- Russia Warns Of 'Non-Diplomatic' Response Over Kaliningrad Blockade
Russia Warns Of ‘Non-Diplomatic’ Response Over Kaliningrad Blockade
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has threatened that their response to transit restrictions on Kaliningrad by Lithuania will be “practical” and “not diplomatic,” the Jerusalem Post reports.
Over the past week, Lithuania has implemented a ban on various rail transit goods going to Russia’s far-western exclave of Kaliningrad to comply with EU sanctions on items such as coal, advanced technology, metals and construction materials.
“As for response measures, now possible measures are being worked out in an interdepartmental format,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told state-owned TASS. “Both Lithuania and the EU, through their diplomatic missions in Moscow, were told that such actions are inadmissible and that the steps taken must be changed and the situation returned to a legal and legitimate course. If this is not done, then, of course, and this was emphasized at all levels in Moscow, retaliatory actions will be inevitable.”
“On the question of what they will be…Will they be exclusively in the diplomatic plane? [The] answer is no. They will not be in the diplomatic, but in the practical plane,” she added.
The EU enforcement measure being implemented from Vilnius marks a complete break in a three decade long treaty that’s been in effect…
RUSSIAN-LITHUANIAN TREATY REGARDING KALININGRAD, 1993https://t.co/4LatUKPN6J pic.twitter.com/ahwCYWMt8c
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) June 19, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Kaliningrad’s governor Alikhanov has already called on Russian federal authorities to prepare tit-for-tat measures against Lithuania in wake of the transit ban.
The blockade of the Kaliningrad🇷🇺region may become a reason for the outbreak of war B/T Russia & NATO
🇪🇺has published a PR on the fifth package of sanctions against🇷🇺
The document,in particular, prohibits transit of goods by 🇷🇺&🇧🇾 transport operators through the territory of 🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/M7k2XAxP0S— Marialvw (@arktinentuuli) April 8, 2022
According to Zakharova, however, this ‘tit-for-tat’ may be a little more explosive than Lithuania counted on.
On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that while it’s “premature” to discuss possible Kremlin responses, “concrete measures” are under discussion in response to the sanctions. “There is no set format, here the main thing for us is to respond to such unfriendly steps, and not meet any deadlines,” he added.
Additionally on Wednesday, Leonid Slutsky, head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, stated that one possible response to the Kaliningrad restrictions could be cutting off Lithuania from the common electricity supply system between Russia, Belarus and the Baltic states, according to Interfax.
Slutsky added that another possible response could be banning the transit of Lithuanian truckers through Russia. -Jerusalem Post
Meanwhile, Moscow has responded to the use of Western arms in Ukraine.
According to a Thursday statement by Peskov, Russia’s defense ministry will monitor how the West is arming Ukraine with weapons from Germany and the US, adding that the weapons would have to “reach the frontline” without being destroyed on the way.
Peskov was responding to a question over whether Moscow would trust Ukraine’s promises to Western nations not to use provided weapons to attack Russia.
“We carefully record all episodes of the use of these weapons,” he continued. “So, if any of these weapons reach the front lines and are not destroyed by our military, we will track how they are being used.”
German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht on Wednesday told lawmakers in Berlin that Ukrainian counterpart Alexy Reznikov assured her that Kiev will only use Western weapons for self defense, and not to strike Russian territory. The day before, Germany delivered seven 155mm PzH 2000 howitzers and other military equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/24/2022 – 02:45 - UK Unveils New Law To Ease Strike Disruptions As Rail Network Paralysed For 2nd Time In A Week
UK Unveils New Law To Ease Strike Disruptions As Rail Network Paralysed For 2nd Time In A Week
Authored by Alexander Zhang via The Epoch Times,
The UK government has announced new legislation to enable businesses to supply agency workers to plug staffing gaps during industrial action, as train services were disrupted again by the second nationwide strike of the week.
Following widespread travel chaos on Tuesday, some 40,000 members of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers’ union (RMT) walked out again on Thursday, and are expected to go on strike again on Saturday.
Union leaders launched what they touted as the “biggest rail strike in modern history” after rail operators refused to agree to the union’s demands including a 7 percent pay rise.
On Thursday, the government announced new measures to help reduce disruption from strike action by removing the restrictions on businesses supplying temporary agency workers to cover striking staff.
‘Not Sustainable’
The move would reverse a legal restriction introduced under former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that prevents employers from hiring agency workers to cover for striking staff.
The government said the existing restriction “can have a disproportionate impact, including on important public services, causing severe disruption to the UK economy and society.”
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “Once again trade unions are holding the country to ransom by grinding crucial public services and businesses to a halt. The situation we are in is not sustainable.”
He said repealing the restrictions will “give businesses freedom to access fully skilled staff at speed, all while allowing people to get on with their lives uninterrupted to help keep the economy ticking.”
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that “far too many hard working families and businesses were unfairly affected by unions’ refusal to modernise” and the new legislation will “ensure any future strikes will cause even less disruption.”
Network Rail, which manages Britain’s rail network, welcomed the new legislation but the opposition Labour Party and unions condemned it as a “recipe for disaster.”
Millions Working From Home
On Thursday, major railway stations were much quieter than normal as services were crippled by the strike. Just one in five trains are running, and they are mostly restricted to main lines, with around half of the network closed.
But Shapps said, “Despite the best efforts of militant union leaders to bring our country to a standstill, it’s clear this week’s strikes did not have the desired impact due to more people being able to work from home.”
Broadband provider Virgin Media O2 said it recorded an increase in usage of up to 10 percent on the first day of the strikes on Tuesday, indicating that “millions more people are working from home” this week.
National Highways senior network planner Frank Bird said traffic flows on motorways and major A roads on Thursday morning were “remarkably good,” despite earlier fears of a surge in traffic as train passengers switch to road transport during the rail strikes.
He said: “Two years on [from the COVID-19 pandemic] we’ve learned to work in different ways, people are working from home, so it’s a very different picture. People are still able to carry on working even though the rail dispute is ongoing.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/24/2022 – 02:00 - Escobar: Exile On Main Street – The Sound Of The Unipolar World Fading Away
Escobar: Exile On Main Street – The Sound Of The Unipolar World Fading Away
The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states. The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.
Let’s cut to the chase and roll in the Putin Top Ten of the New Era, announced by the Russian President live at the St. Petersburg forum for both the Global North and South.
The era of the unipolar world is over.
The rupture with the West is irreversible and definitive. No pressure from the West will change it.
Russia has renewed with its sovereignty. Reinforcement of political and economic sovereignty is an absolute priority.
The EU has completely lost its political sovereignty. The current crisis shows the EU is not ready to play the role of an independent, sovereign actor. It’s just en ensemble of American vassals deprived of any politico-military sovereignty.
Sovereignty cannot be partial. Either you’re a sovereign or a colony.
Hunger in the poorest nations will be on the conscience of the West and euro-democracy.
Russia will supply grains to the poorer nations in Africa and the Middle East.
Russia will invest in internal economic development and reorientation of trade towards nations independent of the U.S.
The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states.
The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.
How does it feel, for the collective West, to be caught in such a crossfire hurricane? Well, it gets more devastating when we add to the new roadmap the latest on the energy front.
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, in St. Petersburg, stressed that the global economic crisis is gaining momentum not because of sanctions, but exacerbated by them; Europe “commits energy suicide” by sanctioning Russia; sanctions against Russia have done away with the much lauded “green transition”, as that is no longer needed to manipulate markets; and Russia, with its vast energy potential, “is the Noah’s Ark of the world economy.”
For his part Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller could not be more scathing on the sharp decline in the gas flow to the EU due to Siemens’ refusal and/or incapacity to repair the Nord Stream 1 pumping engine: “Well, of course, Gazprom was forced to reduce the volume of gas supplies to Europe by 20%+. But you know, prices have increased not by 20%+, but by several times! Therefore, I’m sorry if I say that we don’t feel offended by anyone, we are not particularly concerned by this situation.”
If this pain dial overdrive was not enough to hurl the collective West – or NATOstan – into Terminal Hysteria, then Putin’s sharp comment on possibly allowing Mr. Sarmat to present his business card to “decision-making centers in Kiev”, those that are ordering the current shelling and killing of civilians in Donetsk, definitely did the trick:
“As for the red lines, let me keep them to myself, because this will mean quite tough actions on the decision-making centers. But this is an area that shouldn’t be disclosed to people outside the military-political leadership of the country. Those who deserve appropriate actions on our part should draw a conclusion for themselves – what they may face if they cross the line.”
Baby please, stop breaking down
Alastair Crooke has masterfully outlined how the collective West’s zugzwang leaves it lumbering around, dazed and confused. Now let’s examine the state of play on the opposite side of the chessboard, focusing on the BRICS summit this Thursday in Beijing.
As much as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN, now it’s time for a reinvigorated BRICS to step up its game. In conjunction, these are the key organizations/instruments that will be carving the pathways towards the post-unipolar era.
Both China and India (which between them were the largest economies in the world for centuries before the brief Western colonial interregnum) are already close and getting closer to “the Noah’s Ark of the world economy”.
The G20 – hostages of the Michael Hudson-defined FIRE scam that is the core of the financialized neoliberal casino – is slowly fading away, while a potential new G8 ramps up: and that is directly connected to BRICS expansion, one of the key themes of this week’s summit. An expanded BRICS with a parallel G8 configuration is bound to easily overtake the Western-centric one in importance as well as GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP).
BRICS in 2021 already added Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE and Uruguay to its New Development Bank (NDB). In May, at Foreign Ministry-level debates, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand were added to the 5 BRICS members. Leaders of some of these nations will be connected to the Beijing summit.
BRICS plays a completely different game from the G20. They aim for the grassroots, and it’s all about slowly “building trust” – a very Chinese concept. They are creating an independent Credit Rating Agency – away from the Anglo-American racket – and deepening a Currency Reserves Arrangement. The NDB – including its regional offices in India and South Africa – has been involved in hundreds of projects. Time will tell: one day the NDB will make the World Bank superfluous.
Comparisons between BRICS and the Quad, a U.S. concoction, are silly. Quad is just another crude mechanism to contain China. Yet there’s no question India treads on tightrope walker territory, as it’s a member of both BRICS and Quad, and made a vastly misguided decision to walk out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the largest free trade deal on the planet – opting instead to adhere to the American pie-in-the-sky Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF).
Yet India, long term, skillfully guided by Russia, is being steered to find essential common ground with China in several key issues.
BRICS, especially in its expanded BRICS+ version, is bound to increase cooperation on building truly stable supply chains, and a settlement mechanism for resources and raw material trade, which inevitably has to be based in local currencies. Then the path will be open for the Holy Grail: a BRICS payment system as a credible alternative to the weaponized U.S. dollar and SWIFT.
Meanwhile, a torrent of bilateral investments from both China and India in the manufacturing and services sector around their neighbors is bound to lift up smaller players in both Southeast Asia and South Asia: think Cambodia and Bangladesh as important cogs in a vast supply wheel.
Yaroslav Lissovolik had already proposed a BEAMS concept as the core of this BRICS integration drive, uniting “the key regional integration initiatives of BRICS economies such as BIMSTEC, EAEU, the ASEAN-China free trade agreement, Mercosur and SADC/SACU.”
It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll
Now Beijing seems eager to promote “an inclusive format for dialogue spanning all the main regions of the Global South via aggregating the regional integration platforms in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Going forward this format may be further expanded to include other regional integration blocks from Eurasia, such as the GCC, EAEU and others.”
Lissovolik notes how the ideal path from now on should be “the greater inclusivity of BRICS via the BRICS+ framework that allows smaller economies that are the regional partners of BRICS to have a say in the new global governance framework.”
Before he addressed the St. Petersburg forum on video, President Xi called Putin personally to say, among other things, that he’s got China’s back on all “sovereignty and security” themes. They also, inevitably, discussed the relevance of BRICS as a key platform towards the multipolar world.
Meanwhile, the collective West plunges deeper into the maelstrom. A massive national demonstration of trade unions this past Monday paralyzed Brussels – the capital of the EU and NATO – as 80,000 people expressed their anger at the rising and rising cost of living; called for elites to “spend money on salaries, not on weapons”; and yelled in unison “Stop NATO.”
It’s zugzwang all over again. The EU’s “direct losses”, as Putin stressed, provoked by the sanctions hysteria, “could exceed $400 billion a year”. Russia’s energy earnings have hit record levels. The ruble is at a 7-year high against the euro.
It’s a blast that arguably the most powerful cultural artifact of the entire Cold War – and Western supremacy – era, the perennial Rolling Stones, is currently on tour across a “caught in a crossfire hurricane” EU. On every show they play, for the first time live, one of their early classics: ‘Out of Time’.
Sounds much like a requiem. So let’s all sing, “Baby baby baby / you’re out of time”, as one Vladimir “it’s a gas, gas, gas” Putin and his sidekick Dmitry “Under My Thumb” Medvedev seem to be the guys really getting their rocks off. It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll, but we like it.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 23:40 - How (Un)Affordable Is Gas In Latin America?
How (Un)Affordable Is Gas In Latin America?
As gas prices have risen around the world, not each region and country is impacted equally.
Globally, the average price for a liter of gas was $1.44 USD on June 13, 2022.
But, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, the actual price at the pump, and how affordable that price is for residents, varies greatly from country to country. This is especially true in Latin America, a region widely regarded as one of the world’s most unequal regions in terms of its income and resource distribution.
Using monthly data from GlobalPetrolPrices.com as of May 2022, this graphic by Latinometrics compares gas affordability in different countries across Latin America.
Gas Affordability in 19 Different Latin American Countries
To measure gas affordability, Latinometrics took the price of a liter of gas in 19 different Latin American countries and territories, and divided those figures by each country’s average daily income, using salary data from Statista.
Out of the 19 regions included in the dataset, Venezuela has the most affordable gas on the list. In Venezuela, a liter of gas is equivalent to roughly 1.3% of the country’s average daily income.
This isn’t too surprising, as Venezuela is home to the largest share of proven oil reserves in the world. However, it’s worth noting that international sanctions against Venezuelan oil, largely because of political corruption, have hampered the once prosperous sector in the country.
On the other end of the spectrum, Nicaragua has the least affordable gas on the list, with one liter of gas costing 14% of the average daily income in the country.
Historically, the Nicaraguan government has not regulated gas prices in the country, but in light of the current global energy crisis triggered in large part by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the government has stepped in to help control the situation.
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues with no end in sight, it’ll be interesting to see where prices are at in the next few months.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 23:20 - Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Could Face Jail Time After DUI Charge Filed Thursday
Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Could Face Jail Time After DUI Charge Filed Thursday
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Paul Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi attend the TIME 100 Gala 2019 Cocktails at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on April 23, 2019. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, Paul Pelosi, was charged Thursday with driving under the influence with injury—stemming from a May arrest.
A press release issued by the Napa County District Attorney’s office said Paul Pelosi, 82, allegedly had a blood alcohol content of 0.082 percent, which is over the legal limit in California, after he crashed his vehicle. The blood sample, the DA’s office said, was obtained two hours after the collision at around 12:32 a.m.
“Based upon the extent of the injuries suffered by the victim, the District Attorney filed misdemeanor charges. This decision is consistent with how our office handles these cases with similar injuries,” the office said in a statement on Thursday evening.
Several weeks ago, the California Highway Patrol said Pelosi was involved in a collision with a Jeep in Napa County. Speaker Pelosi wasn’t with him at the time, and a spokesperson for her said she was in Rhode Island giving a speech to college graduates, while describing the incident involving her husband as a personal matter.
Her husband is scheduled to appear in a Napa County court on Aug. 3, said the DA’s office last week. His mugshot was released about a week ago.
Punishment
Under state law, Pelosi now could face a short stint in jail and several years’ worth of probation, according to the news release.
“The punishment for driving under the influence causing injury as a misdemeanor is set by California law. It includes up to five years of probation, a minimum of five days in jail, installation of an ignition interlock device, fines and fees, completion of a court-ordered drinking driver class, and other terms as appropriate,” the DA’s office said on Thursday.
* * *
Following Pelosi’s arrest, officials in Northern California refused to release footage of Paul’s arrest to the Times.
“The Public Records Unit (PRU) has determined the Department possesses records responsive to your request,” the California Highway Patrol told Fox News in response to a California Public Records Act request from the news outlet.
The law enforcement agency added:
“However, the Napa County District Attorney’s Office has advised the release of records would jeopardize an ongoing investigation. As such, records are being withheld pursuant to Government Code section 6254 (f).”
Pelosi was driving a 2021 Porsche when the accident occurred.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 23:00 - Only 23% Of New Yorkers Can Afford Median Rent Amid "Incredibly Tight Market"
Only 23% Of New Yorkers Can Afford Median Rent Amid “Incredibly Tight Market”
Living in a spacious apartment with no roommates in Midtown Manhattan is one of the hallmarks of feeling like you’ve made it in New York City. But that era is over for many as skyrocketing rents and wages failing to outpace inflation have sparked a housing affordability crisis.
Bloomberg cites a New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development report that found only 23% of full-time workers in the city can afford median rent.
The city’s report used the median asking rent of $2.75k for vacant and available units in 2021, and 2020 salary data showed that only 23% of full-time workers in New York made over $100k.
If renters followed the 30% rule, a popular standard for budgeting rent that says a maximum of 30% of your monthly income before taxes should be spent on rent, then those making over $100k could afford the 2021 median rent was only 23% of all workers.
Affordability worsened this year as appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate revealed median rents in May topped $4,000 for the first time.
Matthew Murphy, the executive director of the NYU Furman Center, said the “incredibly tight rental market” and robust demand have pushed rent prices sky-high, adding: “The inventory and supply has not kept up with intense demand.”
Compound the affordability crisis in the rental market with soaring food and energy costs, and many New Yorkers are struggling to survive in the worst inflationary period in four decades.
The dream of living in a spacious apartment alone in Midtown is over, as some New Yorkers might have to find roommates to help pay rent.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 22:40 - The Federal Bureau Of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring An Alarming Number Of FBI Agents
The Federal Bureau Of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring An Alarming Number Of FBI Agents
Authored by Alan MacLeod via Mint Press News,
Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.
Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace. “The FBI’s investigative authority is the broadest of all federal law enforcement agencies,” the “About” section of its website informs readers. “The FBI has divided its investigations into a number of programs, such as domestic and international terrorism, foreign counterintelligence [and] cyber crime,” it adds.
For example, in 2019, Dawn Burton (the former director of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin) was poached from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter. The following year, Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.
Meanwhile, Mark Jaroszewski ended his 21-year posting as a supervisory special agent in the Bay Area to take up a position at Twitter, rising to become director of corporate security and risk. And Douglas Turner spent 14 years as a senior special agent and SWAT Team leader before being recruited to serve in Twitter’s corporate and executive security services. Previously, Turner had also spent seven years as a secret service special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.
When asked to comment by MintPress, former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley said that she was “not surprised at all” to see FBI agents now working for the very tech companies the agency polices, stating that there now exists a “revolving door” between the FBI and the areas they are trying to regulate. This created a serious conflict of interests in her mind, as many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs. “The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” she said.
Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within Twitter. For instance, in 2020, Matthew W. left a 15-year career as an intelligence program manager at the FBI to take up the post of senior director of product trust at Twitter. Patrick G., a 23-year FBI supervisory special agent, is now head of corporate security. And Twitter’s director of insider risk and security investigations, Bruce A., was headhunted from his role as a supervisory special agent at the bureau. His resumé notes that at the FBI he held “[v]arious intelligence and law enforcement roles in the US, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East” and was a “human intelligence and counterintelligence regional specialist.” (On employment sites such as LinkedIn, many users choose not to reveal their full names.)
Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2021 Jeff Carlton built up a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, rising to become a senior intelligence analyst. Between 2014 and 2017, his LinkedIn profile notes, he worked for both the CIA and FBI, authored dozens of official reports, some of which were read by President Barack Obama. Carlton describes his role as a “problem-solver” and claims to have worked in many “dynamic, high-pressure environments” such as Iraq and Korea. In May 2021, he left official service to become a senior program manager at Twitter, responsible for dealing with the company’s “highest-profile trust and safety escalations.”
Other former FBI staff are employed by Twitter, such as Cherrelle Y. as a policy domain specialist and Laura D. as a senior analyst in global risk intelligence.
Many of those listed above were active in the FBI’s public outreach programs, a practice sold as a community trust-building initiative. According to Rowley, however, these also function as “ways for officials to meet the important people that would give them jobs after retirement.” “It basically inserts a huge conflict of interest,” she told MintPress. “It warps and perverts the criminal investigative work that agents do when they are still working as agents because they anticipate getting lucrative jobs after retiring or leaving the FBI.”
Rowley – who in 2002 was named, along with two other whistleblowers, as Time magazine’s Person of the Year – was skeptical that there was anything seriously nefarious about the hiring of so many FBI agents, suggesting that Twitter could be using them as sources of information and intelligence. She stated:
Retired agents often maintained good relationships and networks with current agents. So they can call up their old buddy and find out stuff… There were certainly instances of retired agents for example trying to find out if there was an investigation of so and so. And if you are working for a company, that company is going to like that influence.”
Rowley also suggested that hiring people from various three-letter agencies gave them a credibility boost. “These [tech] companies are using the mythical aura of the FBI. They can point to somebody and say ‘oh, you can trust us; our CEO or CFO is FBI,’” she explained.
Twitter certainly has endorsed the FBI as a credible actor, allowing the organization to play a part in regulating the global dissemination of information on its platform. In September 2020, it put out a statement thanking the federal agency. “We wish to express our gratitude to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force for their close collaboration and continued support of our work to protect the public conversation at this critical time,” the statement read.
One month later, the company announced that the FBI was feeding it intelligence and that it was complying with their requests for deletion of accounts. “Based on intel provided by the FBI, last night we removed approximately 130 accounts that appeared to originate in Iran. They were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 U.S. Presidential Debate,” Twitter’s safety team wrote.
Yet the evidence they supplied of this supposed threat to American democracy was notably weak. All four of the messages from this Iranian operation that Twitter itself shared showed that none of them garnered any likes or retweets whatsoever, meaning that essentially nobody saw them. This was, in other words, a completely routine cleanup operation of insignificant troll accounts. Yet the announcement allowed Twitter to present the FBI as on the side of democracy and place the idea into the public psyche that the election was under threat from foreign actors.
Based on intel provided by the @FBI, last night we removed approximately 130 accounts that appeared to originate in Iran. They were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 US Presidential Debate.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 1, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Iran has been a favorite Twitter target in the past. In 2009, at the behest of the U.S. government, it postponed routine maintenance of the site, which would have required taking it offline. This was because an anti-government protest movement in Tehran was using the app to communicate and the U.S. did not want the demonstrations’ regime-change potential to be stymied.
A carnival of spooks
The FBI is far from the only state security agency filling Twitter’s ranks. Shortly after leaving a 10-year career as a CIA analyst, Michael Scott Robinson was hired to become a senior policy manager for site integrity, trust and safety.
The California-based app has also recruited heavily from the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization that serves as the military alliance’s think tank. The council is sponsored by NATO, led by senior NATO generals and regularly plays out regime-change scenarios in enemy states, such as China.
The Atlantic Council has been associated with many of the most egregious fake news plants of the last few years. It published a series of lurid reports alleging that virtually every political group in Europe challenging the status quo – from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP in Great Britain to PODEMOS and Vox in Spain and Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece – were all secretly “the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.” Atlantic Council employee Michael Weiss was also very likely the creator of the shadowy organization PropOrNot, a group that anonymously published a list of fake-news websites that regularly peddled Kremlin disinformation. Included in this list was virtually every anti-war alternative media outlet one could think of – from MintPress to Truthout, TruthDig and The Black Agenda Report. Also included were pro-Trump websites like The Drudge Report, and liberatarian ventures like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute.
PropOrNot’s list was immediately heralded in the corporate press, and was the basis for a wholescale algorithm shift at Google and other big tech platforms, a shift that saw traffic to alternative media sites crash overnight, never to recover. Thus, the allegation of a huge (Russian) state-sponsored attempt to influence the media was itself an intelligence op by the U.S. national security state.
In 2020, Kanishk Karan left his job as a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab to join Twitter as information integrity and safety specialist – essentially helping to control what Twitter sees as legitimate information and nefarious disinformation. Another DFR Lab graduate turned Twitter employee is Daniel Weimert, who is now a senior public policy associate for Russia – a key target of the Atlantic Council. Meanwhile, Sarah Oh is simultaneously an Atlantic Council DFR Lab non-resident senior fellow and a Twitter advisor, her social media bio noting she works on “high risk trust and safety issues.”
In 2019, Twitter also hired Greg Andersen straight from NATO to work on cybercrime policy. There is sparse information on what Andersen did at NATO, but, alarmingly, his own LinkedIn profile stated simply that he worked on “psychological operations” for the military alliance. After MintPress highlighted this fact in an article in April, he removed all mention of “psychological operations” from his profile, claiming now to have merely worked as a NATO “researcher.” Andersen left Twitter in the summer of last year to work as a product policy manager for the popular video platform TikTok.
Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media.
Positions of power and control
With nearly 400 million global users, there is no doubt that Twitter has grown to become a platform large and influential enough to necessitate extensive security measures, as actors of all stripes attempt to use the service to influence public opinion and political actions. There is also no doubt that there is a limited pool of people qualified in these sorts of fields.
But recruiting largely from the U.S. national security state fundamentally undermines claims Twitter makes about its neutrality. The U.S. government is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world. As far back as 2011, The Guardian reported on the existence of a massive, worldwide U.S. military online influence campaign in which it had designed software that allowed its personnel to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” The program boasts that the background of these personas is so convincing that psychological operations soldiers can be sure to work “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Yet Twitter appears to be recruiting from the source of the problem.
These former national security state officials are not being employed in politically neutral departments such as sales or customer service, but in security, trust and content, meaning that some hold considerable sway over what messages and information are promoted, and what is suppressed, demoted or deleted.
It could be said that poachers-turned-gamekeepers often play a crucial role in safety and protection, as they know how bad actors think and operate. But there exists little evidence that any of these national security state operatives have changed their stances. Twitter is not hiring whistleblowers or dissidents. It appears, then, that some of these people are essentially doing the same job they were doing before, but now in the private sector. And few are even acknowledging that there is anything wrong with moving from big government to big tech, as if the U.S. national security state and the fourth estate are allies, rather than adversaries.
That Twitter is already working so closely with the FBI and other agencies makes it easy for them to recruit from the federal pool. As Rowley said, “over a period of time these people will be totally in sync with the mindset of Twitter and other social media platforms. So from the company’s standpoint, they are not hiring somebody new. They already know this person. They know where they stand on things.”
Is there a problem?
Some might ask “What is the problem with Twitter actively recruiting from the FBI, CIA and other three-letter agencies?” They, after all, are experts in studying online disinformation and propaganda. One is optical. If a Russian-owned social media app’s trust, security and content moderation was run by former KGB or FSB agents and still insisted it was a politically neutral platform, the entire world would laugh.
But apart from this, the huge influx of security state personnel into Twitter’s decision-making ranks means that the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly. “In terms of their outlooks on the world and on the question of misinformation and internet security, you couldn’t get a better field of professionals who are almost inherently going to be more in tune with the government’s perspective,” Rowley said.
Thus, when policing the platform for disinformation and influence campaigns, the former FBI and CIA agents and Atlantic Council fellows only ever seem to find them emanating from enemy states and never from the U.S. government itself. This is because their backgrounds and outlooks condition them to consider Washington to be a unique force for good.
This one-sided view of disinformation can be seen by studying the reports Twitter has published on state-linked information operations. The entire list of countries it has identified as engaging in these campaigns are as follows: Russia (in 7 reports), Iran (in 5 reports), China (4 reports), Saudi Arabia (4 reports), Venezuela (3 reports), Egypt (2 reports), Cuba, Serbia, Bangladesh, the UAE, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Honduras, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Armenia, Spain, Tanzania, Mexico and Uganda.
One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these “former” spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations.
The Cold (cyber)war
Twitter has mirrored U.S. hostility towards states like Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, attempting to suppress the reach and influence of their state media by adding warning messages to the tweets of journalists and accounts affiliated with those governments. “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” it noted.
In a rather bizarre addendum, it explained that it would not be doing the same to state-affiliated media or personalities from other countries, least of all the U.S. “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the U.S. for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” it wrote. It did not explain how it decided that Cuban, Russian, Chinese or Iranian journalists did not have editorial independence, but British and American ones did – this was taken for granted. The effect of the action has been a throttling of ideas and narratives from enemy states and an amplification of those coming from Western state media.
As the U.S. ramps up tensions with Beijing, so too has Twitter aggressively shut down pro-China voices on its platform. In 2020, it banned 170,000 accounts it said were “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” such as praising its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic or expressing opposition to the Hong Kong protests, both of which are majority views in China. Importantly, the Silicon Valley company did not claim that these accounts were controlled by the government; merely sharing these opinions was grounds enough for deletion.
The group behind Twitter’s decision to ban those Chinese accounts was the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a deeply controversial think tank funded by the Pentagon, the State Department and a host of weapons manufacturers. ASPI has constantly peddled conspiracy theories about China and called for ramping up tensions with the Asian nation.
ASPI – The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed Perhaps most notable, however, was Twitter’s announcement last year that it was deleting dozens of accounts for the new violation of “undermining faith in the NATO alliance.” The statement was widely ridiculed online by users. But few noted that the decision was based upon a partnership with the Stanford Internet Observatory, a counter-disinformation think tank filled with former spooks and state officials and headed by an individual who is on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. That Twitter is working so closely with organizations that are clearly intelligence industry catspaws should concern all users.
Not just Twitter
While some might be alarmed that Twitter is cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state, it is perhaps unfair to single it out, as many social media platforms are doing the same. Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress. The NATO cutout organization now serves as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a Facebook press release. Anti-war and anti-establishment voices across the world have reported massive drops in traffic on the platform.
The social media giant also hired former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo to be its head of intelligence. Nimmo subsequently used his power to attempt to swing the election in Nicaragua away from the leftist Sandinista Party and towards the far-right, pro-U.S. candidate, deleting hundreds of left-wing voices in the week of the election, claiming they were engaging in “inauthentic behavior.” When these individuals (including some well-known personalities) poured onto Twitter, recording video messages proving they were not bots, Twitter deleted those accounts too, in what one commentator called a Silicon Valley “double tap strike.”
An April MintPress study revealed how TikTok, too, has been filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department. As with Twitter, these new TikTok employees largely work in highly politically sensitive fields such as trust, safety, security and content moderation, meaning these state operatives hold influence over the direction of the company and what content is promoted and what is demoted.
Likewise, in 2017, content aggregation site Reddit plucked Jessica Ashooh from the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force to become its new director of policy, despite the fact that she had few relevant qualifications or experience in the field.
Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It In corporate media too, we have seen a widespread infiltration of former security officials into the upper echelons of news organizations. So normalized is the penetration of the national security state into the media that is supposed to be holding it to account, that few reacted in 2015 when Dawn Scalici left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of international news conglomerate Thomson Reuters. Scalici, a 33-year CIA veteran who had worked her way up to become a director in the organization, was open about what her role was. In a blog post on the Reuters website, she wrote that she was there to “meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government” – a statement that is at odds with even the most basic journalistic concepts of impartiality and holding the powerful to account.
Meanwhile, cable news outlets routinely employ a wide range of “former” agents and mandarins as trusted personalities and experts. These include former CIA Directors John Brennan (NBC, MSNBC) and Michael Hayden (CNN), ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (CNN), and former Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend (CBS). And news for so many Americans comes delivered through ex-CIA interns like Anderson Cooper (CNN), CIA-applicants like Tucker Carlson (Fox), or by Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC), the daughter of a powerful national security advisor. The FBI has its own former agents on TV as well, with talking heads such as James Gagliano (Fox), Asha Rangappa (CNN) and Frank Figliuzzi (NBC, MSNBC) becoming household names. In short, then, the national security state once used to infiltrate the media. Today, however, the national security state is the media.
Social media holds enormous influence in today’s society. While this article is not alleging that anyone mentioned is a bad actor or does not genuinely care about the spread of disinformation, it is highlighting a glaring conflict of interest. Through its agencies, the U.S. government regularly plants fake news and false information. Therefore, social media hiring individuals straight from the FBI, CIA, NATO and other groups to work on regulating disinformation is a fundamentally flawed practice. One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 22:20 - Pozsar Was Right Again: Shipping Costs Soar 82,000% Amid Global Supply Chain Chaos After Ukraine
Pozsar Was Right Again: Shipping Costs Soar 82,000% Amid Global Supply Chain Chaos After Ukraine
Several months ago, Credit Suisse strategist and former NY Fed “liquidity plumber” Zoltan Pozsar predicted that as a result of Russian commodity exports being shunned by western nations and/or distributors while greeted by eastern nations (such as India and China) would would find delight in the 30% discount to spot on Russian oil, shipping costs would soar as a result of the challenging – and expensive – realignment of global supply chains which would see legacy tanker flows be scrapped only to be resurrected in the form of much more expensive alternatives.
Well, Pozsar was right again because four months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resulting dislocation of global fuel markets has lead to a surge in shipping costs of products such as diesel by sea.
Rates to haul fuels such as gasoline and diesel, known in the industry as clean tanker freight, have more than doubled this year to the highest since April 2020, according to Baltic Exchange data. On one key route in Asia, ship owners are now earning over $47,000 a day transporting products from South Korea to the distribution hub of Singapore, compared with $98 a day prior to the war.
The Russian invasion has exacerbated a tightening of energy markets, upending trade flows and forcing buyers to scour the world for alternative fuel supplies, according to Bloomberg. At the same time, an initial surge in rates for hauling crude hasn’t been sustained, partly due to reduced demand from China, leading to some shipowners switching part of their fleet to haul fuels rather than oil, according to two tanker charterers.
The last time clean tanker freight rates were this elevated was in early 2020, after the pandemic decimated oil consumption and forced fuel producers to export as much product as possible to alleviate swelling storage tanks. Now, we are observing a mirror image of that predicament as demand for ships to haul fuels is expected to climb by 6% this year, underpinned by Europe, said Anoop Singh, head of tanker research at Braemar ACM Shipbroking.
“The European resolve to reduce reliance on Russian supplies will likely outlive the war in Ukraine and that will re-draw trade routes,” said Singh, who notes that Russia was the single largest external supplier of diesel to Europe prior to the war.
Furthermore, and also as Zoltan predicted, more long-range class ships are being used to transport refined fuels since the invasion in late February, according to S&P analysts Fotios Katsoulas and Krispen Atkinson. Longer voyages are reducing the amount of available capacity on vessels and driving up freight rates, they said. LR tankers are the most common and are used to carry both products and oil.
The surge in rates is being replicated across other regions. Ship owners transporting fuel from the Middle East to Japan on a route known as TC-5 — a key passage for naphtha — were earning more than $50,000 a day on Wednesday, compared with as low as $61 a day in February, an 82000% increase, according to Baltic Exchange data. The cost of shipping fuel from the US to Brazil on the TC-18 route was near $37,000 a day, up “more modestly”, from $3,800 a day four months ago.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 22:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: Why The Left Will Cut Biden Loose
Victor Davis Hanson: Why The Left Will Cut Biden Loose
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
Republican pundits and conservative activists are debating whether they can win in 2024 with the successful Trump agenda, but without the controversial former President Donald Trump as their nominee.
The Democrats have a similar, but far more serious dilemma with President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024.
Unlike the Trump Administration’s successful four years, Biden’s tenure has been an utter disaster. There are no policy offsets to the personal liabilities and unpopularity of Biden himself.
Biden’s liabilities transcend his physical infirmities, his advanced age, and his seeming geometric rather than arithmetic rate of mental decline.
Biden, moreover, proves daily that he is not a nice guy. His excesses, past and present, are precisely those the Left considers mortal sins.
Walking back Biden’s absurdities has become the nonstop, tiresome task of many on the Left. As they face a midterm disaster in November, many no longer see any compensating reasons not to drop Biden.
When the Republicans take the House of Representatives in 2022 there will be nonstop investigations of Hunter Biden’s alleged tax avoidances, his possibly illegal work as an unregistered foreign agent, and Joe Biden’s untaxed compensation he received from the Biden lobbying consortium.
Consider also Biden’s nastiness.
During the 2020 campaign he personally attacked a young co-ed as a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” and a stocky questioner was reduced to “fat.”
Unlike Trump’s art of the deal, exaggerations, and distortions, Biden says things that are not simply untrue, but abjectly preposterous — such as the United States currently has a lower inflation rate than major European industrial powers.
In Biden’s world, there were no COVID-19 vaccinations until he took the oath of office. Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the oil companies, or the refiners, or Trump are responsible for the historic crippling gasoline price hikes he caused by canceling drilling and pipeline projects.
Biden claims his negative-growth, hyperinflating economy is not disastrous but strong.
He serially lies that he drove a semi-truck. He has not been to the Middle East 38 times. He never received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nor was he a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The MAGA movement is not the “most extreme political organization in American history.”
In other words, Biden reveals the same fantasies and plagiarism that ended his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns.
On matters of race and sexuality, Biden is the epitome of that for which the Left, supposedly, has zero tolerance. Biden was infamous for damning with praise candidate Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” African American presidential candidate.
In a fake patois, Biden once warned an audience of black professionals that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”
During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden derided a black journalist as a “junkie” and lambasted a radio host and his audience with the claim “you ain’t black” if they didn’t support his candidacy.
Spinning racialist fables like Biden’s “Corn Pop” stories would brand any conservative politician as a racist. As president, Biden still uses the term “negro,” and he called an African American advisor “boy.”
On disturbing matters of sexuality, Biden is even more coarse.
After the Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the nation was lectured that “women must be believed.” But it was the Left who attacked former Biden aide Tara Reade who surfaced in 2016 to accuse then Senator Biden, her former boss, of sexually assaulting her.
Biden himself had a creepy history of invading the private space of young women — inappropriately kissing them, hugging and squeezing them, and smelling and blowing into their hair and ears.
Finally, Biden was forced to apologize — sort of — by claiming he belonged to an earlier generation when such aggression was simply normal behavior. It was not then or now.
The latest controversies whirl around the British tabloid Daily Mail’s publication of the diary of Biden’s own daughter.
From the Mail’s lurid reporting, Ashley Biden seems to suggest that she showered with her father at an age when “showers w/ my dad (probably [were] not appropriate).” And she seemed to connect Biden familial inappropriateness with her regret over being “hyper-sexualized (at) a young age.”
When Trump was accused by porn star Stormy Daniels of a consensual tryst or was caught on old Access Hollywood tape crudely boasting about touching inappropriately female admirers, the resulting uproar nearly derailed the Trump 2016 campaign.
The point is not just the asymmetrical treatment that has shielded Biden’s cognitive decline, his rude outbursts, his outrageous racialist slurs, and bizarre sexual aggressiveness.
Instead, the Left now fears Biden’s terrible polls and a worse record – and the resulting damage he is doing to the Democratic Party.
In such a losing political context, Democrats will soon find no further reason to cover for Biden’s own serial abhorrent personal behavior on matters of financial probity, sex, race, and truthfulness.
No wonder they are growing desperate to find ways to cut him loose – without making Vice President Kamala Harris his successor.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 21:40 - North Dakota AG Investigates Bill Gates Farmland Purchase
North Dakota AG Investigates Bill Gates Farmland Purchase
The North Dakota Attorney General’s office is investigating a land transaction involving one of the biggest farmland owners in America, billionaire Bill Gates.
In a letter dated June 21, Attorney General Drew Wrigley’s office asked the Red River Trust, an entity connected to Gates, about a recent purchase of a multi-thousand-acre potato farm, according to local news KFYR.
Wrigley’s office informed the trust that all corporations or limited liability companies are strictly “prohibited from owning or leasing farmland or ranchland in the state of North Dakota” and “engaging in farming or ranching.”
“In addition, the law places certain limitations on the ability of trusts to own farmland or ranchland,” the letter said.
Red River Trust has 30 days to respond from June 21 to Kerrie Helm, the AG’s Corporate Farming Enforcement Division, about the farm purchase.
“Our office needs to confirm how your company uses this land and whether this use meets any of the statutory exceptions, such as the business purpose exception, so that we may close this case and file it in our inactive files,” the letter continued.
A corporation or LLC “found in violation” of the anti-corporate farming laws could face harsh penalties, such as a $100k fine and one year to divest the land.
AgWeek revealed the trust spent $13.5 million on a 2,100-acre potato farm in Pembina County in November 2021.
North Dakota AG Commissioner Doug Goehring told KFYR that many people across the state are “upset” and “livid” about the billionaire purchasing farmland.
Bill Gates buying up this much farmland should alarm every American.
#attorneygeneral #BillGates #Farms,Farmers,Farming #Food #law #letter #NorthDakota #USnews https://t.co/SS810pWOtR
— Conservative Tribune (@conserv_tribune) June 23, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Over the years, Gates has quietly amassed 270,000 acres of farmland across the country through personal investment vehicles, though still a small slice of the nearly 900 million total farm acres.
Gates isn’t alone. Other billionaires, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have recently increased farmland holdings.
Could this be why billionaires are buying so much farmland?
Bill Gates isn’t buying farmland to feed the poor.
So why is he buying it?
A food shortage is the next “pandemic” – and he wants to control it.
— Jeff Harris (@TheVotersSay) June 19, 2022
Rockefeller Foundation President did warn a “massive, immediate food crisis” is on the horizon.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 21:20 - Four Injured In New Zealand After Mass Stabbing Attack
Four Injured In New Zealand After Mass Stabbing Attack
Authored by Rebecca Zhu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A New Zealand man has injured four people in a random “fast-paced” mass stabbing attack with a large kitchen knife before police arrived and apprehended him.
Police tape surrounds a scene associated with a suspicious death at another property on Farmer Crescent in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, on Sept. 21, 2012. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images) The victims and the offender, who was also wounded, have been confirmed as sustaining “moderate” injuries.
The man began stabbing people in Murrays Bay, Auckland, at around 11 a.m. local time, then walked to Mairangi Bay, where members of the public helped stop the rampage, including someone who reportedly used a crutch to trip the offender.
Waitematā District Commander Superintendent Naila Hassan told reporters that if the public did not intervene to stop the attack, it could have ended “a lot worse.”
“A number of members of the public were following him, and eventually, one of them intervened,” she said. “It could’ve been a lot worse, and that’s why I really need to acknowledge the bravery of those members of the public that intervened to bring this to a conclusion.”
Hassan acknowledged that the incident was “extremely traumatic” for the victims and wanted to assure the public that it was an “isolated incident.”
She also emphasised that the attack was “random” and not a “hate crime.”
“The victims were of different gender, ethnicity, and age,” Hassan said.
The offender is currently in custody under police guard at Auckland City Hospital and will be undergoing further assessments.
‘He Just Started Running At Me’
A local woman told the New Zealand Herald that she had run away screaming for help after a man with a “big knife” chased her off Murrays Bay beach.
“I was wearing headphones and went to take the headphones off to talk to him [when he approached] because that’s what I thought he wanted,” she said.
However, the woman’s gut instinct told her something was wrong, putting her on edge before he “just started running at me,” she said.
The woman immediately called the police when she managed to shake the man off her tracks. The police arrived 10 minutes later, but she did not witness the arrest.
Another witness said the man chased after a young girl who screamed.
“We thought she was being silly, she was shrieking,” she told Stuff News. “He stabbed two people, totally random … it all happened very quickly.”
“He then tried to stab another teenage girl, but she got away.”
Police will be increasing their local presence as a result of the incident.
The attack is the latest in a string of crime incidents in New Zealand as the country experiences what has been called a significant crime wave.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 21:00 - Federal Jury: City Must Pay $59,657 After SWAT Team Wrecks Innocent Woman's House
Federal Jury: City Must Pay $59,657 After SWAT Team Wrecks Innocent Woman’s House
After a SWAT team wrecked an innocent woman’s house, the city of McKinney, Texas essentially told her “tough luck” and refused to compensate her. In a case that could have nationwide property rights implications, a federal jury on Wednesday awarded her $59,656.59 in damages—and more may be coming.
The jury award follows an April 29 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Amos Mazzant III that the city’s “intentional and foreseeable” destruction of Vicki Baker’s house constituted a government “taking” that compelled the city to pay just compensation.
Vicki Baker’s house after a SWAT team attacked it The case marks a “sea change in the law,” according to Baker’s attorney, Jeffrey Redfern of the liberty-minded Institute for Justice:
“Everyone agrees with the general proposition that the government has to pay for the property it takes, but courts across the country had held that this rule just did not apply to the police. But the police are part of the government, which this victory makes abundantly clear.”
Baker is likely to receive additional compensation: The jury also found that the city’s refusal to pay Baker constituted a violation of her civil rights, making the city liable under federal civil rights law too.
It all started in July 2020, when a fugitive took shelter in Baker’s suburban Dallas home, which had just gone under contract for sale after she’d renovated it. Baker, who had recently beaten cancer and was retiring to Montana, notified police and a standoff ensued.
Eventually, McKinney police decided to attack the house with a BearCat armored vehicle, breaking windows and their frames, destroying the garage door, leveling the backyard fence, knocking down the front door, and firing approximately 30 tear gas containers into the home, which broke drywall. Baker’s daughter’s dog was blinded and deafened in the attack. When police entered, they found the fugitive had already committed suicide.
One of multiple windows destroyed by the SWAT team—frame and all “I contacted the city of McKinney and asked how to file suit against them for recovery. I was told…there was absolutely no possible recovery, that the city had never paid such a claim and they had no intention of doing that,” said Baker.
Naturally, Baker’s homebuyer backed out of the deal. She proceeded to spend months and tens of thousands of dollars putting the house back in order.
The SWAT team’s extensive use of tear gas meant that, in addition to fixing the damage already described, Baker had to hire a hazardous materials remediation team to clean the entire house. Carpets had to be replaced. To cover the expense, she withdrew money from her IRA and ran up over $20,000 on her credit cards.
Her repeated follow-ups with the city culminated in a letter from an entity that manages liability claims for Texas governments. It read:
“Based on the facts, we have concluded that there is no liability on the part of the City or any of its employees. Per our discussion, the officers have immunity while in the course and scope of their job duties. For this reason, we must respectfully decline this claim in its entirety.”
The city of McKinney, Texas told Vicki Baker it had no responsibility for this and other destruction throughout her home Destruction by government action is a standard exclusion in homeowners insurance policies. If the city of McKinney didn’t compensate Baker, she’d have to bear the entire cost of the SWAT team’s mayhem.
Enter the Institute for Justice, a national civil liberties law firm on a mission “to end widespread abuses of government power and secure the constitutional rights that allow all Americans to pursue their dreams.”
The Institute for Justice worked with Baker to file a federal suit in March 2021 against the city, arguing that its decision to wreck Baker’s home without compensation violated both the Texas and U.S. constitutions.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Fifth Amendment‘s takings clause ‘was designed to bar government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole’,” said attorney Jeffrey Redfern in an Institute for Justice video that explained the case (embedded below).
“Pursuing a fugitive is a legitimate government interest, but if the government deliberately destroys innocent people’s property in the process, those people must be compensated,” said Institute for Justice attorney Will Aronin.
“My priority has always been to make sure that cities like McKinney cannot treat other people the way I’ve been treated,” said Baker. “I expect today’s victory to send a message to governments across the country that they have to pay for what they break.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 20:40 - Mistake To Recommend COVID-19 Vaccines For All Children: Top Danish Health Official
Mistake To Recommend COVID-19 Vaccines For All Children: Top Danish Health Official
Authored by Zachary Steiber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
COVID-19 vaccines should not have been recommended for all children aged 5 and up, a top Danish health official has said.
Director of Denmark’s National Board of Health Søren Brostrøm addresses a press conference to explain why the AstraZeneca vaccine is stopped in Denmark, in Copenhagen, on April 14, 2021. (Philip Davali / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images) Søren Brostrøm, the director general of the Danish Health Authority, told TV 2 that it was a mistake to broadly vaccinate children based on the knowledge that has accumulated since late 2021.
Children aged 5 to 15 were advised to get a vaccine then, as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 became dominant around the world.
“I want to look all parents of children who have vaccinated their child in the eye and say, ‘You did the right thing and thank you for listening,‘” Brostrøm said.
“But at the same time—and this is the important thing to maintain confidence—I will admit and say that we have become wiser and we would not do the same today. And we will not do that in the future either,” he added.
Studies on the effects of the vaccines have shown that they confer little protection against infection from the virus. Research has also increasingly indicated that the vaccines do not protect well against severe disease in children, who are largely at little risk from severe outcomes if they get the virus.
Denmark’s new vaccine strategy recommends adults get vaccinated but specifies different advice for children.
“Children and adolescents only very rarely have a serious course of COVID-19 with the Omicron variant, which is why the offer of primary vaccination for children between 5 and 17 years will not be a general offer, but can be given after specific medical assessment,” authorities said on Wednesday.
At the same time, Brostrøm encouraged adults to get vaccinated and, if they already have received a primary series, to get a booster, and if they’ve already received a booster, to get a second booster due to waning protection against Omicron.
He said the country did well amid the pandemic in the winter of 2021 even though it removed restrictions due to vaccination. “The strategy for the coming winter is also that the vaccines should get us through a new wave without restriction,” he said in a statement.
Like many nations, Denmark offers Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Both have two-dose primary series.
As of June 15, approximately 85 percent of Danes have received one vaccine dose, about 77 percent have received two or three doses, and about 66 percent have received four doses, according to the Danish Vaccination Register.
About 40 percent of children have been vaccinated.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 20:20 - What Is Stagflation And Why Has The Establishment Been In Denial About It?
What Is Stagflation And Why Has The Establishment Been In Denial About It?
Unless you were an adult living in the US through the crisis of the 1970s into the early 1980s, you probably have no memory or experience with the concept of stagflation. In general, most economic downturns involve deflationary pressures only, and lead to moderate recession events that cause job losses and higher poverty but nothing that has the potential to crash the entire system. Stagflation is a different threat entirely.
There is a considerable amount of disinformation circulating these days about what stagflation is and whether or not we are in the middle of such a crisis. Much of the disinfo has been perpetuated by the Biden White House and the mainstream media. In short, they’ve been denying that the danger exists even though all the signs are right in front of us. When liars get caught, they often gaslight instead of admitting defeat.
Stagflation is basically a combination of deflationary conditions in some areas of the economy coupled with price inflation in other areas, including necessities. The mainstream narrative is that technical stagflation requires “high unemployment” along with rising prices, but this is simply not true. At the height of stagflation crisis under President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the unemployment rate was only 7%, which is not great but also not “high” historically. Stagflation was considered a national problem through the 1970s and yet the average unemployment rate during that decade was 5.4%.
In other words, anyone that claims that you “must have” high unemployment before you can have stagflation is being dishonest. High unemployment is often a side effect of stagflation at the end of the cycle, but not a requirement for stagflation to begin.
Signs of stagflation include: Falling or stagnant GDP, falling retail sales, falling PMI (manufacturing and services), falling or stagnant wages, declining stock markets, etc. When these circumstances are coupled to the loss of buying power in a currency and rising prices in most goods and utilities, then you have stagflation.
This kind of instability is perhaps the worst of all worlds because prices continue to increase even though demand is falling. It signals a severe problem with a nation’s currency system, or a collapsing supply chain or both. The root systems of the entire economy are rotten, this is the only way that stagflation can happen.
The initial trigger for the stagflationary conditions of the 1970s was the removal of the US dollar from the last vestiges of the gold standard under Nixon (at the behest of global central bankers). The US eventually escaped the crisis by exporting inflation overseas as the dollar’s share of global trade increased as the world reserve currency. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker also jacked up interest rates to around 20%, which did ultimately lead to an unemployment rate of 11% in the 1980s and dragged prices down enough to stop the bubble.
Will this happen again? It’s hard to say, but current dynamics suggest that prices will not stop rising for many months to come, and GDP, retail, PMI, wages, and other areas of the economy are now in decline. We are, in fact, in the middle of a stagflation event. Unfortunately we cannot export our inflation anymore because US dollar usage overseas is in decline. This means more dollars in circulation within the US, and that means continued price spikes.
The corporate media has made a concerted effort to downplay the notion of stagflation in the public sphere until recently. This is most likely because of the panic that would take place should people actually be made aware of the gravity of the threat. There is also the theory that certain groups of people (Great Reset globalists) would benefit greatly from economic turmoil, and the less the public is made aware of the danger the more unprepared they will be for the crisis. The more unprepared people are, the easier they are to control through fear and through government handouts.
Solutions to stagflation vary according to specific circumstances, but since the most viable cause would be instability in the currency, that means the currency system as a whole needs to be addressed. Supply chain issues can be dealt with over time by increasing PRIVATE manufacturing and production within a country (not government nationalization of manufacturing or price controls). If people start making some of their own goods at home while localizing production for necessities like food and energy, then prices will inevitably come down. However, currency devaluation requires a wider solution.
Local communities and states could create their own currency scrip to help offset dollar devaluation. States could create their own banking institutions, much like North Dakota has done, to help fund local industry and alleviate credit pressures. At the national level, the dollar could be coupled to some form of commodity standard such as a gold standard and this would have immediate effects on inflation, slowing it down or stopping it completely. Finally, there could be a moratorium on government deficit spending. This would mean shrinking the size of government substantially, but frankly that could only be a good thing. And finally, ending the Federal Reserve would put an end to the stimulus and QE that created the crisis in the first place.
Obviously none of these solutions would be endorsed by the Biden Administration and they might even try to stop individual states from implementing their own fixes. It will be up to state governments and communities to defy Biden and cure the stagflationary curse before it destroys everything.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 20:00 - "I Don't Believe In Censoring Art": Paramount CEO Rejects Trigger Warnings
“I Don’t Believe In Censoring Art”: Paramount CEO Rejects Trigger Warnings
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Paramount CEO Bob Bakish has refused to add trigger warnings to the company’s historical content, asserting, “I don’t believe in censoring art.”
Bakish says the back catalogue for the film studio’s new subscription streaming service Paramount+ will not be censored to please modern politically correct sensibilities.
“By definition, you have some things that were made in a different time and reflect different sensibilities,” Bakish said.
“I don’t believe in censoring art that was made historically, that’s probably a mistake. It’s all on-demand – you don’t have to watch anything you don’t want to.”
As we have previously highlighted, other streaming platforms and broadcasters have censored or outright deleted old shows and movies for containing so-called ‘offensive’ content.
Earlier this year, UK streaming platform ITV Player censored a “homophobic” line from the 2002 Spiderman movie when Spiderman says to Bonesaw, “That’s a cute outfit. Did your husband give it to you?”
During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, UK broadcaster Sky also tagged numerous movies, some little over a decade old, with a message warning viewers that they might be offensive.
“This film has outdated attitudes, language and cultural depictions which may cause offence today,” stated the trigger warning.
During the same year, PBS removed Gone With the Wind from its platform, in the process erasing the first black female actress to win an Oscar, while the BBC also announced it was removing Little Britain from its schedule despite the fact that the TV comedy series satirizes every demographic, often highlighting small minded attitudes of bigots.
Last year, NBC also announced that it was scanning 17,000 hours of past WWE content to weed out “racist” material in order to avoid it appearing on the network’s new Peacock streaming device.
Iconic historical books are also being re-written to reflect ‘modern attitudes’, including George Orwell’s 1984.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 19:40 - Tata Technologies' CEO Puts India In The Semiconductor Spotlight
Tata Technologies’ CEO Puts India In The Semiconductor Spotlight
As focus turns to a new cooperation between BRIC nations as a result of Western sanctions on Russia, some are also asking whether or not India is going to be a key player in the new global semiconductor industry.
Raja Manickam, CEO of Tata Technologies was out this week making the case for India and Southeast Asia as a destination for chipmakers, according to Nikkei. His case is that the country has an attractive location with easy access to shipping routes.
“It’s always location, location and location,” Raja said this week while talking at a semiconductor conference organized by the SEMI industry association. He criticized where semi manufacturing currently takes place in Asia, calling the area prone to “geopolitical worries” and “natural disasters”.
Taiwan and South Korea are currently the two leading players in the industry and both countries face renewed tensions with China and North Korea, the report points out.
The Indian government has already put into place a $10 billion incentive program to develop a semiconductor ecosystem.
Raja continued: “The government has done its part and the respective states are also competing with their own incentive packages. It is on the part of the Indian private sector to step up.”
He also made his case for the industry needing India just as much as India could use the productive capacity: “Many big semiconductor [companies] have research and development based in India, so it’s only logical for the research centers to be surrounded by manufacturing plants.”
He pointed out that India “offers a massive end-user market”.
Loy Hwee Chuan, executive director for telecommunications, media and technology at Singapore’s DBS Bank, was in agreeance with Raja. Chuan said: “[The] overall semiconductor market in India is expected to grow at [an] 18.8% compound annual growth rate, reaching $64 billion in 2026. We would be able to see more investments in India and Southeast Asia as manufacturers adopt the ‘China plus one’ strategy.”
Raja concluded: “When Tata does something, its usually huge and Tata Sons Chairman Chandra (Natarajan Chandrasekaran) has already signaled that semiconductors is going to be one of his key priorities.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 19:20 - BLM Supporter Sentenced To 10 Years Prison For Violence During Portland Riots
BLM Supporter Sentenced To 10 Years Prison For Violence During Portland Riots
Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An Indiana man has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for playing a significant part in fueling violence during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and rioting in Portland, Oregon.
A woman pulls a quilt from the display case inside the Oregon Historical Society during a riot in Portland, Ore., Oct. 11, 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images) Malik Fard Muhammad, 25, was sentenced on Tuesday for “repeatedly and intentionally jeopardizing the lives of police officers, destroying public property, and encouraging others to commit violence during protests that occurred in Portland in 2020,” according to the Justice Department.
In addition to 10 years in prison, Muhammad gets three years of supervised release. Although the DOJ did not mention the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the press release, Muhammad was arrested in 2020 following evidence collected at a BLM protest turned riot.
During the BLM demonstrations that ended in violence on Sept. 21, 2020, Muhammad threw a beer growler made into a Molotov cocktail on a police officer sitting inside his vehicle. The officer jumped out when he saw the firebomb, which did not blow, hurtling towards him.
Muhammed was arrested and charged with attempted aggravated murder, attempted assault in the first degree, attempted murder in the first degree, and unlawful manufacture of a destructive device, along with other crimes.
“Anyone who thinks they can get away with trying to murder police officers and destroy this city should think again,” Police Chief Chuck Lovell said in a statement last year announcing Muhammed’s arrest.
“Holding accountable those individuals whose sole focus is violence and destruction, like Mr. Muhammad, is central to our ongoing effort to support the rights of all Oregonians,” said Scott Erik Asphaug, U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon.
The district attorney’s office said that Muhammad intentionally and repeatedly jeopardized the lives of police officers, engaged in activities that destroyed public property like smashing the Oregon Historical Society’s windows, while calling on others to commit violence.
“The right to protest peacefully is absolute,” said ATF Seattle Field Division Special Agent in Charge Jonathan T. McPherson. “But it is clear Mr. Muhammad didn’t come to exercise his rights. He came from out-of-state to bring violence to our community.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 19:00 - United Airlines Cuts 12% Of Newark Flights To Reduce Delays
United Airlines Cuts 12% Of Newark Flights To Reduce Delays
United Airlines’ announcement to reduce domestic flights from Newark Liberty International Airport to resolve flight disruptions sent airline stocks tumbling Thursday, underperforming the broader market.
United told Reuters it would temporarily cut 50 daily departures, representing 12% of its 425 daily flights from Newark. The change will be effective July 1 and wouldn’t result in the airline exiting airports across the country.
United executives said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved the temporary cut on June 17, citing Newark airport construction and air traffic control problems. In a previously unreported letter seen by Reuters, the agency said reducing flights could “help carriers manage delays during terminal and runway construction projects.”
“After the last few weeks of irregular operations in Newark, caused by many factors including airport construction, we reached out to the FAA and received a waiver allowing us to temporarily adjust our schedule there for the remainder of the summer.
“Even though we have the planes, pilots, crews, and staff to support our Newark schedule, this waiver will allow us to remove about 50 daily departures which should help minimize excessive delays and improve on-time performance – not only for our customers, but for everyone flying through Newark,” United’s executive vice president and COO Jon Roitman wrote in a letter to staff.
United shares closed down 2.5% on the news. The S&P Airlines Industry Index fell as much as 3% but recovered some losses by the end of the cash session, closing down around 1%. The index has yet to recover from the virus pandemic and peaked in April 2021 and now approaches COVID lows.
Through mid-June, FlightAware data shows Newark had the second-most delays of any U.S. airport, behind Chicago Midway.
The airline industry has struggled with flight cancellations and delays due to many factors, including pilot and staffing shortages, weather-related issues, robust consumer demand, and, as Untied described above, infrastructure woes.
Last week, more than 10,000 flights were delayed or canceled, leaving travelers across the country furious and struck at airports, some for more than 24 hours. The spate of flight disruptions was enough for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to warn airlines to fix their problems ahead of the increased travel season associated with the Fourth of July holiday or face consequences.
Besides United, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, Alaska Airlines, and Spirit Airlines have also reduced flights to address congestion. Some carriers are pulling flights from smaller airports.
United’s CEO Scott Kirby pointed out a significant issue plaguing airlines: a pilot shortage. The industry is short a whopping 12,000 pilots, and Kirby said: “there’s no quick fix.” Pilots have staged protests due to being overworked.
So maybe once demand simmers down, flight disruptions abate, but that might not be until the second half of the year, according to Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth. She pointed out a more significant pullback in demand will be seen in 1H23, followed by a recovery into 2024.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 18:40 - Police Department Shows Off 'Pride Cruiser' Which Encourages People To "Report Hate Crimes"
Police Department Shows Off ‘Pride Cruiser’ Which Encourages People To “Report Hate Crimes”
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The Columbus Division of Police has been ridiculed on Twitter for proudly showing off a “pride cruiser” vehicle adorned with the LGBT rainbow flag that encourages people to “report hate crimes.”
A video clip posted to the police department’s official Twitter page shows Officer Lutz, an “LGBTQI+ liaison officer,” introducing the car.
“And we’re unveiling right now our pride cruiser for the month of June…I’m excited about this cruiser, it’s great for representation,” says Lutz.
The car features multi-colored rainbow decals along with the full updated ‘progress pride flag’, which includes non-binary, intersex and transgender colors.
Written on both sides of the vehicle in blue capital letters are the words “REPORT HATE CRIMES.”
Following record murder totals in 2020 and 2021, this is the priority of @MayorGinther. https://t.co/4BnLtaQTOF
— Bruce Hooley (@BHOOLZ) June 23, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
However, the clip didn’t go down well even with leftists, one of whom responded, “report hate crimes” does that include when it’s CPD officers murdering Black people.”
Another commented, “who am i supposed to report the hate crime to when y’all are doing it.”
Other respondents wondered where their representation was.
“Can we have a nuclear family cruiser next? No?” asked one.
“I guarantee you that most of your officers and employees are embarrassed by this nonsense,” said another.
“Following record murder totals in 2020 and 2021, this is the priority of @MayorGinther,” remarked radio host Bruce Hooley.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/23/2022 – 18:20
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