theguardian | A Ukrainian presidential adviser has resigned
after causing widespread anger when he suggested a Russian missile that
killed dozens had been shot down by Ukraine.
In comments to a YouTube channel , hours after the attack, Oleksiy
Arestovych said the rocket had detonated after it had been downed by
Ukrainian air defence forces.
“The rocket was shot down, it fell on the driveway, it exploded when it fell,” he told Feigin Live.
Hundreds
of Ukrainian members of civil society and several prominent figures
took to social media in the days afterwards, demanding the presidential
administration sack Arestovych for making unverified statements. They
said the comments aided Russian propaganda, which frequently portrays
attacks as the fault of Ukraine’s armed forces.
In
a statement, which did not address the remarks directly, Ukraine’s air
defence forces said they did not currently have the technological
capabilities to detect or shoot down ballistic missiles.
Arestovych refused to apologise for two days,
blaming tiredness and stating that it was “one theory” put forward by a
friend who happened to be near the scene. Then on Tuesday, Arestovych
published a picture of his resignation letter on Facebook, stating that
it was “an example of civilised behaviour” in light of his “fundamental
mistake”.
A spokesperson for the president
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Serhiy Nykoforov, confirmed that the resignation
had been accepted. The former actor and politician was appointed as a
freelance, non-staff adviser to the presidential administration in 2020.
thehill | The White House is once again struggling with its messaging, this
time on the discovery of classified documents from President Biden’s
time as vice president, where administration officials have sought to
minimize the damage due to the revelation but have struggled to address
it cohesively.
Democrats, meanwhile, have had scattered reactions, ranging from
praising the Biden administration over its cooperation with the
Department of Justice (DOJ) and National Archives to suggesting a
congressional review of the materials over national security concerns.
Others have acknowledged what a political headache it has become for the
president.
The disjointed responses are in part a reflection of mixed messaging
by the White House, including when it prematurely told reporters last
week that a search of classified documents potentially kept by Biden was
“complete” before the administration said days later that more
documents were found.
Officials have been adamant that they are limited in how much they
can say about the discovery of the documents, what’s in them and when
the president was informed of the situation, citing an ongoing Justice
Department investigation and the appointment of a special counsel by
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who was chosen by Biden to lead the
agency.
“We understand that there’s a tension between the need to be
cooperative with an ongoing DOJ investigation and rightful demands for
additional public information. And so we’re trying to strike that
balance and being as clear as we can,” Ian Sams, a White House
spokesperson for investigations, told reporters on Tuesday.
Addressing the matter to the public has largely been left to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre,
who has at times sparred with reporters over questions about why the
White House didn’t reveal the discovery when it was made in November,
when Biden learned of it and whether any other searches were underway.
On Thursday, Jean-Pierre said that “you should assume that it’s been
completed, yes” in response to a question about a second set of
documents that turned up at Biden’s home in Delaware, including in his
garage. But on Saturday, the White House acknowledged that five more
classified documents had been found at Biden’s home — the first time it
was the administration, not a news report, that revealed a discovery.
When questioned on Tuesday over whether she’s being directed to not
be forthcoming, Jean-Pierre said that she knew as much as the press did
at the end of last week, before the next discovery was revealed on
Saturday.
She also pushed back when asked if she’s upset that she came out to
the briefing on Friday with incomplete and inaccurate information.
“Well, what I’m concerned about is making sure that we do not
politically interfere in the Department of Justice, that we continue to
be consistent over the last two years. And that is continue to refer you
all when it comes to an ongoing process,” she said.
Jean-Pierre also added that she and other members of the press office
found out about the documents in Biden’s office in Washington in
November when CBS broke the news last week. The press secretary has also
faced questions about whether the White House would have disclosed the
findings at all if not for the CBS report.
Nobody’s blackmailing Biden to escalate in Ukraine. Ukraine has been his project going back to 2008 (and his time on the Senate Intelligence Committee likely pushes it further back). Ukraine is his personal project. His favorites from the Clinton State Department that assisted him back then all got nice promotions in his administration. The whole reason he ran in 2020 was to execute the Ukraine plan because Trump had messed it up and nobody in the field was going to be reliable enough to really run with it. Old Cornpop's a violent and angry man. He wanted more war in Yugoslavia, he was all in on Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the Spring he was publicly talking about bringing down Putin as well as informing enlisted soldiers in Poland that they’d be in Ukraine soon. If anything, people are holding Joe back. Consider the documents could be used to get Joe out of the way because Ukraine can’t be wound down as long as he’s POTUS. Per his autobiography, as a freshman senator in the mid 70s, he was introduced to the opportunities of southeast Europe by his mentor, Averell Harriman.
amgreatness |Biden and his allies have continued their vendetta against Trump, exposing his tax returns andraiding his home
for possessing documents he supposedly owed the National Archives. This
did not go over as well as Attorney General (and all-around hack)
Merrick Garland anticipated, and it seemsGarland and theJanuary 6 Committee have each decided to scale back their demands.
This is why the recent exposure of top secretdocuments in Biden’s old office, his garage, and a mysteriousthird location
suggests something is afoot. We went from a Monday disclosure to a
special counsel being appointed on Thursday. Nothing like this happens
this quickly unless it is by design.
There are, of course, ways to deal
with this situation that do not involve public exposure. Couldn’t Biden
or his staff order some FBI agents or White House people to pick them up
and take them to wherever they’re supposed to be stored?
It’s in the news because somehow his lawyers found the documents and reported them
before the story could go through White House channels. And, lawyers
being lawyers, they followed the street-lawyer rule that if someone has
to go to jail, make sure it’s your client and not you. Concerned about
individual culpability for obstruction or mishandling documents, they
made this hot potato someone else’s problem as fast as possible.
Someone is responsible for the way
this information came out, and that someone is an enemy of Biden. There
are plenty of possibilities: some secret Republicans at the Justice
Department, Kamala Harris and her people, a committee of Democratic
Party insiders concerned about Dementia Joe being president for another
four years. The whole thing has a whiff of a conspiracy, and, like the
various allegations and pretexts employed to investigate Trump, it may
very well originate in the intelligence community.
As Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) oncesaid,
“You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you.” In this instance, the hypothesis is not
completely satisfying. Biden has not really taken on the intelligence
community, so far as I can tell, unless they’re still smarting about how
he ended the Afghanistan boondoggle.
ronpaulinstitute | With each new release of the “Twitter Files” we learn more and more
about the deep corruption in Washington. We sensed during Covid that
something was really wrong – for example the bizarre denial of natural
immunity. But thanks to Elon Musk’s decision to open the books, our
worst fears have been proven true. Each new release seems to show
something even more criminal inside America’s rotten ruling class.
In
the latest release, thanks to the excellent reporting of independent
journalist Matt Taibbi, we see outgoing Chair of the House Intelligence
Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), continuously pressuring Twitter to
validate his fantasies of “Russian bots” manipulating US politics.
The
short version of what Taibbi reported comes from around the time
then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes
(R-CA) was about to release his Committee’s findings about the FBI
misuse of the FISA Court to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. The
FBI, it turns out, relied exclusively on the widely-discredited “Steele
Dossier” – paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign – as justification to
spy on the Trump campaign.
When pressure grew to release the
Nunes findings, Twitter exploded with users demanding that Congress
“release the memo.” That’s where then-ranking Member Schiff and his
staff began relentlessly pressuring Twitter to show that the accounts
demanding the release of the memo were actually Russian agents, out to
help their supposed favorite, Donald Trump. Schiff was not alone. Fellow
“Russiagate” hoaxers like Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Richard
Blumenthal (D-CT) also pressured Twitter to find Russians behind the
demand to release Nunes’ findings.
Over and over, Twitter – which
was hardly sympathetic to Trump – told Schiff and his colleagues there
was simply no evidence of Russian involvement. As much as some Twitter
employees may have liked to report the opposite, to their credit they
refused to participate in the scam.
Even after Twitter had
informed Schiff and his fellow hoaxers that there was no Russian
involvement, Sen. Blumenthal released a statement he knew was not true:
“We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly
manipulated innocent Americans.” Again, this was right after he had been
informed by Twitter employees - who were by-and-large strongly opposed
to Trump - that there was just no evidence to back up such a statement.
We are moving closer and closer to a
nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine. For political gain the
Democrats – and plenty of Republicans – have been pushing the
“Russiagate” hoax and in so doing have fertilized the ground for the
obsessive Russia hatred prevalent in the US today.
I do not
believe it is an exaggeration to say that if US/Russia relations had not
been poisoned by the lie of “Russiagate” for pure political gain, we
would not be anywhere near our current state of near-direct conflict
with the largest nuclear power on earth, Russia.
It is shocking
that Schiff and his "Russiagate" allies would potentially sacrifice
millions of dead Americans to defeat Trump and other political enemies.
Let’s
not forget: Rep. Jim Trafficant was expelled from Congress for asking
his staffers to wash his boat. Shouldn’t there be at least equal
punishment for Senators and Members who are lying us into World War III?
Just last week it was
revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the
American public, for past two months, until after the November 8, 2022
federal election.
The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence
Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are main
gateways for information to millions of Americans, is a serious threat
to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.
Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit and
corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence
Community.
Having... false information -- some of which the FBI actually
altered -- in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump.
Today we know that the "Russia hoax" was a lie.... the
information in the "Steele dossier" was false -- and the FBI had known
it was from the start.
For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on
Hunter Biden's laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been
verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post:
"Yes that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a
disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden
won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering
43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA."
One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself
in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the Twitter
files.... Tweet #17 states, "executives were also clearly liaising with
federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of
election-related content." Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million
reportedly to "handle requests from the bureau."
The FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally had set up shop at Twitter.
Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?
Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law
enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?
Has more than one solitary person -- former FBI attorney Kevin
Clinemith, for altering an email -- been held accountable for these
egregious abuses of power?
Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, the intelligence community with twitter?
Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?
Who has the records, notes and decisions that emanated from these groups?
It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be
investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our
Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent
relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining
what speech is allowed.
There... needs to be a significant investigation by an outside,
non-government group to understand how far this massive government
overreach into free speech and election manipulation went. Clearly the
government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to
stop -- now -- before our democracy is destroyed.
CNN cuts away from Speaker McCarthy's press conference when he starts hammering Rep. Swalwell for being allegedly compromised, and Rep. Schiff for repeatedly lying about having evidence of collusion. pic.twitter.com/fL5xcblNI1
trendingpolitics | On Thursday while speaking with reporters, Speaker of the House Kevin
McCarthy left reporters speechless after he defended his decision to
keep California Democrats Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff off of the House
Intelligence Committee.
“If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t
have Swalwell on any committee,” McCarthy said, leaving reporters
silent.
This suggests damning bombshell information about Swalwell’s handlings that we will hopefully learn in the coming weeks.
“And you’re going to tell me other Democrats couldn’t fill that slot?
He cannot get a security clearance in the private sector,” McCarthy
said. “So would you like to give him a government clearance?”
McCarthy went on to explain that the last Congress lead by Nancy
Pelosi kept Swalwell on the committee even though they were aware of the
massive red flag from the FBI.
“You’re going to tell me there are 200 other Democrats that couldn’t
fill that slot, but they kept him on it? The only way that they even
knew it came forward is when they put to nominate him to the Intel
committee. And then the FBI came and told the leadership that he’s got a
problem, and they kept him on. That jeopardized all of us,” McCarthy
said.
McCarthy also name dropped Schiff.
“Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had
proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistle blower,” McCarthy said
while referring to false claims made by the California Democrat against
former President Donald Trump.
“He put America for four years through an impeachment that he knew
was a lie.” At the same time, we had Ukraine, the same time we had
Afghanistan collapse. Was that the role of the Intel committee? No,”
McCarthy said.
“So what I am doing with the Intel committee, bringing it back to the
jurisdiction is supposed to do forward looking to keep this country
safe, keep the politics out of it,” he continued.
trendingpoliticsnews | “In 2018 Hunter Biden claimed he owned the house where Joe Biden kept
classified documents alongside his Corvette in the garage ,” reported
journalist Miranda Devine.
In 2018 Hunter Biden claimed he owned the house where Joe Biden kept classified documents alongside his Corvette in the garage Via @jj_talkingpic.twitter.com/L7c80MRRiS
Was this Hunter Biden’s way of funneling the money he earned with his father’s political connections back to his father?
After Hunter’s divorce was finalized in May of 2017, he was included
in an email from his business partner James Gilliar about a venture with
Chinese state-funded energy company CEFC China Energy. The email stated
that Hunter and his partners would receive 20% of the shares in the new
business, with 10% going to Hunter’s uncle James Biden and the other
10% being “held by H for the big guy.”
Tony Bobulinski, another one of Hunter’s former business partners,
claims that he had a meeting with Joe Biden regarding the CEFC venture
on May 2, 2017, and that the president was the individual referred to as
the “big guy” in Gilliar’s email. Additionally, Gilliar himself
confirmed that Joe Biden was the “big guy” mentioned in a message found
on the laptop.
The New York Post reports: “The following year, federal investigators
began looking into whether Hunter and his business associates violated
tax and money laundering laws during their dealings in China and other
countries. Emails and other records related to the deals were found on
the laptop, which Hunter dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019
and never reclaimed.”
According to text messages found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the
president’s son was on the hook for 50% of family expenses. How did
Hunter Biden get this money back to his father?
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this
entire family for 30 years,” a furious Hunter Biden said to his daughter
Naomi in January of 2019. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike
pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
The New York Post continues:
The laptop doesn’t contain any direct evidence of such
money transfers but shows Hunter was routinely on the hook for household
expenses — including repairs to the Wilmington home.
In December 2020, weeks after his father was elected president,
Hunter Biden announced that his “tax affairs” were being investigated by
federal authorities in Delaware, and said he was “confident that a
professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that
I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
Recent reports have indicated investigators believe they have enough
evidence to charge the first son with tax crimes — as well as with lying
about his drug abuse on a federal form so he could buy a gun in 2018.
Newsweek | Republicans are speculating that the classified documents kept by President Joe Biden at his Delaware home may have been reviewed by the president's son Hunter Biden.
The
White House confirmed on Thursday that classified documents dating back
to the Obama administration had been found at the president's private
residence in Wilmington.
That revelation came only days after it
was announced that an initial batch of classified documents from Biden's
time as vice president had been found in an office at Penn Biden Center
in Washington, D.C.
Biden defended the discovery at his private
home by insisting that he treats "classified materials seriously" and
noting that the documents were inside a "locked" garage. Attorney
General Merrick Garlandappointed a special counsel to look into the Biden document finds later in the day.
Republicans
have argued that there is a double standard regarding the mishandling
of government records. Some have demanded that the FBI raid Biden's home to look for more classified documents, as happened last summer at the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump.
Following the new discovery in Delaware, a number of prominent
conservatives floated conspiracy-laden suggestions that Hunter Biden may
have seen the documents, although there is no evidence to suggest that
he did.
"Given his extensive ties to China, Russia, and Ukraine,
did Hunter Biden have access to Joe Biden's garage and therefore the
classified documents?" Donald Trump Jr. tweeted.
"Gosh I hope Biden didn't let Hunter drive the Corvette," tweeted
conservative commentator Liz Wheeler. "Hunter might've found the
classified documents. Have we checked Hunter's naked crack-smoking
Russian hooker videos for Biden's classified documents yet?"
As a private residence, it is not clear that any visitor logs would
be kept at Biden's home in Delaware. Regardless of any records, the
possibility that Hunter Biden visited his father's home at any point
during the roughly six years since he was vice president seems far from
remote.
However, there is little reason to believe that Hunter Biden would have reviewed the documents during a visit with his father.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump claimed without evidence that Chinese agents "saw" the classified documents that were stored at Penn Biden Center.
The
status of any visitor logs taken at the residences of Trump, who is
facing potential criminal indictments over his own classified documents
scandal, is unclear.
WSJ | Additional pages marked as classified were found at President Biden’s
Wilmington, Del., residence and have been given to the Justice
Department, the White House counsel said Saturday, the latest revelation
over the handling of classified information that has emerged this week.
The documents were discovered after Mr. Biden’s attorneys said earlier that some classified material, likely dating from his time as vice president, had been found in his garage at the residence in December.
One
document marked as classified also was found at his residence earlier
this week, the White House had said. In addition, documents marked as
classified were found at his office at a Washington think tank in November.
In a statement Saturday, Richard Sauber,
special counsel to the president, said he accompanied Justice
Department officials to Wilmington on Thursday to retrieve the initial
document from the residence—and during that process “five additional
pages with classification markings” were found among the material,
bringing the total to six pages discovered this week.
All
material was immediately taken into possession by the Justice
Department, Mr. Sauber said. The Justice Department declined to comment
Saturday.
The revelations come after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney during the Trump administration, as special counsel to examine why classified documents were found at both Mr. Biden’s home and the office he used at the think tank.
Aides
had found documents with classified markings at the think tank, the
Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, on Nov. 2, and
turned them over to the National Archives.
Mr. Biden’s team has said the material was inadvertently misplaced.
House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York said Saturday on Twitter, “House Republicans will hold Joe Biden’s
DOJ & FBI accountable for their double standard of justice and
uncover the TRUTH about why Biden has been allowed to be so
irresponsible with classified documents for so long.”
He says "it's obvious that the conflict, started as a limited
territorial war and escalating to a global economic confrontation,
between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on
the other hand, has become a world war."
He believes that "Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on
the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy,
but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. [...] I
think the Kremlin's calculation was that this decaying society...
... would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on
the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by
external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of
balance, and even a horizon, a hope."
He says he agrees with Mearsheimer's analysis of the conflict:
"Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by
NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was
therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had...
... announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their
point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive
and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to
rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because...
...since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would
be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true."
He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer:
"Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He
considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential,
for the Americans it is basically only one 'game' of power among others.
After Vietnam...
...Iraq and Afghanistan, what's one more debacle? The basic axiom of
American geopolitics is: 'We can do whatever we want because we are
sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to
us'. Nothing would be existential for America.
Insufficient analysis which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly.
America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the
American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected
that the Russian economy would hold up against the 'economic power'...
...of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.
If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed
to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by
China, American monetary and financial controls of the world......would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to
fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become
existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot
withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go.
This is why we...... are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other."
He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:
"I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign
Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees
American weakness, who knows that the......confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will
give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not
to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in
Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of......the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on
its initial protectorates. As the American system shrinks, it weighs
ever more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I
include all of Europe here).
The first to lose all national autonomy...... will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The
Internet has produced human interaction with the US in the Anglosphere
of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so
to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat...... protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is
considerable, and rapid. Let's remember the Iraq war, when Chirac,
Schröder and Putin held joint anti-war press conferences."
He underlines the importance of skills and education: "The US is now
twice as populated as Russia (2.2 times in student age groups). But in
the US only 7% are studying engineering, while in Russia it is 25%.
Which means that with 2.2 times fewer people studying, Russia trains......30% more engineers. The US fills the gap with foreign students, but
they're mainly Indians and even more Chinese. This is not safe and is
already decreasing. It is a dilemma of the American economy: it can only
face competition from China by importing skilled Chinese labor."
On the ideological and cultural aspects of the war: "When we see the
Russian Duma pass even more repressive legislation on 'LGBT propaganda',
we feel superior. I can feel that as an ordinary Westerner. But from a
geopolitical point of view, if we think in terms of...... soft power, it is a mistake. On 75% of the planet, the kinship
organization was patrilineal and one can sense a strong understanding of
Russian attitudes. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a
reassuring moral conservatism."
He continues: "The USSR had a certain form of soft power [but] communism
basically horrified the whole Muslim world by its atheism and inspired
nothing particular in India, outside of West Bengal and Kerala. However,
today, Russia which repositioned itself as the archetype......of the great power, not only anti-colonialist, but also patrilineal
and conservative of traditional mores, can seduce much further. [For
instance] it's obvious that Putin's Russia, having become morally
conservative, has become sympathetic to the Saudis who I'm sure have
a......bit of a hard time with American debates over access for transgender women in the ladies' room.
Western media are tragically funny, they keep saying, 'Russia is
isolated, Russia is isolated'. But when we look at the votes at the UN,
we see that 75% of the world does not......follow the West, which then seems very small.
With an anthropologist reading of this [divide between the West and the
rest] we find that countries in the West often have a nuclear family
structure with bilateral kinship systems, that is to say where male and
female kinship......are equivalent in the definition of the social status of the child.
[Within the rest], with the bulk of the Afro-Euro-Asian mass, we find
community and patrilineal family organizations. We then see that this
conflict, described by our media as a conflict of political......values, is at a deeper level a conflict of anthropological values. It
is this unconscious aspect of the divide and this depth that make the
confrontation dangerous."
cjhopkins | The Mother of All Limited Hangouts has begun. Yes, I’m talking about
the “Covid Twitter Files,” which are finally being released to the
public, in almost textbook limited-hangout fashion. I’ll get into that
in just a minute, but first, let’s review what a “limited hangout” is,
for those who are not familiar with the term.
The way a limited
hangout works is, if you’re an intelligence agency, or a global
corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and
you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those
things are starting to come to light such that you can’t just deny that
you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part
of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you’re doing) to
distract people’s attention from the rest of the story. The part you
release is the “limited hangout.” It’s not a lie. It’s just not the
whole story. You “hang it out” so that it will become the whole story,
and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.
Victor
Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA
who went on to become a critic of the Intelligence Community, described the tactic this way in 1978 …
“…
a favorite and frequently used gimmick of clandestine professionals.
When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a
phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting,
sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to
withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is
usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to
pursue the matter further.”
All right, so, you’re
probably asking, if the “Covid Twitter Files” are a limited hangout,
what’s the whole story that they’re distracting us from?
Let me try to refresh your memory.
In
March and April of 2020, in the course of roughly five to six weeks,
the majority of societies throughout the world were transformed into
pathologized-totalitarian police states. A global “shock-and-awe”
campaign was conducted. Constitutional rights were suspended. The masses
were locked down inside their homes, where they were subjected to the
most massive official propaganda blitzkrieg in human history. Goon
squads roamed the streets of Europe, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia,
Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, beating and arresting people for
being outdoors without permission and not wearing medical-looking masks.
Corporate media around the world informed us that life as we knew it
was over … a “new normal” was coming, and we needed to get used to it.
The
entire official pandemic narrative was rolled out during those first
few weeks. Everything. Masks. Mandatory “vaccines.” “Vaccination”
passports. The segregation of “the Unvaccinated.” The censorship and
demonization of dissent. Everything. The whole “New Normal” package. It
was rolled out all at once, globally.
"As well as enforcing quarantine measures, the law also allows the authorities to force people to be vaccinated, even though there is currently no vaccination for the virus." https://t.co/xejemRbdmO
That is the story. How that happened. Why that
happened. And who or what made it happen. It isn’t a story about a
virus, or our governments’ reactions to a virus. It is the story of the
radical restructuring of society based on lies and official propaganda,
executed, globally, through sheer brute force and
systematic psychological conditioning. It is the story of the
implementation of our new totalitarian global-capitalist “reality” … the
“New Normal” that was announced in the Spring of 2020. It is not a
story the global-capitalist ruling classes can permit to be told, except
by “crazy conspiracy theorists,” “science deniers,” and other
“crackpots” and “extremists.”
All right, so … the
“Covid Twitter Files,” or the “Fauci Files,” or whatever we’re calling
them. If you wanted to bury the actual story (i.e., the story I just
outlined above) with a limited hangout and discredit those of us who
have been trying to report it for nearly three years, you couldn’t do
any better than Elon Musk is doing. Instead of a story about how the
entire global-capitalist power apparatus coordinated with global IT
corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., to conduct a global
Gleichschaltungop
the scale of which Goebbels could have never dreamed of, censoring and
visibility-filtering dissent and enforcing the official pandemic
narrative, not just in the USA, but in countries all throughout the
world … instead of that monumental story, we are getting The Alex Berenson Show!,
starring Alex Berenson as Alex Berenson, with a special guest
appearance by Alex Berenson, written and directed by Alex Berenson, and
so on.
Brownstone | Contrary to popular belief that pharmaceutical companies drove the
COVID vaccine development programs, the US FDA’s website (FDA, 2020)
reveals that the United States Department of Defence (DoD) has been in
full control of the Covid Vaccine development program since its
beginning. The DoD has been responsible for development, manufacturing,
clinical trials, quality assurance, distribution and administration,
since that time (FDA, 2020; Rees and Latypova, 2022; KEI, 2022; Medical
Defense Consortium, 2022; Rees, 2022). The major pharmaceutical
companies have been involved as “Project Coordination Teams” effectively
performing as subcontractors to the DoD. The Chief Operating Officer
for the Warp Speed vaccine program is the US Department of Defence, and
the Chief Science Advisor is the US Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS).
The Nature of Gene-based Vaccines
The true nature of the COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ has been largely
misrepresented by mainstream media, big pharmaceutical companies and
governments and is poorly understood by the population at large.
Referring to these products as “vaccines” led most people to consider
them as relatively safe and well-researched and readily accept their
widespread use. However, they are not really vaccines – they are serious
gene-based interventions which have never been deployed widely in any
population, especially never to healthy individuals including children,
infants and pregnant women. In this sense they should be considered
experimental.
COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ fall into a special class of therapeutic agents
under the US FDA Office of Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies’ defined
as “gene therapy products,” which involve “introducing a new or modified
gene into the body to help treat a disease” (FDA, 2018). Heretofore,
use of gene therapy products has been limited to the treatment of
usually rare, serious and debilitating disease or genetic conditions.
They have potential to cause permanent intergenerational genetic damage,
cancer and interfere with reproductive capacity.
The FDA and other drug regulatory agencies have specific rules and
guidelines to direct manufacturers in development and testing of such
products, for both preclinical (FDA, 2013) and clinical (FDA, 2015)
research. However, the FDA did not evaluate these COVID-19 “vaccines”
according to these gene therapy guidelines.
Instead, there was a concerted effort to avoid referring to them as
gene therapy products, based, in part, on the argument that the genetic
material in the COVID-19 vaccines was not intended to be incorporated
into an individual’s DNA, nor to modify gene expression. There was no
prior short-term safety information and no long-term data on which to
predict future effects. No similar therapeutic products have been
previously approved anywhere in the world. Their widespread
administration globally with no historical safety experience was an
unprecedented risk in human health.
Accelerating Development
Messenger RNA platform technology has been researched by DARPA
(Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) since at least 2012
(McCullough, 2022). In early 2020, in the panic to develop the COVID-19
vaccines, certain critical research and development procedures were
omitted, bypassed, curtailed, or not done in a logical sequential
manner, or to established laboratory or manufacturing standards.
Although the spike protein is the active drug and is directly
responsible for the immune response, its pharmacology and toxicology
have not been studied in animals or in humans as would normally have
been required.
Other notable deficiencies include lack of critical research on
carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, genotoxicity and reproductive toxicology
in appropriate animal species. In particular, the potential for reverse
transcription of mRNA genetic material into an individual’s DNA was not
investigated. Furthermore, scale-up manufacturing was premature and
lacked adequate quality control to ensure that product made in large
batches is the same as made in smaller batches.
Without such research, the potency, mRNA integrity, presence of
contaminants and stability of the “vaccines” cannot be guaranteed. Such
oversights are directly responsible for the failure to predict the
serious adverse drug reactions and mortality which have now been
reported in association with these vaccines.
To mitigate risk, the plan in vaccine development was to use multiple
technologies, multiple facilities and redundancy. Leverage of existing
facilities would also take place. In the interest of expediency, the
plan was to avoid using traditional pathways from early development to
large-scale production. Avoidance of quality standards and guidelines
such as Good Manufacturing Practice and Good Laboratory Practice
guidelines was necessary to speed development, and conventional New Drug
Application (NDA) and Biologics License Application (BLA) approvals
were bypassed.
Instead, the process moved rapidly using compressed timelines and
overlapping stages of development towards Emergency Use Authorization
(EUA). Scale-up and large volume manufacturing was planned in parallel
with, instead of before, clinical trials which, again, may have
contravened accepted codes of Good Manufacturing Practices. These
approaches were probably a recipe for potential disaster. (Latypova,
2022; Watt and Latypova, 2022).
MoA | On Monday CBS launched a story about classified papers found
in a former office of president Biden. I am curious why the story came
out and why it came out now.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S.
attorney in Chicago to review documents marked classified that were
found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in
Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News. The
roughly 10 documents are from President Biden's vice-presidential
office at the center, the sources said. CBS News has learned the FBI is
also involved in the U.S. attorney's inquiry.
The material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on
Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special
counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when
Mr. Biden's personal attorneys "were packing files housed in a locked
closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in
Washington, D.C.," Sauber said in a statement to CBS News.
The story was kept under the wraps for more than two month. Biden's
lawyers, who allegedly found the documents, informed the National
Archive which took possession them the next day. It then informed the
Attorney General who assigned a U.S. attorney and involved the FBI.
That is at least how the story is told.
But I am curious on how much back and forth there was between Biden's
lawyers and the White House after the find. That the lawyers did not
ask Biden or his handlers how to proceed with the documents before
informing the National Archive can be excluded. The alleged find was
easy to hide. The National Archive is said to not have known anything
about the documents. The lawyers were bound by their attorney client
privilege that would have prohibited them from talking about the issue.
By informing the National Archive, which then involved others, it was
made inevitable that someone would let the media know about this.
So why weren't those documents just burned up? Why not avoid the scandal that has now been reinforced by a second find of such documents, this time in a garage at Biden's home in Wilmington? Who made these decisions?
Biden is not an honest man when it comes to political issues. He is not a stranger to covering things up.
The decision to let this out, to not cover it up, is so far
unexplained. The whole thing can only hurt Biden. It also disables the
Democrats of using Trump's withholding of classified papers as a weapon
against him.
Was it the very special content of the classified documents that made
this move necessary? Or is there something else that we do not yet know
about? Something that led to the judgment that the current limit
hangout of some dirty linen is better than to have a real scandal come
to the public's knowledge.
politico | Since
the end of the Cold War, the Arctic has largely been free of visible
geopolitical conflict. In 1996, the eight countries with Arctic
territory formed the Arctic Council, where they agreed to environmental
protection standards and pooled technology and money for joint natural
resources extraction in the region. Svalbard, Europe’s northernmost
inhabited settlement, just 700 miles south of the North Pole, perfectly
represents this spirit of cooperation. While a territory of Norway, it
is also a kind of international Arctic station. It hosts the KSAT
Satellite Station, relied on by everyone from the U.S. to China; a
constellation of some dozen nations’ research laboratories; and the
world’s doomsday Seed Vault (where seeds from around the world are
stored in case of a global loss in crop diversity, whether due to
climate change or nuclear fallout). Svalbard, where polar bears
outnumber people, is considered a demilitarized, visa-free zone by 42
nations.
But today, this Arctic desert is rapidly becoming the center of a new conflict. The vast sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is melting rapidly due to climate change, losing 13 percent per decade — a rate that experts say could make the Arctic ice-free in the summer as soon as 2035.
Already, the thaw has created new shipping lanes, opened existing
seasonal lanes for more of the year and provided more opportunities for
natural resource extraction. Nations are now vying for military and
commercial control over this newly accessible territory — competition
that has only gotten more intense since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For
the past two decades, Russia has been dominating this fight for the
Arctic, building up its fleet of nuclear-capable icebreakers, ships and
submarines, developing more mining and oil well operations along its
15,000 miles of Arctic coastline, racing to capture control of the new
“Northern Sea Route” or “Transpolar Sea Route” which could begin to open
up by 2035, and courting non-Arctic nations to help fund those
endeavors.
At
the same time, America is playing catch-up in a climate where it has
little experience and capabilities. The U.S. government and military
seems to be awakening to the threats of climate change and Russian
dominance of the Arctic — recently issuing a National Strategy for the
Arctic Region and a report on how climate change impacts American
military bases, opening a consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, and appointing
this year an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic region within the State
Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and
Global Resilience. America’s European allies, too, have been rethinking
homeland security, increasing national defense budgets and security
around critical energy infrastructure in the Arctic as they aim to boost
their defense capabilities and rely less on American assistance.
But
17 Arctic watchers — including Norwegian diplomats, State Department
analysts and national security experts focusing on the Arctic — said
they fear that the U.S. and Europe won’t be able to maintain a grip on
the region’s energy resources and diplomacy as Russia places more
civilian and military infrastructure across the Arctic, threatening the
economic development and national security of the seven other nations
whose sovereign land sits within the Arctic Circle.
Even
as the U.S. says it has developed stronger Arctic policies, five
prominent Arctic watchers I spoke with say that the U.S. government and
military are taking too narrow a view, seeing the Arctic as primarily
Alaska and an area for natural resource extraction, but not as a key
geopolitical and national security battleground beyond U.S. borders.
They say the U.S. is both poorly resourced in the Arctic and unprepared
to deal with the rising climate threat, which will require new kinds of
technology, training and infrastructure the U.S. has little experience
with. Several U.S. government officials involved in Arctic planning told
me in private they also fear a nuclear escalation in the Arctic, which
would threaten to engulf Europe and its allies in a larger conflict.
“We’re
committed to expanding our engagement across the region,” one of those
officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about a tense
geopolitical region, told me, “but we’re not there yet.”
“The
[Defense] Department views the Arctic as a potential avenue of approach
to the homeland, and as a potential venue for great power competition,”
America’s new deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and
Global Resilience, Iris A. Ferguson, wrote me in an email. Ferguson
described Russia as an “acute threat” and also outlined fears that
China, a “pacing threat” was seeking “to normalize its presence and
pursue a larger role in shaping Arctic regional governance and security
affairs.” (China has contributed to liquid natural gas projects and
funded a biodiesel plant in Finland as part of its Belt and Road
Initiative now reaching the Arctic.)
indianpunchline | Sweden’s (or Finland’s) NATO membership isn’t exactly round the
corner. Sweden is either unable or unwilling to fulfil Turkiye’s
demands. Besides, there are variables at work here.
Most
important, the trajectory of the current Russian-brokered rapprochement
between Ankara and Damascus will profoundly impact the fate of the
Kurdish groups in the region — and the Kurdish-US axis in Syria.
Washington has warned Erdogan against seeking rapprochement with
President Bashar Al-Assad.
What
complicates matters further is that presidential and parliamentary
elections are due in Turkiye in June and Erdogan’s political compass is
set. Any change in his calculus can only happen in the second half of
2023 at the earliest.
Now, 6 months is a long time in West Asian politics. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war will also have phenomenally changed by summer.
Finland
is ready to wait till summer, but Sweden (and the US) cannot. The heart
of the matter is that Sweden’s NATO membership is not really about the
war in Ukraine but is about containing the Russian presence and strategy
in the Arctic and North Pole. There is a massive economic dimension to
it, too.
Thanks to
climate change, the Arctic is increasingly becoming a navigable sea
route. The expert opinion is that nations bordering the Arctic (eg.,
Sweden) will have an enormous stake in who has access to and control of
the resources of this energy- and mineral-rich region as well as the new
sea routes for global commerce the melt-off is creating.
It
is estimated that forty-three of the nearly 60 large oil and
natural-gas fields that have been discovered in the Arctic are in
Russian territory, while eleven are in Canada, six in Alaska [US] and
one in Norway. Simply put, the spectre that is haunting the US is: “The
Arctic is Russian.”
War
games show that the capacity to wage war effectively will be
constrained by resource depletion. Because of this fact, some state will
seek the "advantage" of carrying out sooner and pre-emptively what's
inevitably beyond that signpost up ahead.Al Jazeera |
Russia has warned that military conflicts over energy resources could
erupt along its borders in the near future, as the race to secure oil
and gas reserves gains momentum.A
Kremlin policy paper, which maps out Russia's main challenges to
national security for the next decade, said "problems that involve the
use of military force cannot be excluded" in competition for resources.The
National Security Strategy's release coincides with a deadline for
countries around the world to submit sea bed ownership claims to a
United Nations commission, including for the resource-rich Arctic.The
paper, signed off by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, says
international relations in the next 10 years will be shaped by battles
over energy reserves."The
attention of international politics in the long-term perspective will
be concentrated on the acquisition of energy resources," it said. "Amid
competitive struggle for resources, attempts to use military force to
solve emerging problems can't be excluded."The existing balance of forces near the borders of the Russian Federation and its allies can be violated," it added.The
document said regions including the Middle East, the Barents Sea, the
Arctic, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia could all be at the centre of
competing claims for resources.Russia,
the world's biggest natural gas producer, has already accused the
United States, with which it shares a small sea border, of coveting its
mineral wealth.But
Moscow is also finding its control over natural gas exports under
threat, as the European Union seeks alternative supply routes that would
bypass Russia and the Ukraine.The
country is also embroiled in a territorial dispute with Norway over
claims to the Arctic sea bed, where around 25 per cent of the world's
untapped reserves are believed to lie underneath the ice.
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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