“What is Zelensky to hear when NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that NATO’s “defence industries [are] under strain” because, “The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions, and depleting Allied stockpiles. The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production?””
I hear-Doesn’t look good for war with Russia or China…or both.
In his State of the Union Addresson February 7, President Joe Biden once again told Ukraine that “America…will stand with you as long as it takes.”
In case the world didn’t hear, Biden moved to a more dramatic stage and repeated the words. Speaking from Kiev, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden spoke again of America’s “unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” He promised that “that support will endure.”
But though Biden spoke the words loudly on an international stage, that may not be what Zelensky heard.
What is Zelensky to hear when Germany loudly promises tanks made by a manufacturer who says the Leopard 2 tanks can’t be delivered until 2024 at the earliest?
Zelensky has been urgently requesting fighter jets: “We have freedom, give us wings to protect it.” But what does Zelensky hear when French President Emmanuel Macron says that the “allies must prioritize equipment that will be the most useful, and fastest, for Ukraine to achieve its end goal” and that “[t]here is no way that fighter planes can be delivered in the next few weeks?”
What does Zelensky hear when one of his strongest backers, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, says that a “decision today to donate any kind of jets, any F-16…is a very serious decision and it’s not an easy one for us to take?” Duda explained that “this poses serious problems if we donate even a small part of them anywhere, because I don’t hesitate to say we have not enough of these jets” and that sending fighter jets “requires a decision by the Allies anyway, which means that we have to make a joint decision.” That joint decision is vetoed for now by Biden who says the U.S. will not send fighter jets and by Germany who says, “The question of combat aircraft does not arise at all.”
He used his considerable celebrity as a clarion call to just how fragile our food production industry is while those with zero skin in the game sit around and make demands on it.
While I’ve been a big fan of Jeremy Clarkson over the years, I’ve never been proud of him before. Hero worship and celebrity go hand in hand and it’s a dangerous game to ascribe motives beyond self-interest to any celebrity.
But in Clarkson’s case he may have just done something worthy of that.
Clarkson is now on the other side of another cancellation campaign against him for a dig at Queen Narcissist herself, Meghan Markle, in one of his recent columns. And, normally, I would just pass the whole thing off as another of Clarkson’s attempts at controversy because if anyone lives by the adage that controversy is good for ratings it’s Jeremy Clarkson.
The guy is a six-foot-four-inch Streisand Effect with bad teeth.
But in this dustup with Queen Meghan, Clarkson did something completely out of the ordinary for him.
He apologized.
Twice.
James Delingpole and I roasted Clarkson for apologizing on a recent podcast we did. And it speaks directly to not having heroes in this world of near infinite political leverage. But, having just watched season two of his latest show, Clarkson’s Farm. I think I know why he apologized.
One of the great things about Top Gear was the refreshingly unapologetic nature of the hosts, Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. They all said things we weren’t supposed to say in public. And we loved them for it.
There’s an entire cottage industry of Top Gear making fun of ethnic group X on You Tube that I didn’t know about until recently. Oh, those memories. But as I think about it now I wonder why I’d never seen these before?
Google algorithm, would you care to contact me and explain why after years of watching car videos I was never offered one of these until the campaign to rid the world of Clarkson kicked into overdrive?
I’m sure ChatGPT’s Dan persona will tell me, it’s just coincidence, Tom.
Clarkson is no stranger to controversy, it’s part of how they built Top Gear into the biggest show IN THE WORLD. We know the story of how the the Holy Trinity of Cars moved from the BBC to Amazon. Clarkson punched a producer and he was fired.
They were also getting stale, visibly older after chafing under the BBC’s rules and, rightfully, wanted to cash in on a big, fat golden parachute of a contract. So, did Clarkson ‘engineer’ their exit from the BBC? It’s a fair question which I don’t give a damn about.
Enter Amazon and The Grand Tour was born.
But the same imperatives that ended their run on Top Gear also ended their run on The Grand Tour — the pace, the toll and the one thing no controversy can outrun, time.
So, an aging Clarkson sold the perfect fish out of water story to Amazon: Jeremy Clarkson, the ape who can’t use a screwdriver, was going to run a farm in the midlands.
Hilarity ensues….end scene.
While I liked season one of the show, it had that same lack of spontaneity that plagued both later seasons of Top Gear and The Grand Tour. What it didn’t lack, however, was the craft Clarkson had honed as a storyteller over the past three decades.
Because Clarkson used this platform to educate millions of people of how how fucking hard it is to scrape out a living as a farmer. And after a year of toil and his massive investment of time and outside capital from his “other job” Clarkson ended season one with a princely profit of £144.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) slammed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg during the most recent episode of “Verdict” this week over his handling of the train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.
Cruz’s remarks come as Buttigieg finally visited the town, weeks after a train derailed there spilling a large amount of toxic chemicals that were set on fire, sparking fears over what the health impacts could be for the surrounding community.
“Look, it is ridiculous that Joe Biden has not been to East Palestine yet,” Cruz said. “You literally have an American city with a major derailment that was on fire, where the water is being poisoned, where the air is being poisoned, where it’s ongoing for multiple days, and this administration does not give a damn.”
Cruz said that the Biden administration does not care about the community because it voted overwhelmingly for former President Donald Trump.
“And it’s clear their attitude. Look, it’s all politics all the time. It’s all communications and PR all the time,” he said. “And so going there is a bad message. And it really is striking.”
Cruz then turned his focus to Buttigieg, who has faced intense criticism for his lackluster performance in responding to multiple crises that fall under his purview.
“What in the hell does Pete Buttigieg have to do to get fired?” Cruz said. “Like in the history of this country, has there ever been a transportation secretary who has screwed more things up? From in his first year in office, a supply chain crisis that impacted the entire country that made it hard to get basics and essentials?”
Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Governor Josh Shapiro announced on Wednesday that his office made a criminal referral over a lack of cooperation from Norfolk Southern, the company at the center of the train derailment and subsequent chemical fallout in East Palestine, Ohio.
Local and state authorities previously evacuated all residents within one mile of the February 3 derailment and started a controlled burn of industrial chemicals on the vehicle to decrease the risk of an explosion, which could have sent shrapnel throughout the small town. Vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen used to manufacture PVC, was emitted from five train cars in the form of massive plumes of dark smoke visible throughout eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Shapiro remarked during an interview with NPR that executives from Norfolk Southern have demonstrated “arrogance and incompetence” in the weeks after the train derailment. “We made a criminal referral to the office of attorney general. They’ll determine whether or not there was criminal activity,” he said. “What I know is that Norfolk Southern is governed every day, not by caring about the communities that they send their trains through, but by corporate greed.”
Shapiro, inaugurated for his first term last month, previously said that Norfolk Southern attempted to silo authorities from Ohio and Pennsylvania into conducting the controlled burn of industrial chemicals so that the company could more promptly open the railroad. Norfolk Southern said in a statement to NPR that it is “committed to thoroughly and safely cleaning the site” and will reimburse “residents for the disruption this has caused in their lives.”
The EPA ordered Norfolk Southern earlier this week to handle the cleanup of contaminated soil and water, reimburse the EPA for cleaning services that will be offered to residents and businesses, and attend public meetings to update residents on the cleanup process. The agency also threatened to “immediately step in, conduct the necessary work, and then seek to compel Norfolk Southern to pay triple the cost” if the company does not fulfill its responsibilities.
I had coffee yesterday with someone who’s been a behind-the-scenes Team Reality advocate since 2020 – a doctor who figured out early on that Covid’s risks were far overblown. No, not Jay Bhattacharya , though as it happened we also talked yesterday and the conversation confirmed this one.
We should be optimistic, this doctor said. People get it now, no one’s taking the vaccines, it’s over. (He’s a surgeon, not an epidemiologist, thus his sunny demeanor. It takes a special kind of confidence to cut your fellow humans open. Plus surgery, unlike public health, actually works most of the time.)
And you know what? He’s right. Half-right, anyway. The Covid jabs are dead. All over the world people are voting with their arms. Fewer than 1 in 100 Americans will get an mRNA jab this month.
But the threat that Covid exposed is not over. Not the threat of the virus, which had an average age of death of maybe 82 or 83. Not even the threat of government orders like school closures and lockdowns. Those are awful, but they’re reversible and we seem to have rejected them resoundingly, at least in the United States.
No, I mean the scientific threats that the pandemic has exposed. Covid has revealed how out of control the public health establishment and its handmaiden virologists and immunologists have become. Drug companies too, although their corruption of medicine is less of a surprise.
So, without further ado, here are five scientific and/or public policy proposals that can help bring us back on track. Three are directed directly at the mRNA jabs, while the other two are larger. All face an uphill battle, but none are impossible, especially with public uneasiness about the jabs continuing to rise.
They’re presented in order of approvability – which, unfortunately, roughly corresponds to reverse order of importance – with a short explanation of each. Feel free to add your own…
(WANT TO SEE MY TOP FIVE? SUBSCRIBE. OR WAIT 72 HOURS. I KNOW, SUCH A TEASE. IT IS VALENTINE’S DAY, AFTER ALL.)
An IgG4 registry.Even mRNA advocates acknowledge they did not expect the fact that many people have a Covid immune response centered around less potent IgG4 antibodies after multiple mRNA shots and infections. We need to prospectively track a large group of those people, 20,000 or more, to see what their health outcomes are over the next few years.
My research has led me to conclude that there’s an elite conspiracy to enslave us all and turn us all into brainwashed automatons mindlessly enacting the wishes of our rulers in a cruel dystopia built by the powerful, for the powerful.
Haha, just kidding. That already happened.
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Step one is learning that the mainstream consensus worldview is a lie, and that we’ve been fed power-serving propaganda since we were children about our society, our nation, our government and our world. Most people haven’t even made it to step one yet.
Step two is getting clear on how we’ve been lied to. A lot of people who make it past step one get mixed up here. Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals, elite conspiracies to make all our kids transgendered or whatever, because their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government. They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia, because their worldview prohibits them from recognizing that we’re already living in a power-serving mind-controlled dystopia.
Others simply don’t go far enough in extracting the mainstream worldview from their minds and don’t inquire deeply enough into what’s really true. Plenty of self-identified socialists and anarchists still buy into bogus mainstream narratives about empire-targeted governments, or still buy into to the power-serving dynamics of party politics. Step two takes a lot of hard, sincere, intellectually honest work sorting out fact from fiction.
Step three is learning what to do about all this, and beginning to take action. This means working to spread awareness of what’s really going on and helping others to make it through steps one and two, because the only thing that ever leads to lasting positive changes in human behavior is an expansion of consciousness. The more people make it to step three, the more people there are to help wake up everyone else.
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Without the US military who would protect the world from hobby balloons and natural gas pipelines?
The US empire’s responsibility for the Nord Stream bombing is going to become one of those open secrets that everyone knows but nobody officially confirms, like Israel’s nuclear arsenal (which just as an aside Sy Hersh also helped expose).
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Free speech is meaningless and worthless if you don’t use it to oppose real power. In western “democracies” the majority of people are so effectively propagandized into speaking in alignment with the interests of the western empire that they may as well be taking orders on what to say at gunpoint.
In totalitarian regimes you say what your rulers want you to say because they physically coerced you using the threat of violence. In “free democracies” you say what your rulers want you to say because they psychologically coerced you using propaganda. The end result is the same.
Reagan once joked about Soviets thinking they are free because they’re allowed to criticize the US government as much as they like, but really that was just projection. Westerners think they have free speech, but they never use that “free speech” to criticize the tyrannical empire they live under.
Free speech is held as an important human right because it helps the people put a check on power. If you’re not using it for that, you may as well not have it. Your speech is only free insofar as you can criticize real power, and insofar as you actually do so.
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The reason I often use the phrase “the political/media class” is because it’s all one class, one social caste. They’re not actually separate in any meaningful way.
Whenever I talk about the hundreds of military bases the US empire is circling our planet with I always get people saying “We only have all those foreign bases because those foreign governments want us there for protection!”
Yes, yes I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that the US subverts, impoverishes and destroys any weaker nation that refuses to facilitate its military interests.
Foreign US military bases are “protection” in the same way extortion payments to the Mafia are “protection”.
Foreign governments don’t allow US military bases on their territory to protect themselves from their neighbors, they do it to protect themselves from the US.
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One of the strangest things the mainstream worldview asks us to accept is that the US government (A) should be the leader of the entire world and (B) wants to be the leader of the world solely for righteous and beneficent reasons.
Anyone else who wants to rule the world gets called a megalomaniac. We all grew up watching movies and shows about evil villains who want to rule the world. Yet the mainstream worldview asks us to accept that the US government wants to rule the world because they want to promote freedom and democracy.
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It’s easy to see the flaws in other countries, cultures and societies. It’s much harder to see the flaws in our own.
It’s easy to see the problems with other political parties and ideological factions. It’s much harder to see the problems with our own.
It’s easy to see how other groups are propagandized. It’s much harder to see how our own group is propagandized.
It’s easy to see how others are misguided and delusional. It’s much harder to see how we ourselves are misguided and delusional.
The further away from ourselves we look, the easier it is for us to find fault. But it doesn’t benefit anyone for us to find problems in the distant other. The closer to home we look, the more good we can do with what we find.
What about that present upper bound of $41? Was that given down to mankind on tablets of stone? No. That, too, originated from our friendly central planners in the booty-seeking capital of the country. How would this fee be determined under the free enterprise system? Simple:
The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, no bureaucrats they, rather public-spirited civil servants, are proposing a new regulation: credit card late fees, which can now reach a maximum of $41, will be capped at a mere $8.
One would think, based on this new initiative, that the reason we have late fees for credit card non or late payments in the first place is out of sheer meanness and profiteering. That would appear to be the level of understanding enjoyed by the promulgators of this new directive.
If you thought that, you’d be right. According to Rohit Chopra, CFPB director, excessive fees such as $41, serve “no purpose beyond padding the credit card companies’ profits.” And in the view of Aaron Klein, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution: “The rule brings to the forefront the reality that credit card late fees are designed to be excessive to create incentives for consumer behavior. They are not in proportion to the cost to the lender…”
Let’s hold on for a second. Suppose, to take the extreme case (often, it is easier to see economics in action when you do so: it is easier to see the mountain rather than the molehill) the new dictat mandated no late fees at all. What would be the effect of that? Obviously, poor people and those without good credit ratings at all, would be charged very high rates of interest for the borrowing that they do, in effect, between the time of their purchases and when their credit card payments are due. But suppose, further, that our masters in Washington DC precluded that option (they would call it usury, ignoring the fact that the high rates of interest would emanate from their foreclosure of late fees in our hypothetical example). What, then, would be the result? Why, those who are presumed by the CFPB to be the beneficiaries of their largesse, the poor and those with bad credit ratings, would not be able to enjoy the benefits of credit cards at all (unless of course, the government granted these to them in an entirely new and very costly program).
Now that we have seen the effects of no penalties at all, it is easy to discern the results of reducing the upper limit from $41 to $8: moves in this malevolent direction. The impecunious will not be entirely bereft of credit cards, although some will. Most such people will either be charged higher rates of interest and/or find it more difficult to initially obtain and then retain their cards, and almost certainly be subject to lower limits on how much they may spend initially.
What about that present upper bound of $41? Was that given down to mankind on tablets of stone? No. That, too, originated from our friendly central planners in the booty-seeking capital of the country. How would this fee be determined under the free enterprise system? Simple: different credit card companies would charge different combinations of interest charges and late fees to their clients. The competitive process would tend to ensure that the amalgamation that came closest to maximizing consumer welfare would be approached. Too high, and the company would lose customers. Too low, and they would court bankruptcy.
Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, during a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee on Feb. 9, 2021. (Ting Shen/AFP via Getty Images)
Not the FAA’s Role
In his Jan. 27 letter to the FAA, Johnson provided specific information about five named pilots with suspected COVID-19 vaccine ill effects; one of the pilots died 17 days after being vaccinated.
Numerous other accounts of pilots with suspected vaccine injuries are included in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, as The Epoch Times reported previously.
Johnson wanted to know what steps the FAA has taken or planned to take to investigate whether the five named pilots and others had suffered adverse effects after COVID-19 shots.
Northrup wrote that her agency isn’t in charge of that.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the responsible agency for tracking and follow up of suspected vaccine adverse events,” she wrote.
Northrup noted that pilots experiencing any medical issues are required to “ground themselves,” seek medical help and report any “significant medical events.”
“FAA is responsible for determining whether that event will have an adverse safety effect,” Northrup wrote.
She also said the agency was “aware of only four potentially vaccine-related adverse events in active pilots.”
Among those four, “only one has provided medical documentation through the normal process,” Northrup wrote. She gave no further information on what that process involves.
Justification For Shots
Johnson noted that, on Dec. 12, 2020, the day after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized COVID-19 vaccines for “emergency use” among the general public, the FAA declared pilots were permitted to take the shots, too.
That action surprised many in aviation because pilots are forbidden from taking other emergency-use-authorized drugs.
To justify the drugs’ use in pilots, Northrup listed nine websites about the general safety of the various brands of vaccines. Aviation experts have questioned whether any studies were done on pilots specifically. There were no such studies immediately apparent among the list Northrup provided.
Asked whether the FAA evaluated whether any changes should be made to guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for pilots, Northrup responded that the agency has “continued to monitor the data and determined no change in policy was indicated.”
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