Pablo Picasso The muse 1935
Happy 51st birthday Julian
Putin on Edward Snowden
Putin on Edward Snowden; takes a dig on America
Surely Julian #Assange made a wrong choice seeking protection in Ecuadorian Embassy. pic.twitter.com/Ba1UN7Hwxs
— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) May 3, 2022
We’re almost there!
Kash Patel Transition Nov 2020
BREAKING: Kash Patel reveals EVIDENCE proving that Donald Trump was not planning an insurrection because he ordered the transition of power in November 2020 through the Government Service Agency. pic.twitter.com/McIKuJ3VX7
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 2, 2022
Bandera
https://twitter.com/i/status/1543221160187502596
FUN FACT: Over $8.5 trillion has been wiped out of the US stock market this year.
“Established old money elites and entrenched academics have long denigrated the power and influence that came from innovation and hard work.”
• This 4th of July: Requiem for Freedoms Long Gone? (Brig Gen (ret) Blaine Holt)
Marinate those ribs, ice the beer, and get the fireworks ready so we can revel in the red, white, and blue. Let’s raise our collective glasses today to the bold few who spoke on our behalf more than 200 years ago. Thomas Jefferson’s inspired words live on: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Can you imagine how electric the atmosphere must have been on that steamy summer day when the Founders, having agreed to the brave separation from the British Crown on July 4, 1776 – committed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other as 51 of the 56 signers executed the Declaration of Independence.
The American Constitution is the longest standing governing document in the history of the world. We owe the Founders not just gratitude, but a civic commitment backed by our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to protect and preserve liberty. Free people in hot pursuit of their happiness are quite an excitable and often unruly lot. Established old money elites and entrenched academics have long denigrated the power and influence that came from innovation and hard work. From Woodrow Wilson to Henry Kissinger to the Davos elites, the usurpation of liberty through the attacks on individual freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are being fired upon citizens at a rapid pace. The nefarious plot to slowly eat away at liberty has been working for more than 70 years.
Global elitist, Henry Kissinger had the playbook when he said; “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” Since Wilson’s day the elites have worked overtime imagining ways to bridle, We the People. Rather than the ho-hum predictable “good ‘ole boys (and girls) clubs,” or access to capital and opportunity based on your last name, they have leveraged eager and willing accomplices in government bureaucracy to establish what we all know as “the system.” Professional politicians beholden to big money rarely fear the people or the ballot box. Voila! — Your 40-year, double-digit term senators and representatives are born.
“The most practical example of this is recent with the Nordics joining NATO without any referendum or popular poll within the countries’ society.”
• The Disintegration Of Western Society – Visible To The Naked Eye (Wilbert)
While we notice the closest integration among emerging countries, we notice a certain disparity among the richest, first-world countries, because they may not seem like it, but they also have internal problems that cannot always be fought. And the most recent of these is inflation, with an unprecedented rise in prices. The middle class, the main target of the Great Reset enthusiasts, is beginning to feel prices rising more and more, even though they don’t fully agree with the war at the moment, which is impressive if you consider that public opinion is of little concern to the leaders who are driving the economic-military and diplomatic disaster in Europe. The most practical example of this is recent with the Nordics joining NATO without any referendum or popular poll within the countries’ society.
And the argument to be used I can already imagine: “But democracy is representative, William! If the people vote for politician x, it’s because they agree with his platform.” Yes. But that is half right. Not entirely. Democracy, especially representative democracy, has a serious flaw, precisely in terms of representation. Politicians who are not faithfully committed to the objectives of the nation, of the homeland, but, unfortunately, are rather vain, cause a distortion in the etymological sense of the term “representative democracy”, because who would it represent? Not the people! And one of the causes of the wrong votes that the people usually give (considering totally clean elections) is due to the fact that it is not invested in the political conscience of these societies, usually due to a lack of interest from part of society, but also due to the lack of incentives from the State in this matter.
But this is a very complex subject that I can deal with in another article. To try to continue the reasoning of the Western disintegration and distortion of the democratic sense, I can give a practical example of Brazil, because it is closer to home. The juristocracy ended up taking over the country after Operation Lava Jato, which was nothing more than an American collusion with the Brazilian opposition to depose the Dilma Rousseff government (which does not cancel out Dilma’s mistakes, who was a terrible supposed economist and basically destroyed the country, becoming easy prey as she fell into popular disgrace). But what is this juristocracy? Simply the country’s Supreme Court overruling any take on government that the Federal Executive Branch has. And that’s just about anyone anyway.
He actually said it.
• “High Gas Prices Necessary For ‘Future Of The Liberal World Order'” (JTN)
White House economic adviser Brian Deese on Thursday told CNN that high gas prices were a necessary inconvenience to preserve the “future of the liberal world order,” amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The average price of gas exceeded $5 per gallon for the first time in U.S. history in early June. CNN’s Victor Blackwell asked Deese to speak to comments President Joe Biden made earlier in the day suggesting Americans would pay high prices for “as long as it takes” for the war in Ukraine to end. Blackwell noted that experts have predicted the war’s end is unlikely to come in the near future before asking Deese “what do you say to those families that say ‘listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. This is just not sustainable’?”
“What you heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes,” Deese answered. “This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.” The Biden administration has drawn considerable criticism for its handling of the economy, especially on inflation and energy policy. Amid rising energy costs and opposition demands for increased domestic production, the government on Friday announced it had yet to decide on a plan to deny or approve, in part or in full, the expansion of oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
Rutte WEF
Back in 2021, Netherlands pm Rutte indicated that the farmers had to leave here in order to roll out the WEF food hubs.
Source: https://t.co/m7P5009X8G pic.twitter.com/mHPjoE25CR— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) July 2, 2022
Biden’s there next week?!
• Saudi Arabia in Discussion to Join BRICS Coalition (CTH)
It is very curious timing in this article from Newsweek, containing massive geopolitical implications, using identified Saudi Arabia sources, would come in advance of Joe Biden’s visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Is this strategic geopolitical pressure from Saudi leader Mohamed Bin Salman (MbS) ahead of the meeting with Biden; or is this a genuine possibility that looms as likely? If the former, then Joe Biden is being geopolitically slow roasted by Saudi Arabia for his previous disparagements and ideological hypocrisy in his visit. If it is the latter, well, then the tectonic plates of international trade, banking and economics are about to shift directly under our American feet.
We have been closely monitoring the signs of a global cleaving around the energy sector taking place. Essentially, western governments’ following the “Build Back Better” climate change agenda which stops using coal, oil and gas to power their economic engine, while the rest of the growing economic world continues using the more efficient and traditional forms of energy to power their economies. This article from Newsweek is exactly about this dynamic with Saudi Arabia now potentially joining the BRICS team. [..] Here is the money quote:
[…] “China’s invitation to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to join the ‘BRICS’ confirms that the Kingdom has a major role in building the new world and became an important and essential player in global trade and economics,” Mohammed al-Hamed, president of the Saudi Elite group in Riyadh, told Newsweek. “Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is moving forward at a confident and global pace in all fields and sectors.”[…] “This accession, if Saudi joins it, will balance the world economic system, especially since the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil in the world, and it’s in the G20,” Hamed said. “If it happens, this will support any economic movement and development in the world trade and economy, and record remarkable progress in social and economic aspects as Saudi Arabia should have partnerships with every country in the world.”
That would essentially be the end of the petrodollar, and -in even more consequential terms- the end of the United States ability to use the weight of the international trade currency to manipulate foreign government. The global economic system would have an alternative. The fracturing of the world, created as an outcome of energy development, would be guaranteed.
Chinese Purchase Of North Dakota Farmland Raises National Security Concerns
• A World Food Crisis Is Coming, And US Allows CCP To Buy American Farmland (CNBC)
At first glance, the largely barren, wind-swept tract of land just north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, seems to be an unlikely location for international espionage. There’s not much on the more than 300-acre patch of prime Dakota farmland right now other than dirt and tall grasses, bordered by highways and light industrial facilities on the outskirts of the city. The nearest neighbors include a crop production company, a truck and trailer service outfit, and Patio World, which sells landscaping supplies for suburban backyards.But when the three North Dakotans who owned the parcels of land here sold them for millions of dollars this spring, the transaction raised alarm bells as far away as Washington, D.C.
That’s because the buyer of the land was a Chinese company, the Fufeng Group, based in Shandong, China, and the property is just about 20 minutes down the road from Grand Forks Air Force Base — home to some of the nation’s most sensitive military drone technology.The base is also the home of a new space networking center, which a North Dakota senator said handles “the backbone of all U.S. military communications across the globe.”Now some security experts warn the Chinese corn milling plant should be stopped, because it could offer Chinese intelligence unprecedented access to the facility. It’s an only-in-America kind of fight — pitting the property and economic rights of a community against national security warnings from high-ranking officials in the nation’s capital.
Debate over the project has roiled the small community, with emotional city council hearings, local politicians at odds with one another, and neighborhood groups gearing up to block the project. Craig Spicer, whose trucking company borders the Chinese-held land, said he’s suspicious of the new company’s intent. “It makes me feel nervous for my grandkids,” he said. “It makes me feel nervous for my kids.” Gary Bridgeford, who sold his parcel of the farmland to the Chinese company for around $2.6 million this year, said his neighbors have vented their anger at him and planted signs opposing the project in his front yard. “I’ve been threatened,” he said. “I’ve been called every name in the book for selling property.”
Bridgeford said he believes the national security concerns are overblown. “How would they gain any knowledge of the base?” he asked. “It’s about 12 miles away. It isn’t like its next door.” “People hear the China stuff and there’s concern,” Bridgeford said. “But everyone has a phone in their pocket that was probably made in China. Where do you draw the line?”
Paul Craig Roberts.
• Nuke War Coming, Mysterious Deaths Don’t Stop, Dems Can’t Win – PCR (USAW)
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts says American leaders want war with Russia. Russia is trying to avoid war, but the provocations from the U.S. and NATO keep coming. At some point, Dr. Roberts says Russia will be backed into a corner, and it won’t take long for the battle to go nuclear. This is a special interview inside the Weekly News Wrap-Up that explains how we got here and where we are going in terms of war with Russia. Dr. Roberts says it’s no longer a question of if, but when, it all hits the fan.
You cannot hide the unexplained deaths and emergency sickness. It is now happening every week. 32-year-old SNL comedian Nick Nemeroff died in his sleep this week, but before he did, he was on video complaining about being deathly sick after the two CV19 shots he already got. He pledged that he would not get the booster, and he never did–because he died a few days later. Meanwhile, Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker was rushed to the hospital with some strange emergency, and the drummer for Five Seconds of Summer passed out on stage for no apparent reason. Once again, the question is, “Were they vaxed?” This trend is going to continue for some time to come no matter if you are famous or not.
A new poll for the Democrats is coming in awful. An AP poll reveals 8 out of 10 Democrats say the country is “headed in the wrong direction.” That’s 8 out of 10 DEMOCRATS. Let that sink in. Couple that with another story from the AP that reports new data showing 1 million Democrats have left the party to register with the GOP. It looks like the Democrats cannot win without massive cheating or a war that shuts down the election process this fall. It’s going to be a rough ride. Buckle up.
George Webb races through Europe. He’s confusing at times.
• Kissinger’s Gas Crisis -And Pipeline- (George Webb)
Five years ago, I speculated about seven laptops in the Senate Sergeant of Arms office – six laptops running covert actions in Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, and Yemen and a seventh laptop used for the Iran Nuclear Deal. I believe the “Iran Nuclear Deal” laptop is still in use today. I based this speculation on a Senate Sergeant of Arms Blackberry I was left by a long-time Biden advisor who said the encrypted Blackberrys were given to the US Senate by the US State Department to negotiate secret energy deals like the Iran Nuclear Deal. Each country’s “deal” had separate participants, so I speculated there would be a separate laptop for each country’s covert action participants. Very similar to the Iran Nuclear Deal was the East Med Pipeline deal involving the US, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, which I called the “Southern Route” in 2017.
The “Southern Route” was being negotiated by Eric Braveman, his “husband”, Neil Brown, Avi Braverman of Israel, and one Ukrainian Billionaire named Igor Kolomoisky with lots of Cyrus bank accounts. So with all these US Senate Sergeant of Arms laptops running these top-secret negotiations, imagine my surprise when at least six of these laptops were stolen from the US Senate Sergeant of Arms office on January 6th, 2021. The “angry mob” took selfies in the US Senate Rotunda but still found time to break into the US Senate Sergeant of Arms office and steal six critical laptops. I had followed the story of the seven laptops for the seven Top Secret plans slipping through the fingers of CIA chief David Petraeus to his girlfriend, Paula Broadwell.
Petraeus somehow left seven folders with Top Secret information for overthrow operations in African and the Middle East on his desk – “Zero Footprint” for Libya and “Timber Sycamore” for Syria, for instance. I had been looking for the Blackberrys servers on Capitol Hill since I began my video series in 2016. because I knew Hillary Clinton and CIA Director David Petraeus communicated with encrypted Blackberry devices. Imagine my surprise again a few days ago when I found that Michael Stenger, the Senate Sergeant of Arms during January 6th, 2021 Capitol break-in, was suddenly dead, just before a special hearing was called on the House inquiry into the January 6th events. The timing of this death seem to correspond to getting funding at the G7 meeting of the top seven nations of the world to underwrite the East Med pipeline.
The plan appears to be 1) Have Kolomoisky provoke Russia with a series of Azov Battalian raids in the Donbas, 2) Have Russia occupy the Donbas in response, 3) Get emergency funding from the G7 to build the East Med Pipeline on behalf of the Genie Energy oil and gas energy consortium that I had been reporting on since 2016. Since some of Kolomoisky’s henchman were seen on Capitol Hill on January 6th, I supposed early on during my broadcasts of January 6th that the Ukrainians were at least going for their own “overthrow server” and for the East Med Pipeline laptop.
” Infuriating does not adequately describe my sentiments toward these intentional liars.”
• Wall Street Advocates Begin Admitting Demand Side Economy is in Free Fall (CTH)
At the exact moment that U.S. inflation began spiking in housing, energy, fuel and food, consumer demand for non-essential purchases, durable goods, started dropping. This is a natural outcome that mirrors your own experience in checkbook economics. When food, fuel and energy cost you more, you stop buying stuff and start prioritizing. Following the path of the “build back better” agenda, the U.S. version called “Green New Deal,” meant the Biden administration had to continue denying that any demand side contraction was taking place. However, it is clear from the indexes under the control of purchasing managers that orders for factory goods have been dropping.
The same is true on the services side of the PMI. Demand for services are being prioritized, and demand for non-essential services are dropping. The U.S. economy is contracting. Denial abounds. Infuriating does not adequately describe my sentiments toward these intentional liars. We are in an abusive relationship with all levels of government and their media spokespeople. Independent and honest journalism, the sharing of information that can empower people to intercede events with political liars, is quite literally the only thing that might save us from the catastrophic consequences of all this pretending. Knowledge is power, and we need to build our arsenal with an urgency unlike any before in our lifetime.
“This is old school racketeering, and it is no different than the mob in the 1920’s. This is old school racketeering for personal gain and profit at the expense of human lives.”
• 700 Million Worldwide Will Die from CV19 Vax by 2028 – Dr. David Martin (USAW)
Dr. David Martin has a deep medical science and investment resume. Dr Martin also runs a company (M·CAM International) that finances cutting edge innovation worldwide. He is also one of the key people seeking justice in lawsuits suing medical companies and the federal government involved in delivering the so-called vaccines for CV19. In simple terms, according to Dr. Martin, the CV19 vaccines are “bioweapons.” Big Pharma and the government knew it and also knew it would cause massive deaths and permanent injuries. Dr. Martin says, “It’s going to get much worse. . . . It is not a Corona virus vaccine. It is a spike protein instruction to make the human body produce a toxin. . . . The fact of the matter is the injections are an act of bioweapons and bioterrorism. They are not a public health measure. The facts are very simple. This was premeditated. . . . This was a campaign of domestic terror to get the public to accept the universal vaccine platform using a known biological weapon. That is their own words and not my interpretation.”
How many will die from the CV19 bioweapons? Dr. Martin says, “By their own estimate, they are looking for 700 million people globally, and that would put the U.S. participation in that of the injected population as 75 million to 100 million people. . . . There are a lot of reasons why they hope it will be between now and 2028 because there is this tiny little glitch of the illiquidity of the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs. So, the fewer recipients of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the better. Not surprisingly, the recommendation was people over the age of 65 were the first ones to get injected.”
Dr. Martin thinks the catastrophic effects of the CV19 injections will hit the medical industry soon. Dr. Martin explains, “The dirty secret is . . . there are a lot of pilots having micro vascular and clotting problems, and that keeps them out of the cockpit, which is a good place to not have them if they are going to throw a clot for a stroke or a heart attack. The problem is we are going to see that exact same phenomenon in the healthcare industry and at a much larger scale. So, we now have, along with the actual problem . . . of people getting sick and people dying, we actually have that targeting the healthcare industry writ large. Which means we are going to have nurses and doctors who are going to be among the sick and dead. That also means the sick and the dying are also not going to get care.”
Dr. Martin and his group are suing everybody from President Biden along with the FDA, CDC, Pfizer, Moderna and many others over the deaths and injuries from the CV19 bioweapons fraudulently passed off as “vaccines.” The next big court case is July 6, 2022, in federal court in Utah. Dr. Martin contends “this is far worse” than the Nuremberg trials of Nazis after WWII and adds, “This is organized crime. . . . They have hidden behind the immunity shield that absolves them of product liability by naming the delivery of a bioweapon–a vaccination program. . . . This is actually a criminal act. This is an act of domestic terror, and it is an anti-trust violation. This is racketeering. This is old school racketeering, and it is no different than the mob in the 1920’s. This is old school racketeering for personal gain and profit at the expense of human lives. You need to call it what it is, and it’s organized crime. I would say the Nazis were better than the people who are doing this. . . . The real question is why did American citizens develop a weapon to kill Americans and get paid to do it? That is a morally outrageous question, and, unfortunately, almost no one is asking it.”
…. for many state employees
• Washington State Governor Makes Covid Vaccines A Permanent Requirement (JTN)
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee has issued a directive making COVID-19 vaccines a permanent condition of employment for state workers in executive and small cabinet agencies, including boosters. The new vaccination standards for state employees are, according to the directive, meant to head off any possibility of going back to more severe actions implemented during the height of the pandemic, including stay-at-home orders and the closure of schools and businesses. “Widespread vaccination is also the primary means we have as a state to protect our health care system and to avoid the return of stringent public health measures,” the directive states.
All new state employees are required to be vaccinated with the most up-to-date vaccines, including any additional doses or boosters as recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Current exempt state employees – executive or professional workers paid a salary rather than by the hour – are required to be fully vaccinated as of July 1, 2023. The directive calls for the State Human Resources Division of the Office of Financial Management to take steps necessary to continue the requirement that state employees not represented by a union be fully vaccinated, including that they have the most up-to-date vaccinations by July 1, 2023.
[..] Elizabeth Hovde, director of the Center for Health Care and Center for Worker Rights at the free market Washington Policy Center, indicated she didn’t understand where Inslee is coming from with this new directive. “COVID-19 is serious, but it is no longer a public-health crisis,” she told The Center Square in an email. “It has become like other viruses that we have to deal with in a reasonable and voluntary way. This is not reasonable or appropriate. And it doesn’t serve the public or the state workforce.” According to the state Department of Health’s COVID-19 Data Dashboard, there are 228 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, and 10% of hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients.
“People of working ages – and they are who this would apply to – have never been the ones dying from COVID-19 in a way that depletes hospital resources or state workforces,” Hovde continued. “Staffing shortages in the public sector and among health care workers are exacerbated by the governor’s vaccine mandate, on the other hand. “From ferries and highway workers to hospitals and first responders, Inslee’s vaccine mandate has ruined careers and family finances, and it has decreased expected service levels, for no demonstrable health benefit.
By Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and James Comer. Kevin McCarthy is House Republican leader, Jim Jordan is House Judiciary ranking member, and James Comer is House Oversight ranking member.
• We’ll Investigate Bidens’ Shady Business Dealings (NYP)
We’ve pursued these threads despite Democrats’ refusal to cooperate. We’ve made almost 100 requests for information relating to Biden family schemes. Many, including every request made to the Biden administration, have been ignored. But with the help of witnesses who have documentation of their dealings with the Biden family, some answers are becoming clear. First, Joe Biden’s family members profited in foreign regions where he had influence as vice president. Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian company in an industry in which he had no experience. His only qualification was that his father ran point on US Ukraine policy. Second, Bidens have used their connections with Joe to promise access to the highest levels of government.
While Joe was vice president, Hunter promised Mexican business partners access to his father, and Joe Biden obliged by hosting them at the vice-presidential residence and the White House. Third, these practices continued during Joe Biden’s four-year government hiatus. In 2018, in the 2020 campaign’s run-up, Hunter Biden boasted privately, “If I say it’s important to me, then he [Joe] will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform.” Biden family members increasingly targeted foreign ventures, including multiple deals with the Chinese Communist Party. Fourth, Bidens were paid hundreds of thousands — if not millions — despite performing no discernible work.
Joe’s brother James boasted to foreign and domestic business partners that Joe would become president and they would reap the rewards in profits and US government endorsements. American banks flagged questionable transactions involving James and Hunter Biden and filed more than 150 Suspicious Activity Reports with the Treasury Department. Finally, contrary to Joe Biden’s statement that he never spoke to Hunter about his foreign business dealings, associates state that he was fully aware of his family’s business dealings and influence peddling. There is evidence of a direct sum of money set aside for “the Big Guy” — who witnesses have identified as Joe Biden — from foreign nationals. This raises significant questions about our national security and the role foreign nationals were allowed to play when he was vice president.
We have uncovered some answers, but many questions remain. In November, the American people will decide whether they accept being told what information they are allowed to know by a colluding media, including who is making policy decisions for this country and for whose interests. A Republican majority will be committed to uncovering the facts the Democrats, Big Tech and the legacy media have suppressed.
“Thomas first encountered the work of Malcolm X while pursuing his undergraduate degree. He had a poster of the man in his dorm room.”
• On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals and Racial Politics (Musa al-Gharbi)
Many assume that Thomas’ rulings flow out of a commitment to conservative orthodoxy, fervent Christianity, or partisan politics. The truth is much more interesting than that, albeit perhaps more unsettling. Thomas’ alignment with the Republican Party seems to be driven first and foremost by a deep mistrust of white liberals, the institutions they control, and the policies they try to advance in the name of ‘social justice.’ This mistrust was widely shared among black activists of his generation. Malcolm X, for instance, famously declared:
“In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negros (i.e. the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power… the white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or a tool in this political ‘football game’ that is constantly raging between white liberals and white conservatives. Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football.”
Thomas first encountered the work of Malcolm X while pursuing his undergraduate degree. He had a poster of the man in his dorm room. He memorized many of Malcom’s speeches by heart and continues to evoke him frequently to this day. But it wasn’t just Malcolm who was skeptical of white liberals. Not by a longshot. In 1966, for instance, the influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a position paper arguing: “More and more we see black people in this country being used as a tool of the white liberal establishment. Liberal whites have not begun to address themselves to the real problem of black people in this country… previous solutions to black problems in this country have been made in the interests of those whites dealing with these problems and not in the best interests of black people in the country. Whites can only subvert our true search and struggles for self-determination, self-identification, and liberation in this country.”
Now take on the CDC and FDA.
• The EPA’s Loss Is A Win For Democracy (Darwall)
Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.
“We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance,’” Justice Antonin Scalia famously wrote. The Court also ruled that the agency had acted unreasonably with its mercury emissions rules, though the EPA boasted that despite this decision, investments meant that most power plants were already well on the way to compliance. Perhaps that attitude was a factor in the Supreme Court’s shock decision in February 2016 to stay the Clean Power Plan to prevent a repeat of the EPA’s workaround. As Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court’s liberal minority, put it, “This Court has obstructed EPA’s effort from the beginning.” Formally, the Court’s decision revolves around rival interpretations of Section 111 (d) of the Clean Air Act and what Congress meant by “best system of emission reduction.”
Around 20 pages of Chief Justice John Roberts’s 31-page opinion for the court is taken up analyzing what he calls this “previously little-used backwater.” By “system,” did Congress mean a system modifying an existing plant’s emission performance? Or can “system” refer to the whole electrical grid or even a cap-and-trade scheme, as Kagan contends? Kagan’s brisk arguments demonstrate how a differently composed Court would have decided the matter. Important as these rival arguments might be, they function as kabuki theater for the underlying disagreement between the justices on the role and legitimacy of the administrative state. Although Roberts refers only once to the administrative state, it is never far from the surface. But the battle lines are made explicit in Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence and in the Kagan dissent.
They hope Trump will win.
• CNN Suffers Biggest Ratings Dip In 7 Years: Viewers Plummet 13% In June (DM)
CNN’s ratings continue to slip in primetime to their lowest numbers in seven years, despite a public about face on sensationalism and opinion shows under new boss Chris Licht. The network, promised by Licht to ‘go a different way’ during a time ‘where extremes are dominating cable news’, appear to still be in the tank even during a month that saw the blockbuster January 6 hearings. Despite the hearings, which drew tens of millions of viewers across multiple networks, CNN had fewer viewers in June than it did in May, which continued a months-long downward slope for the network since the invasion of Ukraine lifted them in March. While the three major cable news outlets – CNN, Fox News and MSNBC – have all seem some declines since former President Trump left office, the numbers for CNN continue to disintegrate at an alarming rate.
CNN, which moved under Warner Discovery leadership in April, drew an average of just 654,000 viewers in primetime in June and 487,000 for one entire newsday, down one and three percent respectively. During the committee hearings week of June 13-19, the network averaged just 480,000 viewers, the network’s worst ratings week since November 2015 and down 13 percent from those May averages. Overall, June 2022 was the lowest-rated month for 24-hour viewership on CNN since July 2015, according to The Daily Beast. By contrast, MSNBC – which had the highest ratings for the hearings on cable – averaged 1.28 million viewers in primetime, up 26 percent from May. Fox News also had a better second quarter than they did in 2021.
DeSantis mRNA
— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) July 2, 2022
Canada Day
https://twitter.com/i/status/1543429525861711874
https://twitter.com/i/status/1543170144595283968
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