In 2022, 29,165.2 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity was generated around the world, an increase of 2.3% from the previous year.

In this visualization, Visual Capitalist’s Chris Dickert and Sam Parker look at data from the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, and ask what powered the world in 2022.

Coal is Still King

Coal still leads the charge when it comes to electricity, representing 35.4% of global power generation in 2022, followed by natural gas at 22.7%, and hydroelectric at 14.9%.

Source: Energy Institute

Over three-quarters of the world’s total coal-generated electricity is consumed in just three countries. China is the top user of coal, making up 53.3% of global coal demand, followed by India at 13.6%, and the U.S. at 8.9%.

Burning coal—for electricity, as well as metallurgy and cement production—is the world’s single largest source of CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, its use in electricity generation has actually grown 91.2% since 1997, the year when the first global climate agreement was signed in Kyoto, Japan.

Renewables on the Rise

However, even as non-renewables enjoy their time in the sun, their days could be numbered.

In 2022, renewables, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, represented 14.4% of total electricity generation with an extraordinary annual growth rate of 14.7%, driven by big gains in solar and wind. Non-renewables, by contrast, only managed an anemic 0.4%.

The authors of the Statistical Review do not include hydroelectric in their renewable calculations, even though many others, including the International Energy Agency, consider it a “well-established renewable power technology.”

With hydroelectric moved into the renewable column, together they accounted for over 29.3% of all electricity generated in 2022, with an annual growth rate of 7.4%.

France’s Nuclear Horrible Year

Another big mover in this year’s report was nuclear energy.

In addition to disruptions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, shutdowns in France’s nuclear fleet to address corrosion found in the safety injection systems of four reactors led to a 4% drop in global use, year-over-year.

The amount of electricity generated by nuclear energy in that country dropped 22% to 294.7 TWh in 2022. As a result, France went from being the world’s biggest exporter of electricity, to a net importer.

Powering the Future

Turning mechanical energy into electrical energy is a relatively straightforward process. Modern power plants are engineering marvels, to be sure, but they still work on the same principle as the very first generator invented by Michael Faraday in 1831.

But how you get the mechanical energy is where things get complicated: coal powered the first industrial revolution, but heated the planet in the process; wind is free and clean, but is unreliable; and nuclear fission reliably generates emission-free electricity, but also creates radioactive waste.

With temperature records being set around the world in the summer, resolving these tensions isn’t just academic and next year’s report could be a crucial test of the world’s commitment to a clean energy future.

Via The Cradle,

An official Israeli delegation has arrived in Saudi Arabia to serve as observers during the 45th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, marking the first public visit by government officials to the kingdom.

An Israeli official who spoke with AP said the delegation is led by Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director-general in the Israeli foreign ministry, and includes several diplomats. The official also stressed that the delegation is “not on a bilateral visit.”

“We are happy to be here – it’s a good first step … We thank UNESCO and the Saudi authorities,” a member of the delegation who did not want to be named told AFP.

The delegation reportedly traveled through Dubai on their way to the kingdom. They only take part as observers due to Tel Aviv quitting UNESCO in 2017 and accusing the organization of being “biased” over Israel’s historical abuses against Palestinians and the military occupation of their land.

Last week, Israeli media accused the kingdom of “delaying granting visas” for the delegation, as the group was reportedly set to include Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Education Minister Yoav Kisch. In March, Riyadh refused Israel’s request to grant entry to Cohen for the UNESCO conference.

The public visit by low-level Israeli officials to Saudi Arabia has been described as a coup for the US in its plans to secure a normalization agreement between the two nations.

Normalization would be part of a so-called “mega-deal” with the US, which also calls for a defense pact from Washington, access to more advanced weaponry for the Saudis, and US help in developing a civilian nuclear program that would include uranium enrichment on Saudi soil.

Saudi Arabia has also publicly declared that normalization hinges on the implementation of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which calls for the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has reportedly set conditions to support Saudi-Israeli normalization.

As part of a Saudi-Israel deal, Palestinians have requested admission to the UN as a full member, ie statehood

US officials rejected this, showing again that the US has in practice abandoned the 2-state solution

Only breadcrumbs seem to be on offer…https://t.co/sfkfuGPFoP

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) September 11, 2023

Although the current visit by Israeli officials is being hailed as a major step toward normalization, last year, the kingdom relaxed its entry rules for Israeli passport holders. Furthermore, reports suggest dozens of Israeli businesspeople traveled to Saudi Arabia over the past year.

Hebrew media revealed last year that several senior security and political figures, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the kingdom over the past decade. Israeli tourists have also been spotted in the planned futuristic megacity of NEOM in Saudi Arabia, which is still under construction.

Hurricane Lee formed nearly a week ago (read here) and rapidly intensified into a Category 5 (read here) on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Lee has since been downgraded to a Cat. 3 with risks of restrengthening into a Cat. 4 this week while it churns toward the northeast Caribbean. New computer models show landfall impacts could be across Maine and the rest of New England.

Lee was located about 340 miles north of the northern Leeward Islands, with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph, according to a 0500 ET update by the National Hurricane Center. 

“A slow west-northwestward motion is expected during the next couple of days, followed by a gradual turn toward the north by midweek,” NHC said. 

The weather agency has no coastal watches or warnings in effect for the US mainland but does expect dangerous surf conditions across the Lesser Antilles, the British and US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas through this week. 

Computer models favor Lee to ride parallel hundreds of miles offshore of the US East Coast by late week, with landfall impact concerns in the New England area next week. 

“It remains too soon to know what level of impacts, if any, Lee might have along the US East Coast and Atlantic Canada late this week, especially since the hurricane is expected to slow down considerably over the southwestern Atlantic,” NHC said. 

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

Could you imagine the difference if, in the fall of 2020, the Washington Post had accepted a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive and actually investigated the thousands of emails, photos, text messages, and other evidence that implicated not just Hunter but his father Joe Biden in sundry unethical and criminal enterprises?

What about CBS, NBC, and ABC?

Shouldn’t we as news consumers expect these leviathans “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved,” as the new owner of the New York Times declared way back in 1896?

Yet in October 2020, when the New York Post wrote a series of stories describing the corrupt nature of the Biden family as exposed by the Hunter Biden laptop, there were few mainstream media outlets that dared to follow.

Or really, not dared, but chose. Because there is nothing daring about doing your job correctly.

You would think that when all the major social media companies like Facebook and Twitter blocked any discussion of the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop, these other major news corporations would have come to the aid of the Post.

If any of them had done their own investigation of the laptop, do you think that Twitter could have continued to censor the news under the false claim that it was Russian disinformation? Hardly.

But no mainstream media outlets were willing to put their own reputations on the line to support free speech – because their reputations are based entirely on being guardians of the left, and protecting Hillary, Barack and the Bidens is more important than fidelity to any chimeric sense of fairness and honor.

And Hunter Biden’s laptop is just a symptom.

In instance after instance, most of the media either closes its eyes to stories that implicate liberals or Democrats in unethical or illegal behavior, or pretends they are of no importance. Examples abound, from the whitewashing of Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the invention of the Russia collusion hoax to the complete lack of curiosity about the sweetheart deal offered to Hunter Biden by the so-called independent Justice Department.

It’s no wonder that much of the public at large is convinced there is no evidence that warrants the impeachment of Joe Biden for bribery or treason.

That’s what happens when you depend on biased news sources to form your opinion.

And what’s worse: These are not just biased news sources, but ignorant ones. Take, for example, the case of Philip Bump of the Washington Post.

Bump, a prized columnist and news analyst, was recently embarrassed by podcast host Noam Dworman, who is best known as the owner of a New York City comedy club. Bump claimed there was no evidence that President Biden had done anything improper in regard to his son’s business deals with foreign adversaries, and when Dworman rattled off some of the most important evidence suggesting otherwise, Bump took off his headset and walked away.

The interview ended when Dworman asked Bump: “What do you take from [Hunter’s] text message to his adult daughter — Hunter texted her, “I had to give 50% of my income to Pop.”

Bump, the Washington insider who molds public opinion by telling the rest of us what to think, declared meekly, “I have no idea what that means. I don’t. I have no idea what that means.”

And let’s be clear.

He doesn’t want to know what it means. That’s because he is not a real journalist; he is a propagandist for Democratic officials, ideas, and policies.

Most importantly, it is when Dworman challenged Bump to acknowledge what a real journalist would do – ask questions of Hunter Biden’s daughter to get to the bottom of the story – that the columnist walked out.

DWORMAN: Has anybody asked her?

BUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know!

DWORMAN: Don’t you think somebody should ask her?

Hell no, because then the mainstream media would be serving the American public instead of Joe Biden. Perhaps even more nefariously than what it has done to protect the Bidens, the media has fed the public with a steady stream of lies about Donald Trump. Most relevant today, as the former president faces 91 felony counts and four indictments, is the insistent drumbeat of claims that Trump led an insurrection against the federal government or that he knowingly lied about election fraud.

Again, just like with the Hunter Biden laptop, the average citizen is supposed to sheepishly accept the dismissive reporting of the media about election irregularities as the unadulterated truth, and any deviation from that narrative is met with silence or scorn.

We have a perfect example of that in the investigative reporting of the Gateway Pundit last month that revealed extensive election fraud in Michigan during the 2020 election. If you are scratching your head, and asking what the heck I’m talking about, then it’s because you have fallen victim to the media’s refusal to cover any news that reflects positively on President Trump.

Chances are, you have never even heard of the Gateway Pundit unless you are a dedicated conservative who has sought out alternative sources of news that counter the mainstream narrative. Anyone else would probably be scared away by the public assessments of such left-wing institutions as Wikipedia, which calls the Gateway Pundit “an American far-right fake news website…. known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.”

But if you want to know the facts about a police investigation that started in October 2020 and found that more than 10,000 mostly fake voter registrations were submitted to election officials in Muskegon County, Michigan, you would need to read the Gateway Pundit, or one of the conservative websites that picked up their stories. Because there is no way that the New York Times or NBC will ever report on this explosive story.

And it doesn’t matter whether the Gateway Pundit is a conservative advocacy website or not.

True, the website doesn’t have journalistic credentials, but who cares?

Journalism as an institution is in total disrepair. No one cares about credentials; we care about credibility. What matters is the evidence the website’s reporters provide to substantiate their claims that a pattern of election fraud in Michigan and other states was discovered prior to the 2020 election and then covered up after the election. And there is plenty of evidence. Most importantly, the Gateway Pundit’s reporters obtained the Michigan State Police report that detailed an extensive preliminary investigation found credible evidence of a scheme to create fake voters.

In many ways, the oppression of the Muskegon election interference story parallels the techniques used to oppress the New York Post’s laptop story. If you do a Google search for “Muskegon voter registration police report” (without the quotes) you will see an interesting pattern. 

First, the blacklisting of Gateway Pundit from the Google results. Second, the utter silence of the elite media on this hugely significant story. Third, a number of so-called “fact checks” that downplay the veracity of the story. The only thing missing is a letter from 51 intelligence agents calling the whole thing a “Russian information operation.”

The closest we ever got to a mainstream news acknowledgment of the Gateway Pundit’s reporting was when the Detroit News ran a shocking admission from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office that the facts of the story were accurate and that the election fraud was reported to the FBI:

Nessel’s press secretary, Danny Wimmer, said the total number of suspected fraudulent forms delivered to the Muskegon clerk by the individual was 8,000 to 10,000 ahead of the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election.

‘The city clerk in Muskegon detected the fraudulent material provided and alerted the proper authorities,’ Wimmer said in a statement. ‘A thorough investigation was conducted by multiple agencies within the state and no successful fraud was perpetrated upon the state’s election process or qualified voter file.’

In other words, because the 10,000 fake registrations were detected by an alert election official, there was nothing to worry about. Huh?

First of all, attempted election fraud on that scale should worry us all, but more importantly, there is no reason to think that all the election fraud was caught just because one election scammer was caught one time.

The Michigan State Police report on the investigation was extensively redacted, but on page 14, the authorities failed to redact the name of GBI Strategies, a Democrat-aligned election-turnout specialist that has been confirmed as having 2020 operations in multiple states. The office of GBI Strategies that was searched under a warrant turned up as many as 19 vehicles used by the company’s workers, certainly more than one lone worker would need. In addition, the woman who tried to submit more than 10,000 fake registrations told state police that she had “done work” in Detroit, Ypsilanti, Southfield, Flint, and Lansing as well as Muskegon.

Despite Nessel’s celebration of how 10,000 fake registrations were detected by an alert election clerk, there is absolutely no reason to believe that thousands of fake registrations were also uncovered in those other cities where GBI Strategies was hard at work. Conclusion? Joe Biden’s victory by 154,000 votes in the Great Lakes State may have been less great than we were led to believe. In fact, it may not have been a victory at all. The only way to find out would be to demand a forensic audit of voter registrations submitted in the month or two prior to the election.

But that will never happen if the only voice demanding it is the Gateway Pundit. Because just as there was a concerted campaign to discredit the New York Post when it revealed the extent of the corruption in the Biden family as exposed on Hunter’s laptop, there has been an equally dishonest campaign to discredit the Gateway Pundit.

Although you won’t find one story published by the Gateway Pundit when you look at the top 100 results of a Google search for the Muskegon police report on election fraud, you will not surprisingly find three “fact checks” claiming the story is fake news. Politifact, Lead Stories, and Newsweek all managed to find their way into the top 100 search results to debunk a story that Google was pretending didn’t even exist.

Each of these “fact checks” followed the same pattern. They repeated the evidence in the Michigan State Police report that the Gateway Pundit based its reporting on, and then they said “It doesn’t matter” because the state attorney general said no fraud occurred. Really? That’s what we call a fact check these days?

How about this? Let’s get the New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post and NBC to assign their best investigative reporters to comb through voter registration records in Michigan. Why not track down the CEO of GBI Strategies and question him about what techniques the company uses to increase voter turnout, which states they operated in during the 2020 election, and what relationship exists between GBI Strategies and the Democratic Party or the Biden campaign?

But that will never happen, which is why the Gateway Pundit and similar citizen journalist organizations are necessary. They may not be perfect, but they provide a service we can’t get from most media outlets today  – they aren’t a mouthpiece for the official narrative being sold to us by the Deep State, the Democratic Party, and the donor class.

And until the mainstream media rediscovers the value of reporting the news “without fear or favor,” I’ll rely on the Gateway Pundit, Breitbart News, and Citizen Free Press to provide the news the powers that be don’t want me to know.

The upcoming Steadfast Defender NATO war drills, set for early 2024, are expected to be the biggest military exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War, the Financial Times is reporting Monday.

At a moment the war in Ukraine grows more and more unpredictable, given neither Russia nor the West have shown any signs of backing down, the FT writes that “Nato is preparing its biggest live joint command exercise since the cold war next year, assembling more than 40,000 troops to practice how the alliance would attempt to repel Russian aggression against one of its members.”

Like with the ongoing, smaller ‘Northern Coasts’ war games currently being executed by NATO in Baltic waters, the Steadfast Defender 24 drills will simulate how the military alliance would respond in the face of a hypothetical Russian invasion. 

NATO officials were quoted in FT as saying the planned exercises are seen as a key part of “demonstrating to Moscow that the alliance is prepared to fight.”

Steadfast Defender is slated to run in February and March, and is likely to be seen as a provocation by Moscow given it will take place in various locales across Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states – the latter which border Russia. According to more from the FT report detailing the upcoming giant war game:

“It will start in spring next year and is expected to involve between 500 and 700 air combat missions, more than 50 ships, and about 41,000 troops, Nato officials said.”

“It is designed to model potential maneuvers against an enemy modelled on a coalition led by Russia, named Occasus for the purposes of the drill.”

Crucially, the Baltic Sea coastline – where NATO has increasingly flexed its military might with more and more exercises – is very important to Russia as its strategic Kaliningrad exclave sits on it, sandwiched between two NATO members, Poland and Lithuania. Last year’s Defender drills had been the largest up to that point, and they continue to get expanded year-by-year.

A July Politico report explained that “NATO has steadily increased its control of the Baltic Sea — a crucial maritime gateway for the Russian fleet which has bases near St. Petersburg and in the heavily militarized Kaliningrad exclave.”

Who would be free to roam around the “NATO Lake” without suspicion? #Nordstream

The Baltic Sea Became a Nato Lake https://t.co/llOiEApK0X

— Gilda Mundson (@GildaMundson) September 28, 2022

The publication also noted that “During the Cold War, only Denmark and Germany at the far western edge of the Baltic were in the alliance. Poland joining NATO in 1999 and the three Baltic republics in 2004 put most of the sea’s southern shore under alliance control.”

Russia has meanwhile at times “answered” these games by staging large drills in the Black Sea. But dangerously at this moment the western Black Sea region is in a state of war, given Russian warships are launching missiles against Ukraine from there.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who’s definitely not running for President in 2024 (until he does), is now on a damage control tour to rewrite history over his draconian pandemic mandates, which made California the “single worst state in every way” when it came to lockdowns, according to state Rep. Kevin Kiley (R).

“I think we would’ve done everything differently,” Newsom told NBC‘s “Meet the Press” in a pre-taped interview which aired Sunday. “I think all of us in terms of our collective wisdom, we’ve evolved. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We’re experts in hindsight. We’re all geniuses now.“

Even host Chuck Todd pressed Newsom on his lockdown strategy, saying “You found a way to allow the motion picture industry and the movie industry to get back to work during COVID, but you didn’t allow people to grieve together at funerals or at churches.”

Wow. Chuck Todd calls out Newsom:

“You found a way to allow the motion picture industry and the movie industry to get back to work during COVID, but you didn’t allow people to grieve together at funerals or at churches.” pic.twitter.com/bmF4fFD0Uh

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 10, 2023

California state Rep. Kevin Kiley (R) called Newsom out in a Sunday post on X, writing; 

Newsom is now admitting he botched California’s COVID response. But this is not, as he claims, a matter of “hindsight” being 20/20. We fought back against his disastrous decisions at the time because they so clearly ran afoul of science, common sense, and the basic precepts of a free society.

Newsom now says “we didn’t know what we didn’t know.” But all 49 other Governors knew better. California was the single worst state in every way: the most onerous school shutdowns, business shutdowns, and church shutdowns; the most draconian mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports; the most complete collapse of checks and balances, personal liberties, and self-government.

Despite all of this – despite the incalculable damage he did to our young people, our businesses, and our democratic institutions in the name of “public health” – California wound up with an excess mortality rate exceeding the national average, even though we had the benefit of a relatively young population.

At every turn, Newsom prioritized getting himself in the headlines and rewarding Special Interests over the health and well-being of Californians. It was the most consequential political failure in modern American history – and the most disgraceful.

Others echoed Kiley’s sentiment: 

This was completely INTENTIONAL. Newsom cannot be permitted to get away with it again.

April 2, 2020 “Newsom says coronavirus is an ‘opportunity for reimagining a more progressive era’. Let’s call this the corollary to Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste”.…

— ReneJayeee (@MorningInUSA123) September 11, 2023

And when confronted about this French Laundry dinner…

He LIED and told the public it was outdoors.

He still has not addressed that lie.

— Myrtle (@MyrtlesGirdles) September 11, 2023

Internal polling must be TERRIBLE.

Or else Republicans found out how Democrats cheated and 2024 may be a functional election.

Cuz Ted Lieu and Newsom don’t care about your rights. They would murder your children and laugh.

Trump 2024 has them shook! pic.twitter.com/blA1zFc6oL

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) September 10, 2023

The reason we can’t accept Newsom’s “hindsight” argument is b/c it isn’t authentic.

An authentic admission of wrong involves not only repentance, but pushing out the ideologues and elevating the dissentershttps://t.co/I2ZPbITiWq https://t.co/qfJX6FYbas pic.twitter.com/iDj5MC5mgu

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) September 11, 2023

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.

The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.

So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.

True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.

In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.

Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.

Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.

Shokin was then looking into the misadventures of Biden’s son Hunter, and why the Vice President’s imbecilic son was receiving lucrative compensation on the boards of a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, yet without any demonstrable expertise or education in matters of energy policy.

Since Trump was impeached, we now know that Joe Biden did lie that he had no connection with or even knowledge of his son’s business. And we know that the fired prosecutor believed the Bidens were recipients of bribes. We know that contrary to Biden’s assertions, he was not following State Department policy.

In contrast, the U.S. had, in fact, lauded Shokin’s efforts to repress corruption. In sum, Biden was undermining the stated policy of the U.S. government to protect his son’s—and his own—efforts to leverage money from Kyiv by monetizing the influence of his own Vice Presidency. In some sense, Biden was guilty of the very “treason” charge—altering U.S. foreign policy for personal benefit—by which Rep. Adam Schiff had earlier falsely accused Trump.

Given that reality, it is easy to argue that the House impeached Donald Trump in 2019 for crimes that he did not commit, but which the current president Joe Biden most certainly had during his Vice Presidency.

But weaponizing impeachment is just one baleful legacy of the Left.

There are plenty more of their own precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves:

• Will the next president have the FBI pay social media censors to suppress the dissemination of any news it feels is unhelpful to the reelection of a Republican president?

• Is it OK now for the next Vice President to invite his son onto Air Force Two to cement multimillion dollars deals that benefit both, with Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs who enjoy government ties?

• Should a conservative billionaire stealthily insert $419 million late in the 2024 campaign to absorb the work of registrars in key voting precincts?

• If a Democratic president wins the 2024 election should conservative groups riot at the Capitol on Inauguration Day? Should a conservative celebrity yell out to the assembled crowd of protestors that she dreams of blowing up the White House? And if a Republican wins, should he prosecute any Democratic rioters who once again swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and charge them with “insurrection,” meting out long prisons sentences to the convicted?

• Is Joe Biden now vulnerable to being impeached for systematic family corruption, or using the Department of Justice to obstruct the prosecution of his son in his last days in office, and then being tried in the Senate as a private citizen?

• If the Republicans gain the Senate, will they move to end the filibuster in agreement with Democratic assertions that it is “racist” and a “Jim Crow relic”?

• If the midwestern Electoral College “Blue Wall” seems to reappear, or if Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada recreate new blue walls, will there be a conservative effort to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College?

• If in 2024 there is a narrow Democratic win in the Electoral College, should conservative celebrities conspire to run ads urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties and not vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote that went Democratic? Should a Republican third-party candidate sue to stop a state’s selection of its electors on grounds the voting machines were rigged?

• If Supreme Court decisions begin to appear to favor the left, will Republicans talk of packing the court, or have the DOJ turn a blind eye when mobs began to swarm the homes of liberal justices? Should the conservative media go after liberal judges with serial accusations of corruption? Should the Republican Senate leader assemble a mob of pro-life protestors at the doors of the court and call out Justices Sotomayor or Jackson by name, with threats that they will soon reap the whirlwind they have sowed, given they have no idea of what is about to “hit” them? Should conservative legal scholars urge the country to ignore Supreme Court decisions deemed liberal?

• Will local prosecutors in red jurisdictions begin filing criminal charges against leading Democratic candidates on various charges, among them accusations of old inflated real estate assessments, campaign finance laws, questioning ballot results, or taking classified documents home? If Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were to run in 2024, will their past illicit behavior gain the attention of a city or state attorney in Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming?

• If Joe Biden continues to decline at his present rate, will Republicans demand he be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment? Will they subpoena Ivy League psychiatrists to testify that an intervention is needed to remove him from office? And will an FBI director and a deputy Attorney General plan to wear wires, and record Biden in his private moments of senility, as a way of convincing the cabinet or Congress that he is demonstrably mentally unfit for office?

• In the 2024 election, should the Republican nominee hire a foreign ex-spy to compile falsehoods about the Democratic opponent and then seed them among the media, and Department of Justice? Should the FBI hire such a Republican contractor and likewise use him to gather dirt on the Democratic nominee?

• If there appears incriminating evidence concerning a Republican nominee, should the FBI retrieve such evidence, keep it under wraps, lie about its veracity, and instead go along with media and ex-intelligence officers assertions that it is a fraudulent production of Russian intelligence?

• Will conservative CIA and FBI directors, and the Director of National Intelligence be given exemptions from prosecutions for systematically lying while under oath in Congress or to federal investigators?

• Will conservative celebrities ritually on social media, without fear of censorship, brag about ways of decapitating, shooting, stabbing, burning, or blowing up the Democratic nominee?

• Since in many states the statues of limitations have not yet expired for arson, murder, assault, looting, and attacks on 1,500 police officers during the summer 2020 riots, will state prosecutors now begin identifying those 14,000 once arrested and mostly released, and begin refiling charges of conspiracy, racketeering—and “insurrection”?

• Will they also file insurrection charges against those who torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic Washington DC church, or conspired to riot and swarm the White House grounds in an effort to attack the President of the United States?

• Will they file charges against Vice President Kamala Harris for “inciting” ongoing violent demonstrations with monotonous, emphatic, and repetitive threats in the weeks before her nomination? Contrary to liberal “fact checkers” at time of nationwide violence, Harris certainly did not distinguish violent from non-violent protests, but in fact implied that they were intimately tied to the upcoming election and beyond. So given the hundreds of police officers injured, the hundreds of millions in property damage, and the dozens killed, what exactly did Harris mean by tying that ongoing summer of often violent protests to Election Day?:

“But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”

Was the above more or less inflammatory than Trump’s January 6 remarks for which in part he is under indictment:

“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”?

In sum, the Democratic leadership along with the media long ago deemed that Donald Trump posed such an existential threat to democracy that they were entitled to destroy democratic norms to destroy him.

Their actions were predicated on three assumptions: one, they had that right because they were more sophisticated, morally superior, and smarter than the rest of America and thus deserved the exemption to blow up customs and norms to achieve the “correct” ends; two, whatever damage they did to long-standing protocols of equal justice under the law paled in comparison to the damage that Trump supposedly would or did do; and three, their conservative opposition either lacked the wherewithal, the brains, or the audacity to emulate such behavior and thus there was no worry anyone would dare do to them what they did to others.

And now? For the first time, given recent polls, the Left is scared that a Republican House and perhaps soon a Republican Senate and White House might follow its own precedents, and use new leftwing guidelines to enact conservative agendas.

Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

So, the Berlin State Prosecutor has launched another criminal investigation of me.

Apparently, I’m being charged with reporting on the original investigation of me that the Berlin State Prosecutor launched in June.

What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of Punishment that the Berlin District Court handed down two weeks ago. So, the prosecutor opened a new criminal investigation and sent my attorney an official notice explaining the gravity of the additional charges.

The charges are of the utmost gravity. I am officially accused of “relativizing” or “minimizing” the crimes of the Nazis … by republishing the two Tweets that I originally tweeted.

Here, once again, are the Tweets …

Yes, that’s right, I just published them again. I am going to explain why I published them again.

I’m not going to explain the Tweets again. I have explained them in several previous columns. I have explained them to Matt Taibbi of Racket News, Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, James Freeman, Patrick Henningsen, Elena Louisa Lange, Dirk Pohlmann, and Christine Black at Brownstone Institute (forgive me if I’m forgetting anyone). I explained them to Stefan Millius of Weltwoche, and to another journalist at a big Swiss newspaper. My attorney has explained them, in German, to the prosecutor, and to German audiences on Kontrafunk. RT published a piece explaining them. I believe they have been exhaustively explained.

Not that they ever really needed explanation. You would have to be a certified moron to believe they “minimized,” or “relativized,” or in any way made light of the crimes of the Nazis. You and I are not certified morons. Neither is the Berlin State Prosecutor. Neither is the District Court of Berlin. Not to put too fine a point on it, the charges are horseshit, and everyone involved knows it. They are a blatant pretext to crackdown on dissent.

OK, now let me explain why I just published the Tweets again, knowing full well that the Berlin State Prosecutor is probably going to read this column, become extremely agitated, and charge me with additional “hate crimes.”

No, I am not a glutton for punishment. I’m not at all enjoying my introduction to the so-called “German legal system.”

It is taking up my time.

It is making me angry.

It is upsetting my wife, which I do not appreciate.

It is costing me a lot of money.

It has forced me to ask other people for money, which is something I do not like to do.

It’s screwing with my sleep.

It is distracting me from my work.

And so on. Which is exactly the point.

The goal of horseshit prosecutions like mine (and those of many other dissidents currently) is (a) to punish us for speaking out against “New Normal” totalitarianism by making our lives as miserable as possible, (b) to make examples of us to discourage others from speaking out, and (c) to intimidate us into shutting the fuck up.

Totalitarians, fascists, and other power freaks are essentially just glorified schoolyard bullies. They may cloak themselves in the mantle of the law, but their modus operandi is brute force. Beneath all the bullshit, their message is simple: “either do what we say, or we will hurt you.”

OK, prepare yourself, because I’m going to give you some advice. I do not generally like to do that, but, in this case, I’m going to make an exception.

Never, ever, give in to a bully.

The second you do, that bully owns you.

What the bully wants, more than whatever he is demanding, more than anything else in the world, is your fear. The bully interprets your fear as respect, because the bully doesn’t understand respect. The bully craves your fear, and your obedience, because they reify the bully’s “authority.” They enable the bully to feel powerful and important. The bully needs to feel “powerful” and “important” because the bully feels weak and unimportant, and afraid. All fascists are essentially cowards. They are cowards, and nihilists, who hate themselves, and fear themselves, and hate and fear life, which is why they are so obsessed with controlling everything.

The point is, never give in to a bully. Never reify a bully’s “authority.” If you do, you will find yourself sucked into the bully’s sadistic, nihilistic “reality.” You will be playing by the bully’s rules. And that is all “reality” actually is, a set of rules we agree to play by, or, in this case, do not agree to play by.

So, getting back to my criminal case, and the Berlin State Prosecutor’s latest attempt to bully me into shutting up and demonstrating my “respect” for the “authority” and “power” of the Berlin State Prosecutor, fuck that. I do not respond well to threats. I do not take orders from totalitarians and fascists, or any other type of authoritarians or bullies. So that is why I have republished those Tweets, and why I will continue to republish those Tweets every time the German authorities threaten me with additional criminal charges for refusing to obey their “authority.”

Again, I am under no illusions. I expect the prosecutor to file new charges and issue further threats, which I will defy, which will lead to additional charges, and so on. I am not looking forward to that, but I don’t have any other choice, not if I want to be able to respect myself.

If you have any doubts about whether that will happen (i.e., an endless cycle of new bullshit criminal charges stemming from my repeated refusal to respond to the German authorities’ bullying), well, let me tell you about another dissident the German authorities are currently persecuting. I’ll do it quickly, and then I’ll let you go.

As many of my readers are aware, I am presently holed up in an undisclosed location in the Italian countryside.

Michael Ballweg, the founder and lead organizer of the “Querdenken” movement, was also here for a while. Michael, who is an excellent cook, whipped up some delicious “extremist” dinners, after which we all sat around “denying Covid,” “conspiracy theorizing,” brainwashing each other with “Russian propaganda,” and “delegitimizing the state,” and so on. Late at night, when the other “extremists” were sleeping, Michael and I discussed our criminal cases.

Michael’s case is a bit more serious than mine. Michael just spent nine months in jail. The German authorities have seized his assets, and frozen all his funds, so he is homeless, and bankrupt, and they are prosecuting him for attempted fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion, or, in other words, for launching a protest movement. If you’re not familiar with Michael and Querdenken, you can read the official propaganda disseminated by the usual “mainstream” media or the Intelligence officers who edit Wikipedia, or … here’s a Spiked article to start you off. Then, go ahead, do your own research.

The most absurd aspect of Michael’s case is the German authorities’ “theory of his crimes.” According to this theory, Michael’s devious scheme was to commit serious fraud by … well, basically, launching a nationwide protest movement that was certain to get a ton of media attention and incur the wrath of the German authorities. As any criminal mastermind will confirm, the best way to commit major fraud is to absolutely infuriate the government by organizing a series of massive protests, and generate tons of media attention, because you definitely want as much publicity as possible while you are defrauding your unsuspecting supporters of their voluntary donations to your cause.

Seriously, this is their “theory of the crime,” which would make Michael Ballweg the most idiotic and incompetent fraudster in the history of fraud.

I could go on about his case, and mine, or those of the numerous other dissidents that are currently being made examples of, and about the broader GloboCap crackdown on dissent, which is happening, not just in New Normal Germany, but all throughout the New Normal Reich, but I need to end here and go water some plants. I am serving as “caretaker” of this thoughtcriminal sanctuary, and I take my responsibilities seriously.

I’ll keep you (and the Berlin State Prosecutor) posted on my further “hate crimes.” In the meantime, best wishes from somewhere in Italy!

Amid concerns of mounting economic headwinds and market volatility, there is renewed optimism that the 18-month slowdown in the initial public offering market, which collapsed equity underwriting revenues, could be due for a rebound. 

On deck this week is the IPO for UK-based chip designer Arm Holdings Plc, which is more than five times oversubscribed. Financials Times spoke with people familiar with the IPO that said the company would raise about $4.9 billion with shares priced at the high end of $47 to $51 per share. The deal is expected to close as early as Tuesday. 

Strong demand for the chip designer that SoftBank Group Corp owns could be what is needed to break the ice on the frozen US IPO market. A group of top tech companies have indicated interest in “purchasing up to an aggregate of $735 million of the ADSs offered” in ARM’s offering, including Apple, Nvidia, Google, AMD, and Taiwan Semiconductor. 

However, Arm could be an outlier.

Also on Monday, Instacart, one of the largest online grocery delivery firms, submitted an updated filing for its upcoming IPO, indicating a money raise of $616 million, with a value of $9.3 billion — or about 25% less than its private valuation two years ago.

Following a surge in growth stocks that pushed US equity benchmarks to near-record highs, investors have been drinking the Wall Street ‘AI Kool-Aid’ with hopes of a robust stock market recovery. 

“As we sit here in late August, looking towards the fall, IPO volumes are actually up 140% this year,” RBC Capital Markets’ John Kolz wrote in a recent note. 

Kolz continued, “Follow-on issuance is up 43%. Converts are up 140%. But those numbers are off an extremely depressed base. The NASDAQ is up 27%, but there’s been virtually no tech IPOs. Deal volumes have been decent, but performance thus far has been fair at best. There’s real-time momentum in the markets right now, but what does that mean for rest of the year, and for IPOs specifically?”

RBC’s Mike Ventura reaffirmed Kolz’s view: “If you think of the year-over-year comparisons you’ve listed, most of that deal volume came from a well-defined window in May and June, ahead of corporate blackouts. The market data has investors feeling good. The knock-on effect of the very strong follow-on performance has already led to a few green shoots in the IPO market.”

While the headline of an oversubscribed Arm IPO brings relief for investors, there is still an unsettled macroeconomic environment where risks of a hard landing (read: Goldman questioning the soft landing narrative) mount despite investors latching onto the ‘Goldilocks’ view. 

Moving beyond the AI bubble, which even JPMorgan’s top tech trader Ron Adler warned might have just popped, we shared a note Monday morning that shows a collapse in Bloomberg’s Smart Money Flow Indicator.

There are rumblings under the surface… 

Whether it’s the prospect for ‘higher for longer’ interest rates, another rate hike, or a scare in consumer spending, the market could be just one narrative away from de-risking, suggesting the IPO market recovery might be too premature and possibly a 2024 story.

Authored by Jordan Schachtel via ‘The Dossier’ Substack,

America was an impenetrable fortress.

That’s at least what the news and the believably competent people in charge said at the time.

We just assumed that nobody would ever mess with us.

Until one day, the Twin Towers came crashing down.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, our country was widely understood as the lone hyper power that whooped that bad guy Saddam not so long ago. We also had just bombed the brakes off of Yugoslavia, but that was necessary to keep peace and such. When it came to military prowess, we were the NBA All Stars, and everyone else’s defense capabilities added up to a high school basketball team. At least that’s what we were told. China was not yet on the radar. America was the uncontested hegemon. And we were nice enough to maintain global order as the World Police, too!

Before September 11, it was just assumed that the government would keep us safe from any foreign threats. One could just imagine how all of those ultra intelligent, wise and moral bureaucrats from those three letter agencies would have all of these super secret Star Wars-like tech measures in place to protect us from the barbarians beyond our shores.

Looking back on it now, September 11, 2001 was the first day of my life that broadly challenged my preconceived notion that the government was our partner in preserving our freedoms and our constitutional system of order.

What the heck? Why didn’t our ultra competent Pentagon defense systems protect us and shoot down the bad guys before they could hit us? Hmm, must’ve been a catastrophic error or something…

But instead of allowing for an internal investigation into the developing paradoxes being introduced into the Millennial mind, the current regime quickly distracted the citizenry with the likes of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Taliban, and co.

I was in middle school across the river in New Jersey, and still remember that day like it was yesterday, when we were abruptly pulled out of class and sent home. Some of those kids’ parents worked in the original World Trade Center. For some classmates who lost a loved one, it would mark the last time I ever saw them. I hope they’re doing well now. Everyone knew someone, or several someones, who never made it back from work that day.

In the New York City metro area, it was a time of disbelief, sadness, unity, and rage.

Everyone remembers the unity. Many have to be reminded of the rage.

There was an overwhelming sense that we needed to get even, and as soon as humanly possible.

The likes of Ron Paul and other non-interventionist forces were shouted down as treasonous.

It was time to get even, even if we didn’t really understand who or what our enemy comprised.

The American war machine weaponized this rage, this indignant mission, into a multi decade boondoggle in dozens of nations.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, foreign policy was more of an intellectual exercise for the dorks in D.C.

Very few Americans knew anything about the Muslim world, let alone Afghanistan (and later Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc).

The people who claimed they knew stuff didn’t really know anything either. We were the easiest of marks.

As the wars continued, George W. Bush reminded the nation that we had to “fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

But wait, how did they get here in the first place?

There was no time for those kind of “insensitive” questions, even years after the 9/11 tragedy. It was always time to get the bad Al Qaeda guys, harbored by their Taliban sponsors. The mission was ever expansive, and it didn’t seem to matter. Anyone who wasn’t on board with the War On Terror agenda was on the side of the terrorists, we were told.

Trillions in spending and thousands of lost American lives later, our country is no more secure than it was on 9/10/2001. Moreover, our sacred liberties have been trampled upon, and the country once understood as an impenetrable fortress is a power in decline.