Category: zerohedge

It appears the campaign by some EU and US officials to try and ensure Russia’s Sputnik V jab stays out of Europe and Western countries isn’t going so well. 

Earlier this month it was widely reported that despite European Union leaders’ fierce public criticisms of Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, the reality is that “Behind the scenes, the bloc is turning to Moscow’s Sputnik V shot as it tries to get its stuttering efforts to vaccinate its 450 million people back on track, EU diplomatic and official sources told Reuters.” It was noted at the time that at least four EU states were seeking to make their own independent deals regardless of the unease in Brussels. 

And now on Tuesday Reuters reports “Austria is in talks with Russia to buy a million doses of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, which has yet to be approved by the European Medicines Agency,” according to a statement by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s office.

It’s predictably unleashed a storm of controversy as the conservative leader is being accused of deliberately and negligently failing to buy the max coronavirus vaccines it was allowed under the European Union’s collective purchasing scheme.

Kurz responded by suggesting Austria’s government would not be beholden to Brussels’ anti-Russia stance which should have no bearing on the science of whether or not Sputnik V is effective. He said:

“There must be no geopolitical blinkers regarding vaccines… The only thing that must count is whether the vaccine is effective and safe.”

Kurz has complained that the EU’s vaccination steering board system for determining how many jabs a country gets is opaque and unreliable, resulting in vaccines distributed “unevenly”.

Back in February, Kurz began being increasingly vocal over not being concerned about the Russian aspect: “It’s about getting a safe vaccine as quickly as possible, never mind who makes it,” he had “controversially” said in an interview with the German weekly Welt am Sonntag.

“Austria would certainly try to make production capacity available at appropriate national firms if the Russian and Chinese manufacturers secure approval and are produced in Europe… just like manufacturers from other countries.” He had explained if available he would personally be ready to receive the Russian vaccine if approved.

US Dep. of Health publicly confirmed that it pressured Brazil against Sputnik V.
We believe countries should work together to save lives. Efforts to undermine the vaccines are unethical and are costing lives.
👇https://t.co/Ga5i4zvbCt P.48 pic.twitter.com/A6wyKOkc8t

— Sputnik V (@sputnikvaccine) March 15, 2021

Slovakia is another country where talks to procure the Sputnik vaccine has unleashed a full-blown political crisis. 

As a prime example of this kind of fear-driven motivation fueling the controversy and debate, earlier this month Charles Michel, the Belgian politician who has served as President of the European Council since 2019, reiterated a commonly echoed theme among diplomats and Western officials: “We should not let ourselves be misled by China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they organize highly limited but widely publicised operations to supply vaccines to others,” he said.

Michel had vowed, “Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes.” It’s this kind of rhetoric that Austria’s Kurz is vowing will not impact his country’s sovereign decision to deal with the vaccine suppliers it wishes. 

Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

Biden was in charge of much of the “Ukraine project” during Obama’s time in office.

In recent weeks President Biden has been saying some rather mean-spirited things about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Now Russian state sources are alleging that Washington under the Biden administration is ramping up military aid to Ukraine. This comes after the media observed the Ocean Glory, a US cargo ship, began delivering 350 tonnes of military equipment, including tactical vehicles, at Ukraine’s Odessa port. Ukraine’s Dumskaya news agency said the American vessel carried at least 35 US military humvees for Ukrainian national forces.

Adding Ukraine to NATO and the EU is a long-held dream of neocons like Victoria Nuland and neoliberals like Biden. This is also important to those supporting the World Economic Forum’s desire to expand the EU and encircle Russia.

They feel such an action would disrupt any dreams of Eurasian integration which could resist their strategy to reshape the way the world is governed. Putin’s foreign policy, coupled with efforts to rebuild the Russian military, has been part of an effort by the former KGB officer to boost Russia’s standing on the world stage.

This has helped make him popular with his people even as NATO has slowly been expanding in the direction of Russia, but also makes him a thorn in the side of the NWO gang.

NATO Has Slowly Expanded Towards Russia

Interestingly, this delivery of military equipment occurred near the time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was signing Decree No. 117/2021. The decree activates the Ukraine Army to recapture and re-unify with Ukraine, the autonomous region of Crimea, and the city of Sevastopol. The military has been instructed to use “hybrid warfare” to re-conquer these former parts of Ukraine. In short, this means Ukraine declared war on Russia, certainly something it would never consider without major backing. It must be noted, his actions are in total conflict with his promise to end the now nearly seven-year-long war in eastern Ukraine that played a central role in his election in 2019. This indicates, Zelensky has continued to subordinate his government’s policies to the US- and NATO-led war drive against Russia.

One Ukrainian blogger contends the censorship of the three opposition channels in Ukraine and the surprise inspection of Ukrainian army units in Donbas link all this together and signals a resumption of the Donbas conflict. He wrote on his Telegram channel, “Protecting his rear through censorship, Zelensky ordered to start an inspection of the AFU units in Donbas in order to establish their readiness to carry out the orders of the military command.” He then went on to say, “Didn’t we warn you last year that the regime was preparing for a major war? All we had to do was wait for the green light from higher authorities.”

Upping tensions in the area is the fact the Kerch Strait Bridge, also known as the Crimean Bridge, is now a target and we will certainly see Russian moves to protect it. Comprised of a pair of Russian-constructed parallel bridges it spans the Strait of Kerch between the Taman Peninsula and the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea. The bridge complex provides for both road and rail traffic and has a length of 19 km. This makes it the longest bridge Russia has ever built.

It is difficult not to tie this to the controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project which Viktor Zubkov, chairman of the board of directors of Russia’s gas giant Gazprom, claims, will definitely be completed this year. He said on Friday, Biden’s goal is to stop the pipeline and the U.S. is now targeting anyone helping the project’s completion in any way. So far, around 90-92 percent of the work required for the project is complete. Earlier this year, Gazprom warned investors that the Nord Stream 2 project could be suspended or entirely discontinued due to extraordinary circumstances, including “political pressure.”

War In Ukraine Is About Money, Energy, And Power!

As to what really motivates the desire to turn Ukraine into a giant-killing field, several possibilities exist but money and profit should not be ruled out. Foreign policy has often been used as a tool to advance national interest which is often dictated by economics. When it comes to the economy energy is often considered the blood from which all strength flows and in the case of Europe the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipeline which after completion will carry natural gas from Russia to Germany is a bone of contention. Years ago leaders from Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania signed an open letter to the parliaments of the EU warning them against the construction of NS2 and cautioned them of how it is not a commercial project but one designed to increase their energy reliance on Moscow.

At that time, Russia’s Gazprom supplied the European Union and Turkey with a record 162 billion cubic meters of gas. Of that gas, 86 billion cubic meters flowed across Ukraine. Those opposed to the new pipeline make a strong case that “Gazprom” is not only a gas company but a platform for Russian coercion and another tool for Russia to pressure European countries. The U.S. State Department has even threatened European corporations they will likely face penalties if they participate in the construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, on the grounds that “the project undermines energy security in Europe.”

Circling back to the conflict, years ago I wrote a piece that urged America to stay out of a war in Ukraine. It warned of the major advantage Putin held by having a huge well-armed army just across the Ukrainian border and that any army cobbled together to face him would most likely be unenthusiastic and politically troubled at best. At the time President Obama had pulled out all the stops to paint Putin with a brush dipped in all the bad colors. Every Sunday in interview after interview Washington experts were paraded across the screens of the talk shows that tell Americans what is happening in our nation’s capital and every single one of them denounced Putin as a “thug and a bully.”

Ukrainian Soldiers Killed In An Unwinnable War

In that piece were accounts of reports from the front in Ukraine often buried or hidden from public view but they appeared to confirm that Ukrainian troops were being sent into a meat grinder. The drafted include men up to 60 years old with only a month of training before they reluctantly go off to the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. Putting more weapons into the hands of those unmotivated to fight for their corrupt state is merely adding fuel to this fire and doing more harm than good. Again, remember Ukraine is a financially failed state and while we can point to its potential, its massive oil and gas reserves by all rights should belong to the people and for their benefit. The IMF, however, points out that Kyiv needs billion in loans and grants just to stabilize its economy after more than twenty years of massive levels of corruption. This debt and the deep, deep hole Ukrainians have dug themselves into flows from a series of bad governments after Kyiv became independent of the Soviet Union.

Back then, the euro-zone faced a lot of problems without jumping into a proxy war against rebels in Ukraine. I use the term proxy because without the money and backing of outsiders things would most likely go quiet. The failed and bankrupt country of Ukraine would most likely break into two parts with the eastern half and its people who share strong ties with Russia aligning itself with that country and Kyiv, and the western-oriented portion of the country drifting towards stronger ties to the euro-zone. What is the big problem with such a solution? Apparently, a great deal for people like Biden in Washington that are pushing for intervention in Ukraine.

To confuse the issue and muddy the waters great efforts have been made at high levels by those advocating military action to paint Russia as an aggressor. These forces aided by the media continue to link Russias move into the majority ethnic-Russian Crimea region as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereign border. In this case, we should remember, the whole concept of sovereign borders is a little gem promoted by those in power, these borders are a creation of man and not visible to the birds flying above. This is an argument of convenience that masks deeper issues and the difference between “terrorist” and “freedom fighters” often depends on a person’s point of view. In this case, it is clearly the new American-backed government in Kyiv that is pushing to bring the eastern part of Ukraine back into the fold.

What this boils down to is that American companies want to sell and supply Europe with Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and seem willing to start a war to make it happen. Whether it is for profit or to minimize the threat of natural gas shipments to Europe being cut off and used as a key weapon in Russia’s political arsenal we cannot ignore the idea more is at play here than just doing the “right thing”. Many people in the “Tin Foil Hat” community have gone so far as to indicate they feel that America and elements of the CIA were involved or had a part in the overthrow of the former corrupt Ukraine government and its replacement with another corrupt but more pro Europe regime. At the time even America’s Vice President, Joe Biden, saw his son join the board of a private Ukrainian oil and natural gas company. One thing is clear, not only those involved in selling energy to Europe will profit from this but also the military-industrial complex stands to gain.

The odds of U.S. LNG significantly displacing Russian natural gas shipped by pipeline are slim. Piped gas sells at a large discount to LNG, which must be cooled to liquid form, shipped overseas, and turned back into its gaseous form. Poland recently received its first shipment of U.S. LNG last month from what is currently the only export facility in the lower 48 states. While LNG trade between the United States and Europe would help Trump in his bid to reduce the U.S. trade deficit it also stands to improve energy security among the European countries by giving them an alternative to Russian gas. Everyone must concede it is not a cure-all, Russia can easily cut prices and adjust terms to maintain its dominant position in the European gas market and European countries are likely to continue buying most of their gas from the lowest-cost supplier.

Bottom-line, Russia has traditionally been the major supplier of European gas. But it charges high prices, often in the form of long-term contracts linked to the price of oil. The overwhelming dependence on Russian gas leaves European countries from a national security standpoint vulnerable to a cutoff of crucial natural gas supplies. This would be devastating to their economies at any time but even more so in the depths of winter. For these reasons, it makes sense for Europe to consider alternative supplies and open its doors to U.S. LNG but due to Ukraine’s history of corruption flooding the country with weapons and using the people of Ukraine as pawns in this high stakes game violates all standards of human decency.

Americans should also be aware that our current policy drives Russia towards the East and into the open arms of China. This creates even more problems long-term than it solves short-term and borders on the edge of insanity. The war in Ukraine has not developed organically but appears to be the product of meddling. Mercenaries and money from America appear to be backing and propping up Kyiv with America acting as the “champion” for this failed bankrupt country.  The best way for the West and Kyiv to prove they are on the right path is by letting the eastern part of the country seceded and then making Kyiv a center of economic and democratic success.

I reiterate the stand taken in April 2018, the Ukraine war is about money, energy, and power! Since the latest ceasefire agreement in the war in Donbas was implemented in July 2020, it appears few if anyone is being killed. This indicates rocking the boat is a bad idea.

We can only hope those hyping the recent events in Ukraine saying the decree signed by Zelensky will someday be looked back upon at the beginning of World War III are overly pessimistic, after all, when you place two major military powers face to face what could go wrong?

Authored (somewhat satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us? No, not those who haven’t been “vaccinated” yet. Us. The “Covidiots.” The “Covid deniers.” The “science deniers.” The “reality deniers.” Those who refuse to get “vaccinated,” ever.

There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so. We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.

They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.

So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation. In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)

In Israel, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and other New Normal countries, they have already begun the segregation process. In the UK, it’s just a matter of time. The WEF, WHO, EU, and other transnational entities are helping to streamline the new segregation system, which, according to the WEF, “will need to be harmonized by a normative body, such as the WHO, to ensure that is ethical.”

Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.) In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.) In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

In the USA, we are being banned by universities. Our children are being banned from public schools. In New York, the new “Excelsior Pass” will allow New Normals to attend cultural and sports events (and patronize bars and restaurants, eventually) secure in the knowledge that the Unvaccinated have been prevented from entering or segregated in an “Unvaccinated Only” section. The pass system, designed by IBM, which, if history is any guide, is pretty good at designing such systems (OK, technically, it was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, IBM’s Nazi-Germany subsidiary), was launched this past weekend to considerable fanfare.

And this is only the very beginning.

Israel’s “Green Pass” is the model for the future, which makes sense, in a sick, fascistic kind of way. When you’re already an apartheid state, what’s a little more apartheid? Here’s a peek at what that looks like …

OK, I know what the New Normals are thinking. They’re thinking I’m “misleading” people again. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t really segregation, and certainly nothing like “medical apartheid.”

After all (as the New Normals will sternly remind me), no one is forcing us to get “vaccinated.” If we choose not to, or can’t for medical reasons, all we have to do is submit to a “test” — you know, the one where they ram that 9-inch swab up into your sinus cavities — within 24 hours before we want to go out to dinner, or attend the theater or a sports event, or visit a museum, or attend a university, or take our children to school or a playground, and our test results will serve as our “vaccine passports!” We just present them to the appropriate Covid Compliance Officer, and (assuming the results are negative, of course) we will be allowed to take part in New Normal society just as if we’d been “vaccinated.”

Either way, “vaccine” or “test,” the New Normal officials will be satisfied, because the tests and passes are really just stage props. The point is the display of mindless obedience. Even if you take the New Normals at their word, if you are under 65 and in relatively good health, getting “vaccinated” is more or less pointless, except as a public display of compliance and belief in the official Covid-19 narrative (the foundation stone of the New Normal ideology). Even the high priests of their “Science” confess that it doesn’t prevent you spreading the “plague.” And the PCR tests are virtually meaningless, as even the WHO finally admitted. (You can positive-PCR-test a pawpaw fruit … but you might want to be careful who you tell if you do that.)

In contrast to the “vaccine” and the “test” themselves, the forced choice between them is not at all meaningless. It is no accident that both alternatives involve the violation of our bodies, literally the penetration of our bodies. It doesn’t really matter what is in the “vaccines” or what “results” the “tests” produce. The ritual is a demonstration of power, the power of the New Normals (i.e., global capitalism’s new face) to control our bodies, to dominate them, to violate them, psychologically and physically.

Now, don’t get all excited, my “conspiracy theorist” friends. I haven’t gone full QAnon just yet. Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are not sitting around together, sipping adrenochrome on George Soros’ yacht, dreaming up ways to rape people’s noses. This stuff is built into the structure of the system. It is a standard feature of totalitarian societies, cults, churches, self-help groups, and … well, human society, generally.

Being forced to repeat a physical action which only makes sense within a specific ideology reifies that ideology within us. There is nothing inherently diabolical about this. It is a basic socialization technology. It is how we socialize our children. It is why we conduct weddings, baptisms, and bar mitzvahs. It is how we turn young men and women into soldiers. It is how actors learn their blocking and their lines. It is why the Nazis held all those rallies. It is why our “democracies” hold elections. It is also basic ceremonial magic … but that’s a topic for a different column.

The issue, at the moment, is the Unvaccinated Question, and the public rituals that are being performed to make the New Normal ideology “reality,” and what to do about those of us who refuse to participate in those rituals, who refuse to forswear “old normal” reality and convert to New Normalism so that we can function in society without being segregated, criminalized, or “diagnosed” as “sociopathic” or otherwise psychiatrically disordered.

For us “conspiracy-theorizing reality deniers,” there is no getting around this dilemma. This isn’t Europe in the 1930s. There isn’t anywhere to emigrate to … OK, there is, temporarily, in some of the US states that have been staging rebellions, and other such “old normal” oases, but how long do you think that will last? They’re already rolling out the “mutant variants,” and God only knows what will happen when the long-term effects of the “vaccines” kick in.

No, for most of us denizens of the global capitalist empire, it looks like the New Normal is here to stay. So, unless we are prepared to become New Normals, we are going to have to stand and fight. It is going to get rather ugly, and personal, but there isn’t any way to avoid that. Given that many New Normals are our friends and colleagues, or even members of our families, it is tempting to believe that they will “come to their senses,” that “this is all just a hysterical overreaction,” and that “everything will go back to normal soon.”

This would be a monumental error on our parts … very possibly a fatal error.

Totalitarian movements, when they reach this stage, do not simply stop on their own. They continue to advance toward their full expressions, ultimately transforming entire societies into monstrous mirror-images of themselves, unless they are opposed by serious resistance. There is a window at the beginning when such resistance has a chance. That window is still open, but it is closing, fast. I can’t tell you how best to resist, but I can tell you it starts with seeing things clearly, and calling things, and people, exactly what they are.

Let’s not make the same mistake that other minorities have made throughout history when confronted with a new totalitarian ideology. See the New Normals for what they are, maybe not deep down in their hearts, but what they have collectively become a part of, because it is the movement that is in control now, not the rational individuals they used to be. Above all, recognize where this is headed, where totalitarian movements are always headed. (See. e.g., Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.)

No, the Unvaccinated are not the Jews and the New Normals are not flying big Swastika flags, but totalitarianism is totalitarianism, regardless of which Goebbelsian Big Lies, and ideology, and official enemies it is selling. The historical context and costumes change, but its ruthless trajectory remains the same.

Today, the New Normals are presenting us with a “choice,” (a) conform to their New Normal ideology or (b) social segregation. What do you imagine they have planned for us tomorrow?

Coming after a ‘successful’ weekend in which sanctions-beleaguered Iran hailed its signing a major 25-year infrastructure and investment agreement with China, Iran’s ambassador to Russia is also touting that a new north-south trade corridor across the region could become a prime ‘alternative’ to the strategic Suez Canal waterway that’s been featured in global headlines due to the ‘Ever Given’ stuck tanker disaster that just played out.

Called the “International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC)” — a two decades in the making ambitious project — the new trade corridor, currently partially in operation, is 7,200km long, linking up Russia, Iran, and India and ultimately accelerating trade with Europe as well.

Commenting on the stuck tanker fiasco in the Suez, Iranian Ambassador Kazem Jalali explained of a potentially less expensive and disaster-prone waterway transport route across Egypt:

“The North-South corridor is a great option to replace the Suez Canal with a reduction in travel times to 20 days and savings of up to 30 percent.”

He further described that the mounting huge costs and fallout from the Ever Given jam disaster (commonly ballparked in the many multiple billions) demonstrates “the need to speed up the completion of infrastructure and the North-South corridor as an alternative to the route through the Suez Canal has become clear and more important than ever.”

A regional analysis site, Silk Road Briefing, reviews the recent history of the project as follows:

The INSTC project came into being in 2002, when the transport ministers of Russia, Iran, and India signed an agreement to create a multimodal ship, rail and road-based transport network stretching 7,200 km, from Mumbai, western India to Moscow via Iran and the Caspian Sea. Since then, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Oman, and Syria have all joined the project, and new routes via Azerbaijan and Central Asian countries have been examined to eliminate the need to transfer cargoes from overland-based transport to cargo ships and back…

The claims of reduced transport travel time and cost are often advanced according to these estimates:

The INSTC corridor has been tested, and cuts current transport costs by between 30-60 percent, in addition to reducing the transit time from west India to western Russia from 40 to 20 days. Dry runs of the route carried out in 2014 and 2017 identified potential bottlenecks and confirmed cost and shipping time estimates.

Will Iranian sea corridor compete with Suez Canal? https://t.co/gMSuAUW61r

— Al-Monitor (@AlMonitor) July 17, 2020

It’s been dubbed in Russian media, even long before the latest Suez crisis, a challenge to the Suez canal. 

Also sometimes compared to the ancient ‘Silk Road’ (the most famous East-West trade route across Asia from antiquity through the Middle Ages) – and somewhat akin to China’s expanding Belt & Road initiative under President Xi, it primarily by rail links two major bodies of water – the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf – by way of Iran to Russia and northern Europe.

Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“I’ve known Xi Jinping for a long time. … He doesn’t have a democratic — with a small ‘d’ — bone in his body,” said Joe Biden in his first press conference as president, and then he ambled on:

“He’s one of the guys, like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future — democracy can’t function in an ever-complex world.

“It is clear, absolutely clear … that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies. … We have to prove democracy works.”

Thus did Biden frame the conflict between America and China in almost purely ideological terms.

“Look … your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy? Because that is what is at stake, not just with China.”

But is this really what the conflict between America and China for economic, military and strategic supremacy is about – a contest between two political systems? And does Xi Jinping see it that way?

Does Xi see himself as the global champion of “autocracy” or as the nationalist leader of the Chinese people and Mao’s successor as The Great Helmsman who heads the party that decides the destiny of the nation?

And are we Americans really the champions of the democracy camp in a great twilight struggle with “autocracy”?

How, then, do we embrace as a NATO ally of 70 years the Republic of Turkey, which is ruled by the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan?

Our Arab allies and partners include President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt, who came to power through a military coup that ousted an elected government. Also aligned with us are the king and crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf who might fairly be called not only monarchists but autocrats.

Are the king of Bahrain, the emir of Kuwait and the sultan of Oman members in good standing in America’s club of democracies?

Unlike the USSR of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, Xi’s China does not appear to seek to impose its political system upon the nations with which it has deep trade and commercial ties such as Australia, Japan and South Korea.

Where Nikita Khrushchev thundered, “Your children shall live under Socialism,” Xi does not.

Indeed, in the ideological struggle defined by Biden, it appears that it’s the United States and Western democracies demanding that China abide by our beliefs and values, not the other way around.

Xi puts China first, and his own people, the Han Chinese majority, also first. As for the tribal and ethnonational minorities inside China – Uighurs, Kazakhs, Tibetans, Mongols, Manchu, Hong Kongese – their rights are subordinated and restricted, as are the beliefs and value systems of Christians in many of the 50 or so Muslim countries.

Unlike America’s liberal elites who celebrate racial, religious and ethnic diversity – the more the better – China’s rulers seem to fear racial, religious, ethnic and ideological diversity as forces threatening the kind of disintegration that befell the Soviet Empire and USSR.

And unlike the Americans who worship at the altar of equality, the Chinese act on the belief that not all religious, racial and ethnic minorities have equal rights.

And while China’s growth in real and relative power and prosperity in the decades since Tiananmen Square in 1989 has been epochal, the politics of the USA seem to have grown more poisonous and the racial divisions more rancorous than they were at the end of the Reagan era.

Nor does Biden’s faith in small “d” democracy appear to have been shared by the men who founded the United States as a “republic, if you can keep it.” They saw democracy not as some object of veneration but as a danger to be avoided

“Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams wrote.

“It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Perhaps our greatest Chief Justice John Marshall said, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

“A Democracy is the vilest form of Government there is,” said Tom Paine, who was echoed by the father of the Constitution, Madison himself:

“Democracy is the most vile form of government. Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.”

By the end of a long life, Thomas Jefferson concluded:

“A Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.”

Democracy and autocracy – of which monarchies and dictatorships are examples – are forms of government, not objects of worship. It is the country that engages the heart, not the system of government by which the country is governed. And it is the country that is the legitimate object of allegiance, loyalty and love.

And that is the meaning of “America First.”

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets live commentator

The largest hedge fund implosion since Long-Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 has left few, if any, scars on financial markets.

A group of stocks linked to the liquidation of Archegos Capital rebounded Tuesday, suggesting the positions have largely been unwound. With that episode running its course, the markets were generally quiet with slightly higher yields and the outperformance of value stocks pointing toward the return of the reflation theme. A stronger dollar, though, is putting commodities under pressure. Bloomberg’s commodity index is starting to diverge from Treasury yields.

Back in China, FTSE Russell confirmed that Chinese bonds will be included in its index with a weighting of 5.3%, as expected. But the implementation won’t start until October and will take three years to complete, which is much longer than anticipated. The immediate market impact is negligible, but the move marks a milestone as Chinese bonds will now be included in all three major bond benchmarks, including those by Bloomberg Barclays and JPMorgan.

China is slowly but surely starting to erode the dominance of advanced nations in the bond market. To make room for Chinese bonds in the benchmark, FTSE cut the weighting of U.S. Treasuries by 1.9 percentage points to about 35%, which is likely to result an outflow of $49 billion, according to HSBC. Japan’s weighting was reduced by about one point to 16%.

In other words, China is starting to compete for capital from international investors at a time when governments are borrowing an unprecedented amount of money. Last year alone, Chinese government bonds attracted about $100 billion of overseas inflows, which is equal to 44% of the increase of foreign holdings in U.S. Treasuries.

Chinese bonds arguably remain under-represented in global benchmarks. They have the same A+ credit rating as Japanese bonds, offer yields that are about 280 bps higher and carry less than half of the interest-rate risk. Yet, the weighting of Chinese bonds is less than a third of the Japanese securities. They’re even weighted less than lower-rated Italian bonds.

Granted, Chinese bonds have their drawbacks. The lack of liquidity means fewer securities meet the criteria to be included in the benchmark. The lack of access to the repo and futures markets also limits foreigners’ interest. And then there are the country’s issues with the rule of law and tensions with the West.

Still, as demonstrated in the recent global debt rout, Chinese bonds provide diversification for investors given their low correlation with other markets. Their sensitivity to U.S. yields has fallen to the lowest in years, according to JPMorgan.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei declared emergency measures Monday along the Guatemala–Honduras border as new reports suggest a new migrant caravan may be forming in Honduras, according to Associated Press News. 

The emergency order declares mass gatherings and demonstrations illegal for the next 2-5 weeks in five Guatemalan provinces that border Honduras. 

In a statement, the Guatemalan government defended the new public health order by saying, “groups of people could put at risk the life, liberty, security, health, access to justice, peace and development” of Guatemalans. A similar order was announced in January to squash previous migrant caravans. 

Threats of another migrant caravan from Honduras with plans to travel to the US come as a US-Mexico border crisis worsens in recent months. The number of migrants attempting to cross into the US has surged, with at least 100,000 arrested in February.

A flood of migrants has been racing towards the Mexico–US border under the Biden administration after President Biden said he’ll reverse former President Trump’s immigration policies and allow many migrants a pathway to citizenship. 

But this has severely backfired for the Biden administration as chaos at the border would see over 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children detained in federal custody, nearly one-third of whom have been sitting in the same ‘cages’ built by the Obama-Biden administration, and 3,000 of whom have been held beyond the 72-hour legal limit.

The border crisis is worsening by the day as President Biden told migrants to stop coming to the US after begging Mexico’s president to help stem the flood of illegal migrants. The surge of migrants has overwhelmed the federal government’s ability to process them.

Days ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R) gave a first-hand account of the chaos at the US-Mexico border – joining Texas GOP Sens. Ted Cruz, and John Cornyn for a tour of the deteriorating border conditions. Lankford tweeted pictures of the US’ migrant camps. 

For a side-by-side comparison, the first photo is from my trip to the border in 2019–the second is from today. Plenty of space to walk around and safely spread out. Tell me this isn’t a crisis. https://t.co/ING6lsNYor pic.twitter.com/ujQXNxkQKD

— Sen. James Lankford (@SenatorLankford) March 26, 2021

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was recently quoted as saying President Biden’s immigration policy encourages illegal immigration, thus enriching cartels through human trafficking operations at the US border. Cartels are making $14 million per day, smuggling people into the US. 

Many of the migrants reaching the US-Mexico border are fleeing violence, drugs, and corruption in Honduras. With the threat of another caravan forming, the Biden administration might want to reconsider finishing President Trump’s border wall instead of halting construction. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Teachers in San Diego are going to the city’s convention center soon to instruct immigrant children in-person, even as schools in the county largely remain online-only.

About 13 teachers have volunteered to work with the minor immigrants, Roberto Carrillo, a principal at the San Diego County Office of Education, told KPBS.

“We definitely want to introduce them to the arts, the visual arts, and the performing arts,” he said.

“We’ll give them the opportunity to start expressing themselves through written formats, giving them a basic understanding of the English language.”

Instruction was slated to start as soon as Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the office confirmed to The Epoch Times that it “is providing an educational program for children who are being housed at the San Diego Convention Center.”

Supervisor Jim Desmond said that it was great for immigrants to receive in-person teaching.

“130,000 kids haven’t been allowed in a classroom for over a year in the S.D. Unified School District. It’s great there’s in-person learning for those unaccompanied minors, but I wish every child in S.D. was allowed the same opportunity for in-person teaching,” he wrote in a tweet.

A spokesperson for the San Diego Unified School District told Fox News that the district shared with its teachers details on how they could volunteer to reach the immigrant children during their spring break, which started on Monday. She said she didn’t know if the teachers were being paid.

The district did not answer a query about the matter from The Epoch Times.

San Diego officials, including its superintendent, issued statements late last week urging students, parents, and others to avoid large gatherings as part of an effort to “stop the surge” of COVID-19 over spring break.

(L-R) San Diego congressmen Scott Peters, Juan Vargas, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, Vice Chairman of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors Nora Vargas, and Congresswoman Sara Jacobs at the San Diego Convention Center on March 27, 2021. (Jane Yang/Epoch Times)

“We want to speak directly to our students today because they have demonstrated incredible courage and resilience through this pandemic. This is not the time to let our guard down. Have fun, get lots of rest and make sure you stay healthy for when school reopens online on April 5 and for in-person learning on April 12,” Cindy Marten, the superintendent, said in a statement.

According to statistics from the county, some 40,000 students are learning full-time on-campus, nearly 130,000 are engaged in hybrid learning, or a mix of in-person and remote, and another 317,855 are learning online-only.

Federal officials reached a deal to convert the San Diego Convention Center into an emergency immigration shelter earlier this month. The facility has an initial capacity of 1,400.

Unaccompanied minors are loaded into a U.S. Border Patrol transport van after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, in Hildalgo, Texas, on March 25, 2021. (John Moore/Getty Images)

The population being housed there are immigrant girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

Dozens of the girls have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

President Joe Biden’s administration reversed the Trump-era policy of expelling unaccompanied minors back to their home countries. Instead, officials are working on quickly giving the minors to family or friends in the United States.

The number of illegal border crossings rose sharply during Biden’s first month in office, including a rise in unaccompanied children from 5,694 to 9,297.

Because of the increase in unaccompanied minors and families reaching the border, coupled with the policy reversals, Customs and Border Protection are holding some minors over the 72-hour mandated limit. The agency is supposed to quickly transfer the children to the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs facilities like the convention center.

A senior Border Patrol official told reporters in a call last week that he expects there will be a continued rise in apprehensions over the coming months, as the weather gets nicer.

On one recent day, 6,000 immigrants were apprehended. In the last 30 days, agents averaged about 5,000 encounters a day, with approximately a quarter of those being unaccompanied minors.

At this point, the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the various mutant strains has been accelerating for five weeks as restrictions on businesses and movement have been relaxed. Over in the US, which ceded its position as the worst outbreak in the world to Brazil back in February, when the 7-day average for Brazil’s daily tally per million population topped the US’s for the first time.

While the outbreak in Latin America’s largest economy continues to spin out of control, the US on Tuesday reported just under 70K new cases, the highest number in a month, as infections rise in half of US states, with some of the biggest accelerations seen in New York, New Jersey and Michigan. Over the past week, the average number of new cases has risen by 24%, according to Johns Hopkins data. 25 states and Washington DC are reporting more cases.

Fortunately deaths continued to slow, with the US reporting fewer than 1K deaths.

Source: mSightly

11 states are currently in the highest “risk level” for COVID, nearly all of them are northeastern blue states (aside from Michigan and Minnesota, although both of those states are also run by Democrats).

Source: mSightly

The increase comes even as the US is vaccinating nearly 3MM people a day, and with practically every state preparing to open vaccinations to adults of all ages, if they haven’t already.

Michigan is leading average new cases with a 14% rise over the past week and a 208% increase over the past month.

Cases in New York have risen by nearly 10% over the previous week and the test positivity rate has remained above 3% for the last month

New Jersey recorded 346.4 cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days, the highest rate in the nation.

Circling back to the national numbers, while the current rate is far below January’s peak of 247K new cases per day, it is in line with the July surge, where daily cases averaged about 68,000.

The numbers complement the head of the CDC’s warnings about “impending doom”, which were widely ridiculed yesterday. In his latest warning, Dr Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned “we’re skating on a knife’s edge right now.”

“We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope,” she said. “But right now, I’m scared.”

New York is the states where coronavirus is spreading the fastest “on a per-person basis.”

Meanwhile, red states like Texas, which have been the focus of mainstream media attention as their governors have reopened their economies, and even though vaccination rates are lagging some of their northern peers, infection rates haven’t bounced back like they have in New York, Michigan and other states like Connecticut.

Unsurprisingly, the rebound in New York – centered around NYC – hasn’t stopped Gov. Andrew Cuomo from pressing ahead with his plans to reopen the state’s economy. Yesterday, the governor announced that the vaccine eligibility age would drop to 30 as of next Tuesday, Cuomo said earlier that college sports could welcome back fans on Friday, albeit with relatively restrictive social distancing numbers.

It was inevitable.

Healthcare workers across the country are taking to social media to brag about stealing COVID-19 vaccination cards from their jobs in order to falsify their vaccination status – allowing them to falsify their vaccine status.

“I work at a pharmacy and grabbed blank ones for me and my hubby,” said one TikTok user, who was identified by other users as a pharmacy tech in Illinois – and promptly reported to state healthcare authorities, according to the Daily Beast.

“Can I pay you to ship a couple to me,” another TikTok user identified as a Texas nurse wrote under the original video bragging about the theft – and was also promptly reported to Texas healthcare authorities.

“I got a template if u want it,” posted one TikTok user under a viral video about faking vaccination cards.

Becca Walker, one of the two users sounding the alarm, posted: “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to steal from your job. And I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to steal blank vaccination papers for COVID-19 to falsify information and claim that you and your husband were vaccinated when in actuality you were not.“

“Stop hating on me! I don’t care what any of you think. I did what is best for my husband and I,” posted the Illinois pharmacy tech right before she wiped her TikTok account history – only to try and cover her tracks by posting a fake TikTok claiming to be a 16-year-old British girl doing a social media experiment for her filmmaker father.

Walker, along with user Savannah Sparks, have since posted several more TikTok videos calling out healthcare workers for allegedly forging or attempting to forge vaccine cards. They claim dozens of tips have been sent to them by other users on the platform, but which they haven’t been able to verify.

If it seems surprising that vaccine resistance would exist among medical professionals, even those with a strong background in science, Schaffer said it simply highlights how many Americans are still resistant to vaccination, more than three months after the first jabs went into the arms of frontline health-care workers. In February, a survey conducted by experts from Northwestern, Northeastern, Rutgers and Harvard universities found that 21 percent of health-care workers surveyed did not want to be vaccinated. Hesitancy, which indicates skepticism towards the vaccine but not an outright unwillingness to be vaccinated, was 37 percent. –Daily Beast

Meanwhile, fake “vaccine passports” are already being sold on the street. Via Summit News:

*  *  *

Fake ‘vaccine passports’ are already being sold by criminals on the streets, according to TV personality Andrew Gruel, who said he saw it happen.

Earlier this week it was revealed that the Biden administration has been working with tech companies and non-profits to create a vaccine passport that “will play a role in multiple aspects of life.”

According to a CNN report, the vaccine passports, which could be ready in weeks, will be a condition of the United States returning to “normalcy” before the end of the year.

However, it appears as though street scammers have already beaten the government to the chase.

Had to work late last night. Walked through a back alley to get to my car. There were 2 shady guys selling fake vaccine passports out of the back of a Cadillac. A market is born.

— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) March 30, 2021

“Had to work late last night,” tweeted TV host Andrew Gruel. “Walked through a back alley to get to my car. There were 2 shady guys selling fake vaccine passports out of the back of a Cadillac. A market is born.”

The ridiculous takeaway from the introduction of vaccine passports is that Americans may be forced to show ID to watch a baseball game while voting can still take place with no ID requirements whatsoever.

As we highlighted yesterday, the vaccine passport isn’t just a proof of vaccination system, it’s a digital ID card that will likely be linked to the facial recognition camera network.

This will then grease the skids for the full implementation of a Communist Chinese-style social credit score system where dissidents are denied basic rights and services and have to live in a de facto state of permanent lockdown.