Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Michael Cohen, former President Trump’s onetime fixer and lawyer, has admitted to a federal court that he was the source of fake case citations used to support his effort to end his supervised release from his earlier criminal convictions.

He blamed Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the error, he also seemed to throw his own attorney under the bus for not checking his work.

U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman was a bit peeved when his clerks checked the authority cited by Cohen, including such cases as “United States v. Figueroa-Flores, United States v. Ortiz and United States v. Amato.” None existed.

In fairness, Cohen is not the first person to be burned by AI. Of course, critics have noted that the faux authority is perfectly consistent with Cohen’s legal career, which is a litany of misrepresentations and outright lies.

Cohen now says that the culprit is Google Bard, an AI service, and that he was only the latest victim of AI invention.

However, one of the most interesting aspects of the statement is that Cohen asks for understanding that he is only a layperson, not a lawyer.

He was, of course, disbarred as a lawyer after pleading guilty various federal crimes.

Cohen told the court:

“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not. Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”

He then put part of the blame on his non-AI lawyer, David Schwartz, and emphasized that it was in the end Schwartz’ filing, not his:

“It did not occur to me then and remains surprising to me now—that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed. I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused.”

Cohen’s current counsel E. Danya Perry, asked that his client  “not suffer any collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s misstep.”

The problems with AI are well-known, but so is Cohen’s checkered history with the courts.

As I have previously written, Cohen has a long history of alleged lies and half-truths in dealing with the government or courts.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to various charges, including tax evasion, campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and several banks to obtain campaign financing and was sentenced to three years in prison.

He unsuccessfully sued Trump on the basis of a verbal contract that again put his own dubious veracity at issue.

As noted in earlier proceedings in Manhattan, Cohen has continued to misrepresent his criminal background and, after assuring the court that he was remorseful for his crimes, was regularly going on the air to deny that he committed tax fraud and suggesting that he was railroaded by prosecutors.

Prosecutors cited his numerous media appearances as containing false accounts of himself and his case: “while Cohen is free to write and say what he wants, he cannot simultaneously distance himself from his conduct on cable news, while cloaking himself in claims of acceptance of responsibility in court filings.”

I became a critic of Cohen long before he broke with the President. He was a disgrace to the bar for years and Trump bears equal blame for retaining such a person as his legal representative.

What Cohen lacked in legal skill, he made up for in a lack of ethical and professional standards.

In 2015, students on The Harvard Lampoon played a harmless prank on Trump by having him sit in the stolen “president’s chair” from the Harvard Crimson for a photo. Cohen threatened the students with absolute ruination. He was quoted by a student on the Lampoon staff as saying: “I’m gonna come up to Harvard. You’re all gonna get expelled. If this photo gets out, you’ll be outta that school faster than you know it. I can be up there tomorrow.”

On another occasion, after a journalist pursued a story he did not like, Cohen told the reporter that he should “tread very f—ing lightly because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting. Do you understand me?”

Cohen remained Trump’s loyal attack dog until he was arrested and Trump refused to pardon him. That is when Cohen proved that when you scratch a lawyer, you can find a foe.

Cohen has been gaming the system his entire career. He claimed urgent medical needs for release from prison. Of course, he previously claimed health problems in failing to appear to testify only to be spotted out on the town for a fancy dinner. Cohen previously (and implausibly) reinvented himself as a redemptive sinner and received financial support from Trump critics.  He continued that pattern after his conviction.

Perry told Fox News Digital in a statement: “These filings—and the fact that he was willing to unseal them—show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong. He relied on his lawyer, as he had every right to do. Unfortunately, his lawyer appears to have made an honest mistake in not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed.”

A federal court previously denied early release after prosecutors claimed that Cohen has reformed little and is still misrepresenting facts. Submitting fake case authority is obviously not ideal in claiming the status of a changed man.

The latest controversy is likely to be raised in the prosecution of Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg where Cohen is expected to be a key witness. The lack of authority, however, does not appear to be a detriment in that case which is pushing unprecedented legal claims. Time to call in the Google Bard?

Well look at that! Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, who was found guilty in November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, won’t face a second trial at all after feds told US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a Friday letter that in the ‘interest of expediency’ it would drop six charges related to SBF’s second trial – including conspiracy to bribe foreign officials, commit bank fraud and operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

The reason? The Bahamas ‘has yet to consent’ to the fallen crypto king moving forward with the second batch of charges.

“Proceeding with sentencing in March 2024 without the delay that would be caused by a second trial would advance the public’s interest in a timely and just resolution of the case,” reads the letter.

Prosecutors said in the letter that the Bahamas, which extradited Bankman-Fried to face the original US charges, has yet to consent to the US going ahead with trying him on the additional charges. Such consent is required under treaty obligations but the former FTX chief executive officer launched a legal challenge in the Bahamas earlier this year, prompting the US to split the case in two.

The government said much of the evidence that would be presented at a second trial was already introduced at Bankman-Fried’s original trial and can be considered by the judge at sentencing set for March 28. –Bloomberg

SBF directed the transfer of FTX money to his affiliated hedge fund, Alameda Research, as well as for political donations, before both companies imploded into bankruptcy last year.

This of course comes on the heels of the feds dropping campaign finance charges against him in July.

Let’s recall…

🤔 pic.twitter.com/XpH56PxLgm

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022

In short, prosecutors have ring-fenced SBF’s illegal activities involving public officials from his activities screwing over the public, for which he faces the possibility of decades in prison.  

JUST IN: The U.S. government is dropping six charges against crypto scammer Sam Bankman-Fried including campaign finance violations and conspiracy to commit bribery charges.

Making bribes with stolen money is fine as long as that money is going to U.S. politicians.

SBF donated… pic.twitter.com/g75YYKIIAP

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 30, 2023

“We don’t know how much more evidence you need to see how broken and corrupt all the three letter gov agencies are,” wrote @AutismCapital on X. “They drop the Sam trial, they’re bleeding out FTX claimants, people with BTC/SOL/ETH/whatever are being paid back the value AT THE TIME OF BANKRUPTCY rather than 4x’d current market value while they pocket the difference.

“FTX bankruptcy lawyers are charging USURIOUS per hour rates to bleed the creditors dry!

“They don’t want people digging into Sam’s campaign finance violation trial (WONDER WHY?) and SAM TRABUCCO got away with it COMPLETELY with the dropping of this upcoming trial.”

!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 30, 2023

Authored by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker via The Brownstone Institute,

We know that the modern West has developed a jaw-dropping degree of totalitarianism, wherein the bureaucracies of the state and the corporate sector coordinate together to cripple humans outside their power networks and media channels. But what are the mechanics of this coordination?

To understand one of the games they play, consider the rise of measures and standards associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) – both occupants of a highly abstract thought dimension and the latter an especially incomprehensible word salad.

ESG as a phrase was coined in a 2006 United Nations report, gradually gaining adoption by private companies like BlackRock via the production of annual ESG reports. Governments then started supporting these voluntary efforts, and eventually began making them mandatory. Since early 2023, corporations in the EU have been compelled to report on ESG. Many US companies with subsidiaries in the EU must observe both US and European rules, and those in the Asia-Pacific region too are starting to follow the ESG reporting pantomime.

In brief, ESG originated at the level of the international and intellectual stratosphere and then grew, unchecked by tedious real-world constraints like scarcity and tradeoffs, as a kind of malignant joint venture between large government bureaucracies and large corporations.

This JV is a serious industry, offering lucrative money-making opportunities for consulting companies, fund managers, and assorted professionals who ‘help’ companies comply. Bahar Gidwani, co-founder of a company called CSRHub, a compiler and provider of ESG company ratings, estimates that the collection of ESG data alone is already costing companies $20 billion worldwide.

It is an expanding industry too, since the reporting requirements keep increasing: according to recent reports, the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission estimates that the cost of ESG reporting by the companies it oversees could quadruple to $8.4 billion this year, primarily due to the introduction of more ESG requirements. And that’s just in the US. 

Large reporting costs are easier for large companies to bear, which offers a clue to why they’re interested: this sort of burden, particularly when made compulsory by the state, helps them dominate their smaller competitors.

DEI is the younger brother of ESG. At present, DEI reporting is not yet compulsory, but about 16% of the biggest US firms have open DEI reports, and the DEI fad is growing, perhaps eventually to eclipse ESG. Just as with ESG, DEI originates from the grandiose world of fluffy abstractions, big corporations, and governments. Despite efforts to make it appear otherwise, it is not grassroots at all.

The Benign-Sounding Aims of ESG

ESG measures and reports are supposedly about gauging whether the activities of corporations are ‘sustainable,’ and especially whether companies are reducing their carbon footprints. DEI is about whether a company’s employment practices promote gender and race ‘equality,’ provide ‘safe spaces,’ and rely on global supply chains that adhere to ‘fair’ practices. Most reasonable people would agree that many of these stated goals sound worthwhile in principle. What is being advocated sounds caring and does not, on the face of it, appear to be destructive in any way.

Yet, talk is always cheap. How do these pretty ideas get operationalised when they confront the harsh reality of measurement?

Let us delve into a leading example from a company report.

Grab Holdings from Singapore

Many Asian companies are ensnared in the ESG compliance system because they are listed on Western financial exchanges. One such company is the Singapore-based ‘superapp’ Grab Holdings, listed on the Nasdaq. Its customers mainly interact with Grab Holdings via a mobile phone app, where they can buy many different services (food delivery, e-commerce, ride-hailing, financial services, etc.), hence the term ‘superapp.’

Grab is unprofitable but very visible. For the first half of 2023, it lost $398 million, on top of the $1.74 billion it lost in 2022. However, it operates in businesses — particularly food delivery and ride-hailing — with serious environmental and human impacts across a vast region encompassing 400 cities and towns in eight Southeast Asian countries. To anyone living where Grab operates, its fast-moving, green-helmeted motorcycle riders are as familiar as yellow taxis are to New Yorkers or red double-decker buses are to Londoners.

Grab’s business model is inherently not great for the safety of its drivers and the public. Grab uses routing and other technology to match riders with deliveries and to minimise both wait time for drivers and delivery times to customers. Scheduling is highly efficient because of the technology, which is to say that drivers are on tight schedules with razor-thin commissions. 

To make a buck, the drivers for Grab (and its competitors) have to be brave and aggressive on the road. Some are real daredevils – the Evel Knievels of Southeast Asia – as we have personally witnessed. Not only that, but there is stiff competition in each of the markets in which Grab operates. Grab itself says that 72% of its five million drivers do double duty, performing both food deliveries and ride-hailing services. This makes the company a more efficient service provider across both cut-throat businesses and gives drivers the opportunity to earn more money.

Despite the fact that it doesn’t make a profit — at least not yet — Grab splashed out to produce an ESG report that in its last iteration (2022) was 74 pages long and almost as heroic as its drivers.

The introductory pages are taken up with the usual marketing talk, replete with large photos of company motorbike drivers grinning from ear to ear because, well, they are just so grateful to be part of such a great organisation. The uniforms in the photos are smart and clean, in contrast to the reality which is that the drivers’ green uniforms are almost always greasy and grubby and the drivers often look, understandably, stressed and morose.

Deeper into the ESG report, Grab gives us 5 pages on how admirably it is performing regarding road safety, 8 pages on greenhouse gas emissions, 1 on air quality, 4 on food packaging waste and 8 on inclusiveness.

Pantomime One: Road Safety

The part of the report on road safety is of special interest, since Southeast Asia’s roads have a deservedly deadly reputation for motorcyclists, and much of the mayhem is provided by the delivery drivers themselves. For example, one study in Malaysia reported that 70% of food delivery motorcyclists drivers broke traffic rules during delivery, and the kinds of violations covered the waterfront: illegal stopping, running red lights, talking on the phone while riding, riding in the wrong direction, and making illegal U-turns. The statistics on crashes involving these drivers make for grim reading.

Other studies based on rider surveys tell an even grimmer story. A 2021 survey of food delivery drivers in Thailand found that 66% of the more than 1,000 respondents had been in one to four accidents while working, with 28% reporting more than five. This squares with reputation: in countries like Thailand, where enforcement of traffic laws is the exception rather than rule, dangerous driving by two-wheelers is famously awful.

So it is with some surprise that one reads in Grab’s ESG report that there is only just under one accident for every million rides involving a Grab delivery driver. That is an incidence at least one hundred times lower than the incidence implied in self-reports. One may assume that many accidents involving delivery drivers are not reported to the company, particularly those involving no or minor injuries, or where the driver is concerned that he will lose his job.

This latter concern is not trivial, since Grab claims that it has a zero-tolerance policy toward violators of the company’s Code of Conduct, which includes failure to follow road rules. This means the count of accidents per ride is a shaky number at best. The report doesn’t really say where the company gets this number from, so it could well be made up out of thin air, though presumably whoever wrote it down had some rationale in mind. One might imagine something like “Sounds low, and dumb Westerners will believe it.”

Pantomime Two: Grab’s Strategy for Saving the Planet

After dispensing with the road safety issue, Grab’s ESG report moves on to how the company is saving the planet. The company’s greenhouse gas emissions rose during the course of the year because of ‘normalization’ after covid, but the report’s author disingenuously sidesteps the problem by saying that most of the emissions were made from vehicles that were owned by the ‘driver-partners’ rather than the company itself. So, with direct blame for GHG emissions dodged, the company’s priority is stated as to ‘support our driver-partners in transitioning to low emission vehicles and encouraging zero-emission modes of transport.’

It really isn’t clear how that fluffy ‘transition’ might come about, since conventional motorcycles are a cheap and convenient form of transport in Southeast Asia, easily outcompeting other available options for the coal-face work required by Grab’s business model. The report says it will encourage cycling, walking, and EVs. The first two are obviously out of the question in most instances for food delivery, and as for the third, for the overwhelming majority of two-wheeler drivers, upgrading to an EV is a pipe dream (or pipe nightmare, depending on how much they know about EV recharging, weight, and maintenance issues).

One of the beauties of Grab being a platform that connects eateries with drivers without actually operating restaurants itself is that – as with GHG emissions – food packaging waste isn’t really Grab’s direct responsibility. It is the responsibility of the restaurants and food manufacturers, like the owners of the factories that make all those nasty little sachets of ketchup, soy sauce, and other condiments. 

Brilliant! With this sleight of hand squarely in frame, this part of the ESG report then writes itself as an exercise in hand-wringing, admitting with furrowed brow that food packaging waste is a serious problem, and stating that the company’s goal is ‘Zero packaging waste in Nature by 2040.’ Exactly what this means and how it is to be accomplished is shrouded in mystery, but to anyone whose beach holidays have ever been marred by the ugly sight of plastic litter on the shoreline, it sounds awfully good.

Pantomime Three: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Most of this section of the report consists of descriptive marketing: saying all the right things and showcasing the occasional shining example, without getting into too much detail. The main statistics given are that 43% of Grab’s employees are women and 34% of those in ‘leadership positions’ are women. Well, maybe that could be true if one counts the few thousand direct employees, including a lot of secretaries, but omits the five million ‘driver-partners’ who are overwhelmingly male. The report also says that female employees earn 98% of what men do, which presumably means that the odd male secretary is treated just as badly as his female colleagues. 

This section of the report showcases other inventive labeling. We are told the company has ‘Inclusion Champions,’ collectively a group of employees who ‘contribute to inclusion through crowdsourcing of ideas and on-ground feedback for better inclusion initiatives. They also help to identify and coach fellow Grab employees towards more inclusive behaviour, and will co-drive projects that help drive inclusion.’ Who knows what that really means? One might guess that ‘crowdsourcing ideas’ is the new term for having a suggestion box, and that pretty much every email sent by HR can be contrived to be a form of ‘inclusive’ coaching.

Grab’s report thus seems like it addresses ESG- and DEI-related issues, but no real-world mechanism ties them to actual outcomes, and there is no realistic external verification. Even seemingly simple things, like counting how much fuel a company buys directly for its processes and thereby estimating the size of its ‘carbon footprint,’ are like child’s play to game, as demonstrated by Grab’s masterly reporting: simply forcing workers and subsidiaries to buy their own fuel (compensated via higher wages or other things) will make the footprint of the company itself seem dramatically lower, while requiring nothing substantial to change. It’s all an elaborate show.

Who’s Asking for This Crap?

Though specious, unverifiable, and mostly made up, ESG reporting is a way to formally present a company’s ‘ESG performance.’ This performance can theoretically be ‘scored’ by some third party, and thereby compared with that of other companies. If ESG is valued highly by consumers, then companies that get high scores should attract a disproportionate amount of investment, meaning that their cost of capital will be lower than companies who don’t score so well – the magic through which a bullshit report is turned into a business opportunity. 

This also makes delicious fodder for fund managers, who can bundle firms’ stock into ‘ESG funds’ or ‘sustainable funds’ or whatever, and charge investors fat fees for the privilege of investing in them. Fund managers also have another motivation to egg on more ESG reporting: their funds are designed not to green the world or make it a nicer place, but rather to highlight which companies will adapt best and thrive the most in a world where ‘progress’ toward ESG goals (for example, ‘net zero’) is actually being made.

How big is this market? According to Morningstar, by the end of the third quarter of 2023, global ‘sustainable’ funds numbered more than 7,600, of which nearly 75% were in Europe and 10% in the US. These funds had assets of $2.7 trillion. However, global inflows into these funds have been falling sharply since the first quarter of 2022. While they have still been attracting more inflows than non-sustainability funds in Europe, this is not true in the US. Amid waning interest in the US, fewer and fewer new ESG funds are being launched, and in 3Q2023 there were more ESG fund exits than new arrivals. 

During the first two years of covid, American ESG stocks outperformed conventional stocks by a wide margin. This is not surprising since technology companies did rather well out of lockdowns, and they also have high ESG scores because of their lower carbon footprints than miscreant ‘old economy’ companies. Still, since the start of 2022, ESG stocks have fallen back and now are only just edging the market. Indicatively, in the seven quarters ending September 30, 2023, the S&P ESG Index was down 7.3%, while the S&P 500 was down 9.4%.

Importantly, many ESG fund investors themselves are government-type entities, like public pension funds, where the distance between investment decision and personal consequence is about as big as it gets. So often the ultimate payers for this circus are the general population whose pensions are, unbeknown to themselves, being used for virtue-signaling by public fund managers.

Who Wins and Who Loses?

Learning how to write up and cheat with these performance reports requires a lot of resources, but once a company antes up, the game becomes easy to play. ESG reporting is just one example of the broader reality that compliance with external bureaucracies requires largely a one-off fixed cost, and in this case the cost is often large enough to bankrupt a small firm. This means that, just as bizarre covid-era rules were a gift of competitive advantage to big companies, ESG and DEI reporting is a mechanism through which big companies can pressurise and even get rid entirely of smaller ones.

This, we think, is the reason why bullshit reporting is not getting pushback from the largest companies that don’t already have natural monopolies: plainly, it suits their purposes. They are big enough to absorb the cost without a major effect on the bottom line, and they are getting in return a stronger position in their markets. They naturally support the big bureaucracies that make these reports compulsory. Big consulting companies, and the aforementioned fund managers, also love the idea of compulsory reporting because it creates business for them.

On this very issue, Michael Shellenberger opined recently on Tucker Carlson’s channel that big traditional energy companies were led by cowards who had been “bullied into submission:” that the ESG movement had “used political activism and the pension funds to put pressure on the oil and gas industries to basically sell out their main product.” He called the ESG movement an “anti-human death cult” and asserted that “it’s finally becoming obvious to people that it’s a scam.” 

On the lattermost point, we hope he’s right.

Yet, the scam is still spreading, as there are plenty more unproductive people eager to climb aboard. The push for companies to jump on the ESG reporting bandwagon is not confined to the West. Regulators in Asia are also pushing — harder in some countries, like Singapore, than in others — to make ESG reporting mandatory rather than optional. Sensing a huge opportunity to divert valuable resources their way, a posse of consulting firms are also coming after companies to advise them on how they can bridge the ESG gap with the more advanced West. Companies in Asia are starting to fall in line and dutifully churn out their ESG reports, breathing more life into the scam.

Will This Eventually Crash and Burn?

Hard-nosed managers of big firms understand that bullshit reporting requirements can be a source of competitive advantage, causing financial distress for their smaller competitors. What is in the whole charade for the state bureaucracy and the corporate bureaucracy is that it makes them seem virtuous while creating a huge fog of mystery about what they are actually doing, thereby providing both jobs and cover.

Like the woke movement, ESG and DEI are at heart parasitical developments, originating from a decaying West, championed by the useless and the clueless, and benefiting the shrewd and the corrupt. 

Such malignancies weaken our society and should be discarded at the earliest opportunity. Much like Elon Musk showed the door to 80% of Twitter staff with no loss of functionality, and just as we have advocated previously that 80% of employment in ‘health’ professions is useless, so too do we think that firing all professionals whose primary business involves ESG and DEI can be done without any loss of functionality. We don’t think this will happen anytime soon.

If it were to happen, what would one do with all those unproductive workers who have been dining on the ESG/DEI word-salad gravy trains for months or years? Paying them to paint rocks for a while would at least get them out of the way. Better still, taking a cue from what the Ontario College of Psychologists has suggested recently for Jordan Peterson, these people could be taken into the field to help communities struggling with actual problems, involving actual trade-offs, as part of a reeducation and retraining program aimed at making them useful to their societies once again.

Russia’s Belgorod region, which lies just north of Kharkiv in Ukraine, was rocked by Ukrainian drone and missile fire which killed at least 14 people, with over 100 injured, according to revised updates. “According to updated information, 12 adults and two children were killed in Belgorod. Another 108 people, including 15 children, were injured,” Russia’s defense ministry said.

The death toll was so high due to the strikes on a residential area, the region’s governor Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov indicated. While this Russian border region has throughout the war come under repeat cross-border attack, it has been relatively quiet of late, with only smaller sporadic mortar or drone attacks. In one instance a centrally located Christmas attraction, said to be (according to unverified reports) a skating rink with many children, came under fire…

Explosions in #Belgorod, Russia. Two children killed. pic.twitter.com/keeXQumfNY

— Russian Market (@runews) December 30, 2023

Russia’s defense ministry described a broader attack on Russian territory Saturday during which time the military intercepted and destroyed dozens of inbound missiles and drones.

Ukrainian media sources said that the armed forces launched some 70 drones on Russia in the series of deadly attacks, however, Kiev officials claim they only targeted military sites, including a direct hit on a electronic factory in Bryansk region where missile system components are made.

This major assault appears ‘retaliation’ by Ukraine for the major nationwide aerial strikes on Ukrainian cities that took place the day prior, where the rising death toll is at 39 Ukrainians killed.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces had cited that in the Friday Russian assault, up to 158 missiles and drones were launched, describing that this was a “record number” and the “most massive missile attack” of the conflict, excluding the very opening few days of the invasion.

The Saturday attacks on Russia were rare for their size and scope, and likely Russian forces are preparing another wave of attacks on Ukraine. President Putin was reportedly briefed on the wide-ranging assault, detailed further as follows:

An initial statement from the Russian defence ministry on Saturday said 13 missiles were destroyed over the wider region overnight. Later, it said 32 drones had been shot down in the Bryansk, Oryol, Kursk and Moscow regions.

The governor of Bryansk region meanwhile said two villages were targeted and a child, born in 2014, had been killed. He said the attacks had damaged 55 homes, two private businesses, a football ground, a leisure centre and a pre-school.

The below photo of Belgorod city shows that the attacks were on a large-scale not seen in many months…

“This offence will not go unpunished,” the Russian MoD said further. And spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a press briefing, “President Vladimir Putin has been informed about the Ukrainian armed forces’ strike on residential neighborhoods in Belgorod.”

Russian state media detailed that the shelling “targeted the central city district, which hosts regional government buildings, as well as the ‘Mayak’ city mall – a popular gathering place for locals that traditionally holds festive events on New Year’s Eve. Some reports also claimed that a local ice-skating rink was hit in the strike.”

The center of Belgorod right after the strike pic.twitter.com/NCPlMaJVj8

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) December 30, 2023

But Ukraine’s military asserted it avoided civilian areas, which isn’t born out by the video evidence. “Unlike Russian terrorist attacks on the territory of Ukraine, the Security and Defense Forces have exclusively hit enemy military targets,” a military source told Ukrainian media.

Belgorod lies merely 20 miles from the Ukraine border, on the other side of which has witnessed two years of heavy fighting. Air raid sirens and the occasional inbound drone have become ‘normal’ for Russian residents in the region, however, the scale of Saturday’s attack was unprecedented in intensity and the rate at which the missiles and drones hit central areas.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

French authorities have warned terrorists are planning attacks on New Year’s Eve and has deployed 90,000 police and gendarmes to counter the threat.

The reaction to Israel’s bombing of Gaza will see similar measures put into place in Germany, another European country with a high Muslim population.

“I’ve requested a very strong mobilisation of police forces and the gendarmerie under the context of a very high terrorist threat, of course due to what’s happening in Israel and Palestine,” said interior minister Mr Darmanin.

6,000 officers will be on patrol around the Champs-Elysees, where up to 1.5 million revelers will gather to celebrate the New Year’s Eve countdown, while 5,000 anti-terror soldiers from Operation Sentinel will also be on high alert.

“France warns of ‘very high’ terror threat on New Year’s Eve”

Remember how they tried to say the (fictitious) ‘far right’ was the greatest threat to Western security

We all know it is ‘that’ group who have brought the threat to our shores

https://t.co/Bc0eYVRMLv

— C (@MrChairmanGB) December 29, 2023

35,000 firefighters will also be dispatched across the country, potentially to respond to mass riots and car burnings, which is a favorite past time of France’s new diverse population.

In Germany, interior minister Nancy Faeser said she was “concerned that New Year’s Eve could once again be a day on which we experience blind rage and senseless violence.”

4,000 police will be deployed throughout Berlin to deal with radicalized extremists.

As we previously highlighted, security services in Germany, Spain, Austria have beefed up their presence outside churches and other major landmarks after learning terrorists had schemed to bring chaos to major cities over the Christmas period.

Concern was particularly high around Cologne Cathedral in Germany, site of the infamous New Year’s Eve 2015 mass molestation of women by huge gangs of migrants from North Africa.

Meanwhile, there’s no threat of a terror attack ruining New Years Eve celebrations in Hungary or Poland.

Wonder why that is?

*  *  *

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California – known for its poo-lined streets, is one step closer to Soylent Green, after state officials approved new “toilet-to-tap” regulations which would allow water agencies to take wastewater from homes, recycle it, and then deliver it back to households in an effort to maximize the state’s water supply.

“It will truly be the highest quality water delivered in the state when it’s done,” according to Darrin Polhemus, director of the Division of Drinking Water and the State Water Resources Control Board, the NY Post reports.

Officials swear it’s safe (until it’s not, we assume), due to three rigorous stages of treatment. The poo water is treated for pathogens and viruses that is allegedly so effective that minerals have to be added back into the water to give it taste.

“If one fails, there’s still two remaining in its place as backups to make sure nothing goes untreated,” said Polhemus.

California is notoroiusly drought-prone and depends on water from other states via the Colorado River.

However, 2023 brought an exceptional amount of rain, and by October, the state was over 99% drought-free, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Although the water will be more expensive than imported water, the supply is more renewable and reliable, according to CalMatters.

California is the second state to allow the process, following Colorado. -NY Post

The Golden State has been using recycled water in farming and watering lawns for several decades, however this would be the first time it’s been used for potable water.

“I would have no hesitation drinking this water my whole life,” according to USC assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, Daniel McCurry.

The first areas of the state to turn poo into water will be San Diego and the Bay Area. In San Diego, half of the city’s water supply would be poo water by 2035, according to officials.

“Drought happens all the time and with climate change, it will only get worse,” Santa Clara Valley Water District official Kirsten Struve told ABC. “This is a drought-resistant supply that we will need in the future to meet the demands of our communities.”

Well, shit.

Authored by Eve Ottenberg via Counterpunch.org,

Nobody in their right mind wants to be obliged to send their kid off to war in Eastern Europe if Romania and Moldova start bombing each other. Yet NATO membership requires just that.

And courtesy of the best congress money can buy, now power to withdraw from NATO has been removed from the U.S. president and enshrined in the well-greased palms of our legislators. More specifically, on December 16 congress approved a bill barring the president from unilaterally exiting NATO without legislative approval. This is a disaster. It’s aimed at Trump and one of the few decent things he might do if elected president, namely ditch that trouble-making albatross, NATO. Naturally president Joe Biden did not delay signing the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes this new NATO provision; so we’re stuck with it.

You doubt this is bad news?

Just look at NATO’s track record: bombing Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and currently the abattoir NATO has made of Ukraine – or rather the disaster caused by NATO’s promise to absorb Ukraine. In Afghanistan, NATO performed with its usual, incomparable mediocrity, so the U.S. withdrew, convinced its puppet regime could hold off the Taliban for months. After all, the U.S. and NATO had bombed the country and the Taliban to smithereens – right? Well, it turned out our puppet couldn’t restrain the Taliban long enough for retreating U.S. jets to lift off from the tarmac. And what was NATO doing in Afghanistan for 20 years anyway? Don’t ask any of our military geniuses like David Petraeus, who kept telling us victory was just around the corner, and who even argued in the Atlantic, August 8 2022, that “we could have won.” Ha!

As for NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, that was a debacle that transformed Africa’s most prosperous nation into a stone-age pit with open-air slave markets. The NATO 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia wasn’t much better, in that it should never have happened and arguably the only reason it did was so then President Bill “NATO Uber Alles” Clinton could distract the public from the lurid details of a sex scandal and impeachment. Thus the noble enterprises in which NATO has engaged, spreading mayhem, misery and murder across the globe in the name of freedom and democracy. What has NATO learned from these fiascos, seriatim? Arguably nothing.

Take NATO’s plans for the South China Sea and for Finland, plans which slate Taiwan for the cemetery and leave Finland bristling with U.S. bases from Helsinki in the south to Utsjoki in the north. You disagree that Taiwan’s headed for the grave? Well, numerous U.S. bigwigs have bandied about the notion of bombing Taiwan’s computer chip industry, rather than letting it fall into China’s hands. That’s American homicidal love for Taiwan. Meanwhile, back in July, NATO infuriated Beijing by portraying China as a major challenge to…you got it, NATO!

What is NATO doing in the China Sea, you ask? Whatever Washington tells it to do.

Lately, that means stirring up trouble and painting Beijing in the garish colors of a supervillain. NATO did so by announcing, according to Al Jazeera July 12, that China “challenged the alliance’s interests, security and values with its ‘stated ambitions and coercive policies.’”

“The PRC’s malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation target Allies and harm Alliance security,” NATO proclaimed.

Welp, your accusations can’t get much more heatedly bellicose than that. Or maybe they can: NATO went on to decry the Moscow-Beijing strategic partnership, recriminating that those two superpowers undercut the sacred rules-based international order. That’s the order Washington cooks up on the fly to serve its interests of the moment. Those are the rules the Empire hands down that everyone, except Washington, must follow. And yes, Russia and China DO undercut this so-called rules-based order – because they follow, instead, international law. Especially as it’s enunciated in United Nations documents.

Then there is Finland, whose recent entrance into NATO president Biden no doubt regards as quite a coup. But it’ll likely turn out the way his other coup, sanctions – “the ruble will be rubble” – did. Which is to say it could backfire bigly. Finland enjoyed decades of peace with Russia, and the two nations had no problems. Now disputes will proliferate, all because the Finns believed the NATO propaganda lie that Moscow intends to conquer many neighboring countries. It does not. It intends to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and murdering its Russian population. It will likely succeed at both.

But now, as the Kremlin has warned, things have changed. Previously when Moscow regarded Helsinki, it saw a peaceful neighbor. Now it sees an enemy. You think not? Then explain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent order recreating the Leningrad Military District on Finland’s borders. That district began to be demilitarized in November 1990 and was completely disbanded in 2010. Now it’s back. And it covers the entire Russian-Finish border. Suffice it to say if Finland eventually goes up in flames, it will be NATO, with its military bases coating that nation, that lit the match.

More accurately the United States, not NATO. For, as AP reported on December 14, Finland will sign a defense pact with the U.S., which will permit “U.S. soldiers access to 15 military areas and facilities covering the entire Nordic nation all the way from a key southern naval base and inland airbases to a vast remote army training area in Lapland, in the Arctic north.” These American bases in Finland include some directly on the Russian border. Fortunately, the U.S. probably lacks sufficient troops and equipment to pack its new Finnish bases with boots on the ground, as military expert Will Schryver has tweeted. But still, no wonder Putin reactivated the Leningrad Military District. His adversary, Biden, who allegedly gave the order to blow up the Nordstream pipelines, doubtless smirks with success and doing everything possible to goad Russia into World War III.

You think that’s too unkind? Then explain Biden’s outburst in early December, when he threatened congressional Republicans, skeptical of more aid to Ukraine, with sending troops to fight Russia.

“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden claimed, falsely, from all the evidence so far. Then Joe “Bring on Armageddon” Biden added, “We’ll have…American troops fighting Russian troops.”

Yes, thanks to an organization called NATO and a jingoistic war president named Biden.

The 500 billionaires on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index added $1.5 trillion in net worth in 2023, fully recovering $1.4 trillion lost last year.

Their fortunes surged due to the strong performance of tech stocks despite elevated inflation, recession fears, high interest rates, and increasing war risks worldwide. 

Elon Musk reclaimed the title of the world’s richest person, surpassing French luxury Bernard Arnault, CEO of luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH. Musk is set to end the year with a net worth of $232.4 billion, a $95.4 billion increase year-to-date. His net worth is closely tied to the performance of Tesla shares, which are up more than 100% this year. 

Arnault is next on the list as the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $179 billion. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is number three with a net worth of $178.3 billion, and Bill Gates number four at $140.5 billion. 

Despite Arnault’s net wealth hitting a new record high this year, the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive interest rate hiking cycle in a generation has dented the fortunes of the top five on the Bloomberg list. 

The Fed pivot, with rate traders now pricing in well over six cuts through the end of 2024, helped unleash a stock market rally; in return, the net wealth of the top billionaires moved higher in recent months. 

Democrats are furious Musk is crowned once more as the world’s richest person as the Biden administration weaponizes federal agencies against the billionaire. 

Authored by Megan Redshaw via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People who receive two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine may be more likely to develop long-COVID, a new study finds.

In the study published in PLOS One, researchers examined data from 487 and 371 individuals at four weeks and six months post-SARS-CoV-2 infection, respectively, to estimate the incidence, characteristics, and predictors of long COVID among patients. Long COVID symptoms were reported by 29.2 percent of participants four weeks following infection. This number dropped to 9.4 percent at six months, indicating symptoms may diminish over time.

Researchers found that the greater the severity of infection a patient had, the more likely they were to experience long COVID. The incidence of long COVID at four weeks of follow-up in those who experienced mild/moderate disease was 23.4 percent compared with 62.5 percent in those with severe cases.

At six months, the incidence of long COVID was considerably lower. For those with mild/moderate infection, only 7.2 percent reported symptoms compared with 23.1 percent in those with severe/critical cases. The most commonly reported symptom was fatigue. Other symptoms included cough, cognitive dysfunction or brain fog, and loss of taste and smell.

During the four-week follow-up, patients were more likely to experience long COVID if they had preexisting medical conditions, a higher number of symptoms during the acute phase of COVID-19 illness, if their infection was more severe or resulted in hospitalization, or if they had received two COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Although previous vaccination was associated with long COVID, the authors could not find “any interaction effect of COVID-19 vaccination and acute COVID-19 severity on causing Long COVID.”

This implies that prior vaccination “was independently associated with the occurrence of long-COVID,” cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough explained in a recent Substack post.

How COVID-19 Vaccines May Contribute to Long COVID

Nearly 7 percent of U.S. adults surveyed in 2022 said they’ve experienced long COVID—a condition commonly thought only to be associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Although definitions of long COVID differ, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broadly defines long COVID as “signs, symptoms, and conditions that continue to develop after acute COVID-19 infection” that can last for “weeks, months, or years.” The term “long COVID” is also used to refer to post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC), long-haul COVID, and post-acute sequelae of COVID-19.

U.S. regulatory agencies claim vaccinating against COVID-19 can reduce the risk of developing long COVID. One theory is that COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe disease, and as researchers noted in the PLOS One study, severe disease is a predictor of developing the condition. However, some research suggests the condition may be caused by an immune overreaction to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that COVID-19 vaccines use to induce antibodies.

One theory is that vaccination may cause some people to generate a second round of antibodies that target the first. These antibodies could function like spike protein, which targets the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor—a cell surface protein—and enables the virus to enter cells. Like spike protein, these “rogue antibodies” might also bind to the ACE2 receptor and disrupt ACE2 signaling, which can cause conditions associated with long COVID.

“In my practice, the most severe cases of long-COVID are in vaccinated patients who also had severe and or multiple episodes of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Dr. McCullough wrote on X. In his recent Substack post, he said he believes long COVID symptoms are due to the retention of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in cells and tissues after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

When people receive an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, this produces a “massive additional load of full-length Spike protein” that can circulate in the blood for six months or longer, he wrote.

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health in 2022 conducted an observational study (posted as a preprint but never published) of 23 individuals with long COVID. Researchers found that a “variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process.”

In a February study published in the Journal of Medical Virology, researchers examined the levels of spike protein and viral RNA circulating in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 with and without long COVID. They found that spike protein and viral RNA were more likely to be present in patients with long COVID. In patients with long COVID, 30 percent were positive for spike protein and viral RNA, whereas none of the individuals without long COVID were positive for both.

In a 2023 study in the European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences, researchers analyzed the serum of 81 individuals with long COVID syndrome and found viral spike protein in one patient after the infection had cleared and yielded a negative COVID-19 test, and vaccine spike protein in two patients two months after vaccination.

“This study, in agreement with other published investigations, demonstrates that both natural and vaccine spike protein may still be present in long-COVID patients, thus supporting the existence of a possible mechanism that causes the persistence of spike protein in the human body for much longer than predicted by early studies,” the authors wrote.