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Debt Rattle February 15 2024

Feb 152024
 
 February 15, 2024  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  53 Responses »


Jean-Michel Basquiat Irony of the Negro Policeman 1981

 

• US Spies Behind ‘Russiagate’ Conspiracy (RT)
• Part 2: US Government Hides Documents That Incriminate Intel Community (Public)
• Biden’s Dual ‘Big Guy’, Memory Scandals Will End His Presidency (Sp.)
• Biden Must Be Removed – West Virginia AG (Sp.)
• Biden Associates Testify on the Influence Peddling of President, Family (Turley)
• Speaker Requested Meeting With Biden About Border, White House Rejected (Sp.)
• Supreme Court Orders Special Counsel To Respond To Trump Immunity Appeal (ZH)
• 2024: The Year America Ceases to Exist (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Tucker Carlson ‘Is Dangerous’ – Putin (RT)
• Old Sick Men Control US Nuclear Chain Of Command – Moscow (RT)
• The World’s Gyre (Alastair Crooke)
• Russia and Hamas: a Strategic Alliance Of Convenience (Sweidan)
• Houthis Claim to Have Stopped Ship Traffic to Israeli Ports (Sp.)
• ‘No One Left to Have Children’ (Sp.)
• West Used Ukraine as ‘Guinea Pig for Human Testing’ After 2014 Coup (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Paul

 

 

 

 

Dugin Pepe
https://twitter.com/i/status/1757773972618223949

 

 

Rickards gold

 

 


Kim Dotcom: Zelenskyy released a helpful guide on who to follow if you want to learn the truth about the failing US proxy war in Ukraine. He calls it pro-Russian disinformation but he’s just angry that these experts constantly reveal the truth about how badly Ukraine and the West are losing.

 

 

Elon

 

 

 

 

This is an existential threat to the US. If this cannot be solved according to the law(s), the Union will dissolve.

Start with Obama, he is behind it all. But he hardly gets mentioned.

• US Spies Behind ‘Russiagate’ Conspiracy (RT)

The US intelligence community inappropriately used foreign allies to target Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to set up the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy ahead of the 2016 election, according to a trio of investigative journalists. Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag – of ‘Twitter Files’ fame – published the first part of an investigation on Tuesday, in which they claim the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ were operationalized against Trump staffers, citing anonymous sources close to the House Intelligence Committee. According to their report, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had sent America’s partners – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – a list of 26 Trump associates to target with data collection, misinformation and manipulation. The Russiagate conspiracy involved multiple failures across western media networks to critically assess US intelligence claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.

A 2018 Pulitzer prize was awarded to Washington Post and New York Times journalists for their reporting on what was later to exposed as a false story. “They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” said a committee source. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up,” the journalists claim. Officially, the FBI only started looking into the Trump campaign that summer, after an Australian diplomat reportedly overheard an aide mention Russia. If confirmed, these findings would demonstrate that the US intelligence community had worked for months before that to set up just such a pretext. In a statement to the investigative journalists, the FBI said it had made “missteps” in the 2016 and 2017 investigation of the Trump campaign, but has since implemented reforms to prevent it from happening again.

“The allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” a spokesman for the British surveillance agency said. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag said they had never asked the GCHQ about “wiretapping.” According to Shellenberger, there is a “10-inch binder” containing previously unknown documents about the intelligence community’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. The 45th US president had ordered these documents declassified, but they went missing instead. In a Fox News appearance on Tuesday evening, Shellenberger suggested the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort may have been related to the missing binder.

After the US intelligence community created a pretext for investigating Trump for ‘ties to Russia,’ they spied on his campaign – and then his presidency – using a falsely obtained FISA warrant. The warrant was based on the ‘Steele dossier,’ a file compiled by a British spy in the pay of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through several intermediaries. The FBI knew the dossier was false as early as January 2017, but continued using the FISA warrant for almost a year thereafter. The FBI lawyer who altered evidence to obtain the warrant, Kevin Clinesmith, ended up sentenced to probation and his law license has since been restored.

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“He was very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was the road map” of Russiagate..”

• Part 2: US Government Hides Documents That Incriminate Intel Community (Public)

Part 2: U.S. Government Is Hiding Documents That Incriminate Intelligence Community For Illegal Spying And Election Interference, Say Sources. Authored by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag via Public substack,

Former CIA Director Gina Haspel blocked the release of “binder” with evidence that may identify her role in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

Last December 15th, as Americans decorated trees, lit Menorahs, and prepared to tune out for winter holidays, CNN ran an extraordinary article titled, “The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump.” Co-authored by Natasha Bertrand, the gargantuan expose claimed a mysterious “binder” of “highly classified information related to Russian election interference” went “missing” in the chaotic waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2021, raising concerns that some of America’s most “closely guarded national security secrets… could be exposed.” CNN and its intelligence sources meant “exposure” in a bad way. Sources have told Public and Racket, however, that the secrets officials worry might be “exposed” are ones that would implicate them in widespread abuses of intelligence authority dating back to the 2015-2016 election season.

“I would call [the binder] Trump’s insurance policy,” said someone knowledgeable about the case. “He was very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was the road map” of Russiagate. Transgressions range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian “influence activities.” The CNN report claimed intelligence officials were concerned about the disclosure of “sources and methods that informed the U.S. government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.” They should be concerned.

The story of how a team “hand-picked” by CIA Director John Brennan relied on “cooked intelligence” to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment is the subject of tomorrow’s story, the last in this three-part series. Corruption, not tradecraft, is what officials are desperate to keep secret. The ”missing binder” story has several variants. Sources offer differing answers on the question of whether anything of consequence is missing. They give mixed accounts of Trump’s frantic last efforts to declassify Russia-related material. But nearly everyone Public and Racket spoke to agreed that the tale obscured a broader and more important story. Dating back to the release of the so-called “Nunes memo” in 2018 exposing the corruption of the FISA application process, senior intelligence officials, including Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, have repeatedly blocked attempts to declassify information about the Trump-Russia investigation.

They had good reason to obstruct the release of these documents. The documents in question are said to contain information about the legal justification for those investigations, or more specifically, the lack of justification, among other things. Should more of that information be made public, it might implicate a long list of officials in serious abuses. Questions like these may be answered if the 10-inch thick binder of sensitive documents about the origins of the Russia probe is made public. Fear for reputations and careers, not national security, is what has intelligence officials panicked. [..] Investigators wanted to declassify their findings before Trump left office, but the CIA “would not cooperate.” Investigators, a source told Public and Racket, “created a binder that blew up the assessment but couldn’t get it out because the CIA controlled it.”

Gorka

Obama

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“It’s election interference from one side that has been covered up and promoted as some kind of search for justice,” Kavanaugh asserted. “Now you have that side actually trying to prevent the same candidate […] from running again, and they get away with it.”

• Biden’s Dual ‘Big Guy’, Memory Scandals Will End His Presidency (Sp.)

On Tuesday, Hunter Biden’s ex-business associate Tony Bobulinski testified to Congress that US President Joe Biden is “the Big Guy” who was mentioned in an email that discussed “remuneration packages” for six people as part of a business deal with a Chinese energy company. The email included a line that said “10 held by H for the big guy?” According to US media, citing people familiar with the testimony, Bobulinski also said that he “personally met” Joe Biden in 2017 during the Milken Conference, just days before the email was sent. It has long been suspected that President Biden was “the big guy” referred to in the email, but Bobulinski’s testimony adds further evidence to back up that presumption. The elder Biden has repeatedly insisted that he did not discuss business with his son or his associates.

“It’s hard to fathom who the big guy could be but Joe Biden. So we’ve known about this,” independent journalist Dr. Jim Kavanaugh told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday. “[Bobulinski] confirms that the big guy is Biden, which means […] [Joe] Biden was getting paid from his son’s activities with [these Chinese businesses].” This, combined with the President’s cognitive problems that have become “impossible to deny” will cause him to step aside before this November’s Presidential elections. “He’s not going to be the Democratic nominee,” Kavanaugh asserted, adding that the only question left is “How much longer is he going to last as president?” Kavanaugh noted that Bobulinski’s testimony validates the IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who claimed that politics caused the FBI to slowwalk the investigation into Hunter Biden. “It’s a mess,” he said. “But I don’t know where the Democrats think they can go with this, and how they think they can hang on.”

The election season with Biden will be a “fun ride” Kavanaugh said “trying to keep Biden out of the public spotlight enough so he won’t make a fool of himself, but in the public spotlight enough to make it seem like he’s still running the show,” adding that all the while Democratic leadership will be “trying to figure out what they’re going to go and with whom they’re going to replace him with.” Kavanaugh also discussed reports from independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger that the CIA allegedly used foreign intelligence agencies to illegally spy on people working for the Donald Trump 2016 Presidential campaign. “It’s election interference from one side that has been covered up and promoted as some kind of search for justice,” Kavanaugh asserted. “Now you have that side actually trying to prevent the same candidate […] from running again, and they get away with it.”

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“..A recent poll by NBC revealed that only 28% of registered voters have a positive opinion of Harris..”

• Biden Must Be Removed – West Virginia AG (Sp.)

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has called on US Vice President Kamala Harris to declare Joe Biden physically unable to perform his duties as president. The demand was issued in a letter sent to Harris on Tuesday. Last week, a report by US Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur described the 81-year-old president as an “elderly man with poor memory,” although he advised against prosecuting Biden over the mishandling of classified documents. Morrisey has now called on Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment against Biden and take over his role, arguing that Hur’s report “paints a clear picture of a President who is not up for the job” and stressing that his “cognitive decline is of great concern to Americans, especially during these times that our nation is falling crisis after crisis both here and abroad.”

“We need a president who is mentally fit,” the attorney general wrote, noting that over the past few months alone, Biden has repeatedly mixed up world leaders and political figures and has appeared to have difficulty speaking on basic issues. The 25th Amendment, adopted in 1965 following the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy, clarifies the succession in the event of the US leader’s sudden death or resignation, and allows the vice president to assume their responsibilities. Under Section 4 of the amendment, the vice president and the cabinet are also allowed to remove the president if he is deemed physically incapable of performing his duties but refuses to leave office. That power has thus far never been used.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Monday, Harris stated she is “ready to serve” and replace Biden if necessary, adding that she does not need to convince anyone of her ability to lead the country. A recent poll by NBC revealed that only 28% of registered voters have a positive opinion of Harris, compared to 53% with a negative view. Biden has vehemently denied concerns over his mental and physical health, and issued an angry rebuke of Hur’s description of him. “I am an elderly man and I know what I am doing,” Biden insisted at a press conference last week. Shortly afterwards during the same conference, he confused Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with the leader of Mexico. The president’s age has become a major concern among voters ahead of this year’s presidential election. According to ABC News/Ipsos poll published on Monday, as many as 86% of US voters believe that Biden is too elderly to serve another term in office.

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“Neither Hunter nor James Biden have demonstrated any particular skill beyond an absence of inhibition and an abundance of appetite. What they have is “an interesting name,” and in Washington, that is enough.”

• Biden Associates Testify on the Influence Peddling of President, Family (Turley)

“An interesting name.” Those three words by Biden family associate Rob Walker could well be the epitaph for Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden. Walker was explaining why Hunter was repeatedly pushed forward as the face of their pitches to the Chinese and other countries. In his interview with House investigators, Walker struggled to protect President Biden while confirming critical aspects of earlier testimony from associates such as Devon Archer that they were selling the “Biden brand.” That brand included Uncle James Biden, whom Walker described as “a snake.” Walker and his associates had a letter to the Chinese come from Hunter because that is what he thought the Chinese expected. He admitted that the Chinese were led to believe that they all worked for Hunter Biden. After all, he “had an interesting last name that would probably get people in the door.”

That “interesting name” is how a Beltway bandit avoids saying “influence peddler.” You are peddling the name — an effort that is reinforced when you repeatedly produce Joe Biden on speakerphone or he drops by lunches. It’s also the same name dropped when Hunter wanted to make sure the Chinese paid up, as revealed in the infamous WhatsApp message: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

Yet whenever questions turned to the most incriminating messages, Walker shrugged. When asked about a reference to “the big guy” receiving 10% of a deal (an apparent reference to Joe Biden), Walker declined to say who the big guy was. When he was asked about Hunter’s repeated references to his father and calling his father “my chairman,” Walker insisted that “I don’t think that Hunter was healthy at the time.” Likewise, when Hunter says his father “vetoed the deal” on a proposed SinoHawk deal structure, Walker again said Hunter was not well. So Hunter was a legitimate businessman “with an interesting name” all the way up to the point that he made admissions on alleged influence peddling. He was then interesting but unhealthy.

Walker repeatedly emphasized that Joe Biden was not a direct part of these deals. While that is a political defense, however, it is not a legal one. As I have previously written, federal courts have long treated payments to family members as evidence of bribery and corruption. Indeed, I was lead counsel in the last judicial impeachment trial in the Senate, when Democratic senators voted to convict a judge on payments and gifts going to the children of a judge. Neither Hunter nor James Biden have demonstrated any particular skill beyond an absence of inhibition and an abundance of appetite. What they have is “an interesting name,” and in Washington, that is enough.

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“.. Johnson said he will continue to insist on a meeting, adding that it is a “problem” if the Speaker of the House cannot sit down with the president.”

• Speaker Requested Meeting With Biden About Border, White House Rejected (Sp.)

US House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday that he has requested a meeting with President Joe Biden about border security, but that the White House has rejected his request. “I’ve been requesting a meeting with the president for weeks now, a month. I’ve been asking to sit down with the president to talk about the border and talk about national security, and that meeting has not been granted,” Johnson said during a press conference. Johnson said he will continue to insist on a meeting, adding that it is a “problem” if the Speaker of the House cannot sit down with the president.

House Republicans will insist on addressing the United States’ border security before sending aid to foreign countries, Johnson said. Earlier this week, Johnson said that he has no plans to bring a $95 billion supplemental funding bill passed by the US Senate to the House floor. The bill provides approximately $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel. However, a congressional source told Sputnik on Tuesday that House lawmakers may divide the legislation into separate portions in an effort to pass the measures.

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“..in 1982, the Supreme Court held in Nixon vs. Fitzgerald that the president has “absolute immunity” from civil liability which extends to the “outer perimeter” of his official duties..”

• Supreme Court Orders Special Counsel To Respond To Trump Immunity Appeal (ZH)

US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has ordered the Department of Justice to respond to former President Trump’s claim that he has presidential immunity in his ongoing Jan. 6 election case in Washington D.C. The move comes after the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn Judge Tanya Chutkan’s refusal to dismiss the case based on Trump’s immunity claim – and less than a week after the Supreme Court heard Trump’s appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled that he was disqualified from appearing on the state’s ballot. Roberts gave Special Counsel Jack Smith until Feb. 20 to respond, pointing to a broader urgency for the Court to address relatively untested legal issues that could have a significant impact on the 2024 presidential election.

“[A] panel of the D.C. Circuit has, in an extraordinarily fast manner, issued a decision on President Trump’s claim of immunity and ordered the mandate returned to the district court to proceed with President Trump’s criminal trial in four business days, unless this Court intervenes (as it should),” reads Trump’s Feb. 12 filing, requesting that the appellate court’s decision be stayed. Jack Smith, meanwhile, has asked the Supreme Court to skip appellate proceedings and fast-track the case, claiming that “only” the Supreme Court could “definitively resolve” the immunity claims, The Epoch Times reports. President Trump is asking for the Supreme Court to halt the appellate decision because it incorrectly ruled that presidential immunity didn’t apply to Mr. Smith’s prosecution of him.

His attorney, D. John Sauer, had argued in January that the Constitution required presidents first face impeachment and trial by Congress before they could be criminally prosecuted within Article III courts. A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit unanimously rejected his arguments, stating that” ‘[c]oncerns of public policy, especially as illuminated by our history and the structure of our government’ compel the rejection of his claim of immunity in this case.” The judges also ruled that “any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”

The issue of presidential immunity is a relatively untested area of law – however in 1982, the Supreme Court held in Nixon vs. Fitzgerald that the president has “absolute immunity” from civil liability which extends to the “outer perimeter” of his official duties. The appellate court, however, held that Trump exceeded these bounds. “Former President Trump’s claimed immunity would have us extend the framework for Presidential civil immunity to criminal cases and decide for the first time that a former President is categorically immune from federal criminal prosecution for any act conceivably within the outer perimeter of his executive responsibility,” reads the lower court’s opinion.

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“..a border conflict and possible “civil war” threat that justifies martial law and the suspension of the presidential election..”

• 2024: The Year America Ceases to Exist (Paul Craig Roberts)

In 234 years of American history, no president has been criminally prosecuted. The entire world knows that the felony and civil charges against Trump are fabricated and concocted. It is obvious that the Democrat Party uses law as a weapon against political opponents just as Stalin did. Democrats are the worst and most dangerous enemy the Constitution and American citizens have ever had. The Democrats , focused on maintaining and expanding their one-party state, have a problem. Biden’s own Justice (sic) Department has ruled Biden mentally unfit to stand trial for compromising US security by having possession of unauthorized national security documents and leaving US national security documents in unsecured locations. So how can Biden be allowed to run for president if he is mentally incompetent to stand for trial for a felony because of mental incapacity?

As I have written on this website and said in interviews, one way out for the Democrats, America’s worst enemies who are legitimizing sexual perversion, maintaining open borders so Americans can be over-run with taxpayer supported immigrant-invaders, and maintaining hostility toward Russia, China, and Iran, thus inviting America’s destruction, is to replace Biden with Hillary. The other way, and perhaps both will be used together, is for the White House puppet of the ruling elite to orchestrate with the World Economic Forum member, the Governor of Texas, a border conflict and possible “civil war” threat that justifies martial law and the suspension of the presidential election. It doesn’t take much intelligence to see that both outcomes are already being set in place. Everywhere in the white Western world we see that the white governments discriminate against white citizens in favor of the Ukrainian refugees and third world immigrant invaders.

I learned today that the living standard in Ireland of the Ukrainian refugees and immigrant-invaders, paid for by the Irish people is higher than the average living standard of Irish citizens. Irish farmers are faced with a wipeout of their assets as the government intends to destroy one million sheep and 200,000 cows to please the global warming agenda. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians is not the only genocide being committed today. The white governments of the Western countries are committing genocide against their own white citizens. The United States, Europe, Canada have open borders not for white people but for people of color who are outside the Western tradition. Try bringing in a European girlfriend, and you will see that immigration is not for white people. Every Western government is busy at work erasing white civilization. These governments are our deadly enemies. But the indoctrinated populace will never see it.

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“While the US has tried to accuse Assange of revealing state secrets, which is more difficult to pin on Carlson, “anything is possible in today’s US, Putin said..”

• Tucker Carlson ‘Is Dangerous’ – Putin (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted on Wednesday that X host Tucker Carlson caught him by surprise during their interview last week. The final interview was two hours long and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. Before it, Carlson was criticized for speaking to Putin at all – and afterwards, for not asking the Russian president certain things. “I think your Carlson – I say yours, since he’s a member of your profession – is a dangerous man,” Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin on the sidelines of the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow. “I thought he would be aggressive, ask me sharp questions. I was not just ready for that, I wanted that, so I could give equally sharp answers,” Putin explained. “But he chose a different tactic.” Carlson ended up patiently sitting through Putin’s lengthy digression into history and “did not give me an occasion to do something I had prepared for,” Putin said.

“Frankly speaking, I did not get the full satisfaction from this interview.” Commenting on reactions to the interview from the West, Putin said it was a good thing that the leaders there watched and listened to what he had to say – but bad that they felt the need to twist his words. Asked if Carlson could face reprisals in the West, the Russian president pointed out that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange “still sits” in a British prison. While the US has tried to accuse Assange of revealing state secrets, which is more difficult to pin on Carlson, “anything is possible in today’s US,” Putin said. While this kind of persecution would certainly be a bad thing for Carlson himself, it would be good for the world, because it would reveal the true face of the “liberal-democratic dictatorship” embodied by the ruling class in the US, the president concluded.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1758007262139048402

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“..diminished faculties in advancing age.”

• Old Sick Men Control US Nuclear Chain Of Command – Moscow (RT)

A high-ranking official in Russia’s Security Council has voiced alarm over the risk of a nuclear “catastrophe” arising from the Pentagon chief’s health problems and the declining faculties of US President Joe Biden, warning of a possible “management mistake” by America’s leadership. Speaking to the Izvestiya newspaper for an interview published on Wednesday, Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Mikhail Popov said Washington’s political instability could trigger an accidental escalation. ”In the overall difficult and nervous internal political situation in the US that has emerged recently, the price of a management mistake, committed by the national leaders, either deliberately or involuntarily, has increased significantly,” he said. “And there won’t be much distance to a global catastrophe.”

Popov stressed that he was not referring to “a banana republic,” but rather “a state that has nuclear weapons and constantly claims to be the world hegemon.” He added that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s cancer diagnosis and Biden’s old age “have raised questions about the global security system” and the US chain of command, asking “How is the decision to use nuclear weapons generally made in the United States?” “The secretary of defense is not there, and no one knows where he is or who is replacing him. The press writes that some of his responsibilities were assigned to Deputy Minister Kathleen Hicks. But she was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time,” he said. The official went on to observe an episode during the Cold War, when a US Air Force major was dismissed for questioning how he could know whether a nuclear launch order “came from a sane president,” as the commander in chief is responsible for employing America’s nuclear arsenal.

Austin’s prostate cancer diagnosis came as a surprise not only to the US public, but to Biden himself, with the Pentagon chief acknowledging that his team did not inform the White House of the news. He has since been re-hospitalized with a bladder issue, for which he was reportedly treated with undisclosed “non-surgical procedures.” As the oldest president in US history at 81, Biden’s fitness is among the most pressing issues for American voters as they look ahead to the 2024 election. In a recent NBC News poll, 76% of respondents voiced major or moderate concerns over the president’s “mental and physical health,” while even special counsel Robert Hur – who was tapped to probe alleged mishandling of classified documents by Biden – concluded that the president has “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

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“..How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews?”

• The World’s Gyre (Alastair Crooke)

The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing – and now has claimed the most central tenet in the ‘Biden strategy’ for resolving the crisis in Gaza. The ‘dangle’ of Saudi normalisation with Israel was viewed in the West as the pivot – around which Netanyahu would either be forced to give up on his maximalist security control from the River to the Sea mantra, or see himself pushed aside by a rival for whom the ‘normalisation bait’ held the allure of likely victory in the next Israeli elections. Biden’s spokesperson was flagrant in this respect: “[We] … are having discussions with Israel and Saudi Arabia … about trying to move forward with a normalization arrangement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So those discussions are ongoing as well. We certainly received positive feedback from both sides that they’re willing to continue to have those discussions”.

The Saudi Government – possibly angry at the U.S. recourse to such deceptive language – duly kicked the plank out from beneath the Biden platform: It issued a written statement confirming unequivocally that: “there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops – and all Israeli occupation forces are withdraw from the Gaza Strip”. The Kingdom stands by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in other words. Of course, no Israeli could campaign on that platform in Israeli elections! Recall how Tom Friedman set out how the ‘Biden Doctrine’ was supposed to fit together as a interlinked whole: First, through taking a “strong and resolute stand on Iran” the U.S. would signal to “our Arab and Muslim allies, that it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner … that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region; Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price”.

The second strand was the Saudi dangle that would inevitably pave the path into the (third) element which was the “building of a credible legitimate Palestinian Authority as … a good neighbour to Israel …”. This “bold U.S. commitment to a Palestinian state would give us [Team Biden] legitimacy to act against Iran”, Friedman foresaw. Let us be plain: this trifecta of policies, rather than gel into a single doctrine, are falling like dominoes. Their collapse owes to one thing: The original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence across Gaza’s civil society – ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the U.S. and Europe. How did this happen? Because nothing changed by way of U.S. policies. It was the same old western bromides from decades ago: financial threats, bombing and violence. And the insistence on one mandatory ‘stand with Israel’ narrative (with no discussion). The rest of the world has grown tired of it; even defiant towards it.

So to put it bluntly: Israel has now come face-to-face with the (self-destructive) inconsistency within Zionism: How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews? The old answer has been discredited. The Israeli Right argues that Israel then must go for broke: All or nothing. Take the risk of wider war (in which Israel, may or may not, be ‘victorious’); tell Arabs to move elsewhere; or abandon Zionism and themselves move on. The Biden Administration, rather than help Israel look truth in the eye, has discarded the task of obliging Israel to face up to the contradictions in Zionism, in favour of restoring the broken status quo ante. Some 75 years after the founding of the Israeli state, as former Israeli negotiator, Daniel Levy, has. noted: ‘[We are back to] “the “banal debate” between the U.S. and Israel over “whether the bantustan shall be repackaged and marketed as a ‘state’”. Could it have been different? Probably not. The reaction comes from deep in Biden’s nature.

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“The Russian leadership considers the current conflict to be as much Washington’s battle as Tel Aviv’s..”

• Russia and Hamas: a Strategic Alliance Of Convenience (Sweidan)

Hamas has asked Moscow to act as guarantor to a Gaza ceasefire. Growing Russian ties with West Asia’s resistance actors should be no surprise; within the context of the global power standoff, they share common enemies. In the past few years, Russia’s expanding ties with the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas have contributed to the growing list of issues that muddy relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv. After Hamas’ 27 October visit to Moscow following the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared the trip “sends a message of legitimizing terrorism against the Israelis.” Yet Hamas officials have continued to flock to the Russian capital, most recently in late January. Since the onset of Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza, Russia’s official stance has been closer to the Palestinian position, evident by Moscow’s various UN Security Council activities: calling for a ceasefire, statements by Russian officials criticizing Israeli criminality, repeat meetings with Hamas in Moscow, and the country’s official media’s focus on human rights violation in the Gaza Strip.

Despite the long-term collaborative nature of Russo-Israeli relations, the Ukraine war has rejigged Moscow’s geopolitical calculations significantly. Today, Russia views the Gaza war and its regional implications from the perspective of its competition with the US and, therefore, considers Israel a critical tool of American influence in West Asia. The Russian leadership considers the current conflict to be as much Washington’s battle as Tel Aviv’s – a weakened Israel would mean the further disintegration of US power projection from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, a strategic Russian objective. Although Tel Aviv and Moscow still retain common interests of value to both, it is the US–Russian strategic competition that currently holds the most sway over the Kremlin’s decision-making.

This can be seen in a flurry of harshly worded Russian statements criticizing Washington’s role in prolonging and exacerbating the Gaza war. Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced the sentiments of most West Asians when he declared: “Many people would agree that this is a vivid example of the failure of US policy in the Middle East.” His Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov went the extra mile: The United States bears primary responsibility for this dramatic and dangerous crisis, since it has sought for many years to monopolize the settlement process and ignore relevant Security Council resolutions, and has now obstructed efforts to reach an appropriate solution.

There is no doubt that the events of the past two years in Ukraine played a major role in calibrating the Russian response to Gaza. During his recent interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin spent an inordinate amount of time unraveling the historical context behind Ukraine’s existence as a state, before boldly declaring: “Ukraine is an artificial state created at Stalin’s will and did not exist before 1922.” Of course, the Russian president understands that his invocation of Ukraine’s weak historical justification for statehood allows him to adopt the same context-rich approach when discussing protracted conflicts in other regions. His history-based formula for tackling the root of conflict applies equally to the establishment of the Israeli state against the objections of Palestinians and their neighboring nations, which likely will play a role in Putin’s position on how to move forward with the Palestine–Israel problem.

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“It is a great victory and a real achievement, as well as proof of the effectiveness of Yemen’s maritime operations..”

• Houthis Claim to Have Stopped Ship Traffic to Israeli Ports (Sp.)

Naval forces of the Ansar Allah movement, also known as the Houthis, have prevented the passage through the Gulf of Aden of all ships that have been heading to Israeli ports recently, the movement’s leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi said on Tuesday. “Operations of Yemen’s naval forces have resulted in a great victory – a complete halt to the passage of Israeli-affiliated ships to Israeli ports. During these weeks, not a single ship related to the Israeli enemy has been able to pass through the Gulf of Aden. It is a great victory and a real achievement, as well as proof of the effectiveness of Yemen’s maritime operations,” the leader said in a video message aired by the Al-Masirah broadcaster.

The Houthi movement, which controls large parts of northern and western Yemen, vowed in November 2023 to attack any ships associated with Israel until it halts military actions in the Gaza Strip. This led US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to announce the creation of a multinational operation to secure navigation in the Red Sea. US and UK forces later launched major strikes against Houthi positions in a bid to degrade the rebels’ ability to target commercial vessels.

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“Syrsky […] is stripping troops from every other front, pulling the very last strategic reserves from the country..”

• ‘No One Left to Have Children’ (Sp.)

Ukraine cannot afford to lose more young people to the frontlines, otherwise, there won’t be enough to have children and replenish the population, international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Tuesday. While discussing the state of the Ukrainian frontline and the mass conscription law being considered by the country’s Parliament, Sleboda explained that Ukraine already had a declining population before NATO’s proxy war launched in the country. “Once you got into the ’90s and particularly the mid-’90s, people were not having children. The result of that is a demographic narrowing at the lower age group,” Sleboda explained. “There are four times as many people in the 35 to 45 age bracket, [and more in] the 45 to 55 age bracket, than in the 18 to 30 age bracket,” the analyst clarified.

There are roughly 3.5 times more Ukrainians in the 35-55 age groups combined than the 18-30 age group and 2.3 times more in the 35-45 group alone, according to the CIA data. Additionally, the number of 18 and 19-year-olds were estimated as 2/5 of the 15-19 group in that calculation. “[Ukraine] can literally not afford to lose any more young people because then there will be no one left to have children,” Sleboda stated. “And I hate to tell you, large numbers of their women went to Europe and are going to have European babies and are not coming back,” he noted, adding that it was “a bit distasteful” but “true.”

Nonetheless, Ukraine has to go forward with the mass conscription plan if it wants to replace its massive losses, particularly in Avdeyevka, according to the analyst. “However bad you think [Avdeyevka] is, it’s much worse,” Sleboda emphasized, saying that newly-appointed Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Alexander Syrsky is repeating Ukraine’s failed strategy in Artemovsk (Bakhmut) and is doubling down on the increasingly encircled city. “Syrsky […] is stripping troops from every other front, pulling the very last strategic reserves from the country […] and is sending them into Avdeyevka, which means it’s not just about keeping the troops that are there, it is about throwing, at least I would say 10,000, reinforcements into the situation.

Sleboda noted that even without the latest conscription law being adopted, Ukraine is already forcing men to the front, focusing on the villages in Western Ukraine. “The conscription has focused on small villages rather than Kiev and other big cities to try to limit the potential for political protests,” he explained. “That is why you’re starting to see videos now of locals, even in West Ukraine, trying to fight in the streets [against] the conscription officials.” Earlier this week, videos appeared on Telegram showing villagers in a town in the Odessa region fighting against conscription officers.

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Biolabs.

• West Used Ukraine as ‘Guinea Pig for Human Testing’ After 2014 Coup (Sp.)

Sputnik has obtained a trove of documents indicating that rheumatological drugs had been allegedly tested for several years on psychiatric patients of a hospital in the city of Mariupol at the request of major Western pharmaceutical corporations and with the assistance of Ukrainian officials. The documents contain information pertaining to such companies as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Celltrion, Novatris International AG, Merck KGaA, and a branch of Samsung that produces medical equipment. The tests were carried out while the Kiev regime held Mariupol until May 2022, when Russia took over the city. Patients of the Mariupol hospital’s psychiatric ward were most likely used as vulnerable “guinea pigs” in experiments that would not have been permitted in the countries where these pharmaceutical firms are located, William Jones, a former White House correspondent for Executive Intelligence Review and a non-resident fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, told Sputnik.

“It has generally been a practice to use some of the developing countries which don’t have such rigorous controls for these types of experiments,” Jones noted, hinting at Ukraine. After the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, the country “effectively became a ‘guinea pig’ for whatever experiments the forces of the Western elites had in store for them, as we see most dramatically in the way in which the ‘nation’ of Ukraine is being whittled down to nothing for the sake of NATO’s surrogate war against Russia,” according to the expert. He also touched upon the issue of “the extensive network of biological labs that have been set up in Ukraine over the twenty years, largely with the help, and no doubt at the behest, of the United States,” something that Jones recalled had repeatedly been pointed out by Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the biological and chemical warfare department of the Russian Defense Ministry.

“Given the present situation in Ukraine with the growing understanding that Ukraine – or NATO – cannot ‘win’ this conflict using conventional weapons, as well as the determination of NATO not to accept a peaceful resolution unless Russia is soundly defeated, it could well lead to the utilization of some form of biological warfare on the part of NATO to ‘even the playing field’,” Jones warned. In the spring of 2022, Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense Troops brought to light the alarming scope of US military-biological activities taking place at numerous locations in Ukraine. These investigations revealed the collaboration between Washington and Kiev in researching and handling various highly dangerous pathogens. Subsequently, several of these findings have been independently corroborated.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Assange

 

 

Hero

 

 

Sledding
https://twitter.com/i/status/1757732842862211297

 

 

Dragonfly

 

 

Boop
https://twitter.com/i/status/1757800859466191280

 

 

Bird spikes

 

 

Monkey parrot

 

 

Live action Simpsons

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle New Year’s Eve 2023

Dec 312023
 
 December 31, 2023  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  37 Responses »


Camille Pissarro Rue Saint-Lazare, Paris 1897

 

• 2024 Could Be When West’s Liberal Elites Lose Control Of World Order (Lukyanov)
• Will 2023 Be Known As The Last Year Of Global US Hegemony? (Fomenko)
• Russia Enters 2024 In A Better Position Than It Was In 12 Months Ago (Timofeev)
• US Wants to Use South Caucasus to Open 2nd Front Against Russia – Moscow (Sp.)
• Argentina’s Choice Not to Join BRICS ‘Ideological’ – Top Diplomat (Sp.)
• DC Deeply Concerned That Trump May Have Copies of His Declassified Binder (ET)
• The Continuing Plot to Silence Trump’s 2024 Comeback (Attkisson)
• Comer Says He Expects More States To Try To Boot Trump From Ballot (JTN)
• CO, ME Just The Start Of Trump Ballot-Blocking (ZH)
• Massie Warns States Barring Trump That House Will Certify Their Electors (JTN)
• Tulsi Gabbard Says Democrats ‘Will Stop at Nothing’ to Keep Trump Off 2024 Ballot (ET)
• Disbarred Michael Cohen Admits to Sending Fake Case Citations (Turley)
• EU Governance Is ‘Anti-Democratic’: European Lawmaker (ET)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sachs

 

 

Former Israeli PM

 

 

Cali

 

 

 

 

Tucker Belfort

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..In the leading countries of the West, a serious battle is being fought between the “populists” and the establishment, the main arena being, of course, America itself..”

• 2024 Could Be When West’s Liberal Elites Lose Control Of World Order (Lukyanov)

The current proliferation of conflicts is a symptom of the weakening of the modern international power structure. This was exercised in the form of a “liberal world order” (more recently called a “rules-based order”). The basis of it was the confidence of a group of countries in their righteousness and the truth of their ideology, gained through victory in the Cold War. Liberal democracy and the market economy defeated the Soviet regime and its planned economy. But soon democracy as the power of the majority, taking into account the opinion of the minority, was transformed into a liberal scheme in which the minority is given more moral and political rights than the majority.

Case in point: in almost all G7 countries the ratings of ruling parties/coalitions are now extremely low, i.e. governments represent the interests of a smaller part of the population. Alternative forces that challenge the current government are labelled as populist. This term (which, incidentally, comes from the word populus – “people”) has become almost a swear word, and the mainstream is instructed to fight those who are tarred by this brush. The idea is that the current elites do not need to be changed. As a result, the establishment now presents almost every vote as a battle for democracy. The implication is that democracy is the victory of the forces that maintain the “correct” continuity. Accordingly, those who want to change course are declared enemies of democracy, even if they have a majority on their side.

The concept of the “world majority” (i.e. countries outside the Western community), which has entered the Russian political lexicon this year, fits with the delineation between processes in individual countries and at the global level. The role of the global establishment is played by the West. There is no single “populist” force opposing it. But there is a huge space (the very “world majority”) which believes that the minority (the West) is abusing its power. What is emerging is not a rigid opposition, but rather a coagulated – albeit growing – resistance that is reducing the effectiveness of the policies of the US and its allies. Within the Western community itself, we see increasing demand from “populists” to reduce involvement in world affairs because the costs outweigh the benefits. This does not have a direct and immediate effect, but rather a lasting indirect one. But as history moves faster and faster, the meaning of “lasting” is changing.

2022 was a turning point, because for the first time the ruling minority was directly challenged. Not by the majority, of course, because Russia has been in a kind of “neither here nor there” position. But a precedent has been set. This year was a time of getting used to the fact that the old restrictions, the very “rules” on which the order is based, are disappearing and the space of possibilities is expanding for everyone. 2024 will be “the year of the great decisions”. Literally, the majority of the world will vote (just add up the populations of India, the US, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Indonesia, Russia, Egypt, and the European Union (there will be a vote for its European Parliament), etc. In the leading countries of the West, a serious battle is being fought between the “populists” and the establishment, the main arena being, of course, America itself.

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“..Washington’s decision to give Israel free rein to destroy Gaza is a strategic setback in multiple domains. The US will have to commit to a new chapter of violent struggle across the Middle East to sustain its position, whether it wants to or not.”

• Will 2023 Be Known As The Last Year Of Global US Hegemony? (Fomenko)

[..] US unipolarity began to wane by the 2010s following the resurgence of Russia, as well as the rise of China. The years of 2018-2023 have been exceptionally consequential in opening a new period of geopolitical turmoil and struggle, as the US pivoted its foreign policies to confront both powers with a view to containing them and sustaining its dominance over the entire planet. No hegemony, of course, goes down without a fight. Britain fought both World Wars precisely for this reason but was exhausted to the point it was forced to pass the baton on to the US. Similarly, in the modern day, neither will America go down without a fight.

And this is why the year 2023 has been immensely significant in this regard. First, the war in Ukraine has continued, with the US aiming to encroach on Russia’s strategic space and impose a strategic defeat on Moscow with NATO containment. However, while Russia suffered initial setbacks in 2022, this year saw Ukraine fail to make any progress despite immense media hype, and the war has started to turn against Kiev as the West loses the political will to continue backing it in an unwinnable conflict. This will ultimately shape the future security architecture of Europe, and Russia will now be looking to impose nothing less than a total defeat on the far-right puppet state in Kiev.

But beyond this, what has been more important to this year, and ultimately what lies ahead, is the fate of the Middle East. In October, war broke out after Hamas decided to launch a full-scale assault on Israel from Gaza. The war was triggered by US appeasement of Israel’s hardline policies through the Abraham Accords, as well as the emerging multipolarity providing more political space for Hamas to resist. Israel responded with an overwhelming bombardment and invasion of Gaza, invoking strong condemnation from around the world. It aims to militarily occupy the strip, a series of decisions which will push the Muslim world’s relations with the Zionist state to the point of no return and therefore pose consequences for the entire region, which in turn will impact the West’s engagement with the Global South and the power struggle there with Russia and China. Ultimately, the war is also a marked failure of the hardline US policies on Iran and unsuccessful attempts to try and contain it by force.

Although Tehran is not a competitor for hegemony, it is nonetheless a formidable regional adversary for Washington, boasting significant power and population, with growing military capabilities, and is fighting to force the influence of the US and Israel out of the Middle East. To this end, Washington’s decision to give Israel free rein to destroy Gaza is a strategic setback in multiple domains. The US will have to commit to a new chapter of violent struggle across the Middle East to sustain its position, whether the it wants to or not.

Then of course, there is the top priority of American foreign policy, the ongoing struggle with China. Washington seeks to contain the rise of Beijing as a military and technological superpower, and militarily encircle it in the region it calls the Indo-Pacific. Although presently the two sides are undergoing a detente after Xi Jinping met Joe Biden in San Francisco, with the Taiwan issue likewise less critical in 2023, the relationship nonetheless remains the overall driver of the strategic environment we live in today, and there is little expectation the US will relent. Beijing is patient and prefers to play ‘the long game’ but is certainly rising to the challenge, which enables every other actor to assert its position, and thus further stretch the international order.

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“..Ideologically, Russia and the West have become principled rivals. There are no compromise solutions to their contradictions. Each side expects to impose its own conditions on the other.”

• Russia Enters 2024 In A Better Position Than It Was In 12 Months Ago (Timofeev)

[..] what are the parameters of this new reality? The first is relations between Russia and the West. In 2022, they entered a format of acute confrontation. It was marked by the delivery of large-scale military and financial aid to Ukraine, a fresh expansion of NATO and a course towards the remilitarization of Europe. Right now, the bloc’s members fear direct military conflict with Russia because of the risk of nuclear escalation, but see little risk in increasing the quantity and quality of arms supplied to Ukraine. The deliveries include both Soviet-era weapons and ammunition left in stockpiles, and Western-made gear. However, the increase in stocks has so far been limited by financial and industrial capacity. As the conflict drags on, these may be overcome over time. Ideologically, Russia and the West have become principled rivals. There are no compromise solutions to their contradictions. Each side expects to impose its own conditions on the other.

The West does it by exhausting Russia with sanctions, sending direct aid to its military opponent, using information warfare and evoking its influence with neutral or friendly countries. Russia does it by inflicting a military defeat on Ukraine and demilitarizing Kiev, as well as by asymmetric retaliation. The parties do not have the capabilities to destroy each other, but they are counting on victory. The West assumes vulnerabilities in the Russian economy and the theoretical possibility of internal upheavals could lead to a radical change in foreign policy and the country’s defeat. Russia believes that the increasing number of conflicts in which the US, and the West as a whole, will be forced to become involved in will put too much of a strain on their resources, and it’s also counting on disagreements within the Western bloc itself.

The second is the military situation in Ukraine. 2023 began with much-hyped expectations from Kiev’s planned counteroffensive. It was fueled by informational and political statements by Western leaders and its success was supposed to justify, among other things, large military and financial injections by Ukraine’s Western partners. The failure of the offensive can be considered one of the most important military results of 2023. The Russian army did not opt for an immediate retaliatory attack, instead exerting pressure along the entire front line. Right now, Western diplomats have rational reasons for exploring the ground for ceasefire talks, even if their government’s positions have not officially changed. Moscow, on the other hand, has no good reason to agree to a halt in the fighting. A pause will allow Ukraine to rearm, increase the capacity of its military-industrial complex and resume the conflict at a moment favorable to Kiev. Obviously, Russia believes that only a painful and large-scale defeat of Ukraine can lead to the consideration of Russian demands and interests. Moreover, such a defeat can be either a crushing blow or from attrition. The second option appears to be the fundamental one.

The third is sanctions against Russia. The year 2022 was marked by a “sanctions tsunami,” when a wide range of restrictive measures were imposed in a very short period of time. These included the blocking of sovereign assets and financial sanctions against systemically important companies, export controls, import bans on oil, coal, steel, gold and other goods, transport and other restrictions. In 2023, all these measures were extended. They caused damage, but they didn’t crush the economy. The shock effect hung in the air in 2022 and was replaced by a plateau in 2023. The US, the EU and other sanctions initiators have tried to combat evasion of the restrictions. Secondary sanctions are being introduced and criminal cases are being opened against alleged violators, including Russian citizens. But even these measures do not radically increase the campaign’s effects. Also, Moscow shows no interest in raising the issue of sanctions relief in response to political concessions.

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“..the Kremlin underscored that “Russia is an absolutely integral part of this region, so it cannot go anywhere..”

• US Wants to Use South Caucasus to Open 2nd Front Against Russia – Moscow (Sp.)

Amid the NATO-led proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the United States is considering using the South Caucasus as a springboard for opening a “second front” against Moscow, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said in an interview with Sputnik. Washington has long made no secret of its plans regarding Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, he said, adding that “all this fundamentally contradicts the genuine interests of the people of the region.” After Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the West’s pressure on Russia’s neighbors, allies, and partners has dramatically escalated. Thus, Washington has been muddying the waters between Moscow and Yerevan, especially in the wake of the recent Nagorno-Karabakh flare-up. In September 2023, Azerbaijan took control over Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive, prompting almost all local residents to flee to Armenia.

Over 100,000 people of Nagorno-Karabakh’s estimated 120,000 Armenian population had left the region by the end of September. The Nagorno-Karabakh authorities declared that the unrecognized state would cease to exist on January 1, 2024. During the flare-up of Karabakh tensions, senior US officials, including the chief of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, and Yuri Kim, acting assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs, were quick to converge on Armenia’s capital Yerevan to “affirm US support for Armenia’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and democracy.” The Armenian Defense Ministry announced in September it would carry out joint military exercises with the US, dubbed “Eagle Partner 2023,” that would involve “stabilization tasks between conflicting parties during the peacekeeping mission.”

Yerevan also signaled readiness to continue cooperation with NATO within the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), while Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in an interview with Italian outlet La Repubblica, claimed Russia’s peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh had “failed,” and that Russia was “leaving” the South Caucasus.In response, the Kremlin underscored that “Russia is an absolutely integral part of this region, so it cannot go anywhere,” with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasizing that the US-Armenian drills caused concern, “especially in the current situation.” Earlier in the year, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that Armenia has been demonstrating its intention to radically “reorient” its foreign policy.

“In my opinion, this is being done clearly at the suggestion or prompting of the West,” Zakharova said at a briefing in November. Commenting on a statement by Secretary of Armenia’s Security Council Armen Grigoryan, who said that Armenia “is not aware of Moscow’s proposals” on a peace treaty between Yerevan and Baku, as well as the delivery of military equipment such as Bastion armored personnel carriers to the country by France, Zakharova said that “Yerevan appears eager to negotiate a peace treaty in Washington, Brussels, although neither the US nor the EU can be considered bona fide intermediaries for a variety of reasons.” The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman emphasized that the actions of the United States and the European Union were aimed at “ousting Russia from the South Caucasus.”

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“If you participate in all organizations, then when do you find time to work?” Huh?

• Argentina’s Choice Not to Join BRICS ‘Ideological’ – Top Diplomat (Sp.)

Argentina’s decision not to enter the BRICS bloc is an “ideological” one, the Foreign Minister Diana Mondino has acknowledged. “It is an ideological and practical decision, but more practical,” Mondino argued in an interview on LN+. According to the official, Buenos Aires already has trade agreements with all members of the bloc. “Argentina has very big economic problems and the BRICS states have one goal: trade,” she stated, adding that it was a “matter of simplification,” and optimization of the use of time. “If you participate in all organizations, then when do you find time to work?” she queried.

Weighing in on the move by President Javier Milei to reverse the country’s entry into BRICS, which was previously announced by former President Alberto Fernandez before concluding his term, Mondino noted that international blocs will be mainly with “Western democracies,” such as the United States, Canada, European countries, and Israel. “We will trade with those who pay more. This decision will not be made by the state. Our task is to create conditions for trade,” the minister said. Mondino also said that the government was working to promote the MERCOSUR agreement with Singapore, and another with the European Union, which is currently stalled.

Earlier in December, ministers from the four MERCOSUR member states – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay – and Foreign Minister Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan signed the MERCOSUR-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (MCSFTA). Argentine President Javier Milei officially rejected the invitation to become a member of the BRICS in a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Infobae news portal reported on Friday. Milei sent his letter to the Russian and Chinese leaders several days ago and also informed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of his decision, according to the news portal.

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Or files that are not yet in the binder.

• DC Deeply Concerned That Trump May Have Copies of His Declassified Binder (ET)

A recent CNN article titled “The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump” discusses, albeit in roundabout fashion, former President Donald Trump’s declassified binder. According to CNN: “A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. “Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said. “In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.”

All very breathless and conspiratorial sounding. Which, of course, is the entire point. But the problem for CNN is that there never was any Russian collusion. It was all a giant hoax. Nor was there any real Russian election interference. No more so than any other year. And no more than what the United States does in Russia. It was all part of a giant fraud that CNN helped to perpetrate in order to hamstring the Trump presidency. So when CNN claims, “The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election,” what they are really referring to is the proof that Trump amassed of the FBI’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

The “sources and methods that informed the US government” is precisely what they don’t want anyone to see. It was never Russian collusion. It was collusion on the part of DC’s entrenched bureaucracy. That’s where the real scandal lies. And the DC establishment is very worried that President Trump has proof of that collusion in his possession. And that’s what this is all really about—information that President Trump has in his possession that proves the involvement of the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and other establishment agencies in their effort to tarnish him with their construction of the Russian collusion lie. Which is why CNN all but gave away the entire premise behind the DOJ’s directed FBI raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in their article. As they note, “The binder was not among the classified items found in last year’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a US official familiar with the matter, who said the FBI was not looking specifically for intelligence related to Russia when it obtained a search warrant for the former president’s residence last year.”

Their need to insert that disclaimer gives the game away. We didn’t find the binder when we launched a politically motivated shock raid on the house of a former president, but we also weren’t looking for it. Right.

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“The real meaning of what’s being done to Trump is: They think he’s going to win.”

• The Continuing Plot to Silence Trump’s 2024 Comeback (Attkisson)

Donald Trump has been slandered and libeled thousands of times. Each time a news reporter, media commentator, or judge refers to Trump as an “insurrectionist,” or claims he’s guilty of “insurrection,” it’s another blatant case of defamation. Same with the other January 6 attendees and participants. Insurrection is a serious federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison under Title 18 U.S. Code 2383. Even with Trump’s enemies in charge at the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies, and with all of the scheming and operations they’ve mounted against him, nobody has convicted him of “insurrection.” Under our system of governing, no judge or election authority has the power to unilaterally accuse and convict any American of a crime, let alone with the accused denied any opportunity to present a defense or to appeal. Yet that’s just what’s happening when courts and officials in Maine and Colorado remove Trump from presidential election primary ballots for “insurrection.”

It’s the ultimate defamation. And many are supporting it because, well, they don’t like Trump. Looking at the evidence today, it is reasonable to hypotheisize that, among all the other consipracies Trump’s enemies have proven to devise, they also conspired in advance to set up his January 6, 2021 rally as an “insurrection” that could serve as their insurance policy to provide grounds to keep him from ever running for president again. Such hypotheses might have been once far-fetched, but no more. Let’s not forget that then-FBI agent Peter Strzok and his alleged lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, texted each other in 2016 that they could not permit Trump to be elected president. According to their messages, discussions about the threat of a Trump presidency had taken place with the FBI’s then-assistant director, Andrew “Andy” McCabe. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected,” texted Page, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.”

The theory that Trump’s enemies set the stage for January 6 to be called “an insurrection” as a spoiler for his 2024 run could help explain why all of the law enforcement agents and informants planted in advance and among Trump supporters on January 6 didn’t serve their usual purpose of preventing crimes and de-escalating events. Instead, by many accounts, they observed and even took part, let crimes happen, and declined to separate the instigators and organizers as they would ordinarily do to defuse tensions and control the crowd. The agents and informants served the odd role of standing down during the event, and identifying alleged perpetrators after-the-fact.Yet, in the end, there was no insurrection— at least according to prosecutors, who would be the ones to charge such crimes and haven’t. And Trump helped destroy the chance to officially charge him with insurrection by specifically directing his followers that day to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Trump’s opponents, found in both the Democrat and Republican ranks, are so delighted to see him persecuted, they are so utterly threatened by a repeat performance of a Trump presidency outside the traditional power and money interests, they are encouraging of the defamation and other acts against him. With few exceptions, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., those who would normally criticize actions like the ones being mounted against Trump, remain silent for fear of being called a Trump supporter in an environment where that opens them to ostracization and worse. The media and those who control our information are so conflicted by their respective biases, nobody is left to stop the madness. The real meaning of what’s being done to Trump is: They think he’s going to win.

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“And I hate to say it….but I fear we’re gonna see more blue states pull stunts like this.”

• Comer Says He Expects More States To Try To Boot Trump From Ballot (JTN)

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky. says he expects more states to try to boot former President Donald Trump from the ballot following the recent Maine decision. “Well, I’m not surprised. I fear we’re going to see this happen in more states,” Comer said during an interview with Fox News. He also alleged in the interview that the Maine Secretary of State’s move was “election interference.” On Thursday, Trump was removed from Maine’s primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause. The decision was made by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, whom Trump’s legal team requested be disqualified from ruling whether or not Trump is eligible for the 2024 ballot.

In other states, plaintiffs have sued regarding Trump’s eligibility, but in Maine, the Secretary of State first weighs in and the decision can be challenged in court. Comer predicted more Democrat states would attempt to remove Trump in order to disrupt the “GOP momentum.” “So I think that the Democrats are trying to do everything they can, in a last-ditch effort to disrupt the Republican momentum right now heading into the presidential election. I think this is another example of that,” he said, according to The Hill. “And I hate to say it….but I fear we’re gonna see more blue states pull stunts like this.”

Blacks for Trump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1740901218585887132

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“Together, the states where Trump’s status is under active challenge account for 269 electoral votes — in a game where you need 270 to win. ”

• CO, ME Just The Start Of Trump Ballot-Blocking (ZH)

As jarring as it’s been to witness the anti-democratic, one-two punch in which a court in Colorado and an unelected bureaucrat in Maine decided Donald Trump cannot appear on primary election ballots, there are many more states where litigation is underway to ban the candidate who’s currently leading the national race. In addition to Colorado and Maine, there are currently active lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to a New York Times survey of the situation. Together, the states where Trump’s status is under active challenge account for 269 electoral votes — in a game where you need 270 to win.

While there’s a lot of red on that map, it understates the scope of the phenomenon. These are only the states where either officials have decided Trump can’t appear on a ballot, or where litigation is currently underway. Expect other states to turn “red” in a bad way. Some of them are states like Michigan and Minnesota, where challenges to Trump’s appearance on primary ballots have been dismissed. Those rulings didn’t cover the general election, so look for those plaintiffs to crawl out of their litigation graves after the GOP primaries. That is, unless a Supreme Court ruling first puts an end to all this madness, in which Democratic judges and officials are banning Trump on the bogus basis that he engaged in an insurrection against the United States government on Jan. 6, 2021, and is therefore barred by the 14th Amendment.

Written to block Confederate officials from US government service, here’s the full text of the provision at issue: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. ”

Trump has never been charged, much less convicted, of engaging in insurrection. Aside from that due process dimension, and the fact that Jan 6 didn’t even begin to approach an “insurrection” in the first place, there’s an argument to be made that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to the office of President.

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“..the U.S. House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether to certify electors from those states..”

• Massie Warns States Barring Trump That House Will Certify Their Electors (JTN)

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., warned states acting to bar former President Donald Trump from the ballot that the House of Representatives will decide whether to certify states’ electors. “Maine, Colorado, and other states that might try to bureaucratically deny ballot access to any Republican nominee should remember the U.S. House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether to certify electors from those states,” Massie said on X Friday. Elon Musk, owner of X, replied to Massie’s comment, saying, “Interesting.”

Colorado’s Supreme Court earlier this month determined that Trump engaged in an insurrection against the U.S. on Jan. 6, 2021, during the Capitol riot, which, the court decided, makes him ineligible for the 2024 presidential ballot under the 14th Amendment. On Thursday, Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows removed Trump from that state’s primary ballot using the same reasoning. Trump has denied the accusations and vowed to appeal the decisions to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Colorado Secretary of State has said that Trump will be on the primary ballot. The GOPs of both Maine and Colorado are also appealing the decisions to the Supreme Court.

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“They have no qualms about doing whatever they feel is necessary to hold on to power..”

• Tulsi Gabbard Says Democrats ‘Will Stop at Nothing’ to Keep Trump Off 2024 Ballot (ET)

Former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, responding to efforts to keep former President Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot, said Democrats “will stop at nothing” to maintain power. In a candid interview on Fox News’s “Hannity” on Thursday, the Democrat-turned-Independent former congresswoman raised an alarm over what she described as a concerted effort by Democrats to sideline President Trump from the 2024 ballot. She described the decision by Maine’s top election official, a Democrat, to remove President Trump from the state’s ballot as a dangerous precedent and urged Republicans and Democrats alike to “stand up for our democratic process” and the right of voters to pick their president. “This is the MO of the Democrat elite,” Ms. Gabbard said. “They will stop at nothing to try to maintain their power, even if it means taking away the right to vote of Americans.”

Furthermore, Ms. Gabbard charged that Democrats “have no issue taking Trump off the ballot,” including by “pursuing him and persecuting him through a weaponized and politicized Department of Justice.” “They have no qualms about doing whatever they feel is necessary to hold on to power,” she added. The former Hawaii congresswoman pointed out the “ridiculous” hypocrisy in the eagerness of some Democrats, whom she referred to as “war hawks,” to intervene in foreign countries when political candidates face similar actions to those experienced by President Trump. “We’ve seen how the war hawks in Washington, they will see this happen in another country, and they’ll be very quick to say we must go and intervene; we must go and topple this banana republic or this dictatorship,” said Ms. Gabbard. Many of the congressional lawmakers who advocate along those lines, she added, “are the people who are driving” these efforts against President Trump.

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“..Cohen asks for understanding that he is only a layperson, not a lawyer. He was, of course, disbarred as a lawyer after pleading guilty to various federal crimes..”

Q: how did this guy become Trump’s lawyer? What an awful choice. Right up there with Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.

• Disbarred Michael Cohen Admits to Sending Fake Case Citations (Turley)

Michael Cohen, former President Trump’s onetime fixer and lawyer, has admitted to a federal court that he was the source of fake case citations used to support his effort to end his supervised release from his earlier criminal convictions. He blamed Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the error, he also seemed to throw his own attorney under the bus for not checking his work. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman was a bit peeved when his clerks checked the authority cited by Cohen, including such cases as “United States v. Figueroa-Flores, United States v. Ortiz and United States v. Amato.” None existed. In fairness, Cohen is not the first person to be burned by AI. Of course, critics have noted that the faux authority is perfectly consistent with Cohen’s legal career, which is a litany of misrepresentations and outright lies.

Cohen now says that the culprit is Google Bard, an AI service, and that he was only the latest victim of AI invention. However, one of the most interesting aspects of the statement is that Cohen asks for understanding that he is only a layperson, not a lawyer. He was, of course, disbarred as a lawyer after pleading guilty to various federal crimes. Cohen told the court: “As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not. Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”

He then put part of the blame on his non-AI lawyer, David Schwartz, and emphasized that it was in the end Schwartz’ filing, not his: “It did not occur to me then and remains surprising to me now—that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed. I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused.” Cohen’s current counsel E. Danya Perry, asked that his client “not suffer any collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s misstep.” The problems with AI are well-known, but so is Cohen’s checkered history with the courts. As I have previously written, Cohen has a long history of alleged lies and half-truths in dealing with the government or courts.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to various charges, including tax evasion, campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and several banks to obtain campaign financing and was sentenced to three years in prison. He unsuccessfully sued Trump on the basis of a verbal contract that again put his own dubious veracity at issue. As noted in earlier proceedings in Manhattan, Cohen has continued to misrepresent his criminal background and, after assuring the court that he was remorseful for his crimes, was regularly going on the air to deny that he committed tax fraud and suggesting that he was railroaded by prosecutors. Prosecutors cited his numerous media appearances as containing false accounts of himself and his case: “while Cohen is free to write and say what he wants, he cannot simultaneously distance himself from his conduct on cable news, while cloaking himself in claims of acceptance of responsibility in court filings.”

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“We need that if we want to save all the peoples around the world from this tyrannical system they’re about to impose on us.”

• EU Governance Is ‘Anti-Democratic’: European Lawmaker (ET)

In a recent interview with The Epoch Times’s Jan Jekielek, host of American Thought Leaders, Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament representing the Alternative for Germany party, explained how the EU’s model of governance bypasses adequate representation for citizens. Ms. Anderson underscored the inappropriate division of power that member nations have experienced, saying it violates fundamental principles in democracies. Members of the government can bypass its democratically elected representatives and seek approval for laws at the EU level, the German politician explained. This is how it works: “Let’s say the German government wanted to pass a law, and the Bundestag, which is the democratically elected representation of the German people, said, ‘No … we will not vote for that.’

“The story wouldn’t be at an end right then and there. But now the German government, all it has to do is pretty much take that law [and] bring it to the EU institutions, because in the council … they will pass the law on EU level. She explained that this structure creates a system where “there is no division of power,” and officials are able to implement “the very same law” that failed to pass through the elected legislative body. This undemocratic structure raises questions about accountability, she said, as politicians can deflect responsibility by passing legislative authority to agencies and experts. Speaking about the options available to citizens, Ms. Anderson said, “The only way that I can change anything is by going after the elected officials. … I elected these people. They are responsible. “They’re accountable to me, but I don’t know who’s above that, whoever it is.”

To ensure that elected officials remain responsible for the laws and policies that impact their citizens, Ms. Anderson stressed the need for transparency and accountability in EU governance. A member of the European Parliament since 2019, she also discussed several other troubling trends that have been seen in her country and throughout the EU. They include labeling anyone who dissents from progressive ideology as “far right.” Mr. Jekielek asked whether the EU is seeing the same trend as the United States, where dissenting voices are maligned by legacy media. Several prominent names were brought up to illustrate the recent political mood, including newly elected Argentinian President Javier Milei and tech mogul Elon Musk. Confirming the mood of her home country and the EU, Ms. Anderson asserted that the term “right” was being misused. “Everyone that is not in support of whatever globalist agenda is being advocated for or pushed at the moment” is given that label.

[..] Part of her hope lies in the United States, Ms. Anderson said, despite the fact that the country is facing some of the same struggles within government. “My hope also lies actually with it, with the American people. Because the American people, they have [more] of a concept of freedom,” she said, adding what “an honor” it was to be asked to speak to the American people about freedom. Near the end of her comments, Ms. Anderson made a plea to Americans, saying, “I really need the American people to just stay American people and uphold that concept of freedom that is deeply rooted within the Americans. “We need that if we want to save all the peoples around the world from this tyrannical system they’re about to impose on us.”

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Denis Rancourt

 

 

 

 


Hugo Suíssas

 

 

Water dogs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1741179363205529641

 

 


Road To The Moon Argiris Karamouzas, Veria, Greece

 

 

 

 

 

 

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