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New Report Reveals Jeffrey Epstein Called His Girlfriend Right Before Death

Financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had a 15-minute phone conversation with his girlfriend Karyna Shuliak before committing suicide in his cell, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Epstein reportedly lied to the prison officials about calling his mother, who had died in 2004, dialing instead his 30-year-old girlfriend Shuliak, three people with knowledge of the phone conversation told the NYT.

During the phone call the convicted sex offender did not in any way reveal an intention to end his life, according to the report.

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COVID-19 Made Democracies More Authoritarian and Authoritarian Regimes Even Worse

The COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to a significant decline in democratic values across the globe as many countries have taken aggressive and authoritarian steps to attempt to curb the virus.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past two years, that’s probably not much of a surprise. Still, a new report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a global nonprofit based in Sweden, offers a comprehensive look at the worrying trend of democratic erosion—a trend that has been helped along by the pandemic even though its roots go deeper.

“The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of Covid-19 restrictions,” the IIDEA warns. The number of countries that are becoming “more authoritarian” by the group’s calculus is three times the number of countries that are moving toward democracy. This year is the fifth consecutive year in which the trend has been moving in that direction, the longest uninterrupted stretch of pro-authoritarian developments since the IIDEA started tracking these metrics in 1975.

That trend predates the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, but governmental responses to the virus have made things worse.

A number of democratic countries—the report specifically mentions the United States in this section—have implemented COVID measures “that were disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unconnected to the nature of the emergency,” according to the IIDEA report. Those include travel restrictions and the use of “emergency powers that sometimes sidelined parliaments.”

The last two years have indeed been littered with examples of previously unheard-of government powers on display in the U.S. That includes everything from statewide lockdowns in which governors decreed which businesses were “essential” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with the backing of both the Trump and Biden administrations, making it nearly impossible for property owners to evict deadbeat tenants. It took until this month for the U.S. to reopen its border with Canada for supposedly “nonessential” travel, even though there was probably no good justification for closing the border in the first place.

Outside the U.S., places like Austria and Australia continue to rachet up authoritarian restrictions on public interactions and economic behavior—even for people who have been vaccinated. According to the report, 69 countries have made violating COVID restrictions an imprisonable offense, with two-thirds of those countries being ones the group considers to be democracies. Albania and Mexico have the most punitive laws on the books, allowing prison sentences of 15 years and 12 years, respectively, for violating pandemic-related protocols.

More than 20 percent of countries have used their militaries to enforce COVID controls, which the report warns could contribute to “the normalization of increasingly militarized civil life after the pandemic.” Meanwhile, 42 percent of countries have rolled out voluntary or compulsory apps used for contact tracing, which may be effective in curbing the spread of the virus but create concerning new opportunities for government surveillance in a post-pandemic world. Of particular concern to IIDEA are the eight non-democratic regimes (Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey) where those apps have been made mandatory for all smartphone-using residents.

Meanwhile, some public health officials in America are wishcasting for even more aggressive restrictions. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, recently praised the “really strict lockdowns” deployed by China—a country that no healthy democracy should be using as a model for good policy making.

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Global warming scare-mongers refuted as Arctic ice growing, on track to be the most ice in 2 decades

The scariest scenario of the global warming doomsayers has been the idea that the melting Arctic ice cap would put coastal cities underwater.  For example:

‘Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,’ reported the BBC back in 2007. ‘Their latest modelling indicates that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.’

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Department of Oceanography of the US Navy predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2013.

Maslowski added that his prediction was on the conservative side, too: “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

There are plenty more such forecasts:

‘Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,’ reported the BBC back in 2007. ‘Their latest modelling indicates that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.’

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Department of Oceanography of the US Navy predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2013.

Maslowski added that his prediction was on the conservative side, too: “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

And:

In 2010, Mark Sereezer, the newly appointed senior scientist at the US government’s Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo. was famously quoted as saying: “the Arctic is screaming.”

But, as with countless other prophesies of climate doom, they were alarmist BS.  Cap Allon writes:

This week, Arctic sea ice is approaching 10,000,000 km2 — the second highest ice extent of any of the last 15 years. Furthermore, the years 2008 and 2005 are on course to be eclipsed in the coming days/weeks, as are many from the early-2000s and mid/late-1990s — this means that 2021 will soon claim the title of ‘the highest Arctic sea ice extent of the past two decades’ (since 2001). (snip)

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Irish senator proposes vaccine passports should be needed to buy groceries

A Senator in Ireland has said that the government should consider banning those without a vaccine passport from public transportation and supermarkets, in one of the most extreme Covid proposals to date.

“Why not supermarkets? Why not public transport?” Senator Gerry Horkan asked. “I know it is difficult to police some of these things, but really, if you want to participate in society, you need to be vaccinated.”

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Atlantic Writer’s Advice for Dealing With Conservative Family on Thanksgiving: ‘Maybe You’ll Need to Report a Relative to The FBI!’

A Wednesday newsletter from The Atlantic urged readers to use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to “deprogram” their conservative relatives.

“Maybe you’ll plant the seed, sow just a little doubt about whatever Tucker Carlson is saying now,” Molly Jong-Fast wrote. “Or maybe you’ll need to report a relative to the FBI!”

Jong-Fast described Thanksgiving as an invariably disappointing day that does not live up to the “hallmark-movie fantasy.” Jong-Fast’s best Thanksgiving, she wrote, was the one she spent in rehab when she was 19.

The writer rejected the idea that Thanksgiving should be a time of niceties, gratitude and harmony. Instead, she argued, readers should turn the holiday into an opportunity to tell their “creepy uncle” to get the vaccine or tell their aunt that her news sources are biased and unreliable. Her readers may be the only ones to tell their anti-vax cousin that the vaccine won’t make her infertile, Jong-Fast explains.

She told readers that some of their family members likely “follow QAnon” and need to be educated at Thanksgiving about the COVID-19 vaccine’s safety or the authenticity of the 2020 election.

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Efforts To Groom Us For War With China Are Getting More Forceful

If you thought western mass media have been brazenly pushy with their anti-China propaganda, wait til you see The Hill’s appalling new opinion piece titled “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan“.

“China’s massive investment in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may show China is preparing to fundamentally change the status quo and preparing for possible war with the United States over Taiwan,” the piece begins. “To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan.”

The article goes on to narrate about Taiwan’s importance on the global chessboard and why we should all expect a full-scale invasion by Beijing quite soon, casually discusses a direct military conflict between two nuclear-armed nations like it’s no big deal, and calls on the Biden administration to “articulate to the American people why Taiwan’s defense is critical to the United States.”

Then at the very bottom of the article you get to the part that really matters: the information about the author.

“David Sauer is a retired senior CIA officer who served as chief of station and deputy chief of station in multiple overseas command positions in East Asia and South Asia.”

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