Today’s News 11th February 2024

• Global Economic War Is Coming And The Threat To The US Dollar Is Real
  Global Economic War Is Coming And The Threat To The US Dollar Is Real

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  In a recent statement posted to social media, Tucker Carlson explained succinctly his many reasons for traveling to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. His decision, mired in an avalanche of outrage from leftist media talking heads and a multitude of western politicians, was inspired by Carlson’s concern that Americans have been misdirected by corporate propaganda leaving the public completely uneducated on the war in Ukraine and what tensions with the East might lead to.

  

  I agree. In fact, I don’t think the majority of Americans have a clue what the real consequences of a global war with Russia and its allies would look like. Even if the conflict never resulted in shots fired and stayed confined to the realm of economic warfare, the US and most of Europe would be devastated by the effects.

  Carlson specifically mentioned dangers to the status of the US dollar, and I suspect this comment probably mystified a great number of people. Most of the population cannot fathom the idea of a US dollar implosion set in motion by a foreign dump of the greenback as the world reserve currency. They really do believe the dollar is invincible.

  The most delusional people are, unfortunately, those within mainstream economic circles. They just can’t seem to grasp that the west is in the midst of financial collapse already, and war would accelerate the effects to levels not seen since the Great Depression.

  I have been warning about this outcome for many years. I think I have made my position clear in the past; I suspect the conflict between east and west has been carefully engineered over the course of a decade or more, and Russia is not innocent in this affair.

  Russia has consistently collaborated with globalist institutions including the International Monetary Fund in the effort to create a new “global reserve currency system.” In other words, the interests of Russia and the globalists do indeed intersect in a number of ways and the war in Ukraine has not necessarily changed that.  Time Magazine even complained last year about the IMF issuing positive reports about Russia’s economy – They thought the organization was going to repeat the false NATO narrative that Russia was in the midst of fiscal implosion.  Instead, the IMF essentially praised Russia’s resiliency in the face of sanctions.

  As I noted in 2014 in my article ‘False East/West Paradigm Hides Rise Of Global Currency’ in reference to the burgeoning war with Ukraine.

  “I would remind pro-Putin cheerleaders that Putin and the Kremlin first pushed for the IMF to take control of the Ukrainian economy, and the IMF is now demanding that Ukraine fight Russia in exchange for financial support. This might seem like irony to more foolhardy observers; but to those who are aware of the false East/West paradigm, it is all the part of a greater plan for consolidation of power.”

  I also argued that:

  “I have warned for quite some time that the development of East/West tensions would be used as a cover for a collapse of the dollar system. I have warned that among the American media this collapse would be blamed on an Eastern dump of foreign exchange reserves and treasuries, resulting in a global domino-effect ending U.S. world reserve status.”

  From the moment Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed (many argue that this was done with the help of western intel agencies) the agenda for WWIII was set in motion. Both sides seemed to create the circumstances by which a conflagration was unavoidable.

  Russia, strangely, supported the intervention of the IMF to secure Ukraine’s economy. The IMF then asserted that Ukraine would have to fight Russia to keep control of the Donbas or risk losing the financial aid that was keeping the country alive. Is this irony, or is there something else going on here?

  NATO started arming Ukraine, and Ukraine used those arms to slaughter civilians in the Donbas. The eastern population wanted to join with Russia, and Ukraine had no intention of allowing this (IMF funding was on the line). In the meantime, the government began openly discussing the official inclusion of Ukraine into NATO. Russia then invaded, taking the Donbas. Now the entire region is a powder keg and both sides are ready to light the fuse.

  But let’s look at this situation as if there was no globalist involvement in facilitating the crisis, just for a moment as an exercise in critical thinking…

  If I had to pick a side that is “more right” in their position, it would have to be Russia, but not for the reasons many leftists might imagine when conservatives defend Russia.  The bottom line is that the left blindly follows establishment dictates while the rest of us are at least willing to look at the situation from both sides (which is the same thing Tucker Carlson is doing, and he’s being accused of treason for it).

  Imagine if China was working to create a military alliance with Mexico with the potential for the Chinese military to stage long range weapons and soldiers on the American southern border? Imagine the chaos that this would cause in the US (maybe they would finally secure the border)? That’s what Russia was facing with Ukraine. Hell, America almost initiated global nuclear war when the Soviets staged missiles in Cuba in 1962. Military operations so close to the borders of major national powers are not a joke.

  This was exact rationale for the war on Ukraine cited by Putin in his discussion with Tucker Carlson, and it makes sense.  Again, if we look at the events without the prospect of globalist interference.  But what if we start to consider who benefits the most from this war?

  I certainly don’t trust Putin, but that doesn’t negate the Orwellian behavior of European and American political leaders. There is something going on here beyond the typical mechanisms of geopolitical brinkmanship. The conflict has wide ranging consequences and only serves the goals of a select group of elites.  I suspect elements of both Russia and NATO governments are either knowingly or unwittingly serving these interests.

  It is undeniable. It is a verifiable reality – Many of our political leaders and elitist institutions are corrupt beyond comprehension. They are seeking an authoritarian reformation, a “great economic reset” and they are triggering multiple conflicts around the world. We saw the mask come off during covid. These people are not merely misguided; they are monsters, and they are hungry. It’s not beyond them to conjure a worldwide calamity and sacrifice the west like a goat on the altar to get the total centralization they desire.

  The East/West paradigm plays into this plan perfectly. The BRICS nations are poised to drop the dollar as world reserve; some have already done so in bilateral trade. Make no mistake, if the conflict in Ukraine (and other parts of the world like Syria or Iran) continues to escalate nations like China will move to dump their dollar holdings just as Russia did. As the largest importer/exporter in the world, many countries would follow China’s lead and shift into a basket of currencies instead of the dollar for international trade.

  What does this mean?

  The dollar, which has been hyperinflated through more than a decade of Federal Reserve QE money printing, has continued to remain stable only because it is the world reserve and the petro-currency. Foreign banks hold trillions in US currency in overseas coffers for this very reason. With the loss of reserve status, an endless river of dollars will then flood back into the US as foreign investors diversify away from the Fed note. Result? Massive inflationary collapse.

  This is what’s at stake. This is what Tucker Carlson was referring to, and far too many in America just don’t get it. Globalists benefit because this is what they have been working towards for decades – The deconstruction of US society and the economy so that the “old world order” can be replaced with their “new world order” of Central Bank Digital Currencies.  An IMF one-world currency basket and a host of other highly unpleasant socialist changes would swiftly follow.

  The BRICS might be working with the IMF because they see the dethroning of the dollar as an opportunity to gain greater influence over international trade.  Or, maybe they are controlled opposition and they are scrambling for a seat at the NWO table.  In the end, the fall of the dollar would be a watershed moment for the formation of a global currency system.

  And the best part for globalists is, they will be seen as the “heroes” when it’s all over. They spent the better part of the last century setting up America for economic failure through their devaluation of the dollar and the creation of a national debt trap. The system was going to break anyway, but now they can divert all blame to war and the “arrogance of nation states” and then come to the rescue with their dystopian digital money.

  An east/west conflict opens the door to the Great Reset.  It is, in a lot of ways, the core of the Reset.  Everything in the new world order agenda relies on it.  Right now, the only thing holding back the tide is the public’s general refusal to fight. No one is interested in going overseas to die in a meaningless battle for Ukraine (Zelensky is truly delusional if he thinks Americans will shed blood in his trenches – Even a draft would be an utter failure). No one is interested in starting WWIII, whether it be nuclear or just economic.

  I think the establishment’s outrage over Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin is based on their fear that western audiences are already skeptical of the motives behind the conflict and an unfiltered discussion on the war might galvanize this feeling.  The notion of war is becoming harder and harder for the establishment to sell.

  This, however, does not negate the ability of NATO or Russia in expanding the crisis beyond Ukraine into other regions or into financial subterfuge (again, keep your eyes on Syria and Iran). Ultimately, they want us to choose sides, but only from the list of sides they approve. Liberty minded groups in the west need to choose our OWN side and fight for our own interests. It can’t be about NATO vs Russia, it has to be about free people vs the globalists. This is the only way these disaster events will ever end.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 23:20

• Billionaire Wealth: The Biggest Winners (& Losers) In 2023
  Billionaire Wealth: The Biggest Winners (& Losers) In 2023

  In early February, Mark Zuckerberg added $28 billion to his wealth in a matter of hours as Meta’s shares soared after the company announced its first dividend payout.

  This follows a banner year for the Facebook founder, who saw his wealth surge 173% in 2023. Like Zuckerberg, many tech billionaires added huge sums to their wealth as the stock market rebounded.

  Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld shows in the following graphic from Preyash Shah, the biggest winners and losers in billionaire wealth in 2023…

  

  The Top Risers and Fallers

  Below, we rank the world’s top 50 billionaires by their net change in wealth:

  

  Adding $113.5 billion to his fortune, Elon Musk saw the biggest gains across the group as Tesla shares doubled in price in 2023.

  This marks a sharp reversal from the previous year, when Musk lost more money than any other billionaire. In a record year, Tesla delivered 1.8 million vehicles—a 38% year-over-year increase.

  Mark Zuckerberg, with the second-highest gains, raked in $78.3 billion as Meta’s shares skyrocketed. Last year, Facebook saw 5 million new users in North America. Adding to this, users’ time spent on Instagram has increased 40% since mid-2020 when Reels was launched.

  As the fastest riser across the top 50, Indonesia’s energy billionaire Prajogo Pangestu saw his wealth climb an incredible 971%. The majority of gains were driven from Barito Renewables, his geothermal power company, going public in October 2023.

  By contrast, India’s Gautam Adani saw the steepest decline in wealth. After a Hindenburg report accused the Adani Group of operating several shell companies to manipulate stock prices and launder money, Adani saw his wealth decline by $56.5 billion, cutting it by almost half.

  Along with Adani, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance—known for its social media app TikTok—lost $6.1 billion while major Republican donor Charles Koch lost $3.8 billion over the year.

  Rapidly Changing Wealth

  So far, the U.S. stock market has hit record highs in 2024, boosting the fortunes of many of the world’s billionaires.

  In fact, Meta recently added $196 billion to its market cap in one day, the biggest gain in the history of Wall Street. Year-to-date, Zuckerberg’s wealth has increased by $38.2 billion as of February 5. Additionally, Jeff Bezos has added $18 billion to his net worth in just over a month as Amazon shares have jumped nearly 14%.

  In 2024, Warren Buffett’s net worth has already climbed by $9.9 billion.

  Other billionaires have not fared as well, in particular Elon Musk, whose wealth has plummeted $55.8 billion after issuing recalls for 3.8 million vehicles. Tesla’s shares have slumped 27% year-to-date given production headwinds and a host of other setbacks, including legal troubles and increasing competition in the electric vehicle market.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 22:45

• The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled
  The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled

  Authored by Daniel Nuccio via The Brownstone Institute,

  “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze – depending on who you ask on the internet.

  

  Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

  When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think “1984.” You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film—or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.

  Whether a surveillance state is the end goal is hard to say. The police chief of Pawnee, Indiana probably isn’t plotting the development of his own mini-Oceania. But, 18,000-plus mini-Oceanias operating across multiple platforms with varying degrees of integration, both locally and nationally, is undoubtedly the direction in which we are heading as salespeople peddle shiny new surveillance gadgets to cities big and small, making often unverified but intuitively appealing claims of how their devices will decrease crime or prove to be useful investigative tools.

  Facial recognition tends to be the surveillance gadget that receives the most attention these days. You’ve seen it in movies and maybe feel some unease over visions of government agents sitting in a penumbrous room illuminated only by the faint glow of countless monitors with little boxes tracking the faces of every person walking down a busy city street. Likely, by now, you’ve also probably heard of facial recognition being used for relatively petty purposes or leading to incidents in which innocent people were harassed or arrested because a program made a mistake. Maybe you’ve even been following the efforts to ban the technology.

  Yet, other surveillance gadgets that aren’t quite as sexy or as prevalent in pop culture manage to remain under the radar of even the most privacy-conscious as they are promoted through law enforcement peer referral programs organized by surveillance gadget companies seeking to have their devices in every town in America.

  Some, such as gunshot detection devices, may seem relatively benign, although there have been concerns they might pick up bits of conversation on quiet streets. Others, such as cell site simulators, are quite a bit more intrusive as they can be used by law enforcement to monitor the location of people through their cell phones, as well as collect metadata from their calls and a considerable amount of other information.

  Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, can be used to log a person’s movements through the license plates of their vehicles. Given the exponential increase in their use over the past few years and the ease with which data from the cameras of some vendors are integrated, they also pose a threat to privacy on par with facial recognition and cell site simulators.

  Often positioned on street lights, traffic lights, independent structures, or police vehicles, ALPRs are a type of camera that captures the license plate and other identifying information of passing vehicles before comparing the information in real time to “hot lists” of vehicles actively being sought by law enforcement and transmitting the information to a searchable database. ALPRs sold by some companies are even said to be able to assess a car’s driving patterns to determine whether the person behind the wheel is “driving like a criminal.”

  Depending on the vendor and the particulars of their contract with a municipality or private entity leasing the cameras from them, the information the cameras collect is maintained usually for thirty days but sometimes for a period of months or even years.

  Although on the surface this may sound relatively unintrusive, leading to places such as Nashville approving ALPRs while rejecting facial recognition, what this ultimately does is create a searchable database for the timestamped rough location of any individual who regularly travels using a single vehicle—in other words, most Americans especially those living outside of major cities.

  Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s national office, who has written extensively on matters pertaining to technology, privacy, and surveillance, stated in a 2023 phone interview, “There’s no question that if you get enough license plate readers and you got one on every block, that put together … can create a GPS-tracker-like-record of my movement and even if there’s, you know, only one every ten miles and [I’m] driving around the country, I’m driving from Texas to California or what have you, that can be very revealing as well.”

  Subsequently, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, and the Brennan Center for Justice, a self-described “non-partisan law and policy institute,” have expressed concerns that the devices could be used to track the activities of protesters and activists.

  If ALPRs were as prevalent during lockdowns as they are now, it’s not difficult to imagine at least some governors or mayors using them to track and reprimand those who dared violate Corona law.

  Furthermore, sometimes the devices do make mistakes, leading to claims by individuals and families that they were psychologically traumatized after they were pulled over, held at gunpoint, searched, and handcuffed by police essentially due to a computer error.

  As for the benefits they provide in terms of making communities safer, quantitative data demonstrating their success tends to be lacking.

  The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights released a report in December 2022 indicating hit rates for ALPRs, or the percentage of license plates photographed by ALPRs within a municipality that are associated with a vehicle being sought by law enforcement, tend to fall below 0.1 percent, meaning a lot of data have to be collected on a lot of law-abiding citizens in order for the devices to be of any use. Moreover, even when they do aid law enforcement in finding a wanted vehicle, the end results still can be somewhat underwhelming.

  The University of Illinois’ Community Data Clinic, for example, in a preliminary report dated Fall 2023, indicated that of 54 instances law enforcement in Champaign, one of the two cities U of I calls home, accessed data from their ALPRs within a particular period, only 31 of those instances likely involved felonies, most of which did not involve a firearm. The University of Illinois report went on to indicate only ten of those instances led to an arrest or an arrest warrant and only two of those arrests led to formal charges.

  As demonstrated at an October 2021 town hall regarding ALPRs in Urbana, Illinois, Champaign’s sister city, even proponents of the devices struggle to produce a single study showing that the cameras deter or prevent gun violence, which is often one of the main reasons communities turn to ALPRs in the first place.

  However, when vendor reps and local law enforcement are trying to gain approval from city councils and assuage the fears of wary citizens, the surveillance potential of the devices, along with their questionable effectiveness and the devastating consequences that can follow when one makes a mistake, tend not to be what they lead with.

  Instead, proponents emphasize how common they are in surrounding cities, cite anecdotal evidence of their utility, and try to present ALPRs as non-threatening, normal, and perhaps even a little old-fashioned.

  You have nothing to worry about, you’re told. The town down the road brought them in six months back. Chief Jones over there said they helped solve that murder from the news. And, by the way, they’re not really that much different from a concerned citizen just keeping an eye on things.

  At the town hall in Urbana, for example, then-police chief, Bryant Seraphin, worked to dismiss the notion that ALPRs actually pose a threat to privacy or even constitute a surveillance tool.

  “They [ALPRs] are not surveillance cameras,” stated Seraphin early in the event. “I cannot pan, tilt, [or] zoom them. There’s no live looking to see what’s happening at the corner …” he explained.

  Repeatedly, he emphasized that ALPRs do not capture any information about the person driving a car or automatically link to information about the person to whom a vehicle is registered. Their ubiquity in the area was accentuated. Supposed success stories were shared.

  To allay any remaining notion that there might be something scary about ALPRs, Seraphin described them with a folksy metaphor: “One of the things that I’ve talked about with these things is that if you pictured somebody sitting in a lawn chair writing down every plate that went by, the date, and the time when they wrote ‘red Toyota ABC123’, and then they would make a phone call and check the databases and then hang up and then go on to the next one—that’s what [an ALPR] does automatically and it can do it over and over again … with incredible speed.”

  Yet, when Anita Chan, the director of the University of Illinois Community Data Clinic, proceeded to raise concerns regarding “the potential violation of civil liberties” and how a license plate alone is sufficient for the police to not just find out “where you live and where you work but also … who potentially your friends are, what religious affiliation you might have, essentially where you get medical services … [and] suss out essentially who’s traveling and where,” Seraphin acknowledged all this is possible. However, he assured her with a frustrated chuckle, ALPRs simply provide a notebook that would only be referenced when investigating serious crimes.

  By the same logic, facial recognition simply provides a notebook as well. As do cell site simulators. As do any surveillance device. Yet, there is a fundamental question of whether such a notebook should exist. Does the chief of police in Urbana or the sheriff in Pawnee need a notebook containing your approximate location three Thursdays ago at 8:15pm, as well as a record of who attended last week’s political rally, in order to solve a murder? Should he be allowed to keep such a notebook if it might help solve an extra murder in his town each year? If the answer is yes, then what are the limits to the tools he and his department should be afforded?

  Furthermore, there is also something a little off about the disarming metaphor of a guy who spends his days sitting around in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles. Something a little insidious. Something that perhaps Anita Chan was piking up on.

  One guy in a lawn chair jotting down license plate numbers is a nosy neighbor, maybe even a neighborhood crank, but not someone to whom you would pay much attention. When he starts following you around though to the point of knowing who your friends are, where you worship, and when you go to the doctor, he kind of becomes a stalker. But, when he develops the ability to gather this kind of information on everyone, he starts to develop a level of omnipresence and omniscience with which no one should be comfortable—which may be why you’re told he’s just a guy in a lawn chair.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 22:10

• Swift Or The Super Bowl: Who Is The Real MVP?
  Swift Or The Super Bowl: Who Is The Real MVP?

  Is Taylor Swift and her already iconic Eras Tour bigger than the Super Bowl?

  The question that started with a quote alleging so from Jane Talbot, CEO of city business improvement association Downtown Van, can be answered with: It depends.

  Talbot alluded to reports that local businesses in Glendale, Arizona, had said their revenues soared more when Swift kicked off her mammoth tour there in March 2023 than when the Super Bowl was played at the same stadium one month earlier.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  This Sunday, Swift and the Super Bowl will of course collide for the first time as the 34-year-old singer is expected to cheer on her boyfriend, Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce, at the event in Paradise, Nev., close to Las Vegas.

  Some of Swift’s perceived superiority might have come from the fact that she packed State Farm Stadium on the outskirts of Phoenix with more people on back-to-back nights than last year’s Super Bowl did. 

  Around 146,000 Swifties – Taylor Swift fans – descended upon the area for both concerts.

  While Talbot’s quote only refers to the opening night, both Swift’s and the Super Bowl’s fans tend to visit hosting cities for several days around their event of choice, creating revenues for local businesses throughout. Looking at per-person spending only, the Super Bowl is still in the lead at $2,500 per ticketed attendee.

  Swift’s fans’ spending was estimated somewhat lower at “just” $1,300 to $1,500 per person. So despite this, the Eras Tour’s 151 dates announced across five continents and two years are clearly bound to bring more money into local economies as well as Taylor Swift’s pockets in total.

  When it comes to net worth, Swift is therefore the most valuable player in the comparison, with a newly estimated net worth of $1.1 billion hugely padded by Eras Tour income.

  This year’s Super Bowl’s richest players are Partrick Mahomes, quarterback for the Kansas City Chief, at $70 million and Nick Bosa, defensive end for the San Francisco 49ers, at $50 million. Boyfriend Travis Kelce can also not hold the candle to Swift at a net worth of $40 million.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 21:35

• Trump: 2nd Biden Term Would Be The Death Knell For The 2nd Amendment
  Trump: 2nd Biden Term Would Be The Death Knell For The 2nd Amendment

  Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times,

  The former president and current frontrunner for the GOP nomination for the 2024 presidential race vowed before hundreds of NRA members to support them in their fight for the Second Amendment.

  

  President Trump was the keynote speaker at the Presidential Forum in the 2024 NRA’s Great American Outdoors Show on Feb. 9.

  “Your second amendment will always be safe with me as your president,” President Trump told the raucous crowd in the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg.

  To the crowd’s cheers, President Trump said he would make the Second Amendment a true American right by demanding Congress pass a national reciprocity law so that Americans could legally carry a gun regardless of where they happen to be.

  “It has to cross state lines,” President Trump said.

  Then he turned his guns on President Joe Biden.

  He told the crowd that the Biden administration is committed to gun control. He promised to reinstate policies from his administration that Democrats had done away with.

  He reminded the crowd that he removed the United States from international gun control agreements, labeled gun makers and dealers as critical businesses during the pandemic, and appointed judges who support the Second Amendment.

  “If Joe Biden is reelected, your gun rights will be gone, totally gone,” President Trump said.

  “The only thing standing between you and the obliteration of the Second Amendment is me.”

  He called President Biden the most incompetent and corrupt president in American history. He warned that reelecting President Biden would be disastrous.

  “If you care about your country, if you care about your children, then we have to fire—remember the apprentice—we have to fire crooked Joe Biden,” President Trump said.

  President Trump said he would defend the Second Amendment by reforming the agencies that enforce gun laws. He promised to replace the heads of agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Department of Justice.

  “We will completely overhaul the Department of Justice,” President Trump said.

  According to President Trump, President Biden is responsible for increased crime, higher inflation, depressed wages, and America’s diminished standing in the world.

  Trump supporters were out in force for the former president during the National Rifle Association’s Great American Outdoors show in Harrisburg, Pa., on Feb. 8, 2024. (Michael Clements/The Epoch Times)

  “Four years ago, I told you what would happen if Joe Biden got into office. I didn’t know how bad it would be. It’s even worse,” President Trump said.

  He said President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he called the most embarrassing moment in American history, led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the growing boldness of Iran, and the Oct. 7 terrorist invasion of Israel by Hamas. He said that none of these things happened during his term.

  “The attack on Israel would have never happened,” President Trump said.

  He promised to reinstate strict enforcement of immigration laws and begin a major deportation effort.

  “The day that I’m reelected is the day that law and order and justice will return to the United States,” President Trump said.

  NRA spokesman Billy McLaughlin revved the crowd up by listing who he considered to be the enemies of the Second Amendment.

  “We have CNN in here, we have MSNBC, we have the New York Times,” Mr. McLaughlin said. As the crowd began to jeer, Mr. McLaughlin responded, “Exactly.”

  He said that the media, working with “gun-hating politicians,” is dedicated to ending the Second Amendment. He lauded the crowd for standing up for their constitutional right to bear arms.

  “Gun-hating politicians and their promoters in the gun-hating media hate everything we stand for. Most importantly, they hate those 27 words we fight for every day, the Second Amendment,” Mr. McLaughlin said, drawing cheers. “We will never let Joe Biden take our guns.”

  ‘We’ve Got to Close the Border’

  Attendees had more than the Second Amendment on their minds. Mark Ciechanowicz of Long Island, New York, said he wants issues at the southern border addressed.

  “We’ve got to close the border. I think everybody now sees what’s really going on is illegal immigration is running rampant, and they’re tired of it,” Mr. Ciechanowicz told The Epoch Times.

  Brian Sherr of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, agreed. He wants to see President Trump sent back to Washington to handle immigration and to tame the economy. According to Mr. Sherr, the price of diesel fuel is driving up the cost of everything else.

  “We need to reduce the price of groceries; that will make everything easier on everyone in the country,” he told The Epoch Times.

  Former President Donald J. Trump speaks at the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa., on Feb. 9, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

  NRA President Charles Cotton said he has faith in President Trump’s promises. While he doesn’t know President Trump personally, he said he knows his record and people who have worked with him for years. He said they all tell him the same thing about the former president.

  “If Donald Trump gives you his word, he will never go back on it,” Mr. Cotton said.

  The Trump supporters who spoke to The Epoch Times acknowledged that President Trump is facing some severe challenges even as he maintains a more than 40 percent lead in the GOP race. But Mr. Sherr said the lawsuits, investigations, and other issues only solidified in his mind that the former president was onto something.

  “The simple fact is that if they had anything on him, they would have been done years ago,” Mr. Sherr said.

  “I don’t think there’s anything else they can try do to keep him out of office.

  “They’re scared.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 21:00

• "If You Want To Control People, You Have To Control The CO2"
  “If You Want To Control People, You Have To Control The CO2”

  As farmer protests rage across Europe, Dutch MP Rob Roos sits down with The HighWire’s Del Bigtree to discuss the climate scam pushed by radical globalist elites in the Western world to seize more power and control. 

  “They [elites] go against family values. They go against natural food. They go against freedom – because if you have to buy an electric car. They’re almost twice as expensive – and people cannot buy that – it’s not about the car – it’s about you can’t go anywhere and must depend on public transportation,” Roos explained. 

  

  He said, “It’s also digitalization – what we see is the digital identity and central bank digital currency – this is all about a new form of communism.” 

  “If you want to control the people, you have to control the CO2 – because everything we do in life, breathing, living, traveling, eating, and everything we do in life leads to CO2 emissions. And if you can control the CO2, you can control the people,” Roos said. 

  He further explained that the ultimate control comes when globalists connect people’s digital identities to the central bank’s digital currency. 

  Bigtree responded: “So much of this [globalist takeover of the West] was really fast-tracked during Covid.” He pointed out that WEF branded the Covid era as the “Great Reset.” 

  MEP Warns Climate Change Policies Will Lead to a “New Form of Communism”

  “If you want to control the people, you have to control the CO2,” says MEP @Rob_Roos.

  “It’s taking away your freedom,” he added.

  “And if you then have the digital identity connected to the central bank… pic.twitter.com/r41RK9wdhF

  — The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) February 10, 2024

  We have cited 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, who have stated in a letter: “There is no climate emergency.” But under the guise of an imminent climate disaster, globalist elites, NGOs, governments, politicians, mega-corporations, and, of course, legacy media outlets push climate fear to usher in a reset of society. 

  The most critical line to remember from Roos’ interview is: “If you can control the CO2, you can control the people. “

  So, the next time you find yourself concerned about radical progressive politicians and rogue billionaires, like Bill Gates, advocating for ‘green’ policies, consider asking yourself: Are these new policies resulting in any loss of freedoms?

  *   *   * 

  Watch the full interview on Rumble: 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 20:25

• Republicans Should Ally With The American People – Not Washington Democrats: Gingrich
  Republicans Should Ally With The American People – Not Washington Democrats: Gingrich

  Authored by Newt Gingrich via RealClear Wire,

  No one should be surprised that conservatives are not supporting the U.S. Senate’s supposedly bipartisan border bill.

  

  Every time Republicans reach out to Democrats to write a bipartisan bill, they inevitably sell out conservative values and accept liberal poison pills to get Democrats’ votes.

  When Republicans give up their principles in the name of bipartisanship, it is a disaster for conservatism, enrages the base, and splits the Republican Party.

  This was the model of so-called bipartisan outreach which led President George H.W. Bush to break his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge.

  It was the same model of bipartisanship which led President George W. Bush to begin his first term working with Sen. Edward Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, a supposedly bipartisan education bill. It only benefited the Teachers’ Union and leftwing bureaucrats – and was a disaster for American students.

  The same brand of bipartisanship ‌is leading Sen. Mitt Romney to propose a fiscal commission on the national debt (which Democrats openly state must include tax increases which the American people deeply oppose).

  Marc Thiessen captured the insanity to which this passion for bipartisanship leads in the Washington Post:

  “This much is certain about the border agreement being negotiated by Senate Republicans and the Biden administration: There is no excuse for a weak deal. The border crisis could cost Democrats this year’s election and put Donald Trump in the White House — and Democrats know it. That means Republicans have all the leverage in these negotiations. So, any deal that Republicans reach needs to force Biden to take steps that will cause some in his party to balk — if Biden won’t do these things, it will be clear that he doesn’t want to stop illegal immigration. He only wants to stop Trump from entering the Oval Office again.”

  Speaking specifically to the bipartisan border deal being discussed in the U.S. Senate, Andrew McCarthy put things even more bluntly in the National Review. Citing Fox News’ Bill Melugin’s analysis of the bill, McCarthy said the parts of the bill Republican senators are touting are “disingenuous and, ultimately, counterproductive.”

  McCarthy explained:

  “That is to say, the good in the bipartisan Senate negotiators’ proposal — and there definitely is some — (a) can already be accomplished under current law, and (b) would require faith that the Biden administration will for some reason enforce these provisions even though it has systematically refused to enforce existing border-security provisions. More important, to get the illusory good in the proposal, Congress would have to enact provisions in the deal that would both undermine existing statutory restrictions and etch into our law magnets for illegal immigration.”

  There is a clear alternative to seeking an alliance with the Democrats. It is to seek an alliance with the American people. It is why President Abraham Lincoln said, with public sentiment anything is possible. Without public sentiment nothing is possible.

  President Ronald Reagan understood this principle, too. He would often say to us, “my job is to shine the light on the American people, so they will turn up the heat on Congress.” In his farewell address, he said “I’ve had my share of victories in the Congress, but what few people noticed is that I never won anything you didn’t win for me. They never saw my troops, they never saw Reagan’s regiments, the American people. You won every battle with every call you made and letter you wrote demanding action.”

  We stood on President Reagan’s shoulders with the Contract with America in 1994. We realized that you can achieve bipartisanship – from the ground up. Every item in the Contract was overwhelmingly popular with the American people. When we passed welfare reform, half the Democrats voted with us, because it was so popular back home they had no choice.

  Recent America’s New Majority Polls make clear the kind of border security bill the American people support. Two-in-three support the provisions in the Secure the Border Act of 2023 (H.R. 2). Further, three-in-four Americans want the government to prioritize stopping illegal immigration before addressing the status of current illegal immigrants. This includes 89% of Republicans, 75% of independents and 60% of Democrats. You would think numbers this massive would help define an American citizen-based bipartisanship.

  Americans by 2:1 favor simplifying the laws for deporting illegal immigrants back to their home countries. This includes 88% of Republicans and 67% of independents. Among minorities it includes 75% of Asian Americans, 52% of Latino Americans, and 48% of African Americans.

  If you just started with these two principles, you could write an immigration and border control bill that would have overwhelming popular support.

  The more the American people learn about the U.S. Senate’s supposedly bipartisan bill, which should be called the Illegal Immigration Support Act, the more they will oppose it – and question the common sense of the people who wrote it.

  For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also, subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 19:50

• A New Year Every Two Months? 'Year-End' Celebrations Around The World
  A New Year Every Two Months? ‘Year-End’ Celebrations Around The World

  Lunar New Year festivities, celebrated in China, Vietnam and South Korea among others, are ringing in a new year today, February 10.

  In China, the event will start the year of the dragon.

  While January 1 is a also public holiday in the country, it is rather insignificant compared to the massive Chinese New Year’s celebration lasting seven days or even longer.

  The Chinese welcome two new years in short succession and, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz shows in the chart below, a new year is celebrated almost every two months in some part of the world.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  In July, Muslim countries rang in a new year on the Islamic calendar. 1445 AH will last from July 19, 2023, to approximately July 5, 2024 – 14 days shorter than the 366 days of the Gregorian year. The date set by Saudi Arabia is based on astronomical calculations of moon cycles and while many countries in the region follow the Saudis’ lead, others wait until they can spot the new moon themselves, causing slightly different observation dates for the holiday.

  Like the Islamic New Year, many regional new year’s celebrations rely on lunar calendars, causing their dates to vary each year in relation to the Gregorian calendar, which is based on one revolution of the Earth around the sun. Because the Islamic year is the only one which is significantly shorter than the solar year, the Islamic celebration is also the only one which can occur in any month of the Gregorian calendar.

  Saudi Arabia until recently condemned new year’s celebrations on January 1 and only allowed fireworks to take place on the date for the first time in 2021. January 1 celebrations have also caused debate in Uzbekistan, where the Persian New Year Nowruz is celebrated in March and traditionally minded Uzbeks would like to see January 1 celebrations – a Soviet legacy – disappear. Nowruz is considered the main new year’s celebration – and main festival of the year – in Iran and Afghanistan, while it is celebrated as “Spring Festival” in much of Central Asia.

  In Southeast Asia, January 1 and regional celebration Songkran coexists peacefully. Its date used to be determined by the lunar Hindu calendar, but has since received set Gregorian dates varying slightly by country for convenience’s sake. In India, the Hindu calendar’s new year is celebrated on various days in March and April depending on the region, while January 1 celebrations are also popular.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 19:15

• "Garbage Deals": Dealership Puts Customers In Cars With $3,000 Monthly Payments
  “Garbage Deals”: Dealership Puts Customers In Cars With $3,000 Monthly Payments

  A New York Fed survey published earlier this week indicated that, in the fourth quarter of 2023, auto loan delinquencies reached levels not seen since right after the Great Recession more than a decade ago. 

  As a refresher, the data from Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed (read: ZH report here) the rate at which car owners are behind on their payments hit an annualized rate of 7.7%, the highest level since 2010. 

  

  “Delinquency transition rates have pushed past pre-pandemic levels, and the worsening appears to be broad-based,” researchers at the NY Fed wrote in a blog post. 

  Given that we already covered this in a report titled Credit-Card & Auto Delinquencies Soar, Especially Age Group 18-39, as well as other eye-opener credit reports in recent weeks:

  • Banks Report Tighter Standards, Weaker Loan Demand But Some Improvement As Financial Conditions Ease
  • Stunning Collapse In Credit Card Debt Change As Average APR Hits New All-Time High

  … perhaps there is reason to believe an increasing number of households have hit the proverbial brick wall despite the Biden administration cheering ‘Bidenomics’ on legacy corporate media outlets. 

  The households who piled on insurmountable auto and credit card debt through the Covid era and the current high-interest rate environment are likely the folks running into financial turmoil. 

  An Edmunds report from last year showed the percentage of drivers with plus $1,000 monthly payments jumped to an all-time high of 17.1% in the second quarter of 2023 compared to 16.8% in the first quarter. The reason is that the average amount financed for a new vehicle is around $40,000, plus auto loan rates are at a generational high.

  “The double whammy of relentlessly high vehicle pricing and daunting borrowing costs is presenting significant challenges for shoppers in today’s car market,” Edmunds’ director of insights Ivan Drury said last year. 

  This leads us to two posts made by X user Clown World. They shared what appears to be an auto dealer sharing several images online of new customers financing vehicles with payments that are as much as monthly mortgage payments. 

  One person purchased a 2023 Tahoe with $2,550 monthly payments on an 84-month term! 

  

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Another person bought a 2023 Sierra 2500 Denali with $3,000 monthly payments, locked in a 96-month term! 

  What a deal 😅😳 pic.twitter.com/r0Sjhma5gC

  — Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) February 9, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Here’s what folks on X said in response to the two posts:

  $288,000 for a truck that will depreciate to 1/5 of that long before it’s paid off.

  — Caballero 🏹 (@HughAkston0) February 9, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Dude could be almost 1/3 of the way through a 30 year mortgage on an expensive house when he pays off his truck.

  — Branos (@thesonofbran) February 9, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  What’s with this trend of people posting their garbage “deals” at dealerships.
  Nice flex 😂

  — T M (@T_morgan61) February 9, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The repo industry silently cheers. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 19:11

• Biden Admin Confirms Using Financial Surveillance To Help Feds Catch Jan6'ers
  Biden Admin Confirms Using Financial Surveillance To Help Feds Catch Jan6’ers

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

  The Treasury Department has admitted that it helped law enforcement catch people involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach by urging banks to comb through the private transactions of customers using terms like “MAGA” and “Trump” as part of a surveillance scheme intended to fight money launderers but used to hunt Jan. 6-ers.

  

  In January, The Epoch Times reported on allegations that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—the U.S. Treasury Department’s financial crime-fighting unit—was accused of engaging in “pervasive financial surveillance” by circulating materials to banks that listed keywords that could be used to flag private financial transactions of potential Jan. 6 suspects for law enforcement.

  The materials also allegedly included instructions to banks to use indicators that could include “the purchase of books (including religious texts)” and subscriptions to media containing “extremist views.”

  The explosive allegations that FinCEN pushed banks to surveil the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges based in part on political and religious expression prompted Republican lawmakers to demand answers.

  Among these was Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, who pressed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and FinCEN director Andrea Gacki for answers in a Jan. 19 letter, in which the lawmaker alleged that, if true, the allegations “represent a flagrant violation of Americans’ privacy and the improper targeting of U.S. citizens for exercising their constitutional rights without due process.”

  Mr. Scott received a response letter on Feb. 9, in which Office of Legislative Affairs acting assistant secretary Corey Tellez confirmed that keywords like “MAGA,” “Trump,” or “storm the Capitol” were included in materials FinCEN provided to banks to help the feds track down Jan. 6 protesters.

  Mr. Tellez wrote that, following the Jan. 6 incident, FinCEN shared information with banks that included typologies that were based on previous efforts to develop robust anti-money laundering programs that could identify specific types of illegal activity, such as that related to active shooters or violent extremists.

  “For example, a document distributed on January 15, 2021, suggested that banks could review payment messages for indications that an individual participated in the assault on the Capitol and included terms such as ”Antifa,“ ”MAGA,“ ”Trump,“ ”Biden,“ ”Kamala,“ ”Schumer,“ and ”Pelosi,“ along with terms indicating an intent to do violence, such as ”shoot,“ ”kill,“ ”murder,“ and ”storm the Capitol.”

  FinCEN shared such documents with banks and law enforcement agencies via a series of events on FinCEN Exchange. This is a public-private information exchange platform established by Congress in 2020 for the purpose of disrupting money laundering, terrorism financing, and other crime

  “FinCEN’s primary role through these Exchange events was to support law enforcement efforts,” Mr. Tellez wrote, adding that these FinCEN Exchange events lasted until around mid-February 2021, so about a month-and-a-half after the Jan. 6 incident.

  Financial Surveillance of ‘MAGA’

  Confirmation that the Biden administration used what Mr. Scott called “politically charged search terms” to flag customers for the benefit of law enforcement stems from the work of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which are conducting oversight of law enforcement activity against U.S. citizens that may skirt the legal process.

  On Jan. 17, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who also heads the weaponization subcommittee, revealed that the two committees were in possession of documents indicating that FinCEN sent out materials to banks on behalf of law enforcement that outlined the typologies of persons of interest linked to the Jan. 6 incident.

  “We now know the federal government flagged terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘TRUMP’ to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms,” Mr. Jordan said in a post on X.

  “What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.”

  In a letter to former FinCEN division director Noah Bishoff, Mr. Jordan accused the agency of engaging in “pervasive financial surveillance” carried out at the request of law enforcement, with the lawmaker claiming this raised doubts about the Treasury Department’s “respect for fundamental civil liberties.”

  Several days after Mr. Jordan made his allegations, Mr. Scott wrote to Ms. Yellen and the FinCEN chief demanding explanations for what he described as reports of “unwarranted financial surveillance.”

  “These allegations are particularly concerning given past efforts to weaponize the financial system and payment activity against politically disfavored, lawful activity,” he wrote.

  As an example of such weaponization, Mr. Scott singled out the Obama-era “Operation Choke Point” initiative, which involved the Justice Department coordinating with financial regulators to push banks to deny services to legitimate businesses that the administration was ideologically opposed to, such as gun retailers.

  Mr. Scott’s demand for answers led to the Feb. 9 letter from the Biden administration and admission of financial surveillance—which Treasury insists was both legal and legitimate.

  “FinCEN is deeply committed to fulfilling this important national security and criminal justice mission in accordance with the law,” Mr. Tellez wrote, suggesting in the letter that, thanks in part to FinCEN, “more than 1,200 people have been charged with crimes in connection with the Capitol attack and nearly 900 have been convicted.”

  Among those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 incident, roughly 750 have been sentenced, with nearly two-thirds receiving some time in prison.

  The longest prison sentence—22 years—was handed down to Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors alleged was a plot to stop the transfer of power from then-President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden during the certification of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

  Dozens of Jan. 6 detainees are still languishing in jail awaiting trial three years after the Capitol incident.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 18:40

• Poll Shows Biden Border Policy Has Backfired With Latinos
  Poll Shows Biden Border Policy Has Backfired With Latinos

  Authored by Bill King via RealClear Wire,

  A poll by the University of Houston was released last week on the prospects for the March primary elections and the November general election in Texas. The poll unsurprisingly projected that Biden and Trump were headed to another showdown in November, and that Trump was leading Biden in that rematch by 9% in Texas. However, what I suspect the Biden campaign team found shocking was that Biden was losing to Trump with Latino voters by a 47-41 margin. Only 55% of Latino Democratic primary voters said they were committed to vote for Biden. The other 45% were undecided.

  

  I have watched for years as pundits and political consultants from both parties, who were mostly white, have made assumptions about how Latino voters felt about issues and how they would likely vote. The near universal mistake these consultants and pundits have made for years was that immigration was the paramount issue for the Latino community and that they wanted more liberal immigration laws. Both assumptions were wrong.

  First, there is no monolithic “Latino community.” Those of Mexican American heritage are the predominant group but there are also Americans from every other country in Central and South America. And they all have very different perspectives on just about every aspect of life, and especially on politics.

  Even among those whose families originally immigrated from Mexico there are vast differences. I have a Latino friend who is a sixth-generation Texan. He joked with me one day that he didn’t know he was a “minority” until he went to college. I can assure you that his views on immigration are very different than a recent immigrant from Mexico who is trying to get the other family members into the country.

  Also, immigration is hardly the only issue that Latinos are concerned about. I had dinner with some members of the Texas House of Representatives a couple of years ago about the prospect of starting a new party in Texas. The group was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. All but one of the Democrat members were Latino.

  I went around the room asking each one why they were dissatisfied with their existing party affiliation. One of the Latino members told me that his family were devout Catholics and opposed to abortion. He was tired of his party “looking down” on him because of his faith. Another said, “Defund the police my a#$, half my family works in law enforcement.” Another shared that his family was in the oilfield service business, and he was worried that Biden’s green energy agenda was going to hurt their family’s business and the economy of the area he represented. Immigration never came up during the dinner.

  In a recent UT poll, 71% of Latinos supported “tightening U.S. border security and providing Border Patrol with increased technology, infrastructure, and personnel.” That was not far behind whites at 85% and African Americans at 81%. It seems clear that Biden’s lax border policies are hurting him in Texas across every demographic group, including Latinos.

  But there is nuance in the polling. While Latinos generally feel about the same as their non-Latino neighbors regarding the state of the border, their views on other immigration issues vary significantly. For example, only 29% support the immediate deportation of immigrants here illegally, with 41% strongly opposed. That compares to 51% of whites who support immediate deportation. Similarly, 68% of Latinos support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants compared to 56% of whites. 61% of Latinos support harsher penalties for employers who hire workers here illegally compared to 82% of whites. Latinos also support a continuation of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, often referred to as Dreamers) at significantly higher levels than whites.

  All of this suggests that a majority of Latinos, and at least a significant plurality of the rest of Americans, want the government to control the border but at the same time want a more rational system to process new immigrants and those who are already here. Biden could thread the needle on immigration but for some inexplicable reason has persisted in his lax border policies.

  I do not subscribe to the theory that the president’s intention was to bring new Democratic voters into the country or the even nuttier “white replacement” conspiracy theories. Those of us who have worked in elections know that trying to register and get non-citizens to the polls is virtually impossible, at least at any scale that could affect the outcome of an election. When a third of American citizens are still not voting in presidential elections, it is much easier to get qualified voters to the polls. By the way, most of those who do not vote would likely favor Democratic candidates. Also, many of the Latino immigrants coming into the country have views on many issues, such as abortion, that are at odds with the Democratic platform.

  This New York Times story attempted to put a noble face on Biden’s immigration political disaster. But even these Biden-friendly reporters struggled to concoct a rational explanation for his border policies. I think the simpler explanation is that every time party control of the White House changes, the new president feels the need to reverse all of his predecessor’s policies, whether they were working or not. Which is why we get little to nothing done. Trump was obsessed with repealing Obamacare, notwithstanding that it was supported by a growing majority of Americans throughout his presidency and most analyses showed that it slowed the increase in healthcare costs.

  Biden came to the White House with the same mindset. Had he simply admitted that some of Trump’s border policies were working and then pressed to pass some badly needed reforms to the immigration system, he would not be in the mess he is now. But as Thomas Paine insightfully observed, “A man under the tyranny of party spirit is the greatest slave upon the earth, for none but himself can deprive him of the freedom of thought.”

  Where is Thomas Paine when we need him?

  Bill King is a businessman and lawyer, and is a former opinion columnist and editorial board member at the Houston Chronicle. He has served in a number of appointed and elected positions, including mayor of his hometown. He writes on a wide range of public policy and political issues. Bill is the author of “Unapologetically Moderate.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 17:30

• Israel Prepares For Rafah Assault That Could Lead To "Tens Of Thousands" Of Casualties As Saudis Warn Of Imminent "Humanitarian Catastrophe"
  Israel Prepares For Rafah Assault That Could Lead To “Tens Of Thousands” Of Casualties As Saudis Warn Of Imminent “Humanitarian Catastrophe”

  With any hopes for a Israel-Hamas ceasefire now dead, overnight Israeli air strikes killed 17 people in Rafah on the Gaza border medics said on Saturday, as over a million Palestinians crammed into the city await a full-scale offensive with the rest of the enclave in ruins and nowhere left to run.

  

  As reported yesterday, four months into the war in Gaza, Israeli PM Netanyahu’s office said it ordered the army to prepare to evacuate civilians from Rafah – a city in Gaza’s far south where more than one million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge, many sheltering in tents pushed up against the border with Egypt and the sea – ahead of a planned ground operation against four Hamas batallions it says are deployed in the city; on Saturday, the Israeli military said the air force killed two Hamas operatives in Rafah. The assault is set to escalate substantially, with Israeli Channel 13 news reporting that Netanyahu has requested the remobilization of reserve soldiers for the military operation.

  Israeli Channel 13: Netanyahu requested the remobilization of reserve soldiers in preparation for the military operation in Rafah. https://t.co/DIcPxziAkA

  — EndGameWW3 🇺🇸 (@EndGameWW3) February 10, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Gaza’s Hamas rulers warned on Saturday that Israeli operations in Rafah could cause “tens of thousands” of casualties in the city. The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said the move “threatens security and peace in the region in the world” and is “a blatant violation of all red lines”.

  Meanwhile, the Israeli military has been dropping leaflets over Rafah advising the civilians of the upcoming military operation and advising them to move safe locations, although it isn’t clear where the Palestinians can move to.

  Today Israel dropped new leaflets over Rafah warning civilians of the forthcoming military operation in the area and advising civilians to move to safe locations. #Gaza pic.twitter.com/rH9OMu9VAW

  — FJ (@Natsecjeff) February 10, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  While in prior Israeli assaults on Gaza’s cities the military ordered civilians to flee south, now that they are effectively pressing against the border with Egypt, there is no obvious place for them to go and aid agencies have said large numbers could die.

  “Any Israeli incursion in Rafah means massacres, means destruction. People are filling every inch of the city and we have nowhere to go,” said Rezik Salah, 35, who fled his Gaza City home with his wife and two children for Rafah early in the war.

  Meanwhile, the world is warning Israel that any incursion into Rafah will have dire consequences. On Saturday, Saudi Arabia said that Israel’s planned army operation in overcrowded Rafah would cause a “humanitarian catastrophe” and called for the United Nations Security Council to intervene.

  The kingdom “warned of the extremely dangerous repercussions of storming and targeting” Rafah and affirmed its “categorical rejection and strong condemnation of their forced deportation”, in a foreign ministry statement carried by state media.

  #Statement | The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia warns of the very serious repercussions of storming and targeting the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/JrdfxLnxaA

  — Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) February 10, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  “This continued violation of international law and international humanitarian law confirms the necessity of convening the Security Council urgently to prevent Israel from causing an imminent humanitarian catastrophe,” the statement added.

  

  While US President Joe Biden’s administration has voiced optimism that Saudi-Israeli normalisation can be revived, Saudi Arabia said this week it had told Washington it would not establish ties with Israel until an independent Palestinian state is “recognised” and Israeli forces leave Gaza. Saudi Arabia, home to the holiest sites in Islam, has never recognised Israel but had been considering to do so before the Israel-Hamas war broke out in October.

  Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned Israel against taking any steps towards a broader war against its proxy, the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, saying that would be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “last day.”

  At a news conference with his Lebanese counterpart Abdallah Bou Habib in Beirut, he also said Iran saw a political solution as the only way to end the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. “Iran and Lebanon confirm that war is not the solution and that we absolutely never sought to expand it,” Amir-Abdollahian said. He also said Tehran was in talks with Saudi Arabia on a political solution to hostilities in Gaza.

  Hamas this week proposed a ceasefire of four and a half months, during which remaining hostages held by Hamas would go free, Israel would withdraw its troops from Gaza, and an agreement would be reached on an end to the war. It also demands the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in Israeli jails for terror attacks.

  Netanyahu called the Hamas terms “delusional” and vowed to fight on. But Amir-Abdollahian said Hamas was presenting ideas based on a “realistic view,” and that they should be widely backed to end the war.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 16:55

• Dem Calls For 25th Amendment Against Trump Come Back To Haunt
  Dem Calls For 25th Amendment Against Trump Come Back To Haunt

  Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClear Wire,

  Thursday’s news crescendo ending in a calamitous presidential press conference carried hidden lessons for both parties: Be careful what you wish on your political enemies. It could monumentally backfire.

  

  The Democrats’ continuous calls during his four years in office to use the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office on the presumed grounds of mental instability took a disastrous turn this week, as the effort self-combusted in a Hindenburg-sized blowback.

  In October 2020, before Joe Biden was elected president and three months before Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference. She was touting a bill to create a bipartisan commission that could determine a sitting president’s ability to carry out the duties of the office.

  The original bill’s author was Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and former constitutional lawyer who would go on to lead the second Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. In Pelosi’s eerily portentous remarks, she said the measure wasn’t explicitly aimed at Trump, but his mental health “reminded” Democrats of why such a commission was needed.

  “This is not about President Trump. He will face the judgment of the voters, but he knows the need for us to create a process for future presidents,” she said. “This legislation applies to future presidents, but we are reminded of the necessity of action by the health of the current president.”

  The measure would have augmented the 25th Amendment, which provides procedures for transferring power to the vice president in case of the president’s death, incapacitation, removal, or resignation. It would set up a commission of 16 members chosen by Democrats and Republicans, who are medical experts or former high-ranking executive branch officials such as former members of a president’s Cabinet. The commission’s members would then select a 17th member, who would serve as chairperson.

  Pelosi and many Democrats regularly raised the issue of the 25th Amendment during Trump’s tenure as president, more as a way to question his judgment and mental acuity amid the 45th U.S. president’s furious Twitter rants and frequent acts of retribution and name-calling.

  Many Democrats have long questioned whether Trump suffers from cognitive decline, and recently, the former president provided more fodder by confusing Nikki Haley with Pelosi herself in accusing the former ambassador to the United Nations of being responsible for security at the Capitol during the pro-Trump riots.

  But the Democratic digs at Trump’s mental health were far trickier after the party’s leaders coalesced around Joe Biden as the Democratic 2020 presidential nominee and suddenly were forced to fend off far worse public perceptions of Biden. Once elected, his stairway falls, mangled words, and misidentified world leaders made the task all the more difficult.

  Now the tables have decisively turned. Republicans are now beating the drum for invoking the 25th Amendment after Special Counsel Robert Hur released a damning report. The findings accused Biden of “willfully” keeping classified documents in his Delaware home but declined to charge the president because his deteriorated mental state made him impossible to prosecute. Jurors would view him only as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur asserted in his report.

  Legal experts and hardline Republicans erupted with calls for Biden’s removal from office, citing Hur’s claims that Biden struggled to remember events such as when his term began and ended as vice president and when, within several years, his son Beau died.

  “The Special Counsel’s report exposing that Joe Biden’s mental decline is so severe that he can not stand trial means he is unfit for office,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, posted on X.com. “We must demand either the 25th amendment be invoked or impeachment.”

  Several other members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative group that helped remove House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in December, quickly amplified the calls. Rep. Mary Miller, an Indiana Republican, painted a dire situation, deeming Biden’s removal from office a matter of national security.

  “For the safety of our nation, Joe Biden must resign,” Miller wrote. “He could not remember basic facts about his life. He is not competent to remain as Commander-in-Chief & every day that he remains, he puts America at risk.”

  Speaker Mike Johnson and the entire House GOP leadership also waded in, issuing a joint statement that concluded: “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”

  Johnson then doubled down after Biden decided to take the questions head-on at a hastily assembled press conference in which he angrily sparred with reporters questioning his mental abilities and mistakenly called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the “president of Mexico.”

  “The President’s press conference this evening further confirmed on live television what the Special Counsel outlined,” the Speaker said on X. “He is not fit to be President.” Two conservative GOP senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida, joined the chorus. “It’s time for his cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment,” Scott tweeted.

  Scott acknowledged just how unlikely such an outcome would be, considering the rules for removing a president outlined in the constitutional amendment and the politics of doing so in an election year. A president can only be removed if he agrees to resign or if the vice president and a majority of presidential Cabinet members agree that he must leave office. And that’s just the first step.

  Under such a scenario, the president can still resist and insist he’s competent to lead the nation. If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet still disagree, they must wait four days before the 25th Amendment faces further nearly insurmountable hurdles. Successfully removing a president requires the support of two-thirds of the House and the Senate. 

  Why does the process give the president so much control over his ability to remain in office? The 25th Amendment’s authors crafted the process to maintain the power of the presidency and to prevent partisan political forces from manipulating it as an end-run around impeachment.

  “It reflects a preference for giving the president the ability to be the main decision-maker here,” explained Brian Kalt, a professor of Michigan State University College of Law and the author of “Unable: The Law, Politics, and Limits of Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.”

  “Not only do you need the president’s own party to vote in significant numbers against him in the House and Senate, you need his own team, basically to say, ‘Look, this is not okay,’” Kalt told RealClearPolitics. “It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be for extreme situations.”

  The 25th Amendment was ratified and approved after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a more explicit mechanism for transferring power from the president. It had previously been understood that the vice president could step in if the president was disabled, but until that time, the Constitution didn’t provide the requisite standards or procedures.

  “So, we never used it, even when presidents were clearly incapacitated,” Kalt said.

  Several times before Kennedy’s assassination, the country’s continuity of government was endangered when presidents became incapacitated. President Garfield was incoherent for two and a half months after he was shot in 1881 before he eventually died. Vice President Chester Arthur didn’t take over despite Garfield’s inability to perform his official duties.

  In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke that severely affected his physical and mental health for the remainder of his term. But he refused to resign, and Vice President Thomas Marshall declined to serve as acting president.

  During President Dwight Eisenhower’s years in office, he suffered a heart attack and underwent surgery for Crohn’s disease. Eisenhower wrote a confidential letter to his vice president, Richard Nixon, naming him responsible for determining whether he could perform his presidential duties. The letter’s legal authority was never adjudicated, and in any event, Nixon took over the duties of president only for a few hours two times, in 1955 after Eisenhower’s heart attack and again during the president’s 1956 surgery.

  “It’s not supposed to be another way for the president’s opponents to get rid of him,” Kalt said. “We really do stack the deck in favor of the president but in a way that allows power to transfer when it’s an undeniable case.”

  After Hur released his devastating report Thursday, Biden’s personal and White House lawyers showed no willingness to concede that Biden’s mental capacity is in any way diminished. The vast majority of Americans do not seem to agree. Even before the special counsel’s conclusions, a January NBC News poll found that 76% of voters have major or moderate concerns about Biden’s cognitive and physical health.

  In reacting to Hur’s report, Biden’s lawyers strongly objected to its characterizations and accused the special counsel of engaging in partisan politics. Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal attorney, who previously served as the general counsel to the Democratic National Committee and President Obama’s presidential campaign, accused Hur of “trashing” Biden.

  “The special counsel could not refrain from investigative excess, perhaps unsurprisingly given the intense pressures of the current political environment,” he said in a statement. “Whatever the impact of those pressures on the final report, it flouts department regulations and norms.”

  But other prominent legal analysts argued that Hur’s decision not to hold Biden responsible for years of violating the Presidential Records Act was far too lenient. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, said the depiction of Biden as too feeble to stand trial reminded him of the defense of mob leader Vincent Gigante, who often showed up in court in robes and pajamas. His lawyers successfully delayed his prosecution for years through arguments that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. Gigante was eventually convicted and sentenced to 12 years.

  “Here the special counsel is saying, ‘You know what? It’s just going to break the jury’s heart to see an elderly man with such a faulty memory and diminished faculties being charged,’” Turley said on Fox News after the report’s release. “There’s going to be a lot of questions about that.”

  When it comes to Trump, Turley argued, it seems prosecutors “hit him with any possible crimes stretching every possible definition.” But when they’re dealing with figures like President Biden, they are “far more cautious and resistant to charges,” he added.

  Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy, a conservative commentator and regular contributor to Fox News, said the report’s conclusions about Biden’s mental health are far more damning than the determination that Biden willfully stored classified documents in his Delaware home.

  “Well, my first impression was that this is supposed to be about whether there’s enough evidence to indict, and as you read the report, I can’t help but say it sure looks like there’s enough here to invoke the 25th Amendment,” McCarthy said on Fox News. “And I know that’s not what he’s looking at, what his purpose is, but [Biden’s] fitness for office is a major issue here.” 

  The White House and Democrats on Thursday immediately pushed back at the report’s conclusions about the president’s mental fitness even as other Democratic members privately acknowledged the grim political reality – that the report confirmed what many Americans had suspected for months, making it far more difficult for Biden to remain the nominee in November.

  Before the report was released, top White House aides were already struggling to defend Biden’s decision to skip the traditional pre-Superbowl presidential interview and explain away his gaffes from earlier this week. Biden, during a fundraiser, wrongly identified dead European leaders as having expressed concern to him about the events of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

  The politics of the situation are daunting for both major political parties. It seems increasingly clear that the Republicans are stuck with Donald Trump as their nominee whether they like it or not – and most rank-and-file voters seem fine with it even though Trump doesn’t poll as well against Biden as challenger Nikki Haley. On the Democrats’ side, if Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the president under the 25th Amendment, she would choose her own running mate. Under such a scenario, it would be far more difficult for the party to dump Harris, who is even less popular than the president, as the presumptive nominee during the remaining primaries or at the convention. There has been talk of Biden trying to replace Harris as his No. 2 since early last year. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren endorsed Biden in February, but equivocated when it came to whether or not he should boot Harris from the ticket. 

  “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team,” said Warren, who shortly afterward tried to undo the damage by issuing a statement “fully” supporting the reelection of Biden and Harris “together.” 

  That hasn’t stopped the speculation about other would-be presidential contenders. There are plenty of Biden alternatives already waiting in the wings, including such possibilities as former first lady Michelle Obama, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

  “Republicans should be careful what they wish for when talking about the 25th Amendment,” Kalt warned. “It could mean they won’t have Biden to run against in November.”

  Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 16:20

• Propaganda Wars Begin: Illegal Immigration Will Boost US GDP By $7 Trillion
  Propaganda Wars Begin: Illegal Immigration Will Boost US GDP By $7 Trillion

  One month ago we asked a simple question: at a time when the Biden admin is breathlessly taking credit for a quote-unquote “strong” job market, how is it not the biggest political talking point right now that since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; while over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs.

  How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

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  A few weeks later, when the grotesque and ridiculous January jobs report hit, we reran the analysis to find something even more jarring. Not only were all job gains in the past year entirely thanks to part-time workers, but native-born workers plunged by a another whopping 560 thousand, bringing the two-month total drop to just under 2 million. This meant that not only has all job creation in the past 4 years been exclusively for foreign-born workers, but there has been zero job-creation for native-born American workers since July 2018 (don’t believe us? go ahead and check the data directly from the Fed).

  

  Well, little by little our observations went viral, and soon the fact that immigration has been the only source of growth in the US was picked up by everyone from unimportant people such as fake (or is it fax) economists such as Paul Krugman, all the way to the most important person in the world, (with all due respect to Dementia Joe), the Fed chair Jerome Powell, and even the Congressional Budget Office. And that required an immediate propaganda response.

  So what does the propaganda blowback against this “biggest political talking point” look like?

  Well, let’s start with the NY Times’ pet Goebbels, Paul Krugman, who just happens to be the world’s most overrated economist who in 1998 said that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”, concedes that “all of the increase in employment since the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic has involved foreign-born workers” (but because facts are “political” he mocks that “Trump and those around him clearly believe that immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans”), and then he proceeds to lose any last trace of credibility liberals may still have in him – since anyone who knows how to click on a hyperlink such as this one can figure it out on their own – when he claims that immigrants “haven’t been taking jobs from the native-born, who are more likely to be employed in their prime working years than they were before the pandemic.” Great, the only problem with that is if one also looks at the quality of jobs instead of just quantity, and finds that all jobs in the past year have been part-time jobs.

  

  Is that the quality of jobs Krugman believes native-born Americans are entitled to? Don’t answer that: it’s rhetorical. As we showed repeatedly, non-immigrant Americans have not gained any jobs in 6 years, so Krugman’s whole argument is one giant strawman.

  As for the employment rate among prime-aged native Americans being flat, all Krugman is confirming is that the population of native born Americans is falling just as fast as their employment, which in turn is keeping the numerator and the denominator more or less unchanged. At the same time not only are all new jobs going to immigrants (whether legal or illegal), all of the US population growth is also due to immigrants (whether legal or illegal), which last time we checked, is precisely what the Replacement Theory is all about.

  Perhaps for his next propaganda exercise, the Democrats’ favorite economist can answer this question: why are so many native-born Americans so terrified of having families and raising children in this Bidenomical nirvana where everything is so wonderful, and why is all growth, in both the labor force and population, left to immigrants (whether legal or illegal).

  Of course, he won’t do that, as that requires figuring out the true nature of the problem which would go against his ideology; and instead he will jump right to the propaganda conclusion which is what one would expect from a professional liar, namely that “Immigrants are really good for the U.S. economy — and nativists really bad.“

  All this is short-run; add in huge long-run benefits from immigration in helping us pay for Social Security, Medicare and so on. Immigrants are really good for the U.S. economy — and nativists really bad 6/

  — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) February 2, 2024

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  * *  *

  Of course, if it was just Krugman doing the full court propaganda press we wouldn’t even bother with this response, but we were rather amazed to hear none other than the Fed chair bring the topic of immigration up in his 60 Minutes interview. Luckily, unlike the NYT ecomedist, Powell’s take was far more accurate, if much more sinister. For those who missed it, here is what Powell said when host Scott Pelley asked him why the return of immigration to the US after the Pandemic (when Trump locked down all the borders) was so important:

  PELLEY: Why was immigration important?

  POWELL: Because, you know, immigrants come in, and they tend to work at a rate that is at or above that for non-immigrants. Immigrants who come to the country tend to be in the workforce at a slightly higher level than native Americans do. But that’s largely because of the age difference. They tend to skew younger.

  PELLEY: Why is immigration so important to the economy?

  POWELL: Well, first of all, immigration policy is not the Fed’s job. The immigration policy of the United States is really important and really much under discussion right now, and that’s none of our business. We don’t set immigration policy. We don’t comment on it.

  I will say, over time, though, the U.S. economy has benefited from immigration. And, frankly, just in the last, year a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era.

  PELLEY: The country needed the workers.

  POWELL: It did. And so, that’s what’s been happening.

  Two points here: first, whether he meant to or not, Powell just insulted a few hundred million native-born Americans who reportedly do not work at a “rate that is above that for non-immigrants”, i.e., they are plain old lazy, and then there is the far more ominous insinuation: when Powell says that a “big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era,” what he really means is that the reason why inflation has fallen so fast since peaking in June 2022 (at 9.1% YoY) without a corresponding surge in the unemployment rate, is because immigrants (whether legal or illegal) were replacing the jobs of those native American workers who were leaving the labor force! Or said otherwise, you have Replacement Theory to thank for the drop in inflation (i.e., wages) which would not have been possible without the surge in immigration, which in turn is why native-American workers haven’t seen any job gains in 6 years!

  Which also explains why private worker wages have indeed tumbled in the past two years, even as government wage growth has exploded to an all time high. That’s right, Replacement Theory for thee… just not for the Deep State, which is taking all the benefits of sliding wages (thanks to Paco mowing your lawn again), and pushing wages of government workers (i.e., the Deep State) to an all time high!

  

  But while Powell’s attempt at spinning immigration (almost entirely of the illegal sort since that’s where the bulk of workers came from in the past two years) was at least grounded in truth – and is why the ominous conclusion of why all this is taking place emerged – the third and final propaganda shocker came from none other than the “bipartisan” Congressional Budget Office, which this week published its latest “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034“, and which not surprisingly for an election year, came out decidedly more optimistic than last year’s edition, largely due to a handful of ridiculous assumptions about the future US budget and deficit, which we will discuss in a subsequent post – some of the “highlights” are i) no recession for a decade, ii) unemployment rates peaks just over 4%, iii) inflation peaks at 2%, iv) discretionary spending declines drastically largely due to a big drop in Medicaid spending – yet even with all these ludicrous cherry-picked assumptions, US debt/GDP still rises to catastrophic, hyperinflationary 172% by 2054.

  

  Anyway, since it is an election year, the CBO – whose forecasts have been dead wrong and overly optimistic every single year this century – was tasked with coming up with some optimistic talking points for the Biden admin, like how many trillions in nominal GDP growth the US economy will add if it maintains the current course over the next decade, and it did as ordered. In fact, it did so well, that the WaPo’s favorite economic columnist and spin master, Catherine Rampell, was effusive in her praise of the CBO forecast on X (formerly twitter). To be sure, not even she could mask the fact that the US is on an unsustainable fiscal course, pointing out that “Thanks largely to those higher-than-previously-expected interest rates, CBO raised its estimate of net outlays for interest over the next decade by $1.2 trillion (or 11%)” (spoiler alert: outlays due to the soaring interest will be orders of magnitude greater).

  But what matters for this analysis is the CBO’s punchline, and what one item they goalseeked to get to their mandated economic increase. Can you guess where the bulk of economic growth comes from?

  Why, that’s right: immigration!

  Here is how the CBO’s labor force forecast looks like today vs a year ago. Why the surge? Well, as the CBO explains, higher population growth through 2026 is “mainly from increased immigration”, which “more than offset a decline in labor force participation due to slowing demand for workers and the rising average age of the population” – translation: more immigrant workers, fewer native-American workers. And that’s not all: according to the CBO, “a large proportion of recent and projected immigrants are expected to be 25 to 54 years old – adults in their prime working years.“

  

  And there’s your Replacement Theory again, only this time with a beautiful spin, one which as the WaPo columnist was delivered by none other than CBO Director Phill Swagel, who writes that “as a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenue will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

  From CBO Director Phill Swagel: “As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”https://t.co/751mWoOqNL pic.twitter.com/xsJS0ROpPc

  — Catherine Rampell (@crampell) February 8, 2024

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  And so there you have it. One month ago we wondered how the surge in immigrant workers is “not the biggest political talking point right now.”

  Well, just a few weeks later, it is emerging as just that, and the propaganda response has been staggering, with establishment figures such as Krugman, who accuses anyone that believes immigration is bad as being part of the lumpenproletariat, which ironically is a Marxist term…

  “No, A.I. and automation, for all the changes they may bring, won’t ultimately take away jobs, and neither will immigrants. Don’t join the lumpencommentariat” – source

  … Powell, who accuses native-born workers of being lazy and claims that immigration is helping defeat the inflation that his policies unleashed…

  “… a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era.” – source

  … and finally the CBO…

  “The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force we estimate that from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenue will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.” – source

  … all coming out in full-throated support of immigration (mostly of the illegal, inflation-crushing because wage-hammering variety).

  To be sure, many rational voices – even those of conventional economists – have come out to challenge these ludicrous assumptions and conclusions, but none of them will be heard because as it should be abundantly clear by now, immigration will be the decisive factor of the November election, and if the Biden propaganda machine can kill two birds with one stone, namely that (illegal) immigration is actually great for the US and will end up boosting the economy by trillions, all the better.

  

  And so, with the election still nine months ago, expect the topic of how illegal immigration is the greatest thing imaginable for the US, to dominate the airwaves of the liberal mainstream media which is also the most vocal propaganda channel available to the establishment, whose fate is now contingent on convincing hundreds of millions of Americans that all those tens of thousands of illegals entering the country every day thanks to Biden’s open-border policies are actually the best thing that could happen to them.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 16:00

• These Were The 10 Best-Selling Vehicles In The US In 2023
  These Were The 10 Best-Selling Vehicles In The US In 2023

  In a banner year, U.S. automakers sold 15.5 million cars in 2023, driven by pent-up demand. Overall, sales jumped 12.4%, with many car manufacturers seeing double-digit sales increases.

  Higher dealership inventory and moderating car prices were two reasons for this growth, helping make up for a tough 2022 which was the worst year in a decade due to supply chain disruptions and production snags.

  Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu created this graphic to show the best-selling vehicles in America in 2023, with data from Motor1.

  

  Trucks and SUVs See Highest Sales

  As the table below shows, nine out of America’s top 10 selling cars were trucks or SUVS:

  

  *Tesla does not break out sales by region. Figures are based on estimates by EVadoption.com.

  The Ford F-Series maintained its spot as the best-selling vehicle in America for over four decades straight.

  Of the two million cars that Ford sold last year, nearly 40% were of the F-Series. While the automaker has cut back electric vehicle (EV) plans for 2024, sales of EV models increased 18% over the year. Meanwhile, hybrid sales climbed 25%, with 133,743 hybrid models sold.

  The Chevrolet Silverado fell next in line—the full-size pickup truck has been a long-standing number two seller to the F-Series. In 2023, the most affordable model had a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $38,195 while the least expensive Ford F-150’s MSRP was $34,445. Overall, sales of the Silverado grew by 6.1% annually.

  Coming in fifth was Tesla’s Model Y. In efforts to reach sales targets, Tesla cut prices on the Model Y SUV amid competition from Ford and BYD, a leading Chinese EV company. While the company doesn’t report regional figures, EVadoption.com estimates U.S. sales to be 403,897.

  Surprisingly, the only sedan in the top 10 is the Toyota Camry. The cheaper Corolla ranked 12th, with 232,370 units sold.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 15:45

• US Intelligence Officials Say Israel Not Close To Defeating Hamas
  US Intelligence Officials Say Israel Not Close To Defeating Hamas

  Via Middle East Eye

  Israel has not even come close to defeating Hamas through its military offensive on the Gaza Strip, US intelligence officials have said. According to the New York Times, the officials told members of Congress earlier this week that while Israel had managed to degrade Hamas’s fighting capabilities, they were still very far from crushing the organization itself.

  Officials also said that given the nature of Hamas’ military wing as a fundamentally “guerilla” force, defeating the group might not even be possible and that simply weakening their combat strength might be a more realistic goal.

  

  Their comments come despite repeated insistence from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the defeat of the Palestinian group was the ultimate goal of his country’s ongoing attack on Gaza.

  In a press conference late on Wednesday, Netanyahu vowed to continue Israel’s military offensive until “total victory” was secured, saying his country would achieve this “within months”.

  “We won’t settle for less,” he said, as he rejected a ceasefire plan proposed by Hamas.

  Earlier on Wednesday, several news agencies, including Middle East Eye, said they had seen the Palestinian group’s proposed three-stage ceasefire plan.

  Among the proposals was for all Israeli women, children under 19, the elderly, and the sick to be released from Gaza during the first 45-day phase in exchange for the release of all Palestinian female, children, sick, and elderly prisoners over 50 years old from Israeli jails. 

  The Palestinian death toll in four months has risen reportedly to more than 27,900, with over 67,400 wounded and at least 7,000 missing, who are believed to be dead and buried under rubble. Over 70 percent of the victims are children and women, according to health officials.

  The air war has also continued…

  ⚡️Sky over the north moments ago pic.twitter.com/iyxNnY7SZy

  — War Monitor (@WarMonitors) February 9, 2024

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  While Netanyahu claimed last month that Israel had killed two-thirds of Hamas’ fighting force, American officials say privately that their estimates are considerably lower, saying maybe only a third of Hamas’s estimated 20,000 to 25,000 fighters had been killed.

  “The closed-door intelligence briefing to members of Congress did not include a discussion of how many Hamas fighters may have been killed, nor did it contain refined estimates of civilian casualties,” NYT writes. 

  “American intelligence officials have refrained from offering specific estimates of how many Hamas fighters have been killed, arguing that such estimates are neither accurate nor meaningful,” the report continues.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 15:10

• Gunning For Garland: Biden Melts Down Over Hur Report As White House 'Unlists' Disaster Press Conference
  Gunning For Garland: Biden Melts Down Over Hur Report As White House ‘Unlists’ Disaster Press Conference

  Joe Biden is fuming mad, and has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t do enough to sanitize a special counsel’s report which concluded that Biden is too cognitively diminished to face prosecution for mishandling classified documents.

  

  As Politico reports;

  Biden and his closest advisers believe Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions, according to those two people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely. And they put part of the blame on Garland, who they say should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.

  The import of Hur’s report, of course, is being seized and pounced upon by conservatives, as the obvious conclusion is that if Biden is too senile to face prosecution, he’s too senile to be the president.

  

  According to the report, Garland is finished – and wouldn’t remain in his post for a possible second term.

  “This has been building for a while,” said an anonymous insider. “No one is happy.”

  And while the White House insists the DOJ isn’t ‘weaponized,’ Biden in recent weeks has apparently grumbled to aides and advisers that had Garland simply moved sooner in his investigation into Donald Trump for election interference, a trial might already be underway – or even have concluded.

  

  “I think Garland will be criticized by historians. We’ve had some terrific attorneys general and some not so good attorneys general. And I think he’s going to rank in the not so good,” said Robert Shrum, a longtime consultant in the Democratic Party.

  “Garland is far and away Biden’s worst appointee by an order of magnitude,” Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal American Prospect. “And we all pay the price. If Biden goes down the drain because Garland has mishandled the investigation of Trump and gave Republicans a weapon … then the country pays the price. It’s not just that Biden gets punished for the stupidity of appointing Garland.” -Politico

  That said, one former DOJ official suggested that frustrations at Garland are better directed at the White House – where the president’s team could have asserted executive privilege over elements of Hur’s report. Had Garland done so, he would have had to explain those redactions to Congress.

  “The way in which the White House story kept changing at the outset made it much more difficult for the Justice Department to resist having a special counsel,” said the former official, referring to the classified documents case. “Had there been a very clear story at the beginning, it would have been easier.”

  Mental competency?

  Meanwhile, following the report, medical professionals stepped up calls for Biden to take a mental competency test.

  “The horse is out of the barn. Not only does [Biden] have an infirmity of some degree, but he has delayed producing objective evidence,” said Dr. Stuart Fischer, a primary care physician at a nursing home in the Bronx, in a statement to the NY Post.

  [A]ccording to Fischer, Biden has “signs of symptoms” that could indicate he suffers from “infectious disease or fatigue,” though the physician stressed that he is not Biden’s doctor and his statements did not constitute a diagnosis.

  “I don’t know how this man can have anything more than a mild schedule,” added the doc, “because the more he pushes himself, the more difficult it is for an 81-year-old body to respond.”

  Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), a physician to both former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump and a member of the White House Medical Unit under President George W. Bush, told The Post that if Biden clinches the Democratic presidential nomination, he should “100%” have to submit to a mental competency test before the general election. -NY Post

  Leading Democrats, meanwhile, are encouraging Biden to ‘get out there’ and show he’s ok upstairs, Politico reports, writing that top party operatives are warning that he cannot retreat – and “want to see him engage with the press and voters in the off-script and punchy exchanges he’s been known for in the past, which they believe will help chip away at concerns about the president’s mental acuity.”

  Hiding the evidence

  Following the Thursday release of Hur’s report, Biden stormed out and gave an angry press conference denouncing its findings and insisting that he’s got all his marbles – before mistakenly referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the President of Mexico, while trying to convey a story about Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu.

  In response, the White House unlisted the video from its YouTube feed for anyone who doesn’t have a direct link.

  🚨 BREAKING: The White House has now UNLISTED Joe Biden’s humiliating press conference from Thursday night, effectively hiding it from their page unless you have the direct link. pic.twitter.com/0EnxDXnmAS

  — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 10, 2024

  So, here it is:

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This is fine…

  …Of course, the various experts and pundits who called for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment are notably silent this week, even after his own Justice Department cited his diminished faculties as a reason for not charging him.

  — Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) February 10, 2024

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 14:35

• Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump 'Almost Certainly' Won In 2020
  Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won In 2020

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.

  

  The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.

  The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.

  After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the data, they concluded that mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 presidential election.

  They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won.

  “Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report’s authors wrote.

  Over 43 percent of 2020 votes were cast by mail, the highest percentage in U.S. history.

  ‘Biggest Story of the Year’

  The new study examined raw data from the December survey carried out jointly between Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports, which tried to assess the level of fraudulent voting that took place in 2020.

  The December survey, which President Trump called “the biggest story of the year,” suggested that roughly 20 percent of mail-in voters engaged in at least one potentially fraudulent action in the 2020 election, such as voting in a state where they’re no longer permanent residents.

  

  In the new study, Heartland analysts say that, after reviewing the raw survey data, subjecting it to additional statistical treatment and more thorough analysis, they now believe they can conclude that 28.2 percent of respondents who voted by mail committed at least one type of behavior that is “under most circumstances, illegal” and so potentially amounts to voter fraud.

  “This means that more than one-in-four ballots cast by mail in 2020 were likely cast fraudulently, and thus should not have been counted,” the researchers wrote.

  A Heartland Institute research editor and research fellow who was involved in the study explained to The Epoch Times in a telephone interview that there are narrow exceptions where a surveyed behavior may be legal, like filling out a mail-in ballot on behalf of another voter if that person is blind, illiterate, or disabled, and requests assistance.

  However, the research fellow, Jack McPherrin, said such cases were within the margin of error and not statistically significant.

  What Are the Implications?

  In addition to reassessing the likely overall degree of fraudulent mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, Heartland analysts calculated the potential impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots might have produced in the six key swing states that President Trump officially lost.

  This, then, was used to determine the impact of potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots on the overall 2020 election result.

  First, the researchers analyzed the electoral results for the six swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—under the 28.2 percent fraudulent mail-in ballot scenario that they estimated based on the raw survey data.

  Then they calculated the electoral results in the six states under the different scenarios, each with a lower assumed percentage of fraudulent ballots, ranging from 28.2 percent all the way down to 1 percent.

  For each of the 29 scenarios that they assesses, the researchers calculated the estimated number of fraudulent ballots, which were then subtracted from overall 2020 vote totals to generate a new estimate for vote totals.

  Overall, of the 29 different scenarios presented in the study, the researchers concluded that President Trump would have won the 2020 election in all but three.

  Specifically, they calculated that the only scenarios that would affirm the official 2020 election result, namely that candidate Biden won, were mail-in ballot fraud levels between 1 and 3 percent of ballots cast.

  Mail-in ballot fraud rates higher than 3 percent would, according to the study, mean more fraudulent Biden votes that should be subtracted from the total, putting President Trump ahead.

  For example, the adjustment to the vote tallies under fraud percentage rates between 13 and 6 percent would mean President Trump would have won Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, though he would have still lost in Michigan and Nevada.

  Under such a scenario, President Trump would have won 289 Electoral College votes compared to candidate Biden’s 249.

  In scenarios of 5–4 percent fraud, each candidate would have received 269 Electoral College votes, but President Trump would likely still have won because Republicans controlled more state delegations and, under a tie scenario, Congress would have voted based on the number of delegates.

  However, the researchers expressed confidence in their overall assessment that the level of mail-in ballot fraud was over 25 percent, indicative of an actual Trump win.

  “We have no reason to believe that our survey overstated voter fraud by more than 25 percentage points, and thus, we must conclude that the best available evidence suggests that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the 2020 presidential election, in favor of Joe Biden,” the paper’s authors wrote.

  

  Survey Criticism

  Jim Womack, president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview and in additional written comments in response to the new study, that he believes the survey questions were flawed and make the survey statistically meaningless, though not without value.

  “We know there was fraud in the 2020 election, but you can’t conclude that it was 20 percent or 10 percent or even 5 percent based on the survey because the questions that could lead to such conclusions were unclear,” Mr. Womack said.

  However, he said that the survey questions on which Heartland based its research were unclear. He argued that the questions comingled legal and illegal activity and that this made it impossible to conclude specific percentages of mail-in ballot fraud with certainty.

  For instance, Mr. Womack pointed out that it’s legal and permissible in all states for people who by reason of blindness, disability, or illiteracy request or require assistance in filling out mail-in ballots to get such assistance.

  However, the wording of one of the survey questions—“During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?”—did not differentiate between legal and illegal forms of filling out a mail ballot on behalf of someone.

  Therefore, 21 percent of people responding “yes” to this question does not necessarily mean that this percentage of people actually committed voter fraud, Mr. Womack argued.

  Mr. Womack also said that another survey question–“During the 2020 election, did you cast a mail-in ballot in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident?”—to which 17 percent replied yes—also does not support the conclusion that all such cases were illegal. That’s because, as Mr. Womack pointed out, federal and state laws allow some voters (such as UOCAVA registered citizens) to cast a ballot in a state where they are no longer permanent residents under certain circumstances.

  “We’d need to dive deeper into these responses to determine if these were fraudulent or not,” Mr. Womack said.

  Regardless, he praised the Heartland Institute for engaging with the topic of mail-in ballot fraud and raising public awareness about what he said is an important problem.

  Response to Criticism

  When asked to comment on Mr. Womack’s objections, Mr. McPherrin, of the Heartland Institute, told The Epoch Times that he stands by the findings.

  For instance, Mr. McPherrin acknowledged that it’s legal for people who are blind, disabled, or illiterate to get help from someone in filling out a ballot.

  However, he argued that the number of such individuals responding to the Heartland/Rasmussen survey (which was based on a representative sample of 1,085 likely voters) would likely have been tiny.

  “It would be difficult to imagine that dozens of blind people or those that are illiterate or disabled are answering this poll,” he said, adding that the presumably tiny fraction of survey respondents who fall into this category would be statistically insignificant and not impact the overall survey results.

  But even if that particular question is left out due to concerns about its clarity, the percentage of people who admitted to potentially fraudulent voter activity would still be about one in five, he said.

  Mr. McPherrin said he and his team have received and reviewed Mr. Womack’s criticism and they believe the points he makes have some validity but not enough to affect their findings in a meaningful way.

  He maintains the study clearly shows that if the 2020 election had been as fair and secure as prior elections, President Trump would “almost certainly” have been re-elected to a second term.

  Mr. Womack continues to stand by his criticism of the survey question design, providing The Epoch Times with a written statement on Feb. 8 that calls the survey “very poorly constructed, failing to capture even a single instance of probable voter fraud.”

  He argued that the survey questions were “vague and ambiguous, commingling permissible with impermissible behaviors, thus diminishing the quality and usefulness of responses.”

  Further, Mr. Womack argued that propagating the contents of the survey does more harm than good and potentially undermines the work and reputation of “legitimate election integrity organizations like EIN,” referring to the Election Integrity Network, a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute.

  Meanwhile, the authors of the Heartland study call for state legislatures to do all in their power to ensure the 2024 presidential election is as secure as possible, mostly by severely limiting mail-in voting and adopting other commonsense policies to prevent mail-in voter fraud.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 14:00

• "More Red Flags Than Before 9-11": Ohio Sheriff Warns American People Of Worsening Border Invasion
  “More Red Flags Than Before 9-11”: Ohio Sheriff Warns American People Of Worsening Border Invasion

  The Biden administration’s radical southern border policies have led to the greatest invasion of migrants this nation has ever seen, including a significant number of military-aged men from around the world. This situation has raised alarm bells within the FBI, prompting the head of the federal agency to alert local law enforcement agencies across the US in a meeting last week.  

  On Wednesday, Ohio Sheriff Richard K. Jones held a press conference where he shared details about a meeting in Washington, DC, that he attended alongside sheriffs from across the nation. The meeting featured discussions with Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI.

  

  Jones explained the president has refused to meet with the 3,300 sheriffs and police chiefs across the US amid the border crisis and eruption in violent crime nationwide. 

  “We were also told by Mr. Ray, the FBI director, that there are more red flags going off now than before 9-11,” Jones said. 

  Here’s part of the transcript of the sheriff’s press conference where he explains Wray’s warning for America (transcript courtesy of Wall Street Apes): 

  “China has safe houses in every state in the United States.” 

  “They’re bringing something here to cause us harm. You have to believe that. China has safe houses in every state in the United States. My name is Rick Jones. I’m the Butler County Sheriff, Butler County, Ohio. I just came back from the National Sheriff’s Training in DC three days ago, two days ago. We were briefed by the FBI director Ray, the director of the FBI, and several federal agencies. There’s 3,300 sheriffs in the United States. 

  The President of the United States refuses to meet with the sheriffs of the 3,300. We have a hierarchy. We have a president. We have a vice president. The President of the United States refuses to meet with the sheriffs. 

  He also refuses to meet with the police chiefs of the United States. They have a hierarchy also. He refuses to meet with them to talk about border issues or talk about crime that’s going on because of the border issue. We were also told by Mr. Ray, the FBI director, that there are more red flags going off now than before 9-11. Okay? 

  When I say red flags, meaning people that are here in this country that are wanting to do harm to us. We were also explained we’re bombing two countries right now. Two countries. These people do not like us before this started. There’s thousands of people here from other countries, 160 different countries. They’re here not to be our friends. 

  Some of them are coming because they’re wanting to come here to the best country in the world, the way we see it. Some are coming here to do harm to us. And we were told by the FBI director, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. We were also told five sheriffs went to Israel five weeks after the attack. The only thing that saved the Israelis, their government was the local police. They were outgunned, outmanned. They came over. The Palestinians did. They came over. They killed, raped. The sheriffs were there. They talked to the police. The local police are what saved that country. You can’t just call, even in Israel, you can’t just call the military up, and they’re going to be there, okay? They went house to house, raping, killing. The Israeli police. 

  When our guys got there, the sheriffs said, they just don’t hate us. They hate you guys equally. And the same people that train them are the same people that train people to hate us. 

  The FBI director said when 9-11 hit, there’s more red flags now than then. So, and he said, these are people that want to kill us and do harm to us. Now, so you’re wondering, I want everybody to know what I know. 

  I can’t tell you everything, but I want the public to know that we are in a terrible way right now. The United States, and I’m going to get to the local. 

  The United States, we’re on the defense. You can’t be just defense and not have an offense. We have no offense. We’re just defense. We’re absorbing these attacks. We’re in other countries. We’re supplying them with weapons. We’re supplying them with our treasure, our money. And we’re not doing much back home. So. 

  With that in mind, we were also told that they’re going, this is from the federal government, three days ago. They’re going to attack our elections.” 

  Ohio Sheriff Richard K. Jones Warning The Amercian People

  After Meeting With Director Of The FBI Christopher Wray, Sheriff Says The Illegal Immigrants Entering America Will Do Us Harm “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when”

  “China has safe houses in every state in the… pic.twitter.com/SJ9DJlk8sY

  — Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 9, 2024

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The sheriff also noted, “We’re going to start training civilians – we’ve offered uh classes to train civilians.” 

  This planned border invasion (via open southern border policies and shadowy networks of NGOs) by the radicals in the White House is happening in an election year.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/10/2024 – 13:25

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