Nov 062023
 
 November 6, 2023  Posted by at 10:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  52 Responses »


Max Ernst Santa Conversazione 1921

 

‘America Is Waging The War In Gaza’: Hassan Nasrallah (Cradle)
Iran Defense Minister: ‘Serious Strike’ On US If Gaza War Continues (Sp.)
Why Israel is Losing Opportunity to Beat Hamas – Scott Ritter (Sp.)
Nuking Gaza is a Possibility – Israeli Minister (RT)
Western Leaders Know Ukrainians Steal Their Money – Kremlin (RT)
Proxy War in Ukraine Exposed NATO’s ‘Failed’ New Warfare Tactics (Sp.)
Why West is Terrified of Transferring Seized Russian Assets to Ukraine (Sp.)
The New Electric War Campaign (Helmer)
Europe in the Crossfire: Can All Crises Be Managed Simultaneously? (Oncan)
Does Any Member of the US Government Represent Americans? (Paul Craig Roberts)
Connecticut Judge Orders New Bridgeport Mayoral Primary (NYP)
Election Fraud Cases Break Out In 3 Democrat States (JTN)
Trump Leads Biden In 5 Battleground States In New York Times Poll (JTN)
Two Men Who Exposed the Bidens’ Corruption in Ukraine (21CW)

 

 

 

 

QueenRania

 

 

Finkelstein

 

 

 

 

As the US makes sure we blame Bibi, Hezbollah knows who’s behind the curtain..

‘America Is Waging The War In Gaza’: Hassan Nasrallah (Cradle)

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah delivered his first speech since the start of the Gaza-Israel war, in which he blamed the US government for the conflict in the occupied Palestinian territories. “Washington is entirely responsible for the war in Gaza, while Israel is merely a tool. The US is preventing the condemnation of Israel at the UN Security Council and a ceasefire in Gaza,” Nasrallah said on 3 November. The Lebanese resistance leader declared “Hezbollah is not intimidated” by the deployment of nearly a dozen US warships to the Eastern Mediterranean. “Your fleets do not scare us, nor have they ever, and we are all set for them,” Nasrallah stressed. sHe then addressed US planners directly, telling them: “You can stop the aggression against Gaza because this is something you unleashed. Whoever wants to prevent a regional war must hasten to stop this aggression.”

“What’s happening now in Gaza is not a usual war; it is not like wars before. This is a decisive conflict,” the Hezbollah leader added. He also highlighted that Hezbollah “has been escalating its operations day by day and forcing Israel to keep its forces near the Lebanese border instead of Gaza or the occupied West Bank.” “What is happening on our front is extremely important and influential, but it will not remain restricted for too long […] All options on the Lebanese front are open. All choices are on the table, and we may decide at any moment,” the resistance leader warned. On Thursday, Hezbollah launched the biggest attack on Israel since the end of the 2006 war. Nearly 60 Hezbollah fighters have died since the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in Gaza.

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Iran knows it too..

Iran Defense Minister: ‘Serious Strike’ On US If Gaza War Continues (Sp.)

Iranian Defense Minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani on Sunday threatened to conduct a “serious strike” against the United States if it does not put an end to the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip. “Our advice to the Americans is to stop the war immediately between Israel and Palestine and ensure a ceasefire, or else the US will face a serious strike,” the brigadier general was quoted as saying by Iranian news agency Tasnim. On October 7, Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise large-scale rocket attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip and breached the border, killing and abducting people in neighboring Israeli communities.

Israel launched retaliatory strikes and ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to more than 2 million people, cutting off supplies of water, food, and fuel. On October 27, Israel launched a large-scale ground incursion inside the Gaza Strip to eliminate Hamas fighters and rescue the hostages. The escalation of the conflict has resulted in the deaths of around 1,400 people in Israel and over 9,000 in the Gaza Strip and raised the risk of a wider regional conflagration due to concerns about Iran or Lebanese militant group Hezbollah joining the fray.

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“They’re also kids of a nation that is averse to casualties. They don’t want their boys and girls coming home in body bags..”

Why Israel is Losing Opportunity to Beat Hamas – Scott Ritter (Sp.)

If the Israeli military hope to defeat Hamas in Gaza, they need to get all the way down to the underground tunnels, veteran former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, and UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter tells Sputnik. But Israel doesn’t want to do that, because “they want war on the cheap,” the geopolitical observer emphasized. “They’re fighting above ground. They’re doing limited tunnel operations. But they’re not succeeding in defeating Hamas. To defeat Hamas, you’ve got to go all the way underground, and you’ve got to shut down the entire tunnel network.” Scott Ritter reiterated that all Israel was doing at present was “destroying the existing infrastructure” amid the soaring civilian death toll,” adding. “The idea still resides that eventually the tunnels would be rebuilt, Hamas will be regrown and Israel will never defeat this ‘idea of resistance’.”

[..] On Sunday, the IDF also said that the Israeli army had gained access to Hamas underground tunnels in the north of the Gaza Strip. Throughout the past weeks, scenes from the bombardment-ravaged Gaza Strip, where Israel had ordered a complete blockade, cutting off supplies of water, food, and fuel, have prompted thousands of protesters to take to the streets of various cities, including the US capital, Washington, DC, to protest against Israeli military activities in the enclave. However, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as he met with Middle Eastern leaders in Jordan, again rejected calls for a ceasefire. Washington has been voicing its support for “humanitarian pauses”. Looking back at the initial Hamas incursion in October, and the way the militant group was able to breach the so-called ‘iron wall’, with its ‘smart technology’, Scott Ritter explained that the myth of the “infallibility of Israeli intelligence” has been busted.

Over the years, the Israeli Defense Force “has been propped up” by American technology, said the pundit. “One of our main goals and objectives in supporting Israel is to ensure that Israel sustains technological supremacy over any potential enemy. That’s why we give them the most advanced American weapons, etc… But the IDF itself – outside of, for instance, the pilots, some senior officers and senior NCOs – the vast majority of the defense force is a conscript military,” clarified Ritter. He went on to explain that this meant that the battalions operating at present in Gaza are composed of “18, 19, 20-year-old kids with no meaningful experience whatsoever.” “They’re also kids of a nation that is averse to casualties. They don’t want their boys and girls coming home in body bags,” said Ritter.

According to the Sputnik contributor, the IDF does a lot of “posturing”, using “stand-off strikes” and hiding “behind their technology”. “However, the IDF, when you tangle with them… What you find out is they can’t win. They didn’t beat Hezbollah in 2006. They didn’t beat Hamas in 2014. They’re not beating Hamas now because you can’t win a major conflict with a conscript-based military when you’re not willing to let these people die … But, you know, if you’re going to kill 50,000 Hamas fighters, understand you need to be prepared to lose 20,000 Israelis,” said Ritter. In his opinion, the IDF is “no longer seen as invincible”, but rather “incompetent” and even “weak”. “And this is bad for Israel because it’s a small country. And one of the best tools it had to hold off the forces that are arrayed against it is the mythology of the invincibility of the IDF, and the infallibility of Israeli intelligence. Both those myths have been shattered,” the ex-UN weapons inspector and WMD whistleblower insisted.

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Bibi can suspend him, but this sentiment is not limited to him..

Nuking Gaza is a Possibility – Israeli Minister (RT)

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has suggested that his country could launch a nuclear strike on Gaza. The controversial remarks caused outrage across the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspending Eliyahu indefinitely. In a Sunday interview with Radio Kol Berama, when asked if Israel could drop an atomic bomb on the Palestinian enclave, the minister, who is a member of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, replied that “this is one of the possibilities.” Eliyahu also spoke out against helping inhabitants of the enclave, which has been under Israeli siege for several weeks now, arguing that “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid,” and that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.” Shortly after the controversial remarks, Netanyahu announced that the minister had been suspended from all government meetings.

Writing on X (formerly Twitter), his office quoted him as saying that “Eliyahu’s statements are not based in reality,” adding that Israel is “operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant condemned what he called Eliyahu’s “baseless and irresponsible words,” adding in a post on X that “it’s good that these are not the people in charge of Israel’s security.” Those remarks were echoed by opposition leader Yair Lapid, who called Eliyahu an “extremist” and pointed out that his statement “caused harm to the families of the hostages, Israeli society, and our international standing,” urging Netanyahu to fire the minister.

The minister’s remarks also did not go unnoticed by Hamas, which launched a surprise attack on Israel last month. It stated that the comments are an “expression of the occupiers’ Nazism and [their] genocide practices,” which came after Israel’s “military failure in the face of the [Palestinian] resistance”. Meanwhile, Eliyahu attempted to control the damage, insisting that “it’s clear to anyone with a brain that the remark about the atom was metaphorical.” He maintained, however, that Israel “must display a forceful and disproportional response to terror,” adding that this approach will show “the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism isn’t worthwhile.” Israel has never publicly confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons. However, it is widely believed to have possessed such arms since the late 1960s. According to a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimate, the nation has a total of 90 warheads.

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“Even such extremely powerful economies as the United States can’t do this indefinitely. They have a lot of problems of their own…”

Western Leaders Know Ukrainians Steal Their Money – Kremlin (RT)

Western countries have come to realize that Ukrainian officials are using the funds they receive from their supporters to line their own pockets, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has said. In an interview with Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin released on Sunday, Peskov claimed that Western leaders “understand that a certain part of the money they give to Ukraine is, simply put, stolen,” adding that this reality is recognized by US policymakers at various levels. According to Peskov, when confronted with rampant corruption in Ukraine, American lawmakers “have to explain to their constituents why there is no proper mechanism [to oversee] the fund disbursement [and] why they turn a blind eye to this” while debating further aid packages.

He went on to add that both the US and Kiev’s backers in Europe are “getting tired of the Ukrainian topic, the Kiev regime, and the burden that they have put on their shoulders,” referring to the massive military and financial assistance Ukraine receives from the West. “Even such extremely powerful economies as the United States can’t do this indefinitely. They have a lot of problems of their own… At some point, all this will become an excessive burden that they can no longer bear,” he stressed. Peskov’s comments come after Politico reported in early October that the administration of US President Joe Biden was “far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit.” A sensitive document cited by the magazine stressed that the widespread graft in Ukraine could force Western allies to abandon Kiev in its fight with Russia.

The Politico article was echoed by a CNN report, which was released around the same time, alleging that US officials were pushing Kiev to do more to fight corruption, with a State Department diplomatic note compiled this summer linking anti-graft efforts to continued direct budget support. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s request for Congress to approve a new security package, which included more than $60 billion for Ukraine, met with strong opposition from the Republicans. Some GOP lawmakers called on the president for more accountability and to clarify what he thinks the endgame in the conflict would look like.

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“..NATO doctrine put into practice in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine clashed with the demands of the times.”

Proxy War in Ukraine Exposed NATO’s ‘Failed’ New Warfare Tactics (Sp.)

The Kiev regime has been sending its troops against Russian defenses, racking up massive human losses while failing to turn the tide of its botched counteroffensive, despite massive shipments of NATO weaponry. Furthermore, Russia’s state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been used en masse to target Ukrainian military equipment. The Ukraine conflict has not only compellingly shown that modern-day warfare has changed, but has also exposed the complete failure of NATO war tactics in the face of these new conditions, reported military-focused US publication 19FortyFive. NATO patrons of the Kiev regime have been increasingly exasperated over how Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed to deliver results, despite the billions’ worth of weapons continuously sent there.

Both Western supporters of Kiev and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky have been egging on Ukrainian troops towards “massive assaults” that “have become suicidal,” the publication stated. But the “fast, large-scale blitzkrieg they envisioned” remained a figment of their imagination. One of the reasons for this is that the advance of drone technology has transformed warfare into a “war of a thousand cuts,” the outlet said. The colorful reference relates to Lingchi, a form of capital punishment that results in a slow, lingering death. Traced back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), it was meted out to offenders in Asian countries like China, Vietnam, and Korea. The practice is believed to have ended around the early 1900s. Current warfare is similarly “more gradual,” the report insisted. It drew attention to how NATO doctrine put into practice in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine clashed with the demands of the times.

Furthermore, Ukrainian troops’ training by NATO failed to “cover the reality of modern drone warfare,” the outlet stated, referencing US Army veterans’ expert opinions. Thus, the alliance’s “offensives based on combined arms maneuver,” such as tanks and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) breaching defense lines, supported by an array of artillery and air power, failed to work for Ukraine, as per the columnist. Ukrainian attempts at assaults utilizing large armored units resulted in heavy losses. Such attacks, where success hinges on a superlative level of coordination, is a feat that NATO armies “spend years” honing, it was added. However, in Ukraine’s Armed Forces, staffed with mostly recently mobilized civilians, such attacks become what pundits call a “meat grinder.” Furthermore, throwing such troops at Russia’s superlative defense lines, with vast minefields, anti-tank ditches, and anti-tank pyramid-shaped concrete defense obstacles, known as “dragon’s teeth,” is futile – something that Russia has been proving repeatedly throughout its special military operation.

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“..this could destabilize the global financial system and in particular diminish the dollar’s and the euro’s captive investors among central bank reserve managers.”

Why West is Terrified of Transferring Seized Russian Assets to Ukraine (Sp.)

The political battle for Russian state assets trapped abroad continues to intensify. Last week, European Union leaders approved in principle a controversial measure allowing the bloc to skim profits from Russian assets for use in “Ukraine reconstruction,” and called on the European Commission to “accelerate work with a view to submitting proposals” in this direction. Across the Atlantic, US officials have similarly stepped up efforts to try to make use of the seized Russian assets, although these efforts have so far stuck to behind-the-scenes negotiations in the corridors of power occasionally reported on by the media. The discussions about legal justifications to seize the Russian funds outright or at least skim interest comes at a difficult time for the Ukrainian proxy war’s sponsors, with Western lawmakers with the power to dole out extra money for Kiev and the public at large turning their focus to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis.

The reevaluation of priorities could not have come at a worse time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government’s dependence on Western handouts has reached dangerous proportions. Actually seizing Russia’s frozen assets and handing them over to Ukraine is easier said than done, with more than 20 months of threats and talking on the matter yet to bear fruit for advocates of the idea in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev. Part of the problem may relate to difficulties finding the money. While it was initially reported that some $300+ billion in Russian Central Bank funds got trapped abroad in February 2022, Washington-based financial experts revealed at the end of that year that the actual amount seized was closer to $80-100 billion, and that the US and the EU have had trouble finding the frozen funds. This past February, US business media reported that actually only about $36.5 billion had been found by the EU (which was estimated to contain over two thirds of seized funds to begin with), to date.

But the real problem isn’t technical or legal, but relates to reputational risks. In an op-ed in a major British business newspaper on Sunday, commentator Martin Sandbu explained that “legal obstacles” are only the “ostensible justification” for the failure to deliver Russian money to Ukraine, since, theoretically, Western countries could join Canada in making changes to legislation and citing legal arguments claiming Russia has “no legal resource” to its money to justify the seizure and transfer. But the West hasn’t moved against Russia, given “the fear that confiscating Russia’s assets will make other non-Western countries pull their own reserves out of the West, in case one day the same treatment could be meted out to them,” the observer noted.

“The concern,” Sandbu writes, “is that this could destabilize the global financial system and in particular diminish the dollar’s and the euro’s captive investors among central bank reserve managers. The European Central Bank has issued a strong warning to European policymakers against even taxing EU companies making windfall profits on blocked Russian assets – which seems the most that the sanctions coalition is currently willing to contemplate.” And although the commentator spends the rest of the op-ed suggesting that this danger is overblown, and demanding that Russian reserves be seized and transferred “now” before the Ukrainian proxy war ends, the reality seems otherwise, with major powers which have spent decades fattening up Western banks and subsidizing the West’s development now thinking twice about parking assets in the US and Europe after seeing what was done to Russia.

Regulators in China, for example, held an emergency conference with major domestic and foreign banks last year to brainstorm ways to protect PRC assets should the US impose sanctions similar to those it has slapped on Russia, with officials reportedly “put on alert” of the West’s ability to arbitrarily seize foreign assets. Beijing, for the record, is one of Washington’s biggest foreign creditors, owning about $860 billion in US Treasuries alone, and amassing assets abroad worth nearly $10 trillion. Saudi Arabia, another major creditor and investor in the US and Europe, whose allegiance is crucial in propping up the petrodollar, has also watched the West’s actions vis-à-vis Russia closely, and has made major moves this year to dramatically diversify geostrategic alignment, normalizing ties with Iran, joining the BRICS bloc, and rejecting US requests to ramp up oil production to offset the global economic downturn sparked by NATO’s proxy war with Russia.

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Drones galore.

The New Electric War Campaign (Helmer)

In the coming winter phase of the Russian offensive in the Ukraine, the electric war will be run quite differently from the way the first electric war was directed last winter. The impact on the Ukrainian grid and on the country’s and military’s capacities to cope will be more destructive than a year ago. The reason for this, Ukrainian sources have been saying publicly and Russian military assessments now confirm, is that most of the money which the US, the European Union, and the World Bank have provided Kiev officials over the past nine months to repair, reconstruct, and prepare the country’s power generating and distribution system for the coming winter has been stolen. The US and NATO command and control centres inside the country for running the war will be operating in the dark, not only because of the precision of the Russian missiles and drone operations, but because of the corruption of the Ukrainians.

They understand that defeat and capitulation are coming; they are running away with the loot before it’s too dark, too late. In the latest Ukrainian press reports, the battlefield evidence indicates the new electric war has begun. “Kiev said,” according to this summary, “two dozen Russian drones and a missile were downed overnight as concern grows that Moscow is once again targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Officials in Kharkiv reported civilian targets were hit by shelling and drone attacks…Police in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine reported that at least 10 Russian drones hit civilian infrastructure and triggered multiple fires in the city and shelling also damaged buildings. The overnight raids are part of a recent rise in Russian attacks. More than 100 settlements in eastern Ukraine, including Kharkiv, were targeted on Wednesday, the heaviest day of shelling so far in 2023…Ukraine and its partners in the West worry that Russia could try to replicate a strategy it followed last winter, squeezing Ukraine by targeting energy infrastructure as temperatures fall.”

There is no corroboration in the latest bulletin from the Russian Ministry of Defense that the new round of aerial attacks was targeted on energy infrastructure. “From October 28 to November 3, 2023, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out fifteen group strikes with precision weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles on warehouses of rocket and artillery weapons, places of storage of weapons and military equipment, as well as temporary locations of Ukrainian servicemen, nationalists and foreign mercenaries. As a result of the strikes, hangars for preparing Ukrainian aircraft for takeoff, production sites for unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned boats, groups of foreign instructors and mercenaries were destroyed.” The problem for the Ukrainians is that the electricity generating plants and the power grids are now more vulnerable to precision attack triggering cascading system failure than they were a year ago.

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They can’t even manage one…

Europe in the Crossfire: Can All Crises Be Managed Simultaneously? (Oncan)

Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has not only triggered anti-Russian sanctions and financial/military aid for Ukraine but has also exposed the multiple threats confronting Europe. As the West, led by the United States, seeks to wield Ukraine, a product of color revolutions, as a strategic lever, Europe bears the brunt of the ensuing political and economic tensions. Presently, Europe grapples with escalating energy prices stemming from the Ukrainian crisis and anti-Russian sanctions. Additionally, unrest fueled by Ukraine’s grain restrictions on European countries, a deteriorating economy, the ongoing migration wave, and the challenges it presents continue to be pressing issues awaiting resolution.

Meanwhile, Israel’s actions in Gaza and the U.S.’s supportive declarations further complicate matters for Europe. Despite hopes that a resolution in the Israel-Palestine conflict might shift Ukraine from the forefront, European leaders are expected to navigate both crises simultaneously, with few exceptions like Spain. Quoting Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who remarked, “It is evident that the Middle East conflict casts a shadow on events in Ukraine,” Politico anticipates that EU leaders will assert their capacity to address both the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East concurrently.

It’s not limited to just Ukraine and Israel; there are also revealed color revolution plans in Kosovo-Serbia, ongoing issues in Georgia, an anticipated political crisis in Armenia due to Azerbaijan’s actions in Karabakh, and political pressure on opposition parties in Moldova, among other concerns. It’s evident that all of these matters are interconnected with unresolved crises in the former USSR region, and they are, in a broader context, part of the United States’ strategy to encircle Russia. Meanwhile, Europe is directly grappling with the consequences of these developments, which align with the broader interests of the United States on the global stage, all while striving to enhance its own geopolitical influence.

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” Israel, considered a rich country, does not need foreign aid, but any member of Congress who does not vote for Israel’s billions finds in his next election a challenger financed by Israel’s billions..”

Does Any Member of the US Government Represent Americans? (Paul Craig Roberts)

US Representative Matt Gaetz has courage and principles, for the most part good ones. It was Gaetz who had the courage and leadership ability to get rid of Rino McCarthy as Speaker of the House. It is Gaetz who understands that hardly any member of Congress in either party represents Americans. Instead, they represent the military/security complex’s power and profits, the profits of the pharmaceutical companies, the profits of agri-business (ethanol for example), the profits of Wall Street, the profits of energy, timber, and mining, and so forth. And especially, the US Congress represents the artificial state of Israel and all of Israel’s agendas. Indeed, Matt Gaetz himself cannot escape having to support an occupier of Palestinians’ land, claiming that it is Israel’s.

The fact that even a brave man like Matt Gaetz has to support an aggressor against a people abandoned by the “moral” West shows how captured the US government is at all levels by vested monied interests. Gaetz along with the entirely of the US Congress and the President are purchased by the billions of dollars that American taxpayers are forced to hand over to Israel each year. American taxpayers are forced to give Israel annually billions of dollars that are used to purchase our government. Israel, considered a rich country, does not need foreign aid, but any member of Congress who does not vote for Israel’s billions finds in his next election a challenger financed by Israel’s billions and himself a victim of Israel’s slander machine.

The same thing happens if you vote against an excessive military/security budget or against the agendas of powerful organized interests. A government whose election is financed by interest groups has to represent those interest groups. So, obviously, the solution is not term limits on members of Congress. The solution is to take the money that Congress gives Israel to buy our government out of politics along with the ability of corporations to purchase the US government, thanks to an unconstitutional ruling of the US Supreme Court that it is a “free speech right” for corporations and foreign interests to purchase the US government for their own use. There you have it. The US government is a purchased entity. It has nothing whatsoever to do with American interests or protecting the interests of the American people.

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It IS possible…

Connecticut Judge Orders New Bridgeport Mayoral Primary (NYP)

A Connecticut judge ordered a new Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport as surveillance footage showed multiple workers allegedly stuffing absentee ballots into an outdoor ballot box days before the original primary. In September, Incumbent Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim defeated challenger John Gomes by 251 votes out of 8,173 cast in the primary election, according to NBC. However, Gomes released a video in October that appeared to show two women stuffing heaps of ballot papers into drop boxes at least four locations across the city. Superior Court Judge William Clark determined the amount of evidence left the court “unable” to determine the result for the state’s largest city.

“The volume of ballots so mishandled is such that it calls the result of the primary election into serious doubt and leaves the court unable to determine the legitimate result of the primary,” Clark wrote in his ruling on Wednesday. The judge ruled that the abnormally large numbers of absentee ballots were cast in certain voting districts and that video evidence showing the alleged ballot stuffing violated state elections law. “The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties,” Clark wrote in his ruling. Judge Clark ruled two women made or were directly involved in 15 incidents of drop boxes being stuffed with ballots.

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“That particular gentleman has spent more time in prison than he spent out, but he is a good man and he’s the individuals I’m fighting for in the city of Springfield. We’re running an election that is inclusive.”

Election Fraud Cases Break Out In 3 Democrat States (JTN)

A new primary election has been ordered by a Connecticut state court amid alleged fraud, while Democrats in Massachusetts and New Jersey are also accused of or charged with election fraud. This brings the total of election-related criminal cases across the country to at least three. Democrats in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are facing various allegations of election fraud, as two instances are related to this year’s elections while two more are with regard to prior elections. On Wednesday, Bridgeport Superior Court Judge William Clark overturned the results of a Democratic mayoral primary and ordered a new election in connection to allegations of absentee ballot abuse.

The judge made the decision after a video was posted online that appeared to show a supporter of incumbent Democrat Mayor Joe Ganim stuffing stacks of papers into a ballot drop box, according to WNPR Connecticut Public Radio. The general election for mayor was set for Nov. 7. A new primary date has yet to be set, but the judge told lawyers that they had 10 days to work with city and state election officials to determine a potential date for the new election, the Associated Press reported. Judge Clark determined the allegations of possible malfeasance were sufficient to toss out the results of the Sept. 12 primary, which incumbent Ganim won by 251 votes out of 8,173 cast. Absentee ballots secured Ganim’s margin of victory, WNPR Connecticut Public Radio also reported. Judge Clark said, “the videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties.”

Meanwhile, in neighboring Massachusetts, a Democratic mayoral candidate is accused of bribing residents to vote. Election officials for the city of Springfield say they witnessed voters being brought to the city hall for early voting and that at least some expected to be given cash after they voted for Democratic candidate Justin Hurst, according to local news outlet The Republican. Video footage has also been released of a man associated with Hurst’s campaign allegedly handing cash to voters last weekend. City officials claim in sworn affidavits that the distribution of $10 bills, clearly visible in surveillance footage, represents voter fraud, The Republican also reports.

Hurst denied all the allegations ahead of Election Day on Tuesday. “Any accusations that my team paid residents in exchange for their vote is unequivocally false,” he said, according to Western Mass News. He also addressed the video in which a man appears to be handing out cash to voters. “That gentleman has volunteered on many campaigns,” Hurst stated. “That particular gentleman has spent more time in prison than he spent out, but he is a good man and he’s the individuals I’m fighting for in the city of Springfield. We’re running an election that is inclusive.”

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“..71% of respondents said Biden is “too old to be an effective president..”

Trump Leads Biden In 5 Battleground States In New York Times Poll (JTN)

Former President Donald Trump is leading President Joe Biden in five of the six major swing states, according to new polls released Sunday, as voters largely express disapproval of the current president. Trump leads Biden by 10 points in Nevada, 6 in Georgia, 5 in Arizona, 5 in Michigan and 4 in Pennsylvania, according to new polls by The New York Times and Siena College. He is down by 2 points in Wisconsin. Biden carried all six of the states in 2020, but now, 59% of voters in those states say they disapprove of Biden’s job performance, while 38% say they approve. Meanwhile, 71% of respondents said Biden is “too old to be an effective president,” compared to 39% who said the same about Trump. Additionally, 62% of voters said Biden does not have the mental sharpness to be an effective president, while just 35% said he does.

As to Trump’s mental acuity, 54% of voters said he is sharp enough to be an effective president compared to 44% who said he is not. More than half of all registered voters surveyed (53%) also said Biden’s policies have personally hurt them, while 51% of voters said Trump’s policies have personally helped them. The polls of 3,662 registered voters across the six swing states were taken from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3 and, when taken together, had a 1.8% margin of error. While Trump has not been formally nominated as the Republican presidential nominee for 2024, he is far ahead of all other candidates. While other Democratic candidates are running for the nomination, the Democratic Party has said it fully supports Biden’s reelection bid and will not host primary debates.

Abrams

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“..doing your patriotic duty and publicly standing up for Ukrainian national interests, and trying to prevent a dangerous distortion in Ukraine-US relations, which could be harmful to both countries – had actually placed him in the firing line, literally.”

Two Men Who Exposed the Bidens’ Corruption in Ukraine (21CW)

Andriy Derkach started his career in big politics in the mid-90s. At different times he held positions in presidential administrations and the government, as well as managing a large state-owned enterprise, the energy corporation Energoatom, and was involved in parliamentary activities for more than 20 years. Everything changed after the United States initiated its regime change operation in Ukraine in 2014, and its “Revolution of Dignity”, which resulted in pro-Russian President Yanukovych fleeing the country, and eventually replaced by Ukrainian oligarch, Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko, who seemed more interested in his own shady business schemes than reforming a state wracked with institutional corruption, immediately outsourced key nodes of governance of the country to proxies of America’s Democratic administration – all managed through the U.S. Embassy in Kiev.

Not long after, the new government and coalition began to make a series of unconstitutional decisions and laws at the request of various US-linked international organizations, and old ‘disloyal’ officials were gotten rid of through a process of “lustration”, as the influence of the courts and law enforcement system were gradually eroded by the creation of externally-controlled shadow government bodies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), the High Anti-Corruption Court and others. As the Ukrainian state found itself increasingly under the thumb of United States operatives, the active opposition figures began to emerge, one of whom was Ukrainian politician, Andriy Derkach, who began to fight against this foreign subterfuge and control by Democratic Party top brass.

The first open confrontation between Derkach and the Democrats occurred in 2017, when Derkach filed an official application for criminal proceedings on the fact of interference of NABU in the 2016 US presidential elections. As Derkach claimed, in the midst of the campaign, NABU Director Artem Sytnyk had deliberately (at the request of certain representatives of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine) publicized information about the receipt of money in Ukraine by political consultant and Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The document in question became known as “The Party of Regions’ barn book”. From this incident, it became clear the goal of NABU head Sytnyk was to help Trump’s 2016 opponent, Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, by knocking out Trump’s chief of staff right at height of a national election cycle.

The dodgy document and media hype which entailed led to Manafort being removed from Trump campaign headquarters, followed by a 21 month prison sentence in the US for other unrelated federal charges. As a result, Ukraine, with its own hands, helped to undermine the US election process, something which couldn’t have been done without the help of agents within the Democrat Party and US government. Derkach sought to expose this and other instances of corruption, but quickly discovered that doing your patriotic duty and publicly standing up for Ukrainian national interests, and trying to prevent a dangerous distortion in Ukraine-US relations, which could be harmful to both countries – had actually placed him in the firing line, literally.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fish Cafe

 

 

So good
https://twitter.com/i/status/1720858446000456107

 

 

Polar

 

 

Food
https://twitter.com/i/status/1721177325738328214

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Oct 172023
 
 October 17, 2023  Posted by at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Henri Matisse Sorrow of the King 1952

 

Pulling the Roof Down on Today’s Paradigm (Alastair Crooke)
This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen (Chris Hedges)
US Faces Defeat In Geopolitical War In Gaza (Bhadrakumar)
Lindsey Graham Threatens To Force Iran ‘Out Of Oil Business’ (RT)
Survivor Of Hamas Assault: Israeli Army Killed Their Own Civilians (Cradle)
US Sending 2,000 Marines To Israeli Coast (RT)
US Military Getting Extremely Weak Due to Ukraine Aid – American General (Sp.)
Ukraine Is Not A US Ally – Ex-Pentagon Strategist (RT)
Who Do They Think They’re Kidding? (Kunstler)
Judge Bars Trump From Making Statements About Court Case (ZH)
Trump Files Lawsuit in UK Court to Discredit ‘Scandalous’ Steele Dossier (Sp.)
Don’t Forget Washington’s War Against Julian Assange and Donald Trump (PCR)
The Republicans Will Not Help Us (PCR)
Biden Devalues American Citizenship (PCR)

 

 


Spain’s minister for social rights, Ione Belarra, urged the coalition government of her nation to request that the International Criminal Court launch an investigation into war crimes committed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

 

“Colombia has EXPELLED the Israeli ambassador and told the ambassador to “apologize and leave the country.” “If we have to suspend foreign relations with Israel, we will suspend them. We do not support genocides. The president of Colombia will not be insulted.”

 

 

Trump Carson

 

 

 

 

Celente

 

 

 

 

mtracey: “..the US, UK, France, and Japan just voted *against* a UN Security Council resolution on Gaza calling for:
— “An immediate, durable, and fully respected humanitarian ceasefire”
— “Secure release of all hostages”
— “Safe evacuation of civilians”
— “Unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance”

The resolution further emphasizes that both “the Israeli and Palestinian civilian population must be protected,” and “strongly condemns all violence and hostilities directed against civilians and all acts of terrorism”.

But, it was drafted by Russia and supported by China – so of course had to be intrinsically Bad.”

 

 

 

 

3 key pledges: “.. the Judaification of al-Aqsa; the founding of the State upon the biblical ‘Land of Israel’ and the ending of secular Basic law – Palestine and the Palestinian people simply are erased..”

Pulling the Roof Down on Today’s Paradigm (Alastair Crooke)

Today, all eyes are focussed on the widening ‘war’ in the Middle East. Many questions are asked, but the principal one is ‘Why?’ Here, we find the issues are eerily similar. At the end of WW2, the West wanted its European Jews to have a ‘homeland’, and so in 1947, Palestine was peremptorily divided between Jews and Arabs. The predominant narrative in the West has been that the travails and wars that segued from that event – particularly today’s confrontation in Israel/Palestine – result simply from Arab States’ perverse inability to come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel. Many in the West see this as irrational at the least – or as a fundamental cultural flaw, at worst. Well, as was the case in respect to the European post-war military situation, nothing was formally agreed in respect to Jews and Arabs living on the one plot of land.

The 1993 Oslo Accords were an attempt at some agreement, but again everything was vague, and the crucially master security ‘key’ to the whole Accord rested wholly at the discretion of the Israelis. Plainly, this was intended to give Israel maximum room for manoeuvre. More than that, it was intended that Israel should have the strategic ‘edge’ – not just the political ‘edge’, but the U.S. had pledged to ensure that Israel would have the military ‘edge’ over its neighbours too. Put bluntly, the objective of bringing Arab States to accept Israel’s presence was never pursued, or else it was compelled by military and financial measures (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran). Except in the case of Egypt, through returning the Sanai to Cairo. The current iteration of the ‘Abraham normalisation’ (coming to terms with Israel) however, effectively throws the Palestinians ‘under the bus’ for the sake of Saudi compliance to normalization.

Just as NATO surging forward was intended to put Asia under the U.S. sway, so Greater Israeli’s cultural hegemony in the Middle East – it was believed in U.S. Beltway circles – would place the Middle East under western sway also. What lies behind the present outpouring of Palestinian violent resistance is precisely rooted in a converse understanding to that held in the Beltway. The converse ‘reality’ is that, over the last decade, Israel has been departing further and further away from the foundations on which any sustainable regional peace might have been built. Israel, perversely, has been moving in the opposite direction – striking down the pillars by which a regional rapprochement might have been possible.

Netanyahu, over the last decade, has taken the Israeli electorate far to the Right, leveraging Iran as the Phantasm by which to frighten the public. (It was not always like that: After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Israel had allied with Iran, against the Arab ‘near neighbourhood’). Netanyahu also propagated ‘the message’ to his electorate that, thanks to the ‘success’ of the Abraham Accords, the world cares ‘zilch’ for the Palestinians. That they are “yesterday’s news”. This performance has distracted the western world from understanding fully what radical ministers in Netanyahu’s government have been planning: One key commitment of Netanyahu’s Cabinet colleagues is to build the Jewish (Third) Temple on Temple Mount, where al-Aqsa Mosque presently stands. Plainly put, this implies a commitment to demolish al-Aqsa and build a Judaic Temple in its stead.

The second key pledge is to found Israel on the biblical ‘Land of Israel’. Again, plainly put, this would dispossess Palestinians in the West Bank; as National Security Minister Ben Gvir made clear, they would face a choice: leave or live under subservience in a Jewish supremacist state. The third is to institute Jewish law (Halakha) in the stead of secular law. This would divest non-Jews in Israel of their legal status. Put together – the Judaification of al-Aqsa; the founding of the State upon the biblical ‘Land of Israel’ and the ending of secular Basic law – Palestine and the Palestinian people simply are erased. Three weeks ago, Netanyahu waved a map of Israel as he gave his address at the UN General Assembly; have a look: Gaza and the Palestinian territories do not appear on it at all. They are erased. The situation is as existential as that.

Read more …

“Gaza is being leveled, flattened, destroyed, reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of its impoverished residents will be killed, wounded or left homeless without food, fuel, water and medical help.”

This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen (Chris Hedges)

I have been in urban warfare in El Salvador, Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia and Kosovo. Once you fight street by street, apartment block by apartment block, there is only one rule — kill anything that moves. The talk of safe zones, the reassurances of protecting civilians, the promises of “surgical” and “targeted” air strikes, the establishment of “safe” evacuation routes, the fatuous explanation that civilian dead were “caught in the crossfire,” the claim that the homes and apartment buildings bombed into rubble were the abode of terrorists or that errant Hamas rockets were responsible for the destruction of schools and medical clinics, is part of the rhetorical cover to carry out indiscriminate slaughter.

Gaza is such a small area — 25 miles in length and about 5 miles wide — and so densely populated that the only outcome of an Israeli ground and air assault is the mass death of those Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls “human animals” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls “human beasts.” Israeli Knesset member Tally Gotliv suggested dropping “doomsday weapons” on Gaza, widely seen as a call for a nuclear strike. Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday dismissed calls to protect Palestinian civilians. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible … this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true,” Herzog said. “They could’ve risen up, they could’ve fought against that evil regime that took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” He added, “We will break their backbone.”

The demand by Israel that 1.1 million Palestinians — nearly half of Gaza’s population — evacuate northern Gaza, which will become a free fire zone, within 24 hours, ignores the fact that given the overcrowding and sealed borders there is no place for the displaced to go. The north includes Gaza City, the most densely populated part of the strip, with 750,000 residents. It also includes Gaza’s main hospital and the Jabalia and al-Shati refugee camps. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion military aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” This is not a war. It is the obliteration of civilians trapped for 16 years in the world’s largest concentration camp.

Gaza is being leveled, flattened, destroyed, reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of its impoverished residents will be killed, wounded or left homeless without food, fuel, water and medical help. Nearly 600 children are already dead. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been forced to close 14 food distribution centers leaving half a million people without food relief. Gaza’s only power plant has run out of fuel. The United Nations says 12 of its staff have been killed by Israeli air strikes, 21 out of 22 UNRWA health facilities in Gaza have been damaged and hospitals lack basic medicines and supplies. Israel, as it has in the past, will block the dissemination of independent reporting and images once some 360,000 soldiers launch a ground assault. It cut internet service in Gaza on Saturday. The brief glimpses of Israeli atrocities that make it out will be dismissed by Israeli leaders as anomalies or blamed on Hamas.

Read more …

The Arab world is gathering together.

US Faces Defeat In Geopolitical War In Gaza (Bhadrakumar)

One hundred years after the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) against the ruling Ottoman Turks amidst the impending defeat of Germany and the Triple Alliance in World War I, another armed uprising by the Arabs has erupted — this time around, against Israeli occupation, in the backdrop of the looming defeat of the United States and the NATO in Ukraine War — presenting a thrilling spectacle of history repeating unabridged. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated as a result of the Arab Revolt. Israel too will have to vacate its occupied territories and make space for a state of Palestine, which of course, will be a crushing defeat for the US and marks the end of its global dominance, reminiscent of the Battle of Cambrai in Northern France (1918) where Germans — surrounded, exhausted and with disintegrating morale amidst a deteriorating domestic situation — faced the certainty that the war had been lost, and surrendered.

The torrential flow of events through the past week is breathtaking, starting with a phone call made by Iran’s President Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi to the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday to discuss a common strategy toward the situation following the devastating attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, against Israel on October 7. Earlier on Tuesday, in a powerful statement, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had emphasised that “From the military and intelligence aspects, this defeat (by Hamas) is irreparable. It is a devastating earthquake. It is unlikely that the (Israeli) usurping regime will be able to use the help of the West to repair the deep impacts that this incident has left on its ruling structures.”

A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Raisi’s call to the Crown Prince aimed to “support Palestine and prevent the spread of war in the region. The call was good and promising.” Having forged a broad understanding with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian held discussion with his Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, during which he called upon Islamic and Arab countries to extend their support to the Palestinian people, emphasising the urgency of the situation. On Thursday, Amir-Abdollahian embarked on a regional tour to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Qatar through Saturday to coordinate with the various resistance groups. Notably, he met Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha. Amir-Abdollahian told the media that unless Israel stopped its barbaric air strikes on Gaza, an escalation by the Resistance is inevitable and Israel could suffer a “huge earthquake,” as Hezbollah is in a state of readiness to intervene.

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Threatening only Iran is no use. Iran is no longer isolated.

Lindsey Graham Threatens To Force Iran ‘Out Of Oil Business’ (RT)

US Senator Lindsey Graham has warned Iran that the American military could target its oil industry in response to any escalation in the Middle East. The lawmaker said he would put forward a resolution to this effect, citing concerns that the Tehran-backed Hezbollah could join the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Appearing on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday, Graham described Hezbollah as a “proxy of Iran” and claimed that a “massive attack on Israel” by the Lebanon-based militant group would pose an “existential” threat to the Jewish state. The Republican foreign policy hawk warned that he could introduce a resolution in the Senate “to allow military action by the United States in conjunction with Israel to knock Iran out of the oil business.”

“Iran, if you escalate this war, we’re coming for you,” Graham concluded. Appearing on Al Jazeera on Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian cautioned that “it is highly probable that many other fronts will be opened” unless Israel stops striking Gaza. He also urged Muslim nations to support the Palestinian cause, echoing earlier calls by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On Saturday, Amir-Abdollahian hinted that Hezbollah could strike northern Israel, causing a “huge earthquake.” According to two diplomatic sources cited by Axios, Iran will respond if Israel goes ahead with a ground offensive in Gaza. However, Reuters on Sunday quoted Iranian representatives at the UN as clarifying that “Iran’s armed forces will not engage” unless directly attacked by Israel first.

On Saturday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the deployment of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower as well as two guided-missile destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser to the Eastern Mediterranean, in addition to the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group already in the region. Austin explained that the move was aimed at deterring “any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war.” sAt the same time, US President Joe Biden has acknowledged that “at this point” there is “no clear evidence” that Tehran helped Hamas carry out its attack on Israel on October 7.

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She sounds convincing.

Survivor Of Hamas Assault: Israeli Army Killed Their Own Civilians (Cradle)

A survivor from the Palestinian resistance offensive on Israeli settlements on 7 October says the Israeli army is “undoubtedly” responsible for killing many of their civilians. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages, because there was very, very heavy crossfire,” 44-year-old mother of three Yasmin Porat told the Haboker Hazeh radio program on Israeli Kan radio last week. When the interviewer asked if Israeli troops were responsible for civilian deaths, Porat said, “Undoubtedly.” Her interview has been scrubbed from the online version of Haboker Hazeh and the Kan website; however, Electronic Intifada procured a copy and translated it from Hebrew. “There are five or six hostages lying on the ground outside. Just like sheep to the slaughter, between the shooting of our commandos and the terrorists,” Porat describes.

Porat says that, before the arrival of Israeli troops, she and other civilians had been held by the Palestinians “for several hours” and treated “humanely.” “They did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely,” Porat said, adding, “They give us something to drink here and there. When they see we are nervous, they calm us down. It was very frightening, but no one treated us violently.” She recalled one Palestinian fighter who spoke Hebrew saying: “Look at me well, were not going to kill you. We want to take you to Gaza. We are not going to kill you. So be calm, you’re not going to die.” “I was calm because I knew nothing would happen to me,” she added.

Furthermore, during a lengthy interview on Israel’s Channel 12, Porat speaks of intense gunfire after Israeli forces arrived and elaborates that, although the resistance fighters were heavily armed, she never saw them shoot captives or threaten them with their guns. She also highlights that the Israeli army announced their arrival at the settlement “with a hail of gunfire,” catching the resistance fighters and their captives by surprise. Her account echoes that of another Israeli settler who spoke with Channel 12 last week about her experience as a prisoner of war (POW) of Hamas. The accounts from survivors stand in stark contrast to the widespread claims found in western media outlets that say Hamas forces did everything from “beheading babies” to torturing and raping settlers.

Salah al-Aruri, Deputy Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, last week addressed claims that resistance fighters were ordered to deliberately kill as many Israeli settlers as possible, telling Al Jazeera TV that fighters from the Qassam Brigades – the military wing of Hamas – were “under strict protocol to not harm civilians.” He also said that after Israel’s Gaza division disintegrated in the face of the Gaza factions, others rushed the border, “causing chaos.” Furthermore, he notes that some of the deaths of Israeli settlers are a result of the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive,’ which is a protocol that allows Israeli soldiers to use overwhelming force to kill one of their own captured soldiers rather than allow them to be taken, prisoner.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1714019234680832369

Read more …

+ 2,000 already there.

US Sending 2,000 Marines To Israeli Coast (RT)

The Pentagon has sent 2,000 marines and sailors to waters off Israel’s coast as part of a “show of force” in the region, CNN reported, citing unnamed US officials. The move comes amid continued fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants, which has claimed thousands of lives this month. Led by the elite 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the “rapid response force” is headed toward Israel on board the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship previously stationed in the Gulf of Oman, officials told the outlet on Monday. They did not specify the unit’s exact destination, or say if it would join two US carrier strike groups parked in the Eastern Mediterranean. The naval deployments are reportedly meant to “send a message of deterrence to Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah,” and some of the US warships have recently patrolled waters near the Islamic Republic.

Separately, on Sunday Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered another 2,000 troops to gear up for a potential “medical and logistical support” mission in Israel, according to multiple news agencies. However, Pentagon staffers stressed that the order does not guarantee direct US involvement in the conflict with the Gaza Strip-based militant group Hamas, noting that the White House “does not want to give the impression that American troops could become embroiled in a hot war.” The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the preparations, also stated that the troops would be tasked with “advising and medical support” and “aren’t intended to serve in a combat role.” The 2,000 soldiers are now stationed across a wide area, including in the Middle East and Europe, but have been placed on notice to deploy within 24 hours if needed.

Though officials said the move would be aimed at “forestalling a wider regional war,” the planning comes as some US lawmakers push for direct military action in the Middle East. During a sit-down with CNN last week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham declared “If there’s an escalation of this war against Israel, I’m blaming Iran, and it is now time to put them on notice.” Asked whether Washington should “bomb Iran,” even without evidence the country aided Hamas’ deadly October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Graham simply replied: “Yeah.” The surprise rocket and ground assault from Gaza on Israeli cities has triggered weeks of fighting, with the Israel Defense Forces launching retaliatory airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave. Around 1,400 people have been killed in Israel in the latest flare-up, according to local authorities, while Palestinian officials have reported over 2,800 fatalities in Gaza.

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“We [Washington] can’t kid Americans about this. We need to start telling them the truth, which we haven’t been doing in a very long time.”

US Military Getting Extremely Weak Due to Ukraine Aid – American General (Sp.)

The US has already funneled around $46 billion worth of military assistance to Kiev amid Russia’s repeated warnings that doing so will prolong the conflict in Ukraine. The Biden Administration’s relentless Ukraine aid has plunged the US military into becoming overstretched, which affects the White House’s push to shore up other allies, retired Brigadier General Don Bolduc told an American broadcaster. “I think it’s a wake-up call to the American people that you know during the Biden administration our military has become extremely weak. We’ve become overstretched. Logistically, we could not support really a lot of things that would go on simultaneously in this world,” Bolduc said. He described the situation as “a very serious problem for America and its national security apparatus,” adding he is “very concerned about that.”

According to the retired general, “We [Washington] can’t kid Americans about this. We need to start telling them the truth, which we haven’t been doing in a very long time.” Earlier this month, US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted by his own party for cutting a deal with President Joe Biden to continue funding the Kiev regime. This came after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives introduced a bill to extend government funding for 45 days and avoid a shutdown, a document that does not stipulate further assistance to Ukraine. Biden, at the same time, made it clear that the US “will not walk away” from Ukraine as far as aid goes.

America and its allies ramped up their military assistance to Kiev shortly after Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly warned that NATO countries are “playing with fire” by supplying arms to the Kiev regime, which the Kremlin said adds to prolonging the conflict in Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, underscored that any cargo with weapons for the Zelensky regime will become a legitimate target for Russian forces.

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“..the number of Americans in favor of giving Ukraine more aid had dropped to 41%, 24 percentage points down from the figure recorded in June..”

Ukraine Is Not A US Ally – Ex-Pentagon Strategist (RT)

Ukraine has never enjoyed the status of a US ally, meaning that Washington has no obligation to defend it per se, Elbridge Colby has argued. The former official, who now heads The Marathon Initiative, a think-tank, put the leadership in Kiev on the same level as the now-defunct Afghan government, which was overthrown by the Taliban back in 2021. In a message on X (formerly Twitter) published on Saturday, Colby, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 till 2018, wrote that “Ukraine was not and is not an ally, and we had never committed to defend it.” He noted that “US alliance credibility wasn’t in play” when Russia launched its military operation against the neighboring state last February.

The post came in response to an assertion by another X user, who claimed that the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan had emboldened Russia to start its military action less than six months later. In a previous thread of messages, Colby defended the position that the “debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal” had damaged America’s credibility to a lesser extent than some contend. The former top Pentagon staffer went on to argue that the US kept standing by its real allies in Europe and Asia, while the Afghan government was somewhat dispensable. “Our relationship with our established allies was different than with Afghanistan and the threat posed by China or Russia greater than the Taliban,” he wrote, adding that it is for this reason that “NATO and our NE Asian alliances didn’t collapse. Nor did our opponents assault them.”

Last Wednesday, commenting on the impasse in the US Congress following the ouster of Kevin McCarthy earlier this month, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby warned that while Washington would “keep that aid going as long as we can,” it is “not going to be indefinite.” A growing number of Republican lawmakers have been voicing skepticism over the continuation of US aid for Ukraine. The issue lay at the heart of McCarthy’s removal, as some fellow GOP congress members suspected he had cut a secret deal with the administration of President Joe Biden to approve more funding for Kiev. Meanwhile, an opinion poll by Reuters-Ipsos published earlier this month indicated that the number of Americans in favor of giving Ukraine more aid had dropped to 41%, 24 percentage points down from the figure recorded in June. The survey showed that the trend was noticeable both among Democrats and Republicans.

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“In this particular case, it led to putting “Joe Biden,” with his handlers and movers, in a position to destroy the country, and they are getting it done.”

Who Do They Think They’re Kidding? (Kunstler)

Since the FBI has been so preoccupied the duration of the “Joe Biden” regime tracking down every native-born living soul who attended the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, instead of using the agency’s assets to monitor alien networking, you have to wonder why Mr. Wray even bothers to comment on the current situation. He can only embarrass (or incriminate) himself more deeply. One thing for sure is not happening: any effort by Mr. Mayorkas and his 260,000 employees to make the US/Mexico border any less porous. If it hadn’t occurred them yet, they might consider closing down the US-funded United Nations operation in Central America (with help from several international NGOs) that is running way-stations to transport aliens north to our border in hundred-plus bus fleets at a time, taking every possible advantage to accelerate the flow. I guess we’ll just have to stand by and see what happens.

Speaking of mind-blowing bullshit, emanating from a different pseudopod of the DC blob, former CIA Director Leon Panetta chimed in with Fox News’s Bret Baier last week to declare he still thinks that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian dis-info operation. Mr. Panetta was a co-signer of the notorious letter from 50 other former US Intel bigwigs in October, 2020, a few weeks before the election, organized by former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell to gaslight voters after The New York Post published the existence of the Laptop from Hell and some of its sordid contents tending to incriminate the Biden family for foreign influence-peddling.

As with so many blobsters infesting government and its nether regions, Leon Panetta likes to demonstrate that his contempt for the people of this land is boundless. He can’t possibly believe what he is saying. Everyone from the FBI to The New York Times has declared Hunter’s laptop authentic. Therefore, Leon Panetta is either a fool, a lying scoundrel, or insane. This kind of self-satisfied dishonor is a new thing in the USA, at least at the colossal scale it has achieved the past decade. In 2023 it is the order-of-the-day. In this particular case, it led to putting “Joe Biden,” with his handlers and movers, in a position to destroy the country, and they are getting it done.

Yet, events are still in motion, and decades are happening in days now. We’ll learn this week whether escalation of the war involving Israel and its enemies can be averted without giving Hamas a pass on consequences for its recent murder spree. We’ll learn whether a meaningful opposition against the Party of Chaos can organize around a new House speaker. We’ll learn whether that same assembly can begin the process of laying out a president’s crimes for all in the nation to see, including the sizeable cohort of citizens who relish official lying and being lied to.

Read more …

“..he does not have the right to say and do exactly what he pleases..”

Let’s check with the Constitution, shall we?

Judge Bars Trump From Making Statements About Court Case (ZH)

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled on Monday that former President Trump cannot make comments regarding his ongoing case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith regarding Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. According to the ruling, Trump is barred from making statements about witnesses, testimony, court staff, or Special Counsel Jack Smith. The decision comes after Smith requested as “narrowly tailored” gag order in September in order to limit what the former president can say about the case. Smith argued that Trump’s public remarks threatened to “undermine confidence in the criminal justice system and prejudice the jury pool.”

Trump’s lawyers argued that the gag order would violate Trump’s First Amendment rights, and “unconstitutionally silence” him during his bid for presidency in 2024. Chutkan said that Trump must “follow the conditions of release,” and that “he does not have the right to say and do exactly what he pleases,” to which Trump attorney John Lauro agreed, CNN reported earlier. Of note, Chutkan is an Obama appointee who was formerly a partner at liberal law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner (BSF). BSF attorney Karen Dunn notably prepped Hillary Clinton for debates in 2016, and worked in the Obama White House. Another BSF attorney, Dawn Smalls, was John Podesta’s assistant.

Read more …

“Steele has insisted his dossier has not been discredited and claims its “main tenets continue to hold up well,” although he admits he cannot provide evidence for the outlined claims.”

Trump Files Lawsuit in UK Court to Discredit ‘Scandalous’ Steele Dossier (Sp.)

Former US President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in a UK court against the company behind the infamous Steele Dossier, which included a variety of sensational claims targeting the then-presidential candidate during the 2016 US election. The dossier, created by the company founded by former British spy Christopher Steele at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign, was published by US media days before Trump’s inauguration. It made unsubstantiated and salacious allegations about the soon-to-be US president and was the basis for much of the so-called “Russiagate” controversy that hung over his presidency. Much of the document was contradicted by the Mueller and Horowitz reports, with the Durham report criticizing the FBI for leaning on the dossier in its investigations into Trump when it couldn’t corroborate anything in the report. It is now largely accepted to be a discredited document by most major media outlets.

Hugh Tomlinson, Trump’s lawyer working on the recent legal case, has said Orbis Business Intelligence – the company founded by Christopher Steele and the creator of the document, violated Trump’s data protection rights causing “personal and reputational damage and distress.” A lawyer for Orbis has called for the case to be dismissed, arguing the report was never meant to be made public and was published without authorization. They further argue it is too late to make a claim. Tomlinson says people still believe the false allegations in the report, and that Trump plans to vindicate himself by proving the allegations false in court. “Until there is such a judgment, I continue to suffer damage and distress as a result of people wrongfully believing that the data in the dossier is accurate,” the former US president wrote in his witness statement.

The Steele Dossier included salacious and at-times bizarre claims about Trump, including the infamous “pee tape,” and that the Russian government had been collaborating with Trump when he was the host of a reality TV show. It also accused Trump of bribery, among other crimes. Steele has insisted his dossier has not been discredited and claims its “main tenets continue to hold up well,” although he admits he cannot provide evidence for the outlined claims. Trump previously tried to sue Steele, Clinton and her advisers and top FBI officials for allegedly working together to concoct the Russiagate conspiracy; however, that case was thrown out. By 2020, a British judge ordered Steele to pay $23,000 in damages to a Russian bank that was falsely named in the dossier. The judge presiding over the latest legal filing has indicated that she would rule at an undetermined date if the case can move forward after hearing arguments in London’s High Court.

Read more …

When Paul Craig Roberts (PCR) gets angry, he writes 3 pieces in one day…

“On top of the stress of the job as President of the US, Trump simultaneously endured Russiagate accusations, two impeachments, strippergate charges, insurrection charges, document gate charges, rape charges, and now faces 4 separate felony trials while he campaigns for reelection..”

“In the Midst of the Wars Against Russia and Palestine, …”

Don’t Forget Washington’s War Against Julian Assange and Donald Trump (PCR)

One war is not over and another bloody one has started. War is the history of the 21st century, and Washington is behind them all–Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, South Ossetia, Yeman, Ukraine, Palestine. All the while Washington proceeds with its murders of Julian Assange and Donald Trump. Assange has been imprisoned for a decade in one form or another. He has spent recent years in solitary confinement, despite never being tried or convicted. The British who gave the world habeas corpus have denied the protection of law to Assange. An utterly corrupt media has falsely presented Assange as a traitor to America, a ridiculous charge as he is not an American citizen.

How can a non-citizen be a traitor to a country? Habeas corpus prevents a ruler from holding a person in prison without due process of law. But Assange has been held indefinitely without presentation of evidence against him. He is held on Washington’s demand alone. As Washington has no evidence against Assange, this is Washington’s way of killing him. Washington is relying on the stress from years of frustration from being denied due process to kill Assange. It is nothing but an act of vengeance because Wikileaks published leaked documents that embarrassed Washington.

Donald Trump is also being murdered. Again, Washington is relying on stress. Trump is 77 years old. On top of the stress of the job as President of the US, Trump simultaneously endured Russiagate accusations, two impeachments, strippergate charges, insurrection charges, document gate charges, rape charges, and now faces 4 separate felony trials while he campaigns for reelection, and a crooked Democrat court has convicted him on the false charge that he overstated the value of his real estate holdings and is attempting to confiscate his properties. All of this is likely also stressing his marriage and his relationship with his daughter. The Republicans in Congress are part of the one party state and do not support their own President.

Trump is a man who has been pounded unjustly for 7 years with the worst yet to come. Clearly, Washington having no evidence against him is relying on a stroke or heart attack induced by the stress that Washington is applying. The intention of the massive persecution of Donald Trump is to teach all future presidential candidates that they will be destroyed if they go against the Establishment’s agendas, try to give government back to the people or to normalize relations with an enemy that the military/security complex needs in order to remain profitable. This extraordinary demonstration of power against the American people goes unnoticed, which reinforces my question: Do the American people have enough intelligence to survive?

Read more …

“If they fail to elect Trump President in the next election, they will have committed themselves and all future Americans into tyranny, or, perhaps, civil war..”

The Republicans Will Not Help Us (PCR)

All that differentiates Republicans from Democrats is that Republicans are not anti-white Americans determined to turn a white nation into a tower of babel. Republicans don’t do much to prevent the destruction of white America, but it is not the driving motivation of their politics. With no ideology or principle other than self-gain, the Republican Party is a weak force to stand against the Democrats’ program of “multiculturalism” in order to rectify “white racism.” “Patriotism” and campaign donations from the military/security complex insure that Republicans are for war–all wars. Not even the neoconservatives are more vociferous supporters of war than Nikki Haley, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio. Almost every Republican in Congress subordinates America’s interests and morality to Israel’s demands.

Even Republican presidential contender Ron DeSantis calls for Israel not to hold back in the destruction of Hamas, which, of course, means Palestine, and orders Florida to Assist Israel. So not only the federal government in Washington but also state governments are rushing to Israel’s support in the destruction of Palestine. This pandering to Israel is standard procedure for American politicians. DeSantis sees only Israeli deaths, not Palestinian ones. He thinks that in the past Israel hasn’t used enough force against Palestinians. DeSantis was a good governor. He stood up for the normal moral people in Florida against Woke ideologues intending to brainwash Florida’s children that they are white racists and born into the wrong body, and he prevented mandated Covid jabs, lockdowns, and masks.

If he had come out in support of Trump, he would have been the vice presidential nominee and a future president. Now he, like Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Rinos, has alienated the majority of Republican voters by coming out against Trump. He is now accusing Trump of being anti-semitic. It was Trump who broke from the world and served Israel by moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The Rinos prevent Republicans from having principled leaders. Once Jim Jordan secured the nomination for Speaker of the House, the Rinos quickly pushed forward a non-entity as a rival. Now the Rinos by cooperating with Democrats can block the election of an effective Republican leader who is principled and would try to shape the Republican Party into more of an opposition party instead of the go-along-get-along entity that it is. The Republican Party is an extremely weak force.

The party stands aside as their President is falsely accused and prosecuted and as Trump appointees, such as General Flynn, and lawyers who defend Trump are falsely accused and indicted. Even the lawyers who are defending the falsely indicted 18 Trump attorneys are feeling pressure. The Republican Party is doing nothing to prevent the kangaroo trials of the few principled Republicans who exist. As the Republican Party will do nothing, the problem is in the hands of the American people. If they fail to elect Trump President in the next election, they will have committed themselves and all future Americans into tyranny, or, perhaps, civil war. The American people have been failing in their duty to protect their liberty for many years, due in part to patriotic blindness that sees enemies only abroad and never at home. Can we have any confidence that Americans will wake up, perceive the real threat, which is not Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas, and arouse themselves to the task of holding on to their liberty?

Read more …

“The person twice elected president is considered a threat to America but not the occupation of the US by immigrant-invaders who do not in any way share the history, culture, or belief system of Americans.”

Biden Devalues American Citizenship (PCR)

President Biden is a traitor to the United States. He is doing everything possible to make illegal immigrant-invaders identical in their rights to US citizens. The Biden regime has sued Elon Musk’s SpaceX for hiring Americans instead of immigrant-invaders. The Biden regime has extended the protection of US law to illegal immigrant-invaders. Last Thursday the Biden Justice (sic) Department and Biden Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told banks that refusal to lend money to immigrant-invaders amounts to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin and thereby constitutes grounds for federal action against the offending financial institution. The Biden regime gives Federal ID cards to illegal immigrants and releases them into the population. The Federal ID provides the illegals with access to benefits, housing, transportation, jobs, and bank loans.

Once they are on payrolls, they pay Social Security and Medicare tax and become eligible for these benefits. The presstitutes lie for the Biden regime, claiming it is not really an official ID, only something to help the Department of Homeland Security keep check on those who might pose a security risk. I remember when they said Social Security numbers could not be used for identification purposes. My original card says: ‘Not For Identification Purposes.” Today your Social Security number is your identification. You cannot do anything without it. You tell me, what is the difference between an illegal immigrant-invader and an American citizen? You might think that the only remaining difference is the right to vote, but the Democrats already vote illegal immigrants, and NY City permits illegals to vote on local matters.

We now have a Somali immigrant-invader, Ilhan Omar, elected to the US Congress. Somali immigrant-invaders have been elected to American city councils, school boards and to the Minnesota state legislature. The Somali immigrants to the US were the direct result of Washington’s military intervention in Somalia. The Muslin immigrants to the US from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya are also the direct consequence of Washington’s wars against those countries. It seems that Washington goes to war for the purpose of flooding America with refugees, people of color who have preferential legal standing in US law. What we are experiencing is the first time in human history that a government intentionally destroyed the ethnic basis of a country. Nothing is done to stop the constant march across the border from Mexico of people from numerous countries. Open borders is the Biden regime’s immigration policy.

Allegedly, these many millions of immigrant-invaders are refugees from political persecution in their own countries. Perhaps a few are, but this excuse is used for the intentional overrunning of a white nation, because the Democrats got a law passed that says the US has to accept refugees from political persecution. The Refugee Act of 1980 resulted from Democrat President Johnson’s Vietnam War. The Carter Administration sponsored the Act. The law changed the definition of “refugee” to a person with a “well-founded fear of persecution.” In other words, people who took Washington’s side in a war that Washington lost, as in Vietnam, had to be rescued by being brought to America. Ever since, anyone from all over the world, as long as they are not white, can walk in to America unopposed. Who knows whether they have a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

Every white American should understand that “their” government has betrayed them. The Biden Regime that allows the US to be overrun with immigrant-invaders has declared President Trump and his 85 million members of the electorate to be dangerous domestic terrorists. The FBI has created a new division to monitor these “domestic extremists who constitute the greatest threat to the United States.” Consider what this means. The person twice elected president is considered a threat to America but not the occupation of the US by immigrant-invaders who do not in any way share the history, culture, or belief system of Americans.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Skull And bones
https://twitter.com/i/status/1713929464646672405

 

 

Macaw
https://twitter.com/i/status/1713868274352411122

 

 

Tongue

 

 

 

 

Fungi

 

 

Gecko
https://twitter.com/i/status/1713923345589096650

 

 

Umbrella

 

 

 

 

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Jul 022023
 


Caravaggio The raising of Lazarus 1609

 

 

A Dutch paper tells me that PM Mark Rutte is “very disappointed” that Switzerland has decided not to deliver 96 more tanks, that belong to Swiss “defense company” Ruag, and which Germany, Holland and Denmark wanted to purchase, to send to Ukraine. The 96 would have come on top of another 100 they also apparently bought for the same purpose. Neither would make any difference for the outcome of the battle. 100 tanks is nothing. The only thing we know for sure is that 96 more tanks will kill 96xY more people. But of course Rutte is not the only EU and NATO “leader” who thinks the way he does. They all do, except Orban and perhaps Serbia’s Vucic. But Biden, Blinken, Macron, Scholz, you name them, they all say the same thing: we must deliver more guns, tanks, jet fighters. US “top general” Mark Milley chimes in:

Ukrainian Counteroffensive Will Be Long And ‘Very Bloody’

Ukraine’s counteroffensive will be “very difficult” and achieving significant gains could take a long time, a top US military officer has warned, Report informs, citing Yahoo. Army general Mark Milley told the National Press Club in Washington that the counteroffensive was “advancing steadily, deliberately working its way through very difficult minefields … 500 meters a day, 1,000 meters a day, 2,000 meters a day, that kind of thing”. Mr Milley said he was unsurprised progress was slower than some people predicted.


He said: “War on paper and real war are different. In real war, real people die. Real people are on those front lines and real people are in those vehicles. Real bodies are being shredded by high explosives.” Mr Milley added: “What I had said was this is going to take six, eight, 10 weeks, it’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be very long, and it’s going to be very, very bloody. And no one should have any illusions about any of that.”

My problem with this is they all know very well that some 400,000 young Ukrainians have already died in the conflict, with many more severely injured, and many many more will be killed and maimed if these tanks are delivered to Kiev and the “counteroffensive” continues. Not Rutte’s Dutch young people, or Biden and Milley’s Americans or Macron’s French, no, just young Ukrainians. And some Russians, at about a 1 to 10 count. But if they don’t care about young Ukrainians, they sure care less about young Russians.

Where does this attitude come from? What makes it acceptable to help kill more young people, anywhere in the world? Young men who have mothers, fathers, girlfriends, wives, who should have children or already have them? Who are “leaders” like Rutte to knowingly send them to their deaths? For what reason? So they can beat Russia and save Ukraine’s “democracy”? Ukraine has no elections, no political parties, no free press, and Zelensky is selling its land to BlackRock et al as we speak. And that’s what these promising young lives have to be cut short for? For Zelensky’s and BlackRock’s profits?

Majority Of Americans Back Weapons Deliveries To Ukraine

Some 65% of Americans support continued military aid to Ukraine, up from 46% in May, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday. Other surveys, however, show a fall in support for President Joe Biden’s promise of unlimited weapons for Kiev. Conducted earlier this week, the poll found bipartisan support for arming Ukraine, with 81% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans in favor. This result mirrors the situation in Congress, where Biden’s Democrats are almost unanimous in backing arms deliveries, while the GOP is split between an establishment that backs the weapons shipments and a pro-Trump, isolationist wing in opposition.

First, send young Dutch, American, French, boys -and girls -to die on the Ukraine battlefields. Then see how the homefront reacts. And tell them that Ukraine and NATO have no chance in hell of beating Russia. But yes, I know, the propaganda never stops. And then you get surveys like this. Putin is the antichrist and Zelensky is Churchill. If you dumb people down enough, anything goes. But still, Rutte, Milley, Biden, Blinken et al are murdering young Ukrainians. You can’t blame Putin, or Russia for this. Your voters may believe it, but the world at large, outside of your propaganda field, will not.

These people want you to believe, and maybe they still believe it themselves, that Ukraine can beat Russia. Over the past 16 months, there has been nothing that points to that, Ukraine has lost anything and everything, but EU and NATO still want to send more weapons into the meat grinder. Weapons, but not their children. Why do 65% of Americans, and “leaders” like Rutte, Blinken, Macron, want the killing to continue? Because their voters have no problem with 400,000 dead young Ukrainians. And their media will blame everything on Putin. The same media tells them they will win. But there is no indication that this is even remotely realistic. Unfortunately, NATO doesn’t care about realistic: losing to Russia is not in their dictionary. Having a million Ukrainians killed, is.

 

NATO is the past. Its power has waned. The US alone spends more than 10 times more on its defense budget than Russia, but is lagging way behind in weapons development. And it’s not going to make up for that disadvantage anytime soon. Certainly not in time to turn the Ukraine conflict around. And still guys like Rutte and Milley want to send more tanks into the battlefield. These people need psychiatric assistance. As do the next tranches of Ukraine cannon fodder. What we, the collective west, are providing Ukraine with, is not a chance at winning a war, but a mind boggingly huge assisted suicide program. And we, NATO citizens, should ask ourselves if we want to be part of that. If you live in NATO/EU territory, this is now on your conscience. No escaping anymore. They speak and act in your name. You can no longer claim innocence.

How many more young Ukrainians are left for you to kill? The “400,000 dead young Ukrainians” number comes from US military veterans like Scott Ritter and Douglas Macgregor. Maybe it’s “only” 350,000. But that included all their most experienced and trained soldiers. Their replacements are nowhere near as good. How many of those? I’d guess 100,000, 200,000 at best. While Russia just finished properly training 300,000 over an 8-month period, Kiev picked up kids and 65-year olds from the street, gave them a 2-week crash course, and dumped them at a frontline.

But you know what’s the worst thing here, and that I haven’t even mentioned? Nobody on the US/NATO/Kiev side, when confronted with those numbers among Ukrainians, ever mentions peace talks. No-one. The reason is that they would have to admit Russia’s won and NATO lost. Not just Ukraine lost, but NATO. And that is unthinkable. Consider what that would mean for the close to $1 trillion a year US arms industry, Raytheon, Boeing etc. They would never -voluntarily- admit it. Hey, they make more profit than they have in decades… What’s another 100,000 Ukrainian assisted suicides? I grew up thinking that every human life matters.

 

 

 

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Jun 272023
 
 June 27, 2023  Posted by at 12:47 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – Desolation 1836

 

I’m still full of questions. Prigozhin and his men are now gathering 100 km from Kiev, instead of 200 km from Moscow. With Putin’s full approval. Lucky coincidence?

 

 

Andrew Korybko thinks he has a few answers. Again, fair enough.

 

Andrew Korybko:

The Wagner Chief Speaks

Prigozhin released an over ten-minute-long audio message on Telegram in which he shared his version of events from over the weekend. It can be listened to at his press service’s account here, while those who don’t understand Russian can read a rough automated translation here. Upon doing so, they’ll see that he predictably twisted the truth about his failed coup. In fact, one of the purposes behind his message was to deny that he had any such regime change intent, instead claiming that it was only just a protest.

Was Wagner Really Going To Be Fully Disbanded?

The Wagner chief started off by alleging that his group would have ceased to legally exist by 1 July after refusing to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry (DM) despite all of its accomplishments in advancing Russian interests across the world and especially in the course of the special operation. While that might have been the case in terms of the law, it’s doubtful that Russia would have fully disbanded the same fighting force that functions as the pillar of its African policy, which was explained here, here, and here.

Wagner members might have been prohibited from participating in the special operation and had their activities inside Russia restricted due to their group’s lack of legal status, but there are no grounds to believe that its African-based fighters would have been prevented from fulfilling their duties there. Considering the patriotism that characterizes most of their members, the vast majority would probably have redeployed to that continent in order to continue serving their country.

Prigozhin Admits To Russian Blood On His Hands

The next point that Prigozhin made was to claim that Wagner gathered their equipment ahead of time in anticipation of handing it all over to the DM in Rostov by 30 June in the event that a last-minute deal wasn’t reached to enable them to continue operating as before without signing contracts with the DM. He then claimed that the DM launched a surprise strike against them on Friday, resulting in the death of over 30 members, which is why the decision was made to march on Rostov and Moscow later that day.

None of the above can be independently confirmed, but the bombing was denied by both the DM and the FSB, for what it’s worth. A cynic might suspect that Prigozhin is just spinning a story to explain why Wagner gathered all that equipment in advance if it didn’t supposedly plan to carry out a coup. This narrative also presents his forces as acting out of self-defense, which is important when it comes to winning and retaining the population’s support, especially after what he soon thereafter admitted.

Prigozhin confirmed that his forces did indeed fire on the Russian Air Force exactly as was reported, which readers can learn more about in detail here if they aren’t already familiar, but said that they regretted it and only did so after bombs were dropped on them first. This detail discredits the popular conspiracy theory swirling around the Alt-Media Community claiming that the coup attempt was a false flag cooked up by President Putin, which some say was to secretly open a northern front against Ukraine.

There’s no way that he colluded with Prigozhin to kill their country’s pilots, especially since last weekend’s events attracted much more attention to Wagner than if its fighters quietly dispersed over the weeks and then gradually reassembled at a later date in Belarus and/or on Russia’s pre-2014 borders with Ukraine. It’s everyone’s right to believe whatever they want, but it’s beyond kooky for anyone to still insist on this after now knowing that Russian pilots were killed during the failed coup.

Why Wasn’t Wagner Stopped En Route To Moscow?

Moving on after debunking that ridiculous conspiracy theory, Prigozhin then claimed that his forces locked down and neutralized all military facilities along the route of their march to Moscow without killing anyone on the ground despite a few of their own suffering casualties. Like what he alleged about the DM bombing Wagner, this also can’t be independently confirmed but might be speculatively due to President Putin’s reluctance to have the military resort to force except as an absolute last resort.

Despite saying during his national address that “The Armed Forces and other government agencies have received the necessary orders” to have those involved in the events “punished” and “answer before the law”, those tasked with doing so could have been told to use their discretion when it comes to force. After all, the Russian leader also said during his address that “We will not allow [Russians killing Russians and brothers killing brothers] to happen again”, so it’s a credible possibility and not baseless conjecture.

In that scenario, those at the military facilities along that route might have decided not to resort to force to stop Wagner so long as that group didn’t fire first, instead calculating that it’s best to heed President Putin’s words as much as is realistically possible under those tense circumstances while waiting to see if the crisis will soon end on its own. As for Prigozhin’s next claim that his fighters knew the ultimate goal of their march and weren’t forced to participate in it, that might only be partially true too.

What Were Wagner’s Fighters Really Thinking?

Many might have truly thought that it was an “anti-corruption” campaign like their boss told them and didn’t hear President Putin’s national address until later since they reportedly had to hand over their cell phones before heading out. If what he said was true about their compatriots not stopping them along their route, especially for the reasons speculated above, then this impression would have persisted until they approached Moscow and realized that blood would definitely be shed if they didn’t back down.

At that moment, they’d have known that something was wrong and that the Armed Forces were willing to use force to oppose them, thus dispelling the illusion that they had the Russian leader’s tacit support for what they’d hitherto sincerely thought was their “anti-corruption” campaign. If Prigozhin didn’t intend to challenge the head of state, then he’d have called off their march the moment that the latter demanded this of him during his national address instead of defiantly continuing on to the capital.

This observation therefore contradicts the Wagner chief’s claim that this was just a protest aimed at bringing to justice those who he says allegedly bungled the special operation since Prigozhin already caught President Putin’s attention by the time of his speech yet still kept marching towards Moscow. Nevertheless, what he said regarding the support that his group received from some of the public is true since it’s backed up by video evidence, but all isn’t as simple as he makes it seem.

What Were Wagner’s Supporters In Rostov Really Thinking?

Anti-corruption causes and criticism of the military brass for their conduct of the special operation thus far are legitimately popular among a segment of the population, many of whom had up until this point assumed that Prigozhin had the support of people in the Presidential Administration. The very fact that he wasn’t apprehended or at least charged for violating the otherwise strictly enforced law prohibiting defamation of the Armed Forces was interpreted by them as evidence that he had powerful patrons.

Even after President Putin sharply condemned him for treasonously stabbing their country in the back due to his “Inflated ambitions and personal interests”, some might have thought that the Russian leader was a so-called “palace hostage” of the supposedly corrupt military and thus said this under duress. Placed in traditional historical terms, they could have imagined that he was “the good tsar surrounded by bad boyars who had to be freed by a good boyar for the sake of the country”.

The point is that it shouldn’t be assumed that all those in Rostov who publicly supported Prigozhin did so because they shared his thinly disguised intent to overthrow President Putin after he refused to make the personnel changes in the DM that were demanded of him. It should also be said that the number of people in that footage represents an insignificant proportion of the population, though as was earlier written, there’s also no denying that Prigozhin’s self-professed causes resonate with many more than that.

What Was The Real Reason Why Prigozhin Retreated?

What’s beyond dispute, however, is that practically everyone in the country regardless of their stance on this crisis was relieved that Prigozhin turned around after approaching Moscow and concluding that there was no way to continue his march without provoking enormous bloodshed. What he said about not wanting to spill any Russian blood isn’t true though since he himself earlier admitted in this same audio message that his side did indeed fire on the Russian Air Force, albeit out of self-defense he said.

Blood was therefore already spilled by his fighters regardless of their reason behind doing so, thus meaning that this explanation isn’t sincere and that he probably decided to turn around at that point since he thought that it would be a suicide mission to try to take the capital. The second explanation that he shared for this decision is that he’d already demonstrated his protest, which he insists was never intended to topple the government, though this also isn’t true either.

As was earlier written, he defiantly challenged the head of state by continuing onward after explicitly being told by him to stop, which leaves no doubt that his march had transformed into a regime change operation by that point even if one believes that it was only an “anti-corruption” campaign until then. In any case, he claims that this marked the moment when Belarusian President Lukashenko intervened to offer Wagner the option to continue legally operating by relocating to that allied country.

Can Wagner’s March Really Be Compared To The Special Operation?

In his closing remarks, Prigozhin said that this march exposed serious security problems in the country due to his force’s neutralization of all those military facilities along their route, though this was already accounted for in the analysis. The next part about them having traveled further during this march than the Russian Armed Forces did at the beginning of the special operation, and this supposedly proving that the latter could have ended right away if properly executed, is also questionable.

Even though it’s true that Wagner is universally regarded as an elite force that stands head and shoulders above their peers, they weren’t being fired at by their compatriots over the weekend, unlike the resistance that they’d have been expected to receive from their Ukrainian foes. This makes his comparison an inaccurate and manipulative one, especially when remembering that Kiev was able to muster enough meat to hold Wagner back from capturing Artyomovsk for months.

That’s not to imply that they’re equals since that battle ground down Ukraine’s capabilities and forced it to throw literally dozens of formations against that single one, but just that this example shows in hindsight that nobody should have expected a quick victory no matter how the special operation began. The point that he’s trying to make is obviously intended to score political points, redeem his reputation after last weekend’s failed coup, and also hammer home the harsh criticisms that he’s made of the DM.

Concluding Thoughts

Altogether, his first audio message since last weekend’s events saw him sticking to his demands for justice, still denying any intent to overthrow President Putin, and insisting that those pilots who his forces shot at and which reports claimed were killed had been targeted in self-defense. This fact-check proves that he’s twisting the truth in all regards, which is likely being done out of ego as well as the possibility that he still has some political ambitions that he hopes to revive sometime in the future.

 

 

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War

May 222023
 
 May 22, 2023  Posted by at 2:40 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  22 Responses »


Nicolas Poussin A Dance to the Music of Time 1634-36

 

 

I haven’t written articles for a while, but instead focused on the Debt Rattle news overviews. My focus has always been on conveying information in the best possible way, so you guys can make up your own mind, instead of me doing it for you. And it’s been hard to counter the MSM reporting, which does exactly that -make up people’s minds-, on Ukraine, with better sources. RT has been a great help. The west ban them because “propaganda”, but it’s clear who is really propaganda. They are a solid news operation, and I can look past that supposed propaganda part.

Anyway, it has made me only work harder over the past few months. And I hope I’ve done well. The fall of Artyomovsk seems a good moment to move towards original articles again. Not that I think MSM/NATO or all the “leaders” involved will stop their practices anytime soon. But at least they’ve been clearly beaten, even if you won’t see it reported in the western media. The world has changed, and we must change with it.

Note: If my writing is a bit rusty, please forgive me.

 

 

In Bakhmut/Artyomovsk, all of NATO, all 31 member nations, were defeated by a restaurant owner and a bunch of convicts, is how I saw someone describe it. That of course caricatures the situation somewhat (Wagner is well-organized), but it’s not that far off. And that spells a serious problem for NATO. All of those 31 members may have lots of control over their media, but in the end you can’t endlessly deny being defeated.

So what will NATO do now? They will double down, and then again. And at the end of the “doubling down road” lie nuclear weapons. Not Russian nukes, because as my friend Wayne wrote the other day, their high-precision hypersonic missiles make nukes look crude and primitive, Middle Ages territory. But NATO/US never developed such weapons. They spent 10+ times as much money on weapons, still do, and -comparatively – ended up with bows and arrows.

Nuclear bombs are good only to create widespread panic and destruction. But that includes your own destruction, because of Mutually Assured Destruction protocols. Which also go back almost as far as the bow and arrow. If you fire a nuclear missile, one very much like it will land on your head a few minutes later. End of story, end of you.

US/NATO, the “collective west”, the hegemon, has lost. And has missed the moment when that occurred. Because hegemon equals hubris. Look at what they’ve all still been saying, and you notice they can’t see, and can’t acknowledge, that -and how- the world has changed. Not just this weekend, and the 9 months before, in Artyomovsk. It’s the entire story of Ukraine: it illustrates how the West “lost it”.

The US plotted a coup and moved NATO’s borders east, and Russia reacted exactly how they said they would. No nukes, no nazis, no NATO. They got the last two, and know they can expect the first too. But still the west maintains Russia’s special operation was entirely unprovoked. Look, they’re not even listening anymore. They would like to negotiate and end all this, but negotiate about what? Putting AZOV back on the borders of the Donbass, so they can kill more Russians there? Not going to happen.

It’s not only about weaponry, though that plays a major role: the hegemon can no longer make its demands based on military might. It’s been surpassed. Nor can it make demands based on the dollar’s reserve currency status, and it caused that itself. Weaponization of the currency has backfired to the extent that de-dollarization has become a process that can no longer be halted.

The moment that Saudi prince MbS turned his back on “Joe Biden” is a milestone. Because once he did that, it was obvious many would follow. In central Asia, if you are Kazachstan or Uzbekistan, why on earth would you opt to go with G7/US/NATO instead of BRICS? Why go with the power that is waning, and not the one in ascendancy? Russia is your biggest neighbor, strongly connected to China which is building its BRI network in your region, and the nearby Arab states are about to join that network. Why would you link yourself to the G7? When you know all your neighbors do not?

Then there are the voices that say the US will push for a bigger and wider war, perhaps including American troops. First, because NATO is losing, and second, because it could mean American boots on the ground, and presidents don’t lose elections in wartime. I’ve said before, I would expect them to go with Polish troops first, possibly on Polish territory too. But the Polish don’t appear all that eager anymore. And neither would any other European NATO country. German and French and Dutch troops are in no shape for war, and in the US over 70% of potential troops are grossly overweight and/or handicapped in some other way.

Ukraine had perhaps the best boots on the ground force in Europe, financed and trained since 2014 by NATO, and they lost to a caterer and a loose group of hired hands. You’re not going to win that. Your only option is long distance weapons, missiles, planes, you name it. But NATO has no advantage in that over Russia. To put it mildly.

The sole thing that’s in your favor is that Russia doesn’t seek to destroy you. They want to live in peace and trade with you. Same thing for China. NATO equals unipolar. But the world has moved towards multipolar. Ergo, NATO is obsolete. Ukraine will never reconquer its “lost” territories, and Zelensky will move to some property in Italy or Florida, never to be heard from again, unless perhaps in his obituary. The deaths of some 300,000 of his countrymen will be on his conscience.

But also on that of all the “leaders” who have sent their second-hand armory to Kiev. They are just as responsible for all those deaths. The world has changed a lot in the past few years, and ignorance is no excuse if you are a “leader”, or a “Joe Biden”. Not even if you’re “just” a voter or reader. Those deaths will be on your head when you go see St. Peter at the gate.

PS: Don’t be surprised if “Joe Biden” sends US boots on the ground anyway. No hegemon has ever given up power lightly. That part of the road is yours, US and EU voters. You may have to fill up the streets like you’ve never seen. The rest, the majority, of the world will be waiting to see if you do or not. They’re prepared for either of the two options.

 

 

 

 

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Apr 062023
 
 April 6, 2023  Posted by at 2:21 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  2 Responses »


John Singer Sargent The moraine 1908

Andrew Korybko:

 

Symbolism & Substance

Zelensky’s first state trip to Poland since the start of Russia’s special operation last year took place earlier this week, during which time he was awarded with his host country’s highest civilian honor, the Order of the White Eagle. His visit occurred at a crucial moment in the NATO-Russian proxy war, which adds an element of intrigue to it, as does its symbolism. The present piece will thus analyze the aforesaid in order to better understand the importance of Zelensky’s latest trip.
 

The Latest Military-Strategic Dynamics

To begin with, the NATO chief declared in mid-February that his bloc is in a so-called “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia, one which Moscow is winning as evidenced by its continued military resilience and Zelensky’s remark late last month about running out of ammunition. Wagner founder Prigozhin also recently claimed victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk/“Bakhmut” after his group captured that city’s administrative center, which prompted a policy reversal from the Ukrainian leader.

Back in late February, he said that his forces might abandon that area if their losses there become unreasonable, but then he told CNN last month that losing that city might result in Russia rolling through the rest of Donbass. Zelensky then built upon this prediction to warn just a little more than a week ago that he’ll be pressured at home and abroad to “compromise” with Moscow if that happens, but now he’s snapped back to his prior position after preconditioning the public to expect a possible withdrawal.

It remains to be seen what’ll ultimately happen, but there’s no doubt that the military-strategic dynamics favor Russia. This isn’t wishful thinking either but is predicated on the damning details contained in the Washington Post’s report from the middle of last month about how poorly Kiev’s forces are faring. With this larger context in mind, it’s clear that Zelensky’s latest trip to Poland truly took place at a crucial moment in this conflict.
 

The De Facto Polish-Ukrainian Confederation

As for the symbolism, Poland is among Ukraine’s top allies, so much so that those two declared their mutual intent last May during President Duda’s visit to Kiev at the time to eventually remove all borders between them. This resulted in them gradually merging into a de facto confederation, which advances Poland’s geopolitical project of restoring its lost commonwealth in pursuit of its grand strategic goal of once again becoming a Great Power.

Zelensky’s reaffirmation of their mutual intent to remove all borders between them during his latest trip to Poland extends credence to this assessment, as does a neoconservative lobbyist’s push for that geopolitical project in a recent article for the influential Foreign Policy magazine. With a view towards legitimizing Ukraine’s status as his country’s de facto protectorate, Duda declared that Warsaw is seeking additional security guarantees for its neighbor ahead of this summer’s next NATO summit.
 

Polish-Ukrainian Problems

For as much as those two want to gradually merge their countries into a de facto confederation, there still remain some very serious obstacles in their way. For starters, there’s obviously the question of financing this geopolitical project, which Poland can ill afford. Second, Poles are disgusted with Ukraine’s glorification of Hitler’s fascist genocidal collaborator, Bandera. The more that the Polish state tolerates this in spite of its occasional rhetoric in defense of historical truth, the angrier that average Poles get.

Building upon the aforementioned observation, the third challenge to this geopolitical project is rising anti-establishment sentiment in Poland, which could lead to the Confederation party winning enough votes during this fall’s elections that the ruling party is forced to form a governing coalition with them. That outcome could throw a wrench in these plans, thus indefinitely delaying their implementation, especially if Confederation finds a way to block the requisite funding and/or security guarantees.
 

The Prospects Of A Polish Military Intervention

There’s still plenty that can still happen before the next elections, however, including a Polish military intervention in Ukraine. Its Ambassador to France thundered late last month that “If Ukraine fails to defend its independence, we will have no choice but to enter the conflict. Our fundamental values, which are the cornerstone of our civilisation, our culture will be in fundamental danger, so we don’t have a choice.” Even though the embassy said his words were decontextualized, the intent was clear.

Russia has been warning about this scenario for quite a while already, which could represent an unprecedented escalation in NATO’s proxy war against it by dint of Poland being an official member of that bloc whose countries have mutual defense obligations to one another. A Polish intervention could therefore serve as a tripwire for that anti-Russian alliance to formalize its role in this conflict, especially in the event that Poland announces its “unification” with Ukraine and brings it under their umbrella.

While this sequence of events remains speculative, it’s nevertheless founded on a factual basis as was explained thus far in this piece, especially considering the disadvantageous military-strategic dynamics that cast a cloud over Zelensky’s latest trip to Poland. Returning to those and keeping in mind the words of the Polish Ambassador to France as well as these two countries’ leaders reaffirming their desire to remove all borders between them, observers shouldn’t discount the possibility that this transpires.
 

Scenario Variables

In fact, it could very well unfold prior to the next elections in fall should Russia’s capture of Artyomovsk lead to it rolling through the rest of Donbass like Zelensky earlier predicted might happen, which could prompt Poland to intervene in accordance with the conditions that its Ambassador to France stipulated. The only variables that could credibly offset this scenario are Russia continuing to only make piecemeal progress on the ground or Kiev agreeing to a ceasefire with Moscow prior to resuming peace talks.

The first’s chances could be strengthened by a surge of modern Western weapons to Ukraine while the second’s could be reduced by Poland promising whatever support Kiev requires in order to not feel forced by circumstances into negotiating with Russia. Therein lies the likely purpose behind Zelensky’s latest trip to Poland, namely to explore exactly what Warsaw could provide in this respect so as to better assess whether it’s worth seriously considering during this crucial moment in the conflict.
 

Reassessing Duda’s Demand To NATO

Duda implied during an interview with Le Figaro in early February that he feared France might try to broker a ceasefire, the scenario of which could be advanced by Macron’s ongoing trip to China, whose 12-point peace plan was praised by President Putin during his counterpart’s visit to Moscow last month. The political dynamics of this conflict are therefore just as disadvantageous from Kiev’s and Warsaw’s shared perspective as the military-strategic ones since they both point to an impending ceasefire.

This observation adds further context to Duda’s demand that NATO give Ukraine more security guarantees. His statement can now be interpreted as either hinting at a forthcoming Polish military intervention (irrespective of whether this is preceded by formalizing their confederation) or suggesting that these could soon be extended to reassure Kiev of that bloc’s enduring support in the event that it’s forced by circumstances into agreeing to a ceasefire with Russia (regardless of who might mediate it).
 

Ukraine’s Upcoming Counteroffensive

Duda’s desire for this to be done sometime in the next three months before early July’s NATO summit places a concrete deadline on his demand, which coincides with Kiev’s expected counteroffensive. About that, the Washington Post’s earlier cited report tempered expectations about its success, as did the latest assessment from the former commander of the Polish Land Forces. Waldemar Skrzypczak told leading Polish media that Ukraine is “not ready” for this and that “Now it’s time for politicians.”

Cynics who might claim that this retired official doesn’t have accurate information about the conflict’s military-strategic dynamics should be reminded of what incumbent Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces General Rajmund Andrzejczak told publicly financed media in late January. He warned that time is running out for Kiev, confirmed that Russia’s military might still remains formidable, and expressed serious concern that Ukraine could ultimately be defeated.

Despite this dire analysis from Poland’s top military official, who’s indisputably in a position to receive the most up-to-date classified information about the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, Kiev will probably still attempt its planned counteroffensive anyhow. That will in turn influence whether Poland formalizes their de facto confederation and/or militarily intervenes in its support, exactly which security guarantees NATO might give Kiev, and whether a ceasefire is reached before the bloc’s summer summit.
 

Concluding Thoughts

This insight leads to the conclusion that Zelensky’s latest trip to Poland was super significant since it’s intended to shape the course of the NATO-Russian proxy war over the next three months. Warsaw’s role in forthcoming events will powerfully influence what Kiev does during this crucial moment in that conflict, hence the timing with which the Ukrainian leader decided to meet with his counterpart. For as carefully as Zelensky is planning everything, however, he might still fail in reversing his side’s fortunes.

 

 

 

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Jan 102023
 
 January 10, 2023  Posted by at 3:14 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  18 Responses »


John Koch Conversation 1962

 

 

I don’t really like to do predictions, not without tea leaves and crystal balls, but I do have one. My prediction is that NATO will -try to- expand/widen/deepen the Ukraine conflict in 2023, and not just a little. They have to, because Ukraine as a theater is failing, no matter how much additional weaponry they import into it. And because Ukraine is running out of -under 65- boots on the ground.

Next step will be to actively involve the NATO members who despise Russia most. Ergo: the Baltic States. Problem with that is there’s not a lot of people there. But it’s just a hop across the border from Lithuania to Poland. And Poland is a whole different story. And, like the Baltics, but unlike Ukraine, a NATO member.

Here’s NATO’s own numbers: Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014-2022)

 

Poland has the weaponry, and the trained personnel. No threat to Russia, but you could sell is as such. Poland is just what Washington likes. And Raytheon, Northrop etc. The US cannot send US troops into the theater. And neither can Western Europe. Unpalatable. Countries like Germany, France and Holland won’t even think about sending troops. NATO depends on eastern European cannon fodder. Western Europe, like the US, will only send their second hand armoury. But not so, Poland. Here’s from Politico, November 21 2022:

 

Meet Europe’s Coming Military Superpower: Poland

Poland’s paranoia about Russia prompted it to eschew the prevailing Zeitgeist across much of Europe that conventional warfare was a thing of the past. Instead, it is building what are now on track to become the EU’s heftiest land forces. “The Polish army must be so powerful that it does not have to fight due to its strength alone,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on the eve of Poland’s independence day. It’s a shift that has resonated with Poland’s indispensable ally.

“Poland has become our most important partner in continental Europe,” a senior U.S. Army official in Europe said, citing the crucial role Poland has played in supporting Ukraine and in shoring up NATO defenses in the Baltics. While Germany, traditionally America’s key ally in the region, remains a linchpin as a logistical hub, Berlin’s endless debates over how to resurrect its military and lack of a strategic culture have hampered its effectiveness as a partner, the official said. As Germany continues to debate the details of what it calls the “Zeitenwende,” or strategic turning point triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland is already making substantial investments.

Warsaw has said it will raise its target defense spending from 2.4% of GDP to 5%. Meanwhile, Germany, which spent about 1.5% of GDP on defense last year, is debating whether it can maintain NATO’s 2% goal after it exhausts a €100 billion defense investment fund it approved earlier this year. Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak pledged in July that his country would have “the most powerful land forces in Europe.” It’s well on its way. Poland already has more tanks and howitzers than Germany and is on course to have a much larger army, with a target of 300,000 troops by 2035, compared with Germany’s current 170,000.

Today, Poland’s military is about 150,000 strong, with 30,000 belonging to a new territorial defense force set up in 2017. These are weekend soldiers who undergo 16 days of training followed up by refresher courses. They were initially seen as a bit of a joke, but Ukraine’s success in using mobile militia equipped with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles now makes the idea seem much more sensible. “Today, those doubts have disappeared,” Blaszczak said during a recent swearing-in ceremony for new territorial troops.

Unlike Germany, which struggles to attract new troops, Poland’s recruiting drive is gaining attention. “The Poles have a much more positive attitude towards their military than Germany because they had to fight for their freedom,” said Gustav Gressel, a former Austrian military officer and security scholar now with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In military circles no one questions the quality of the Polish army.”

We would do well to see all this in the light of what Julian Assange said about Afghanistan in 2011. NATO wants a forever war, not a successful one.

 

 

NATO, the US and the rich part of Europe, have nothing to lose. They send plenty of mostly useless weapons into the Ukraine theater, but as long as there are no coffins arriving at their (air)ports, their people won’t complain. On the contrary, their media make sure that they keep cheering it all on. While making sure it remains murky how much it exactly costs them.

I found this very peculiar, through Andrew Korybko:

Top Ukrainian & Former US Officials Are Panicking That $100 Billion In Aid Isn’t Enough

Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK Vadim Prystaiko [..] telling Newsweek: “The West now has a unique chance. There are not many nations in the world who would allow themselves to sacrifice so many lives, territories and decades of development for the purpose of defeating the archenemy…This is what I mean: All hands on deck, every single thing we can spare to help Ukraine win.”

You have a unique chance to have our people shot to bits. We will be happy to sacrifice them for your goals. Just keep giving us weapons, that’s all you have to do. Note the use of the term “archenemy”. For a country whose language and culture is still very much alive for perhaps more than half of Ukrainians. The 2014 US coup unseated a president elected by a majority of the population.

 

For some reason the US dragged two of their biggest old warmongers out of their respective proverbial basements: former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Who co-wrote this in the WaPo:

Time Is Not On Ukraine’s Side

Under current circumstances, any negotiated cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position to resume their invasion whenever they are ready. That is unacceptable. The only way to avoid such a scenario is for the United States and its allies to urgently provide Ukraine with a dramatic increase in military supplies and capability — sufficient to deter a renewed Russian offensive and to enable Ukraine to push back Russian forces in the east and south.


Congress has provided enough money to pay for such reinforcement; what is needed now are decisions by the United States and its allies to provide the Ukrainians the additional military equipment they need — above all, mobile armor. The U.S. agreement Thursday to provide Bradley Fighting Vehicles is commendable, if overdue. Because there are serious logistical challenges associated with sending American Abrams heavy tanks, Germany and other allies should fill this need. NATO members also should provide the Ukrainians with longer-range missiles, advanced drones, significant ammunition stocks (including artillery shells), more reconnaissance and surveillance capability, and other equipment. These capabilities are needed in weeks, not months.

It’s starting to look like a desperate push. But it will come. Much stronger than today. Desperation has that kind of effect. The suffering will be in Ukraine and soon likely in Poland and Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia. Western Europe will pay through higher food- and energy prices. The US elites will be sitting pretty.

There is zero doubt that we will have to come back to this, a lot, in the near future. But that’s sort of what you do with predictions. They foretell actual events and conversations.

 

Gonzalo Lira talked about these things back in November 2022:

 

To be continued. As long as the people in the west remain oblivious to their own destiny, fate, reality. We are all used to having unipolar control of the world. But those times are over.

 

 

 

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Jan 072023
 
 January 7, 2023  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  89 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Interieur au Pot de Fleurs 1953

 

Ukraine On ‘NATO Mission’ – Defense Minister (RT)
Ukrainian Political Scientist: Putin Needs Truce To Prepare New Offensive (Az.)
US To Send Ukraine Dozens Of Bradleys In $2.85b Aid Package (RT)
US To Arm Kiev With Sea Sparrows – Politico (RT)
WWIII HAS BEGUN: Medvedev Wants Hypersonic Missiles Near Washington (Celente)
McCarthy Elected House Speaker After Last-minute Call From Trump To Gaetz (PM)
Senators Make New Demand Regarding FBI, Hunter Biden, Obama White House (CB)
2 Yrs After Jan. 6: 1,000 Arrests; Zero ‘Insurrection’ Charges (Attkisson)
Jan. 6 Comm. Releases Social Security Numbers Of Trump Officials, Allies (Fox)
Adam Schiff’s Assault on the First Amendment (BB)
Ted Cruz Slams Joe Biden for Turning Pharmacies Into Abortion Centers (LN)
Biden Spokeswoman Blames Trump Ahead Of Border Visit (Fox)
Repentance (Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

VSRF

 

 

 

 

‘Unavoidably Unsafe’
https://twitter.com/i/status/1610373150767824901

 

 

Disturbing trend

 

 

 

 

 

 

What? Has NATO denounced this? Since when can NATO not do its own business?

Ukraine On ‘NATO Mission’ – Defense Minister (RT)

Kiev is shedding blood to carry out the mission NATO set for itself and expects the “civilized West” to provide weapons and ammunition in return, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov has said in an interview for a domestic TV channel. Appearing on the 1+1 network’s TSN channel on Thursday evening, Reznikov pointed out that at the Madrid summit last summer, NATO declared Russia the greatest threat to the US-led bloc. “Today, Ukraine is addressing that threat. We’re carrying out NATO’s mission today, without shedding their blood. We shed our blood, so we expect them to provide weapons,” he said.

Reznikov also claimed that his NATO colleagues have told him, both in conversations and via text messages, that Ukraine is the “shield of civilization” and “defending the entire civilized world, the entire West.” Ukrainian officials, from President Vladimir Zelensky on down, routinely make public appeals for tanks, missiles, artillery and ammunition. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told the General Staff in December that Moscow was de facto fighting the collective West. By his estimates, the government in Kiev has received almost $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and other supplies in 2022 alone. Reznikov has led that effort, boasting to the US outlet Politico in October that he had figured out the Pentagon’s political process. His goal, he said, was to keep raising the bar until Ukraine received main battle tanks.

While that particular threshold has yet to be crossed, on Friday Washington announced the delivery of 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, the most modern armor sent to Kiev so far, as part of a $3 billion weapons package. Earlier this week, France pledged a number of wheeled ‘light tanks’ as well. These shipments are intended to replace Ukraine’s battlefield losses. Last month, Kiev’s top general Valery Zaluzhny told The Economist he would need 300 more tanks, up to 700 infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 howitzers to conduct offensive operations. This is more than the number of such vehicles in British or German inventory. Moscow insists that Western weapon deliveries only serve to prolong the conflict, and has repeatedly warned Ukraine’s backers that this could result in an all-out military confrontation between Russia and NATO.

Read more …

Yeah, Putin needs just 36 hours for that.

Ukrainian Political Scientist: Putin Needs Truce To Prepare New Offensive (Az.)

On January 5, Vladimir Putin instructed the Russian Defense Ministry to introduce a ceasefire along the entire line of contact from 12:00 on January 6 to 24:00 on January 7. Kyiv rejected this proposal, calling it a cover and declaring Russia’s intention to bring equipment, ammunition and military personnel closer to the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ukrainian political scientist believes that Vladimir Putin needs this truce in order to prepare a new offensive in Ukraine by February-March. “Russia is now short of shells, and for them this truce was necessary,” Reichel said. According to him, Russia now has only one option for a mediator in the person of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, because Western leaders will not talk with Putin: “Negotiations with China made it clear that the country wants to distance itself from the conflict without providing special support either to Russia or to Ukraine.


India is not up to the war in Ukraine now, it already has so many internal and external problems with Pakistan and China. Therefore, Erdogan is now the only person with whom Moscow can talk and whom Kyiv can listen to. Using his mediating experience Turkiye has offered Russia the idea of a truce, thereby taking a step towards future negotiations, in which Putin is very interested,” he added. According to the expert, it was immediately obvious that Kyiv would not agree to a truce. “This truce is nothing but a political cover, Ukraine does not need it,” he said. Yuri Reichel explains this by the fact that any truce is beneficial for Russia, which is now trying to accumulate certain reserves in the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia in order to prevent a possible Ukrainian offensive, which, according to Western and Ukrainian experts, is being prepared in February-March.

Read more …

Do US taxpayers now pay twice for these obsolete machines?

US To Send Ukraine Dozens Of Bradleys In $2.85b Aid Package (RT)

The U.S. will send Ukraine nearly $3 billion in military aid, in a massive new package that will for the first time include several dozen Bradley fighting vehicles, U.S. officials said Thursday, in the Biden administration’s latest step to send increasingly lethal and powerful weapons to help Ukraine beat back Russian forces, according to AP. European allies also stepped up their weapons commitments. Germany announced it will provide armored personnel carriers and a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine, and France said it will soon hold talks to arrange for the delivery of armored combat vehicles.


All of the announcements, however, fall short of sending heavier battle tanks, which are more complex to use and have a longer-range gun. The Bradley, an armored carrier used to transport troops to combat, is not a tank but is known as a “tank-killer” because of the anti-tank missile it can fire. The latest U.S. aid — totaling about $2.85 billion and about 50 Bradleys — is the largest in a series of packages of military equipment that the Pentagon has pulled from its stockpiles to send to Ukraine. It is aimed at getting as much to the Ukrainian forces as possible during the winter months, before spring sets in and an expected increase in fighting begins.

Read more …

“..fitting US-made munitions onto Soviet-made launchers suggests heavy US involvement in such an upgrade..”

US To Arm Kiev With Sea Sparrows – Politico (RT)

The US may supply Ukraine with RIM-7 Sea Sparrow short-range anti-aircraft missiles, Politico reported on Thursday, citing unnamed officials. The missiles are expected to be fitted onto Soviet-made Buk launchers in an attempt to mitigate a shortage of munitions for the systems remaining in Kiev’s inventory. The missiles, developed in the early 1960s, are expected to be included in a new upcoming military aid package to prop up Ukraine in the ongoing conflict with Russia. “The package will for the first time include radar-guided Sea Sparrow anti-air missiles, which can be launched from the sea or on land to intercept aircraft or cruise missiles. In a bit of battlefield innovation, the Ukrainian military has managed to tweak its existing Soviet-era Buk launchers to fire the Sea Sparrow,” the outlet wrote, citing “two people familiar with the matter.”

Politico did not explain how Kiev came up with this “battlefield innovation,” but given that Ukraine has never been in possession of RIM-7 missiles, fitting US-made munitions onto Soviet-made launchers suggests heavy US involvement in such an upgrade. The missiles in question had previously been successfully fitted onto the Kub anti-aircraft launchers, the predecessor of the Buk system, in a collaboration between Raytheon and the Polish defense manufacturer WZU Sa. The upgrade to Soviet-made launchers was first unveiled in the early 2010s.

The inclusion of unspecified “surface-to-air” missiles into the new massive $3 billion aid package for Ukraine was confirmed by White House officials during a news briefing on Friday. In recent months, Western backers of Kiev have intensified their efforts to bolster Kiev’s anti-aircraft defenses, struggling to deal with a ramped-up bombing campaign against critical Ukrainian infrastructure launched by Moscow in the aftermath of the Crimean Bridge blast. Recent deliveries to Ukraine have included US-made short-range NASAMS systems, German IRIS-T air defense systems, while at least one battery of the US Patriot system, the backbone of NATO’s anti-aircraft defense, is expected to be transferred to Kiev in the near future.

Read more …

Seems a bit overdone.

WWIII HAS BEGUN: Medvedev Wants Hypersonic Missiles Near Washington (Celente)

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s national security council, on Thursday called for Moscow’s hypersonic Zircon missiles to be placed about 100 miles off of the coast of the U.S. in retaliation for Washington’s support of Ukraine. He called for these missiles to be in close striking distance to Washington, D.C. and called them a New Year gift. Business Insider reported that the Kremlin announced Wednesday that it will sail the Admiral Gorshkov warship armed with the Zircons “on a long-range voyage that would pass through the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean Sea.” The ship is one of Russia’s most advanced warships. In 2019, the ship docked at a Havana, Cuba, the port.


The AP reported at the time: All of the Russian naval missions to Cuba have been seen as a projection of military power close to U.S. shores, although neither Cuba nor Russian have described them as anything other than routine. His threat came after a U.S. embassy video emerged that supported Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine, Reuters reported. We reported in May that Moscow said it successfully fired its Zircon from a warship in the Barents Sea that traveled 625 miles and hit its target in the White Sea. The missile can reportedly travel nine times the speed of sound. In April, Russia also successfully test fired its new Sarmat superheavy Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that can reportedly deploy 10 or more nuclear warheads on each missile.

Read more …

Theater.

McCarthy Elected House Speaker After Last-minute Call From Trump To Gaetz (PM)

California Rep. Kevin McCarthy won a late night vote to become Speaker of the House on Friday night after Donald Trump called Matt Gaetz, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to The Post Millennial. Gaetz was leading the charge to oppose McCarthy along with Rep Lauren Boebert, and had opposed McCarthy in nearly every vote since Monday. This after McCarthy made major concessions to the 20 GOP holdouts who spent the week vocally opposing his leadership. Those concessions, however, were not as key as the head of the MAGA movement insisting its members stop rejecting the victory of a GOP-led House.


The final vote saw the hold-outs Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Crane, Good and Rosenthal not stand in the way of McCarthy’s leadership This after a vote earlier on Friday saw the flip of 14 in the GOP who had been consistently voting against his speakership. Florida’s freshman Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna posted some of the concessions made by McCarthy. She had offered her vote for McCarthy on Friday, making a note in the House of the successful negotiations between the Trump-backed speaker hopeful from California and the MAGA contingent.

Read more …

What investigations will we see?

Senators Make New Demand Regarding FBI, Hunter Biden, Obama White House (CB)

Two GOP senators who have been investigating alleged Biden family corruption for years have stepped up their efforts. After Facebook and Twitter suppressed, to an extent, explosive revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, Republican Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin want more answers. Grassley and Johnson have sent a letter to Zuckerberg noting that in October 2020, “when the New York Post published articles based on evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop, many news and social media organizations inappropriately rushed to censor and discredit the initial reporting and falsely labeled it as ‘disinformation.’” Mainstream media outlets have finally admitted that the information gleaned from the laptop was not Russian disinformation but was in fact real.

“You recently appeared to indicate that the reason why Facebook made the unwise decision to censor articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop was based on an alert from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the senators wrote. Whistleblowers have also alleged to Senator Johnson that local FBI leadership instructed its employees not to look at the Hunter Biden laptop immediately after the FBI had obtained it,” the senators noted further, going on to say that Americans “deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden.” “Congress and the American people require clarity with respect to the extent the FBI communicated with Facebook during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden-related information,” they added.

Expected incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan believes there’s been a seismic shift regarding the ongoing federal investigation of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The Ohio Republican suggested “something is up” with the probe because of a new interest in the story by many of the same media outlets that initially dismissed reports of corruption evidence stemming from materials and emails obtained from a laptop he reportedly abandoned at a computer repair store in Delaware in 2019. “It sure looks like Joe Biden was involved,” Jordan added. “So, my, how this story has changed. And now, we find out these text messages and emails that link the entire family, not just Hunter and Joe and — but also uncle, the — Joe’s brother, James Biden, is involved in this as well.”

Read more …

“..there was no evidence proving that Byrd did not fear that Babbitt could kill him..”

2 Yrs After Jan. 6: 1,000 Arrests; Zero ‘Insurrection’ Charges (Attkisson)

Two years after the January 6 pro-Trump rally and Capitol riots, the Dept. of Justice has charged nearly 1,000 people with crimes. However, nobody has been formally accused of “sedition,” “treason,” or “insurrection,” according to officials. Sedition is defined as: Conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch. Insurrection is defined as: A violent uprising against a government or authority. Treason is defined as: Betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies. The closest related charge made is “seditious conspiracy,” which is planning or plotting with at least one other person to incite rebellion against the authority; not necessarily, personally, committing an act of sedition.

Several suspects pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. At least one of them, a member of the “Oath Keepers” group, was not present at the US Capitol on January 6. To date, it is inaccurate and arguably libelous to refer to January 6 defendants as “insurrectionists.” Most of the defendants, approximately 860, are charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds. Typically, when Congress is conducting business on the House or Senate floor, the public has a right to enter the US Capitol and watch the proceedings. However, members of the public were blocked from attending on January 6, and there would not have been space for the many thousands to observe in the normal gallery seats. So far, the Dept. of Justice reports, about 192 people have been sentenced to jail or prison.

Officials say 52 people have pleaded guilty to federal charges of assaulting law enforcement officers. The only person shot at the US Capitol on January 6 was an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt. The US Capitol Police officer who killed her, Lt. Michael Byrd, was not charged with a crime. Officials kept his identity secret for weeks while they investigated the shooting. Prosecutors eventually found there was no evidence proving that Byrd did not fear that Babbitt could kill him. A shooting by an officer in fear of his life is typically considered to be justified. In an interview, Byrd claimed he’d “saved countless lives” by killing Babbitt, even though Babbitt was unarmed, and there was no evidence she attacked or intended to attack anyone.

July 6th
https://twitter.com/i/status/1611491464537862144

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“..inadvertently..”

Jan. 6 Comm. Releases Social Security Numbers Of Trump Officials, Allies (Fox)

When the House Jan. 6 committee released hundreds of documents from its investigation online at the end of the year, it inadvertently made public nearly 2,000 Social Security numbers belonging to high-profile individuals who visited the White House in December 2020, according to a report. The Washington Post reported Friday that the leaked Social Security information was included in a spreadsheet buried within the “massive cache” of records from the committee’s work. Social Security numbers belonging to at least three members of Trump’s cabinet, a few Republican governors, and several Trump associates were reportedly compromised. The data was part of the White House visitor logs published by the committee.


While many Social Security numbers in the logs were redacted, the Post reported that around 1,900 of them were not. The Government Publishing Office (GPO), which was responsible for publishing the file, does not appear to have notified any of the individuals whose private information was released, the report said. Those whose Social Security information was made public include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) and her family, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Others include an unnamed federal district court judge and a federal appeals court judge, at least half a dozen people who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, and a lawyer who represented another witness before the committee, the Post reported.

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“..Sperry’s reporting was never refuted..”

Adam Schiff’s Assault on the First Amendment (BB)

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) violated the First Amendment and, arguably, his oath to uphold the Constitution in 2020 when his office demanded that Twitter suspend the account of Paul Sperry, an investigative journalist. Sperry happens to be the journalist who reported in 2019 that the “whistleblower” who worked with Schiff to engineer the impeachment investigation against President Donald Trump was Eric Ciamarella, a CIA analyst who had worked at the White House. Though Democrats convinced the media and Silicon Valley to suppress the story, Sperry’s reporting was never refuted, and the article remains live at RealClearInvestigations today.

This week, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi revealed in the “Twitter Files” that Schiff’s office at the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee sent a list of requests to Twitter, including that it suspend Sperry. Schiff claimed, without evidence, that Sperry was spreading “QAnon conspiracy theories.” (Sperry denies he has ever done so, anywhere.) Twitter declined that request, but suspended Sperry in 2022 with no explanation. The attempt by any member of Congress to suppress the freedom of expression of a journalist is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which specifically restricts Congress from interfering in a free press. That violation is even more egregious when perpetrated by a congressional leader with unique access to secret information, and who implies that he has evidence no one else does and is acting to protect national security.

Schiff, who is now considering a run for U.S. Senate, is a frequent guest on mainstream media news programs, who have given him wide latitude for years to promote unfounded claims, such as the “Russia collusion” hoax. These journalists, who described Trump as a threat to press freedom merely for insulting the media, have a professional and ethical duty to demand that Schiff explain why he thought he could censor any journalist. It is also worth revisiting Schiff’s egregious record on civil rights in general. Last year, this author outlined five reasons that a new Republican-run Congress should subpoena Schiff — as he has subpoenaed so many others.

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“This decision was not made with the wellbeing and health of women in mind..”

Ted Cruz Slams Joe Biden for Turning Pharmacies Into Abortion Centers (LN)

Senator Ted Cruz, a longtime pro-life Texas senator, is not happy with Joe Biden’s recent ruling from his FDA that essentially turns pharmacies into abortion centers. As LifeNews reported, the FDA will allow pharmacies to sell the dangerous abortion drug that has killed millions of babies and injured thousands of women. Previously, mifepristone could only be dispensed by clinics, medical offices, and hospitals or under the supervision of a licensed physician. Following the decision, Walgreens and CVS announced they will sell the abortion drug that has killed millions of babies. Cruz slammed the decision, saying that not only will it expand abortions that kill babies, it will put women’s health at risk because the mifepristone abortion pill has killed at least dozens of women and injured countless thousands more.


“This decision was not made with the wellbeing and health of women in mind,” he said. “We should all be able to recognize that these pills can cause very serious side-effects, and should never be taken without medical supervision.” Cruz continued: “This is a reckless decision that puts the lives of women and girls in Texas and America in danger in order to push a pro-abortion agenda. This decision is not based on science, but on radical politics, and I am deeply disappointed by the callousness of the FDA.” The FDA has already lifted its in-person requirement for a doctor visit which is a medical necessity because taking the abortion pill in a variety of situations such as an ectopic pregnancy can be fatal for women. The decision will set up the ability of customers to purchase the abortion pill via teleconference — denying women the doctor’s visit they should be getting to avoid potential death or major complications.

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After two years of absence…

Biden Spokeswoman Blames Trump Ahead Of Border Visit (Fox)

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday blamed the previous administration for the immigration crisis facing the Biden administration, accusing Republicans of making the problem worse by opposing Democratic proposals for comprehensive immigration reform. Ahead of President Biden’s first visit to the southern border as president, Jean-Pierre told reporters that immigration reform is a “high priority” for the administration and that Biden is looking for Congress to act in the face of historic rates of illegal immigration overwhelming resources at the border.

“The president inherited a mess because of what the last administration did. We inherited a mess. And, you know, Republicans in Congress made it worse by blocking comprehensive immigration reform,” Jean-Pierre said at the daily White House press briefing. “And so what you’re seeing from this president is he’s acting. He’s acting to protect, to continue to protect the border, secure the border, and also deal with irregular migration.” Biden announced several changes to his immigration policies Thursday in a major speech from the White House. His speech came after more than 2.3 million migrant encounters were reported in FY 2022, breaking the historic 1.7 million record encountered in FY 2021.

So far in FY 2023, which began in October, the first two months have outpaced the same period last year — with 233,740 encounters in November, compared to 174,845 in 2021 and 73,994 in 2020. To address this crisis, Biden will expand a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelan nationals to include Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans, allowing some 30,000 individuals per month from those countries to be paroled into the U.S. for a two-year period if they meet certain conditions. Those who attempt to cross the border illegally will be ineligible for the program.

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“..Something will emergently replace this monster we call “health care.”

Repentance (Kunstler)

And what are they going to do now? Pretend that none of this is happening? Continue to demonize, discredit, and punish the few doctors who won’t pretend? My PC doc doubles as Chief Health Officer of his group practice. He’s fired doctors and others on the staff who refused to take the shots his company mandated. He’s dishonored his Hippocratic oath. He’s in mid-life with, one would assume ordinarily, many working years ahead of him. The information about vaccine deaths and disabilities is going to get worse, and his own behavior around the crisis is going to look worse, probably even to himself. There are hundreds of thousands of doctors like him. As of now, early 2023, there is no general movement among them to explain or apologize for their actions. What will happen?

I’ll tell you what will happen: medicine as we’ve known it is going to collapse, along with most other activities in our society. Apart from ethical offenses against the public in the single instance of the Covid-19 emergency, doctors and their administrative cohorts have stealthily surrendered to a racketeering business model that had already badly damaged the practice of medicine before Covid-19 came on the scene. Remember: as a general principle, organisms and systems often assume their greatest size just before the go extinct or fail. That’s exactly what you’re seeing in the conglomeratization of hospitals in the USA. If the idea was to remove redundancies for the sake of “efficiency,” then they did exactly what destroys ecosystems. Anyway, the net effect of all that hospital consolidation was just to make access to health care much more difficult for the average citizen, and the only benefit was to make multi-millionaires of the executives who run the hospitals.

Then Covid-19 came along and they decimated their own workforce with vaccine mandates. Now, many hospitals can barely function, and many have had to shut down specific services. Quite a few hospitals are going bankrupt, which only feeds the predatory consolidation still ongoing. When the financial, banking, and insurance disorders ahead start to bite later this year, hospitals will be shutting down. In the meantime, a lot of people will lose their lives to the disastrous side-effects of the vaccines. It is already the case, that the vaccine-injured who seek help from the medical system are lied-to, mis-treated, or ignored. Some of these are the doctors themselves and other health professionals who collide with reality the hard way. Something will emergently replace this monster we call “health care.”

Maybe it will still think of itself medicine, but it will operate at a much smaller scale, minus a lot of the expensive and rather miraculous high-tech developed in our time, but also minus a lot of hazardous high-tech interventions, especially pharmaceuticals, that were used as revenue streams despite the adverse blowbacks they induced. Will the doctors recover the trust of the public? It’s going to be a slog for them. They’ll have a long way to go just to recover their own honor and self-respect. Some sort of organized act of apology and repentance will have to happen first.

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It takes time

 

 

 

 

Speed
https://twitter.com/i/status/1611121105640505350

 

 

Ant hill

 

 

 

 

Glass octopus

 

 

Tiger mom

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 202022
 
 December 20, 2022  Posted by at 9:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  80 Responses »


Saul Leiter 463 1956

 

Managing the Ukraine Denial Narrative (Crooke)
News From The NATOstan-Imposed Meat Grinder (Escobar)
Why Time Isn’t Ripe For Ukraine Talks (Bhadrakumar)
How To Avoid Another World War (Kissinger)
Ukraine Blasts ‘Appeaser’ Henry Kissinger For Urging Peace Negotiations (ZH)
Moscow: Delivery Of Greece’s S-300s To Ukraine Would Be ‘Very Provocative’ (K.)
How Lobbyists Captured The EU (Fazi)
A Christmas Parable (Kunstler)
Will Musk Step Down After Twitter Poll? (Turley)
TWITTER FILES: How The FBI Moved To Quash Hunter Laptop Story (ZH)
‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI (Ron Paul)
FBI Agent Elvis Chan Gave Twitter Execs Top Secret Clearance (Senger)
Canada Health Director Who Lead Vaccine Rollout Dies Suddenly at 35 (GP)

 

 

 

 

#StopTheTreaty

 

 

Greatest athletic achievement

 

 

Gonzalo

 

 

 

 

“The ‘writing is on the wall’, in other words. Ukraine cannot win.”

Managing the Ukraine Denial Narrative (Crooke)

Look around: the tectonic plates of geo-politics and geo-finance are shifting – shifting radically away from an increasingly flailing West.The inflection has begun. It has been messaged by the Financial Times (FT) and The Economist – the two media that so faithfully transmit any ‘replacement narrative’ to the globalist sherpas (those who carry the baggage up the mountain, on behalf of the mounted nabobs). The Economist leads with interviews with Zelensky, General Zaluzhny and Ukraine’s military field commander, General Syrsky. All three are interviewed – interviewed in The Economist, no less. Such a thing does not occur by happenstance. It is messaging intended to convey the Ruling Class’ new narrative to the ‘golden billion’ (who will all read and absorb it).

On the surface, it is possible to read The Economist piece as a plea for more money and many more weapons. But the underlying messaging is clear: “Anyone who underestimates Russia is heading for defeat”. The Russian force mobilisation was a success; there is no problem with Russian morale; and Russia is preparing a huge winter offensive that will start soon. Russia has huge reserve forces (of up to 1.2 million men); whereas Ukraine now has 200,000 who are militarily trained for conflict. The ‘writing is on the wall’, in other words. Ukraine cannot win. It is appended with a huge shopping list of sought-after weapons. But the shopping list is ‘pie in the sky’; the West simply does not have them in inventory. Period.

The FT’s ‘Big Read’, by contrast, is a venting of deep western anger at those Russian ‘reformist’ siloviki technocrats who, instead of breaking with Putin over the SMO, instead shamefully enabled the Russian economy to survive western sanctions. The message uttered – through clenched teeth – is that Russia’s economy has successfully survived western sanctions. Leading US military strategist, Col. Douglas Macgregor, here expands on the messaging: Even the provision of seven or eight Patriot missiles is “no escalation”. It will have at best – ‘marginal impact’ on the Ukraine battlescape; it is mere window dressing. Scott Ritter, in discussion with Judge Neapolitano, believes that The Economist interviews reveal the West pushing aside Zelensky – as Zaluzhny administers his large dose of reality (that will be shocking to many sherpa loyalists). The Economist interview emphasis thus was unmistakably on General Zaluzhny, with Zelensky pointedly de-emphasised – which Ritter suggests indicates that Washington wishes to ‘switch leadership horses’. Another ‘message’?

Judge Nap/Scott Ritter

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“..Russia can conveniently defeat the whole of NATO as there is hardly anything “there”..

News From The NATOstan-Imposed Meat Grinder (Escobar)

The non-stop trashy parade of Western military analysts is now “assessing” that the first targets of an incoming, joint Russia-Belarus attack on the 404 black hole formerly known as Ukraine will be Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, and why not throw Kiev in the mix straight out of a second axis. The Russian General Staff is attentively monitoring all the action and may even follow the advice of such “analysts”. And then there’s outright panic, as the Ministry of Defense announced that the Strategic Missile Forces have loaded two Yars ICBMs into their intended silos. Cue to widespread shrieks of horror of the “Russia Readies Nuclear Missile Capable Of Striking Deep Into US” variety. Some facts though never change. Number One is NATO as a figment of the collective West’s – extremely impaired – imagination. If push ever came to shove – as Straussian/neo-con armchair warriors hope and pray – Russia can conveniently defeat the whole of NATO as there is hardly anything “there”.

That, of course, would require a massive Russian mobilization. As it stands, Russia may look feeble in a few quarters as they activated at best 100,000 troops against possibly 1 million Ukrainian troops. It’s as if Moscow was not exactly seduced by the idea of “winning” – which may be the case, in a quite twisted way. Even now, Moscow has not mobilized enough troops to occupy Ukraine – which, in theory, would be imperative to completely “denazify” the Kiev racket. The operative concept though is “in theory”. Moscow in fact is busy demonstrating a completely new theory – irrespective of the fact that a few exalted souls have been peddling that Putin should be replaced by the FSB’s Alexander Bortnikov.

With its array of hypersonic missiles, Russia can knock out all NATO bridges, ports, airports as well as power stations, oil and natural gas storage, Rotterdam oil and natural gas installations, in a matter of a few hours. All energy production equipment across NATOstan would be destroyed. Europe would be shut off from natural resources. A dazed and confused Empire would be unable to move troops, any troops, to Europe. And still provocations run unabated. The recent attack by Tu-141 Ukrainian drones against Engels-2 airbase was blamed by Moscow on Kiev – which predictably denied all responsibility. Yet what really mattered was Moscow’s strategic messaging to US/NATO, with Putin flirting with the notion that sooner or later the response may be up a serious notch in case US/NATO weaponry supplied to Kiev is used to strike deep into sensitive Russian Federation territory.

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Drawn in too deep.

Why Time Isn’t Ripe For Ukraine Talks (Bhadrakumar)

A Russian-American “consensus” is forming that the Ukraine conflict is far from a climactic stage leading to peace talks. Russia’s stance is that any settlement will devolve upon Kiev recognising “realities” — namely, acceptance of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions being integral parts of Russian Federation. But wouldn’t Russia know that no government in Kiev can afford to concede a demand that entails loss of over a quarter of the country’s territory? On the other hand, Kiev wants to vacate the Russian occupation and restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders and the Biden Administration is supportive. Wouldn’t they know that is a pipe dream?

Truly, since four of the erstwhile Ukrainian oblasts (excluding Crimea) are far from under Russia’s total control and the Kremlin intends to fully “liberate” them, the fighting continues in Donbass and further Russian moves to gain full control over Zaporozhye and Kherson regions will depend on its outcome. But the big question remains: How could any government in Kiev surrender vast tracts of Ukrainian territory after such sacrifices by the people? That may leave Russia with no choice but to seek total victory. The attitude of the Biden Administration is crucial. The clearest indication that the US is far from in a hurry to negotiate comes from none other than the White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan whose visit to Kiev last month (just before the US midterms) had triggered a flurry of speculations that Washington was pressuring President Zelensky to negotiate.

Now, Sullivan’s remarks at an appearance at the Carnegie last weekend made it clear that the US is in Ukraine for the long haul. He said: “We don’t know when this is going to end up. What we do know is that it is our job to continue to sustain our military support to Ukraine so that they are in their best possible position on the battlefield, that if and when diplomacy is ripe, they will be in the best possible position at the negotiating table. “That moment is not ripe now, and so, as a result, we’ve gone to Congress and asked for a substantial amount of further resources to be able to continue to ensure that Ukraine has the means to fight this war. We’re confident we will get bipartisan support for that…

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“Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war.”

How To Avoid Another World War (Kissinger)

As the world’s leaders strive to end the war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country, they should also reflect on the impact on this conflict and on long-term strategy of incipient high–technology and artificial intelligence. Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war. Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input?


How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities? No theory for this encroaching world yet exists, and consultative efforts on this subject have yet to evolve – perhaps because meaningful negotiations might disclose new discoveries, and that disclosure itself constitutes a risk for the future. Overcoming the disjunction between advanced technology and the concept of strategies for controlling it, or even understanding its full implications, is as important an issue today as climate change, and it requires leaders with a command of both technology and history.The quest for peace and order has two components that are sometimes treated as contradictory: the pursuit of elements of security and the requirement for acts of reconciliation. If we cannot achieve both, we will not be able to reach either. The road of diplomacy may appear complicated and frustrating. But progress to it requires both the vision and the courage to undertake the journey.

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“Previously he’s been on record as saying “It was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.”

Ukraine Blasts ‘Appeaser’ Henry Kissinger For Urging Peace Negotiations (ZH)

It didn’t take long for the Ukrainian government to blast and dismiss former US Secretary of State Kissinger’s peace plan proposal as “appeasing the aggressor”. “Mr. Kissinger still has not understood anything… neither the nature of this war, nor its impact on the world order,” Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said in response to the 99-year old influential US statesman’s Saturday op-ed in The Spectator entitled How to Avoid Another World War. “The prescription that the ex-Secretary of State calls for, but is afraid to say out loud, is simple: appease the aggressor by sacrificing parts of Ukraine with guarantees of non-aggression against the other states of Eastern Europe,” Podolyak stated, expressing a firm rejection of what Kissinger outlined in his piece.

The Ukrainian official added that the proposal was simplistic, saying: “All supporters of simple solutions should remember the obvious: any agreement with the devil – a bad peace at the expense of Ukrainian territories – will be a victory for Putin and a recipe for success for autocrats around the world.” In his weekend op-ed, Kissinger had warned that continued attempts to render Russia “impotent” could result in an uncontrollable and unpredictable spiral. He laid out that along with the sought after “dissolution” of Russia would come a massive power vacuum out of which new threats to the whole world would emerge as bigger powers rush in. “The dissolution of Russia or destroying its ability for strategic policy could turn its territory encompassing 11 time zones into a contested vacuum,” Kissinger wrote.

“Its competing societies might decide to settle their disputes by violence. Other countries might seek to expand their claims by force. All these dangers would be compounded by the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons which make Russia one of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.” Among the more controversial aspects of Kissinger’s plan was his suggesting the possibility of referendums for contested territories now occupied by Russia and still being fought over “which have changed hands repeatedly over the centuries” [i.e.: particularly the Donbas] – according to the essay. Kissinger last May also angered Ukrainian officails for daring to propose that Ukraine be willing to recognize Crimea as under Russia, and in return Russian forces would fall back to their lines before the Feb. 24 invasion. Previously he’s been on record as saying “It was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.”

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Erdogan plays this game a lot smarter.

Moscow: Delivery Of Greece’s S-300s To Ukraine Would Be ‘Very Provocative’ (K.)

The spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova stated on Monday that a potential delivery of Greece’s S-300 PMU1 missile defense system to Ukraine would be considered a very provocative move.“We consider plans to supply the Kyiv regime with S-300s or other Russian/Soviet air defense systems that will be used against Russia very provocative,” stated Zakharova. “The Greek authorities recently underlined their readiness to supply Ukraine with the S-300 PMU1 missile defense system, on condition of receiving additionally American Patriot missile defense systems to replace them,” she added. “There is a complete indifference by Greece on the international limitations on arms trading,” she concluded, stating that the Russian armed forces will locate and destroy all military supplies sent to Ukraine.

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“Bribery and corruption are endemic to the Brussels system — and most of it is perfectly legal.”

How Lobbyists Captured The EU (Fazi)

Addressing a recent European Parliament debate on “human rights in the context of the World Cup”, vice-president Eva Kaili had an unexpected message: “Qatar is a frontrunner in labour rights.” So, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when, last week, she was among six people arrested by Belgian police amid allegations of Qatari corruption and money laundering . Members of the EU establishment have been quick to spin the issue as a problem limited to a few bad apples. Several European Parliament officials told Politico the allegations were limited to a “few individuals” who had gone astray. Others, however, expect more names to be drawn into the widening dragnet. But whether or not the scandal extends to other people is beside the point.

By focusing on “Qatargate”, we risk losing sight of the fact that the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper and more widespread malaise, involving not just the European Parliament but all EU institutions. Bribery and corruption are endemic to the Brussels system — and most of it is perfectly legal. It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels, making it the second capital of lobbying in the world after Washington, DC. Most are in the service of corporations and their lobby groups, with huge sums at their disposal: the combined lobbying budget of the 12,400 companies and organisations on the EU lobby register has grown steadily over the years — especially since the pandemic — and today amounts to €1.8 billion.

Topping the list are Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Energy giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Bayer and Shell, as well as industry associations such as the European Chemical Industry Council, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), and BusinessEurope — all of which declare annual lobbying budgets of €4-6 million. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, given the long history of businesses under-reporting their spending. Big Pharma and Big Tech, in particular, both significantly boosted their lobbying firepower throughout the pandemic. EFPIA alone — which represents Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — increased its spending by 20% in 2020. A conservative estimate of total annual EU lobby spending by Big Pharma is now close to €40 million per year, with nearly 300 lobbyists officially working in Brussels to push the industry’s interests (though the actual number is probably higher, since disclosure rules do not capture all the spending on law firms, academic partnerships and activities in individual countries).

It’s safe to say the investment was amply repaid: by the end of 2021, the EU had signed €71 billion worth of confidential contracts, securing up to 4.6 billion doses of vaccines (more than ten doses for each European citizen). EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses, worth up to €35 billion if fully exercised — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the matter. Such extreme cases, however, mask the true extent of the structural problem that pervades every aspect of the Brussels system. It goes without saying that this army of well-funded lobbyists, which far outnumbers and outspends public interest groups, gives corporations a massive influence over the European decision-making and legislative process.

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“Up rose a social movement, Wokery, that had the earmarks of a histrionic religious mania, with Satanic overtones. Up rose the demons, the Antifa louts, the BLM arsonists, the drag queens.”

A Christmas Parable (Kunstler)

It started when the women of the professional and managerial class watched their avatar, Hillary Clinton, lose the 2016 election against a man who seemed the quintessence of everything they hated about Daddydom. Donald Trump, flawed to perfection, wrecked the chance of the amalgamated successful women of America to run the national household. Out came the pussy-hats, the Wiccans, and the celebrities threatening to “blow up the White House.” Out came a savage animus against men generally, and a campaign to feminize them in retaliation — and then punish them for objecting to it. Up rose a social movement, Wokery, that had the earmarks of a histrionic religious mania, with Satanic overtones. Up rose the demons, the Antifa louts, the BLM arsonists, the drag queens.

Thus unrolled a national psychodrama that continues to spool out as every system, every business, every institution in our country wobbles and flies apart now. The men embedded in the professional and managerial class tried in 2016 to chivalrously protect their womens’ avatar and her steadfast followers and, failing ignobly that grim November day, then turned to actually attack their adversary, Donald Trump, with the explicit intent to destroy him by all means necessary. In the years-long process, they devolved into criminality, and in so doing they entered a vicious cycle of lying about everything they did to escape the consequences of their ostensible exercise in gallantry. In effect, the people running things went from a war against a particular person to a war against reality and its twin sister, truth.

Now they are deeply invested in unreality and untruth to the point where they have forgotten how this whole thing started and all they can do is desperately patch the dike they had to construct against a deluge of information composed of truth and reality coming at them like a tsunami rolling across the sea. The harder they work at this futile task of defense, the more absurd they make themselves, leading to ridicule, humiliation, and, finally condemnation in whatever remains of the legal arena, where their deeds will finally be judged. The first stage of that outcome for them is pretending that none of it is happening. That’s why The New York Times and Washington Post ignore the news that the gallant knights of the FBI and several other tentacles of the Intel octopus mounted a ferocious, long-running psy-op through the new phenomenon of social media — that happened to rise in importance through this whole period of national discord. In effect, the intel agencies seized the transmitters (as Fidel Castro might put it) and used them very effectively to control their hallowed narratives.

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Did he hold the poll just to expose the bots?

Will Musk Step Down After Twitter Poll? (Turley)

Many of us have supported Elon Musk in his fight to restore free speech protections to Twitter despite concerns over decisions like the use of polls to determine if individuals should be allowed back on the social media site. He has now subjected himself to the same poll judgment in asking if he should step down as CEO. After more than 17.5 million users voted, 57 percent said yes. Unless Musk was looking for an exit, it was a mistake. He handed his critics an easy opportunity to remove him. For the left, Musk has been a nightmare because he cannot be bullied like most corporate executives. He is an eccentric billionaire who has refused to yield despite a full mobilization of the political, media, and business establishment. That could now change.

While many on the left spent weeks dismissing Twitter’s polls as unscientific, they are now demanding that Musk follow through and step down. Some 42.5% of users wanted him to stay. On Twitter Sunday, Musk seemed to say that he would follow the results but expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO. He said that the person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.” He further noted that “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” That is precisely why the left wants Musk out. As shown in companies like Disney, the left can muscle executives to take actions even against the interests of the company or shareholders. The left has strived to make such campaigns personal for executives, who often yield rather than risk being individually tagged and targeted.

That is why it was essential to remove Musk. The political and media establishments generally are unstoppable forces — but they met their first immovable object in Musk. That immovable object has now taken a step to remove himself from the path of the establishment. One can hardly blame him, but, as Democratic members warned Facebook not to even consider following the path of Twitter, the prospect of Musk’s departure will strengthen the efforts to maintain censorship over social media. It is hard to ask anyone to continue to stand against this alliance of political, media, and business forces. Musk has been made a persona non grata for seeking to reduce censorship on the site. He has put billions on the line for the free speech of others. One can certainly understand why he would want this cup to pass from his lips. However, if he stays the course, his work at Twitter could prove to be his greatest legacy in resisting the trend toward censorship and speech controls in social media.

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Do we understand how crazy this is?

TWITTER FILES: How The FBI Moved To Quash Hunter Laptop Story (ZH)

In the latest episode of ‘THE TWITTER FILES,’ journalist Michael Shellenberger reveals “How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.” The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for, and takes, Hunter Biden’s laptop. By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time. In early Oct, Giuliani gives it to @nypost.

Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emails JP Mac Isaac. Hunter and Mesires had just learned from the New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day. 7. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter. 8. The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. 9. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans. Why is that? What, exactly, happened?

10. On Dec 2, @mtaibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article. Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms

Berman

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“This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration.”

‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI (Ron Paul)

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like. US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.

This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets. What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.

Go home

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More insanity.

FBI Agent Elvis Chan Gave Twitter Execs Top Secret Clearance (Senger)

New internal documents from Twitter, revealed today as part of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” series, show FBI Agent Elvis Chan arranged for Top Secret security clearance—the highest level of US national security clearance—to be granted to Twitter executives for the purpose of facilitating the censorship of suspected misinformation in advance of the 2020 election. Elvis Chan has long been closely involved in working with social media companies to identify and censor suspected misinformation from sources both foreign and domestic, especially with regard to suspected election interference. This has included regularly sending lists of social media posts to social media companies for them to take down, as well as the suspension of the New York Post and others for what was subsequently borne out to be a true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In his deposition last month, Chan described how the pressure that he and other FBI agents placed on social media companies to censor information about Hunter Biden’s laptop stemmed from a “thesis” that the incriminating content may have been uploaded onto the laptop as part of a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation. But the basis for this Russian hack-and-leak thesis is disputed, in no small part because the FBI took possession of the laptop in December 2019, nearly a year before the story was censored, and because there did not appear to be any new intelligence to suggest that Russia was interfering in the 2020 election. Elvis Chan’s regular emails and weekly meetings with social media executives raise new questions about the level of coordination taking place between the federal government and social media companies for the purpose of censoring suspected misinformation shared by ordinary citizens.

The level of this coordination is currently the subject of lawsuits including my own, Changizi v. Dept. of Health & Human Services, and Missouri v. Biden, in which a damning round of discovery previously revealed that more than 80 federal officials across a dozen agencies had been involved in the censorship of social media content. Upon hearing the news, one FBI agent expressed disgust at what he described as the “gross subservience” that’s been shown by social media companies to the FBI, noting that the “default position” is for private companies to be “totally adversarial” to inquiries by the FBI about their customers.

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Sad.

Canada Health Director Who Lead Vaccine Rollout Dies Suddenly at 35 (GP)

The Director of Parliamentary Affairs at Health Canada, who oversaw the country’s response to Covid-19 and the rollout of the vaccine, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35. Adam Exton, a long-time Liberal Party organizer, died suddenly on Friday, December 9th, according to his family.“It is with great sadness that the family of Adam Exton announce his passing on December 9th, 2022 at the age of 35 in Ottawa, Ontario. Much loved son of Wendy Exton, brother of Bradley Exton (Ellen Wessel) and son of Allan Exton. He will also be deeply missed by his loving girlfriend, Reesha, as well as his many cousins, aunts, uncles and grandmother, Bette Readman,” his obituary reads. “As a young person, Adam became actively involved in politics and had a passion for public service and volunteering in the community. In 2012, Adam won the Ontario Young Liberal Volunteer of the Year Award.


He received a degree in political science from the University of Toronto. Adam spent many years working at various levels of government, eventually holding the position of Director of Parliamentary Affairs at Health Canada.” Adam Exton was a part of the group that orchestrated the response to Canada’s totalitarian mandates against its own citizens.His obituary stated, “During the challenging times of the pandemic, Adam was part of the leadership team that led Canada’s health response to COVID-19. He was a talented and respected campaign manager that was instrumental in helping to bring cabinet ministers and members to Queens Park and Ottawa. Adam always did and will continue to make his family extremely proud of who he was and his service to his community and country.”

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Smart dogs

 

 

Larry

 

 

It’s a wonderful life
https://twitter.com/i/status/1604624935569313793

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 072022
 
 December 7, 2022  Posted by at 9:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem 1630

 

Elon Musk Fires Twitter General Counsel James Baker (CTH)
The EU’s Operation Against Musk (Matthieu Buge)
Elon Musk Slams Wikipedia Over ‘Left-wing Bias’ (PM)
Twitter’s “Partner Support Portal” for COVID-19 Related Censorship (AFL)
Are Ukrainians Russians? (Saker)
Ukraine Trying To Drag US Into War – ex-CIA Officer (RT)
A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine (Jeffrey Sachs)
Mosscow Accuses Ukraine Of ‘Nuclear Terrorism’ (RT)
Hungary Raises Alarm Over ‘Critical’ Situation With Fuel Supply (RT)
World Will Still Need Russian Oil – Official (RT)
Private Spying Firm Targets Global Population With Illegal Spyware (GZ)
FTX Crypto Fraudsters Targeted Poor Black Neighborhoods (Shellenberger)
Mask Mandate in Schools Based on Politics Not Evidence (DS)
Soros Bankrolls 253 Groups to Influence Global Media (NB)

 

 

 

 

Comer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1599961932424835072

 

 


Bob Mankoff, New Yorker, 1981.

 

 

Ron Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


FBI agent Elvis Chan, at the San Francisco field office

 

 

 

 

Baker was scrubbing the Twitter Files before Taibbi and Bari Weiss ever saw them. That’s why the FBI is not mentioned in them.

“Twitter’s former top attorney James Baker was formerly an FBI attorney who passed on fake dirt from the Hillary campaign’s operatives in 2016, alleging a secret online portal from Russia’s Alfa Bank to Trump. Now attempted to shape the “Twitter Files.”

Elon Musk Fires Twitter General Counsel James Baker (CTH)

Yesterday, we speculated publicly the first set of “Twitter Files” released was heavily pre-filtered by internal stakeholders connected to DHS who hold a vested interest in controlling any evidence of Twitter’s former political activity. Knowing there are multiple executives remaining within the company who previously aligned with the intents of government, specifically DHS officials, to control the platform, the prediction was not a stretch. Indeed, it just made common sense. Former FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker, a man of notoriously corrupt disposition, was one of those former government officials who started working for Twitter as general counsel. James Baker (pictured below left) working as a government mechanism for filtration of damaging information was not a leap. Again, just common sense.

Today, as an outcome of internal discoveries that indeed Jim Baker did prefilter internal documents in order to mitigate sunlight and exposure [outline here], Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired legal counsel James Baker. Mr Musk said through his Twitter account, “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today.” Mr. Musk followed up a question about James Baker being asked to explain himself by saying, “His explanation was …unconvincing.” Matt Taibbi provides the context: ” On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay. We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.

The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated. Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @Bari Weiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.” “My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss. The first batch of files both reporters received was marked, “Spectra Baker Emails.” Baker is a controversial figure. He has been something of a Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016, from the Steele Dossier to the Alfa-Server mess. He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into leaks to the press.

The news that Baker was reviewing the “Twitter files” surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to “exit” Baker Tuesday. Big Picture: The Twitter Files are a threat vector to a bigger story. The DHS, DOJ, FBI and ODNI U.S. government elements who operated with control over the social media platform did so as an outcome of the larger surveillance state. That surveillance state was deployed against Donald Trump in 2016 and everything as an outcome of that failed effort, and the ongoing coverup effort, is what surrounds the current DOJ effort to attack and remove the threat Donald Trump represents.

Fitton Musk

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“Now, they have to limit freedom of speech in order to protect freedom of speech – a logic that can, understandably, leave many people speechless.”

The EU’s Operation Against Musk (Matthieu Buge)

After Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the recent reactions of Brussels’ bureaucrats, it has become clear how far the EU is willing to go in order to preserve its own bubble of political agenda. Just as one needs a special dictionary in order to understand Kant’s work and his own understanding of certain terms and concepts, more and more, one needs a special dictionary to understand the language of the EU. And the first entry to look up is ‘F – Freedom’. Its synonym, ‘liberty’, is the first word in France’s motto. And with the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk and the wish of the billionaire to restore total freedom of speech on the platform, we have a new opportunity to try to decrypt it.

Commenting on the French-US partnership during his speech at the White House on December 1, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “Our two nations are sisters in their fight for freedom.” Words that are quite consistent with the EU’s suddenly emerging rhetoric concerning the freedom of the Chinese people facing the zero-Covid policy of the Chinese Communist Party, the freedom of the Uyghurs in the west of China, the freedom of Russians opposing the Kremlin, the freedom of Iranian women to be like Western women… We could go on forever with this list, because it is constantly changing, adapting itself to the context of geopolitics. As a concept, freedom of speech is really an illusion, as it is ruled, like everything else in the world, by balances of power. The EU proved this hard-to-admit fact to be true when it quickly banned RT and Sputnik after the beginning of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

And there is no doubt that this threadbare concept has been used in geopolitics for ages, establishing amusing if not pathetic double standards. But double standards are not really the issue here. What is at stake is pure logic. Thierry Breton, the commissioner for internal market of the EU, talked to Elon Musk in order to make Brussels’ point clear. And then said: “I welcome Elon Musk’s statements of intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA [Digital Services Act]. I am pleased to hear that he has read it carefully and considers it as a sensible approach to implement on a worldwide basis. But let’s also be clear that there is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation, and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising.”

Breton should hand every citizen of EU member states some instructions, or a guidebook, to navigate the EU’s logic here. “To reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech” is like saying “Let’s have lunch together; you’re free to order whatever I tell you to eat.” These unelected bureaucrats threatened to ban Musk’s newly acquired company in the EU if he refused to comply with their rules, and the mainstream media has found a new way to wage war against those who don’t agree with all their narratives and restrictions: The use of the word ‘absolutist’. While Musk himself wears the label of ‘free speech absolutist’, pundits are using it as a way to pillory those they can’t dismiss as ‘conspiracy theorists’. In this context, ‘absolutist’ rhymes with ‘terrorist’, ‘extremist’, or whatever you can imagine could be a threat.

Famed Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson has repeatedly argued that free speech implies that one should be challenged and even offended, that it is a condition of dialectics and progress. This is pure common sense. No more in Europe. During the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to promote their quarantine politics, some European governments said it was necessary to “limit freedoms in order to protect freedom.” Now, they have to limit freedom of speech in order to protect freedom of speech – a logic that can, understandably, leave many people speechless.

Kash
https://twitter.com/i/status/1600344422314430464

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“If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”

Elon Musk Slams Wikipedia Over ‘Left-wing Bias’ (PM)

Twitter owner Elon Musk said that Wikipedia has a “non-trivial left-wing bias” after the encyclopedia site marked the article for the “Twitter Files” for deletion. Editors for the site wrote that the article is a “nothing event about another nothing event.” “There’s not really anything here. Even as a stub it suffers from being unsourced in some places and poorly sourced in others, suggesting a lack of notability,” wrote an editor. “It also doesn’t have a clearly defined topic. Is this about an investigation, or is this about a Substack article?” They continue: “While the title suggests the former and the lede suggests the latter, the content of the article is actually about neither. There is no investigation, and the article lacks any notable information about what the self-published article had to offer.”

Musk noted in his tweet that Wikipedia requires the citation of biased “MSM sources” to “confirm” claims. This is not the first time that Wikipedia has apparently worked to protect the Biden regime. This past summer, Wikipedia changed the definition of “recession” on their site to fit the definition given by the Biden White House. Wikipedia then locked the page, preventing people from updating the website. The White House redefined the definition of “Recession” ahead of the summer economic report, which showed that the US had suffered from two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. This was the standard definition, but the White House declared that the definition should be tied more closely to unemployment numbers.

On the Wiki page that provides the definition of a “recession,” a message pops up when an attempt is made to edit the information, reading: “This page is protected to prevent vandalism.” Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has been vocal in criticizing his creation, saying that it is run by left-leaning editors and that the site is no longer trustworthy. Sanger said that he believes the site is run by teams of Democratic-leaning editors, and that the site lost its neutral nature in 2009. He named topics such as Covid and Hunter Biden as examples of Wikipedia’s bias. “There are a lot of people who would be highly motivated to go in and make the article more politically neutral but they’re not allowed to,” Sanger said. He added, “If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”

Notorious right wingers Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald

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Not just Twitter, all social media.

Twitter’s “Partner Support Portal” for COVID-19 Related Censorship (AFL)

Today, America First Legal (AFL) released the fourth set of shocking documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealing further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of “misinformation.” This nearly 600-page release of documents contains new appalling information. Among these include the fact that Twitter ran a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other “stakeholders” to submit posts that it would remove or flag as “misinformation” on its platform. Documents obtained by AFL show Twitter enrolling one government employee, through their personal Twitter account, into this Portal. We know from other publicly related documents, that Facebook has copied this approach for election-related censorship.


This production also reveals that the U.S. government was actively working to “socially inoculate”–or brainwashing–the public against anything that threatened its narrative. It did so by using aligned Big Tech corporations to monitor and manipulate users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. For example, Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it bragged about censoring more than sixteen million “pieces of content” containing opinions or information the U.S. government wanted suppressed. Finally, the documents reveal the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organization Mafindo” to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia that is funded by Google.

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The Saker’s deep dive into a complex issue.

Are Ukrainians Russians? (Saker)

Seems like a simple question, but in reality it is immensely complex. I will try to outline a few of the issues, assumptions and implications this question involves. Well, for starters, we might want to ask “what is a Ukrainian?” After all, no such nation or country can be found in history books. But we should not stop here, and we also need to ask “what is a Russian?”. Yes, there was a Russian nation and a Russian country recorded in history books, but does that really help us? French history books used to begin with the sentence “our ancestors the Gauls” which even kids on the French colonies had to learn. Some ridiculed the fact that sub-Saharan Africans or the children of Guadeloupe had to learn that and that was self-evidently ridiculous. But what about metropolis French, those who lived in France proper?

Where their ancestors really Gauls and, if so, how much continuity, if any, is there between Vercingetorix and Macron or the people from ancient Gallic tribes to the modern French? What we often overlook is that nationality is a very modern concept born out of the post 1789 ideology of nationalism. In the more distant past, people built their identity around 1) their place of birth/residence 2) their religion and 3) their ruler. Keeping all that in mind, let’s begin by asking the question “what is a Russian?”. But before we go there, I need to mention another pesky issue: the English word “Russian” can mean one of two things: a member of the Russian ethnic/cultural group, in which case the Russian term is roosskii or a citizen of the Russian Federation, in which case the Russian term would be rossiianin.

For the time being, let’s ignore the second meaning and focus on the ethnic/cultural roosski. To try to find a good definition, let’s being by spelling out what a Russian is not. This is not somebody who speaks Russian. There are plenty of folks out there who speak Russian and who are not Russian. This is not somebody born in Russia, because there are plenty of non-Russians born in Russia. How about somebody born from Russian parents? Here we run into a logical problem: if we define as Russian somebody born of Russian parents without defining what Russian means in the first place, this is a completely circular definition. Also, is Shoigu Russian? This father is an ethnic Tuvan. So 50% Russian max? How about Czar Nicholas II? His ancestry was mostly German and Danish. How about Lenin? He had only 1/4 “Russian” blood (whatever that means)

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Philip Giraldi.

Ukraine Trying To Drag US Into War – ex-CIA Officer (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is looking for ways to get the US and NATO directly involved in the conflict, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said, pointing to Monday’s drone attack on two airfields inside Russia as an example of such tactics. “This was a clear attempt by Zelensky, in my mind, to escalate the war,” Giraldi told Judge Andrew Napolitano on Monday evening’s episode of the ‘Judging Freedom’ podcast. “He tried to do that with the missile that was misdirected, possibly, and wound up in Poland and killed two people. He even pushed it and said NATO has to intervene now. This could be another attempt to, shall we say, promote an escalation on the part of the Russians that could possibly be construed as a danger to Poland, danger to troops in Poland, that sort of thing. This is the game that’s being played.”

The missile that struck the village of Przewodow last month was quickly identified as Ukrainian, but Zelensky continued to insist otherwise for several days, until both Warsaw and Washington expressed frustration. Napolitano had pointed out that the US currently has around 40,000 troops in Poland. Their presence creates a “high potential for accidents” and misunderstandings, said Giraldi, noting that Russia would know right away if they made a move to cross the border. On Monday morning, two drones attempted to strike the Dyagilevo airfield in Ryazan Region and Engels airfield in Saratov Region, more than 500 kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled territory. Three Russian servicemen were killed and several more injured, but the attack did not disrupt a strategic aviation strike against Ukrainian logistics later in the day, the defense ministry in Moscow said.

“The whole purpose of this is again political,” Giraldi told Napolitano about the attack. “It’s to escalate the process so that Russia – at least in the hopes of Zelensky and his advisers, many of whom are probably American – does something that is really stupid and provocative in return, and this will provoke the NATO-US reaction that Zelensky wants to see. I am convinced that this is what he’s playing at.” The big question, Giraldi added, is whether the US military and the White House knew of the attack in advance, “and if so, did they approve it?” The US insists it is not a party to the conflict in Ukraine, but President Joe Biden has said he would support Kiev with weapons and money for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia on the battlefield.

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Putin in 2008: “..If you push NATO enlargement, we retake Crimea.”

A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine (Jeffrey Sachs)

From the beginning — and from before the beginning, from 2021, when Putin made clear what the political issues at stake were — but I happen to know this goes back, in many ways, back to 1990, ’91. I was at that point an adviser to the economic team of President Gorbachev, and then, later, President Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Kuchma, so I’ve watched this from the start. There have been a few very important political issues at stake. One is the NATO enlargement. I think it is really the dominant issue, but three others are extremely important. Of course, I should say, equally important is Ukraine’s sovereignty as a sovereign country and in need of security arrangements. But NATO as Ukraine’s security doesn’t work. It’s an explosive brew. So, one needs to find, as President Zelensky himself said earlier this year, before backing off from it, that there needed to be a non-NATO way to secure Ukraine.


And there can be. So, that’s another crucial issue, is Ukraine’s sovereignty and security in a non-NATO manner. The third issue that is very consequential is Crimea. Crimea, the peninsula, people can look on the map, the peninsula in the Black Sea, has been the home to Russia’s naval fleet in the Black Sea, and therefore completely consequential for Russia’s economic and foreign policy and military security since 1783. So, this is, from Russia’s point of view, an absolutely core issue. And incidentally, in 2008, when George W. Bush Jr. was very unwisely pushing NATO enlargement, President Putin said specifically to President Bush in Bucharest at the time of the NATO-Russia meeting, that “If you push NATO enlargement, we retake Crimea.” This was already explicit. And the point is that, for Russia, this is vital.

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It’s up to US/NATO to halt this.

Mosscow Accuses Ukraine Of ‘Nuclear Terrorism’ (RT)

Ukraine is resorting to dangerous tactics by deliberately targeting the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant on Russian territory, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has alleged. Earlier, Moscow said it would not accept any security arrangement that would involve handing the facility over to a third party. Addressing senior military officials on Tuesday, Shoigu accused the Ukrainian forces of firing 33 shells at the nuclear power plant over the past two weeks. The defense minister characterized these actions as nothing short of “nuclear terrorism.” According to Shoigu, Kiev is deliberately seeking to make a nuclear disaster at the site seem likely. “Our units are taking all [necessary] measures to ensure the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant’s safety,” Shoigu said.

Moscow has repeatedly made similar allegations against Kiev, with Ukrainian officials consistently denying they have targeted the power plant, and accusing Russia of the same. On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RIA Novosti media outlet that “there can be no talk of any Russian withdrawal or transfer of control over the plant to some third party.” She insisted that the facility is on Russian territory and is fully controlled by the country’s authorities. She went on to say that only Moscow “can ensure the physical and nuclear security” of the plant. Zakharova’s comment came after International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said on Friday that any deal for the protection of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant would involve the withdrawal of Russian weaponry from the premises.

Grossi told Italian journalists that he expects such an agreement will be reached “by the end of the year,” adding that Moscow is “not against an agreement and the principle of plant protection.” The largest nuclear power facility in Europe, the Zaporozhye plant was taken over by Russian forces in early March, days after the Kremlin launched its military operation in Ukraine. This autumn, four formerly Ukrainian territories, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, were incorporated into Russia following referendums. In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree proclaiming Russian ownership over the plant.

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Even though Hungary is already exempted from the price cap.

Hungary Raises Alarm Over ‘Critical’ Situation With Fuel Supply (RT)

The fuel supply situation in Hungary is “critical,” with people queuing up at filling stations across the country due to a sharp surge in demand, the country’s oil and gas group MOL announced on Tuesday. In an email statement, Gyorgy Bacsa, the company’s managing director, said that “panic-buying has started causing shortages” and that the only solution was to create conditions for increased imports. On Monday, MOL reported a shortage of fuel inventories across its entire network of filling stations after many people began stockpiling over the weekend. The company said that a lack of fuel was caused primarily by insufficient imports and a halt of the country’s major refinery due to maintenance. MOL added that it was trying to deliver more products from its processing plant in Slovakia but had “reached the limits of its logistical capacities.”


Earlier, a non-governmental organization called the ‘Association of Independent Petrol Stations’ reported that MOL had not supplied gasoline or diesel fuel to some petrol stations for the third week straight due to supply problems. On Tuesday, Bacsa confirmed to radio Kossuth that “the total capacity of MOL is not enough to meet the needs of the Hungarian market,” adding that about 30% more fuel needs to be imported. The development comes as the EU has introduced a ban on Russian seaborne crude along with a $60 price cap. Hungary, which is heavily dependent on energy supplies from Russia, has been granted an exemption from the price cap scheme. The country is a vocal opponent of Western sanctions and has repeatedly criticized the EU initiative, saying it’s “high time” Brussels realized that measures such as this “hurt the European economy the most.”

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“Global consumption, economic growth in the world must be provided with energy resources..”

World Will Still Need Russian Oil – Official (RT)

Russian oil will still be in high demand despite the latest EU sanctions on the country’s exports, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said on Tuesday. His statement comes as the EU introduced a ban on Russian seaborne crude along with a $60 price cap. The latter measure has received support from G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) and Australia. According to Novak, this type of interference in market instruments will “certainly affect” the work of Russian companies and sales, but Moscow does not see “any tragedy” in this. “Global consumption, economic growth in the world must be provided with energy resources. There is not much oil in the world, and Russian oil has always been and will be in demand. Yes, supply chains will change,” Novak explained.

By imposing a price cap, Western countries will only trigger further energy inflation due to scarce supply, the minister said, adding that Russia views these types of non-market mechanisms as unacceptable. “This can only lead to a global decline in investment and a future shortage of relevant resources. This, in turn, will cause an even greater increase in prices, which we are seeing, including the gas markets, for example, where there was an artificial decision to limit long-term contracts,” Novak said. The official did not rule out a decline in Russian oil production amid the uncertainty following the sanctions, but said that it would not be big, adding that Russia “is doing everything to ensure that the situation is stable.”

The deputy PM noted that Russian oil and gas condensate production rose 2.2% from January to November in annual terms, to 488 million tons. Condensate output in Russia averaged 10.91 million barrels per day in the reported period, according to Reuters’ calculations.

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Nothing personal. It’s just business.

Private Spying Firm Targets Global Population With Illegal Spyware (GZ)

Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal how a smartphone tracking technology tramples over fundamental data protection tenets and international law, while violating the privacy of citizens across the world without their knowledge or consent. The clandestine tool can transform anyone into a potential person of interest to Western intelligence agencies, and thus a target for recruitment, surveillance, harassment, or worse. It is likely most readers will be unfamiliar with Anomaly 6. Its spartan, single-page website is home to the company’s name, a generic email address, and general location – Fairfax, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters – but nothing about its services, personnel, or otherwise. By carving through layers of “anonymized” data, this little-known company unearths reams of sensitive information about any individual it chooses anywhere on Earth.

Anomaly 6’s activities amount to a globe-spanning criminal dragnet, the reach of which could well extend further than even that of the CIA and NSA. As we shall see, its founders are extremely wary of media attention, not least because they fear the “legal basis” of their operations “is unlikely to stand-up to scrutiny” given past successful court actions against state spying agencies, such as GCHQ and the NSA. The company, which was founded by a pair of US military intelligence veterans, surreptitiously embeds software development kits, or SDKs, in hundreds of popular smartphone and IoT apps, allowing it to track a user’s movements and much more besides. This data is then analyzed and the results passed on to private sector and governmental clients.

One confirmed customer is US Special Operations Command Africa, which paid Anomaly 6 $589,500 in September 2020 for a “Commercial Telemetry Feed”. In April, The Intercept reported on a leaked Anomaly 6 pitch for new business, in which the company claimed to be able to simultaneously monitor roughly three billion smartphone devices in real-time. To demonstrate its invasive prowess, Anomaly 6 followed the movements of hundreds of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency employees at once via their smartphones. The anonymous source of the leaked presentation “expressed grave concern” about the legality of the company disclosing “social posts, usernames, and locations of Americans” to US government agencies.

The Grayzone can reveal that it’s not just US citizens, but the world’s entire population, in the firing line of Anomaly 6’s unblinking eye. And the company is secretly selling its hyper-invasive wares to a number of foreign governments, militaries and security and intelligence services. One of the most unsettling Anomaly 6 files reviewed by The Grayzone is a case study, demonstrating the company’s ability to track the “movements of individuals in completely denied terrain.” The firm identified 100,000 separate smartphone users who traveled to North Korea over a 14-month period, among them US citizens, “to show the value of our data” for both counterintelligence and source development purposes.

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“The whole strategy was overseen by Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, a Stanford Law professor.”

FTX Crypto Fraudsters Targeted Poor Black Neighborhoods (Shellenberger)

In the spring of 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, made Chicago its U.S. headquarters, drawing the applause of the city’s mayor. “This is a mechanism and a tool to bring traditionally underrepresented and ignored populations into the world of crypto so they can take ownership and control of their own financial destiny,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot at the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opulent, 9,000 square foot FTX headquarters in May. “I think the sky is the limit.” The reason FTX.US chose Chicago was, in part, to use the city to pilot a cash giveaway program aimed at poor African American residents. FTX was essentially contributing to two ”guaranteed basic income” programs, one run by a nonprofit called Equity And Transformation (EAT), and the other by the city.

Ostensibly a charitable exercise, the program, which FTX also ran in Florida, expanded the market for FTX’s app, and appears to have been a crucial part of a public relations and lobbying effort aimed at winning the support of Democrats for FTX’s agenda to effectively regulate itself. Bankman-Fried was the second largest donor to both President Joe Biden in 2020 and to Democrats in 2022, after George Soros. There is abundant evidence that Bankamn-Fried’s donations bought influence. After Bankman-Fried testified in May to a Congressional committee chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), she blew him a kiss. The episode is a cautionary tale about how powerful financial interests use progressive social justice ideology to advance their business interests at the expense of the communities they claim to be helping.

“We, like most nonprofits, are shocked by this because they presented this ‘effective altruism’ model to everyone and seemed to push for racial equity,” said Richard Wallace, the co-founder and executive director of EAT, one of the cash-giveaway initiatives. The whole strategy was overseen by Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, a Stanford Law professor. I am the first to report that Bankman had been working for FTX from the very beginning. “From the start [of FTX], whenever I was useful, I lent a hand,” said Bankman.

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Teacher’s unions.

Mask Mandate in Schools Based on Politics Not Evidence (DS)

IIn October of 2022, however, after repeated FOI challenges by our team and after the DfE had claimed that its paper trail could not be disclosed because to do so would constrain future policymaking processes, DfE officials have now finally provided access to some of their paperwork. Despite heavy redactions across the documents revealed by the DfE, the picture that emerges, and seemingly now confirmed by Matt Hancock’s diaries, is both astounding and deeply concerning. The first notable revelation is that the first time an evaluation of the masks in class policy was provided to the Education Minister, at that time Nadhim Zahawi, appears to have been on December 30th 2021. That is seventeen months after schools had first been advised by his department to require children to wear masks in schools. There was no assessment of harms for masks in schools under Gavin Williamson.

The second notable revelation is that more than one third of the DfE’s evaluation document supporting its briefing to the Minister was given over to concerns about the risk of teaching unions encouraging their teachers to walk out of schools on the insidious grounds that schools had become dangerous places to work. Those concerns were given materially greater airtime in that December 2021 briefing document than the few paragraphs devoted to the risks of harm for schoolchildren. It is evident that the adversarial approach of teaching unions had a material influence on the DfE’s advice to the Minister. The evaluation document notes that mandating the wearing of masks in school “could help reduce the risk of some teachers invoking section 44 of the Employment Rights Act” (a statutory provision that allows employees, exceptionally, to decline to work in materially unsafe conditions), a provision the NEU and Unison had apparently flagged to their members in January 2021.

It also cited surveys recording that 71% of Unison members had reported in March 2021 that masks in class were thought to be “an important safety measure”, and 79% of respondents to a private schools survey around the same time had “noted benefits of wearing face coverings in the classroom”. The deeply troubling implication of this limited and largely redacted paper trail is that policymaking within the DfE was led not by a rational evaluation of scientific evidence or after a weighing-up of actual and potential risks and harms for children against known or perceived benefits. Rather, the motivation for the August 2020 policy appears to have been a direct response to union-led pressures, and perhaps also to incitements from some elements of the mainstream media, who seemed intent on shutting down schools in order to ‘protect’ teachers and other adults. Any harms to children appear to have been of subsidiary importance to making adults feel safe.

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He’s 92 and proves addiction to power is absolute.

Soros Bankrolls 253 Groups to Influence Global Media (NB)

Leftist billionaire George Soros used his charities to build ties with hundreds of media organizations around the world involved in news and activist media. The journalism and activist media groups Soros supports mold public opinion on practically every continent and in many languages. They also insulate him from inquiry because reporters see him as an ally, not a target for investigation. The 92-year-old philanthropist’s multimillion-dollar efforts promoting his bizarre “open society” agenda encompass some of the most radical leftist ideas on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism.


His global media clout is massive. An extensive analysis by MRC Business discovered at least 253 news and activist media organizations across the world financed by Soros’ philanthropic organizations. These groups wield massive power over information in international politics. This report is the first in a three-part series that reveals the extent of the reach Soros wields over international media to influence the world population. Soros once told The New York Times that he was working to “bend” the arc of history “in the right direction.” He means it.

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Lethal vaccination

 

 

 

 

Stossel “Science”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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