Today’s News 23rd September 2022

• Escobar: The Real US Agenda In Africa Is Hegemony
  Escobar: The Real US Agenda In Africa Is Hegemony

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

  Forget development. Washington’s primary interest in Africa today is keeping the Chinese and Russians out…

  

  In a rational environment, the 77th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) would discuss alleviating the trials and tribulations of the Global South, especially Africa.

  That won’t be the case. Like a deer caught in the geopolitical headlights, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued platitudes about a gloomy “winter of global discontent,” even as the proverbial imperial doomsayers criticized the UN’s “crisis of faith” and blasted the “unprovoked war” started by Russia.

  Of course the slow-motion genocide of Donbass russophone residents for eight years would never be recognized as a provocation.

  Guterres spoke of Afghanistan, “where the economy is in ruins and human rights are being trampled” – but he did not dare to offer context. In Libya, “divisions continue to jeopardize the country” – once again, no context. Not to mention Iraq, where “ongoing tensions threaten ongoing stability.”

  Africa has 54 nations as UN members. Any truly representative UNGA meeting should place Africa’s problems at the forefront. Once again, that’s not the case. So it is left to African leaders to offer that much-needed context outside of the UN building in New York.

  As the only African member of the G20, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently urged the US not to “punish” the whole continent by forcing nations to demonize or sanction Russia. Washington’s introduction of legislation dubbed the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, he says, “will harm Africa and marginalize the continent.”

  South Africa is a BRICS member – a concept that is anathema in the Beltway – and embraces a policy of non-alignment among world powers. An emerging 21st century version of the 1960s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is strengthening across the Global South – and especially Africa – much to the revulsion of the US and its minions.

  Back at the UNGA, Guterres invoked the global fertilizer crisis – again, with no context. Russian diplomacy has repeatedly stressed that Moscow is ready to export 30 million tons of grain and over 20 million tons of fertilizer by the end of 2022. What is left unsaid in the west, is that only the importation of fertilizers to the EU is “allowed,” while transit to Africa is not.

  Guterres said he was trying to persuade EU leaders to lift sanctions on Russian fertilizer exports, which directly affect cargo payments and shipping insurance. Russia’s Uralchem, for instance, even offered to supply fertilizers to Africa for free.

  Yet from the point of view of the US and its EU vassals, the only thing that matters is to counter Russia and China in Africa. Senegal’s President Macky Sall has remarked how this policy is leaving “a bitter taste.”

  ‘We forbid you to build your pipeline’

  It gets worse. The largely ineffectual EU Parliament now wants to stop the construction of the 1,445 km-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, invoking hazy human rights violations, environmental threats, and “advising” member countries to simply drop out of the project.

  Uganda is counting on more than 6 billion barrels of oil to sustain an employment boom and finally move the nation to middle-income status. It was up to Ugandan Parliament Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa to offer much-needed context:

  “It is imprudent to say that Uganda’s oil projects will exacerbate climate change, yet it is a fact that the EU block with only 10 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 25 percent of global emissions, and Africa with 20 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 3 percent of emissions. The EU and other western countries are historically responsible for climate change. Who then should stop or slow down the development of natural resources? Certainly not Africa or Uganda.”

  The EU Parliament, moreover, is a staunch puppet of the biofuel lobby. It has refused to amend a law that would have stopped the use of food crops for fuel production, actually contributing to what the UN Food Program has described as “a global emergency of unprecedented magnitude.” No less than 350 million people are on the brink of starvation across Africa.

  Instead, the G7’s notion of “helping” Africa is crystallized in the US-led Build Back Better World (B3W) – Washington’s anaemic attempt to counter Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – which focuses on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality,” according to the White House. Practical issues of infrastructure and sustainable development, which are at the heart of China’s plan, are simply ignored by the B3W.

  Initially, a few “promising” projects were identified by a traveling US delegation in Senegal and Ghana. Senegalese diplomatic sources have since confirmed that these projects have nothing whatsoever to do with building infrastructure.

  B3W, predictably, fizzled out. After all, the US-led project was little more than a public relations gimmick to undermine the Chinese, with negligible effect on narrowing the $40-plus trillion worth of infrastructure needed to be built across the Global South by 2035.

  Have YALI, will travel

  Imperial initiatives in Africa – apart from the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which amounts to raw militarization of the continent – brings us to the curious case of YALI (Young African Leaders Initiative), widely touted in the Washington-New York axis as “the most innovative” policy of the Obama years.

  Launched in 2010, YALI was framed as “empowering the new generation of Africa leadership” – a euphemism for educating (or brainwashing) them the American way. The mechanism is simple: investing in and bringing hundreds of young African potential leaders to US universities for a short, six-week “training” on “business, civil leadership, entrepreneurship, and public management.” Then, four days in Washington to meet “leaders in the administration,” and a photo op with Obama.

  The project was coordinated by US embassies in Africa, and targeted young men and women from sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 nations – including those under US sanctions, like Sudan, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe – proficient in English, with a “commitment” to return to Africa. Roughly 80 percent during the initial years had never been to the US, and more than 50 percent grew up outside of big cities.

  Then, in a speech in 2013 in South Africa, Obama announced the establishment of the Washington Fellowship, later renamed the Mandela-Washington Fellowship (MWF).

  That’s still ongoing. In 2022, MWF should be granted to 700 “outstanding young leaders from sub-Saharan Africa,” who follow “Leadership Institutes” at nearly 40 US universities, before their short stint in Washington. After which, they are ready for “long-term engagement between the United States and Africa.”

  And all that for literally peanuts, as MWF was enthusiastically billed by the Democrat establishment as cost-efficient: $24,000 per fellow, paid by participant US universities as well as Coca-Cola, IBM, MasterCard Foundation, Microsoft, Intel, McKinsey, GE, and Procter & Gamble.

  And that didn’t stop with MWF. USAID went a step further, and invested over $38 million – plus $10 million from the MasterCard Foundation – to set up four Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs) in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Senegal. These were training, long distance and in-class, at least 3,500 ‘future leaders’ a year.

  It’s no wonder the Brookings Institution was drooling over so much “cost-efficiency” when it comes to investing “in Africa’s future” and for the US to “stay competitive” in Africa. YALI certainly looks prettier than AFRICOM.

  A few success stories though don’t seem to rival the steady stream of African footballers making a splash in Europe – and then reinvesting most of their profits back home. The Trump years did see a reduction of YALI’s funding – from $19 million in 2017 to roughly $5 million.

  So many leaders to ‘train’

  Predictably, the Joe Biden White House YALI-ed all over again with a vengeance. Take this US press attache in Nigeria neatly outlining the current emphasis on “media and information literacy,” badly needed to tackle the “spreading of disinformation” including “in the months leading up to the national presidential election.”

  So the US, under YALI, “trained 1,000 young Nigerians to recognize the signs of online and media misinformation and disinformation.” And now the follow-up is “Train the Trainer” workshops, “teaching 40 journalists, content creators, and activists (half of whom will be women) from Yobe, Borno, Adamawa, Zamfara, and Katsina how to identify, investigate, and report misinformation.” Facebook, being ordered by the FBI to censor “inconvenient,” potentially election-altering facts, is not part of the curriculum.

  YALI is the soft, Instagrammed face of AFRICOM. The US has participated in the overthrow of several African governments over the past two decades, with troops trained under secrecy-obsessed AFRICOM. There has been no serious Pentagon audit on the weaponizing of AFRICOM’s local “partners.” For all we know – as in Syria and Libya – the US military could be arming even more terrorists.

  And predictably, it’s all bipartisan. Rabid neo-con and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, in December 2018, at the Heritage Foundation, made it crystal clear: the US in Africa has nothing to do with supporting democracy and sustainable development. It’s all about countering Russia and China.

  When it learned that Beijing was considering building a naval base in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, the Biden White House sent power envoys to the capital Malabo to convince the government to cease and desist. To no avail.

  In contrast, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was received like a superstar in his recent extensive tour of Africa, where it’s widely perceived that global food prices and the fertilizer drama are a direct consequence of western sanctions on Russia. Uganda leader Yoweri Museveni went straight to the point when he said, “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us?”

  On 13-15 December, the White House plans a major US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington to discuss mostly food security and climate change – alongside the perennial lectures on democracy and human rights. Most leaders won’t be exactly impressed with this new showing of “the United States’ enduring commitment to Africa.” Well, there’s always YALI. So many young leaders to indoctrinate, so little time.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/23/2022 – 02:00

• Masters Of Deceit: The Government's Propaganda Of Fear, Mind Control, & Brain Warfare
  Masters Of Deceit: The Government’s Propaganda Of Fear, Mind Control, & Brain Warfare

  Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”

  – J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

  The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.

  It’s all documented, too.

  This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

  Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

  With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

  Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.

  Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

  

  Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda.

  In the 1950s, MK-ULTRA, the mind control program developed under CIA director Allen Dulles as part of his brain warfare Cold War campaigns, subjected hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel to doses of LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. For Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA hired prostitutes to lure men into a bugged room, where they would be dosed with LSD and observed having sex

  As Brianna Nofil explains, “MK-Ultra’s ‘mind control’ experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.”

  The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

  As one study reported, detainees held in CIA safe-houses abroad “were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis and torture, to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”

  Similarly, the top-secret Montauk Project, the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, allegedly was working to develop mind-control techniques that would then be tested out on locals in a nearby village, triggering crime waves or causing teenagers to congregate.

  As journalist Lorraine Boissoneault concludes, “Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.”

  Fast forward to the present day, and it’s clear that the government—aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation—has updated its psy ops warfare for a new era. For instance, the government has been empowered to use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

  It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

  Back in 2014, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain).

  Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic could easily be considered psychological warfare disguised as a pandemic threat. As science writer David Robson explains: “Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic… Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations… Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease… the evocative images of a pandemic led [participants in an experiment] to value conformity and obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.”

  This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm.

  This is not a new experiment in mind control.

  Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

  This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

  We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter. 

  The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

  The government’s fear-mongering is yet another key element in its mind-control programming.

  It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

  A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

  Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

  This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

  This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

  It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

  “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

  As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, to this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

  For years now, the powers-that-be—those politicians and bureaucrats who think like tyrants and act like petty dictators regardless of what party they belong to—have attempted to brainwash us into believing that we have no rights: to think for ourselves, make decisions about our health, protect our homes and families and businesses, act in our best interests, demand accountability and transparency from government, or generally operate as if we are in control of our own lives.

  Well, the government is wrong.

  We have every right, and you know why? Because, as the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights—to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness—that no government can take away from us.

  It’s time we started reminding the government that “we the people” are the ones in charge.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 23:40

• Secretive B-21 Raider To Be Unveiled To Public In December
  Secretive B-21 Raider To Be Unveiled To Public In December

  Northrop Grumman Corporation and the US Air Force will unveil the highly-classified, next-generation stealth bomber, known as the B-21 Raider, as early as the first week of December. 

  USAF hasn’t solidified a final date but announced the unveiling event would take place at Northrop’s facilities in Palmdale, California. 

  “We are still working to nail down all the plans,” Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter said during a discussion with reporters at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space, and Cyber conference, on Tuesday. 

  

  Northrop disclosed that it has six B-21s in “various stages of final assembly” at the Palmdale facility, with the first flight scheduled for 2023. 

  “The B-21 is the most advanced military aircraft ever built and is a product of pioneering innovation and technological excellence. 

  “The Raider showcases the dedication and skills of the thousands of people working every day to deliver this aircraft,” said Doug Young, sector vice president and general manager, Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems.

  December’s event will be the first time in 34 years Northrop has unveiled a stealth bomber. In 1988, Northrop gave the first public display of the B-2 bomber that flew the following year and was introduced into service in 1997. 

  “Northrop Grumman is proud of our partnership with the US Air Force as we deliver the B-21 Raider, a sixth-generation aircraft optimized for operations in highly contested environments,” said Tom Jones, corporate vice president and president, Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems.

  Northrop has been preparing to unveil the B-21 well before the war in Ukraine. China and Russia have also revealed renderings of stealth bombers, but the US could beat them to the skies. As far as hypersonic missiles, that’s a different story… 

  When the B-21s are ready for service, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri will be their new home. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 23:20

• Why Orwell Matters
  Why Orwell Matters

  Authored by Bruno Waterfield via Spiked-Online.com,

  Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

  He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.

  And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.

  

  Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time

  The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.

  Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

  Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

  Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.

  

  Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith and Jan Sterling as Julia, in an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, 3 June 1955.

  In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

  Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

  Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.

  The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.

  The importance of words

  Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).

  Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:

  ‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

  As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’

  This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

  But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).

  As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:

  ‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

  The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.

  However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.

  The intellectual turn against freedom

  But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

  Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.

  ‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.

  Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

  An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.

  These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.

  And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.

  Orwell’s legacy

  Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.

  

  His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.

  Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’

  Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

  ‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

  Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.

  *  *  *

  This is an edited version of a speech given at this year’s Living Freedom, an annual residential school organised by the Battle of Ideas.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 23:00

• Manhattan Apartment Rents Finally "Plateau" After Red-Hot Summer
  Manhattan Apartment Rents Finally “Plateau” After Red-Hot Summer

  Manhattan’s hottest residential rental market in decades has finally “plateaued,” according to Bloomberg, citing a new report from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. 

  After six months of “record number of records” as median rent in the borough soared to $4,150 in July, the hottest run in decades appears to have subsided as new leases signed in August averaged around $4,100, down $50 from July’s all-time high. 

  “Rents are robust but they are starting to plateau,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. He doesn’t expect prices to plunge unless recessionary trends materialize, such as increased job loss, making it more challenging for people to pay rent and bills in current apartments. 

  

  August’s median rent decline is barely a relief and still holds 17% above prices seen three years ago. The good news is rapid price increases have stopped (well, at least for now). 

  Sigh… 

  “There’s no bottom dropping out here … and landlords are still pushing their rents,” said Hal Gavzie, executive vice president of residential leasing at Douglas Elliman. 

  We correctly pointed out that rent prices in the borough would skyrocket this summer in an April note titled “Not A Peak” – Manhattan Apartment Rents Hit Another Record High,” informing readers who were looking at renting in the city to hold off because there will be “cooling in the fall.” 

  Gavzie said landlords aren’t slashing rents yet, but “concessions have slowly started to creep up, which doesn’t really surprise me.” 

  “All along, we were all wondering how long the high rents could be sustained,” he added. 

  Miller added the percentage of new leases with bidding wars is still at levels seen earlier this year, which is about 20% of deals, and average rents over asking were approximately 12.6%, indicating “the market is extremely tight.” 

  Perhaps wait until 2023 to lock in a new residential lease in Manhattan as the likelihood of a Fed-induced recession rises in the months ahead. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 22:40

• Trump Says He Thinks FBI Agents Took His Will
  Trump Says He Thinks FBI Agents Took His Will

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  FBI agents raiding Mar-a-Lago in August might have taken former President Donald Trump’s will, Trump said on Sept. 21.

  “They took a lot. I think they took my will. I found out yesterday, I said, ‘where is it?’ I think they took my will,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Hannity.”

  Trump says he thinks the FBI took his will. pic.twitter.com/Vnzg9UwRZ8

  — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 22, 2022

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

  The FBI has referred inquiries on the raid to the Department of Justice, its parent agency. The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  Agents executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Aug. 8 took some 100 documents marked classified in addition to over 11,000 non-classified documents, according to an inventory list released by the government. The government has also acknowledged that agents seized three of Trump’s passports.

  U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, later revealed in a court filing that the seized materials include “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information.”

  Trump has said the FBI took his “complete and highly confidential medical file and history” in addition to tax records.

  If the will was taken, “that could cause a lot of problems if that gets published,” Trump said on Tuesday, adding that some people may not be happy while others might be pleased.

  

  Surveillance Footage

  When agents went to Mar-a-Lago, they asked representatives of Trump to turn off surveillance cameras, Trump and his team have said. Trump’s representatives refused, but Trump has yet to release the footage.

  Sean Hannity, host of the Fox show, wondered why that was.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 22:20

• Russia Prepares To 'Ramp Up' Stealth Jet Production Amid Rising Threat Of War With West
  Russia Prepares To ‘Ramp Up’ Stealth Jet Production Amid Rising Threat Of War With West

  Russia’s war in Ukraine escalated this week when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization of the country’s military and vowed to use “all available means” to deter future attacks against Russia — a reference to the country’s diverse nuclear weapons arsenal. 

  Then Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, provided fresh warnings Thursday on the heels of Putin’s nuclear threats that “Hypersound [hypersonic weapons] will be able to reach targets in Europe and in the United States much faster, guaranteed.” 

  Now there’s word that Russian state-owned defense corporation Rostec will increase production of Su-57 5th-generation stealth fighter jets. 

  “The Russian Air Force will receive new Su-57 jet fighters this year,” Rostec head Sergey Chemezov said on the company’s Telegram channel. 

  Chemezov said the “production speed” of the stealth fighter jets “will be increased.” He said the plant is based in Russia’s Far East and is undergoing expansion to ramp up output. 

  

  The multirole fifth-generation fighter was first delivered to Russia’s Aerospace Force in 2019. A video surfaced in 2018 of the jets used in Syria for combat operations. 

  Su-57 over Syria. Video from Russian MoD pic.twitter.com/iCEnKfvV74

  — Yuri Lyamin (@imp_navigator) November 19, 2018

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

  Meanwhile, the US has been training for aerial warfare against Su-57s. We noted in 2019, Nellis Air Force Base had a General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon painted to mimic Russia’s fifth-generation stealth fighter. 

  

  “The next world war will be fought with fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic weapons,” we said in 2019. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 22:00

• This $5 Billion Dubai Moon Hotel Will Simulate An Outer Space Experience On Earth
  This $5 Billion Dubai Moon Hotel Will Simulate An Outer Space Experience On Earth

  Authored by Elijah Cohen via TheMindUnleashed.com,

  The most populous city in the United Arab Emirates is due to be remodeled by a brand new hotel, which Moon World Resorts believes will live up to Dubai’s reputation for opulent building design.

  The Canadian corporation intends to construct a total of four MOON resorts, with Dubai being the location of the first one.

  

  Standing at 735-foot-tall, the copy of the Moon will have all of the conveniences and luxuries that one would anticipate from a high-end resort, in addition to unique experiences that are designed to simulate a trip to Earth’s moon.

  The goal of the $5 billion venture is to bring the experience of “lunar surface” and “lunar colony” down to Earth so that it may be enjoyed by tourists interested in space travel. Once it is finished being constructed, Sandra Matthews and Michael Henderson, who are the creators of the company, believe that the resort will be able to welcome up to 10 million guests each year.

  The moon “colony” alone has the ability to host 2.5 million visitors annually, and there are plans to include a training platform for space programs and astronauts within the complex as well.

  Naturally, MOON is still a resort, and as such, there will be a wide variety of activities and amenities available for visitors to try out and appreciate throughout their stay. The resort will have a nightclub, an event center that can accommodate as many as 5,000 people, a spa and wellness center, a jazz piano bar, and a multi-level lounge designed to seem like an alien spaceship.

  A sizable conference center is being built with the intention of luring exhibitors from the aerospace and technology industries.

  As part of its private home concept, MOON will also have 144 premium apartments that are available for purchase. Every 2,000-square-foot home has a lifetime membership to MOON, which gives the owner access to a variety of special benefits.

  The business anticipates that it will take two years to build this one-of-a-kind resort, even if the formal designs for Dubai are still in the process of being approved. “From an architectural, engineering, and design perspective, MOON can be built,” Henderson shares.

  

  Moon resort in Vegas.

  Moon World Resorts has a history of creating waves, therefore this is not the first time that they have done so. The business made the announcement in 2021 that they intended to bring MOON to Las Vegas at some point in the future. Henderson said at the time that he and Matthews had first conceived of the idea in the year 2000 and that “the objective was to develop an authentic, mega-scale reproduction of planet Earth’s Moon, incorporating the world’s largest sphere.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 21:40

• China Accuses NSA Of Hacking Into Government-Funded University
  China Accuses NSA Of Hacking Into Government-Funded University

  Three months after US security agencies warned that Chinese-backed hackers had been targeting “major telecommunications companies and network service providers” for over two years, Chinese state media on Thursday accused the National Security Agency (NSA) of infiltrating a government-funded university and gaining access to ‘China’s telecommunications network,’ CNBC reports.

  

  Citing an unnamed source, the Global Times accused the NSA of phishing – a hacking technique which uses malicious links or other methods to trick users into providing access credentials – to gain access to Northwestern Polytechnical University, where they allegedly stole “core technology data including key network equipment configuration, network management data, and core operational data,” along with other files.

  The report goes on to claim that the NSA infiltrated Chinese telecom operators in an effort to “control the country’s infrastructure.”

  The Global Times, citing its unnamed source, reported that more details about the attack on Northwestern Polytechnical University will be released soon.

  For several years, China has accused the U.S. of cyberattacks but has not been specific. However, in the last few weeks, Beijing has been more vocal in attributing particular attacks to the U.S., in a ramping up of tensions between the two nations in the cyber sphere. -CNBC

  The alleged attack was discovered by China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center several weeks ago, which also accused the US of engaging in “tens of thousands” of cyberattacks on Chinese targets.

  Conversely, the US has accused China of massive hacking operations – with FBI Director Christopher Wray claiming in February that Beijing’s cyberattacks have become “more brazen, more damaging, than ever before,” in their attempts to steal US information and technology.

  In June, US security agencies warned that Chinese-backed hackers were targeting “major telecommunications companies and network service providers” since 2020.

  In a June 7 cybersecurity advisory, they urged those affected to take immediate remedial action.

  The advisory, coauthored by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said the hackers “continue to exploit publicly known vulnerabilities,” using tactics to bypass defenses and keeping themselves undetected.

  The agencies pointed out that the hackers allegedly utilized open-source tools, such as RouterSploit and RouterScan, and known software flaws in networking devices such as routers.

  “[T]hese devices are often overlooked by cyber defenders, who struggle to maintain and keep pace with routine software patching of Internet-facing services and endpoint devices,” noted the agencies.

  The agencies did not identify the victim companies in the advisory, but they included a list of the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) most frequently exploited by the Chinese regime’s hackers since 2020, together with vulnerability types and the major vendors—Cisco, Citrix, D-Link, Fortinet, and Netgear.

  They urged potential victims to shore up their networks by applying immediate patches, updating infrastructure, and disabling unnecessary ports and protocols.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 21:20

• Sri Lanka Mulls Taking On More Debt From China, India To Pay For Energy
  Sri Lanka Mulls Taking On More Debt From China, India To Pay For Energy

  Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

  Sri Lanka is considering purchasing solar panels through a credit line from India and China to offset rising electricity tariffs, Power and Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekara said on Tuesday.

  

  The Sri Lankan government raised electricity tariffs by 75 percent in August, the first increase in nine years, triggering protest among local Buddhist clergy who were struggling to pay their electricity bills.

  The Central Provincial Sangha of the Ramanya Nikaya said it would switch off the lights in all temples in the province on Poya Day—a Buddhist holiday—to protest against the increase in electricity costs, Daily Mirror reported.

  Speaking in parliament on Tuesday, Wijesekara proposed using renewable energy sources and installing solar panels for religious institutions, particularly those that pay higher electricity charges.

  “We have the problem of foreign exchange, making it difficult to pay for imports. One solution we have to think is to have a credit line from India or China as panels are imported from them,” he said, according to the Press Trust of India.

  The state-owned Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is heavily in debt, owing more than 80 billion rupees ($225 million) in fuel costs and another 46 billion rupees ($129 million) to renewable energy suppliers.

  Daily Power Cuts

  Sri Lanka’s population of 22 million people has been struggling with hours-long daily power cuts due to the government’s acute lack of foreign currency to pay for essential imports.

  The Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL) reportedly scheduled an 80-minute power cut on Tuesday and Wednesday, citing inadequate power generation caused by a fuel shortage.

  A few weeks earlier, PUCSL imposed power cuts on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28, and later extended to Aug. 29 for the same reason. Sri Lanka also imposed a nationwide 13-hour power cut in March, according to local reports.

  CEB Engineers Union President Anil Ranjith said at a press conference on Sept. 15 that Sri Lanka’s ongoing power cuts could continue for at least three years if the government refused to increase the nation’s electricity supply.

  “The demand peaks at night times. The power mainly comes from hydro, thermal and, if there is wind, then from wind power plants. If we don’t have coal or oil, then we have to go for power cuts,” he said, Economy Next reported.

  “Until we increase our supply, through thermal, wind, [liquefied natural gas], coal or solar, and store our energy, the power cuts will continue,” Ranjith added.

  IMF Agreement

  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier approved a $2.9 billion bailout fund under a new 48-month Extended Fund Facility to help restore Sri Lanka’s macroeconomic stability and debt sustainability.

  The IMF said that its deal with Sri Lanka is contingent on approval by IMF management and the executive board, as well as on financing assurances from Sri Lanka’s creditors, including China, Japan, and India.

  President Ranil Wickremesinghe told reporters on Monday that Sri Lanka will hold talks with major creditors India, China, and Japan, as well as private creditors.

  “While we look at our issues of debt, we also have to repay what we have borrowed. This means we need 25 years from now to 2048. Then we will be 100, by then will be a prosperous society,” Wickremesinghe said in his speech.

  Sri Lanka defaulted its debt in May. The island nation has $10 billion in bilateral debt as of August, of which 44 percent is owed to China, according to the Finance Ministry (pdf). Japan holds 32 percent of Sri Lanka’s debt, while India holds another 10 percent.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 21:00

• Activist Group Suing DeSantis Received Nearly $1.4 Million From Soros Network
  Activist Group Suing DeSantis Received Nearly $1.4 Million From Soros Network

  An activist group which has filed a class-action lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida officials over last week’s migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Network.

  

  According to Fox News, nonprofit immigrant advocacy group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the suit on behalf of Alianza Americas, which was described in a press release as “a network of migrant-led organizations supporting immigrants across the United States.”

  The lawsuit was filed in the District of Massachusetts, and alleges that DeSantis and other officials “designed and executed a premeditated, fraudulent and illegal scheme centered on exploiting this vulnerability for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal, financial and political interests.”

  

  According to Open Society Foundation records, Alianza Americas received $1,383,947 between 2016 and 2020 – with grants coming from three Soros nonprofits; Open Society Institute, Open Society Policy Center and Foundation to Promote Open Society.

  

  The grants were to support policy advocacy on immigration, a Global Compact for Migration initiative and to strengthen the group’s international work in Central America and Mexico.

  The law firm filing the suit, Lawyers for Civil Rights, received $50,000 from the Borealis Philanthropy in 2019, tax forms show. Borealis is a left-wing donor-advised fund that acts as an intermediary steering Democratic money to organizations.

  Borealis has partnered with Black Lives Matter and the left-wing Marguerite Casey Foundation, which advocates for the abolishment of policing and prisons. -Fox News

  Another liberal group, the MacArthur Foundation, gave Alianza Americas $1.26 million between 2008 and 2020.

  The class-action lawsuit filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights alleges that migrants were told they were headed towards Boston or Washington, “which is completely false,” and that they were induced to cross state lines under false pretenses – carrying perks such as $10 McDonald’s gift certificates.

  DeSantis’ office, meanwhile, says that 50 Venezuelan migrants voluntarily signed forms agreeing to be flown to Martha’s Vineyard last week, and called the lawsuit legally flawed.

  “I agree to hold the benefactor or its designated representatives harmless of all liability arising out of or in any way relating to any injuries and damages that may occur during the agreed transport to locations outside of Texas until the final destination of Massachusetts,” states the form.

  

  DeSantis’ office cited the form as evidence that the migrants were not misled.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 20:40

• Whistleblowers Allege Intelligence, Command-And-Control Failures At US Capitol Police, Lawmaker Says
  Whistleblowers Allege Intelligence, Command-And-Control Failures At US Capitol Police, Lawmaker Says

  Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Several U.S. Capitol Police whistleblowers have exposed what they call intelligence failures leading up to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and problems in the law enforcement agency’s command structure, an Illinois congressman said.

  

  Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, said whistleblower testimony speaks directly to the need to reform the $460 million police agency with some 2,300 employees.

  “We have heard from several whistleblowers within USCP who fear retribution, and we take seriously the need to protect their identities,” Davis told The Epoch Times in a statement. “Many have brought to light issues with the command-and-control structure of USCP, including the Capitol Police Board.

  News of the USCP whistleblowers came shortly after an email surfaced from a former USCP intelligence analyst to senior staff at the agency. The memo by Eric Hoar, dated Jan. 9, 2021, blasted the USCP for failure to share information on threats from groups that talked about attacking the Capitol on January 6.

  “We analysts have been reporting for weeks that patriot groups are commenting on social media their intentions to storm the U.S. Capitol with overwhelming numbers,” Hoar wrote in the email, disclosed by John Solomon at Just the News.

  “I don’t know what was occurring behind the scenes, but I hope that information was briefed with the veracity it deserved and not just a one-time event assessment,” wrote Hoar, who was assigned to the USCP Intelligence and Inter-Agency Coordination Division. He has since left Capitol Police.

  

  Solomon’s report said in the two weeks leading up to January 6, USCP received “detailed warnings from the FBI, Homeland Security Department, the U.S. Marshals Service and D.C. Metropolitan Police that right-wing extremists were plotting to storm the Capitol and attack lawmakers.”

  Hoar said he hoped his memo would “provide insight to help prevent another disaster.”

  “The notion that valid intelligence is trumped by optics or political decisions is unacceptable and puts lives in danger,” he wrote.

  Bulletin Reflected No Threats

  Hoar’s concerns (pdf) were not reflected in the information shared in a Jan. 5, 2021, memo (pdf) from the USCP’s Civil Disturbance Unit (CDU). Titled, “CDU Operational Plan,” the document’s threat analysis reads, “At this time there are no specific known threats related to the Joint Session of Congress – Electoral College Vote Certification.”

  The CDU plan said if violence occurred on Jan. 6, the plan was to use the FN-303 anti-riot gun along with the PepperBall launcher system, which deploys powdered chemical irritants. Kinetic impact projectiles “will not be fired indiscriminately into crowds,” the memo said.

  Numerous protesters were injured on January 6 when flashbangs, dispersion grenades, and other explosive devices were fired and tossed into the tightly packed crowds on the west side of the Capitol. The heavy use of munitions was chronicled in The Epoch Times documentary, “The Real Story of Jan. 6.”

  About 140 police officers from USCP and the Metropolitan Police Department were injured on January 6.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 20:20

• Nobody Cares: Trump Approval Rating Remains Stable Despite Multiple Investigations
  Nobody Cares: Trump Approval Rating Remains Stable Despite Multiple Investigations

  Despite the best efforts of the January 6th committee and Biden’s ‘weaponized‘ DOJ (which took 18 months to stage a public raid on the former President’s home), Americans just don’t care.

  

  According to the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll – voters held nearly identical views from those earlier in the summer when it comes to a favorable view of Trump, whether they think he committed serious federal crimes, and who they would support in a potential 2024 Trump-Biden rematch.

  Also worth noting that the Times poll sampled 49% Biden voters and 42% Trump voters, weighted towards younger Democrats and older Republicans.

  

  Overall, 44 percent of voters viewed Mr. Trump favorably, and 53 percent viewed him unfavorably. The recent poll was fielded early this month, after news of the Justice Department’s inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of confidential documents but before the New York attorney general announced she was suing Mr. Trump and his family business.

  That level of Trump support has effectively been unchanged since the last Times/Siena poll, which was fielded in July amid televised hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. It was also fundamentally similar to levels of support Times/Siena polls and other surveys found in recent years. –NYT

  Approximately half of voters said they thought Trump had committed serious federal crimes, while 38% said they thought he hadn’t – which was essentially identical to similar responses from July.

  The Times also acknowledges that Trump supporters’ loyalty towards the former president “has long been clear in his favorability ratings, which remained stable throughout his time in office, even during moments of peak turmoil, such as his first impeachment trial.”

  Many of Mr. Trump’s signature policy proposals have remained fairly popular among the public, the September poll found. Half of all respondents favored a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, including more than 15 percent of those who said they would vote for Mr. Biden in 2024. And a majority said they agreed more with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party when it came to illegal immigration. -NYT

  Meanwhile, the poll also found that 49% of registered voters think Democrats “have gone too far in pushing a ‘woke’ ideology on issues related to race and gender,” while 34% think Democrats have not gone far enough in exposing “racism and sexism.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 20:00

• NATO Says China's Role In Ukraine War A "Challenge" To The Alliance
  NATO Says China’s Role In Ukraine War A “Challenge” To The Alliance

  Authored by Kyle Anzalone & Connor Freeman via The Libertarian Institute,

  During remarks on Wednesday, the civilian head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) slammed China as a “challenge” to the alliance. In an interview with Reuters, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Beijing’s support for the war in Ukraine, its opposition to NATO expansion, and its territorial claims justify the alliance assigning China this label. 

  Largely in response to Washington’s increasing hostility, Moscow and Beijing have strengthened their ties for well over a decade. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, China and Russia carried out several rounds of military exercises. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have met several times since the war began, reaffirming the two Asian powers’ growing ties. 

  While Beijing has not given public support to Moscow’s war, China has refused several demands to condemn Russia’s invasion. Beijing has drastically increased its economic ties with Moscow as Russia has become more isolated from Western markets. 

  

  After Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Washington leveled massive sanctions on Russia and many NATO member states agreed to scale back Russian energy purchases. The intention was to crush the Russian economy and disable the Kremlin’s war machine. 

  However, the Western economic war on Russia caused energy prices to spike, allowing Moscow to replace the shrinking European market with Asian customers. While Russian oil is selling below market rates, Moscow’s increased exports to China, India and Turkey pushed the rouble to seven-year highs this summer. 

  “The sum of all is this just increases the importance of NATO allies standing together and realizing that China is part of the security challenges we need to face today and in the future,” Stoltenberg said in the interview with Reuters. 

  Meanwhile, India and Turkey have followed Beijing in importing more Russian goods. Ankara is a NATO member state. The US and several other NATO members recently engaged in war games with India.

  Stoltenberg also took issue with Beijing over its opposition to NATO expansion. At the fall of the USSR in 1990, the North Atlantic alliance only had 16 members. In the 30 years since, NATO has added 14, soon to be 16, new members. Many of the new additions to the alliance are former Warsaw Pact or USSR states. Moscow has long protested NATO expansion. In 2008, the US Ambassador to Russia said expanding the alliance to Ukraine and Georgia violated all of Russia’s red lines. NATO has also expanded its global reach. 

  NATO chief Stoltenberg regards 🇨🇳 as a security challenge because:
  1. 🇨🇳 cooperation with 🇷🇺 since 🇷🇺 invasion of 🇺🇦
  2. 🇨🇳 “coercive behavior” in the South China Sea & against its neighbors
  3. 🇨🇳 violate basic human rights@SolomonYue @robert_spaldinghttps://t.co/7fTRkRNWFW

  — Future (@PplFuture) September 21, 2022

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

  This week, NATO members, the US and Canada, conducted a joint transit through the Taiwan Strait. Last year – eyeing Beijing and following Washinton’s imperial lead, with British, French and German warships sailing the South China Sea.

  This year, NATO targeted China in its new Strategic Concept document. UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has even openly called for a “global NATO”  to defend Taiwan and confront China in the Asia Pacific. Under Truss, Beijing will be classified as a “threat” to England’s “national security for the first time… for a tougher approach to Beijing,” the Times reported last month. In his first Congressional address, Biden boasted he “told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe…”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 19:40

• Pennsylvania County Sues Dominion Voting Systems Over 'Severe Anomalies' In 2020 Election
  Pennsylvania County Sues Dominion Voting Systems Over ‘Severe Anomalies’ In 2020 Election

  Officials in Fulton County, Pennsylvania have sued Dominion Voting Systems, alleging “severe” issues with voting data discovered after the 2020 US election, Just the News reports.

  

  The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims that county officials “became aware of severe anomalies in the Dominion Voting Systems due to the inaccuracy and/or inability to reconcile voter data with votes actually cast and counted” by the company’s proprietary system at or about the time of the 2020 election.

  Officials cite a report from earlier this month which revealed that “security measures necessary to harden and secure” Dominion’s systems had not been performed, and that “external USB hard drives had been inserted in the machines on several occasions” when there was “no known list of approved external drives that could have been or were used or inserted into the machines.”

  The county allegedly discovered that a “python script” had been installed on one device, which was “connected to an external device on an external network” reportedly located in Canada.

  The script “can exploit and create any number of vulnerabilities including, external access to the system, data export of the tabulations, or introduction of other metrics not part of or allowed by the certification process.”

  

  Officials also claim that the machines were running a July, 2016 version of Windows Defender, which would have left the machine vulnerable to “viruses or malicious software” created after that date.

  The suit alleges “breach of contract and breach of warranty, and breach of other common-law and statutory duties, by Dominion,” which the county says entitles it to “all fees, expenditures and costs made in reliance upon and in consideration for the provision by Dominion of a serviceable product that was fit for its intended purpose and use.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 19:20

• Latino Vote To Determine Outcome In Dozens Of 2022 Midterm Races
  Latino Vote To Determine Outcome In Dozens Of 2022 Midterm Races

  Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  How 32 million eligible Latinos will vote in dozens of pivotal House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections across the country in November will be vital in determining which party controls Congress after this year’s midterm elections.

  

  Latinos make up the second-largest voting bloc in the United States, constituting 18.7 percent of the nation’s total population.

  That’s no secret, of course, with candidates of all persuasions aggressively soliciting the Latino vote with Spanish-language political ads in tight races in Texas, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Oregon, and Florida.

  The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Sept. 8 announced it had hosted this year more than 5,000 separate events appealing for minority votes at 38 voter outreach centers in 19 states, including dozens labeled “Hispanic community centers.” The campaign is meant to sustain the momentum Republicans gained among Latino voters during the Trump presidency.

  Meanwhile, Democratic heavyweights are directly appealing to Latino voters to seal erosion in what had been a solid, reliable bank of support. Critics within and without the party say Democrats may have taken the Hispanic vote for granted and are only now belatedly focusing on it.

  President Joe Biden addressed the 45th Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Gala on Sept. 15. He used the occasion to tout how the American Rescue Plan benefits Latinos by providing access to vaccines, better health care, and keeping schools open.

  On Sept. 25, former President Barak Obama, a Democrat, will address the 5th annual L’ATTITUDE Conference, the nation’s “premier Latino business event,” in San Diego, Calif.

  Both parties are trying to tailor their candidates’ campaigns to appeal to Latino votes with tactics and strategies based on data and polls collected and analyzed since June by research firms, media groups, and campaigns.

  Regardless of how the data is interpreted, there is ample opportunity for candidates of both parties to gain favor with a Latino “voting bloc” that is hardly monolithic but—despite distinct ethnic and regional variations—appears predominately commonly concerned with jobs, cost-of-living, and the economy.

  In 2020, when Latinos cast one-10th of ballots in the presidential election, Biden received an estimated 61 percent of that vote, down from over 70 percent Barak Obama received in his two elections.

  Latino voters nationwide identified jobs, the economy, health care, schools, and public safety as top priorities in a survey of Latino voters conducted in July by UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy group. A Siena College poll of Hispanic voters published Sept. 16 reaffirmed the findings.

  Both surveys indicate that Latinos are amenable to Republican messaging on jobs and the economy, but a significant majority want progress on gun control and immigration policies. An overwhelming number favor legal access to abortion.

  The emergence of abortion access as an issue among Latino voters may spell trouble for some Republican hopefuls. For the first time since it conducted Latino voter surveys this century, UnidosUS reported access to abortion was cited by Latino voters as a top five issue, with more than 70 percent of respondents saying it should remain legal.

  This emerging trend in the wake of June’s U.S. Supreme Court repeal of Roe v Wade could stem the eroding Latino support for their party, Democrats say.

  That claim may have some validation in the Siena College survey of 522 Hispanic voters conducted Sept. 6-14 within a broader poll of 1,399 registered voters nationwide. That survey found Latinos are more likely to agree with Democrats on more issues than Republicans but will support GOP candidates strong on crime and policing.

  Worryingly for Democratic candidates, 40 percent of Latino respondents in the Siena poll expressed reservations about the Democratic Party’s progressive wing’s focus on race and gender.

  Most Latino survey respondents ultimately said their vote would come down to which candidates best address their economic concerns. According to the Sienna poll, Latino voters are evenly split on which party they think can best deliver jobs and lower the cost of living.

  Overall, 56 percent of the Sienna poll respondents said they would vote blue, and 32 percent said they would vote red in November.

  While that may sound like good news for Democrats, it may not be enough good news for the party to thwart the forecast that Republicans will retake the House and Senate.

  According to the Siena survey, young Latino voters, especially men in Texas and Florida, are increasingly registering as Republicans.  That trend is confirmed in a Sept. 2-11 nationwide survey of 400 registered Latino voters published Sept. 14 by BSP Research.

  All the data, polls, and analyses add to uncertainty for Nov. 8 candidates in dozens of U.S. House races where Latinos constitute 20 percent or more of the constituency.

  The “Latino vote” is also expected to be a key determinant in several close gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, such as Arizona and Nevada, where Spanish speakers comprise 25 percent of eligible voters.

  Latinos are projected to sway outcomes even in districts or states without a large presence in overall voter numbers. In Pennsylvania, Latinos account for less than 10 percent of total voters but have proven to be key in determining winners and losers in close races.

  

  Arizona

  Latinos constitute one-third of Arizona’s residents and one-quarter of the state’s registered voters, according to a July analysis by UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute. By some estimates, Latinos will comprise half the state’s population by 2050.

  Approximately 840,000 Latinos voted in the 2020 election in Arizona, which saw a record 3.4 million turnout. Biden edged Trump by 10,457 votes.

  Approximately 644,600 will cast ballots on Nov. 8, according to one forecast. That would amount to a record Latino turnout for an Arizona midterm election and four times the number who voted in the 2002 primary.

  According to the Arizona Secretary of State’s office, 45 percent of approximately 1 million Latinos registered to vote in the state are enrolled Democrats, 15 percent are registered as Republicans, and nearly 40 percent are not affiliated with a party, reflecting a national trend among all voters in registering as independents or “NAs,” meaning “Non-Affiliated” with a party.

  How Latinos within that unaffiliated contingent will vote could determine if incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) defeats Trump-endorsed Republican challenger Blake Masters as he is favored to do, and if Trump-endorsed Republican Kari Lake beats Democrat Kati Hobbes, Arizona’s current secretary of state in the “tossup” gubernatorial race.

  Lake has made border security an integral component of her campaign, posting on Twitter after her primary win that on “Day 1, I take my hand off the Bible, give the Oath of Office and we Declare an Invasion on our Southern Border.”

  But Arizona Latinos, while identifying immigration policy as a concern and opposed to “open borders,” do not rate “border security” as a high priority, making it uncertain how the state’s Latino voters will receive Lake’s campaign.

  In one survey, Arizona Latinos said they favor keeping abortion legal by 30 percentage points, which hasn’t caused Lake to change her campaign messaging but has prompted Masters to remove his anti-abortion stance from his campaign website.

  

  Pennsylvania

  Latinos constitute only 7.6 percent of the Keystone State’s residents and 5.3 percent of its registered voters, according to an analysis by Pew Research. But they are regarded as one of the difference-making constituencies in several congressional district races.

  While cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh include long-established Latino neighborhoods that traditionally vote Democratic, demographic shifts indicate pockets of GOP-registered Latino voters in cities such as Reading and Allentown.

  Therefore, Pennsylvania Latino voters are targeted as potential lynchpins in the battleground race for governor between Trump-endorsed Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) and Democrat Josh Shapiro. The same is true for the U.S. Senate race between Trump-endorsed TV celebrity Dr. Mehmet Öz and Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.

  Latinos made up 4 percent of the total turnout in Pennsylvania’s 2020 election, up from 3 percent in the 2018 midterms, according to Pew Research.

  Latino voters backed Biden by at least a 3-1 margin in Pennsylvania in 2020, according to UCLA. That proved pivotal in his narrowly winning the battleground state.

  “Latinos in Pennsylvania will play a decisive role in the 2022 election cycle,” Mi Familia Vota National Programs Manager Irving Zavaleta said during an Aug. 25 media call.

  According to NALEO’s National Latino Voter Tracking Poll, Pennsylvania Latino respondents generally favored Democrats over Republicans by a 32 percentage-point margin; 21 percent said they were undecided.

  Seventy-three percent of respondents said abortion should remain legal, with 41 percent saying it was a “deal-breaker” for them; 83 percent said it was important for Pennsylvania’s elected officials to speak out against white nationalism and white supremacy.

  Only 61 percent of NALEO survey respondents in Pennsylvania were sure they’d vote in November. Zavaleta’s said that relatively low percentage. He added that the large percentage of undecideds among those who say they will vote indicates there has been little outreach to Latino voters in the state by candidates.

  

  Colorado

  According to Univision’s Hispanic Vote, Latinos constitute 21 percent of Colorado’s residents and cast 11 percent of the state’s vote in 2020.

  NALEO projects that 8.9 percent more Latinos will vote in this year’s midterm election compared to 2018.

  According to a May study from Emerson College’s nationwide initiative on Latinos, non-registered Colorado Latino voters were split over whether their vote would make a difference, with 41 percent believing their votes don’t matter, 40 percent saying they could be swayed to vote  “if …more informed”, and but 39 percent saying they have no intention of voting.

  Libre Initiative Action, an Hispanic outreach group backed by Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, maintains that concerns over inflation and the cost of living among Latinos are giving Republicans an opportunity to win the U.S. Senate race between GOP challenger and underdog Joe O’Dea and incumbent Democrat Sen. Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) Both are running Spanish-language campaign ads.

  One of seven new U.S. House districts created nationwide following post-2020 Census redistricting, Colorado’s Congressional District 8 (CD 8) has the largest concentration of Hispanic residents, at 38 percent, of any Colorado congressional district.

  CD 8’s inaugural election in November pits state Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-Thornton), a pediatrician who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, against Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer (R-Fort Lupton).

  The RNC earlier this year opened a “Hispanic Community Center” in Thornton to appeal to CD 8 voters. At the same time, Libre Initiative Action has been very active on behalf of Kirkmeyer’s platform, claiming it has knocked on more than 4,000 doors in the district since August.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 19:00

• Azov Fighters For Pro-Kremlin Oligarch? Biggest Prisoner Swap Of War Has Outraged Some In Russia
  Azov Fighters For Pro-Kremlin Oligarch? Biggest Prisoner Swap Of War Has Outraged Some In Russia

  Turkey’s government is touting that it was President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who was a main driver behind a successful prisoner swap between the two warring sides of Russia and Ukraine, resulting in the exchange of over 200 prisoners of war. Some reports are saying the Saudi government also helped mediate the deal. Erdoğan while speaking in New York City on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly said it was an “important step” towards ending the war.

  It was a major swap involving the freeing of 215 high-profile Ukrainian prisoners of war, notably leading Azov militants and even an Azov battalion commander and his deputy, for 55 Russian troops. But importantly, crucial to the deal was the return of Kremlin-ally and wealthy businessman Viktor Medvedchuk, who had been arrested by Ukrainian authorities in the opening months of the invasion on charges of treason. Medvedchuk had long been seen as Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine, and the two are said to be personal friends.

  

  But the deal has sparked outrage in some political and media circles in Russia, given that – as The Intercept and much of the mainstream media previously recognized – Azov regiment is a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military group, and is especially hated in Russia, also having not long ago been formally designated a terrorist organization. On the list of those freed from Russian detention also appear to be a handful of foreign fighters from the US and UK.

  “Wednesday’s record prisoner swap between Moscow and Kyiv nearly seven months into the war saw the release of fighters from Ukraine’s Azov Battalion who led the defense of Mariupol in the first months of the war that later became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance,” The Moscow Times writes. “Moscow’s decision to release Azov soldiers, including the battalion’s commander and his deputy, was seen as a betrayal by pro-war and far-right voices.”

  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first proposed a major prisoner swap in April, just after images of Viktor Medvedchuk in handcuffs appeared in the media. “I propose to the Russian Federation to exchange ‘your guy’ for our boys and our girls who are now in Russian captivity. It is therefore important that our law enforcement and military also consider this possibility,” Zelensky said in the video address at the time. “We will establish the full truth about all these savages. No matter how much time and effort it takes, we will find them all,” Zelensky said, warning also that Ukrainian forces will capture many more soldiers and Russia sympathizers such as Medvedchuk. He stressed at the time this should be taken as a “warning” – saying, “Let Medvedchuk be an example for you.”

  Below: after Medvedchuk’s arrest, when Ukraine undertook a “purge” of influential Ukrainians who were seen as Kremlin sympathizers…

  Zelensky’s official telegram account announces that SBU caught the fugitive oligarch and Putin’s close friend Viktor Medvedchuk. Camouflage and all. pic.twitter.com/DkWa5xlOEq

  — Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) April 12, 2022

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  Videos have been circulating late Wednesday into Thursday showing scenes of each side’s prisoners after having been released…

  Video of prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine, which reportedly included swap of pro-Russian Ukrainian MP Viktor Medvedchuk for defenders of Mariupol #Ukraine #Russia pic.twitter.com/CAVeD5Hj6S

  — Danny Armstrong (@DannyWArmstrong) September 21, 2022

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  Some ten foreigners were among those let go by Russia, including Americans and British nationals. Ukraine’s Zelensky is meanwhile doing a victory lap:

  “This is clearly a victory for our state, for our entire society,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address, adding that the swap had been in the works for quite a long time.

  Aidan Aslin and a group of foreigners have been allowed to leave Russia after Saudi Arabia offered to mediate Aslin shares this emotional message and said We just want to let everyone know that we are out of the danger zone#Aidan #Aslin #group #foreigners #Russia #Saudi pic.twitter.com/JVtM7ASzyd

  — Shahryar Sultan (@Shahryar_Sultan) September 21, 2022

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  Kiev officials are currently alleging that some of those freed Ukrainians show signs of having been tortured. According to further details of what’s being hailed as the biggest and most high-profile prisoner swap thus far in the conflict: 

  Ten prisoners of war from countries including the United States and Britain were earlier on Wednesday transferred to Saudi Arabia as part of the exchange between Moscow and Kyiv, Zelenskyy said.

  “We have managed to liberate 215 people,” the head of Zelenskyy’s office, Andriy Yermak, announced on television. Zelenskyy said five military commanders including leaders of the defense of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol were taken to Türkiye as part of an operation prepared well in advance and agreed with Erdoğan.

  The released prisoners will remain in Türkiye “in total security and in comfortable conditions” until the end of the war, Zelenskyy added.

  Fifty-five Russian servicemen arrived in Russia, captured in the following TASS photo…

  

  But from Moscow’s point of view, this could serve to accentuate Russia’s battlefield setbacks amid the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the East – given according to some critics its forces should have never been this much on the defensive to the point of having to broker a “bad” deal in the first place.

  The Wall Street Journal in reporting on still-emerging details quoted the following Russian pundits who are outraged:

  Igor Girkin, a former intelligence officer who led pro-Russian militants in a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine in 2014, denounced the release of the Azov commanders as treachery and said it was an insult to those now being mobilized.

  “The release…is worse than a crime…and worse than a mistake. It is incredible stupidity,” he wrote. “It was apparently impossible to do this at least a couple of days before the presidential decree announcing mobilization.”

  …“It is very strange when Russian heroes are met like this. Empty airfield, no flags, no flowers. Not to mention any greeters,” wrote Andrey Medvedev, a journalist who is often quoted by Kremlin supporters.

  And more:

  Dmitry Seleznev, another pro-war blogger who writes for the WarGonzo Telegram channel, was also critical. “I am not personally against Azov fighters being exchanged. But the fact that Azov commanders must now holiday in Turkey for the rest of the special military operation as a condition for their exchange is a bit of a mockery.”

  Source: Putin made a personal appeal to Erdogan to facilitate the release of Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, during a meeting in Sochi on 5 August.

  Erdogan later that month visited Lviv, where he met Zelensky, struck a deal on 200 Ukrainian POWshttps://t.co/GXk9GGb0wV

  — Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) September 22, 2022

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  A fresh UK tabloid news headline on the swap:

  

  UK Prime Minister Liz Truss announced, “Hugely welcome news that five British nationals held by Russian-backed proxies in eastern Ukraine are being safely returned, ending months of uncertainty and suffering for them and their families.”

  All of this comes, ironically enough, as conscripts and reservists have been seen lining up ready to board military buses and transport planes in cities and towns across Russia following Putin’s ‘partial mobilization’ order from the day prior, headed to the frontlines in Ukraine.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 18:40

• 24 Attorneys General Demand Credit Card Companies Drop Plans To Track Gun Sales
  24 Attorneys General Demand Credit Card Companies Drop Plans To Track Gun Sales

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

  Two dozen Republican attorneys general have sent a letter to Visa, Mastercard, and American Express demanding the credit card companies abandon plans to track gun sales in the United States through firearm-specific transaction codes.

  

  Credit card companies face pressure from gun control groups and lawmakers sympathetic to their cause to adopt new merchant category codes (MCC) for firearms, which now fall into the “general merchandise” category.

  This, in turn, was prompted by a decision on the part of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a Switzerland-based group that sets and monitors quality standards for various industries, to establish firearm-specific codes.

  Reacting to the ISO decision, Visa said in a statement that it would “proceed with next steps, while ensuring we protect all legal commerce on the Visa network in accordance with our long-standing rules.”

  The National Rifle Association (NRA) criticized the shift, calling it an erosion of Second Amendment rights.

  “The decision to create a firearm-specific code is nothing more than a capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding Americans, one transaction at a time,” an NRA spokesperson said.

  More pushback against the adoption of firearm-specific codes came in the form of a Sept. 20 letter penned by 24 Republican attorneys general.

  In the letter, the attorneys general argued that the new codes won’t protect public safety, unfairly single out law-abiding merchants and customers, and are prone to being misused.

  “First, efforts to track and monitor sales at gun stores would only result in vague and misleading information. This categorization would not recognize the difference, for example, between the purchase of a gun safe and a firearm,” they wrote.

  The codes also wouldn’t capture gun sales at department stores and so would result in “arbitrarily disparate treatment” targeting sellers and buyers at gun stores.

  “More importantly, purposefully tracking this information can only result in its misuse, either unintentional or deliberate,” the attorneys general wrote.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 18:20

• The Mobilization Begins – Scenes Around Russia: "What Are We Going For?"
  The Mobilization Begins – Scenes Around Russia: “What Are We Going For?”

  The day after President Putin’s partial mobilization order – wherein at least 300,000 Russian reservists have been called up – was met Thursday with some scenes of enthusiasm in Moscow, but also many instances of frustration and confusion in various parts of the country.

  “Summons delivered to eligible men at midnight. Schoolteachers pressed into handing out draft notices. Men given an hour to pack their things and appear at draft centers,” The Guardian observed. “Women sobbing as they sent their husbands and sons off to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

  First clips coming out of Russia this morning of draftees saying bye to their families. This from a small town in Yakutsk. Credits @taygainfo pic.twitter.com/tlaVRoDgLT

  — Pjotr Sauer (@PjotrSauer) September 22, 2022

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  Putin’s speech had cited a “threat to the territorial integrity” of Russia, but in some places sparked immediate protest by local anti-war voices who complain that the country’s young men will be sent to front lines in Ukraine as “cannon fodder”.

  This as Russian airports continue to be packed, and tickets abroad reportedly sold out for days or even weeks, as people with means exit the country on fears of being sent to fight…

  

  “Thousands of men across Russia were handed draft papers and NGOs helping conscripts were flooded with requests for help Thursday amid the military mobilization launched by President Vladimir Putin to provide extra manpower for the Ukraine war,” The Moscow Times reports Thursday.

  “One Muscovite who was detained with her husband at an anti-mobilization demonstration told The Moscow Times that male protesters were given draft papers at the police station.”

  Footage of men lined up on the tarmac of a military airbase, wearing civilian clothes while toting military gear bags, has emerged and was circulated on social media after being published by regional outlet Mash.

  Mash: Mobilized men at Magadan pic.twitter.com/BXVUHW443d

  — Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) September 22, 2022

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  According to a further description of another scene wherein a Moscow woman watched her husband leave for war:  

  “There was a military recruiting officer who gave the detained men draft notifications,” she told The Moscow Times. 

  “When the first person was asked to go to a separate room, we did not understand what was going on — but when he returned with a draft slip, we just started crying.”

  Meanwhile, it only took a few hours for another group of mobilised Russians to get dead drunk. “What are we going for? Where are going? F*ck knows!”, one concludes. pic.twitter.com/8XUP4UNbFP

  — Tadeusz Giczan (@TadeuszGiczan) September 22, 2022

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  Recruitment and mobilization has reportedly been met with some pushback and controversy particularly in outlying ethnic minority regions of the Russian Federation.

  Pretty powerful video. In Dagestan locals clearly don’t want to go to war with Ukraine. The recruiting officer argues they have to fight for the future. – We don’t even have a present, what future are you talking about,” replies a Dagestani man. pic.twitter.com/1O4ob2GhSN

  — Tadeusz Giczan (@TadeuszGiczan) September 22, 2022

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  Another regional report described of some clips being widely shared:

  One video, reportedly taken in Yakutia, shows the management of local companies summoning their workers and loading them onto buses heading to recruitment offices.

  Another video, taken in the province of Zabaykalsky Krai, north of Mongolia, shows local military enlistment officers “collecting cannon fodder” late at night.

  Videos from Chechnya have also appeared. Local warlord Ramzan Kadyrov has seemingly decided to implement Putin’s decree as quickly as possible, gathering several hundred young men.

  Tickets for travel abroad have skyrocketed in price, with most being for one-way flights out of the country. 

  Flights departing Moscow and St. Petersburg today. The @AP is reporting international flights departing Russia have either sold out or skyrocketed in price after Putin announced a mobilization of reservists.

  Search SVO, VKO, DME for Moscow airports and LED for St. Petersburg. pic.twitter.com/LV2PrkwPD9

  — Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 21, 2022

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  The Associated Press has meanwhile reported of ongoing anti-war protests popping up in various locales across the country, particularly in large cities: 

  As protest calls circulated online, the Moscow prosecutor’s office warned that organizing or participating in such actions could lead to up to 15 years in prison. Authorities issued similar warnings ahead of other protests recently. Wednesday’s were the first nationwide anti-war protests since the fighting began in late February.

  The state communication watchdog Roskomnadzor also warned media that access to their websites would be blocked for transmitting “false information” about the mobilization. It was unclear exactly what that meant.

  Protests in Moscow and St Petersburg today have grown pretty large. People chanting “No to War!” Dozens of arrests reported pic.twitter.com/9F4E5VIy9E

  — Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) September 21, 2022

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  Protests have been filmed in and around Moscow and St. Petersburg Wednesday night into Thursday, with hundreds of arrests reported…

  In #Moscow, #Russia, the police are detaining protesters against the mobilisation at an unauthorised #protest rally taking place tonight. The protester who is being detained is chanting “No to War!”.

  pic.twitter.com/rvqGhJuqMl

  — Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) September 21, 2022

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  One activist group was cited in The Guardian as saying of Putin’s Wednesday speech and military order related to Ukraine mobilization, “It’s not a partial mobilization, it’s a 100% mobilization.” 

  Men boarding buses in the Belgorod region after being handed their orders…

  «Папа, пока! Возвращайся!»

  Жуткое видео из Старого Оскола (Белгородская область) pic.twitter.com/YYuHFKvY3K

  — Холод (@holodmedia) September 22, 2022

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  Writes The Guardian: “During a televised interview on Wednesday, Shoigu said Russia would be targeting 300,000 draftees, mainly those with recent military experience. But the actual number in an order signed by Putin is secret.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/22/2022 – 18:00

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