Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General Sue the Biden Administration Over Free Speech
BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE – AUGUST 8, 2022
Brownstone Institute has repeatedly reported on the unholy alliance between the administrative state and Big Tech with the censorious results of free speech suppression. We’ve published a full articles of inquiry as a template for further investigation into these unprecedented actions.
The cooperation between these people during the pandemic response became intense and pervasive. This model is being deployed in other areas too, with a symbiotic relationship between power centers that ends in suppressing dissent. This is contrary to the First Amendment.
The state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have filed suit against the Biden administration. Among the plaintiffs are Brownstone Senior Scholars Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty who have experienced this censorship first hand. The case is joined by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division.
The text of the lawsuit is embedded below. Here is an excerpt.
The aggressive censorship that Defendants have procured constitutes government action for at least five reasons: (1) absent federal intervention, common-law and statutory doctrines, as well as voluntary conduct and natural free-market forces, would have restrained the emergence of censorship and suppression of speech of disfavored speakers, content, and viewpoint on social media; and yet (2) through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and other actions, the federal government subsidized, fostered, encouraged, and empowered the creation of a small number of massive social-media companies with disproportionate ability to censor and suppress speech on the basis of speaker, content, and viewpoint; (3) such inducements as Section 230 and other legal benefits (such as the absence of antitrust enforcement) constitute an immensely valuable benefit to social-media platforms and incentive to do the bidding of federal officials; (4) federal officials—including, most notably, certain Defendants herein—have repeatedly and aggressively threatened to remove these legal benefits and impose other adverse consequences on social-media platforms if they do not aggressively censor and suppress disfavored speakers, content, and viewpoints on their platforms; and (5) Defendants herein, colluding and coordinating with each other, have also directly coordinated and colluded with social-media platforms to identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content and thus have procured the actual censorship and suppression of the freedom of speech. These factors are both individually and collectively sufficient to establish government action in the censorship and suppression of social-media speech, especially given the inherent power imbalance: not only do the government actors here have the power to penalize noncompliant companies, but they have threatened to exercise that authority.
After firing unvaccinated workers, Hershey’s says it can’t make enough candy for Halloween – blames Putin
By Ethan Huff – Collapse News – 08/07/2022
If there is even still a recognizable America later this fall, you can expect to see a whole lot less candy in your child’s Halloween bag.
According to reports, The Hershey Company is facing “capacity constraints” that will greatly reduce the output of candy in the coming months, resulting in demand exceeding supply. And get this: Hershey’s is blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for its self-induced problems.
Earlier in the year, you may recall, Hershey’s fired all of its unvaccinated employees, which created a worker shortage. Now, company CEO Michele Buck wants to blame Putin, “supply chain issues,” and everything else other than herself for Hershey’s going down the tubes.
Buck made these and other false accusations against others for her company’s fate during a recent quarterly earnings call with investors. In a nutshell, Hershey’s will not have the capacity to maintain output in anticipation of its busiest holiday because it previously engaged in medical fascism against its un-jabbed employees.
“We had a strategy of prioritizing everyday, on-shelf availability,” Buck stated during the call, explaining that the company uses the same equipment to produce both everyday and specialty holiday items. (Related: Remember when Hershey’s was caught engaging in illegal price fixing?)
“It was a tough decision to balance that with the seasons, but we thought that was really important. And so that was a choice that we needed to make. We had [an] opportunity to deliver more Halloween [candy], but we weren’t able to supply that.”
How is it Russia’s fault that Hershey’s fired all of its unvaccinated employees?
Consumer engagement with Hershey’s, all things considered, is expected to remain high, according to Buck. The problem is that the company no longer has the capacity to deliver, thanks to the unvaccinated employees it “separated from the company.”
From now on, Buck indicated, Hershey’s “will not be able to fully meet consumer demand due to capacity restraints” – a deflective way of admitting that she and others in the executive leadership team at Hershey’s screwed up big time.
Buck expects “high single-digit growth” for Hershey’s during Halloween and Christmas, which she says she feels “really good about.” Perhaps there will even be more capacity during that time, she hinted.
Is Hershey’s planning to hire more workers to meet demand? Or perhaps a better way of wording that question is: Will Hershey’s be able to find anyone who isn’t already sick and dying from Fauci Flu shots who is willing to work for the company going into the holiday season?
Buck seems to think this might happen, all while she shifts the blame onto Putin and the “Russian invasion” for her company’s decline.
“I think generally we continue to see struggles across the supply chain,” Buck stated.
“We’re now starting to see bigger concerns relative to scarcity of ingredients needing to leverage different suppliers at higher cost and price points in order to secure production.”
A whopping 10 percent of annual sales at Hershey’s occur during the Halloween season. If the company is unable to meet demand – which seems likely – then it will face a major revenue hit, which is certainly of interest to shareholders.
“This is the same company that about 15 years ago almost shut down because it couldn’t figure out how to put in a new enterprise system (SAP),” wrote a commenter at The Epoch Times.
“I’m sure that Nestlé and Mars will figure out how to take advantage of this company’s incompetence.”
Another wrote that because Hershey’s fired its unvaccinated employees in a demonstration of medical tyranny, consumers should do the same by firing Hershey’s and not buying any more of its products.
Pentagon doles out another $1 billion in Ukraine aid
Samizdat | August 8, 2022
The US Department of Defense has announced its largest military aid package for Kiev since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began in February, planning an additional $1 billion in weapons shipments to the former Soviet republic.
The latest batch of weaponry was approved under President Joe Biden’s so-called “drawdown authority,” the 18th such package for Ukraine, the Pentagon said on Monday. It will include more ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers that the US previously sent to Ukraine, as well as 1,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles, C-4 explosives, Claymore anti-personnel mines, and tens of thousands of artillery and anti-aircraft rounds.
The Pentagon also plans to provide 50 armored medical treatment vehicles, plus more pallets of medical supplies and equipment. Biden has now approved about $9.8 billion in military aid to Kiev since he took office in January 2021, including $9 billion since Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders. Congress approved $40 billion in overall new aid to Ukraine in May after previously providing $13.6 billion.
“To meet Ukraine’s evolving battlefield requirements, the United States will continue to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with key capabilities calibrated to make a difference,” the Pentagon said. The latest aid package includes the types of weaponry “the Ukrainian people are using so effectively to defend their country.”
Ukrainian officials have touted the effectiveness of the US-made HIMARS system, calling it a “game-changer” on the battlefield. However, the Russian Defense Ministry has claimed to have destroyed six of the 16 HIMARS launchers that the US has sent to Ukraine, as well as ammunition stockpiles.
Only about 30% of the weapons sent to Ukraine by the US and its allies have actually made it to the front lines, according to a CBS News investigative report that was released on Thursday. Getting weapons to the troops involves navigating a complex network of “power lords, oligarchs [and] political players,” the outlet cited Lithuanian aid group founder Jonas Ohman as saying. However, facing pressure from the Ukrainian government and its supporters, CBS censored itself on Sunday, deciding to cancel a documentary that it had planned to broadcast on the issue and revising the text version of its report.
Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip Exposes Foolishness of Interventionism
By Ron Paul | August 8, 2022
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “surprise” trip to Taiwan last week should be “Exhibit A” as to why interventionism is dangerous, deadly, and dumb. Though she claimed her visit won some sort of victory for democracy over autocracy, the stopover achieved nothing of the sort. It was a pointless gesture that brought us closer to military conflict with zero benefits.
As Col. Doug Macgregor said of Pelosi’s trip on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, “statesmanship involves advancing American interests at the least cost to the American people. None of that is in play here. … Posturing is not statesmanship.”
Pelosi’s trip was no outlier. Such counterproductive posturing is much celebrated by both parties in Washington. Neoconservative Senators Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham were thrilled with Pelosi’s stop in Taipei and used it as a springboard to push for new legislation that would essentially declare war on China by declaring Taiwan a “major non-NATO ally.”
The “one China” policy that, while perhaps not perfect, has kept the peace for more than 40 years is to be scrapped and replaced with one sure to provoke a war. Who benefits?
Foolishly taking the US to the brink of war with Russia over Ukraine is evidently not enough for Washington’s bipartisan warmongering class. Risking a nuclear war on two fronts, with both Russia and China, is apparently the only way for Washington to show the rest of the world it’s serious.
The Washington Post’s neoconservative columnist Josh Rogin accurately captures the mindset in Washington DC with a recent article titled, “The skeptics are wrong: The US can confront both China and Russia.”
For Washington’s foreign policy “experts,” those of us who don’t believe a war with both Russia and China is a great idea are written off as “skeptics.” Count me as one of the skeptics!
During the Cold War there were times of heightened tension, but even in the darkest days the idea that nuclear war with China and the Soviet Union could be a solution was held only by a few madmen. Now, with the ideological struggles of the Cold War a decades-old memory, such an argument makes even less sense. Yet this is what Washington is selling.
The US fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Nancy Pelosi provoking China nearly to the point of war over Taiwan is meant to show the world how tough we are. In reality, it demonstrates the opposite. The drunken man in a bar challenging everyone to a fight is not tough. He’s foolish. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose from his display of bravado.
That is interventionism at its core: a foolish policy that provokes nothing but anger overseas, benefits no one in the US except the special interests, and leaves the rest of us much poorer and worse off.
There may be plenty to criticize about China’s government and policies. They are far from perfect, particularly in protection of civil liberties. But have we already forgotten that our own government shut down the country for two years over a virus, and then forced a huge number of Americans to take an experimental shot that is proving to be as worthless as it is dangerous? Let’s look at the log in our own eye before we start lobbing missiles overseas.
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute
Here Are The Winners And Losers In The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | August 8, 2022
As Democrats pat themselves on the back after the Senate finally passed their massive tax, climate, and healthcare bill – the “Inflation Reduction Act” which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called “one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in a decade,” Bloomberg has compiled a list of winners and losers.
Not only did none of the billions in tax increases Democrats threatened high-earners with last year make it into the final version of the bill, their plans to ‘tax the 1%’ turned out to be nothing more than a big virtue signal.
Private equity fund managers
As we noted on Friday, the landmark bill only passed after AZ Sen. Kyrsten Sinema insisted on keeping the carried-interest loophole that allows investment managers (like her former bosses) to shield the majority of their income from higher taxes.
The private equity industry was able to gain an additional win shortly before the final passage of the bill when a handful of Democrats broke with their party to vote on a Republican amendment that created a carveout for private equity-owned companies in the corporate minimum tax. -Bloomberg
Manchin and Sinema were big winners – after having held their party hostage for more than a year over this legislation, “The entire contents of the bill were essentially cherry-picked by Manchin and then tweaked to fit Sinema’s preferences,” according to the report.
The two were also able to score direct benefits for their states – with Manchin securing an agreement to permit the completion of the Equitrans Midstream Corp.’s Mountain Valley Pipeline, and Sinema – who was able to secure $4 billion in drought relief for western states.
The IRS And The Green agenda
The bill will give $80 billion to the IRS over the next 10 years to expand its audit capabilities, as well as a bevy of technology upgrades.
Meanwhile, electric carmakers got an extension of a popular $7,500 per vehicle customer tax credit for EVs, but will have to comply with strict battery and critical minerals sourcing requirements demanded by Sinema and Manchin – which could render the credits useless for years.
Solar and hydrogen companies, such as Sunrun and Plug Power, Inc. will also benefit from generous tax credits, while operators of nuclear reactors such as Southern Co., Constellation Energy Corp., Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. and Energy Harbor Corp. could benefit from a $30 billion production tax credit.
Medicare, Obamacare Enrolees
The final version of the bill caps seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses to $2,000 per year, and enables Medicare to negotiate the prices on 10 medications four years from now. Th bill also kicks the can on a massive increase in Obamacare premiums that were set to happen in January for many middle income Americans, which will now happen in three years.
LOSERS:
Republicans who thought Manchin and Sinema wouldn’t cave on their promises to raise taxes during a recession.
The GOP was confident they had beaten back Biden’s tax and climate agenda and were stunned in late July when Schumer and Manchin announced a deal. While still the favorites to gain seats in the midterm elections, passage of the bill is a major setback for the GOP’s policy aims. It does, however, give them a new issue to campaign on in the fall campaigns. -Bloomberg
Other losers include tech companies – that will bear the brunt of two major tax increases in the bill; a 15% minimum tax on financial statement profits, and a new levy on stock buybacks which have allowed companies like Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook to minimize their tax burden over the years.
SALT – the ability to deduct state and local taxes, a $10,000 cap which coastal Democrats were hoping to repeal.
Bernie Sanders – who Bloomberg notes wanted $6 trillion in spending, making the $437 billion in new spending a far cry from success. Excluded from the bill is all proposals for new social programs, including tuition-free-college, child care, housing spending and an expanded-child monthly tax credit.
Russia suspends US inspections of nuclear military sites
Samizdat | August 8, 2022
Moscow has informed Washington of a “temporary withdrawal” from the inspection regime under the START nuclear disarmament treaty, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday. Citing treaty provisions for “exceptional circumstances,” Russia is saying the Western sanctions have prevented its inspectors from performing their duties, thus giving US inspectors an unfair advantage. Once the principle of parity and equality is restored, the inspections will resume, Russia said.
Moscow cited “anti-Russian unilateral restrictive measures” imposed by the US and its allies, such as visa restrictions on Russian inspectors and a ban on Russian aircraft in US and EU airspace. These restrictions effectively make Russian inspections under the treaty impossible, while the Americans “do not experience such difficulties.”
“The Russian Federation is now forced to resort to this measure as a result of Washington’s persistent desire to implicitly achieve a restart of inspection activities on conditions that do not take into account existing realities, create unilateral advantages for the United States and effectively deprive the Russian Federation of the right to carry out inspections on American soil,” the Foreign Ministry said.
Russia “raised this issue with the relevant countries, but did not receive an answer.” Until these problems are resolved, “it would be premature to resume inspection activities under the START Treaty, on which the American side insists.”
As justification for the measure, Moscow cited the relevant section of the treaty protocol that covers extraordinary circumstances. Washington has been officially informed through diplomatic channels.
“We would like to emphasize that the measures we have taken are temporary. Russia is fully committed to complying with all the provisions of the START Treaty, which in our eyes is the most important instrument for maintaining international security and stability,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
As soon as the “existing problematic issues” are resolved, the inspections can resume again in full, according to Moscow.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (known as New START) went into effect in 2011, and limits the number of nuclear warheads and their delivery vehicles that the US and Russia are allowed to possess. It is the only remaining arms control agreement between the two nuclear powers, after the US withdrawal from the INF and Open Skies treaties in recent years. New START almost expired before it was extended in February 2021, and is supposed to remain in effect until 2026.
Though US President Joe Biden said he had offered Russia talks on a new treaty, which would include China as well, Moscow said last week that it had received only “declarative statements” and not concrete proposals.
Pentagon-hired contractors ‘everywhere on battlefield’ in Ukraine
Samizdat | August 8, 2022
Ukrainian forces have “had the American military at their side” from the start of the conflict with Russia, the magazine Causeur cited a “well-placed analyst” in French intelligence as saying. Pentagon-hired contractors are allegedly “everywhere on the battlefield.”
The claim was published by the right-leaning outlet last week in an analysis of the five-month-long Russia-Ukraine conflict, which, it stated, “is not the fight of David against Goliath,” contrary to what many people believe.
“In Ukraine, the Pentagon for the first time subcontracted large-scale warfare,” the magazine cited its source as saying. These “mercenaries” come in addition to the “gigantic” military aid provided to Kiev by Washington, and are not necessarily frontline fighters, according to Causeur.
As an example of ‘subcontracted’ warfare, it cited the widely-publicized supply of SpaceX satellite internet access for Ukrainian military officials. CEO Elon Musk initially framed this as an act of charitable support, but media reports later revealed that it was paid for with US taxpayer money.
The US decided not to involve its troops in Ukraine, claiming it did not want a direct confrontation with Russia. However, the French magazine said Washington is apparently ignoring the threat of escalation as it pours weapons and private manpower into Ukraine for the sake of “bleeding” Russia, which, the US government hopes, will result in a strategic defeat for Moscow.
The magazine also said that Russia appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand over Ukraine as its superior firepower is prevailing over Kiev’s eight-year preparations for a fight for Donbass. The heavy damage caused by Russian artillery and aerial forces have led to dissertations and insubordination among the Ukrainian troops, it said. If the Russian forces progress beyond the heavily urbanized Donbass with its unfavorable terrain, the balance of power could quickly shift in Moscow’s favor, the report said.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
CBS Deletes Documentary Revealing That Just ‘30%’ of West’s ‘Aid’ to Ukraine Reached Frontlines
By Ilya Tsukanov | Samizdat | August 8, 2022
CBS News has curiously deleted a bombshell documentary which uncovered that just “30%” of the military assistance sent to Ukraine by Western countries during the first months of the conflict with Russia actually reached the front lines.
Upon clicking on the link to the documentary, called “Arming Ukraine,” users are greeted with a “The page cannot be found” error.
CBS News announced Monday that it had “removed a tweet promoting” the doc, assuring that since it was filmed, control over deliveries had improved. “Additionally, the US military has confirmed that defense attache Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kiev in August for arms control and monitoring. We are updating our documentary to reflect this new information and air at a later date,” the network explained.
Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba nevertheless declared that the US network had “misled a huge audience by sharing unsubstantiated claims and damaging trust in supplies of vital military aid to a nation resisting aggression and genocide.”
“There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why.”
In the documentary, Jonas Ohman, CEO of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based group involved in the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine, told CBS News correspondent Adam Yamaguchi that just one third of the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of support sent to Ukraine by the US and its NATO allies was reaching the Ukrainian military.
“You know all this stuff goes to the border, and then kind of like something happens and kind of like, 30 percent maybe reaches its final destinations,” Ohman told CBS News in a preview of the documentary.
Ohman offered hints about what happens to the rest of the equipment, saying that “there are like power lords, oligarchs, political players” operating in the country. “The system itself, it’s like, ‘we are the armed forces of Ukraine. If security forces want it, well, the Americans gave it to us.’ It’s kind of like power games all day long, so eventually people need the stuff, and they go to us.”
The CEO also offered a novel explanation for why the West needs to ensure that Ukraine “wins” in the conflict with Russia. “If we lose the war, if we have this kind of gray zone, semi-failed state scenario or something like that. If you do this – you funnel lots of lethal resources into a place and you lose – then you will have to face the consequences,” he said.
Blue-Yellow has been funneling everything from body armor to night vision equipment and light drones into Ukraine since 2014, when the country was thrust into a civil war sparked by a US- and EU-backed coup in Kiev. The coup led to civil unrest in eastern Ukraine after the new authorities announced a crackdown on the Russian language and began pulling the country into EU and NATO orbit, ultimately culminating in the February 22, 2022 Russian recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as independent states and the launching of a special operation to “demilitarize” Ukraine two days later.
The United States has committed over $23 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since February, on top of billions delivered to the country between 2014 and 2021. The UK, Germany, Poland, and other NATO members have committed over $7 billion more.
Andy Milburn, a retired US Marine colonel and founder of the Mozart Group, a US private military company engaged in the training of Ukrainian troops, suggested the problem with supplies not reaching the front was organizational, and that the West should be more involved in putting “people in place” on the ground to “supervise the country” to prevent pilfering.
“If you provide supplies, or a logistics pipeline, there has got to be some organization to it, right? If the ability to which you’re willing to be involved in that stops at the Ukrainian border, the surprise isn’t that, oh, all this stuff isn’t getting to where it needs to go – the surprise is that people actually expected it to,” he said.
Last week, Sputnik Arabic got an inside look into the nitty-gritty details of the arms smuggling operations taking place in Ukraine, contacting a Ukrainian weapons merchant on the dark web who expressed readiness to sell US-made M4S assault rifles, ammunition, and frag grenades hidden in barrels of motor oil to a Sputnik correspondent posing as a Yemeni arms buyer. The weapons dealer referred to middlemen “allies” in Poland and Portugal ready to assist in the shipment.
Russia has spent months warning the US and its allies about the dangers posed by the shipment of weapons to Ukraine and the threat that they could wind up on the international arms black market thanks to the corruption and instability which have wracked the country.
Washington and Brussels have ignored these warnings, with Kiev assuring them that the arms would not be transferred to third parties or countries. Last month, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) announced that it was “working closely” with Kiev to prevent weapons smuggling after discovering that there was evidence of firearms and military equipment from Ukraine appearing in EU countries.
Most Ukraine aid is a ‘scam’ – US lawmaker
Samizdat | August 7, 2022
Republican lawmakers are feeling vindicated for opposing a $40 billion Ukraine aid package after a CBS News report showed that only 30% of the Western weapons flooding into the country are actually making it to the front lines in Kiev’s conflict with Russia.
“This [is] one of the reasons I voted ‘no,’” US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said on Twitter in a retweet of the CBS News post. Greene was among 57 House Republicans who voted against the massive aid bill, which passed overwhelmingly in May with the support of all Democrats and most GOP lawmakers. Eleven Republicans opposed the bill in the Senate, where it passed by an 86-11 margin.
The CBS story noted that with nearly $60 billion in US and Western European aid approved for Ukraine since Russia’s military offensive began in February, most of the weaponry has failed to get through to Ukrainian fighters. Getting weapons to the troops involves navigating a complex network of “power lords, oligarchs [and] political players,” the outlet cited Lithuanian aid group founder Jonas Ohman as saying. Amnesty International senior crisis adviser Donatella Rovera told CBS that “there is really no information” on where the weapons are going.
Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said such scrutiny had been dismissed prior to the CBS report. “How many people were called Russian bots for saying this exact same thing since March? Now, when CBS says it, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever the case, glad the facts are out now. The majority of the Ukraine aid is a scam.”
US Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) delayed the Senate’s vote on the Ukraine aid bill by insisting on adding a provision appointing an inspector general to monitor how the money was being spent. His colleagues refused to include the oversight requirement and passed the massive package a few days later. A US intelligence official told CNN in April that arms shipments were dropping “into a big black hole” once they reached Ukraine.
Greene, Boebert and other lawmakers who voted against the aid bill were pilloried by critics for failing to support Ukraine. After Greene argued that the US government was focused on sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine at a time when American mothers couldn’t even buy formula for their babies, Democrats accused her of standing “with President Putin in the face of Russian aggression.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said she was “repeating Putin’s propaganda and disinformation” and “appeasing imperialist assaults on sovereign nations.”
The Georgia lawmaker also tussled with a fellow Republican after Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) defended the Ukraine aid package by saying “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.” Greene replied, “So you think we are funding a proxy war with Russia? You speak as if Ukrainian lives should be thrown away, as if they have no value. Just used and thrown away.”
Biden Regime Calls For Censorship On Energy
BY JOHN HINDERAKER | POWERLINE | AUGUST 4, 2022
This is shocking, or would be in a sane world: Gina McCarthy, the Biden administration’s National Climate Advisor, is openly calling on tech companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor any dissent from the administration’s “green” fantasies. McCarthy says the tech companies “have to stop allowing” people to disagree with Biden. No doubt the people she wants to censor include Steve Hayward and myself, among many others.
In my opinion, Gina McCarthy and the Biden administration disseminate misinformation on climate and energy 24/7. But I think they should be “allowed” to do so. Truth will win out, but only if it is not censored.
We wrote here about the lawsuit that the states of Missouri and Louisiana have brought against the Biden administration, accusing it of coercing, or colluding with, tech companies to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights. Watch for Gina McCarthy’s open call for censorship to be an exhibit in that case.
Why the Gulf states’ SCO membership is a big deal
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | AUGUST 7, 2022
Washington has backtracked from the dissimulation by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that Washington had intelligence suggesting Iran was preparing to provide Russia with “several hundred” drones to use in Ukraine, with training sessions set to begin in July.
On July 26, NSC spokesman John Kirby, clarified his boss’ remark by admitting to Al Arabiya, “We’ve seen no indications of any sort of actual delivery and/or purchase of Iranian drones by the Russian Ministry of Defence.”
Interestingly, Al Arabiya buttonholed Kirby at all. For, Sullivan’s fake news (probably based on Israeli disinformation) came at his special briefing on President Biden’s visit to Jeddah. Al Arabiya’s dogged downstream pursuit of the “fake news” suggests that Riyadh knew Sullivan making a crude attempt to to hustle the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in directions that would have made Biden’s trip a roaring success.
Biden had three overlapping objectives: one, to rally Saudi leadership behind his containment strategy against Russia and China; two, to break up the OPEC+ alliance between Saudi Arabia and Russia so that a coordinated counterpoint ceases to be in the world oil market that is beyond American control; and, three, to assemble an anti-Iran military military alliance of Gulf states and Israel to give verve to Abraham Accords which has patently lost its fizz.
Biden drew blank on all three counts: Saudis will pursue their friendly relations with Russia and China and its normalisation with Tehran. Prince Mohammed spoke with President Putin within the week of Biden’s visit where they discussed further expansion of trade and economic cooperation and significantly, also underscored “the importance of further coordination within OPEC+”.
Traditionally, Saudi actions speak far better than words. So, when the OPEC+ held a virtual meeting last Wednesday, it concluded that:
- There is “severely limited availability of excess capacity” among oil producing countries resulting from “chronic underinvestment in the oil sector”;
- It is a matter of “particular concern… (that) insufficient investment into the upstream sector will impact the availability of adequate supply in a timely manner to meet growing demand beyond 2023.”
- The importance of maintaining consensus and the “cohesion” of OPEC and OPEC+ (that is, OPEC plus Russia principally) cannot be overstated.
Plainly put, it rejects the July 3 G7 Foreign Ministers’ Statement on Energy Security, which envisages imposing comprehensive embargo on all services for “transportation of Russian seaborne crude oil and petroleum products globally” unless Moscow sells oil at a price to be agreed in consultation with the West.
Simply, the West is once again contemplating a crackdown on a major oil producing country for geopolitical reasons, which would have profound impact on the world oil market. The paradox here is that, unlike in the case of Iran or Venezuela, the West desperately needs Russian oil’s continued flow into the world oil market but is capping the price at which Moscow can sell so that its income from oil exports cannot sustain the special military operations in Ukraine.
Indeed, the West is acting in the spirit of George Kennan’s famous dictum in the early 1950s that oil “belongs to us” because it lubricated the West’s prosperity. The G7 statement is no doubt precedent-setting. As the pressure on world’s resources becomes more acute, this predatory approach harkens back to the colonial era (when India was frog-marched by Imperial Britain to supply cotton to the textile mills in Britain and buy back textiles at prices determined by the colonial master.)
It can extend to resources other than oil as well. China, for example, produces roughly two-thirds of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, whereas, the US only produces 1% of global lithium supply and 7% of refined lithium chemicals — versus China’s 51% — and is about 70% dependent on imported lithium (which has such critical uses in industries ranging from mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras and electric vehicles to aircraft, high-speed trains and satellites.
To be sure, the G7 move to seize control of Russia’s oil exports rings alarm bells all across the oil-producing countries of the Gulf region. The geopolitical message is: ‘Fall in line, or else.’ Now, this comes at a time when the EU is desperately eyeing access to cheap and reliable supply of oil. (Japan just announced that its “sanctions from hell” against Russia will not apply to the Sakhalin 2 gas and oil project!)
Against such a tumultuous backdrop with the industrial powers inclining toward brandishing their latent colonial instincts of a bygone era, the Gulf states become highly vulnerable. The Gulf states already are shell-shocked about the banditry that the EU and US resorted to against Russia by confiscating its reserves in the Western banking system and appropriating the private assets of wealthy Russians.
There is also an added dimension. Tomorrow, what prevents the “Collective West” from resorting to such pressure tactics to enforce “regime change” in the Gulf region on the pretext of advancing democracy and human rights? After all, it is no secret that the former Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef was Washington’s preferred choice to succeed King Salman. Make no mistake, Biden’s fist bump with Prince Mohammed is not the last word on Saudi succession.
Indeed, Prince Mohammed’s suggestion (while Biden was still in Jeddah) that Saudi Arabia and Iran should now step up their contacts to the political level becomes highly significant. Even more so, Saudi Arabia’s interest in SCO membership (so soon after Iran’s admission to the grouping.)
Along with Saudi Arabia, a host of other West Asian countries have approached the SCO for membership. The Russian daily Izvestia reported on Thursday that the SCO plans to sign memoranda on granting dialogue partnership to Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain at the forthcoming summit in Samarkand. Interestingly, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been invited to the event.
According to Izvestia, as an exception, the UAE has sought SCO membership on an expeditious basis, although the grouping’s established practice so far has been to start with a “dialogue partner”. Izvestia quoted a source close to the SCO organising committee that the SCO has had consultations internally and “the main understanding that dominates is that the SCO is interesting, the SCO attracts, and therefore the most important thing for us is not to wallow in bureaucracy, but to find solutions that will allow us to respond adequately… And react by adapting the rules to new conditions.”
Clearly, Biden’s offer of a military alliance not only had no takers in the Arab world but they seem petrified. If as the Bible says, there are three brands of deception — vanity, flattery, and blasphemy — and Satan uses all three, Biden’s offer contains elements of all three. And if the SCO offers an antidote to the poisoned chalice, why not?
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New Book
The silver that medicine dropped — four thousand years of clinical use, four decades to erase.
Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Inside Bill C-22, Canada’s Patriot Act.
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