dimanche 31 décembre 2023
(Encore un psychopathe américain, il a de grandes chances de finir milliardaires. note de rené)
Lindsey Graham Urges Biden To Blow Iran "Off The Map" Over Red Sea Attacks
The recent spate of attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by Iran-backed Houthis has resulted in more and more Congressional calls for the US military to act. Even after dozens of incidents, which have effectively closed the vital waterway to regular ship transit, the US Navy has not been authorized by the Biden administration to hit back directly on Houthi launch positions.
Some Republican hawks are clamoring for confrontation with Tehran, also at a moment that Iran's most powerful poxy in the region - Lebanese Hezbollah - is engaging in daily fire at Israel's northern border. Sen. Lindsey Graham is leading the charge, urging for the Pentagon bomb Iran directly in response to the Houthi Red Sea attacks. In an appearance on Fox & Friends days ago, he went so far as to say Iranian bases and oil fields should be blown "off the map". Watch:
NEW - Lindsey Graham: "Hit Iran... blow it off the map." pic.twitter.com/5dfhVQOcja
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 28, 2023
"Without Iran there are no Houthis," he claimed in the Wednesday segment. "The Houthis are completely backed by Iran. I have been saying for six months now…hit Iran. They have oil fields out in the open, they have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space. Blow it off the map."
Predictably, Graham also lashed out at the Biden administration for holding back, even as some Pentagon leaders have quietly complained they are being handcuffed in terms of an inability to respond:
"We’re fighting the Houthis. We beat the Germans and the Japanese. We should be able to beat the Houthis. Secretary Austin and the Biden administration’s failing our troops in the field," the Senator from South Carolina added.
Graham has previously in the wake of the Oct.7 Hamas terror attacks advocated for Israel hitting back against Palestinian militants as hard as possible, controversially saying saying there's "no limit" to how many civilians can be killed while trying to root out Hamas.
Here's what he told CNN at the end of October:
CNN host: "Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government, in which the US would say, ‘Let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?’”
Graham said: “No. If somebody asked us after world war two, ‘Is there a limit what would you do to make sure that Japan and Germany don’t conquer the world? Is there any limit what Israel should do to the people who are trying to slaughter the Jews?’"
"The answer is no. There is no limit," Graham emphasized at the time. He described also that he would like to see Israeli military planners "be smart" and "try to limit civilian casualties the best we can. Let’s put humanitarian aid in areas that protect the innocent. I’m all for that." Since then, many more thousands of Gazan civilians have died, many of them children.
Commenting on the fresh Fox interview in which the senator essentially called for war with Iran, the outlet Citizen Free Press echoed what many are thinking, simply stating "Lindsey Graham is a maniac."
(Ils vont mzttre les crises cardiaques à répétition provoquées par les précédentes injections anti-covid sur le dos d'un soi-disant nouveau variant et ils vont nous dire "Il faut vous injecter", trop fort ! note de rené)
'Experts' Say New COVID Strain Will Cause Global "Heart Failure Pandemic"
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson vis Modernity.news.
Scientists are warning that a new COVID strain will cause a global “heart failure pandemic,” prompting much skepticism.
A new strain known as JN.1 will cause many people to suffer from “reduced cardiac function,” according to the report.
“Japan’s top research institute Riken has now issued a warning in the new report, which states that the ACE2 receptors, which the coronavirus clings to within human cells, are ‘very common’ in the heart,” reports GB News.
“Even though conclusive clinical evidence that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with declined cardiac function has not been reported so far, the proof-of-concept study of the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 persistent infection of the heart and the potential risk of opportunistic progression of heart failure should be validated by a three-dimensional human cardiac tissue model which would serve as the alarm bell for a global healthcare risk,” states the report.
Health officials suggested people should be wary of gathering for New Year’s Eve celebrations, warning, yet again, that hospitals would be at risk of being stretched to breaking point.
Despite everything we’ve learned about the association between COVID vaccines and serious heart problems, it appears they’re now trying to re-brand the heart problems as being caused by COVID itself.
Oh well, guess we better take another round of the “100 per cent safe and effective” then!
Once the new booster is rolled out, expect another spate of healthy, professional sports stars suddenly collapsing in the middle of the field as a result of…checks notes… the JN.1 COVID strain.
Respondents on X shockingly weren’t buying it.
* * *
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch.
Whistleblower Docs Expose Key Tactics Of The Censorship Industrial Complex: Matt Taibbi
Authored by Ella Kietlinska and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Documents recently provided by a whistleblower reveal offensive tactics used by government and outside organizations to counter and preempt the spreading of undesirable information, said independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
Mr. Taibbi and journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag recently exposed a new set of documents from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), an “anti-disinformation” group that waged an aggressive information operation on the public.
The new documents, dubbed the “CTI files,” analyzed tactics used against foreign terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, that can now be applied domestically to prevent unwanted information from being published, Mr. Taibbi said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
The CTI files referred to these tactics with the military term “left of boom action” and justified their usage by the danger posed by somebody like former President Donald Trump, the journalist said.
Mr. Taibbi previously investigated and disclosed some of the “Twitter Files” after tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and allowed Mr. Taibbi and other designated journalists to query the company’s internal files.
The Twitter Files show how Twitter, a major social media platform for political speech, had been intertwined with the censorship industrial complex to suppress or remove under government pressure content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The government censorship apparatus partnering with academia, nongovernmental organizations, and private research institutions is often called the “censorship industrial complex.”
Preemptive Tactics
CTIL was supposed to be a volunteer organization with a goal to identify misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Taibbi said, but “in reality, you got under the hood—they were interested in basically any topic.”
CTIL described on its website its main goals, which included protecting the medical sector and life-saving organizations worldwide from cyberattacks and cyber threats—mainly related to the COVID-19 pandemic—and making them resilient to disinformation.
While the Twitter Files revealed that Twitter used defensive tactics to control the information posted on its platform, such as censorship and de-amplification, the CTI files show the organization resorted to offensive tactics like burner phones, creating sock puppet accounts, and infiltrating groups, Mr. Taibbi said.
The CTI files also revealed “a sort of a handbook manual on how to create false identities online,” he added.
Other tactics described in the CTI documents included putting financial pressure on disfavored groups through requests to cut off their banking services or even directly going to merchandising outlets to try to stop them from selling their wares, Mr. Taibbi explained.
Such tactics are “the offensive information operation,” he pointed out.
From ‘Counterterrorism to Counter-Populism’
In a report on Substack, Mr. Taibbi wrote that the CTI files exposed that in 2019, “U.S. and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL.”
Officially established in March 2020, CTIL grew to more than 1,400 volunteers from almost 80 countries, according to the group’s inaugural report.
In April 2020, CTIL partnered with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to stop malicious cyber activity related to COVID-19, the then-director of CISA announced on Twitter.
Mr. Taibbi said that the sudden emergence of “all of these anti-disinformation groups,” both in government and in civil society, did not occur by accident. He believes that their appearance coincides with the development of the internet and its huge democratizing force in the world that created “all sorts of political energy” that was uncontrollable and gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Tea Party, and the Arab Spring.
In 2015 and 2016, a series of events took place that the national security establishment considered very troubling, such as Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to a Labour Party leadership position in the United Kingdom, Mr. Taibbi said.
Both Mr. Corbyn and Mr. Sanders were left-wing populist politicians who gained popularity among young voters.
To the national security establishment, all these events were “illegitimate threats of the same type ... that they had been dealing with overseas,” so it directed its efforts inward from counterterrorism to counter-populism, Mr. Taibbi explained.
The structures built to counter online activity overseas were effective to counter groups like Al-Qaeda, and ISIS, but once that massive structure is turned inward against the country’s own domestic population, it operates with no legal oversight and “it creates all kinds of questions that are kind of horrifying,” Mr. Taibbi said.
“And they’re not even in the same ballpark as the First Amendment.”
Media Competition Versus Shared Endeavor
The training materials included in the CTI files intended for people who are going to review domestic speech featured a quote from the joint chiefs of staff, “talking about how you have to use certain tactics to defeat your enemy,” Mr. Taibbi said. Thus, trainees learned to treat other Americans as the enemy, he added.
This is the mindset of people inside the political establishment in the West, which can be viewed as “a sort of loose confederation of institutions” like media platforms, government, and civil society organizations, he pointed out.
He cited Luke Harding, a journalist at The Guardian, who described such formation as “the shared endeavor” in his article reviewing a book about Bellingcat, a platform for online investigations.
The author of the book believes that “rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavor, the truth out there if we wish to discover it,” Mr. Harding wrote.
However, Mr, Taibbi argued that America’s founders “envisioned the press to be an adversarial institution, by its nature.” The concept of the shared endeavor is completely opposite of the founders’ view, he explained.
Americans view “the clash of institutions and the clash of ideas as a good thing,” the journalist said.
“We all think differently, we live differently, we have different faiths, but ultimately, we arrived at a good place together. That system has worked incredibly well in America for hundreds of years.”
Replacing this concept with the other idea, like a shared endeavor, is “authoritarian in nature and ultimately anti-democratic. And it begins with speech,” Mr. Taibbi pointed out.
“There’s a reason that speech is the first guarantee in the Constitution. Because without it, none of the other rights really work.”
Malinformation
Another shift in the information policy is to evaluate information “according to where it rests on the narrative, as opposed to whether it’s true or false,” Mr. Taibbi said.
It is a new concept that defines as disinformation anything that, for example, promotes COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, he said.
“A true story about somebody dying of myocarditis after getting a shot” could be categorized as a form of disinformation, even if that person might be pro-vaccine, because it might cause other people not to get the vaccine, he explained.
“It’s what they would call malinformation,” he said.
CISA defines malinformation as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
Mr. Taibbi cited the Virality Project at Stanford University, which proposed addressing the issue of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through suppressing or disseminating information in order to shape public opinion.
In February 2022, the Virality Project released a report “with unique insights from real-time monitoring of anti-vaccine narratives across social media platforms.”
The report proposed two approaches for social media platforms to boost preferred authoritative content: “first, raising up authoritative voices by elevating them in search results or on dedicated information carousels or tabs, and second, deplatforming those who repeatedly spread false and misleading information.”
For example, Pinterest “only surfaces content from leading public health institutions such as the CDC and WHO,” the report said.
Twitter deplatformed President Trump after the 2020 election along with 70,000 other accounts as “harmful sources,” according to the report.
Facebook removed Instagram accounts that belonged to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree’s “HighWire” talk show after they expressed their critical views on COVID-19 vaccines, the report stated. They had 799,000 and 162,000 followers, respectively, according to the report.
Mr. Kennedy is the founder of Children’s Health Defense and, at that time, served as the organization’s chairman of the board and chief legal counsel.
Mr. Bigtree is a filmmaker, investigative medical journalist, and the host of “The HighWire” talk show.
The job of a traditional journalist is to discern what is true and what is not, said Mr. Taibbi, adding that he was raised as a traditional journalist.
“Once it’s true, we put it out there, and then it’s up to you what to do with it.”
However, the new approach is to focus on “motive, intent, and likely impact, as opposed to the true/false dichotomy,” Mr. Taibbi said. The factuality issue has become secondary.
“That’s very dangerous,” he said.
Petr Svab contributed to this report.
(Ces batteries au lithium sont un danger public, mais cela ne semble pas gêner. Normalement, on devrait dire, la voiture électrique, il y a un gros problème, il va falloir le résoudre avant de supprimer la voiture thermique, ce qui serait le comportement normal. Mais non, on on fait comme si ça n'existe pas parce qu'on a décidé que c'était comme ça et qu'un tas de fric a déjà été investi et que plein de plans de financements sont déjà en cours. note de rené)
San Diego-Bound Cargo Ship Hauling Lithium Batteries Reports Fire (OSA)
A fire was reported on a 410-foot cargo ship carrying lithium-ion batteries from Vietnam. The US Coast Guard is assisting the vessel diverted to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on Friday.
Around 0440 local time Thursday, the 17th Coast Guard District Command Center in Juneau received a report from "Genius Star XI" about a fire onboard. The distress call was made about 225 miles (362 kilometers) southwest of Dutch Harbor.
The Coast Guard dispatched a Lockheed HC-130 from Air Station Kodiak and Coast Guard Cutter Alex Haley to assist the vessel. It noted that a "safety zone" will be erected around the ship "carrying lithium-ion batteries."
Bloomberg data shows Genius Star XI departed from Vietnam earlier this month with a port call to San Diego. As of Saturday, the vessel is now offshore of Dutch Harbor.
Wisdom Marine Group of Taipei, Taiwan, owns the cargo ship. A spokesperson from the company told AP News that there were no injuries to the 19 crew members.
The company warned about the "potential risk of explosion" and said the cargo hold, a space in the ship for storing and transporting cargo, has been "kept sealed."
In a news release, Capt. Chris Culpepper, commander of Coast Guard Sector Anchorage, wrote, "This will be an ongoing team effort as we work to safely extinguish the fire, provide any necessary medical care for the crew, and mitigate the dangers associated with a shipboard fire."
There have been a series of lithium fires on commercial vessels this year. The latest was in July when a massive roll-on, roll-off ship experienced a fire caused by what early reports said was an electric vehicle.
(Une indemnité pour chaque noir en pardon pour l'époque esclavagiste. Maire démocrate de l'aile gauche. note de rené)
Chicago Mayor's Grand Plan To Stop 'Crime Crisis' Are Reparation Checks (USA)
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to pay off 'descendants of enslaved African Americans' with reparation checks every month to end the "cycle of violence" in the crime-ridden metro area run by radical progressives.
While speaking to Poppy Harlow on "CNN This Morning" Wednesday, Johnson acknowledged Chicago was plagued with out-of-control violent crime and declared that the "full force of government" would solve the crisis. The brilliant idea from the mayor: $500,000 in reparation checks.
"These are the first dollars spent in this city to begin the process of studying both restoration and reparations," Johnson said.
He said, "When residents who have experienced neglect and disinvestment for generations speak out of their pain and their trauma, this administration and the Black Caucus we hear you."
All of the "neglect and disinvestment' of the black folks in the metro area have been under nine decades, or nearly a century, of Democratic mayors. But the current mayor will never mention that inconvenient truth.
Johnson believes he can spend his way out of an imploding metro area:
"A quarter of a billion dollars to address homelessness, $100 million for violence prevention. We added 80 million more dollars to our youth employment program of which we hired 25,000 young people just this summer. That's a 20% increase from the previous year."
However, big government and socialism are not viable solutions to solving Chicago's violent crime crisis. Instead, enforcing common sense 'law and order' and refunding the police are some of the first steps to save the metro area from disastrous social justice policies.
But, the damage of failed social justice policies has already been realized as companies and residents flee the warzone-torn area. Democrats have taken zero responsibility for the exodus.
In 2022, Illinois's richest man, Ken Griffin, moved the Citadel hedge fund from Chicago to Miami to escape crime and high taxes.
If Johnson's grand plan to save the collapsing city is reparation checks or another form of redistribution of wealth = socialism, then residents have to be very concerned the mayor has no serious crime-fighting plan.
That may be why Johnson's polling data is trash.
Ah, yes.
To sum up, socialism is not the answer to the crime crisis. Instead, the first step involves refunding the police and enforcing common sense law and order.
(Les banques ne financent plus l'économie réelle, le rapport n'est plus intéressant, c'est plus profitable de spéculer avec l'argent magique de la FED. note de rené)
San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help (USA)
Authored by Siyamak Khorrami via The Epoch Times,
A long-time small-business owner in San Francisco is on the verge of losing his business because, he says, no bank will make him a commercial loan.
Mark E. Sackett, who owns The Box SF, a meeting and events space in a historic building in the city’s South of Market district, said a loan on his business is due in February, but dozens of lenders are turning him down.
“Six have said [they] are not even willing to make a commercial loan in San Francisco,” he said during a recent one-hour episode of EpochTV’s “California Insider.”
Others have told him they won’t make a loan for less than $30 million while another made him an offer, but under poor terms.
“I was grateful to get the offer, but I would be out of business in six or seven months because it [was] an interest-only loan, and my payments would … almost triple from what they are now,” he said.
Such a climate is not only impacting him, but others in the city, such as mom-and-pop corner store owners. Some are already gone.
“It’s whole areas boarded up. Those were all [once] viable businesses,” he said.
Mr. Sackett started his business in 1990. Over the years Apple, Intel, other major tech companies, and even the governor of California—multiple times—have hired him to stage events at The Box SF.
He says he has impeccable credit and kept his business, with two employees, afloat during the pandemic by dipping into his retirement savings, after many, he said, called it quits.
“They just gave up on San Francisco,” he said.
Pedestrians walk by a closed Whole Foods store in San Francisco on April 12, 2023. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Now, starting to finally recover from the pandemic, he said his business has picked back up, which keeps hundreds of vendors employed—like caterers, florists, bartenders, and tech teams.
“I’m a blip on the radar,” he said. “But I would argue that I am a critical part of the economy, for those hundreds of others that I help stay employed.”
Mr. Sackett says the lenders have become “selfish,” lack the motivation to help smaller entrepreneurs, and may see working with him as too risky, as so many businesses have recently called it quits—or shuttered outlets—in the city, including Walgreens, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Whole Foods.
He said such thinking is misguided.
“Big companies are now tumbling,” he said, “and I am still here. In my mind, if I was a banker, that would be a pretty good bet for me.”
He also said that the lack of willingness from lenders may have something to do with the media’s current hyper-focus on the city’s ills.
“The national story is San Francisco is crumbling with drugs, crime, car break-ins, homelessness, mental illness and . . . other things,” he said.
“I believe when you have a world-class city that is suffering, the spotlight’s going to be there.”
And then there is all the shoplifting.
Each of the problems, he said, are interrelated, and are contributing to more people and businesses leaving the city. He thinks of the issues in a ranking of severity: drugs and drug dealers are at the top, followed by addicts on the streets, then mental illness issues, and finally the homeless.
Overlaying all of this, he said, is crime.
“If we don’t get a handle on [these issues], we are going to lose more businesses. There’ll be more people exiting California in bigger numbers,” he said.
Frustrated by a lack of progress by nonprofits and politicians, he said he got involved with a local coalition to try and improve conditions in his neighborhood.
The group planted greenery and installed new lights. He also painted a 300-foot mural on the side of his building at 1069 Howard St., where the late publisher William Randolph Hearst printed the San Francisco Examiner in the 1920s.
But now, he says, he has to paint out graffiti every day on the mural, and the plants were stolen—yanked out of the ground.
He said he was also attacked, not long ago, by a man with a switchblade near his business, and a couple of days later someone took a sledgehammer to one of his businesses’ windows. Often, he says, there are people passed out from fentanyl in front of his doorway. And more recently, he intervened—when security guards wouldn’t—to stop a woman from stealing merchandise from a local drug store.
“She was livid at me because I interrupted her robbery,” he said.
“The criminal element has always been [here], but they’re a lot more emboldened now.”
Fentanyl, he said, is a key part of the issue, and goes hand-in-hand with homelessness.
A homeless person in San Francisco on Feb. 23, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
They are “basically saying ‘screw you’ to the government, ‘screw you’ to the resources offered, because they are dealing drugs out of these tents,” he said. “It’s all over the West Coast.”
At the root of the issue, Mr. Sackett said, is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2018, that said cities in the Western U.S., which the court oversees, could not clear homeless encampments unless shelter was provided.
Since then, the issue has worsened, he said, even after the city has spent billions.
“We have become, politically in San Francisco, a culture of ‘let’s throw money at it and see if it solves a problem,’” he said.
But the business community, he argued, which took so many hits during the pandemic, has been ignored.
“We’re not getting that kind of money for small businesses,” he said. “We’re not getting that kind of support.”
According to Mr. Sackett, such is the city’s tax base, its economy, and it’s why—along with San Francisco’s natural beauty—tourists the world over visit.
“I don’t even know if the city is aware of businesses like mine,” he said.
“They have not reached out to me. They have not offered to help.”
He said he used to be homesick for San Francisco and couldn’t wait to get home after traveling to places like London, or New York, or even his hometown of Kansas City.
But not anymore.
“I am not thinking like that right now and that saddens me,” he said.
“I want to not have to worry that I have to watch myself when I go out and be worried about my safety … see broken glass on the ground … to see a guy who’s not able to stand because he has foil and a straw and he’s high on fentanyl. I don’t want to see all my neighbors gone and everything boarded up.”
To change things, he said, people need to get more involved and need to vote. Politicians, he said, need to stop thinking about the party, the left, the right, or the middle.
“Vote and hire good people. That’s how I would hire in my business,” he said.
“People are suffering and we need to figure out how to end that suffering.”
He said there is hope.
“Don’t give up. Don’t give up on San Francisco. It’s a world-class city. We have so much good going for us.”
