Category: zerohedge

Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable…

As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.

One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?

To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.” Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,” and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.

Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State” actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.

To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.

Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure” to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.

The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town” and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.

So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.

It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.

I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.”

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies.

The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy.

That is the real danger.

The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself.

And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.

In an unusually blunt threat and warning even for the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that US forces are ready to “fight tonight” in comments aimed at North Korea after an angry Pyongyang denounced the resumption of joint military exercises between the US and South Korea. 

“Our force remains ready to fight tonight, and we continue to make progress toward the eventual transition of wartime Operational Control to a [Republic of Korea]-commanded, future Combined Forces Command,” Austin said on Thursday.

He issued the words from Seoul at the tail end of his Asia trip this week alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken and South Korean leaders. Secretary Blinken had continued his denuclearization of the peninsula message, saying, “We are committed to the denuclearization of North Korea, reducing the broader threat the DPRK poses to the United States and our allies, and improving the lives of all Koreans, including the people of North Korea who continue to suffer widespread and systematic abuses at the hands of their repressive government.”

Pyongyang on Thursday slammed what DPRK first vice foreign minister Choe Son Hui called a “lunatic” and “hostile” policy. The senior North Korean diplomat said of the question of denuclearization talks that there will be no contact with Washington “unless the US rolls back its hostile policy towards the DPRK.”

She said further:

“Therefore, we will disregard such an attempt of the US in the future, too.” The “new regime” in the US, she added, had only put forward a “lunatic theory of ‘threat from north Korea’ and groundless rhetoric about ‘complete denuclearisation'”.

The Biden administration has reportedly been attempting to reach out to the North via various diplomatic channels since mid-February, but to no avail. 

Meanwhile the resumption of joint military exercises with the South, which had been on pause for a year with the ostensible reason given being the coronavirus pandemic, certainly won’t help thaw the ongoing tensions anytime soon.

Authored by Brad Lena via AmericanThinker.com,

Currently, transnational globalists are pushing for a “Great Reset.”  It helps to understand what’s coming at us if you remember that the globalist’s mindset is akin to a zookeeper’s.  Currently, the zookeepers have their animals safely confined, but there remains a modicum of hope that the animals can liberate themselves.

First some context.  History is replete with ideologies that seek to save people either from themselves or a foreign contagion.  Until recently, this impulse, as the 20th century shows, has taken the form of political ideologies.

For those espousing Marxism, the ideology sought to cleanse a people from the errors and machinations of the past.  When the new ideas prevailed, even if only briefly, the alleged salvation from historical, social, and economic maladies required a reset of just about everything.  More often than not, the reset was accompanied by a sea of blood and violence.  The objects of salvation (the people) often died or ended up in the same circumstances or were worse off.

I’m referring to communism, fascism, and National Socialism.

Some will say, what about capitalism?  Whatever the ills of capitalism, it behooves one to consider the alternatives offered during the 20th century.  Some have said history is just one damn thing after another.  Others say history is the same damn thing after another.

In any case, the intellectuals of modernity (see Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society) decided that people left to their own devices will get in the way of humanity’s salvation.  Their solution is global governance that will closely manage all human activity.  Saving humanity is yesterday’s solution.  Saving Planet Earth from humanity is the ticket.  Enter the zookeeper.

In a zoo, the animals are confined.  Their diet, reproduction, interaction with other species, consumption of resources, etc. are carefully managed, depending on the zookeeper’s management goals. 

 When the kept animals’ illness, infirmity, or age becomes a liability, they are eliminated.

In the 21st century, COVID has given the intellectuals and their political and media lackeys the ability to turn modern life into a giant zoo.  Whatever the coronavirus’s root cause, the ruling elite have passionately embraced its usefulness as a tool to reorder societies and economies across the globe.

I may be wrong, but I do not recall a time when the world’s governments acted in such remarkable uniformity.  The virus-instigated collapse of the extant infrastructure (i.e., jobs, income, mobility, access, distribution, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) has been blindingly swift.  The obvious question — “When will things return to normal?” — is regularly answered by the authorities: they won’t.  

The ruling class intends to give the “new normal,” AKA “the reset,” its best shot.

The future the ruling class contemplates is one in which “rights” and privileges will be granted only to those people who comply.  Global mobility has plummeted, enforced confinement is mandated, jobs have vanished, goods are becoming scarcer, surveillance is omnipresent, and noncompliance is punished.  We will be told that this is all for the greater good.  The elite have turned the world into a zoo, with themselves as keepers and the rest of us as the animals that must be trained or destroyed.

The power to command and control human activity is off the charts.  The impulse toward totalitarian rule is as old as dirt.  Those with the power to attempt it have always done whatever it takes.  The good news is that the animals in this new zoo are the most innovative, creative, adaptive, and resilient creatures on the planet.  There’s still a chance they can bust out of the joint.

Anyone expecting a major bank to discuss a deflationary scenario will have to wait for at least a year; they certainly won’t get it here.

In his latest Flow Show report, BofA CIO Michael Hartnett first looks at the biggest driver behind the ongoing reflationary wave, and writes that globally delivered covid vaccines (400 million) are already far outpacing covid cases (122 million)…

… which is why clients are even talking about a vaccine “glut” by the autumn offsetting the spring shortage in Europe and Emerging Markets, and the resulting disorderly bond yield rise is negative for Q2 economic growth.

Then there is the elephant in the room: the unprecedented fiscal excess unleashed by most DM countries and the US in particular. Having earlier touched on the Fed’s “Catch 21”, namely the soaring US budget & current account deficits, which will surpass $4TN in ’21, and $2TN in ’22 (with forecasts excluding a potential $1.5-2tn in additional infrastructure spend)… 

… Hartnett notes that issuance YTD is Treasuries $861bn, IG/HY bonds $514bn, stocks $178bn (incl SPACs), all on pace for record highs, so bond & equity supply is annualizing a record $7.6TN. Also note that US Treasury issuance ($4.45tn) this year will easily exceed the GDP of Germany, so it’s “little wonder 30-year UST off to 2nd worst start in past 100 years.”

The combination of the “end of covid” as noted in the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey, now that runaway inflation and taper tantrums are both bigger risks than the vaccine rollout…

… with the relentless flood of fiscal stimulus leads Hartnett to make the stunning conclusion that “we are in midst of strongest macro data of our lives” as the boom phase currently is set to dominate the upcoming bust for a long time:

Philly Fed survey manufacturing highest since Mar’73; Philly & NY price surveys show inflation pressures early March; US small businesses reporting ‘jobs hard to fill’ highest in 50 years; US house prices +19%, China exports up +60% Y/Y; Baltic shipping rates +95% YTD;

And yet despite this record economic overheating, one where inflation is already out of control as  supply chains are broken and shortages of most goods are prevalent…

… the Fed is convinced that this inferno of soaring prices will be transitory, and has remained uber-dovish, promising on Wednesday not to hike rates though 2023. However, according to Hartnett, this “uber-dovish Fed posture has backfired”, with the bond vigilantes “moving quickly to bully US central bank into Yield Curve Control” which the BofA CIO says is likely once the yield on the 5Y surpasses 1¼%.

Meanwhile EM’s are already tightening to curb runaway inflation (Brazil & Turkey just hiked this week) resulting in 8 global rate hikes YTD (vs 5 cuts); And not just EMs – Norway was the 1st DM central bank to signal hike, and no matter how deep in the sand the Fed, ECB and BOE stick their heads, global financial conditions are starting to tighten – just look at spreads, vol and so on…

Which brings us to three views from Hartnett: a short-term, a medium-term and a longer term:

1) Short-term: Cyclicals have soared in anticipation of boom & “Goldilocks” plays e.g. tech, credit & EM on back foot; immediate risk is disorderly yield jump hurts cyclicals. Indeed, the oil price plunge may have been the first sign of potential regime shift to higher yields – lower growth. Here Hartnett says to watch HYG <$84...

…  BKX <115, SOX <2800, and notes that the basket of rate sensitive assets (LQD, HYG, EEM, IAI, KRE, VBK, XHB, SOXX ) has started to roll. BofA's advice: utilities & staples are good defensive hedges.

2. Medium-term: Ominously, the BofA CIO predicts low/volatile asset returns in ’21 driven by 3P’s of peak Positioning, Profits, Policy in H1, and 3R’s of rising Rates, Regulation, Redistribution in H2. His advice how to trade the medium-term: own volatility.

3. Longer-term: 2020 marked the secular low point for inflation and interest rates; 40-year bull market in bonds is officially over…

… with the following long-term asset allocation implications: bullish real assets, commodities, volatility, small cap, value & EAFE/EM stocks, bearish bonds, US dollar, large cap growth.

To Hartnett’s reco we would just throw in bitcoin. Why? Because in the “longer-term” central banks will launch digital currencies to reflate at any cost even if it means the loss of the reserve currency to terminally debase fiat, and force billions into the parallel monetary system that is crypto. Incidentally, it was Hartnett who earlier today explained why bitcoin is 2021’s safe haven (read “The Fed’s “Catch 21”: BofA Explains Why Bitcoin Is 2021’s Safe Haven“). And yes, those who were long bitcoin heading into this year. are blowing out all other asset classes as Hartnett himself shows with his latest “Scores of the Doors: bitcoin 99.9%, oil 23.3%, global stocks 4.0%, US$ 2.1%, cash 0.0%, HY bonds -0.2%, IG bonds -4.8%, government bonds -5.2%, gold -8.9% YTD.”

Having successfully summited the stairs into Air Force One this afternoon, President Biden (and his administration full of desperate virtue-signaling panderers) are currently in Atlanta, Georgia, to speak with leaders of the Asian communities there, after a shooting spree targeting three massage parlors.

The attack was horrific leaving eight people dead (six of whom were of Asian descent) because our society doesn’t value human life.

Rather unsurprisingly, this was immediately turned into a race issue.

The man pulling the trigger was white, and therefore, this must be a race-related hate crime committed by a white supremacist.

(If this were race-related, one would expect all eight victims to be of the same race? Or was that part of his cunning plan to throw off investigators to his real racist motives?)

The problem is, as much as the left wants it to be, it wasn’t ‘race’ that caused the man to commit these crimes.

Specifically, as we previously noted, the man arrested for the murders reportedly said he committed the crime spree because “it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” 

He admitted that he has a “sex addiction” and frequently used these “massage parlors” to feed his sex habit. Six of the eight victims were of Asian descent.

Of course, that wasn’t good enough and “investigations” into his motives continued…

But, in an interview with NPR last night, FBI Director Wray came clean:

“So obviously, it’s a heartbreaking incident, and it hits particularly close to home for me since I consider Atlanta home…

The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff’s Office. So we’re actively involved but in a support role.”

Director Wray continued saying:

“And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.”

Listen to the full interview here:

Now, perhaps, the Biden administration will step up support for disadvantaged women? Or attempt to clamp down on the sex-trafficking epidemic (cough, border control, cough) that forces so many women into these desperate situations… instead of amplifying the “white supremacy” card, which the left and their compliant media are always so quick to use, exacerbating societal divides.

We’re not exactly sure if the non-fungible token craze has peaked, but this has got to be a surefire sign that we’re close.

“NYC man sells fart for $85, cashing in on NFT craze,” was the exact headline the NY Post ran with on Thursday of this week whilst reporting on a Brooklyn-based art director in the midst of selling “a year’s worth of fart audio clips” as non-fungible tokens. 

The artist, Alex Ramirez-Mallis, asked the Post: “If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?”

In fact, he is selling a whole year of them. He has launched an NFT called “One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts,” which he started at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. He got the idea when him and his friends were sharing audio of farts via WhatsApp, the report notes. 

And on the one year anniversary of his quarantine, he compiled the respective recordings into what the Post called a 52 minute “master collection” audio file. He is selling individual fart recordings for 0.05 Ether, or about $85 each. So far, one has sold. 

He also seems to acknowledge the absurdity of the NFT craze. “If the value increases, they could have an extremely valuable fart on their hands,” Ramirez-Mallis commented. “The NFT craze is absurd — this idea of putting a value on something inherently intangible. These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.” 

“I’m hoping these NFT farts can at once critique [the absurdity], make people laugh and make me rich,” he said. Ah, yes, the American dream. Getting rich selling audio of your farts for a currency that wasn’t even around 10 years ago.

He continued: “In many ways, this is a bubble, but it’s also been around forever. Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value in has been around for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing that transactional nature of art.” 

“The art is just an avatar for value. There’s that old saying, ‘Why don’t they just frame the money?’, and this is really the embodiment of that.”

The “artist’s” friend Grayson Earle commented: “By purchasing an NFT, you become part of the in-crowd of a technological novelty that masquerades as revolutionary but operates in the same tired old way of the existing art market.”

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a much-hyped, much-cited new report on “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Elections.” The key conclusion:

We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, [and] undermining public confidence in the electoral process…

The report added Ukrainian legislator Andrey Derkach, described as having “ties” to “Russia’s intelligence services,” and Konstantin Kilimnik, a “Russian influence agent” (whatever that means), used “prominent U.S. persons” and “media conduits” to “launder their narratives” to American audiences. The “narratives” included “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden” (note they didn’t use the word “false”). They added a small caveat at the end: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

As Glenn Greenwald already pointed out, the “launder their narratives” passage was wolfed down by our intelligence services’ own “media conduits” here at home, and regurgitated as proof that the “Hunter Biden laptop story came from the Kremlin,” even though the report didn’t mention the laptop story at all. Exactly one prominent reporter, Chris Hayes, had the decency to admit this after advancing the claim initially.

With regard to the broader assessment: how many times are we going to do this? We’ve spent the last five years watching as anonymous officials make major Russia-related claims, only to have those evidence-free claims fizzle.

From the much-ballyhooed “changed RNC platform” story (Robert Mueller found no evidence the changed Republican platform was “undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”), to the notion that Julian Assange was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russians (Mueller found no evidence for this either), to Michael Cohen’s alleged secret meetings in Prague with Russian conspirators (“not true,” the FBI flatly concluded) to the story that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress (“not accurate,” said Mueller), to wild stories about Paul Manafort meeting Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, to a “bombshell” tale about Trump foreknowledge of Wikileaks releases that blew up in CNN’s face in spectacular fashion, reporters for years chased unsubstantiated claims instead of waiting to see what they were based upon.

The latest report’s chief conclusions are assessments about Derkach and Kilimnik, information that the whole world knew before this report was released. Hell, even Rudy Giuliani, whose meeting with Derkach is supposedly the big scandal here, admitted there was a “50/50 chance” the guy was a Russian spy. Kilimnik meanwhile has now been characterized as having “ties” to Russian intelligence (Mueller), as a “Russian intelligence officer” (Senate Intelligence Committee), and is now back to being a mere “influence agent.” If he is Russian intelligence, then John McCain’s International Republican Institute (where Kilimnik worked), as well as embassies in Kiev and Moscow (where Kilimnik regularly gave information, according to the New York Times), have a lot of explaining to do.

No matter what, the clear aim of this report is to cast certain stories about Joe or Hunter Biden as misinformation, when the evidence more likely shows that material like the Hunter Biden emails is real, just delivered from a disreputable source. That makes such stories just like, say, the Joe Biden-Petro Poroshenko tapes, which were also pushed by Derkach and reported on uncontroversially by major media outlets like the Washington Post, before it became fashionable to denounce outlets reporting such leaks as Russian “proxies” and “conduits.”

I never thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was anywhere near as big of a deal as the efforts by platforms like Facebook and Twitter to block access to it, which seemed a historic and dangerous precedent. This new effort to cast the reporting of “allegations against President Biden” as participation in a foreign intelligence campaign is nearly as ominous. Even worse is the degree to which press figures are devouring the message. Will any bother to point out the huge quantity of recent official takes on the Russia story that went pear-shaped? A very, very brief sample:

1. All 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four (it was actually three):

2. The Trump organization was communicating with Russia via a mysterious server tied to Russia’s Alfa Bank. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted the FBI concluded “by early February 2017 that there were no such links,” yet stories pegged to anonymous intel officials persisted for years after that.

3. Russia “hacked a Vermont utility,” according to U.S. officials! Except, the next day:

   

4. Four “current and former American officials,” citing a “trove of information the FBI is sifting through,” said the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.” Months later:

5. A “senior U.S. government official” characterized the ex-spy who claimed Russia had been cultivating Donald Trump for at least five years, and could “blackmail him,” was “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.” But Christopher Steele was subsequently dismissed as an FBI source for his “completely untrustworthy” decision to talk to the media, and Horowitz not only discovered that both the FBI and the CIA (who dismissed his reports as “internet rumor”) had many reservations about his credibility, but that his famed “blackmail” claims about pee and prostitutes had been made in “jest,” over “beers.”

6. Former Trump adviser Carter Page was a “catalyst” for the FBI investigation into connections between Donald Trump and Russia, according to “current and former law enforcement and counterintelligence officials.” Similarly, the New York Times cited court documents in describing George Papadopoulos: “Trump Campaign Adviser Met With Russian to Discuss ‘Dirt’ on Clinton.”

   But Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified that as early as August of 2016, Page became the focus of secret surveillance because Papadopoulos had been deemed a dead end. This scarcely reported detail only rendered the entire predicate for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation absurd:

7. Jeff Sessions did not disclose contacts with a Russian ambassador in a security clearance form, Justice Department sources told multiple outlets, in what became a major, front-page scandal. Except it came out later he didn’t have to make those disclosures, and as for the contacts themselves? “Brief, public, and non-substantive,” said Robert Mueller.

8. “Senior FBI and national intelligence officials” told the White House and major news outlets that releasing the name of an “informant” in the Trump-Russia investigation could “risk lives,” one of many such stories (we heard similar warnings before the release of the name of Christopher Steele, his source Igor Danchenko, the “exfiltrated spy” Oleg Smolenkov, the “anonymous” New York Times editorialist, the Ukraine “whistleblower,” and others). The “informant” Haspel warned about, Stefan Halper, turned out to have been a professor outed by name as an intelligence source in the New York Times all the way back in 1983:

9. “Current and former intelligence officers” told the New York Times that CIA director Gina Haspel showed Donald Trump pictures of British children sickened, as well as ducks killed, by a Russian assassination in England using the deadly nerve agent Novichok. It turns out there were no such sick children or dead ducks, and Haspel didn’t show such pictures, an error the Times chalked up to lack of research time:

10. According to “officials briefed on the matter,” New York Times reported, and the Washington Post “confirmed,” that “a Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan.” Two months later, an on-the-record military official was less certain:

One could go on and on with this list, from the bogus claims about Maria Butina that ended up as Times headlines (“Suspected Secret Agent Used Sex in Covert Plan”), to overhype of the Cambridge Analytica story (which turned out to have nothing to do with Brexit), to the bass-ackwards denunciations of the so-called “Nunes memo” (validated almost entirely by Horowitz), and on, and on.

Does this mean the Russians don’t meddle? Of course not. But we have to learn to separate real stories about foreign intelligence operations with posturing used to target domestic actors while suppressing criticism of domestic politicians. It’s only happened about a hundred times in the last five years — maybe it’s time to start asking for proof in these episodes?

A long-awaited show trial for one of two Canadians accused of espionage in China started Friday, as family members of the men say they are prepared for the worst, according to media reports. According to Bloomberg, a hearing was held at a local court in Dandong city (situated in the northeastern province of Liaoning) in the trial of Michael Spavor on allegations of spying. Spavor ran a business organizing tours of North Korea for mostly western clients before he was picked up by Chinese law enforcement back in late 2018.

Trials for both men are set to begin Friday (for Spavor) and Monday (for Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who has also been accused of spying). The two Canadians have been detained since December 2018 and were charged in June last year with spying. In a Thursday statement, Marc Garneau, Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, said the country’s embassy in Beijing “has been notified that court hearings for Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are scheduled to take place on March 19 and March 22, respectively.”

Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who worked for the International Crisis Group at the time of his arrest, has been accused of “stealing sensitive information and intelligence through contacts in China since 2017.” Spavor has been accused of providing intelligence to Kovrig. It’s not clear whether the two men knew each other prior to their arrests.

Chinese officials haven’t shared any of the “evidence” they have gathered against the two men, or information detailing their alleged crimes, though they insist that “the facts are clear and evidence is solid.”

Both men were arrested shortly after Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou after she stepped off a plane in Vancouver. Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, a high-profile figure in China, was arrested at the behest of US authorities, who sought her extradition to the US to face charges that she violated US sanctions against Iran.

The arrests were widely seen as political retribution against Ottawa for cooperating with the US. However, while Meng has been allowed out on bail (she’s currently under house arrest in her opulent home) while she awaits the results of her extradition proceedings – which are still ongoing – both men have been detained in Chinese prisons, will little contact with their families or the outside world.

Family members and contacts of the two Canadian men have described them being held in poor conditions, and denied outside contact. Almost all in-person consular visits to foreign prisoners in China have been paused since last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, diplomats have only been allowed to speak to the men via phone.

Teng Biao, a lawyer who practiced human rights law in China for 10 years, and now lives in exile in New Jersey, told Canada’s the Toronto Star that the two men have almost no chance of being found innocent. They will face a “show trial” driven by political considerations, before being handed potentially lengthy prison sentences, to be served in China.

“In this kind of politically sensitive case the judges, the court, are not able to make the final decision,” Teng said. “We can say in these kinds of cases the court is only a political tool of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Criminal trials in China are generally very short, often lasting only a day or two, said Teng, and won’t be open to the public.

After Kovrig and Spavor were charged with espionage last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the “political” nature of their case, saying their detention was a “decision made by the Chinese government and we deplore it.” However, Beijing has held strong, continuing to insist that the charges against the men are legitimate, while denying Trudeau’s claims that the CCP is persecuting Canadian nationals for political purposes.

Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.”

Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.”

Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny and for meddling in the 2020 U.S. election to allegedly help Donald Trump. Russia also faces U.S. sanctions for building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic to deliver natural gas to Germany.

With its president being called a “killer” by the U.S. president, Russia called Ambassador Anatoly Antonov home “for consultations.” In other times, such an exchange would bring the two nations to the brink of war.

What is Biden doing? Do we not have enough enemies? Does he not have enough problems on his plate?

The May 1 deadline for full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, negotiated a year ago with the Taliban, is just six weeks off. Do we stay and soldier on or depart? No decision has been announced.

If we stay, our forces in Afghanistan could, again, come under fire. If we leave, the Kabul regime could be shaken to its foundation and fall.

Leaving would be an admission that the U.S. failed, and the war is lost.

After the recent U.S.-South Korea military exercises, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister issued this threat to the Biden administration:

“We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off powdered smell in our land (that) if it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

There is talk of new North Korean tests of missiles and nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Tokyo this week that the U.S. goal remains “the complete denuclearization of North Korea” But Presidents Bush II, Obama and Trump all failed to achieve that goal.

With national elections in June, the clock is also running on the Tehran regime that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal. Does Biden intend to sign on again, as he indicated in the campaign he would, or walk away?

Biden also faces a new crisis of his own making. His “compassionate” policy on illegal immigration has been rewarded with scores of thousands of children, teenagers and families crossing our Southern border to be granted temporary residence while their cases await hearings.

With the border disintegrating, one would think the Biden administration would not be looking around for other crises.

Yet, in Tokyo, on the eve of his meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Blinken was playing the hawk:

“China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. … We will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.”

China has enacted a new law that authorizes its coast guard to use force to defend Chinese sovereignty. And among China’s claims to sovereign control are the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, claimed and controlled by Japan.

Blinken has warned the U.S. will fight to keep the Senkakus Japanese.

While in Tokyo, Blinken also denounced the generals’ coup in Myanmar, accusing Myanmar’s army of “attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election and … brutally repressing peaceful protesters.”

Former national security adviser to President Trump John Bolton has listed other areas where China is engaged in “unacceptable behavior.”

“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion; building military bases in the disputed South China Sea; menacing Taiwan, Vietnam and India; increasing strategic nuclear forces and egregious global cyberwarfare; empowering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; concealing the origins of covid-19; stealing intellectual property and forcing technology transfers; and genocide against Uyghurs and the repression of Hong Kong.”

Perhaps the Anchorage talks can be extended to get all the items on Bolton’s agenda fully addressed.

Again, does not America have enough on her plate already?

Our national debt is now larger than our national economy. COVID-19 has killed half a million of us and is killing 1,000 a day more. We have a broken and bleeding Southern border being overrun with no end in sight.

Politically, our nation is divided as deeply as it was on the eve of the Civil War. We are caught up in a culture war, at the root of which is an irreconcilable conflict over whether America is a good and great country, perhaps the greatest — or a nation of whose history and founding we ought to be eternally ashamed.

If time is on America’s side in our cold wars with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, is not the wiser policy to maneuver to avoid any new hot wars?

Bill Gates took to Reddit for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Friday, where he answered all sorts of questions about vaccines, fake meat, and his favorite Mortal Kombat fighter (he’s never played).

One question he completely ignored, however, concerned his relationship with notorious and now-dead pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein – who he met with at least six times, including visits to Epstein’s recently-sold Manhattan mansion on “multiple occasions,” staying at least once into the night, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Gates adviser Boris Nikolic (pictured below) was named as a fallback executor in an will Epstein amended days before his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell. 

Several Redditors took this opportunity to ask Bill to explain himself.

“Thanks for doing this again. First of all – big fan of your humble rags-to-riches journey in which you rose against the odds from a rich, well-connected family and utilised predatory patenting to profit from publicly-funded work to sell back to the public. Very inspiring!” asks user proahteane, who followed up the complement with:

“Platitudes aside, my question is this: why were you meeting with Jeffrey Epstein after his first conviction? What could you possibly have to discuss with a prolific pedophile eugenicist?“

And while the question was the 12th most upvoted, Gates completely ignored it, while answering over two-dozen lower-ranked questions.

Were they both interested in eugenics?

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 12, 2019

Meanwhile, employees of the Gates foundation also visited Epstein’s mansion on multiple occasions, while Epstein also “spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund — an arrangement that had the potential to generate enormous fees for Mr. Epstein,” according to the Times. 

In late 2011, at Mr. Gates’s instruction, the foundation sent a team to Mr. Epstein’s townhouse to have a preliminary talk about philanthropic fund-raising, according to three people who were there. Mr. Epstein told his guests that if they searched his name on the internet they might conclude he was a bad person but that what he had done — soliciting prostitution from an underage girl — was no worse than “stealing a bagel,” two of the people said. -NYT

How Gates and Epstein met, according to the New York Times; 

Two members of Mr. Gates’s inner circle — Boris Nikolic and Melanie Walker — were close to Mr. Epstein and at times functioned as intermediaries between the two men.

Ms. Walker met Mr. Epstein in 1992, six months after graduating from the University of Texas. Mr. Epstein, who was an adviser to Mr. Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, told Ms. Walker that he could land her an audition for a modeling job there, according to Ms. Walker. She later moved to New York and stayed in a Manhattan apartment building that Mr. Epstein owned. After she graduated from medical school, she said, Mr. Epstein hired her as a science adviser in 1998.

Ms. Walker later met Steven Sinofsky, a senior executive at Microsoft who became president of its Windows division, and moved to Seattle to be with him. In 2006, she joined the Gates Foundation with the title of senior program officer.

At the foundation, Ms. Walker met and befriended Mr. Nikolic, a native of what is now Croatia and a former fellow at Harvard Medical School who was the foundation’s science adviser. Mr. Nikolic and Mr. Gates frequently traveled and socialized together.

Ms. Walker, who had remained in close touch with Mr. Epstein, introduced him to Mr. Nikolic, and the men became friendly.

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Gates first met face to face on the evening of Jan. 31, 2011, at Mr. Epstein’s townhouse on the Upper East Side. They were joined by Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden whom Mr. Epstein had once dated, and her 15-year-old daughter. (Dr. Andersson-Dubin’s husband, the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, was a friend and business associate of Mr. Epstein’s. The Dubins declined to comment.)

The gathering started at 8 and lasted several hours, according to Ms. Arnold, Mr. Gates’s spokeswoman. Mr. Epstein subsequently boasted about the meeting in emails to friends and associates. “Bill’s great,” he wrote in one, reviewed by The Times.

“I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that,” claims Gates. “There were people around him who were saying, hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.” 

And it looks like Gates was one of Epstein’s “rich people.” According to the report, Gates donated $2 million to MIT’s Media Lab, which university officials described as having been “directed” by Epstein. 

According to Arnold, Gates’ spokeswoman, “Over time, Gates and his team realized Epstein’s capabilities and ideas were not legitimate and all contact with Epstein was discontinued.” 

Perhaps ‘Gates and his team’ should have steered clear of the known pedophile in the first place?

*  *  *

More Gates answers, via Bloomberg:

Bill Gates is in favor of raising some taxes, but says some proposals seem to go too far. “Taxes are an important issue. Government has to do more -health costs, pandemic recovery, climate investments, foreign aid generosity… So I have pushed for some higher taxes. I have disagreed with some proposals that seem to go too far,” the billionaire said Friday during an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A session on Reddit. The commentary follows a recent proposed wealth tax from Senator Elizabeth Warren that called for a 2% annual tax on households and trusts valued at between $50 million and $1 billion. All net worth over $1 billion would be taxed at 3%. The Microsoft co-founder did not specifically mention any tax proposals during his Q&A. Gates, who is the third wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, also said a higher estate tax can be an effective tool for revenue and avoiding dynastic wealth.

More key quotes:

• On crypto mining:
  • “I have a lot of issues with anonymous money transfer compared to attributed systems where you can dispute and reverse transactions and make sure taxes are paid. The electricity use is just one issue. We do need digital money but without that overhead.”
• On universal basic income:
  • “Today we provide income to people who are disabled in many countries. The question is, can we afford to do this for everyone. We are getting richer as we innovate but I question if we are rich enough to discourage able people from working. Over time we have been more generous and we will be more generous. The discussion on this is very interesting but it does come down to numbers…”
• On misinformation, disinformation and fake news:
  • “Some false information is more interesting than the truth so digital channels seem to magnify echo chambers with bad facts. I haven’t seen as much creativity on how we solve this as we need.”
• On climate denial:
  • “The damage in the past was huge. Now the oil companies have stopped funding these things so I think climate denial will go down. There are issues about how we go about reducing emissions but I hope all young people agree that is a critical goal.”
• If nothing is done about climate change:
  • “It gets worse over time and natural ecosystems go away. The migration away from the unlivable areas around the equator will be massive. We won’t be able to support a large population if it gets a lot warmer.”
• On reaching net zero emissions by 2050:
  • “There’s more public support for taking big steps to avoid a climate disaster than ever before. It’s inspiring to see governments and companies around the world set ambitious goals for reducing emissions. The world’s power to invent makes me optimistic.”