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Debt Rattle October 28 2024

Oct 282024
 
 October 28, 2024  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  71 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh On the Outskirts of Paris 1887

 

• CNN Data Analyst: Trump On Course To Win Popular Vote (MN)
• Desperate Deep State Wants War & Martial Law – Martin Armstrong (USAW)
• Musk Accuses Biden Of Lying About His ‘Illegal’ Work (RT)
• Musk Hopes To Cut US Budget By ‘At Least $2 Trillion’ (RT)
• Trump Promises Not To Fight Foreign Wars (RT)
• Former Vatican Ambassador: Kamala “An Infernal Monster Who Obeys Satan” (MN)
• Trump and Harris Are Fighting Over The ‘McDonald’s Vote’ (Marsden)
• US Unable to Operate Modified B-52s Before 2033 (Sp.)
• BRICS Summit Will Eventually Be Seen As A Milestone (Lukyanov)
• Americans Are More Dependent Than Ever on Government Handouts (ET)
• Gun and Torts Liability to Collide in Mexican Case Before the SCOTUS (Turley)
• UK Refuses To Discuss Slave Trade Compensation (RT)
• Serbian President Calls Russian Central Bank Chief ‘A Genius’ (RT)
• Zelensky Allows Foreign Mercenaries To Serve As Ukrainian Army Officers (RT)
• US Envoy’s Diplomatic Cover For Israeli Expansion (Raiss)
• A Stunning De-Capitation? The Netanyahu “Madness” (Alastair Crooke)
• Entire Northern Gaza Population At Risk Of Dying – UN (RT)

 

 

 

 

Maga

Trump ad

Jordan Peterson on Trump X-men team


https://twitter.com/i/status/1850290385597182100

Rogan after Trump

Trump ad

JD

Elon

Macgregor

Virginia

Big Mike

O’Leary

 

 

 

 

Not at Polymarket. There, Trump is at 42% vs Kamala’s 58%. But the popular vote doesn’t decide the election.

• CNN Data Analyst: Trump On Course To Win Popular Vote (MN)

CNN’s data analyst Harry Enten suggested Friday that Donald Trump could be on course to win the popular vote on November 5th. That hasn’t happened for a Republican candidate for 20 years. If it happens, Trump will almost certainly win the electoral college and the election. Enten noted that a New York Times/Siena College poll was released last week showing Trump tied with Kamala Harris at 48% in the national popular vote. “Everyone has been talking about this idea that Trump may win in the Electoral College, but Kamala Harris may win the popular vote, but Trump may finally get his great white whale,” Enten stated. He added that Wall Street Journal and CNBC polls also have Trump ahead of Harris in the popular vote.

“Part of my job is to warn our viewers, on either side of the aisle, of an event that may occur, that they don’t necessarily like, and Donald Trump winning the popular vote could ABSOLUTELY happen,” Enten urged. He added “You might as well wrap your minds around it now folks if you don’t like Donald Trump,” noting that Democrat supporters heads are currently “exploding.” The RCP average has Trump in the lead for the popular vote for the first time in his political career by two points. If he did it, Trump would only be the second Republican in 36 years to win the popular vote.

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”This is why they want war . . . so they can default on everything. . . They take us to war, and there goes Social Security and everything else.“

• Desperate Deep State Wants War & Martial Law – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong says we are getting down to the wire with the 2024 Election, and the Deep State Dems are in panic mode. Could we have a false flag, martial law, debt crisis, default, war or all of the above? Armstrong says, “They want war. There is no question about that. . . . Lindsey Graham was on Face the Nation a couple of months ago, and he slipped and told the truth for once. He said there was a $10 trillion to $12 trillion natural gas asset under Crimea, and we can’t allow Russia and China to get that. . . . This is like Iraq. We are going after the oil.”

On martial law, Armstrong says, “I am very concerned about martial law. . . . They (Supreme Court) have kind of hinted that martial law is a common law type thing. When the courts are closed, then you have martial law. It is justified under ‘necessity.’ This is what the Supreme Court has said. So, I am very concerned that these neocons are so desperate that they are definitely going to try to create some sort of a false flag or anything they can do perhaps the last week in October going into the election.” On the war front, we just had Israel bomb Iran, and NATO is still poking Russia. Armstrong says, “NATO is a retirement home for neocons. It should have been shut down. They are trying to take the world into World War III. They are now raising a $100 billion so they can continue the war against Russia in case Trump is elected.”

Armstrong is still seeing Trump winning in 2024 in a “landslide.” Kamala Harris is going the other way. A few months back, Armstrong said Kamala’s real approval rating was 10.5%. Armstrong says he just ran new Kamala Harris approval ratings with his Socrates computer program. Armstrong says, “It’s actually down to 6.5% to 7.5%. It’s really appalling.” Armstrong says Kamala has “negative coattails,” which will spell big losses for Democrats down ballot in November. On the economy, Armstrong says, “We are in this debt Ponzi scheme where they issue new debt every year to pay off the old debt. People say the debt is $34 trillion, but the level of the debt does not matter.

It could be a quadrillion dollars. . . China holds 10% of America’s debt. They sold $53 billion at the beginning of the year. This is where the danger comes. If you don’t have someone to take up what China is not buying, guess what? You can’t pay, and when you can’t pay, that’s when a default comes. This is why they want war . . . so they can default on everything. . . They take us to war, and there goes Social Security and everything else.” On the 2024 Election, Armstrong says, “The 2024 Election will be the last election. . . The US will break up into three or four sections. . . We are committing suicide. . . This is how governments die. . . Gold goes up when people lose confidence in government. This is why central banks want gold. They are afraid of governments defaulting on their debt in war. . . In the war, we lose it next time. They want terrorism so they can lock us down. This is the future we face.”

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Talk about desperate. They trot out the alleged “US President” with complete lies… There’ll be more of this the next 10 days. Biden has nothing to lose, they can make him say anything.

• Musk Accuses Biden Of Lying About His ‘Illegal’ Work (RT)

Elon Musk has denounced Joe Biden for saying the businessman had been an “illegal worker” before he became the wealthiest man in the world. The incumbent US president was accusing the billionaire of being hypocritical regarding immigration. In response to the claims, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO made posts accusing the incumbent president outright lying and saying “losing the election was making the Democrats desperate.” “I was in fact allowed to work in the US. The Biden puppet is lying,” Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “They know this, as they have all my records.” “So NOW he cares about illegals,” he quipped in conclusion. Biden’s remarks, made on Saturday, followed a Washington Post report that alleged, citing Musk’s former business associates, court records and documents, that the businessman obtained a work visa in 1996 after he had already been working in the country without one.

At the time, the billionaire was launching his startup Zip2, an IT-company that provided and licensed online city guide software for newspapers. “That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here when he was here,” Biden said at a campaign event in support of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “He was supposed to be in a school, when he came on a student visa. He was working. He was violating the law and he’s talking about all these illegals.” The tech entrepreneur, who is currently backing Republican candidate Donald Trump, had previously accused the Democrats of bringing a large number of illegal immigrants to swing states. Each of the two major US political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, dominates dozens of states in the country.

However, voters are more evenly divided in the remaining ‘swing’ or ‘battleground’ states, making them key to winning the election. “Triple digit increases over the past 4 years! Their STATED plan is to give them citizenship as soon as possible, turning all swing states Dem,” Musk stated earlier this week in a post on X. Musk, who had previously positioned himself as politically neutral, publicly endorsed the Republican nominee shortly after the failed assassination attempt on Trump on July 13. The former president has promised to create a new government post called ‘secretary of cost-cutting’ tailored specifically for Musk if he wins.

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“..the only thing we’ll be able to pay is interest.”

• Musk Hopes To Cut US Budget By ‘At Least $2 Trillion’ (RT)

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made an appearance at a Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, promising to save American taxpayers trillions of dollars under his hypothetical second administration. Despite previously proclaiming his political neutrality, Musk has leaned towards Trump in recent months, publicly endorsing him after the first assassination attempt. Following this, Trump promised that if he wins the November election, he will establish a “government efficiency” commission headed by the billionaire entrepreneur. As he walked on stage in New York on Sunday, Musk was asked, “How much do you think we can cut from this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” “I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Musk replied, eliciting loud cheers from the crowd.

“At the end of the day, all government spending is taxation. Whether it’s direct taxation or government spending, it either leads to inflation or becomes direct taxation.” Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that! We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook! When the former US president proposed creating DOGE, he stated it would be an independent force “tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for the drastic reforms we need.” Neither Trump nor Musk specified how exactly the panel would operate or which specific policies it would eliminate or implement.

The tech billionaire has repeatedly sounded the alarm over U.S. debt, warning just last week that the country is spiraling toward bankruptcy and will quickly go bust if Washington doesn’t curb its spending. In September, he wrote that every trillion dollars of debt added is money that “our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay somehow.” If debt continues to grow at this pace, Musk warned, the US will be trapped in a vicious cycle where “the only thing we’ll be able to pay is interest.” Earlier this month, Musk told American journalist Tucker Carlson that he has bet “all in” on Donald Trump winning the US presidential election in November; if Trump loses, he is “f**ked” and will probably end up in jail.

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“You don’t have to send your kids out to war, have your kid blown up for a country that you’ve never heard of, and that doesn’t want anything to do with you anyway.”

• Trump Promises Not To Fight Foreign Wars (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump promised not to send Americans to fight and die in countries they have never heard of while addressing a crowd in the battleground state of Pennsylvania this weekend. Speaking at a campaign rally on Saturday, Trump once again claimed he is the only one capable of preventing an all-out global conflict, arguing that his Democratic rival Kamala Harris “would get us into World War III, guaranteed, because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.” “To make her president would be to gamble with the lives of millions of people. Sons and daughters will end up getting drafted to fight in a war in a country you’ve never heard of,” he said. In his nomination acceptance speech earlier this year, Trump vowed to “end every single international crisis that the current administration has created,” particularly the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts.

He never offered specific plans to bring about world peace, but repeatedly warned that by supporting and financing “other people’s wars” under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the US is increasing the likelihood of sliding into WWIII. Last week, Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that “if Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to war.” “But I will not send you to fight and die in a foolish, never-ending foreign war,” he told the crowd on Saturday. You don’t have to send your kids out to war, have your kid blown up for a country that you’ve never heard of, and that doesn’t want anything to do with you anyway.

The Republican has repeatedly promised to end the Ukraine conflict within 24 hours of being elected, before even being sworn into office, by forcing both sides into negotiations. Harris, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, has criticized Trump’s approach, claiming he would essentially force Kiev to surrender. The Kremlin has cast doubt on Trump’s promises of peace, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggesting that he does not “think there is a magic wand” that can stop the fighting overnight. Trump also claimed that he could have prevented last year’s October 7 Hamas incursion into Israel, telling podcaster Joe Rogan that when he was president, he made sure Tehran had no money to fund its proxies.

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“The choice is between a conservative President, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan.”

• Former Vatican Ambassador: Kamala “An Infernal Monster Who Obeys Satan” (MN)

Former Vatican Roman Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò endorsed Donald Trump for president this week, urging that Kamala Harris represents “an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and anti-human vision of society.” Viganò, who was the Vatican’s ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, writes in a letter to Catholics “The choice is between a conservative President, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan.” “For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy,” he further asserts.

https://twitter.com/CarloMVigano/status/1848670426924302813

A vote for Trump “means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and anti-human vision of society,” Viganò continues, adding “It means stopping those who want to create a hellish dystopia that is even worse than the one announced by George Orwell.” Viganò urges that Trump is “the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.” The former archbishop further describes Harris as a George Soros “puppet,” who is controlled directly by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Viganò was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in July after repeatedly voicing opposition to the current Pope and modern changes made to the Roman Catholic Church. He was extremely outspoken in opposing COVID vaccines, charging that public health authorities were conducting “experimentation on the entire world population,” and slamming the Catholic church for going along with it.

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“McDonald’s is acting like the country of Switzerland in a war – or a girl being fought over for a prom date.”

• Trump and Harris Are Fighting Over The ‘McDonald’s Vote’ (Marsden)

Times sure have changed. It used to be that US presidential candidates argued about who best served in the military. Now, it’s about who best served up fries. The “McDonald’s vote” has arguably never mattered more than it does in this election. Republican former (and potential future) President Donald Trump showed up at a McDonald’s franchise in Feasterville, Pennsylvania recently, tied on an apron and worked the drive-thru window serving up french fries. He joked that after 15 minutes, he had worked longer at McDonald’s than his Democratic opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had said that she worked at the world-renowned fast-food chain in her youth. An online army subsequently took to the review site Yelp in an all-out online assault against the restaurant that hosted the campaign stunt. “The atmosphere was creepy with a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist behind the counter. Yuk,” wrote one reviewer, referencing Trump’s legal woes.

“Customer service was a joke. Senile old man got bronzer on my fries, didn’t wear gloves. Repeated himself several times,” said another. “Usually I hold high praise for a company that employs the mentally impaired but this one seemed more off than usual,” added yet another. And it went on and on for pages…until Yelp disabled user submissions. It was Harris who first made the restaurant a campaign war zone. “I worked at @McDonalds when I was a student, doing french fries and ice cream. There wasn’t a family relying on me to pay the bills – but that’s the reality for too many workers today. Proud to stand with @SEIU today for livable wages and a safe working environment,” she tweeted in June 2024, addressing the two million nationwide employees of the Service Employees International Union. McDonald’s is acting like the country of Switzerland in a war – or a girl being fought over for a prom date.

“McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President. We are not red or blue – we are golden,” the company said in a statement. So, what’s the big deal about McDonald’s? It’s about more than just economic policy in an election where that’s the number one issue. “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs,” Harris said, trying to explain in an MSNBC interview why she even brought up McDonald’s in the first place. But that doesn’t explain why McDonald’s strikes such a cultural nerve, or why that’s particularly the case right now.

North Americans, notably Generation X and older, relate to McDonald’s on a visceral level because of its cameo appearances in so many core memories. The birthday parties in the McDonald’s play park or caboose. Walking in the door under the Golden Arches at the crack of dawn after all-night high school graduation celebrations, passing friends dozing off with their heads on tables en route to buying some hotcakes and syrup. The community sports events featuring McD’s famously bright “orange drink.” Hitting the drive-thru after gymnastics practice to wolf down Big Macs to give hard working parents an affordable reprieve from cooking after a long day. Dates that consisted of a trip through the drive-thru for a picnic in a local park. Counting the minutes until Saint Patrick’s Day, because it meant mint green Shamrock Shakes. Looking forward to a first job experience working with friends from the neighborhood.

Those were the golden years of the Golden Arches, and of America, which are virtually synonymous with each other – as much in their former greatness as in their perceived decline. If things were still so great, then why is there so much nostalgia for those days? Now, people complain en masse about the ice cream machines being broken. The prices skyrocketed, with menu items costing on average 40% more just since 2019 alone, according to the company’s president himself. The cabooses vanished. McDonalds tried to be more sober and serious with its color scheme, making it seem less inviting and more like a Judgy McJudgerson, towards people going in for a quick sundae while dressed in a wet swimsuit and flip flops, with just a towel wrapped around your waist after swim practice (not that I would know anything about that).

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“..disruption of global supply chains, which forced US authorities to cannibalize parts from B-52s to keep others airworthy. Such cannibalization rates have grown 200% since 2019..”

• US Unable to Operate Modified B-52s Before 2033 (Sp.)

The newest B-52J variant of the US B-52 Stratofortress strategic aircraft won’t be complete until 2033, The National Interest reports. The modernization plan that would involve installing new Rolls-Royce F130 engines, enhanced Raytheon navigation systems and several other improvements was heavily criticized by the Government Accountability Office, which stated that the program failed to develop “formal cost or schedule estimates”, the National Security Journal reported earlier. Another issue the whole B-52 series faced, is the disruption of global supply chains, which forced US authorities to cannibalize parts from B-52s to keep others airworthy. Such cannibalization rates have grown 200% since 2019, the DefenseNews portal wrote. The B-52 bombers – one of three pillars of US nuclear triad – were first deployed 60 years ago, but the number of operable units has since dropped to less than 80.

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“..the main function of BRICS is its status as an anti-monopoly group, ensuring competition by restricting the monopolist, in this case on a global scale.”

• BRICS Summit Will Eventually Be Seen As A Milestone (Lukyanov)

This week’s BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, caused a stir, which is understandable. It was a major event in terms of both representation and concept. Everyone is free to evaluate it in their own way, but it cannot be dismissed an unimportant. If we turn away from the ceremonial and social part of the event, we should distinguish two aspects of the international assembly, which are related but don’t coincide. The first is meaningful measures agreed, or shall we say: concrete results, in the here and now. Here, a discerning commentator will notice that there are more declarations than practical plans. Ambitious areas of action have been declared, but only as tasks. There is a basic consensus on the issues discussed (an achievement in itself, given the very diversity of participants and guests), but in some places it’s very streamlined.

Finally, contrary to talk of BRICS ushering in a fundamentally new world order, the final declaration devotes considerable space to supporting the more effective functioning of existing institutions, from the UN Security Council to the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. The second is long-term. In this respect, the Kazan forum may be seen as a milestone. BRICS has reached a new level, where a prestigious but rather amorphous club has now become a significant meeting place. It is necessary to be at the table because, firstly, important things are being discussed there and, secondly, a key global trend is taking shape. Namely, an alternative space to the one organized around the institutions (and interests) of the West. In a sense, the main function of BRICS is its status as an anti-monopoly group, ensuring competition by restricting the monopolist, in this case on a global scale.

The fight against cartels is never easy, in any context. It’s a long process, but it has begun and it’s actually developing faster than might have been expected. The conditions have been in place for some time. So, the main thing about BRICS, no matter how many problems and oddities arise in and around this community, is that it corresponds to the rationale of the development of the global system. The importance of progress along all these lines varies for different members of the association; for some it is a priority, for others it’s more like “why not?” But this difference of opinion does not change the direction of travel.

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“..interest payments on U.S. government debt increased from $31 billion in 1970 to more than $1 trillion today.”

• Americans Are More Dependent Than Ever on Government Handouts (ET)

Payments from the government have become the fastest-growing source of income for Americans, according to a new study. A report by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a public policy research organization, titled “The Great Transfer-mation,” states that Americans have become substantially more dependent on government support, with the share of national income coming from transfer payments more than doubling over the past 50 years. Transfer payment programs include Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment and disability, food stamps, and veterans’ benefits. Transfer payments increased from 8 percent of U.S. total income in 1970 to 18 percent today, the report states, crowding out private income from wages and investments.

“There is a large range of experiences driving transfer reliance across communities,” Benjamin Glasner, EIG economist and one of the report’s authors, told The Epoch Times. “But it’s unavoidable to look at the fact that transfer reliance has grown rapidly across the country, and it’s something we need to deal with.” According to Federal Reserve data, government transfer payments increased from about $70 billion in 1970 to more than $6 trillion in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, before falling back to the current level of $4.3 trillion. According to the EIG report, if government transfer payments were spread evenly among all Americans, they would have amounted to an annual payment of $11,500 per person in 2022. One factor driving much of the shift from private income to government dependence is that the U.S. population is, on average, getting older.

According to demographic data from USAfacts, the percentage of Americans 65 years and older increased from 13.1 percent of the population in 2010 to 17.3 percent in 2022. During the same period, the percentage of Americans under the age of 20 fell from 26.9 percent to 24.4 percent. “The primary driver that we found in our report is demographic related, specifically the fact that the country has aged so rapidly,” Glasner said. “And the transfer programs that target that aging population also have grown significantly more expensive over time.” Of all government assistance payments in 2022, 56 percent went to the elderly, mostly for Medicare, the EIG report stated. Health care costs were a major factor, both because more Americans qualified for Medicare and Medicaid, and because the cost of medical treatment rose significantly. According to data compiled by Peterson-KFF, a health care policy analytics organization, total health spending in the United States was $74.1 billion in 1970.

By 2022 total health spending was $4.5 trillion, indicating an exponential increase in medical costs per capita. The growth in transfer payments have taken their toll on state and federal budgets. The 2024 Pension Solvency and Performance Report, authored by Ryan Frost and Mariana Trujillo for Reason Foundation’s Pension Integrity Project, stated that public pensions are increasingly falling behind on their ability to pay. As of 2023, the authors state, total unfunded public pension liabilities across the United States hit $1.59 trillion, and the median funded ratio was 76 percent. The U.S. federal deficit is currently $1.8 trillion, and interest payments on U.S. government debt increased from $31 billion in 1970 to more than $1 trillion today.

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Gun manufacturers.

• Gun and Torts Liability to Collide in Mexican Case Before the SCOTUS (Turley)

This month, there is a new case on the docket after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos. The First Circuit reversed a trial court that dismissed the case, alleging that the American firearms industry is legally responsible for violence in Mexico. I believe the First Circuit is dead wrong and will be reversed. However, as a torts professor, there is a question of whether the tort element of proximate cause could be materially changed in the case. Torts professors are already lining up to argue that there is a proximate cause under existing doctrines to hold the firearms industry. I respectfully disagree. In the petition, Smith and Wesson and other gun manufacturers challenge the claim, including the argument that their sale of lawful firearms in the United States is the proximate or legal cause for the carnage in Mexico. They note that Mexico has long been riddled with violence and corruption connected to the extensive drug industry in that country.

In my view, the trial court dismissed the case correctly under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). That was passed to bar suits against firearms companies based on criminals using these products for criminal or intentionally tortious acts. However, the First Circuit reversed on the ground that Mexico has made a legally cognizable case that gun manufacturers aided and abetted firearms trafficking that has harmed the Mexican government. The First Circuit is an outlier in this case and ignores both the purpose of the law and basic tort principles of proximate causation. The Court has accepted the review on two questions:

1. Whether the production and sale of firearms in the United States is the “proximate cause” of alleged injuries to the Mexican government stemming from violence committed by drug cartels in Mexico.

2. Whether the production and sale of firearms in the United States amounts to “aiding and abetting” illegal firearms trafficking because firearms companies allegedly know that some of their products are unlawfully trafficked.

PLCAA was enacted to require dismissal at the inception of lawsuits like this, and other courts have recognized that. The First Circuit’s decision creates a circuit split. Mexico’s complaint is wildly off base both factually and legally. It suggests that these companies are effectively funneling guns to criminal gangs in Mexico by producing products that they have used in criminal conduct. The First Circuit adopted an analogy that destroyed the credibility of its decision: Imagine that a U.S. company sent a mercenary unit of combat troops to attack people in Mexico City. Such an attack would directly cause Mexico itself the expense of paying soldiers to defend the city. Proximate cause would be quite clear. So, too, here, where the defendants are alleged to have armed the attackers for their continuing assaults.

Is that the best these federal judges could come up with? There is a vast difference between the United States sending a combat unit across the border and manufacturers who supply distributors who serve dealers who sell lawful products to consumers. That sounds more like The Merchandisers than The Expendables. PLCAA specifically bars any “qualified civil liability action” against gun manufacturers and licensees. Any action filed against a federal firearms licensee for damages or other relief resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse of a firearm is expressly addressed in the statute under § 7902 of PLCAA: “A qualified civil liability action … shall be immediately dismissed by the court in which the action was brought or is currently pending.”

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$24 trillion.

• UK Refuses To Discuss Slave Trade Compensation (RT)

The Commonwealth of Nations has submitted a formal request for “discussions” with the UK on compensation for the transatlantic slave trade. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer tried but failed to keep the subject off the agenda of a major gathering in the Pacific island of Samoa. The Commonwealth is made up of over 50 countries, most of which are former territories of the British Empire. The UK has ruled out any money payment and so far refused to make a formal apology. Last year, the Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm, concluded that the UK owed more than £18 trillion ($24 trillion) in reparations for its involvement in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries. Starmer had previously rejected compensation talks, saying that the UK would neither be “offering an apology” nor paying reparations for the atrocities spanning three centuries.

However 56 member states signed a communique branding slavery a “crime against humanity.” It also calls for “discussions on reparatory justice with regard to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement.” “The time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity,” the document states, adding that the leaders will continue to play “an active role in bringing about such inclusive conversations addressing these harms.” Earlier this month, British tabloid The Daily Mail claimed that a group of Caribbean countries were seeking “an astonishing £200 billion” ($261 billion) in compensation for slavery at the meeting in Samoa.

During a press conference after the summit, Starmer admitted that slavery was “abhorrent,” but refused to address the idea of a payout. “I should be really clear here, in the two days we’ve been here, none of the discussions have been about money. Our position is very, very clear in relation to that,” he said, maintaining that the summit’s agenda was mainly focused on “resilience and climate.” In August, UN judge Patrick Robinson said that the UK cannot ignore calls for slavery reparations, highlighting that the amount calculated by the Brattle Group was an “underestimation” of the damage caused by the discarded institution.

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“Vucic admitted that the tenacity of the “fantastic” Russian economy has been surprising.”

• Serbian President Calls Russian Central Bank Chief ‘A Genius’ (RT)

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has lauded the work of Bank of Russia Governor Elvira Nabiullina, noting that her country’s economy has remained buoyant despite the challenges it has faced over the past several years. The comment was made a day after the regulator raised its key interest rate by 200 basis points to a record high of 21%, citing persistent inflation that “considerably” exceeded its July forecast of 6.5-7.0% for this year. Commenting on the hike, Nabiullina said that inflation is projected to be double the regulator’s target of 4% annually, emphasizing that the bank remains committed to bringing it down to the target level. In a televised interview with TV Prva, Vucic admitted that the tenacity of the “fantastic” Russian economy has been surprising.

“I have to admit that I am surprised by the resilience of the Russian economy. Nabiullina is a genius,” the president said, while stressing that it is very difficult for the wartime economy to function under the current conditions. The head of state also said that he skipped last week’s BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan because of the “consequences” that could arise if other meetings were cancelled. Serbia’s delegation to the summit was led by the country’s Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin, as well as Defense Minister Bratislav Gasic, Economy Minister Adrijana Mesarovic and Nenad Popovic, the minister who oversees international economic cooperation. Vucic expressed hope that he “retained the respect of both sides,” adding that Serbia’s policy will not change overnight.

Earlier this week, the president suggested that Serbia could have a referendum on joining BRICS in light of the economic bloc’s growing popularity in the country. According to research cited by Vucic, 42% of Serbs are in favor of integration with the EU, while another 42% are supportive of the idea of joining BRICS. The Balkan country applied to join the EU in 2009 and has been a candidate since 2012. Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin has accused Brussels of moving the goalposts for accession, most recently by linking Belgrade’s membership to severing relations with Moscow. Despite mounting pressure from Brussels, Belgrade has opted to reject the sanctions imposed on Moscow by Kiev’s Western allies, officially pledging neutrality in the Ukraine conflict and maintaining trade relations with both Russia and the West.

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“The new law is aimed at tackling a shortage of commanding staff in Kiev’s armed forces..”

“A Ukrainian [officer] might feel sorry for another Ukrainian and not send him to a certain death. But this is not what Zelensky is being paid for..”

• Zelensky Allows Foreign Mercenaries To Serve As Ukrainian Army Officers (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has signed a law allowing foreign mercenaries to serve as officers in the country’s military during the conflict with Russia. The Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed the relevant legislation on October 10. On Friday, it was signed into law by Zelensky, according to the website of the Ukrainian government. The move means that foreigners who have a contract with the Ukrainian military can now become not only privates or sergeants, but also have positions of authority in the army, regardless of their citizenship. When the law was being discussed in September, the deputy head of the parliamentary committee on national security, defense and intelligence, Egor Chernev, explained that it was needed to address the lack of commanding staff in the armed forces.

“We all understand the current situation with the officer corps. There are problems. Indeed, we have a shortage,” Chernev told the broadcaster Rada at the time. There is interest among former officers from foreign countries in joining the Ukrainian forces, he insisted. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested in a post on Telegram on Saturday that Zelensky signed the law “so that foreign commanders could finish off the Ukrainians more actively, by throwing them into ‘meat assaults.’” “A Ukrainian [officer] might feel sorry for another Ukrainian and not send him to a certain death. But this is not what Zelensky is being paid for,” she wrote. In March, the Russian Defense Ministry said that at least 13,387 mercenaries from foreign countries had arrived in Ukraine since the escalation between Moscow and Kiev began in February 2022.

Most of them were from Poland (2,960), Georgia (1,042), the US (1,113), Canada (1,005) and UK (822). According to the ministry, at least 5,962 of those soldiers of fortune have been killed in the fighting with the Russian forces. This spring, faced with manpower shortages, mounting losses and military setbacks in the conflict with Russia, Ukraine lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 and significantly tightened mobilization rules, obliging potential recruits to report to conscription offices for “data validation,” which often means a trip straight to the front. Multiple videos have popped up on social media in recent months, showing conscription officers trying to snatch people in the streets, gyms and shopping malls.

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“..once an Israeli tank crewman, returned to Lebanon as a US envoy, not to protect peace but to redefine it on Tel Aviv’s terms..”

• US Envoy’s Diplomatic Cover For Israeli Expansion (Raiss)

On 21 October, Amos Hochstein, born in Israel in 1973 and once an Israeli tank crewman, returned to Lebanon as a US envoy, not to protect peace but to redefine it on Tel Aviv’s terms. The irony is undeniable: Israel, having lost 28 tanks in almost as many days during its latest invasion attempt, now sends one of its former tank crew members, not in battle, but in diplomacy – to achieve through words what military force could not secure: control over Lebanon through revisions to UN Resolution 1701. Hochstein’s mission may appear to be an act of diplomacy, but is it really about fostering peace? Or is he aligning with Israeli policy to reframe control while eroding Lebanon’s sovereignty? The diplomatic veneer only thinly conceals the underlying agenda of control.

The Israeli playbook of manipulating peace processes is nothing new. In a 2001 leaked video, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about his manipulation of the Oslo Accords, using vague phrases like “military facilities” to tighten Israeli control over contested areas. Netanyahu openly stated, “America is something that you can easily maneuver,” hinting at the ease with which Israeli influence shapes US diplomacy – a dynamic that is evident today in Hochstein’s actions. The Israeli army veteran’s push for amendments to Resolution 1701 is a clear continuation of this strategy: advancing the occupation state’s interests under the guise of diplomacy from Washington. Just as Netanyahu reinterpreted the Oslo Accords to solidify Israeli control, Hochstein’s proposed changes to 1701 seek to turn it into a tool for extending Tel Aviv’s influence. This is not diplomacy for peace; it is diplomacy for power.

Resolution 1701, passed by the UN Security Council on 11 August 2006, marked a critical point for Israel, which found itself unable to defeat Hezbollah during the July War despite its advanced military capabilities. Brokered by then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the ceasefire allowed Israel a face-saving exit under the guise of diplomacy rather than face a prolonged, unwinnable battle. But the resolution has since been a point of ongoing contention – one Israel has repeatedly violated. One notable violation is Israel’s continued occupation of Shebaa Farms, which contravenes both Resolution 1701 and the earlier Resolution 425. Hezbollah’s decision to remain armed, often criticized internationally and in some quarters domestically, becomes a logical and legally justified response under international law, given Israel’s occupation of Lebanese land. The ongoing presence of Israeli forces undermines the very peace that Resolution 1701 aimed to establish.

Tel Aviv’s disregard for the resolution extends beyond territorial occupation. Since 2013, Israel has repeatedly violated Lebanese airspace to conduct strikes on Syria, treating Lebanon’s skies like an unguarded backdoor for foreign interventions. This belligerent behavior is akin to a trespasser using a neighbor’s yard to attack another – an act that undermines Lebanon’s sovereignty entirely. In August 2019, a significant escalation occurred when Israel launched a drone strike in Beirut, which then-president Michel Aoun condemned as a “declaration of war.” Moreover, Israel’s occupation of the northern part of Ghajar village further violates both the Blue Line and Resolution 1701. Despite UNIFIL and the Lebanese Armed Forces deploying south of the Litani River, Israel’s persistent refusal to withdraw ensures that peace remains elusive, leaving Lebanon under the constant threat of Israeli aggression.

The amendments proposed by Hochstein to Resolution 1701 reveal Israel’s broader strategy of using international mechanisms to further its objectives. These changes would extend UNIFIL’s jurisdiction two kilometers north of the Litani River, allowing international forces to conduct searches, patrols, and inspections without requiring approval from Lebanese authorities. These inspections can include searching vehicles, private properties, and suspected weapons sites. Effectively, this is a demand for Lebanon to cede control over its own territory – a clear infringement on its sovereignty. Under the guise of peacekeeping, this would grant Israel indirect control over Lebanon’s internal security dynamics, especially since intelligence for these operations may be influenced by, or even originate from, Israeli sources.

Brzezinski

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“Iran winning – the Resistance winning therefore – is very much a Russian interest..”

• A Stunning De-Capitation? The Netanyahu “Madness” (Alastair Crooke)

A major war between Israel and Iran is soon likely to erupt – so says Israel’s Defence Minister Gallant. It will be initiated when Israel launches its long mooted strike on Iran. Gallant has promised that Israel’s strike on Iran will be “lethal, precise and especially surprising”, adding that Iran “won’t understand what happened to it, or how”. ‘How’ so – an interesting choice of words. As of this morning, there is no sign of the lethal response promised by Gallant. It would appear that Israel which initially attached importance to responding swiftly and directly, is awaiting the THAAD anti-ballistic missile batteries to be set up – and for the U.S. troops that will operate them to arrive in Israel. THAAD likely is no ‘game-changer’. Iran proved on 1 October its ability to saturate and overwhelm Israeli Air Defence capabilities through two successive volleys of incoming ballistic missiles.

The point here about the THAAD arrival is that, on the one hand, Israel is running short of intercept missiles, and secondly, that drawing the U.S. into a war between the U.S. and Iran – is hugely more important for Netanyahu than keeping to timetable. The THAAD batteries paradoxically might do just that (draw the U.S. into the war). With U.S. forces now deployed on the ground in support of Israel’s military kinetic action against Iran, Israel effectively inserts an American ‘tripwire’ into the war drama: Should American soldiers be killed, then the U.S. is at war with Iran; It would feel bound to react forcefully to the deaths of American soldiers. Netanyahu has been wanting this war for 25 years. He can now see it taking solid shape – directly in front of his eyes. It comes too, from his perspective, at an benign juncture – just before the U.S. elections in which almost every candidate vies to pronounce his or her fealty to Israel.

To be clear, this is no ‘small beer’. It may evolve into a major conflict with Russia, should Tehran be threatened. Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its inhuman – beyond all Rules of War – bombing of civilians in Lebanon to force a terrorised submission, has turned Russia into a full partner with Iran. Russia therefore, has worked hard to supplement Iranian defences with their own top-of-the-line defence systems. Russia’s role however likely will be confined to providing Iran with this defence assistance: Russian ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance); its latest electronic warfare system; certain missiles; and possibly S-400 Air Defence missiles (though their arrival in Iran has not been confirmed). Russia will have a prime interest in observing how these weapons perform against an Israeli strike. Should they function well, it will provide a major boost to Russian general deterrence.

And here lies the key point: For Israeli Zionists and American neocons, the path to a de-fanged Moscow is viewed as passing through a de-capitated and defeated Tehran. Iran winning – the Resistance winning therefore – is very much a Russian interest. Excited by Israel’s de-capitation of much of the Hizbullah senior leadership, and heartened perhaps by unauthorised (and wrong) signalling from Iran that it might respond perfunctorily to an Israeli strike, Team Biden might well perceive a new Zionist-led Middle East about to be born. Will the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon intervene to stop the march to conflict – as they did over Blinken’s escalation plans in Ukraine? It seems unlikely. They have unreservedly supported Israel up to now. And they have agreed to send the THAAD batteries.

The Joint Chiefs certainly will have experienced the strong pro-Israeli sentiment in Congress, in marked contrast to the growing disenchantment with Ukraine. Yet, taking on Iran – supported by Russia and China – is no small thing: Is it truly ‘winnable’? What if it isn’t? What if Israel loses – and therefore America loses? It would be an earthquake; a humiliation that would shake the western world.

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“Shelters have been emptied and burned down…families have been separated, and men and boys taken away by the truckload..”

• Entire Northern Gaza Population At Risk Of Dying – UN (RT)

What Israeli forces are doing in besieged Gaza during their ongoing war against Hamas cannot be allowed to continue, the United Nation’s top humanitarian official has said. “The entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying,” Joyce Msuya, acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, warned on Saturday, in a post on X (formerly Twitter). According to the official, hospitals in the region have been hit, health workers detained and first responders prevented from rescuing people trapped under the rubble amid ongoing Israeli military operations. “Shelters have been emptied and burned down…families have been separated, and men and boys taken away by the truckload,” she said, adding that “such blatant disregard for basic humanity and for the laws of war must stop.”

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, echoed the warning, having voiced deep concerns over the “catastrophic” situation in Gaza. He also highlighted the severe impact of the ongoing hostilities on healthcare in the region. “Intensive military operations unfolding around and within healthcare facilities and a critical shortage of medical supplies, compounded by severely limited access, are depriving people of life saving care,” Ghebreyesus wrote on X on Saturday. The WHO Director-General added that Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Jabalia, one of the few functioning medical facilities in northern Gaza, has been severely impacted, with only a limited number of staff remaining to care for nearly 200 patients after the detention of 44 male personnel. Earlier this week, the Health Ministry in the Palestinian enclave claimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stormed the hospital, detaining hundreds of staff, patients and displaced people.

The IDF insisted it was operating in and around the facility based on “intelligence information regarding the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the area”. “In the weeks preceding the operation, the IDF facilitated the evacuation of patients from the area while maintaining emergency services,” it added in a post on social media on Friday. West Jerusalem has been repeatedly accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians in Gaza. According to the enclave’s health officials, over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 97,000 wounded since the fighting between Hamas and Israel erupted in October 2023. The IDF has dismissed allegations of committing war crimes, arguing that Hamas is using Palestinian civilians as human shields. More than a year into the conflict, around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced, most of them multiple times, according to UN estimates.

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Ioannidis

 

 

 

Coastguy


 

Kardashev
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850362331802554822

 

 

Chain reaction

 

 

Bubble

 

 

Potatoes

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 27 2023

Jul 272023
 
 July 27, 2023  Posted by at 8:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  82 Responses »


Samuel Melton Fisher Asleep 1902

 

• Russian Military Emerging Bigger, Stronger From Ukraine War – Martyanov (Sp.)
• Ukraine ‘Offensive’ Has Not Helped – They Already Lost The War – Macgregor (WF)
• West ‘Torpedoed’ Ukraine Peace ‘Because We Want War With Russia’ – RFK Jr.
• NATO-Trained Ukrainian Soldiers Being Wiped Out – Austrian Military Expert (Sp.)
• US Official Shares Details of Secret ‘Track 1.5’ Diplomacy With Moscow (MT)
• Zelensky Uses Martial Law To Avoid Election (RT)
• West Using Dollar As Weapon – Putin (RT)
• Cash Is King Of The Thieves In The Ukraine (Helmer)
• Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Falls Apart (DeMartino)
• Inside Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal (Will Scharf)
• Neither East Nor West: Turkiye’s Travails As A ‘Swing State’ (Bhadrakumar)
• Elon Musk’s X Seizes @X Account From Longtime Twitter User (Sp.)
• EV Suspected In Fire Of Massive Cargo Ship Carrying 3,000 Cars (ZH)

 

 

 

 

The federal court judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s case seems extremely uncomfortable that the plea deal is far too generous to Hunter — which is what the IRS whistleblowers have been saying — and she might reject it altogether, a very rare move

 

 

Patel plea deal

 

 

 

 

Trump ad

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m beginning to think that many American generals also know and learn about warfare from the entertainment industry, from Hollywood..”

• Russian Military Emerging Bigger, Stronger From Ukraine War – Martyanov (Sp.)

Having blown over $95 billion on arms to Ukraine, Western countries have increasingly started talking about their inability to keep providing Kiev with weapons and ammo at the same pace as they have up to now. Some European countries have calculated that their armies would be able to fight a full-scale war for as little as 24-48 hours after their sending weapons and ammo inventories to Kiev. Earlier this month, President Biden admitted to media that the United States was deploying cluster bombs to Ukraine because it was running low on conventional 155 mm artillery ammunition. The admission sparked harsh criticism from former President Donald Trump, who blasted Biden for essentially revealing that the emperor has no clothes.

“Let me put it this way: We have witnessed, in the last 15 months, a ‘21+ mature audiences only explicit’ demolition of the American military mythology and American technological mythology,” Andrei Martyanov, a veteran Russian military analyst and best-selling author, told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast. “Those people from the think tanks [predicting the weakening of the Russian MIC], most of them never served a day in the armed forces. And to quote General Robert Latiff, author of the book Future War, ‘everything that the American public and politicians know about warfare is primarily from the entertainment industry.’ I’m beginning to think that many American generals also know and learn about warfare from the entertainment industry, from Hollywood. Those people are absolutely unprepared and not equipped to operate with basically what amounts to operational values, and they don’t even understand what they’re looking at,” Martyanov stressed.

Characterizing the field of Russia studies in Western countries as “basically a wasteland” today, Martyanov suggested that they don’t have the ability to comprehend realities on the ground because they take their primary data from Kiev, which falsifies it, and from “pseudo-academic shysters” in US academia whose “only task is to rewrite and then reiterate what Russia is and what is history, especially of the 20th century, is, and sell it to the public and policymakers.” [..] “The point is, just to give you a technological example…that the United States in terms of air defenses…is not even in the same league with Russia. In terms of cruise missiles, again, the United States lags here not by years, it lags by generations. And the same goes for armor, the same goes for operational concepts and things of this nature, and even in electronic warfare,” the observer stressed.

“For the average American political scientist who grew up with their Wall Street type economy, that’s the one I think they studied, they operate with gross domestic product numbers which are provided by Wall Street and shysters from the economic schools. They still cannot even grasp the idea” that the US could be weaker than its adversaries, Martyanov said. “For example, Russia produces as much steel as the United States. And it produces six times more aluminum…And when you look at these fundamental economic and military indices, how can you explain it? [Meanwhile] they still believe that they are the number one economy in the world, while China actually dwarfs the United States.”

Martyanov

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“Anybody else would have said by now, no more death. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dying… but there’s no humanity in these people. They don’t care..”

• Ukraine ‘Offensive’ Has Not Helped – They Already Lost The War – Macgregor (WF)

Col. Douglas Macgregor always tells it like it is. See the full interview below with Judge Napolitano as well as clips with Turley. Basically, a peace treaty was signed, Russian territories with mostly Russian people would be part of Russia. Putin started pulling his troops out. But the Deep State and the Big Guy want to keep the con going, costing lives and American tax dollars. And then… Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor: “The message that Jake Sullivan and President Biden have sent to Moscow is ‘Gentlemen, you’re going to have to march west. Nothing will stop until you make it clear unambiguously that you’ve won.’ Unfortunately, that’s what they’re saying. These people are not reasonable. They’re not rational. Anybody else would have said by now, no more death. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dying… but there’s no humanity in these people. They don’t care”

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“Zelensky ran for president. He was a comedian. He had no political experience. Why did he win? Because he ran on one issue: signing the Minsk Accords.”

• West ‘Torpedoed’ Ukraine Peace ‘Because We Want War With Russia’ – RFK Jr.

There is no chance of Russia losing the proxy war with NATO in Ukraine, the West fomented the conflict and a peace agreement is needed immediately to prevent further bloodshed, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said. “Russia’s not gonna lose this war. Russia can’t afford this – it’d be like us losing a war to Mexico. They are not gonna lose the war,” Kennedy said, speaking at a televised town hall Tuesday night. “Go look at what Russia did in Stalingrad in order to preserve its territorial integrity. Russia’s been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time, Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians. They’re 400 miles from Moscow. We already have Aegis missile systems within 12 minutes of Moscow.

We wouldn’t tolerate that if the Russians did it [like] in 1962 when they put them in Cuba,” the candidate added, referencing the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which time his late uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president. “The more disturbing thing,” Kennedy said, “is that on two occasions the Russians tried to sign a peace agreement with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky,” and both times the West sabotaged it. The candidate pointed to the 2015 Minsk Agreements, which Zelensky expressed interest in before being talked out of it by the US in 2019, and the 2022 draft peace deal reached after talks in Belarus and Turkiye. “In 2019, France Germany and Russia all agreed to the Minsk Accords. That year, Zelensky ran for president. He was a comedian. He had no political experience. Why did he win? Because he ran on one issue: signing the Minsk Accords.

As soon has he got in there, Victoria Nuland and the White House told him he couldn’t do it,” Kennedy recalled. “Then,” in February 2022, he noted, Russia sent “40,000 troops in. That’s not enough to conquer the country. Clearly, [Putin] wanted somebody to come to the negotiating table.” Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Istanbul, hammering out a draft peace deal. After that, “Putin in good faith began withdrawing troops from Ukraine. What happened? We sent Boris Johnson over there to torpedo it. Because we don’t want peace, we want war with Russia,” RFK Jr. stressed. The Democratic politician also pointed out that the current crisis has its origins in the end of the Cold War. “We promised in 1992, the Russian leadership said… ‘We’re gonna withdraw 400,000 troops from East Germany and we’re gonna allow you to reunite Germany under NATO,’ which is a hostile army.

That’s a huge concession for them. ‘One commitment that we want,’ is what the Russians said, ‘is that you will not move NATO to the east.’ James Baker, who was then secretary of state under [George H.W.] Bush, famously promised ‘We will not move NATO one inch to the east.’ Well since then, we’ve moved it 1,000 miles and 14 countries. Now when we started that plan in 1997, Bill Perry, who was the secretary of defense under the Clinton administration, said ‘If you move NATO to the east, I am resigning because you are forcing the Russians to come to war with us.’ George Kennan, who’s the most important diplomat in American history, the architect of the containment policy [after] World War II, said the same thing. You do not need to make an enemy out of Russia,” Kennedy said.

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“Due to inexperience, he ordered his platoon to advance directly into minefields. Only just over half of the platoon returned..”

• NATO-Trained Ukrainian Soldiers Being Wiped Out – Austrian Military Expert (Sp.)

Many Ukrainian soldiers who underwent a six-month training in NATO countries are lost in action, Colonel Markus Reisner, a military strategist from the Ministry of Defence of Austria revealed in an interview with a German television channel. “I recently spoke to a Ukrainian comrade: in a neighboring unit, their commander was a 47-year-old reservist. Due to inexperience, he ordered his platoon to advance directly into minefields. Only just over half of the platoon returned,” he recounted. According to Reisner, such a mistake severely affected the morale of the Ukrainian troops. The Austrian officer also expressed his opinion that the first phase of the Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed.


In a highly anticipated development last month, the Ukrainian forces finally launched the much-awaited counteroffensive. This strategic move had been eagerly anticipated for several months, with President Zelensky making multiple announcements about its impending implementation. Despite Kiev’s readiness to sacrifice hundreds of its soldiers, Ukrainian troops have encountered formidable resistance in their pursuit of strategic objectives. As of the current situation, they have not succeeded in breaching the initial line of Russian defenses, known as the “Surovikin Defensive Line,” underscoring the complexity of the conflict with both sides locked in a tense and high-stakes struggle for dominance.

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“Russian power,” he concluded, “is not necessarily a bad thing.”

• US Official Shares Details of Secret ‘Track 1.5’ Diplomacy With Moscow (MT)

Secret diplomatic talks are ongoing between former senior U.S. national security officials and high-ranking members of the Kremlin, a former U.S. official directly involved in the talks has confirmed to The Moscow Times. Earlier this month, NBC first reported the existence of these back-channel discussions, which involve former U.S. officials engaging in discreet exchanges with the Kremlin, as well as a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an effort to lay the groundwork for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Known as track 1.5 diplomacy, these covert discussions enable both sides to understand each other’s red lines and mitigate potential conflicts, serving as a crucial link between official government negotiations (track 1 diplomacy) and unofficial expert dialogues (track 2).

The Moscow Times has since spoken to one of the individuals directly involved in these talks. The former U.S. official agreed to speak on condition of anonymity given the confidential nature of the discussions. “There is an eminent need for track 1.5 diplomacy when the world gets closed off as it has now,” the former official said. Meetings between the U.S. and officials in the Kremlin have been taking place at least twice a month, often through an online format. “I have been visiting Moscow at least every three months,” the former official said. When it came to the Kremlin’s willingness to lay its cards on the table, the former official stated: “We were given some access to the Kremlin’s thinking, though not as much as we would have liked.”

From his vantage point, sitting across from senior Kremlin officials and advisers, it was apparent that the greatest issue was that the Russians were unable to articulate what exactly they wanted and needed. “They don’t know how to define victory or defeat. In fact, some of the elites to whom we spoke had never wanted the war in the first place, even saying it had been a complete mistake,” he said. “But now they’re at war — suffering a humiliating defeat is not an option for these guys.” “It was here that we made clear that the U.S. was prepared to work constructively with Russian national security concerns,” the former official added, breaking from the official U.S. line of squeezing Russia financially and isolating it internationally so as to prevent it from continuing its war against Ukraine.

“An attempt to isolate and cripple Russia to the point of humiliation or collapse would make negotiating almost impossible — we are already seeing this in the reticence from Moscow officials,” he said. “In fact, we emphasized that the U.S. needs, and will continue to need, a strong enough Russia to create stability along its periphery. The U.S. wants a Russia with strategic autonomy in order for the U.S. to advance diplomatic opportunities in Central Asia. We in the U.S. have to recognize that total victory in Europe could harm our interests in other areas of the world. “Russian power,” he concluded, “is not necessarily a bad thing.”

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To stay in power, he needs martial law to continue. For that, he needs the war to continue.

• Zelensky Uses Martial Law To Avoid Election (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on Wednesday proposed to extend the state of emergency, thereby effectively canceling the parliamentary elections scheduled for October. Zelensky announced martial law on February 24, 2022, and has been extending it ever since. The most recent 90-day extension was announced on May 20, and is due to expire on August 18. If the Verkhovna Rada approves Zelensky’s latest request, this will see the emergency extended through November 15. Ukrainian law calls for parliamentary elections no later than October 29, with a 60-day campaign season starting on August 28. However, it also forbids campaigning and voting during martial law. Another extension would cut into the campaign season for the presidential elections, currently scheduled for March 2024.

“If we have martial law, we cannot have elections. The constitution prohibits any elections during martial law,” Zelensky announced in May. The following month, he told the BBC that “elections need to happen in a time of peace, when there is no fighting.” Some of Ukraine’s supporters in Europe and North America have been critical of the possible cancellation of elections. Ukraine should prepare for a vote as soon as possible, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) head ‘Tiny’ Kox said in an interview in May. “Although democracy is far more than only elections, I think we all agree that without the elections, democracy cannot properly function,” Kox said at the time.

Zelensky ran on a peace platform in 2019 and won with 73% of the vote. Soon thereafter, his newly formed party – named after the TV show in which he played a fictional president of Ukraine – won a supermajority in the Verkhovna Rada as well. By late 2020, he had pivoted away from the notion of peace in Donbass and began to openly talk about a military solution for “occupied territories.”

Within three months of the conflict with Russia escalating, in May 2022, Zelensky enacted a law that allowed him to ban any political parties merely accused of being “pro-Russian,” without any right to appeal. He has outlawed a dozen parties since then, including the formerly largest parliamentary opposition bloc. Earlier this month, the Federal Intelligence Service of Switzerland accused Zelensky of attempting to “politically eliminate” Kiev mayor Vitaly Klitschko ahead of next year’s presidential election. The FIS cited “credible intelligence” to say that Zelensky was “showing authoritarian traits” which may lead to Western pressure, according to a classified report leaked to the outlet NZZ.

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The BRICS bank headaches.

• West Using Dollar As Weapon – Putin (RT)

Setting up alternative financial institutions is a difficult but necessary endeavor at a time when Washington has weaponized the US dollar, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, at the meeting with New Development Bank head Dilma Rousseff. The former president of Brazil, who took over the former BRICS Development Bank in March, was in St. Petersburg to meet with Putin ahead of this week’s Russia-Africa summit. “I have no doubt that, using your rich experience in government and knowledge in this area, you will do everything to develop this institution, which I think is very important today,” Putin told Rousseff. “In current conditions, this is not an easy job, given what is happening in world finance and the use of the dollar as a tool of political struggle,” he added.

Putin underscored that the economic bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is not aimed against anyone, but working together in mutual interest, including in finance. He pointed out that BRICS members are already increasingly settling accounts in national currencies. Rousseff agreed that this approach should be implemented by developing countries in general. She also said that the biggest challenge to developing nations is the ability to raise funds for projects of national interest, from social service to environmental issues. This issue, she argued, gets neglected as everyone focuses on the debt problem. The US accounts for some 20% of global economic output, but more than 50% of world currency reserves are held in dollars.

That percentage has actually shrunk over the past year, as the financial sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict – including the freezing of sovereign reserves and blocking of SWIFT access – raised concerns in other countries that such measures might target them in the future. Last October, Putin argued that the US had “discredited the institution of international financial reserves” by weaponizing the dollar, first by monetary emissions and then by “stealing” Russian funds. Since then, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has agreed that sanctions might drive some countries to abandon the dollar. “The long historical era of the dominance of the American dollar is coming to an end,” Andrey Kostin, head of Russia’s VTB bank, said in an interview last month. While most Western economists don’t see any other currency capable of replacing the greenback, Putin hinted in June that BRICS was working on a reserve currency of its own, perhaps based on a commodities basket.

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“This is Zelensky’s pyramid”..”No IMF member state has ever been allowed to take a six-times multiple of its borrowing quota at this money volume..”

• Cash Is King Of The Thieves In The Ukraine (Helmer)

President Vladimir Zelensky has enough fingers to count that $115 billion is worth almost three times more than $41.3 billion. The first number is the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) calculation of “external support over 2023–27 involving sizable official financing in the form of grants and concessional loans, as well as debt relief.” This includes “SDR [Special Drawing Rights] 11.608 billion (577.01 percent of quota, about US$15.6 billion).” No IMF member state has ever been allowed to take a six-times multiple of its borrowing quota at this money volume except for the Ukraine. Nor has any IMF member state ever been authorised by the IMF board of directors to stop new domestic bank lending and postpone all borrowing obligations (“current debt standstill”) for at least another three years from this Christmas.

The resulting money pile the IMF calls “the wartime liquidity surplus”. Converting this into the Ukrainian banks’ profit line and diverting that into individual cash and assets, Kiev officials have told Reuters to report as the “Ukraine banks’ robust health.” “Across the banking sector,” the New York-based propaganda agency reports, “deposits are as abundant as they’ve ever been, and the country’s lenders have found ways to remain profitable.” This is being done, they explain, by borrowing more and more in government bonds at a 25% interest rate guaranteed by more IMF money flowing into the central bank; lending less and less to zero for customers; and ignoring the increasing pile-up of defaulted, non-performing, or fraud loans.

This is Zelensky’s pyramid, even Reuters and its Ukrainian banker sources imply, though the IMF staff cannot bring themselves to say so. “In the current context, Ukrainian bankers note, the choice makes sense. “’We will only survive if the government survives,’ [Privatbank chief executive Gerhard] Boesch sums up.” The big money number dwarfs the Pentagon’s most recent estimate that “the Biden administration has committed more than $41.3 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.” The new July 7 number includes deliveries of Patriot missiles, HIMARS rockets, cluster bombs, and “dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICM”. Using the banker’s term, the Pentagon announcement declared “the Ukrainian forces have effectively leveraged assistance…So we will continue to provide Ukraine with the urgent capabilities that it needs to meet the moment, as well as what it needs to keep itself secure for the long term from Russian aggression.”

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That was quite a dirty trick they tried to pull. He would have gotten away with murder.

• Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Falls Apart (DeMartino)

President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is facing federal charges over information found on a laptop that he abandoned at a computer repair shop. His defense team and prosecutors earlier reached a plea agreement that was widely blasted as too ‘lenient’ by Republicans figures. An earlier plea deal agreement made between prosecutors and Hunter Biden’s defense team fell apart on Wednesday after the presiding judge questioned its constitutionality and prosecutors revealed that Biden is still under investigation. The first son appeared before US District Judge Maryellen Noreika on Wednesday, when he was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges after his legal team and prosecutor David Weiss agreed to a deal that would have suspended a felony gun charge.

Noreika raised concerns that she believed the deal would be ruled unconstitutional. The agreement stipulated that if Biden broke any of the terms, Noreika would act as an arbiter to decide if the gun charge would be reissued. The district judge noted the executive branch – not the judicial branch – is in charge of when to charge a person, and said she was concerned Biden may lose his immunity if the accord was ruled unconstitutional. Biden’s defense attorney Chris Clark said the stipulation was necessary to prevent the case from becoming further politicized if the government were to bring up the gun charge again. While Noreika said she understood his concerns, the official noted she was unaware of any case law that would support the agreement.

Another bombshell came in the case when Noreika asked Weiss whether Biden was still under an investigation, to which Weiss responded that he is but could not provide additional details on the matter. Weiss later remarked it was a possibility that Biden could be hypothetically charged for violating the Foreign Agents Registry Act. Asked if the deal would shield Biden from a prosecution stemming from that ‘possibility,’ Weiss indicated it would not, although Clark disagreed. Weiss responded by noting that “then there is no deal,” to which Clark replied: “As far as I’m concerned, the deal is null and void.” Biden ultimately submitted a not guilty plea after Noreika relayed that she could not say whether she would in fact accept the plea deal.

The judge said she would need to order a fact-finding mission on the deal and asked both sides for a briefing but did not set a date. She also did not rule out the possibility of agreeing to all terms of the current deal after gathering more information. Weiss and the Biden legal team could also hammer out a new plea deal that satisfies Noreika’s concerns. Prosecutors say Biden received taxable income of over $1.5 million for both 2017 and 2018 and owed more than $100,000 in taxes for each year, but did not pay any taxes either year. Officials also say he lied about his drug use on a purchase form for a firearm, which is what led to the felony gun charge that was supposed to be suspended under the terms of the plea deal. Last week, two whistleblowers with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alleged during congressional testimony that the yearslong Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden was fraught with misconduct and political favoritism.

Read more …

Twitter (X?) “thread”.

• Inside Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal (Will Scharf)

Based on conversations with people who were in the courtroom today, and my experience as a former federal prosecutor, I think I know the full story of what happened with the Hunter Biden plea agreement blow-up this morning. Bear with me, because this is a little complicated: Typically, if the Government is offering to a defendant that it will either drop charges or decline to bring new charges in return for the defendant’s guilty plea, the plea is structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(c)(1)(A). An agreement not to prosecute Hunter for FARA violations or other crimes in return for his pleading guilty to the tax misdemeanors, for example, would usually be a (c)(1)(A) plea. This is open, transparent, subject to judicial approval, etc.

In Hunter’s case, according to what folks in the courtroom have told me, Hunter’s plea was structured under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(c)(1)(B), which is usually just a plea in return for a joint sentencing recommendation only, and contained no information on its face about other potential charges, and contained no clear agreement by DOJ to forego prosecution of other charges. Instead, DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers effectively hid that part of the agreement in what was publicly described as a pretrial diversion agreement relating to a § 922(g)(3) gun charge against Hunter for being a drug user in possession of a firearm. That pretrial diversion agreement as written was actually MUCH broader than just the gun charge. If Hunter were to complete probation, the pretrial diversion agreement prevented DOJ from ever bringing charges against Hunter for any crimes relating to the offense conduct discussed in the plea agreement, which was purposely written to include his foreign influence peddling operations in China and elsewhere.

So they put the facts in the plea agreement, but put their non-prosecution agreement in the pretrial diversion agreement, effectively hiding the full scope of what DOJ was offering and Hunter was obtaining through these proceedings. Hunter’s upside from this deal was vast immunity from further prosecution if he finished a couple years of probation, and the public wouldn’t be any the wiser because none of this was clearly stated on the face of the plea agreement, as would normally be the case. Judge Noreika smelled a rat. She understood that the lawyers were trying to paint her into a corner and hide the ball. Instead, she backed DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers into a corner by pulling all the details out into the open and then indicating that she wasn’t going to approve a deal as broad as what she had discovered.

DOJ, attempting to save face and save its case, then stated on the record that the investigation into Hunter was ongoing and that Hunter remained susceptible to prosecution under FARA. Hunter’s lawyers exploded. They clearly believed that FARA was covered under the deal, because as written, the pretrial diversion agreement language was broad enough to cover it. They blew up the deal, Hunter pled not guilty, and that’s the current state of play. And so here we are. Hunter’s lawyers and DOJ are going to go off and try to pull together a new set of agreements, likely narrower, to satisfy Judge Noreika. Fortunately, I doubt if FARA or any charges related to Hunter’s foreign influence peddling will be included, which leaves open the possibility of further investigations leading to further prosecutions.

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Erdogan paints himself into a corner.

• Neither East Nor West: Turkiye’s Travails As A ‘Swing State’ (Bhadrakumar)

The Russian Foreign Ministry website featured two press releases last week on Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s conversations with his Turkish and Iranian counterparts, Hakan Fidan and Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, respectively. The conversations took place at the initiative of the Turkish and Iranian sides. Lavrov’s conversation with Fidan was business-like and formal, while with Amir-Abdollahian, Russia’s top diplomat, was in a noticeably relaxed freewheeling exchange — “trust-based” and signaling “mutual interest in closely coordinating the approaches” to world politics. The alchemy of the Russian-Turkish relationship has distinctly changed, whereas, the strategic partnership with Iran has consolidated and a high level of maturity and predictability is visible.

One recent factor that corrupted the Russian-Turkish relationship is the Kremlin’s unilateral decision to let the Black Sea Grain Initiative expire on 17 July. Ankara tried behind the scenes to avert the moment, but the Russian decision was not Turkiye-centric. Therein lies the hope — and the despair. Russia has since offered that a new grain deal with Turkiye might be possible if Moscow’s demands are met, announcing works on new export routes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reciprocated by calling on western countries to “follow up on Putin’s expectations.” However, the crisis of confidence in the Russian-Turkish relations has a geopolitical dimension, and it concerns the war in Ukraine. Succinctly put, Turkish foreign policies have lately displayed a nuanced “westernism” that affects vital Russian interests.

Indeed, there is no plausible explanation for the sudden visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Istanbul on 8 July, the sudden release of notorious Azov commanders who were in Turkish custody per an understanding with Russia on the exchange of prisoners, or the plan to set up a co-production venture in Ukraine for Turkiye’s Bayraktar drones. One way of looking at such a sharp Turkish turnaround could be that interest groups in Turkiye’s defense industry are being manipulated by Zelensky. Erdogan’s open support for Ukraine’s NATO membership is blatant tokenism. The big picture is that Zelensky, with encouragement from the US, is looking for opportunities to erode the mutual trust and confidence that has accrued in the Turkish-Russian relationship over recent years, thanks to the hands-on diplomacy between Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Anyway, on the eve of the NATO Summit in Vilnius (11-12 July), where Erdogan was expected to meet up with US President Joe Biden (and Zelensky), Lavrov made Moscow’s concerns known to Foreign Minister Hakan in a phone conversation initiated by the latter. The Russian readout said: “The sides exchanged opinions on the regional agenda and prioritized the latest developments around Ukraine, including the situation regarding the return of Azov battalion “ringleaders” from Istanbul to Kiev. The Russian side drew the attention of Ankara to the fact that continued deliveries of military equipment to the Kiev regime amounted to a destructive course. It was noted that subsequent steps could only bring about negative consequences.”

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Doesn’t look elegant.

• Elon Musk’s X Seizes @X Account From Longtime Twitter User (Sp.)

The user who once held the @X account on the Elon Musk-owned social media site formerly known as Twitter and recently renamed “X” had his account taken by the company and was offered little in return. X reportedly took over the account on Tuesday night, which previously belonged to San Francisco photographer Gene Hwang, who opened the account in 2007, the year after the platform launched. The email informing him that his account had been taken over by the newly rebranded firm said it would let him pick any unclaimed or inactive usernames, and offered fan merch and a trip to the company’s headquarters in return.

“Additionally, as a reflection of our appreciation, you will also be provided with a selection of X merch and an exclusive visit to X’s HQ to meet members of our team,” the email read, which Hwang shared with US media. Hwang said he does not plan to take X up on its offer, and suggested he may ask for the bird on the sign the company is dismantling outside its main office. The @X account has since been posting as an official account of the site. Hwang seems to have moved to @x12345678998765.

However, X may run into issues with its new name. Trademark lawyers have said that a simple trademark will make it more difficult for Musk to sue companies that use the letter X for their own branding On the flip side, Musk may find his trademark being challenged by other tech giants. As previously reported by Sputnik, both Meta* and Microsoft hold trademarks for “X.” Google and Xfinity also own trademarks related to X. While none seem to be directly related to the services X currently offers, if Musk moves forward with his current plan to make X the “everything app” there may be some crossover that could cause another company to challenge his trademark.

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It’ll keep burning for days. What do the insurers think of this?

• EV Suspected In Fire Of Massive Cargo Ship Carrying 3,000 Cars (ZH)

A fire on a ship carrying 3,000 cars off the Netherlands coast is suspected of being started by an electric vehicle and killed one sailor, “could burn for days,” the Dutch Coast Guard told AFP News. The fire broke out late Tuesday night on board the roll-on, roll-off ship the Fremantle Highway off the northern Dutch coast. “The fire could still burn for days,” stated a coastguard official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The ship is being cooled to keep it stable. “Only the side of the ship is being sprayed, not the deck,” said the official. Fremantle Highway is carrying 3,000 vehicles. Of those vehicles, 25 are EVs, a coastguard official told the NOS public broadcaster, adding there is suspicion that one of those 25 EVs started the blaze.

Rescue ships and helicopters have evacuated 23 crew members. However, one individual lost their life due to the fire. Should the vessel sink, “it would be a disaster of the highest order,” the daily paper De Telegraaf said. Bloomberg ship tracking data shows Fremantle Highway left the German port of Bremen on Tuesday. The vessel appears to have deviated off course around 5 pm local time Tuesday, an indication of possibly when the fire broke out. “Currently several parties including salvagers and the Dutch authorities are looking at minimizing the damage as much as possible,” the Coast Guard said.

Shipping company Wallenius Wilhelmsen warned earlier this year: “Shipping companies are facing an added concern with the increasing demand for electric vehicles. Fires onboard vessels can have catastrophic consequences, and battery fires are extra potent and dangerous. Li-ion batteries generate extreme heat when they malfunction, often reaching temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius or higher. This heat can quickly spread to nearby combustible materials, causing a rapid fire that’s challenging to extinguish. Controlling battery fires is nearly impossible and might indicate Fremantle Highway could burn for days, if not longer.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Tucker Ice Cube

 

 

Always one
https://twitter.com/i/status/1684307786325262343

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle November 10 2022

Nov 102022
 
 November 10, 2022  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


Salvador Dali Portrait of my father 1920

 

• How The Green Agenda Is Being Used To Fleece The Naive (Rachel Marsden)
• On Deconstructing Constructs (Batiushka)
• How the Loss of Control of Either House Could Impact the President (Turley)
• Moscow Comments On US Electoral System ‘Crisis’ (RT)
• Washington Refuses To Send Advanced Drones To Ukraine – WSJ (RT)
• Ukraine Extends Martial Law, Mobilization For 90 Days Until Feb. 19 (Az.)
• The WEF Plan for Mankind and What Comes Next (Casey)
• The WEF’s Stakeholder Capitalism Is Just Global Fascism By Another Name (AltM)
• Europe Braces For New Refugee Crisis (RT)
• Hungary Reacts To EU Aid Plan For Kiev (RT)
• Kremlin Comments On Putin’s G20 Plans (RT)
• Biden: Elon Musk’s Links To Other Countries ‘Worthy Of Being Looked At’ (G.)
• The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and National Security State (Jac.)
• Profit Inflation And A Basket Full Of Holes (K.)

 

 

“You have a device in your pocket that can communicate with satellites so that you can order tacos in your undies but we can’t count ballots.”

That says 150 million.

 

 

Keri Lake

 

 

 

 

Simpsons

 

 

This cannot be due to the vaxx/boosters, because no-one’s taking those.

 

 

 

 

Green becomes the color of oppression.

• How The Green Agenda Is Being Used To Fleece The Naive (Rachel Marsden)

Banks and corporations making pledges of ‘net-zero’ emissions are taking the public for a ride, according to a new United Nations report released at this week’s COP27 climate change conference. “We must have zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing,”UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, in reference to the concept of virtue-signaling a green agenda for marketing purposes as a strategy to gain more business, all while failing to back up the claims in practice. Oh, so the airlines asking whether you want to freely donate extra cash when buying a plane ticket to offset the carbon footprint of your flight aren’t technically achieving much beyond making the insufferably sanctimonious feel good about themselves? Or that the energy companies using renewables as window dressing are nonetheless continuing to invest in fossil fuels? You don’t say!

In case the idealists haven’t noticed, there’s currently an energy crunch in the West due to Western sanctions on fuel from Russia – and renewables aren’t anywhere near ready for prime time as a replacement. Germans are turning instead to coal and firewood, while France is scrambling to ramp up nuclear power. The EU even backpedaled at the beginning of the year in labeling gas and nuclear ‘green’ – which now conveniently allows its leaders to run around to fossil fuel pariah countries asking for desperately needed energy. Might as well, though, for all the good that this pricey and pretentious charade is doing. The UN says that more financing, to the tune of up to $340 billion per year by 2030, is the key. Anything less is apparently futile.

The notion of massive funding being necessary to prevent Earth’s temperature from increasing by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is a tough sell, particularly in the absence of any logical explanation of how the cash would credibly be used to realistically adjust the thermostat, so officials now seem to be trying a new sales pitch. “The world must step up and protect people and communities from the immediate and ever-growing risks of the climate emergency. We have no time to lose,” Guterres said, with the UN citing things like flooding in Pakistan and multi-year droughts as justification for the funding.

Greenwashing is just another way of scamming the hopelessly naive. And no one does it better than governments themselves, who have managed to relieve taxpayers of countless billions to fill slush funds under the guise of saving the world. And now US President Joe Biden is using a green pretext to protect US economic interests to the detriment of European allies – even as the US ramps up fossil fuel liquefied natural gas exports to the EU. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is conveniently framed as a green energy initiative, offering US consumers tax incentives to buy American electric cars with batteries that have at least 40% of components from the US or a country with which it has free trade. Germany and France view the measures as blatant protectionism.

Read more …

“An artificially-imposed union in unnatural borders is known as ‘a construct’..”

USA and Europe are constructs.

• On Deconstructing Constructs (Batiushka)

An artificially-imposed union in unnatural borders is known as ‘a construct’. Constructs are artificial, as they are populated by different peoples, who speak different languages and have different cultures, and who would prefer to live in their own common nation-state because of those differences. For these reasons constructs are always imposed top-down for ‘reasons of State’ and rejected by those who are oppressed by them at the grassroots. Constructs are only ever popular among the elites which invent them and make money from them. They rarely achieve more than 50% popularity, usually far less. They are always rejected by the people at the bottom of the pile. This is why constructs never last.

1. The USA as a Construct For instance, the USA, founded on exploitation, gun-law, slavery and the genocide of its native peoples, is a construct. Its straight-line borders are artificial, the result of wars and treaties, forced on others by historical circumstances or illegal occupations, for example as in Alaska and Hawaii. Much of its southern territory is Spanish-named and was stolen from Mexico and is now – such is the justice of history and the reward of patience – being reoccupied by Spanish speakers. As for the northern border, that was fixed because basically the lands northwards were cold and uninviting. The vast majority of them, except for a very narrow strip close to the US border, spread up to the Arctic and were uninhabitable. Thus, the US elite left them to the unwanted whom they called ‘Canadians’, who presented no threat to them.

As regards its ‘United’ States, they are the result of an incredibly bloody Civil War, leaving as many as one million dead, the equivalent of ten million today. It was directed by an industrial elite in the North-East and the result, enforced by genocide, was by many never accepted. That elite was Zionist (not Jewish, though many of its financiers were Jews) in its proclamation that it was exceptional and that its ‘manifest destiny’ (i.e. manifest only to themselves) was to spread ‘from sea to shining sea’.

2. Europe and its Constructs Europe (meaning by etymology ‘the west’) is also a construct, its identity going back to an ancient Greek myth. For the Romans 2,000 years ago, it did not exist separately from Asia and Africa. Indeed, it is artificially separated from Asia (meaning by etymology ‘the east’), from where its peoples emigrated. There is no natural border between the European peninsula and Asia: its eastern border is purely political and for the moment fixed in the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus. Moreover, nearly all of its languages are ‘Indo-European’ and have their origins in a language spoken in today’s Turkey (Asia Minor) or even further east, well over 5,000 years ago. The historically recent contempt of ‘Europe’ for anything ‘Asian’, contemptuously termed ‘Asiatic’ or ‘barbarian’, is simply a rejection of its own origins and a self-justification for its artificial state of separation.

In the early 90s the then French President, Chirac, called on all: ‘Creeons l’Europe, Faisons l’Europe, il faut construire l’Europe’ (Let us create Europe, Let us make Europe, We must build Europe’). This was simply an open admission that Europe did not exist. It does not. Within contemporary Europe the EU, the UK and the Ukraine are obviously constructs. The EU goes back only to 1993, the Ukraine to 1992, and the UK to 1922. In other words, they are all temporary inventions of the twentieth century. Now we are in the twenty-first century, we can see that they will not last much longer.

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“..a Republican-controlled House has plenty to investigate, and impeachment is unlikely his greatest fear..”

• How the Loss of Control of Either House Could Impact the President (Turley)

Last Thursday, Biden warned supporters that the Republicans have made clear “they’re gonna impeach me.” When Biden warned that he might be impeached if voters do not stop a Republican wave, there was an audible laugh which prompted the President to added “No, I’m not joking.” While Biden may or may not be the subject of an impeachment, a Republican-controlled House has plenty to investigate, and impeachment is unlikely his greatest fear. Here are the top three concerns, and there is every indication that Biden is wise to be worried.

Hunter Biden and Influence Peddling
House Democrats repeatedly moved to block investigations into the alleged multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operations by the Biden family. For his part, Attorney General Merrick Garland steadfastly refused to appoint a special counsel despite an overwhelming basis for such an appointment. Biden has repeatedly denied knowledge of Hunter Biden’s business entanglements despite numerous emails and pictures showing him meeting with Hunter associates. Hunter’s partner, Eric Schwerin, alone made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015. There are emails of Chinese, Ukrainian and other foreign clients including some thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to Joe Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar that the Bidens wanted to avoid such references: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.” [..]

Social Media and Censorship-by-Surrogate The president has at times acted as a virtual censor-in-chief, denouncing social-media companies for “killing people” by not censoring enough. Recently, he expressed doubt that the public can “know the truth” without such censorship by “editors” in Big Tech. There is growing evidence of long-suspected back channels between government and Democratic political figures and Big Tech. Some of those contacts were recently confirmed but Congress again refused to investigate. If officials coordinated the censorship of citizens, it could lead to lawsuits (in addition to already pending actions) and embarrassing disclosures. The government cannot do indirectly what it is barred from doing directly. The investigation could produce considerable collateral damage for political and media figures alike.

Pandemic politics and policies Republicans have pledged to open a full investigation into what officials knew about the origins and risks of COVID-19. Specifically, members like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have pledged to uncover material showing what officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci knew about the lack of efficacy of masks as well as guidelines on limiting groups or the closure of businesses and schools. These investigations might also reveal the coordination of health-care guidelines with teacher unions and political allies. These investigations could eventually be linked in critical ways. For example, many of those who questioned the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown were barred on social media (and attacked in the mainstream media). Fauci is accused of quickly scuttling such discussion, and critics point to his own alleged approval of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Read more …

“Joe Biden promised unity but has instead demonized and smeared Americans while making life more expensive for all..”

• Moscow Comments On US Electoral System ‘Crisis’ (RT)

The US electoral system has found itself in dire straits amid a high level of political polarization, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday, adding that the problems are evident to the entire world. Speaking to Sputnik radio, Zakharova was asked to comment on the midterm elections in the US. According to the spokeswoman, the crisis of the US voting system “is being noticed even by their closest allies.” The concern is also shared by “members of official international institutions” that assess elections from a legal point of view, she continued. “In my opinion, one can see this with the naked eye even without these statements,” Zakharova noted.

She pointed to the current intense political struggle between the Republican and Democratic parties. “I’m not even talking about social polarization, I’m talking about the level of dialogue between these poles,” she said, adding that it “looks more like annihilation than electoral procedures.” According to CNN vote tracking, the Republican Party is on course to regain control of the US House of Representatives and is projected to take at least 198 seats, against the Democratic Party’s 178. In the Senate, the parties appear to be neck and neck. However, exit polls suggest that 70% of US voters believe that the democratic system itself is “threatened,” either by lax voting laws, faulty vote machines, or false allegations of electoral misconduct.

This sentiment was echoed by US President Joe Biden last week, who accused his predecessor Donald Trump and other Republicans of encouraging political violence while blasting them for denying the results of the 2020 presidential election. The GOP dismissed the allegations, and accused the president of fostering division in America. “Joe Biden promised unity but has instead demonized and smeared Americans while making life more expensive for all,” it said.

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“..could “signal to Moscow that the US was providing weapons that could target positions inside Russia.”

• Washington Refuses To Send Advanced Drones To Ukraine – WSJ (RT)

The administration of US President Joe Biden has rebuffed Kiev’s requests to provide it with state-of-the-art drones over concerns that doing so could escalate the Ukraine conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing sources. According to US officials and people familiar with matter interviewed by the newspaper, the US won’t send the Gray Eagle MQ-1C drones to Ukraine that it has been requesting for months. This type of military aid, they said, could “signal to Moscow that the US was providing weapons that could target positions inside Russia.” US officials also worry that the technology used in the drones, particularly the cameras, could fall into the wrong hands, the report says.

In September, a bipartisan group of members of the US Congress is said to have insisted that the Biden administration send to Ukraine the medium altitude and armed drones, which can stay in the air for more than 24 hours. In their letter, they asked for the review process to be accelerated, which spurred a briefing on Capitol Hill, congressional officials told the WSJ. The MQ-1C Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft Systems can fly at an altitude of up to 7,600m for more than 27 hours and carry up to four HELLFIRE missiles. They also have a range of up to 4,600km via satellite communications, which may potentially enable Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russian territory.

Since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in late February, the US has been supplying Ukraine with large quantities of weapons, including reconnaissance and kamikaze drones. Washington has so far resisted calls to provide Kiev with advanced weaponry such as Patriot air defense systems and F-16 fighter jets. Russia has repeatedly warned the West against “pumping” Ukraine with weaponry, saying that do so will only prolong the conflict.

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Makes me wonder how many foreigners there are today in Ukraine’s army.

• Ukraine Extends Martial Law, Mobilization For 90 Days Until Feb. 19 (Az.)

With efforts to hold back Russian forces continuing, Ukraine’s parliament has extended martial law and military mobilization in the country for 90 days, until Feb. 19 of next year. Tuesday’s passage of legislation presented by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy goes into effect as of Nov. 21, when the previous law on the extension of martial law expires. The previous extension of martial law and mobilization in light of the war was passed this Aug. 15, again for 90 days. Martial law in Ukraine was first declared by Zelenskyy on Feb. 24, when Russia launched its war on its neighbor. It was first extended in March for a period of 30 days.

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“Schwab was very clever to have put together an organization where the richest, most powerful, and most influential people in the world are charged huge amounts to be introduced to each other..”

• The WEF Plan for Mankind and What Comes Next (Casey)

The World Economic Forum (WEF) describes its mission as the “international organization for public-private cooperation.” What do you make of the WEF and the power it wields? Doug Casey: “International organization for public-private cooperation” is a code phrase for economic fascism – which is to say, the hand-in-glove melding of the political power of the State with the economic power of corporations. Things like the WEF, and other NGOs (non-governmental organizations), institutes, and think tanks, have proliferated in recent years. They’re almost all destructive parasites on productive society. Almost all of them are leftist, statist, and collectivist in orientation. They’re typically populated by intellectuals and academics and funded by tax-exempt foundations, usually set up by elderly do-gooders interested in leaving a “legacy.”

The WEF is by far the most successful of the breed. Instead of just cadging donations so intellectuals could hang around and seem prestigious, in 1971, Klaus Schwab formed a club where the rich and powerful could discuss ideas with other members of the overlord class. Political and financial types could find a philosophical home, disguising the quest for money and power with a patina of benevolence. It’s become an amazingly large and powerful organization. They have roughly 800 full-time employees, most of them very highly paid. They have an annual budget of over $300 million. Their balance sheet indicates that the WEF is worth over $1 billion, funded by major corporations who give it millions of dollars, as do various governments. Most of the world’s political leaders and corporations are members.

Schwab was very clever to have put together an organization where the richest, most powerful, and most influential people in the world are charged huge amounts to be introduced to each other and talk about how they can become even richer, more powerful, and more influential. It seems clear that members of the WEF have to toe the party line or be disinvited. Nobody wants to be excommunicated from the WEF or cut off from association with other rich and powerful people. It’s safe to say that WEF members share a common philosophy, one that’s in line with Schwab’s weltanschauung.

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“The natural progression of every form of Marxism, communism, socialism, fascism etc. all ultimately lead to a kind of globalist ideology..”

• The WEF’s Stakeholder Capitalism Is Just Global Fascism By Another Name (AltM)

The concept of “fascism” was originally entered into the Encyclopedia Italiana by Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who stated that “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini would later take credit for the quote as if he had written it himself, but it’s important to note because it outlines the primary purpose of the ideology rather than simply throwing the label around at people we don’t like as a dishonest means to undermine their legitimacy. Despite the fact that leftists today often attack conservatives as “fascists” because of our desire to protect national boundaries and western heritage, the truth is that all fascism is deeply rooted in leftist philosophies and thinkers.

Mussolini was a long time socialist, a member of the party who greatly admired Karl Marx. He deviated from the socialists over their desire to remain neutral during WWI, and went on to champion a combination of socialism and nationalism, what we now know as fascism. Adolph Hitler was also a socialist and admirer of Karl Marx, much like Mussolini. It is actually hard to find where Marx, the communists and the fascists actually differ from each other – A deeper sense of nationalism seems to be one of the few points of contention. Though Marx saw the existence of nation states as temporary to the proletariat and to the ruling class, he noted that the industrialists were erasing national boundaries anyway. Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto with some optimism:

“National differences and antagonisms between peoples are already tending to disappear more and more, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, the growth of free trade and a world market, and the increasing uniformity of industrial processes and of corresponding conditions of life.” Marx saw the development of corporate power as useful and the next necessary step towards socialism, noting that joint-stock companies (corporations) and the credit system are: “The abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself.” In other words, corporations are viewed as a tool for the eventual transition to a socialist “Utopia” and the death of free markets. Once again, we see there is very little difference in motive between the political left and the fascists. The natural progression of every form of Marxism, communism, socialism, fascism etc. all ultimately lead to a kind of globalist ideology and erasure of cultural separation.

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“A Slovak government contingency plan envisages that about 700,000 refugees may pour into the country this winter..”

• Europe Braces For New Refugee Crisis (RT)

Eastern European countries are girding for a new influx of Ukrainian refugees this winter, with Slovakia anticipating that hundreds of thousands people may arrive in the country in the coming months due to low temperatures and hostilities in Ukraine, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing local officials. A Slovak government contingency plan envisages that about 700,000 refugees may pour into the country this winter, the report says. “A large number of (Ukraine’s) internally displaced people are currently temporarily housed in conditions that are not suitable for the winter,” the document reads, according to Reuters, adding that the “further escalation of the conflict is also a risk. Moreover, European nations are said to be opening reception centers and stocking up products to get ready for a new refugee crisis.

In Hungary, Zsofia Dobis-Lucski, a spokesperson for the charity organization Hungarian Reformed Church Aid, told Reuters that about 300–500 people have been arriving daily at the border train station in the town of Zahony in recent weeks. However, Witold Wolczyk, an official from Przemysl in eastern Poland, has so far noticed little commotion. At the same time, he told the outlet that local authorities have to prepare for a potentially difficult winter, as well as for a new wave of refugees. “We are constantly stocking up on hygiene products and food,” Wolczyk added. According to UN data, about 4.5 million refugees are currently registered within various national protection schemes in Europe, with about seven million people internally displaced in Ukraine itself.

Europe is bracing for a new refugee crisis amid Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power plants that have knocked out up to 40% of the country’s energy infrastructure, according to Kiev. The bombardment came after Moscow accused Kiev of conducting “terrorist attacks” on Russian infrastructure, including the strategic Crimean Bridge. Against this backdrop, in late October Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk urged her fellow citizens who had fled the country not to return home before spring to ease pressure on the power grid.

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€1.5 billion per month for Azov NATO.

• Hungary Reacts To EU Aid Plan For Kiev (RT)

Hungary has rejected an EU loan scheme set to provide €18 billion ($18.1 billion) in stable financial aid to Ukraine next year. Finance Minister Mihaly Varga was quoted by the media as saying on Tuesday that Budapest has had “bad experience” with joint EU loans and still has not received enough aid regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Bloomberg, Varga told his colleagues at a meeting in Brussels that Budapest will not back the idea to use the EU budget in order to offer concessional loans to Kiev. The measure needs the approval of all the bloc’s 27 member states. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Monday that his country will not stop helping Kiev, but will also not greenlight a bloc-wide borrowing plan. “We are ready to continue financial support on a bilateral basis,” Szijjarto said.


“But we will certainly not support any kind of joint EU borrowing in this field.” “Why? Because we have already done it once. We supported joint borrowing during the coronavirus epidemic, and that was more than enough,” he explained. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed an aid package of €1.5 billion ($1.5 billion) per month for Ukraine over the course of 2023. The amount will ensure “a stable and reliable, predictable flow of income” for Kiev, she said last month. In a video address to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in October, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said his country will need $55 billion next year to cover the estimated budget deficit and rebuild critical infrastructure amid the conflict with Russia.

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Lavrov will do. Putin can spare the others from humiliating themselves.

• Kremlin Comments On Putin’s G20 Plans (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the summit of G20 leaders in Bali, Indonesia next week in person, his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed on Thursday. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be heading the Russian delegation at the two-day event, the official said. The same information was also given by Russia’s Embassy in Jakarta to Russian and foreign media outlets, while Reuters reported on it citing an Indonesian government official. Both sources said Putin may participate in the event via video link. The host nation previously came under pressure by the US and its allies to block Putin from attending the meeting, claiming that Russia should be isolated diplomatically as punishment for sending troops into Ukraine.


US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, together with representatives from the UK and Canada, walked out of a meeting of G20 finance ministers in April, in protest against a speech of Russian delegates. Jakarta did not yield and sent an invitation to Putin just like any other leader of G20 nations. There was some speculation in the Western media that US President Joe Biden could meet Putin on the sidelines of the gathering, but the White House ultimately ruled this out. According to some reports, the Biden administration made plans on how to prevent even a casual encounter between him and Putin, should the Russian leader attend the G20 summit in person. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is expected to participate in the event virtually too. He conditioned his involvement on Putin’s not going to Bali.

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I know! I know this one! Call Robert Mueller to investigate!

• Biden: Elon Musk’s Links To Other Countries ‘Worthy Of Being Looked At’ (G.)

Joe Biden thinks Twitter boss Elon Musk’s relationships with other countries is “worthy of being looked at”. Biden was asked at a news conference on Wednesday whether he thought Musk was a threat to national security and if his acquisition of Twitter with help from a Saudi Arabian conglomerate should be investigated by the US government. “I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” Biden said. “Whether he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting they’re worth being looked at.” Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, among the richest Middle East investors, and his investment firm has emerged as the second-largest investor in Twitter after Musk’s takeover of the social media platform.


Two US senators – Democrat Ron Wyden, who chairs the finance committee, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut – last week called for a “thorough vetting” of the Twitter deal. In a statement, Wyden said: “Given the Saudi regime’s history of jailing critics, planting a spy at Twitter, and brutally murdering a Washington Post journalist, the Saudi regime must be blocked from accessing Twitter account information, direct messages and other data that could be used to identify political opponents or to suppress criticism of the royal family. “I’ve long argued that the United States has a national security interest in protecting Americans’ data from murderous foreign governments, and this Saudi regime absolutely fits that description.” The White House said last month that reports the US was discussing launching a national security review of some of Musk’s ventures, including Twitter, were “not true”.

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This is not China.

• The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and National Security State (Jac.)

The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it refers to as “MDM”: misinformation, disinformation, and “malinformation.” Documents obtained and made publicly available by the news outlet show that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been formulating a strategy to combat MDM regarding US elections and other matters. While seemingly unobjectionable on the surface -who could be against combating false information, which is rife online?- it raises serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the already-troubling phenomenon of tech censorship.

The conversations detailed in the documents show the federal government, and the DHS specifically, taking a more active role in tech companies’ efforts to suppress MDM. We’ve had some indications this was happening for a while, as when DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC in August that the government was “working with the tech companies” on “strengthen[ing] the legitimate use of their very powerful platforms and prevent[ing] harm from occurring,” and that it was doing so “across the federal enterprise” – comments that were only reported in right-wing media. The documents give us details about what that work has entailed. In these discussions, the government did not directly carry out censorship.

Rather, they involved government agencies: doing “debunking” and “pre-bunking”; directing the press, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to “trusted resources”; carrying out “rumor control”; boosting “trusted authoritative sources”; giving financial support to its external partners; and improving information literacy. Much of the focus is on elections, with participants talking about using these resources to prevent people being misled about how, where, and when to vote, and stressing that CISA should strictly be a “resource” that at most uses its “convening power.” But it’s not just election misinformation that’s the focus. Among the recommendations made by CISA is to target MDM that “undermines critical functions carried out by other key democratic institutions.” What are these institutions? It lists as examples the courts and, absurdly, the financial system which -besides not actually being one of our “democratic institutions”- is a notable broadening of what “fighting misinformation” involves. And yet a representative of JP Morgan Chase attended the discussions, and several emails suggest CISA is facilitating collaboration between Google and Facebook and the department of treasury on “social media and influence matters,” as one puts it.

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From the local Greek press. “..the same basic consumer goods and necessities are much more expensive in Greece than in Germany..”

• Profit Inflation And A Basket Full Of Holes (K.)

There is certainly an inflation problem in the United States and Europe, and its reappearance after decades is a global phenomenon. No country, no economy, no one is immune. However, inflation is not a neutral phenomenon. As long as consumption holds up, companies pass the increased costs on to their customers. Even if they keep the same rate of profit, they increase their profits as an absolute number, since the same rate of profit is calculated on increased base prices. In addition, many companies take advantage of the situation to increase their profit margins. Real profits are rising, while real wages are falling, Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote recently in the Financial Times, referring to the US economy. The problem is called profit inflation.

According to the Labor Institute of the General Confederation of Greek Workers (INE/GSEE), since April this year, the minimum wage has lost 19% of its purchasing power. In 2022, when inflation is hovering at around 10%, the losses are greater for the lowest incomes, reaching 40% for households with a monthly income of up to 750 euros. Note this too: In the first half of this year, Greek natural gas providers had the second highest profit margin in Europe. There’s profits, and there’s massive profits. Furthermore, the fact that inflation is currently a global problem does not explain why the same basic consumer goods and necessities are much more expensive in Greece than in Germany or other European and Mediterranean countries, even though some of these countries have higher wages, more expensive rents and other factors that affect cost. It does not explain why the same supermarket chains sell goods for noticeably less in their stores in Munich than they do in their stores in Athens.

The answer is because competition doesn’t work in Greece. Instead, we have the “market of cronies,” where easy and big money is made. These systems are not touched by Greek governments – certainly not the current one – even though the tsunami of price hikes, if left unchecked, will turn into a kind of looting at the expense of the people’s income. There is no magic solution. But if a government wanted to put a stop to this tsunami, it would act with responsibility, seriousness and professionalism – and it certainly wouldn’t work against the independent watchdog, the Hellenic Competition Commission. And after obtaining a real picture of the economic details of each sector from the relevant bodies (so as not to be ignorant), it would invite all those involved – from retail chains to importers, producers and manufacturers – and impose a broad agreement and cooperation to lower prices.

Nothing was done in this direction. Instead of some real fight against inflation there is the impression of a fight, with the launch of the so-called “household basket” – a set of products at supermarkets protected from inflation. It is a “basket” full of holes. The price of the products that go into it will rise modestly. But if this price needs to rise excessively, then it will be removed from the basket – with system and order.

Greece Nov 8

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Kolakusic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1590295381509693441

 

 

 

 

 

 

Owl
https://twitter.com/i/status/1590405696688132096

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 17 2022

Aug 172022
 
 August 17, 2022  Posted by at 7:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  51 Responses »


Piet Mondriaan New York City I 1942

 

• Ukraine Aiming To Create Chaos Within Russian Forces – Zelenskiy Adviser (G.)
• Western Countries Waiting For ‘Fall Of Ukraine’ – Kiev (RT)
• Zelensky Speaks Out On Travel Ban For Ukrainian Men (RT)
• Annual Grocery Bills In Great Britain Will Soar By £533 – Experts (G.)
• Gazprom Makes EU Gas Price Prediction (RT)
• Why Is Amnesty Apologising For Telling The Truth About Ukraine? (Cook)
• Germans Cut Down On Gas Consumption – Industry Body (RT)
• Russian Military Signs Contract For ‘Uninterceptable’ Missiles (RT)
• False System vs False System in the Netherlands (Garlington)
• Judge Assigned To Lawsuit Alleging CIA Spied On Assange Visitors (D.)
• The Most Damaging Farm Products? Organic, Pasture-fed Beef And Lamb (Monbiot)
• Comirnaty Is A Ghost Shot (Schachtel)
• 44% of Pregnant Women in Pfizer Trial Lost Their Babies (AG)
• President Trump Wants Full Unredacted Raid Affidavit Released (CTH)

 

 

 

 

Neuralink

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read a lot. Also in the Guardian. Now, they send me messages that I am one of their top readers. Signed, Luke Harding. One of the authors of this propaganda. Hilarious.

• Ukraine Aiming To Create Chaos Within Russian Forces – Zelenskiy Adviser (G.)

Ukraine is engaged in a counteroffensive aimed at creating “chaos within Russian forces” by striking at the invaders’ supply lines deep into occupied territories, according to a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Mykhailo Podolyak told the Guardian there could be more attacks in the “next two or three months” similar to Tuesday’s mysterious strikes on a railway junction and an airbase in Crimea, as well as last week’s hit on Russian warplanes at the peninsula’s Saky aerodrome. Russia said a fire on Tuesday had set off explosions at a munitions depot in the Dzhankoi district of Crimea – an incident that Podolyak said was a reminder that “Crimea occupied by Russians is about warehouse explosions and high risk of death for invaders and thieves”.

Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attacks. They have prompted Russian tourists to flee Crimea in panic. There were queues on Tuesday outside the railway station at the regional capital, Simferopol. The defence ministry in Moscow said it was dealing with cases of sabotage and taking “necessary measures” to prevent further episodes. Speaking from the presidential offices in Kyiv, Podolyak said: “Our strategy is to destroy the logistics, the supply lines and the ammunition depots and other objects of military infrastructure. It’s creating a chaos within their own forces.”

The adviser, often described as the country’s third most powerful figure, said Kyiv’s approach ran counter to Moscow’s use of blunt artillery power to gain territory in the Donbas region to the east, which has seen Russian troops destroy cities such as Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk in order to gain territory. “So Russia has kind of taught everybody that a counteroffensive requires huge amounts of manpower like a giant fist and just go in one direction,” he said, but “a Ukrainian counteroffensive looks very different. We don’t use the tactics of the 60s and 70s, of the last century.” However, the remarks could also be interpreted as an acknowledgment that Ukraine is struggling to amass the amount of men and military material required to sustain a full counteroffensive in the south of the country, which typically requires a superiority of three or more soldiers to one.

Scott Ritter Odessa

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They have gotten into a habit of blaming the hand that feeds them. Not sure how long that will benefit them.

• Western Countries Waiting For ‘Fall Of Ukraine’ – Kiev (RT)

Several countries in the West are waiting for Kiev to surrender and think their problems will immediately solve themselves, said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba in an interview published on Tuesday. “I often get asked in interviews and while speaking to other foreign ministers: how long will you last? That’s instead of asking what else could be done to help us defeat Putin in the shortest time possible,” Kuleba said, noting that such questions suggest that everyone “is waiting for us to fall and for their problems to disappear on their own.” The foreign minister went on to suggest that some Western countries are ready to accept Ukraine’s surrender in the ongoing military conflict with Russia and have it concede some of its territories – something Kiev has repeatedly insisted it would never agree to.

Last week, Mikhail Podolyak, an aide to President Zelensky, ruled out Kiev’s military defeat as a possible scenario and stated that it would fight “to the last Russian citizen in Ukrainian territory,” with the help of Western weapons which he says will be funneled into the country regardless of the cost. Podolyak also suggested that nobody would try to negotiate a truce with Russia at the expense of Ukraine, due to the reputation of President Zelensky for “not allowing any such talks behind his back.” Zelensky has repeatedly condemned the insistence of some Western countries on a peaceful resolution to the conflict without considering Kiev’s interests, stating in June that “everyone wants to push us to some result, definitely not desirable for us,” while pursuing their own financial and political interests.

“Fatigue is growing, people want some kind of result for themselves. And we need a result for us,” the Ukrainian leader stated. Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has predicted that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine would eventually end with a negotiated settlement but insisted that Kiev must continue to receive military support from the West to improve its negotiating position.

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“The Rada has since extended the period of martial law several times, most recently prolonging it for an additional 90 days, until November 21.”

• Zelensky Speaks Out On Travel Ban For Ukrainian Men (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has announced that men without military experience will be banned from leaving the country as long as martial law is in effect. The statement was posted on the president’s website on Monday in response to a petition urging that men between the ages 18 and 60 be allowed to travel abroad. The petition, which was signed by over 27,000 people, says many Ukrainian men are unfit for military service but could be useful in other fields. The author argued that if these people were allowed to work abroad, they could help refugees and send back money to aid the military, which, the text says, already has enough capable people.

“Fighting should be fought by able-bodied people. We have many IT, social, creative, technical, and other specialists who can fight on the information front and be more useful working abroad, helping our refugees and supporting the army with earned funds,” the petition reads. The author claimed that Kiev’s travel restrictions aimed at certain categories of citizens resemble “Soviet practices, which [Ukraine] is gradually getting rid of,” and offered the example of Estonia, which only prohibits travel to those who are the subjects of criminal proceedings. “Therefore, we ask the president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, to allow men aged 18-60 who do not have military experience and are of limited fitness to travel abroad,” the petition concludes. According to Ukrainian law, if an online petition receives more than 25,000 signatures, the president must issue a response.

Zelensky replied by pointing to Article 64 of the constitution, which states that freedom of movement may be limited for Ukrainian citizens in the event of an emergency or the introduction of martial law. The president explained that according to the constitution, during a period of “martial law, the constitutional rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen… may be limited.” He went on to note that “the abolition of these restrictions is expected to be carried out after the end of the legal regime of martial law.” Ukraine’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, approved Zelensky’s decree introducing martial law in the country on February 24, 2022, after Moscow launched its military operation against Kiev. The Rada has since extended the period of martial law several times, most recently prolonging it for an additional 90 days, until November 21.

Ukr soldier

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Lowballing?!

• Annual Grocery Bills In Great Britain Will Soar By £533 – Experts (G.)

Supermarket bills in Great Britain will soar by £533, or more than £10 a week, as grocery price inflation hits its highest level since at least 2008. The price of a weekly shop rose 11.6% in the four weeks to 7 August, compared with a year before, according to the latest figures from Kantar. That represents the highest rate of inflation since the market research group began tracking the sector 14 years ago taking the average annual grocery bill to £5,128. Fraser McKevitt, the head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said: “As predicted, we’ve now hit a new peak in grocery price inflation, with products like butter, milk and poultry in particular seeing some of the biggest jumps.” The price rises will pile pressure on households already struggling to cope with rising energy bills and petrol prices.


More than one in eight UK households fear they have no further way to make cuts to afford a sharp increase in annual energy bills expected this autumn. Discounters Aldi and Lidl both increased sales by double-digit percentages in the three months to 7 August as shoppers sought ways to reduce their bills. Kantar found that together Lidl and Aldi have gained 1.8 percentage points of British grocery sales over this period, representing a £2.3bn annual shift in spending. The homegrown discounter Iceland also increased sales by almost 3%. Aldi is close to overtaking Morrisons to become the UK’s fourth largest supermarket. Its market share rose 0.9 percentage points to 9.1%, a fraction behind Morrisons on 9.3%. Waitrose, Morrisons and independent stores all saw sales fall back, as the overall grocery market rose 2.2% in the three months.

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Playing with(out) fire.

• Gazprom Makes EU Gas Price Prediction (RT)

Russian state energy giant Gazprom on Tuesday warned that gas prices in Europe could surge by 60% this winter. “European spot gas prices have reached $2,500. According to conservative estimates, if such a tendency persists, prices will exceed $4,000 per thousand cubic meters this winter,” the company posted to its official Telegram channel. Gazprom’s exports to Europe are running at reduced levels this year due to Ukraine-related sanctions and technical issues. The company said its gas exports to non-former Soviet countries fell by 36.2% to 78.5 billion cubic meters between January 1 and August 15, while production dropped by 13.2% to 274.8 billion cubic meters year-on-year. However, the Russian company maintains that it supplies gas “in accordance with confirmed requests.”


As Russia remains the EU’s largest source of natural gas, European gas prices have quadrupled since the start of the year on thinning flows. Earlier on Tuesday, the cost of gas futures on the TTF hub in the Netherlands exceeded $2,600 per thousand cubic meters for the first time since March, which is about 13% above the previous day’s settlement, data from the London Stock Exchange ICE showed. Meanwhile, Gazprom’s shipments to Asia have surged. Flows through the Power of Siberia pipeline regularly exceed the daily contracted quantities, according to the company. For instance, in January-July Gazprom supplied 60.9% more gas to China via this pipeline compared to the same period in 2021.

Putin

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“Amnesty made a statement last week in which it said it “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused by its report, while at the same time stating: “We fully stand by our findings.”

• Why Is Amnesty Apologising For Telling The Truth About Ukraine? (Cook)

Should a human rights organisation apologise for publishing important evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses? If it does apologise, what does that suggest about its commitment to dispassionately uncovering the truth about the actions of both parties to war? And equally, what message does it send to those who claim to be “distressed” by the publication of such evidence? Those are questions Amnesty International should have pondered far more carefully than it obviously did before issuing an apology last week over its latest report on the war in Ukraine. In that report, Amnesty accused Ukrainian forces of committing war crimes by stationing troops and artillery in or near schools, hospitals and residential buildings, thereby using civilians effectively as human shields. Such practices by Ukrainian soldiers were identified in 19 different towns and villages.

These incidents did not just theoretically endanger civilians. There is evidence, according to Amnesty, that return fire by Russian troops on these Ukrainian positions led to non-combatants being killed. The Israeli army regularly accuses Palestinian factions like Hamas of hiding among civilians in Gaza, while obscuring its own, long-documented practice of using Palestinians as human shields. But whatever the truth of Israel’s claims, unlike the tiny and massively overcrowded Gaza, which offers few or no hiding places outside of built-up areas for Palestinian fighters to resist Israeli aggression, Amnesty concluded of the situation in Ukraine: “Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas.” In other words, it was a choice made by the Ukrainian army to put its own civilians in harm’s way.

Notably, this is the first time a major western human rights organisation has publicly scrutinised the behaviour of Ukraine’s soldiers. Until now, these watchdog bodies have focused exclusively on reports of crimes committed by Russian forces – a position entirely in line with the priorities of their own governments. By its own admission, Amnesty has published dozens of reports condemning Russia. The pushback against the latest report was relentless, coming even from Amnesty’s own Ukrainian team. Oksana Pokalchuk, its head, quit, explaining that her team “did everything they could to prevent this material from being published”. Under mounting pressure, Amnesty made a statement last week in which it said it “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused by its report, while at the same time stating: “We fully stand by our findings.”

Amnesty

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Take that Putin!

• Germans Cut Down On Gas Consumption – Industry Body (RT)

Natural gas usage in Germany plunged in the first half of this year, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing the power industry association BDEW. The country consumed nearly 15% less natural gas compared with the same period of 2021, mostly due to far milder spring weather, the report said. Even after being adjusted for temperature effects, the drop was still 8%, according to the outlet. BDEW highlighted that much higher energy prices, weaker economic growth and increased personal motivation to save energy may have also contributed to the decline. In June, gas consumption was nearly a quarter lower than the same month last year, according to BDEW.


Nevertheless, the association noted that nearly all households and public buildings could do more to cut consumption, such as by turning down the heat by a degree or two in winter. The statistics also showed that the country’s electricity generation from gas has been declining since the middle of 2021. In the first half of 2022, gas-fired power plants generated around 12% less electricity than in the same period last year, BDEW noted. It was reported on Monday that Berlin has since late July stopped illuminating around 100 public buildings and historic landmarks in order to save energy. The city authorities said that in total, 150 buildings will no longer be lit at night.

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Miles ahead.

• Russian Military Signs Contract For ‘Uninterceptable’ Missiles (RT)

The Russian military will receive state-of-the-art Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles, which, according to the manufacturer, can pierce through any existing air defense. The signing of a state contract “for the production and supply of the Sarmat strategic missile system” was announced on Tuesday during the Army 2022 forum, which is taking place in Moscow Region. The deal was signed by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksey Krivoruchko and the general manager of the country’s Makeev Missile Center, Vladimir Degtyar, RIA Novosti reported. Speaking on Russian TV in May, Degtyar claimed that “it is impossible to intercept” the Sarmat missile thanks to its “incredibly complex” design, which allows it to “overcome any multi-layered missile defense.”


The commander of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, Sergey Karakaev, said at the time that the new rocket can travel along unusual trajectories, including via the South Pole. He added that the Sarmat is the “largest military rocket in human history,” boasting a diameter of three meters and a height equal to that of a 14-story apartment block. The missile is said to weigh over 200 tons. The signing of another contract was also made public on Tuesday, in which the Russian Army will obtain the S-500 Prometheus air defense system – the latest iteration of the famed S-300 and S-400 missiles. With a range of 600km, its specialty is the interception of incoming missiles at high altitudes. The S-500 entered production by April, according to Yan Novikov, the general manager of state-owned defense company Almaz-Antey.

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Some strange comparisons. Dutch farmers, civil war US and Smolensk in the 13th century.

• False System vs False System in the Netherlands (Garlington)

Dixie has always had a heavily agricultural economy, so many here are able to sympathize with the farmers in the Netherlands, whose lands and livelihoods are being threatened by globalists and radical environmentalists to further their agendas of technocratic control, depopulation, and so on. And more than that. The Dutch farmers are skillfully using unconventional tactics in their fight (e.g., blocking roadways with manure, tractors, or hay bales set aflame), something Southerners also are familiar with in their wars against the British Empire (1776-83) and the nascent Yankee Empire (1861-5) under generals such Francis Marion, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and John Mosby. But there is another similarity that isn’t so good.

The South in her fight against the Yanks didn’t offer enough of a difference in fundamental ideals to inspire her people to keep fighting until independence was achieved. To be sure, there were (and are) some very real, very deep differences between the two that played a large role in their conflict. But what the War between the States ultimately boiled down to was a clash between two types of governmental systems: the centralized, unrestrained Yankee governing system and the decentralized, limited government of Dixie. And there simply isn’t enough spiritual strength and vitality in an idea like constitutional interpretation to fire good, decent men to fight in an agonizing war for years on end. Thus, the South surrendered to Lincoln’s Army in 1865 after only four years of fighting, and has not mustered the wherewithal to challenge Washington City’s rule over her since then.

A similar situation may be developing in the Netherlands, where a right to widely distributed private ownership of land, economic autonomy, and this sort of thing is being opposed to a centrally planned economy with very few owners. Will the Dutch farmers be able to keep their resistance going with abstractions like ‘freedom’ as their underlying motivation? The prospects do not seem too bright. In a contest of one atheistic, materialistic ideology (distributed ownership of farms) vs another atheistic, materialistic ideology (central ownership of farms), the system being pushed by the more ruthless of the two groups of people will likely prevail.

This is what happened in the States: Lincoln and his generals waged unlimited warfare against the civilians of the South and broke them down physically and mentally. Likewise in Canada with the trucker protests earlier this year, the globalist Trudeau government used harsh tactics against the protestors to bring that populist rebellion to a quick end. The protests in the Netherlands are likely headed for the same sort of resolution: a hard crackdown by the Rutte government that breaks the spirit of the protestors, who then tamely submit to the new order. Unless . . .

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A glimmer of hope?

• Judge Assigned To Lawsuit Alleging CIA Spied On Assange Visitors (D.)

Judge John Koeltl, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, was assigned to a lawsuit filed on behalf of journalists and attorneys, who claim the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo spied on them when they visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Attorney Richard Roth, who is representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the assignment. “Appointed to the bench in 1994, Judge Koeltl is a bright, experienced, and hard working judge in the Southern District,” Roth said. “He has presided over some of the highest profile cases in the SDNY, including the World Trade Center bombing case.” “We are fortunate to have such a seasoned jurist,” Roth added. Koeltl previously presided over a case involving Assange and WikiLeaks.

[..] In 2019, Koeltl ruled that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) could not hold Assange or WikiLeaks liable for publishing DNC emails or emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which Russian agents were accused of stealing. The decision Koeltl issued highlighted the Pentagon Papers case, where the US Supreme Court ruled there was a “heavy presumption” against suppressing the publication of information. He concluded Assange and WikiLeaks had a First Amendment right to publish, even if WikiLeaks knew the materials were obtained illegally. “The First Amendment prevents such liability in the same way it would preclude liability for press outlets that publish materials of public interest, despite defects in the way the materials were obtained,” Koeltl asserted.

Koeltl added, “So long as the disseminator did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place,” publishing was protected. “This was not a solicitation to steal documents but a request for material that has been stolen. Journalists are allowed to request documents that have been stolen and to publish those documents,” Koeltl declared.

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Ha ha ha, George Monbiot. I still think he means well, but he’s not the brightest light, is he? Organic, pasture-fed beef is more damaging than factory farming? Are you sure? Eat bugs, George.

• The Most Damaging Farm Products? Organic, Pasture-fed Beef And Lamb (Monbiot)

Perhaps the most important of all environmental issues is land use. Every hectare of land we use for extractive industries is a hectare that can’t support wild forests, savannahs, wetlands, natural grasslands and other crucial ecosystems. And farming swallows far more land than any other human activity. What are the world’s most damaging farm products? You might be amazed by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realise this is a shocking claim. Of all the statements in my new book, Regenesis, it has triggered the greatest rage. But I’m not trying to wind people up. I’m trying to represent the facts. Let me explain. Arable crops, some of which are fed to farm animals, occupy 12% of the planet’s land surface. But far more land (28%) is used for grazing: in other words, for pasture-fed meat and milk.


Yet, across this vast area, farm animals that are entirely pasture-fed produce just 1% of the world’s protein. Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases. The only category in which numbers fall when grazing by cattle or sheep ceases are those that eat dung. Where there are cattle, there are fewer wild mammals, birds, reptiles and insects on the land, and fewer fish in the rivers. Perhaps most importantly – because of their crucial role in regulating living systems – there tend to be no large predators.

Amish farm

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“One year later: How the Biden Admin, Big Tech, and Pfizer fooled Americans into taking “FDA approved” COVID vaccines that never actually existed..”

• Comirnaty Is A Ghost Shot (Schachtel)

It has been almost one year since the FDA gave full approval to Pfizer’s mRNA COVID injection. Yet many will be surprised to find out that this particular vaccine, in FDA approved form, has never actually existed, and will never exist. The Biden Administration’s highly touted FDA approval was a mere sleight of hand. It was bureaucratic trickery. There remains no FDA approved COVID vaccine that is actually available in the United States, and there may never be one. On August 23, 2021, the FDA approved Pfizer’s Comirnaty shot, the FDA cleared version of the emergency use authorized Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Marked as a turning point in the battle against the virus, the Biden Administration, Government Health agencies, and Pfizer went on a full PR blitz to crush what they deemed “vaccine hesitancy.”

Big Tech and media “fact checkers” also joined in on the mRNA uptake blitz campaign, with all of these forces maintaining a false reality in which FDA approved vaccines were readily available. Four emergency use authorization shots (and counting) later, It has became very clear, despite shoddy academic papers to the contrary, that the mRNA drug does not work, is particularly risky for young men, and is not in any way, shape, or form a vaccine by its traditional definition. But at the time of the FDA approval, “fully vaccinated” meant just two shots, and the government rubber stamp measure was weaponized to convince Americans to get the shot. “Safe and Effective,” and now, “FDA approved.” Additionally, the Biden Administration leveraged this fraudulent FDA approved status to pressure private companies into coercing their employees to take the shot.

Of course, they did not actually have access to an FDA approved shot. However, the campaign succeeded with flying colors, as millions of Americans were forced to take the shot under duress, as they couldn’t afford to be rendered unemployed by the biomedical security state. The American government engaged in a pharmaceutical sales campaign, based on polling data, to trick its own citizens into taking a shot that they thought was FDA approved. However, everyone in America was being injected with — and continue to take — the legally distinct emergency use authorization (EUA) version of the shot. The FDA approved Comirnaty shot has never become available to the American public in the United States. [..] Finally, in June, as reported in The Dossier, Pfizer acknowledged in quiet filings to the CDC that they would never produce the FDA approved version of Comirnaty that was authorized on August 23, 2021.

Hide the bodies

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“..if you lost your baby, it was categorized by Pfizer as resolved adverse event, like a headache that got better..”

• 44% of Pregnant Women in Pfizer Trial Lost Their Babies (AG)

More than 40 percent of pregnant women who participated in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages, according internal Pfizer documents, recently released under court order. Despite this, Pfizer, and the Biden administration insisted that the vaccines were safe for pregnant women. Out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, according to an analysis of the documents. In a January court ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas, ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release around 12,000 documents immediately, and then 55,000 pages a month until all documents were released, totaling more than 300,000 pages.

The nonprofit group, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, sued the FDA last September, after the agency denied its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to expedite the release of mRNA vaccine review documents. In a November 2021 joint status report, the FDA proposed releasing only 500 pages of the documents a month, which would have taken up to 75 years. Trial documents released in April revealed that Pfizer had to hire 1,800 additional full-time employees in the first half of 2021 to deal with “the large increase” of adverse reactions to its COVID vaccine. [..] A batch of documents released in late July showed that 44 percent of women who were pregnant during the trial suffered miscarriages, feminist author and journalist Dr. Naomi Wolf revealed on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

Wolf has been spearheading research and analysis of the Pfizer documents through her website Daily Clout. In the past, only 10 to 15 percent of known pregnancies ended in miscarriage. “Pfizer took those deaths of babies—those spontaneous abortions and miscarriages—and recategorized them as recovered/resolved adverse effects,” Wolf told Bannon. “In other words, if you lost your baby, it was categorized by Pfizer as resolved adverse event, like a headache that got better,” she added. [..] “Over a year ago, the FDA received this report that out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, and they did not say anything,” Wolf said, choking back tears. “Thus the FDA was aware of the horrifying rate of fetal death by the start of April 2021 and were silent.” The CDC, as recently as last month, still recommended the experimental mRNA vaccines for pregnant and breastfeeding “people.”

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Lawyer ‘sundance’ has written a lot about Trump and the raid lately. But sometimes a format doesn’t fit the Debt Rattle. Browse his site.

• President Trump Wants Full Unredacted Raid Affidavit Released (CTH)

The NSA compliance officer notified NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers of unauthorized use of the NSA database by FBI contractors searching U.S. citizens during the 2015/2016 presidential primary. That 2016 notification is a classified record. The response from Mike Rogers, and the subsequent documentary evidence of what names were being searched is again a classified record. The audit logs showing who was doing the searches (which contractors, which agencies and from what offices), as noted by Director Rogers, was preserved. That is another big-time classified record. In addition, we would have Admiral Rogers writing a mandatory oversight notification to the FISA court detailing what happened.

That’s a big and comprehensive classified record, likely contained in the documents in Mar-a-Lago… and then the goldmine, the fully unredacted 99-page FISA court opinion detailing the substance of the NSA compromise by FBI officials and contractors, including the names, frequency and dates of the illegal surveillance. That is a major classified document the Deepest Deep State would want to keep hidden. These are the types of documents within what former ODNI John Ratcliffe called “thousands of pages that were declassified by President Trump,” and given to both John Durham and Main Justice with an expectation of public release when the Durham special counsel probe concluded.

In short, President Trump declassified documents that show how the institutions within the U.S. government targeted him. However, the institutions that illegally targeted President Trump are the same institutions who control the specific evidence of their unlawful targeting. These examples of evidence held by President Donald Trump reveals the background of how the DC surveillance state exists. THAT was/is the national security threat behind the DOJ-NSD search warrant and affidavit. The risk to the fabric of the U.S. government is why we see lawyers and pundits so confused as they try to figure out the disproportionate response from the DOJ and FBI, toward “simple records”, held by President Trump in Mar-a-Lago.

Very few people can comprehend what has been done since January 2009, and the current state of corruption as it now exists amid all of the agencies and institutions of government. Barack Obama spent 8 years building out and refining the political surveillance state. The operators of the institutions have spent the last six years hiding the construct. President Donald Trump declassified the material then took evidence to Mar-a-Lago. The people currently in charge of managing the corrupt system, like Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Chris Wray and the Senate allies, are going bananas. From their DC perspective, Donald Trump is an existential threat.

Affidavit

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Thomas the Tank

 

 

 

 

 

Extinct

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 28 2018

Nov 282018
 
 November 28, 2018  Posted by at 10:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Yasuhiro Ishimoto Chicago 1959

 

• Stock Market Selloff Only Half-done, Final Leg In 2019 – Morgan Stanley (MW)
• Home Prices Have Surged, Government’s Share Of Mortgages Will Too (MW)
• Trump Says ‘Not Even A Little Bit Happy’ With Fed’s Powell (R.)
• Manafort’s Lawyer Repeatedly Briefed Trump Attorneys On Mueller Talks (ZH)
• If Manafort Visited Assange There Should Be Ample Evidence (Greenwald)
• Manafort Plans To Explore “All Legal Options” Against The Guardian (ZH)
• Poroshenko Claims Ukraine Offered ‘Military Assistance’ By US (Ind.)
• ‘Put Putin In His Place’, Ukrainian Ambassador Tells Germany (R.)
• Ukraine Digests What Martial Law Will Mean (Ind.)
• Chancellor Admits UK Will Be Worse Off Under All Brexit Scenarios (G.)
• Murphy to the Rescue (Kunstler)

 

 

Sorry, useless predictions. MS knows no more than you do.

• Stock Market Selloff Only Half-done, Final Leg In 2019 – Morgan Stanley (MW)

Elon Musk’s cringe-inducing Twitter meltdown, the rise and fall of bitcoin, and the record-breaking oil plunge — for some 2018 can’t end soon enough. But be careful for what you wish for as the bear that has rampaged through the stock market is expected to return in the new year, according to one Wall Street strategist. “The Rolling Bear market is now better understood by the consensus; and more importantly, it is better priced, with forward price/earnings falling 18% from peak to trough. In short, while 90% of the price damage has been done by this bear, we’ve likely only served 50% of the time,” said Mike Wilson, an equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, in a note to clients.

Wilson was among the handful of market watchers to predict the recent market wipeout even as stocks were trading at record levels. “The Rolling Bear is tired from all the mauling he has done this year. However, he is likely just resting rather than hibernating,” he said. ”The final leg of this bear likely won’t come until numbers are reduced for 2019, although that should feel a lot less painful than the multiple compression stage we experienced in 2018.” The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are poised to close out November in the red as worries about tighter liquidity resulting from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes and a trade war with China triggered an exodus from stocks.

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Why do Fannie and Freddie atill guarantee $700,000+ loans? If they didn’t, homes would become much more affordable.

• Home Prices Have Surged, Government’s Share Of Mortgages Will Too (MW)

A federal regulator has raised the dollar amount of home loans that qualify for backing by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant government-sponsored enterprises. In 2019, the maximum conforming loan limit will be $484,350, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said Tuesday. That’s up 6.9% from the 2018 maximum of $453,100. The change is based on the rate of change in home prices between the third quarter of 2017 and third quarter of 2018, as measured by FHFA’s House Price Index. But in higher-priced areas, loan limits are capped at 150% of the baseline $484,350. That means Fannie and Freddie will guarantee loans up to $726,525 in roughly 100 higher-cost counties.

Raising the dollar limit on Fannie- and Freddie-backed loans is one way of lubricating the mortgage market. If banks or other lenders can sell bigger mortgages to the enterprises, that makes it easier for them to keep lending. In turn, that makes it easier for would-be buyers to find financing that is generally more advantageous than other types of mortgages, like those backed by the Federal Housing Administration. But it also increases the risk to taxpayers. Fannie and Freddie operate with only a slim capital reserve, as the result of a 2012 directive from Congress that was patched over late in 2017. The update was owed to an agreement between FHFA Director Mel Watt and the U.S. Treasury even as they continue to guarantee between 40%-50% of new mortgages. That means that in any given quarter, either company is at risk of having to take taxpayer money.

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Trump senses the danger, and then ridicules himself.

• Trump Says ‘Not Even A Little Bit Happy’ With Fed’s Powell (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday kept up his criticism of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, saying rising interest rates and other Fed policies were damaging the U.S. economy, the Washington Post said. “So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay,” the Post quoted Trump as saying in an interview, referring to the man he picked last year to lead the Fed. “Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”

In recent months, the Republican president has repeatedly criticized Powell and the Fed’s interest rate increases that he said was making it more expensive for his administration to finance its escalating deficits. Trump has called the Fed “crazy” and “ridiculous.” “I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump told the Post on Tuesday. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

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Joint defense agreements are common and fully legal, but the NY Times labels this one “highly unusual”. Summarized: Mueller was outflanked, though he could/should have known, and Manafort may be relying on a pardon.

• Manafort’s Lawyer Repeatedly Briefed Trump Attorneys On Mueller Talks (ZH)

One day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller said that Paul Manafort had lied and violated his plea agreement with Federal prosecutors, and as a result should be sentenced immediately, the NYT has reported that in a “highly unusual” arrangement, a lawyer for Paul Manafort had repeatedly briefed president Trump’s lawyer on what he told Mueller and other federal investigators after he agreed to cooperate with the special counsel. While the arrangement is not illegal, it reportedly inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began “cooperating” two months ago, with some legal experts speculating that Manafort’s backdoor cooperation with Trump’s legal team was a bid by Trump’s former campaign chair for a presidential pardon even as he worked with Mueller in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani acknowledged the arrangement to the NYT, and “defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.” Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office. As an example of what Manafort told the Trump legal team, Giuliani said, Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing told him that prosecutors hammered away at whether the president knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Russians promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, although this line of investigation is hardly a surprise. Trump has long denied knowing about the meeting in advance, with Giuliani saying that Mueller “wants Manafort to incriminate Trump.”

What is notable is that this kind of joint defense agreement is legal, and while Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Manafort and Mueller’s prosecutors, who on Monday accused Manafort of holding out on them and even lying, despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant. As a result of the collapse of the plea deal, Manafort will now face sentencing on two conspiracy charges and eight counts of financial fraud — crimes that could put him behind bars for at least 10 years. Just as importantly, Manafort’s frequent updates helped reassure Trump’s legal team that Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing, which begs the question just how was Manafort “cooperating” with Mueller for two whole months.

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Greenwald: “The Guardian itself “obtained the Embassy’s visitors logs in May,” and made no mention of Manafort’s visits at the time..”

Excuse me, but Greenwald and others do Luke Harding and the Guardian far too much honor by going into the details. The guy wrote a book called ‘Collusion’ for Pete’s sake. he does smear and hit pieces on Assange for a living. WikiLeaks is dead on when it says “Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation..”

Only, Harding and Guardian have published at least a dozen other stories of the same ‘level’. That reputation should be long gone. It’s not. Matrix.

• If Manafort Visited Assange There Should Be Ample Evidence (Greenwald)

The Guardian today published a blockbuster, instantly viral story claiming that anonymous sources told the newspaper that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange at least three times in the Ecuadorian Embassy, “in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016.” The article – from lead reporter Luke Harding, who has a long-standing and vicious personal feud with WikiLeaks and is still promoting his book titled “Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House” – presents no evidence, documents or other tangible proof to substantiate its claim, and it is deliberately vague on a key point: whether any of these alleged visits happened once Manafort was managing Trump’s campaign.

For its part, WikiLeaks vehemently and unambiguously denies the claim. “Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation,” the organization tweeted, adding: “WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” The group also predicted: “This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the ‘Hitler Diaries.’ [..] Of course it is possible that Manafort visited Assange – either on the dates the Guardian claims or at other times – but since the Guardian presents literally no evidence for the reader to evaluate, relying instead on a combination of an anonymous source and a secret and bizarrely vague intelligence document it claims it reviewed (but does not publish), no rational person would assume this story to be true.

But the main point is this one: London itself is one of the world’s most surveilled, if not the most surveilled, cities. And the Ecuadorian Embassy in that city – for obvious reasons – is one of the most scrutinized, surveilled, monitored and filmed locations on the planet.

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Entirely in the vein of my article yesterday about people living in the Matrix, we need to ponder that outlets like the Guardian no longer care about their credibility, but instead rely on people swallowing whole anything they say, today about Manafort, Assange and Russian aggression, tomorrow about other topics. That is plenty scary.

• Manafort Plans To Explore “All Legal Options” Against The Guardian (ZH)

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has responded to a “totally false and deliberately libelous” report in The Guardian that he had several meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In a Tuesday afternoon statement through a spokesman, Manafort said: “This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter. We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.”

The Guardian reported on Tuesday – based on unnamed sources – that Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, right around the time he joined Trump’s campaign. “Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House. It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.” -The Guardian

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If the US find someone else who obeys them, they’ll drop Poroshenko.

• Poroshenko Claims Ukraine Offered ‘Military Assistance’ By US (Ind.)

Ukraine has been offered “military assistance” by the US amid rising tension with Russia, the country’s president Petro Poroshenko has claimed. America’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, had assured him in a phone call that his country, had the “full support, full assistance, including military assistance, full coordination, what we [need] to do to protect Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity”, Mr Poroshenko said. Addressing a suggestion that Donald Trump had been slow to back Ukraine over the stand-off, the Ukrainian leader told CNN host Christiane Amanpour, that the president “in his speech, also supported Ukrainian territorial integrity and [has] been on our side” The US president had earlier said: “We do not like what’s happening either way. We don’t like what’s happening, and hopefully it will get straightened out.”

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A bit overlooked perhaps. How much of a factor in the Russia aggression narrative is Nordstream 2? It would bankrupt Ukraine.

• ‘Put Putin In His Place’, Ukrainian Ambassador Tells Germany (R.)

Ukraine’s top diplomat in Germany urged Berlin and other Western states to punish Russia by extending sanctions, banning energy imports and putting the NordStream 2 gas pipeline on hold after Moscow seized three Ukrainian ships near Crimea. The ambassador even raised the possibility of sending German marines to the region. Several senior European politicians have raised the possibility of new sanctions against Russia after the incident on Sunday, which the West fears could ignite a wider conflict near Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “Germany must take a clear line … and put (Russian President Vladimir) Putin in his place,” ambassador Andrij Melnyk told German radio on Wednesday. “Everything is at stake.”

“The club of sanctions should be wielded quickly …. There should be a complete ban on gas and oil imports from Russia, NordStream 2 must be put on ice,” he said, adding only such measures could stop Putin’s “brutal, hoooligan-like” behavior. Ukraine is already nervous about the prospect of the NordStream 2 pipeline which increases Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, fearing it will lose out on transit revenues. “In military terms, what can you do? Sending German marines to the coast of Crimea … could help stop an escalation. If you are there, Russians have fewer possibilities to act so brutally,” he said.

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Anything that smells of Russia will be thrown in dungeons. That’s what it means. And Poroshenko means to stay in power.

• Ukraine Digests What Martial Law Will Mean (Ind.)

A day after the Ukrainian parliament voted to introduce martial law across 10 border regions, there was little clarity about what it would actually mean in practice. With parts of the government on different pages, and the introduction of measures that could cover most aspects of life, even family, some areas of the country bordered on panic mode. In the southern city of Odessa, there were rumours of forced mobilisation, though these turned out to be false. In other cities across the region, shortages of foreign currency were reported. The text of the law eventually voted on was considerably watered down from the edict originally presented by President Petro Poroshenko on Monday afternoon.

That contained provisions for a state of martial law lasting 60 days across the whole country. By logical extension, that would have meant delaying next March’s presidential elections, a point that caused uproar among the opposition. The eventual compromise saw a commitment to fix the date of the elections, the duration reduced to 30 days, and the zone of coverage reduced to 10 border regions. The Independent understands that these concessions were made only at the last moment, and the vote would not have passed without them. In the text agreed by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, the state of martial law was due to start on Wednesday morning at 9am local time.

But on Tuesday morning, the secretary of the national security council, Oleksandr Turchynov, said that a state of martial law was already in effect. To make matters even more complicated, the Government Courier, the state newspaper where all laws are published, printed a version of the original law, including provisions for 60 days of restrictions across all of Ukraine. [..] in the 10 border regions at least, the law potentially has a very wide scope. The presidential amendments introduce few restrictions on the overarching 2015 legislation covering martial law. In other words, it allows for extrajudicial searches of property, travel bans, closing media deemed against national interests, bans on rallies and demonstrations, limitations on private correspondence and communications, and even introducing limitations on education, private and family life.

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But that’s exactly what the people voted for, they want to be worse off, and you can’t deny them their vote, that’s bad for democracy.

• Chancellor Admits UK Will Be Worse Off Under All Brexit Scenarios (G.)

Philip Hammond has admitted that the UK will be worse off “in pure economic terms” under all possible Brexit outcomes – including the prime minister’s own deal. Speaking on Wednesday morning, the chancellor gave strong hints the government had begun its contingency planning should it lose the vote in parliament on Theresa May’s Brexit deal negotiated with the EU. The latest Guardian analysis suggests 94 Tory MPs have confirmed they will vote against the deal, with numbers likely to tip into three figures in the coming days. Hammond suggested the economic hit would be mitigated if the deal was clinched, rather than the UK leaving with no deal.

Asked if all scenarios would have a cost, Hammond said: “If you look at this purely from an economic point of view, yes there will be a cost to leaving the European Union because there will be impediments to our trade.” Hammond said the deal would “absolutely minimise those costs” and would offer political benefits of being able to sign new trade deals and having new controls over fishing waters. “The economy will be slightly smaller in the prime minister’s preferred version,” he said. He said if the government loses the vote in parliament on 11 December, it would be in “uncharted political territory”. More than half of backbench Tory MPs who are not on the government payroll have committed to voting down the deal.

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Monday Morning I Want My Quarter Back

• Murphy to the Rescue (Kunstler)

Ukraine verges on martial law after a naval incident with Russian ships in the waters off Crimea. Say what? Martial Law? They might as well declare a Chinese Fire Drill. Details of the actual incident around the Kerch Strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov remain murky besides the fact that two Ukrainian gunships and a tug disobeyed orders from Russian ships to stand down in Russian maritime waters and shots were fired. Who knew that Ukraine even had a navy, and how can they possibly pay for it? But now NATO is trying to get into the act, meaning the USA will get dragged into just the sort unnecessary and idiotic dispute that kicks off world wars.

Note to the Golden Golem of Greatness (aka Mr. Trump): this dog-fight is none of our goddam business. Russia, meanwhile, asked the UN Security Council to convene over this, which is the correct response. What could go wrong? Late Monday update: I’ve heard reports this afternoon that Russia had intel Ukrainian ships were transporting an explosive device supplied by NATO which they suspected was intended to be deployed to blow up the strategic bridge across the Kerch Strait. Still unconfirmed chatter. Developing story….

Yesterday, about five hundred Central American migrants rushed the border at Tijuana. The US Border Patrol tear-gassed them and they backed off. Bad optics for those trying to make the case for open borders. Naturally, The New York Times portrayed this as an assault on families, defaulting to their stock sob story, though the mob assembling down there is overwhelmingly composed of young men. Complicating matters, a new Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, takes over next Saturday, a Left-wing populist and enemy of Trumpismo. Tijuana is now choking on the thousands of wanderers who were induced to march north to test America’s broken immigration policies. What could go wrong?

The engine pulling that choo-choo train of grievance is Robert Mueller’s Russian Collusion investigation. I expect him to produce mighty rafts of charges against Mr. Trump, his family and associates, and anyone who ever received so much as a souvenir mug from his 2016 campaign. But I doubt that any of it will have a bearing on Russian election “meddling.” And in that case, the charges will be met by counter-charges of an illegitimate investigation, meaning welcome to that constitutional crisis we’ve been hearing about for two years. That’s a mild way of describing anything from a disorderly impeachment to troops in the American streets. What could go wrong there?

Read more …

Debt Rattle October 19 2016

Oct 192016
 
 October 19, 2016  Posted by at 9:16 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


NPC KKK parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC 1925

• The Curious Case Of China’s Remarkably Consistent Economic Growth (CNBC)
• China Home Sales Value Rose 61% in September From Year Earlier (BBG)
• Australians Ignore A Crisis Bigger Than Brexit: Chinese Debt (SMH)
• America the Beautiful Bankrupt (MD White)
• The Debt Trap Is Global (Mike Maloney)
• France Burns Coal Like It’s 1984 as Prices Jump on Atomic Woes (BBG)
• Legal Case for Brexit Is Surprisingly European (BBG)
• UK Councils ‘Tell Homeless To Sleep On Streets So They Can Get Help’ (Ind.)
• The Cycle of Civil Unrest & Martial Law (Martin Armstrong)
• Half Of US Adults Are Recorded In Police Facial Recognition Databases (G.)
• Hillary May Hand Control Over US Retirement Savings To Wall Street (IBT)
• Vote-Rigging Felon Visits White House 340 Times During Obama Admin (ZH)
• Adam Curtis – HyperNormalisation: Full BBC Documentary 2016
• EU-Turkey Refugee Deal Dying in the Greek Islands (Spiegel)
• World’s Mammals Are Being Eaten Into Extinction (G.)

 

 

Nice detail: China Jan-Sep home sales rose 43.2%.

• The Curious Case Of China’s Remarkably Consistent Economic Growth (CNBC)

China’s economy has managed a curiously singular feat for any country: Growing a steady rate of 6.7% for the third quarter in a row. “It’s definitely unusual in an international context,” noted Julian Evans-Pritchard, a China economist at Capital Economics on Wednesday. “There are almost no countries that have such stable GDP growth rates.” The GDP trifecta is the first since at least 1992 when Reuters began compiling data. “It suggests quite significant smoothing of the data behind the scenes. Even by Chinese standards, this is quite rare,” Evans-Pritchard said. [..] “In China, these numbers don’t tend to bounce around a lot. They tend to be remarkably smooth,” said Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics.

“The authorities feel so strongly about the GDP numbers that the whole government apparatus are always doing everything they can, especially in terms of policies and stimulating growth to make sure that the activity numbers, the economic growth numbers are pretty close to what it’s targeting.” Kuijs said he viewed the focus on meeting the 6.5-7.0% economic growth target as a setback. He noted that last year, high-level policymakers had indicated that it would be acceptable to miss growth targets, but then late in 2015, the government returned to a rigid interpretation. “Many economists find that unfortunate,” Kuijs said. “If you have organic growth in your economy of around 5.5% in a context of a pretty subdued global economy, if you continue to insist on 6.5% growth, that means you have to rely on rapid credit growth and other macro-economic stimulus to achieve it.”

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And when you look at ‘value’, the number gets even higher…

• China Home Sales Value Rose 61% in September From Year Earlier (BBG)

The value of China’s new home sales rose 61% in September from a year earlier, defying policymakers’ moves earlier this year to cool the property market. The value of homes sold rose to 1.2 trillion yuan ($178 billion) last month from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data the National Bureau of Statistics released Wednesday. The increase compares with a 33% gain the previous month. Residential transactions surged in an extended real-estate bull market, prompting local authorities in late September to roll out tougher curbs in big cities. At least 21 cities have introduced purchase restrictions and toughened mortgage lending since late September, reversing two years of easing to support buyers. Property-development investment growth, which expanded at the slowest pace in 15 years in December, was running at 5.8% in the first three quarters of this year, up from 5.4% in the first eight months.

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If Australians are not scared, then who is?

• Australians Ignore A Crisis Bigger Than Brexit: Chinese Debt (SMH)

When our buttoned-down economic guardians start using words like “disruptive adjustment” it’s a sign something’s amiss. Over the past few weeks both the Reserve Bank and the IMF have used that same ominous phrase with reference to Australia’s biggest trading partner, China. In essence, the problem is a corporate debt binge. Credit growth in China has accelerated and is growing at twice the pace of its economic growth rate. Debt levels have ballooned to 250% of GDP and alarm bells are ringing. So how worried should we be here in Australia? No one knows for sure, but probably a fair bit. Economists often resort to the term “uncharted waters” to describe unusual conditions but in this case the cliche is apt.

It is notoriously hard to predict how and when debt bubbles will unwind in the most transparent of democratic systems. In a huge one-party-state like China it’s even more mysterious. Few institutions have invested as much over recent years in understanding the Chinese economy as the Reserve Bank of Australia. In its regular review of financial stability, released on Friday, it described China as “a key locus of risk” given its increasing size in the global economy and the run-up in borrowing. “The potential for a disruptive adjustment in China remains pronounced, given the ongoing increase in debt,” it said. The sheer pace of lending growth makes it likely many loans are going to marginal borrowers or unprofitable projects.

China’s growth is slowing and that will make it harder for highly leveraged firms to service their debts, especially if loans have funded unviable projects. To make matters worse much of the rapid growth has been from China’s less regulated “shadow banking” sector. China’s financial system “has become increasingly large, opaque and interconnected,” the Reserve warned.

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Our old friend Michael David White has this: “Greece is a savvy tycoon sitting on piles of money compared to the United States. Detroit is a model of careful planning. Venezuela is smooth and efficient in its operation.”

• America the Beautiful Bankrupt (MD White)

Every person in America can sell everything they own two times — every house, car, bicycle, tent, stock, bond, blanket and kitchen sink — send all the money to the federal government, and Medicare and social security will almost be in good standing. Americans have $90 trillion of personal wealth and $210 trillion of federal debt. We are a dead man. We rest peacefully, in a lead coffin, at the bottom of the sea. We are underwater and we can’t pay our bills. We are dead broke. Plan B is now our destiny. The federal government’s debt of $210 trillion is two times greater than all of the personal wealth of all Americans combined. The federal government’s debt is 11 times greater than the debt of a country in bankruptcy.

And the federal government’s debt is more than 20 times greater than the mortgage debt on every American home. The Democratic Party, led by the progressive Big Media, whose signature legislation is social security and Medicare, has bankrupted the wealthiest country in the history of the world. The “social justice” initiatives of President Roosevelt and Johnson will end with the greatest financial crisis ever. The Roosevelt-Johnson global depression will spread poverty misery and violence far and wide. Socialism bankrupts host countries. America is going to learn the hard way and the world will be forced to go with us for a very long ride. Big Media will bury the story until the cities are burning.

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“..this is going to be a global recession and it’s going to be bad..”

• The Debt Trap Is Global (Mike Maloney)

Mike shows you how much the government controls the economy today. And why it will be very difficult to get out of this mind-boggling level of debt. You’ll see this is not just a problem in the Western world, it’s the entire world. As Mike says, “this is going to be a global recession and it’s going to be bad.”

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So they still have the capacity to burn all that coal depsite years of relying on nucler power? Did they see this coming?

• France Burns Coal Like It’s 1984 as Prices Jump on Atomic Woes (BBG)

France produced the most power from fossil fuels for September in 32 years to help meet demand as nuclear generation dropped. Output from coal and gas plants more than doubled as Paris-based Electricite de France was forced to keep reactors offline for inspections. French month-ahead power prices have risen to near the highest since 2009. “The availability of French nuclear continues to alarm market participants,” said Bruno Brunetti, managing director of global power at Pira Energy Group in New York. “With the lack of French exports supporting thermal generation, we have revised upward forecasts of coal-fired dispatching by roughly 5 terawatt-hours through 2017 in western Europe.”

EDF’s reactors produced 26.6 terawatt-hours of electricity in September, the least since August 1998, prompting “heavy use” of stations burning coal and gas in a trend that has been increasing since April, according to a report by French grid operator Reseau de transport d’electricite. Thermal power generation was 4,132 gigawatt-hours, or 11% of the total. France has seven fewer reactors available than at the same time last year after EDF announced it needed more time to carry out inspections to rule out potential anomalies on steam generators at 18 of its 58 units ordered by the nation’s nuclear regulator.

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Building on the lack of a British written constitution, conflicting arguments can be made.

• Legal Case for Brexit Is Surprisingly European (BBG)

The constitutional argument against Brexit is clever and powerful. It’s being made by David Pannick, a member of the House of Lords and a particularly skilled and brilliant barrister. As articulated before the court it runs like this: A well-recognized principle of the U.K. constitution is that one law enacted by Parliament may only be changed by another law. Parliament enacted the European Communities Act in 1972. That law, which opened the way for the U.K. to join the European Economic Community, says that European laws apply in the U.K. European law today includes lots of individual rights, including those found in the European Declaration of Human Rights. Once the U.K. leaves the EU, the rights will no longer apply to Britons. Hence, Pannick says, the U.K. can’t leave the EU without a law authorizing withdrawal. And a law requires an act of Parliament.

If accepted by the courts, Pannick’s argument would have the effect of blocking PM Theresa May’s government from invoking Article 50 of the EU treaty, which allows member states to withdraw. The government would need to go to Parliament, which would say no – and Brexit would be blocked. So is Pannick right? There’s a somewhat plausible technical response to his claims. It says essentially that since the 1972 law incorporates European law, and Article 50 of the EU treaty is European law, there’s no need for another act of Parliament, because the 1972 law isn’t really being revoked but simply relied upon to withdraw. This would be a pretty cheap way for courts to solve the deeper problem, and I suspect the judges won’t want to reject Pannick’s claim on a technicality – or at least they shouldn’t.

The better, more substantive answer to Pannick’s argument is that while Parliament hasn’t enacted a new law for EU withdrawal, there has been a public pronouncement on the topic: the Brexit referendum. True, a referendum isn’t a law. But it is the voice of the people, at least as expressed on the fateful day of the vote. Here’s where things get really interesting from a constitutional standpoint. If the U.K. had a written constitution, it would probably say whether a referendum should be treated the same as a legislative vote. But because it doesn’t, the courts will have to decide whether a referendum is just as good as a legislative vote, or better, or worse. And that judgment will require some serious thought about the true nature of democracy.

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“In the past five years, the number of people sleeping rough has more than doubled.”

• UK Councils ‘Tell Homeless To Sleep On Streets So They Can Get Help’ (Ind.)

Homeless people are being told by councils to sleep rough so they can get help, research by a charity has found. People who turned to their local authority for help were often sent packing without support or instructed to sleep rough in order to access services, according to a report by St Mungo’s. The findings, based on interviews with 40 St Mungo’s clients, suggested that three-quarters of homeless people had slept rough the night after they asked a council for help because they had nowhere to stay. One of those interviewed by St Mungo’s said: “We decided to go to the local council and they told us that we had to sleep rough for three nights in a row before they could actually do anything to help us. We just felt complete despair.”

The charity is calling on the government to ensure that no one is sent away by local authorities when they have nowhere to go. St Mungo’s will take part in a mass lobby of Parliament on Wednesday in support of the Homelessness Reduction Bill. The research also found that 129 rough sleepers have died in London since 2010, while a quarter reported being physically assaulted when they were on the streets. One interviewee said: “I’ve been beaten up quite a few times sleeping in doorways, or even in cars, they smash the window in on top of you, spit on you, urinate on you, try and set you on fire. I’ve had all of those things happen to me.” In the past five years, the number of people sleeping rough has more than doubled – with a 30% increase in the past year alone.

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A very useful history lesson on US protests, rebellion, goverment and courts.

• The Cycle of Civil Unrest & Martial Law (Martin Armstrong)

All agencies are quietly being armed just in case there may be civil unrest which arises by rigging the election to defeat Donald Trump. Even Ben Carson has come out and explained why Trump beat everyone in the Republican field: “the people themselves have just gotten disgusted with being manipulated and controlled”. There is no question that we have entered a new age post-2015.75 that is one of betrayal and deception. Many people assume that Obama would never declare martial law and that the proposition is simply a conspiracy theory. This is simply not true. Martial law in the United States has been declared several times, so it is by no means off the table. The martial law concept within the United States legally is very closely linked with the right of habeas corpus, which has been suspended and reduced in many cases over the years.

That is why they keep Guantanamo open for if they are not on US soil, they cannot file a habeas corpus. Effectively, the right to a hearing on “lawful” imprisonment is embodied in the essence of habeas corpus that is under the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary, which of course has been stacked with pro-government judges. The constitutional ability to suspend habeas corpus is related to the imposition of martial law. Under the Constitution, Article 1, Section 9 states; “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” There you have the authority to suspend the law if there is a “rebellion” based upon civil unrest that is political in nature. Obama can also claim “public safety” is at stake if Trump supports riot.

Therefore, under United States law, martial law is very limited by several court decisions that were handed down between the American Civil War and World War II. Don’t forget the Japanese Internment camps during World War II. You were locked up just because of your heritage without any rioting or committing some threatening act. It was just “presumed” you “might” do something and that was as good as guilt.

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1984.

• Half Of US Adults Are Recorded In Police Facial Recognition Databases (G.)

Half of all American adults are included in databases police use to identify citizens with facial recognition technology, according to new research that raises serious concerns about privacy violations and the widespread use of racially biased surveillance technology. A report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that more than 117 million adults are captured in a “virtual, perpetual lineup”, which means law enforcement offices across the US can scan their photos and use unregulated software to track law-abiding citizens in government datasets. Numerous major police departments have “real-time face recognition” technology that allows surveillance cameras to scan the faces of pedestrians walking down the street, the report found.

In Maryland, police have been using software to identify faces in protest photos and match them to people with warrants, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The report’s findings, along with revelations from the ACLU on police monitoring in Baltimore, suggest that the technology may be violating the rights of millions of Americans and is disproportionately impacting communities of color, advocates said. “Face recognition, when it’s used most aggressively, can change the nature of public spaces,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown’s privacy and technology center. “It can change the basic freedom we have to go about our lives without people identifying us from afar and in secret.”

The center’s year-long investigation, based on more than 100 police records requests, has produced the most comprehensive survey of facial databases to date and raises numerous questions about the lack of transparency and privacy protections. Law enforcement biometric databases have traditionally captured DNA profiles related to criminal arrests or forensic investigations. What’s alarming about the FBI’s “face recognition unit”, according to the report, is that it is “overwhelmingly made up of non-criminal entries”.

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Smells like ‘doing God’s work’.

• Hillary May Hand Control Over US Retirement Savings To Wall Street (IBT)

While Hillary Clinton has spent the presidential campaign saying as little as possible about her ties to Wall Street, the executive who some observers say could be her Treasury Secretary has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings. The executive is Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group. The investment colossus is most famous in politics for its Republican CEO likening an Obama tax plan to a Nazi invasion. James, though, is a longtime Democrat — and one of Clinton’s top fundraisers. The billionaire sculpted the retirement initiative with a prominent labor economist whose work is supported by another investment mogul who is a big Clinton donor. The proposal has received bipartisan praise from prominent economic thinkers, and James says that Clinton’s top aides are warming to the idea.

It is a plan that proponents say could help millions of Americans – but could also enrich another constituency: the hedge fund and private equity industries that Blackstone dominates and that have donated millions to support Clinton’s presidential bid. The proposal would require workers and employers to put a%age of payroll into individual retirement accounts “to be invested well in pooled plans run by professional investment managers,” as James put it. In other words, individual voluntary 401(k)s would be replaced by a single national system, and much of the mandated savings would flow to Wall Street, where companies like Blackstone could earn big fees off the assets. And because of a gap in federal anti-corruption rules, there would be little to prevent the biggest investment contracts from being awarded to the biggest presidential campaign donors.

[..] Recently, [..] regulators, pension trustees, investment experts and academics have questioned whether retiree savings should be invested with firms like Blackstone in the first place. Some pensions are pulling out their money. Other pension systems have been turned into 401(k)-style plans, which are difficult for the alternative investment industry to break into because of federal laws that discourage those plans from buying into riskier, illiquid investments. In the face of these challenges, James’ proposal could provide a government-mandated flow of money from workers’ paychecks into the high-fee alternative investment industry.

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Hillary can’t wait for November 8. Her team won’t be able to hold back the floods much longer.

• Vote-Rigging Felon Visits White House 340 Times During Obama Admin (ZH)

Earlier today we wrote about a new Project Veritas undercover video that uncovered several democratic operatives openly discussing, in explicit detail, how to commit massive voter fraud. One of the operatives was a person by the name of Robert Creamer who is a co-founder of a democratic consulting firm called Democracy Partners. Within the video, an undercover journalist details a plan to register Hispanic voters illegally by having them work as contractors, to which Creamer can be heard offering support saying that “there are a couple of organizations that that’s their big trick”. Unfortunately, the embarrassing video caused Creamer to subsequently resign from consulting the Hillary campaign as he issued a statement saying that he was “stepping back from my responsibilities working the [Hillary] campaign” over fears that his continued assistance would be a distraction for the campaign.

But voter fraud isn’t Creamer’s only criminal specialty. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that Creamer spent 5 months in federal prison back in 2006 for a “$2.3 million bank fraud in relation to his operation of public interest groups in the 1990s.” So, with that kind of history, you can imagine our surprise when we discovered that a Mr. Robert Creamer showed up on the White House visitor logs 340 times beginning in 2009 when Obama took office and culminating with his latest visit in June 2016. Moreover, in 45 of those instances, Creamer was scheduled to meet with POTUS himself. Perhaps this is just two old Chicago “community organizers” hanging out?

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The full new Adam Curtis doc has arrived on YouTube, so anyone outside Britain can now view it too.

• Adam Curtis – HyperNormalisation: Full BBC Documentary 2016

We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed – they have no idea what to do. This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening – but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.

It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West – not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves – have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal. But there is another world outside. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago – that then festered and mutated – but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.

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“The Balkans would turn into a battleground for migrants, smugglers, border guards and soldiers..”

• EU-Turkey Refugee Deal Dying in the Greek Islands (Spiegel)

Abdul Shakoor thought nothing could shock him anymore. He has, after all, survived an assassination attempt by Pakistani security agents, he claims, in addition to torture in a Lahore prison. “But I was wrong.” Thirty-three-year-old Shakoor is standing in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and pointing at the overcrowded plastic tents inside of which women, children and the ill are lying pushed up against one another, at the cement wall that surrounds the camp, and at the barbed wire. “I would have expected these kinds of conditions in Pakistan or Afghanistan,” he says. “But not in Greece.” As a result of the refugee influx, the infrastructure on Lesbos and other Greek islands is in danger of collapsing. Europe’s model is no longer working.

Although the number of migrants dropped after the EU-Turkey deal came into effect in March, the number of refugees heading for Greece has once again gone up, partially in response to the failed military coup in Turkey on June 15. In August and September, 6,527 refugees crossed the Aegean, twice as many as in May and June. The crisis in Turkey, it seems, isn’t just scaring many Turks, it is also driving refugees out of the country. Currently, there are at least 15,000 migrants on the Greek islands, with the camps available only able to handle half that many. And new boats arrive every day. Skirmishes between camp residents – and between refugees and locals – have become a frequent occurrence.

The Greek government is facing a dilemma, says political advisor Gerald Knaus, whose think tank, the European Stability Initiative, helped conceive the EU-Turkey deal. The Greeks, he says, can no longer ignore the chaos on the islands. If Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras carries through on his recent pledge to move large numbers of refugees onto the mainland, it would be a signal to the smugglers in Turkey that the Aegean Route has reopened. “If the EU doesn’t do anything quickly,” Knaus warns, “the refugee deal will be dead in a few months.” Knaus, whom many people describe as the creator of the refugee deal, warns that if the deal fails, chaos could result. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, he says, would arrive in Greece and try to break through the fences to the north. The Balkans would turn into a battleground for migrants, smugglers, border guards and soldiers, Knaus says. “That would be the end of European asylum policy.”

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We are blind to God.

• World’s Mammals Are Being Eaten Into Extinction (G.)

Hundreds of mammal species – from chimpanzees to hippos to bats – are being eaten into extinction by people, according to the first global assessment of the impact of human hunting. Bushmeat has long been a traditional source of food for many rural people, but as roads have been driven into remote areas, large-scale commercial hunting is leaving forests and other habitats devoid of wildlife. The scientists behind the new analysis warned that, without action, the wiping out of these species could lead to the collapse of the food security of hundreds of millions of people reliant on bushmeat for survival.

The work comes against the backdrop of the natural world undergoing the greatest mass extinction since a giant meteorite strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago, with species vanishing far more rapidly than the long term rate, driven by the destruction and invasion of wild areas by humans and their livestock and hunting. The researchers, whose study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, used the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list to identify the endangered land mammals that are primarily at risk from hunting for food. They found 301 such species, representing 7% of all the land mammals assessed by IUCN and about a quarter of all endangered mammals.

Other mammals are threatened by habitat loss or hunting for other reasons, such as elephants which are poached for their ivory. The 301 species include 168 primates, such as the lowland gorilla and mandrill, 73 hoofed animals, such as the wild yak and bactrian camel, 27 bats, such as the golden-capped fruit bat and the black-bearded flying fox, and 12 carnivores, such as the clouded leopard and several bear species. There are also 26 marsupials threatened by meat hunting, including the grizzled tree kangaroo, and 21 rodent species, such as the Sulawesi giant squirrel and the alpine woolly rat.

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