Frank Herbert on the police state…
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Russian oligarch keeps showing up in the most inconvenient places for FBI, Washington elites
The bombshell indictments this week alleging that a former senior FBI counterintelligence agent had an inappropriate financial relationship with Oleg Deripaska focused fresh light on an uncomfortable truth: Washington elites have simultaneously demonized and cozied up to the controversial Russian oligarch over the last two decades.
Deripaska, a protégé of Russian president Vladimir Putin and once owner of the country’s largest aluminum company Rusal, has been courted over the years by a prominent Democrat senator seeking help from his lawyer and FBI agents seeking dirt on Donald Trump, enlisted by the bureau to spend his own money to find a missing FBI agent in Iran and lured into hiring Christopher Steele for a legal project before the former MI-6 agent penned his famous dossier.
Even Hunter Biden once crafted a plan to make money off Deripaska by seeking a handsome $80,000 fee to dig up dirt on the Russian businessman for an American aluminum company.
The efforts to court, cajole and cash in on Deripaska occurred at the same time the U.S. government was casting the Russian as a potentially nefarious actor who should be kept from U.S. shores.
In the early 2000s, it was the State Department alleging, with scant public evidence, that the Russian was tied to organized crime or brutal killings. In 2016, he became a focal point of the FBI efforts to prove Donald Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, an allegation that proved spurious. And in 2018, he was sanctioned by the Treasury Department as an ally of Putin and Russian influence campaigns and later indicted by the Justice Department.
Throughout the saga, Deripaska has always maintained his innocence, while his accusers have sent a tantalizing mixed message by courting his help at the same time they were vilifying him.
In a 2019 videotaped interview with this reporter for The Hill newspaper, Deripaska said his on-again-off-again relationship with the American government was symbolic of the larger drifting apart of Russia and the United States as allies after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
2 Antifa indicted for targeting pro-life pregnancy center in Florida ‘Jane’s Revenge’ attack
The Department of Justice has indicted two Florida residents on charges of a civil rights conspiracy for spray-painting threats on reproductive health services and for violating the FACE Act. If convicted, the two could face up to 12 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and up to $350,000 in fines.
The Grand Jury indictment from the Middle District of Florida “alleges that Caleb Freestone, 27, and Amber Smith-Stewart, 23, engaged in a conspiracy to prevent employees of reproductive health services facilities from providing those services.”
“2 Members of #Miami #Antifa indicted by the feds for a string of Jane’s Revenge related vandalism targeting pro life pregnancy centers in 2022 Caleb Freestone and Amber Smith-Stewart are both charged with Civil Rights Conspiracy and violating the FACE act,” Antifa watch reported.
A Hard-Edged Rock: Waging Economic Warfare on Humanity
Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture?
Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.
In 2011, Fink said agricultural and water investments would be the best performers over the next 10 years.
“Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach.”
Unsurprisingly then, just three years later, in 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, were capitalising on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.
Funds tend to invest for a 10-15-year period, resulting in good returns for investors but often cause long-term environmental and social devastation. They undermine local and regional food security through buying up land and entrenching an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture.
In September 2020, Grain.org showed that private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – were being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world.
This money was being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. Offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had targeted Ukraine in particular.
Western agribusiness had been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. A 2015 article by Oriental Review noted that, since the mid-90s, Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council have been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.
In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds.
In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month, strings-attached $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine.
Even before the conflict, the World Bank incorporated measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”
It is interesting to note that Larry Fink and BlackRock are to ‘coordinate’ investment in ‘rebuilding’ Ukraine.
Crushed Bug ‘Additive’ is Now Included in Pizza, Pasta & Cereals Across the EU
As of yesterday, a food additive made out of powdered crickets began appearing in foods from pizza, to pasta to cereals across the European Union.
Yes, really.
Defatted house crickets are on the menu for Europeans across the continent, without the vast majority of them knowing it is now in their food.
“This comes thanks to a European Commission ruling passed earlier this month,” reports RT.
“As per the decision, which cited the scientific opinion of the European Food Safety Authority, the additive is safe to use in a whole range of products, including but not limited to cereal bars, biscuits, pizza, pasta-based products, and whey powder.”
But don’t worry, because the crickets first have to be checked to make sure they “discard their bowel content” before being frozen.
Lovely stuff.
Critics suggested that once bugs become widely accepted as a food additive, their consumption will become normalized across the board.
“The Liberal World Order has decided that the little people must eat bugs to prevent the climate from fluctuating, in accordance with ruling class ideology,” writes Dave Blount.
“Yet rather than mindlessly obey The Experts as most did with Covid policy, people have resisted. So our moonbat overlords are furtively sneaking insects into food.”
Make up your damn minds…
WEF hears about technology that allows your thoughts to be monitored
The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering has always been a testing ground for some bizarre ideas, which nonetheless serve a purpose: to introduce, and if possible normalize all kinds of mass surveillance and sometimes extremely privacy-invasive technologies.
And monitoring people’s brain activity, including via implants – surely, it doesn’t get much more invasive than that.
Yet this was one of the technologies presented at an event in Davos this year by Duke University Professor Nita Farahany.
Brain implants are not new in and of themselves, as are used in medicine to treat some serious conditions. However, the kind brought up here at one point are the ones to be put into healthy people – basically to read their minds.
“Decoding complex thought,” is already possible, Farahany said during her “Ready for Brain Transparency?” talk at the WEF summit last week. And the tech now is also able to reveal the degree of stress somebody is experiencing, as well as what they are paying attention to. So, the goal is to know what/how a person is feeling, what they are thinking, and what draws their interest.
New Biden Admin Program Will Hide Numbers of Illegal Immigrants Entering the Country
If the Biden administration tells you illegal border crossings are down, don’t be fooled. Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) fellow Todd Bensman wrote a piece for Newsweek on Jan. 24 explaining how the new CBP One program doesn’t reduce the number of illegal migrants flooding the southern U.S. border; it simply “pre-approves” those migrants so Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol can claim the numbers of illegal apprehensions and crossings are down. As Bensman said, “The illusion would impress Harry Houdini.”
December was the worst month ever in the border crisis, according to CBP statistics, but CBP seems eager to assure America on Biden’s behalf that the crisis is improving. “The American public will indeed see sharp declines in the monthly illegal apprehension statistics, starting with the January report which comes out next month,” Bensman said. But those declines are just a clever deception on the part of the Biden administration, not an increase of border security. Illegals will be entering America in numbers as large as ever. They will just be able to achieve a sort of legitimized status before entering through CBP One.
Christopher Hitchens on religion…
Massive spike in excess deaths sparks calls for an ‘urgent investigation’: NHS crisis is blamed for nearly 3,000 more Brits than usual dying each week
MPs have called for an urgent investigation into Britain’s soaring death rates as thousands more people than usual are dying each week.
Some 17,381 deaths were registered in England and Wales in the seven days to January 13 – 2,837 above average for the time of year.
This is the highest number of excess deaths since 3,429 in the week to February 12, 2021, when the UK was experiencing its second wave of Covid-19 infections and vaccination had only just begun.
On that occasion, deaths involving coronavirus accounted for 37 per cent of all those registered, according to the Office for National Statistics.
But in the most recent week, Covid-19 accounted for just 5 per cent of the total – meaning other factors are likely to be driving the high level of mortality.
Health experts say this could include ambulance delays, long waits in A&E, unmet need during the pandemic and major backlogs for routine NHS care.
Excess deaths, sometimes known as extra deaths, are the number of deaths that are above the average for the same period in previous years.
This winter has seen a sharp spike in the figures, with deaths 21 per cent and 20 per cent above average in the last two weeks of December, followed by 14 per cent and 20 per cent in the first two weeks of January.
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