Hard to Admit But Give the Man His Due – McConnell Was Right about Garland

Here’s the absolutely hilarious money quote:

“Readers may recall the intense media pressure in 2016 to let President Barack Obama fill the vacancy created by the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia. Much of the press corps adopted the Obama line that Merrick Garland, then an appellate judge, was a moderate and the even more preposterous Obama contention that senators had a constitutional duty to hold a Garland vote.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thanks-to-mitch-mcconnell-11627938477?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

And, here’s the piece – it even has Charley Rose, the aging leftist sexual predator:

A recent Journal editorial urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to abandon his partisan challenge to Georgia’s new duly enacted voting law, given that a recent Supreme Court decision makes his case even more likely to fail. But the AG is not only sticking with his political campaign against Georgia. Now he’s inviting leftist lawyers at the Justice Department to seek political advantage for Democrats in other states, too.

Attorney General Garland’s Justice Department released new guidance last week on voting statutes affecting voting methods. It reads:

Since the 2020 election, some States have responded by permanently adopting their COVID-19 modifications; by contrast, other States have barred continued use of those practices or have imposed additional restrictions on voting by mail or early voting. In view of these developments, guidance concerning federal statutes affecting methods of voting is appropriate.

The Department’s enforcement policy does not consider a jurisdiction’s re-adoption of prior voting laws or procedures to be presumptively lawful; instead, the Department will review a jurisdiction’s changes in voting laws or procedures for compliance with all federal laws regarding elections, as the facts and circumstances warrant.

Speaking of presumptions, a casual reader can quickly glean that the Garland Justice Department presumes Covid-related changes to be positive. Justice should forgive readers who presume a political motive when the department suggests that laws that existed until early 2020 are not necessarily legal. The natural question is why were such laws not successfully challenged before Covid? Or is there something about Covid that changes the definition of voting rights under statute and court precedent?

What certainly has changed lately is the pressure from progressive leftists to use the federal government to conform state voting laws to the preferences of Democrats.

Instead of inviting his attorneys to challenge policies not enacted between March and November of 2020, Mr Garland ought to be urging a new spirit of restraint before launching another partisan attack on state laws. Last month Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote in the Journal about his state’s 6-3 Supreme Court victory over the Democratic National Committee in a case with some similarities to Justice’s case against Georgia:

The irony is that the DNC chose to attack Arizona, a state that offers some of the most convenient ways to vote. You can vote early in-person, vote on Election Day, or request a no-excuse absentee ballot. Don’t want to get out of the car? We also have drive-through ballot drop-off sites. Contrast that with other jurisdictions such as Delaware, Connecticut and New York, which require bureaucrats to approve your reason for absentee voting. Why are those requirements not being challenged? It’s clear that the DNC prefers to pursue its partisan power plays in what it deems to be battleground states.

Very few media folk warned that AG Garland would be such a partisan combatant. But at least he’s not serving a lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, and Americans can thank Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) for that.

Readers may recall the intense media pressure in 2016 to let President Barack Obama fill the vacancy created by the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia. Much of the press corps adopted the Obama line that Merrick Garland, then an appellate judge, was a moderate and the even more preposterous Obama contention that senators had a constitutional duty to hold a Garland vote.

Mr. McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, pointed out that traditionally the Senate majority did not act on Supreme Court nominees in an election year when the White House was held by the other party, and that tradition would be upheld.

But President Obama went ahead and announced the Garland nomination anyway on March 16, 2016, and also presumed to announce the start of a Senate confirmation process:

Tomorrow, Judge Garland will travel to the Hill to begin meeting with senators one-on-one. I simply ask Republicans in the Senate to give him a fair hearing and then an up-or-down vote. If you don’t, then it will not only be an abdication of the Senate’s constitutional duty, it will indicate a process for nominating and confirming judges that is beyond repair.

That afternoon, the Associated Press reported:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has told President Barack Obama ‘s nominee to the Supreme Court that the Senate won’t consider his nomination.

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart says the Senate’s majority leader spoke to nominee Merrick Garland by phone on Wednesday. Stewart says McConnell repeated his long-held position that the Senate won’t consider a nominee for the high court until the next president nominates one…

Stewart says McConnell felt it was more considerate of Garland to talk by phone, and not subject him to “more unnecessary political routines orchestrated by the White House.”

Stewart says McConnell wished Garland well in the Wednesday afternoon call, which the spokesman says did not last long.

That was just about that, but of course many media folk were not ready to quit the Garland campaign. Mr. McConnell appeared on a PBS program in June for an interview with Charlie Rose. It’s worth noting Mr. McConnell’s prescient remarks about the man who is now U.S. Attorney General:

CHARLIE ROSE: If Garland was nominated by Hillary Clinton, president- elect, to be a Supreme Court justice, would you support it?

MITCH MCCONNELL: Here`s the deal. We`re in the middle of a presidential election here. You would have to go back 80 years to find the last time a vacancy created in a presidential election year was filled. You have to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland to find the last time a Supreme Court [nominee for a] vacancy occurring in a presidential election year was confirmed by a senate of the opposite party. Let`s go back to 1992, Joe Biden was chairman of the judiciary committee… It wasn`t a vacancy, but he said gratuitously, … if there is a vacancy that occurs this year, he wouldn`t fill it. Chuck Schumer said 18 months before the end of George Bush, 43: If a vacancy occurred, they wouldn`t fill it. So what is everybody saying here? If you are in the middle of an election year for president, a vacancy on the Supreme Court will not be filled. And it is not about Merrick Garland personally, although the president calling him a moderate doesn`t make him a moderate. But it`s not about him personally.

CHARLIE ROSE: Well, but he has been supported by the Republicans in the past…

MITCH MCCONNELL: For lower court appointments. This is the Supreme Court we`re talking about…

CHARLIE ROSE: But are you not rolling the dice? Because some will argue that if, in fact, Hillary Clinton is elected president and she may appoint someone more to the left of Judge Garland, and therefore you`ll get something more than you might have gotten if Judge Garland, who is a man of temperament…

MITCH MCCONNELL: Yeah. I heard that argument. He`s a nice man. We will not get anybody any more liberal than Merrick Garland.

CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, I wouldn`t say that…

MITCH MCCONNELL: I would.

CHARLIE ROSE: OK.

MITCH MCCONNELL: I`ve looked at his record very carefully.

“She Blinded Me With Science”

Obey logo and symbol, meaning, history, PNG

Jeffrey Tucker: https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-threat-science/5751720

The CDC Is a Threat to Science

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the astonishing shift from the CDC on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. It is not just that the CDC is re-recommending masks for people indoors in many parts of the country, which could include your neighborhood or not, and this could change tomorrow. (Hint: right now, it disportionately affects red states.) 

Whether and to what extent you “protect” yourself from disease with a paper strapped to your mouth and nose is now wholly contingent on data reporting and interpretation. It might feel like science but it has a better name: arbitrary power. Out with the Constitution. Out of traditions of law. Out with legislatures and the will of the people.

What’s even stranger was the rationale that the CDC cited to claim that the Delta variant renders the vaccines – the ones that have been hyped with unrelenting propaganda for many months, including stigmatization and demonization of those who refuse – substantially less effective for stopping infection than President Biden was touting just last week.

Our thinking on the subject is supposed to mutate at the same pace as the virus itself. It’s exhausting and triggers anyone’s BS detector. How in the world does the CDC expect anyone to believe anything it says in the future?

To be sure, the claim that breakthrough infections (PCR positives in vaccinated individuals) might be more common than thought could in fact be true. Indeed, I tend to think it is. It is a general principle of immunology that for viruses that mutate quickly, inoculation cannot always keep up as an infection preventive.

This is one reason that these fields have for the better part of 100 years observed that natural immunity is to be preferred if that is an option. It is safer and more globally effective for pathogens that are mild for most people, which is exactly what the science is (pointlessly) showing yet again now. Vaccines are glorious for stable viruses (measles, smallpox), but less comprehensively effective for flus and  coronaviruses – which is saying nothing controversial. I should add.

For example, a study from a Houston, Texas, hospital shows that the Delta variant is more transmissible than the wild type or other mutations. “Delta variants caused a significantly higher rate of vaccine breakthrough cases (19.7% compared to 5.8% for all other variants)” and yet there are fewer hospitalizations and deaths – which is another point for traditional virus theory: as a rule of thumb, variants of these pathogens are more prevalent but less severe. We’ve long known that – or did until 2020 when we decided to scrap a century’s worth of public health wisdom.

There is a rumor out there – that’s all it is – that the CDC is relying on some other study out of India that demonstrates that the Delta variant outwits the vaccine, but the study in question pertains to a vaccine not available in the US, has not been peer-reviewed, and was even withdrawn from preprint status so there is no way to check the findings or the data behind them. There are by now more than 100,000 pieces of science out there related to Covid, and they are public. But the one on which the CDC is rumored to follow is not available.

Where it gets interesting is that when a CDC spokesman was asked for the science behind the mandate – we aren’t talking about masking here, but the basic claim that the Delta tends to make an end-run around vaccines – the person said it wasn’t published, as if that were completely normal. What does this mean? Only Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and some other big shots at the government agency have access? The millions of other scientists in the world cannot even have access to check out to make sure that the science is sound? And from the interpretation of a small cabal inside some bureaucracy comes the law of the land?

A critical principle of science is peer review, and that at least requires sharing study results that you claim to be definitive. If you don’t do that, people have every reason to dismiss your claims. In the decades since the internet, we’ve seen an ever more intense push to get those journals from behind paywalls and make them publicly available for greater accountability and a better scientific process.

In fact, open science works. A perfect example has been shown this past year when members of the public – including this writer – have enjoyed access to all the science pouring out daily, and happened to take notice of how completely screwed up policy has been in light of the actual evidence. There is zero evidence of a relationship between lockdowns and disease mitigation, zero credible evidence that masks cause a change in the virus trajectory, zero evidence that any of this wreckage of our liberties and rights has been worth it in any case, among many other revelations thanks to open science.

But now we have the CDC making a massive change in the lives of Americans – mandating a piece of clothing around our faces – but flat-out refusing to cite the science behind the claim; either about the variant, its effects, much less the sketchy claims that masks make any difference at all either way. They could have cited the Houston study but did not. Nope. The studies “have not been published yet,” the CDC spokesperson told the Epoch Times.

And we are just supposed to sit by, take our instructions, believe what they say about the science we’ve never seen and they will not share with other scientists, and not complain about it. To be sure, it could be correct that the vaccines are less effective than we have been told all these months, and that’s fine. Just give it to us straight. And yet even the Houston study showing this admits that Delta itself is less deadly.

Isn’t the whole point of this whole Covid kabuki dance to minimize severe outcomes – not cases, not infections, not exposure but hospitalization and death? One would suppose so. But the data games have enabled the disease planners for the better part of a year and a half to keep the shell game going, manipulating data, trends, and various other factors to remix the numbers in ways that fit whatever story they want to tell at the moment. So long as it generates a headline and a policy, we are good to go.

These days, the game is out in the open, brazen, completely undisguised. The science has been reduced to the status of pure diktat. They speak, you obey. If you question it, or even if you are correct too soon, you are toast. The fact-checkers will nail you and you will be body bagged as a subversive and an enemy of the people.

The unscientific nature of this game is summed up in the following realization. The Biden administration is toying with tactics and strategies for disease control that have utterly and completely failed for the 16 months they have been tried. Everwhere in the world! The science as we know it conclusively demonstrates the failure of every bit of the lockdown agenda. And yet here we are, threatened by another round on all sides.

I was curious how our home assistants have handled this newest turn of events that is going to land the nation’s kids in masks again this fall. I asked her. I got in return a tedious rendering of the same bland messaging from 5 different news sources, each nonchalantly telling us the new instructions from some unelected bureaucracy led by people with no experience or skin in the game.

I had the sudden sense that I was playing a bit part – the powerless man in a chair – in some dystopian science fiction movie. The point of the movie is to warn us against a future that we should all work to prevent – to know that such a nightmare would be possible and to therefore guard against any trend in that direction. Such movies exist to remind us how fragile freedom really is.

Sadly, the nightmare is here. It is everywhere. There is no more need for warnings. Now we have to deal with the reality of what we’ve become thanks to the people who once imagined that they could use the power of the state to outwit an enemy that neither we nor they could see or understand. Refusing to admit complete failure, they only double and triple down in a theater of the tragically absurd.

CDC Still Baffled People Are Paying Attention To Them

Babylon Bee: https://babylonbee.com/news/cdc-still-baffled-people-are-paying-attention-to-them

ATLANTA, GA—The CDC has once again changed course, recommending that people wear masks indoors, even those who have received the COVID-19 vaccination. Many people have reacted angrily to this decision—greatly confusing the CDC, which is used to being completely ignored.

“This whole pandemic has been bizarre for us,” said CDC spokesman Dexter Park. “Normally, we put out recommendations like only cook a steak well-done and only fry eggs over-hard, and people don’t even pay enough attention to make fun of us, so people acting like what we say during the pandemic matters is really confusing.”

The CDC is a group of bureaucrats used to working a 9-to-5 job of complete pointlessness, making lists of recommendations that are fated to be crumpled up and thrown in a wastepaper basket. Thus, the pandemic turning them into experts whose opinions matter has caught them completely by surprise.

“People keep saying our suggestions on masking are dumb and make no sense,” said CDC regulator Lyle Howell. “But that’s all of our suggestions on everything. We have to keep making recommendations, though, to justify our existence and get a budget. But no one listens to them—not even us. So can’t you all just go back to ignoring us and stop yelling at us? I’m just here until I get my pension.”

Discounting the Future

Steve Goldstein on living in the moment – literally: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/interest-rates-havent-been-this-low-in-5-000-years-11627644496?mod=home-page

Interest rates haven’t been this low in 5,000 years

Interest rates were considerably higher in Mesopotamian times. DAVID MCNEW/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

How is this for a historical comparison — interest rates are at a 5,000-year low.

That’s a finding in the latest Bank of America flow show report, which, in fairness, is a number that’s been trotted out before. It’s based on a 2005 book about the history of interest rates, but the chart is still incredible to examine.

“In the next 5,000 years, rates will rise, but no fear on Wall Street this happens anytime soon,” said David Jones, director of global investment strategy at Bank of America.

The Bank of America report pointed out there was a record weekly inflow to Treasury inflation-protected securities of $3.2 billion. The belief in low-rates also has inflows to tech stocks trending higher.

The 10-Year Treasury Inflation-Indexed security yielded a record low negative 1.15% on Thursday.

The 10-year yield TMUBMUSD10Y, 1.223% was 1.25%.

The S&P 500 index SPX, -0.54% closed Thursday as its second-highest level ever, though stock futures ES00, 0.46% pointed to a lower start on Friday.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia

Kurt Schliter: https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/07/29/imagine-if-they-hadnt-lied-to-us-for-the-last-18-months-n2593208

Imagine If They Hadn’t Lied To Us For The Last 18 Months

Everybody wrap something around your face again even though they said you wouldn’t need to if you got vaxxed! But they didn’t lie – no, apparently a bunch of people – and not just those evil white nationalist-Christian-gun-Jesus-flag people – are refusing to get the vaccine, and the reason is that they are moral defectives somehow in thrall to Tucker Carlson’s Svengali-like powers of persuasion. You see, the people who won’t get it are stupid people who hate science because they refuse to trust the people who have spent the last year-and-a-half lying to them.

I don’t blame those folks a bit. 

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine our ruling class was not as utterly corrupt, dishonest, incompetent and downright stupid as it manifestly is. I know that’s hard, but go with me.

This weird new virus appears and starts spreading. Instead of leveraging it to take down Trump, the Democrats appear with the Republican president and GOP leadership to announce they are working together to solve the problem. Imagine that instead of shaming people, first about wearing masks, then about not wearing masks, then about not wearing two masks, then no masks, then masks again, they went with transparency. 

“We are not sure how much, if at all, masks work. We’re running test trials to see and we’ll tell you what we find as soon as we have the data. In the meantime, let’s all wear them just in case.” And then, when they ran the studies, they would tell us the answer. 

Have you seen any studies about masks? We get a lot of that fascist gnome and others telling us to wear masks (after initially telling us they were useless – remember that memory-holed narrative?) but where’s the actual science?

See, you have to believe the science, and believe them when they tell you what it is yet won’t show you. Obey!

But trust is earned, and these people act like it is their right to have our trust, that we owe them to take it on faith that whatever these people say is the Gospel. Except they are wrong all the time, and instead of owning up to it, they treat you like some sort of idiot for noticing. When you don’t trust people who are perpetually wrong, that’s not denying science. That is science – you are making observations, and drawing reasonable conclusions. In this case, the observation is that our establishment sucks, and that it can’t be trusted.

How far would a little humility gone? Very far. Imagine, and this will be hard, these masterminds getting up and saying, “America, we were wrong about something. We thought it was right, but we tested it and we found we were not right. Here is the data, and now that we have better information, we are changing our recommendation.”

What would we say? “Oh, okay. They were doing the best they can and being straight with us. People make mistakes. We need to learn from them. After all, it’s been a century since the last pandemic so we have a lot of lessons to re-learn. Let’s move forward.”

But no. No, there’s no humility. They make a mistake and they don’t stand up and admit it. Instead, they just change the narrative and act as if the narrative du jour was always the narrative. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. But we’re not blind or stupid for noticing.

They tell us the vaccine is going to make us immune from COVID. Then it turns out you can still get it, just not as bad. Yet when people notice this 180-degree spin, the smart set shrieks like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Just imagine if they had been honest and forthright. But that was not in the cards. The ruling caste’s conceit is that we are idiots, unable and unworthy to make simple decisions for ourselves. We must be guided, nudged, or intimidated, if necessary, into making the right choice. And we do not deserve explanations, because the last thing our elite wants is accountability. 

Instead, they want unlimited power. Look at their arbitrary emergency rules and regulations. You could go to a strip club but not a church. Huh? And the courts, again, let us down initially by not enforcing the Constitution. It was an emergency, after all, and as we all know, in an emergency you need to rule by decree, say our betters. So, we got to watch idiots walking around in the sunshine with mouth thongs on while cops busted mommies for letting little Billy play on the slide. At no time did most of the establishment reconsider or change. No, it doubled down on failure. Yet we’re supposed to trust it?

And then there are the revelations about where it came from. They first blamed the innocent pangolin. But it looks like it was our elite’s buddies the Chi Coms, except when people raised that notion earlier, they got banned by social media. Our establishment limited our ability to speak about something true. Think about that. And they want to do it again.

And that’s where the vaccine hesitancy comes in. The smart set squanders its trust then is shocked to find that its trust has been squandered. People are seeing side effects from the vaccine. Those were always going to happen. But our elite is unwilling to level with people about them and let individuals manage their own risks. Instead, our garbage elite dismisses people with questions as “anti-vaxxers” instead of engaging with them and earning their trust. See, we peasants are unworthy of engagement. How dare we seek to choose for ourselves? The nerve of us serfs!

I got the vaccine. I also had the disease. I talked to conservative doctors I trusted about my unique situation and made my decision. You should do the same – you know your situation, and you should balance the risks. I don’t tell other people what to do because it’s not my business and I don’t know their story. I’ve had people get on me for mine, and they need to back off – they don’t know my situation and it’s none of their business. Similarly, theirs is none of mine.

The establishment has squandered its credibility, which is why its demand that everyone take the shot is getting shriller and the attempts to force people more punitive. Imagine if they had been honest from the beginning. Imagine if they had been held accountable. But to do that, you have to imagine having a ruling class that doesn’t suck. And that’s more imagination than anyone can muster.

Reverse Repo Madness

Is this the work of a serious artist?

And here’s Tyler showing you what’s ahead: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/25-trillion-reverse-repo-year-end

RRP volume is quickly approaching $1 trillion a day, with today’s reverse repo usage hitting the second highest on record at $987.3 billion and just shy of $1 trillion.

And with QE still running at $120 billion a month, the Fed continues to inject liquidity into the markets, which then continues to recycle back to the Fed via the RRP facility.

So how big will the Fed’s reverse repo facility get? As Curvature’s Scott Skyrm calculates, assuming QE will not change between now and the end of the year, it is about to get much bigger.

During the month of April, RRP volume increased by $49 billion. $296 billion during the month of May, $362 billion* in June, and $124 billion in July. If RRP volume continues around the same pace, say $200 billion a month, RRP volume will reach $2 trillion by the end of the year.

Looking at the trendline, it puts RRP volume at $2.5 trillion by the end of the year. However, RRP volume at the end of the year will be a large number, meaning it could very well approach $3 trillion by year end.

A few rhetorical questions to conclude: what will be the impact of $2 trillion going into the RRP each day? How will this affect the markets? Will the Fed need to adjust the RRP rate again?

I’m finding the wisdom of Hunter Thompson’s view of life increasingly applicable to the “gonzo economics” that is our Federal Reserve and its evil twin, the Federal Government:

  • “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
  • “We can’t stop here, this is bat country!”
  • “If asked if you care about the world’s problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again.”
Fear And Loathing Quotes Bats. QuotesGram

A blood marker predicts who gets ‘breakthrough’ COVID

A woman in a facemask and glasses uses a syringe to extract vaccine from a vial.

It depends on post-vaccination antibody level.

Nature: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02096-3

People fully vaccinated against COVID-19 are less likely to become infected with the coronavirus if they have relatively high levels of virus-blocking antibodies, according to a study of thousands of health-care workers who received the Pfizer–BioNTech jab1.

The analysis adds to a growing body of evidence that a person’s levels of ‘neutralizing’ antibodies, which block SARS-CoV-2 from infecting cells, predict whether that person will become infected.

A robust predictive marker, known as a correlate of protection, could help regulators to approve new vaccines without requiring large clinical trials. It could also help them to assess the need for booster shots to guard against emerging viral variants. The study “is an important step in further validating the use of neutralization titre as a correlate of protection”, says Miles Davenport, an immunologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

When SARS-CoV-2 breaks through

The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on 28 July, draws on data from almost 11,500 fully vaccinated health-care workers at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, Israel. Extensive testing between late January and late April 2021 identified 39 workers who had become infected with SARS-CoV-2 despite being fully vaccinated. All had mild symptoms or none at all, but 19% still had some symptoms 6 weeks after diagnosis.

For 22 of the 39 workers with ‘breakthrough’ infections, the authors were able to obtain antibody measurements taken either on the day the infections were detected or in the week before. The researchers also examined data from 104 fully vaccinated workers who matched infected workers for factors such as age but who did not get infected. Comparison showed that levels of neutralizing antibodies were lower among those who got infected — providing the first direct evidence of this effect, says Davenport.Six months of COVID vaccines: what 1.7 billion doses have taught scientists

The results bolster earlier data collected during clinical trials of the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine. Analysis of those data also showed a link between higher levels of neutralizing antibodies and a lower likelihood of breakthrough infection2. But the difference in antibody levels between trial participants who had breakthrough infections and those who didn’t was not statistically significant.

The latest study does have drawbacks. It is based on a small number of cases among young and healthy adults, which limits its application, says Andrew Fiore-Gartland, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. More studies from vaccine trials are expected soon, he says.

And the analysis does not provide a specific level of antibodies that is associated with protection, say researchers. Such a threshold of protection “is what the field really needs to move forward”, says Fiore-Gartland.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02096-3

References

  1. 1.Bergwerk, M. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072 (2021).Article Google Scholar 
  2. 2.Feng, S. et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.21.21258528 (2021).

Punching Above Their Weight

Comfort, luxury, and air superiority can be yours at the low, low price of $30 million/copy

Strategic Culture Foundation: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/07/27/what-week-did-russia-achieve-check-mate-with-its-latest-introduction-cutting-edge-weapon-systems/

Robert BridgeJuly 27, 2021

Russia has, in just one week, upped the military ante to such a degree that long-term peace in this part of the world is a very tempting thought.

While it remains a hypothetical question as to whether Russia has surpassed the rest of the world in terms of fighting preparedness, it would be hard to name another seven days in recent history when the country has unveiled more potential game changers.

If anything demonstrates once and for all that Russia has dusted off the cobwebs of its Soviet past and moved boldly into the future, it was to be found at the MAKS-2021 Air Show in Moscow, held from July 20-25.

The star attraction of the international aviation salon, which draws thousands of visitors annually, was not seen roaring in the skies overhead, but rather it was tucked away inside of a mocked up pavilion. Resembling a premier of the latest Hollywood action flick, visitors lined up almost half a kilometer to catch a glimpse of the Sukhoi Su-75 ‘CheckMate,’ the new stealth fighter that state-owned United Aircraft Corporation touted as superior to Lockheed Martin’s F-35 joint strike fighter. All things considered, it seemed only fair that Russian President Vladimir Putin got the first preview of the aircraft.

YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNDrTSDmaZY

The rollout of the Su-75 is critical for Moscow on several fronts. First, it simply proves that Russia, if there was any doubt about it before, has broken the mold on technological breakthroughs achieved during the communist period. Up until now, the Russian Air Force has been dependent on two-engine warhorses, like the Su-35 and the MiG-35, formidable in their own right but expensive to produce and maintain.

By comparison, the streamlined and lightweight single engine Su-75 costs just $30 million dollars per machine and will allow Russia to close the aviation gap with NATO, which has been able to make up for its technological inferiority with raw numbers.

To quote an article by The Saker: “Russia’s main weakness when compared to the U.S./NATO is primarily quantitative: while they are much inferior, U.S./NATO aircraft are produced in huge numbers the Russian industrial base and finances cannot match, at least not by producing very advanced but also very expensive aircraft a la Su-35S.

“The RAF needs many cheap but highly effective combat aircraft and the Su-75 might well be “the” dream machine for Russia.”

Some of the main technological features of this highly anticipated aircraft include:

–     Top speed of 2400 km/h (about 1500mph or just under Mach 2);

–     Capable of engaging 6 targets simultaneously;

–     1500 kilometer combat range (932 miles);

–     The fighter is “open architecture,” which means it can be adapted to specific needs;

–     $25-30 million apiece to produce, which will make it attractive on foreign markets.

Aside from giving Russia a fearsome addition to its already airtight air defense system, it will also allow smaller countries to punch far above their weight. Insiders say that prospective state buyers of the state-of-the-art aircraft could include Egypt, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela and Syria, which nearly disintegrated into another Libya as multiple NATO states descended upon the country in a muddled attempt to dislodge Islamic State from the territory. Only with the participation of Russian forces – much to the dismay of the Western military alliance, by the way, which seemed content to let the extremist forces overrun the legitimate Syrian government of President Bashar Assad – was the terrorist cancer ultimately removed with surgical strikes.

Speaking of Syria, just this week the country came under consecutive attack by the Israeli Air Force, which has made a habit over the years of conducting airstrikes inside of the Arab republic with the excuse of acting in self-defense against “Iranian” forces operating inside of the country.

According to reports by the Russian military, two Israeli F-16s launched four missiles from Lebanon airspace at Syria’s Homs province. All of the missiles were reportedly intercepted and destroyed by the Syrian Army using Russian-made ‘Buk’ air defense systems. Days earlier, Syrian air defenses, responding to yet another incursion, shot down seven of eight Israeli missiles during a July 19 raid. The missiles in that attack were launched over Syria proper, after the Israeli aircraft reportedly penetrated an area on the Jordanian border controlled by U.S. forces.

Coincidentally, just one day after the Israeli incursion into Syrian territory Russia released video of the new S-500 anti-aircraft system that is designed to shoot down fighter aircraft. The trials proved successful, with the missile seen obliterating a high-speed target as it streaked across the sky.

Earlier this month, Chief Commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Sergei Surovikin, said the new system will be capable of taking down enemy aircraft and even hypersonic weapons in “near-Earth space,” making the S-500 the first generation of such defensive weapons, RT reported.

According to the Ministry of Defense, “after completing all the assessments, there are plans to deliver the first of the S-500 systems to air defense-missile brigades near Moscow.”

Now as if all that were not enough, that same week of muscle-flexing saw the Russian Navy successfully test fire the Zircon missile, which hit a target in the White Sea at a distance of 350 kilometers while traveling at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound.

The test comes as competition in the Arctic is heating up, especially as climate change appears to be opening up the region to easier access to oil and gas deposits, as well as highly profitable shipping lanes.

In May, the Russian Ministry of Defense responded to increased U.S. and NATO activity in these frigid northern regions with the announcement that it would deploy a squadron of Su-34 fighter-bomber jets to an updated 14,000 sq. m military base located in the Franz Josef Land archipelago.

Whether or not the move will cool NATO’s engines in the region remains to be seen, but the newfound business and strategic potential in the Arctic remains simply too great for Russia to let down its guard.

On Sunday, July 25, the hyperactive week for the Russian military came to a festive close as Vladimir Putin formally kicked off the annual Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, where dozens of vessels – including the 186.4 meters (611 ft. 7 in.) cruiser Marshal Ustinov – sailed down the Neva River as huge crowds watched in awe from the banks.

“Today, Russia’s naval fleet has everything it needs for the guaranteed defense of the country, of our national interests,” the Russian leader proclaimed. “We can detect any enemy and, if necessary, carry out an unavoidable strike.”

Indeed, Russia has, in just one week, upped the military ante to such a degree that long-term peace in this part of the world is a very tempting thought. However, Russia’s long and turbulent history has taught it not to place too much hope on such elusive things. As the famous Russian proverb says, ‘Eternal peace lasts only until the next war.’

Creating the Ukrainian Slush Fund in the Nordstream-2 Deal on Behalf of the American Political Class and Their Cronies

$175 million “seed money” for a $1 billion fund for “Green Energy” (hilarious).

And where does the $1 billion come from? Care to guess?

Ви вмієте говорити українською? Якщо ви можете, тоді ви знаєте, хто буде платити.

https://odysee.com/@theduran:e/merkel-makes-germany-look-weak.-sets-up:f

Hunter Biden – drop the art deals and call your office STAT!

Die Deutschen brauchen das Gas. Or, if you prefer …Немцам нужен газ

Here’s Tom Luongo spelling out the obvious: https://tomluongo.me/2021/07/24/nordstream-2s-hard-lesson-in-reality-for-everyone/

Nordstream 2’s Hard Lesson in Reality for Everyone

For more than six years everyone who is anyone in a politically sensitive position in Europe and the U.S. has wrung their hands over the Nordstream 2 pipeline. From the moment it was announced the howls of pain could be heard all around the world.

Those screams were the screams of people who had grown fat and rich on the status quo realizing their gravy train was over.

Now the project is all but complete and the saga coming to an end we have a weak deal between all the major parties to keep some of that gravy train running. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Joe Biden finally buried the hatchet over Nordstream 2.

But the reality was that Nordstream 2 was always going to get completed. I’ve never wavered in my assessment of this.

The reasons were myriad.

The Germans need the gas.

The Germans wanted another political cudgel to use over the recalcitrant Poland and the Baltics.

The Germans need the gas.

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is a board member of the Nordstream 2 consortium who put the deal together.

Oh, and the Germans need the gas.

It wasn’t a tough set of equations to solve here. The major players are Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the U.S. Whose needs are fulfilled by Nordstream 2? Germany’s.

Who controls the EU? The Davos Crowd through Germany.

Who needs relatively cheap energy to keep popular revolts from overthrowing major governments? Davos.

In the end economics and the reality of positive incentives always force a resolution on people determined to hold back the tide through regulation and arm-twisting creating perverse incentives. Believe me, there’s a broader lesson for all concerned here than just Nordstream 2.

As to the pipeline itself, the main sticking point for many people in the U.S. was a combination of leftover Cold War policy of denying Russia any new pipelines into Europe and personal enrichment because of Ukrainian gas transit.

But the events of the past decade and the existence of Nordstream 1 saw the dynamic in that relationship shift dramatically.

The U.S clearly does not control the reins over European energy policy and hasn’t for a long time.

The Davos Crowd controls U.S. policy over Europe and damn near everything else at this point, especially with Biden sporifying in the White House and Obama pulling all the strings behind the scene.

That anti-pipeline policy was powerful when the U.S. called the shots in its relationship with Europe. Trump tried to reassert U.S. dominance over Europe and beginning to be successful. But Merkel and others simply waited for his term to end, hoping their incessant meddling in his presidency would weaken him.

Because of the times and Trump’s excellent media instincts and unwillingness to be publicly shamed, he only grew stronger. So they had to depose in the most nakedly brutal way imaginable. However, his opposition to Nordstream 2 forced a lot of people to expose themselves over their corruption in Ukraine. Davos called in nearly every marker they had to bury Hunter Biden’s corruption.

At the same time Hunter was nothing more than a distraction to keep people from looking deeper at Mitt Romney, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Poppy Eyed Adam Schiff, all of whom have interests in Ukraine continuing to transit gas through the old leaky Soviet pipelines.

The reason Nordstream 2 got finished is because Davos finally acceded to reality that it lost in Ukraine.

That’s what the Biden/Putin summit was about (among other things).

In the past, when Davos had its sights set on Ukraine to take it away from Russia through a terrible offer of EU membership in 2013, new pipelines into Europe were actively blocked, e.g. Southstream. U.S. Cold War policy and their goals converged.

In the case of SouthStream, the U.S. was made out to be the bad guy putting the final pressure on Bulgaria to stop the project. The truth was the EU kept changing the rules on Gazprom in order to lock them into a long-term relationship which the EU would consistently hold the regulatory whip hand over and use to dictate prices once they had their monopsony in place.

At least that was the plan.

When that plan failed and Putin cancelled Southstream, disallowed Ukraine’s admittance into the EU — which former President Viktor Yanukovich was never serious about — and blocked the full takeover of the country by backing the independence of both the Donbass and Crimea, Nordstream 2 was put on offer.

This was a desperation move. Plain and simple.

Now Gazprom had all the leverage in new Ukraine gas transit talks. Putin froze the conflict in Ukraine. The current gas transit deal is all in Gazprom’s favor. It will be again in 2024 when it ends then.

This reality forced Davos to back Germany over the pipeline otherwise Germany would no longer be able to run its economy and leverage that to lord over the rest of Europe. Davos’ control over Europe rests on Germany’s economic and political strength within in the bloc. Period. Without that the EU splinters rapidly.

This is why Tump was such a real problem. Once he was removed and order restored from their perspective they made one last attempt to test Russia’s resolve in Ukraine. They got a firm, if not stern, Russian “Nyet,’ and then sent Biden over to Geneva to sue for peace after he made it kinda look like he wasn’t rolling over.

And that peace was a face-saving way out of the mess in Ukraine; the face-saving ‘deal’ that allows the U.S. to look like it forced Germany to recompense Ukraine for potential future revenue losses which was agreed to by a lame duck Merkel and Biden this week.

The deal is a joke. The boys at The Duran covered it beautifully last night. It’s nothing more than a slush fund to ensure a couple of billion dollars continues moving through the right people’s hands while it has the political veneer of ‘green’ energy investment in Ukraine to appease the locals.

It’s a typically cynical deal by Merkel as she throws Ukraine further under the bus, tries to threaten Russia with something Germany will never do — not buy gas from them — and ensure that the American politicians with the most to lose are insulated from further scrutiny.

The reality is, as Gazprom deputy chairman Alexander Medvedev said back in 2018, all the wrangling over Nordstream 2 is silly. Germany and Europe are going to need Nordstream 3. There’s plenty of gas demand in Europe to go around.

And in case anyone hasn’t been watching, natural gas prices are signaling that we’re in for a lot more than just a tranistory rise in energy prices.

Natural gas is looking to close July at more than $4.00 / mcf for the first time since the cold weather spike during the nasty 2018 winter which saw even the obnoxiously belligerent British buy tankers of Russian gas to keep people from freezing.

Natural gas prices haven’t been sustainably above $4.00 / mcf since 2014. And this price spike is happening during the summer, not the winter when gas demand is highest. This is yet another reason why Germany simply could not afford to lose Nordstream 2.

They’ll not only need Nordstream 2 and likely 3 but also those LNG terminals that Merkel promised Trump as a sop to get him to back off on the pipeline. Trump, for all of his faults, understood Merkel well enough to know she wasn’t offering anything she wasn’t already prepared to do alreaady.

Trump’s pressure on the project was existential for Europe given Merkel’s (and Davos’) disastrous decision to shutter all nuclear power in Germany. The EU going forward is a massive energy importer. The offshore gas fields of the Netherlands and Norway are drying up faster than anyone wanted to admit until recently.

And at the heart of Davos’ Great Reset is the imposition of their new more enlightened communism than that of the brutal Slavs and the sub-human Chinese. It is this Euro-centric arrogance and, frankly, racism that drives them.

The fact is most of Europe is going to have to face the reality that their great social welfare systems which so many younger Americans have been propagandized into thinking are sustainable are actually on life support. They’ve always been on a ventilator.

And that ventilator has been cheap, locally produced oil and gas, which is ending.

Why do you think Davos is so hostile to oil and gas? It has absolutely zero to do with Climate Change and saving humanity from itself. They hate what they no longer have. The hard lesson for a lot of Millennials and frankly stupid Greens who can’t think beyond first order effects is the same one the Soviet Union had to face.

Communism doesn’t work even if you subsidize the bejeesus out of it through energy exports and hand out ‘free stuff’ from the profits to everyone to mask the costs. In short, incentives matter. Perverse incentives just hollow out the productive class, in Marxist terms, the bourgeoisie, and ensure the collapse of the economy through the inability to rationally calculate costs. Some guy named Mises worked this out in 1922, here we are a century later having to explain the basics of human action over and over again.

And Davos can’t run their new technocratic dystopia if they don’t have control over the input price of energy in their home turf, Europe. The Soviet Union lasted as long as it did because of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves. Europe is trying to implement a more perfect Soviet Union while simultaneously sending real energy costs skyrocketing.

This is truly a case of people thinking they are so clever they sell themselves the dumbest ideas imaginable.

Nordstream 2 will likely see Gazprom undercut the global price for gas, helping to offset the EU’s disastrous regulatory scheme which creates a structural disadvantage for German companies. Moreover, since they are trapped at negative nominal yields and are desperate to maintain the façade of a strong euro to keep sovereign debt yields low, there is no hope or help from what should be the natural ebb and flow of exchange rates.

So, rock meet hard place. Something had to give and in this case the U.S. gave up on Nordstream 2 and Davos is going to find out really soon that no matter how many palms you grease, how much Kompromat you generate on important people, perverse incentives are the root cause of all human organizational failure.

That’s likely the hardest lesson of all here. Davos blew up the world economy by vandalizing the middle classes of the first (and second) world, in the process mangling the capital investment cycle into energy which is now coming back to haunt them as prices rise alongside public unrest.