For centuries, global financial centers have served as a linchpin for capital market activity.

These hubs share important features, from the infrastructure to facilitate billions of transactions to the regulatory framework to promote more transparent markets.

As economies have evolved, so have centers for global business—however the transition can shift slowly.

Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld and Sam Parker created the following graphic, based on rankings from the consultancy group Z/Yen, to show the top global financial centers in 2023.

How Cities Were Ranked

To analyze the strength of each financial center, Z/Yen looked at the following areas of competitiveness:

• Financial Sector Development

• Business Environment

• Human Capital

• Infrastructure

• Reputation

Each of these categories has four subcomponents, which altogether arrive at a cities score.

The World’s Leading Financial Centers

In 2023, New York remained the epicenter for global finance.

With $46 trillion in stock market capitalization, it captures 40% of the world’s total, thanks to the depth and liquidity of its markets. Domestic and international companies look to list on its exchanges due to their broad investor base.

Roughly 330,000 people work in financial services, however, financial firms are increasingly moving out of the city. Since the end of 2019, $993 billion in assets across 158 companies have moved headquarters driven by lower taxes in other states.

London ranked second given its role as an investment banking and foreign-exchange trading hub. While it remains a dominant center, international banking has waned since Brexit as business has shifted to the euro area.

With a population of six million people, Singapore fell in third. Its diplomatic neutrality allows Asian and Western companies to conduct business in the country, operating as the “Switzerland of Asia”. Tech giants from Google to Alibaba have their regional headquarters based in the commerce hub.

This year, Hong Kong ranked fourth, followed by San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Shanghai (7th) is home to the largest stock exchange in Asia, at $6.6 trillion. However, it fell in rank over the last year along with other major Chinese financial centers.

The Future of Global Financial Centers

Along with ranking the global centers of commerce, Z/Yen highlighted the top centers likely to grow in significance over the next two to three years.

Seoul featured at the top of this list, followed by Singapore and Kigali, Rwanda’s capital.

To attract foreign investors and expand its role as a financial center, Seoul has proposed new tax revisions that exempt income and corporate taxes for foreign companies for three years. While these are still in discussion, obstacles remain.

Overall, the majority of up-and-coming hubs were located in Asia, likely driven by the region’s increasing economic influence over the last several decades.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Two environmental groups have challenged in court the UK’s approval of a major new oil project in the North Sea, arguing that the field would be incompatible with the UK’s net-zero goal and that the government hasn’t factored in Scope 3 emissions when giving the green light to the plan.

In separate lawsuits filed in Scotland’s top civil court, Edinburgh’s Court of Session, Greenpeace, and Uplift are suing the UK government for the approval issued earlier this year to the development of the Rosebank oilfield northwest of Shetland, the largest discovered untapped resource on the UK Continental Shelf.    

At the end of September, UK regulators approved the development plan for the Rosebank project, paving the way for operator Equinor to proceed with a $3.8-billion investment in the field, which has stirred controversy in Britain amid debates about the need for new oil and gas projects.

The approval for Rosebank had been delayed amid concerns about whether the development plan would meet requirements for electrification for net-zero emissions. These requirements are part of the so-called North Sea Transition Deal, an agreement between the UK government and the offshore industry to cut emissions from oil and gas development and production as much as possible.

Total recoverable resources at the Rosebank field are estimated at around 300 million barrels of oil, with Phase 1 targeting an estimated 245 million barrels of oil, Equinor says.

“If Rosebank goes ahead, the UK will blow its own plans to stay within safe climate limits,” Uplift’s executive director Tessa Khan said, as carried by the Financial Times.

The Government said it “strongly rejects these claims” and would contest any lawsuits.

“The UK is a world leader in reaching net zero – cutting emissions faster than any other major economy – and as the independent Climate Change Committee recognises, we will still need oil and gas as part of our energy mix,” a spokesperson for the government said.

While Germany shuttered the last of its nuclear power plants this year, like idiots, British aerospace and defense company Rolls Royce is in talks with Ukraine’s largest power company to build a series of mini nuclear plants across the country – including two sites currently occupied by Russia, The Telegraph reports.

Ukraine’s DTEK, owned by billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, has held early-stage, and obviously ambitious, discussions with Rolls about the small modular reactors (SMRs) at sites which are currently using coal power stations. CEO Maxim Timchenko says he expects nuclear power to constitute a vital part of DTEKs future portfolio amid the rebuilding of Ukraine, as the country shifts away from fossil fuels.

SMRs under development are a new and commercially-unproven technology that wouldn’t be deployed until 2030 at the earliest.

DTEK and Rolls are examining whether up to eight existing coal power station sites, two of them currently in territory occupied by Russia, could eventually be converted to house SMRs in the 2030s.

It comes as Ukraine is scrambling to deploy less centralised and more renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar farms, in the face of a targeted bombing campaign by Russia to take out grid infrastructure during the harsh winter months. -The Telegraph

DTEK began generating wind power in May at the Tyligulska wind farm, located around 60 miles from the frontline of the war. This month the company announced plans to quadruple the site’s output capacity.

Timchenko went against the climate cult, saying that while renewables remain a key to boosting energy security in Ukraine – as wind turbines make for more difficult targets than large coal power plants, a large portion of Ukraine’s power will need to come from ‘less intermittent’ sources such as nuclear.

“We are trying to find a way to install these SMRs,” he told The Telegraph, adding “From our side, we have quite a big capacity of coal-fired power stations and we are in discussions with Rolls-Royce SMR to convert [them].”

Ukraine is already heavily reliant on nuclear, with four state-owned plants generating more than half of the country’s power before the Russian invasion. One of the sites, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, is currently sitting in occupied territory.

As part of the current discussions, DTEK is seeking to establish some of the supply chain in Ukraine, which has significant expertise with nuclear engineering.

“The details of these discussions are commercially confidential,” Rolls-Royce SMR told the outlet.

DTEK is also understood to have held talks with other companies developing SMRs.

The company provides one fifth of Ukraine’s electricity, largely through coal plants, but its infrastructure has come under heavy fire from Russian forces since the conflict erupted in February 2022.

Talks with Rolls emerged as bidders in the UK competition to fund SMR designs were told that the next stage is being pushed back.

Six companies including Rolls are vying to build government-funded SMR projects. They were expecting to submit a formal tender this month but have now been told the process will start in January. -The Telegraph

A spokesman for Great British Nuclear told the outlet that ‘The next phase of the competition will launch as soon as possible and we look forward to receiving vendor bids.”

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The British government’s top-secret intelligence, security and cyber agency has applied to the local council to ask if it can fly gay pride, transgender and autism flags on poles outside its headquarters.

Yes, really.

The Daily Mail reports that CGHQ, notorious for its spying activities, has asked the borough council for planning permission to display the flags at its main headquarters in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

I’ve been representing you, Mr Bond: Government’s secret intelligence agency GCHQ criticised by families after seeking planning permission to fly transgender flag at its HQ https://t.co/yQcUtuw0QU pic.twitter.com/L6SD7o9APk

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) December 18, 2023

The report notes that there are two flag poles outside the huge state of the art building. One is currently flying the British national Flag, the Union Jack, while the other has the Ukraine flag on it.

We’re flying the Ukrainian flag at HQ in solidarity with our Ukrainian friends.

The UK stands with the people of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s unprovoked attack on freedom and democracy.

We #StandwithUkraine pic.twitter.com/9DRt9yHMoF

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) February 25, 2022

Of course it does.

But the ‘current thing’ is always changing, so GCHQ wants to be prepared.

In its application to the council, the agency wrote that “GCHQ in the future could use two flags for both existing listed consented uses under the Advertisement Regulations but also in addition, fly flags of other groups or interests particularly to mark events throughout the calendar.”

the letter continues, “This may include, for example, the Progress Pride Flag, the Transgender Flag, Autism Pride or indeed any other combination of two flags as to which is deemed suitable on site.”

The application further notes that the flags “will be flown on the existing two poles at various points throughout the year when needed, which may for example mark specific national events or follow events in the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion calendar.”

“For example, this year from November 13 to 19 was Transgender Awareness Week,” it adds, clarifying that “In future by applying ‘all flags’ would allow the use of the two existing flag poles for both the Union Flag and Transgender Flag that week.”

 The application is public and can be viewed here.

Not sure why they are applying now when they seem to have been doing this anyway for some time:

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

We’re proud to be flying the rainbow flag at our Cheltenham headquarters to celebrate #PrideMonth2022#PrideMonth pic.twitter.com/jtKwmFqAbA

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) June 1, 2022

🏳️‍🌈 | We’re proud to fly the rainbow flag today for #IDAHOBIT2018#LGBT pic.twitter.com/7fQED4C9n9

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) May 17, 2018

👥 | We recently flew the bisexual pride flag in support of our bi+ colleagues for #BiVisibilityDay #TBT pic.twitter.com/gx0wRKnbb6

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) October 4, 2018

This weekend, we marked Transgender Day of Remembrance by flying the transgender flag outside GCHQ for the first time pic.twitter.com/B2xZesZvsE

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) November 21, 2016

Today we’re marking #TDOR by flying the #transgender flag outside GCHQ pic.twitter.com/W38xy4B76J

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) November 20, 2017

Good morning from a sun-drenched doughnut in Cheltenham 👋

Proud to be flying the rainbow flag as we celebrate #pride2021 month pic.twitter.com/CgtqRa5WUy

— GCHQ (@GCHQ) June 9, 2021

Important stuff.

Monitoring everyone’s emails, calls and texts comes a close second. Somewhere down the priority list is stopping terrorist attacks.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews

Authored by Milton Ezrati via The Epoch Times,

China and the European Union (EU) recently held their first in-person summit since 2019. The tone in 2023 certainly points to the difference four years can make.

In place of the friendliness and calls for cooperation that emerged in 2019, recent meetings contained much tension and accusations. If Beijing had hoped to drive a wedge between Washington and Brussels at this summit, it failed. On the contrary, the meetings showed that Europe is pretty much in line with Washington’s approach to China.

Any memories of the earlier gathering reveal how much things have changed. Four years ago, the meetings, replete with smiling photo opportunities, produced a 3,000-word joint statement full of promises for Sino–European cooperation on matters like steel overcapacity. There was also talk of the joint development of 5G and efforts to ease tensions in the South and East China Seas.

In 2019, Brussels and Beijing both intoned support for the Minsk Accords to negotiate the differences between Russia and Ukraine and, more generally, to work together to secure human rights around the world, including in the Xinjiang region of China. Especially since just before the 2019 summit, the EU had designated China as a “systemic rival,” the friendly nature of that summit was taken as a strong signal of continued amity and cooperation.

Compared with the tone of this recent summit, the language from 2019 sounds as if it comes from a different world. This year had none of the smiling photo opportunities of all participants. The gathering was much smaller than in the past, consisting of only four key players: China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, EU European Council President Charles Michel, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. While Xi referred to the EU as a “key partner” in trade and technological cooperation and asserted that the parties had no need to view each other as “rivals,” the Europeans pressed a considerable list of troubling economic and diplomatic issues.

Even before the meetings began, the EU had already sanctioned China over alleged abuses in Xinjiang and further announced an investigation into Beijing’s subsidies for electric vehicle production, something that could lead to the imposition of tariffs. Germany, the biggest economy in the EU by far, had moved toward expelling the Chinese company Huawei from its 5G network.

At the summit, Ms. von der Leyen dwelt on how Europe’s trade deficit with China has doubled in just the last two years to the equivalent of $400 billion. She blamed the flood of red ink on Beijing’s practices of limiting market access to foreign companies, giving preferential treatment to domestic operations, and, in some cases, how overcapacities in China have undercut European companies. She sounded almost a perfect echo of Washington’s complaints in 2018, when the Trump administration began to impose tariffs on Chinese goods, and still complains of today. Like Washington, she spoke of Europe’s need to de-emphasize China trade, though she used the word “de-risk,” whereas Washington used the word “de-couple.”

Rather than promote amity, the Europeans went beyond trade to more sensitive diplomatic matters. Both Mr. Michel and Ms. von der Leyen pressed Xi to use his influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring a quick diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine. They each warned of “irreparable damage to EU–China ties” should Beijing arm Russia in that conflict or help Russia evade sanctions. They brought up human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and warned the two Chinese leaders against using force with Taiwan. Xi spoke of cooperation between his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Europe’s parallel plan, called Global Gateway. The Europeans remained cool, no doubt, because their plan was put into effect precisely as an alternative to China’s BRI.

If Beijing had hoped to blunt Washington’s strident approach to China by creating a friendlier Europe, it failed. The Europeans showed themselves as suspicious of Beijing’s ambitions as Washington. They echoed many of Washington’s trade and investment complaints and accusations and used even stronger language about human rights and Taiwan. The summit failed to reveal Western division, as Beijing no doubt hoped it would, and instead produced an image of common Western hostility, if not unity.

Authored by Scott Ritter,

The US Department of Defense has failed its sixth annual audit in a row, but taxpayer money will keep going down that drain..

Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.

The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.

This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.

The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment. 

Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up.

Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria. 

These numbers are mind-numbingly large – so large that they become meaningless to the average person. The US defense enterprise is so massive that it is literally a mission impossible to speak of balancing the books. The American people might be willing to shrug off an accounting error or two. But the defense budget equates to American military power and the perceptions of national worth that translate into notions of American exceptionalism.

The fact of the matter is that our cavalier approach to defense spending has resulted in fraud of a massive scale. The American people were sold a bill of goods – a military capable of projecting power world-wide to sustain the so-called “rules based international order” upon which the notion of American exceptionalism has been premised. As it turns out, the US military is as hollow as the numbers on the Pentagon ledgers. The American people have bought an apparatus that is incapable of fighting and winning a major war against any of the potential opponents arrayed against it. We failed to defeat Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. And we are not able to defeat either China or Russia, let alone regional powers like North Korea and Iran. And yet we will simply continue to invest, in seemingly unquestioning fashion, into this enterprise, expecting somehow that a system that cannot pass an audit will somehow magically produce a different result despite the fact that we, the American people, are doing nothing to demand such a result.

In short, the defense budget is the equivalent of “pay-to-play,” in which the American people pay the US government to produce the results necessary to sustain their overinflated sense of self-worth.

We Americans have become so accustomed to being the biggest, baddest bully in the global arena that we assume that simply by pouring money into a system that had produced the desired results for more than seventy years that we could keep the good times rolling.

But when you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house of cards.

Authored by Lorenz Duchamps via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. health officials are investigating whether three brands of recalled cinnamon apple puree and applesauce that left dozens of American children sickened may have been intentionally contaminated with lead.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first reported adverse events in children as young as 1 year old in October. The agency has since launched an inspection at a plant in Ecuador that produced the cinnamon-flavored applesauce products.

Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for Human Foods, told Politico in an interview published on Dec. 14 that although the investigation is still ongoing, investigators believe the adulteration may have been “an intentional act.”

“We’re still in the midst of our investigation. But so far all of the signals we’re getting lead to an intentional act on the part of someone in the supply chain and we’re trying to sort of figure that out,” Mr. Jones said.

“My instinct is they didn’t think this product was going to end up in a country with a robust regulatory process,” he added. “They thought it was going to end up in places that did not have the ability to detect something like this.”

The affected products were marketed to parents and children under the brands WanaBana apple cinnamon fruit puree and Schnucks- and Weis-branded cinnamon applesauce pouches. They were sold nationwide by grocery chains such as Dollar Tree, as well as online retailers such as Amazon.

In its latest update on the lead poisoning outbreak, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it has identified a total of 125 cases from 22 states across the nation.

Of those cases, 46 are confirmed, 68 are probable cases, and 11 are suspected, according to the CDC. So far, all of the children are aged 6 or younger.

‘Economically Motivated Adulteration’

Meanwhile, the FDA said health officials are looking into several theories as to why or by whom the lead was added to the applesauce pouches, pointing out that the agency currently believes the adulteration was “economically motivated.”

“The FDA can confirm that one of the theories the agency is exploring is the potential that the cinnamon contamination occurred as a possible result of economically motivated adulteration,” an FDA spokesperson told Consumer Reports, stressing additional investigation is needed before the agency reaches any conclusions.

According to the FDA, economically motivated adulteration refers to someone intentionally leaving out, taking out, or substituting an ingredient to make the product appear better or of greater value.

Asked why U.S. food safety laws wouldn’t have prevented the tainted products from entering the country, Mr. Jones said intentional adulteration is “always going to be tricky to absolutely stop.”

“We have limited authority over foreign ingredient suppliers that do not directly ship product to the U.S. because their food undergoes further manufacturing/processing prior to export,” the FDA spokesperson told Politico, which first reported the story.

More Details

According to the CDC, there is “no safe blood lead level” for young children. The agency said it uses a marker of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter to identify children with elevated blood lead levels—higher than most American children aged between 1 and 5 years.

In a report released on Nov. 13, the CDC said an investigation found 22 children who had consumed the lead-contaminated applesauce pouches had blood lead levels as high as 29 micrograms per deciliter, far above the CDC’s marker of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter.

Three recalled applesauce products—WanaBana apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches, Schnucks-brand cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches and variety pack, and Weis-brand cinnamon applesauce pouches. (FDA via AP)

The children experienced signs and symptoms including headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, change in activity level, and anemia, according to the CDC.

Lead is toxic to humans, and exposure at any age or health status can lead to serious symptoms. In adults, high blood lead levels can increase their risk for high blood pressure, other cardiovascular effects, kidney problems, adverse reproductive outcomes, and gout.

Although most children with lead exposure have no obvious immediate symptoms, parents and caretakers should consult a health care professional if they suspect a child may have been exposed to lead, according to the FDA.

Short-term exposure to lead could result in headaches, abdominal pain/colic, vomiting, and anemia, while longer-term exposure could result in irritability, lethargy, fatigue, muscle aches or muscle prickling/burning, constipation, difficulty concentrating/muscular weakness, tremor, and weight loss.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, heavy metals like lead can get into food products from the soil, air, water, or industrial processes.

The Florida Republican Party has suspended its chairman, Christian Ziegler, after a a woman who was in a sexual relationship with Ziegler and his wife, Bridget, accused him of raping her after a planned 3-way sexual encounter went off the rails.

The Sarasota Police Department is investigating an incident reported on Oct. 4 by the accuser, who says Christian Ziegler showed up for an agreed-upon 3-way with his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler. Police say that Bridget Ziegler was unable to make it, however Christian Ziegler arrived anyway and assaulted her.

Bridget told police that she and her husband had been involved with the woman sexually, but only once in the past year. Bridget was the lone vote on the Sarasota County School Board against a resolution asking her to resign from her post on the board – which she has refused to do. She also serves on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ tourism board that oversees the district containing Walt Disney World.

Christian Ziegler has denied the rape allegation, and says that the encounter with the woman was consensual.

In response, the Florida Republican Party stripped him of his authority and all but $1 of his $120,000 salary until it can remove him.

“These are serious issues,” said Jack Brill, GOP chair of Sarasota County, where Ziegler lives, the Orlando Sentinel reports. “[This] is uncharted territory for the great majority of everybody.”

The unanimous decision by the party’s executive board to censure Ziegler took place at the Rosen Centre, the same Orlando hotel where he was elected chair just 10 months before.

The man Ziegler had defeated for the job, Evan Power, called Sunday’s special meeting in his role as vice chair and will take over almost all of Ziegler’s powers alongside treasurer Mike Moberley.

Power said he expects the full committee to officially remove Ziegler at a meeting in Tallahassee on Jan. 8. -Orlando Sentinel

“Today, we took an appropriate action to bring accountability to one of our members,” Power said, following the meeting. “It was a hard moment for many of us. …  But the charges against him are serious in nature. And we cannot move forward as an organization without a new leader.”

According to state Rep. Michelle Salzman (R-Pensacola), the situation is “very frustrating,” adding “[Ziegler] needs to resign. It was unanimous, every single motion today was unanimously [approved]. And he’s still there.”

Authored by James Bovard via The Mises Institute,

Early this year, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, was arrested and charged with transmission of national defense information and other charges.

Teixeira allegedly leaked classified documents on the Ukraine war and other foreign policy issues to a Discord gaming group. The document propagated from there and appeared in many news articles in the following months.

The Post article sympathetically portrays the struggles of U.S. government officials fighting to suppress the unapproved eruption of hard facts. In a passage sue to boost sales of Kleenex inside the Beltway, the Post quotes a U.S. government official who was permitted to remain anonymous: “We were blindsided and furious,” 

The Post, which partnered with PBS for a television program on the Discord leaks, noted that the “top secret… leaks predicted Ukraine’s failure to make substantial gains in its counteroffensive — a multibillion-dollar effort that cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The bleak forecast provided a sharp contrast to Washington’s optimistic messaging on the war, and it hurt Ukraine’s relationship with its chief backer, the U.S. government.” The “bleak forecast” was vastly more accurate than anything emitted by the Biden White House. A senior defense official (anonymous, of course) told the Post that the Pentagon raced to determine “what information may have been compromised.”

But the real challenge was determining which official lies had been debunked.

The Post bewailed how the leaks discomfited the Ukrainian government.

The Post noted that the “the leaks included never-before-released casualty estimates for Ukrainian forces, weaknesses in Ukraine’s ability to service damaged armored vehicles and the country’s shrinking supply of air defense munitions, which left population centers vulnerable to Russian cruise missile strikes and drones. Other documents warned that Ukraine was struggling to sustain troops, artillery and equipment, which probably would result in only “modest territorial gains” that fall “well short” of Kyiv’s goals.”

But the only reason that the “leaks” caused an international uproar is because U.S. government officials and their foreign partners had been brazenly lying about Ukrainian successes and prospects for victory.

Folks who read foreign news sources or independent American outlets or websites (such as Mises.org) were far more likely to recognize that the war would have no happy ending for either Ukraine or Russia.

The Post omitted mentioning the role of federal censorship in deluding Americans about the Ukraine war. In July 2023, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the FBI routinely colluded with Ukraine’s spy agency which sought help to suppress social media accounts that criticized the Ukraine government or “inaccurately reflects events in Ukraine” (including accurate battlefield reports of Ukrainian military defeats). The House report revealed that the FBI “routinely relayed these lists [of accounts] to the relevant social media platforms” and sought their suppression. The House report noted that “authentic accounts of Americans, including a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists, were ensnared in the censorship effort and flagged for social media companies to take down.” The CIA also pressured Twitter, calling for the suppression of “long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of ‘anti-Ukraine narratives,” journalist Matt Taibbi reported.

Washington Post readers are the cream of the intellectual crop, at least according to Washington Post readers. So how did Post devotees respond to the indignation about the leaker?

The article generated almost 600 comments. Among the most liked was an outburst from “ArtPope”:” Don’t understand why this article was written other than to support the pro-Putin, anti-Ukrainian position of the white nationalist evangelical fascist RepubliQans.” “Thinking4″ replied: They have profound ignorance of democracy and that their very words and actions undermine the standing of the US in the world.” (Thinking4 was probably not an English major.)

None of the most liked comments showed any outrage about Team Biden’s perennial lies on Ukraine. Instead, raw hatred was popular: “Find these traitors. Put their butts in jail. 10 years minimum. No deals.” “Make it 30,” came a quick reply, and another person piled on: “In solitary.” Said another: “Throughout history, the traditional punishment for treason is hanging. I’m ok with that.” “Mario TRUTH” joined the lynch mob: “What Teixeira did was nothing short of America WORST traitor it has ever seen. He not only aided in murdering 1000’s of innocent people, he intruded in Ukrainian leaders planning of a counteroffensive that would have saved many of the 1000’s Teixeira killed.”

So, U.S. government officials are entitled to blindfold and deceive the American people to avoid “intruding” on foreign leaders planning a military attack? This theory of democracy gets curiouser and curiouser.

The Post noted that the Discord leaks “depicted Zelensky in a new light, revealing his apparent interest in occupying Russian border villages and obtaining long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russian territory — an assertion that Ukrainians deny and would have deeply angered Washington.” So, America’s favored foreign leader was conniving to pull the United States into World War Three? Maybe Biden should have asked if Americans supported such recklessness? No, he was president, so he was entitled to delude Americans and pretend to rule the world.

Perhaps the greatest intellectual calisthenics in the long article was the paragraph that exonerated all Biden administration falsehoods on Ukraine. The Post offered a finger-wagging explanation: “Rather than exposing willful deceit by a U.S. government eager to bury bad news, the Discord leaks revealed a sharp divide between the U.S. intelligence analysts who authored the documents and many senior officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department who were overly sanguine about Ukraine’s prospects for success.”

Do the Post reporters and editors have no shame? They were not smart (or honest) enough to hark back to one of the clearest lessons from the Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971. As philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, during the Vietnam War, “the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.” CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But “in the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,” Arendt commented. The Post rationalized the bias of Team Biden: “U.S. officials viewed the airing of pessimistic battle outcomes as detrimental to their endeavor to raise support for the war effort, both in Congress and internationally.” Truth-telling never competed with cheerleading for more bombs and missiles.

Biden, his appointees, and plenty of former military officials on the gravy train have made endless brazenly false statements about the Ukraine war. The result is that the Ukrainian government is on the verge of conscripting Ukrainian grandfathers to send on daily suicidal Pickett’s Charges so that Ukrainian politicians can keep pocketing billions of dollars in handouts from the U.S. government. Ukraine prohibited any males between the age of 18 to 60 from leaving the country – as if the government had a preemptive right to send them to their death. Ukraine is closing its western border to “military age males” the same way that East Germany closed its border to West Europe decades ago.

But it remains a “no cost” war inside the Washington Beltway, where Ukrainian flags quickly replaced BLM banners after the start of the war. Nothing has changed for the policy class in the last 60 years. Arendt castigated the lavishly-paid intellectual cheerleaders for the Vietnam War who ignored “the untold misery that their ‘solutions,’ pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and anti-personnel bullets, held in store.” In the subsequent decades, intellectuals became more affluent but not more trustworthy.

Will the Washington Post ever honestly examine the costs of its own kowtowing to officialdom? The Post could do a great in-depth investigation of why its own editorial page and columnists have made so many false, misleading, or deranged statements on the Ukraine war. But don’t expect hell to freeze over any time soon.