Month: January 2023

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has changed the end date for a key study on post-vaccination heart inflammation without notifying the public.

Pfizer was supposed to complete a study on the occurrence of subclinical myocarditis, or heart inflammation, after receipt of its COVID-19 vaccine. The completion date was listed by the FDA in 2021 as June 20, 2022. Pfizer was also supposed to submit the results of the study to the FDA by the end of 2022 as part of a list of requirements the FDA imposed as a condition of approving Pfizer’s jab.

But after the deadline passed, the FDA quietly changed the date.

Under a list of postmarketing requirements for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the FDA now says the same study has an “original projected completion date” of June 30, 2023.

The current status of the study is listed as “pending.”

The FDA and Pfizer did not respond to requests for comment.

Jessica Adams, a former regulatory review officer at the FDA, said the wording amounts to misinformation.

“By definition, ‘original’ dates can’t change,” she wrote on Twitter, tagging the agency. “Please correct this ‘misinformation.’”

Dr. Vinay Prasad, who has increasingly criticized the FDA over its decisions during the pandemic, said the new timeline “is so slow it will be entirely moot.”

“Another FDA failure,” he said on Twitter.

Study

The study is one of nine Pfizer was to complete to examine post-vaccination adverse events.

The study is designed to “prospectively assess the incidence of subclinical myocarditis” after receipt of a third dose, or a booster, in people aged 16 to 30.

Pfizer submitted a timetable to the FDA stating the company would submit a final protocol by Nov. 30, 2021, and complete the study by June 30, 2022, according to the FDA’s approval letter for the company’s vaccine. The final report was due to the FDA by the end of 2022.

The study was one of several examining myocarditis and pericarditis, a related condition. Both are caused by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, according to U.S. officials and other experts.

Some of the vaccine-caused myocarditis cases have led to death.

FDA officials expressed concern about the post-vaccination heart inflammation when considering whether to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.

Signal for Myocarditis After New Booster

The bivalent Pfizer vaccine triggered a safety signal for adults aged 18 to 35, Richard Forshee, an FDA official, told the agency’s vaccine advisory committee on Jan. 26.

Regulators cleared that bivalent and one from Moderna in the fall of 2022 despite there being no clinical data for either shot.

The adverse event happened at a concerning rate after a Pfizer bivalent in recent months, according to analyses of data from the FDA’s Biologics Effectiveness and Safety initiative, which pulls from systems such as one managed by CVS Health.

“The only signal we have detected so far is for myocarditis/pericarditis following the Pfizer bivalent vaccine among adults 18 to 35 years old,” Forshee told the panel.

Safety signals indicate a vaccine may cause events but don’t establish causality. But officials have stressed that the bivalents are similar to the original vaccines in defending the authorization without clinical data, and have acknowledged a causal link between the original messenger RNA vaccines and the heart inflammation.

Most of the meeting presentations that went over adverse events focused on ischemic stroke, which triggered the threshold for a safety signal following Pfizer’s bivalent booster in the elderly and following receipt the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in all adults.

Officials said that the stroke has happened in many people who received a flu vaccine on the same day as a COVID-19 vaccine. They’re studying whether there’s a connection, though they noted there was no signal for the stroke after a flu shot alone.

Dr. Nicola Klein, a Kaiser Permanente researcher who helps the CDC monitor vaccine safety, said that the signal for stroke wasn’t as strong as that for myocarditis.

“This is a cluster but … it doesn’t stand out as extremely striking, unlike some other signals which we have seen,” Klein said. “For example, myocarditis, it’s an extremely strong signal that you can see without doing statistics.”

Panel Notified of CDC Analyses

During the public comment portion of the meeting, any panel members watching were notified that the CDC’s analyses of reports to a different surveillance system concluded hundreds of adverse events met the safety signal threshold, including approximately 500 with a signal larger than that for myocarditis.

Read more here…

After an 18-month audit, a federal watchdog says that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) failed to adequately monitor and address problems involving EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based nonprofit that was used to offshore risky gain-of-function research to Wuhan, China after the Obama administration banned the practice in 2014.

According to the report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the “NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address” compliance issues with EcoHealth.

In April 2020, after then-President Donald Trump claimed the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have come from the WIV lab, NIH terminated the EcoHealth grant with little explanation. That step was widely condemned by scientists, and OIG’s report now says NIH improperly executed the termination because it did not provide a valid reason or provide EcoHealth with required information for appealing the decision.

A few months later, NIH reinstated the award but immediately suspended it, setting conditions for resumption that EcoHealth said it could not meet. NIH permanently terminated the WIV subaward as of August 2022 for compliance issues, including WIV’s failure to provide NIH with laboratory notebooks related to the funded experiments. –Science

The audit examined the above grant, as well as two others from 2014 to 2021 which totaled $8 million, but largely focused on $600,000 of it which went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH faulted EcoHealth for failing to promptly report gain-of-function results in some experiments, however the company has blamed a computer glitch at NIH for the 2-year delay.

Digging into the report is US Right to Know’s Emily Kopp, who has broken down various aspects of the OIG report.

EcoHealth would like you to believe it had technical issues for four years straight

HHS OIG: 🙄 pic.twitter.com/H0gZjzCWh7

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

The 2018 report lists scientific publications including 2019 and 2020 papers

The 2019 report lists zero papers pic.twitter.com/CzwHlbqAVu

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

How does EcoHealth get away with this?

Oversight from Fauci’s NIAID was non-existent.

NIAID awarded new funds to EcoHealth in 2020 before they received either of these overdue progress reports.

The only reason EcoHealth filed the 1st report was because @fastlerner FOIA’d it. pic.twitter.com/Er2fQTLkCV

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

The line we often hear from NIH is that EcoHealth’s reported gain-of-function research could not have sparked the pandemic.

But given (1) the sloppiness of the reports (2) the lateness of their submission to NIH, I do not believe we have a complete picture of EcoHealth’s work.

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

Meanwhile, the audit also found that the nonprofit billed NIH for $89,171 in disallowed costs, including expenses such as alcohol, and a staffer’s $3,285 trip to a conference that was miscoded, and should have instead been billed to a non-NIH grant. 

The OIG recommends that the WIV (but not EcoHealth) be banned from receiving future NIH funds.

Meanwhile, EcoHealth just scored a fresh $3 million grant from the Department of Defense.

EcoHealth Alliance currently has federal contracts and grants from USAID, DoD-DTRA, DoD-USU, DHS, NIAID, and NSF.

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) January 21, 2023

Authored by Douglas Macgregor via TheAmericanConservative.com,

Until it decided to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine, Washington confined the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose, wars with weak opponents in the developing world from Saigon to Baghdad that did not present an existential threat to U.S. forces or American territory.

This time – a proxy war with Russia – is different. 

Contrary to early Beltway hopes and expectations, Russia neither collapsed internally nor capitulated to the collective West’s demands for regime change in Moscow. Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions. 

As a result, Washington’s proxy war against Russia is failing. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was unusually candid about the situation in Ukraine when he told the allies in Germany at Ramstein Air Base on January 20, “We have a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring,” admitting, “That’s not a long time.” 

Alexei Arestovich, President Zelensky’s recently fired advisor and unofficial “Spinmeister,” was more direct. He expressed his own doubts that Ukraine can win its war with Russia and he now questions whether Ukraine will even survive the war. Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks. 

Ukraine’s materiel losses are equally severe. These include thousands of tanks and armored infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, air defense platforms, and weapons of all calibers. These totals include the equivalent of seven years of Javelin missile production. In a setting where Russian artillery systems can fire nearly 60,000 rounds of all types—rockets, missiles, drones, and hard-shell ammunition—a day, Ukrainian forces are hard-pressed to answer these Russian salvos with 6,000 rounds daily. New platform and ammunition packages for Ukraine may enrich the Washington community, but they cannot change these conditions.

Predictably, Washington’s frustration with the collective West’s failure to stem the tide of Ukrainian defeat is growing. In fact, the frustration is rapidly giving way to desperation. 

Michael Rubin, a former Bush appointee and avid supporter of America’s permanent conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, vented his frustration in a 1945 article asserting that, “if the world allows Russia to remain a unitary state, and if it allows Putinism to survive Putin, then, Ukraine should be allowed to maintain its own nuclear deterrence, whether it joins NATO or not.” On its face, the suggestion is reckless, but the statement does accurately reflect the anxiety in Washington circles that Ukrainian defeat is inevitable.

NATO’s members were never strongly united behind Washington’s crusade to fatally weaken Russia. The governments of Hungary and Croatia are simply acknowledging the wider European public’s opposition to war with Russia and lack of support for Washington’s desire to postpone Ukraine’s foreseeable defeat. 

Though sympathetic to the Ukrainian people, Berlin did not support all-out war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf. Now, Germans are also uneasy with the catastrophic condition of the German armed forces. 

Retired German Air Force General (four-star equivalent) Harald Kujat, former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, severely criticized Berlin for allowing Washington to railroad Germany into conflict with Russia, noting that several decades of German political leaders actively disarmed Germany and thus deprived Berlin of authority or credibility in Europe. Though actively suppressed by the German government and media, his comments are resonating strongly with the German electorate.

The blunt fact is that in its efforts to secure victory in its proxy war with Russia, Washington ignores historical reality. From the 13th century onward, Ukraine was a region dominated by larger, more powerful national powers, whether Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, Austrian, or Russian. 

In the aftermath of the First World War, abortive Polish designs for an independent Ukrainian State were conceived to weaken Bolshevik Russia. Today, Russia is not communist, nor does Moscow seek the destruction of the Polish State as Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and their followers did in 1920. 

So where is Washington headed with its proxy war against Russia? The question deserves an answer.

On Sunday December 7, 1941, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman was with Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill having dinner at Churchill’s home when the BBC broadcast the news that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Harriman was visibly shocked. He simply repeated the words, “The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.”

Harriman need not have been surprised. The Roosevelt administration had practically done everything in its power to goad Tokyo into attacking U.S. forces in the Pacific with a series of hostile policy decisions culminating in Washington’s oil embargo during the summer of 1941. 

In the Second World War, Washington was lucky with timing and allies. This time it’s different. Washington and its NATO allies are advocating a full-blown war against Russia, the devastation and breakup of the Russian Federation, as well as the destruction of millions of lives in Russia and Ukraine. 

Washington emotes. Washington does not think, and it is also overtly hostile to empiricism and truth. Neither we nor our allies are prepared to fight all-out war with Russia, regionally or globally. The point is, if war breaks out between Russia and the United States, Americans should not be surprised. The Biden administration and its bipartisan supporters in Washington are doing all they possibly can to make it happen.  

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own.

In today’s world, the key orthodoxies are secular rather than religious: they are economic, ideological, political. Religious orthodoxy is in the spiritual realm. It may have secular ramifications (for example, Galileo being forced to renounce his scientific advances) but it doesn’t deal with forecasts of real-world systems.

Economic, ideological and geopolitical orthodoxies are different. They make forecasts about the real world, and they will be right or wrong.

The orthodoxies are roughly divided into two camps: the Establishment/Status Quo orthodoxies and the alternative orthodoxies.

Both are fiercely defended by True Believers, as the orthodoxy is the foundation of the True Believers’ identity and worldview.

The two orthodoxies aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed. Sometimes they overlap.

Much of what passes for “informed commentary” now is nothing more than True Believers cherry-picking whatever supports their orthodoxy. In this mindset, what’s important is that everyone agrees with the orthodoxy. Public fealty to the orthodoxy is all that matters.

In this climate, projecting an outcome that doesn’t fit an orthodoxy is heresy and must be suppressed.

I don’t see any value in trying to persuade others to agree with me. The analysis goes where it goes, and it doesn’t really matter if we like the conclusion or not.

What matters is one forecast will be accurate and the rest will be wrong. If 99.99% of the populace doesn’t like the accurate forecast, that doesn’t change the outcome.

If the analysis is sound, then the forecast is sound, and it won’t change if it offends our sensibilities.

In other words, an emotionally detached analytic view is more likely to generate accurate forecasts than defending orthodoxies.

Put another way, accurate forecasts don’t arise from popularity contests.

We might not like the results of a detached analysis, but liking it or hating it isn’t the point. The accuracy is the point.

We might disagree with the forecast and hope it isn’t accurate, but we understand our opinions and hopes won’t change the outcome.

If we want to prepare an appropriate response to what’s coming down the pike, we’re better served by cultivating a detached view that favors our own independent analysis rather than orthodoxy. In other words, our self-interest is best served by becoming self-reliant.

Consider all the standard-issue orthodoxies, neatly packaged for easy marketing / consumption: Left and Right, Conservative and Progressive, Capitalist and Socialist, etc.

I find all the orthodoxies lacking. None makes sense of the dynamics I see as consequential, so we’re forced to assemble our own analysis.

In other words, we’re forced to secretly dabble in heresies.

For example, the Status Quo orthodoxy holds that the world is now multipolar and the influence and power of the U.S. / West is in an inevitable decline.

The West’s dominance was a bad thing, so multipolarity is a good thing.

The alternative orthodoxy holds that the U.S. / West are doomed not just to decline but to give way to the dominance of China and its partners.

The West had its day, now it’s China’s turn.

This orthodoxy holds the US dollar will collapse in a heap, replaced by Bitcoin, a gold-backed yuan, or a basket of non-Western currencies.

Questioning these orthodoxies is akin to declaring God is dead in 1500. It doesn’t go over very well with True Believers and their enforcers.

These orthodoxies are values/identity-based rather than analytic. They project what we think should happen because it fits our value system and what we identify with.

This is why orthodoxies are so vehemently defended: to question them is to question the moral rightness of the orthodoxy.

The problem with orthodoxy is two-fold: 1) orthodoxies suppress evolution and 2) we’re blinded by our emotional attachments to orthodoxies.

We don’t get attached to forecasts that don’t impact our values or our financial security.

If someone forecasts inflation in Lower Slobovia will rise from 8% to 10%, we don’t have any emotional stake in the forecast. If inflation there rises or falls, we don’t care. We don’t bristle and rush to defend either forecast.

Unless we’ve staked a speculative bet on inflation rising in Lower Slobovia. Then we care, deeply. We’re completely emotionally engaged, and ready to tear the head off anyone arguing that our position is faulty and we’re going to lose the bet.

Those with no emotional stake in the issue look on us with bemusement. What’s the big deal? Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, so why get worked up about it?

Indeed.

As longtime readers know, I favor looking at everything as a system. There is really only one system dynamic, Natural Selection, i.e. evolutionary success or failure when evolutionary pressure is applied.

Human societies and economies are ecosystems, too, and so their success or failure is Natural Selection at work.

Two things matter in evolution: transparency and variability. Evolution is only possible if the genome / society / economy generates a steady stream of mutations / variations.

Variations / variability are the fuel of evolution: if there are no mutations / variations, then there’s nothing new being fed to the system which can offer selective advantages.

Transparency is the mechanism needed to test / select variability. In the genome, mutations that offer some selective advantage are conserved by an automatic process.

In human organizations, transparency means there’s a free-for-all churn of variability / dissent, experimentation and sharing of results. New ideas and data flow freely between all the nodes of the system.

Human organizations with weak variability and transparency fail to adapt because they lack the means to do so.

This is scale-invariant. Relationships lacking variability and transparency fail, enterprises lacking variability and transparency fail, nations lacking variability and transparency fail.

Authoritarian regimes, be they relationships, enterprises or nations, fail because there is no other possible outcome other than evolutionary failure. Any success will be illusory / temporary.

Finding this regime attractive or repugnant won’t change the inevitability of its failure.

Transparency is not easy. People contest our treasured orthodoxies, upsetting us. We’re forced to admit to being wrong far more often than we like. It hurts our pride and we lose face, but the upside is the immense success of the evolutionary churn.

This process is scale-invariant: every argument / disagreement reflects the underlying dynamics of the system, so every negotiation to resolve the conflict reflects these same dynamics.

This process is also evolutionary. The previous negotiation may leave one side dissatisfied, and so the negotiations evolve.

From the perspective of evolutionary churn, we shouldn’t grudgingly allow variations, we should elicit them, welcome them not as threats but as essential churn, and then negotiate an outcome that is evolutionary, i.e. contingent and open to being changed as conditions change.

The couple that never argues and always puts on a smiley face isn’t the healthy relationship. It’s evolutionarily doomed to failure because the facade of unity and happiness is not actual unity or happiness.

The lack of variability and transparency have a cost that the participants and the system pay one way or another. It can be hidden for a while but not indefinitely.

The same can be said of nations. If dissent is suppressed, data is suppressed, communication is shackled by fear of exposure or censure and all decisions are made opaquely, that regime is doomed to evolutionary failure.

The nation where all the dirty laundry is out and everybody is arguing about it is evolutionarily robust. The nation where the dirty laundry is hidden deep in the basement to preserve the illusion of unity and success has been stripped of variability and transparency.

My analytic forecast (laid out in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal) is that evolutionary success demands relocalizing production of essentials and consuming less, and all the systemic changes required to enable and incentivize this evolution.

Evolutionary pressure doesn’t go away when you hide the dirty laundry. It builds up. When variability / dissent are suppressed, the system has no evolutionary fuel. Starved, it collapses.

I don’t think it matters what we call the world system or what configuration aligns with our values or what we think should happen. Evolutionary pressure is building, and those organizations which choose autocratic suppression of variability / dissent and transparency will fail.

Those that defend the churn of variability / dissent and transparency will evolve, come what may.

Orthodoxies by definition have been of stripped of variability and transparency. That’s what makes an orthodoxy an orthodoxy.

For this reason, evolutionary success cannot arise within orthodoxies. Dissent, variability, sharing ideas, proposing solutions and negotiating transparently are all intrinsically heretical.

Orthodoxies have mastered the illusion of adapting to changing times. Orthodoxies introduce updated catch-phrases to mask their inability to evolve.

Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own. Orthodoxy is a luxury we can ill-afford. What will prove consequential is Self-Reliance.

New Podcast: UPThinking Finance with Emerson Fersch and Charles Hugh Smith (55 minutes)

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Michelle Yeoh was nominated this week for an Academy Award for her lead role in independent flick Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Malaysian Chinese actress is the first women of Asian descent ever to be nominated in the Best Actress category (when disregarding Natalie Portman who has U.S. and Israeli citizenship) .

However, as Statista’s Florian Zandt reports, while the milestone has received widespread coverage, there have also been voices criticizing the lack of black Best Actress nominees this year, showing that eight years after the hashtag #oscarssowhite, the discussion about diversity at the Academy Awards is still ongoing.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Looking at nominations in the Oscar’s Big Five categories since the #oscarssowhite controversy, Best Actress is the category where the least Black, Asian and Latin American people (or those with a corresponding family background) have been nominated – just seven out of 40. Best Actor is not far behind at eight out of 40 nomination. This includes last year’s nomination and win by Will Smith for his role as the father and coach of Serena and Venus Williams in the sports drama King Richard.

The Big Five, generally seen as the most prestigious categories at the Oscars, grow slightly more diverse in the categories Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (both adapted and original). Best Director saw 11 nominations in the given time frame, including the nominations and wins of Chloé Zhao for Nomandland, Bong Joon-ho for Parasite, Alfonso Cuarón for Roma and Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water between 2017 and 2020. This year, the director duo of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, is nominated in the category and could snag another win with Asian-American participation.

The fact that this share of Oscar nominees doesn’t reflect the demographics of the United States and serves to underline the minority status of non-white voices in the movie industry led to the #oscarssowhite movement in 2015, which gained increased traction in 2016 after the Academy allegedly failed to address the concerns voiced by proponents of this movement. The issue that the movie industry doesn’t reflect general society has also been backed by research. For example, according to a study by the University of California, 26 percent of movie writers and 25 percent of movie directors had a minority background in 2020, while the group of people with singular Hispanic, Latin American, Black or African American backgrounds alone comprised 31 percent of the U.S. population in the same year.

One group that’s particularly absent and isn’t talked about at length is actors, directors and writers with a distinctly Arabian background. In 2021, for example, only two films by Arabian filmmakers were nominated, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin and The Present by Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi. In 2018, Egyptian-American actor Rami Malek won Best Actor for his role as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Authored by Rob Smith via RealClear Wire,

Here is something you won’t hear anywhere else. It is clear that Joe Biden is being ratted out in the classified document scandal, but by whom? Tucker Carlson is convinced it is a cabal of Democratic Party members who want a new presidential nominee for 2024. Tucker, I love ya, but I don’t think so. I believe foreign actors and their interests  may be involved.

Joe Biden has been in politics for 50 years. He’s never had a real job. The only core conviction he has is the self-aggrandizement that comes from being able to have people suck up to him due to the power and vast resources at his disposal. He’s dumber than a doorknob. Yet, with 50 years of experience, he is on automatic pilot when it comes to self-preservation. He simply does what he is told and reads his teleprompter without really knowing what he is reading. Thus, I don’t buy Tucker’s analysis because the “powers that be” controlling him already have a pretty good gig. Why would they want to dump him?

I have great respect for anybody who risks his own money creating a product or service that others want to buy, whether it is a plumber growing his business or a software engineer creating the next new gizmo that charms Menlo Park. But people who sell influence and access to American politicians are despicable.  The conspiring politicians are sewer rats. They are fiduciaries of your money, and they use their access to your money to grant favors to others so they will have the benefit of your money and in return they enrich themselves. The nation’s interests take second fiddle to their interests. Yet, the pernicious, indeed the treasonous element of all this is when they sell influence to foreign actors, bad people in charge of powerful governments that are hostile to the United States. It is sick. It is despicable. It is treasonous.

Money is money. It is a force for great good, but can also be a force for evil and corruption. Men of integrity, the type that should be our elected officials know this. They understand that they as humans are corruptible and thus studiously avoid any potential conflict which would compromise their integrity or loyalty to their principal. These are age old truisms that have been in circulation and practiced by those who are serious about preserving their character for at least the past 2,000 years. See Matthew 6:24. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Space is limited for me to list every Biden family “crime” of influence peddling, though Hunter Biden’s laptop is a wealth of information. The Biden family took money from Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs closely associated with their country’s governments. They orchestrated Defense Department money to fund bio-labs in Ukraine to enrich themselves, as they had financial ties to these entities.  We know about Burisma,  Bobulinski, SinoHawk and no interest forgivable loans. Ever hear of IRS imputed interest?  And by the way, forgiveness of debt is taxable as ordinary income. Then there is Hunter’s 2013 trip on Air Force II with his dad where the Biden crime syndicate walked away with $1.5 billion of communist Chinese government funding into an “equity fund” that crack-head Hunter was to manage. I always look to invest my money with crack addicts, don’t you? Then there is CEFC Energy. There were huge fees paid by China to the Bidens to secure cobalt mining in the Congo Republic in order to manufacture Chinese electrical vehicles. Jim Biden secured a $1.5 billion contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq. He’s never driven a nail into a 2 by 4. The Penn-Biden Center, funded almost exclusively by the Chinese government and other “dark” money emanating from China,  paid Joe a salary of $900,000 to basically do nothing. His cronies like Anthony Blinken got a “get paid” for doing nothing quasi-job too. By the way, he’s now the Secretary of State. Author Peter Schweizer has done excellent work thoroughly documenting Biden family corruption with hostile foreign governments, but as recent as these works are,  they do not even scratch the service of what we now know as each day reveals explosive new stories.

This past week I was deposed by California and New York lawyers because I publicly ratted out a lawyer who represented both sides in a multi-million-dollar business deal. The deal went south and he was a principal on the “buy side” of the transaction where his client was the seller.   Per the Matthew scripture above, one can’t serve two masters. In this instance, as despicable as the lawyer’s actions were,  only one individual was harmed. But when the President of the United States serves two masters, the harm is incalculable. Corrupt governments like Ukraine and China know exactly what they are doing when they buy political influence, aka bribe American politicians. They control the politician. The politician does their bidding instead of his nation’s because the politician can be so easily blackmailed.

Why did President Biden withdraw one million barrels of oil out of the Strategic Petroleum  Reserve to “sell” to Sinopec, a Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden?

More importantly, why are we giving $100 billion dollars to Ukraine? I understand that Putin is a bad guy, but Zelensky ain’t exactly Mother Teresa. Ukraine is as notoriously corrupt as Russia as illustrated in this recent news story of brazen thievery. Would the lives of ordinary Ukrainians (not the oligarchs) living in the breakaway republics of Donestsk and Luhansk (both with a majority of ethnic Russians) really be that much different under Russian control?  One thing we have learned from this conflict is the mighty Russian armed forces are not the threat to the West that we all thought. So what is the real goal? Once the conflict ends, how will things really change? One can look at the tragedy of many wars and Monday morning quarterback. What did all the death and property destruction solve?

This week, Joe Biden announced further escalation of the war by providing Ukraine with 31 Abrams tanks. This is a massive new commitment of American servicemen, as these Americans will have to train Ukrainians; arm, supply and maintain these vehicles, which means US servicemen in Ukraine fighting Russians. Y’all may want to read Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution. Only Congress can declare war.

So why is the Joe Biden risking nuclear war by escalating this conflict?

Miranda Divine in the New York post printed an April 12, 2014 email off of Hunter Biden’s laptop which Hunter wrote to his business partner Devon Archer (currently in jail for fraud) in which he knew an amazing amount of detailed information about Ukraine, the type of information one might well have learned from reading top secret classified reports given to him by his father to help their influence peddling racket. He clearly implicates his father in their influence peddling and concludes his email in Tony Soprano fashion by instructed Devon to buy a “burner phone.”

So who ratted Joe out? Could it have been the Russians? They have a pretty good intelligence system. They certainly have good reason to rat Joe out and expose his ties to Ukraine. Then again, suppose Zelensky said “Joe, either give me the tanks or I will take you down,” and wanted to fire a shot over Joe’s bow to get him to act? Certainly, Zelensky has a dossier on all the Biden activities in Ukraine and is willing to use it. Our president is bought and compromised. He and his family are scoundrels and traitors. Call me a conspiracy nut, but it is absolutely reasonable to ask such questions when someone has betrayed his country.

I suspect that these classified documents have something to do with Ukraine and exposing the Biden family corruption that has jeopardized the security of the United States and of course put us closer to a nuclear war. Slow Joe’s personal attorneys were trying to nab these files to do what with them? Almost certainly to keep their contents and subject matters from implicating the President in criminal activities. Merrick Garland named a Special Prosecutor. Is he in on the cover up? Watch my friends. He will almost certainly refuse to disclose the content of the files seized and aid the National Archives to evade Congressional subpoenas by claiming “disclosing any information will jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation.” You can fool the Washington press corps, but you can’t fool Rob Smith.

To quote young Alice of Wonderland fame, this is getting “curiouser and curiouser.”  We don’t know all the answers, but one thing is for absolutely sure, one can’t serve two masters.

From couch surfing to shelters to sleeping on the streets, new research revealed the top US cities with the most homeless Gen-Z youth (aged 18 to 24). 

The nonprofit United Way of the National Capital Area reviewed data from the US Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and found San Jose had the largest number of homeless Gen-Z youth per 100,000 residents. New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle round out the top five cities for homeless young adults. 

The latest data from the National Network for Youth, a DC-based nonprofit that helps young people, showed about 3.5 million young adults are homeless. 

When thinking about homelessness, young adults generally don’t come to mind. However, their struggles are mounting under the highest inflation in a generation, a lack of affordable housing, and a nationwide drug crisis. 

Millennials don’t realize how good they have it – at least their baby boomer parents have basements. 

It does not surprise us that the cities with the most homeless Gen-Zers are Democratically-run.