Authored by Emma Suttie via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The edible insect industry is booming. And although the thought of eating bugs may be unappealing, insect protein is already being used for aquaculture, livestock feed, pet foods, and many products intended for human consumption. Insects are also being hailed as a possible solution to world hunger as increasing populations, and limited resources become a growing concern, and food industries are compelled to find viable alternatives.

The French biotech firm Ÿnsect has just announced plans to construct a global network of insect farms, significantly ramping up production. Ÿnsect will soon boast the world’s largest vertical insect farm in Amiens, France. The company says the vertical farm model allows the production of more protein using less space and fewer resources. The automated facility is the second in France and claims it will manufacture 20,000 tons of insect-based foods annually.

In December 2022, the company announced it was expanding into the U.S. and Mexico to build insect ingredient production facilities, pushing into two substantial new markets. Ÿnsect also signed a deal with the U.S. flour milling company Ardent Mills to build a factory next to one of its U.S.-Midwest sites, expanding its reach into new territory.

Insects for Human Consumption

For the past decade, Ÿnsect has produced insects used as nutritional additives in pet foods and to feed fish and livestock. That all changed, however, when in early 2021, the European Food Safety Agency declared that mealworms—used whole or as a powder— were deemed safe for human consumption. Ever since, Ÿnsect has been selling powders for baked goods, sports nutrition products, pasta, meat, and meat alternatives—and business is thriving.

Type of Insects

The most popular insects in the edible market intended for humans are black soldier flies, grasshoppers, mealworms, silkworms, and crickets.

Ÿnsect uses two types of mealworms which are the beetle larvae of the Molitor mealworm (also known as Tenebrio molitor) and the Buffalo mealworm (Alphitobius diaperinus).

The FDA

Back in the U.S., we are already eating bugs, mostly unintentionally. According to FDA guidelines, a certain amount of insect parts are, although not desirable, allowed in the foods we eat. The Food and Drug Administration’s Defect Levels Handbook states that certain “natural and unavoidable defects” are allowed in our food and, supposedly, don’t pose threats to humans.

For example, any macaroni and cheese product may contain as many as 225 insect fragments or more per 225 grams of food. Peanut butter allows 30 or more insect fragments up to 100 grams, and wheat flour allows 75 or more insect fragments per 50 grams. Interestingly, the FDA categorizes the presence of insect parts in foods as ‘insect filth,’ and other things it allows in our foods are mold, Drosophila fly eggs, and ‘rodent filth’, which includes hairs and feces. The list is comprehensive and a sobering reminder that we are already consuming insects and many more things we might not have imagined. Simply put, it is all but impossible to keep these contaminants out of our food entirely.

The FDA has long classified insects as ‘filth’, but as we usher in a new era of edible insects, they might want to revise their classification from insects being something it tolerates in the food supply to something people might someday wish to consume.

This disconnect was observed in an article by Marie Boyd, a law professor at the University of South Carolina Law School. In her article entitled “Cricket Soup: A Critical Examination of the Regulation of Insects as Food,” she explains that although the FDA has devoted significant attention to insects as undesirable defects in human food, it has given little attention to insects as human food. She says that, culturally, insects are not commonly considered food in the United States partially because the FDA has categorized insects as ‘filth’ under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA). She concludes that by recognizing insects as food, the FDA may help to facilitate greater acceptance of insects as a food source by the general public.

Read more here…

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

Raisi’s visit to Beijing, the first for an Iranian president in 20 years, represents Tehran’s wholesale ‘Pivot to the East’ and China’s recognition of Iran’s centrality to its BRI plans…

The visit of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Beijing and his face-to- face meeting with counterpart Xi Jinping is a groundbreaking affair in more ways than one.

Raisi, the first Iranian president to officially visit China in 20 years, led an ultra high-level political and economic delegation, which included the new Central Bank governor and the Ministers of Economy, Oil, Foreign Affairs, and Trade.

The fact that Raisi and Xi jointly supervised the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements ranging from agriculture, trade, tourism and environmental protection to health, disaster relief, culture and sports, is not even the major take away.

This week’s ceremonial sealing of the Iran-China comprehensive strategic partnership marks a key evolution in the multipolarity sphere: two Sovereigns – both also linked by strategic partnerships with Russia – imprinting to their domestic audiences and also to the Global South their vision of a more equitable, fair and sustainable 21st century which completely bypasses western dictates.

Beijing and Tehran first established their comprehensive strategic partnership when Xi visited Iran in 2016 – only one year after the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iranian nuclear deal.

In 2021, Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year cooperation deal which translated the comprehensive partnership into practical economic and cultural developments in several fields, especially energy, trade and infrastructure. By then, not only Iran (for decades) but also China were being targeted by unilateral US sanctions.

Here is a relatively independent analysis of the challenges and prospects of the 25-year deal. And here is an enlightening perspective from neighboring Pakistan, also a strategic partner of China.

Iran: gotta modernize everything

Beijing and Tehran are already actively cooperating in the construction of selected lines of Tehran’s subway, the Tehran-Isfahan high-speed railway, and of course joint energy projects. Chinese tech giant Huawei is set to help Tehran to build a framework for a 5G telecom network.

Raisi and Xi, predictably, stressed increased joint coordination at the UN and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), of which Iran is the newest member, as well as a new drive along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

While there was no explicit mention of it, underlying all these initiatives is the de-dollarization of trade – in the framework of the SCO but also the multipolar BRICS group of states. Iran is set to become one of the new members of BRICS+, a giant step to be decided in their upcoming summit in South Africa next August.

There are estimates in Tehran that Iran-China annual trade may reach over $70 billion in the mid-term, which will amount to triple the current figures.

When it comes to infrastructure building, Iran is a key BRI partner. The geostrategy of course is hard to match: a 2,250 km coastline encompassing the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Sea of Oman and the Caspian Sea – and huge land borders with Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Every think tank in China sees how Iran is irreplaceable, not only in terms of BRI land corridors, but also the Maritime Silk Road.

Chabahar Port may be a prime Iran-India affair, as part of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – thus directly linked to the Indian vision of a Silk Road, extending to Central Asia.

But Chinese port developers do have other ideas, focused on alternative ports along the Persian Gulf and in the Caspian Sea. That will boost shipping connections to Central Asia (Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan), Russia and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan).

And that makes perfect sense when one combines port terminal development with the modernization of Iran’s railways – all the way to high-speed rail.

An even more revolutionary development would be China coordinating the BRI connection of an Iranian corridor with the already in progress 3,200 km-long China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), from Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar port in the Indian Ocean.

That seemed perfectly plausible when Pakistani Prime Minister  Imran Khan was still in power, before being ousted by a lawfare coup. The key of the whole enterprise is to build badly needed infrastructure in Balochistan, on both sides of the border. On the Pakistani side, that would go a long way to smash CIA-fed “insurgents” of the Balochistan Liberation Army kind, get rid of unemployment, and put trade in charge of economic development.

Afghanistan of course enters the equation – in the form of a China-Afghan-Iran corridor linked to CPEC. Since September 2021, Beijing has explained to the Taliban, in detail, how they may profit from an infrastructure corridor – complete with railway, highway and pipeline – from Xinjiang, across the Wakhan corridor in eastern Afghanistan, through the Hindu Kush, all the way to Iran.

The core of multipolarity

Iran is perfectly positioned for a Chinese-propelled boom in high-speed cargo rail, connecting Iran to most of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan).

That means, in practice, cool connectivity with a major logistics cluster: the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Khorgos, only 330 km from Almaty on the Kazakh-China border, and only four hours from Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital.

If China pulls that off, it would be a sort of BRI Holy Grail, interconnecting China and Iran via Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nothing less than several corridors in one.

All that is about to happen as the Islamic Revolution in Iran celebrates its 44th year.

What is already happening now, geopolitically, and fully recognized by China, might be defined as the full rejection of an absurdity: the collective west treating Iran as a pariah or at best a subjugated neo-colony.

With the diverse strands of the Resistance embedded in the Islamic Revolution finally consolidated, it looks like history is finally propelling Iran as one of the key poles of the most complex process at work in the 21st century: Eurasia integration.

So 44 years after the Islamic Revolution, Iran enjoys strategic partnerships with the three top BRICS: China, Russia and India.

Likely to become one of the first new members of BRICS+, Iran is the first West Asian state to become a full member of the SCO, and is clinching a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).

Iran is a major strategic partner of both BRI, led by China, and the INSTC, alongside Russia and India.

With the JCPOA all but dead, and all western “promises” lying in the dust, Tehran is consolidating its pivot back to the East at breakneck speed.

What Raisi and Xi sealed in Beijing heralds Chinese pre-eminence all across West Asia – keenly perceived in Beijing as a natural consequence of recognizing and honoring Iran’s regional centrality.

Iran’s “Look East” strategy could not be more compatible with BRI – as an array of BRI projects will accelerate Iran’s economic development and consolidate its inescapable role when it comes to trade corridors and as an energy provider.

During the 1980s Tehran was ruled by a “Neither East nor West” strategy – faithful to the tenets of the Islamic Revolution. That has now evolved, pragmatically, into “Look East.” Tehran did try to “Look West” in good faith, but what the US government did with the JCPOA – from its murder to “maximum pressure” to its aborted resuscitation – was quite a historical lesson.

What Raisi and Xi have just demonstrated in Beijing is the Sovereign way forward. The three leaders of Eurasia integration – China, Russia and Iran – are fast on their way to consolidate the core of multipolarity.    

Millions of metric tons of plastic are produced worldwide every year. While half of this plastic waste is recycled, incinerated, or discarded into landfills, a significant portion of what remains eventually ends up in our oceans.

In fact, many pieces of ocean plastic waste have come together to create a vortex of plastic waste thrice the size of France in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii.

Where does all of this plastic come from? In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Freny Fernandes and Louis Lugas Wicaksono used data from a research paper by Lourens J.J. Meijer and team to highlight the top 10 countries emitting plastic pollutants in the waters surrounding them.

Plastic’s Ocean Voyage

First, let’s talk about how this plastic waste reaches the oceans in the first place.

Most of the plastic waste found in the deep blue waters comes from the litter in parks, beaches, or along the storm drains lining our streets. These bits of plastic waste are carried into our drains, streams, and rivers by wind and rainwater runoff.

The rivers then turn into plastic superhighways, transporting the plastic to the oceans.

A large additional chunk of ocean plastic comes from damaged fishing nets or ghost nets that are directly discarded into the high seas.

Countries Feeding the Plastic Problem

Some might think that the countries producing or consuming the most plastic are the ones that pollute the oceans the most. But that’s not true.

According to the study, countries with a smaller geographical area, longer coastlines, high rainfall, and poor waste management systems are more likely to wash plastics into the sea.

For example, China generates 10 times the plastic waste that Malaysia does. However, 9% of Malaysia’s total plastic waste is estimated to reach the ocean, in comparison to China’s 0.6%.

The Philippines—an archipelago of over 7,000 islands, with a 36,289 kilometer coastline and 4,820 plastic emitting rivers—is estimated to emit 35% of the ocean’s plastic.

In addition to the Philippines, over 75% of the accumulated plastic in the ocean is reported to come from the mismanaged waste in Asian countries including India, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Thailand.

The only non-Asian country to make it to this top 10 list, with 1,240 rivers including the Amazon, is Brazil.

The Path to a Plastic-free Ocean

The first, and most obvious, way to reduce plastic accumulation is to reduce the use of plastic. Lesser production equals lesser waste.

The second step is managing the plastic waste generated, and this is where the challenge lies.

Many high-income countries generate high amounts of plastic waste, but are either better at processing it or exporting it to other countries. Meanwhile, many of the middle-income and low-income countries that both demand plastics and receive bulk exports have yet to develop the infrastructure needed to process it.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Years before a gigantic white spy balloon from China captured America’s attention, a top Chinese aerospace scientist was keenly tracking the path of an unmanned airship making its way across the globe.

On a real-time map, the white blimp appeared as a blinking red dot, although in real life its size was formidable, weighing several tons and measuring 328 feet (100 meters) in length—about 80 feet longer than a Boeing 747-8, one of the largest passenger aircraft in the world.

“Look, here’s America,” the vessel’s chief architect, Wu Zhe, told the state-run newspaper Nanfang Daily. He excitedly pointed to a red line marking the airship’s journey at about 65,000 feet in the air, noting that in 2019, that flight was setting a world record.

Named “Cloud Chaser,” the airship had been flying for just shy of a month over three oceans and three continents, including what appears to be Florida. At the time of Wu’s interview in August, the airship was hovering above the Pacific Ocean, days away from completing its mission.

Wu, a veteran aerospace researcher, has played a key role in advancing the Chinese regime in what it describes as the “near space” race, referring to the layer of the atmosphere sitting between 12 and 62 miles above the earth. This region, which is too high for jets but too low for satellites, had been deemed ripe for exploitation in the regime’s bid to achieve military dominance.

Despite having existed for decades, the regime’s military balloon program came into the spotlight recently when the United States shot down a high-altitude surveillance balloon that drifted across the country for a week and hovered above multiple sensitive U.S. military sites. That balloon, the size of three buses, was smaller than Cloud Chaser.

The U.S. and Canadian militaries have since taken down three flying objects over North American airspace, although President Joe Biden on Feb. 16 said those are likely linked to private companies.

Wu is turning 66 this month. He has ties to at least four of the six Chinese entities Washington recently sanctioned for supporting Beijing’s sprawling military balloon program, which the U.S. administration said has reached over 40 countries on five continents.

As a specialist in aircraft design, Wu has helped develop the Chinese regime’s homegrown fighter jets and stealth technology during his more than three decades in the aerospace field, taking home at least one award for his contribution to the military.

He was the vice president at Beihang University in Beijing, a prestigious state-run aeronautics school, until he voluntarily gave up the title for teaching and research in 2004, and he once served on the scientific advisory committee for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Armaments Department, a now-dissolved agency in charge of equipping the Chinese military.

Public records show that Wu is well-connected in the aerospace field, with stakes in many aviation firms. He is the chairman of Beijing-based Eagles Men Aviation Science, one of the six firms that, along with its branch in Shanxi, Washington has named as culprits in the balloon sanctions.

Both Beihang and the Harbin Institute of Technology, Wu’s alma mater and dubbed “China’s MIT,” are on a U.S. trade blacklist, the former for aiding China’s military rocket and unmanned air vehicle systems, and the latter for using U.S. technology to support Chinese missile programs.

‘Silent Killer’

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long vied for dominance in near space, which Chinese scientists see as a region for a variety of applications, from high-altitude balloons to hypersonic missiles.

From high above, there’s a wealth of information that an aerostat, equipped with an electronic surveillance system, can intercept and turn into an intelligence asset.

“If you’re flying a balloon that is 100,000 feet up in the air, you’ve got … visibility on the ground of hundreds and hundreds of miles over several states, because it’s up so high,” said Art Thompson, co-founder of California aerospace company Sage Cheshire Aerospace. During his three decades in the aerospace industry, Thomspon has worked on the B-2 stealth bomber and was technical director for the Red Bull Stratos project that broke the record for the highest balloon flight and the largest manned balloon.

“Whether it’s phone data, radio data, transmissions from aircraft, as to what the airplanes are, who owns it, all that data is available,” Thompson said.

As early as the 1970s, efforts were underway at the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences to explore high-altitude balloons, according to a state media report. Lacking the aid of computers, Chinese researchers drew inspiration from German and Japanese aerospace books and cut up newspapers to piece together prototypes.

The result was a helium balloon with an aluminum basket, altogether about the size of a typical hot air balloon. The team triumphantly named it HAPI and flew it into the stratosphere in 1983 to observe signals from a neutron star.

For the Chinese military, there’s high strategic value in aerostats, a technology that was in use as early as the late 1700s by the French as lookouts. Compared to airplanes or satellites, balloons are cheaper and easier to maneuver, can carry heavier payloads and cover a wider area, and are harder to detect, two regular columnists wrote in a 2021 article for PLA Daily, the Chinese military’s official newspaper. They consume less energy, allowing them to loiter in a target area for an extended period. And critically, they are often not caught by radars, so they can easily evade an enemy’s air defense system or be classified as UFOs.

Read more here…

Authored by Jillian Schneider via RealClear Wire,

A Virginia school board is considering revising its policies on after-school clubs following conflict over a new “After School Satan Club.”

The Chesapeake Public School Board previously allowed the Satan club to meet on school property, stipulating it pay over $600 for security for each meeting, something the district’s policy allows, local media reports.

The likelihood of demonstrations is part of what makes securing the event so expensive, as Satan clubs are frequently protested. Last January, an Ohio superintendent was even reprimanded by the attorney general for discouraging parents from protesting the Satan club.

However, Chesapeake’s school board put a temporary hold on any non-sanctioned school clubs as it considers revisions to its policy. Among the proposed changes:

• Security costs must be paid by an organization in advance. 

• The school district determines the number of officers needed for security. 

• Promotional materials cannot include the school or facility name without permission from the Office of Student Activities and Facility Use. 

At Monday’s board meeting, which included a discussion of the proposed revisions, community members didn’t shy away from expressing their views. 

“If this club meets, I plan on removing my daughter from school and finding a private alternative,” declared Steve Scheerbaum, a local parent.  

Another said limiting the club’s access to public property would be unconstitutional.  

“I sincerely hope that the Satanic Temple takes this city to court for this blatant disregard of the constitution,” said another resident.  

The Chesapeake school board is scheduled to vote on the proposed policy revisions at its Feb. 27 meeting. 

In the meantime, Superintendent Jared Cotton assured the community the board wouldn’t discriminate against religious groups.  

“It’s important for us to point out that the groups in particular that we’ve been discussing over the last couple of months are outside groups, not school-sponsored,” he explained. “We do have groups who ask to use our facility from time to time but we have to treat all groups fairly.” 

After-School Satan Club, an initiative of The Satanic Temple, “exists to provide a safe and inclusive alternative to the religious clubs that use threats of eternal damnation to convert school children to their belief system.”  

Satan clubs market themselves as an alternative to the Christian evangelical Good News Club, often targeting schools that already have a Christian club. 

“They’re opposed to our views and they’re trying to counter and even undermine our presence there so I’m concerned in that regard,” said Chris Williams, a Christian pastor in Chesapeake. “I think the wrong kind of attention could force the school board to say we can’t do any of these clubs.”  

Fred Pry, associate vice president of USA Ministries for Child Evangelism Fellowship, was more optimistic. 

“The reality is, parents are the gatekeepers for all the clubs in schools,” he said. “All of them need permission slips signed by the parents so parents hold the power. Parents are the ones who control the Satan clubs because if no children sign up, Satan clubs are not going to exist.” 

Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,

In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler’s seminal book “War Is A Racket” warned of the dangers of the US military-industrial complex, more than 25 years before the outgoing US President Eisenhower implored the world to “guard against” the same thing.

One of the most decorated soldiers in US military history, Butler knew what he was talking about, famously writing that war is “…conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

While he lamented the loss of his fallen comrades and despite the gongs he received for defending his country, Butler came to understand that he was actually a “high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” Later, the historian Antony C. Sutton proved that Butler was right.

When the US administration of George Bush passed its Foreign Operations Appropriation Law in 1991, it ended all US credit to the former, thriving socialist republic of Yugoslavia. At the time the perception on the Hill was that Yugoslavia was no longer required as a buffer zone between the NATO states and their former Warsaw Pact adversaries, so its independent socialism was no longer tolerated.

The US military industrial complex, that Butler and Eisenhower told everyone to tackle, effectively destabilised the entire Balkan region, destroyed hitherto relatively peaceful countries and then fuelled the resultant wars with its pet Islamist terrorists. Ably assisted by the World Bank and the IMF.

So-called “assistance,” via the Train and Equip Program, gave US taxpayers the opportunity to funnel $500M to private security contractors like DynCorp. DynCorp put taxpayer’s money to use, seemingly by training terrorists and child trafficking to paedophiles.

The US and its Western allies’ military industrial complex pulled off more or less the same trick in Iraq, Libya and nearly in Syria. In hindsight this doesn’t appear to have been a very good idea. That is, if you think wars are fought for the reasons we are told.

Having bombed Iraq into the stone age, to stop its regime producing the WMDs it didn’t have, the US then “rescued” the country, from the horrific violence and starvation sanctions the US government itself visited upon the Iraqi people, by establishing the US led coalition’s puppet Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) government. Once installed, the CPA did things like award US engineering firm Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) a ‘sole source contract’ to fix and operate all of Iraq’s oil wells.

That US Vice President Dick Cheney, who lied passionately about Iraqi WMD, was also in receipt of an annual $2M stipend from KBR was just a coincidence. As was the massive boost to the value of his Halliburton shareholdings as a direct result of the war he was instrumental in starting.

When the former UK Prime Minister Teresa May OK’d missile trikes upon Syrian civilians, the fact that her husband made millions out of it, as his investments in missile manufactures went through the roof, was also just a coincidence. In no way did she personally profit from killing children and the fact that her family continues to make a fortune by killing more children in Yemen does not undermine Theresa’s very public profile as a champion of good causes. Although, it appears, not killing children isn’t one of them.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when, once again, we discover that war, far from an impediment to business, actually improves operational margins, increases production, boosts markets and offers white collar criminal enterprises industrial scale profits.

Sure, people, including children, die in huge numbers but so what? Where there’s muck there’s brass. War certainly is a racket.

It turns out that Ukraine has been buying Russian fuel from the EU member state Bulgaria throughout the Ukraine War. An odd oversight for alleged combatants in a war. It is similar to the Ukrainian government’s decision to allow the continuing transit of Russian gas from Gazprom to EU markets through its resident pipelines.

The Russian energy giant Lukoil, whose former CEO Ravil Maganov accidentally fell out of a window a few months ago—a common problem for the wrong Russian executives—has been shipping Russian oil to its refinery in the Bulgarian port city of Burgas. The Burgas refinery is the only one in Bulgaria and the largest in the Balkans. From there the refined gas-oil (red diesel) is exported to Russia’s supposed enemy, Ukraine.

This was all being done in secret, says the Russian MSM, although this is just perception management, pro-war propaganda. There has also been a lot of nonsense written by the Western MSM, alleging that Bulgaria has been illicitly circumnavigating EU “sanctions.” Regardless of the fact that this too is monumental tripe.

There isn’t anything “secret” about it. In truth, the door was left open for Russia and Bulgaria to continue this trade, at least until the end of 2024, because the EU inserted a loophole to ensure that they could.

Presumably, the Russian government knew nothing about the massive oil shipments, which is why it remained a “secret,” according to Russian MSM.

Given that the “secrecy” narrative is total claptrap, why would both the Western and the Russian MSM want to peddle essentially the same disinformation? Let’s spend a moment to reflect upon the EU’s non-sanction sanctions shall we?

It means that third party non-EU trading nations, like Kazakhstan for instance, can ship Russian oil to the EU unhindered by the inconvenience of alleged sanctions. The sanctions are for reordering global energy flows, not ending them.

While the switch-over has plunged European citizens into an energy crisis, that’s OK. It is essential for the future of the planet that Europeans are convinced to accept ever increasing energy prices. Otherwise they might not welcome the transition to the “sustainable energy” that will make their lives much worse.

Red diesel in Ukraine is used for industrial and heavy machinery, in agriculture and manufacturing for example. It is also used for, oh I don’t know, fuelling tanks and armoured personnel carriers, mobile artillery units and stuff like that.

Stories from European news outlets that Bulgaria provides nearly 40% of Ukrainian military fuel are all nonsense because ‘reasons’. Officials have denied the evidence, such as confirmation from the former Bulgarian President, so it isn’t “officially approved” evidence. Consequently, it can safely be discounted by anyone gullible enough to do so.

Don’t forget, according to Western and Russian MSM outlets, it’s all a secret. Which may come as a relief to some, because otherwise the Russian government would have been colluding with the EU to ensure that the Ukrainian military could stay in the fight wouldn’t it?

Recently, despite apparently running out of weaponry, if you believe Western propaganda that is, Russia has launched a massive missile strike on Ukraine, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. According to Russian MSM this is part of the Russian governments efforts to undermine Ukraine’s “military capabilities.”

The fact that it ensures that Ukraine will need to be rebuilt by borrowing enormous sums from international financiers, with the diligent assistance of Gazprom investors BlackRock, is not relevant. So ignore this too please.

Gazprom sells gas to Moldova which is now going to provide gas to Ukraine via the Ukrainian transit gas pipelines that Russian bombing has accidentally missed entirely. The Moldovan government is keen to stress that this is not the gas it buys from Gazprom but is rather the gas it buys from somewhere else it hasn’t specified despite admitting that it is completely reliant upon Russian energy.

If the energy and the fuel from countries like Moldova, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan is used by the Ukrainian government’s military, which it won’t under any official circumstances whatsoever, and Gazprom gas helps keep Ukrainian’s lights on, despite the missile strikes, it looks like the Russian government’s objective is to keep Ukraine at war while hobbling it just enough to ensure it can’t win.

This can’t be true because NATO appears to be doing exactly the same thing and Russia and NATO are enemies. Although NATO’s not quite enough assistance differs from the Russian governments not quite enough aggression, it essentially amounts to the same thing.

The piddly number of tanks offered to Ukraine by its NATO “partners,” the reluctance from NATO to give Ukraine military aircraft and the tepid reception for Ukraine’s more recent pleas to join NATO, appears to signal that NATO isn’t prepared to provide, or perhaps isn’t capable of providing, the military support Ukraine would need for victory. But it is seemingly willing to give it just enough old used scrap to keep it loosing.

This means Ukrainians, the new Russian populations in the Donbas, and troops on both sides, though primarily the Ukrainians, will continue to die while the geopolitical landscape continues to shift around them. Meanwhile the military industrial complex and the billionaires it enriches, such as Elon Musk, are making a fortune. When the conflict is concluded, multinational corporations on both sides will be awarded the contracts to rebuild the stuff their government partners have just destroyed.

Butler wrote:

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted.

While some might think it wise to add politician’s to that list, for some unfathomable reason, far more people seem to think this is a good point but that it isn’t a serious proposal. Why not? Do they not get it, do they not understand what Butler, Eisenhower, Sutton and many more like them have been trying to tell them for nearly a century?

What is it about the military industrial complex that they assume to be inevitable? Why on Earth do they think it is a “necessary evil?”

It is only necessary because millions, perhaps billions, of us accept that war is the “failure” of foreign policy and diplomacy, instead of understanding the obvious fact that it is the extension of foreign policy. As we are seeing right now with the warmongering posturing of the West and China, war is the intended product of foreign policy and sledgehammer diplomacy.

Wars don’t just “happen” by accident. They are planned, engineered and delivered as required. Our’s and our children’s deaths mean nothing to the people who we allow to lead us into war. They don’t have skin in the game but they should and we have the power to make sure that they do. All we have to do is refuse to fight. It really isn’t rocket science. Obedience is not a virtue.

But we won’t because we continue to fall for the same old lies, time and time again. We continue to imagine, like amnesiac slaves, that we can only be led to a better future by following another bunch of parasitic criminals.

Around and around we go: blowing up and starving children to death, condemning pensioners to freezing fuel poverty and accepting that we might just have to sacrifice ourselves and our loved ones along the way.

When the warmongers next press gang our sons and daughters into dying for their ambitions, we will again say it is in a good cause: for the defence of our country, our culture or our way of life.

It isn’t, it never was and it never will be as long as we continue to go along with it.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he has continued to keep his promise of transparency with regard to the company’s past behavior

Thanks to the revelations in the so-called  ‘Twitter Files’, we have seen clear evidence that the FBI and other three-letter agencies worked directly with various social media entities to suppress perfectly “lawful speech” for purely political reasons.

Twitter suppressed or removed content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was under government pressure to purge such content and its purveyors from the platform, though most of the time it was cooperating with the censorship requests willingly, the documents indicate.

And yet, as Matt Taibbi writes, these extremely newsworthy revelations…

2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the “U.S. intelligence community”: pic.twitter.com/njklzvX0n1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

…have produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months.

Something he discussed with Joe Rogan this past week…

However, as Taibbi notes, House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.

The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!

And so, Taibbi throws down the gauntlet in the latest ‘Twitter Files’, “purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area”…

5. Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?

Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like:

• “Rand Paul visit excitement”

• “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)”

• Being followed by rival Eric Brakey

• Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.”

Taibbi notes that King’s office declined comment. If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like:

Read the full (rather lengthy) spreadsheet here in a Google doc to see if you’re on ‘the list’.

Yes, the Maine Senator demanded @ZeroHedge (and 100s more) Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (and Facebook Groups) be instantly removed for being “suspicious”.

As one wit on Twitter responded via DM when we remarked on Senator King’s actions: “the f**king balls on these people!!”

We could not have said it better.

As Matt writes in a follow-up…

One of the funniest things about the @SenAngusKing suspicious accounts list is that they seemed to think @zerohedge is a bot. https://t.co/2jiOKvpc9o

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023

Taibbi concludes the latest tweet thread with a big reality-check slap to the face of the mainstream media

The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they’re about.

Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.

The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that’s not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.

Beginning in March, we’ll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

All of which, roughly translated, sounds like – look out MSM, there’s so much more to come that you will never get away with not covering it! We won’t hold our collectively censored breaths but with Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others on the forensic case, we suspect the run up to the 2024 election will be a little more ‘free’ than the run-up to the 2020 election.

Authored by Chris Nelson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo is sounding the alarm about a 4,400 percent increase in life-threatening conditions reported in the state to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since the 2021 rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.

In a letter dated Feb. 15, Ladapo asks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “promote transparency in health care professionals to accurately communicate the risks these vaccines pose.”

VAERS, co-managed by the FDA and CDC, documents reports of injuries and conditions related to vaccines.

“In Florida alone, we saw a 1,700 percent increase in reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400 percent in vaccine administration for the same period,” Ladapo’s letter reads. “The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased 4,400 percent. ”

“Even the H1N1 vaccine did not trigger this type of response,” reads the letter.

In 2009, during the H1N1 vaccination campaign, 1358 reports were made to the VAERS system in Florida.

After the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in 2021, 41,473 reports of adverse reactions were made to VAERS.

In his letter, Ladapo cites a study on the website of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) entitled, “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.”

The study lists documented reactions including coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell’s Palsy, and encephalitis.

“To claim these vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ while minimizing and disregarding the adverse events is unconscionable,” Ladapo’s letter to federal health officials reads.

Warning to Floridians

In addition to the letter, the Florida Department of Health has issued a health alert related to the safety of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

“The state surgeon general is notifying the health care sector and the public of a substantial increase in Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System reports from Florida after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout,” the warning reads.

VAERS relies on healthcare professionals and individuals to report adverse reactions. But some have worried that findings have been downplayed by the media and even censored by Big Tech.

In January 2022, after the number of reported COVID-19 vaccine adverse events reported hit one million, Senator Ron Johnson posted a graphic from the VAERS website to Twitter.

“Unsurprisingly, Twitter blocked my VAERS chart tweet,” Johnson wrote later in a post.

Read more here…

Authored by River Page and Brandon Gorrell via Pirate Wires (Subscribe here)

Intro by Mike Solana:

Following a viral photo series of realistic, AI-generated “sexy” women, and in the wake of a Twitch deepfake porn scandal — in which the likenesses of real women were cloned without their consent, and manipulated into pornographic images — River Page and Brandon Gorrell spoke to OnlyFans creators Aella and others about the future of artificial intelligence and sex work.   

Editor’s note: best to assume all links in this piece are Not Safe for Work (NSFW). 

-Solana

“I might just generate AI nudes of myself,” Aella told us over Zoom. 

Aella’s a sex researcher with a popular, thoughtful, and often provocative presence on Twitter. At one point, she was also one of the top OnlyFans creators, making up to $100,000 a month. “I might just say they’re AI nudes, and have it be fun,” she said. “Taking nudes is so boring. I’ve taken so many nudes, and it’s like, you stand in the same place and take another photo. I don’t understand male psychology really. Like I do, but I don’t. Guys want to see the same pair of boobs, but they want to see a different photo of the same pair of boobs over and over again. And it’s just excruciatingly boring to do on your own. But, they like it. I’d love to be able to do it more creatively. ” 

On the heels of a major deepfake scandal, the negative discourse surrounding AI-generated porn seems to have reached critical mass. Will synthetic porn meaningfully compete with human OnlyFans creators? Will creators lose control of their own likenesses, as a separate class of parasitic creators train AI on their bodies and use it to sell deepfakes without their consent? Or will AI be a boon to OnlyFans creators, enabling them to create their own synthetic nudes and videos? In this way, they could create more content than ever before. They could also create content in categories they wouldn’t have previously been able to monetize. 

HarperTheFox is an OnlyFans creator who, according to her Twitter bio, uses AI trained on her own body to create fantasies for her fans. For example, here she is using AI to give herself fox-like features, here she is skewing more masculine, and here’s an AI-generated cyberpunk-inspired nude she made, where she’s brandishing an AR-style weapon. 

Avalon, an Australian OnlyFans creator we talked to over DM, was also bullish on leveraging AI for her OnlyFans. “Real people using AI in their own likeness to create content could be an amazing game changer,” she said, “allowing them to work while hiding injuries, pregnancy, or even old age. Or they can hire employees to create and upload new content on their behalf if they need to take a break.”

It’s inevitable, but people with reach now will be able to leverage AI to keep creating.

When Hollywood is full of machine generated characters, people will still want to see movies with Brad Pitt (or “Brad Pitt”) in the@. https://t.co/S6IBmqfZgK

— ai chick 🦊 HarperTheFox (@HarperTheFox) January 30, 2023

For OnlyFans creators, there may be a new opportunity in business models that leverage AI in such a way that the creator can personalize her content by ‘shapeshifting’ on request. Content strategies that identify trending motifs and use AI to generate content that targets those signals in real time could be a huge advantage for ambitious OnlyFans creators. But others pursuing this same business model could cut them out entirely by producing this type of content without them — without a human subject at all. 

“I think they’re absolutely going to be able to do that,” Aella said. “I don’t think we’re that far from running a language model and having the perfect girlfriend. We’re already trying to get the perfect girlfriend. [For example], there’s Replika trying to bond, and make people feel warm.” 

Avalon had a different take. She’s short on prolific output, long on emotional connection and worldbuilding. “People who only want to look at boobs can find what they’re looking for on Google for free. The people who pay, they want intimacy, a sense of companionship, and entertainment,” she said. “We sell our characters and personalities as much as we sell images of our naked bodies. For better or worse, successful sex work thrives on parasocial relationships. Guys who want to replace OnlyFans creators will need to create realistic characters and find fans who connect with their creation before they’ll make any real money. Most people burn out quickly when the reality of the actual work involved hits them.” 

This might be the case for sites like MyFreeCams, Aella said, but not OnlyFans, which — if it weren’t for its robust creator identity verification protocols (more on this below) — would already be vulnerable to completely synthetic creators. “[With] MyFreeCams and other livestreaming websites, men are aware of each other, and can compete with each other. A lot of the incentive to tip comes from doing it in front of other people. It’s like peacocking. The men develop a status in the community, with the girls — 80 percent of your income can come from one or two people. So the girls have a very strong connection with the men. It’s extremely delicate. These girls will be texting with a guy all day.  

“So if you’re marketing to the very high-end, very intelligent man who needs that deep connection, sure, it’s going to be more difficult to replicate,” Aella said. “But that’s a minority of where your money comes from on OnlyFans, where you’re not allowed to see the other men. It’s structured such that it encourages you to send mass DMs that look like personalized DMs. Girls even sign up with agencies that have warehouses of people running their accounts, talking in DMs to men. These people DMing the men are not the actual OnlyFans girls. The quality of the exchange is quite low. One time I pretended to be a man and signed up to one of these girls’ OnlyFans in order to see what it was like talking to the people in the warehouse, and it was terrible! Just really bad! So with OnlyFans you’re selecting for guys who don’t need that kind of emotional connection. The guys who do need a big emotional relationship don’t have the incentive to stick around.” 

To Aella’s point, the state of mainstream entertainment is a testament to a corporation’s ability to create franchises that thrive on their fans’ parasocial relationships with their characters. K-Pop is an obvious example of top-down, high-budget worldbuilding characterized by a rotating cast of replaceable stars whose personas are meticulously developed and maintained, funded by multi-trillion dollar conglomerates who profit off obsessive fans. It seems too optimistic to assume that adult entertainment will forever be ignored by highly-funded entities who have the resources to pick off any category they want, at will.

Is there any reason OnlyFans creators should be worried that deepfake content of themselves, produced and sold by someone else, could meaningfully claim their own content’s market share? OnlyFans in particular has a system in place that seems pretty good at preventing that. Avalon described it as very strict, automated, and monitored. Even human creators can get mistakenly flagged when their appearance changes.

“If you post on OnlyFans and your makeup or a wig changes your appearance too much, your post will be flagged, prompting you to tag the creator you shared. Since AI artwork can have minor differences in facial features, even within the same character prompts, there’s a good chance an AI account will get flagged often.” 

And beyond the OnlyFans verification process, Avalon thinks most websites would be unwilling to work with AI “because of obvious litigation issues. Since AI learning uses photos of real people, you risk having an AI character who looks too similar to an actual person, so the creator will likely need to prove that their creation is not the person it resembles, and is not based on that person, because that can start falling into revenge porn legislation.”

But OnlyFans and other more ‘reputable’ adult entertainment sites aren’t the only places you can find and buy porn, and for Bombshell Barista, an OnlyFans creator from Washington, it’s not the potential competition that bothers her. She just hates the idea of it being done without her consent. On the phone, she described the experience of having her content reposted without her permission as terrifying, saying it made her feel like she’d lost control. She worries deepfakes will make this problem even worse. “When it comes to AI, I have no control over that. That’s a big issue for me.”

Rogan, a gay porn creator who does live action porn as Harlem Hookups, and animated porn as SneakyLinks, told us in a phone call that he thinks AI’s intrusion into the world of porn is inevitable, and that sex workers need to organize to make sure their content is legally protected. He even said he’s looked into getting a 3D model of his face copyrighted in hopes that this would offer him some protection against deepfake plagiarism. 

“But would it even matter, to your audience, if the people in your videos weren’t real anymore?” we asked him. “To people of a certain age, it would,” he said. But younger generations, whose porn options have included VR, animation, and gaming for as long as they’ve been old enough to be interested, will have a much easier time normalizing fully synthetic porn. 

On our read, most of the internet seems to think AI porn will wipe human-created porn out of existence. When @heartereum tweeted the viral AI-generated photorealistic bikini pics, their caption was “It is SO over.” But a few days later, Arabelle Raphael, an OnlyFans creator with nearly 400k Twitter followers, quote tweeted @heartereum’s tweet: “This is so funny because it’s obvious all these takes are from people who don’t understand sex work, and why consumers consume sex work. The looks are one thing but the intimacy and interaction are a huge thing which AI can’t really do.”

We all do seem to agree that AI will be disruptive. We just aren’t sure how, or how much yet. We suppose the OnlyFans creators, just like the rest of us, will have to wait and see. 

-River Page and Brandon Gorrell

All conversations have been edited for structure, flow, length, and brevity.