Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

The White House believes Ukraine’s military could retake the Crimean Peninsula from Russia. However, officials say the offensive may cross Moscow’s “red lines” and prompt a nuclear strike.

The Biden administration has radically changed its view of Kiev’s military since Russia invaded nearly ten months ago. The Ukrainians “continue to shock the world with how well they’re performing on the battlefield,” an unnamed official said.

The White House now assesses that the Ukrainian armed forces are capable of retaking Crimea, with NBC News reporting that statements to that effect were made to lawmakers during a Congressional hearing last month. The administration official was attempting to explain to Congress why Kiev still needs American support.

The Crimean Peninsula was a region of Ukraine before it was annexed by Russia in 2014. While a referendum of Crimean citizens backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision, Kiev and Washington assert the peninsula still belongs to Ukraine.

Sources reached by NBC News said the White House believes Putin will respond sharply to a successful Ukrainian offensive in Crimea. “Putin may react more strongly to Crimea,” one official said, while a former administration staffer added “That’s the red line.”

The White House does not believe Ukrainian military operations in Crimea to be imminent. “A lot would have to happen militarily first” before Ukraine could begin a real offensive to retake Crimea, an official stated.

However, the Biden administration has been surprised by some of Ukraine’s most advanced military operations.

Two US officials and an American defense staffer said the White House was caught off guard and frustrated after Kiev launched a series of three drone attacks strikes deep inside Russian territory.

In the latest release of ‘THE TWITTER FILES,’ journalist Matt Taibbi details how Twitter acted as a ‘subsidiary’ of the FBI.

As a reminder, parts 1-3 of the series covered respectively, Twitter’s decision to interfere in the 2020 election by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, how the company created secret blacklists, and how they justified removing former President Donald Trump despite internally agreeing that he didn’t break any rules (parts one, two and three).

Take it away, Matt:

2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Continued:

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

 

6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.

 

7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.

 

8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.

 

9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

 

10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

 

11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines:

12. An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.

 

13. “HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:

 

14.Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromMA, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8:

 

 

15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @ClaireFosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding:

 

16. “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging.

 

17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @fromMA – were suspended.

 

18.In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”:

 

19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his “Twitter folks”:

20. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin:

21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter:

22.When told of the FBI flagging, @lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”

 

23.“I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That’s crazy,” said @Tiberius444.

 

24.In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

 

25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?

27.At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”

 

28. About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”

29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets:

30.Here, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on:

 

31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”:

 

32.The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”

33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.

34.While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”:

35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them:

36.There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI:

37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”:

38.State governments also flagged content.

 

39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.

 

40.“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet:

 

41.Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS):

42.If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS:

43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.

 

44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

 

45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @bariweiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.

KABOOM 💥💥💥💥💥 https://t.co/TS3jFZ51VR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

Also the irony of where the real interference came from https://t.co/tye6NEiRTu

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 16, 2022

🤔”something new”…

Instead of waiting for flagged content to gain warrants, the Obama approach allowed FBI/DHS/DOJ-NSD to analyze raw data scraped as the result of *new warrantless self-granted surveillance authorities* to monitor domestic speech and communication networks. https://t.co/7UuoVFm1Up

— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) December 16, 2022

FBI asked Twitter to track physical locations of users who said the 2020 election was stolen.

Holy hell. Twitter was basically used as a surveillance tool by the FBI so they could conduct intimidation raids at peoples’ homes if they made posts questioning the 2020 election. 😳 https://t.co/du8rIeRpr7

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) December 16, 2022

Authored by Claudio Grass via The Mises Institute,

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us.

As Reuters reported on the 15th of November, “Global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup Inc , HSBC Holdings Pl, Mastercard Inc and Wells Fargo & Co are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed’s innovation center, they said in a statement. The project, which is called the regulated liability network, will be conducted in a test environment and use simulated data, the New York Fed said. The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.”

Shockingly enough, essentially zero attention was paid to the story. Most media outlets mentioned it in passing and offered little to no context that would make the unsuspecting reader aware of the implications of this development. There was no mainstream discussion or debate about what this means or about how it can affect the average citizen, and no politicians, Fed officials or other institutional figures called any attention to it and argued either for or against it.

There was one notable exception, though, one high-profile individual that noticed what could mark the start of a tectonic shift and thought the rest of the world should notice too: Edward Snowden.

The aforementioned context that should have been provided to the average news reader that is not necessarily familiar with the concept of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) would include at least a brief explanation what they are, what purposes they serve and how they compare to existing fiat paper money. As I outlined in previous articles, the stakes are too high for people to ignore this development. Whoever controls the money, controls everything and the rise of CBDCs threatens to make that control absolute, closing whatever little “loopholes” of freedom may still exist today.

To most citizens, savers and taxpayers, the transition to a digital dollar might seem harmless, or even beneficial, given that most of the population today associates digitalization with convenience and speed. Indeed, if one doesn’t understand the ins and outs of monetary history, of fiat money and of digital currencies, this concept appears totally innocuous. But even for many who do understand these things, it might seem like such a step would really make no difference. Junk money is junk money after all, be it physical or digital, it’s still backed by nothing, right?

Well, that is right indeed, but there’s a lot more to it. While the currency itself will continue to be worthless, its digital form will come with a bunch of perks and advantages for central planners. As Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University, puts it:

One should recognize that the CBDC creates new opportunity for monetary policy. If we all had CBDC accounts instead of cash, in principle it might be possible to implement negative interest rates simply by shrinking balances in CBDC accounts. It will become a lot easier to undertake helicopter drops of money. If everybody had a CBDC account, one could easily increase the balance in those accounts.

What this essentially means is that any choice that remains and any degree of financial sovereignty that is left in the present system could be easily wiped out by CBDCs. And its not only financial freedom that’s at stake: these centralized digital currencies can be used by governments to monitor, to control and even to directly punish dissenters, by blocking transactions, freezing their accounts or seizing they assets. Some might find that farfetched, but those are probably the same people who thought that China’s “Social Credit System” was implausible too, right up to the moment it was actually implemented.

Hate speech cases across Western Europe are growing more outrageous by the year, with the latest example out of Norway reaching new heights of absurdity. This as various countries’ laws get narrower and narrower over what can or cannot be said regarding ‘gender identity’. 

A woman in Norway is being threatened by the government with a stiff prison sentence for the alleged “hate speech crime” of pointing out that a man cannon become a lesbian.

What’s more is that the filmmaker and actress currently under investigation by Norwegian authorities, Tonje Gjevjon, is herself a lesbian – and quite a prominent personality in popular culture as well. On the other side, is a “transgender female” who claims to be a “lesbian mother” named Christine Jentoft, who has a history of publicly denouncing people for ‘transphobia’.

Gjevjon’s offending words which triggered outrage were previously posted to Facebook as follows:

“It’s just as impossible for men to become a lesbian as it is for men to become pregnant. Men are men regardless of their sexual fetishes,” the post stated.

She was then informed on November 17 that there’s now a formal criminal investigation which was opened by prosecutors for allegedly violating national laws related to protecting “gender identity and gender expression”.

Gjevjon has long been on record as saying that the trans agenda is in reality “harmful” and “discriminatory”  for women, especially lesbians. Last year, for example, she called on government ministers to “take action to ensure that lesbian women’s human rights are safeguarded, by making it clear that there are no lesbians with penises, that males cannot be lesbians regardless of their gender identity.”

Her Facebook posts are now subject of a criminal probe. Gjevjon has said the country’s laws have in effect become discriminatory against women.

The Minister of Culture and Equality Anette Trettebergstuen responded to this challenge publicly by saying, “I do not share an understanding of reality where the only two biological sexes are to be understood as sex. Gender identity is also important.”

Trans activists have long been out to get Gjevjon, with the actress and filmmaker later saying she knew her Facebook post would result in an avalanche of backlash. Meanwhile, her opponents have repeatedly denounced her as a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, or TERF. The whole issue is similar to denunciations of J.K. Rowling and the so-called “trans community” trying to get her de-platformed. 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Over 400 hotels in the UK, some of which are four and five star rated, are being used to house illegal boat migrants in the UK, it has been revealed.

According to Home Office statistics, 419 different hotels are being used to accommodate asylum seekers, that vast majority of whom are economic migrants, at a cost of £7 million pounds per day.

The figure represents the number of hotels being used for such purposes in mid-November, so the real number is probably even higher now.

Nigel Farage responded to the revelation by remarking, “It is out of control, there are very very few towns now unaffected by this.”

There are now 419 illegal migrant hotels in the UK… Invasion! pic.twitter.com/R75w43JvIU

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) December 15, 2022

Areas around the hotels have been plagued by criminality, anti-social behaviour and sexual assaults.

A 37-year-old woman in Standish was raped by a migrant staying at a nearby hotel, while other migrants from the hotel were caught filming PE lessons at a local school and sexually harassing teenage girls as they walked home.

The revelation that the number of hotels has surpassed the 400 mark is sure to stoke more anger, given that many Brits continue to suffer through a cost of living crisis.

While they make the difficult choice between heating and eating this winter, illegal economic migrants are being kept cozy and warm in comfortable hotel accommodation at taxpayer expense, in some cases in prime tourist areas.

People who booked the hotels months in advance are also having their wedding plans ruined after receiving phone calls from the hotel to immediately cancel their bookings.

As we previously highlighted, the UK government has arrested just 0.3 per cent of illegal boat migrants despite passing a law that makes it a crime to arrive in the UK without proper permission.

Almost 50,000 boat migrants have arrived this year alone, nearly half of whom are scammers from Albania, a country at peace.

As we document in the video below, Europe continues to experience major social unrest problems with its growing migrant population.

*  *  *

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The market may have been too quick to dismiss the impact of European oil price cap on Russian oil.

Assuming that the latest G-7 attempt to limit Russian oil revenues were one big nothingburger – after all, the US itself admitted that the goal of the price cap was not so much to cripple Putin’s Treasury as to maintain a more stable flow of oil – the market quickly ignored the potential of lower Russian output as it continued to sell oil into year end amid fears there won’t be enough demand to offset stable supply. 

But in yet another case of poetic justice-cum-Murphy’s law, Europe’s exercise in virtue signalling optics is about to backfire and achieve precisely what it was meant to achieve, if only for virtuous public consumption.

According to Bloomberg, there are signs that oil tanker companies are avoiding sending their ships to collect crude from a key Russian port in Asia following the G-7 sanctions targeting Moscow’s petroleum revenues. As has been duly documented here previously, since Dec. 5, buyers of Russian oil have only been allowed to access industry standard insurance and an array of trade-critical services if they pay $60 a barrel or less. But shipments of the key ESPO grade from the Asian port of Kozmino are about $10 above that, meaning they need to make alternative arrangements.

Since the cap began, ESPO (which stands for Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean, the initials of a pipeline that takes the oil from east Siberia to the Pacific) has seen loadings cut in half from a month earlier, tanker tracking compiled by Bloomberg show. By contrast Urals, a much larger grade exported from western Russia, is flowing freely to customers in Asia — aided by the fact it fell far below the $60 threshold a few weeks before it was introduced.

However, amid the latest sanctions which set the $60 price cutoff, tankers are shying away from the Asian grade, and in the 10 days since the measures began, 4.4 million barrels have been loaded onto tankers at Kozmino, Bloomberg calculates. In the same period a month earlier, there were 8.8 million barrels loaded.

While it is too soon to say if the observed drop in ESPO flows reflects something structural, weather conditions haven’t been particularly bad and there doesn’t appear to be many candidate ships in place to collect cargoes in the coming few weeks. That said, tanker tracking data is always volatile, depending on the timings of loadings, and the comings and goings of individual tankers.

Shipbrokers and traders contacted by Bloomberg also said that said there are signs that ESPO sellers are struggling to secure tankers for cargoes purchased at more than $60 a barrel. At least two large and well-known shipowners, China Cosco Shipping Corp. and Greece-based Avin International Ltd. have stepped back from moving ESPO crude since Dec. 5, according to shipbrokers. Emails sent to both companies weren’t answered.

Their absence has taken at least five tankers out of the regular pool of ships that move the grade, they said. That leaves charterers to work with smaller independent owners who’re still willing to handle the trade. If charterers continue to face headwinds with the booking of tankers, flows could be impeded, they said. ESPO and Sokol, another grade that’s exported from eastern Russia, currently trade above the $60 a barrel threshold that gives access to insurance and G-7 services.

With Urals grade Russian oil trading well below the price cap, and last fetching about $45/bbl, shipbrokers said tanker bookings for Russia’s flagship crude from western ports are proceeding more normally. Tanker tracking also suggests no obvious disruption to flows of the grade.

Of course, all of this is just a snapshot in time: once oil prices spike, as they will after the year-end selling is over, it is virtually assured that all Russian oil grades will be priced above $60, even with the deep discount to spot. At that point, traders will be watching closely to see if Russian crude exports can be maintained and how Moscow will respond if supplies do get disrupted.

As noted previously, the irony behind all this is that the stability of Russian exports is crucial as the US and rest of G-7 work on ensuring security of global oil supplies ahead of the Northern hemisphere winter while simultaneously attempting to deprive the Kremlin of funding for its war in Ukraine. A sharp loss of output could backfire on the west if it boosts wider oil prices and reignites inflation. And while the price cap wasn’t really supposed to be a price cap, it just may end up being one with Russian oil exports suddenly cut off, sending all “non-Russian” oil prices explosively higher, and sparking a new energy crisis some time in early 2023.

As for Russian product just sitting there, about half the ESPO cargoes scheduled for loading in the rest of this month have yet to secure tankers, according to shipbrokers. That is slower than usual, and they attributing it to the smaller pool of willing tankers operated by a smaller number of owners. It’s possible that tankers which previously handled oil from sanctioned regimes such as Iran and Venezuela – the so-called dark fleet – would be booked, shipbrokers said.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Serbia has formally asked NATO if it can deploy up to 1,000 troops into northern Kosovo, where Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic says ethnic Serbs are being “terrorized” by the Kosovo government based in Pristina.

Vucic made the request to the commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, known as KFOR. Serbian officials say that a UN resolution that formally ended the Kosovo war allows for the deployment of up to 1,000 Serbian troops into Kosovo, but Vucic still doesn’t expect the request to be granted.

“The request says that a certain number of (Serbian troops), from one hundred to up to 1,000, return to Kosovo,” he said.

Tensions have been high in northern Kosovo since the summer when Pristina tried to implement a policy that would require ethnic Serbs to acquire license plates issued by Kosovo. Serbs in the area don’t recognize the government in Pristina and still use Belgrade-issued documents to cross the border.

Serbia and Kosovo failed to reach a deal in talks back in November, as Pristina wants any agreement to involve recognition from Belgrade. According to RT, Serbs have barricaded border crossings between Serbia and Kosovo to protest the deployment of ethnic Albanian police in the area.

Serbia wants to deploy troops to secure the border crossings and says NATO forces cannot protect the Kosovo Serbs from ethnic Albanians. KFOR previously threatened to intervene if “stability is jeopardized” in northern Kosovo when tensions were high over the summer and would likely take action if Serbia went ahead with the troop deployment.

2/ After an @EULEXKosovo patrol was attacked last night, EUHR @JosepBorrellF said the EU “will not tolerate the use of violent, criminal acts in the north.”

“Barricades must be removed immediately by groups of Kosovo Serbs,” Borrell said.

🎥 BIRN pic.twitter.com/TT3mYt0m7t

— Balkan Insight (@BalkanInsight) December 11, 2022

KFOR has been present in the breakaway former Serbian province of Kosovo since the US and NATO 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia. Kosovo formally declared its independence in 2008, but it’s not recognized by enough countries to have a seat at the UN.

Currently, there are about 3,700 NATO troops deployed under the KFOR mission, including over 600 US troops.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

Xi Jinping has made an offer difficult for the Arabian Peninsula to ignore: China will be guaranteed buyers of your oil and gas, just pay us in yuan…

It would be so tempting to qualify Chinese President Xi Jinping landing in Riyadh a week ago, welcomed with royal pomp and circumstance, as Xi of Arabia proclaiming the dawn of the petroyuan era.

But it’s more complicated than that. As much as the seismic shift implied by the petroyuan move applies, Chinese diplomacy is way too sophisticated to engage in direct confrontation, especially with a wounded, ferocious Empire. So there’s way more going here than meets the (Eurasian) eye.

Xi of Arabia’s announcement was a prodigy of finesse: it was packaged as the internationalization of the yuan. From now on, Xi said, China will use the yuan for oil trade, through the Shanghai Petroleum and National Gas Exchange, and invited the Persian Gulf monarchies to get on board. Nearly 80 percent of trade in the global oil market continues to be priced in US dollars.

Ostensibly, Xi of Arabia, and his large Chinese delegation of officials and business leaders, met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to promote increased trade. Beijing promised to “import crude oil in a consistent manner and in large quantities from the GCC.” And the same goes for natural gas.

China has been the largest importer of crude on the planet for five years now – half of it from the Arabian peninsula, and more than a quarter from Saudi Arabia. So it’s no wonder that the prelude for Xi of Arabia’s lavish welcome in Riyadh was a special op-ed expanding the trading scope, and praising increased strategic/commercial partnerships across the GCC, complete with “5G communications, new energy, space and digital economy.”

Foreign Minister Wang Yi doubled down on the “strategic choice” of China and wider Arabia. Over $30 billion in trade deals were duly signed – quite a few significantly connected to China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects.

And that brings us to the two key connections established by Xi of Arabia: the BRI and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The Silk Roads of Arabia

BRI will get a serious boost by Beijing in 2023, with the return of the Belt and Road Forum. The first two bi-annual forums took place in 2017 and 2019. Nothing happened in 2021 because of China’s strict zero-Covid policy, now abandoned for all practical purposes.

The year 2023 is pregnant with meaning as BRI was first launched 10 years ago by Xi, first in Central Asia (Astana) and then Southeast Asia (Jakarta).

BRI not only embodies a complex, multi-track trans-Eurasian trade/connectivity drive but it is the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept at least until the mid-21st century. So the 2023 forum is expected to bring to the forefront a series of new and redesigned projects adapted to a post-Covid and debt-distressed world, and most of all to the loaded Atlanticism vs. Eurasianism geopolitical and geoeconomic sphere.

Also significantly, Xi of Arabia in December followed Xi of Samarkand in September – his first post-Covid overseas trip, for the SCO summit in which Iran officially joined as a full member. China and Iran in 2021 clinched a 25-year strategic partnership deal worth a potential $400 billion in investments. That’s the other node of China’s two-pronged West Asia strategy.

The nine permanent SCO members now represent 40 percent of the world’s population. One of their key decisions in Samarkand was to increase bilateral trade, and overall trade, in their own currencies.

And that further connects us to what has happening in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in full synchronicity with Riyadh: the meeting of the Supreme Eurasia Economic Council, the policy implementation arm of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Kyrgyzstan, could not have been more straightforward: “The work has accelerated in the transition to national currencies in mutual settlements… The process of creating a common payment infrastructure and integrating national systems for the transmission of financial information has begun.”

The next Supreme Eurasian Economic Council will take place in Russia in May 2023, ahead of the Belt and Road Forum. Take them together and we have the lineaments of the geoeconomic road map ahead: the drive towards the petroyuan proceeding in parallel to the drive towards a “common paying infrastructure” and most of all, a new alternative currency bypassing the US dollar.

That’s exactly what the head of the EAEU’s macroeconomic policy, Sergey Glazyev, has been designing, side by side with Chinese specialists.

Total Financial War

The move towards the petroyuan will be fraught with immense peril.

In every serious geoeconomic gaming scenario, it’s a given that an enfeebled petrodollar translates as the end of the imperial free lunch in effect for over five decades.

Concisely, in 1971, then-US President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon pulled the US from the gold standard; three years later, after the 1973 oil shock, Washington approached the Saudi oil minister, notorious Sheikh Yamani, with the proverbial offer-you-can’t-refuse: we buy your oil in US dollars and in return you buy our Treasury bonds, lots of weapons, and recycle whatever’s left in our banks.

Cue to Washington now suddenly able to dispense helicopter money – backed by nothing – ad infinitum, and the US dollar as the ultimate hegemonic weapon, complete with an array of sanctions over 30 nations who dare to disobey the unilaterally imposed “rules-based international order.”

Impulsively rocking this imperial boat is anathema. So Beijing and the GCC will adopt the petroyuan slowly but surely, and certainly with zero fanfare. The heart of the matter, once again, is their mutual exposure to the Western financial casino.

In the Chinese case, what to do, for instance, with those whopping $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds. In the Saudi case, it’s hard to think about “strategic autonomy” – such as what’s enjoyed by Iran – when the petrodollar is a staple of the Western financial system. The menu of possible imperial reactions includes everything from a soft coup/ regime change to Shock and Awe over Riyadh – followed by regime change.

Yet what the Chinese – and the Russians – are aiming at goes way beyond a Saudi (and Emirati) predicament. Beijing and Moscow have clearly identified how everything – the oil market, global commodities markets – is tied to the role of the US dollar as reserve currency.

And that’s exactly what the EAEU discussions; the SCO discussions; from now on the BRICS+ discussions; and Beijing’s two-pronged strategy across West Asia are focused to undermine.

Beijing and Moscow, within the BRICS framework, and further on within the SCO and the EAEU, have been closely coordinating their strategy since the first sanctions on Russia post-Maidan 2014, and the de facto trade war against China unleashed in 2018.

Now, after the February 2022 Special Military Operation launched by Moscow in Ukraine and NATO has devolved into, for all practical purposes, war against Russia, we have stepped beyond Hybrid War territory and are deep into Total Financial War.

SWIFTly drifting away

The whole Global South absorbed the “lesson” of the collective (institutional) west freezing, as in stealing, the foreign reserves of a G20 member, on top of it a nuclear superpower. If that happened to Russia, it could happen to anyone. There are no “rules” anymore.

Russia since 2014 has been improving its SPFS payment system, in parallel with China’s CIPS, both bypassing the western-led SWIFT banking messaging system, and increasingly used by Central Banks across Central Asia, Iran and India. All across Eurasia, more people are ditching Visa and Mastercard and using UnionPay and/or Mir cards, not to mention Alipay and WeChat Pay, both extremely popular across Southeast Asia.

Of course the petrodollar – and the US dollar, still representing under 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves – will not ride into oblivion overnight. Xi of Arabia is just the latest chapter in a seismic shift now driven by a select group in the Global South, and not by the former “hyperpower.”

Trading in their own currencies and a new, global alternative currency is right at the top of the priorities of that long list of nations – from South America to Northern Africa and West Asia – eager to join BRICS+ or the SCO, and in quite a few cases, both.

The stakes could not be higher. And it’s all about subjugation or exercising full sovereignty. So let’s leave the last essential words to the foremost diplomat of our troubled times, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, at the international interparty conference Eurasian Choice as a Basis for Strengthening Sovereignty:

“The main reason for today’s growing tensions is the stubborn striving of the collective West to maintain a historically diminishing domination in the international arena by any means it can… It is impossible to impede the strengthening of the independent centers of economic growth, financial might and political influence. They are emerging on our common continent of Eurasia, in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.”

All aboard…the Sovereign Train.

While there are nearly 8 billion people in the world, just over 3,000 are billionaires as of November 2022. As Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang notes, this tiny group of people is worth nearly $11.8 trillion – Equivalent to about 11.8% of global GDP.

Where do these billionaires live? This graphic by Truman Du uses data from Forbes to map out the richest billionaires around the world.

The Full List

As it turns out, billionaires are a lot more geographically concentrated than you might think.

In fact, of the 195 officially recognized countries around the world, only 76 are home to billionaires. And even within these countries, there’s vast disparities between the quantity of billionaires.

Here’s a breakdown of all the countries that have at least one billionaire. For countries with more than one, we’ve highlighted the billionaire with the highest net worth as of November 28, 2022:

The United States is well known to have one of the highest concentrations of billionaires. It’s home to over 900, with Elon Musk the wealthiest of them all with a staggering net worth of over $191 billion in November 2022. That makes him not just the richest billionaire in America, but the richest person in the world.

China has the second highest concentration of billionaires, with 400 ultra-wealthy that have a combined net worth of $1.45 trillion. China’s richest billionaire, Zhong Shanshan, is the founder of the Nongfu Spring beverage company.

Interestingly, there are no clear patterns when it comes to the type of industry or sector that these billionaires are involved in. The exception is the U.S., where a significant number of billionaires are linked to the tech industry.

And it’s important to note that some heads of states are reportedly billionaires, and in many cases might be the wealthiest people in their respective countries. But their wealth is often a state secret, well-diversified, and too difficult to accurately estimate.

Male vs. Female Billionaires

One trend that does stand out is the number of men versus women who are billionaires. Of the 76 billionaires on the list, only 7 are women.

This pattern is also evident when looking at the entire billionaire population—of the 3,311 billionaires worldwide, only 12.9% are women.

It’s worth mentioning that this population of billionaire women is rising. According to Forbes, the 2021 list included 328 women, 36% more than in 2020.

Authored by David Henderson and Charles Hooper via The Brownstone Institute,

The COVID-19 pandemic brought us a panoply of lies and evidence-light declarations that were less intended to inform Americans than to consolidate power and buy time. Among these were Anthony Fauci’s famous shift from arguing against wearing masks, to recommending wearing one, and, finally, to wearing two. 

Fauci also tried to convince us that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not manipulated in a lab even though his inner circle had emailed him about “unusual features” of the virus that looked “potentially engineered.”  And, of course, we had “fifteen days to stop the spread,” an evergreen concept that dragged on for two years. Lest readers fault us for forgetting, there was also the “gain of function” controversy, the focused protection battle, school closures, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine misrepresentations. 

These topics have received much public attention. The one pandemic topic that hasn’t, and is nonetheless important, is the maligned ivermectin. It’s time to set the record straight.

If you’ve followed the news closely over the last two years, you’ve probably heard a few things about ivermectin.

• First, that it’s a veterinary medicine intended for horses and cows.

• Second, that the FDA and other government regulatory agencies recommended against its use for COVID-19.

• Third, that even the inventor and manufacturer of ivermectin, Merck & Co., came out against it.

• Fourth, that one of the largest studies showing that ivermectin worked for COVID-19 was retracted for data fraud.

• And, finally, that the largest and best study of ivermectin, the TOGETHER trial, showed that ivermectin didn’t work.

Let’s consider the evidence.

Ivermectin has a distinguished history, and it may have benefits comparable to those of penicillin. The anti-parasitic’s discovery led to a Nobel Prize and subsequent billions of safe administrations around the world, even among children and pregnant women. “Ivermectin is widely available worldwide, inexpensive, and one of the safest drugs in modern medicine.”

The FDA put out a special warning against using ivermectin for COVID-19. The FDA’s warning, which included language such as, “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death,” and “highly toxic,” might suggest that the FDA was warning against pills laced with poison, not a drug the FDA had already approved as safe. Why did it become dangerous when used for COVID-19? The FDA didn’t say.

Because of the FDA’s rules, if it were to make any statement on ivermectin, it was obliged to attack it. The FDA prohibits the promotion of drugs for unapproved uses. Since fighting SARS-CoV-2 was an unapproved use of ivermectin, the FDA couldn’t have advocated use without obvious hypocrisy. Ivermectin’s discoverer, Merck & Co., had multiple reasons to disparage its own drug. 

Merck, too, couldn’t have legally “promoted” ivermectin for COVID-19 without a full FDA approval, something that would have taken years and many millions of dollars. Plus, Merck doesn’t make much money from cheap, generic ivermectin but was hoping to find success with its new, expensive drug, Lagevrio (molnupiravir).

A large study of ivermectin for COVID-19 by Elgazzar et al. was withdrawn over charges of plagiarism and faked data. Many media reports seem fixated on this one dubious study, but it was one of many clinical studies. After the withdrawn studies have been removed from consideration, there are 15 trials that suggest that ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID-19 and 78 that do. 

The TOGETHER trial received significant positive press. The New York Times quoted two experts who had seen the results. One stated, “There’s really no sign of any benefit [from ivermectin],” while the other said, “At some point it will become a waste of resources to continue studying an unpromising approach.” 

While the Elgazzar paper was quickly dismissed, the TOGETHER trial was acclaimed. It shouldn’t have been. Researchers who have analyzed it have found 31 critical problems (impossible data; extreme conflicts of interest; blinding failure), 22 serious problems (results were delayed six months; conflicting data), and 21 major problems (multiple, conflicting randomization protocols) with it. 

While the popular narrative is that the TOGETHER trial showed that ivermectin didn’t work for COVID-19, the actual results belie that conclusion: ivermectin was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death, a 23 percent lower risk of mechanical ventilation, a 17 percent lower risk of hospitalization, and a 10 percent lower risk of extended ER observation or hospitalization. We have calculated that the probability that ivermectin helped the patients in the TOGETHER trial ranged from 26 percent for the median number of days to clinical recovery to 91 percent for preventing hospitalization. The TOGETHER trial’s results should be reported accurately.

Based on the clinical evidence from the 93 trials that ivermectin reduced mortality by an average of 51 percent, and on the estimated infection fatality rate of COVID-19,  about 400 infected Americans aged 60-69 would need to be treated with ivermectin to statistically prevent one death in that group. The total cost of the ivermectin to prevent that one death: $40,000.

(Based on the GoodRx website, a generic prescription for ivermectin is priced at approximately $40. Roughly 2.5 prescriptions would be needed per person to receive the average dose of 150 mg per patient.) 

How much is your life worth? We’re betting it’s worth far more than $40,000.

When the next pandemic strikes, by necessity we’ll rely on older drugs because newer ones require years of development. Ivermectin is a repurposed drug that helps, and could have helped so much more. It deserves recognition, not disparagement. What we really need, however, is a way to inoculate ourselves against the lies and misrepresentations of powerful public figures, organizations, and drug companies. Sadly, there are no such vaccines for that contagion.