GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Global Net Zero Climate Change Targets Are "Pie In The Sky"TUESDAY, APR 06, 2021 - 05:00 AM
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
India lambasted the richer world's carbon cutting plans, calling long term net zero targets, "pie in the sky."



The 2050 Net Neutral Challenge
The UK will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow on. 1 – 12 November 2021.

The UN and the Paris Accord have set a net neutral target for 2050. The US, the UK, Japan, and the EU are on board.

Without China, forget about it. China says 2060. India has a more realistic assessment of the situation.

197 Counties Cannot Agree On Anything
It's a lot easier for developed countries to do something about carbon emissions than developing countries.

In a pre-summit meeting of 197 countries, China did not show up, and India blasted the targets as "Pie in the Sky".

Trying to lead 197 countries forward on the critical global issue of climate change is not a job for the faint hearted, as the UK is currently finding out. India, the world's fourth largest emitter, doesn't seem keen to join the club.

"2060 sounds good, but it is just that, it sounds good," Raj Kumar Singh, India's minister for power, told a meeting organized by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

"I would call it, and I'm sorry to say this, but it is just a pie in the sky."
"You have countries whose per capita emissions are four or five or 12 times the world average. The question is when are they going to come down?"

"What we hear is that by 2050 or 2060 we will become carbon neutral, 2060 is far away and if the people emit at the rate they are emitting the world won't survive, so what are you going to do in the next five years that's what the world wants to know."

"The developed world has occupied almost 80% of the carbon space already, you have 800 million people who don't have access to electricity. You can't say that they have to go to net zero, they have the right to develop, they want to build skyscrapers and have a higher standard of living, you can't stop it," he told the meeting.

"So my plea is to avoid the 'happy talk' and recognize that this challenge is global and never has there been a challenge that requires the unity of countries all across the planet than now."

Can the Targets Be Met?
Perhaps. Technology can do wondrous things in the next 30-40 years.
But it will not happen without China, India, and developing nations in the Mideast, Africa, and South America in general.

Where is the CO2 Coming From?


CO2 Stats

• Please note that the US reduced its carbon footprint from 6.13 billion tons in 2007 to 5.28 billion tons in 2019.
• Meanwhile, China increased its footprint from 6.86 billion tons in 2019 to 10.17 billion tons in 2019.
• In the same timeframe, global output rose from 31.29 billion tons to 36.44 billion tons.
• In 2007, the US accounted for 19.6% of the total global carbon footprint.
• In 2019, the US accounted for only 14.5% of the total global footprint.

Even if you eliminate 100% of carbon from the US and EU, you don't solve the problem.

That is the simple fact of the matter. And for pointing out the facts, I was accused of cherry picking the data.

Cherry Picking Accusation

Racism
Emissions from China and India continue to grow. For mentioning this fact, I was also called a racist.

Excuse me for pointing out that unrealistic demands on India, China, African nations, etc., are what's racist, not facts.

John Kerry's Straw Man Climate Arguments
John Kerry is Biden's climate czar.

He blamed 4 hurricanes on climate change as if throwing any amount of money at the alleged problem would have stopped the hurricanes.

For discussion, please see Kerry's Straw Man Argument for Wasting Money on Climate Change

Government to the Rescue?

A Word About Climate Change
Climate change on earth has been ongoing for billions of years and will go on for billions of years more, until the earth is swallowed by the sun, literally.

Roughly 5 billion years from now, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen fuel in its core and start burning helium, forcing its transition into a red giant star. During this shift, its atmosphere will expand out to somewhere around 1 astronomical unit — the current average Earth-Sun distance.

The world will not end in 10 years or even 100 years if we do nothing.

Climate change is not the ‘Existential Threat of Our Time’ as Biden says.

Those who want to be taken seriously, best not to make absurd exaggerations as Biden, Kerry, AOC, Gretta, Al Gore, and countless others have done with predictions that have failed one after another.

What Happens if the Seal Level Rises?
Please note, Melting Ice Could Slow Global Temperature Rise.

The research, published in Nature, finds that the rate of ice-sheet melt in a high-emissions scenario could see the oceans cooled by the influx of frigid water. This could knock as much as 0.4C off global temperature rise, the researchers say, potentially delaying exceeding the 1.5C and 2C Paris temperature limits by around a decade.

Scientists not involved in the research tell Carbon Brief that while the results are intriguing, some caution is warranted given that the study relies on a single climate model. It also uses a speculative ice-melt scenario and focuses on a region – the Southern Ocean and Antarctica – which climate models can struggle to simulate accurately.

While climate models seek to include various different elements of the Earth’s systems, many are still limited in their modeling of changes in global ice sheets. While models include the role of ice melt on global sea level rise, they generally do not include the impact of the effect of meltwater from ice sheets and ice shelves on the climate.

The broader climate impacts of ice-sheet and ice-shelf melt are not included in the current generation of climate models – CMIP5 – and are not expected to be accounted for in the upcoming CMIP6 models either.

Hmm, it seems we have a major problem with the model's, don't we?

50 Years of Dire Climate Forecasts and What Actually Happened
Let's review 50 Years of Dire Climate Forecasts and What Actually Happened
2014 John Kerry: "We have 500 days to Avoid Climate Chaos" discussed Sec of State John Kerry and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabious at a joint meeting.
I list 21 predictions and what actually happened.

Also, please recall my January 2019 post Ocasio-Cortez Says World Will End in 12 Years: Here's What to Do About It.

I am tired of this discussion.

Instead, let's assume all but the extreme predictions from here on out are true. Moreover, let's assume instead of the oceans rising 3 inches as scientists predict, let's assume the oceans rise 6 inches.

Then cold water from melting ice rates to dampen temperatures, perhaps far more than admitted or realized.

But let's assume no mitigating temperature impact of cooling waters.

What Do We Do About It?
How do we meet the 2050 targets with China not on board and India openly mocking even the 2060 target as "pie in the sky"?

With that question, let's return to a comment I made above that is the key to the issue: Technology can do wonderous things in the next 30-40 years.

Technology and Innovation
Look at what we are doing on mars as an example of amazing technological feats: Search for Life on Mars Continues With a Tiny 4 Pound Robot Helicopter
Back on earth, I noted GM to Phase Out Gas-Powered Vehicles by 2035, Carbon Neutral by 2040

That's one heck of a commitment given Tesla has about a 79% share of the 2% of total sales that are electric.

Believe what you want about climate change but fearmongering won't change anything.

Nor will badgering 197 nations to agree to a plan that China will not honor and India labels "pie in the sky".

If there is a solution, technology, innovation, and the free market will find it.

Per Capita Addendum
A reader asked why I don't mention per capita carbon.

I have commented before. It proves my point so I should do it more often.
The population of China is 1.40 billion, India is 1.37 billion, and the US is 0.33 billion. It is precisely this reason India called the effort "pie in the sky".

Q: What happens when the rest of the world wants a US standard of living?
A: The global carbon footprint will not decline, global standards of living will not rise, the US standard of living will fall dramatically, there will be a huge technology breakthrough, or some combination of the above.

Alternatively, expect war.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Joe Biden's No-Boondoggle-Left-Behind Plan

THURSDAY, APR 08, 2021 - 11:05 AM
Authored by Jim Bovard,

“Government must be a powerful force for good in the lives of Americans,” White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese announced on March 29. This is the core principle of President Joe Biden’s promise to “change the paradigm” with his $3 trillion stimulus package which seeks to pour vast amounts of tax dollars into dozens of government programs that have dismally failed in the past. But thanks to Biden’s election, the federal government has suddenly become far more competent than ever before.



To have confidence in the American Jobs Plan, it is not enough to believe that additional spending is needed for repairing bridges, paving roads, or boosting child care. Instead, one must believe that the damning revelations from all the inspectors general and Government Accountability Office reports in recent decades are null and void. A vast increase in outlays will achieve miraculous results because there is no resemblance between federal agencies commanded by Biden appointees and the same agencies in the past half century. The notion that “government must be a powerful force for good” is premised on the notion that Biden himself is such an inexorable “force for good” that history no longer applies inside the Beltway.

Biden wants the feds to spend another $100 billion on job training programs, even though those programs are notorious for 40 years for reducing trainees’ subsequent earnings. Former President Barack Obama admitted in 2014 that such programs rely on a “‘train and pray‘ approach. We train them and we pray that they can get a job.” Biden does not explain the rationale for deluging the Labor Department with new appropriations when that agency has scrupulously avoided conducting evaluations that will determine whether enrollees actually benefit from subsidized training. Biden also says that subsidies will be targeted to “justice-involved youth” — the politically correct euphemism for criminal offenders from the Obama era.

Biden wants to double federal funding for public transit. Public transit was losing riders even before its subways and buses helped supercharge the COVID-19 pandemic in New York and many other cities. The Washington, D.C. subway, with its callous long-term shutdowns for endless ineffective emergency repairs, perpetually broken escalators, and unreliable trains epitomize the contempt that government systems show for customers. Service levels for the D.C. subway are appalling in large part because of the power of transit unions; the system spends $56 in total compensation for every hour worked by Metro employees.

Biden is calling for $50 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research, a $52 billion fund to invest in domestic manufacturers, and a new $50 billion office at the Department of Commerce dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity and funding investments to support production of critical goods.” There is no reason to expect government semiconductor production to be any more reliable than government mail delivery. This proposal seems to be a relic of the 1980s, when the Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Investment was supposedly spearheading that nation’s permanent conquest of world markets. The U.S. Commerce Department has never had a reputation for anything other than being a dumping ground for political hacks.

Biden calls for local governments to begin offering Internet service and also favors “individual subsidies to cover internet costs.” Label this one the Pornhub Bailout of 2021. But an even larger problem is the plan’s prioritized municipal broadband networks. When Biden was vice president, Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency would unleash its illegal surveillance dynamo on anyone detected “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” It takes little imagination to wonder whether government-run internet will be less secure from capricious surveillance. Besides, why expect any federal intervention on this score to be more coherent than Biden’s description of the issue in his Pittsburgh speech: “You know in America where the early interest was in internet, this thing called the internet, that we invest in, we invented the early, early internet. It was invented here.”

Biden wants to spend $100 billion to “upgrade and build new public schools” because “we can’t close the opportunity gap if low-income kids go to schools in buildings that undermine health and safety.” This pitch would have more credibility if Biden’s teacher union allies were not continuing to keeping a pandemic padlock on so many schools to buttress teachers’ right to full pay and zero risk. The “achievement gap” between low-income and other students and between Black and Hispanic students and other students has vastly increased during the school shutdowns. No amount of posturing by Biden and his appointees can undo the lasting damage on young Americans inflicted by the lockdowns that Biden has championed.

Biden wants $25 billion to boost access to childcare because shortfalls make it “harder for parents, especially mothers, to fully participate in the workforce.” Biden has avoided acknowledging the role of the lockdowns he championed in obliterating opportunity for millions of families, including women who had to quit work to take care of kids barred from classrooms. Biden appointees are taking the lead on this score even before the American Jobs Act is enacted. On March 25, the Office of Personnel Management put out a call for federal employees who could temporarily babysit the surge of young illegal aliens arriving on the southwest border. Members of the new Babysitting Corps are compensated according to their old government salaries up to $144,000 a year, as PJ Media reported.

Biden seeks to “mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers” with a $10 billion “investment” to “put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice through a new Civilian Climate Corps.” This program echoes two New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Work Progress Administration (WPA), both of which recruited vast numbers of unemployed during the Depression. The WPA was popularly known in the 1930s as “We Poke Along” and gave a bad name to leaf-raking. Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps would be a super AmeriCorps, the program created by former President Bill Clinton which became renown for bankrolling political activism, leftist causes, and photo opportunities.

Biden justifies his vast spending barrage because “lack of employment has negative social impacts on communities.” But if the Biden team really believed that, why did Biden’s American Rescue Plan boost unemployment benefits in a way that exceeds what many low-to-moderate income people could earn on a job? University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan estimated that the extra unemployment payments and other benefits in the American Rescue Plan could result in up to eight million fewer Americans being employed later this year.

In his Pittsburgh speech March 31, Biden concluded, “I truly believe we’re in a moment where history is going to look back on this time as a fundamental choice having been made between democracies and autocracies…. It’s a basic question: Can democracies still deliver for their people?”

But Biden’s American Jobs Plan is a fix based on a Chinese model - vesting almost unlimited discretion in the president and his appointees, giving them almost unlimited money to spend, and providing no effective check or balance to prevent vast corruption.

How will Biden’s attempt to remake America via far more federal spending and power work out? Perhaps the recent experience of New York offers the best warning.

When the pandemic hit last year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo quickly seized nearly absolute power to shut down everything in the state. Cuomo vindicated himself for putting almost 20 million people under house arrest: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” When pandemic fears were surging, the New York Times proclaimed, “Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now.” A New Yorker profile, titled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.”

Cuomo’s reign has more “force” than “good,” such as his bizarre assertion that sheriffs were “dictators” for refusing to enforce his mask mandate inside people’s homes. But Cuomo’s power grabs have spurred a backlash that could end his political career. The federal investigation into the cover-up of mass deaths at nursing homes that occurred thanks to Cuomo’s dictates could pose more danger to him than a busload of sexual harassment charges.

Similarly, the Biden administration’s dogma that “government must be a powerful force for good” could be paving the way to both constitutional and political ruin. Many of the same zealots who swore that the federal government was a fascist dictatorship while Trump was president now believe that practically every federal program will operate impeccably because Biden is president. This is an even more childlike notion than most of the political delusions festering inside the Beltway. Because Biden is in the Oval Office, we are obliged to believe that federal spending will miraculously achieve what politicians promise. If that was the case, Biden would not be hustling a long list of public sector failures that supposedly require trillions of dollars of new government spending.

 

[marsh]

Pete Buttigieg: Racism Is 'Physically Built’ into American Infrastructure

Pete Buttigieg said "there is racism physically built” into U.S. infrastructure during an interview addressing Biden's infrastructure bill.

www.breitbart.com

Pete Buttigieg: Racism Is ‘Physically Built’ into American Infrastructure
553

Alex Wong/Getty Images
JOSHUA CAPLAN7 Apr 2021988

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg declared “there is racism physically built” into U.S. infrastructure during a Tuesday interview addressing President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure proposal.

Speaking to TheGrio, Buttigieg argued that some highways and bridges across several cities were designed to divide communities by race.

“Well if you’re in Washington, I’m told that the history of that highway is one that was built at the expense of communities of color in the D.C. area,” he said. “There are stories and I think Philadelphia and Pittsburgh [and] in New York, Robert Moses famously saw through the construction of a lot of highways.”

“There is racism physically built into some of our highways, and that’s why the jobs plan has specifically committed to reconnect some of the communities that were divided by these dollars,” he added.

Biden’s infrastructure plan would dedicate $20 billion to “reconnect neighborhoods” by investing in projects designed to “advance racial equity and environmental justice.”

In March, Buttigieg’s agency sent a letter to the state of Texas requesting it pause an interstate expansion in Houston as it investigates racial justice complaints.

Buttigieg, during his Senate confirmation hearings in January, pledged to combat what he described as racial injustice in infrastructure as transportation secretary.

“I also recognize that at their worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities in transportation can reinforce racial and economic inequality by dividing or isolating neighborhoods and undermining government’s basic role of empowering Americans to thrive,” Buttigieg said in his opening statement.

On Sunday, Buttigieg said in an interview that Biden would like Congress to act on his infrastructure plan by Memorial Day.

“We know that this is entering a legislative process where we’re going to be hearing from both sides of the aisle, and I think you’ll find the president’s got a very open mind. But time is of the essence,” he told ABC’s This Week. “So we’ll look at these ideas on how to pay for it. We’ll look at ideas on where the investments ought to be, too. But the president is hoping for major progress from Congress before Memorial Day. And we can’t allow this thing to just keep dragging on because the need is there today.”

However, several Senate Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) oppose the infrastructure proposal due to its proposed corporate tax rate hike to 28 percent.

“As the bill exists today, it needs to be changed,” Manchin told Metro News on Monday.

“It’s more than just me” the Democrat senator added. “There’s six or seven other Democrats who feel very strongly about this. We have to be competitive, and we’re not going to throw caution to the wind.”

 

[marsh]

Radical Left's Infrastructure Bill Wish List Includes Climate Change, Amnesty

Members of the radical left have released a wish list of items they hope are incorporated in the next infrastructure bill.

www.breitbart.com

Radical Left’s Infrastructure Bill Wish List Includes Climate Change and Amnesty
46

JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
HANNAH BLEAU9 Apr 202183

Members of the radical left have released a wish list of items they hope are incorporated in the next infrastructure bill, prioritizing climate change initiatives and mass amnesty.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) surveyed its 95 members, which include far-left members of the “Squad” — Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — and released a list of priorities the CPC as a whole is advancing at the current stage of infrastructure discussions. The list includes five key areas, which include beefing up government-run health care and tackling climate-related issues while providing amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.

The leftists identified investments and climate jobs as a top agenda item, demanding at least 40 percent of investment funds to go to “communities on the frontlines of our economic, environmental, and public health crises.”

The leftists called for the establishment of what they dubbed a “Strong National Clean Energy Standard,” which they believe will create “millions of clean jobs in the renewable energy sector to help meet emissions reductions through binding, enforceable federal clean-energy standards.”

Additionally, the CPC called for the incorporation of a climate jobs program, which they said will “directly put Americans to work serving the public interest, including the robust funding of a Civilian Climate Corps, Public Health Jobs Corps, and Resilience Job Corps.”

They also called for a sizeable investment in resources “required” to address climate change.

The CPC identified mass amnesty, or the “Roadmap for Citizenship and Inclusion for Immigrant Communities,” as another top priority, demanding a roadmap to citizenship for “essential workers, TPS recipients, and Dreamers.”

“Strengthen the Care Economy” is listed as another priority. The CPC called for a $450 billion investment in Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) to help Biden’s stated support of creating jobs in the home care industry.

Such jobs, the CPC said, should pay $15 an hour. Additionally, childcare access should be a “universal benefit,” and leaders should establish permanent paid family and medical leave, they said.

The caucus also demands a focus on housing, urging any infrastructure plan to include “Guarantee Housing Choice Vouchers” for all eligible Americans. They should “convert the funding status from annual appropriations to mandatory spending,” the CPC added.

Additionally, the CPC asked for $70 billion to “address the public housing repair backlog” and $45 billion “for the National Housing Trust Fund per year.” The leftists also demand to “make weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades consistent with the Green New Deal for Public Housing.”

Lowering drug prices rounds out the list of priorities, with the CPC asking to ” improve on H.R. 3 in a manner recommended by drug pricing advocates and the Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce.” Recommendations include expanding the “numbers and types of drugs eligible for negotiation, launch prices, and inflation caps” and capping drug prices “at the average price in other OECD countries.”

“We agree that it’s time for transformative change and we look forward to working with the Biden Administration to expand on their proposal and ensure that the American Jobs Plan goes big to truly meet the needs of the public,” Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said in a statement that comes amid reports of the Biden White House working on courting far-left members of the Democrat caucus.

Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) triggered a wave of reactions after identifying paid leave, child care, and caregiving as infrastructure in a Wednesday tweet, which she doubled down on a follow-up tweet on Friday:

President Biden outlined his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan last month, deeming it a “once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we’ve seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago.”

“Democrats aren’t serious about fixing America’s infrastructure,” National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokeswoman Torunn Sinclair said in a statement. “They’re serious about passing their socialist agenda by any means necessary.”

 

[marsh]

Front Page Featured | MRCTV

cnsnews.com

Beware the 'Green Fraud' and the Climate Lockdown
By Tim Graham | April 9, 2021 | 10:10am EDT

Mainstream media have promoted Greta Thunberg as the young icon of climate change activism. (Photo credit: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images)

Beware arrogant liberal journalists besmirching the supposedly disgusting concept of bothsidesism, insisting truth and falsehood should never be aired together. The American people are too dim to figure out which side is which. The "false" side must be shunned.

The most fervent topic of this arrogance is global warming, and the so-called "true" side never has to be held accountable for its dire predictions, ever.

Take biologist Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the epic 1968 manifesto of error "The Population Bomb," in which he predicted that "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions are going to starve to death" from overpopulation. Wrong.

The liberal media always cooperate in this propaganda. I've never forgotten the very one-sided reports NBC's "Today" show allowed Ehrlich to narrate in 1989 and 1990.

On May 4, 1989, Ehrlich warned of "rapid" climate change, that "we could expect to lose all of Florida, Washington D.C., and much of the Los Angeles Basin....We'll be in rising waters with no ark in sight."

They repeated this disaster-movie routine on Jan. 11, 1990. Ehrlich claimed that when the ice sheet melts in Antarctica, the sea level would rise "not...1 to 3 feet in a century but...10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time." He added: "The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. And storm surges would make the Capitol unusable."

Did any of this turn out to be true over the last 30 years? Ehrlich's predictions aired without a second of a skeptical opinion. Was "truth" served and "falsehood" denied?

From Oct. 7-11 in 1990, PBS aired a 10-part documentary series called "Race to Save the Planet." It was such an urgent "race" that it required 10 hours of radical leftists without any rebuttal. Narrator Meryl Streep warned: "By the year 2000 — that's less than 10 years away — the Earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time."

Does anyone remember the "enormous calamities" experienced by the human race since then?

This point is hammered again in a new book by Marc Morano titled "Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think."

These days, the hype machine celebrates radicals such as Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who said: "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of economic growth. How dare you!"

If you're a "denier" of this prediction, then you'll be mocked by Time magazine, who made this teen its person of the year in 2019, oozing that she "repeats the unassailable science" and "in summoning the courage to speak truth to power, became the icon of a generation."

Morano concludes his book by warning that Republicans can't try to meet this media freight train by trying to compromise. "If they don't go after the scientific premises, the GOP is left arguing the Green New Deal is too expensive," he says. And if we're risking "mass extinction," how will that sound?

The "Green New Deal" is more of the same radical agenda to lock down (if not abolish) capitalism, like a never-ending COVID-19 scare. The left never really relies on the scientific method on this subject. It only intimidates its opponents into silence and crushes any whisper of televised debate. It relies on the same media that always found creeping authoritarianism under former President Trump. It should look in the mirror.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Kissinger Warns Washington: Accept New Global System Or Face A Pre-WWI Geopolitical Situation

FRIDAY, APR 09, 2021 - 11:00 PM
Authored by Paul Antonopoulos via GlobalResearch.ca,

With the White House continually provoking tensions against Russia and China, the doyen of American foreign policy, Henry Kissinger, dramatically warned Washington last week to either agree to a new international system or continue pushing tensions that are leading to a situation similar to the eve of World War One.



In a recent Chatham House webinar with former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, 97-year-old Kissinger called on the U.S. to create a balance with existing global forces, adding

“if you imagine that the world commits itself to an endless competition based on the dominance of whoever is superior at the moment, then a breakdown of the order is inevitable. And the consequences of a breakdown would be catastrophic.”

The veteran diplomat urged the U.S. to understand that not every issue has “final solutions” and warned

“if we don’t get to an understanding with China on that point, then we will be in a pre-World War One-type situation in which there are perennial conflicts that get solved on an immediate basis but one of them gets out of control at some point.”

However, the idea that the U.S. should stop imposing its will on everyone else will not be easily accepted in Washington. This is attested by the sharp rhetoric and personal insults that U.S. President Joe Biden continually levels against his Russian and Chinese counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

High-ranking Chinese official Yang Jiechi told U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on March 18 in Alaska that “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

Then, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi boldly said days later on March 22 during their meeting in Beijing that they “jointly safeguard multilateralism, maintain the international system with the UN at its core and the international order based on international law, while firmly opposing unilateral sanctions as well as interference in other countries’ internal affairs.”

Kissinger’s career is washed in blood when we remember his backing of Pakistan during Bangladesh’s War of Independence despite the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people and mass rape; orchestrated a military coup in Chile to remove democratically elected Allende in favor of the Pinochet dictatorship; tacitly supported Indonesia’s mass killing of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese; and, blessed Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus that led to 200,000 Greek refugees without a right of return – among many other things.

However, his most recent statement about the U.S. and the international system is actually a mature proposal that would be beneficial for world peace if the Biden administration accepts his advice that the global order is changing. It is unlikely that Washington is ready to unilaterally end its hard and soft power aggression as it falsely believes it can maintain a unipolar order.



It is always difficult for Great Powers to accept that the world has changed, especially when it is to their detriment. The behavior of the Biden administration, which deliberately uses threatening and inappropriate rhetoric, demonstrates that it will not rationally accept a multipolar world system, especially since Russophobia and Sinophobia are on the rise.

Personal insults against Putin and Xi are an expression of American impotence, especially when we consider that the U.S. historically did not engage in this kind of rhetoric when it was at the zenith of its power. The U.S. is no longer the world’s sole superpower and its rivals are no longer accepting such aggression, which is exactly why the Chinese delegation that went to Alaska last month clearly stated that it does not accept any language of force.

An additional problem for the U.S. is whether its allies will strain their relations with China and Russia, and whether they will accept being pushed into conflicts with them. There are indications that the most important European countries will resist U.S. demands. This is evidenced by the Nord Stream 2 issue where American attempts to prevent its construction are being met with resistance from important European Union countries despite the endless complaints from minnows like Lithuania and Poland.

Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and U.S. Secretary of Defense, admitted in a recent interview with the Washington Post that sanctions against Russia do not any good for the U.S. In The National Interest, Robert Kaplan describes Russia as a “problem from hell” because it cannot be subdued. Kaplan offered reasons why it is necessary for Russia to “move away from its one-sided alliance with China” and find balance with the U.S.

Washington’s misguided policy of aggression to maintain a unipolar world order worked in the favor of China and Russia, especially in accelerating their cooperation. The West can no longer suppress China’s economic power or Russia’s military power. Military strategists in the West are aware that the Russo-Sino cooperation cannot be compensated by anything.

In the end, Washington will have to resort to a strategy resembling Kissinger’s suggestion of finding equilibrium, whilst also accepting the multipolar reality that has been established.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Infrastructure Bills Do Not Lead To Recovery, Only Increased Federal Control

FRIDAY, APR 09, 2021 - 11:40 PM
Authored by Alt-Market.us' Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group, GOLD

The concept of infrastructure stimulus has been hyped for decades as a kind of cure-all for economic decline. The propaganda runs parallel to the narrative of the “savior” of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In fact, one cannot examine the presidency of FDR without being bombarded with one sided worship of infrastructure spending and the “New Deal.”



The New Deal is often credited in left-leaning literature as being the singular cure for the depression, and FDR by extension has been handed messiah status among leftists. The New Deal is supposedly proof that massive socialized federal and central bank interventions through public works programs is an economic ambrosia. So, it’s not surprising that nearly every president since the Great Depression has argued for an unprecedented infrastructure bill when faced with economic collapse. A large portion of the public on both sides of the aisle has been trained to think these programs will save us.

Biden, in particular, has made historic stimulus spending the very first platform of his administration, and consistently cites FDR and Lyndon Johnson as patron saints of his infrastructure bill. If it worked for them, then obviously it will work for him… right?

Actually, the New Deal wasn’t a great deal
In reality, the public works and welfare programs of FDR in particular had very little to do with the ending of the Great Depression. In fact, the New Deal actually made the situation worse.

Roosevelt’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, lamented on May 6th, 1939 after two full terms of FDR’s presidency and stimulus programs that the New Deal was a complete failure. He stated to fellow Democrats during a session of the House Ways and Means Committee that:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”

High unemployment and declining living standards were an epidemic in the U.S. throughout the 1930s and well into World War II. The Census Bureau outlines the dismal state of the financial system and the U.S. consumer throughout this period in its “Historical Statistics of the United States.” By 1939 the stock market had crashed on multiple occasions, car sales imploded by 30%, business closures increased by 50%, and real estate foreclosures were still near record highs. The New Deal had achieved minimal benefits of limited scope, but not much else. For the average American, it was as if nothing had changed in a decade.

That said, for certain major companies and big banks, the gains were incredible. Companies like General Electric, IBM, Proctor and Gamble and JP Morgan saw endless profits during the Great Depression while buying up smaller competitors for pennies on the dollar. Those companies involved in public works programs siphoned government money like a black hole while very little trickled down to American workers. All in all, the Great Depression was a windfall for the corporate elite as wealth was consolidated and centralized into fewer and fewer hands.

So we have to ask, if the New Deal was a failure and did nothing to solve the depression problem, what did solve it? Some historians and journalists suggest the beginning of World War II and increased defense spending saved America. This is incorrect. As noted by Robert Higgs, the U.S. standard of living continued to decline throughout World War II. It was not the beginning of the war that saved America, but “After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.”

How the U.S. led the world out of the war
The U.S. was one of the only industrialized nations on the planet that had been left mostly untouched by the destruction. Because of this, all other nations had to turn to the U.S. for manufacturing during the long rebuilding process. In Europe, this process carried on well into the 1950s. The U.S. had very little competition, so much so that the U.S. dollar’s reserve status increased to the point of complete dominance. If you wanted access to manufactured goods, you had to trade with the U.S., and to trade with the U.S., you had to have a stockpile of U.S. dollars.

What I see today is a change in the flow of global commerce – in the opposite direction from the post war era. Yes, trillions of dollars in stimulus measures have created a short term reversal of the pandemic collapse. In fact, there is much evidence to suggest the economy is overheating. Price inflation is becoming rampant in numerous sectors.

In the meantime, U.S. Treasuries are being dumped by foreign investors and the dollar is in decline. Central banks are now dumping the dollar, decreasing their reserves to the lowest level since 1995.

China is now the world’s largest manufacturing base, leaving very little major industry on U.S. soil. In the background, globalists are calling for a “Great Reset” of the world economy that would centralize monetary policy even further and create the foundation of a cashless society built on a digital reserve currency system.

What’s the massive infrastructure spending really about?
I believe, according to the evidence as well as past failures like the New Deal, that Biden’s infrastructure plans will accelerate the U.S. collapse instead of reversing it. The U.S. GDP might increase, but only because it is calculated to include almost every dime the government prints out of thin air and spends.

Production of fiat money is not the same as real production within the economy.

Trillions of dollars in public works programs might create more jobs, but it will also inflate prices as the dollar goes into decline. So, unless wages are adjusted constantly according to price increases, people will have jobs, but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. This leads to stagflation, in which prices continue to rise while wages and consumption stagnate.

Another Catch-22 to consider is that if inflation becomes rampant, the Federal Reserve may be compelled (or claim they are compelled) to raise interest rates significantly in a short span of time. This means an immediate slowdown in the flow of overnight loans to major banks, an immediate slowdown in loans to large and small businesses, an immediate crash in credit options for consumers, and an overall crash in consumer spending. You might recognize this as the recipe that created the 1981-1982 recession, the third-worst in the 20th century.

In other words, the choice is stagflation, or deflationary depression.
Finally, I would point out that there may also be an ulterior motive for the deluge of federal dollars into state economies through public works. Currently, Conservative states are increasingly willing to risk the consequences of returning to business as usual, regardless of federal mandates. Resistance is building against pandemic-related restrictions.

Red states are also seeing a far superior financial recovery when compared to blue states. Blue states have sabotaged themselves with lockdowns while red states have remained more open. However, the Biden Administration is hell bent on keeping pandemic restrictions in place nationwide
What if infrastructure spending plans are designed to trap red states into compliance with future covid mandates? What if the goal is to bribe these states with trillions in stimulus, but only if they submit to federal authority? I suspect that Biden’s public works bill is partially intended to be a blue state bailout, and money will be withheld from any conservative state that refuses to conform to lockdowns.

Only time will tell what the true agenda is, but this much is undeniable given the facts at hand: Biden’s plan is either:

• an act of desperation,
• a deliberate attempt to pull the rug out from under the U.S. dollar and the economy to jump-start the globalist reset,
• or a scheme to lock state governments into obedience over pandemic restrictions.

Whatever else Biden’s “New New Deal” is, it is certainly NOT a plan for economic recovery.

 

[marsh]

From “Event 201” to “Cyber Polygon”: The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic”

Last year, the World Economic Forum teamed up with the Russian government and global banks to run a high-profile cyberattack simulation that targeted the financial industry, an actual event that would pave the way for a “reset” of the global economy.

unlimitedhangout.com

From “Event 201” to “Cyber Polygon”: The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic”

Last year, the World Economic Forum teamed up with the Russian government and global banks to run a high-profile cyberattack simulation that targeted the financial industry, an actual event that would pave the way for a “reset” of the global economy. The simulation, named Cyber Polygon, may have been more than a typical planning exercise and bears similarities to the WEF-sponsored pandemic simulation Event 201 that briefly preceded the COVID-19 crisis.

BYJOHNNY VEDMOREAND BYWHITNEY WEBB
FEBRUARY 5, 2021

BI.ZONE CEO Dmitry Samartsev presents at the first Cyber Polygon session at the World Economic Forum annual meeting, January 2020. Source: BI.ZONE

On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF), along with Russia’s Sberbank and its cybersecurity subsidiary BI.ZONE announced that a new global cyberattack simulation would take place this coming July to instruct participants in “developing secure ecosystems” by simulating a supply-chain cyberattack similar to the recent SolarWinds hack that would “assess the cyber resilience” of the exercise’s participants. On the newly updated event website, the simulation, called Cyber Polygon 2021, ominously warns that, given the digitalization trends largely spurred by the COVID-19 crisis, “a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect,” adding that “a secure approach to digital development today will determine the future of humanity for decades to come.”

The exercise comes several months after the WEF, the “international organization for public-private cooperation” that counts the world’s richest elite among its members, formally announced its movement for a Great Reset, which would involve the coordinated transition to a Fourth Industrial Revolution global economy in which human workers become increasingly irrelevant. This revolution, including its biggest proponent, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, has previously presented a major problem for WEF members and member organizations in terms of what will happen to the masses of people left unemployed by the increasing automation and digitalization in the workplace.

New economic systems that are digitally based and either partnered with or run by central banks are a key part of the WEF’s Great Reset, and such systems would be part of the answer to controlling the masses of the recently unemployed. As others have noted, these digital monopolies, not just financial services, would allow those who control them to “turn off” a person’s money and access to services if that individual does not comply with certain laws, mandates and regulations.

The WEF has been actively promoting and creating such systems and has most recently taken to calling its preferred model “stakeholder capitalism.” Though advertised as a more “inclusive” form of capitalism, stakeholder capitalism would essentially fuse the public and private sectors, creating a system much more like Mussolini’s corporatist style of fascism than anything else.

Yet, to usher in this new and radically different system, the current corrupt system must somehow collapse in its entirety, and its replacement must be successfully marketed to the masses as somehow better than its predecessor.

When the world’s most powerful people, such as members of the WEF, desire to make radical changes, crises conveniently emerge—whether a war, a plague, or economic collapse—that enable a “reset” of the system, which is frequently accompanied by a massive upward transfer of wealth.

In recent decades, such events have often been preceded by simulations that come thick and fast before the very event they were meant to “prevent” takes place. Recent examples include the 2020 US election and COVID-19. One of these, Event 201, was cohosted by the World Economic Forum in October 2019 and simulated a novel coronavirus pandemic that spreads around the world and causes major disruptions to the global economy—just a few weeks before the first case of COVID-19 appeared. Cyber Polygon 2021 is merely the latest such simulation, cosponsored by the World Economic Forum. The forum’s current agenda and its past track record of hosting prophetic simulations demands that the exercise be scrutinized.

Though Cyber Polygon 2021 is months off, it was preceded by Cyber Polygon 2020, a similar WEF-sponsored simulation that took place last July in which speakers warned of a coming deadly “pandemic” of cyberattacks that would largely target two economic sectors, healthcare and finance. Cyber Polygon 2020 was officially described as “international online training for raising global cyber resilience” and involved many of the world’s biggest tech companies and international authorities, from IBM to INTERPOL. There were also many surprising participants at the event, some of whom have been traditionally seen as opposed to Western imperial interests. For example, the person chosen to open the Cyber Polygon event was the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Mishustin, and its main host, BI.ZONE, was a subsidiary of the Russian-government-controlled Sberbank. This suggests that the overused “Russian hacker” narrative may be coming to an end or will soon be switched out for another boogeyman more suitable in light of current political realities.

Aside from Mishustin, WEF executive director Klaus Schwab and former UK prime minister Tony Blair participated in the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, which is due to be repeated annually and bears many similarities to 2019’s Event 201. Rather than preparing for a potential medical pandemic, Cyber Polygon 2020 focused on preparing for a “cyberpandemic,” one that mainstream media outlets like the New Yorker claim is “already underway.” Given the WEF’s recent simulations, powerful billionaire business owners and bankers appear to be poised to use both physical and digital pandemics to reform our societies according to their own design and for their own benefit.

The Architects of Cyber Polygon
According to Russian cybersecurity firm BI.ZONE, 120 organizations spread over twenty-nine countries took part in the two scenarios that were simulated at Cyber Polygon 2020, with as many as five million people allegedly having watched the livestream in over fifty-seven countries. Like many events that took place in 2020, the Cyber Polygon simulations were conducted online due to COVID-19 restrictions. Together with the World Economic Forum, BI.ZONE, a subsidiary of Sberbank, manages the Cyber Polygon project. Sberbank’s largest shareholder, as of last year, is the Russian government, and it is thus often described by English-language media outlets as a state-controlled bank.

The 2020 event was launched with an address from the prime minister of the Russian Federation Mishustin, who has a history of courting Western tech companies prior to entering politics. In 1989, Mishustin graduated from Moscow State Technological University (generally known as Stankin) with a qualification in systems engineering. During the 1990s, he worked at the International Computer Club, a nonprofit organization with the goal of “attracting Western advanced information technologies” to Russia. Between 1996 and 1998, Mishustin was the chairman of the board of the ICC, but the company was liquidated in 2016.

Between 2010 and 2020, he served as head of the Federal Taxation Service of the Russian Federation. Even though he had never shown any previous political ambitions, on January 16, 2020, he was appointed prime minister of the Russian Federation by an executive order issued by President Putin.

During Mishustin’s welcoming remarks at the WEF’s Cyber Polygon 2020, the Russian PM warned of the need to create public policy to “strengthen the digital security of critical activities without undermining the benefits from digital transformation in critical sectors that would unnecessarily restrict the use and openness of digital technology.” The statement suggests that “unnecessary restrictions” could become seen as necessary in time.

Mishustin goes on to explain that Russia’s post-COVID economic recovery will be based on the “increasing digitalization of that economy and government,” adding that “we will drastically increase the number of available digital public services and introduce fundamentally new support measures for digital businesses.” He also stated that “Russia has developed a common national system for identification and the prevention of cyberattacks with the government agency’s information systems linked in the system.” He also addressed the Cyber Polygon audience about the international community needing to come together to prevent a “global cyberfraud pandemic.”

Sberbank, the largest Russian banking institution and former Soviet savings monopoly, which was originally founded by Nicholas I, was an official host of the Cyber Polygon 2020 event alongside the World Economic Forum. As reported in the Economist in January 2021, the Russian banking giant has begun to reimagine its business in an effort to become a consumer-technology giant.

Sberbank has spent around $2 billion on technology and acquisitions, including the acquisition of internet media group Rambler, which it fully acquired in 2020.

As late as December 30, 2020, Sberbank acquired Doma.ai, which describes itself as “a convenient real estate management platform.” On June 15, 2020, Sberbank bought 2GIS, a map, navigator, and business directory with over 42 million monthly active users. Sberbank’s twenty-two investments, eleven as the lead investor, include some of the most used services in Russia, and its clear intention is to become a one-stop digital shop for all services. The bank also became the owner of one of the largest data-processing centers in Europe when the South Port data-processing center opened in November 2011, replacing the existing thirty-six regional data centers. Sberbank is set to be the world’s first bank to launch its own cryptocurrency, Sbercoin, and digital finance “ecosystem” this March. It notably announced the coming Sbercoin, a “stablecoin” tied to the Russian ruble, just a few weeks after the Cyber Polygon 2020 exercise.

Sberbank’s alliance with the WEF and prominence at Cyber Polygon 2020 was underscored at the event during the welcoming remarks delivered by Klaus Schwab. Schwab gave special thanks to Herman Gref, a member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and Sberbank’s CEO and also issued the following dire warning:

We all know, but still pay insufficient attention to, the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyberattack which would bring to a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyberattack. We have to ask ourselves, in such a situation, how could we let this happen despite the fact we had all the information about the possibility and seriousness of a risk attack. Cybercrime and global cooperation should be on the forefront of the global agenda.

Similar warnings were heard at a 2019 simulation that was also cosponsored by the World Economic Forum, Event 201. Event 201, which simulated a global pandemic just months before the COVID-19 crisis, presciently warned in its official documentation: “The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering.” In contrast to similar simulations conducted in the past, Event 201 championed a “public-private partnership” approach to combatting pandemics, with a focus on engaging “the private sector in epidemic and outbreak preparedness at the national or regional level.” The WEF is, among other things, a major evangelist for the merging of the public and private sectors globally, describing itself as the “international organization for private-public cooperation.” It is thus unsurprising that their latest disaster simulation, which focuses on cyberattacks, would promote this same agenda.

The Speakers at Cyber Polygon 2020
Aside from Schwab and Mishustin, twenty others took part in Cyber Polygon 2020, including some big names from the top echelons of the political elite. First off, Herman Gref engaged in discussion with former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who has been pushing for digital identity systems for decades. Blair straightforwardly told the CEO of Sberbank that biometric digital identity systems will “inevitably” be the tools that most governments will use to deal with future pandemics. Blair, discussing the coronavirus pandemic with Gref, advocated the harshest of lockdown measures, saying the only alternative to biometric digital identities is to “lockdown the economy.”

Next, Sebastian Tolstoy, Ericsson’s general director for Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia and current chairman of the Tolstoy Family Foundation in Sweden, dialogued with Alexey Kornya. Kornya is president, CEO, and chairman of the management board of Mobile TeleSystems. He previously worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers and AIG-Brunswick Capital Management at North-West Telecom. Tolstoy and Kornya presented a segment at Cyber Polygon 2020 entitled “Building a Secure Interconnected World: What Is the Role of the Telecom Sector?” in which they discussed the importance of digital communication and connectivity to our modern way of living.

In the next segment, Nik Gowing, BBC World News presenter between 1996 and 2014 and founder and director of Thinking the Unthinkable, spoke with Vladimir Pozner, journalist and broadcaster, on the subject of “fake news” in a conversation that was actually somewhat refreshing in its arguments and approach.

Stéphane Duguin, the CEO of the CyberPeace Institute, a Geneva-based company that describes itself as “citizens who seek peace and justice in cyberspace,” then gave a talk to the millions of viewers watching the simulation. The CyberPeace Institute, funded by Microsoft, Facebook, Mastercard, and the Hewlett Foundation, among others, claims to help their customers “increase digital resilience and the capacity to respond to and recover from cyberattacks.” The core backers of the CyberPeace Institute are also among the top backers of the Global Cyber Alliance, which unites the public sectors of the US, UK, and France with multinational corporations and intelligence-linked cybersecurity firms, employing “a coordinated approach and nontraditional collaboration” to “reduce cyber risk.”

Part 1 of 3

 

[marsh]

Part 2 of 3
Duguin, who is also on the advisory board of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, recently launched the Cyber4Healthcare initiative, a “free” cybersecurity service to healthcare providers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cyber4Healthcare initiative includes as its main partners BI.ZONE as well as Microsoft and the Global Cyber Alliance. This is yet another suspicious Microsoft-linked free cybersecurity service currently being pitched to and adopted by healthcare providers around the world at a time when warnings of a coming cyberattack on healthcare systems globally are becoming more public.

Dhanya Thakkar, senior vice president of AMEA at Trend Micro, who advertises himself online as a top ASEAN LinkedIn “cybersecurity influencer,” and Wendi Whitmore, vice president of IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence, next discussed the topic “Know Your Enemy: How Is the Crisis Changing the Cyberthreat Landscape?” IBM’s presence is notable due to the company’s longstanding relationship with the CIA, dating back to the early Cold War. The company has become so entrenched that the CIA recently recruited their chief information officer directly from IBM Federal. Before joining IBM, Whitmore held executive positions at California-based cybersecurity technology companies CrowdStrike and Mandiant, the latter acquired by FireEye in a stock and cash deal worth in excess of $1 billion. Whitmore was responsible for “professional services.”

Notably, both CrowdStrike and Mandiant/FireEye are the key organizations leading the investigation into the recent SolarWinds hack, which US intelligence has blamed on a “Russian hacker” without providing any evidence. Whitmore began her career as a special agent conducting computer crime investigations with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

Jacqueline Kernot, the Australian “partner in cybersecurity” for Ernst and Young, and Hector Rodriguez, senior vice president and regional risk officer for Visa, next discussed how to prepare for cyberattacks. Kernot worked for over twenty-five years as a military officer for the Australian Intelligence Corps and spent two years working at IBM’s Defence|Space|Intelligence for Tivoli Software in the UK with “international responsibilities within the UK Ministry of Defence, Defence Primes, and NATO.” Ernst and Young and Visa, alongside other WEF-linked corporations such as Salesforce, are well represented on the Vatican’s exclusive Council for Inclusive Capitalism. The Council, like the WEF, calls for the reconstruction of the economic system to be more “sustainable,” “inclusive,” and “dynamic” by “harnessing the power of the private sector.”

Troels Ørting Jørgensen , chairman of the advisory board of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, and Jürgen Stock, the Danish secretary general of INTERPOL, also spoke together at Cyber Polygon regarding the changes in global cybercrime over the course of the previous year. A few months after appearing at Cyber Polygon, the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority announced in an official statement that “Troels Ørting has notified the Ministry of Business Affairs that he is resigning from the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority’s board.” Citing unnamed sources, Danish financial news service FinansWatch reported that during the time between 2015 and 2018, when he was employed as head of security at Barclays bank, Ørting had been a key figure in the hunt for a whistleblower who had exposed the same criminal activity Ørting railed against at Cyber Polygon.

The man speaking alongside Ørting, Jürgen Stock, is a former German police officer, criminologist, and lawyer. He was elected for a second term as secretary general of INTERPOL in 2019, a term that generally lasts for five years. Craig Jones, the cybercrime director at INTERPOL, also joined the discussion at Cyber Polygon 2020. The New Zealander spent twenty-seven years in law enforcement and is considered an expert in cybercrime investigations. He previously held several senior-management positions in UK law enforcement, most recently at the National Crime Agency.

Petr Gorodov and John Crain were briefly interviewed at the Cyber Polygon 2020 event. Gorodov is head of the General Directorate for International Relations and Legal Assistance of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation and also sits on the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s files. He is on the Requests Chamber of INTERPOL, which examines and decides on requests for access to data as well as requests for correction and/or deletion of data processed in the INTERPOL information system. John Crain is chief security, stability, and resiliency officer at ICANN, the nonprofit internet security corporation. He is currently responsible for the management of the L-Root server, one of the internet’s thirteen root servers, making his inclusion at the simulation particularly notable. At Cyber Polygon 2020 he promoted a “long-term solution of working together in the cybersecurity community.”

The final word at Cyber Polygon 2020 was delivered by Stanislav Kuznetsov, deputy chairman of the executive board at Sberbank. He is also a board member for the Sberbank charity foundation Contribution to the Future, a project that seeks to get Russian schoolchildren from grades seven through eleven interested in AI (artificial intelligence), machine learning, and data analysis and to help them develop math and programming skills. Kuznetsov studied at the Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

The Main Event: Enter the Polygon

Participants in the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, Source: Cyber Polygon
The simulation component of Cyber Polygon 2020 saw 120 teams from twenty-nine countries take part in the cybersecurity technical simulation. During the online event, participants “exercise[d] the actions of the response team in a targeted attack aimed at stealing confidential data and thus resulting in damage to the company reputation.” Two teams, the Red and the Blue, went head-to-head in the simulations where the Red Team, made up of the training organizers from BI.ZONE, simulated cyberattacks and the Blue Team members attempted to protect their segments of the training infrastructure. The actual simulation was made up of two scenarios in which the various subgroups making up the teams could gain points.

The first scenario, called Defence, made the Cyber Polygon participants practice repelling an active APT (advanced persistent threat) cyberattack. The scenario’s objective was stated as being to “develop skills for repelling targeted cyberattacks on a business-critical system.” The simulation’s fictional organization’s virtual infrastructure included a service that processes confidential client information. This service became the subject of interest to an APT group that planned to steal confidential user data and resell it on the “darknet” to financially benefit and damage the company’s reputation. The APT group studied the target system in advance and discovered several critical vulnerabilities. In the scenario, the cyber “gang” plans to attack on the day of the exercise. The participants involved were judged on their ability to cope with the attack as fast as possible, to minimize the amount of information stolen, and to maintain service availability. Blue Team participants could apply any applications and tools to protect the infrastructure and were also allowed to fix system vulnerabilities by improving the service code.

In the second scenario, called Response, the teams had to investigate the incident using “classic forensics and threat hunting techniques.” Based on the information gathered, participants had to compose a dossier that would help law enforcement agencies locate the criminals. The second scenario’s objective was to develop skills in incident investigation using the scenario in which cybercriminals gained access to a privileged account through a successful phishing attack.

When the BI.ZONE team released the results of the simulation they intentionally avoided using the real names of the organizations so as not to “set off a competition between the participants and keep their results confidential.”

However, the teams could later compare their results with the others by using a basic scoreboard, and the hosts could analyse the crucial data showing various organizational weaknesses of each of the participating teams/institutions.

The final report states that the results showed that “banks and companies from the IT industry demonstrated the highest resilience. Security assessment expertise in these sectors is quite well developed, with classic forensics and threat hunting widely applied.” In lay terms, the teams from banks and the IT industry seemed to be better prepared than most other sectors for investigating and hunting down threats. However, all the teams involved proved to be less than able when it came to the initial defense from a cyberattack, with the BI.ZONE report stating that “27% of the teams had difficulties earning points for the first scenario, which allows us to conclude that some of the team members lack or have insufficient expertise in security assessment and protection of web applications.” On the subject of threat hunting, the report goes on to say that “21% of the teams could not earn a single point for the second round of the second scenario. This was attributed to ‘Threat Hunting’ being a relatively novel approach and the majority of organisations lacking experience of applying its techniques in practice.”

 

[marsh]

Part 3 of 3

The Cyber Polygon 2020 event revealed the weakness in human-led defensive response and resilience as it relates cyberdefense. This outcome is convenient for hi-tech cybersecurity companies like BI.ZONE that wish to highlight the superiority of AI-driven cybersecurity products in comparison to “inefficient” human workers. Also, it should be noted that BI.ZONE’s gaining knowledge of global institutional weaknesses through cyberdefense training could be useful intelligence for their parent company, Sberbank, and in turn the largest shareholder of Sberbank, the Russian government.

Bringing Russia in from the Cold?
Although Russian Federation authorities are quite used to being out in the cold both politically and physically, there appears to be a change in the usual order of nations. Russia’s inclusion as the leader in such an important global cybersecurity initiative is a bit surprising, especially after Russia has been the scapegoat of choice for any cyberattack committed against any Western power for several years, most recently with the SolarWinds hack in the US. Yet, there was no outcry in the West over Cyber Polygon 2020, in which a company that is majority owned by the Russian government was able to gain direct knowledge of the cyberdefense weaknesses of major global institutions, banks, and corporations through their hosting of the exercise.

The complete absence of the “Russian hacker” narrative at Cyber Polygon as well as Russia’s leadership role at the event suggests either that a geopolitical shift has taken place or that the Russian hacker narrative commonly deployed by intelligence agencies in the US and Europe is mainly meant for the general public and not for the elite figures and policymakers in attendance at Cyber Polygon.

Another possibility for Russia no longer being treated as the perpetual enemy of cyberspace is that it is entirely on board with both the official coronavirus narrative and the allegedly imminent cyberpandemic. Cyber Polygon 2020 appeared, in part, to be a Russian charm offensive that was welcomed by the powerful elite. Tony Blair, who once held out the hand of false reconciliation on behalf of the international community to Colonel Gaddafi, has often been involved in these exercises of international diplomacy on behalf of the elites in the years since he left public office. His involvement in the exercise may have been meant to facilitate support among Western WEF-aligned governments for even greater Russian inclusion in the Great Reset. Part of this is due to the WEF-led effort to bring BRICS nations like China and Russia into the Great Reset fold because it is essential for their agenda’s success on a global scale. Now, Russia is pioneering this new model of supposedly national finance systems that the WEF supports through Sberbank’s creation of a digital monopoly not only of financial services but all services within the Russian Federation.

Cyber Polygon 2020 was both an ad for pro-Russian relations and a promotional exercise for Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Some of the people who took part and supported the Cyber Polygon event are involved at the highest levels of cyber intelligence; some may have even been unofficial representatives of their national state intelligence apparatus. The decisions of several national governments to participate directly in the WEF-led Great Reset is no “conspiracy theory.” For instance, the incoming Biden administration sent its climate envoy, John Kerry, to the WEF annual meeting last month, where Kerry underscored the US commitment to the Great Reset agenda and the associated Fourth Industrial Revolution that seeks to automate most jobs being currently performed by humans. With the governments of Russia, China, the US, the UK, Israel, Canada, and India, among others, on board with this transnational agenda, it becomes deeply unsettling that high-ranking operatives in both the public and private sectors joined the WEF to conduct a simulation of a crisis that would clearly benefit the Great Reset agenda.

As previously mentioned, the WEF cosponsored a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic just months before the actual event. Soon after the COVID-19 crisis began in earnest last March, Schwab noted that the pandemic crisis was just what was needed to launch the Great Reset as it served as a convenient catalyst to begin overhauling economies, governance, and social society on a global scale. If the destabilizing events simulated at Cyber Polygon do come to pass, it will likely be similarly welcomed by the WEF, given that a critical failure in the current global financial system would allow the introduction of new public-private “digital ecosystem” monopolies such as those being built in Russia by Sberbank.

This effort by Sberbank to both digitize and monopolize access to all services, both private and public, may be appealing to some because of its apparent convenience. However, it will also be emblematic of what we can expect from Schwab’s Great Reset—monopolies of fused public- and private-sector entities disguised by the term “stakeholder capitalism.” What the general public does not realize yet is that they themselves will not be included among these “stakeholders,” as the Great Reset has been designed by the bankers and wealthy elite for the bankers and the wealthy elite.

As for the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, the coming cyberpandemic is being prophetically thrown in our faces just as the pandemic exercise was prior to the actual disease’s appearance. Such prophetic warnings are coming not only from the WEF, however. For instance, the head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, Yigal Unna, warned last year that a “cyber winter” of cyberattacks “is coming and coming faster than even I suspected.” In the cyber directorate, Unna works closely with Israeli intelligence agencies, including the infamous Unit 8200, which has a long history of electronic espionage targeting the US and other countries and which has been responsible for several devastating hacks, including the Stuxnet virus that damaged Iran’s nuclear program. Israeli intelligence is also poised to be among the greatest beneficiaries of the Great Reset due to the strength of the nation’s hi-tech sector. In addition, last month saw the UAE’s central bank following Cyber Polygon’s lead by conducting its first-ever cyberattack simulation in coordination with the Emirati private-finance sector. Corporate media outlets, for their part, began this year by claiming that “cyberattacks may trigger the next crisis for banks” and, as of February 1, that “the next cyberattack is already underway.”

Some will say that a “cyberpandemic” is an inevitable consequence of the quickly developing hi-tech world in which we live, but it still fair to point out that 2021 is the year that many have been predicting for the financial destruction of big institutions that will lead to new economic systems that align with the Great Reset. The inevitable collapse of the global banking system, resulting from the off-the-charts corruption and fraud that has run rampant for decades, is likely to be conducted through a controlled collapse, one that would allow wealthy bankers and elites, such as those that participated in Cyber Polygon, to avoid responsibility for their economic pillaging and criminal activity.

This is especially true for Cyber Polygon participant Deutsche Bank, whose inevitable collapse has been openly discussed for years due to the bank’s extreme corruption, fraud, and massive exposure to derivatives. In late 2019, months before the COVID-19 crisis began, the CEO of Deutsche Bank warned that central banks no longer had tools that could adequately respond to the next “economic crisis.” It is certainly telling that entirely new banking systems, such as Sberbank’s soon-to-be-launched digital monetary monopoly, began to be developed just as it began to be publicly acknowledged that central banks’ traditional means of responding to economic calamities were no longer viable.

A massive cyberattack, such as that simulated at Cyber Polygon 2020, would allow faceless hackers to be blamed for economic collapse, thus absolving the real financial criminals of responsibility. Furthermore, due to the difficult nature of investigating hacks and the ability of intelligence agencies to frame other nation states for hacks they in fact committed themselves, any boogeyman of choice can be blamed, whether a “domestic terror” group or a country unaligned with the WEF (for now, at least) like Iran or North Korea. Between the well-placed warnings, simulations, and the clear benefit for the global elite intent on a Great Reset, Cyber Polygon 2020 appears to have served not only its publicly stated purpose but its own ulterior motives.

 

[marsh]

Pope Francis Calls for “Global Governance” and Vaccines for All. - The National Pulse

Pope Francis has officially called for “global governance” and held up the goal of “universal vaccines” in an April 4 letter—a letter in which God is mentioned only once, but vaccines mentioned three times.The letter was sent to the Spring 2021 virtual meeting (April 5-11) between the globalist...

thenationalpulse.com

Pope Francis Calls For “Global Governance” And Vaccines For All.

• APRIL 11, 2021
• CATHERINE SALGADO

Pope Francis has officially called for “global governance” and held up the goal of “universal vaccines” in an April 4 letter—a letter in which God is mentioned only once, but vaccines mentioned three times.

The letter was sent to the Spring 2021 virtual meeting (April 5-11) between the globalist World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and delivered through Peter Cardinal Turkson, Prefect of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

In the letter, the Pope says the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world to “confront a series of grave and interrelated socio-economic, ecological, and political crises.”

Francis brought up one of his favorite topics, climate change, claiming, “We are, in fact, in debt to nature itself, as well as the people and countries affected by human-induced ecological degradation and biodiversity loss.”

Francis’s language sounds similar to that of the globalist founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, who designed the anti-Catholic “Great Reset,” a plan heavily dependent on a “green financial agenda.” Francis has sent addresses to WEF already four times during his eight years as pope and has permitted a Vatican roundtable at WEF’s annual Swiss conference site, Davos.

Pope Francis also refers to the secular fraternity outlined in his recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti, and calls for “a justly financed vaccine solidarity,” which, according to him, is necessary to fulfill “the law of love and the health of all.”

“Here,” he continues, “I reiterate my call to government leaders, businesses and international organizations to work together in providing vaccines for all, especially for the most vulnerable and needy.”

Pope Francis recently called for a “new world order” and, according to the letter, this world order should be globalist, as he says, “There remains an urgent need for a global plan that can create new or regenerate existing institutions, particularly those of global governance, and help to build a new network of international relations for advancing the integral human development of all peoples.”

Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church are not mentioned at all in the letter, while God is mentioned only once—in the letter’s last line.

 

[marsh]

Is Klaus Schwab the Most Dangerous Man in the World?

townhall.com

Is Klaus Schwab the Most Dangerous Man in the World?

John Mac Ghlionn
|
Posted: Apr 10, 2021 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Source: Beto Barata/Brazil's presidential press office via AP

Internationally, levels of personal freedom continue to decrease; COVID has, of course, played a role, but the downward spiral started long before the pandemic.

For freedom to flourish, democracies are required. Around the world, however, established democracies are in decline. Again, the decline was occurring long before the pandemic hit.

Democracy, we’re told, dies in darkness. No, democracy dies in Davos.

If in doubt, please read the following:

"Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, 'our city'. I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service.'

These are not lines from an episode of “Black Mirror.” No, these lines come directly from the World Economic Forum website. Founded in 1970, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is arguably the most influential platform in the world. Each year, some of the most influential figures in politics and tech gather for a meeting in Davos. The most recent meeting occurred in January, and the topics discussed are of profound importance.

As Anthony P. Mueller, a professor of economics, warns, “The main thrust of the forum is global control. Free markets and individual choice do not stand as the top values, but state interventionism and collectivism. Individual liberty and private property are to disappear from this planet by 2030.”

Not me, you say. I didn’t sign up for this. In the world of biopolitics, where the lines between human biology and politics become indistinguishable, your vote really doesn’t matter. In fact, you don't have a vote. This isn’t the same loss of freedom that, say, the likes of Alexei Navalny is experiencing right now. No, this loss of freedom is attritional in nature; death by a thousand cuts.

Now, before I am accused of conspiratorial thinking, let me point you in the direction of The Commons Project. Supported by the WEF, The Commons Project is in the process of creating mandatory vaccine passports. According to the project’s site, for “travel and trade to return to pre-pandemic levels, travelers will need a secure and verifiable way to document their health status as they travel and cross borders. Countries will need to be able to trust that a traveller’s record of a COVID PCR test or vaccination administered in another country is valid.” In order to travel internationally, millions of people will have no option but to acquiesce. Are humans becoming nothing but algorithmic afterthoughts?

The writing is very much on the wall, and it reads: Obey your Master.

One could argue that master’s name is Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

When we think of dangerous people, we tend to think of men with guns, or Charles Manson types sporting maniacal grins. However, if COVID has taught us anything, it’s that the greatest dangers are invisible. We never see them coming, and there’s little we can do when they arrive. The most dangerous people today are not the ones armed with guns; they are the people armed with ideas.

On the WEF website, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, are ominously listed as agenda contributors. Klaus Schwab, though, is the agenda setter.

What does his agenda entail?

In 2018, the German wrote a book called Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With the merging of physical, digital, and biological worlds, this revolution is like nothing that came before. All other revolutions relied on human input. This revolution, however, eliminates millions, if not billions, of people from the employment equation.

If you are skeptical, please feel free to check out Stretch, the robot, Amazon’s latest design. It can move up to 800 boxes per hour. Furthermore, it requires no payment, validation, sick leave, or health insurance. It’s hyper-efficient. It doesn’t talk back. And Stretch doesn’t need a bathroom break.

Although the tech gurus regularly discuss the ways in which technology will help humans (instead of replacing us), there are plenty of reasons for concern. When it comes to matters of employment, psychiatrists, lawyers, scientists, and other top-tier professions appear to be safe, but those involved in manufacturing, retail services, courier services, and general transportation (bus drivers, taxi drivers, lorry drivers, etc) certainly aren’t. In other words, people who generally lack a college degree. Considering only 6.7 percent of the world’s population are college educated, the future looks bleak.

While the eradication of some jobs is both necessary and laudable, most jobs are not inherently dangerous. They give people a sense of purpose, and a sense of purpose is essential to living life to its fullest. Universal Basic Income (UBI) may help to put food on the table, but it can never address the problem of purpose. Where will our purpose come from when so many jobs are gone?

The disingenuous “retrain the masses” arguments simply don’t work, either. Retrain people for what? In the future, with recursive self-improvement, AI systems will be able to learn from their mistakes and ultimately become smarter. No need for human input. In fact, no need for humans.

What is the final goal? Utopia, we’re told. But remember, the Greeks defined utopia not as a heavenly place, but as “no-place.”

And this seems fitting, as in the future, there simply won’t be any place for millions of humans to go. If in doubt, just ask Klaus Schwab, the most powerful – and arguably, the most dangerous - man in the world.

 

[marsh]

Members Of Biden’s ‘Environmental Justice’ Advisory Council Have History Of Radicalism, Claiming Fossil Fuels Are Racist | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

Members Of Biden’s ‘Environmental Justice’ Advisory Council Have History Of Radicalism, Claiming Fossil Fuels Are Racist

By Ashe Schow
•Apr 10, 2021 DailyWire.com

Alex Wong/Getty Images

At the end of last month, the Biden administration announced the members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which would “provide advice and recommendations to the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council on how to address current and historic environmental injustices.”

Twenty-six people were named to the council, but at least four of them have made radical statements connecting fossil fuels to racism.

Susana Almanza, for example, is the director of People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources (PODER), an environmental justice organization based in Austin, Texas. Hilltop Views, the student news website of St. Edward’s University, profiled Almanza, noting that she has a Che Guevara poster in her office and said that her organization is “fighting big monsters; they’re not little ones,” referring to oil companies.

Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, addressed a recent Department of Interior public forum on the federal oil and gas program and implored the Department to review the program “with an analysis of how it perpetuates environmental racism and the racial inequity of climate vulnerability.” She also insisted that “racial discrimination that is central to oil and gas operations.”

In an interview with Vox back in February, Wright linked energy development to slavery and Jim Crow.

“People often forget the legacies of slavery, of Jim Crow segregation and out of that chain, laws that were deeply entrenched within the social structure of the Southern environment that worsened our quality of life,” Wright told the outlet.

“That legacy resulted in communities that had been inundated with toxic facilities, impacting our health, the value of the homes where people live, causing them to have higher cancer rates, and to eventually be relocated from within the midst of these facilities.”

Another member of the council, Jade Begay, communications and digital director at the Indigenous Environmental Network, previously called climate change “cultural genocide” in an article for EcoWatch.

“Climate change isn’t just a scientific issue—it’s an issue of racial inequity, economic inequity and cultural genocide,” she wrote. She also tied climate change to “colonialism.”

“It’s essential to note that Indigenous vulnerability and resilience to climate change cannot be detached from the context of colonialism, which created both the economic conditions for climate change and the social conditions that continue to limit the capacity for Indigenous resistance and resilience. Both historically and in the present, climate change itself is thoroughly tied to colonial practices. Greenhouse gas production over the last two centuries hinged on the dispossession of Indigenous lands and resources,” Begay wrote.

In an interview with Gal-Dem, Begay insisted that “the most important action needed now is to stop all new fossil fuel development.”

Finally, Tom Cormons wrote for the Green Scene Blog that “fossil fuels…are one of the greatest threats to our children’s future.”

Keep in mind, the advisory council was announced at the same time CNN reported that the Biden administration was seeking to purge dozens Trump-appointed advisers from two Environmental Protection Agency science panels.

 

[marsh]

Joe Biden considers ordering climate confessions - Washington Examiner

President Joe Biden is readying an executive order that would require companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, special climate envoy John Kerry said this week.Kerry didn’t elaborate on the details of the order or the timing, but the move would fulfill a promise Biden made...

www.washingtonexaminer.com

Joe Biden considers ordering climate confessions

by Abby Smith, Energy and Environment Reporter |
April 12, 2021 06:27 AM

President Joe Biden is readying an executive order that would require companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, special climate envoy John Kerry said this week.

Kerry didn’t elaborate on the details of the order or the timing, but the move would fulfill a promise Biden made on the campaign trail to require all public companies to report their emissions and climate-related risks.

Already, the Biden administration has taken a number of actions to bolster capacity at agencies such as the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Federal Reserve to address the risks climate change poses to the financial system. Last month, the SEC asked for input on establishing a regime for climate disclosures.

The early moves from Biden's team on climate finance have already drawn fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers, who say the administration's efforts are a politically motivated attempt to choke off capital to fossil fuels.

Kerry, during remarks Wednesday at a virtual event hosted by the International Monetary Fund, said climate disclosure requirements will shift the allocation of capital.

“Suddenly, people are going to be making evaluations considering long-term risks to their investment based on the climate crisis,” Kerry said. “And that will encourage new investment, as well as laws in countries,” such as tax incentives to support clean energy technologies, he added.

Kerry’s remarks came following comments from IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva saying that overseeing and standardizing climate disclosures is an important role for global financial entities.

“We have to make the invisible visible — the transition risk that banks are carrying because they’re invested in high-carbon activities that, over time, are going to be phased out and the physical risks, investments in highly vulnerable coastal areas or in agriculture that could be affected by floods or droughts,” Georgieva said.

Understanding what risks banks and companies face is paramount, she said, and the IMF is aiming to stress test those levels of risk to determine how well the financial system could handle them. Georgieva said big investment firms are also demanding disclosures so they can understand their own potential risks.

Environmental advocates have broadly welcomed the Biden administration’s actions thus far on climate finance. They see disclosure requirements as a necessary component of the U.S. approach to curbing climate change.

“That alone will not get us to a net-zero future, but we will never, never get to a net-zero future without mandatory, across-the-board climate disclosure,” said Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets.

“We are anticipating the executive order and are hopeful that it will send a positive and strong signal across the marketplace,” he added.

The Obama administration in 2010 issued SEC guidance on climate disclosures, but such reporting wasn’t mandated, so whether and how much companies report their emissions and climate risks has been largely inconsistent.

Recently, however, many investors, including major asset managers such as BlackRock, have called on governments to require climate disclosures, especially as those investors work to align their own portfolios with the Paris climate agreement.

Ben Ratner, a senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the Biden administration now has an opportunity to move away from “scattershot” climate disclosures.

“Raising the bar will help the market accurately price climate risk and further the competitiveness of American businesses on the evolving global stage,” Ratner said. “Sector-level reporting guidance, including companies’ climate lobbying, are important elements of a robust U.S. response.”

U.S. agencies are also increasingly engaging on the international stage on climate finance. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is co-chairing the G20’s sustainable finance group. The Federal Reserve joined the Network for Greening the Financial System, a global network of central banks working on climate change, late last year. The SEC is participating in efforts by the International Organization of Securities Commissions to improve the consistency of climate disclosures globally.

Rothstein, though, said the Biden administration shouldn’t wait for a “world standard” for climate disclosure.

“Literally, parts of our country are on fire, other parts are seeing droughts, other people are seeing ice storms, so we need to act and act quickly,” he added. While it’s important to coordinate globally, he said, the United States can’t “wait for international consensus.”

 

[marsh]

Joe Biden puts China on notice by proposing electric car cash windfall for the communist state

President Biden’s push to fill the nation’s roads with electric vehicles would be a boon for China and would increase America’s dependence on the communist power, which dominates the globe in advanced battery production and the mining of rare minerals needed to make those batteries.

www.washingtontimes.com

Biden puts China on notice by proposing electric car cash windfall for the communist state


President Biden wants 500,000 charging stations installed across the country to fuel electric cars that are “made in America,” but the lack of domestically produced rare earth minerals required for such an endeavor would make the U.S. heavily reliant on ... more >

By Haris Alic - The Washington Times - Sunday, April 11, 2021

President Biden’s push to fill the nation’s roads with electric vehicles would be a boon for China and would increase America’s dependence on the communist power, which dominates the globe in advanced battery production and the mining of rare minerals needed to make those batteries.

The White House is working with congressional Democrats to ensure its infrastructure package includes at least $174 billion for “made in America” electric vehicles. At least $40 billion would be used to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations across the country.

“I’m proposing a plan for the nation that … will grow the economy, make us more competitive around the world, promote our national security interests and put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years,” Mr. Biden said recently.

But instead of putting the communist superpower on notice, the administration’s embrace of electric vehicles would benefit China, experts say.

“At the moment, Beijing leads every other country in the production of electric vehicle batteries,” said Dan Kish, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. “They control the resources and the technology that U.S. automakers will need to import in abundance to make electric cars a viable alternative” to gas-powered engines.

China produced 72% of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in 2019, and the U.S. accounted for 9%. The batteries are used most frequently to power electric vehicles, according to the Energy Department.

The Chinese regime’s dominance is the result of long-range investment and planning.

Beijing is on track to develop at least 107 lithium-ion battery megafactories by 2030. At least 53 are already up and running. Meanwhile, the U.S. is expected to develop nine megafactories, three of which are now operational.

If those trends continue, then most of the electric vehicles built in the U.S. will rely on key components imported from China.

Mr. Kish, who served as an energy and environmental policy adviser to Paul D. Ryan when he was House speaker, told The Washington Times that President Biden was “jumping the gun on electric vehicles before having the capacity necessary to build and sustain them” without China’s resources.

More troubling is that China is producing most of the rare earth minerals and chemicals required for electric vehicle batteries.

“There is not enough lithium being produced in the U.S. to support new electric vehicle battery manufacturing,” said USA Rare Earth CEO Pini Althaus. “Outside of the non-China supply chain, there are not enough materials now for one electric vehicle manufacturer, let alone all of the electric vehicle manufacturers in the world.”

Mr. Althaus’ company is working to bolster the domestic supply of minerals critically needed for electric vehicles and other green energy projects. It is finding success but still faces an uphill battle.

China produced 80% of the raw materials used for advanced batteries, a 2019 report by the London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence found. Lithium, as well as cobalt, nickel and graphite, are all critical for producing electric vehicles.

China is estimated to control 80% to 90% of the global rare earth minerals market. The U.S. imports about 80% of its rare earth minerals and compounds from the communist power.

China demonstrated its dominance in the sector in 2018 when it produced 60% of all-electric vehicles sold worldwide.

Part of the reason for China’s supremacy in the electric vehicle market is that the U.S. is not taking full advantage of its chemical resources.

The nation has a significant number of resources required to build lithium-ion batteries, including cathodes and anodes.

The three cathode extraction plants in the U.S. produce just 1% of the chemical globally. China, on the other hand, produces more than 65% of all cathodes and 82% of all anodes.

The U.S. is at a significant risk of becoming even more dependent on China if the Biden administration’s push toward electric vehicles is successful.

“With gas-powered cars, at least there are options from where you can get the petroleum that is eventually refined into gasoline,” Mr. Kish said. “It can come from the Middle East, Canada or even the Gulf Coast. With electric cars, you don’t have that flexibility.”

That reality is something the Trump administration attempted to address. During his first year in office, President Trump issued an executive order establishing a federal strategy on securing sufficient critical mineral supplies outside of China.

Mr. Trump expanded that effort after the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the frailty of U.S. supply chains. In mid-2020, he issued an executive order declaring that America’s reliance on China for rare earth minerals posed a national emergency.

“Our over-reliance on countries like China that are not reliable trading partners for critical supply chains threatens our economic and national security,” Dan Brouillette, energy secretary in the Trump administration, wrote in an op-ed at that time.

Mr. Biden has followed the Trump administration’s lead.

On his first day in the White House, Mr. Biden issued his own executive order to bolster the domestic stockpile of critical minerals. The administration also is proposing that its upcoming infrastructure package include money for research and development in mining.

“America is in a race against economic competitors like China to own the [electrical vehicle] market, and the supply chains for critical materials like lithium and cobalt will determine whether we win or lose,” Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said recently.

Mr. Althaus told The Washington Times that the Biden administration is off to a “good start” but it will take significantly more time and resources to end the U.S. reliance on China for electric vehicle batteries and rare earth minerals.

 

[marsh]

Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash

Photovoltaic panels are a boon for clean energy but are tricky to recycle. As the oldest ones expire, get ready for a solar e-waste glut.

www.wired.com

Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash

Photovoltaic panels are a boon for clean energy but are tricky to recycle. As the oldest ones expire, get ready for a solar e-waste glut.
https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/#

PHOTOGRAPH: RICHARD NEWSTEAD/GETTY IMAGES

THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.

But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.

“If we don’t mandate recycling, many of the modules will go to landfill,” said Arizona State University solar researcher Meng Tao, who recently authored a review paper on recycling silicon solar panels, which comprise 95 percent of the solar market.

Solar panels are composed of photovoltaic (PV) cells that convert sunlight to electricity. When these panels enter landfills, valuable resources go to waste. And because solar panels contain toxic materials like lead that can leach out as they break down, landfilling also creates new environmental hazards.

Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years, and the world didn’t start deploying solar widely until the early 2000s. As a result, a fairly small number of panels are being decommissioned today. PV Cycle, a nonprofit dedicated to solar panel take-back and recycling, collects several thousand tons of solar e-waste across the European Union each year, according to director Jan Clyncke. That figure includes solar panels that have reached the end of their life but also those that were decommissioned early because they were damaged during a storm, had some sort of manufacturing defect, or got replaced with a newer, more efficient model.

When solar panels reach their end of their life today, they face a few possible fates. Under EU law, producers are required to ensure their solar panels are recycled properly. In Japan, India, and Australia, recycling requirements are in the works. In the United States, it’s the Wild West: With the exception of a state law in Washington, the US has no solar recycling mandates whatsoever. Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope. “Right now, we’re pretty confident the number is around 10 percent of solar panels recycled,” said Sam Vanderhoof, the CEO of Recycle PV Solar, one of the only US companies dedicated to PV recycling. The rest, he says, go to landfills or are exported overseas for reuse in developing countries with weak environmental protections.

Even when recycling happens, there’s a lot of room for improvement. A solar panel is essentially an electronic sandwich. The filling is a thin layer of crystalline silicon cells, which are insulated and protected from the elements on both sides by sheets of polymers and glass. It’s all held together in an aluminum frame. On the back of the panel, a junction box contains copper wiring that channels electricity away as it’s being generated.

At a typical e-waste facility, this high-tech sandwich will be treated crudely.

Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. (Because the vast majority of that mixture by weight is glass, the resultant product is considered an impure, crushed glass.) Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the US is between $12 and $25—after transportation costs, which “oftentimes equal the cost to recycle.”

At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid-waste landfill.

“We believe the big blind spot in the US for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue,” Meng said. “It’s on the order of a 10-to-1 ratio.”

If a solar panel’s more valuable components—namely, the silicon and silver—could be separated and purified efficiently, that could improve that cost-to-revenue ratio. A small number of dedicated solar PV recyclers are trying to do this. Veolia, which runs the world’s only commercial-scale silicon PV recycling plant in France, shreds and grinds up panels and then uses an optical technique to recover low-purity silicon. According to Vanderhoof, Recycle PV Solar initially used a “heat process and a ball mill process” that could recapture more than 90 percent of the materials present in a panel, including low-purity silver and silicon.

But the company recently received some new equipment from its European partners that can do “95 plus percent recapture,” he said, while separating the recaptured materials much better.

Some PV researchers want to do even better than that. In another recent review paper, a team led by National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists calls for the development of new recycling processes in which all metals and minerals are recovered at high purity, with the goal of making recycling as economically viable and as environmentally beneficial as possible. As lead study author Garvin Heath explains, such processes might include using heat or chemical treatments to separate the glass from the silicon cells, followed by the application of other chemical or electrical techniques to separate and purify the silicon and various trace metals.

“What we call for is what we name a high-value, integrated recycling system,” Heath told Grist. “High-value means we want to recover all the constituent materials that have value from these modules. Integrated refers to a recycling process that can go after all of these materials, and not have to cascade from one recycler to the next.”

In addition to developing better recycling methods, the solar industry should be thinking about how to repurpose panels whenever possible, since used solar panels are likely to fetch a higher price than the metals and minerals inside them (and since reuse generally requires less energy than recycling). As is the case with recycling, the EU is out in front on this: Through its Circular Business Models for the Solar Power Industry program, the European Commission is funding a range of demonstration projects showing how solar panels from rooftops and solar farms can be repurposed, including for powering ebike charging stations in Berlin and housing complexes in Belgium.

Recycle PV Solar also recertifies and resells good-condition panels it receives, which Vanderhoof says helps offset the cost of recycling. However, both he and Tao are concerned that various US recyclers are selling second-hand solar panels with low quality control overseas to developing countries. “And those countries typically don’t have regulations for electronics waste,” Tao said. “So eventually, you’re dumping your problem on a poor country.”

For the solar recycling industry to grow sustainably, it will ultimately need supportive policies and regulations. The EU model of having producers finance the take-back and recycling of solar panels might be a good one for the U.S. to emulate. But before that’s going to happen, US lawmakers need to recognize that the problem exists and is only getting bigger, which is why Vanderhoof spends a great deal of time educating them.

“We need to face the fact that solar panels do fail over time, and there’s a lot of them out there,” he said. “And what do we do when they start to fail? It’s not right throwing that responsibility on the consumer, and that’s where we’re at right now.”

 

[marsh]

Biden’s Infrastructure Bill: Change Zoning to Diversify Neighborhoods

President Biden's infrastructure bill includes funds for “diversifying” neighborhoods through changing zoning laws and financial incentives.

www.breitbart.com

Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Includes Making ‘Diverse’ Neighborhoods Across America Through Zoning Laws
1,147

icholakov/Getty Images
PENNY STARR11 Apr 20212,291

The focus of President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill is allegedly to address aging infrastructure across the country, but the massive bill covers a vast amount of other spending, including money for “diversifying” neighborhoods.

This portion of Biden’s American Jobs Plan would change zoning laws to end single family home neighborhoods and allow for multiple unit “affordable” or low-income rental housing.

According to the White House Fact Sheet, the housing effort is “an innovative new approach to eliminate state and local exclusionary zoning laws, which drive up the cost of construction and keep families from moving to neighborhoods with more opportunities for them and their kids”:

“For decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities,” the fact sheet states.

“President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

In contrast to former President Donald Trump’s Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Opportunity Zones program that partnered the federal government with private sector investors to create less rental housing and increase home ownership, Biden’s plan uses tax breaks for state and local governments, the Fact Sheet states:

“[Biden] is calling on Congress to pass the innovative, bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA). Offering $20 billion worth of NHIA tax credits over the next five years will result in approximately 500,000 homes built or rehabilitated, creating a pathway for more families to buy a home and start building wealth.”

Reuters reported on the shift from free markets to government control:

President Joe Biden is seeking to ease a national affordable housing shortage by pushing local governments to allow apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes.
The $5 billion plan could inject the White House into a debate pitting older homeowners against younger workers seeking to gain a foothold in the most expensive U.S. cities, where many families spend a third or more of their income on housing.

The proposal, which would provide financial incentives to local governments that change zoning laws restricting many neighborhoods to single-family homes, is an example of the sort of broad social policy changes Democrats are including in Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill.

Biden’s plan even designates which workers will benefit from this housing project — “put union building trade workers to work upgrading homes and businesses to save families money,” the Fact Sheet states.

The New York Times published an Ezra Klein Show interview with Brian Deese, Biden’s director of the National Economic Council, “the nerve center that coordinates economic policy across the executive branch.”

“I’m interested in this idea of using money to either reward or even to change local capacity and even laws on the ground sometimes by running the competitions,” Klein said. “In the housing section of the bill, you want to build a ton of new housing, but it’s also connected, at least in some cases, to getting cities to change their zoning laws, such that it is easier to build that housing.”

“That’s a pretty interesting policy,” Klein said. “Tell me about how that might work in practice.”

“Yeah,” Deese answered. “And just to be clear, this is not a federal pre-emption of local zoning laws or anything. In fact, these are ideas that build off ideas that, again, Republicans and Democrats have at least put forward congressionally over the course of the last couple of years.”

“The idea is, basically, we need to build more housing in the U.S. in the right places. And if we can do that, it has an important economic multiplier, because it allows people to move to opportunity and move to jobs that are potentially ladders into higher-paying careers in areas where those jobs exist,” Deese said.

“Part of the opportunity in doing that is to have more enlightened zoning policies at the local level. But using investment can help sometimes get over the chicken-and-the-egg problem: Changing zoning policies to allow for development is harder to do if you don’t have some investment or some match to help fund the construction of that housing.”

“So the idea is relatively basic, which is to hold out that carrot but then put those resources in the areas where there’s going to be the biggest bang,” Deese said.

“And in some cases, that’s going to be because you’ve gotten a change in zoning that would unlock more opportunity to build housing in the right places.”

Forbes magazine reported on Biden’s plan, which includes impacting neighborhoods that want to retain single family housing, which critics call NIMBY — Not in My Backyard — homeowners.

“Any proposal that works to reduce restrictive zoning and provides municipalities incentives to embrace affordable housing is a positive,” Dudley Benoit, executive vice president of Alliant Capital, an affordable housing-focused tax credit syndication firm, said in the Forbes report. “NIMBYism and restrictive zoning drive up the cost of affordable housing by limiting where affordable housing can be built.”

“This also leads to excluding low-income renters from communities that may have better resources [like schools],” Benoit says. “It remains to be seen if locales that have fought for decades to prevent affordable housing can be incentivized to change their ways, but it is worth a try and could have a substantial impact if successful.”

[COMMENT: This is how the federal government reaches out to subsume local government. The feds do not have zoning authority, so they pass a conditional grant program that buys jurisdiction from local government. This type of zoning, BTW, is a SMART Growth policy. Zoning is founded on the "police powers" of local government to protect public health and safety. The Dems have grossly expanded this to include the concept of promoting public welfare to the point of social engineering and community planning gone wild.]

 

[marsh]

https://headlineusa.com/globalist-companies-climate-agenda/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=globalist-companies-climate-agenda

Globalist Corporations Urge Biden to Pursue ‘Bold’ Climate Agenda

'An effective national climate strategy will require all of us...'
ByAssistant Editor
April 13, 2021

Coca-Cola's iconic polar bear mascots / IMAGE: Coca-Cola via YouTube
(Headline USA) More than 300 far-left corporations and investors, including such giants as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Coca-Cola, are calling on the Biden administration to set an ambitious climate change goal that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The target would nearly double the nation’s previous commitment and require dramatic changes in the power, transportation and other sectors.

It is unclear how such goals might affect their bottom lines, although doing so would certainly create dramatic paradigm shifts for the fossil-fuels and other energy industries, as well as likely impacting the everyday lives of Americans in unwelcome ways.

President Joe Biden is considering options for expected carbon reductions by 2030 ahead of a virtual climate summit the United States is hosting later this month.

The so-called Nationally Determined Contribution is a key milestone as Biden moves toward his ultimate goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Biden has promised to reveal the nonbinding but symbolically important 2030 goal before the Earth Day summit opens April 22.

“A bold 2030 target is needed to catalyze a zero-emissions future, spur a robust economic recovery, create millions of well-paying jobs and allow the U.S. to ‘build back better’ from the pandemic,” the businesses and investors said in a letter to Biden.

“New investment in clean energy, energy efficiency and clean transportation can build a strong, more equitable and more inclusive American economy,” they wrote.

An ambitious 2030 target would guide the federal government’s approach to sustainable and resilient infrastructure, as well as zero-emissions vehicles and buildings, and “would inspire other industrialized nations to set bold targets of their own,” the group wrote.

Besides the tech and consumer products giants, companies with major energy holdings, including Exelon, General Electric, PG&E and Edison International, also signed the letter.

Meanwhile, dozens of European lawmakers, business executives and union leaders on Tuesday also urged the United States to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half in the coming decade.

They called for a trans-Atlantic alliance to tackle climate change and achieve a “just and sustainable transition” toward a low-carbon economy.

The letter from U.S. business leaders to the Democratic president comes as fissures between corporate America and the Republican Party have opened over corporate America’s embrace of a woke, globalist agenda driven largely by pressure from China and partisan neo-Marxist activist groups that have leveraged the propagandist mainstream media.

The most recent flashpoint was in Georgia, where a new Republican-backed law reasserted the state legislature’s authority to set voting law in the wake of controversy during the 2020 election.

Leftists launched a full-tilt pressure campaign in response, demanding denunciations from Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola, whose headquarters are in the state, and resulting in Major League Baseball pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta.

However, leaders including President Donald Trump have now urged counter-boycotts of the virtue-signaling corporations involved. And the MLB move is expected mainly to have an adverse impact on businesses and workers in Atlanta, which is heavily populated with minorities, thus undermining the claims that it was done in support and solidarity with the black community.

More than 100 business leaders participated in a Zoom call last weekend to discuss how to oppose the efforts being waged by GOP legislatures nationwide to prevent the “irregularities” that occurred under the auspices of pandemic emergencies from being codified into regular practice.

Those loosened restrictions, which often targeted battleground states won by Trump in 2016, resulted in reports of widespread vote fraud involving both mail-in absentee ballots and voting machines.

Options suggested by the woke companies included stopping political donations and holding off in investments in states that approve the laws.

Conservatives, already overwhelmed by the mass migration from blue states like California and New York to red ones like Georgia and Texas—accompanied by regular demands that they capitulate to the leftist agenda—may welcome the boycott effort if it prompts yet another left-wing exodus.

As with the climate policies, many corporations would do harm to their own profit margins by returning to states with less favorable tax policies.

However, multinational companies with heavy Chinese backing are likely to offset those losses by expanding outside the US.

A recent report revealed, in fact, that some US-based environmental activism groups have been linked to China, promoting policies that would be harmful to US economic interests but favorable to its chief economic rival.

On climate, the business leaders told Biden they “applaud your administration’s demonstrated commitment to address climate change head-on, and we stand in support of your efforts.”

They claimed that millions of Americans were already feeling the impacts of climate change, citing the severe winter storm that caused blackouts in Texas and other states, deadly wildfires in California and record-breaking hurricanes in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

“The human and economic losses of the past 12 months alone are profound,” they wrote. “Tragically, these devastating climate impacts also disproportionately hit marginalized and low-income communities who are least able to withstand them. We must act now to slow and turn the tide.”

While Biden has reentered the U.S into the Paris climate accord and made climate action a pillar of his presidency, more action is needed, the corporate executives said. “An effective national climate strategy will require all of us,” they told Biden, but “you alone can set the course by swiftly establishing a bold U.S. 2030 target.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

 

[marsh]

Front Page Featured | MRCTV

cnsnews.com

Major News Outlets Pledge to Begin Calling ‘Climate Change’ a ‘Climate Emergency’
By Craig Bannister | April 13, 2021 | 11:36am EDT

(Screenshot)

A number of major news organizations worldwide, ranging from Scientific American and The Columbia Journalism Review to The Guardian and Al Jazeera, have signed a pledge to begin referring to “climate change” as a “climate emergency” in their reporting.

“Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term ‘climate emergency’ in its coverage of climate change,” the publication announced Monday in a tweet to its 3.9 million followers touting “the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape.”

“We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So,” the headline of a Scientific American commentary published Monday declares. Claiming that that climate change is “the biggest environmental emergency to beset the earth in millennia,” the piece announces the name change:

“Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term ‘climate emergency’ in its coverage of climate change.”

Scientific American reports that the media organizations have signed a statement “coordinated by Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative with more than 400 media partners.” Signatories include:

• Scientific American,
• Columbia Journalism Review,
• The Nation,
• The Guardian,
• Noticias Telemundo,
• Al Jazeera,
• Asahi Shimbun, and
• La Repubblica

“Why ‘emergency’? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, humanity must take action immediately,” the statement says.

“The media’s response to Covid-19 provides a useful model,” the statement advises, noting how media were able to control the narrative and compel Americans to comply with safety mandates by referring to the pandemic as an “emergency.”

While the statement does not expressly forbid the use of the term “climate change,” it requires that it be referred to as being a “climate emergency.”

Climate Coverage Now’s full statement of agreement to coordinate climate coverage is presented below:

COVERING CLIMATE NOW STATEMENT ON THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

Journalism should reflect what the science says: the climate emergency is here.

It’s time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here.

This is a statement of science, not politics.

Thousands of scientists—including James Hansen, the NASA scientist who put the problem on the public agenda in 1988, and David King and Hans Schellnhuber, former science advisers to the British and German governments, respectively— have said humanity faces a “climate emergency.”

Why “emergency”? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, humanity must take action immediately. Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires, and ice melt of 2020 routine and could “render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable,” warned a recent Scientific American article.

The media’s response to Covid-19 provides a useful model. Guided by science, journalists have described the pandemic as an emergency, chronicled its devastating impacts, called out disinformation, and told audiences how to protect themselves (with masks, for example).
We need the same commitment to the climate story.

We, the undersigned, invite journalists and news organizations everywhere to add your name to this Covering Climate Now statement on the climate emergency.

(Screenshot)

[COMMENT: Why "emergency"? Because (1) fear genders compliance; (2) Constitutionally protected individual rights can be suspended; (3) force may be used under the state's "police powers" to protect injury or danger to the public by individual action. ]

 

[raven]

this is a train wreck and the only thing that can be said is "Brace for Impact"
<EOM>

 

[Dozdoats]

Nine more years.

I pray I have checked out before then.

 

[von Koehler]

When the Sun releases a massive solar eruption, like in the1859 Carrington event, these idiots will find out what a real climate crisis is all about.

CO 2 is plant food.

 

[marsh]

Nolte: Democrat-Run Suburbs Will Be Destroyed Under Biden Infrastructure Plan

If Democrats are in charge of your suburban zoning laws, get ready for the death of your quality of life and single family housing.

www.breitbart.com

Nolte: Democrat-Run Suburbs Will Be Destroyed Under Biden Infrastructure Plan
2,696

KIBOCK DO via Unsplash
JOHN NOLTE15 Apr 20211,142

If Democrats are in charge of your suburban zoning laws, get ready for the death of your quality of life.

His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” plan includes provisions to annihilate suburban single family housing. This from the far-left USA Today pretty much sums it up:

Biden’s proposal would award grants and tax credits to cities that change zoning laws to bolster more equitable access to affordable housing. A house with a white picket fence and a big backyard for a Fourth of July barbecue may be a staple of the American dream, but experts and local politicians say multifamily zoning is key to combating climate change, racial injustice and the nation’s growing affordable housing crisis.

Remember when Donald Trump warned us Biden was determined to destroy the suburbs and the fake-media fact checkers told us that was a lie? Well, here you go… Already the Biden administration and Democrats have declared the suburbs “racist,” and now they intend to punish the racist suburbs by zoning them for “affordable housing,” which means rental units and lower property values and instability for your daily quality of life:

Biden wants cities to put more apartment buildings and multifamily units, such as converted garages, in areas traditionally zoned for single-family housing….

Current zoning laws that favor single-family homes – known as exclusionary zoning – have disproportionately hurt low-income Americans. Many of them can’t afford to buy a big lot of land, leaving them trapped in crowded neighborhoods earmarked in the past for Black and brown residents, while white families were able to move to single-family areas in the suburbs.

How is Biden going to convince local politicians, who are in charge of their own zoning laws, to destroy their own suburbs? Bribes, paid for by U.S. taxpayers:

Federal policy was designed to protect people from discrimination when they are renting or buying a home, but regulating land use and zoning is largely a function of local government. Biden’s infrastructure plan could significantly increase local budgets decimated during the COVID-19 economic recession – an attractive proposal for some mayors who already support affordable housing policies but want cash to cover the cost of these projects.

Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, said his city plans to “take full advantage” of the federal dollars to bolster a 10-year master planning process and increase access to affordable housing for Black and brown residents.

They make it about race, but plenty of black people are fleeing Democrat-run shithole cities for the suburbs:

The second trend is the racial and ethnic transformation of suburbia. Part of this is due to immigration, but another part is the suburbanization of African Americans. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of African Americans living in suburban Atlanta increased from 27 percent to 78 percent; while in greater Washington D.C it rose from 25 percent in 1970 to 82 percent. Those trends have continued to accelerate[.]

And now all the hard work and financial investment white and black Americans have poured into their suburban home is at real risk under this malicious plan.
For those of you who might not understand what’s going on here, let me explain with a single word: stability.

What you want where you live, what you want more than anything else, is stability. Rental units undermine stability. You never know who your neighbors are going to be. Your neighbors are changing all the time. Eventually you will be stuck with lousy neighbors.

Example: When three empty lots across the street from my house went up for sale, the wife and I went into debt to buy them Why? Because of the stability that comes with those lots remaining empty. We now don’t have to worry about who our three new neighbors might be. It also makes a nice greenspace for the neighborhood. All the neighbors are invited to use it, and few things make us happier than when they do.

Further, the only problems we have ever had in this neighborhood come from a rental house. Every year or two we get new renters in that house. The current renters are great. In the past, though, we’ve had problems with those renters and those living closest to them dealt with the worst of it.

The problems is this… There are good renters and there are lousy renters, and people (of all colors and creeds) move to the single family-zoned suburbs to escape the stress that comes from that reality. This is why rental units decrease your property values. Rental units automatically mean a lower quality of life and a lower quality of life means your property is worth less.

Now imagine those who paid a premium on their home to enjoy a single-family zoning quality of life and will now suffer a loss when the Democrats who run their local government sticks it in their ass to get all this federal money.

Of course Democrats want to destroy the suburbs. Of course, they do… Name one thing that’s fun and enjoyable Democrats are not determined to destroy… Sports, entertainment, news media, education, and now your idyllic neighborhood.

This is what fascists do. They are all miserable people who can’t stand the thought of anyone living peaceful, fulfilling and happy lives.

If this bill passes and Democrats are in charge of your local zoning laws, you are screwed.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Remembering Solyndra - A $524 Million Green Energy Failure

THURSDAY, APR 15, 2021 - 07:50 PM
Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via RealClearPolicy,

Considering President Joseph Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, Americans should first review the taxpayer money that was spent on projects in 2009 and learn from the ones that were massive failures.



Biden asked Congress to invest $35 billion in green energy leadership to see “technology breakthroughs that address the climate crisis and position America as the global leader in clean energy technology and clean energy jobs,” according to the White House fact sheet.



But look as recently as 2009, when Congress passed the the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act during President Barack Obama’s administration.

That $831 billion spending package made lots of promises, including to save jobs and create new ones, but waste — and possibly some fraud — tainted the outcomes.

Often referenced as a what-not-to-do in stimulus financing, solar panel start-up Solyndra cost taxpayers $570 million.

The company received $535 million in loans from the 2009 stimulus and a $25 million tax break from California's agency for alternative energy.

Solyndra said it would use the $535 million to invest in generating solar energy.

But a report from the Inspector General’s Office later found that the company misled the U.S. Department of Energy in its application and that the department did not manage and approve Solyndra’s loan guarantee properly.

In 2011, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, laid off its 1,100 employees and ended its operations.

About six months before closing shop, the company also received $10.3 million in long-term credit from the U.S. Export-Import Bank for its exports to Belgium.
To prevent a repeat, the American public and Congress should ask questions of Biden’s recent proposal, vet the companies and projects, get bipartisan support, and then audit “every dime” of the spending on the projects.

The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

 

[TammyinWI]

Those corporations are not going to like it when the number of people spending money on their products or services greatly decreases, because a great big part of the plan to reduce emissions is killing off a great amount of the global pop., in fact most of us.

This is currently in play, and chemtrails spewing out who knows-all-what, including aluminum nano-particles that people breathe in (masks do not deter this) and that soaks in through the skin helps their agenda.

With the smart meters, the 5G, the 5G satellites and the nano-particles, which I read are in "the jabs," too, people will get an unnatural bad reaction, and immune systems will be tried and taxed.

This all is very, very evil, and Kissinger is just as bad as if not worse than Gates, Soros, Obama, Clinton, etc. too many to mention.

 

[marsh]

Warning: ‘Keys of the Food System’ Being Handed Over to Big Tech

A misguided technological revolution is about to sweep through food systems, but civil society and social movements can stop it in its tracks.

childrenshealthdefense.org

04/16/21
Warning: ‘Keys of the Food System’ Being Handed Over to Big Tech

A misguided technological revolution is about to sweep through food systems, but civil society and social movements can stop it in its tracks.

By Nick Jacobs
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/food-system-big-tech/#disqus_thread
Imagine a world where algorithms are used to optimize growing conditions on every fertile square meter of land. Where whole ecosystems are re-engineered. Where drones and surveillance systems manage the farm. Where farmers are forced off the land into e-commerce villages.

Imagine a world where food is treated like a strategic asset and food transit routes are militarized. Where powerful governments and their flag-bearer corporations control resources and food supplies across vast economic corridors.

Imagine a world where many foods are grown in petri dishes, vats, and bioreactors. Where people’s eating habits are invisibly nudged using reams of metadata they have unknowingly surrendered via digital wallets. Where AI assistant apps decide on people’s food intake based on genetic information, family history, mood, and data readings from inside their waste bins and digestive systems.

This may sound like science fiction. But the “4th industrial revolution” is already sweeping through food systems. For proof, we need look no further than the changing complexion of the agri-food sector, where mergers and market disruptions are occurring at a dizzying pace.

E-commerce platforms like Amazon and China’s JD.com are now among the top ten retailers globally. With agribusiness increasingly reliant on cloud, AI and data processing services, big tech firms like Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, Google, and Baidu are moving into food production. Meanwhile, Blackrock and 4 other asset management companies own 10 – 30% of the shares of the top agri-food firms.

With climate change, environmental breakdown and pandemics wreaking havoc on food systems over the coming years, the “silver bullet” solutions offered by the new agri-food giants may prove irresistible to panicking policymakers. This year’s UN Food Systems Summit — arising from a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum — will be a showcase for corporate-led “solutions.”

In other words, the keys of the food system are already being handed over to data platforms, e-commerce giants and private equity firms. This could mean dismantling the diversified food webs that sustain 70% of the world’s population and provide environmental resilience. It could mean putting the food security of billions of people at the mercy of high-risk AI-controlled farming systems and opaque supply corridors.



And yet, there is nothing inevitable about this dystopian future. In reality, divisions will grow among corporations and between companies, workers and consumers, as ecosystems refuse to be tamed, people refuse to be nudged, technologies malfunction and environmental and social tipping points draw closer.

Farmers, food workers and their allies have recognized the crossroads we are at. They are already organizing in new ways to defend their spaces, their livelihoods, and their future — starting with mobilization around the Food Systems Summit.

In scanning the landscape for clues about the next quarter century, we found that what could be achieved by civil society and social movements is just as “disruptive” as the plans of the agri-food giants. A “Long Food Movement” — bringing together farmers, fishers, cooperatives, unions, grassroots organizations and international NGOs — could shift $4 trillion from the industrial chain to food sovereignty and agroecology, cut 75% of food systems’ GHG emissions and deliver incalculable benefits to the lives and livelihoods of billions of people over the next 25 years.

The challenge is vast, and many of the victories will be hard-won, from new treaties to regulate and recall failing technologies, to shifting the $720 billion of annual producer subsidies towards agroecological farming and territorial markets.

But most of the tools are in the hands of civil society and social movements. Much can be achieved by amplifying existing approaches, linking different struggles together across sectors, scales and strategic differences and thinking five, 10 or even 20 years ahead.

Over a 25-year timeframe, huge progress could be made by multiplying the farmer field schools and seed exchanges that underpin agroecological systems; by sustaining the current trend lines towards local, regional and ethical purchasing and flexitarian diets; by developing “early listening systems” and emergency food security blueprints so we are ready to act when harvest failures, pandemics and other shocks hit; by deploying apps to instantaneously decode negotiating texts, and to apprise consumers of the ‘true cost’ of their food and even by syncing funding cycles and civil society gatherings to make cross-sectoral collaboration the norm.

Both of these futures remain viable — but for how much longer? Travel any further down the path laid by agribusiness, and the momentum will soon be unstoppable. Once systems have been structured around specific production models and technological trajectories, it is very difficult to change the course. GMOs offer a cautionary tale: instead of rethinking chemical-intensive monocultures in the face of widespread environmental and social damage, the “green revolution” was followed by a “gene revolution” that reinforced its logic.

We often hear that we have 10 harvests left before climate change becomes unstoppable. We may have less than 5 years to prevent the full-scale digitization and automation of food systems, and only 6 months to prevent corporate takeover of global governance at the Food Systems Summit. Neither short-term actions nor long-term planning can wait. That’s why we need a Long Food Movement.

 

[marsh]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1382853672254717953

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1382853672254717953
.15 min

 

[marsh]

Is the World Economic Forum's 'Cyber Polygon 2020' Predicting an Upcoming Internet Attack? | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft

After COVID-19 should we be worried about a world cyberattack that impacts the Internet and shuts it down?

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Is the World Economic Forum’s ‘Cyber Polygon 2020’ Predicting an Upcoming Internet Attack?

By Joe Hoft
Published April 17, 2021 at 3:00pm

After COVID-19 should we be worried about a world cyberattack that impacts the Internet and shuts it down?

Natural News reported:
In 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) conducted a simulation called “Cyber Polygon 2020” that predicted a coming global catastrophe caused by a worldwide “cyber pandemic.”

Much like how billionaire eugenicist Bill Gates’ “Event 201” predicted the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) before it happened, Cyber Polygon 2020 predictively programmed a coming supply-chain cyberattack similar to the SolarWinds attack that occurred earlier this year.

In 2019 Bill Gates and Company held an exercise known as Event 201. It was put together only a few months before COVID-19 hit the United States. The Event claims this about its exercise:

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.


The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly propose these recommendations.

The Event 201 ‘exercise’ mirrored the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the World Economic Forum conducted a simulation of a global cyber pandemic related to the shutting down of the Internet on a mass scale:

View: https://youtu.be/-0oZA1B3ooI
1:42 min

Should we now be prepared for a cybersecurity ‘pandemic’ that shuts down the Internet? Time will tell.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Globalists Will Need Another Crisis In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails

FRIDAY, APR 16, 2021 - 11:40 PM
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

It might sound like “US exceptionalism” to point this out (…and how very dare I), but even if the globalist Reset is successful in every other nation on Earth, the globalists are still failures if they can’t secure and subjugate the American people. As I’ve noted many times in the past, most of the world has been sufficiently disarmed, and even though we are seeing resistance in multiple European nations against forced vaccination legislation and medical tyranny, it is unlikely that they will have the ability to actually repel a full on march into totalitarianism. Most of Asia, India and Australia are already well under control. Africa is almost an afterthought , considering Africa is where many suspect vaccines are tested.

America represents the only significant obstacle to the agenda.



Conservative Americans in particular have been a thorn in the side of the globalists for generations, and it really comes down to a simple matter of mutual exclusion: You cannot have an openly globalist society and conservative ideals at the same time in the same place. It is impossible.

Conservatives believe in limited government, true free markets, individual liberty, the value of life, freedom of speech, private property rights, the right to self defense, the right to self determination, freedom of religion, and the non-aggression principle (we won’t harm you unless you try to harm us). None of these ideals can exist in a globalist world because globalism is at it’s core is the pursuit of a fully centralized tyranny.

There are people on this planet that are not satisfied to merely live their lives, take care of their families and make their mark peacefully. They crave power over all else. They desperately want control over you, over me, over everything, and they will use any means at their disposal to get it. I would compare it to a kind of drug addiction; globalists are like crack addicts, they can never get enough power, there is always something more to take.

They tell themselves and others that they are “philanthropists”, that “they know what is best” for the rest of us. They believe themselves superior and therefore it is their “destiny” to dictate and micro-manage society for the “greater good” of us all. But really, when we witness their methods it becomes clear that they have no noble aspirations. They have no empathy or honor. They don’t care about the average human being, or the environment, or the economy or society in general.

They only care about themselves and their delusions of grandeur. These people are a cancer on the rest of civilization.

They seem to be particularly obsessed with deconstructing and sabotaging America in the pursuit of their global Reset. Real philanthropists would not have a problem if someone didn’t want to accept their “charity”, but psychopaths cannot abide a group of people rejecting them and their ideology. You are not allowed to walk away from them. You are not allowed to do things your own way. You must be forced to comply. The agenda only works if EVERYONE submits.

Unfortunately for the globalists, the Reset is not working out for them everywhere. In the US, the agenda is failing miserably compared to Asia and parts of Europe.

As the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is so fond of reminding us, the Covid pandemic is the “perfect opportunity” to push forward the globalist plans for a total Reset of human economy and society. To the globalists, the crisis is a panacea, a doorway to their version of a better world.

They love the pandemic, they are not distressed by it.

The problem is, it’s not doing enough damage or terrifying enough people.

Consider the Event 201 coronavirus pandemic simulation – It was held by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation only two months before the real thing “coincidentally” happened in early 2020. The pandemic war game was less about saving lives and more about how the elites planned to keep the public under control. The suppression of alternative media and censorship in social media was discussed at great length. Dissenting voices need to be silenced if the Reset is going to prevail.

One factor within the Event 201 simulation that never played out, though, was the WEF projections on deaths. The war game suggested at least 65 million initial deaths due to the pandemic. Early projections on the death rate suggested 2% to 3% of the population or more. The same projections were repeated by the UN’s World Health Organization when the real pandemic was first revealed to the public.

Instead, Covid-19 has been a letdown for the globalists, with a tiny death rate of around 0.26% outside of nursing homes. Meaning, 99.7% of the population has nothing to worry about from covid. Millions of Americans are becoming savvy to the situation and are refusing to comply with mandates over a virus that is a non-threat.

Instead of backing off of the Reset scheme, the globalists are continuing to double down. Why? Because they have no other choice. They let the cat out of the bag and bloviating big-mouths like Klaus Schwab told the world exactly what the plan is. If they retreat now, they might NEVER get another chance to implement a world centralization plan; a massive grift which requires medical tyranny in order to prevent rebellion.

You see, if the death rate had been dramatically higher than 0.26% and covid represented a legitimate threat, then maybe a larger portion of the US population would have been on board with longer term restrictions and medical passports. Maybe not. The fact remains that 40% of deaths have been in nursing homes among patients with preexisting illnesses, the death rate outside of these facilities is minimal, the mask mandates have been proven completely ineffective and the states that have remained open and removed mask mandates have FALLING death and infection rates when compared to states that are enforcing lockdowns.

The fear narrative is falling apart. States across the US are opening and are refusing to implement useless mandates. In my home state of Montana, legislators and the governor are passing laws that forbid the enforcement of medical passports. Even major corporations are not allowed to demand vaccine passports from customers or employees.

On top of that, 40% to 50% of the US population in polls are refusing to comply with the vaccine rollout or medical passports. Why take a vaccine for a virus that 99.7% of the population is unaffected by anyway?

The jig is up. The globalists are going to need another crisis if they hope to enforce further lockdowns in the US, along with medical passports and disarmament. Do not be surprised if there is more engineered chaos going into the summer months. But what will the next crisis look like? I think we are already seeing the signs…

Covid Mutations
The mainstream media is pushing a non-stop narrative of covid mutation hype. We hear about UK and Brazilian variants on a weekly basis, and the assertion has been that surely, these variants will be more infectious and more deadly that the original virus. There is still no proof whatsoever to confirm this, but the globalists only care about planting the idea in people’s heads. They only care about reigniting the fear.

My feeling is that this strategy is going to fail, at least in the US. Too many Americans are aware of the con game, and a new virus threat is not going to have the same effect as Covid-19 did in the early months of the pandemic. None of us really knew what we were facing back then, and caution was a practical response. Today, we know for a fact that covid is not a concern for the vast majority of the public. Media attempts to amp up the threat will be ineffective, but they will of course still try.

BLM Riots
This is the next obvious tactic on the part of the establishment. Numerous state officials are openly supporting renewed riots across the country due to a recent police shooting in Minnesota. The shooting itself was accidental, with the suspect violently resisting arrest and leaping into his car. A female officer grabbed her pistol in a panic instead of her taser and fired.

This event had nothing to do with racism, and nothing to do with police brutality. But, that’s not stopping Marxist groups like BLM from taking advantage and making it all about “white supremacy”. The real danger of unrest, however, will arrive at the closing of the Derek Chauvin trail.

With the trail coming to an end, evidence has been revealed that George Floyd was involved in heavy drug use and the medical examiner indicated that this along with heart disease were contributing factors to Floyd’s death. A “speed ball” containing Fentanyl was also discovered in the back of the police cruiser in which Floyd was originally restrained. So, even if Derek Chauvin’s knee to the neck tactic helped kill Floyd, it is unlikely that a jury will convict him of 1st or 2nd degree murder based on the evidence. Any lesser charges will undoubtedly trigger more BLM riots.

Conveniently, these powderkeg events are taking place at the onset of the warm spring and summer months, which is prime time for riots.

My concern is that civil unrest will be allowed to spread and fester in the US until regular citizens start taking matters into their own hands. And, of course, any community that tries to defend itself against looting and destruction will be accused of “racist aggression” – At which time the Biden Administration will then try to assert the authority to institute martial law measures in various regions.

This combined with renewed attempts at covid lockdowns is a highly likely scenario.

Cyber Polygon
Just as the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic preceded the real thing by only two months, there are concerns that the next World Economic Forum simulation event will also be a precursor to another crisis.

Cyber Polygon is a war game being held by the WEF this July which is meant to simulate a major cyber attack on the global supply chain and the economic system. There has been endless discussion int the media the past year building up fears of cyber attacks by Russia, China, Iran and even North Korea.

In terms of supply chain threats, I’m not sure exactly how a cyber attack could do much to disrupt global shipping, unless we are talking about another blockage in a major shipping route like the Suez Canal. But, a successful attack on stock exchanges in places like Wall Street could be devastating. I suggest watching this event carefully as it may be designed to precede a real cyber attack sometime this year.

Global War Tensions
The media and the Biden Administration are very busy trying to create tensions with Russia over Ukraine. There are renewed tensions between Iran and Israel and continued destabilization by the West in Syria. And, a rising danger of confrontation with China over Taiwan.

War could be the goal, or, the goal could merely be economic conflict. After all, China has already been dumping dollars and US treasuries the past year, and it would not take much to cause damage to the dollar’s world reserve status if China and Russia both diversified into a basket of currencies for global trade.

Beyond that, there are many advantages for globalists in creating regional wars and drawing Americans into pointless conflicts. For example, the threat of war could be used to institute a new draft. What better way to keep American men in particular busy and stop them from rebellion against the Reset than to draft them so they can die in a meaningless war overseas?

There is also a narrative advantage to global tensions; when presented with a foreign threat, are Americans more likely to reject notions of rebellion against government trespasses? I have no doubt that the establishment will try to claim the liberty movement is not a movement for freedom, but an “astro-turf” movement created by the Russians to destabilize America. This has been the leftist media propaganda strategy for years now; so why would they stop?

The bottom line is this: America is the primary target of the globalists because we are one of the only countries with the means and the numbers to stop them and the Reset. Until they are removed from the equation they will continue to throw crisis after crisis at us in order to wear us down and force us to accept totalitarianism. Do not get too comfortable in the fact that the pandemic agenda is failing here; stay alert and continue to organize your communities.
* * *

 

[marsh]

Crazy John Kerry Signs Another Garbage International Deal - This Time with China Regarding Climate Change Where He Will Screw Americans and China will Skate | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft

John Kerry signed another garbage deal that will no doubt hurt the United States and suck billions from its coffers. This deal was with China regarding climate change. John Kerry is a legend in his own mind. The failed presidential candidate and former soldier who threw his military brothers...

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Crazy John Kerry Signs Another Garbage International Deal – This Time with China Regarding Climate Change Where He Will Screw Americans and China will Skate

By Joe Hoft
Published April 18, 2021 at 10:15am

John Kerry signed another garbage deal that will no doubt hurt the United States and suck billions from its coffers. This deal was with China regarding climate change.

John Kerry is a legend in his own mind. The failed presidential candidate and former soldier who threw his military brothers under the bus, now believes China is signing an agreement for the good of the world.



Simply put, John Kerry is an ignorant elitist nutjob.

FOX News reports this morning:

The United States and China, the world’s two biggest carbon polluters, agreed to cooperate to curb climate change with urgency, just days before President Joe Biden hosts a virtual summit of world leaders to discuss the issue.

The agreement was reached by U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua during two days of talks in Shanghai last week, according to a joint statement.
Advertisement - story continues below

The two countries “are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands,” the statement said.

No doubt Kerry signed away billions from the US taxpayer to go to who knows where. The article goes on to state as if a fact that this agreement is “key to a success of global efforts to curb climate change”. Both climate change and the US and China’s involvement to curb it are bold and disputed claims.

After the COVID disaster last year and the resulting loss of rights, jobs, and money, Kerry mentions nothing about holding China accountable for that.

Also, ask the people of Hong Kong how well China upholds agreements they sign.

Chinese military horribly abuse a dissident in Hong Kong.

China promised not to mess with Hong Kong for 50 years in 1997 when the UK passed control of the tiny country to China, but today, less than 25 years later China has taken over Hong Kong’s government and is imprisoning those who stand up to the communist nation.

China is already reneging on Kerry’s agreement:

While Kerry was still in Shanghai, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng signaled Friday that China is unlikely to make any new pledges at next week’s summit.

“For a big country with 1.4 billion people, these goals are not easily delivered,” Le said during an interview with The Associated Press in Beijing. “Some countries are asking China to achieve the goals earlier. I am afraid this is not very realistic.”

Anyone who has traveled throughout China and the United States knows that the pollution in China when compared to the United States, is staggering and heavy. If pollution is a result of CO2 emissions then the US is way, way behind China. There are provinces in the middle of China that rarely see a blue sky due to the intense pollution.

The first thing that Chinese citizens who come visit the US for the first time notice is the blue skies, even over major cities.

It would be insane for the US to sign a deal with China and trust their words and promises. If Kerry puts together an agreement like the Iran deal, it will match the worst deal in world history. No doubt he’s willing to do that and will claim victory while China will laugh at his face.

China loves having Biden in the White House. They know Kerry, Biden, Obama, and their team are idiots.

China knows that any of their actions related to the release of the COVID virus are already forgotten and look forward to signing a garbage deal that they will never uphold where the US will be held to self-destructive promises.

 

[von Koehler]

Gates wants to carry on the eugenics programs of his late father and reduce the Earth's population to 500 million (Georgia Stones).

Need I say more?

 

[marsh]

Exclusive -- Charlie Hurt: Higher Gas Prices Are Left's Plan to Make Driving Unaffordable

Raising the price of gasoline is part of Democrats' plan to make driving unaffordable for most Americans, Charlie Hurt said.

www.breitbart.com

Exclusive — Charlie Hurt: Higher Gas Prices Are Part of Left’s Plan to Make Driving Unaffordable
57

Joe Raedle/Getty Images
ROBERT KRAYCHIK19 Apr 202172

Raising the price of gasoline is part of Democrats’ plan to make driving unaffordable for most Americans, Washington Times opinion editor and Breitbart News columnist Charles Hurt said Monday on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

“They make no secret about the fact that they … want [gas] at six dollars a gallon,” Hurt remarked. “They want it at eight dollars a gallon. This is not a secret to them. The Green New Deal, the whole thing — all these people — their intent is to raise the price of gas so that it is so expensive that nobody can drive anywhere. They’re not kidding around about this. This is not a joke to them, and they’re not embarrassed by it. … They want gas to be at $20 a gallon. They want it to be like Europe because they want no one to be able to afford to drive anywhere. That’s their goal.”

https://soundcloud.com/breitbart%2Fcharlie-hurt-april-19-2021 View: https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/charlie-hurt-april-19-2021
32:27 min

Marlow noted that higher prices on gas — either through increased taxation or government-driven restriction of supply — amount to a “regressive” tax more harmful to poorer Americans.

Breitbart News reported:

The early Biden era inflation is weighing particularly on the bottom end of the income scale. Gasoline prices, for example, rose 8.8 percent in March. The lower third of household incomes spend more on transportation than the upper two thirds, according to long-running data from Pew Charitable Trusts. In 2019, transportation costs—of which the price of gasoline is a major component—accounted for 17 percent of all household expenditures, according to Statista, the second biggest category after housing.

Food is third in line after transportation and housing, accounting for 13 percent of household spending. The March Producer Price Index indicates food prices rose half a percentage point in March and 1.3 percent in February. Over the past 12-months, food prices are up 5 percent.

According to the latest data from U.S. Energy Information Association, national gas prices currently average $2.85 per gallon, up 99 cents from one year ago, an increase of 34.7 percent.

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

 

[marsh]

Watch Live — AOC and motley Marxists relaunch Green New Steal with outdoor press conference…

Happening LIVE right now outdoors in DC

citizenfreepress.com

Watch Live — AOC and motley Marxists relaunch Green New Steal with outdoor press conference…
Posted by Kane on April 20, 2021 11:52 am

View: https://youtu.be/bkLGLYrUyoE
1:08:05 min

 

[marsh]

Bill Gates, Dozens of World Leaders to Attend Biden Climate Summit

Bill Gates will address a climate summit hosted by President Joe Biden this week and nearly all of the 40 world leaders that were invited have confirmed they will attend, according to a source familiar with matter. Microsoft Corp co-founder and philanthropist Gates will...

www.newsmax.com

Bill Gates, Dozens of World Leaders to Attend Biden Climate Summit

(Getty)
Tuesday, 20 April 2021 05:47 PM


Bill Gates will address a climate summit hosted by President Joe Biden this week and nearly all of the 40 world leaders that were invited have confirmed they will attend, according to a source familiar with matter.

Microsoft Corp co-founder and philanthropist Gates will address the second day of the summit, which kicks off virtually on Thursday and will conclude on Friday.

The White House event paves the way for another global summit in November in the Scottish city of Glasgow that aims to ensure the world meets a goal of limiting planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are among the leaders of countries that contribute the most to emissions who will speak.

Biden has made fighting climate change a top domestic and international priority and this week's summit is a chance for him to convince his counterparts that the United States is back as a leader on the issue after former President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement to cut global emissions.

Biden brought the United States back into the accord at the beginning of his administration in January and the White House plans to unveil a new commitment to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 shortly. Sources familiar with the matter expect the administration to pledge to cut U.S. emissions around 50% compared with 2005 levels.

On Thursday, major economies will discuss those climate change commitments, according to the source familiar with the plan. Finance, the role of capital markets, adaptation and resilience to climate change will also be discussed.

On Friday the president's "Build Back Better" program will be in focus. Biden has made clear he sees fighting climate change as an opportunity to create jobs, and his infrastructure bill includes funding that is critical to his administration's plan to reduce greenhouse gases.

Innovation in clean energy and "industries that have yet to be created" will also be discussed. Gates will address that broad topic with his remarks. The software developer has invested some $2 billion toward the development of clean technologies.

 

[marsh]

Video: Rand Paul Warns Of ‘Climate Corps Youth’ Plan In ‘Horrendous’ Green New Deal

'This has connotations in our history of these sort of government informed youths out there marching for things that the government tells them to do'

summit.news

Video: Rand Paul Warns Of ‘Climate Corps Youth’ Plan In ‘Horrendous’ Green New Deal

‘This has connotations in our history of these sort of government informed youths out there marching for things that the government tells them to do’

21 April, 2021
Steve Watson

As extreme leftists within the Democratic party formally reintroduced their radical ‘green new deal’ Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul warned that the vast spending plan seeks to overturn the voter economy, do away with free market capitalism, and even create armies of youths dedicated to implementing socialist policy.

Appearing on Fox News, Paul warned that the far left “definitely think that money grows on trees, and I guess that’s part of the green plan.”

While the plan has been touted as a $172 Billion spend, Paul note that “if you add all of it up from the infrastructure bill, it’s actually about $500 billion.”

“There’s $174 billion for weatherising houses, which never gets to energy efficiency, to meet the cost. There’s about $100 billion for electric cars,” Paul also noted.

“There’s $10 billion for some kind of army of climate change people, some kind of climate corps youth which I think has connotations in our history of these sort of government informed youths out there marching for things that the government tells them to do,” the Senator further warned.

Video on website 4:12 min

The Civilian Climate Corps Act, introduced along with the new deal Tuesday says that a civilian army should exist “to mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs.”

“I think all of it is horrendous but the biggest problem is the financial drain on the future of our country by spending so much money we don’t have,” Paul urged.

Countering the argument made by the likes of Bernie Sanders that the deal will create millions of jobs, Paul emphasised that “building pyramids could create jobs, it’s really should the government be deciding where we use our dollars and where they’re spent and where the jobs are created, or should the market place?”

The Senator continued, “In the market place we vote. So when I go to Walmart or Kroger, I vote on what needs to be produced by buying something. So what is produced and where the jobs are created are what I like to eat or what I like to buy at Walmart, that is the consumer driven capitalist way where we vote in the economy. When government does it, it means I don’t get to vote as a consumer, Bernie Sanders gets to decide it.”

Paul also noted that when it comes to policy that actually has an effect on the carbon footprint, Democrats are opposed.

“One industrial decision has accounted for more reduction in carbon than any other decision in the history of this movement, and that’s fracking,” Paul noted.

“And so they are against the one thing that has reduced the carbon footprint, as we’ve converted to natural gas,” he added.

The plan, being pushed by the likes of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) calls for transitioning to a 100 percent carbon free-economy, as well as meeting 100 percent of power demand from zero-emission energy sources like wind and solar.

Critics have warned that it will collapse an already stretched economy while handing government total control over all aspects of society.

 

[marsh]

House Republicans Outline Their Stance on Climate Change and Clean Energy

www.theepochtimes.com

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaks during his weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 18, 2021. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

House Republicans Outline Their Stance on Climate Change and Clean Energy

BY MASOOMA HAQ
April 20, 2021 Updated: April 20, 2021

House Republicans on April 19 outlined their stance on climate change and reducing global emissions, advocating for developing clean U.S. energy resources without sacrificing American energy independence and American jobs. Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), ranking member of the House Select Climate Committee, said Republicans want to further reduce emissions around the world and protect the environment by exporting the United States’ cleanest energy.

“And at the heart of this—American innovators, domestic resources, and free markets,” said Graves in a video summary of GOP view on climate change and clean energy. “We must utilize these tools in a way that enhances the American workers’ competitiveness and improves our energy and national security.”

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Monday that Republicans in the House will be featuring dozens of bills and policy ideas on energy and climate in the coming weeks of 2021.

“Our members have been working for years to develop thoughtful targeted legislation to reduce global emissions by ensuring we can develop and build a new technology at home that is clean, affordable, and exportable,” said McCarthy. “Unlike Democratic plans, ours don’t kill American jobs or make American energy more expensive to increase taxes and regulations. Instead, House Republicans are focused on solutions that make American energy cleaner, more affordable, and also reduce emissions around the world.”

President Joe Biden’s recent executive orders on climate change state a goal of setting the United States on course to creating a carbon-free power sector by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050. To achieve these goals, the Biden administration is having all relevant federal agencies adopt its climate change agenda and subsidies are being cut off from the fossil fuel industry.

“The order establishes the National Climate Task Force, assembling leaders from across 21 federal agencies and departments to enable a whole-of-government approach to combat the climate crisis,” the order states. “Secretary of the Interior is to pause any new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters to the extent possible,” the order continues. In all, the order mandates that the United States move away from fossil fuels.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the Republicans’ position on climate change and U.S. energy independence.

“America is the world leader in reducing emissions, and in energy research and development,” said Graves. “What we’ve got to focus on with our clean energy strategies is looking at the entire globe because this isn’t a problem that the United States can solve itself, many of the very climate solutions that have been pushed by the left actually result in increased global emissions.”

One such policy is the Obama-era Paris climate accord, which Trump pulled the United States out of but Biden has rejoined since taking office. Conservatives are opposed to the pact because it does not require countries like China, the world’s biggest polluter, to reduce their carbon emissions to the extent that the United States is required to. Graves said for every ton of emissions the United States is required to reduce, China increases by 4 tons.

Conservatives believe that even if the United States were to achieve net-zero emissions by paying higher energy bills and bearing the brunt of a weaker economy, this would not help global emissions because larger countries like China and India would still be increasing their carbon footprint.

Graves, Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Foreign Affairs Ranking Member Michael McCaul (R-Texas) recently introduced the Paris Transparency and Accountability Act.

This bill calls for renegotiating the Paris agreement or developing a new agreement to ensure China and all major carbon emitters have results comparable to the United States.

The United States has been a global leader in reducing emissions and the GOP wants this to continue by putting the focus on exporting U.S. clean energy to other countries since global demand for energy is projected to increase almost 50 percent by 2050.

Republicans want to fill that global demand with clean U.S. natural gas energy without sacrificing American jobs and American resources.

The Biden administration’s policies are canceling projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is said to have cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars as well as making the U.S. less energy independent.

14 Attorneys General wrote to Biden in Feb. to ask him to reverse the decision on the pipeline and to prevent the economic damage that many keystone states will experience.

“The pipeline states and their local communities will also suffer dramatically. In Montana for instance, killing Keystone XL will likely cost the state approximately $58 million in annual tax revenue,” the letter states.

Meanwhile, Graves said, the U.S. spends more money “on basic energy research than every other country in the world combined,” said Graves. “Our oil and gas are going to have demanded all over the world. Since it’s the cleanest the most efficient, we need to be exporting it to these countries to displace the dirtier fuel sources for Russia and China.”

Not only that, but Graves said his party believes China is using the climate change crisis to advance its military strategy, which is a direct security threat to the United States.

“China has gone and dominated the rare earth and strategic minerals markets. They’ve cornered or monopolized the resources around the world, and they’re one of the top producers,” said Graves. “Continuing down this path of flawed energy and climate strategies only plays into the hands of China, and their national military strategy.”

 

[marsh]

Xi Jinping: China Will Use Belt and Road to Create ‘Rules and Standards’

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping plans to use Belt and Road to impose China’s vision of universal “rules and standards” on the world.

www.breitbart.com

Xi Jinping: China Will Use Belt and Road to Create Universal ‘Rules and Standards’
158

ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images

In his keynote speech to the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference on Tuesday, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping talked about his plans to use the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to impose China’s vision of universal “rules and standards” on the world, permanently displacing the United States and Europe as the leading global powers.

As always, Xi’s plans for Chinese global hegemony were couched in soothing promises that China “will never seek hegemony, expansion, or a sphere of influence” – an assertion that would prompt bitter laughter from the Filipinos currently watching fleets of Chinese militia boats gobble up their islands, Indians watching China push into their Himalayan territory, or Burmese watching their country fall to a brutal Beijing-supported military junta.

What Xi was actually describing, beneath all his globalist cant about “multilateral cooperation on trade and investment” and a “closer partnership for openness and inclusiveness,” was a new unipolar world dominated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) where authoritarian dictatorships are liberated from any concerns about human rights. He saw BRI as the path leading to that destination:

I have noted on various occasions that the Belt and Road Initiative is a public road open to all, not a private path owned by one single party. All interested countries are welcome aboard to take part in the cooperation and share in its benefits. Belt and Road cooperation pursues development, aims at mutual benefits, and conveys a message of hope.

Going forward, we will continue to work with other parties in high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. We will follow the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, and champion the philosophy of open, green and clean cooperation, in a bid to make Belt and Road cooperation high-standard, people-centered and sustainable.

Xi also sought to use China’s coronavirus and climate change as leverage to project Beijing’s power across a weakened Third World:

In the ongoing fight against COVID-19, victory will be ours at the end of the day. We must put people and their lives above anything else, scale up information sharing and collective efforts, enhance public health and medical cooperation, and give full play to the key role of the World Health Organization (WHO). It is important that we bolster international cooperation on the R&D, production and distribution of vaccines and increase their accessibility and affordability in developing countries so that everyone in the world can access and afford the vaccines they need. It is also important that we take comprehensive measures to improve global governance on public health security and work together for a global community of health for all. We need to follow the philosophy of green development, advance international cooperation on climate change, and do more to implement the Paris Agreement on climate change. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities must be upheld, and concerns of developing countries on capital, technology and capacity building must be addressed.

Xi talked about “openness and innovation,” and the supposedly welcoming nature of the Chinese marketplace – but as the World Health Organization’s farcical mission to Wuhan demonstrated, China is utterly opaque. Beijing’s relentless campaign of cyber-warfare and intellectual property theft demonstrates what it really thinks about “openness and innovation.” Foreign businessmen who search for profit in China’s marketplace soon find their economic interests turned into political leverage against them, as with the international corporations Xi is currently forcing to swallow their objections to slave labor.

Much of Xi’s speech was a thinly-veiled assault on Western leadership and the last remaining international restraints on Beijing’s growing power:

World affairs should be handled through extensive consultation, and the future of the world should be decided by all countries working together. We must not let the rules set by one or a few countries be imposed on others, or allow unilateralism pursued by certain countries to set the pace for the whole world. What we need in today’s world is justice, not hegemony. Big countries should behave in a manner befitting their status and with a greater sense of responsibility.

This, again, is risible coming from the dictator-for-life of a country that routinely disregards international court judgments and arbitration that interferes with its agenda – the country that loves to talk about climate change theology, because it cripples Western competition, while it litters the world with carbon-spewing coal power plants. Xi and his apparatchiks are very good at saying what globalists want to hear, but Beijing’s conduct is almost the perfect opposite of what they say.

Beijing’s bid for global hegemony has three prongs: a growing international appetite for authoritarian stability after China’s pandemic destroyed the world economy, the desire of brutal dictatorships for protection against Western human rights ideals, and the challenge to America’s moral standing made possible by the election of President Joe Biden. The Chinese quickly demonstrated proficiency at using the anti-American rhetoric of Biden and his Democrat Party as cudgels against them.

This proficiency was on display in Xi’s speech to the Boao Forum, and also in Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin’s tirade on Monday against the U.S. and Japan for allegedly “ganging up” against China, as reported by China’s state news service Xinhua:

On human rights issues, Japan and the United States owe debts to Chinese and world people, said Wang, citing the disaster inflicted on Chinese and Asian people by Japan’s invasion war in the 1930s, and the incessant wars launched by the United States on foreign lands, which have killed more than 800,000 people since 2001, including 300,000 civilians.

Instead of using human rights issues as a pretext for interfering in China’s internal affairs, Japan and the United States should reflect on and correct their own invasion history and their wrong deeds of violating the human rights of the people of other countries.

He said that for the Japanese side, the pressing task now is to face up to solemn concerns of the surrounding countries and the international community, immediately stop the implementation of the decision to dump nuclear wastewater into the sea.

Wang said politicization and stigmatization of COVID-19 by the United States has not only taken a heavy toll on U.S. people but also created obstacles for international cooperation in fighting COVID-19.

China’s gambit for global dominance is a fairly stark offer to reward smaller governments, and transnational corporations, who abandon their commitment to human rights and accept Beijing’s political dominance in exchange for Chinese money and profits. Agreeing not to “stigmatize China” for the coronavirus is essentially the first line on an application for Chinese bank loans and business permits.

Political domination is sold with the promise that China’s dictatorship is more orderly, rational, and stable than erratic democracies with bitter internal conflicts and feuding political parties. Xi Jinping knows what his audience needs to hear in order to salve what remains of their consciences.

 

[marsh]

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Dresses Down Vatican Over Globalist Confab with Chelsea Clinton, Dr. Fauci, Jane Goodall and Other Heretics - Only 2 Clergy Speakers in 114 Listed | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò went off on Pope Francis and the upcoming Vatican Globalist confab this week in Vatican City.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Dresses Down Vatican Over Globalist Confab with Chelsea Clinton, Dr. Fauci, Jane Goodall and Other Heretics – Only 2 Clergy Speakers in 114 Listed

By Jim Hoft
Published April 21, 2021 at 2:25pm

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò went off on Pope Francis and the upcoming Vatican Globalist confab this week in Vatican City.

Globalist Pope Francis organized a conference that includes a Who’s Who of globalist activists and pro-abortion fanatics.

This is just the latest slap-in-the-face to his conservative Catholic flock.

Archbishop Vigano spoke out Tuesday against this upcoming conference.
Vaccine developers, Mormon elders, pro-abortion Chelsea Clinton, population control advocate Jane Goodall, a New Age activist, a prominent UK Muslim scholar, and a pro-abortion American actress known for posing nude, are all speakers at an upcoming Vatican conference on ‘health.’ There are only two Catholic clergy listed amongst the 114 speakers. May 6-8.

Here is Archbishop Vigano’s letter on the conference – via LifeSite News:

From May 6-8, 2021, the fifth International Vatican Conference will take place, entitled Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. Unite to Prevent & Unite to Cure. A Global Health Care Initiative: How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health. The event is being hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Cura Foundation, the Science and Faith Foundation, and Stem for Life.

Michael Haynes of LifeSiteNews has reported (here) on the topics to be addressed and the participants, including the infamous Anthony Fauci, whose scandalous conflicts of interest did not prevent him from taking over the management of the pandemic in the United States; Chelsea Clinton, a follower of the Church of Satan and a staunch abortion advocate; the New Age guru Deepak Chopra; Dame Jane Goodall, environmentalist and chimpanzee expert; the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna; representatives of Big Tech; and a whole slew of abortionists, Malthusians, and globalists known to the general public. The conference has recruited five prominent journalists to be moderators, who are exclusively from left-wing media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Forbes.

This Conference – along with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Global Compact on Education, and the inter-religious Pantheon to be held in June in Astana, Kazakhstan – is the umpteenth scandalous confirmation of a disturbing departure of the current Hierarchy, and in particular its highest Roman members, from Catholic orthodoxy. The Holy See has deliberately renounced the supernatural mission of the Church, making itself the servant of the New World Order and Masonic globalism in an antichristic counter-magisterium. The same Roman Dicasteries, occupied by people ideologically aligned with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and protected and promoted by him, now continue unrestrained in their implacable work of demolishing Faith, Morals, ecclesiastical discipline, and monastic and religious life, in an effort as vain as it is unprecedented to transform the Bride of Christ into a philanthropic association enslaved to the Strong Powers. The result is the super-imposition over the true Church of a sect of heretical and depraved Modernists who are intent on legitimizing adultery, sodomy, abortion, euthanasia, idolatry, and any perversion of the intellect and will. The true Church is now eclipsed, denied and discredited by her very Pastors, betrayed even by the one who occupies the highest Throne.

The fact that the deep church has managed to elect its own member so as to carry out this infernal plan in agreement with the deep state is no longer a mere suspicion, but a phenomenon which it is now essential to ask questions about and shed light on. The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the Sacred Pastors and in the bewilderment of the People of God, who have been abandoned to themselves.

Further demonstration of this degenerate libido serviendi of the Vatican towards the globalist ideology is the choice of speakers to give testimonials and lectures: supporters of abortion, of the use of fetal material in research, of demographic decline, of the pan-sexual LGBT agenda, and last but not least, of the narrative of Covid and the so-called vaccines. Cardinal Ravasi, the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, is certainly one of the leading representatives of the deep church and Modernist progressivism, as well as an advocate of dialogue with the infamous Masonic sect and a promoter of the famous Courtyard of the Gentiles. It is therefore not surprising that included among the organizers of the event is the Stem for Life Foundation, which proudly defines itself as “a nonsectarian, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization focused on creating a movement to accelerate development of cell therapies.”



On closer inspection, the sectarianism and partisanship of the Vatican Conference are made evident by the topic it addresses, the conclusions it seeks to draw, its participants, and its sponsors. Even the image chosen to promote the Conference is extremely eloquent: a close-up of Michelangelo’s fresco of Creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which the hand of God the Father reaches out towards the hand of Adam, but with both hands covered by disposable surgical gloves, recalling the regulations of the new “health liturgy” and implying that even the Lord Himself might spread the virus.

In this sacrilegious representation, the order of Creation is subverted into therapeutic anti-creation, in which man saves himself and becomes the mad author of his own health “redemption.” Instead of the purifying laver of Baptism, the Covid religion proposes the vaccine, the bearer of disabilities and death, as the only means of salvation. Instead of Faith in the Revelation of God, we find superstition and the irrational assent to precepts that have nothing scientific about them, with rites and liturgies that mimic true Religion in a sacrilegious parody.

This choice of imagery has an aberrant and blasphemous ring to it, because it uses a well-known and evocative image to insinuate and promote a false and tendentious narrative that says that in the presence of a seasonal flu, whose virus has still not been isolated according to Koch’s postulates (here) and that can be effectively cured using existing treatments, it is necessary to administer vaccines that are admitted to be ineffective and that are still in the experimentation phase, with unknown side-effects, and whose producers have obtained a criminal shield of immunity for their distribution. The victims immolated on the altar of the health Moloch, from children dismembered in the third month of pregnancy in order to produce the gene serum to the thousands of people who have been killed or maimed, do not stop the infernal machine of Big Pharma, and it is to be feared that there will be a resurgence of the phenomenon over the next few months.

One wonders if Bergoglio’s zeal for the dissemination of the gene serum is not also motivated by base economic reasons, as compensation for the losses suffered by the Vatican and the Dioceses following the lockdown and the collapse of attendance by the faithful at Mass and the Sacraments. On the other hand, if Rome’s silence about the violation of human and religious rights in China has been paid for by the Beijing dictatorship with substantial prebends, nothing prevents the replication of this scheme on a large scale in exchange for the Vatican’s promotion of the vaccines.



The Conference will obviously take great care not to mention even indirectly the perennial teaching of the Magisterium on moral and doctrinal questions of the greatest importance. Conversely, the sycophantic praise of the worldly mentality and the prevailing ideology will be the only voice, along with the amorphous ecumenical repertoire inspired by the New Age.

I note that in 2003 the same Pontifical Council for Culture condemned yoga meditation and, more generally, New Age thought as being incompatible with the Catholic faith. According to the Vatican document, New Age thought “shares with a number of internationally influential groups the goal of superseding or transcending particular religions in order to create space for a universal religion which could unite humanity. Closely related to this is a very concerted effort on the part of many institutions to invent a Global Ethic, an ethical framework which would reflect the global nature of contemporary culture, economics and politics. Further, the politicization of ecological questions certainly colors the whole question of the Gaia hypothesis or worship of mother earth” (2.5). It goes without saying that the pagan ceremonies with which Saint Peter’s Basilica was profaned in honor of the pachamama idol fit perfectly into that “politicization of ecological questions” denounced by the 2003 Vatican document, and which today is instead promoted sine glossa by the so-called Bergoglian magisterium, beginning with Laudato Sì and Fratelli Tutti.

At La Salette, Our Lady warned us: “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” It will not be the Holy Church, indefectible by the promises of Christ, that will lose the Faith: it will be the sect that occupies the See of Most Blessed Peter and which today we see propagating the anti-gospel of the New World Order. It is no longer possible to remain silent, because today our silence would make us accomplices of the enemies of God and of the human race. Millions of faithful are disgusted by the countless scandals of the Pastors, by the betrayal of their mission, by the desertion of those who by Holy Orders are called to bear witness to the Holy Gospel and not to support the establishment of the kingdom of the Antichrist.

I beg my Brothers in the Episcopate, priests, religious, and in a particular way the faithful laity who see themselves being betrayed by the Hierarchy, to raise their voices so as to express with a spirit of true obedience to Our Lord, Head of the Mystical Body, a firm and courageous denunciation of this apostasy and its authors. I invite everyone to pray that the Divine Majesty may be moved to compassion and intervene in our aid. May the Most Holy Virgin, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata, intercede before the Throne of God, compensating with Her merits for the unworthiness of Her children who invoke Her with the glorious title of Auxilium Christianorum.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
20 April 2021
Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam II
post Octavam Paschae

 

[marsh]

Bannon Exposes Xi and Party of Davos’s Call for ‘New World Order’

Stephen K. Bannon exposes Communist China's leader Xi Jinping's call for a "new world order" as an attack on America

pandemic.warroom.org

Bannon Exposes Xi and Party of Davos’s Call for ‘New World Order’

April 21, 2021 by Elizabeth

Stephen K. Bannon exposes Communist China’s leader Xi Jinping’s call for a “new world order” as an attack on America and the Deplorables.

Rumble video on website 1:24 min

“Headline, ‘Xi Calls for New World Order,'” Bannon said. “That’s not the War Room.”

“He walks through a new world order where the Chinese Communist Party and the Party of Davos are in the lead,” he said.

Bannon exposed Apple, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Tesla, are all at the conference, where Xi is calling for a global model of state-capitalism and dictatorial control.

“The globalists are all there feeding off the trough,” he said.