Oct 17

Today’s News 17th October 2024

  • Italy's Meloni On Israel Arms Embargo: "We Have Blocked Everything"
    Italy’s Meloni On Israel Arms Embargo: “We Have Blocked Everything”

    The Italian government has imposed the strictest arms embargo on Israel among any European nation, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni having confirmed before the Italian senate that all new arms deals were blocked within weeks of the start of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

    “After the start of [Israeli military] operations in Gaza, the government immediately suspended all new export licenses, and all agreements signed after October 7th were not implemented,” Meloni said on Tuesday.

    Source: ANSA English

    She further described that licenses authorized before the war are being “analyzed on a case-by-case basis by the competent authority at the foreign ministry.”

    “We have blocked everything,” the Italian leader said while acknowledging that her government’s ban is “much more restrictive than that applied by our partners—France, Germany and the United Kingdom.”

    Pro-Israel sources as well as Jewish news agencies in the West have described Italy’s rhetoric as “increasingly hostile” toward Israel of late, particularly after the escalation of war in Lebanon.

    Meloni in her Tuesday address made reference to ongoing controversy surrounding Israeli forces targeting troops of the UN Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL). Italy and Ireland tend to be Europe’s largest contributor of troops to the peacekeeping team which has its command HQ in south Lebanon.

    Two UNIFIL troops have been wounded by Israeli forces (IDF) thus far. “Even if there have been no casualties or extensive damage, I think that Israel’s attack on UNIFIL cannot be considered acceptable,” the Italian premier said. “We believe that the attitude of the Israeli forces is completely unjustified,” she emphasized.

    IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi has countered by saying that the real problem is that Hezbollah terrorists are exploiting positions surrounding UNIFIL outposts. 

    Israel has called on the UN peacekeepers to leave while accusing UNIFIL of allowing Hezbollah to relentlessly bombard northern Israel with missiles from territory under its watch. Meloni meanwhile also unveiled plans to soon visit Lebanon.

    As for whether arms embargos on Israel will grow among European countries, Frances is currently in embroiled in a public spat with Israeli leadership. Top German leaders have also of late blocked the sale of weapons to Israel.

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

    The German government has insisted that there is no official arms embargo in effect. Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently vowed that more weapons will be sent to Tel Aviv soon.

    However, Politico has highlighted: “Arms export decisions are approved by the Federal Security Council made up of senior ministers. Bild reported that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock — Green politicians who are in governing coalition with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats — withheld approval for arms exports in the council pending assurances from Israel that it would not use German weapons in a genocide.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/17/2024 – 02:45

  • EU Energy Ministers Debate Russian Gas Flows As Ukraine Transit Deal Nears End
    EU Energy Ministers Debate Russian Gas Flows As Ukraine Transit Deal Nears End

    Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

    • EU ministers are debating alternatives to Russian gas imports as the Ukraine transit deal expires in December 2024.

    • Concerns are rising regarding rising Russian LNG imports and the effectiveness of EU sanctions on re-exports.

    • Some EU members advocate for stricter LNG reporting and alternatives like Azerbaijan are being discussed, but no concrete solutions are yet agreed upon.

    European Union energy ministers are discussing the flows of natural gas from Russia to the EU as the transit deal via Ukraine is nearing its end.

    The ministers are also talking about the issue of Russia’s LNG shipments to the bloc, which have been rising in recent months.

    The EU’s latest package of sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine included in June a ban on reloading services of Russian LNG in EU territory for the purpose of transshipment operations to third countries, after a transition period of 9 months. This covers both ship-to-ship transfers and ship-to-shore transfers, as well as re-loading operations, and does not affect import but only re-export to third countries via the EU, the bloc said.

    Now several EU member states, including France and Belgium, are calling on the European Commission to propose stricter requirements for reporting LNG import volumes by suppliers and storage companies.

    “We have seen in Belgium a doubling of LNG volumes. These are probably destined for security of supply within Europe but we have difficulty implementing this (14th) package that’s why we are calling for a tracking system,” Belgium’s Energy Minister Tinne van der Straeten said, as carried by Reuters.

    Regarding remaining pipeline gas flows from Russia to the EU via the Ukraine transit route, Ukraine has already said on several occasions that it would not extend the current gas transit deal which expires on December 31, 2024.

    But Slovakia, which continues to receive Russian gas, has said it would like to continue using the route via Ukraine.

    EU energy ministers have been discussing replacing Russia with Azerbaijan as a supplier, but there haven’t been many details about how this could work, technically and politically, Bloomberg notes.

    The EU is nowhere near an agreement on replacing Russian flows, and a possible deal could even be struck at the 11th hour or early next year, anonymous sources familiar with the discussions told Bloomberg.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/17/2024 – 02:00

  • The US Plans To Let BRICS Fail In A Geopolitically Explosive Environment
    The US Plans To Let BRICS Fail In A Geopolitically Explosive Environment

    Authored by Peter Hanseler via VoiceFromRussia.ch,

    Introduction

    In less than two weeks, the 2024 BRICS Summit will take place in Kazan from 22-24 October. Our team will be there to follow and report on what is likely to be the most important geopolitical event of the year.

    We are using the summit as an opportunity to publish several articles on this issue of the century. In this first article, we describe the adverse geopolitical environment in which this organisation is developing.

    I would like to preface this with the following: Reliable geopolitical statements are based on facts. As the geopolitical facts change almost daily, this fact makes it difficult or impossible to produce analyses that will stand the test of time.

    Several key geopolitical parameters are either completely in flux or will not have been decided at the time of the BRICS summit. I consider the following parameters to be crucial for medium-term geopolitical developments: (1) war in the Middle East; (2) war in Ukraine; (3) interest rate developments and the behaviour of the Fed until the end of this year as an indicator of the instability of Western financial markets with the inevitable consequences for the global economy; (4) US presidential elections.

    For China and Russia, which play a leading role in BRICS – Russia currently holds the chair – the following questions arise: Should BRICS accept few, no or many new members? Candidates are lining up, but some are under enormous pressure from the US to avoid joining BRICS. Should a new payment mechanism independent of the US dollar be introduced now, further upsetting the balance in already unstable financial markets? Such decisions, or even the mere communication of them, have the potential to significantly alter the entire geopolitical situation within hours – positively or negatively, depending on the observer’s point of view.

    This article can therefore be no more than a transcription of thoughts on significant geopolitical developments that are currently taking place simultaneously and unpredictably. A full assessment is impossible. Many factors cannot be reliably assessed – such as developments in Africa, Asia and South America.

    The feigned disinterest of the West

    For a long time, the Western media maintained an ironclad silence on the subject of BRICS. A glimmer of interest appeared when Turkey expressed interest in joining BRICS. Now there is radio silence again. Alternative media are outdoing each other with predictions that BRICS will change the world tomorrow. The Russian media are holding back in this fireworks of jubilation. But to interpret the silence of the Western media as a lack of interest in BRICS would be more than naive.

    The Mainstream Media in the West as Hate Mongers and Warmongers

    In retrospect, people are always amazed at how people allowed their leaders to behave so foolishly and against the interests of their own nations on the road to world wars.

    The answer is banal: the mainstream media regularly play a devastating role, both on the road to war and during war. The mainstream media allow themselves to be used and wring their hands when those media that report honestly are destroyed. Without journalists who sell their souls and trample on the interests of their own country, there would be no such catastrophes.

    A few gallows should be kept ready for the ladies and gentlemen responsible. That would be nothing new, by the way. Julius Streicher, publisher of the Nazi hate newspaper “Der Sturmer”, was hanged in Nuremberg.

    Hate propaganda can lead to a broken neck – Julius Streicher, former publisher of the newspaper “Der Stürmer”

    This picture is intended to be a visual lesson in how it can end when you throw all journalistic principles overboard for evil.

    The population in the West is already powerless

    Since the brainwashing is not yet absolute, significant parts of the European population are still far from believing and supporting the madness spread by the media. The closed front of hatred – for example, against Russia – takes place primarily in the media, which are in complete lockstep throughout the West, with a few exceptions.

    Significant parts of the population – in France, Germany and Austria, for example – have expressed their disgust with their leaders at the polls, and in a functioning democracy this should have led to political change. The political elites in France and Germany – and recently also in Austria – have used illegal means to prevent the political participation of those parties that advocate peace, for example in Ukraine, accompanied by the media labeling those who advocate peace as “Nazis” or at least “right-wing extremists. I have never heard of Adolf Hitler advocating peace.

    There are certainly parallels with those dark times. The actions of the Nazi regime after it seized power in 1933 are virtually identical to those of today’s elites in Europe against dissenters in terms of restricting freedom of expression: inciting the masses against those sections of the population who question the policies of the powerful; bringing the media into line; and – especially in Germany – violating the law beyond recognition. For example, denying the winner of the regional elections in Thuringia the right to participate in the government or to have a blocking minority.

    Freedom of expression in the midst of agony

    Representative of the trend that freedom of expression in the West is hanging by a thread, here is a quote from John Kerry, on the occasion of a WEF meeting that took place between September 23 and 27.

    “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence.

    What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.

    In other words, Kerry qualifies freedom of expression as a problem and announces that this “problem” would be solved by the state if Kamala Harris wins. We leave this thought in the air and refer to our article: “US elections decide on war or peace”.

    If it weren’t for the internet and blogs, the powerful would have already achieved their goal, because fortunately it seems practically impossible to silence all voices of reason.

    BRICS: From an economic project to a geopolitical force

    When representatives from Brazil, Russia, China and India first met formally on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in 2006, the world looked very different. Even in 2009, when the first formal BRIC summit was held in Yekaterinburg in June 2009, without South Africa – hence “BRIC” instead of “BRICS” – the world was different. The original goals of the BRIC countries were to achieve better economic cooperation between countries that had not yet been openly declared enemies or even sanctioned by the West. There seemed to be no rush (yet).

    From 2014, pressure on Russia increased as a result of Maidan and Crimea. Russia was portrayed as the villain and sanctions were imposed. President Putin continued to seek diplomatic solutions for another eight years, welcomed Minsk I and II, but was again deceived. The artillery shelling of civilians in Donetsk by the “peaceful” Ukrainians did not stop, and NATO was building up the Ukrainian army for an attack on Russia.

    Russia began to prepare for the foreseeable, especially economically, because militarily it had been doing so with great energy and creativity since the attack on Georgia in 2008. When the situation escalated in February 2022, Russia had apparently done its economic homework and could count on the loyalty of its partners in BRICS and SCO. The US miscalculation can be explained by the fact that Americans are unfamiliar with the concept of loyalty, while the EU miscalculation can be explained by the fact that most of its members are ruled by leaders whose stupidity borders on idiocy.

    Russia has weathered the economic war unleashed by the West, despite a storm of sanctions unprecedented in world history. The losers are to be found in the West, with Germany being hit the hardest – also due to a senseless economic policy.

    The U.S. did not limit its economic war to Russia, but also began to sanction China in 2014, as always with flimsy arguments. The EU – as a vassal of the US – has willingly gone along with this, and is currently doing so out of its own self-interest, since the industrial pearl that is Germany has already lost out due to misguided economic policies, bad decisions by its automotive industry and suicidal sanctions against Russia. Auto industry experts are speechless and wringing their hands: Since Covid, Mercedes has not managed to get its factories above 50% capacity – a complete collapse is becoming apparent across the board.

    Next came the freezing of the reserves of the Russian Central Bank and the expropriation not only of Russians, but of anyone with a “Russian connection”, a term that is not legal in nature and has opened the door for governments and banks in the West to stage a raid.

    China, which is only a few steps behind Russia in terms of sanctions, has become a target for the West because of its industrial superiority. It is the great new enemy of the US and Europe.

    It would be naive to neglect the South China Sea and Taiwan, which are hot spots along with Ukraine and the Middle East, because what is at stake is nothing less than military domination of the Pacific, which the Americans have held since 1945, and control of one of the world’s most important transportation routes. Once the Americans are somewhere, you can’t get rid of them – even 80 years after a conflict. In Germany, for example, the US still operates 40 military bases. This alone makes it clear that Germany is not even nominally sovereign, but a mere vassal of the US. What “interests” the US “protects” for others around the globe remains in the dark.

    Although most people consider military conflicts to be more important than economic wars because they are more bloody and evoke more emotion, history teaches us that the economically stronger ultimately prevails. As a consequence of this thought, it can be argued that the economic war as the decisive part of the 3rd World War is already in full swing.

    In addition to many small military conflicts – such as in Africa – two increasingly escalating wars are currently raging: the conflict in Ukraine has been going on for two and a half years, and the latest conflict in the Middle East has been raging for a year.

    Military escalation in Ukraine

    Since last September, it has been clear who will prevail militarily in Ukraine. The advance of Russian troops across the entire front is accelerating steadily. We regularly recommend a YouTube channel that provides an unemotional daily report in English (“Military Summary”) and Russian (“Военныe сводки”) of events at the front and has not made any mistakes: only facts.

    Ukraine’s Kursk adventure will end as it was bound to end; the last elite Ukrainian troops that (President) Selenski assembled for this suicide mission and equipped with modern equipment will leave Kursk as prisoners or in body bags. My sources speak of more than 21,000 casualties on the Ukrainian side.

    Since the military outcome of the matter was decided – that is, since September 2023 – (President) Selenski, on behalf of his masters in Washington, has been wasting his men – young and old – at an ever-increasing rate. The death rate on the Ukrainian side has doubled from last year to June 2024: 60,000 to 80,000 men lost – per month. The number of Ukrainian prisoners of war is also increasing daily due to military encirclement. The fresh soldiers who have been thrown to the front since the beginning of the year do so after a 10-day quick fix, following a veritable hunt by recruiting troops throughout the territory of western Ukraine. These men do not want to go to the front and flee at the first opportunity. They know the war is lost, and they are not willing to give their lives for a country whose leadership they do not respect and whose fight is hopeless. Even CNN and the New York Times are reporting this.

    The latest attempt by the U.S. and Britain to escalate the situation by using NATO’s long-range weapons against Russia failed because of President Putin’s clear response that in this case NATO countries, the U.S. and Europe would be directly involved in the war in Ukraine and that Russia would therefore make appropriate decisions based on the threat, given the changed nature of this conflict. This statement caused President Biden to backtrack within hours. Russia then further tightened its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons, making it clear that the concept of proxy wars would no longer be tolerated in the future.

    It is not possible to say how long these two statements by President Putin will prevent the escalation. On October 3, another attack was carried out against the Kursk nuclear power plant – it is not known whether long-range weapons were used. It was rumored that at the next Ramstein meeting, Germany would authorize the use of long-range weapons despite the warning from the Kremlin. However, President Biden has now announced that he would not be attending this meeting due to the hurricane situation in the US. Shortly afterwards, Anthony Blinken also canceled. Meanwhile, the meeting has been canceled for the time being. Believing in victory looks different.

    On October 8, Foreign Minister Lavrov reaffirmed the new doctrine and its automatic application in the event of the use of long-range weapons.

    “As soon as this decision is taken [by the West to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles], if it is taken, we will learn that, and the contingency mentioned by Vladimir Putin will already be in action,”

    Sergei Lawrow – 8 Oktober 2024

    Selenski’s ‘victory plan’ was rejected in Washington anyway and testifies to the president’s complete loss of touch with reality. Even Czech President Petr Pavel has pointed this out. Although he is a vocal supporter of Ukraine and a former NATO general, he nevertheless expressed the view that parts of Ukraine would probably end up belonging to Russia. He softened this statement by describing this Russian occupation as ‘temporary’. Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, has also come out strongly against Ukraine joining NATO. Fico has long been a thorn in the side of the hawks, and they will regret that the attempt on his life did not bear fruit. I would not be surprised if a second attempt is made, as has already happened with Donald Trump.

    The interim conclusion is that Russia has already won militarily against Ukraine, but the dying goes on without changing the outcome. The only thing left for NATO to do is to use long-range weapons against Russia in order to extend the war to the whole of NATO.

    Escalation in the Middle East

    The situation in the Middle East is even worse. After the events of 7 October 2023 were portrayed as a massacre of Palestinians, Prime Minister Netanyahu used this event, referred to as the “9/11 moment”, as an opportunity to massacre the population of Gaza. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled unequivocally that this was genocide. To no avail, because since its creation in 1948, Israel has only respected the law that benefits it.

    In the months following October 7, it emerged that the vast majority of the deaths that day were at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces and that the alleged mass rapes and beheadings of children were pure invention. These clear denials of Israeli propaganda were, incidentally, not made by obscure blogs, but by the Israeli daily newspaper “Haaretz”.

    The entire Western public has been subjected to an unprecedented brainwashing, which in Germany, for example, has gone so far as to issue a memo to the staff of public television stations dictating the wording and adjectives they should use in their reporting. See our article “ARD–Glossary justifies genocide – Dr. Goebbels would be proud“.

    Apart from a few courageous students, who were labeled anti-Semites for protesting against this genocide, no one in the West seems to be bothered by the fact that genocide is becoming fashionable again as a war tactic. After the Israeli military expanded the slaughter to the West Bank, Israel turned its attention to Lebanon. The leader of Hezbollah was eliminated by dropping 86 massive bombs on a residential neighborhood consisting of six buildings. Hundreds of civilians died. Israel uses such barbaric methods to eliminate a few officers of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The attacks in Pager are also acts of terrorism and war crimes. Western media celebrate them as ingenious moves by Mossad.

    Genocide and terror are “legal” for the US and the entire West. The Holocaust was also legal, as was the slaughter of over 15 million Russian civilians. The Nazi regime provided these “actions” with a “legal basis”. We have thus returned to a time when the terms “legal basis”, “law” and “law” have degenerated into empty phrases to assuage the consciences of those who actually commit these atrocities.

    Since 1979, Iran has been described by the West as the epitome of evil and a terrorist state, even though it has not attacked another country in 150 years. That may be about to change. When the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was liquidated by the Israelis in Tehran on July 31, 2024, Iran held back. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was apparently persuaded by the U.S. not to respond militarily as a cease-fire was being worked out in Gaza. Iran showed its goodwill.

    This was followed shortly afterwards by the pager attack, the assassination of Hassan Nasrrallah and the invasion of Lebanon. The Americans have once again pulled the wool over Iran’s eyes and set a trap. The response from Tehran last week was a missile attack with almost 200 missiles. The US and Israel are calling it a failure, but Israel has banned the dissemination of information about the damage. Film footage shows that over 80% of the missiles hit their target and the damage to military infrastructure is considerable. Iran only attacked military targets, not civilian ones. This distinguishes Iran from the real terrorist state, which has probably systematically killed over 100,000 civilians since last October.

    Israel and the US should think carefully about whether this is a good idea before launching further attacks on Iran: Russia has equipped Iran with S-400 air defense systems and fighter jets – probably including pilots; at the same time, Moscow is clearly distancing itself from Israel and calling on Russian citizens to leave the country.

    The risk of a conflict in which the US and Russia face each other directly in the Middle East has therefore increased noticeably. Neither China nor Russia have the slightest interest in Iran being forced into a war. As a member of the SCO and BRICS, Iran has become an ally of these two major powers and they would therefore have to respond militarily, which would make a direct confrontation between the US and Russia/China de facto inevitable.

    I rule out a military victory for Israel and the US over Iran for the following reasons: Firstly, due to its military successes in the 1960s and 1970s, Israel lives from a myth as a military superpower in the Middle East, which is based on conflicts that lasted a few days or weeks against opponents who were inferior to the Israelis in every respect.

    In 2006, however, Israel clearly lost against Hezbollah and the ineffectual Israelis had to call off their offensive against Lebanon after a month. The Israelis were also unable to achieve their loudly proclaimed goals against a significantly less powerful Hamas despite their genocidal approach.

    Iran is a huge country with an area of 1.6 million square kilometers and a population of 90 million, with an army of just under one million men including reservists. Moreover, Iran is over 1,700 km away from Israel, which rules out a land war. Even the Americans, who cannot even prevail against the Houthis, will have no chance here. Attacking Iran is therefore complete nonsense and madness.

    If you listen to experts, even air strikes seem practically impossible and extremely risky for aircraft due to the Russian S-400 defense systems. Iran has hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art missiles at its disposal and could cover Israel with hundreds of missiles every day for months. The Israelis’ miraculous Iron Dome may be suitable against old Quds missiles, but they are practically ineffective against modern Iranian missiles, as the last attack showed.

    Unless the Americans have completely lost their minds, they will not comply with the wishes of the Israeli Mini-Hitler. That would probably also be worse for the Biden-Harris government. If the conflict escalates, Iran will multiply the price of oil through attacks on oil infrastructure and a possible blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which would mean the end of the Harris campaign.

    The third major conflict for supremacy in the South China Sea and over Taiwan is not yet being waged kinetically, but it could just as well start tomorrow or in a year’s time.

    The forces that control the USA are the cause of this evil

    Overview

    It sounds simplistic, but there is actually one party ultimately responsible for all the incidents described: The US. It is – rightly – afraid of losing its role as hegemon after 80 years.

    The US’s problem is multifaceted. Firstly, the world’s most indebted country is economically in the doldrums: The published economic figures, which paint a slightly better picture, are sugarcoated. Secondly, society in the US is more divided than ever before: the election campaign between Harris and Trump is hate-filled and this is not about the choice between two people, but about the choice between the deep state and the anti-establishment, which we already described in detail a month ago (US elections decide war or peace) and therefore do not cover this aspect in this article. Thirdly, the strategy of destroying or dismembering Russia implemented after the fall of the Soviet Union has become a distant prospect by conventional means; the war against Russia in Ukraine has failed. Fourthly, over the last 45 years, the US has lost its formerly dominance in the Middle East. The last bastion is Israel, which is being led to its doom by a sociopath under the expert leadership of the US. Fifthly, in my opinion, the biggest problem for the US is the rise of BRICS, as the American empire cannot exist without the supremacy of the US dollar. With the rise of BRICS, this dominance will disappear. For this reason, the US is fighting BRICS with all means at its disposal, be it by exerting pressure on new or potential members (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or through military intervention (e.g. Russia and Iran).

    US economy: The world’s richest country driven to the wall

    The US took over as hegemon after the Second World War with 22,000 tons of gold, an economy that produced 70% of the world’s industrial goods and a monetary system (Bretton Woods) that was imposed on over forty members and made the US dollar the world currency. In addition, the US was practically spared from the Second World War – as it had been from the First World War. The country and the civilian population suffered no damage whatsoever and compared to the losses suffered by many other warring parties – first and foremost the Soviet Union – the American losses in both world wars can be described as homeopathic.

    Despite this “starting capital”, the US as hegemon did not succeed in maintaining this strength over time. The list of coups, military conflicts and major wars launched by the US in the last 80 years is almost endless and has led to millions of civilian deaths, destroyed countries and complete military defeats for the US.

    The image that the US paints of itself as a “friendly hegemon” is a complete farce. The US was not only brutal and ruthless towards enemies, but also towards friends. If a friend stepped out of line, it was destroyed militarily (Iraq, Libya), subjected to decades of sanctions (Cuba, Iran) or blackmailed by other means (Switzerland).

    The biggest problem for the United States is the fact that it has always lived beyond its means and spent more money than it earned. This led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system after just 26 years, when President Nixon was forced to close the gold window, which led to them ripping off their partners in the Bretton Woods system. Then the genius Henry Kissinger invented the Petrodollar, which turned the US dollar into the “King Dollar” and gave the US an instrument for unlimited debt, which the Americans also used as a weapon. Anyone who tried to break away and sell raw materials in currencies other than the US dollar was destroyed (Iraq, Libya).

    The turning point came at the latest with the freezing of Russian central bank funds, an infringement of assets that was primarily started by the vassals in the EU in 2022, with even “neutral” Switzerland participating in this – until then – unthinkable breach of the law.

    In my opinion, this action will go down in the history books as one of the greatest blunders, as it not only heralds the end of the Petrodollar, but also greatly accelerates the coming together of the Global South, which is characterized by the fact that the Chinese and Russians no longer conduct 60%, but only 15% of their transactions in US dollars and the BRICS countries – whenever possible – conduct their trade activities outside the US dollar. This trend is accelerating with each passing year and will sooner or later lead to the collapse of the US budget, as it is dependent on the world holding US dollars, or else the US will collapse.

    The stock markets in the West are still close to their highs, but are a miserable measure of the economic health of the Collective West. Most of the countries in this group are effectively bankrupt and are keeping themselves alive by printing money and cutting interest rates. Interest rate cuts that are based on the lie that inflation has been defeated. Every European or American who has to watch their budget has tears in their eyes – from laughter or weeping – when they look at the official inflation figures.

    The official figures have nothing in common with reality. It is the West’s last gasp before collapse. Here, too, history is repeating itself. In the 1970s, Americans were also led to believe that inflation was under control and the Fed Chairman at the time, Arthur F. Burns, lowered interest rates. An inflationary storm then broke out, which Burns’ successor, Paul Volcker, finally got under control again by raising the key interest rate to 19.1% (June 1981).

    On October 4, ZeroHedge reported that global food prices have risen the most in 18 months. The parallels with the 1970s in terms of inflation are striking and worrying.

    This drastic cure would no longer be feasible today. At today’s interest rates, the US is paying over one trillion US dollars in interest per year on its gigantic mountain of debt. That is more than the US spends on its gigantic military apparatus. Very few people can even imagine what a trillion actually means:

    Here are some examples of what a trillion actually means:

    • One million seconds equals 11.5 days – one trillion seconds equals: 32,000 years.

    • If someone were to give away a million every day since the day Christ was born, they would still have enough money today to continue this process for another 715 years – until the year 2,739.

    • One trillion grains of rice weigh approximately 30,000 tons.

    It is only a matter of time before this house of cards collapses. Whether the catastrophe starts in Europe, the US or Japan is of secondary importance, as this will lead to a domino effect.

    Bloodbaths accompany the loss of US supremacy in the Middle East

    In our three-part series “Bloodbaths are changing the world”, we have meticulously detailed the rise of the military-industrial complex in the US (Part 1) as the basis for the US’s aggressive foreign policy.

    Until the overthrow of the Shah of Persia in 1979, the US dominated the Middle East and thus also controlled a large part of the world’s oil reserves.

    In the following maps, the influence of the US is colored red. The coloring in the following maps should not be considered absolute.

    Influence of the US (red) in the Middle East until the fall of the Shah of Persia – Source: VoicefromRussia.com

    In 2001, the situation looked much worse for the US – its influence was much smaller.

    Situation on September 11, 2001 – Source: VoicefromRussia.com

    In part 2 of our bloodbath series, we explained how the US used 9/11 as an excuse to plan a huge campaign to conquer Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iran. A plan that was in no way inferior to Hitler’s megalomania.

    Influence US in September 2001: (red) – the plan: (yellow) – Source: VoicefromRussia.com

    It turned out differently: all war campaigns led to disaster for the US. Nevertheless, the Americans destroyed the following countries either completely or significantly: Afghanistan (US withdrawal), Iraq (US withdrawal with a small contingent remaining against the will of the government), Libya (no [official] ground troops, country destroyed), Syria (lost, but to this day still some ground troops in the oil-rich part), Sudan (no control), Somalia (no control).

    The situation today is as follows: A disaster for the US.

    In addition, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt joined BRICS last summer (Saudi Arabia joined but has not yet signed up). The following countries in the Middle East have also submitted formal applications for membership: Kuwait, Bahrain and Turkey – more on these in our follow-up articles to this report.

    The geopolitical reach of the US in the Middle East is therefore extremely limited. Furthermore, anyone who believes that Israel does not do exactly what the US orders is naive.

    Israel would not be able to survive a month without US financial and military support. The US has once again found a sociopath (Prime Minister Netanyahu) to do the dirty work for the US, including genocide.

    The power of the Zionists

    Much more important, however, is the question of who is able to influence the US to such an extent and how this is done. The short answer: the Zionists.

    What is Zionism? – “Zionism (from Zion) refers to a political ideology and associated movement aimed at the establishment, justification and preservation of a Jewish nation state in Palestine.”

    The Zionists are in charge of the Israeli government today, although they only represent around 10% of the electorate. One of their most extreme representatives is the current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

    In our series on Israel, we mentioned the ultimate goal of the Zionists several times and proved this, among other things, with the help of an entry in Ben Gurion’s diary, namely the creation of a Greater Israel that included Israel, Jordan, Iraq, parts of Syria and areas of Saudi Arabia. This also proves that the term “river” in the Israeli saying “From the river to the sea” does not mean the Jordan, but the Euphrates. This ultimate goal is always dismissed in the West as a conspiracy theory, as well as an old hat, since Ben Gurion’s diary entry dates back to 1948. However, the following statement by Smotrich from October of this year confirms the unbelievable:

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    It is no secret that the American government is riddled with Zionists – such as Blinken and Sullivan. Even Joe Biden describes himself as a Zionist.

    The Zionist movement is organized worldwide. By far its most powerful lobbyist is the extremely wealthy AIPAC – The American Israel Public Affairs Committee; in essence a Zionist lobbying organization in the US.

    In the US, all lobbying organizations must be registered as such, which is required by law under FARA – the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This has been in place since 1938 to prevent foreign influence on American politics. AIPAC is expressly excluded from this.

    AIPAC has unlimited access to members of the US Congress and Senate at all times. There has never been a US president who has dared to go against the express will of AIPAC. And AIPAC is the organization that Netanyahu can fully rely on at all times in his religious war mania and to ensure the supply of weapons and money not only from the US.

    This short paragraph should suffice to show that (1) Israel’s goal is not peace, but gigantic expansion at the expense of practically all its Arab neighbors; (2) the question of whether Israel dominates the US or the US dominates Israel is irrelevant: the Zionists are in decisive positions in many countries – including the US and Israel.

    As long as the Zionists occupy these positions of power worldwide, there will be no peace in the Middle East.

    Priority number 1 for the US: Prevent BRICS!

    Whether the US can maintain its hegemony ultimately depends not on military successes, but on economic might, because the US has not won a war since 1945, but has still been able to maintain its world dominance.

    Every hegemon that has ever lost its status has lost it because it went broke. Nevertheless, the US’s approach makes perfect sense from its perspective. The weakness of the US can no longer be hidden. They are now trying to weaken their opponents – at least to create a balance on a relative level – by causing wars that are waged by third parties who weaken each other in the process.

    This is intended to prevent the “rest of the world” from realigning itself collectively. BRICS stands for precisely this realignment: a realignment through the creation of a multipolar world. If BRICS is successful, the US will disappear as a hegemon and will then be one of many players at the table, with defunct empires regularly acting as if they were playing a major role for centuries to come. Just like President Macron or Boris Johnson, for example, who from a rational point of view are just ridiculous loudmouths with countries that belong on the geopolitical dustbin.

    The West’s cast-iron silence on BRICS should therefore by no means be interpreted as a lack of interest. The really important geopolitical developments are known to take place in the background. I personally believe that this organization poses the greatest threat to the US. Russia and China are the two countries that are leading the development of this organization. It therefore makes perfect sense from an American point of view to fight these two countries most aggressively.

    The Russians and Chinese are aware of this and are reacting with the discretion and restraint typical of both countries. There have been 200 events on BRICS in Russia this year and not a lot has been heard.

    It is a huge challenge for BRICS to develop in a well-structured way in this geopolitical turmoil. Some members are already at war with the Collective West (Russia, Iran), Saudi Arabia may not make up its mind as it is obviously under enormous pressure due to its huge investments in the UK and US. The formal signature for accession is still pending.

    The war against Russia in Ukraine has completely failed and has considerably weakened Europe – especially Germany – and exposed NATO as a chatter club. The time will come when even the last naive person in Europe will realize that Europe is once again being used as a blunt and willing instrument of its masters in Washington against Russia. This is a betrayal of national interests. Bought morons in the service of Washington. But how Germany has managed to elect a government whose intellectual abilities are difficult to describe is down to the society that made a choice back in 1933, the consequences of which we all know. The Germans seem to have a special ability to regularly shoot themselves in their own feet – the left and the right.

    To date, US efforts to bring down BRICS by weakening Russia and China have failed.

    Nevertheless, the geopolitical turmoil that the US has caused in recent years is certainly influencing the development of BRICS – both negatively and positively.

    Negatively, as potential members are being bullied, such as Saudi Arabia. Attempts are also being made to influence full BRICS members by luring and threatening them (India, Brazil). Other countries that would like to join BRICS are put under pressure, even if the general public is not aware of this, as this happens in the background or the pressure is exerted for other, pretextual reasons (e.g. Venezuela).

    The positive effect of the US’s behavior is that many countries are becoming acutely aware of what could befall them if they are treated in the same way as Russia and China, although many countries in the Global South are mere microcosms compared to these two giants and therefore lack the resilience of Russia and China. Since BRICS sells multipolarity credibly and actually behaves in a spirit of partnership and not hegemonism, the prospect of living under the umbrella of this community is extremely attractive. This is evident from the long list of countries that would like to formally join or have expressed a strong interest.

    Looking into the crystal ball

    Now one has to ask what the best strategy for BRICS will be: Just grow fast? I do not hold this opinion. Based on conversations with my contacts, BRICS decision-makers seem to think along similar lines. It is possible that no new full members will be admitted at all this year and a status called “ Partner” will be introduced, because the big growth step of last August (increase from 5 to 9 members) must be consolidated and in the current geopolitical environment it is an advantage to be smaller and more flexible.

    What can be considered certain: BRICS has evolved from an economic association to a geopolitical entity. In times of conflict, such an economic community must secure itself geopolitically. It is very possible that the SCO, a security policy organization, will move closer to BRICS or even merge with it.

    From an economic perspective, the biggest challenge for BRICS is to create an efficient payment or settlement system independent of the US dollar. At present, most trade activities within BRICS are settled in local currencies, but no solution has yet been found for settling trade deficits among the members. A lot is being written and rumored, but the Russians and Chinese are keeping their cards close to their chests on this matter. We will hopefully be able to comment on this before the summit begins.

    In the next part, we will provide the latest figures on BRICS. The fact that BRICS is the big economic magnet of the Global South can be anticipated. Over 50 countries want to join and this would create an organization that would outshine everything that has ever existed, because BRICS is already stronger than the G7 in terms of all important parameters.

    Conclusion

    What the death throes of a hegemon look like is currently being demonstrated to the global public in all its gruesome detail. An unbelievable number of people are dying, genocide is once again considered acceptable in the West, the media are becoming drivers of hatred, concealing objectively important developments and lying through their teeth. “Friends” (better: vassals) are sent into the fire for ‘the good cause’. Their own population is lied to and economically ruined. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the hard-hit empire to credibly convey the noble slogans of “freedom”, “democracy” and “prosperity” to its people.

    Being able to develop in an orderly and free manner in such an adverse environment is a huge challenge for an organization like BRICS. This organization, which was launched as a purely economic association, was originally designed to assert itself in free competition. Today, hatred, sanctions and wars are being used as a means to put an end to this organization. A loose economic alliance is becoming a geopolitical alliance and, in the event of further escalation, has every chance of becoming a military alliance.

    I am not an augur, but I would not be surprised if BRICS adopts a strategy of resilience rather than growth and flexibility rather than size. We will know more on October 24.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 23:25

  • NFL Beer Cost Inflation Over The Past Decade
    NFL Beer Cost Inflation Over The Past Decade

    This graphic, via Voronoiapp.com, shows where beer prices have increased the most across NFL teams between 2013 and 2023, based on data from Team Marketing Report via FinanceBuzz.

    The Carolina Panthers saw the sharpest increase in beer cost, likely due to having the cheapest 16-ounce beer in the league in 2013, at $4.36.

    Four teams saw beer prices more than double, including the Philadelphia Eagles, where a beer cost a hefty $15.35 in 2023.

    On average, the price of beer rose 25% across the NFL, lower than the pace of inflation, which was 31% over the period.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 23:00

  • Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches
    Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches

    Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

    – Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

    Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

    While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

    Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

    Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

    And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

    We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

    As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

    Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

    So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

    Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

    This is how evil wins.

    This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

    This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

    The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.

    We are at our most vulnerable right now.

    The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

    We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

    No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.

    Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.

    The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

    In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

    Consider for yourselves:

    • Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.

    • SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.

    • The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.

    • Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.

    • For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.

    • Censorship hasn’t stopped.

    • The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.

    • Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.

    • The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.

    • The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.

    • Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.

    • The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”

    • The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.

    • The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.

    • And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

    So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.

    The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

    They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

    “Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”

    The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.

    In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.

    Life is good in America, too.

    Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

    Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%. 

    Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

    So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

    Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 22:35

  • Syrian, Russian Warplanes Pound AQ In Idlib After Israeli Attacks On Damascus
    Syrian, Russian Warplanes Pound AQ In Idlib After Israeli Attacks On Damascus

    Via The Cradle

    Syrian and Russian fighter jets carried out several air raids on Wednesday targeting positions belonging to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group, formerly Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front. 

    The strikes hit HTS positions in the countryside of the northern Idlib governorate, as well as in the countryside of the northwestern city of Latakia, for the second day in a row, according to Al Mayadeen’s correspondent. “The raids targeted military training sites and warehouses, in addition to an underground tunnel in the vicinity of the town of Benin in Jabal al-Zawiya,” Al Mayadeen reported. 

    Illustrative Russian defense ministry image

    Russian and Syrian jets have stepped up their bombardment of HTS positions in the Idlib and Latakia countryside over the past few days. 

    Syrian-Russian airstrikes targeted the extremist group’s encampments in the Al-Basel Forest west of Idlib city on Monday, as well as the hills surrounding the towns of Sheikh Bahr and Kafr Jales. 

    Sources told Al Mayadeen that the strikes two days ago hit an underground machinery warehouse in Idlib city. 

    According to the opposition-linked war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Syrian army forces brought in additional military reinforcements to Idlib from the suburbs of Aleppo and its western countryside. 

    Syria intensified its bombing campaign against Idlib in October last year, following a drone attack carried out by extremists under HTS command, which targeted a Syrian military college, killing dozens. According to several reports, anti-government extremist militants in northern Syria have expanded their drone arsenal and expertise in drone warfare through recent cooperation with Ukraine. 

    Idlib is the last governorate of Syria under full control of extremist armed opposition groups. Damascus’ forces made their first advancement towards Idlib in 2019 when they captured the town of Habeet in the Idlib countryside.

    The latest strikes on Idlib come as Syria has withstood repeated Israeli attacks. Damascus has, over the years, accused HTS and other extremist groups in the country of close cooperation with Tel Aviv. 

    Northeastern Syria has also witnessed significant escalation in recent months, particularly after heavy fighting broke out in August between pro-government Arab tribes and Washington-backed Kurdish militants of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) near US-occupied parts of the country. 

    Map: Voice of America 

    The fighting has come to an end, yet tensions remain high. Tribal figures and academics in Syria’s northeast have attempted to bridge the divides between Damascus and several Kurdish organizations with a new national dialogue initiative. Syrian officials held talks with SDF officials and US-backed Kurdish authorities last year, but the negotiations never progressed. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 21:45

  • Venezuelan Prison Gang Seizes Multiple Apartment Buildings In Texas
    Venezuelan Prison Gang Seizes Multiple Apartment Buildings In Texas

    A new shocking report has found that Venezuelan transnational gang Tren de Aragua has taken over at least four apartment building complexes in San Antonio, Texas, as thousands of its illegal alien gangsters run amok nationwide, sparking crime and chaos from Colorado to Texas to New York City. Many of the members of the armed migrant prison gang invaded the nation through Biden-Harris’ open southern borders.  

    DailyMail revealed: 

    A dangerous Venezuelan gang has taken over at least four apartment complexes in San Antonio, Texas, as it expands its reach in yet another America city, DailyMail.com can reveal.

    The report confirmed that Palatia Apartments was one apartment complex where TdA members were operating out. This complex was the scene of a recent raid… 

    Just last week a small army of police officers raided an apartment complex in San Antonio and arrested 19 individuals – including four gang members.

    Law enforcement sources confirmed TdA had been operating at the Palatia Apartments for five to six months – squatting in empty units they either rented out to other migrants, used as a base to deal cocaine or, most horrifically, as prostitution dens to pimp out women and children.

    But now DailyMail.com can reveal that this apartment invasion is just the tip of the iceberg in the major southern Texas city, with at least three other rental properties also occupied by the criminal organization. 

    While Palatia Apartments was one complex full of TdA members, the other three buildings were not named in the report because of ongoing police investigations. 

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    TdA’s activity in San Antonio comes after armed gangsters from the same prison group terrorized the Denver suburb of Aurora last month. This area is a sanctuary city run by far-left Democrats.

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    The US Army warned in leaked documents that as many as 5,000 TdA members have invaded the nation, many of which are armed.

    DailyMail noted that TdA’s command and control center shifted north to just below the US border in the Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez. The armed group is rapidly expanding turf nationwide. This may ignite gang warfare with native US gangs.

    In recent weeks, police sources told the NYPost that TdA was recruiting their members and victims straight out of NYC-run migrant shelters. 

    In the Big Apple, Tren de Aragua is trying to recruit foot soldiers to force women into sex trafficking — in the hopes that it will become a main source of income for the gang, according to the leaked memo. -NYPost

    This is shocking…

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    Only made possible by. 

    ‘We did it, Joe!’ … 

    Democrats are importing the third world into the first world – this only means the situation will worsen.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 21:20

  • Anthony Fauci: The Man Who Thought He Was Science
    Anthony Fauci: The Man Who Thought He Was Science

    Authored by Jayanta Bhattacharya via The Brownstone Institute,

    As a young medical student, I admired Tony Fauci. I bought and read Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, a vital textbook that Fauci co-edited. In reading his new memoir, On Call, I remembered why I admired him. His concern about his patients’ plights, especially HIV patients, comes through clearly.

    Unfortunately, Fauci’s memoir omits vital details about his failures as an administrator, an adviser to politicians, and a key figure in America’s public health response to infectious disease threats over the past 40 years. His life story is a Greek tragedy. Fauci’s evident intelligence and diligence are why the country and the world expected so much of him, but his hubris caused his failure as a public servant.

    It is impossible to read Fauci’s memoir and not believe he was genuinely moved by the plight of AIDS patients. Since the first time he learned of the illness from a puzzling and alarming case report, his laudable ambition has been to conquer the disease with drugs and vaccines, cure every patient, and wipe the syndrome from the face of the earth. He is both sincere and correct when he writes that “history will judge us harshly if we don’t end HIV.”

    When an aide in 1985 offered to quit when he contracted AIDS for fear of scandal at Fauci’s beloved National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci hugged him, declaring “Jim, you crazy son of a bitch, there is no way in the world I would ever let you go.” This was Fauci at his best.

    But Fauci paints an incomplete picture of his attitude toward AIDS patients in its early days. In 1983, in response to a case report of an infant with AIDS published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci told the press that AIDS might be spread by routine household contact. There was no good evidence then and is none now to suggest that HIV is transmitted that way. But Fauci’s statement, prominently echoed in the media, panicked the American people, almost certainly leading many to physically shun AIDS patients out of an unfounded fear of catching the disease.

    Fauci does not address this incident, so one is left to speculate about why he was attracted to this theory. One possibility is that there was little political support for government spending on AIDS when the public thought it only affected gay men. As the public came to understand AIDS impacted broader populations, such as hemophiliacs and IV drug users, public support for funding HIV research expanded.

    Fauci was tremendously successful in eventually building public support for government spending on treating and trying to prevent the spread of AIDS. Likely no other scientist in history moved more money and resources to accomplish a scientific and medical goal than Fauci, and his memoir proves he was highly skilled in managing bureaucracy and getting his way both from politicians and from an activist movement that was at first highly skeptical about him. (One prominent AIDS activist, playwright Larry Kramer, once called Fauci a murderer.)

    Fauci’s response to activist criticism was to build relationships and use them as a tool to push for more government funding. Fauci’s activist allies seemed to understand the game, staging attacks on Fauci, both playing their part to gain more money for HIV research.

    By contrast, his treatment of scientific critics is harsh, crossing lines that federal science bureaucrats should not cross. In 1991, when University of California, Berkeley, professor and wunderkind cancer biologist Peter Duesberg put forward a (false) hypothesis that the virus, HIV, is not the cause of AIDS, Fauci did everything in his power to destroy him. In his memoir, Fauci writes about debating Duesberg, writing papers, and giving talks to counter his ideas. But Fauci did more, isolating Duesberg, destroying his reputation in the press, and making him a pariah in the scientific community. Though Fauci was right and Duesberg wrong about the scientific question, the scientific community learned it was dangerous to cross Fauci.

    Fauci’s HIV record is mixed. The great news is that, because of tremendous advances in treatment, a diagnosis of HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in the 1980s or 1990s. Fauci claims credit in his memoir, pointing out that the NIAID developed a clinical trial network that made it easier for researchers at pharmaceutical companies to conduct randomized studies of the effectiveness of HIV medications. But any competent National Institutes of Health (NIH) director would have directed NIAID resources this way.

    Furthermore, many in the HIV community have criticized Fauci for not using this network to test treatment ideas developed within the community—especially off-patent medications. Fauci is more reasonable when he takes credit for the 2003 creation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program (PEPFAR), through which the US sent effective HIV medications to several African nations.

    Despite billions of dollars spent on the task, no one to date has produced an effective HIV vaccine or a definitive cure, and the virus remains a threat to the health and well-being of the world population.

    By Fauci’s own high standard, there is still a long way to go.

    In the early days of the war on terror, Fauci became head of civilian biodefense, with the mandate to develop and stockpile countermeasures to biowarfare agents. This appointment made Fauci one of the most well-paid and powerful figures in the US government. Fauci leveraged his deep knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, streamlining federal contracting rules to issue “sole source contracts” and “rapid research grants” to create constituencies of companies and scientists who depended on Fauci for their success.

    In 2005, avian flu emerged and spread among birds, chickens, and livestock. Also spreading were worries that the virus could evolve to become more transmissible among human beings. Fauci deployed NIAID money to develop an avian flu vaccine, leading the government to stockpile tens of millions of ultimately unused and unnecessary doses.

    At this point, virologists persuaded Fauci’s NIAID to support dangerous scientific lab experiments designed to make the avian flu virus more easily transmissible among humans.

    In 2011, NIAID-funded scientists in Wisconsin and the Netherlands succeeded. They published their results in a prestigious scientific journal, so that anyone with the knowledge and resources could replicate their steps. They effectively weaponized the avian flu virus and shared the recipe with the world, with Fauci and his agency in full support.

    The idea behind this gain-of-function research was that we would learn which pathogens might leap into human beings, and that knowing that would help scientists develop vaccines and treatments for these prospective possible pandemics. Fauci, writing to molecular biologists in 2012, downplayed the possibility that laboratory workers or scientists studying these dangerous pathogens might cause the pandemic they were working to prevent.

    He also argued that the risk of such an accident was worth it: “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”

    The NIH did pause funding gain-of-function work aimed at increasing germs’ pathogenicity. The pause didn’t last long, though. In the waning days of the Obama administration, the government implemented a bureaucratic process to permit NIH and NIAID to fund gain-of-function work again. Fauci played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in reversing the pause, but his memoir provides almost no information about what he did. This is a gaping, telling hole, given the subsequent history with Covid-19.

    Among the projects Fauci and the NIAID funded during these years was research to identify coronaviruses in the wild and bring them into laboratories to study their potential for causing a human pandemic. The work encompassed laboratories worldwide. Fauci’s organization funded an American outfit, EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    In his memoir, Fauci goes out of his way to deny that any NIH money went to any activities that might have led to the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid. When Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in July 2021 confronted Fauci with the possibility that Fauci’s NIAID had funded this work, Fauci resorted to cheap debate tactics to obfuscate his and the NIH’s responsibility in supporting this work. It is undeniable that Fauci championed pathogen enhancement for a decade or more.

    While the molecular biological and genetic evidence for a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 is strong, many virologists disagree. (Their entire field would come under a cloud were it true, and many virologists’ careers have been generously supported by Fauci’s NIAID.) The debate on this topic rages on. A review of Fauci’s memoir is not the place to settle the dispute.

    But in judging Fauci’s record as a scientist and a bureaucrat, it’s worth knowing that in 2020, Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, failed to empanel public discussions and debates on this vital topic. Instead, they created an environment where any scientist voicing the lab-leak hypothesis came under a cloud of suspicion, accused of advancing unfounded conspiracy theories. As with Duesberg, Fauci sought to destroy the careers of dissenting scientists.

    In his memoir, Fauci writes of a “right-wing…smear campaign [that] soon boiled over into conspiracy theories.” He asserts, “One of the most appalling examples of this was the allegation, without a shred of evidence, that an NIAID grant to the EcoHealth Alliance with a sub-grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China funded research that caused the COVID pandemic.”

    But in Congressional testimony in 2024, Fauci denied that he had called the idea of a lab leak a conspiracy theory: “Actually, I’ve also been very, very clear and said multiple times that I don’t think the ‘concept’ of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory.”

    This self-serving denial makes a lawyerly distinction between the possibility of a lab origin of the Covid pandemic and the NIH’s funding of EcoHealth Alliance to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronaviruses. These are neither “right-wing” nor “conspiracy theories,” and the likelihood of a connection between the two is, for good reason, the subject of active bipartisan congressional investigation.

    Fauci was quick to gather all the glory of administrative achievements like PEPFAR to himself while decrying any possibility of blame for the origin of Covid. But if he is responsible for the consequences of one (the millions of Africans saved because of PEPFAR), he is responsible for the consequences of the other. This includes the tens of millions who have died due to the Covid pandemic and the catastrophically harmful lockdowns used to manage it. This is Fauci at his worst.

    By any measure, the American Covid response was a catastrophic failure. More than 1.2 million deaths have been attributed to Covid itself, and deaths from all causes have stayed high long after the number of Covid deaths themselves diminished. In many states, particularly blue states, children were kept out of school for a year and a half or longer, with devastating effects on their learning and future health and prosperity.

    Coercive policy regarding Covid vaccination, recommended by Fauci on the false premise that vaccinated people could not get or spread the virus, collapsed public trust in other vaccines and led the media and public health officials to gaslight individuals who had suffered legitimate vaccine injuries.

    To pay for the lockdowns recommended by Fauci, the US government spent trillions of dollars, causing high unemployment in the most locked-down states and a hangover of higher prices for consumer goods that continues to this day. Who is to blame?

    Fauci served as a key adviser to both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, and was a central figure on Trump’s Covid task force that determined federal policy. If Fauci has no responsibility for the outcomes of the pandemic, nobody does. Yet in his memoir’s chapters on Covid, he simultaneously takes credit for advising leaders while disclaiming any responsibility for policy failures.

    Fauci implausibly writes that he “was not locking down the country” and “had no power to control anything.” These statements are belied by Fauci’s own bragging about his influence on a host of policy responses, including convincing Trump to lock the country down in March 2020 and extend the lockdown in April.

    He discusses the extended closure of schools, now almost universally seen as a bad idea, in the passive voice, as if the virus caused the school closures on its own. In Congressional testimony in 2020, Fauci exaggerated the harm to children from getting infected with Covid, instilling fear in parents that their kids might suffer from a rare complication of Covid infection if they sent them to school. It is impossible not to recall Fauci exaggerating the risk of children contracting HIV from casual contact.

    In May 2020, Fauci said that schools should reopen, conditional on “the landscape of infection with regard to testing.” But he also recommended six-foot social distancing, based on no evidence—a policy that made it nearly impossible to open schools. Fauci opposed churches holding services and mass, even outdoors, despite the lack of evidence that the disease spread there. His memoir provides little detail about the scientific data he relied on to support these policies.

    All this background makes his discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration all the more galling. The Declaration is a short policy document I wrote along with Martin Kulldorff (then of Harvard University) and Sunetra Gupta (of the University of Oxford) in October 2020.

    Motivated by recognizing that the lethality and hospitalization risk from Covid was 1,000 times lower in younger populations than in older, the document had two recommendations: (1) focused protection of vulnerable older populations, and (2) lifting lockdowns and reopening schools. It balanced the harms of the lockdowns against the risks of the disease in a way that recognized that Covid was not the only threat to human well-being and that the lockdowns themselves did considerable harm.

    Fauci denigrates the Great Barrington Declaration as being filled with “fake signatures,” though FOIAed emails from the era make it clear he knew tens of thousands of prominent scientists, doctors, and epidemiologists had co-signed it. In his memoir, he repeats a propaganda talking point about the Declaration, falsely claiming the document called for letting the virus “rip.” In reality, it called for better protection of vulnerable elderly people.

    Fauci asserted it was impossible to “sequester to protect the vulnerable” while simultaneously calling for the whole world to sequester for his lockdowns. His rhetoric about the Great Barrington Declaration poisoned the well of scientific consideration of our ideas. With brass-knuckle tactics, he won the policy fight, and many states locked down in late 2020 and into 2021.

    The virus spread anyway.

    Fauci does not mention the success of Swedish Covid policy, which eschewed lockdowns and instead—after some early errors—focused on protection of the vulnerable. Swedish all-cause excess death rates in the Covid era are among the lowest in Europe and much lower than American all-cause excess deaths. The Swedish health authorities never recommended closing schools for children 16 and under, and Swedish children, unlike American children, have no learning loss.

    If lockdowns were necessary to protect the population, as Fauci claims, Swedish outcomes should have been worse than American ones. Even within the United States, locked-down California had worse all-cause excess deaths numbers and economic outcomes than Florida, which opened in the summer of 2020. It is shocking that Fauci still does not seem to know these facts.

    Near the end of his memoir, Fauci writes that by March 2022, he knew “there would not be a clear end to the pandemic;” the world would need to learn to “live indefinitely with COVID.” He reasons that “perhaps the vaccine and prior infection had created a degree of background immunity.” This is as close as he comes in the book to admitting error.

    A part of me cannot help but admire Fauci, but the extent of damage caused by his hubris gets in the way. He once told an interviewer, “If you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science….Science and the truth are being attacked.” Despite his career accomplishments, no one should give any man, much less Fauci, credit for being the embodiment of science itself.

    If Fauci’s goal in writing this memoir is to guide how historians write about him toward the positive, I do not think he succeeded.

    He will be remembered as a consequential figure for his contributions to the American approach to the HIV and Covid pandemics.

    But he will also be remembered as a cautionary tale of what can happen when too much power is invested in a single person for far too long.

    Republished from The Illusion of Consensus

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 20:55

  • These Are The Most & Least 'Green' Cities In America
    These Are The Most & Least ‘Green’ Cities In America

    WalletHub compared the country’s 100 largest cities across 28 “green” indicators.

    Voronoiapp.com visualizes the 10 greenest and 10 least green cities in America…

    The data used to create this ranking was collected as of September 4, 2024.

    To determine the greenest cities in America, WalletHub compared the 100 most populated cities across four key dimensions: 

    1) Environment, like air quality and greenhouse-gas emissions;

    2) Transportation, like commuters traveling alone, biking, and walking score;

    3) Energy Sources, like the share of renewable sources and

    4) Lifestyle & Policy, like community gardens, green job opportunities. (Excluding recycling efforts.)

    West Coast leads: California cities dominate the top 10.

    Arizona falls short: Four Arizona cities land in the bottom 10.

    Southern and Rust Belt cities struggle: Major metros like Houston and Detroit rank low.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 20:30

  • Here's What's Driving The Arctic Dimension Of The Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership
    Here’s What’s Driving The Arctic Dimension Of The Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

    Rising Indian influence in the Arctic serves as a counterbalance to China’s, which meets both Russian and Western interests…

    The Russian-Indian joint working group on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) through the Arctic Ocean, which is expected to become one of the world’s most important trade routes, just held its first meeting last week in Delhi. It was formed as a result of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s trip to Moscow over the summer where he and Putin signed nine agreements for expanding cooperation in diverse fields. Here’s what’s driving the Arctic dimension of their decades-long strategic partnership:

    1. India Is Expected To Use The NSR For More Of Its Trade With Europe

    The ongoing Israeli-Resistance War indefinitely suspended work on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and inspired the Houthis to blockade the Red Sea, thus raising the costs of Indo-European trade and highlighting how strategically insecure it’s always been. India is therefore expected to use the NSR more in the future as a less risky route to complement the Red Sea one upon its reopening, thus adding context to the four points that’ll follow.

    2. Indian Shipyards Have The Capacity To Build Russian Icebreakers

    The Maritime Executive reported that Russia’s interest in having India build four non-nuclear icebreakers is due to its shipyards having the capacity that competitors in China, South Korea, and Japan will lack till at least 2028. They also noted that European shipyards can’t service such contracts due to sanctions. India plans to build more than 1,000 ships in the next decade so it makes perfect sense for Russia to invest some of its enormous rupee stockpile into this industry with a view towards developing the NSR.

    3. India Also Has Enough Extra Sailors To Train For Navigating The NSR

    Last week’s meeting also discussed training Indian sailors, who are the third most numerous in the world, for navigating the NSR. A 2017 Russian law banned shipping oil, natural gas, and coal along that route under a foreign flag, while a 2018 one mandates that these ships will have to be built in Russia. Given Russia’s naturally declining population, experienced Indian sailors could be contracted to help navigate these ships instead of relying on Central Asian migrants, who the locals don’t want any more of.

    4. India Could Invest In Russian Arctic Energy Under Certain Conditions

    Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 project, from which a Chinese company withdrew over the summer, could see Indian investment under certain conditions. Its Oil Secretary said last month that his country won’t get involved for now due to the sanctions, but an exemption might be possible if it helps broker an end to the Ukrainian Conflict. Kiev reportedly prefers for India to play this role instead of China, and if it can pull this off, then the West might reward it accordingly in order to reduce China’s influence in the Arctic.

    5. India Plays An Indispensable Role In The Global Balance Of Influence

    And finally, Russia relies on India to preemptively avert disproportionate dependence on China, which readers can learn more about here, here, and here. Despite Western pressure on India to distance itself from Russia, the West is gradually beginning to appreciate this role as well, hence why it hasn’t imposed maximum sanctions against India for their reportedly covert tech trade. Rising Indian influence in the Arctic therefore serves as a counterbalance to China’s, which meets both Russian and Western interests.

    Russian-Indian cooperation in the Arctic is very promising for the reasons that were enumerated, though it’ll be held back from its full potential so long as India remains reluctant to defy Western sanctions on the Arctic LNG II project. Considering India’s indispensable role in the global balance of influence, it and the West should enter into discreet talks on what could be done to receive an exemption, which would then enable India to more effectively compete with China in the Arctic.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 20:05

  • Pro-Life Mother Begins 3.5 Year Prison Sentence After Biden-Harris DOJ Threw The Book At Her
    Pro-Life Mother Begins 3.5 Year Prison Sentence After Biden-Harris DOJ Threw The Book At Her

    Bevelyn Williams – a pro-life activist and the mother of a young daughter, is reporting to an Alabama prison today to serve a 3.5 year sentence for unlawful assembly after the Biden-Harris DOJ threw the book at her for taking part in a two-day pro-life protest outside a New York City Planned Parenthood in June of 2020.

    “I wanted to give you an important update,” Williams wrote in a Tuesday Facebook post. “My legal team worked tirelessly to submit a stay of appeal so I could be home on bail while appealing this case for the sake of my daughter and husband. Unfortunately, the judge, who also sentenced me, denied the appeal. I have now been assigned a federal facility to report to and must surrender tomorrow at FCI Aliceville.”

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    Her husband recorded a video as they were headed to the prison:

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    The DOJ accused Williams of having “repeatedly intimidated and interfered with individuals seeking and providing critical reproductive health services. She did so by physically blocking access to clinics, threatening staff, and by force.”

    That said, her category of offense was unlawful assembly.

    “Please share this people need to know the truth 41 months, 3 1/2 years for unlawful assembly under the Biden Harris administration!!” she posted to X.

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    Williams voted for Trump before taking off for prison.

    Williams set up a GiveSendGo account, which can be found here.

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 19:40

  • Disaster: Kamala.exe Crashes In Fox Interview Meltdown
    Disaster: Kamala.exe Crashes In Fox Interview Meltdown

    Kamala Harris appeared in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier Wednesday night, where she alternated between deflection, blame, and then had a complete meltdown when shown a clip of Donald Trump (full interview here).

    For starters, when asked if she would take responsibility for the flood of illegal immigrants after she and Joe Biden ripped up Trump’s executive orders on immigration on day one, Harris spat out a well-work Democrat talking point about ‘Trump killing a bill’ that would have saved the day. Baier – a NeverTrumper who deserves credit for this one – pushed back.

     As Fox‘s Bill Melugin points out, the Democrat bill “would have given pathway to amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and it failed despite Democrats controlling the White House & Congress.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsKamala.exe Bluescreens

    When asked to explain why more than 70% of people say the country is on the wrong track.

    “That track follows three-and-a-half years of you being vice president and President Biden being president. That is what they’re saying. 79 percent of them. If you’re turning the page – you’re been in office for three-and-a-half years…“

    To which Harris offered the strangest answer yet – “And Donald Trump has been running for office…”

    Kamala Enraged!

    When shown a clip of Trump denying he would ‘turn the American military on the American people,’ Harris went ballistic…

    Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro and a few hundred J6 protesters would like to have a word about weaponized government…

    Word Salad On The Menu

    What did you expect? Kamala simply can’t answer questions…

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    According to Baier and others, not only did Harris show up late for the interview, her staff was desperate to end the interview…

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 19:25

  • 10 Signs That The Economy Is A Giant Mess As The Election Approaches
    10 Signs That The Economy Is A Giant Mess As The Election Approaches

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    The health of the economy has been a major determining factor in many past presidential elections, and the health of the economy is certainly going to have an enormous influence on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election.  In fact, according to a poll that was just released by Rasmussen the economy is the number one issue by a wide margin for voters in the ultra-important swing state of Pennsylvania.  

    Unfortunately for the Democrats, most Americans are not pleased with how the economy is performing, and it appears that conditions are now taking another turn for the worse.  

    The following are 10 signs that the economy is a giant mess as the election approaches…

    #1 The number of Americans filing first time claims for unemployment benefits just hit the highest level in over a year…

    The number of people filing for unemployment for the first time was at its highest levels in more than a year, partly due to storm damage and labor stoppages.

    Initial jobless claims for the week ending Oct. 5 came in at 258,000, up 33,000 from last week’s level of 225,000, and the highest since it hit the same level in August 2023, data from the Labor Department shows.

    #2 According to Primerica’s latest Financial Security Monitor report, the percentage of middle-income households that “rate their personal financial situation negatively” has hit the highest level that they have ever recorded…

    Primerica’s latest Financial Security Monitor report for the third quarter found 55% of middle-income households now rate their personal financial situation negatively, a 6-point jump from the previous survey.

    “For the first time in a year, a majority of middle-income households are feeling negative about their personal finances,” said Glenn Williams, CEO of Primerica. “In fact, this latest report represents the highest negative rating we’ve seen since we began fielding the survey exactly four years ago.”

    #3 I am old enough to remember a time in this country when you were set for life if you had a million dollars.  Unfortunately, thanks to our endless cost of living crisis it now costs 4.4 million dollars to live “the American Dream” over the course of a lifetime…

    You can live the American Dream, but it will cost you.

    The lifetime tab for such aspirations as owning a home, driving new cars, raising kids and taking annual vacations comes to a cool $4.4 million, according to Investopedia, the financial media site.

    That’s more than the average American earns in a lifetime.

    #4 The company that produces more french fries than anyone else in North America is cutting production and laying off workers due to a dramatic slowdown in consumer demand…

    Lamb Weston, the largest producer of french fries in North America and a major supplier to fast-food chains, restaurants and grocery stores, is closing a production plant in Washington state. The company announced last week that it would lay off nearly 400 employees, or 4% of its workforce, and temporarily cut production lines in response to slowing customer demand.

    #5 At one time Boeing was flying high, but now it has decided to lay off approximately 10 percent of its entire workforce…

    The CEO of Boeing told employees late Friday that the company plans to cut 10% of its total staff “over the coming months.”

    “Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together,” said Kelly Ortberg, who started at CEO of the troubled aircraft maker two months ago and has been dealing with a strike by 33,000 hourly workers for half his time on the job.

    #6 The banking industry continues to deeply struggle.  So far this year, banks in the United States have permanently shut down over 700 local branches…

    US banks closed more than 700 branches in the first nine months of the year, forcing thousands to travel further to access vital services.

    Bank of America closed the most locations of any bank, shuttering 132 between January and September.

    U.S. Bank followed swiftly behind, having closed 101 of their own branches.

    #7 After 75 years, True Value has been forced to file for bankruptcy and will be “selling substantially all of its operations to a rival”…

    True Value, a 75-year old hardware store brand, has filed for bankruptcy and is selling substantially all of its operations to a rival, the company announced Monday.

    In a press release, True Value said it will continue day-to-day operations of selling hardware and other homeware tools to its 4,500 independently operated locations during the Chapter 11 process, which includes a $153 million stalking horse bid from rival company Do it Best.

    #8 Did you ever think that you would live to see a day when hundreds of 7-Eleven stores would be closing?  Sadly, that time has now arrived…

    Several hundred “underperforming” 7-Eleven locations across North America are closing, the convenience store announced.

    Seven & I Holdings, the chain’s Japan-based parent company, revealed in an earnings report Thursday that 444 locations of 7-Eleven are shutting down because of a variety of issues, including slowing sales, declining traffic, inflationary pressures and a decrease in cigarette purchases.

    #9 Home Depot apparently believes that rough times are ahead, because they are dumping millions of square feet of warehouse space…

    Home Depot is hastily exiting warehouse space, to the tune of 3.2 million square feet in a month, according to Bisnow.

    Since late August, Home Depot has put up nearly 4 million square feet of warehouse space for sublease, including a 1.3M SF Phoenix warehouse and a 1.1M SF distribution center in the Inland Empire, according to CoStar Analytics.

    #10 At this point, things are so bad that even Disney is laying off workers…

    According to sources cited by Deadline, Disney is pushing ahead with new layoffs as part of a broader “cost-saving initiative.” About 300 employees across Disney’s corporate divisions will be impacted this week.

    The layoffs of 300 employees began on Tuesday and will continue until the end of the week. They are all US-based employees who work across the company’s corporate operations, including legal, HR, finance, and communications.

    If you have recently lost your job, I feel very badly for you, because the employment market has gotten a lot more “complicated” than it was in the old days.

    Once upon a time, being good at what you do was enough.

    But now other considerations are often more important than pure merit…

    A top Oregon state official has been put on administrative leave after a pink-haired, DEI-obsessed subordinate complained he was making hiring decisions based on qualifications instead of personal identity considerations, according to a report.

    Mike Shaw, who until recently served as the Oregon Department of Forestry’s second-in-command, was put on blast by Megan Donecker, the department’s former DEI strategy officer, for looking “beyond gender and identity in hiring, seeking only candidates most qualified for the job,” OregonLive reported.

    He was formally placed on administrative leave Aug. 6 after Donecker filed a formal complaint, according to the Daily Mail.

    Isn’t that nuts?

    Our society is getting crazier with each passing day, and I am deeply concerned about where all of this is heading.

    Sadly, the tough economic times that we are experiencing now are not even worth comparing to the pain that is coming if we don’t turn things around.

    Our system is literally crumbling right in front of our eyes, and unless something dramatic happens economic conditions in this country will soon become extremely harsh.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 19:15

  • Where Americans Should Retire Vs Where They Actually Retire
    Where Americans Should Retire Vs Where They Actually Retire

    This chart, via Voronoiapp.com, compares the top states for retirement (based on five metrics analyzed by experts), with those states where retirees are actually moving, as indicated by net migration data.

    Figures are sourced from Smart Asset and Bankrate, as of 2024.

    Bankrate’s study judged all fifty states by five key metrics: affordability (40%), well-being (25%), healthcare (20%), weather (10%), crime (5%). Check out our graphic on their method and how each state performed.

    The experts and retirees only agree on three states that are best for retirement – Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia – indicating that there’s a divergence between the data analyzers and where retirees actually want to live.

    It’s also clear most retirees are moving for warm summers and mild winters.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 18:50

  • Political Analyst Predicts 'Biggest Mental Health Crisis In American History' If Trump Wins
    Political Analyst Predicts ‘Biggest Mental Health Crisis In American History’ If Trump Wins

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via modernity.news,

    Political analyst Mark Halperin predicts that America will experience the biggest mental health crisis in its history if Trump wins the election and that it will lead to violence.

    Halperin made the explosive comments during a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson.

    Given that many Democrats think Trump winning again is the worst thing that could happen to the country, Carlson asked Halperin how Kamala Harris voters would react.

    “I say this not flippantly, I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country,” Halperin responded.

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    The pollster added that a Trump win would completely derail tens of millions of Americans’ connection to their country and their fellow citizens.

    He went on to add that mental health professionals will be overwhelmed with people requiring support and will lead to “trauma in the workplace” as well as “alcoholism” and “broken marriages.”

    “They think he’s the worst person possible to become president,” said Halperin, noting that the crisis won’t pass in between the election and Trump’s inauguration, but will be a “sustained,” “unprecedented” and “hideous” fallout.

    Halperin said the country was not ready for what is coming if Trump beats Harris and that some level of “violence” will inevitably ensue, in the form of riots, workplace fights and even unrest during things like kids birthday parties.

    The pollster said for tens of millions of Americans, Trump winning would be “so traumatic” that it will become “impossible for even the most mentally healthy person to truly process and incorporate in the daily life.”

    “They think that their fellow citizens supporting Trump is a sign of fundamental evil at the heart of their fellow citizens and of the nation,” concluded Halperin.

    Trump’s first term in office was characterized by what became known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, where everything Trump said or did became a reason for some Americans to flip out and engage in deranged behavior.

    At one point, some actually took to screaming helplessly at the sky because they simply couldn’t accept that he was in power.

    * * *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 18:25

  • "Superhuman": Nvidia CEO Blown Away After Musk Sets Up 100,000 GPUs In 19 Days
    “Superhuman”: Nvidia CEO Blown Away After Musk Sets Up 100,000 GPUs In 19 Days

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Elon Musk pulled off a “superhuman” feat by setting up a supercluster of 100,000 H200 Blackwell GPUs in just 19 days – a process he says takes everyone else “one year to accomplish.” 

    Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

    According to Tom’s Hardware, the xAI team reportedly went from “concept” to full-ready compatibility with Nvidia’s “gear” in less than three weeks – including running xAI’s first AI training run.

    From start to finish, the process involved building the massive X factory where the GPUs would reside and equipping the entire factory with liquid cooling and power to make all 200,000 GPUs operational. That’s not to mention all of the coordination between Nvidia’s and Elon Musk’s engineering teams to get all of the hardware and infrastructure shipped and installed precisely and in a coordinated manner.

    What’s more, Huang says that networking Nvidia’s gear isn’t as simple as networking traditional data center servers. “The number of wires that goes in one node…the back of a computer is all wires,” he said, adding that Musk’s integration of 100,000 H200 GPUs has “never been done before,” and probably won’t be repeated by anyone else anytime soon.

    Watch:

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 18:00

  • Joy Reid Claims Black Male Trump Voters Are Part Of A 'Global Fascist Phenomenon'
    Joy Reid Claims Black Male Trump Voters Are Part Of A ‘Global Fascist Phenomenon’

    While it’s true that not many Americans watch MSNBC’s Joy Reid and take her seriously (her show ‘The ReidOut’ is #14 on the list of most popular news commentary shows in the US according to viewership), she does remain a symbol of the woke left and her views often give us a glimpse into the collective hive mind of progressives.  Similar to women on shows like ‘The View’, Reid is a standard bearer for perpetually angry, post-menopausal cat ladies that do sadly tend to vote in large numbers. 

    These are the same women coming out in droves to support Kamala Harris based purely on her gender and skin color.  They are the same women that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 simply because they wanted a woman president and they didn’t care who it was.  And generally speaking it is these kinds of women that use shaming tactics as a means to control the people around them.  Their only source of power in life is to henpeck others into submission.

    The problem for Harris is that childless cat ladies are not a large enough demographic to ensure a presidential win; she needs men to vote for her as well.  As many critics have pointed out, this is rather ironic given the fact that Democrats and leftist activists have spent the better part of the last decade calling masculinity a “toxic” and oppressive social disease that needs to be eliminated.  They have worked hard to demonize all men as potential rapists, misogynists, mass shooters and fascists.  Now, not surprisingly, progressive women want men to lift them out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.  

    But they don’t want to admit they were wrong about men or apologize for their behavior and accusations, no.  That would be asking far too much.  Instead, they have turned to the same old shaming tactics they always use to get what they want.

    This week Joy Reid suggested that Kamala Harris’ plunge in the polls is due in large part to a ‘global fascist phenomenon’ led by white males.  She also argues that pockets of ‘black and brown men’ are a part of this supposed fascist takeover.

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    The campaign to drag black voters back to the Democrat plantation continues.

    Reid’s comments come not long after Barack Obama (also a henpecker) tried to shame black men into voting for Harris by accusing them of bias against her because she’s a woman.  As 2016 taught Americans, it’s foolish to blindly trust the polls and the election isn’t over until it’s over – That said, numerous indicators suggest that Harris does not inspire trust or optimism among most Americans. 

    Minority voters including black men have been loudly explaining why they don’t like Harris, and her being a woman is rarely on their list of complaints.

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    Here’s what most American voters care about according to the surveys:  The failing economy and stagflation, mass immigration and open borders and foreign policy leading to WWIII.  That’s it.  It doesn’t matter if they are white, black, brown, man or woman, these are the issues that concern people the most.  Electing the first black woman president is irrelevant compared to these problems. 

    Black male voters in particular are walking away from the political left, not because they are turning “fascist”, but because they’re finally waking up to the game being played with their futures.       

     

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 17:44

  • SBA's Disaster Loan Program Runs Out Of Money As Hurricanes Drive Demand
    SBA’s Disaster Loan Program Runs Out Of Money As Hurricanes Drive Demand

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

    The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) disaster assistance loan program is out of money after hurricanes Helene and Milton struck parts of the United States, the agency has announced.

    In an Oct. 15 press release, the SBA said funds for the program have been exhausted following increased demand from disaster survivors in the wake of multiple extreme weather events, including the two hurricanes that made landfall in September and October.

    The agency will therefore be pausing new loan offers for its direct, low-interest, long-term loans to disaster survivors.

    The SBA encouraged individuals and small businesses to continue applying for loans, citing assurances from congressional leaders that additional funding will be provided once they return to Capitol Hill in November.

    The agency’s loan application portal will also remain open, while its disaster centers and in-person staff will continue to be deployed across the country, the press release said.

    “The agency will continue to accept new applications and ready borrowers to get their disaster loan offers as soon as possible once Congress appropriates funds,” the SBA stated.

    Additionally, the SBA noted it may continue to make a “small number of new loan offers during this time,” using funds made available through loan cancellations and similar actions.

    The SBA was created in 1953 and offers low-interest loans to businesses, homeowners, renters, and private nonprofit organizations to help them recover from federally declared disasters.

    Thousands Seek Relief Funds

    Through its loan program, homeowners can receive up to $500,000 to replace or repair their primary residence, while businesses and private nonprofit organizations can get up to $2 million to cover disaster-related physical damage and economic injuries that aren’t fully covered by insurance.

    In a statement, SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman stressed the importance of getting swift financial relief to communities, noting it helps in both recovery efforts and stabilizing local economies.

    “While we await Congress to provide much-needed funding, we strongly encourage eligible businesses and households to apply for SBA disaster loans,” Guzman said.

    “SBA will continue to support homeowners, renters, businesses, and nonprofits in processing their applications to ensure they receive assistance quickly once funds are replenished,” she added.

    The latest announcement from the SBA comes after President Joe Biden warned lawmakers this month that the agency’s disaster loan program was set to run out of funding “in a matter of weeks” and well before Congress plans to reconvene in November.

    Biden urged lawmakers to act immediately to replenish the disaster loan program, although he stopped short of stating exactly how much money the program needs.

    It comes amid recovery efforts from hurricanes Helene and Milton,  the latter of which Biden said has caused around $50 billion worth of damage.

    In its latest press release, the SBA said it has received around 37,000 applications from those impacted by Helene, and has made over 700 Helene loan offers totaling about $48 million.

    For Milton, the agency has already received over 12,000 applications, it said.

    “Importantly, despite this funding lapse, borrowers who already have a loan offer will continue to receive disbursements, and borrowers who already have existing loans may continue with servicing actions and loan modifications,” the agency said.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 17:40

  • WTI Rallies After API Reports Across-The-Board Inventory Draws
    WTI Rallies After API Reports Across-The-Board Inventory Draws

    Oil prices dipped very marginally today (with WTI holding above $70), down for the fourth day in a row as traders focused on an uncertain demand outlook – particularly from China, the world’s largest crude importer.

    Additionally, traders have “largely priced in the Middle East tensions,” and the base-case scenario for many of them is that there will be a limited attack on Iranian energy facilities, if any, from Israel, Naeem Aslam, chief investment officer at Zaye Capital Markets, told MarketWatch.

    However, “the fact is that we are looking at a situation where two countries are attacking each other directly,” he added.

    “[It] is a very serious situation because currently the U.S. is very much mediating the matter and tensions are incredibly high on both sides.”

    “On the demand side, market participants are looking for clearer signals regarding China’s fiscal policy, as uncertainties about its economic recovery affect oil-demand expectations,” said Christopher Tahir, senior market strategist at Exness, in emailed comments.

    “Both the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the International Energy Agency have lowered their forecasts for global oil-demand growth in 2024, mainly due to expected changes in China’s consumption,” he noted.

    For now, the recent hurricanes are playing havoc with any analysis of the real-time supply/demand regime based on API/DOE data.

    API

    • Crude -1.58mm (+1.9mm exp)

    • Cushing +410k

    • Gasoline -5.93mm (-2.0mm exp)

    • Distillates -2.67mm (-2.2mm exp)

    After the large gasoline draw the prior week (and big crude build), the effect of Hurricanes Helene and Milton continue to ripple through physical energy markets. API reports major product draws and a surprise crude draw (build expected) last week…

    Source: Bloomberg

    WTI was hovering just above $70 ahead of the API print and rallied into the green for the day after the print…

    From a price perspective, Zaye Capital Markets’ Aslam believes oil is very much back to “normal fundamentals,” with the Chinese demand equation influencing the market.

    “So in the absence of any serious geopolitical tension, the path of least resistance is skewed to the downside,” he said.

    Tomorrow (a day late due to the Columbus Day holiday), we will get the official weekly data on US production, demand, and inventories.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/16/2024 – 17:20

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