By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 5, 2023
The fake meat industry appears to be in a death-spiral as sales at plant-based ‘meat’ companies Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have imploded.
As Axios reports, “after years of hype, the tide is turning against the first generation of plant-based protein makers.”
Last year, both companies were riding high – with prime placement on supermarket shelves, and Burger King even adding an Impossible Whopper to its menu.
Impossible Meat even began to branch out – looking to expand offerings to highly processed meats such as chicken nuggets and sausages.
Sales have collapsed, however, which according to a recent Bloomberg report, has resulted in Impossible Foods planning to lay off around 20% of its workers.
Impossible Foods Inc., the maker of meatless burgers and sausages, is preparing to cut about 20% of its staff, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Redwood City, California-based company currently employs about 700 workers. The new round of dismissals could reduce that amount by more than 100.
Impossible Foods also offered voluntary separation payments and benefits to employees at the end of 2022, said the person, who asked not to be named discussing private information. An internal document viewed by Bloomberg confirmed the separation packages being offered. The company previously reduced headcount in October, cutting about 6% of its workforce at the time. – Bloomberg
Beyond Meat’s sales fell over 22% in the third quarter of 2022, as the company is preparing to similarly cut 20% of its workers. The company has also lost several executives.
According to the report, supermarket sales fell by 15% y/y as of Jan. 1, according to market-research firm IRI, while orders in restaurants dropped 9% in the12 months ended in November, according to NPD Group.
Meanwhile, data from consumer-experience strategy firm HundredX suggests waning interest in general – as the percentage of shoppers polled who have eaten Impossible products and say they won’t do it again has risen.
Beyond Meat stock is also down around 67% vs. one year ago.
By Drago Bosnic | February 6, 2023
For the last several days, the mainstream propaganda machine diverted its attention from the mandatory “evil Russia” narrative and focused on 24/7 coverage of a weather balloon. Although the media frenzy was part of the “evil China” narrative, this one is not as omnipresent as that about Russia, at least not yet. The rather bizarre overfocus on such a trivial matter still has its propaganda purpose, as the “spy balloon”, while insignificant at a glance, fulfilled an important geopolitical goal for the United States.
First, the idea that a superpower such as China needs weather balloons to effectively spy on the US is quite laughable, as the Asian giant has more than enough surveillance satellites for that purpose, both military and civilian, to say nothing of its intelligence services and other means of collecting information. Second, weather balloons are simply too obvious and, thus, too (geo)politically sensitive to be used for that purpose, not to mention they’re not exactly the most steerable aircraft and are also quite slow, meaning they take quite a lot of time to reach the desired location.
Eventually, the US Air Force sent its much-touted F-22 fighter jets to shoot down the balloon. The coverage of the shootdown was quite embarrassing, to say the least, as the F-22 “Raptor” is an extremely expensive aircraft and it made no sense to use it for such a trivial matter. The jet that costs $334 million apiece and nearly $70,000 per flight hour fired a nearly half a million dollar missile to down a weather balloon, but the media presented it as if the target was no less than an alien spacecraft invading the US. There are now even photos of an F-22 with the balloon painted on it as its first air-to-air kill.
The balloon was also presented as some pinnacle of Chinese technology, despite the fact that Beijing operates satellites, hypersonic surveillance drones and other truly high-end technologies, some of which even the US itself lacks. Additionally, according to the US, China suddenly decided to send a weather balloon to spy on America’s “Minuteman 3” ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos right after it invited the US Secretary of States Anthony Blinken to visit Beijing. Worse yet, it supposedly did so on the eve of the visit, despite China’s insistence that Blinken also meets President Xi Jinping.
Such diplomatic and (geo)political absurdity can hardly be expected from China, as it simply makes no sense for Beijing to try and make yet another peaceful overture toward the US only to sabotage its own efforts by sending a “spy balloon” over the most obvious spy target in the continental US. Even the Pentagon confirmed that “it had been tracking the balloon for quite some time” and that “it wasn’t the first time such an incident occurred”. So, again, the question is, why did the US military decide to go public with the “spy balloon” story at this exact moment? The fact that Anthony Blinken announced he is postponing his visit to China is quite indicative of America’s goal in this case.
China insists that the weather balloon is indeed just that – a weather balloon that has drifted too far from its course and ended up in US airspace. The Washington Post quoted national security experts who confirmed this and stated that “the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitude balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting.” The Pentagon itself also confirmed this and stated that “the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites” and that “the balloon posed no serious physical or intelligence threat”.
Again, this begs the question as to why the Pentagon even made the public announcement and why the US corporate and state-run media decided to go for such bizarre coverage. It’s simply impossible not to connect the story to the deteriorating US-China relations and the fact that Washington DC is doing everything in its power (bar direct war, for now, at least) to make sure the relationship between the two global powers stays on the collision course. Blinken’s visit, as previously mentioned initiated by Beijing, could have been a crucial step toward some form of detente between the US and China.
However, with an “evil Chinese spy balloon flying over American ICBM silos” Washington DC has a “perfect” (in reality, ludicrous) excuse to continue its incessant escalation with the Asian giant. The continuous US belligerence can only be explained by the fact that Washington DC is simply afraid to let China develop peacefully, since American political elites are perfectly aware that they are falling behind the Asian giant in virtually every metric, be it economy, technology, military, etc. It’s the only viable explanation for such a sudden obsession with a weather balloon.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
By Jason Isaac | RealClear Energy | February 1, 2023
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” reads an inscription at the gate to Hell in Dante’s “Inferno,” but in the modern world, Dante might as well be referring to the gates of Net Zero. After walking through those gates for a few days—maybe just a few minutes—most people would recoil at the effects of Net Zero: higher prices for everything, unreliable electricity, and a plunge into poverty. But as in “Inferno,” there is hope: you just have to abandon Net Zero. Cases-in-point include San Antonio, Texas; Huntington Beach, California; and Orange County, California.
For the past four years, San Antonio has been, by some metrics, the most-impoverished large metro area in the United States, surpassing Detroit. Despite its community’s pressing needs, San Antonio enacted a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) in 2019, with a vote of 10-1, to focus on “reducing the carbon intensity” of San Antonio’s electric generation instead of reducing the city’s poverty by providing more affordable and reliable energy.
At the time, more than half of San Antonians polled said they were not willing to pay a single dime more for climate change programs. And yet, the city’s misguided climate plan was going to lead to higher utility bills by at least $1,000 a year per household.
That was in 2019. Regardless of whether San Antonians and Americans-at-large were willing to pay more for energy, inflation and the Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels has now caused energy prices to soar. A nationwide survey released in October 2022 said that “32% of Americans have paid a bill late in the past six months — and 61% of them say it’s because they didn’t have enough money to cover the costs.” A $1,000 a year increase—at least—with a net-zero campaign is not sustainable for a city already overrun by poverty and hurting from inflation and soaring energy prices.
In recent months, the city’s electric utility management and its rate advisory committee adopted a plan that will have the utility invest in significant new natural gas generation, eschewing calls from environmental groups to adopt a more wind and solar heavy mix. On Jan. 17, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg threw his support behind the proposal, noting that “People want to make sure that we can affordably keep the lights on in San Antonio,” and “In this scenario, we are owning more of that ability [to generate power] ourselves.” While not formally abandoning the city’s Net Zero by 2050 plan, the change is a tacit acknowledgement that the city’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, its electric utility, cannot affordably meet that goal.
Similarly, the Huntington Beach City Council just voted to pull out of its plan for 100% renewable energy with the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA). Like San Antonio, Huntington Beach has concerns for its residents, including the increasing homelessness in the community. Orange County had already bailed on the plan, claiming that “the authority failed to inform the public that their electricity bills were increasing.”
While citizens of San Antonio, Huntington Beach, and Orange County have averted the left’s woke Green New Deal for now, many cities and countries are still headed down the path of decarbonization to the detriment of their citizens’ livelihoods. Think about the countries that actually live at Net Zero. Malawi’s life expectancy is a full 20 years less than developed countries; a man can’t expect to live past 57. In Ethiopia, many girls walk more than three miles daily, spending eight hours walking to collect water, instead of attending school. Sri Lanka went from economic growth to plunging its people into hunger because of the (now former) president’s policies as the first ever Net Zero chief executive. He banned the use and importation of nitrogen-based fertilizer. Food production dropped 40% and prices rose 80%.
That’s the impact of Net Zero that the US will not have to feel if its cities and states continue to come to their senses about the impossibility of such a goal. Expensive energy hurts the poor; affordable and reliable energy has the power to lift millions out of poverty.
It’s time to abandon Net Zero.
By J.D. Rucker • The Liberty Daily • February 1, 2023
The House of Representatives is very different than it was a year ago. Back then, any notion of ending vaccine mandates was shuffled into a memory hole. Anyone who opposed them was dismissed as an anti-vaxxer. Today, we may be seeing progress. Finally.
On Tuesday, Congressman Thomas Massie gave a speech explaining the reasons the vaccine mandate against healthcare workers must end.
“I rise in support of this resolution because it would facilitate the passage of HR 497, the Freedom for Healthcare Workers Act,” he said. “What does that bill do? It ends the unscientific, illogical, immoral, unconstitutional, unethical vaccine mandate on healthcare workers that is predicated on lies.”
He listed the five predicates for the mandate that turned out to be lies:
As he put it, “We’re living under medical malpractice martial law right now under the PREP Act and the EUAs.”
He concluded by dropping the ultimate truth bomb. “This is the epitome of hypocrisy. Nobody in this room was mandated to take a vaccine, and we’re voting on whether we’re going to force people who want to take care of people whether they have to take the vaccine.”
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 05.02.2023
A US jet destroyed a Chinese weather balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, with US officials saying the balloon had engaged in espionage as it flew over US airspace over the past several days. Beijing insists the dirigible was just a meteorological research balloon that drifted off course.
It’s unclear whether the Chinese weather balloon downed over the Atlantic was an intelligence-gathering vessel, but the incident has certainly given Washington the pretext it needs to feed anti-China hysteria amid tectonic shifts being witnessed in the global geopolitical and economic order, former Department of Defense analyst-turned anti-war whistleblower and activist Karen Kwiatkowski has told Sputnik.
“The only reason to shoot down the balloon after it had completely transversed the continental US would be to confirm exactly what the balloon was carrying before it got out of the 200 nautical mile exclusion zone. If we do hear about any analysis from the Pentagon later, this could be used to inform or propagandize the Biden administration’s actions or inaction,” Kwiatkowski explained.
“If the balloon constituted a legitimate threat, and apparently this is not the first time such balloons have drifted this way, then the Biden administration obviously failed to react in defense of the US. More likely they knew it wasn’t a threat but as it was observed by civilian Americans on the ground, it technically became a UFO, they didn’t know what to do, and eventually acted in a way that could be explained, albeit weakly,” she said.
“The Chinese response may have been to chuckle, or it helped inform the Chinese government as to the air defense capabilities of the US, or both. Obviously, if it is determined that [the US] belatedly shot down a weather balloon with a 5th generation fighter jet with a standoff air-to-air Sidewinder missile, it feeds into the global narrative of the US military as an offensively-oriented warmonger, and kind of silly,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
Either way, Washington’s overreaction (or untimely underreaction, as the case may be) will be sure to inform Beijing’s perceptions of US air defense capabilities, as well as perceptions of the US leadership in general, according to the retired officer.
“From a Chinese perspective, the whole event was handled weakly, and I think reveals leadership vacuums and US confusion, and these conditions will inform Chinese relations with the US, and their long-term strategy in dealing with Washington. I don’t see how DC can be treated seriously by the Chinese government, notwithstanding the large, offensive-oriented US military and the US policy for nuclear first strike, Kwiatkowski said.
Conceding that “any airborne object can and probably does collect data,” and that “all countries do this, whether they admit it or not,” Kwiatkowski believes that the longer the Pentagon waits to produce evidence of the balloon’s malicious nature, the more likely it will be that it really was just a harmless weather balloon, as the Chinese say it was. However “if the surveillance equipment on this balloon is found to be interesting, we can be sure this will be used to whip up Chinese war narratives,” she said.
PR Stunt?
Kwiatkowski emphasized that as a critic of the Biden administration, she would actually be “gratified” to learn that the spy balloon drama was just a PR stunt on the part of the White House, since this would at least “indicate some strategic unity and a well-defined set of military and diplomatic objectives vis-à-vis China in the coming years.”
Instead, she said, this administration has so far only demonstrated its propensity to bicker, and faces a massive trust deficit with the public due to difficulty communicating “honestly and clearly” with the American people.
“Officials in the Biden administration are not only bickering amongst themselves over the Ukraine tar-baby, they are not trusted by anyone, and will not be until Blinken and Victoria Nuland and others are removed from their posts,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
Ominous Omen
There is also a more ominous aspect of the balloon story, related to the growing push by Washington to prepare Americans for a possible direct conflict with China, according to the observer.
“The US government-controlled media has hyped [the spy balloon story] because it feeds into an overall fear narrative that the government wishes to stoke, given a loss of popular interest in continuing to subsidize and extend the war in Ukraine, and to help feed anti-Chinese hysteria among the people. Just last week, [US General Mike] Minihan… publicly proclaimed that the US would be in a hot war with China by 2025. The story [about the balloon] fits with that kind of propagandizing. More than a military war with China is really the impending economic and government problems with the rest of the world’s oil consumers and producers moving decisively off the petrodollar system. If US government debt cannot be supported on the back of its formerly dominant dollar, that government must collapse or go completely autocratic to survive. Meanwhile, global gold and energy and actual productive capabilities are entirely outside of US control or influence, or will soon be. When empires collapse, they seek war, and they propagandize and threaten war,” Kwiatkowski explained.
Did Someone Forget What Century They’re In?
Commenting on the balloon incident and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin’s remarks about the Chinese dirigible being used to monitor American military facilities, Russian military observer Oleg Glazunov told Sputnik that it seemed like Washington had forgotten what century they’re in as far as intelligence-collecting methods go.
“When was the last time you heard of reconnaissance by balloon? This was over 50-60 years ago. Moreover, there is a Chinese diaspora in the United States of over 2 million people, with their position so strong in some cities that the FBI can’t do anything. What balloon are we talking about?” he said.
For his part, former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a US-based non-partisan non-profit, pointed out that “there is no established law regarding satellites or other flying objects passing through someone’s airspace as a violation of sovereignty or international agreements if that object is well beyond the atmosphere, as this balloon was. Satellites cross most nations in the world at a high altitude and many of them are, in fact, spying, but Washington has not begun shooting down those that transit the United States.”
Giraldi echoed Kwiatkowski’s sentiments that the balloon hysteria supports the Biden administration’s push to portray China as a future “adversary” or even “enemy” of the United States. However, he doesn’t expect China to react to the “provocation” through escalation, “as its leadership is more sensible than what we are forced to suffer with here in the United States.”
“I believe that the relationship between Beijing and Washington will continue to be difficult, with most of the problems coming from the political posturing engaged in by a clueless White House,” the observer concluded.
RT | February 5, 2023
The UN should open an investigation into Washington’s crimes against humanity, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin suggested on Sunday.
Writing on Telegram on the 20th anniversary of the infamous 2003 speech by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN Security Council, during which he justified the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Volodin offered a scathing criticism of what he described as the American “empire of lies.”
According to the speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, this date marks “one of the biggest deceptions of the global community by the United States.” He recalled that during the landmark Security Council meeting Powell “accused Iraq of producing weapons of mass destruction, providing a vial with ‘white powder’ as proof.” At the time, the US secretary of state said the vial could be used to store anthrax.
While the UN did not approve the Iraq invasion, the US attacked the country anyway, he added. “Half a million civilians fell victims, the president was executed, the country was gone,” Volodin wrote, pointing out that Powell later admitted that the vial stunt was “a hoax,” but Washington was never held to account.
“All policies of the United States and the collective West are based on lies,” the Duma speaker stressed.
He noted that the same applied to NATO’s promises not to expand eastwards after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, as well as to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements. The latter were signed by Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany in a bid to pave the way for peace in Ukraine by granting the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics special status within the Ukrainian state.
These accords “also turned out to be a deception – but [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [former French President Francois] Hollande acted as Powell did”, Volodin said. He was referring to the bombshell confessions by the two ex-leaders, who admitted in December that the Minsk Agreements were simply meant “to give Ukraine time” to strengthen its army.
“The UN should investigate Washington’s crimes against humanity. And the decision-makers should be punished for the millions of victims, refugees, broken destinies, destroyed states,” Volodin added.
By Kit Klarenberg | MintPress News | February 2, 2023
Throughout January, a deluge of previously concealed evidence exposing how journalists, spies and social media platforms perpetuated and maintained the RussiaGate fraud has entered the public domain at long last, via the Elon Musk-approved “#TwitterFiles” series.
While Twitter’s Pentagon-connected owner evidently has a partisan agenda in releasing this material, the at-times explosive disclosures amply confirm what many independent journalists and researchers had long argued. Namely, false claims of Kremlin-directed bot and troll operations online were duplicitously weaponized by an alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies to bring major social networks to heel, and enduringly enshrine their status as subservient wings of the national security state.
Yet, while RussiaGate only becomes ever-more dead and buried over time, and the true purposes it served becomes increasingly stark, a central component of the conspiracy theory stubbornly clings to life. In June 2017, The Intercept published a leaked N.S.A. document, which it claimed revealed “a months-long Russian hacking effort against the U.S. election infrastructure.”
Ever since, it has been an article of faith in the mainstream media and among Democratic politicians that Russian G.R.U. cyberwarriors “hacked” the 2016 election, if not others too, by malevolently attempting to alter vote tallies to skew results. Moreover, Reality Winner, the N.S.A. analyst who leaked the document and ended up in jail as a result, has been elevated to the status of a heroic whistleblower on a par with Edward Snowden.
These outcomes, or at least something like them, may well have been the specific objectives of the individual and/or entity that furnished the N.S.A. with the information contained in the leaked report. For as we shall see, there are strong grounds to believe Winner unwittingly walked into a trap laid by the C.I.A.
G.R.U. “HACKING OPERATIONS”
Before The Intercept had even published its scoop on the leaked file, Reality Winner was in jail, pending trial for breaches of the Espionage Act. Her arrest, announced by the Department of Justice on the same day the story was published, only added to the mainstream frenzy that erupted in the wake of its publication.
Overnight, the hitherto unknown Winner, a United States Air Force Intelligence Squadron veteran who’d received a medal for aiding the identification, capture, and assassination of hundreds of “high-value targets,” became a major cause célèbre for Western liberals, and campaigns calling for her release backed by major press freedom and digital rights groups sprouted in profusion.
Winner’s incarceration, and the failure of the N.S.A. to take action on the report’s findings publicly or privately, also furthered suspicions that proof of Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin being subject to a politicized coverup at the highest levels, in which the ostensibly independent U.S. intelligence community itself was implicated.
It is perhaps due to Winner becoming the main focal point of the scandal, combined with desperation among liberal politicians and journalists to substantiate the RussiaGate narrative, that the leaked report’s details were never subject to serious mainstream scrutiny.
While The Intercept declared the document “displays no doubt” that a wide-ranging cyberattack in which spear-phishing emails were dispatched to over 100 local election officials mere days before the 2016 election “was carried out by the G.R.U.,” its contents suggest nothing of the kind.
The report, authored by an N.S.A. intelligence analyst, does attribute this activity to the G.R.U. But the underlying “raw intelligence” – evidence upon which that conclusion is based – is not contained in the file. It is abundantly clear, though, the finding was far from concrete anyway.
For one, the report states, “it is unknown if the G.R.U. was able to compromise any of the entities targeted successfully.” Still, more significantly, the agency is said only to be “probably” responsible – an “analyst judgment” based on the purported hacking campaign having “utilized some techniques that were similar to other G.R.U. operations.” The analyst is nonetheless forced to concede “this activity demonstrated several characteristics that distinguish it [emphasis added]” from known prior G.R.U. hacking operations.
Yet further cause for doubt about the report’s clearly unsupported headline claim is provided by the extremely unsophisticated methods employed by who or what was behind the spear-phishing efforts, which included the use of a blatantly fraudulent Gmail account. Evidently, this was not a professional operation and had very little chance of succeeding. Why would an elite intelligence agency stoop to such rudimentary tactics, particularly if its operatives were seriously determined to compromise U.S. election integrity?
Even more dubiously, among the named recipients of a purported G.R.U. spear-phishing email is the election office of American Samoa, an unincorporated U.S. territory located in the South Pacific, southeast of Samoa itself. Its population is just 56,000, and they cannot vote in mainland elections.
While a criminal hacker might have an interest in personal data held by such an entity, it is difficult to conceive what possible grounds a military intelligence agency would have for seeking access to such a trove. This interpretation is furthered by a chart in the N.S.A. report referring to how the same hacker also attempted spear-phishing campaigns targeting other email addresses, including those registered with Mail.ru, a Russian company.
These shortcomings, rather than a concerted coverup, may account for why the report was not publicized or acted upon by the N.S.A. The Intercept, however, bombastically dubbed the document “the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.”
“SPEED AND RECKLESSNESS”
When asked by journalist Aaron Maté in a September 2018 interview about “the possibility that the significance of this document has been inflated,” Jim Risen, senior national security correspondent at The Intercept and director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund (which supported Winner’s legal defense) was at a total loss.
Audibly flustered and irritated by this repeated line of questioning, Risen then terminated the interview abruptly when Maté sought to probe him over “criticism” of how The Intercept handled the document, which all but ensured Winner’s identification and imprisonment.
Now departed co-founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald rightly branded Winner’s exposure “deeply embarrassing,” claiming it resulted from “speed and recklessness.” A New York Times post-mortem of the debacle confirmed the two reporters who took the lead on the story, Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito – whose sloppiness and dishonesty landed C.I.A. whistleblower John Kiriakou in jail in 2012 for disclosing secrets about the Agency’s torture program – were “pushed to rush the story to publication.”
It would be entirely unsurprising if this pressure emanated from Betsy Reed, then editor-in-chief of The Intercept, a committed RussiaGate advocate who in 2018 slammed left-wing skeptics of the narrative as “pale imitations” of Glenn Greenwald, lacking his “intelligence [and] nuance.” When former FBI director Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation conclusively found no indication of a secret relationship between Trump and the Kremlin the next year, she claimed the failed probe, in fact, identified “plenty” of “soft loose” collusion.
The outlet’s haste to publicize the leaked N.S.A. report meant in-house digital security specialists at The Intercept were not consulted, leading Cole and Esposito to make a number of shocking blunders in attempting to verify the document pre-publication. First, they contacted a U.S. government contractor via unsecured text message, informing them they had received a printed copy of the document in the mail, postmarked Augusta, Georgia, where Winner then lived. This contractor subsequently informed the N.S.A.
Then, The Intercept approached the N.S.A. directly with a copy of the report. As Winner’s arrest warrant attests, examination of the material showed pages within it were creased, “suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.”
While all color printers embed borderline invisible patterns on each page, allowing for individual devices to be identified via serial number, the N.S.A. simply checked which of its staffers had printed the document. Six had, and Winner was among them. Further checks of the sextet’s desk computers showed she, and only she had used hers to contact The Intercept.
The outlet’s failure to undertake even the most basic measures to protect their source terminally damaged its reputation and remains a stain upon it and its senior staff to this day. Nonetheless, there has never been any acknowledgment of how inept and incautious Winner’s own actions were.
Even if The Intercept had not readily handed over distinguishing clues to the N.S.A, her highly self-incriminating use of a work computer to email the outlet, along with identifying the specific area where she resided, were in themselves smoking guns that almost inevitably would have led to her exposure.
“IGNORE DISSENTING DATA”
Winner has always claimed she acted alone, and there is no reason to doubt that she felt it was her patriotic duty to release the document. But her clumsiness, naivety and incompetence suggest she may well be easily manipulable, and a great many individuals and organizations had an interest in the dud intelligence report’s release. Foremost among them, elements of the C.I.A. loyal to John Brennan, Agency director between 2013 and January 2017.
Two weeks before Donald Trump took office, Brennan presented an Intelligence Community Assessment (I.C.A.) on “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” It declared American spooks had “high confidence” that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election to help the upstart outsider seize power. While the document contained nothing to substantiate that charge, its dubious assertions were eagerly seized upon by the media.
It was not revealed until four years later that this “confidence” wasn’t shared by the U.S. intelligence community. Instead, Brennan personally authored the report’s incendiary conclusions, then selected a clique of his own confidantes to sign off on them. This subterfuge irked many analysts within and without the C.I.A. who assessed Russia, in fact, favored a Hillary Clinton victory, given Trump was an unpredictable “wild card” calling for much-increased U.S. military spending.
“Brennan took a thesis and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” stated a senior U.S. intelligence official.
The only trace of dissent to be found in the I.C.A. is a reference to the N.S.A. not sharing the “confidence” of the C.I.A. in its findings. While wholly overlooked at the time, this deviation was massively consequential, given the N.S.A. closely monitors the communications of Russian officials. Its operatives would therefore be well-placed to know if high-level figures in Moscow had discussed plans to assist Trump’s campaign or even viewed him positively.
Brennan fudged the I.C.A. findings to keep the F.B.I. Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation alive. Launched by the Bureau in 2016, it found no evidence Trump or members of his campaign were conspiring with Moscow. The N.S.A. publicly breaking ranks would have inevitably been poorly received by Brennan and his allies in Langley, given it undermined their malign objectives.
As such, it is an obvious question whether Winner’s leak – in addition to furthering the RussiaGate fiction and damaging Trump – also served to discredit the N.S.A. by creating the illusion it had been asleep at the wheel over Kremlin meddling, if not actively suppressing evidence of this activity from the public.
Winner need not have been a willing or conscious collaborator in this scenario; the introduction of the report she leaked notes opaquely that information about the purported G.R.U. hacking effort became available in April 2017. The nature of this information and its source is unstated; could it have been the C.I.A. or operatives thereof?
“EXPOSING A WHITE HOUSE COVERUP”
Winner was convicted in August 2018 and jailed for 63 months, the longest sentence ever imposed for the unauthorized release of classified information to the media in U.S. history. Her appallingly harsh sentence was accordingly framed as politically motivated, yet further proof then-President Donald Trump had been compromised by and/or owed his upset election victory to the Kremlin and was desperate for this to be swept under the rug.
Released in June 2021, Winner remains under probation until November 2024, is not allowed to leave southern Texas, has to obey a strict curfew, and must report any interaction with the media in advance, a shocking coda to her time behind bars. Still, while allegedly facing imprisonment for discussing the document she leaked publicly, a documentary on her case is in production, and she has conducted multiple interviews with both mainstream and independent journalists.
In Winner’s most prominent media appearance to date, in July 2022, CBS aired a highly sympathetic, lengthy sit-down discussion with her, likely watched by millions. Apparently unconcerned about legal ramifications, she made a number of bold claims and statements throughout, at total odds with comments at her sentencing, when she told the judge, “my actions were a cruel betrayal of my nation’s trust in me.”
For its part, CBS rather unbelievably declared, based on the word of “two former officials,” that her leak “helped secure the 2018 midterm election,” as it revealed the “top secret emails” used by the hackers. Quite what threat those addresses could have posed, or why they would continue to be used a year-and-a-half after the report became publicly available, is not clear.
The program’s framing of Winner, in her own words, “exposing a White House coverup” as “the public was being lied to” was even more curious. A clip of Trump being interviewed by John Dickerson – “typical of the time,” according to CBS – was inserted, in which the President stated, “if you don’t catch a hacker in the act, it’s very hard to say who did the hacking.”
“I’ll go along with Russia, could’ve been China, could’ve been a lot of different groups,” he added before a CBS narrator stated dramatically, “but it was Russia, and the NSA knew it,” as Winner “had seen proof in a top-secret report on an in-house newsfeed.” The program then cut back to the former N.S.A. analyst: “I just kept thinking, ‘My God, somebody needs to step forward and put this right. Somebody.’”
In that clip, Trump was, in fact, discussing which party was responsible for purported cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee servers (D.N.C.), not the spear-phishing attack on election officials detailed in the leaked N.S.A. report. This dishonest sleight of hand by the program’s producers is nonetheless illuminating, for it highlights another potential utility of that report’s leak from the perspective of the C.I.A. – obfuscating its own role in the hack-and-leak of Democratic Party emails.
That the D.N.C. servers were hacked by Russian intelligence is widely accepted, a conclusion based primarily on the findings of D.N.C. contractor CrowdStrike. Yet, when grilled under oath by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the matter in December 2017, the company’s chief, Shawn Henry, revealed he, in fact, possessed no “concrete evidence” the files were “actually exfiltrated” by anyone – dynamite testimony that was hidden from public view for over two years.
CrowdStrike’s case for Russian culpability was predicated on a number of seemingly injudicious errors on the part of the hackers, such as their computer username referencing the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, Russian text in their malware’s source code, and ham-fisted attempts to use the Romanian language. However, WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 disclosures show the CIA’s “Marble Framework” deliberately inserts these apparent failings precisely into a cyberattack’s digital footprint to falsely attribute its own hacking to other countries.
The Agency would have had good reason for falsely attributing the emails’ source. For one, at this time, the C.I.A. was tearing its proverbial hair out attempting to link WikiLeaks – the organization that published them – and its founder Julian Assange with a foreign actor, preferably Russia, to secure legal justification for engaging in hostile counterintelligence operations against the organization and its members.
By framing the emails as Russian-hacked, media and public attention were also diverted from the communications’ contents, which revealed corruption by the Clinton Foundation and meddling in the Democratic Party primaries to prevent Bernie Sanders from securing the Presidential nomination. Meanwhile, concerns about whether D.N.C. staffer Seth Rich’s still-unsolved July 2016 murder was in any way related to his potential role in leaking the material were very effectively silenced.
The fate of Assange (and perhaps Rich, too) is a palpable demonstration of what can so often befall those who publish damaging information powerful people and organizations do not want in the public domain. Winner’s veneration by the U.S. liberal establishment, and post-release promotion by the mainstream media, should, at the very least, raise serious questions about who or what ultimately benefited from her well-meaning, personally destructive actions.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPresss News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
By Roger Watson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 28, 2023
More good news on vaccine, folks. First, you may be required to take only one Covid-19 shot per year, and if all goes well you will not even have to do that. You will be able to drink or even inhale your vaccine. No more painful injections, just a quick slurp or a snort and the job’s a good ’un. That’s you safe from the deadly virus for another year.
We could even make it fun. Why not hold Covid-19 vaccine parties? A selection of flavours in shot glasses (they don’t call them shot glasses for no reason) or add your vaccine to a vape and puff away until your immune system is primed.
I glean all this garbage from Global Health Now, the daily newsletter from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The first story concerns how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States is considering ‘simplifying the Covid vaccination schedule, allowing most people to get the currently available booster, regardless of how many doses they had received before that’. This means that if you are boosted up to the eyeballs or have never had one before and suddenly made the incomprehensible decision to start now, then Bob’s your uncle; roll up your sleeves.
Please note that nothing has changed; there is no new vaccine and no new threat. The FDA is just making an arbitrary decision to change the schedule. Clearly the aim is to get more people to accept the vaccination. But it is also clear that they are making this stuff up as they go along. They have no further evidence that the vaccines will work any better this way.
The information that is available to them is the abundant and accumulating evidence of vaccine harms which, incredibly, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MRHA) in the United Kingdom admits can be serious while insisting that the vaccines are safe. If truth is the first casualty of war – it certainly died early in the Covid-19 madness – logic is not far behind it. The MRHA is willing to trade off serious vaccine side effects against minimal protection from a virus which is virtually harmless to the vast majority of people. Perhaps the FDA is trying to reduce the number of boosters it says people will need in the hope that vaccine injuries will go away. Alternatively, it may be keen to accelerate the rollout before the general population wakes up to the fact that they are being conned, if they are lucky, and killed if they are not.
The potential for a drinkable/snortable/inhalable vaccine comes courtesy of US Speciality Formulations, a company which has produced the QYNDR vaccine. If QYNDR is a bit of a consonant-rich mouthful, then be informed that the official pronunciation if ‘KINDER’. And the advent of QYNDR is closer than you think. Phase 1 trials have already been completed in New Zealand (where else?) and all that is required is more funding to proceed with further trials. Apparently, it is very difficult to formulate a vaccine that survives the vicissitudes of the digestive tract.
And why do we need these vaccines? Well, according to US Speciality Formulations: ‘Covid-19 is still here and deadly.’ Also, I imagine that the inventors and investors envisage that this will make them shedloads of money. It clearly pays to perpetuate the Covid-19 narrative and to pepper it with as much panic as possible.
At some point in the panic-demic, the vaccine rollout became a juggernaut. Large and hard to stop. With the widespread and obvious extent to which people are gullible, government and drug manufacturers are willing to lie, health professionals are willing to stay silent and there are bucks to be made, it is unlikely that the juggernaut will be halted any time soon.
Who knows what’s next? Perhaps they will develop a vaccine that one can stick up one’s bottom. Whether or not they do, I strongly advise them that is what they can do with the present products.
RT | February 4, 2023
US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday the first transfer of assets, confiscated as part of anti-Russia sanctions, to Ukraine to pay for the country’s reconstruction.
The measure affects $5.4 million expropriated from Russian businessman Konstantin Malofeyev on charges of sanctions evasion, according to the top official.
“With my authorization today, forfeited funds will next be transferred to the State Department to support the people of Ukraine,” Garland said, adding that the funds were confiscated following an indictment against Malofeyev, issued last April.
Earlier this week, a federal court in New York allowed prosecutors to confiscate $5.4 million belonging to Malofeyev, paving the way for the funds to be used to help rebuild Ukraine.
In June, millions were seized from a US bank account belonging to Malofeyev, against whom the US Treasury Department announced sanctions in April “for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly” the Russian government.
The businessman, who owns Russian Orthodox Christian channel Tsargrad TV, has been on the US sanctions list since 2014. Malofeyev previously claimed that he had no holdings in the West since then.
In December, US President Joe Biden signed legislation allowing the Department of Justice to transfer some forfeited assets to the State Department to aid Ukraine. US law restricts how the government can use such assets.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 2, 2023
Top Cardiologist and The HighWire Contributor, Dr. Peter McCullough, was sued by health giant Baylor Scott & White, over an alleged violation of his separation agreement. On January 23rd, a Dallas County District Court dismissed the case with prejudice. Del announces the development, and offers his thoughts as well as congratulations to Dr. McCullough over the ‘win for freedom.’
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 2, 2023
The Covid emergency is over in America… in three more months says the White House. Why now? Is politics at the heart of this decision? And what does it mean for the EUA vaccines and therapies? The HighWire gets to the facts behind the headlines.
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By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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