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Debt Rattle November 23 2024

Nov 232024
 
 November 23, 2024  Posted by at 9:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Titian The rape of Europe 1560-62

 

• In the Weeds of the Swamp (Kunstler)
• Ukrainians Have Stolen Up To Half Of US Aid – Ex-Polish Deputy Minister (RT)
• Trump Eyes Richard Grenell As Special Envoy For Ukraine (RT)
• Ukrainian Military Plans For 2025 ‘Derailed’ – Moscow (RT)
• RFK Jr.’s Plans for Reshaping HHS Draw Strong Reactions (ET)
• Trump Names Billionaire Scott Bessent As Treasury Secretary (ZH)
• Washington Chose to Go to War with Russia (Paul Craig Roberts)
• World ‘Very Close To Point Of No Return’ – Scott Ritter (RT)
• US Investor Eyes Nord Stream 2 Purchase, Citing Strategic Value for US (Sp.)
• White House Refuses to Recognize Responsibility for Escalation in Ukraine (Sp.)
• Musk on His ‘To-Do List’ on Time Cover: We Need to Colonize Other Planets (Sp.)
• NY ‘Hush Money’ Judge Grants Trump Request To File For Dismissal (ZH)
• Israel Preparing to Attack Iranian Nuclear Facilities (Sp.)
• European States Vow To Arrest Netanyahu (RT)
• US Senator Threatens Invasion of Netherlands (RT)
• HBO Delivers Blow Against the Anti-Rowling, Anti-Free Speech Movement (Turley)
• British Operation KISS – “Kill Instantly Skripals” – Has Failed (Helmer)
• G20 Knocks Out G7 Agendas (Pepe Escobar)

 

 

 

 

App

Cuts

DOGE

Ruhle

Ron Paul

Celente

 

 

 

 

 

 

“RussiaGate is starting to look like ancient history to many, but it is a giant slime trail of sedition and treason involving many people who are still very much alive..”

• In the Weeds of the Swamp (Kunstler)

Okay, you’ve had enough post-election euphoria. Time to wake TF up. Rats from inside the walls of the Deep State are trying to gnaw their way into the Trump cabinet. Ever hear of an outfit called Cipher Brief? Of course not. Cipher Brief is sort of the McKinsey of blob-world (a.k.a. the “national security” network), a combination Human Relations / Public Relations firm, totally spooked-up with former CIA officers. Quite a few of the spooks who signed the infamous letter in October 2020 that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” are contractors there. They all knew the heinous laptop was genuine, though, and they did it anyway to queer the election for “Joe Biden.” Why? Because. . . Trump. One Cipher Brief operative is a character named Dan Hoffman, a retired CIA “clandestine service” officer who ran the agency’s Middle East Bureau, among other things. He’s now a sometime talking head on Fox News.

Hoffman has scuttled his way to the sidelines of the Trump transition team, trying to punk them on personnel. I received my own intel about Dan Hoffman and his current operations. “Hoffman talks the talk,” I’m informed. “He was involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. He is 100-percent Deep State. They think he is a brother-in-arms. He is not. Hoffman and the people around him are in direct contact with Tulsi Gabbard [DNI-designate] and John Ratcliffe [CIA Director-designate]. Remember, agency ops officers are trained to be all things to all people, to manipulate them, detect their vulnerabilities, and exploit them. Their game vis-a-vis Donald Trump? To kneecap his attempts to lower tensions world-wide, stop efforts to reduce and reform the intel and defense communities, push a generally Globalist policy agenda, keep the American ‘empire game’ running so they can cash out, and keep non-Beltway Americans from having any say in our foreign policy.

“Hoffman is not a minor figure. He is heading up the cabal trying to co-opt Ratcliffe and Gabbard. Understand that [this group] essentially took over Agency operations during the so-called Global War on Terror [GWOT] after 9/11. Not only did these assholes lead America into the quicksand of the Middle East, they feathered their own nests and those of their buddies with hundreds of millions in ‘contracts’. . . they cooked up the Ukraine War . . . . Nobody associated with Cipher Brief should be anywhere near Ratcliffe or Gabbard, period. They should be blacklisted. They are the people who worked to take down Trump, and now they are trying to cover their tracks and sneak into the new administration.” Dan Hoffman, remember the name.

And thus, the chatter this week about former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike Rogers (a.k.a. Admiral Michael S. Rogers) floated as the next Director of the FBI. Oh, really? Not a joke (har har)? Mike Rogers was DNI throughout the first years (2016-17) of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” op to take down the then-new president Donald Trump using Hillary Clinton’s concocted “Steele Dossier,” known to be utter bullshit by all involved at the highest levels, but used anyway. Mike Rogers was in office when the FBI took down new National Security Advisor Mike Flynn in February, 2017, for talking to the Russian ambassador. (Since when are high US officials not allowed to speak with foreign diplomats?) By the way, Mike Rogers was endorsed for the FBI job this week by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, one of the chief managers of The RussiaGate op, which included “Crossfire Hurricane,” and the FBIs programmatic lying to the FISA court.

RussiaGate is starting to look like ancient history to many, but it is a giant slime trail of sedition and treason involving many people who are still very much alive, and some who are still in positions of power (Christopher Wray). It is going to be re-litigated in the new administration, but many other crimes just as sinister, carried out under color-of-law by the FBI and its parent, the Department of Justice (DOJ), have followed since then. For instance: the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol instigated by “confidential human resources” (FBI plants), and actual FBI agents — labeled “the insurrection” by blob publicists. It was engineered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, General Mark Milley, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, and others to prevent a public review of election irregularities in the joint session of Congress convened to certify the electoral vote. It succeeded splendidly, and was promptly converted into one of the worst national mind-fucks in US history. Debate over dubious vote-counts was squelched and objections were never allowed to be heard. From that sprung the “Big Lie” that anyone voicing skepticism over the 2020 election is a criminal — and thus, the two preposterous federal cases (plus the Fulton County, GA, case) cooked up against Mr. Trump three years later.

There is also the matter of the pipe bomb op at the DNC and RNC headquarters blocks away from the US Capitol the same hour of the same day, 1/6/21, when, for no good reason, Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris hid-out in the DNC building. (Why would she not have been attending the joint session of Congress in the Capitol at that hour when the signal achievement of her life to-date was to be grandly announced in front of all her colleagues?) I will tell you why: because the pipe bomb was supposed to be Plan-A for disrupting the electoral vote certification — to set off wild alarms about “terrorism” and scatter the lawmakers. It just happened that the riot at the Capitol (Plan-B) successfully stole the show and Nancy Pelosi got what she said she was “waiting for” — the means to permanently knock Donald Trump off the game-board.

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Americans too:

“..war-related corruption is linked not only with Ukraine, but also the supplier nation..”

• Ukrainians Have Stolen Up To Half Of US Aid – Ex-Polish Deputy Minister (RT)

Ukraine did not receive as much foreign aid as claimed by the administration of US President Joe Biden, and whatever help it did get was largely embezzled, a former Polish deputy minister has claimed. Up to a half of the funds that reached Kiev was stolen by Ukrainian officials, Piotr Kulpa has alleged. The political commentator previously held several posts in the Polish government, serving as deputy labor minister in the mid-2000s, and is currently a regular contributor on Ukrainian online shows. Kulpa is a vocal supporter of US President-elect Donald Trump, as evidenced by his remarks to Ukrainian journalist Lana Shevchuk on Thursday. “Everyone understands that war-related corruption is linked not only with Ukraine, but also the supplier nation,” he said. “Who would ever believe that the US burned through $2 trillion in Afghanistan? It’s delusional!”

US aid programs are a mechanism to “write off large sums of money that finance shady systems under the Democratic Party’s control,” he alleged. The incoming Trump administration could review government finances and discover the truth that “Ukraine got very little” compared to the amounts mentioned in public statements, Kulpa claimed. “But they will also find something else: that a huge portion of the funds was stolen in Ukraine. From 30% to 50%, regardless of the nature of the aid,” he added. If Kiev were to recover all the embezzled money for the Ukrainian budget, the country would have enough for a year, Kulpa said. He denounced senior Ukrainian officials, whose regular salaries and bonuses he believes are outrageously high.

“It’s a spit in the face of every Ukrainian,” the former minister asserted. “To every European and American taxpayer. This system is criminal from start to finish.” Trump and his allies have been highly critical of the amount of assistance that the Biden administration has sent to Kiev. The president-elect has argued that EU nations should assume the burden of propping up Ukraine, while the American government should focus on its own priorities. US concerns about graft in Kiev have been reflected in some government documents, such as a report that Pentagon Inspector General Robert Storch’s office released last week. It said corruption “continues to complicate Ukraine’s efforts to achieve its EU and NATO aspirations.”

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“..he has advocated for the creation of “autonomous zones” in the conflict area..”

• Trump Eyes Richard Grenell As Special Envoy For Ukraine (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump is considering Richard Grenell, a veteran of his previous administration, for the position of special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources. Grenell served as Washington’s ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence. Trump’s plans to appoint a high-ranking diplomat tasked with “find[ing] a resolution, to get to a peace settlement” were first reported by Fox News last week, with its source saying the person in the position will have “a lot of credibility.” Four Reuters sources confirmed that Trump is thinking about creating the position of special envoy, with Grenell considered as a potential candidate. However, there is no guarantee that the position will be created, though the president-elect is strongly leaning toward doing so, the article said.

Grenell, a seasoned diplomat and political operative, served as the US ambassador to Germany from 2018 to 2020, and as acting director of national intelligence for several months in 2020. Days after his appointment as envoy to Berlin, Grenell faced criticism for what many EU leaders saw as his crude disregard for diplomatic finesse and nonchalant attempts to influence the domestic political landscape, as he urged European capitals to cut business ties with Iran while openly voicing support for local right-wing parties. As for Grenell’s stance on the Ukraine conflict, he has advocated for the creation of “autonomous zones” in the conflict area and insisted that Ukraine should not be brought into NATO anytime soon, a stance shared by many on the Trump team.

Supporters of Grenell point to his long diplomatic career and deep knowledge of European affairs, according to Reuters. He served as special presidential envoy for Serbia-Kosovo peace negotiations from 2019 to 2021. In September 2020, he brokered an agreement between the country and its breakaway region, which paved the way for economic normalization and helped defuse tensions at the time. Trump has vowed to swiftly put an end to the Ukraine conflict. One of the reported plans includes Kiev suspending its NATO ambitions and agreeing to a freeze along the current front line. Russia has ruled out a freeze of the conflict, insisting that all of the goals of the military operation, including Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification, should be fulfilled.

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“..ground down” Kiev’s best military units..”

• Ukrainian Military Plans For 2025 ‘Derailed’ – Moscow (RT)

Russian forces involved in repelling a Ukrainian incursion in Kursk Region have “ground down” Kiev’s best military units and have effectively “derailed [its] entire campaign of 2025,” Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov has claimed. Kiev sent some of its best-armed and most experienced troops across the northern border in August, claiming that securing control of Russian territory in Kursk would be of great benefit. Ukrainian officials said the move would slow down Russian advancement elsewhere on the front line and give their country an important bargaining chip in eventual peace talks. Belousov has visited a command and control site operated by the ‘North’ group of forces, responsible for Russia’s response to the Ukrainian operation, the Defense Ministry reported on Friday. The ministry released footage in which the minister praised soldiers and officers for thwarting Kiev’s plans for next year after hearing a report by General Aleksandr Lapin, the commander of the ‘North’ battlegroup.

Belousov was also given a tour of an exhibition of NATO weapons captured during the fighting, including communications equipment, drones, small arms, and man-portable heavy arms. He was told that much of the hardware was inferior to its Russian equivalent. The minister personally awarded military decorations to several service members who had shown valor on the battlefield. Moscow has described the Ukrainian incursion as a major turning point in the armed conflict. No peace talks can happen before all of Kiev’s troops are pushed out of Kursk Region, senior Russian officials have said. Ukrainian forces have suffered more than 34,500 casualties and lost hundreds of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and other pieces of heavy weaponry in the operation, the Russian military has claimed.

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“He is dangerous to the health and well being of every American..”

• RFK Jr.’s Plans for Reshaping HHS Draw Strong Reactions (ET)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to “make America healthy again” through his platform as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The possibility of that happening has drawn praise from many Republican lawmakers and vaccine and food safety advocates. Multiple Democratic legislators and public health officials have criticized President-Elect Donald Trump’s nomination, calling Kennedy a “danger” to public health. Fighting chronic disease, improving children’s health, and addressing corporate influence on government agencies were vital parts of Kennedy’s campaign platform when he ran for president as a Democrat and then an independent. Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and backed Trump in August. He previously told The Epoch Times that it was a “heart-wrenching decision” and a necessary step toward achieving his mission of saving Americans from the chronic disease epidemic.

Under the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, Kennedy aims to curtail what he calls the chronic disease epidemic by addressing the so-called “corporate capture” of federal health agencies and removing toxic chemicals from the nation’s food supply, among other objectives. Trump’s naming Kennedy as his HHS secretary has drawn strong reactions. Donna Shalala, who was HHS secretary under former President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001, said Kennedy is not qualified for the position. “The nomination of RFK Jr. for HHS by President-elect Trump is shocking. … He is dangerous to the health and well being of every American,” Shalala wrote on X. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on X that Kennedy would be the person to “detox the place after the Fauci era,” in reference to former NIH director Dr. Anthony Fauci. Kennedy and Paul have both been outspoken critics of Fauci’s policies related to vaccines and the public health response to COVID-19.

[..] Kennedy has said that he will urge Trump on day one to declare a national emergency for chronic disease. Kennedy said he believes little will change until the influence of giant or private corporations on the FDA, the CDC, and the Department of Agriculture is addressed. At a roundtable organized by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in September, Kennedy said these agencies “advance the mercantile and commercial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that has transformed them and the food industry into sock puppets for the industry they’re supposed to regulate. Kennedy has vowed to dismiss the officials who lead those agencies and appoint replacements. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he wrote on X on Oct. 25, adding his support for raw milk, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, foods with healing properties, and natural remedies such as sunshine.

In September, Kennedy told The Epoch Times that he would revamp the NIH to focus on the causes of autism, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopment diseases instead of developing drugs and serving as an incubator for pharmaceutical products. He has also vowed to lead efforts to address the issue of chemicals in ultra-processed foods. He told Fox News he would “get processed food out of school lunch immediately” and said federal food assistance such as food stamps should not go toward junk food.

RFK

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“..work to create an economy that places growth at the forefront, especially through our coming world energy dominance..”

• Trump Names Billionaire Scott Bessent As Treasury Secretary (ZH)

After Trump appointed Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary and Kevin Warsh was clearly being groomed as Powell’s replacement at the Fed, it was just a matter of time before the most important appointment in the Trump admin was made. That happened late on Friday when president-elect Donald Trump nominated Scott Bessent to lead the Department of the Treasury, ending days of speculation after other names emerged as competitors to the reported favorite. “Scott is widely respected as one of the world’s foremost international investors and geopolitical and economic strategists. Scott’s story is that of the American Dream,” Trump said in a statement on the nomination. Bessent, 62, is a Wall Street veteran who once worked for George Soros, and founder of international macro investment company Key Square Group. He served as a key economic adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Others contenders for the role included Howard Lutnick, the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Partners. He co-chairs the Trump–Vance transition team, which is in charge of selecting administration candidates, vetting personnel, and crafting policy. Lutnick was ultimately chosen on Nov. 19 to lead the Department of Commerce. Kevin Warsh, 54, a former Morgan Stanley banker and former Federal Reserve Board governor, likewise entered the conversation. He became the leading candidate for treasury secretary on the betting website Polymarket after reports emerged that the president-elect was expanding his search to fill the position. In his statement on Bessent’s nomination, Trump said that economic policy under his administration would maintain the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status, fortify the United States’s position as the world’s strongest economy, and invigorate the private sector.

“As a lifelong champion of Main Street America and American industry, Scott will support my policies that will drive U.S. competitiveness, and stop unfair trade imbalances, work to create an economy that places growth at the forefront, especially through our coming world energy dominance,” Trump said. The president-elect also noted Bessent’s deep family roots in South Carolina, saying that he belongs to a historic French Huguenot Church, which members of his family founded in the 1680s, in the port city of Charleston. Like his predecessors, Bessent will now oversee a vast portfolio to employ the president’s economic agenda. As the Epoch Times notes, the two immediate issues Bessent will grapple with will be averting a default as the national debt ceiling limit will expire on Jan. 1, 2025, and extending the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act due to expire at the end of next year.

More importantly, Bessent will also be tasked with the delicate, if not conflicting, job of championing Trump’s trade proposals, including across-the-board tariffs, on one hand, while keeping the debt and deficit in check and preventing bond yields and the dollar from rising too high, too fast, as an even more rapid tightening in financial conditions will surely tip the US economy into recession.

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“We Are Faced with the Extraordinary Event that..”

• Washington Chose to Go to War with Russia (Paul Craig Roberts)

This interview from two days ago explains the dangerous situation into which the Biden Regime has placed life on earth by Washington’s conscious decision to go to war with Russia. The Russian government made it completely clear that a decision to fire missiles into Russia means the West is at war with Russia. Nevertheless, the insane West fired missiles into Russia. Putin responded with a demonstration of a new hypersonic missile that completely destroyed a Ukrainian armaments production facility. The missile travels at speed that the West has no capability to intercept and was designed to carry nuclear warheads. The message to the West is clear: If you persist in your war with Russia, you can expect widespread destruction. What will the insane West do? Will it come to its senses, or is it more important to widen the war in order to lock Trump in and prevent him from reaching a peaceful end to the conflict?

The Russian-hating Jew that Washington installed as its agent in Ukraine is demanding a “strong response” from the West. In other words, Zelensky is demanding Europe and the US put themselves at risk of destruction simply because Russia responded to a missile attack by the West from Ukrainian soil with a missile attack on a Ukrainian military facility. What sense does this make? None. It is unclear that the American people and those of Europe will survive their acceptance of the theft by the Democrats of the 2020 US presidential election. The consequence of the theft of the presidential election was an insane regime in Washington that has consistently step-by-step widened a local conflict into a war of the West with Russia. The British have not helped the situation by electing a prime minister as unhinged as Biden. In the West it seems that only Hungary’s Viktor Orban understands the seriousness of the situation.

I will briefly review the situation as Putin has stated it to the Russian people and to the dumbshits ruling in the West. Putin said the West’s missile attack on Russia drastically changed the nature of the conflict in Ukraine. The conflict has been transformed into a war of the West against Russia. This intentional decision by the West to go to war with Russia was taken despite Russia’s clear warning. Putin reminded everyone that the conflict in Ukraine was provoked by Washington which refused Russia’s peaceful approach of the Minsk Agreement and refused Russia’s request for a mutual security agreement. Putin made the point that Washington and NATO have deliberately escalated the conflict and are making it into global war. Putin pointed out that Washington has deliberately “destroyed the system on international security” and is “pushing the whole world toward a global conflict.”

Putin made the point that although the West has no defense against Russian missiles, Russia prefers diplomacy to war, but if the West persists in war, the West will suffer the consequences Certainly, Ukraine’s retention of Donbas, formerly a part of Russia herself that Soviet leaders attached to the Soviet Union’s Ukrainian province, is not worth a devastating, perhaps final, war. What madness is driving the West’s irresponsible attitude toward life? It appears to be the neoconservatives’ agenda of US and Israeli hegemony, egged on by profit and power for the US military/security complex and the unrealistic belief of Americans in their invincibility. The question before us is: Will the hubris of the West destroy the World?

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“They are ‘Trump proofing’ NATO, Ukraine and the deep state..”

• World ‘Very Close To Point Of No Return’ – Scott Ritter (RT)

Russia’s strike on a Ukrainian defense industrial facility using a new hypersonic ballistic missile system has shown the West that a policy of further escalation will lead to devastating consequences, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has said. America’s recklessness in dealing with Russia, as well as underestimating Moscow’s readiness to respond, has already brought the world dangerously close to an all-out nuclear war, the former US marine officer claimed on the ‘Judging Freedom’ YouTube show on Thursday. Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country’s military successfully hit a Ukrainian target with a new intermediate-range ballistic missile called the Oreshnik. The strike was a response to Kiev using US-made ATACMS and HIMARS systems, as well as British-made Storm Shadow missiles in strikes on internationally-recognized Russian territory earlier this week, he added.

The missile launch is a clear signal to the West that Moscow was not bluffing when it said the US and its allies would not get away with aiding Kiev in striking Russia with Western-made weapons, Ritter argued. “The missile that they used is a nuclear-capable system. It had a conventional warhead but could be used for nuclear purposes. Putin basically said that this missile can cover all of Europe and that in the future, he will mirror every action by Ukraine and the West; that any escalation will immediately be responded to,” Ritter told the host of Judging Freedom, Andrew Napolitano. The former UN weapons inspector also called the development a “qualitative advancement” that brought a completely new type of weapon to the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Everyone who believed that Russia was bluffing “has now been put on notice” that it is not, he added.

A continuation of the current Western policy towards the Ukraine conflict and Russia would be dangerous and irresponsible under such circumstances, Ritter believes. “We are very, very close to reaching the point of no return when it comes to a nuclear war,” he warned. He particularly slammed remarks by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) spokesman Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, who said on Thursday that Washington was ready to launch nuclear strikes but would only do so “on terms that are most acceptable to the US.” Such statements sound as if the US is ready for a “pre-emptive strike” against Russia, Ritter said, adding that taking out Russia’s nuclear capabilities first was “the only way an exchange works that you can walk away from.” Such rhetoric is bound to put Moscow on edge, according to the former UN weapons inspector.

The “lame duck” administration of President Joe Biden might have made a U-turn on allowing Kiev to use Western long-range weapons for strikes on undisputed Russian territory to make life difficult for their successors, opined Ritter, a former RT contributor. “They are ‘Trump proofing’ NATO, Ukraine and the deep state” in order to make the Ukraine conflict problem “so hard” that President-elect Donald Trump will not be able to resolve it as he intends, he said. Trump has vowed to swiftly end the Ukraine conflict upon assuming office. One possibility would be to force Ukraine to drop its NATO ambitions and agree to freeze the conflict, according to reports. Moscow has ruled out the latter, insisting that all the goals of its military operation – including Ukraine’s demilitarization and denazification – must be fulfilled.

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Much of it was financed by Gazprom. They won’t sell.. You gonna seize control?

• US Investor Eyes Nord Stream 2 Purchase, Citing Strategic Value for US (Sp.)

American investor Stephen P. Lynch has expressed an interest in buying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if it is put up for auction as part of the bankruptcy proceedings in Switzerland, The Wall Street Journal reports. “An American investor with a history of dealmaking in Russia has asked the U.S. government to allow him to bid on the sabotaged Nord Stream Pipeline 2 if it comes up for auction in a Swiss bankruptcy proceeding,” the report said. According to sources cited by the newspaper, Lynch expressed determination to buy the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline and applied to the US Treasury in February for a license to negotiate its construction with entities under US sanctions, noting that many investors might avoid the auction due to the difficult geopolitical situation. Lynch has advocated to US officials and lawmakers that owning the pipeline would give the United States a powerful tool in negotiating peace with Russia to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, while also supporting broader American strategic objectives.

“The bottom line is this: This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for American and European control over European energy supply for the rest of the fossil-fuel era,” the newspaper quotes Lynch as saying. The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, built to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Europe, were hit by explosions on September 26, 2022. Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have not ruled out deliberate sabotage. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has opened an investigation into it as an act of international terrorism. Russia has repeatedly requested information on other countries’ investigations into the explosions, but never received it, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

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“Every step of escalation comes from Russia. They are the ones who are escalating it..”

• White House Refuses to Recognize Responsibility for Escalation in Ukraine (Sp.)

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday declined to acknowledge that US President Joe Biden’s authorization of long-range strikes on Russia with ATACMS missiles had contributed to escalating the conflict, instead placing the blame on Russia. “Every step of escalation comes from Russia. They are the ones who are escalating it,” she alleged when asked whether Biden’s decision to authorize strikes using long-range ATACMS missiles deep into Russian territory was a factor in escalating the conflict in Ukraine. Jean-Pierre claimed that neither Ukraine nor the United States bears responsibility for the escalation. The launch of a Russian missile will not deter US policy towards Ukraine, the press secretary added. The United States will continue to provide new weapons packages to Ukraine and work to expedite their delivery, she said.

Washington has not seen any signs of Russia preparing to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the White House spokesperson admitted. Washington is not seeking war with Moscow but will continue to send weapons to Ukraine, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh added. Russia notified the US briefly before launching an intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine, the Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged. Earlier in the day, President Vladimir Putin said that Russia fired a non-nuclear hypersonic version of a ballistic missile, striking a Ukrainian arms manufacturer in the city of Dnepropetrovsk in response to Kiev’s use of US and UK longer-range weapons to strike Russian territory.

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“I am trying to make life multiplanetary to maximize the probable lifespan of consciousness..”

• Musk on His ‘To-Do List’ on Time Cover: We Need to Colonize Other Planets (Sp.)

US entrepreneur Elon Musk, commenting on his “to-do list” on the cover of Time magazine, has said that it is not really his checklist, but that some items are needed to achieve a global goal of human colonization of other planets. Earlier in the week, Time released the cover of its December issue featuring the entrepreneur and his alleged tasks or accomplishments, including two items that have not yet been completed, including reducing US government spending by $2 trillion and flying to Mars. “To be clear, I have not done any media interviews and this is not actually my checklist. I am trying to make life multiplanetary to maximize the probable lifespan of consciousness. Some of the items below are needed for that,” Musk said on X.

Last month, Musk said that if Trump won the US presidential election, the entrepreneur would reduce state budget spending by $2 trillion. The presidential election took place in the United States on November 5. Republican candidate Donald Trump, who served as the US president from 2017-2021, was declared the winner by all leading race callers and networks. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris conceded defeat in an address to supporters. The Electoral College will vote in accordance with the will of the voters on December 17, and the new Congress will approve the results of the vote on January 6. The presidential inauguration will take place on January 20.

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Even Merchan folds. Alvin Bragg: Bye!

• NY ‘Hush Money’ Judge Grants Trump Request To File For Dismissal (ZH)

Liberals will be tearing what’s left of their hair out even more this morning as Judge Juan Merchan just granted President-elect Trump’s request to file a motion to dismiss the charges in the Stormy Daniels’ ‘hush money’ case and removed the sentencing date for the president-elect from the schedule. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) is opposing that request. Instead, Bragg floated that Merchan could freeze the proceedings while Trump is in office, meaning the conviction would remain on the books but sentencing wouldn’t occur until 2029, at the earliest. Merchan ordered Trump to file his formal motion asking for dismissal by Dec. 2 and Bragg to respond by Dec. 9. Merchan also confirmed the stay in sentencing for Trump, which was requested by both Trump and Bragg attorneys.

The sentencing was scheduled for Nov. 26, but on Friday, Merchan said that date “is adjourned.” The judge will then decide how to proceed. In a letter to Merchan on Wednesday, Trump defense attorney and now-nominee for Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche demanded the case against President-elect Donald Trump be tossed. “On November 5, 2024, the Nation’s People issued a mandate that supersedes the political motivations of DANY’s ‘People,’” Blanche wrote. “This case must be immediately dismissed.” Blanche said that “immediate dismissal of this case is mandated by the federal Constitution, the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, and the interests of justice, in order to facilitate the orderly transition of Executive power following President Trump’s overwhelming victory in the 2024 Presidential Election.” Trump’s imminent return to the White House has already pumped the brakes on his other criminal prosecutions.

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Russia guards Iran.

• Israel Preparing to Attack Iranian Nuclear Facilities (Sp.)

The Israeli authorities reached a consensus at all levels of the security system and political echelon on the need to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli news portal Walla reported, citing a high-ranking source. Israel also allegedly has the technological capability to carry out such an attack, the report said on Thursday. Israel will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, the source noted. Economic sanctions against Tehran serve only as a deterrent and are not intended to eliminate Iran’s nuclear project, the source added.

Last week, the Axios news portal reported that Israel’s attack on Iran that took place in late October destroyed an active top secret nuclear weapons research facility of the Parchin military complex and affected the country’s capability to resume nuclear arms research. The destroyed facility reportedly was a part of Iran’s Amad nuclear weapons program, which Tehran is believed to have halted in 2003. In late October, the Israel Defense Forces said that they struck military targets in Iran in response to the October 1 attacks on the Jewish state. Media reported that the Israeli attack on Iran was limited to military assets and did not target nuclear or oil facilities.

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Britain joined in.

• European States Vow To Arrest Netanyahu (RT)

Several Western states have pledged to execute an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Hague-based court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu along with former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas commander Ibrahim al-Masri. West Jerusalem claims that al-Masri is already dead. The warrants are for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to the Gaza conflict. The decision has elicited mixed reactions in the West. Several nations emphasized their respect for the independence of the court, while others voiced support for Israel. The Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, and Norway all claimed they would meet their commitments and obligations under the Rome Statute and international law.

However, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto stressed that the ICC was “wrong” to put Netanyahu and Gallant on the same level as Hamas. Austria also said that it would obey the decision, but its foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, added that the warrant was “utterly incomprehensible.” Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp assured the country’s parliament that the authorities would act on the warrants and avoid non-essential contacts with those named. Geert Wilders, the head of the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, a member of the ruling coalition, condemned the decision, saying that the Israeli authorities are being confronted with arrest warrants instead of receiving international understanding and support.

Earlier this month, the Dutch capital saw rioting between Israeli soccer fans, who chanted anti-Palestinian slogans, and pro-Palestinian locals. In France, Foreign Ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine said that potentially acting on the warrants was a “complex legal issue” while admitting the importance of acting in line with ICC statutes. At the same time, Lemoine declined to say whether France would arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if they came to the country. Meanwhile, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban denounced the ICC’s decision, telling a state radio station that he would invite the Israeli leader to Hungary.

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ICC.

• US Senator Threatens Invasion of Netherlands (RT)

US Senator Tom Cotton has lashed out at the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its decision to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He invoked a US law which greenlights the use of military force against the Netherlands-based court. The Republican senator threatened the ICC by referring to the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, informally referred to as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, which permits the US president to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free Americans or allied individuals detained at the request of the court. The ICC on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the Gaza conflict. Chief prosecutor Karim Khan also announced similar charges against Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif.

Cotton condemned the ICC in a post on X on Thursday, branding it a “kangaroo court” and labeling its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, a “deranged fanatic.” “Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it,” Cotton warned. Passed by Congress in 2002, the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ was designed to shield US personnel from the court’s jurisdiction. It authorizes military action to rescue any American or allied citizen held by the court in The Hague. Civil rights groups argued the law aims to intimidate nations that support the ICC treaty. Washington, Israel’s main ally, has opposed the court’s decision, and a number of US politicians have called for the White House to impose sanctions on the ICC for issuing warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.

The EU, however, has taken a different stance. Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, and Norway are among the countries that have said they will comply with the ICC’s request. While Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, under the treaty that established the court, Netanyahu and Gallant could be detained in any of 124 countries that recognize the its authority. The ICC has accused Netanyahu and Gallant of using starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza, and deliberately depriving the enclave’s civilian population of essential supplies such as food, water, and medicine without any “obvious military necessity.” The charges are part of a broader ICC investigation that includes alleged crimes Hamas committed during its October 7 attacks on Israel.

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JK Rowling should be celebrated. She created an entire world of her own. How many people can say that?

• HBO Delivers Blow Against the Anti-Rowling, Anti-Free Speech Movement (Turley)

This week, HBO delivered the corporate version of the Expelliarmus or disarming curse for the long-standing cancel campaign targeting “Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling. We have been discussing this campaign against Rowling, a feminist who has opposed transgender policies that she views as inimical to the rights of women. The cancel campaign against Rowling has been extreme and unhinged from blacklisting her books to even barring the playing of Harry Potter games in pubs. Even authors who support Rowling’s free speech have been targeted. Nevertheless, HBO, which has also been targeted in the past, is now saying enough. Rowling’s work will continue to be featured and developed by the company.

HBO has enraged the anti-Rowling movement by announcing that it will not yield and will continue to work with the author: “J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.” It added that “her contribution has been invaluable.” HBO has a new upcoming Potter series set to premiere on HBO’s Max streaming platform in 2026. Both Harry Potter stars, Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, and Emma Watson, who played Hermine Granger, have joined the criticism of Rowling. However, the criticism itself is not the primary problem, even if they unfairly characterize Rowlings’ actual statements. That is a use of their own free speech rights.

However, the cancel campaigns are far more damaging for free speech, as I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right. The issue of cancel campaigns came up in my recent debate at Harvard Law School on free speech with Professor Randall Kennedy. Kennedy defended cancel campaigns as the exercise of free speech. There is no question that such campaigns involve the act of free speech as people rallying for or against viewpoints. However, the impact of such campaigns, particularly in higher education, is to limit the diversity of viewpoints and reinforce an orthodoxy on our campuses. It is not to express a view but to seek to silence an opposing view. It is the antithesis of free speech values in higher education.

It also has a damaging effect on an academic community. When students see faculty supporting the canceling of conservative, libertarian, or dissenting speakers, it is hardly an invitation to speak freely yourself in class. The same is true for publishers. We have discussed companies discontinuing publication of Rowling’s work and both editors and writers joining blacklisting campaigns against her and others. We have even seen the embracing of book burning. For the activists behind this massive cancel campaign, HBO’s announcement is nothing short of a corporate Cruciatus (torture) Curse. However, both the arts and free speech are the winners in Rowling’s continuing to produce and expand her legendary body of work.

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Motive: “..they believed Sergei Skripal was planning to return home to Russia, and that the GRU was planning an exfiltration operation..”

• British Operation KISS – “Kill Instantly Skripals” – Has Failed (Helmer)

This is the comic book version of what really happened, as revealed by the clumsiest judge in England – Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right). Even if all the evidence presented to Hughes and already endorsed by him is true – on the record of six and half years of British Government investigations and twenty-one days of hearings with concealed witness faces, censored documents, missing CCTV — there remains no direct evidence that the Russians attacked the Skripals by poisoning their front-door handle when they were inside their home, four hours before their collapse. Instead, Hughes and his lawyers have directed the police and other witnesses to stretch their circumstantial evidence and dictated their inferences of Russian guilt. In New York, the legal textbook difference between direct and circumstantial evidence is this.

To stretch the circumstantial evidence and inferences beyond the criminal standard of reasonable doubt, Hughes has prevented direct evidence from being presented, stopping the Skripals from testifying themselves. Their Home Office lawyer purportedly representing the Skripals in the hearings has said nothing at all; Hughes’s lawyers have manipulated witnesses with leading questions; alternative explanations for the circumstantial evidence have been blocked by Hughes from the hospital doctors and independent experts. The way in which this has been done is comic book jurisprudence. The judges of the former British empire aren’t laughing; this is how they say the means and opportunity of a capital crime must be prosecuted, then judged.

The CCTV and other evidence presented at the Hughes hearings shows the Russians knew they had been marked by MI6 from the minute they booked their flights and landed at Gatwick Airport; and they then encouraged the video recording which took place, often mugging in front of the CCTV cameras for that purpose. There is no evidence of their coming close enough to the Skripal house, or to Sergei and Yulia Skripal in person, in order to attack them. Ergo, the evidence of the murder act is missing; the evidence of the murder weapon is missing; the evidence of the murder attempt at the bench is missing. Means, opportunity, motive are all missing from the British prosecution of the Russians for the crime. Yulia Skripal has testified that the poison attack took place when she and her father were sprayed as they were eating lunch inside Zizzi’s Restaurant. They then walked outside, felt ill, sat down on a city bench, and collapsed. Yulia Skripal’s evidence indicates the attackers were British.

The refusal of the British chemical warfare laboratory to name the weapon by its organophosphate name, and reveal its molecular composition and mass conceals the origin of the weapon. In police, forensic or courtroom practice, this is the equivalent of concealing ballistic evidence determining whether a fatal bullet was fired from the gun in the alleged shooter’s hand. The evidence, collected by the police and Porton Down agents, then analysed by Porton Down, then announced publicly by then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson days before he told Prime Minister May’s meeting of Cabinet, is as likely to be of a British-made organophosphate nerve agent subsequently called Novichok as of a Russian-made nerve agent. What motive: why would the British attack the Skripals?

Their reason was that they believed Sergei Skripal was planning to return home to Russia, and that the GRU was planning an exfiltration operation on March 4, 2018. The Russians knew that MI6 would be suspicious, so they prepared decoys. These are the two men, Alexander Petrov (Alexander Mishkin) and Ruslan Boshirov (Anatoly Chepiga), now accused of the Novichok attack. The British planned to kill the Skripals but camouflage the operation, as they have done. Motive was pressing for the British if Sergei Skripal had returned to Russia, revealing himself in Moscow to be one of the first successful triple agents in modern espionage history. The Russian exfiltration failed; the British failed to execute the Skripals on the spot; for a few minutes from her hospital bed on March 8, Yulia Skripal revealed what had happened before she was put into an artificial coma, then silenced with a tracheostomy on March 21, and kept incommunicado ever since.

The British camouflage for their operation – Operation KISS, “Kill Instantly the Skripals” — relied on the door-handle as “ground zero” – the original source of the Novichok – and on Porton Down to replace the inconclusive or negative tests conducted by doctors treating the Skripals at Salisbury District Hospital. A corpse had to be found, dead enough not to be able to testify otherwise as Yulia Skripal had done. That turned out to be Dawn Sturgess, who died at her home on June 30, 2018, of cardiac arrest and brain hypoxia after consuming a combination of sleeping and anti-anxiety medications, cocaine, and fentanyl. The Novichok weapon, fabricated in a perfume atomiser by MI6 and Porton Down, was then placed on Sturgess’s kitchen table for the police to discover eleven days after her drug binge and collapse; and after medics and police had failed to find it through multiple and repeated searches

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“..trade with the US represents only 2.4 percent of Chinese GDP..”

• G20 Knocks Out G7 Agendas (Pepe Escobar)

The G20 summit in Rio earlier this week offered the quite intriguing spectacle of a deeply divided world, geopolitically and geoeconomically, trying to put on a brave ‘holiday in the sun’ face. There was plenty of fluff to amuse attentive audiences. French President Emmanuel Macron surrounded by a beefy security detail strolling on Copacabana beach near midnight; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen barefoot in the sand, stunned by the lapping waves; the White House lodger, US President Joe Biden – with his expiry date in less than two months – missing the G20 family pic because he was talking to a palm tree. Right before the summit, Biden posed on a soundstage in the rainforest, complete with two giant teleprompters, pledging to save the Amazon just as his handlers in Washington let leak the “authorization” for Ukraine to attack targets inside the Russian Federation with ATACMS; a qualified preamble for a possible WWIII.

With Rio providing the ultimately gorgeous set, at the very least, tempers at the renovated Museum of Modern Art, the G20 venue with the Sugarloaf in the background, were bound to mellow out. This even allowed for a short, tense handshake between Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a true leader of the Global South, and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, a US asset who hates Lula’s guts. The populist Brazilian head of state, whose political capital transcends all barriers, was, of course, an impeccable master of ceremonies, but the real star of the show was Chinese President Xi Jinping – fresh from his previous triumph, when he was for all practical purposes coronated King of Peru during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima – complete with the inauguration of the $1.3 billion port of Chancay, the new South American node of the Pacific Maritime Silk Road. As China is all about global connectivity corridors, Chancay-Shanghai became an instant new motto ringing all across the Global South.

Beijing’s prime role as an engine and cooperation propeller across Asia–Pacific also applies to most of the G20 members. China is the largest trading partner of the 13 APEC economies, and is responsible for 64.2 percent of Asia-Pacific’s economic growth. This prime role extrapolates to China’s BRICS colleagues among the G20, as well as brand-new BRICS partner-nations such as Indonesia and Turkiye. Compare that with the G7/NATOstan contingent of the G20, starting with the United States, whose main global offerings range from Forever Wars and color revolutions to weaponizing of news and culture, trade wars, a tsunami of sanctions, and confiscation/theft of assets. So, predictably, there was some serious underlying tension permeating the G20, especially when it came to the face-off between the G7 and the Russia-China strategic partnership. Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t even bother to attend, sending his uber-competent Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead.

As for Beijing, after 7 years of combined Trump-Biden trade and tech war, the Chinese economy continues to grow by 5.2 percent a year. Exports now account for only 16 percent of China’s GDP, so the economic powerhouse is far less vulnerable to foreign trade machinations. And the US share of that 16 percent is now only 15 percent; that is, trade with the US represents only 2.4 percent of Chinese GDP. Even under what can be described as NATOstan’s all-out tech sanctions, Chinese tech firms are growing at warp speed. As a result, all western tech companies are in deep trouble: massive retrenchment, factory downsizes, and shutdowns. Meanwhile, China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world has expanded to a record one trillion US dollars. That’s what horrified Western economists qualify as China on a “collision course” with some of the world’s biggest – yet dwindling – economies.

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Carvey

 

 

Volvo

 

 

Goat

 

 

Fright

 

 

Henson

 

 

Quarry

 

 

Street food

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle August 24 2024

Aug 242024
 
 August 24, 2024  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  50 Responses »


Salvador Dali Galatea of the Spheres 1952

 

• I Throw My Support Behind Donald Trump – RFK Jr (ZH)
• The 2024 DNC In 2 Words – ‘Not Trump’ (ZH)
• RFK Jr Addresses The Nation (ZH)
• Why Kamala Harris Won’t Sit For An Interview (Bridge)
• End of Hoaxes (Jim Kunstler)
• CIA Endorses Harris as Democrats Promise More War, Foreign Intervention (Sp.)
• US Running Out Of Ammo – Trump (RT)
• US Preparing To Lift Ban On Strikes Deep Inside Russia – Moscow (RT)
• India Is Not Neutral But Stands For Peace, Modi Tells Zelensky (RT)
• Crackdown on Ukraine’s Largest Church Is ‘Full-fledged Satanism’ – Medvedev (RT)
• Ukraine Sells Its Orthodox Heritage Out to West. But Wait, It’s Russian (Sp.)
• Confusion And Chaos At Factory That Built Two Doomed 737 MAX Planes (ZH)
• Tale of Two Pipelines… Europe Loses, China Gains (SCF)
• US House Oversight Asks TSA Why Tulsi Gabbard Is on Terror Watchlist (Sp.)
• JK Rowling Reportedly Sued by Olympic Boxer Over Gender Criticism (Turley)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1826765855008719103

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1826835677759013348
https://twitter.com/i/status/1826812669640462518

 

 

Vivek will be a force

 

 

RFK jr

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who needs a policy if you hate Donald Trump?

• I Throw My Support Behind Donald Trump – RFK Jr (ZH)

“Democrats have become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money wanting to abandon democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president. I left the party to run as an independent… The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for VP Harris based upon nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates. Only smoke and mirrors.””A Chicago circus that is based on NOTHING. Who needs a policy if you hate Donald Trump?” “How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?” Kennedy asked. “We know the answer: They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.

What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies.” Kennedy refuses to be a spoiler… “Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler… In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control.” “I am simply suspending it and not ending it. My name will remain on the ballot in most states. I encourage you to vote for me. In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election. After all, the polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates. In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name.”

[..] I throw my support behind Donald Trump.” Kennedy said that in a series of meetings with Trump and his team, he realized he shared more in common with the former president than he thought. He compared their potential partnership to President Lincoln’s famous “Team of Rivals,” which saw him stock his Cabinet with former foes. “In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and fiercely if need be on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.” “I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences.”

“But we are aligned with each other on other key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the US intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections.” “Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I’m convinced that it’s the best hope or ending the Ukraine War and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for finally protecting free speech.” “I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children above all things.” Most notably, RFK Jr. admitted in front of the nation that he attempted to contact VP Harris first and that she neither wanted to talk or meet with him is a strong message to Independent voters:

“Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris. Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me.” “Democrats want nothing to do with you, Republicans will at least give you a seat at the table.” RFK addressed details on the Russia-Ukraine war (via Kyle Becker): “We have pushed Russia closer to China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962. And the Neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all.” “Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles. And the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.” “This is a first class calamity for our country.” “Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic for this and other Neocon military adventures.”

“President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president.” “This alone would justify my support for his campaign.” “Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine War, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech, our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of our government or to defy the Neocons on their agenda of endless military adventurism.” “But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration.” “I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.”

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‘Kamala Harris, for the people.’

• The 2024 DNC In 2 Words – ‘Not Trump’ (ZH)

Objectively, if prediction sites can be trusted in any way (perhaps more so than biased polls), the last four days of speeches, musical performances, and delegate celebrations were a ‘failure’ of sorts for the Democratic Party as during the DNC, Kamala Harris odds of success in November dropped while Trump’s improved (though we note the incumbent VP remains a favorite)… Perhaps, ‘we the people’ realized that the goal of the whole week was for party lawmakers, community leaders, past presidents, and cultural figures to convince Americans that Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden… and has not been in The White House for the last almost-four-years… is the not the lowest-approval-rated VP in history… and is not in any way responsible, or tied to any of the policies that left the vast majority of Americans questioning the direction of the country just a week or two before the mainstream media anointed her ‘Mamala’

Most directed pointed attacks at former President Donald Trump, tying his candidacy and campaign to the controversial Project 2025, which Trump has disavowed, while illustrating differences between a potential second Trump term and a Harris White House. While light on specific domestic and foreign policy discussions, the convention highlighted the Democratic Party’s commitment to ensuring abortion access after the 2022 Dobbs decision overthrew Roe v. Wade. For four straight days, protesters rallied in the streets against the Biden/Harris administration’s support for Israel during the Israel–Hamas war, pushing for a Palestinian speaker at the Chicago convention. As Jacob Burg and Nathan Worcester detail below via The Epoch Times, here are the key takeaways from the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

After securing enough delegate support to become the party’s presidential nominee earlier this month, the convention served as a coronation ceremony for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. With a little more than 70 days remaining in the election, Harris is moving fast to define herself, her platform, and her vision for America. Speaking about her family and their impact on her life, she said it was those who loved and believed in her the most that “told us we could be anything and do anything.” In her acceptance speech, Harris described her parents meeting at a civil rights gathering and attorneys like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, who inspired her to become a lawyer. When Harris’ best friend revealed sexual abuse by a parent, Harris set out to be a prosecutor.

“And every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge, and I said five words, ‘Kamala Harris, for the people.’” She added, “And to be clear, my entire career. I’ve only had one client, the people.” “On behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks … I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America,” Harris said. In a coalition-building effort as her campaign inches closer to election day, Harris vowed to unite a divided country. “Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”

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Articles were updated on the fly last night as things happened. This is one of the older parts of the opening article.

• RFK Jr Addresses The Nation (ZH)

While Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann point out that RFK Jr. was never a serious candidate, he had a famous name (to those of us old enough to remember), a tinge of legitimacy, and a wealthy billionaire running mate to keep the train going. It wasn’t enough to reach office but it got his foot in the door after RFK Jr. was shunned by Democrat Party insiders in their initial effort to prop up husk of a president, Joe Biden. Now they are stuck with Biden’s insurance policy, Kamala Harris. It terrified the Dems to have RFK Jr. in the running, so they rigged the rules, banned him from state ballots, and vilified him as extreme. And to dampen his impact on the Harris-Walz ticket, after trying to deny him ballot access and remove RFK Jr. from the state ballots he made his way to, Democrats will now attempt to keep him on ballots to hurt Trump. Such hypocrites.

He’s an environmental attorney, about as Lefty Democrat as you can get! He was expected to capitulate, kiss the crown, and get in line with everyone else. Instead, he went rogue. He showed them by unexpectedly running as an Independent. In exchange for his potential endorsement, what can Trump promise? A cabinet post? Being named director of the FBI to clean up that mess? Or ironically, heading up the CIA? Maybe after six decades, we’ll find out exactly what was the role of the agency in assassinating his uncle and if it had any role in his own father’s assassination. He’s now rumored to be ready to endorse Trump and is expected to announce his campaign suspension in Phoenix, where Trump is scheduled to hold a rally nearby. Coincidence? Unlikely. If this happens, it will take much of the post-DNC momentum away from Harris-Walz and focus attention on the PR value of RFK Jr.’s endorsement.

Imagine the son of RFK and the nephew of JFK, endorsing a Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump no less. It will be a net positive gain for Trump, although not much and only for so long. But it could make all the difference in a race that’s expected to be tight in the all-important swing states—especially Pennsylvania. After spending millions to keep him off the ballot, the Democratic National Committee released a memo Friday dismissing the potential impact Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump will have on the presidential race. The DNC claimed, without evidence, that the only reason Kennedy was in the race was to be a spoiler candidate to help former President Trump, but derided him as “a near-negligible factor” with “no meaningful base of support.” The DNC memo purported, again without evidence, that Trump was “at a low point and acting out of desperation.”

“Embracing RFK Jr. now —when he has nothing to offer but months of disqualifying revelations—is not a decision a campaign makes when they’re acting from a position of strength.” The memo went on to accuse RFK Jr. as having an “unsavory and reckless past, ties to MAGA donors, and MAGA-lite positions on abortion bans and January 6th pardons,” and assert that “his support has dwindled to make him a near-negligible factor.” “The little support that remains is soft, split across ideologies, and disproportionately among lower propensity voters. With no meaningful base of support and sky-high negatives among Democrats, RFK Jr.’s threat to VP Harris was neutralized,” the DNC memo stated. The DNC memo argued Kennedy could actually hurt Trump because of his allegedly “controversial” positions on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Sept. 11 attacks and vaccines. Right now, in their post-DNC euphoria, Democrats believe that they have positioned Harris to win.

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It would end her campaign.

• Why Kamala Harris Won’t Sit For An Interview (Bridge)

The US media has once and for all proven that it is in the pocket of the Democratic Party. It continues to fawn over the greatly flawed Kamala Harris while the presidential candidate has steadfastly refused to do interviews or press conferences for weeks. Taking the lead in this media-backed coup d’état is Time magazine, whose latest issue features a powerful portrait of Kamala Harris on the cover bearing the glowing caption “Her Moment.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t ‘her moment’ for a little chat with the media, although it was certainly the perfect opportunity. In one of the only lines of criticism against Harris in the 3,000-word puff piece, Time writer Charlotte Alter admitted that “Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts.” Shockingly, Harris even refused a single comment to Time, despite offering gratuitous promotion of the vice president.

That speaks volumes about Harris, who refuses to speak to a publication that is absolutely committed to providing kid-glove treatment to the Democrats. Alter’s description of Harris provided little substance on the vice president’s track record and oceans of ink spewing vacuous allusions to the carnivalesque atmosphere that now accompanies Harris’ political rallies. Many have suggested that this is the only way she is able to fill stadiums and inject a feeling of enthusiasm. “The soundtrack suggested a Beyoncé concert,” Alter opened in the very first paragraph of her article titled ‘The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris’. “The light-up bracelets evoked the Eras Tour. And the exuberant crowd – more than 14,000 strong, lining up in the rain – resembled the early days of Barack Obama.” The name Taylor Swift, certainly no political scientist, popped up several paragraphs later: “More than 38,000 people registered on Vote.org in the 48 hours after she became the presumptive nominee, eclipsing the voter-registration surge encouraged by Taylor Swift last year.”

And if that wasn’t enough, Alter came up with this ridiculous allusion to Hollywood starlets in an effort to explain Harris’ inexplicable rise: “Mass enthusiasm for a woman is nothing new: Harris’s run comes just a year after the blockbuster summer of Barbie, Beyoncé, and Swift.” Finally, Time provided an absurd quote from Senator Cory Booker, who invoked Star Wars imagery to argue that Harris has “mastered the art of ‘arm twisting’ required to pass major legislation” for Democrats. “She has gone,” he said, “from being a Padawan to a Jedi master.” Too bad the force was not with Harris when it came to securing the southern border, or helping working class Americans survive some of the worst inflation the US has experienced in decades. Compare all of that mindless puffery to Donald Trump, who Time interviewed for a cover story in April that was an 83-minute read, while the nitpicking factchecking following the piece took over 20 minutes to digest.

Eric Cortellessa, the journalist who conducted the interview, asked Trump a dozen questions about the Trump prosecutions, five questions about the January 6 ‘insurrection’, four on battling the ‘deep state’, three on his “dictator for a day” joke, two about the possibility of right-wing violence if Trump loses the election, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment to serve a third term in office. It seems that the only reason Trump agrees to sit through these tortuous liberal inquisitions is to have the ability to say he is doing what Kamala Harris conspicuously refuses to do – talk to the media. Whether this strategy will work in his favor is highly debatable given the overwhelming support Harris receives regardless of what she does or doesn’t do. Yet even the Democrats must understand that the media are the gatekeepers to our aspiring politicians. Without the ability of journalists to sit down and grill officials on policy matters, the American people will remain in the dark.

Moreover, sitting in the media hot seat allows the audience to determine if a person has the mettle required for leadership. Many believe that Harris, who has demonstrated an inability to convey complex ideas – ‘word salads’, as they’ve been called – without the assistance of a teleprompter, is perfectly aware of her personal shortcomings, and that is why she is content to remain in the shadows while the media pumps her up into a political tour de force. This could also explain why the Democrats waited until the 11th hour to replace feebleminded Joe Biden with Harris on the presidential ticket – the less time the American people have to listen to Harris’ convoluted arguments (and grating cackle), the better. The rise of Harris from basement-level popularity ratings just four years ago to some sort of political genius proves the undeniable power of the corporate media complex to turn the greatest mediocrity into anyone they like.

“The way the US corporate media transformed Kamala Harris from a national embarrassment to a transformative pioneer overnight – without even pretending to care about anything that she thinks or believes – is a powerful testament to how potent the science of propaganda is,” journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X (formerly Twitter). [..] Trump and Harris are set to debate on ABC on September 10, an event that the former president, barring some unforeseen disaster, has essentially already won. The final result, however, will depend on whether the audience will side with the snake-oil media and ‘believe their lying ears’, or will they be able to think past their media mind controllers and make an honest judgement of Harris’ performance. The future of the United States hinges on that question.

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“..this year’s Democratic Convention, their Cluster-B personality disorder freak show..”

• End of Hoaxes (Jim Kunstler)

Get this: there is one thing, one lurking terror, behind every fake and desperate move the Democratic Party has made this dire election cycle: the fear that hundreds of high officials might have to pay for their crimes of recent years if they lose on November 5. That’s why they lie about everything, and work so hard to construct false narratives, and struggle to obliterate the memory of Joe Biden’s ruinous term in power. Of course, they can’t talk about it. It’s like the darkest secret in a wrecked human soul that has lost itself in mental illness, some abscess of shame and guilt sealed off in the mind’s attempt to protect itself — like the memory of an incest or an unsolved family murder — which explains the rich show of various derangements actually highlighted at this year’s Democratic Convention, their Cluster-B personality disorder freak show. It is an anguished, guilt-ridden collective mind leaking clues to its own disordered debasement.

So, the deed is done now. The odious “Joe Biden,” fake president, is dumped in the ditch of history, and a mighty operation is mounted to put over Veep Kamala Harris, who ignored “JB’s” incapacity to head the US government for four years, carrying out no duties meanwhile, hiding from the public, answering nothing, going nowhere, abetted by a treasonous news media bent on hiding her as she drank away the months in the old Naval Observatory. The conventions are over and the contest is on. Have you heard enough of their fake war-cry: “defending our democracy?” From a party that has tortured the law to jail and silence its critics and scrape its challengers off every ballot. The pretense is perfect. Their “democracy” is actually a colossal “spoils” system — to the victor goes the spoils! — a grotesque political machine funneling trillions of federal dollars to their client voter groups, and especially to the non-profit orgs and NGOs that form a sinister secondary bureaucracy accountable to nobody.

And all done with direct connivance of the federal intel blob at war with everyone outside this matrix of turpitude. And, by the way, the money is gone. Trillions. And nothing to show for it. This is what Mr. Trump opposes, and has been fighting against since 2016. No wonder it wants to stuff him in prison or kill him. It is a mighty enemy because it holds the levers of official power, especially the federal prosecutors and the state and county prosecutors put in place by the Democrats’ chief “influencer,” the George and Alex Soros NGO empire. And the big picture includes the monumental crime against our country — against all the countries of Western Civ, really — which was the Covid-19 operation that left millions disabled or dead from a phony, poisonous “vaccine.”

And now we hear — as I write early this Friday morning, hours before any official announcement — that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is about to suspend his campaign, kneecapped by the Democratic Party so busy “defending our democracy,” and perhaps throw his support to Donald Trump in order to defeat this mafia of the mentally ill. I hope he does that. And I hope he denounces the party of his ancestors in the most vividly opprobrious terms so that no one can misunderstand the gravity of what has been going on. I’d also look forward to Mr. Kennedy playing an important role in the second Trump government. Mr. Kennedy knows probably better than anyone in America exactly how the gigantic racketeering operation was constructed that grafted pharma onto the US public health agencies, the FDA, CDC, NIAID, and others.

This monster that has left so many Americans dead and injured, and wrecked the health of the nation’s young people especially, must be slayed. It must be disassembled and its pieces reconstructed into institutions that actually serve the public. This includes the hospital holding companies, the private equity pirates out to asset-strip medicine, the insurance-driven, overgrown doctors’ practices, and the mendacious medical boards, professional orgs, and journals that unjustly punished dissident doctors and nurses who tried to oppose the extralegal Covid-19 vaxx mandates. If it happens that Mr. Kennedy joins forces with Mr. Trump, it could be a momentous turn in an election so far marred by Democratic Party hoaxes, coups, and lawfare ops. Naturally, The New York Times played the story this morning in a tiny headline below-the-fold, saying nothing about the rumored stunning alliance between the Kennedy and Trump campaigns.

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Leon Panetta. Sweet Jesus.

Trump wants peace. Kamala wants whatever the Deep State wants.

• CIA Endorses Harris as Democrats Promise More War, Foreign Intervention (Sp.)

A former chief of the controversial intelligence agency voiced his support for the vice president at the Democratic National Convention Thursday. US Vice President Kamala Harris signaled she would continue her predecessor’s hawkish foreign policy in Gaza and Ukraine Thursday as an ex-CIA director publicly endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate. “As president I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies,” Harris declared during her acceptance speech, voicing strong support for Kiev’s US-backed proxy war against Russia. Former intelligence chief Leon Panetta also delivered a speech praising Harris during which the controversial figure claimed he was “proud” to have served in the US Army and CIA director. US military aggression throughout the Middle East during the so-called “War on Terror” is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 4.5 million people while the CIA has been implicated in numerous human rights violations.

“The Democrats really showed that this is a hawkish party and really neoconservatives are in charge of the party,” noted CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program. “I mean, they brought out Leon Panetta earlier tonight. He’s a former CIA director who was a key mastermind of the drone war and a key figure behind Russiagate and a key supporter of Hillary Clinton and chief of staff in the Bill Clinton White House.” “In her speech [Harris] was talking about how [former US President Donald] Trump supposedly coddled [foreign leaders] like Putin, and that’s totally false,” he continued. “Trump had a pretty hardline policy toward Russia. He pulled out of the INF Treaty. He ramped up weapons supplies to Ukraine. So that’s just like an extreme right-wing position that they’re adopting.”

“They’re celebrating this war in Ukraine [that] siphoned off billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a sinkhole just like Afghanistan, and a lot of those weapons have been stolen. And this party is cheerleading for that. So that’s where they are.” Corruption has long been recognized as endemic in Ukraine, which experts have noted is “the most corrupt nation in Europe.” Earlier this year, a massive corruption scandal was uncovered that saw almost $40 million in US aid stolen by officials in the country’s defense ministry. In June, it was revealed that Western military-grade weapons supplied to Ukraine have been sold on the black market, ending up in the hands of terrorists and European drug cartels. Various neoconservative figures such as Iraq War architect Bill Kristol have shifted allegiances to the Democratic Party in recent years as Republicans have become increasingly critical of foreign intervention under the banner of Trump’s “America First” ethos. Recent polling shows increasing numbers of Americans believe the US has spent too much money funding Ukraine’s quixotic proxy war on Russia.

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“You know why. We gave it all up to Ukraine and various other places. We gave them everything.”

• US Running Out Of Ammo – Trump (RT)

The US military is running out of ammunition as President Joe Biden’s administration has bled stockpiles dry to arm Ukraine and other nations, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has claimed. The GOP firebrand pledged to turn the tide and make a “historic investment in rebuilding” the American military, if elected. Speaking by phone to Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky last month, Trump reiterated his long-standing promise to swiftly end the conflict between Kiev and Moscow if elected in November. Back in June, the former US president also made it clear that he would stop donating tens of billions of dollars’ worth of handouts to Ukraine. Addressing his supporters, along with his vice presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance, in Asheboro, North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump lamented: “They released a report talking about all of the vulnerable areas… we’re weak here, we’re weak there.”

“That’s like saying: ‘We have no ammunition,’” he said. “You know why. We gave it all up to Ukraine and various other places. We gave them everything.” According to the former president, billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and ammunition has been donated free of charge. While it is not clear what report exactly Trump was referring to, experts on the congressional Commission on the National Defense Strategy released a 312-page assessment in late July, warning that the US military “lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.” According to the report, in a hypothetical future conflict with China, the latter would likely be aided, at least economically and possibly also militarily, by the likes of Russia, Iran, or North Korea. This would make the odds of a US victory increasingly slim, military experts predicted.

“Unclassified public wargames suggest that, in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g. anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days,” the document concluded. Experts on the commission attributed the current state of affairs to serious inadequacies in America’s defense industry that they said would require significant investment to rectify.

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“..Russia must therefore “act decisively, increasing our military-industrial potential, because only our army and navy will protect our country..”

• US Preparing To Lift Ban On Strikes Deep Inside Russia – Moscow (RT)

Claims by Washington that it has banned Ukraine from using US-supplied long-range weapons for strikes deep inside Russian territory cannot be trusted, Moscow’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, has said. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has resumed his calls for the country’s Western backers to allow long-range strikes on Russian territory during Kiev’s ongoing incursion into Kursk Region. The Pentagon stated last week that its stance remains unchanged, and that Ukraine is still banned from using US-supplied ATACMS missiles, which have a range of up to 300km (186 miles), for attacks deep inside Russia. Speaking to journalists on Friday, Antonov claimed that the US authorities “seem to be constantly teasing us by saying that today it is allegedly not allowed to use long-range systems to strike at Russian territory.” “But in reality, they are essentially preparing the ground to simply remove all existing restrictions, at a certain point,” the Russian envoy added.

Judging by Washington’s previous assistance to Kiev, including its training of pilots to fly F-16 jets, it is almost certain that Ukraine will “fight with US-made [long-range] weapons against us,” the ambassador said, as cited by TASS. “Where exactly will it happen? We cannot say or foretell,” he stressed. According to Antonov, the administration of US President Joe Biden is becoming increasingly unpredictable. “There is no guarantee that the whole world will not change tomorrow when you and I wake up. How the Americans will behave in this situation is very hard to tell,” he said. Russia must therefore “act decisively, increasing our military-industrial potential, because only our army and navy will protect our country,” the ambassador insisted.

Antonov also made a live appearance on Russia’s Channel One on Thursday, where he rejected claims by the US authorities that they had been unaware of the Ukrainian plans to attack Kursk Region.“I am firmly convinced that in Kiev they do nothing without the go-ahead from their masters… They wouldn’t have dared to move a finger… in our direction without consent from Washington,” he said. Commenting on the fate of Ukrainian troops who have entered Russian territory, the ambassador insisted that “no one has any doubts that they will be destroyed, not pushed back, but destroyed.” Russia’s Defense Ministry estimated on Thursday that Ukraine has lost more than 4,700 troops and several hundred units of military equipment, including 68 tanks and 53 armored personnel carriers, since the start of the incursion in Kursk Region on August 6.

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“New Delhi stopped short of signing the joint communiqué emerging from the Swiss-hosted event, as the event didn’t include Russia..”

• India Is Not Neutral But Stands For Peace, Modi Tells Zelensky (RT)

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Kiev on Friday, marking the first visit by an Indian premier to the country. During a meeting with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, Modi stated that India has not been “neutral or an indifferent bystander” as the Russia-Ukraine conflict persists, and has always been “on the side of peace.” The joint communique issued by the two sides after the leaders’ meeting noted that Modi reiterated its “principled position and focus on peaceful resolution through dialogue and diplomacy.” According to Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, who briefed the media in Kiev, Modi and Zelensky had a detailed and open discussion and New Delhi promised it was ready to make proactive contributions towards efforts for peace. The joint statement noted that India had attended the ‘peace summit’ hosted by Switzerland in June this year as part of this commitment.

However, New Delhi stopped short of signing the joint communiqué emerging from the Swiss-hosted event, as the event didn’t include Russia. On Friday, Jaishankar noted that Modi called for “practical engagement” between all stakeholders” to work out “innovative solutions” that could lead to peace. “President Zelensky knows we mean well by Ukraine, we want this conflict to come to an end. If there is anything we can do in any way in sort of upfront, behind or supporting anybody, we are willing to do whatever we can. This conflict must end, we believe,” Jaishankar said. Modi’s visit was the first-ever visit by an Indian premier to Ukraine since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Upon his arrival in Kiev, he was greeted by members of the Indian diaspora there. Later, he and Zelensky honored the memory of children who died in the conflict in a visit to the Martyrologist Exposition tribute, and paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in the ‘Oasis of Peace’ park in the capital.

Modi’s Ukraine visit comes nearly six weeks after he traveled to Russia for a bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since the beginning of the conflict, India has abstained from condemning Moscow over the conflict or from downgrading trade and diplomatic ties with it, despite pressure from the West. New Delhi has maintained robust ties with Russia despite the West’s scrutiny of the relationship. Bilateral trade crossed $60 billion last year, largely bolstered by Indian imports of discounted Russian coal and oil. The premier’s visit to Moscow in July came under intense scrutiny from Washington and other global capitals. Biden administration officials were uncomfortable with the optics of the visit, which coincided with a crucial NATO summit that featured Zelensky. Ukraine’s leader himself termed Modi’s meeting with Putin a “huge disappointment” and a “blow” to peace efforts, prompting New Delhi to summon the Ukrainian envoy over the remark.

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A 10 year old regime vs a 1000 year old religion.

• Crackdown on Ukraine’s Largest Church Is ‘Full-fledged Satanism’ – Medvedev (RT)

Kiev’s Western backers are supporting its “satanic” crackdown on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev claimed on Friday. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that prohibits “Russia-linked” religious organizations. The self-governed UOC, which has historical and spiritual ties with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), is understood to be the primary target of the legislation. Medvedev, who serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, said he holds Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky accountable for the crackdown. Pyotr Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor, caused a major religious schism in Ukraine when he orchestrated the creation of the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine in late 2018 as part of his failed reelection campaign, Medvedev pointed out.

Under Zelensky, however, “the destruction of the Orthodox faith in Ukraine and the persecution of Christians for their faith started,” culminating in the new law, the former Russian leader argued. Zelensky “has no religious identity” and the crackdown is “full-fledged satanism” supported by people in his government, Medvedev alleged. “The civilized West” backed both Poroshenko’s ploy and the ongoing persecution “to inflict maximum damage to Russia and its citizens,” he added. Ukraine “will be destroyed, like Sodom and Gomorrah were, and the demons will inevitably fall,” Medvedev said, referring to the Old Testament story of two cities obliterated by divine intervention for their wickedness. He added a biblical quote describing the Jewish conquest of Canaan and the punishment that Joshua exacted on the leaders of conquered tribes.

Viktor Elensky, the head of the Ukrainian service for ethnic policy and freedom of conscience, claimed on Thursday that the new law “has the legitimate goal of stopping the subversive activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.” Kiev has no intention of forcing clerics and the faithful to join any other denomination, but if the UOC wishes to exist, it has to abide by the new rules and disavow any ties with Moscow, the official added. Clement, the UOC bishop who serves as the spokesman for the church, wondered if schismatic leaders would have to overcome bureaucratic barriers to prove their loyalty. Among other things, the law demands public affirmation by Ukrainian clerics that they have cut all ties with the Russian church. The UOC will “keep living as a true church recognized by the majority of practicing Ukrainian believers and the world’s independent Orthodox churches,” he told the media. Any attempt to ban it will merely tarnish the reputation of the people pushing for it, Clement argued.

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The church is rich. Ukraine is corrupt.

• Ukraine Sells Its Orthodox Heritage Out to West. But Wait, It’s Russian (Sp.)

The Kiev regime tends to view its common religious heritage with Russia as exclusively Ukrainian and sells to the West invaluable Christian artifacts, religion expert Roman Lunkin told Sputnik. Historical and cultural artifacts, including Orthodox icons, are taken out of Ukraine and transferred to Western countries where some of them are sold, according to Roman Lunkin, head of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society of the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). “It is not rational and not at all ethical to treat the heritage this way,” Lunkin told Sputnik. Last year, the rarest 6th and 7th-century Byzantine icons were secretly transferred from the territory of Ukraine to France under the pretext of safety issues, and then displayed at the Louvre Museum in Paris. All in all,16 invaluable artifacts were brought to France through Poland and Germany.

Still, the crux of the matter is that these Christian Orthodox icons were gifted to the head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem by the Sinai Monastery of St. Catherine in the mid-19th century, according to Bishop Porfiry, a Russian theologian and byzantinologist. In 1940, the Soviet government transferred the icons to the Kiev Museum of Western and Oriental Art (now known as the Khanenko Museum of Art), where they were kept after the Great Patriotic War. It is unclear whether and when the icons will be returned. On June 26, 2023, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) reported on Kiev’s plans to remove Christian valuables and relics from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, and send them to Europe under the pretext of “saving them from Russian missile attacks”, despite the fact Russian forces are not targeting civilian facilities, let alone Orthodox holy places.

Still, there is more to the Kiev regime’s readiness to squander its heritage, and the West’s eagerness to keep Ukraine’s Christian valuables under the auspices of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH), chaired and overseen by US billionaires. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova last year linked the alleged plot, described by the SVR, as well as the secret removal of Byzantine icons from the Kiev museum, to the old Western colonial trend: “Western countries have stolen national valuables throughout the world, and their museums can be described as the ‘safekeepers’ of valuables stolen from their colonies, as you can see in the Ancient Egypt exhibit in the Louvre or the British Museum… The West has always plundered its colonies. Ukraine is no exception. There is no doubt that no one was going to return the valuables they had taken away from other countries,” Zakharova stressed.

The problem is that the Kiev regime considers this historical and cultural heritage “exclusively Ukrainian”, regardless of its true origin, Lunkin underscored. “Icons that are kept in the [Kiev-Pechersk] Lavra and other museums, including cultural monuments in Ukraine, are the common property of Russian culture and the culture of Kievan Rus, which was created from the moment of the Baptism of Russia more than 1000 years ago. Accordingly, this is the common and inseparable heritage of our countries because it was created at a time when Rus existed, before Ukrainians and Ukraine did. Therefore, it is wrong to call these icons exclusively Ukrainian,” the pundit said. The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra was founded in 1051, during the rule of the Russian Duke Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned in Rostov, Novgorod, and later in Kiev. The Lavra has always been considered part of the common historical and religious heritage of Russians and Ukrainians.

However, in the aftermath of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which illegitimately brought to power Western-backed nationalist authorities, the Kiev regime doubled down on creating a separate “Ukrainian history” to “appropriate” the Kievan Rus history. In May 2017, then President Petro Poroshenko claimed that Duke Yaroslav and his daughter, Anna, who became Queen of France in 1051 upon marrying King Henry I, were “Ukrainians”, regardless of the fact that this East Slavic ethnic group had not been formed at that time. Volodymyr Zelensky has gone even further, according to Lunkin. In addition to creating a myth about a separate Ukrainian history and a separate Ukrainian Orthodoxy, “the Ukrainian authorities and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which they created [in 2018], are trying to separate the saints, who were born on the territory of modern Russia,” the pundit pointed out.

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When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the entire new company became focused on cost saving. Accountants for engineers.

• Confusion And Chaos At Factory That Built Two Doomed 737 MAX Planes (ZH)

New documents released Thursday reveal that ‘confusion and chaos’ reigned in the company’s Renton factory that built two 737 MAX planes that later crashed, killing 346 people in 2018 and 2019, the Seattle Times reports. According to a prominent whistleblower Ed Pierson, production issues from back then still affect MAX planes flying today. The new documents reveal multiple electrical issues that were discovered as Boeing assembled the Ethiopian Airlines jet that crashed in 2019. The Times notes that in 2018, the FAA found that employees in another Boeing facility in Everett, WA – where electrical components for integration – had been pushed to move to fast, and produced defective pieces. Communications between Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines show the plane that later crashed experienced an in-flight safety incident months before the fatal accident. Boeing told the airline that the December 2018 incident was likely the result of an electrical error, the records show.

The whistleblower, Pierson, said the records and the earlier safety incident bolster his view that the deadly crash of the Ethiopian jet may have been initiated by an electrical problem. That problem traces back to production issues with electrical wire bundles that Pierson has highlighted. Pierson, who worked at Boeing for more than a decade and served as a senior manager coordinating fixes for assembly problems on the 737 program, released the new documents through an advocacy group he formed after the crashes, the Foundation for Aviation Safety – and said that Boeing withheld the documents from regulatory investigators looking into the two deadly crashes. Following the deadly incidents, he repeatedly alleged that manufacturing defects played a role. The FAA, NTSB, and international regulators are in disagreement over the cause.

In both crashes, an error with then-new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System or MCAS — caused the plane to nosedive. Boeing recently pleaded guilty to misleading safety regulators about MCAS and how much training pilots would need to fly safely. In the case of the Ethiopian crash, the NTSB and its French counterpart concluded that it wasn’t an electrical error but a bird strike damaging a sensor that likely triggered the MCAS software. The U.S. agency disputed a report from Ethiopian authorities that said the sensor was triggered by “production quality defects.” Pierson sent the newly disclosed records to the NTSB, the FAA and the Department of Justice in July, he said. Meanwhile, the FAA and NTSB are playing hot potato over the new documents, and have suggested that questions should be directed to Ethiopian authorities.

Boeing, in a statement, said that it “fully cooperated and provided relevant information to the investigation” regarding the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crash, adding “We defer to the investigative agencies for further information.” The new documents also reveal that from communications between Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines, in December 2018, the airline’s 737 MAX experienced an “uncommanded roll”—a situation where the plane rolls unexpectedly, potentially disorienting the pilot and risking loss of control. This incident occurred just weeks after Ethiopian Airlines took delivery of the aircraft, and only a few months before it tragically crashed, killing all onboard.

Boeing’s communication with the airline at the time indicated that the uncommanded roll was likely caused by an electrical fault. The company advised Ethiopian Airlines to inspect the plane’s wiring for issues, raising questions about the broader electrical integrity of the 737 MAX fleet. Further complicating matters, the Foundation for Aviation Safety released a copy of Boeing’s Shipside Action Tracker from the 2018 production of the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines plane. This internal database, used by Boeing to document and resolve issues during aircraft assembly, revealed a series of misinstalled and mislabeled electrical components. The records also pointed to significant miscommunication among Boeing employees regarding the work performed on the aircraft.

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Power of Siberia.

• Tale of Two Pipelines… Europe Loses, China Gains (SCF)

The Power of Siberia pipelines transporting natural gas from Russia to China were back in the news this week, as was the ill-fated Nord Stream pipeline, the Russian-European counterpart. First, it was announced the Power of Siberia 2 was on track for completion this year. When operational, the new pipeline will augment existing trans-Siberian delivery to China, bringing the total gas supply from Russia to 100 billion cubic meters per year. That awesome gas supply figure is significant. For not too long it was projected that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines would have a combined capacity to deliver 100 bcm to Europe. Alas, that energy project was sabotaged in September 2022 when the gas pipes were blown up on the Baltic seabed.

Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and other writers have provided the most compelling account of the sabotage. It was carried out by American military and CIA operatives with the approval of President Joe Biden. See our weekly editorial published on September 30, 2022, days after the incident in which we outlined strong evidence inculpating Washington. It was an audacious act of international state terrorism carried out by the Americans to destroy the decades-old energy trade between Russia and Europe. In particular, Germany’s postwar economic prowess was powered by relatively cheap and abundant Russian hydrocarbons. Now, the United States has stepped in as a supplier of much more expensive Liquefied Natural Gas to Europe. Incredibly, no serious investigation has been carried out by European states to find the culprit.

Russia, which was the main owner of the multi-billion euro project, has offered to cooperate with European states to investigate the blast, but all of Moscow’s offers have been rebuffed. You could hardly make this criminal farce up. For years, the Americans enviously griped about Russia being the strategic energy supplier to Europe. With the escalation of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine in February 2022, the Americans and their European NATO lackeys had a convenient pretext for blowing up the Nord Stream pipes. The net result is that Germany’s economy – once the powerhouse of the European Union – has been dragged to its knees from the loss of its vital energy input from Russia. Germany is teetering on recession and its famed export-led industries are no longer competitive.

Yet despite this blatant crime, the political establishments in Germany and other countries directly affected by the Nord Stream vandalism – Sweden and Denmark – remain pathetically beholden to Washington. Two years after a huge transgression against Europe and Russia by the obvious culprit, the European authorities have dissembled and procrastinated. Last week, Germany issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diver whom it claims was involved in the undersea attack. This is a variant of previous claims in the American media that the Nord Stream sabotage was carried out by Ukrainian operatives. This narrative is absurd and an obvious distraction from the real story. There is no way that such a difficult operation could have been achieved by a bunch of amateurs. The Nord Stream sabotage required state-level expertise. The Americans also had an imperative motive – to force their way into the lucrative European energy market.

All of this is a tragicomedy. Russia’s fair and advantageous services have been perversely spurned by Europeans under the malign spell of American overseers. The European governments and media can’t even muster the courage or independence to conduct a proper investigation into the wanton destruction of their economies. However, Russia has not been deterred or undermined. Far from it, unlike Germany and other recession-hit European states, Russia is growing at a robust rate. A large part of the benefit stems from the Russian energy trade now being directed to Asia. China is gaining where Europe lost. The expanding Power of Siberia projects represent the loss of Nord Stream.

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We know why this is happening. Insulting Kamala is not tolerated.

• US House Oversight Asks TSA Why Tulsi Gabbard Is on Terror Watchlist (Sp.)

US House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent a letter on Friday to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief David Pekoske regarding whistleblower allegations that the agency placed former US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard on a terror watchlist. A whistleblower from the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS) disclosed to Congress that the TSA allegedly targeted Gabbard under its Quiet Skies program, which is designed to mitigate threats posed by higher risk passengers, the letter said. The TSA added Gabbard to the Quiet Skies program on July 23, 2024 – one day after she criticized the Biden administration in an interview, the letter said. A whistleblower also disclosed that his wife was targeted with “special mission coverage” because she attended former US President Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech in Washington, but was “nowhere near” the US Capitol that day, the letter said.

Moreover, the whistleblower claims that the TSA classified the protected disclosures as a leak and initiated a retaliatory investigation. “It is alarming that TSA is wasting its resources to surveil an air marshal’s wife and Ms. Gabbard – a high-profile, American public figure – when the threat of terrorist attacks on the United States is high,” the letter said. The letter requests information from TSA on actions taken with respect to employees linked to the disclosures regarding Gabbard and the air marshal’s wife, as well as all information related to Gabbard and the Quiet Skies program. The letter also requests a briefing for committee staff no later than August 30.

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“..My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport.”

• JK Rowling Reportedly Sued by Olympic Boxer Over Gender Criticism (Turley)

We have previously discussed the cancel campaigns targeting JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling was not only the greatest selling author of all time but a wildly popular writer until she publicly opposed certain transgender policies as inimical to the advances in feminism. Now, she is the target of a lawsuit by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the gold-medal winning athlete who had previously failed a gender test to confirm that she is a female fighter. We previously discussed that global debate, but Khelif is now accusing Rowling out of many thousands of critics of being a cyberbully. X owner Elon Musk has also been named in the lawsuit. Rowling has been the target of a global campaign due to her rejection of transgender laws and policies. Many on the left have unleashed book bans and burnings. I have been critical of that campaign.

Even third parties who have supported Rowling’s right to free speech have been targeted in cancel campaigns. She held her ground after Scotland passed a draconian law, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. The new crime under the law covers “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.” Rowling previously posted various responses to the controversy on her X account on August 7, including: “For the record, bombarding me with pictures of athletic women to ‘teach’ me that women don’t all look like Barbie is like spamming me with pics of differently-shaped potatoes to prove rocks are edible. I can still see the difference and you look frankly bonkers.”

She later also posted: “Commentators pretending critics of the IOC’s reliance on documents rather than sex testing think Khelif is trans are straw-manning. I don’t claim Khelif is trans. My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport.” She further wrote on X how she was concerned over both boxers challenged over their gender at the Olympics: “What will it take to end this insanity? A female boxer left with life-altering injuries? A female boxer killed?” France has eviscerated free speech protections over the last few decades with speech criminalization laws. There is some question whether the French laws would apply to tweets made outside of the country. These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar.

At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism. In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.” The question of the extraterritorial application of such laws is the question. Conversely, the United Kingdom and the European Union are asserting the right to regulate speech in any country, including political speech in American presidential elections. Rowling has every right to be heard on the Olympic boxing controversy. This debate raises core issues that touch on a wide array of political speech. Khelif has the ability to refute these claims through the exercise of her own free speech. As in the past battles fought by Rowley, her effort to advocate for women’s rights is also a major test over free speech in Europe.

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Legend

 

 

 

 

Tantrum

 

 

Rottweiler

 

 

Caprice No. 24 Paganini

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle April 3 2024

Apr 032024
 
 April 3, 2024  Posted by at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  38 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Field with Irises near Arles 1888

 

• Moscow Condemns Assassination Of Iranian Generals (RT)
• Israel Attack on Iranian Consulate And Netanyahu’s Pending Defeat in Gaza (Sp.)
• Shia Army: How Iran Formed A Ring Of Enemies Around Israel (Juma)
• Trump Posts $175 Million, Preventing Seizure of Buildings in Civil Fraud Case (ET)
• It’s This Election That’s The Referendum On Democracy (Tucker Carlson)
• Just 8% of Ukrainians Ready To Take Up Arms Against Russia (RT)
• Kiev Has Lost More Than 80,000 Troops Since January – Russian MoD (RT)
• West to Use Hypothetical Russia-Ukraine Talks to Supply Arms to Zelensky (Sp.)
• Ukraine’s Defeat May Help EU Establishment (RT)
• Stop Covering Up Kiev Role In Bucha Events – Zakharova (TASS)
• Why ISIS Is Now Targeting Geopolitical Enemies Of The West (Ma Xiaolin)
• Biden a ‘Threat To Democracy’ – RFK Jr (RT)
• Biden Sinks To New Lows Over Moscow Bombing And RussiaGate Fake News (Jay)
• Judge Denies Hunter Biden Motions to Dismiss Tax Charges (Turley)
• “#arrestme”: JK Rowling Dares Scotland to Enforce Anti-Free Speech Law (Turley)

 

 


Trump post on Truth Social April 1

 

 

Lies about Trump

 

 

 

 

J6
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774734557998162397

 

 

 

 

Netflix
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775194637377974655

 

 

 

 

Targeting consulates and embassies is a road to nowhere good.

• Moscow Condemns Assassination Of Iranian Generals (RT)

Russia has rebuked Israel after an airstrike that demolished the Iranian consulate in Damascus on Monday evening. The attack reportedly killed several Iranian diplomats as well as seven officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals – Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi. Tehran has vowed to avenge their deaths. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday that Moscow views as unacceptable any attack on diplomatic missions, which are protected under the Vienna conventions on diplomatic and consular relations. It noted that bombing of the building, located in a residential area, posed a high risk to Syrian civilians.

“We consider it necessary for all responsible members of the international community to declare their positions clearly and give their legal assessments of this action,” the statement said. It warned that Israel could trigger a major regional escalation with its attacks in Syria and other nations in the region. Israel has not commented on the strike, which its usual practice with such operations. Israeli officials have previously acknowledged targeting Iran-linked forces in Syria, with dozens of such raids attributed to the Jewish state over the years. The White House did not immediately comment on the incident. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that Washington was “looking into it”. A national security spokesperson quoted by Axios said the US “had no involvement in the strike and we did not know about it ahead of time.” A senior US official told the news outlet that Washington “has communicated this directly to Iran”.

Israel notified its key ally minutes before the strike took place, when its fighter jets were already in the air, the Axios article said. The Israelis allegedly said they were going to kill General Zahedi, but did not offer details of their operation, such as his location at the Iranian consulate. General Zahedi was a senior commander with the Quds Force, the IRGC unit responsible for operations on foreign soil, while General Rahimi was his deputy. Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in a US drone strike during a visit to Iraq in January 2020, was the commander of the same division.

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“So I think Iran’s response would be two-fold in a manner that is not satisfying the Israeli aim of widening the war..”

• Israel Attack on Iranian Consulate And Netanyahu’s Pending Defeat in Gaza (Sp.)

Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria suggests that it is trying to “widen” the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip by drawing Iran into it, said Foad Izadi, an associate professor at the University of Tehran’s Department of American Studies. “They have been trying to start a military confrontation between the United States and Iran for many years. And they think that they have an opportunity to have this done fighting Iran using American soldiers,” he told Sputnik, apparently suggesting that the US would be quick to leap to Israel’s defense if the latter were threatened by Tehran. Izadi also remarked that Israel displayed a blatant disregard for international law by attacking a diplomatic compound, which is a violation of the Vienna Convention. “That is what Israelis are trying to do. Netanyahu realizes that he has lost the war in Gaza. He has managed to kill more than 30,000, mostly women and children, without achieving any goals except killing these people and ruining their homes,” Izadi said.

“They say that they want to destroy Hamas, but that’s not a goal they can achieve. Obviously, they would have done that if they could. That’s why criminal acts and genocide in Gaza continue. And Netanyahu realizes that sooner or later this war needs to end. And that would be the end of his prime ministership. And so he’s trying to prolong the war, he’s trying to widen the war,” Izadi added. Noting that Iran’s attempt to seek justice via the UN Security Council may be unsuccessful due to the likelihood of the US vetoing a resolution critical of Israel, Izadi suggested that Tehran may opt to “cause pain for the Israelis so that these types of actions are not repeated.” “Because Iranian officials realize that if there is no pain in engaging in this type of activity, then they will continue,” he elaborated. “So I think Iran’s response would be two-fold in a manner that is not satisfying the Israeli aim of widening the war. I think that’s what Iranian leaders will do.”

WCK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775063630494720093

Gaza

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Did they form it or was it already there?

• Shia Army: How Iran Formed A Ring Of Enemies Around Israel (Juma)

On Monday, the Israeli Air Force struck a building near the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital. As a result of the attack, the consulate building was destroyed and the commanders of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) unit, Generals Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, were killed. President Ebrahim Raisi has already warned that “this unfair crime won’t go unanswered.” “Zionists must know that they will never achieve their sinister goals with such inhumane actions and, day by day, the resistance front and the disgust and hatred of free nations against their illegitimate nature are being strengthened, and this cowardly crime will also not go unanswered,” he said. What the answer will be is still unknown. However, in recent years, Tehran has managed to become a full-fledged superpower in the region, with support in many countries in the Middle East.

The escalation of the conflict in Gaza, which started with the Hamas-led invasion of Israel last October (“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”) and the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) subsequent military operation that claimed tens of thousands of lives, gave rise to much speculation about the weakness and short-sightedness of the Israeli leadership and the exceptional military training of Israel’s opponents. And it’s not just Hamas that we’re talking about, but Iran. Iran was immediately accused of being involved in the Hamas attack. The WSJ reported that Iran had trained the Palestinians and instructed them on how to break through the Israeli border. Moreover, it was said that Tehran had green-lighted the attack. The detailed coordination of the operation allegedly took place during a meeting between senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and two other Iran-backed militant groups in Beirut shortly before October 7. Officers of the IRGC also attended the meeting.

Later, the IRGC stated that the Hamas attack had been planned as revenge for the 2020 murder of the head of the Quds Force (part of the IRGC), General Qassem Soleimani. However, rumors about Iran’s direct involvement in the anti-Israeli operation haven’t been verified. On November 3, 2023, the secretary general of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, publicly stated that Iran had not been involved in operation Al-Aqsa Flood. “The decision behind this operation was 100% Palestinian, and its implementation was 100% Palestinian. [It was launched] in order to draw the attention of the whole world to this problem. Its planners hid it from everyone, even from the movements of the Axis of Resistance,“ he said. “Absolute secrecy is what ensured the brilliant success of the operation through the element of astonishing surprise. The Islamic Republic of Iran publicly supports the resistance movements but it does not exercise any guardianship over them [or] over their leaders.”

Ritter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774948467191767045

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“..the judge and attorney general had access to his finances because of the monitorship requirement, saw a figure close to $464 million cash, and decided that was what they were going to make him pay..”

• Trump Posts $175 Million, Preventing Seizure of Buildings in Civil Fraud Case (ET)

Former President Donald Trump has posted $175 million in his New York civil fraud case, meeting the 10-day deadline given on March 25 and staying execution of judgment in the case. The payment prevents any seizure of President Trump’s assets as his appeal of the case is heard. “As promised, President Trump has posted bond. He looks forward to vindicating his rights on appeal and overturning this unjust verdict,” the president’s attorney Alina Habba said in a statement. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the 45th president in 2022, accusing him of inflating his net worth and defrauding insurers and banks, and therefore the public, in Trump Organization annual statements of financial condition. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg and comptroller Jeffrey McConney, and several Trump Organization holding companies were named codefendants in the case presided over by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron in a three-month bench trial.

The judge ultimately ordered $363 million disgorgement with 9 percent backdated interest, totaling $464 million, with the lion’s share to be paid by President Trump; as well as prohibiting the defendants from holding director positions in any business or legal entity in New York for a period of time, and a minimum three-year monitorship of Trump Organization after which there may be additional penalties. The posting of the judgment amount was not required in order for President Trump to appeal the case, but had been a requirement to stay enforcement of the judgment in the meantime. “I’ll fight this all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary,” President Trump told Fox News days before the deadline. “They can’t take away your property before you’ve had a chance to appeal the decision of a Trump-hating, incompetent judge who has been overturned more than any judge in the state.”

Days before President Trump posted bond, he said on social media that he had nearly $500 million in cash but intended to use much of it on his presidential campaign. He accused his political opponents of trying to make him spend that cash fund on legal battles rather than on his campaign for president. State law would have required President Trump to post the full judgment amount within 30 days in order to stay the execution of judgment, but the appellate court lowered the $454 million requirement to $175 million on the last day of the deadline. It gave him a 10-day window to post the new amount, and did not comment on the underlying reasons for the change. President Trump said the appellate division’s ruling was further evidence that the original bond requirement was unreasonable.

“This is a confrontation between a Judge and those that rule above him – A very bad situation in which to place New York State and the Rule of Law!” President Trump stated of the appellate decision. “This is the 5th time in this case that he has been overturned, a record. His credibility, and that of Letitia James, has been shattered.” Justice Engoron, who presided over the bench trial and issued the massive disgorgement figure. The attorney general had asked for $250 million in disgorgement before trial, and changed that number to $370 million near the end of the trial. President Trump claimed in a press conference that the judge and attorney general had access to his finances because of the monitorship requirement, saw a figure close to $464 million cash, and decided that was what they were going to make him pay. He told reporters he did have the cash necessary to stay judgment, but wanted to use it to campaign and not satisfy who he described as “crooked” officials.

Putting all his cash into an escrow account where neither he nor the state could touch it for the duration of the appeal was one option to stay judgment. A bond was another, and would not have required President Trump to move his cash reserves, but would have required him to have higher amounts of cash to serve as collateral—$577 million, by his attorneys’ estimates, after negotiations with 30-plus surety companies fell through. For weeks, defense attorneys argued in the appellate division that securing a $464 million bond was “impossible.” Surety companies just don’t issue bonds that big, they argued. A second problem was that for them to consider doing so they would have needed 120 percent in cash as collateral plus a high premium or two. This came out to be far more cash than Trump Organization had, as a real estate company.

Watters

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X thread. “If Joe Biden gets reelected, democracy is a freaking joke..”

• It’s This Election That’s The Referendum On Democracy (Tucker Carlson)

Lex Fridman: You said some degree the election was rigged. Was it stolen?
Tucker Carlson: It was a hundred percent stolen. Are you joking?
Lex Fridman: It was rigged to that large of a degree?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. They completely change the way people vote right before the election on the basis of COVID, which had nothing to do with-
Lex Fridman: So in that way it was rigged, meaning manipulated.

Tucker Carlson: One hundred percent. Then you censor the information people are allowed to get, anyone who complains about COVID… Which is like, by the way, it might’ve hurt Trump. But I mean it’s like whatever. I mean you could play it many different ways. You can’t have censorship in a democracy by definition. Here’s how it works. The people rule. They vote for representatives to carry their agenda to the capitol city and get it enacted. That’s how they’re in charge. And then every few years they get to reassess the performance of those people in an election. In order to do that, they need access, unfettered access to information. And no one, particularly not people who are already in power, is allowed to tell them what information they can have.

They have to have all information that they want, whether the people in charge want it or don’t want it or think it’s true or think it’s false, it doesn’t matter. And the second you don’t have that, you don’t have a democracy. It’s not a free election, period. And that’s very clear in other countries, I guess. But it’s not clear here. But I would say it’s this election that… It took me a while to come to this, but it’s this election that’s the referendum on democracy. Biden is senile. He’s literally senile. He can’t talk, he can’t walk. The whole world knows that, leave our borders. Everybody in the world knows it. A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud, period. Who would vote for a senile man? He literally can’t talk. And nobody I’ve ever met thinks he’s running the US government because he’s not. And so I think the world is looking on at this coming election and saying… And a lot of the world hates Trump. Okay, it’s not an endorsement of Trump, but it’s just true. If Joe Biden gets reelected, democracy is a freaking joke. That’s just true.

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“The Institute “has been trying to avoid surveys directly related to the military action” because mobilization is a “sensitive issue” of state policy..”

• Just 8% of Ukrainians Ready To Take Up Arms Against Russia (RT)

Most Ukrainians expect their country to win in the armed conflict with Russia, but just 8% are willing to fight to further their cause, the head of a leading Kiev-based polling agency has claimed, in an interview published on Tuesday. The Ukrainian leadership has said that it is seeking to boost the military’s ranks by up to 500,000. Additional troops are required to relieve forces on the frontline, some of which have not been properly rotated in years, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has claimed. Vladimir Paniotto of the International Institute of Sociology discussed how the Ukrainian people’s worldview is reflected in research conducted by his organization with local news outlet Ukrainskaya Pravda.

They tend to “wish for conflicting things,” he mused, such as capitalist liberalization alongside robust social support by the state, or democracy as well as the “strong arm” of the government. The conundrum is present in what Ukrainians are willing to do to defeat Russia – an outcome that they overwhelmingly believe will end the ongoing hostilities. ”Certainly, many people are willing to act, to send donations or work as volunteers,” Paniotto said. “But facing a direct risk to life and taking part in military action – that is much harder… We estimate that the share of those willing to take arms is roughly 8% across all categories.” The figure may be overestimated, since the pollster takes the responses at face value without conducting follow-up studies to confirm the respondents’ true intentions. The Institute “has been trying to avoid surveys directly related to the military action” because mobilization is a “sensitive issue” of state policy, he explained.

The Ukrainian parliament is considering a major reform of the military system, which would facilitate the draft, including by imposing serious penalties for evasion. Fighting-age Ukrainian men residing in foreign nations, for example, would not be able to replace their expired passports without the consent of a conscription officer after the bill goes into force, MP Fyodor Venislavsky told the media last week. The lawmaker is a member of the parliamentary Committee for National Security, Defense and Intelligence. The Russian military said on Tuesday that Ukrainian frontline losses since January have surpassed 80,000.

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No wonder there are few volunteers.

• Kiev Has Lost More Than 80,000 Troops Since January – Russian MoD (RT)

Ukrainian forces have lost more than 80,000 troops since the beginning of the year, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday, adding that the Russian military is continuing to reduce “the enemy’s combat potential.” More than 14,000 units of military hardware have also been destroyed by Russian forces since January, including 1,200 tanks and other armored combat vehicles. During the same period, Moscow has liberated some 403 square kilometers of Russia’s new territories, Shoigu said. Despite Kiev’s lack of success on the battlefield, the Ukrainian leadership “is still trying to convince its Western sponsors of its ability to resist the Russian Army,” he said. To do so, Kiev has resorted to terrorism and long-range strikes on Russian territories, targeting the civilian population, the minister added.

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Not the first time..

• West to Use Hypothetical Russia-Ukraine Talks to Supply Arms to Zelensky (Sp.)

The West will use hypothetical negotiations between Moscow and Kiev to supply weapons to Ukraine and to regroup its forces, Konstantin Gavrilov, the head of the Russian delegation at the talks in Vienna on military security and arms control, told Sputnik. “Even if we imagine the hypothetical possibility of resuming negotiations, it is clear that the [Kiev] regime’s curators will use them to give the Ukrainian armed forces time to rest, pump them up with weapons, and complete a regrouping of troops,” Gavrilov said in an interview dedicated to the 75th anniversary of NATO marked on April 4. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C. on April 4, 1949.

A repeat of a scenario that emerged after the March 2022 talks in Istanbul when the Ukrainian armed forces received time to rest is unacceptable for Russia, Gavrilov added. Gavrilov also said that the West will use hypothetical negotiations between Moscow and Kiev to supply weapons to Ukraine and to help Kiev regroup its forces. “We have been through this before after the Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022, and the repetition of such a scenario is unacceptable to us. Therefore, at the moment, the future of the Ukrainian conflict is being decided on the battlefield, where our troops hold the initiative along the entire front line,” Gavrilov said in an interview dedicated to the 75th anniversary of NATO marked on April 4.

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“If Ukraine’s position weakens, there may be a ‘rallying behind the flag effect’ more favorable to the forces in place..”

• Ukraine’s Defeat May Help EU Establishment (RT)

With polls showing ‘nationalist’ parties surging in popularity ahead of the upcoming European Parliament election, Kiev’s worsening situation could prove useful to the bloc’s powers that be, according to a new book by French investigative journalist Charles Sapin. Most of the EU has been outspoken in supporting the Ukrainian government in the conflict with Russia, sending an estimated €77 billion ($83 billion) worth of weapons, equipment, ammunition and even cash to Kiev. Sapin’s analysis, however, implies that bad news from the battlefield could bolster the European People’s Party (EPP) and the second-largest group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) in upcoming elections. “If Ukraine’s position weakens, there may be a ‘rallying behind the flag effect’ more favorable to the forces in place,” he was quoted as saying by Politico EU on Monday.

Sapin is a reporter for the weekly Le Point who spent six years researching what he calls the “nationalist” parties that form the Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc in the European parliament – such as Hungary’s Fidesz, Portugal’s Chega, Spain’s Vox, France’s National Rally, Brothers of Italy and the Sweden Democrats. The final result was the book called ‘Les Moissons de la Colere’ (The Harvests of Wrath), presented as a deep dive into “nationalist Europe.” One major weakness of the parties in the ID grouping, according to Sapin, is that they have different opinions on the Ukraine conflict. Nationalists’ numbers might be rising but they are “isolated” in Brussels because of their particularism, he contends. Their victories in the upcoming election would move the needle to the right, but to the benefit of the EPP, currently the majority group. This may help explain why French President Emmanuel Macron brought up Ukraine at a recent brainstorming session about the upcoming elections.

Amid the strategy discussions the French leader suddenly voiced a concern that Ukraine “could fall very quickly,” according to sources that spoke with Politico. He then set up a ‘New Europeans’ coalition, an alliance of liberal parties from France, Denmark, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – long the sole dissenter when it came to aiding Kiev – doubled down on calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine and a negotiated peace. According to Sapin, parties like Orban’s have gained power thanks to semantic tricks and ideological acrobatics, converting “old bourgeois” voters by talking about immigration, identity and the environment and abandoning calls for leaving the EU. His book includes insights from both the closest political advisers to Orban, from Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen – and from their political enemies.

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“Bucha” has become a curious narrative.

• Stop Covering Up Kiev Role In Bucha Events – Zakharova (TASS)

Russia is calling upon international organizations to stop covering up for the Kiev regime and its role in perpetrating the events almost two years ago in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, and instead to push for a thorough investigation, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a comment ahead of the second anniversary of what she called the staged incident in Bucha. “Once again, we demand that international organizations stop covering up for the Kiev regime and instead work toward conducting a thoroughgoing investigation that will, at long last, disclose the names of those killed, the time and cause of their deaths <…> as well as of those responsible for that terrible crime committed by the Kiev regime,” Zakharova said.

Meanwhile, numerous previous calls by Russia for international organizations, including agencies of the United Nations, to conduct a serious investigation of precisely what transpired in Bucha two years ago have to date remained unanswered, the Russian diplomat added. “Multiple Russian calls on international organizations, including appeals to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, to investigate every detail of what happened <…> in Bucha or [reveal] other information remain unanswered,” Zakharova lamented. “It shows that the organizers of that deadly operation have something to conceal,” she said. According to Zakharova, this year, Ukrainian officials will be pursuing the goal of preventing the international community from focusing too much on the dire situation in Ukraine and along the line of engagement.

Russian Investigative Committee Chairman Alexander Bastrykin said in April 2022 that a criminal investigation had been launched under Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code (“Public Dissemination of False Information about the Use of the Russian Armed Forces”) following a Ukrainian false flag operation in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev. He noted that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry had provided video footage purportedly taken in Bucha to Western media outlets, describing it as proof of mass killings of civilians, in a bid to discredit the Russian Armed Forces. However, statements made by the mayor of Bucha on March 31, 2022, combined with other reports, have substantiated the fact that the Russian Army pulled out of the town on March 30. Moreover, a video filmed by Ukrainians that surfaced on social media immediately after the withdrawal of Russian troops made no mention at all of the alleged killing of civilians in the town.

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X thread by Arnaud Bertrand.

• Why ISIS Is Now Targeting Geopolitical Enemies Of The West (Ma Xiaolin)

[..] a top Chinese international relations scholar (Ma Xiaolin, director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at Zhejiang International Studies University) shares his view on why ISIS is now targeting geopolitical enemies of the West. I translated his article in full (original in Chinese here: https://tidenews.com.cn/news.html?id=2754250) below:

“On March 26th, a commuter vehicle for the Dasu Hydropower Project in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan, was attacked by terrorists, resulting in the deaths of five Chinese personnel and one Pakistani staff member. This was the second such suicide bombing attack on the project in three years, with “Islamic State Khorasan Province” (ISKP) being a major suspect. Prior to this, on March 22nd, a serious terrorist attack occurred near Moscow, killing 143 people and injuring nearly 200, with ISKP claiming responsibility. On January 3rd, a series of suicide bombings in Kerman, Iran, killed nearly a hundred people, with ISKP also claiming responsibility. Within three months, Iran, Russia, and China became targets of terrorist attacks, indicating that the Islamic State, which had long considered the US and Europe as enemies, is changing its attack direction, increasingly targeting countries considered adversaries by the US and Europe.

This represents a new trend of turning enemies into friends and shifting disaster eastward, along with submitting a declaration of intent to traditional foes. Following the Moscow attack, Russian security agencies arrested eight suspects, confirming them to be Tajikistan nationals hired for the attack. This atypical “Islamic State” terrorist attack, which involved fleeing instead of a suicide mission, was immediately claimed by ISKP, which also released on-site video evidence. Before the end of 2017, the Islamic State was essentially defeated as a territorial entity, suffering a fatal blow and being forced to disband and go underground, with its focus shifting from West Asia to Central Asia. The Khorasan branch, active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, became the main force, taking up the banner of terrorism and frequently acting, gradually adjusting its survival rules and strategic direction.

Over the years, there have been signs that the Islamic State’s targets for revenge have clearly shifted to Eastern countries, no longer viewing the US and Europe as primary enemies, and completely deviating from its original goals of ending US global dominance and “liberating Palestine”. In the past six months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has caused heavy casualties. The Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” has pressured Israel in various ways, with China and Russia also actively promoting a ceasefire. However, the Islamic State has launched attacks on Iran, Russia, and even China, leading some to speculate that it may have aligned with the United States or even come under control of Israel’s Mossad.

Despite the US indirectly or directly warning Iran and Russia of Islamic State attacks, suspicions remain. The defeat of the Islamic State in the Middle East was a collective achievement of the international anti-terrorism alliance, credited to both the US-led 62-nation coalition’s continuous airstrikes and the close cooperation of the “Shia Crescent” led by Russia and Iran, especially in ground combat and siege warfare. However, the continuous attacks by Islamic State remnants on Iran and Russia, ignoring the reality of “Israel killing people with American knives,” indicate their use of complex geopolitical conflicts to adjust policies and directions, seeking survival by allying with former enemies.

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“President Biden is the first candidate in history – the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”

• Biden a ‘Threat To Democracy’ – RFK Jr (RT)

President Joe Biden could be a bigger danger to US democracy than former president and presumptive 2024 election rival Donald Trump, another presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has said. Biden is the first president in US history to mobilize federal agencies to silence his political opponents, the politician stated. Speaking on CNN on Monday, Kennedy Jr pointed to his being blocked on various social media platforms during Biden’s term in office and branded this as an effort to “censor political speech” that violated the First Amendment of America’s constitution. He also attributed the ‘censorship’ to pressure from the White House. Pressed by CNN’s Erin Burnett on who he believes poses a bigger threat to democracy, Kennedy stated that he still views Biden as a bigger danger, even though Trump played a role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

“The question was, who is a worse threat to democracy? And what I would say is … I’m not going to answer that question. But I can argue that President Biden is, because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important,” the candidate told presenter Erin Burnett. “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history – the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.” The politician’s Instagram page was suspended in 2021 over what its parent company, Meta, described as “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.” The account was reinstated in 2022, shortly after Kennedy announced his election campaign. In December, the Supreme Court barred him from joining a challenge to a case dealing with the Biden administration’s communication with social media platforms over posts the government considered disinformation. The politician also had a similar case pending in a lower court.

Last year, Kennedy testified before the House Judiciary’s subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, where he spoke as part of a House Republicans’ inquiry into alleged social media censorship against conservatives. The politician also made freedom of speech a focus of his presidential campaign. Kennedy, 70, is the son of former US Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the nephew of former US President John F Kennedy, each of whom was assassinated during the 1960s. He has gained notoriety recently for being a prominent critic of vaccines, in addition to calling for an end to “proxy wars” conducted by the US – but some of his critics have dismissed many of his positions as being conspiratorial in nature. The former Democratic Party candidate is now campaigning as an independent ahead of the November vote.

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774977436561670316
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775338106398372288

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“The crafted fake news narrative of everything starting from the day of the Russian invasion will no longer wash once Russian forces overthrow the Zelensky government and the West will be humiliated beyond its wildest nightmares..”

• Biden Sinks To New Lows Over Moscow Bombing And RussiaGate Fake News (Jay)

Are we all preparing for the inevitable? Trump returning to the White House? It would seem that certainly the Biden administration is doing just that given recent events. Moscow’s terror attack has taken centre stage of world news in recent days yet not one western journalist seems able to call out the ISIS warning from the U.S. for what it was: sham. And not only the warning was disingenuous but the sheer bad taste vitriol of Washington which was on a level only matched by the suspicious outright and swift rejection that Kiev had no part in the attack. Bad taste seems to be the hallmark of the Biden administration with a failed foreign policy which trails in second place. If Americans didn’t know before that the U.S. could not control two proxy wars on two separate fronts, now they know. As the aid parcels which drop onto Palestinians – sometimes even killing them – makes a statement in itself, it’s interesting to see how Biden is always looking in the past in almost everything he does.

Even RussiaGate has been dragged out of its dank grave and had new life breathed into by Biden’s press people who are now preparing the American public for a Biden failure in December. The biggest fear for Biden is the “hack and leak” attack which pushed many democrats over a line with Hillary Clinton when her emails revealed what an utterly morose political figure she is. Who could forget that “there are terrorists there [in Syria] but they’re on our side” comment when talking about the early days of the Syrian crisis which started in 2011? For Biden, there must be many troves for the Russians to leak at the given moment, with corruption in Ukraine being at the top of the list. But one salient question might be, does Putin even need to worry about “election interference”? This comical expression, coined by the Americans and slung at Moscow is done in such a fashion as to trick the humble observer that it was a dirty Russian invention despite the Americans practically inventing the practice and using it to their own means for the last 70 years in Latin America.

The reality is that Putin doesn’t need to interfere. He’s on a win-win ticket as, if Biden is re-elected the then senile U.S. president will be defeated in Ukraine and the American people will not only see all of the corruption stories emerge from that country but also the link between the Obama administration’s election meddling in 2014 to overthrow a Russian-aligned leader and today’s war. The crafted fake news narrative of everything starting from the day of the Russian invasion will no longer wash once Russian forces overthrow the Zelensky government and the West will be humiliated beyond its wildest nightmares into signing whatever is handed to them. This, in part, explains how the NATO press machine – and most European governments – are going into overdrive on the subject of the need to beef up Europe’s military capabilities. This is entirely a ruse to act as a distraction for when Kiev falls and western elites are ready with their soundbites. The Russians are coming. We told you so.

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“As the Court stated at the hearing, Defendant filed his motion without any evidence..”

• Judge Denies Hunter Biden Motions to Dismiss Tax Charges (Turley)

Despite hours of argument by the counsel for Hunter Biden, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi denied his eight motions to dismiss tax charges with a stringing rebuke that the defense omits one thing from its argument: actual evidence. Hunter Biden has been arguing that he is the victim of selective prosecution despite a documented history of receiving special treatment as the son of the President. However, he has proven a key witness against himself in swatting down defenses raised by his counsel and publishing self-incriminating facts in his book. The filings also did not address the fact that 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. It only fell apart when a judge decided to ask a couple of cursory questions of the prosecutor, who admitted that he had never seen an agreement this generous for a defendant.

Special Counsel David Weiss noted in his filing that they filed new charges only after Hunter’s legal counsel refused to change the agreement and insisted that it remained fully enforceable. One only has to look at the series of superseding indictments against Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to see how Hunter continues to receive special treatment. Rather than the four original counts, Menendez now faces 18 counts with his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, and alleged co-conspirators Wael Hana and Fred Daibes. What is most notable is not the proliferation of counts but the lack of comparative charges in the pending case against Hunter Biden. Some of us have long raised concerns over the striking similarity in the alleged conduct in both cases, but the absence of similar charges against the president’s son. Judge Scarsi made fast work of the Biden filings as entirely insufficient to dismiss these charges. Abby Lowell and the defense team seem to be doubling down on the same claims despite the uniform rejection by courts.

The judge noted: “As the Court stated at the hearing, Defendant filed his motion without any evidence. The motion is remarkable in that it fails to include a single declaration, exhibit, or request for judicial notice. Instead, Defendant cites portions of various Internet news sources, social media posts, and legal blogs. These citations, however, are not evidence.” Lowell disagreed with the court’s order and pledged “to vigorously pursue Mr. Biden’s challenges to the abnormal way the Special Counsel handled this investigation and charged the case.” In truth, the “abnormal” treatment of Hunter was giving him advance notice of attempts to interview him and searches of Biden property. It was allowing the statute of limitations to run despite having an agreement on the table to keep potential felonies alive. It was trying to secure a plea agreement that even the prosecutor admitted in court was like nothing he had ever seen in his career.

The court even makes reference to Schrödinger’s cat, a paradox suggested by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 that a cat in a thought experiment could be viewed simultaneously both alive and dead: “The Court understands that its decision rests on an interpretation of the agreement neither party advocated—that the Diversion Agreement is a binding contract but performance of its terms is not yet required. The Court, therefore, invites the parties to stipulate to further pretrial motion practice to the extent there are additional disputes that arise from the Court’s Schrödinger’s cat-esque construction of Defendant’s immunity under the Diversion Agreement.”

Bobulinski

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“April Fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”

• “#arrestme”: JK Rowling Dares Scotland to Enforce Anti-Free Speech Law (Turley)

We have previously discussed the growing anti-free speech movement in Scotland with the expanding criminalization of political and religious speech. The new Scottish law is a perfect nightmare for free speech, expanding the potential of a jail sentence for merely insulting language. In response, author JK Rowling has taken a stand and dared the Scottish police to come and arrest her for criticizing transgender status. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 illustrates how these laws create a slippery slope of speech criminalization as more and more speech is banned. We previously discussed the law when it was first introduced. The new crime covers “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything reasonably “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.”

It is enough that a person is found to have likely understood that the comments would be abusive or insulting as opposed to intending to be abusive or insulting. For that ill-defined crime, you can be sent to jail for seven years. Police officers are currently being given a two-hour training program to enforcing the law. Rowling has been the target of a global campaign due to her rejection of transgender laws and policies. Many on the left have unleashed book bans and burnings. I have been critical of that campaign. Even third parties who have supported Rowling’s right to free speech have been targeted in cancel campaigns. On April 1, Rowling posted a reference to various trans campaigners and other individuals as women. She then ended the thread with “April Fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”

She stated “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.” Even if meant as a joke, Scottish censorship laws have never been a laughing matter with comedians raising objections. That could clearly fall within the law. The law is so broad that it allows arbitrary enforcement. To that end, Rowling made it plain: “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.#arrestme.” The law is a disgrace, but hardly new. Free speech has been in a free fall in the United Kingdom as well as other Western countries. I discuss this trend in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates. A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers. Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt. Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.” Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.” A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.” We also discussed the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic. English courts have seen criminalized “toxic ideologies” as part of this crackdown on free speech. Scotland has now pulled ahead in the race to the bottom of speech criminalization. The home of David Hume and Adam Smith is now imposing laws as stringent as those founds in Iran, Russia, and China. It is a shocking denial of a right that once defined Western Civilization

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Legend

 

 

Hitchens

 

 

VdB
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775285512426660206

 

 

1903

 

 

 

 

Baby owl

 

 

Alien

 

 

Catfish

 

 

Baby elephant

 

 

Faa Sai
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775051957352235364

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle April 2 2024

Apr 022024
 
 April 2, 2024  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  57 Responses »


Keith Haring Pop Shop II 1988

 

• This Is Not an April Fool’s Gag (Jim Kunstler)
• Biden Denies Proclaiming Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday (RT)
• The Electric War Is Redrawing The Ukraine Map – In Black (Helmer)
• Ukraine Counteroffensive ‘Biggest Debacle In Modern Warfare’ – David Sacks (RT)
• Every NATO Member Has Military Personnel In Ukraine – Estonia (RT)
• ‘Too Old and in Poor Health’: Ukrainian Conscripts Unmotivated to Fight (Sp.)
• Israel’s War, Netanyahu’s Gamble (Alastair Crooke)
• The Sahel’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ (Pepe Escobar)
• EU Can No Longer Expect US To Defend It – Rheinmetall CEO (RT)
• How Private Interests Seized Control of America (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Disney’s Litigation Against Florida Collapses as the Media Shrugs (Turley)
• Weaponization of the Secret Service Has Put RFK Jr’s Life at Risk (Fleetwood)
• Left Livid Over Trump Ally Efforts To Eliminate Anti-White Policies (ZH)
• JK Rowling Could Be Imprisoned For “Misgendering” Trans People (MN)
• Imran Khan’s Jail Sentence Suspended (RT)
• Judge Orders Release Of ‘Border Riot’ Migrants Who Overwhelmed National Guard (ZH)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1774949562504855745

 

 

Tucker sobriety

 

 

Trump

 

 

Matteo
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774722152346054919

 

 

Joan Rivers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geert Vanden Bossche predicts the collapse of society. And the rise of ivermectin. Not sure how the two can be combined.

• This Is Not an April Fool’s Gag (Jim Kunstler)

Did you have a fabulous Transgender Visibility Day, uncluttered with any loose talk about one Jesus Christ and his travails in the Roman Levant some 2000 years ago? The Easter Bunny desisted from twerking on the White House lawn this time around, but the Party of Chaos still nailed down the vote of the .000429 percent of the population that identifies as opposite the clerical error made upon their sexual assignment at birth. All in all, this may be the last grotesque frivolity the political class indulges in for a long time to come, and I’ll tell you why.

I had the honor of interviewing the Belgian virologist Geert Vanden Bossche on Friday for my podcast, and he had quite a sobering message. “What I am predicting,” he said, “is a massive, massive tsunami” of illness and death among highly-vaccinated populations with dysregulated immune systems.

“You commit errors or even crimes at the very small scale, you can hide them,” he said (at around 47:00 minutes into the hour-long discussion). “I have seen this happen with the Ebola vaccination with Africa a number of years ago. . . . However, if you do this at the very large scale, like what has happened with this mass [Covid] vaccination campaign, the truth will surface. And those who have committed these crimes who have been lying to the people, who have not been taking care of the health and safety of the people, will be severely, severely punished. . . . If these people would now go out and say, ‘Yeah, wait a minute, we have been making some mistakes, it wasn’t all right, we have to correct them, we have to revise our opinion,’ these people will be stoned in the streets. . . . They can only hope that something will happen that will distract from this issue, but it won’t. . . . The truth will surface: this has been a large-scale experiment of gain-of-function on the very human population. This will be something that will be reported in history for many many generations to come.”

A bit further on (around 55:20 minutes) he says, “You will see what will happen, for example, in the next coming weeks. . . is more and more cases of more serious long Covid. . . . They will start to replace the surge of the cancers. . . now we have a more chronic phase. It will end with a hyper-acute phase, a huge, huge wave. . . I’ve been studying this now for four years. I know what I’m talking about. I’m probably the only person, in all modesty, who understands the immunology behind this. . . . (At 1:00:12) The thing I want your audience to understand, what we will be facing in the hyper-acute Covid crisis that is imminent, is that we will have to build a completely new world. . . . It is very very clear that when this starts, our hospitals will collapse. And that means the chaos in all kinds of layers of society — financial, economic, social, you name it — will be complete. And that is what I’m very clearly predicting. . . . It’s very strange for me to make such statements, but I’m not hiding it because I’m two hundred percent convinced that it will happen.”

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The kind old man with memory issues.

• Biden Denies Proclaiming Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday (RT)

US President Joe Biden has rejected criticism over his annual proclamation of March 31 as Transgender Visibility Day, which this year coincided with Easter Sunday. The president’s ambiguous remarks on the matter, however, were perceived by his critics as a flat denial of the move he had made just a day before. Biden was pressed on the matter by reporters and asked about the criticism, voiced by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called the step “outrageous and abhorrent’ tradition-busting moves.” The president stated the speaker was “thoroughly uninformed” on the matter, producing what appeared to be a flat denial to a follow-up question on how exactly Johnson was “uninformed.” “I didn’t do that.”

The remarks re-ignited the criticism, with Johnson taking to X (formerly Twitter) to poke fun at the president and posting a screenshot of Biden’s proclamation of March 31 as the Transgender Day of Visibility. “This you, Joe Biden?” the speaker wrote. Some, however, translated the president’s remarks as an attempt to explain that he was not the one to introduce the tradition in the first place, rather than a denial of his own move. The proclamation dates back to 2009, when then-President Barak Obama introduced it shortly after assuming office, marking March 31 as Transgender Visibility Day. The date will not coincide with Easter Sunday for decades to come. The White House appeared to back this position as well, with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisting any backlash over the president’s move was “misinformation.”

“So surprised by the misinformation that’s been out there around this and I want to be very clear: every year for the past several years on March 31, Transgender Day of Visibility is marked,” she stated, adding that the nature of the situation was evident “for folks who understand the calendar and how it works.”“Easter falls on different Sundays, right, every year, and this year it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day. And so that is the simple fact. That is what has happened. That is where we are,” she explained.Still, the affair has triggered a storm of criticism from prominent Christians and conservatives alike, getting further aggravated by the fact that the Biden administration has opted to ban children participating in the Easter Egg design contest from using religiously themed designs.

Watters

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The next phase of the war? The end phase?

“If the current Russian plan of attack is causing swings of 300+ volts, it’s not even safe to plug in a cell phone..”

“Who knows what’s happening there. It must be chaos, and if it isn’t, it will be soon.”

• The Electric War Is Redrawing The Ukraine Map – In Black (Helmer)

The electric war, which in its first phase commenced last October and November, has now entered its second and final phase – final, that is, for the Ukraine. This is strategic; war has never been fought like this in Europe. The US and NATO general staffs and politicians have been taken by complete surprise. “The Ukrainians are building Maginot and Siegfried lines according to the instructions of their foreign advisers,” according to a Moscow analyst, “as if the Russian offensive will be men, artillery and tanks running across the landscape towards Kiev. But they won’t have to. The offensive against Ukrainian electricity cannot be stopped at these lines.” Without effective defence for its power generating plants, distribution hubs, and grid lines, the Kiev regime’s power is being stopped across the country; the major Novorussian cities in the east – Odessa, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk – are being blacked out and their populations forced to evacuate; the warmaking resupplies of the NATO allies are being cut off at borders which are now exposed to reversal of electricity surges threatening the plants and grids of southern Poland, Romania and Moldova.

Even European and American money for President Vladimir Zelensky’s regime needs electricity to move. “The Russian General Staff is thinking electrically,” comments a NATO veteran and expert in applying electrical engineering to war. “The way the strikes are unfolding causes the Ukrainians to perform at lot of switching. Anyone who knows anything about high-voltage switching understands that the more it’s done, the greater the likelihood there is of some kind of fault occurring, including surges or transients. So, leaving enough power on today so the Ukrainians can throw switches tomorrow may be part of the plan.” “Even if the French/NATO plan a deployment in the Ukraine, what will they be deploying to?” the military engineer adds. “If the current Russian plan of attack is causing swings of 300+ volts, it’s not even safe to plug in a cell phone.


MAP OF RUSSIAN STRIKES AGAINST UKRAINE POWER PLANT TARGETS, MARCH 30

We can safely assume that all manner of appliances and other expensive electrical or electronic equipment has been destroyed in the affected areas. Indeed, even if the power engineers manage to get the power back on, millions of light fixtures, especially the electronic/LED variety, are burned out. Diagnostic equipment (medical and technical), process instruments, programmable logic controllers, power supplies, inverters, frequency drives, bank machines, computerized checkout, refrigeration equipment, are burned up” “Who knows what’s happening there. It must be chaos, and if it isn’t, it will be soon.” The Russian General Staff doesn’t telegraph its punches. The daily Ministry of Defense operations briefing – blocked for many US and allied audiences – concentrates on the five combat groups, Western, Southern, Eastern, Centre, and Dniepr; and their operational directions along the Donbass line of contact; at present, they are Kupyansk, Donetsk, Avdeyevka, South Donetsk, and Kherson.

Last Friday, for example, the briefing began almost nonchalantly: “Tonight [March 29], the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a group strike with high-precision long-range air, sea and land-based weapons, including aeroballistic hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles, at energy facilities and air defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The objectives of the strike have been achieved. All objects are affected.” [..] “Ukraine is moving towards a truly definitive energy crisis”, Militarist reported on March 30. “In the east and west, thermal power plants are being eliminated one by one by completely demolishing the main turbine and generator sections. Dams also began to collapse from south to north. It is expected that all dams and thermal power plants will be put out of operation in the near future. The Ukrainian military industry will be destroyed both by direct attacks and by the energy crisis. The possibility of NATO-supported domestic production and maintenance will also be excluded. Thus, the logistics infrastructure in the rear may not be able to cope with events at the front.”

Macgregor

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“These people are fools who should have no credibility left. But of course the MSM never holds them accountable so we will get more of the same until Ukraine finally collapses..”

• Ukraine Counteroffensive ‘Biggest Debacle In Modern Warfare’ – David Sacks (RT)

The failure of Ukraine’s 2023 summer counteroffensive against Russia was “easily predictable,” according to US tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist David Sacks, who has suggested that the Washington elite should be held accountable for talking up the doomed operation. Sacks’ comments came in response to a post on Saturday by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who condemned the unnecessary loss of life suffered by Kiev’s forces as they attempted to “attack a larger army” that had superior defenses. The failed Ukrainian counteroffensive was “one of the biggest debacles in the history of modern warfare,” Sacks said in agreement, adding that Kiev’s soldiers and tanks had effectively run “headlong into minefields while Russian artillery rained down on them from heavily fortified positions.” “This should have been easily predictable,” the former PayPal COO and founder of the Yammer corporate social network stressed.

According to estimates released in March by the Russian Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian military saw over 166,000 casualties during last year’s failed counteroffensive. Kiev’s overall casualties since the outbreak of the conflict with Russia stand at 444,000, the ministry has claimed. Sacks went on to suggest that US officials such as ex-CIA chief David Petraeus, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken should all be held responsible for encouraging the doomed operation. “These people are fools who should have no credibility left. But of course the MSM never holds them accountable so we will get more of the same until Ukraine finally collapses,” Sacks surmised. Musk, meanwhile, has called the counteroffensive “a tragic waste of life for Ukraine,” suggesting that Kiev should not have attacked Russian forces – which had deployed vast minefields and had stronger artillery – while Ukrainian forces lacked armor or air superiority.

“Any fool could have predicted that,” the billionaire said, recalling that one year ago he had recommended that Kiev’s forces entrench and apply all resources to defense. Musk stated that Kiev would continue to have difficulty holding on to territory, but suggested that Russia was unlikely try to take over the entire country, arguing that it would face “extreme” local resistance in western regions of Ukraine. He also warned that if the conflict “lasts long enough, Odessa will fall,” and advised Kiev to reach a negotiated settlement with Moscow as soon as possible, before Russia gains more territory and Ukraine loses all access to the Black Sea. Moscow has stressed that it remains open to meaningful talks with Kiev, and has blamed the lack of a diplomatic breakthrough on the Ukrainian authorities, who refuse to accept the “reality on the ground.”

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Russia knows where they all are. Sitting ducks.

• Every NATO Member Has Military Personnel In Ukraine – Estonia (RT)

Every NATO member already has military personnel in Ukraine, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur claimed on Monday. Under no circumstances, however, will forces from the US-led bloc take part in the hostilities against Russia, the minister insisted in an interview with Austrian media outlet Die Presse. NATO servicemen are operating in the embattled country as advisers and are involved in training Ukrainian soldiers in Poland, the UK, and Estonia, Pevkur told the outlet. Western defense officials are currently planning to set up training camps in Ukraine in a bid to avoid issues with border crossings and to speed up the preparation process, he added.

At the same time, Pevkur insisted there is no talk of NATO soldiers fighting directly in the conflict, stating that “this has already been ruled out.” “The reality is that every NATO member country already has military personnel in Ukraine, such as military attaches or people who travel to Ukraine from time to time,” the official said. “What [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron said mainly related to personnel training,” he added. Macron openly raised the possibility of putting NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine in February, saying that “we cannot exclude anything” and that the West “will do everything necessary to prevent Russia from winning this war.”

The remarks, which Macron later described as having been “weighed, thought through, and measured,” prompted a wave of denials from a vast majority of NATO states and the bloc’s leadership. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg publicly refuted the idea shortly after Macron’s initial statement, saying that no plans existed to deploy troops to Ukraine. Numerous Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have also denied any such plans. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said any NATO troop deployments in Ukraine would not change the situation on the battlefield, given that Western soldiers are already active in the country as military advisers and mercenaries. He nonetheless warned that the ramifications of such a move would be “tragic.”

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“..deep divisions in Ukraine’s parliament and more broadly in Ukrainian society.”

• ‘Too Old and in Poor Health’: Ukrainian Conscripts Unmotivated to Fight (Sp.)

Quite a few Ukrainian conscripts recruited by the “dysfunctional” and “unwieldy” drafting system are “often too old, in poor health and unmotivated,” The New York Times has cited brigade officers as saying. Alina Mykhailova, an officer in the Ukrainian Army’s Da Vinci Wolves battalion, told the newspaper that of the 200 conscripts they had received, only 25 showed a desire to fight. According to her, the goal is to “recruit volunteers faster, so that we get fewer of those people who are absolutely unmotivated.” “It’s like a market. You must try to find people with marketing methods,” another Ukrainian officer, Myroslav Hai, said, referring to public relations recruitment campaigns that aim to lure more people into joining the army. The remarks come after The Washington Post reported that the Kiev regime’s lack of any clear mobilization strategy aimed at plugging the gaping holes in the ranks of its armed forces is fueling “deep divisions in Ukraine’s parliament and more broadly in Ukrainian society.”

The Financial Times, in turn, suggested that Ukraine’s plans to mobilize half a million additional troops via a controversial new mobilization law have little hope of panning out if new Western assistance doesn’t arrive. The draft legislation, expected see a vote in Ukraine’s parliament in mid-April, looks to lower the draft age to 25, commit recruits to three years of service, and force eligible men to register via a digital portal, among other measures. Shortly after Russia started its special military operation, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced martial law and general draft in Ukraine. Under martial law, men aged between 18 and 60 are banned from leaving the country, and men aged 27 and older are eligible to be drafted, with some exceptions. In a sign that the problems of draft dodgers show no sign of being solved, draft cards are handed out not only in recruitment offices, but also on the streets, at gas stations, or in cafes.

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Mass protests against Netanyahu.

• Israel’s War, Netanyahu’s Gamble (Alastair Crooke)

U.S. Democratic Party support for Israel is fast fissuring – an “ideological tremor”, Peter Beinart (editor of Jewish Currents) calls it. Since 7 Oct “it has become an earthquake” – a “Great Rupture”. This concerns the fusion of Liberalism to Zionism that long has defined the Democratic Party: “Israel’s war in Gaza has supercharged a transformation on the American Left. Solidarity with Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics – as is support for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. And, as happened during the Vietnam War and the struggle against South African apartheid – leftist fervour is reshaping the liberal mainstream”. Put plainly, in tandem to Israel moving to the far Right, pro-Palestinian support in the U.S. has hardened. By November 2023, 49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel.

That is one vector; one direction of travel within the American polity. On the other path, American Jews – those most committed to Zionism; the ones who run establishment institutions – see that liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable. They are responding to this shift by forging common cause with the American Right. Netayanhu had made the observation that Israel and a wokish Democratic Party were on divergent paths some ten years earlier – shifting the Likud and the Israel Right away from the Democrats to the American Evangelicals (and thus, broadly in the direction of the Republican Party). As a former senior Israeli diplomat, Alon Pinkas, wrote in 2022: “With Netanyahu it was always transactional. So in the last decade or so he developed his own vile version of “replacement theory”: The majority of evangelical Christians will replace the vast majority of American Jews. Since it’s all about numbers, the evangelicals are the preferred ally”.

Beinart writes: “Supporters of Israel remain not only welcome in the Democratic Party but are also dominant. But the leaders of those institutions no longer represent much of their base”. “Senator Schumer, the highest Jewish representative in public life, acknowledged this divide in his speech earlier this month, when he said – the speech’s most remarkable line – that he “can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in particular, to support a one-state solution”. A solution – to say it bluntly – that does not involve a ‘Zionist State’: “Those are the words of a politician who understands that his party is undergoing profound change”. Numbers of younger ‘changelings’ are larger than many recognize, especially among millennials and Gen Z; and the latter are joining a Palestine solidarity movement that is growing larger, but also more radical.

“That growing radicalism has produced a paradox: It is a movement that welcomes more and more American Jews – but correspondingly finds it harder to explain where Israeli Jews fit into its vision of Palestinian liberation”, Beinart worries. It was to bridge this Gulf that the Biden Administration confected its awkward stance at the UN Security Council this week, when the U.S. abstained on a ‘Ceasefire and Hostage Release Resolution’. The resolution was intended by the White House to ‘face both ways’, appealing to (older) American Jews who still identify as both progressive and Zionist, and – facing the other way – appealing to those who view the growing alliance between leading Zionist institutions and the Republican Party as uncomfortable, even unforgivable (and want the Gaza massacres to stop now). The Resolution ploy however, was not well thought-through (the latter lacuna becoming something of a White House habit). The content was badly mis-represented by the U.S., which stated that the resolution was ‘non-binding’. The New York Times actually mis-stated the resolution, saying that it ‘calls for’ a ceasefire. It did not.

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“The African Sahel is revolting against western neocolonialism – ejecting foreign troops and bases, devising alternative currencies, and challenging the old multinationals. Multipolarity, after all, cannot flower without resistance paving its path.”

• The Sahel’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ (Pepe Escobar)

The emergence of Axes of Resistance in various geographies is an inextricable byproduct of the long and winding process leading us toward a multipolar world. These two things – resistance to the Hegemon and the emergence of multipolarity – are absolutely complementary. The Axis of Resistance in West Asia – across Arab and Muslim states – now finds as its soul sister the Axis of Resistance spanning the Sahel in Africa, west to east, from Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. Unlike Niger, where the change in power against neocolonialism was associated with a military coup, in Senegal, the power change comes straight from the polls. Senegal plunged itself into a new era with the landslide victory of Bassirou Diomaye Faye, 44, in nationwide elections on 24 March. A former tax inspector who had just spent a fortnight stint in jail, Faye emerged with the profile of an underdog pan-African leader to turn the ‘most stable democracy in Africa,’ under French puppet incumbent Macky Sall, upside down.

The incoming Senegalese president now joins Ibrahim Traore, 36, in Burkina Faso, Aby Ahmed, 46, in Ethiopia, Andry Rajoelina, 48, in Madagascar, as well as future superstar Julius Malema, 44, in South Africa as part of the new, young pan-African generation focused on sovereignty. In his election manifesto, Faye pledged to reclaim Senegal’s sovereignty no less than eighteen times. Geoeconomics is key to these shifts. As Senegal becomes a substantial oil and gas producer, Faye will aim to renegotiate mining and energy contracts, including the largest ones with British Petroleum (BP) and UK gold mine operator, Endeavor Mining. Crucially, he plans to ditch the exploitative CFA franc – the French-controlled currency system used in 14 African states – even setting up a new currency as part of reshaping relations with neocolonial power France, Senegal’s top trading partner. Faye, echoing Comrade Xi Jinping, wants a “win-win” partnership.

Faye has not yet been clear on whether he intends to kick the French military out of Senegal. Were that to happen, the blow to Paris would be unprecedented, as embattled Petit Roi Emmanuel Macron and the French establishment consider Senegal the key player when it comes to blockading landlocked Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, which have already left Paris in the (Sahel) dust. The three latter states, which have just formed an Alliance of the Sahel States (Alliance des Etats du Sahel, AES, in the original French), are not only a major Paris nightmare after serial humiliations but also a big American headache – epitomized in the spectacular breakdown of military cooperation between Washington and Nigerien capital Niamey.

The culprit, according to the US Deep State, is, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obviously, no one in the US Beltway has been paying due attention to the Russia–Africa diplomatic flurry since last year, involving all key players from the Sahel to the new African BRICS members Egypt and Ethiopia. In sharp contrast to its prior regard of Niger as a staunch ally in the Sahel, Washington is now forced to present a calendar date to get its troops out of Niger – after a military cooperation deal was annulled. The Pentagon cannot be involved in military training in Nigerien territory anymore.

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Those are dollar signs in his eyes.

• EU Can No Longer Expect US To Defend It – Rheinmetall CEO (RT)

Washington has sent a clear message to European NATO members that they can no longer rely on its military protection, the head of German defense giant Rheinmetall has argued. For decades, the EU has been taking for granted that the US would come to its rescue in case of war, but “that will no longer happen,” CEO Armin Papperger told The Financial Times. He cited the failure of the US Congress to approve continued military assistance to Ukraine as a signal to Europe that the Americans are not willing to pay for its security. The US is treaty-obligated to consider an attack on any NATO member as an attack on itself. The commitment has been put into question by former President Donald Trump, who has argued that US protection should be conditional on the other nations meeting their military spending obligations, and claimed he said as much to a European leader while in office.

President Joe Biden has denounced the remarks as “dangerous” and “un-American”. If Trump is elected president again in November, “the pressure will be higher” on Germany, Papperger said, but the risk will still be there regardless of who wins the presidency. ”The US focuses more on the Asia-Pacific area than on Europe,” he said. If a full-blown armed conflict erupts in the region, “the US will focus on Asia, and then Europe will be totally alone.” Papperger said his warning to European nations stems from his enduring perception of the world as “dangerous.” It has also shaped his response to the Ukraine crisis and the EU’s intention to ramp up arms production. Unlike people at the helm of other major producers, he did not hesitate to invest in expansion, the Financial Times report noted.

Since the Russia-Ukraine hostilities erupted in 2022, the Dusseldorf-based company’s share price has surged fivefold. Rheinmetall has announced plans to open armor and munitions factories in Ukraine, despite the risk of them being targeted by Russian forces. Kiev and its Western backers have claimed that a Russian victory in the conflict would expose NATO members in Europe to a future attack by Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin called this argument “simply delirious” last week, considering the vast advantage in military spending that the US-led military bloc has.

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“Social power is when people have power. Then you have government. State power is when the state has power. Then you have tyranny.”

• How Private Interests Seized Control of America (Paul Craig Roberts)

One thing that we know with certainty about our time is that no Western government represents the people it rules. Western governments represent the interests of those whose campaign contributions elect the government. The government is simply purchased by campaign contributors. It is not a government in the sense of the word used by Thomas Jefferson and Albert Jay Nock. In the United States, the Supreme Court has legalized the purchase of the government by special interests who use government for their agendas. The Supreme Court actually ruled that it is a First Amendment right to purchase the government. Elsewhere in the Western world it is even worse, because the governments must first represent Washington’s interest. As representing Washington seldom conforms to their interests, no Western government has the support of the people.

I recently posted the approval ratings of the German chancellor, the British prime minister, and the French president, and they were even lower than Biden’s. The German chancellor has an approval rating of 17% In other words, 83% of Germans disapproved. Yet he rules them. Everywhere in Europe approval ratings are disapproval ratings with European leaders disapproved by 65 to 70% of the populations. How can this be called democracy? It can’t. Albert Jay Nock told us the truth of our situation in 1935 in the most important book describing the American political system that has ever been written. If you read and understand Nock’s book and read a couple of Charles Beard’s political histories of the US, you will have a very clear understanding why freedom in America is being extinguished. Albert Jay Nock distinguishes between social power and state power. Social power is when people have power. Then you have government. State power is when the state has power. Then you have tyranny.

This situation is one in which government becomes privatized by powerful interests, including government agencies, to serve their agendas and is transformed into an unaccountable state. Thomas Jefferson intended for the new nation to be governed by social power, that is, by the people. But other of the founding fathers wanted state power that they could enlist to privilege their pursuit of their own interest. Nock provides examples of this by the original founders. In my opinion, perhaps the best example of this was 60-70 years later with Abe Lincoln’s service to the railroads and support of the northern manufacturers for a tariff that would serve their interest at the expense of higher prices for the population. It was Lincoln’s support of the tariff that caused the secession of the Southern states and Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederacy. To cover up the fact that Lincoln was nothing but a shill for economic interests, historians invented a false account of Lincoln’s war against the Confederacy.

In the Western world democracy is merely an exercise used to convince the people that they are in control. I am not going to explicate Nock’s explanation of how we were doomed from the start. It began with the replacement of popular sovereignty with the state. Today unthinking patriots support the state at the expense of country and popular sovereignty. Originally, state power grew by handing out special favors to support the interests of those who gained control of the state. Today the situation has greatly worsened. The state is used to suppress those who object to the special interest agendas. For example, consider the massive repression of popular sovereignty. ( Websites, such as vDare.com, that point out the adverse consequences of the state turning a nation into a tower of babel are being suppressed by the state. vDare.com has been explaining that massive immigration of unassimilable people into a country in the name of diversity and multiculturalism actually means the destruction of the nation. The ultimate effect is to eliminate diversity.

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“DeSantis wrestled control away from Disney’s handpicked board and now Disney has dropped its challenge after suffering a series of losses in court..”

• Disney’s Litigation Against Florida Collapses as the Media Shrugs (Turley)

It is a familiar pattern. Media outlets pick sides in a legal dispute and then distort the merits of the claims in favor of that party. In the fight between Disney and Florida, the media not only misrepresented a popular Florida parental rights bill (including falsely calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” law) but heralded Disney’s decision to enter the political fray to oppose the law. It then portrayed Disney’s legal moves to block state efforts to regain regulatory control over the company as brilliant and overwhelming. Some of us disagreed on all of those points, including the prospects of Disney’s ill-considered litigation strategy. Last week, that strategy collapsed with a settlement in which Disney decided to just “Let it go” and these same media outlets simply shrugged and moved on.

In a raw muscle play, Disney had its hand-picked board (the Reedy Creek Improvement District) effectively transfer authority to the company just before it was disbanded. Many in the media were thrilled by the move despite the unlikelihood of its being sustained legally. As I wrote at the time, it would be ridiculous for a court to rule that a company could stop a state from removing special treatment for a corporation like Disney. Even as the company racked up losses in court, the media and legal experts heralded its brilliance and toughness. In the meantime, as Disney itself admitted that it was losing money due to its political agenda, the media heaped praise on the corporation.

When it came to the lawsuits, the media portrayed the moves as brilliant and mocked Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., as outgunned as some of us struggled with how Disney could possibly prevail in the long term. NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd insisted that Republicans had “better be careful going after Disney.” MSNBC host and former 2020 Biden campaign aide Symone Sanders-Townsend agreed and said “Oh, my money’s on the Disney lobbyists, honey. My money is on the Disney lobbyists.” On a “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough insisted “you can’t beat Disney.” MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch agreed: DeSantis is “fighting a fight he can’t win, and this, to me, is a precursor of him on a bigger national stage. And he’s just stupid. It’s a stupid, stupid play.”

Vox wrote that “Disney is proving to be the foe that will not die.” Another Vox headline read “How Disney just beat Ron DeSantis.” The problem is that Disney was never winning, but viewers were not told that. The company was gushing money while losing in court. In the end, the Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act continued to garner overwhelming support in the state. DeSantis wrestled control away from Disney’s handpicked board and now Disney has dropped its challenge after suffering a series of losses in court. The response from the media? Crickets. For Disney’s part, it spent millions of dollars, alienated millions of customers, and created precedent against itself. It literally achieved nothing material from its litigation against the state beyond driving up its own costs and reinforcing the regulatory authority against the company. It then walked away.

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“For 55 years, every presidential administration has granted early protection to major candidates who requested it. The Biden administration is the sole outlier..”

• Weaponization of the Secret Service Has Put RFK Jr’s Life at Risk (Fleetwood)

Secret Service records recently revealed the agency’s conclusions that Kennedy is at “elevated risk for adverse attention,” and after reviewing credible armed threats against Kennedy, the agency assembled a group of eight teams ready to step in quickly after they get the go-ahead. But they never got it. The threat to Kennedy is particularly acute because of his controversial politics and his family history—his father, RFK, Sr., a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, and his uncle, John F., a U.S. president, were both assassinated. RFK Jr. has provoked and challenged some of the most powerful forces in our country, especially concerning the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and endless foreign wars that so enrich defense contractors. The perils to Kennedy arise not only because of his name but also because of the mainstream media’s relentless demonization of him.

Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, the lead actress in the popular TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm, accused Biden of “playing politics” with her and RFK Jr.’s safety. “Yesterday, an intruder climbed the fence at my home and was arrested,” Kennedy tweeted a few months ago. “After being released from police custody later in the day, he immediately returned to my home and was arrested again.” In September, a heavily armed man impersonating a U.S. marshal and the CIA, with loaded concealed firearms and an accomplice, was arrested after infiltrating a private event. No wonder Hines is scared and worried. The Kennedy name is a lightning rod, a bright target for disturbed and demented individuals. Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation, filed a Freedom of Information request and lawsuit to determine why Kennedy’s multiple requests for Secret Service protection were not answered. Finally, they obtained a trove of previously hidden emails.

“These documents confirm the bureaucratic and political runaround the Biden administration went through to ultimately deny Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the requested Secret Service protection,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “The Biden administration’s refusal to provide Secret Service protection to Mr. Kennedy is dangerous and vindictive.” According to the reports, higher-ups ordered the Secret Service not to talk to Kennedy’s private security. Seventy percent of voters do not want Biden or Trump. According to a January 9, 2024, Gallup poll, Kennedy’s favorability rating of 52% is higher than Biden’s (41%) and Trump’s (42%). According to an earlier Gallup poll, 63% of U.S. adults think that the major parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.”

This is a 7% increase from a year ago. Biden’s choice to deny Kennedy protection reflects insecurity, fearing Kennedy’s popularity and radical, transformative message have the potential to endanger his reelection. He might also worry that Secret Service protection will elevate Kennedy’s stature and give him a certain presidential aura as a credible contender among the media and voters. For 55 years, every presidential administration has granted early protection to major candidates who requested it. The Biden administration is the sole outlier. If another Kennedy is killed while campaigning for president, it will be a long-lasting, traumatic stain on the American psyche that will scar the soul of our democracy for decades to come. Unfortunately, we live in violent, polarized times. The United States has surpassed 400 mass shootings in 2023, a record-breaking year in gun violence.

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774977436561670316

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“..it’s only natural to assume that a revived effort to paint him as a racist would follow..”

• Left Livid Over Trump Ally Efforts To Eliminate Anti-White Policies (ZH)

With Donald Trump’s popularity growing among black and latino voters, it’s only natural to assume that a revived effort to paint him as a racist would follow. In a Monday ‘exclusive’ report, Axios is absolutely beside themselves, writing “Trump allies plot anti-racism protections — for white people” There’s a plot afoot!nTrump’s Justice Department would push to eliminate or upend programs in government and corporate America that are designed to counter racism that has favored whites. Does racism still favor whites? Last we checked, white people, particularly white men – who ‘toxically mansplain’ everything, are the scourge of the universe. Anyhow, Axios has presented quite the narrative; the Trump campaign’s longstanding promise to eliminate Biden DEI initatives + efforts by Trump allies to legally combat anti-white racism “with the Supreme Court’s turn to the right” = racism. First, here’s what Trump said last year:

“Every institution in America is under attack from this Marxist concept of ‘equity,'” adding “I will get this extremism out of the White House, out of the military, out of the Justice Department, and out of our government.” Trump campaign spox Steven Cheung told Axios: “As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated,” adding “President Trump is committed to weeding out discriminatory programs and racist ideology across the federal government.” This is apparently a very bad thing. “Longtime aides and allies preparing for a potential second Trump administration have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints — some of which have been successful. A central vehicle for the effort has been America First Legal, founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, who has called the group conservatives’ “long-awaited answer to the ACLU.”

“America First cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in February in a lawsuit against CBS and Paramount Global for what the group argued was discrimination against a white, straight man who was a writer for the show “Seal Team” in 2017.” -Axios. Axios then picks what we can assume they consider to be the most racist example – the February filing of a civil rights complaint against the NFL over the “Rooney Rule,” which America First says violates “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and engaging in race and sex discrimination,” as the purpose of the 2003 rule was “increas[ing] the number of minorities hired in head coach, general manager, and executive positions,” to address “the historically low number of minorities in head coaching positions.”

The Rooney Rule has been amended several times since its adoption and now requires teams to interview at least two external minority candidates for head coach and general manager vacancies, at least one external minority for a coordinator job, and at least one minority and/or female candidate for senior level positions, such as club president and senior executives. Effectively, in the twenty years that the Rooney Rule has been in existence, all it has done – according to minority interviewees for head coaching positions and the former head of the NFL Players Association DeMaurice Smith – is result in member clubs engaging in sham interviews with minority candidates solely to check the Rooney Rule box. Given the limited timeframe to hire executives and coaches after the season, this results in fewer opportunities for similarly situated, well-qualified candidates who are not minorities.” -America First Legal.

Read more …

For saying a woman is a woman..

• JK Rowling Could Be Imprisoned For “Misgendering” Trans People (MN)

Author JK Rowling could be prosecuted for “misgendering” trans people under Scotland’s odious new hate crime law that comes into force today, an SNP minister has admitted. Senior police officers are expecting a deluge of complaints over online posts after the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 created a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. A person could now be imprisoned for up to seven years if they engage in “insulting” behaviour towards ‘protected’ groups, and the prosecution only needs to prove that the hatred was “likely” rather than “intended”. Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, initially stated that calling a “trans woman” (a man) “he” would not be a crime. However, after the law came into force, Brown stated, “It could be reported and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that.”

Rowling has vowed to continue calling biological males men and says she will now be targeted for telling the truth. During their training program on enforcing the new law, police officers were taught that even the content of plays and comedy gigs should be considered as potential hate crimes. Many have asserted that merely retweeting a Ricky Gervais joke about transgender people could amount to a hate crime in Scotland. As we previously highlighted, authorities admit that dealing with the expected flood of hate crime reports would prevent them from investigating real crimes. A Police Scotland pilot in Aberdeen which was deemed a “success” and is expected to be implemented means “more than 24,000 offences a year will no longer be allocated to a front-line officer.” Been a victim of burglary? Tough, the police are too busy clamping down on tweets that offend transgender activists.

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“Despite the suspension, 71-year-old Khan will remain in jail on multiple other sentences..”

• Imran Khan’s Jail Sentence Suspended (RT)

A Pakistani court on Monday granted the country’s former prime minister Imran Khan leave to appeal his conviction for graft and suspended his 14-year jail sentence, according to Reuters, citing his lawyer. Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi were each handed a 14-year sentence on January 31 – just a week ahead of Pakistan’s February 8 elections, which Khan’s party alleges were rigged. Khan has been in prison since August last year on several charges. According to his lawyer, Barrister Ali Zafar, the Islamabad High Court said the couple’s sentences for corruption will remain suspended until a final decision on the convictions. “No evidence backs up this conviction,” he told reporters, claiming that was the reason why the court suspended the sentence on first hearing of the appeal.

Khan and his wife were charged with unlawfully selling state gifts, worth more than 140 million rupees ($500,000), while Khan was prime minister from 2018 to 2022. A list of these gifts reportedly included perfumes, diamond jewelry, dinner sets, and seven watches, mostly Rolexes. Despite the suspension, 71-year-old Khan will remain in jail on multiple other sentences imposed on the politician ahead of the polls, and which also disqualified him from holding any public office for ten years. In another such prosecution, the former PM was given ten years in prison for leaking state secrets. Khan claimed that the cable he released contained evidence of collusion between the Pakistani military and US officials to have him removed from power in April 2022. A former cricketer-turned-politician, Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote in 2022, with the opposition accusing him of mismanaging the economy and foreign policy.

Since then, the former leader has fought dozens of legal battles. Khan repeatedly denied the allegations and claimed that he was overthrown as a result of a conspiracy. His Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) also maintained that the cases were based on made-up charges to keep him out of politics. The PTI was barred from the election, forcing its candidates to run as independents. On March 3, Pakistan’s newly formed government elected Shehbaz Sharif, who heads the country’s Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, as prime minister, following a general election. The vote took place amid protests by Khan’s supporters, who insist the election was a sham. This is the second term for Sharif, who was first elected prime minister in April 2022, after Khan was ousted in the no-confidence vote.

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“So if the DA’s office is telling me that they are not ready to go, what we’re going to do is we’re going to release all these individuals on their own recognizance..”

• Judge Orders Release Of ‘Border Riot’ Migrants Who Overwhelmed National Guard (ZH)

A group of migrants involved in a riot at the southern US border have been ordered to be released by an El Paso magistrate judge. The swarm of migrants overwhelmed Texas National Guard soldiers who were trying to organize them into groups to be taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). At one point, a migrant attempted to grab a soldier’s firearm, one National Guard source told the NY Post. Following the riot, authorities confiscated knives and shanks from some of the migrants. “These people were willing to assault military,” said the Post’s source. “They were willing to assault law enforcement. They have complete disregard for our laws.” In an Easter Sunday decision, presiding Magistrate Judge Humberto Acosta ordered the rioters released after accusing the El Paso DA’s Office of being unprepared to proceed with detention hearings for each defendant, so they should be released, the El Paso Times reports.

“It is the ruling of the court is that all the rioting participation cases will be released on their own recognizance,” Acosta ordered, noting that they will only remain jailed if there’s a federal immigration hold blocking their release. The arrests were made by the Texas Department of Public Safety in connection with a March 21 stampede of asylum-seeking migrants — mostly men from Venezuela — who torn down razor wire along the Rio Grande and rushed the border fence at Border Safety Initiative Marker No. 36 in the Riverside area of El Paso’s Lower Valley. Some migrants face charges of assault of a public servant for knocking down National Guard troops before order was regained. The migrants had sought to surrender themselves to U.S. Border Patrol in bids for asylum.

It was unclear if Acosta’s decision applied only to the “riot participation” charge, or the assault and criminal mischief charges related to the border incident. It is unknown how many migrants were booked on the charge of “riot participation,” a Class B misdemeanor – though Acosta referred to “hundreds of arrestees,” who he says are entitled to individual detention hearings within 48 hours. The DA’s office requested a continuance to have the hearings at a later date, however Acosta rejected the request. “So if the DA’s office is telling me that they are not ready to go, what we’re going to do is we’re going to release all these individuals on their own recognizance,” Acosta said at the hearing.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Pouch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774682786089124271

 

 

Pet cat
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774594071472038207

 

 

Family
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774811222216507506

 

 

7 baby ducks

 

 

Parakat

 

 

Buffalo

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 8 2023

Aug 082023
 
 August 8, 2023  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Claude Monet Ships in harbor 1873

 

• The Great Unravelling: ‘For All That Is Ours, We Must Fight’ (Alastair Crooke)
• Trump Demands Supreme Court ‘Intercede’ In Legal Battles (ZH)
• Can Trump Get an “Impartial Jury” in DC? (Dershowitz)
• DOJ Slapped By Judge In Trump Documents Case (ZH)
• Trump Pushes Back On Proposed Gag Order (RT)
• Trump May Face Racketeering Charges in Fulton County Election Case (Sp.)
• Ukraine’s Counteroffensive May ‘Run Its Course in the Next Few Weeks’ (Sp.)
• ‘No Compromise’ With Moscow, Kiev Vows (RT)
• The West Really Believes Russia Is On The Verge Of ‘Collapse’ (Andrey Sushentsov)
• Normies Awake! (Kunstler)
• The EU Is A ‘Failed Project’ – Right-wing “Alternative For Germany” Party (RT)
• Ukraine Leader in Black Market of Human Organ Trafficking – Zakharova (Sp.)
• UK’s NHS Raises Age For Government-Funded Transgender Treatments To Seven (ZH)
• Museum Bans JK Rowling From Harry Potter Exhibit (RT)

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

Ramaswamy

 

 

 

 

Satire
https://twitter.com/i/status/1688611582639546368

 

 

Ritter Aug 6

 

 

 

 

The idea is to drown Trump in litigation. And then at some point, make up something that puts him in jail. No more campaigning.

“This indictment is a naked threat and act of intimidation by the Democratic Party against any and all of their political opponents’”

• The Great Unravelling: ‘For All That Is Ours, We Must Fight’ (Alastair Crooke)

“[The DoJ indictment] “is ‘a declaration of war’ against American voters. It is not about Trump per se. It’s about criminalising dissent and punishing the millions who voted for him. [This week the Justice Department] took the unprecedented step of indicting former President Donald Trump — Biden’s chief rival in the upcoming 2024 election — for repeatedly expressing his opinion that the last election was stolen, rigged, and unfair”. It’s an opinion millions of Americans share, and to which they are unquestionably entitled thanks to the First Amendment. And that includes Trump, who has said repeatedly (and recently) that the 2020 election was stolen. He will probably keep saying it until his dying day, and he has every right to do so. The idea that our Justice Department can indict someone, especially the sitting president’s main political rival, over speech that’s protected by the First Amendment is simply insane … Simply put, this indictment is nothing more than a declaration of war against American voters and their constitutional right to free speech.

“Consider what is alleged and what isn’t: The charges against Trump do not include ‘incitement to violence’ on Jan. 6, 2021. Critically, The indictment simply presupposes that there was no election fraud. It then characterizes Trump’s contrary assertions from November 14, 2020 through January 20, 2021 as “false” – as though this were self-evident. “Trump’s claims were false and that he knew they were false”. On this basis, the indictment claims that 6th Jan was a ‘conspiracy’ – based in deceit – to prevent Electors’ votes from being appropriately counted”. Tom Fitton, president of the Conservative legal and election watchdog group, Judicial Watch, believes: “This indictment is a naked threat and act of intimidation by the Democratic Party against any and all of their political opponents’”.

And The Federalist warns: “If the prosecution of Trump succeeds, it means the First Amendment is a dead letter in America. It means you’re not allowed to have opinions that contradict the Justice Department’s official narrative”. For the sake of clarity, what is being expressed here is that this indictment is part and parcel of the ongoing western ‘culture war’ – just as scientists were cancelled, dismissed from their professions and ostracised for expressing a view about mRNA science; just as views on human biology are subject now to official negation; just as ‘misgendering’ has become a potential criminal offence (hate speech), so ideological and institutional capture is being extended to the political sphere. This is the issue, amongst others, that is set to unravel America – and, in unravelling the U.S., will unravel Europe too.

Read more …

SCOTUS wants to remain neutral. But with, what is it, 10 indictments and 42 charges(?!) vs Trump, that neutrality is long gone. Better act while Trump is still a free man.

• Trump Demands Supreme Court ‘Intercede’ In Legal Battles (ZH)

Former President Donald J. Trump has called on the Supreme Court to step in and ‘intercede’ in his various legal battles.” “My political opponent has hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits, including D.A., A.G., and others, which require massive amounts of my time & money to adjudicate,” Trump said in a Friday post to Truth Social. “I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field,” he continued “It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!” The former president is currently President Joe Biden’s #1 political opponent, and has been charged by Biden’s DOJ with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

He was arraigned on Thursday in a Washington DC courtroom, where he entered a ‘not guilty’ plea on the four charges above. The indictment is the third filed against the former president in the past few months – as opposed to the entire time he’s been out of office. Trump is already facing charges linked to porn-star payoffs and keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, in a locked safe, as opposed to a garage where his crackhead son doing business with the Chinese and the Ukrainians had full access to them. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and maintained that he is being prosecuted for political purposes because of position as the front-runner for the GOP nomination for president in 2024.

All three of Trump’s criminal cases remain in early stages. Although the disputes could eventually end up at the Supreme Court, such an appeal would not take place until further down the road. In his hush money case, Trump has begun the appeal process over a ruling that denied Trump’s attempt to move the case to federal court. That dispute is now in the hands of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. -The Hill Meanwhile, President Biden – who lied about his level of knowledge and involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings – says his DOJ is apolitical and makes its own decisions.

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No.

• Can Trump Get an “Impartial Jury” in DC? (Dershowitz)

What should happen… when it is virtually impossible for the defendant to get an impartial jury in that state or district? The prosecution of Donald Trump for the events around January 6, 2021 would seem to call for a change of venue. The District of Columbia is the most extreme Democratic district in the country. Approximately 95% of the potential jurors register and vote Democrat. Whereas approximately 5% voted for Trump. Furthermore, the anger against Trump is understandable in light of the fact that the events of January 6th directly involved many citizens of the district. Moreover, the judge randomly selected to preside over this case has a long history of bias against Trump and his supporters, and her law firm has a long history of conflicts and corruption.

It is imperative, therefore, that in a case where the incumbent president has urged his Attorney General to pursue his political opponent aggressively, that all efforts must be made to ensure fairness. Prosecutors must lean over backwards to persuade the public that partisan considerations played absolutely no role in the decision to indict. Agreeing to a change of venue and judge would go a long way toward seeing that justice is done. Change of venue motions are only rarely granted, as are motions to recuse a selected judge. But this is a case where justice demands that these motions be granted, both in the interests of the defendants and in the interests of justice. The government should not oppose such motions, though they generally do if it gives them a tactical advantage.

It is likely therefore that these defense requests will be denied by the trial judge. If an unfair trial results in a conviction, the impact will already be felt, even if it is reversed on appeal after the election, as the prosecution likely anticipates. If the prosecution case is strong, it should have no fear of a jury and judge outside of DC. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly said: the job of a prosecutor is not merely to maximize the chances of winning, but to assure that he wins fairly and justly. In order to achieve that goal, the prosecutors in this case should not oppose defense motions for a change of venue and judge. Nor should it oppose an appeal if the trial judge denies these well-founded defense motions.

In all likelihood, prosecutors will vigorously fight all efforts by the defense to assure an impartial jury and judge, because they want every advantage that will help them secure a victory. They will point to defense efforts to secure advantages for their client and argue that the adversary system of justice requires them to do the same. But that is not the law. The Supreme Court clearly delineated a different role for prosecutors who represent the government: “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” The prosecutors in the January 6th case should study this opinion before they deny Trump an impartial jury.

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Yeah, he can get a Pyrrhic victory in Florida.

• DOJ Slapped By Judge In Trump Documents Case (ZH)

The judge overseeing former President Trump’s classified documents case, Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon, rebuked federal prosecutors on Monday while striking down two of their filings. DOJ special counsel Jack Smith has been directed by the court to unseal two filings and to provide a comprehensive legal rationale for a Washington, D.C. grand jury’s involvement in the investigation. Specifically, Cannon, a Trump appointee, has ordered Smith to explain “the legal propriety” of using a DC Grand Jury in a Florida matter. “The Special Counsel states in conclusory terms that the supplement should be sealed from public view ‘to comport with grand jury secrecy,’ but the motion for leave and the supplement plainly fail to satisfy the burden of establishing a sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement,” the order reads.

“Among other topics as raised in the Motion, the response shall address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district,” the order adds. Canon was responding to the special counsel’s motion for a “Garcia” hearing, where Smith’s team addressed a potential conflict of interest posed by Stanley Woodward representing defendant Walt Nauta and individuals who could be called to testify in the classified documents case, the Daily Caller reports.

“Trump and Nauta are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 10 for the classified documents case. Smith issued a superseding indictment July 27 with additional charges for Trump and new charges for Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira who allegedly moved boxes around Trump’s Florida estate. Smith indicted Trump Tuesday for allegedly contesting the 2020 presidential election results and for his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. The former president pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Washington, D.C. Thursday and accused Smith of “persecution” for his latest charges.” -Daily Caller. Separately, a grand jury in Washington DC indicted Trump last week on four counts over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

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A gag order on a campaignig presidential candidate. What’s next? That’s right: jailtime.

• Trump Pushes Back On Proposed Gag Order (RT)

Lawyers for former US President Donald Trump have challenged a protective order requested by prosecutors on his election interference case, insisting that only “genuinely sensitive” material should be kept from the public eye. Trump’s legal team responded to the proposed order in a court filing on Monday night, saying that any attempt to prohibit the defense from publicly discussing material obtained from the government, including “exculpatory documents,” would violate Trump’s constitutional rights. “In a trial about First Amendment rights, the government seeks to restrict First Amendment rights,” the attorneys said.

“Worse, it does so against its administration’s primary political opponent, during an election season in which the administration, prominent party members, and media allies have campaigned on the indictment and proliferated its false allegations.” The filing went on to accuse special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the election interference case against Trump, of seeking to use the court as a “censor” to impose “content-based regulations” on the former commander in chief, instead calling for a “more measured approach.”The defense lawyers suggested an amended protective order that would “shield only genuinely sensitive materials,” rather than “all documents produced by the government, regardless of sensitivity,” as proposed by the prosecution.

Though the attorneys noted they had reached a deal with prosecutors on a “small number” of revisions to the order, they said the government would be unlikely to agree to their full proposal, citing communications with Smith’s team. That leaves the matter to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will decide on the order sometime before the next hearing scheduled on August 28. Trump was indicted last week on multiple criminal charges linked to alleged interference in the 2020 election, to which he has pleaded not guilty. The ex-president has slammed the case as politically motivated, claiming he was unfairly targeted to remove him as a contender in the 2024 presidential race.

“How can my corrupt political opponent put me on trial(s) during a campaign that I am winning (by a lot!),” Trump said in an all-caps social media post on Monday, apparently referring to President Joe Biden. He added that the legal proceedings are “forcing me to spend time and money away from the ‘campaign trial’ in order to fight bogus accusations.” In addition to the latest case, Trump also faces two other criminal lawsuits launched earlier this year, including dozens of felony charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office, as well as another linked to alleged hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign. He has pleaded not guilty in those cases as well, insisting the charges are part of a “witch hunt” against him.

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Yes, they love him in Georgia, too.

• Trump May Face Racketeering Charges in Fulton County Election Case (Sp.)

To date, former US President Donald Trump has faced down three indictments tied to dealings that took place while in his official capacity as commander-in-chief. The trio of cases are currently linked to hush money payments, the mishandling of classified documents and alleged election interference efforts. A looming fourth indictment against former US President Donald Trump may see Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis invoke Georgia’s RICO Act and hit Trump with racketeering charges over his alleged efforts to interfere in the state’s 2020 election results. The state-level act echos much of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, which has largely been used to take down organized crime entities involving mob connections and cartel groups.

Legal scholars noted Willis may utilize the state’s RICO Act as she has a proven success rate in such cases, and because it would allow her to connect various instances in which Trump associates across the US attempted to keep the one-time president in office. Additionally, officials pointed out that Willis early on in her investigation retained John Floyd, who is known as a leading expert on racketeering offenses. “It [invoking Georgia’s RICO Act] gives prosecutors lots of choices as far as venue goes, and it leads to very long complicated trials that wear down defense attorneys,” said Andrew Fleischman, a defense lawyer in Atlanta, to a US media.

The impending grand jury proceedings, scheduled to convene within the next two weeks, will decide whether criminal charges are warranted against Trump and his GOP allies. Already facing federal charges, the election interference case in Georgia proves the second such investigation into the Trump case over the 2020 presidential election. To date, Trump’s legal battles span multiple states, including New York and Florida, where he pleaded not guilty to all charges.

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“The Russians are now fighting with weapons they didn’t have 18 months ago because they didn’t exist 18 months ago.

And that to me is the most impressive thing..”

• Ukraine’s Counteroffensive May ‘Run Its Course in the Next Few Weeks’ (Sp.)

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier said that Kiev’s counteroffensive, which was launched on June 4, has been unsuccessful on all fronts as Russia continues its special military operation in Ukraine. The next few weeks will see the Ukrainian counteroffensive “run its course”, former International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist and Bank of America strategist David Woo has told the Russian media. Woo said that he was “really impressed” with the fact that that “the Russian military technology has literally been going through a revolution every three months” and “the Russians are constantly learning from their mistakes.” “The Russians are now fighting with weapons they didn’t have 18 months ago because they didn’t exist 18 months ago.

And that to me is the most impressive thing, […] whereas the West is still walking around in the same circle, Russia’s getting better and better, and this war is gonna [sic] be won by technology in the end,” the former IMF economist argued. He suggested that even though “the Ukrainians are good fighters,” Russia will eventually “crush them”. According to Woo, “if Russia crushes Ukraine, that will be the end of American hegemony, as we know.” Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive kicked off on June 4 after months of delays over a lack of military supplies from Western donors. Russian President Vladimir Putin underscored last month that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which he said claimed the lives of “tens of thousands” of Ukrainian servicemen, had yielded no results.

“Neither the colossal resources that were pumped into the Kiev regime, nor the supply of Western weapons, tanks, artillery, armored vehicles and missiles helped. The delivery of thousands of foreign mercenaries and advisers who were most actively used in attempts to break through the front of our army did not help either,” Putin told a Russian Security Council meeting at the time. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, for his part, said that “the Kiev regime has no successes” and “is in a very difficult situation.” “The special military operation continues. It is obvious that the counteroffensive is not working out the way it was intended in Kiev,” Peskov told reporters. He was echoed by the Russian Defense Ministry, which in turn, said that Ukrainian troops kept trying, but were failing to advance as they continue to suffer heavy losses in men and materiel. A number of Western media outlets also pointed to the unimpressive results of Kiev’s counteroffensive, admitting that its progress was “slower than desired.”

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‘No Compromise’ = ‘No Ukraine’.

• ‘No Compromise’ With Moscow, Kiev Vows (RT)

The government in Kiev has not given up on its “peace formula” and rejects all compromise positions, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podoliak announced on Monday. His comments came after the Wall Street Journal suggested Ukraine had softened its stance during the peace conference in Saudi Arabia. “The only basic ‘foundation for negotiations’ is President Zelensky’s Peace Formula,” Podoliak tweeted. “There can be no compromise positions such as ‘immediate ceasefires’ and ‘negotiations here and now’ that give Russia time to stay in the occupied territories. Only the withdrawal of Russian troops to the 1991 border.”

Ukraine accuses Russia of “occupying” not just Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson – four regions that chose to join Moscow last year – but also Crimea, which voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia after the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev. “Any scenario of a ceasefire and freezing of the war in Ukraine in the current disposition will mean only one thing – Russia’s actual victory and [President Vladimir] Putin’s personal triumph,” Podoliak added several hours later. “This would be a great defeat for the Western world and the end of the current global security order.”

He also claimed that Moscow would use a “Minsk 3” to rearm and prepare for the “next round” of war, which would return “bigger, bloodier, and better prepared” as soon as “political leaders in key Western countries change.” Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 were ceasefires mediated by Paris and Berlin in 2014 and 2015, after Kiev failed to crush the rebellion in Donetsk and Lugansk by force. The German and French leaders involved in the talks admitted last year that they were buying time so NATO could arm Ukraine for a war against Russia. Podoliak did not specify what prompted his tweets. However, a Wall Street Journal article about the weekend’s talks in Jeddah – which suggested Ukraine had given up on its hardline position – circulated widely on Russian-language social media on Monday.

The talks, to which Russia was not invited, did not appear to accomplish anything. However, the Journal quoted “a senior European official” and two diplomats to report that Ukraine “didn’t push again for its peace plan to be accepted” and “didn’t press the point” about the demand for Russian withdrawal. Moscow has rejected Zelensky’s “peace formula,” a set of ten demands amounting to Russia’s unconditional surrender, as “a useless ultimatum” that only serves to prolong the hostilities. “There can be no negotiation process in the current disposition. The status quo must be changed on the battlefield. This means… more weapons, missiles and aircraft,” Podoliak demanded on Monday afternoon. The US and its allies have already supplied Ukraine with over $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and equipment, arguing that Russia “must lose” while insisting they are not actually involved in the conflict.

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Hard to believe, but probably true. It’s what you get when all you see is propaganda.

• The West Really Believes Russia Is On The Verge Of ‘Collapse’ (Andrey Sushentsov)

The ongoing Western narrative that Russia is constantly on the verge of imminent collapse stems from the persistent perception that the state is vulnerable to internal combustion because of its perceived fragility, vast territory and critical imbalances. The current crisis serves as a serious stress test for Russia. However, in reality, it has already revealed the country’s remarkable adaptability. Moscow’s current strategic foreign-policy objectives have remained unchanged since they were formulated in November-December 2021. Originally intended to be solved through diplomatic channels, they encompass not only Ukraine but also Russia’s broader relations with the US and the West. An agreement could have been reached through negotiations but, unfortunately, the West did not take this route. As a result, Russia has resorted to military means to achieve its vital interests.

Russia’s plans revolve primarily around ensuring the demilitarization of Ukraine and preventing any formal alliance between Kiev and Washington, as well as countering potential military links with the NATO military bloc. Moscow’s determination to get what it wants remains unwavering, and it is prepared to use all available means. If negotiations resume in the future, it is likely that the issues that figured prominently in the November-December 2021 diplomatic contacts will be revisited. Unfortunately, the dominant narrative in Western countries often focuses on Russia’s supposed imminent collapse, ignoring its will to overcome the crisis. This narrative appears to be fueled by Western politicians’ belief in the country’s perceived weaknesses, which encourages the Western establishment not to seek an end to the conflict.

Based on long-term observations of the situation on the ground, especially after the infamous ‘Prigozhin revolt,’ one can conclude that there are still no clear signs of an impending crisis in Russia. On the contrary, the current state of the country has exceeded expectations in many areas – economic, social, demographic and military, given Russia’s ability to stand up to NATO’s formidable military machine. The current crisis situation serves as a serious stress test, assessing Moscow’s ability to make informed decisions, demonstrate social resilience, use resources effectively, adapt its economic model, sustain its political system, manage information strategies and overcome foreign-policy challenges. Undoubtedly, Russia is under enormous pressure and, like any nation state, is subject to factors that reveal both strengths and weaknesses.

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“Businesses that can’t sell anything stop being businesses..”

• Normies Awake! (Kunstler)

What news is suppressed? That the USA is worse than dead broke. That the people were poisoned, apparently on-purpose. That the spectral “Joe Biden” sold out our country. That the war we started in Ukraine, on purpose, for no good reason, is about to be lost, and with it our standing around world. That there actually is such a criminal organism as the Blob at large in our government, responsible for the astounding abnormality immersing us. But never mind all that… for now, just go see Barbie. Have a clam roll, a dip in the ocean, another margarita…. September will be here soon enough.

Eventually, the official perversion of money — especially of borrowing an awesome lot of it with no intention of ever repaying — leads to the unhappy circumstance of money disappearing until nobody has any money. And by such, the broke-ness of the government transmogrifies to a whole land full of broke people. Many banks go broke as well. Even the high-fliers who hoarded things that purport to represent money go broke. Then, nobody has the means to buy anything. Businesses that can’t sell anything stop being businesses. After a while, no activity is meaningful except grubbing in the soil to grow some food, or stealing it from those who grubbed and grew it. By then, you can barely even call it a society.

By September, we’ll have some idea where all that is heading. The bond market is wobbling because the government can’t stop increasing its spending. America issues more and more bonds to borrow ever more money, but to the world’s bond-buyers (a.k.a. lenders), what used to be considered virtually risk-free now looks like a bad bet. So, the enticement to buy, which is called the interest rate, has to go up. But as it goes up, the cash value of existing bonds goes down (who wants the older bonds when the newer ones pay more?)

The holders of bonds are mainly big institutions: banks, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds (other countries). They put their large holdings into bonds because in normal times they are safe and dependable investments. But these are abnormal times. When the value of their bonds goes down a lot, the value of their reserves goes down. And when those reserves get reduced too much in relation to the institutions’ liabilities (what they owe), the institutions go bankrupt. When that happens, the people who are vested in those institutions lose their money, too, and end up having to sell stocks and other property to meet their obligations. This ends up looking like what we call “a crash.” It will get Normies’ attention.

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On their way to becoming the no. 1 party.

• The EU Is A ‘Failed Project’ – Right-wing “Alternative For Germany” Party (RT)

The European Union’s migration, climate, and monetary policies have “completely failed,” according to a policy document adopted by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Sunday. However, the party aims to change the EU from within rather than withdraw from the bloc. AfD delegates adopted the document at a party conference in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Sunday. The paper describes the EU as a “failed project,” and calls for the bloc to be reformed as a “federation of European nations,” with significant sovereignty ceded back to its member states. “The EU and the globalist elites that support it have strayed from the original idea of the founding fathers of a European community adopted many years ago,” the document states, citing the 2007 Lisbon Treaty – which gave the EU the power to act as a single legal entity and made EU law supersede national law – as the moment when the bloc became “an EU super state.”

Among a lengthy list of reforms, the AfD is proposing that the EU strengthen its external borders, lessen its military reliance on the US by following a policy of “strategic autonomy,” and protect the “diversity of cultures and traditions of the peoples of Europe” from immigration. While a draft version of the document released in June called for the “orderly dissolution of the EU,” this language is absent from the final version. The party also chose 35 candidates to contest next year’s European Parliament elections at the Magdeburg conference. The list is led by Maximilian Krah, who has been an MEP since 2019. The AfD currently holds nine seats in the parliament, and is the third-largest German party in the EU legislature.

At home, the AfD is currently polling at a record high of 21%, according to Politico. This figure puts the party ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and behind only former chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). However, Germany’s mainstream parties have repeatedly ruled out entering into coalition with AfD, and a government-funded watchdog group recently called for the party to be banned for its “racist and nationalist” positions. The latest polling figures suggest a doubling in the AfD’s support since 2021, when it garnered 10.3% of votes in the parliamentary elections. This surge in popularity comes as Germany’s economy reels in the wake of Berlin’s decision to impose sanctions on Russia, which was formerly the country’s leading energy supplier. At a rally last year, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla accused Scholz’s government of waging an “economic war” on the German people by cutting the country off from Russian energy imports.

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“This is conclusive evidence that the Ukrainian state is covering up and encouraging this bloody business,” Zakharova stated..”

• Ukraine Leader in Black Market of Human Organ Trafficking – Zakharova (Sp.)

Rampant corruption and lawlessness in Ukraine have effectively turned the country into a veritable paradise for organ traffickers eager to take advantage of cheap and abundant supply of human tissue. While reports about organs being illegally removed from the bodies of the deceased in Ukraine started emerging as early as in the late 1990s amid the decline of the Ukrainian economy , the illicit organ harvesting and trade in the country started becoming more widespread during the 2000s, noted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. In her op-ed in one of the Russian newspapers, Zakharova pointed out that the 2014 coup in Kiev and the armed conflict in Donbass that followed further exacerbated the problem, with OSCE confirming the discovery of the bodies with removed internal organs in mass graves located in the conflict zone.

Things have taken a turn for the worse since the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict in February 2022, while the laws passed by Ukrainian legislators in recent years greatly simplify the work of black market transplant specialists. For example, Zakharova points out, the Law No. 5831 passed by the Ukrainian parliament on December 16, 2021, effectively waives the requirement for a written consent of a living donor or their relatives for organ donation. “There is no need to authenticate signatures, either. In effect, even the removal of organs from children is permitted. The procedure for removing organs from the deceased who did not consent to donation while living has been significantly simplified,” Zakharova surmised.

She added that, under the Ukrainian legislation, the person responsible for the burial of a deceased, such as a head doctor at a hospital or a military unit’s commander, could grant permission for the removal of tissues from the corpse. Furthermore, private clinics in the country have also been granted the right to perform transplantation, while the Law No. 5610 adopted by Ukraine’s parliament on April 14, 2022, made transplantation exempt from VAT. Posthumous organ donations and the sale of human organs abroad have also been legalized in Ukraine. Massive casualties taken by Ukraine’s Armed Forces amid the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict resulted in a steady supply of fresh corpses that could be harvested for organs, leading to the emergence of hearts, livers, kidneys and other body parts of slain Ukrainian soldiers on the darknet marketplaces, Zakharova noted citing media reports.

One black market dealer reportedly claimed that a heart could be procured quickly for €25,000 while kidneys may be obtained for €12,000. The delivery, limited to the EU countries, would be made in a medical box within 48 to 60 hours, either to a predetermined location or directly to the recipient. Zakharova also claimed that people related to the infamous Kosovo Liberation Army – a militant group whose members faced allegations of illegal organ harvesting in the past – may own this illicit organ marketplace or at least have dealings with it. Aside from Ukrainian soldiers, the children of Ukraine also risk falling prey to illicit organ traffickers. For example, in June 2023 a member of a certain charity was detained on the border between Ukraine and Slovakia.

According to Zakharova, the detainee was involved in the trafficking of Ukrainian children abroad, with some of these children trafficked for the purpose of organ transplantation. Despite the severity of the accusations against him, the suspect was released on a 1 million hryvnias (about $27,000) bail and promptly disappeared. “This is conclusive evidence that the Ukrainian state is covering up and encouraging this bloody business,” Zakharova stated, adding that people close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may be involved in this sordid trade.

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Sickos.

• UK’s NHS Raises Age For Government-Funded Transgender Treatments To Seven (ZH)

Children covered by the services will be offered psychological support and therapy to focus on issues that may have led to feelings concerning their gender, however health experts warn that the new rule could still put children with mental health struggles on a “pathway to medical transition.” The concerns are amplified by the potential consequences of labeling a child’s difficulties as gender-related, potentially pushing them towards a predetermined path of treatment. The decision to implement these changes stems from the NHS’ decision to shutter the Tavistock transgender clinic. Dr. Hilary Cass’ review deemed the clinic as unsafe, raising concerns that young individuals were being rapidly pushed into a medical framework without adequate consideration of alternative factors such as autism and mental health.

“The clinic is being replaced by a set of regional centres that will be led by medical doctors, rather than therapists, and consider the impact of other conditions such as autism and mental health issues. The move came amid growing concern about the impact of gender ideology on children, including in schools where some were being socially transitioned without their parents’ consent. NHS England said that a new service was needed because there was “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making” at the Tavistock clinic.” -Telegraph

The shift in approach reflects the growing unease around the impact of gender ideology on children. Reports of children undergoing social transitions without parental consent in schools have fueled concerns over the potential consequences of premature interventions. While the move toward evidence-based decision-making is welcomed by many, questions linger about the potential long-term effects of early intervention. Critics argue that more research is needed to fully understand the ramifications of puberty blockers, especially for young patients whose bodies and minds are still developing.

Under the new plans, “Children under seven years of age may not be expected to have sufficiently developed their intellectual understanding of, and comprehension of, sex and gender to be able to understand the reasons for, and potential consequences of, a referral to a specialist gender incongruence service.”” But, according to the UK, by the age of seven, children will “be more established within school, and education professionals and school nurses will be able to contribute to a general observational view as to the appropriateness of a referral.” Right. Previously, children as young as three were being treated by Tavistock, with an average of three children under the age of seven having been referred each month.

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“..scared at times for my safety and, overwhelmingly, for my family’s safety.”

For saying a woman is a woman. Why not try to ban her work outright?

• Museum Bans JK Rowling From Harry Potter Exhibit (RT)

The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle has removed any references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling from an exhibition celebrating the fictional wizard, due to her “super hateful and divisive” comments about the transgender community. “There’s a certain cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity in the world of Harry Potter and, this time, it is not actually a Dementor,” the exhibit’s project manager Chris Moore, who is transgender, wrote in a blog explaining the decision to axe Rowling from the museum. Moore added: “This certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored.” The blog post also explained that the series creator’s absence is a short-term measure to “reduce her impact” while the museum determines its “long-term practices.”

According to the Daily Mail newspaper, the Harry Potter exhibit remains on display but without any mention whatsoever about the creator of the series, which has sold over 500 million books globally since 1997. JK Rowling was inducted into the museum’s hall of fame in 2018. In a statement, the museum said that it is “proud to support our employees and unequivocally stands with the nonbinary and transgender communities.” Rowling initially courted controversy in 2019 when she issued a message on social media in support of a British woman who’d lost her job after she herself tweeted that a woman could not change her biological sex. “I absolutely knew that if I spoke out, many people who love my books would be deeply unhappy with me,” the author said in a podcast interview earlier this year. She added that the backlash against her views has led to her being “scared at times for my safety and, overwhelmingly, for my family’s safety.”

Rowling was absent last year at events to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book – with each of the film series’ three stars having expressed their opposition to her statements about transgender people. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played Harry Potter in the eight movies that have taken in more than $7.7 billion at the box office globally, said that he was “hurt” by Rowling’s comments. Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley, also said, “Trans women are women, trans men are men,” while Emma Watson announced a donation to a transgender charity in the wake of Rowling’s comments. Rowling is one of the world’s most successful authors. In 2008, nine years after the release of the first Harry Potter book, she was named by Forbes magazine as the world’s highest-paid author.

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koi

 

 

Eat bugs

 

 

Hey Joe

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 21 2020

Sep 212020
 
 September 21, 2020  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


Ray K. Metzker Europe 1961

 

• Leak Shows Biggest Western Banks Finance Cartels, Terrorists & Mobsters (ZH)
• Can We, Like, Stop Praising Sweden Now? (MB)
• How COVID-19 Spreads (CDC)
• People Not Rushing Back to Movie Theaters (NBCW)
• Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky Home Targeted In Supreme Court Protest (Fox)
• The War on Populism: The Final Act (CJ Hopkins)
• Hunter Biden Is “Riding The Dragon” (ZH)
• Biden’s Foreign Policy Advisors Loyal to Israel, Defense Contractors (CP)
• Down the 1619 Project’s Memory Hole (Quillette)
• JK Rowling’s Books Burned or Banned Around the World (Turley)
• World’s Richest 1% Cause Double CO2 Emissions Of Poorest 50% – Oxfam (G.)
• Ilargi: Why Trump Will Win (Yves Smith)

 

 

US new deaths lowest since July 5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biden 200 million

 

 

Lots of questions. My first and immediate one was: would this have been leaked to Assange if he had been available, and not to, of all places, BuzzFeed? Second: will the journalists and publishers (BBC et al) involved, now be treated the same way Assange has? There will be much more on this, but do keep watching out for criminal investigations. That will say a lot.

• Leak Shows Biggest Western Banks Finance Cartels, Terrorists & Mobsters (ZH)

In what looks like one of the biggest leaks of private banking records since the Panama Papers, Buzzfeed News has published a lengthy investigation into how the world’s biggest banks allow dirty money from organized criminals, drug cartels, and terror groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban to flow through their networks. The “FinCEN Files”, as Buzzfeed calls them, offer “a never-before-seen picture of corruption and complicity.” A lengthy investigation by Buzzfeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – the same group that handled the Mossack Fonseca leaks – Instead of combating financial crime, the current system of requiring banks to report all suspicious transactions to FinCen simply allows money laundering to flourish, while ensuring that any enforcement will be of the ‘whack-a-mole’ variety.

“These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees. Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations — and the banks play a key role. “Some of these people in those crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,” said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.

Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, is the agency within the Treasury Department charged with combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. It collects millions of these suspicious activity reports, known as SARs. It makes them available to US law enforcement agencies and other nations’ financial intelligence operations. It even compiles a report called “Kleptocracy Weekly” that summarizes the dealings of foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin. What it does not do is force the banks to shut the money laundering down.”

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Let’s.

• Can We, Like, Stop Praising Sweden Now? (MB)

I don’t expect the virus psychos to listen but here is the chart, courtesy of Greg Jericho at The Fake Left:

Sweden and EL Trumpo, hand in hand. Unleash the virus and unleash the economic decline.

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CDC update. Seemed easier as a pic. Do they still have any credibility left? You know, after Redfield’s “Act for one Man and one Mask”?

• How COVID-19 Spreads (CDC)

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Common sense. Works better than any lockdown.

• People Not Rushing Back to Movie Theaters (NBCW)

About three quarters of the country’s movie theaters are open, but Americans are not going back in significant numbers in the COVID-era, even with new films coming into the marketplace weekly. The biggest movies continue to limp along. According to studio estimates Sunday, Warner Bros.’ “Tenet” earned $4.7 million in its third weekend from nearly 2,930 locations, Disney’s “The New Mutants” added $1.6 million in its fourth weekend, “Unhinged” brought in $1.3 million and Sony’s rom-com “The Broken Hearts Gallery” picked up an additional $800,000 in its second frame. And newcomers aren’t faring any better. The faith-based “Infidel,” which stars Jim Caviezel, did the best with $1.5 million from just over 1,700 theaters.


This weekend also saw the limited release of two adult dramas, IFC’s “The Nest,” with Jude Law and Carrie Coon, and Bleecker Street’s “The Secrets We Keep,” with Noomi Rapace. Both played in under 500 theaters across the country and neither got much more than $200 per location. “The Nest” earned an estimated $62,000 from 301 locations and “The Secrets We Keep” brought in just under $90,000 from 471 theaters. “There’s no question that this is an extraordinarily challenging marketplace, especially for North America,” said Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst. “This is a slow roll out. It’s going to take some time.”

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Stay away from people’s homes and families.

But what curious details in the article, feels like a small town daily:

“After facing the towing of her vehicle, the woman went inside the store and bought a six-pack of beer but police arrested her anyway, the report said. The arrest prompted other protesters to start chanting, and one member of the crowd kicked a glass door and damaged it, the newspaper reported. Other protesters agreed to move vehicles that were blocking traffic on a nearby street, following a police request.”

• Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky Home Targeted In Supreme Court Protest (Fox)

At least one protester was arrested Saturday after a group of about 100 people gathered outside the Kentucky home of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader is a key figure in determining whether a nominee appointed by President Trump will succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court before Election Day. “Ruth Sent Us,” and “No Ethics No Shame,” read some of the signs carried by crowd members in Louisville, local FOX station WDRB-TV reported. “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Mitch McConnell has got to go,” others chanted. Reports were unclear on whether McConnell was at home in Kentucky or in Washington on Saturday.


In addition to the impending battle over the court vacancy, McConnell, 78 – a member of the Senate since 1985 — also faces a reelection fight on Kentucky’s November ballot. One protester was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and improper parking, after police determined she used a pharmacy parking lot without planning to patronize the store, the Courier Journal of Louisville reported. After facing the towing of her vehicle, the woman went inside the store and bought a six-pack of beer but police arrested her anyway, the report said. The arrest prompted other protesters to start chanting, and one member of the crowd kicked a glass door and damaged it, the newspaper reported. Other protesters agreed to move vehicles that were blocking traffic on a nearby street, following a police request.

2016/2020
https://twitter.com/i/status/1307877608487628802

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“..our protagonist is GloboCap (i.e., the global capitalist empire), or “democracy,” as it is known in the entertainment business.”

• The War on Populism: The Final Act (CJ Hopkins)

So, it appears the War on Populism is building toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color revolution, and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters … you couldn’t really ask for much more. OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won’t spoil our viewing experience. The fun isn’t in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what’s going to happen. The fun is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or “the moderate rebels,” or the GloboCap “Resistance,” take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or whatever.

The show-runners at GloboCap understand this, and they are sticking to the classic Act III formula (i.e., the one they teach in all those scriptwriting seminars, which, full disclosure, I teach a few of those). They’ve been running the War on Populism by the numbers since the very beginning. I’m going to break that down in just a moment, act by act, plot point by plot point, but, first, let’s quickly cover the basics. The first thing every big Hollywood action picture (or GloboCap color revolution) needs is a solid logline to build the plot around. The logline shows us: (1) our protagonist, (2) what our protagonist is trying to do, and (3) our antagonist or antagonistic force. For example, here’s one everyone will recognize: “A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.”

In our case, the logline writes itself: “After America is taken over by a Russian-backed Hitlerian dictator, the forces of democracy unite to depose the tyrant and save the free world.” Donald Trump is our antagonist, of course. And what an antagonist he has been! As the deep-state spooks and the corporate media have been relentlessly repeating for the last four years, the man is both a Russian-backed traitor and literally the resurrection of Hitler! In terms of baddies, it doesn’t get any better. It goes without saying that our protagonist is GloboCap (i.e., the global capitalist empire), or “democracy,” as it is known in the entertainment business.

Now, we’re in the middle of Act III already, and, as in every big-budget action movie, our protagonist suffered a series of mounting losses all throughout Act II, and the baddie was mostly driving the action. Now it’s time for the Final Push, but, before all the action gets underway, here’s a quick recap of those previous acts. Ready? All right, here we go …

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Full 40 minute movie. is Hunter’s basement the one below Joe’s?

• Hunter Biden Is “Riding The Dragon” (ZH)

In the lead-up to the November election political investigator and author Peter Schweizer, who currently heads the Florida-based Government Accountability Institute, has unveiled a bombshell exposé presenting damning evidence of Hunter and his father Joe Biden’s shady and hidden financial dealings with China. Directed by Matthew Taylor, whose prior works include Clinton Cash and Creepy Line, the 41-minute film entitled “Riding the Dragon: The Bidens’ Chinese Secrets,” details a pile of corporate records, financial documents, legal briefings as well as court papers which tie Hunter’s firm with a major Chinese defense contractor, namely Aviation Industry Corp. of China (AVIC), and multiple other PLA linked companies.


“It’s a relationship that grew while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States and shortly after he was appointed the point person on U.S. policy towards China,” Schweizer, who narratives the film, described upon the documentary’s release earlier this month. “This new firm started making investment deals that would serve the strategic interests of the Chinese military.” “It’s the story of the second most powerful man in the world at the time and how his family was striking deals with America’s chief rival on the global stage, the People’s Republic of China,” he added.

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“Biden’s campaign is so beholden to AIPAC that they have adopted racist tropes to define Palestinians, the same tropes used to justify apartheid policies.”

• Biden’s Foreign Policy Advisors Loyal to Israel, Defense Contractors (CP)

When Donald Trump was elected president, the foreign policy apparatus that Barack Obama’s administration built did not disappear. The power brokers went to think tanks and lobbying firms, cashing in on the uncertainty with help from defense contractors and other corporations. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s potential foreign policy would likely be a continuation of Obama’s aggressive approach with the use of extrajudicial killings and jailing of asylum seekers. Advisors have made clear that Biden would have no intention of making military aid to Israel conditional on Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians. Michèle Flournoy, a front-runner for Biden’s pick for Secretary of Defense, is already considered something of a glass ceiling breaker as the highest-ranking woman to have served as a Senate-confirmed Presidential appointee in the Pentagon.

In 2011 the Washington Post described her as “tall and slender with a regal manner” and “known for being extremely poised and rarely showing emotion.” In 2018, Flournoy co-founded WestExec advisors with Biden foreign policy advisor Antony Blinken, Former Deputy Secretary of State. Blinken, who is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and global affairs analyst at CNN, is on leave from the firm to focus on the presidential campaign. The firm is a group of senior national security professionals who advise corporations, including former CIA deputy director David S. Cohen and Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel. WestExec does not disclose its clients, but according to the American Prospect, they work with Israeli artificial intelligence company Windward.

In July, as part of the Democratic National Committee, Shapiro called on members to oppose a measure to condition U.S. aid to Israel so “no US aid may be used to facilitate annexation or to violate Palestinians rights.” The measure was rejected by a wide margin. “While we understand that those concerns have not been addressed to the full satisfaction of all parties, we believe we have taken significant and overdue strides while sustaining the unity of our Party,” Shapiro said. Vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris has drawn criticism in the past for her relationship with the Israeli government. In May 2019, she met with representatives of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) from California in her Senate office after saying she would not attend the conference. Her campaign communications director said at the time that “her support for Israel is central to who she is.”

In 2017, Harris visited Israel, where she was photographed speaking with two members of the Israel Defense Forces in front of a Raytheon Iron Dome missile defense battery. She visited a cybersecurity development program run by the Israeli Defense Forces, the Israeli National Cyber Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office, and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Finally, she met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem the day after he had announced a plan to deport 40,000 African asylum seekers. She told AIPAC the same year: “[The] first resolution I co-sponsored as a United States senator was to combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations and reaffirm that the United States seeks a just, secure, and sustainable two-state solution.” Abed Ayoub, the legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), told the Middle East Eye: “Biden’s campaign is so beholden to AIPAC that they have adopted racist tropes to define Palestinians, the same tropes used to justify apartheid policies.”

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Rewriting history is not as easy as it may seem.

• Down the 1619 Project’s Memory Hole (Quillette)

The history of the American Revolution isn’t the only thing the New York Times is revising through its 1619 Project. The “paper of record” has also taken to quietly altering the published text of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism. When the 1619 Project went to print in August 2019 as a special edition of the New York Times Magazine, the newspaper put up an interactive version on its website. The original opening text stated: The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

The passage, and in particular its description of the year 1619 as “our true founding,” quickly became a flashpoint for controversy around the project. Critics on both the Left and Right took issue with the paper’s declared intention of displacing 1776 with the alternative date—a point that was also emphasized in the magazine feature’s graphics, showing the date of American independence crossed out and replaced by the date of the first slave ship’s arrival in Jamestown, Virginia. For several months after the 1619 Project first launched, its creator and organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on the claim. “I argue that 1619 is our true founding,” she tweeted the week after the project launched. “Also, look at the banner pic in my profile”—a reference to the graphic of the date 1776 crossed out with a line. It’s a claim she repeated many times over.

But something changed as the historical controversies around the 1619 Project intensified in late 2019 and early 2020. A group of five distinguished historians took issue with Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, focusing on its historically unsupported claim that protecting slavery was a primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. Other details of the project soon came under scrutiny, revealing both errors of fact and dubious interpretations of evidence in other essays, such as Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project piece attempting to connect American capitalism with slavery. Finally back in March, a historian who the Times recruited to fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay revealed that she had warned the paper against publishing its claims about the motives of the American Revolution on account of their weak evidence. The 1619 Project’s editors ignored the advice.

Throughout the controversy, the line about the year 1619 being “our true founding” continued to haunt the Times. This criticism did not aim to denigrate the project’s titular date or the associated events in the history of slavery. Rather, the passage came to symbolize the Times’s blurring of historical analysis with editorial hyperbole. The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles. Rather than address this controversy directly, the Times—it now appears—decided to send it down the memory hole—the euphemized term for selectively editing inconvenient passages out of old newspaper reports in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Without announcement or correction, the newspaper quietly edited out the offending passage such that it now reads: The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

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Rewriting history 2.0. Harry Potter meets George Orwell. It feels an eternity ago that I wrote “No More Washington or America”, about once you get started, there is no end.

• JK Rowling’s Books Burned or Banned Around the World (Turley)

In Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore told the students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.” Many are learning the truth of that line written by famed author JK Rowling as self-described progressives burn her books or ban them from shelves because she personally holds an opposing view of gender. Much like the boycott movement of Chick-Fil-A over comments by its CEO, people are seeking to punish Rowling through attacks on her literature. We previously discussed the embracing of art destruction as analogous to book burning, but now actual book burning is being embraced as a weapon of the woke.

A TikTok series show people around the world burning copies of Rowlings’ books. In one video of a burning pile of books by TikTok user @elmcdo, a voice is heard saying “You have to stop using ‘death of the author’ as an excuse to have your cake and eat it too. While the reader’s perspective is an important part of interpretation and meaning, it is impossible to completely divorce a work from its creator. The positive impact that J.K. Rowling’s work had on millions of readers does not negate how her hateful lobbying has affected the trans community.” That sums up the logic of every book burner in history. You cannot read a book because of the views or religion or identity of the author. It is better to burn the book to protect society.

Then there is Rabble Books and Games in Maylands, Perth. The owner owner Nat Latter proudly declared on Facebook that he had removed all fo the Harry Potter books from bookshelves to guarantee “a safer space for our community.” So you can buy a Rowlings book by having it retrieved from behind the back room like pornography. It is a form of censoring by making it more difficult to buy some books rather than others because you disfavor authors with opposing views. Latter seems to relish the role of a book censoring book seller: “Whilst stocking a book isn’t an endorsement (good grief, that would be a minefield), and we will always take orders for books that aren’t in stock, there are more worthy books to put on the shelf, books that don’t harm communities and won’t make us sad to unpack them.”

Does Latter also hide works with opposing views on gender from the Bible to the Koran to classic novels? Indeed, why not pull all of the work of authors like Hemingway and others for their views of women or race relations or other issues? Book sellers used to be people who wants to be gateways to knowledge and a world of different ideas and values. Now readers are being protected from even seeing the name of an author who personally holds opposing or offensive views. [..] These actions only prove again what Albus Dumbledore said (and J.K. Rowling wrote): “Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.”

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Not in the least surprising. The poorest half, 3.5 billion people, are good for just 7% of emissions.

• World’s Richest 1% Cause Double CO2 Emissions Of Poorest 50% – Oxfam (G.)

The wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, according to new research. Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 60% over the 25-year period, but the increase in emissions from the richest 1% was three times greater than the increase in emissions from the poorest half. The report, compiled by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, warned that rampant overconsumption and the rich world’s addiction to high-carbon transport are exhausting the world’s “carbon budget”.

Such a concentration of carbon emissions in the hands of the rich means that despite taking the world to the brink of climate catastrophe, through burning fossil fuels, we have still failed to improve the lives of billions, said Tim Gore, head of policy, advocacy and research at Oxfam International. “The global carbon budget has been squandered to expand the consumption of the already rich, rather than to improve humanity,” he told the Guardian. “A finite amount of carbon can be added to the atmosphere if we want to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. We need to ensure that carbon is used for the best.”

The richest 10% of the global population, comprising about 630 million people, were responsible for about 52% of global emissions over the 25-year period, the study showed. Globally, the richest 10% are those with incomes above about $35,000 (£27,000) a year, and the richest 1% are people earning more than about $100,000.

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Yves posted my essay from yesterday at Naked Capitalism, with this interesting comment. I know some people here feel poorly treated at NC, but I never have, and Yves and I have had a solid relationship for 12 years or so.

• Ilargi: Why Trump Will Win (Yves Smith)

Yves here. As Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway said: “The good thing about someone else’s prejudices is that they either confirm your own, or they make you cross – either of which is a blessing in these bland times.” Here Ilargi reveals a bias…but not, as some might suggest, of being pro-Trump, but of seeing this Presidential election as being personality-driven. I doubt that is correct, which is one of the many factors that makes this contest too difficult to call despite Trump lagging in polls. Historically, marketers did not like “psychographic” market segmentations because they would cross demographic and geographic lines, which made it difficult to target prospects cost-effectively.

With the Internet creating social media outlets that cater to people with particular views, like lovin’ gunz or believing in Russiagate, suddenly that sort of segmentation is not only viable but may actually be attractive. As readers know well, Sanders was running on policy, not personality. As one friend said, Sanders has all the charm of your cranky Jewish uncle telling you to take your feet off the coffee table. Under prodding, he did make some small efforts in his 2020 campaign to seem less scold-y by smiling more and telling a bit of his life story. And as readers also know, Sanders had strong support among young voters. The Democratic party leadership beat Sanders not by having better policies or a more appealing a candidate, but by using what amounts to machine politics: rallying different voter blocs that are loyal to the party either by design or default.

The extension of the machine policy mindset is the Democratic party strategm of invoking tribalism. This is particularly effective because their core, the professional-managerial class, is so convinced of its right to rule via merit that it is almost incapable of seeing itself as a class (see Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal for a brilliant description of its ethnography). But its shadow side, in Jungian terms, of the PMC is its stereotype of the white working class. In their minds, this uneducated, undisciplined lot is getting what it deserves, and having them have influence is an affront to the proper ordering of society. Hillary’s “deplorables” remark was no accident. Time recapped what she said:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.” “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said. What is the subtext of Hillary’s remark? That Trump’s voters are lower income and less educated. The less educated part is correct, the lower income is not.

[..] What about the general election? A few weeks ago, the American National Election Study — the longest-running election survey in the United States — released its 2016 survey data. And it showed that in November 2016, the Trump coalition looked a lot like it did during the primaries…many of the voters without college educations who supported Trump were relatively affluent. It isn’t hard to imagine that higher income/less educated voters would resent the preening of the credentialed elites and would find Trump’s total lack of respect for what they hold dear to be attractive. But the gods look to have handed Biden a gift with the timing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. It’s galvanizing Democratic Party donations and will probably persuade some voters who weren’t terribly keen about Biden to go to the effort of voting for him.

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