“What is perfection in love? Love your enemies in such a way that you would desire to make them your brothers … For so did He love, Who hanging on the Cross, said ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” (Luke 23:34)
Distinction Matter - Subscribed Feeds
-
Site: Henrymakow.com
WHEN TRAITORS RULE, PATRIOTS ARE PARIAHS
If the US were not the bitch of Organized Jewry (Communism & Zionism), Charles Coughlin's crusade against its Satanism would be taught in every public school.
Hollywood would make blockbusters about him, instead of Barbie & the Communist Robert Oppenheimer.
Reb Culhane is the pseudonym of a 21 year old college student in Denver, Colorado.
from Dec 11, 2009
By Reb Culhane
Throughout the 20th century, voices that cut a little too close to the core of the New World Order, were silenced, slandered, and discredited. One such voice, was Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979.) A Roman Catholic priest of Canadian birth, Coughlin pioneered use of the radio to reach vast numbers of people during the 1930s era of Roosevelt's New Deal. Father Coughlin spoke the truth in key areas which led to his consignment to the "wrong" side of history in official accounts.
Originally a strong supporter of the Wall Street puppet FDR, Coughlin said, "The New Deal is Christ's Deal" and "God is directing Franklin Roosevelt." However, he soon changed his mind. Coughlin became a staunch proponent of monetary reform and an early advocate of abolishing the Federal Reserve.
With the advent of Coughlin's radio program, he began to reach millions of people a week and by 1934 had become the most prominent Roman Catholic economic and political speaker. Roosevelt himself sent Frank Murphy and JFK's father Joseph P. Kennedy to try and "tone him down." Coughlin ignored them and began to denounce FDR as a puppet of Wall Street. Coughlin also began to support the Louisiana populist leader Huey Long, who was murdered by the Illuminati.
Father Coughlin was a major opponent of the twin Hegelian heads of the New World Order, monopolistic capitalism and communism. He declared in 1935 "I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness."
Indeed, Coughlin was by very nature anti-globalist and supported the America First Movement of which Charles Lindbergh was a prominent figure.
"Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity" was a campaign slogan of Coughlin's organization, the National Union for Social Justice. Speaking like this brought the full scorn of the New World Order down on the outspoken Catholic priest.
SHUTDOWN
During its height, Coughlin's radio program was wildly popular, with listeners flooding his office with 80,000 letters a week. It is estimated that almost a third of the nation tuned in at the time. However, Coughlin's popularity gained him some powerful enemies. The Roman Catholic Church itself did not approve of him and the Vatican wanted him silenced. The Roosevelt administration was determined to shut down the "Radio Priest".
Eventually accomplished this by performing an end run around the 1st Amendment. The administration decided that freedom of speech did not apply to broadcasting because radio was a "limited national resource" and should be regulated as a "publicly owned commons." New regulations were put into place demanding that regular radio broadcasters obtain operating permits. Coughlin was denied a permit and forced off the air.
He attempted to work around this by purchasing air time, but this became incredibly costly and reduced his resources and ability to reach people. Coughlin then resigned himself to publishing editorials in his own newspaper, entitled Social Justice. The Roosevelt administration acted predictably and revoked his mailing privileges, rendering him impotent in sending the paper out to subscribers.
Upon this, his influence was crippled. In addition, the attack on Pearl Harbor and entrance into World War II turned public opinion against anti-interventionists like Coughlin and official government propaganda smeared them as "collaborating with the enemy."
Thus, Coughlin faded into obscurity, spending his retirement keeping a low profile and writing anti-communist pamphlets until his death in 1979. His church, the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, still stands today and was declared a National Shrine by the United States Bishops Conference in 1998.
Modern history texts smear him as a demagogue and anti-Semite with fascist sympathies. This isn't surprising because the winners write history and the Illuminati has been the winner for quite some time now.
CONCLUSION
Father Charles Coughlin was a strong anti-NWO activist and showed steadfast courage and bravery in his crusade to expose those who run the Shadow government. He pointed to the power structure, the central bankers, and called to abolish their control center, the Federal Reserve. For this he should be commended and held as an example for all patriots who value God, Freedom, and Country.
Coughlin's story also brings with it a strain of pessimism, though. After all, if a man who once had the attention of a third of the nation could not effect change, what chance do we have of doing so today?
-
Site: RT - News
Lindsey Graham has told West Jerusalem to do “whatever” it takes to annihilate Hamas
Israel must do whatever needs to be done to win its “existential” war with Hamas, just like the US was “justified” to drop nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has claimed.
The Israeli military is facing increasing international scrutiny as its military operation in Gaza enters its eighth month, claiming the lives of more than 34,000 Palestinians. However, Graham argued in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that Hamas is to blame for the bulk of civilian casualties, and urged Israel to continue fighting until a decisive victory is achieved, no matter the cost.
“When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, with nuclear weapons,” Graham stated.
“So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do,” he added.
Read more
US unveils results of Israel war crimes probe
While Graham did not call for the use of actual nuclear weapons in Gaza, he made a similar controversial comparison during a subcommittee hearing earlier in the week, referring to Israel’s war with Hamas as “Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.”
The White House recently suspended the supply of some larger-payload bombs that Israel could use in its new offensive in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, outraging the Jewish state’s staunch supporters.
“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose, and work with them to minimize casualties,” Graham said.
Read more
US congressman calls for ‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ solution in Gaza and Ukraine
Washington has acknowledged its “reasonable” concerns that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) may have violated international humanitarian law while using American weapons, but a new US State Department report failed to pin-point any specific violations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Sunday that Israel has failed to show any “credible plan” to get civilians out of harm’s way.
President Joe Biden vowed not to support a “major” military operation in Rafah with US weapons, but indicated that Israel’s “limited” invasion has yet to cross Washington’s red line. On Friday, Israel’s war cabinet approved a “measured expansion” of the ground operation in Rafah. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to continue the military campaign and “fight with our fingernails” even without US weapons.
-
Site: Public Discourse
Millennials like me were confused and incensed during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. We wanted reform. We wanted heads to roll. We got corporate welfare instead. In the ensuing decade and a half, we have listened and nodded along as politicians and news outlets rail against the greed of Wall Street grifters who packaged riskier and riskier mortgages in AAA-rated securities and then peddled them to unsuspecting investors, all the while preparing their own golden parachutes. We’ve all seen The Big Short. We all seem to agree about what happened and who’s to blame.
But this conversation never included a more fundamental issue, one every homeowner I know intuits on some level: housing cannot be both shelter and an investment. As shelter, it is far too expensive; as an investment, its price must go up. This is something Charles Marohn, the founder of the Strong Towns organization, and Daniel Herriges call the “housing trap.” In their new book, Escaping the Housing Trap, Marohn and Herriges lay out the problem and propose a way forward.
Housing as Investment
In the early part of the twentieth century, as building technology and housing quality improved, housing prices swung violently. When the federal government became involved in mortgage lending during the Great Depression, prices began to rise. Housing—or more precisely, mortgage paper—became a financial product. And Americans in the booming post–World War II economy needed something to invest in, generating ever-increasing demand for more mortgages. The need to make those investments safe was used to justify the practice of “redlining,” by which minorities were excluded from lending, and thus from building intergenerational wealth. With the help of these new financial products (along with cars, also bought with new consumer debt instruments), we embarked on what the authors call the “suburban experiment.” We built entire communities from scratch to a finished state and put them under glass using exclusionary zoning. They were only accessible by car, so we invented the strip mall, the shopping mall, the office park, and the hour-long commute.
In the years since the end of World War II, the cost of housing relative to inflation, as reflected in the Case-Shiller Index, has been on an upward climb. There have been bubbles like the Savings and Loan Bubble of the 1980s and the one that burst in 2008. Eventually, the government stepped in, lowering interest rates and buying bad mortgages, in order to stabilize prices and prevent a more widespread crisis.
But prices did not return to normal after these bubbles burst. After the subprime mortgage crisis, the Case-Shiller Index never again fell to the level it was in 2001, a time when analysts like Stephane Fitch and Josh Rosner were already warning of a bubble. Prices bottomed out in 2012 and then began climbing more steeply than they did in the last bubble. They are much higher now than they were at the peak.
Part of the problem, according to Marohn and Herriges, is that mortgages make bad investment instruments:
When interest rates fall, the investment value of a 30-year fixed rate mortgage goes up. Someone owning a bundle of mortgages paying 6% annually is going to want to hang onto them when new mortgages are being made at 3%. Yet those are the exact conditions when the borrower refinances, terminating the 6% payment in exchange for a lower-yielding loan. The investor has no recourse but to give up their prized asset. The opposite happens when interest rates rise. Someone owning a bundle of mortgages paying 3% annually is going to want to trade them out when new mortgages are being bundled at 6%. That is exactly when homeowners hunker down. Again, the investor is stuck, this time with lower-yielding paper.
So why invest in mortgages? “Mortgages are at the foundation of our financial system,” the authors continue, “yet they are the worst kind of investment. The reason investors accept such bad payoff asymmetry is because the federal government is committed to keeping housing prices elevated” (emphasis added).
The government and financial institutions have decided that housing is an investment. They cannot let prices fall.
Housing as Shelter
So what is the problem with home prices going up? When housing is thought of as an investment, nothing. But that’s just it: someone has to live in that investment. Twenty years ago, the average American household was spending 23 percent of its income on housing. By the end of 2022, that number was 30 percent. We are in a well-documented crisis of housing affordability.
One of the causes of this crisis, according to Marohn and Herriges, is exclusionary zoning. These policies, which were widely adopted after the Village of Euclid Supreme Court decisions made them legal in 1926, allow governments to decide what land uses are allowed in what areas, and exclude all others. If you live in a detached single-family home, in a neighborhood full of single-family homes, that is probably because zoning ordinances dictate that single-family homes are the only thing that can be built there.
None of us wants to live beside a waste treatment plant or a paper mill. We want laws that prevent those from being built in our communities. But exclusionary zoning does much more than prevent harmful land uses from cropping up in neighborhoods: it prevents neighborhoods from maturing over time. Under the traditional development pattern, communities that thrived would gradually become denser and more various, with property owners converting homes into duplexes and quads, small apartment buildings supplanting rundown houses, and neighborhood-centric businesses opening to serve the community’s needs. None of this is possible under a regime of exclusionary zoning. Whole neighborhoods are now built all at once to a finished state. This is part of what Marohn calls “the suburban experiment.”
There are many problems with this pattern of development. Since home and places of work have been separated by statute, everyone needs a car. People without access to cars—the elderly, children, the disabled, and the poor—are stranded or stuck on inefficient public transit that must cover huge distances because of the low population density. The homes in these neighborhoods tend to be similar in quality and age, leading to de facto socioeconomic—and often racial—segregation.
But why has this led to a crisis in housing affordability? In places where housing is scarce, developers need to be able to build enough housing to keep up with demand, or prices will rise. But in most places that is not legal. If a community cannot add enough housing by adding density—growing upward—it will do so by growing outward.
This outward growth only worsens the problem, because it is fiscally unsustainable, as Charles Marohn showed convincingly in his book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. When a new suburb is built, it requires a large infrastructure investment. In the best cases, cities get developers to foot that bill. The city gets a sudden influx of property taxes from all that new housing. But roads, pipes, and treatment plants age, and after a decade or two, those maintenance bills start to exceed the tax revenue. Cities experience budget shortfalls and need another influx of property taxes to fill the gap. Marohn calls this the “suburban growth Ponzi scheme.” The problem, as he recently explained in an article about financially insolvent cities, is that “if you lose money on every transaction, you don’t make it up in volume.” Cities can keep it going as long as growth continues.
But like the classic Ponzi scheme, the moment growth stops, the house of cards comes falling down. The mayor of Houston recently announced that the city’s finances were broken, facing a $160 million budget deficit. Communities across the country are feeling the same squeeze. In Portland, where I live, the Bureau of Transportation is facing $3.5 billion in deferred maintenance on about $20 billion in assets. Taxpayers will end up footing this bill, making their housing even more unaffordable.
A Path Forward?
Bad investing, exclusionary zoning, and the suburban experiment have helped to create the housing affordability crisis. But what is to be done about it? While they offer proposals for dealing with the housing trap, Marohn and Herriges are quick to explain that they are not providing a solution. They caution against the kind of top-down thinking denoted by the idea of a “solution to the housing crisis,” noting that such thinking created the problem in the first place.
But the authors provide several proposals that they believe would stabilize the cost of housing. The most important change is to allow neighborhoods to grow denser by relaxing exclusionary zoning ordinances. They recommend making the “next increment of density” legal everywhere; in a single-family neighborhood, this would mean allowing backyard cottages, duplexes, and neighborhood-centric businesses. And they call on communities to “release the swarm” of small-scale local developers necessary to build enough housing.
Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that cities “have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” That is the swarm the authors want to release.
A Breath of Fresh Air
Housing is shelter. Its value as an investment is, if anything, secondary. We do not have enough housing in growing communities right now, and what we do have is far too expensive. In order for prices to come down, we need to build a lot more housing, and we need to do so fast.
We cannot do that without recognizing that this is not a partisan issue. The typical housing advocate is a leftist; the Yes, in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement has not yet caught on on the Right. But this dynamic seems to be in the middle of shifting, as almost every American is feeling the strain of unaffordable housing, and people across the political spectrum are looking for creative solutions. Escaping the Housing Trap is an example of this.
Marohn, who started the Strong Towns organization in 2009, is not your typical housing advocate. He is a devout Catholic whose political views lean right. This is significant because it has allowed Marohn and his co-author to write a book that will not appeal just to progressives. The authors recognize several principles that conservatives tend to value, most importantly, fiscal responsibility and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the understanding, often articulated in Catholic social teaching, that the level of society that is best suited to address a problem is the smallest or most local level. More centralized levels of authority in society exist to support, rather than supplant, the lower levels. In the context of housing, this means that the people most capable of building housing that meets local needs are those already embedded in the communities that need more housing. Large-scale developers tend to build housing that changes communities in cataclysmic ways (and, as the authors point out, creates more NIMBYs). Local developers do not, both because that sort of housing is expensive to build, and because they are hesitant to fundamentally alter their communities.
The most important thing local policymakers can do to get us out of the housing trap is to encourage this kind of incremental development in every possible way. This means relaxing exclusionary zoning ordinances, allowing so-called “granny flats,” or accessory housing units for extended family, long-term guests, or aging parents, and legalizing the next increment of density everywhere. These proposals are in everyone’s interest because they would allow our communities to grow organically, while bringing homeownership—one of the surest ways of building generational wealth and community stability—within reach of average Americans.
But cities that adopt these changes are not guaranteed success. In my hometown of Portland, we have made some of them but are not building nearly enough housing. Escaping the Housing Trap helped me understand why: you cannot open a door with several deadbolts until you’ve unlocked all of them. Here in Portland, we’ve changed some laws, but we have done nothing to remove the bureaucratic red tape that makes permitting, as I discovered when I tried to renovate my home recently, a nightmare that only deep-pocketed developers and insiders can survive.
For American families, housing has become too expensive. We can make it more affordable if we build enough housing. But in order to do that, we cannot stop at making it legal; we need to make it easy.
Image by AnnMarie and licensed via Adobe Stock.
-
Site: Zero HedgeNewsom Forced To Slash California Budget, Blames Crippling Deficit On "Rain Bombs" And Tax ShortfallsTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 20:00
In the course of two years, California has turned a $100 billion surplus into a $73 billion deficit, forcing governor Gavin Newson (D) to propose painful (token) spending cuts on Friday while announcing his revised state budget.
California Governor Gavin Newsom unveils revised 2024-25 state budget on Friday, May 10 (photo: AP, Rich Pedroncelli)
When asked how the state was able to achieve such a monumental fail, Newsom - who claims the deficit is actually $27.6 billion (to which even AP called him out) - blamed a reduction in taxes from capital gains income, which surged in 2021 amid a raging stock market and plummeted in 2022. Then, in 2023, the state 'continued to collect less tax revenue than projected' due to capital loss carryovers. He also blamed "unexpected rain bombs" - which caused the IRS to extend the tax filing deadline for most California taxpayers in 2023 following severe winter storms. When those taxes were eventually collected, they were 22% below expectations, according to the Governor's office.
Watch:
According to AP, Newsom will cut $6.7 billion set aside for doctors who treat Medicaid patients, cut off healthcare to 14,000 disabled migrants in their home, saving $94.7 million, and slashed $550 million that was headed towards state schools in order to build new facilities.
Republican State Senator Brian Dahle called the cuts a "hollow gesture, at best," adding "The governor's national ambitions have triggered a massive exodus of people and businesses creating an enormous revenue shortfall of personal and corporate income taxes."
"You can't have a good government without a strong private sector. Plain and simple, people are being priced out of California from bad policies and mismanagement," Dahle continued.
In total, Newsom is proposing $32.8 billion in cuts over two years - including an 8% cut to state operations, which he says will shore things up.
Of course, we know that's bullshit.
Refreshing your memory from early April, Mike Shedlock gave a sobering view into reality;
* * *
The City Journal founder Ed Ring comments on the Golden State Budget Fantasy
While finalizing the upcoming fiscal year’s state budget back in May 2022, California governor Gavin Newsom boasted of an extraordinary projected surplus: $97 billion. The governor immediately collaborated with an enthusiastic state legislature to spend it all. Of course, new spending on new programs and benefits tends to become permanent.
This has happened repeatedly in California. Between fiscal year 2012–13 and fiscal year 2022–23 (the year with the projected $97 billion surplus), per capita general-fund spending doubled, from just over $3,000 per resident to just under $6,000. (All figures are in 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars.)
The State Office of Legislative Analyst’s latest report projects a $73 billion dollar deficit for the next fiscal year. It won’t be easy to paper over this debt, but the state may use its opaque accounting system to hide the ball.
California’s general-fund budgets are reported on a cash basis. The state’s balance sheet, however, uses “accrual-based accounting.” Without getting too far into the weeds, this is an apples v. oranges situation. Instead of the algebraic perfection of private-sector income statements, balance sheets, and cash flows, government accounting provides no easy way to reconcile what you see on the budget.
Some watchdogs, however, have succeeded in cracking the code. John Moorlach, one of the only certified public accountants to serve in the California State Senate, just published a review of the state’s fiscal health, focusing on the balance sheet. According to Moorlach, California’s balance sheet is in trouble.
Moorlach declared in a March California Insider interview that the state “now has the largest unrestricted net deficit in the US: $222 Billion.” In plain English, Moorlach is saying that California’s state government accounts have liabilities that exceed assets by $222 billion. No matter how creative Newsom and his financial wizards may be, someday that money will have to be paid.
A remedy that California has turned to over the years and will undoubtedly turn to now is to accumulate additional long-term debt. Emulating the federal government, but lacking its dollar-printing ability, California’s state and local governments and agencies have racked up over a trillion dollars in debt, primarily in bonds and unfunded pension liabilities. These liabilities, too, must be paid. Since that’s all but impossible, the liabilities must be serviced with payments that, just as at the federal level, will eat up more and more of the operating budgets.
How Much Is California in Debt?
The above link says over a trillion. That’s being very generous to California. Click on it to discover … California State and Local Liabilities exceed $1.6 Trillion.
California’s total state and local government debt now stands at almost $1.6 trillion, or about half the state’s GDP.
That isn’t an alarming ratio when compared to the national debt, which has now soared to 128 percent of U.S. GDP with no end in sight. But Californians carry this $1.6 trillion state and local debt ($40,000 per capita) in addition to their share of the national debt (about $90,000 per capita).
That article was from February of 2022. I suspect the liabilities are now close to $2 trillion.
Cost of Running a McDonalds Jumps $250,000 in CA
On February 4, I noted the Cost of Running a McDonalds Jumps $250,000 in CA Due to Minimum Wage Hikes.
A blowback is underway.
California Restaurants Cut Jobs
On March 26, I commented California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise
Proposition 103 Backfires
Citing wildfire risk, State Farm will not renew policies on 30,000 homes and 42,000 business in California.
Also on March 26, I commented Proposition 103 Backfires, State Farm to Cancel 72,000 California Policies
Blame the state, not insurers.
Congratulations to NY, IL, LA, and CA for Losing the Most Population
People in California, increasingly getting sick of the state’s progressive madness, are voting with their feet.
For discussion, please see Congratulations to NY, IL, LA, and CA for Losing the Most Population
Absolute Basis Losers
-
New York: -631,104
-
California: -573,019
-
Illinois: -263,780
California Leads the Nation in Unemployment
The BLS metro shows unemployment rates were up in 218 of 389 metro areas. Nonfarm employment only rose in 59 areas.
On March 15, I noted Unemployment Rates Rose in 218 of the 389 Metropolitan Areas
Unsurprisingly, California has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 5.7 percent vs. 4.1 percent nationally.
A Booming Economy?
California has massive problems although the stock market is at a record high and the economy is allegedly booming. The next recession will hit California exceptionally hard, and it’s not too far off.
-
-
Site: Zero HedgeKansas Democrat Governor Vetoes Bill Restricting Foreign Ownership Of Land Near Military BasesTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 19:30
Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a bill on Friday that aimed to prevent companies of China and other “foreign adversaries” from acquiring real property near military installations in the state.
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly gives her inaugural address for her second four-year term on the south steps of the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan., on Jan. 9, 2023. (John Hanna/AP Photo)
Senate Bill 172 aims to block individuals or companies from “countries of concern” from owning any interest in land located within a 100-mile radius of a military installation in Kansas.
Under the bill, any foreign principal that owns or acquires any interest in real property in Kansas would be required to file registration with the attorney general and divest of the property.
The Democratic governor has vetoed the proposed legislation, saying that the bill contains provisions that are “overly broad” and “not narrowly tailored” to protect the state from foreign adversaries.
“While I agree that it is important for our state to implement stronger protections against foreign adversaries, this legislation contains multiple provisions that are likely unconstitutional and cause unintended consequences,” Ms. Kelly said in a statement.
“Additionally, the retroactive nature of this legislation raises further serious constitutional concerns,” she added.
Ms. Kelly said the legislature should consider proposals that protect Kansas from “bad actors” without affecting the state’s legitimate business relationships with potential trading partners and small businesses.
“I am not willing to sign a bill that has the potential to hurt the state’s future prosperity and economic development,” the governor stated.
According to a report by Kansas State University, foreign investors from China own a single acre of privately held agricultural land in the state. China is among the countries listed as U.S. foreign adversaries.
As of 2021, China ranked as the third-largest export market for Kansas, trailing behind Mexico and Canada, according to a Kansas Export Statistics Executive Summary.
Republicans Voice Disappointment
Kansas Republicans have criticized Ms. Kelly’s decision to veto the bill. House Speaker Dan Hawkins, Majority Leader Chris Croft, and Speaker Pro Tempore Blake Carpenter issued a joint statement saying that the governor is putting military installations in Kansas at risk.
“Foreign adversaries, such as China, have made their intentions toward the U.S. and our democracy abundantly clear,” Mr. Hawkins said in the statement.
“It’s shameful that our governor has chosen not to take those threats seriously, leaving Kansas’ critical infrastructure and military installments exposed,” he added.
Mr. Croft described the governor’s veto as “beyond disappointing,” saying that it leaves the state’s military bases and other critical infrastructure “wide open for adversarial foreign governments.”
“The assets of this state are too important for us to sit on our hands and wait until it’s too late,” he stated. “This bill was carefully designed with input from everyone who wanted a say on how we should move forward.”
Mr. Carpenter said he remains committed to protecting the military installations in Kansas and “ensuring that the Chinese Communist Party and other foreign adversaries do not compromise Kansas’s safety.”
Similar Legislation in Other States
Similar legislation has been introduced in several states, including Georgia, Iowa, Utah, and Oklahoma. The South Carolina Senate passed a bill in March that will partly ban companies or citizens of foreign adversaries from acquiring real property in the state.
Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition aimed at ending discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, has condemned the measure and said it could stoke “xenophobia” among Asian American communities.
“These land ban laws label our communities as untrustworthy, blame them for the actions of another country’s government, and stoke the flames of racism, xenophobia, and hate,” Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, said in a statement after Georgia’s passage of the bill.
As of December 2021, China accounted for 383,935 acres of the 40 million acres of U.S. agricultural land owned by foreign investors, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
While the acreage under Chinese ownership is slightly less than 1 percent of all foreign-held agricultural land, it represents a nearly 30-fold leap from 13,720 acres in 2010, according to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report.
Caden Pearson contributed to this report.
-
Site: Zero HedgeUkraine Warns Against Questioning Zelensky's Legitimacy Due To Wartime Suspension Of ElectionsTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 19:00
The end of Volodymyr Zelensky's five year term as president of Ukraine is set to end by the close of May, at least according to what was stipulated upon his getting elected, however, the government has made it clear there will be no new election.
Officials have cited martial law due to the Russian invasion to say that after his five-year term ends on May 21, there won't be a new election until after martial law and wartime regulations are lifted.
Creative Commons Image
Ukraine's Minister of Justice, Denys Malyuska, confirmed this in a fresh weekend interview with BBC News Ukraine. "The president's powers endure until the election of his successor. However, certain provisions of the Constitution are open to interpretation, inviting speculation or conspiracy theories," Malyuska said when asked about ongoing speculation over what happens after May 21st.
He explained, "There may be considerable debate and criticism, particularly considering that the Constitution's framers may not have fully anticipated the possibility of Ukraine being embroiled in a large-scale conflict, leading to some provisions being inadequately formulated."
When asked about appealing to a Constitutional Court in order to seek clarification, Malyuska said that it is ill-timed. Or in essence he said it won't happen and warned against such an effort.
"Such an appeal would imply legitimate questions and doubts, warranting resolution by the Constitutional Court. Given the country's communication and security challenges, openly questioning the president's legitimacy would be a grave error."
"Therefore, I see no merit in approaching the Constitutional Court presently. Perhaps, in the future, under different circumstances, it could be considered, but not at this juncture," Malyuska followed with.
Meanwhile, at a moment that Russia's new cross-border Kharkiv offensive is in full swing, President Zelensky is telling the nation not to panic:
Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on his people not to panic amid Russia’s ongoing advance in the Kharkiv region that’s jeopardizing a local city.
Ukrainians should trust in their army defending the country’s northeastern border area and not “yield to emotions” despite the fierce fight there and the “extremely difficult” situation on the outskirts of Vovchansk, Zelenskiy said in his regular evening statement on Sunday.
"The advance in the Kharkiv region aims to stretch our forces and undermine their morale and motivation," Zelensky said. "Defense battles have never been simple, and they become even more challenging when an enemy manages to instill fear."
There are reports that Russian forces have been rapidly advancing in the north this weekend...
#BREAKING Russia is unexpectedly opening a new front in northern Ukraine - Sky News
— Russian Market (@runews) May 10, 2024
The Russian army has taken control of Strelche, Krasnoe, Pilna, and Borisovka in the Kharkiv region. pic.twitter.com/2DEMYUWbukRussia is said to be seeking to create a 10km deep 'buffer zone' inside Ukrainian territory in order to better deter against cross-border mortar and drone attacks on the Belgorod region. According to the latest Sunday headlines:
- RUSSIA CLAIMS CAPTURE OF MULTIPLE VILLAGES IN KHARKIV REGION, INCLUDING VOVCHANSK, PROMPTING MASS EVACUATIONS - SOURCES
- UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT ZELENSKIY URGES CALM AMIDST RUSSIAN ADVANCES IN KHARKIV, EMPHASIZING TRUST IN THE ARMY'S DEFENSE EFFORTS - SOURCES
- DESPITE REPORTS OF RUSSIAN GAINS, UKRAINIAN FORCES RESIST AND ATTEMPT COUNTER-ATTACKS IN THE REGION - SOURCES
- FOCUS OF RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE APPEARS TO BE ESTABLISHING A BUFFER ZONE RATHER THAN DIRECT ASSAULT ON KHARKIV CITY, ACCORDING TO ANALYSTS - SOURCES
- UKRAINIAN FORCES RESIST AND ATTEMPT COUNTER-ATTACKS IN THE REGION
Scores of Russian civilians have been killed and wounded over the last several months by such shelling. Moscow has warned it will punish Ukraine for such attacks directly on Russian territory.
-
Site: Zero HedgeBlame Canada? Justin Trudeau Creates Blueprint For Dystopia In Horrific Speech BillTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 18:25
Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,
On February 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a press conference in Edmonton, announcing his government’s decision to introduce the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63. It was described in Canadian media as a “bill to protect kids” that would stop the “exploitation of children,” and Trudeau’s curt speech focused solely on minors. The scarf-clad PM angrily dismissed criticisms the bill might have a broader focus.
“I look forward to putting forward that Online Harms bill, which people will see is very, very specifically focused on protecting kids, and not on censoring the Internet,” he said sharply. “I think everyone, wherever they are in the political spectrum, can agree that protecting kids is something governments should be focused on doing.”
Soon after, on February 26th, Trudeau’s government introduced the bill. Canada’s stable of retreating, credulous on-air personalities announced its rollout like the arrival of penicillin. “Tonight, Web of Harm,” gushed CTV’s Omar Sachedina. “Tackling online dangers and safeguarding children… The long-awaited framework for protecting the vulnerable…”
There was little initial uproar. What could be wrong with increasing child safety, or “protecting the vulnerable”?
Then people read the bill.
“If you look at the purpose of this law, it’s actually quite noble and most lawyers would agree with it,” says Canadian attorney Dan Freiheit. “Online safety, protecting children’s physical and mental health.” But the actual text?
“It’s wild,” Freheit says.
Trudeau was lying when he said C-63 was “very, very specifically focused on correcting kids.” The purview of the Online Harms Act extends far beyond speech, reimagining society as a mandated social engineering project, creating transformational new procedures that would:
-
enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system;
-
introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
-
punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “will commit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
-
penalize past statements. The law gets around prohibitions against “retroactive” punishment by calling the offense “continuous communication” of hate, i.e. the crime is your failure to take down bad speech;
-
force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”
Things you’re saying, things you’ve already said, things an administrative judge thinks you might say, all barred, with neighbors deputized as enforcers? Good times. Leave it to Trudeau, a frequent trailblazer in new forms of illiberalism in the digital age, to come up with this quantum leap downward on the rights front. C-63 is a Frankenstein’s Monster combining the worst censorship ideas already deployed by supposed ally government-in-laws like Europe’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s updated Australian Communications and Media Authority Act (ACMA), and Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which saw 7,152 complaints in its first week when the law took effect last month.
Trudeau’s creation is a turbo-charged social surveillance law aimed first at forcing big platforms like Facebook and Twitter to “self-police,” but secondarily targeting individuals and doling out civil and criminal penalties for speech and thought on a scale not seen anywhere. What constitutes hateful conduct? While the bill newly defines hate speech as “likely to foment detestation or vilification” of Canada’s growing list of protected groups and individuals, Canadian lawyers interviewed were generally unsure of what the standard might look like in practice.
“It’s impossible to know what exactly it’s going to mean,” says Bruce Pardy, Executive Director of Rights Probe. “So you’re going to have to rely upon the court in a criminal prosecution, or the human rights tribunal in a human rights proceeding, to put their own interpretation on that, and figure out where the line is.”
Despite being split on how serious the immediate impact might be (“We’re not looking at prisons full of people doing life for misgendering” said one), most attorneys seemed to agree C-63 will be a game-changer if passed, aimed beyond speech at the very concept of individual rights, chipping away at ideas like the presumption of innocence and the right to face one’s accuser, and using traditionally dubious tools like ex post facto laws.
On one level, it’s not surprising, given Canada’s historically diffident attitude toward rights — the first section in the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ironically introduced when Trudeau’s father Pierre was Prime Minister, is essentially a giant loophole — but this Prime Minister appears determined to swap out Canada’s reputation for brotherhood, humor, and generosity for a new one based on rigidity and collective paranoia.
RIGHTS, BUT: Canada guarantees the right to freedom of expression, but “only to such reasonable limits… as can be demonstrably justified.”
There’s a long backstory of important recent laws and Supreme Court cases that helped push Canada down a path toward C-63, but this bill still stands apart as a unique problem, and only a few domestic media outlets have been willing or able to criticize it. One of those is Rebel News, whose founder Ezra Levant says Canadians could really use America’s help in sounding the alarm. “Canadians need to fight for our own freedom, but the Canadian political and media establishment are obsessed by what U.S. journalists and politicians have to say about us,” Levant says. “So any attention Americans can bring to this civil liberties bonfire really makes a difference. Frankly, we need your help.”
How bad is C-63? See for yourself, in a tour through its key sections:
The biggest headline-grabber in C-63 involves new provisions for life imprisonment for speech offenses. There are really two. “Advocating genocide” is already a crime in Canada, but C-63 boosts its maximum penalty from five years to life. “Life sentences for sending out some words. That’s heavy,” Canada’s former Supreme Court Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, told journalist Edward Greenspon.
Andrea MacLean of the Calgary-based JSS Barristers is among the lawyers who don’t necessarily foresee an avalanche of life sentences for speech offenses, but does worry the draconian life sentence provisions might have serious downstream effects.
“They might encourage people to take plea deals they wouldn’t otherwise take,” MacLean says.
As bad as the “sending out some words” portion is, a more frightening provision prescribes potential life sentences for any “offence motivated by hatred.” This is a difficult concept, but what the law proscribes is any violation of any “Act of Parliament,” no matter how minor, combined with hateful motivation. One example given was crumpling up an anti-gay flier and throwing it out the window in a national park, which would combine a federal littering prohibition with hate speech. Another attorney suggested this could refer to something like denial of restaurant service, and marveled that “this takes civil offenses and makes them into crimes.”
I heard conflicting takes on this section, and it’s worth noting that Justice Minister Arif Virani has repeatedly described this “offence motivated by hatred” section as hateful intent mixed with a “criminal” offense like theft, assault, or murder. But the text reads like a parody of the American “hate crime enhancement” idea:
ANY OTHER ACT OF PARLIAMENT: Combining hate with any federal violation, no matter how minor, results in potential life sentences.
The “prior restraint” portion of C-63 describes the process by which a person can be punished preemptively if an informant convinces a judge that either a “hate propaganda offence” or the aforementioned “offence motivated by hatred” has a “reasonable” chance of occurring:
MINORITY REPORT: If authorities believe there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect a “hate propaganda” offense will occur, they will be able to hand out pre-emptive punishment.
This clause might particularly affect a high-profile person like J.K. Rowling who’s already declared an intention to keep saying things deemed offensive to Canadians, who in 2017 passed a law (C-16) forbidding “gender identity” discrimination. Pardy, who described the 2017 measure as a “weaponization of human rights law,” says C-63 is like that act “on steroids.” This pre-crime provision includes a long list of potential punishments, ranging from house arrest, scheduled exit and entry from the home, ankle monitoring, and seizure of firearms. MacLean pointed out that this guts Canada’s Section 11 guarantee of presumption of innocence unless guilt is proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Again, a “reasonable” chance the crime will occur is sufficient to justify detention...
Subscribers to Racket can read the rest here...
-
-
Site: The Orthosphere
“We put our man into a pulpit, and we virtually tell him ‘Now you may stand there and talk to us for half-an-hour. We won’t interrupt you by as much as a word! And you shall have it all your own way!’ And what does he give us in return? Shallow twaddle, that, if it were addressed to you over a dinner-table, you would think ‘Does the man take me for a fool?’”
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889)*
My readers from time to time chide me for what they perceive as unseemly irreverence, although I must suppose they are my readers because they enjoy my irreverence towards holy cows other than their own. I do not say this to chide these readers. It is human nature to be amused until one’s own ox is gored. I say it to preface some words on the uses and abuses of irreverence.
My epigraph is taken from the first volume of Lewis Carroll’s last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, which unlike his novels about Alice is today very largely forgotten. The sentiment is expressed by Arthur, the protagonist in one of the novel’s plots, and it is one in a series of strictures on the state of the Anglican Church in Victorian England.
Readers must understand that Carroll was himself a very serious Christian, a fact that is almost always obscured or omitted in secular celebrations of the madcap surrealism of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). He was born into a family of High-Church Anglicans, and appears to have died very much in the faith.
Although a High-Church Anglican, Carroll was keenly conscious that ritual tends to degrade into ritualism, and ritualism into a sham pageant of gorgeous spectacles and gross hypocrisy.
Carroll believed in a formal liturgy, but also believed that a liturgy of scripted motions very easily degrades into worship that only goes through the motions. I believe he was correct, for example, when he says that a liturgy that requires the congregation to kneel in prayer is a liturgy that will teach many in the congregation—especially the children—how to pretend they are praying.
Carroll made his observations on pretended prayer in the Preface to the second volume of Sylvie and Bruno, which was published four years after the volume in which Arthur made his caustic remark about preposterous sermons. Many readers apparently wrote to chide Carroll about this and other strictures, and he wrote the Preface to the second volume to clarify his position.
He first points out that a novelist must put into the mouths of his characters many opinions that are not his own, and therefore,
“I do not hold myself responsible for any of the opinions expressed by the characters in my book.”**
Carroll however admits that Arthur’s strictures on sermons are very nearly his own. A great many sermons (and homilies), then as now, are “shallow twaddle,” a pablum of motivational uplift and sophomoric psychology. As Carroll very pithily puts it:
“If it were addressed to you over a dinner-table, you would think “Does the man take me for a fool?”*
To prove his point, Carroll challenges his readers to name the text and treatment of the sermon that they heard the Sunday before. I challenge you to do likewise. Embarrassing, isn’t it? And I am asking you this question on Sunday.
But Carroll goes deeper, first suggesting the root of the problem and then explaining the deeper evil of sermons (and homilies) that are composed of “shallow twaddle.”
“In my opinion, far too any sermons are expected from our preachers; and, as a consequence, a great many are preached, which are not worth listening to; and, as a consequence of that, we are very apt not to listen.”**
As a man who keeps body and soul together by lecturing, I have always sympathized with priests and preachers who are expected to deliver one or more original public addresses every week. I do not like “shallow twaddle,” but I do not hold them altogether to blame for it. Push a dairy farmer to the wall and he will begin to water his milk.
Carroll’s explanation of the deeper evil of “shallow twaddle” is so true that every honest man will feel uneasy to see it expressed. Far too often the sermon (or homily) is the stage in a service where worshippers allow their minds to relax and wander. Not a few find the drone from the pulpit overpoweringly restful.
Carroll was, as I said, a High-Church Anglican or Anglo-Catholic. Thus he was part of the movement that began with the Tractarians and gave us the glorious gothic revival churches of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This movement was a reaction against (1) the lingering puritanism of Low-Church Anglicanism and (2) the crypto-Unitarian humanism of the eighteenth century. Like the Roman Catholic Church in the Counterreformation, High-Church Anglicans aimed to restore the sacramental and transcendent aspect of worship with gorgeous ritual.
Carroll was, by training and temperament, part of this movement, but like his fictional character Arthur, he saw,
“those ‘high’ services are fast becoming pure Formalism. More and more the people are beginning to regard them as ‘performances,’ in which they only ‘assist’ in the French sense.”*
To assist in the French sense is to attend. It is merely to be present, like the day-dreaming students who waste their time by merely attending one of my lectures. At best, it is to adopt the pose of a spectator and not a participant. As Carroll says in the Preface to volume two:
“Then, as to ‘Choristers,’ and all the other accessories—of music, vestments, processions, etc.—which have come, along with them, into fashion—while freely admitting that the ‘Ritual’ movement was sorely needed, and that it has effected a vast improvement in our Church-Services, which had become dead and dry to the last degree, I hold that, like many other desirable movements, it has introduced many new dangers.”**
The new dangers were that the symbolic windows on transcendence (this is what High-Church Anglicans mean by “sacramental”*) can all to easily become mere spectacles, mere sources of diversion, entertainment and aesthetic delight. As he goes on to say in the Preface to the second volume of Sylvie and Bruno:
“For the Congregation this new movement involves the danger of learning to think that the Services are done for then; and that their bodily presence is all they need contribute. And for the Clergy and Congregation alike, it involves the danger of regarding these elaborate Services as ends in themselves, and of forgetting that they are simply means, and the very hollowest of mockeries, unless they bear fruits in our lives.”
After detailing some examples from personal experience, Carroll laments,
“To me it is much as if I were to see a Bible used as a footstool.”
What Carroll (and Jesus) teaches is that we must focus on the fruit, and not on the means to that fruit. A stained glass window, to give an example, may be an excellent sacramental means to experience the transcendent. But it only works so long as we see through the stained glass window to something beyond. Once we begin to see only the window, and to reverence that window, we would do well to follow the example of the Puritans and pull it down.
This is because reverence for the means of worship is the definition of idolatry, and irreverence for reverence of the means of worship is therefore destruction of idols.
*) Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (London: Macmillan, 1889), chap. 19.
**) Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (New York: Macmillan, 1894), Preface.
***) “Now beauty is sacramental in essence, for it is ‘an outward and visible sign of a spiritual truth or spiritual experience . . .” Ralph Adams Cram, The Gothic Quest (New York: The Baker and Taylor Co., 1907), p. 277. -
Site: Zero HedgeIsraeli Attacks Intensify Across Gaza, Rafah Civilians Have Nowhere To GoTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 17:15
Israeli tanks have moved into eastern Jabalia in northern Gaza following a night of intense bombardment, which has killed some 19 Palestinians and flattened residential blocks, according to health officials.
Israeli fire targeted ambulances near the camp's Unrwa clinic, Wafa news agency is reporting. The Israeli army said that the latest incursion on the camp was to prevent Hamas from "rehabilitating military capabilities" there.
Via Reuters
In other areas of Gaza, Israeli air strikes reportedly killed some 27 Palestinians overnight. In Rafah, 18 Palestinians were killed in air strikes, including several children, according to Wafa.
Wafa is also reporting that the continuing air strikes have killed dozens more in the past few hours, with 12 bodies arriving at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.
The director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Sam Rose, has warned that Palestinians in Rafah are being instructed to evacuate to a nearby "expanded humanitarian area" which is already overcrowded and lacking in essential services.
In an interview with BBC news, Sam Rose explained that al-Mawasi is "essentially sand dunes on the Mediterranean coast that are crowded with hundreds of thousands of people" who have already been displaced.
"There is no water network, there is no infrastructure, sewage, sanitation," he said.
.@BarakRavid @axios sources suggest the Israelis are going to try to salami-slice Rafah to avoid crossing Biden's "red line": https://t.co/ND4EgQ4McI
— Sam Heller | سام هيلر (@AbuJamajem) May 10, 2024Here are some of the latest updates:
-
The Israeli military has intensified attacks across Gaza in the past 24 hours, with 27 Palestinians killed overnight, including several children in southern Rafah.
-
Israeli forces "carpet-bombed" Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing and wounding several Palestinians, Wafa news agency is reporting. Residential houses and evacuation centres have been flattened. The death toll is currently unknown.
-
In the West Bank, Israeli forces have raided the Arroub refugee camp near Hebron on Sunday, Wafa is reporting.
-
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres renewed calls for an "immediate ceasefire".
-
UN agencies have warned that food supplies for distribution in southern Gaza will run out today.
-
Unrwa estimates that 300,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah in the last week, emphasising that displaced people have "nowhere safe to go".
-
-
Site: RT - News
Reports about a recent assassination attempt on Mohammed bin Salman appear to have been false – but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen
Recently, several media outlets reported an attack on the convoy of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). However, these claims appear to have been false.
The video and information about burning cars in Riyadh emerged in a post by X (formerly Twitter) user Winter Intel, whose account analysis indicates an unreliable source. Later, the General Directorate of Civil Defense of Saudi Arabia reported an accident involving two cars, one of which had caught fire. The agency confirmed that there were no casualties.
Many Saudi journalists also debunked the news of the attack, calling it fake. Despite the widespread presence of fake news in the modern information space, questions remain about who could have an interest in spreading such rumors, and why. Could there indeed be an assassination attempt on MBS, and what might the reasons be?
Vision 2030: A great reformer for a nation of the future
Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, initiated comprehensive reforms in the kingdom from the moment he assumed key positions of power. His ambitious reform program “Vision 2030” reflects a strategic plan to transform various aspects of the country’s economy, society, and culture. The primary economic goal is to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil, and MBS has taken several critical steps toward this objective.
Sectors like tourism, entertainment, information technology, healthcare, industry, and mining are being developed. Saudi Arabia aims to increase the share of the non-oil sector in GDP from 16% to 50%. Privatization of state-owned enterprises is another vital element. The process of partial privatization of Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, has begun, as well as privatization of other public enterprises in various sectors.
At the same time, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the largest sovereign funds in the world, with assets exceeding $620 billion, was established. The fund finances many strategic investments within and beyond the country, including the major project to build the futuristic NEOM megacity on the Red Sea coast. To stimulate the private sector, MBS has paid particular attention to developing small and medium-sized businesses, creating favorable conditions for entrepreneurship and foreign investment, including lifting restrictions on foreign ownership of businesses in the country.
MBS has also brought significant changes to Saudi Arabian social life. The most critical step was expanding women’s rights: they can now drive, attend sports stadiums, start their own businesses, and travel without a male guardian’s permission. Mandatory gender segregation at public events has also been abolished. Additionally, the establishment of the General Entertainment Authority has led to the emergence of concerts, cinemas, festivals, and other forms of entertainment previously strictly prohibited.
Read more
No Saudi defense pact without Israel deal – White House
Opening Saudi Arabia to foreign tourists is another key social reform. Thanks to the introduction of tourist visas, the country has for the first time become accessible to visitors not involved in a pilgrimage. In the cultural sphere, MBS is promoting development of arts and culture. The General Culture Authority was created, launching initiatives to support local artists and cultural projects. Special attention is also given to preserving Saudi Arabia’s cultural heritage, restoring historical sites and opening them to visitors.
Political reforms have also become an essential part of “Vision 2030.” In November 2017, MBS launched an anti-corruption campaign, arresting dozens of princes and businessmen. This campaign allowed significant sums to be returned to the state treasury, which were then used to finance key reforms. The government service reform introduced new standards for civil servants and improved the efficiency of the government apparatus.
Despite the complexity and scale of the changes, MBS continues to advance Vision 2030, striving to make Saudi Arabia more progressive, modern, and sustainable in the future.
“Challenges of 2030”: What problems does MBS face?
MBS’ reforms are already changing the face of Saudi Arabia, but they have sparked strong reactions, both domestically and internationally. Vision 2030 is an ambitious plan to transform Saudi Arabia but the implementation of the program faces significant challenges.
Despite notable achievements, MBS’ reforms have drawn criticism from both inside the country and abroad. The anti-corruption campaign was accompanied by harsh repression of dissent. The November 2017 move on princes and businessmen returned significant sums to the state. However, this step by MBS was also seen as an attempt to eliminate political opponents, consolidate his power, and suppress dissent.
The arrests of activists and journalists have restricted freedom of speech and political participation, provoking strong criticism from international human-rights organizations. The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 cemented a negative image of MBS in the eyes of the global community. This crime became a symbol of a brutal suppression of opposition, and several Western countries imposed sanctions on Saudi officials suspected of involvement in the killing.
The UN and international human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have raised concerns and leveled criticism at MBS for the arrests of journalists, bloggers and activists, including female activists fighting for women’s rights such as Loujain al-Hathloul. Strict laws on insulting religion and the state, mistreatment of prisoners, and the kingdom’s use of the death penalty continue to attract global attention.
Another source of international criticism is the war in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, led by MBS, headed a coalition against the Houthis in 2015. The conflict has led to massive civilian casualties and a humanitarian crisis in Yemen. MBS was accused of waging a war that disproportionately targeted civilian infrastructure, and of blockading Yemen, which led to widespread famine.
Sharp economic and social changes have also triggered resistance within Saudi Arabia. Despite efforts to develop non-oil sectors, oil remains a significant source of the country’s revenue. The recent sharp decline in global oil prices has exposed the vulnerability of the kingdom’s economy. Vision 2030 aims to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil revenue, but economic diversification has proven to be a challenging task.
Read more
Saudi Arabia denies shooting down Iranian drones destined for Israel
The reforms have faced the most resistance from religious and conservative circles. Most significantly, expanding women’s rights was met with fierce criticism from the religious establishment and conservative parts of the population, who see such reforms as a threat to traditional Islamic values.
These problems are not without historical parallels to the reforms of King Faisal, who also faced challenges in modernizing Saudi Arabia in the mid-20th century. King Faisal, the uncle of MBS, also carried out reforms that changed Saudi Arabia. He sought to reduce the country’s dependence on oil by developing infrastructure and non-oil sectors of the economy. In the 1960s and 1970s, he introduced a mandatory education system for girls despite conservative opposition, and sought a more modern, open Saudi Arabia. However, he was shot and killed by his nephew, although the real reasons behind this act remain unclear.
However, there are significant differences between the reforms of MBS and King Faisal. King Faisal acted cautiously and gradually, avoiding abrupt changes, while MBS aims for rapid results, often causing social upheaval. King Faisal was more diplomatic in his approach to opponents, whereas MBS employs harsh methods to suppress adversaries of reform. The anti-corruption campaign and its mass arrests have become part of MBS’ strategy to consolidate power, which critics see as authoritarian.
Rising external tensions
The United States remains Saudi Arabia’s primary strategic partner, but relations between the two countries have often been strained due to MBS’ policies. After the Khashoggi murder, the US Congress and the Biden administration sharply criticized the crown prince. The CIA linked this crime directly to MBS, which led to sanctions against several Saudi officials and complicated relations with Washington. The US also expressed concern over the war in Yemen. President Biden announced the end of US support for the Saudi campaign and reviewed arms supplies. An additional source of tension was the October 2022 OPEC+ decision led by Saudi Arabia to cut oil production, which raised energy prices and angered the Biden administration.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have traditionally been regional rivals, supporting opposing sides in conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon while also competing for influence in the Persian Gulf. The severing of their diplomatic relations in 2016 and mutual accusations of destabilizing the region heightened enmity between Riyadh and Tehran. Saudi Arabia criticizes Iran’s nuclear program and supports sanctions against Tehran, fearing the possible development of Iranian nuclear weapons. However, in March 2023, with China’s help, the two nations agreed to restore diplomatic relations, opening a new chapter in the Riyadh-Tehran dialogue and promising a potential reduction in regional tensions, though the fundamental causes of competition and rivalry remain.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has traditionally been a close partner of Saudi Arabia in the region, but the ambitions of its leader, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), create friction. The UAE seeks to become a regional economic hub, which creates competition between Dubai and Riyadh. Saudi Arabia requires international companies to move their headquarters to Riyadh to secure contracts in the kingdom, which displeases Dubai. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE fight the Houthis together but pursue different goals: the UAE supports the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which seeks southern Yemen’s independence, while Saudi Arabia advocates a unified Yemen. In relations with Israel, the UAE normalized ties through the Abraham Accords in 2020, promoting regional cooperation, while Saudi Arabia remains hesitant to follow suit due to concerns over internal backlash.
Read more
What the Arab world thinks of Russia’s military operation against Ukraine
Saudi Arabia and Israel do not have official diplomatic relations, but against the backdrop of common opposition to Iran, both states are cautiously moving towards rapprochement. Tehran remains the main adversary for both countries, providing a basis for informal security cooperation. Israel offers Saudi Arabia support in countering the Iranian threat. In the framework of the Abraham Accords, several Arab countries have normalized relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia has yet to grant official recognition, but negotiations were actively ongoing until the conflict in Gaza erupted in October 2023
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Türkiye improved after a period of tension over the Khashoggi murder. Türkiye seeks to strengthen its influence in the Middle East, competing with Saudi Arabia. Earlier, Ankara had strongly criticized Riyadh’s actions in Yemen and its blockade of Qatar. In 2022, MBS visited Turkey, and the two countries agreed to improve relations. This demonstrates MBS’s pragmatic approach to cooperation, even with those who have criticized him in the past.
In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, led by the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain, imposed a blockade on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and of maintaining close ties with Iran. This created deep regional divisions and strengthened Türkiye’s and Iran’s influence over Qatar. However, in January 2021, Riyadh and Doha signed an agreement to restore relations and ended the blockade. Nevertheless, mutual distrust remains.
In the changing global world, Saudi Arabia faces difficulties as MBS seeks to pursue a sovereign and diversified foreign policy. Western criticism often stems not only from human-rights issues and the crown prince’s harsh governance methods but also from his desire to develop relations with Russia and China. Riyadh sees China as a strategic partner in trade and investment. Saudi Arabia and Russia cooperate within OPEC+ on oil-price regulation. Riyadh maintains contacts with Moscow despite Western isolation of Russia due to the war in Ukraine.
MBS’ domestic and foreign policies, despite complicated relations with many countries and forces, reflects his desire to strengthen Saudi Arabia’s position as a regional leader and to reshape the kingdom. However, his harsh methods and uncompromising struggle against the opposition have intensified criticism from global and regional players, creating new challenges for the crown prince. Therefore, potential assassination attempts on the de-facto leader of modern Saudi Arabia may not be fake in the future.
His reforms are opening a new chapter in Saudi Arabian history, but they also highlight the difficulty of modernizing the kingdom amidst contradictions and resistance from various segments of society. The Vision 2030 program remains an ambitious attempt to make the kingdom more progressive, modern, and sustainable in the future, despite the many challenges on this path. After all, not everyone is interested in a strong and sovereign Saudi Arabia.
-
Site: Zero HedgeWatch: Pelosi Dismantled In Real Time In Masterclass On PopulismTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 16:40
Two weeks ago, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was thoroughly savaged during a debate at Oxford University over the question of whether populism is a "threat to democracy." In case you missed it, read on as it's making the rounds. If you have 14 minutes to spare, jump right in:
Opening the case for the left was Rachel Haddad, Secretary of the Oxford Union. She argued that populist leaders like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage pose a threat to democracy, and are not a "new generation of geniuses" who can find simple solutions to longstanding, complex problems.
Pelosi closed the debate for the proposition, defining populism as an "ethno-nationalist populism, generated by an ethnic negativity to immigrants, people who are different from them and the rest" (so, 'they're racists!').
Speaking against the motion were Union committee members Sultan Kokhar (Chair of Consultative Committee) and Oscar Whittle (Director of Research), as well as former Mumford & Sons lead guitarist, Winston Marshall - now a podcaster for The Spectator - who got into an exchange with Pelosi during parts of his speech.
Marshall started out by saying:
"Words have a tendency to change meaning when I was a boy, "woman" meant "someone who didn't have a cock."
Populism has become a word used synonymously with "racists." We've heard "ethno-nationalist," with "bigot," with "hillbilly," "redneck," with "deplorables."
Elites use it to show their contempt for ordinary people."He then noted that Barack Obama, while still president, tried to frame he and Bernie Sanders as actual populists vs. Donald Trump, who 'doesn't care about working people.'
But then, "If you watch Obama's speeches after that point, more and more recently, he uses the word "populist" interchangeably with "strong man," with "authoritarian." The word changes meaning, it becomes a negative, a pejorative, a slur."
"To me, populism is not a dirty word. Since the 2008 crash and specifically the trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout, we are in the populist age, and for good reason. The elites have failed," Marshall continued.
He then got into it with Pelosi after drawing a parallel between January 6th and June 2020, saying: "I'm sure Congresswoman Pelosi will agree that the entire month of June 2020, when the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon was under siege, and under insurrection by radical progressives, those too were dark days for America."
To which Pelosi shot back, "You are not. There is no equivalence there," adding "It is not like what happened on January 6, which was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States."
Read on for Marshall's complete masterclass in populism (transcript courtesy of RealClear Politics).
My point, though is that all political movements are susceptible to violence, and indeed insurrection. And if we were arguing that fascism was a threat to democracy, I'd be on that side of the House.
Indeed, the current populist age is a movement against fascism. I've got quite a lot to get through.
Populism as you know, is the politics of the ordinary people against an elite, populism is not a threat to democracy. Populism is democracy, and why else have universal suffrage, if not to keep elites in check?
Ladies and gentlemen, given the success of Trump, and more recently, Javier Milei taking a chainsaw to the state behemoth of Argentina's bureaucratic monster, you'd be mistaken for thinking this was a right-wing populist age, but that would be ignoring Occupy Wall Street. That would be ignoring Jeremy Corbyn's "for the many, not the few," that would be ignoring Bernie against the billionaires, RFK Jr. against Big Pharma, and more recently, George Galloway against his better judgment. Now all of them, including Galloway, recognize genuine concerns of ordinary people being otherwise ignored by the establishment.
I'm actually rather surprised that our esteemed opposition, Congressman Pelosi, is on that side of the motion. I thought the left was supposed to be anti-elite. I thought the left was supposed to be anti-establishment today, particularly in America, the globalist left have become the establishment. I suppose for Miss Pelosi to have taken this side of the motion, she'd be arguing herself out of a job.
But it's here in Britain, where right and left populists united for the supreme act of democracy, Brexit. Polls have showed the number one reason people voted for Brexit was sovereignty, for more democracy.
What was the response of the Brussels elite? They did everything in their power to undermine the Democratic will of the British people and the Westminster elite were just as disgraceful. As we've heard, David Cameron called the voters "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists." The liberal Democrats did everything they could to overturn a democratic vote. Keir Starmer campaigned for a second referendum. Elites would have had us voting and voting and voting until we voted their way. Indeed, that's what happened in Ireland and in Denmark.
Let's look at some of the other populist movements. The Hong Konger populist revolt is literally called the Pro-Democracy Movement. In the Farmer revolts from the Netherlands to Germany, France, Greece, to Sri Lanka, farmers are taking their tractors to the road to protest ESG policy that's floated down to us from those all-knowing, infallible elites of Davos. The trucker movement in Canada became anti-elitist when petty tyrant Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze their bank accounts, not the behavior of a democratic head of state. The Gilets Jaunes France, ULEZ in London, working people protesting policy that hurt them. And how are they treated? They're called conspiracy theorists. They're called far-right, by the mayor as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, populism is the voice of the voiceless. The real threat to democracy is from the elites. Now don't get me wrong, we need elites. If President Biden has shown us anything, we need someone to run the countries. When the president has severe dementia, it is not just America that crumbles, the whole world burns.
But let's examine the elites. European corporations spend over €1 billion a year lobbying Brussels, U.S. corporations spend over $2 billion a year lobbying in DC, and two-thirds of Congress receive funding from pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer alone spent $11 million in 2021. They made over $10 billion in profit. No wonder then that 66% of Americans think the is rigged against them for the rich and the powerful.
And by the way, we used to have a word for when big business and big government were in cahoots. And I think any students here of early 20th-century Italian history will know what I'm talking about.
What about Big Tech? Throughout the pandemic, Biden's team, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security colluded with Big Tech in censoring dissenting voices. Not kooky conspiracy theorists, people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford epidemiologist, people like Harvard scientist Martin Kulldorf, people spreading true information, not misinformation, true information at odds with the government narrative.
Need I remind you, democracy without free speech is not democracy.
This was a direct breach by the way of the First Amendment. Before COVID, Intelligence services colluded with Big Tech to have Trump suspended off Twitter. Yes, the same platform which hosted the Taliban and Ayatollah "Death To Israel" Khomeini. They thought the president crossed the line when he tweeted on Jan 6 quote, "Remain peaceful. No violence! Respect the law and our great men and women in blue." That's a quote.
You may be thinking now that Trump is a populist. You are right. He didn't accept the 2020 elections and he should have. So should Hillary in 2016. So should Brussels, and so should Westminster in 2016. And so too should Congresswoman Pelosi, instead of saying the 2016 election was quote, "hijacked."
PELOSI: That doesn't mean we don't accept the results, though!
WINSTON MARSHALL: What about the mainstream media? Let me read you some mainstream media headlines. The New Yorker the day before the 2016 election, "The Case Against Democracy." The Washington Post, the day after the election, "The Problem With Our Government Is Democracy." The LA Times, June 2017, "The British Election Is A Reminder Of The Perils Of Too Much Democracy." Vox, June 2017, "Two eminent political scientists say the problem with democracy is voters." New York Times, June 2017, "The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is The Participants."
Mainstream media elites are part of a class who don't just disdain populism, they disdain the people. If the Democrats had put half their energy into delivering for the people, Trump wouldn't even have a chance in 2024. He shouldn't, he shouldn't have a chance. You've had power for four years. From the fabricated Steele dossier, to trying to take him off the ballot in both Maine and Colorado, the Democrats are the anti-Democrat party. All we need now is the Republicans to come out as the pro-Monarchist party.
Ladies and gentlemen, populism is not a threat to democracy, but I'll tell you what is. It is elites ordering social media to censor political opponents. It's police shutting down dissenters, be it anti-monarchists in this country or gender-critical voices here, or last week in Brussels, the National Conservative Movement.
I'll tell you what is a threat to democracy. It's Brussels, DC, Westminster, the mainstream media, big tech, big Pharma, corporate collusion and the Davos cronies. The threat to democracy comes from those who write off ordinary people as "deplorable." The threat to democracy comes from those who smear working people as "racists." The threat to democracy comes from those who write off working people as "populists."
And I'll say one last thing. This populist age can be brought to an end at the snap of a finger. All that needs to be done is for elites to start listening to, respecting, and God forbid, working for ordinary people. Thank you.And of course, being Oxford, the Union voted for 'populism bad' - with 177 members voting for the motion, and 68 voting against.
-
Site: Zero HedgeClimate "Reparations" Numbers Are RiggedTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 16:05
Authored by Paul Mueller via the American Institute for Economic Research,
Nobel Prize–winning economist Esther Duflo thinks rich countries should pay poor countries $500 billion in compensation each year for climate-change damages. It is our “moral debt.” She proposes an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich and an increase in the global minimum corporate tax rate to fund this $500 billion transfer.
Fishermen haul their catch near a fishery in Goa, India. 2016.
You and I may be shocked by such a suggestion but don’t worry: “It’s really necessary. And it’s reasonable. It’s not that hard.” Only someone in an elite, progressive bubble could say something like that. Let’s check her reasoning.
Duflo claims that climate change creates costs, specifically through “excess” deaths due to excessive heat. Poorer countries from the global south near the equator will see more days of extreme heat, and so will see a disproportionate increase in excess deaths.
Other economists translated those deaths into an externality cost of $37 per ton of CO2. Multiply that by the roughly fourteen billion tons of CO2 emitted by the US and Europe and voila, wealthy countries generate $500 billion in externality costs per year.
She proposes paying for this by increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate from 15 percent to 18 percent and introducing an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich, which she defines as the 3000 richest billionaires. We can’t go into the many problems and obstacles to such funding mechanisms here — suffice it to say such ideas will be nearly impossible to implement.
But Duflo’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, besides missing the bigger picture, are so speculative as to require playing make-believe. Let’s play along for a moment to see why. We’ll start by reverse-engineering her $500 billion number into a measure of harm.
Regulatory agencies and insurance companies use the concepts of “statistical value of life” or the “statistical value of a life-year” to do cost-benefit analysis on risk and the monetary value of life. These concepts are slippery, however, and calculated in a variety of ways with a wide range of estimates.
To keep things simple, let’s assume that the value of one life-year is $200,000. The $500 billion number proposed by Duflo suggests that the cost imposed by wealthy countries burning fossil fuels is the loss of roughly 2.5 million life-year” in poor countries per year.
That sounds like a staggering number!
But what about the benefits that have accrued to developing countries from activities that generate CO2 emissions? Important advances in medicine, such as antibiotics and vaccines, were developed in modern industrialized countries. So, too, were refrigeration, cars, the internet, smart phones, radar; modern agricultural methods with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers; improvements in plumbing, building materials, manufacturing, and much more. “Polluting” activities in industrialized countries improved nutrition and safety around the world. These advances, and many others, significantly increased people’s life expectancies — especially in poor countries.
Surely the value of these improvements should weight the opposite side of the scale from the expected harm of climate change — especially since the crusade against fossil fuels and carbon emissions will assuredly slow economic growth and innovation. Let’s consider the case of India for a moment.
Life expectancy in India has basically doubled from about 35 years in 1950 to about 70 years in 2024. If you consider that India has just over a billion people living in it, modern technology developed by rich CO2-emitting countries has added 35 billion life-years in India alone.
Translating life-years back into dollars, 35 billion life-years times $200,000 per life-year means that the benefits from greater life expectancy in India over the past 75 years is the equivalent of $7 quadrillion dollars — or in annualized terms, an annual benefit of about $93 trillion dollars. In other words, the benefits to India alone are over a hundred times larger than Duflo’s estimate of costs!
Nor is India cherry-picked. China has a similar story with life expectancy rising from 43.45 years to 77.64 years. Similar improvements in life expectancy occur across the global south.
In Africa:
- Mali (26.35 years to 60.86 years)
- Chad (35.28 years to 55.44 years)
- Libya (35.28 years to 73.59 years)
- Kenya (41.05 years to 67.70 years)
- Democratic Republic of Congo (38.15 years to 61.86 years)
- Tanzania (39.86 years to 66.67 years)
- Sudan (43.02 years to 66.30 years).
In South America:
- Panama (55.19 years to 79.27 years)
- Nicaragua (40.44 years to 75.43 years)
- Colombia (49.48 years to 78.04 years).
In southeast Asia:
- Indonesia (39.77 years to 72.50 years)
- Malaysia (52.80 years to 76.79 years)
- Vietnam (51.24 years to 75.91 years).
Of course, one could argue that developed industrial countries are not solely responsible for increases in life expectancy around the world. But one could just as easily say the same about whether developed industrial countries are solely responsible for global CO2 emissions, climate change, or harm to people in the global south due to hotter weather. Connecting these two issues makes perfect philosophical sense, because the production of CO2 has historically been directly associated with increases in economic growth; which in turn is necessary for all the developments increasing longevity around the world.
Even if we massage the assumptions in Duflo’s favor, the results remain favorable to industrialization. Suppose western technology and industrial activities contribute 50 percent to improvements in life expectancy. That’s still a $46 trillion annualized benefit to India. Reduce the value of a statistical life-year to $100,000 — that’s still a $23 trillion/year benefit from industrialization in the west. Exclude India from the analysis and cut the population we focus on down to 500 million people — that’s still over $12 trillion/year in benefits. Reduce the improvement in life-expectancy by six years — that still leaves about $10 trillion/year in benefits.
So, even after making tons of assumptions to reduce their size, the estimated benefits of industrialization are still about twenty times larger than Duflo’s estimate of its costs.
Worrying about hypothetical, indirect costs of CO2 emissions when it comes to human well-being is like scrounging for pennies while ignoring $100 bills lying on the sidewalk. Actually, it is worse than that. It is like lighting $100 bills on fire to help you search a dark alley for some pocket change of human welfare.
Economic development, driven largely by Adam Smith’s dictum “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” which includes strong private property rights and limited government intervention, has improved human living standards in unprecedented ways over the past 300 years. These remarkable improvements in human welfare are not limited to wealthy, developed economies but are enjoyed around the world.
Duflo talks about the (external) costs of industrialization on certain countries without considering the truly massive (external) benefits of industrialization to those same countries.
If anything, with a proper accounting, developing countries owe rich countries gratitude for the benefits they have received from industrialization and the corresponding CO2 emissions.
Paul Mueller is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University. Previously, Dr. Mueller taught at The King’s College in New York City.
-
Site: LES FEMMES - THE TRUTH
-
Site: Zero HedgeCitadel Ken Griffin Rises Up Against Left's "Cultural Revolution," Says Time To Embrace "Western Values"Tyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 15:30
The woke takeover of America's higher education system, transforming classrooms into woke indoctrination camps, has been on full display over the last several years. More recently, the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses have been a shocking eye-opener for many, which only reveal America's future leaders are being transformed into toxic, leftist creatures, used as 'useful idiots' by leftist-funded non-governmental organizations (funded by you know who), in a sinister plan masqueraded underneath social justice movements to start an actual revolution, destroy capitalism, and ultimately, conquer America.
If you don't believe us, we've got some news that might change your mind.
Late last month, one very outspoken speaker at a pro-Palestinian campus protest said the quiet part out loud:
"There's only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the USA."
An extremist on the mic says: "There’s only one solution, intifada revolution. We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the USA."
— A Man Of Memes (@RickyDoggin) April 30, 2024
This isn’t just about Israel/Palestine. It's an attempt of the Marxist takeover of America. Our colleges have become… pic.twitter.com/2IEqRyuorBThe question law-abiding Americans need to ask is why leftist radicals in the Biden administration, who quite honestly hate America, allow toxic woke ideologies to flow through the education system, promoting hate and violence at colleges and universities.
Entire education curriculums have been infected with Marxist teachings, and purple-haired folks who are confused about their gender are infecting the vulnerable minds of youngsters with woke ideologies such as diversity, equity and inclusion, and queer theory.
With some calling for the federal government to intervene and save the republic from this chaos, the most unlikely heroes of our time are the billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and Ken Griffin, who are stepping up to the plate to defend Old Glory and the nation.
Musk is on X, awakening the world's population to various forms of Marxism, pushed by dark money-funded NGOs, which is spreading across governments and society like stage four cancer. On the other hand, Ackman and Griffin have denounced woke Ivy League schools, such as Harvard, in very public ways.
The latest is Griffin, who founded the $63 billion hedge fund Citadel. In an interview Saturday, Griffin told the Financial Times that Harvard needs to embrace "Western values." The school's major donor said the campus crisis is a byproduct of a "cultural revolution."
He said the US had "lost sight of education as the means of pursuing truth and acquiring knowledge" over the past decade.
"The narrative on some of our college campuses has devolved to the level that the system is rigged and unfair, and that America is plagued by systemic racism and systemic injustice," he noted.
Griffin continued, "What you're seeing now is the end-product of this cultural revolution in American education playing out on American campuses, in particular, using the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed."
"The protests on college campuses are almost like performative art, and we're not actually helping Palestinians or Israelis with these surreal protests," the billionaire said, adding that in previous humanitarian crises, Americans would focus on practical aid.
As we've pointed out, the campus riots have nothing to do with helping the poor Palestinians. Similarly, adjacent pro-Palestinian protests, shutting critical infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, and airport terminals nationwide, have zero to do with helping these folks and everything to do with collapsing America.
The woke cult has been activated and unleashed in the US, as its objective is to scream racism over and over until communism is installed. If that's the solution to their alleged problems - well - this should be a wakeup call - that communism has yet to work in the world - killing more than 100 million people and counting.
Here's Morgan Freeman on ending racism:
Morgan Freeman on ending racism: pic.twitter.com/Jw6lEymC8D
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) April 23, 2024FT asked Griffin on how to fix Harvard, and his response:
"Harvard should put front and centre [that it] stands for meritocracy in America and will educate the next generation of leaders in American business, government, healthcare, and the philanthropic community. Harvard will embrace our Western values that have built one of the greatest nations in the world, foster those values with students, and ask them to manifest these values throughout the rest of their life."
The billionaire added: "Freedom of speech does not give you the right to storm a building or vandalize it. That's not freedom of speech. That's just anarchy."
So again, the unlikely heroes of our time are an elite class of billionaires; they're strapping on their combat shoes in this culture war and are signaling enough is enough.
Perhaps it's time to upload antivirus woke software in America's schools, not just higher education but the entire damn system in a major overhaul - we suspect the Trump admin team will do that.
-
Site: Zero HedgePutin Unveils Dramatic Reshuffling Of Closest Advisors: Shoigu Out As Defense MinisterTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 14:44
Russian state media is confirming a huge breaking development that President Putin has removed his longtime Defense Minister and personal friend Sergei Shoigu as defense chief, who has overseen the Ukraine war since its beginning in Feb. 2022. He will now serve as head of the nation's security council.
"Sergei Shoigu is likely to lose the post of Minister of Defense of Russia to acting First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov," English-language RT is reporting. "His candidacy was proposed by President Vladimir Putin, the Federation Council announced on Sunday."
Putin has also reportedly dismissed Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, according to Interfax.
This appears in order to shuffle Shoigu into that position. Putin has now appointed Shoigu as new Secretary of the Russian Security Council. Likely Patrushev is also being moved to another position too.
Wow, indeed. Looks like Putin is pushing out his long-time Defense Minister and Siberian forest hiking partner Sergei Shoigu. https://t.co/XUYoKmR1UO
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) May 12, 2024The proposed candidate for new defense chief, Belousov, has a background in Russia's central bank and economics and finance...
Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed former First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov as candidate for Defense Minister, Tass reports https://t.co/jLuFF5g6b8
— Bloomberg (@business) May 12, 2024Below is some background on Belousov and his last two decades of government experience, though specific military decision-making or army experience on a strategic level appears to be absent, interestingly:
2000‒2006: General Director, Centre for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting.
2000‒2006: External adviser to the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.
2006‒2008: Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Deputy Minister of Economic Development.
2008‒2012: Director, Government Department of Economy and Finance.
2012‒2013: Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation.
2013‒2020: Presidential Aide.
21 January 2020: First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, appointed by executive order of the President of Russia.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov addressed this lack of military experience as follows in a late Sunday press briefing:
Explaining Shoigu's replacement with a non-military official, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "natural" for Putin to decide that a civilian official to head the Defense Ministry.
"The Defense Ministry must be absolutely open to innovation, to introduce advanced ideas and to create conditions for economic competitiveness — that’s why the president chose the candidacy of Andrei Removich Belousov," Peskov told reporters.
According to more details of Putin's big reshuffling via RT:
Senators are scheduled to engage in consultations regarding the nominees put forth by the president during committee sessions on May 13 and during a Federation Council meeting on May 14, as announced by the upper house of the Russian parliament.
No further alterations have been made to the roster of candidates Putin has submitted for cabinet positions. His nominations include Vladimir Kolokoltsev for the position of interior minister, Alexander Kurenkov for minister of emergency situations, Sergey Lavrov for foreign minister, and Konstantin Chuichenko for justice minister.
Denis Manturov, who served as deputy prime minister and head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade during Putin’s last term in office, has been nominated for the position of first deputy prime minister.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, says the Kremlin wanted to appoint an economic official to run the defense ministry after Russia’s security budget ballooned to 6.6 per cent of gross domestic product.
— max seddon (@maxseddon) May 12, 2024
“This demands special attention,” he told reporters.And TASS has this further confirmation and backgrounder on Belousov (machine translation)...
"Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed the candidacy of Andrei Belousov for the post of Minister of Defense, which was previously held by Sergei Shoigu. This is stated in a message on the Telegram channel of the Federation Council. In the previous government, Belousov worked as first deputy prime minister."
"65-year-old Belousov at various times held the positions of assistant to the head of state Vladimir Putin on economic issues, Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation, director of the Department of Economics and Finance of the Government of the Russian Federation, general director of the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, and worked at the Russian Academy in 1981-2006 Sciences (until 1991 - USSR Academy of Sciences). From April 30 to May 19, 2020, during Mishustin’s hospitalization with coronavirus infection, Belousov served as acting head of the Cabinet."
-
Site: Zero HedgeUS Is Offering Israel A Strange Incentive To Hold Off Rafah OffensiveTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 14:20
Over the weekend The Washington Post has reported a strange incentive and quid pro quo that the US is offering Israel if it agrees to hold off on the Rafah offensive.
The Biden administration is ready to hand over to Israel "sensitive intelligence" on the whereabouts of top Hamas leaders. The Washington Post cited four unnamed sources as saying the US "is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels."
The 'offer' is bizarre and somewhat unprecedented given one would think that Washington's aim alongside Israel would be to dismantle a designated terror organization and ultimately bring down its top leadership.
But instead this is apparently being dangled like a carrot. Washington is holding out hopes that a ceasefire deal can be accomplished with Qatari and Egyptian mediation, but that still appears to be going nowhere. A full-scale Rafah assault is likely to put an end to Hamas-Israel talks, at least for the near future.
According to more of the 'incentives' for Israel to abandon its Rafah ground offensive: "American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks," WaPo writes.
"President Biden and his senior aides have been making such offers over the last several weeks in hopes they will persuade Israel to conduct a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city," the report continues.
Separately, public comments made by White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby during a Thursday briefing appeared to confirm the Post's reporting.
Kirby had said, "We could also, in fact, help them target the leaders, including [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar, which we are, frankly, doing with the Israelis on an ongoing basis."
Part of the White House's plan is to first get the bulk of Rafah civilians—which have been widely reported to be at over one million Palestinians—safely removed and evacuated before major fighting begins. But the main question echoed by almost all is: where will they go?
"The aid community generally is very skeptical there’s any safe way to relocate people out of Rafah," Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying.
People in Rafah sending me photos of the new evacuation orders from Israeli military for Al-Shaboura, Al-Geneina and Khirbet Al-Adas. “Everyone in these areas is risking their lives and the lives of their family members. For your safety - we ask you to evacuate immediately” pic.twitter.com/39B9f7VUq4
— Bel Trew (@Beltrew) May 11, 2024It of course remains unknown the degree to which US intelligence actually has more info on Hamas leaders' whereabouts compared to Israeli intelligence.
Presumably such intel would come through intercepted communications, or perhaps even a human source that had infiltrated Hamas. However, it's highly doubtful the US has its own intelligence officers on the ground - other than possibly those working alongside IDF forces.
-
Site: Zero HedgeAlvin Bragg's Office Deleted Phone Call Records Of Michael Cohen And Stormy Daniels' LawyerTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 13:45
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A paralegal from Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg’s office testified on Friday during former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial that some phone call records between Michael Cohen and Stephanie Clifford’s (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) lawyer were deleted, raising questions about evidentiary integrity.
In a bid to challenge some of the evidence being put forward in President Trump’s business records falsification trial in Manhattan, Trump attorney Emil Bove asked paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider in court on May 10 about roughly three pages worth of records that the attorney claimed Mr. Bragg’s office had deleted.
Mr. Jarmel-Schneider confirmed some deletions. He acknowledged that some phone call records from 2018 between Mr. Cohen and Keith Davidson (Ms. Clifford’s lawyer) had been deleted, along with some records of conversations between Ms. Clifford’s manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard about Ms. Clifford’s claim that she had an affair with President Trump.
The Trump attorney alleged that the deletions were “significant,” prompting Mr. Jarmel-Schneider to dispute that characterization, though he acknowledged that some of the records had indeed been deleted.
Prosecutors have submitted the call records into evidence in a bid to bolster their case that the alleged affair—which President Trump has denied—took place and that the former president falsified business records to conceal payments allegedly made to Ms. Clifford to stay silent.
President Trump has denied any wrongdoing and maintains the case is a politically motivated bid to undermine his 2024 presidential campaign.
The fact that prosecutors submitted the call records into evidence but didn’t tell the Trump defense team that some of them had been deleted raises questions about the integrity of the proceedings, according to Trump attorneys, and others.
“Insanity! How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it,” the former president’s eldest son, Don Trump Jr., said in a post on X.
Insanity! How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 10, 2024
I’d love if we had actual journalists that would report on this ongoing travesty.
Sadly, proper journalism is dead. They’re just scribes for the regime. https://t.co/vQkLDk3t1TMr. Trump Jr. was presumably referring to the fact that evidence tampering is a class E felony in the state of New York.
Mr. Bragg’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the deleted records.
The development comes at the tail end of an intense week that saw President Trump subjected to gag order sanctions, two failed attempts by the defense team to have a mistrial declared, and Ms. Clifford taking the stand.
Mr. Cohen is expected to take the stand next week.
Trial End in Sight
After four weeks in court, prosecutors signaled that the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president will be coming to an end.
Jurors will soon have to decide whether prosecutors have proved beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump was involved in falsifying business records as part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election.
President Trump was charged by Mr. Bragg with 34 counts of falsifying business records. Typically, this is a misdemeanor charge, but in this case prosecutors allege the records were falsified to cover up a scheme to influence the 2016 election and therefore amounts to a felony.
A number of legal experts have challenged the way Mr. Bragg elevated the misdemeanor into a felony. This includes retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who argued that Mr. Bragg was operating on an invalid legal premise because he invoked federal statutes over which New York has no jurisdiction.
Mr. Dershowitz also recently said that he believes that Mr. Bragg’s office has violated voters’ rights with the Trump prosecution, with the legal scholar arguing that the case amounts to a criminal conspiracy to influence elections.
Prosecuting attorney Joshua Steinglass said Friday that prosecutors plan to call just two more witnesses and that it’s “entirely possible” that the prosecution will rest its case at the end of next week.
Mr. Cohen, [a total liar] who is set to testify next week, made the original claims that led to the case. Specifically, the allegation of falsified business records pertains to 11 checks Mr. Cohen received and their corresponding invoices and vouchers.
The defense team says that Mr. Cohen was paid attorney’s fees, while prosecutors allege that the legal expense categorization of the payments was fraudulent in order to cover up that they were meant to buy Ms. Clifford’s silence about the alleged affair.
Ms. Clifford testified over the course of two days, with attorneys and the judge expressing some frustration that she frequently responded to questions with commentary that did not directly answer the question.
Defense attorneys moved for a mistrial, arguing that her statements were “extremely prejudicial” and would improperly influence the jury.
The judge denied that motion.
-
Site: Zero HedgeGoldman Asks: "Might This Be A Monetary Juncture Akin To 1995 Or 2011"Tyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 13:10
In a client note on Friday, Goldman's Mark Wilson commented on the money supply (M2) growth, which has noticeably turned upward following the most significant crash since the Great Depression. He questions if this is an inflection point in a "monetary juncture akin to 1995 or 2011."
"Although we may be 12 months past the inflection in M2, the historic analog of that chart does pose the interesting macro question of might this indeed be a monetary juncture akin to 1995 or 2011," Wilson wrote.
M2% Y-o-Y chart via Wilson's note:
As a reminder, the complete disinflation trend followed the M2 growth slump and really should've fallen faster if deficit spending wasn't so out of control. The latest CPI bounce comes after the money supply bottomed about one year ago and, of course, rising deficits, with the federal government spending $1 trillion every 100 days.
On a separate note, Tressis chief economist Daniel Lacalle recently pointed out, "The massive deficit means more taxes, more inflation, and lower growth in the future," adding, "Deficits are not a tool for growth; they are tools for stagnation."
Ahead of next week's April CPI print, we outlined to pro-subs on Friday that traders should expect a "downside surprise" as the lagging OER "crashes" and catches up with real-time metrics.
And now comes the April CPI "downside surprise" as OER crashes down to catch up with real time metricshttps://t.co/yRwuFen2e4
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 1, 2024However, we'll leave you with this from Dohmen Capital Research: "The Fed is being forced to step on the accelerator to enable the financing of the record deficits at the US Treasury. They know that is inflationary, but they have no alternative."
-
Site: Henrymakow.comPlease send links and comments to hmakow@gmail.comWe are passengers on The Titanic. Anyone with half-a-brain can see that:NATO is begging Russia to destroy the West in a nuclear war.Why? This video is a bit dated but essentially correct. Organized Jewry thinks that the earth belongs to them, and everyone else is a squatter.This is not the view of ordinary Jews. The Protocols of Zion are coming true. This video is an excellent introduction. The craziest part is that it is still on YouTube!
Withdraw of Consent - The Protocols of the Learned Elders of ZionViewer--"It's as if this was written by Satan himself. Very alarming!!!"-The Dearborn Independent, July 10th, 1920---"Whosoever was the mind that conceived (the Protocols) possessed a knowledge of human nature, of history, and of statecraft which is dazzling in its brilliant completeness, and terrible in the objects to which it turns its power. It is too terribly real for fiction, too well sustained for speculation, too deep in its knowledge of the secret springs of life for forgery." -."Zionism is but an incident of a far-reaching plan," said leading American Zionist Louis Marshall, counsel for bankers Kuhn Loeb in 1917. "It is merely a convenient peg on which to hang a powerful weapon."The "far-reaching plan" is world Communist dictatorship that will emerge after WW3.
"A Jew was not created as a means for some other purpose; he himself IS the purpose, since the substance of all divine emanations was created ONLY to serve the Jews." Chabad Lubavitch leader, "The Great Rebbe" Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (left)The Jewish Plot to Destroy Christian Civilization ("Creative Destruction" and 6uild 6ack 6etter)-Israeli police have used water cannons and mounted officers to disperse an anti-government protest rally in Tel Aviv, a Sputnik correspondent reported on Saturday.Thousands of people gathered in central Tel Aviv in front of the Israeli Defense Ministry's building, calling for snap elections and a deal with Palestinian movement Hamas on the release of hostages still held in the Gaza Strip.--Russian philosopher: Russia defends traditional values that US/NATO 'seeks to abolish'It's all a charade. Dugin fails to identify the West as Communist"He explained that the West has moved from "classical liberalism" - which professed individual freedom and democracy as understood as the rule of the majority - to a "new liberalism" defined by the rule of minorities and woke-ism. Rather than emphasizing freedom of the individual, the new incarnation of liberalism prescribes adherence to certain progressive values that are completely at odds with traditional values and in fact seeks to abolish them."-
The Empty Wagon: Zionism's journey from Identity Crisis to Identity TheftRabbi Yaakov Shapiro says Zionists replaced the Jewish religion. His book is a crusade to restore Jewish religion. He seems oblivious to Jewish Cabalism.-CNN is on the Commie side of the Zionist Commie charadeIsrael's deplorable treatment of Palestinian prisoners"We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They're not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold."--
The USA died in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve, unlimited money printing by the elites backed by the labor of the USA Slave Workers via the 1913 creation of the federal income tax. Now we are a bloated rotting corpse being eaten by the vulture globalists for whatever we have left-Reddit Conspiracy- Israel entered Eurovisions first walk while "I don't care, I love it" played in the background. Then proceeded to show nuclear explosions in the background while they sang.Start at 2 min--make up your own mind--Mitch McConnell has a brain freeze-
John O'Looney--Illegal Migrants that are pouring into our respective countries are in fact UN soldiers.Exclusive Breaking: The Mass Numbers of Illegal Migrants that are pouring into our respective countries are in fact UN soldiers."these are UN Soldiers and they will be deployed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) when they announce the next Pandemic Lockdown"The Black Watch a Scottish Infantry regiment based in Perth Scotland has been instructed to train illegal migrants to carry out crowd control and other measures to force compliance within the British population in the event of a civil uprising of the population against the government.There are bird flu Avian influenza H5N1 vaccines being flown into the UK right now ready to be used on the British Public!UK Businessman John O' Looney raises the alarm and says he has conclusive evidence that these UN soldiers are being trained by British forces who are being ordered to do so by globalist's infesting the British Government.John has stated that he has surveillance and video evidence of what is going on along with detailed vehicle and registration numbers of the vehicles that are in use.
The details that are emerging suggest that British Forces will be sent abroad to fight Russia in Ukraine that will effectively leave no patriotic soldiers within Britain to protect the British population and that Illegal migrants will be issued Uniforms and given powers by the Globalists to Police, control and order the British people to stay at home and will have the powers to get physical and arrest anyone who does not comply.This explains why Canada, The United States, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe are all facing the same plan by the Globalists.These Illegal migrants have no loyalty to the host countries and will gleefully follow orders from the globalists to subjugate and control the people in our respective countries. This is a betrayal of biblical proportions. It's time to get prepared and its time to resist.Join our freedom movement http://freedomtraininternational.org to stay informed and up to date with what's about to happen.-Globalists Plot Worldwide Genocide Via WHO Pandemic TreatyIt almost seems as though the elite controllers of Western society have decided that open warfare is insufficient to reach their depopulation goals, so that a different solution must be sought. What they appear to have lighted upon is the deliberate inculcation of pandemics. COVID, including the deadly mRNA "vax," was possibly their dry-run. -
Site: Catholic ConclaveEmotional Protestant experimentMore devotion than concert: That's what the big Taylor Swift service was likeSinger Tine Wiechmann interprets songs by musician Taylor Swift at a service in the Heiliggeistkirche in Heidelberg.Dare to do more pop culture - this is the credo of the Protestant City Church of Heidelberg. On Sunday – in brilliant summer weather – several hundred Christians came to the Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
-
Site: Zero HedgeThe Davos Class Is DesperateTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 12:35
Authored by Marty Bent via bombthrower.com,
One of Davos’ favorite front men, Yuval Noah Harari, joined the BIS Innovation Summit earlier this week to spread some laughable anti-bitcoin propaganda.
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” - Satoshi Nakamotopic.twitter.com/EsB4PBdQ0D
— Marty Bent (@MartyBent) May 10, 2024During his chat, Harari opined that “as a historian” he does not like bitcoin because it is a “currency based on distrust”. Here’s exactly what he said:
When I look at bitcoin as a historian I don’t like it because this is a money built on distrust. The central idea of bitcoin is basically electronic gold, that we don’t trust the banks, the governments so we don’t want to give them the ability to create as much money as they like. So we create this bitcoin. It’s a currency of distrust.
I do think that the future belongs to electronic money, but what we’ve seen over the last centuries is that it is actually a good idea to give banks and governments the ability to create more and more money in order to build more trust within society. So, I’m not sure what money would look like in 20 years or 30 years, but I hope that it would be a currency of greater trust and not a currency of distrust. -Yuval Noah Harari, famed Malthusian Nihilist and mediocre author
Wow. This is what we in the psy-op world like to call “gaslighting”. It’s a tactic used to make someone believe something that is totally false and most likely never happened is actually true. When it comes to Harari’s specific comments on the history of humanity he is attempting to gaslight people into believing that giving governments and central banks the ability to “create more and more money in order to build trust within society” has actually happened. Nothing could be further from the truth and one only needs the ability to pick their head up from their phone, look around at the state of the world and recall four years of history to refute this objectively insane point of view.
Do you all remember when a majority of the world’s governments banded together to shut down the global economy while flooding the global economy with TRILLIONS of dollars of liquidity? I think we can all agree that this was most likely the most extreme example of central planning on the political and monetary fronts that the world has ever seen. If we are to follow Harari’s logic that this level of coordination and central control over the monetary system, one would have to be able to look out at the world right now and confidently say that collective trust in governments and banking institutions by the people is at an all time high.
Clearly, this is not the case. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Trust in political and financial institutions is as low as it has ever been. The Common Man is suffering under the weight of price inflation and is beginning to question the validity of government spending programs. Particularly here in the US. The geopolitical landscape is shifting toward a multi-polar world as large governments are finding it impossible to trust each other. This increasing distrust is being driven by the fact that some governments used their “trusted” control over the international monetary system to freeze the assets of a sovereign nation. We don’t even have to mention the bail out of the banks during the Great Financial Crisis, the forever wars in the Middle East, or the silencing of the whistleblowers who tried to make people aware that their governments cannot be trusted. Harari is either completely disconnected from reality or being completely disingenuous. I have a feeling it’s most likely the latter.
This particular line of thinking shouldn’t be surprising coming from Harari and the fact that he said this at a digital summit thrown by the Bank for International Settlements should be even less surprising. The BIS is the top borg bank that would like to cattle herd the world into a digital panopticon that runs on a CBDC that can be granularly controlled by “trusted banks and governments”. Bitcoin is, quite literally, the biggest threat to their existence because it enables individuals to opt-out of a system dependent on trusting central planners.
Trying to tap into people’s emotions by framing the discussion of “electronic money” myopically and attempting to reduce the decision making process to a knee jerk reaction based on the connotation of the juxtaposition of “distrust v. trust” is truly some lowest denominator argumentation. One would have to truly believe that most people are not only dumb, but extremely dumb.
“Distrust in government bad. Trust in government good. Therefore, government controlling money good.” Caveman shit.
Luckily for us, no one is buying Harari’s BS and Satoshi Nakamoto designed bitcoin in a way that allows us to break free from the madness of trusting governments and central banks. As he pointed out in February of 2009, the history of currencies is littered with breaches of trust by governments and central banks. Trusting these entities with the power to issue currency has proven to be catastrophic for whole societies. Trust needs to be completely removed from the process by leveraging a system that cannot be controlled by any individual, group, company or government and that is what bitcoin brings to the world. Individuals shouldn’t have to trust anyone but themselves to know what’s going on with their money. “Don’t trust, verify” is the ethos that bitcoin embodies and empowers individuals with. It’s a beautiful thing and it scares the ever living shit out of the Harari’s of the world.
The Davos class is desperate and scared, as is evidenced by the nonsensical assertion put forth by Harari earlier this week. This should encourage you. Lean in. They know their losing the narrative battle.
We’re going to win.
* * *
Follow Marty Bent on Twitter and subscribe via Tftc.io.
The CBDC Survival Guide will give you the tools and the knowledge to navigate coming era of Monetary Apartheid. Bombthrower subscribers will get free when it drops (and The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto while you wait), sign up today.
-
Site: PeakProsperityJPY continues to be a major event right now, and last week's BOJ intervention was mostly (60%?) unwound this week. Lawfare is going badly and the invasion of Europe is really intense. Add it all up and it's another Sunday of reading and analysis.
-
Site: non veni pacem
(Whooo boy. Here is “Harvey Millican” laying down simple truths, as sometimes us unlettered laynothings have to do, because those tasked with the heavy lifting are crippled in their sloth and effeminacy. Cross-posted with permission. A Mothers Day gift y’all are sure to enjoy. -nvp)
Take Note, Dr. K…
Ladies and gentlemen, this:
…is St. Catherine of Siena.
St. Catherine held no degrees. She spoke boldly to cardinals and to the pope. She proclaimed an unpopular truth in the midst of a political and ecclesiastical firestorm. She was, of course, totally right.
She is a Doctor of the Church.
Recently, Peter Kwasniewski posted something to a social media page (brought to my attention by my sister since I’m not on any of that) stating that he had received much interest from people wishing to add their signatures to a petition that he and others have begun circulating. The petition or letter or whatever it is relies on the false-base premise that Jorge Bergoglio is now or ever was the Roman Pontiff.
What is laughable is that Dr. K. states in his post that only “credentialed” individuals (and even then only those whom he will thoroughly vet) need apply to sign the document. So only those chosen elites in the “club” are smart enough to make this kind of a call…
And that document…
The amount of mental gymnastics one has to perform in order to fail to see the obvious (he’s an antipope usurper) and then bend over backwards so far as to reach the conclusion that he’s a pope but a heretic; and that laymen can force his resignation leads to a medical condition known as Colo-cranial Syndrome. This is a malady wherein one’s head is literally up one’s ass.
But should I expect anything more from someone who places such a high value on a piece of paper hanging on his wall? As a very wise man once told me, “Rectal thermometers also have lots of degrees on them and we know where they end up.”
St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us!
-
Site: Zero HedgeBig Oil Has Flourished, Despite Biden's Best Efforts, And Will Back Trump In 2024Tyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 12:00
“It’s death by 1,000 cuts. It’s the worst presidency with regard to energy policy I’ve ever seen — and I’ve been involved in energy for 40 years, my entire career.”
Those were the words of Steve Pruett, chief executive of Elevation Resources, to Financial Times last week, talking about how the Biden Administration has gone out of its way to make life difficult for the energy sector.
After the deregulation seen during Donald Trump's presidency, a tailwind for the sector, President Biden has prioritized tackling climate change and promised to regulate the oil and gas sectors more tightly.
His administration has introduced a range of environmental regulations, including endangered species protections, methane leak controls, and limits on offshore leasing and new licenses for liquefying and exporting American gas. All the while he has been draining the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve while trying to cover up the tracks of inflation that is spinning out of control under his watch.
While many Democratic voters see these regulations as necessary, they have certainly rendered Biden unpopular in Midland, Texas, FT writes.
Midland lies at the core of the Permian Basin, which produces over 6.1 million barrels of oil a day—more than some OPEC nations—positioning the US as the largest oil producer globally.
FT notes that with the presidential election six months away, energy policy is a major divide between Biden and Trump. Despite Biden's best efforts, U.S. oil production has soared to record levels, over 13 million barrels per day, boosted by commodity price increases following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Investors have seen substantial returns, with ExxonMobil shares - one of our favorite investments we have been touting for years - doubling since Biden's inauguration.
Nonetheless, industry insiders believe these achievements have happened despite White House policies, not because of them, and fear further regulations could harm the sector long-term.
Stephen Robertson, executive vice-president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association commented: “In Biden’s campaign to become president, he said he was going to end the oil and gas industry — he is doing that.”
“There have been over 200 actions taken by this administration opposed to the oil and gas industry. There’s not one of these that will be the end of the industry . . . but there’s going to be a straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Biden said while campaigning in 2020: “The oil industry pollutes significantly. It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
In 2024, the oil industry will be behind Trump. FT notes that Pennsylvania, a key swing state and the second-largest shale gas producer in the U.S. after Texas, plays a crucial role in presidential elections. Trump won the state in 2016, but Biden narrowly took it in 2020.
Biden's suspension of new LNG permits has been unpopular in Pennsylvania, where the oil and gas sector employs around 80,000 people. Trump, promising to reverse this policy, was met with strong support at a recent rally in the swing state.
Even local Democrats, including Governor Josh Shapiro, a Biden ally, have opposed the freeze and urged its repeal.
Alexandra Adams at the National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit added: “From day one, the Biden administration has made a strong commitment to addressing climate change.”
But Biden's energy policies, aiming to reduce oil and gas pollution, have sparked significant opposition from the industry, which fears these measures will limit future U.S. production and energy security.
This conflict intensified as Biden took actions like suspending new LNG terminal licenses and restricting offshore drilling, despite oil and gas production reaching record highs under his administration. Industry stakeholders argue these regulations threaten investments and job stability, particularly affecting smaller companies that cannot easily absorb new costs.
Now, as election tensions rise, the industry is heavily funding campaigns advocating for fewer restrictions and promoting fossil fuel reliance, signaling deep concerns about the potential impacts of continued regulatory changes.
Harold Hamm, founder of Continental Resources told Financial Times: “We have what we call punitive regulation and punitive policy that has been brought about by this administration.”
Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute concluded: “We need predictability. And when governments change rules at the drop of a hat without much consultation that sends a signal that if you’re going to invest in that place your investment may be at risk.”
-
Site: Euthanasia Prevention CoalitionAlex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
Liz CarrLiz Carr, who is an actress, comedian and disability rights activist, produced a documentary that she titled Better off Dead? that will be airing on BBC1 on Tuesday May 14 at 9 pm (UK). Carr may be best known for her role as Clarissa Mullery on the BBC series Silent Witness.
John Pring interviewed Carr for Disability News Service for an article that was published on May 9, 2024. Pring begins with Carr telling him how frighting the concept of legalizing assisted suicide is for people with disabilities, within the concept of the failing National Health Service (UK):
Legalising assisted suicide, she said, would be even more dangerous at a time when “we are absolutely removing our welfare state, and we are dismantling our incredible NHS”.
Last week, at a protest outside the Houses of Parliament, she told DNS she was terrified by the government’s latest proposals to cut spending on personal independence payment.
She said: “I don’t even think the other side will make the connection over how terrifying that feels to disabled people yet again.
“We know disabled people have killed themselves because of DWP reforms in the past.Carr speaks about her experience with interviewing Amir Farsoud, a Canadian with disabilities who sought euthanasia based on fears of homelessness. Pring reports:
“That’s what terrifies me: the kind of thing happening in Canada where people for socio-economic reasons are choosing to end their lives through euthanasia.”
In Canada, she interviewed Amir Farsoud, a disabled man from Ontario, who requested an assisted suicide because his landlord was planning to sell off his apartment building, and he was terrified at the prospect of being left homeless on the freezing streets.
He eventually changed his mind about seeking an assisted suicide after a crowd-funding effort raised tens of thousands of dollars to support him.Farsoud told Carr that it was easier and quicker in Canada to apply for medical assistance in dying (assisted suicide) than disability benefits.Carr comments on Keir Starmer, the leader of Britains Labour party, who is pro-euthanasia and currently leading in the polls, if an election were to happen:
She said: “I’ve always been a little bit worried about Starmer getting in power, because he introduced the guidelines [on prosecuting cases of assisted suicide, in 2010] when he was director of public prosecutions.
“I’ve known he’s been pro, we all have, for over 10 years.”
She said this was “quite frightening” and “makes it difficult for voters like me to know what to do for the next election”.
Asked if she had a message for Starmer, she said: “I would say, please watch the documentary.Carr, who is an athiest, said that people who are concerned about the legalization of assisted suicide shouldn't sideline the opposition because they are marginalized or religious because there are many people who are concerned about legalizing assisted suicide.
Pring then spoke to Carr about her meeting with Canadian euthanasia doctor Ellen Wiebe:
She also spoke of the “chilling” attitude of Canadian doctor Dr Ellen Wiebe – who is herself disabled – who has provided assisted suicide to hundreds of Canadians since it was legalised and is shown in the documentary telling Carr she was “so glad, so glad” that they had medical assistance in dying laws in Canada.
She told her: “I love my job. This is the very best work I have ever done.”
Wiebe is also shown saying that she had never had so many grateful patients, which Carr said was “one of the most terrifying things in the documentary”.
She said: “When she says that doctors like grateful patients, that is chilling to me.
“And as somebody that’s had a lot of involvement with, you know, medics, that really frightens me.”Pring then reported on Carr's message at a preview event for the documentary:
“If we ask the question, ‘Do you want to stop dying people’s suffering?’ everybody has to say yes to that, or you’re a psychopath.
“We all, I believe, want everyone to have a good death, so the answer is how we do that.
“And the only difference between me and [those supporting legalisation] is how you do that. That’s the only difference.
“I don’t want people to suffer. I want people to have a good death. I just think people will suffer more if we introduce assisted suicide.”Carr commented on the media reports that indicate that legalizing assisted suicide is inevitable. Pring reports:
she said there was “nothing inevitable about it, nothing at all… I still think it’s time for a conversation and it’s not inevitable.”
Carr said she did not understand why those fighting for legalisation did not put their resources into pushing for improved healthcare and palliative care, or “into giving people choice and control in their lives”.
She said: “Because choice isn’t choice when you’ve got no choice. It absolutely isn’t.
“And I meet people in my life who are suffering absolutely because they do not have choices in their life.”Pring reports that Carr produced the documentary to get people with disabilities prominent in the debate:
One of the things she wanted to do with the documentary, she said, was to ensure that the disabled activists who are “a big part of my life” and “who have waited for this voice for years… feel heard and seen”.
A series of disabled actors, artists and activists opposed to legalisation are either seen on film or interviewed in the documentary, including Lisa Hammond, Ellen Clifford, Jamie Hale, Paula Peters, Eleanor Lisney, Penny Pepper and disabled peers Baroness [Jane] Campbell and Baroness [Tanni] Grey-Thompson.Pring concludes the interview with Carr stating that her interview with Melanie Reid, who supports assisted suicide, primarily focused on the experiences of being two disabled women, living in contemporary society, and the struggles and the fights to get our care needs met”.
The documentary, Better off Dead? creates common ground for people with disabilities to oppose the legalization of assisted suicide. -
Site: Zero HedgeEvery Four Years, Overeager Young Journalists Attempt To Trap Powell In A Jack Nicholson MomentTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 11:25
By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management
“We’re always going to do what we think is the right thing for the economy,” said Jerome Powell, annoyed, but classy as always.
“It’s hard enough to get the economics right here,” he explained, swatting away the pesky reporter with a bit of false modesty.
Every four years, overeager young journalists attempt to get the Fed Chairman to admit the institution is influenced by presidential politics. They long for their moment of glory, a hero-nerd’s version of the “You can’t handle the truth” interrogation of Jack Nicholson by Tom Cruise in A Few Good.
“This is my fourth presidential election here,” said Powell. “Read all the transcripts and see if anybody mentions in any way the pending election,” he said, as if that matters.
Everyone in Washington is obsessed by the election. And from what I hear, nearly all are as determined to do everything possible to deny Trump a second term, as they are repulsed by the Democrat’s inexplicable failure to replace Biden on their ticket.
The Federal Reserve’s twelve voting members are just as capable of weighing the effect of their decisions on the election without explicitly mentioning it, as they are at considering the impact of US monetary policy on the Bank of Japan’s increasingly tenuous situation without talking about it directly.
So, for instance, the Bank of Japan intervened massively this week to stem the yen’s collapse, and this quite obviously was on Powell’s mind when he reassured markets that the Fed is not considering further rate hikes, which would intensify downward pressure on the yen.
A disorderly decline in the yen would force the Bank of Japan to hike rates substantially, which would cause utter havoc in global stock and bond markets.
The Fed will do whatever necessary to prevent this ahead of November’s election. And a stock market crash this autumn would pressure Powell to slash rates, but he really can’t with US inflation on the rise.
And this quandary would itself cause market panic. But you see, no one need discuss any of this in a Fed meeting, because everyone but overeager young journalists already knows it.
-
Site: RT - News
Ukrainian Air Force spokesman had earlier claimed that promised fighter jets could be supplied as early as this month
Ukraine may receive the F-16 fighter jets promised to it by its Western backers “within weeks,” the British newspaper Evening Standard claimed on Friday, citing what it called a “high-ranking military source.” The aircraft were due to be supplied to Kiev either by June or July, the source said.
The paper did not report on which nation would supposedly deliver the jets or what their total number is to be. In March, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said that Demark would be the first nation to deliver the F-16s and would do it at some point this summer. The Netherlands was to follow soon after and provide Ukraine with their batch of fighter jets “in the second half of the year,” the minister said at that time.
Earlier in May, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Ilya Evlash stated that Kiev could get the jets as early as after May 5. He also admitted that the delivery date had already been “changed several times.” Kiev has been seeking to acquire the US-made jets for quite some time amid its ongoing conflict with Moscow, which entered its third year this February.
Read more
Ukraine’s top brass believe Western F-16s no longer relevant – Politico
In 2023, Western countries announced an international coalition to help Ukraine procure US-designed F-16s and train its pilots. More than 40 aircraft were pledged to Kiev in total by several Western nations, including Denmark, which vowed to provide 19 jets of this type, and by the Netherlands, which said it would send 24.
The Ukrainian officials admitted that the country may face infrastructure difficulties in maintaining the US-designed jets. Some of the nation’s senior military officials also told Politico in April that the aircraft could even be no longer relevant, since Russia had already taken measures to counter them.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last November that, although the F-16s would surely add to Ukraine’s capabilities, they would be far from “a silver bullet” that could fundamentally change the situation on the front lines.
Russia has repeatedly stated that continued Western arms shipments to Kiev only prolong the conflict without changing its future outcome.
-
Site: Zero HedgeBaltic NATO Country Says It's Ready To Send Troops To UkraineTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 10:50
A Baltic NATO country has belatedly jumped on board and backed French President Emmanuel Macron's idea of putting Western boots on the ground in Ukraine.
Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said in an interview with the Financial Times this week that her country is prepared to deploy troops inside Ukraine. She stipulated it could be part of a training mission for Ukrainian troops if called upon.
However, a formal request from Kiev has not been made yet, she said. Šimonytė then admitted, "If we just thought about the Russian response, then we could not send anything."
"Every second week you hear that somebody will be nuked." Thus she appeared to openly admit that the consequences would likely be catastrophic and lead to WW3, even while saying Lithuania is open to the possibility.
"Russia is trying to provoke a new wave of people fleeing Ukraine because there are no basic utilities and no basic services," Šimonytė described of the current situation of unrelenting Russian attacks on the country's energy infrastructure.
Her words follow Macron telling the The Economist last week that NATO allies would "legitimately" have to consider sending troops to defend Ukraine in the scenario that Russian forces break through the front lines. Yet that already appears to be happening in the north, in Kharkiv region, where Russia has launched a rare cross-border offensive.
"Russia launched a new wave of counteroffensive actions... Ukraine met them there with our troops, brigades, and artillery," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Friday. "Now there is a fierce battle underway."
The AFP has written, "If Moscow's advances are confirmed, it would represent the Russian military's largest land operation in the region since sending thousands of troops across the border in February 2022."
Last month, Germany sent an advance team of 20 soldiers to Lithuania, laying the groundwork for the recently discussed establishment of a permanent brigade in the NATO country.
You will find more infographics at Statista
According to Deutsche Welle reporting, the 5,000-strong strikeforce called Panzerbrigade 45 is said to become fully operational by 2027. The brigade will support the already existing so-called NATO Enhanced Forward Presence in the Baltic country, which, in contrast to Panzerbrigade 45, rotates its personnel regularly and was made up of soldiers from Germany, Belgium, Czechia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States as of December 2023.
-
Site: RT - News
The defense minister is expected to officially present reforms to the draft system in early June
The German Defense Ministry has prepared several conscription reform proposals to tackle a chronic personnel shortage in the Armed Forces, Die Welt newspaper reported this week. Minister Boris Pistorius is expected to choose one of them and officially present it in early June, the paper said.
Pistorius first raised the issue of reintroducing compulsory military service last month, when unveiling an ambitious military reform plan, aimed at making Germany better prepared for a potential armed conflict.
“We have considered reintroducing compulsory military service,” the minister said at that time, while sharing few details on the plans. Germany abolished mandatory service in 2011.
Last week, the Defense Ministry allegedly presented three options for Pistorius to consider, Die Welt’s weekly edition said, citing the ministry’s internal documents. The first and the “most cautious” one, according to the paper, is aimed at “exploiting all possibilities for voluntary military service.”
Read more
Germany must bring back conscription – defense minister
Under the first plan, all young people reaching the age of 18 must to be registered with the military and receive promotional and information materials about service with the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr. They can then voluntarily fill out a questionnaire about their psychological and physical state and motivation for military service. Those willing to join the army would then go through consultation and assessment procedures.
The option is described as requiring only minor legal changes, while being “significant in terms of time, personnel and finances,” but potentially inadequate to meeting army recruitment needs, which amount to between “30,000 and 40,000” personnel a year, according to Die Welt.
The second option would make registering and filling out the form mandatory for all German males aged 18 or older. Women would also be contacted by the military but on a voluntary basis. The German military would then select the required number of conscripts in accordance with their needs and the recruits’ fitness requirements.
The model is “assessed by the ministry as suitable from a personnel planning perspective in order to close the current deficits in meeting needs,” Die Welt said, citing the ministry papers.
Read more
Only 17% of Germans ready to defend their country – survey
“Reactivation of compulsory military service is a strong political signal to our partners in Europe, and systemic rivals and in the alliance,” the document also reportedly says. Such changes could be introduced through a simple change in the law, without the need to alter the constitution, the media outlet added.
The third option would introduce a “gender-neutral” conscription model and make registration with the military and potential draft compulsory for both men and women. Later, “the introduction of a general compulsory service could be discussed” on the basis of this model, the military documents suggest. Additionally, alternative service with the medical services or fire departments would be introduced. Ministry officials described this model as “the most promising option in terms of meeting the needs” of the military.
It would still require a “comprehensive change in the legal basis to create compulsory military service and enlistment,” according to the documents. The reform authors reportedly acknowledge that introducing such changes would be “not easy” because of the “clear skepticism” among the younger generation in particular.
Only one party – the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – is currently supporting the reform plans, according to Die Welt. The governing three-party coalition and Chancellor Olaf Scholz are not keen on the idea, the paper added. Scholz himself said in November 2023 that it was “not a good idea to reverse all of this.”
-
Site: RT - News
The defense minister is expected to officially present reforms to the draft system in early June
The German Defense Ministry has prepared several conscription reform proposals to tackle a chronic personnel shortage in the Armed Forces, Die Welt newspaper reported this week. Minister Boris Pistorius is expected to choose one of them and officially present it in early June, the paper said.
Pistorius first raised the issue of reintroducing compulsory military service last month, when unveiling an ambitious military reform plan, aimed at making Germany better prepared for a potential armed conflict.
“We have considered reintroducing compulsory military service,” the minister said at that time, while sharing few details on the plans. Germany abolished mandatory service in 2011.
Last week, the Defense Ministry allegedly presented three options for Pistorius to consider, Die Welt’s weekly edition said, citing the ministry’s internal documents. The first and the “most cautious” one, according to the paper, is aimed at “exploiting all possibilities for voluntary military service.”
Read more
Germany must bring back conscription – defense minister
Under the first plan, all young people reaching the age of 18 must to be registered with the military and receive promotional and information materials about service with the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr. They can then voluntarily fill out a questionnaire about their psychological and physical state and motivation for military service. Those willing to join the army would then go through consultation and assessment procedures.
The option is described as requiring only minor legal changes, while being “significant in terms of time, personnel and finances,” but potentially inadequate to meeting army recruitment needs, which amount to between “30,000 and 40,000” personnel a year, according to Die Welt.
The second option would make registering and filling out the form mandatory for all German males aged 18 or older. Women would also be contacted by the military but on a voluntary basis. The German military would then select the required number of conscripts in accordance with their needs and the recruits’ fitness requirements.
The model is “assessed by the ministry as suitable from a personnel planning perspective in order to close the current deficits in meeting needs,” Die Welt said, citing the ministry papers.
Read more
Only 17% of Germans ready to defend their country – survey
“Reactivation of compulsory military service is a strong political signal to our partners in Europe, and systemic rivals and in the alliance,” the document also reportedly says. Such changes could be introduced through a simple change in the law, without the need to alter the constitution, the media outlet added.
The third option would introduce a “gender-neutral” conscription model and make registration with the military and potential draft compulsory for both men and women. Later, “the introduction of a general compulsory service could be discussed” on the basis of this model, the military documents suggest. Additionally, alternative service with the medical services or fire departments would be introduced. Ministry officials described this model as “the most promising option in terms of meeting the needs” of the military.
It would still require a “comprehensive change in the legal basis to create compulsory military service and enlistment,” according to the documents. The reform authors reportedly acknowledge that introducing such changes would be “not easy” because of the “clear skepticism” among the younger generation in particular.
Only one party – the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – is currently supporting the reform plans, according to Die Welt. The governing three-party coalition and Chancellor Olaf Scholz are not keen on the idea, the paper added. Scholz himself said in November 2023 that it was “not a good idea to reverse all of this.”
-
Site: AsiaNews.itHe made the appeal during the Regina Caeli in the name of the Risen One "who frees us'. For the Solemnity of the Ascension, which is being celebrated today in Italy, the faithful may ask if the desire for eternal life 'alive in me' Francis spoke about the 'wisdom of the heart' on World Day of Social Communications and expressed gratitude to all mothers on their feast day.
-
Site: Zero HedgeNebraska Ends Income Taxes On Gold And Silver, Declares CBDC’s Are Not Lawful MoneyTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 10:15
Authroed by JP Cortez via the Mises Institute,
With Gov. Jim Pillen’s recent signature, Nebraska has become the 12th state to end capital gains taxes on sales of gold and silver.
LB 1317 is the fourth major sound money bill to become law this year, as state lawmakers across the nation scramble to protect the public from the ravages of inflation and runaway federal debt.
Under the new Nebraska law, any “gains” or “losses” on precious metal sales reported on federal income tax returns are backed out, thereby removing them from the calculation of a Nebraska taxpayer’s adjusted gross income (AGI).
Supported by the Sound Money Defense League, Money Metals Exchange, and in-state advocates, Nebraska’s sound money measure passed out of the unicameral legislature’s Revenue committee unanimously before being amended into a larger bill.
Sponsor Sen. Ben Hansen said upon news of the formal enactment of his legislation:
Gold and silver are the only forms of currency mentioned in our Constitution and with that comes the people’s ability to use it as such without penalty from the government. Saving, and using, gold and silver is our right and one of the only checks and balances to our federal government’s unending devaluation of our paper currency.
Taxpayers often realize ‘gains’ when converting the monetary metals back into Federal Reserve notes even though the ‘gains’ do not reflect an increase in real value but rather reflect the currency’s ongoing devaluation.
Despite the lack of “real” gains, the Internal Revenue Service imposes capital gains taxes on such transactions. Nebraska has now opted out at the state level, declining to carry the IRS’s position into the definition of Nebraska income.
Jp Cortez, executive director of the Sound Money Defense League, explained during his testimony before the Revenue Committee that the ferocious wave of inflation facing Nebraskans is largely caused by harmful actions of the Federal Reserve:
The state can take a different course and provide Nebraska citizens cleaner access to gold and silver ownership – and these metals are not only a proven inflation hedge but states all over the country are remonetizing constitutional sound money in the form of gold and silver.
Eleven other states already do not charge an income tax on sales of precious metals, with Arkansas, Arizona, and Utah recently enacting such laws. Meanwhile, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri, West Virginia, and Kansas have been considering similar legislation in 2024.
“Investments in precious metals coins and bullion in Nebraska are now rightly exempt from both sales tax and income tax,” said Stefan Gleason, CEO of Money Metals and Chairman of the Sound Money Defense League.
Neutralizing Nebraska’s income tax treatment of the monetary metals removes significant disincentives in the Cornhusker State against the ownership and use of the monetary metals.
Meanwhile, LB 1317 revises the state’s formal definition of money by adding language that states: “Money does not include central bank digital currency.”
The new law defines central bank digital currency as “a digital medium of exchange, token, or monetary unit of account issued by the United States Federal Reserve System or any analogous federal agency that is made directly available to the consumer by such federal entities. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) includes a digital medium of exchange, token, or monetary unit of account so issued that is processed or validated directly by such federal entities.”
Sen. Hansen said: “I believe we have to be extra vigilant in our assessment and application of a Central bank digital currency to make sure they do not become a danger to our freedom. That’s why we defined in LB 1317 that CBDC’s are not classified as currency in Nebraska, which should help protect against unwarranted mandates for their use in the future.”
Versions of this “anti-CBDC language” have advanced or signed into law in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida, South Dakota, and Indiana . Congressman Alex Mooney has also introduced a federal measure to block the Federal Reserve’s digital currency scheme.
In his testimony, Cortez discussed the potential risks of adopting a CBDC, including creating a greater ability to track all financial transactions, disallowing certain types of purchases, or even completely “turning off” a targeted individual’s access to money.
Nebraska joins Utah, Wisconsin, and Kentucky as states to have enacted pro-sound money legislation into law so far in 2024.
Currently ranked 22nd in the 2024 Sound Money Index, Nebraska’s ranking is expected to rise.
-
Site: Steyn OnlineIn case you missed it, here's how the last seven days looked to Mark...
-
Site: Steyn OnlineIt's Mother's Day - in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and various other places, that is. In the British Isles and Nigeria, Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday in Lent, which was a few weeks back. Still, around much of the world today, a young
-
Site: Steyn OnlineJust ahead of Part Twenty-Four of our current Tale for Our Time, a reminder that, as part of the seventh-birthday observances of The Mark Steyn Club, we have a brand new weekly music show. Hope you'll want to check that out. Agatha Christie's second
-
Site: Zero HedgeWatch: Just Stop Oil Activists Try To Destroy Case Holding Original Magna CartaTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 09:40
The Just Stop Oil and related green "Apocalypse" movements are poster children for modern Cultural Marxists - sharing similarities with the Chinese communist mobs behind the Cultural Revolution of 1966. The general goal of every Marxist movement is to undermine or sabotage any opposing culture using whatever means necessary so that it can be scrapped and replaced with a new progressive/collectivist system. In particular, such activists have long targeted western civilization for demolition with the intention of bringing about a woke revolution.
This is why we often see the same people (or types of people) involved in seemingly separate causes. It might be protests and riots in favor of BLM, it might be Antifa efforts to disrupt conservative and moderate speakers, it might be protests to control college campuses in the name of Gaza or it may even be anti-carbon protests to derail energy security in the name of "saving the planet" from a global warming threat that doesn't actually exist.
Most interesting is the habit of Just Stop Oil activists to target famous symbols of western history for defacement or destruction. One might ask what does the Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta have to do with oil production or climate change, and the answer is absolutely nothing. Protesters would claim that trying to destroy these antiquities is a way to get media attention for their cause, but the only attention they ever get is negative - These actions make people want to hate protesters rather than help them.
The real message is one of aggression, not attention. Marxist activists are saying that western culture, not oil, is their enemy. And, if they don't get what they want they will continue to try to smash our greatest works of art and historic documents as a means to tear the west down piece by piece. When protesters declare the Magna Carta fair game it's not a random decision; they know exactly what they are doing. In this situation, two gullible elderly women were obviously given a task they were not able to complete:
Just Stop Oil protestors try to break the glass of the Magna Cartapic.twitter.com/68EaOeJS03
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 10, 2024Rev. Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher, were both arrested after they tried to smash a glass case containing the historical document at the British Library in London on Friday, London's Metropolitan Police said. The Magna Carta is a revered 13th Century treaty that held English royalty to the same legal standards as the citizenry. It is often cited as a precursor to later freedom-based documents like the US Constitution and a source for western democracy.
The incompetence of Just Stop Oil protestors is the one saving grace in this scenario, and it is likely a natural consequence of the kinds of people that are attracted to the idea (high IQs apparently don't jump at the chance to join the ranks). The group is, however, suspiciously coordinated and tends to receive favor from progressive political leaders. It is a sad reflection of the ideological hysteria holding the world hostage today. With so many different movements chipping away at the foundations of the west, eventually something will break.
-
Site: AsiaNews.itFor ten years, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea has held two visits annually to listen to people in places that are important for the life of the Church and society. On the mudflats near the longest dyke in world, built 20 years ago, the bishops saw first-hand the dyke's environmental impact on local communities, which was front-page news following last year's Scouts Jamboree debacle.
-
Site: Zero HedgeThe Investment "Holy Grail" Doesn’t ExistTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 09:05
Authored by Lance Roberts via realinvestmentadvice.com,
When it comes to the financial markets, investors have a litany of investment vehicles to choose from. The choices are nearly unlimited, from brokered certificates of deposit to complex derivative instruments. Of course, investment vehicles’ proliferation comes from investors’ demand for everything from excess benchmark returns to income generation to downside protection.
Of course, every investor wants “all the upside, with none of the downside.” While there are vehicles, like indexed annuities, that can provide no downside risk, they cap the upside return. If you buy an index fund, you can get “all the upside” and “all the risk.”
However, an email from a reader last week got me thinking about the perfect “investment vehicle” and the search for the “holy grail” of investing.
“My wife and I are looking for a place to position some of our ’emergency funds’ for a better return. Our requirements are pretty simplistic:
- Guarantee at least a 4% rate of return.
- Allow me to withdraw cash without penalty when needed.
- Reinvest all income
- If bond yields decline as expected, the value of the investment increases.
At this point, I was confident in just suggesting purchasing a 10-year Treasury bond. At current rates, the investment would yield greater than 4% and guarantee the principal. If yields decline, the bond rises in price, reinvestment of income is an option, and the investment is highly liquid.
Theoretically, this would be the “perfect investment” vehicle for their needs. I said “theoretically” because they added one more requirement just as I was about to spout off my terrific idea.
“Oh, and one more thing, the dollar value of the account must remain stable at all times.”
And that, as they say, quickly ended the “perfect investment” vehicle for their needs.
Why did the addition of “price stability” make their request impossible?
The 3-Components Of All Investments
In portfolio management, you can ONLY have two of three components of any investment or asset class:
- Safety – The return of principal without loss due to price change or fees
- Liquidity – Immediately accessible without penalties or fees
- Return – Appreciation in the price of the investment
The table below is the matrix of your options.
The takeaway is that cash is the only asset class that provides safety and liquidity. Safety comes at the cost of return. Equities are liquid and provide returns but can suffer a significant loss of principal. Bonds can offer returns through income and safety if held to maturity. But in exchange for that safety, investors must forego liquidity.
In other words, no investment can provide all three factors simultaneously. While the table above uses only Equities, Bonds, and Cash, those three factors apply to any investment vehicle you may consider.
- Fixed Annuities (Indexed) – safety and return, no liquidity.
- Certificates of Deposit – safety and return, no liquidity.
- ETFs – liquidity and return, no safety.
- Mutual Funds – liquidity and return, no safety.
- Real Estate – safety and return, no liquidity.
- Traded REITs – liquidity and return, no safety.
- Commodities – liquidity and return, no safety.
- Gold – liquidity and return, no safety.
You get the idea.
Let’s revisit our email question.
While I initially focused on the cash requirements, these were also funds set aside for an “emergency.” In other words, these funds must be readily available when an unexpected event arises. Since “unexpected events” tend to happen at the worst possible time, these funds should never be put at risk. The need for “safety” and “liquidity” eliminates the third factor: Return.
No matter what investment vehicle you choose, you can only have two of the three components. Such is an essential and often overlooked consideration when determining portfolio construction and allocation.
8-Reasons To Focus On Liquidity
Liquidity is the most essential factor in making any investment. Without liquidity, I can not invest. Therefore, liquidity should always remain a high priority when managing your portfolio.
I learned a long time ago that while a “rising tide lifts all boats,” eventually, the “tide recedes.” Over the years, I made a straightforward adjustment to my portfolio management, which has served me well. When risks begin to outweigh the potential for reward, I raise cash.
The great thing about holding extra cash is that if I’m wrong, I simply make the proper adjustments to increase the risk in my portfolios. However, if I am right, I protect investment capital from destruction and spend far less time ‘getting back to even.’ Despite media commentary to the contrary, regaining losses is not an investment strategy.
Here are 8-reasons why you should focus on liquidity first:
1) We are speculators, not investors. We buy pieces of paper at one price with hopes of selling at a higher price. Such is speculation in its purest form. When risk outweighs rewards, cash is a good option.
2) 80% of stocks move in the direction of the market. If the market is falling, regardless of the fundamentals, the majority of stocks will decline also.
3) The best traders understand the value of cash. From Jesse Livermore to Gerald Loeb, each believed in “buying low and selling high.” If you “sell high,” you have raised cash to “buy low.”
4) Roughly 90% of what we think about investing is wrong. Two 50% declines since 2000 should have taught us to respect investment risks.
5) 80% of individual traders lose money over ANY 10-year period. Why? Investor psychology, emotional biases, lack of capital, etc. Repeated studies by Dalbar prove this.
6) Raising cash is often a better hedge than shorting. While shorting the market, or a position, to hedge risk in a portfolio is reasonable, it also merely transfers the “risk of being wrong” from one side of the ledger to the other. Cash protects capital and eliminates risk.
7) You can’t “buy low” if you don’t have anything to “buy with.” While the media chastises individuals for holding cash, it should be somewhat evident that without cash you can’t take advantage of opportunities.
8) Cash protects against forced liquidations. One of the biggest problems for Americans is a lack of cash to meet emergencies. Having a cash cushion allows for handling life’s “curve-balls,” without being forced to liquidate retirement plans.Layoffs, employment changes, etc. are economically driven and tend to occur with downturns that coincide with market losses. Having cash allows you to weather the storms.
Importantly, I want to stress that I am not talking about being 100% in cash.
I suggest that holding higher cash levels during periods of uncertainty provides both stability and opportunity.
With the political, fundamental, and economic backdrop becoming much more hostile toward investors in the intermediate term, understanding the value of cash as a “hedge” against loss becomes much more critical.
Chasing yield at any cost has typically not ended well for most.
Of course, since Wall Street does not make fees on investors holding cash, maybe there is another reason they are so adamant that you remain invested all the time.
Lance Roberts is a Chief Portfolio Strategist/Economist for RIA Advisors. He is also the host of “The Lance Roberts Podcast” and Chief Editor of the “Real Investment Advice” website and author of “Real Investment Daily” blog and “Real Investment Report“. Follow Lance on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and YouTube
-
Site: Catholic ConclaveHow accusations against Father Marko Rupnik resonate in his hometown Locals in Črni Vrh, where the world-famous Father Marko Ivan Rupnik is from, want to shake off as soon as possible the thought about how much truth there is in the affair about the abuse of nuns. For them, the decision of the Vatican will be essential. It will calm the spirits on one side, but at the same time Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
-
Site: Zero HedgeUkrainian Suicide Drone Attack At Russia's Volgograd Oil Refinery Sparks FireTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 08:30
In defiance of repeated warnings from the Biden administration, the Ukrainian military is ramping up kamikaze drone attacks on the Russian energy complex, a move to hamper the nation's crude oil and crude product export revenues and curtail Moscow's ability to fund President Putin's 'special operation' in Ukraine.
The latest suicide drone attack struck early Sunday at Lukoil PJSC's large oil refinery in Volgograd, deep within the country and hundreds of miles east of the Ukrainian border, according to Bloomberg.
"During the night of May 12, the air defense and electronic warfare forces fought off a drone on the territory of the Volgograd region," Governor Andrey Bocharov wrote on Telegram.
Unverified claims on X, one from OSINTtechnical said, "Overnight, Ukrainian forces successfully struck the Lukoil refinery in Volgograd, Russia. At least one drone hit the complex, reportedly setting the ELOU AVT-1 refining unit ablaze."
Overnight, Ukrainian forces successfully struck the Lukoil refinery in Volgograd, Russia.
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) May 12, 2024
At least one drone hit the complex, reportedly setting the ELOU AVT-1 refining unit ablaze. pic.twitter.com/qkG3qSNBToBelarus media outlet Nexta said, "UAVs attacked an oil refinery in Russia's Volgograd region. Propaganda media reported that after the strike, a heavy fire broke out."
⚡️ UAVs attacked an oil refinery in Russia's Volgograd region
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) May 12, 2024
Propaganda media reported that after the strike, a heavy fire broke out. pic.twitter.com/PO0kWg9NV9Bloomberg noted, "The Volgograd refinery is capable of processing 14.8 million tons of oil a year and is among Russia's largest. It was previously struck by drones in February, when it temporarily cut back some of its operations."
On Thursday, a Ukrainian drone targeted Gazprom PJSC's Salavat Neftekhim, a top-producing petrochemical and oil-refining facility. On Friday, a drone strike targeted a smaller refinery in the Kaluga region.
In March, FT reported that the Biden admin was freaking out that Ukraine's drone strikes "risked driving up global oil prices."
One month later, in April, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Ukraine that drone and missile attacks should not be focused on energy infrastructure but instead on military targets because of the risk of sending Brent crude prices over $100/bbl.
"Those attacks could have a knock-on effect in terms of the global energy situation," Austin said, adding, "Quite frankly, I think Ukraine is better served by going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight."
In mid-April, Reuters estimated that Russia's refining capacity, which was offline due to drone attacks, was around 660,000 barrels per day, compared to 907,000 bpd offline at the end of March. Russia has stated it can repair all damaged units within two months.
Russia's Energy Minister Nikolai Shulginov said all damaged refineries would be restarted by the beginning of June.
The main goal of the refinery drone attacks by Ukraine is to crush Moscow's funding of the war by curtailing crude product (such as diesel) exports.
Days ago, Foreign Affairs magazine writer Sam Winter-Levy penned a note titled "Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries," explaining that "with less domestic refining capacity, Russia will be forced to export more of its crude oil, not less, pushing global prices down rather than up."
If Biden's foreign policy is to keep Brent prices below $90/bbl before the November presidential elections, and if Levy's analysis is correct, then this could only mean more drone attacks. However, this risks further escalating the conflict as no peace deal is in sight and the world marches closer to World War III.
-
Site: Novus Motus LiturgicusAt that time, Jesus said to His disciples: When the Paraclete has come, Whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth Who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness concerning Me. And you also will bear witness, because you are with Me from the beginning. These things I have spoken to you that you may not be scandalized. They will expel you from the synagogues; but the hour is Gregory DiPippohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295638279418781125noreply@blogger.com0
-
Site: Zero HedgeGOP Senators Want IRS To Yank Tax-Exempt Status For Organizations Involved In Campus ProtestsTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 08:00
A group of fifteen Republican Senators want the IRS to investigate whether groups involved in recent anti-Israel protests on college campuses violated their tax-exempt status by supporting Hamas, a designated terrorist group.
According to the letter, spearheaded by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), the AJP Educational Foundation (AJP), the Tides Foundation, the Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation (WESPAC Foundation), and others were offered to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in order to determine if they "engaged in conduct warranting revocation of their tax-exempt statuses on the basis of their financial support of NSJP," Just the News reports.
The letter notes that victims of the Oct. 7 attack in Israel have sued AJP and NSJP, accusing them of being a propaganda division of Hamas, and suggests that the organizations have "control" over Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, which have been heavily involved in campus protests.
Notably, George Soros has funded Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) through a constellation of nonprofits which all lead to the billionaire agitator.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019. -NY Post
"It is long-established precedent that when 501(c)(3) organizations have ‘planned activities that violate laws’ or engage in activities designed ‘to induce the commission of a crime or if the accomplishment of the purpose is otherwise against public policy,’ the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has grounds to revoke their tax-exempt status," reads the Ernst letter.
"In fact, the IRS has set the precedent that ‘organizations have been held not to qualify for IRC 501(c)(3) on grounds that the activities of the organizations in question contravened public policy even though the organizations did not violate any federal statutes or state or local laws."
The letter also points out that these organizations and the protests are supporting Hamas, which has been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).
"In light of this abhorrent support for an FTO, we call on you to initiate an investigation to determine whether financial supporters of NSJP, including but not limited to AJP, the WESPAC Foundation, and the Tides Foundation, have engaged in conduct warranting their tax-exempt status to be stripped," they added.
The groups have defended themselves. For example, in a recent post on X, NSJP wrote that its members "are developing a generation of disciplined, politicized young leaders who will carry the torch of our struggle," adding "Long live the Student Intifada."
All of that said - Ernst is a huge recipient of pro-Israel campaign donations and has attended AIPAC events...
...so one has to wonder if using the IRS against Israel's enemies on this very horseshoe issue is anywhere near 'good faith.'
Read the letter below:
-
Site: Catholic ConclaveThe keys to the fall of Felipe BerríosInappropriate conduct at school retreats, voluntary work by high school and university students and events that occurred within the framework of the Sacrament of Confession, settled the expulsion of the priest from the Society of Jesus. By order of the Vatican, he was also prohibited from the public exercise of the priesthood and all pastoral contact with Catholic Conclavehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06227218883606585321noreply@blogger.com0
-
Site: Zero HedgeUN Agency Closes Jerusalem HQ After Israeli Settler Arson AttacksTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 07:30
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced on Thursday that it is shutting down its headquarters in east Jerusalem after Israeli settlers carried out an arson attack on its building.
This was the second settler attack on the UNRWA building in less than a week, according to the agency’s general commissioner, Phillipe Lazzarini.
"Our director, with the help of other staff, had to put out the fire themselves as it took the Israeli fire extinguishers and police a while before they turned up. This is an outrageous development. Once again, the lives of UN staff were at serious risk."
"In light of this second appalling incident in less than a week, I have taken the decision to close down our compound until proper security is restored," Lazzarini said.
Video footage on social media showed the UNRWA building in flames as settlers were heard cheering in the background. There were no injuries, but the fires caused significant damage to property, according to WAFA news agency.
Just two days earlier, settlers attacked the same headquarters, throwing stones at UN staff members "under the watch of the Israeli police," Lazzarini added.
Earlier today, Israeli settlers launched an attack on the UNRWA headquarters in occupied Jerusalem, setting fire to its surroundings. Israeli authorities have not intervened or made any arrests among the Israeli attackers. pic.twitter.com/Ck6LNj1rjV
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) May 9, 2024The perpetrators of these attacks must be investigated, and those responsible must be held accountable. Anything less will set a new dangerous standard,” he said, adding that settlers have continuously attacked and harassed UNRWA staff for months. “On several occasions, Israeli extremists threatened our staff with guns.”
Settlers have been staging violent and provocative protests outside UNRWA headquarters for the past two months.
The UN agency has been operating in support of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians since 1950. The organization provides education, health care, and other services. In recent years, it has suffered a severe lack of funding for its global operations.
This evening, Israeli residents set fire twice to the perimeter of the UNRWA Headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem.
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) May 9, 2024
This took place while UNRWA and other UN Agencies’ staff were on the compound.
While there were no casualties among our staff, the fire caused extensive damage… pic.twitter.com/ZqHFDNkiWCAfter the October 7 attacks, Israel accused UNRWA staff members of taking part in the attack.
-
Site: Zero Hedge"Investment Into European Security": Poland Unveils New Fortifications On Belarus BorderTyler Durden Sun, 05/12/2024 - 07:00
Starting in 2022, NATO and EU member Poland began building a large border wall in order to keep migrants from crossing from Belarus. At the time Belarus, which is closely allied with Russia, was alleged by Warsaw to be 'weaponizing' migrants. Warsaw says this has not only continued but has escalated.
Poland is now seeking more funds from the European Union to further strengthen and extend its fence and fortifications on the Belarusian border while presenting the project as an "investment into European security."
Via AP
Prime Minister Donald Tusk confirmed during a televised visit to the border that new 'anti-migration structures have been erected.
"We have begun intensive work on modern fortification lines in many dimensions. This fortification will appear along the entire Polish border - here in the east- and we will inform public opinion," he said. He urged the EU to back the undertaking.
"This is the external border of Poland, as well as the European Union. Therefore, I have no doubt that the whole of Europe, I believe that we will get this, will have to invest in its security, investing in the eastern border of Poland and in the security of our borders," Tusk underscored.
"I know that there are more and more illegal crossings every day," Tusk continued while also citing the war in Ukraine as a chief cause. He described "the growing threat resulting from the Russian-Ukrainian war, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the uncertain geopolitical situation."
"I came today primarily so that both commanders and their subordinates have no doubt that the Polish state and the Polish government are with them in every situation, here at the border," Tusk continued.
He additionally said that he let it be known to his security commanders guarding the border that "there are no limits on resources when it comes to Poland’s security."
The crisis became acute in 2022, when thousands of migrants from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Africa first poured into Belarus and proceeded to the Polish border, where they endured bitter cold in their quest to cross the border. Poland alleged that Belarusian security was coordinating and facilitating the plot behind the secenes the whole time.
Poland is fortifying its entire eastern border with Belarus due to illegal migration & growing “hybrid war”. pic.twitter.com/IrY7QmEpQp
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 11, 2024At times, the situation has brought major confrontations, for example when hundreds of migrants pushed toward the border near the Polish village of Kuznica and attempted to defeat a barbed wire fence with spades and other tools, clashing with Polish security on the other side.
-
Site: RT - News
Incoming drones and projectiles could be targeted from Poland and Romania, lawmakers have said
German lawmakers from both the ruling coalition and the opposition support the idea of NATO imposing a no-fly zone over western Ukraine amid the conflict with Russia, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has reported.
For its article on Saturday, the paper asked members of parliament about the proposal, earlier floated by the defense minister’s chief of staff, Nico Lange, who suggested that Russian missiles and drones targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and military installations could be shot down from the territory of neighboring Poland and Romania.
Read more
Macron ‘hopes’ France won’t go to war with Russia
According to Lange, this would lead to the creation of a 70-km-wide safe zone on the border between the EU and Ukraine, while also allowing Kiev to re-deploy its own air defense systems, which are in short supply, from the west of the country to the front line.
“Defending the airspace over Ukraine from Poland and Romania should not be ruled out in the long term,” Anton Hofreiter, a member of parliament for the Green Party, which is part of the German coalition, told FAZ. However, such a move is “not up for debate” at the moment as the current priority for the West is to supply Ukraine with “significantly more” arms and ammunition, he stressed.
Marcus Faber from the Free Democratic Party (FDP), also in the ruling coalition, agreed that the “airspace over the Ukrainian border regions” could be “protected by air defenses on NATO territory.” According to Faber, this would only be “possible” if the West can secure enough ammunition for the air defense systems.
A lawmaker for the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Roderich Kiesewetter, also said Kiev’s Western backers could shoot down Russian drones over western Ukraine. “This would relieve the Ukrainian air defense and enable it to protect the front,” he explained.
Kiesewetter recalled how the US, UK and France assisted Israel with countering a large-scale bombardment by Iran in April, saying it showed that countries can provide such help to their allies without actually becoming “a party to the conflict.”
In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the US-made F-16 fighter jets that the West is planning to supply to Ukraine will be targeted at airfields in NATO countries if they are going to operate from there.
READ MORE: Ukraine using British weapons for terror attacks – Moscow
Earlier this week, Russia said it would conduct tactical nuclear weapons drills as a warning to the US and its allies not to escalate the Ukraine conflict. The announcement followed a suggestion by Poland of potentially hosting US nuclear weapons, and remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron about the possibility of sending French and other NATO soldiers to Ukraine.
-
Site: RT - News
Incoming drones and projectiles could be targeted from Poland and Romania, lawmakers have said
German lawmakers from both the ruling coalition and the opposition support the idea of NATO imposing a no-fly zone over western Ukraine amid the conflict with Russia, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has reported.
For its article on Saturday, the paper asked members of parliament about the proposal, earlier floated by the defense minister’s chief of staff, Nico Lange, who suggested that Russian missiles and drones targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and military installations could be shot down from the territory of neighboring Poland and Romania.
Read more
Macron ‘hopes’ France won’t go to war with Russia
According to Lange, this would lead to the creation of a 70-km-wide safe zone on the border between the EU and Ukraine, while also allowing Kiev to re-deploy its own air defense systems, which are in short supply, from the west of the country to the front line.
“Defending the airspace over Ukraine from Poland and Romania should not be ruled out in the long term,” Anton Hofreiter, a member of parliament for the Green Party, which is part of the German coalition, told FAZ. However, such a move is “not up for debate” at the moment as the current priority for the West is to supply Ukraine with “significantly more” arms and ammunition, he stressed.
Marcus Faber from the Free Democratic Party (FDP), also in the ruling coalition, agreed that the “airspace over the Ukrainian border regions” could be “protected by air defenses on NATO territory.” According to Faber, this would only be “possible” if the West can secure enough ammunition for the air defense systems.
A lawmaker for the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Roderich Kiesewetter, also said Kiev’s Western backers could shoot down Russian drones over western Ukraine. “This would relieve the Ukrainian air defense and enable it to protect the front,” he explained.
Kiesewetter recalled how the US, UK and France assisted Israel with countering a large-scale bombardment by Iran in April, saying it showed that countries can provide such help to their allies without actually becoming “a party to the conflict.”
In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the US-made F-16 fighter jets that the West is planning to supply to Ukraine will be targeted at airfields in NATO countries if they are going to operate from there.
READ MORE: Ukraine using British weapons for terror attacks – Moscow
Earlier this week, Russia said it would conduct tactical nuclear weapons drills as a warning to the US and its allies not to escalate the Ukraine conflict. The announcement followed a suggestion by Poland of potentially hosting US nuclear weapons, and remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron about the possibility of sending French and other NATO soldiers to Ukraine.
-
Site: PaulCraigRoberts.org
The Transformation of Once Free Countries into Horrible Dystopias Is at Hand
The West is succumbing to tyranny, and Canada is leading the way. Justin Trudeau, the tyrant who rules Canada, has introduced a bill that will create the most hideous kind of dystopia. On the basis of anonymous accusation a Canadian can be sentenced to life in prison for expressing “hate words.” This bill, likely to become law as legislators usually support increases in state power as the US House of Representatives recently did, means that in Canada no one will say anything. The reason is that in a tower of babel, which is what every Western country is, almost anything can be said to be offensive by someone among the disparate elements that no longer comprise a nation. Many innocuous expressions of speech are considered offensive to blacks, such as “call a spade a spade.” With our limited experience with Muslims, we have no idea what might be considered hate speech by them. The same for Asians. I thought Jap was just shorthand for Japanese, like Yank for American, but apparently it is a hate term.
Matt Taibbi explains Trudeau’s proposed law:
-
Site: PaulCraigRoberts.org
How many times do the rigged trials against Trump have to be admitted and exposed before a judge throws them all out of court? Or is the legal system in America rotten to its core?
“A paralegal from Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg’s office testified on Friday during former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial that some phone call records between Michael Cohen and Stephanie Clifford’s (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) lawyer were deleted, raising questions about evidentiary integrity.”
What the Trump trials are doing is discrediting forever trust in the US Department of Justice (sic), a strictly criminal organization.
-
Site: PaulCraigRoberts.org
Elon Musk Warns 2024 Election Will Be ‘The Last’ Decided By US Citizens
https://headlineusa.com/musk-2024-election-last-us-citizens/
Actually, the last election decided by American citizens was 2016.
California Governor Gavin Newsom unveils revised 2024-25 state budget on Friday, May 10 (photo: AP, Rich Pedroncelli)
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly gives her inaugural address for her second four-year term on the south steps of the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan., on Jan. 9, 2023. (John Hanna/AP Photo)
Creative Commons Image
RIGHTS, BUT: Canada guarantees the right to freedom of expression, but “only to such reasonable limits… as can be demonstrably justified.”
ANY OTHER ACT OF PARLIAMENT: Combining hate with any federal violation, no matter how minor, results in potential life sentences.
MINORITY REPORT: If authorities believe there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect a “hate propaganda” offense will occur, they will be able to hand out pre-emptive punishment.
Via Reuters
Fishermen haul their catch near a fishery in Goa, India. 2016.
Via APPages
Telegram Channels
Today's Mass
Traditional Liturgical Calendar
Tags
abortion
anti-Catholicism
anti-Christianity
anti-Russian propaganda
apostasy
Bergoglio anti-Catholicism
Bergoglio effect
Bergoglio heresy
Bergoglio homosexualism
Bergoglio idiocy
Bergoglioism
Bergoglio pontificate failure
Bp. Athanasius Schneider
CallMeJorge
Cardinal Müller
Cardinal Robert Sarah
Cdl. Raymond Burke
China
Church in Germany
Church revival
Covid19 coronavirus totalitarianism
culture of death
diabolical disorientation
DNC
Donald Trump
E.U.
EponymousFlower
euthanasia
feminism
Fr. Allan J. McDonald
Fr. John Hunwicke
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
Fr. Peter Carota
Fr. Ray Blake
France
Germany
GlobalResearch
Gloria.tv
Gregory DiPippo
Holy Communion for lechers
homosexualism
homosexuality
intra-Church persecution
ISIS
Islam
Islamisation
Laura Wood
leftism
LifeNews
LifeSiteNews
Louie Verrecchio
Maike Hickson
marriage
Matthew Archbold
Michael Matt
modernism
Mundabor
Novus Motus Liturgicus
Novus Ordo
Novus Ordo apostasy
Novus Ordo filth
Novusordoism
Novus Ordo Missae
NovusOrdoWatch
OnePeterFive
papal heresy
papal piracy
papal scandal
persecution
Peter Hitchens
Peter Kwasniewski
political correctness
Pope Benedict XVI
Roberto de Mattei
Ron Paul Institute
Rorate Caeli
Russia
SSPX
Steve Skojec
StrategicCulture.org
Sweden
Syrian war
Tantumblogo
The Remnant
totalitarianism
traditionalism
transgenderism
Tridentine Mass
U.K. decline
U.S. circus
U.S. decline
U.S. militarism
U.S. roguery
Ukraine
Vatican II
Vladimir Putin
VoxCantoris
Western civilisation downfall
Western decadence
Western intervention