus countries as well. If we are to be guided by the concensus’s analysis, then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that Washington and Brussels pushed Ukraine into the claws of the aggressive, angry bear they themselves riled and aggravated. No matter. United together, ‘we will not waver’: Ukraine will fight ‘as long as it takes’ to defeat the bear on behalf of the United States and its subservient allies.

Read more …

“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?!”

• Failed Proxy War With Russia Shows US Can’t ‘Pick on Someone Its Own Size’ (Sp.)

In a string of statements last week justifying cluster bombs’ deployment, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials characterized it as a stopgap measure that should allow US defense industry to ramp up its “depleted” stocks of 155 mm shells. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even suggested that Ukraine would be “defenseless” if Washington did not urgently send the weapons. “The stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running out, about to be depleted. And so, the hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this: if we didn’t do it, we don’t do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, then they will be defenseless,” Blinken said.

“I don’t understand how a cluster bomb is a ‘defensive’ weapon,” veteran US-based journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin told Sputnik. “This is something you drop from a plane or you deploy and it goes across a widespread area and explodes, or it remains undetonated and then someone walks by and gets blown up. So the idea that they would be ‘defenseless’ without the cluster bombs, that doesn’t add up [if you] look at what a cluster bomb is.” Maupin also questioned how it was that the US and its NATO allies, which outspend Russia militarily multiple times over, and have sent more weapons to Ukraine than Moscow spends on defense in a year, could be “running out” of ammunition.

“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?! And you look at Russia, and you look at Belarus, the countries that are on the other side in Ukraine, they don’t seem to have this problem. They’re not running out of ammunition. They’re not running out of military hardware and weapons,” Maupin said.

“The United States has spent so much more money on this and so many billions of dollars have been piled into Ukraine. What’s going on here? What in the world is going on here? You almost wonder if this military-industrial complex thing where weaponry has been turned into a mechanism for stabilizing the economy, we dump lots of money into military expenditures – you wonder if a lot of these weapons are produced with the thought that they might never be used. They’re simply a moneymaking cash cow for certain Pentagon contractors. And with that being the situation, you have to wonder why we are going through them so quickly and what’s really going on here,” he added.

Read more …

The numbers are interesting. They don’t seem to confirm what RFK claims.

• Why Dennis Kucinich Should Now Threaten His Candidate RFK Jr. (Zuesse)

The former Congressman Dennis Kucinich is RFK Jr.’s campaign manager, which is a crucial advisor to any Presidential candidate; he now needs to lay down the law to his candidate and threaten to resign unless RFK Jr. will promise never again to be so sloppy in his wordings as to leave his many enemies on both the left and the right an opportunity to splash headlines against him that will take advantage of those sloppy wordings from him so as to accentuate still further the candidate’s existing propaganda-vulnerabilities. RFK Jr. has now done this twice — once in a way that will antagonize Palestinians and any progressive Jews who support them against Israel; and, now, this time, on July 12th, in an incident that the intensely pro-Israel Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headlined about on July 15th, “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews”. (A more honest headline would have been “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews and Chinese,” but Murdoch knows that Democratic Party primaries candidates need votes mainly from Jews and from Blacks, not from Chinese; and, so, playing the ‘anti-Semite’ card against Kennedy would hit him where any Democratic Party Presidential candidate would be hurt the most.)

Kennedy said there that scientific studies had shown that because of certain details of the structure of the virus that causes the covid-19 disease, and because of certain genetic structures that are more commonly found in Jews and in Chinese and that are least commonly found generally among both Whites and Blacks, the ratios of Jews and of Chinese who have fallen victim to the covid-19 virus have been remarkably low, and the ratios of all Whites and of all Blacks who have fallen victim to it have been remarkably high. He apparently felt that more research needs to be done on this, especially if covid-19 was created as a bioweapon (and so maybe targeted against Whites and Blacks). If those allegations are truthful, then any rational person would agree with them, but RFK Jr.’s having worded his argument as carelessly as he did was a gratuitous invitation for his enemies to use his statements there as a weapon against him so as to prevent him from becoming the Party’s nominee instead of for Joe Biden to become that.

This was the second such incident. The first was pandering for the pro-Israeli or “zionist” Jewish vote on June 13th by telling Glenn Greenwald that “Israel is a democracy” (as-if an apartheid nation can even POSSIBLY be that), and he refused to answer Greenwald’s question of whether if he will become President he will act so as to stop U.S. taxpayers from continuing to donate $3.8 billion per year to Israel’s Government, $3.3 billion of that to be spent on buying weapons made by U.S. weapons-manufacturing corporations to be used against Palestinians and against Iran. He wouldn’t answer it.

[..] I myself am skeptical even of the truthfulness of what Kennedy said there about the covid-19 virus and its vaccines [..] look at Israel there: It has had 517,874 covid-19 cases per million inhabitants, and that is the 23rd-highest infection-rate among the 228 nations on the planet. Israel has had 1,348 covid-19 deaths per million population, and that’s the 85th-highest covid death-rate. So, since Israel has the world’s highest population-percentage who are Jews, why does that country have among the world’s highest infection-rates and even of death-rates from that virus? And how can this be the case if what RFK Jr. said on July 12th is actually true? Obviously, it can’t. On the other hand: China has had only 347 cases of covid-19 per million people, and that is the lowest of all nations (except for Western Sahara which has a total population of only 626,161 spread over its entire desert, and that’s too small a population over too large an area for it to be at all comparable to China.)

But look at what is the world’s second-lowest: Niger. And its population is 26,083,660. There is no reason to doubt its covid-19 statistics; moreover, some others among the best-performing covid-19 countries are also Black African nations.

Read more …

“..the Cocaine was for use by Hunter, & probably Crooked Joe, in order to give this total disaster of a President a little life and energy!”

• Hunter Biden Threatens Trump With ‘Legal Trouble’ (RT)

Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to former president Donald Trump on Thursday, warning that continuing to target the troubled 53-year-old on social media could result in “even more legal trouble” for the Republican presidential hopeful. Trump’s online comments – including his suggestions that one or both Bidens was responsible for the cocaine recently discovered in the White House – “could lead to [Hunter’s] or his family’s injury,”Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for the younger Biden, told ABC News on Friday. Lowell cited previous incidents, including the January 6 Capitol riot, the assault on then House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in October, and the arrest of a heavily-armed man near the Obama’s home last month, as being inspired by past Trump comments and warned Trump’s attorneys, “We are just one such social media message away from another incident.”

“You should make clear to Mr. Trump – if you have not done so already – that Mr. Trump’s words have caused harm in the past and threaten to do so again if he does not stop,” Lowell continued, urging the ex-president’s lawyers to impress upon their client “how his incitement can further hurt people and cause himself even more legal trouble.” Trump recently skewered Hunter with a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, arguing the cocaine discovered in a cubby in the White House’s West Wing earlier this month belonged to the younger Biden, whose struggles with crack addiction are well-documented. “THEY 100% KNOW WHO IT IS,”Trump wrote regarding the cocaine culprit on Monday, claiming, “If they don’t release information, it means they destroyed the tapes & the Cocaine was for use by Hunter, & probably Crooked Joe, in order to give this total disaster of a President a little life and energy!”

In an earlier post, he asked if “anyone really believe[d] that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, [was] for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden.” Trump renewed his attacks after the younger Biden pleaded guilty last month to two misdemeanor tax charges following a years-long investigation, in a plea deal that is expected to keep him out of prison. The Republican 2024 frontrunner lamented that the prosecutor “gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.” The former president’s own legal troubles continue to pile up, as a Georgia grand jury considers charging him over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. He has already been indicted both federally and by the state of New York and has pled not guilty to all charges.

Read more …

So much for protected free speech.

• Almost Half of Millennials Want Jail Time for “Misgendering” (Turley)

A recent survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, found that 44 percent of millennials (between ages 25-34) favor criminal charges for people who use the wrong pronouns for others or so-called “misgendering.” We have previously discussed how misgendering is now a crime in countries like Great Britain. Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities. There has been a concern that we are seeing the rise of a generation of censors, who have been taught since a young age that speech is harmful and even violent. Yet, hate speech is protected in the United States. Given that fact, it is astonishing to claim that a pronoun violation could lead to incarceration. Only 31 percent of the millennials disagreed with the proposition. They are not alone. Recently, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer, said that “if you espouse hate … you’re not protected under the First Amendment.”


Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.” If hate speech is constitutionally protected, pronoun use or misuse is also protected as a criminal matter. (There is ongoing litigation of the protection in an employment setting for civil liability or disciplinary action). Yet, the most serious concern is the inclination of this generation to use criminal laws to police such questions. It reflects the erosion of free speech principles with younger generations. That crisis of faith could prove disastrous with free speech in a virtual free fall in Europe.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Media – It’s hot in Europe & people are going to stop going on holiday. Except here’s a map of July 1973 for Greece. It didn’t stop European holidays, they increased to +538 million tourists, predicted to increase by 9 million per year.

 

 


42°C in Novara, Northern Italy, back in 1952.

 

 

 

 

Pool

 

 

cat rooster
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680817457177542656

 

 

Puffer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680609418071756801

 

 

WHEN I AM OLD
When I am old… I will wear soft gray sweatshirts… and a bandana over my silver hair… and I will spend my social security checks on my dogs. I will sit in my house on my well-worn chair and listen to my dogs breathing. I will sneak out in the middle of a warm summer night and take my dogs for a run, if my old bones will allow… When people come to call, I will smile and nod as I show them my dogs… and talk of them and about them…

the ones so beloved of the past and the ones so beloved of today… I will still work hard cleaning after them, mopping and feeding them and whispering their names in a soft loving way. I will wear the gleaming sweat on my throat, like a jewel, and I will be an embarrassment to all… especially my family… who have not yet found the peace in being free to have dogs as your best friends… These friends who always wait, at any hour, for your footfall… and eagerly jump to their feet out of a sound sleep, to greet you as if you are a God, with warm eyes full of adoring love and hope that you will always stay,

I’ll hug their big strong necks… I’ll kiss their dear sweet heads… and whisper in their very special company… I look in the mirror… and see I am getting old… this is the kind of person I am… and have always been. Loving dogs is easy, they are part of me. Please accept me for who I am. My dogs appreciate my presence in their lives… they love my presence in their lives… When I am old this will be important to me… you will understand when you are old, if you have dogs to love too.

Author Unknown (DM)

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle May 8 2023

May 082023
 
 May 8, 2023  Posted by at 9:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  43 Responses »


Paul Cézanne Village derrière des arbres, Île-de-France 1879

 

• The Prighozin File: Twilight of the Gods or Maskirovka? (Pepe Escobar)
• Wagner Promised ‘As Much Ammo As We Need’ – Prigozhin (RT)
• China, The Peacemaker? – McCoy (IC)
• Kiev Counteroffensive To ‘Pave The Way’ For Dialogue With Russia – WSJ (TASS)
• Kissinger Makes Ukraine Peace Prediction (RT)
• EU Defenseless Against China – Berlusconi (RT)
• US Anti-Russia Actions Push Humanity Towards World War, Malaysia ex-PM (TASS)
• Kamala Harris To Run AI Taskforce (RT)
• Fauci’s Never-Ending Victory Tour (Pierre Kory)
• Tucker Carlson Squaring Off Against Fox – Axios (RT)
• Rep. Comer Urges DOJ To Hold Possible Hunter Biden Indictment (Fox)
• Close to 190 US Banks Could Collapse, According To Study (USAT)
• A Credit Crunch Is Inevitable (Lacalle)
• China And Its Trading Allies Are Well Placed To Topple The Dollar (Münchau)
• MSM Doesn’t Care That the CIA May Have Helped Cause 9/11 (Marcetic)
• Ex-Russian Space Boss Questions US Moon Landing (RT)

 

 

 

 

VDB

 

 

 

 

Assange

 

 

 

 

JFK Vietnam

 

 

Bowie Lennon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pepe on Twitter: “written on Thursday, BEFORE Prighozin’s deal with Kadyrov to wrap up Artemyovsk. Confirmed to me by top Donbass politico: fierce competition Wagner-MoD.”

• The Prighozin File: Twilight of the Gods or Maskirovka? (Pepe Escobar)

There’s no question: if Prighozin is essentially telling the truth, this is – literally – nuclear. Either Prighozin knows everything nearly everyone doesn’t, or this is a spectacular maskirovka. Yet facts on the ground since February 2002 seem to support his main accusation: the Russian army can’t properly fight because of a completely corrupt bureaucratic gang right at the very top of the MoD, all the way to Shoigu, all of them only interested in making a financial killing. And it gets worse: under a rigidly bureaucratized environment, commanders at the frontlines have no autonomy to take decisions and quickly adapt, and need to wait for orders from far away. That should be the main reason for the Kiev counter-offensive standing a chance of imposing dramatic upsets.

Prighozin is definitely not alone among Russian patriots in voicing his analysis. In fact there’s nothing new: he was just more forceful this time. Strelkov has been saying the exact same thing since the start of the war. That even coalesced into an “Angry Patriots Club” releasing an explosive video on April 19. So here we have a small but very vocal group bearing impeccable patriotic credentials sounding a serious alarm bell: Russia runs the risk of losing this proxy war entirely unless dramatic changes take place right away. Or, once again, this could be brilliant maskirovka – leaving the enemy totally misdirected. If that’s the case, it’s working like a charm. Kiev propaganda outlets triumphantly adopted Strelkov’s accusations with headlines such as “Russia is on the brink of defeat, Strelkov threatens the Kremlin with a coup.”

Strelkov keeps doubling down, insisting that the Russian state really does not take this war seriously and is planning to make a deal without really fighting, even ceding territory in Ukraine. His evidence: the “corrupt” (Prighozin) Russian army did not make any serious effort to prepare the economy, or public opinion, for an offensive – in terms of training and logistics. And that’s because the elites in the Kremlin and the army do not rally believe in this war, nor want it; they’d rather go back to the pre-war status quo. So here we go again. Maskirovka? Or a sort of Revenge of the MoD against Wagner? It’s a fact that at the start of the SMO the Russian army didn’t exactly get its act together, they really needed Wagner on the ground. But now it’s a different ball game, and the MoD may be engaged in gradually reducing Wagner’s role so Prighozin’s men do not capture all the blazes of glory when Russia starts going for the jugular.

And then right in the middle of this incandescent confrontation, we have the irruption in the dead of night of a couple of puny kamikaze drones over the Kremlin. This was no attempt to assassinate Putin: rather a cheap PR stunt. Russian intel must have pieced the whole story by now: the drones were probably launched from inside Moscow or its suburbs, by Ukrainian strike cells dressed in civilian clothing and sporting fake IDs. There will be more such PR stunts – anything from car bombs and booby traps to improvised landmines. Russia will have to step up internal security towards a real war footing. But what about the “response” to – in Kremlin terminology – a “terrorist attack”? Elena Panini from Russtrat.ru has offered a priceless, non-hysterical appraisal: “The purpose of the night strike, judging by the video footage, was not the Kremlin itself and not even the dome of the Senate Palace, but the flagpole on the dome with a duplicate of the standard of the President of the Russian Federation.

The game of symbolism is already purely British stuff. A kind of ‘reminder’ from London on the eve of the coronation of Charles III that the conflict in Ukraine is still developing according to the Anglo-Saxon scenario and within the framework set by them.” So yes: those neo-Nazi mutts in Kiev are just tools. The orders that matter always come from Washington and London – especially when it comes to breaching red lines. Panini argues it’s time for the Kremlin to seize the definitive strategic initiative. That should include upgrading the SMO to the status of a real war; declare Ukraine as a terrorist state; and implement what is already being discussed in the Duma: the transition to the use of “weapons that are capable of stopping and destroying the Kiev terrorist regime.” The puny double drone attack – a combined Anglo-Saxon neocon provocation – has offered Moscow the perfect gift: an unmistakable casus belli.

Read more …

Putin?! No more withdrawal.

• Wagner Promised ‘As Much Ammo As We Need’ – Prigozhin (RT)

The Russian private military company Wagner Group, which is fighting Ukrainian troops in the Donbass city of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), has been promised enough ammunition to continue the battle, the company’s head, Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Sunday.The statement comes after Prigozhin warned that his fighters would be forced to pull out of the city on May 10 unless ammunition shortages are addressed by Russia’s Defense Ministry. In a voice message posted on his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said that Wagner received “a military instruction … in which we were promised as much ammunition and weapons as we need to continue our activities.” “We were told that we can carry out activities in Artyomovsk as we deem necessary,” Prigozhin added.


He also said that Army General Sergey Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, was tasked with “making all decisions related to the military activities of Wagner PMC in coordination with the Defense Ministry.” On Friday, Prigozhin said that Wagner personnel were suffering heavy losses because of what he described as a 70% shortage of ammunition. He later announced that the positions held by Wagner would be handed over to Akhmat, an elite unit from Russia’s Chechnya. The fierce and bloody battle for the mining city of Artyomovsk, known to Ukrainians as Bakhmut, has been raging for several months. Prigozhin claims his forces have taken control of nearly all of the city, while the Ukrainians are holding out in a small area in the western part. Capturing Artyomovsk, an important logistical hub, would allow Russian forces to make further advances in Donbass.

Bakhmut

Read more …

“..China the dominant economic presence of the Eurasian landmass..”

• China, The Peacemaker? – McCoy (IC)

China has, in the last ten years, according to latest figures, expended a little over a trillion dollars in massive development loans. And they’ve done two things: They’ve laid a steel grid across the Eurasian landmass, for the first time actually overcoming that distance, and unifying Europe and Asia. So that, really, we shouldn’t speak of them as separate continents anymore; they were only divided by that great distance in the center. China has filled that distance with a steel grid of pipelines and rail links. And then, they’ve also ringed the whole world-island — that tricontinental world island of Europe, Asia, and Africa — with 40 ports, stretching from Sri Lanka, around the coast of Africa, and then ringing Europe, all the way from Piraeus in Greece to Hamburg in Germany.

And then, here we have to get almost metaphysical, a little bit mystical, OK? Because everybody talks about geopolitics. You know, you can pick up The Washington Post and New York Times and, probably, in every issue find the word “geopolitics” popping up all over the place. What is geopolitics? What might geopolitics mean? How might geopolitics actually make a difference? What’s the relationship between geographical formations and political events? And here’s what I think is happening, OK? That geopolitics is kind of like a substrate beneath the visible, tangible surface of events. Now, China has changed the Eurasian politics by investing this trillion dollars and laying down this infrastructure, so that China has an infrastructure for dominance of Eurasia. And then what happens? It’s kind of like the grinding of the tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface that periodically manifests themselves in earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. When the liquid rock breaks through the earth’s surface and you get an enormous eruption, and then, suddenly, you realize that the tectonic plates are shifting.

Well, that’s what’s happened. China has changed the substrate of Eurasia’s geopolitics. And now, just now, after — It’s only been ten years that China’s been doing this. They started this in 2013, we’re in 2023. It’s [been] ten years. That’s not a long time. But they’ve done it fast, and they’ve done it, actually, pretty well, despite what you might read in the U.S. press about white elephant investments and all the rest. And so, there are all these manifestations. One was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. I mean, what China did was, they ran a geopolitical squeeze play around the U.S. position in Afghanistan. They signed very lucrative development deals with the six countries ringing Afghanistan, particularly Pakistan. And mind you, how does the U.S. military fight? We have troops on the ground and we have air support. And it’s that combination that’s absolutely central to all U.S. warfighting strategy. No planes, then no soldiers on the ground.

And where’d those planes come from? The nearest air base that they could fly from after this geopolitical squeeze play was the Persian Gulf. They had to fly 2,000 miles, which means their ability to loiter over the battlefield and provide close air support was very limited. They could refuel, of course, but it was impossibly inefficient, and it was dangerous for the troops on the ground. And that meant, bang, we had to get out of there as fast as we could. The next manifestation we saw which, you know, seemed to be absolutely unrelated — But, again, think of that substrate and the periodic eruption. The next eruption was this sectarian division, as deep as the history of Islam, over a thousand years between Sunni and Shia —Shia, Iran, Sunni, Saudi Arabia — locked in the confrontation. But China signed a $480 billion development deal with Iran, and China’s top source of oil — and it’s the world’s leading oil importer — was Saudi Arabia. And so, China suddenly was in a position, because of this change in the geopolitical substrate that makes China the dominant economic presence of the Eurasian landmass. They could mediate between them.

Read more …

“.. the US Department of State and the CIA are skeptical of the idea and would like to see the result of the potential Ukrainian counteroffensive before taking any diplomatic steps..”

• Kiev Counteroffensive To ‘Pave The Way’ For Dialogue With Russia – WSJ (TASS)

The Kiev regime’s ostensibly possible counteroffensive may “pave the way” for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine by the end of the year with China being one of the mediators, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday citing European officials. According to the newspaper, key representatives from the US National Security Council support the idea of holding the negotiations between Kiev and Moscow. That said, the US Department of State and the CIA are skeptical of the idea and would like to see the result of the potential Ukrainian counteroffensive before taking any diplomatic steps. The Wall Street Journal also points out that this “shift in Western thinking” is occurring amid Western countries’ serious concern that they won’t be able to maintain the necessary level of military aid to the Kiev regime in the future.


That said, some Western states want to see whether China is capable of defusing the conflict which also indicates a change in the way the West sees Beijing’s role. Media conjecture about a potential counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops has been rife for several months running, with various potential trigger dates being publicly mooted. Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry highlighted that such open speculation within Western countries about expectations for an upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive only serves to confirm these countries’ direct involvement in the conflict. On April 23, Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Alexey Danilov rejected calls for dialogue on settling the conflict with Russia demanding more weapons from the West. Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow always supported holding negotiations but dialogue on the situation around Ukraine is possible only if Russia’s legitimate interests and concerns are taken into account.

Read more …

“Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think by the end of the year..”

• Kissinger Makes Ukraine Peace Prediction (RT)

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has told CBS News that the conflict in Ukraine may be approaching a turning point, and that Chinese-brokered peace talks could begin by the end of 2023. “Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think by the end of the year,” the 99-year-old diplomat told CBS in an interview broadcast on Sunday. By that time, he continued, “we will be talking about negotiating processes and even actual negotiations. With the release of its ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’ in February, China put itself forward as a potential mediator between Moscow and Kiev. The Chinese plan was rejected outright by the US and EU, while Russian President Vladimir Putin described some of its 12 points as “in tune” with Moscow’s position, and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky welcomed only a handful of its points, but maintains that Kiev will not compromise with Russia in any way.

Zelensky’s refusal to negotiate with Putin’s government – the Ukrainian leader banned contact with the Kremlin in a decree last October – is just one stumbling block faced by China or any other potential middleman. Russia considers the conflict in Ukraine a proxy war between itself and NATO, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday that any negotiations would not be held “with Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters.” In Washington, the administration of President Joe Biden publicly claims that it is up to Ukraine to decide when to seek peace. Zelensky has been offered no incentives by the US to do so, with Biden offering to continue supplying him with weapons “for as long as it takes” to achieve his war aims.


Among these aims is the capture of Crimea, a Russian territory since 2014. American military leaders have publicly admitted that the chances of this happening are slim to none. Kissinger drew the ire of Kiev last year when he suggested that Ukraine should accept a return to the “status quo ante,” or relinquish its territorial claims to Crimea and grant autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, in the name of peace. He has since suggested that these territories become the basis of negotiations after a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal. Moscow has repeatedly said that it is open to talks with Kiev but only if Ukraine “recognizes the reality on the ground,” including the new status of the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as parts of Russia. Otherwise, the Kremlin has stated, Russia will settle the conflict by military means.

Read more …

“The best thing we could do would be to go to school to study Chinese..”

• EU Defenseless Against China – Berlusconi (RT)

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi warns that the EU would be unable to defend itself if China decided to attack one of its member states. The veteran politician urged Brussels to adopt a robust military strategy and invest heavily in defense. Berlusconi made the remarks in a video interview recorded on Friday by Sky TG24 news channel. He is currently in the San Raffaele hospital in Milan and is being treated for leukemia, which was diagnosed in early April. The former prime minister said the EU is hardly a force to be reckoned with in the international arena, and should China decide to “occupy Italy, and maybe some other European country, we would absolutely not be able to counter it.” “The best thing we could do would be to go to school to study Chinese,” he added.

To improve its standing, Berlusconi said, the EU needs to adopt a “single military policy, with strong cooperation between the armed forces of all European countries.” He also advocated an increase in defense spending and the establishment of a 300,000-strong “emergency corps.” Politically, Berlusconi said he would like to see a “truly united continent” – something which would be more achievable if the bloc dropped its ‘unanimity principle’ in voting in favor of an 80-85% majority, he argued. He went on to stress that the EU can and must play a greater role in the world, including standing up to what Berlusconi described as “Chinese imperialism. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was considering withdrawing from China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project.


According to sources cited in the article, however, there is a lack of consensus on the matter within the ruling coalition. Speaking in late March ahead of her visit to China, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that while “decoupling” from Beijing is not in the EU’s interests, Brussels should become “bolder” in its relations with China – which is growing “more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,” she added. Commenting on Von der Leyen’s remarks, the Chinese ambassador to the EU, Fu Cong, said her message was incoherent and contradictory, while calling out the “misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Chinese policies and Chinese positions,” and advising the European Commission chief to find better speechwriters.

Read more …

”..if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO, I think Russia will feel less threatened, and there will be no confrontation. But once the process is started, Russia will take preemptive action,..

• US Anti-Russia Actions Push Humanity Towards World War, Malaysia ex-PM (TASS)

The US authorities push humanity towards a world war by contributing to emergence of two hostile blocs, says Former Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad. “The US will try to get other countries to join in the action against Russia, and Russia will also have to find friendly countries which will support it,” Mahathir, 97, said in an interview for the Global Times. “There will be confrontation between the Eastern bloc and Western bloc. And this will escalate and become a world war.” The expert noted that the conflict in Ukraine, provoked by the West, has already affected the entire world. He noted that the complicated situation has led to increased spending for essential goods around the world, negatively affecting grain shipments.


“The invitation to Ukraine to join NATO is a provocation. In fact, if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO, I think Russia will feel less threatened, and there will be no confrontation. But once the process is started, Russia will take preemptive action,” Mahathir said. He pointed out that NATO states are not directly involved in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict et, because Ukraine is not a member of the alliance. However, according to the ex-Prime Minister, the standoff with Russia harms NATO member states greatly. “In the end, they [Russia and Ukraine] will have to find some settlement. It is better for them to talk to each other, to discuss, to negotiate,” Mahathir said.

Read more …

Feel safer?

• Kamala Harris To Run AI Taskforce (RT)

US Vice President Kamala Harris has been appointed to head a new artificial intelligence initiative in partnership with leading companies in the field, the White House announced in a press release on Thursday. Harris and other senior officials in the administration of President Joe Biden will meet with the CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI to remind them of their “responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public.” The meeting is intended to keep the companies on track toward “driving responsible, trustworthy and ethical innovation with safeguards that mitigate risks and potential harms to individuals and our society,” according to the White House, which referenced recent executive orders and official statements reminding tech companies that their products were subject to civil rights law and other protections against unlawful discrimination.

The four companies, along with Hugging Face, NVIDIA, and Stability AI, will also submit to a public evaluation of their capabilities by thousands of industry experts and other curious members of the public at DEFCON 31, the Las Vegas hacking convention that has repeatedly put the insecurity of the US’ voting machines on display by giving children a chance to hack them. The White House also announced the creation of seven new National AI Research Institutes focusing on climate, agriculture, energy, public health, education, and cybersecurity, explaining the new institutes would “support the development of a diverse AI workforce” with $140 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. The administration is also giving the public the chance to weigh in on government AI policy starting this summer, according to the press release.


Tasked with stemming the flow of migrants over the US’ southern border upon taking office in 2021, Harris instead presided over a record amount of illegal immigration, earning her the lowest approval rating of any modern US vice president. Last year, she was assigned with developing a blueprint for fighting “disinformation,” harassment and abuse online despite having no experience in the technology sector. While hundreds of experts in the AI field have called for a moratorium on, or at least a dramatic slowdown of, AI development until internationally agreed-upon safety measures can be put in place, the US has thus far shied away from issuing any strong statements about the technology. Last month, Biden met with his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to discuss the “risks and opportunities” in the field but declined to address the experts’ warnings while admitting AI “could be” dangerous.

Read more …

“For all his faults, Fauci is no fool. One does not spend 54 years ensconced in the federal government without learning how to play politics.”

• Fauci’s Never-Ending Victory Tour (Pierre Kory)

What a dystopian nightmare watching “America’s Doctor” try to continue his Covid victory tour. It is both shocking and unsurprising that he would do this despite leaving a generation of children with lower IQ scores, a US life expectancy which dropped three years in the span of two, hundreds of thousands of deaths from the vaccines amongst working-age Americans (threatening the life insurance industry), millions of vaccine injured, skyrocketing disability rates, an explosion of cancers, and suddenly plummeting birth rates. So I went after him. Again. Maybe he will get the memo this time, particularly in light of the frosty receptions he has received of late from normally kid-gloved, obsequious interviewers. Enjoy. Dr. Anthony Fauci left government in December, but his media tour is going strong, albeit with a different tone and tenor.

The fawning adulation and questions about his exercise regimes and bobbleheads have been replaced by skepticism and outright doubt from outlets who never dared question the all-knowing man once dubbed “America’s doctor” by the New Yorker. Fauci recently appeared on CNN to complain about, “a personification of me as a person who essentially closed everything down.” He was responding to a lengthy sitdown with the New York Times where he declared, “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” For all his faults, Fauci is no fool. One does not spend 54 years ensconced in the federal government without learning how to play politics.

Three years removed from the worst of the COVID pandemic, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases knows the policy decisions guided by his medical recommendations are looking worse by the day. Herein lies his problem. When his ideas were in vogue, Fauci had no problem claiming responsibility. Now that the ugly consequences are coming due, he is eager to wash his hands. In the face of plummeting math and reading scores between 2020 and 2022, Fauci is especially quick to deny his role in the school shutdowns. Last fall, Fauci raised eyebrows for denying that school lockdowns, “forever irreparably damaged anyone.” Yet as late as September 2020, Fauci recommended that schools only open back up once the virus is “under control.”

Earlier in the year, he had chastised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, warning that premature reopening “likely” led to widespread student infection. Today, even left-leaning sources concede that, “kids are safe. They always have been.” Then came the vaccines. From the outset, Fauci’s entire COVID mitigation strategy was based on an experimental vaccine rushed to market under the branding “warp speed.” There had never been an mRNA-approved vaccine before, and now it was being pushed non-stop from the White House podium with the full support of the pharmaceutical industry. It was always highly illogical to deploy a static vaccine toward a mutagenic and constantly changing coronavirus. Then came the checks the vaccines couldn’t write. Fauci told us they would stop transmission. He implored us to “follow the science.”

Read more …

“..knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and is ready to start drawing a map..”

• Tucker Carlson Squaring Off Against Fox – Axios (RT)

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson is ready to go on the attack against Fox News if the network does not release him from his contract, Axios reported on Sunday, citing sources close to the pundit. Fox fired its number-one host last month just hours before he was scheduled to go on air, but has not released Carlson from his $20 million annual contract, which forbids him to work elsewhere in the industry until January 2025. While Carlson has made no public statement on his departure or his future plans, aside from a two-minute Twitter video promising his viewers that he would see them “soon,” he has retained entertainment lawyer Bryan Freedman to negotiate an exit to the contract. Sources claiming to be close to the newsman say he is losing patience with the network.

“His team is preparing for war. He wants his freedom,” a “close Carlson friend” told Axios, noting that Carlson had previously said he wanted to “get this done quiet and clean” but his team was now “going from peacetime to Defcon 1.” The conservative icon “knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and is ready to start drawing a map,” another insider source agreed. Carlson’s allies in the media are supposedly prepared to go on the offensive against Fox, and outlets including video platform Rumble and cable network Newsmax have reportedly offered to pay him even more than his previous employer. Even billionaire Twitter CEO Elon Musk is reportedly interested, though the two have not discussed the details of any arrangement. “The idea that anyone is going to silence Tucker and prevent him from speaking to his audience is beyond preposterous,” Freedman told Axios.


The network lost almost half of its audience in Carlson’s 8pm time slot in the week following his firing, and ratings for the network’s other shows have also declined precipitously – especially in the 25-54 age demographic desirable to advertisers. Carlson’s show drew over 3 million viewers per night, far more than the next most popular show. The exact reason for Carlson’s ouster has not been made public. Media critics including the New York Times point to leaked text messages from the anchor, specifically one in which Carlson admitted enjoying watching footage of an antifa protester being beaten by a group despite this not being “how white men fight,” then acknowledging the protester’s humanity. Other leaked texts revealed Carlson did not believe the claim that Dominion Voting Systems was flipping votes for Democrat Joe Biden. Fox settled Dominion’s defamation lawsuit for $787 million just days before firing the anchor.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1654966139074539520

https://twitter.com/i/status/1655321469541285889

Read more …

“We’re going to disclose many of the different LLCs, many of the different transactions that all these different Biden family members have gotten from our adversaries around the world..”

• Rep. Comer Urges DOJ To Hold Possible Hunter Biden Indictment (Fox)

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., urged the Justice Department to hold on a potential Hunter Biden indictment until after Republicans hold a press conference unveiling additional details surrounding the Biden family’s business dealings. Comer warned officials to wait to charge the first son until they hear from congressional leaders, arguing that the possible indictment could be just a “slap on the wrist” compared to their upcoming revelations. “My message to the Department of Justice is very loud and clear. Do not indict Hunter Biden before Wednesday,” Comer said during “Sunday Morning Futures.” “When you have the opportunity to see the evidence that the House Oversight Committee will produce with respect to the web of LLCs, with respect to the number of adversarial countries that this family influence peddled in, and this is not just about the president’s son.

This is about the entire Biden family, including the President of the United States. So we believe there are a whole lot of tips that the IRS and the DOJ don’t know about because we don’t believe they’ve done a whole lot of digging in this, and we have.” “By all accounts from the media reports that we’re getting, what they’re looking at charging Hunter Biden on is a slap on the wrist. It’s a drop in the bucket,” he continued. “So Wednesday will be a very big day for the American people in getting the facts presented to them so that they can know the truth, and then the Department of Justice can finally do what they should have done years ago.” Federal prosecutors are reportedly nearing a decision on a potential Hunter Biden indictment stemming from a years-long probe into possible tax and gun-related violations.


But Republicans are set to hold a press conference on Wednesday presenting the American people with additional information on the Biden family’s bank records, a briefing that Comer argued will provide additional information into the investigation led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Comer warned the evidence they have further implicates the Biden family in a broader, criminal “pay-for-play” bribery scheme. “We’re going to present to the American people all the information that we’ve received thus far pertaining to bank records. We’re going to disclose many of the different LLCs, many of the different transactions that all these different Biden family members have gotten from our adversaries around the world,” he said. “We don’t believe this was just a coincidence that all these Biden family members were receiving money from these this Web of LLC into their personal bag.”

Read more …

“uninsured depositor runs”

• Close to 190 US Banks Could Collapse, According To Study (USAT)

With the failure of three regional banks since March, and another one teetering on the brink, will America soon see a cascade of bank failures? Bloomberg reported Wednesday that San Francisco-based PacWest Bancorp is mulling a sale. Last week, First Republic Bank became the third bank to collapse, the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history after Washington Mutual, which collapsed in 2008 amid the financial crisis. After the demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March, a study on the fragility of the U.S. banking system found that 186 more banks are at risk of failure even if only half of their uninsured depositors (uninsured depositors stand to lose a part of their deposits if the bank fails, potentially giving them incentives to run) decide to withdraw their funds.

Uninsured deposits are customer deposits greater than the $250,000 FDIC deposit insurance limit. Regional banks are failing because the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes to tamp down inflation have eroded the value of bank assets such as government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. Most bonds pay a fixed interest rate that becomes attractive when interest rates fall, driving up demand and the price of the bond. On the other hand, if interest rates rise, investors will no longer prefer the lower fixed interest rate paid by a bond, thus driving down its price. Many banks increased their holdings of bonds during the pandemic, when deposits were plentiful but loan demand and yields were weak. For many banks, these unrealized losses will stay on paper.


But others may face actual losses if they have to sell securities for liquidity or other reasons, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “The recent declines in bank asset values very significantly increased the fragility of the U.S. banking system to uninsured depositor runs,” economists wrote in a recent paper published on the Social Science Research Network Of course, this scenario would play out only if the government did nothing. “So, our calculations suggest these banks are certainly at a potential risk of a run, absent other government intervention or recapitalization,” the economists wrote.

Read more …

“What will generate a credit crunch is the destruction of capital in the asset base of most lenders.”

• A Credit Crunch Is Inevitable (Lacalle)

Federal Reserve data shows $98 billion of deposits left the banking system in the week after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Most of the money went to money-market funds, as the Bloomberg data shows that assets in this class rose by $121 billion in the same period. The data shows the challenges of the banking system in the middle of a confidence crisis. However, as many analysts point out, this is not necessarily the main factor that dictates the risk of a credit crunch. Deposit flight is certainly an important risk. Many regional banks will have to cut lending to families and businesses as deposits shrink, but in the United States bank loans are less than 19 percent of corporate credit according to the IMF, while in the euro area it is more than 80 percent. What will generate a credit crunch is the destruction of capital in the asset base of most lenders.

The slump in mark-to-market valuations of all asset classes from loans to investments is what will ultimately drive an inevitable credit contraction. Credit standards have tightened significantly already, and the credit impulse of the economy, both in the US and euro area, has deteriorated rapidly, according to the respective Bloomberg indices. Both are below the March 2021 low. We must remember that credit standards’ tightening was already a reality before the Silicon Valley Bank demise. But the reality check of capital destruction in the financial system’s asset base is far from done. Start-ups will most likely see the most severe crunch in financing as the tech bubble burst adds to the asset base capital destruction in private equity and venture capital firms, who have delayed all they could the required write-downs and face a sobering reality check.


Our internal estimate of capital destruction in the asset base of banks and private equity firms is between a 15 to 25 percent wipeout, which is consistent with the average decline in market value over the October 2021–March 2023 period. Real estate investments all over the US and Europe require a significant reevaluation now that real estate has underperformed the market for eighteen months, according to Morgan Stanley. The optimistic valuations of real estate and corporate investments in banks’ balance sheets will require a significant analysis and subsequent write-off that leads to much tighter credit standards and stringent investment conditions.

Read more …

“..shifting at least part of its $3.2trn worth of foreign reserves held in dollars into other currencies. All of this would take a long time – one or two decades, perhaps.”

• China And Its Trading Allies Are Well Placed To Topple The Dollar (Münchau)

The dollar is the foundation of US global leadership, and the future of the dollar is therefore intricately linked to the debate about geopolitical fragmentation. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, asked during his recent visit to China: “Why should every country have to be tied to the dollar for trade?… Who decided the dollar would be the [world’s] currency?” These are good questions. The perhaps surprising answer is that he himself made that decision, together with the former leaders of the other “Brics” group of nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Their economic-development models have succeeded but have also critically depended on the US dollar. During the period of hyperglobalisation – which I date from 1990 to 2020 – the US became the global importer of last resort, and let its trade deficit against the rest of the world increase.

China and many other fast-developing economies built up savings in the currency they were paid in – the US dollar. They invested those savings into US bonds and other assets. The willingness of the US to absorb the world’s savings surpluses was the engine of globalisation. It ensured that the dollar would maintain its status as the world’s leading currency. This mechanism explains what happened in the last 20 years, but it won’t tell us what will happen in the next 20. Yet the dollar fans assume that the geopolitical and geo-economic environment will stay broadly the same. f the five Brics countries wanted to end their dependence on the dollar, they would have to do more than just choose another currency to trade in. It is not a menu choice, as Lula suggested during the same speech. He and his fellow Brics leaders would have to change how they interact with the rest of the world, and with one another.

China is key. In 2021, the country derived 43 per cent of its GDP from investment. This is approximately twice the level of the US and other Western countries. If China managed to shift some of its GDP to consumption, it would reduce its external trade surplus, as consumers tend to buy more imported goods. If you wanted to be less reliant on the US dollar, this is where you would have to start. As a second step, China and the other Brics countries could start trading more with each other, become more self-reliant in their supply chains, and set up their own financial infrastructure. hanging economic models is hard. Three years after Brexit, the UK is still struggling to move away from a model that depended on close integration with the EU.

Germany is finding it hard to maintain competitiveness without cheap Russian gas and with impaired global supply. It takes decades to build industrial production lines and supply chains. In China, there are an awful lot of vested political interests at the regional level, which rely on the investment boom continuing. If President Xi Jinping was really keen to extricate China from the US dollar, he would need to impose policies that would meet with resistance from regional leaders. In parallel, China would also have to start a long process of shifting at least part of its $3.2trn worth of foreign reserves held in dollars into other currencies. All of this would take a long time – one or two decades, perhaps.

Read more …

“Several former agents recalled being blocked by the agency from sharing intelligence about the hijackers with the rest of the FBI.”

• MSM Doesn’t Care That the CIA May Have Helped Cause 9/11 (Marcetic)

For all the ways the September 11 attacks continue to shape US culture and foreign policy, the event is still shrouded in a surprising amount of mystery. A recently unearthed bombshell court filing offers some possible clarity on the questions that continue to surround the attacks and their aftermath — and yet, like similar bombshells in recent years, it’s been studiously ignored by the media and political establishment. First reported by Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Hettena on the Substack SpyTalk, the media project run by veteran former Newsweek national security reporter Jeff Stein, those potential answers come in the form of a signed affidavit from Guantanamo military commission investigator Don Canestraro. The affidavit outlines the findings of a 2016 investigation by Canestraro, a longtime veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), into Saudi and CIA complicity in the terrorist attacks, findings that are squarely at odds with the story given to the public in their wake.

Relaying the information gathered from dozens of interviews he conducted with former FBI and CIA personnel, members of the 9/11 Commission, and US government officials, Canestraro’s affidavit outlines a sequence of events that, if true, suggest a botched and illegal domestic CIA operation was at the heart of the intelligence failure that enabled the attacks. More than that, it suggests there was a concerted cover-up of the grave blunder after the fact by both the CIA and the George W. Bush administration. The affidavit outlines the overlapping claims of numerous agents that the CIA impeded law enforcement efforts that could have prevented the attacks. Several former agents recalled being blocked by the agency from sharing intelligence about the hijackers with the rest of the FBI.


The CIA knew from wiretaps that two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Halid al-Mindhar, had multiple entry visas letting them travel to the United States, one former agent said, but didn’t pass it on to the bureau. Two other agents alleged that the CIA withheld information about the two men’s connection to the planner of the October 2000 al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, which, if known, would have turned the case into a criminal investigation for the FBI to pursue. One of those agents recalled a meeting with the CIA in which they were shown photos of three suspected terrorists, two of which would turn out to be future hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mindhar. When the agent, referred to in the affidavit as CS-12, asked who was placing border crossing alerts on the suspects, which would have notified law enforcement about their entry into the United States, they were told no one was.

Read more …

“..he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to..”

• Ex-Russian Space Boss Questions US Moon Landing (RT)

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof. In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast. Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time.

All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon. The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.


Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.” Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to the Moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going down in history as the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. The flight was preceded by the unmanned Soviet Luna 2 program, which blazed the trail for Moon exploration. Last April, President Vladimir Putin pledged to resume Russia’s lunar program.

Read more …

 

 

 

 


A husky next to a wolf. Although wolf-like in appearance, huskies are no more closely related to wolves than poodles and bulldogs are. And the size says it all.

 

 

Kiss whale
https://twitter.com/i/status/1655267089551183875

 

 

Aqua puppy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1655210878101340167

We love little guy

 

 


The rainbow starfrontlet (Coeligena iris) is a species of hummingbird in the “brilliants” tribe Heliantheini. Males have a glittering yellow-green forecrown that transitions through golden yellow to blue on the crown Jorge Luis Cruz Alcivar

 

 

Chick
https://twitter.com/i/status/1655043864279785473

A video of a giant Squid. This specimen, found in Toyama Bay, measured approximately 3.7 meters in length. However, estimates place their maximum size at about 12-13 meters.

 

 


Secretary bird

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Zelensky Admits Ukraine Already Ran Out Of Ammo

Mar 262023
 
 March 26, 2023  Posted by at 11:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Jasper Johns Three flags 1958

 

Andrew Korybko:

The US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) began reporting more accurately on the military-strategic dynamics of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine since the start of the year, but the true test of their comparatively improved integrity will be whether they raise awareness about Zelensky’s latest damning admission. In an interview with Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, he candidly told his interlocutors that “We do not have ammunition. For us the situation in the East is not good.”

This is a major revelation for several reasons. First, it proves that Russia is winning NATO’s self-declared “race of logistics” in the sense that its armed forces still have ammo to continue fighting while the West’s Ukrainian proxies already ran out of that which their patrons provided over the past year. Second, the aforesaid aid that was already extended to this crumbling former Soviet Republic exceeds $100 billion, which makes Russia’s leading position in this “race of logistics” all the more impressive.

Third, Zelensky’s admission adds credence to what the Washington Post recently reported regarding how poorly Kiev’s forces are faring in this conflict, especially its “severe ammunition shortages” that one of its sources spoke about. Fourth, the preceding points drastically decrease the chances that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will achieve much of anything and actually make it increasingly likely that such a move would be an epic mistake that could ultimately lead to a decisive Russian breakthrough.

And finally, it can therefore be expected that Zelensky and his agents of influence across the West will beg for even more aid, arguing that the failure to pay up would risking making their prior investments in this proxy war all for naught if Kiev ends up losing to Russia. The problem, however, is that no amount of money can make ammunition appear out of thin air since it requires a lot of time to scale production accordingly to meet these newfound exorbitant needs.

The very fact that Ukraine is out of ammunition proves that the West’s defeat in its self-declared “race of logistics” with Russia might already be a fait accompli by this point since it’s clear that Kiev can’t keep pace with its opponent despite being backed by all of NATO’s military-industrial capacity. Zelensky almost certainly didn’t realize that his candid admission essentially amounted to this, but it’s presently unclear whether the MSM will inform their audience about this or not.

On the one hand, doing so could contribute to his forthcoming begging campaign, but it could also backfire if taxpayers start asking whether it’s worth ponying up even more money if Ukraine already ran out of ammo despite the over $100 billion in aid that it’s received thus far. After all, if that astronomical sum wasn’t enough to keep their guns firing, then there’s no telling how much will be needed for Kiev to reconquer more of its lost territory like it intends to do.

Not only that, but as was earlier explained, no amount of money can make ammunition appear out of thin air. Quite clearly, fundamental changes in the Ukrainian Armed Forces are needed in order to indefinitely perpetuate this conflict like the US is plotting to do, but its fighters can’t immediately transition to using exclusively Western equipment when they’re used to operating Soviet-era wares. This poses a dilemma since Russia keeps moving further ahead in this “race of logistics” as each day goes by.

Objectively speaking, the military-strategic dynamics are trending in the Kremlin’s favor, which would ordinarily compel Kiev to seriously consider China’s peace plan if it wasn’t for its American overlords preventing it from doing so. The longer that Zelensky remains resistant to the very thought of a ceasefire, the greater the chances are that Russia will transform its growing advantage in its “race of logistics” with NATO into a decisive victory that could result in Ukraine losing even more territory.
 

 

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

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

 

Debt Rattle February 14 2023

Feb 142023
 
 February 14, 2023  Posted by at 10:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  79 Responses »


Elaine de Kooning Fairfield Porter #1 1954

 

• When Do The Giant Ants Show Up On Fremont Street In Las Vegas? (Kunstler)
• 30 Million People May be in Danger by East Palestine Disaster (TP)
• US Raises Pressure On Kyiv To Make Significant Gains On Battlefield – WaPo (Az)
• Taking Odessa, Kharkov To Help Ensure Russia’s Security – Chechen Leader (TASS)
• NATO Sounds Alarm Over Ukraine’s Ammo Consumption (RT)
• US Has No Long-Range Missiles For Ukraine – Politico (RT)
• Former Pentagon Chief: US Uses Ukraine To Achieve Goals Against Russia (Tass)
• EU Has No Plans To Urge Its Citizens To Leave Russia (TASS)
• Hungary Must Resist America’s Woke Imperialism (Furedi)
• Amid Turkiye’s Rubble Lies Erdogan’s Political Fate (Karan)
• Clapper: Letter About Russian Links To Hunter Biden Laptop Was ‘Distorted’ (WE)
• Seymour Hersh Speaks About His Nord Stream Report and Media Silence (Celente)
• Global Debt & Death Spiral – John Rubino (USAW)
• 30% Of High School Girls ‘Seriously Considered’ Suicide Last Year (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Zel Eu
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625108675533627393

 

 

 

 

Yes, there is a recent film set in East Palestine that is about an enviromental disaster exactly like the one that happened on Friday

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry Jim, I changed the title…

• When Do The Giant Ants Show Up On Fremont Street In Las Vegas? (Kunstler)

Didn’t you get the feeling this weekend that we’re living in HG Wells’ classic tale of the earth invaded by sinister alien spacecrafts? Our government is playing the story like a bassoon concerto. “American officials do not know what the objects were, much less their purpose or who sent them,” The New York Times reported, poaching a line from every horror movie of the 1950s. When do the giant ants show up on Fremont Street in Las Vegas? Looks like they’ll keep up the suspense as long as possible, too. Oh, we can’t retrieve that thing up in Alaska due to white-out weather conditions… Oh, that other thing — the eight-sided silver tic-tac — it fell into Lake Huron, glug glug… and that first one, the big balloon payload, lies deep in Davy Jones’ Locker now. You’ll have to stand by, folks….

Let’s face it, all the other mindfucks set in motion by the folks-in-charge are not just losing their mojo — they’re generating a lot of nasty blow-back in the way of widespread distrust of authority and institutional collapse. Even Woked-up Democrat voters begin to suspect that the vaxxes they greeted like a holy deliverance might not be so good for you after all. I’m waiting for Rob Reiner’s head to explode when he starts to notice how many young SAG-AFTRA members are waking up dead in West Hollywood. More to the point, you are now correct to suspect that the entire Covid-19 episode, from the design of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to the gene-modification shots put out by Pfizer and Moderna (erroneously labeled “vaccines”), was a joint Intel-DOD operation, not really a public health crisis. The abiding mystery is… why? Why turn Western Civilization upside down and inside out and then try to pound the whole thing down a rat-hole?

Frankly, the only angle that makes sense is that our government is captive to a hostile force. The WEF, the WHO, and the UN are the most obvious culprits, certainly the most talked-up, the most active on-the-scene. But until a few years ago these organizations had no real influence on the world. They were bad jokes… only pretending to protect the global community’s interests… actually completely incapable, utterly incompetent. Klaus Schwab, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus? Please! What Muppet factory were they made in? The UN was a mere collective of Third World hustles and rackets. And everybody knew it, but the developed world played along as a sop to these sad-sack nations and their greedy officials because the grift was chump-change.

Read more …

BlackRock, Vanguard, and JPMorgan are the biggest stockholders of Norfolk Southern, the train operator that crashed in Ohio, that’s why there has been a major media blackout on the toxic chemical disaster.

They’re actually telling people the water is safe…

• 30 Million People May be in Danger by East Palestine Disaster (TP)

30 million people, or 10% of the United States population, may be in danger after a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio that led to the release of toxic chemicals. “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist. As public officials try to calm the public, animals are falling sick and dying. “Out of nowhere, he just started coughing really hard, just shut down, and he had liquid diarrhea and just went very fast,” said resident Taylor Holzer while he explained the mortally ill confition of his foxes. “Smoke and chemicals from the train, that’s the only thing that can cause it, because it doesn’t just happen out of nowhere,” Holzer said. “The chemicals that we’re being told are safe in the air, that’s definitely not safe for the animals … or people.”

According to a new report, the situation may become much more widespread through the Ohio River Basin. As noted by Stew Peters, 10% of the United States population may be in trouble. “10% of the U.S. population, over 30 MILLION PEOPLE, live in the Ohio River Basin!” he tweeted. “The Ohio River itself provides drinking water to over 5 MILLION PEOPLE!” According to Upward News, the dangerous chemicals are making their way as far as West Virginia through the Ohio River. “Toxic chemicals from the train derailment & explosion in East Palestine have reportedly “contaminated” the Ohio River as far as West Virginia, a water source for over 5 million,” they reported. “The Ohio River is one of the nation’s great natural resources. Over 30 million people, or about ten percent of the U.S. population, live in the Ohio River Basin. With numerous public drinking water intakes and industries, the river provides drinking water to +5,000,000 people.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1624910190847094784

Read more …

“‘As long as it takes’ pertains to the amount of conflict,” the official added. “It doesn’t pertain to the amount of assistance.”

Note that Stoltenberg in the video talks about the THIRD invasion.

• US Raises Pressure On Kyiv To Make Significant Gains On Battlefield – WaPo (Az)

As the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears, US officials are telling Ukrainian leaders they face a critical moment to change the trajectory of the war, raising the pressure on Kyiv to make significant gains on the battlefield while weapons and aid from the United States and its allies are surging, Report informs, citing the Washington Post. Despite promises to back Ukraine “as long as it takes,” Biden officials say recent aid packages from Congress and America’s allies represent Kyiv’s best chance to decisively change the course of the war. Many conservatives in the Republican-led House have vowed to pull back support, and Europe’s long-term appetite for funding the war effort remains unclear. Several officials noted the strong bipartisan support that has accompanied every Ukraine package, adding that Congress gave the White House more than it asked for, but they acknowledged that was under a Democrat-led House and Senate.


“We will continue to try to impress upon them that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” said one senior administration official, referring to Ukraine’s leaders. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters, added that it was the administration’s “very strong view” that it will be hard to keep getting the same level of security and economic assistance from Congress. “‘As long as it takes’ pertains to the amount of conflict,” the official added. “It doesn’t pertain to the amount of assistance.” “Ukraine has expended significant resources and troops defending Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region. Zelenskyy, however, attaches symbolic importance to Bakhmut and believes it would be a blow to Ukrainian morale to lose the city,” two senior administration officials said.

Stoltenberg
https://twitter.com/i/status/1625115812896841731

Read more …

“We are fighting for peace, so that we are not killed, not shot at…”

• Taking Odessa, Kharkov To Help Ensure Russia’s Security – Chechen Leader (TASS)

Taking control of Odessa and Kharkov will ensure Russia’s security, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of Russia’s Republic of Chechnya, said on Monday. “Although some say that it will take a year, or two, or even three [to complete the special operation], I think that by the end of the year, we will have completed 100% of our task. I believe that the least we must do is take Odessa and Kharkov, which will go a long way in ensuring the security of our state,” he said in an interview with the 60 Minutes program on the Rossiya-1 television channel. According to Kadyrov, up to 200 trained soldiers are sent to the frontline from Chechnya every week. “We are fighting for peace, so that we are not killed, not shot at. All of us must work this way now. Every week, we send 200 soldiers. It is not easy. People are coming from all over Russia and we train them, <…> provide them with outfit and footwear, armor vests and helmets – we give them everything that is necessary,” he added.

Read more …

It’s obvious they’re running out. But they can’t admit it.

• NATO Sounds Alarm Over Ukraine’s Ammo Consumption (RT)

Ukraine is consuming an “enormous amount” of ammunition, and the West needs to boost production to keep up, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Monday. Stoltenberg also called on the bloc’s members to increase their intelligence efforts, accusing China and Russia of spying on them with balloons. “The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of ammunition,” he said ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. “This puts our defense industries under strain,” he continued, adding that “we need to ramp up production and invest in our production capacities.” Stoltenberg then pledged, as he has repeatedly since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began, that “NATO stands with Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

“Standing with Ukraine” has proven costly for NATO, particularly its European members. After decades of underinvestment, the German military rapidly emptied its stockpiles for Ukraine and reportedly has only enough ammunition for two days of warfare. Furthermore, Berlin will not be able to send its full complement of 187 Leopard 1 tanks to Kiev until refurbishment is complete in 2024, and even then, reports suggest that ammunition for these tanks is in short supply. The situation in the UK is similar, with the British Army reportedly having just enough ammunition for days or even hours of full-scale fighting. Meanwhile, multiple European nations have walked back promises of tanks for Ukraine, citing shortages and the vehicles’ state of disrepair.

Stoltenberg has repeatedly called on NATO members to boost arms and ammo production since the conflict in Ukraine began. On Monday, however, he also urged them to increase their intelligence gathering and sharing capacities, claiming that China and Russia are “increasing their intelligence and surveillance activities against NATO allies.” The NATO chief claimed that both nations are using “balloons” to spy on the West, referring to four aircraft shot down over the US and Canada in recent days. One of these airships came from China, while the origin of the other three is unclear. US authorities have not linked any of the four to Russia, and Beijing insists that the first was a “civilian airship” that veered off course.

Read more …

“..If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days.”

• US Has No Long-Range Missiles For Ukraine – Politico (RT)

The US will not supply Ukraine with its Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) due to concerns it will not have enough for itself, officials told Politico. Kiev continues to demand longer range missiles and other heavy weapons, despite $30 billion in military aid already authorized by the White House. Ukrainian officials were informed that Washington has no ATACMS missiles to offer during a recent meeting in the US capital, with the Pentagon concluding that transfers would “dwindle America’s stockpiles and harm the US military’s readiness,” the outlet reported on Monday. “With any package, we always consider our readiness and our own stocks while providing Ukraine what it needs on the battlefield. There are other ways of providing Ukraine with the capabilities it needs to strike the targets,” a senior military official said on condition of anonymity.

While it is unclear how many ATACMS remain in US stocks, weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin has produced only about 4,000 units of various makes over the last 20 years, with around 600 used up by US forces during the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. A number of those missiles have also been sold to allies, including Bahrain, Greece, Poland, Qatar, Romania, South Korea, and Turkey. Short of obtaining the weapon directly from the US, Kiev is considering whether to ask one of those allied countries to provide the ATACMS instead, a move that would have to be approved by Washington. Arms transfers to Ukraine have stressed US stocks over the last year, with shortages in Javelin and Stinger missiles reported as early as last March, just weeks after the conflict with Russia kicked off. As of February 3, Washington has sent at least 1,600 Stinger systems and more than 8,000 Javelins, in addition to a massive quantity of other arms, including drones, mortars, howitzers, armored combat vehicles, and dozens of HIMARS multi-launch rocket systems.

In addition to concerns about shrinking arms inventories, US officials also fear that Ukrainian forces would use the ATACMS to “attack deep inside Russian territory” given their range of 190 miles, according to Politico. Though the White House has approved increasingly heavy weapons for Kiev – including the M1 Abrams main battle tank – it believes strikes on Russian soil could cross a “red line” with the Kremlin.The NATO bloc has urged member states to “ramp up production” of weapons and ammunition to keep up with Kiev’s needs, with the alliance’s head, Jens Stoltenberg, warning on Monday that the Ukrainian military is consuming an “enormous amount” of materiel. A recent NATO assessment obtained by Reuters found that arsenals across the alliance have been significantly depleted thanks to the conflict, with one official telling the outlet that “If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days.”

Moscow has repeatedly urged against foreign arms deliveries to Ukraine, saying they would only prolong the fighting without changing the outcome of the conflict. The Kremlin has also warned that the aid creates a greater risk of escalation, especially if Western weapons are used to strike Russian cities or to try to seize Russian territory.

Read more …

“The Ukrainian people are doing the dirty work of what we never wanted to do here in the United States..”

• Former Pentagon Chief: US Uses Ukraine To Achieve Goals Against Russia (Tass)

The Ukrainian people in the conflict with Russia are ‘doing dirty work’ that the US would not want to do, former US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told the Russian pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov (Vovan) and Alexey Stolyarov (Lexus). The pranksters called Esper on behalf of former Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko and asked the former Pentagon chief for his opinion on US involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. “The Ukrainian people are doing the dirty work of what we never wanted to do here in the United States, which is why we should continue to support you [Ukraine] with everything we can, whether it’s munitions or arms or intelligence,” Esper said.


According to him, the expansion of Russian influence in other countries, including Africa, “is a problem” for the United States. At the same time, the former Pentagon chief expressed concern that US technology could end up in the hands of other countries because of arms deliveries to Ukraine. He stressed that it was important for the US to make sure that its technology would not fall into the wrong hands.

Read more …

France just did.

• EU Has No Plans To Urge Its Citizens To Leave Russia (TASS)

The EU has no plans to follow the US’ example and recommend its citizens or people with double citizenship to leave Russia, European External Actions Service Spokesman Peter Stano said Monday. “The EU has made no such decision, and we have no discussions in this regard. That is a question for EU member states. Consular decisions are a responsibility of member states, not the EU,” he said. Previously, the US Embassy in Russia called on US nationals to immediately leave the country, claiming that the Russian said can allegedly deny US citizens the recognition of their double citizenship; strip them of access to consular aid; mobilize them to the armed forces or to prevent them from leaving the country.

Read more …

Wokeness is a smokescreen. All they care about is Orban not joining the war.

• Hungary Must Resist America’s Woke Imperialism (Furedi)

Samantha Power, head administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), arrived in Budapest last week with one mission – to save Central European nations from themselves. Her main target was Hungary. According to a press release issued by USAID to accompany her trip to the Hungarian capital, Power wants ‘to help support democracy in Central Europe’. And she wants ‘independent media to thrive and build new audiences’. ‘[A] free and diverse press is a cornerstone of democracy’, she tweeted, ‘and in Hungary, independent journalists are facing real challenges’. By a ‘free’ and ‘independent’ media, what Power really meant are outlets that freely propagate the worldview of the Biden administration. Central to this worldview, it seems, are LGBT rights.

That’s why USAID’s press release explicitly told the Hungarians that the US will ‘continue to stand as an ally with LGBTQI+ people and all marginalised groups in their struggle for equality’. Power’s attempt to impose the White House’s obsession with LGBT issues on Hungary is not especially surprising. It is worth remembering that one of Biden’s earliest foreign-policy initiatives was to send the State Department a memo ‘to ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBTQ+ persons’. But of course, it’s not just LGBT rights driving the US’s intervention in Central Europe. Last December, when USAID announced its Central Europe programme, it also claimed it was going to support ‘new locally driven initiatives in Central Europe with the goal of strengthening democratic institutions, civil society and independent media, which are all pillars of resilient democratic societies’.

For USAID, these ‘locally driven initiatives’ refers not to any grassroots organisations, but to NGOs. And through these NGOs, USAID claims it is building ‘the watchdog skills of civil society and media to enhance rule-of-law observance, combat corruption and increase access to justice’. The use of the word ‘watchdog’ is telling. As is well known, a watchdog usually has a master – and one does not need a PhD in political science to guess that this watchdog’s master is not a million miles away from 2201 C Street Northwest, Washington, DC – the home of the State Department. USAID’s promise to ‘support democracy’ and ‘strengthen democratic institutions’ is entirely cynical. In practice, USAID wants to use local NGOs and other institutions to translate Washington’s cultural narrative and political priorities into a local language.

This is to create the impression that what’s ‘made in America’ appears as locally grown. In reality, of course, it’s nothing of the sort. This represents a clear attempt on the part of Washington to erode the sovereignty and exert influence over the democratic decision-making processes of Hungary and other nations in Central Europe. The US is effectively assuming the role of a moral guardian of democratic life in Central Europe. The arrogance is breathtaking. It seems that the Biden administration believes it possesses an inalienable right to influence the political and cultural life of Hungary and other Central European nations.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.

Read more …

“..the TAF’s ability and capacity to respond to such disasters had been significantly reduced after and even before the 2016 attempted coup…”

• Amid Turkiye’s Rubble Lies Erdogan’s Political Fate (Karan)

Turkiye’s Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (AFAD), under the Ministry of Interior, is responsible for handling national disasters and emergencies. Unlike many other countries where disaster response executives are military experts, AFAD executives in Turkiye are mostly Imam-Hatip (religious school) graduates with questionable qualifications. The agency was also criticized for being understaffed and having major coordination issues. In the first critical hours after the earthquake, AFAD officers either never arrived at the wreckage or came to only take notes. The lack of available equipment, such as cranes and construction equipment, made it difficult to reach the affected areas. Experienced miners in the Black Sea region were not dispatched until 48 hours after the earthquake. In contrast, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) were deployed within a short period of time during the 1999 Golcuk earthquake, but only 3,500 soldiers were deployed in the first 24 hours this time round.

On 7 February, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency (OHAL) in the disaster zone and a week of mourning. Despite the outpouring of support from the opposition municipalities and civil society, the government faced criticism for its slow response and lack of preparation. In addition, the Turkish Red Crescent was virtually absent on the ground. Erdogan responded to criticism by lashing out and claiming that he would address the “lies” and “distortions” leveled at his administration in due course. However, the very next day, social media, which was being used by civil society to save lives via search and rescue posts, was shut down, causing immense outrage. Access was restored only after celebrated Turkish singer Haluk Levent, known for his charity work, called out the authorities and referred to the social media ban as “equivalent to murder.”

Perhaps the most controversial issue was the response of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) to the catastrophe. Despite the presence of 50 thousand Turkish soldiers in Syria, only 3500 troops were deployed in the first 24 hours after the earthquake. Minister of National Defense Hulusi Akar was correct when he explained that Turkish troops were delayed due to weather conditions and destroyed land routes. But the failure of President Erdogan to effectively mobilize the TAF did not go unnoticed. Retired officers who took part in the relief efforts for the 1999 Golcuk earthquake had raised warnings in the early hours of this month’s disaster. Retired Rear Admiral Cem Gurdeniz called for amphibious ships to be sent to the Iskenderun Bay to help Hatay. Meanwhile, teams from countries such as Russia, Spain, and Israel had already established field hospitals.

Experts pointed to the fact that the TAF’s ability and capacity to respond to such disasters had been significantly reduced after and even before the 2016 attempted coup. The closure of the prestigious Gülhane Military Medical Academy (GATA) was cited as an example. Retired Admiral Turker Erturk, former Black Sea commander, emphasized the importance of the army’s role in both responding to natural disasters and external threats, stating: “The government destroyed the health facilities and capabilities of the Turkish army and the field hospitals. They also enacted a law so that the TAF would not interfere in such matters. The TAF had security, public order and aid plans called EMASYA, and the Natural Disaster Relief Plan called DAFYAR. Erdogan made laws and destroyed them. He prevented the military from rushing to the aid of the people.”

Read more …

““All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation..”

Yeah sure. Watch the 2020 video.

• Clapper: Letter About Russian Links To Hunter Biden Laptop Was ‘Distorted’ (WE)

The former director of national intelligence for President Barack Obama is blaming Politico for the “distortion” of a letter signed by more than 50 ex-intelligence officials that had baselessly claimed Russia’s involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop saga. Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign quickly dismissed the laptop story as a Russian disinformation operation. After the New York Post published emails belonging to his son, Biden called the story “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan” during an October 2020 debate with then-President Donald Trump. Biden said at the time: “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said this is, has all the — four, five former heads of the CIA. Both parties say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”

He was referring to a Politico report about the letter in an article titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The title was a bit misleading because the letter never directly called the story Russian “disinformation.” Ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper complained about the Politico headline to the Washington Post this week. “There was message distortion,” Clapper told the outlet. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said.” Clapper did not speak up about this during the 2020 election, however, despite the Biden campaign exploiting the letter to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop stories as a Kremlin disinformation operation, and he implausibly claimed in his new interview that he was unaware of how Joe Biden described the letter during the 2020 debate.

“It could have been bad information, false information. But we had no evidence, no inside baseball that it was. The intent of the letter was that this could be Russian disinformation — emphasis on could,” Clapper told the outlet. “It’s a very important nuance … a distinction that people are always ignoring.” Although the October 2020 letter hedged a bit at various times, it did repeatedly contend there was Russian involvement with the laptop stories, arguing that “if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election” and expressing “our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.” The letter claimed that the laptop saga “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that “our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

Clapper 2020

Read more …

“..they have The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSN, and CNN fronting for them..”

• Seymour Hersh Speaks About His Nord Stream Report and Media Silence (Celente)

Seymour Hersh spoke to Radio War Nerd about his recent column on the Nord Stream blast that blames the Biden administration of carrying out the attack. It was his first interview after his story was published that has been largely ignored by the Western propaganda media. Hersh said he was asked about how he found the story, and said his friend told him he is an “expert at deconstructing the obvious.” He said German newspapers have been “nasty” to him and outlets like The Washington Post and New York Times simply ignore him. He said these outlets want him to name his source, which he will not, because the individual will end up in jail. “The problem is, it’s all been cheapened. Because now the New York Times and the Washington Post think an unnamed source can be a press guy, a press secretary, that whispers something to them on the side. I don’t know, they don’t seem to have anyone inside,” he said.


He theorized that mainstream outlets in the U.S. avoided his stories because it gives a “pro-Russian” impression. “The way I look at it, you know, the White House, despite all the criticism of [President Joe] Biden…they have The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSN, and CNN fronting for them,” Hersh said. Hersh said the only reporter to call him was Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. “It’s amazing to be how they fall in line, my colleagues,” he said.

Read more …

“Welcome to the end game for the world’s big currencies.”

• Global Debt & Death Spiral – John Rubino (USAW)

Analyst and financial writer John Rubino says we’re are in a “debt and death spiral” that will force dramatic changes on the world. Rubino explains, “The debt spiral part of this means things from here continue to get worse and worse for the big currencies of the world until they die. In other words, until people lose faith in them, refuse to use them and hold them anymore until their value falls to their intrinsic value, which is zero. That manifests to hyperinflation. The value of the currency falls as opposed to the things you buy with it. . . . Things feel basically okay for a long time as long as governments could force interest rates down to really low levels. The side effects of that are massive money creation and, eventually, inflation. That’s what we are dealing with now. So, here we go. Welcome to the end game for the world’s big currencies.”

Rubino contends things have gotten so out of control that there is no stopping what is coming. Rubino says, “We are in the part of the cycle now where things just get worse, and there is nothing we can do about it. You are going to see companies that have borrowed huge amounts of money to buy back their stock, and now they see their interest costs explode. Governments around the world have the same problem, and there is nothing central banks can do about this. The next stage of this is when everybody realizes that there is no fix. Daddy is not going to come home and take care of all of this, and there is no adult supervision. The financial markets are basically on their own with so much debt that there is nothing left to do.

You either have mass bankruptcies or inflate away the currencies of the world, and we’re there—finally. 2023 is going to be an amazing year . . . and we make the decision about what kind of a crisis we fall into. We have a 1930’s style deflationary depression, which is what happens if we keep raising interest rates. Or, a Weimar Germany kind of hyperinflation, which is what happens if we try to inflate our way out of our current debt problems. And that’s it. This is not something on the distant horizon anymore. It’s something right here staring us in the face.”

Rubino talks about the threat of global nuclear war and contends our extreme financial problems will seem timid if the nukes fly. In the nuclear war scenario, the global population could get cut in half with “radiation and starvation.” Rubino also talks about ways to be more resilient, and that starts with shedding as much debt as you can. It also includes food, water, cash, defensive investments and precious metals. Rubino thinks the economy is so weak, with so many different financial bubbles, that one bubble pop could bring the entire system down rapidly. Rubino says look out for big European banks to go insolvent as a warning sign of trouble if the trillion-dollar derivative complex blows up. There is much more in the 52-minure interview.

Read more …

The CDC is your friend…

• 30% Of High School Girls ‘Seriously Considered’ Suicide Last Year (ZH)

A staggering 30% of high school girls in the United States who were surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they had “seriously considered attempting suicide” in 2021, up from (a still shocking) 19% in 2011. Panning back, almost 60% of high school girls surveyed said they felt ‘persistent sadness or hopelessness’ in 2021, an increase of roughly 60% over the same time period. “Though both high-school girls and boys reported experiencing mental-health challenges, girls reported record high levels of violence, sadness and suicide risk, the CDC said. In 2021, 57% of high-school girls reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year, compared with 36% in 2011. Thirty percent reported they seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021, up from 19% in 2011.” -WSJ

When it comes to boys in high school, 29% reported persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness in 2021 vs. 21% in 2011, while 14% reported seriously considering a suicide attempt, up from 13% in 2011. Following the survey, federal officials noted a spike in mental health among young people – particularly girls, in new data released on Monday which was gathered from a biennial survey spanning 2011 to 2021, of 9th through 12th-graders across the country. According to mental health experts, girls are particularly vulnerable to anxiety and depression, given higher rates of harassment and discrimination they face compared with boys. And of course, now they’re all competing with TikTok Barbies who set even more unrealistic and unhealthy standards.

And as the Wall Street Journal notes, the evidence suggests that the stress, isolation and loss during the pandemic amplified mental health issues among young people who were already struggling. “These data show our kids need far more support to cope, hope and thrive,” said CDC chief medical officer, Debra Houry. According to the CDC, there LGBTQ teens are showing ‘ongoing and extreme distress,’ with more than half of these students reporting a recent episode of poor mental health, and 22% reporting an actual suicide attempt in the past year.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Elon bad now

 

 

 

 

 

 

The EU has approved a 4th species of insects for human consumption. From now on, it will be possible to sell food products made out of the larvae of the Lesser Mealworm.

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle February 4 2023

Feb 042023
 
 February 4, 2023  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  66 Responses »


Henri Matisse Olive trees at Collioure 1906

 

• Building A New World Order Is Now An Existential Issue For Russia (Trenin)
• US-China War By 2025: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? (Fomenko)
• Pentagon Allows Ukraine To Fire Long-range Missiles At Will (RT)
• Russia Responds To Latest US ‘Escalation’ (RT)
• From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses (Batiushka)
• UK MIlitary Could Run Out Of Ammo In Single Afternoon – Ex-commander (RT)
• Serbia Names ‘Greatest’ Mistake By West (RT)
• RAND Gets It, Sort Of (Helmholtz Smith)
• The Arsenal of Democracy Isn’t (Schryver)
• Sanctions On Russian Oil Not Working – Analysts (RT)
• Lose-Lose (Jim Kunstler)
• Republicans to Force Nancy Pelosi to Testify About Jan 6 (TP)
• Musk Wins Lawsuit Over ‘Funding Secured’ Tweet (ZH)
• Thai Princess Coma Mystery – World Expert Says It’s A Covid Jab Injury (DTNZ)
• Biden Announces U.S. Surrender To Chinese Balloon (BBee)

 

 

 

 

OH SH*T, HERE WE GO (MacGregor)

 

 

 

 

What Becomes of NATO After The Loss In Ukraine

 

 

 

 

Trump Ukraine

 

 

 

 

“..a defeat – if it is hypothetically possible – could provoke a destabilization of the country, accompanied by the disintegration of Russian statehood.”

• Building A New World Order Is Now An Existential Issue For Russia (Trenin)

Let us begin by assessing the current situation. One effect of the conflict has already been a fundamental change in the external environment in which Russia finds itself. Its political relations with the collective West, and its allies, have become openly hostile and the armed conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war by the West against Russia. Economic relations with this part of the world have been permanently undermined and are shrinking like Mars bars. Cultural, scientific, sporting and humanitarian ties have been severely curtailed, the information war has reached maximum intensity, and the Iron Curtain in Europe has been rebuilt – this time by the West. However, Russia is not completely isolated. It maintains and develops partnerships in many areas with the world’s new centers of power, and other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This part of the world community includes most of the world’s states, where the majority of the human population lives and where more than half of the global economy is concentrated. It can rightly be called a world majority with the clear understanding, of course, that this majority is not a bloc and that its members are not allies of Russia. They are guided primarily by national interests and are deeply integrated into the global economy and the Western-centric institutions that serve it, which significantly limits interaction with Moscow. The dramatic shift in the external cycle has led to profound changes within Russia. The old model of mainly exporting raw materials and importing technology no longer works. The political system, which was built on liberal American-French models and then adapted more or less successfully – in substance, not in form – to domestic traditions, is obviously in need of a profound overhaul.

The quasi-ideology of pragmatism and the cult of money, which dominated the country after the collapse of the USSR, proved to be flawed and harmful. In short, the end of the historical orientation towards integration with the Western world logically requires Russia to reorient itself. But what does this mean? To which “self”? Soviet, tsarist or otherwise? A prerequisite for Russia’s long-term strategy is victory in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The most important criterion for such a victory is a state that is guaranteed not to lead to a renewed war after some time. On the contrary, a defeat – if it is hypothetically possible – could provoke a destabilization of the country, accompanied by the disintegration of Russian statehood. The stakes for Russia in the current conflict are therefore existential and fundamentally higher than those of the US and its allies. This in itself is a factor working in Russia’s favor, but it certainly does not guarantee its success.

Read more …

“..It also sees the competition catching up, however, and is ready to use all means necessary, and to take massive risks, to prevent the rise of rival powers. ”

• US-China War By 2025: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? (Fomenko)

American Four-Star General Mike Minihan, head of the US Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) believes the US and China will go to war by 2025. “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” Minihan reportedly wrote in a memo to his officers, obtained by media outlets. The message instructs AMC personnel to train and get their affairs in order so that they are “legally ready and prepared.” This prediction is the most direct and blunt yet from an American official on the prospect of a potential conflict between the US and China, besides President Joe Biden’s indications that the US would intervene on the side of Taiwan if China invaded.

Of course, Minihan is not a policymaker, and the memo is not an official statement of US military policy towards China. But the influence of the US military and by extension, the military-industrial complex, on US foreign policymaking and on the mood in Washington in general, should not be underestimated. The reality is, especially as seen in Ukraine, that the risk of a major-power conflict is arguably at the highest it has ever been since the end of World War II or the height of the Cold War. That is because the US sees itself as a rightful and permanent global hegemon. It also sees the competition catching up, however, and is ready to use all means necessary, and to take massive risks, to prevent the rise of rival powers. As such, the US and China risk falling into the so-called, “Thucydides Trap,” which is described as “an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon”.

The current distribution of power in the world is described as “emerging multipolarity”. Following three decades of American unipolarity, when the US ruled unchallenged, a number of emerging powers are changing the international order. Multipolarity differs from “bipolarity,” where two powers compete for hegemony, the best known example being the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While bipolarity brings a form of stability, as the military capabilities of both powers are evenly matched and the stakes of a potential conflict are extremely high, history shows multipolarity typically brings instability as it creates an insecure, unpredictable, and competitive international environment. The world of 1914, where a theatre of competing European powers scrambled for international dominance, ultimately combusted into the First World War. As competing world powers expanded their imperialist ambitions, they sought to contain others by forming alliances and starting arms races.

Sounds familiar? It should. Today’s world has some disturbing parallels. The US – an insecure hegemon whose relative power is diminishing as other world powers emerge – is desperately seeking to degrade, undermine and contain its rivals by triggering arms races and expanding alliance systems. Already, the focus on expanding NATO has provoked the conflict in Ukraine, but worse still, the Biden administration is actively seeking to expand that model to East Asia against China, in the form of blocs such as the Quad and AUKUS.

Read more …

“..Moscow will “push back” the Ukrainian troops to a range at which they will not be a threat.”

• Pentagon Allows Ukraine To Fire Long-range Missiles At Will (RT)

It is up to the government in Kiev to decide how to use the new rockets for the US-supplied HIMARS launchers, the Pentagon said on Friday, confirming that the latest batch of munitions the American taxpayers are funding will include Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB).The Boeing-manufactured munitions consist of a rocket motor mated with an airplane bomb, with an estimated range of up to 150 kilometers. While Friday’s announcement listed “additional ammunition” for the HIMARS and “precision-guided rockets,” Brigadier-General Patrick Ryder told reporters that this indeed included the GLSDB, confirming the information leaked to Reuters earlier this week. Ryder also confirmed that the US won’t stand in the way of Ukrainians using the missiles to strike deep inside Russia.

“When it comes to Ukrainian plans on operations, clearly that is their decision. They are in the lead for those,” he said on Friday. “So, I’m not going to talk about or speculate about potential future operations, but again, all along, we’ve been working with them to provide them with capabilities that will enable them to be effective on the battlefield.” The GLDSB are produced by Boeing in cooperation with Swedish Saab AB, and combine the GBU-39 small-diameter bomb with the M26 rocket motor. It was unclear how many of the munitions the Pentagon intended to send, or whether they would come from the US military stockpile or need to be freshly produced. Reuters claimed to have seen a Boeing document saying the first deliveries could be “as early as spring 2023.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg cited unnamed officials who said the timeline could be as long as nine months, depending on when the US Air Force issues the contract. Bloomberg also reported the GLSDB order would account for $200 million of the $1.75 billion in the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funding, referring to contracts for weapons and ammunition not coming out of the Pentagon stockpile. Whenever the missiles actually arrive, Russia has already hinted at how it will respond. On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin tasked the military with “eliminating any possibility” of Ukrainian artillery strikes on Russian territory. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview on Thursday that Moscow will “push back” the Ukrainian troops to a range at which they will not be a threat. “The longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved,” Lavrov said.

Read more …

“the longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved.”

• Russia Responds To Latest US ‘Escalation’ (RT)

The decision to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles marks a “deliberate escalation” by the United States, Russia’s ambassador to Washington has said, warning that Moscow would not tolerate strikes on Russian cities. In a statement on Friday evening, Ambassador Anatoly Antonov commented on the latest round of US military aid approved for Ukraine earlier in the day, which is set to include Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) – munitions with an operational range of 93 miles (150 kilometers). “Washington sees no boundaries in seeking to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The transfer of increasingly powerful weapons to the Kiev regime is a deliberate escalation of the conflict by the United States,” he said, adding “Any attempt to harm the Russian Federation is doomed to failure. The sooner the United States realizes this, the sooner the current conflict will end.”

Though the Pentagon did not mention the GLSDB by name in announcing the weapons transfer, Brigadier-General Patrick Ryder later confirmed that it would be included in the next round of aid, also noting that US officials would not stop Kiev from using the missiles to strike inside Russia. Fired from the US-supplied HIMARS missile launcher, the GLSDB is among the longest-range weapons authorized for Kiev to date, and could theoretically reach targets deep within Russian territory. Antonov went on to say the United States is “de facto inciting its proteges to attack Russian regions,” arguing that Moscow makes no distinction between newer territories which voted to join the Russian Federation last year and other Russian lands.

“For us there is no difference when we talk about a possible attack by Kiev criminals on the Zaporozhye or Bryansk regions, the Crimea or the Smolensk region,” he continued. Though the new weapons could take up to nine months to reach the Ukrainian battlefield, Russia has already suggested how it might react, with President Vladimir Putin ordering the military to eliminate “any possibility” of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory earlier this week. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, meanwhile, said Russian forces would repel Ukrainian soldiers to a distance from which they would not pose a threat, declaring: “the longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved.”

Read more …

“..Only through such a crushing defeat for Western hubris can further crazy adventures, including nuclear ones, be avoided.”

• From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses (Batiushka)

Western support for the Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has done nothing for America’s authority. It had already been undermined by war crimes, water-boarding, economic decline, a drugs epidemic, mass shootings, a trashed health system for 40 million in poverty and military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The ‘regime changes’, assassinations, electoral frauds, black propaganda (also called PR), massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States since 1945 have resulted in over 20 million dead and planetary revulsion for U.S. imperialism. ‘Yanks go home’. Blood lies on the US. Did they really expect to get away with this?

The conflict in the Ukraine is effectively World War III, or if you prefer, World War I, Part III. A proxy hot war between Washington and Moscow. Yes, the military phase is local, having started between Russia and the Ukraine in 2014. But the repercussions for Russia are enormous. They mark the end of a 300-year period when Russia was enamoured with the West. Now Western deceit means that Russians have lost their illusions and naivety for ever. Now Russia will fight on until the Armed Forces of Ukraine and all those who took up arms and have been fighting Russians for almost nine years are no longer a threat to anyone. The Kiev Army will be routed and Russia will return to its roots of over 300 years ago.

However, the political and economic repercussions for the Western world, held on a tight leash by its feudal US owner, are even more enormous: the end of the rule of the dollar. True, there are those who predict a second military phase between Iran and the US colony of Israel. And a third could be between China and the US, the pretext being the Chinese Ukraine, Taiwan. But nothing is certain. After the coming Russian victory in the Ukraine, all could still be averted, for that victory will be sobering for the Western world. This indeed is the last hope, that defeat here will at last bring the Western world back to its senses and reality. Only through such a crushing defeat for Western hubris can further crazy adventures, including nuclear ones, be avoided.

Read more …

“..British armed forces “are smaller and less ready to fight than at any time in living memory.”

• UK MIlitary Could Run Out Of Ammo In Single Afternoon – Ex-commander (RT)

The UK could deplete its ammunition stocks in mere hours should it be drawn into large-scale fighting, a former British general warned on Thursday. This and other issues make the UK military unfit to be regarded as a “top tier” NATO member, he said. Retired General Richard Barrons, who formerly headed the UK’s Joint Forces Command, sounded the alarm in an op-ed published by The Sun in which he said the fighting force has been “hollowed out by spending cuts.” Barrons claimed that the British armed forces “are smaller and less ready to fight than at any time in living memory.” He also warned that the UK Army is on course to slip below 76,000 troops. However, even these service members often do not receive inadequate training, Barrons noted.

British tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces mostly date to the previous century, while “years of cuts to ammunition production mean that, for some types of key weapons, the army would run out in a busy afternoon,” the general said. Barrons added that the Royal Navy and Air Force are “in better shape” and boast some “outstanding modern equipment,” but cautioned that without experienced personnel, ammunition, and spare parts they might turn out to be just a “glittering shop window” without much to show for it on the actual battlefield. The former commander said the UK should focus on Europe, arguing that the “tilt to Asia can wait.” He urged London to invest in modern capabilities, including drones, missiles, and cyber and electronic warfare capabilities.

Britain should also double its reserves to 60,000 troops, he said. Regarding Russia, Barrons estimated that to be able to handle a “surprise attack,” the British Army will need to spend “£3 billion ($3.67 billion) this year, and every year for the next ten years.” British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted in the House of Commons on Monday that the military has been “hollowed out and underfunded.” His comments followed a Sky News report alleging that a top US general had told Wallace that British forces are “barely tier two” in terms of fighting capabilities.

Read more …

“..the West’s “biggest” political mistake because it effectively manages to “unite the Russians like never before.”

• Serbia Names ‘Greatest’ Mistake By West (RT)

The West’s recent announcement that it would be supplying Ukraine with main battle tanks marks a major miscalculation, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic said on Friday. That’s as Moscow has threatened to burn any Western equipment that enters Ukraine and has vowed to retaliate “far beyond the scope of armored vehicles.” Vucic noted that the decision to supply Ukraine with tanks, especially with the “terrifying” German Leopard 2s, is the West’s “biggest” political mistake because it effectively manages to “unite the Russians like never before.” Last month, Germany and the US agreed to provide a number of heavy tanks to Kiev. Washington has promised between 30 and 50 of its M1 Abrams tanks, while Berlin pledged 14 Leopard 2A6s from the Bunderswehr’s own stocks.

An additional 51 of the same model and 88 of the older Leopard 1 model may also come from Rheinmetall as they get refurbished, Germany said. Berlin also gave the green light to countries that have expressed a desire to export their own Leopards to Ukraine. Those include Poland, Finland, Spain, Norway and the Netherlands. The UK and Canada have also said they would be sending their heavy equipment to Kiev. The decision has been heavily criticized by Russia, which has called it an “extremely dangerous” move that threatens to escalate the conflict in Ukraine. On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin likened the new threat of “German Leopard tanks with crosses on their hulls” to the Soviet Union’s struggle against Hitler’s forces and warned that Moscow’s response would not be limited to weapons.

Other countries have also voiced their concerns about the West’s move. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the delivery of NATO tanks to Ukraine was a “high-risk endeavor” that would fail to help end the conflict and only “line the pockets of gun barons.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban also slammed Germany’s decision, noting that these Western countries are “drifting” towards becoming active participants in the conflict. Orban has insisted that instead of arming Kiev, the West should be pursuing “a ceasefire and peace talks” in Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly objected to Western weapon deliveries to Ukraine, arguing that non-stop arms shipments only serve to prolong the conflict and risk direct confrontation with NATO. The Kremlin has also insisted that no amount of military aid will prevent Moscow from reaching its objectives and warned that the tanks would “burn like the rest of Western weapons” supplied to Kiev.

Read more …

“morally repugnant Russian invasion”, “international community”, “illegitimate and illegal”, “aggression”, “humanitarian reasons”, “international norms.”

• RAND Gets It, Sort Of (Helmholtz Smith)

A few years ago RAND put out a report Overextending and Unbalancing Russia. “This brief summarizes a report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress—overextend and unbalance— Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” One of the things recommended was exploiting Russia’s “greatest point of external vulnerability” by “providing lethal aid to Ukraine.” (Only someone as paranoid as Putin, of course, could see any hostility in this). Well, they did it and it’s time for a new RAND report – Avoiding a Long War.

To save you the bother of reading this trivial effort, I will summarize – they start with the usual posturing – “morally repugnant Russian invasion”, “international community”, “illegitimate and illegal”, “aggression”, “humanitarian reasons”, “international norms.” Then on to how Russia is losing – “Russia’s conventional capabilities have been decimated in Ukraine”, “the weakened state of Russia’s conventional military”, “It will take years, perhaps even decades, for the Russian military and economy to recover from the damage already incurred.” But, as you wade on, you begin to suspect that the authors aren’t as triumphant after all – perhaps victory is not quite so close “given the slowing pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensives in December 2022, restoring the pre-February 2022 line of control—let alone the pre-2014 territorial status quo—will take months and perhaps years to achieve” or even so certain “Continued conflict also leaves open the possibility that Russia will reverse Ukrainian battlefield gains made in fall 2022.”

The authors spend some space explaining why a long war is not to America’s advantage. So, RAND, they followed your advice but things aren’t going very well. Time to try and get out of it. “Since avoiding a long war is the highest priority after minimizing escalation risks, the United States should take steps that make an end to the conflict over the medium term more likely.”

Read more …

“..the US armaments industry is effectively a modestly scaled high-end boutique..”

• The Arsenal of Democracy Isn’t (Schryver)

You see, for all its massive plunder of the public purse, the US armaments industry is effectively a modestly scaled high-end boutique. And there is simply no way this domestic US industry can expeditiously expand its production. It would literally take years – probably a full decade – for the US to expand its military production to a seriously potent industrial scale. For one, the labor pool for these industries is extremely finite and highly specialized. In the overwhelmingly financialized and service-oriented US economy, there is a shocking dearth of technical expertise of ALL kinds. It’s not simply a boomer cliché that “kids these days are innocent of almost any mechanical know-how”. If the US wants to staff new armaments factories any time soon, it will have to import the skilled labor from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

Beyond that, the permitting of new factories, with the attendant bureaucratic delays, public hearings, environmental impact studies, and various special interest road-blocking … well, everyone knows how these things work now in America. It took five years to build the Hoover Dam in the early 20th century. It would take FIFTY here in the early 21st century – if it could be built at all. Those clamoring for the US to intervene in the Ukraine war in order to “teach those filthy Russians a lesson they’ll never forget” simply have no conception of the catastrophe that would ensue were their dreams to be fulfilled. If the Pentagon consented to such an undertaking, it could probably amass no more than 250,000 combat-capable troops in the theater, and to do so would entail the evacuation of virtually every major US military base on the planet (and most of the minor ones).

It could probably assemble an additional quarter million troops from the active reserves and National Guard units in the United States. That said, it is empirically impossible that 500,000 combat troops could be satisfactorily equipped for high-intensity conflict such as would be the scenario in a war between the US and Russia in eastern Europe. And even if they could be assembled and equipped, it would be an insufficient force to face over a million Russian troops, close to a third of which are already “battle-hardened” from almost a year of high-intensity combat in Ukraine. In anticipation of the casualties attendant to great power warfare, it would become necessary for the United States to reinstitute conscription almost immediately. If a strong anti-war movement had not already been incited by its previous actions, conscription in America would almost certainly induce a widespread political upheaval, with large and aggressive public protests cropping up in all the major cities of the nation.

Read more …

“oil friendships are greasy”

• Sanctions On Russian Oil Not Working – Analysts (RT)

Sanctions imposed by the West on Russian crude oil exports have so far “failed completely,” and new price caps could also prove ineffective, according to a CNBC report on Friday, citing analysts. The conclusions come as the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian refined petroleum products, including diesel and jet fuel, from February 5. The bloc had already prohibited imports of seaborne crude oil from Moscow in December. The EU, G7 countries, and Australia have also set a $60-per-barrel price cap, which blocks Western companies from providing insurance and other services to shippers of Russian oil unless the cargo is purchased at or below the set price. The price cap “was invented by bureaucrats with finance degrees. None of them really understand oil markets,” Paul Sankey, president and lead analyst at Sankey Research, told CNBC.

“It’s been a total bomb; it has failed completely,” he stressed. According to Sankey, Russian oil supplies have not been significantly interrupted and “they’ve sustained exports at high levels.” “I heard it from a great source that the Saudis have been asking around as to how come Russian oil is still flowing,” he said. “That brings the question of what will happen with the sanctions coming up on products, because it just doesn’t seem to work.” The founder of analytics firm Vanda Insights, Vandana Hari, also told the US broadcaster she was skeptical about the upcoming restrictions on Russian refined oil products, noting that “the crude price cap was pretty inconsequential.” “I think the refined product caps that they’re planning – about a $100 [per barrel] for diesel and clean products and perhaps around $45 for dirty fuels like fuel oil – are probably going to be immaterial as well,” the analyst explained.

According to Hari, Russian oil will find its way into the markets that are “still welcoming it” such as China and India. “China and India have benefited quite a big deal last year from heavily discounted Russian crude prices and the same’s going to happen to Russian refined products,” Hari predicted, adding that it could be more complicated for Moscow to find markets for such products. Paul Sankey also noted that “oil friendships are greasy” and there’s a lot of different ways to move Russian oil around the world, bypassing the price caps. Meanwhile, the EU has been struggling to agree on the price cap for Russian oil products, with some members reportedly claiming the proposed level is too generous for Moscow, and seeking a lower ceiling. The measures are expected to come into effect on February 5 after gaining the approval of all 27 EU member states.

Read more …

“..The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion..”

• Lose-Lose (Jim Kunstler)

For those of you not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own. That business model could be reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived.

Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize. Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies.

These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested. There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity and giving the plunder to a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g. the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes. This might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family are a right-wing conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.

Read more …

“… Nancy, we’ll get you, and we’ll fly you back from Italy once you’re the ambassador.”

• Republicans to Force Nancy Pelosi to Testify About Jan 6 (TP)

As the Biden Documents Scandal continues to build and the Chinese spy balloon over Montana dominates the headlines, some Republicans are still focused on holding Nancy Pelosi to account for the failures of security at the US Capitol on January 6th, failures to which they claim she is connected. One such Republican is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who said: “The reason there wasn’t a proper security presence on that day goes right to the speaker’s staff and the speaker’s office. As you go back and look at the communications, there’s this pattern that develops where the Sergeant of Arms is meeting with Pelosi’s staff. Many of those meetings, Republican staff wasn’t allowed to be there, but they had this pattern where everything had to run through her office, her staff, before the Sergeant of Arms could make a decision.”

Joining Rep. Jim Jordan was Rep. Troy Nehls, who said “And Nancy Pelosi. You do have questions you need to answer … Nancy, we’ll get you, and we’ll fly you back from Italy once you’re the ambassador.” The statements from Jordan and Nehls follow a late-December of 2022 report released by Republicans that blamed Pelosi for the security failures at the Capitol on that day, faulting her for creating “political pressures” that led to lackluster security and inadequate preparations. The New York Post, reporting on that report, said: “Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on January 6, 2021,” says the report, which is based on a trove of texts and email messages, and testimony from Capitol Police leaders and rank-and-file officers.

House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who answered to Pelosi as one of three voting members of the Capitol Police Board, “succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership,” was “compromised by politics and did not adequately prepare for violence at the Capitol.” Pelosi and her staff “coordinated closely” with Irving on security plans for the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, but Republicans were deliberately left out of “important discussions related to security.” And, in an apparent attempt to hide from Republicans the fact that they were being excluded from discussions, Irving asked a senior Democratic staffer to “act surprised” when he sent “key information about plans for the Joint Session on Jan. 6, 2021, to him and his Republican counterpart.”

Read more …

“..Musk testified that the “funding secured” tweet was “absolutely truthful..”

• Musk Wins Lawsuit Over ‘Funding Secured’ Tweet (ZH)

Having previously noted the absurdity of the trial, Elon Musk has defeated a shareholder lawsuit alleging that tweets claiming he had the “funding secured” to take Tesla private cost investors billions of dollars in losses. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the nine-person San Francisco-based jury said the investors who brought the class-action case failed to prove that Mr. Musk hurt them by tweeting about a possible deal. “The jury got it right,” Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, said after the verdict. Musk testified that the “funding secured” tweet was “absolutely truthful,” touting what he described as an “unequivocal” commitment by Saudi Arabia even though he had nothing in writing. As Bloomberg reports, Musk gave jurors other reasons to believe him.

He said he felt compelled to reveal that he was considering taking Tesla private because earlier that day, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia was building a sizable stake in Tesla. He testified he was afraid his going-private plans might also be leaked, and that he wanted to put all Tesla investors on equal-footing by broadcasting his plans on Twitter. Musk also said that if required, he could’ve divested his ownership stake in his closely held rocket-ship company, SpaceX, to fund the transaction. This case is unusual for having gone to trial. From 1997 to 2001, less than 0.2% of federal securities class-action cases, excluding those involving mergers or acquisitions, were tried to a verdict, according to Cornerstone Research.

Musk, who had taken the stand as a witness in the case, was present in court during closing arguments. As The FT reports, the “funding secured” tweet has already proven costly for Musk. He and Tesla each paid $20mn to settle legal action from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk also had to resign as the carmaker’s chair, although he kept his position as chief executive. However, Musk has criticized the SEC in the years since, saying he felt pressured to settle and suggesting that doing so made him appear guilty. This case, he said in a deposition, was an opportunity to “clear the record.” And now he has!

Read more …

“.. Pfizer BioNTech is going to have to pay back those billions to Thailand, with which Thailand will recompensate those peoples that have lost their existence…”

• Thai Princess Coma Mystery – World Expert Says It’s A Covid Jab Injury (DTNZ)

44 year old Princess Bajrakitiyabha of Thailand collapsed while out walking her dogs on 14 december last year. According to sources she had not felt well after receiving her 3rd booster. After her collapse she lost consciousness and remains in a coma. According to a report in The Independent, she is ‘on medical equipment supporting her heart, lungs and kidneys.’ Princess Bajrakitiyabha is the eldest child of current King Rama X. The law graduate is a senior diplomat in the Thai government. The Thai palace confirmed she had suffered a ‘heart issue’. But the explanation given by the authorities and a local university that it was caused by a bacterial infection has been called ‘ridiculous’ by medical expert Professor Sucharit Bhakdi.

Thai-born Bhakdi, a former professor of microbiology at the University of Mainz in Germany had a celebrated career in medical science as a world expert on the immune system and arterial disease, until mainstream narratives and ‘fact checkers’ labelled him a ‘conspiracy theorist’ for his strong opposition to the COVID ‘vaccines’. According to Bhakdi, who claims he and his contacts have been in direct contact with the Thai Royal Family over the matter, the princess’ collapse was an adverse reaction to the COVID jab. She was previously healthy with no known medical conditions. Speaking on the ‘neutralswiss‘ Rumble channel yesterday, Bhakdi said:

“This whole COVID-19 agenda is a fake… And I was able to lay out for them the proof that the COVID vaccinations were based on fraud… The EMA declared that safety pharmacological studies were never performed – never. And they were never deemed necessary. So now we have it. So, when I told the Thais this, you know guys, they jumped up. They jumped up in the room. And so they said to me ‘we will see to it that Thailand is the first country in the world that is going to declare this contract null… Which means that Pfizer BioNTech is going to have to pay back those billions to Thailand, with which Thailand will recompensate those peoples that have lost their existence…”

“‘One daughter of the present king Rama X collapsed and is in a coma… within 23 days after the third shot, 44 years old, never been seriously ill, collapsed and is now in a coma. The diagnosis that was given by the authorities and by the university is so ridiculous – she’s supposed to have a bacterial infection that will never do what she suffered from. And so we are determined, and the activists in Thailand who have been on this many many months now – great guys, also a professor from the University of Bangkok, he’s gotten in touch with the Royal Family, and we are sending information to the Royal Family to alert them to the fact that in all probability the princess is suffering as a victim of this jab, as so many people around the world have been suffering.’

Read more …

Whenever a story this crazy comes along, we suspect something’s hiding behind it.

• Biden Announces U.S. Surrender To Chinese Balloon (BBee)

In a surprise statement to the world from the White House Situation Room, President Biden has announced America’s unconditional surrender to the Chinese Spy Balloon. “Listen, folks, it’s over,” said Biden as a single tear ran down his face. “We’re outgunned here. There’s no hope that we can match the awesome power of this giant balloon.” Biden’s voice was drowned out by the dozens of weeping journalists gathered outside the room. “I urge you all to hug your loved ones and embrace your children, for the end is near. God help us all,” Biden finally said before signing off for the last time. At publishing time, Americans had been urged by the administration to start learning Mandarin.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Sika deer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621524781127573509

 

 

Water is life
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621438461151526912

 

 

Gallop croc
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621580255835181064

 

 

Dog doc
https://twitter.com/i/status/1621730772670349313

 

 

 

 

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