Menu Icon

Debt Rattle July 21 2024

Jul 212024
 
 July 21, 2024  Posted by at 9:03 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


George Caleb Bingham The verdict of the people 1854

 

• Ad Urging Biden To Step Aside Will Run On Morning Joe TV Show (RT)
• Dems Plot ‘Loophole’ Of Rebellion If Biden Won’t Step Down (ZH)
• Trump Says He ‘Took A Bullet For Democracy’ (RT)
• US Secret Service Says Rejected Requests to Strengthen Trump’s Security (Sp.)
• Biden Removal From 2024 Election Could Lead to Hunter’s Prosecution (Sp.)
• Trump’s Team Preparing Ground to Undermine Harris -NYT (Sp.)
• Drone Surveillance by Trump’s Shooter Reveals Additional Security Lapses (Sp.)
• Could Trump’s Election End NATO’s Proxy War In Ukraine Against Russia? (SCF)
• Democracy Really Is Dying in Darkness—But by Whom? (Victor Davis Hanson)
• US Elections: A Democracy That Does Not Allow Opposition (Vasco)
• Erdogan Teaches His NATO Allies Some Unpleasant Truths (Amar)
• Ukraine Crisis Is Europe’s Responsibility – Trump ‘Envoy’ (RT)
• Scott Ritter: Dark Eagle Hypersonic Missiles in Europe (Sp.)
• ‘We Just Deleted Crowdstrike From All Our Systems’ – Musk (RT)
• Ultra-Processed Foods Account For Two-Thirds Of UK Children’s Calories (Ind.)

 

 

 

 

Matrix
https://twitter.com/i/status/1814504087284498937

 

 

Trump Crowdstrike

 

 

Loudon

 

 

Maher

 

 

Corey

 

 

Total stand down

 

 

5 min 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..both the program and the advertising area were chosen in order to send the message directly to the 81-year-old..”

• Ad Urging Biden To Step Aside Will Run On Morning Joe TV Show (RT)

A group of concerned US voters from the Democratic Party, called ‘Pass the Torch’, has joined the campaign to pressure President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race and allow another candidate to take his place. In a video prepared by the group, seven voters ask Biden to step aside to avoid losing to his Republican rival, former President Donald Trump. They urge him to “be the leader we know you are,” praising him for “saving democracy in 2020” when he was elected for his current term. “Now you have a chance to do it again. It’s time to pass the torch and let us choose a new nominee. One who can bring new energy, new hope and make sure Donald Trump never gets near the White House again,” the voters say in the ad.

The video, which was posted on YouTube earlier this week, is set to start running on Monday on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’, one of Biden’s favorite shows. The advertising area would cover Biden’s Rehoboth Beach home in Delaware, where he is currently recuperating after testing positive for Covid-19 earlier in the week. Pass the Torch co-founder Aaron Regunberg told NBC on Friday that both the program and the advertising area were chosen in order to send the message directly to the 81-year-old politician. Biden has faced public scrutiny over his mental and physical decline for some time, but concerns deepened after his disastrous televised debate with Donald Trump last month. Biden mixed up words and numbers, lost his train of thought, and struggled to finish sentences.

This led to dissent within the Democratic Party, with many influential members and campaign donors asking Biden to drop out of the race. The party has also postponed the official nomination, which had been planned for this week, to sometime in August.According to reports this week, former US President Barack Obama reportedly told allies in private that Biden should end his campaign, as did Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Reports also indicate that even Biden’s family is discussing potential avenues for him to drop out of the race. Biden has so far refused to step aside, claiming that he has the best chance of beating Trump. According to sources who spoke to NBC, the politician “feels angry” and “betrayed” at efforts to force him out of the election.

Read more …

“It’s not a loophole! That’s the process. You can vote for whoever you want,” they said, adding “I think it’s almost inevitable he drops out.”

• Dems Plot ‘Loophole’ Of Rebellion If Biden Won’t Step Down (ZH)

While Joe Biden is decidedly ‘dug in’ and isn’t going anywhere, Democrats, the party of ‘democracy is on the ballot,’ are plotting a ‘loophole’ if Biden refuses to step aside or drop out of the race. During a Friday morning Zoom call with 50 delegates, DNC delegate Elaine Kamarck said the apparent “loophole” allowing for such rebellion if convention-goers say they can no longer vote for their pledged candidate in “good conscience” despite picking them in primaries and caucuses. Kamarck, who has been on the DNC’s Rules Committee for decades, informed the 50 delegates on the call that “there’s no such thing as Joe Biden releasing his delegates. And Joe Biden gets this.” “I don’t know why the rest of the press doesn’t get it,” she said. -NY Post. According to the DNC’s rules, “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

Kamarack said that the rules previously mandated that delegates have to vote for whoever they’re pledged to, however that changed after the 1980 convention in which Ted Kennedy and then-President Jimmy Carter were battling for the iron throne. Unlike the Republican party, Democrats can revolt at any time. Given that Biden won nearly all the pledged delegates in the primary, those delegates can say that Biden no longer “reflect[s] the sentiments of those who elected them,” and can dump him at will. “See, we’ve never had a situation quite like this where the primaries were over. Very clear-cut winner. And yet something was discovered unclosed, whatever you want to call it, after the end of the primaries that caused people to severely doubt whether or not their nominee should proceed,” she said. The Friday call was led by Kamarck on behalf of Delegates Are Democracy, a new group which launched last week to inform delegates of their options before the Aug. 19-22 convention in Chicago.

The group claims they weren’t formed to force Biden out. (Can they try not lying about one thing for once?) One anonymous delegate on the Zoom call asked how they should proceed in an open convention, to which Kamarck replied that it would be “tough” to decide. “I would start with the people who voted for you to become a delegate, see what they think and see how they think you should proceed. You probably won’t have polling. That’s very good. You may have to rely on sort of national polling,” she said. Such a revolt on the convention floor would ‘amount to a political earthquake toppling the commander in chief.’ One anonymous Democrat pushed back on the Post’s assertion that this was a loophole. “It’s not a loophole! That’s the process. You can vote for whoever you want,” they said, adding “I think it’s almost inevitable he drops out.”

“The scale of a possible revolt is unclear, with the source saying he could imagine “very few” actually joining in if Biden forges ahead — particularly if former House Speaker Nancy Pelsoi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and former President Barack Obama set aside their private misgivings following Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. But even an unsuccessful revolt could hurt Biden going into the Nov. 5 election against former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. “If it’s 10 or 100 or 200, people in the media will say, ‘Oh my God, it’s a massive defection,’” he added. -NY Post. “We are so f–ked,” one senior congressional Democrat told The Post.”

Read more …

“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy…’ I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do for democracy? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy’.”

• Trump Says He ‘Took A Bullet For Democracy’ (RT)

Former US President and Republican nominee for the November elections, Donald Trump, addressed a crowd of supporters in the swing state of Michigan, speaking alongside his newly announced running mate, J.D. Vance. The Saturday rally in Grand Rapids was Trump’s first public campaign event since the attempt on his life last week when he narrowly avoided getting shot in the head. The gunman’s shots at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazed his ear and hit the crowd behind Trump, killing one person and injuring two others. Michigan is one of several pivotal battleground states on which the outcome of the November presidential election is expected to hinge. In the 2020 election, incumbent US President Joe Biden flipped the state’s vote, despite Trump securing it in the previous 2016 election.

“At this very moment, Democrat Party bosses are frantically trying to overthrow the results of their own party’s primaries to dump Crooked Joe Biden from the ballot,” Trump, now wearing a skin-colored bandage on his ear, told the crowd. “As you’re seeing, the Democratic Party is not the party of democracy. They’re really the enemies of democracy,” he added. They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy…’ I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do for democracy? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy’. The Republican frontrunner took a jab at his political opponents, saying the Democrats “have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we.”

This comes amid a rising chorus of Congressional Democrats urging their presumptive nominee to step aside and make way for another party member to run. While the 81-year-old has faced public scrutiny over his mental and physical decline for some time, apprehension deepened since his disastrous performance in last month’s televised debate against Trump. Biden, who is currently isolating in his Delaware home after contracting Covid-19, has insisted he’s still in the race and will be back on the campaign trail by next week.

Read more …

“..for two years..” They facilitated the shooting.

• US Secret Service Says Rejected Requests to Strengthen Trump’s Security (Sp.)

The US Secret Service has acknowledged that it rejected requests to strengthen former US President Donald Trump’s security with its resources for two years before the assassination attempt, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service. At the same time, Guglielmi noted that the requests for beefed-up security did not specifically concern the event in Pennsylvania where Trump was wounded in a shooting, the report said. He also added that in cases where the Secret Service was unable to provide additional security for Trump, it instead deployed state or local law enforcement officers or altered security plans to reduce the threat to Trump’s life, the report read.

The shooting took place on July 13 at a Trump rally in Butler, the US state of Pennsylvania. Trump sustained a gun wound to his right ear and was briefly hospitalized. Thomas Crooks, 20, killed a member of the audience and injured two others in the crowd before the US Secret Service neutralized him. The FBI is investigating the incident as an assassination attempt and potential domestic terrorism.

Read more …

Joe has to pardon his entire family – and himself. That may not be accepted.

• Biden Removal From 2024 Election Could Lead to Hunter’s Prosecution (Sp.)

A potential withdrawal by US President Joe Biden from the 2024 election could lead to the prosecution of himself and that of his son Hunter, including for crimes conducted in Ukraine, US antiwar activist and Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space Coordinator Bruce Gagnon told Sputnik. “The Biden crime family likely worries if the current president is removed from the November ticket, he and his son could well be prosecuted for multiple crimes – particularly for their crimes in Ukraine,” Gagnon said. This might lead to Biden cutting a deal to get a pardon for himself and his son as a trade-off for stepping down, Gagnon said.

Earlier on Friday, US media reported that members of the Biden family have begun discussions about the president’s potential plan to exit the election amid growing pressure on him to drop out. The White House, however, called these reports “wrong.” Former Hunter Biden business associate Anthony Bobulinski said in a congressional testimony in February that the Biden family received tens of millions of dollars from foreign actors, including in China and Ukraine, to get access to the White House. Gagnon emphasized that the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump strengthened Trump’s position in the race and raised the Democrats’ concerns regarding Biden.

“Already we see the Democrats in Congress increasingly worried that it will impact their reelection races. Thus, the call for removal of Biden is growing,” Gagnon said. “It is clearly an indication that elections in the United States are not about ‘free democratic expression’ but are events controlled by competing regional oligarchs who will use any methods to win.” Gagnon expressed concern that this situation shows the United States is inching toward internal instability that could lead to the break-up of the country. “I believe it will be worse here in the United States than it was in Russia after the break-up of the former Soviet Union. We don’t have any leaders on the scale of Vladimir Putin who helped restore Russia,” Gagnon added.

Read more …

BS from NYT. KaMAla is no threat to Trump.

• Trump’s Team Preparing Ground to Undermine Harris -NYT (Sp.)

US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign is preparing a strategy to undermine the rating of US Vice President Kamala Harris if she becomes the Democratic Party’s nominee for US president instead of the incumbent President Joe Biden, the New York Times reported, citing sources. In particular, the report said that shortly before the Republican convention, Trump’s team prepared a series of anti-Harris videos to show to delegates at the event and on television, but after the assassination attempt on Trump, it was decided to abandon this idea. In addition, the Republican National Committee is closely monitoring the financing of Biden’s election campaign and will be ready to file lawsuits if Harris illegally uses this funding in any way, the report said on Saturday.

On Friday, CNN said that some White House officials and members of Joe Biden’s camp were privately saying that the 81-year-old should drop out of the race. NBC reported that Biden’s family members were discussing an exit plan amid growing pressure on Biden to step aside. Biden’s dismal performance in the first campaign debate against his Republican rival in June reinforced concerns about his cognitive abilities, leading many Democratic politicians and donors to call on him to quit. The Democratic Party can theoretically replace Biden at its convention in August. So far, Biden is saying that he intends to stay in the race.

Read more …

Lots of people at the Secret Service must be fired.

• Drone Surveillance by Trump’s Shooter Reveals Additional Security Lapses (Sp.)

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the shooter who tried to kill Donald Trump at the rally in Pennsylvania, managed to fly a drone for aerial footage of the site, a few hours before the assassination attempt, the WSJ reports, citing law-enforcement officials familiar with the matter. Crooks had flown the drone on a programmed flight path several times earlier in the day on July 13, to scour the Butler Farm Show grounds ahead of the event, the officials said. The discovery has raised more serious concerns over the reliability of the security services, the outlet notes. What else has been revealed? The use of the drone was just one way in which authorities said Crooks had planned his attack. The perpetrator came to Trump’s rally with a pair of homemade bombs designed for detonation with remote control.

The authorities also found primitive explosives and a vest with three 30-round magazines in Crooks’ car. This suggests that he probably “wanted to cause greater carnage”, according to the article. Crooks had also ordered several packages labeled “hazardous materials” to be shipped to his home in the past month. He also conducted online searches for Trump rally dates, and information on Biden and the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, a 20-year-old man tried to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally in the state of Pennsylvania, but the bullet from the gunman’s AR assault rifle grazed Trump’s right ear. US Secret Service agents killed the gunman moments after he was able to fire several rounds toward the stage, killing one spectator and critically injuring two others.

Read more …

“..JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been even more explicit in proposing that the warring parties should accept the territorial gains made by Russia – including Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson provinces – and that Ukraine must accept Moscow’s demand that it remain neutral and outside of the NATO alliance..”

• Could Trump’s Election End NATO’s Proxy War In Ukraine Against Russia? (SCF)

The presidential nomination of Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance as his running mate raises the prospect of a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Ukraine. Both have been vociferous critics of the NATO proxy war and the arming of the Kiev regime. Vance has even proposed a peace settlement that is close to Moscow’s demands. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is recently pushing peace diplomacy, has voiced optimism that the omens are good for a settlement later this year to the worst war in Europe since the Second World War – if Trump and Vance are elected. Only days after Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, he was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate amid ecstatic scenes at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. After the tumult and drama over the last week – a long time in politics, as the saying goes – the Trump election campaign is in the driving seat.

His vice presidential running mate is 39 years of age and gives the Republican Party a youthful zest. Both men are very much singing from the same hymn sheet regarding their “Make America Great Again” vision. Trump has united the GOP under his leadership. All former party rivals lined up this week in Milwaukee to endorse the former real estate magnate in his bid to seek re-election to the White House in November. That helps to solidify his manifesto, which bodes well for diplomacy in Ukraine. By contrast, the election campaign of Democrat incumbent President Joe Biden has run into a ditch. This week he was self-isolating in Delaware having reportedly incurred a third-time Covid infection. Biden increasingly looks toast. His apparent mental decline – the latest gaffe this week was not remembering the name of his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, referring to him haltingly as “a black man” – has provoked a crisis in the Democratic Party and the largely favorable U.S. corporate news media.

Senior figures including former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are reportedly urging Biden to stand down and pass the torch to a younger candidate. Panic is in the air. There are reports that Biden may throw in the towel within the next few days as the Democrats head into their National Convention to officially nominate their presidential candidate. The trouble for the Democrats is they do not have a viable alternative candidate at this late stage in the campaign – with less than four months to election day on November 7. That means there is now a serious chance that Trump could return to the White House after he lost the election in 2020, which MAGA loyalists hotly disputed as “stolen”. That election outcome turns attention to one issue in particular: the war in Ukraine. The conflict erupted in February 2022 and has cost the lives of over 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Under the Biden administration and aligned European NATO members, there is no sign of the war coming to an end.

Biden and European allies have pledged to keep sending weapons to Ukraine and tens of billions of dollars to prop up a hopelessly corrupt NeoNazi regime in Kiev. Trump and Vance have pitched a diametrically opposite policy on the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. That stance is causing the Deep State and its military-industrial complex acute anxiety. The Ukraine war racket has been a bonanza that vested interests in the U.S. ruling class do not want to end. That tension provides a plausible explanation for the attempted assassination of Trump during an open-air rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. Salient questions remain about how the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old student, gained access to such a high-security position to fire his rifle at Trump. The Republican candidates have warned that the Ukraine conflict is in danger of spiraling into a nuclear world war. Trump has said that he would end the war immediately by cutting off the military aid spigot and forcing the Kiev regime to begin negotiations with Russia.

Tantalizingly, JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been even more explicit in proposing that the warring parties should accept the territorial gains made by Russia – including Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson provinces – and that Ukraine must accept Moscow’s demand that it remain neutral and outside of the NATO alliance. Such a position is a breath of fresh air for its rationality. Many respected American scholars and diplomats have also recommended this historically coherent position as a solution, including Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. At least Trump and Vance seem to be cognizant of this reality, unlike the Biden administration and the rest of the Democrat Party, along with the Western media establishment and European minions who insanely push a fraudulent war to the last Ukrainian.

Read more …

X thread

• Democracy Really Is Dying in Darkness—But by Whom? (Victor Davis Hanson)

Never in modern presidential history has a political party staged a veritable inside coup to remove their current president from his ongoing candidacy for his party’s nomination and reelection. Stranger still, the very elites and grandees, who now are using every imaginable means of deposing Biden as their nominee, are the very public voices that just weeks ago insisted that candidate Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle.” And they damned any who thought otherwise! They are also the identical operators whose machinations ensured that there would not be an open Democratic primary. They demonized the few on the Left who weakly challenged Biden in the primaries. Yet now they will select a replacement candidate who likely never received a single primary vote. Note further: Biden’s impending forced abdication is not because he is non compos mentis.

Rather, the inside move is due to Biden’s disastrous debate exposure that confirmed his dementia could no longer be disguised by a conspiracy of leftist politicos and media. But far more importantly, the impetus for removal is driven by the admission that the cognitively Biden is headed for a climactic November defeat.mWere Biden now ahead in the polls by five points, these same backroom machinists would be insisting that he was still Pericles. Yet now Biden is being un-personed and Trotskyized, as we prepare the new groupthink narrative of his likely surrogate—a soon to be praised eloquent, mellifluous, and articulate Cicero-Harris. That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next six months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding.

Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how:
a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility,
b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation),
c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replace candidate,
d) without ever offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not? Perhaps as an aid and primer on Biden removal they should reread the essay by former Obama Pentagon official Rosa Books. Just 11 days after the Trump inauguration, she published in Foreign Policy, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020”.

It was a veritable manual on the various ways of removing the just inaugurated president—listing immediate alternatives to the distant 2020 election: impeachment and conviction, 25th-Amendment removal, and, barring all that, a military coup: “The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” So, to make sense of what these self-appointed and sanctimonious protectors of democracy are trying to pull off demands an Orwellian vocabulary—memory hole, newspeak, unperson, and groupthink. Yet there is one more irony. Very soon, those who welcomed the protests of summer 2020 radicals, and exempted the rioting and violence, and then again did nothing in 2024 as mobs tore apart campuses and shut down public facilities, will host a Chicago convention—where those very same liberated forces may wreak havoc on the outside, while their backroom progenitors, with threats, money, and the media, will wreak havoc on democracy on the inside.

Read more …

“..63% of Americans thought that the two parties do such a “bad job” of popular representation that a third major party is needed..”

• US Elections: A Democracy That Does Not Allow Opposition (Vasco)

For the presidential elections in November this year, the script is the same as always: Democratic Party vs. Republican Party. Even though the majority of voters do not agree with the candidacies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as a Reuters/Ipsos survey on January 25 pointed out: “in general, an absolute majority of Americans (52%) are not satisfied with the system of two parties and wants a third choice.” This feeling is not new today. In 2008, when the presidential elections pitted Barack Obama (D) against John McCain (R), 47% of voters surveyed by Gallup wanted an alternative to Democrats and Republicans. In October 2023, the same institute pointed out that 63% of Americans thought that the two parties do such a “bad job” of popular representation that a third major party is needed. A third highly prestigious institute in the USA, the Pew Research Center, showed, on April 24, that 49% of voters would replace both Biden and Trump as candidates in these elections, if they had the “ability” to decide who would be the candidate for each party.

Even with such dissatisfaction, which highlights the American people’s opposition to the two-party regime, this opposition does not materialize in a political party with a chance of victory. Only on eight occasions in U.S. history (the first in 1848 and the last in 1992) has a third candidate won more than 10% of the popular vote. And only in two of them did he manage to be ahead of one of the two main candidates, but never ahead of two, that is, he never managed to get elected. These two third-way exceptions who came in second were John Breckinridge for the Lecompton Democrats in 1860 and Theodore Roosevelt for the Progressive Party in 1912. For more than a hundred years, Americans have not been given any option other than the Democratic Party candidate or the Republican Party candidate, even though, as polls show, voters demand this third option. But the pulsating U.S. democracy does not respond to the will of its citizens in its most important moment, the presidential election!

In fact, parties and candidates that try to compete with the two-party regime are systematically prevented by the electoral apparatus. Few are able to qualify to appear on electoral ballots, the criteria for which vary by state. Voting intention polls do not mention names other than those of the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate – very few mention a third or fourth candidate. The press does not report on the activities of the other candidates, nor does it interview them. To participate in the debates promoted by the Presidential Debate Commission, the candidate must have at least 15% of the voting intentions in the polls (how, if his name is even mentioned?) and appear on a sufficient number of ballots to have a chance of winning in the Electoral College. The entire apparatus of the U.S. regime (electoral justice, institutions, press, search engines) works as if there were only two candidates: the Democrat and the Republican. And, in fact, this is the reality. The other four or five who perform the feat of overcoming difficulties to appear on the ballot do not effectively compete.

This same apparatus, headed by the U.S. government, usually demands that other countries – especially those that do not accept American interference – hold elections where all candidates have equal opportunities to win. Of course, these demands are just a ruse to force regime change in the countries to be dominated. The American regime itself does not offer any chance for the opposition to win the elections – and does not even accept international observers, just “escorts”. But not only that. The hole is much lower. The poor souls who, after much suffering, manage to run against the bipartisan machine and have no chance of winning it are actually not even a consenting opposition. They are simply not opposition.

An exponent of this thesis is Robert Kennedy Jr. He gave up his candidacy for the Democratic Party to run as an independent. But, despite having left the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party did not leave RFK Jr. Its proposals are not very different from those of the two hegemonic parties – in fact, throughout history, there has always been a bloc of Democrats and Republicans with proposals distinct from the party leadership, with a social and more isolationist inclination. The son of former senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy is not even an outsider: the most conclusive proof of this is his faithful support for the genocide promoted by the USA/Israel in Gaza. Just like Democrats and Republicans, RFK Jr. is in the pocket of the bourgeoisie that controls the American regime.

Read more …

“..NATO should pursue solutions that are both “sustainable” and in accordance with common sense. This implies a rejection – diplomatic but clear – of the idea of waging a forever war in Ukraine, because this strategy is a perfect example of what is not sustainable..”

• Erdogan Teaches His NATO Allies Some Unpleasant Truths (Amar)

On the occasion of NATO’s 75th anniversary meeting, only two leaders of NATO member states dared openly speak about issues that in a reasonable organization shaped by mutual respect that seeks the most effective and responsible policies would be the subject of intense debate among all members. The president of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, made their dissent clear on the eve of the meeting. A third leader, Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, issued an urgent warning afterwards, arguing that making Ukraine a NATO member – not the same as the misguided but fortunately non-binding talk about ‘irreversibility’ that the meeting proudly produced – would be a “guarantee of World War III.” Both Erdogan and Orban broke with the conformism that is the unwritten law of NATO now more than ever. Instead of simply following the often misguided and selfish lead of the US, they signaled three things:

Rational dissent on policy reflecting both reason and national interests; that such dissent is normal, useful, and should be welcome; and that they won’t join in the ideological and detrimental groupthink that suppresses dissent inside NATO, and more broadly, the Collective West. Orban delivered his dose of healthy independence through diplomacy, traveling to Kiev, Moscow, and Beijing on the eve of the summit (meeting with former and likely future US President Donald Trump was just a final touch). Erdogan made his views explicit most of all in an important set of statements in the American magazine Newsweek. Türkiye, it is worth recalling in this context, has the second-largest military in NATO. Its officers and troops have extensive experience in actual military operations, its arms industry is both growing and constantly modernizing, and last but not least, its location, spanning Europe and Western Asia and controlling access to the Black Sea, is as strategically significant as can be.

For all these reasons, it is fair to say that Erdogan’s intervention was especially important. Reminding Newsweek’s mostly American readers that Türkiye is important to NATO as well as being in solidarity with its other members, the Turkish president quickly signaled that Ankara’s commitment is not blind but rests on the assumption – or condition – that NATO should pursue solutions that are both “sustainable” and in accordance with common sense. This implies a rejection – diplomatic but clear – of the idea of waging a forever war in Ukraine, because this strategy is a perfect example of what is not sustainable. And given the ongoing human suffering, economic losses, and severe risk of regional and perhaps even global escalation that the strategy also entails, it is not reconcilable with common sense, as Erdogan spelled out explicitly later on as well.

Next, the Turkish president outlined three areas in which Ankara disagrees with its Western partners. First, regarding the fight against terrorism, Erdogan noted a profound Western failure – with Washington in the lead – to act in solidarity with Türkiye’s key national interests. From Ankara’s point of view, this is an intolerable situation that is not “consistent with the spirit of alliance.” In the realm of diplomacy, this language could not be clearer. Second, concerning the Ukraine conflict, Erdogan confirmed that Türkiye will continue its policy of not being a party to it, while instead focusing on the pursuit of peace by diplomacy and maintaining dialogue with both Ukraine and Russia. And third, with regard to the ongoing mass deaths of civilians in Gaza perpetrated by Israel and its Western helpers against the Palestinians, the Turkish president may not have used the term ‘genocide’, but his meaning was nonetheless clear.

Read more …

“..likely pick for the Secretary of State..”

• Ukraine Crisis Is Europe’s Responsibility – Trump ‘Envoy’ (RT)

Ukraine is in Europe’s “own backyard,” and solving the ongoing crisis should be considered its responsibility, a close associate of US presidential candidate Donald Trump, Richard Grenell, believes. Grenell, who held several senior diplomatic posts during Trump’s first tenure and is now widely regarded as his “envoy” and likely pick for the Secretary of State, should the Republican win the elections, made the remarks in an interview with German tabloid Bild on Friday. Among other things, the diplomat suggested Ukraine was largely the EU’s “responsibility” rather than Washington’s. “It’s in your backyard. If there was a war in Mexico, we would do most, if not all, of the job. And we certainly wouldn’t ask the Germans for help if there was a war in Mexico,” Grenell stated. “There were no wars in Europe during Donald Trump’s time in office,” he pointed out, insisting that the continent had fared better during the previous president’s administration.

Grenell also criticized the incumbent, Joe Biden, for his apparent lack of any effort to engage in diplomacy with Russia or talk to President Vladimir Putin. “Biden has not spoken to [Putin] in three years. I think talking to people is a tactic. Not the goal, not the solution – but it gets us there,” he suggested. Grenell has been rather vocal about the Ukrainian conflict lately, floating a proposal earlier this month on how exactly the hostilities could be brought to an end. The diplomat said Ukraine should not become a member of NATO any time soon, and that transforming the country into a federation of sorts with more autonomous regions could be the key to ending the hostilities. “Autonomous regions can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but you got to work through those details,” Grenell stated during a Bloomberg News roundtable.

The proposal received a cold response in Moscow, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissing it as an attempt to re-imagine the long-defunct 2014–15 Minsk Agreements. The deal, which had provided a roadmap out of the conflict in then-Ukrainian Donbass, was ultimately revealed both by Kiev and its Western backers to be a mere ruse to buy time for arming Ukraine. “Where were you, Rick, when the Minsk agreements dedicated to exactly this were on the table of the international community, and Russia did its best in support of them and called for finding a form of federalization of Ukraine to preserve its integrity?” Zakharova wrote in a Telegram post.

Read more …

“..the only one of the half-a-dozen plus US hypersonics programs anywhere near operational status..”

How near?

• Scott Ritter: Dark Eagle Hypersonic Missiles in Europe (Sp.)

Russia has vowed a military response to US’ plans to deploy strategic, ground-based missiles in Germany by 2026. Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector-turned international affairs observer who literally wrote the book on arms control in Europe in the 1980s, tells Sputnik why the prospective deployment is so dangerous. The White House announced plans to deploy three types of strategic missiles in Germany last week, with the new capabilities set to include: Ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, which became available to the Pentagon after the US unilaterally scrapped the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia in 2019. The Raytheon-manufactured missiles have a range anywhere from 460-2,500 km, and can be armed with conventional or low-to-intermediate yield nuclear warheads.

The SM-6 – a long-range surface-to-air-missile system which can be launched from the US Army’s new Typhon Mid-Range Capability (MRC) missile system, or the Aegis Ashore air and missile defense systems the US has deployed in Romania and Poland. Manufactured by Raytheon. Firing range of 240-460 km. Unnamed ‘hypersonic’ capabilities widely speculated to be the Army’s Dark Eagle Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) – the only one of the half-a-dozen plus US hypersonics programs anywhere near operational status. Developed by Lockheed Martin. Reported range up to 3,000 km. Payload unknown. “It’s the Dark Eagle that is perhaps the most destabilizing,” former weapons inspector and US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter told Sputnik. “While it is not a nuclear-capable missile, it is a system that has the ability to strike deep inside Russia with precision hypersonic warheads that are virtually impossible to intercept,” Ritter explained.

With such a system, the observer noted, Pentagon planners and hawks in Washington may be tempted to launch aggression against Russian military and leadership targets. This would be in line with the DoD’s long-running Conventional Prompt Strike (formally Prompt Global Strike) initiative – a program which has been in the works since the 2000s. “This is an extraordinarily destabilizing development, and Russia has said it will respond,” Ritter said, noting that while “the specifics of a Russian response aren’t known,” it’s possible that it may include resuming development of the RS-26 Rubezh – a solid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile with a nuclear multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) or maneuverable reentry vehicle (MaRV) payload. “It’s believed that Russia could bring this system back into operation and deploy it in short order. The RS-26 is a road-mobile system that has the ability of carrying three Avangard hypersonic [glide vehicle] warheads that are nuclear-capable,” Ritter said.

The former weapons inspector, who wrote a book on his experiences working with the On-Site Inspection Agency in the late 1980s to verify the USSR’s compliance with the then-recently ratified INF Treaty – which was designed to dramatically reduce nuclear tensions in Europe by eliminating all US and Soviet ground-launched missiles in the 500-5,500 km range, told Sputnik that Washington’s plans to deploy missiles in Germany again are eerily familiar to him. “We’ve gone back in time. It’s back to the 1980s, back to a situation where the United States and NATO and Russia once again face off with weapons that are inherently destabilizing. One mistake, one miscalculation, one misjudgment could lead to a situation where these missiles are fired in anger, and this would lead to the potential of a general nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia,” Ritter warned.

Read more …

Every large company should follow suit.

• ‘We Just Deleted Crowdstrike From All Our Systems’ – Musk (RT)

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that his companies stopped using web/cloud-based antivirus platform CrowdStrike in the wake of Friday’s global Windows 10 outage. The cyber-security firm has admitted that the massive failures were caused by a recent update that conflicted with Microsoft systems. The IT meltdown affected Windows 10 users around the world, including airports, banks, and broadcasters. According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, at least 4,295 flights were grounded globally due to the outage. The worldwide glitch also hit a number of media outlets, including the UK-based Sky News – which went off the air for a while – as well as the Australian-based ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9, and News Corp Australia.

Responding to a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday, Musk wrote: “We just deleted Crowdstrike from all our systems.” Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, confirmed on X that a CrowdStrike update was to blame for Friday’s outage, adding that Microsoft was providing “customers [with] technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.” Musk replied to the statement, saying: “This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain.” Commenting on a Financial Times report on the global Windows 10 outage, the US-based billionaire said in a separate post that this was the “biggest IT fail ever.” The tech tycoon also concurred with Christopher Stanley, the head of security engineering at X and a principal security engineer at SpaceX, who described Friday’s events as a “wake up reminder that you shouldn’t have an internet connected privileged binary running on your production systems.”

“What was a bad update could have easily been a massive adversary backdoor. A third party vendor will always be the weakest link,” he warned. Speaking to NBC on Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said his company is “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected” by the outage. “We’ve identified it very quickly… The systems come back online as they are rebooted,” he stated, adding that CrowdStrike is working with its customers to help them return to normal operations.

Read more …

If you think “poor nutritional value” is the main isssue here, you are not an expert.

• Ultra-Processed Foods Account For Two-Thirds Of UK Children’s Calories (Ind.)

Ultra-processed foods account for two-thirds of the daily calorie intake of children in Britain, research suggests. Experts found that UPFs make up a significant proportion of the diets of 11 to 18-year-olds and are eaten more by white youngsters and those from deprived backgrounds. UPFs have been linked to poor health, such as through an increased risk of obesity and heart disease. They often contain high levels of saturated fat, salt and sugar and additives, which experts say leaves less room in people’s diets for more nutritious foods. Examples of UPFs include ice cream, processed meats, crisps, mass-produced bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits and fizzy drinks. UPFs tend to include additives and ingredients that are not often used when people cook from scratch, such as preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial colours and flavours.

In the new study, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol, experts looked at four-day food diaries from almost 3,000 children aged 11 to 18 in the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey between 2008/09 and 2018/19. The study found typical UPF consumption was 861g per day, or 66% of daily energy intake. However, the study also found that, between 2008 and 2019, UPF intake fell from 67.7% to 62.8% of total energy intake. The researchers suggested this may be due to increased health campaigns urging people to cut down on sugar or fatty foods, and the UK Government’s sugar tax which cut the amount of sugar in drinks. Data past 2019 was not looked at in the study.

Dr Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde, study author from the University of Cambridge, said: “Adolescents’ food patterns and practices are influenced by many factors, including their home environment, the marketing they are exposed to and the influence of their friends and peers. “But adolescence is also an important time in our lives where behaviours begin to become ingrained. “It’s clear from our findings that ultra-processed foods make up the majority of adolescents’ diets, and their consumption is at a much higher level than is ideal, given their potential negative health impacts.” Dr Esther van Sluijs, also from Cambridge, said: “Ultra-processed foods offer convenient and often cheaper solutions to time and income-poor families, but unfortunately many of these foods also offer poor nutritional value.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Kingfisher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1814674121562767625

 

 

Mahi

 

 

Hummingbird
https://twitter.com/i/status/1814579045935259792

 

 

Snapping
https://twitter.com/i/status/1814601149925695731

 

 

 

 

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