Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

The volumes of natural gas that Turkey has found so far in the Black Sea are worth in excess of $500 billion, Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Fatih Dönmez told broadcaster CNN Türk.

The huge gas finds would be enough to supply all households in the country for 35 years, or to cover total Turkish natural gas consumption, including from industry, for 15 to 20 years, the minister added.  

Last week, Turkish Petroleum (TPAO) said on Twitter that the installation of the pipes connecting the energy base in the Black Sea to the Sakarya Gas Field Land Facility had been successfully completed. The company said the inauguration of the start of the gas transmission from the field is expected to take place on April 20 in the presence of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Sakarya gas field is set to initially produce around 10 million cubic meters per day, before reaching a peak within three years to pump some 40 million cubic meters per day in 2025, Dönmez told CNN Türk.

The field inauguration could be the beginning of the Turkish plan to become less dependent on imports of natural gas, which account for 99% of consumption at present.

At the end of last year, Turkey announced a new natural gas discovery in the Black Sea and upgraded estimates for an already discovered field in the basin, in what could be a major step for the country in slashing gas imports and diversifying its energy sources. Turkey’s natural gas reserves in the Black Sea have now increased to 710 billion cubic meters (bcm), Erdogan said at the end of December.

The newly developed gas fields are set to go a long way toward Turkey’s energy diversification. So far, the country has mostly relied on imports to procure energy supply. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has hit Turkey’s economy and energy prices hard and has made energy imports much more expensive for Ankara.

So far, six skiers, two of whom were guides, were killed in a massive avalanche caught on video in the French Alps on Easter Sunday. 

Reuters reported the avalanche occurred in the afternoon at the Armancette glacier, near Mont Blanc in south-eastern France. 

Rescue teams snowmobiled to the avalanche area. They found six bodies, but according to Emmanuel Coquand, a spokesperson for the local authorities in the region, all searches have been called because there are no other reports of missing persons. 

Coquand declined to comment on the six people killed. However, Reuters said: 

Local media said two of them were mountain guides and the other four were their clients, all French, including a young woman and man in their 20s and a couple in their 40s.

According to Jean-Luc Mattel, an official of the nearby Contamines-Montjoie village, the avalanche was caused by a large slab of snow breaking off from the top of the mountain. Reuters said the avalanche was over 500 meters wide. 

At the time of the incident, there was no avalanche warning for the area. 

BREAKING: At least six people have died following an avalanche in the French Alps and rescuers have called off the search for any more survivors. https://t.co/nChrR8uib1

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/HuDaTYP0tY

— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 10, 2023

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted, “Our thoughts are with [the victims] and their families.”

Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington —  not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or the rubble of what remains of Raqqa. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn’t happen in 1991 (when the USSR collapsed). At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should have declared “mission accomplished” and parachuted into the great Ramstein Air Base in Germany to begin the demobilization of America’s war machine.

So doing, he could have slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $250 billion (2015 $); demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; reduced the United States’ standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.

Unfortunately, George H. W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even middling intelligence.

He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who singlehandedly blew the peace when, in the very year the 77-Years’ War ended with the demise of the Soviet Union, he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the gluttonous emir of Kuwait. But that was none of George Bush’s or America’s business.

Furthermore, George H. W. Bush should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power — even if he eventually denounced them in his doddering old age.

Alas, upon his death, Bush the Elder was deified, not vilified, by the mainstream press and the bipartisan duopoly. And that tells you all you need to know about why Washington is ensnared in its Forever Wars and is the very reason there is still no peace on earth.

Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991, Washington opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George H. W. Bush’s petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.

We will momentarily get to the 52-year-old error that holds that the Persian Gulf is an American lake and that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is the Fifth Fleet.

Suffice it to say here that the answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices —  a truth driven home in spades by the oil busts of 2009, 2015 and 2020, and the fact the real price of oil today (2022 $) is no higher than it was in the mid-1970s.

But first it is well to remember that in 1991 there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield, MA, Lincoln, NE, or Spokane, WA, when the Cold War ended.

The Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and far-flung republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would leave it with a GDP about the size of Philadelphia.

And China’s GDP was even smaller and more primitive than Russia’s. Even as Mr. Deng was discovering the People’s Bank of China’s printing press, which would enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient Chinese threat to national security was never in the cards.

The First Gulf war — A Catastrophic Error

Confronted with the greatest opportunity for global peace in nearly a century, George H. W. Bush did not hesitate: Upon the advice of his retainers, he immediately elected the path of war in the Persian Gulf.

This endeavor was hatched by Henry Kissinger’s economically illiterate protégés at the National Security Council and Bush’s Texas oilman, Secretary of State James Baker. They falsely claimed that the will-o’-the-wisp of “oil security” was at stake and 500,000 American troops needed to be planted in the sands of Arabia.

That was a catastrophic error and not only because the presence of “crusader” boots on the purportedly sacred soil of Arabia offended the CIA-recruited and trained mujahideen of Afghanistan, who had become unemployed when the Soviet Union collapsed.

The CNN-glorified war games in the Gulf during early 1991 also further empowered another group of unemployed crusaders. Namely, the neocon national-security fanatics who had misled Ronald Reagan into a massive military buildup to thwart what they claimed to be an ascendant Soviet Union bent on nuclear-war-winning capabilities and global conquest.

So when the defense budget went from $134 billion in 1980 to $304 billion in 1989, this unprecedented 130% peacetime rise (+50% in inflation-adjusted dollars) went overwhelmingly to the building of a globe-spanning conventional forces armada that was utterly unneeded in a world with or without the Soviet Union.

Accordingly, everything on land, sea and air was upgraded and expanded. This included the 600-ship Navy and 12 carrier battle groups; massive upgrades of the fleet of M1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles; and endless procurement of cruise missiles, fixed wing planes, rotary aircraft, air-and sea-lift capacity, surveillance and electronic warfare capacity and a black budget so large as to dwarf anything that had gone before.

In a word, the misguided Reagan defense buildup enabled the invasions and occupations that commenced almost instantly after the Soviet demise. That is to say, the neocon defense buildup of the 1980s fathered the “Forever Wars” of the 1990s and beyond.

The folly and deceit of the purportedly anti-Soviet defense buildup was evident enough at the time because by the mid-1980s the Evil Empire was already unraveling at the seams economically — and for the simple reason that communism and rigidly centralized command-and-control economics don’t work.

Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and rest of the neocon gang surrounding Bush the Elder managed to deftly pull a “bait and switch” maneuver of no mean extent. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the Soviet Union at all but the alleged lesson from Washington’s Pyrrhic victory in Kuwait that “regime change” among the assorted tyrannies of the Middle East was in America’s national interest.

More fatally, the neocons now insisted that the first Gulf War proved regime change could be achieved through a sweeping interventionist menu of coalition diplomacy, security assistance, arms shipments, covert action and open military attack and occupation via the spanking new conventional forces armada that the Reagan Administration had bequeathed.

What the neocon doctrine of regime change actually did, of course, was to foster the Frankenstein’s monster that ultimately became ISIS.

Bin Laden would have amputated Saddam’s secularist head if Washington hadn’t done it first, but that’s just the point. The attempt at regime change in March 2003 was one of the most foolish acts of state in American history.

That the Islamic State was Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster became evident from the moment it rushed upon the scene in mid-2014. But even then the Washington War Party could not resist adding fuel to the fire, whooping up another round of Islamophobia among the American public and forcing the Obama White House into a futile bombing campaign for the third time in a quarter century.

But the short-lived Islamic State was never a real threat to America’s homeland security.

The dusty, broken, impoverished towns and villages along the margins of the Euphrates River and in the bombed-out precincts of Anbar Province did not attract thousands of wannabe jihadists from the failed states of the Middle East and the alienated Muslim townships of Europe because the caliphate offered prosperity, salvation or any future at all.

What recruited them was outrage at the bombs and drones dropped on Sunni communities by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and by the cruise missiles launched from the bowels of the Mediterranean that ripped apart homes, shops, offices and mosques that mostly contained as many innocent civilians as ISIS terrorists.

The truth is the Islamic State was destined for a short half-life anyway. It had been contained by the Kurds in the North and East and by Turkey with NATO’s second-largest army and air force in the Northwest. And it was further surrounded by the Shiite Crescent in the populated, economically viable regions of lower Syria and Iraq.

Absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been nowhere for the murderous fanatics who had pitched a makeshift capital in Raqqa to go. They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and public acquiescence in their horrific rule in any event.

But with the USAF functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy in Syria, the gates of hell had been opened wide, unnecessarily.

In any event, bombing did not defeat ISIS; it just temporarily made more of them.

Ironically, what did extinguish the Islamic State was the Assad military, the Russian air force invited into Syria by its official government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. It was they who settled an ancient quarrel that had never been any of America’s business.

But Imperial Washington was so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it could not see the obvious. Accordingly, 31 years after the Cold War ended and several years after Syria and friends extinguished the Islamic State, Washington has learned no lessons.

The American Imperium still stalks the planet for new monsters to destroy — presently in the precincts of Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine that are utterly irrelevant to America’s peace and security.

*  *  *

The amount of money the US government spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, and other aspects of foreign policy is enormous and ever-growing. It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point. It could cause the most significant disaster since the 1930s. Most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video with all the details. Click here to watch it now.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger, Leighton Woodhouse, and Madeleine Rowley via ‘PUBLIC’ Substack,

Beware false claims of “genocide”…

Trans activists (left) incited violence against women’s right’s activist Kellie-Jay Keen (center), who was assaulted just minutes later at a New Zealand “Let Women Speak” event last month. Organizers of the “Trans Day of Vengeance” (right) canceled their event after a trans person murdered six people at a Christian school in Nashville.

For years, transgender activists have claimed there is a genocide being waged against transgender people. As evidence, they point to the murders of trans victims. In 2022, at least 32 transgender and gender-nonconforming people were killed in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

But 32 trans killings is a decline from 40 in 2020  and 59 in 2021 and researchers do not know if trans people are being killed disproportionately compared to non-trans people.

There remains a prejudice against trans people. Some trans people are, without question, victims of violence. But there is no “genocide,” nor even strong evidence that the trans people being killed are targeted for being transgender rather than for some other reason. For example, transgender people are disproportionately represented in the sex trade, which is an extremely dangerous criminal enterprise.

By contrast, we have seen a wave of transgender rights activists attacking women for ideological reasons. Consider recent events. In New Zealand on March 25, a mob of angry trans activists assaulted a British women’s rights advocate, Kellie-Jay Keen, at a “Let Women Speak” rally. In Nashville on March 28, a trans male killed three adults and three children at a Christian school. Last December, a group of women in Oakland protested the potential placement into a women’s prison of a self-identified trans woman who had murdered a lesbian couple and their son. They were assaulted with a bicycle, an umbrella, eggs, and pies.

And on April 6, a mob of trans activists trapped women’s collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines in a room for three hours, and somebody punched her in the face. On Instagram, trans student activists denied that Gaines was trapped or anyone hit her. “Nobody put a finger on you white girl,” posted a black trans youth. But Gaines told Public she was hit by “a man wearing a dress.”

The University Police Department (UPD) at San Francisco State University said, “We are conducting an ongoing investigation into the situation. The disruption occurred after the event’s conclusion, which made it necessary for UPD officers to move the event speaker from the room to a different, safe location.”

Transgender people should no more be held responsible, as a group, for the actions of a small number of activists, any more than non-trans people should be held responsible for the vast majority of crimes and violence by non-trans people.

But there’s no doubt that we’ve seen an increase in physical violence by trans activists  — not all of whom are trans themselves — in recent years, and we should try to understand it in the same way we try to understand violence and radicalization by other social groups.

In 2018, a mentally ill trans female shot six of her coworkers at a Rite Aid distribution Center in Maryland. In 2019, a trans teenager in Denver shot one student dead and injured eight more. In 2022, a natal male identified as a “trans gamer girl” tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home. And a trans person killed five people at a Colorado nightclub that same year.

While Keen and Gaines survived, both women feared for their physical safety and their lives.

“I genuinely thought if I fell to the floor,” said Keen, “I would never get up again, my children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.” 

Video from the event shows a trans rights activist punching an elderly woman, who was later identified as being 70 years old, in the face multiple times.

“It was terrifying for me,” said Gaines.

In yesterday’s interview, she said she was “pushed and shoved into the podium. I had no idea where the police were or even if the police were there. I was struck twice, hit in the shoulder and face. And this was closed-fist.”

At that point, Gaines was effectively kidnapped for three hours.

“This is when a woman came up to me and grabbed me. We were forced into a classroom where I was ultimately barricaded for three hours. They yelled, ‘We deserve to be able to look at you and yell at you and hit you.’”

There is an obvious double standard at play.

Said Gaines’ representative, Eli Bremer, “Imagine if it had been a black or trans student kidnapped in that room by white supremacists. Would the campus police have stood by for three hours and let it happen?” Trans activists, noted Gaines, “claim they’re being persecuted… but in my experience this past year, I’ve always been on the receiving end of the violence.”

Where is this alarming radicalization coming from? Why are a growing number of trans activists attacking women? And what can be done to protect them?

The Psychopathology of Gender Theology

There are no doubt individual psychological reasons behind such aggression. Many aggressive trans activists may suffer from co-occurring mental illnesses and gender dysphoria. A friend of the Maryland Rite-Aid trans shooter said they suffered from bipolar disorder and depression, in addition to gender dysphoria.

University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas and Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines react after finishing tied for 5th in the 200 Freestyle finals at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 18th, 2022 in Atlanta Georgia. (Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

…

The trans activists at San Francisco State University were similar to other fanatics. They are true believers, like Christian Puritans who persecuted women as supposed witches in colonial American history. They are like the Maoist students of the Cultural Revolution in China, taking control of physical spaces and intimidating the university administrators, who become too cowardly to take control. They are intoxicated by their feeling of power and in that sense, hedonistic.

…

A broader change is needed in the culture, led by the media, educational, sporting, and health institutions. We can acknowledge that people who identify as trans may in some instances be victims of discrimination but have also, over the last 10 years been celebrated as much if not more than any other minority, and that the trans movement has embraced a dangerous victimhood mentality, starting with the Big Lie that there is a genocide against them. History shows that such a persecution complex is often pretext for aggression, violence, and totalitarianism.

*  *  *

Subscribers can read the full report here

Beer lovers across the United States celebrated National Beer Day on April 7 to commemorate the end of Prohibition, at least as far as (low-alcohol) beer is concerned.

As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, on that day in 1933, the Cullen-Harrison Act was signed into law by President Roosevelt, legalizing the sale and consumption of beer with an alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent.

This was the first step towards the repeal of Prohibition, which officially ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment.

National Beer Day has since become a day to celebrate the rich history and culture of beer in the United States, and is marked with events, festivals, and of course, the consumption of beer.

America’s rich culture of beer got even richer in recent years, as the number of craft breweries and available beer styles has exploded over the past decade.

As our latest Racing Bars video shows, the number of small, independent breweries in the country has more than quintupled between 2010 and 2021, after growing by less than 20 percent in the previous decade.

According to the Brewers Association, the U.S. beer landscape included more than 9,000 craft breweries in 2021, representing a great counterweight to brewing conglomerates that command an ever-growing share of the global beer market.

Authored by Nina Nguyen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Right-leaning news channel Sky News Australia has announced that it would discontinue publishing to the popular Chinese app TikTok in an effort to protect its reporters and audiences from security risks.

Sky called TikTok a “spy network masquerading as a social media platform,” saying the risks of being on TikTok are “far too great for any serious news publisher to ignore” while the gains are “negligible at best.”

The media also criticised other outlets and journalists who reported the platform’s use as a tool for soft power and foreign interference, then later jumped on TikTok themselves. Sky News described TikTok as a “vanity exercise” for media companies who deemed “arbitrary viewership figures” more important than the fact that they “cannot be monetised in any meaningful way.”

The News Corp-owned media agency is one of the first major outlets in Australia to have publicly boycotted TikTok, which has been under heavy scrutiny in the past months for its close ties to the Chinese regime.

“Australians will lose absolutely nothing of substance if media organisations make the right decision and withdraw from this platform. And news organisations will equally suffer little loss,” wrote Sky News Australia digital editor Jack Houghton on Monday.

“While money is not a consideration in our decision, it is also worth noting that apart from the security issues, TikTok is the only developed social media platform to not have a proper commercialisation strategy for content creators.”

The move comes after the U.K state-owned media BBC and a Danish public broadcaster issued guidance for its staff to remove TikTok from company phones. The BBC continued to publish content on the Chinese social media app.

TikTok Surveilled U.S. Journalists

Previous reports have revealed that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has illegally tracked journalists using the platform by obtaining their IP addresses and other user data.

In December 2022, Forbes reported that China-based employees at ByteDance were using TikTok to track their journalists’ physical locations in October. The publication described the effort as a “covert surveillance campaign” designed to counter and suppress leaks from the company.

ByteDance reportedly fired its chief internal auditor, Chris Lepitak, who was responsible for the team which led the campaign. China-based Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who answered directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned over the issue.

The ByteDance probe, known internally as Project Raven, was reportedly launched in response to a Buzzfeed story that found that China-based ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed U.S. user data from TikTok.

“Project Raven involved the company’s Chief Security and Privacy Office, was known to TikTok’s Head of Global Legal Compliance, and was approved by ByteDance employees in China,” the Forbes report said.

“The team that oversaw the surveillance campaign was ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department, a Beijing-based unit primarily responsible for conducting investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees.”

Australian Government Banned TikTok From Government Devices

Sky News’s decision to boycott TikTok followed the decision by Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus to ban TikTok from all government-issued devices, citing national security risks.

Dreyfus said in a statement that the ban would come into effect “as soon as practicable.” He said exemptions would be granted on a case-by-case basis.

“After receiving advice from intelligence and security agencies, today I authorised the secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department to issue a mandatory direction under the Protective Security Policy Framework to prohibit the TikTok app on devices issued by Commonwealth departments and agencies,” Dreyfus said.

“The direction will come into effect as soon as practicable.”

However, he noted that possible exemptions will be granted on a “case-by-case basis and with appropriate security mitigations in place.”

Andrew Thornebrooke and Victoria Kelly Clark contributed to this article.

For the first time in its 257-year history, academic workers at Rutgers University, including faculty and postdoctoral associates, intend to strike at the institution’s three campuses – New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark. This decision comes after a Sunday vote approving the labor action, following almost a year of unsuccessful negotiations with the university to raise salaries in line with inflation. 

“We have bargained and bargained and bargained and bargained and bargained, and we are not getting anywhere, and we need to do something more,” said Rebecca Givan, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. “We will take this momentous step.”

Rutgers AAUP-AFT represents 8,000 workers across the three campuses that failed to agree with the school administration for a new contract that would boost pay, provide job security, and implement race and gender equity initiatives, among other demands.

“It’s not for lack of trying that we now have to have a strike,” said Catherine Monteleone, a professor of medicine and the president of AAUP-BHSNJ.

On Sunday, the university’s president, Jonathan Holloway, released a statement calling the labor action “deeply disappointing.” He said a mediator was appointed to help both sides reach a deal as soon as possible. 

Gov. Phil Murphy tweeted that both sides are expected to meet with him today for “productive dialogue.”

Rutgers University is one of the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning. I am calling the University and union bargaining committees to meet in my office tomorrow to have a productive dialogue. pic.twitter.com/KTDmpm3LKD

— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) April 10, 2023

Rutgers stressed, “More than 67,000 students are unaffected by the strike and may continue their academic progress.” 

On strike! #Rutgers #RUStrike pic.twitter.com/2ht3AoGbT8

— Michael Reagan (@reaganrevoltion) April 10, 2023

Looks like the ‘woke’ academic workers are hitting the streets of the university. 

Rutgers On Strike. pic.twitter.com/UkJHAvqv82

— Colm Atkins in On Strike (@_colm_) April 10, 2023

The decision by Rutgers unions to strike comes as a rising trend of labor actions at US universities, according to a labor action tracker from Cornell University. 

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The leaked intel might be advantageous to Russia were this not to be misdirection: and the possibility is quite real…

The script reads like a spoof straight out of legendary Mad magazine 1960’s cartoon “Spy vs. Spy”: Secret Pentagon Documents Fall in the Hands of Malign Russia. Well, actually in the hands of millions accessing Twitter and Telegram.

So here, at face value, we have a major leak essentially detailing Pentagon planning for the next stage of the NATO vs. Russia proxy war in Ukraine: the interminably debated Spring “counter-offensive” that may, or may not, start in mid-April, as well as war plans shared with FVEY – the Five Eyes.

The leaked intel might – and the operative word is “might” – be advantageous to Russia were this not to be misdirection: and the possibility is quite real.

The inestimable Ray McGovern, who knows one or two things about the CIA, noted whether the Pentagon is “falsifying kill-ratio to gild Easter lilies in Kyiv? Recent leak of an apparently official NATO document shows 71,500 Ukrainians KIA and only 16,000 to 17,500 Russians, a far cry from earlier Pentagon ‘estimates’. All sounds so Vietnam-déjà vu!”

So this may be Vietnam all over again – never count on the Pentagon learning from their mistakes – but could be something way more alarming, according to a top Beltway intel source, retired: “Our interpretation of this breach is that intel sources in the United States have released critical intel data in order to avoid a nuclear war with Russia.”

As it stands, the only certainty is that the spin war has gone berserk. So the leaker may have been a – disgruntled – U.S. insider. No, wait: the whole thing may be fake, as the Pentagon insists. In spin speak, that would be an attempt to “spread false information that could harm the U.S.”.

Tweaked or not, the “secret” Pentagon comparative war dead ratio between Russians and Ukrainians still does not make sense. The numbers appear to reflect Bakhmut/Artemovsk casualties, where Russian casualty ratios were highest. Yet reliable on the ground Russian military correspondents assure the ratio is really 10 to 1, with the Russians employing the snail technique combined with a formidable artillery mincing machine.

“Stupefying” incompetence

The undisputable conclusion out of the – real or fake – Pentagon leaks is that the U.S. is in a state of war against Russia. And that is serious enough.

Washington has been feeding information non-stop on command posts, ammunition depots and key nodes in the Russian military lines. It’s such real-time intel that has allowed Kiev to target Russian forces, kill senior generals and force ammunition depots to be moved farther from the Russian front lines.

Anything Pentagon/NATO stenographers say about Kiev playing the proverbial “decisive role” in planning and executing these strikes is a lie. The U.S. exercizes total, absolute control of the Ukraine war on a central command basis. Including from that “secret” underground bunker near Lviv which recently received a business card from Mr. Khinzal and has gone to meet its maker – along with over 200 NATO high-level operatives.

Fake or not fake, we also have confirmation that the Pentagon has direct access to communications of the Russian Ministry of Defense. And that the Americans listen to everyone and his neighbor: the sweaty T-shirt actor in Kiev, all the Five Eyes allies, and the Mossad.

As for the notion that Kiev has changed its counter-offensive “military plans” because of the Pentagon leaks, everyone should feel free to control the pitch of their roaring laughter.

The Russian non-response response to all this hoopla could be seen as a classic of misdirection. Responding to the U.S. de facto engaged in an undeclared war against Russia, much hotter than Hybrid, President Putin said that Russia is interested in “peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and establishing a balance of interests” given their status as the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.

Well, no one can possibly imagine Stalin saying that Russia was interested in peaceful coexistence with Nazi Germany in July, 1941 as the Wehrmacht was rushing towards Moscow, Leningrad and the Caucusus oil.

From the point of view of valuable military information, the indispensable Andrei Martyanov summed it all up: these “documents” contain none, apart from confirming that the Pentagon is absolutely clueless on the SMO: why is it happening, what is the modus operandi and what it plans to achieve.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov did cut to the chase: “We don’t have the slightest doubt about direct or indirect involvement of the U.S. and NATO (…) it cannot influence the final outcome of the special operation.”

As Martyanov stresses, Russia maneuvers an extremely advanced ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) complex, including human intel on the ground, electronic warfare and satellite constellations: “In terms of war correlates and combat statistics – I wouldn’t touch anything coming from Pentagon with a long stick.”

There are indeed several serious issues with the Pentagon “top secret” intel. It oozes the impression it was redacted based on open data, and not actual intel. And all that packaged by some quite shoddy work.

For instance, the insistence to “re-equip” Ukrainian air defense with missiles is not supported by data on where such missiles will be coming from. The name of the NASAMS – the middle range, ground based air defense system co-developed by Raytheon – is misspelled.

In official NATO documents, weapons from the USSR and from Russia are indicated in NATO codification. There is no style uniformity: it’s a messy mix of official code designations and transliterations from Russian into English.

So no wonder the impression is solidified that the U.S. Army Command in Europe (EUCOM) got their “intel” from open sources, and is absolutely clueless on how many weapons, how much equipment and how many people the Ukrainians actually have.

And that explains what’s going on in Artemovsk – with the Russians taking all the time in the world to calibrate their strategic defense, and after the orderly abandon of Kherson, lure the Ukrainians into a non-stop slaughterhouse. Martyanov qualifies U.S./NATO incompetence to see it coming as “stupefying.”

A do-or-die war to control Eurasia

Once again: the most important consequence of the Pentagon leaks is to establish that the U.S., de facto and de jure, is at war against Russia – whatever may be the spin by that Norwegian piece of dead wood in Brussels. Russia will establish a war crimes tribunal for Ukraine, so sooner rather than later, selected collective West luminaries better take refuge in their New Zealand bunkers.

It’s also crucial to always keep in mind Ukraine is a mere pawn in their game for not losing world power, against China, Russia and potentially Germany.

The initial psycho Straussian neocon goal was to cut off Germany from Russia using “Liver Sausage” Chancellor Scholz, who was briefed in advance on the terror attack on the Nord Streams.

Scholz was also involved in the CIA misdirection scam, channeling the blame for the terror attack on some obscure Ukrainian “dissident” and a bumbling yacht – as brilliantly covered by Seymour Hersh.

The next step is to cut off Ukraine from Russia – “reconquering” Crimea, the focus of the current P.R. blitzkrieg, and Donbass, thus originating a cataclysmic psychological upheaval in Russia leading to a Putin regime change.

Then the Straussians would finally command Russia’s massive natural resources – and block them from China by land and by sea via the U.S. Fleet.

That’s not exactly clever – but Straussian neocons do revel in their own intellectually shallow pond. Cue to that insufferable idiot Admiral John Kirby saying there can be no negotiations with Russia until they leave Ukraine, abandoning Donbass and Crimea.

So the (show) war in Ukraine must go on, to the last Ukrainian, or all these elaborate plans will irretrievably bite the dust. This is a do-or-die war against Russia-China for the control of Eurasia. Will that imply more Pentagon leaks? Bring them on.

The son of pro-crime billionaire George Soros, Alex, is raising eyebrows over more than a dozen White House meetings since October 2021, where he met with multiple officials including then-Chief of Staff, Ron Klain and several national security officials.

According to White House visitor logs reviewed by Fox News (and first reported by the NY Post), the 38-year-old Alex Soros visited the White House over 14 times.

His latest trips include visiting Dec. 1 with then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s advisor Nina Srivastava, who also worked on Biden’s presidential campaign, the logs show.

Later that evening. the younger Soros was one of 330 people who attended a lavish state dinner on the White House South Lawn hosted by the president and First Lady Jill Biden honoring French President Emmanuel Macron and Macron’s wife, Brigitte.

A day later, Alexander Soros — who chairs the powerful, liberal grant-making network Open Society Foundations founded by his dad — met with both Advisor to the Counselor of President Mariana Adame and Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer, records show. -NY Post

“[It’s] notable that almost all, with the exception of Ron Klain, who had the president’s ear, obviously were involved in national security,” said Matt Palumbo, author of “The Man Behind the Curtain”‘ during a Monday appearance on “Fox & Friends First.”

“Ukraine is a country where the Soros family has unfortunately boasted a lot of influence. There is tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown around there. So I think that will be something worth circling back on in coming months or years.”

Despite George Soros’ notorious sway among political circles, Palumbo said the younger Soros could someday boast even more power, noting Alex has been flaunting his influence on social media with pictures of himself alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama. -Fox News

“He’s standing on $11 million of his own money. Now, that may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to his father. And it is, but it’s not going to be that way forever,” Palumbo continued.

“The way I would put it is George Soros, over his career, has spent around $20 billion, his Open Society Foundation, which is the vehicle by which he makes this spending, has around $20 billion on its balance sheet. So when Alex takes over, he has a war chest that is basically able to, I would say, at a minimum, double the amount of damage his father is going to do and probably more.”

George Soros’ son set to take over his dad’s war chest…

He could do even more damage…

The Democrat party is basically the progressive party of George Soros now, but Alex has been to The White House 14 times since 2021 pic.twitter.com/OcLcex6fPb

— Red Voice Media (@redvoicenews) April 10, 2023

“The Soros agenda is one of death and destruction in the name of open borders and ending Western Civilization. The Biden administration and rogue prosecutor movement may be [its] most damaging purchase in America to date,” said Mike Howell, the director of the Heritage Foundation‘s Oversight Project (via PJ Media).

And according to Judicial Watch‘s Tom Fitton, Alex Soros’ White House visits showed “an outsize policy influence in the Biden administration.”

“Don’t be distracted by Alex’s name in the visitor log; it’s a George Soros rep they’re looking to meet with at the Biden White House,” Fitton continued, adding “He’s still calling the shots, it’s his money, his foundations.”

Meetings, via The Post;

• 12/2/2022: Mariana Adame, Advisor to the Counselor Steve Ricchetti
• 12/2/2022: Jon Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor
• 12/1/2022: State Dinner on South Lawn for French President Emmanuel Macron attended by President Biden
• 12/1/2022: Nina Srivastava, adviser to then-Chief of Staff Ron Klain
• 10/14/2022: Mariana Adame, Advisor to the Counselor Steve Ricchetti (x2)
• 10/6/2022: Jon Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor
• 10/6/2022: Kimberly Lang, Executive Assistant to the National Security Advisor
• 9/15/2022: Jon Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor
• 9/14/2022: Nina Srivastava, adviser to then-Chief of Staff Ron Klain (x2)
• 4/22/2022: Madeline Strasser, adviser to then-Chief of Staff Ron Klain
• 12/15/2021: Jon Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor
• 10/29/2021: Madeline Strasser, adviser to then-Chief of Staff Ron Klain

Authored by James Breslo via The Epoch Times,

On March 31, a full three years after first implemented, Los Angeles’ COVID-19 state of emergency finally expired.

Officials had used their emergency powers to regulate virtually every aspect of life in L.A.

They closed beaches, parks, and hiking trails. They closed businesses they deemed not to be essential. Churches were closed, but not liquor stores. They closed schools and required that children wear masks upon reopening. They banned family gatherings and funerals, and prevented people from being next to their loved ones in hospitals as they took their last breath.

Thank God it is now over, but many of the measures put in place are now permanent.

Leftists used the mandates to implement policies which would never have been possible otherwise, like universal mail-in balloting, eviction moratoriums, expanded health and welfare benefits, and even student loan debt forgiveness. Many vaccine and masking requirements remain in place.

So, it should be no surprise that the left has made sure that the COVID-19 state of emergency is replaced with a new one. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency in December over the homeless crisis. She compared the declaration to the one L.A. declared after the massive 6.7 earthquake in 1994.

A homeless encampment lines a street in the Skid Row community in Los Angeles on Dec. 14, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Emergency declarations after earthquakes and hurricanes are what Americans are used to. They typically remain in place for a number of weeks. But this declaration was clearly inspired by the COVID-19 state of emergency and similarly is likely to be in place for years to come.

What will come this time? Will residents be ordered to take homeless people into their homes? Will parks and beaches be closed to the public to allow for encampments? Will hotels be ordered to make rooms available for the homeless?

During the recent city elections, polls showed that homelessness was the number one issue concerning voters. It polled higher than the economy, gas prices, inflation, and crime. This is because homelessness in L.A. is on a level like no other city in the United States. Los Angeles has about 42,000 homeless people, second only to New York City (but more per capita), and several times that of the next closest city.

The problem is out in the open for all to see. Huge tent encampments are all over the city, including L.A.’s beaches, parks, and sidewalks. It is a humanitarian crisis for those living on the streets, and a quality-of-life crisis for ordinary Angelenos trying to live a normal, safe, and healthy life.

Residents encounter the homeless, most with mental health or addiction issues, on a daily basis. They cannot take their family to their local park or beach without being prepared for uncomfortable encounters. Crime is way up in the city due in part to the homeless explosion.

The problem was created when Los Angeles stopped enforcing its no camping laws. This allowed the encampments to be set up and grow, with tents filled with belongings popping up everywhere. The solution is obvious: start enforcing the law again.

Cities around L.A. which have been enforcing no camping laws have no homeless problem. This is the case even in cities with no affordable housing, like Manhattan Beach which is one of the most expensive zip codes in the state. Clearly it is an enforcement issue. You allow it, they will come. Just like the U.S. border: if you enforce the border laws, you do not get illegal immigrants. If you do not, you get them in droves.

A homeless individual in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan 27, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Los Angeles based its refusal to ban encampments on a 2018 court decision. In Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prosecuting people for sleeping in public amounted to cruel and unusual punishment when no shelter beds are available. But the ruling only applies to sleeping at night. Nothing in the ruling prohibits banning encampments during the day. If police were permitted to enforce the day ban, the encampments would go away. Without a tent, the homeless can no longer set up a home in the public space. It is not nearly as comfortable to live a homeless lifestyle if you are not able to maintain a tent with a sofa and all your belongings in it. Other cities figured this out, but L.A. has chosen not to.

Instead, the city’s new mayor, in announcing the state of emergency, focused primarily on addressing the “affordable housing crisis.” That is because Bass and her fellow city leaders are less interested in solving the homeless problem than they are in using it to implement all kinds of progressive dream policies. Yes, L.A. has a shortage of affordable housing on the beach. But there is no shortage of affordable housing if you look 45 minutes from the beach, which is what rational people do.

This allows the city’s leftists to implement policies like rent control, eviction moratoriums, affordable housing projects, free housing projects, and housing vouchers. Los Angeles spends $1.2 billion per year on housing solutions, building units for as much as $848,000 each.

They call enforcing camping bans inhumane. Where will they go if we enforce it? The answer is, to a shelter. L.A. has lots of them. They are not full, because most of the homeless have one reason or another for preferring a tent. If the shelters do become full, it is very cheap to create more compared to the cost of building permanent housing as the city is currently pursuing.

Alternatively, they may connect with friends or family. There are many stories of parents finding lost children when the homeless finally leave the streets.

They could also go to rehab or a mental health facility. Or, if they choose none of the above and continue illegal camping, they could wind up in jail. That is not the worst place to be. Many homeless get sober and turn things around while in jail.

All of this is far more compassionate than leaving them on the streets to be used as political pawns in order to help implement socialism.

By not enforcing the ban they have made Los Angeles the mecca for homeless. They move from the cities which enforce camping bans to L.A., where they are allowed to camp. The city’s residents are then asked to solve the problem by building permanent housing for them. This is all part of the leftist’s plan.