Jul 232023
 


Andy Warhol Ingrid Bergman 1983

 

Zelensky Carries Out ‘Polonization’ Of Ukraine – Duma Speaker (TASS)
Russia on the Grain Deal at the UN Security Council (Combate)
Kiev Used Grain Deal To Stock Up On Military Supplies – Russia (RT)
West Driven By “Impotent Rage” – Moscow (RT)
China Overtaking US – Orban (RT)
Western Firms Reluctant To Pull Out Of Russia Despite Sanctions – Orban (TASS)
Washington Becoming Weary of Zelensky’s Never-Ending Demands For Aid (Sp.)
Japan Doesn’t Want to Fight for Taiwan and Neither Do Other US Allies (Sp.)
Lockheed Martin Predicts Strong Profits as Global Instability Rises (LI)
Hunter Biden Expected To Face Up To 10 Criminal Referrals (ZH)
New BRICS Currency Boosts Gold & Destroys Dollar – Jim Rickards (USAW)
Tyranny of the Minority (Turley)
The Downfall of Blobism (Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

Running out

 

 

Ted Nugent
https://twitter.com/i/status/1682755010566803457

 

 

 

 

He says $200 Billion.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1682824375056187393

 

 

Kolakusic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1682649222607261697

 

 

 

 

No Sane Person Goes to War against Russia (Military Textbook Ch. 1 Par. 1) | Dmitry Orlov

 

 

Macgregor: NATO is an Appendage of Globalist Foreign Policy

 

 

 

 

Will he give it away before they come take it?

Zelensky Carries Out ‘Polonization’ Of Ukraine – Duma Speaker (TASS)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is carrying out “polonization” of Ukraine in hopes that this would allow him to stay in power for longer, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on his Telegram channel. “Zelensky is carrying out a process of polonization [capture of Ukraine by Poland – TASS] of his country, hoping that, in return, his masters [Washington and Brussels – TASS] will allow him to stay in power for longer,” he said. To that extent, a law was adopted that effectively equals Poles to Ukrainians, providing them with the same set of rights – stay without permission, employment, education, medical service and even some allowances, the official added.

According to Volodin, Ukrainians are being expelled from their homes in Sumy and Chernigov regions, which border Russia, as the authorities seek to replace them with Polish migrants, loyal to the neo-Nazi regime. Ukrainian citizens are also being forced to use Polish language instead of Russian; orthodox Christianity is being persecuted, with Ukrainians being converted to Catholicism, the Duma Speaker underscored. “Meanwhile, a 25-thousand military force comprised mostly of Polish and Lithuanian armed soldiers, ready to occupy Western Ukraine, has been established. The Poles want to take back what they consider their historic lands – the Eastern Borderlands. They do not need Ukrainian citizens on these territories,” Volodin noted.

He stated that, according to the ideology of Washington and Brussels, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people must die at the frontline (with growing amounts of weapons being shipped to Ukraine to that extent), while the rest must lose their national identity. In order to meet this goal, “Poland’s imperial ambitions” are being used. “Washington and Brussels will continue waging the war until the last Ukrainian,” Volodin concluded.

Read more …

Twitter thread. More land given away:

“..the owners of a significant part of Ukrainian arable land (more than 17 million hectares) are Western corporations Cargill, DuPont and Monsanto.”

Did they pay Zelensky personally?

Russia on the Grain Deal at the UN Security Council (Combate)

“Most of you expressed, in one way or another, disappointment at the termination of the so-called grain deal that provided for exports of Ukrainian grain to global markets. I have a question to you. What was it that you expected? From the very start, we have been drawing everyone’s attention to the fact that the initiative did not meet the initially proclaimed goal and was gaining a well-defined commercial nature. In fact, from the very beginning, developed countries have taken the lead among those buying food from Ukraine. However, no steps were taken to remedy this trend. During the Black Sea Initiative, a total of 32.8 million tonnes of cargo was exported, of which more than 70% went to high- and upper-middle-income countries, including the European Union. The poorest states, notably Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia, accounted for less than 3%…


Such geography and commercialization of an initially humanitarian initiative is easily explained by the fact that the owners of a significant part of Ukrainian arable land (more than 17 million hectares) are Western corporations Cargill, DuPont and Monsanto. They bought up Ukrainian land after Kiev lifted a 20-year moratorium on its sale at the request of the IMF and became the main beneficiaries of Ukrainian grain exports. On the other hand, the Europeans who buy Ukrainian food at dumping prices then process it at home and resell as ready-to-consume goods with high added value. In other words, they earn twice. What does this have to do with the task of getting food delivered to the poorest countries, about which we have heard again today?”

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“A large number of Ukrainian soldiers and foreign mercenaries have also been stationed in the areas protected under the deal..”

Kiev Used Grain Deal To Stock Up On Military Supplies – Russia (RT)

Ukraine has used the Black Sea grain deal to accumulate sizable military and fuel supplies, Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN Dmitry Polyansky told the organization’s Security Council (UNSC) on Friday. EU nations have also exploited the agreement to reap profits from cheap Ukrainian food products, he said. Since the UN-facilitated deal was introduced a year ago, “the Kiev regime has built up significant military and industrial [supplies], as well as fuel… storage capacities in the areas near its Black Sea ports,” the diplomat said during a UNSC meeting convened after Russia’s decision to withdraw from the agreement.

A large number of Ukrainian soldiers and foreign mercenaries have also been stationed in the areas protected under the deal, he said, adding that Russia could “remedy this situation” now that it has left the deal. The Ukrainian military did not hesitate to use the humanitarian corridors reserved for the grain shipments to launch attacks on the Russian military and civilian targets, Polyansky said, adding that neither the UN nor Western nations had reacted to such attacks in any way. “Do you just want us to put up with it?” asked the envoy. The Russian military repeatedly reported on Ukrainian attempts to strike targets in Crimea with both aerial and naval drones, which were mostly thwarted by Russian defense systems.

In May, Moscow stated that the Ukrainian forces had taken advantage of the grain corridors to stage attacks on Crimea. The deal itself, which was initially touted as a humanitarian initiative aimed at helping the poorest nations to avoid a food crisis, was ultimately “commercialized” by the West, Polyansky said. “Europeans, who buy Ukrainian food products at give-away prices, then process them and re-sell them as manufactured goods with high added value,” he continued, adding that EU nations are “benefiting twice” from the deal. “Tell me, where is the goal of providing the poorest nations with food here?” he asked.

Moscow has repeatedly stressed that only a tiny percentage of the grain exported from Ukraine as part of the agreement has been shipped to such nations, while the bulk of it has ended up in Europe. On Friday, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto also stated that “95% of exported Ukrainian grain does not go to Africa.” He blamed this for rising food prices on the continent, which were “destabilizing regions that are already in difficulty.” The US Department of Agriculture also said in its July report that almost half of all Ukrainian wheat exports ended up in the EU after the grain deal was struck. Türkiye imported almost a quarter of Ukraine’s wheat over the same period, and only roughly one-fifth went to the “rest of the world,” the report showed.

Read more …

“Western leaders are suffering from “megalomania and inferiority complex” at the same time, which is a “dangerous mix..”

West Driven By “Impotent Rage” – Moscow (RT)

The geopolitical decisions of the US and its allies are being dictated by “impotent rage” over the West’s dwindling influence on the global stage, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has stated. Following his meeting with members of the Alexander Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund in Moscow on Friday, Ryabkov was asked to comment on this week’s hearing at the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, during which some participants suggested that the strengthening of Russia’s ties with Africa was a result of mistakes committed by Washington. In response, the deputy foreign minister broadly criticized the policies pursued by the US and its allies on the international arena, suggesting that the Western countries have been “making one mistake after another.”


“Their path over the past few years is a path of mistakes and suffering – suffering from their own deficiency in international affairs – from their inability to combine their ambitions, their high expectations that everybody around should obey them, with what they see in reality,” he argued. Ryabkov went on to describe the West’s behavior on the international stage as being driven by “impotent rage.” The diplomat said he senses “deep geopolitical volatility and offendedness” in the decisions made by the US and its allies. Western leaders are suffering from “megalomania and inferiority complex” at the same time, which is a “dangerous mix,” Ryabkov stressed.

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“..today, instead of American dominance, there are two suns in the sky..”

China Overtaking US – Orban (RT)

The world is facing the biggest power shift in decades, with the US poised to lose its leading position to China, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday. This could result in a major conflict between Washington and Beijing unless the US accepts that it cannot be the “winner” forever, he warned. “[China] has become a manufacturing powerhouse and is now overtaking America,” Orban said in his annual speech in the town of Baile Tusnad in Romania’s Eastern Transylvania. In just 30 years, China has undergone the industrial revolution that took the West around three centuries, the Hungarian prime minister said, adding that America is about to say ‘goodbye’ to its status as the world’s only superpower.

Beijing is also challenging the values Washington seeks to portray as universal, Orban said. China considers American values to be a “hostile ideology,” he said, adding that “there is some truth in it.” Such a development would certainly not sit well with Washington, which will want to remain “on top of the world” forever, Orban warned. He said attempts to challenge existing hegemony had led to major conflict on multiple occasions in human history. “There are no eternal winners and eternal losers,” he added. A conflict between the two great powers is likely but not unavoidable, the Hungarian leader believes. The world needs to find a new balance, and the two opposing parties should recognize each other as equals, he said.

Major nations have to “accept that, today, instead of American dominance, there are two suns in the sky,” Orban added. He also painted a grim picture of Europe’s future by saying it’s about to lose its dominant position in the global economy. Orban blamed the West’s anti-Russian policies for this development. The EU is already “rich but weak,” he said, adding that it would further lose its competitive advantages as a result of its determination to impose sanctions on Russia. The idea that Russia can be separated from the world economy through various restrictions is an “illusion,” he warned. The EU has already witnessed the results of its erroneous decisions, Orban said, adding that “others buy Russian energy instead of us, and we pay more for energy than ever before.”

According to Orban, the UK and Italy would drop out of the world’s top ten economies, and Germany would fall to 10th place, down from its current fourth position. A significant part of the European economy is still linked to Russia despite all the rhetoric about sanctions, he said. Hungary has emerged as one of the major critics of Western policies amid the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Budapest has repeatedly called for a ceasefire and peace deal in Ukraine, and has criticized the EU for sending arms to Kiev. In June, Orban told the German tabloid Bild that a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield was “impossible.” Hungary has also insisted that anti-Russia sanctions are hurting Europe more than they hurt Russia.

Read more …

“..the European Union countries had annually paid about 300 billion euros for oil and gas, whereas they paid 653 billion euros last year..”

Western Firms Reluctant To Pull Out Of Russia Despite Sanctions – Orban (TASS)

Western companies are not willing to leave Russia despite the sanctions, as they understand that Russia’s economy will still remain part of the global one, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday in his speech at the Free University and the summer student camp in the Romanian town of Baile Tusnad (Harghita County) in Transylvania. The prime minister said that, according to his information, 88% of pharmaceutical, 79% of mining, 70% of energy and 77% of other European industrial companies that were operating in Russia at the beginning of 2022 were still staying in the country. “Of the 1,400 major Western companies, only 8.5% have left Russia,” said Orban, whose speech was aired by Hungarian television channel M1. According to the prime minister, foreign companies paid $3.5 billion to the Russian budget in 2022.


The prime minister said that there is an attempt to “disconnect Russia” from the European economy through sanctions in order to exert political pressure on Moscow. However, he is convinced that this will not have the desired effect, since Russia’s economy is intertwined with the rest of the world, including in the energy sector. “Somebody else is buying Russian raw materials, while we are suffering from military inflation and losing our competitiveness,” he said. Orban pointed out that before sanctions were imposed on Russia, the European Union countries had annually paid about 300 billion euros for oil and gas, whereas they paid 653 billion euros last year. Europe will not be able to compete with the rest of the world as long as energy supplies are twice as expensive as they used to be, Orban believes.

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“..while also deciding to view Zelensky at ground level instead atop a pedestal.”

Washington Becoming Weary of Zelensky’s Never-Ending Demands For Aid (Sp.)

American officials are growing tired of the demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to make with regard to Western support for Kiev, Douglas MacKinnon, a former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon, wrote in an opinion piece for a US media outlet. MacKinnon pointed out in his Saturday article for The Hill, citing sources, that US President Joe Biden “lashed out” at Zelensky in June 2022, yelling that the Ukrainian leader “should be showing more gratitude for the billions in aid he was getting from the United States via the American people.” Asked about Zelensky’s never-ending demands for US aid, a former high-level Pentagon official told MacKinnon that Western support is not infinite.

“Zelensky is acting like a spoiled, petulant child who gets everything he wants and it’s still not enough. Many in the U.S. government and many of our citizens are growing tired of his act. I can assure you he is burning bridges in Europe as well. There is only so much money and good will to go around,” the former Pentagon official said. MacKinnon emphasized that more and more Americans are becoming unsupportive of the continued US aid to Kiev and this trend is likely to grow, “as the American people take a harder look at the horrific consequences of the war while also deciding to view Zelensky at ground level instead atop a pedestal.”

Earlier this week, media reported that Washington was planning to announce a new package of military assistance for Ukraine worth up to $400 million. The new package, which could be announced as early as next week, could include artillery munitions, air defense missiles and ground vehicles for Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive. Earlier this month, the US Defense Department announced a new security assistance package to Kiev worth $1.3 billion that for the first time included 155mm cluster artillery rounds.

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Japan risks becoming both the rock and the hard place.

Japan Doesn’t Want to Fight for Taiwan and Neither Do Other US Allies (Sp.)

Despite Japan bolstering its military capabilities under the nation’s new Defense Buildup Program, it appears to have zero appetite to engage in direct confrontation with China over Taiwan, Western media and think tanks say. US military facilities in Okinawa, Japan, might play a central role in any Taiwan crisis, according to the Western press. Moreover, American military analysts have almost unanimously agreed that Japan is “the most likely US ally to contribute troops” in a potential US conflict with China over the island. Back in October 2021, War on the Rocks, a US online media outlet, quoted a Japanese poll which appeared to indicate that 74% of respondents would support their government’s military engagement in the Taiwan Strait against China.

The report further speculated about the possibilities of circumventing the country’s Constitution, which limits Japan’s ability to participate in conflicts. Bold statements made by some Japanese officials also seemed to confirm Tokyo’s resolve. One of them, former Minister of Defense Yasuhide Nakayama, insisted in June 2021 that Taiwan is a “red line” and that “we have to protect Taiwan as a democratic country.” Japan and Taiwan are geographically close and any possible military actions over the island could potentially affect Japan’s Okinawa prefecture, Nakayama argued at the time. The People’s Republic of China, which considers Taiwan its inalienable part, has repeatedly stated that it is going to reunite with the island peacefully, referring to years of fruitful collaboration with the former Taiwanese government formed by members of Kuomintang Party.

The Kuomintang can make a spectacular comeback during the Taiwanese general elections, scheduled for January 2024. The party’s victory could nip the fuss around Taiwan’s secessionism and potential conflict in the bud. Even US lawmakers admit it, considering the Kuomintang’s win a potential “threat” to Washington’s plans in the Asia-Pacific. [..] The unfolding situation has apparently given shivers to the Japanese leadership. The Wall Street Journal broke on Monday that the Japanese government is ready to give permission to the US to use bases in Japan in the case of conflict over Taiwan, but Tokyo’s own participation is unlikely. Per the report, Washington invited Tokyo to consider using its Self-Defense Forces, especially the Maritime Self-Defense Force for hunting for Chinese submarines around the island of Taiwan and for other military missions.

Read more …

What Ukraine is really about.

Lockheed Martin Predicts Strong Profits as Global Instability Rises (LI)

Lockheed Martin believes global instability is driving demand and sees an increase in annual profits. Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine has caused an increase in arms spending among NATO members, boosting weapons makers’ stock prices. On Tuesday, Lockheed raised its annual profit and sales outlook on strong demand for military equipment. After making the announcement, the company’s stock price increased by one percent. Reuters reports, “[Lockheed] expects full-year net sales to be between $66.25 billion and $66.75 billion, up from its earlier forecast of $65 billion to $66 billion.”

The billions in profit are driven by sales of big-ticket systems like the F-35. However, Lockheed has struggled to produce F-35s that can perform its promised abilities. In May, the government found the planes’ engines have a serious problem dealing with heat. “The F-35’s engine lacks the ability to properly manage the heat generated by the aircraft’s systems,” POGO reported. “That increases the engine’s wear, and auditors now estimate the extra maintenance will add $38 billion to the program’s life-cycle costs.” The arms maker has additionally experienced a boost in demand for smaller systems, like the Javelin anti-tank missile. The White House has shipped thousands of Javelin systems to Kiev since Joe Biden took office.

As well as predicting future success, Lockheed announced it beat expectations regarding quarterly sales. According to Reuters, “Quarterly net sales rose 8.1% to $16.69 billion, beating expectations of $15.92 billion.” Last year, Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, described the surge in the market for weapons as the highest since the Cold War. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” he said. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lockheed’s stock price traded below $340 a share, the price increased to over $450 within a few months. On Thursday, Lockheed’s stock was valued at $456 per sale.

Read more …

How do you keep Joe out of the story?

Hunter Biden Expected To Face Up To 10 Criminal Referrals (ZH)

The Chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, James Comer (R-KY), says he plans to file “between six and 10 criminal referrals” against Hunter Biden once his committee finishes its investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings. According to the NY Post, the charges would include sex trafficking a woman across state lines for prostitution. “The Democrats kept saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any evidence.’ Well, [Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene] showed them evidence,” Comer told Fox Business in an interview, referring to a sexually graphic image printed on a poster from Hunter Biden’s laptop, in which he’s stuffing his manhood into a prostitute’s mouth who was allegedly paid for with company funds.

“She showed them evidence of the president’s son committing a crime, violating the Mann Act,” said Comer, adding “She showed the plane tickets, she showed the pictures, she showed the evidence. You know, there’s no question he violated it. That’s another thing that he could have been charged with.” Comer also said that the referrals could include violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). “He was money laundering,” said Comer. “He was racketeering. He committed wire fraud. He violated the Mann Act. The list goes on and on and on.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Thursday released an unclassified FBI document in which a confidential human source lays out an alleged bribery scheme involving Joe and Hunter Biden, in which a Ukrainian gas giant, Burisma, hired Hunter to gain access to his then-VP father. “The House Oversight Committee previously issued a subpoena to obtain the document, with which FBI Director Christopher Wray did not comply. Though he ultimately permitted the committee members to view the FD-1023 in a secure location, the contents remained unpublished until Grassley’s Thursday release. The document shows that the bureau had a trusted source privy to Burisma’s efforts to quash a probe from then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and its plans to expand to the U.S. and secure a company for IPO purposes. -Just the News

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“You don’t need dollars and you don’t need gold. You just need to be smart enough to anchor your currency to gold..”

New BRICS Currency Boosts Gold & Destroys Dollar – Jim Rickards (USAW)

Seven-time, best-selling financial author James Rickards predicted in his most recent best-seller called “Sold Out” why broken supply chains would cause big inflation. He was right, and he still contends, “Supply chain problems and inflation are not over.” For an example of the supply chain still being in fragile shape, look no further than the failed grain deal between Ukraine and Russia last week. Rickards points out, “Putin has been very patient about this. He had a deal. Ukraine was not living up to their end of the deal. Putin says we are the ones getting attacked, so, screw the deal. What’s that going to do to the price of grain? It’s going to send grain prices up, and it’s already up 10% just in a matter of days.”

This brings us the new BRICS gold-weighted currency (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) that might be announced in the middle to the end of next month. Rickards calls one unit of currency a “BRIC.” This is a competitor to the U.S. dollar, but Rickards says, “It’s not a reserve currency. . . .I think it may be 8 grams of gold to one “BRIC” (currency), but I don’t know. What I do know is it does not matter. What does matter is they are going to anchor it to a weight of gold. . . . It’s NOT redeemable in gold, it is anchored to it. . . . Let’s says a “BRIC” is worth one ounce of gold. Today that is $1,970 per ounce, except the “BRIC” is NOT anchored to the dollar. It is anchored to gold, which stands in the middle of this equation.

So, the dollar price of gold is going to be going up and down all the time, which means the dollar/“BRIC” exchange rate is going to be going up and down all the time. They don’t have to defend the “BRIC.” They have gold, but they don’t have to back it up with gold. . . . They actually don’t need any gold. . . . If you have made your currency anchored to gold . . . do you want the price to go up or down? You want the price of gold to go up because that means the “BRIC” is worth more dollars, and the dollar is crashing. It’s a way to destroy the dollar. You don’t need dollars and you don’t need gold. You just need to be smart enough to anchor your currency to gold, and when dollar inflation starts to go up, your currency is going to be worth more because of how you pegged it, not to dollars, but how you pegged it to gold.”

Rickards goes on to say, “So, if I were a BRICS member, and I were Russia in particular, and I had this currency tied to gold, and I wanted my currency to be more valuable and your currency (U.S. dollar) less valuable, one of the ways to do that is mess with the supply chain and drive up the price of oil, gasoline, grain . . . which drives up pork prices and chicken prices, and the list goes on. That’s one way to do it.” Rickards also talks about deflation this year and big inflation coming after that. Rickards is predicting big inflation coming for people using dollars, and with his track record, you would be a fool to bet against his analysis.

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“I shall resist any illegal federal court order.”

Tyranny of the Minority (Turley)

“I shall resist any illegal federal court order.” When “the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong,” the president should refuse to follow it. Those two statements were made roughly 60 years apart. The first is from segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D). The second was made by two liberal professors this month. In one of the most chilling developments in our history, the left has come to embrace the authoritarian language and logic of segregationists in calling for defiance and radical measures against the Supreme Court. In a recent open letter, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and University of San Francisco political scientist Aaron Belkin called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.”

Thus, in light of the court’s bar on the use of race in college admissions, they argue that Biden should just continue to follow his own constitutional interpretation. The use of the affirmative action case is ironic, since polls have consistently shown that the majority of the public does not support the use of race in college admissions. Indeed, even in the most liberal states, such as California, voters have repeatedly rejected affirmative action in college admissions. Polls further show that a majority support the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. So despite referenda and polls showing majority support for barring race in admissions, academics are pushing to impose their own values, regardless of the views of the public or of the courts.

However, even if these measures were popular, it would not make them right. It is precisely what segregationists such as Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.) argued, that “all the people of the South are in favor of segregation. And Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, we are going to maintain segregated schools.” Tushnet and Belkin cite with approval Biden’s declaration that this is “not a normal Supreme Court.” Biden’s view of normalcy appears to be a court that agrees with his fluid view of constitutional law, by which he can forgive roughly a half of trillion dollars in loans or impose a national eviction moratorium without a vote of Congress.

Tushnet and Belkin know their audience. Biden has previously evinced little respect for the Constitution or the courts. Take the eviction case. In an earlier decision, a majority of justices had declared that Biden’s actions were unconstitutional, confirming what many of us had said for months. Even after the majority declared it unconstitutional, Biden wanted to reissue the national moratorium. White House counsel and most scholars told him the move would be blatantly unconstitutional and defy the express ruling of the court. Instead, he consulted the only law professor willing to tell him what he wanted to hear and did it anyway. It was quickly again declared unconstitutional.

Read more …

Good point:

“..who would even want to win the support of such vile creatures as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jerrold Nadler, and Adam Schiff, let alone be associated with them in the same club?”

The Downfall of Blobism (Kunstler)

You might not know it these lazy, hazy, muggy days of midsummer, but things are getting pretty wildly out-of-hand in our republic. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. blew up the Democratic Party yesterday in the House Subcommittee on Weaponization of Government hearing, acting like a normal human while being set upon by a flock of harpies desperately screeching “Russia, Russia, Russia,” as if that means anything anymore. He branded them as worse than the McCarthyites of the 1950s, rebuked their insane scurrilities supporting censorship, and left them in a state of exhausted disgrace.

It happens that he is running for the nomination of that very party knocking itself out to destroy him. To win that prize he would have to put a thousand top Democrats through some grueling act of repentance and contrition — and then you’ve got to ask yourself: who would even want to win the support of such vile creatures as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jerrold Nadler, and Adam Schiff, let alone be associated with them in the same club?

Elsewhere around the scene this week, we have the ever more degenerate antics of the FBI on view as whistleblowers pour out of the woodwork disclosing the rot behind Director Chris Wray and his boss AG Merrick Garland. This Deep State Blob of turpitude has been growing and festering with so many overlapping cover-ups that they’ve run out of rugs to sweep their crimes under. The massive moneygrubbing misdeeds of Hillary Clinton from Skolkovo and Uranium One beat a direct path through the Ukraine coup of 2014, to RussiaGate, to the Biden Family’s global influence-peddling operation and every mendacious act in-between including the FISA falsehoods, the J-6 entrapment caper, hundreds of malicious and deceitful prosecutions, the Covid-19 fraud, the censorship and medical tyranny, and God-knows how many ensuing deaths from a poisonous vaccine… and now, a brain-dead government trifling with nuclear war.

And whose brilliant idea was it, anyway, to install this disgusting and incompetent grifter, “Joe Biden,” as our head-of-state? They surely knew well before 2019 that his bag-man son was rooting out bribes in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere, at the same time he was consorting with whores and trafficked children while destroying his brain with crack and downing a fifth of vodka a day. And you’re telling me that the CIA and FBI did not know about any of this, even before October 2019 when Hunter’s laptop stuffed with graphic evidence fell into their hands? If they didn’t know any of this, then what’s the point of having an intel community?

My guess is that it was Barack Obama’s idea to stick “Joe Biden” in the White House in the vain effort to use this captive criminal to stave off any accounting for the aforesaid villainies that occurred during Mr. Obama’s two terms. The mission was originally Hillary Clinton’s — she had plenty at stake herself — but she botched the job in 2016 and allowed the Golden Golem of Greatness to slip into power. It is amazing to look back and see how the mighty Blob congealed after that election — like a giant rogue macrophage — to surround and eliminate Mr. Trump, who apparently did not know for many months what he was up against: the entire permanent bureaucracy.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Burton

 

 

 

 

Russ/Gore

 

 

Nanny cam

 

 


saharan dust, a mineral dust from the sahara desert, under the microscope. the dust particles contain sodium, manganese, aluminum, silicon, iron, cobalt, copper, potassium, sulfur and calcium. saharan dust provides marine bacteria and phytoplankton with important nutrients.

 

 

 

 

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Jun 202023
 
 June 20, 2023  Posted by at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  82 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Fishing Boats on the Beach at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer 1888

 

We Need a Peace President (Ron Paul)
Blinken Says US Does Not Support Taiwan Independence (JTN)
Beijing Tells US To Respect ‘One China’ Policy (RT)
Future Of Humanity Depends On China-US Relations – Xi (RT)
Scholz: West Should ‘Brace’ Itself For Prolonged Conflict In Ukraine (TASS)
Biden Warns Of ‘Real’ Nuclear Threat (RT)
Greater Eurasian Partnership Becomes Russia’s Flagship Project – Lavrov (TASS)
BRICS Expansion, De-Dollarization and ‘Decline of US Empire’ (Tweedie)
Kiev Reportedly Can’t Account for ‘Hundreds of Millions’ in Weapons (Reed)
EU Wants to Mandate Arms Makers to Prioritize Orders for Ukraine
German Armor Too Wide To Transport – Bild (RT)
BlackRock, JP Morgan Set Up ‘Reconstruction Bank’ For Ukraine (HE)
Strange Days (James Howard Kunstler)
The New World War On Free Speech (Shellenberger)
Juneteenth, The Day Republicans Freed All The Democrats’ Slaves (BBee)

 

 

Rand Paul
https://twitter.com/i/status/1670604730794401793

 

 

 

 

Putin OUN

 

 

Lavrov Germany
https://twitter.com/i/status/1670747070372691969

 

 

Results of the counteroffensive …

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..we desperately need a peace president to do for us what JFK did for the US during the Cuba crisis..”

We Need a Peace President (Ron Paul)

Most people agree that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some would even argue that we are closer now than we were in those fateful days, when Soviet missiles in Cuba almost triggered a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. In those days we were told that we were in a life-or-death struggle with Communism and thus could not cede a square foot of territory or the dominoes would fall one-by-one until the “Reds” ruled over us. That crisis was very real to me, as I was drafted into the military in the middle of the US/USSR standoff over Cuba and we could all feel how close we were to annihilation. Fortunately, we had a president in the White House at the time who understood the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship.

Even though he was surrounded by hawks who could never forgive him for aborting the idiotic Bay of Pigs Cuba invasion, President John F. Kennedy picked up the telephone for a discussion with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, which eventually saved the world. Historians now tell us that President Kennedy agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing missiles from Cuba. It was a classic case of how diplomacy can work if properly employed. It is all too clear that we do not have a John F. Kennedy in the White House today. Although we no longer face a Soviet empire and communist ideology as justification for taking a confrontational tone toward Russia, the Biden Administration is still dragging the US toward a nuclear conflict. Why are they putting us all at risk?

The same old “domino theory” that was discredited in the Cold War: If we don’t fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian, Putin will soon be marching through Berlin. This all started with Biden promising to only send uniforms and medical supplies to Ukraine for fear of sparking a Russian retaliation. From there we went to anti-tank missiles, multiple-rocket launchers, Patriot missiles, Bradley fighting vehicles, and millions of rounds of ammunition. The Biden Administration announced last week that it would send depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine, which poisons the earth for millennia to come. Rumors are that long-range ATACMs missiles are to be delivered soon, which could strike deep into Russia. Apparently, F-16 fighter jets are also on the way.

The escalation rationale from Washington, we are told, is that since the Russians have not directly retaliated against NATO for NATO’s direct support of Ukraine’s war machine, we can be sure they never will respond. Is that really a wise bet? It is clear to many that US-built F-16 fighters taking off from NATO bases with NATO pilots attacking Russians in Ukraine – or even Russia itself – would be a declaration of war on Russia. That means World War III – something we managed to avoid for the whole Cold War. Congress is silent – or compliant – as we lurch forward toward disaster for no discernable US strategic goal. Biden – or whoever is actually running the show – is forging straight ahead. As we move into the US presidential election cycle one thing is clear: we desperately need a peace president to do for us what JFK did for the US during the Cuba crisis. Hopefully it won’t be too late!

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“About 50% of the global commercial container traffic… goes through the Taiwan Strait every day,” Blinken remarked, including the vast majority of “high-end semiconductors.”

Blinken Says US Does Not Support Taiwan Independence (JTN)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a press conference Monday that the U.S. does not support Taiwan independence. “We do not support Taiwan independence,” Blinken said. “We remain opposed to any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side. We continue to expect the peaceful resolution of cross strait differences. We remain committed to continuing our responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act including making sure Taiwan has the ability to defend itself.” Blinken made clear that the U.S. does have some concerns about China and what its actions could have on the world. “At the same time, we and many others have deep concerns about some of the provocative actions that China has taken in recent years going back to 2016,” he continued, according to Fox News.


“And the reason that this is a concern for so many countries, not just the United States, is that were there to be a crisis over Taiwan, the likelihood is that could produce an economic crisis that could affect quite literally the entire world.” Blinken wrapped up his meeting with China President Xi Jinping and summarized it as “candid” and “constructive,” but admitted to “profound differences” as the two nations seek to repair “unstable” relations with each other. He said during an interview with NPR that it was important to maintain peace with the nation that China treats as its own. Taiwan is a massive contributor to the global trade market. “About 50% of the global commercial container traffic… goes through the Taiwan Strait every day,” Blinken remarked, including the vast majority of “high-end semiconductors.” “If either of those things were taken offline as a result of a crisis, it could have devastating consequences for the global economy,” he continued.

Blinken Taiwan

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Where Blinken got his talking points.

Beijing Tells US To Respect ‘One China’ Policy (RT)

The US should respect the One China principle and stop supporting Taiwan’s push for independence from Beijing, Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi has told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “China has no room to compromise or concede” on the status of Taiwan, Wang told Blinken during a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guest House in Beijing on Monday. “The US must truly adhere to the One China principle… respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and clearly oppose ‘Taiwan independence’,” the director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission office of the Chinese Communist Party was quoted by local media as saying. Washington’s support for sovereignty in Taiwan, a self-governed island of 23.5 million which Beijing views as part of its territory, has been among the issues aggravating tensions between China and the US in recent years.

According to Wang, bilateral relations have now reached “a critical juncture.” He told Blinken that Washington needs to make a choice “between dialogue or confrontation, cooperation or conflict” with Beijing. “We must take a responsible attitude toward the people, history and the world, and reverse the downward spiral of US-China relations,” he said. China’s top diplomat also called upon the Biden administration to stop making threats towards Beijing and abandon its “suppression” of Chinese scientific and technological development. According to the US State Department, Blinken stressed the importance of “responsibly managing the competition” between the US and China “through open channels of communication to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.”

He also told Wang that Washington will “continue to use diplomacy to raise areas of concern and stand up for the interests and values of the American people.” Blinken is the first US secretary of state to visit Beijing in five years. His trip was initially scheduled to take place in February, was postponed due to the so-called “spy balloon” incident. Washington claimed it shot down a Chinese surveillance aircraft over its territory, while Beijing said it was merely a weather balloon, which had strayed into American airspace by accident. Following his meeting with Wang, Blinken held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. His two-day visit also included negotiations with China’s recently appointed Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Sunday.

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“The international community [..] doesn’t want to choose sides in the event of a conflict..”:

Future Of Humanity Depends On China-US Relations – Xi (RT)

Stable relations between China and the US are vital for the international community, which doesn’t want to choose sides between the two countries, Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Beijing on Monday. “Planet Earth is big enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the US,” Xi told Blinken, according to a statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The Chinese leader said that the world is interested in “generally stable” ties between Beijing and Washington, because “whether the two countries can find the right way to get along bears on the future and destiny of humanity.” The international community expects China and the US to “coexist in peace and have friendly and cooperative relations,” and doesn’t want to choose sides in the event of a conflict, Xi stated.

The Chinese president argued that competition with Beijing would not help Washington to solve America’s domestic problems or the challenges currently facing the world. “China respects US interests and does not seek to challenge or displace the US,” Xi stressed, adding that Beijing expects the same approach from the Biden administration. Xi called on the US to adopt a rational and pragmatic attitude towards China, and to jointly work on improving ties and making the global situation more stable. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Blinken had assured Xi during their 35-minute talk that the US does not seek conflict or a new Cold War with Beijing, and has no intention of trying to change China’s political system.

Washington expects to continue high-level engagement with Beijing, while keeping lines of communication open and managing differences responsibly, the top US diplomat said, according to the Chinese statement. Blinken is the first US secretary of state to meet Xi since 2018. He was initially scheduled to arrive in Beijing in early February, but the trip was postponed due to the so-called “spy balloon” scandal. The US claimed it had shot down a Chinese surveillance aircraft over its territory, while China insisted that the object was a weather balloon which had strayed into American airspace by accident. The two-day visit by Blinken also included a meeting with Beijing’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, earlier on Monday, as well as talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Sunday.

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“However, it’s obvious that NATO will not become a party to the conflict.”

Scholz: West Should ‘Brace’ Itself For Prolonged Conflict In Ukraine (TASS)

The West should adjust its policy with the expectation that the Ukraine conflict may go on for an indefinite period of time German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday. “We have to brace ourselves that the Russian [special military operation] act could last for a long time,” German Chancellor Scholz said speaking at a joint news conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg “This is what we are preparing for and this is what we are orienting our policy toward,” Scholz told Stoltenberg. “Germany will continue to be a staunch supporter of Ukraine as long as it takes,” Scholz continued. “However, it’s obvious that NATO will not become a party to the conflict.”

On June 14, the German government has adopted the country’s first ever National Security Strategy, which enshrines the main principles and measures to counter potential external threats to the state in the coming years. “The determining factor” of the document’s development was Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the “Zeitenwende” or “tipping point,” as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it. The German government enshrined its NATO commitments and decided to increase defense spending by twp percent of GDP. “We express our strong commitment to NATO and the EU and strengthen the Bundeswehr (the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Germany) to meet the primary objective of national and alliance defense (of two percent),” the document said.

It pointed out that the authorities planned to reach the two-percent increase in defense spending in the term of “over several years.” “We will strengthen our security in cyberspace and space,” the document stressed. In addition, the German government said that it will reduce dependence on energy and raw materials supplies and work on their diversification. “We will reduce unilateral dependency on the supplies of raw materials and energy resources by diversifying them. We will work together with our businesses to promote raw materials projects, including creating strategic stockpiles,” the document said. The German authorities also added that they sought to expand national food, energy, and medicine reserves. The document included as well plans to overpass a law aimed at protecting critical infrastructure facilities.

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“Before blaming others, Washington could use some introspection.”

Biden Warns Of ‘Real’ Nuclear Threat (RT)

President Joe Biden has claimed there is a “real” threat that Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons, soon after the Kremlin announced that it would station some of its arsenal in a friendly neighboring state. Speaking to a group of donors in California on Monday, Biden suggested that Russia’s moves in Belarus could be a sign that it is preparing to use its smaller-yield tactical nukes, despite recent comments from the White House acknowledging no “imminent indication” of any such attack. “When I was out here about two years ago saying I worried about the Colorado river drying up, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” he said, adding “They looked at me like when I said I worry about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. It’s real.”

The statement came after the president slammed Russia’s upcoming deployments as “totally irresponsible” over the weekend. He previously told reporters he felt “extremely negative” about the decision. Moscow and Minsk finalized an agreement on hosting tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory last month. According to Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, the atomic warheads will be mounted on Iskander-M missiles and fighter jets specifically modified for the purpose. Russia first revealed that talks for the deployments were underway in March, and said the decision was a response after Britain supplied depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine last year. On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin told his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko that “everything is going according to plan,” adding that preparations for the missiles would be completed by July.

Responding to critical reactions from US officials, the Russian Embassy in the United States previously accused Washington of hypocrisy on the issue, pointing to some 150 American nuclear missiles stationed across Western Europe and Türkiye. “The United States has been for decades maintaining a large arsenal of its nuclear weapons in Europe. Together with its NATO allies it participates in nuclear-sharing arrangements and trains for scenarios of nuclear weapons use against our country,” it said, adding “Before blaming others, Washington could use some introspection.”

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Building a formidable bloc.

Greater Eurasian Partnership Becomes Russia’s Flagship Project – Lavrov (TASS)

Building support for the Greater Eurasian Partnership project could be seen as the flagship project of Russia’s foreign policy, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday. “Our flagship foreign political project is to [build] support for the concept of the Greater Eurasian Partnership. What we’re talking about is facilitating the objective process of forming a broad integrative configuration that is open for all countries and associations across our vast continent. Practical steps are already being made [in this direction],” Lavrov said.


These include the processes of interlinking the complementary development plans of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, expanding interaction within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the involvement of SCO observer states and dialogue partners, strengthening the strategic partnership between Russia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and establishing working contacts among the executive bodies of the EAEU, SCO and ASEAN, the foreign minister noted. “Among the concrete deliverables [of these processes] we envision the provision of mutually beneficial, interlinking infrastructure and the creation of a continent-wide architecture of peace, development and cooperation throughout Greater Eurasia,” Lavrov added.

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“I could give you ten other statistics and they all point in the same direction. This is an empire that is declining..”

BRICS Expansion, De-Dollarization and ‘Decline of US Empire’ (Tweedie)

Economist Richard Wolff told Sputnik that the US displaced its mother country Britain as the world’s dominant imperial power around 1920 — and that history was now repeating itself. “The American empire didn’t work the same way. It didn’t set up colonies the way the British had in India or South Africa or any of the other places,” Wolff said. “It had a more informal empire. [From] The way it had managed to control Latin America throughout the early years of this country to how they expanded and controlled the world by economic arrangements, by political deals, by alliances.” But the US empire peaked around the year 2000, the academic said, and is now in “decline.” “We lost the wars in Vietnam. We lost the war in Afghanistan. We lost the war in Iraq,” Wolff said.

“It’s not clear what’s going to happen in Ukraine. But I wouldn’t bet money on a different outcome there either. And that war is a war between the United States and Russia more than anything else, with the disaster being concentrated on […] Ukraine.” While the US leads the G7 group of the biggest Western economies, “there’s a different and other bloc, and that’s what’s new, it’s the bloc called the BRICS.” “The BRICS now account for 33 per cent, one third of the total output of goods and services on this planet, whereas the United States and its allies have slipped to under 30 per cent, about 29 per cent of total output.” “I could give you ten other statistics and they all point in the same direction. This is an empire that is declining,” he added.

The conflict in Ukraine and Western sanctions on Russia — the world’s biggest energy and food grain exporter — has accelerated that downfall. “The economic war between Russia and Europe is being lost by Europe, not by Russia, which was not the intent, but is the outcome,” Wolff said. “The Europeans are going to have to ask themselves, which side are you on? Are you going to stay with the US and the G7 and heading down the slide of your bloc as the BRICS blocs rises, or are you going to choose the other way?” The academic pointed out that when the UK had the world’s greatest empire from the 17th to the 19th centuries, the pound sterling was the “global currency.” With the rise of the US in the 20th century the dollar usurped the pound.

“What that means is that everywhere in the world, people need dollars to do their business. Central banks hold dollars as that alongside of gold, as the guarantor of the value of their currency,” Wolff explained. Now BRICS has overtaken the G7 as “the dominant economic bloc in the world,” a new contest has begun which will end in “the decline of the dollar and the rise of whatever alternative the BRICS settle on, either the Chinese currency or a composite that they’re producing.”

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Everybody takes their cut…

Kiev Reportedly Can’t Account for ‘Hundreds of Millions’ in Weapons (Reed)

The Zelensky regime spent “hundreds of millions” on weapons which have yet to materialize, according to a damning new [NYT] article which reported serious problems throughout the Ukrainian military supply chain. “Ukrainian government documents show that as of the end of last year,” Kiev’s leaders “paid arms suppliers more than $800 million since… February 2022 for contracts that went completely or partly unfulfilled,” the outlet noted. “We did have cases where we paid money and we didn’t receive,” a deputy Ukrainian defense minister working on arms procurement reportedly confirmed. When weapons do show up, their quality is reportedly a major source of frustration. Video of a “recent delivery of 33 self-propelled howitzers donated by the Italian government…. showed smoke billowing from the engine of one, and engine coolant leaking from another,” according to the outlet.

In a statement, Italy’s Defense Ministry claimed the vehicles were known to have been decommissioned long ago but that the Kiev regime demanded them regardless. The weapons were always meant “to be overhauled and put into operation,” the ministry insisted, given what it called “the urgent need for means to face the Russian aggression.” But the headaches didn’t end there. Efforts to fix the faulty howitzers were complicated by another setback in January after Zelensky’s officials claimed they paid a US company to carry out the necessary repairs, but 13 of them were still “not suitable for combat missions” when received. In a February letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general, Ukraine’s defense procurement director effectively accused Ultra Defense Corporation of defrauding the Kiev regime of millions of dollars, claiming the Florida-based weapons supplier took $19.8 million of Ukrainian government funds with “no prior intention to fulfill its obligations.”

However, the company’s chief executive, Matthew Herring, strenuously denies the accusations. “Every single one of them worked when we delivered them,” he reportedly wrote. In a statement which accused the Ukrainians of failing to maintain the weapons upon their arrival, he noted that one howitzer suffered from a coolant leak which “magically appeared after delivery in Ukraine.” The episode isn’t the only instance where Kiev officials’ stories didn’t exactly match up with the entities they partnered with. The documents, reportedly the product of a government audit this year, “showed that some of the most valuable sets of undelivered contracts are between the Defense Ministry and state-owned Ukrainian arms companies that function as independent brokers.” “In recent months, the ministry has sued at least two of those state firms over unfulfilled contracts, and Ukraine recently announced overhauls aimed at making those companies more efficient,” the outlet reported.

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With all those millions/billions missing, let’s spend more, and faster…

EU Wants to Mandate Arms Makers to Prioritize Orders for Ukraine

The European Union put forward a “temporary emergency measure” which will obligate manufacturers of explosives to prioritize the orders of firms producing ammunition for Ukraine, the military news portal reported on Monday, citing a European Commission spokesperson. “The Commission’s proposal provides for priority rated orders to help manufacturers – for example – with the supply of necessary raw materials where the Commission could ask suppliers to prioritize selling to those manufacturers,” the spokesperson told the outlet. At the moment, the “emergency measure” is getting through the EU’s approval process, the spokesperson was cited as saying.


The initiative has already drawn criticism from a number of member states and private companies that fear the Commission will get too much power assuming the role of regulator of the ammunition market, according to the report. They argue the plan will create conditions for the violation of trade secrets or the disclosure of confidential information. The unnamed Commission spokesperson allayed these concerns by telling that “the Commission has long-standing experience in handling such information in the context of other procedures and has the necessary safeguards in place.” In early May, the Commission announced it would allocate 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) for the production of ammunition for Ukraine. The EU plans to spend another 500 million euros on expanding the production of shells in Europe.

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“German media have mocked it as the ‘Pannenpanzer,’ or “breakdown tank.”

German Armor Too Wide To Transport – Bild (RT)

Germany’s main infantry fighting vehicle, the Puma, is too wide to be transported by train, the outlet Bild reported on Sunday. The IFV has struggled with a variety of mechanical problems since entering service in 2015. “In terms of firepower, the Puma is really good. But the transport is more than suboptimal,” one soldier told Bild. Tracked vehicles such as tanks and IFVs are normally transported to the area of operations by train, in order to save on fuel and track maintenance. Because the Pumas are so wide, their crews need to unscrew their side armor before loading it onto the rail cars – then repeat the procedure in reverse at the destination. A company of 14 Pumas can be “completely loaded and stowed in 24 hours,” a Bundeswehr spokesperson told Bild.

Military experts estimated that transporting an entire battalion of 44 vehicles can take “a few days.” One big bottleneck is a shortage of cranes, but the military said Puma companies will be “equipped with them in the future.” Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann developed the Puma between 1995 and 2009 to replace the older Marder IVF, which Berlin has since supplied to the Ukrainian military. The specifications called for a vehicle that could be airlifted to places like Africa and Afghanistan. “The Puma shows what mistakes were made in procurement,” Andreas Schwarz, a Bundestag member from the ruling SPD, told Bild. “Instead of relying on battle-tested and marketable weapon systems, a panzer was developed according to special requests that is too wide for train transport. That must end.”

Word of the new problems with the Puma comes during a difficult month for the reputation of German armor, as photographic and video evidence from Ukraine showed Leopard 2 tanks provided to Kiev getting destroyed in battles with the Russian military. Berlin paused the purchase of new Pumas last December, after a disastrous exercise that saw one of the vehicles catch fire and all 18 break down. The vehicle is supposed to have superior crew protection and excellent firepower, including a 30mm autocannon and anti-tank missiles. However, German media have mocked it as the ‘Pannenpanzer,’ or “breakdown tank.”

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They’re probably making deals for a Ukraine that includes the Donbass (the richest part) and Crimea. But there will not be such a Ukraine.

BlackRock, JP Morgan Set Up ‘Reconstruction Bank’ For Ukraine (HE)

BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are reportedly aiding the Ukrainian government in setting up a reconstruction bank that could see rebuilding projects being heavily invested in by private entities. The Financial Times noted that it would cost Ukraine roughly $411 billion to rebuild their country amid the onslaught of attacks by Russia, but the cost is continuing to increase. The Ukraine Development Fund is still in the early stages of setting up the reconstruction bank, but potential investors will get an inside preview of how things will look during a London conference that is set to take place this week. With the steep cost to rebuild, the Ukrainian government reached out to BlackRock in November to see if there was a conceivable way of attracting investments. JPMorgan was soon added in February.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed last month that he was working with the two financial institutions and consultants at McKinsey, per the report. Philipp Hildebrand, BlackRock vice-chair, said: “So many of today’s long-term challenges are best addressed through blended finance and this is one. You need these vehicles to mobilise capital at scale.” Though BlackRock and JPMorgan are offering their services, they will likely have the first look at potential investments in the Eastern European country. The report noted that the current development has only deepened JPMorgan’s relationship with its long-standing client, Ukraine. The financial institution has helped Ukraine raise more than $25 billion in sovereign debt since 2010, and it led in the country’s $20 billion debt reconstruction in 2022.

BlackRock has claimed that Ukraine needs a “development finance bank” that would provide the country with infrastructure, climate, and agriculture opportunities. This will apparently make them more attractive to other long-term investors. JPMorgan was added to the venture due to its debt expertise. Stefan Weiler, JPMorgan’s head of debt capital markets in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, said: “The fund is being set up to also give public and private sector investors the opportunity to invest into specific projects and sectors.” “There will be different sectoral funds that the fund identified as priorities for Ukraine. That aim is to maximise capital participation.” However, it does not appear that Ukraine is expected to receive such investments until the end of the conflict with Russia.

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“..if Harris were flat-out forced to resign, then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would automatically become president..”

Strange Days (James Howard Kunstler)

Strange doings at a strange time in a strange land. Videos of widespread military vehicle maneuvers around our nation popped up on the Web at mid-weekend while the American citizenry went about its holiday weekend business (including Father’s Day revels and “Juneteenth” celebration mass shootings): Scenes of armored personnel carriers rolling down Walnut Street in downtown Philly; B2 bomber wings over Minnesota; Tank columns galumphing along a California highway… leading to widespread suspicions that something untoward is up. Durned if I know what’s up. Among things one can know: The “Joe Biden” presidency is whirling around the drain in plain sight, and with it, likely, the Globalist hopes and dreams of making everybody eat bugs while they take away everything you own.

Last week, audiotapes surfaced of the main parties to the Ukraine grift (Biden and Poroshenko) working things out in 2016 over the phone in “JB’s” final days as vice-president. Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee has got its mitts on Biden family bank records galore detailing the abstruse money-laundering activities that were run through obscure European banks and innumerable Biden shell companies. Well, sonofabitch…! It’s getting hard even for Democrats to ignore the accumulating evidence of the Biden family’s global grift operation, and “JB’s” obvious advancing mental deterioration, provoking moves that should lead to his ejection from office. Last week, their captive mainstream news media broadcast a cavalcade of embarrassing public idiocies committed by the Commander in Chief — declaring “God save the Queen” incongruously at the end of a Gun Safety Summit in Connecticut; groping actress Eva Longoria’s boobs after a White House movie screening; cracking a weird joke about the “Philadelphia girl” in his bed (Dr. Jill Biden); being introduced at an I-95 bridge collapse event by brain-damaged PA Senator John Fetterman who tossed up a word salad about the federal “delegadation” aiming to fix “infructure,” while dressed-up looking like Uncle Fester out of The Addams Family. The indignity of it all was really something to behold.

You understand, “Joe Biden’s” reelection campaign is another rank hoax, yet another trip laid on the American public by a desperate, degenerate Democratic Party that doesn’t know what to do next with public opinion souring on it. There’s no way this gibbering near-corpse can run again. He can’t even perform as a puppet anymore. He’s a broke-down engine pulling a train of failure, perfidy, and treason five miles long behind him. The Ukraine war project he presides over looks more and more like an effort to conceal and cover-up his family’s bribery schemes by laying waste to the pitiful chump of a foreign land that went along with the grift — and which, anyway, is winding up as yet another American military humiliation with the Russians finishing off what’s left of Ukraine’s army in the failed “spring offensive.”

Do you suppose that all these military vehicle movements around the country in recent days signal a constitutional crisis in the offing, necessitating martial law? Let me lay it out: Absolutely no one believes that Vice-president Kamala Harris is up to the job of stepping-in when “Joe Biden” gets bum-rushed out of the White House. Nor, I’m sure, are they willing to force her to resign hastily without a substitute vice-president (say, Gavin Newsom) in place — a cumbersome process that requires approval by both the House and Senate (with the Senate split 50-50 and no vice-president to preside over the body with a tie-breaking vote). But if Harris were flat-out forced to resign, then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would automatically become president.

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“..hate speech” includes the reluctance of some people online to use female pronouns when referring to transwomen..”

The New World War On Free Speech (Shellenberger)

The war on free speech is hardly a novel phenomenon, instead mutating over the centuries. What is new, however, is its global aspirations: today, the conflict takes the form of a world war. You can see its shadow in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every multinational organisation, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation, we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations and multilateral organisations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online. It is for this reason that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security recently created a “Disinformation Governance Board”, the European Commission crafted a new Digital Services Act and Code of Practice on Disinformation, and the UN is proposing a “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”.

All of these initiatives are allegedly the product of good intentions; all of them, however, are rooted in the same fallacy: there is little evidence to suggest that hate speech and misinformation are on the rise. On the contrary, Western countries are more tolerant of racial, religious and sexual minorities than ever before. To take one example, the percentage of Americans who approve of marriages between white and black Americans has risen from 4% in 1958 to 87% in 2013 to 94% in 2021. There are, of course, plenty of examples of misinformation and hatred online, and Twitter and Facebook are right to reduce their spread — but often the threat is exaggerated. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), for instance, recently published a study that concluded that antisemitism was increasing on Twitter.

But there is no definitive evidence of rising hate online. The ISD study counted tweets criticising George Soros which didn’t mention his Judaism as antisemitic. Elsewhere, “hate speech” includes the reluctance of some people online to use female pronouns when referring to transwomen — even though one might oppose using female pronouns for natal males and harbour no animus toward transwomen. Here we can see that what people label as “hatred” and “misinformation” is often merely an opinion they don’t like or which they fear will encourage bad behaviour. In both the UK and the US, this led to government officials demanding that social media platforms censor “often-true” content, including about Covid vaccine side effects, out of fear that such stories would result in vaccine hesitancy.

What’s more, Facebook and Twitter have also started deleting a significant amount of true content. Between 2020 to 2021, for example, Facebook censored claims that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, even though that was always as likely, if not more so, than the natural-origin hypothesis. Twitter also censored an accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while allowing supporters of his father, Joe Biden, to falsely claim it was a result of “Russian disinformation”. The global campaign to censor disfavoured views on Twitter and Facebook is therefore rather curious. If there is no evidence that hatred and misinformation are increasing, and ample evidence of inappropriate censorship of true and accurate information, why are politicians across the West calling for greater power to censor?

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“Congress has also approved the building of a giant elephant statue in D.C. to honor the party responsible for the freeing of slaves from Democrat plantations..”

Juneteenth, The Day Republicans Freed All The Democrats’ Slaves (BBee)

The Senate has unanimously passed a resolution to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday, commemorating the glorious day Republicans freed the last of the Democrats’ slaves. “We are so proud to show the world how not racist we are by officially recognizing the day the Republicans came charging in to free all our slaves,” said Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer. “Yeah– we Democrats did a little ‘whoopsie’ with that whole slavery thing, but the Republicans corrected it. Thanks, Republicans!” During this year’s Juneteenth, the nation will gather to celebrate the American political party that was founded on protecting human rights of people of all skin colors.


Democrats around the country will write letters of apology and organize celebrations for the vast network of Christians, Catholics, Quakers, and Republicans who fought and died to end the scourge of slavery in America. Congress has also approved the building of a giant elephant statue in D.C. to honor the party responsible for the freeing of slaves from Democrat plantations. Biden has confirmed he will organize a celebration at the White House after he lays a wreath on the grave of his best friend Robert Byrd.

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1670742749807620096

 

 

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1670749721365733376

 

 

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May 012023
 
 May 1, 2023  Posted by at 6:30 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Edgar Degas Self Portrait 1862

Andrew Korybko:

 

The US is shaping the Asia-Pacific in preparation of a conventional conflict with China, to which end it unveiled the AUKUS alliance in late 2021. This platform is intended to form the core of a NATO-like military structure for containing the People’s Republic, and it’ll replace whatever related role American policymakers initially envisaged the Quad playing. This makes AUKUS extremely dangerous, especially as other regional countries tacitly expand their cooperation with its American leader.

South Korea’s recent decision to let US nuclear-armed submarines dock at its ports for the first time in decades, which was made during President Yoon’s trip to DC last week, signals its interest in de facto integrating into this anti-Chinese bloc. Nearby Japan can already be regarded as an informal member of that alliance after Prime Minister Kishida reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the US’ regional goals in January and implied that it’ll rapidly remilitarize in the coming future in order to contain China.

Taken together and paired with the recent Japanese-Korean rapprochement, it can therefore be concluded that the US has strengthened its alliance network in Northeast Asia in order to facilitate the region’s unofficial integration into AUKUS+. At the same time, it’s also doing something similar with the Philippines in Southeast Asia, whose president visits the US this week. He’s expected to also de facto integrate his country into AUKUS+ too exactly as his South Korean counterpart just did.

The Philippines’ northernmost core island of Luzon is much closer to Taiwan than the Japanese Home Islands are, thus making it an ideal staging post for any American military intervention in that Chinese province. Although President Marcos just denied that his country intends to facilitate anyone’s regional military plans, it was recently revealed that the four new bases that he agreed to let America use are located on that island, thus casting serious doubts on the sincerity of his claim.

Three other recent developments bode ill for peace in this part of Asia. CNN published a lengthy analysis in mid-April arguing that the US should maximally stockpile weapons in Taiwan in order to help its ally’s forces survive in the event that China blockades the island prior to launching a special operation there. Curiously, such resupply challenges were then confirmed a few days later during an anti-Chinese congressional committee’s wargame of precisely that scenario.

The second development concerned top EU diplomat Borrell’s suggestion that the bloc’s navies patrol the Taiwan Strait. This came just several weeks after NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg declared that “We are now stepping up our cooperation with our partners in the Indo-Pacific: Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia.” The indisputable trend is that the US’ European partners are poised to play a larger military role in the region, including a provocative one if they end up patrolling the Taiwan Strait.

And lastly, it was reported last weekend that US special forces carried out their first-ever drills simulating what they’d do if their country went to war with China over Taiwan, thus removing any so-called “strategic ambiguity” about how Washington would respond to that scenario. It can no longer claim any pretense to neutrality after literally preparing its most highly trained forces for infiltrating into Taiwan to kill whatever Chinese forces might eventually enter that island.

These three developments prove that the US is rounding up allies in both the Asia-Pacific and Europe ahead of a possible war with China, but there are two important players that either won’t participate in this plot or have yet to decide, with these being India and Indonesia respectively. The influential Council on Foreign Relations’ official magazine just published a piece about why India won’t get involved, while Indonesia is being pressured to allow American and Australian forces to transit through its territory.

Even without those two, the US’ emerging anti-Chinese containment coalition is still very formidable and represents its success in getting a multitude of countries to converge around AUKUS. South Korea will serve as an intelligence and missile outpost, Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and the Philippines’ Luzon are complementary staging points for facilitating a US intervention in Taiwan, and NATO will provide back-end support all across the region as well as possibly provoke China by patrolling the Taiwan Strait.

Amidst the solidification of the Asia-Pacific’s NATO-like military structure, the US and its allies will likely fill Taiwan to the brim with weapons exactly as CNN suggested and an anti-Chinese congressional committee curiously confirmed should be a top priority just a couple days later. These interconnected trends represent extremely pressing challenges for China’s objective national security interests, which are being threatened ever more by the day as it holds off on launching a special operation in Taiwan.

There are justifiable reasons for China’s stance, especially since its leadership would truly prefer to peacefully reunify with their country’s wayward region and thus want to completely exhaust all related possibilities before resorting to military means. This moral approach is predicated on their reluctance to be the first to initiate what would be a fratricidal conflict, which is commendable, but it comes at the expense of military interests in the event that a war over that island is inevitable.

No one knows whether it is or not, but the US is doing its utmost to be in the best position possible should that scenario unfold, which thus complicates China’s own position in that event. If the US feels that it’s obtained a decisive edge over China through the crystallization of AUKUS+ and upon maximally stockpiling weapons in Taiwan, then it might even seek to provoke a conflict that wargamers convinced themselves Beijing would lose, which is a frightening scenario that can’t be ruled out.

 

 

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Mar 032023
 


Edvard Munch Summer Night’s Dream. The Voice 1893

 

What Sparked D.C.’s Sudden, Dramatic Anti-China Shift? (Schachtel)
US Army Secretary: US Preparing to Win a War With China Over Taiwan (Antiwar)
Beijing To Fast-Track Taiwan ‘Reunification’ Plans After “Extraordinary” Year Of Tensions
US Rallying Allies For New China Sanctions (RT)
Ride Across the River (Schryver)
Europe Needs ‘NATO’ Without US – Orban (RT)
Orban Says Understands Putin’s Arguments, Rejects His Actions On Ukraine (TASS)
US Blocking Russia From Participating In Nord Stream Explosion Probe (TASS)
Putin Calls Attack By Ukrainian Militants In Bryansk Region ‘Act Of Terror’ (TASS)
Top FBI Officials Opposed Mar-a-Lago Raid – WaPo (Turley)
House Overwhelmingly Votes to Keep Syria Sanctions After Earthquake (Antiwar)
Twitter Received ‘State Sponsored Blacklists’ From US – Matt Taibbi (RT)
Musk’s Human Brain Experiments Rejected By US Regulator (RT)

 

 

 

 

40%

 

 

 

 

Candace Tucker
https://twitter.com/i/status/1630965039401238530

 

 

Jan 6
https://twitter.com/i/status/1631501213232513027

 

 

 

 

Rogan Brand

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..Sensing an imperial power in decline, China is increasingly challenging America’s status as the global hegemon..”

What Sparked D.C.’s Sudden, Dramatic Anti-China Shift? (Schachtel)

In recent days, select US government agencies have claimed, behind the shadow of classified reports, that they now believe a lab leak is to blame for the Covid-19 outbreak. It’s fascinating to observe this radical narrative departure from the not so distant past, when these very same people declared that blaming China for Covid was racist, xenophobic, and whatnot. On top of that, it seems that the new Congress is positioning itself only to investigate the gain of function versus lab leak scenarios, but not the origin of the information operations and very oddly timed coincidences that resulted in full blown Covid hysteria. They’re signaling that people like Fauci, Bill Gates, and Big Pharma are going to be let entirely off the hook, which is quite unfortunate.

Unsurprisingly, this is a signal that Congress is not very serious about the real origin story of Covid, and never will be. So what’s going on with all the China bashing? Previously, the Uniparty Standard was to do everything possible not to offend the Chinese Communist Party, and to even engage them as a potential partner on the climate hoax and other power grab campaigns. Now, suddenly, everyone in D.C. seems to agree that China can do no right. So what changed? Why take this action now, several years after the first reported outbreak in Wuhan, China? One possible explanation is China’s behavior concerning the war in Ukraine. Take into account that the D.C. Uniparty has already “invested” well over $100 billion in taxpayer funds into the Slava Slush Fund. Despite these “investments,” the regime in Kiev continues to find itself on increasing shaky ground, losing battle after battle in the conflict.

Ukraine is about to retreat from Bakhmut, once declared a “stronghold” city by Ukraine’s President Zelensky. When Zelensky went to Congress in December, he presented them with a flag from soldiers he said were fighting in Bakhmut. “The fight for Bakhmut will change the trajectory of our war for independence & freedom,” Zelensky said. Now, the fall of Bakhmut will serve as a massive strategic and moral failure for Kiev. Making matters exponentially worse for Ukraine is the possibility that China will take a more active role in this conflict. China is increasingly considering arming Russian forces, and it’s noticeably setting off alarm bells in Washington. China’s economy is ten times bigger than Russia’s, and counteracting the support coming in from D.C. would serve as a significant boost for an already progressing Russian military campaign.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken demanded that China take this idea off the table. “We did very clearly warn China about the implications and consequences of going through with providing such support,” he said. “We will not hesitate, for example, to target Chinese companies or individuals that violate our sanctions, or otherwise engaged in supporting the Russian war effort.” And earlier Wednesday, the White House press secretary labeled TikTok a “potential national security risk,” opening the door to a ban of the social media platform. More broadly, the China quarrel is about much more than the D.C. Globalist American Empire’s once-unchecked campaigns concerning Ukraine. Sensing an imperial power in decline, China is increasingly challenging America’s status as the global hegemon, and they’re doing so on multiple fronts. Beijing is also turning up the heat on Taiwan, which is not very committed to its own self-defense.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1631461008492597250

Read more …

The crazies dug up a new hero from behind the woodwork: Christine Wormuth.

US Army Secretary: US Preparing to Win a War With China Over Taiwan (Antiwar)

sUS Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said this week that the US must prepare to win a future war with China over Taiwan by beefing up its military deployments in the region. “I personally am not of the view that an amphibious invasion of Taiwan is imminent,” Wormuth said at an American Enterprise Institute event, according to Voice of America. “But we obviously have to prepare, to be prepared to fight and win that war.” Wormuth’s plan would involve sending more troops and advanced weapons into the region, including hypersonic missiles. She said the buildup would be an effort to deter war with China, although Beijing has been increasing its military activity in the region in response to US actions. Wormuth laid out three ways the US Army would work to build up forces in the region.

First, by increasing cooperation with allies, which she said would “complicate” Beijing’s decision-making. Second, the Army will establish “theater distribution centers” to pre-position weapons and other supplies in the region. She listed Australia and Japan as two places where weapons could be staged and said non-lethal equipment might be stored in the Philippines and Singapore. The third aspect of the plan would be to place more visible combat forces in the region. “Our goal is to have Army forces in the Indo-Pacific seven to eight months out of the year,” Wormuth said. When war breaks out in the region, Wormuth said the Army’s role would be to establish “staging bases for the Navy, for the Marines, for the Air Force” and to “provide intra-theater sustainment” using the weapons stockpiles and watercraft. She said the US Army would also have a role to play in the American homeland.

“If we got into a major war with China, the United States homeland would be at risk as well, with both kinetic attacks and non-kinetic attacks. Whether it’s cyberattacks on the power grids, or on pipelines, the United States Army, I have no doubt, will be called to provide defense support to civil authorities,” she said. When asked if the American public could sustain the level of casualties that would come with a war with China, she said they could, just “like we did in World War II.” But both the US and China possess nuclear weapons, meaning a potential war could be catastrophic for the entire world. Wormuth is the latest US official to openly discuss the fact that the US is preparing for war with China. Earlier this year, a four-star Air Force general predicted the US will be at war with China within two years and ordered his forces to be prepared. “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me will fight in 2025,” Gen. Mike Minihan, the head of Air Mobility Command, said of war with China in a leaked memo.

Wormuth
https://twitter.com/i/status/1631183835864891392

Read more …

US never recognized independent Taiwan.

Beijing To Fast-Track Taiwan ‘Reunification’ Plans After “Extraordinary” Year Of Tensions

Increased military interactions with the US, including ramped-up American naval sail-throughs and flyovers of the contested Taiwan Strait, appear to have hastened Beijing’s timeline for Taiwan “reunification”. A top Chinese lawmaker and adviser, National People’s Congress deputy Li Yihu, announced this week, “The [Communist] Party’s overall strategy for resolving the Taiwan issue in the new era has basically taken shape, and the strategic goals and focus of the future reunification cause have also become very clear.” He specified the process will be sped up, saying ahead of the annual National People’s Congress meeting which kicks off March 5 that “The mainland will promote national reunification on a fast development track.”

Notably this also comes after then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ultra-provocative visit to the self-ruled island in August, and further after multiple weapons packages have been announced by the Biden administration. Current Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is also said to be planning a Taiwan visit in the near future. Li Yihu specifically cited an “extraordinary” year for tensions in the region, as well as heightening global events and rivalries: “A series of new policies, including on Taiwan, are expected to be unveiled during the gathering, along with the defense budget and a government reshuffle. Comments made by NPC deputies such as Li can provide some insight into Beijing’s policymaking, which remains largely secretive. In the interview, Li – who is also dean of the Taiwan Research Institute at Peking University – said 2022 was an “extraordinary” year for cross-strait ties and that its major events would “have a certain impact on the future direction” of the relationship.”

Without doubt he also had in mind the Russia-Ukraine war, and the comparisons which some US officials as well has pundits have increasingly made between the Ukraine and Taiwan situations. Beijing has consistently rejected such comparisons, stressing that Taiwan is under Chinese sovereignty, also finding the idea that the situations are parallel to be an offensive. President Xi Jinping and his officials have long emphasized a Chinese plan of peaceful unification via political processes, also as the mainland has deep involvement with opposition movements and parties in Taipei. But it’s unclear whether Washington’s pushing past “red lines” have changed the calculus. Certainly we are witnessing the beginnings of a more assertive and aggressive Chinese posture vis-a-vis the Taiwan question.

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Two can play that game.

US Rallying Allies For New China Sanctions (RT)

The US is coordinating with its close allies to impose new sanctions on China should it decide to support the Russian campaign in Ukraine, according to Reuters. Beijing has rejected claims that it intends to offer military aid to Moscow, and recently unveiled a plan seeking a peaceful settlement to the conflict. Washington is in “consultations” with foreign partners, namely those from the G7 nations, regarding new economic penalties, several unnamed US officials told the outlet on Wednesday. They declined to provide details about the potential sanctions, only confirming that discussions are “laying the groundwork for potential action.” The report follows repeated warnings toward China from the US and other Western nations, which claim Beijing intends to supply weapons to Russian forces for the campaign against Ukraine.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg echoed the charges during a recent interview with the Associated Press, saying “we have seen some signs that they may be planning for that,” but without offering evidence. On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that Washington would “not hesitate” to target Chinese firms with sanctions in the event that Beijing supplies lethal aid to Moscow, saying the move would carry “implications and consequences.” Blinken added that he raised the issue with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi when they met at the Munich Security Conference last month. China has dismissed the charges as “groundless speculation,” arguing that it does not intend to provide weapons to Russian troops while accusing Washington of hypocrisy.

“The US has no right to dictate China-Russia relations, and we will never accept coercion and pressure from the US,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Monday. She went on to observe that it is Washington, not Beijing, that has been “pouring lethal weapons into the battlefield in Ukraine.” While Western nations have long pressured China to sever ties with Russia, accusations toward Beijing have only grown louder since it unveiled a 12-point roadmap for a diplomatic settlement for the conflict in Ukraine last month. Moscow has signaled willingness to “carefully analyze” the details of the proposal, though US officials quickly rejected the plan, claiming Beijing has adopted “Russia’s false narrative about the war” and is not “serious” about ending hostilities.

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“Ukrainian tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces have been reduced to a minute fraction of what they had a year ago plus what they have received..”

Ride Across the River (Schryver)

The following is a speculation; a flight of fancy, if you will. Beginning no later than the waning autumn of 2022, observers of the ongoing war in Ukraine have been anticipating a major Russian offensive to be launched. The extremely costly late summer Ukrainian “counter-offensives” in the Kharkov and Kherson regions had ground to a halt against impenetrable Russian defensive lines east of the Oskol River in the north and along the Dnieper River in the south. Meanwhile, the Russians executed a substantial mobilization which has added upwards of 400,000 thousand effectives to their forces. Contrary to almost-universal predictions that Russian armaments would have long-since been exhausted, and their economy crumbled under the weight of western sanctions, neither has occurred.

From a military standpoint, the Russians have adopted a resolute strategy of attrition, most exemplified by the relentless meat-grinder of Bakhmut, which has become not only the single largest battle of this war, but the bloodiest battle seen on the European continent since the Second World War. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are now a depleted shell. The tally of soldiers killed in action is almost certainly at least 150,000 – and very arguably in excess of 200,000, with the irretrievably wounded likely double the number of killed. The Ukrainian Air Force is a non-factor. Ukrainian tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces have been reduced to a minute fraction of what they had a year ago plus what they have received from NATO since then. Ammunition shortages have become acute. The Ukrainians are quite literally groveling for more of everything from their NATO handlers. But the NATO armaments cupboard is now bare. And despite grandiose pledges of large new shipments of NATO equipment, the reality is proving to be a pale shadow of the promises.

Even so, the AFU manages to supply still-formidable garrisons of the “fortress cities” they constructed over the course of the years preceding the war. Despite the impending fall of the key strategic fortress of Bakhmut, several strongly fortified towns stand in the way of a successful Russian liberation of the remaining Ukrainian-occupied areas of Donetsk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson oblasts. I have previously considered that the logical Russian solution was to mass forces to launch “big arrow” offensives south from the general direction of Belgorod and north from the general direction of Zaporozhye; cut off Ukrainian supply lines, and then simply starve the Ukrainian fortress cities into submission. Something along those lines could very well still be the Russian plan. But these would be inherently risk-laden maneuvers. Big arrow moves necessarily mean exposed flanks and very long and highly vulnerable lines of communication.

Read more …

“.. the EU is serving the interests of the US at the expense of its own..”

Europe Needs ‘NATO’ Without US – Orban (RT)

Europe needs its own military bloc, one that’s free of American influence, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the Swiss Weltwoche weekly on Thursday. The US is dragging Europe into a conflict that cannot be won and risks a global war, he believes. “The solution would be a European NATO,” Orban said, adding that the US’ desire for further expansion of its influence is what has led to the tensions between the West and Russia. Moscow is concerned about NATO expanding further east into Ukraine and Georgia, Orban claimed, referring to his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin just weeks before the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev broke out in late February 2022.

“Putin told me his problem was with the American missile bases in Poland and Romania and possible NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia,” Orban told the Swiss media, noting that the Russian leader was concerned about the US potentially deploying its weapons to these nations as well. According to Orban, that was one of the underlying reasons behind the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. “I understand what Putin said. I do not accept what he did,” the Hungarian prime minister explained, referring to the Russian military operation in Ukraine. Orban insisted that Hungary should stay out of this conflict. He also said that Budapest was subjected to “constant pressure” as other Western nations “want to drag us into the war through every possible means.”

Orban believes that is because the EU is serving the interests of the US at the expense of its own. “Decisions made by Brussels reflect American interests more often than European ones,” he said. In his opinion, Western nations need to demonstrate a true “desire” and “will” for peace if they want it to be achieved in Ukraine. “That will is what is lacking today, at least in the West,” he said. Hungary has repeatedly called for peace amid the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, as well as criticized the Western sanctions imposed against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine. Earlier this week, Orban said that the ongoing hostilities benefitted no one in the world. Hungary was also the only NATO nation that supported China’s peace plan for Ukraine.

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“I understand what Putin said, but I reject what he did..”

Orban Says Understands Putin’s Arguments, Rejects His Actions On Ukraine (TASS)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that he understands Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arguments, but rejects his actions regarding Ukraine. Speaking in an interview for Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche, the Prime Minister also stated that the West must find a way to coexist with Russia peacefully regardless. Orban disclosed that he discussed international security issues, including the expansion of NATO, during a meeting with Putin in February, 2022. According to the Prime Minister, the Russian leader told him back then that “Hungary’s membership in NATO is not a problem, only Ukraine’s and Georgia’s.”


“Putin’s problem is the US missile bases, already created in Romania and Poland, as well as the potential expansion of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, with subsequent deployment of weapons there. In addition, the Americans cancelled important disarmament treaties. This is why Putin could no longer sleep well at night,” Orban believes. “I understand what Putin said, but I reject what he did,” he added. He also opined that Russia views thing differently from the West, because “this is a different civilization.” However, “it matters not if the West likes it or not,” he said. He underscored that Western power must find a way to coexist peacefully with such a strong power as Russia.

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Well, obviously…

US Blocking Russia From Participating In Nord Stream Explosion Probe (TASS)

Moscow has no doubt that the United States is preventing Russia from participating in the probe into the explosions at the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told a press conference on Thursday. “We were not allowed to involve our experts in the investigation. Neither as participants in the probe, nor as experts, including from Gazprom. Undoubtedly, the United States is behind this,” he said. He also called on the US and its allies to stop obstructing negotiations on this topic. “We want to resolve this situation from a legal point of view. As far as I understand, there have been certain negotiations on this issue, and they will continue. I hope that all participants understand the need for such negotiations,” he added.


Ryabkov noted that those who are now investigating the explosions did not share any details with Moscow. “For months since the Nord Stream’s undermining, we have been trying to get some kind of explanation or reliable information from those who continue to conduct the probe. They have not shared the tiniest piece of information with us,” he said, stressing that Moscow continues to insist on an international investigation into the incidents. [..] At a meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers on March 2, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow will continue to seek a prompt and impartial investigation of sabotage at the gas pipelines. Moscow insists on its participation in this probe, he added. He noted that the call of the Russian Federation to reflect the need for a fair investigation into Nord Stream in the G20 declaration was ignored.

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“set out to deprive the Russian people of their historical memory, deprive us of our history, our traditions, and language..”

Putin Calls Attack By Ukrainian Militants In Bryansk Region ‘Act Of Terror’ (TASS)

The attack by Ukrainian saboteurs in the Bryansk Region bordering Ukraine is a terrorist act, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with participants of the pilot educational program Mentor School. Soldiers and officers of the Russian Armed Forces are now courageously carrying out their duty, protecting Russia, Putin stressed. “Protecting against neo-Nazis and against terrorists such as those who were torturing and killing people in Donbass for eight years, such as those who murdered Darya Dugina in Moscow, such as those who today carried out another act of terror, committed another crime, infiltrated the border area and opened fire on civilians,” the president stressed.


The saboteurs were well aware that they were attacking a civilian car. “They saw it was a civilian car, saw that civilians and children were inside, that it was just a Niva car, but no, they opened fire on them,” Putin said. It is people like this who “set out to deprive the Russian people of their historical memory, deprive us of our history, our traditions, and language,” President Putin stressed.”This is violence, real crime, committed exactly by the neo-Nazis I’ve just mentioned, and by their masters. I’m sure that these very masters won’t remember today’s crime. No one will even pay heed to it,” Putin went on to say. “They won’t succeed, we will put the squeeze on them,” he vowed.

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It was personal.

Top FBI Officials Opposed Mar-a-Lago Raid – WaPo (Turley)

The Washington Post is reporting that there was a heated debate in the Justice Department over the decision to raid Mar-a-Lago in July 2022. The senior FBI agents objected that they believe that a consensual search was possible without the necessity of a raid. It was main Justice officials who overruled them and insisted on the raid. What is most striking about the account is that FBI agents were raising the very concerns that some of us voiced after the unprecedented raid on the home of a former president. The Post describes a “tense showdown” a week before the raid. Jay Bratt, Chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) of the National Security Division, joined other Justice officials to demand a raid. He was accompanied to the FBI by Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen as well as two counterintelligence officials, George Toscas and Alan E. Kohler Jr.

Toscas previously worked on the Crossfire Hurricane and Clinton email investigations. He reportedly pushed for a raid. The FBI pushed back hard, according to the Post. Steven M. D’Antuono, then the head of the FBI Washington field office was running the investigation and said that he considered the raid to be unnecessary and overkill. He wanted to arrange a consensual search. He reportedly even refused to conduct the raid without a direct order. D’Antuono wanted to reach out to Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, who is a former Justice Department prosecutor to arrange the search. Reportedly, the objections angered Bratt and the meeting became loud and heated. Notably, the article reports that D’Antuono “also questioned why the search would target presidential records as well as classified records, particularly because the May subpoena had only sought the latter.”

It quotes him as objecting “we are not the presidential records police.” Finally, D’Antuono reportedly demanded to know if Trump was officially the subject of the criminal investigation. As head of the FBI investigation, that was a telling question. Bratt reportedly replied “What does that matter?”[..] What is striking about the report is the preference, yet again, for the Justice Department to take the DEFCON 1 option over other alternatives in a matter involving Trump. If D’Antuono was allowed to seek a consensual search, any refusal would have largely blunted any later objections. Yet, the FBI General Counsel Jason Jones (who replaced the controversial James Baker at the Bureau) followed his predecessor’s more aggressive approach.

The report will only deepen the unease over how the Justice Department will handle the classified document controversy. Since the raid, President Joe Biden and former Vice President Michael Pence were both found to have classified material in their private homes. In the case of Biden, some of these documents go back over a decade to his time as a senator and were found in multiple locations from a university center office to his personal library to his garage. While special counsels are investigating Trump and Biden on the matters, the ultimate decision will rest with Attorney General Merrick Garland who must decide if prosecution is in the public interest. Few people want to see Biden, Pence, and Trump indicted. Indeed, the Justice Department maintains that it cannot indict a sitting president like Biden. To prosecute only Trump for such unlawful possession would cause a public uproar.

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“Only Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voted against the measure..”

House Overwhelmingly Votes to Keep Syria Sanctions After Earthquake (Antiwar)

The House this week voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution to maintain sanctions on Syria following a devastating earthquake that has killed at least 5,900 people in the country, The Cradle reported on Wednesday. The resolution was introduced by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) and received 51 cosponsors. It passed in a vote of 414-2. Only Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voted against the measure. The resolution calls for the Biden administration to remain committed to “implementing the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019,” a law that imposed crippling sanctions on Syria that are designed to prevent the country from rebuilding after years of war.

The resolution said that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was “falsely claiming” US sanctions impeded the aid response to the earthquake. But it’s a fact that US sanctions hurt the relief effort, something that has been detailed by the head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and UN experts. After initially claiming sanctions wouldn’t hurt the relief effort, the Biden administration issued a 180-day sanctions exemption for transactions related to earthquake relief. UN experts responded by welcoming the move but said it wasn’t enough and called for the sanctions to be fully lifted.

The House resolution said it “mourned” the victims of the earthquake and portrayed enforcing the Caesar Act as a way to “protect” the Syrian people. But even before the earthquake, US sanctions on Syria were having a devastating impact on the civilian population. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged in 2021 that it was US policy to “oppose the reconstruction of Syria,” and the policy hasn’t changed. Business Insider covered Greene and Massie voting against the resolution but completely mischaracterized the bill. The report said they voted against “mourning the 50,000 people killed in the deadly earthquakes in Turkey and Syria” and made no mention of the fact that it supported maintaining crushing sanctions on Syria.

The Biden administration has said it’s against regional countries upgrading ties with the Assad government, even if it’s part of an effort to aid in earthquake relief. On top of the sanctions and opposing Syria’s engagement with its neighbors, the US maintains an occupation force of about 900 troops in eastern Syria and backs the Kurdish-led SDF in the region, allowing the US to control about one-third of Syrian territory. The area the US controls is where most of the country’s oil resources are, keeping the vital resource out of the hands of Damascus.

Read more …

“..Yoel Roth, was approached in 2021 and given a list of 40,000 accounts suspected of engaging in “inauthentic behavior” in support of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party.”

Twitter Received ‘State Sponsored Blacklists’ From US – Matt Taibbi (RT)

The US State Department, both directly and through third-party organizations, pressed Twitter to censor American users for their non-existent connections to Russia, China, and Hindu nationalism, according to internal documents. Published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Thursday, the latest ‘Twitter Files’ reveal that Twitter’s former trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth, was approached in 2021 and given a list of 40,000 accounts suspected of engaging in “inauthentic behavior” in support of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party. The list was provided by the ‘Digital Forensics Research Lab’ at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US State Department’s ‘Global Engagement Center’ (GEC), as well as a host of NATO governments and weapons manufacturers.

According to the files, Roth investigated the list and found that “virtually all appear to be real people” rather than Indian bots, while Taibbi contacted several and learned that they were “ordinary Americans” with no connection whatsoever to Indian politics. Created in the final year of the Obama administration, the GEC is a State Department entity that works with multiple US intelligence agencies to “counter foreign disinformation.” It is forbidden from operating within the United States, and recently had to cut its ties with a George Soros-backed NGO that was using its funding to target American conservative news sites.

While the list of supposed Hindu nationalists was given to Twitter via the Atlantic Council, the GEC directly passed other lists to the social media platform, including 500 accounts that were allegedly spreading Iranian “disinformation,” and 5,500 “Chinese accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation,” despite the fact that this latter list included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees. Roth described the Chinese list as “a total crock,” while fellow employee Aaron Rodericks said it provided “more entertainment value than anything.” The GEC and its organizations tangentially connected to the State Department – such as the infamous ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’ that published the ‘Hamilton68’ dashboard of “Russian bots” – had long pressed Twitter to crack down on allegedly Kremlin-connected accounts, but Roth told staff that it was impossible to detect “Russian fingerprints” on any of the accounts.

Instead, accounts that retweeted “news sources linked to Russia” were considered Kremlin-sponsored. One list handed to Twitter by the GEC considered membership in France’s anti-government ‘Yellow Vests’ movement as “being Russia-aligned.” While Twitter’s executives may have been skeptical of the GEC’s ‘blacklists’, the US media was not. Emails show that multiple news outlets and agencies – including the Associated Press – would receive reports from the organization, and then press Twitter to take action and ban the listed accounts. “Reauthorization for GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year,” Taibbi wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?”

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Would you volunteer?

Musk’s Human Brain Experiments Rejected By US Regulator (RT)

The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected clinical trials of billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant, seven current and former employees told Reuters on Thursday. The regulator cited multiple safety concerns the company must address before human testing can begin – a milestone they had hoped to reach this month. The FDA cited dozens of “deficiencies” barring the way to human trials when it rejected Neuralink last year, the employees explained. Dozens of pigs have already been pressed into experimental service in order to address the agency’s concern that the tiny threads that interface with the wearer’s brain could migrate, altering brain and implant functionality, causing inflammation, rupturing blood vessels and otherwise damaging the fragile tissue, employees said.

The FDA is also reportedly concerned about whether Neuralink can be removed without causing damage – an issue the employees claimed has not been adequately addressed, despite the company’s assurances. Just like the lithium-ion batteries that power Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles, which burn for hours at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit if hit the wrong way, Neuralink’s lithium batteries could cause brain damage if they so much as overheat, experts told Reuters. The FDA wants Neuralink to prove with animal studies that the remotely-chargeable battery is “very unlikely” to fail. Displeased with the regulatory red-light, Musk has reportedly rushed the animal experiments in an attempt to address the FDA’s safety concerns. As a result, the Department of Agriculture is looking into potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act after alarms have been raised about the treatment of the animals.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation is investigating whether Neuralink correctly followed safety procedures when disposing of chips removed from animal brains. The Tesla tycoon has previously boasted that Neuralink is so safe he’d implant it in his own children, claimed it would restore total mobility to the paralyzed, and bragged that users would eventually “be able to save and replay memories.” However, Neuralink’s Vice President of engineering Dongjin Seo told a conference last month that its “primary short-term goal” was merely to help paralyzed patients use computerized text to communicate. Anything else, he said, was “long-term.” Despite the company’s recent projection of March 7, 2023 as the day the FDA would approve human trials, employees told Reuters there were no regulatory approvals looming on the horizon.

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Yes, the sphinx has a tail. A large one.

 

 

When it is in repose the Pterochroza ocellata (or peacock katydid) camouflage resembles a dead leaf. But in its startle display, it shows false eye spots on its normally hidden hind wings

 

 

Toucans

 

 


Seals have nails. They are not called fingernails, or toenails, or even flipper nails. Just nails

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Aug 022022
 
 August 2, 2022  Posted by at 9:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Edward Hopper The long leg 1935

 

Germany Counts Cost Of Russian Gas Cut-off (RT)
Europe Has Lost The Energy War (Fazi)
Ukraine Limiting Russian Gas Flow To EU – Gazprom (RT)
Brandon Shifts The Narrative On Banderastan (Saker)
Anti-Russia Sanctions Don’t Reflect Global Reality – Putin (RT)
West Will Run Out Of Money To Support Ukraine – Macgregor (RT)
Hundreds Of ‘Petal’ Mines Reportedly Found In Donetsk (MSO)
Spain Comments On Kosovo’s Independence (RT)
Russia ‘Absolutely’ Supports Serbia – Kremlin (RT)
Supposed Killing Of Al Zawahiri Is Suspect, Weird And Fishy (CTH)
The Day Anthony Fauci Wrecked American Freedom (Tucker)
Atonement (Jim Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

Graham McCain 2016
https://twitter.com/i/status/1554088190637740033

 

 

Ukraine produces 3.1% of global wheat. Let’s all panic!

 

 

 

 

“German inflation may well exceed 10% by the end of the year..”

Germany Counts Cost Of Russian Gas Cut-off (RT)

German inflation may well exceed 10% by the end of the year if gas supplies from Russia are cut off, Deutsche Bank head Christian Sewing said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, published on Saturday. “If Russian gas continues to flow [into Germany], we should reach an inflation rate of around 8% by the end of this year. But inflation would be higher if the gas stopped flowing. Then 10% or more is possible,” Sewing said. The CEO pointed out that losing gas supplies from Russia “would have a significant impact on economic growth in Germany” and the country “will definitely slip into recession.” He noted that “with the right interest rate hikes and the right policies, there is still a chance to bring [inflation] down to 5-6% next year, and then get close to the actual target of 2% again in 2024.”

However, such measures “will take time, so we should not give people false impressions,” he added. Commenting on the recent move by the European Central Bank (ECB) to hike interest rates, he said the ECB “is moving in the right direction.” “Currency devaluation is poison for people. I am grateful that the ECB is well aware of the problem and has now given a clear signal to raise the rate by 0.5 percentage points. We have been saying for a long time: higher inflation is not a temporary phenomenon, and it needs to be dealt with seriously,” Sewing stressed. He warned, however, that the worst may still be ahead for the German economy.

“The biggest burden for many people is yet to come. If monthly expenses exceed income, people will consume less and the mood of the country will deteriorate as well. It’s all the more important that the right steps are taken early on,” the banker stated. Inflation in Germany soared this month, jumping to 8.5% year-on-year in July after dropping to 8.2% in June as a result of government relief measures. This comes as elevated food prices and surging energy costs continued to plague the country. In a poll published by the newspaper Bild earlier this month, half of respondents said they feel their economic conditions are deteriorating, seeing rising prices as a heavy burden and fearing being unable to heat their homes this winter.

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It doesn’t feel like they ever tried to win.

Europe Has Lost The Energy War (Fazi)

After a decade of financial austerity, is Europe now on the brink of a new age of energy austerity? The city of Hanover has recently introduced strict energy-saving rules that include cutting off the hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms, banning mobile air conditioners, fan heaters or radiators, switching off public fountains, and stopping illuminating major buildings such as the town hall at night. Meanwhile, several countries across Europe are considering dimming or switching off public lights, and even adopting “energy curfews”, with early closures for businesses and public offices. And more drastic measures are under consideration — including gas rationing for energy-intensive industries such as steel and agriculture.

These measures are part of an EU-wide Gas Demand Reduction Plan, ominously titled Save Gas for a Safe Winter, to reduce gas use in Europe by 15% until next spring. Among the proposals is a provision that officials in Brussels impose fines for non-compliance if they decide the crisis is escalating dangerously. All of this comes amid growing fears that dwindling Russian gas supplies may plunge Europe into an energy crisis this winter. Overall, Russian gas exports to the EU are at about a third of last year’s levels, falling steadily since the invasion of Ukraine. While several European countries have been reducing their Russian gas imports, Russia itself has been reducing gas flows to Europe through Nord Stream 1, the continent’s biggest pipeline, citing mainly technical issues.

Just the other day, citing equipment repair, Russia announced yet another reduction in the amount of natural gas flowing through Nord Stream 1, which is now operating at only 20% capacity.This has caused natural gas spot prices to surge to levels not seen since early March; they are now almost 10 times higher than they were two years ago. In most countries, electricity prices have risen accordingly. Soaring energy prices are already fuelling record inflation — currently close to 9% and rising in the EU — squeezing people’s spending power, plunging thousands into poverty, and placing a huge burden on industry. This is especially true for Germany, which is almost entirely dependent on Russian gas imports. Indeed, the country’s industrial production has been contracting for over three months. Astonishingly, 16% of industrial German companies have reduced production or partially stopped their activities due to rising energy prices. This helps explain why last month Germany became the first country to escalate its warning over gas supplies to the “alert level”.

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Humor: Nord Stream 2 turbines come from Iran, not Germany.

Ukraine Limiting Russian Gas Flow To EU – Gazprom (RT)

Russia’s EU-bound natural gas supplies, pumped via Ukraine, are limited to one remaining entry point, while Kiev refuses to reopen a second transit station, energy giant Gazprom said on Monday. “Gazprom is supplying Russian gas for transit through Ukraine in the volume confirmed by the Ukrainian side through the Sudzha gas metering station – 41.7 million cubic meters as of August 1. The application to reopen the Sohranovka gas metering system has been rejected,” Gazprom’s representative told reporters. Ukraine shut down transit through the Sokhranovka station, which handles about a third of the Russian gas flowing through Ukraine to Europe, in early May, citing “interference by the occupying forces.”

Kiev argued that is gas transit operator GTSOU could not control the Novopskov border compressor station in Lugansk Region due to Russia’s military operation, and considered the situation a force majeure. However, Gazprom at the time said it did not see any grounds for halting gas flows. Kiev asked the Russian firm to transfer all gas transit to the Sudzha pumping station in the Kursk Region, which Gazprom ruled out as technically impossible. Meanwhile, Russia has also been forced to reduce its gas flow to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, due to turbine malfunctions. Gazprom has blamed the issue on the German company Siemens, which produced and maintains the equipment, accusing it of failing to fulfil its commitments.

The drop in Russian supplies has led to a surge in gas prices in Europe. In July, futures contracts for deliveries in August and September traded on the Dutch TTF exchange in the range of $1530-2385 per thousand cubic meters. In comparison, at the same time last year the spot price was less than $500.

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“And now “Biden” “generously” will allow Putin to stay in power. Yes, “Biden”, not the fact that the Russian population fully support Putin, and the SMO.”

Brandon Shifts The Narrative On Banderastan (Saker)

President “Biden” (i.e. the “collective” Biden, not the actual Bradon) penned an interesting article for the NYT entitled “President Biden: What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine“. The entire things is behind a paywall, and it is not really worth reposting it here. But I do want to comment on a few of “Biden’s” theses. First, I will ignore the obnoxious habit of calling the USA “America”, when just Canada and Brazil alone are almost as big as the USA. Furthermore, the USA is only 9,833,520 km2 (3,796,742 sq mi) while the total area of the Americas is 42,549,000 km2 (16,428,000 sq mi). Finally, there are 35 countries in the Americas but, fine, okay, if saying “‘Murica” evokes imagines of Captain America and waving (Chinese made) flags – then fine. Let’s look at a few key sentences:

“America’s goal is straightforward: We want to see a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression (…) We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia. As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow“. Now that is a HUGE change. In Russian, there is this expression of “changing shoes while in mid jump” which refers to situation when a person suddenly make a full and instantaneous 180 after pompously insisting on a goal which is now dropped. The initial plan was simple: to smash the Russian economy, have Putin overthrown in an insurrection of some kind, break apart Russia and then turn towards China and crush it.

And, considering the absolutely extreme demonization of Putin, he was clearly designated as the object of total hate by “all of progressive and freedom loving mankind”. And now “Biden” “generously” will allow Putin to stay in power. Yes, “Biden”, not the fact that the Russian population fully support Putin, and the SMO. How stupid does “Biden” think that we all are? Anyway, let’s continue, “We will also continue reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank with forces and capabilities from the United States and other allies. And just recently, I welcomed Finland’s and Sweden’s applications to join NATO, a move that will strengthen overall U.S. and trans-Atlantic security by adding two democratic and highly capable military partners“This entire paragraph can be summarized in all sorts of colorful ways, I will just call in counter-factual and delusional nonsense. Where do I even begin here?

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“..unfair competition, a bid by the West to hinder Russian businesses and reconfigure world markets in their favor…”

Anti-Russia Sanctions Don’t Reflect Global Reality – Putin (RT)

The West’s decision to sanction Russia over the Ukraine conflict was made for the sake of opportunistic political interests which do not reflect global realities, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. Addressing a virtual meeting on Russia’s metals industry, the president noted that the sector continues to face challenges in light of the Western sanctions. He highlighted the problem of limited access to international markets and the ban on buying foreign equipment for the production of fittings, rolled metals and steel sheets in Russia. “As I have already said, these decisions were made by Western countries for the sake of political interests, moreover, current, opportunistic ones and not reflecting the realities either in world politics, nor in the world economy,” he claimed.

Vladimir Putin argued that the Western sanctions failed to take into account “obvious consequences”, such as the rising cost of building materials on the international market, and the spurring of global inflation.“The decline in well-being and the quality of life of ordinary citizens, first and foremost in Europe, is of no interest to politicians, not to mention such things as adherence to the principles of the World Trade Organization. These things have been simply tossed into the trash,” the Russian leader added. Putin described attempts to limit Russia’s metals industry as a blatant manifestation of unfair competition, a bid by the West to hinder Russian businesses and reconfigure world markets in their favor.

Western countries including the US and EU members have imposed sweeping sanctions on nearly all aspects of the Russian economy since the launch of Moscow’s military offensive in Ukraine in late February. The measures include limitations on Russian oil and gas, goods and financial services.Last month, Putin branded the sanctions illegitimate, saying they ignore the fundamental principles of respecting another nation’s sovereignty and non-interference in its internal affairs. He insisted that such actions not only damage relations between states and peoples, but undermine the global legal system. Putin also reiterated Moscow’s stance that it will always be a reliable and responsible partner for those who are committed to mutually beneficial, predictable business cooperation. He pledged, however, that Russia will not work to its own detriment with “those who are clearly unfriendly towards us.”

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Will the support last till Christmas? Or will they be too occupied with China by then?

West Will Run Out Of Money To Support Ukraine – Macgregor (RT)

The West will eventually lose interest in the Ukraine conflict and run out of resources to support Kiev in its war against Russia, a top former US military official said. “There is no strategy. What we have is impulse,”retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor told Judge Andrew Napolitano on his YouTube channel on Friday. In a wide-ranging interview, MacGregor said much of the military aid earmarked for Ukraine never reaches the country itself. “Most of the money goes to the Department of Defense to compensate the armed forces for the movement of equipment and resources over to Europe. That money in turn is then transferred to the defense industries, the contractors who support and provide the replacement equipment,” he said, adding that the “whole circular operation enriches everyone who is important to Capitol Hill in terms of re-election.”


MacGregor called the situation a “shell game”that enriches the military-industrial complex, the same people who help politicians get re-elected in Washington. “My own view is that this war in Ukraine will not end with a bang but with a whimper, that eventually we will just sort of quietly run out of resources,” he said, adding that domestic problems in the West will overshadow the conflict. “We’ll have so many problems at home here in the United States that we’ll no longer bother with [Ukraine],” he said. In a combination of aid packages, the US is sending roughly $54 billion to Ukraine in both economic and military aid, with approximately $12 billion of that in weapons. At the same time, the US economy shrank 0.9 percent in the second quarter of this year, which is the second consecutive quarter of economic contraction, which technically meets one definition of a recession. Coupled with the highest inflation since 1981, the US economy faces a period of “stagflation” – defined as low growth with high inflation.

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Why?

Hundreds Of ‘Petal’ Mines Reportedly Found In Donetsk (MSO)

Ukrainian forces were accused of shelling residential areas of the eastern city of Donetsk on Saturday night with hundreds of so-called petal mines littering the streets in the aftermath. The tiny bombs, which are shaped like small flowers, were found in the centre of Donetsk, areas close to the city’s university, recreational areas and others.Journalist Eva Bartlett, based in Ukraine, heard the shelling start on Saturday night. “This morning I saw these mines in a heavily populated western Donetsk district,” she said. “They tear off limbs but don’t necessarily kill. Nasty war crimes to add to the list of Ukraine’s manifold war crimes.” Local authorities issued a warning to residents asking them to “watch your step carefully, walk only on asphalt” and to call emergency services if they spot one of the deadly mines.


Civilians were advised to only walk on open routes and to avoid shortcuts after the latest attack as the mines are difficult to spot in grass or other areas. The Lepestok cluster mines are banned under international humanitarian law and their use is deemed a war crime under the Geneva Convention. They were widely used in Afghanistan where children often mistook them for toys, and were seriously injured or killed after handling them. On Saturday, Donetsk authorities said that a large number of the petal mines were found by a school in the city’s Kirov district. The overnight shelling occured shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered troops and civilians to urgently evacuate from Donetsk. Transport networks were suspended across the city today as clear-up operations were under way.

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“Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 was illegal and can’t be recognized by Spain..”

Spain Comments On Kosovo’s Independence (RT)

Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 was illegal and can’t be recognized by Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Monday during a visit to Albania’s capital, Tirana. As Sanchez met with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama amid his tour of the Balkans, he stated that the “unilateral declaration of independence, in the view of the Spanish government and with respect to the Albanian government, was a violation of international law”and therefore “unacceptable” to Madrid. The Spanish PM also told Rama that Madrid fully supports Albania’s bid for European Union membership, citing the applicant’s “commitment and the reforms it has made.”

His comments come after tensions flared up over the weekend on the border between Serbia and its breakaway province, officially called the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija in the Serbian constitution, which received recognition by several Western powers in 2008. The government in Kosovo planned to ban the use of Serbian-issued license plates and ID papers starting from August 1, and was to use its police force to enforce the measure. Belgrade officials called it an attack on Kosovo’s Serbian population as President Aleksandar Vucic accused Pristina of violating the rights of local Serbs.

Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti in turn has accused local Serbs of opening fire on police, and claimed his government is facing “Serbian national-chauvinism” and “misinformation” from Belgrade. On Sunday, Serbs in the north of the breakaway province set up roadblocks and rang alarm bells as heavily armed Kosovo special police took control of two administrative crossings with Serbia. The situation received a temporary resolution after Washington called on Kosovo officials to postpone the implementation of the controversial law until September 1. Pristina agreed, on condition that Serbia remove barricades from the de facto border. Vucic has said that he hopes for tensions to ease and promised that Belgrade would do everything within its power to preserve the peace through compromise.

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“..one-sided, spontaneous decisions aimed at squeezing [the Serbs] out of Kosovo..”

Russia ‘Absolutely’ Supports Serbia – Kremlin (RT)

Moscow fully backs its ally Belgrade in the dispute with Kosovo over the decision by the breakaway province to ban Serbian license plates and identification papers, the Kremlin press-secretary Dmitry Peskov has said. “Of course, we absolutely support Serbia,”Peskov replied, after being addressed on the issue by journalists on Monday. The decision by the Kosovo authorities to outlaw Serbian license plates and IDs was“absolutely unreasonable,” he stated. On Sunday, Serbs in the north of the breakaway province set up roadblocks and rang alarm bells as heavily armed special police took control over two administrative crossings with Serbia, preparing to implement the order by Pristina.

As tensions mounted, Kosovo’s prime minister Albin Kurti announced late in the day that the ban had been postponed at the request of the US ambassador to the province. However, Kurti stressed that the measure, which according to Pristina was needed to impose “law and order,”has only been delayed, not canceled. “Thank God, the escalation was avoided tonight, but this situation has only been postponed for one month, so it’s paramount for all sides to show prudence,” the Kremlin press-secretary pointed out. Russia’s ambassador to Serbia Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko also warned on Monday that “it was difficult to see the conditions for finding sustainable solutions to those issues that caused the current spike in tension.”

The lack of agreement on license plates and IDs, and many other similar matters, are “being used by Pristina to make one-sided, spontaneous decisions aimed at squeezing [the Serbs] out of Kosovo,” he added. According to Peskov, Moscow believes that that the Western countries, which recognized the mainly Albanian-populated Kososvo in 2008,“should now use their influence to warn the authorities in Kosovo against making any ill-conceived steps,” he said. Serbia considers Kosovo a part of its territory, and is backed in doing so by Russia, China and the UN in general, who haven’t recognized the territory as an interdependent entity.

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“Since when does al-Qaeda wait 48+ hours to denounce hostile action in their territory?”

How many times has he been killed now?

Supposed Killing Of Al Zawahiri Is Suspect, Weird And Fishy (CTH)

Everything about the supposed killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri is suspect, weird and fishy. First, Al Zawahiri has been reported as killed or dead at least a half dozen times in the last 10 years; including by natural causes. Second, Ayman Zawahiri was very old. Western citations put his age at 71 (born 1951), however, that is suspect (sounds like his younger brother’s age). Third, the location of his reported killing in Kabul is odd. Zawahiri was known to avoid large populations, and even with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan the tribal conflicts with factions of the Taliban would have been an issue.

Fourth, somehow the Taliban waited until after the U.S. intelligence community leaked the strike to the media before they issued a statement condemning the drone attack. Since when does al-Qaeda wait 48+ hours to denounce hostile action in their territory? Coordinating and timed joint press releases between the White House and ‘Taliban‘ to western media outlets is seriously sketchy. Fifth, absolutely no official outline from the Pentagon or White House on this “successful counterterrorism strike“? Despite a primetime presidential address, the White House has no announcement, no official statement, nothing, on their website. Additionally, Biden leads off saying the attack was on Saturday, the Taliban waited 48-hours to denounce a U.S. drone strike?

Think about it. Doesn’t add up. More sketchy. Sixth, and seemingly just an oddball addendum, Fox News breaks the story using Jennifer Griffin as lead reporter. As I noted several days ago, Griffin had been missing from Fox News since she went bonzo in March attacking Tucker Carlson over his cynicism of the official State Dept and Pentagon narrative in Ukraine. May, June, July, nothing from pentagon deep state promoter Jenn Griffin at all. Then, suddenly, on the same day Griffin resurfaces, after months of nothing, there’s a major terrorism strike in Afghanistan, killing Zawahiri and she’s leading the coverage?…. With Brett Baier cheerleading? C’mon man. Sketchy, all of it.

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Trump was trumped.

The Day Anthony Fauci Wrecked American Freedom (Tucker)

Fears of a virus from China had been rising for two months in the spring of 2020. The White House under Donald Trump had already weathered two impeachment crises and was turning its attention toward reelection in November, which seemed assured. The virus was an enormously complicating factor. Trump surrounded himself with a small team of people among whom included supposed infectious disease experts such as Anthony Fauci from the National Institutes of Health and Deborah Birx of the Centers for Disease Control. On the recommendation of his vice president and son-in-law, Trump trusted them.

Trump had already closed travel from China but now his scientific advisers were urging him to do more: stop travel from Europe, UK, and Australia. That was March 12. He made the announcement in a prime-time address. In that brief speech, he misread the teleprompter and said that the travel ban would include goods. He meant to say that it would not. The stock market tanked and the White House had to issue a clarification the next day. Already there was chaos in the air. Over the weekend, Trump spent most of his time in huddles with close advisors. The main influence over that period became Deborah Birx, whose job it was to convince Trump of the need for a two-week lockdown of the entire American economy.

Trump agreed to do the deed. He would appear with Fauci and Birx at a press conference on Monday, and preside over the call for a lockdown. “If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now,” Trump said, “we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus and we’re going to have a big celebration together.” Later Birx admitted that she knew that two weeks “was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.”

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“..first they will have a lot of money that’s worthless and then they will have no money, like everybody else..”

Atonement (Jim Kunstler)

News flash to Boston: Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine is all over except the shouting. Plus, nobody in the USA cares about it anymore, and if they do, probably for the wrong reasons. The right reason to care is that the “Joe Biden” regime’s insane campaign to destroy Russia has only brought Western Europe to the brink of collapse and ruin, thereby threatening the continuation of Western Civilization altogether.

You don’t hear much chatter about this emanating from, say, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government because, apparently, they’re all-in on the demolition of Western Civ. It is the ultimate act of atonement, and atonement for the sins of culture and politics is the currency for personal status in Woke Elitedom. America’s elites are secretly disgusted with themselves, especially about the wealth they have been able to grift out of all the racketeering that has replaced honest work in our country — and nowhere is the racketeering more grotesque, or more pretentiously caparisoned, than in the Ivy League universities. Status drives Wokery because Woke Elitedom has more money than it knows what to do with, so just having a lot of money means less than it used to — just ask Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Don’t worry. Soon they will have a lot less money. Or rather, first they will have a lot of money that’s worthless and then they will have no money, like everybody else. The demoralizing inflation underway leads to the destruction of credit and when enough credit is destroyed, there will be no money, since our money is based on credit. When that happens, see what your self-proclaimed moral purity will buy you.

The credit-driven money system is a metaphor representing the expectation that we will always have more of everything. That was surely the consensus in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was born. 1913 was the last year of the Belle Époque, the beautiful era preceding the First World War. It was also the coming-of-age of economies based on oil. In that moment, Western Civ stood in amazement at its achievements and in thrall to its glittering future. The slaughter in the trenches of WWI shattered that confidence, nowhere more deeply than in Germany, which afterwards lurched from the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic to the depravity of Hitler’s Third Reich, and from there back to ruin in the Second World War.

Today’s Woke Elitedom of Europe, led by Germany, is deliberately driving the EU nations into a ditch without bothering to go to war. They certainly don’t have the military mojo to prosecute a war with Russia — which is what they would be doing if NATO intervened actively in Ukraine (ain’t gonna happen). Instead, they have torn-up reams of trade agreements and imploded a richly-constructed supply network of basic operating resources like oil, natgas, minerals, and grains in an absurd act of atonement, in obeisance to the experts at the World Economic Forum and the fiends behind “Joe Biden.” And lately, they are bent on destroying their food supply with cockamamie campaigns against their farmers, in line with WEF hallucinations about climate change.

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Rutte

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apr 212022
 


Juan Gris Portrait of Pablo Picasso 1912

 

Russia Test Fires ‘Satan 2’ Missile Amid Ukraine War (Celente)
Zelensky: If Ukraine Had Access To More Weapons, War Would Already Be Won (NYP)
NATO Is Invalid And The Nations In It Deserve What They Get (Denninger)
Jeremy Corbyn Calls For End To NATO To Bring World Peace (GBNews)
Red Cross Denies Kyiv’s Accusation Of Working ‘In Concert’ With Moscow (Y!)
Chinese Defense Minister Warns Pentagon Chief In 1st Call (ZH)
Former Intel Officials Want Efforts to Break Up Big Tech Stopped (CTH)
Democrats Sicced The CIA On Their Domestic Enemy, The President (Fed.)
Sussmann Doesn’t Want Clinton Tweet Admitted in Durham Case (ET)
‘Horrifying Amount Of Information’ Recovered From Biden Laptop (OAN)
Inside The New Right (Vanity Fair)
Le Pen, Macron In Bitter Clash Ahead Of Tight French Election (Y!)
US Mortgage Interest Rates Reach a 12 Year High (R.)
Assange Extradition Order Sent to Priti Patel (Lauria)
Dark Day For Press Freedom As UK Court Orders Assange Extradition (Gosztola)

 

 

Russia appears to have “liberated” Mariupol, but not -yet- the Azovstal complex.

 

 

 

 

Matt Walsh: pre-mummification

 

 

Imran Khan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1516556681316024320

 

 

“Sarmat could carry a payload capable of wiping out a landmass “the size of Texas or France..”

Russia Test Fires ‘Satan 2’ Missile Amid Ukraine War (Celente)

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Wednesday the successful test launch of its new Sarmat superheavy Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that can reportedly deploy 10 or more nuclear warheads on each missile. Putin used the launch as a warning for “external threats and provide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country,” Reuters reported. Western analysts have called the missile “Satan 2.” The design is intended to evade anti-missile systems and can reportedly hit any target on earth. The missile was called the world’s most powerful and with the longest range. The missile was launched from Plesetsk cosmodrome, in Russia’s northwest, and traveled about 3,2000 miles to the Kamchatka peninsula.

In 2018, Putin said the Sarmat would render even to most advanced missile systems useless. “No kind of, not even future missile defense systems will offer any trouble to the Russian rocket complex, Sarmat.” The Heritage Foundation’s 2021 Index of U.S. Military Strength said “Russia remains the primary threat to American interests in Europe and is the most pressing threat to the United States,” describing Russia as “aggressive in its behavior and formidable in its growing capabilities.” Congressional Research Service wrote on 21 March 2022: “Relations between the United States and Russia have shifted over time—sometimes reassuring and sometimes concerning—yet most experts agree that Russia is the only nation that poses, through its arsenal of nuclear weapons, an existential threat to the United States.”


“Reports indicate that the next-generation Sarmat can carry up to 15 warheads, along with penetration aids, and potentially several Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles. Russia began testing the Sarmat missile in 2016. Putin noted that Sarmat could attack targets by flying over both the North and South Poles, evading detection by radars seeking missiles flying in an expected trajectory over the North Pole. Sarmat could carry a payload capable of wiping out a landmass “the size of Texas or France,” according to a report by the Kremlin-aligned Sputnik news agency.” -CNBC

ICBM

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Peacemaker.

Zelensky: If Ukraine Had Access To More Weapons, War Would Already Be Won (NYP)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he believes the war against Russia would have already been won if Western allies including the US and NATO had sent more weapons to arm Ukraine. “If we had access to all the weapons we need, which our partners have and which are comparable to the weapons used by the Russian Federation, we would have already ended this war,” Zelensky said in a video address Tuesday evening, the Times of London reported. “We would have already restored peace and liberated our territory from the occupiers, because the superiority of the Ukrainian military in tactics and wisdom is quite obvious.”

Since the invasion began on Feb. 24, Zelensky has repeatedly asked the US and NATO for increased military aid and action, such as imposing a no-fly-zone over Ukraine — a move Western nations have avoided taking. Instead, the US in particular has repeatedly imposed sanctions against varying Russian oligarchs, businesses, banks, as well as President Vladimir Putin and members of his family. President Biden has also offered up packages of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, most recently approving an $800 million package last week — which includes helicopters, artillery and ammunition.

Still, Zelensky is looking for the West to do more. “It is unfair that Ukraine is still forced to ask for what its partners have been storing somewhere for years. If they have the weapons that Ukraine needs here, need more, if they have the ammunition that we need here and now, it is their moral duty first of all, to help protect freedom,” he said. “Help save the lives of thousands of Ukrainians.” Zelensky went on to claim that any delay in additional aid “gives the occupiers an opportunity to kill more Ukrainians.” Leading up to the invasion and since it began, the Biden administration has been slammed by Republicans and Democrats alike for not supplying Ukraine with more military aid, such as MiG-29 jet fighters.

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“..each and every nation at this time that has in any way violated the above provisions, which includes the United States, is not entitled under its provisions to anything..”

NATO Is Invalid And The Nations In It Deserve What They Get (Denninger)

Everyone wishes to argue “Article 5” of the NATO treaty, which is the mutual-defense pact. You get attacked and we all get attacked. Ok. What does Article I say? “The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” Shipping arms into an area where armed conflict is either occurring or threatening to occur, where the destination is NOT a NATO member and thus is NOT subject to NATO’s mutual defense obligations is a clear violation of Article I. It is escalatory, it is a threat to use force or enables the actual use of force, and thus is a clear violation of Article I.

How about Article 8? “Each Party declares that none of the international engagements now in force between it and any other of the Parties or any third State is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty.” Providing arms to a belligerent not a member of NATO violates this provision in that it can cause a mutual defense obligation to arise that would otherwise not. Therefore NATO members are obligated to stay out of non-member conflicts except with the unanimous consent of all members. Intervening in a non-member’s conflict, in short, by other than unanimous consent is a violation of the treaty.

How about Article 11? “This Treaty shall be ratified and its provisions carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited as soon as possible with the Government of the United States of America, which will notify all the other signatories of each deposit. The Treaty shall enter into force between the States which have ratified it as soon as the ratifications of the majority of the signatories, including the ratifications of Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, have been deposited and shall come into effect with respect to other States on the date of the deposit of their ratifications. (3)”

For the United States to engage in the elements of a proxy war, which it did at Maidan and now through the provision of arms without a declaration of said war by Congress is a direct violation of the US Constitution and thus a violation of the treaty. Fraud vitiates all agreements. Therefore no nation is obligated under any other provision of the NATO Treaty and each and every nation at this time that has in any way violated the above provisions, which includes the United States, is not entitled under its provisions to anything, including mutual defense under Article 5.

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Stating the obvious, which is disappearing at the horizon.

Jeremy Corbyn Calls For End To NATO To Bring World Peace (GBNews)

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested military alliances like Nato could build up “greater danger” in the world and should ultimately be disbanded. Mr Corbyn acknowledged the transatlantic alliance was not going to be scrapped immediately but added that people should “look at the process that could happen at the end of the Ukraine war”. He said he did not blame NATO for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but questioned: “Do military alliances bring peace?” The Islington North MP said he wanted to see “some kind of much deeper security discussion, as indeed Nato was having a security discussion with Russia until last year”.


Mr Corbyn, a long-standing critic of NATO, told Times Radio: “I would want to see a world where we start to ultimately disband all military alliances. “The issue has to be what’s the best way of bringing about peace in the future? Is it by more alliances? Is it by more military build-up? “Or is it by stopping the war in Ukraine and the other wars… that are going on at the present time, which are also killing a very large number of people? “And ask yourself the question, do military alliances bring peace? Or do they actually encourage each other and build up to a greater danger? “I don’t blame NATO for the fact that Russia has invaded Ukraine, what I say is look at the thing historically, and look at the process that could happen at the end of the Ukraine war.”

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Yeah, why not blame them too?!

Red Cross Denies Kyiv’s Accusation Of Working ‘In Concert’ With Moscow (Y!)

A senior Kyiv official on Wednesday accused the International Committee of the Red Cross of working “in concert” with Russia in Ukraine, a charge the organisation denied. Ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova decried ICRC’s announcement last month that it was planning to open a branch in Russia’s southern Rostov region to help Ukrainian refugees, who, Kyiv says, have been forcibly deported to Russia. “The International Red Cross is not fulfilling its mandate, I am certain of that,” Denisova said on Ukrainian television Wednesday after meeting with the head of the ICRC’s Ukrainian branch. Citing data from the United Nations, Denisova said that some 550,000 Ukrainians, including 121,000 children, have been taken to Russia during the course of the war, but Kyiv has no information on who these people are and where they are being kept.


“Where are they? In filtration camps? In temporary facilities?” Denisova asked. The official said she had asked both her Russian counterpart Tatyana Moskalkova and the ICRC for help in getting information on these refugees so that Ukraine could facilitate their return home, but had received “zero answer from her or from the Red Cross”. Asked by the TV anchor whether Denisova suspected that the Red Cross was working “in concert” with Russia, Denisova replied: “Yes, I suspect they are.” The ICRC strongly rejected Kyiv’s accusations. “The ICRC does not ever help organize or carry out forced evacuations. We would not support any operation that would go against people’s will and international law,” the organisation said in a statement to AFP.

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The global balance is shifting.

Chinese Defense Minister Warns Pentagon Chief In 1st Call (ZH)

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin held a call with his Chinese counterpart, Defense Minister Wei Fenghe, wherein Wei conveyed a warning that no one can change Taiwan’s status as part of China. The Wednesday phone call was the first that the two defense leaders have held. Wei informed Austin that “If the Taiwan issue were not handled properly, it would have a damaging impact on Sino-US relations,” according to Reuters. The call was intended as a follow-up between last month’s virtual meeting between presidents Biden and Xi, wherein Biden warned over China’s deepening cooperation with Russia it executes its war against Ukraine.

A Pentagon official later said the Austin emphasized that the US will continue to adhere to the ‘One China’ status quo policy, which is the typical response from Washington officials anytime Beijing warns over US officials stoking the pro-independence movement on the democratic-run island. Chinese state-run English language Global Times further described the importance of the call as one of Beijing conveying its unwavering resolve to Washington on the Taiwan issue. GT writes that Wei stressed “the importance of the Taiwan question, while demanding the US to stop its military provocations at sea, and not to throw mud or threaten China with the Ukraine issue.”

Further, “Wei stated a solemn position over the Taiwan question, as he stressed that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and this is a fact and a status quo no one can change.” Without doubt part of the “provocations” Beijing has in mind is that the US has been increasingly sending high-level officials to Taipei. In the latest example, just a week ago: “A delegation of United States lawmakers led by vocal China critics Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham arrived in Taiwan on Thursday for a two-day trip as Beijing threatened “strong measures” in response. The group of six US legislators is making the latest in a string of visits by foreign politicians to Taiwan in defiance of Beijing’s efforts to isolate the island nation.”

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“The scale of simultaneous user data-processing is not financially viable without the U.S government subsidizing it.”

Former Intel Officials Want Efforts to Break Up Big Tech Stopped (CTH)

Of course, the Fourth Branch of Government would want to get the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence involved. The SSCI created all of the mechanisms to facilitate the existence of the Fourth Branch of Government. However, I would take the issue deeper…. and ask readers to see what really worries the intelligence apparatus about the potential breakup of Big Tech. These are the intelligence people who constructed the model for Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop. This public-private partnership between the cyber division of the intelligence apparatus and Big Tech social media is where the free coffee comes from. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Google itself, are financially and operationally dependent on the scale of the data processing system that is run by the U.S. government.

The capacity of each of the big social media companies to exist, operate and be financially viable, is dependent on the backbone of interconnected data networking, and massive data processing. The scale of simultaneous user data-processing is not financially viable without the U.S government subsidizing it. That’s the free coffee that cannot be duplicated in the private sector by any competing social media company. That’s the cost and scale system behind the partnership that permits Big Tech to operate. Ultimately, this is what the intelligence apparatus needs to keep hidden from the American (and global) public. The biggest of the Big DATA processing is done through a public-private collaboration between Big Tech and Big Government/Intel.

Any private sector entity who attempts to create, or duplicate the scale of social media runs into this cost issue. It is just too expensive to operate a competing coffee shop without the free coffee. That’s why the coffee providers are lined up against Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter. The ramifications of the public discovering Facebook and Twitter social media are only possible with subsidy from government tech architecture are massive. Essentially, the U.S. government is in control of our social media networking.

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Always found this a very weird story.

“This data, Sussmann claimed, “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”

Democrats Sicced The CIA On Their Domestic Enemy, The President (Fed.)

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements. When Special Counsel John Durham charged former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann in September 2021, the indictment focused on the Alfa Bank hoax that Sussmann, tech executive Rodney Joffe, and other cybersecurity experts had crafted. The indictment detailed how Joffe and other tech experts had allegedly mined data and developed “white papers” that deceptively created the impression that Trump had maintained a secret communication network with the Russia-based Alfa Bank.

Then, allegedly on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Joffe, Sussmann provided the Alfa Bank material to the media and to the FBI’s general counsel at the time, James Baker, with Sussmann falsely telling Baker he was sharing the “intel” on his own and not on behalf of any client. That alleged lie formed the basis for the one count, Section 1001 false statement charge against Sussmann. The 27-page indictment, however, also spoke of Sussmann sharing “updated allegations” on February 9, 2017, to another U.S. government agency, namely the CIA, while allegedly repeating the same false claim that he was not sharing the “intel” on behalf of any client. From the framing of the indictment, it appeared that what Sussmann had shared with the CIA concerned the same Alfa-Bank data provided to the FBI several months earlier, albeit updated.

But then two months ago, as part of the government’s “Motion to Inquire Into Potential Conflicts of Interest,” Durham’s team revealed for the first time that when Sussmann met with the CIA in early 2017, he provided agents with internet data beyond the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory. This data, Sussmann claimed, “demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” The “supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones” were “Yotaphones.” Following Durham’s filing of the conflicts of interest motion, it appeared Sussmann bore responsibility for peddling a second conspiracy theory to the CIA. But the details contained in the government’s motion proved insufficient to understand the Yotaphone angle to Spygate. That all changed on Friday, when the special counsel filed two CIA memoranda memorializing what Sussmann said about the Yotaphones and the data Joffe and his tech experts had compiled.

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“On Oct. 31, 2016, Clinton wrote on Twitter: “Donald Trump has a secret server … It was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank.”

Sussmann Doesn’t Want Clinton Tweet Admitted in Durham Case (ET)

The lawyer charged with hiding his work for the Clinton campaign from the FBI filed a motion requesting that special counsel John Durham not be able to use a Hillary Clinton Twitter post that made reference to alleged Trump–Russia collusion claims. Durham wrote last week that he wanted an October 2016 Twitter post from the Clinton campaign that promoted an allegation that there was a secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank. The campaign’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, was charged last year with lying to the FBI by allegedly stating that he wasn’t working on behalf of any client when he pushed the Trump-Russian bank claim to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker.

On Oct. 31, 2016, Clinton wrote on Twitter: “Donald Trump has a secret server … It was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank.” She later wrote that “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” The claims about the alleged secret backchannel between the bank, reportedly identified as Alfa Bank, and former President Donald Trump’s business were ultimately refuted by the FBI. Durham also sought to preserve a Twitter post from Clinton’s campaign that included a lengthy statement from former adviser Jake Sullivan, who now works as President Joe Biden’s national security adviser. “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan claimed. “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”

Last week, Durham argued that these Twitter posts are material because Sussmann “had communicated with the media and provided them with the Russian Bank-1 data and allegations” before articles on the claims were published. He also kept Clinton campaign staff “apprised of his efforts” while they “communicated with the Clinton Campaign’s leadership about potential media coverage of these issues.” But Sussmann’s lawyers over the past weekend, in court, wrote that the Clinton campaign’s Twitter posts about the matter, including the Sullivan one, should not be preserved for Sussmann’s trial. “The Tweet, which was posted on October 31, 2016, does not reveal anything about Mr. Sussmann’s state of mind over a month earlier, when he purportedly made the alleged false statement,” his attorneys wrote. “There is no evidence that Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with Mr. Baker had anything to do with the Clinton Campaign’s broader media strategy.”

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How nervous are they?

‘Horrifying Amount Of Information’ Recovered From Biden Laptop (OAN)

Journalist and whistleblower Jack Maxey says he may have recovered “a horrifying amount of information” previously thought to have been erased from Hunter Biden’s laptop. One America’s John Hines has more from Washington.

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Action, re-action.

Inside The New Right (Vanity Fair)

NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s “radical young intellectuals,” as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism’s “terrifying future,” as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic.

But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted.

Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word. This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century—that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It’s a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures.

One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire who helped fund NatCon and who had just given the conference’s opening address. Thiel has also funded things like the edgelordy and post-left–inflected New People’s Cinema film festival, which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He’s long been a big donor to Republican political candidates, but in recent years Thiel has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world—becoming something like a nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art-world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called Thielbucks. His most significant recent outlays have been to two young Senate candidates who are deeply enmeshed in this scene and influenced by its intellectual currents: Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, running for the Republican nomination in Ohio, and Blake Masters in Arizona.

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Doesn’t feel bitter.

Le Pen, Macron In Bitter Clash Ahead Of Tight French Election (Y!)

French President Emmanuel Macron and far-right rival Marine Le Pen on Wednesday clashed bitterly over relations with Russia and the Islamic headscarf as they sought to sway undecided voters in an acrimonious debate four days ahead of presidential elections. France faces a stark choice in Sunday’s second-round run-off between the centrist Macron and the anti-immigration Le Pen, who will seek to become the country’s first far-right head of state in an outcome that would send shockwaves around Europe. There was little cordiality in the bruising three-hour live televised debate, with Macron repeatedly seeking to land punches on Le Pen over her record, while she sought to keep the focus on the government’s performance.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine overshadowing the campaign, Macron angrily zeroed in on a loan Le Pen’s party had taken from a Czech-Russian bank ahead of her 2017 election campaign. “You are dependent on the Russian government and you are dependent on Mr (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” Macron said. “When you speak to Russia you are speaking to your banker.” Macron also referred to Le Pen’s past recognition of Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. “Why did you do this?” he asked. Le Pen replied that she was “an absolutely and totally free woman”, arguing that her party had only taken that loan as it could not find financing in France where banks refused to lend to her.

Macron adopted a variety of poses to express scepticism at her arguments, raising his eyebrows, leaning his chin on his fists and lamenting in apparent bewilderment “Madame Le Pen… Madame Le Pen!” The most explosive clash came when Le Pen confirmed she was sticking to her controversial policy of banning the wearing of the Islamic headscarf by women in public, describing it as a “uniform imposed by Islamists”. Macron responded: “You are going to cause a civil war if you do that. I say this sincerely.”

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How long until the entire housing market goes poof?

US Mortgage Interest Rates Reach a 12 Year High (R.)

The average interest rate on the most popular U.S. home loan climbed to a 12 year high last week and fewer homebuyers sought properties in a sign that the Federal Reserve’s aim of cooling the housing market may be beginning to have an impact, data from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) showed on Wednesday. The average contract rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage increased to 5.20% in the week ended April 15 from 5.13% a week earlier, the MBA survey showed. It has risen 2 percentage points from one year ago.


The bulk of the run up, however, has occurred since the start of the year, causing the fastest climb in home-financing costs in decades as the Fed abandoned a cautious approach to raising its benchmark overnight lending rate in favor of swifter and more decisive action to bring down persistently high inflation. The central bank is also set to decide at its next meeting on May 3-4 to begin reducing its portfolio of $8.5 trillion of U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, a stash of assets that had helped keep consumer borrowing costs – for mortgages in particular – low throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Those expectations for Fed tightening actions have led to a surge in Treasury yields as financial markets reacted. The yield on the 10-year note US10YT=RR, which acts as a benchmark for mortgage rates, is at its highest level since 2018.

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Who cares about the law when they are in power?

Assange Extradition Order Sent to Priti Patel (Lauria)

An order to extradite WikiLeaks‘ publisher Julian Assange was sent to British Home Secretary Priti Patel on Wednesday morning by Westminster Magistrate’s Court. The order came after the U.K. Supreme Court last month declined to hear Assange’s appeal of a High Court decision to allow the extradition to the United States to proceed. Patel now has four weeks to decide whether to send Assange to the U.S. to face espionage and computer intrusion charges for publishing prima facie evidence of U.S. war crimes that could land him behind bars for up to 175 years — an effective life sentence. Assange’s legal team can appeal to Patel during the next four weeks. After her decision is made Assange can then make a renewed appeal to the High Court if she opts to send him to the U.S.

Mark Summers QC, one of Assange’s lawyers, told Westminster Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday, that while he was not permitted by rule to present “fresh evidence” at the present hearing, Assange’s legal team would make submissions to Patel on “fresh developments” in Assange’s case. Without elaborating, Summers said Patel would be sent “serious submissions on U.S. sentencing practices.” Among the new developments since the High Court hearing in October is a deterioration in Assange’s health after he suffered a mini stroke on the first day of that hearing. Assange initially won his extradition case in the magistrate’s court in January 2021 based on the high likelihood that his mental health would lead to his suicide in harsh prison conditions in the United States.

After the case was lost, the U.S. made diplomatic “assurances” to Britain that it would not put Assange in so-called Special Administrative Measures (SAMS), the most severe condition of isolation in the U.S. prison system. The U.S. also promised that Assange would be given adequate physical and mental health care. The U.S. then appealed. Based on those assurances alone, the High Court on Dec. 10, 2021 overturned the lower court’s decision to block extradition. But that decision was made after Assange had suffered a stroke during the first day of the two-day High Court hearing. The stroke was not made public until the day after the ruling.

That markedly changed the conditions upon which the decision was reached as one of the High Court judges made the distinction during the hearing that Assange was suffering only from a mental and not physical disability. The crucial question remains: when did the High Court learn about the stroke? If Patel decides to extradite and if Assange decides to appeal again to the High Court, his lawyers could also challenge parts of the lower court’s ruling on issues of press freedom and the political nature of the U.S. charges, which are not allowed in the U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty.

Not nearly enough people outside the court

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The threat appears much wider than just press freedom.

Dark Day For Press Freedom As UK Court Orders Assange Extradition (Gosztola)

While the defense for Assange objected to District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling on January 4, 2021, particularly as it related to issues of press freedom, they never had an appropriate opportunity to raise their objections. She denied the extradition request after determining it would be “oppressive” for mental health reasons. His attorneys would likely challenge many of Baraitser’s conclusions about Assange if Patel allowed the request. (Note: Baraitser is no longer a district judge at the Westminster Magistrates Court.) Assange is detained at Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. He faces 18 charges brought against him by the US Justice Department, 17 of which are under the Espionage Act. All the charges relate to documents WikiLeaks released in 2010 and 2011, which were provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

The prosecution makes Assange the first publisher to be charged under the 1917 law, and globally the case has been condemned by virtually all reputable civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom organizations. Patel and the Home Office support an expansion of the Official Secrets Laws in the UK, which Elmaazi reported “would expand possible imprisonment for leakers, recipients of leaks and secondary publishers–including journalists–from the current maximum of two years to as high as 14 years in prison.” The Home Office contends there is no longer much of a difference between “espionage and the most serious unauthorized disclosures.” That includes what Patel would call “onward disclosure.” The department treats journalism as an act capable of “far more serious damage” than traditional espionage.

In the UK, the Office for Security and Counterterrorism is a part of the Home Office. The division is responsible for MI5 (Britain’s FBI) and anti-terrorism police operations. Operation Pelican, the name for the pressure campaign to force Assange out of the Ecuador embassy in London, was supported by the Home Office. But as Declassified UK chief investigator Matt Kennard noted, the Home Office claims it does not “hold” any records containing details related to the operation, even though eight officials from the department were involved. Kennard also reported that Patel was on the advisory council for a right-wing group linked to the CIA called the Henry Jackson Society, which has attacked Assange in the press for over a decade.

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Calvin gets 25c

 

 

 

 

Name this band

 

 

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

 

 

 

Oct 192021
 


René Magritte The song of love 1948

 

 

Just this morning, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechia, UK and New Zealand announced record or near-record numbers of positive Covid numbers and/or deaths. Yes, here we go again. Sadly, all of it is completely preventable, and all of us choose to not prevent it, because most have never been told this. Once again, an overview.

 

 

In the UK, a report came out last week about the country’s Covid approach, written by politicians, from the government’s own party nonetheless. It’s titled “Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date”, which is kind of ironic, because the one thing WE learn, at least from the press coverage of it, is that not a single lesson has been learned. BBC:

Covid: UK’s Early Response Worst Public Health Failure Ever

The 150-page document, “Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date”, is from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, and MPs from all parties.


[..] Conservative MPs Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who chair the committees, said the nature of the pandemic meant it was “impossible to get everything right”. “The UK has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both,” they said. Cabinet Office minister Stephen Barclay said scientific advice had been followed and the government had made “difficult judgements” to protect the NHS. He said the government took responsibility for everything that happened – saying the government would not shy away from any lessons to be learned at the full statutory public inquiry, expected next year.

What were those big mistakes, according to those 150 pages? These:

[..] the UK was not as open to different approaches on earlier lockdowns, border controls and test and trace as it should have been.

And the “big achievements”?

But their report highlighted successes too, including the vaccination rollout. It described the approach to vaccination – from the research and development through to the rollout of the jabs – as “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”.

I kid you not, the biggest mistakes these politicians could come up with was that the UK should have locked down, shut its borders and start testing and tracing healthy people earlier. That’s it. But none of those come close to being the biggest mistakes. And that after 20 months they all still don’t appear to understand that is a sad, saddening and deadly “mistake” all by itself.

The real biggest mistake is the complete denial, and ignoring, of the crucial role prophylactics and early treatment could and should have played. And since neither plays such a role even today, yes, it will continue to be very deadly. The pharmaceutical industry prevents the use of -most- pharmaceuticals, and allows only the use of some of the newest and -therefore- most profitable ones. The promised “full statutory public inquiry” won’t change that.

 

But first, let’s look at the “big achievements”. Vaccination, “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”, has resulted in the following picture:

 

“Cases” are, let’s say, “stubbornly high” again (they average about 45,000 recently, and on Monday reached almost 50,000):

 

Hospitalizations are high too, compared to other countries. Which is odd, since the vaccines were supposed to stop severe cases in every country, we were told. After the claims that they stop infection and transmission became untenable:

 

Deaths appear to have normalized a little more in the UK, but what’s worrisome in this graph is the “Other excess deaths”. What are they? Are they vaccine deaths? Hard not to think they may very well be. But also hard to know because information on this is so scarce. In any case, they appear to outnumber Covid deaths. Which is no surprise, but still “good” to see in a graph:

 

 

 

The UK is presently about 65% vaccinated, according to Our World In Data, after “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history”. 65%? How effective have other “initiatives” been? On the bright side, the unvaccinated 35% may well turn out to be the lucky ones.

 

But why were (and are) the “big mistakes” made? A clue is that lockdowns, closed borders, test and trace, and facemasks, are all non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s). Any and all things pharmaceutical have been ignored from the get go. And not just ignored: there have even been – and still are- extensive coordinated campaigns against ivermectin (IVM), hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and recently even aspirin.

Never has there been any advice for people to boost their vit. C and D levels, or zinc and quercetin. Aspirin and melatonin are never mentioned. Still, it’s widely known that these substances can provide protection from Covid in their various ways. So how can it be that all those highly paid medical experts and scientists that advise their governments never seem to talk about them?

Perhaps you need to look at how the field is laid out. The pharmaceutical industry has the by far largest lobbying departments in the world (and you thought it was Big Oil). In Washington alone there are hundreds of lobbyists working for Big Pharma. Who not only support the politicians’ election campaigns, they also pay huge amounts to the same medical experts that advise the same politicians. Moreover, lobbyists often even write the laws for the politicians, who are not experts. Sort of a symbiotic relationship, if you will.

 

The problem that I have with this, and these people apparently don’t, is that this has cost enormous amounts of suffering and deaths. For no apparent reason at all. The UK, and any other -western- country, could have promoted vitamin D -and C-, plus zinc and quercetin, and added on ivermectin and/or HCQ, perhaps doxycycline, and only a fraction of the present victims would have died and/or been incapacitated.

And this is not a story about the past either: it continues to this day. There are no protocols for protecting people, and none for early treatment. It’s still: go home and wait till you get so sick you need a ventilator. What doctor signs up for that? Well, most of them do. Screw Hippocrates. 95% of the deaths and misery could have been prevented with cheap, available, run-of-the-mill pharmaceuticals. And your doctors refused to provide them for you.

We’ve all seen the horse dewormer campaign against ivermectin that especially outlets like CNN, and even Rolling Stone, have put so much energy in recently. But the real story of IVM is completely different. Here are a few countries and states, and their experiences with it.

 

 

 

Puerto Rico:

 

Uttar Pradesh:

 

Tokyo:

 

And Indonesia:


Indonesia ramped up ivermectin production and the government assured national distribution and fair prices. IVM is considered by the government a COVID medicine.

 

 

Good thing we didn’t take that horse dewormer. We were smart, we listened to “The Science”, and spend billions on vaccines. It’s too early to oversee the harm these substances have done and will do, and there’s a lot of pressure not to make it public, but we can get an idea from two countries that were initially spared much of what we experienced. They were genuine Covid success stories, like New Zealand was. Until they started vaccinating. Here’s Taiwan and Singapore.

 

Taiwan:

 

And here is Singapore, bit of a strange graph because the timeline is split in two, but obvious enough:

 

And now we’re sitting here without ivermectin, because it’s been banned in many places, but with increasing pressure to get jabbed with substances that look very suspect. And increasingly without the freedom to choose what we think is best for us and our families.

But you can still choose to boost your immune system with vitamin D, without which it can’t properly function, and vitamin C. Be careful with zinc, but do consider it; it keeps the virus out of your cells. And it works better with quercetin. And do tell your doctor that you would like a prescription for ivermectin -if only to see the reaction- or HCQ. Ask about melatonin. Get some low dose aspirin. Inform yourself.

Since I am not a doctor (I just listen to them a lot), let me close with an old favorite I haven’t used in a long time: This information is for entertainment purposes only.

PS: Oh, and no, these things are not mistakes. Mistakes are not deliberate.

 

 

 

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Oct 152021
 


Paul Gauguin Christ in the garden of olives 1889

 

For the Right to Try (Hope)
Deaths Following Vaccination in Taiwan Exceed COVID Death Total (BA)
Go Ahead, Keep Being Stupid (Denninger)
FDA Panel Recommends Half-dose Boosters For Moderna Vaccine (JT)
Navy Announces Plans To Expel Those Refusing Vaccine, Revoke Benefits (ZH)
Workers At Los Alamos Nuclear Lab Sue Over Vaccine Mandate (JTN)
The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg (Fed.)
Blackwell: Republicans Should Have Poll Workers At Every Precinct In 2022 (JTN)
#EmptyShelvesJoe Hits Number 1 Trend On Twitter (PM)
Joe Biden Could Get Drawn Into The FBI Probe Into His Son Hunter (Fox)
Americans’ Heating Bills To Soar Up To 50% This Winter (ZH)

 

 

Hessen becomes the first federal state in Germany to allow supermarkets to bar unvaccinated persons from entry (BILD).

 

 

Highly effective

 

 

Vermont is the most vaccinated US state

 

 

 

 

Murder by judge.

For the Right to Try (Hope)

“A Fairfield Township man with COVID-19 whose wife sued to force West Chester Hospital to treat him with Ivermectin has died, according to his attorney. Jeffrey Smith died Saturday, September 25, said his attorney, Jonathan Davidson of Hamilton. Smith, 51, was diagnosed with COVID-19 in July and was in the intensive care unit at West Chester Hospital.” According to a news report published October 4, 2021, “Jeffrey Smith tested positive for COVID-19 July 9, was hospitalized, and was admitted to the intensive care unit July 15. He was put on the hospital’s COVID-19 protocol of the antiviral drug, Remdesivir, along with plasma and steroids. On July 27, after a period of relative stability, Jeffrey Smith’s condition began to decline. He was sedated and intubated, and placed on a ventilator on August 1.

Smith was in a medically-induced coma on August 20, according to an affidavit his wife filed with her lawsuit. ‘My husband is on death’s doorstep; he has no other options,’ she wrote, adding at another point that her husband’s chances of survival had dropped to less than 30%.” In August, Judge Gregory Howard ordered the hospital, West Chester, to honor the family’s request to treat him with Ivermectin. Judge Howard approved Dr. Fred Wagshul’s prescription of Ivermectin 30 mg daily for three weeks. Dr. Wagshul is a renowned Pulmonary Specialist who reports having treated over 2,000 patients with Ivermectin with 100% success. He heads the Lung Center of America in Dayton, Ohio.

In addition, he is a founding member of the World-Renowned Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a non-profit group of highly-published physicians dedicated to saving lives. By the grace of God and Judge Howard, Jeffrey Smith won the court order to receive the life-saving Ivermectin for which attorney Ralph Lorigo and his team had fought at his wife’s plea. It appeared that Jeffrey Smith would be another in the string of Lorigo’s cases that received court-ordered Ivermectin and went on to enjoy a full recovery. Lorigo’s ICU cases who win court-ordered Ivermectin have more than a 90% recovery rate, unlike their chances with standard care, which is well below 50%, and in this case, less than 30%.

[..] Over thirteen days, Smith faithfully got the Ivermectin, and began to improve, said Dr. Wagshul. It looked like Ralph Lorigo had worked another miracle. And then the unthinkable occurred. A new judge ordered the Ivermectin stopped against the wishes of his wife, his family, and Dr. Wagshul. And soon after that, 51-year-old Jeffrey Smith’s life ended. Judge Michael Oster reversed the ruling before Smith could receive the entire three weeks of court-ordered Ivermectin. As a result, he only received 13 doses out of the 21 mandated by the previous order. According to Ralph Lorigo, lead attorney, “they were planning to begin weaning off the ventilator.”

Read more …

Taiwan was doing fine. And then the vaccines came.

Deaths Following Vaccination in Taiwan Exceed COVID Death Total (BA)

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, few nations have been lauded as much for their management of the disease as Taiwan has. Since the first cases of COVID-19 in the country were reported in February 2020, only 16,313 infections and 846 deaths have been recorded. Despite how successfully the nation had managed the outbreak, it still enrolled itself in the World Health Organization-led COVAX exchange program and began its first wave of vaccinations on March 22, 2021. While the nation hadn’t had even a dozen deaths attributed to COVID-19 by the time the first vaccine was administered, 836 of the 846 deaths attributed to COVID-19 have occurred since the vaccination program began. In an even more dubious display concerning the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines administered in Taiwan, the nation’s Central Epidemic Command Center (“CECC”) has stated that 850 deaths have been reported as adverse events following vaccinations. That total eclipses the number of fatalities attributed to the virus itself.


Taiwan’s vaccination campaign began much later than many other nations, a lag which many blame on political interference from China which was best illustrated by the island nation’s difficulties procuring orders of Pfizer-BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines. Despite these hurdles, the country was able to first able to procure 117,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccines. Additional deliveries of 200,000 and 400,000 doses from the same manufacturer arrived the following two months before another 150,000 vaccines from Moderna were delivered in May 2021. It gave emergency approval to a domestically engineered alternative made by Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corporation with shipments from Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson soon following. As of October 11, 4.48 million Taiwanese, about 19% of the population, have been fully vaccinated and 13.7 million, or about 59% of population, have received on dose. The country has stated that it seeks to have 70% of its population fully vaccinated.

Yet, by the time Taiwan had approved those five vaccines for emergency use, an alarming trend began appearing. The highest seven-day average of new cases of COVID-19 observed in Taiwan before its first vaccines were deployed was just 3. By May 28, 2021, that seven-day average exploded to 597. As the rest of the world grappled with an increase in cases despite the global advancement of vaccination efforts, most those countries had record their all-time highs for new cases and deaths before any vaccines were available. One exception to that rule was seen in Israel, where the record for a highest single-day case count was recorded following the beginning of the nation’s campaign to administer third doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines in the wake of concerns of the delta variant’s impact of the efficacy of vaccines. Yet, even though Israel did surpass its previous one-day high, the amount by which it exceeded that paled in comparison to Taiwan. The seven-day average in Taiwan would not fall under 10 new cases again until September 2021. Since then, despite the increase in vaccinations, that national average has never managed to reach its pre-vaccination levels. The lowest seven-day average Taiwan has seen since it began vaccinating its citizens was recorded at 5 on September 5, 2021.

Read more …

“If your particular “circle of friends and acquaintances” hasn’t seen a spike of severe injuries, disability and mortality yet — I’ll make a prediction: It will.”

Go Ahead, Keep Being Stupid (Denninger)

Two days of FDA murderfest are on deck with the agenda items being Moderna and J&J “booster” shots. As with the Fraudzer jabs there will be no data deck submitted, no side effect profile, no disclosure of the data the manufacturers have that is not in VAERS, no reconciliation of the VAERS data with clinical experience and zero accountability for any of the people already wounded, including those mortally wounded who don’t know it yet all the way up to those already dead. The screamfest about how Covid-19 infection produces “worse” myocarditis and other cardiac complications than the vaccines will, of course, be maintained. Never mind the clinical study data that says that’s a lie:

“To analyse the impact of COVID-19 pandemics on CVD outcomes in Belo Horizonte (BH), the 6th greater capital city in Brazil, including: mortality, mortality at home, hospitalizations, intensive care unit utilization, and in-hospital mortality; and the differential effect according to sex, age range, social vulnerability, and pandemics phase.” Oh, you mean someone’s done the work? Why yes, yes they have. Oh look, we have a formal study here in Brazil. They have fat people, thin people, old people, young people, you know, humans. And like everywhere else they get cardiovascular disease. Like everywhere else they also have gotten hammered with Covid-19; indeed, they’ve been hammered worse than many other places, largely because they have an extraordinarily-stratified population and a large part of it has jack for medical care, routine or otherwise.

So if Covid-19 was killing people a few weeks to months later via heart attack it would show up in the numbers. This study ran through November of 2020, that is, all through the worst of the first wave, with months of time for those adverse impacts to show up and kill people. By the claims all those who got Covid-19 and recovered contributed massively to CVD deaths, right? The rate was much higher than it would otherwise be. Why, after you got Covid-19 you were much more likely to have a heart attack and die! THIS IS THE CLAIM SO WHAT WERE THE RESULTS? “Results: We found no changes in CVD mortality rates (RiR 1.01, 95%CI 0.96-1.06). However, CVD deaths occurred more at homes (RiR 1.32, 95%CI 1.20-1.46) than in hospitals (RiR 0.89, 95%CI 0.79-0.99), as a result of a substantial decline in hospitalization rates, even though proportional in-hospital deaths increased.”

Oh. What did they find related to this? That people avoided the hospital when in cardiac distress and thus the percentage of such deaths that occurred at home went up. But wait….. is this one indictment or two indictments in one study? You see, if going to the doctor or hospital saves your ass when in such a condition then the death rate from CVD should have gone up. That it was difficult to figure out why it went up is still an open question, but it should have increased, assuming said hospitals and doctors actually improved outcomes. But…. they don’t improve outcomes, do they? Need to read it again? Results: We found no changes in CVD mortality rates So said doctors and hospitals don’t help. That’s a bummer.

What’s a bigger bummer is that the jabs are killing and severely-injuring people, and not a few of them either. If your particular “circle of friends and acquaintances” hasn’t seen a spike of severe injuries, disability and mortality yet — I’ll make a prediction: It will.

Read more …

Protection for 6 weeks? Or do we have to subtract the first two here as well?

Oh, and your booster can be another vaccine too, I hear, so nobody will have any idea anymore about a specific vaccine’s efficacy.

FDA Panel Recommends Half-dose Boosters For Moderna Vaccine (JT)

The Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel unanimously approved Thursday a booster shot of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for select groups of people. According to the Associated Press, the panel of outside experts recommended booster shots be administered to people over the age of 65, people ages 16 and older who have underlying conditions causing them to be at risk of severe illness, and those whose profession puts them at risk of contracting COVID. The final category of people includes frontline workers, such as supermarket employees, healthcare professionals, and first responders.


The panel recommended booster shots at half the dosage of the original shots, advising that they can be administered six months after a person was fully vaccinated. According to NPR, some experts pointed out that the FDA has set a precedent by granting emergency use to Pfizer for its booster shots. “I support this [emergency use authorization] because we’ve already approved it for Pfizer, and I don’t see how we can possibly not approve it for Moderna and not have most U.S. folks completely confused,” said Dr. Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa. “I think it’s a pragmatic issue.” The panel is expected to discuss booster shots for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine on Friday.

Read more …

We’re going to lose a lot of doctors, nurses, policemen, soldiers.

Navy Announces Plans To Expel Those Refusing Vaccine, Revoke Benefits (ZH)

At the end of August the Pentagon initially announced a mandate for military personnel across all armed service branches, ordering them to “immediately begin” Covid vaccination. A memo issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time directed the Secretaries of the Military Departments to “immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19.” However, when the mandate went out it remained unclear precisely what repercussions military members would face if they don’t comply – this also as a number of lawsuits have since been filed against the DoD by troops arguing that the order violates individual medical freedom. On Thursday the US Navy made it clear to their personnel: receive the jab by November 28 for be expelled from the service.

“With Covid-19 vaccines now mandatory for all military members, the Navy has announced plans to start processing for discharge those who refuse vaccination without a pending or approved exemption,” the US Navy said in the statement. The Pentagon had so far remained ambiguous over whether servicemembers would actually be booted after the mandate cut-off date. With Thursday’s Navy announcement, other branches are expected to soon follow suit. The AFP notes that “The navy said that 98 percent of its 350,000 active duty members had begun or completed the vaccination process.” The rate among all branches combined is about equal – or just under this, but Pentagon officials worry about lagging vaccination rates in the reserves, given recent reports indicate just 80% of the reserves have had at least one dose.

The AFP report underscores that if official Pentagon policy becomes to expel troops across the board for refusing the shot, this could create a significant problem for US defense readiness, given it would inevitably involve a mass exit of troops. “If all the services take the same hard line that the navy is taking, it risks losing as many as 46,000 troops, though presumably more will accept vaccinations before the deadline,” the report underscores. What remains is the question of the terms under which they would be discharged at the end of November. The Navy said in the Thursday announcement those kicked out for not taking the vaccine “will receive no lower than a general discharge under honorable conditions.” However, there could be penalties like being forced to pay back certain training and education costs – or more significantly the loss of post military service benefits, as the official Navy guidance spells out: “This type of discharge could result in the loss of some veterans’ benefits.”

Read more …

“Workers at the lab face potential termination if they are unable to provide proof of vaccination by Friday.”

Workers At Los Alamos Nuclear Lab Sue Over Vaccine Mandate (JTN)

Workers at a nuclear laboratory in New Mexico filed a lawsuit Thursday attempting to stop a vaccine mandate from taking effect. According to The Hill, more than 100 workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are alleging that the laboratory’s vaccine exemption policy is too strict and that their exemptions were wrongfully denied. The New Mexico laboratory is best known for creating the atomic bomb and is one of the largest employers within the state. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have some of the highest security clearances in the nation, and their jobs range from nuclear engineers to research technicians.


According to the Associated Press, the workers allege that the company that manages the lab, Triad National Security LLC., created a hostile work environment, as well as violated their constitutional rights by implementing a strict COVID-19 vaccine mandate. In an anecdote reported to The Hill, one worker claimed they were scolded publicly for not being vaccinated and told that his “family deserved to die.” According to the Associated Press, the management company says 96% of its workforce is vaccinated, while the plaintiffs claim this number is actually much lower. Workers at the lab face potential termination if they are unable to provide proof of vaccination by Friday.

Read more …

“..passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices..”

The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg (Fed.)

During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters. But this wasn’t traditional political spending. He funded a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally non-partisan — but demonstrably ideological — non-profit organizations. Analysis conducted by our team demonstrates this money significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states. This unprecedented merger of public election offices with private resources and personnel is an acute threat to our republic, and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward.

The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes. The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices, and it came with strings attached. Every CTCL and CEIR grant spelled out in great detail the conditions under which the grant money was to be used. This is not a matter of Democrats outspending Republicans. Private funding of election administration was virtually unknown in the American political system before the 2020 election.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, lobbying, or other expenses that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists, and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with Democratic voters. For instance, CTCL/CEIR funded self-described “vote navigators” in Wisconsin to “assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing … and witness absentee ballot signatures,” and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called “Happy Faces” counting the votes amidst the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia.

Read more …

“..training ex-military to be poll workers on Election Day..”

Blackwell: Republicans Should Have Poll Workers At Every Precinct In 2022 (JTN)

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is urging that all Republican candidates should follow the lead of GOP Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who is training ex-military to be poll workers on Election Day. Youngkin’s campaign is ensuring they have poll workers — not just observers — at every precinct for the the state’s gubernatorial election in November, Blackwell explained on the John Solomon Reports podcast Wednesday. With this strategy, “any attempt to hide in the dark corners of a process and snatch this election from the voters of Virginia will be stopped dead in its tracks,” said Ohio’s former top election official. “[S]afeguarding the integrity of our elections is paramount to preserving our republic,” he continued.


“And any attempts of individual cheaters, or any attempt by the federal government to concentrate control of our elections back in one party in Washington, D.C. must be resist[ed].” Blackwell added that Virginia is the first test case “to build a strong team on the field — you know, not sideline sitters, but folks who are on the frontline.” Blackwell was asked if the Republican Party should train poll workers, like Youngkin is doing with ex-military, and have them cover every precinct in America during the 2022 midterm elections. “I’m encouraging … that battle plan to be carried out in every state,” he replied. In a country of over 3,000 counties, there are hundreds of thousands of precincts, he noted. “[W]e cannot allow what happened in 2020 to happen again,” Blackwell stressed, when “we had tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of precincts left uncovered.”

Read more …

They’re sweating by now.

#EmptyShelvesJoe Hits Number 1 Trend On Twitter (PM)

On Wednesday afternoon, #EmptyShelvesJoe became the number one trending hashtag on Twitter in the US as the country experiences shortages stemming from a supply chain crisis. Despite President Joe Biden calling himself a “Supply Commander” during his run for president, the US has been hit hard with supply chain snarls. At one point, there were 62 boats backed up at the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles. In a Wednesday speech, Biden addressed the supply chain issues, saying he signed an executive order in February regarding the issue. Conditions have gradualy deteriorated since then.

“I know you’re hearing a lot about something called supply chains, and how hard it is to get a range of things from a toaster to sneakers to bicycles bedroom furniture. And that’s why, back in February. I signed a piece of legislation on supply chain — Executive Order on supply chains, and what we had to move on. And with the holidays coming up, you might be wondering if gifts you plan to buy will arrive on time,” said Biden. He continued: “Well, let me explain. Supply chains, essentially mean, how we make things, and how the material and parts get delivered to factory a factory, so we can manufacture things, and manufacturing here, how we move things, how a finished product moves from a factory to a store to your home.”

Biden assured residents in June that after a dismal jobs report, saying “There are going to be ups and down in jobs and economic reports, but there are going to be supply chain issues and price pressures on the way back to stability and steady growth.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether the issue would get better before it got worse, but she refused to make a prediction on the matter. “I’m not going to make a prediction of that from here. We know there are a number of issues that impact the supply chain and I don’t want to make a prediction because it’s not just one issue. Certainly, increasing the capacity at… ports and increasing the number of hours will have a positive impact, there’s no question about that,” said Psaki on Wednesday.

Read more …

“With these disclosures, we have accounts being used to pay both Hunter and Joe Biden..”

Joe Biden Could Get Drawn Into The FBI Probe Into His Son Hunter (Fox)

A report published Tuesday contends that President Joe Biden could get tied up in the ongoing FBI investigation into his son Hunter Biden’s finances due to the sharing of bank accounts and payment of each other’s bills. Emails obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show that his business partner, Eric Schwerin, was working on Joe Biden’s tax returns and discussing the father and son paying each other’s bills. Additionally, the emails show that Schwerin fielded book deal requests for Joe Biden, who was vice-president at the time, and also managed the donation of Biden’s Senate papers to the University of Delaware.

Hunter Biden has claimed that he and his father shared a bank account and admitted last year that he was under federal investigation over his taxes. Emails show that on April 9, 2010, Schwerin wrote to Hunter: “I was dealing all afternoon with JRB’s taxes (but solved a big issue – so it was all worth it).” On June 10 of the same year, Schwerin wrote, “Your Dad’s Delaware tax refund check came today. I am depositing it in his account and writing a check in that amount back to you since he owes it to you. Don’t think I need to run it by him, but if you want to go ahead. If not, I will deposit tomorrow.” It is unknown what specifically Joe Biden owed Hunter money for.

An expert on money laundering and criminal tax law told DailyMail.com that those entanglements could drag the current president into the FBI’s investigation. “Whatever transaction you’re looking at, if there’s a connection to a family member or a friend, sure the answer is yes [they would be investigated],” the expert, a former federal prosecutor who requested not to be named, told DailyMail.com. “Obviously, if you’re talking about the President of the United States, you’d better have a pretty damn good reason to talk to that person.”

[..] JONATHAN TURLEY: With these disclosures, we have accounts being used to pay both Hunter and Joe Biden and money being reimbursed to Hunter Biden from an individual associated with a company called Rosemont Seneca. Now that’s a company that has been tied to payments from China and Russia. And so this is getting more and more serious. The question is why the Justice Department hasn’t considered the appointment of a special counsel. We know there’s a criminal investigation into the tax issues, possible money laundering. But there are also serious questions about whether the Biden family conducted an extensive influence-peddling operation involving not just Hunter but his uncle and potentially the president of the United States.

Read more …

The pandemic cost us a lot of energy.

Americans’ Heating Bills To Soar Up To 50% This Winter (ZH)

So far, Americans have been watching the money-depleting energy crisis that hit Europe and Asia with detached bemusement: after all, while US energy prices are higher, they are nowhere near the hyperinflation observed in Europe. That is about to change because as the Energy Information Administration warned this week, much higher heating bills are coming this winter. According to the IEA’s October winter fuels outlook (pdf), nearly half of U.S. households that warm their homes with mainly natural gas can expect to spend an average of 30% more on their “multi-year high” bills compared with last year. The agency added that bills would be 50% higher if the winter is 10% colder than average and 22% higher if the winter is 10% warmer than average.


The forecast rise in costs, according to the report, will result in an average natural-gas home-heating bill of $746 from Oct. 1 to March 31, compared with about $573 during the same period last year. As the Epoch Times adds, propane costs are forecasted to rise by 54%, heating oil costs to rise by 43%, natural gas costs to rise by 30%, and electricity costs to rise by 6 percent. And with natural gas consumption projected to rise by 3% this winter, households are expected to spend $746 this winter, up from $573 last winter. The increase in natural gas heating costs varies by region with the Midwest U.S. leading the price hike at a 45% increase from last winter, and the Northeast expecting a hike of 14%.

Nearly half of all U.S. households use natural gas as the primary source of heating. Households relying on heating oil over winter will spend $1,734 over winter, relative to $1,212 last winter. Houses in Northeastern regions will be more affected by the price hike as nearly one in five homes in the region rely on heating oil as their primary source of space heating. The projection is based on the Brent crude oil price, which helps determine the prices of U.S. petroleum products. “The higher forecast Brent crude oil price this winter primarily reflects a decline in global oil inventories compared with last winter as a result of global oil demand that has risen amid restrained production levels from OPEC+ countries,” according to the EIA.


While most households commonly use electricity for heating, 41% rely on electric heat pumps or heaters as their primary source for space heating. These homes should expect to spend $1,268 this winter season, relative to $1196 last year. This projection accounts for 3 percent more residential electricity demand with more Americans working from home, a colder winter, as well as a rise in fuel costs for power generation. “During the first seven months of this year, the cost of natural gas delivered to U.S. electric generators averaged $4.97/MMBtu, which is more than double the average cost in 2020,” stated EIA.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug 172021
 


Pablo Picasso Family of Saltimbanques 1905

 

New Zealand To Enter Nationwide Lockdown After 1 Local Covid Case (Axios)
Uttar Pradesh Logs Lowest Ever Daily Covid Figure at 17 (N18)
NSW Police Fine 600 People On First Day Of Covid Crackdown Blitz (AAP)
Lockdowns Widen In China As Locals Doubt Official COVID-19 Data (ET)
Association of Vaccine Type and Prior SARS-CoV-2 Infection (JAMA)
Harvard Med Professor Censored For Contrarian Covid Posts (JTN)
Afghans Fleeing Taliban Need Negative PCR Test For Now-suspended Flights (RT)
Tsitsipas Refuses To Take Vaccine Unless It Becomes Mandatory On Tour (R.)
Afghan Abandonment A Lesson For Taiwan (Global Times)
Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Joe Biden (Ron Paul)
Afghanistan: We Never Learn (Taibbi)
When The Penny Drops It’s You And Your Portfolio On That Kabul Tarmac (Every)
Strange Days Ahead (Kunstler)

 

 

Biden condensed

 

 

The CIA gets a large part of its off the books funding from poppies.

The Taliban banned poppy growing. The CIA moved its poppy farms to Colombia. Over the past years, much has been moved back.

Afghanistan GDP is $20 billion; the UNODC estimated the country’s overall illicit opiate economy in 2017 at $6.6 billion.

Will the CIA make a deal with the Taliban this time?

 

 

Shut you entire country down for one case, after 20 months, and people call you a success story.

New Zealand To Enter Nationwide Lockdown After 1 Local Covid Case (Axios)

New Zealand will enter a snap nationwide lockdown at its highest level on Tuesday night after a 58-year-old man from Auckland tested positive for COVID-19, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced. This is the first coronavirus case detected in NZ’s community for 170 days and officials are concerned the man may have the highly contagious Delta variant. New Zealand has only experienced a level 4 nationwide lockdown once before. This is only the second lockdown for communities outside Auckland, NZ’s most populous city, since the pandemic began. Ardern noted at a news conference Tuesday that although it was unknown what strain of the virus the man had, most of the infections in managed hotel quarantine had the Delta variant.


The level 4 national lockdown will last for three days, from 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. Auckland and the Coromandel Peninsula, which the recently man visited, will likely experience this for seven days. New Zealand has largely contained COVID-19 cases to managed hotel quarantine facilities. Under alert level 4 restrictions, schools move to remote classes and non-essential businesses close — including food delivery services. Only essential travel is permitted, and water activities like swimming are banned. People must remain at home unless they’re exercising outdoors and locally and within their household “bubbles.” The country has paused vaccinations for the duration of the lockdown.

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This is the real success story.

Uttar Pradesh Logs Lowest Ever Daily Covid Figure at 17 (N18)

Uttar Pradesh on Monday witnessed the steepest decline in the number of fresh cases as the state limited the infections to just 17, making it the lowest ever daily-case count. Uttar Pradesh has restricted the daily-case count below 100 for over 5 weeks now. The downward trajectory of the virus has continued for the consecutive 14th week. In another significant achievement, the state registered a drop in the daily Covid test positivity rate (TPR) — the number of positive cases against the total tests done — to 0.01 percent. This rate was at its highest at 16.84 percent on April 24 and now remains even lower than the lowest post the first wave of Covid-19. The active caseload in the most populous state now stands at 419, from its peak at 3,10,783 cases on April 30.


On the contrary, sparsely populated states like Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu account for a heavy active caseload of 1,78,640, 64,219 and 20,458, respectively. In another major relief, none of the 75 districts reported fresh infections in double-digits, indicating signs that the pandemic is receding. Uttar Pradesh is rapidly moving towards being coronavirus-free as active and fresh cases in as many as 17 districts have declined to zero. In its bid to become self-reliant in terms of producing life-saving medication, as many as 317 of the 556 oxygen plants have already been established and are functional, while work on the remaining plants is going on in Uttar Pradesh.

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From inside the jail.

NSW Police Fine 600 People On First Day Of Covid Crackdown Blitz (AAP)

New South Wales police issued nearly 600 infringement notices to people flouting tough new health orders on the first day of a three-week crackdown designed to get the state’s escalating Covid crisis under control. The deputy commissioner, Mal Lanyon, said some people were still not complying even after a 5km travel rule came into effect for greater Sydney and the state reported a record 478 new local Covid-19 cases and eight deaths on Monday – the state’s worst day of the pandemic. “Yesterday we issued 579 infringement notices which is disappointing. It shows that people are still not complying. Thirty-four people received court attendant notices,” he told the Nine Network on Tuesday. Police also conducted 3,800 welfare checks to see if people were following stay-at-home orders.

Seven weeks of lockdown in Sydney (NSW)

One Covid-positive man from the hotspot of Fairfield in Sydney’s south-west wasn’t home when police arrived and was later unable to provide an excuse for his actions, Lanyon said. The entire state is now locked down and a 21-day police blitz came into effect on Monday to enforce new regulations, with almost 18,000 police officers supported by 800 members of the Australian defence force. Tougher noncompliance fines of up to $5,000 are in place with people in greater Sydney confined to within 5km of their homes. Police commissioner Mick Fuller warned that officers have been told to adopt “a no-nonsense approach” to people deliberately flouting laws.

OzStudents

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“All of us have been fully vaccinated (with two doses),” “All of us have been tested for COVID this week. And all of us have to take the second test tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,”

Lockdowns Widen In China As Locals Doubt Official COVID-19 Data (ET)

A spokesperson for the Chinese National Health Commission Mi Feng said at a press conference on Friday: “As of now, the diagnosed local [COVID-19] cases have risen for 19 consecutive days, and involved 16 provinces.” On Saturday and Sunday, the regime announced more infections but many people interviewed by the Chinese-language Epoch Times said they didn’t believe the numbers because of the regime’s past underreporting on COVID-19. The regime has reported relatively small-scale local outbreaks this year until July 20, when Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu Province announced airport workers were diagnosed with COVID-19. Since then, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, has spread to dozens of cities across the country.

In its counting of COVID-19 cases the Chinese regime doesn’t include infected people not showing obvious symptoms. The regime also claims that anyone found to have COVID-19 who travelled overseas in the past month must have contracted the CCP virus when they were out of China, and count them as imported cases. Local cases end up being those who haven’t visited other countries in the past months and have symptoms. In Zhengyang County in central Henan Province, the regime only announced one person diagnosed with COVID-19 in recent weeks, but have locked down residential compounds and villages. The regime even planned to test all residents in the county again on Friday, although it didn’t report any infections in a first round of tests carried out two days earlier.

As of around midday Monday local time, Zhengyang County government had only announced that it had found one case that tested positive on Aug. 9 and another that was counted as an individual showing symptoms on Thursday. However, the county has strictly controlled people’s movements. On Saturday, local residents in the county said lockdown measures meant they couldn’t leave home and many believed the real infection figure must be larger than what the authorities are admitting. “All of us have been fully vaccinated (with two doses),” Wang, a staff member of Zhengyang train station, said in a phone interview on Saturday. “All of us have been tested for COVID this week. And all of us have to take the second test tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” Wang said. “The outbreak is very severe here.”

The Zhengyang City government announced that no private or business vehicles were allowed on roads from Saturday. Only ambulances, garbage trucks, and other emergency vehicles were allowed to use the roads. A Zhengyang farmer told the Chinese-language Epoch Times on Saturday that even farmers aren’t allowed to leave their homes or work their fields. “If there’s only one infection [in Zhengyang], the regime shouldn’t be so nervous, and shouldn’t ask us to test at night. They said we will be tested again,” the farmer said. “They [the regime] don’t allow us to farm our lands, don’t allow us to visit the city, don’t allow us to visit our friends and relatives. All schools and after-school classes were closed,” she said.

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Berenson: “New @JAMA_current paper says @moderna_Tx caused 2.3x the number of “significant” symptoms compared to @pfizer in a sample of 950 people.


Moderna also produced more antibodies. Raising the question of what a third dose, which produces still MORE, will do.”

Association of Vaccine Type and Prior SARS-CoV-2 Infection (JAMA)

In June 2020, HWs in the Johns Hopkins Health System provided oral informed consent to participate in a longitudinal study of S1 spike antibodies in which serum samples and survey responses were collected every 3 to 4 months. Ethical approval was obtained from the Johns Hopkins University Institutional Review Board. The HWs who participated for a study visit between March 10 and April 8, 2021, were included in this analysis if their serum sample was collected 14 or more days after receiving dose 2 of either mRNA vaccine. Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (Euroimmun), IgG antibody measurements were determined based on optical density ratios with an upper threshold of 11 based on assay saturation.

Prior SARS-CoV-2 infection was defined as having (1) a positive SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction test result prior to 14 days after dose 2 or (2) S1 spike IgG measurement greater than 1.23 prior to vaccination.5 Participants self-reported symptoms following vaccination as none, mild (injection site pain, mild fatigue, headache), or clinically significant (fatigue, fever, chills). Logistic regression models were used to explore the association of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccine type with symptoms following each dose, adjusting for sex and age. A linear regression model was used to explore the association between magnitude of antibody response (log-transformed) and age, sex, prior infection, vaccine type, symptoms, and time after 2 doses of vaccine. Analyses were performed in R, version 4.0.2 (R Foundation).

Results
A questionnaire and serum sample were collected 14 or more days following dose 2 for 954 HWs. Clinically significant symptoms were reported by 52 of the 954 (5%) after dose 1 and 407 (43%) after dose 2. After adjusting for prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, age, and sex, the odds of clinically significant symptoms following either dose were higher among participants who received the Moderna vs the Pfizer vaccine (dose 1: odds ratio [OR], 1.83; 95% CI, 0.96-3.50; dose 2: OR, 2.43; 95% CI, 1.73-3.40) (Table). Prior SARS-CoV-2 exposure was associated with increased odds of clinically significant symptoms following dose 1 (OR, 4.38; 95% CI, 2.25-8.55) but not dose 2 (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.36-0.99), after controlling for vaccine type, age, and sex.

Regardless of symptoms, the vast majority of participants (953 of 954, greater than 99.9%) developed spike IgG antibodies 14 or more days following dose 2; 1 participant who was taking immunosuppressant medication did not develop IgG antibodies. Reporting clinically significant symptoms, age younger than 60 years, female sex, receipt of Moderna vaccine, and prior SARS-CoV-2 exposure were independently associated with higher median IgG measurements, after adjusting for time after dose 2.

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Kulldorff is next.

Harvard Med Professor Censored For Contrarian Covid Posts (JTN)

Martin Kulldorff started relying on LinkedIn to share news and views on COVID-19 policy after Twitter suspended the Harvard Medical School professor for a month for questioning the protective power of masks. Now the Microsoft-owned professional social network is scrutinizing his posts, going so far as to remove two for violating its misinformation policy. It’s at least the second action LinkedIn has taken this summer against a vaccine scientist who questioned COVID-19 orthodoxy. It suspended Robert Malone, who credits himself as the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, for alleging dangers from the “spike protein” in mRNA vaccines, citing heart-inflammation reports in some vaccinated young people and highlighting Big Tech censorship and conflicts of interest. A LinkedIn “senior executive” personally apologized to him for wrongful removal, Malone said.

Kulldorff made a similar cost-benefit argument against mandatory COVID vaccinations for young people in a June op-ed. He directed Twitter followers to find the op-ed on his LinkedIn page because “Twitter does not allow vaccine scientists to freely discuss vaccines.” Now he’s directing Linkedin followers to find him on Twitter, though the scientist confirmed to Just the News that he is concerned about further censorship there, “so I self-censor on Twitter.” One of Kulldorff’s Harvard Med colleagues spoke against LinkedIn for the censorship. “The point is not whether a minority viewpoint is right,” bioethics professor Jonathan Darrow, who cowrote a journal article with Kulldorff last year, wrote in an email. If such views are silenced, “public health options may be closed off prematurely, matters may be erroneously believed to be settled, and needed research may never be conducted.”


[..] COVID-19 orthodoxy has “unjustifiably tarnished” the reputations of scientists such as Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, “one of the most well-respected luminaries” in evidence-based medicine, Darrow said. Ioannidis lost that respect “because he publicly presented data about COVID’s infection fatality rate that were politically unpopular.” Censorship is also “communicable,” according to Darrow, “potentially tipping the scales of public judgment one way or the other and leading to a downward spiral of intolerance in which minority views are increasingly suppressed.”

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When one insanity meets the other.

Afghans Fleeing Taliban Need Negative PCR Test For Now-suspended Flights (RT)

The suspension of flights leaving Kabul has left countless civilians at the mercy of the Taliban. But even if flights resume, Afghans fleeing the country will still need to test negative for Covid, according to a baffling report. Soon after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital on Sunday, hundreds of civilians began to pour into Kabul’s international airport in hopes of being airlifted to safety. But by Monday morning, commercial airlines had halted operations in the Afghan capital due to gunfire around the air hub – caused at least in part by US soldiers firing warning shots at civilians gathering on the tarmac. But the suspension of regular outbound flights is just one of several hurdles facing Afghans seeking a one-way ticket out of the country: airlines operating in the Afghan capital ask for passengers to provide a negative coronavirus test.


The arguably ill-timed flight requirement was spotted at the end of an Atlantic article chronicling the frustrating story of an Afghan interpreter, Khan, and his family as they try to secure safe passage out of the country. “Today, Sunday, the Taliban are in Kabul… The neighborhood where Khan was renting a room has become dangerous, and he and his family have fled, walking six miles to another hiding place. He needs to find a facility that will administer the Covid-19 tests required by the airlines. He needs to get his family to the airport. He needs two more days,” reads the last paragraph of the article.

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Bubbles.

Tsitsipas Refuses To Take Vaccine Unless It Becomes Mandatory On Tour (R.)

World number three Stefanos Tsitsipas said he would only get the Covid-19 vaccine if it became mandatory to compete in tennis. While the men’s ATP Tour has publicly encouraged players to get vaccinated, the 23-year-old Greek is among those who still have reservations. “No one has told me anything. No one has made it a mandatory thing to be vaccinated,” he told reporters, when asked if he would seek a vaccine while competing in the US. “At some point I will have to, I’m pretty sure about it, but so far it hasn’t been mandatory to compete, so I haven’t done it, no,” added Tsitsipas, who received a first-round bye in the Masters 1000 tournament in Cincinnati.

He reached the French Open final in June but suffered a shock, first-round exit at Wimbledon, where he told reporters he found it challenging to live and compete in the Covid-19 “bubble.” The Covid-19 vaccine has divided opinion within tennis. World number one Novak Djokovic said in April he hoped the Covid-19 vaccine would not become mandatory for players to compete and has declined to answer questions regarding his own vaccination status. However, fellow 20-time Grand Slam winners Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal feel athletes need to play their part to get life back to some form of normality.


Federer said in May that he received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, while Nadal said: “The only way out of this nightmare is vaccination. Our responsibility as human beings is to accept it. “I know there is a percentage of people who will suffer from side effects, but the effects of the virus are worse.” Spectators will not be allowed to attend qualifying rounds at this month’s U.S. Open due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) said last week. The USTA previously said it would allow full fan capacity for the main part of the tournament.

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China knows.

Afghan Abandonment A Lesson For Taiwan (Global Times)

The geopolitical value of Afghanistan is no less than that of Taiwan island. Around Afghanistan, there are the US’ three biggest geopolitical rivals – China, Russia and Iran. In addition, Afghanistan is a bastion of anti-US ideology. The withdrawal of US troops from there is not because Afghanistan is unimportant. It’s because it has become too costly for Washington to have a presence in the country. Now the US wants to find a better way to use its resources to maintain its hegemony in the world. Taiwan is probably the US’ most cost-effective ally in East Asia. There is no US military presence on the island of Taiwan. The way the US maintains the alliance with Taiwan is simple: It sells arms to Taiwan while encouraging the DPP authorities to implement anti-mainland policies through political support and manipulation.

As a result, it has caused a certain degree of depletion between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits. And what Washington has to do is only to send warships and aircraft near the Straits from time to time. In general, the US does not have to spend a penny on Taiwan. Instead, it makes money through arms sales and forced pork and beef sales to the island. This is totally a profitable geopolitical deal for Washington. Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces, the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere. A military intervention of the US will be a move to change the status quo in the Taiwan Straits, and this will make Washington pay a huge price rather than earn profit.


Some people on the island of Taiwan hype that the island is different from Afghanistan, and that the US wouldn’t leave them alone. Indeed, the island is different from Afghanistan. But the difference is the deeper hopelessness of a US victory if it gets itself involved in a cross-Straits war. Such a war would mean unthinkable costs for the US, in front of which the so-called special importance of Taiwan is nothing but wishful thinking of the DPP authorities and secessionist forces on the island.

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“Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.”

Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Joe Biden (Ron Paul)

This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?

The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war? So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around. Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation.

There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along. The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke. The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

[..] Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.

Vet

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Well, we have to make some money, c’mon!

Afghanistan: We Never Learn (Taibbi)

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, when asked months ago about the possibility that there might be a “significant deterioration” of the security picture in Afghanistan once the United States withdrew its forces, said, “I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.” Blinken’s Nostradamus moment was somehow one-upped by that of his boss, Joe Biden, who on July 8th had the following exchange with press: “Q: Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse. BIDEN: That is not true, they did not reach that conclusion… There is going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy… The likelihood that you’re going to see the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

[..] The pattern is always the same. We go to places we’re not welcome, tell the public a confounding political problem can be solved militarily, and lie about our motives in occupying the country to boot. Then we pick a local civilian political authority to back that inevitably proves to be corrupt and repressive, increasing local antagonism toward the American presence. In response to those increasing levels of antagonism, we then ramp up our financial, political, and military commitment to the mission, which in turn heightens the level of resistance, leading to greater losses in lives and treasure. As the cycle worsens, the government systematically accelerates the lies to the public about our level of “progress.”

Throughout, we make false assurances of security that are believed by significant numbers of local civilians, guaranteeing they will later either become refugees or targets for retribution as collaborators. Meanwhile, financial incentives for contractors, along with political disincentives to admission of failure, prolong the mission. This all goes on for so long that the lies become institutionalized, believed not only by press contracted to deliver the propaganda (CBS’s David Martin this weekend saying with a straight face, “Everybody is surprised by the speed of this collapse” was typical), but even by the bureaucrats who concocted the deceptions in the first place.

The look of genuine shock on the face of Tony Blinken this weekend as he jousted with Jake Tapper about Biden’s comments from July should tell people around the world something important about the United States: in addition to all the other things about us that are dangerous, we lack self-knowledge. Even deep inside the machine of American power, where everyone paying even a modicum of attention over the last twenty years should have known Kabul would fall in a heartbeat, they still believe their own legends. Which means this will happen again, and probably sooner rather than later.

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“..if you don’t see this US policy debacle increases the risks of ‘red-line’ incidents in the Asia/Indo-Pacific, perhaps you should look for a desk job at the CIA.”

When The Penny Drops It’s You And Your Portfolio On That Kabul Tarmac (Every)

The US Beltway experts who six weeks ago said the Taliban could not establish an Islamic Emirate for at least a year, and then suddenly revised that down to six weeks, and then to 72 hours, still got it wrong: it happened on Sunday evening. The Afghan president has fled, along with his artificial $88bn “army”, but the actual weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban. Crowds of desperate Afghans are flooding the runway of Kabul airport –requisitioned by the US Army because it surrendered Bagram airbase without warning weeks ago, and the Taliban now control it– in scenes that look like Saigon in 1975. Or, tragically, like the Khmer Rouge entering Phnom Penh in ‘The Killing Fields’ (in Cambodia, a few years later); and there seems a very real risk the comparison won’t stop there.

Yes, markets will try to brush this geopolitical earthquake off: It’s just Afghanistan; It’s a long way away; We never wanted to go on holiday there anyway; They don’t even buy much cheese. There will probably be attempts to talk of a ‘New Taliban’, as we did with New Labour in the UK, brushing over the fact that the latter ‘New’ was vs. 1970’s socialism, and the former is vs. 7th century fundamentalism. Indeed, the Taliban seem to now realize which Western memes make it look more palatable, and are promising to be “inclusive”. They may only need to throw in “diverse”, “equity”, “green”, and “sustainability” for Wall Street to perk up and ask “Are you in favour of free trade and QE?”, and for EU foreign policy representatives to sit next to them.

But what to do? Michael Bloomberg has already penned an editorial that says “The US Can’t Walk Away From Afghanistan”, which is correct: the US *ran* away in the eyes of Afghans. He then Bloombergs that: “Words are easy. Solutions are hard,” and suggests the US continue to fund the Afghan government and army as long as viable (too late!), help people to flee (where?), and use airstrikes and special forces to keep terrorism at bay, which will involve “Cajoling neighbouring countries for intelligence support and basing rights.” (Neighbours like China; Turkmenistan; Tajikistan; Uzbekistan; Iran; and Pakistan.) Hey, words *are* easy! And solutions hard. Yet Bloomberg is right in that this geopolitical nightmare is almost certainly only just beginning.

As noted here on Friday, if you don’t see this US policy debacle increases the risks of ‘red-line’ incidents in the Asia/Indo-Pacific, perhaps you should look for a desk job at the CIA. The US now looks like it is flailing around like a social-media influencer discovering not just a micro-aggression, or that life contains people who don’t agree with you, but that there are people who aren’t even on Twitter that can punch you in the face and break your nose and teeth (and far, far worse). Geopolitically, opportunists of all stripes may now be considering if they may not be able to earn theirs, so to speak, by kicking the US while it is down. And yet the US is clearly swinging most of what is still the world’s most formidable military muscle squarely towards the Asia/Indo-Pacific region, and will almost certainly not want to be seen to ‘do a Kabul’ in that jurisdiction too. Or a Nord-Stream 2. Or an Iran.

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“Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!”

Strange Days Ahead (Kunstler)

Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse? Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness.

No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken! Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers — that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.


Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives — I’m sure you do, too — who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda — and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work?

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Jul 182021
 
 July 18, 2021  Posted by at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  83 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The blue room 1901

 

Infections in Vaccinated Overtake Those in Unvaccinated For the First Time (LDS)
British Ministers Decide Against Mass Vaccination For Teens (R.)
The CDC Owes Parents Better Messaging on the Vaccine for Kids (Wired)
Fauci: US Might ‘Still Have Polio’ If Media Back Then Opposed Vaccine (Y!)
Biden Denounces Big Tech as “Killing People” By Not Censoring Speech (Turley)
Sheriff In California Won’t Enforce Mask Mandate: ‘Not Backed By Science’ (RT)
Game Postponed After 6 New York Yankees Test Positive For Covid-19 (CNN)
Kamala’s Husband Spreads Misinformation (ZH)
US-Backed Tech Restores Internet To More Than 1 Million Cubans (ZH)
Does Japan Control The Trigger For US Nuclear War On China? (Ritter)

 

 

`

 

 

There is never a single source of truth. Other than in dictatorships.

 

 

 

 

At what point can this no longer be ignored?

Infections in Vaccinated Overtake Those in Unvaccinated For the First Time (LDS)

Health Secretary Sajid Javid has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, despite being vaccinated – and he is far from alone. The latest ZOE data shows that, as of July 12th, infections in the vaccinated (with at least one dose) in the U.K. now outnumber those in the unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the latter plummet (see above). (Note that 68% of the population has had at least one vaccine dose, so there are still at this stage disproportionately more new infections in the unvaccinated, though on current trends that may soon change.) At what point will the Government accept that these vaccines have limited efficacy in preventing infection and transmission, and thus the whole rationale of being vaccinated to protect others – vaccine passports, compulsory vaccination, and so on – is suspect?

The above graph was in yesterday’s report, so I downloaded today’s report (you can get it by signing up to the app and reporting your symptoms) to get the new update. I was dismayed to find the graph was gone. At the bottom, a note explains: Removed incidence graph by vaccination status from the report as there are very few unvaccinated users in the infection survey, the Confidence Intervals are very wide and the trend for unvaccinated people is no longer representative. Which I would say is very convenient, just as infections in the vaccinated became the majority. Perhaps ZOE should try to recruit some more unvaccinated people for its survey, so it can continue to report on this as well as have a control group for its vaccine data? That would seem the scientific thing to do, rather than just stop reporting it because it is suddenly “no longer representative”.

It’s doubly odd because Tim Spector, lead scientist on the ZOE app, made the decline among the unvaccinated a feature of his video this week. So the realisation that the trend is “no longer representative” appears to have been rather sudden, even invalidating the contents of a ZOE ‘data release‘ two days earlier.

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Rare light.

British Ministers Decide Against Mass Vaccination For Teens (R.)

Britain has opted against mass COVID-19 vaccinations for all children and teenagers, with ministers instead preparing to offer doses to vulnerable 12 to 15-year-olds and those about to turn 18, the Telegraph newspaper reported late on Saturday. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is believed to have advised ministers against the rollout of vaccines to all children until further evidence on the risks is available, the report added. Under guidance the newspaper said are due to be issued on Monday, vaccine doses will be offered to children between 12 and 15 who are deemed vulnerable to COVID-19 or who live with adults who are immunosuppressed or otherwise vulnerable to the virus.


They will also now be offered to all 17-year-olds within three months of their 18th birthday, according to The Telegraph, which reported that the committee would keep the possibility of vaccinating all children “under review.” In response to the report, Britain’s Health Department said that “no decisions have been made by ministers on whether people aged 12 to 17 should be routinely offered COVID-19 vaccines.” Britain on Saturday reported 54,674 new COVID-19 cases, a rise on the 51,870 new cases reported on the previous day to post a fresh highest daily total in six months.

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Yeah: Don’t!

The CDC Owes Parents Better Messaging on the Vaccine for Kids (Wired)

On June 23, an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met to discuss, among other topics, vaccine-related cases of myocarditis, which have hospitalized hundreds of adolescents. Evidence of a correlation between the condition, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and the vaccines had been mounting for months. Numerous countries had altered or withheld recommendations for pediatric vaccination, with some citing an ambiguous risk-benefit. One day after the committee meeting, however, CDC director Rochelle Walensky went on TV and calmly reassured viewers that there was nothing to worry about: Vaccinating kids age 12 and up, at the full dosage and same schedule as adults, should continue with alacrity.

Walensky cited a string of statistics that showed “the benefits of vaccination far outweigh any harm.” But some epidemiologists, public health experts, pediatricians, cardiologists, and other scientists dispute the CDC’s numbers, characterizations, and conclusion. The agency, they variously contend, is both exaggerating the risks of Covid-19 to young people and underplaying the potential risks of the vaccine to them. Much data that would support the CDC’s declarations are either unknown, unrevealed, or far messier than the agency and its director portray. And the data that are known and clear have been projected through a specific lens with blunt certainty. The absolute risk of the vaccine still appears to be extremely small for young people but, on balance, when the data are seen through a different frame, the relative individual risk from vaccination, particularly for healthy young males, may be higher than it is to not be vaccinated at this time.

There is no debate among most experts critical of the CDC about the value of vaccines on a societal level to help usher in the end of the pandemic, which is the ultimate goal of the vaccine. Rather, the matter at hand is the CDC’s messaging, which fails to help parents and children make properly informed decisions about the vaccines on an individual level. As Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and physician at Johns Hopkins, recently tweeted, “One can be both very pro-Covid-19 vaccination and also be worried about the individual risk:benefit profile of Covid-19 vaccines in <16 yo.”

First, the link between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, particularly in young males, is sufficiently clear that the FDA revised its vaccine fact sheets to include a warning about it. As of June 11 (the latest date most data were collected for the meeting), 128 cases within seven days of the second dose had been reported in boys aged 12 to 17, when the CDC’s expected number for that same population was zero to four cases. VAERS, the reporting database for vaccine-related adverse events that these statistics are drawn from, has limitations. Some portion of the events reported may be unrelated to the vaccines. But the differential between expected and observed cases within certain cohorts is the statistical equivalent of a blaring siren. (A detailed analysis in Israel estimated the incidence of myocarditis following vaccination in young males to be around one in 5,000, equating to 200 cases per million.)

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It took Salk 7 years to get a real vaccine, which you still don’t have, and maybe never will. Nuff said. How did this crazed loose cannon become the most trusted voice, and what does that tell us about America?

Fauci: US Might ‘Still Have Polio’ If Media Back Then Opposed Vaccine (Y!)

Top US scientist Anthony Fauci on Saturday blasted commentators who sound an anti-vaccination theme, saying America might still be battling smallpox and polio if today’s kind of misinformation existed back then. The comments from the country’s leading infectious disease expert reflected mounting frustration over the sharp slowdown in the Covid-19 vaccination rate in the United States, even as the disease has been surging in states with low rates. It also came days after President Joe Biden expressed his own visible frustration, saying social media that carry widely heard misinformation about vaccines are “killing people.”


Fauci was responding to a CNN interviewer who asked if he thought “we could have defeated the measles or eradicated polio if you had Fox News, night after night, warning people about these vaccine issues that are just bunk.” Fauci said: “We probably would still have smallpox and we probably would still have polio … if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread.” Initial vaccine skepticism in many areas has increasingly evolved into outright hostility, a message magnified by baseless conspiracy theories regularly aired on Fox and other conservative networks. “Maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that,” Tucker Carlson, one of Fox’s most popular commentators, said recently.

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“Biden is accusing these companies of actually killing people for refusing even more extensive censorship of speech. The statement equates free speech with death itself.”

Biden Denounces Big Tech as “Killing People” By Not Censoring Speech (Turley)

President Joe Biden slammed Big Tech companies this week for “killing people” by failing to engage in even greater censorship of free speech on issues related to the pandemic. It was a surprising condemnation of companies who have been loyal allies of Biden, including killing stories embarrassing to his family like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before the election. It also has censored stories questioning his victory in 2020. Nevertheless, Biden denounced the range of uncensored free speech as the cause of death for many — the ultimate anti-free speech trope for those seeking to convince people to embrace their own censorship. Biden was asked by a reporter what his message was to “platforms like Facebook” on the subject of “COVID misinformation.”

He responded “They’re killing people. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they’re killing people.” This comes as these companies have been criticized for censoring debates over the origin or treatment of Covid-19. For a year, Big Tech has been censoring those who wanted to discuss the origins of pandemic. It was not until Biden admitted that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab that social media suddenly changed its position. Facebook only recently announced that people on its platform will be able to discuss the origins of Covid-19 after censoring any such discussion. The White House recently admitted that it was flagging “misinformation” for censorship by companies like Facebook. Moreover, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has called for people to be banned from all social media if any one company bans them.

Biden is accusing these companies of actually killing people for refusing even more extensive censorship of speech. The statement equates free speech with death itself. We have seen this type of reckless rhetoric in other areas where disagreement with a policy or proposal is treated as de facto racism or hate speech. That was the case recently with the NAACP official who denounced those of opposing what is commonly referred to as critical race theory lessons as haters of a long litany of groups from the disabled to children to “help people.” This was followed by the chilling words “Let them die.”

Rather than seek to convince the skeptical, Biden wants to silence them and use these companies to control what is read and discussed about the pandemic. What is chilling is the degree to which reporters and academics have supported the massive censorship system in the United States. However, that system is clearly not (to use Sen. Blumenthal’s words) “robust enough” for Biden who wants these companies to carry out a more complete censorship of opposing views.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH about censorship

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A sheriff who can read. They didn’t count on that. How much did John Wayne ever read when he played one?

Sheriff In California Won’t Enforce Mask Mandate: ‘Not Backed By Science’ (RT)

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has made waves and caused outrage by refusing to enforce the city’s reinstated mask policy, saying the decision is “not backed by science.” Los Angeles County health officials shocked many this week when they announced that their mask mandate would be returning. Similar to the restriction in place before the county began reopening last month, residents have been told to wear masks in indoor settings and large gatherings, regardless of one’s vaccination status. County officials reinstated the mask mandate due to new Covid-19 daily cases reaching over 1,000 every day for a week. Health officials also cited the Delta variant as a reason why people “need to reduce our risk of infection and our risk for potentially infecting others.”


Villanueva, who is up for reelection next year, was quick to respond to the mandate, and made it clear that he and his officers would have no part in helping the county enforce the new rule. “Forcing the vaccinated and those who already contracted COVID-19 to wear masks indoors is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines,” he said in a statement. The “underfunded” department, the sheriff added, will not be using their “limited resources” to make sure people are in compliance, though he made sure to say they “have the authority” to enforce if they wanted to. The sheriff is asking for “voluntary compliance” from residents instead.

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All fully vaccinated.

Game Postponed After 6 New York Yankees Test Positive For Covid-19 (CNN)

Six players on the New York Yankees have tested positive for Covid-19, general manager Brian Cashman told reporters Thursday, in the second instance this year of breakthrough cases occurring among some members of the baseball team. “We have three positives, and we have three pending that we’ve had rapid tests on,” Cashman said, saying the three positive rapid tests are being confirmed with additional lab work. The players with confirmed positive tests are pitchers Jonathan Loaisiga, Nestor Cortes Jr. and Wandy Peralta, according to the team. The three unnamed players have results pending.


The three named players were all vaccinated, according to the team. Two of the players received Johnson & Johnson vaccines and the other was from either Pfizer or Moderna, Cashman says. The pitchers are “doing well thus far,” Cashman said, while he declined to comment on the unnamed players until final confirmation of their positive tests are received by the team. Earlier this season, eight positive tests were recorded among coaching and travel staff, all of whom had previously taken the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Of the team members who tested positive, only one showed mild symptoms and his condition improved, the Yankees said.

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He’s as crazy as she is.

Kamala’s Husband Spreads Misinformation (ZH)

Emhoff spoke to the 44-year-old man as if he was a toddler at the doctor’s office. “Don’t be nervous. It won’t hurt. I’ve had it. I can take it. So don’t be scared,” Emhoff told Posadas. The immigrant then stood off to the side while Emhoff shook hands with doctors and medical staff from Ochsner Health. After posing for photos, Emhoff turns back to Posadas. “Gustava, thank you so much. Muy importante,” Emhoff said in English-accented Spanish. “What do you have to say to people? And you’re going to tell a bunch of people…?” “I tell everybody,” Posadas said in Spanish-accented English. “I don’t want this before. But now I think this is real…” “This is real,” Emhoff says, completing his sentence. “And it’s the only thing that is going to prevent you, your family and others from dying or getting really sick.”

Say what? A vaccine is the only thing that is going to prevent people from dying from COVID? Is this what the Biden administration’s door knockers are telling people in private? The recovery rate for COVID is 98 to 99 percent. Almost all the deaths are due to age or underlying conditions. Johns Hopkins currently has the rate at 98.2 percent in America. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before Congress that the survival rate is actually 99 percent because asymptomatic cases are under counted. Emhoff seemingly doesn’t care to give the facts to Posadas and put the success of the media stunt at risk. “I’m so grateful you’re doing this in front of the cameras so you can tell everyone it’s okay,” said Emhoff. Posadas nods his head. “Everything – my people – I thinks, we want the shot. This is real. I not believe you before, but I feel it now.”

No reporter asks questions. But the obvious one is: How long ago did Posadas not “believe” Emhoff? Who convinced him to take the vaccine? What was told to him in English or Spanish? Emhoff wastes no time with Posadas’s hesitancy. “Well let’s do it!” said the Second Gentleman while the medical staff and clergy applaud. Posadas is put in a white, folding chair. He keeps on the mirrored sunglasses. A woman in scrubs tells him to pull the mask over his nose. He rolls up his sleeve as the woman comes in with the needle. Posadas looks in the opposite direction. “Look at me! Look at me!” Emhoff tells him, while the shot is administered. The crowd applauds. Emhoff holds out his fist, and Posadas bumps him after he stands.

“Thank you for doing this,” Emhoff says, while Posadas rubs his arm and says something in Spanish. “Thank you for telling everyone to do this.” Emhoff walks away to do media interviews while a woman is heard off camera saying, “Gustava, did you get your card with your vaccination on it?” The Second Gentleman tells reporters that, “On the Covid piece, on the vaccinations, I’m not going to stop. This administration is not going to stop until we continue to get the word out here.” Emhoff continues but seems to not remember Posadas’s name. “You heard what he said – it’s real. He didn’t believe it. He believes it now….” Harris’s husband does a hard sell of the vaccines and adds, “We’re going to go door to door, bring the vaccines out to the people until we get this done.”

Biden/Kamala vaccines

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Ha ha ha! Think they installed a “misinformation” filter?

US-Backed Tech Restores Internet To More Than 1 Million Cubans (ZH)

With summer uprisings in Cuba, the communist government has discovered ways to cut the internet off to millions of residents, so organized protesting on social media is near impossible. Let’s take a step back to early last week when reports of the Cuban regime used China-made technology systems to block internet and cell phone service to prevent pictures and videos of what was happening on the ground published online near impossible for the outside world to see. The regime also blocked popular social media channels that would make organized protesting impossible. Remember, a decade ago, during Arab Spring, Facebook and Twitter were critical for organizers to orchestrate uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain.

The Biden administration is finding ways to provide anti-censorship tools to Cubans to access social media during the blackouts. According to Bloomberg, the U.S. government supports a censorship circumvention tool designed to unblock content in Cuba and is powered by a company called Psiphon Inc. As of Thursday, Psiphon tweeted, “1.389 Million daily unique users accessed the open web from Cuba through the Psiphon network. Internet is ON; circumvention tools ARE working.” Psiphon uses proxy servers that disguise internet traffic so Cuban authorities cannot tell if people are accessing social media platforms. The Toronto-based nonprofit has received money from the U.S. government. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted Saturday that the proxy service is working well:

The Biden administration has been strategizing on other ways to provide the people of Cuba with internet access. “They have cut off access to the internet. We are considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access,” President Biden said on Friday. Biden commented after Florida Governor Ron Desantis told the president the federal government should restore internet on the island located in the northern Caribbean Sea. Desantis said there’s a technology that would allow the U.S. to broadcast internet access into Cuba remotely. “Technology exists to provide Internet access into Cuba remotely, using the innovation of American enterprise and the diverse industries here,” the governor wrote. He said this reminds him of the Cold War when the U.S. funded radio stations to broadcast information into the Soviet Union.

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A bunch of tiny islands and a dispute that no-one ever bothered to resolve. But now if the US wants to stand with Japan, it must stand against Taiwan. And the Chinese are thinking: let’s have that fun.

Does Japan Control The Trigger For US Nuclear War On China? (Ritter)

Statements made by Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister about his country’s need to defend Taiwan have raised the specter of a “Japan exception” to China’s no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons. In April this year, Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide became the first foreign leader to visit the White House after the swearing in of Joe Biden as America’s 46th President. After private discussions, Yoshihide and Biden issued a joint statement entitled “US-Japan Global Partnership for a New Era.” What made it stand out from similar joint releases over the past decades of US-Japanese relations was the fact that, for the first time in over 50 years, the Japanese and American leaders made mention of Taiwan, declaring “we underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.”

While the statement was, on the surface, rather innocuous, the Chinese Embassy in the US immediately reacted, declaring Beijing’s resolute opposition to what it deemed to be interference in China’s internal affairs, and noting that the talks had gone beyond the scope of normal bilateral relations, harming third-party interests and threatening peace and stability in the region. While most observers might think the Chinese objection was centered on its long-standing claim on Taiwan proper, the trigger point was, more likely, the specific reference made in the statement to a tiny cluster of uninhabited rocky islands situated some 170 kilometers (105 miles) north of Taiwan and around 400 kilometers (248 miles) due west of Okinawa.

These islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands and in China as the Diaoyu Dao Islands, are located not only in rich fishing waters, but also on top of economically viable underwater oil and gas deposits. While their ownership is a matter of ongoing legal dispute, with China viewing them as constituting part of Taiwan, and Japan as part of the Okinawa prefecture, at the present time the islands are administered by Japan. The US-Japanese joint statement reiterated Washington’s “unwavering support for Japan’s defense under the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.” It then went on to reaffirm “the fact that Article V of the Treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands,” adding that both the US and Japan “oppose any unilateral action that seeks to undermine Japan’s administration of the Senkaku Islands.”

Left to its own devices, the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Dao Islands should have remained low-key. But on July 6, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister, Taro Aso, reportedly stated that “If a major problem took place in Taiwan, it would not be too much to say that it could relate to a survival-threatening situation [for Japan],” citing language which specifically triggers Japan’s Constitutionally-mandated right of collective self-defense, where it would be permitted to deploy its armed forces in support of an ally who had been attacked. A “survival-threatening situation” occurs when an armed attack against a foreign country allied with Japan poses a clear risk of threatening Japan’s survival.

“We need to think hard that Okinawa could be the next,” Aso was quoted as saying, indicating the specific nature of the “survival-threatening situation” he spoke of. While China has never expressed any territorial interest in either Okinawa or the other populated islands contained in the Okinawa prefecture, the fact that Japan views the Senkaku Islands as part of Okinawa, and China views the Diaoyu Dao Islands as part of Taiwan, means that any Chinese move on Taiwan would, as a matter of course, include asserting its claim over the disputed islands. This, in turn, would trigger Article V of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation, which is backed by the nuclear arsenal of the United States.

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