GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

Opioids At Work: Hidden Scourge Sapping The Economy | ZeroHedge

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Opioids At Work: Hidden Scourge Sapping The Economy​

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 04:00 PM
Authored by James Varney via RealClear Wire,

Strung out on drugs half her life, Brandi Edwards, 29, said the longest she held a job before getting sober four years ago was “about two and a half months.”

“I worked at an AT&T call center, a day-care center for a month, fast food places, but I had to take drugs to get out of bed in the morning and when I did show up, I wasn’t productive,” the West Virginia mother of three told RealClearInvestigations. “The first paycheck came along and I was out of there.

In jail for the ninth time on drug-related charges, and separated from her children, Edwards had an awakening in “looking hard at what I’d lost.” Now clean for four years after rehab, she is married and back in her children’s lives with a home in Princeton, W. Va., and a steady job.

But such success stories are too infrequent to offset the massive cost of the opioid epidemic to the American workforce. Only a couple of people in her former addict circle have returned to productive life, she says, while most are dead or incarcerated.

That toll on labor, haunting America’s working present and future probably for years -- if not decades -- to come, is largely invisible and underreported because it is difficult to measure, according to physicians, counselors, economists, workers and public officials. But its staying power is suggested by other lasting national challenges, including the porous southern border -- a major conduit for smuggled, Chinese-made fentanyl -- and economic and social traumas set in motion by the coronavirus pandemic.

In addition to untold years of productivity lost from fatal overdoses, the nation’s labor participation rate has shrunk steadily since 2000. Precise correlation is elusive, but any graph of that decline would stand in sharp contrast to the rise of opioid addiction in the U.S. And while it is difficult to calculate just how much drug use has caused absenteeism, tardiness and stretches of disability, the connection is strong, as Brandi Edwards’ experience suggests.

“We’ve been writing about this for years but it doesn’t seem to get a lot of traction,” said Dr. Gary Franklin, a research professor at the University of Washington who served as the medical director of the state’s Department of Labor and Industries. “People have not realized how much opioids contribute to disability and lost productivity, and I don’t know if anyone has been able to put a number on that.”

Headline figures on lives lost in the opioid epidemic have been fairly clear for years. In 2021, more than 107,000 people died from drug overdoses, a nearly 15% increase from the year before and more than double the grim tally recorded in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All told, overdose deaths are seven times higher than they were in 1999.

Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which law enforcement has tracked from labs in China along trafficking routes through Mexico on the southern border, are now driving the overdose epidemic. The CDC attributed 69,000 overdose deaths to synthetic opioids in 2020, 82% of the nation's total that year. Heroin overdoses, meanwhile, went up 7% in 2020 to 13,000, according to CDC figures.

That means synthetic opioids and heroin dwarf cocaine and methamphetamines, although totals for both of those have been rising for a decade and often cause overdose deaths in combination with opioids. The National Institutes of Health shows fewer than 5,000 people killed by cocaine alone and fewer than 10,000 by what it dubs "psychostimulants," which includes methamphetamines, in 2020.

Less precisely, economists since at least 2017 have pegged at over $1 trillion the epidemic’s annual dollar cost in terms of deaths, law enforcement and “lost productivity.”

But the amount attributable to deaths - $550 billion of the $1 trillion - is largely conjecture because it is derived from actuarial estimates for lost years; for example, the decades cut from what would have been a normal working life for someone who fatally overdoses at age 45.

Then there is the less lethal side of the equation -- one that workers and employers grapple with daily. Roughly 8% of workplace fatalities in 2020 - 388 of 4,786 - were attributed to "unintentional overdose from nonmedical use of drugs," according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the agency said it is unclear "how many of these deaths involved opioids specifically."

A post on a neighborhood social media platform asking about opioids’ dire impact in the workforce unleashes a barrage of firsthand horror stories. Homeowners speak of an inability to hire handymen, painters, landscape workers and the like.

“If I’m lucky enough to have an employee that can pass a [urine analysis] the chances of them doing so after the first check is slim,” wrote a tree surgeon in suburban New Orleans. “Tree men get a terrible rap. People think we are all crazy, wild, no fear having, hard working dopeheads.”

But he acknowledged some truth to the stories of workplace abuse of prescription opioids, mentioning laborers’ common habit of relying on increasingly higher-milligram dosages of pain pills like Percocet.

Workers “didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Hmmm, great day to go down a road that will cost me it all,’ " he wrote. "Then it’s inevitable. We get hurt. Usually pretty badly. So we start out getting a few .5 [mg] maybe 7.5. Later, as our careers go so does the pain, so do the amounts needed to consume to keep it at bay.”

A National Safety Council study reported that more than 75% of U.S. employers have been affected by employees’ prescription drug use, according to congressional testimony, and the National Institutes of Health estimates some 3 million Americans, including workers, are addicted to opioids.

Edwards managed to break her addiction and return to the workforce with the help of Jobs & Hope, a statewide West Virginia placement initiative launched in 2019 that claims more than 1,500 success stories. But with a budget of $3.1 million it cannot handle all of the 200-250 addicts referred to it each month, said Deb Harris, the group’s lead transition agent.

Businesses have been largely receptive to such programs, but the state is still trying to regain its footing from the “flood of pills” that hit it early in the 21st century, according to Dr. Matthew Christiansen, director of West Virginia’s Office of Drug Control in the Department of Health and Human Services.

“We don’t keep a running tally at the state level, but the numbers have probably stayed pretty consistent or maybe gotten a little bit worse because of an increase in overdose deaths due to fentanyl,” Christiansen said.

The Centers for Disease Control does keep a tally, although it hasn’t publicly updated the grim numbers on its “opioid dashboard” since 2017. The figures from that year show that the biggest economic hit has come in the Appalachian states around the Ohio Valley and in New England, two regions where opioids and synthetics have torn a hole through the workforce.

For example, West Virginia, long considered ground zero in the opioid epidemic, had the biggest annual per capita loss due to opioids at $7,247, according to the CDC figures that include overdose deaths. That tops Ohio, where the per capita cost in 2017 was $6,226, and New Hampshire at $5,953. Ohio saw the highest overall economic cost, at $72.58 billion, followed by Massachusetts at $36.91 billion, according to the CDC.

Fixing opioid disorder costs is complicated by the fact much of it is now driven by black-market synthetic drugs like fentanyl and thus can no longer be tracked through prescriptions. Nor is substance abuse a topic that workers - or many employers - are comfortable quantifying. All those involved in coping with the epidemic, however, peg the cost as staggering.

“It’s difficult to measure these things but it’s likely a substantial part of the labor decline,” said Michael Betz, an economist at The Ohio State University who researches opioid disorder issues. “You’re piecing together different pieces of evidence, but when you look at the decline in labor participation rates and opioid disorder figures, they match up pretty similarly.”

Franklin’s team did calculate the odds opioids influenced the disability bills Washington state taxpayers foot each year for roughly 100,000 workers, a relatively uncomplicated tally since Washington is one of four states with a centralized government system and not a private workers’ compensation insurance market.

“We found that two prescriptions of opioids for more than 7 days in the first six weeks after an injury doubled the risk of a worker being on disability one year later,” he said.

Answers to broader questions on opioids’ baleful economic impact, however, are scarce.

“Productivity losses due to anything is an extremely complex analysis and is not routinely tracked,” Franklin said.

To date, the nation's prime age labor workforce has not recovered to where it was at the beginning of 2020 and is now the lowest it has been in 45 years. The hit has been especially pronounced among older adults, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Between 2015 and 2019, adults 50 years old or older "were an estimated 22 percent less likely to be in the labor force (either employed or actively seeking work),” a GAO report found. In addition, people in that age group "were an estimated 40 percent less likely to be employed; and employed older workers who misused opioids were twice as likely to have experienced periods of unemployment."

Once again, however, pinpointing the precise connection between opioids and lost productivity remained elusive, as "the data did not allow GAO to determine causality."

Middle-aged white men have long comprised the single biggest group of annual overdose deaths, but between 2015 and 2020 the rate among black men skyrocketed to 54.1 per 100,000, topping white men’s 44.2 per 100,000, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Local economic conditions play some part in all this but they aren’t the key role; the main driver is the increase in supply,” Betz said.

That leads some experts on the topic to conclude that opioids’ catastrophic hit to the United States’ workforce has been misconstrued. For a time, as deaths rose early on, particularly among middle-aged white men, and labor participation rates began their decline, the phrase “deaths of despair” took hold among some researchers.

Under this theory, the opioid epidemic fed on declining economic prospects, particularly for middle-aged white men facing unemployment or shrinking incomes.

But the “deaths of despair” theory reverses cause and effect, according to some physicians and people dealing with the fallout from opioids, including their more deadly synthetic cousin fentanyl.

“We’ve debunked that,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a faculty member at Brandeis University whose practice has specialized in opioid addiction. “Rather than economic conditions leading to overdose deaths it’s really the other way around - it’s not the economy driving them to death, it’s the opioid crisis affecting the economy.”

 

[marsh]

Stagflation Is "Just The Beginning" For America's Economic Crisis: Peter Navarro | ZeroHedge

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Stagflation Is "Just The Beginning" For America's Economic Crisis: Peter Navarro

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 03:20 PM
Authored by Tom Ozimek and Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times,

Economist Peter Navarro, erstwhile adviser to former President Donald Trump, told Epoch TV’s “Crossroads” program in a recent interview that the current stagflationary downturn stalking the U.S. economy is “just the beginning” of America’s economic woes, and that Trump is the one who’s best poised to pull the country out of a dire slump.

Navarro said in the interview that he believes the United States has fallen prey to the destructive force of stagflation—a toxic combination of high inflation and sluggish growth.

“That’s what we’ve got now because of the fecklessness of Joe Biden, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, and this administration,” he said.

There’s been fierce debate about what led to prices accelerating at their fastest pace in decades, eroding purchasing power, and squeezing American households.

Some, including many members of the Biden administration, have mostly blamed supply-side constraints and external shocks like the war in Ukraine. Others, including many Republicans, have pointed the finger at unprecedented levels of fiscal and monetary spending.

The inflationary wave that has swelled into a persistent cost-of-living crisis for many Americans was driven mostly by a stimulus-fueled demand surge, although supply-side bottlenecks made the problem worse, a team of economists concluded in a recent study.

Soaring inflation, which Fed officials have admitted is far more persistent than they initially believed, has come alongside deteriorating economic conditions. The U.S. economy contracted for two consecutive quarters this year, according to updated figures released by the government on Sept. 29, which meets the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.

‘This Is Just the Beginning’
Navarro argued in the interview that the United States is already experiencing stagflation—and that it’s going to get worse.

“This is just beginning. This economic crisis is just beginning, and it’s going to be as bad or worse and as long as it was during the 1970s,” Navarro said.

The dreaded toxic brew of high unemployment and high inflation plagued the U.S. economy for over a decade in the 1970s. America’s unemployment rate doubled to 9 percent between 1973 and 1975, while inflation peaked at around 14 percent in annual terms.

Inflation didn’t fall substantially until the early 1980s, and only after the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates to around 19 percent, leading to two back-to-back recessions in 1980 and 1981–82.

In the interview, Navarro offered a lookback on the Trump administration’s economic policies and credited them with low unemployment and low inflation.

“What we did was structural in nature, designed to increase the real wages of American workers, the productivity of American workers, the prosperity of the middle class,” Navarro said.

“And we did that beautifully through structural elements, not just the traditional Republican tax cuts and lower regulatory burdens, but by securing the southern border, which prevents a flood of uneducated, low-income workers coming in,” he said.

Navarro added that Trump’s policies on re-shoring manufacturing and bringing supply chains back to the United States helped boost wages for blue-collar Americans.

The economist further argued that bringing back Trump-era policies is key to pulling the country out of stagflation.

“I think the only one who fully understands how to get out of that is Donald Trump,” Navarro said. “I don’t see anybody else in the Republican Party who has that kind of sophistication.”

His take on the trajectory of the U.S. economy dovetails with remarks made by other economists, who see darkening clouds on the horizon.

‘Stagflationary Debt Crisis’
Economist Nouriel Roubini, for example, who’s been dubbed “Dr. Doom” for his pessimistic, yet accurate, prediction of a financial market meltdown in 2007–08, told Bloomberg in a recent interview that he expects “a real hard landing” for the U.S. economy.

Roubini also said he continues to believe that it’s “delusional” for analysts to expect a short and shallow recession, arguing instead that it will be long and severe.

In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, he also warned of a looming “stagflationary debt crisis” with “some of the worst elements of both the 1970s and the 2008 crash” as public debt levels have become unsustainable and most of the fiscal ammunition already used.

“Things will get much worse before they get better,” he predicted in the op-ed, adding that he believes the economic downturn will come alongside financial market turmoil.

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said at a recent investor summit in New York City that he’s worried that the economic downturn affecting United States could be worse than an “average garden variety” recession.

At the same time, investor pessimism has hit levels not seen since the financial crisis of 2008–09.

 

[marsh]

(BRIC)

India, China, Brazil Abstain From UN Vote Condemning Russian Annexation | ZeroHedge

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https://gettr.com/share?&text=India...nexation-india-china-brazil-and-gabon-abstain
India, China, Brazil Abstain From UN Vote Condemning Russian Annexation

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 01:12 PM

Russia on Friday vetoed a Western bid to condemn its annexations of four occupied Ukrainian regions following controversial referendums - and while this move was expected from the Kremlin, China, India, Brazil and Gabon abstained.



Russia's veto came after the United States and Ukraine co-sponsored the resolution hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow would take over areas of Ukraine seized during the invasion following referendums organized by the Kremlin.

"This is exactly what the Security Council was made to do. Defend sovereignty, protect territorial integrity, promote peace and security," said US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, adding "The United Nations was built on an idea that never again would one country be allowed to take another's territory by force."

Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said that it was unprecedented to try and condemn a permanent member of the Security Council.
"Do you seriously expect Russia to consider and support such a draft? And if not, then it turns out that you are intentionally pushing us to use the right of the veto in order to then wax lyrical about the fact that Russia abuses this right," he said.

 

[marsh]

'Just Kidding': Biden Yanks Student Loan Forgiveness From 770,000 Borrowers | ZeroHedge

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'Just Kidding': Biden Yanks Student Loan Forgiveness From 770,000 Borrowers

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 04:30 PM

In a jarring reversal, the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday quietly revised its online guidance on who qualifies for the $10,000 of student loan forgiveness that President Biden announced in August. In doing so, it pulled the rug out from under at least several hundred thousand people.

At issue: Borrowers who have Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL). Those earlier-generation loans were guaranteed by the federal government but were issued and are managed by private lenders. The FFEL program ran from 1965 to 2010; Perkins loans ended in 2017.



— as the crow flies (@anandasara) September 30, 2022
Previously, the Department of Education's online guidance said Perkins and FFEL loans could be consolidated into federal direct loans and then qualify for debt forgiveness.

On Thursday, however, the Department of Education -- without fanfare or a press conference -- changed the rules by adding this content to its website: "As of Sept. 29, 2022, borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED cannot obtain one-time debt relief by consolidating those loans into Direct Loans."

This is no marginal change: An anonymous Biden administration official told Reuters it will affect 770,000 borrowers. That estimate relies on the fact that many of the 4 million total FFEL borrowers also have direct loans and can still qualify for consolidation.

"This is a gut punch, to say the least," tweeted Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors. "This is one of the most harmful decisions I've seen come out of the Ed in a long time."



The Education department says it's "assessing whether there are alternative pathways to provide relief to borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED."

The harsh withdrawal of the debt forgiveness from nearly a million or more Americans came on the same day that Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina asked a federal judge to impose an immediate temporary restraining order on entire the debt forgiveness scheme.

The suit specifically attacks the forgiveness of FFEL loans, arguing that doing so deprives private lenders of assets and "the ongoing payments that those loans generate."

In their lawsuit, the states also more broadly allege that Biden is overstepping his authority by using the 2003 HEROES Act to wipe away the debt. That legislation focused on aiding active duty military service members serving in the war on terror.

"It is inconceivable, when it passed the HEROES Act, that Congress thought it was authorizing anything like the Administration’s across-the-board debt cancellation, which will result in around half a trillion dollars or more in losses to the federal treasury," the six state attorneys general wrote in their filing.

The estimated cost of the debt forgiveness scheme has already soared in just the first month after it was announced. The Congressional Budget Office says it will cost at least $400 billion over three decades, far above earlier estimates of $300 billion.

Biden's loan forgiveness proclamation was in keeping with a 2020 campaign pledge, and the announcement was clearly timed to maximize its impact on the midterm election. However, after Thursday's jolting move by the Biden administration, some 770,000 to 4 million borrowers may be feeling a little less confident in Democratic governance.

 

[marsh]

Michael Yon @MichaelYon
Sep 30, 2022 at 7:29pm
Casus Belli for Preemptive Nuclear Strike On Russia
01 October 2022
Dublin, Ireland
Mind dump, sans edit

Watching it all unfold. They wave the corrupted Ukrainian flag. Even while fighting-aged Ukrainian men and women have swept away and can be found in capitals across Europe.

This war is completely out of control — as it was destined. A small handful of well-placed globalists in United States, Germany, and more, have reached the state of euphoric war trance. Oblivious to the oblivion aimed at their faces. Or maybe they just welcome death. Some people use war for suicide.

This is clear: Demons in charge of America’s nuclear weapons are creating casus belli for preemptive strike on Russia. And if Demons are to hit Russia, Demons likely will go all in for North Korea, Iran, and even China.

They are, after all, the Demons who forced millions of Americans, Germans, and more, to ingest death jabs. Anyone who will do this will do anything.

 

[marsh]

The Great Reset: The Bond Yield-Dollar Feedback Loop | ZeroHedge

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The Great Reset: The Bond Yield-Dollar Feedback Loop​

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 08:20 AM
Via Global Macro Monitor,

The Great Reset is upon us.

All things as we have known and have become comfortably numb with, such as zero interest rates, negative real interest rates, quantitative easing (digital money printing), and Pax Americana, [and central bank dominance of the U.S. bond market] are being upended and overturned.

Beware of recency bias, folks, as the global structural shifts and changes are now ubiquitous. – GMM, Sep 23rd

Here’s a quick primer that may explain the current global macro dynamic between the strong dollar and rising bond yields. We’ve been beating this drum for years.

Central Banks Will Be Net Sellers Of Treasury Securities​

Central banks, both foreign and the Fed, who are and have never been price and market sensitive, have been the predominant buyers of Treasury coupon securities over the past 20 years.

Look at the following table from a July 2021 post, which set the stage for the inflation we are now experiencing.



Granted, the massive ramp in the budget deficit during COVID – to a 12-month trailing high of 19 percent of GDP in March 2021 – is unlikely to repeat, but ditto for the Fed’s Treasury purchases. The markets did not have the ability to absorb such a massive new issuance without a major financial disruption and a spike in interest rates.

The markets will now have to absorb or step in and replace both the Fed’s demand as the balance sheet runs off (effective net Treasury selling) and the foreign central bank selling. Both have now morphed from the largest buyers to net sellers.

Also, note from the above table the Fed’s purchase of almost 200 percent of TIPs issuance during the period; that is, all of it and then some. Inflation expectations? Managed!

China Selling Treasury Holdings​

Once the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, China has sold down its holdings by over 26 percent from its November 2013 peak. We also have no doubt Japan’s holdings are down from the latest observation in July.

However, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) seems more comfortable with a weakening yen but not at the recent rapid clip, which forced them to intervene in the currency market.

Japan intervened in the foreign exchange market on Thursday to buy yen for the first time since 1998, in an attempt to shore up the battered currency after the Bank of Japan stuck with ultra-low interest rates. – Reuters, Sep 22nd

Global Capital Flows And The Great Financial Crisis​

Before the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), the Fed raised its policy rate by 425 basis points, and long-term yields barely budged. Were financial markets efficient in anticipating the GFC?

Hardly. The technical position of the yield curve contributed to and helped cause the GFC.

Alan Greenspan argued that the Fed lost control of the U.S. yield curve. Foreign central banks recycled their massive dollar purchases back into the U.S. bond market after intervening in home markets to keep their currencies from appreciating. Central banks were still reeling from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which taught them a hard lesson about letting currencies become too overvalued.

The foreign central bank Treasury purchases suppressed long-term rates and allowed the credit and housing bubble to continue for much longer than the Fed anticipated and desired.

Looking back, he [Alan Greenspan] says today: “We tried in 2004 to move long-term rates higher in order to get mortgage interest rates up and take some of the fizz out of the housing market. But we failed.” Something besides Fed policy was at work. Both Mr. Greenspan and his successor, Ben Bernanke, point to an unanticipated surge in capital pouring into the U.S. from overseas.
– Council of Foreign Relations

Are We Now In A Rising Bond Yield/Strong Dollar Feedback Loop?​

In our 2017 post, Orwellian Monetary Policy, we posited that tighter domestic monetary policy in a globalized capital market could, in effect, and paradoxically, create looser domestic financial conditions as foreign capital is sucked back into the U.S. markets. We suspect that is what happened before the GFC and agree with Greenspan and Bernake on this point.

We wrote in the dystopian 1984 language,

“Tightening is Easing”

Today’s World​

The moves in exchange and interest rates over the past few months have been violent.

We suspect we are now in a bond yield-dollar feedback loop, where many central banks are forced to intervene in their home currency markets, selling their Treasury holdings to raise the dollars to ease the pressure on the home currency.

On the margin – and prices are set by marginal buyers and sellers — their actions put downward pressure on U.S. bond prices, causing yields to rise.



We are unsure whether this is a reality or GMM fitting reality to a nice theory, but we deduce it fits the action we are currently witnessing in the global markets.

The same is true for all central banks whose currencies are under pressure. Witness the positive feedback loop.

Reflexivity​

Reflexivity in economics is the theory that a feedback loop exists in which investors’ perceptions affect economic fundamentals, which in turn changes investor perception. The theory of reflexivity has its roots in sociology, but in the world of economics and finance, its primary proponent is George Soros. – Invetopedia

We don’t know if the markets are in a period of Soros’ reflexivity, where traders and investors understand the above model and are trading on it, causing yields to rise and the dollar to strengthen even further in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We suspect it is so; in the same spirit of Milton Friedman’s pool player analogy, acting as if they understand the laws of physics even though they don’t.

Consider the problem of predicting the shots made by an expert billiard player. It seems not at all unreasonable that excellent predictions would be yielded by the hypothesis that the billiard player made his shots as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give the optimum directions of travel, could estimate accurately by eye the angles, etc., describing the location of the balls, could make lightning calculations from the formulas, and could then make the balls travel in the direction indicated by the formulas. Our confidence in this hypothesis is not based on the belief that billiard players, even expert ones, can or do go through the process described; it derives rather from the belief that, unless in some way or other they were capable of reaching essentially the same result, they would not in fact be expert billiard players. – Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economic, 1953

Where Are The Dollars Going?​

Moreover, where is all the liquidity going from the King-Kong dollar strength?
Our priors are more, or some are being transferred from foreign central bank holdings of Treasuries into private sector hands and recycled back into the U.S. short-end bond and money markets.

Nobody knows for sure, but after three 75 bps rate hikes and quantitative tightening well underway, one would think that money liquidity would be shrinking. However, it doesn’t seem to be the case as the Fed’s overnight reverse repo facility remains at record highs.

We suspect foreign capital is flowing into the short-end, which now provides decent yields of 3-4 percent, giving the gorilla strength to the U.S. dollar.

Are Financial Conditions Tight? ​

After the jumbo rate hikes and $90 billion per month being drained from the domestic financial markets as the notes and bonds roll off the Fed’s balance sheet, one would think so.

Our favorite indicator of U.S. financial conditions,, the Chicago Fed’s National Financial Condition Index (NFCI), a weighted average of a large number of variables (105 measures of financial activity). tells a different story, however. Financial conditions remain slightly loose.

Upshot​

The U.S. financial markets are still flush with too much money, and the Fed has once again lost control of events. Something big will eventually break, but in the words of the great-late MIT professor Rudy Dornbush,

In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. – Rudiger Dornbusch

Because we have reached the tipping point of excess money, liquidity, capital, or however you define it, which are creating global inflationary pressures, don’t count on the monetary cavalry coming to the rescue anytime soon or returning to the good old days of hurricane force central bank headwinds.

Look how markets reacted to the U.K.’s unfunded tax cuts this week.

Britain’s new government announced a sweeping series of tax cuts on Friday, betting it had found the path to economic growth despite high inflation.

But the market verdict was swift and negative: The value of British stocks and bonds fell sharply, while the pound sank to lows against the U.S. dollar not seen since 1985. – NY Times

The Great Reset is upon us, folks. Don’t fight it.

We expect global policymakers will eventually be forced to coordinate their actions.

^^^

 

[marsh]

(UK)

"Forced Selling Of Everything" - UK Pension Funds Are Still Liquidating Assets, Seeking Bailouts | ZeroHedge

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"Forced Selling Of Everything" - UK Pension Funds Are Still Liquidating Assets, Seeking Bailouts​

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 09:20 AM

UK pension funds are/have been servicing ever increasing margin calls driven by the extreme moves in real and nominal rates.

As BondVigilantes.com notes, they are on a hunt for liquidity (cash) to service these calls at the same time the liquidity (bid offer spread) of asset markets is extremely fragile. A sub layer to this dynamic is that pension funds are also a significant provider of gilts to the repo market (which they repo out to fund levered investments) and where we are now seeing some strain as these gilts are either withdrawn from repo programmes (to sell, as of yesterday to the BOE) or repo’d out to raise cash to fund said margin calls.

The timing could not be worse with quarter end looming, increasing demand for bank balance sheet from non-bank market participants and an ever increasing war chest of cash from the liquidity ‘Haves’ chasing collateral.

While The Bank of England stepped in to buy gilts on Wednesday, stabilising the market, The Financial Times reports that the pension funds are continuing to sell assets to meet cash calls.

“There’s a lot of pain out there, a lot of forced selling,” said Ariel Bezalel, fund manager at Jupiter.

“People who are getting margin called are having to sell what they can rather than what they would like to.”

He said the BoE’s intervention had helped to bring down yields in longer-dated bonds but other assets remained “under pressure” because pension schemes were “having to liquidate paper”. He added:

“We’re seeing really quality investment grade paper coming up for grabs...names like Heathrow, John Lewis, Gatwick, BT - solid fundamentals - to raise cash.”

Simeon Willis, partner at XPS Pensions Group, said:

“Pension schemes are selling equities and corporate bonds and using those assets to top up their hedges.”

“There could be many hundreds of schemes that have had their hedges reduced or removed. This means their funding positions are now much more vulnerable than they were a week ago.”

To fund the collateral calls, some pension schemes have resorted to asking employers backing their plans for cash. Outsourcing group Serco provided £60mn after a request from pension trustees, according to a person familiar with the matter, a highly unusual move for a well-funded corporate scheme. Sky News first reported the move.

While some schemes continue to rush to raise cash to fund their derivatives positions, others have had the positions terminated by LDI managers, including BlackRock, leaving them exposed to further moves in rates and inflation.

Related to this liquidation, more behind-the scenes details of this week's chaos in the UK are being exposed with The FT reporting that none other virtue-signaler-extraordinaire BlackRock basically 'blackmailed' the UK government into intervention as UK pension funds faced crises.

BlackRock, which sits between the pension schemes and banks on derivatives trades designed to hedge against adverse movement in interest rates and inflation, told its clients that it would no longer demand additional collateral but would instead liquidate holdings to meet margin calls that were soaring due to the extreme volatility in UK asset prices.

In a memo sent on Wednesday morning, BlackRock told clients using its liability-driven investing strategies that it would freeze “funds more at risk of assets being exhausted” and move the assets to cash.

The graph below shows the overall market value of available gilt collateral has fallen sharply over recent days...



BlackRock is “not proceeding with any further recapitalization events until further notice”, said the email to LDI clients, which was seen by the Financial Times and was sent at about 11am, before the Bank of England announced its emergency intervention to stabilise the gilt market.

David Fogarty, a professional trustee with Dalriada, a trustee firm, said:

“If you run out of collateral they were saying, ‘we will close the position’, without going back to ask for more money from the fund. It is protecting their positions against contagion but it is not protecting their pension funds.”

This liquidation would have caused even further vicious spiral plunges in gilt prices and, just as JPMorgan did in 2019 with The Fed and 'Not QE' to bailout the repo market, BlackRock exercised its 'TBTF Put' and forced The Bank of England's hand to re-liquify the long-end of the gilts market.

In summary, as BondVigilantes.com notes, there are very clear collateral strains for some sterling market participants and demarcation of the liquidity ‘Have and Have Nots’. The urgent question (with an unclear answer at the moment in my view) is whether this could spill over into a broader liquidity breakdown as the various actors seek to right-size or further shore up their defensive cash stocks during these unprecedented markets. One thing that goes without saying is that cash really is king at the moment.

^^^^^

 

[marsh]

Michael Yon @MichaelYon
Sep 30, 2022 at 10:52pm
Putin’s Speech
01 October 2022
Dublin, Ireland

I watched the entire speech. Many ‘analysts’ are busy trying to read his mind. They seem to pay less attention to his actual words and actions and instead construct psychological thrillers.

Bottom line:

Putin’s actions reveal that Russia is not backing down

Putin says he and Russia are not backing down

There is no evidence that Putin is beaten, or backing down

There is physical evidence and verbal statements indicating Putin is doubling down

Analysts would be better served listening closely to words, actions, and history, than playing Freud and Jung.

This war clearly is intensifying.

 

[marsh]

Michael Yon @MichaelYon
Sep 30, 2022 at 10:37pm
Democrat US Border Invasion
Call it what it is.

1st half of September #’s

From 09/01/22 @ 00:00 hrs to 09/15/22 @ 23:59 hrs

As of 09/24/22 @ 0215 hrs

**** BE ADVISED

The #’s will probably change (INCREASE) when all the outstanding are either counted as Apps, TBs, GTAs, or Non-violations.

SOUTHERN BORDER SECTORS

Big Bend Sector
Apps- 738
TBs- 5
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 427
Unresolved Detection- 5
No Arrest- 60
Deceased-0
Non-violation- 22
Outstanding- 3

Del Rio Sector
Apps- 28,732
TBs- 65
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 5,159
Unresolved Detection- 53
No Arrest- 1,551
Deceased-16
Non-violation-75
Outstanding-15

El Centro Sector
Apps- 4,776
TBs- 254
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 392
Unresolved Detection- 0
No Arrest- 2
Deceased-0
Non-violation-2
Outstanding-0

El Paso Sector
Apps- 22,177
TBs- 1,469
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 6,897
Unresolved Detection- 7
No Arrest- 117
Deceased-1
Non-violation-58
Outstanding-0

Laredo Sector
Apps- 3,098
TBs- 1,106
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 970
Unresolved Detection- 10
No Arrest- 928
Deceased-2
Non-violation-157
Outstanding-0

RGV Sector
Apps- 14,230
TBs- 2,097
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 1,736
Unresolved Detection- 31
No Arrest- 707
Deceased- 7
Non-violation- 68
Outstanding- 0


San Diego Sector
Apps- 8,433
TBs- 232
Got Aways (known/recorded)-2,806
Unresolved Detection- 10
No Arrest- 2,149
Deceased-5
Non-violation-22
Outstanding-8


Tucson Sector
Apps- 11,693
TBs- 374
Got Aways (known/recorded)-6,835
Unresolved Detection- 116
No Arrest- 1,147
Deceased-4
Non-violation-67
Outstanding-0


Yuma Sector
Apps- 13,600
TBs- 54
Got Aways (known/recorded)- 477
Unresolved Detection- 3
No Arrest- 20
Deceased-2
Non-violation-11
Outstanding-0

 

[marsh]

Full Putin Speech 2022 Sept 30th 45:53 min

FULL PUTIN SPEECH 2022 SEPT 30TH​

• WATCH

^^^^^
Putin signs agreements with Pushilin, Pasechnik and the heads of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions .29 min

PUTIN SIGNS AGREEMENTS WITH PUSHILIN, PASECHNIK AND THE HEADS OF THE KHERSON AND ZAPOROZHYE REGIONS​

• WATCH

^^^^^
Crowd chants "Russia, Russia, Russia" in Moscow's Red Square as Putin makes an appearance. .36 min

CROWD CHANTS "RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA" IN MOSCOW'S RED SQUARE AS PUTIN MAKES AN APPEARANCE.

• WATCH

 

[marsh]

(Europe)

Stand up and say NO... we don't want foreign culture in our Countries.

www.bitchute.com

2:19 min

STAND UP AND SAY NO... WE DON'T WANT FOREIGN CULTURE IN OUR COUNTRIES.​

• WATCH

(Due to your immigration policies, we are soon to face a majority of young men from archaic, misogynist societies)

 

[marsh]

Anti-Globalism Is Going Mainstream – Which Means Engineered Disaster Is About To Strike | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Anti-Globalism Is Going Mainstream – Which Means Engineered Disaster Is About To Strike

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 08:45 PM
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

I have noted in the past that criminals tend to brag about their criminality when they believe there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Frankly, in their narcissism many of them can’t help but revel in the moment and let everyone know how “superior” they are to the rest of us. We witnessed many moments like this from elitists within globalists institutions the past couple of years at the height of the pandemic pandemonium.

There were people like the globalist academics at MIT proclaiming that we were “never going back to normal” and that we were going to have to accept the loss of many of our freedoms for the rest of our lives in order to combat the spread of covid. There were people like Klaus Schwab declaring the beginning of the “Great Reset” and the launch of what the Davos crowd calls the “4th Industrial Revolution.” There have also been MANY political leaders like Joe Biden that strut around on the media stage accusing ideological opponents (conservatives mostly) of being “enemies of democracy.”

If their vision of “democracy” is medical tyranny and the forced expansion of cultural Marxism, or if their idea of democracy is government cooperation with corporate monopoly and the erasure of our country’s founding principles, then yes, I suppose I am indeed an enemy of “democracy.”

The globalists were really basking in the glow of their assumed victory. They thought they had us peasants by the scruff of the neck and that their agenda was all but assured. But as I have been arguing since last year, the money elites may have celebrated a little too early.

The covid agenda utterly failed if the goal was to implement longstanding mandates and restrictions across North America and Europe. If you want to know what success for the globalists would have looked like, just examine China with its endless lockdown cycles and digital vaccine passports. The elites wanted that outcome for the west and they didn’t get it. They came close, but millions of Americans, Canadians and Europeans stood their ground and the cost to force us into compliance would have been too great.

Even Joe Biden has openly admitted that the pandemic is over. They dropped the mandates because they knew if it came to war, they would lose.

If the goal of the pandemic fear factory was simply to get the population injected with the mRNA vaccines, here they also failed. With many states in the US 40% unvaxxed (according to official numbers) and many parts of the world with large unvaxxed populations, there is a massive control group for the covid vaccines. If there are going to be constantly developing health problems associated the mRNA vax (like Myocarditis) then the public is going to know what caused them because of this control group. The globalists needed near-100% vaccination and they did not get it. Not even close.

There is no escape for them – They greatly overestimated the public’s apathy when it comes to authoritarianism. The rebellion is too large and they will eventually be held accountable for their trespasses.

Case in point: The latest election in Italy has resulted in a landslide win for the conservative coalition and the new prime minister (and first woman prime minister), Georgia Meloni, gave a rousing victory speech this week which directly exposed the far-left invasion of western nations, globalism and the poisonous collusion with woke corporations to silence dissent. She called for a return to freedom, and what was the mainstream media response? They are calling her a “fascist.”

The Italian election is just a small part of an ongoing trend, an awakening of the people to the imminent threats presented by globalists, and the globalists can’t stop it.

The fear among them is palpable. Anti-globalism is now going mainstream, and as it does people are going to start looking for answers. Why have our economic conditions been so degraded? Why are we facing stagflationary crisis? Why are prices on everything continuing to climb? Why did we almost lose all of our civil liberties in the name of fighting a virus with a tiny 0.23% official median Infection Fatality Rate? Why are pointless carbon controls being instituted in the middle of a supply chain crisis? Why are politicians and banks making everything so much worse?

The public outcry for a reckoning is growing and it’s the heads of globalists that will end up on the chopping block. All roads to destruction lead back to them and the policies they have forced upon the populace.

Of course, when criminals feel like they are being cornered they will sometimes set fires and take hostages in a last ditch effort to stay alive and slip through the net. I believe we are closing in on that stage of this terrible drama. It’s important to accept the conditions of the battlefield as they are and not underestimate the enemy. The truth is, globalists have extensive means at their disposal to wreak havoc and they have already set some of these disasters in motion.

As I warned many years ago (way back in 2017 in my article ‘The Economic End Game Continues’), tensions with eastern nations are being used to diminish the role of the US dollar as the world reserve currency and the petro currency. The conflict is also causing resource shortages and supply chain weakness, not to mention an energy crisis in Europe that is now irreversible with the sabotage of the Nord pipelines.

I also predicted in 2017 that the Federal Reserve would repeat a pattern of raising interest rate into severe economic weakness causing increased economic turmoil. They used a very similar tactic at the onset of the Great Depression, which former federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted was the cause of the long term deflationary collapse.

From my article in 2017:

“The changing of the Fed chair is absolutely meaningless as far as policy is concerned. Jerome Powell will continue the same exact initiatives as Yellen; stimulus will be removed, rates will be hiked and the balance sheet will be reduced, leaving the massive market bubble the Fed originally created vulnerable to implosion.

An observant person…might have noticed that central banks around the world seem to be acting in a coordinated fashion to remove stimulus support from markets and raise interest rates, cutting off supply lines of easy money that have long been a crutch for our crippled economy.”

The Bank for International Settlement’s, the central bank of central banks and the institution that writes global policy initiatives for all other member banks, called for MORE rate hikes last week. Aside from a minor intervention by the Bank of England, the evidence shows that the globalists WANT a crash and are engineering conditions of instability. They set up the dominoes in advance and now they have decided to knock them down. I think this is a fail-safe; a panic trigger in the event that they did not get the control they wanted from the covid pandemic.

They will blame Russia, they will blame China, they will blame conservatives, they will blame anything and anyone besides themselves in an attempt to divert public attention away from the international banking actions that created the crash conditions in the first place. We can’t let them. Whatever happens next, it is vital that people remember who really did this to us and who needs to be punished.

Over the course of the next couple of years the establishment power brokers are going to attempt to use a chaos screen in order to sow seeds of fear in the population. They are going to try to exploit that fear to gain even more centralized governance and change the very foundations of our society while suffocating what’s left of our liberties. It’s the only play they have left, but at least we now know for certain that there are millions of us out there – millions of people that will not comply and that will fight back. And, we know that the globalists are afraid; if they weren’t then they would not be falling back to such drastic measures.

 

[marsh]

Exxon CEO Pushes Back On Biden's Plan To Limit Fuel Exports | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Exxon CEO Pushes Back On Biden's Plan To Limit Fuel Exports

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 06:40 PM

First it was Chevon's CEO reaching out to warn President Biden about the administration's action again oil companies. Now, it's Exxon warning the President about limiting fuel exports.

Exxon is "pushing back" against the idea of reducing U.S. fuel exports, telling President Biden's Energy Department this week that such actions would lead to continued volatility in oil prices globally, and at the pump domestically, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. Exxon said that "the oil industry should not slow fuel shipments in favor of putting more in storage tanks", the Journal report says.

Exxon argued that cutting exports would lead to a glut in the Gulf Coast which would then, in turn, prompt output cuts.

The concerns were laid out in a letter this week signed by Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods. Woods wrote: “Continuing current Gulf Coast exports is essential to efficiently rebalance markets—particularly with diverted Russian supplies. Reducing global supply by limiting U.S. exports to build region-specific inventory will only aggravate the global supply shortfall.”

Biden's Energy Department responded by pointing out parts of the country that have oil and gas levels near five year lows heading into hurricane season. A spokesperson said: “The administration has impressed upon the oil and gas industry that it must do more to ensure fair prices and adequate supply for all Americans, while meeting the needs of our allies.”

Woods argued that the East Coast had 59.3 million barrels of total gasoline and ethanol in storage, 1% lower than usual for the time of year. He also noted that demand for gasoline though June was about 9% lower than the three year average prior to Covid. He noted that pipelines that carry the fuel from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast are full and that there aren't enough ships to move U.S. made fuel to the Northeast.

“Free market incentives remain the most efficient way for the industry to address these problems,” Woods said.

The pushback follows a letter by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in August, where she urged oil companies to slow exports in order to refill stocks in the East Coast.

She wrote: “The most effective way to resolve this issue without having to deploy emergency actions is for industry to prioritize building inventories during this critical window. The data clearly show there has not been sufficient progress in building inventories ahead of peak hurricane season.”

She also took the step of threatening to limit exports if oil companies didn't follow suit, stating that the Biden administration would consider “additional federal requirements or emergency measures."

In September, after discussing the idea with industry executives, she said the Biden administration was not "currently weighing any restrictions", the Journal report noted.

 

[marsh]

Stockman Slams Washington's Pointless War On Behalf Of A Fake Nation | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Stockman Slams Washington's Pointless War On Behalf Of A Fake Nation

FRIDAY, SEP 30, 2022 - 07:05 PM
Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The messages are coming in loud and clear today - from the crashing pound, to repudiation of establishment governments in Italy, Sweden and more to come, to Hungarian Prime Minister Orban’s call to end the Sanctions War and do so pronto.

So let’s be clear: Washington’s dunderheaded intervention in the intramural spat between Russia and Ukraine and the accompanying global Sanctions War is the surely the stupidest, most destructive project to arise from the banks of the Potomac in modern times. And the architects of this perfidious folly—Biden, Blinkin, Sullivan, Nuland et. al.—cannot be condemned harshly enough.

After all, this madness is being pursued in the name of abstract policy norms—the rule of law and sanctity of borders—that make Washington a laughing stock. More than any other nation on planet earth (and by a long-shot), it has serially and blatantly violated these standards scores of times in recent decades.

Among other actions, Washington’s interventions in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia etc were not only pointless; they were also a self-evident violation of the very rule of law and sanctity of borders upon which Washington now beats its breasts ever more stridently.

Moreover, by wallowing in this unhinged hypocrisy Washington has abandoned every semblance of commonsense as to why this conflict happened in the first place and why it is wholly irrelevant to the national security of the American homeland, or, for that matter, Europe, as well.

The fundamental fact is, aside from the historically short interval of iron-fisted communist rule during the Soviet era, Ukraine had never been a nation-state within its post-1991 happenstance borders. In fact, for upwards of 275 years before 1918 much of its territories were borderlands, vassals and outright provinces of Czarist Russia; and before that constituents of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire and others.

So we are not dealing with the invasion of a long-established, ethnically and linguistically coherent state by its aggressive neighbor, but with the left-over potpourri of separate tongues, territories. economies and histories that were smashed together by brutal communist rulers between 1918 and 1991.

Accordingly, the fast-approaching dark, cold winter of stagflationary collapse in Europe is not being done in heroic defense of the grand principles proffered by Washington and NATO. To the contrary, it amounts to the pointless and grubby business of preserving a vile status quo ante that was confected on the lands north of the Black Sea, not by the ordinary course of historical evolution and nation-state accretion, but by the bloody-hands of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

In any event, the staggering economic costs for the everyday peoples of Europe in pursuit of such a threadbare and illegitimate purpose is starting to register among the long-suffering victims of Brussels’ elitist rulers. Hence the thunderbolts from the Italian elections this weekend and Viktor Orbán’s parallel appeal to the European Union to lift sanctions and thereby potentially reduce energy prices by half in one swell swoop.

Nor is Orbán the only one calling for an end to sanctions, with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki calling for a repeal of Russian sanctions as well. Other political leaders, such as Matteo Salvini, who leads the conservative League party and will be a major force in Italy’s new government, says that Europe needs a “rethink” on Russian sanctions due to the harmful economic effects.

Likewise, the conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has also been pushing for an end to sanctions and an re-opening of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines due to soaring energy costs in Germany. AfD member of the Bundestag, Mariana Harder-Kühnel, for instance, recently echoed Orbán’s call.

“The EU bureaucracy has turned the screw on the sanctions, and now we are paying the bill,” she said.

In this context, the ructions since Friday in the FX market for the pound sterling speak more powerfully than anything else.

The British pound briefly plunged to its lowest level ever early this week, touching $1.0349 during Asian trading hours, breaking through its previous record low of 1985. Moreover, today’s cliff-dive followed a tumble of 3% on Friday, after the new Truss government announced sweeping tax cuts and a massive energy bailout for businesses and individuals.

Likewise, the price of U.K. government debt has fallen in tandem with the pound, with yields rising sharply again today. The 10-year government bond was yielding 4.11%, up 28 basis points from Friday and a staggering 342% from the 0.93% yield of just one year ago.



For want of doubt, here is the path of pound sterling over the last twelve months. That’s a massive thumbs down by the FX markets if there ever was one.



But the relevant point here is not all the Keynesian palaver about the “mistake” of lowering the 45% top income tax rate and removing other disincentives to work and investment that take UK marginal rates as high as 60%. These reductions in the crushing tax rates that Conservative and Labor government alike have erected atop the UK’s lavish Welfare State are long-overdue and will, in fact, stimulate compensatory economic activity.

What’s actually going to destroy the remnants of the UK’s fiscal sustainability is Truss’ utterly foolish plan to freeze all energy prices for all citizens and businesses at a cost of upwards of $200 billion per year or 5% of GDP. But that’s neocon insanity run amok.

If London wants to relieve its consumers of onerous energy prices and utility bills it only need follow Orban’s advice and terminate its Sanctions War against Russian energy, food and other commodity exports. And it wouldn’t cost the Exchequer a dime.

That is to say, the pound’s crash ought to be a general wake-up call to Europe and Washington, too. By declaring war on the productive and peaceful commerce with Russia that previously prevailed, Europe’s leaders—-especially the new government of United Kingdom—have sacrificed their own prosperity and the living standards of their citizens in behalf of a prodigiously corrupt, anti-democratic regime in Kiev that is dedicated to preserving intact nothing more noble than the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium.

Or as our friend James Howard Kunstler rightly summarized:

Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project. They engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr. Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia, Russia!

So we return to the question at hand: Every Ukrainian presidential election since 1991 has revealed a nation radically split between pro-Russian populations in the east and south and anti-Russian nationalists in the center and west. When the mailed fist of communist rule was removed, in fact, Ukraine became a territory yearning to be partitioned into more amenable jurisdictions of governance.

For instance, here is the results of the 2010 election that put a pro-Russian politician in the president’s office and at length gave rise to Washington’s putsch during the Maiden uprising that soon drove the country into civil war.



The above map barely does justice to the actual figures. In many of the yellow Tymoshenko-supporting areas the vote was 80% or higher in favor of the latter’s nationalist candidacy, while in much of the blue area the pro-Russian Yanukovych won be similar massive pluralities.

Yet this wasn’t a one-time fluke of short-term electoral politics: It was actually the recrudescence of the manner in which the fake nation of Ukraine was put together during the last three centuries.

Prior to the end of WWI, there was no Ukrainian state. Like the artificial and unsustainable polities of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which were confected by self-serving politicians at Versailles (especially the domestic vote seeking Woodrow Wilson), Ukraine was a product of geopolitical engineering—in this case by the new rulers of the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the historical provenance of “Ukraine” can be described in a nutshell. What was to become Ukraine joined Russia in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, petitioned Russian czar Alexey to accept the Zaporozhian Host into Russia. That is to say, Imperial Russia spawned the latter day polity of Ukraine by annexing into its service the fearsome Cossack Warriors who inhabited its central region.

The army and a small territory then under Hetman control was called “u kraine,” which means in Russian “at the edge”, a term that had originated in the twelfth century to describe lands on the border of Russia.

During the next 250 years the expansionist Czars annexed more and more of the adjacent territory, designating the eastern and southern regions as “Novorussiya” (New Russia), which territories included Catherine the Great’s purchase of Crimea from the Ottomans in 1783.

That is to say, at the time of America’s own independence the heart of today’s Ukraine was ruled by the long arm of Czarist autocracy.

After the Bolshevik revolution, of course, the map changed radically. In 1919 Lenin created the socialist state of Ukraine on part of the territory of the former Russian Empire. Ukraine officially became the Ukrainian People’s Republic with the capital of Kharkov in 1922 (moved to Kiev in 1934).

Accordingly, the new communist state swallowed up Novorussiya per the eastern and southern portions of the green area in the map below, including Donetsk, and Lugansk regions, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions bordering the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea that are the sites of today’s Russia-sponsored succession referendums.

Then in 1939, as a result of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin annexed the eastern territories of Poland, as designated by the yellow areas of the map. Thus, the historic territory of Galicia and the Polish city of Lvov were incorporated into Ukraine by the joint decree of Stalin and Hitler.

In June of 1940, Stalin next annexed Northern Bukovina (brown area) from Romania. And then at the Yalta conference in 1945, upon Stalin’s insistence to Churchill and Roosevelt, the Hungarian Carpathian Ruthenia was incorporated into the Soviet Union and added to Ukraine.

Taken together, these Stalinist seizures are now known as Western Ukraine, the people’s of which understandably do not cotton to things Russian. At the same time, the 85% Russian-speaking population inhabiting the purple area (Crimea) was gifted to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954 for the very reason of extending his own accession to the communist dictatorship.

Nevertheless, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited these communist-confected borders within which there were upwards of 40 millions Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Tartars and countless lesser nationalities—all trapped in a newly declared country in which they didn’t especially wish to reside.



Indeed, the reason that the hapless state of “Ukraine” needs relief in partition, not a war to preserve the handiwork if Czars and Commissars, was well summarized by Alexander G. Markovsky in the American Thinker:

Today’s Ukrainian civil war is thus greatly exacerbated by the fact that unlike pluralistic societies such as the USA, Canada, Switzerland, and Russia, which are tolerant of different cultures, religions, and languages, Ukraine is not.

Unsurprisingly, devotion to pluralism proved not to be her forte. Even though the Kiev regime had no historical roots in the real estate it inhabited, it imposed Ukrainian rules and the Ukrainian language on non-Ukrainian people after declaring independence.

As a result, pro-Russian sentiments – ranging from the recognition of the official status of the Russian language to outright secession – have always been prevalent in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Western Ukraine has always gravitated toward its Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian roots. Emphatically anti-Russian, Poland may not miss this strategic opportunity to re-acquire its land and avenge the humiliation inflicted by the Yalta Conference.

The West’s insistence on maintaining the status quo of the Ukrainian borders established by Lenin, Stalin and Hitler exposes the disconnect between strategic doctrine and moral principles.

Indeed, Poles make no secret of their ambitions. Polish President Andrzej Duda, recently declared, “For decades, and maybe, God forbid, for centuries, there will be no more borders between our countries – Poland and Ukraine. There will be no such border!”

Romania is not far behind, especially in light of many inhabitants of former Northern Bukovina already carrying Romanian passports.

The territory of Ukraine is a mosaic of other people’s lands. If we want to stop this insane war and ensure peace in Europe, instead of calling Russia’s sponsored referendum in Eastern Ukraine a sham, we should conduct an honest referendum in all the disputed territories under the auspices of the UN and let the people decide what government they want.

Needless to say, partition of the fake state of Ukraine is not remotely on Washington’s mind. After all, it would remove the latest neocon reason for spreading the blessings of Forever Wars to the fairest parts of the planet.

 

[marsh]

'We Do Not Conform': Resisting the Destructive Ideology of Transhumanism 1:51 min

'We Do Not Conform': Resisting the Destructive Ideology of Transhumanism​

Red Voice Media Published September 30, 2022

Prof. Mattias Desmet: "That's the real danger at the moment, this transhumanist ideology, which will try to impose itself on society — and we will have to resist it. We will have to step up, speak out, and say we do not conform."

 

[marsh]

THIS is why you shouldn’t trust big banks | #shorts .59 min

THIS is why you shouldn’t trust big banks | #shorts​

Glenn Beck Published September 30, 2022

 

[marsh]

Empire and Infrastructure 6:34 min

Empire and Infrastructure​

The New American Published September 30, 2022

By the end of the 19th Century, England was sacrificing its own internal domestic economy to divert funds to building up colonies. This led Great Britain to rot from within and collapse. The United States, sadly, appears to be pursuing this same policy: embezzling money from America to transfer it to Asia to build up foreign supply chains. As our roads, bridges and levees crumble, will anyone in the political class begin to question globalization and learn from the lessons of history?

 

[marsh]

The One Word That Sums Up Biden's America

There's only one word that can be used to describe Biden's America — Steve Gruber explains just what that word is. Get Real News on #AVL, weekdays at 2 PM EST: https://americasvoice.news/playlists/ame

rumble.com

12:33 min

The One Word That Sums Up Biden's America​

RealAmericasVoice Published September 30, 2022

There's only one word that can be used to describe Biden's America — Steve Gruber explains just what that word is.

 

[marsh]

WEF caught LYING about their plan to control our bank accounts | Redacted with Clayton Morris 19:27 min

WEF caught LYING about their plan to control our bank accounts | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published September 30, 2022

Will a cashless society make us all more vulnerable to global powers? Why are we being pushed to ditch cash in favor of a currency that governments can more easily control? What are the ways to hedge bets when governments want to control your bank account?

 

[marsh]

Bill Clinton Admits: ‘There Is a Limit to How Many Migrants Any Society Can Take Without Severe Disruption’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R) stunt sending illegals to Martha's Vineyard, where Clinton frequently vacations, evidently hit close to home and struck a nerve.

www.infowars.com

Bill Clinton Admits: ‘There Is a Limit to How Many Migrants Any Society Can Take Without Severe Disruption’​

Infowars.com
September 30th 2022, 6:10 pm

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R) stunt sending illegals to Martha's Vineyard, where Clinton frequently vacations, evidently hit close to home and struck a nerve.

Former President and devout globalist Bill Clinton incredibly stated the obvious and acknowledged immigration should have limits.

In a stunning departure from typical pro-immigration liberal talking points, where the damage to a country by hordes of illegal migrants must not be mentioned at any cost, Clinton astonishingly admitted to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that a nation can only take so much.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1571564460497522688

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1571564460497522688
6:28 min

“I think it’s fair to say the asylum system is broken,” Zakaria told Clinton. “This was supposed to be a system that allowed people who are in desperate circumstances.”

“Now what you have is a lot of people who are essentially economic migrants … essentially gaming the system, using the asylum as a way to get in. Isn’t it true that there has to be some order placed on this? Some control?” Zakaria asked Clinton.

“I agree with that,” Clinton replied. “That is, there is a limit to how many migrants any society can take without severe disruption and assistance, and our system is based much more on an assumption that things would be more normal.”

Clinton went on to recall the past when Mexican migrants would cross freely back and forth between the US and Mexico for agricultural work, saying at the time it “worked for people.”

“…Now you’ve got the largest number of refugees since World War II because of Syria and now Ukraine and other problems,” he claimed.

According to the Daily Mail: “Border agents have encountered more than 2.1 million border crossings this fiscal year, the highest number ever recorded in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) history. There were 203,000 crossings in August.”

Despite acknowledging the devastating impacts of illegal migration, including from countries like Venezuela, Clinton went on to chastise Republican governors in Texas and Florida.

“What’s happening in Venezuela, more than 2 million refugees pouring into first Colombia, then to nearby countries, has created unprecedented new challenges and meanwhile provides opportunities for stunts like Gov. Abbott’s — sending his refugees to some place that he thinks is advocating for a broad-minded policy that it doesn’t have to live with,” Clinton stated.

“And then [Florida] Gov. [Ron] DeSantis sending those people to Martha’s Vineyard was amazing. That may come back to haunt him a little bit.”

Clinton’s comments on Martha’s Vineyard, where he’s frequently vacationed, are indicative Desantis’ stunt hit close to home and struck a nerve.



As pointed out on social media, Clintons’ comments on immigration are a radical departure from statements he made while president when he condemned illegal border crossings, showing how Democrats have moved further left in recent years.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575152458329890816

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575152458329890816
1:24 min

 

[marsh]

A Climate Cult Guide for Cowardly Republicans

What can business leaders and Republicans do now after helping leftists wreck the U.S. economy and our standard…

redwave.press

A Climate Cult Guide for Cowardly Republicans​

Jonathon Moseley
October 1, 2022

What can business leaders and Republicans do now after helping leftists wreck the U.S. economy and our standard of living, as hard-left partisan activists claim special status as scientists dealing with the “climate crisis”?

Climate-minded Europeans are seriously going to die this winter without Russian oil, unless they restart coal and nuclear power plants. When the children wanted to tear apart civilization, the adults figured, “It’s just a phase they’re going through. They’ll get over it.” So they pandered.

How did this happen? Business leaders, Republicans and the media have been afraid for decades to push back with things like facts and logic because they don’t own a lab coat.

Now it’s time to ask hard questions. Prominent people should emulate Detective Colombo. Colombo brought the hardest criminal to tears by his relentless, seemingly innocent questions. Loudly and persistently demand that the Climate Cult answer questions. Don’t make claims. Ask questions (that the left cannot answer):

1. Can people claim to be scientists if they reject the Scientific Method? That is, a hypothesis capable of being tested, carefully designed experiments, repeating the experiment in different places under different conditions, over and over?
2. The Associated Press published a warning in 1989 from the United Nations climate science team that mankind had only 10 years, from 1989 to 1999, to stop irreversible global warming. So, is it already too late?
3. Are you saying that A happened, then B happened, therefore A caused B? Is that science? You argue that CO2 increased in the atmosphere. Then you say that temperature increased. One thing happened, then another thing.
4. One study found that the Earth’s temperature has increased as the number of pirates has decreased. Is global warming caused by not enough pirates? Or is it scientifically invalid to merely say two things happened without experiments proving that one caused the other?
5. Isn’t one of the purposes of scientific experiments to eliminate the possibility that something else is going on that we didn’t think of?
6. Are scientific papers without an experiment just opinion columns (op-eds)?
7. The hypothesis of climate change involves a worldwide – not local – increase in the planetary temperature caused by an increase in the atmosphere’s content of CO2. Is a planet-wide experiment required, capable of testing that hypothesis? Wasn’t the only experiment on CO2 in a container inside a laboratory?
8. The Earth’s surface is 196.9 million square miles. Is that right? So have we ever measured the temperature of 196.9 million square miles of Earth’s surface area?
9. To measure the temperature of the entire planet Earth would require statistically random sampling, correct? Have we ever taken a truly randomized sample of the Earth’s 196.9 million square miles of surface area?
10. Because local temperatures change throughout the seasons, would measuring the temperature of planet Earth, mean taking all measurements on the same day of the year?
11. Would we need to take all measurements at the same local time of day?
12. A statistical random sample requires that the sample be randomized every single time, right? In statistics, can you re-use the same random sample more than once?
13. Do you agree that statistics requires that the size of a random sample depends upon the margin of error you require?
14. The claim is that the Earth warmed by 1.5 degrees over the last 125 years. If it was faster near the end, let’s be generous and say we are trying to detect annual changes of 0.025 degrees C, year over year. Right?
15. To detect annual changes of 0.025 degrees C would require randomized samples of 80,000 to 400,000 locations out of the Earth’s 196.9 million square miles of surface area, correct? The change expected must be larger than the margin of error.
16. Does the Earth’s climate exhibit cycles over time? Why is El Nino a repeating cycle, of unpredictable length?
17. How do you know if we are just measuring an up-swing or a down-swing around a naturally recurring climate cycle? Do we have to observe temperature over tens or hundreds of thousands of years to capture oscillations, maybe some we don’t know about yet? Was the ice age scare of the 1970s a downswing of the same oscillation that is now cycling back upward?
18. Is it true that we have no systematic temperature measurements of even one city earlier than 1850? That is, high-quality thermometers calibrated to a worldwide standard of consistency with reliable manufacturing requirements used to keep meticulous notes every single day, at the same regular local time of day.
19. Is there any value to temperature readings from different cities that are not comparable to each other, taken in the same way to the same standards of reliability?
20. Is it true that the Fahrenheit temperature scale was only invented in 1724 and the Celsius scale in 1742? Not in common use, just invented. How do you correlate proxy temperature readings from before the temperature scales were even invented with current data? How are proxies comparable to modern data?
21. Climate alarmists claim that they can read the temperature from the different sizes of annual tree rings. Isn’t tree growth responsive mainly to rainfall and sunlight (possibly shadows of competing trees) – not so much temperature?
22. The width of annual tree rings do not show daily temperature readings, do they?
23. Don’t trees decay to dust within a few dozen or hundred years?
24. Is it true that although machines to detect CO2 in the air (mainly from patients’ breath) were being worked on throughout the 1800s, that they only produced usable, reliable results starting from around 1900 to 1930?
25. Climate alarmists claim that they can measure air pockets trapped in deep layers of glacial ice to garner information about Earth’s past. When has this technique ever been validated? For example, a true, accurate measurement of the Earth’s atmosphere from 1 million years ago would need to be compared with an air pocket trapped in ice all that time.
26. Was professor Zbigniew Jaworowski’s testimony on March 19, 2004, correct before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that the drilling process itself and the drill-machinery fluids contaminate the air pocket and change its composition during extraction? Was Jaworwski correct that under the intense pressures under layers of glacial ice, “More than 20 physico-chemical processes, mostly related to the presence of liquid water, contribute to the alteration of the original chemical composition of the air inclusions in polar ice. One of these processes is formation of gas hydrates or clathrates”? Jaworowski (now deceased) argued that when the sample is returned to surface pressure, the gas hydrates or clathrates unravel, changing the air sample even further.
27. Is it true that a survey of automated weather stations found that they violate requirements, such as weather stations at airports in the exhaust blast of jet airplanes taking off, next to industrial air conditioning units blasting out heat on commercial rooftops, next to brick buildings, in one case next to a barbecue pit of a fire department?
28. Before we tear our economy and society apart, should we commission an independent, unbiased audit of all the temperature stations being used (though not random) to claim there is climate change?
29. Should we actually measure the Earth’s temperature properly, using a random sample of at least 80,000 randomly-chosen locations, one day a year? Presumably mass-production, simplification and minimization of automated temperature gauges reporting back by satellite “phone” could produce low-cost units that would be financially possible to air drop, activate on the same day, retrieve the stored data over time, and then maybe recover during the following year.

 

[marsh]

100,000 Cattle Dead, 2M More Sickened: Highly Contagious, Deadly Virus Sweeps Through India Farms

Lumpy skin disease, a highly contagious and deadly virus first seen in Africa, is sweeping through cattle farms in India.

www.westernjournal.com

100,000 Cattle Dead, 2M More Sickened: Highly Contagious, Deadly Virus Sweeps Through India Farms

By The Associated Press
September 29, 2022 at 8:09pm

A viral disease has killed nearly 100,000 cows and buffaloes in India and sickened over 2 million more.

The outbreak has triggered devastating income losses for cattle farmers since the disease not only results in deaths but can also lead to decreased milk production, emaciated animals and birth issues.

The disease, called lumpy skin disease, is spread by insects that drink blood, such as mosquitoes and ticks. Infected cows and buffaloes get fevers and develop lumps on their skin.

Farmers have experienced severe losses from extreme weather events over the past year: a record-shattering heat wave in India reduced wheat yields in April, insufficient rainfall in the east shriveled parched winter crops such as pulses, and an unusually intense September rainfall has damaged rice in the north.

And now, the virus has spread to at least 15 states, with the number of cow and buffalo deaths nearly doubling in three weeks, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

The contagion spreading among cattle is having a disproportionate impact on small farmers, many of whom rear cattle for milk, said Devinder Sharma, an agriculture policy expert in northern Chandigarh city.

“It’s a serious, serious issue and this [disease] … has been growing since the last couple of years,” he said, adding that the government figures were likely an undercount of the actual death toll from the disease.

The first cases in South Asia were detected in 2019, and it has since spread to India, China and Nepal. It was first recorded in Zambia in 1929 and has extended through Africa and more recently to parts of Europe.

Dairy is among the largest agricultural commodities in India, employing 80 million people and contributing to 5 percent of its economy, per federal data. It’s the world’s largest milk producer, making up more than a fifth of global production — but exports are only a fraction of this.

To try and protect the industry, authorities are vaccinating healthy cows using a shot designed for a similar disease, while efforts are underway to develop a more effective vaccine.

India’s vast hinterland is now punctuated by mass graves of cows. In some places, the carcasses rot in the open and the pained cries of sick animals resound in villages. Western Rajasthan state has seen the worst impact: 60,000 cattle dead and nearly 1.4 million sickened.

“The disease is contagious. It’s now shifting from the west to the east,” warned Narendra Mohan Singh, a director at Rajasthan state’s Animal Husbandry Department.

In bordering Uttar Pradesh state, India’s most populous, the trade and movement of cattle with neighboring states have been curbed.

But farmers such as Amarnath Sharma in Milkipur village say they have been left in the dark. Three of his five cows are sick and, while he has heard about the viral disease, he doesn’t know how to help his livestock.

“If these animals don’t get treatment, they’ll die,” he said.



Farmers in affected states, such as the Himalayan Himachal Pradesh, have urged the government for financial aid.

Meanwhile, a study of the lumpy skin disease virus’ genetic makeup found that it was very different from previous versions, said Vinod Scaria, a scientist at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi.

Viruses evolve all the time and not all these changes are harmful to health. But Scaria, who is one of the study’s authors, said it exposed the need for continuous monitoring and tracking of diseases since it wasn’t clear how the virus evolved in the past two years.

 

[marsh]

King of the Globalists: Charles III Is a Key Figure Behind WEF That’s Pushing the Great Reset

Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, her son Charles III ascended to the throne as the monarch of the United Kingdom. He will be officially crowned the following year after his mother’s death – on June 2, 2023. Following tradition, the British monarch should remain apolitical. But there is...

basedunderground.com

King of the Globalists: Charles III Is a Key Figure Behind WEF That’s Pushing the Great Reset​

by Mary Villareal
September 30, 2022

Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, her son Charles III ascended to the throne as the monarch of the United Kingdom. He will be officially crowned the following year after his mother’s death – on June 2, 2023.

Following tradition, the British monarch should remain apolitical.

But there is something sinister that people should be concerned about. Apparently, Charles III is a key figure behind the World Economic Forum (WEF) that is pushing the so-called Great Reset.

Charles III is a staunch environmentalist in the same vein as climate activist Greta Thunberg, quoting Christian Patriot News. The royal figure has previously announced the need for “a military-style campaign to bring the world to zero emissions.” Moreover, he has also called for the same campaign to “marshal the strength of the global private sector” using his globalist powers and the royal coffers.

During his time as the Prince of Wales, Charles III ignored the convention of royals staying away from politics. He did, however, promise to put aside his advocacy during a speech following Elizabeth II’s death.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Australian Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have differing views on the new British king’s remarks.

“[As] the king, he will have a responsibility to dispense his duties fairly as the [late] queen did,” said Dutton, who heads the Liberal Party of Australia. “I think as the queen conducted her business, he is there now as an impartial person.”

Albanese, meanwhile, defended Charles III’s outspokenness on the climate issue as “appropriate.”

“Dealing with the challenge of climate change shouldn’t be seen as a political issue, it should be seen as an issue that is about humanity and about our very quality of life and survival as a world,” he said.

The prime minister, who also leads the Australian Labor Party (ALP), inadvertently revealed how his government will treat opponents of climate change. By insisting that climate change is apolitical, the Labor Party is casting anyone who disagrees with their approach as a partisan who does not care about the “very quality of life and survival.”

It oddly mirrors the same approach as attacking those who opposed lockdowns against the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) as killers, despite a plethora of obvious reasons why locking down millions for a virus with an overwhelmingly high chance of survival was a bad idea.

Charles III as a political monarch​

According to Sky News Australia, dealing with climate change is intensely political – as the policies imposed in relation to it stems from a left-wing political ideology, namely massive government meddling in the economy.

Virtual addresses delivered by Charles III to the WEF back in June 2020 emphasized how the “Great Reset” sought to use the shift toward Big Government oversight seen during the COVID-19 pandemic to “reset” the global economy.

Moreover, the WEF would move to a form of neo-feudalism, where governments would collude with private sectors to facilitate a reset of capitalism to fight climate change.

Try as it might, Sky News noted that there is no hiding the fact that climate change remains to be one of the most political issues of recent times. And to try to mask this, the ALP is going to use guilt-laden rhetoric used by state politicians at the height of their COVID-19 future to ensure compliance.

Watch the video below to know more about Charles III and his role in the Great Reset.

This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com. 1:33:56 min

 

[marsh]

The Importance of Fossil Fuels - American Free News Network

The Importance of Fossil Fuels. There has been a lot of talk lately about penalizing fossil fuel companies because of climate change or global warming. Democrats, especially, do not seem to understand at all some basic facts about energy. Here are a few things to consider: No one has ever proven...

afnn.us

The Importance of Fossil Fuels​

September 30, 2022 by Jim Hollingsworth

The Importance of Fossil Fuels. There has been a lot of talk lately about penalizing fossil fuel companies because of climate change or global warming.

Democrats, especially, do not seem to understand at all some basic facts about energy.

Here are a few things to consider:

1. No one has ever proven that increasing carbon dioxide will endanger life on the earth.
2. All plants need carbon dioxide to survive. The more carbon dioxide there is the better they grow. The level of carbon dioxide now at 420 parts per million is at the low end. Plants really need more than that, but a lot is locked up in limestone deposits, and in the ocean.
3. Fossil fuels are what made America the greatest nation on earth for over 200 years.
4. Electric cars were used about 2014, but were quickly abandoned when gasoline cars became popular as they are much more practical.
5. All electric cars depend on the power grid for their electricity. That may be wind and solar, or hydro-electric or even nuclear, which produce on carbon dioxide. More likely they are powered by natural gas generation, or even coal which produce carbon dioxide. So nothing is gained by using electric cars.
6. Much of the weight of an electric car is the battery. Batteries require much rare material. It is going to be nearly impossible to produce enough material for all cars to be electric.
7. Much of these rare earth minerals are mined in foreign countries, and in some cases by children.
8. When batteries wear out they have to be replaced. A new battery costs more than the car is worth, so used electric cars will have little cash value
9. Wind turbines and solar panels eventually wear out and have to be removed. It is nearly impossible to re-cycle these devices.
10. The elimination of fossil fuels, especially oil, would end life as we know it today. This is a serious matter. The operation of many steel mills uses fossil fuels. Natural gas is the main source for producing fertilizer. Oil is refined for gasoline, diesel, kerosene and other flammable products. It is also the source material for all plastics. So, the following products will no longer be available.
    1. No nylons
    2. No toothbrushes
    3. No pavement highways
    4. No vinyl fences
    5. No vinyl house siding
    6. Many car bodies are made of plastic
    7. No paint
    8. No paint thinner
    9. No electrical wiring insulation
    10. No telephones
    11. No computers
    12. No checkbooks
11. There are over 6,000 things that are made from oil; most of these we use on a daily basis.

There are surely a few Democrats who understand basic science. It is hard to believe that none of them are telling the politicians what they are trying to do will destroy America as we know it.

We need to wake up and realize that all this pressure against fossil fuels has nothing to do with climate change. After all they have been predicting the end of the world in ten years for over 30 years, and life has just gone on as normal.

No, this has nothing to do with climate change, but it has a lot to do with control. This is part of the leftist plans for global tyranny, to take control of every life on the planet.

We need to protect our republic and turn these insane people out of office.

 

[marsh]

Report Cites Major Problem With Electric Vehicles, Identifies Lithium Batteries As DANGEROUS - The Blue State Conservative

Breitbart recently reported on a Washing Post, of all places, op-ed that uncovered some devastating realities of electric vehicle batteries and their unsafe penchant for catching fire. The Post article admits that battery problems and the deadly fires they often ignite are not related to design...

thebluestateconservative.com

Report Cites Major Problem With Electric Vehicles, Identifies Lithium Batteries As DANGEROUS

by Hailey SanibelSeptember 30, 2022

Breitbart recently reported on a Washing Post, of all places, op-ed that uncovered some devastating realities of electric vehicle batteries and their unsafe penchant for catching fire. The Post article admits that battery problems and the deadly fires they often ignite are not related to design flaws, but rather the nature of lithium-ion in general.

Breitbart opened:

In a recent op-ed, the Washington Post outlines how Tesla’s battery issues and fires may not just be due to poor design and manufacturing but a side effect of electric vehicles relying on lithium-ion batteries.

Breitbart went on to say that nothing in the Post article makes electric vehicles particularly safe with current technology:

The Washington Post reports in an op-ed titled “Tesla’s Big Batteries Aren’t the Fire Problem. Lithium Is,” that Americans should be questioning whether lithium-ion powerpacks should be used for applications such as electric vehicles. The piece argues that the science of lithium-ion batteries make them inherently dangerous.

This site has extensively covered the repeated hazards and dangers associated with electric vehicles. Two teens were tragically killed after they were in an accident and the EV batteries later started on fire while the trapped occupants slowly burned to death. In another case, a driver barely managed to escape death after a fire started during the charging process.

This says nothing of other glaring concerns related to practicality. Stories abound of towing failure, issues with long distance road trips, cars getting stuck in the middle of nowhere without the option to recharge, and others.

At least Americans are starting to wake up; polls suggest most Americans reject the use of electric vehicles. This, despite the fact that some banks are rejecting new car loans if they are for the purchase of gas-powered cars.

Quoting the source directly, here is how the Washington Post piece wrote about the concerning flaws related to electric vehicles’ lithium battery packs:

The large-scale use comes with significant risks, although most modern power systems choose this formulation because it boasts higher energy density, as well as greater charging and discharging efficiency. However, lithium-ion batteries have a volatile, flammable electrolyte. So, while there are safeguards to avoid fires, all the combustible ingredients are still there. Flames can accelerate through chain reactions, known as thermal runaway.

Big batteries are made up of several cells packed together. Current is constantly flowing inside, which generates heat. If there are no barriers between the components, a failure in one part quickly cascades through.
While elaborate (and critical) equipment for cooling the system is put in place, it draws on the energy of the actual powerpack and reduces its output. In addition, when charged, a coat of lithium metal can form on the surface and dendrites, or needle-like structures can grow, and lead to short-circuits.

There are other considerations, too. For instance, in its review of battery failures in 2019 and 2012, the Arizona State Commission pointed to reports of “fires with 10 feet to 15 feet flame lengths that grew into 50 feet to 75 feet flame lengths appearing to be fed by flammable liquids coming from the cabinets.” After one incident, it took nearly three months to discharge the stranded energy.

 

[marsh]

The Coming Water Wars

STORY AT-A-GLANCE The climate crisis is blamed on human activities, but they may not be the activities you’re thinking of,

americafirstreport.com

The Coming Water Wars

Droughts and water shortages are becoming commonplace throughout the world.

BY DR. JOSEPH MERCOLA October 1, 2022 in Cross-Posted, Opinions
Drought (3)

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

The climate crisis is blamed on human activities, but they may not be the activities you’re thinking of, like driving cars but, rather, activities that are much more nefarious, like the intentional creation of a water crisis in order to gain totalitarian control

The U.S. military has a history of using weather modification practices in warfare, including during the Vietnam War

China recently made headlines for using seed clouds to induce rainfall over the Yangtze River, and it also used cloud seeding to ensure dry weather during the 2008 Beijing Olympics

In 2018, researchers from the European Commission’s Joint Research Center suggested that competition over limited water resources — or “hydro-political issues” — would be the driver of future wars

One of the most important preparations you can make is to secure a supply of potable water, such as a large cistern to collect rainwater

Historic droughts and threats of water shortages are occurring around the world, as media reports highlight rivers — such as the Loire, Po and Danube in Europe — reaching historic lows.1 In China, a double threat of heat and lack of rainfall has led portions of the Yangtze river basin to go dry, affecting not only crops but also the drinking water supplies of people and livestock.2

In the U.S., the Colorado River is at “critical levels,” leading officials from the U.S. Interior Department to state that water use in the basin must be reduced “in order to avoid catastrophic collapse of the Colorado River System and a future of uncertainty and conflict.”3 Toward that end, Washington officials have now stepped in, announcing that certain water supplies to U.S. states and Mexico would be cut.4

Much of the crisis is blamed on human activities, but as James Corbett covers in “The Corbett Report,” they may not be the activities you’re thinking of, like driving cars but, rather, activities that are much more nefarious, like the intentional creation of a water crisis in order to gain totalitarian control.5

It’s not too late to prepare for what’s to come. Many of our sponsors are perfectly suited to help. Don’t wait until the crap hits the fan. Be READY when it does with our “Be Prepare” List.

The History of Climatic Warfare
While geoengineering, including spraying sulfate aerosols into the Earth’s stratosphere in order to modify climate,6 is often still talked about as though it’s straight from a science fiction movie, weather modification techniques have been used for military purposes for some time.

Sometimes referred to as weather warfare, the notion that humans could control Mother Nature became a reality in 1946, when scientists working with the General Electric Research Laboratory released dry ice into clouds, creating the first human-made snowstorm.7 As noted by Smithsonian Magazine:8

“After the experiments of G.E.’s Research Laboratory, there was a feeling that humanity might finally be able to control one of the greatest variables of life on earth. And, as Cold War tensions heightened, weather control was seen by the United States as a potential weapon that could be even more devastating than nuclear warfare …

In August of 1953 the United States formed the President’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control. Its stated purpose was to determine the effectiveness of weather modification procedures and the extent to which the government should engage in such activities.”

It wasn’t long after that the U.S. military began to use weather modification practices in warfare, including during the Vietnam War. Corbett noted:9

“Unsurprisingly, the idea was put to active military use almost immediately. From 1967 to 1972, the US Air Force ran Operation Popeye, a highly classified rainmaking program deployed in Southeast Asia ‘in an attempt to slow the movement of North Vietnamese troops and supplies through the Ho Chi Minh trail network.’

The program was so classified that even President Nixon’s Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, didn’t know of its existence until it was reported in the press. So, who went over the Secretary of Defense’s head to authorize and coordinate a scheme to weaponize the weather? Why, Henry Kissinger, of course.

… Don’t worry, though. The revelation of the program caused such international outrage that the UN introduced a convention in 1977 prohibiting the use of environmental modification technology in warfare. The US ratified that convention in 1980, so no one has ever tried to modify the weather for warfare again. (Would world leaders ever lie to the public about something like that?)”

Cloud Seeding Is Used Worldwide
While climatic warfare was supposed to have been phased out in 1980, weather modification — for various purposes — has been picking up steam around the globe. More than 50 countries worldwide already participate in one type of weather modification known as cloud seeding.10

The prospect of using cloud seeding to increase rainfall is its most popular usage. In the U.S., about $15 million is spent on cloud-seeding projects annually, which pales in comparison to the $100 million a year spent in China. Still, in the U.S. cloud seeding has grown by one-third in the last 10 years.11

There are a number of different ways that cloud seeding can work, but typically dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) pellets or silver iodide are applied to certain clouds to modify their output. Seeding agents may be applied to clouds from the ground but, most often, aircraft are used to apply the materials to the clouds. This occurs either by releasing the seeding agent below the cloud into its updrafts or by dropping the seeds directly into the upper regions of the clouds.12

China recently made headlines for using seed clouds to induce rainfall over the Yangtze River, and it also used cloud seeding to ensure dry weather during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.13 In Wyoming, the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Program conducted a randomized cloud-seeding program, which found the seeding increased snowfall by 5% to 15% under ideal seeding conditions.14

In North Dakota, meanwhile, the North Dakota Cloud Modification Project reported that cloud seeding produces an estimated 5% to 10% additional rainfall annually in the project area while reducing crop hail losses by 45%. As for costs, they say it only costs 16 cents per acre to enhance rain and suppress hail.15

As you can imagine, aside from the benefits of protecting water supplies or the military applications, there are many people who have their hand in the pot when it comes to benefiting from weather modification. Corbett explained:16

“So many events in the course of human activity are predicated on short-term weather and long-term climate phenomena that the ability to determine (or even influence) either could be extremely valuable. Insurance companies, for example, stand to lose billions (and reconstruction-related industries stand to make those same billions) every time a strong storm makes landfall in populated areas.

So it should not be surprising that a market has evolved for ‘weather derivatives,’ effectively allowing large financial institutions to make money gambling on the weather. And it should also come as no surprise that this market was largely pioneered by that infamous globalist-connected insider corporation, Enron.”

The practice is not without controversy, however. Potential consequences of cloud seeding include environmental impacts downwind of target areas, which may have a negative impact on others — including those across political boundaries.17 Could it be, also, that global elites have already harnessed this technology for their own purposes of population-level control? Corbett thinks so:18

“Yes, of course the establishment press is lying to its readers yet again, keeping them in the dark about a well-established technology so their governmental masters can plausibly deny that any large-scale climate events are manmade. Large-scale climate events like, say, a hemisphere-wide drought.

Instead, they can safely blame the current water shortages on the globalist bogeyman … It’s all just a coincidence that we’re plunging into an age of water shortages, droughts, famine and pestilence, guys. And the answer to this crisis is more weather modification!”

‘A Crisis by Design’
In 2018, researchers from the European Commission’s Joint Research Center suggested that competition over limited water resources — or “hydro-political issues” — would be the driver of future wars.19

“Although water issues alone have not been the sole trigger for warfare in the past, tensions over freshwater management and use represent one of the main concerns in political relations between riparian states and may exacerbate existing tensions, increase regional instability and social unrest,” they wrote in Global Environmental Change.20

“The wars of the future,” the New York Post wrote, “will be fought over water not oil.”21 Indeed, other than air, there is no resource as precious as water, and if it becomes scarce, those who control it will retain ultimate power. This, Corbett believes, is part of the master plan:22

“But now let’s entertain for a moment this harebrained, cockamamie, tinfoil wing nut idea that perhaps — just perhaps — the global climactic events taking place at the moment (including the widespread water shortages taking place across the world) are not the result of your carbon footprint.

What if — and I know I’m out on a limb here — they were being deliberately engineered with the types of weather modification technology that we know the US military and other countries around the world have been actively studying for at least 80 years now? What would that mean?

Well, it would certainly create a convenient case for the UN and other would-be world controllers to step in and start restricting productive human activity in the name of saving us from the weather gods. Climate lockdowns to save the day! … Sound farfetched?

Well, as even mainstream commentators are starting to note, the water supply crisis is not simply happening by chance. It is the result of carefully planned government actions, inactions and restrictions.

The answer is obvious: the water shortage is a crisis by design, like the food crisis and the various geopolitical crises and the economic crisis … and it’s designed to justify more government control over you and your life and, in the end, to corral you into tightly controlled urban centers where your access to the necessities of life can be turned off.”

How to Secure Your Own Water for Emergencies
One of the most important preparations you can make is to secure a supply of potable water, as you can survive far longer without food than you can without water. An ideal system to consider, if you have a garden, is to install a large cistern to collect rainwater.

Since I have a full acre of land that I grow food on, I have a 5,000-gallon cistern that collects rainwater from the gutters on my roof. This serves to augment my irrigation system but is also a large emergency source of water. Another strategy is to install a series of connected rain barrels to your gutters.

A system like this can provide you with a source of water indefinitely, provide there isn’t a long-term drought. Just be sure to keep the water clean, using a combination of filters — a leaf diverter as well as a screen on the inlet going into the barrel — and treatment as follows:23

Treat the water with bleach once a month. This will help prevent algae growth. All you need is 1/4 teaspoon per gallon of water, or 2 to 4 tablespoons for a 55-gallon barrel. Beneficial microbes can also be used in lieu of bleach. One such product is Nutri-Life BAM24

Test the pH of your water once a month using a standard pH test strip. If the water is neutral or alkaline (aka “hard” water), add baking soda to bring back its acidity. For a 55-gallon barrel, you typically only need a couple of tablespoons to correct the pH balance. Vinegar is another option for lowering the pH

The best-case scenario is that you install such a system and don’t need it. In that case, you can still use the water for your garden. But in the worst-case scenario, in which war erupts over water rights and those in power attempt to limit or, worse, eliminate, your supply, you’ll have a backup ready.

 

[marsh]

Intelligence Community Developing AI Tool to Unmask Anonymous Writers - Valiant News

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has announced they are developing an AI tool to unmask anonymous writers.

valiantnews.com

Intelligence Community Developing AI Tool To Unmask Anonymous Writers​

The program will also be used to scramble linguistic patterns, making it impossible to crack the identity of authors that they wanted to keep under lock and key…

Jack Hadfield
Published
14 hours ago

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has announced they are developing an AI tool to unmask anonymous writers.

A press release on Tuesday from the ODNI revealed that the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), their research and development arm, is starting work on the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure program – HIATUS for short.

“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day,” with “text containing linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” a document from IARPA notes. The HIATUS tool would therefore use AI to identify anonymous writers via features such as “word choice, sentence phrasing [and] organization of information.”

“Think about it as like your written fingerprint, right?” program manager Dr Timothy McKinnon said in February. “What characteristics make your writing unique? So the technology would be able to identify that fingerprint compared against a corpus of other documents, and match them up if they are from the same author.”

McKinnon said that the AI program would be used by the intelligence community to track “disinformation campaigns,” and combat “human trafficking and other malicious activities that go on in online text forums.”

In the same vein, HIATUS would be able to detect whether text was not authored by a human, but generated by another machine.

The second use of the HIATUS program is to hide the identity of authors that it wanted to keep under lock and key. Using the same system, HIATUS could rewrite and modify text so that those same linguistic fingerprints in a text could be scrambled, making it impossible to attribute authorship.

With AI models that use deep learning, they often function as a “black box,” where the AI works perfectly well, but their methods are undecipherable to the human eye. HIATUS will be designed differently, implementing “explainable AI techniques” so that human operators can understand why it has identified a text as having a certain authorship, so that no mistakes are made.

20 different contracts have been awarded as part of the HIATUS project, including to groups such as Raytheon, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Univeristy of Southern California.

“We have a strong chance of meeting our goals, delivering much-needed capabilities to the Intelligence Community, and substantially expanding our understanding of variation in human language using the latest advances in computational linguistics and deep learning,” McKinnon concluded.

According to the timeline provided by the ODNI, the project will take at least three and a half years to conclude before the intelligence community will be able to use it, if it is successful.

 

[marsh]

Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App

@NiMingda_GG: 1/ The Western ruling class & the rich will do ANYTHING to preserve the U.S. led "rules-based international order". ANYTHING includes allowing the Western masses to go broke, hungry & freeze this winte...…

threadreaderapp.com

1/
The Western ruling class & the rich will do ANYTHING to preserve the U.S. led "rules-based international order".

ANYTHING includes allowing the Western masses to go broke, hungry & freeze this winter.

ANYTHING also includes risking WW3 with China & Russia.

Here’s why…

/2
This "order" enables the U.S. (and by extension, its Western allies) to control the world's financial system.

It preserves the USD as the global reserve currency & allows America to print "money" with impunity to fund endless wars of resource extraction & asset privatisation.

3/
Much of this "free money" ends up being managed by Wall Street, London & European big finance.

Consequently, just 17 of these firms control more than USD 40 trillion in capital.

For comparison, China only has about USD 3 trillion in foreign exchange reserve.

4/
It took China 21 years of trading to save that USD 3 trillion in foreign reserve.

But it only took America two years to print USD 17 trillion out of thin air... which it can use to exchange for real goods with other nations.

This is a scam & a great injustice.

5/
So Western big finance have lots of free "money" to invest.

But not everything is for sale.

Certainly not in socialist countries or "autocracies" where the state exercises strict control over national resources & public assets.

This is where regime-change comes in.

6/
Conveniently, directors from these trillion-dollar firms also serve as advisors for the G7, IMF, WTO, World Bank, & U.S. Federal Reserve.

They exercise great influence over Western politicians & policymakers.

In turn, they are influenced by the rich whose wealth they manage.

7/
These trillion-dollar Western banks & asset management firms invest in each other.

They also invest in almost every type of industries around the world.. including the infamous military industrial complex of the West.

So they literally make money from wars & suffering.

8/
In 2016, Oxfam reported that a mere 62 people own half the world's wealth. In 2017, that number became just 8 men.

The richest 1% of humanity controls most of the planet's wealth.

And the "rules-based international order" ensures that the rich become richer.

9/
However, there are downsides to hoarding so much wealth while so many struggled to make a living.

The rich are constantly worried about popular revolt.

Hence why Western media is owned by only a handful of billionaires. By controlling the narratives, they control the masses.

10/
If you think billionaires controlling Western media is bad, wait till you find out how much Western politicians are beholden to them.

In Western democracies, political donations & lobbying is legal.

Guess which group has the money & platform to help politicians gain office?

11/
By the way, there's nothing wrong being rich.

It's only wrong if you...

- profiteer from the misery of others
- influence policymaking to advance your own interests, to the detriment of the masses-
-not contributing to public coffers by paying little to no taxes

12/
Yet those are the 3 injustices that the U.S. led Western "rules-based international order" allow the rich to commit.

It allows them to lobby Western politicians to regime-change any country they don't like.

And they use Western media to back their pretexts for conflict.

13/
Under the U.S. led Western "rules-based international order", endless wars & regime-change ops have been waged to thwart the use of alternative currencies or to "liberate" a previously restricted market.

Weak countries suffer direct invasions. Strong ones suffer proxy wars.

14/
When it comes to NOT contributing to public coffers, the rich has London & its offshore tax havens to help.

Through complex structures of trusts & shell companies, they hide their wealth & identity.

On paper, the rich is "poorer" than a waiter. So they don't pay taxes.

15/
You can see how the elites behind the Western "rules-based international order" is not only defrauding the world... it's also defrauding its own people.

It wages wars against the global south & pillage them in the name of "democracy". And it does so by manufacturing consent.

16/
This is why China... a country that suffered a century of war & looting at the hands of Western & Japanese imperialists... has built an alternative financial system to escape the "rules-based international order".

For this trespass against Western elites, China is targeted.

17/
Now do the Western ruling class & their rich benefactors actually want a nuclear war?

I don't think so.

They wouldn't ruin their privileged lifestyle.

However, they are willing to RISK it because they believe they can limit a conflict.

And this is why they're dangerous.

18/
Addendum:

The U.S. Fed recently hiked interest rates, making the USD artificially expensive to obtain.

Since about 70% of global trade is conducted in USD (thanks to U.S. big fist), other countries have to pay more to get hold of dollars.

This caused worldwide inflation.

19/
Addendum:

If you want to know what this U.S. led Western "rules-based international order" is and how it came about, I covered that in a previous thread...


Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App@NiMingda_GG: 1/ Western elites often talk about a "rules-based international order" and how China has defied it. But what exactly is this "order"? And why do Western elites feel so threatened by Chin…Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App

20/
Addendum:

American & British ruling elites played an outsized role in the creation & preservation of the Western "rules-based international order".

I revealed more in this previous thread...


Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App@NiMingda_GG: People think the British Empire (the world's largest) was no more. But that's functionally incorrect. It simply passed the reigns to the American Empire, which now exercises global hegem…Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App

21/
Addendum:

If you want to know...
- how the USD became the world's reserve currency
- why it's called the "Petrodollar"
- why America is the only country that can print 'almost' unlimited amount of its currency without hyperinflation

... read my previous thread in 19/.

22/
Key takeaway #1:

The "rules-based international order"...

- is centred around preserving the USD as global reserve currency
- gives Western elites almost unlimited, free "money" & unfettered access to the world's wealth
- is zealously promoted as "freedom & democracy"

23/
Key takeaway #2:

Any country that...
- attempts to bypass the USD
- restricts Western capital access (eg. through state owned/controlled assets & resources)
- attempts to create alternatives to Western systems (eg. SWIFT, IMF, etc.)

... becomes target for regime-change.

24/
Key takeaway #3:

Western regime-change playbook:

1. Find "moral" pretext
2. Label target country as autocracy / dictatorship / genocidal
3. Get Western media, NGOs & think tanks to promote allegations
4. Support coup & install puppet gov
5. Setup bases
6. Loot country

25/
Key takeaway #4:

The "rules-based international order" not only defrauds the global south, it also defrauds ordinary Westerners by allowing the rich to...

- influence policymaking through political lobbying... usually to the detriment of the masses
- avoid paying taxes

26/
Conclusion:

It will take a concerted effort by nations of the global south & ordinary Westerners to dismantle this unjust, U.S. led "rules-based international order".

The USD must be made to lose its world reserve currency status.
Key to this is de-dollarisation... (cont.)

27/
Conclusion: (cont.)

Without its global currency status, the USD cannot be printed with impunity.

That means...

- no more "free money" for Western banks to play with
- no more 'near-unlimited' budget for Western military industrial complex to make endless wars

(cont.)
28/
Conclusion: (cont.)

Sadly, there are still many businesses that only accept USD as the currency for international payments.

Reinforcing the USD's global reserve currency status is akin to supporting Western imperialism.

It's time we change this for the sake of the world.
__________________
If you have found this thread informative, check out the catalogue of my previous analysis covering various geopolitical subjects...



If anyone has the ability, it would be great to turn this thread into a TikTok video.

Our next generation of leaders need to understand this critical truth, and TikTok is where most of the young people are nowadays.

Together, we can create a fairer & more equitable world.

 

[marsh]

Europe’s descent into deindustrialisation

The rapid economic collapse that Britain is facing is simply an accelerated version of what the whole of Europe is about to go through; unsustainable borrowing to fund the gap between high energy prices and what households can actually afford. With the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, there...

www.spectator.co.uk

Europe’s descent into deindustrialisation​

The attack on the Nord Stream pipeline will encourage protectionism

Philip Pilkington
29 September 2022, 11:00pm

The rapid economic collapse that Britain is facing is simply an accelerated version of what the whole of Europe is about to go through; unsustainable borrowing to fund the gap between high energy prices and what households can actually afford. With the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, there is now no feasible way back. Europe can no longer physically import Russian gas – prices will remain high until Europe builds more energy capacity, which could take years.

What is likely to come of this? High energy prices will render European manufacturing uncompetitive. European manufacturers will be forced to pass through the higher energy costs in the form of higher prices and consumers will find it cheaper to buy products from countries with normal energy prices.

The only logical European response to the threat of widespread deindustrialisation is to raise tariffs. This is the only way to equalise prices between more expensive European goods and cheaper foreign goods, therefore artificially supporting European manufacturing. This strategy will lower living standards, depriving Europeans of cheaper goods, but it will at least preserve some manufacturing jobs.

The only logical European response to the threat of widespread deindustrialisation is to raise tariffs

This process looks remarkably like the start of the Great Depression. In the 1920s, due to lopsided financial arrangements initiated in the Treaty of Versailles, western economies accumulated enormous amounts of debt. In 1929, the collapse of the American stock market removed one of the key remaining props and the western economies collapsed. Europe went first and, as trade dried up, America followed it down the hole.

Modern western economies have been accumulating debt for decades. But since the lockdowns in early 2020, this debt accumulation has gone into overdrive. In 2019, Eurozone government debt-to-GDP was 83.8 per cent. In 2020, after the lockdown bailouts were unveiled it shot up to 97.2 per cent. In the same period, Britain’s debt-to-GDP ratio went from 83.8 per cent to 93.9 per cent. These are the largest single increases in history. The run-up in debt during the lockdown was probably unavoidable. But it certainly triggered the beginning of the inflationary pressures we now see everywhere, especially because the lockdowns themselves completely demolished supply chains. So, more money chasing fewer goods. But what has happened since the start of this year is something else entirely.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered an energy price war in Europe that is forcing even higher levels of government borrowing to cover energy costs. Unlike the lockdowns, these energy price increases are putting direct pressure on both prices and the trade balance between countries. Higher energy prices mean that Europe must send more euros and pounds abroad to get energy and so the value of imports rises and these higher import costs are fed through to consumers as businesses try to offset rising energy costs by raising prices. The situation is no longer remotely sustainable. This is almost certainly our 1929 moment.

In the 1930s, Europe fell into an economic black hole. Its economy collapsed and so all the trade that it did with the rest of the world was sucked down the hole with it. Europe then turned in on itself and started raising trade barriers to eke out some semblance of economic normality. This was a classic case of what economists called the ‘fallacy of composition’: what was good for Europe in particular, was bad for the world economy and since Europe was part of the world economy, it turned out to be bad for Europe too. The world slipped into depression.

Could the same thing happen today? The Office of the United States Trade Representative estimates that the United States engaged in over $5.6 trillion of trade – roughly 26 per cent of GDP – in 2019. In the same year, trade with the European Union was estimated at $1.1 trillion – that is approximately 20 per cent of total trade. As European falls into the hole, this trade will fall with it.

The American economy, already frail, will likely fall too.

One key difference this time around is that there is a rival economic bloc that could be insulated from these dynamics, the emerging Brics+: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Argentina – with Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia also joining the queue. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Brics countries have been solidifying trade and financial ties and adding new members. It appears that the goal is for these economies to decouple as much as possible from the West. If they are successful in doing that – and it looks like they may be – they may avoid the depression. The Nord Stream sabotage could be the point at which future historians mark the end of western dominance.

 

[marsh]

Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App

@NiMingda_GG: People think the British Empire (the world's largest) was no more. But that's functionally incorrect. It simply passed the reigns to the American Empire, which now exercises global hegemony thru the "r...…

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倪明达 (Ni Mingda) Profile picture
倪明达 (Ni Mingda)

Twitter logo
Jul 3 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
People think the British Empire (the world's largest) was no more.

But that's functionally incorrect.

It simply passed the reigns to the American Empire, which now exercises global hegemony thru the "rules-based international order".

Britain and Sons Ltd. is still in business.

Moreover, many people still do not understand what the "rules-based international order" actually is.

They often confuse it with freedom & democracy.

Or they think it's the same as the UN international rules.

It's not.

The "order" is mainly monetary:


Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App
@NiMingda_GG: 1/ Western elites often talk about a "rules-based international order" and how China has defied it. But what exactly is this "order"? And why do Western elites feel so threatened by Chin…

Thread by @NiMingda_GG on Thread Reader App

@NiMingda_GG: 1/ Western elites often talk about a "rules-based international order" and how China has defied it. But what exactly is this "order"? And why do Western elites feel so threatened by China that they're ...…

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This is why many people are confused when the Five Eyes nations (,,,,) seemingly moved in lockstep with each other... even when those moves were contrary to the interests of their masses.

Britain & Sons Ltd. is one company... led by the elites of their societies.
People are even more confused when the EU nations (at the behest of the U.S. through NATO) seemingly made decisions that are contrary to the interests of their masses.

Britain & Sons Ltd. also have European elite "shareholders". Together they control the world's monetary system.
So what are the monetary instruments of this system?

SWIFT, USD as world reserve currency, IMF, World Bank, British controlled offshore tax havens & a number of large Wall Street banks & investment firms.

This is the core part of the "rules-based international order".
Like any world order, the "rules-based international order" also has its own military to enforce submission.

They're called the U.S. military.

And since Britain & Sons Ltd. is a pan-European company, its "shareholders" also contribute to the military.

They're called NATO.

Moreover, like most companies, Britain & Sons Ltd. also has its own PR and marketing arm.

They're called Western media.

Would you be surprised if I told you the world's biggest media & entertainment companies are owned and controlled by just a handful of Western billionaires?

Does Britain & Sons Ltd. have non-Western collaborators?

Absolutely. And they're all over the world.

The Chinese government has successfully prosecuted some of the billionaire collaborators within its borders.

Some managed to escape to the West and fight the CPC from there.
So why do Britain & Sons Ltd. and their "shareholders" see China as a threat?

The answer is clear when you understand that the "rules-based international order" is mainly a monetary system.

China has built a parallel monetary system that's more equitable for developing nations.

China's monetary system was initially designed to shield its own (and by extension its trading partners') economy from being abused by the Western elites that control the current monetary system.

For example, Britain & Sons Ltd. has sanctioned numerous countries it doesn't like.

So in order to escape the financial stranglehold of the "rules-based international order", China created:

- AIIB as alt. to IMF & World Bank
- CIPS as alt. to SWIFT
- UnionPay as alt. to MasterCard & VISA
- eYuan as potential alt. to USD

... and the BRI as the modern Silk Road.
Since China is the largest trading partner of most countries in the world, these countries were able to bypass the monetary system of Britain & Sons Ltd. and transact directly with China.

They chose China's system due to better terms, fairness, respect and mutual benefits.

Moreover, countries that are heavily sanctioned under the "rules-based international order" were able to survive and trade due to China's alternative system.

Russia (currently sanctioned by Britain & Sons Ltd.) is one of the many beneficiaries of this Chinese system.
Conclusion:

Britain & Sons Ltd. and their "shareholders" know that by controlling the world's monetary system, they exercise great power over the world's governments.

It's a monopoly that they will never willingly relinquish.

And they would risk WW3 to preserve their "order".
Conclusion: (cont.)

Britain & Sons Ltd. has also assessed that only China has the financial, technology, economic & military means to successfully defy its "rules-based international order".

This is why the "company" has been waging asymmetric (esp. info) wars against China.
Addendum:

I coined the term 'Britain & Sons Ltd.' to better explain the continuation of Western imperialism via the "rules-based international order".

But do not forget that although the EU elites are "shareholders" of the "company", it's mainly the USA & UK that runs the show.
Addendum:

148 years ago, there was an actual British company that had an army twice the size of the British army.

It had the royal charter to make war, mint money & even colonise countries.

It ruled India, HK & parts of SE Asia.

It was called the British East India Company...
Image
Addendum:

Britain & Sons Ltd.

= Founder & Chief Advisor
= CEO
= Chief Marketing Officer & Deputy Sheriff
= Chief Compliance Officer
= Assistante Personnelle du Président-Directeur Général (Personal Assistant to the CEO)

= Shareholders
Appendix:

Have you found this thread useful in helping you understand how the British Empire passed the baton of imperialism to the USA?

Then check out the catalogue of my selected threads on geopolitics and international relations strategic analysis:

 

[marsh]

Thread by @KonstantinKisin on Thread Reader App

@KonstantinKisin: I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarise as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from...…

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Konstantin Kisin Profile picture
Konstantin Kisin

Twitter logo
17h • 25 tweets • 5 min read

I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarise as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from the outset, what his intentions and complaints are in the plainest terms possible.

Setting aside his brief comments on the recent "referendums", he spends most of his speech discussing the West. His primary complaint isn't NATO expansion, which gets only a cursory mention. The West is greedy and seeks to enslave and colonise other nations, like Russia.

The West uses the power of finance and technology to enforce its will on other nations. To collect what he calls the "hegemon's tax". To this end the West destabilises countries, creates terrorist enclaves and most of all seeks to deprive other countries of sovereignty.

It is this "avarice" and desire to preserve its power that is the reason for the "hybrid war" the collective West is "waging on Russia". They want us to be a "colony". They do not want us to be free, they want Russians to be a mob of soulless slaves - direct quote.

The rules-based order the West goes on about is "nonsense". Who made these rules? Who agreed to them? Russia is an ancient country and civilization and we will not play by these "rigged" rules. The West has no moral authority to challenge the referendums because it has violated

...the borders of other countries. Western elites are "totalitarian, despotic and apartheidistic" - direct quote. They are racist against Russia and other countries and nations. "Russophobia is racism". They discriminate by calling themselves the "civilised world".

They colonised, started the global slave trade, genocided native Americans, pillaged India and Africa, forced China to buy opium through war. We, on the other hand, are proud that we "led" the anti-colonial movement that helped countries develop to reduce poverty and inequality.

They are Russophobic (they hate us) because we didn't allow our country to be pillaged by creating a strong CENTRALISED (emphasis his) state based on Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. They have been trying to destabilise our country since the 17th century in the Times...

...of Trouble (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_T…). Eventually, they managed to "get their hands on our riches" at the end of the 20th century. They called us friends and partners while pumping out trillions of dollars (his irony game is strong today).

Time of Troubles - Wikipedia

Time of Troubles - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

We remember this. We didn't forget. The West claims to bring freedom and democracy to other countries but it's the exact opposite of the truth. The unipolar world is anti-democratic by its very nature. It is a lie. They used nuclear weapons, creating a precedent. They flattened
German cities without "any military need to do so". There was no need for this except to scare us and the rest of the world. Korea, Vietnam. To this day they "occupy" Japan, South Korea and Germany and other countries while cynically calling them "allies".

The West has surveillance over the leaders of these nations who "swallow these insults like the slaves they are".

He then talks about bioweapon research (haven't heard about them for a while) and human experiments "including in Ukraine".

The US rules the world by the power of the fist. Any country which seeks to challenge Western hegemony becomes an enemy. Their neocolonialism is cloaked in lies like "containment" of Russia, China and Iran. The concept of truth has been destroyed with fakes and extreme...
...propaganda (irony game still strong).

You cannot feed your people with printed dollars and social media. You need food and energy. But Western elites have no desire to find a solution to the food and energy crises *they* (emphasis his) created.

They solved the problems at the start of 20c with WW1 and the US established dominance of the world via the dollar as a result of WW2. In the 80s they had another crisis they solved by "plundering our country". Now they want to solve their problems by "breaking Russia".

Russia "understands its responsibility to the international community" and will "do everything to cool the heads of these neocolonials who are destined to fail".

They're crazy. I want to speak to all Russian citizens, do we want to replace mum and dad with parent 1 and 2?

They invented genders and claim you can "transition". Do we want this for our children?

We have a different vision.

They have abandoned religion and embraced Satanism - direct quote.
The world is going through a revolutionary transformation. A multipolar world offers nations freedom to develop as they wish and they make up the majority of the world.

We have many like-minded friends in Western countries. We see and appreciate their support. They are forming
liberation, anti-colonial movements as we speak - direct quote. These will only grow.

We are fighting for a fair world for our country. The idea of exceptionalism is criminal and we must turn this shameful page. The breaking of the West's hegemony is INEVITABLE (emphasis his).

There is no going back. We are fighting for our "great (as in big), historic Russia". Our values are (irony game crescendo): love of our fellow man, compassion and mercy.

Truth is with us, Russia is with us.

That's the end of the speech. As I said from day 1, the purpose of what Putin is doing in Ukraine is to throw the West off its pedestal. This isn't about NATO or Ukraine, this is the big play to replace the current world order.

View: https://youtu.be/j1C8awu_d6Y
1:30:33 min

 

[marsh]

As Great Resetter Bill Gates Doubles Down on Digital IDs, Critic Warns of ‘Gravest Technological Threat’ to Liberty

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website. The Bill & Melinda

noqreport.com

As Great Resetter Bill Gates Doubles Down on Digital IDs, Critic Warns of ‘Gravest Technological Threat’ to Liberty

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this month announced $200 million in new funding — part of an overall $1.27 billion commitment in support of “global health and development projects” that include creating a global digital ID system.

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. October 1, 2022 in Opinions

Bill Gates Digital ID
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) this month said it will invest $200 million in digital ID projects, encompassing “digital public infrastructure, including civil registry databases and digital ID” to help meet the 2030 target date for reaching the United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The $200 million in new funding — part of an overall $1.27 billion commitment by the BMGF in support of “global health and development projects,” is closely tied to Goal 16.9 of the SDGs, for which “digital identity programs are supposedly needed,” Reclaim the Net reported.

The funding adds to several existing BMFG-supported global digital ID initiatives, even as such initiatives come under fire for violating people’s right to privacy.

Michael Rectenwald, author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said that far from promoting an improved digital infrastructure or “global health and development,” digital identity will have more onerous applications.

Rectenwald told The Defender:

“Of all the other means of identifying and tracking subjects, digital identity poses perhaps the gravest technological threat to individual liberty yet conceived.

“It has the potential to trace, track and surveil subjects and to compile a complete record of all activity, from cradle to grave.”

Rectenwald said these more onerous applications of digital identity are what the BMGF and other similar entities find appealing:

“Digital identity will serve as a means of coercion and enforced compliance with the outrageous demands of a vaccine regime that will have no end.

“It is no wonder that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding this invasive, rights-abrogating technology, given Gates’ investments, both financially and ideologically, in coercive neo-Malthusian and arguably eugenics-friendly methods.”

Report claims biometric technologies required for ‘equitable redistribution of wealth and resources’
Commenting on the $200 million investment, the BMGF said:

“This funding will help expand infrastructure that low and middle-income countries can use to become more resilient to crises such as food shortages, public health threats, and climate change, as well as to aid in pandemic and economic recovery.”

Additionally, according to the BMGF, such infrastructure “encompasses tools such as interoperable payment systems, digital ID, data-sharing systems, and civil registry databases.”

The announcement came during the two-day Goalkeepers event in New York City held in parallel with the annual session of the UN General Assembly, and one week after the release of the BMGF’s “Goalkeepers Report” for 2022.

The 2022 Goalkeepers Report warned that progress toward achieving most SDGs by 2030 is off track, in part due to a myriad of global crises in the past two years that reversed previous progress in meeting the targets.

The report also highlighted biometrics as one of the technologies required to achieve the equitable redistribution of wealth and resources in economically developing countries — a goal also contained within the SDGs.

Participants in this year’s Goalkeepers event — the first held in person since 2019 — stressed the need for a renewed commitment to meeting the SDGs by the 2030 target.

BMGF CEO Mark Suzman, speaking at the event, said:

“We can get back on track toward the SDGs, but it’s going to take a new level of collaboration and investment from every sector.

“That’s why our foundation is significantly stepping up our commitment to helping confront crises now and ensure long-term impact across critical determinants of health and development.”

Gates, BMGF, Microsoft involved in multiple global digital ID initiatives
Gates is invested in digital ID initiatives around the world, not only through the BMGF but also personally and through Microsoft.

For instance, the BMGF is a supporter of MOSIP, an India-based open-source digital ID platform.

On its website, MOSIP provides “a robust scalable and inclusive foundational identity program” and “an open source platform on which national foundational IDs are built.”

These platforms, claims MOSIP, help “governments and other user organizations implement a digital, foundational identity system in a cost effective way.”

The BMGF is also a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which in 2018, through its INFUSE (innovation for uptake, scale and equity in immunization) initiative, advocated in favor of digital IDs for kids:

“Imagine a future in which all children have access to life-saving vaccines no matter where they live — a future in which parents and health workers ensure their timely vaccination, a future in which they have their own digitally stored health record that cannot be lost or stolen, a future in which, regardless of gender, economic or social standing, this record allows each child (and parents) to have access to a bank account, go to school, access services and ultimately build a prosperous life.

“This future is possible today. With the latest advances in digital technologies that enable more effective ways to register, identify births and issue proof of identity and authentication for access to services — we are on the brink of building a healthier and more prosperous future for the world’s most vulnerable children.”

This would be accomplished by “calling for innovations that leverage new technologies to modernize the process of identifying and registering the children who are most in need of life-saving vaccines.”

The INFUSE initiative supports a digital ID for children from the moment they are born, claiming that “digital records can make it convenient to track a child’s vaccines and eliminate unnecessary paperwork.”

According to INFUSE, as children grow, “their digital health card can be used to access secondary services, such as primary school, or ease the process of obtaining alternative credentials.”

“The digital health card could, depending on country needs and readiness, potentially become the first step in establishing a legal, broadly recognized identity,” INFUSE concluded.

Investigative reporter Leo Hohmann described the initiative as “all about data collection,” having “nothing to do with health” but instead bringing “the current generation of children into the blossoming global digital identity system.”

Gavi, in turn, closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, founded in 2016, which claims to advocate in favor of “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID,” adding that “doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties, and claims to support “ethical, privacy-protecting approaches to digital ID.”

Microsoft is a founding member of the ID2020 alliance (in 2018) and appears to partner with it, while Kim Gagné, ID2020’s board chairman, is a former Microsoft executive.

Other founding partners of ID2020 include Gavi, the BMGF, the World Bank, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Bill Gates also backed Aktivate, a “software-as-a-service” platform that “powers student-athlete administration for over 1,300 K-12 schools and 1.5 million athletes across 30 states.”

Aktivate recently generated controversy in one Florida school district, which quietly made the platform mandatory for the registration of student athletes, before walking back this requirement.

Gates has drawn fire in India for his support and funding of various digital ID schemes there.

For instance, on his personal blog, Gates praised Aadhaar, a national digital identification card system launched in 2009, which today is the world’s largest biometric identification system.

Gates described Aadhaar as “a valuable platform for delivering social welfare programs and other government services” — and Nandan Nilekani, who developed the Aadhaar system and now works with the World Bank Group to help other countries develop similar schemes.

The Aadhaar identification number was linked with numerous public and private services, including the opening of bank accounts, verification of electoral identity, filing income tax returns, making digital payments, receiving government pensions, subsidies and welfare payments and registration of mobile SIM cards.

Aadhaar generated controversy in India over the government’s plans to link it to the national voter database, and the alleged coercion of HIV patients to submit their Aadhaar numbers, leading them to drop out of treatment programs due to privacy concerns.

Gates has dismissed privacy concerns surrounding Aadhaar, stating that “Aadhaar in itself doesn’t pose any privacy issue because it’s just a bio ID verification scheme,” adding that “We [the BMGF] have funded the World Bank to take this Aadhaar approach to other countries.”

A counterpart system to Aadhaar, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission — a system that would complement Aadhaar by providing a unique digital health ID to all citizens and would be linked to their personal health records — was launched in 2021.

Gates also publicly praised this platform, claiming it will help “ensure equitable, accessible healthcare delivery and accelerate progress on India’s health goals.”

The BMGF gave the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission a $350,690 grant to support its “rollout and strengthening,” despite concerns regarding privacy, informed consent and data leakage.

A report released July 2022 by New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice entitled “Paving the Road to Hell? A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID” specifically linked digital ID programs such as Aadhaar to “severe and large-scale human rights violations.”

According to the report, such digital ID programs “may in fact exacerbate pre-existing forms of exclusion and discrimination in public and private services” and “may furthermore lead to novel forms of harm, including biometric exclusion, discrimination, and the many harms associated with surveillance capitalism.”

The report added that the benefits of digital ID are “ill-defined” and “poorly documented,” and their repercussions may be “severe and potentially irreversible,” adding that the “ultimate objective” of such programs is to “facilitate economic transactions and private sector service delivery while also bringing new, poorer, individuals into formal economies and ‘unlocking’ their behavioral data.”

The same report also highlighted the role of entities such as the World Bank in promoting digital ID schemes — highlighting broader efforts to continue developing such programs despite the controversy they have created.

Commenting on the report, Rectenwald said:

“Integrated with a kind of social credit scoring system like the one supposed to be in place in China, as well as a vaccine passport, the digital identity could serve as a definitive means for political profiling, for perfecting the means of political cancellation already a part of Western life.”

 

[marsh]

Italy's Giorgia Meloni's Globalist Alliances Are Causing Alarm - RAIR

Are Giorgia Meloni's controversial globalist alliances for the benefit of the Italians or the elites?

rairfoundation.com

Italy's Giorgia Meloni's Globalist Alliances Are Causing Alarm

Amy MekOctober 1, 20222 comments4 min read

Are Meloni’s controversial globalist alliances for the benefit of the Italians or the elites?

The conservative bloc led by Giorgia Meloni has won the Italian parliamentary elections. Her Fratelli d’Italia party has taken the country by storm and become its most powerful political group. Meloni will become Italy’s first female prime minister. But, while many conservatives across the world are celebrating, Meloni’s globalist connections are ringing alarm bells.

During the Covid pandemic, Meloni supported the controversial “vaccines,” green passes (Digital ID), and the oppressive lockdowns.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1574393559234625538

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1574393559234625538
.33 min

Furthermore, not only is Meloni a fervent supporter of Ukrainian President Zelensky, but also a member of the controversial Aspen Institute, reports German news site Wochenblick.

On Twitter, she expressed her “loyal support” to Selenski. Previously, Meloni supported arms supplies to Zelensky. But, unfortunately, that could mean Italians must also be out in the cold for Ukraine this winter.



Mighty Globalist Clubs
Last February, she joined the Aspen Institute, an American think tank funded by powerful globalist clubs such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

Billionaire George Soros’ network is also involved. Between 2003 and 2020, organizations linked to Soros transferred more than $3 billion to the Aspen Institute. Among other things, it was meant to support the promotion of pro-abortion groups. This is confusing since Meloni appears publicly to defend Christian values and is against abortion.

The Aspen Review, which reports directly to the institute, also railed that the Hungarian prime minister had turned his country into a “semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian country” and “demonized Soros with regime propaganda.” However, Meloni repeatedly refers to Orban as her alleged role model.

This year, part of the Aspen Institute called the Aspen Climate Cohort launched a 10-week training program for engineers, scientists, and economists to turn their ideas into realpolitik. A kind of Agenda 2030 summer school.

World Economic Forum
There are also many parallels between the World Economic Forum and the Aspen Institute. After all, the head of the organization, Walter Isaacson, is also a WEF “Agenda Contributor.” In addition, many other people in the Aspen network are also in the WEF & Soros orbit.

Both groups rely on training programs to groom their globalist soldiers. For example, Klaus Schwab, the WEF leader, relies on his “Young Global Leaders” program (Young World Leaders), and the “Aspen Institute” has its “Rising Leaders” camp (Aspiring Leaders). In 2019 alone, around 8.4 million US dollars flowed into the Aspen Institutes’ “Global Leadership” network.

The big difference between the two organizations is that the “Aspen Institute” takes a regionalized approach. Only US citizens are eligible for the US subgroup, only British citizens for the UK group, and only Italian citizens for the Italy group. In the US group in 2021, there were, for example, employees of the State Department and the US Army, but also representatives of strategically important companies such as Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Amazon. The group also trained university professors, political scientists, mainstream journalists, and employees of left-wing NGOs.

The fact that Meloni, a seasoned politician, became a member of the Aspen Institute on her own accord does not create confidence, explains Wochenblick. On the other hand, Viktor Orban was also initially sponsored by Soros’s network. The Hungarian prime minister would later become one of the most prominent critics of the billionaire. For the Hungarian prime minister, it was his younger experiences that later made him one of the biggest critics of the globalist’s machinations.

Meloni has long had a system for maintaining transatlantic relations. This is one of the reasons why the Austrian Federal President Alexander van der Bellen recently described Meloni as “no danger” for Europe, as we saw when she pledged her support and “European solidarity” for Ukraine.

Meloni wants to position herself as a reliable partner for the NATO allies. However, a threat from the EU makes one sit up and notice. Because if Italy develops in the direction of the conservative government in Hungary, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen threatened they have “tools” to bring Italy into line.

Whether the globalist agenda is pushed through out of conviction or using pressure doesn’t matter. Are Meloni’s controversial globalist alliances for the benefit of the Italians or the elites? Conservatives worldwide are anxiously waiting to see if Meloni will stand up to Globalists and their organizations or if she will hand over her power to them.

 

[marsh]

More counties demand Texas declare invasion at southern border, bringing total to 32

New emergency declarations by three counties state drug cartels have operational control over "our unsecured U.S./Mexico border."

justthenews.com

More counties demand Texas declare invasion at southern border, bringing total to 32

New emergency declarations by three counties state drug cartels have operational control over "our unsecured U.S./Mexico border."

By Bethany Blankley
Updated: September 30, 2022 - 11:21pm

Three more counties are the latest to express support for Texas declaring an invasion at the southern border, bringing the total to 32.

The judge and county commissioners of Ector County, in the Permian Basin, signed a Declaration of Local State of Disaster on Sept. 27 stating the “health, safety, and welfare of Ector County residents are under an imminent threat of disaster from the unprecedented levels of illegal immigration, human trafficking, and drug smuggling coming across the U.S. border from Mexico.”

The declaration states that the “sophisticated human smuggling and drug trafficking organizations that facilitate these criminal acts are spearheaded by violent international drug cartels who have operational control over our unsecured U.S./Mexico border.” The crisis at the border “is not acceptable, and has resulted in a security threat and humanitarian disaster with overwhelming consequences to the residents of Ector County and Texans,” they argue.

Ector County Commissioner Mike Gardner told The Center Square that even in Odessa, Texas, residents are seeing “busloads of illegal aliens coming through every day.” The county’s law enforcement and judicial system “is already up against the wall and short-handed,” he said, with not enough staff to handle the crime stemming from the border. “We have enough issues in our county without the burden of this coming through. We need help from the state to fight the amount of drugs and people coming through.”

The declaration only lasts for seven days and will continue for a longer period if the commissioners renew it.

Lavaca County Judge Mark Myers signed a declaration of local disaster that remains in effect “until terminated by the County Judge.”

It states the “the health, safety, and welfare of Lavaca County residents is under an imminent threat of disaster from the unprecedented levels of illegal immigration, human trafficking, and drug smuggling coming across the U.S. border from Mexico.”

Judge Myers cites recent CBP data that shows that more than 5 million people have been apprehended or evaded apprehension at the southern border since January 2021, including dozens on the terrorist watch list. “The unprecedented amount of human trafficking, combined with the smuggling of fentanyl and other opioids infiltrating our border,” being “spearheaded by violent international drug cartels” has created “a security threat and humanitarian disaster with overwhelming consequences to the residents of Lavaca County and Texas,” necessitating him declaring a disaster, he said.

His declaration states these and other factors “constitute among other things an invasion of Lavaca County,” as the term used in Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution and Article 4, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution.

Myers also requested the governor of Texas “declare the existence of an invasion on its border with Mexico and take necessary actions to preserve and protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Texas.” Citing clauses of the U.S. Constitution and Texas Constitution, he called on the governor to “immediately prevent and/or remove all persons invading the sovereignty of Texas and that of the United States.”

Hamilton County Judge Mark Tynes signed a resolution “calling for additional measures to secure the border, stop the invasion at the border and protect our communities.” He also cited Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution and Article 4, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution granting the governor authority to secure the Texas border from cartels who are acting as “paramilitary, narco-terrorist organizations that profit from trafficking people and drugs into the United States.”

The resolution also states that Hamilton County Commissioner’s Court “recognizes our southern border is under invasion,” and “recognizes and affirms the sovereignty and unilateral authority explicitly reserved to the states, respectively, under Article 1, Section 10 of the United States Constitution and Article IV, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution to defend themselves against invasion, which has been exacerbated by the Federal Government’s failure in meeting its constitutional obligation to ‘insure domestic tranquility,’ ‘provide for the common defense,’ ‘execute the laws,’ and ‘protect each state against invasion.’”

Hamilton County expressed support for Texas’ border security efforts through Operation Lone Star and “expanded operation authorities” and “requests Governor Abbott to take the necessary steps as allowed” under aforementioned U.S. and Texas constitutions.

So far, judges and commissioners who’ve signed resolutions in support of Texas declaring an invasion represent the counties of Atascosa, Burnet, Chambers, Clay, Ector, Edwards, Ellis, Goliad, Hamilton, Hardin, Hood, Hunt, Jack, Jasper, Johnson, Kinney, Lavaca, Liberty, Live Oak, Madison, Montague, Orange, Parker, Presidio, Terrell, Throckmorton, Tyler, Van Zandt, Wharton, Wichita, Wilson, and Wise.

While the judges of Jeff Davis and Rockwall counties expressed support for declaring an invasion, their county commissioners didn’t sign resolutions. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin is the only mayor in Texas or the U.S. to declare an invasion.

A majority of Americans recently polled say the U.S. is being invaded at the southern border. They did so as the number of illegal foreign nationals being apprehended or evading capture at the southern border since January 2021 total more than the individual populations of 25 states.

 

[marsh]

Joe Biden: Mass Immigration Is Making America 'So Much Better'

President Joe Biden celebrated mass immigration to the U.S. at the White House on Friday, saying America is being made "so much better."

www.breitbart.com

Joe Biden: Mass Immigration, Changing Demographics Making America ‘So Much Better’

JOHN BINDER30 Sep 2022508

President Joe Biden celebrated mass immigration to the United States at the White House on Friday, saying the constant flow of millions of illegal and legal immigrants every couple of years is making America “so much better.”

During a speech for Hispanic Heritage Month, Biden celebrated that the U.S. foreign-born population has hit a record-breaking nearly 47 million and that 26 percent of students in American schools speak Spanish rather than English.

“When in American history has there been a circumstance where one ethnicity has the potential to have such a profound impact on the direction of a country?” Biden said.

“Twenty-six percent of every child who’s in school today speaks Spanish — 26 percent,” Biden continued. “We’ve had large waves of immigration before but the thing is, we just have so much opportunity to make this country so much better. I really mean it … so as my father would say ‘Let’s go get ’em.'”

View: https://youtu.be/bhSrW1tG1JQ
43:20 min

The remarks come as Biden has spiked the number of foreign-born residents across a multitude of states and Democrats vow to add a million foreign-born voters to the nation’s voter rolls in the next four years.

Already, annually, the U.S. government rewards over a million foreign nationals with green cards and another more than a million with temporary work visas to take American jobs. In addition, under Biden, about 2.2 million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. interior.

The decades-long waves of mass immigration, bragged about by Biden, have been largely unpopular with American voters — particularly working and middle class Americans who are the most likely to compete for jobs, housing, and public services against new arrivals.

A YouGov poll from August revealed that a 35 percent plurality of American adults said current immigration levels are making the U.S. “worse off.

This month, another YouGov poll found that the majority of GOP voters now say current immigration levels are making the U.S. “worse off.” Similarly, an AP-NORC poll in May showed that nearly half of Republicans said Biden and Democrats are using mass immigration to import new voters and retain a permanent political majority in Washington, D.C.



Research and the establishment media have consistently admitted that the larger a region’s foreign-born population, the more likely that region is to vote for Democrats over Republicans.

In 2019, for example, The Atlantic‘s Ronald Brownstein found that nearly 90 percent of House congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average are won by Democrats. This means every congressional district with a foreign-born population exceeding 15 percent has a 90 percent chance of electing Democrats and only a ten percent chance of electing a Republican.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Axios, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all admitted that rapid demographic changes spurred by mass immigration are tilting the nation toward a permanent Democrat political majority.

“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios acknowledged in 2019. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”

Already, the U.S. has the most generous immigration system in the world — expected to bring in 15 million new foreign-born voters by 2042. About eight million of those voters will have arrived entirely due to the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.

 

[marsh]

Watters: Pelosi Tells Migrants to 'Shut Up and Pick My Grapes' 1:28 min

Watters: Pelosi Tells Migrants to 'Shut Up and Pick My Grapes'​

Red Voice Media Published October 1, 2022

“Joe Biden has bungled the border so badly even Bill Clinton says enough is enough.”

_______

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibWkp7OFB_A
2:54 min

 

[marsh]

(Twitter grab bag)

(UK)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576182782404935680

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576182782404935680
.45 min

(Iran)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575861964844109824

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575861964844109824
.13 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575872446980190208

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575872446980190208
1:00 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576178096570761216

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576178096570761216
.19 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576182640683753473

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576182640683753473
.10 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575942306942750722

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575942306942750722
.23 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576182580101128192

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576182580101128192
.22 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576190861167280130

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576190861167280130
.54 min

(Pakistan)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575930984893120532

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575930984893120532
.20 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575849700594417671

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575849700594417671
.40 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576166448317140997

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576166448317140997
.34 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1575451860017860609

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1575451860017860609
.33 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576078372010356736

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576078372010356736
2:19 min

(Canada)

 

[marsh]

Michael Yon @MichaelYon
Oct 1, 2022 at 8:12am
The Irelands Moving to Unite
01 October 2022

Dublin, now.

 

[mzkitty]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1576212913555066880

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1576212913555066880

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmIwm5RElRs
3:00 min

I don't want to set the world on fire - the Ink Spots