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Debt Rattle July 6 2024

Jul 062024
 
 July 6, 2024  Posted by at 9:04 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


Roy Lichtenstein Forget it! Forget me! 1962

 

• Incoherence Day: Biden’s Fourth (ZH)
• European Leaders ‘Stunned’ By Biden’s Accelerated Aging – WaPo (RT)
• Biden Says Every Day Is A ‘Cognitive Test’ For Him (RT)
• HuffPo Calls For Biden Campaign To Use AI To Make Him Appear Cogent (MN)
• Trump Poses As Peacemaker For Ukraine After Stoking The War As President (SCF)
• Republican Control In The States Could Give Trump Victory (Vasco)
• Who Turned Off the Gaslight? (Kunstler)
• Rep. Goldman Insists the Country is Safe in the Hands of Others (Turley)
• Orban’s Surprise Visit To Moscow Sparks Fury In Brussels (RT)
• I Don’t Need A Mandate To Promote Peace – Orban (RT)
• Orban and Putin Discuss ‘Shortest Way Out’ Of Ukraine Conflict (RT)
• NATO Members To Give Ukraine $43 Billion in Military Aid for 2025 (Antiwar)
• Trusting the ‘Five Eyes’ Only (Michael Klare)
• Why the SCO Summit in Kazakhstan Was a Game-Changer (Pepe Escobar)

 

 

 

 

Rogan Dore

 

 

Tucker

 

 

Vindman

 

 

 

 

Galloway Ritter

 

 

 

 

“..next week’s schedule: Biden will host a three-day NATO summit in Washington that starts on Tuesday. As part of that event, he will conduct a rare solo press conference..”

• Incoherence Day: Biden’s Fourth (ZH)

Thursday’s dark comedy started with an appearance on Philadelphia’s WURD radio, which features a format categorized as “urban talk.” Having already boasted about appointing the first black woman to the Supreme Court and selecting the first black woman as vice president, Biden short-circuited and said, “I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president…the first black woman to serve with a black president.” In the same interview, Biden completely garbled his reminiscing about John F. Kennedy, Jr serving as a barrier-breaking inspiration to Biden’s younger self: “I remember, as a Catholic kid growing up up in an area where we didn’t like, Catholics didn’t get — I’m the first president to be elected statewide in the state of Delaware when I was a kid. Well, you know, I was, I looked at John Kennedy and said, ‘Well, he got elected. Why can’t I get elected?

Later, in remarks to military families at the White House, Biden twice showcased another of his chronic symptoms, as he started a train of thought, only to quickly abandon it. The first example came as he attempted to trot out the disputed allegation that then-President Trump called dead American soldiers in a French World War I cemetery “losers” and “suckers.” After his anecdote stalled, Biden tried recovering with one of his all-purpose rhetorical crutches, shouting, “We gotta just remember WHO IN THE HELL WE ARE…We’re the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” Another dead-end sentence came as he seemed to be making an exaggerated claim about putting himself in danger alongside service members in foreign conflicts:

In another radio interview meant to reach black audiences, Biden appeared on the nationally syndicated Earl Ingram Show. “Despite the low-pressure nature of the interview, the president at times spoke haltingly as he delivered his rapid-fire answers,” the New York Times reported. “In the 17-minute interview, he sometimes stopped himself in the middle of an answer.” For example, in the middle of a sentence about Trump’s proposed tariffs, Biden abandoned the venture, saying, “…anyway, just, I don’t want to get too wrapped up in it, really.” With his flub-filled Fourth in the books, Biden’s next major opportunity to shore up voters’ perception of this mental soundness comes tonight, when appears in his first sit-down interview since last week’s debate disaster. The interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos will be recorded during the day amid Biden campaign stops in Wisconsin and then aired in an 8pm ET “primetime special.”

To counter suspicions that the network will edit the interview to Biden’s benefit, ABC has committed to releasing a transcript of the entire interview sometime today or this evening. As we noted yesterday: “Readers will naturally view the idea of a Stephanopoulos interview with justifiable wariness of soft-pitch questions and friendly editing. However, we’re in a different political world than last week… Given the debate-triggered earthquake that’s altered the leftist landscape, Stephanopoulos will likely feel significant pressure to act something like a real journalist, for once.” As Biden staggers from one risky public appearance to the next, a white-knuckled Team Biden is surely sweating next week’s schedule: Biden will host a three-day NATO summit in Washington that starts on Tuesday. As part of that event, he will conduct a rare solo press conference, which could well prove the most treacherous challenge he’s faced since last week’s debate — and perhaps even more so.

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“It’s very, very rare in a democracy that the person you run for an election is someone that you all know can’t lead the country for four more years..”

• European Leaders ‘Stunned’ By Biden’s Accelerated Aging – WaPo (RT)

US President Joe Biden has been displaying worrying signs of “accelerated aging” in recent months and these changes shocked European leaders who met him at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Italy last month, the Washington Post reported on Friday. The outlet cited 21 people who spoke on condition of anonymity. Longstanding concerns over Biden’s health came into focus following what was widely perceived as a disastrous performance in his first debate with Republican rival Donald Trump last week. While the Biden camp claimed the president had caught a cold, his performance reportedly panicked Democratic officials and donors, with some even suggesting he needed to be replaced as the party’s candidate for the November election. According to the Post, numerous aides, foreign officials, donors and members of Congress say the president has “slowed considerably.” They pointed to how he moves more slowly, speaks more softly and loses his train of thought more often.

During the G7 summit in Italy last month, “several” European leaders “came away stunned” by how much older Biden seemed since their last interactions with him, according to officials that spoke to the outlet. In some cases, they said it had been mere months since those people had previously seen the US leader.“People were worried about it,” one said. Another reported that leaders had come to the conclusion that Biden “cannot win in November.” Some officials admitted that, while they had brushed off concerns over Biden’s health before the debate with Trump, they are now questioning his abilities. Concerns were also raised after a recent immigration event in the White House, according to the report. Some pointed out Biden’s obvious frailty, with one describing his performance that day as “terrifying.” The Post said its sources “largely” did not question Biden’s mental acuity, with several White House officials insisting that he continues to be fully cognizant on complicated policy matters and can easily recall facts from previous meetings.

However, staffers said that most of Biden’s high-priority meetings and events were scheduled for midday, when he is at his best. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Biden had admitted to Democratic donors that he needed more sleep and less work, preferring to avoid any events past 8pm. Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, told the Post that even if he won, European leaders don’t expect Biden to be able to run the country for another term. “It’s very, very rare in a democracy that the person you run for an election is someone that you all know can’t lead the country for four more years,” Bremmer said. A CBS News-YouGov poll following the face-off with Trump found 72% of respondents said they believe Biden does not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, while 49% said the same about Trump.

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“Not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world, and that’s not hyperbole.”

• Biden Says Every Day Is A ‘Cognitive Test’ For Him (RT)

US President Joe Biden tried to dispel concerns over his age and cognitive abilities after his lackluster performance during last week’s debate against Donald Trump, in an interview with ABC News on Friday. In the highly anticipated sit-down with George Stephanopoulos, the 81-year-old leader explained the debate fiasco as entirely “my fault, no one else’s fault,” insisting that it was simply a “bad episode” because he was “exhausted” and “sick” with a “bad cold” – and in no way an indication of any serious condition. Biden said he has “medical doctors trailing me everywhere I go” and after the debate they told him he was “exhausted,” but nothing more serious. “I have an ongoing assessment of what I’m doing. They don’t hesitate to tell me if something is wrong.” When asked directly whether he was ready to take a neurological test to prove to Americans that he is up to the job, Biden dodged the question by claiming, “I have a cognitive test every single day.”

“Every day I have that test,” Biden reiterated when pressed again. “Not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world, and that’s not hyperbole.” The entire interview went in circles, with Stephanopoulos repeatedly asking whether Biden believes he is in good enough shape to beat Trump, while Biden kept citing his past record and defiantly rejecting the notion that he could leave the race amid worsening poll numbers. Biden said he did not believe the poll numbers that showed him trailing Trump in the popular vote, claiming that the race is a “toss-up” and that he is the “most qualified person to beat him.” Biden refused to speculate whether he would leave the race if Democratic Party leaders asked him to, noting that he would withdraw only if God told him to do so.

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Cheap fakes.

• HuffPo Calls For Biden Campaign To Use AI To Make Him Appear Cogent (MN)

Leftist Biden mouthpiece the Huffington Post published an article Wednesday which literally calls for the Biden campaign to use AI to make fake videos of him looking and sounding normal in an effort to salvage his candidacy. The piece, titled ‘It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI‘ states “After the president’s dismal debate performance, he noted that he ‘might not walk as easily or talk as smoothly as I used to.’ AI could help with this.” “Given the president’s concerning performance last week, it’s time for the Biden campaign to consider leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively reach the voting public,” it continues, with the author, one Kaivan Shroff, declaring that “the consequences of not taking this approach could be dire.” He goes on to state that Biden is old and can barely speak, suggesting that “AI augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information.”

So, lets get this straight. Mr Shroff is suggesting the Biden team make fake videos where Biden speaks perfectly and looks more than half awake, and pass them off as real to encourage people to vote him in for a second term as President of the country, when in reality he cannot even form coherent thoughts or operate for 90 minutes per day. Incredible. “AI would be a cost-effective and efficient way to communicate his message personally and directly to voters,” Shroff continues, adding “How many times have we heard voters and pundits alike gripe that ‘Biden would be the perfect candidate if he were just 10 years younger?’ With modern technology, this exact deliverable is possible.” He goes on to argue that Biden’s campaign creating fake AI videos would be fine because the likes of The New York Post have shared “cheap fakes”of Biden wandering around looking lost and completely out of it “to make him appear confused or weak.”

The only issue here being, of course, that the so called ‘cheap fake’ videos in question were actually 100% real. No one needs to create fake videos to show Biden looking confused and weak, because he really is. You’ve just admitted that earlier in your extremely stupid article. Even more incredibly, the author then goes on to argue that if the Biden campaign created its own fake videos it would allow them “to respond rapidly to misinformation.” “In a world where misinformation and disinformation spreads virally, often through short-form video content, having the capability to produce polished, articulate responses in real-time could be a game-changer,” he ludicrously proclaims. To summarise, this guy thinks its totally acceptable that the Biden campaign knock up some cheap AI generated fake videos of him appearing fine in order to declare that any real videos of him looking and sounding old, tired and senile are ‘disinformation’. It doesn’t get any more backwards than this.

Incredibly, the article continues, “Until now, it has been almost taken as a given that using AI renderings of the president would violate some ethical baseline of campaigning. In an ideal world that may be so. Yet, what last week’s debate made clear is just how far from any such ideal our current reality is. The greatest moral and ethical imperative for those who care about American democracy should be keeping the man who tried to overthrow it as far away from the White House as possible.” So, your argument is that because Biden is mentally deficient and proved so during the debate, his campaign needs to forget about any remaining morals they have and create fake videos in order to keep Donald Trump from winning because it’ll be the end of democracy… or something. Hell, why not just go the whole hog and steal the election then? Use AI to fake some votes, rig some ballots, swing some states in Biden’s favour… in order to save democracy.

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“We can be sure that Trump did not personally initiate those provocative moves. He was obeying the deep state planners and their agenda of pushing confrontation with Russia..”

• Trump Poses As Peacemaker For Ukraine After Stoking The War As President (SCF)

Asked about Trump’s peacemaking offer, President Putin responded politely this week, saying that he believed the American was sincere, but pointed out the lack of detail in Trump’s proposal. That’s the rub. Donald Trump is not known for coherent details. His style is bluster and braggadocio. Taken with a large pinch of salt. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, was not convinced by Trump’s peace musings. Nebenzia indicated that the Republican candidate lacked the necessary understanding to resolve the conflict. That would involve an intelligent appreciation of history: the relentless expansionism of NATO, the treacherous backsliding by Washington over past security agreements, and the inherent workings of U.S. imperialism as an insatiable aggressor going back to the foundation of NATO 75 years ago. There is more than a suspicion that “the Donald” is merely motivated by superficial electioneering. The former real estate magnate has acumen for tapping popular sentiment.

The two American presidential contenders are neck and neck in the polls with less than four months until election day. Even after Biden’s disastrous TV debate performance last week, Trump has not capitalized on a decisive lead – which reflects how poorly both candidates are perceived by American voters. Polls show that a clear majority of American citizens want the conflict in Ukraine settled by diplomacy. There is widespread misgiving over the enormous amounts of taxpayer money thrown at a regime notorious for its corruption, as well as the visceral fear that the conflict could spiral out of control into a nuclear World War Three. Trump’s talk about brokering a peace deal before he is inaugurated on January 20, 2025, seems to be nothing more than an expedient bet that such a position might be enough to garner a winning edge among undecided voters and get him back to the White House. Nothing wrong with that, one might say. After all, surely some attempt at peaceful diplomacy is better than none, no matter how cack-handed that attempt might be.

The trouble is Trump has no credibility. The last time he was in the White House (2016-20), he proved useless at standing up to the deep state despite his promises to normalize relations with Russia. Admittedly, his presidency was assailed by the baseless Russia-gate hysteria promoted by the U.S. establishment and its servile media to undermine him. Nevertheless, on key issues, Trump showed himself to be a willing instrument for U.S. imperialist interests. A major sign of weakness was Trump’s approval of sending lethal weapons to the Kiev regime. He broke a crucial taboo. Even his predecessor, the Democrat President Barack Obama, had refused to go that far. Obama and his then Vice President Joe Biden oversaw the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 ushering in a NeoNazi Russia-hating regime. But the sending of lethal U.S. weaponry to that regime was off the cards – so provocative was it deemed. Trump broke that taboo in 2019 when he ordered the supply of $47 million worth of Javelin anti-tank missiles to the NeoNazis.

That move emboldened the Kiev regime to ramp up its aggression against the ethnic Russian population in the Donbass region. That genocidal offensive eventually led to Russia intervening in February 2022 and safeguarding the region as a new part of the Russian Federation. Moreover, it was Trump who scrapped two key arms control measures with Russia, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and the Open-Skies Treaty. We can be sure that Trump did not personally initiate those provocative moves. He was obeying the deep state planners and their agenda of pushing confrontation with Russia. By revoking the INF, the United States has found a legal way to supply medium-range ballistic missiles to Ukraine which are being used to strike Russia’s territory. In that way, arguably, Trump played a pivotal and baleful role in stoking the proxy war in Ukraine that was primed in 2014 under Obama and eventually erupted in 2022 under Biden.

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GOP 255 delegates for the electoral college, Dems 243.

• Republican Control In The States Could Give Trump Victory (Vasco)

Among this year’s swing states, Republicans control the political machine in Georgia (government, legislature and history of two of the last three presidential elections), while Democrats control Nevada (with the exception of the government) and Michigan (where they did not win in only one of the last three presidential elections). The other three “swing states” are where control is much more balanced: Democrats hold the governorship and the House of Pennsylvania and have won two of the last three elections there, but Republicans have won one of the last three elections and control the Senate; Democrats govern Wisconsin and have won there in two of the last three presidential elections, but Republicans control both legislative houses and have won in one of the last three elections; and in Arizona, Democrats won one of three elections and hold the government, but Republicans won the other two elections and dominate the legislature.

All of this means that, taking into account control of the state political machine, Republicans are expected to win in all “red states” and in 17 other states, including the “swing state” of Georgia. They will thus be guaranteed 255 delegates for the electoral college, in addition to the total number of delegates that each of these states are entitled to. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to win in all the “blue states” and in 10 more states, including the “swing states” of Nevada and Michigan and the states of Minnesota and Maine, where, unlike all the others, the party that get the majority of popular votes in the state do not automatically elect all delegates, but have their own rules – our calculation takes into account that Democrats control the political machine in these two states, therefore they are able to manage the results of the elections. The Democrats will thus obtain 243 delegates to the electoral college.

For its candidate to be the winner of the presidential elections, a party must have at least 270 delegates in the electoral college. Hence the essential importance of “swing states” where political control is not defined (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona). To be elected, it will be enough for Trump to win in just one of them (Pennsylvania), or, if he loses in Pennsylvania, if he wins in the other two. The Democratic candidate will be forced to win in Pennsylvania and in one of the other two key “swing states”. Considering, therefore, the control of the political machine in the states, added to the tendency of greater preference among voters in polls of voting intentions, Donald Trump has a greater chance of being elected president than the Democratic candidate.

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“..there’s still plenty of time left for them to destroy the country altogether. Just keep giving American missiles to Ukraine to fire into Russia and see what happens.”

• Who Turned Off the Gaslight? (Kunstler)

Any reality-based thread that happened to leak into public view from independent alt-news reporters was branded by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, and many others as “misinformation” — a newish concept produced by a cadre of language Stasi skilled at inverting the meaning of anything to bamboozle the public. It appears that the news media became so invested psychologically in its own dishonest product that it began to believe its own bullshit. Or, at least, they wanted to pretend to believe it. One of the big problems was that absolutely everything they labeled “misinformation” or “conspiracy theory” turned out to be truthful, and that was becoming an inescapable embarrassment. And then the biggest blunder they made was going along with the Deep State’s selection of “Joe Biden” in the very sketchy Super Tuesday primary of 2020. The old grifter had next-to-zero support in all the preceding preliminaries and somehow (abracadabra !) he swept the field.

By then, the Democratic Party, and its public relations arm in the mainstream media, had descended into florid mental illness. Everything they stood for post-World War Two flipped to its opposite. Suddenly, they were against free speech. They weren’t coy about it. They just made-up some new bullshit about free speech being “hate speech.” Similarly, they were against a free press. They went along with all the misinfo / disinfo bullshit the government cooked up and supported its role in suppressing the news. They were no longer anti-war, the party-of-peace. They were now pro-segregation and pro-discrimination (white people need not apply) according to Critical Race Theory (a childishly sketchy doctrine). Most of all, they were no longer skeptical of anything that the leviathan establishment wanted to do, including abridging the liberties of American citizens.

Then there was the campaign to use the most powerful human instinct, sexuality, as a weapon to disorder the minds of American children, leading even to the mutilation of their bodies — a program that unmistakably tipped toward genuine evil, suggesting that actual psychosis lay behind the Cluster-B crypto-Marxism used to justify it. “Joe Biden” was fine with all of that, and the news media was fine with “Joe Biden” and whoever was using him as a front. Of course, it was evident during the 2020 campaign that “Joe Biden” was not up to a job as demanding as Chief Executive of the US government — and that was even apart from the dense criminal web of influence peddling discovered around him and his family, which the news media ignominiously ignored. But now the years have gone by and there’s no hiding “Joe Biden’s” rather gravely diminished mental abilities.

Last week’s debate gave away the game. It had the effect of finally turning off the gaslight that the news media has been shining over the republic lo these many years. They can no longer pretend that this president is anything close to okay in body and mind. They can’t annul the gaslighted public’s delayed realization that they’ve been subject to a concerted program of deliberate lying for a long long time. So now, inveterate pretenders and liars, such as Jake Tapper of CNN and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times — and many others — have to pretend that they were innocently duped into supporting all the turpitudes of the Democratic Party / Deep State axis-of-evil. It is really hard to imagine that they can successfully rehabilitate their reputations. They have done immense harm to our country. It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party might survive, too, no matter who they finally put up for election this year. Of course, there’s still plenty of time left for them to destroy the country altogether. Just keep giving American missiles to Ukraine to fire into Russia and see what happens.

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“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Government..”

• Rep. Goldman Insists the Country is Safe in the Hands of Others (Turley)

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote “The President [of the Galaxy] in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. […] His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.” This week, Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) seemed to be taking the Hitchhiker’s Guide as a guide for government. When asked about the alarming physical and mental decline of President Joe Biden, Goldman suggested that it really does not matter. In responding to a call for Biden’s removal under the 25th Amendment, Goldman suggested that the Republic is safe because it is safely in the hands of people around Biden. It is an argument that flips the 25th Amendment on its head and embraces the idea of a figurehead president. After the Hur report was released noting the diminishment of the President’s faculties, Goldman was one of the most vocal in shouting the Special Counsel down. He went public declaring that the President is “sharper than anyone I’ve spoken to” on public policy issues.

He has continued brushed away the growing calls for President Biden to step aside as incapable of serving another four years. Indeed, some are calling for an investigation into whether he can carry out the duties of his office until January 2025. “So, let’s not just focus on Joe Biden here. Let’s focus on the people around him, the administration, the policies, and most importantly, the appreciation and protection for the rule of law and our democracy that Donald Trump, every single day, has vowed to take down.” He added that Biden is “vibrant” and that “the reality is that Joe Biden has surrounded himself with an incredibly capable team with almost no turnover.” Other Democrats have attempted to avoid the manifest confusion and infirmity of the president. This includes Democrats who repeatedly called for formal action to remove former President Donald Trump under the 25th Amendment, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Jamie Raskin, D-Md.; Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

However, it was Goldman who, as usual, came up with the most vertigo-triggering spin.The 25th Amendment was designed to specifically avoid a figurehead presidency where family or aides perform critical functions of the office. That was indeed the concern with presidents like Woodrow Wilson when a stroke left him incapable to function as president. His wife Edith hid the truth from the public and the Congress as she and others carried out his functions. He also had “an incredibly capable team” around him, but they were not elected president. In the meantime, the media is still struggling to explain to the public why they did not disclose the President’s condition earlier while promulgating the “cheap fake” narrative. For weeks heading into the debate, media outlets repeated the claim that videos showing Biden’s confusion were false and misleading. Some are now reportedly admitting that they did not want to confirm “right-wing media” accounts — an admission of shaping the news for political purposes.

The greatest threat to President Biden may ultimately be the political calculus. For most of these members, their loyalty to Biden ends at the point that he endangers their own hold on power. A couple dozen members are reportedly preparing a letter calling for possible removal in the hope that they can replace Biden with someone who has a better chance of beating Trump. It is no easy feat, but Democratic operatives are furiously working out the complications under federal election laws and state laws. In the meantime, the 25th Amendment process is looming. More citizens may become convinced by what Pelosi said about then President Donald Trump: “Congress has a constitutional duty to lay out the process by which a president’s incapacity and the president of any party is determined…A president’s fitness for office must be determined by science and facts.”

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Don’t you dare talk peace!

• Orban’s Surprise Visit To Moscow Sparks Fury In Brussels (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban unexpectedly visited Russia on Friday and met with President Vladimir Putin to discuss ways to resolve the Ukraine conflict. The surprise trip caused major outrage among Orban’s fellow EU leaders, as it came only days after the Hungarian premier made a similar unannounced trip to Ukraine. Hungary holds the rotating EU presidency for the remainder of this year. Orban, however, has claimed that he doesn’t require any sort of mandate from Brussels in order to promote peace, noting that his discussions cannot be considered official negotiations. Orban said his trip had been the first step to restoring dialogue. A critic of Western military aid to Ukraine, the Hungarian premier said he recognized he had no EU mandate for the trips but that peace could not be achieved “from a comfortable armchair in Brussels.” “We cannot sit back and wait for the war to miraculously end,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter) before meeting Putin.

Orban visited Kiev earlier in the week, where he urged Vladimir Zelensky to seek peace with Russia, arguing that a ceasefire could serve as a first step in the right direction. The Ukrainian leader didn’t take his proposal well, Orban said later. Kiev insists that only a military victory will result in a “just peace.” The Hungarian premier said he wanted to hear directly from Putin how Russia perceives various peace initiatives, calling it an important step, even though the frank discussion confirmed that there was a major rift between the conflicting sides. Putin and Orban discussed the “shortest way out” of the conflict, which the latter later revealed to journalists. Moscow’s and Kiev’s positions remain very “far apart,” the Hungarian admitted. “A lot of steps have to be taken to get closer to a resolution of the war. Still, we’ve already taken the most important step – establishing the contact, and I will continue to work on this in the future,” Orban stated. Putin has told Orban that he presented his vision of how the conflict can be resolved, in a keynote speech at the Foreign Ministry last month, and said he is prepared to discuss its nuances.

The proposal he was referring to was to suspend hostilities immediately after Kiev renounces its bid to join NATO and orders its troops to pull back from all territories claimed by Moscow. Then a comprehensive discussion of a new security architecture in Europe could be held, Putin suggested. The Ukrainian government has rejected the offer. The Russian president has reiterated Moscow’s readiness to resolve hostilities through negotiations. The Ukrainian leadership, however, appears to be still incapable of abandoning its idea of waging a war “until the end,” Putin noted. Moscow is seeking to reach lasting, sustainable peace rather than opting for a temporary ceasefire or a “frozen conflict” of any sort, the Russian president warned. There should not be a “ceasefire or some kind of pause that the Kiev regime could use to recover losses, regroup, and rearm. Russia is in favor of a complete and final end to the conflict,” Putin stressed.

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“But we can be a good tool in the hands of God, we can be a good tool in the hands of people who want peace..”

• I Don’t Need A Mandate To Promote Peace – Orban (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has defended his peacemaking efforts after a senior EU official criticized his purported plans to travel to Russia. Orban, who visited Kiev earlier this week and urged Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky to consider an immediate ceasefire, will pay a visit to the Russian capital on Friday, media reports have speculated. European Council President Charles Michel condemned the purported trip, claiming in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday that despite holding the rotating EU presidency, Hungary “has no mandate to engage with Russia on behalf of the EU.” “The European Council is clear: Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine is the victim. No discussions about Ukraine can take place without Ukraine,” the senior bureaucrat added.

During his weekly interview with Radio Kossuth on Friday morning, Orban rejected the notion that he should not vie for peace. “What I do looks like negotiations in format, because we sit at tables and discuss issues, but we don’t negotiate,” he explained. “That’s why I don’t even need a mandate, because I don’t represent any party.” Hungary is aware of its relatively limited political clout and expects larger powers to eventually hold peace talks to end the Ukraine conflict, he said. “But we can be a good tool in the hands of God, we can be a good tool in the hands of people who want peace,” the prime minister added.

The Hungarian leader said opinion polls showing support among EU citizens for continued backing of Kiev do not correctly reflect their attitudes. Everyday people are worried about the economic cost of the conflict because EU taxpayers’ money is being spent on Ukraine, he argued. Orban neither confirmed nor denied plans for a Moscow visit during the interview. Another pro-Kiev politician, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, previously expressed disbelief that the Hungarian leader could make the trip. “The rumours about your visit to Moscow cannot be true @PM_ViktorOrban, or can they?” he asked in an X post. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered Kiev a ceasefire in exchange for Ukraine renouncing its bid for NATO membership and withdrawing its troops from Russian territory that it lays claim to. Kiev has insisted it will not accept any outcome in which it does not control all the land it considers Ukrainian.

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“Moscow is seeking to reach lasting, sustainable peace rather than opting for a temporary ceasefire or a “frozen conflict” of any sort..”

• Orban and Putin Discuss ‘Shortest Way Out’ Of Ukraine Conflict (RT)

Talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday revolved around finding the “shortest way out” of the Ukraine conflict, the latter revealed during a joint press conference following the closed-doors negotiations. Moscow’s and Kiev’s positions remain very “far apart,” Hungary’s PM admitted, citing his recent trip to Kiev to meet the Ukrainian leadership. “A lot of steps have to be taken to get closer to a resolution of the war. Still, we’ve already taken the most important step—establishing the contact, and I will continue to work on this in the future,” Orban stated. The enduring conflict between Russia and Ukraine is affecting the broader European region, Orban noted, adding that the continent has enjoyed the most rapid and sustainable development only during peacetime.

“As I’ve already told Mr President, Europe needs peace. Yet this peace will not emerge by itself, we must work to reach it,” the visiting premier said. The Russian president has reiterated Moscow’s readiness to resolve the hostility through negotiations. The Ukrainian leadership, however, appears to be still incapable of abandoning its idea of waging a war “until the end,” Putin noted. Moscow is seeking to reach lasting, sustainable peace rather than opting for a temporary ceasefire or a “frozen conflict” of any sort, the Russian president warned. There should not be a “ceasefire or some kind of pause that the Kiev regime could use to recover losses, regroup, and rearm. Russia is in favor of a complete and final end to the conflict,” he stressed.

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While Orban talks peace…

• NATO Members To Give Ukraine $43 Billion in Military Aid for 2025 (Antiwar)

NATO allies have agreed to pledge $43 billion in military aid for Ukraine, which will be provided next year, Reuters reported on Wednesday. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was looking for the alliance to make a multi-year commitment to ensure long-term support for the proxy war, but the allies did not agree. Instead, they will re-evaluate military aid for Ukraine each year. The agreement says that NATO allies will “aim to meet this pledge through proportionate contributions.” If the $43 billion is funded based on how much each member contributes to NATO, most of the burden would be on the US since it pays for about two-thirds of the alliance’s budget. The $43 billion is part of a slew of measures NATO will announce at its summit next week in Washington. NATO is also expected to station a civilian official in Kyiv and establish a new command in Germany that will oversee military aid and training for Ukraine, taking over duties currently overseen by the US.

While planning to provide tens of billions in new military aid, NATO will also tell Ukraine that it’s too corrupt to join the alliance. The Telegraph reported this week that the alliance will release a communique calling on Ukraine to take more anti-corruption steps before talks on its NATO membership could progress. President Biden has frequently cited Ukraine’s corruption as a reason why the country couldn’t join NATO. But that hasn’t stopped him from providing over $100 billion in aid to Ukraine, which includes tens of billions in the form of direct budgetary aid that funds the government.

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“..the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

• Trusting the ‘Five Eyes’ Only (Michael Klare)

Wherever he travels globally, President Biden has sought to project the United States as the rejuvenated leader of a broad coalition of democratic nations seeking to defend the “rules-based international order” against encroachments by hostile autocratic powers, especially China, Russia, and North Korea. “We established NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” he told veterans of D-Day while at Normandy, France on June 6th. “Today… NATO is more united than ever and even more prepared to keep the peace, deter aggression, defend freedom all around the world.” In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South” — the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”

But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: the United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive — and provocative — feature of the Biden presidency. To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv — persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia — he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.

Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7th rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating U.N. resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions — with consistently meager results. Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: as a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies – most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

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Next one to use the term Game-Changer will be drawn and quartered.

• Why the SCO Summit in Kazakhstan Was a Game-Changer (Pepe Escobar)

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the 2024 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) this week in Astana, Kazakhstan. It can certainly be interpreted as the antechamber to the crucial BRICS annual summit, under the Russian presidency, next October in Kazan. Let’s start with the final declaration. As much as SCO members state “tectonic shifts are underway” in geopolitics and geoeconomics, as “the use of power methods is increasing, with norms of international law being systematically violated”, they are fully engaged to “increase the SCO’s role in the creation of a new democratic, fair, political and economic international order.” Well, there could not be a sharper contrast with the unilaterally-imposed “rules-based international order”. The SCO 10 – with new member Belarus – are explicitly in favor of “a fair solution to the Palestinian issue”. They “oppose unilateral sanctions”.

They want to create a SCO investment fund (Iran, via acting President Mohammad Mokhber, supports the creation of a SCO common bank, just like the NDB in BRICS). Additionally, members that “are parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty stand for compliance with its provisions”. And crucially, they agree that “interaction within the SCO may become the basis for building a new security architecture in Eurasia.” The last point is actually the heart of the matter. That’s proof that Putin’s proposal last month in front of key Russian diplomats was fully debated in Astana – following Russia’s strategic deal with the DPRK de facto linking security in Asia as indivisible with security in Europe. That is something that remains – and will continue to remain – incomprehensible for the collective West. A new Eurasia-wide security architecture is an upgrade of the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership – involving a series of bilateral and multilateral guarantees and, in Putin’s own words, open to “all Eurasian countries that wish to participate”, including NATO members.

The SCO should become one of the key drivers of this new security arrangement – in total contrast with the “rules-based order” – alongside the CSTO, the CIS and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). The road map ahead of course includes socio-economic integration and the development of international transportation corridors – from the INSTC (Russia-Iran-India) to the China-supported “Middle Corridor”. But the two crucial points are military and financial: “To gradually phase out the military presence of external powers” in Eurasia; and to establish alternatives to “Western-controlled economic mechanisms, expanding the use of national currencies in settlements, and establishing independent payment systems.” Translation: the meticulous process conducted by Russia to deliver a fatal blow to Pax Americana is essentially shared by all SCO members.

President Putin laid down the basic tenets further on down the road when he confirmed the “commitment of all member states to forming a fair world order based on the central role of the UN and commitment of sovereign states to mutually beneficial partnership.” He added, “the long-term goals for further expansion of cooperation in politics, economy, energy, agriculture, high technologies and innovation are stated in the project of development strategy of SCO till 2035.” That’s a quite Chinese approach to long-term strategic planning: China’s five-year plans are already mapped out all the way to 2035. President Xi doubled down when it comes to the leading Russia-China strategic partnership: both should “strengthen comprehensive strategic coordination, oppose external interference and jointly maintain peace and stability” in Eurasia. Once again, that’s Russia-China as leaders of Eurasia integration and the drive towards a multi-nodal world (italics mine; nodal with an “n”).

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Etna
https://twitter.com/i/status/1809013270512058804

 

 

Sea lion
https://twitter.com/i/status/1809293898147102793

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 8 2023

May 082023
 
 May 8, 2023  Posted by at 9:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  43 Responses »


Paul Cézanne Village derrière des arbres, Île-de-France 1879

 

• The Prighozin File: Twilight of the Gods or Maskirovka? (Pepe Escobar)
• Wagner Promised ‘As Much Ammo As We Need’ – Prigozhin (RT)
• China, The Peacemaker? – McCoy (IC)
• Kiev Counteroffensive To ‘Pave The Way’ For Dialogue With Russia – WSJ (TASS)
• Kissinger Makes Ukraine Peace Prediction (RT)
• EU Defenseless Against China – Berlusconi (RT)
• US Anti-Russia Actions Push Humanity Towards World War, Malaysia ex-PM (TASS)
• Kamala Harris To Run AI Taskforce (RT)
• Fauci’s Never-Ending Victory Tour (Pierre Kory)
• Tucker Carlson Squaring Off Against Fox – Axios (RT)
• Rep. Comer Urges DOJ To Hold Possible Hunter Biden Indictment (Fox)
• Close to 190 US Banks Could Collapse, According To Study (USAT)
• A Credit Crunch Is Inevitable (Lacalle)
• China And Its Trading Allies Are Well Placed To Topple The Dollar (Münchau)
• MSM Doesn’t Care That the CIA May Have Helped Cause 9/11 (Marcetic)
• Ex-Russian Space Boss Questions US Moon Landing (RT)

 

 

 

 

VDB

 

 

 

 

Assange

 

 

 

 

JFK Vietnam

 

 

Bowie Lennon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pepe on Twitter: “written on Thursday, BEFORE Prighozin’s deal with Kadyrov to wrap up Artemyovsk. Confirmed to me by top Donbass politico: fierce competition Wagner-MoD.”

• The Prighozin File: Twilight of the Gods or Maskirovka? (Pepe Escobar)

There’s no question: if Prighozin is essentially telling the truth, this is – literally – nuclear. Either Prighozin knows everything nearly everyone doesn’t, or this is a spectacular maskirovka. Yet facts on the ground since February 2002 seem to support his main accusation: the Russian army can’t properly fight because of a completely corrupt bureaucratic gang right at the very top of the MoD, all the way to Shoigu, all of them only interested in making a financial killing. And it gets worse: under a rigidly bureaucratized environment, commanders at the frontlines have no autonomy to take decisions and quickly adapt, and need to wait for orders from far away. That should be the main reason for the Kiev counter-offensive standing a chance of imposing dramatic upsets.

Prighozin is definitely not alone among Russian patriots in voicing his analysis. In fact there’s nothing new: he was just more forceful this time. Strelkov has been saying the exact same thing since the start of the war. That even coalesced into an “Angry Patriots Club” releasing an explosive video on April 19. So here we have a small but very vocal group bearing impeccable patriotic credentials sounding a serious alarm bell: Russia runs the risk of losing this proxy war entirely unless dramatic changes take place right away. Or, once again, this could be brilliant maskirovka – leaving the enemy totally misdirected. If that’s the case, it’s working like a charm. Kiev propaganda outlets triumphantly adopted Strelkov’s accusations with headlines such as “Russia is on the brink of defeat, Strelkov threatens the Kremlin with a coup.”

Strelkov keeps doubling down, insisting that the Russian state really does not take this war seriously and is planning to make a deal without really fighting, even ceding territory in Ukraine. His evidence: the “corrupt” (Prighozin) Russian army did not make any serious effort to prepare the economy, or public opinion, for an offensive – in terms of training and logistics. And that’s because the elites in the Kremlin and the army do not rally believe in this war, nor want it; they’d rather go back to the pre-war status quo. So here we go again. Maskirovka? Or a sort of Revenge of the MoD against Wagner? It’s a fact that at the start of the SMO the Russian army didn’t exactly get its act together, they really needed Wagner on the ground. But now it’s a different ball game, and the MoD may be engaged in gradually reducing Wagner’s role so Prighozin’s men do not capture all the blazes of glory when Russia starts going for the jugular.

And then right in the middle of this incandescent confrontation, we have the irruption in the dead of night of a couple of puny kamikaze drones over the Kremlin. This was no attempt to assassinate Putin: rather a cheap PR stunt. Russian intel must have pieced the whole story by now: the drones were probably launched from inside Moscow or its suburbs, by Ukrainian strike cells dressed in civilian clothing and sporting fake IDs. There will be more such PR stunts – anything from car bombs and booby traps to improvised landmines. Russia will have to step up internal security towards a real war footing. But what about the “response” to – in Kremlin terminology – a “terrorist attack”? Elena Panini from Russtrat.ru has offered a priceless, non-hysterical appraisal: “The purpose of the night strike, judging by the video footage, was not the Kremlin itself and not even the dome of the Senate Palace, but the flagpole on the dome with a duplicate of the standard of the President of the Russian Federation.

The game of symbolism is already purely British stuff. A kind of ‘reminder’ from London on the eve of the coronation of Charles III that the conflict in Ukraine is still developing according to the Anglo-Saxon scenario and within the framework set by them.” So yes: those neo-Nazi mutts in Kiev are just tools. The orders that matter always come from Washington and London – especially when it comes to breaching red lines. Panini argues it’s time for the Kremlin to seize the definitive strategic initiative. That should include upgrading the SMO to the status of a real war; declare Ukraine as a terrorist state; and implement what is already being discussed in the Duma: the transition to the use of “weapons that are capable of stopping and destroying the Kiev terrorist regime.” The puny double drone attack – a combined Anglo-Saxon neocon provocation – has offered Moscow the perfect gift: an unmistakable casus belli.

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Putin?! No more withdrawal.

• Wagner Promised ‘As Much Ammo As We Need’ – Prigozhin (RT)

The Russian private military company Wagner Group, which is fighting Ukrainian troops in the Donbass city of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), has been promised enough ammunition to continue the battle, the company’s head, Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Sunday.The statement comes after Prigozhin warned that his fighters would be forced to pull out of the city on May 10 unless ammunition shortages are addressed by Russia’s Defense Ministry. In a voice message posted on his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said that Wagner received “a military instruction … in which we were promised as much ammunition and weapons as we need to continue our activities.” “We were told that we can carry out activities in Artyomovsk as we deem necessary,” Prigozhin added.


He also said that Army General Sergey Surovikin, the deputy commander of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, was tasked with “making all decisions related to the military activities of Wagner PMC in coordination with the Defense Ministry.” On Friday, Prigozhin said that Wagner personnel were suffering heavy losses because of what he described as a 70% shortage of ammunition. He later announced that the positions held by Wagner would be handed over to Akhmat, an elite unit from Russia’s Chechnya. The fierce and bloody battle for the mining city of Artyomovsk, known to Ukrainians as Bakhmut, has been raging for several months. Prigozhin claims his forces have taken control of nearly all of the city, while the Ukrainians are holding out in a small area in the western part. Capturing Artyomovsk, an important logistical hub, would allow Russian forces to make further advances in Donbass.

Bakhmut

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“..China the dominant economic presence of the Eurasian landmass..”

• China, The Peacemaker? – McCoy (IC)

China has, in the last ten years, according to latest figures, expended a little over a trillion dollars in massive development loans. And they’ve done two things: They’ve laid a steel grid across the Eurasian landmass, for the first time actually overcoming that distance, and unifying Europe and Asia. So that, really, we shouldn’t speak of them as separate continents anymore; they were only divided by that great distance in the center. China has filled that distance with a steel grid of pipelines and rail links. And then, they’ve also ringed the whole world-island — that tricontinental world island of Europe, Asia, and Africa — with 40 ports, stretching from Sri Lanka, around the coast of Africa, and then ringing Europe, all the way from Piraeus in Greece to Hamburg in Germany.

And then, here we have to get almost metaphysical, a little bit mystical, OK? Because everybody talks about geopolitics. You know, you can pick up The Washington Post and New York Times and, probably, in every issue find the word “geopolitics” popping up all over the place. What is geopolitics? What might geopolitics mean? How might geopolitics actually make a difference? What’s the relationship between geographical formations and political events? And here’s what I think is happening, OK? That geopolitics is kind of like a substrate beneath the visible, tangible surface of events. Now, China has changed the Eurasian politics by investing this trillion dollars and laying down this infrastructure, so that China has an infrastructure for dominance of Eurasia. And then what happens? It’s kind of like the grinding of the tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface that periodically manifests themselves in earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. When the liquid rock breaks through the earth’s surface and you get an enormous eruption, and then, suddenly, you realize that the tectonic plates are shifting.

Well, that’s what’s happened. China has changed the substrate of Eurasia’s geopolitics. And now, just now, after — It’s only been ten years that China’s been doing this. They started this in 2013, we’re in 2023. It’s [been] ten years. That’s not a long time. But they’ve done it fast, and they’ve done it, actually, pretty well, despite what you might read in the U.S. press about white elephant investments and all the rest. And so, there are all these manifestations. One was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. I mean, what China did was, they ran a geopolitical squeeze play around the U.S. position in Afghanistan. They signed very lucrative development deals with the six countries ringing Afghanistan, particularly Pakistan. And mind you, how does the U.S. military fight? We have troops on the ground and we have air support. And it’s that combination that’s absolutely central to all U.S. warfighting strategy. No planes, then no soldiers on the ground.

And where’d those planes come from? The nearest air base that they could fly from after this geopolitical squeeze play was the Persian Gulf. They had to fly 2,000 miles, which means their ability to loiter over the battlefield and provide close air support was very limited. They could refuel, of course, but it was impossibly inefficient, and it was dangerous for the troops on the ground. And that meant, bang, we had to get out of there as fast as we could. The next manifestation we saw which, you know, seemed to be absolutely unrelated — But, again, think of that substrate and the periodic eruption. The next eruption was this sectarian division, as deep as the history of Islam, over a thousand years between Sunni and Shia —Shia, Iran, Sunni, Saudi Arabia — locked in the confrontation. But China signed a $480 billion development deal with Iran, and China’s top source of oil — and it’s the world’s leading oil importer — was Saudi Arabia. And so, China suddenly was in a position, because of this change in the geopolitical substrate that makes China the dominant economic presence of the Eurasian landmass. They could mediate between them.

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“.. the US Department of State and the CIA are skeptical of the idea and would like to see the result of the potential Ukrainian counteroffensive before taking any diplomatic steps..”

• Kiev Counteroffensive To ‘Pave The Way’ For Dialogue With Russia – WSJ (TASS)

The Kiev regime’s ostensibly possible counteroffensive may “pave the way” for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine by the end of the year with China being one of the mediators, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday citing European officials. According to the newspaper, key representatives from the US National Security Council support the idea of holding the negotiations between Kiev and Moscow. That said, the US Department of State and the CIA are skeptical of the idea and would like to see the result of the potential Ukrainian counteroffensive before taking any diplomatic steps. The Wall Street Journal also points out that this “shift in Western thinking” is occurring amid Western countries’ serious concern that they won’t be able to maintain the necessary level of military aid to the Kiev regime in the future.


That said, some Western states want to see whether China is capable of defusing the conflict which also indicates a change in the way the West sees Beijing’s role. Media conjecture about a potential counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops has been rife for several months running, with various potential trigger dates being publicly mooted. Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry highlighted that such open speculation within Western countries about expectations for an upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive only serves to confirm these countries’ direct involvement in the conflict. On April 23, Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Alexey Danilov rejected calls for dialogue on settling the conflict with Russia demanding more weapons from the West. Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow always supported holding negotiations but dialogue on the situation around Ukraine is possible only if Russia’s legitimate interests and concerns are taken into account.

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“Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think by the end of the year..”

• Kissinger Makes Ukraine Peace Prediction (RT)

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has told CBS News that the conflict in Ukraine may be approaching a turning point, and that Chinese-brokered peace talks could begin by the end of 2023. “Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think by the end of the year,” the 99-year-old diplomat told CBS in an interview broadcast on Sunday. By that time, he continued, “we will be talking about negotiating processes and even actual negotiations. With the release of its ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’ in February, China put itself forward as a potential mediator between Moscow and Kiev. The Chinese plan was rejected outright by the US and EU, while Russian President Vladimir Putin described some of its 12 points as “in tune” with Moscow’s position, and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky welcomed only a handful of its points, but maintains that Kiev will not compromise with Russia in any way.

Zelensky’s refusal to negotiate with Putin’s government – the Ukrainian leader banned contact with the Kremlin in a decree last October – is just one stumbling block faced by China or any other potential middleman. Russia considers the conflict in Ukraine a proxy war between itself and NATO, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday that any negotiations would not be held “with Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters.” In Washington, the administration of President Joe Biden publicly claims that it is up to Ukraine to decide when to seek peace. Zelensky has been offered no incentives by the US to do so, with Biden offering to continue supplying him with weapons “for as long as it takes” to achieve his war aims.


Among these aims is the capture of Crimea, a Russian territory since 2014. American military leaders have publicly admitted that the chances of this happening are slim to none. Kissinger drew the ire of Kiev last year when he suggested that Ukraine should accept a return to the “status quo ante,” or relinquish its territorial claims to Crimea and grant autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, in the name of peace. He has since suggested that these territories become the basis of negotiations after a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal. Moscow has repeatedly said that it is open to talks with Kiev but only if Ukraine “recognizes the reality on the ground,” including the new status of the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as parts of Russia. Otherwise, the Kremlin has stated, Russia will settle the conflict by military means.

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“The best thing we could do would be to go to school to study Chinese..”

• EU Defenseless Against China – Berlusconi (RT)

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi warns that the EU would be unable to defend itself if China decided to attack one of its member states. The veteran politician urged Brussels to adopt a robust military strategy and invest heavily in defense. Berlusconi made the remarks in a video interview recorded on Friday by Sky TG24 news channel. He is currently in the San Raffaele hospital in Milan and is being treated for leukemia, which was diagnosed in early April. The former prime minister said the EU is hardly a force to be reckoned with in the international arena, and should China decide to “occupy Italy, and maybe some other European country, we would absolutely not be able to counter it.” “The best thing we could do would be to go to school to study Chinese,” he added.

To improve its standing, Berlusconi said, the EU needs to adopt a “single military policy, with strong cooperation between the armed forces of all European countries.” He also advocated an increase in defense spending and the establishment of a 300,000-strong “emergency corps.” Politically, Berlusconi said he would like to see a “truly united continent” – something which would be more achievable if the bloc dropped its ‘unanimity principle’ in voting in favor of an 80-85% majority, he argued. He went on to stress that the EU can and must play a greater role in the world, including standing up to what Berlusconi described as “Chinese imperialism. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was considering withdrawing from China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project.


According to sources cited in the article, however, there is a lack of consensus on the matter within the ruling coalition. Speaking in late March ahead of her visit to China, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that while “decoupling” from Beijing is not in the EU’s interests, Brussels should become “bolder” in its relations with China – which is growing “more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,” she added. Commenting on Von der Leyen’s remarks, the Chinese ambassador to the EU, Fu Cong, said her message was incoherent and contradictory, while calling out the “misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Chinese policies and Chinese positions,” and advising the European Commission chief to find better speechwriters.

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”..if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO, I think Russia will feel less threatened, and there will be no confrontation. But once the process is started, Russia will take preemptive action,..

• US Anti-Russia Actions Push Humanity Towards World War, Malaysia ex-PM (TASS)

The US authorities push humanity towards a world war by contributing to emergence of two hostile blocs, says Former Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad. “The US will try to get other countries to join in the action against Russia, and Russia will also have to find friendly countries which will support it,” Mahathir, 97, said in an interview for the Global Times. “There will be confrontation between the Eastern bloc and Western bloc. And this will escalate and become a world war.” The expert noted that the conflict in Ukraine, provoked by the West, has already affected the entire world. He noted that the complicated situation has led to increased spending for essential goods around the world, negatively affecting grain shipments.


“The invitation to Ukraine to join NATO is a provocation. In fact, if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO, I think Russia will feel less threatened, and there will be no confrontation. But once the process is started, Russia will take preemptive action,” Mahathir said. He pointed out that NATO states are not directly involved in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict et, because Ukraine is not a member of the alliance. However, according to the ex-Prime Minister, the standoff with Russia harms NATO member states greatly. “In the end, they [Russia and Ukraine] will have to find some settlement. It is better for them to talk to each other, to discuss, to negotiate,” Mahathir said.

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Feel safer?

• Kamala Harris To Run AI Taskforce (RT)

US Vice President Kamala Harris has been appointed to head a new artificial intelligence initiative in partnership with leading companies in the field, the White House announced in a press release on Thursday. Harris and other senior officials in the administration of President Joe Biden will meet with the CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI to remind them of their “responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public.” The meeting is intended to keep the companies on track toward “driving responsible, trustworthy and ethical innovation with safeguards that mitigate risks and potential harms to individuals and our society,” according to the White House, which referenced recent executive orders and official statements reminding tech companies that their products were subject to civil rights law and other protections against unlawful discrimination.

The four companies, along with Hugging Face, NVIDIA, and Stability AI, will also submit to a public evaluation of their capabilities by thousands of industry experts and other curious members of the public at DEFCON 31, the Las Vegas hacking convention that has repeatedly put the insecurity of the US’ voting machines on display by giving children a chance to hack them. The White House also announced the creation of seven new National AI Research Institutes focusing on climate, agriculture, energy, public health, education, and cybersecurity, explaining the new institutes would “support the development of a diverse AI workforce” with $140 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. The administration is also giving the public the chance to weigh in on government AI policy starting this summer, according to the press release.


Tasked with stemming the flow of migrants over the US’ southern border upon taking office in 2021, Harris instead presided over a record amount of illegal immigration, earning her the lowest approval rating of any modern US vice president. Last year, she was assigned with developing a blueprint for fighting “disinformation,” harassment and abuse online despite having no experience in the technology sector. While hundreds of experts in the AI field have called for a moratorium on, or at least a dramatic slowdown of, AI development until internationally agreed-upon safety measures can be put in place, the US has thus far shied away from issuing any strong statements about the technology. Last month, Biden met with his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to discuss the “risks and opportunities” in the field but declined to address the experts’ warnings while admitting AI “could be” dangerous.

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“For all his faults, Fauci is no fool. One does not spend 54 years ensconced in the federal government without learning how to play politics.”

• Fauci’s Never-Ending Victory Tour (Pierre Kory)

What a dystopian nightmare watching “America’s Doctor” try to continue his Covid victory tour. It is both shocking and unsurprising that he would do this despite leaving a generation of children with lower IQ scores, a US life expectancy which dropped three years in the span of two, hundreds of thousands of deaths from the vaccines amongst working-age Americans (threatening the life insurance industry), millions of vaccine injured, skyrocketing disability rates, an explosion of cancers, and suddenly plummeting birth rates. So I went after him. Again. Maybe he will get the memo this time, particularly in light of the frosty receptions he has received of late from normally kid-gloved, obsequious interviewers. Enjoy. Dr. Anthony Fauci left government in December, but his media tour is going strong, albeit with a different tone and tenor.

The fawning adulation and questions about his exercise regimes and bobbleheads have been replaced by skepticism and outright doubt from outlets who never dared question the all-knowing man once dubbed “America’s doctor” by the New Yorker. Fauci recently appeared on CNN to complain about, “a personification of me as a person who essentially closed everything down.” He was responding to a lengthy sitdown with the New York Times where he declared, “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” For all his faults, Fauci is no fool. One does not spend 54 years ensconced in the federal government without learning how to play politics.

Three years removed from the worst of the COVID pandemic, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases knows the policy decisions guided by his medical recommendations are looking worse by the day. Herein lies his problem. When his ideas were in vogue, Fauci had no problem claiming responsibility. Now that the ugly consequences are coming due, he is eager to wash his hands. In the face of plummeting math and reading scores between 2020 and 2022, Fauci is especially quick to deny his role in the school shutdowns. Last fall, Fauci raised eyebrows for denying that school lockdowns, “forever irreparably damaged anyone.” Yet as late as September 2020, Fauci recommended that schools only open back up once the virus is “under control.”

Earlier in the year, he had chastised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, warning that premature reopening “likely” led to widespread student infection. Today, even left-leaning sources concede that, “kids are safe. They always have been.” Then came the vaccines. From the outset, Fauci’s entire COVID mitigation strategy was based on an experimental vaccine rushed to market under the branding “warp speed.” There had never been an mRNA-approved vaccine before, and now it was being pushed non-stop from the White House podium with the full support of the pharmaceutical industry. It was always highly illogical to deploy a static vaccine toward a mutagenic and constantly changing coronavirus. Then came the checks the vaccines couldn’t write. Fauci told us they would stop transmission. He implored us to “follow the science.”

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“..knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and is ready to start drawing a map..”

• Tucker Carlson Squaring Off Against Fox – Axios (RT)

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson is ready to go on the attack against Fox News if the network does not release him from his contract, Axios reported on Sunday, citing sources close to the pundit. Fox fired its number-one host last month just hours before he was scheduled to go on air, but has not released Carlson from his $20 million annual contract, which forbids him to work elsewhere in the industry until January 2025. While Carlson has made no public statement on his departure or his future plans, aside from a two-minute Twitter video promising his viewers that he would see them “soon,” he has retained entertainment lawyer Bryan Freedman to negotiate an exit to the contract. Sources claiming to be close to the newsman say he is losing patience with the network.

“His team is preparing for war. He wants his freedom,” a “close Carlson friend” told Axios, noting that Carlson had previously said he wanted to “get this done quiet and clean” but his team was now “going from peacetime to Defcon 1.” The conservative icon “knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and is ready to start drawing a map,” another insider source agreed. Carlson’s allies in the media are supposedly prepared to go on the offensive against Fox, and outlets including video platform Rumble and cable network Newsmax have reportedly offered to pay him even more than his previous employer. Even billionaire Twitter CEO Elon Musk is reportedly interested, though the two have not discussed the details of any arrangement. “The idea that anyone is going to silence Tucker and prevent him from speaking to his audience is beyond preposterous,” Freedman told Axios.


The network lost almost half of its audience in Carlson’s 8pm time slot in the week following his firing, and ratings for the network’s other shows have also declined precipitously – especially in the 25-54 age demographic desirable to advertisers. Carlson’s show drew over 3 million viewers per night, far more than the next most popular show. The exact reason for Carlson’s ouster has not been made public. Media critics including the New York Times point to leaked text messages from the anchor, specifically one in which Carlson admitted enjoying watching footage of an antifa protester being beaten by a group despite this not being “how white men fight,” then acknowledging the protester’s humanity. Other leaked texts revealed Carlson did not believe the claim that Dominion Voting Systems was flipping votes for Democrat Joe Biden. Fox settled Dominion’s defamation lawsuit for $787 million just days before firing the anchor.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1654966139074539520

https://twitter.com/i/status/1655321469541285889

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“We’re going to disclose many of the different LLCs, many of the different transactions that all these different Biden family members have gotten from our adversaries around the world..”

• Rep. Comer Urges DOJ To Hold Possible Hunter Biden Indictment (Fox)

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., urged the Justice Department to hold on a potential Hunter Biden indictment until after Republicans hold a press conference unveiling additional details surrounding the Biden family’s business dealings. Comer warned officials to wait to charge the first son until they hear from congressional leaders, arguing that the possible indictment could be just a “slap on the wrist” compared to their upcoming revelations. “My message to the Department of Justice is very loud and clear. Do not indict Hunter Biden before Wednesday,” Comer said during “Sunday Morning Futures.” “When you have the opportunity to see the evidence that the House Oversight Committee will produce with respect to the web of LLCs, with respect to the number of adversarial countries that this family influence peddled in, and this is not just about the president’s son.

This is about the entire Biden family, including the President of the United States. So we believe there are a whole lot of tips that the IRS and the DOJ don’t know about because we don’t believe they’ve done a whole lot of digging in this, and we have.” “By all accounts from the media reports that we’re getting, what they’re looking at charging Hunter Biden on is a slap on the wrist. It’s a drop in the bucket,” he continued. “So Wednesday will be a very big day for the American people in getting the facts presented to them so that they can know the truth, and then the Department of Justice can finally do what they should have done years ago.” Federal prosecutors are reportedly nearing a decision on a potential Hunter Biden indictment stemming from a years-long probe into possible tax and gun-related violations.


But Republicans are set to hold a press conference on Wednesday presenting the American people with additional information on the Biden family’s bank records, a briefing that Comer argued will provide additional information into the investigation led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Comer warned the evidence they have further implicates the Biden family in a broader, criminal “pay-for-play” bribery scheme. “We’re going to present to the American people all the information that we’ve received thus far pertaining to bank records. We’re going to disclose many of the different LLCs, many of the different transactions that all these different Biden family members have gotten from our adversaries around the world,” he said. “We don’t believe this was just a coincidence that all these Biden family members were receiving money from these this Web of LLC into their personal bag.”

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“uninsured depositor runs”

• Close to 190 US Banks Could Collapse, According To Study (USAT)

With the failure of three regional banks since March, and another one teetering on the brink, will America soon see a cascade of bank failures? Bloomberg reported Wednesday that San Francisco-based PacWest Bancorp is mulling a sale. Last week, First Republic Bank became the third bank to collapse, the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history after Washington Mutual, which collapsed in 2008 amid the financial crisis. After the demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March, a study on the fragility of the U.S. banking system found that 186 more banks are at risk of failure even if only half of their uninsured depositors (uninsured depositors stand to lose a part of their deposits if the bank fails, potentially giving them incentives to run) decide to withdraw their funds.

Uninsured deposits are customer deposits greater than the $250,000 FDIC deposit insurance limit. Regional banks are failing because the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes to tamp down inflation have eroded the value of bank assets such as government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. Most bonds pay a fixed interest rate that becomes attractive when interest rates fall, driving up demand and the price of the bond. On the other hand, if interest rates rise, investors will no longer prefer the lower fixed interest rate paid by a bond, thus driving down its price. Many banks increased their holdings of bonds during the pandemic, when deposits were plentiful but loan demand and yields were weak. For many banks, these unrealized losses will stay on paper.


But others may face actual losses if they have to sell securities for liquidity or other reasons, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “The recent declines in bank asset values very significantly increased the fragility of the U.S. banking system to uninsured depositor runs,” economists wrote in a recent paper published on the Social Science Research Network Of course, this scenario would play out only if the government did nothing. “So, our calculations suggest these banks are certainly at a potential risk of a run, absent other government intervention or recapitalization,” the economists wrote.

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“What will generate a credit crunch is the destruction of capital in the asset base of most lenders.”

• A Credit Crunch Is Inevitable (Lacalle)

Federal Reserve data shows $98 billion of deposits left the banking system in the week after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Most of the money went to money-market funds, as the Bloomberg data shows that assets in this class rose by $121 billion in the same period. The data shows the challenges of the banking system in the middle of a confidence crisis. However, as many analysts point out, this is not necessarily the main factor that dictates the risk of a credit crunch. Deposit flight is certainly an important risk. Many regional banks will have to cut lending to families and businesses as deposits shrink, but in the United States bank loans are less than 19 percent of corporate credit according to the IMF, while in the euro area it is more than 80 percent. What will generate a credit crunch is the destruction of capital in the asset base of most lenders.

The slump in mark-to-market valuations of all asset classes from loans to investments is what will ultimately drive an inevitable credit contraction. Credit standards have tightened significantly already, and the credit impulse of the economy, both in the US and euro area, has deteriorated rapidly, according to the respective Bloomberg indices. Both are below the March 2021 low. We must remember that credit standards’ tightening was already a reality before the Silicon Valley Bank demise. But the reality check of capital destruction in the financial system’s asset base is far from done. Start-ups will most likely see the most severe crunch in financing as the tech bubble burst adds to the asset base capital destruction in private equity and venture capital firms, who have delayed all they could the required write-downs and face a sobering reality check.


Our internal estimate of capital destruction in the asset base of banks and private equity firms is between a 15 to 25 percent wipeout, which is consistent with the average decline in market value over the October 2021–March 2023 period. Real estate investments all over the US and Europe require a significant reevaluation now that real estate has underperformed the market for eighteen months, according to Morgan Stanley. The optimistic valuations of real estate and corporate investments in banks’ balance sheets will require a significant analysis and subsequent write-off that leads to much tighter credit standards and stringent investment conditions.

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“..shifting at least part of its $3.2trn worth of foreign reserves held in dollars into other currencies. All of this would take a long time – one or two decades, perhaps.”

• China And Its Trading Allies Are Well Placed To Topple The Dollar (Münchau)

The dollar is the foundation of US global leadership, and the future of the dollar is therefore intricately linked to the debate about geopolitical fragmentation. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, asked during his recent visit to China: “Why should every country have to be tied to the dollar for trade?… Who decided the dollar would be the [world’s] currency?” These are good questions. The perhaps surprising answer is that he himself made that decision, together with the former leaders of the other “Brics” group of nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Their economic-development models have succeeded but have also critically depended on the US dollar. During the period of hyperglobalisation – which I date from 1990 to 2020 – the US became the global importer of last resort, and let its trade deficit against the rest of the world increase.

China and many other fast-developing economies built up savings in the currency they were paid in – the US dollar. They invested those savings into US bonds and other assets. The willingness of the US to absorb the world’s savings surpluses was the engine of globalisation. It ensured that the dollar would maintain its status as the world’s leading currency. This mechanism explains what happened in the last 20 years, but it won’t tell us what will happen in the next 20. Yet the dollar fans assume that the geopolitical and geo-economic environment will stay broadly the same. f the five Brics countries wanted to end their dependence on the dollar, they would have to do more than just choose another currency to trade in. It is not a menu choice, as Lula suggested during the same speech. He and his fellow Brics leaders would have to change how they interact with the rest of the world, and with one another.

China is key. In 2021, the country derived 43 per cent of its GDP from investment. This is approximately twice the level of the US and other Western countries. If China managed to shift some of its GDP to consumption, it would reduce its external trade surplus, as consumers tend to buy more imported goods. If you wanted to be less reliant on the US dollar, this is where you would have to start. As a second step, China and the other Brics countries could start trading more with each other, become more self-reliant in their supply chains, and set up their own financial infrastructure. hanging economic models is hard. Three years after Brexit, the UK is still struggling to move away from a model that depended on close integration with the EU.

Germany is finding it hard to maintain competitiveness without cheap Russian gas and with impaired global supply. It takes decades to build industrial production lines and supply chains. In China, there are an awful lot of vested political interests at the regional level, which rely on the investment boom continuing. If President Xi Jinping was really keen to extricate China from the US dollar, he would need to impose policies that would meet with resistance from regional leaders. In parallel, China would also have to start a long process of shifting at least part of its $3.2trn worth of foreign reserves held in dollars into other currencies. All of this would take a long time – one or two decades, perhaps.

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“Several former agents recalled being blocked by the agency from sharing intelligence about the hijackers with the rest of the FBI.”

• MSM Doesn’t Care That the CIA May Have Helped Cause 9/11 (Marcetic)

For all the ways the September 11 attacks continue to shape US culture and foreign policy, the event is still shrouded in a surprising amount of mystery. A recently unearthed bombshell court filing offers some possible clarity on the questions that continue to surround the attacks and their aftermath — and yet, like similar bombshells in recent years, it’s been studiously ignored by the media and political establishment. First reported by Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Hettena on the Substack SpyTalk, the media project run by veteran former Newsweek national security reporter Jeff Stein, those potential answers come in the form of a signed affidavit from Guantanamo military commission investigator Don Canestraro. The affidavit outlines the findings of a 2016 investigation by Canestraro, a longtime veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), into Saudi and CIA complicity in the terrorist attacks, findings that are squarely at odds with the story given to the public in their wake.

Relaying the information gathered from dozens of interviews he conducted with former FBI and CIA personnel, members of the 9/11 Commission, and US government officials, Canestraro’s affidavit outlines a sequence of events that, if true, suggest a botched and illegal domestic CIA operation was at the heart of the intelligence failure that enabled the attacks. More than that, it suggests there was a concerted cover-up of the grave blunder after the fact by both the CIA and the George W. Bush administration. The affidavit outlines the overlapping claims of numerous agents that the CIA impeded law enforcement efforts that could have prevented the attacks. Several former agents recalled being blocked by the agency from sharing intelligence about the hijackers with the rest of the FBI.


The CIA knew from wiretaps that two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Halid al-Mindhar, had multiple entry visas letting them travel to the United States, one former agent said, but didn’t pass it on to the bureau. Two other agents alleged that the CIA withheld information about the two men’s connection to the planner of the October 2000 al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, which, if known, would have turned the case into a criminal investigation for the FBI to pursue. One of those agents recalled a meeting with the CIA in which they were shown photos of three suspected terrorists, two of which would turn out to be future hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mindhar. When the agent, referred to in the affidavit as CS-12, asked who was placing border crossing alerts on the suspects, which would have notified law enforcement about their entry into the United States, they were told no one was.

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“..he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to..”

• Ex-Russian Space Boss Questions US Moon Landing (RT)

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof. In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast. Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time.

All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon. The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.


Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.” Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to the Moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going down in history as the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. The flight was preceded by the unmanned Soviet Luna 2 program, which blazed the trail for Moon exploration. Last April, President Vladimir Putin pledged to resume Russia’s lunar program.

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A husky next to a wolf. Although wolf-like in appearance, huskies are no more closely related to wolves than poodles and bulldogs are. And the size says it all.

 

 

Kiss whale
https://twitter.com/i/status/1655267089551183875

 

 

Aqua puppy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1655210878101340167

We love little guy

 

 


The rainbow starfrontlet (Coeligena iris) is a species of hummingbird in the “brilliants” tribe Heliantheini. Males have a glittering yellow-green forecrown that transitions through golden yellow to blue on the crown Jorge Luis Cruz Alcivar

 

 

Chick
https://twitter.com/i/status/1655043864279785473

A video of a giant Squid. This specimen, found in Toyama Bay, measured approximately 3.7 meters in length. However, estimates place their maximum size at about 12-13 meters.

 

 


Secretary bird

 

 

 

 

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