Aug 272024
 
 August 27, 2024  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  86 Responses »


M. C. Escher Development II 1939

 

A Period of Great Uncertainty – Martin Armstrong (USAW)
France Extends Durov Arrest – Media (RT)
Rumble Boss Flees EU After Durov Arrest (RT)
#FreePavel: Telegram CEO Becomes Latest Target of European Censors (Turley)
Telegram Founder Finds Out That ‘Freedom’ Isn’t Free (Marsden)
The Undemocratic Party (Miles)
Trump Suggests He Might Pull Out of ABC Debate With Harris (ET)
“RFK, Jr. Murders Whale with Chainsaw!” (Kunstler)
Secret Service Rescinds Protection For RFK Jr. After Trump Endorsement (ET)
The Agenda Is To Elect Kamala (Paul Craig Roberts)
Another Former Democrat Joins Trump Campaign (RT)
Trump Suggests Consulting Role for Musk in Cabinet If Elected (Sp.)
This Election Is a Referendum on Free Speech (RCP)
Trump Lauds Russia’s ‘Winter Fighting’ (RT)
America’s Reckoning With Reality (Douglas Macgregor)
Is President Putin Preparing For Istanbul-II? (Helmer)
Hezbollah Could End Normal Life in Israel, Drive Israelis ‘Underground’ (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1827776519625949331


https://twitter.com/i/status/1827851477366505802
https://twitter.com/i/status/1827778206365098106

 

 

Cut the fat
https://twitter.com/i/status/1827860033268498585

 

 


– 2016: 51% of young men identified or leaned Democrat
– 2023: This number dropped to 39%

 

 

Promo
https://twitter.com/i/status/1827865650624413853

 

 

Sequel

 

 

Salad

 

 

Debate 1,2

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I am very concerned they will start WWIII before the end of the year and maybe by September.”

A Period of Great Uncertainty – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

Almost everything you see and hear with the Lying Legacy Media and the government is a lie. Just this past week, the Biden Administration backtracked about employment as it was widely reported, “US economy added 818,000 fewer jobs than first reported in year that ended in March.” A huge miss or a huge lie–take your pick. Other big lies we have been told in recent years: “Trump is colluding with Russia,” “Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, and the “CV19 vax injections are “safe and effective.” That is just scratching the surface of the lies we are told on a daily basis. The lies, which people realize are becoming preposterous, are adding to the public’s lack of confidence in everything, including the economy. Martin Armstrong says, “We are in a period of great uncertainty. . .. When people are uncertain, they don’t spend. They save. That’s what happens in a depression and a recession. . ..

So, if you have no confidence in the future because of all this crazy stuff going on, what do you do? You don’t borrow, and you pull back and say let me see what is going to happen.” Armstrong says another big lie told to the public is the approval rating of Kamala Harris. The so-called polls say Harris is running neck and neck with Donald Trump in the presidential race. Don’t believe it. Armstrong says a recent data dive on his Socratees computer program shows, “Kamala’s approval rating came in around 10.5 %. (A second confidential source says Kamala’s approval rating is 8.5%.) Confidence in government is 7%. So, how can Kamala possibly be 40%, 50% and 60%? It’s illogical. . .. The polls are really propaganda at this point. They were propaganda back in 2016. They all said Hillary would win, and she would sweep Trump under the carpet.”

On news RFK Jr. suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump, Armstrong says, “I was always pushing RFK Jr. to be Attorney General. I think I got his eyes to light up when I said if you take the Attorney General job, you could even indict Pfizer.” Armstrong says the Trump camp is seriously considering RFK Jr. for AG, and Armstrong says he has been in contact with top Trump advisors. We will see, but we do know RFK Jr. is going to be a part of Trump’s Administration. On Trump winning in November, Armstrong says, “Look, the computer says Trump should win. I don’t know how the hell they allow that to happen.

They have to trap Trump into a war or they kill him, one or the other. These people are unconscionable. . .. We are looking at serious civil unrest regardless of who wins in November. Neither side is going to accept it.” On gold at $2,500 an ounce, Armstrong says it’s not about inflation, it is about the fear of a US debt default. This is why central banks are buying. Armstrong says, “If there is a big war, the US will default on it’s debt. . .. I am very concerned they will start WWIII before the end of the year and maybe by September.”

Read more …

Tomorrow the judge must press charges or let him walk.

“..the arrest warrant was issued by France’s OFMIN, the agency tasked with combating violence against minors..”

France Extends Durov Arrest – Media (RT)

The judicial authorities in France confirmed on Sunday the arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of the Telegram messaging app, extending the detention of the Russian tech entrepreneur, AFP has reported, citing a source close to the investigation. The detention of the 39-year-old dual Russian-French national was reportedly extended beyond Sunday night by the investigating magistrate who is handling the case. The detention period for initial interrogation is limited to 96 hours in France; however, it can be extended to 144 hours for serious offences such as drug trafficking and terrorism. During the detention phase, the judge must either press charges and remand in further custody, or release the detainee.

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity told the news agency that the arrest warrant was issued by France’s OFMIN, the agency tasked with combating violence against minors, to conduct a preliminary probe into alleged fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime, and promotion of terrorism. Reuters reports, citing unnamed sources, that a cybersecurity gendarmerie unit and the national anti-fraud police are leading the investigation. The Paris prosecutor’s office told RT that a press release concerning the case will be issued later on Monday. French media had previously reported that Durov’s detention at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday was related to alleged offenses regarding Telegram.

The reports indicated that the authorities believe he is complicit in a range of crimes allegedly committed via the social media app due to insufficient moderation. Telegram, which has nearly reached 1 billion active monthly users, was created by Durov and his brother in 2013 in Russia. The entrepreneur, who is also a citizen of the UAE and St. Kitts and Nevis, left Russia in the mid-2010s and settled in Dubai. He was granted French citizenship in 2021. Commenting on Durov’s arrest, Telegram said the platform “abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards,” adding that claims that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse committed by users are “absurd.”

Read more …

Probably a smart move.

Rumble Boss Flees EU After Durov Arrest (RT)

France has crossed all boundaries by arresting Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of video-sharing platform Rumble, has said, adding that he left Europe after the news broke. Durov was taken into custody at a Paris airport on Saturday evening after arriving from Azerbaijan by private jet. While the French authorities have yet to publicly announce the reason for detaining the Russian tech mogul, reports indicate that the charges are related to his alleged complicity in drug trafficking, pedophilia offenses, fraud, as well as failure to address criminal activity on the messenger. Telegram has denied any wrongdoing, adding that it is “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Pavlovski said he had “safely departed from Europe” in the aftermath of Durov’s arrest. He slammed the move by France, saying it “crossed a red line,” while noting that the country had already threatened Rumble. ”Rumble will not stand for this behavior and will use every legal means available to fight for freedom of expression, a universal human right. We are currently fighting in the courts of France, and we hope for Pavel Durov’s immediate release,” he added.

Pavlovski’s platform, which has positioned itself as a free speech alternative to YouTube, has been embroiled in its own legal battle with the French authorities. It began in November 2022 after officials in Paris banned Rumble over its refusal to comply with a request to remove Russian media accounts blocked in the EU due to sanctions over the Ukraine conflict. Though Durov’s arrest occurred in France, a number of opinion leaders, including American entrepreneur David Sacks, have suggested that the US was behind the move. In April, Sacks also predicted that Washington could go after Telegram, X, and eventually Rumble, given that the US passed a law that would ban the video-sharing platform TikTok if its Chinese-based developer, ByteDance, refused to sell it within 12 months.

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“Social media is now the dominant form of communication between people. It surpasses telephones.”

#FreePavel: Telegram CEO Becomes Latest Target of European Censors (Turley)

Elon Musk put it simply: “#FreePavel.” For many, a hashtag of one billionaire calling for the release of another billionaire is hardly a compelling cause. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, 39, is neither a familiar nor sympathetic figure for most Americans. However, for free speech advocates, Durov’s arrest is a chilling escalation of global censors in using European laws to control speech on the Internet. The press and pundits heralded the arrest and played up the allegations that Durov is under investigation for fraud and child abuse. Some might think from the headlines that Durov is himself being investigated for committing such crimes. While we have not seen anything akin to a charging sheet, reports indicate that French authorities took the action because of his refusal to yield to their demands to censor content on his messaging app.

Others have been ecstatic that censors could soon come for Musk. Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the Trump impeachment proceedings, declared “There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.” Social media is now the dominant form of communication between people. It surpasses telephones. There is, however, a major difference in how such communications are protected. There would be an outcry if AT&T broke into a telephone call to object to the views of the parties and cut off access to the telephone lines until they moderated their views. The Europeans have been threatening to hold executives liable for how others use their sites. Imagine if a mobster used a telephone to do business and the FBI arrested the CEO of AT&T.

The implication of this case goes far beyond Durov. Social media sites allow large numbers of people to communicate and to associate. They share values or viewpoints, including some that most of us find offensive or repulsive. However, free speech should protect the right of people to associate so long as they do not commit crimes. Under free speech principles, those crimes should not include viewpoints or ideology. If individuals are engaging in child pornography or human trafficking, they should be arrested. That is conduct, not just speech. While the media emphasizes the allegations that there are people engaged in fraud or child porn, officials add that Durov has failed to remove viewpoints that they consider extreme or offensive. French officials have cited the failure to engage in greater “content moderation,” the euphemism of censorship.

We have been discussing how countries like France and the United Kingdom have been ramping up anti-free speech crackdowns. Recently, the European Union threatened Musk that he could be charged if he did not censor political speech in this election, including any information deemed by the EU to be false in his interview with Donald Trump. European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton issued a threatening message to Musk, “We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”

The law behind these threats is the Digital Services Act. The act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager celebrated its passage by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.” In addition to Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr. has denounced the arrest. This action is not due to the encryption capacity or child porn rationales. European officials have been making the same threats against other sites over the failure to censor views that they deem unacceptable. Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski wrote “France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.”

Read more …

“Russia could actually start looking not too bad by comparison the minute that his new pals decide that they’re fed up with him..”

Telegram Founder Finds Out That ‘Freedom’ Isn’t Free (Marsden)

French officials have sprung into action with an arrest warrant that seemed to have been scribbled on the back of a napkin when they realized that the founder of the globally-popular online chat app, Telegram, was about to make the colossal mistake of landing in France, despite his company being based well out of the EU’s reach in Dubai. Russian Pavel Durov mysteriously managed to get French citizenship in 2021 without ever even living in the country. Normally, French citizenship requires proof of five years of residency, and seemingly more importantly to French authorities, five full years of paying income tax in France. Instead, Durov managed to get fast-tracked citizenship through a French Foreign Ministry initiative that awards naturalization based on some kind of action that contributes to the image, prosperity, and international relations of France.

No one has been able to actually articulate what exactly Durov has contributed to France beyond badmouthing Russia, or having created the chat app that French media have long qualified as the top choice of French President Emmanuel Macron and his entourage since at least 2016. Just as equally puzzling is the fact that just three years later, the judicial branch of the same French government that gifted him with a highly political shortcut to citizenship is now suddenly accusing him of taking an overly laid-back approach to his platform’s content. French press reports have been citing anonymous judicial sources close to the case, alleging that the app has turned into a giant free-for-all for assorted scum of the earth (in addition the aforementioned elites): terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, pedophiles.

No explicit mention of people who happen to just have opinions that the establishment doesn’t particularly like, and whose online proliferation European officials are always whining about and threatening these platform operators about publicly – the most recent being X platform owner Elon Musk. TikTok, owned by China? National security threat that the West wants to ban – unless they hand over data management and access to the US. Huawei? National security threat, mostly for honing in on the turf of Western competitors who struggled to compete. RT and other Russia-linked platforms? National security threat offering alternative views and information to the EU’s official narrative on Ukraine. Now we’re down to French media outlets like C8 and CNews being threatened like they were Russian – because they haven’t fallen in line with the French regulator’s content demands.

Durov’s arrest was apparently enough to incite the Canadian founder of another free speech platform, Rumble’s Chris Pavlovski, to grab his go-bag and get the heck out of dodge. “I’m a little late to this, but for good reason – I’ve just safely departed from Europe,” Pavlovski wrote on the X Platform.”France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.” Pavlovski previously opted to outright geoblock Rumble across France rather than censor content that the French government had asked him to – like RT for example. But Durov was singing a tune that the West really liked for a while, about how he was pressured by the Russian government over content control and backdoor access and how he basically just flipped them off heroically.

His persecution by Russia was such that he was never actually arrested or charged with anything there, and Telegram is still operational in Russia while Durov is free to go around the world promoting himself as a professional victim of his homeland. Durov even fell right in line with top-down EU demands to censor RT and other Russian media. But there has been a significant shift recently. He had started to change his tune to one that probably wasn’t such a crowd pleaser for the Western establishment, suggesting a few months ago in an interview with Tucker Carlson that the FBI tried to convince one of his engineers to basically start installing Western-friendly backdoors that would allow intelligence services easy access to encrypted Telegram content. He added that they seemed particularly interested in infiltrating groups that opposed Covid mandates and jabs.

Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev said in the wake of Durov’s arrest that he previously warned him that he’d have problems in virtually any country where he didn’t want to cooperate with the authorities on major crimes. Not that people denouncing Covid mandates are committing major crimes, which makes you wonder how much of this is really just France playing up the major crime element in order to tackle much lesser things that they consider a threat to their own power rather than to society. Durov may now be on the verge of learning that despite his anti-Russian rhetoric, Russia could actually start looking not too bad by comparison the minute that his new pals decide that they’re fed up with him – and your app goes from being the toast of the Elysee to the trash bin.

Read more …

“..observers worry about the precedent set by the Democrat Party’s end run around its own voters.”

The Undemocratic Party (Miles)

“For the first time since 1968, the Democratic nominee will win the nomination without winning a single primary vote… it would be a culmination of the elite-oriented trends that have shaped the nominating process since 1984, in which party elites have played an increasingly large role in shaping the presidential nomination,” [Beth] Daley warned. “If Democrats truly want to make this election about democracy, they might start by looking at the recent trends in their own house.” Analyst Richard Morgan considered America’s democratic deficit as demonstrated during previous presidential administrations, such as that of Gerald Ford in the 1970s. Ford was selected to be Richard Nixon’s vice president after the resignation of Spiro Agnew in 1973 then became president the following year when Nixon stepped down amid the sprawling Watergate scandal. He is notable for having served as both president and vice president of the United States without winning a single vote.

Harris has also come under scrutiny for her political track record, with critics accusing her of opportunism. “Her record as a [San Francisco District Attorney]… sounds spotty, with her embracing two different extremes at different times – from strong against drugs and crime to weak,” said former US Justice Department prosecutor Ronald Sievert in an interview with Sputnik. Harris has received criticism from some in the Democratic Party who accuse her of running as a self-styled “tough on crime” politician in the years before Black Lives Matter and a string of high-profile police shootings brought a renewed focus to criminal justice reform. She was famously criticized by former Democratic Party Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a primary debate in 2020 for her record as District Attorney and California’s attorney general during which she enforced heavy penalties for drug possession.

“When you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives you did not, and worse yet in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to [turn it over],” said Gabbard during an exchange often credited with ending Harris’s previous run for president. “There is no excuse for that and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.” Harris’s acceptance speech during the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago has been slammed by many within the party for its hawkish tone. The Democratic candidate signaled strong support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza and the Western proxy war in Ukraine while also receiving an endorsement from controversial former CIA director Leon Panetta.

Panetta delivered a speech praising Harris during which he claimed he was “proud” to have served in the US Army and as head of the CIA. US military aggression throughout the Middle East during the so-called “War on Terror” is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 4.5 million people while the CIA has been implicated in numerous coups and human rights violations. “In her speech [Harris] was talking about how [former US President Donald] Trump supposedly coddled [foreign leaders] like Putin, and that’s totally false,” said CovertAction Magazine managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov on Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program recently. “Trump had a pretty hardline policy toward Russia. He pulled out of the INF Treaty. He ramped up weapons supplies to Ukraine. So that’s just like an extreme right-wing position that they’re adopting.”

“They’re celebrating this war in Ukraine [that] siphoned off billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a sinkhole just like Afghanistan, and a lot of those weapons have been stolen. And this party is cheerleading for that. So that’s where they are.” The 2024 presidential campaign cycle represents the third in a row during which Democratic Party leaders have intervened heavily to boost their favored candidate. Leaked DNC emails revealed the extent to which party officials sought to subvert Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ candidacy during 2016’s party primary while former President Barack Obama intervened to once again undermine Sanders in 2020. 2024 marks the first year in decades that a major US political party’s presidential candidate has been chosen without a democratic primary process, and observers worry about the precedent set by the Democrat Party’s end run around its own voters.

Read more …

“The Vice President is ready to deal with Trump … in real time,” Fallon said. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”

In the Biden debate the Dems insisted on the mute button.

Trump Suggests He Might Pull Out of ABC Debate With Harris (ET)

Former President Donald Trump suggested on the evening of Aug. 25 that he may skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris amid dueling statements issued by both campaigns about whether the microphone should be muted. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he did not like how the network’s Jonathan Karl handled an interview with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Aug. 25, questioning ABC’s capacity to be impartial. Trump then wrote, “Why would I do the debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” On Aug. 26, Trump told reporters inside a Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, why he didn’t like how the network handled the Cotton interview. “When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network,’” the former president said. “I want to do it.”

When asked directly whether he will participate in the September ABC debate, he said, “We’re thinking about it. We’re thinking about it. They also want to change the rules. You know, the deal was we keep the same rules. Now, all of a sudden, they want to make a change in the rules.” He did not elaborate on the proposed rule changes but said he wants to have a fair debate and is seeking “tough questions.” He argued that the Disney-owned channel should not be holding the debate. “I‘d much rather do it on NBC. I’d much rather do it on CBS. … And certainly, I‘d do it on Fox. I’d even do it on CNN. I thought CNN treated us very fairly the last time,” Trump said. Statements issued by both campaigns on Aug. 26 indicated that there was an impasse over microphones and whether they should be turned on or off. Trump told reporters in the Virginia press conference that he would prefer to have his microphone switched on.

During his CNN-hosted debate with President Joe Biden, his microphone was muted much of the time. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have it, probably, on. But the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time,” the former president said. “I’m not spending a lot of time on it. I think my whole life I’ve been preparing for a debate. “You can’t cram knowledge into your head, for, you know, 30 years of knowledge in one week. So, you know, there’s a little debate prep, but I’ve always done it more or less the same way.” In response to Trump campaign comments and his Truth Social post, Harris spokesperson Brian Fallon said in a statement that their campaign wanted ABC News to keep their microphones on for the full event and not be muted. “The Vice President is ready to deal with Trump … in real time,” Fallon said. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said in a statement that the team already agreed to the same terms as the debate hosted by CNN in June. “We said no changes to the agreed-upon rules,” he said. Harris obtained the Democratic Party’s nomination after Biden stepped aside last month, and she had said that she would do the Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News previously agreed to by Biden and Trump. Trump had floated another debate hosted by Fox News on Sept. 4, which he said would become a televised town hall with just himself and host Sean Hannity if Harris didn’t accept. The Harris campaign said it was not interested. The vice presidential candidates, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are scheduled to debate on Oct. 1 on CBS News.

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“..it’s become obvious that Mr. Trump’s aims and ideas are more in-tune with those forsaken principles of Mr. Kennedy’s father and his uncle, JFK.”

“RFK, Jr. Murders Whale with Chainsaw!” (Kunstler)

The raptures of “joy” tend to obscure the idea that there is a future to be concerned about. Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He explained his view of the situation and his role in it with unsurpassed clarity last Friday in a powerful and moving speech outlining a decision that must have been very painful for him. As I averred he would do last Friday morning, he denounced the party of his ancestors in unequivocal terms for coming to militate against its own traditional principles — opposing war, fighting for free speech, helping poor working people, and against weaponizing government agencies. He threw his support to Mr. Trump because it’s become obvious that Mr. Trump’s aims and ideas are more in-tune with those forsaken principles of Mr. Kennedy’s father and his uncle, JFK.

And now he’ll campaign on behalf of Mr. Trump, with the expectation that he will play an important, well-defined role in the next Trump administration — in charge of a range of public health issues that he is deeply familiar with from decades of litigation and researching the books about pharmaceutical racketeering actually written by himself. It’s Monday after the convention. What’s on the candidates’ campaign schedule today. CNNs “Campaign Latest” page says that Mr. Trump will give a speech in Detroit today to the National Guard Association where he is expected to greet the endorsement of former Rep. (and Lt. Col. In the National Guard) Tulsi Gabbard. Kamala Harris has no public appearances scheduled, but CNN reports that she has raised a fabulous $540-million since her launch a few weeks ago. Isn’t that nice? Boolah boolah, lotsa moolah. On Wednesday, Ms. Harris and her veep sidekick, Tim Walz, embark on a bus tour around Georgia. Bus tours will be the signature of their campaign.

Let me tell you what that means: instead of flying expeditiously between campaign stops where they might have to state some positions on public issues, Harris & Walz will eat up many hours on long bus rides from Point-A to Point-B, hiding from the public and the press. Bobby Kennedy, meanwhile, is cramming as many media appearances as possible into his schedule, submitting to questions about everything, including the latest barrage of accusations about his fully-disclosed personal history. Fox has had him on several programs, though the other cable news stations are ignoring him, as are The New York Times and the WashPo, except to publish scurrilous stories from his mindfucked siblings and cousins — the latest being that he cut the head off a dead whale on the beach at Cape Cod with a chainsaw. Readers are supposed to construe that to mean he murdered a whale with a chainsaw.

Read more …

They want them both dead.

Secret Service Rescinds Protection For RFK Jr. After Trump Endorsement (ET)

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will no longer receive Secret Service protection after he announced on Aug. 23 that he was suspending his campaign in 10 battleground states and urging voters in those states to support former President Donald Trump instead. “Mr. Kennedy no longer has USSS protection,” Kennedy’s press secretary, Stefanie Spear, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 25. Anthony Guglielmi, Secret Service chief of communications, confirmed that Kennedy “is no longer a protectee given he suspended his campaign,” in an Aug. 25 statement to The Epoch Times. Kennedy was denied Secret Service protection five times before the Department of Homeland Security granted it shortly after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13.

Thomas Michael Crooks was identified by authorities as the gunman. Trump’s ear was grazed by the gunfire, former fire chief Corey Comperatore was killed, and two others were injured. Following the attack, Trump said that Kennedy should “immediately” get Secret Service protection. “In light of what is going on in the world today, I believe it is imperative that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receive Secret Service protection—immediately,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Given the history of the Kennedy Family, this is the obvious right thing to do!” On July 15, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas authorized Kennedy’s Secret Service protection.

“We are in a heightened and very dynamic threat environment. The United States’ Secret Service, we—including the FBI and our other partners across the federal government—take the threats very seriously and adjust security measures as warranted, maintaining the safety and security of the president, the former president in their campaign events is one our most vital priorities,” Mayorkas said. “In light of the weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection for Robert Kennedy Jr.” It’s standard procedure for the Secret Service to end protection when a presidential candidate drops out of the race. Kennedy said that he has suspended his campaign in 10 battleground states but will be on the ballot in the other 40 states during his Aug. 23 address. He encouraged voters to support him in states where he would not be considered a “spoiler” and detract backing for their Trump or Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

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“What the Russians will end up destroying is a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel. No one will miss it.”

The Agenda Is To Elect Kamala (Paul Craig Roberts)

Dear American, this is your next presidential administration: It will be anti-white, anti-family, pro-open borders, pro-legalization of sexual perversity, pro-sexualization of young children, and pro-war. It cannot be deterred by your votes, because the election will be stolen. In the swing states the methods used by Democrats to steal the 2020 and 2022 elections have been legalized. Moreover, if news reports are correct, in some, perhaps all, of the swing states it is now illegal to challenge election outcomes. If you will remember, when Kamala Harris competed for the presidential nomination in 2020, she was immediately eliminated. She had zero support. If you will remember, she has been an unpopular vice president. Yet today the media presents her as leading Trump, who continues to turn out massive attendance at his appearances, as the likely next president.

The media uses rigged polls and positive coverage of Kamala and negative coverage of Trump to create in the voting public’s mind the expectation of a Kamala victory. The polls are rigged by overweighting Democrats in the polled population. Google Kamala and you will find 90% of the information is favorable. Google Trump and 90% is unfavorable. By creating the expectation of a Kamala victory, the ground is laid for stealing the election. It is not possible to steal an election unless the election is close or the person for whom the election is stolen is presented as the leading candidate. Ask yourselves, how did Kamala go from zero support among Democrats to the leading presidential contender? She did not win the primary election as there was no primary. She has not had any debates, much less triumphed in one.

She represents everything but white Americans, families, sexual morality, peace, law as a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government, nationhood instead of a tower of babel, truth instead of lies, the Constitution instead of a woke agenda- based rule. The media have made it completely obvious that the election is going to be stolen. Why else the rigged polls and biased coverage? The public is being prepared to accept a stolen election. And Republicans are silent. If Trump raises the issue, the media will say that Trump has already admitted that he is going to lose and is already raising the theft issue prior to the election. Obviously, Trump cannot be the one who raises the obvious issue in front of our eyes that the Democrats are going to steal the election. The theft has to be raised by Republican governors, US Senators, US Representatives, and that small part of social media where free speech is still possible.

Try to imagine Republican wimps raising a real issue. Republicans are incapable of fighting. As they have never done it, they don’t know how. Moreover, even if they were capable of fight, they wouldn’t, because it would cast aspersion on the purity and sanctity of “American democracy.” Republicans regard any effective self-defense as a reflection on the American myth. The “USA USA USA” crowd would get upset. Americans need to try to understand what life is going to be like under a Kamala regime. Federal marshals and FBI SWAT teams are going to be sent house to house in red states seizing firearms. Once disarmed, legions of immigrant-invaders will be sent to throw you out of your homes and move in. It will be treated as a rental issue and be decided in favor of the tenant, the underdog favored by the Democrat regime. Your unrealized capital gains, which you were relying on for your retirement, will be taxed. You will have to sell retirement funds in order to pay the tax. When the market falls, you will not be compensated for the disappeared capital gains that you paid taxes on.

You will lose all control over your children, who will be groomed in public schools for pedophiles and gender change. Not too far into this process of “transformation to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive society,” white people, as in The Camp of the Saints which we are now living, will not be permitted to marry and to procreate. The white people you see in the video of the DNC convention are so utterly stupid, or brainwashed, or insouciant that they cannot realize that they are supporting their own elimination. They signify the inability of white Americans to recognize their peril and to defend themselves. Defense is impossible, because not even the Republican Party will say a word about the election theft that has so obviously been set in place. The border remains wide open.

Critical race theory continues to be taught in public schools. Transgender promoters are gaining parental authority over children. The attempted assassination of Trump remains non-investigated and has disappeared from the media. Free speech has been labeled “a threat to democracy.” My advice to young white heterosexual Americans stands: Get out of the country. You have no future here. White women who remain can expect to be used for the sexual comfort for the immigrant-invaders, just as they are in Sweden, Norway, UK, Germany, France, and the rest of what was once Western civilization. What the Russians will end up destroying is a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel. No one will miss it.

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Join in, Tulsi. Many more will follow.

“..describing the ex-president as the only candidate who can walk the US back from “the brink of nuclear war.”

Another Former Democrat Joins Trump Campaign (RT)

Former Democratic lawmaker Tulsi Gabbard has endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, describing the ex-president as the only candidate who can walk the US back from “the brink of nuclear war.” Trump brought Gabbard on stage during a speech at the National Guard Association’s annual conference in Detroit on Monday, introducing the former Hawaii congresswoman as a “true American patriot” with “great common sense” and “great spirit.” Gabbard, a 17-year National Guard veteran who served two combat tours in the Middle East, praised Trump’s isolationist brand of foreign policy. “We saw this through his first term in the presidency when he not only didn’t start any new wars, he took action to de-escalate and prevent wars,” she said, adding that Trump had “the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace.”

“The same can not be said about Kamala Harris,” Gabbard continued. “In fact the opposite is true, and we’re living through this reality today as this administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world, and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.” “This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House,” she told the crowd. “Because I am confident that his first task will be to…walk us back from the brink of war.” Gabbard left the Democratic Party in 2022, arguing that it had fallen “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers” and social-justice ideologues. Three years earlier, Gabbard was widely credited with ending Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign with a single debate performance.

In the 2019 Democratic primary showdown, Gabbard slammed Harris’ record as California’s attorney general, criticizing her for jailing thousands of marijuana offenders “and then laughing about it,” for her use of prison labor, and for blocking evidence that would have freed innocent men on death row. “There is no excuse for that and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology,” Gabbard said, leaving Harris unable to respond. Gabbard has long opposed US involvement in and funding of foreign conflicts. During her four terms in office from 2013 to 2021, she advocated dialogue with America’s rival superpowers, coupled with a hardline policy on Islamic terrorism. Like Trump, she has faced accusations of being a “Russian asset,” most notably from failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Gabbard responded to Clinton’s 2019 jab – likely a reference to her past praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fight against terrorism in Syria – by calling Clinton “queen of the warmongers” and suing her for defamation. Gabbard is the second high-profile former Democrat to endorse Trump in recent days, after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his third-party campaign and backed the former president on Friday. Gabbard and Kennedy have both cited President Joe Biden’s funding of the Ukrainian military and “weaponization” of the justice system and intelligence agencies against Trump as key factors behind their decision.

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Musk can pick his own role.

Trump Suggests Consulting Role for Musk in Cabinet If Elected (Sp.)

US presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk would likely be too busy to serve in his cabinet but suggested that the entrepreneur could play a consulting role in his administration if he wins the November election. “He wants to be involved. Now look, he’s running big businesses and all that, so he can’t, really, I don’t think he could be cabinet… He can sort of, as the expression goes, consult with the country and give you some very good ideas,” Trump told The Shawn Ryan Show, as quoted by US media. Trump emphasized that he had an excellent relationship with Musk, who stated earlier that he was willing to take up a position in the White House. The entrepreneur also posted an image of himself behind a podium, with the caption “Department of Government Efficiency.”

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“The Supreme Court had multiple opportunities during the last term to end the censorship of conservatives by social media. It chose a different path.”

This Election Is a Referendum on Free Speech (RCP)

The Supreme Court had multiple opportunities during the last term to end the censorship of conservatives by social media. It chose a different path. Now, Democrats are free to double down on the Biden-Harris administration’s massive censorship enterprise. There is every indication they intend to do so. The bedrock of American democracy, the First Amendment, prohibits Congress from making laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The prohibition also applies to executive actions and state governments. Until recently, there was bipartisan agreement on the centrality of free speech to American liberties. Today, nearly a third of Americans believe free speech rights go too far. When Donald Trump was elected president, Democrats in Congress threatened social media platforms with antitrust actions and repeal of the libel protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if they failed to rein in conservative speech.

When Joe Biden took office, the federal government institutionalized a censorship enterprise that coerced and collaborated with social media platforms to censor, suppress, and demonetize disfavored views. The New York Times acknowledges the left has long sought to limit “unfettered speech.” Former president Barak Obama told a Stanford University conference that government controls must be imposed to stop so-called “disinformation.” Vice President Kamala Harris announced a White House task force to block disinformation involving women’s issues. Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz told MSNBC, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” In fact, both are generally protected by the First Amendment. The Democrat platform sees controlling disinformation as a priority.

By contrast, in July, the Republicans adopted a platform that states: “We will ban the Federal Government from colluding with anyone to censor Lawful Speech, defund institutions engaged in censorship, and hold accountable all bureaucrats involved with illegal censoring. We will protect Free Speech online.” In Murthy v. Missouri, healthcare professionals, Missouri, and Louisiana sued to block the Biden-Harris censorship regime. During discovery, officials testified that they knowingly sought to end-run the prohibitions on government interference in free speech by working with and through third parties, including Stanford, non-profit associations, and social media companies. After reviewing extensive discovery, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty found that the Biden-Harris administration had engaged in “a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government” and issued an injunction to stop it.

A unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the findings but tailored the injunction to eliminate ambiguities and exclude some agencies. Florida and Texas then passed laws to make it more difficult for social media platforms to ban political speech. The 11th Circuit struck down Florida’s law, finding that it impermissibly limited editorial discretion, while the Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’ law, concluding that content moderation activities are not speech.

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“He also promised to have it “settled” as president-elect and not wait for the January inauguration.”

Trump Lauds Russia’s ‘Winter Fighting’ (RT)

Former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has expressed admiration for the Russian military’s warfighting skills and vowed to end the Ukraine conflict before the end of the year, if elected. Trump addressed the Russia-Ukraine conflict as part of an hour-long interview, posted on Monday. Advertised as “unfiltered stories of heroic events and current world issues,” the show is hosted by the former US Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan. “Russia’s a great winter fighter,” Trump told Ryan. “They beat Germany and they beat Napoleon. They’re not easy to beat. And they are a massive military, and Ukraine isn’t. But Ukraine has us giving them a lot of money.”

The US and its allies have channeled more than $400 billion in aid to Kiev since the conflict began in 2022, including over $120 billion in direct military aid, according to estimates from the Kiel Institute, a German think-tank tracking the contributions. Without going into the details, Trump objected to the US accounting for the lion’s share of the military aid, arguing the European members of NATO needed to “equalize” their contribution. “That war is much more devastating than people understand,” Trump said in the interview. He also promised to have it “settled” as president-elect and not wait for the January inauguration. Trump has repeatedly argued that the conflict would not have broken out had he stayed in the White House, instead of being replaced by Joe Biden in 2021. He has also claimed he would end the fighting within 24 hours.

The Shawn Ryan show was not the first time Trump has praised the Russian “war machine,” either. He first brought it up during a Fox News town hall in February, then again in July, recounting a phone call with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. Asked by Ryan what he would spend the $175 billion that the US Congress has appropriated for Ukraine aid, Trump pointed out that the US has over $30 trillion in national debt. The former president also lamented the fact that the Pentagon has managed to empty the stockpile he had worked so hard to replenish during his time in office. “These guys gave it all to Ukraine,” Trump told Ryan. “Now we have no ammunition again.”

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“As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

America’s Reckoning With Reality (Douglas Macgregor)

Why would the Uniparty inflict this damage on the American People? The Uniparty knows that, without common identity or kinship, democracy is replaced with tribal anarchy, a societal condition that leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality, and worse. The goal is painfully obvious. It is the denationalization of the United States, the fundamental destruction of national identity and the social cohesion that supports it. The process involves the conversion of Americans into an amorphous mass of sedated consumers. The transformation of the U. S. Armed Forces into mercenary military formations staffed by illegal migrants is an enormously important step in the direction of denationalization. After all, before Americans won their independence, their national identity rested on the shoulders of the Continental Army.

If General Washington could hold the Continental Army together despite fearful odds, our country and its governing body—congress—existed. The Continental Army was, and today’s Armed Forces still are, the repository of American national Identity. The Uniparty rejects these charges. Instead, the Uniparty tells us how fortunate we are to welcome tens of millions of foreigners into our country where they will enhance our culture, society and way of life. Really, how many “Rs” are there in “fat chance?” Meanwhile, the Uniparty promotes the sexualization of children in our public school systems. Naturally, the Uniparty pretends to care for the workingman or woman, and it promises everything to everyone for nothing in perpetuity—tuition-free college, free health care, free housing, free everything. The Uniparty is giving non-paying, illegal immigrants access to our healthcare system.

How the Uniparty will pay for these things is a question no one answers. Servicing the national debt on an annual basis already involves a sum larger than the defense budget. Are the presidential candidates aware? Do they care? For the Uniparty, none of these concerns matters. The daily life of the Uniparty is about self-enrichment, sensual pleasure, and social prestige. The Uniparty motto is “When in doubt, print more money.” Equally troubling is the Uniparty’s enthusiasm for war. In fact, the Uniparty sees enormous benefit to war, even to the point of turning over control of the U.S. Armed Forces to the direction of a foreign power for use in a major war that will escalate to involve other nuclear-armed powers.

But Americans are not stupid. Americans know that open borders are not a net benefit, and they know that modern war is not a game or an event that occurs only on foreign soil. The new, emerging constellation of potential adversaries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is no longer a loose collection of hapless opponents without armies, air forces, navies, air defenses, or persistent surveillance from seabed to space. President Abraham Lincoln was right: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The time for Americans to halt the destruction is upon us. The question is whether Americans will remain bystanders or intervene to save the Republic.

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“Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU..”

Is President Putin Preparing For Istanbul-II? (Helmer)

Remember the old adage — sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me. In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia since 1945, the propaganda war has been lost by the Russians many times over. That war is still being lost. But for the first time since 1945, the battlefield war is being won by the Russian General Staff. The uncertainty which remains is whether President Vladimir Putin will continue to restrict the General Staff’s war plans in order that Putin can go to negotiations with the Americans on terms which will forego the demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian territory between Kiev and the Polish border, and concede to the Kiev regime unhindered control of the cities to the east — Kharkov, Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk.

Call those terms Istanbul-II. As with the draft terms initialled in Istanbul at the end of March 2022, Istanbul-II amounts to an exchange of dominant Russian military power for US and Ukrainian signatures on paper with false intention and temporary duration. The US administration says it believes Putin will concede. It also believes that by staging its war of pinpricks — that’s the drone, artillery and missile barrages fired by the Ukrainian military, directed by the US and UK – in the Black Sea and Russia’s western border regions, Putin’s red lines and threats of retaliation are exposed as empty bluff. The same interpretation of Putin, and confidence that he will accept US terms, are the foundation of the Ukraine “peace plan” of Donald Trump’s advisors. The Trump plan’s offer of “some limited sanctions relief” reflects the conviction in Washington that Putin’s oligarch constituency can be bribed to push Putin into the same “frozen war” concessions as Roman Abramovich got Putin to accept at Istanbul-I – until the General Staff stopped them both.

Putin’s restrictions on the General Staff’s proposals for neutralizing the US and British air surveillance and electronic warfare operations; and his orders to stand by while the Ukrainians have assembled several thousand forces, first to cross into Kursk, and then into Bryansk and Belgorod, are now as visible in Moscow as they have been in Washington. Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU. They understood the battlefield intelligence as it was coming in and requested Putin’s agreement to respond. In retrospect, they say “we told you so”; they imply their hands were tied by the Kremlin orders.

“My understanding for now,” says one of the sources, “is that these are pinpricks that feel painful but they are not life threatening. Russia will not take any land, for now, other than the four regions. It should be the eight regions but it’s obvious Putin doesn’t have the will and the military does not have the capacity to hold. So we will see Ukrainians inside Kursk for a while. But it should be downplayed because it should not be allowed to be a bargain chip in negotiations the other side is aiming at.” Putin said this himself, the source points out at his meeting on August 12 with the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and others. “These [Kursk] actions clearly aim to achieve a primary military objective: to halt the advance of our forces in their effort to fully liberate the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, the Novorossiya region.”

Putin also said: “It is now becoming increasingly clear why the Kiev regime rejected our proposals for a peaceful settlement, as well as those from interested and neutral mediators…. It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future. However, what kind of negotiations can we have with those who indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian infrastructure, or pose threats to nuclear power facilities? What is there to discuss with such parties?” “It’s obvious at this point,” comments a military source, “that the Americans and Ukrainians have decided that Putin will come to terms if they snatch enough Russian territory and keep up their strikes behind the Russian lines…The Ukrainians are going for broke in the north while the centre collapses. But they know, no matter how expensive it is, the longer they remain on the attack, the worse it looks for the Russian leadership. They also have the measure of Putin who gives orders for half measures.”

This is also obvious in the Security Council in Moscow. The Council’s deputy secretary, ex-president Dmitri Medvedev, made the point explicitly in his Telegram account declaration on August 21, implying that until he had said it, no one else dared: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances; for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences.” Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I. “After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]”

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“Hezbollah has the “will and the ground resources it needs [to] have a very, very, very large impact on Israeli soil..”

Hezbollah Could End Normal Life in Israel, Drive Israelis ‘Underground’ (Sp.)

Tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have boiled over amid a series of increasingly powerful back-and-forth attacks. But neither side, nor their allies truly want a full-scale war, since it would end any semblance of normal life in Israel, sink Tehran’s hopes on the diplomatic front, and stretch US resources to a breaking point, observers say. Major airlines began canceling and diverting flights to and from Beirut and Tel Aviv over the weekend amid fears of all all-out war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel. The cancellations came in the wake of large-scale preemptive aerial attacks by as many as 100 Israeli warplanes against suspected Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon, with the militia launching a barrage of hundreds of drones and rockets at 5 am Sunday morning in retaliation to Tel Aviv’s assassination of senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut last month.

Smaller follow-up targeted back-and-forth air-drone and rocket attacks have been reported, with scores Hezbollah fighters, Israeli soldiers and civilians killed or injured in the latest escalation. In a televised speech Sunday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah cited the militia’s successful targeting of Israeli military and intelligence sites. Nasrallah said the delay in the militia’s response to Shukr’s July 30 murder was meant to provide time for the Gaza ceasefire talks to bear fruit – a chance he said was squandered by Prime Minister Netanyahu and the United States. “Our goal…is to end the aggression on Gaza, so we gave it [the ceasefire process, ed.] enough of an opportunity, but after all this time, it is clear that Netanyahu is putting in new conditions and the Americans are working with him and this is all a waste of time, so there was no reason to delay any longer,” Nasrallah said.

“Regional and international actors indirectly involved in this war such as the US and Iran have no intention to directly be involved,” American University of Beirut Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy international affairs section coordinator Yeghia Tashjian told Sputnik, commenting on the escalating tensions between Hezbollah and Israeli. Pointing to the factors of the upcoming US presidential election, plus Iran’s attempts at diplomatic rapprochement with Western countries following July’s elections, Tashjian said he believes the recent back-and-forth strikes, serious as they are, remain “managed clashes,” signaling that neither side is “ready to shift the current status into a major war.” There are other reasons Israel and the US in particular don’t truly want a full scale conflict, says Furkan Halit Yolcu, an academic and Middle East Institute faculty member at Turkiye’s Sakarya University.

Hezbollah, unlike Hamas, isn’t “a small-scale non-state actor,” but a force to be reckoned with approaching national armies in terms of its ground strength, and has missile and air defense power that can do great “harm and hurt” to any army attacking it, the observer told Sputnik. Hezbollah has the “will and the ground resources it needs [to] have a very, very, very large impact on Israeli soil,” Yolcu warned, noting that ordinary Israelis may literally be driven into underground bomb shelters their government has prepared for them, and see their day-to-day lives disrupted completely thanks to Hezbollah’s ability to saturate Israeli air and missile defenses.

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Sprinkler

 

 

Daughter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1828077033567469633

 

 

Elephant

 

 

Ride
https://twitter.com/i/status/1827958010389352673

 

 

BaldEagle

 

 

Pickup
https://twitter.com/i/status/1828057315645559188

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Aug 072024
 
 August 7, 2024  Posted by at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


Pablo Picasso In “Le Lapin Agile” or harlequin with a glass 1905

 

Kamala Can’t Win (Lippincott)
US Democrats Make Harris-Walz Ticket Official (RT)
Jenna Ellis Flips, Will Aid Arizona Prosecutors In 2020 Election Case (ZH)
Tulsi Gabbard Actively Under Surveillance via Quiet Skies Program (uDC)
This Boxer Is Male: IBA Press Conference To Address Olympic Gender Issue (MN)
The Road to War (Paul Craig Roberts)
The House Moves Forward With Investigation of Blacklisting Company (Turley)
Rumble Joins X In Massive Lawsuit Against ‘Advertising Cartel’ (ZH)
Elon Musk Revives Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Co-founders (ET)
CCP Develops AI Weapons, Ignoring Global Risks (ET)
800,000 Ukrainians Have Gone ‘Underground’ To Dodge Draft – MP (RT)
Venezuela Opens Probe Into Opposition Over ‘Insurrection’ Attempts (RT)
UK Riots: Blame It All On The ‘Far Right’ (Marsden)
UK Travel Alerts Issued Worldwide (RT)

 

 


1960 Soviet poster by Kovalev and Godgold: “To build your strength for work, you need sun, air and water”

 

 

Biden crash
https://twitter.com/i/status/1820473630805111043

 

 

13 seconds

 

 

Hawley

 

 

Raskin

 

 

benstiller

 

 

Half of everybody living in the Arab world is inbred. 70% of all Pakistanis are inbred.

 

 

 

 

Not legitimately, no. But…

Kamala Can’t Win (Lippincott)

Kamala is not a legitimate candidate for President. She is not popular. She is not inspiring. She has no base of support. She has no cogent policy proposals to better the country. She is a terrible public speaker with little to no grasp of national politics. She was airdropped into the 2024 campaign because her boss couldn’t string together a coherent sentence. She was selected as VP in the first place because she is a Black woman. Should the DC regime install Kamala, it will mean the end of our constitutional order and of free and fair elections. Kamala cannot legitimately win the presidency. Should the media declare her the winner on November 6, it would be an absurdity on the scale of journalists insisting that North Korean elections are free and fair. Kamala’s campaign is the ultimate ritual humiliation for the American electorate. The 2020 results were bad enough.

The DNC coup to remove Biden from the 2024 ticket was a stunning public admission that he was never the “most popular candidate” of all time and that the 81 million “votes” he “won” in 2020 were a mirage cooked up by ballot-harvesting, COVID protocols, and outright fraud. American voters stomached, barely, that illegitimate result because Trump always had the potential to come back. As long as there was a reasonable possibility of Trump winning, voters were willing to tolerate the absurdity of the Biden “victory.” The legitimacy of the American electoral system therefore rests entirely on Trump’s shoulders. The regime cannot survive the installation of another astroturfed and unpopular political leader into the highest office in the land. The weight of the sheer ridiculousness of it all will bring faith in our system of government crashing to the ground.

No reasonable person can believe that Kamala has any shot in this race. The entire Democrat campaign for the presidency has had to retool on the fly—they need new signs, a new rally schedule, and a new message—with only a dozen weeks to go in the race. Kamala possesses the worst of both worlds. As vice president, she both completely owns the legacy of the current administration but also has no real policy accomplishments to point to. Her brief foray as “border czar” was an unmitigated disaster Harris has no real contact with voters either. In the 2020 Democratic primary, Kamala did so badly in early polls and was beaten so soundly by Tulsi Gabbard in an early debate that she had to drop out before voting in Iowa even occurred. Kamala Harris isn’t just bad with voters; even her closest allies and staff dislike her.

As California attorney general, she insisted that her subordinates greet her every day with a “Good Morning, General” and refused to engage with low-level employees. Her office as vice president was known to be a hive of discontent with an extremely high turnover rate. Harris is a political radical once labeled the most liberal senator by GovTrack. She raised bail money for communist rioters during the 2020 riots. She supports gun confiscation and giving free healthcare to illegals. This isn’t popular among any significant sector of the American electorate. As it stands now, only a few thousand voters have even seen Kamala in person as a candidate. I have yet to see a single yard sign with her name on it anywhere I go here in Michigan. She is behind the power curve by months. Trump has already made multiple enormous public appearances in all of the swing states. Kamala isn’t even close to that kind of ground game.

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A real comedian: “Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school..”

US Democrats Make Harris-Walz Ticket Official (RT)

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be the running mate of current Vice President Kamala Harris, the US Democrats have announced, with two weeks still to go before the party’s convention. Walz’s nomination was leaked to the media earlier on Tuesday, sinking the hopes of the faction urging the choice of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. “I am proud to announce that I’ve asked TimWalz to be my running mate,” Harris said on X (formerly Twitter). “As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team. Now let’s get to work.” Walz responded by saying it was “the honor of a lifetime” to join the campaign. “Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school. So, let’s get this done, folks!” he said.

President Joe Biden, who last month bowed out of the campaign in favor of Harris, hailed the choice of Walz as “a great decision.” On his personal X account – the same venue where he announced his withdrawal – Biden praised Walz as “a strong, principled, and effective leader” and noted he was the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to ever serve in the US Congress. The Harris-Walz ticket “will ensure that America continues to lead the world and play its role as the indispensable nation,” Biden added. Former President Barack Obama also endorsed Walz as the running mate for Harris.

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The woman behind Ellis in the photo is Sidney Powell. Who was recently fully exonerated in the same case. As they got to Ellis. Curious.

Jenna Ellis Flips, Will Aid Arizona Prosecutors In 2020 Election Case (ZH)

A lawyer who worked on Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign will dodge a potential jail sentence by cooperating with Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, who’s charged 18 defendants with election interference over their participation in post-election challenges. Trump hasn’t been charged — yet — and is currently described as an unindicted co-conspirator. According to the agreement, nine felony charges against attorney Jenna Ellis have been dropped in exchange for her committing to “completely and truthfully” testify, and to turn over documents that could help prosecutors trying to build a case that centers on what Democrats like to call “fake electors.” These were Republicans who were encouraged by the Trump campaign to meet on Dec. 14, 2020 and sign a certificate asserting that they were “duly elected and qualified” electors, on the assumption that Trump had actually won the state’s 11 Electoral College votes.

“This agreement represents a significant step forward in our case,” said Attorney-General Kris Mayes in a statement issued Monday. “[Ellis’] insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court…I will not allow American democracy to be undermined — it is far too important.” In 2022, Mayes — who’s lauded by leftists for being openly lesbian and seeking to turn Arizona into an abortion safe haven for people in other states — defeated her Trump-endorsed opponent by just 510 votes out of more than 2.5 million. The remaining defendants — who’ve all plead not guilty — have been charged with nine felonies apiece, including forgery, conspiracy and fraudulent schemes. In addition to the self-proclaimed GOP electors, they include Rudy Giuliani and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The Arizona cases aren’t expected to reach the trial phase until next year. In June, lawyers for defendants filed challenges to the prosecution, saying it ran afoul of an Arizona law that, like similar statutes in other states, takes aim at what is called a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or “SLAPP.” A motion filed for charged Trump lawyer John Eastman asserted that… “[Arizona’s anti-SLAPP law] is quite clearly aimed at preventing public officials from using the criminal process as a weapon to punish and prevent speech on political issues…Public officials have the right to voice their disagreement through open discourse guaranteed by the First Amendment, but they should not use indictments to silence their opponents, as the attorney general has tried to do here.”

Ellis was also targeted by Georgia prosecutors. In October, she tearfully pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writing, telling a judge in an Atlanta courtroom that she regretted not having performed “due diligence” about the campaign’s claims of election fraud. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges.” She was sentenced to five years probation, $5,000 in restitution, 100 hours of community service and was ordered to write an apology letter addressing the citizens of Georgia. During the 2020 campaign, Ellis described herself as one member of an “elite strike force team” of attorneys, and frequently shared a microphone with Giuliani. She reportedly urged Trump to try persuading Mike Pence not to open election results from contested states on Jan. 6, 2021.

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“Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshalls on every flight she boards..”

Tulsi Gabbard Actively Under Surveillance via Quiet Skies Program (uDC)

In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists. The whistleblowers first shared the information with Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), a national advocacy group for the Federal Air Marshals (FAMs). According to LaBosco, at least one of the whistleblowers is ready to go on the record with pertinent documentation.

LaBosco shared that Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshalls on every flight she boards. LaBosco has attempted to contact Gabbard and her staff but has not received a response. LaBosco and AMNC President David Londo have repeatedly testified on behalf of FAMS. They have also written countless letters concerning the classification of innocent Americans as domestic terrorists to the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the House Homeland Committee, the Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the House Oversight Committee.

Because of ongoing whistleblower information, LaBosco believes TSA and Homeland Security are violating citizens’ constitutional rights in a “big domestic surveillance grab” that seems to be targeting conservatives. UncoverDC broke a story in November 2023 about A.J. Fischer’s infant son, who continues to be enrolled in the program because his father attended the Jan. 6 Capitol protests. J6 attendee Bryan Smith, who served 20 years with unblemished service, is also on the list. So is Christine Crowder, the wife of an active Air Marshal. Crowder was in D.C. on Jan. 6 but did not attend the Capitol protest. For what the Federal Government calls national security reasons, an individual is enrolled in the program without knowledge. Teams of Federal Air Marshals are assigned to individuals, following and tracking them from when they enter the airport and then on all their flights and transits until they reach their destination.

Enrolled individuals usually have a Quad S (SSSS) on the bottom right-hand corner of their boarding passes, but not always. They are often flagged for extra searches, frequently so lengthy that they miss their flights. According to LaBosco, Gabbard’s enrollment in Quiet Skies is likely politically motivated. Air Marshals were first assigned to Gabbard on Jul. 23, a day after she criticized Kamala Harris, Biden, and the National Security State in an interview with Laura Ingraham. FAMs were mobilized on Jul. 24 and assigned to their first flight with her on Jul. 25. Gabbard posted the interview on Twitter, as shared below.

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1815697038371397993

In the context of what has transpired since 2020, there is ample reason to speculate that Gabbard may have been placed on Quiet Skies because of her viewpoints and recent fallout with the Democratic Party. Gabbard fell out of favor with the Democratic party when she switched parties to become an Independent in 2022. In addition, during her 2020 Presidential Campaign, Gabbard was highly critical of U.S. interventionism and endless wars. She continues to be very outspoken and critical of the Biden administration. Hillary Clinton smeared Gabbard during the 2020 campaign by suggesting she was a “Russian asset.” Gabbard answered Clinton with a defamation lawsuit filed on Jan. 22, 2020.

LaBosco is outraged with what has transpired with FAMS over the past few years. What was a straightforward law enforcement function has now been shoved under the TSA, the federal government’s bloated administrative arm. LaBosco and Londo are working overtime to shut down the Quiet Skies program. However, their primary mission is to restore FAMs to their rightful place as law enforcement, not political pawns of the administrative state.

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“..both Khelif and Yu-ting were informed that they tested positive for XY chromosomes and were allowed to appeal the findings..”

Appeal what exactly?

This Boxer Is Male: IBA Press Conference To Address Olympic Gender Issue (MN)

The International Boxing Association (IBA) held a press conference Monday and categorically confirmed that the two fighters currently participating in Olympic women’s boxing are “male,” because they failed a previous gender chromosome test. As we have highlighted, a furore has erupted over Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria who are both now in the semi-finals of the women’s boxing in Paris. Both fighters were previously disqualified from competing in the women’s category by the IBA. During the IBA gathering, CEO Chris Roberts said that the 2022 test results for the fighters by an independent laboratory in Istanbul “demonstrated the chromosomes we refer to in competition rules that make both boxers ineligible.” Roberts emphasised that both Khelif and Yu-ting were informed that they tested positive for XY chromosomes and were allowed to appeal the findings to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, with the IBA offering to cover the costs. Roberts noted that Yu-ting chose not to appeal, and Khelif did initially but then withdrew the appeal.

Both boxers were then re-tested in India during the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships, with the same results being recorded. Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, the former Chair of the IBA Medical Committee, also spoke at the press conference and was adamant that the fighters should not be competing as women. “Medicine is knowledge, it is not opinion,” Filippatos said, adding: “One passport can give to us the opportunity to be men, and, tomorrow when I go back to Athens, it’s possible to go to my government and… change my name from Ioannis Filippatos to Ionnia Filippatos. That means I am a woman tomorrow? Please. The nature and the biological world do not change.” Some of the journalists became extremely agitated with Filippatos’ comments, but he doubled down, and explained that he is relaying medical test results. “Why are you attacking me?” he stated, adding “The blood results look and say — the laboratories — that this boxer is male,” he asserted.

The IOC, refuses to back down from describing the fighters as women, with spokesperson Mark Adams claiming “These athletes have been competing in senior competitions for six years with no issues. These women were eligible for this contest, remain eligible for this contest and compete in this contest.” “I cannot tell you if they were credible or not credible [gender tests] because the source from which they came was not credible and the basis for the tests was not credible,” Adams further claimed, despite the source being the IBA. “For that reason there was no consideration of whether they were correct or not correct because they had no bearing for the eligibility of boxing here,” Adams added. Khelif is scheduled to fight later today in the Welterweight semi-final, and Yu-ting will fight tomorrow in the Featherweight semi-final.

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“..they have failed to understand that it is not their choice and that they are bringing on war by failing to stand up to Washington and Israel..”

The Road to War (Paul Craig Roberts)

It is OK for Israel and Washington to escalate the situation, but not for Iran or Russia. Here is the way it works. Israel assassinates a Muslin leader on Iranian territory, and then the media goes into action calling on Iran not to escalate the situation. Iran doesn’t, and from Iran not “escalating the situation” another leader is assassinated. Iran is again called on not to escalate the situation. The reason we are headed to war is that Russia, Iran, and China are provoked time and again, and their response is to wait, and wait, and wait some more while Washington and Israel get prepared, thus reducing the effectiveness of any action taken by Russia, Iran, and China. Iran has now waited so long before responding to Israel’s assassinations that Israel has had time to prepare an underground bunker for Netanyahu and his war party. Iran had a chance to catch them in the open and blew it.

Now Iran says it wants to punish Israel but avoid all-out war. No meaningful action will be forthcoming from Iran. Putin waited eight years from 2014 to 2022 before he accepted the obvious fact that he had to act in Donbas. If he had acted in 2014 there would have been no war. Like Russia and Iran China issues endless “warnings.” But as the warnings never are backed by action, no one pays any attention to the warnings. Russia, Iran, and China are right not to want war. But they have failed to understand that it is not their choice and that they are bringing on war by failing to stand up to Washington and Israel.

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“..blacklisting systems are now being used to control public access to information by choking off the revenue of sites..”

TAE knows what that is like.

The House Moves Forward With Investigation of Blacklisting Company (Turley)

We have been discussing media rating systems being used to target advertisers and revenue sources for certain cites and companies. NewsGuard and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have been criticized as the most sophisticated components of a modern blacklisting system targeting conservative or dissenting voices. I recently had a series of exchanges with NewGuard after a critical column. Now, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence. The demand to preserve evidence went to various companies, including Adidas, American Express, Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS and General Motors.

In my new book, I discuss the rating systems as a new and insidious form of blacklisting. Notably, Elon Musk has now filed a lawsuit against GARM and may be able to get more evidence out in discovery on the operations of this outfit. It is an effort to strangle the financial life out of sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.”

At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation. Once GDI’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the GARM, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams. Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”

GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA sites refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.” Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views. Rakowitz has denounced the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and how civil libertarians cite “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).” He appears to be referring to free speech. If so, it is deeply troubling. Some of us believe that free speech is a human right, not just an American right. Those “white men” include philosophers from the Enlightenment whose ideas were incorporated in the Framer’s view of inalienable rights like free speech.

The threat against free speech today is being led by private groups seeking to exercise an unprecedented level of control over people can read and discuss. Pundits and politicians, including President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, have justified their calls for censorship (or “content moderation” for polite company) by stressing that the First Amendment only applies to the government, not private companies. That distinction allows Obama to declare himself to be “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist.” He did not call himself a “free speech absolutist” because he favors censorship for views that he considers to be “lies,” “disinformation,” or “quackery.”

The distinction has always been a disingenuous evasion. The First Amendment is not the sole or exclusive definition of free speech. Censorship on social media is equally, if not more, damaging for free speech. Those who value free speech should oppose blacklisting systems, as was the case during the McCarthy period. Now that conservatives and libertarians are being blacklisted, it is suddenly less troubling for many on the left. Rakowitz now wields massive influence over public discourse in this collaboration with corporations and groups like GDI. As was done to the left in during the McCarthy period, blacklisting systems are now being used to control public access to information by choking off the revenue of sites. The current anti-free speech movement is the most dangerous in history due precisely to this sophistication and the unprecedented alliance of corporate, media, academic, and government interests.

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A dirty world.

Rumble Joins X In Massive Lawsuit Against ‘Advertising Cartel’ (ZH)

Social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against an ‘advertising cartel’ who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on last month by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee. In a Tuesday filing against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and several members – including CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever, X alleges that the group abused its influence over marketers and ad agencies to unfairly discriminate against X, prompting an ad boycott. “These actions were all against the unilateral self-interest of the advertisers; they made economic sense only in furtherance of a conspiracy performed in the confidence that competing advertisers were doing the same,” reads the complaint. In an open letter, X CEO Linda Yaccarino alleged that GARM’s “behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue,” adding “It’s also clear that there are likely others who suffered at the hands of this activity.

This case is about more than damages – we have to fix a broken ecosystem that allows this illegal activity to occur.” Shortly after lawsuit was filed, video-sharing platform Rumble joined the lawsuit. The conspiracy centers around an initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), created by the WFA, that established arbitrary standards for the content on digital platforms where its members may want to advertise. GARM used those one-size-fits-all standards to perpetrate an advertiser boycott against Rumble and other platforms. The suit also notes that GARM has vast reach since it counts the six largest ad agency holding companies among its members, including defendant WPP. The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.

As we noted last month, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019. This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually. GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of “brand safety.” As Axios notes;

“Last month, conservatives on Capitol Hill held a hearing to address complaints from conservative media firms, mainly the Daily Wire, that GARM was colluding with ad-buying giant GroupM to discourage clients from buying ads on their sites because of conservative politics. The lawsuit references a report published earlier this month by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee that argues that GARM used “shadowy corporate coordination” to silence conservatives.” Meanwhile, Jonathan Turley also notes that House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence.

[..] Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.” GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA sites refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.” Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views.

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“..Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero..”

Elon Musk Revives Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Co-founders (ET)

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, X, and SpaceX, has reignited a legal battle against OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, months after initially dropping his lawsuit. The revived complaint, filed Aug. 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the defendants of multiple counts, including fraud, breach of contract, and violations of federal civil racketeering laws. Musk had originally sued in February before dropping the suit in June with no explanation given at the time. Musk’s revived lawsuit includes several allegations against OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman—at the heart of which is a claim that Altman and Brockman “intentionally courted and deceived” Musk into co-founding OpenAI under false pretenses. Musk asserted in the 81-page suit that he was misled into believing that OpenAI would be a nonprofit organization focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies “for the benefit of humanity,” operating as a counterbalance to for-profit tech giants.

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s co-founders allegedly manipulated Musk by making repeated promises and assurances that the organization would remain open-source and not driven by profit. The suit defines “open source” as the practice of making AI technology and research freely accessible to the public, allowing for transparency and collaboration. “Altman assured Musk that the non-profit structure guaranteed neutrality and a focus on safety and openness for the benefit of humanity, not shareholder value,” the suit claimed. “But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy—the hook for Altman’s long con.” Musk claims that these representations were part of a scheme to attract significant funding and expertise, which he provided, including “tens of millions of dollars” and the recruitment of top AI scientists. The complaint further accuses Altman and Brockman of engaging in “rampant self-dealing” and transforming OpenAI into a for-profit entity in partnership with Microsoft, thereby abandoning its original mission.

Musk argued that OpenAI’s pivot to a for-profit model has resulted in substantial unjust enrichment for the defendants, which he contends was at the expense of the nonprofit’s mission. OpenAI responded to the latest legal filing in a statement. “As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” a spokesperson for the company told The Associated Press in an emailed statement. In March, OpenAI released emails purportedly written by Musk showing initial support for making the company for-profit to secure the necessary funding to compete with Google DeepMind. Musk also supported the idea of merging OpenAI with Tesla. “We may wish it otherwise, but, in my and [redacted]’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero,” Musk wrote in an email dated Feb. 1, 2018.

Musk’s legal team has outlined several demands for relief, including compensatory and punitive damages, restitution, and surrendering ill-gained profits. The lawsuit seeks to impose a “constructive trust” on the alleged ill-gotten gains of the defendants, demands an accounting of all profits derived from the purported misconduct, and requests a judicial declaration that the licensing agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft is “null and void” or that certain OpenAI technologies fall outside the scope of this license. Additionally, the complaint seeks an injunction to prevent further harm, alleging that the defendants’ actions have caused substantial injury to Musk’s reputation and commercial interests, impacting his ability to recruit leading scientists.

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Why AI can be worrisome.

CCP Develops AI Weapons, Ignoring Global Risks (ET)

Cutting-edge weapons powered by artificial intelligence are emerging as a global security hazard, especially in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to several experts. Eager to militarily surpass the United States, the CCP is unlikely to heed safeguards around lethal AI technologies, which are increasingly dangerous in their own right, the experts have argued. The nature of the technology is prone to feeding some of the worst tendencies of the regime and the human psyche in general, they warned. “The implications are quite dramatic. And they may be the equal of the nuclear revolution,” said Bradley Thayer, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, an expert on a strategic assessment of China, and a contributor to The Epoch Times. The development of AI-powered autonomous weapons unfortunately is rapidly progressing, according to Alexander De Ridder, an AI developer and co-founder of Ink, an AI marketing firm.

“They’re becoming quickly more efficient and quickly more effective,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that “they’re not at the point where they can replace humans.” Autonomous drones, tanks, ships, and submarines have become a reality along with more exotic modalities, such as the quadruped robot dogs, already armed with machine guns in China. Even AI-powered humanoid robots, the stuff of sci-fi horrors, are in production. Granted, they’re still rather clumsy in the real world, but they won’t be for long, De Ridder suggested. “The capabilities for such robots are quickly advancing,” he said. Once they reach marketable usefulness and reliability, China is likely to turn its manufacturing might to their mass production, according to De Ridder. “The market will be flooded with humanoid robots, and then it’s up to the programming how they’re used.” That would mean military use, too. “It’s kind of inevitable,” he said.


China International Industry Fair in Shanghai on Nov. 2, 2015. (Getty Images)

Such AI-powered machines are very effective at processing images to discern objects—to detect a human with their optical sensors, for example, explained James Qiu, an AI expert, founder of GIT Research Institute, and former CTO at FileMaker. That makes AI robots very good at targeting. “It’s a very effective killing machine,” he said. On a broader level, multiple nations are working on an AI capable of informing and coordinating battlefield decisions—an electronic general, according to Jason Ma, an AI expert and data research lead at a multinational Fortune 500 company. He didn’t want the company’s name mentioned to prevent any impression he was speaking on its behalf. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the CCP military, recently conducted battle exercises in which an AI was directly put in command. The U.S. military also has projects in this area, Ma noted.

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“..Ukrainians collectively pay anywhere between $700 million and $2 billion per year for fraudulent ways to avoid mobilization..”

800,000 Ukrainians Have Gone ‘Underground’ To Dodge Draft – MP (RT)

An estimated 800,000 Ukrainian men have gone “underground” due to the threat of military mobilization amid the conflict with Russia, a senior MP in Kiev, Dmitry Natalukha, has told the Financial Times. The lawmaker stated the case for economic-driven exemptions from the draft. Kiev introduced a harsh new system for military conscription earlier this year, which was intended to discourage draft avoidance through the threat of serious punishment. One consequence was that businesses operating legally in Ukraine are now at a disadvantage compared to those in the ‘shadow economy,’ the FT explained. Draft-dodgers change their addresses and prefer to be paid in cash to stay under the radar, it added. “We are working at the limit,” the HR director of a large steel mill told the newspaper, explaining the issues his company faces due to workforce shortages.

The FT reported on Sunday how Ukrainian MPs plan to tackle the problem by revamping the system for draft exemptions. One proposal penned by Natalukha, the chair of the Economic Development Committee, would allow businesses to shield up to 50% of their employees from mobilization by paying a fixed fee of about $490 per month. A competing bill would protect anyone with a wage over a threshold of $890, who are presumably of greater value to the war effort when contributing to the economy than they would be if sent to fight. Natalukha told the FT that his proposal would keep around 895,000 men from military service and generate roughly $4.9 billion for Kiev’s war chest.

He previously argued in Ukrainian media that his bill is preferable to the alternative because it does not fuel the perception that only poor people who cannot bribe their way out of the draft have to fight. Ukrainians collectively pay anywhere between $700 million and $2 billion per year for fraudulent ways to avoid mobilization, he estimates. The current system allows the government to decide which agencies and businesses are essential for Ukraine and offer them partial or full immunity from mobilization. An update last month, for instance, issued waivers to 100% of the employees of NGOs that receive foreign grants and are engaged in political activities. Moscow perceives the conflict as a US-driven proxy war, in which Ukrainians serve as “cannon fodder” and are forced to fight by their Western-dependent government.

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“..usurpation of functions, dissemination of false information to cause unrest, incitement to disobey the law, incitement to insurrection, association to commit crimes and conspiracy.”

Venezuela Opens Probe Into Opposition Over ‘Insurrection’ Attempts (RT)

Venezuela has launched a criminal investigation into Western-backed opposition figures Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado, after they called on the armed forces to abandon their support for the country’s legitimate president, Nicolas Maduro. Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) on July 28 declared Maduro the winner of the country’s presidential election. On Friday, Venezuelan authorities ratified Maduro’s victory after the final ballot count revealed that he had won 52% of the vote, compared to 43% for main rival Gonzalez. The opposition contested Maduro’s victory and proclaimed Gonzalez as the elected president in a letter posted on X (formerly Twitter), also calling on the country’s security forces to “stand by the people” and protest the result.

Gonzalez and Machado “falsely announced a winner of the presidential election other than the one proclaimed by the National Electoral Council, the only body qualified to do so,” Venezuela’s top prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, said in a statement on Monday. The former presidential candidate and his allies have openly incited “police and military officials to disobey the laws” by spreading false information, the statement added. The prosecutor general said Gonzalez and Machado will be investigated for “the alleged commission of the crimes of usurpation of functions, dissemination of false information to cause unrest, incitement to disobey the law, incitement to insurrection, association to commit crimes and conspiracy.” Protests erupted in the South American country following the announcement of the election results. Maduro condemned the unrest an attempted “coup against Venezuela.”

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez also accused the Western-backed opposition of attempting a “media coup” and condemned the protests. Washington backed the opposition candidate, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying on Thursday that “Edmundo Gonzalez won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.” Caracas has been under US sanctions for over 15 years. Washington refused to recognize Maduro as president following the 2018 election, and declared the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, to be the interim leader of the country. Following Maduro’s reelection, Russia and China congratulated the incumbent. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that Venezuela’s opposition should admit defeat and congratulate the winner. Other countries that have recognized Maduro’s victory include Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

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“..that doesn’t mean that there aren’t also legitimate underlying issues in desperate need of resolution..”

UK Riots: Blame It All On The ‘Far Right’ (Marsden)

Every summer now, Canada is rife with forest fires. Some exploit the disasters to push an agenda, arguing that it’s a surefire sign of climate change, and ignoring that a lack of environmentally inconvenient controlled burns are the actual culprit. The same could be said for the riots that have swept Britain since three children were murdered in Southport at a day camp by a British 17-year old of Rwandan origin. The British government has long known that the migration issue was out of control, and newly-elected Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has found the culprit. It’s the “far-right” Brits that are “targeting” Muslim and “other minority communities.” Because who, en route to doing a little shopping in Mayfair, isn’t tired of passing their “Nazi salutes in the street” as they stretch their arms in between putting beatdowns on cops, as Starmer suggests.

The “far-right” is to these riots what “climate change” is to forest fires: a politically useful pretext to deflect from the long-festering negligence of the political class. It’s not like the average Brit is buying Starmer’s gaslighting. In fact, Starmer himself owes his recent electoral win to the growing popularity of the right wing, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party significantly eating into the popular vote of the center-right Tories last month. These are voters who feel that Rishi Sunak’s Tories didn’t go far enough in an election where “immigration and asylum” was the second most important issue for voters, (after cost of living), according to a YouGov poll. When nearly a fifth of your population has just finished telling pollsters that the immigration issue dictates their vote, it’s probably a dumb idea to get up in front of them and suggest that the real problem is those who are just imagining that to be an actual issue, because they’re a bunch of racists.

It probably doesn’t help that the Brit accused in this particular attack is of Rwandan origin, when Rwanda has been all over the UK headlines for former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers there – an initiative that Starmer has now cancelled. Much has been made in the Western press of all the erroneous allegations flying around in the initial wake of the attack suggesting that the alleged perpetrator was an asylum seeker himself. The fog of war always comes on thick around breaking news, particularly online. But what’s the actual argument here? That the guy’s not actually a migrant himself so people should calm down? Everything’s just fine then, because this one single case, upon closer inspection, doesn’t actually tick the boxes for what the establishment considers to be a legitimate expression of anger?

Also complicating the issue is the fact that Southport itself has long been described by locals as a festering cesspool of crime, drugs, and violence, where teenagers seem to be out of control. The High Parkers drug gang that has plagued the area doesn’t seem to have a visible minority in sight among their mugshots, but various things can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive. Southport clearly has a long-documented crime problem. The crime isn’t exclusively committed by minorities. The suspect is of minority origin in this case. The UK has a migration problem that transcends this single incident, but which it has clearly served to catalyze. And not everyone who’s evoking the problem within the convenient context this incident provides is just a racist yob.

While every protest or riot is an opportunity for special interests to exploit, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t also legitimate underlying issues in desperate need of resolution. How hard would it have been for Starmer to acknowledge all of these realities instead of just whitewashing everything by trying to make people believe that there’s no actual problem anywhere here beyond the “far-right”?

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It ain’t over..

UK Travel Alerts Issued Worldwide (RT)

Several countries, including Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, have issued safety warnings to their citizens about travelling to the UK in light of widespread anti-immigration protests across the country. Multiple demonstrations turned violent across Britain over the weekend, as anti-immigration protesters clashed with police following the murder of three children by a teenager of African descent last week. According to media reports, at least five countries have now issued travel warnings to their citizens. Malaysia was the first country to issue a notice to its citizens in the UK on Sunday, urging them to “stay away from protest areas” and “remain vigilant.”

The Indonesian Embassy in London issued a similar appeal, urging its citizens in the UK to be cautious, especially if traveling or doing activities outside the home, and to “avoid large crowds and places that have the potential to become gathering places for masses or groups of demonstrators.” Nigeria issued a travel alert on Monday, warning its citizens planning to visit the UK that demonstrations in parts of the UK have been “large and in some instances unruly” and that “there is an increased risk of violence and disorder.” In its warning on Monday, the Australian government also advised its citizens to “exercise a high degree of caution,” saying: “Avoid areas where protests are occurring due to the potential for disruption and violence.”

On Monday, the official account of the UAE Embassy in London urged citizens of the country to “exercise the necessary precautions and avoid crowded areas.” India is the latest nation to have issued a warning. On Tuesday morning, the High Commission of India in London reportedly said it was “closely monitoring the situation,” and warned Indian citizens to “stay vigilant and exercise due caution while traveling in the UK” and avoid any areas where protests may be taking place. Dozens of British towns and cities have been rocked by protests against immigration and Islam since last Monday, when a British teenager of Rwandan descent stabbed three children to death and injured ten others in the town of Southport, near Liverpool.

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Cybertrump

 

 

Horse calf

 

 

Yes!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1820470529901699128

 

 

Sunbathing
https://twitter.com/i/status/1820744639197896823

 

 

Condor

 

 

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Feb 082022
 


Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Fire 1566

 

Wake-Up Call (Jim Kunstler)
Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations (Auth.)
Vaccination Data Update (Fenton)
Tracking Cryptic SARS-CoV-2 Lineages Detected In NYC Wastewater (Nature)
Embalmer Richard Hirschman Reveals Novel Clotting In 65% Of Cases (Kirsch)
Spike Protein As Oncogenic “Seed” (Chesnut)
Biden Officials Trying To Recalculate US Covid-19 Hospitalizations (Pol.)
Harm to AstraZeneca Jab’s Reputation ‘Probably Killed Thousands’ (G.)
Were Masks A Waste Of Time? (Unherd)
So You’ve Seen The Canadian Truckers, Right? (Denninger)
Rumble Offers Joe Rogan $100 Million for a 4-Year Censorship-Free Contract (TC)
US Senator Asks Biden To Release Leonard Peltier (LP)
EU Sounds Alarm Over Russian Gas Supply (RT)
NY Times, Washington Post Driving US to War with Russia Over Ukraine (MPN)
“Censored” NFTs Raising Funds To Help Julian Assange (CD)

 

 

 

 

The only people still afraid of covid are vaccinated against it.

 

 

Dangerous men

 

 

 

 

Armstrong Schwab Young leaders

 

 

Brand/Stelter

 

 

“It’s rumored that the Canadian military told Mr. Trudeau in plain un-Woke Canadian English to fuck-off..”

Wake-Up Call (Jim Kunstler)

[..] Justin Trudeau — arguably the most fatuous would-be tyrant in the former “Free World” — has failed to emerge from his hidey-hole for the better part of a week, perhaps afraid of his seeing his shadow like the groundhog of legend, and it begins to look as if his days as Prime Minister grow short. It’s rumored that the Canadian military told Mr. Trudeau in plain un-Woke Canadian English to fuck-off, they will not take orders to put down the trucker’s protest, and even the Mounties are wobbling, so it’s left to the Ottawa police, who threaten to arrest anyone aiding the truckers with food, water, and fuel. Wait and see how quickly that will turn to fighting in the streets. Constitutional crisis, ay?

Meanwhile, a dozen or so other members of the Western Civ Club of Nations are ditching their Covid-19 mandates and restrictions. The reason: despite the mighty forces of deliberate organized mind-fuckery and resulting mass delusion, the Covid-19 “vaccines” are finally revealed as a criminal fraud, a danger to all who submitted to them, and an insult to the age-old accrued intelligence of the human race as used-to-be represented by science, ethics, and law. And still, America’s own putative leader, the empty suit known as “Joe Biden,” had the temerity to go on TV last week and once again tell his sore-beset people to “get vaccinated… get your kids vaccinated!” Who does he think he’s speaking to? The counter-information to Tony Fauci’s criminal bullshit is flooding the zone, despite America’s sinister Intel Community attempting to control the captured and discredited legacy news media.

Just last night CBS’s 60-Minutes told its audience that our hospitals are overwhelmed by the unvaccinated with Covid, which is an outright lie. Maybe we should start asking: who are the individual producers and network executives responsible for this arrant mendacity? Would it be interesting to see them in a court of law, having to answer whether they believe their own bullshit? Or is someone telling them to sell it? Some powerful counter-information to The Official Narrative emerged last week from the US military’s own Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) when several whistleblower doctors revealed to attorney Tom Renz heretofore suppressed statistics on the shocking increase in vaccine injuries among young, otherwise able-bodied soldiers.

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Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos, Peter A McCullough

Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations (Auth.)

The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the widely perceived public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease had no precedent, but desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures. The mRNA vaccines utilize genetically modified mRNA encoding spike proteins. These alterations hide the mRNA from cellular defenses, promote a longer biological half-life for the proteins, and provoke higher overall spike protein production. However, both experimental and observational evidence reveals a very different immune response to the vaccines compared to the response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. As we will show, the genetic modifications introduced by the vaccine are likely the source of these differential responses.


In this paper, we present the evidence that vaccination, unlike natural infection, induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. We explain the mechanism by which immune cells release into the circulation large quantities of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances are shown to have a potentially direct causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, increased tumorigenesis, and DNA damage. We show evidence from adverse event reports in the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines excludes them as positive contributors to public health, even in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Heart injury occurring in children below the age of 12

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I wrote the other day that I was seeing more reports linking the vaccines to cancer. This Twitter thread from @Parsifaler dives into that.

Spike Protein As Oncogenic “Seed” (Chesnut)

SPIKE PROTEIN AS RAS CUE BALL: THE ONCOGENIC CASCADE- SPIKE PROTEIN AS ONCOGENIC “SEED”. It is not only what it stakes claim to, but also what it removes. I can’t think of anything more carcinogenic than the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2. LOCAL RAS WORKS IN A PARACRINE FASHION. Think of the Spike Protein as a cue ball that sets off a cascade to CREATE A TUMOR MICROENVIRONMENT while SIMULTANEOUSLY inducing the EPIGENETIC MODULATIONS to COMMENCE A TUMOR. JUST LIKE A SEED, the Spike Protein (tumor) not only can “grow” itself (once it takes hold), it can also FEED ITSELF by CREATING IT’S OWN IDEAL ENVIRONMENT.


After all, is what follows not exactly what the Spike Protein does? Local RAS works synergistically and independently of systemic RAS in a paracrine fashion. Ang II mediates effects that reduce tumor perfusion and oxygenation, resulting in hypoxia and subsequent acidosis within the tumor stroma. For example, local Ang II, predominantly exists in hypoxic regions of nasopharyngeal carcinoma and breast cancer cells, where it is autocrinely produced by chymase-dependant rather than ACE dependent mechanism. In which case the action of ACEi will not be effective to inhibit tumor growth.

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“..the vaccinated – and especially the triple vaccinated are disproportionately being hospitalized with Covid.”

Vaccination Data Update (Fenton)

The letter exposes – on a small but important scale – much of what we have been saying about the misrepresentation and manipulation of data comparing vaccinated v unvaccinated.How massively exaggerated are claims about unvaccinated dominating Covid hospitalizations. The original FOI request already revealed the extent to which widespread claims that ‘the vast majority of patients with Covid are unvaccinated’ are wrong: it stated that only 14 out of the 182 patients hospitalized with Covid in Blackpool Victoria on 22 Jan 2022 were unvaccinated (i.e. over 92% were vaccinated).


How the data on the vaccinated is continually changed and manipulated. When it was pointed out that the data seemed to be suggesting that NONE of the vaccinated patients had been triple vaccinated, the hospital conceded that there had been ‘1 small error’ which just happened to be the fact that 130 of those who had been previously classified as having 2 doses, had in fact had three doses (and there was indeed there were two other genuinely small errors, namely that 162 and not 161 as previously stated had at least 2 doses, while only 13 rather than 14 were unvaccinated). So in total 93% were vaccinated and: • 7% were vaccine-free (a more accurate term than ‘unvaccinated’) • 4% had one dose •17.6% had two doses • 71.4% had 3 doses. Here is the Government’s latest data today on proportion of people vaccinated in Blackpool:

Note that this is dated 5 Feb, so the proportion of triple vaccinated on 22 Jan will have been lower that the 56.9% currently showing. Whichever way you look at it the vaccinated – and especially the triple vaccinated are disproportionately being hospitalized with Covid.

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@EthicalSkeptic: “Omicron lineages continue to show as more diverse than is possible for a recently-appeared variant.”

Tracking Cryptic SARS-CoV-2 Lineages Detected In NYC Wastewater (Nature)

Tracking SARS-CoV-2 genetic diversity is strongly indicated because diversifying selection may lead to the emergence of novel variants resistant to naturally acquired or vaccine-induced immunity. To monitor New York City (NYC) for the presence of novel variants, we deep sequence most of the receptor binding domain coding sequence of the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from the New York City wastewater. Here we report detecting increasing frequencies of novel cryptic SARS-CoV-2 lineages not recognized in GISAID’s EpiCoV database. These lineages contain mutations that had been rarely observed in clinical samples, including Q493K, Q498Y, E484A, and T572N and share many mutations with the Omicron variant of concern.


Some of these mutations expand the tropism of SARS-CoV-2 pseudoviruses by allowing infection of cells expressing the human, mouse, or rat ACE2 receptor. Finally, pseudoviruses containing the spike amino acid sequence of these lineages were resistant to different classes of receptor binding domain neutralizing monoclonal antibodies. We offer several hypotheses for the anomalous presence of these lineages, including the possibility that these lineages are derived from unsampled human COVID-19 infections or that they indicate the presence of a non-human animal reservoir.


A Schematic of SARS-CoV-2 and the amplification locations. B Distribution of SARS-COV-2 variants based on patient sequences (patient data obtained from GISAID) and wastewater surveillance. Polymorphisms detected from amplicon sequencing that were used to assign sequences to lineages are shown in the legend. The variants detected from the 14 NYC WWTPs were weighted by flowrate to generate a city-wide average distribution. C Novel lineages detected from WWTPs. Schematic highlights shared sequences identified from WWTP 10, 11, and 3 are shown. The percent of the sequences from each date that contained the indicated polymorphisms is shown below each lineage. The viral copies/L corresponding to each date are shown in Supplementary Table 3. Some sequences have additional polymorphisms not listed. WNY lineage designations are shown for sequences used for tropism and antibody neutralization analysis. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

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Autopsies, embalming, that’s where you should see what is really going on.

Embalmer Richard Hirschman Reveals Novel Clotting In 65% Of Cases (Kirsch)

Richard Hirschman has been an embalmer for over 20 years. In 2021, he started noticing very odd blood clots that he had never seen before. In Jan 2022, 65% of his cases exhibited these clots. The only rational conclusion is that the clots, which are deadly, are all associated with the COVID vaccines. Nobody from the mainstream media or medical community wants to touch this story. It’s not just Richard who is seeing this; it is everyone in the industry he’s talked to about it. They are all seeing it, but Richard is the only person in the US (so far) willing to speak out about it.


[..] Hirschman’s data is explosive because it establishes a relative proportion of people affected which we can then use to establish an absolute rate of death. So let’s say the actual rate of vaccine-caused deaths is 40% of all deaths which is less than the 65% rate that Hirschman is seeing. The CDC says around 65,000 people die a week. So that would be 26,000 people a week killed by the vaccine. He started noticing these deaths in May (they could have started sooner), so let’s just say it’s only been in the last 6 months to be conservative. 26 weeks *26,000 deaths/week=676,000 vaccine-related deaths. That’s a lot of deaths. So you see why this observation is explosive.

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Are they going to correct the umbers of the past 2 years as well?

Biden Officials Trying To Recalculate US Covid-19 Hospitalizations (Pol.)

The Biden administration is working on recalculating the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S., according to two senior officials familiar with the matter. A task force comprised of scientists and data specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with hospitals nationwide to improve Covid-19 reporting. The group is asking hospitals to report numbers of patients who go to the facility because they have Covid-19 and separate those from individuals who go in for other reasons and test positive after being admitted, the two officials said. The administration’s goal is to get a more accurate sense of Covid-19’s impact across the country and whether the virus is causing severe disease.


Senior Biden health officials have increasingly relied on hospitalization numbers, rather than case counts, to determine how to respond to the virus as well as the efficacy of the vaccines. Lower hospitalization rates could inform the administration’s thinking on public health measures such as masking. More accurate Covid-19 numbers also could provide a better picture of the strain on hospitals and which resources they might need during surges. Recalculating the hospitalization rate will not be easy, said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and former advisory board member of the Covid Tracking Project, a team that worked to collect and synthesize local Covid-19 data during the peak of the pandemic.

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Odd, but then, it’s the Guardian.

“I think bad behaviour from scientists and from politicians has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people – and that they cannot be proud of that..”

Harm to AstraZeneca Jab’s Reputation ‘Probably Killed Thousands’ (G.)

Scientists and politicians “probably killed hundreds of thousands of people” by damaging the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine, according to an Oxford scientist who worked on the jab. Prof John Bell said: “They have damaged the reputation of the vaccine in a way that echoes around the rest of the world.” “I think bad behaviour from scientists and from politicians has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people – and that they cannot be proud of that,” he told a BBC Two documentary When the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab was rolled out in the UK government advisers recommended under-40s should be offered an alternative due to a link to very rare blood clots. Fears over the links to blood clots also led other countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, Iceland and Thailand, to pause their use of the vaccine.


The AstraZeneca vaccine has also not played a significant role in the booster programme. The BBC reported it accounted for only 48,000 of the more than 37m booster doses given in the UK. The AZ vaccine was celebrated as a UK success story and billed as “Britain’s gift to the world” when it was developed. It was designed to be cheap, and developers had the ambition that it should be available at low cost. Unlike the mRNA vaccines, it could be transported at low cost and stored at fridge temperature. Nearly half of the adult population in the UK received two doses of the vaccine. The AZ vaccine’s approval in the UK coincided with Britain’s separation from the EU. “I don’t think it made relations with Europe any easier that it was promoted as the British vaccine,” Bell told the documentary, AstraZeneca: A Vaccine for the World, to be broadcast on the BBC on Tuesday at 9pm.

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“The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on.”

Were Masks A Waste Of Time? (Unherd)

The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on. Mask mandates have been, in Miller’s phrase, “a population-wide experiment”, but few within the US scientific and medical establishment have seemed interested in parsing the resulting data, leaving that task to outsiders like Miller. Astonishingly, there have been just two randomised controlled trials on masking published since the pandemic began. One found no significant effect at all, while the other found a small effect of 11% for surgical masks and no significant effect for cloth ones. The first was largely ignored or dismissed, while the second was optimistically glossed as proving that masks work.

Moreover, even the most bullish case for the technical efficacy of at least some higher-quality masks does not constitute a case for mask mandates, a distinction that most commentary elides. The only way to measure the efficacy of mandates is to look at their actual track record. This is what Miller has done, and the result, he argues, is clear: “mask mandates have demonstrated very little impact, if any, on case curves throughout the United States and in many other international locations.” Miller is justifiably derisive about the experts who have oversold dubious policies at every turn, but the ironic implication of his book is that much of the expert guidance from prior to 2020 has been vindicated. Before Covid appeared, scientists and officials advised time and again that masks would be ineffective at containing a pandemic respiratory virus, and the evidence Miller has compiled suggests they were correct.

It is not difficult to see why mask mandates proved irresistible to politicians. Masks are the perfect form of hygiene theatre, conveying an intuitive sense of safety regardless of demonstrable efficacy at scale. They also offload responsibility for controlling the pandemic to ordinary people. The overcrowding of ICUs can be blamed on the bad behavior of “anti-maskers”, rather than on the allocation of resources by governments and hospital CEOs. When cases and deaths spike, it is the fault of the citizenry, not the leadership.

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“..plenty of people get Covid-19 who had the jabs and the CDC itself admits that against Omicron the efficacy is statistically zero.”

So You’ve Seen The Canadian Truckers, Right? (Denninger)

It is not my place to pass judgment on another nation’s sovereign decisions. I can certainly agree or disagree, but one of the principles of national sovereignty is that short of projecting something into another nation the limit of it is whether you choose to trade with said nation and its people or not. But here, in the United States, since I’m a US Citizen, its a different story. For two years now, approximately, we’ve listened to nothing but lies. We now have two alleged “approved vaccines” for Covid-19, both of which, in the FDA’s approval letter, claims they prevent Covid-19. We know this is a lie; plenty of people get Covid-19 who had the jabs and the CDC itself admits that against Omicron the efficacy is statistically zero.

Since Omicron is the only circulating variant of statistical importance right now (again, per the CDC) these claims by the FDA are frauds since, to whatever extent they were valid, that disease no longer exists. A jab against something that doesn’t exist is stupid. But more to the point is that none of these are actually available in the US. All the arm-waving is pure performative art, that is, theater intended to convince people and businesses that an experimental drug really isn’t — when in fact, from a legal and marketing perspective it is experimental and nothing has factually changed. I have, since the first letter, challenged people to send me a photograph of a vial with the approved drug on the label, its lot number visible and that same lot and drug entered on the person’s vaccine card.

That is, not only is it available said person got that shot, per the certified actions of a health care professional which, if they lied, would constitute use of a mislabeled drug and is a criminal violation of law. I’ve yet to receive even one such piece of evidence. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t exist. This much is utterly certain when it comes to stopping government lies, whether related to Covid-19 or anything else: Without the voluntary actions of a whole lot of people, specifically truckers, rail personnel and similar, you get nothing whatsoever.

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Spotify has deleted 135 episodes by now?

Rumble Offers Joe Rogan $100 Million for a 4-Year Censorship-Free Contract (TC)

Rogan signed a $100 million deal giving Spotify exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2020. However, Spotify is facing increasing pressure to censor the popular podcast over Rogan’s willingness to speak to guests with different perspectives about the pandemic. Though the company has said they will not pull the plug on the podcast, they have removed approximately 70 episodes from their library in recent days. Launched in 2013, Rumble runs its own infrastructure — so the company says it is “immune to cancel culture.” Rumble went public through a deal with CF Acquisition Corp. VI with an initial enterprise value of $2.1 billion in December. In a letter to Rogan tweeted by the company, CEO Chris Pavlovski urged Rogan to join Rumble.

Pavlovski wrote, “We stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans in desire for real conversation. So we’d like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place.” “How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new, with no censorship, for 100 million bucks over four years?” Pavlovski continued. The letter concluded, “this is our chance to save the world. And yes, this is totally legit.” Though episodes are being removed, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has defended keeping Rogan on the platform. Ek told upset employees last week that the solution is not to get rid of Rogan’s podcast, but perhaps to obtain more exclusive content from different perspectives.

“The real thing here is to try to go for an even broader set of exclusives that represent even more voices,” Ek said. “There are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive. But let me go back to what I said earlier, if you want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he continued. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.” He pointed out that there have been episodes of the podcast that did not make it onto the platform because they violated the rules.

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“..imprisoned for 46 years for crimes he maintains he never committed..”

US Senator Asks Biden To Release Leonard Peltier (LP)

The president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Patrick Leahy, called for the release of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned for 46 years for crimes he maintains he never committed. “There is no question that our criminal justice system is imperfect, and Peltier knows firsthand how imperfect it can be,” the Vermont Democratic lawmaker told President Joe Biden in his unequivocal plea for clemency. His trial was so riddled with flaws that even one of the prosecutors who tried him acknowledged that Peltier was wrongly convicted, he added in his request to the president. According to Leahy, releasing the inmate from prison on an expedited basis “is the right thing to do”. In prison since Feb. 6, 1976, Peltier is now 77 years old and ill with multiple health problems, he recalled.

“I have long believed that pardons and commutations are vital tools to provide clemency and relief, especially when our criminal justice system has been contorted to propagate injustices,” Leahy concluded. In a recent statement, Peltier, considered America’s longest-serving political prisoner, described the conditions of his confinement in a Florida federal prison as a “torture chamber.” “The loneliness and lack of care are like a torture chamber for sick and elderly people,” warned the also writer and poet. Of Anishinaabe Lakota descent, leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which arose in the 1960s in the heat of the struggles for Civil Rights, Peltier was accused of the murder of two FBI agents in 1975 during a shooting that took place in the Pine Ridge aboriginal reservation, in South Dakota.

At that time, massacres of natives took place and as a consequence of this harassment of the Lakota people, more than 250 people of this indigenous nation were murdered, without the crimes having been investigated until now.
Several international organizations denounced irregularities in the trial that condemned Peltier in 1977 to two consecutive life sentences and it is even said that there are more than 10,000 pages with categorical evidence that would absolve him immediately. Filmmaker Michael Moore urged Barack Obama to review the multiple documents that prove that Peltier did not have a fair trial, but the former African-American president followed the same line of his predecessors. Born on September 12, 1944, when he was imprisoned in February 1976 he was a young fighter for the rights of native peoples and had already known repression and jail, historians point out.

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“..Russia has done far more to build resilience to Western sanctions than the European Union has to improve its ability to survive disruption..”

EU Sounds Alarm Over Russian Gas Supply (RT)

Russia has done far more to build resilience to Western sanctions than the European Union has to improve its ability to survive disruptions in the gas supply chain, the EU high representative for foreign affairs said on Sunday. Writing in his weekly blog, Josep Borrell accused Moscow of using energy supplies for “political purposes” and suggested any further measures against the Kremlin have serious blowback effects for the EU, including a reduction of gas available to the bloc. His comments came ahead of a meeting of the EU-US Energy Council, due to be held on Monday, in America. “Energy prices have surged due to global supply and demand issues,” Borrell wrote. “With the severe crisis that we are currently going through with Russia, it has become not only a price issue but also a matter of security of supplies.”

According to the Eurocrat, over 40% of EU gas imports come from Russia, while the EU provides over 60% of Russia’s import revenues. “However, in recent years, Russia has enhanced its resilience against economic sanctions, by increasing its foreign currency reserves, more than we have done to enhance our capacity to face potential gas supply cuts,” he explained, calling on the bloc to begin developing EU strategic gas reserves and boost investment in renewable sources of energy. In the last three months, Moscow has been threatened by Western nations with the possibility of hard-hitting sanctions, following fears that it is planning an invasion of Ukraine. Russia stands accused of placing more than 100,000 troops on the frontier, with some believing that this is a sign of an upcoming military incursion. This claim has repeatedly been denied by the Kremlin.

However, despite serious rhetoric, the media has suggested that the EU is not unanimously in agreement over potential measures. Last month, America’s Bloomberg news agency reported on a German demand that proposed measures do not include restrictions on energy, insisting that the sector be exempted.

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Happens every year. Just a bit louder this time.

NY Times, Washington Post Driving US to War with Russia Over Ukraine (MPN)

Western media and governments have expressed alarm over a suspected buildup of Russian military forces close to its over-1200-mile border with Ukraine. There are reportedly almost 100,000 troops in that vicinity, causing President Joe Biden to warn that this is “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II.” Yet this is far from the first media panic over a supposedly imminent Russian invasion. In fact, warning of a hot war in Europe is a near yearly occurrence at this point. In 2015, outlets such as Reuters and The New York Times claimed that Russia was massing troops and heavy firepower, including tanks, artillery and rocket launchers right on the border, while normally sleepy frontier towns were abuzz with activity.

In 2016 there was an even bigger meltdown, with media across the board predicting that war was around the corner. Indeed, The Guardian reported that Russia would soon have 330,000 soldiers on the border. Yet nothing came to pass and the story was quietly dropped. With the next spring came renewed warnings of conflict. The Wall Street Journal claimed that “tens of thousands” of soldiers were being deployed to the border. The New York Times upped that figure to “as many as 100,000.” A few months later, U.S. News said that thousands of tanks were joining them. In late 2018, The New York Times and other media outlets were again up in arms over a fresh Russian buildup, this time of 80,000 military units.

And in the spring of last year, it was widely reported (for instance, by Reuters and The New York Times) that Russia had amassed armies totaling well over 100,000 units on Ukraine’s border, signaling that war was imminent. Therefore, there are actually considerably fewer Russian units on Ukraine’s border than there were even 11 months ago, according to Western numbers. Furthermore, they are matched by a force of a quarter-million Ukrainian troops on the other side. Thus, many readers will be forgiven for thinking it is Groundhog Day again. Yet there is something different about this time: coverage over the conflict has been enormous and has come to dominate the news cycle for weeks now, in a way it simply did not previously. The possibility of war has scared Americans and provoked calls for a far higher military budget and a redesign of American foreign policy to counter this supposed threat.

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“The organization has independently raised around 12,569 ETH, i.e., approximately $38.8 million, to bid on the ‘Clock’ NFT..”

“Censored” NFTs Raising Funds To Help Julian Assange (CD)

The auction for the upcoming ‘Censored’ NFT collection that consists of two generative interactive blockchain artworks will start from February 7, 2 PM GMT. The first part is a single edition NFT title ‘Clock,’ which counts the total number of days that Assange has been in prison. The NFT is dynamic and generative and is programmed to keep counting the days. It is designed to blink in a rhythmic heartbeat, and the bidding for the piece will start at 1 ETH on the censored.art website. In mid-December, the US government won its appeal against a UK court ruling that prevented Assange’s extradition. Once extradited to the US, Assange will face 175 years in prison under charges of “publishing truthful information.”

On the same day, a group of ‘cypherpunk’ organized in a Telegram group and decided to set up the decentralized autonomous organization AssangeDAO to raise awareness and support for the liberation of Julian Assange from prison. The organization has independently raised around 12,569 ETH, i.e., approximately $38.8 million, to bid on the ‘Clock’ NFT and contribute to Julian Assange’s legal defense fund. The founder of Wikileaks is currently being held in a London prison and is fighting extradition to the U.S. AssangeDAO members are raising ETH in return for JUSTICE governance tokens which they will use to bid on the NFT released by Pak in collab with Assange. All auction proceeds will be deposited in the Wau Holland Foundation to support Assange’s case.

The second part of the collection, ‘Censored,’ is a 48-hour open edition. This means that it will have unlimited NFTs, and anyone can participate in it over the span of 48 hours. Participants can tokenize a message that they want to broadcast to the community by minting an NFT that will display the message. This can include a word, symbol, statement, purpose, hypothesis, idea, question, vision, belief, plan, clue, thought, feeling, or scheme. The message that will be displayed as an NFT will be struck through to represent censorship. The NFTs can be minted free of cost, but contributions of any amount are being welcomed. Pak has already minted the first NFT in the collection as a message that reads ‘Pak was here’ and contributed 100 ETH to the cause. All the proceeds from the Open Edition collection will go to organizations promoting freedom of information, education, digital privacy, health, and animal rights organizations.

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CNN sucks
https://twitter.com/i/status/1490891558929190913

 

 

 

 

 

 

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