You'll Have To Pry The White House From Jill Biden's Cold Dead Fingers....,

dailybeast  |  Usually, a first lady looking radiant on the cover of Vogue is a PR coup for any presidential administration and a carefully-cultivated statement for a magazine that primarily covers fashion but also insists on its seriousness and depth.

respected first lady + tasteful Vogue treatment = mutually beneficial. And it would have been for first lady Jill Biden, who looks equal parts chic, powerful, and beatific in a Suffragette-white tuxedo dress in front of a cream-plaster backdrop, her name in font so large it is dwarfed only slightly by the Vogue logo, and augmented by a quote that was meant to be a feminist rallying cry: “We will decide our future.”

Except the cover dropped just days after her husband gave a debate performance so disastrous that there is widespread talk of replacing him on the ticket, and as Jill, Joe, and the Biden family gathered at Camp David to hash out next steps. “We will decide our future” suddenly takes on a different implication—not that voters generally and women specifically will decide the nation’s future, but that a small, tight-knit family will decide for the rest of us.

Jill Biden has largely been a well-liked and uncontroversial first lady, but in the aftermath of the debate and her family’s wagon-circling, she’s been under more scrutiny. And that scrutiny has expanded now to Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who is a Biden friend and political donor.

Some conservatives have whined that Melania Trump was never given a Vogue cover while her husband was in office, while Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, and Laura Bush were all featured in the magazine (Melania did grace the cover when she married, but she was identified not by name, but as “Donald Trump’s New Bride”). Generally, the accusation seems to be that Wintour is playing favorites with Democrats because of her own political persuasions.

This is, of course, extremely silly from a variety of angles. Vogue is an aspirational magazine aimed at sophisticated, city-dwelling women who care about high-end fashion and lifestyle but also choose to read longer-form articles about politics and culture–not exactly Trump’s voter base, and not exactly a cohort that admires or aspires to be like Melania.

College-educated city women are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. And these same women have vested personal interests in many of the matters the Democratic Party promotes and the anti-feminist Republican Party attacks, including access to abortion, contraception, and IVF, not to mention paid family leave, affordable childcare, and a general vision of women as free and independent.

Women’s magazines have a duty to inform their readers and to be fair to their subjects. But they also have a duty to be honest with their audiences about how elections and the winning party might impact their lives, and not just stick to shoes and handbags as some demand.

 

Are Palestinians Human?

 

BREAKING:
LEAKED audio of Columbia University vice president Gerry Rosberg unable to respond when asked if Palestinians are human.
He stated that this question was “intimidating”.
Acknowledging that Palestinians are human is “intimidating rhetoric” to Columbia admin. pic.twitter.com/T1U2qrOQls

— Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (@ColumbiaSJP) March 12, 2024

400 U.S. Officials Sign Letter Critical Of Biden's Israel Policy

antiwar  |  More than 400 US officials from 40 government agencies have sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza in the latest example of dissent from within the US government.

“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the letter reads.

According to The New York Times, the majority of the signatories to the letter are political appointees who work throughout the government, including in the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Security Council. Some signatories helped get Biden elected and said they were worried his support for the onslaught on Gaza was opposed by many Democratic voters.

The letter says that the “overwhelming majority of Americans support a ceasefire,” citing a poll from Data For Progress that found 66% of voters believe the US should push for a ceasefire, including 80% of Democrats. “Furthermore, Americans do not want the US military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East,” the letter says.

President Biden and his top aides have called for “pauses” in the fighting but refuse to use the term “ceasefire,” demonstrating that they are committed to continuing support for the Israeli war, which has killed at least 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children.

Since October 7, the US has shipped weapons to Israel on a near-daily basis and is providing special operations support, including surveillance drone flights over Gaza. Besides the new letter, Biden’s full-throated support for the brutal war has drawn three dissent memos from State Department employees and an open letter signed by more than 1,000 employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

What's Left Of Biden Still Believes The Lie About "Team America World Police!"...,

sputnik  |  Asked whether there should be a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, US President Joe Biden said in an interview for CBS that Israel has to go after Hamas and called them a “bunch of cowards.” “Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust. And so, I think Israel has to respond. They have to go after Hamas. Hamas is a bunch of cowards. They’re hiding behind the civilians,” Biden said. Gaza is a small, densely populated 140.9 square meter area with over 2 million people. Travel in and out of Gaza is heavily controlled by Israeli forces. Biden emphasized that Hamas needs to be “eliminated entirely.” Biden also said that he is in talks with Egypt and Israel about the establishment of a humanitarian corridor in the area.

“We’re also talking to Egyptians whether there is an outlet to get these children and women out of that area at this moment. But it’s hard,” Biden said in the interview. The US President also responded “yes” when asked if he supported humanitarian aid being sent to Gaza, something Israel has been blocking, including food, water and electricity, though Israel announced on Sunday that some water services had been turned back on. At least 13 Americans have been missing since Hamas’ attack, and 30 Americans have been confirmed dead. Biden said that the US is trying every avenue they have to see its remaining citizens returned safely but would not provide details. The interviewer noted that Biden had called the missing Americans’ families and spoke to them on Zoom.

While Biden consistently stressed throughout the interview that the United States supports Israel in their fight against Hamas, he suggested that they do not attempt to occupy Gaza. “I think it’d be a big mistake. Look, what happened in Gaza, in my view, Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people. And I think that … It would be a mistake … for Israel to occupy … Gaza again,” Biden said. Biden added that he does not think committing American troops will be necessary in the conflict. The President stressed that he still supports a two-state solution in the area, which has long been the official US policy, but said that right now is not the time to press for it. He also said that the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is not dead because of the conflict. “The Saudis, and the Emiratis, and other Arab nations understand that their security and stability is enhanced if there’s normalization of relations with Israel,” Biden said. “It’s just going to take time to get done.”

Biden also addressed the conflict in Ukraine, saying that the United States can handle both it and Israel at the same time. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history– not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.” The United States has provided at least $111 billion to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s special operation. Earlier this month, an additional $24 billion in aid was blocked by a group of House Republicans. That debate resulted in the ousting of House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Congress is now frozen until a new speaker is elected. The White House has continued to ask Congress for aid for both Ukraine and Israel. When asked if the situation in Congress threatens world security, Biden responded “yes,” putting the blame on “MAGA Republicans.”

That 70's Era IDF Was Comprised Of Hardened Red Army Veterans - Today's IDF Not So Much...,

theatlantic  |  Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel has laid bare an uncomfortable truth: The fearsome reputation of the Israeli military, like that of Israeli intelligence services, may be overdue for a revision.

Israel has an excellent air force and elite special-operations units, but its conventional line units—made up mostly of conscripts—are neither particularly well trained nor well disciplined by American standards. These units are still demonstrably superior to those of Israel’s adversaries from wars gone by, such as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. But today Israel faces highly disciplined and motivated nonstate foes in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and its military does not seem to have a clear advantage over them at the unit level.

The United States provides Israel roughly $3.8 billion a year in military assistance. (Last year, only Ukraine received more.) That money allows Israel to purchase expensive weaponry, such as F-35 aircraft, that it would otherwise struggle to afford. The two countries review and agree on the amount of aid every 10 years; when we signed our most recent memorandum of understanding with Israel, in 2016, I was the Pentagon’s senior representative, taking part in several months of negotiations in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I had a chance to look under the hood of the Israeli military, and I came away hugely impressed with the Israeli officers with whom I worked. But I was also frankly worried about what the next war might look like.

Even then, Israeli military officials knew that the country was vulnerable to infiltration operations, such as the one Hamas has just executed. They judged Hezbollah likely to consider such tactics in any new clash. Hamas itself had pulled off a similar operation in 2006, albeit on a much smaller scale, when it kidnapped the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom it held captive for more than five years. Israel knew that more of these kinds of attacks were coming, and yet somehow, it was caught completely off guard when they did.

Read: A devastating attack by Hamas

The intelligence failure—which you can be sure Israelis will carefully review—does not surprise me. Few Americans fully appreciate the trauma that the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005, left behind. Israelis built walls, both physical and mental, between themselves and their Arab neighbors. I remember asking multiple Israelis in Jerusalem for directions to Ramallah, a Palestinian city roughly 12 miles away, in 2009. None of them had any idea how to get there. The Palestinians were both out of sight and out of mind, and after the ordeal of the preceding years, that was precisely where many Israelis wanted them. But the Palestinians never actually went anywhere. This lack of intimacy, together with Hamas’s expulsion of other Palestinian factions from Gaza in 2007, has surely hindered Israel’s ability to understand what is going on inside Gaza.

More worrying, and more structural, are the complacency and lack of discipline that not only cost Israel in the opening stages of this new war but will likely continue to do so. I spent almost three years in Lebanon in the mid-2000s and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Hezbollah’s evolution as a fighting force. The few Hezbollah fighters I met in those days struck me, for the most part, as motivated, well trained, and disciplined. Those who fought in the 2006 war with Israel retained a certain amount of wary respect for the U.S. military but held their Israeli adversaries in contempt. They had seen Israeli soldiers in action—and had not been impressed.

Israel does an excellent job—arguably better than the U.S. military—of learning from its tactical and operational failures. But the country’s semiprofessional military relies heavily on conscripts and reservists, which places it at a disadvantage in many respects. Full-time, professional militaries can dedicate themselves to rehearsing collective tasks that high-intensity combat situations often require: reacting to ambushes, conducting raids, incorporating artillery and airpower into maneuvers. Conscript militaries, by contrast, are forever bringing on and training new people. The turnover is often too high to allow units to develop proficiency in the most complicated military tasks.

Israel’s conventional forces, moreover, seem to spend less time rehearsing combined arms operations than they do policing the occupied territories. Indeed, what few active-duty battalions Israel has appear to have been deployed away from the south and to the West Bank to safeguard settlers during the holiday. Such policing operations, in addition to pulling needed units away from other priorities, are poor practice for more high-intensity combat.

Many Israelis in uniform look unkempt and even slovenly, which can be somewhat charming—the contrast with, say, a U.S. Marine can be stark—but the closer one looks, the more one wonders if such appearances betray a certain nonchalance about the profession of arms. In nearly every war Israel has fought since 1967—1973 and 2006 come most immediately to mind—Israel’s armed forces have been slow out of the starting blocks. Discipline is another issue: In 2006, Hezbollah was able to locate Israeli positions by intercepting Israeli reservists calling home on their mobile phones.

This Forbes Smear Of David Grusch And Disclosure Has Aged Like Milk....,

Forbes  |  UFO fever has been sweeping through the internet in the wake of explosive claims made by “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch, a former military intelligence official and Air Force veteran who says the U.S. government is in possession of alien spacecraft.

Grusch recently appeared on NewsNation to elaborate on his claims, interviewed by journalist Ross Coulthart.

The past few years have seen the fringe beliefs of UFO enthusiasts spread from The Joe Rogan Experience to the New York Times and the Guardian, imbuing UFO mythology with a newfound sense of legitimacy.

During his NewsNation interview, Grusch offered no evidence for his extraordinary claims, but said that his information comes from “several sources.” Grusch confirmed that he had not personally seen any of the alleged alien spacecraft, but has seen “some interesting photos” and “read some very interesting reports.”

UFO skeptic Mick West released an excellent response video to Grusch’s interview that delves into the details of his claims. Notably, many of Grusch’s claims contain illogical assumptions, popularized by science fiction tropes.

While science fiction can offer a glimpse into an imagined future, the genre often reflects the cultural anxieties and technological limitations of the time period in which it is conceived.

What are Grusch’s claims?

Grusch claims that the United States is in possession of multiple “vehicles” or “spacecraft” constructed by a "non-human intelligence" and that their existence is being concealed from the public.

Grusch says that these spacecraft have “either landed or crashed” on Earth, and that both the U.S. government and defense contractors are currently working to reverse-engineer the technology.

Extraordinarily, Grusch even claimed that some of the vehicles contained the bodies of pilots, and that some of the spacecraft were “very large, like a football field kinda size.”

Grusch stated that the vehicles were not “necessarily extraterrestrial,” and speculated that they might come from another dimension, stating, “as somebody who studied physics, where maybe they’re coming from a different physical dimension, as described in quantum mechanics.”

Grusch described the vehicles as being composed of “extremely strange, heavy, atomic metal, you know, high up at the periodic table, arrangements that we don’t understand.”

Grusch hinted that some of the alien beings were malevolent, and had even killed humans. Grusch also implied that there is some kind of secret agreement between the government and aliens, and that people have been murdered to protect the secret.

Grusch claimed that he was taking “great personal risk and obvious professional risk” by speaking to the media.

Why is this science fiction?

 

Uncritical Slobbering All Over ChatGPT

NewAtlas |  OpenAI's humble, free-to-use chatbot has made it clear: life will never be the same after ChatGPT.

We are witnessing a revolution. After the stunning debut of OpenAI's Dall-E 2 image generator last year, the company opened its natural language generator up to the public at the end of November last year. Since then, it's spread like wildfire, amassing more than 100 million users in its first two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history and the buzzword of the year.

There had been thousands of AI chatbots before, but never one like this. Here was an artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of billions of words; it has read billions of books, billions of web pages, billions of Wikipedia entries – so it's ingested a broad and detailed snapshot of the entirety of human knowledge up until around June 2021, the cutoff point for the dataset on which its underlying GPT 3.5 language model has been trained. 

Beyond being handed this priceless treasure trove of knowledge, ChatGPT has been trained in the art of interaction using untold numbers of written human conversations, and guided by human supervisors to improve the quality of what it writes.

The results are staggering. ChatGPT writes as well as, or (let's face it) better than, most humans. This overgrown autocomplete button can generate authoritative-sounding prose on nearly any topic in a matter of milliseconds, of such quality that it's often extremely difficult to distinguish from a human writer. It formulates arguments that seem well-researched, and builds key points toward a conclusion. Its paragraphs feel organic, structured, logically connected and human enough to earn my grudging respect.

The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly something big is happening.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 2, 2022

It remembers your entire conversation and clarifies or elaborates on points if you ask it to. And if what it writes isn't up to scratch, you can click a button for a complete re-write that'll tackle your prompt again from a fresh angle, or ask for specific changes to particular sections or approaches.

It costs you nothing. It'll write in any style you want, taking any angle you want, on nearly any topic you want, for exactly as many words as you want. It produces enormous volumes of text in seconds. It's not precious about being edited, it doesn't get sick, or need to pick its kids up from school, or try to sneak in fart jokes, or turn up to work hungover, or make publishers quietly wonder exactly how much self-pleasuring they're paying people for in a remote work model.

Little wonder that websites like CNET, Buzzfeed and others are starting the process of replacing their human writers with ChatGPT prompt-wranglers – although there's icebergs in the water for these early adopters, since the technology still gets things flat-out wrong sometimes, and sounds confident and authoritative enough in the process that even teams of fact-checking sub-editors can't stop it from publishing "rampant factual errors and apparent plagiarism," as well as outdated information.

Despite these slight drawbacks, the dollar rules supreme, and there has never been a content-hose like this before. Indeed, it seems the main thing standing between large swaths of the publishing industry and widespread instant adoption of ChatGPT as a high-volume, low-cost author is the fear that Google might figure out how to detect AI-generated text and start penalizing offenders by tanking their search ratings.

Just in case anyone's wondering, we don't use it here at New Atlas, and have no plans to start – but we'd be fools not to see the writing on the wall. This genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and it won't take long before it can fact-check itself and improve its accuracy. It's not immediately obvious how AI-generated text can reliably be detected at this point. So enjoy your local human writers while you still can ... And throw us $20 on an ad-free subscription if you want to help keep the doors open!

Its work certainly doesn't have to be dry and (seemingly) factual, either. ChatGPT has more than a passing understanding of more creative forms of writing as well, and will happily generate fiction too. It'll pump out custom bedtime stories for your kids, or complex choose-your-own-adventure experiences, or role-playing games about anything you like, or teen fiction, or screenplays, or comedy routines.  

 

 

Deeply Offended That A 3rd World Cheese Dick Controls The POTUS

kanekoa  |   The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”

Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later, on May 12, 2014.

A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.

The study, which was funded to dig up the corruption of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, instead found that Ihor Kolomoysky “managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.”

Burisma Holdings changed owners in 2011 when it was taken over by an off-shore Cyprus enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd, and subsequently, moved addresses under the same roof as Ukrnaftoburinnya and Esko-Pivnich, two Ukrainian gas companies which happened to be also owned by Kolomoysky through off-shore entities in the British Virgin Islands.

Oleh Kanivets, who worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya, confirmed Kolomoysky as the owner of Burisma Holding in the 2012 report saying, “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group.”

In other words, Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings is the same Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch who also claimed the position of boss and benefactor over Volodymyr Zelensky before he became Ukraine’s president.

Kolomoysky Owns 1+1 Media Group

Kolmoysky, who currently holds a net worth of $1.8 billion, making him the 1750th richest person in the world, owns holdings in metal, petroleum, and the media sector, where he has had a long history with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

For years, Zelensky’s company produced shows for Kolmoysky’s TV network, 1+1 Media Group, one of the largest media conglomerates in Ukraine. Zelensky achieved national fame, portraying a president on a hit television sitcom called Servant of the People, which was broadcasted on a channel owned by Kolmoysky.

In 2019, Kolmoysky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign, while Kolmoysky even provided security, lawyers, and vehicles for Zelensky during his campaign. Kolmoysky’s bodyguard and lawyer accompanied Zelensky on the campaign trail as Zelensky was chauffeured around in a Range Rover owned by one of Kolmoysky’s companies.

The Pandora Papers showed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his TV production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms created in 2012, the same year Zelensky’s production company entered into a deal with Kolomoysky’s media group, which allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoysky’s Privatbank.

Zelensky’s political rival, President Petro Poroshenko, commented on their connection during the campaign trail, “Fate intended to put me together with Kolomoyskiy’s puppet in the second round of the elections.”

After Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoysky, who had spent the last few years living between Israel and Switzerland, returned to Ukraine to keep up his relationship with the new president, nominating over 30-lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.

I Guess The CIA Twitter Didn't Like That...,

 @GonzaloLira1968 

Account suspended 

Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules. Learn more 

Gonzalo posted a video of happy American soldiers in Izium (the Izium sign was shown in the video).

#US and #UK mercenaries took a short video from the entrance of #Izyum #Kharkov after #Russian army retreated from the area.

They are all part of #Nazi #Ukraine army unit #KarpatskaSich

Mercenary Rob-roy Lane who is taking video thinks he is fighting Soviets. pic.twitter.com/e0ncESWzfd

— Luka (@Luka_zgd) September 11, 2022

HUGE Food For Thought As They Start Dispensing Newfangled Pox Jabs

amidwesterndoctor |  This is a supplemental addition to my previous piece.  I would strongly encourage you to read that article before reading this one as this one goes into more tangential and complex points that supplement the original, but many of you may find very insightful.  Many of the concepts here also appear to apply to the COVID immunizations, however for length considerations, I will omit most of those connections and leave you to draw your own conclusions.  All of the books I cited here can be easily found on Amazon and often as PDFs, but I avoided linking to them here and supporting Amazon. Lastly, as I did not want to further delay publication, a significant number of minor edits will occur in the next few days.

I did not expect to attract the viewership the original article received, or the follow-up by larger media outlets (Steve Kirsch’s newsletter, the Kate Daley show and mercola.com) and am sincerely grateful for your support, and those parties in particular in spreading this message.  As I now have many readers, I will try to produce quality content as my time permits (with work and all), as I want it to be worth your time to read what I produce.  For the time being I will focus on interesting bits of medical history (the next piece will be interesting lessons from the 1918 influenza I applied to my treatment of COVID).

Additionally, since my last publication a reader notified me of a short book written in 1889 and viewable online which concisely provides evidence for many of the points covered in Dissolving Illusions, such as the lack of efficacy from the vaccination, the diseases associated with its administration, the distortion of data used by government officials to claim benefit rather than harm, and false claim it reduced death in hospitals.

To be complete and illustrate the observed effects of the smallpox vaccines, this article is a bit longer than the previous.  I could have cited significantly more resources, but I aimed to cover one text that was representative from each major school of thought at the time.  Its sections are as follows:

-Introduction
-General Smallpox Observations
-Allopathy
-Naturopathy
-Homeopathy
-Osteopathy
-Traditional Chinese Medicine
-Modern Research

Brandon Is Just So F**king Pitiful....,

libertarianinstitute |  Are Biden’s off-the-cuff-and-wall remarks signs of dementia? Or are they just the Bidenesque “Kinsley gaffes” we’ve become accustomed to? (A Kinsley gaffe occurs when someone important speaks his mind when he or his handlers know he shouldn’t.)

By now, Biden’s irresponsibly provocative remarks have made the rounds. He has said that Russia’s use of chemical weapons in Ukraine would bring a NATO response, but left the nature of the response vague. His administration seems to be shying away from explicitly declaring “red lines.”

And yet, when ABC News asked Biden, “If chemical weapons were used in Ukraine could that trigger a military response from NATO?” Biden responded, “It would trigger a response in kind. Whether or not — you’re asking whether NATO would cross — we’d make that decision at the time.” (Emphasis added.)

Say what? Response in kind? Does that mean he might order a chemical-weapons counterattack?

As others have pointed out, even a de facto red line is an invitation for a false-flag attack in which a Ukrainian group, hoping to bring NATO into the fight, would use chemical weapons while making the perpetrator appear to be Russian. This sort of thing seems likely to have happened in Syria.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky is still lobbying for even more NATO intervention (in addition to arms and sanctions) in the form of a no-fly zone, which is now called “close the sky.” The shameless public appeal includes this video, with the lyric “If you don’t close the sky/I will die.” The lyricist neglected to point out that if the sky is closed and the U.S. Air Force shoots down a Russian jet, we all could die in a nuclear exchange.

Biden still says no to closing the sky, but if he started saying the opposite, who’d be surprised?

As everyone knows, while abroad Biden also seemed to call for regime change in Russia with this ad-lib: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” History teaches that implied policies such as that do not facilitate ceasefires and peace. The Gaffer-in-Chief and his people tried to walk it back, but the attempts were lame. “I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel,” he said while insisting he wasn’t walking back his statement, “and I make no apologies for it.” (American presidents are always morally outraged whenever countries they don’t like do what the U.S. government regularly does.)

A White House official dutifully insisted that what his boss meant “was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” If you buy that, they have a bridge you might be interested in.

"Scientists Being Scientists" There Are Definitely Biological Weapons In The Ukraine Warzone

thebulletin  |  “There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Pope said. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”

The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for legitimate scientific research, Pope said.

“What we have today and what these countries maintain are small amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are collected out of their environment that they need for research to be able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against,” he said.

This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before destroying the live samples.

Pope said his program had been close to an agreement with the Ukrainians on consolidating samples, but the invasion has now made that project uncertain. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with the recent events,” he said.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Pope said Thursday, has not had contact with biosafety staff at the labs in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Phone lines have been jammed in Ukraine, he said, and “I don’t know what kind of contact we will have in these labs in the near future.”

Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s bioweapons program.

The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six Ukrainian labs. The program also provides biosafety and scientific mentorship training to Ministry of Health personnel throughout the country.

Russia Bout To Find Biological Weapons In Those Biological Weapons Labs

greenwald  |  The neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

But Rubio's clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:

Nuland's bizarre admission that “Ukraine has biological research facilities” that are dangerous enough to warrant concern that they could fall into Russian hands ironically constituted more decisive evidence of the existence of such programs in Ukraine than what was offered in 2002 and 2003 to corroborate U.S. allegations about Saddam's chemical and biological programs in Iraq. An actual against-interest confession from a top U.S. official under oath is clearly more significant than Colin Powell's holding up some test tube with an unknown substance inside while he pointed to grainy satellite images that nobody could decipher.

It should go without saying that the existence of a Ukrainian biological “research” program does not justify an invasion by Russia, let alone an attack as comprehensive and devastating as the one unfolding: no more than the existence of a similar biological program under Saddam would have rendered the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq justifiable. But Nuland's confession does shed critical light on several important issues and raises vital questions that deserve answers.

Any attempt to claim that Ukraine's biological facilities are just benign and standard medical labs is negated by Nuland's explicitly grave concern that “Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of” those facilities and that the U.S. Government therefore is, right this minute, “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.”

 

What Will Russia Find In U.S. Bioweapons Labs In The Ukraine?

veteranstoday  |  I have often reported that the U.S., more specifically the Pentagon, operates several bioweapons labs in Ukraine. The last time I reported on this was on January 27. The U.S. has always refused international inspections of its labs, so no one knows what they are researching in these labs. But we can assume that Russian special forces will take a closer look at these labs in the coming days.

And this seems to be exactly a can of worms. A tweet was published on Twitter about this and the user was immediately blocked. I won’t go into the content of the tweet, which can still be found in an Internet archive. If you are interested, you can view it here [1].

My point is that Twitter was so quick to delete a tweet and its author merely because he pointed out that there are U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine and that it looks like their capture is one of the important targets of the Russian military operation.

The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria, and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases.

Biowarfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program– Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa.

Biowarfare scientists under diplomatic cover

Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) – an International organization funded mainly by the US government which has been accorded diplomatic status.

The STCU officially supports projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.

The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.

364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu

One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from Flu-like virus in just two days with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv.

As of March 2016, 364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 % caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the world pandemic in 2009).

 

 

Jamelle Bouie Never Visited A Post-NAFTA Hell Of Addiction, Joblessness, And Hopelessness

NYTimes  |  It has not been uncommon, in recent years, to hear Americans worry about the advent of a new civil war.

“Is Civil War Ahead?” The New Yorker asked last month. “Is America heading to civil war or secession?” CNN wondered on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Last week, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois told “The View” that “we have to recognize” the possibility of a civil war. “I don’t think it’s too far of a bridge to think that’s a possibility,” he said.

This isn’t just the media or the political class; it’s public opinion too. In a 2019 survey for the Georgetown Institute of Politics, the average respondent said that the United States was two-thirds of the way toward the “edge of a civil war.” In a recent poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard, 35 percent of voting-age Americans under 30 placed the odds of a second civil war at 50 percent or higher.

And in a result that says something about the divisions at hand, 52 percent of Trump voters and 41 percent of Biden voters said that they at least “somewhat agree” that it’s time to split the country, with either red or blue states leaving the union and forming their own country, according to a survey conducted by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia (where I am a visiting scholar).

Several related forces are fueling this anxiety, from deepening partisan polarization and our winner-take-all politics to our sharp division across lines of identity, culture and geography. There is the fact that this country is saturated with guns, as well as the reality that many Americans fear demographic change to the point that they’re willing to do pretty much anything to stop it. There is also the issue of Donald Trump, his strongest supporters and their effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Americans feel farther apart than at any point in recent memory, and as a result, many Americans fear the prospect of organized political violence well beyond what we saw on Jan. 6, 2021.

There is, however, a serious problem with this narrative: The Civil War we fought in the 19th century was not sparked by division qua division.

Two Weeks Ago Sloly Asked For Help, Today He Got A Foot In His Ass...,

cbc  |   "Chief Sloly and the Ottawa Police Service have been working, with our policing partners, around the clock for three weeks to end this illegal occupation of our city," the statement said.

"This unprecedented situation, well beyond the experience of any municipal policing body in Canada, has put tremendous strain on all our officers."

The statement said the Ottawa Police Service is working with the OPP and RCMP to establish a joint incident command that it says will see more resources and expertise made available to help end what many are calling the occupation of the nation's capital.

"In future there will be an opportunity for a full review of the operation, but right now it is time to work together with our partners and focus on ending this illegal occupation," the statement said.

OPS media relations told CBC News no one was available for an interview.

The Globe and Mail recently noted that while Sloly has faced criticism for his handling of some issues, he was not known in policing circles as someone quick to resort to heavy-handed measures.

During a special meeting of the Ottawa Police Services Board Friday, police board chair Coun. Diane Deans defended Sloly's response to the crisis, saying that despite requests for help issued to the province and the federal government the OPS still did not have the resources it needed to end the occupation of the city. 

The Ottawa Police Service is "working tirelessly with the resources they have and there has been some progress. There have been over 1,700 tickets issued, there have been at least 25 arrests, police have been working to seize fuel, they've made progress on clamping down on the encampment at Coventry Rd. and in Confederation Park, but it's not enough," Deans said at the meeting.

"We do not have the resource requirement that we have asked for at this point."

Deans declined an interview request from CBC News Monday when asked about specific allegations related to Sloly's behaviour as chief of police.

San Francisco Elites Must've Taken London Breed To The Woodshed...,

NYTimes |  The mayor of San Francisco on Friday made a sharp break with the liberal conventions that have guided her city for decades, declaring a state of emergency in one of its most crime-infested neighborhoods.

Mayor London Breed’s announcement came just days after she emphasized the need for the police to clean up what she has described as “nasty streets.” At a news conference at City Hall, steps away from where drug dealers openly peddle fentanyl and methamphetamines, she said, “We are in a crisis and we need to respond accordingly.” She added, “Too many people are dying in this city, too many people are sprawled on our streets.”

The neighborhood, the Tenderloin, has been ground zero for drug dealing, overdose deaths and homelessness for years. But Ms. Breed said in an interview that she reached her “breaking point” in recent weeks after meeting with families with children who live in the Tenderloin and said they felt constantly threatened.

Her actions and startlingly blunt language were a marked change in tone and policy in a city that has been polarized over homeless encampments and open-air drug use. Elected as a liberal Democrat, she spoke this week about “a reign of criminals,” trash strewn across neighborhoods full of “feces and urine,” and shoplifting at high-end stores that she called “mass looting events.”

Joe D’Alessandro, president and chief executive of the San Francisco tourism bureau, said the city had an image problem and praised the mayor for addressing it.

“We are excited and enthusiastic to see some significant steps to make San Francisco a safer city,” he said. “People are just fed up with some of the stuff they’ve seen and want to see some action.”

The announcement of a state of emergency specifically targeted the drug overdose crisis: More than twice as many people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco last year as died from the coronavirus. But Friday’s announcement is part of a broader, aggressive push to crack down on drug dealing and improve conditions. In practical terms, Ms. Breed said the city would no longer tolerate illicit drug users in the streets — giving them a choice between treatment or arrest.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb: Next Panicdemic, We'll Have To Involve Our Instruments Of National Security

nakedcapitalism |  “We’ll have to involve our instruments of National Security.” This is mere question begging. Surely the intelligence agencies are not the only state organs capable of prediction and analysis? (To be fair, I can understand why one might wish to fall back on one of the few institutions in our sclerotic state that actually does function, rather like calling in the Army to handle nursing home staffing or container jams.)

One obvious reason run screaming from the room if anybody proposes Gottlieb’s idea is this episode. From Scientific American, “How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All“:

In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.

It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.

The deadly consequences have already begun. Villagers along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border chased off legitimate vaccine workers, accusing them of being spies. Taliban commanders banned polio vaccinations in parts of Pakistan, specifically citing the bin Laden ruse as justification. Then, last December, nine vaccine workers were murdered in Pakistan, eventually prompting the United Nations to withdraw its vaccination teams. Two months later gunmen killed 10 polio workers in Nigeria—a sign that the violence against vaccinators may be spreading.

Such attacks could not come at a worse time. The global polio campaign has entered what should be its final stages. The number of cases has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to 650 in 2011. The disease spreads naturally in only three countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria—down from more than 125 countries a quarter of a century ago. Disrupting or postponing vaccination efforts could fan a resurgence of polio around the world.

The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred, says Leslie F. Roberts of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Forevermore, people would say this disease, this crippled child is because the U.S. was so crazy to get Osama bin Laden,” he argues.

100,000 crippled children because CIA operatives hijacked a public health effort, good job. Gottlieb is, of course, aware of this episode. His idea is that if the public health people are “at the table” good things will happen. Perhaps the Norms Fairy will intervene, I don’t know. Page 370:

Wait..., WHAT?!?!?!

By Itself - Mr.NA DOES NOT Vaccinate Against Super-Covid!!! But....,

nature | These jokers created some super-covid from the worst strains of existing covid variants. (Gain of Function Research)  It’s virological and immunological <s>dual use bioweapons</s> research.  Hope none gets out of the NYC lab where they created it over a year ago. 

They then tested antibodies created from a natural Covid-19 infection - and - antibodies created by someone with an mRNA vaccine against this “gain of function” super strain of Covid-19. The super Covid was resistant to both types of antibodies. However, antibodies from someone who both was infected and recovered from a Covid-19 infection AND received an mRNA vaccination defeated the super strain of Covid-19.

 

The number and variability of the neutralizing epitopes targeted by polyclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 convalescent and vaccinated individuals are key determinants of neutralization breadth and the genetic barrier to viral escape^1–4. Using HIV-1 pseudotypes and plasma-selection experiments with vesicular stomatitis virus/SARS-CoV-2 chimeras⁵, we show that multiple neutralizing epitopes, within and outside the receptor binding domain (RBD), are variably targeted by human polyclonal antibodies. Antibody targets coincide with spike sequences that are enriched for diversity in natural SARS-CoV-2 populations. By combining plasma-selected spike substitutions, we generated synthetic ‘polymutant’ spike protein pseudotypes that resisted polyclonal antibody neutralization to a similar degree as circulating variants of concern (VOC). By aggregating VOC-associated and antibody-selected spike substitutions into a single polymutant spike protein, we show that 20 naturally occurring mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike are sufficient to generate pseudotypes with near-complete resistance to the polyclonal neutralizing antibodies generated by convalescents or mRNA vaccine recipients. Strikingly, however, plasma from individuals who had been infected and subsequently received mRNA vaccination, neutralized pseudotypes bearing this highly resistant SARS-CoV-2 polymutant spike, or diverse sarbecovirus spike proteins. Thus, optimally elicited human polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to substantial future SARS-CoV-2 variation and may confer protection against potential future sarbecovirus pandemics.