Dec 122024
 


Alfred Sisley A Village Street in Winter 1893

 

Trump Wants ‘Day One’ Changes To US Policy (RT)
Trump Told Zelensky He Wants ‘Immediate Ceasefire’ – Reuters (RT)
Trump Likely To Leave Ukraine With Financial Black Hole – NYT (RT)
FBI Director Chris Wray Resigns (ZH)
Sheriff’s Assn. Embraces Kash Patel As FBI director: ‘He’s A Butt Kicker’ (JTN)
RFK Jr. Wants To Prove CIA Killed His Uncle – Axios (RT)
Trump Mocks ‘Bidenomics’ (RT)
Tulsi Gabbard Goes On Offense With Trump’s Support As Assad Falls (JTN)
Democrats Ignore Tulsi Gabbard’s Request To Meet (RCW)
Giuliani Says Blanket Pardons From Biden Could End Up At Supreme Court (JTN)
Russia Tells Citizens To Avoid Visiting US (RT)
Euroclear Warns Of Risks If Russian Assets Seized (RT)
US Loan To Ukraine ‘Theft’ Of Russian Money – Deputy FM (RT)
Nothing Will Be Left Of Frozen Russian Funds – EU’s Kallas (RT)
US Media ‘Can’t Calm Down’ Over Loss Of Influence – RT editor-in-chief (RT)
Judge Rejects the Onion’s Purchase of Infowars in Bankruptcy Sale (ET)
Liberal World Order Is Over – Orban (RT)
Syria’s post-mortem: Terror, Occupation, and Palestine (Pepe Escobar)

 

 

 

 

NOTE: I noticed there are lots of RT articles today – again. I even looked for other pieces on the same topics. But I will leave in what RT covers better. It’s not propaganda, it’s a good news service, and Margarita Simonyan is an excellent Editor-in-Chief.

 

 

Kash
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866870168674062465

Waltz
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866650880868851891

Alina
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866592202211619003
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866559337172258879

Dershowitz

Stossel

 

 

 

 

“..plans to issue more than 25 executive orders on his first day in office..”

Trump Wants ‘Day One’ Changes To US Policy (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump plans to issue more than 25 executive orders on his first day in office, “dramatically” reshaping a number of government policies, Reuters has said. Executive orders are presidential directives instructing the US government what to do and how, within the boundaries of the constitution. Outgoing President Joe Biden began his term in 2021 by signing 17 such documents, mainly revoking policies Trump enacted during his first mandate. “The American people can bank on President Trump using his executive power on day one to deliver on the promises he made to them on the campaign trail,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Reuters on Wednesday.

Trump has told his aides he wants to make a “big splash” and act with greater scale and speed than in the first term, two anonymous sources told the agency, revealing the number of anticipated presidential actions. More orders will be issued in the following days and weeks, the sources said. According to Reuters, some of the first executive orders will focus on immigration enforcement, including resuming the construction of the wall on the border with Mexico. While this could face some pushback from states governed by Democrats, under the Biden administration it was established in court that immigration was entirely within the purview of the federal government. One planned executive order would end birthright citizenship, which the US has been granting to anyone born in the country based on a particular interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Trump aides told Reuters that the incoming administration will be ready to defend this in court.

Other rumored executive orders would deal with reversing the Biden administration’s promotion of “equity,” including transgender rules and racial preferences, as well as mandatory “diversity training” for federal contractors. One source from the State Department transition team described an executive order that would review hiring decisions based on identity rather than merit. Stephen Miller, recently announced as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, is reportedly coordinating the executive order effort. The measures are said to be based on drafts provided by think tanks such as the America First Policy Institute, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Many of Trump’s executive orders from the first term were challenged by Democrats in court. Even though most were eventually upheld, the delay meant they did not end up being implemented before Biden took over.

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“Trump “behaved in a friendly, respectful and open manner and appeared to be in listening mode.”

Trump Told Zelensky He Wants ‘Immediate Ceasefire’ – Reuters (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has told Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron that he wants an end to hostilities between Moscow and Kiev as soon as possible, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources. The three met last week in Paris, where they held talks on the Ukraine crisis, despite Trump’s reported reluctance to attend the sit-down. Following the meeting, Trump claimed that Ukraine “would like to make a deal” to end the conflict with Russia. Zelensky, however, insisted that Kiev must first receive ironclad security guarantees while ruling out any territorial concessions. A Reuters source familiar with the matter said that during a 35-minute discussion that took place without advisers, Trump “behaved in a friendly, respectful and open manner and appeared to be in listening mode.”

Several sources also suggested that the president-elect appeared to be trying to build a personal rapport with his counterparts. According to four sources, the three leaders “did not discuss specific details of any vision for peace,” but Trump insisted that he “wanted an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war quickly.” Neither the president-elect nor his team “have been forthcoming on how exactly they envisage a solution” to the conflict, the article added. However, a Ukrainian source told the agency that the issue of security guarantees to prevent a resumption of hostilities was raised during the meeting. Asked about Trump’s reaction, the source noted that “he’s thinking about all the details.” Trump vowed on the campaign trail that he would bring the Ukraine conflict to a swift end if reelected, even before he is sworn into office in January.

Last month, he announced that he would appoint retired Army General Keith Kellogg as a special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg was reportedly one of the authors of a peace plan that would freeze the conflict along the current front line without recognizing Russia’s sovereignty over territories claimed by Ukraine while suspending Kiev’s NATO membership ambitions. Moscow has repeatedly ruled out freezing the conflict, stressing that all the goals of its military operation, including Ukraine’s neutrality, demilitarization and denazification, must be met. Russian President Vladimir Putin said this summer that Moscow would immediately declare a ceasefire and start peace talks once Kiev withdraws troops from all Russian territories, including the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.

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Ukraine IS the black hole.

Trump Likely To Leave Ukraine With Financial Black Hole – NYT (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party are unlikely to provide Ukraine with the same level of financial support as the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. Kiev has been heavily reliant on foreign aid throughout the conflict to keep its economy afloat. However, this support could be significantly reduced once Trump takes office in January, according to the outlet. The Republican has repeatedly signaled that he would “probably” reduce American spending on Ukraine and has instead been calling for an “immediate ceasefire” between Moscow and Kiev. Trump has also suggested that he would be able to resolve the conflict within 24 hours of taking office, although he has not provided concrete details about how he would achieve this.

Some believe he could use the threat of reduced US aid to force the Ukrainian leadership to begin negotiations with Moscow while simultaneously threatening to increase aid to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into talks. The New York Times prediction comes after the Biden administration has been spending its last weeks seemingly trying to leave Kiev with something for when Trump takes over. On Tuesday, the White House approved the transfer of some $20 billion to Ukraine in the form of a loan to be repaid using the interest generated by Russia’s frozen central bank assets. The loan is part of a broader $50 billion deal devised earlier by the G7 countries, which also includes a $20 billion EU commitment and another $10 billion to be split by the UK, Japan, and Canada.

Last month, Biden also wrote off about $4.7 billion in taxpayer-funded loans to Kiev. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the move is in the “national interest of the US and its EU, G7+ and NATO partners.” Trump, meanwhile, has insisted that any future aid to Kiev must be granted in the form of loans instead of taxpayer-funded gifts. The Ukrainian government is almost entirely reliant on Western aid to support its economy. As of October, Kiev’s public debt had exceeded $155 billion, according to the Ukrainian Finance Ministry, with over $111 billion represented by foreign liabilities. In September, Ukrainian MP Irina Gerashchenko reported that Kiev’s 2025 budget deficit is estimated to amount to some $37.6 billion, or nearly 20% of GDP. She stated that Ukraine expects to raise only $944 million from partners next year and stressed that without donor support the Ukrainian economy “will not survive.”

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Trump appointed Wray, who then directed the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

FBI Director Chris Wray Resigns (ZH)

Before President-elect Donald Trump could say “You’re Fired!” – FBI Director Christopher Wray has resigned, and will leave his post at the end of President Joe Biden’s term. Wray’s decision comes weeks after Trump nominated Kash Patel as his replacement. Patel, a fierce critic of the FBI, has said he would seek to shrink the agency’s power, close its Washington headquarters, fire its top ranks, and prosecute corrupt agents. While Wray’s departure was always in the cards, the move comes two days after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote an 11-page letter to Wray asking him to step down, accusing him of mismanagement and “failure to take control of the FBI.” “These failures are serious enough and their pattern widespread enough to have shattered my confidence in your leadership and the confidence and hope many others in Congress placed in you,” wrote Grassley.

As the Epoch Times notes further, in November 2022, Grassley published FBI documents showing that higher-ranking officials were sometimes penalized less severely than subordinates. Wray had addressed this disparity, saying in a Bureau-wide email on Dec. 11, 2020, that the agency “has zero tolerance for any form of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct.” On March 4, 2022, FBI Deputy Director Abbate warned all FBI employees: “Regardless of your rank and title, every one of us has the responsibility to treat everyone with dignity, respect, and professionalism. … Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated.” Grassley also mentioned in his letter his inquiry about the vetting of refugees from Afghanistan through the Operation Allies Welcome program.

In February 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that the Department of Homeland Security had not cross-checked these evacuees against data from the Department of Defense. As a result, 50 individuals who had been flagged as “potentially significant security concerns” by the National Ground Intelligence Center were allowed into the United States. Requests to the FBI for further information were ignored, Grassley said. Wray said “in a classified multi-agency briefing to congressional staff” that he was unsure of the location of other refugees who might pose a threat, Grassley wrote. “I can’t sit here right now and tell you that we know where all are located at any given time,” Grassley quoted Wray as saying. He pointed out that one potential terror threat had been foiled when the FBI arrested Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi on Oct. 7 of this year. Tawhedi was allegedly planning a terror attack to disrupt the U.S. election on Nov. 5.

Grassley also accused Wray and the FBI of exercising a double standard by refusing to investigate President Joe Biden’s or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. President-elect Donald Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after firing the previous director, James Comey. In a recent interview with “Meet the Press,” Trump expressed displeasure over Wray’s performance. “He invaded my home,” Trump said, referring to the 2022 FBI raid on his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Trump also cited Wray’s initial claim that his ear was struck by shrapnel instead of an assassin’s bullet, and waning public respect for the FBI as an institution. “I can’t say I’m thrilled,” he said.

The president-elect has already named Kash Patel the new FBI director, indicating that Wray’s time at the post is nearly over. However, Grassley wants Wray and Abbate to step down sooner. “For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives,” the letter says. The agency told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement: “The FBI has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to responding to Congressional oversight and being transparent with the American people. “Director Wray and Deputy Director Abbate have taken strong actions toward achieving accountability in the areas mentioned in the letter and remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work of the FBI.”

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“..the FBI is way too lawfare, way too weaponized and way too corrupt.”

Sheriff’s Assn. Embraces Kash Patel As FBI director: ‘He’s A Butt Kicker’ (JTN)

A prominent leader of an influential sheriff association on Tuesday publicly embraced President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for FBI Director, Kash Patel, claiming he was a “butt kicker.” Trump nominated Patel to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray last month. But Wray, who was selected by Trump in 2017, can legally remain in his position until 2027. Former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who founded and leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, said his group has already endorsed Patel and encouraged the nominee to pick a sheriff as his deputy director. “We already endorsed him publicly, and we love that he’s there. He’s a butt kicker. That’s exactly what we need,” Mack said on the “Just The News, No Noise” TV show.

“There’s a lot of good sheriffs that really could help him clean Washington, D.C., up, but the FBI is way too lawfare, way too weaponized and way too corrupt.” Mack said he has connections to the FBI through his father, who retired from the bureau, and a cousin who was deputy director, and still believes the bureau needs some “revamping.” “I’d like to see [Patel] completely redo the FBI, abolish it and then bring back a few to keep it going where they’re really needed,” the former law enforcement officer said. “But the sheriffs and local officials and state officials can do a lot of what they’ve been doing, and there’s duplicity all over the place … We really have too many bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and this bureaucratic nightmare needs to end.”

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“Shortly after RFK Jr. endorsed him in August, Trump promised to declassify the last of the documents pertaining to the JFK assassination through a new presidential commission.”

RFK Jr. Wants To Prove CIA Killed His Uncle – Axios (RT)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lobbying for his daughter-in law to become deputy CIA director so she can get to the bottom of the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, the Washington outlet Axios has claimed. President Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. The official investigation identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole suspect. Oswald himself was killed soon afterward by local resident Jack Ruby. RFK Jr. has long suspected the CIA of being behind the hit, however. “RFK believes that and wants to get to the bottom of it,” an anonymous Republican source told Axios on Wednesday, suggesting this rationale might be behind the proposal to nominate Amaryllis Fox Kennedy as deputy director of the CIA.

Fox Kennedy ran her father-in-law’s independent presidential campaign after the Democrats closed off their primaries. RFK Jr. ended up endorsing Republican Donald Trump, who won in November. The former Democrat has been nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services in the next administration, while former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has been tapped to head the CIA. According to Axios, RFK Jr. has been telling people that Fox Kennedy would help get to the truth about JFK. She has previous experience at the CIA, having been an undercover agent for almost a decade. Shortly after RFK Jr. endorsed him in August, Trump promised to declassify the last of the documents pertaining to the JFK assassination through a new presidential commission.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson in August 2023, RFK Jr. claimed that the CIA had the means, motive, and opportunity to murder his uncle and suggested the agency may have been behind the 1968 assassination of his father as well. According to RFK Jr., the commission that investigated the Dallas assassination and pinned it on Oswald was not really run by Justice Earl Warren but by Allen Dulles, the long-running CIA chief that JFK had sacked in November 1961. The CIA and Dulles had a personal vendetta against JFK because he had cracked down on their operations against Cuba after the 1962 missile crisis with the Soviet Union and threatened to purge the agency’s planning division, RFK Jr. has argued.

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“You pay taxes, I send it to Ukraine. They send it back to Hunter. Hunter gives it to me. Pardon Hunter.”

Trump Mocks ‘Bidenomics’ (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has mocked his predecessor’s economic agenda, using a meme involving funding for Ukraine and the recently pardoned Hunter Biden. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden gave his son Hunter, a convicted felon who lied about his addiction to crack cocaine while applying for a gun license, a blanket pardon for anything he may have done between January 2014 and December 2024. Before pulling out of the US presidential race, Biden had insisted on multiple occasions that he would not pardon his son. Trump’s campaign slammed the decision as an example of how the current government has weaponized the justice system. On Tuesday evening, Trump shared a meme on his Truth Social platform, describing how ‘Bidenomics’ works in practice. It showed Biden standing beside a whiteboard with a list of items. “You pay taxes,” the list begins. “I send it to Ukraine. They send it back to Hunter. Hunter gives it to me. Pardon Hunter.”

Hunter Biden was paid millions of dollars to sit on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president of the US and lead on Washington’s relations with Kiev. According to the contents of a laptop the younger Biden forgot at a Delaware repair shop, 10% of all international contracts went to “the Big Guy,” widely assumed to be a reference to his father. Biden officially defeated Trump in 2020 and embarked on an ambitious plan to reinvent the US economy after the Covid-19 pandemic that his advisers dubbed ‘Bidenomics’. Vice President Kamala Harris, whom the Democrats put forth as their candidate this year, spent the campaign insisting that the economy was in great shape and that ‘Bidenomics’ was working. American voters apparently disagreed, handing Trump victories in the electoral college, popular vote, and all seven swing states.

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“The notion that we must just blindly accept and follow as truth, that which the government or those in power tells us is true goes against the very essence of our Constitution and Bill of Rights..”

Tulsi Gabbard Goes On Offense With Trump’s Support As Assad Falls (JTN)

With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Director of National Intelligence-designate Tulsi Gabbard is doubling down on her anti-intervention stance with backing from President-elect Donald Trump as she faces a contentious confirmation battle. Gabbard, a former Hawaii representative and veteran who served in the Middle East, left the Democratic Party after unsuccessfully seeking the party nomination for president in 2020. She joined the GOP ahead of the 2024 election and has become something of a Republican fan favorite among those opposed to foreign interventions. Her positions have roiled Democrats and establishment Republicans alike, with some going as far as to baselessly smear her as a “Russian asset.” She had previously attracted ire over her opposition to intervention in Syria, even should that leave the Assad regime in power.

After her nomination, Tulsi was expected to be on defense over Assad, but the stunning collapse of his government over the course of mere days and the complete evaporation of the Syrian Arab Army in the face of a renewed offensive from rebel groups based in the country’s northwest has changed the script entirely. While President Joe Biden has supported U.S. involvement in the Syrian transition process, Trump has called for keeping the U.S. out of the conflict entirely and signaled that the Assad regime’s collapse should bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the table to end the war in Ukraine as well. “There was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid. In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Trump posted.

After Assad left Damascus, Trump opined that Russia had lost interest in protecting him due to Moscow’s focus on Ukraine and highlighted the estimated death tolls. “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse,” Trump then posted. “I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!” Trump’s calls for non-involvement and de-escalation of global conflicts seem to have given Gabbard the ammunition she needed to fight back against perceptions of herself as a foreign policy radical and portray her stances as in line with the White House’s main stream. “I stand in full support and wholeheartedly agree with the statements that President Trump has made over these last few days with regards to the developments in Syria,” Gabbard said.

A stalwart champion of the First Amendment, Gabbard’s nomination has some conservative Republicans jubilant, despite her prior time as a member of the opposing party. In 2022, Gabbard ruffled feathers with her appearance at the Reagan Dinner, hosted by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). In that event, Gabbard highlighted the importance of free speech and excoriated efforts to crack down on “misinformation”, saying “the latest strategy and tactic that they’re using is to try to undermine our free speech by taking it upon themselves to say they’ve got the responsibility to protect us from so called misinformation.” “The notion that we must just blindly accept and follow as truth, that which the government or those in power tells us is true goes against the very essence of our Constitution and Bill of Rights,” she added.

Several GOP heavyweights, particularly in the lower chamber, have expressed hope for reform on federal censorship and surveillance efforts with her in charge of the nation’s intelligence. Freedom Caucus lawmakers Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., for instance, have opined that her position in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence could pave the way for significant reform to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) Section 702, which allows for warrantless surveillance in limited cases. The provision has attracted scrutiny from conservative hardliners over the prospect that such surveillance may acquire information on American citizens. “Yeah, I think this is one where we can, we can actually have a chance to get it through,” Biggs said of FISA reform in light of Gabbard’s nomination. He made the remarks in November on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show.

“So again, having Tulsi at ODNI. I mean, she’s a champion of the First Amendment,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on the same program. “I mean having, this is what I love so much about President Trump’s elections, is he is putting people in these cabinet agencies, nominating people who have the attitude the American people elected, that American people voted for, which is we’re going to go serve the people, protect their liberties, make government actually more efficient smaller, working for the country and protecting their rights.”

“That, I think is great, and Tulsi believes in the First Amendment, free speech and freedom,” he added. “That’s why I’m hopeful. She’s going to be confirmed and be our next ODNI director.” Gabbard herself was placed on the Biden/Harris administration’s TSA’s terrorism watchlist, the “Quiet Skies” program, which monitors “elevated risks to aviation security.” Hawaii News Now reported that at least five agents and two explosive detection canine teams were following Gabbard and her husband in July.

Rand Paul
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866607629252112473

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“Trump remains unbothered by the meeting with Assad. Asked by NBC News if the meeting “compromises her,” the president-elect all but rolled his eyes.”

Individuals may sympathize with her, but the party as a whole -which she turned her back on- can not.

Democrats Ignore Tulsi Gabbard’s Request To Meet (RCW)

The return of Tulsi Gabbard to Capitol Hill began with breakfast in the Senate dining room courtesy of Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, followed by back-to-back meetings with other Republicans, all of whom were happy to welcome the former Hawaii Democrat and discuss her nomination to lead the U.S. intelligence community. But members of her old political party, including one-time House colleagues, largely ignored her. It’s still early in the process, but Gabbard has been unable to schedule a single meeting with Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, outgoing chairman of the committee, has not responded to her requests for a meeting, according to a source directly familiar with Gabbard’s efforts. Others have replied to her outreach but remain hesitant about putting anything on the books. At least one Democrat scheduled a sit-down this week only to abruptly cancel.

The cold shoulder comes nearly a month after President-elect Donald Trump picked Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence, two years after she quit a Democratic Party that she called “an elitist cabal of warmongers,” and immediately after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Gabbard met with the now-deposed dictator twice in 2017 while on a “fact-finding mission” to the war-torn country. These meetings proved to be an impediment when she ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020. “What do you say to Democratic voters who watched you go over there, and what do you say to military members who have been deployed repeatedly in Syria, pushing back against Assad?” Kasie Hunt asked two years later during an MSNBC interview. Gabbard replied that U.S. troops deployed there “without understanding what the clear mission or objective is.”

Gabbard added that Assad was “not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” Hillary Clinton promptly accused Gabbard, then a major in the Hawaii National Guard, of being a “Russian asset.” The Republicans who will control the Senate next year do not see the meeting with Assad eight years ago as disqualifying or insurmountable. Despite the suggestion of Democrats such as Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who recently worried that Gabbard “couldn’t pass a background check,” Republicans point out that as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, Gabbard already has a top-secret security clearance. More than 250 military veterans co-signed a letter published Monday endorsing her as “a warrior whose vote cannot be bought.” Trump remains unbothered by the meeting with Assad. Asked by NBC News if the meeting “compromises her,” the president-elect all but rolled his eyes.

“I met with Putin,” he said of the Russian president now sheltering the Syrian dictator. “I met with President Xi of China. I met with Kim Jong-un twice. Does that mean that I can’t be president?” Nonetheless, Gabbard will be grilled about her Syria meeting. Defense hawks, Republicans and Democrats alike, are expected to press her for details in committee and challenge her foreign policy views that some have described as “isolationist.” Allies of the president-elect prefer the term “America First.” And it is increasingly the new orthodoxy among a GOP base wary and weary of overseas entanglements. There is some evidence that skepticism of a muscular foreign policy has gained traction among younger Democrats and independents in the last four or five years. When Hillary Clinton questioned Gabbard’s logic and loyalty, Gabbard punched back.

In a series of tweets, she called the former secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee “the queen of warmongers” and “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” Upstart presidential candidate Andrew Yang took Gabbard’s side. “Tulsi Gabbard deserves much more respect and thanks than this,” Yang tweeted. “She literally just got back from serving our country abroad.” As Gabbard made the rounds Monday, the nominee mostly ignored shouted questions from reporters. The only public statement Gabbard made was a reiteration of the Trump policy announced over the weekend that the U.S. would stay out of Syria.

“My own views and experiences have been shaped by my multiple deployments and seeing firsthand the cost of war and the threat of Islamist terrorism,” Gabbard said. “It’s one of the many reasons why I appreciate President Trump’s leadership and his election where he is fully committed, as he has said over and over, to bringing about an end to wars, demonstrating peace through strength and putting the national security interests and the safety, security and freedom of the American people, first and foremost.”

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Blanket pardon? “The King of England could only pardon what he knew about.”

Giuliani Says Blanket Pardons From Biden Could End Up At Supreme Court (JTN)

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that if President Joe Biden issues blanket pardons, they could end up being challenged in the Supreme Court. “I think if he does it across the board….these blanket pardons of maybe eight to 10 people, then we’ll have a real Supreme Court test of whether the blanket pardon is unconstitutional,” Giuliani said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. Biden earlier this month pardoned his son on gun and tax charges, as well as any other crimes committed in the last ten years, despite promising not to make such a move.

Congressman Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., predicted that Biden would pardon his brother James. Giuliani said that many law professors wrote against President Gerald Ford pardoning President Richard Nixon, arguing it wasn’t constitutional. “You cannot give a pardon for a crime that may be committed because the pardon power derives from the power of the King of England,” he said. “The King of England could only pardon what he knew about.”

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“..weaponizing its justice system to detain and imprison Russians on trumped up and politically motivated charges.”

Russia Tells Citizens To Avoid Visiting US (RT)

Russian nationals should avoid making non-essential trips to the US and allied countries, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said, warning that they could be “hunted down” by the American authorities for political reasons. Travelling to the US poses “serious risks” due to “the increasing confrontation in the Russian-American relations,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a regular press briefing on Wednesday. She stated that more Russian nationals were being “hunted down by American authorities, especially by secret services,” with Washington utilizing “fraudulent schemes” to lure Russians abroad in order to prosecute them for “political reasons.” “For the upcoming holidays and beyond, we strongly advise to avoid non-emergency visits to the US and allied countries, especially Canada and, with rare exception, the countries of the European Union,” Zakharova said.

“When staying abroad, you should avoid situations, in which you can become a victim of provocations and be detained under the pretense of supposedly violating local laws,” the spokeswoman added. Zakharova urged Russian citizens to consider potential “tragic incidents” on foreign soil when planning trips abroad, claiming that the US justice system “leaves no room for a fair trial.” The US has blacklisted multiple Russian nationals over the conflict in Ukraine, which led to the unprecedented level of tensions between the two countries. Even before the conflict broke out in February 2022, Moscow has frequently accused Washington of weaponizing its justice system to detain and imprison Russians on trumped up and politically motivated charges.

Famous cases include the prosecution of businessman Viktor Bout and pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who were released during prisoner swaps in 2022. Another high-profile incident involved activist and journalist Maria Butina, who was convicted of failing to register as a foreign agent in the US and was deported to Russia in 2019, after spending nearly 120 days behind bars. Several Russian citizens who were part of the last major prisoner swap in August were originally extradited to the US from European countries. Vadim Konoshchenok was arrested in Estonia on a US warrant, while Vladislav Klyushin was extradited from Switzerland in 2021. The August exchange also included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan, both of whom were convicted of espionage in Russia.

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This will go awfully wrong.

Euroclear Warns Of Risks If Russian Assets Seized (RT)

Belgian-based clearinghouse Euroclear, which holds the bulk of Russia’s frozen assets, has said it does not want to be held liable if the EU confiscates the funds and hands them over to Ukraine. Euroclear immobilized an estimated €197 billion ($213 billion) in assets belonging to the Russian central bank as part of Ukraine-related sanctions. The frozen assets generated €5.15 billion in interest in the first three quarters of this fiscal year. Earlier this year, the EU decided to give Ukraine a chunk of that interest but stopped short of tapping the assets themselves. The move prompted renewed accusations of theft from Russia. Euroclear CEO Valerie Urbain told Bloomberg on Tuesday that any plan to seize the assets should also transfer all of the liabilities.

“We cannot be in the situation whereby the assets have been seized, but, in a couple of years, Russia comes and knocks at the door and says, ‘I want to recoup my securities,’ while the securities assets would have been gone,” she said. “If there is a confiscation of assets, everything should move, liabilities included.” Euroclear recently revealed having made a first payment of about €1.55 billion ($1.63 billion) to the European Fund for Ukraine in July from the interest generated by the Russian assets. That month, the European Commission announced an allocation of €1.5 billion to Kiev as a first tranche of aid. In October, the European Parliament approved a loan of up to €35 billion to Ukraine to be repaid with future revenues generated by the Russian funds. The loan is the EU’s part of a package the G7 agreed in June to provide Kiev with up to $50 billion in financial support.

The government of outgoing US President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced a transfer of Washington’s portion of the loan, totaling $20 billion, to Kiev. The funds are “paid for by the windfall proceeds earned from Russia’s own immobilized assets,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. Because US President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to cut aid to Kiev, the idea of using the assets themselves is likely to resurface, noted Bloomberg. According to Urbain, however, taking this step would threaten the euro’s role as a reserve currency and pose risks to the broader stability of the bloc’s finances. A similar warning was issued earlier by the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde.

On Tuesday, a delegation from the European Parliament arrived in Kiev to discuss the bloc’s financial aid to Ukraine.The head of the delegation, Iratxe Garcia, said that he had asked High Representative Kaja Kallas to “put forward a legal proposal to use the €200 billion of frozen Russian state assets in order to arm and reconstruct Ukraine.” During the meeting, Zelensky reiterated Kiev’s call to use the immobilized Russian funds to cover the cost of weapons for Ukraine, stating that $30 billion would be enough to “fully cover our skies.”

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“..this act falls under the classification of robbery [on the part] of an organized group..”

US Loan To Ukraine ‘Theft’ Of Russian Money – Deputy FM (RT)

The disbursement by the US of a $20 billion loan to Ukraine funded by Russia’s frozen central bank assets could be classified as theft, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has said. The US loan is part of a broader $50 billion G7 loan deal, which includes a separate $20 billion commitment by the EU and $10 billion to be split by G7 members Great Britain, Japan, and Canada. On Tuesday, the US Treasury Department announced the money had been transferred to a World Bank fund that will send it on to Kiev. “I can say that this act falls under the classification of robbery [on the part] of an organized group, I mean [on the part] of the Group of Seven,” Ryabkov told journalists on Wednesday. The US and its allies froze an estimated $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

In June, the G7 members pledged a $50 billion loan for Kiev, with the frozen Russian assets to be used as collateral, to help Kiev buy weapons and rebuild its infrastructure. The agreement was finalized in October. Ukraine theoretically is expected to repay the multibillion-dollar G7 loan over 40 years. According to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the loan transfer will provide Ukraine a “critical infusion of support.” The money covers around half of Kiev’s current deficit. The country’s state budget for next year, signed by Vladimir Zelensky into law last month, anticipates revenues of $49 billion and expenditures of $87 billion, putting the overall deficit at $38 billion. Zelensky said on Tuesday he was “deeply grateful” to Biden, Yellen, and lawmakers who supported using seized Russian assets to bolster Ukraine’s defense, describing their decision as a “powerful act of justice.”

A week earlier, the outgoing US president authorized a new $725 million military aid package for Ukraine and imposed additional economic sanctions on Russia. Moscow has repeatedly accused the West of “stealing” its money and warned that tapping these funds would be illegal and set a dangerous precedent. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned in October that Moscow would respond in kind to the West’s use of the income generated by its frozen central bank reserves. Last month, he said Russia would respond by using the income from the frozen assets of Western investors. The International Monetary Fund has also warned that any decisions regarding the seizure of frozen Russian assets should be backed with “sufficient legal support,” noting that without this, the move could undermine trust in the Western financial system.

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The EU needs diplomats, not warmongers.

Nothing Will Be Left Of Frozen Russian Funds – EU’s Kallas (RT)

The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has expressed doubt that Russia will ever see its sovereign assets frozen by the bloc as part of Ukraine-related sanctions. In an interview with Politico on Tuesday, the EU’s new foreign policy chief admitted that Russia legally had a “legitimate claim” to the assets immobilized by the West since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. She added, however, that the bloc should use the cash to reconstruct Ukraine before handing back whatever remains. “But I doubt there is anything left over,” the former Estonian prime minister said. Kallas did not specify whether she was referring to the interest generated by Russian assets or to the assets themselves. Kallas took over the EU’s top diplomatic post from Josep Borrell on December 1. She has advocated for tougher sanctions on Russia and is known for her strident stance against Moscow.

The US and its allies have immobilized around $300 billion of assets belonging to the Russian central bank since 2022. The bulk of the funds, around €197 billion ($213 billion), is being held at the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear, where they generated €5.15 billion ($5.55 billion) in interest in the first three-quarters of this fiscal year. Earlier this year, Brussels decided to give Ukraine a chunk of the interest. In July, the European Commission announced it would allocate €1.5 billion to Kiev, mainly for weapons, as the first tranche of aid. In a press release in October, Euroclear stated that it had made a first payment of about €1.55 billion ($1.63 billion) to the European Fund for Ukraine in July. The second tranche, expected to amount to €1.9 billion, could reportedly be disbursed next spring.

The G7 countries also agreed in June to give Kiev a $50 billion aid package financed by revenues from frozen Russian central bank assets. The EU and US both recently approved respective contributions of $35 billion and $20 billion to the package. Russia has repeatedly accused the West of “stealing” its money. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov on Tuesday described as “a robbery organized by the G7” the transfer of $20 billion to Kiev that was announced by the US Treasury the day before. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said last month that Russia would use income from the frozen assets of Western investors in response to the moves by the US and EU.

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“..the states that sanction Russian news outlets are violating their own principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press..”

US Media ‘Can’t Calm Down’ Over Loss Of Influence – RT editor-in-chief (RT)

The US media continues to be unsettled by a journalism course organized by the RT Academy in Africa, one month after its completion, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan posted on Telegram on Wednesday. Her remarks came in response to a feature in the National Interest, a US-based bimonthly, titled ‘Combating Russia’s Global Disinformation Campaign’. The lengthy article, published earlier this week, warns Western media of the presumed dangers posed by Russian journalism, which is rapidly evolving and becoming influential in the countries of the Global South. According to the article, while Russia’s main tactic to compete with Western news media was previously to create alternative outlets such as RT and Sputnik, Moscow has recently changed course by introducing journalism training and fact-checking.

“Russia – with its eye particularly trained on the Global South – seems intent on advancing its own mirror image of Western journalism training, one in which Russian media practices are portrayed as the gold standard,” the article states. It names RT Academy, launched in February, as an example of such practices, recalling that it welcomed journalists from all over the world to train and had a course specifically for African participants in October. The article also claims Russia’s tactics “follow decades of effort by Moscow to ingratiate itself with journalists, especially in the Global South,” so as to challenge the Western narrative. The piece then offers Western news organizations advice on how to counter Russia’s growing influence, chiding them for overlooking the Global South and failing to provide enough of their own coverage there. Simonyan found the attention of Western press on RT Academy amusing.

“American media just can’t calm down. They are discussing our RT Academy course for journalists from Africa a month after its completion,” she stated in a Telegram post on Wednesday, adding a tongue-in-cheek: “You’re falling behind, comrades. We already have a course for journalists in Chinese in full swing.” Russian media, and RT in particular, has been repeatedly smeared and targeted in the West. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow last month claimed that US President-elect Donald Trump will try to turn the American media into an “American-accented version of RT,” suggesting that it would be the end of free press in the country.

BBC chief Tim Davie said in October that Russian media outlets were spreading “unchallenged propaganda” across the Global South. The US State Department has sanctioned a host of Russian news outlets over the past two years, including RT and its parent company, accusing the latter of acting as an extension of Russian intelligence. However, many experts, including some in the West, have criticized the incessant targeting of Russian media, noting that the states that sanction Russian news outlets are violating their own principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

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“This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody..”

Judge Rejects the Onion’s Purchase of Infowars in Bankruptcy Sale (ET)

A federal judge in Texas on Dec. 10 rejected the auction sale of Alex Jones’s Infowars website to satirical publication The Onion, ruling that the process did not result in the best possible bids and citing concerns about transparency in the auction. The Onion was named the winning bidder of Infowars’ assets during the Nov. 14 auction, part of a personal bankruptcy case Jones filed in late 2022 after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in several defamation lawsuits. The lawsuits were filed against Jones in Connecticut and Texas by relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which Jones repeatedly claimed was staged as part of a government plot to increase gun control. A total of 20 children and six educators were killed in the shooting. Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting took place and was “100 percent real.”

He said that he attempted to correct the claims that he initially made, but that “[the media] won’t let me take it back.” Following a two-day hearing in Houston, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said he would not approve the sale. He rejected claims by Jones that the bankruptcy auction was plagued with collusion and fraud but noted problems, not wrongdoing, with the auction process. The Onion’s bid of $1.75 million with additional incentives for Infowars’ assets was backed by the families of the massacre victims. The bid won despite a higher $3.5 million cash offer from First United American Companies, which runs a website in Jones’ name and sells nutritional supplements. The Connecticut-based Sandy Hook families, who are Jones’ largest creditors, augmented the Onion’s bid by agreeing to forgo $750,000 of the proceeds from the sale in favor of other creditors, providing the creditors with more money than First United’s higher cash offer.

That concession caused the bankruptcy trustee to value The Onion’s bid at $7 million overall. The judge said Christopher Murray, a court-appointed trustee who oversaw the auction made “a good-faith error” when he asked for final offers for Infowars instead of encouraging more back-and-forth bidding between The Onion and First United American Companies. “This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Lopez said. “It’s clear the trustee left the potential for a lot of money on the table.” Lopez also said the two offers for Infowars were just a fraction of the money that Jones has been ordered to pay in defamation lawsuits, and noted the extent of his debts. He left it up to the trustee to resolve the disputes between the creditors before making a new attempt to sell Infowars.

After winning the auction in November, The Onion said it planned to relaunch Infowars in January as a parody website alongside advertiser Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country. In a complaint filed in November, Jones urged the federal bankruptcy court in Texas to disqualify The Onion’s bid and instead recognize First United American Companies as the rightful winner of the auction. Lopez’s ruling puts The Onion’s plan to take possession of the Infowars website and its associated assets on hold. In a Dec. 11 social media statement, Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said the publication is “deeply disappointed” but will “continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.”

Collins said the company will also continue to “seek a path” towards purchasing Infowars in the coming weeks. “It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case,” Collins said. Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families who sued Jones in Connecticut, also expressed disappointment over the judge’s ruling. “These families, who have already persevered through countless delays and roadblocks, remain resilient and determined as ever to hold Alex Jones and his corrupt businesses accountable for the harm he has caused,” Mattei said in a statement. “This decision doesn’t change the fact that, soon, Alex Jones will begin to pay his debt to these families and he will continue doing so for as long as it takes.”

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Hungary is “the westernmost Eastern and the easternmost Western nation..”

Liberal World Order Is Over – Orban (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future. “The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels. EU leaders have accused Orban of undermining democracy in Hungary and harming the economic bloc’s solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

“As the changes come, only those nations can be winners that can bring the most out of themselves,” Orban told a gathering of university students, as quoted by his office. “Those who assimilate, fall into line, are unable to show their own values or discover the strength inherent in their national character will soon become irrelevant,” he added. Hungary is “the westernmost Eastern and the easternmost Western nation,” and it seeks to “connect to all the economic powerhouses of the world,” Orban said.

Budapest claims that the West’s response to the Ukraine conflict, including its attempts to punish Russia with economic sanctions, has caused a decline in living standards and other problems in Europe. Unlike other national leaders, who intend to support Kiev “for as long as it takes” to defeat Moscow, Orban has refused to send any military assistance and has attempted to mediate peace talks. Earlier this year, the prime minister made visits to Ukraine, Russia, China and the US during what he called a peace tour in a bid to facilitate negotiations. Orban expects US President-elect Donald Trump, whom he supports, to bring about radical changes on Ukraine after he is inaugurated in January.

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“After Aleppo fell, it became clear that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power, so we started to engage in diplomatic talks..”

Syria’s post-mortem: Terror, Occupation, and Palestine (Pepe Escobar)

The short headline defining the abrupt, swift end of Syria as we knew it would be: Eretz Israel meets new-Ottomanism. The subtitle? A win-win for the west, and a lethal blow against the Axis of Resistance. But to quote still-pervasive American pop culture, perhaps the owls are not what they seem. Let’s start with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s surrender. Qatari diplomats, off the record, maintain that Assad tried to negotiate a transfer of power with the armed opposition that had launched a major military offensive in the days prior, starting with Aleppo, then swiftly headed southward toward Hama, Homs, aiming for Damascus. That’s what was discussed in detail between Russia, Iran, and Turkiye behind closed doors in Doha this past weekend, during the last sigh of the moribund “Astana process” to demilitarize Syria.

The transfer of power negotiation failed. Hence, Assad was offered asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. That explains why both Iran and Russia instantly changed the terminology while still in Doha, and began to refer to the “legitimate opposition” in a bid to distinguish non-militant reformists from the armed extremists cutting a swathe across the state. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – his body language telling everything about his anger – literally said, “Assad must negotiate with the legitimate opposition, which is on the UN list.” Very important: Lavrov did not mean Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Salafi-jihadi, or Rent-a-Jihadi mob financed by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) with weapons funded by Qatar, and fully supported by NATO and Tel Aviv.

What happened after the funeral in Doha was quite murky, suggesting a western intel remote-controlled coup, developing as fast as lightning, complete with reports of domestic betrayals. The original Astana idea was to keep Damascus safe and to have Ankara manage HTS. Yet Assad had already committed a serious strategic blunder, believing in lofty promises by NATO messaged through his newfound Arab leader friends in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. To his own astonishment, according to Syrian and regional officials, Assad finally realized how fragile his own position was, having turned down military assistance from his stalwart regional allies, Iran and Hezbollah, believing that his new Arab allies might keep him safe. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) was in shambles after 13 years of war and ruthless US sanctions. Logistics were prey to deplorable corruption. The rot was systemic.

But importantly, while many were prepared to fight the foreign-backed terror groups once again, insiders say Assad never fully deployed his army to counterattack the onslaught. Tehran and Moscow tried everything – up to the last minute. In fact, Assad was already in deep trouble since his visit to Moscow on 29 November that reaped no tangible results. The Damascus establishment thus regarded Russia’s insistence that Assad must abandon his previous red lines on negotiating a political settlement as a de facto signal pointing to the end. Apart from doing nothing to prevent the increasing atrophy and collapse of the SAA, Assad did nothing to rein in Israel, which has been bombing Syria non-stop for years. Until the very last moment, Tehran was willing to help: two brigades were ready to get into Syria, but it would take at least two weeks to deploy them.

The Fars News Agency explained the mechanism in detail – from the Syrian leadership’s inexorable lack of motivation to fight the terror brigades to Assad ignoring serious warnings from Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since June, all the way to two months ago, with other Iranian officials warning that HTS and its foreign backers were preparing a blitzkrieg. According to the Iranians: “After Aleppo fell, it became clear that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power, so we started to engage in diplomatic talks with the opposition, and arranged the safe exit of our troops from Syria. If the SAA does not fight, neither will we risk our soldiers’ lives. Russia and the UAE had managed to convince him to step down, so there was nothing we could do.”

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Colossus

 

 

Box
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866861978154607060

 

 

Tractor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866922481891807454

 

 

Overreact
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866527187026776325

 

 

 

 

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Jun 232024
 


Vincent van Gogh Weeping woman 1883

 

Biden May Decline Nomination If He Does Poorly in June 27 Debate – Hersh (Sp.)
A New Multipolar Security System Based On ‘Pax Rossiya’ (SCF)
Is Washington Trying To Dump The Ukraine War Into The EU’s Lap? (Jay)
The Only Way to End Confrontation Between Russia and the West (Lukyanov)
The Ukrainian Border War Folly (David Stockman)
Tens of Thousands of Ukrainians Hiding From Draft Officers – NYT (TASS)
Belgium Warns Against Seizing Russian Money (RT)
White Christians Being Replaced In Europe – Orban (RT)
Sunak Accuses Farage Of Appeasing Putin (BBC)
Wikipedia’s Political Bias Spreading To AI (RT)
The Supreme Court Swatted Down Hunter Biden’s Hail Mary Pass (Turley)
Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order (Lynn)
Bibi Is Needy (DeMartino)
UK Invents Phantom Skripals To Refuse To Testify In Novichok Inquiry (Helmer)

 

 

 

 

Cuomo Maher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804499826546983385

 

 

Comer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804207426297561197

 

 

Tucker J6

Jan 6
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804376332077535479

 

 

Judge Judy

 

 

Tesla

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..Biden is going to need to match the intensity he demonstrated at his State of the Union address in March if he wants to stay in the race, Hersh said..”

Biden May Decline Nomination If He Does Poorly in June 27 Debate – Hersh (Sp.)

Democrats are discussing plans to have President Joe Biden decline the Democratic presidential nomination if he has a bad showing at the upcoming presidential debate on June 27, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Friday, citing a longtime friend of the US president. Hersh reported that there is a serious concern among the Democratic Party leadership and major Democratic donors about Biden’s ability to defeat former President Donald Trump in the November election. “One extreme possibility in the case of a very bad showing Thursday night, I have been told, is to obtain agreement from Biden and his family advisers for the president to come to the Democratic convention in Chicago in August and accept the accolades of a first-round delegate victory; then he would decline the nomination and throw the nominating process open to all,” Hersh said.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker could be favorites to replace Biden, Hersh said. Next week, Biden is going to need to match the intensity he demonstrated at his State of the Union address in March if he wants to stay in the race, Hersh said. An aggregation of national polls by RealClearPolitics shows that Trump holds a half-a-point lead over Biden and leads him in all seven swing US states.

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“The U.S. and its Western partners – a global minority – have come to be seen by most people of the world as rogue states that have trashed international law..”

A New Multipolar Security System Based On ‘Pax Rossiya’ (SCF)

For several years now, Russia, China and other members of the expanding BRICS alliance have been formulating progressive trade and financial relations of the emerging multipolar world order. That order is based on mutual respect and partnership grounded in international law and the UN Charter. The BRICS concept is rightly the zeitgeist of our time. It is rallying more nations to its fold especially those of the so-called Global South which for decades have been subjected to the unilateralism of Western hegemony. The trouble is that for a new world order based on equality and fairness to succeed in practice, it needs to be secure from arbitrary military aggression and imperialist tyranny. In other words, a new security architecture is required to underpin the development of a multipolar world. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been advocating for a new indivisible international security system. This week saw the plan for a new security arrangement put into action.

The Russian leader embarked on state visits to North Korea and Vietnam during which he signed new strategic partnership and defense accords. Ahead of his trip to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Putin outlined the integrated vision thus: “We are also ready for close cooperation to make international relations more democratic and stable… To do this, we will develop alternative mechanisms of trade and mutual settlements that are not controlled by the West, and jointly resist illegitimate unilateral restrictions. And at the same time – to build an architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.” The concept of indivisible security is by no means limited to Eurasia. Russia has signaled the same principles apply to Latin America, Africa and indeed every other corner of the world. During Putin’s meetings with Chairman Kim Jong Un of the DPRK and President Lo Tam of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the strategic partnerships agreed were not merely about military defense and security.

They involved comprehensive partnerships for the development of trade, transport, technology, education, science and medicine. Nevertheless, it was clear that the commitment to strategic partnership was underpinned by new mutual defense accords. This was most explicit in the treaty signed with the DPRK which furnished “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties”. This is a game-changer. It totally upends the geopolitical calculations of the United States and its NATO partners who have been unilaterally expanding military force and provocations in Eurasia and elsewhere. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has ramped up aggression in the Asia-Pacific against China and North Korea with impunity. Under his watch, the US has increasingly moved nuclear forces into the region to intimidate not only Beijing and Pyongyang but also Moscow. The Biden administration has been assiduous in forming hostile military formations in the region with its NATO partners, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

Year after year, the United States has built up weapon systems in Taiwan to provoke China and on the Korean Peninsula to threaten North Korea. This unilateral aggression and “might is right” arrogance underpin the notion of Pax Americana that prevailed for decades after the Second World War. That notion was always a cruel euphemism for American imperialist violence to impose its economic and political interests. The Korean and Vietnam Wars in which millions of civilians were annihilated were the real-world grim translations of Pax Americana and its fraudulent “rules-based order”. Geopolitical perceptions have dramatically changed in a few short years. The U.S. and its Western partners – a global minority – have come to be seen by most people of the world as rogue states that have trashed international law through illegal wars and unilateral bullying with economic sanctions. The U.S. dollar and Washington’s relentless debt spending are seen as instruments of imperialist looting.

The BRICS multipolar world order is a welcome alternative to the mayhem of the Western-dominated system. The principles of fairness and cooperation are laudable and necessary to implement. But such principles must be reinforced with military defense and security for all. This is far from the one-sided “defense and security” of the United States and its NATO partners, which in reality is an Orwellian cover for aggression. The defense commitments given by Russia to the DPRK this week can be seen as long overdue. One may wonder how the U.S. and its allies got away with threatening the people of North Korea for so long and denying Pyongyang the sovereign right to self-defense. Admittedly, Russia did previously support UN sanctions on North Korea over its missile program. That’s over.

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“America wants to hand over the responsibility of Ukraine to the Europeans and shed responsibility for the mess that it has created..”

Is Washington Trying To Dump The Ukraine War Into The EU’s Lap? (Jay)

With just a mere matter of weeks now before the U.S. presidential election some experts are wondering if Joe Biden is preparing, at the last minute, to wriggle free of the Ukrainian curse and tell voters that in the next term, if he were to be President, Ukraine funding will be reduced dramatically. This would, after all, be a cunning move to outfox Trump who has told reporters on numerous occasions that he would end the war once in office simply through cutting U.S. financial support.Either scenario places EU countries – and the EU itself in Brussels – in a quandary as their worst nightmare is coming true: America wants to hand over the responsibility of Ukraine to the Europeans and shed responsibility for the mess that it has created. One could even argue that relations now between the U.S. and EU countries are on a collision course given one recent offer Washington made to the EU in the form of a loan which the EU would guarantee but U.S. companies would benefit from.

As Hungary prepares to take the helm of the EU’s six month rotating presidency on July 1st, western elites are fretting over whether this time Budapest will veto outright the sanctions which are in place, which need to be signed off every six months. America in particular wants a quick fix solution but is indicating that it wants to hand over all the risk to Europe. It argues that those who hold Russian assets should be the ones to offer the guarantees against default – through interest on Russian cash held by them – and that U.S. Congress anyway is unlikely to sign off another batch of military aid, even in the form of a loan, at such short notice. Following a massive body blow from European elections, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will tell President Joe Biden they reject the American proposal for Europe to act as sole guarantors for the loan, according to conversations with six senior diplomats and officials.

The offer was structured in such a way that EU countries would pay the interest, accept the risk and allow most of what was a 50bn dollar loan to benefit U.S. companies. Remarkable sting for the EU governments when it shows that the relationship between them and the Biden administration just sinks lower and lower each week. Of course, there is a great deal of anger from the EU side as many EU leaders feel as though the U.S. has cleaned up quite nicely from the whole business of war which has profited the U.S. on so many levels but has drained EU economies, explaining why Poland recently held a pole which claimed that a majority of those asked wanted funding for the Ukraine war to end. Europe has really been left holding the baby over the Ukraine war and the palpable resentment against the U.S. is certainly growing. The deal the U.S. pushed of course was never going to be a runner but more likely a new European Commission in September will borrow a new 50bn euro tranche from its seven year 1.2 trillion euro budget for Ukraine.

Even in this scenario, the EU is scraping the barrel and reaching new lows in throwing cash into the fire just as an ephemeral last-ditch effort to stay warm. But both the U.S. and EU realise that time is running out for whoever wants to pour more money into the black hole of Ukraine. Time is running out because while Ukraine desperately needs the money, there’s no certainty that a Donald Trump presidency would back any loan initiatives. A final agreement will now be delayed until at least in autumn with just a matter of few weeks before November 5 election. Relations between the U.S. and EU have never been so tipped in Washington’s favour. And that’s before Trump even gets into the White House.

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Talk.

The Only Way to End Confrontation Between Russia and the West (Lukyanov)

The concept adopted at the end of the Cold War stated that NATO ensured European security, and a bigger NATO meant a more secure continent. As a first step towards this, everyone (including Moscow) agreed that a reunited Germany would remain a member of the bloc instead of receiving neutral status, as some had suggested earlier. Further, it was implied that each country had the right to choose whether or not to join any alliances. Theoretically, that is what sovereignty implies. But in practice, the geopolitical balance of power had always imposed restrictions that forced alliances to consider the reaction of non-member countries. However, the triumphalism that reigned in the West following the Cold War significantly reduced the willingness to take such reactions into account. In other words, NATO felt like it could do anything and no reply would follow.

The situation could have changed dramatically if Russia had considered the possibility of joining NATO, and if the bloc itself had considered such a scenario. Then the principle of the indivisibility of security, proclaimed in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, would have been respected within the framework of the bloc. However, it was impossible for Russia to join NATO, since, even at its weakest, Russia remained one of the world’s largest military powers and possessed the largest nuclear arsenal. The hypothetical accession of such a state to NATO would mean the emergence of a second force within the club that would be on a par with the US, and therefore, would not obey it on the same level as other allies. This would change the very essence of the organization, and alter its principles of Atlanticism (simply because of Russia’s geographical location). No one was prepared for this. The qualitative transformation of NATO was never on the agenda.

As a result, NATO’s expansion, which in a sense became automated, pushed Russia further and further to the east. Moscow’s attempts to regulate this process – first through participation in joint institutions (such as the NATO-Russia Council of 2002, which was an expansion of the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997) and then through growing opposition (starting with Putin’s Munich Speech in 2007) – did not bring the desired results. In addition to the inertia of the West’s initial approach (which implied that the bloc’s very existence is security in itself), the West believed that Moscow didn’t have the right to set conditions and must only follow the rules set by the stronger and more successful Western community. This is how the EU eventually got involved in the current Ukraine war. Could relations between NATO and Russia have developed in a different way? The West believes that the persistence of Russia, which continued to consider NATO a threat to its security, led to the current military crisis. And, in fact, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But even assuming that this was true, the speed and ease with which NATO returned to a strong confrontation with Russia shows that it had been prepared for this.

Russia’s memorandum of December 2021 and the 2022 military operation in Ukraine were designed to put an end to the idea of NATO’s uncontested expansion as the only means of ensuring European security. Two-and-a-half years later, we see that the scale of the conflict has exceeded all initial expectations. Judging by Moscow’s statements, the confrontation may only come to an end when the principles on which European security is based are fundamentally reconsidered. This is not a territorial conflict, but a conflict which may only end when NATO abandons its main goal and function. So far, there is no compromise on the horizon. The Western side is not willing to agree that the results of the Cold War must be reconsidered, and the Russian side is not ready to retreat without this assurance. Thirty years after the signing of the Partnership for Peace program, there’s still no partnership or peace between Russia and NATO. And neither is there a clear understanding of why the two sides were unable to achieve it.

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Not one country. Never was.

The Ukrainian Border War Folly (David Stockman)

once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface. So-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the fragile post-communist equilibrium.

That’s the true meaning of the Maidan coup. It ended the tenuous cohesion that kept the artificial state of Ukraine intact for barely two decades after the Soviet demise. So save for Washington’s destructive intervention, the partition of a communist-confected state that had never been built to last would have eventually materialized. The evidence that the Maidan coup was the coup ‘d grace for the makeshift Ukrainian state is apparent in the maps below. These maps below tell you all you need to know about why this is a civil war, not an invasion of one neighbor by another. The first map is from the 2004 presidential election, which was won by the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Yushchenko. The latter predominated in the orange areas of the map, over the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who swept the blue regions in the east and south.

2004 Ukraine Election Results—National Divorce In The Making

The second map is from the 2010 election, showing the same stark regional split, but this time the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, won. In the map below, the dark blue parts to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison. As it happened, the sum of the pro-Yanukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the lands of old eastern Galicia and Poland) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.

Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis. Yet it was one which still produced a sufficient victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Yanukovych – so as to be reluctantly accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010. At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Yanukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate. But when Washington essentially put the anti-Russian regions in charge of Ukraine’s government by orchestrating, funding and immediately recognizing the Maidan coup, everything changed on a dime. That was especially the case when the new, illegal government enshrined in its constitution a requirement to join NATO at the earliest possible opportunity.

In effect, Washington’s 2014 Maidan coup was the equivalent of Khrushchev’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba during 1962. Even had Putin been as erudite and civilized as JFK, rather than the ruffian he actually is, he would have had little choice except to insist that NATO missiles 30 minutes from Moscow cannot stand. In a word, there has been no unprovoked “invasion” by Moscow of the transitory artifact known as the Ukrainian state. The latter effectively began and ended with the Soviet Union.Moreover, with respect to the actual underlying reason for intervention in Ukraine—NATO’s proxy war against Russia– a simple question recurs: Besides restocking the NATO arsenals depleted by the demolition derby in what remains of Ukraine, what’s the reason for NATO’s war? Alas, the question answers itself. The War Capital of the World on the Potomac insists upon it, and its vassals in Europe like Ursula von der Leyen nod, jawohl!

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“..hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians to be called up into the army..”

Tens of Thousands of Ukrainians Hiding From Draft Officers – NYT (TASS)

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men have gone into hiding as they avoid conscription for fear of dying in the conflict involving “bloody trench warfare,” The New York Times reported on Friday. While it is not clear how many men are hiding from authorities, in big cities like Kiev and Lvov, social media groups alerting members to mobilization include tens of thousands of people, the newspaper wrote. Ukrainian men expressed fear of dying in the conflict, the NYT continued. According to the newspaper, Kiev has been sending troops without “sufficient training” to the front to replace combat losses.

Military analysts agree that a lack of adequate training makes it difficult for Kiev to hold its lines, the newspaper concluded. Ukraine announced a general mobilization in February 2022, which it has extended periodically ever since, with the country’s authorities doing their utmost to prevent men of conscription age from dodging the draft, including a ban on male residents of Ukraine from leaving the country. On May 18, a law tightening mobilization rules came into force in Ukraine, allowing hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians to be called up into the army.

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In a video I posted June 18, Jim Rickards says: “..Russia will retaliate by putting a lien on $40 trillion at the Euroclear custodian..” That’s not Russian money, but the total of what Euroclear processes. A recipe for absolute chaos.

Belgium Warns Against Seizing Russian Money (RT)

Belgium does not support the seizure of Russian assets that have been frozen by the EU as part of Ukraine-related sanctions, the country’s Finance Minister Vincent Van Peteghem said on Friday, highlighting the mounting risks related to the move. The West froze nearly $300 billion in assets belonging to the Central Bank of Russia following the launch of Moscow’s military campaign against Ukraine in February 2022, a move denounced by Moscow as “theft.” Around $280 billion of this sum is held in the EU, primarily in the Belgium-based depositary and clearing house Euroclear. “First of all, for our country there are two elements that are important: we did not touch the assets themselves, as the ownership title change would yield consequences both on the legal side and financial side that are unknown,” Van Peteghem said during a press conference after the bloc’s ECOFIN meeting in Luxembourg.

“And second, of course, risk sharing, that I think is important in the rollout of the instruments and is a crucial element of all discussion,” the minister added. Earlier this month, the G7 nations announced that they had reached an agreement on using interest from frozen Russian assets to finance a $50 billion loan to help Kiev buy weapons and rebuild damaged infrastructure. At the time, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that the confiscation of the assets was not on the table. In April, Van Peteghem stated that the bloc was close to reaching a political agreement on seizing the profits generated by Russia’s central bank reserves, stressing that the first tax collection could take place as early as July 1.

The idea of seizing the frozen Russian assets has been debated by EU lawmakers and the bloc’s allies for about two years. While the US and UK have called for the outright confiscation of the funds, multiple reports suggest that EU member states remain cautious regarding the move, citing the lack of a legal basis for such a measure as well as fears that Russia will take retaliatory steps. Some top officials have reportedly warned that the drastic move could undermine investors’ confidence in the EU’s financial system. The Kremlin has denounced the push to use its immobilized funds to provide support for Ukraine. Earlier this week, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow has a “wide arsenal” of political and economic countermeasures it can use to respond to the potential confiscation of its sovereign assets.

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Sounds familiar.

White Christians Being Replaced In Europe – Orban (RT)

A “militant” faction of pro-migration politicians is overseeing the “replacement” of white European Christians with Muslim immigrants, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has declared. “In Europe there is an exchange of populations, the number of white, Christian, traditional – let’s say European – people is decreasing, the number of migrants being imported and the number of people belonging to the Muslim community born here is radically increasing,” Orban told Kossuth Radio on Friday. German politician Manfred Weber, who leads the centrist European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament, is the “beelzebub” responsible for this alleged scheme, Orban continued, adding that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is Weber’s “little servant girl” responsible for its implementation.

The EPP remained the largest faction in the European Parliament after last month’s elections. However, the decline of the Greens and a surge in support for right-wing parties has left the EPP with fewer allies with whom to pass legislation. Hours after he spoke to Kossuth Radio, Orban flew to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ahead of Hungary assuming the EU Council’s rotating presidency next month. The Hungarian PM claimed that Germany has suffered greatly as a result of immigration, and “no longer looks like it did ten years ago.” “This Germany is no longer the Germany that our parents and grandparents held up to us as an example,” he said, adding that the country is now a “colorful, changed multicultural world” in which migrants are “no longer guests.”

Hungary’s stance on immigration has placed the country at odds with Brussels in recent years. Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Budapest to pay €200 million ($216 million) for failing to comply with EU asylum law, and imposed a fine of €1 million per day until Hungary fully implements the legislation. According to the court, Budapest has limited migrants’ access to asylum procedures since 2020, making the process of filing applications “virtually impossible.” “It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens,” Orban responded, vowing to “figure out a way, so [the ruling] hurts Brussels more than it hurts us.”

Orban was criticized in the German media for his comments on Friday, with Munich’s Merkur newspaper accusing him of spreading “conspiracy myths” about immigration. The idea of a so-called ‘Great Replacement’ is often written off by liberals as a racist conspiracy theory. However, the population share of white Europeans has been decreasing across the continent since the mid-20th century, and European leaders sometimes admit that they intend to use non-European immigration to replace the aging native workforce. Speaking in Athens earlier this year, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson stated that “legal migration should grow by more or less 1 million per year” to achieve this goal.

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“..the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, ‘They’re coming for us again’ and to go to war”.

Sunak Accuses Farage Of Appeasing Putin (BBC)

Nigel Farage’s claim the West provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “completely wrong and only plays into Putin’s hands,” Rishi Sunak has said. The prime minister accused the Reform UK leader of “appeasement” that was “dangerous for Britain’s security”. In a BBC Panorama interview, Mr Farage said that “of course” the war was President Vladimir Putin’s fault. But he added that the expansion of the EU and Nato gave Mr Putin a “reason” to tell the Russian people “they’re coming for us again”. His remarks have prompted criticism from across the political spectrum. Labour’s shadow defence secretary John Healey said they made the Reform UK leader “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament.” Former Conservative defence secretary Ben Wallace described Mr Farage as “pub bore”, who did not understand the “real world” of politics.

Speaking on an election campaign visit in London, Mr Sunak said: “What he (Mr Farage) said was completely wrong and only plays into Putin’s hands.”He added: “This is a man (Mr Putin) who deployed nerve agent on the streets of Britain, who is doing deals with countries like North Korea, and this kind of appeasement is dangerous for Britain’s security, the security of our allies that rely on us, and only emboldens Putin further.” In his Panorama interview, the former UKIP and Brexit Party leader was asked by Nick Robinson about his past comments on Mr Putin. “I said I disliked him as a person, but I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia,” he replied. He said it had been “obvious” to him for many years “that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, ‘They’re coming for us again’ and to go to war”.

Pressed further, he added: “We provoked this war. It’s, you know, of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.” After the interview aired on Friday, Mr Farage, a former member of the European Parliament, said on X that he was “one of the few figures that have been consistent and honest about the war with Russia”.Alongside the new statement, he reposted a speech in the European Parliament from 2014 in which he called for the West to “stop playing war games with Putin. “The Ukrainian presidency has told the BBC it will not be putting out an official statement on Mr Farage’s comments. But a source in the presidential office warned about the “virus of Putinism and the rise of war propaganda”, adding: “The task of civilized humanity is to fight this virus in the bud.”

Reform UK has been gaining ground on the Conservatives in the opinion polls since Mr Farage announced he was returning to front-line politics as the party’s leader shortly after the general election campaign got under way.
He has said his aim is for Reform to replace the Conservatives as the official opposition to Labour, which he says is certain to gain power on 4 July, although polling suggests the party may win only handful of seats at this election.

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“..its co-founder, Larry Sanger, saying last year that the website had become an instrument of “control” used by the US intelligence agencies to wage information warfare..”

Wikipedia’s Political Bias Spreading To AI (RT)

Wikipedia’s tendency to negatively portray right-wing political figures is feeding into AI large language models (LLMs) that harvest data from the online encyclopedia, a US-based conservative think-tank has claimed. A report released on Thursday by the Manhattan Institute looked at evidence of political bias in English-language articles on Wikipedia, by correlating the names of Western leaders and prominent politicians with emotion-laden words. The study found “prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures; and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures,” suggesting “evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.” “We find some of the aforementioned political associations embedded in Wikipedia articles popping up in OpenAI’s language models,” the report concluded.

The researchers noted that Wikipedia articles are likely a prominent part of OpenAI’s “secret corpus of data” used to train ChatGPT. The report acknowledges, however, that this pattern is not universal, and is more common in articles about US political figures, while there was no evidence of Wikipedia bias in entries on British politicians or US-based think tanks. For example, in references to recent US presidents, Donald Trump – now the Republican presidential frontrunner – was portrayed with the most negative sentiment, while Barack Obama was listed as having the most positive references. The report concluded that Wikipedia “is not living up to its stated neutral-point-of-view policy.”

The policy referred to, which Wikipedia describes as one of the pillars of the encyclopedia, stipulates that articles must exclude personal opinions and interpretations of the editor, be based on reliable sources, and explore multiple points of view when dealing with a controversial topic. Wikipedia has been repeatedly criticized for its supposedly biased takes on hot-button political issues, with its co-founder, Larry Sanger, saying last year that the website had become an instrument of “control” used by the US intelligence agencies to wage information warfare.

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“What is now left for Hunter are sentencing guidelines that strongly support jail time and a judge who has imposed such jail time in past cases..”

The Supreme Court Swatted Down Hunter Biden’s Hail Mary Pass (Turley)

While the result in Washington was not as bad as the unanimous decision in Delaware, it may well have sealed his fate on appeal. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika did not leave him much for appeal in overseeing a fair and textbook trial. The Biden legal team had been counting on Hail Mary passes since a Special Counsel was appointed. It almost worked. Special Counsel David Weiss seemed to work hard to avoid any felony charges against the president’s son. The Justice Department not only allowed the statute of limitations to run on major crimes, but sought to finalize an obscene plea agreement with no jail time for Hunter. In the hearing to accept the plea, Judge Noreika decided to ask a couple of cursory questions of the prosecutor, particularly about a sweeping immunity provision covering any and all crimes committed by Hunter.

The prosecutor admitted that he had never seen an agreement this generous for a defendant. The plea fell apart and the Biden team seemed unwilling to accept anything but a single throw victory. They told the prosecutor in court “just rip it up.” The Biden legal team then blundered in taking the case to trial with a jury nullification strategy. Some of us wrote that Hunter needed to plead guilty to avoid jail time. Instead, they hoped that a Delaware jury in Bidentown could never convict a Biden. They were wrong. That left the last pass to the Supreme Court, which just seemed to land in the stadium seats. In reality, it was never a strong throw. After all, Hunter was convicted for lying on gun forms, something that the Court was never likely to excuse.

What is now left for Hunter are sentencing guidelines that strongly support jail time and a judge who has imposed such jail time in past cases. The other group of people that may be even more upset with this ruling may be many in the media and Congress. Once again, the Court has shattered the false narrative that this is a hopelessly divided Court along ideological lines. This month the Court has continued to rule unanimously or nearly unanimously, including in cases like Rahimi in controversial constitutional claims. Instead, the Court rendered a reasonable, balanced accommodation for public safety under the Second Amendment. It is not clear who is more disappointed: Hunter or the Court critics.

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The New World Order can’t meme anymore than the left..

Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order (Lynn)

Relativism, undeniably, trends in modernity. And Orwell was right: “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” Orwell, George, ”1984”: part 2, chapter 9. So whether by Marxism or any other form of secular utopianism: The goals are always out with the “old” and in with the “new”. Order out of chaos. Dissolve and coagulate. Also like Orwell’s “1984”: The world’s global societal power structure is stratified into concentric rings of power. The Inner Party functions to continuously preserve and enrich itself; as the Outer Party (i.e. those following orders) and the Proles are utilized and cannibalized when necessary.

The circles of power have become increasingly interconnected in modernity; and technology allows the Inner Party to launch policies that are enforced by the Outer Party and unto the Proles. This process is also called “history”. The Outer Party depends upon the Inner Party for survival and it always remains a difficult challenge to convince the Proles of something they can’t, or won’t, see. As a result, history unwinds in inevitable, cyclical waves. Yet, the Inner Party has survived for generations – even before the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and its unleashing of the modern Fractional Reserve Banking monster. Slavery is rooted in economics; and so the Inner Party uses debt to implement and expand its various wars. The rich get richer as the poor suffer, starve, and die. While driving the other day, I listened to an “expert” on AM radio discussing the vast increase of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere and the conclusion was this: “Climate Change is real!” The radio voice seemed very confident in its conclusions and, by implication, it was ready to do everything necessary to stop what it perceived as a genuine threat. Always the same dialectics, again and again.

Is America having seizures? Or postmortem convulsions? At this point in time, I am convinced it’s the latter. While in communication with a retired retarded professor, she expressed exasperation at those who still plan to vote for Trump. After all, he was convicted by a jury of his peers and is now a convicted felon. In response, and from memory, I typed out a meme I saw on the internet: “He lived over 70 years without a criminal record. But when he ran for president he was charged with over 90 crimes! How can you explain that?” Silence. But… oops! Did you notice what I did there? Did you see how the Inner Party’s phony dialectics had me defending the proud promoter of Operation Warp Speed®?

When it was revealed that U.S. Senate ratification was required for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Pandemic “Treaty”, it was, instead, transitioned into an “agreement”. Except that strategy went down in flames, too, at the WHO’s 77th World Health Assembly. In response, Team Biden, China, and other unelected WHO totalitarians stealthily passed new International Health Regulations (IHR) behind closed doors. This was done on June 1, 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland. The Ethiopian Communist, and WHO Director, Tedros Ghebreyesus, violated the IHR’s Article 55.2 eligibility requirements and with less than the required quorum of member states voting. This power grab was completely illegal and unlawfully elevated the WHO “from a global advisory-only body to an international enforcer of its mandates.” So we all better get the word out, before it’s too late. Especially now that it’s another election year so flu season is almost here.

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“Turning on a practically endless faucet of cash for a friend and then being criticized because it wasn’t endless enough..”

Bibi Is Needy (DeMartino)

On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu released a video complaining about a short-lived pause of one weapon shipment from the United States. In the video, he directly criticized the administration of US President Joe Biden. “It is inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel,” The Israeli Prime Minister said, despite the United States being the largest provider of weapons to Israel and its most stalwart defender on the international stage. The White House canceled a meeting with high-ranking Israeli officials in response and attempted to assure the public that it had not stopped sending weapons to a country that has been accused of genocide by several nations. The decision to delay one shipment of weapons was in response to Israel’s decision to go forward with its Rafah invasion, despite pressure from the United States to hold off.

Biden has been dealing with protests over the US supplying weapons to Israel, but the pause on one shipment seemingly did nothing to slow Israel’s campaign. More than 6% of the Gaza population has been killed, seriously injured or remains missing. Turning on a practically endless faucet of cash for a friend and then being criticized because it wasn’t endless enough must be a familiar experience for Biden. Ukraine’s illegitimate President Volodymyr Zelensky complained earlier this year that aid from the US, which he had already received well over $110 billion worth, was arriving too slowly. But, considering who his family is, he is probably used to it. Last year, texts between Biden and his son Hunter were revealed that showed the younger Biden– despite earning millions allegedly on the back of his father’s name– complaining about being broke and asking his uncle James Biden for money.

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“The British have presented no evidence of Novichok on the Skripal home door handle; in the blood, skin, and urine testing of the Skripals in hospital; or in subsequent inquest and court proceedings..”

UK Invents Phantom Skripals To Refuse To Testify In Novichok Inquiry (Helmer)

A new lawyer appeared in a London court on Friday claiming to represent Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Jack Holborn, a barrister specializing in what he calls human rights, told Lord Anthony Hughes, who is conducting a public inquiry into the alleged Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in 2018, that the Skripals should not be called to give evidence or testify in the case. Holborn claimed the Skripals are fearful for their security. “No security measures are perfect”, he said. Holborn has not been in contact with the Skripals, however. He refuses to answer questions put to him on what visual contact or other communications he has had with either Sergei or Yulia Skripal. Instead, he was told what to say at the hearing by the law firm of Kingsley Napley which the British government is paying to show that the Skripals are participating in the Novichok case. The spokesman for Hughes and the inquiry was asked to explain Holborn’s presence in court for the first time on Friday. She was also asked what authority the Skripals had given Holborn to represent them.

The spokesman answered: “Kingsley Napley has been designated as the recognised legal representative of the Skripals under r[ule] 6 of the Inquiry Rules 2006. By rule 8, the recognised legal representative may appoint a team to assist them and Kingsley Napley have accordingly instructed counsel to appear on their clients’ behalf.”. In other words, there has been no contact between the lawyers who say they represent the Skripals, and the Skripals themselves. The judge and government are refusing to give evidence that Sergei Skripal is alive, and that Yulia Skripal is not in prison. The problem for the British Government is that if the Skripals are allowed to give live evidence at the Hughes inquiry, there is no telling what they may say to contradict or discredit the six-year official narrative of the Russian Novichok attack in England. The lawyer for the inquiry, Andrew O’Connor KC, told Hughes on Friday morning this was a “difficult question as to whether either or both of Sergei and Julia Skripal should give oral evidence.”

He also acknowledged there was the same problem in revealing what the Skripals have already said. “In the case of the Skripals, the transcripts of their police interviews have not yet been provided to CPs [Concerned Parties] but will be very shortly.” In fact, the Skripal transcripts will be so redacted, the officials and lawyers admitted in court, it is uncertain what the Skripals believe had happened to them, and why. Release of the redacted Skripal transcripts from March of 2018 risks being contradicted by fresh written statements to the Hughes inquiry from the Skripals, so that form of testimony is also being barred. Since March 4, 2018, when the Skripals slumped unconscious on a Salisbury town bench and were kept in hospital under police guard, three British prime ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak — have continued the story that three Russian military officers attacked the Skripals with a Novichok nerve agent they had brought by plane into England, and sprayed on to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s home; that was several hours before he and his daughter showed symptoms and collapsed.

The British have presented no evidence of Novichok on the Skripal home door handle; in the blood, skin, and urine testing of the Skripals in hospital; or in subsequent inquest and court proceedings. The alleged Russian attack weapon – a perfume bottle atomiser – did not materialize for months until July 2018, when police claim to have found it on a kitchen bench in the home of another alleged victim, Dawn Sturgess, ten days – repeat ten days — after exhaustive police searches of the house had failed to find it. Sergei Skripal has not been seen in public since the day of the alleged Novichok attack, March 4, 2018. He has not been heard on the telephone by family members in Russia since June 26, 2019. Yulia Skripal was last seen in a government-directed interview at a US bomber base in England in May 2018; her last telephone call to Russia was heard on November 20, 2020. The Skripals have not been seen or heard from since.

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Off-switch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804219814627471641

 

 

Aurus

 

 

Only men

 

 

Brahmaputra
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804372316085981370

 

 

Coral
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804467986520002771

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jun 182024
 


Pablo Picasso The blue room 1901

 

Next Stage – The General Staff’s Targets After Putin’s Feint (Helmer)
NYT Docs: Putin Was Willing To Compromise To End War in 2022 (Antiwar)
US Must Be Saved From WWIII – Trump (RT)
If Putin Ukraine Peace Offer Rejected, Next To Be Tougher – Intel Chief (TASS)
NATO In Talks To Put More Nuclear Weapons On Standby – Stoltenberg (RT)
Kremlin Views NATO’s Rhetoric On Putting Nukes On Alert As Escalation (TASS)
Netanyahu Disbands War Cabinet (RT)
The Unites States of Go Figure (Kunstler)
Schumer Plans Vote on Bill to Ban Bump Stocks After Supreme Court Ruling (ET)
British Conservatives Annihilated In Pre-Election Polls (RT)
Elon Musk Slams “Extinctionist Movement” Who See Humans As A “Plague” (MN)
Brain Chips To Replace Cell Phones In Future – Musk (RT)
Tesla Begins Testing Full Self-Driving On Chinese Roadways Ahead Of Rollout (ZH)
Horrors Of Biden’s Lost 85,000 Migrant Children In America (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Jim Rickards @JamesGRickards My latest interview with Steve Bannon on The War Room covers the G7 theft of Russian assets and how Russia will retaliate by putting a lien on $40 trillion at the Euroclear custodian. U.S. can’t think one move ahead. Financial chaos will result.

 

 

Black voters

 

 

Tucker Alex

 

 

 

 

Watters

 

 

 

 

“To think anyone on the other side is trustworthy, or capable of agreement, after all Putin recounted of US aggression, lying, double-dealing, and Ukrainian Nazism, is impossible.”

Next Stage – The General Staff’s Targets After Putin’s Feint (Helmer)

“[Putin’s terms] will obviously not be accepted by the West and their Ukrainian puppets,” wrote Rozhin. “Against the background of the ‘world summit’ [the Burgenstock, Switzerland, meeting on June 15-16] this will indicate that in fact the West is prolonging the war, so these statements [of Putin] are another torpedo in the summit. Russia is thus showing the countries of the Global South that it has offered a world that will be rejected by those who are broadcasting about ‘peaceful summits’…The war will continue. The goals of the SVO [Special Military Operation] will be achieved by military means.” The distinction in the last line is between Kremlin political strategy and General Staff military strategy – this is a distinction which published Russian analyses of the president’s speech and the state propaganda organs avoid identifying. The semi-official Vzglyad quoted Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, as characterizing the reaction from the West as “of an unconstructive nature”. No Russian official will say as little as this for the record.

Instead, Vzglyad has mobilized its official sources to patch over the differences between Kremlin strategy and General Staff strategy by emphasizing that Putin is following the latter. “According to [Putin], the West has received a specific condition – either Ukraine will be outside the NATO bloc, or there will be a bold and sharp onslaught that will leave no chance for the enemies. Putin is confident of victory not only over Ukraine, but also over the entire collective West. The proposal was made in order to recall this initiative after the defeat of Ukraine. But Western leaders did not understand Putin, and then they themselves will say that they want peace… But there will be no mercy, tougher conditions will be put forward.” In a second report from academics on the Kremlin-financed Valdai Club roster, Vzglyad claims “the essence of the Russian president’s speech is that the European security system no longer exists and will not be based on the same principles.”

“In addition, the Russian president managed to change the agenda of the Swiss summit…the president’s initiative is capable of transforming the security structures not only of Eurasia, but also in the perspective of the entire planet. In addition, Russia already has really working international institutions in this space: the CIS, SCO, EAEU, CSTO, BRICS, the Union State of Russia and Belarus. All these tools have proven their reliability and suitability in modern conditions.” The Kremlin’s American camp followers have repeated the semi-official line by scratching the difference between tactics and strategy, between feint and purpose. “Notice he’s [Putin] not making a demand about Odessa,” said one. “So Odessa is still off the table…So this is a prelude to the next ramp-up in Russian military operations.”

Russian skeptics, as well as non-Russian military analysts, point out that Putin has repeatedly refused to follow the General Staff’s advice, restricting their proposed military operations to an extent that there is open questioning about his reasons. One source says Putin’s June 14 exposition is “only half-right in blaming the Western ‘globalist liberal elites’ [Putin’s speech] for the current ‘extremely dangerous state of affairs’ [Putin’s speech]. Ultimately, the ideology of liberalism, inferiority complex, and corruption which dominate the oligarch-backed elite in Moscow has played a major role.” This is a reference to the role Putin invited the oil and minerals oligarch Roman Abramovich to play in the negotiations of March-April 2022 in Istanbul; in the negotiations with the Ukrainian delegation, Abramovich was Putin’s personal delegate and he outranked the official Russian negotiators.

There was strong domestic military and political opposition to this at the time in Moscow; there remains suspicion of an attempt to repeat by Putin’s Kremlin staff, represented by Peskov, even now. “He [Putin] cannot be so influenced still as to think the war against Russia via the Kiev regime will stop under the conditions he laid out, nor can he think there are any terms which the US and NATO can be trusted by the Russians to sign. That’s why the Russian Foreign Ministry tabled the terms of a non-aggression and security in Europe requiring the roll-back of NATO’s borders to 1997. That was in December 2021. To think anyone on the other side is trustworthy, or capable of agreement, after all Putin recounted of US aggression, lying, double-dealing, and Ukrainian Nazism, is impossible.”

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Much better deal than available now, and 500,000 Ukrainians still alive.

NYT Docs: Putin Was Willing To Compromise To End War in 2022 (Antiwar)

In April 2022, Ukraine and Russia were on the brink of signing a deal to end the war just weeks after it began. The New York Times published documents showing President Vladimir Putin was willing to make concessions to get an agreement signed. According to the documents, Putin initially sought to have Kiev recognize Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. However, a draft agreement from April 15, 2022, suggests both parties were prepared to set aside the issue to end the conflict. “Paragraph 1 of Article 2 and Articles 4, 5, and 11 of this Treaty shall not apply to Crimea and Sevastopol,” the document says. In December, Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi explained that an agreement was reached in the spring of 2022, stating the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise. We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”

Kiev was also willing to accept neutrality with regards to NATO, according to the NYT. Ukraine’s negotiation team proposed a peace deal that would say the country “does not join any military alliances” and “does not deploy foreign military bases and contingents.” The draft deal would have allowed Kiev to sign bilateral agreements with NATO states, as well as become a member of the European Union, but would have required Ukraine’s security partners to lift sanctions on Russia. The Kremlin also sought to protect the rights of millions of Russian speakers living in Ukraine by forcing Kiev to repeal restrictions on the Russian language, and to bar the state from erecting monuments glorifying neo-Nazis and WWII-era Nazi collaborators. As the talks were ongoing, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was pushed by his Western backers to forgo diplomacy and attempt to forcibly expel Russian troops from his country.

Then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made an infamous trip to Kiev to pressure Zelensky to abandon any peace negotiations, while Washington repeatedly vowed to supply unlimited military aid. The NYT report added details about US pressure on Ukraine to ditch the talks. According to a senior American official familiar with the negotiations, Washington “quietly said, ‘You understand this is unilateral disarmament, right?’” Additionally, the NYT noted that Polish leaders believed the French and German governments might have endorsed the peace agreement and pushed Ukraine to accept it. During a meeting in late March 2022, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda pressured other NATO leaders not to allow Ukraine to sign the Russian proposal.

Some US officials cautioned Ukraine not to trust Russia and warned the talks were merely a military ploy. However, two out of three Ukrainian negotiators who spoke with the NYT believed the Russian proposal was genuine, and one explained Putin had “reduced his demands” over the course of the discussions. Ultimately, decision-makers in Kiev listened to their supporters in Warsaw, London, and Washington and elected to break off the negotiations. More than two years later, the conflict drags on, with Russian forces steadily advancing on major Ukrainian cities despite renewed Western military aid. On Friday, the Russian president extended a public peace offer to Ukraine that is similar to the one nearly agreed to in 2022. However, along with Kiev agreeing never to join NATO and the West lifting sanctions on Russia, the Kremlin is now demanding that Ukraine recognize Moscow’s sovereignty over Crimea and four other Ukrainian oblasts that have been annexed by Russia throughout the two-and-a-half-year-long war.

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“..he has done more damage to the country than the ten worst presidents in US history combined..”

US Must Be Saved From WWIII – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has warned of the possibility of a third world war breaking out under the current leadership in Washington, saying that if elected he would reverse course. Speaking at a Turning Point USA campaign event in Detroit, Trump emphasized that he had not started any new conflict during his 2017-2021 presidency, and vowed to work towards restoring peace, particularly in Ukraine, if he wins a second term. Trump claimed that Joe Biden’s “weakness and failure” were putting the US in “grave danger” and “dragging us towards World War III,” suggesting that he has done more damage to the country than the ten worst presidents in US history combined. “We have a lot of problems in this country, on top of that, we could end up in World War III because we have an incompetent leader that should never have been there,” he stressed.

Earlier this month, the Republican also warned that the world could be plunged into a devastating nuclear war due to Biden’s alleged mental decline. Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that unlike the leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea, Biden is “not at the top of his game” and had never been “the brightest bulb” among US politicians. Trump warned that a nuclear exchange could lead to “world obliteration” and emphasized that the US currently has a leader that is “incapable of even discussing” the issue. During his speech in Detroit, the presidential candidate also criticized the Biden administration for “wasting money at levels never seen before,” particularly when it comes to continued financial support for Ukraine, and called Vladimir Zelensky “the greatest salesman that has ever lived.”

“Every time he comes to our country, he walks away with $60 billion dollars,” Trump said, adding that every time Zelensky receives money, he immediately asks for more. “It never ends,” he stressed, and vowed to have the issue “settled” before he takes office again as president. Previously, Trump has stated that the Ukraine conflict “never would have happened” if he had been president at the time and has said that he would be able to end it “in 24 hours” if he gets another term in November. He has not, however, offered any details as to how he would accomplish that goal.

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Obviously.

If Putin Ukraine Peace Offer Rejected, Next To Be Tougher – Intel Chief (TASS)

The conditions of the next peace proposal for Ukraine if the current one is rejected will be more complex and harsh, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin said in an interview with TASS. “The conditions on which peace can be achieved and some sort of a peace agreement may be signed will become more complex and tough for Ukraine,” he said, replying to a question as to what will happen if Ukraine refuses Russian President Vladimir Putin’s peace proposal. Earlier, Putin presented new peace proposals on settling the Ukraine conflict, providing for the recognition of Crimea, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions as parts of Russia, the establishment of Ukraine’s non-aligned and non-nuclear status as well as its demilitarization and denazification and the lifting of anti-Russian sanctions. The Kiev regime has rejected this initiative.

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“..the only scenario in which they might resort to a nuclear option is if Russia’s very existence is at stake..”

NATO In Talks To Put More Nuclear Weapons On Standby – Stoltenberg (RT)

NATO members are debating putting more of their nuclear weapons on standby mode amid tensions with Russia and China, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Sunday, Stoltenberg stated that NATO is in talks about taking nuclear assets out of storage and making them ready to use, since the US-led military bloc must clearly convey to the outside world that it has a strong deterrent potential. ”I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues,” he said, adding that deliberations are already underway. The NATO chief stressed that while the bloc’s ultimate goal is a world without nukes, “as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world.”

He voiced particular concern about what he called China’s growing nuclear capabilities, adding that NATO could soon face “something that it has never faced before, and that is two nuclear-powered potential adversaries” – Beijing and Moscow. According to Stoltenberg, the US is also modernizing its nuclear gravity bombs deployed in Europe, and its allies on the continent are also upgrading the aircraft that carry them. This came after Pranay Vaddi, Special Assistant to the US President and Senior Director for Arms Control, said earlier this month that “absent a change in the trajectory of adversary arsenals,” the US would soon reach a point where it would have to increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons.

Western media and officials have repeatedly accused Russia of nuclear saber-rattling amid the Ukraine conflict. However, officials in Moscow have repeatedly said that they have no plans to use nukes against the neighboring country, stressing that the only scenario in which they might resort to a nuclear option is if Russia’s very existence is at stake. At the same time, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned last week that Moscow could potentially alter its nuclear doctrine in view of a growing threat caused by “unacceptable and escalatory actions of the US and its NATO allies.”

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“..the Russian president never talks nukes “at his own initiative as he takes the issue seriously..”

Kremlin Views NATO’s Rhetoric On Putting Nukes On Alert As Escalation (TASS)

The recent remark by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that the bloc’s allied members are discussing putting their nuclear arsenals on alert is another bout of tensions, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “This is nothing else but an escalation,” Peskov said. Unlike Western officials, the Russian president never talks nukes “at his own initiative as he takes the issue seriously,” the Kremlin spokesman said. “Whenever President [Vladimir] Putin comments on the issue of nuclear arms, he does so, taking someone’s questions or questions from reporters, including foreign ones,” he explained.

Also, the NATO chief’s statement runs counter to the declaration issued following last weekend’s conference on Ukraine in Switzerland, Peskov added. The communique, he said, ruled out such rhetoric as inadmissible. Stoltenberg told The Daily Telegraph in an interview that NATO allies had started consultations on the need to put nuclear weapons on alert, including against the background of China’s plans to increase the number of its nuclear warheads.

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Nothing changes.

Netanyahu Disbands War Cabinet (RT)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved the war cabinet overseeing the conflict in Gaza after a key member, retired general Benny Gantz, resigned from the emergency government, according to media reports. The prime minister reportedly announced the move to ministers at a meeting of the cabinet on Sunday. Gantz, a former defense minister without portfolio who entered the war cabinet shortly after the beginning of the conflict with the Palestinian militant group Hamas last October, announced his resignation earlier this month, citing disagreement with Netanyahu’s policies. ”The cabinet was in the coalition agreement with [National Unity MK Benny] Gantz at his request. As soon as Gantz left – there is no need for a cabinet anymore,” Netanyahu said, as cited by local media.

The prime minister is now expected to hold consultations on the Gaza conflict with a small group of ministers, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who had been in the war cabinet. Shortly after Gantz’s resignation, another minister without portfolio, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, also resigned from the cabinet, where he served as one of three observers. Another observer, Knesset member Yechiel Tropper, made the same announcement. Both Gantz and Eisenkot said they resigned due to Netanyahu’s failure to form a strategy for the war in Gaza.

During the government meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu reportedly said, “in order to reach the goal of eliminating the capabilities of Hamas, [I] made decisions that were not always acceptable to the military echelon,” adding, “we have a country with an army and not an army with a country.” The war cabinet was established on October 11, just days after the Israeli-Hamas war broke out following the Palestinian militant group’s surprise attack on southern Israel, in which over 1,000 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. The cabinet was chaired by Netanyahu, and included Gantz and Gallant, along with three observers – Dermer, Eisenkot, and Shas party leader Aryeh Deri.

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“Pretend is what actors actually do, you see. They’re really good at it, and your job is to play along, suspend your disbelief. That’s the essence of showbiz.”

The Unites States of Go Figure (Kunstler)

You realize, don’t you, that everything going on around the Ukraine fiasco on the NATO side is completely insane? The folks running the US government — Barack Obama and his witches’ coven — started the whole thing over there in concert with a gang of corporate players (BlackRock, sundry oil-and-gas companies, Haliburton types, arms-makers, bunch of big banks), plus the dastardly WEF for “guidance” (ha!), looking to grab the mineral wealth of Ukraine and, ultimately, of Russia itself. Nice try. Didn’t work out. Tons of money pounded down a rat hole. Now, the chatter is that we (NATO) “can’t afford to lose.” Yeah? But we’re losing. Russia will hold the eastern Ukraine provinces and what’s left in the rest of Ukraine will be a failed state drained of men under sixty able to work at anything, bankrupt, broken. It will take a century, if ever, for Ukraine to recover from all that and the West will have gained nothing.

Anyway, that’s the true prospect. And so, the West’s “solution” to that humiliating quandary appears to be: start a bigger war, right up to and including nukes. That’s good thinking there, Butch, said Sundance. Why the European members of NATO wanted to go along with this nickel-plated clusterfuck is an abiding puzzle of history now, like who exactly bumped off JFK in 1963. Germany, the Euro club’s biggest economy, stood by listlessly while America blew up its supply of affordable natgas (the Nord Stream pipelines), which was an act of war by us against Germany. Apparently, Olaf Scholz went to our CIA station in Berlin for a haircut one day and came out with a lobotomy, staring blankly through the whole affair like a Hinterwälder steer on the killing floor. Meanwhile, goodbye industrial economy! Nice knowing you. Looks like it’s back to the fourteenth century, living on rough black bread, sleeping with the cattle under your house for heat in winter, fighting jihadis inside your town walls. . . .

What is the purpose, you ask yourself, of this new world war we’re itching to start? And why now, exactly? The stupid answers may be the correct ones. To furnish an emergency pretext allowing “Joe Biden” (Barack Obama & Co.) to “postpone” the election? If so, I guess they want a hot civil war even more than WWIII, because that’s what they’ll get. Or is it just to complete the destruction of the USA, turning us into a failed state run by a tranny Mamluk-ocracy? Or is it, as Ed Dowd has averred, to cover up the imminent implosion of the US / Euroland debt debacle? To provide cover for all that, the West held a fake peace conference at a five-star resort in Switzerland last week — flutes of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut with langoustine mousse in puff pastry boats . . . to die for! (and you just might) — and you know how serious the USA was because we sent our ace problem-solver Veep Kamala Harris, who cackled and hee-hawed her way through a session or two and then. . . just. . . split the scene, mysteriously. Russia, was conspicuously not invited, by the way. Whose idea was that?

Mr. Putin marked the occasion by issuing a sane proposal to commence peace negotiations so plain, simple, and straightforward that even “Joe Biden” might have gotten the drift: 1) withdraw Ukrainian troops from Donbas territory that has joined the Russian Federation, and 2) agree that Ukraine not join NATO. The US and NATO instantly rejected it, on grounds unspecified. According to The New York Times own search engine this very morning (June 17), the newspaper hasn’t published a news story on the Ukraine War for the past five days. Go figure . . . . While Veep Kamala Harris was yukking it up over the peace hilarity in Switzerland, “Joe Biden” went to the far more important celebrity fundraiser out in Hollywood, headlined by the likes of actors George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and late-nite snarkist Jimmy Kimmel, that is, certified experts on geopolitical conflict, united in the cause of “saving our democracy” from “the dictator Trump.”

“Joe Biden” declared that Donald Trump was bent on “retribution. . . he’s gonna get back at the people.” Roger that. But I think he meant that Mr. Trump might open some inquiries into how come the Democratic Party and its Intel blob ran one debilitating lawless hoax after another on our country for the past eight years while bankrupting it and destroying the medical system, the legal system, the currency, higher education, and the US military, not to mention jailing thousands on fake criminal charges and letting ten billion alien mutts into the country, many of them jihadis with dubious intentions.But never mind all that. $30-million got raised in Hollywood to continue the game of pretend that “JB” is running for reelection. Pretend is what actors actually do, you see. They’re really good at it, and your job is to play along, suspend your disbelief. That’s the essence of showbiz.

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“.. the high court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority..”

How is that a “disgraceful decision”?

Schumer Plans Vote on Bill to Ban Bump Stocks After Supreme Court Ruling (ET)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he will bring a vote this week on legislation to outlaw bump stocks after the Supreme Court on June 14 struck down a Trump-era ban on the gun accessory. Mr. Schumer, at a June 16 news conference shared by CBS News, said he would bring the bill up for unanimous consent, meaning that only one senator has the power to block the measure. It is almost certain that a Republican senator would move to block the measure. “We’ll see just what Republican MAGAs do: Will they allow it to go forward, or will they cower to MAGA and hurt the American people?” Mr. Schumer said. A 6–3 opinion by the high court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority when it interpreted a federal firearms statute to outlaw the use of bump stocks.

Bump stocks are attached to the butt end of a rifle, to take advantage of a semiautomatic gun’s recoil to fire more rapidly. “As I warned the Trump administration at the time, the only way to permanently close this loophole is through legislation. Senate Democrats are ready to pass legislation to ban bump stocks, but we will need votes from Senate Republicans,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement on June 14 after the ruling. The ATF in 2018, with the support of President Donald Trump, reversed its earlier position and declared bump stocks illegal in response to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which a gunman used firearms equipped with bump stocks to fire multiple guns more rapidly, killing 60 and leaving hundreds wounded.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito filed a concurrence on June 14 that emphasized Congress’s role. “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” he said. “Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Supreme Court decision “deeply disappointing.” “Today’s ruling renews a call for Congress to enact further gun safety legislation,” he wrote on social media platform X. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) echoed that, writing on X that the ruling was a “disgraceful decision” that “will result in the death of more Americans, especially children.” Some Republicans saw the ruling as a victory for Second Amendment rights. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on June 16 that any legislation to ban bump stocks might violate the Second Amendment.

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“Winning just 72 seats would be the party’s worst result in its 200-year history..”

British Conservatives Annihilated In Pre-Election Polls (RT)

The UK’s ruling Conservative Party is heading for “electoral extinction,” according to multiple polls published in British media over the weekend. Amid Sunak’s record unpopularity, two polls showed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party surging to third place. According to an Opinium poll published in The Observer on Saturday, 40% of likely voters said they would choose the Labour Party when they cast their votes on July 4. Another 23% said they would vote Conservative, while 14% said they would back Reform UK candidates, a better result for the anti-immigration party than for the Greens (7%) and Liberal Democrats (12%). A Telegraph poll published the same day showed even more dismal results for Sunak’s party, with 46% of likely voters choosing Labour, 21% Conservative, and 13% opting for Reform UK.

It marks the poorest showing for the Conservatives in a Telegraph poll in five years, while Labour’s 25-point lead is the party’s largest since October 2022, when Conservative Prime MInister Liz Truss stepped down after unveiling a widely-reviled mini-budget. Reform’s share in both polls is its largest since the party’s creation in 2021. A more detailed poll carried out by Survation for the Times showed Labour winning 456 out of 650 parliamentary seats, and the Conservatives hanging on to only 72. By contrast, the Conservatives won 365 seats in 2019, a majority of 80 and at the time their best result since 1987. Winning just 72 seats would be the party’s worst result in its 200-year history. The Conservatives’ previous low point came in 1906, when under the leadership of Arthur Balfour it won 156 seats to the Liberal party’s 397.

Sunak called the election last month, before the publication of economic data showing that inflation was unlikely to fall to his government’s target. Like Truss and Boris Johnson before him, Sunak has presided over an historic decline in British living standards and a rise in energy costs and inflation, both of which soared after the UK cut itself off from Russian fossil fuels in 2022. With three weeks to go until the election, some Conservatives have accused Reform UK and its leader, Nigel Farage, of splitting the right-wing vote. “The only wasted vote is a Conservative vote,” Farage shot back last week, after a separate poll showed Reform as the country’s second-largest party. “We’re heading north and the Tories are heading south,” he continued, declaring that “the people’s revolt is just gathering momentum.”

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“..If humans go extinct or civilisation collapses, whatever policies we may have are irrelevant..”

Elon Musk Slams “Extinctionist Movement” Who See Humans As A “Plague” (MN)

In a recent interview, Elon Musk warned that those who wish to see humanity thrive are in a fight against those with an “extinctionist” philosophy, environmental extremists who see humans as a “plague on the Earth.” Musk was speaking to the Cato Institute about the “implosion of the birth rate,” noting that we should be “very concerned” because it is “accelerating in most countries.” “If there are no humans, there’s no humanity,” Musk simplified, adding “we need to make them somehow.” The Space X owner continued, “In the sort of extreme form of the environmentalist movement, people start to view humans as a plague on the surface of the earth, as a fundamentally bad thing, and with the implication that if all humans disappeared, somehow earth would be better off.”

Musk labeled it “The Extinctionist Movement,” urging that “I think at a fundamental level, you can think of things as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist philosophies.” “That’s what really matters. If humans go extinct or civilisation collapses, whatever policies we may have are irrelevant,” he further asserted. Musk further stressed that civilisation and consciousness will end and everything will be left to robots unless we “have an expansionist philosophy.” “We must seek to go beyond what we’ve done in the past to increase the number of humans,” Musk declared, adding “one way or another, this must happen.” His final message to the world was “Go forth and multiply.” It is a warning Musk has been repeating for some time now.

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He mentions so much, and the author picks out the cell phone? How about “revolutionary treatments for people suffering from various physical disabilities such as paralysis and blindness, as well as illnesses like obesity, autism, depression, and schizophrenia..”?

Brain Chips To Replace Cell Phones In Future – Musk (RT)

Cell phones will become obsolete in the future, being replaced by chips that are implanted directly in the human brain, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has predicted. His Neuralink biotech company implanted a brain chip for the first time in 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh back in January. The surgical procedure involved placing the computer chip – which is about the size of a coin – in the region of the brain which controls the intention to move. The chip is then used to “record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention.” Musk shared his latest prediction in response to a post published on X (formerly Twitter) by a parody account named Not Elon Musk on Sunday. The original message read: “Would you install a Neuralink interface on your brain to allow you to control your new X phone by thinking?”

Musk replied by claiming that “in the future, there will be no phones, just Neuralinks.” In its press release last year, Neuralink said its Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) program aims at developing a “fully implantable, wireless brain-computer interface” that would at first grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts. It would later pave the way for revolutionary treatments for people suffering from various physical disabilities such as paralysis and blindness, as well as illnesses like obesity, autism, depression, and schizophrenia. In an interview with Joe Rogan in 2018, Musk suggested that Neuralink could also one day allow humans to communicate without using words, and possibly also achieve a state of “symbiosis” with artificial intelligence.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval for the first chip implantation trial last May. Several weeks after the procedure in late January, Musk reported that the man had made a “full recovery with no ill effects that we are aware of,” and was capable of moving a computer mouse around the screen “by just thinking.” However, in May, Neuralink acknowledged that it had encountered certain issues after tiny wires implanted in the brain were dislodged out of position. Nevertheless, the FDA gave the green light for a second human trial, the Wall Street Journal reported last month. The next experiment, which is reportedly slated for June, will feature a modified procedure, whereby a chip will be implanted deeper into the brain to prevent it from retracting. According to the media outlet, another eight people are expected to take part in further trials by the end of the year.

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Wow. That’s fast.

Tesla Begins Testing Full Self-Driving On Chinese Roadways Ahead Of Rollout (ZH)

Beijing recently ‘greenlighted’ Tesla the ability to roll out its driver-assistance system, known as “Full Self-Driving,” or FSD. A new report suggests Tesla is testing vehicles equipped with FSD on city streets and highways in the world’s largest car market. Reuters cited a report from the government-backed Shanghai Observer that said ten Tesla vehicles with FSD are being tested ahead of what could be a much larger planned rollout later this year. Elon Musk has been strategically paving the way for an FSD rollout in China in recent months. His surprise visit to China on April 28, where he met with top Chinese officials, including Premier Li Qiang, clearly indicated Tesla’s deepening ties with China.

One day later, on April 29, news broke in US corporate media that Tesla would partner with Chinese tech giant Baidu for mapping and navigation software to support FSD, including satisfying regulators about data security and privacy requirements. Other reports said top Chinese officials gave Musk the greenlight to roll out FSD in some limited capacity. In May, Reuters reported that Tesla was preparing to register FSD with Chinese authorities for a planned rollout later this year. Chinese state media also stated that Tesla had begun building a Megapack factory in Shanghai. The larger rollout of FSD in China will be a golden opportunity for Tesla to expand revenue streams amid the worldwide slump in EV sales. Also, this allows them to better compete with local rivals in China.

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“If this happened under former President Trump, CBS, ABC, NBC, and other media outlets would be running 24/7 specials about the horrific situation..”

Horrors Of Biden’s Lost 85,000 Migrant Children In America (ZH)

One of Muckraker.com’s journalists has taken to X, revealing an upcoming report set to expose the shocking reality behind some of the 85,000 migrant children who vanished under the Biden administration’s first term. Muckraker wrote on X that one government insider has supplied them with a “list of addresses where some of the 85,000 missing alien children have been delivered under the Biden administration.” In the video, a Muckraker journalist stood outside an abandoned Amityville, New York house. He said this is one of the thousands of addresses the government insider has provided them, adding this home with boarded-up windows allegedly had two migrant children delivered to a sponsor living at the house. “Our upcoming report will expose the horrors of the Biden administration’s unaccompanied children program,” Muckraker wrote on X.

Leftist corporate media outlets have barely covered that the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement has lost more than 85,000 migrant children in Biden’s first term. If this happened under former President Trump, CBS, ABC, NBC, and other media outlets would be running 24/7 specials about the horrific situation. All the American people hear are crickets from leftist corporate media outlets, more focused on rainbow June month than actually caring about missing children. It is disappointing and another reason why distrust in leftist corporate media is soaring as ratings implode. In recent weeks, “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Trump in an interview about the missing migrant children situation and what he would do if reelected.

“So in just this year, fiscal year 2024, there’s been 74,000 unaccompanied children that have come across the border. In 2023, get this number, 137,275. You know, you’ve seen the images of these children … and the Joe Biden administration has lost 80,000 of them. No one can track, no one knows where they’re at … Will you commit, will the Trump administration commit to finding these children, to finding them and returning them to their families? To their countries? Because many of them have been lost into sex trafficking. It’s heartbreaking. Will you commit to that?” Campos-Duffy asked the former president.

Trump responded: “Yeah, I would do that. Sure, adding, “I haven’t been asked that question, but the answer is yes. It’s a simple answer. Many of them are dead. They have done such a bad job.” Trump also spoke with Dr. Phil about the situation, in which he said, “Can you imagine if that were Trump that had 88,000 missing children…” What Trump is referring to is corporate leftist media would be railing against him if he were president right now for the missing children. Muckraker did not provide a release date on the report: “Stay tuned, you do not want to miss what’s next.” If the climate cultists and woke zombies across the West redirected their wasted energy from rainbow parades to actually addressing human trafficking, perhaps real progress in tackling this crisis could be made.

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Kansas AG Pfizer

 

 

Turandot
https://twitter.com/i/status/1802646620015579338

 

 

Whenever I see Optimus, I just keep thinking: Joe Biden moves very energy efficient.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1802678186611777681

 

 

Horse

 

 

Baby turtle

 

 

Baby rhino

 

 

Elephants

 

 

Pride
https://twitter.com/i/status/1802658014249328657

 

 

 

 

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