German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Haar Støre have called on NATO to protect underwater pipelines and communication cables by creating a special coordination structure, according to Deutsche Welle.
“Pipelines, telephone and internet cables are vital communications for our states; their safety should be given top priority,” Scholz said following his meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre on the eve of the Berlin Security Conference.
He added that the recent attacks on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines have shown how high the risks are in this area.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the initiative.
“We have increased security measures in the wake of the recent Nord Stream sabotage, and it is vital that we do even more to ensure that our maritime infrastructure is protected against future attacks,” Stoltenberg said.
Norway’s prime minister also said his country would direct some of its gas export revenues to help Ukraine and other countries affected by the global energy crisis. The rise in energy prices caused by the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine has brought additional profits to Norway.
Scholz thanked Norway for the 10 percent increase in gas deliveries to Germany, as Berlin tries to make up for reduced deliveries from Russia. Scholz also said his country would continue to be a leader in defending Europe and European freedoms.
“No aggressor should doubt that we have a firm intention to defend every one of our allies and every inch of alliance territory with all the forces at our disposal,” said the German chancellor.
Meanwhile, German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann confessed that Germany may have contributed to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine because it supported the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
“Knowing what we know today, the decision to proceed with Nord Stream 2 after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was Germany’s contribution to the outbreak of war in Ukraine,” Buschmann said in a welcome address to a meeting of G7 justice ministers in Berlin.
He added that it was Germany’s duty to “confront this truth directly” and “draw the right conclusions” from it.
Earnings Expectations Bottom With COVID-Zero Ending
By Ye Xie
Three things we learned last week:
1. After three years, the Covid Zero policy is ending. Big cities including Beijing and Guangzhou have relaxed restrictions despite a still-large number of infections. President Xi Jinping told European Union chief Charles Michel that the less-lethal omicron variant is now the prevalent Covid-19 strain in China, Bloomberg reported Friday.
The MSCI China Index jumped 29% last month in its best performance since 1999. It looks like earnings expectations have bottomed.
With the relaxation, the risk now is of an explosive outbreak during the winter that overwhelms hospitals. For its part, the government has started a vaccination campaign, setting a target of 90% of people over 80 years old to take at least one dose by the end of January, according to Caixin.
2. Despite the easing of the Covid policy, economic activity remains deeply depressed. As many as 28 of 99 cities still impose heavy controls on mobility, according to Bank of America. Production and consumption softened, with auto sales slumping 31% year-on-year during the week ending Nov. 27.
3. China pivoted before the Fed. Fed Chair Jerome Powell essentially confirmed that that the central bank will slow the pace of its tightening to 50 bps at this month’s meeting. But he reiterated that the Fed will continue to raise rates until three conditions — further deceleration of goods prices, lower shelter inflation, and softening labor demand — fall clearly into place. On Friday, the job report showed that that condition isn’t there yet. Payroll growth exceeded expectations and wages surged by the most in nearly a year.
On November 30, the European Commission, the executive of the European Union, proposed “options to Member States to make sure that Russia is held accountable for the atrocities and crimes committed during the war in Ukraine.”
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission, in selective condemnation, tweeted “Russia must pay for its horrific crimes.” The hypocrisy displayed by von der Leyen and the EU is nothing short of remarkable.
Russia must pay for its horrific crimes.
We will work with the ICC and help set up a specialised court to try Russia’s crimes.
With our partners, we will make sure that Russia pays for the devastation it caused, with the frozen funds of oligarchs and assets of its central bank pic.twitter.com/RL4Z0dfVE9
It would seem the EU collective of unelected bureaucrats suffers from amnesia. Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton and NATO mercilessly bombed Yugoslavia, targeting civilian infrastructure. Rick Rozoff enumerates the war crimes:
A passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters, a vacuum cleaner factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27 other Chinese injured. Cluster bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium ordnance were used widely. No one, not a single individual, has been held accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and exaggerating atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate a war. Few Western politicians and journalists would have escaped that charge over their roles in 1999.
“There were aspects of the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia that were in breach of accepted norms of warfare, the greatest example being the bombing of the TV station. NATO deliberately targeted unarmed civilian non-combatants, that’s the bottom line,” Duncan Bullivant, author of a report on Kosovo for London’s Centre for European Reform, told the Irish Times in 2000.
No tribunal was organized for the psychopaths responsible for terrorizing and murdering Serbs. Bill Clinton, also responsible for attacking Iraq and killing civilians, in addition to making sure Iraqi children starved to death under a medieval sanctions regime, was not held responsible. In fact, he was described in “Churchillian tones” by aides and the corporate media. Clinton’s illegal and immoral bombing of the former Yugoslavia made George W. Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq easier.
Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.
Ursula von der Leyen and the EU have blood on their hands. European countries inserted Eurofighters, Tornados, MK 80 series bombs, and other munitions and death machines into the Yemen conflict. “Are European arms companies therefore aiding and abetting alleged war crimes committed by the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Yemen?” asks the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
Despite documented attacks on civilian homes, markets, hospitals and schools – conducted by the Saudi/UAE-led military coalition – transnational companies based in Europe continue to supply Saudi Arabia and the UAE with weapons, ammunition and logistical support. European government officials authorized the exports by granting licenses.
Despite ample evidence of war crimes, NATO and the USG received a free pass. “The United Nations’ chief war crimes prosecutor said today that there was no basis for a formal investigation into whether NATO committed war crimes during the bombing of Yugoslavia,” the New York Times reported on June 3, 2000.
NATO is the preferred executioner. Amnesty International, in 2014, criticized the USG and NATO for ignoring its numerous war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan. NATO was also accused of committing war crimes in Libya. A report issued in 2012 by the Arab Organization for Human Rights, together with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the International Legal Assistance Consortium, detailed wanton violation of human rights by NATO.
“Among civilian sites visited by the mission that had been struck by NATO bombs and missiles were schools and colleges, a Zliten regional food warehouse, the Office of the Administrative Controller in Tripoli, and private homes,” the report notes.
In November of 2011, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo, stated that “there are allegations of crimes committed by NATO forces (and) these allegations will be examined impartially and independently.” The crimes include the “lynching” of Moammar Gaddafi, a brutal act that prompted a chortle from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
No special commission was empaneled to look into these war crimes, although the ICC did order the arrest of Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and other supporters. NATO refused to admit civilians were killed after 7,642 air-to-surface weapons were used.
“Although the prosecutor of the ICC said that he would investigate war crimes by both sides, the eagerness with which he seized on allegations of a policy by Gaddafi to encourage rape, with hundreds of victims, and the provision of ‘viagra-type medicaments’ to his forces, did nothing to enhance a perception of objectivity when they went unsubstantiated,” writes Ian Martin, the director of the UN’s support mission in Libya from 2011-12 and the former head of Amnesty International.
The war crimes of the EU and NATO cannot compare to those of the United States Government, an aggressive and repeat offender of international law. Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 states quite explicitly:
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away or for any other motive.
Russia is indeed in violation of this specific protocol. However, here in the “West,” we are only given half of the story. In fact, we are given less than half and are expected to believe a passel of lies, daily cranked out by the corporate war propaganda media. No mention of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine dedicated to abducting, torturing, and killing ethnic Russians in Lugansk, Donetsk, and elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine. For an example of the brutal punishment these ultranationalists inflict on their enemies, look no further than the arson of the labor building in Odesa.
Corporate media mention of war crimes is highly selective and biased. No mention of the USG-orchestrated illegal coup overthrowing the elected leader of Ukraine for his crime of seeking a better deal with Russia than the neoliberal-espousing EU.
No mention of Neo-Nazi thugs setting fire to a labor building in Odesa, killing around 50 or more anti-Maidan activists (this largely ignored news item is buried beneath stories depicting alleged Russian crimes). No mention of the ignored Minsk I and II agreements hammered out in 2014 and 2015 to end the “civil war” between the Neo-Nazi brigades embedded in the Ukrainian military and “separatists” in Donbas.
The USG and its European “partners” (in crime) count on the amnesiac perception of a perpetually lied to and manipulated public to support or remain disconnected and apathetic to its bloody neoliberal wars and resource-grabbing predations. Iraq serves as the primary example, although what the USG did there is largely forgotten and not considered relevant to the conflict in Ukraine.
Iraq’s civilian population was dependent on industrial capacities. The US assault left Iraq in a near apocalyptic condition as reported by the first United Nations observers after the war. Among the facilities targeted and destroyed were:
electric power generation, relay and transmission;
water treatment, pumping and distribution systems and reservoirs;
telephone and radio exchanges, relay stations, towers and transmission facilities;
food processing, storage and distribution facilities and markets, infant milk formula and beverage plants, animal vaccination facilities and irrigation sites;
railroad transportation facilities, bus depots, bridges, highway overpasses, highways, highway repair stations, trains, buses and other public transportation vehicles, commercial and private vehicles;
oil wells and pumps, pipelines, refineries, oil storage tanks, gasoline filling stations and fuel delivery tank cars and trucks, and kerosene storage tanks;
sewage treatment and disposal systems; factories engaged in civilian production, e.g., textile and automobile assembly; and
historical markers and ancient sites.
However, there is a difference between Putin’s SMO and Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Russia faces an antagonistic enemy on its border, installing missile systems and conducting military exercises while supporting rabid ultranationalist neo-Nazis busy bombing ethnic Russian civilians in Donbas.
Iraq, on the other hand, did not have troops and missiles on the border of the United States, and it did not pose a threat to USG “interests” in the Middle East. It was a neoliberal hit job to take down an Arab nation that was at the time the most advanced in the Middle East (Libya, the most advanced nation in Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa, was also taken out under false “humanitarian” pretense). The neocons lied about weapons of mass destruction, the same as they are now lying about Russia wanting to reclaim its lost Soviet territory.
Ursula von der Leyen presides over a criminal organization responsible for the death and destruction of manufactured “enemies” that do not threaten Europe. She is, in essence,calling for the freezing of Europeans dependent on natural gas from Russia at bargain basement prices and war without end or a perceivable exit.
China has set up at least 54 overseas police stations in 30 countries, including in the United States (New York), Canada, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria, according to a recent report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO.
The police stations are part of China’s campaign to “persuade” Chinese citizens suspected of criminal acts – particularly telecommunications fraud, but also political “crimes” such as political dissent – to return to China to face criminal prosecution. China not only threatens the Chinese citizens themselves but also members of their families who have stayed behind in China. Such threats have been continuing for years, as FBI Director Christopher Wray pointed out in 2020, when he mentioned a case from the US in which a Chinese government “emissary” visited a target in the US and told him that he could choose between returning to China or committing suicide.
China’s overseas police stations purport merely to have administrative or consular functions, but function as means of threatening Chinese abroad to return to China, thereby skipping the necessary legal requirements under international law.
Crucially, the police stations operate without the consent and knowledge of the host countries, such as in the Netherlands, where one of the police stations operates out of a plain ground-floor apartment in Rotterdam belonging to a small Chinese handyman business.
Beijing, not surprisingly, has denied all wrongdoing. “The organizations you mentioned are not police stations or police service centers,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian Zhao insisted. “Their activities are to assist local Chinese citizens who need to apply for expired driver’s license renewal online….”
Safeguard Defenders has appealed to countries to take swift action against the police stations.
“Action needs also be taken to protect a quickly growing Chinese diaspora in the target countries, unless the latter are content with having a foreign government police minority groups on their territory, often to the intentional detriment of the target country and its policies, and aimed at intimidating the diaspora into obedience to the CCP anywhere in the world. Dedicated reporting and protection mechanisms must urgently be made available.” – Safeguard Defenders, January 18, 2022.
China has set up at least 54 overseas police stations in 30 countries, including in the United States (New York), Canada, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria, according to a recent report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO. Most of these police stations are located in Europe, with nine such police stations in major Spanish cities, four in Italy, and three in Paris, among others.
According to Peter Dahlin, director of Safeguard Defenders, those are just the tip of the iceberg:
“We are convinced that there are many more, because these only belong to two jurisdictions – Fuzhou and Qingtian, where most of the Chinese in Spain come from – and China itself admits that it has launched the project in ten. So it could be up to five times more.”
The police stations are part of China’s campaign to “persuade” Chinese citizens suspected of criminal acts – particularly telecommunications fraud, but also political “crimes” such as political dissent – to return to China to face criminal prosecution. China not only threatens the Chinese citizens themselves but also members of their families who have stayed behind in China. Such threats have been continuing for years, as FBI Director Christopher Wray pointed out in 2020, when he mentioned a case from the US in which a Chinese government “emissary” visited a target in the US and told him that he could choose between returning to China or committing suicide.
On August 17, China’s Ministry of Public Security stated:
“The number of cross-border telecom fraud cases targeting Chinese residents has been significantly decreased in China, with 230,000 telecom fraud suspects being educated and persuaded to return to China from overseas to confess crimes from April 2021 to July 2022…”
“Official guidelines explicitly outline the different tools made available to ‘persuade’ the targets to voluntarily return to China to face charges,” Safeguard Defenders wrote.
“These include targeting the purported suspects’ children in China, denying them the right to education, as well as targeting family members and relatives in a similar fashion. In short, a full-on ‘guilt by association’ punishment to ‘encourage’ suspects to return from abroad.”
China’s overseas police stations purport merely to have administrative or consular functions, but function as means of threatening Chinese abroad to return to China, thereby skipping the necessary legal requirements under international law. According to Safeguard Defenders:
“These methods allow the CCP and their security organs to circumvent normal bilateral mechanisms of police and judicial cooperation, thereby severely undermining the international rule of law and territorial integrity of the third countries involved… In eschewing regular cooperation mechanisms, the CCP manages to avoid the growing scrutiny of its human rights record and the ensuing difficulties faced in obtaining the return of ‘fugitives’ through legal proceedings such as formal extradition requests. It leaves legal Chinese residents abroad fully exposed to extra-legal targeting by the Chinese police, with little to none of the protection theoretically ensured under both national and international law…
“Openly labeled as overseas police service stations… for example in renewing Chinese driver’s licenses remotely and other tasks traditionally considered of a consular nature… [the stations] also serve a more sinister goal as they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.'”
The police stations are obviously also used to target Chinese abroad who disagree with the regime.
“One of the aims of these campaigns, obviously, as it is to crack down on dissent, is to silence people,” Laura Harth, a campaign director with Safeguard Defenders said. “So people are afraid. People that are being targeted, that have family members back in China, are afraid to speak out.”
Crucially, the police stations operate without the consent and knowledge of the host countries, such as in the Netherlands, where one of the police stations operates out of a plain ground-floor apartment in Rotterdam belonging to a small Chinese handyman business. Several countries, such as Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, Portugal and Spain, are now investigating the matter and some have already demanded the closure of the Chinese overseas police stations on their soil.
“[We] have asked the Chinese ambassador for full clarification on the so-called police service stations carrying out tasks in the Netherlands on behalf of the Chinese government,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra wrote on Twitter.
“As no permission was sought from the Netherlands for this, the ministry has informed the ambassador that the stations must close immediately. In addition, the Netherlands itself is also investigating the stations to find out their exact activities.”
In the US, FBI Director FBI director Christopher Wray said that the FBI was investigating the matter.
“We are aware of the existence of these stations. To me, it is outrageous to think that the Chinese police would attempt to set up shop, you know, in New York, let’s say, without proper coordination. It violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial and law enforcement cooperation processes.”
Wray added that the FBI was “looking into the legal parameters,” and stated that the FBI has opened charges related to Chinese government harassment, stalking, monitoring and blackmailing Chinese in the US who were critical of China’s President Xi Jinping.
“It’s a real problem and something that we’re talking with our foreign partners about, as well, because we’re not the only country where this has occurred.”
Beijing, not surprisingly, has denied all wrongdoing. “The organizations you mentioned are not police stations or police service centers,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian Zhao insisted.
“Their activities are to assist local Chinese citizens who need to apply for expired driver’s license renewal online, and activities related to physical examination services by providing the venue.”
Nevertheless, the Spanish newspaper El Correoquoted an unnamed official from the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Shanghai, who reportedly acknowledged that the police stations abroad are part of how China operates:
“The bilateral treaties are very cumbersome, and Europe is reluctant to extradite to China. I do not see what is wrong with pressurizing criminals so that they are brought to justice.”
Safeguard Defenders has appealed to countries to take swift action against the Chinese police stations.
“We call on Members of Parliament to raise this issue with their Governments: ask if and how this practice is being monitored; to what extent such operations take place in their country, and what measures are being formulated to counter them. Action needs also be taken to protect a quickly growing Chinese diaspora in the target countries, unless the latter are content with having a foreign government police minority groups on their territory, often to the intentional detriment of the target country and its policies, and aimed at intimidating the diaspora into obedience to the CCP anywhere in the world. Dedicated reporting and protection mechanisms must urgently be made available.”
Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
Twitter owner Elon Musk blasted a New York Times report claiming problematic content and hate speech was on an “unprecedented” rise on the platform following his takeover, countering earlier claims by the billionaire.
According to findings by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League, and other groups, the NY Times reported that slurs against black Americans increased from 1,282 times a day to 3,876 times. Posts against gay men and Jews went from 2,506 times to 3,964, and 61 percent, respectively during the two weeks after Musk bought Twitter.
Musk replied in a tweet that the report was “Utterly false.”
The NY Times report has, till now, gotten over 44,000 likes, while the Musk response garnered 346,000 likes, and nearly 21,000 retweets.
“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in the report. “They have reacted accordingly.”
The outlet said that accounts related to the terrorist group ISIS were coming back on the platform, along with QAnon supporters who have received verification symbols.
“This reporting is such garbage,”said Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute.
“The experience on Twitter is pretty much the same as it was before, plus a few ‘edgy’ accounts being reinstated. The left-wing journalists want to create a false narrative to justify more censorship. It’s transparent and pathetic.”
Hate Speech on Twitter
Musk has reiterated his view that hate speech will not be tolerated on the platform, and that there will be no “free-for-all hellscape” regarding speech. However, he has also upheld free speech on Twitter by uncensoring prominent conservative personalities like former president Donald Trump, investigative news organization Project Veritas, and satire site The Babylon Bee.
This has irked many on the left who advocate for banning these accounts under the pretext of hate speech.
“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law,”said Musk earlier in the year.
“I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
In a Dec. 2 tweet, Musk said, “Hate speech impressions (# of times tweet was viewed) continue to decline, despite significant user growth! @TwitterSafety will publish data weekly. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity.”
He added, “There are about 500M tweets per day & billions of impressions, so hate speech impressions are
European Backlash, Advertiser Boycott
A senior European Union official issued a warning to Musk that Twitter could be blocked on the continent if it fails to comply with the bloc’s regulations.
“There is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation, and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising,” EU Commissioner Thierry Breton told Musk, according to a readout of a call between the two had on Wednesday.
The warning comes amid a pullback by advertising from investing on the platform. Major brands such as Jeep, Mars candy, cereal maker Kellogg, pharma giant Merck, and Verizon had paused advertising according to an analysis report by The Washington Post.
Other brands, including United Airlines, Carlsberg, Mondelez, and General Motors, have also stopped displaying ads on Twitter.
Twitter’s policy on hateful conduct states: “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.”
Just hours after we find out that the Hunter Biden laptop not only wasn’t “Russian disinformation”, but rather was being actively covered up by social media, another “conspiracy theory” that wound up costing tons of honest truth seekers their social media accounts (including Zero Hedge, who was first to talk about the lab leakall the way back in February 2020), is inching closer toward being validated as reality.
That’s because a scientist who formerly worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has now gone on record and has said that COVID was “man-made” and leaked from the lab.
The claims are according to the Post, who cited The Sun, who was provided a copy of the scientist’s forthcoming book.
The gravity of the allegations, which I have written about at length over the last year, would make the global Covid-19 pandemic cover up among the most stunning lies ever perpetrated on modern humanity.
The whistleblower, epidemiologist Andrew Huff, called the lab leak the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11″. He detailed his allegations in his book “The Truth About Wuhan”.
Get 50% off: If you enjoy this article, would like to support my work, I would love to have you as a subscriber and can offer you 50% off for life: Get 50% off forever
Huff is the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, which studied coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He worked for the company from 2014 to 2016 and, per the Post:
…said that the non-profit helped the Wuhan lab put together the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species” for many years.
“Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he wrote in his book.
Huff wrote: “China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent. The US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.
“I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.”
Fringe Finance has been covering the idea of a lab leak since the blog’s inception and we have long maintained that a leak from the lab was the most obvious explanation for Covid.
Now the question becomes: who will be held accountable…not only for the leak but for the campaign against those who asked honest questions about the lab for the last 3 years?
And what other “conspiracy theories” will we soon find out are closer to truth?
Alameda’s Caroline Ellison Spotted In NY Amid Speculation She Is About To Roll On SBF After Hiring Iconic Clinton Lawyer
As Sam Bankman-Fried enters day six of his whirlwind media tour in which he makes one or more daily appearances – against the advice of his lawyers – in hopes of convincing someone that he was too dumb to be a criminal mastermind with billions in crypto in cold storage and in bank accounts in Dubai and Singapore (luckily all his wire transfers can be traced), also known as the Simple Jack defense…
So today was day one of @SBF_FTX “i am too dumb to be a criminal mastermind” world tour.
Join us tomorrow for day two when he channels Simple Jack next to Janet Yellen and Zelenskyy at the NYT summit of totally non-criminal folks.
… the weakest link in SBF’s defense was just spotted in a New York coffee shop, amid speculation she is preparing to blow up SBF’s entire defense strategy.
According to Autism Capital, the former CEO of Alameda Capital (which as a reminder was ground zero of the FTX implosion after it blew up $8 billion in FTX client funds on trades gone horribly wrong), Caroline Ellison, was spotted at 8:15am this morning at the Ground Support Coffee on West Broad in SoHo Manhattan. This, as AC notes, “would mean she is not in Hong Kong and is in NY not in custody.”
PLEASE CONFIRM: A user claims that they spotted Caroline Ellison at Ground Support Coffee on West Broad in SoHo Manhattan at 8:15 AM. This would mean she is not in Hong Kong and is in NY not in custody. pic.twitter.com/QUduYO9GfZ
Why does this matter? Because while the prominent Democrat donor, who reportedly is “responsible for Biden being in office” and who – at least according to Musk – donated over $1 billion to democrats…
That’s just the publicly disclosed number. His actual support of Dem elections is probably over $1B. The money went somewhere, so where did it go?
… continues his deluded daily media appearances while casually throwing his former alleged lover, co-worker and penthouse-mate, Caroline – and pretty much all other co-workers – under the bus by claiming he has no idea how $8 billion in FTX client funds just vaporized in SBF’s personal hedge fund, Alameda (implying that only Alameda’s CEO, Ellison, was responsible for the theft and fraud) Caroline is two-steps ahead of SBF and is already cooperating with members of the DOJ, and specifically the SDNY, which we previously reported is probing the collapse of FTX.
The general consensus is that Caroline Ellison is likely in NY cutting a deal and cooperating with SDNY prosecutors to roll on Sam.
… best known for its Government Affairs Department Chair, Jamie Gorelick, who was the former No. 2 ranking member in the Clinton Justice Department, and in a recent interview, she referred to Garland as her “wingman.”
If indeed Ellison is working the Feds while currying favor with SBF’s former closest friends, the days of Bankman-Fried – who may or may not soon commit Epsteincide – outside of a prison cell are numbered.
As for SBF, who is still wasting his time “uhhhm“-ing and “like“-ing across various interviews hoping to demonstrate to the world – and his future jurors – just how bloody stupid he really was…
… and blaming it all on messy accounting, poor risk management, and of course, Caroline Ellison – not his premeditated fraud of course – even the CEO of Coinbase is no longer buying his relentless bullshit, saying earlier that no matter how “messy you accounting is (or how rich you are) – you’re definitely going to notice if you find an extra $8B to spend” adding that “even the most gullible person should not believe Sam’s claim that this was an accounting error” (here he is referring to Bill Ackman, of course), and correctly concluded that “it’s stolen customer money used in his hedge fund, plain and simple.”
It’s stolen customer money used in his hedge fund, plain and simple.
All that’s missing is the definitive proof, and if the above rumors are correct, Caroline Ellison is in the process of, or already has provided it to the Feds. Which incidentally, may explain why SBF’s “I am Simple Ja-ja-ja-jack, i’m so-so-so-sorry” tour just came to a crashing halt, when late on Sunday, the commingling masterming told Maxine Waters he won’t be voluntarily appearing before Congress – where any lie is a perjury – on the 13th (or ever for that matter).
Rep. Waters, and the House Committee on Financial Services:
Once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened, I would feel like it was my duty to appear before the committee and explain.
I’m not sure that will happen by the 13th. But when it does, I will testify. https://t.co/c0P8yKlyQt
Former Global Head Of Trust And Safety At Twitter Reveals Widespead Scientific Censorship
After Elon Musk’s buyout and the ongoing release of the the “Twitter files”, the cat is out of the bag, as it were, when it comes to Twitter’s extreme leftist political agenda and their collusion with the federal government and the DNC. And, it appears that some of the people deeply involved in the platform’s censorship model are willing to discuss their tactics and motives. One might expect them to take a more apologetic position in light of their exposed lies and trespasses against their customers and site users, but this is definitely not the case.
Former Twitter employees, most especially former moderators and Trust and Safety employees, are unrepentant for their censorship efforts tainted with political bias and seem to loath Elon Musk for opening the door to fair debate on the social media site.
One Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, was recently in the headlines for admitting that Twitter’s aggressive censorship of the Hunter Biden Laptop story was a “mistake.” Roth is the former Global Head of Trust And Safety and played a direct role (along with other executives) in the suppression of the news, leading to the banning of the New York Post account merely for relaying accurate reporting.
Presenting the event as a “mistake” rooted in the company’s concerns about “misinformation”, however, seems disingenuous. As we now know, Twitter and the DNC were in regular contact with each other and requests were made by DNC officials to block any mention of such damaging stories. There was round-table debate at Twitter, but it was not about whether it was morally right to censor the information. Rather, Twitter execs debated whether or not they could get away with it.
The trust and safety elites within Big Tech companies have no doubts about the validity and righteousness of their cause, and that’s the biggest problem. The monstrous nature of the ideology of scientifically precise censorship is on full display in the following interview with Roth at the Knight Foundation. Roth has no qualms about the notion of crushing free speech.
Roth equates banned information to “malicious campaigns,” painting a picture of some nebulous organization of “trolls” with ill intent working from the shadows to spread mean words and falsehoods. This is projection. The only organized and shadowy efforts were performed by Twitter’s leadership and were designed to silence dissent, in some cases in an effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 election for their friends in the Democratic Party.
This is even hinted at by Roth, who explains the widespread decision within Big Tech companies after the 2016 election to focus heavily on campaign and election influence. Roth cites the long debunked theory that Russia manipulated the 2016 election as the reason for this agenda to control election information.
A clear case of collusion can be presented between the Democrats and Twitter to do the exact thing Roth warns about, which is the subversion of election outcomes. But the psychology of people like Yoel Roth is disturbing beyond the issue of potential political manipulation. For example, Roth goes on to claim that the satire inherent in organizations like Libs of Tikok and the Babylon Bee is “dangerous” and specifically suggests they threaten the lives of people within the trans community.
Keep in mind that satire and humor are usually the first targets of any authoritarian regime clamoring for power because the greatest comedy strikes at the heart of lies and speaks truths that many people are otherwise afraid to discuss. If a joke is based on falsehoods it’s usually not very funny. As far as Libs of TikTok is concerned, all they do is re-post videos of leftists’ own arguments and confessions, and for that they are labeled “dangerous.”
The former trust and safety exec goes on to admonish the removal of covid censorship, calling it “bad and damaging” without explaining how. One can only suggest that the leftists at Twitter were also in collusion with government officials to silence any and all facts and evidence that ran contrary to the mainstream pandemic narrative. Much of this information, like the Biden Laptop, was labeled “conspiracy theory” and banned, only to later be revealed as absolutely true.
The deeper poison of Trust and Safety cultism is two-fold: First, it is being done scientifically and with increasing precision. It is not only based simply on community flagging; these people are exploiting algorithms and computer modeling in the hopes that they can develop predictive suppression. They think they can “measure hate events” as if they are hurricanes and batten down the hatches before the waves hit. The thing is, much of the “hate” they fear is all in their minds. The “malicious campaigns” they see are often merely people disagreeing with them on the basis of facts and principles.
You cannot accurately measure “hate”, for one, and when that hate is perceived through a lens of delusion built on bias and zealotry, we run into a threat much bigger than hate – The threat of despotism wrapped in technocracy. They aren’t blocking hate, they are blocking free debate.
The real discussion should be on whether or not Trust and Safety metrics should even exist. Why do we need them? Roth never questions the validity of his former job and the motivations behind it. The bottom line is this: Big Tech censorship is founded on the argument that people cannot be trusted to make up their own minds on the information they see. Social media leaders think that THEY should be the arbiters of information in order to protect people from themselves.
What qualifies them to hold this kind of power? Nothing. No one is qualified enough, intelligent enough or objective enough to mediate the speech of millions of people, and since Big Tech holds a veritable monopoly on modern communications, their policies become a kind of law that affects the whole of society. Twitter by itself is only a small part of the overall picture, but the cold and calculating censorship promoted by Roth is something that is being executed by the majority of Big Tech companies right now. We have to ask ourselves as Americans (and western culture in general needs to ask) if this kind of ideological monopoly can be allowed to persist, because it means the eventual destruction of free speech as we know it.
Swiss naturopathic physician George Della Pietra believes people worldwide should be free to choose whether to get a COVID-19 vaccine injection or not.
He believes the same should hold for those receiving transfusions with “vaccinated” blood.
“The problem is right now we have no choice,” said Della Pietra, founder of the nonprofit Safe Blood Donation service in 2021, matching unvaccinated blood recipients with donors in 65 countries.
“It was very clear from the beginning that the COVID hype was way out of control,” Della Pietra said. “It was not as dangerous as they say it was.
“As a naturopath, I can make no sense of this pandemic, which was never really a pandemic. It leaves space for so many explanations.”
Della Pietra believes that an mRNA injection is more dangerous than the pharmaceutical companies are willing to admit. He said the growing numbers of adverse reactions are reason to question their safety and effectiveness.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that vaccinated and boosted people made up 58.6 percent (6,512) of the COVID-19 deaths in August—up from 41 percent in January.
“We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Cynthia Cox, the Vice President of the Kaiser Family Foundation told The Washington Post in an article on Nov. 23.
Nearly 70 percent of the world’s 8 billion people have received at least one mRNA injection for COVID-19 since the vaccines began rolling out in 2021 at the height of the virus’s spread.
Each of the three primary mRNA COVID-19 vaccines contains COVID-19 “spike protein” fragments, which bind at the cellular level to stimulate an immune response to the virus.
Della Pietra believes these spike proteins produce “classic symptoms”—namely blood clots—that “horrified” him.
“I’ve never seen anything similar—and I’m not talking only about spike proteins,” Della Pietra told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.
“It’s unbelievable because we never had this problem before. It’s been only two years. They want to keep the narrative [that an mRNA vaccine] is not dangerous.”
Although donated blood and plasma must undergo a cleansing process before transfusion, Safe Blood Donation says this is not enough to remove all mRNA ingredients.
“I’m talking about graphene oxide and non-declared inorganic components in the vaccine, which we can see in the blood. When I see them, I have no idea how we can get rid of them again,” Della Pietra said.
Looking at the abnormalities in vaccinated blood, he said, “OK, we have a problem.” People are receiving the vaccine “more or less through the back door.”
“You can not avoid it anymore.”
In the United States alone, there are approximately 16 million units of donated blood annually. Of those units, about 643,000 are “autologous”—self-donated—and the number is increasing yearly, according to BloodBook.com.
Della Pietra said that, to his knowledge, Safe Blood Donation, based in Switzerland, is the first unvaccinated blood donation service of its kind.
“So, there is no blood bank with mRNA-free blood yet, not even with us,” Safe Blood Donation states on its website.
“And, although we have already asked hundreds of clinics, at the moment—at least in Europe—all of them still refuse to allow the human right of free blood choice with them—or at least do not want to be mentioned because otherwise, they fear reprisals.”
Della Pietra said the main goal of Safe Blood Donation is not to start an mRNA-free blood bank. Rather, it is to make it possible to match unvaccinated blood donors and unvaccinated recipients, “which we bring together in a clinic (medical partner) that allows the choice of blood donor.”
Medical website Seed Scientific said that blood banks and biotech companies will offer as much as $1,000 monthly for blood donations.
While Della Pietra said there are no unvaccinated blood banks, he sees the demand for unvaccinated blood rising.
“This is why I decided to do [SafeBlood Donation]. I wanted to make a network for unvaccinated people looking for a blood donor because they need it—whether they have scheduled surgery or an emergency,” he said.
Safe Blood Donation began working in the United States about a month ago, building an infrastructure of medical partners.
However, in the current medical environment, central blood banks such as the Red Cross do not segregate their blood donations based on their vaccinated or unvaccinated status.
“The American Red Cross does not facilitate designated donations for standard blood needs, as this process often takes longer and is more resource intensive than obtaining a blood product through our normal process,” the Red Cross told The Epoch Times in an email.
“In a small number of situations, there is an exception for rare blood types where compatible blood types are extremely difficult to find. A rare blood type is defined as one that is present in less than 1/1000 people.
“We want to emphasize that the Red Cross adheres to all donor and product requirements as determined by the FDA to ensure the safety of the blood supply and is committed to continuing to provide life-saving blood products for patients across the country.”
The National Library of Medicine said that “across study sites, the average hospital cost per unit transfused was $155 and the average charge per patient was $219.”
Still, the Red Cross, which provides 40 percent of the nation’s blood donations, said “no studies” demonstrate adverse outcomes from transfusions of blood products collected from vaccinated donors.
The pose of wokeness is a costume that the left liberal elite puts on to virtue signal that they care about social justice and to hide their greed and corruption, said the former executive of a major brand-name apparel manufacturer.
Jennifer Sey, former chief marketing officer and brand president of Levi Strauss & Co., told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program that she had “pushed back” on the public school closures due to COVID-19 for two years, and in the end, she was pushed out of the company for her advocacy.
Sey, who was sending her children to public schools, believed that prolonged school lockdowns were harmful to children and started speaking out against them at the beginning of the pandemic.
Sey said she and her husband were reading the data that was coming out of Italy at the start of the pandemic, a country heavily hit by the disease, and the data showed that the median age of death due to the disease was over 80.
“Nobody was bothering to look at actual data or adhere to the pre-pandemic playbook, which said you never shut schools down for more than a couple of weeks,” Sey pointed out. “It was from day one that me and my husband, we both said, ‘Hell no, this is wrong. People are going to be harmed.’”
In September 2020, Sey’s company warned her that her advocacy against school closures could be considered speaking on behalf of the company, “the implication being, there would be reputational harm to the company caused,” she said.
At the same time, her peers began sending their kids back to private in-person schools, Sey continued.
“I was so angry that these people would dare to say to me while sending their own kids to in-person school: ‘You can’t advocate for poor children to be in school.’”
Sey said it was atypical for her peers—and even for employees two or three levels below her in the corporate hierarchy—to send their kids to public school in her city of San Francisco.
“I thought the lightbulb would go off, and people would see the hypocrisy if I just made it clear in a calm, nice way. But they didn’t, because the hypocrisy, in a sense, is the point.”
“This pose of wokeness, it’s a cloak they wrap themselves in to signal virtue … to hide greed, corruption, keeping all the good stuff for themselves,” she said.
“It’s this costume that the left, liberal elite wraps around themselves to say, ‘I care about social justice. I care about all these causes. I am a good person.’ If you threaten to expose that, you need to be banished.”
Sacrificed Career for Speaking Out
Around the time of the new year in 2022, Sey was told that there was no longer a place for her at the company.
“You can’t be the CEO because of the things you’ve been saying and doing. Therefore, you can’t sit in your current chair because that is the role that ultimately becomes the CEO, so you need to leave,” Sey said she was told.
She was offered a $1 million severance package, which she decided to turn down because it would come with the signing of a nondisclosure agreement.
“What the nondisclosure agreement would require is that I never speak about the terms of my ousting. I was not OK with that,” she said.
In February, Sey resigned from her post at Levi Strauss & Co. after almost 23 years with the company.
The Epoch Times reached out to Levi Strauss & Co. for comment.
Sey said the illiberalism that has traveled from college campuses into companies and taken hold of corporations across the country is “incredibly dangerous.”
“If you insist on a culture where free speech is not tolerated, not only is it non-inclusive, which is problematic in and of itself, but I actually think it’s fraught and rife with the potential for corruption and fraud, like we’ve seen with Theranos and FTX and Enron,” she said,
Theranos, a company that claimed to provide blood testing lab services with a single drop of blood, defrauded its investors in a multimillion-dollar scheme. Its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was recently sentenced to 11 years in prison.
FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, recently went bankrupt along with more than 130 affiliate companies due to insufficient liquidity. FTX users are potentially facing $8 billion in cumulative losses, while investors in the company are likely to lose their entire investment as a result of the bankruptcy.
Enron, a Texas-based energy-trading company, went bankrupt in 2001 due to fraudulent accounting practices and conflicts of interest. Within a year, Enron’s stock price plummeted from about $90 per share to 26 cents per share, which caused billion-dollar losses to investors, thousands of job losses, and the liquidation of more than $2 billion in pension plans.
“There were people in those companies who knew what was going on, but they didn’t feel they could say anything,” Sey said.
“If you cannot have a conversation in the company about what is working and what is not working, what is true and what is not, you can’t innovate. You can’t move forward,” she said. “It stands in the way of progress when we can’t have these conversations because we’re all just adhering to propaganda.”
“It is a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment,” Sey added.
Being “woke” during the 1940s through the beginning of the 1960s meant “being awake or alert to the fact that there was racial inequality, and being part of the movement to change that,” Sey said. “It’s admirable, I have no issue with that.”
However, in the last 10 or 15 years, and especially in the last three to five years, those beliefs have been corrupted and commodified “into an ideology which can never be questioned,” such as gender ideology, race ideology, or body positivity, Sey explained.
Sey said that she was very supportive of transgender people working in her team. “I would never want a person to be discriminated against for anything, including being unvaccinated.”
But someone who questions whether an 11-year-old should be on puberty blockers, when there is no research on the mid- to long-term impacts of this therapy, is considered evil and must be banished for violating this ideology, Sey said.
“[Wokeism] has become religious in nature. Woke capitalism is really just an attempt to profit off of this ideology and the passion behind this ideology amongst primarily Gen Z and millennial consumers,” she said.
Another example of ideology that cannot be questioned is the idea of “body positivity,” which touts that the size of the body does not affect its health, Sey said.
“We couldn’t say during COVID that it was dangerous to be overweight. I said it, and that made me a fat-phobe,” she said.
“We can’t say that, because the mantra is ‘healthy at any size.’ It’s ideological. And you have to be pure in the belief of that ideology, or you are evil and must be shunned.”
