Although the global media used all its weapons of opinion to make the “peasant war” that shook Germany seem nonexistent, the world was still treated to dramatic images of the mass farmers’ demonstrations through the new era of social media.
“No fuel, no food, no future” — that is the slogan most often used by German farmers, obviously in English because it was the only way to get mass exposure of their current plight.
However, you’d be forgiven for missing the protests raging across Germany — and in many other countries this past week, including Romania and France — due to the mainstream media’s apparent disinterest in the farming revolution, with producers seemingly given particularly strict instructions on what to, and what not to report.
The existence of protests unfolding throughout Europe appeared to be under some form of media embargo.
Perhaps it might be worth considering why.
It is true in general, but in post-WWII Europe in particular, which was in a rather dire situation, it has proven true many times over that food supply is perhaps an even more delicate and important strategic sector than heavy industry. Although in macro statistics, which give a false picture, agriculture’s share could be only a few percent, or even “negligible,” it is not only not negligible, but it turns out to be more important than anything imaginable.
The great peasant wars of the 15th and 16th centuries were fought for exactly the same reasons as today. In that century and a half, in addition to literally “pulling the rug out from under the peasantry,” the average peasant’s daily working hours doubled, and the income he received for those hours was cut in half. It is understandable (though not excusable) that the brutal cruelty of the somewhat frustrated peasant masses knew no bounds. Nor, indeed, did the reprisals that followed.
The global power economy and the collaborationist power structures of Europe, increasingly subordinated to it and forced into a pariah role, are now doing the same, shifting onto peasant society the costs of prolonging the agony of the U.S. world empire.
The outcome of the conflict is, as of yet, unpredictable, as the entire European system of domination is on the verge of collapse.
Just as the rebel leaders who led the peasant wars many centuries ago had no “adequate narrative” of what an acceptable settlement looked like, today, we are still living through a whirlwind of emotions, with little sign of an amicable solution being reached anytime soon.
US ‘Deplores’ Israeli Shelling Of UN Shelter In Gaza, Mass Casualties Reported
The Biden administration has issued a statement saying the US “deplores the deadly attack on a UN shelter in Gaza.” Earlier in the day Palestinian sources and UN officials said at least nine civilians were killed and another 75 injured after two tank rounds scored a direct hit on a United Nations training center in southern Gaza.
Hundreds of displaced Gazans were taking shelter there when the attack unfolded. The casualties were so high because the tank shelling set off a large blaze at the facility, UN officials said.
Khan Younis is experiencing some of the most intense ground fighting between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas since the start of the war.
“Thomas White, head of Gaza operations for the agency, known as UNRWA, said that the center in the southern city of Khan Younis had been unreachable for two days and that people were trapped,” the NY Times reports. “Khan Younis has been hit by heavy fighting as Israel says it is hunting down Hamas leaders, leaving hospitals and other facilities in the middle of a war zone.” At least two major hospitals are said to be besieged in the southern city.
Below is the full State Department statement in reaction to the bombing of the UN shelter:
“We deplore today’s attack on the UN’s Khan Yunis training center,” spokesman Vedant Patel said.
“You’ve heard me say it before, you’ve heard the Secretary say it before, but civilians must be protected and the protected nature of UN facilities must be respected. And humanitarian workers must be protected so that they can continue providing civilians with the life saving humanitarian assistance that they need.”
Arab news sources have claimed that the IDF is “shooting anything that moves.” Meanwhile a major Israel proposal for a 2-month pause in fighting is unlikely to materialize, also on reports that Hamas quickly rejected it while demanding that Israel’s ground forces pull out of the Strip altogether.
BREAKING| Israel’s military carries out more strikes targeting an UNRWA training centre in Khan Yunis in Gaza sheltering over 10,000 displaced Palestinians, which is already burning. pic.twitter.com/4KMLBLPZQu
Making matters worse for the situation in Khan Younis is that it has already been swarmed by internally displaced refugees who were forced out of their homes in the north. Some 500,000 Palestinians — nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population — are believed to no longer have a home to return to, according to UN officials.
Even if country 404 is utterly defeated in 2024, once again it’s imperative to stress it: this is far from over…
Selected players scattered around the Beltway silos of power, diligently working as messengers for the people who really run the show in the Hegemon, have concluded that a no holds barred confrontation with Russia would lead to the collapse of all of NATO; undo decades of US iron grip on Europe; and ultimately cause the Empire’s downfall.
Playing brinkmanship games sooner or later would meet the indestructible red lines inbuilt in the unmovable Russian object.
US elites are smarter than that. They may excel on calculated risk. But when the stakes are this high, they know when to hedge and when to fold.
The “loss” of Ukraine – now a graphic imperative – is not worth risking the loss of the whole Hegemonic ride. That would be too much for the Empire to lose.
So even as they get increasingly desperate with the accelerated imperial plunge into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss, they’re frantically changing the narrative – a domain in which they excel.
And that explains why discombobulated European vassals in NATO-controlled EU are now in total panic.
Davos this week offered bucketloads of Orwellian salad. The key, frantic messages: War is peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not winning. Hence Ukraine needs way more weaponizing.
Yet even Norwegian Wood Stoltenberg was told to toe the new line that matters: “NATO is not moving into Asia. It’s China that is coming close to us.” That certainly adds a new wacky meaning to the notion of moving tectonic plates.
Keep the Forever Wars engine running
There is a total void of “leadership” in Washington. There is no “Biden”. Just Team Biden: a corporate combo featuring low-rent messengers such as de facto neocon Little Blinkie. They do what they’re told by wealthy “donors” and the financial-military interests that really run the show, reciting the same old cliché-saturated lines day after day, bit players in a Theatre of the Absurd.
Only one exhibit suffices.
Reporter: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”
The President of the United States: “Well, when you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
The same in what passes for “strategic thinking” applies to Ukraine.
The Hegemon is not being lured into fighting in West Asia – as much as the genocidal arrangement in Tel Aviv, in tandem with US Zio-cons, wants to drag it into a war on Iran.
Still, the imperial machine is being steered to keep the Forever Wars engine running, non-stop, at varying speeds.
The elites in charge are way more clinical than the whole Team Biden. They know they will not win in what will soon be country 404. But the tactical victory, so far, is massive: enormous profits out of the frantic weaponizing; totally gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing the EU to the sub-status of a lowly vassal; and from now on plenty of time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to the whole Takfiri-neo ISIS galaxy.
From Plato to NATO, it may be too early to state it’s all over for the West. What is nearly over is the current battle, centered on country 404. As Andrei Martyanov himself stresses, it was up to Russia, once again, “to start dismantling what today has become the house of demons and horror in the West and by the West, and she is doing it again in a Russian way – by defeating it on the battlefield.”
Yet the war is far from over. As Davos once again made it quite clear, they will not give up.
Chinese wisdom rules that, “when you want to hit a man with an arrow, first hit his horse. When you want to capture all the bandits, first capture their chief.”
The “chief” – or chiefs – certainly are far from being captured. BRICS+ and de-dollarization may have a shot at it, starting this year.
The plutocratic endgame
Under this framework, even massive US-Ukraine corruption involving rings and rings of theft from lavish US “aid”, as recently revealed by former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach, is a mere detail.
Nothing has been done or will be done about it. After all, the Pentagon itself fails every audit. These audits, by the way, did not even include the income from the massive multi-billion dollar heroin operation in Afghanistan – with Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo set up as the distribution center for Europe. The profits were pocketed by US intel operatives off the books.
When fentanyl replaced heroin as a domestic US plague, it was pointless to continue occupying Afghanistan – subsequently abandoned after two decades in pure Helter Skelter mode, leaving behind over $7 billion in weapons.
It’s impossible to describe all these Empire-centric concentric rings of corruption and institutionalized organized crime to a brainwashed collective West. The Chinese, once again, to the rescue. Taoist Zhuangzi (369 – 286 B.C.): “You can’t talk about the ocean to a frog living in a well, you can’t describe ice to a summer midge, and you can’t reason with an ignoramus.”
NATO’s cosmic humiliation in Ukraine notwithstanding, this proxy war against Russia, against Europe and against China remains the fuse that could light up a WWIII before the end of this decade. Who will decide it is an extremely rarefied plutocracy. No, not Davos: these are only their clownish mouthpieces.
Russia has reactivated a military factory system at lightning speed – now standing at about 15 times the capacity of January 2022. Along the front line there are about 300,000 troops, plus in the back two pincer armies of hundreds of thousands of mobile troops in each pincer being prepared to create a double envelopment of the Ukrainian Army and annihilate it.
Even if country 404 is utterly defeated in 2024, once again it’s imperative to stress it: this is far from over. The leadership in Beijing fully understands that the Hegemon is such a disintegrating wreck, on the way to secession, that the only way to hold it together would be a world war. It’s time to re-read T.S. Eliot in more ways than one: “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / and approach to the meaning restores the experience.”
The Big Lie of the January 6 “insurrection” is falling apart before our eyes…
With over three years having passed since January 6, 2021, it may come as a shock to some that this vexed date is more relevant than ever. The regime has broadly employed the absurd notion of January 6 as a violent assault on the scale of 9/11 as a pretext to weaponize the national security state against its political opponents. The still more absurd notion that Trump personally instigated this insurrection has emerged as the sham legal rationale behind the regime’s recent efforts to remove the presumptive GOP nominee from the ballot entirely. A bungling, senescent Biden clearly signaled in his speech marking the third anniversary of the “day we almost lost America” that January 6 would feature prominently in the Democrat’s 2024 strategy.
The stakes involved help us to understand why the regime so jealously guards its official January 6 narrative, and so aggressively attacks anyone who dares to question it. These troublesome questions involve asking why, of all days, the Capitol seemed to enjoy uniquely poor security, despite numerous warnings and threats. One might also ask how, given the well-established level of penetration federal authorities had into the key militia groups accused of conspiracies to attack the Capitol, the same authorities could possibly claim to have been caught off guard. Most troubling and damning of all, one might ask whether any government agents or affiliates took more active steps in helping to facilitate the events of January 6. This last line of questioning has been the principal focus of my reporting at Revolver.news, and has led me to maintain that the two smoking guns of the “Fedsurrection” is the curious case of Ray Epps, on the one hand, and the case of the so-called January 6 pipe bombs on the other.
The January 6 pipe bombs refer to the two alleged explosive devices planted on the evening of January 5 and discovered on January 6 near the DNC and RNC buildings, respectively, just as the assault on the west perimeter of the Capitol began to unfold in the early afternoon. These pipe bombs, technically considered weapons of mass destruction by the government, were arguably the most serious, terrorist-like element associated with the day the media and regime has been desperate to paint as a domestic terror attack on par with 9/11. The FBI put out urgent videos pleading with the public to provide help in helping to identify and apprehend this presumptive MAGA terrorist.
From the very outset it was clear that something was off with the FBI’s treatment of this case. A more careful look at the pipe bomb story reveals that the official version of events relies on an almost impossible set of coincidences compounded on one another. The best entry point into the pipe bomb story is a 7-minute clip reluctantly and quietly released by the Capitol Police of the DNC bomb being discovered. When considered as a stand-alone piece of footage, it is sufficient to warrant a national scandal; when considered in light of the broader aforementioned coincidences surrounding the pipe bomb story, it threatens to completely demolish the regime’s January 6 narrative and expose one of the darkest and most damning government operations in recent American history.
Without further ado, we ask that the reader skim the linked video and then revisit it as you read our description below.
This surveillance footage released by the Capitol Police depicts the discovery of a pipe bomb by a bench right outside of the Democrat National Committee headquarters at approximately 1:05 PM on January 6. In the first part of the video, from approximately 1:05:30-1:06:30, we can see an individual with a backpack approach two SUVs parked outside the DNC garage entrance. The SUVs were both part of then Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ secret service detail (more on that later) and the individual with the backpack was informing the Secret Service of the presence of the pipe bomb just feet away.
After being informed of an explosive device within feet of themselves and possibly their protectee, it takes the Secret Service officers over a minute to even bother getting out of their cars, after which point they proceed to stand and lounge about in the most lackadaisical manner imaginable for another two minutes. Go ahead and look at the footage around the 1:07 timestamp and ask yourself whether the Secret Service officers are behaving the way you’d expect upon being informed of an explosive device in the vicinity.
The real whopper occurs at around the 1:09:41 timestamp. Here we can see a group of children cross the street in the direction of the pipe bomb, and walk within feet of where the pipe bomb is placed. Astonishingly, the Secret Service agents who themselves are standing about don’t even bother to warn these children of the bomb. Shortly thereafter, a Capitol Police officer walks right up to the bomb, snaps a photo of it, gives a thumbs up sign to the other agents, who then for the first time in the entire clip move with hustle and purpose and quickly leave the scene.
Here we see the Secret Service detail acting with utter lack of concern for their own lives, for the lives of their protectee Kamala Harris, and perhaps most scandalously of all, for the lives of the group of children they cavalierly allowed to walk right next to the pipe bomb. The Secret Service somehow knew the pipe bomb was a dud, but how would they have known that? A reliable source who has seen the extended non-public footage reports to us that, minutes after the footage above ends, authorities had that very DNC pipe bomb defused by a bomb-safe robot. If the Secret Service were so confident the bomb wasn’t a threat that they would exhibit zero concern for themselves, their protectee, and children walking by, then why bother with the gratuitous spectacle of defusing the bomb with a robot?
Now let’s turn to the question of Kamala Harris. It may surprise the reader to learn of then-VP-elect Harris’ presence in the DNC building on January 6, a fact that Harris studiously kept hidden from the public for almost a year before the information leaked—and still Harris has never acknowledged it publicly. Let’s stop for a moment to process this information. Kamala Harris is without question one of the most politically opportunistic creatures on this planet. Why on earth would she forgo the opportunity to milk politically the fact that she came within a hair’s breadth of losing her life to this January 6 pipe bomb at the DNC? Joe Biden is so desperate to paint Donald Trump and his supporters as insurrectionists that he took the occasion of the third anniversary of January 6 to give an ominous speech on the matter. And yet, nowhere in this speech attempting to reinforce the narrative of January 6 as a dark day of domestic terrorism does he bother to mention that his own Vice President came dangerously close to the only known explosive devices associated with this day of supposed infamy. How is this possible? How dirty and embarrassing does the truth have to be for the likes of Kamala and Biden to forgo such an obvious and politically advantageous talking point?
These questions alone are simply damning, but when considered in light of the full context of our knowledge of the January 6 pipe bombs, the situation becomes far worse. Almost as bizarre as the Secret Service’s inexplicable lack of concern in response to being informed of the pipe bomb is the fact that up until that point the Secret Service was informed of the bombs at 1:05 P.M., the pipe bomb had been sitting out there, fairly conspicuously, by the bench for over 17 hours without being discovered. For reference, here is a photo of the pipe bomb next to the DNC bench —presumably the photo taken by the Capitol Police officer as described above.
According to the FBI and surveillance footage presented by the FBI, the pipe bomber planted this bomb at approximately 8 P.M. on the evening of January 5. From 8 P.M. on January 5 to 1:05 P.M on January 6 (over 17 hours) the pipe bomb was supposedly sitting there by the bench—undiscovered by motorists, pedestrians (January 6 was a very high foot traffic day), a regularly stationed security guard within feet of the pipe bomb, and the Secret Service of the United States, which is on record as having swept the DNC premises prior to Kamala Harris’ entrance into the building. Are we to believe that the Secret Service dogs had Covid that day and weren’t able to smell the live explosive material found on the pipe bomb, according to a national forensics task force report that still has not been made fully available to the public?
The notion that the DNC pipe bomb could have sat out there for 17 hours undiscovered, including by the Secret Service, seemed so bizarre to our investigative team at Revolver News that we thought to revisit the question as to whether the bombs were actually planted when the surveillance footage released by the FBI suggests they were. From this we were able to demonstrate conclusively that the FBI is in possession of footage that would prove definitively whether or not the pipe bomber planted the bomb at the time they claim he or she did, but they for whatever reason have decided not to release this. Furthermore, we showed that the surveillance footage itself is clearly tampered with, as it has a frame rate of 1.6 frames per second which is well below the lowest commercial standard of 8 frames per second. Are we to believe that any gas station in the country has higher quality surveillance cameras than the national headquarters of the Democrat Party? And why is it the case that the only footage of the pipe bomber at the benches that the FBI will make public is the clearly corrupted DNC surveillance footage? And why is the Democrat Party so uninterested in questions that could help us to identify the pipe bomber who planted an explosive device outside of their national headquarters?
To get to the essential structural flaw in the official pipe bomb story, however, we need to say a few things about the discovery of the first pipe bomb, at the office of the Republican National Committee, and the timing surrounding it. The first device discovered on January 6 was found by a random pedestrian named Karlin Younger behind a trash can in a back alley near the Capitol Hill Club. Younger reports that she discovered the bomb at 12:40 P.M. and notified a security official in the Capitol Hill Club. We know from sources that the security official in question also happened to be a veteran of the Capitol Police, and reported the bomb’s discovery through the Capitol Police system, whereupon the Capitol Police began responding to the bomb at 12:50 P.M.
The timing is relevant as 12:50 is just three minutes before the initial and decisive attack on the west perimeter of the Capitol. Karlin Younger reported that the mechanical kitchen timer affixed to the pipe bomb, which was an hourlong timer, was stuck on the 20-minute mark. Younger found the bomb at 12:40 and it had 20 minutes on the dial, conveying the impression that it was set to go off exactly when the certification of the vote proceeding was to begin at 1:00 P.M.
Take a second to digest just how infinitesimally improbable this set of circumstances is. Like the DNC pipe bomb, surveillance footage provided by the FBI suggests the RNC pipe bomb was planted on the evening of January 5 at around 8:30 P.M. This means that the RNC bomb was sitting behind a trash can in a back alley, undiscovered for over 16 hours, only to be randomly stumbled upon by a random pedestrian who discovers it nearly to the exact minute such as to be perfectly synchronized with both the certification proceeding and the initial and decisive attack on the west perimeter of the Capitol. The synchronicity here is so striking that many, including former head of Capitol Police Steve Sund, believed the pipe bombs were never intended to detonate but rather to serve a diversionary purpose, specifically to divert resources away from the Capitol as the attack unfolded. Given the remarkable timing of the pipe bombs’ discovery this seems likely, especially because the hour-long mechanical kitchen timers on the bombs meant that the latest they could have detonated would have been at 9:30 PM or so on the evening of January 5, which would have been pointless.
There’s only one problem with this otherwise eminently sound diversion theory. How could the pipe bomber have counted on these pipe bombs being discovered at such a time as to perfectly synchronize with the unfolding attack on the Capitol? How could he or she have known the pipe bombs wouldn’t have been discovered early in the morning, which likely would have had the counterproductive effect of beefing up security at the Capitol? The DNC bomb was lying undiscovered for over 17 hours until it was found at 1:05 P.M, scarcely 15 minutes after the first pipe bomb was discovered. Did the pipe bomber just count on getting so lucky that the pipe bombs wouldn’t be discovered prematurely, but rather would sit in their respective locations for 16 or 17 hours, only to be discovered in a narrow 15-minute window that corresponded precisely to the unfolding attack on the Capitol?
As if things weren’t strange enough, the head of the pipe bomb investigation at the FBI was a man called Steven D’Antuono, who had just recently been the head of the Detroit FBI Field Office where he oversaw the disgraced entrapment operation known as the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot. Perhaps as a result of our continuous and damning reporting on the pipe bomb story, along with a guilty conscience, D’Antuono resigned from his position as head of the Washington D.C. Field Office—a rare move as the WFO position is usually a stepping stone to the rarified floors of the FBI’s Hoover building.
Unusually, D’Antuono in his retirement volunteered himself for questioning before the Judiciary Committee in Congress. Congressman Thomas Massie compiled a number of pointed questions based on Revolver’s long history of reporting on the pipe bomb issue. D’Antuono had no answer for any of the questions, and seemed to acknowledge that the whole pipe bomb story made no sense. When asked whether the FBI used geo-fencing technology to identify the pipe bomber, D’Antuono sheepishly replied in the affirmative, but noted that the telecom company in question reported that for the specific time and location of the pipe bomber, the data was corrupted. While D’Antuono acknowledged that it is “investigation 101” that the people who discovered the pipe bombs would be considered suspects, at least initially, he claimed that he didn’t even know the identity of the man who discovered the DNC bomb, and professed not to know whether this individual had even been interviewed.
The timing of the discovery of the bombs in relation to the attack on the Capitol alone means that, at the very least, the people who discovered the RNC and DNC bombs respectively should be subject to serious questioning. The bizarre footage of the discovery of the DNC bomb is so damning that we must use it to generate sufficient pressure to force the gatekeepers in the Capitol Police to identify the individual who discovered the DNC bombs and allow Congress to question him. Given the massive amount of public attention on this story as of late we expect the plain clothes officer who discovered the DNC pipe bomb to be identified and interviewed quickly. And given the concatenation of shockingly implausible coincidences that precariously undergird the official pipe bomb narrative, we expect the lies behind the pipe bomb story to unravel rapidly, and with it the entire Fedsurrection lie.
The regime has desperately tried to suppress our Fedsurrection coverage, but with the story now having reached escape velocity the goal of suppression has grudgingly given way to the goal of damage control. At this very moment, mainstream newsrooms and government offices alike are brainstorming the best damage control strategy in nervous anticipation of the pipe bomb story cracking wide open. I suspect this damage control will involve a narrative containment strategy to cordon off the pipe bomb scandal and prevent it from metastasizing to other highly questionable elements of January 6. Unfortunately for the regime such containment is impossible. The perfect synchronicity between the discovery of the pipe bombs and the unfolding of the west perimeter attack on the Capitol make such a containment strategy possible.
There is already overwhelming evidence for massive federal involvement in this west perimeter breach as presented in the Revolver News piece “Meet Ray Epps Part II.” If the pipe bomb story is exposed as some kind of government operation to frame Trump supporters, the federal involvement in the West Perimeter breach is likely to follow. If both the January 6 pipe bombs and the West Perimeter breach were instigated by the government, then January 6 at large can fairly be described as an inside job. If January 6 is finally and definitively exposed as a Fedsurrection, so goes the key pretext the regime has been counting on to weaponize the security apparatus politically against its opposition, and there goes the key pillar the democrats are leaning on to deprive Trump a fair shot at the White House.
These are the stakes. We are very close. And this is why we all need to give this ill-fated pipe bomb story the final push that it needs to bring the entire rotten January 6 edifice crumbling down on its corrupt and criminal architects.
MUFG Warns “Higher Friction Geopolitics” Puts These Global Maritime Chokepoints At Risk
With the US Department of Transportation and one of the world’s largest shippers, Maersk, warning about prolonged turmoil across the Red Sea on Wednesday due to continued Red Sea attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, global trade could seriously be affected.
In a note to clients, the global corporate & investment banking capital markets strategy team at MUFG Bank provided a series of visualizations that show how rising geopolitical tension could jeopardize maritime chokepoints.
Analysts led by Tom Joyce, managing director and capital market strategist at MUFG, showed how key events over the last five years, starting with the 2018 trade war to the 2020 Covid crisis to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war, and so forth, are responsible for the chaos in trade and geopolitics today.
Joyce’s top theme for markets this year is “Higher friction geopolitics.”
The deteriorating geopolitical environment worldwide has analysts worried about critical maritime chokepoints:
Military conflict in the 21st Century is quickly shifting to maritime theaters. Climate, geopolitical risk and de – globalization will pose significant challenges to the world’s most important geopolitical chokepoints in the decade ahead.
Focusing on the Middle East, Joyce shows how 25% of global trade that flows through three chokepoints, Suez Canal, Bab-El Mandeb Strait, and Strait of Hormuz, is at serious risk of sparking global trade disruption.
“As of early January 2024, the number of container ships at the entry point to the Red Sea had declined 90% from the year prior,” Joyce noted.
The analysts elaborated on the trade significance of these three maritime chokepoints in the Middle East:
In a separate report, Rabobank’s Senior Economist Maartje Wijffelaars outlined how commercial vessels rerouted from the Red Sea to Cape of Good Hope will trigger a new round of surging cost-push inflation.
During an interview with Tucker Carlson on X, Senator Rand Paul expressed anger at his own party, declaring that half of them would rather fund a war in Ukraine than secure their own border.
“It gets to me when I see people who I think care more about the borders of Ukraine than our own Southern border,” Paul stated adding “And I see these people every day because they are the entire Democrat caucus up here, but they are half of my caucus.”
He continued, “Half of my Republican caucus is, as we speak, ready to sell out, and they’re ready to sell out fake border reform in exchange for what they really want, which is to send more of your tax dollars to Ukraine.”
“I think Nikki Haley fits right in that camp,” Paul further urged, adding “I think she’s from the McConnell/Dick Cheney wing of the party. And this is the antithesis of everything I believe in.”
“I’ve spent a few years trying to promote the ideas of liberty, there is a wing of the party that believes in that,” Paul further noted, adding “I want to make sure anybody who follows what I do knows there is no way, shape, or form I could support Nikki Haley.”
Watch:
Rand Paul is one of the few Republicans in the Senate who understands the threat of Nikki Haley. He may be the only one who cares where COVID came from. “Anthony Fauci should be in jail,” he says. pic.twitter.com/LoxtDSEI6d
Paul has set up an entire website dedicated to derailing Haley’s campaign, but he is yet to officially endorse Trump as of time of writing. This will likely change following Trump’s decisive New Hampshire primary win in the face of Democrat shenanigans.
Meanwhile, Biden’s handlers are now openly admitting they want the border completely open:
Biden’s America, where the National Guard has to desperately cobble together its own fences out of razor wire in a last ditch effort to secure the overrun border, and then the Feds come and take them down with the backing of the Supreme Court. Shameful. https://t.co/QOXBS2OIgQpic.twitter.com/Hj9WKt72ra
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Saudi Regime Opens First-Ever Liquor Store… For Non-Muslim Foreigners Only
Saudi Arabia has since its birth as a modern nation-state been known for its especially rigid form of Islam, called Wahhabism, which is enforced by its largely independent hardline Sharia courts and feared ‘morality police’ who lurk menacingly on city street corners, ready to mete out corporal punishment the moment Koranic law codes are transgressed, from hand-holding among young couples to women going out without a family chaperone, to drinking long forbidden alcohol.
Yet it has also long been a kingdom of contradictions, known for its hard-partying set of billionaire princes and their lavish private jet/yacht/French Riviera luxury chateau high society jetsetting life-styles. In Saudi society it remains an open secret that the royal elite partake of indulgences considered “haram” behind closed doors or while traveling abroad, and most especially booze.
Typically, western workers and oil execs – for example the local expat community in the energy industry – live in their own walled communities that are set apart from daily Saudi society. In these “suburb-style” Aramco compounds it is well-known that alcohol is discreetly consumed.
But Reuters has reported in a new exclusive on Wednesday that the kingdom’s strict prohibition on selling and consuming alcohol is about to the change. Of course, it will be a ‘limited’ loosening up, but it’s hugely significant nonetheless: “Saudi Arabia is preparing to open its first alcohol store in the capital Riyadh which will serve exclusively non-Muslim diplomats, according to a source familiar with the plans and a document,” the report says.
Obviously this will only act in a ‘for foreigners only’ kind of way, but the bin Salman regime is still touting this as part of a broader “reform” plan:
Customers will have to register via a mobile app, get a clearance code from the foreign ministry, and respect monthly quotas with their purchases, said the document, which was seen by Reuters.
The move is a milestone in the kingdom’s efforts, led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to open the ultra-conservative Muslim country for tourism and business as drinking alcohol is forbidden in Islam.
It will be interesting to see what these monthly quantity limits will be. The individual quotas could in the end be so restrictive that this whole initiative will perhaps prove just symbolic in the end, meant merely to generate some positive PR for a ‘reforming’ MbS in Western headlines. Here’s a summary of the proposed restrictions:
Thirsty envoys would need to register beforehand and receive clearance by the government
No one under 21 will be allowed in the store and “proper attire is required” at all times inside
Drinkers will not be able to send a proxy, such as a driver
Monthly limitations would be enforced, the statement said.
Diplomats and foreign embassy staff already had their long relied upon workarounds in place, as for years officials with diplomatic passports could bring their secure “pouches” through airports, which authorities weren’t allowed to pry into based on diplomatic immunity and protections.
Under current/prior laws, expats could face deportation or steep fines if caught with alcohol. As for Saudis themselves, they would be subject to hundreds of lashes as well as hefty monetary penalties.
While the United States is ostensibly not at war with anyone, our government is spending taxpayers’ money as if it were.
This year, the budget for the U.S. Department of Defense is $844 billion. The United States spends nearly three times more on defense than does China and 10 times more than does Russia. At the same time, the depletion of U.S. military stockpiles and other reserves is accelerating through multiple conflicts such as in Ukraine and the Middle East. The defense contractors, their shareholders, and bought politicians benefit, but who pays? In the end, it is the American taxpayer, who never voted to send their hard-earned tax dollars abroad or to have their militaries engage in wars in all but name, that foots the bill. These citizens are paying twice: first in their tax dollars, and second, and most perniciously, in their diminished purchasing power and real (after inflation) wealth.
This is taxation without representation, in that these decisions are made without appropriate congressional oversight.
Wars are always inflationary.
This is a rule without exception.
We will continue to see high inflation in the United States to the extent these current engagements remain unchecked or others are allowed to mushroom from them.
When examples are given of runaway inflation, the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany following the First World War is the most often cited of the twentieth century. While it certainly was among the worst suffering nations, Germany was not alone. Every European country engaged in the continental war suffered massive inflation. When Germany entered the war in August 1914, the currency stood at 4.2 Reichsmarks to one U.S. dollar. In the wake of war and its aftermath, the German currency depreciated to a near infinite level of 4.2 trillion Reichsmarks to the U.S. dollar in December 1923, when a new currency was introduced, and hyperinflation eventually brought to heel. All of which came at great political and social cost.
Russia, like Germany, saw its currency become worthless and its government violently overthrown.
Other belligerents, including Great Britain, France, Austria, and Hungary saw prices double or triple and their currencies substantially devalue in dollar terms.
In the United States, the history is the same.
Prices rose during the Revolutionary War between 350–700 percent depending on the colony and their own fiscal and monetary policies (there was no central government with tax-levying power). During the Civil War, prices rose by over 60 percent, and by much more in the South. Prices rose nearly 70 percent in the United States during World War I, and well over 50 percent during World War II. Price levels rose by 35 percent during the decade-long Vietnam War, but the real inflationary effects were delayed until the 1970s, when high inflation kicked in following the oil crises. Inflation lags monetary expansion by years.
Governments go to great lengths to hide the true cost of war from their citizens. They do this in a number of ways, but one of the most common is by ensuring that the links in the chain between cause and effect are made long, plentiful, and as invisible as possible. It would be too obvious to levy a “war tax.” So instead, governments fiddle with interest rates, allow inflation to run hot while manipulating the statistical headline rates of prices, and blame greedy corporations and evil villains when inflation is too obvious to ignore. For example, recall President Joe Biden’s reference to “Putin’s price hike!” to explain U.S. inflation in 2022, in order to find someone else to blame and to divert the attention of Americans from the unprecedented $7 trillion of deficit spending that had occurred without congressional restraints over the previous two years. Inflation is a tax, but it is a hidden tax, initially unseen to most as it creeps along year by year, slowly devouring savings and purchasing power.
When currencies were backed by gold, governments were restrained from perpetuating wars and state-sponsored violence by the fact that wars were very costly and specie was limited. Leaders sued for negotiated peace and wars were ended when government coffers started to run low. However, after each of the world’s leading powers abandoned the gold standard in the twentieth century, and moved instead to a fiat model (i.e., paper currencies backed by nothing more than the faith and credit of the issuing government), this natural restraint on war was removed. So long as the printing press could run, deficits could grow, new debt could be raised, and paper money (or its digital equivalent) issued to pay for ongoing conflict. The massive economic costs are quietly borne by the same patriotic working and middle classes who send their sons and daughters to sacrifice their lives and bodies.
Today, the United States stands at a crossroads.
While not technically at war, the country is deficit spending at war-time levels. It would be one thing if the fiscal and monetary position of the nation was healthy at the starting point. But it is not. The U.S. government has over $34 trillion in debt growing by the trillions just from debt-service (interest) costs. The government continues to deficit spend as if the party can go on forever. But it cannot. The risk of a widening war grows with each passing month.
The U.S. government’s ability to finance a major conflict is slowly but surely being eroded as those foreign nations and other investors who would otherwise subscribe to our debt grow wary of fiscal disaster.
The remaining option will be monetization of the debt (when the Federal Reserve steps in as buyer of last resort), galloping domestic inflation, and an eventual currency crisis.
SHOT Show Day 2: Best Gear & Equipment For Special Forces Operators
Welcome to day two of the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show (SHOT Show), the world’s largest shooting sports, hunting, and law enforcement industry expo of its kind.
The closed-door event is held at the Venetian Expo in Vegas through Friday. It features 500+ suppliers, some of which are defense contractors, offering weapons and gear for Tier 1 operators to law enforcement to civilian markets.
Before the day began, anti-gunners at Bloomberg leaked a new Biden administration draft rule targeting the exports of semiautomatic weapons.
It’s crucial to recognize that the timing of the new draft rule’s release is not accidental. This timing was chosen to coincide with SHOT, where the world’s top firearms manufacturers showcase their products.
For some context, last year, the ATF Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) unveiled the pistol brace rule.
We then saw the ATF booth, where many agents appeared somewhat displeased with attending SHOT.
Here’s day two of walking the floor:
We first stopped by Ops-Core’s booth to check out the latest and greatest headborne system solutions for elite defense forces (i.e., Tier 1 operators).
Ops-Core’s ballistic face protection for Tier 1 operators.
Once upon a time, constitutional interpretation actually involved interpreting the text of the Constitution.
It’s not a blank slate. Its words have actual meanings.
While the federal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recognizes that the Constitution contains words, the judges on that court seem to think they can ascribe any meaning—no matter how outlandish—to those words.
Martin, the lead case, held that the government may not punish a homeless individual for sleeping on public property if there is no bed in a secular facility for him or her to use free of charge. (The decisions actually go much further, but let’s take it slowly.)
Now, that ruling might surprise most people, because the government holds public property for the benefit of the public and has the same right to decide who can sleep (or camp, or micturate, or do No. 2) on public property that private parties have to protect their own property. Plus, there is neither a homeless protection clause in the Constitution, nor a right-to-sleep-on-public-property clause.
To be fair, the 9th Circuit did point to a passage in the Constitution—the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishments clause—that the court thought justified its ruling. This provision prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments.” (Yes, we had the same puzzled look that you now have, but read on.) It says nothing about whether the government can criminalize certain conduct.
But the 9th Circuit mistakenly thought that the Supreme Court’s decisions in Robinson v. California and Powell v. Texas held that an act must be voluntary for a state to make it a crime and sleeping is involuntary. Accordingly, the laws at issue must fall.
But legal interpretation is not like Creative Writing 101 or a class on cubism. There is a limit as to how far the Supreme Court’s words can be stretched before the reader distorts their meaning.
Robinson held that the state cannot make it a crime to be addicted to drugs (as opposed to possessing or distributing drugs), while Powell held that a state may define public drunkenness as a crime. The latter decision, written by Justice Thurgood Marshall (who was hardly an “extreme MAGA” Republican), is particularly relevant because it expressly distinguished being drunk in public from being drunk at home, with the former being a fit subject for a criminal sanction.
That decision should have made short work of the case, but it wouldn’t have given the 9th Circuit the result it wanted. So, a little improv was necessary.
In the second case, Grants Pass, the 9th Circuit went even further and held that the city could not enforce criminal or civil penalties in an attempt to enforce the city’s anti-camping laws.
And, most recently, in Coalition on Homelessness, Judge Patrick Bumatay, dissenting from the decision, said the 9th Circuit “let stand an injunction permitting homeless persons to sleep anywhere, anytime in public in the City of San Francisco unless adequate shelter is provided.”
He went on to say that this “represents yet another expansion” of the 9th Circuit’s “cruel and unusual Eighth Amendment jurisprudence.” He explained that in reality, though, the decision itself is “cruel because it leaves the citizens of San Francisco powerless to enforce their own health and safety laws without the permission of a federal judge.” And he said the decision is “unusual because no other court in the country has interpreted the Constitution in this way.”
After all, the state’s decision to prohibit sleeping on public property is not an irrational or mean-spirited attack on the homeless. The homeless encampments that have taken over the streets in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle rob the public of the opportunity to use those areas safely.
Plus, as Sam Quinones, a journalist who has chronicled America’s ongoing drug crisis, put it, “[t]hough other drugs and alcohol are part of the mix, many encampments are simply meth colonies.”
Homeless encampments are rife with open drug sales and use, along with prostitution and the fact or threat of violence—including violence against the homeless in those camps—and they are governed by the law of the jungle, as the strong prey on the weak.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear the Grants Pass case and has a chance to undo the damage done by the 9th Circuit’s bizarre use of the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to prohibit cities from protecting their own residents and properties.
Whatever you can say about the policy choice reflected by the 9th Circuit’s rulings, those decisions make almost no pretense of finding a home in the Constitution. They are result-oriented jurisprudence at its worst, proof that an intellectually dishonest judge can reach any result he or she wants just by writing grammatically correct sentences and sprinkling in a few citations to, or quotations from, Supreme Court decisions.
The Supreme Court should reverse the 9th Circuit’s judgment in the Grants Pass case, allow public officials to address the problems of homelessness and public safety, and order that the judges responsible for that atrocity be publicly (at least metaphorically) spanked—a fitting punishment that no doubt most honest observers would find neither cruel nor unusual.
