Andy Warhol Reigning Queens 1985
Joe Biden at 29
"Who is getting ripped off here"? from the Biden organized crime family. Vintage Biden defends the need for campaign finance reform.
– "I am not sure you should assume I am not corrupt"
– "the system does produce corruption, implicit in the system is corruption"
– "I think its… pic.twitter.com/xQhcLMdRf4— Stop the Endless War Machine (@stop_endlesswar) June 29, 2023
Kerry
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680479725624369153
Until now, we were pointing out that Ukraine was running out of troops, weapons and ammo. Now, it’s all of NATO. 3 articles.
“These are numbers that, unless they announce an all-out mobilization, cannot be provided.”
• NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.)
NATO’s plan to beef up its military presence in Eastern Europe will face “serious” problems because almost no country can muster troops in significant numbers, with Spain no exception, military analyst Juan A. Aguilar told Sputnik. Spain would be able to send only a meagre number of soldiers to reinforce the NATO flank in Slovakia and Romania, he added. In fact, the media impact of the announcement recently made by the country’s President is far greater than the actual size of the forces to be sent on the ground, remarked the director of the strategic research portal Geoestrategia.es. Pedro Sanchez had revealed during the recent NATO summit in Vilnius that Spain will deploy 700 troops in Slovakia and reinforce its presence in Romania by 250 military personnel.
“As a committed member, Spain is going to announce the deployment of Spanish forces in Slovakia to reinforce the eastern front and we are going to reinforce our presence in Romania with a greater number of troops,” Sanchez said, adding that his country would “continue to contribute to the alliance’s effort to achieve the just and lasting peace.” Although the details have not yet been officially specified, Juan A. Aguilar weighed in on the announcement, saying: “I don’t think that more than 300 soldiers can be deployed in three annual rotations, about 1,000 in total, a battalion… There are no more, unless they withdraw from other areas,” said the military analyst. He recalled that although Spain has on paper “some 150,000 troops”, far from all of them are available to be posted to Eastern Europe.
“Out of the 150,000 we have to subtract those integrated into Common Corps, Headquarters, Logistics, the Navy and the Air Force… Then, those of the special units (NBC, UME, Anti-aircraft) and, of course, the garrison troops deployed in the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla”, Aguilar explained. “What’s left?” queried the military analyst, and speculated: “Three light brigades and three armored-mechanized brigades, not at full strength, numbering about 18,000 soldiers. You have to leave a garrison for the country’s capital… There are troops deployed in Lebanon, Iraq, Mali, Turkey, the Baltic countries… And there are at least three rotations a year”.
NATO has been bulking up its military footprint along the alliance’s eastern flank, in countries that share a land border with Ukraine, where Russia is conducting its special military operation. NATO’s multinational battlegroups are currently stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. US President Joe Biden on Thursday approved an executive order authorizing 3,000 US military reserve personnel to augment Operation Atlantic Resolve, which provides rotational deployment of combat-credible forces to Europe as part of the United States’ commitment to NATO. Following decisions made at the NATO summit in Vilnius, allies that have been sending tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the regime in Kiev vowed to maintain up to 300,000 troops in a “state of high readiness”, as part of the NATO Response Force.
However, this comes as many of the afore-mentioned bloc members are worried about their own insufficient ammunition stocks, drained by the US-spearheaded Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Major European NATO powers like Germany, Italy and the UK have all conceded that after splurging on Ukraine, their own military had been “hollowed out” by arms shipments. Moscow has warned repeatedly about the consequences of these actions for regional and global security, only serving to fan the flames of the Ukraine conflagration. As for military manpower along the eastern NATO flank, Juan A. Aguilar told Sputnik: “NATO wants to deploy 300,000 men in Eastern Europe. The US would put up 100,000, but the rest of the countries have to provide a total of 200,000. If they make four rotations a year, 800,000 troops are needed. These are numbers that, unless they announce an all-out mobilization, cannot be provided.
“So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War..”
• US, NATO Weapons Stockpiles at ‘Dangerously Low’ Levels: Top General (ET)
The weapons stockpiles of the United States and its NATO allies are becoming “dangerously low,” with no “short-term” solutions, according to a top U.S. Air Force commander. Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, made the remarks at the Chief of the Air Staff’s Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference in London, Breaking Defense reported. The air force general urged NATO allies to think seriously about their stockpiles. “I think it’s very important that we kind of take stock of where we are in our weapons state across the 32 nations of NATO, and we’re getting way down compared to where we were,” Gen. Hecker said, while speaking on a panel with the air chiefs of the UK and Sweden at the conference, the outlet reported.
“And it’s probably not going to get better—well, it’s not in the short term—but we’ve got to make sure in the long term we have the industrial base that can increase what we have,” he said at the July 12–13 event, urging all NATO nations to start making deeper investments. The United States is at “roughly half the number of fighter squadrons” it had compared to when it engaged in Operation Desert Storm, a U.S.-led operation that started in January 1991 as part of a response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, according to the general. He noted that there has been a similar decrease in fighter squadrons for the UK. “So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War,” he said.
“Now you add that we’re giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians, which I think is exactly what we need to do, but now we’re getting dangerously low and sometimes, in some cases. even too low, that we don’t have enough,” Gen. Hecker said. “And we need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going.” The United States has provided Ukraine with more than $41.3 billion in security assistance as of July 7, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to the U.S. State Department. That total encompasses more than $15 billion in weapons and equipment delivered to Ukraine from U.S. military stocks since the Russian invasion.
“Until now, we have not used them… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition..”
• ‘They’re Running Out of Ammo’: Putin on US Sending Cluster Bombs to Kiev (Sp.)
The Biden administration unveiled a new military assistance package for Ukraine on July 7, which included cluster bombs. The lethal weapons are banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which has been ratified by 123 countries, excluding the US and Ukraine, and several other nations. The US decided to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine because the Western-fueled proxy war against Russia is running low on ammo, President Vladimir Putin told local media. “They [the United States] are doing this not because of ‘the good life’, but because they are running low on ammunition in general,” the head of state said, answering a question from a Russian journalist. The Russian leader recalled that Washington previously referred to the use of cluster bombs as a “crime.”
“As for cluster munitions, the US administration itself provided an assessment of these munitions with comments by its staff some time ago, when the use of cluster munitions was called a crime by the US administration itself. This is how I think it should be regarded,” he said. Moscow reserves the right to respond accordingly in case of cluster munitions use against the country, emphasized the Russian president. “Of course, if they are used against us, we reserve the right to mirror actions,” Putin said in the interview for Russian television. He underscored that Russia, which has various kinds of cluster munitions, has not yet needed to resort to using the lethal weapons. “Russia has in its possession a sufficient stockpile of various types of cluster munitions. Until now, we have not used them… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition,” Putin noted.
The US-pledged cluster munitions have already been delivered to the Kiev regime, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday. Lt Gen Douglas Sims, Joint Staff J3 director of operations, said that the bombs “have indeed been delivered to Ukraine at this point.” The Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to the Russian military, have previously resorted to the use of the controversial cluster munitions for shelling Donbass, in particular Donetsk. According to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, this indicates that the goal of the Ukrainian military is to kill a maximum number of civilians. Cluster bombs are extremely deadly containing dozens or hundreds of explosive submunitions, or bomblets, and are designed to maximize damage to enemy forces across an area of up to several hundred square meters.
“The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second..”
• The Incredible Shrinking NATO (Dmitry Orlov)
NATO is a captive buyers’ club for US-made weapons. That is what vaunted NATO standards, with which the Ukraine must comply before it is deemed worthy to be invited to join NATO, are all about: to comply with these standards, your weapons have to be mostly US-made. That is also the reason for all of the various wars of choice, from Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria: these were demonstration projects for US weapons, with the additional goal of using up the weapons and the munitions so that the Pentagon and the rest of NATO would have to reorder them. The geopolitical rationales for these military conflicts are mere rationalizations. For instance, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years.
What was the geopolitical rationale? Nobody can even remember if there ever was one. But those bombs were about to expire and needed to be used up and reordered to keep the money flowing. In response to such strange inducements, US-made weapons tend to be overly complex (so that their makers can charge more for the useless extra features) and rather fragile (never tested against a peer adversary like Russia or China, or even against Iran), developed slowly (to clean up on R&D funding), built slowly (because what’s the rush?) and very high-maintenance (so that US defense contractors can get even richer delivering spare parts and service). These weapons were supposed to be tested every so gently by giving hell to backward tribesmen armed with old Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
Ukraine is a different story altogether. There, the Ukrainians, with their mismatched hand-me-down Western armor, are being asked to penetrate three lines of hardened Russian defenses. After about a month of effort and staggering losses of men and equipment, they haven’t yet been able to reach the first defensive line. The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second — before their reputations end up completely ruined; hence the unseemly haste with which the entire Ukrainian project is being orphaned.
Russia is angry now.
• Ukraine Behind New Crimean Bridge Attack – Media (RT)
The Crimean Bridge was damaged in a joint “special operation”conducted by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and naval forces, media outlets reported on Monday. The Russian authorities have yet to announce the reason behind the incident. According to a source for RBK Ukraina, the key infrastructure linking the peninsula with mainland Russia was attacked by an unspecified number of sea surface drones. “It was difficult to reach the bridge, but finally the task was accomplished,” he said. Ukrainian officials have cheered the incident but have yet to confirm their direct involvement in the reported attack.
Andrey Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, described the Crimean Bridge as a “redundant construction,” but refused to elaborate. Traffic on the bridge was stopped in the early hours of Monday, with Crimean Governor Sergey Aksyonov citing an unspecified “emergency.” Later, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said that a married couple from his region was killed in the incident and their daughter was injured. Russia’s Ministry of Transport said the road surface of one of the tracks was damaged, while the bridge’s supports remain intact.
Ukraine has attempted to target the strategic link in the past, according to Moscow. Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Kiev attempted to strike the bridge with a missile, but failed to penetrate the air defenses. In October last year, the bridge was damaged in a deadly truck bombing, which Moscow said was orchestrated by Ukrainian intelligence services. At the time, Russia responded by intensifying missile strikes on Ukraine’s military and energy infrastructure.
Bridge
The Verkhovna Rada proposed to present those involved in the attack on the Crimean bridge, to state awards: “This is a huge success for Ukraine” pic.twitter.com/MV2mp4Ven3
— Spriter Team (@SpriterTeam) July 17, 2023
“..despite the losses, the Ukrainians have so far taken just five of the 60 miles they hope to cover to reach the sea in the south and split the Russian forces in two.”
• Real War To Defeat, Fake Propaganda To Victory – Nato Is In Two Minds (Helmer)
What is new now is that the Ukraine, the US and NATO are losing their war against Russia on the battlefield, and risk losing all the deterrence which NATO has been designing, building, buying, and deploying since 1949. With or without desperation measures, Swiss colonel Jacques Baud tells War of the Worlds, Russia has already won the war. “Colonel Douglas Macgregor hasn’t this courage,” a US NATO veteran comments, referring to the Trump Administration appointee now broadcasting against the Biden Administration. Russian military bloggers and the Defense Ministry in Moscow are reporting that the so-called mosquito tactic of numerous small Ukrainian attacks on the Russian lines, run simultaneously, are resulting in Russian feints followed by artillery counter-fire; ending in heavy Ukrainian losses followed by retreat without territorial gains.
“It is within the realm of possibility that Ukrainian forces have seen losses at this level,” the New York Times quotes a British security analyst, adding that “ a significant level of lost weapons was generally a hallmark of wars of attrition, like the one in Ukraine.” The newspaper adds the claim: “In the first two weeks of Ukraine’s gruelling counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry it sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to American and European officials. The toll includes some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians. The startling rate of losses dropped to about 10 percent in the ensuing weeks, the officials said, preserving more of the troops and machines needed for the major offensive push that the Ukrainians say is still to come.
Some of the improvement came because Ukraine changed tactics, focusing more on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles than charging into enemy minefields and fire. But that good news obscures some grim realities. The losses have also slowed because the counteroffensive itself has slowed — and even halted in places — as Ukrainian soldiers struggle against Russia’s formidable defences. And despite the losses, the Ukrainians have so far taken just five of the 60 miles they hope to cover to reach the sea in the south and split the Russian forces in two.”
“This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.”
• The Wagner Mutiny (Jacques Baud)
Clearly, Putin did everything he could to prevent the mutineers from reaching Moscow, where any clashes could have fed into Western propaganda. Playing with Lukashenko’s mediation, Putin reacted with a mixture of firmness (adoption of anti-terrorist measures, trenches on access roads to Moscow, placing territorial units on alert) and magnanimity (offering a way out via Belarus) to calm things down. It should be noted that, despite his tough talk about “treason,” and contrary to the claims of Western propagandists, the indictment of the mutineers does not refer to article 275 of the penal code (treason), but to article 279 (armed rebellion), which is less serious, as explained by John Helmer in an excellent podcast.
That said, Vladimir Putin’s statement on June 27 that Russian forces had “prevented a civil war” seems to have unnecessarily over-dramatized the situation. He probably wanted to give importance to the role of the armed forces in this crisis, but at the same time, he also suggested a greater fragility than the events had shown. As to the idea that the intelligence services had foreseen this mutiny, it is most probably false. In fact, Westerners are watching Russia’s domestic situation for the slightest hint of regime change, which is the ultimate goal of our support for Ukraine. This is why, as early as May, with the first Prigozhin videos, Western services raised the possibility of a coup in Moscow. But, in terms of intelligence methodology, these are not “predictions,” but simply working hypotheses and scenarios.
For an intelligence service, predicting an event implies having indicators and concrete indications on which to draw conclusions. However, neither the Ukrainians, nor the Americans, nor the French had the slightest indication, but only the hope that such a mutiny might take place. As a member of Ukrainian military intelligence told the French channel France 24. In reality, everyone was surprised, and no international actor has been able to exploit in Ukraine or elsewhere what could have been the beginning of a power crisis in Russia. This also shows that Western understanding of the conflict is based exclusively on hypotheses, which are themselves often based on Ukrainian wishful thinking, but very rarely on facts. This is why we are pushing Ukraine towards defeat.
It is very likely that there was no Western involvement in Yevgeny Prigogin’s decision. The USA made every effort to demonstrate its distance from the Prigozhin mutiny. Westerners, on the other hand, saw it as the realization of their “dream” and clearly stirred up the situation in the hope that it would lead to internal conflict. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky tweeted that he might spend his vacation in Crimea. Besides a childish behavior, it shows that he has understood absolutely nothing about the dynamics of events in Russia. In the end, this situation was nothing more than that of a company director trying to save his business and doing so impulsively and thoughtlessly, with potentially dramatic consequences for combatants on both sides in Ukraine. This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.
“They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses.”
• Cracks in NATO’s Ukraine Project (Hahn)
Western and Ukrainian expectations and claims regarding the potential of the counteroffensive are exposing the hideously phantasmagorical expectations of most in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev. After six weeks of Ukraine’s highly costly counteroffensive, instead of territorial gains Kiev’s forces are being routed, experiencing enormous casualties, losses of territory on the Oskol river, an operational encirclement of Avdiivka, and successful Russian advances on the Kupyansk-Liman front lines. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed on July 11th that the Ukrainians have suffered 26,000 casualties and lost 3,000 units of equipment, including 1,244 tanks and fighting vehicles as well as APCs, artillery pieces, and mortars, since June 4th when the counteroffensive began.[2]
To put this into the perspective of Ukrainian weapons requests and NATO capacity and willingness (or unwillingness) to meet them, in December 2022 last year Zalyuzhniy told The Economist that he needed “300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers.” In such case, he thought it “completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd.” But the Ukrainians never received anything like this, and the West nevertheless pressed Zelenskiy to underataken the ill-considered idea of a broad counter-offensive against the revived Russian army. The Ukrainians have lost more equipment in just six weeks of the counteroffensive than Zalyuzhniy had requested; this without even reaching the first line of the Russian forces’ three well dug-in defense lines in the south and making even less progress in the east. Ukrainian forces have not been able to take and hold even one small settlement along the entire line of contact extending from Kherson to Kharkov. They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses. Not surprisingly, cracks are appearing in the Ukrainian ranks.[3]
On this background it is hardly surprising that tensions between Kiev and its Western patrons are running high, with each side blaming the other for the military farce. Both Zalyuzhniy and Zelenskiy are at odds with the West for its failure to provide sufficient military equipment for a counteroffensive the West itself has demanded as a kind of test as to whether Kiev deserves continuing military aid. In turn, Zelenskiy made his disenchantment with NATO and the West known both before and during the summit. In a June 30th Washington Post interview, Zalyuzhniy seemed to be airing both his opposition to the conduct of the counteroffensive without sufficient fire power (recall the pre-offensive pressure from Kiev for the provision of F-16s) as well as Kiev’s grievances regarding insufficient arms, thus setting up the West as scapegoat for the counteroffensive’s failure.
[..] Years of successfully pulling the wool over people’s eyes and Western fawning over him since February 2022 led Zelenskiy to overestimate the power of his personality and his communication skills. There was never any chance that the NATO summit in Vilnius would offer Ukraine membership, a membership action plan (MAP), or a shortcut to membership no matter how charismatic Zelenskiy imagines himself to be. These hopes were as delusional as were the repeated Ukrainian decisions not to forego NATO membership before and after Maidan, before and after Minsk, before and after Putin’s proposals on a new European security architecture and his massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders, before and after his February 2022 invasion, and before and after the March 2022 agreement to end the war by Kiev renouncing the goal of NATO membership and returning to the Minsk format.
What kind of policy is it that demands Ukraine’s movement towards NATO membership, backs a coup to achieve it, and then arms the intensely anti-Russian Maidan regime while not offering Kiev NATO membership in the face of decades of protestations from the military and nuclear power next door that it views such actions as a grave threat to its national security? But it is worse than that.
The Washington/Brussels consensus tells us that Putin is a hungry, imperial dictator determined at all costs to conquer ‘all of Ukraine’ and reestablish the former USSR, meaning taking all the Baltic and Transcaucasus countries as well. If we are to be guided by the concensus’s analysis, then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that Washington and Brussels pushed Ukraine into the claws of the aggressive, angry bear they themselves riled and aggravated. No matter. United together, ‘we will not waver’: Ukraine will fight ‘as long as it takes’ to defeat the bear on behalf of the United States and its subservient allies.
“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?!”
• Failed Proxy War With Russia Shows US Can’t ‘Pick on Someone Its Own Size’ (Sp.)
In a string of statements last week justifying cluster bombs’ deployment, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials characterized it as a stopgap measure that should allow US defense industry to ramp up its “depleted” stocks of 155 mm shells. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even suggested that Ukraine would be “defenseless” if Washington did not urgently send the weapons. “The stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running out, about to be depleted. And so, the hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this: if we didn’t do it, we don’t do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, then they will be defenseless,” Blinken said.
“I don’t understand how a cluster bomb is a ‘defensive’ weapon,” veteran US-based journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin told Sputnik. “This is something you drop from a plane or you deploy and it goes across a widespread area and explodes, or it remains undetonated and then someone walks by and gets blown up. So the idea that they would be ‘defenseless’ without the cluster bombs, that doesn’t add up [if you] look at what a cluster bomb is.” Maupin also questioned how it was that the US and its NATO allies, which outspend Russia militarily multiple times over, and have sent more weapons to Ukraine than Moscow spends on defense in a year, could be “running out” of ammunition.
“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?! And you look at Russia, and you look at Belarus, the countries that are on the other side in Ukraine, they don’t seem to have this problem. They’re not running out of ammunition. They’re not running out of military hardware and weapons,” Maupin said.
“The United States has spent so much more money on this and so many billions of dollars have been piled into Ukraine. What’s going on here? What in the world is going on here? You almost wonder if this military-industrial complex thing where weaponry has been turned into a mechanism for stabilizing the economy, we dump lots of money into military expenditures – you wonder if a lot of these weapons are produced with the thought that they might never be used. They’re simply a moneymaking cash cow for certain Pentagon contractors. And with that being the situation, you have to wonder why we are going through them so quickly and what’s really going on here,” he added.
The numbers are interesting. They don’t seem to confirm what RFK claims.
• Why Dennis Kucinich Should Now Threaten His Candidate RFK Jr. (Zuesse)
The former Congressman Dennis Kucinich is RFK Jr.’s campaign manager, which is a crucial advisor to any Presidential candidate; he now needs to lay down the law to his candidate and threaten to resign unless RFK Jr. will promise never again to be so sloppy in his wordings as to leave his many enemies on both the left and the right an opportunity to splash headlines against him that will take advantage of those sloppy wordings from him so as to accentuate still further the candidate’s existing propaganda-vulnerabilities. RFK Jr. has now done this twice — once in a way that will antagonize Palestinians and any progressive Jews who support them against Israel; and, now, this time, on July 12th, in an incident that the intensely pro-Israel Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headlined about on July 15th, “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews”. (A more honest headline would have been “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews and Chinese,” but Murdoch knows that Democratic Party primaries candidates need votes mainly from Jews and from Blacks, not from Chinese; and, so, playing the ‘anti-Semite’ card against Kennedy would hit him where any Democratic Party Presidential candidate would be hurt the most.)
Kennedy said there that scientific studies had shown that because of certain details of the structure of the virus that causes the covid-19 disease, and because of certain genetic structures that are more commonly found in Jews and in Chinese and that are least commonly found generally among both Whites and Blacks, the ratios of Jews and of Chinese who have fallen victim to the covid-19 virus have been remarkably low, and the ratios of all Whites and of all Blacks who have fallen victim to it have been remarkably high. He apparently felt that more research needs to be done on this, especially if covid-19 was created as a bioweapon (and so maybe targeted against Whites and Blacks). If those allegations are truthful, then any rational person would agree with them, but RFK Jr.’s having worded his argument as carelessly as he did was a gratuitous invitation for his enemies to use his statements there as a weapon against him so as to prevent him from becoming the Party’s nominee instead of for Joe Biden to become that.
This was the second such incident. The first was pandering for the pro-Israeli or “zionist” Jewish vote on June 13th by telling Glenn Greenwald that “Israel is a democracy” (as-if an apartheid nation can even POSSIBLY be that), and he refused to answer Greenwald’s question of whether if he will become President he will act so as to stop U.S. taxpayers from continuing to donate $3.8 billion per year to Israel’s Government, $3.3 billion of that to be spent on buying weapons made by U.S. weapons-manufacturing corporations to be used against Palestinians and against Iran. He wouldn’t answer it.
[..] I myself am skeptical even of the truthfulness of what Kennedy said there about the covid-19 virus and its vaccines [..] look at Israel there: It has had 517,874 covid-19 cases per million inhabitants, and that is the 23rd-highest infection-rate among the 228 nations on the planet. Israel has had 1,348 covid-19 deaths per million population, and that’s the 85th-highest covid death-rate. So, since Israel has the world’s highest population-percentage who are Jews, why does that country have among the world’s highest infection-rates and even of death-rates from that virus? And how can this be the case if what RFK Jr. said on July 12th is actually true? Obviously, it can’t. On the other hand: China has had only 347 cases of covid-19 per million people, and that is the lowest of all nations (except for Western Sahara which has a total population of only 626,161 spread over its entire desert, and that’s too small a population over too large an area for it to be at all comparable to China.)
But look at what is the world’s second-lowest: Niger. And its population is 26,083,660. There is no reason to doubt its covid-19 statistics; moreover, some others among the best-performing covid-19 countries are also Black African nations.
“..the Cocaine was for use by Hunter, & probably Crooked Joe, in order to give this total disaster of a President a little life and energy!”
• Hunter Biden Threatens Trump With ‘Legal Trouble’ (RT)
Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to former president Donald Trump on Thursday, warning that continuing to target the troubled 53-year-old on social media could result in “even more legal trouble” for the Republican presidential hopeful. Trump’s online comments – including his suggestions that one or both Bidens was responsible for the cocaine recently discovered in the White House – “could lead to [Hunter’s] or his family’s injury,”Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for the younger Biden, told ABC News on Friday. Lowell cited previous incidents, including the January 6 Capitol riot, the assault on then House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in October, and the arrest of a heavily-armed man near the Obama’s home last month, as being inspired by past Trump comments and warned Trump’s attorneys, “We are just one such social media message away from another incident.”
“You should make clear to Mr. Trump – if you have not done so already – that Mr. Trump’s words have caused harm in the past and threaten to do so again if he does not stop,” Lowell continued, urging the ex-president’s lawyers to impress upon their client “how his incitement can further hurt people and cause himself even more legal trouble.” Trump recently skewered Hunter with a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, arguing the cocaine discovered in a cubby in the White House’s West Wing earlier this month belonged to the younger Biden, whose struggles with crack addiction are well-documented. “THEY 100% KNOW WHO IT IS,”Trump wrote regarding the cocaine culprit on Monday, claiming, “If they don’t release information, it means they destroyed the tapes & the Cocaine was for use by Hunter, & probably Crooked Joe, in order to give this total disaster of a President a little life and energy!”
In an earlier post, he asked if “anyone really believe[d] that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, [was] for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden.” Trump renewed his attacks after the younger Biden pleaded guilty last month to two misdemeanor tax charges following a years-long investigation, in a plea deal that is expected to keep him out of prison. The Republican 2024 frontrunner lamented that the prosecutor “gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.” The former president’s own legal troubles continue to pile up, as a Georgia grand jury considers charging him over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. He has already been indicted both federally and by the state of New York and has pled not guilty to all charges.
So much for protected free speech.
• Almost Half of Millennials Want Jail Time for “Misgendering” (Turley)
A recent survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, found that 44 percent of millennials (between ages 25-34) favor criminal charges for people who use the wrong pronouns for others or so-called “misgendering.” We have previously discussed how misgendering is now a crime in countries like Great Britain. Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities. There has been a concern that we are seeing the rise of a generation of censors, who have been taught since a young age that speech is harmful and even violent. Yet, hate speech is protected in the United States. Given that fact, it is astonishing to claim that a pronoun violation could lead to incarceration. Only 31 percent of the millennials disagreed with the proposition. They are not alone. Recently, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer, said that “if you espouse hate … you’re not protected under the First Amendment.”
Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.” If hate speech is constitutionally protected, pronoun use or misuse is also protected as a criminal matter. (There is ongoing litigation of the protection in an employment setting for civil liability or disciplinary action). Yet, the most serious concern is the inclination of this generation to use criminal laws to police such questions. It reflects the erosion of free speech principles with younger generations. That crisis of faith could prove disastrous with free speech in a virtual free fall in Europe.
Media – It’s hot in Europe & people are going to stop going on holiday. Except here’s a map of July 1973 for Greece. It didn’t stop European holidays, they increased to +538 million tourists, predicted to increase by 9 million per year.
42°C in Novara, Northern Italy, back in 1952.
Pool
This is WoWpic.twitter.com/kFxE7iRECG
— Figen (@TheFigen_) July 16, 2023
cat rooster
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680817457177542656
Puffer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680609418071756801
WHEN I AM OLD
When I am old… I will wear soft gray sweatshirts… and a bandana over my silver hair… and I will spend my social security checks on my dogs. I will sit in my house on my well-worn chair and listen to my dogs breathing. I will sneak out in the middle of a warm summer night and take my dogs for a run, if my old bones will allow… When people come to call, I will smile and nod as I show them my dogs… and talk of them and about them…
the ones so beloved of the past and the ones so beloved of today… I will still work hard cleaning after them, mopping and feeding them and whispering their names in a soft loving way. I will wear the gleaming sweat on my throat, like a jewel, and I will be an embarrassment to all… especially my family… who have not yet found the peace in being free to have dogs as your best friends… These friends who always wait, at any hour, for your footfall… and eagerly jump to their feet out of a sound sleep, to greet you as if you are a God, with warm eyes full of adoring love and hope that you will always stay,
I’ll hug their big strong necks… I’ll kiss their dear sweet heads… and whisper in their very special company… I look in the mirror… and see I am getting old… this is the kind of person I am… and have always been. Loving dogs is easy, they are part of me. Please accept me for who I am. My dogs appreciate my presence in their lives… they love my presence in their lives… When I am old this will be important to me… you will understand when you are old, if you have dogs to love too.
Author Unknown (DM)
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