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Debt Rattle December 20 2024

Dec 202024
 
 December 20, 2024  Posted by at 10:27 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  62 Responses »


Jan van Eyck Madonna and Child at the Fountain 1439 (height: 7.4“, 19cm)

 

• Trump-Backed Funding Bill Fails House Vote As 38 Republicans Say ‘No’ (ZH)
• Trump and Musk Sink US Government Spending Bill (RT)
• DOGE Insider: ‘A Lot of Stuff Ready For Day One’ (ZH)
• A Very Different Transition (Jeffrey A. Tucker)
• Trump Notches Several Court Victories On Eve Of Return To The White House (JTN)
• Georgia Appellate Court Disqualifies Fani Willis (Turley)
• Top Editors Stiff WashPost (Axios)
• Trump Confronts a Rising China (Michael Klare)
• Putin Says He Hasn’t Spoken To Trump For More Than Four Years (RT)
• Putin Challenges West To ‘Technological Duel’ With Oreshnik (RT)
• Russia’s Invincible Oreshnik Has Left West in The Dust – Ex-DoD Analyst (Sp.)
• ‘Deeply Immoral’ Anglo-Americans Sabotaged Ukraine Peace – Ex-Swiss Envoy (RT)
• It’s The Biolabs, Stupid: Is This Why Ukraine Murdered A Russian General?
• EU Suffers By Suppressing National Identities – Putin (RT)
• Russia Expresses Concern Over Gaza ‘Recolonization’ (RT)
• US Plans to Sell Off Syria’s Wealth After Assad (Klarenberg)
• Russia Owes Growing Economic Strength to West’s ‘Sanctions on Steroids’ (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

Sachs

Tom Homan

Lala

Sen. Kennedy

Watters Biden

Durbin

Jennings

O’Leary

 

 

 

 

“There are probably dozens of Republicans who have never voted for raising the debt ceiling. Now Trump is forcing them to do so.”

• Trump-Backed Funding Bill Fails House Vote As 38 Republicans Say ‘No’ (ZH)

Update (1752ET): The first vote to kick the can down the road until 2027 has failed the House, by a vote of 174-235-1, with 38 Republicans voting ‘no’. The bill required 2/3 of the vote under a fast-track method, yet didn’t even clear a simple majority. Polymarket odds of a shutdown have spiked to 76% as of this writing * * * Update (1752ET): In what comes as a surprise to nobody, Democrats want their pork – and have said “Hell no” to the massively reduced spending package that Mike Johnson rolled out after conferring with the Trump team. “The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It’s laughable. Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters as he walked into a closed-door caucus meeting Thursday afternoon. In short, it’s doomed. “I’m not simply a no. I’m a hell no,” Jeffries then said at the closed-door meeting, Politico reports, citing three people familiar with the meeting.

[..] With Friday’s government shutdown looming – and odds spiking after everyone figured out that the 1,547-page Continuing Resolution (CR) was full of Orwellian bullshit and other malarkey, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has gone to Donald Trumps team with hat in hand. The new plan will be a federal funding stopgap plan that includes disaster aid, pushing off the debt limit fight for two years, and a one-year farm bill extension, Politico reports, citing Republicans familiar with the discussions. No word on how close this comes to a “clean” bill, or how much of the aforementioned bullshit is gone – such as funding the Global Engagement Center, shielding the Jan. 6 committee from subpoenas, and funding new biolabs, but we guess we’ll find out. Also unknown is whether Democrats will support the plan.

“But Trump had made an 11th hour public demand that any stopgap bill should deal with the debt limit. Trump’s team is pushing for at least a commitment to lift the debt limit before Jan. 20. The level of disaster aid and whether it’s completely paid for is still unclear. The package would also likely include some additional economic aid for farmers, amid threats from rural Republicans to oppose any stopgap that doesn’t include the funding”. -Politico. In a closed door meeting on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Democratic lawmakers: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” citing JFK. Polymarkets odds of a government shutdown went from 15% yesterday to 49% this morning. According to Punchbowl News, here’s what happened, and what’s next;

At some point today, House Republicans and Democrats will likely have separate party meetings to chart their path forward. Democrats have announced their meeting for 9 a.m. We’ll talk more about them below. But make no mistake — this is Johnson and Trump’s mess to solve. And we’re inching toward a shutdown as government funding runs out at midnight Friday. Johnson was mostly MIA Wednesday, holed up in his Capitol office for hours without showing his face. Even the House GOP leadership team felt like they were being kept in the dark about what was happening. Late in the evening, Johnson met with Vance, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Rules Committee Chair Michael Burgess (R-Texas). Jordan and Roy are conservative hardliners. Diaz-Balart is a senior appropriator.

As Scalise left around 10 p.m., he told reporters “We’re not there yet” when asked whether the debt-limit boost would be part of any new government-funding plan. “A lot of things have come up,” Scalise added.A somewhat obvious play may be a funding bill with a two-year debt-limit extension. Why? Because Trump supports increasing the debt limit now. Given how volatile Trump was during his first term, there’s no guarantee he’ll do this again. (For what it’s worth, Biden administration officials estimate the debt limit won’t be reached until sometime next summer. GOP leaders were planning to handle it in a reconciliation bill). Trump is giving Johnson cover for the time being. It’s limited, however. Because Trump, once again, has put his party in a bind. There are probably dozens of Republicans who have never voted for raising the debt ceiling. Now Trump is forcing them to do so.

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“If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF..”

• Trump and Musk Sink US Government Spending Bill (RT)

The US government is facing a partial shutdown after a stopgap spending bill pitched by lawmakers earlier this week was scrapped under pressure from President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The current funding expires on Friday, and unless a bill is passed before that deadline, millions of US federal workers will be left without paychecks. The text of the new spending plan, known as a continuing resolution (CR), was released on Tuesday just days before the deadline. The package largely provides for the government to continue to spend at current levels for the next three months, giving the newly elected Congress time to work on more permanent federal funding. The 1,547-page bill includes a pay raise for lawmakers, $100 billion for disaster relief funding and $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, numerous provisions including foreign investment restrictions and new health care policies, among other authorizations.

US Republicans balked at the proposed package right after its release, slamming it as being too bloated and full of Democratic policy priorities. Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk – pitched by Trump as the head of his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a panel charged with finding ways to slash federal spending – launched an entire campaign against the package on X. “This bill should not pass,” Musk wrote early on Wednesday, repeatedly posting different versions of this call throughout the day and late into the night, making a total of more than 60 updates. He decried the bill as “criminal,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” and ultimately “one of the worst bills ever written.” Musk’s tirade sparked a virtual flashmob of disapproving statements regarding the bill, which culminated with condemnation by Donald Trump, who called it full of “Democrat giveaways.”

“Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,” he said in a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance, posted on his TruthSocial account. Many observers noted that it was unusual for the incoming president and his team to tip the scales on legislation before officially coming into power. CNN and The Washington Post reported late on Wednesday that the bill had been killed, with Musk confirming it in yet another post on X.

“Your elected representatives have heard you, and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed!” he wrote, adding in another post that “no bills should be passed Congress until January 20,” when Trump takes office. It is currently unclear whether House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spearheaded the failed bill, will be able to come up with an alternative before Friday’s deadline. According to The Hill’s sources, Johnson could propose a “clean” CR, which would entail dropping the additional provisions included in the package, such as disaster aid and assistance for farmers. However, Johnson has not yet scheduled a vote on the bill.

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“What can we do right now, and then what can we do next? Let’s just focus on what we can do right now.”

• DOGE Insider: ‘A Lot of Stuff Ready For Day One’ (ZH)

Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale expressed strong optimism for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative during his appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show. The Palantir co-founder highlighted the “very bold” reforms being planned by co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, revealing that the DOGE team is already hard at work on strategic priorities. With over 100 people on board, the team is preparing to enact immediate changes, including staff removals and regulatory rollbacks.

SHAWN RYAN: We’re both pretty fired up about the [Trump administration]. Who are you most excited about? Do you have anybody in particular?

JOE LONSDALE: I’m most excited about Elon, Vivek and the DOGE effort because this is something I’ve wanted to see for forever. I’m probably like one of the only guys in tech that’s done a lot in policy on the right, on the small government side for the last 10-20 years, and it’s like the world just shifted this way—like the vibe shift is exactly in line with stuff I’ve been thinking and talking about for a decade. I’m so excited about this.

SHAWN RYAN: How fast do you think they’re going to start cleaning this stuff up?

JOE LONSDALE: They’re already doing it, man. They can’t really officially do it yet, but they’re already making all the plans. There’s people working hard there. There’s guys picking me, ‘Joe, we need another engineer for this,’ ‘We’re trying to map this out,’ ‘We need more lawyers for this. They’re going right now as hard as they can and getting ready. It’s going to be really bold. I think the way Elon works in general is just like, “What can we do right now, and then what can we do next? Let’s just focus on what we can do right now.” So they have what’s called their ‘Day One priorities,’ and they’re just focusing and sprinting on everything they could do day one. I think they’re going to have a lot of stuff ready for day one.

They’re bringing in at least well over 100 people for the DOGE effort, and they’re going to put a few of them directly into each agency. A lot of the transition team itself is hiring people to put into these jobs. There’s these policy placements that are all working with DOGE and being liaisons with DOGE. They’re going to come out of the gate with a bunch of general things—removing certain people, removing certain regulations. I can’t go into the details exactly of what they’re going to be doing, but it’s going to be really aggressive right from the start.” Meanwhile, Lonsdale stressed the need to rebuild America’s manufacturing base.

“I’m concerned in general that we don’t have an advanced manufacturing base that’s nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective it’s extremely dangerous and if we want to be ready—so in World War II it wasn’t that we had like a bunch of big defense contractors that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war.” “If we’ve basically gotten rid of a lot of that base and we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think Trump is very good on this; he shifted it back. I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country where a lot of people on both sides now agree we need to fix this. But this is where the tariffs against China, if they’re done correctly, are not totally insane at all. It makes a lot of sense to me,” he continued.

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“.. it makes no sense for the machinery that the incoming administration wants to overthrow to be in charge of the transition..”

• A Very Different Transition (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

The transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in 2016 went like every other presidential transition in modern history. The old administration had extended meetings with the new, and old agency heads and their staff trained the new ones. It was managed by Chris Christie and then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence. It was funded by the General Services Administration and the incoming team received emergency drills, confidential documents, security briefings, and training sessions on emergency protocols. The FBI was brought on board to vet all new hires. That’s because the incoming administration believed that the system worked. It had won and therefore would be in charge. That’s how it is supposed to work in the United States. The idea of this process is to ensure continuity in government from one administration to the other.

In normal times, all of this would be a good idea. The Founders set up a structural system of government with minimal functions, stable law, checks and balances, and established elections for president every four years to ensure that the chief executive served with the people’s consent. Most functions of government were handled by the states, in any case. There was never supposed to be a need for a fundamental regime change. We merely changed administrators and members of Congress. The rest was supposed to take care of itself, which is why it would seem to make sense that the old administration trains the new one, and a permanent staff of experts and civil service employees helps the new kids learn the ropes from those with experience. And yet here we are. The Trump administration’s mandate from voters is not just for a change in personnel.

The mandate is in fact for fundamental regime change within the framework of democracy. The administrative state, which is nowhere found in the Constitution, has over time developed far more power than elected leaders. That absolutely must change, as voters made clear in November 2024. It was yet another case, just like in 2016, of the candidate winning whom nearly the whole of mainstream media believed would not win, and of the whole of what anyone would call the establishment disfavoring the result. The victory was so overwhelming as to amount to a primal scream against government as usual. In this case, it makes no sense for the machinery that the incoming administration wants to overthrow to be in charge of the transition. Remember that this is not Team Trump’s first rodeo. Last time, it went along with all the protocols, funding, systems, and sessions.

The White House staff members went through day after day of lectures from government experts on how Washington works. They sat through intelligence briefings. They were schooled in protocols for the management of nuclear war, biological warfare, natural disasters, and pandemics. They put up with all the PowerPoint presentations, exhortations, manuals, lists, and introductions to people who really run the government. They assumed that once the president was sworn in, he would in fact be the president and those whom he appointed would be in charge.

[..] After leaving office in January 2021, the Trump team went to work trying to figure out what the heck had happened in the first term to cause everything to go so wrong, or, more specifically, what enabled the administration’s authority to be so thoroughly subverted from within. It concluded that the real problem began with the transition itself. That was when the permanent bureaucracy first asserted its power over the incoming administration. That’s when the deep state got its hooks in. This time, the team has a very different plan. It is being managed by trusted members of Trump’s inner circle. They have not allowed the General Services Administration to manage any aspect of the transition. They have done this by refusing to accept any money from any government source.

Instead, the transition has been entirely privately funded, with methods deployed to make sure that the funding sources are not tainted by deep state contacts. The explicit purpose has been to avoid subversion. It’s been the same with FBI vetting. The incoming Trump administration simply does not trust the process and for good reason. It was the FBI that had spied on the campaign and even raided Trump’s own home. Furthermore, it worked with other agencies to deploy myriad forms of lawfare for years.

This transition is without precedent. The permanent staff of government itself only became the U.S. norm starting in 1883, and it has grown every decade since. At some point in the past, the elected leaders became more like decorations than real rulers of government. The Trump administration cannot achieve its objectives with this status quo. This is the reason for this very different transition. It is a good sign and symbol of what might be coming. We might in fact experience a much-needed change of regime in Washington through exactly the system and process that the Founding Fathers set up. The second term of Trump seems determined to avoid repeating the obvious errors of the last time around.

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“..even some Democrats are even admitting that the slew of legal cases against him were either unfounded or a strategic blunder..”

• Trump Notches Several Court Victories On Eve Of Return To The White House (JTN)

The legal system has been very good to Donald Trump as he prepares to return to the White House, removing perceived enemies as prosecutors, dismissing charges and even awarding defamation damages. A Georgia appeals court decision to disqualify Fani Willis, the anti-Donald Trump Fulton County district attorney from prosecuting an election interference case against the once and future president marks only the latest victory for Trump in lawfare battles since the 2020 election. Recently, Trump also obtained a $15 million defamation settlement from ABC News after an anchor inaccurately and repeatedly claimed he was found civilly liable for “raping” E. Jean Carroll. The New York Post reported that George Stephanopoulos was repeatedly told by his executive producer not to “use the word ‘rape’” before going on the air to discuss Donald Trump but the ABC News anchor ignored the warning.

Early on in the Republican primary, Trump had to grapple with five cases brought by state and federal prosecutors that tied the former president to courtrooms as the election season kicked off. Now, with Trump still standing as the president-elect for the second time, the state-level cases appear to be embroiled in death throes and delays while the Justice Department’s special prosecutor moved last month to dismiss the two pending federal cases. As the cases die down and Trump prepares to take office in January, even some Democrats are even admitting that the slew of legal cases against him were either unfounded or a strategic blunder. “The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bullshit, and pardons are appropriate,” Senator John Fetterman, D-Penn., wrote in his first post to Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.

“Weaponizing the judiciary for blatant, partisan gain diminishes the collective faith in our institutions and sows further division,” he continued. Before the election, former Democratic presidential candidate and Congressman Dean Philipps called on New York Governor Kathy Hochul to pardon Trump in his state cases “for the good of the country.” Trump latest win came in the Georgia election interference case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that Willis and her deputies should be disqualified from prosecuting Trump due to the “appearance of impropriety.” “We reverse the trial court’s denial of the appellants’ motion to disqualify DA Willis and her office. As we conclude that the elected district attorney is wholly disqualified from this case the assistant district attorneys — whose only power to prosecute a case is derived from the constitutional authority of the district attorney who appointed them — have no authority to proceed,” the Georgia appeals court wrote in the decision.

During several hearings on the case, Willis faced accusations of financial mismanagement and of carrying on an improper relationship with her chief prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade. The Fulton DA also laid the groundwork for prosecuting Trump before she had even taken office, according to Wade’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year. The judges wrote that the “remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.” This decision indicates that the proceedings in the case are likely to drag out even longer, already significantly delayed by the Willis accusations. Trump and his co-defendants have raised several other legal challenges on appeal including over the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.

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“The case against Trump was deeply flawed. It read like a legal version of six degrees from Kevin Bacon..”

• Georgia Appellate Court Disqualifies Fani Willis (Turley)

Today, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her team in the prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump. The final collapse of the House of Willis came after months of her spending enormous amounts of time and money to try to stay at the lead of the high-profile case. Lawfare holds little value unless you are the lead warrior. For over a year, some have criticized Willis for her refusal to recuse herself. When her hiring of her former lover was first disclosed, Willis could have done the right thing for her office, the case, and the public. She could have recused herself and may have preserved her office’s ability to continue with the case. She was then given a further opportunity to do the right thing by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee who disqualified her former lover, Nathan Wade, and found an “appearance of impropriety.”

He, however, left it up to Willis to recuse herself after criticizing her conduct. Some of us noted that the finding did not jive with the order. If there was an “appearance of impropriety,” it would obviously continue with Willis remaining at the lead in the case. However, Willis let the case go dormant and committed her office to the fight to preserve her role. Now, the appellate court has forced her off the case and ordered a new office to take over any prosecution. The court ruled that “[a]fter carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office. The remedy crafted by the trial court to prevent an ongoing appearance of impropriety did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.”

The court admitted that Willis had forced the hand of the court by her refusal to do the right thing in the lower court. It recognized that “an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” Accordingly, it reversed McAfee and found that if “the elected district attorney is wholly disqualified from this case, ‘the assistant district attorneys — whose only power to prosecute a case is derived from the constitutional authority of the district attorney who appointed them — have no authority to proceed.’” The opinion made clear that these cases cannot become the vanity projects of prosecutors. They are expected to do the right thing, even when the right thing does not come easily personally or politically.

The center of the case now shifts to another prosecutor who will have to decide whether it wants to continue the case and what (and who) to prosecute. As I have previously written, the Georgia case has viable crimes against others for offenses such as unlawful entry into restricted areas. The case against Trump was deeply flawed. It read like a legal version of six degrees from Kevin Bacon. As my friend and fellow analyst Andy McCarthy noted, this is the first racketeering case that any of us have seen where the strongest connection between the parties was being named in the charging documents.

A new prosecutor should drop the Trump charges and end this ridiculous lawfare enterprise. If not, the case will likely collapse by its own weight due to the attenuated racketeering theory or other legal problems, including the use of evidence barred under the recent presidential immunity decision. In the end, Willis was reelected by the voters of Atlanta who clearly accepted or supported the weaponization of the criminal justice system to target political opponents. The millions spent in the case were just treated as a cost of doing the business of lawfare. Hopefully, a new prosecution office will restore a modicum of integrity to the Georgia legal system. It is now time to end this circus as the ringmaster leaves the center ring.

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What did Bezos pay? Not much of that is left. The $1 million for Trump comes way too late. Nobody reads WaPo anymore.

• Top Editors Stiff WashPost (Axios)

The situation at The Washington Post is so dire that two candidates to run the paper — Cliff Levy of The New York Times and Meta’s Anne Kornblut, a former Post editor — both withdrew from consideration for the top newsroom job over the paper’s strategy, sources involved in the process tell us. The Post is scrambling to find a new executive editor, the chair once held by Ben Bradlee, amid shrinking paid readership and revenue. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis, handpicked by owner Jeff Bezos to save The Post, hasn’t impressed the candidates with his vision for the future, the sources tell us. One person involved in the search told us Lewis’ pitch was foggy and uninspiring. Levy, who pulled out last week, and Kornblut, whose conversations ended in September, declined to comment. Other candidates include current interim executive editor Matt Murray.

But it’s hard to imagine this monthslong process unfolding so publicly — only to end with the same guy in charge. A few candidates were asked to write six-page memos — a hallmark of Amazon culture — about their journalistic vision for the paper, using AI and how to grow The Post’s audience. Levy is a two-time Pulitzer winner who was an early advocate for digital innovation, and now is deputy publisher of two prized Times properties, The Athletic and Wirecutter. He started talking to The Post in August after the paper’s search firm, Egon Zehnder, reached out. Kornblut, who declined to move forward with the process after initial conversations, is Meta’s VP of global product content operations. She had a formidable newspaper career before moving to the Bay Area as a tech executive: She was a Washington correspondent for The Boston Globe and The New York Times before becoming a Washington Post reporter and editor for eight years.

Kornblut rose to deputy assistant managing editor for national news, where she was the lead editor on Pulitzer-winning coverage of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. Matea Gold — a respected, popular managing editor many reporters wanted in the top job, and who conceived of and ran The Post’s Pulitzer-winning investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — announced last week that she’s moving to The New York Times as Washington editor, making her deputy to the bureau chief. There’s lots of anxiety in The Post newsroom right now about whether the paper is still committed to that kind of fearless accountability reporting. Axios confirmed that the search firm also reached out to Kevin Merida and Steven Ginsberg, two former Washington Post managing editors. Neither expressed interest in the role.

The big picture: Bezos has said little about what he wants for a revived Post. He is scheduled to dine with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago this week — two months after killing a Post endorsement of Trump’s rival, Vice President Harris. Bezos’ various business interests — Amazon and the Blue Origin space company — stand to gain or suffer from Trump’s presidency. The Post has announced no major shifts or innovations under the Lewis regime. Toss in a demoralized staff and invigorated labor unions, and you have a mighty challenge for the next top editor.

Between the lines: The Post has lost a ton of talent this last year, and several stars are talking to competitors about leaving soon. One hot rumor inside The Post: The Atlantic is licking its chops over political writers who are increasingly poachable. Other Posties are eying The New York Times, long known at the Post as “Brand X.” People involved in the process say Bezos has been mostly MIA at the Post, leaving matters to Lewis, who is unpopular in the newsroom.
Several people familiar with The Post’s search were baffled by the apparent absence of editorial vision or business strategy. “I’m not sure it’s salvageable,” one of them said.

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“..forcing Trump to make critical choices between his transactional instincts and the harsh ideological bent of his advisers.”

• Trump Confronts a Rising China (Michael Klare)

Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other country has the capacity to resist his predictable antagonism with the same degree of strength and tenacity, and none arouses more hostility and outrage among MAGA Republicans. In short, China is guaranteed to put President Trump in a difficult bind the second time around: he can either choose to cut deals with Beijing and risk being branded an appeaser by the China hawks in his party, or he can punish and further encircle Beijing, risking a potentially violent clash and possibly even nuclear escalation. How he chooses to resolve this quandary will surely prove the most important foreign test of his second term in office.

Make no mistake: China truly is considered The Big One by those in Trump’s entourage responsible for devising foreign policy. While they imagine many international challenges to their “America First” strategy, only China, they believe, poses a true threat to the continued global dominance of this country. “I feel strongly that the Chinese Communist Party has entered into a Cold War with the United States and is explicit in its aim to replace the liberal, Western-led world order that has been in place since World War II,” Representative Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice as national security adviser, declared at a 2023 event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “We’re in a global arms race with an adversary that, unlike any in American history, has the economic and the military capability to truly supplant and replace us.”

As Waltz and others around Trump see it, China poses a multi-dimensional threat to this country’s global supremacy. In the military domain, by building up its air force and navy, installing military bases on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, and challenging Taiwan through increasingly aggressive air and naval maneuvers, it is challenging continued American dominance of the Western Pacific. Diplomatically, it’s now bolstering or repairing ties with key U.S. allies, including India, Indonesia, Japan, and the members of NATO. Meanwhile, it’s already close to replicating this country’s most advanced technologies, especially its ability to produce advanced microchips. And despite Washington’s efforts to diminish a U.S. reliance on vital Chinese goods, including critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, it remains a primary supplier of just such products to this country.

For many in the Trumpian inner circle, the only correct, patriotic response to the China challenge is to fight back hard. Both Representative Waltz, Trump’s pick as national security adviser, and Senator Marco Rubio, his choice as secretary of state, have sponsored or supported legislation to curb what they view as “malign” Chinese endeavors in the United States and abroad. Waltz, for example, introduced the American Critical Mineral Exploration and Innovation Act of 2020, which was intended, as he explained, “to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals and bring the U.S. supply chain from China back to America.” Senator Rubio has been equally combative in the legislative arena. In 2021, he authored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which banned goods produced in forced labor encampments in Xinjiang Province from entering the United States.

He also sponsored several pieces of legislation aimed at curbing Chinese access to U.S. technology. Although these, as well as similar measures introduced by Waltz, haven’t always obtained the necessary congressional approval, they have sometimes been successfully bundled into other legislation. In short, Trump will enter office in January with a toolkit of punitive measures for fighting China ready to roll along with strong support among his appointees for making them the law of the land. But of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump, so nothing is a given. Some analysts believe that his penchant for deal-making and his professed admiration for Chinese strongman President Xi Jinping may lead him to pursue a far more transactional approach, increasing economic and military pressure on Beijing to produce concessions on, for example, curbing the export of fentanyl precursors to Mexico, but when he gets what he wants letting them lapse.

Howard Lutnick, the billionaire investor from Cantor Fitzgerald whom he chose as Commerce secretary, claims that Trump actually “wants to make a deal with China,” and will use the imposition of tariffs selectively as a bargaining tool to do so. What such a deal might look like is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to see how Trump could win significant concessions from Beijing without abandoning some of the punitive measures advocated by the China hawks in his entourage. Count on one thing: this complicated and confusing dynamic will play out in each of the major problem areas in U.S.-China relations, forcing Trump to make critical choices between his transactional instincts and the harsh ideological bent of his advisers.

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Puti did his annual “ask me anything” gathering. 4.5 hours. Off the cuff.

• Putin Says He Hasn’t Spoken To Trump For More Than Four Years (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin stated during his annual end-of-year press conference on Thursday that he has not spoken to US President-elect Donald Trump in over four years, and thus expects “there will be plenty to discuss” when their next conversation takes place. The comment came in response to a question from Keir Simmons of NBC News, who asked about the potential dynamics of a future meeting between the two leaders, suggesting that Russia’s position on the global stage has weakened and that Trump would have the upper hand in any talks. “I don’t know when we will meet because he has not said anything about it,” Putin said. “I have not talked to him for more than four years. Of course, I’m ready to talk anytime; I will be ready to meet with him if he wishes.”

The Russian leader went on to refute the notion of a weak Russia, saying that the US journalist and those paying his salary “really want to see Russia in a weakened state,” but as a “well-known writer once remarked: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’” “I believe that Russia has become significantly stronger in the past two or three years. Why? Because we are becoming a truly sovereign country, and we barely depend on anybody. We are capable of firmly standing on our own feet when it comes to the economy,” Putin said. The president highlighted Russia’s economic resilience and stated that the combat readiness of the Russian Armed Forces is among the highest in the world, with the defense industry rapidly expanding and producing essential military equipment.

“That is why I believe that Russia has largely achieved the state we wanted to achieve. It has grown stronger and become a truly sovereign state, and we will make decisions without regard to other people’s opinions, only with our national interests in mind,” he added. During a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, Trump declined to say whether he had spoken to Putin since winning last month’s presidential election, but indicated that he intends to do so at some point.

“We’ll be talking to President Putin, and we’ll be talking to representatives Zelensky and others from Ukraine,” he said. “We’ve got to stop it. It’s carnage,” referring to the almost three-year conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he could end the Ukraine conflict within “24 hours” of taking office by forcing “peace through strength,” but has not provided specifics on how he would do this. Putin previously stated that Trump’s remarks on ending the conflict “deserve attention” and expressed openness to talks with the president-elect. “Should there be an opportunity for a meeting with the newly elected President Donald Trump, I am confident there will be plenty to discuss,” Putin said on Thursday.

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“Let them identify a target in Kiev, concentrate all their air defense and missile defense systems there, and then we will strike it with an Oreshnik..”

• Putin Challenges West To ‘Technological Duel’ With Oreshnik (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has challenged the West to put their modern air defense systems up against Moscow’s new hypersonic Oreshnik missile in what would be a “technological duel.” During his annual end-of-year press conference on Thursday, Putin was asked to comment on opinions expressed by some foreign military experts suggesting that the Oreshnik can easily be shot down by Western missile defense systems. “Well, if those Western experts you mentioned believe that, they should suggest to their employers in the West and the US to conduct a technological experiment. For instance, a high-tech duel of the 21st century. Let them identify a target in Kiev, concentrate all their air defense and missile defense systems there, and then we will strike it with an Oreshnik. Let’s see what happens. We are ready for such an experiment. Is the other side ready?” Putin asked.

The president explained that given the technical characteristics of the Oreshnik and the current missile defense systems deployed by the West, it would be impossible to stop the missile or its hypersonic warheads after it had been launched. Putin suggested that the results of such a “duel” would be of great interest to both Russia and the US, whose air defense systems are currently operating in Ukraine. Putin was also asked why the Oreshnik is named the way it is, to which he confessed that he doesn’t actually know.

The Russian military carried out the first-ever combat test of the Oreshnik on November 21, using it to destroy a Ukrainian military industrial facility in Dnepr with multiple hypersonic warheads. Putin said at the time that the decision to unveil the Oreshnik was made in response to Ukraine’s long-range strikes on internationally recognized Russian territory made with Western permission. Putin had previously explained that the Oreshnik can carry both nuclear and conventional warheads, which travel at ten times the speed of sound, making it impossible for Western air-defense systems to intercept them.

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“The US not only does not have a hypersonic offensive system – it doesn’t even have a defensive system that has any hope of stopping Oreshnik..”

• Russia’s Invincible Oreshnik Has Left West in The Dust – Ex-DoD Analyst (Sp.)

Russia’s Oreshnik medium-range hypersonic ballistic missile grabbed the attention of military observers the world over after it was fired at a major defense-related enterprise in Dnepropetrovsk days after the US and the UK okayed the launch of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles at targets deep inside Russia.The West is in denial about Russia’s Oreshnik missile that defense systems are powerless to counter, Michael Maloof, former senior security policy analyst in the Pentagon, told Sputnik.He pointed out that Russia’s multi-warhead, nuclear-capable Oreshnik has left the United States far behind.“The US not only does not have a hypersonic offensive system – it doesn’t even have a defensive system that has any hope of stopping Oreshnik and the new class of missiles that are coming out,” the veteran analyst maintained. While the US scrambles to be in the vanguard of such cutting-edge weapons systems, in effect it tends to “put all the bells and whistles on a system, overprice it and then fall behind,” said Maloof.

Washington is reluctant to acknowledge that both Russia and China have weapons systems that the US does not have, namely, hypersonic missiles. The pundit speculated that if the United States had remained in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a missile like the Oreshnik might not exist today. He observed that Russia’s clear demonstration of the missile’s unmatched capabilities serves as “another way of Putin telling Trump to maybe reconsider.”“I think in order to lessen the threshold of war […] and this would be a good start and, at least, beginning with the United States and Russia. And the other countries can follow suit,” said Maloof, adding: “It’s something that the world needs to really focus in on, recognize, and deal with constructively.”

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“..the “West pulled the plug on the negotiations which were on course to produce a ceasefire.”

• ‘Deeply Immoral’ Anglo-Americans Sabotaged Ukraine Peace – Ex-Swiss Envoy (RT)

Veteran Swiss diplomat Jean-Daniel Ruch has alleged that the US and UK “immorally” prevented Ukraine and Russia from sealing a truce back in April 2022 in the hope of dealing a blow to Moscow. The former official, who at the time served as Swiss ambassador to Türkiye, was in the country when peace talks were taking place. In Istanbul, Ukraine and Russia preliminarily agreed to a draft truce under which Kiev would have renounced its NATO membership aspirations, declared neutrality, and limited the size of its armed forces in exchange for international security guarantees. However, Ukrainian negotiators abruptly pulled out, with Moscow later claiming that then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had urged the Ukrainian leadership not to sign any accord and to “just continue fighting.”

While David Arakhamia, the Zelensky-allied MP who led the Ukrainian delegation, confirmed this in November 2023, Johnson still insists that the allegation is an “absolute steaming, stinking lie.” In an interview with the French-speaking Anti These media outlet on Sunday, Ruch recounted how the “West pulled the plug on the negotiations which were on course to produce a ceasefire.” According to the diplomat, it was clear already in April 2022 that “if the war continued… the dead would be counted at least in tens of thousands, more probably in hundreds of thousands.” Nevertheless, the “Americans and their British allies” intervened in the Istanbul peace talks and scuttled a ceasefire that “was within reach,” insisting on weakening Russia further instead, Ruch claimed.

The former ambassador described the move as “deeply immoral,” suggesting that Kiev is now unlikely to be offered terms as favorable as the ones proposed in 2022 in Türkiye. Speaking on Johnson’s role in those events, the veteran diplomat alleged that the former British leader “was in [Istanbul] on duty for the Americans” as he “doesn’t make this kind of decisions all by himself.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly expressed readiness to engage in dialogue with Kiev based on the draft agreement prepared in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, plus recognition of the “new territorial realities” that have taken shape since. According to the Russian leader, “the document did not come into force only because the Ukrainians were ordered not to do this. The elites in the US and some European countries felt the desire to seek Russia’s strategic defeat.”

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The Ukrainians were merely the henchmen. They had to get the OK first.

• It’s The Biolabs, Stupid: Is This Why Ukraine Murdered A Russian General?

The shocking assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, reverberates far beyond the streets of Moscow. On December 17, 2024, Kirillov was killed in a brazen bombing, an act the Russian government has denounced as terrorism. While the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) – Kiev’s successor to the Soviet KGB – via ‘anonymous sources’ cited in multiple media outlets, has claimed responsibility, labeling Kirillov a war criminal, the truth about his death is likely far more complex – and far more chilling. Kirillov’s death was not just an attack on a prominent Russian official; it was an attack on the truth. For years, he had been at the forefront of investigating and exposing alleged US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, claiming they were part of a broader Western biological warfare agenda.

His assassination raises a deeply unsettling question: Was this a deliberate effort to silence him and prevent his revelations from coming to light? Kirillov’s work was controversial, but his allegations deserved scrutiny. He repeatedly accused the United States of funding clandestine biological laboratories in Ukraine, purportedly operating under the guise of public health initiatives. According to Russian reports, these labs were involved in the development of pathogens that could potentially target specific populations, a claim Washington and Kiev vehemently denied. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Kirillov presented what he claimed were classified documents and intercepted communications proving the existence of such facilities.

He argued that the labs represented a serious threat not only to Russia but to global security. Though his assertions were often dismissed in the West as propaganda, they stirred debate and distrust among nations already skeptical of US military and scientific activities abroad. The timing and method of Kirillov’s assassination are too conspicuous to ignore. A bomb concealed on an electric scooter detonated as he left for work, killing him and his assistant. The sophistication of the attack suggests involvement by professionals with substantial resources. The SBU’s admission of responsibility and Russia’s subsequent arrest of an alleged Ukrainian agent may seem to provide a tidy explanation. However, there are reasons to believe that more powerful actors had a vested interest in Kirillov’s demise.

Kirillov’s investigations threatened to unveil a shadowy intersection of science, warfare, and geopolitics. If even a fraction of his claims about the US biolabs in Ukraine were accurate, they would implicate powerful institutions in serious breaches of international law, including violations of the Biological Weapons Convention. Such revelations would have provoked outrage among non-aligned nations and could have seriously undermined the credibility of the United States and its allies.

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National identities are a threat to Brussels.

• EU Suffers By Suppressing National Identities – Putin (RT)

People in the European Union are being negatively affected by the marginalization of their national identities, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, arguing that a lack of national sovereignty affects all aspects of life in a state. Speaking during his year-end marathon Q&A session, Putin cited economic stagnation in Germany, claiming Russia’s economy is stable in comparison. One of the event’s co-hosts brought up a story that Putin told recently about a visit to Germany and how all songs performed at an event he was attending were in English. Putin said it was not completely true, since he brought a Russian band with him to be part of the entertainment at the birthday of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The visiting singers learned a native song on their way to Hanover as a gesture of respect to the host, he said.

”Sovereignty is a very important thing. It has to be on the inside, in the heart. I believe that the German people had this feeling of belonging to a homeland and sovereignty eradicated in them during the post-war period,” he mused. ”Who are the Europeans? They are all proud to be European. But they are first of all French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Europeans secondly,” he added. Attempts to tone down national differences in the bloc are affecting everything, including the economy, Putin argued. Russia puts a premium on its sovereignty and enjoys the benefit of deciding its own policies, he concluded.

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Hot air.

• Russia Expresses Concern Over Gaza ‘Recolonization’ (RT)

Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has raised the alarm over Israeli officials floating the idea of replacing Palestinians with Jewish settlers in Gaza. The diplomat also accused the US of shielding Israel through its vetoes in the UN Security Council. Israel has been occupying the West Bank since 1967 in defiance of the international body’s decisions. Israel launched a massive military operation in Gaza following a deadly attack by Hamas militants on the country on October 7, 2023, which left 1,200 people dead and over 250 abducted. The heavy aerial bombardment and ground offensive by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has killed 45,000 Palestinians in the densely populated enclave, according to local Hamas-controlled health officials.

Speaking at a UN Security Council session on Wednesday, Nebenzia stated that the “Israelis continue to further their plans on building new [illegal] settlements in the West Bank,” as well as razing Palestinian homes on made-up pretexts. This, according to the Russian envoy, is precluding any chance of a negotiated settlement to the decades-long conflict. He also noted multiple instances of harassment and violence by Jewish settlers toward Palestinians, with the Israeli authorities allegedly turning a blind eye. “Against this backdrop, Israeli officials’ remarks on forcibly changing the demographics of Gaza with a view to ‘recolonizing’ the enclave are causing particular concern,” Nebenzia said. He went on to claim that Israel is abusing its legitimate right to self-defense by conducting indiscriminate military actions in Gaza, the West Bank, as well as Lebanon and Syria.

“To our huge regret, all efforts by the UN Security Council to impose a ceasefire and free the hostages have so far been blocked by the US,” Nebenzia said, citing Washington’s repeated vetoes of resolutions. As recently as this October, several Israeli ministers and settler activists held a rally near the Gaza border, with attendees calling for the removal of Palestinians from the enclave and repopulating it with Jews. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, said during the event: “What we have learned this year is that everything is up to us. We are the owners of this land.” May Golan, the minister for social equality and women’s rights, echoed this sentiment, pledging that “anyone who uses their plot of land to plan another Holocaust will receive from us… another Nakba” – a term used to describe the mass exodus of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine in 1948.

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“Per a 2018 U.N. investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free..”

• US Plans to Sell Off Syria’s Wealth After Assad (Klarenberg)

In the immediate wake of the Syrian government’s abrupt collapse, much remains uncertain about the country’s future – including whether it can survive as a unitary state or will splinter into smaller states as did Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, a move that ultimately led to a bloody NATO intervention. Moreover, who or what may take power in Damascus remains an open question. For the time being at least, members of ultra-extremist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appear highly likely to take key positions in whatever administrative structure sprouts from Bashar Assad’s ouster after a decade-and-a-half of grinding Western-sponsored regime change efforts. As Reuters reported on December 12, HTS is already “stamping its authority on Syria’s state with the same lightning speed that it seized the country, deploying police, installing an interim government and meeting foreign envoys.”

Meanwhile, its bureaucrats – “who until last week were running an Islamist administration in a remote corner of Syria’s northwest” – have moved en masse “into government headquarters in Damascus.” Mohammed Bashir, head of HTS’ “regional government” in extremist-occupied Idlib, has been appointed the country’s “caretaker prime minister.” However, despite the chaos and precariousness of post-Assad Syria, one thing seems assured – the country will be broken open to Western economic exploitation, at long last. Multiple reports show that HTS has informed local and international business leaders that when in office, it will “adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy, in a major shift from decades of corrupt state control.”

As Alexander McKay of the Marx Engels Lenin Institute tells MintPress News, state-controlled parts of Syria’s economy may have been under Assad, but corrupt it wasn’t. He believes a striking feature of the ongoing attacks on Syrian infrastructure from forces within and without the country is that economic and industrial sites are a recurrent target. Moreover, the would-be HTS-dominated government has done nothing to counter these broadsides when “securing key economic assets will be vital to societal reconstruction, and therefore a matter of priority”: We can see clearly what kind of country these ‘moderate rebels’ plan to build. Forces like HTS are allied with U.S. imperialism, and their economic approach will reflect this.

Prior to the proxy war, the government pursued an economic approach that mixed public ownership and market elements. State intervention enabled a degree of political independence [that] other nations in the region lack. Assad’s administration understood without an industrial base, being sovereign is impossible. The new ‘free market’ approach will see all of that utterly decimated.” Syria’s economic independence and strength under Assad’s rule and the benefits reaped by average citizens, as a result, were never acknowledged in the mainstream before or during the decade-long proxy war. Yet, countless reports from major international institutions underline this reality – which has now been brutally vanquished, never to return. For example, an April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how Damascus “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.”

Per a 2018 U.N. investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, “an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class, and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90% for both men and women [emphasis added].” By 2016, millions were out of school. A U.N. Human Rights Council report two years later noted pre-war Syria “was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,” its “thriving agricultural sector” contributing “about 21%” to GDP 2006 – 2011. Civilians’ daily caloric intake “was on par with many Western countries,” with prices kept affordable via state subsidy. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was “one of the best performing in the region, with a growth rate averaging 4.6%” annually.

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“All essential goods and services have been successfully replaced by Russian manufacture, or from what are now known as ‘friendly’ nations..”

• Russia Owes Growing Economic Strength to West’s ‘Sanctions on Steroids’ (Sp.)

President Putin commented on the state of the Russian economy at his traditional year-end press conference Thursday, projecting GDP growth of 2-2.5% in 2025, and attributing the economy’s growing strength to “sovereignty.” Sputnik asked a leading financial observer to list off the measures Russia has taken to survive the West’s sanctions onslaught. “To a large extent,” Russia’s economic stability “is the result of the strengthening of sovereignty, including projected onto the economy,” Putin said at Thursday’s annual Q&A session. “Sovereignty comes in different forms, including defense, technological, scientific, educational, cultural. This is especially important for our country, because when we lose our sovereignty, we lose statehood. That’s the most important thing,” Putin added.

Russia’s path toward economic sovereignty goes back over a decade, owing its success largely to the unprecedented sanctions war the West launched against Moscow in 2014, at the start of the Ukrainian crisis, veteran financial analyst Paul Goncharoff says. “Back in 2014 the ‘sanctions on steroids’ era began against Russia. With each following year the dose only increased,” with Russia eventually becoming “the most sanctioned country in history,” Goncharoff, general director of consulting firm Goncharoff LLC, recalled in an interview with Sputnik. Russia was able to overcome the sanctions pressure through baby steps, starting with timely investments in agricultural self-sufficiency to reduce dependence on imports, as well as “stimulating essential import replacements for machinery and technological items,” the observer explained.

Gradually, Moscow “realized that there were economically beneficial alliances to be made with countries that were to one or another degree impacted by restrictions from the West,” Goncharoff added, highlighting the priority eventually given to developing good economic relations with BRICS countries, the bloc’s expansion “and the use of sovereign currencies outside of the US dollar and Euro,” illuminating “the need and desire by many sovereign governments to get out of the ‘influence sphere’ of the G7, and their payments systems.” Russia’s strategy, particularly after its exclusion from the SWIFT banking system in 2022, proved correct, according to the analyst.

“Government fiscal income revenues from Russian imports have dropped in the West and increased in the East by tens of billions of dollars. Russia’s exports increased by US$31 billion after the West imposed the nastiest post 2022 trade sanctions. This has been a boon to the neighboring countries of Central Asia, Southeast Asia, India, MENA, Africa, and the Mercosur countries who now derive benefit from the Western-forced disengagement of Russia,” Goncharoff emphasized. Ultimately, Russia was able to find new partners outside the Western bloc by hitching its economic wagon to developing nations enjoying strong economic growth.

“All essential goods and services have been successfully replaced by Russian manufacture, or from what are now known as ‘friendly’ nations. The US Dollar is no longer used in settling international trade commitments, and with an understandably volatile transition, is gradually becoming systematized,” the observer said. “To sum it up: Import substitution, trade in local sovereign currencies, infrastructure changes toward the Global South and East, redirecting oil and gas to the Global South and East, and participating in the enhancement and expansion of BRICS as the new economic frontier all come together to have formed a successful series of strategic decisions which are ongoing and gathering strength,” Goncharoff concluded.

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Eva

 

 

Hecc

 

 

Beach


 

Jingle


 

Adopted


 

Dinosaur

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 29 2024

Nov 292024
 
 November 29, 2024  Posted by at 10:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Mattia Preti The Adoration of the Shepherds 1660-99

 

• Trump Is ‘Not Safe’ – Putin (RT)
• Putin: Oreshnik Saved For A Rainy Day (Helmer)
• Trump May Be Oreshniked On Ukraine Even Before He Gets To China (Pepe Escobar)
• Oreshnik Missiles Could Be Used To Strike Kiev – Putin (RT)
• Russian General Staff Prepares Retaliation Friday-Saturday (Helmer)
• Did Trump Just Solve The US-Mexico Border Crisis? (ZH)
• Marc Andreessen Describes “Alarming” Meeting With Biden Admin (ZH)
• Musk Floats Slashing IRS Budget, Regulatory Agency In X Posts (JTN)
• Trump-Zuckerberg’s Mar-a-Lago Chatter Suggests Imminent Changes in Meta (Sp.)
• White House Pressing Ukraine To Draft 18-Year-Olds for War (Antiwar)
• Lawfare Warriors Express Regret But Not Remorse After Election (Turley)
• Either The Most Corrupt Judge In England, Or The Stupidest (Helmer)
• Sky News Is The Limit For Fake News In The UK From Israeli Lobby Cash (Jay)
• “Good Faith” Discussions Underway To Un-Cancel NFL Redskins Logo (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Andreesen

 

 

 

 

“Putin said he was even more astonished that Trump’s political opponents had targeted the Republican’s family and children..”

• Trump Is ‘Not Safe’ – Putin (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump is “not safe,” Russian President Vladimir Putin believes. The Russian president made the remarks on Thursday at a press conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, following a two-day Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit. Putin said he was astonished by the way the US election campaign had unfolded, citing the “absolutely uncivilized methods used to battle against Trump, including repeated assassination attempts.” “In my opinion, he is not safe now,” Putin emphasized, noting that “various incidents have happened in US history.” Russia’s president praised Trump as an experienced and intelligent politician, saying he hopes the president-elect is “cautious and understands this.”

Trump survived an assassination attempt on July 13 during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a bullet fired from around 150 meters away grazed his ear. The Secret Service responded by taking down the shooter, who was later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, a resident of a suburb of nearby Pittsburgh. Another would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, was arrested in September after he set up an ambush at a Florida golf course belonging to Trump.

On Wednesday, ABC News reported, citing court documents, that US federal authorities have arrested an Arizona man who allegedly threatened to kill Trump and his family via a series of Facebook videos, which he had been posting on a “near daily basis.” Putin said he was even more astonished that Trump’s political opponents had targeted the Republican’s family and children. He called such behavior “revolting” and indicative of the US political system’s decline, noting that even criminal groups would not resort to such methods. Putin said he couldn’t rule out that the Biden administration has been trying to create difficulties for Trump’s relations with Russia. Nevertheless, Moscow is “ready for dialogue with the United States, including with the future administration,” Putin stressed.

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“You know, in Soviet times there was that joke about weather forecasts. ‘The forecast is: Everything is possible today during the day.’”

• Putin: Oreshnik Saved For A Rainy Day (Helmer)

In remarks to Russian journalists on Thursday evening, President Vladimir Putin confirmed that missile and drone strikes against the Ukraine’s military infrastructure and the electricity grid carried out on Thursday, and also earlier in the week, are the retaliation the Defense Ministry foreshadowed for the November 23-25 ATACMS strikes on Kursk. Detailed target and damage reports by Russian military bloggers published between noon and 13:00 Moscow time, indicate that strikes by Kalibr and Kh-101 missiles, drones, and other weapons hit targets across the country’s electricity system, including the western regions of Rivne, Khmelnitsky, Volyn, and Vynnitsa. Power blackouts in the Ukraine were reported to be widespread from the line of combat in the east to the Polish border in the west, with up to eleven hours of power outage in Kiev where the temperature has dropped below freezing.

President Putin followed in remarks to Russian reporters at the conclusion of his two-day meetings in Astana, Kazakhstan, in a session posted by the Kremlin at 17:15. Asked several questions about the use of the Oreshnik missile in Russian retaliation for the ATACMS strikes on Kursk on November 23 and 25, Putin quipped that it is being saved for a rainy day. “It would be futile to target a minor objective with a hypersonic missile; that’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. However, we will utilise our entire arsenal against significant targets. As I have previously mentioned, we do not rule out the combat employment of Oreshnik on military-industrial facilities or command centres, including those in Kiev.”

The earlier ATACMS attacks, Putin said, “received a response today. Our Armed Forces have been executing retaliatory strikes over the past couple of days. Today, there was a comprehensive operation: 90 missiles were deployed alongside 100 unmanned strike vehicles. Seventeen targets within Ukraine were struck, encompassing military, military-industrial, and auxiliary facilities which support the armed forces and industrial defence enterprises. I wish to reiterate once more: we will certainly respond to such acts of aggression against the Russian Federation. The timing, methods, and weapons employed will be determined by the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense, as each target necessitates a specific approach and appropriate weaponry.”

Asked again about Oreshnik, “do you think these strikes on the [Kiev decision-making] centres are also possible with Oreshnik because nothing else seems to be able to get it?” Putin replied: “You know, in Soviet times there was that joke about weather forecasts. ‘The forecast is: Everything is possible today during the day.’ ” The president was followed on Thursday evening, Moscow time, by a detailed Defense Ministry bulletin announcing “in response to the strikes of the Kiev regime in the depths of the territory of Russia, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation during this week carried out strikes on the locations of the systems of long-range western weapons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Details of the targets followed, including US and French military personnel reported killed while directing Ukrainian missile operations in bunkers at Kharkov and Odessa.

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“..launched from Chukotka, it may reach Minuteman III silos in Montana in 23 minutes.”

• Trump May Be Oreshniked On Ukraine Even Before He Gets To China (Pepe Escobar)

When it comes to state of the art Russian weaponry, what the inestimable Ray McGovern defines as the MICIMATT – the whole Hegemonic complex – seems to dwell in perpetual stupor. They had no clue about Kalibr, Sarmat, Khinzal, Zircon or Avangard before they were introduced. They had no clue about Oreshnik (‘Hazel”) before the 30-minute protocolar warning by the Russians, stating a missile test was coming, and it was not nuclear. The Americans assumed that would be just another ballistic missile test, as they happen routinely close to the Arctic. Even President Putin didn’t know Oreshnik was ready for its close-up until the last minute. And Kremlin spokesman Peskov confirmed that only an ultra-rarefied circle knew Oreshnik even existed. In a nutshell: the MICIMATT only sees what Russia shows off – and when it happens.

Call it a leak-proof vow of secrecy permeating the Russian military complex – which, by the way, is a massive state, nationalized company, with a few private components. And that offers the Russian government, in practice, better engineering, better physics, better mathematics and better practical, final results than anything across the self-important collective West. Oreshnik – a kinetic weapons system – is a certified game-changer when it comes to military technology and warfare in more ways than one: actually several. Simple physics tells us that by combining enough kinetic force and mass, utter devastation is guaranteed, comparable to a low-to-medium yield nuclear weapon. With the added benefit of no radiation. Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), under development by Russia (along with other systems) even before Trump 1.0 pulled the U.S. out of the INF treaty in 2019.

A few concise analyses have pointed out how Oreshnik can be fitted into intercontinental non-nuclear missiles. The Russians are being very diplomatic, not stressing that if Oreshnik is launched from the Russian Far East, it can easily reach most latitudes across the USA. Moreover, applying Oreshnik tech to tactical missiles – Putin late last week said this is already happening – also changes the whole tactical domain. The new game in town is Russia being capable of unleashing ultra-high-velocity kinetic weapons literally anywhere around the world – after warning civilians to abandon the area around the targets. And there’s absolutely no defense against it, anywhere. It’s quite predictable that the woke, arrogant/ignorant MICIMATT, as well as NATO and the whole, brainwashed collective West simply have no idea what just hit them, seemingly out of the blue. To be concise: a system with the destructive power of a tactical nuclear weapon but carrying the precision of a top sniper’s bullet.

Ergo, sitting duck billion-dollar aircraft carriers; the whole, 800-plus Empire of Bases; assorted underground bunkers; ICBM launch platforms; naval shipyards; not to mention NATO’s HQ in Brussels, the Aegis Ashore base in Redzikowo (Poland), the NATO joint force center in the Netherlands, southern NATO command in Naples – all these immensely expensive assets are fair game for non-nuclear Oreshniks capable of reducing them to dust in a flash after flying for mere minutes at over Mach 10. By now multitudes around the world are aware that Oreshnik may reach Berlin in 11 minutes and London in 19 minutes. Also that launched from southern Russia, Oreshnik may reach the U.S. air base in Qatar in 13 minutes; launched from Kamchatka in the Far East, it may reach Guam in 22 minutes; and launched from Chukotka, it may reach Minuteman III silos in Montana in 23 minutes. To quote the epic 1960s Motown hit: “Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”

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“Russia has several of the weapons systems at its disposal and is building more of them, the president has warned..”

• Oreshnik Missiles Could Be Used To Strike Kiev – Putin (RT)

The Russian military is selecting targets in Ukraine for further possible strikes using the country’s new Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missiles, President Vladimir Putin warned on Thursday. Potential targets for the missiles could be “decision making centers” in Kiev, the Russian leader warned, during a meeting with Moscow’s key regional allies in Astana, Kazakhstan. Military facilities could also be targeted, along with defense and industrial enterprises – “especially since the Kiev regime has repeatedly attempted to strike at facilities of national importance in Russia,” Putin explained. Moscow already has several Oreshnik missiles at its disposal and has begun the large-scale production of the advanced weapon system, he added.

Addressing his counterparts from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Putin reiterated that the first Oreshnik launch last week had been Moscow’s response to Western countries granting permission for Kiev to fire long-range weapons deep inside Russia. This made NATO member states directly involved in the conflict, he added. Last night, Russia launched around 90 missile and 100 drone attacks against military targets in Ukraine, he said. It came in response to Kiev’s continued attacks using Western weapons. More Oreshnik strikes may follow, he warned. “Oreshnik has no counterparts in the world, of course, and I believe none will appear anytime soon,” he said. “[The system has] dozens of homing warheads that attack their targets at Mach-10 speed… Their temperature reaches 4,000 degrees,” the president added. “Anything located in the strike center is obliterated into elemental particles, reduced to dust.”

Oreshik can destroy highly fortified targets buried deep underground, Putin said. A massive strike with such missiles would be comparable to a nuclear strike in its force, he added. We have several units ready for use now. Certainly, should the strikes with Western long-range weapons on our territory continue, we will respond, including by launching more combat tests of Oreshnik systems. Speaking at the CSTO meeting, Putin compared Russian systems with similar specifications to US ATACMS missiles and French/British SCALP/Storm Shadow missiles, which Kiev has used against Russia. Moscow’s weapons are superior in some aspects, and the country produces significantly more of them that the entire NATO bloc can, he claimed.

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“..if a civilian evacuation warning is also issued, as Putin has foreshadowed, then one hour on Friday or Saturday will be what Putin has called the “danger zone”.

• Russian General Staff Prepares Retaliation Friday-Saturday (Helmer)

On Tuesday afternoon, November 26, the Russian Defense Ministry issued an unusual bulletin revealing that since the Oreshnik strike on November 21, the US had launched two ATACMS attacks across the Ukrainian border on Russian military targets in the Kursk region. The first of these on an S-400 air defence unit on November 23 had not been disclosed before. Both the November 23 and November 25 ATACMS strikes, totalling 13 missiles in all, had been partially intercepted. Russian casualties were suffered, including several fatalities. The Defense Ministry also telegraphed its punch. “Retaliatory actions are being prepared,” the bulletin concluded. Earlier that same morning, November 26, the airspace around the Oreshnik launch site at Kapustin Yar — east of Volgograd in the north of Astrakhan region — was identified for closure to civilian flights by an international notice to airmen (NOTAM).

The notice said the no-flight zone would start at 04:00 on Thursday, November 27, and continue until 20:00 on Saturday, November 30. Kapustin Yar was the launch pad for the first Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash plant at Dniepropetrovsk on November 21. The flight distance for that Russian missile from launch to target was 800 kilometers. If a second Oreshnik strike is being prepared at Kapustin Yar, the range to US and Ukrainian military bunkers at Kiev is within 1,100 kms; to the comparable military targets in Lvov, 1,600 kms; to the US-Ukrainian base at Rzeszów, on the Polish side of the border, 1,750 kms. The Oreshnik can strike targets at up to 5,000 kms, making it an “intermediate range”, not an “intercontinental range” missile.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 27, President Vladimir Putin arrived in Astana, Kazakhastan, for two days of talks. He is due to return from Kazakhstan on the evening of Thursday, November 28. Once the president is in Moscow, he will be in position to order, direct, and follow a retaliation strike by the General Staff against US and Ukrainian targets. If the strike flies at Oreshnik speed of Mach 10 to Mach 12, the operation will run from 5 to 9 minutes. If a 30-minute advance warning is sent to the US, and if a civilian evacuation warning is also issued, as Putin has foreshadowed, then one hour on Friday or Saturday will be what Putin has called the “danger zone”.

“In case of an escalation of aggressive actions,” Putin has said, “we will respond decisively and in mirror-like manner…It goes without saying that when choosing, if necessary and as a retaliatory measure, targets to be hit by systems such as Oreshnik on Ukrainian territory, we will in advance suggest that civilians and citizens of friendly countries residing in those areas leave danger zones. We will do so for humanitarian reasons, openly and publicly, without fear of counter-moves coming from the enemy, who will also be receiving this information.” The Defense Ministry has now confirmed the escalation by the US on November 23 and 25. Putin will decide his retaliation before Saturday evening.

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She denies.

• Did Trump Just Solve The US-Mexico Border Crisis? (ZH)

Did Trump solve the border crisis two months before even being sworn in as the 47th president? Two days after surprising markets – and sending the peso plummeting – by announcing he would enact 25% import duties on Mexican goods if the country doesn’t stop the flow of drugs and migrants across the border.[..]? tariffs on Mexican goods in response to the flood of drugs across the porous southern border, best known for allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the US in the past four ears, Trump’s unexpected gambit may have already paid off. In a post on Truth Social network, Trump announced that after a “wonderful” conversation with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, she “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”

He added that the two also talked about “what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States” concluding that it was a “very productive” conversation which of course, it would be, if indeed Trump – who again is still two months away from inauguration – managed to solve the US border crisis just 48 hours after using targeted tariffs as a bargaining chip. While it remains to be confirmed on the Mexican side if Trump’s recollection of the conversation is accurate, Trump’s announcement comes just hours after the legacy media reported that Mexico would take on a more aggressive posture, with the AP reporting that Sheinbaum had suggested that “Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own” and that while she was willing to engage in talks on the issues, drugs were a U.S. problem. “One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” Sheinbaum said, referring to U.S. automakers that have plants on both sides of the border.

She said Tuesday that Mexico had done a lot to stem the flow of migrants, noting “caravans of migrants no longer reach the border.” However, Mexico’s efforts to fight drugs like the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl – which is manufactured by Mexican cartels using chemicals imported from China – have weakened in the last year. Amusingly, Sheinbaum also said Mexico suffered from an influx of weapons smuggled in from the United States, and said the flow of drugs “is a problem of public health and consumption in your country’s society” which judging by the libs ongoing reaction to Trump’s victory is pretty much spot on.As noted, there is still no official confirmation or full context of the agreement from President Sheinbaum’s side, but the market certainly reacted with the peso surging, and almost wiping out all losses from the past 48 hours after Trump’s first unveiled his 25% tariff threat.

If confirmed, this would be the second time Trump has managed to convince Mexico to suspend migrants from crossing its territory to enter the US. Back in 2018, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – a charismatic, old-school politician – developed a chummy relationship with Trump. The two were eventually able to strike a bargain in which Mexico helped keep migrants away from the border – and received other countries’ deported migrants – and Trump backed down on similar threats. While Sheinbaum, who took office Oct. 1, has been seen as a stern leftist ideologue trained in radical student protest movements, and appeared less willing to pacify or mollify Trump, it seems she too has capitulated just 48 hours after Trump unveiled what was coming.

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Insanity on steroids.

• Marc Andreessen Describes “Alarming” Meeting With Biden Admin (ZH)

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, revealed in a new episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that after an “alarming” meeting with Biden administration officials earlier this year was the moment he would have no other choice but to support Donald Trump. For decades, Andreessen has supported Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. However, a troubling spring meeting with Biden administration officials caused major concerns. During the meeting, officials explained their plan to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China.

“We had meetings [Biden officials] this spring that were the most alarming meetings I’ve ever been in. Where they were taking us through their plans, and it was – basically just full government – full government control – like this sort of thing, there will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government, they told us. They said don’t even start startups – there’s just no way that they can succeed – there’s no way that we’re going to permit that to happen.”

In mid-July, Axios reported that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had donated to President-elect Trump’s campaign. At the time, their support was attributed to Trump’s pro stance on crypto and AI regulation. It’s another telling example of just how far-left Democrats in the White House spooked Silicon Valley heavy hitters, such as Elon Musk. Back to the podcast, Rogan asked Andreessen: “When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?” Andreessen responded: “You endorse Donald Trump.”

Andreessen told Rogan about the federal government’s rogue “Operation Choke Point.” He described it as a move by the Department of Justice that initially targeted marijuana businesses and gun manufacturers. He said under Biden, it was then weaponized to destroy political opponents, tech founders, and the crypto community.

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“There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies..”

• Musk Floats Slashing IRS Budget, Regulatory Agency In X Posts (JTN)

Billionaire Elon Musk, who will play a role in the new Trump Administration as a co-head of the newly planned, informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) commission, has often floated proposals on his social media platform, X. On Wednesday, the entrepreneur asked his millions of followers if Congress should grant a recent $20 billion dollar funding request from the Internal Revenue Service by Biden Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, who said the extra funds were vital for running the tax collection agency. “The IRS just said it wants $20B more money,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Do you think its budget should be: Increased, Same, Decreased, Deleted,” he asked, in an attached poll. More than 60% of the users who voted in his poll called for the IRS’s budget to be “deleted.”

This is just the latest instance of Musk asking for public feedback on his policy proposals on X, which he acquired in 2022. Adeyemo’s plea for extra funding comes after Republican lawmakers were able to include a $20 billion cut to the agency’s budget in a federal funding stopgap bill in September, which is keeping the government funded until Dec. 20. Musk also called for slashing government regulations by eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is responsible for protecting consumers in the financial sector. “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Musk posted to X. The agency was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to regulate the sector.

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“..to “remove Meta’s ability to remove or censor political content.”

• Trump-Zuckerberg’s Mar-a-Lago Chatter Suggests Imminent Changes in Meta (Sp.)

President-elect Donald Trump met with Meta* CEO Mark Zuckerberg face-to-face in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on November 27, the New York Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. “Zuckerberg is attempting to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration in order to avoid criminal prosecution,” Ryan Hartwig, a Facebook* whistleblower and co-author of “Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship”, tells Sputnik. Trump has long been critical of Zuckerberg over reportedly restraining him and other conservatives on social media, withholding the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” story, and orchestrating a “plot” against him in the 2020 election. Nonetheless, the two exchanged pleasantries during the recent encounter, according to the NYT.

“I think there may be some closed-door negotiations, however, given that Meta is a valuable tool for national security and surveillance of foreign countries, we may see a slight decrease in Trump’s rhetoric,” the pundit continues. “Hopefully there are penalties for Meta and Zuckerberg beyond just monetary fines. Influencing other countries’ elections is one thing, but domestic election interference is a very serious matter.” Hartwig expects Trump to proceed with social media regulations under section 230 during his second term in order to “remove Meta’s ability to remove or censor political content.” He also suggests possible changes in Meta’s executive leadership and even relocation of the company’s headquarters to Texas or another state “that isn’t an echo chamber for certain viewpoints.”

“These policy changes would include not removing any political speech and gutting most of its community standards,” the pundit highlights. And “more importantly, taking a stricter stance against minors on the platform and enforcing strict age verification,” Hartwig adds in an apparent reference to X owner Elon Musk lambasting Meta for “a massive child exploitation problem.”

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+ Lindsey Graham.

• White House Pressing Ukraine To Draft 18-Year-Olds for War (Antiwar)

The White House is pressuring Ukraine to increase the size of its military by lowering the minimum age of conscription from 25 to 18, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday. A senior Biden administration official said the outgoing administration wants Ukraine to start drafting 18-year-olds to expand the current pool of fighting-age males. The pressure from the US comes as polling shows the majority of Ukrainians want peace talks with Russia to end the war. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently hinted that the US was pressuring Ukraine to expand conscription, saying Ukraine’s biggest problem in the war was the lack of manpower.

“Our view has been that there’s not one weapon system that makes a difference in this battle. It’s about manpower, and Ukraine needs to do more, in our view, to firm up its lines in terms of the number of forces it has on the front lines,” Sullivan said on PBS News Hour last week. Last month, Serhiy Leshchenko, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Ukraine was under pressure from US politicians to lower the conscription age. “American politicians from both parties are putting pressure on President Zelensky to explain why there is no mobilization of those aged 18 to 25 in Ukraine,” he said. Zelensky signed a mobilization bill into law back in April that lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25.

A few weeks before the mobilization bill became law, Zelensky received a visit from US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who complained that not enough young Ukrainian men were being sent to the frontline. “I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27,” Graham said. “You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.” The Biden administration’s push for Ukraine to draft younger men comes as it is doing everything it can to escalate the proxy war before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20. President Biden is seeking another $24 billion to spend on the conflict even though it’s clear there’s no path to a Ukrainian military victory.

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“..the use of motivated judges in favorable jurisdictions for political advantage. These same figures claim to be “saving democracy.”

• Lawfare Warriors Express Regret But Not Remorse After Election (Turley)

The reaction to the reelection of Donald Trump in the media has ranged from histrionic to outright hysteria. MSNBC analyst and former Sen. Claire McCaskill wept openly on television as CBS News anchor John Dickerson got choked up on national television in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, still struggling to discuss the news days after the election. However, arguably the most perplexing responses came a few days ago when the New York Times ran a column from one of the advocates of the lawfare used against Trump since 2016. Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn has long been a favorite of the New York Times as part of what I have previously described as a counter-constitutional movement in higher education. As I discuss in my book, The Indispensable Right, Moyn and others have insisted that the constitution itself may be the problem with America. In a previous New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” Moyn and Harvard Professor Ryan D. Doerfler called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

While the New York Times publicly condemned a U.S. senator for writing about the use of the National Guard to stop violent protests (as would be done at both the White House and the Capitol), it has published a long line of figures who have engaged in violent or extremist rhetoric from the left. However, this particular column may be worth the ink and hypocrisy needed to publish it. The New York Times long lionized those who brought raw partisan prosecutions against Trump and his allies, including efforts to cleanse ballots to deny citizens the opportunity to vote for the man who just won the popular vote. In his new column “Liberals Bet They Could Beat Trump With the Law, Moyn regrets the lawfare, not because it distorted the law and weaponized the legal system, but because it did not work. He even quotes Benjamin Wittes, who helped create the Lawfare website, which was used, in Moyn’s words, “to hem in Mr. Trump.” Wittes wrote, “I have no interest in recriminations.” Perhaps, but the public does.

The election—which handed both houses of Congress and the White House to the GOP—was arguably the largest verdict in history. However, it was not necessarily a verdict for Trump as much as it was against the lawfare and advocacy journalism that had been used openly for years. After all, the “Let’s Go Brandon!” movement developed at the start of the Biden Administration and was as much a criticism of the media and political establishment as it was Joe Biden — a type of “Yankee Doodling” of the governing elite. For years, these figures ignored the “recriminations” of some who objected to using the legal system for political purposes, particularly in the New York cases. To his credit, Moyn now admits that “the more uncomfortable truth is that our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired.”

However, he remains remarkably uncritical of such tactics in the first place. Instead, he insists that these losses were due to simply “legalistic tactics.” Some of us call that the law. Moyn plays Shakespeare’s Othello in claiming to be “one that lov’d not wisely but too well.” The problem, he explains to the fragile Times readership is that they “rooted their opposition to Mr. Trump in the law since his first month in office.” He even refers to efforts early on to block Trump’s immigration policies. As soon as Trump came into office, he faced an acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, who ordered the department to stand down and not assist the new president in his immigration orders. I wrote at the time that the order was an outrageous and partisan act by Yates, who was planning on leaving in a matter of days.

While I criticized the initial Trump orders as poorly crafted (perhaps due to the lack of legal support) and in need of revision, I noted that he was likely to prevail on his claimed underlying authority. He ultimately prevailed after revising the orders. Yet, the New York Times and other publications again lionized Yates for an act that some of us view as unprofessional and arguably unethical. The problem with the lawfare campaign is that it did not just treat the law as an extension of politics, but treated the public as chumps. A large part of the public saw these cases for what they were: the use of motivated judges in favorable jurisdictions for political advantage. These same figures claim to be “saving democracy.”

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“Russian weapon, Russian crime, Russian culprits, Russian responsibility – those are the Hughes orders.”

• Either The Most Corrupt Judge In England, Or The Stupidest (Helmer)

The story the British government began telling in March 2018 on the road to the war, which the British and their allies are now losing in the Ukraine, is that Russian assassins, on a mission approved by President Vladimir Putin, tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a poison weapon they left behind. As story-telling goes, this one has been extraordinarily successful. Much more successful than the Anglo-American war against Russia. Most British people, all United Kingdom media reporters, and about one-quarter of the black cab drivers of London believe the story. This large group of people are being persuaded by a retired Court of Appeal judge named Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) not to notice that between the allegation of an unwitnessed attempt at murder by poison sprayed on a door handle on March 4, 2018, and the allegation of a death by poison sprayed from a perfume bottle on June 30, 2018, there is a gap of more than four months in time, and of almost fifteen kilometres in space.

The question for the judge is an obvious one: how did the murder weapon get from the one crime scene to the other without the murderer’s movement, presence or action; without leaving a single circumstantial clue; and without causing collateral damage, let alone poisonous contamination of anyone over such a long interval. In testimony to answer this question this week in a London meeting hall made up like a court, Hughes listened to the chief investigator of the crimes at the Metropolitan Police repeatedly admit he didn’t know how to explain the gap. In ten accompanying evidence exhibits, Hughes also accepted that the only way the sole witness called to explain the gap could do so was to coach him through ten separate police interviews, eight of them in just three weeks following the death of Dawn Sturgess, his girlfriend.

The witness Charles Rowley, according to his police record, is a criminal with multiple heroin possession convictions, a suspect in dealing Class A drugs, and a drug addict on methadone prescription. Para 31. Rowley was also on the press record as hustler for a million-pound payout. Rowley, the judge was told by the police, was classified by the MET as a Section 18 witness. That is to say, according to the exhibit of the police “Witness Interview Strategy – Charlie Rowley”, dated July 12, 2018, he was a witness “whose quality of evidence is likely to be diminished by reason of fear or distress”. Hughes made a record of accepting as admissible Rowley’s changing and contradictory explanations of how he came by the poison weapon. The judge also accepted as admissible the MET’s acknowledgement that they don’t know with confidence how the poison weapon had gone from one place to the other.

Their confidence was so low, the chief MET investigator told the judge, “we have not managed to secure sufficient evidence yet to present to the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], sir, that allows them to charge with any offences linked to Dawn and Charlie’s poisoning,” — Page 6. Hughes’s counsel replied: “Yes, thank you. Moving on just a little bit.” . The policeman, Commander Dominic Murphy, also said: “I don’t think we will ever actually know and the reality is there are of course several hypotheses for where the Novichok could have been and where Charlie could have found it”; “I think it’s worth acknowledging, sir, that there are of course many possibilities still for where the Novichok would have been and how Charlie found it”; “I don’t think we can discount the box being anywhere during those periods, no. We cannot evidence where the box was from 4 March right through to the point at which it was in Muggleton Road [Dawn Sturgess’s home]”; “I should say as the SIO [Senior Investigating Officer] for Operation Caterva I have seen no information or evidence to suggest that this is the case, but yes, of course it absolutely remains a possibility.”

“Thank you,” Hughes said. Hughes tried telling the policeman how to say what he wasn’t sure he saw. “He [Rowley] is coming from the direction of the bins. What is he carrying, do you think? A [Murphy]. I would imagine items he has recovered during the process. LORD HUGHES: Well, don’t imagine, Mr Murphy, come on. What does it look like?” The judge was so angry with the police officer, he stripped him of his commander rank. In the Anglo-American jurisprudence of murder trials, when the judge coaches the witness in front of the jury, the defence lawyer rises and objects. He then asks for the jury to be excused while he demands the judge retract, recuse himself, or dismiss the charges because the prosecution has failed to present a case to answer.

Hughes, however, is following the orders of the British Government, not English law. The orders are to fabricate the appearance of the case which the prosecution cannot make, in order to “identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.” Russian weapon, Russian crime, Russian culprits, Russian responsibility – those are the Hughes orders.

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Britain is in deep.

• Sky News Is The Limit For Fake News In The UK From Israeli Lobby Cash (Jay)

The European Union and a number of its member states’ governments are continuing in their quest to control media even more. The most recent move from the UK – to give an on screen seal of approval from the state in the form of a ‘Kitemark’ – was actually rejected by the House of Lords recently. This institution, made up of octogenarian buffoons – who mostly employ assistants to deal with their email boxes, such is the condition of their digital awareness – produced a report recently which they themselves ultimately rejected. The idea floated was that there would be some sort of regulator who would approve broadcast content with an on screen icon allowing viewers to see that the state had given it the thumbs up for being objective, unbiased and accurate.

At this point you might have fallen off your seat laughing at this notion, given that practically all of the UK’s entire fourth estate – large players as well as individual journos – are the most bigoted, biased and, at best, ill-informed group of media folk you are ever likely to meet in your lifetime, given what he have seen in Ukraine and Gaza. But the joke gets funnier. While we see over the last two years how out of touch the state is with how it is perceived, let alone its decisions to support the IDF in Gaza murder children and women or how it blindly supports Ukraine in its war against Russia, this idea that the humble citizens of the UK would place their trust in the government to direct them on the validity of media’s offerings is beyond parody.

How did the House of Lords even get to have a hand in all of this is remarkable in itself, but the idea of the Kitemark gives you an idea of the direction of where a further media crackdown is heading. Perhaps the old buffers, before their afternoon nap, were onto something when they rejected it, thinking that maybe it would open up a Pandora’s box and backfire on those who created it. Take the EU for example. What no British MEP, let alone Nigel Farage, who became an multimillionaire on the back of the Brussels beast he pretends to loath, is that this organization itself already spends hundreds of millions of its own taxpayers’ money on funding the biggest fake news operation for television ever known. Virtually all TV reporting which comes from Brussels is down with the production costs paid for by the EU, via is impressive state of the art studios and production teams all on hand to support the hapless Brussels correspondent.

If this grotesque subsidy were to be taken away, there would be almost no reporting on the EU at all, which would of course be a fine thing as what the so-called journalists are doing to show their gratitude to the brown envelope of course is very complimentary to the project. But back to the Kitemark. If we had such on screen logos to ‘direct’ viewers, how long would it be before the new eurosceptics in the bloc – Hungary, under the leadership of Viktor Orban – would insists that a new on screen logo should be seen by every report which comes from Brussels whose team have benefited from their entire report being paid for by the EU? If even the most supportive of EU voters were to see such a symbol they might ask themselves a perfectly reasonable question: how objective can these reports actually be? The House of Lords rejecting the on-screen Kitemark idea are thinking ahead of the game.

They are assuming that most people will switch off altogether watching those reports and move entirely to social media for their information. In reality, this has already happened on a large scale as any journalist will tell you if you want to know what’s really going on in Gaza or in Kursk, it’s going to be social media where you will go. The problem is the UK media model, once a respected beacon of its time which stood as an example to the rest of the world, is now entirely corrupted. It is rotten to the core and only serves one real purpose which is to keep the narrative from firstly, the U.S. and secondly the British government alive. Perhaps even funnier is the role of Sky News which has shown particularly on Gaza that it is the champion of fake news with its interpretation of the events entirely projected through the prism of the Zionists behind the genocide and their own depraved false narratives cooked up for western media, rather than for anything which comes close to raw, objective reporting of the events.

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Wokeists know better than those they “protect”.

• “Good Faith” Discussions Underway To Un-Cancel NFL Redskins Logo (ZH)

In a recent X post by Republican Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the senator wrote, “The censorship of the former Commander logo was a classic case of woke gone wrong. I applaud the Commanders & the NFL for their commitment to never censor the logo again.” Speaking to Fox News, Daines said, “The irony – they [woke left] were canceling Native American culture, as in the DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] movement went way too far …” At a recent Energy & Natural Resources Committee meeting on Capitol Hill, Daines stated that there had been “good faith negotiations” with the NFL team to restore the logo of Blackfoot Chief John Two Guns White Calf, which had been in use for half a century.

In 2020, the NFL team succumbed to pressure from the radical left, promoting woke culture and forcing a name change from the Redskins to the “Washington Commanders.” Before the woke left unleashed cancel culture, the NFL franchise used Native American artist Walter “Blackie” Wetzel’s artwork of the Blackfoot chief as the inspiration for the team’s logo from 1972 to 2020.

[…] And just like that, the iconic logo, celebrating Indian Country, was memory-holed, as were many other logos. The nation is waking up from a terrible decade of toxic and nation-killing wokeism nightmare. As we’ve previously noted, the ‘Overton Window’ has shifted. For the sake of humanity, let us hope the woke mind virus—destructive by nature and detrimental to the nation—comes to an abrupt end. Woke ideology was never intended to succeed; its true purpose is to destroy. Even The New York Times and Bloomberg acknowledged a new Rutgers study showing that DEI initiatives transform individuals into being “hostile.”

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Hotel

 

 

Jump

 

 

Nap
https://twitter.com/i/status/1861719390628311086

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 24 2024

Nov 242024
 
 November 24, 2024  Posted by at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Giovanni Bellini St. Francis in ecstasy 1480

 

• The Ukraine War After The Penny Has Dropped – Make That The Oreshnik (Helmer)
• Oreshnik – The 3 Km Per Second Plot Twist (Pepe Escobar)
• Reach Of Russia’s New Hypersonic Missile: ‘London In 20 Minutes’ (ZH)
• Putin Announces Mass Production Of Oreshnik Missiles (RT)
• RFK Jr. vs WaPo First Round In Trump’s Fight With Legacy Media, Censorship (JTN)
• Trump’s AG Fight Threatens To Spill Over To His Other Cabinet Picks (JTN)
• Trump Taps COVID-Contrarian Marty Makary For FDA (ZH)
• How Lies Become Facts And The World Ends (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The US and Britain, Inciting Global War, Must Be Defeated For Good (SCF)
• Russia’s “Apocalyptic” Troops Officially Engaged In The SMO (SCF)
• Mobilization Out Of Question – Kremlin (Sp.)
• White House Promises ‘Sprint’ to Protect Biden’s ‘Legacy’ From Trump (Sp.)
• Biden Vows to Arm Ukraine as Much as Possible Before Trump Inauguration (Sp.)
• Medvedev Tells How To End Ukraine Conflict (RT)
• Putin Must Be ‘Adult In The Room’ On Ukraine Conflict – Jimmy Dore (RT)

 

 

 

 

Gaetz

All in Pod

Megyn
https://twitter.com/i/status/1860050307713237211

Jennings

Fang

 

 

 

 

“..the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are talking directly to Trump & Co.”

• The Ukraine War After The Penny Has Dropped – Make That The Oreshnik (Helmer)

President Vladimir Putin has announced that serial production of the new Oreshnik hypersonic, intermediate range, 36-warhead missile has commenced. He made this announcement at a special public meeting with Defense Ministry officials in the Kremlin on Friday, November 22. “There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in the world today,” Putin said. “We need to launch its serial production. Let us assume that the decision on the serial production of this system has been made. As a matter of fact, it has already been essentially organised.” This means there are already, or will shortly be deployed, dozens of Oreshniki missiles for firing at targets in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and as far west as the Polish and Hungarian borders. This also means that no American, no NATO staff group, no Anglo-American target intelligence unit in bunkers in Kiev or Lvov are safe any longer.

Nor are Vladimir Zelensky and his advisors. To escape Israeli-precedent decapitation, they must all decamp to the Ukrainian war operations mock-up already prepared on the Polish side of the border. Ukrainian military intelligence head, Kirill Budanov, has claimed that the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash (Pivdenmash) plant in Dniepropetrovsk is “just a cipher…We know for sure that as of October they were supposed to make two research samples, maybe they made a little bit more, but believe me, this is a research sample, but not yet serial production, thank God.” “Wishful thinking,” a NATO military source comments. “He’ll get the chance to find out first- hand.” Russian military sources add that, following disclosure of the Kremlin’s back-channel talks with Donald Trump and his advisors on terms for an end-of-war settlement, the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are talking directly to Trump & Co.”

Putin was explicit in his first announcement of the Oreshnik firing: “We believe that the United States [President Trump] made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext.” Dmitry Rogozin — formerly Russian NATO ambassador, then deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian military industrial complex, now senator for Zaporozhye – carefully identified the credit for the Oreshnik: “Today, everyone who fought for the creation of this missile system, who overcame what we may call scepticism, should congratulate each other. And I join those congratulations. Good for you!…Thank you to the Supreme Command for supporting the work! Thank you to the Academy for not backing away!” A Russian source, who does not believe Putin ordered the General Staff to suspend its electric war campaign between August and this month, believes Russian strategy now is “a thousand cuts.

The Oreshnik is a particularly deep one but I don’t believe that the Kremlin and General Staff have decided to use it to hit Bankova [street address in Kiev of the presidential offices and living quarters]. The decapitation threat is real enough though to impel Zelensky to exit, or maybe for the Ukrainian military to get rid of him on their own initiative.” “Just as important,” the source says, “the Russian ground offensive in the east will remain slow, patient, maybe for two years more. The priority is on preventing Russian casualties, conserving Russian lives. This is essential once you realize that the [Putin] presidential succession also depends, not only on winning the war on Russian terms, but ensuring the protection of Russian lives.” Oreshnik in Russian means, literally, hazel nut or the wood of the hazelnut tree. In Siberia, the cognate expression “to give nuts” has the metaphorical meaning of inflicting punishment.

As Putin pointed out in his national address on the evening after the Oreshnik strike, it had been then-President Trump’s “mistake” in 2019 to unilaterally withdraw from the 1987 Soviet-American treaty on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF). Oreshnik is both the Russian reply and also a warning to Trump to correct his mistake. For the time being, the Financial Times, a Japanese propaganda outlet in London, reported a Norwegian graduate student as claiming “there certainly was no military value to it.” In Moscow, Izvestia, on which the BBC has relied for republication, reported “it is likely that we are dealing with a new generation of Russian intermediate-range missiles [with a range of] 2,500-3,000km (1,550-1,860 miles) and potentially extending to 5,000km (3,100 miles), but not intercontinental. It is obviously equipped with a separating warhead with individual guidance units.”

This means the missile is MIRV, comprising multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles. Close observation of the strike videoclips shows six of these releasing six munitions capable of penetrating deep underground bunkers. A salvo of thirty-six warhead detonations, altogether. Missile speed is reported to be between Mach 10 and Mach 11.

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“..it was Trump 1.0 who withdrew the US from the INF treaty, in 2019. If the US had remained, Russia would not have been able to develop and use Oreshnik.”

• Oreshnik – The 3 Km Per Second Plot Twist (Pepe Escobar)

Captain America believed it would intimidate Russkie Charlie with the “authorization” straight out of the Deep State for Ukraine to attack targets inside the Russian Federation with ATACMS. Such attacks had already happened in the past on Russia’s new territories. Still, two new ones were unleashed after the “authorization”, against Kursk and Bryansk; one with ATACMS, and the other with Storm Shadows. Then came the inevitable Russian response. What was that? New multiple hypersonics? Zeus? Superman? Deputy Chair of the Security Council, Dimitri “Unplugged” Medvedev, could not resist concise trolling; “So that’s what you wanted? Well, you’ve damn well got it!” Collective West rats were predictably scurryin’ all across the spectrum after watching what was first interpreted as a RS-26 “conventional warheads package” demo. Then President Putin went on the record.

Key takeaways: Western long-range weapons have been used against Russia, which retaliated with the new, medium-range, ballistic hypersonic “Oreshnik” system against the Yuzhmash factory in Dnipropetrovsk; additionally, the use of long-range weapons by the enemy cannot affect the course of the Special Military Operation (SMO). But this was the key relevant message Putin relayed to the Americans, NATO and the collective West: “We are conducting combat tests of the Oreshnik missile system in response to the aggressive actions of NATO countries against Russia. The issue of further deployment of medium-range and shorter-range missiles will be decided by us, depending on the actions of the United States and its satellites. The targets for destruction during further tests of our newest missile systems will be determined by us based on threats to the security of the Russian Federation. We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military installations of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities. And in case of escalation of aggressive actions, we will also respond decisively and in a mirror manner. I recommend that the ruling elites of those countries that have plans to use their military contingents against Russia seriously think twice about this.”

The initial interpretation of this de facto game-changing move was that Russia had launched a single RS-26 Rubezh road mobile missile against the Yuzhmash missile production factory in Dnepropetrovsk, equipped with six independent, non-nuclear (italics mine) warheads, each in turn deploying other warheads (call it 6×6 = 36). That in itself changed the “essence” of the war in Ukraine, as Putin himself had previously recognized when it comes to the “authorization” for attacks by ATACMS. Putin’s speech established that Russia in fact used a completely new medium range (1,000 to 3,000 km) missile, the Oreshnik (“Hazelnut). Even US officials admitted it’s an “experimental” system; that implies they knew something about it. Putin himself also referred to “combat testing”. What is established beyond any testing, in Putin’s own words, is that “Hazelnut” may be sent as a gift to any target across NATO.

Oreshnik is as badass as missiles get. It may reach the UK in only 19 minutes; Brussels in 14; Berlin in 11; and Warsaw in 8 minutes. And, of course, traveling at over Mach 10, it simply cannot be intercepted by anything in the collective West arsenal. That includes the US. High destructive power is a given – already guaranteed by the surprise factor; you only know what hits you after you get hit (maybe). One potential option is that Oreshnik targeted secret underground workshops at Yuzhmash, where NATO had sent equipment and parts for short-range ballistic missiles (500 km to 1,500 km). In his four books and in his blog, the indispensable Andrei Martyanov has made it clear that “Russia has an overwhelming conventional escalation superiority” compared to the Hegemon. So, yes: this testing of an IRCM (a conventional missile) with hypersonic MIRVs (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles) may be just a demo – a preview of what else may be in store.

Martyanov: “NATO has zero capability to stop Russia’s long-range fires.” The “demo” also happens to be paired with a new shot at making war a relatively civil affair: Moscow will warn civilians of any impending Oreshnik strike. Those that won’t leave will do so at their own peril. As Martyanov remarked, “this is not anymore just SMO”. Indeed: for quite a while we have been way past a special military operation: this is a do-or-die NATO v. Russia hot war. Aggravated by the fact that the Hegemon’s ruling elites are congenitally incapable of stop escalating. Even the Oreshnik demo won’t stop escalation. A plausible scenario is that US military intel learned about an impeding Russian mid-range ballistic missile strike and then informed Kiev and NATO. Moscow then warned the US 30 minutes before the strike (that’s the norm, to prevent nuclear misunderstandings); the Americans not only confirmed it, but stressed there was no risk of a Russian nuclear attack on Kiev, now or in the foreseeable future.

Oreshnik in fact is a tacit demo that Russia does not need nuclear power to solve anything in the Ukrainian theater of war. So let’s assume that escalation has been controlled – for now. Yet we still have nearly two months of a completely deranged US administration in power. NATO’s congenital dementia suggests escalation will continue. The difference though is stratospheric: now they don’t know if Oreshnik handing them a business card comes with a nuclear bomb on or not. For all the inbuilt dementia of the current – exiting – administration, Americans who only understand the world via movies may have forgotten that it was Trump 1.0 who withdrew the US from the INF treaty, in 2019. If the US had remained, Russia would not have been able to develop and use Oreshnik. But now it’s hazelnut salad time, everybody; a great way to regulate blood pressure.

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“• Six warheads, each carrying six submunitions. • A terminal phase speed exceeding Mach 11..”

• Reach Of Russia’s New Hypersonic Missile: ‘London In 20 Minutes’ (ZH)

Soon after warning that Russia’s newly deployed ‘Oreshnik’ nuclear capable hypersonic missile is able to reach any European capital, at a top speed of Mach 10+ —which is significantly faster than a bullet—Russian state media issued the below ominous infographic. It touts that Eastern European capitals could be hit in a matter of a few minutes, and that Berlin is reachable in only 15. It lists capitals as far away from the Kapustin Yar rocket launch complex like London and Paris as reachable by the Oreshnik in just 20 minutes. This means if proverbial all hell broke loose and WW3 came to Europe, these populations would have very little time to reach shelter. On Thursday Moscow had shocked the world after six independent war heads of a new intermediate range ballistic missile were launched on the Yuzhmash missile plant in Dnipro Ukraine. Thus Putin has demonstrated that the West has crossed his ‘red lines’ after its long-range attack authorization granted to Kiev.

According to more via a war monitoring site: Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) provided further details, stating that “Oreshnik” refers to a research project, while the operational missile system is named “Kedr.” Its known specifications include: • Six warheads, each carrying six submunitions. • A terminal phase speed exceeding Mach 11. If this is indeed a medium-range ballistic missile, as Putin suggests, its range could extend up to 5,500 kilometers. This would violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by the US and the Soviet Union to eliminate such missiles. Developing Kedr would thus signify Russia’s breach of this agreement. Vladimir Putin warned back in July, “Today, the development of such systems in Russia is nearing completion. We will take mirror measures to deploy them, taking into account the actions of the United States, its satellites in Europe and in other regions of the world.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1859663512093544452

A day after Russia’s attack on Ukraine with what were clearly big, very fast and new intermediate-range missiles, which many outlets initially reported to be an ICBM, the Kremlin is touting that it launched a cutting-edge hypersonic missile for which there is no defensive intercept capability. Russia says that Washington has now understood and been able to grasp Putin’s warnings and red lines more clearly following the missile strike a Ukrainian defense industry facility in Dnepropetrovsk Thursday morning. The new hypersonic weapon, dubbed ‘Oreshnik’ is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. “We have no doubt that the current administration in Washington has had the opportunity to familiarize itself with this announcement and understand it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. Putin had said the West’s escalation, seen this week in authorizing Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russia with US/UK-made weapons, makes Ukraine a “global” conflict.

He strongly hinted that this global aspect to the war means attacks on Western targets can’t be ruled out. The same day, the foreign ministry said a US missile base in Poland is a prime target. Peskov further called Putin’s message following the hypersonic attack “comprehensive, clear and logical.” The Russian leader has authorized the new missile to enter mass production. “The key message is that the reckless decisions and actions of Western countries — which produce missiles, supply them to Ukraine and subsequently take part in carrying out strikes on Russian territory — cannot go unanswered,” Peskov continued. On Friday Russian state media sources have begun publishing specs for the Oreshnik missile, claiming it flies at Mach 10, and can reach 5,500km in distance, or 3,400+ miles (as a medium-range weapon). Russia’s missile command has also informed Putin that the projectile is capable of reaching any European target…

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“..it is a new development based on cutting-edge hypersonic technology and modern materials..”

I was wondering about the -heat-resistant- coating. Didn’t see a clue. It’s what the west can’t get right.

• Putin Announces Mass Production Of Oreshnik Missiles (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed on Friday the decision to begin serial production of the new Oreshnik ballistic missile system. The announcement came after the system was used in combat for the first time earlier this week in Ukraine. Speaking during a meeting at the Kremlin with the leadership of the Defense Ministry and defense industry representatives, Putin outlined that the Oreshnik missile system, one of Russia’s latest military advancements, is not a modernization of an old Soviet weapon. Instead, it is a new development based on cutting-edge hypersonic technology and modern materials. “It is the result of work done in the conditions of New Russia,” Putin said, highlighting that the system was created to meet contemporary defense needs.

Putin confirmed that several Oreshnik systems are currently undergoing testing in Russia, and that the decision to embark on mass production had already been articulated. “You can assume that the decision on production has been made. In fact, it is organized,” he added. More of the missile systems are expected to be delivered to Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces in the coming months. The first combat use of the Oreshnik missile took place on Thursday, when it was used to strike a Ukrainian defense facility in Dnepropetrovsk. The target was Yuzhmash, one of Ukraine’s largest defense-industrial facilities inherited from the USSR that produces missile equipment and other weapons.

Putin said the use of the missile was in response to Kiev’s attacks inside Russia with Western-supplied long-range weapons such as American ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles. The Oreshnik is described as a medium-range, hypersonic weapon designed for high precision strikes. According to the Defense Ministry, “all warheads” of the missile “reached the target” during this week’s deployment. The president praised the missile’s successful test and combat deployment, expressing admiration for the speed at which the system had been developed. Putin also emphasized the importance of continuing testing and increasing production rates. “I congratulate the military on the successful tests and support the adoption of the system,” he said.

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”..clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end run around the Constitution.”

• RFK Jr. vs WaPo First Round In Trump’s Fight With Legacy Media, Censorship (JTN)

“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” President-elect Donald Trump said in a video posted to social media just day after winning reelection on Nov. 5. “Today, I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime.” Not mentioned by name, though alluded to, are the various non-profit and for-profit groups that have sprung up to battle “fake news” but typically target outlets that lean right of center. Those group include the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), Media Matters for America (MMFA), the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and NewsGuard. “When I am president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large,” Trump also announced. With his bold pronouncements in mind, the following is Part 1 of a four-part series – a deep dive into some of the organizations to which he was likely referring.

Critics of their work say it leads to censorship and loss of advertising for the media outlets that dare challenge the legacy media’s approved narrative. Multiple outlets have published profiles of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the past 18 months, though only The Washington Post’s in June warranted a 20-page response from Kennedy that includes 78 footnotes. The letter, reviewed by Just the News, includes the expected complaints: The writer referred to Kennedy’s claims as “conspiracy theories” or as having been “debunked,” though he says they hadn’t been. Too many journalists do not “speak truth to power,” Kennedy wrote, but instead “serve as propagandists pouring concrete on official orthodoxies, and attacking dissent.” The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment.

Peppered throughout the letter are references to something called the Trusted News Initiative, a global consortium of members founded in 2019 by the BBC that also includes the Associated Press, Reuters, Microsoft, Google, YouTube and The Washington Post. Its goal: combat disinformation. In the letter, Kennedy, nominated by Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, refers to TNI as a “clandestine industry partnership” and a “cabal” made up of “conspirators” whose mission is to label as “misinformation” any assertion that departs from pronouncements made by the Biden-Harris administration, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other bureaucracies. Examples of “misinformation” that proved to be plausible, if not true, include early claims that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China; that mRNA vaccines might not prevent infection or transmission of COVID-19; that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin might be effective in treating the infectious disease; and that a laptop left at a repair shop belonged to first son Hunter Biden.

One of Kennedy’s footnotes includes a quote from TNI Director Jessica Cecil, who said last year: “We don’t fact check; but once we learn from a partner that something is unreliable, that’s when we alert each other.” The TNI did not respond to a request for comment from Just The News, nor to its request that it reveal the names of outside donors or to clarify whether it gets – directly or indirectly – funds or directives from any government entity. Trump, in the Nov. 9 video, alluded to the latter when he vowed to end censorship, saying, “We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end run around the Constitution.”

One of Kennedy’s footnoted accusations reads: “By depriving the public of complete scientific information, TNI may have had a calamitous impact on public health. Nearly 100 studies of ivermectin and 400 studies of hydroxychloroquine revealed that the drugs are safe and effective against COVID-19. TNI social media platforms nevertheless took the official position that these repurposed drugs were unsafe and ineffective.” He writes that TNI was doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical companies, given that “federal law prohibits the issuance of an Emergency Use Authorization for any vaccine if any approved drug is demonstrated effective against the target disease.” Kennedy’s letter notes that The Post reported that 70% of calls to one state’s poison control center involved ivermectin, when the real number was 2% (the newspaper ran a correction).

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“Newsweek’s Josh Hammer, moreover, suggested that the nod may have been an example of Trump playing “4-D chess..”

• Trump’s AG Fight Threatens To Spill Over To His Other Cabinet Picks (JTN)

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s, R-Fla., withdrawal from consideration to serve as United States Attorney General and his replacement with Florida’s Pam Bondi has many scratching their heads and some forecasting trouble for his future Cabinet picks. Trump’s nomination of Gaetz shocked Capitol Hill. The conservative firebrand and die-hard MAGA supporter had previously rocked the lower chamber by leading the charge to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year. His reputation as an anti-institutional wrecking ball, moreover, scared establishment lawmakers stiff. More shocking than his nomination, however, was his withdrawal and speedy replacement with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Neither Gaetz nor Bondi were on most insiders’ shortlists for the post and more than a handful of Republican heavyweights have speculated that the Gaetz nomination may have been some sort of headfake.

Ostensibly motivating Gaetz’s withdrawal were his concerns that a contentious nomination process would needlessly distract from Trump’s agenda. But Gaetz had also faced a House Ethics Committee investigation into his conduct, of which Gaetz has vehemently denied. The DOJ previously declined to charge him after a years-long investigation, but senators wanted the panel’s findings. After Gaetz resigned from Congress, the committee chose not to release them. Purportedly, Gaetz did not have the votes for confirmation, with a handful of establishment Republicans standing firm in their opposition to him despite a Capitol Hill meeting between Gaetz and members of the upper chamber. While his replacement may have an easier path to confirmation than he did, Gaetz’s departure from the media cycle may prove a detriment to the success of Trump’s other nominees.

Defense Secretary designate Pete Hegseth, for instance, was briefly the subject of headlines over his own legal woes and allegations, though Gaetz’s nomination saw him draw the media flak away from Hegseth. An Army veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Hegseth earned two Bronze Stars and went on to become a host on Fox News. His issues speedily returned to headlines after Gaetz backed out of the nomination. More than a few analysts predicted Gaetz’s failure as a nominee and have suggested that Trump may have as well. “There’s always one” that takes the fall and “gives cover to the others,” one Republican strategist told Fox News, suggesting Gaetz was a “sacrificial lamb” for other nominees. Newsweek’s Josh Hammer, moreover, suggested that the nod may have been an example of Trump playing “4-D chess,” in reference to a 2016 notion that he was outthinking his opponents.

The essence of Hammer’s theory is that Trump’s nomination of Gaetz gave the congressman an excuse to leave Congress and thereby avoid the release of the ethics report, freeing him up for a possible 2026 gubernatorial run. Given how odious Gaetz was to Senate lawmakers, moreover, whomever Trump chose to replace him would seem more palatable. Hammer suggests that the short turnaround between Gaetz’s withdrawal and Bondi’s nomination signaled she may have been on deck for the job already. Under that theory, Trump would have helped a MAGA stalwart gear up to lead one of the most important Republican bastions while greasing the wheels for another stalwart nominee, who might otherwise have faced more intense scrutiny.

In late October, Trump declared that he and Gaetz have a “little secret” they would reveal after the election concluded. The clip of him saying so recirculated amid Gaetz’s nomination, though Trump never confirmed any link between the clip and the AG nod.

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This is RFK Jr.

• Trump Taps COVID-Contrarian Dr. Marty Makary For FDA (ZH)

In another appointment with potential to shake up the federal health regime, Donald Trump on Friday nominated Dr. Martin Makary to lead the Food & Drug Administration. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University pancreatic surgeon and author of three New York Times bestsellers, has been critical of the government’s role in health care. The role requires Senate confirmation. Declaring that the FDA has “lost the trust of Americans,” Trump said Makary will “course-correct and refocus the agency,” to include “properly evaluat[ing] harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the childhood chronic disease epidemic.” Makary grew to national notoriety as one of several highly-credentialed physicians who pushed back on many elements of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Testifying before Congress, Makary said:

“The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government. Misinformation that Covid was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity…that myocarditis was more common after the infection than the vaccine…that young people benefit from a booster…” While not broadly opposing Covid-19 vaccines, Makary condemned the Biden administration for pushing boosters on young patients for whom the virus presented a far lower threat, and has declared that heavy-handed vaccine mandates “created never-vaxxers.” He co-wrote a study that concluded that Covid vaccine booster mandates for college students created net harm, with adverse reactions like myocarditis in young men outweighing slim benefits from vaccination.

Makary also ridiculed fear-mongering about the Omicron variant as “fueling…a pandemic of lunacy,” and urged a rollback in Covid testing in low-risk situations, saying, “If you test everyone in the United States, you will find a virus particle in the nose of some fraction of Americans forever.” That said, some feel Makary was too slow to question some elements of the Covid regime, and was initially too credulous about the benefits of vaccination. In June 2020, he touted the “liberating” qualities of “universal masking.” In March 2021, he tweeted, “The data show that vaccines confer near perfect protection against death and hospitalization from Covid.” With a $7 billion budget and 18,000 employees, the FDA has enormous influence over Americans’ lives, with regulatory influence over products that account for about a fifth of all US consumer spending.

Makary, who has degrees from Bucknell University, Thomas Jefferson and Harvard, would report to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr — if the controversial Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate or manages to achieve a recess appointment to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has said the FDA is in need of a major trimming. “There are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go—that are not doing their job. They’re not protecting our kids,” Kennedy said earlier this month. In a more aggressive post to X in October, Kennedy said “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” and said that, for employees who were part of corruption that serves the pharmaceutical industry to the detriment of the public’s health, “I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

The Washington Post reports that Kennedy was influential in Makary’s selection, as Kennedy urged Trump to favor candidates that are not tightly linked to either the health care industry or government. Kennedy is said to consider Makary as a likeminded reformer. Much like Kennedy, Makary has harshly criticized the federal government’s approach to food and health, saying root causes of serious conditions are ignored in favor of simply prescribing drugs: “We are right now witnessing the largest uncontrolled experiment in modern health history…we have introduced tons of chemicals, pesticides, micro-plastics, ultra-processed foods, seed oils into the modern diet, altering the microbiome and no one talks about it. They’re too busy demonizing saturated fat and trying to defend the old food pyramid. They just replaced it with a food compass that’s almost worse…it says Lucky Charms is healthier than a steak.”

Makary’s new book is “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.” Makary makes a case that government malpractice has been at the root of many modern health crises, from opioid addiction to peanut allergies to obesity and drug-resistance bacteria. Here he is recounting how the National Institutes of Health, on the basis of its own profoundly flawed study, wrongly discouraged doctors from prescribing hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women, creating a reluctance that still persists today:

However tardy Makary may have been in challenging some public health approaches to the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems clear he is poised to shake things up at the all-too-powerful FDA. January 20 can’t come quickly enough.

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“Russia has been pushed as far as it is safe to push. If the pushing doesn’t stop, the world is going to end.”

• How Lies Become Facts And The World Ends (Paul Craig Roberts)

Endless repetition by whore media and careless media turn lies into truth. Whatever media you read, you read that “Russia invaded Ukraine.” The lie is not limited to official narrative-controllers, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, CNN. Wikipedia, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, Telegraph, Guardian. It appears in alternative media, such as the Epoch Times and Breitbart. Indeed, the lie is repeated as fact almost everywhere, in the houses of Congress, the UK Parliament, Wall Street, European media and governments. The fact is there was no Russian invasion at all. Russian forces entered Donbas at the request of the two independent breakaway republics for help against the US-trained and equipped Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi militias that were about to invade Donetsk and Luhansk. The two independent republics requested Russia to return them to Russia in 2014 along with Crimea.

But Putin refused the republics, taking only Crimea because it is the site of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Instead Putin placed his bet on the Minsk Agreement, which kept Donbas as part of Ukraine. The enforcers of the Minsk Agreement, Germany and France, later admitted that the Minsk Agreement was used to deceive Putin while Washington created a Ukrainian army to conquer the independent republics and present Putin with political difficulties for failure to defend Russians from those whose forebears fought for Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In other words, it was a plan to discredit Putin, for his crime of dissenting from Washington’s hegemony. Putin’s refusal to restore Donbas to Russia in keeping with the overwhelming vote of the Donbas people subjected Donetsk and Luhansk to eight years of bombardment and many casualties while Putin stood by the Minsk Agreement.

Finally in February, 2022, with Washington, NATO, and the EU refusing Russia a mutual security agreement, and the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics facing invasion, Putin was forced to act to protect the Russian populations in the east and south of Ukraine that had been attached to the Ukrainian province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders for political and administration reasons. Donbas and Crimea were for centuries part of Russia, not Ukraine. Putin, a leader, rebuilding Russian confidence after the Soviet collapse, could not stand aside while Russian people were massacred by an American-provided Ukrainian army. Putin’s view of his intervention was very limited. It had nothing whatsoever to do with conquering Ukraine. His publicly announced “Special military operation” had to do only with driving Ukrainian forces out of Donbas. Putin made no effort to conquer Ukraine.

At the time I said his limited approach, particularly his intention to minimize both Russian casualties and casualties among the Ukrainian population, would leave the Ukrainian puppet government in place to continue the war despite Russian successes in clearing Donbas of Ukrainian forces. My prediction, and not Putin’s bet, proved to be correct. As I said would be the case, by not impeding Kiev’s ability to continue the war, Putin enabled a long-term war, now three years, during which Washington has managed to get the West involved up to the hilt. The latest being the Biden regime’s green light to missiles being fired by US and NATO personnel into Mother Russia. The recent US missile strikes into Russia crossed a red line that, finally, Putin was not prepared to ignore in his interest to avoid a wider war. Unlike the West, Putin does not want war. He did not want the conflict in Ukraine. Washington forced it on him. He cannot stand aside while an army created by Washington slaughters Russians.

Putin’s response to the missile strikes, which ignored his warning, was restrained. He merely demonstrated with a hypersonic missile that travels at mach 10 the fate of the West if the West’s attack on Russia continues. The question is whether the West heard the warning.. Putin’s past record of ignoring provocations in order to avoid widening the war has created the impression in the West that Putin’s warnings don’t mean anything as “Putin never does anything.” This conclusion is dangerously mistaken. It ignores that Putin, a humanitarian, ignores provocations in order to avoid widening the war, which has a terrible impact on innocent civilians and their hopes, and, if nuclear, on life on Earth. The West’s conclusion also ignores that provocations can become too severe for Putin to ignore. I believe that point has been reached.

If the irresponsible American establishment, deluded by its hubris and belief in its invincibility, continues to provoke Russia, Putin will run out of space into which to back up. At that point the Western world’s aggression could result in an unintended consequence. The problem before us is that the Western leaders are too lost in their false narratives to comprehend reality. It is not all their fault, because Putin encouraged their provocations by not standing up to them. But the aggression lies with the West, not with Russia. And Russia has been pushed as far as it is safe to push. If the pushing doesn’t stop, the world is going to end.

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From a western source.

• The US and Britain, Inciting Global War, Must Be Defeated For Good (SCF)

This week marks a fateful threshold for the world. In a grave announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the three-year proxy war in Ukraine has now reached a global dimension. The responsibility for this abysmal moment lies fully with the United States’ elitist rulers and their British accomplices. They are inciting global catastrophe in a desperate bid to save their hegemonic empire. Putin’s announcement on November 21 came only hours after Russia launched a retaliatory strike against Anglo-American aggression. Russia’s new hypersonic ballistic missile destroyed a munitions center in Dnepropetrovsk in central Ukraine. The conventionally armed missile – called Oreshnik – was deployed in combat for the first time. It delivered several warheads at Mach-10 speed. There is no air defense against such a unique weapon.

The Oreshnik attack was in response to the firing of long-range missiles by the United States and Britain on November 19 and 21 against the pre-conflict territory of the Russian Federation. There is no doubt that the U.S. and British forces were directly involved because, as Moscow has noted, the Ukrainian regime does not have the personnel or logistics capability to operate these advanced NATO weapon systems. The conclusion is stark. The world is on the cusp of World War Three, a war that would inevitably become a nuclear conflagration and precipitate the end of life on Earth. The evil facing humanity is staggering. Western barefaced lies to the public Ludicrously, or perhaps more accurately, fiendishly, Western politicians and media are condemning Russia for the escalation. Their accusations are in flagrant contradiction with the facts. The Western public is being lied to about the sequence and causes of war.

In a move beyond reckless, the United States and Britain attacked Russia with long-range missiles from the territory of Ukraine. The ATACMS and Storm Shadow weapons were aimed at Bryansk and Kursk Oblasts in Western Russia. The American missiles were shot down by Russian air defense, while the British Storm Shadow cruise projectile caused deaths in Kursk. That barrage marked an open act of war against Russia by the United States and Britain. Hence, the Russian leader commented that the proxy war in Ukraine had now taken on a global dimension. The American and British leadership went ahead with this aggression even after Russia had explicitly warned several weeks ago that the deployment of such weapons against Russian territory would be seen by Moscow as an act of war.

It also followed only hours after Russia revised its nuclear defense doctrine on November 19, defining that the use of long-range conventional weapons from the territory of a non-nuclear state (Ukraine) supplied by nuclear states (the U.S. and Britain) would constitute a joint attack, thereby giving Russia the right to retaliate with nuclear force. The situation has thus entered the realm of nuclear world war. Given the aggression initiated by the U.S. and Britain with their ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles, Russia has the legal right to hit those territories and any other territory of the NATO alliance. Russia chose not to do so – for now – limiting its Oreshnik’s target to the territory of Ukraine. What happens next over the coming days depends on the U.S. and its NATO partners. So far, the White House and Pentagon have sought to (irrationally) blame Moscow for escalation and are saying that the United States will continue to deploy long-range missiles from Ukraine against Russian territory. That remains to be seen if the insanity prevails.

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“The American inaction was the best warning that could have been given to the Ukrainians. The Americans made it clear that they would do nothing to protect their proxy.”

• Russia’s “Apocalyptic” Troops Officially Engaged In The SMO (SCF)

November 21, 2024, will go down in Russian military history as the date of the first real combat deployment of the legendary and feared Strategic Rocket Forces of the Russian Federation (RVSN). Created in Soviet times, the RVSN is the independent branch of the Russian Armed Forces responsible for the arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, literally the “troops of the apocalypse” – responsible for firepower capable of causing a global catastrophe. Of course, the RVSN was involved in all the major nuclear tensions of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Norwegian Incident. Although it has remained on high combat alert several times, no actual military engagement has occurred until now. NATO, however, exceeded all expectations of escalation in its provocations against Russia and succeeded in turning the Ukrainian conflict into the most dangerous security crisis in history.

After the Western-Ukrainian side ignored repeated Russian warnings to cease long-range strikes against the Federation’s undisputed territory, Moscow had no alternative but to call in its most feared troops and authorize an unprecedented operation. The target chosen was a military equipment factory in Dnepropetrovsk. The weapon used was a new missile, previously untested in real situations – nicknamed ‘Oreshnik’. Luckily for the Ukrainians, no nuclear warhead was attached to the missile, which worked as a conventional weapon despite its surprising speed and high lethality. There are two main points to be understood from the attack on Dnepropetrovsk: on the one hand, this was a test for Moscow, which had the opportunity for the first time to use the Oreshnik missile technology in a real combat situation, confirming its absolute effectiveness. On the other hand, the attack was a kind of “last chance” for the enemy, as well as a major warning to Ukraine.

Moscow could have responded to the Ukrainian strikes on Bryansk and Kursk with nuclear weapons, as such a decision would have been fully in line with recent reforms in the Russian Nuclear Doctrine. However, once again mercy and a desire for de-escalation prevailed in the Kremlin’s decisions, leading to a warning being delivered to both NATO and Ukraine before the “final solution”. For NATO, the message was clear: there is no military technology available that can stop Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. If the decision to go nuclear is taken, the targets will be hit without the Atlantic alliance and its proxies being able to do anything to prevent it. For Ukraine, the warning was even deeper: Moscow made it clear that no one would “help” the neo-Nazi regime. Obviously, the Russian attack was noticed by the Americans in time.

There are thousands of observers involved in various monitoring projects whose specific task is to see such maneuvers and prepare a response in time for the event of a nuclear crisis. In other words, Washington saw that the attack was happening and did nothing. Perhaps the US held back from reacting out of fear. Perhaps it held back from reacting because it assumed the target would be Ukrainian. But in any case, there was no reaction. Washington did not issue an emergency plan for nuclear retaliation, even without any confirmation, until minutes after the targets were hit, that the Russian warheads contained nuclear material or not. In other words, the US, faced with dangerous uncertainty, chose to remain silent.

The American inaction was the best warning that could have been given to the Ukrainians. The Americans made it clear that they would do nothing to protect their proxy. If Russia launches nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Kiev will have to deal with the consequences alone. More than that, it must be emphasized that the Americans had no way of predicting whether the Russian strikes would target NATO or not, which is why the lack of an immediate retaliatory operation has an even deeper significance and calls into question even the “collective defense” of the Western alliance.

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“..an average of 1,000 people join the army each day.”

• Mobilization Out Of Question – Kremlin (Sp.)

Russia is not considering another mobilization round as the country continues to rely on a strong stream of volunteers willing to join the military, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. Russia announced a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022, calling up some 300,000 reservists to man the Ukraine conflict front line. Despite rumors circulating in recent months of a new mobilization campaign, none have been announced while Russian officials have repeatedly insisted that there is no need for such measures. In an interview with RIA Novosti on Saturday, Peskov reiterated “that there is no talk of mobilization at all… There is no need.” He noted that Russian citizens “are very actively signing contracts with the Defense Ministry,” adding that the government has developed a program that provides substantial payments for those willing to enlist.

“These people are numerous – hundreds sign contracts every day and join the special military operation,” Peskov said, adding that volunteers undergo rigorous training before being sent to the front. The Kremlin spokesman was interviewed by Faina Savenkova, a 16-year-old intern journalist from the Russian city of Lugansk. At the age of 12, she was added to the notorious Mirotvorets “enemies of Ukraine” list after she urged the UN to protect children in Donbass from Kiev’s artillery strikes. In August, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted a significant increase in volunteers willing to defend the country after Ukraine launched its large-scale incursion into the border Kursk Region, during which multiple attacks on civilians were recorded. In July, the Defense Ministry said that more than 190,000 citizens had signed military contracts in 2024 alone, adding that an average of 1,000 people join the army each day.

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“..sprint efforts to preserve the “legacy” and “productive” work of outgoing US President Joe Biden..”

• White House Promises ‘Sprint’ to Protect Biden’s ‘Legacy’ From Trump (Sp.)

The White House promises sprint efforts to preserve the “legacy” and “productive” work of outgoing US President Joe Biden, who failed to win re-election for a second term and spent more than a third of his first term in country residences and on the beach. “President Biden is focused on ensuring the remainder of his term is as productive as any other period in the last four years,” the White House press service said in a statement. It notes that the remainder of the current administration’s time “is a sprint to build on the historic progress we’ve made under his presidency.” According to the White House, Biden plans to work hard on a program to invest in the US, seek confirmation of judicial nominees, and “continue to strengthen our Alliances and partnerships.” The press service cites American media outlets that report on the administration’s efforts to preserve and protect Biden’s “legacy” from the incoming Republican administration.

Biden’s opponents counted the days he spent outside the White House, in suburban or beach residences, throughout his tenure. According to these data, the US president spent about 40% of his time in office on vacation. His term will be remembered for many embarrassments, slips of the tongue, and falls. Biden, who was planning to run for a second term, dropped out of the race only after a disastrous performance in the debates with Trump in the summer, but this decision was also caused by massive pressure from fellow party members; experts noted that Biden did not want to give up the fight, since he was sensitive to his place in history and the legacy he had left behind. The Democrats failed to retake the White House after Biden’s “productive period.” Donald Trump, who won the election, will take office on January 20.

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It’s not about Biden.

• Biden Vows to Arm Ukraine as Much as Possible Before Trump Inauguration (Sp.)

US President Joe Biden is trying to strengthen Kiev as much as possible during his remaining time as head of the country before Donald Trump, who won the election, comes to power in late January, Bloomberg reported. This intention explains Biden’s latest decisions in the Ukrainian direction, including permission to use long-range missiles and approval of sending anti-personnel mines, the publication said. At the same time, the agency acknowledged that Biden’s options were very limited, since most of the remaining money for Kiev could only be used for weapons that are already at the Pentagon’s disposal. Thus, too much cannot be allocated, otherwise it will jeopardize the defense capability of the United States itself. According to the agency, the Biden administration considered a possible public call for an official invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, but decided that the likelihood of this call being successful would be too low.

Instead, the current US authorities are considering a number of bilateral agreements with Kiev in the security sphere. Russia believes that arms supplies to Ukraine hinder the settlement and directly involve NATO countries in the conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that any cargo containing weapons for Kiev would become a legitimate target for Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised speech on Thursday that Ukraine fired US-supplied ATACMS missiles and the UK’s Storm Shadows at facilities in the Kursk and Bryansk regions on November 19. Russia responded by launching a combined strike against a defense industry complex in Dnepropetrovsk on Thursday using the Oreshnik missile.

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“If NATO merely “stops fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, this conflict can be ended with no expenses for humanity. No new expenses, at least..”

• Medvedev Tells How To End Ukraine Conflict (RT)

The conflict between Moscow and Kiev could be swiftly ended with no additional loss of lives if only NATO came to its senses and abandoned its belligerent policy towards Russia, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told Al Arabiya in an interview published on Friday. Allowing Ukraine to use long-range Western weapons for strikes into internationally-recognized Russian territory has made the US-led bloc a direct party to the conflict, said Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council. Kiev has launched several such strikes using US-made ATACMS and HIMARS systems, as well as British-made Storm Shadow missiles. Moscow responded by striking a military industrial facility in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk (known as Dnipro in Ukraine) with a new intermediate-range ballistic missile equipped with a conventional warhead.

On Saturday, Paris officially confirmed that it had given Kiev the green light to use French-made SCALP-EG cruise missiles in long-range strikes against Russian territory. “The NATO member states have essentially got fully engaged in this conflict,” Medvedev said, commenting on the developments. The former president said that such nations should “understand” that they are currently at war on the Ukrainian side. “They are at war with the Russian Federation.” Not only do Western nations supply Kiev with weapons and financial aid, but they also provide targeting for Western-made missiles, Medvedev stated. Moscow has insisted that such systems cannot be successfully operated without the involvement of specialists from the nations that produced them. Under such circumstances, no developments can be ruled out, Medvedev warned, pointing to Russia’s recently updated nuclear doctrine that allows a nuclear response to a conventional attack by a non-nuclear state supported by a nuclear power, including a missile strike against Russian territory.

“Everyone who is currently stirring up the war hysteria, primarily within NATO, the US, and other states, should think about it,” the former president warned. When asked to elaborate on the potential use of nuclear weapons by Russia, he described it as a “realistic” possibility. At the same time, he said that Moscow would very much like to avoid that option. “There are no madmen in the Russian leadership,” he stated, explaining that the nation’s nuclear doctrine had been updated in accordance with modern deterrence needs. According to Medvedev, the Ukraine conflict could be swiftly and easily ended with no need for any additional losses. If NATO merely “stops fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, this conflict can be ended with no expenses for humanity. No new expenses, at least,” he said.

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“What they’re trying to do is start a war that Donald Trump can’t stop..”

• Putin Must Be ‘Adult In The Room’ On Ukraine Conflict – Jimmy Dore (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin should continue exercising “restraint” in his responses to the US-led proxy war against Russia waged by the Kiev regime, Jimmy Dore, political commentator and host of the Jimmy Dore Show, has warned. According to the progressive pundit, it is imperative that Putin wait until US president-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January before making decisions that could kick-start World War III. In an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi broadcast on RT on Saturday, Dore was commenting on the latest decision by outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration to greenlight Kiev’s use of long-range US-supplied weaponry for strikes on undisputed Russian territory.

Moscow sees the US decision as an escalation that makes the US a direct party to the fighting. Remarking on the situation earlier this week, Vladimir Putin said that the “regional” Ukraine conflict has now “assumed elements of a global nature,” and warned of a backlash if tensions escalate further. “Joe Biden and the neo-cons in his administration have been constantly escalating war… What they’re trying to do is start a war that Donald Trump can’t stop,” Dore said, warning that the end-result of their actions could be a new world war. “The only hope we have is that Putin shows restraint, that he is the only adult in the room and that he can hold off somehow until Donald Trump becomes president,” he stated. Trump will be inaugurated in late January and has pledged to swiftly end the Ukraine conflict upon assuming office.

“That is why the establishment hate Trump… why they accused him non-stop of being a traitor and working with Putin – it was the only card they had to play, because he got elected on ending our foreign regime-change interventionist wars,” Dore said. “Trump is not a warmonger… He likes to find deals. He might be corrupt, but he’s New-York-city-real-estate-corrupt, not neo-con-warmongering-kill-people-for-money-corrupt,” the pundit claimed. Dore suggested that together, Putin and Trump would be able to bring an end to the Ukraine conflict, but cautioned that things could go wrong if the current US administration continues to take steps to escalate it. “Putin is a rational actor, but you never know how much NATO, Joe Biden and his neo-con administration is going to poke the bear,” Dore added.

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Pony

 

 

Catsnake

 

 

6 months apart
https://twitter.com/i/status/1860432009538965964

 

 

Horns

 

 

Balance
https://twitter.com/i/status/1860426778604417208

 

 

Voice over
https://twitter.com/i/status/1860015220577698006

 

 

Freefall
https://twitter.com/i/status/1860311805844725931

 

 

Only girls
https://twitter.com/i/status/1860339965076320427

 

 

 

 

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