Corporate Overlords Steady Creeping To Throttle Last Vestiges Of Peasant Dissent

zerohedge  |  A Senate bill is raising fears among some for its potential to enable Big Tech and mainstream media outlets to collude against smaller and independent media outlets.

The bill, dubbed the Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), would supersede some existing antitrust laws and allow media companies to band together to negotiate with Big Tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Specifically, the JCPA says:

“A news content creator may not be held liable under the antitrust laws for engaging in negotiations with any other news content creator during the 4-year period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act to collectively withhold content from, or negotiate with, an online content distributor regarding the terms on which the news content of the news content creator may be distributed by the online content distributor.”

In brief, this means that online and print media outlets, including some of the largest and longest-established names in the industry, could band together in a kind of media union to demand concessions from tech companies in order for the coalition to continue to allow their content on the platform. Under existing antitrust laws, such cartels—which describe a collusion of firms in an industry to join together for a common financial or industry outcome—are decidedly illegal.

Proponents of the JCPA have presented it as a much-needed panacea to address dwindling numbers of dedicated local media companies who, proponents say, are often left behind in the umbrella of Big Tech algorithms and advertising capacity.

In a change.org petition that has garnered over 23,000 signatures, the News Media Alliance, one of the most outspoken supporters of the bill, explained this position, presenting it as a hardline position against the reach of big tech power and influence.

“Today, many local newspapers are struggling to stay in business. Big Tech platforms, such as Facebook and Google, control how we access trustworthy news online and how journalism is displayed, prioritized, and monetized. They capture the vast majority of all digital advertising dollars because of their outsized ability to collect consumer data.

“Local newspaper revenues have gone down and as a result, thousands of journalists have been laid off, ‘news deserts’ are emerging across the country, and dangerous misinformation that threatens the fabric of our democracy continues to flourish.”

But opponents of the bill have raised alarm bells, warning that in practice the policy will only serve to benefit established legacy and mainstream outlets, to the exclusion of anti-establishment, independent publications.

Specifically, opponents point to a section of an updated draft of the JCPA that could effectively permit legacy media cartels to demand that tech platforms censor or outright refuse to permit newer, less-established media outlets from publishing on the platform.

 

Gazprom Presents The Lullabye Of Winter For The West

DW  | Putin accused the West of attempting to "subordinate" Russia with sanctions during a speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He also announced new deals with China and Myanmar regarding gas and oil. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted some sectors of the Russian economy are suffering due to sanctions and political pressure, which he referred to as the "economic, financial and technological aggression of the West," but remained bullish on building new ties with Asia.

Putin made the comments in a landmark speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in the far east city of Vladivostok on Wednesday.

"Other challenges of a global nature that threaten the whole world have replaced the pandemic," the Russian president said.

"I am speaking of the West's sanctions fever, with its brazen, aggressive attempt to impose models of behavior on other countries, to deprive them of their sovereignty and subordinate them to their will."

However, Putin added: "No matter how much someone would like to isolate Russia, it is impossible to do this."

Grain shipments under threat

During his speech, Putin said said Russia had been "grossly swindled" by a grain shipping deal that was reached with Ukraine in July. The deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN, was intended to shield the world's most vulnerable people from a looming food crisis.

The Russian president claimed only two out of 87 ships went to poor countries, and said Russia had been unable to resume lucrative fertilizer exports which had been promised as part of the deal. Putin said he would now consider limiting the destinations for grain exports under the agreement.

Ukrainian authorities hit back later on Wenesday, with presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak calling Putin's proposal "unexpected" and "groundless."

"The agreements signed in Istanbul ... concern only one issue, and that is the transfer of cargo ships through the Black Sea," Podolyak told Reuters.

"Russia can't dictate where Ukraine should send its grain, and Ukraine doesn't dictate the same to Russia." 

Oil and gas in limbo

Russia is the world's largest natural gas exporter, and the second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.

Putin said Russia would renege on energy contracts if the Group of Seven (G7) countries imposed a price cap on Russian oil, threatening to cut the flow of gas to Europe.

"Will there be any political decisions that contradict the contracts? Yes, we just won't fulfil them. We will not supply anything at all if it contradicts our interests," Putin said. "We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil — we will not supply anything."

Hours after Putin's comments, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters: "We will propose a price cap on Russian gas... We must cut Russia's revenues which Putin uses to finance this atrocious war in Ukraine."

 

 

British Police Fear Hard Winter Of Surging Crime And Violence

thetimes |  Police forces are braced for a rise in crime, a breakdown in public order and even corruption in their ranks this winter as they draw up emergency proposals to deal with the cost of living crisis.

Contingency planning among police chiefs is under way to deal with the fallout that could result from millions of households falling into financial difficulties.

A leaked national strategy paper, drawn up by them this summer, has revealed they are increasingly concerned that “economic turmoil and financial instability” has “potential to drive increases in particular crime types”.

These include “acquisitive” offences, such as shoplifting, burglary and vehicle theft, as well as online fraud and blackmail, and crimes that “rely on exploiting financial vulnerability”.

At a regional level, some police forces are preparing for more children to be sucked into county lines drug gangs and women falling victim to sexual exploitation. Priti Patel, the home secretary, is understood to share their concern.

One chief constable has said that their force has already noticed an increase in some offences and has stepped up preparations in response. The higher price cap on household energy bills, £3,549, comes into force on October 1.

Drawn up with input from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the document goes on to say that “a more complex and unpredictable risk is the chance of greater civil unrest, as a response to prolonged and painful economic pressure”.

A senior officer at one force in the north of England told a local MP that without significant government intervention they feared a return to the febrile conditions that led to the London riots in 2011.

The document says: “Greater financial vulnerability may expose some staff to higher risk of corruption, especially among those who fall into significant debt or financial difficulties.” It offers a glimpse of the stark choices facing the new prime minister, expected to be Liz Truss, when they take office on Tuesday. It can also be revealed:

•Truss will make a “very short” speech to the country on Tuesday making clear that she understands the pain caused by rising energy bills and offering an “immediate” package of support for families, before getting cabinet approval for the plans on Wednesday.

Only The Fiction Of Democracy Remains

scheerpost  |  There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ignored by a hyperventilating press that thundered against the barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war. 

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home.

In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, economics was subordinate to politics. But under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There is no attempt, unlike fascism and state socialism, to address the needs of the poor. Rather, the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more you are exploited, thrust into a hellish debt peonage from which there is no escape. Social services, from education to health care, are anemic, nonexistent or privatized to gouge the impoverished. Further ravaged by 8.5 percent inflation, wages have decelerated sharply since 1979. Jobs often do not offer benefits or security.

2 Parties 1 Ideology And Its Enemy Within Strategy

globalresearch |  Maliciously smearing approximately half of the country as existential terrorist-inclined threats to “the soul of the nation” is nothing but the crudest Machiavellian means of dividing and ruling the population.

The Unprecedentedly Dangerous Divider-In-Chief

US President Joe Biden’s nationally televised speech on Thursday that the official White House website headlined as being about “the continued battle for the soul of the nation” saw the incumbent become the most dangerous and divisive American leader in history. Far from trying to cleanse and protect that very same soul, he shamelessly spit on it by pitting his people against one another as part of an obvious divide-and-rule plot ahead of the neck-and-neck midterm elections that are only two months away.

Debunking Biden’s False Belief In Equality & Democracy

The first part that stands out is Biden emphasizing how the location of his speech, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was made and the Constitution signed, reinforces the mutually complementary concepts of equality and democracy connected with those two documents. He doesn’t truly believe in either of those though as proven by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemning all minority views as “extremist” earlier that same day.

Nevertheless, he pretended that he’s a true believer in them in order to artificially manufacture the basis upon which to contrast himself with former US President Donald Trump. Biden claimed that his predecessor and those who still support his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement supposedly “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Falsely framing them as existential threats so close to the midterms is obviously aimed at manipulating voters’ perceptions.

Applying The “Rules For Radicals” Against The MAGA Movement

This crude tactic would be condemned by the American Government if it was employed by any Global South leader irrespective of whether it’s baseless like in Biden’s case or genuinely backed up by facts. Biden then channeled the infamous Saul Alinksy’s “Rules For Radicals”, specifically the thirteenth rule to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”, when claiming that “the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”.

By adding that “that is a threat to this country”, the incumbent ominously implied that the full authority of the state will be brought down to bear on those who are even simply suspected of being remotely connected to the former president or his movement on faux national security pretexts. He then instantly reverted to gaslighting once again just like he earlier did by unconvincingly claiming that he supports the Founding Fathers’ vision of equality and democracy by contrasting Democrats and MAGA on false bases.

Who Really Employs Political Violence & Election Conspiracy Theories?

The same man who represents the party that frenziedly fanned the flames of the joint Antifa- and BLM-led Hybrid War of Terror on America all throughout summer 2020, whose countless antagonists were manipulated into functioning as “useful idiots” of the anti-MAGA faction of the US “deep state” (permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies), counterfactually claimed that it’s Trump and his supporters who divided the country through the use of violence for political ends.

Biden also insulted Americans’ intelligence by gaslighting that it’s only some MAGA folks who’ve ever rejected the outcome of a presidential election when most Democrats refused to recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016. Not only that, but their anti-MAGA “deep state” puppeteers literally concocted the Russiagate conspiracy theory that they laundered through allied congressional representatives, law enforcement, media, and NGOs to discredit the entirety of his four years in office.

How Did Western Political Leadership Come To Be Comprised Exclusively Of Compradores?

imetatronink  |  this war has reached the stage equivalent to Nazi Germany in mid-January 1945: the war is lost; everyone knows it is lost, and all that remains is the positioning in advance of the inevitable surrender, the unrestrained looting, and the occasional harassment of the never-say-die snipers who will fight to their last round of ammo and last drop of blood.

In other words, we’ve finally arrived at the most dangerous juncture of this conflict.

You see, as I have frequently observed, this war, at its deepest root, has always been an existential struggle between Russia and the rapidly declining fortunes and dominion of the long-since irredeemably corrupted American Empire.

Beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union, and continuing throughout the 1990s, the western vulture capitalists raced to divide, conquer, and despoil the unfathomable natural resource wealth of the former USSR. And indeed, in ten short years, they managed to extract a massive pile of treasure at Russia’s expense, only to be prematurely thwarted by the unforeseen rise of the previously obscure Vladimir Putin.

At first, the finely accoutered locusts believed they could manipulate Putin as easily as they had his immediate predecessors. But they were soon disabused of that fallacy. So then they began to pressure Putin and Russia by methodically assimilating into their “defensive alliance” all the previously unaligned nations that stood between NATO’s 1997 borders and the Russian frontier.

This, of course, awakened in Russia a sober sense of their increasingly precarious position, and in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a landmark speech wherein he put the Empire on notice that Russia was drawing a line in the sand beyond which it would not permit further NATO expansion. That line extended from eastern Poland to northern Armenia.

Predictably, Putin’s declarations were first mocked and then summarily dismissed.

I suspect this was the point at which Russia came to see that war was very likely inevitable in order to retain its sovereignty and security.

Nevertheless, Putin exhibited extraordinary patience. While initiating an aggressive military upgrade and expansion program, he bided his time for the next several years.

But with the threat to Russia’s strategic naval base in Syria and the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine, he was compelled to act, albeit with considerable restraint, to alter the trajectory of events. He dispatched an expeditionary force to Syria to prevent the fall of the Assad regime at the hands of US-supported “moderate rebels”; he moved to reclaim historically Russian Crimea, and to much more aggressively support the ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine who were waging a tenuously balanced civil war against the US-installed regime in Kiev.

American designs in Syria were foiled. But the ongoing de facto NATO assimilation of Ukraine continued, as the US and its NATO allies set out to methodically construct what would eventually become the most formidable proxy army in history, with ambitions to lure Putin into a Slavic civil war that would sap Russian strength, mortally wound its still-fragile economy, and induce social unrest within Russia and discontent among its various loci of domestic power, and ultimately effect “regime change” in the Kremlin.

But, at every juncture, Putin out-maneuvered them.

Meanwhile, the decades-long superiority of Russian missile technology produced for Putin several trump cards in the form of long-range stand-off weapons capable of threatening prime US military assets virtually anywhere on the planet.

Armed with this “ace in the hole”, Putin’s negotiation posture was significantly fortified, and from 2018 onward he began to articulate much more forcefully that Russia would not abide any further NATO expansion towards its borders – most explicitly in the case of Ukraine, where the ambitious training and outfitting of a NATO proxy army continued apace.

Captagon A Big Part Of Why Ukro-Nazis Are Willing Cannon Fodder

dailyveracity |  Captagon is a drug that first came to prominence during the Islamic State’s terror wave throughout the middle east. Since 2014, the drug reportedly reemerged within Ukraine, fueling neo-nazi terrorists who have used the meth-like substance on the battlefield to overcome the fear of death, becoming what some people call “zombie soldiers.” 

The Donetsk People Republic (DPR) recently uncovered drug laboratories where ‘combat drugs’ have reportedly been developed ii village of Sopino near Mariupol, and administered to the Azov Battalion. Sputnik reported.

 DNR-Kräfte fanden Labors in der Nähe von Mariupol, in denen "Kriegs"-Drogen für ukrainische Nationalisten hergestellt wurden, berichtet RIA Novosti pic.twitter.com/PjZuDfPfSW

— Xx (@Xx17965797) March 6, 2022

“You start taking him somewhere, and they’re laughing. They don’t feel anything, no pain or anything. They’re like zombies.” describes a Donbas soldier.

A DPR soldier alleged that the drugs, which are a combination of Captagon, as well as other amphetamines, cause “stupidity and courage” among the Ukrainian neo-nazis who are said to lose all fear of death when taking the substance.

Some of the neo-nazis who were high on the drug, admitted to killing fellow Ukrainian citizens, saying “I understood that I was shooting at civilians, but I was high on drugs, I was following orders”

Captagon, before being banned throughout the western world, was first manufactured in 1961 as an alternative to amphetamine and methamphetamine—used at the time to treat narcolepsy, fatigue, and the behavioral disorder “minimal brain dysfunction.”

Since, the illegal manufacturing of the substance exploded throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East, and is said to have fueled ISIS throughout their terror campaign across the middle east.

The ‘Combat Drug’ has since become a staple for the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, who is said to manufacture the substance and administer it to combatants who then are said to stay up for days without fatigue.

The Azov soldiers have gone through Ukraine, torturing, beating, and killing Ukrainian civilians. It has been reported that the Ukrainian soldiers have killed their own, indiscriminately, while laughing and cheering.

 

What Is Captagon?

Newsweek |  In the past three months, investigators across Europe have intercepted thousands of Captagon pills, an amphetamine-based drug popular with the Islamic State militant group. Nicknamed "the jihadists' drug," Captagon keeps users awake for long periods of time, dulls pain and creates a sense of euphoria. According to one former militant who spoke to CNN in 2014, ISIS "gave us drugs, hallucinogenic pills that would make you go to battle not caring if you live or die." Given similar testimony from other fighters, experts say it seems likely that the hallucinogenic pills the militant took were Captagon.

Invented in Germany in the 1960s to treat attention and sleep disorders, and highly addictive, Captagon was banned throughout most of the world in the 1980s.

On May 10, Dutch investigators said they had discovered a drug lab the previous month that was churning out Captagon pills, and they were looking for two suspects associated with the lab. In March, Greek police confiscated more than 600,000 Captagon pills in a raid and arrested four people for allegedly manufacturing the drug.

Greek and Dutch police haven't said the Captagon stashes they found were destined for ISIS fighters.

Captagon is one of the brand names for the drug fenethylline, a combination of amphetamine and theophylline that relaxes the muscle around the lungs and is used to treat breathing problems. A German company first synthesized fenethylline in 1961, and when it discovered the drug improved alertness, doctors began prescribing it to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Though generally without side effects, says Dr. Raj Persaud, a fellow at the London-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, overuse can cause extreme depression, tiredness, insomnia, heart palpitations and, in rare cases, blindness and heart attacks. In the 1980s, when the drug's addictiveness became clear, the United States and the World Health Organization listed it as a controlled substance, and it is now illegal to buy and sell throughout most of the world.

Nevertheless, fenethylline remains popular in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where more Captagon is consumed than in any other country in the world. Though Islamic law forbids the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, many users there see Captagon as a medicinal substance. In October 2015, Lebanese authorities arrested a Saudi prince at the Beirut airport after two tons of cocaine and Captagon pills, which sell for roughly $20 per pill in Saudi Arabia, were found on a private plane.

Once manufactured in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs, Captagon is now predominantly made in Syria. The Syrian conflict has allowed for illicit activities to flourish, and many fighters there know the benefits of using the drug.

The use of drugs in war has a long history. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, U.S. Civil War soldiers and the Nazis all relied on drugs—wine, mushrooms, morphine and methamphetamines, respectively—to get them through the horror of battle. "The holy grail that armies around the world have been looking for is a drug that gives people courage," says Persaud, and Captagon comes close. "It doesn't give you distilled courage, but it gives you a tendency to want to keep going and impaired judgment, so you don't consider whether you're scared or not," he says. "You feel euphoria. You don't feel pain. You could say it's courage without the judgment." For a fighter in a war so brutally waged, the benefits of that are clear.

 

Europeans Won't Be Shivering In The Dark By Themselves

marketwatch  |  As European governments struggle to contain the fallout of soaring energy costs to their citizens, the U.S. may also be facing a brewing crisis with an estimated 20 million households struggling to pay their utility bills.

Representing one in six households, the eye-popping number comes from a study at the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) that was highlighted in a Bloomberg report earlier this week. The total amount in arrears amounted to $16 billion in June, just under the highest number so far this year — $16.5 billion in March.

“So before the pandemic, it was about $8 billion…and then the number doubled,” the author of that study, Neada’s executive director Mark Wolfe, told MarketWatch on Thursday.

Those 20 million households — largely low-income — can be anywhere from 30 to 90 days in arrears on utility payments, said Wolfe, who has been tracking the data for about 10 years.

Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which tracks utility disconnections across the U.S. told Bloomberg that she expects a “tsunami of shutoffs.”

The rise in the cost of living was at a 40-year-high at 8.5% in July compared to the year before. Grocery prices continued to soar — the price increase was 13.1% compared to the same period last year. Many Americans reported they have already dipped into savings to pay for bills and bought smaller package sizes and cheaper alternatives to cut down on costs.

Because of the rising costs, lower-income Americans are already struggling to pay back credit-card loans and purchase big-ticket items like automobiles, Radha Seshagiri told MarketWatch previously. Seshagiri is the public policy and system change director at SaverLife, a nonprofit that helps families with low and moderate incomes to save money.

Residents living in rural areas were seeing even bigger impacts of inflation and the recent rise in energy costs, according to a report by Iowa State University professor Dave Peters, which studied the impact of inflation in small towns.

“The biggest inflationary impact on rural households has been the increased cost of transportation, which is essential in rural areas where residents have to drive longer distances to work, school, or to shop for daily needs.” Peters wrote in the report.

Rural people are paying $2,470 per year more for gasoline and diesel fuels than they did two years ago, while urban dwellers are paying $2,057 more, according to the report.

 

WRT Ukraine - India Ain't Have To Lie To Nobody About Nothing

indianpunchline |  The US media vaguely claims that Ukrainian forces are making “tactical gains” and are preparing “for a long and hard-fought battle before winter sets in… Western officials cautioned the counteroffensive won’t sweep the Russian forces out of Ukraine any time soon. However, success in retaking the region of Kherson and gaining control of the western side of the river would be “really significant.” (Politico) 

The daily noted, “Such a victory would show Ukraine’s Western allies that they are right to continue sending billions of dollars of weapons and supplies to help counter Russia.” 

This last bit is the crux of the matter. The arms supplies from European countries to Ukraine have virtually dried up to a trickle and a similar trend is discernible with the US supplies too. The Biden Administration is asking Congress to approve another $11.7 billion in aid for Ukraine but that is in anticipation of the likelihood that the 2023 budget may not be passed by the deadline of Oct. 1. The White House Office of Management and Budget announcement on Sept. 2 acknowledges that this is “a short-term continuing resolution to keep the Federal government running.” 

The OMB statement says the White House wants this anomaly because funds from previous packages to boost Ukrainian military are running low, with three-quarters distributed or committed, and more will follow in the next month. Importantly, though, of the $11.7 billion requested by the White House, $4.5 billion would go toward replenishing Pentagon’s depleted stockpiles, $4.5 billion to budgetary support for Ukraine’s government, and only $2.7 billion to defence and intelligence aid as such. This new round of aid is intended to last through December. 

Zelensky must be a worried man. He needs to convince the US that such massive multi-billion dollar military aid has been worth it. He should show at the very least, a bloody stalemate on the southern warfront. (Russia is gaining the upper hand in Donass already.) 

There is always the danger that Zelensky might overreach. Politico disclosed: “Western governments have warned Kyiv against spreading its forces too thinly in a bid to capture as much territory as possible, since the Ukrainians would have to hold any gains they make. The officials said they expect Ukraine to reassess its military goals if it retakes Kherson. However, the city of Melitopol, also in the south, remains too far away from the Ukrainian positions, while a ground attack against Crimea during this offensive is not plausible.” 

Now, all this juxtaposes with the upbeat tone but bare factual information shared in the official Russian statements on Kherson front. Other Russian reports say that the “counteroffensive” has been virtually muzzled and Ukrainian forces have taken heavy casualties running into several thousands. It seems to be an apocalyptic scenario , too tragic to recount. 

The solitary Ukrainian breakthrough remaining as of Saturday night was a bridgehead across the Ingulets river — the so-called Andreevsky bridgehead. There is speculation that Russians may have lured the Ukrainian troops into a “fire trap.” The river crossings have been cut off and Russians are probably encircling the Ukrainian troops trapped on the western side of Ingulets with no supplies or reinforcements reaching them. 

The counteroffensive has lost its bite and is now turning into positional battles on one or two sites in the Mykolaiv-Krivoy Rog direction. A Russian counterattack has also been mentioned to the effect that the frontline now touches the “administrative boundary” of Mykolaiv region (which is a crucial city en route to Odessa.) Heavy bombardment of Mykolaiv city has also been reported. The Russians claim to have destroyed vast quantities of weaponry. 

Russia’s “domain control” can be put in perspective: the enemy is, on the one hand, caught on the bare steppe and cut down with the overwhelming superiority of Russian artillery and aviation, and, on the other hand, encountering well-fortified, entrenched defence lines. 

That said, Zelensky cannot give up, as he is desperately in need of a success story. Kiev still hopes to reverse the situation, but how that is achievable remains to be seen. 

Against this sombre backdrop, more and more sceptical voices are being heard in the US about the Biden Administration’s policy trajectory. The latest is an opinion piece in Wall Street Journal by Gen. (Retd) Mark Kimmitt, formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs in the Bush administration. Kimmitt predicts that “a breakthrough is unlikely” and soon, “logistics shortfalls” may force a change in US strategy.

U.N. Spokesman Thanks Russia For Overcoming Secret NATO Operation To Take Zaporizhzhia

Head of UN mission to #Zaporozhye thanks the Russian Federation for keeping his team safe from attacks from Zelensky regime forces, who tried to stop the inspection team from reaching the plant.

"I'm glad the Russian military did what they had to do to keep our inspectors safe," pic.twitter.com/TUtsbupSAg

— Citizen Journalists (@citizenjournos_) September 1, 2022

sonar21  |  The title sums it up in a nutshell. The intelligence services of the U.K. and the United States put together a plan and directed Ukraine to carry it out–i.e., capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant from the Russians on the very day that UN Inspectors were scheduled to arrive. This was a highly coordinated operation. (See Andrei Martyanov’s piece on U.S. role in planning the Kherson offensive.) For example, David Ignatius, a reliable shill for the CIA, wrote a piece in the Washington Post–Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Than Just Bravado. His cheerleading for Ukraine is no mere coincidence on the same day that the Ukrainian Army gambled and lost at Zaporizhzhia (warning, this is behind a firewall):

As Ukraine mounts a new counteroffensive in the southern part of the country, Zelensky’s bravado risks setting expectations too high. In truth, Ukraine probably won’t liberate its territory this year, or even next. Still, as Ukrainian forces push toward the Black Sea coast, Zelensky is delivering a defiant response to President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real country. Not only can Ukraine survive, it also can regain some of its occupied land.

The best defense is a good offense, as military strategists have argued for centuries. And if Ukraine’s drive toward the coast succeeds, it will restore the country’s economic viability by relieving pressure on its port city of Odessa. Moreover, it could threaten Russia’s occupation of Crimea by cutting into the land bridge that connects to the Russian-controlled Donbas region in the east.

The Ukrainian attempt to capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant consisted of two river crossings–1: seven speed boats carrying up to 60s that landed 3 kilometers northeast of the ZNP and 2: two barges launched several miles south of the ZNP manned by Ukrainian airborne forces.

The Russian Ministry of Defense provides an accurate summary of the action:

On the morning of September 1, the Kiev regime attempted a major provocation to disrupt the arrival of IAEA expert working group at Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

At 6:20 a.m., seven fast-moving motorboats landed on the coast of Kakhovskoye reservoir, three kilometres northeast of Zaporozhye NPP, with two sabotage groups of up to 60 people in total.

The sabotage groups were detected and blocked in the drop-off area by Russian National Guard units guarding the territory of Zaporozhye NPP.

A unit of the Russian Armed Forces and helicopters of the army aviation arrived to reinforce Russian Guard troops in order to suppress an attempt to enter the nuclear power plant and destroy Ukrainian saboteurs.

At about 7:00 a.m., units of the Russian Armed Forces prevented another attempted landing to seize a nuclear power plant.

A few kilometres from Zaporozhye NPP near Vodyanoye, an attempt was made to land a tactical airborne assault by AFU two self-propelled barges from Nikopol. Two self-propelled barges carrying tactical airborne assault of AFU are sunk as a result of the Russian Armed Forces’ shelling.

As of 8:00 a.m., the Kiev regime has blocked the passage of IAEA expert mission from controlled territory to Zaporozhye NPP.

Ukrainian artillery is shelling the territory of Zaporozhye NPP, the meeting place of IAEA mission with Russian specialists near Vasil’evka, as well as the route of their movement to Energodar. Four shells exploded 400 metres from the 1st unit of Zaporozhye NPP.

If Ukraine had pulled this off it would have been a major black eye for the Russians and would have put the nuclear plant back in Ukrainian hands. It would have marked the first serious victory in this war for Ukraine. If, if, if. There is an old saying, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts it would be Christmas every day.” Christmas did not come for Ukraine. They got their ass handed to them.

European People vs. European Politicians On Russia - Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

German FM: I will put Ukraine first “no matter what my German voters think” or how hard their life gets. pic.twitter.com/GwAqIZ2jL7

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) August 31, 2022

Telegraph  |  Britain is now in grave danger of falling into Vladimir Putin’s trap. His kamikaze economic war on the West will eventually take down his disgusting coterie of war criminals, but in the meantime it is beginning to inflict immense, permanent damage on the Western way of life, to the great delight of Moscow’s siloviki hard men.

We risk ending up with calamitous poverty, civil disobedience, a new socialist government by next year, a break-up of the UK, nationalisations, price and incomes policies, punitive wealth taxes and eventually a complete economic and financial meltdown and IMF bailout. The situation in the EU is, if anything, worse.

This is not a plea for pacifism, for looking away when Ukraine is being illegally invaded by a savage regime. Britain was – and remains – morally right to back Ukraine in a carefully calibrated way. Instead, this is a plea for an economic counter-offensive, for Liz Truss, the next PM, to tackle Putin’s economic and energy war head-on.

Mass, immediate intervention is inevitable, but must be designed to avoid hastening Britain’s shift into demagoguery, welfarism and socialist central planning, all steps down Hayek’s “road to serfdom” that the Leftist and green elites are longing us to take. The wrong response – because too little is done, or because the wrong solutions are chosen – would merely advance Putin’s masterplan to cripple the West.

Cheap and plentiful energy is essential to our consumerist societies. We cannot be delusional about the scale of the developing catastrophe. Household energy and vehicle fuel costs will jump from 4.5 per cent of household spending in early 2021 to some 13.4 per cent by April next year, much higher than at any time during the past 50 years, including the 1970s, according to Carbon Brief. Households may face a rise in energy costs of £167 billion, or 7 per cent of GDP, taking total expenditure to £231 billion, more than government spending on health, and that is before the hit to business is accounted for. The rise for consumers alone is more than the combined defence and education budgets.

This is equivalent to a Depression-style shock. Pay rises will protect some workers at the expense of investors, but – until and unless energy prices fall again – our national living standards will slump massively. The nation is sending tens of billions more abroad to pay for energy imports.

The state can borrow to cushion the blow, reducing future consumption to prop up current living standards, but our impoverishment cannot be magicked away. Coming after years of QE, there is a real danger of excess borrowing triggering even higher inflation, rocketing interest rates, mass repossessions and a banking crisis, so caution is imperative.

There was little the West could do other than rely on hostile Opec nations in the 1970s, the last time an energy war almost destroyed us; but it was an unforgivable error for Europe to become so reliant on Russian supplies, and to fail so miserably to increase domestic energy production. The French even allowed their nuclear plants to break down.

Putin struck at the right time: the zombified Western economy was in the doldrums. Covid was a disaster of unpreparedness and errors, increasing national debts and inflation and entrenching a dependency culture. But the Russian tyrant’s canniest move was to understand just how suicidal our energy policy had become. A toxic brew of net zero ideology, deep hypocrisy about decarbonising without making the nuclear effort, endemic nimbyism, short-termism and state incompetence had radically weakened the West.

Joe Biden, Street Fighting Man

 

Dark Brandon

"It is a lunatic conspiracy theory to believe we are controlled by a secret cabal of child snuffing globalist snake human hybrids bent on microchipping all of us into slavery and then liquifying us into a tasty stew"

Joe Biden: pic.twitter.com/O3jbE85pku

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 2, 2022

RT |  US President Joe Biden has apparently made a 180-degree turn on the alleged dangers posed by Donald Trump supporters, saying he doesn’t consider his predecessor’s backers to be a threat to America.

“I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden told reporters on Friday at the White House. “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge an election has been won, insists upon changing the way in which the rule you count votes, that is a threat to democracy.”

The comment was a far cry from the political rhetoric that Biden has used in recent days, including a scathing speech he gave on Thursday night at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. He argued that “MAGA forces” – referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan – are an existential threat to American democracy.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said in the speech. He added in a Twitter post that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.”

Biden altered that message dramatically on Friday, saying he was only talking about people who fail to condemn political violence, those who try to manipulate electoral outcomes and those who refuse to acknowledge the results of an election.

“When people voted for Donald Trump and support him now, they weren’t voting for attacking the Capitol,” Biden said. “They weren’t voting for overruling an election. They were voting for a philosophy he put forward.”

However, just last week, Biden likened Trump’s “MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre essentially confirmed the president’s view when challenged on his controversial attack, saying Biden is “never going to shy away from calling out what he sees.”

Biden is apparently trying to stoke fear of pro-Trump Republicans as this November’s midterm congressional elections approach. But the strategy may be risky, given reaction to past condemnations of large voting blocs. For instance, Hillary Clinton may have helped energize her opponent’s supporters when she said during the 2016 presidential election that half of Trump backers belong in “the basket of deplorables.”

 

 

Today I Learned That Rabbinical Law Prohibits The Scientific Study Of Ashkenazi Remains

cell |  We report genome sequence data from six individuals excavated from the base of a medieval well at a site in Norwich, UK. A revised radiocarbon analysis of the assemblage is consistent with these individuals being part of a historically attested episode of antisemitic violence on 6 February 1190 CE. We find that four of these individuals were closely related and all six have strong genetic affinities with modern Ashkenazi Jews. We identify four alleles associated with genetic disease in Ashkenazi Jewish populations and infer variation in pigmentation traits, including the presence of red hair. Simulations indicate that Ashkenazi-associated genetic disease alleles were already at appreciable frequencies, centuries earlier than previously hypothesized. These findings provide new insights into a significant historical crime, into Ashkenazi population history, and into the origins of genetic diseases associated with modern Jewish populations.

The deaths of 17 medieval Jews: An incredible new genetics paper has just dropped: The earliest Jewish genomes and the story of where they are from and how they died is incredibly important, and central to the origin of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy hatred. 🧵

— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) August 31, 2022

In 2004 construction workers excavating land in central Norwich, UK, as part of the Chapelfield shopping center development recovered human skeletal elements from their spoil.

Subsequent archaeological investigations led to the discovery and excavation of a probable well containing the commingled remains of at least seventeen people. The stratigraphic position of the remains, their completeness, and state of articulation suggested that they had all been deposited in a single event shortly after their death. The overrepresentation of subadults and the unusual location of the burial outside of consecrated ground suggested that they may have been victims of a mass fatality event such as famine, disease, or mass murder.

Pottery sherds from the well were dated typologically to 12th–14th centuries CE, and two initial radiocarbon determinations on the skeletal remains placed these in the 11th–12th centuries.

The most prominent historically attested mass death in Norwich within this date range was in 1190 CE when members of the Jewish community were killed during antisemitic riots precipitated by the beginning of the Third Crusade although the number of individuals killed is unclear.

Norwich had been the setting for a previous notable event in the history of medieval antisemitism when, in 1144 CE, the family of William of Norwich claimed that local Jews were responsible for his murder, an argument taken up by Thomas of Monmouth through the first documented invocation of the blood libel myth. This represents the beginnings of an antisemitic conspiracy theory that persists up to the present day.

The possibility that the remains found at the Chapelfield well site were those of the victims of antisemitic violence is given further support by the site’s location just to the south of the medieval Jewish quarter of the city.

However, no additional archaeological evidence linked the human remains to a specific historical event or group of people. During the High Medieval period (ca. 1000–1300 CE), Norwich witnessed a number of outbreaks of large-scale violence, and additional data were therefore required to test the hypothesis that these individuals were of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.

Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening now commonplace to mitigate risks.

Their prevalence is generally attributed to strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks coupled with high endogamy although other processes such as heterozygote advantage have been proposed.

Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th centuries.

No genomes from known Jewish individuals are currently available from the medieval period or earlier, largely because exhumation and scientific testing of Jewish remains are prohibited. Such data could inform on the migration and admixture histories of Jewish populations. Furthermore, the presence of any pathogenic variants would provide valuable clues to the origins and spread of Ashkenazim-associated genetic disorders. Here, we examine results from radiocarbon dating and genetic analyses of the Chapelfield individuals to better establish who they were, when they died, and the nature of their death and burial, and identify potential broader implications for Ashkenazim population history and genetics.

It's About The Social Order...,

zacharydcarter |  So why all the vitriol over student debt? When we argue about student debt, we aren't really debating credit policy, inflation, growth or the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution. All of these avenues of discussion are elaborate detours around the central issue: the structure of the American social order.  

In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren't just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They're less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige. 

In a better world, the simple fact of being human would command equal respect for everyone. That is not our world, but we can imagine such a place and work toward realizing it. Prestige, by contrast, is inherently exclusive. The less there is to go around, the better it is for the people who have it. And so the more people we exclude from higher education, the more secure people with college degrees will feel about their place in society.

The recent student debt freak-out reminds me a lot of God and Man at Yale -- the 1951 memoir that launched William F. Buckley into the conservative intellectual stratosphere. It's remarkably bad for a book that has a reputation as a political classic -- a wealthy conservative Catholic goes to Yale and is horrified to find Protestants and Keynesians. What, pray, can the Board of Trustees do to save our dear, beloved Yale? The ideological material is generic McCarthyism, the writing is flat (Buckley would get better at that), and the entire project is preoccupied with weird provincial details. At one point he even complains about the vending machines. The literary establishment basically laughed at it, with both The New York Times and The Atlantic running devastating reviews.

But God and Man at Yale became a publishing sensation. After World War II, millions of new college students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees. For many prior graduates, this step toward democratization was threatening. Their credential was being diluted. Buckley's book about the waywardness of newfangled university life spoke to this new and unexpected status anxiety among the American upper-class, and so it flew off the shelves.

The Warm Salty Golden Shower Of Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness...,

BAR  |  Senator Joe Biden played a role in creating these terrible conditions. In 2005 he and 17 other democrats joined republicans in voting for the Bankruptcy Act, which made it all but impossible to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. The Delaware senator was beholden to the consumer credit industry, like all of that state’s elected officials. They were the drivers in ensuring that filing for bankruptcy for any reason would become very difficult and they were always among Biden’s biggest campaign contributors.

Of course Biden knows what people need and want. During his campaign he said , “I propose to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $125,000.” At other times he included Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in this debt forgiveness plan.

It is easy to point out the discrepancy between what he promised and what he now proposes, but the problem is bigger than the laundry list of Biden campaign lies. There is great confusion among Black people about student loan debt relief, what it will really accomplish, and what is actually needed.

Biden promised well heeled democratic fundraisers that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Forgiving student loans or any of the other forms of debt peonage is the last thing that the U.S. oligarchy wants to see. The increasingly predatory capitalist system demands that Biden does little more than give lip service instead of meeting the people’s needs. That is why the oddly named Inflation Reduction Act will negotiate Medicare drug prices but not until 2026 and then only for ten drugs. Even if Biden cared he wouldn’t be allowed to do anything more for senior citizens, student loan debtors or anyone else.

Of course the Black political class can be counted on to aid in the subterfuges that are used to keep the people quiet. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley falsely proclaimed , “President Joe Biden just canceled student debt.” Her assigned role at this juncture is to get Black voters to the polls in November and she can’t do that without lying about Biden. Getting voter buy-in for neo-liberal policies is Pressley’s problem. No one else has to go along with the inevitable falsehoods that come with the territory of holding elective office.

She and others may call themselves “progressives” but in the end they are no better than Senator Biden when he worsened the student debt crisis. They are all little more than errand boys and girls for the kleptocrats and all of them are compromised.

American Political Misleadership Gotta Give Up Its Plan To Steal Russia

theamericanconservative |  Look, I don't like that Russia invaded Ukraine, and I don't like that they are succeeding in their aggression. But they have won this thing. Why? Because the West cannot afford to continue this proxy war with Moscow.

In Poland, homeowners are lined up in their cars for days, hoping to buy enough coal to last the winter. Excerpt:

Artur's household is one of the nearly 4 million in Poland that rely on coal for heating (granted, these households are probably in better shape than the ones relying on nat gas whose price is rising by 10-20% every day and is now almost literally in the stratosphere) and now face shortages and price hikes, after Poland and the European Union imposed an embargo on Russian coal following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February. Poland banned purchases with an immediate effect in April, while the bloc mandated fading them out by August.

While Poland produces over 50 million tonnes from its own mines every year, imported coal, much of it from Russia, is a household staple because of competitive prices and the fact that Russian coal is sold in lumps more suitable for home use.

Soaring demand has forced Bogdanka and other state-controlled mines to ration sales or offer the fuel to individual buyers via online platforms, in limited amounts. Artur, who did not want to give his full name, said he had collected paperwork from his extended family in the hope of picking up all their fuel allocations at once.

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Yesterday in Rome, I talked to a couple of Poles who are terrified of the coming winter. If you are Polish and have the possibility of burning firewood, you are stocking up on it. But very many Poles do not. Nor can they burn coal in their flats for heat. What are they going to do? They're not sure.

As rich as the West is, it can't keep its people warm in the winter by burning cash. And so, European households are now being forced to ask if freezing in the dark for Ukraine is something they really want to do. This is not going to happen to Americans -- but you should think about how you would react if this were you, and your elderly parents, and your kids. 

Sanctions Blowback Doesn't Bode Well For European PEOPLE Civilization

Euros and the US. 😅
- via Pepe Escobar, Telegram pic.twitter.com/8lABewuDMy

— Seeji Sundarakshan (@Sseeji) August 30, 2022

sonar21  |  Just like Wile E Coyote, the United States and Europe are discovering that their incredibly “clever” plan to punish Russia with draconian economic sanctions is backfiring. And it is backfiring with a vengeance.

In Europe, things are markedly worse. The UK and Ireland are grappling with soaring energy costs that are forcing many small businesses to shutter their operations:

One such owner is Geraldine Dolan, who owns the Poppyfields cafe in Athlone, Ireland – and was charged nearly €10,000 (US$10,021) for just over two months of energy usage.

The cost of electricity to the Poppyfields cafe for 73 days from early June until the end of August came in at €9,024.70 an increase of 250 per cent in just 12 months. There doesn’t include the €812.22 in VAT, which brought her total bill to €9,836.92.

It has left Geraldine Dolan wondering if she will be able to continue running the business she has owned for the last 16 years as Ireland heads into what is certain to be a winter of rising energy prices and cost of living spikes.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/08/30/athlone-cafe-owner-shocked-after-getting-9000-electricity-bill-things-are-only-going-to-get-worse/

Geraldine Dolan, of Poppy Fields Cafe, Athlone, with an electricity bill for just under ten thousand euro for two months. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill / The Irish Times

Zerohedge reports that this is not an isolated event:

In short, small businesses are getting utility bills that are 10 times what they were paying a year ago. Most are going to be forced to shutdown operations.

Things are no better in Germany and Slovakia:

Zinc, Aluminum Smelters Shuttered In Europe Due To Soaring Power Prices

“A Structural Rupture” – German Companies Shutting Down In Response To Record Energy Prices

As the FT reports, German manufacturers are halting production in response to the surge in energy prices, a trend the government has described as “alarming”. German economy minister Robert Habeck said industry had worked hard to reduce its gas consumption in recent months, partly by switching to alternative fuels like oil, making its processes more efficient and reducing output. But he amusingly clarified, some companies had also “stopped production altogether” — a development he said was “alarming”.

“It’s not good news,” he said, “because it can mean that the industries in question aren’t just being restructured but are experiencing a rupture — a structural rupture, one that is happening under enormous pressure.”

Habeck said rising gas prices were affecting everyone from big industrial companies to small trading firms and the medium-sized enterprises that make up the “Mittelstand”. “Wherever energy is an important part of the business model, companies are experiencing sheer angst,” he said. And since energy is a crucial part of every business model, one can only imagine the chaos, fear and loathing hammering the largest European economy right now.

Meanwhile, the Russian economy is doing okay. That is because it produces energy and commodities and metals that the world needs. It is not dependent on imports to stay afloat. And, the sanctions notwithstanding, Russia continues to export oil, gas, fertilizer and grains.

 

World's Largest Purveyor Of State Sponsored Terrorism And Political Assassination

warontherocks |  today’s growing wave of assassination attempts has crossed ideologies. Certain adherents of the far left have been responsible for attempts on the Republican baseball practice and more recently Justice Kavanaugh. But the far-right is also active in this space and was responsible for the most recent successful high-level political assassination in the country: the killing of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, state senator of South Carolina, at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015. Jihadists often place prominent figures in their crosshairs, as demonstrated by a recently disrupted plot against George W. Bush. Even the more nascent male supremacist movement has its targets: A so-called “men’s rights activist” attacked the home of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas in July 2020, killing her son.

The emerging trend is due in no small part to the reemergence of so-called “accelerationism” as a distinct violent extremist strategy. For extremists seeking to sow chaos and speed up some cataclysmic societal collapse, high-profile politicians provide an attractive target, as symbols of the mainstream liberal political order. “We need to kill the HVT’s,” one poster wrote on Telegram in August 2019, using a military acronym for high-value target. “When a popular HVT is gunned down, it inspires hope and dreams.” The COVID pandemic then added fuel to the fire as public officials were blamed and then threatened for the lockdowns and enforced quarantines. Targets ranged from prominent health officials like cerebral National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as many other lower-level state officials responsible for the imposition of these extraordinary public health measures. Fauci was forced into constant law enforcement protection because of threats against his life — which was only a prelude to the death threats and serial harassment that now routinely are directed against local and state election officials.

Political assassinations are uniquely suited to tear at the country’s social fabric. For starters, they force opposing politicians and voters into an apparently awkward dilemma between condemning hatred and violence and seeming to renege on their own political positions — a situation Democrats did not handle particularly well after the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life. As Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco stated in June in response to that attempted attack, “We can’t come together on this topic without acknowledging and condemning the appalling rise in violence that we have seen from a range of ideologies directed at public officials.” But they also risk dissuading good people, across the political spectrum, from running for public office and participating in a vibrant American democracy. Indeed, perhaps the most damning element of the January 6 commission hearings has been the broadcasting of the threats issued against everyday public servants, such as Georgia’s election workers. The Department of Justice recently announced it has opened around 110 federal criminal investigations into “contacts reported as hostile or harassing by the election community.” “A common refrain I hear from my members is that nobody is going to take this seriously until something bad happens, and we are all braced for the worst,” the National Association of State Election Directors executive director warned in recent written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Until recently, this was not a field you went into thinking it could cost you your life.”

Heightening the threat yet further is a growing tendency for assailants to use untraceable or even homemade weaponry as part of violent plots — as seen in the assassination of Abe, in which the assassin used a fully homemade shotgun to evade Japan’s stringent gun laws. The crude attack was reminiscent of failed drone attacks against political leaders in Venezuela and Iraq and may be indicative of an emerging era in which more widely accessible tools are weaponized in these strikes against individuals — again, regardless of the motivating ideology. Cruder technology lowers the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing even untrained or unprepared extremists — such as Zeldin’s assailant, who, despite being an Army veteran, used a personal protection device disguised as a cat-shaped keychain in his assault — to attempt serious plots. As Colin Clarke and Joseph Shelzi write, “The proliferation of emerging personal technologies like drones, 3-D-printed weapons, and other innovations will likely open the door for more attacks against high-profile figures in the future.”

We live in an age of heightened political tensions, when political decisions are often seen as existential crises, and where elections, therefore, carry perceived life-or-death stakes. With a midterm around the corner, a former president under investigation, and major upheavals occurring on hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control, extremists inclined to violence will be increasingly likely to lash out. The situation is only made more serious by the seeming consent a faction of the political right has offered to would-be assassins, including a Florida State House candidate who was recently expelled from Twitter for writing, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight! Let freedom ring!” The conceit that fuels these would-be assassins’ fanaticism and feeds their egos poses a considerable and growing danger to civil servants and political figures across the political spectrum — at a time when mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, cinemas, and other public venues have already become an increasingly frequent occurrence. “The system was blinking red,” Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet famously told the 9/11 Commission describing the months before September 2001 — a sentiment which feels pertinent again now.

Brandon Got Wound Up And Had Another Public "Imaginary Badass" Moment...,

FoxNews  |  President Biden took another swipe at supporters of the Second Amendment during his speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Biden appeared in the battleground state to tout his latest "Safer America" agenda to promote efforts to support law enforcement and deter crime.

Biden: "He used to go down in the East Side, what they call the bucket. Highest crime rate in the country. Theres a place where I was the only white guy that worked, was a lifeguard down in that area.... you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is." pic.twitter.com/Hl3o3ZwTe3

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) August 30, 2022

Although his speech was primarily focused on his policies, Biden later turned his attention towards his political opponents, attacking Republicans for opposing actions on gun control.

Specifically, he attacked defenders of the Second Amendment who argue that the right is necessary for self-defense against foreign enemies and a tyrannical government.

"For those brave right-wing Americans who say it’s all about keeping America independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something more than a gun," Biden said.

Social media users attacked the comment for being tone-deaf and criticizing American citizens. Others pointed out that this claim followed the one-year anniversary of Biden’s Afghanistan pullout, where several weapons, including F-15s, were left behind for Taliban forces.

"The only F-15s the Taliban had when they fought against our country were the ones Biden left in Afghanistan for them," X Strategies senior digital strategist Greg Price tweeted.

"The president has been saying this for years but it's less and less congruent with how even his own administration has played out. How many F-15s did the Taliban have when Biden decided to surrender Afghanistan to them?" The Reload founder Stephen Gutowski wrote.

Red State deputy managing editor Brandon Morse joked, "I'd say he's ignoring the Eric Holder ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal but it's Biden and it's very likely that he actually forgot."