Russia"s top prosecutor criticizes mass mobilization, telling Putin to his face that more than 9,000 were illegally sent to fight in Ukraine

Igor Krasnov told Putin there were "more than 9,000 citizens who were illegally mobilized" when Russia sent conscripts into Ukraine late last year. Russian President Vladimir Putin (l) and Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, January 31, 2023.Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP Russia's prosecutor general told Putin more than 9,000 mobilized troops were called up illegally. In a face-to-face meeting, he said their health was why many shouldn't have been sent to fight in Ukraine. Reports last year said Russia had called up students, elderly people, and those with health issues. In a sitdown meeting with Russia's president, the country's prosecutor general said that thousands of troops who were mobilized to fight in Ukraine last year were conscripted illegally.Igor Krasnov told Russian President Vladimir Putin that almost 9,000 reservists were mobilized illegally, according to a transcript of their conversation released by the Kremlin on Tuesday. He said that many of them should not have been sent in the first place because of ill health, and were later returned to Russia.Krasnov also said there had been issues with paying the troops.In his conversation with Putin, Krasnov said that the mobilization "revealed a lot of significant problems."In September, Russia announced a partial mobilization of 300,000 troops, which it said was completed in October. This came after major battlefield setbacks for Russian forces, which had expected a quick victory following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.Putin said in December that 150,000 of those troops had been sent to serve in Ukraine, with the rest still in training in Russia.The military call up resulted in tens, if not hundreds of thousands of young Russians leaving the country by plane and over its land borders in the weeks that proceeded it.Putin admitted last September that Russia had made "mistakes" in its mobilization, after reports that students, people without combat experience, the elderly, and those with health issues were among those who had been called up to fight, when only reservists were supposed to have been drafted.Krasnov told Putin that Russia had been forced to "reconsider approaches to the organization of military registration," and had created databases of available military personnel.Widespread issues related to Russia's mass mobilization have long been reported, including a lack of training and equipment. Some soldiers were drafted, trained, sent to Ukraine, killed, and returned home in body bags within a month of the announcement — a rapid timeline that would be unheard of in a Western army.Experts and defectors also say that Russian generals used the troops like cannon fodder.In the transcript of the conversation released by the Kremlin, Putin praised Krasnov's work, and asked him to keep monitoring the "rights" of mobilized Russians. This comes as Russia is expected to announce another round of mobilizations, though the numbers are unclear.Ukraine and its allies say they expect a fresh Russian offensive in the spring, with Ukrainian intelligence warning earlier this month that Russia plans to mobilize 500,000 additional troops.NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday that Russia is preparing to mobilize more than 200,000 troops, while the UK ministry of defense said in December that Putin had been presented with plans to expand Russia's military by around 30%, to 1.5 million active personnel.The release of the transcript between Putin and Krasnov is likely an effort by the Kremlin to reduce concerns in Russia that any future mobilizations will be as ill-prepared as the last one.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Conscripts and students will not be called up and will affect only those with combat experience, according to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a ceremony to receive credentials from foreign ambassadors to Russia at the Alexander Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow on September 20, 2022.Photo by PAVEL BEDNYAKOV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced the partial mobilization of his country's reservists. According to Russian officials, 300,000 reservists will be drafted immediately. Putin said the move is meant to "defend the motherland" and protect Russia's sovereignty. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for the "partial mobilization" of the country's military reservists, in a move that is likely to escalate Moscow's ongoing war with Ukraine.In a televised address on Wednesday morning, Putin said the mobilization would begin immediately and that those called up would be granted the same status as regulars in the armed forces.The mobilization will see 300,000 reservists drafted, The Washington Post reported, citing officials. Conscripts and students will not be called up and will affect only those with combat experience, according to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.In his speech, Putin reiterated that the goal of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the liberation of the Donbas region. Per the BBC, the Russian leader also accused the West of trying to blackmail Russia and vowed to "use all resources we have to defend our people.""The territorial integrity of our motherland, our independence, and freedom will be secured, I repeat with all the means we have," Putin said, per the outlet."Those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the prevailing winds can turn in their direction," he added, the BBC reported.Pro-Russian separatist officials in four occupied regions in eastern and southern Ukraine announced on Tuesday that they would hold referendums on joining Russia within the next few days. Ukrainian officials in response slammed the referendum as a "sham" and said it won't change anything. "Russia has been and remains an aggressor illegally occupying parts of Ukrainian land. Ukraine has every right to liberate its territories and will keep liberating them whatever Russia has to say," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in response. Ukraine's defense ministry said: "Ruscist reconstructionists in the occupied territories never tire of repeating the Nazi referendum on the Anschluss of Austria. They are expecting 1938 results. Instead, they will get Hitler's 1945 outcome."Western officials on Tuesday expressed similar sentiments. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the referendums are a "further escalation in Putin's war" and said they carry no legitimacy. And Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters that the votes are "meant to distract from the difficult state that the Russian military currently finds itself in right now," adding that the US won't recognize the outcome of any vote. The referendums come after several weeks of Ukrainian advances along the war's eastern and southern fronts — including a punishing counteroffensive in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region, which has seen the liberation of thousands of square miles of territory previously under the occupation of Russian troops. In the face of major battlefield defeats, Putin's military continues to face a tremendous personnel shortage. A senior US defense official said on Monday that Russia is struggling to find volunteers to fight in Ukraine because significant casualties and poor battlefield performance have led to refusals to go into combat. Even the notorious Wagner Group — private mercenaries with close Kremlin ties who have been fighting alongside Russian troops in Ukraine for months — is experiencing its own staffing problems. The official said Wagner has tried recruiting prisoners to take up arms in Ukraine in exchange for their freedom, but many are refusing the offer. Britain's defense ministry highlighted these shortcomings in a recent intelligence assessment, noting that Wagner's issues and shortened training courses at Russian military academies indicate that the "impact of Russia's manpower challenge has become increasingly severe." Some Russia watchers have expressed concerns that the annexation of captured Ukrainian territories by Moscow would be exploited by the Kremlin as a means of escalating the war and solving the Russian military's manpower issues. Retired US Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, a former defense attaché to Russia and senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, recently told Insider that if the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk asked for accession into Russia and were accepted, then it would mean — in the eyes of the Kremlin — that "the fighting that is currently going on in Ukraine will suddenly be 'in Russia.'"Ryan warned that this could have a number of immediate implications. "For one, Putin could solve his military-manpower problem because now all the conscripts (35+% of the force) can be used — since it's no longer a war abroad," Ryan said."A second development will be that the red lines against fighting on Russian territory will be suddenly crossed," Ryan added. "NATO weapons will be fighting and shooting inside Russia. And most importantly, the Russian state will be under direct attack. And as we know, that is a trigger for using nuclear weapons."Western officials have consistently warned that the use of nuclear weapons by Russia cannot be ruled out, particularly if Putin feels pushed into a corner. That said, some Russia experts are still skeptical that Moscow would use weapons of mass destruction given the potential consequences — including a possible direct confrontation with NATO. Multiple members of the military alliance, which is comprised of 30 countries, are nuclear powers. "I don't think that Putin would use tactical nukes in this situation — even if he's losing, even if he lost everything in Ukraine," Robert Orttung, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, told Insider last week. Orttung said that using such a weapon would "take the war to the next level" and that the Russian president would be "too afraid of what the response would be."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Whitney Tilson’s email to investors discusing why he is not persuaded by Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB)’s defense; responses to his letter to Sheryl Sandberg; other reader feedback and his comments. Q3 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more Why I’m Not Persuaded By Facebook’s Defense 1) In yesterday’s e-mail, I shared Facebook’s (FB) defense to the […] Whitney Tilson’s email to investors discusing why he is not persuaded by Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB)’s defense; responses to his letter to Sheryl Sandberg; other reader feedback and his comments. if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') { document.write(''); } .first{clear:both;margin-left:0}.one-third{width:31.034482758621%;float:left;margin-left:3.448275862069%}.two-thirds{width:65.51724137931%;float:left}form.ebook-styles .af-element input{border:0;border-radius:0;padding:8px}form.ebook-styles .af-element{width:220px;float:left}form.ebook-styles .af-element.buttonContainer{width:115px;float:left;margin-left: 6px;}form.ebook-styles .af-element.buttonContainer input.submit{width:115px;padding:10px 6px 8px;text-transform:uppercase;border-radius:0;border:0;font-size:15px}form.ebook-styles .af-body.af-standards input.submit{width:115px}form.ebook-styles .af-element.privacyPolicy{width:100%;font-size:12px;margin:10px auto 0}form.ebook-styles .af-element.privacyPolicy p{font-size:11px;margin-bottom:0}form.ebook-styles .af-body input.text{height:40px;padding:2px 10px !important} form.ebook-styles .error, form.ebook-styles #error { color:#d00; } form.ebook-styles .formfields h1, form.ebook-styles .formfields #mg-logo, form.ebook-styles .formfields #mg-footer { display: none; } form.ebook-styles .formfields { font-size: 12px; } form.ebook-styles .formfields p { margin: 4px 0; } Get The Full Series in PDF Get the entire 10-part series on Charlie Munger in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or email to your colleagues. (function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true); Q3 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more Why I'm Not Persuaded By Facebook's Defense 1) In yesterday's e-mail, I shared Facebook's (FB) defense to the latest charges of bad behavior by whistleblower and former employee Frances Haugen, as articulated by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as a friend who knows the company well. My take: I'm not buying what they're selling... Zuckerberg's post is laughably bad. In the face of Haugen's compelling testimony and her release of thousands of pages of damning internal company documents – which has led to overwhelming, bipartisan criticism – Zuckerberg's 16-paragraph, 1,316-word post doesn't once acknowledge any problem, much less any contrition, much less any indication that he and his company might need to do even a few things differently. His tone deafness is matched only by his arrogance. My friend, on the other hand, at least acknowledges that "there is a huge problem," but says, "I disagree Facebook is blind to it." (Quick correction: I misquoted him yesterday here: "This extends to idiots on Facebook's board as well by the way." Here's what he wrote: "I have no opinion on FB's board – I was referring to board members at other companies who try to tell the CEO how to run a company when they have no idea what is really happening. That is why a board's role is to hire and fire the CEO, not to run the company.") In most of his response, however, he criticizes Haugen, saying that she: ... had no direct reports, never met a senior executive at Facebook, started with extreme bias, and then only found/extracted information that confirmed it. She never worked in the areas she is "so knowledgeable about" – like teens – so has no idea what Facebook is trying to do... ... she is basically as knowledgeable as a tabloid – at best. It's like the janitor telling Zuckerberg how to run Facebook... She's an idiot looking for five minutes of fame. Industry veterans are cringing. I couldn't disagree more. First, Haugen was hardly the "janitor." She's a Harvard Business School graduate with more than 10 years of experience in the social media sector, nearly two years of which was at Facebook (from 2019 to 2021 – see her LinkedIn profile) – plenty of time to see what was going on. As for the argument that she wasn't a C-suite executive and therefore wasn't in the loop for high-level decisions, I'd argue the opposite... She was perfectly positioned to be a whistleblower both because of the group she was in – the Civic Integrity unit, which was responsible for preventing the spread of election misinformation and addressing other bad behavior – as well as her level: as a Product Manager, she was senior enough to see what was really happening, but not so high up that she wouldn't know the details. Moreover, Haugen's testimony, to both 60 Minutes and Congress, was compelling. I've been watching 60 Minutes since I was a kid in the 1970s, and she was one of the most impressive people I've ever seen on the show. And my opinion is widely shared: Senators on both sides of the aisle praised her, as did Mike Isaac of the New York Times, who wrote: We're moving into hour three of Ms. Haugen's testimony and she hasn't shown any signs of flagging. Confident, poised, and accurate, for my money she is one of the most impressive critics of Facebook I've seen appear on Capitol Hill. Lastly, Haugen's testimony is corroborated by: a) thousands of pages of internal company documents she copied... b) the long, sordid history of Zuckerberg and Facebook, dating back to the very founding of this company (for more on this, read this shocking article: How Facebook Was Founded) – also, note that my friend wrote that Haugen "said nothing we all didn't already know"... and c) many other former company insiders. For example, here's an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times by Roddy Lindsay, a former Facebook data scientist: I Designed Algorithms at Facebook. Here's How to Regulate Them. Excerpt: Washington was entranced Tuesday by the revelations from Frances Haugen, the Facebook product manager-turned-whistle-blower. But time and again, the public has seen high-profile congressional hearings into the company followed by inaction. For those of us who work at the intersection of technology and policy, there's little cause for optimism that Washington will turn this latest outrage into legislative action. Even more damning are the comments of Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook: Brazen Is the Order of the Day at Facebook. Excerpt: I think the overall theme of the leaked documents and the Wall Street Journal series is that since 2016 Facebook has built teams of hundreds of data scientists, social scientists and investigators to study the negative effects of the company's products. Unfortunately, it looks like the motivational structure around how products are built, measured and adjusted has not changed to account for the evidence that some Facebook products can have a negative impact on users' well-being, leading to a restive group of employees who are willing to leak or quit when the problems they work on aren't appropriately addressed. I agree with Stamos' recommendation: I think Zuckerberg is going to need to step down as CEO if these problems are going to be solved. Having a company led by the founder has a lot of benefits, but one of the big problems is that it makes it close to impossible to significantly change the corporate culture. It's not just Zuckerberg; the top ranks of Facebook are full of people who have been there for a dozen years. They were part of making key decisions and supporting key cultural touchstones that might have been appropriate when Facebook was a scrappy upstart but that must be abandoned as a global juggernaut. It is really hard for individuals to recognize when it is time to change their minds, and I think it would be better if the people setting the goals for the company were changed for this new era of the company, starting with Zuckerberg. With new leadership, you could see the company adopting safety countermetrics on the same level as engagement and satisfaction metrics, and building a product management culture where product teams are not only celebrated for their success in the marketplace but held accountable for the downstream effects of their decisions. Zuckerberg is, of course, never going to step down voluntarily, and given that he controls 58% of the voting shares, how could he ever be removed? Here's how: the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") – which, thanks to Haugen, is now investigating Facebook for misleading investors – could force him out. I don't think it's likely – but it's not impossible. I think there's a 25% chance that Zuckerberg is no longer CEO within two years... Responses To My Letter To Sheryl Sandberg 2) I received huge amounts of feedback in response to my open letter to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Below is some of it, with my responses in some cases... "Instead of lambasting Sheryl and Mark (unfairly in my eyes), you should have sent your letter to Congress. Congress (and then the courts) has full responsibility for regulating our communication systems. All best (& I love reading your newsletter – I really do & enjoy pics also)." – Paul B. My reply: Thanks for your feedback, Paul. In fact, I sent my letter to a dozen members I know in the House and Senate, one of whom replied: "Wow, wow, wow. Thanks for sharing. I hope it is read." Another replied: "A powerfully written letter. I agree with every word of it, although I doubt that Facebook will find the wisdom to follow your advice. I am going to sign up for your newsletter "I agree with your assessment of Facebook (and your letter to Sheryl Sandberg), but your recommendation for them to rehire Haugen will never happen. She is considered a traitor by Facebook and they will never rehire a traitor. Based on Zuckerberg's reply, I'm skeptical that they are willing to address and fix the issues until the government force them to do so." – Sid My reply: I agree. "I'm so glad you compared them to the Sacklers. I hope this wakes them up." – Alex B. [But another reader disagreed...] "Good email but would recommend not equating people with Sacklers in the future unless they are literally killing people by knowingly promoting something dangerous (like Oxycontin). To me, the Sacklers fall into a group of historical miscreants that can only be used narrowly for an analogy – otherwise, it's overkill and can dilute from your point. Sandberg may read your email and dismiss it, saying to herself, 'We are not the Sacklers.' You could also substitute Hitler for the Sacklers and you can see my point. I'd only use Hitler as an analogy for a leader who is mass killing people, like Pol Pot. My two cents. Always enjoy your daily email!" – Bruce Z. My reply: Hi Bruce, to be clear, I didn't say they currently are equivalent to the Sacklers, but rather they "are on a trajectory to have legacies that rival the Sacklers." To understand why I say this, read the following articles: Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar Sri Lanka: Facebook apologizes for role in 2018 anti-Muslim riots Hate Speech on Facebook Is Pushing Ethiopia Dangerously Close to a Genocide NGO: Facebook approved ads inciting violence in N Ireland Bangladesh: Fake news on Facebook fuels communal violence When Social Media Fuels Gang Violence Civil rights leaders condemn Zuckerberg, Facebook for fueling racial hatred and violence Domestic violence and Facebook: harassment takes new forms in the social media age "I really do not understand what the fuss is about. If I hear or see something on radio or TV that I find to be dangerous or offensive I turn the channel. Nobody is forced to use Facebook or Instagram, or Snapchat or any of the other social media platforms. Just delete the apps. If you don't want your children to use them, then delete them from their phones. Take some personal or parental responsibility. I truly do not want someone else deciding what I can listen to or watch. Let me decide." – T. H. My reply: Hi T.H., in a perfect, rational world, I'd agree with you. But in the real, messy world, I can't. "I have found it very hard to get anyone who works at Facebook to engage openly about anything at the company, even in a social/casual off the record context. I can't think of another company whose employees are so unwilling to speak off the record. It makes me wonder if they really know deep down how bad what they are doing is." – B.B. "Thank you Whitney for sharing a BIG story of our time. I agree with some of the defensive remarks – the issue of 'bad actors,' misinformation, and hate speech on social media is not unique to FB, but FB is certainly guilty of providing a platform that has allowed all of the above to be promoted on its platform. "It took the World Jewish Congress five years of complaining to FB to finally get them via Sheryl Sandberg to put in more strict algorithms regarding Holocaust denial and misinformation on FB – five years of effort! Now, FB users are directed to factual information when they make up falsehoods about it. But this only pertains to the U.S. and U.K., so the fight continues with FB to get them to implement this in Arabic and other languages and countries. This is incredibly frustrating and hurtful. "Why are the Mullahs in Iran permitted to use Twitter (TWTR) to spread Islamist and hate speech, for example? So as much as I dislike government interference into business practices, I do see a necessity given the extent of damage being done. "Thanks for all you do to share carefully researched information that provide opportunities to empower our lives." – Andrea L. "I spent 15 years in the Valley, much of it in the same orbits as the leadership at Facebook (I'm being vague purposefully). I actually can't say for sure they are well-intentioned." – Matty G. "Thanks Whitney on behalf of the multitudes who have truly mixed feelings about Facebook. We're thrilled about the connections we relish with wonderful people, but deplore the damage it has done to our society and body politic." – Andrew S. "I'm on board with [your] evaluation and solution 100%. Let's hope they both have the courage to right the ship. The country that I love and have fought for is losing its grip. Let's show some respect. Thank you very much." – Ken J., former Ranger "Zuck and the rest knew what they were doing. They were complicit in all of it in order to rake in ad revenue. Wall Street Capitalism only measures 'good' in terms of money. I think you are right: they will do a PR apology tour and that's all." – Grant P. "Isn't Zuck a bit too narcissistic to care? The company was born in betrayal. Ironic that such a complete asocial person is in charge of the way we socialize in this country. I think he'll do anything he can get away with and is too arrogant to think there will be consequences." – Leigh S. "Hello Whitney... I am one of those folks who believes when someone does something good, it should be recognized. You and I are very different in our perspectives about most subjects. I read your letter to Facebook just a few minutes ago. "Your letter to the COO was simply and completely what they needed to hear. Although I still have a FB account, I have not actively used FB in over three years. It seemed the vitriol just got worse and worse, regardless of the subject matter, but especially politically. I decided I would not be a part of that, as it can consume you, if you allow it to take up your time. You have to realize that every person has a viewpoint, and it is not likely you will be successful in changing someone's mind, although it does happen on an infrequent basis. "I commend you for reaching out to them, as I am sure others will do. I have a concern that the size of this organization will make government intervention likely. I am not a fan of big government, big brother, as it were, but this situation, if they do not turn it around on their own, government may be the only answer. All the best." – Larry F. "You said everything I was thinking, but ever so much better. I will hope the letter is taken to heart and sweeping changes made so FB can continue to be the great business that it COULD be but has failed so badly to be." – Stacey G "I think you nailed it, my friend! Well, reasoned and direct, to the point, your letter will hopefully bring the FB team and Ms. Haugen together again to make a better, stronger company that serves our social interactions in an honest and forthright manner." – Chuck M. "After reading Zuckerberg's lengthy response I am more convinced that he and the FB team know exactly what they are doing and the harm they are causing. A CEO that wants to be regulated rather than taking the necessary steps to clean up their business strategies is only creating cover for themselves. Unfortunately FB is not only damaging to young girls but to our society as a whole. Through their technology and algorithms they easily manipulate the masses of uniformed customers to be persuaded in any direction they chose. Unfortunately this is like leading blind sheep to slaughter. Yes FB needs to be regulated but not in a way Zuckerberg would approve of. He knows Congress isn't capable of passing any type of regulation to make FB clean up its act and this gives him plenty of cover to continue their unethical business practices." – David L. Other Reader Feedback 3) Lastly, here is one reader's response to Zuckerberg's post: Here are some questions that came to mind when I read Zuckerberg's message: He wrote: Many of the claims don't make any sense. My reply: Which ones don't make any sense? And which ones do make sense? He wrote: If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? My reply: Because you need to do the research to maximize 'engagement.' This is clearly consistent with profit maximization. He wrote: If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space – even ones larger than us? My reply: Is this demonstrably true? What companies in your space are larger? He wrote: If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? My reply: What is this "industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting?" Where can I learn more about these standards? If FB transparency standard is so high, then where are the reports of your research? He wrote: And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the U.S. while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? My reply: Which countries are not becoming more polarized? Excluding authoritarian regimes, are there any? Just saying things doesn't make them true – though if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that saying things over and over again can convince large numbers of people that they are true. Prime examples – claiming rampant election irregularities when none exist; vaccines are the government's plots to control the population; pizza-gate. – Randy J. Thank you, as always, to my readers for sharing their insightful and provocative thoughts! Best regards, Whitney P.S. I welcome your feedback at WTDfeedback@empirefinancialresearch.com. P.P.S. My colleague Enrique Abeyta is looking to hire a junior analyst to help him launch his upcoming newsletter, Empire Elite Crypto, later this fall. If you geek out on cryptos and enjoy writing, we'd like to hear from you. Send us your résumé and a one-page write-up of your favorite crypto investment idea right here. Updated on Oct 7, 2021, 2:11 pm (function() { var sc = document.createElement("script"); sc.type = "text/javascript"; sc.async = true;sc.src = "//mixi.media/data/js/95481.js"; sc.charset = "utf-8";var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(sc, s); }()); window._F20 = window._F20 || []; _F20.push({container: 'F20WidgetContainer', placement: '', count: 3}); _F20.push({finish: true});.....»»

Victor Davis Hanson: The March Madness Of The President Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com, Joe Biden’s political utility and near senility serve as exemptions for his often sexist, racist, and creepy riffs... Another couple of weeks, another bout of madness from Joe Biden and his team. Of recent Biden delusions, consider: Biden went off in one of his impromptu Corn Pop, or “beat-up-Trump-behind-the-bleachers” fables. These often slurred and nearly unintelligible tales characteristically virtue signal Biden’s own victimhood and “courage.”  They are interspersed with his bizarre propensity for eerie female contact. So we see or hear of his long record of blowing into the ears and hair, or squeezing the necks of young girls. He hugs, for far too long, mature women. He can call out among a crowd an anonymous attractive teen stranger. Or, recently he relates an incoherent but quasi-sexual vignette.  So Joe recalled his patient days in his usual off-topic “no lie/not kidding/no joke” manner (i.e., tip offs that he’s lying). He told us that a noble nurse once would “come in and do things that I don’t think you learn in medical school—in nursing school.” The president got a nervous laugh from the apparent quasi-pornographic reference (but then again Joe is excused because he is a “feminist”), before he detailed her technique:   She’d whisper in my ear.  I didn’t—couldn’t understand her, but she’d whisper, and she’d lean down. She’d actually breathe on me to make sure that I was—there was a connection, a human connection. A woman leaning over to blow into a prone man’s ear certainly constitutes a “human connection.” Yet all of Joe’s fables have different Homeric-style retellings. Two years ago he claimed that the same nurse in question actually blew into his nostrils. What a strange air-pressure technique that must have entailed for a person recovering from brain surgery. But perhaps it was consistent with biblical references to God blowing the spirit of life into the nose of man. About a week later, referencing that hospital stay, Biden added that doctors “had to take the top of my head off a couple times, see if I had a brain”—a reference that did not reassure the nation he is not enfeebled.  No one in the media had much of a reaction because Joe Biden’s political utility and near senility serve as exemptions for his often sexist, racist, and creepy riffs.  Instead, the media wrote off the nurse breathing into good ol’ Joe’s orifices as belonging to the same weird genre that a while back gave us inner-city kids stroking the golden hairs on Joe’s tan legs, or the shower revelations of Ashley Biden’s diary, or his “you ain’t’ black,” “put y’all back in chains,” and “junkie” sorts of racial condescension (e.g., “Why the hell would I take a test? C’mon, man. That’s like saying you, before you got on this program, you take a test where you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?”).  Joe also blustered to a crowd during Black History Month, “I may be a white boy, but I’m not stupid.”  The crowd laughed at the idea that the jester Biden believes white people are usually stupid, but that he, Joe, the exception to his race, is not stupid, despite being white. At least Biden finally referenced himself as “boy.” Usually he has used that racial putdown for prominent blacks like Maryland Governor Wes Moore or a senior White House advisor Cedric Richmond. The February-March madness of Joe was not through. Sometimes, his venom renders him disgustedly comic, as when he took the occasion of mass American deaths from fentanyl on his watch, to chuckle that the carnage was at least worse under Trump (an abject lie):  ‘I should digress, probably. I’ve read, she [Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene], she was very specific recently, saying that a mom, a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl, that, that I killed her sons. Well, the interesting thing is that fentanyl they took came during the last administration.’ Followed by the Biden laugh. Apparently, 100,000 dead at least deserves from Joe a “Trump did it” chuckle. Joe, for the third time in two years, tripped and nearly fell ascending the ramp of Air Force One. At some point even his supporters will concede that when octogenarians repeatedly stumble and fall, if not put under careful watch or provided a walker, it is only a matter of time until they break a hip and become bedridden. In another replay, once again Biden finished his remarks, turned around to exit—and had no idea where he was going to go or whose invisible hand he was supposed to shake. Amid all this, Biden more or less stuck to his now tired rhetorical themes.  One is the serial denunciation of the MAGA Republicans. Usually, he trashes them as semi-fascists or un-American, often in the context of his “unity speeches.” After calling for reconciliation, bipartisanship, and unity, Joe then usually tightens his face, grimaces, and starts yelling about the MAGA dregs and chumps.  If Biden is really angry, he adds the intensive adjective “Ultra” for the MAGAites. He gets particularly incensed when referencing the one percent who “don’t pay their fair share” (the one percent pays over 40 percent of all income tax revenues). Biden is oblivious that the entire Biden clan is under popular suspicion of not reporting all of the millions of dollars in quid pro quos leveraging they raked in from foreign governments without registering as their agents. Note that his entire team, when stung by charges of incompetency or illegality, usually follows Joe’s tactic of “Trump did it.” So when Pete Buttigieg was criticized for ignoring the East Palestine rail wreck and reminded of his past serial transportation failures, junkets, and incoherent systemic racism charges, he retreated to blaming Trump for the derailment.  Buttigieg falsely claimed that Trump’s past lifting of particular electric railcar brake regulations caused the wheel bearing failure in East Palestine, a lie that even members of his department could not stomach. Two, Joe creates elaborate fables. In the past two weeks, he returned to his civil rights lie that he was a campus activist agitating for racial justice. At least he did not add his usual fillips of being arrested or standing up to apartheid police in South Africa. In Biden’s world, he brags he has reduced inflation. Yet when he entered office in January 2021, the annualized inflation rate was 1.7 percent. Two years later in January 2023 inflation went up to 6.4 percent, after hitting a high in June 2022 of 9.1 percent—6.4 percentage points higher than when he took office. In mid-March we will learn of the February 2023 annualized rate, but it is expected to climb back to more than 8 percent.  If anyone compares the current price of eggs, or rent, or diesel fuel, or a natural gas heating bill or building materials to their respective costs when Biden entered office, then he would know Biden’s inflation is cumulative and has nearly destroyed the affordability of shelter, food, and fuel—the stuff of life. He mentioned lowering heating and cooling costs of American homes through his climate change advocacy. In truth, on average electric rates shot up over 10 percent last year. Natural gas and fuel went even higher to over 25 percent in a single year.  Biden talks about his low unemployment rate of 3.4 percent. But it is almost identical to what the Trump Administration achieved—without Biden’s high interest rates and acute inflation—in the months before the massive COVID lockdowns.  Moreover, current low employment is largely a reflection of reduced labor participation—due to early retirements, exits during the pandemic, fear of COVID, long COVID, the zoom culture, and most importantly the Biden continuance of massive COVID-era subsidies that discourage employment. The labor participation rate has hit near historic lows under Biden, lower than the pre-COVID rate under Trump.  It was not until last month that the Biden economy finally achieved the level of total employed Americans who had been working in January 2020 on the eve of the Covid lockdowns.  As far as interest rates for 30-year fixed mortgages, they were 2.9 percent when Biden took office. Now they are currently over 7 percent.  In sum, Biden repeats the same patterns of deception: crash the economy as evidenced by many of its major indicators, then when a data point reveals a slight and likely temporary monthly recovery, he brags he “reduced” inflation, interest, or unemployment. We also heard during the same week from Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland who was shredded during his testimony to the Senate. He argued that the vastly disproportionate FBI response to violence against abortion centers versus attacks on pro-life groups was only due to the differences between light and dark—literally: abortion centers are attacked during daytime; in contrast, pro-life shelters are attacked during night.  Apparently his Justice Department and the FBI shut down at sunset and reawaken at dawn—as if either most violent crime does not occur at night or there is nothing to be done about it when it does.  Garland further embarrassed himself when he could not explain the disproportionate use of force in arresting or detaining conservative suspects versus the virtual exemptions given prominent left-wing suspects.  Most embarrassingly, when asked why he did not charge mobs that swarmed the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices to influence their decisions—a federal felony—he lamely claimed there were federals protecting the residences. In Garland’s world, some criminals committing felonies are completely exempt if law enforcement prevents further violent manifestations of their criminal behavior. So illegally swarm a Supreme Court justice’s residence to influence a court decision, but then stop short of escalating further by the sight of law enforcement—and, presto, you never committed a crime in the first place.  Garland finished off his recent nonsense by repeating the lie that five police officers were killed due to the January 6 protests. In fact, none were. Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes after the protests were over. The other four committed suicide weeks or even months later and no one has connected their self-induced deaths with any act of the protestors.  About the same time, a beleaguered Pete Buttigieg went off on riffs about Tucker Carlson, who, he implied, lacked the grassroots, working-man fides of Buttigieg. He claimed that for all the criticism he has endured, he believes that he will be remembered for posterity for his fight against “climate change”—although he did not point to any concrete result in reducing carbon emissions due to his singular policies.  In fact, Buttigieg will be known but for other characteristics: He repeatedly emphasizes his identity politics gay stature both to note his supposedly pathbreaking courage and to claim victimhood when attacked. He sees transportation through the lens of race and so chases the unicorn of white privilege, whether concerning past freeway routes or the makeup of current construction crews (falsely charging that white men are overrepresented on them). Under his tenure as Transportation Secretary, the country experienced dangerous supply interruptions, ossified ports, and harbor-bound trains robbed in Wild West fashion.  Buttigieg’s diversity mandates either did nothing to ameliorate, or actually led to, a series of near-miss airline crashes, the complete shutdown of the airline industry due to computer glitches and weather, the implosion for a week of Southwest Airlines, the East Palestine derailment disaster, and labor interruptions. In all these cases he either was on leave or a junket, wrote them off as Trump’s fault, or contextualized them as no big deal.  Delusional Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkas has declared the border closed and the nation secure, even as 100,000 Americans per year have died from overdoses of fentanyl shipped with impunity across the open border by Mexican cartels. When upwards of 7 million aliens flow across the border illegally since Biden took office, it is written off as Trump’s fault.  Finally, last week there were several interviews with FBI Director Christopher Wray. He could not explain why his agency goes full military mode to arrest a father and husband for protesting at an abortion clinic while having no clue who has been attacking pro-life shelters.  In Wray’s mind, the performance art sweep into Mar-a-Lago, which he claims was not a “raid,” was no different from having Biden’s lawyers quietly conduct their own “investigations” of Biden’s improper removal of classified documents (improper with an asterisk, since no vice president has the president’s legal authority to declassify whatever he wishes).  Wray could not explain why the FBI sat on the Biden trove until the midterm election was over and then only acted to further search Biden residences when its own asymmetrical protocols came under fire.  Add up the last few weeks, and we learned that Christopher Wray’s FBI is doing splendidly in its even enforcement of the law. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is absolutely disinterested and treats all sides equally. Alejandro Mayorkas has closed the border and we are now “secure.” Pete Buttigieg is building a legacy for the ages as a climate change crusader. And an eloquent and dynamic Joe Biden has compiled an impressive legislative record on his way to a great presidency—with the energy, we are told by Dr. Jill Biden, that is more impressive than any 30-year-old’s. Tyler Durden Mon, 03/13/2023 - 21:20.....»»

Luongo: The War For The Dollar Is Already Over, Part II: The Fly Or The Windshield? Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog, Live images flashing by Like windshields towards a fly Frozen in that fatal climb But the wheels of time, just pass you by -RUSH, “Between the Wheels” In part I of this series I told you the war over the US dollar was over because the bane of domestic monetary policy, Eurodollar futures, lost the battle with SOFR, the new standard for pricing dollars. The ignominious end of the Eurodollar system is a study in the evolution of markets, as a new system replaces an old one. Old systems don’t die overnight. We don’t flip a switch and wake up in a new reality, unless we are protagonists in a Philip K. Dick novel. More than a decade ago I looked at the responses to President Obama cutting Iran out of the SWIFT system as the beginning of the end of the petrodollar system. The goal was to take Iran out of the global oil markets by shutting Iran out from the dominant dollar payment system. Out of necessity Iran opened up trade with its major export partners, most notably India, in something other than dollars. India and Iran started up a ‘goods for oil’ trade, or as Bloomberg called it at the time, “Junk for Oil.” The stick of sanctions created a new market for pricing Iranian oil and a way around the monopoly of US dollar oil trading. India, struggling with massive current account deficits because of their high energy import bill, welcomed the trade as a way to lessen the pressure on the rupee. Iran needed goods. They worked out some barter trade and the first shallow cuts into the petrodollar system were made. Turkey eventually joined the fray, seeing the opportunity to act as a middle man by accepting gold into its banks from Iran’s customers and settling up with Iran in dollars or whatever. Turkey was the first country to make gold a 100% reserve asset in defiance of Basel I capital rules to facilitate this trade. Turkey’s gold ‘reserves’ skyrocketed because of this. More than 10 years later we’re now looking at the lynchpin of the petrodollar, Saudi Arabia, seriously considering taking other currencies for their oil. The petrodollar was never going to die overnight, it was always going to die as the cost of doing business in dollars rose to make using other currencies a better path to buying/selling oil. Every time the US went to the sanctions well to coerce conformity, the more “star systems slipped through its fingers,” to quote Princess Leia. While we joke today about never ‘going full retard,’ this is just another way of saying that you should never threaten to nuke someone either. Trump went sanctions nuclear on Iran in 2018. He failed. “Biden” and Davos went nuclear on Russia in 2022, going further than even Trump. And they failed even harder. All they did was raise the cost of using dollars in the minds of the dollar’s best customers. When the cost/benefit framework flips, behavior changes accordingly. In the world of money, since we don’t have anything close to resembling real capital markets, rather politicized ones, policy is the thing that alters that cost/benefit structure the most. This means while analyzing the market reaction to day-to-day data the listening to the tea-leaf reading by commentators becomes an exercise in chasing your tail through a wilderness of rhetorical mirrors if you don’t include policy changes. So, with that in mind we have to analyze structural changes to markets from a policy perspective to see what the future really looks like. It’s not that the markets don’t have a say in the matter, it’s that if you analyze the policy through the lens of capital flowing to where it is treated best, then the future outcome is pretty predictable if there isn’t a competing policy put in place to redirect that capital flow later. In this sense, financial analysis in politicized markets is better described by court politics than spreadsheet output cells. People want oil. They will buy it regardless of what Davos or “Biden” or anyone else says about this. Until you replace oil itself, no amount of policy changes will fundamentally change the market for oil unless you destroy the supply chain supporting the oil industry. And analyzing oil supply and demand fundamentals in this case is a fool’s errand when malign actors are materially affecting the supply and demand for oil and are incentivized to ‘game the statistics.’ It’s not that these numbers are worthless, it’s more that they should be discounted heavily until policy changes are assessed. Diminishing Returns of Socialism In the end all markets respond predictably to the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. If you don’t believe that, then you are a Malthusian and publicly admitting you are a moron with the inability to accept outcomes you cannot personally perceive. I put the “Peak Oil” folks in this category. And you know who you are. I put Climate Change believers in this category as well. Yes, by the transitive property of rhetorical mathematics, I just called them all morons. The Davos solution to their problems of overpromising the deliverables of socialism financed through the dollar is to default on those promises through global monetary inflation using war with Russia and China as the cover and Climate Change as the reason why it’s necessary. This is to save themselves and secure totalitarian control for their posterity into the next cycle of history. But history will prove them wrong. Because, in the end, you can’t fight a flowing river any more than you can alter the mass of human behavior with respect to their preferences. If they want to drive a car, eat a steak, live in a house, own a gun or have a child, they will. You can delay it or make it more expensive but that expense is a double-edged sword, because as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” (OPM) Think of the Eurodollar system as the ultimate expression of OPM, which is a homophone for ‘hopium.’ If you really want to change their behavior, you have to give them more carrot than stick. This appraoch worked for decades to guide us towards their more perfect technocratic dystopian unions as long as money got progressively cheaper during the dollar reserve standard. This system broke in 2008 and by 2011 forced the world, through a compliant Federal Reserve, into birthing the Coordinated Central Bank Standard, where all the major central banks would take turns inflating a deflating credit system. But back to Diminishing Marginal Utility. The law simply states that the acquisition of the next unit of a thing, any thing (water, money, food, credit dollars, etc.), is worth less to a person than the previous unit. We act to alleviate our perceived need to hedge against future uncertainty. So, in hurricane season, we Floridians stock up on bottled water, propane, toilet paper, preserved food, etc. Price is supposed to tell us when to stop stocking up and really assess what’s important to us. I’ll leave my rant about ‘anti-gouging’ laws on the cutting room floor. It is this verity about human action in the face of both scarcity and abundance that creates the Newtonian ‘opposite reaction’ to rising/falling costs. It is what always squashes the fears of Malthusian thinking against the windshield of history. So, while you can bully people into acting against their preferred outcomes for a while by raising the costs of disobedience to be greater than the marginal return of defiance, eventually a reversal of that cost/benefit framework takes place. For the Fed and the domestic banking interests, the best way to get to their preferred end, a domestically-driven cost structure to the US dollar, it meant offering the market gradually a better alternative to the old system or Eurodollars. SOFR is a collateralized rate, delivered to the market by the market for dollars. It’s a fundamentally superior interest rate product than LIBOR, which is a number picked out of thin air by 18 banks of dubious character and even more dubious motivations. Eurodollar futures are set based on LIBOR and because of LIBOR being written previously into every old debt and debt derivative instrument out there, LIBOR was the tail wagging the monetary policy dog. The five-year roll out of SOFR was done to introduce the better system and phase it in allowing the market to come to the ‘right’ conclusion that it is superior. If SOFR wasn’t a superior product to LIBOR no matter how much the Fed tried to force it onto the market, the market would have rejected it. Eurodollar futures would have remained a vibrant and liquid market up to the last day and call the Fed’s bluff. But SOFR was a superior product, gradually weaning the markets off LIBOR. Now there is still a whole lotta LIBOR-indexed debt out there and a lot of people are holding out hope this is all just a bad dream, but it’s not. There has been an uptick in loans switching to the Federal Reserve’s recommended Secured Overnight Financing Rate (Sofr) from Libor so far this year, but “a huge volume” still needs to transition, he said. Of the loans, many of which are held by CLOs, that still need to remediate, about 55% risk falling back to the prime rate, which is 7.75%, compared to around 4.5% for Sofr, if they do not find a transition path before the deadline, according to KKR. That difference could hurt borrowers with lots of debt and lower credit ratings, like CCC or B-, as their chances of downgrades rise, and it also puts lenders, such as CLOs that are measured by how many CCCs and defaults are in their vehicles, in a difficult spot, said Reback. “That is a significant risk for the loan market,” she said. Caught between the Scylla (a 25 bps spread over LIBOR) and Charybdis of prime, 3.50% over that, the outcome is inevitable. Anyone holding out is likely hoping for a last-minute policy change to help them out. If I had to guess those holdouts are at Blackrock trying to blackmail the Fed like they blackmailed the Bank of England last summer over UK pension obligations. I don’t know that the situation is analogous but it certainly smells that way. The BRICS and the Golden Path I had Vince Lanci on the podcast recently to discuss this very thing, how to replace an old system with a new one gradually. He’d been thinking about remonetizing gold, spurred on by a Twitter Spaces we did where we discussed gold redeemable Treasuries, or as Vince put it, “throw gold out onto the yield curve.” Listen to the podcast as we go over this idea in detail. Like the fall of the petro- and euro- dollar, the re-monetization of gold cannot happen overnight. Instead something like that has to happen over time. Again, using more carrot than stick is the better, more sustainable path. The markets are screaming for a solution to the current mess — wanting less debt, even less leveraged debt, fewer wars, more decentralization — but everyone also doesn’t want to be reduced to Bartertown and all that that implies. So, the best way to achieve that is to signal to the market that this exactly what you want. It starts with policy. In the case of the Fed it starts with being wholly unapologetic of the political consequences of aggressively tight monetary policy. FOMC Chair Jay “Baller” Powell gave us that this week testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. Powell reiterated his ‘higher rates for longer’ mantra. But, unlike in the past, the markets are now actually listening to him. There are still holdouts, trying to undermine the Fed, but I’ll leave the ECB and BoJ out of the discussion for now. The bond markets are grudgingly accepting this but the yield curve on US Treasury debt is still stubbornly inverted. But more significantly, Powell told Sen. Cynthia Lummis the Fed flat-out does not consider the fiscal situation on Capitol Hill in making monetary policy. (H/T Jim Bianco). 1/2 Interesting passage from Powell's testimony today: pic.twitter.com/SuKSba2oJW — Jim Bianco biancoresearch.eth (@biancoresearch) March 8, 2023 Read that passage carefully and you’ll see this FOMC Chair isn’t above telling Congress their business. You may not believe Powell but we know there are ways of getting out of this fiscal and monetary mess if we commit to doing it, rather than pouring gasoline on the socialist fire that the “Biden” Administration just did with their budget proposal. Moreover, what’s unspoken by Powell and others in the position to support him is what’s lurking on the other side of the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a growing international framework for trade wholly outside the control or threats of the western political establishment and their slap-happy sanction monkeys we call heads of state. Powell can see the de-dollarization writing on the wall and he knows now is the time to slow down that trend and find a way to make the dollar more trustworthy. But, again, he can only deal with one side of that equation — the monetary policy side. The Fiscal and regulatory side are still firmly controlled by, frankly, shitbag commies; old, terrified colonial interests in Europe and the northeast US who see their time passing and refuse to accept it with grace. People who would rather burn the world to the ground than let it fall into the hands of those they consider ‘the help.’ But ‘the help’ are no longer helpless in the face of a big bully US dollar. They have a plan and they are executing it. That plan clearly involves the return of gold as the asset to balance the trade books to rebuild global trust and if the US and Europe don’t stop acting like entitled, spoiled children on the world stage, they will drop the gradualism and one day we will wake up in a different reality. This was Powell’s real message to Congress this week. It is the clear geopolitical imperative staring us all in the face. But if we don’t start down it now voluntarily, the superior monetary system will eventually outcompete and capital will flow to where it is treated best. This is the future policy choice we have to make our peace with. Because if we don’t I’m reminded of an old, bad joke I first heard as a teenager. “What’s the last thing that goes through a fly’s head before it hits the windshield of your car?” “It’s ass.” “We can move from boom to bust From dreams to a bowl of dust. We can fall from rockets red glare Down to — “Brother can you spare…” Another war — another wasteland — and another lost generation…” — RUSH, “Between the Wheels” Join my Patreon if you don’t like windshields Tyler Durden Fri, 03/10/2023 - 17:00.....»»

One Year Later In Ukraine: Washington And NATO Got It Very Wrong Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute, It’s been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In spite of claims from the regime and its media allies that Russia was the next Third Reich and would soon roll through half of Europe, it turns out that was never even remotely true. In fact, things have unfolded more or less just like we predicted here at mises.org: the Russians aren’t even close to occupying any place in Europe beyond eastern Ukraine. It’s not Munich 1938. Economic sanctions have not crippled the Russian regime. Most of the world remains ambivalent on the conflict. The conflict will likely end with a negotiated settlement - contrary to what the Washington wants. The fact is that in spite of the United States’ and North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) efforts to turn Ukraine into World War III, the war in Ukraine remains a regional conflict. It seems most of the world is uninterested in making sacrifices to carry out US policy in Ukraine and that many see the inherent hypocrisy behind US talk about respecting national sovereignty.  There’s also an important lesson here about listening to the war maximalists who incessantly promote full-scale war as the “solution” to every international crisis. The US clearly wants to fight the war to the last Ukrainian, in what the US is packaging as a global crusade in the style of World War II. But, it seems now that more pragmatic thinkers—i.e., the French and the Germans—recognize that negotiations are the more humane solution.  They Wanted a “Munich Moment” Within days of the Russian invasion, the Western global hegemonists got to work claiming the invasion was essentially a war of global conquest. For instance, Matthew Kroenig in Foreign Policy stated that Vladimir Putin had shown a clear interest in “resurrecting the former Russian Empire, and other vulnerable Eastern European countries—Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states—might be next.” Kroenig immediately concluded that the US’s military budget should be doubled. Another writer insisted the Ukraine invasion contained “a whiff of Munich.” John Storey at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute claimed that “the forgotten lesson of Munich” had allowed “Putin is [to do] his best impression of German dictator Adolf Hitler.” Storey ominously asked, “Will the Baltic states and Eastern Europe be next?” dutifully repeating the party line that Russian tanks might soon roll into central Europe. Yet the “lesson of Munich”—which is invoked incessantly and certainly not “forgotten”—has never been appropriate for conceptualizing the war in Ukraine. That sort of thing has even led some pundits to proclaim that global nuclear war is "worth it." The real lesson to be learned here, however, is the lesson of 1914: that we should not allow military alliances to lead major powers into overreactions that lead to global disasters. The “Munich” crowd wanted mass mobilization against Russia in early 2022. They didn’t get it, and thank goodness. Russia Was Never a Global Threat It has been clear from the very beginning that Russia has never had the capability to sustain an occupation of any areas that do not already contain a sizable number of ethnic Russians or Russian sympathizers. This hardly mirrors the military capabilities of the Third Reich. Thus, it is not surprising that Russia’s occupation endures only in southeastern Ukraine and the Crimea. At this point, Russia is attempting to push the frontiers of its occupation zone as deeply as possible into areas with a sizable Russian minority. Even this has proven difficult for the Russian regime. Russia simply lacks the resources to take on anyone but its impoverished neighbors.  What’s more, bogging down Russia has required only a tiny portion of the war-making resources available to the NATO coalition. Europe’s NATO members have mostly pledged older weapons, and precious little state-of-the art equipment. The Washington Post recently noted, for example, that the West “is still short on pledges.” Recent promises of Leopard tanks from Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands turned out to be promises of “refurbished” tanks that are more than forty years old. Moreover, none of these tanks will even arrive before this summer. As of late November, contributions of military aid from Germany, the United Kingdom, and France combined totaled a paltry €5 billion. That’s 6.00 percent the size of Russia’s military budget, and a miniscule 0.05 percent of the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $10 trillion that comes out of the UK, Germany, and France combined. But what of US military aid? Surely a huge amount is needed to counter the Russian juggernaut? Well, the US military aid totals no more than $50 billion as of early 2023. That’s 6.00 percent of the US military budget, and it’s 0.20 percent of the US’s GDP.  In addition to this, the US regime now admits it doesn't even know what happens to the weapons it sends to Ukraine. How much of that $50 billion actually goes to Ukraine's defense? Not $50 billion.  If that’s all it takes to keep Russia slogging it out in eastern Ukraine, it’s hard to see how the Russian regime poses an existential threat to even western Ukraine, let alone any other state in Europe. This helps illustrate how unnecessary the US is to the conflict. Russia poses no threat to the US—unless the US escalates to the point of nuclear war. If the Europeans feel threatened, they can easily defend themselves given the huge size of their economic bloc, relative to Russia. The Europeans have more than enough resources to "stand with Ukraine" however they wish to define that. Yes, that might require Europeans to give up a bit of their government pensions and enormous welfare states in order to fund their own military defense. But there's absolutely no reason why American taxpayers need be on the hook to subsidize Europeans as they're swilling cappuccinos on month-long vacations. The World Is Not United against Russia Perhaps seeing that Russia presents no conventional military threat beyond its “near abroad,” most of the world has not signed off on starting a new cold war. Although NATO mouthpieces have been enthusiastic about the passage of United Nations resolutions condemning Russia, it’s notable how many countries chose to abstain from the vote. Last week, the UN general assembly voted again on a resolution condemning the Russian invasion and calling for Russia’s withdrawal. One hundred forty-one countries voted in favor, but, notably, thirty-two countries abstained from voting (seven states voted against the measure). Among those thirty-two countries were China, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. India, a US ally and the “world’s largest democracy,” was apparently uninterested in joining NATO on the resolution. South Africa, another major world economy and democracy, stayed out of the matter as well. In fact, the only member of the BRICS bloc to vote in favor of the resolution was Brazil. This has partly been driven by practical matters. The political leadership in these countries is simply not prepared to impoverish its population in order to please Washington. But the resistance also comes from the fact that most of the world knows US pretensions toward respecting national sovereignty and international law are all an act. The US invasions and bombing campaigns against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have made it clear the United States is perfectly at ease with violating national sovereignty when it suits US ambitions. The so-called rules-based international order obviously means nothing to the US when it becomes inconvenient to Washington. (It should also be noted the Ukraine regime supported invading Iraq and sent at least five thousand troops to help the US occupy that supposedly sovereign nation.) What does this all mean for Russia? It means that some of the world’s largest economies have signaled they have no plans to cut Russia off from the global economy and that they refuse to cut themselves off from Russian oil, gas, and foodstuffs. Sanctions Didn’t Ruin Russia The US has been unsuccessful in securing global compliance in isolating Russia economically. Thus, the US has been forced to rely on coercive sanctions—not just against Russia, but against those who choose to keep doing business with Russia. The US must now spend time and resources enforcing “secondary sanctions” designed to coerce countries that don’t play along, and now finds itself in the position of repeatedly threatening countries other than Russia with “consequences” for violating US sanctions. But, for all the US bluster on this, US sanctions have clearly failed to ruin Russia economically. Recent numbers show that the US oil sanctions against Russia “have done little to curb the flow of Russia’s crude.” Or as this article as CNBC suggests, the oil sanctions “failed completely.” This isn’t to say that the sanctions have had no effect. Yet it is clear that the sanctions—the harshest sanctions used since World War II—are not a “game-changer.” Instead, the sanctions have created additional motivation for states to find ways to get around US sanctions in the future. As Agathe Demarais notes in Foreign Policy: Russia, Iran, China, and other countries at odds with the United States are doubling down on efforts to vaccinate their economies against sanctions. These measures have little to do with sanctions circumvention: Instead, they represent preemptive steps to render potential financial sanctions entirely ineffective. Such mechanisms include de-dollarization efforts, the development of alternatives to SWIFT (the Belgian cooperative that connects all banks across the world), and the creation of central bank digital currencies. That reference to “other countries” is key. The more the US employs its financial power as a weapon against other regimes, the further this will push the world’s regimes to find ways to break free of the US-centered financial world. Those efforts will put downward pressure on the dollar in coming years. “Unconditional Surrender” was Never an Option The US has generally saved its “regime change” rhetoric for small, dirt-poor countries that are unable to fight back. Yet, following the Russian invasion, many Western commentators began calling for regime change in Russia as well. Most notably, on March 26, President Joe Biden said Putin “cannot remain in power,” although he was later forced to backtrack. Not only are the prospects for regime change in a nuclear-armed country fraught with immense danger, but many observers recognize the fact that toppling Putin is easier said than done. Nor would such a move guarantee that Putin’s regime would be replaced with a regime opposed to Russian expansionism. In fact, the new government could easily be “worse” by NATO standards. This is a hard pill to swallow for Americans who are wed to a long-standing obsession with “unconditional surrender” in every military conflict. The model here is the Japanese surrender in the Second World War. The reality, however, is that the overwhelming majority of military conflicts are ended through negotiated settlements. Nevertheless, throughout the first half of 2022, those who called for negotiations to end the war—for purposes of ending the bloodshed sooner—were branded Russian apologists. Only total victory, we were told, was an acceptable outcome. Those days are swiftly coming to a close. “Total victory” for Ukraine, defined as the total withdrawal of Russia, was never likely. The reality is more along the lines of what French diplomats are privately willing to admit. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, French and German leaders are now telling the Ukrainian regime that it needs to consider peace talks: “We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable,” a senior French official said. “And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.” Gen. Petr Pavel, president-elect of the Czech Republic and a former NATO commander, said at the Munich conference [last week]: “We may end up in a situation where liberating some parts of Ukrainian territory may deliver more loss of lives than will be bearable by society. . . . There might be a point when Ukrainians can start thinking about another outcome.” The endgame is coming into view, and it’s a negotiated settlement. Unfortunately, it’s a settlement that will come only after an immense loss of life for both Ukrainians and Russians, and at the price of enormous loss of capital and infrastructure. A settlement could have likely been achieved sooner, and with the same territorial losses in Ukraine that likely would have resulted in any case. The US could have given up its obsession with making Ukraine a NATO outpost. The Ukraine regime could have given up trying to turn Ukraine into an ethno-state where Russian-speakers are second-class citizens. The US and Ukraine could have admitted they're not getting Crimea back.  Instead, they chose to prolong the conflict, and the result has been perhaps hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. The fact that the Russian regime is ultimately the aggressor here does not change this reality.  Being a small, poor country next to Russia has always been just an unfortunate reality for some. Thus, responsible foreign policy for those states lies in taking positions that limit unnecessary bloodshed while finding ways to co-exist with the Russians. Instead, the US and Ukraine have chosen to wax philosophical about moral rectitude while NATO leaders recite their bullet points on regime change, total victory, Munich, and a “rules-based order.” None of this helps save lives.  Those who promoted a need for full-scale war and "no peace until total victory"  have been stunningly wrong, and it has proven to be very costly. *  *  * Read More: We Must Now Learn the Lesson of 1914, Not the Lesson of 1938.  A Brief History of Pundits Encouraging Nuclear War NATO Plans to Rip Off Americans Even More as Sweden and Finland Set to Join If Ukraine Joins the EU, It Will Be the Poorest Member by Far It's Time to Abandon America's Fetish for "Unconditional Surrender" Russia Isn't Nearly as Isolated as Washington Wants You to Believe Russian Weakness and the Russian "Threat" to the West No, Ordinary Russians Are Not Responsible for the Crimes of the Russian Regime Why Sanctions Don't Work, and Why They Mostly Hurt Ordinary People Will Biden Sanction Half the World to Isolate Russia? Tyler Durden Fri, 03/03/2023 - 23:40.....»»

The KGB morphed Putin into a master manipulator and played a key role in his rise to power and his approach to the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with the Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin in Saint Petersburg on October 9, 2022.Gavriil Grigorov/Getty Images Putin's time in the KGB helps explain his worldview and brutal approach to warfare, ex-spies say. A former KGB agent told Insider the biggest thing Putin learned from the Soviet spy agency was "how to lie." A career CIA officer said Putin's ruthless tactics in Ukraine are part of a "KGB/terrorist mindset." Russian President Vladimir Putin has the world on edge as he wages a major war in Europe that's fueled geopolitical tensions and sparked a global energy crisis and fears of a nuclear conflict. As Western intelligence agencies vie to stay two steps ahead of the Russian leader and get inside his head, peering into Putin's KGB past may offer clues on what he's thinking. Long before he was a world leader, Putin was a mid-level KGB officer stationed in Dresden, East Germany towards the end of the Cold War. The official narrative on this period of Putin's life suggests it was an uneventful stint in a backwater, a long way from the action in Berlin. But ex-spies and Russia experts told Insider that Putin's time in the KGB — the Soviet Union's primary and much-feared security agency — played an instrumental role in shaping his mindset. "Putin's KGB background tells us a lot about how he thinks and how he sees the war. He is a creation of the KGB, and the KGB was a terrorist organization," John Sipher, a former CIA officer who served in Russia, told Insider. "It was all about keeping the leadership in power at all costs. It killed any domestic opposition to the [Communist] Party and used subversion abroad."Under Putin's leadership, the Russian military has routinely targeted civilian areas in Ukraine and been widely accused of committing numerous war crimes — including torture, rape, and mass killings. Russian forces have engaged in sabotage and damaged crucial infrastructure as part of an effort make life miserable for Ukrainians, break their resolve, and squeeze Kyiv into capitulating to Putin's demands.From Chechnya to Syria and now Ukraine, the Russian leader has shown a willingness to devastate cities and kill scores of civilians with indiscriminate strikes. Sipher, who worked for the CIA's clandestine service for nearly three decades, said Russia's indiscriminate warfare against Ukraine is part of a "KGB/terrorist mindset.""The Russian services have long spent far more of their time on things like disinformation, sabotage, deception, agitation, and assassination," Sipher said, adding, "What we have seen from Putin over the past 20 years are these same asymmetric attacks. Like a terrorist group that can't take on enemies directly, he looks for weaknesses to exploit and soft targets to attack."'How to lie'Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin presents an award to a local police officer at a Russian military base in the mountains of the Botlikh region, Dagestan in August 1999.Associated PressThe KGB's recruits were imbued with a deep sense of patriotism.  Jack Barsky, an ex-KGB spy who was a sleeper agent in the US during the Cold War, told Insider that being a KGB agent meant being a servant. "You were not in charge. You executed based on what people told you. I did too. [Putin] rose above that," Barsky said. "The mindset when you become a member of the KGB — it wasn't just a career thing, it was also a patriotic thing. Vladimir Putin thinks of himself as a super patriot of Russia," said Barsky, who remained in the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually consulted the FBI and NSA after being exposed in the 1990s as a former undercover agent, operating without diplomatic cover."I was driven by high motives. I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best for society," Putin once said of his decision to join the KGB. Few concrete details are known about Putin's work in Dresden, where he was stationed from 1985 to 1990, but the Russian leader and those close to him have often presented it as inconsequential."East Germany wasn't where you do a lot of espionage," Barsky said, underscoring that Putin was operating in a country friendly to the Soviet Union at the time. Work in East Germany largely involved collaborating with the Stasi, the ruthless secret police for the German Democratic Republic, and recruiting assets, he said.What Putin did in the KGB was "very similar" to the work of "the fellow who recruited me while I was a student at university," Barsky said. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy's book, "Mr. Putin," suggests that he was most likely involved in an array of recruitment operations while in Dresden and may have even traveled to West Germany undercover at times. Putin was a "really good networker," Barsky said, adding, "When the Soviet Union fell apart, he had a great network amongst ex-KGB agents.""Those were the ones that rose to power — mostly economically, but also politically — because they knew how the capitalist-type world functions," Barsky went on to say, "And so that's how [Putin] rose to power."To be in the KGB meant to live a life of deception on some level. Toward the end of his service in Dresden, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin famously confronted a crowd of angry protestors outside of his office building. The crowd was seemingly looking for members of the Stasi, and Putin's German made him a potential target. "When they aggressively asked who he really was, Putin responded that he was 'a translator,'" Hill and Gaddy wrote. "Putin lied his way out of trouble."Barsky's mission involved far more extreme acts of deception — living under false identity and attempting to blend into American society to make contact with high-level decisionmakers in the US. Born Albert Dittrich in East Germany in 1949, Barsky spied in the US for a decade and built an entirely new life in the process. "I was a well-kept state secret as an illegal undercover agent," Barsky said, "They picked me because they had reason to believe I'm very adaptable and I can make good decisions on my own — and I'm not afraid to make decisions. There's a list of character traits that they were looking for in candidates for this kind of a job."In 1988, the KGB ordered Barsky to come home. But he defied the Soviet spy agency and risked a potentially deadly retaliation to stay in the US. Barsky exploited Soviet fears of AIDS, falsely telling his handlers that he'd contracted it. The lie worked and Barsky was able to remain in the US, living a relatively normal American live until his cover was blown in the 1990s and the FBI approached him.The "biggest thing" that Putin learned during his time in the KGB is "how to lie," Barsky said, "Well, I did too."The Ukraine war has seen Putin and his propagandists make a series of assertions — ranging from plausible to preposterous — to justify Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. These include baselessly claiming that Ukraine is ruled by neo-Nazis, despite the fact Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost family during the Holocaust.The Russian government has pushed conspiracy theories since the war began, making groundless claims about staged atrocities and dirty bombs, among other bogus assertions. In many cases, these outlandish claims have been parroted by far-right US politicians and media figures like Tucker Carlson of Fox News.  Indeed, Putin's career has been typified by spreading disinformation aimed at sowing discord and confusion among Moscow's enemies. When Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, it initially sent in masked troops in unmarked uniforms. Putin at first denied that the mysterious soldiers — dubbed the "little green men" — were Russian military, claiming they were "local self-defense forces." The Russian leader later admitted that the masked men were Russian troops.'Scare and manipulate'Russian President Vladimir Putin seen on Victory Day in central Moscow, Russia, on May 9, 2022.Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via REUTERSWhile most intelligence services focus on collecting information and sharing their findings with policymakers, for the KGB "intelligence collection was always a distant second to active covert measures designed to weaken an opponent from within (think the 2016 elections)," Sipher said.In the early days of the Ukraine invasion, Russia sought to topple Ukraine's elected leaders with a combination of covert operations and a massive show of force. With the war in Ukraine going poorly for Russia, its approach to the conflict continues to follow this track. Putin's KGB past plays into his preference for hybrid warfare — blending conventional and unconventional tactics, said Angela Stent, a top Russia expert who served in the Office of Policy Planning at the State Department and later as a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council."[Putin] was a case officer in Dresden, so he wasn't involved directly in military operations," but "deception" — taking actions that you can never quite pin on one single actor — is part of his and Russia's playbook, Stent told Insider in an interview.Russia is suspected of being behind attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in late September, as Moscow vied to weaponize energy supplies and drive up costs for its Western adversaries. Putin has simultaneously leveled nuclear threats, reminding the world he controls thousands of warheads — the largest arsenal on the planet. Though these threats are largely believed to be part of an effort to dissuade the West from continued support for Kyiv, Western officials — including CIA Director William Burns — have expressed concern that Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine if he feels pushed into a corner.Russian forces have suffered staggering losses in Ukraine, with casualties estimated to be nearing 200,000, and Putin has taken a series of escalatory steps in a desperate effort to turn the tide. He declared a partial military mobilization to address Russia's manpower problems, sending poorly trained conscripts to the front line. The Russian leader also illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions, even though Russian forces do not fully occupy these territories. Ukraine's forces have pushed back the Russians in key areas in the east and south as part of a counteroffensive, which includes parts of the territories Putin now claims as part of Russia.But Putin is seemingly determined to continue the war no matter the costs. Hill, who also served as the top Russia expert on the National Security Council under the Trump administration, told Politico in October that Putin's KGB experience is central to his refusal to back down in Ukraine despite major losses. "Whenever he has a setback, Putin figures he can get out of it, that he can turn things around. That's partly because of his training as a KGB operative," Hill said, adding, "He says there are always problems in an operation, there are always setbacks. Sometimes they're absolute disasters. The key is adaptation.""Putin still thinks he's got more game to play," Hill said.As it faced an increasingly grim situation with winter around the corner, the Russian military took to raining down missiles on crucial infrastructure across Ukraine. Kyiv has seen blackouts and much of the city has at times lost access to water. "[Putin] knows he can't win on the battlefield and he is in a weak position," Sipher said, "He has a number of escalatory actions he can take short of using a nuclear weapon. We can expect more cyber attacks, threats, support for violent groups in the West, and actions like bombing the underwater pipeline. He is seeking to send a signal to Western leaders to remind them he can cause economic and political pain." "Rather than having a sensible military and diplomatic strategy, [Putin] is killing civilians and threatening nuclear war as an effort to scare and manipulate Western leaders," Sipher said.This article was originally published on 11/5/2022.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Chinese hardware won't do much to fix the Russian military's "bad leadership, bad execution, and bad skills," Philip Breedlove said this week. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shanghai in May 2014.Reuters/Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin The US is again warning China not provide military support to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Russia's military has structural problems that foreign gear can't fix, a retired US general says. Russia and Ukraine face similar supply issues and are seeking support for major operations this year. The US has renewed its warnings to China about providing military support to Russia in response to what officials say are signs that Beijing is considering supplying "lethal" aid to Moscow, but Chinese hardware may not be enough to fix the Russian military's structural issues, according to a former commander of US forces in Europe.Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued the new warning to his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, during a meeting on February 18, warning Wang "about the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia or assistance with systemic sanctions evasion," the State Department said afterward.Blinken then went public, saying in interviews that the US has "growing concern" that China "is considering providing lethal support" to Russia — comments echoed by allies, including NATO Secretary General Jens Stotlenberg, who told the Associated Press on Wednesday that Western officials "have seen some signs" that China "may be planning" to provide Russia with arms or other support.US officials have not specified what they have seen or what they consider "lethal" aid. On Wednesday, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said Chinese officials haven't taken such aid "off the table" but avoided "characterizing" what it would consist of or what "consequences" China would face for providing it. (US officials are reportedly considering releasing the intelligence on which their accusations are based.)Putin and Wang meet in Moscow on February 22.ANTON NOVODEREZHKIN/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty ImagesBut more hardware may not tilt the balance if Russia's military remains unable to employ its troops effectively, according to Philip Breedlove, a retired US Air Force general who led US European Command from May 2013 to May 2016."Clearly, if China brings industrial mass to the problem, that's going to be a problem for Ukraine, but I still want us to have a sober view of what Russia can do, because they now have structural problems in their ability to effectively act as a unit on the battlefield," Breedlove said Tuesday during an event hosted by American Purpose and the American Enterprise Institute.Russian forces have struggled with command-and-control throughout the war, facing issues ranging from tactical-level communications problems to a force-wide lack of experienced enlisted troops and junior officers, the latter of which has been exacerbated by heavy losses.Russia has scrambled to replace those losses. In September, Moscow called up several hundred thousand troops, many of them older reservists or inexperienced conscripts, in a "partial mobilization." The Kremlin has also relied more on mercenaries, particularly the Wagner Group, which has stoked infighting among Russian commanders."You can't build a leader overnight, so even if they have huge mobilizations, they're missing those junior officers," said Breedlove, who also served as NATO's top officer. "Remember, they don't have an NCO corps like we have an NCO corps, and this sort of density of ability to lead, think, and fight independently is not something that Russia is demonstrating on the battlefield."A US Army instructor briefs Ukrainian soldiers at a training center in Ukraine in April 2017.Oklahoma Army National Guard/Sgt. Anthony JonesUkraine's military has benefited from Western training, including training to develop noncommissioned officers, or NCOs, and has adapted its tactics throughout the war, but Russia's military appears to not be applying battlefield lessons across its force."In terms of Russia as a learning organization, the evidence isn't very good for the Russian side. We keep seeing them make similar mistakes," Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said at a think tank event Wednesday.While lower-level Russian units have been able to adapt, "I think the big problem in the Russian military is that the culture is not very conducive to" learning, added Lee, an expert on Russia's military. "It's very top-down. It's not bottom-up, and so when when there's developments at the bottom level, those do not make it the top level" because Russian generals are not "open to learning."Russian military leadership failings and inability to perform under fire will limit the utility of whatever hardware Beijing may provide, Breedlove said."You can pile stuff on top of bad leadership, bad execution, and bad skills, and yes, the mass will have some ability, but I think the real limit now of the Russian military is their soldiers and the leaders of their soldiers and the strategic leaders of the leaders of their soldiers," Breedlove said. "They have demonstrated a lack of capability and proficiency on the battlefield."While China has generally avoided violating international sanctions on Russia, Beijing has provided consistent political and economic support and rejected Western criticism of its close ties with Russia.Chinese armed police and Russian national guards during a joint counter-terrorism drill in China in December 2017.REUTERS/StringerAsked about Blinken's warning at a press conference on February 20, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said it was "the US, not China, that has been pouring weapons into the battlefield. The US is in no position to tell China what to do."While US officials have not specified what military support China may provide, there are signs Russia is using artillery ammunition more sparingly. Russia's missile stocks also appear to be dwindling, prompting it to repurpose air-defense and anti-ship missiles to attack ground targets in Ukraine, often inaccurately.Moscow has looked abroad for supplies, using drones and missiles from Iran and reportedly seeking rockets and artillery rounds from North Korea. The US released photos in January that it said showed North Korean "material" on its way to Russia.Ukraine faces similar supply issues. While Ukrainian leaders have secured hundreds of Western-made tanks and are looking to acquire Western-made fighter jets, Western officials say that air-defense systems and ammunition, particularly artillery ammunition, are still top priorities for the ongoing aid effort.Both sides are now preparing for major operations this year — a Russian offensive appears underway already — and support from their partners will be central to how the war unfolds in the coming months."A lot of this depends on foreign support," Lee said Wednesday. "A lot depends on artillery ammunition and availability, and those things are really hard to predict six months in the future because who knows if China, North Korea, NATO, how much they'll provide and how much they can provide."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

The death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police's Scorpion unit has renewed scrutiny on other elite "street crime" squads around the country. People gather to protest against the police killing of Tyre Nichols at Times Square in New York on January 28, 2023.Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesHow elite police units, like the Memphis Scorpion squad that killed Tyre Nichols, commit the crimes they're created to stopThey went by different names.Red Dog. CRASH. The Gun Trace Task Force. Street Crime Unit. The Special Operations Section. The "Death Squad." The Place-Based Investigations Unit.Scorpion.But the specialized "street crime" squads, created in police departments around the country in response to rising rates of homicide and drug- and gun-related crimes, share a pattern of abuse.The outgrowth of decades of popular policing theories that advocate concentrating attention on high-crime areas, "street crime" squads in practice tend to focus on drugs, guns, or gangs – typically in lower-income neighborhoods with fewer white residents. Their aggressive tactics are so notorious – and so similar – that in many cities they're known as "jump-out boys" for the way officers spill out of their cars to accost people during stops. In Chicago, such units have contributed to residents seeing the police as "an occupying force" that make some neighborhoods feel like "an open-air prison," the Department of Justice found in 2017."They patrol our streets like they are the dog catchers and we are the dogs," one Chicago resident told investigators.The proliferation of these "street crime" squads is under renewed scrutiny after five members of Memphis's Scorpion unit were charged earlier this year with beating 29-year-old Tyre Nichols to death in what should have been a routine traffic stop."What we've seen this month in Memphis and for many years in many places, is that the behavior of these units can morph into 'wolf pack' misconduct," Ben Crump, an attorney for Nichols' family, which is suing the city, wrote in an open letter to the city of Memphis last month. "The 'why' of Tyre Nichols's death is found in this policing culture itself."Insider's review of nearly two dozen units established to target neighborhoods police viewed as high-crime zones found repeated complaints of abuse, discrimination, criminal violence, and corruption. Oftentimes, these units have been disbanded after egregious incidents, including the use of deadly force, only to be reconstituted months or years later under a different name when  they become politically popular again. Specialized units have been connected to some of the most high-profile and flagrant cases of police brutality of the last 30 years, including the killings of Breonna Taylor, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Eric Garner."There are umpteen examples of this turning into a nightmare. These elite units are going off the rails," said Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has written extensively about police militarization. "It happens so often that you have to conclude this is a flawed model."A woman leaves a flower during a vigil on the day of the release of a video showing the Memphis police beating of Tyre Nichols.Brian Snyder/ReutersTyre Nichols and the Memphis Scorpion unit On the evening of January 7, members of the Memphis police department stopped Tyre Nichols in the middle of a six-lane road on the outskirts of the city for what they alleged was reckless driving. It was dark. A group of officers, screaming obscenities, yanked him from his car and forced him to lay on the ground. One member of the unit used pepper spray, hitting Nichols and some of the other officers. Nichols broke free and ran down a nearby street."I hope they stomp his ass," one of the pepper-sprayed officers, who stayed behind at the scene of the stop, is heard saying on body-camera footage.About eight minutes later, officers found Nichols a half-mile away. Officers shook him, sprayed him with pepper spray, and kicked him in the head, footage released by the city shows. As Nichols staggered, moaning incoherently, some officers held him upright while others punched him in the head.After several minutes, officers handcuffed Nichols and leaned him against a car. In the roughly 20 minutes before he was loaded into an ambulance, Nichols was mostly silent and motionless.Nichols, who family members described as a free spirit skateboarder and photographer with his mom's name tattooed on his arm, died three days later. State police investigators said he died from injuries sustained during the "use-of-force incident with officers." Memphis police officers Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Dean, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin., and Desmond Mills Jr. are now facing murder charges.Memphis Police DepartmentMemphis launched Scorpion in fall 2021, with four teams of 10 officers each directed to focus on violent crime. Memphis clocked more than 300 murders that year and 290 in 2020, far more than in the years before the pandemic. Only a few months after forming Scorpion, Mayor Jim Strickland was already boasting that the unit was helping turn the tide."Since its inception last October through January 23, 2022, the Scorpion Unit has had a total of 566 arrests — 390 of them felony arrests," he said. "They have seized over $103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles, and 253 weapons."Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis disbanded the unit in the wake of Nichols' homicide.The contours of Nichols's death resonate with New Yorkers who recall the era of stop-and-frisk, with Atlantans who remember the heyday of the Red Dog unit, with Baltimore residents scarred by the abuses of the Gun Trace Task Force – and with residents of dozens of other major cities that have established elite, aggressive units dedicated to targeting specific neighborhoods where police believe crime proliferates.An elite squad's mistakes led to Breonna Taylor's deathLouisville, Kentucky's Place-Based Investigations unit was supposed to help police eliminate some of the most persistent violent crime in the city. Tasked with going after drugs and guns, the unit, founded in 2019, was disbanded fewer than six months later after a botched police raid killed 26-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor.The unit's very first mission was targeting suspected drug dealing on Elliott Avenue, miles from Taylor's home. But the scope of its investigation rapidly broadened to include Taylor, who police erroneously suspected of holding drugs on behalf of her ex-boyfriend. Plainclothes officers, acting on false information from the Place-Based Investigations Unit, broke into Taylor's home with a battering ram, failing to knock and announce their presence as their warrant required. Inside, Taylor's boyfriend, who later told police he thought an intruder was trying to break in, shot one officer in the thigh. Police opened fire on the couple, killing Taylor.Later, in a plea agreement, one of the members of the Place-Based Investigations unit would admit that she and other officers based the justification for the warrant to search Taylor's home not on evidence, but on a "gut belief." Taylor's death helped spur the swell of nationwide protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020.The story behind the creation of the Place-Based Investigations Unit shows how well-intentioned academic researchers and ties to other police officers can help such squads proliferate around the country, Kraska, the Eastern Kentucky University professor, said.Investigation of the Chicago Police Department. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois. January 13, 2017United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of IllinoisThe Louisville department had consulted with Tamara Herold, a former Cincinnati police officer turned University of Nevada Las Vegas criminologist, about a study that seemed to show that focusing an increased police presence on geographic areas with high levels of crime could lead to sustained crime reductions. Two years after Taylor's death, nine other cities had adopted the model, the Washington Post reported. Herold, who has said Taylor's death was a "horrific tragedy" but is "not a defining feature of this initiative," is still pitching it to police departments. "Hot-spots policing can be very effective. Cops count. When police are present, we can have a significant deterrent effect," Herold told the Police 1 podcast last month, acknowledging that if done poorly, the model can "strain police-community relationships." Herold did not respond to a request for comment.Memphis's Scorpion unit emerged a few years after a regional anti-crime group consulted with former New York City Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly on a strategy for tackling gang violence. Kelly is the architect of some of New York's most controversial policing strategies, including the creation of anti-crime units, and is a vocal advocate for stop-and-frisk.Reports from the private investigations firm K2 Intelligence, where Kelly then worked, recommended Memphis increase staffing levels in specialized units to fight street crime. By 2019, according to the Marshall Project, the city had done so.The New York Police Department directed officers to aggressively target suspicious activity in neighborhoods they viewed as high-crime areas. Here, officers frisk and arrest men in Harlem in 1995.Jon Naso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesMemphis police chief Davis also has prior experience with special street crime units. Davis, who took the reins of the Memphis PD in 2021, previously led the force in Durham, North Carolina. Before that, she rose through the ranks in Atlanta, including a stint leading a unit of the so-called Red Dogs, an Atlanta street-crime squad that was disbanded in the face of abuse allegations and lawsuits.Elite police units are magnets for scandal Virtually every big city has had an elite unit that's been broken up after leaders concluded that it went too far. Atlanta public safety commissioner George Napper created the Red Dog unit in 1987, at a time when Atlanta was dealing with a surge in crack cocaine use. Its name comes from a football play, but was later claimed to be an acronym for "Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia." An article in the Atlanta Constitution from its first year describes how the team would descend on reports of drug activity, make arrests, and seize drugs and cash."When the squad sweeps an area, anyone moving, especially young, black males, is told to hit the ground, hands behind his head, face down," the newspaper said. "Police officials admit the squad does little to reduce the flow of drugs into the city or the demand for them, but Mr. Napper said even what little the squad can do is important."Two decades later, though, the concerns about the unit's methods and effectiveness that had been raised from the start came to a head. The unit was abolished in 2011 after a raid on the Eagle, a gay bar, whose patrons and employees filed lawsuits claiming that police illegally detained them and used homophobic slurs while they lay handcuffed on the barroom floor. The city ended up paying more than $1 million in settlements.Investigation of the Chicago Police Department. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois. January 13, 2017United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of IllinoisDecades before Atlanta ended its elite unit operations, Detroit scrapped its "Stress" anti-robbery squad in the 1970s after its members shot dozens of rounds into an apartment where off-duty Wayne County deputies were playing poker, killing two. Chicago disbanded its Special Operations Section in 2007 amid a wide-ranging corruption scandal. Prosecutors ultimately charged 13 of its members with breaking into homes to rob residents and conducting illegal traffic stops to shake down drivers. Eleven pleaded guilty and two went to prison, including one who admitted to ordering a hit on a fellow officer he believed was collaborating with the federal investigation.   The Los Angeles Police Department's robbery-focused Special Investigations Section was embroiled in so many shootouts that it was branded the "death squad." And its CRASH team was broken up in 2000 after a member — who had been caught stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and replacing it with Bisquick pancake mix — flipped on his colleagues in what became known as the Rampart scandal.More recently, in Baltimore, all eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force were charged in 2017 and convicted of crimes including robbing drug dealers, stealing cash and filing bogus overtime claims. And in 2021, Springfield, Massachusetts responded to a Justice Department report about abuses by its narcotics bureau by shifting the team's focus to firearms.Police chiefs say elite teams are popular and effectiveMany police leaders and criminologists say specialized units do work that other officers can't. Uniformed officers conducting patrols or responding to 911 calls don't have the time or tools to surveil gangs and gather information on the flow of drugs and guns, they say, and it takes dedicated officers to take criminal networks down.Tyre Nichols's death is far from the only instance where what should have been a routine traffic stop turned violent. In May 2020, Atlanta police threatened college student Messiah Young with a handgun before arresting Young and his passenger. The officers were fired. This photo is a still pulled from body camera footage.Associated PressThe units can also be politically popular. "Police departments say these units are created in response to community demand for specialized policing," said Jorge Camacho, a former New York prosecutor now with Yale Law School.The Los Angeles Police Department's robbery-focused Special Investigations Section was embroiled in so many shootouts that it was branded the "death squad." And its CRASH team was broken up in 2000 after a member — who had been caught stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and replacing it with Bisquick pancake mix — flipped on his colleagues in what became known as the Rampart scandal.Meanwhile, police chiefs contend they are essential to fighting crime."It works. They make a lot of good cases, a lot of good arrests. Put a lot of bad people away to help solve the issue," Florida's Orange County Sheriff John W. Mina, who previously led the Orlando Police Department, told CNN last year.Street crime squads are popular among politicians who say only aggressive policing will reduce violent crime. New York Mayor Eric Adams reintroduced the city's controversial street crime units last year. Here, Adams points to a chart of gun violence he said shows his policies are working.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe popularity of these units among some elected officials, criminologists, and law enforcement can sometimes shield them from scrutiny, allowing abusive practices and corruption to fester. Police leaders had been receiving complaints about the Gun Trace Task Force for years before it was disbanded in 2017, The Baltimore Sun reported, including a 2015 tip from a local reporter that the task force's leader, Wayne Jenkins, was robbing people. Until his arrest on racketeering charges in 2017, Jenkins was widely considered "a rising talent," the Sun wrote, "with an uncanny knack for delivering the goods."There's not a clear explanation for why so many elite units go bad. In interviews with Insider, experts suggested that a confluence of mission overreach, militarized training, inadequate supervision, racism, and other factors could be to blame.Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department. U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. August 10, 2016U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights DivisionA recent report from the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, castigated U.S. police academies' "paramilitary approach" to training for prompting police officers to view community members "as the enemy." Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, said lowering the ratio of officers to supervisors within elite units could begin to address some of their issues."When you have these young, aggressive, proactive cops all together, with no controls, what do you think is going to happen?" Alpert said. "These units need more supervision, more control."Camacho said that part of the problem is that when all police have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."You have a bunch of officers with a mandate to look at homicide," he said, prompting them to be "hyper-vigilant." "They view anything as an indicator of violent crime," he added, "and respond accordingly.""There is no hunting like the hunting of man"Even after decades of elite units being shut down over abuses, cities have continually found ways to resurrect them. In New York, one notorious police unit has twice been disbanded only to come back from the dead.The cyclical saga of the Street Crime Unit is a prime example of how even after egregious incidents, such squads are often reconstituted under a different name, even as their mission and tactics remain the same.Established in 1971, by the late 1990s, the NYPD's Street Crime Unit was "known as the commandos" of the department, "an elite squad of nearly 400 officers," a New York Times reporter wrote in 1999, "dispatched into menacing neighborhoods each night to chase down rapists, muggers and dangerous fugitives, and above all, to get illegal guns off the streets."They wore t-shirts with a Hemingway quote: "Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, shown here leaving a press conference after a federal judge ruled the department's use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, later consulted on the formation of Memphis's Scorpion squad.Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesThe unit made up less than 2% of the force but seized 40% of the illegal guns confiscated by the NYPD. In the late 1990s, the Street Crime Unit tripled in size, amid a panic over a rising number of homicides. Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani preached a "broken windows" policing doctrine that advocated zero tolerance toward even minor offenses.In a city grappling with violent crime, authorities touted the Street Crime Unit as a bright spot."I wish I could bottle their enthusiasm and make everyone take a drink of it," then-NYPD commissioner Howard Safir told the New York Daily News in 1998. But on February 4, 1999, four members of the Street Crime Unit fired 41 bullets at 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo while he was standing in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building, after the officers said he reached into his pocket as if to draw a firearm. Diallo was unarmed and reaching for his wallet, multiple investigations into his killing later found. The officers were acquitted of criminal charges and temporarily reassigned to desk duty.The police killing sparked a maelstrom of accusations that the Street Crime Unit's pervasive violence, particularly against poor, Black and brown New Yorkers, had gone ignored for years. Investigation of the Springfield, Massachusetts Police Department's Narcotics Bureau. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office District of Massachusetts. July 8, 2020United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office District of MassachusettsUproar over Diallo's death — and a class-action lawsuit challenging the department's use of stop-and-frisks, which plaintiffs said was a form of illegal racial profiling — forced the NYPD to disband the Street Crime Unit in 2002.In spirit, though, the Street Crime Unit continued. Many of its officers were absorbed into new plainclothes units, called anti-crime units, that were charged with the same mission of preventing violent crime. And their tactics spread: NYPD officers made more stop-and-frisks in the early 2000s than they had in the 1990s, a second class-action lawsuit, filed in 2008, alleged. The ranks of anti-crime units grew to nearly 600 officers by 2020.  "The problem on a most basic, fundamental level is that the leadership of most departments does not want to deal with the Constitution," New York civil rights attorney Jonathan Moore, who sued the city over stop-and-frisk, told Insider.The purpose of stopping so many New Yorkers for patdowns was explicitly racial, then-state senator Eric Adams testified in federal court in 2013. An analysis by The Intercept found that plainclothes officers, including members of the anti-crime units, were responsible for or involved in 31% of police shootings since 2000, despite composing only 2% of the police force. The anti-crime units were involved in notorious police killings, including the fatal 2018 shooting of Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill man, in Brooklyn; the fatal 2006 shooting of Sean Bell; and, in 2014, the death by suffocation of Eric Garner, whose last words, "I can't breathe," have become an emblem of protests against police brutality.  Amid the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, another police commissioner decided to shut down the units. The NYPD "can move away from brute force," then-commissioner Dermot Shea said at the time.But less than two years later, now-Mayor Adams brought back the controversial squads, this time rebranded Neighborhood Safety Teams, amid a panic over rising crime rates and a deadly attack in 2022 on two police officers. A member of Chicago's Special Operations Squad making an arrest in 2005, two years before the unit was broken up amid allegations of corruption.Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis via Getty ImagesAdams promised not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But he also said the squads were necessary in order to disrupt "the flow of guns in our cities."Their early record has not been promising. Most of the arrests made by the Neighborhood Safety Teams have nothing to do with guns, City & State reported. The most frequent type of arrest their officers have made is for possession of a fake ID.Elite police squads get rebranded after controversies New York is far from the only place where notorious squads have been disbanded and reformed. The New Haven Police Department dissolved its Street Interdiction Squad in 2007 amid a theft and bribery scandal, then reconstituted it two years later. Miami resurrected its Street Narcotics Unit under a new moniker, but was forced to dissolve it in 2013 under fire from the Department of Justice, which partially blamed it for a spate of police shootings. Experts say cities that stand up street crimes units risk replacing one kind of violence with another. Such units bring "a new level of aggression and threat to the community," said Maurice Hobson, a professor at Georgia State University who has written a book about Atlanta's Red Dog unit. After Atlanta shut the unit down, the city also created a new specialist team to take its place: the APEX unit. (In 2021, the unit was rebranded as the Titan unit.) "From people in the community, the only change when the APEX unit came out was they changed their uniforms," said Tiffany Roberts, the policy director for the Southern Center for Human Rights. The death of Tyre Nichols has prompted others to come forward with claims of mistreatment at the hands of the Scorpion unit. Maurice Chalmers-Stokes, 19, told Memphis media that he was thrown into a fence last fall by a group of officers, including one of the cops accused of killing Nichols. He is suing the city, and fighting charges for possessing a stolen gun that police say they found on him in that interaction.NPR reported that four of the five officers charged in Nichols's death, who had two to six years of experience, had been disciplined by the Memphis police. One of the officers, Demetrius Haley, was disciplined in 2021 for not reporting an incident where a colleague — who resigned — yanked a woman from a car and dislocated her shoulder.Haley was also named in a 2016 lawsuit filed by a plaintiff who said that Haley was one of the corrections officers who abused him at a Shelby County jail. The case was dismissed. Moore, who worked on the New York City stop-and-frisk case, said part of the issue with elite units is that some of them are stretched too thin. But he said no matter how many supervisors are on the job, street-crime teams often do what politicians and policymakers want them to do."Leadership does not want these officers to have their hands tied," he said. "They want them to go out and be aggressive."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

The death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police's Scorpion unit has renewed scrutiny on other elite "street crime" squads around the country. People gather to protest against the police killing of Tyre Nichols at Times Square in New York on January 28, 2023.Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesHow elite police units, like the Memphis Scorpion squad that killed Tyre Nichols, commit the crimes they're created to stopThey went by different names.Red Dog. CRASH. The Gun Trace Task Force. Street Crime Unit. The Special Operations Section. The "Death Squad." The Place-Based Investigations Unit.Scorpion.But the specialized "street crime" squads, created in police departments around the country in response to rising rates of homicide and drug- and gun-related crimes, share a pattern of abuse.The outgrowth of decades of popular policing theories that advocate concentrating attention on high-crime areas, "street crime" squads in practice tend to focus on drugs, guns, or gangs – typically in lower-income neighborhoods with fewer white residents. Their aggressive tactics are so notorious – and so similar – that in many cities they're known as "jump-out boys" for the way officers spill out of their cars to accost people during stops. In Chicago, such units have contributed to residents seeing the police as "an occupying force" that make some neighborhoods feel like "an open-air prison," the Department of Justice found in 2017."They patrol our streets like they are the dog catchers and we are the dogs," one Chicago resident told investigators.The proliferation of these "street crime" squads is under renewed scrutiny after five members of Memphis's Scorpion unit were charged earlier this year with beating 29-year-old Tyre Nichols to death in what should have been a routine traffic stop."What we've seen this month in Memphis and for many years in many places, is that the behavior of these units can morph into 'wolf pack' misconduct," Ben Crump, an attorney for Nichols' family, which is suing the city, wrote in an open letter to the city of Memphis last month. "The 'why' of Tyre Nichols's death is found in this policing culture itself."Insider's review of nearly two dozen units established to target neighborhoods police viewed as high-crime zones found repeated complaints of abuse, discrimination, criminal violence, and corruption. Oftentimes, these units have been disbanded after egregious incidents, including the use of deadly force, only to be reconstituted months or years later under a different name when  they become politically popular again. Specialized units have been connected to some of the most high-profile and flagrant cases of police brutality of the last 30 years, including the killings of Breonna Taylor, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Eric Garner."There are umpteen examples of this turning into a nightmare. These elite units are going off the rails," said Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has written extensively about police militarization. "It happens so often that you have to conclude this is a flawed model."A woman leaves a flower during a vigil on the day of the release of a video showing the Memphis police beating of Tyre Nichols.Brian Snyder/ReutersTyre Nichols and the Memphis Scorpion unit On the evening of January 7, members of the Memphis police department stopped Tyre Nichols in the middle of a six-lane road on the outskirts of the city for what they alleged was reckless driving. It was dark. A group of officers, screaming obscenities, yanked him from his car and forced him to lay on the ground. One member of the unit used pepper spray, hitting Nichols and some of the other officers. Nichols broke free and ran down a nearby street."I hope they stomp his ass," one of the pepper-sprayed officers, who stayed behind at the scene of the stop, is heard saying on body-camera footage.About eight minutes later, officers found Nichols a half-mile away. Officers shook him, sprayed him with pepper spray, and kicked him in the head, footage released by the city shows. As Nichols staggered, moaning incoherently, some officers held him upright while others punched him in the head.After several minutes, officers handcuffed Nichols and leaned him against a car. In the roughly 20 minutes before he was loaded into an ambulance, Nichols was mostly silent and motionless.Nichols, who family members described as a free spirit skateboarder and photographer with his mom's name tattooed on his arm, died three days later. State police investigators said he died from injuries sustained during the "use-of-force incident with officers." Memphis police officers Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Dean, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin., and Desmond Mills Jr. are now facing murder charges.Memphis Police DepartmentMemphis launched Scorpion in fall 2021, with four teams of 10 officers each directed to focus on violent crime. Memphis clocked more than 300 murders that year and 290 in 2020, far more than in the years before the pandemic. Only a few months after forming Scorpion, Mayor Jim Strickland was already boasting that the unit was helping turn the tide."Since its inception last October through January 23, 2022, the Scorpion Unit has had a total of 566 arrests — 390 of them felony arrests," he said. "They have seized over $103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles, and 253 weapons."Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis disbanded the unit in the wake of Nichols' homicide.The contours of Nichols's death resonate with New Yorkers who recall the era of stop-and-frisk, with Atlantans who remember the heyday of the Red Dog unit, with Baltimore residents scarred by the abuses of the Gun Trace Task Force – and with residents of dozens of other major cities that have established elite, aggressive units dedicated to targeting specific neighborhoods where police believe crime proliferates.An elite squad's mistakes led to Breonna Taylor's deathLouisville, Kentucky's Place-Based Investigations unit was supposed to help police eliminate some of the most persistent violent crime in the city. Tasked with going after drugs and guns, the unit, founded in 2019, was disbanded fewer than six months later after a botched police raid killed 26-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor.The unit's very first mission was targeting suspected drug dealing on Elliott Avenue, miles from Taylor's home. But the scope of its investigation rapidly broadened to include Taylor, who police erroneously suspected of holding drugs on behalf of her ex-boyfriend. Plainclothes officers, acting on false information from the Place-Based Investigations Unit, broke into Taylor's home with a battering ram, failing to knock and announce their presence as their warrant required. Inside, Taylor's boyfriend, who later told police he thought an intruder was trying to break in, shot one officer in the thigh. Police opened fire on the couple, killing Taylor.Later, in a plea agreement, one of the members of the Place-Based Investigations unit would admit that she and other officers based the justification for the warrant to search Taylor's home not on evidence, but on a "gut belief." Taylor's death helped spur the swell of nationwide protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020.The story behind the creation of the Place-Based Investigations Unit shows how well-intentioned academic researchers and ties to other police officers can help such squads proliferate around the country, Kraska, the Eastern Kentucky University professor, said.Investigation of the Chicago Police Department. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois. January 13, 2017United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of IllinoisThe Louisville department had consulted with Tamara Herold, a former Cincinnati police officer turned University of Nevada Las Vegas criminologist, about a study that seemed to show that focusing an increased police presence on geographic areas with high levels of crime could lead to sustained crime reductions. Two years after Taylor's death, nine other cities had adopted the model, the Washington Post reported. Herold, who has said Taylor's death was a "horrific tragedy" but is "not a defining feature of this initiative," is still pitching it to police departments. "Hot-spots policing can be very effective. Cops count. When police are present, we can have a significant deterrent effect," Herold told the Police 1 podcast last month, acknowledging that if done poorly, the model can "strain police-community relationships." Herold did not respond to a request for comment.Memphis's Scorpion unit emerged a few years after a regional anti-crime group consulted with former New York City Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly on a strategy for tackling gang violence. Kelly is the architect of some of New York's most controversial policing strategies, including the creation of anti-crime units, and is a vocal advocate for stop-and-frisk.Reports from the private investigations firm K2 Intelligence, where Kelly then worked, recommended Memphis increase staffing levels in specialized units to fight street crime. By 2019, according to the Marshall Project, the city had done so.The New York Police Department directed officers to aggressively target suspicious activity in neighborhoods they viewed as high-crime areas. Here, officers frisk and arrest men in Harlem in 1995.Jon Naso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesMemphis police chief Davis also has prior experience with special street crime units. Davis, who took the reins of the Memphis PD in 2021, previously led the force in Durham, North Carolina. Before that, she rose through the ranks in Atlanta, including a stint leading a unit of the so-called Red Dogs, an Atlanta street-crime squad that was disbanded in the face of abuse allegations and lawsuits.Elite police units are magnets for scandal Virtually every big city has had an elite unit that's been broken up after leaders concluded that it went too far. Atlanta public safety commissioner George Napper created the Red Dog unit in 1987, at a time when Atlanta was dealing with a surge in crack cocaine use. Its name comes from a football play, but was later claimed to be an acronym for "Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia." An article in the Atlanta Constitution from its first year describes how the team would descend on reports of drug activity, make arrests, and seize drugs and cash."When the squad sweeps an area, anyone moving, especially young, black males, is told to hit the ground, hands behind his head, face down," the newspaper said. "Police officials admit the squad does little to reduce the flow of drugs into the city or the demand for them, but Mr. Napper said even what little the squad can do is important."Two decades later, though, the concerns about the unit's methods and effectiveness that had been raised from the start came to a head. The unit was abolished in 2011 after a raid on the Eagle, a gay bar, whose patrons and employees filed lawsuits claiming that police illegally detained them and used homophobic slurs while they lay handcuffed on the barroom floor. The city ended up paying more than $1 million in settlements.Investigation of the Chicago Police Department. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois. January 13, 2017United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of IllinoisDecades before Atlanta ended its elite unit operations, Detroit scrapped its "Stress" anti-robbery squad in the 1970s after its members shot dozens of rounds into an apartment where off-duty Wayne County deputies were playing poker, killing two. Chicago disbanded its Special Operations Section in 2007 amid a wide-ranging corruption scandal. Prosecutors ultimately charged 13 of its members with breaking into homes to rob residents and conducting illegal traffic stops to shake down drivers. Eleven pleaded guilty and two went to prison, including one who admitted to ordering a hit on a fellow officer he believed was collaborating with the federal investigation.   The Los Angeles Police Department's robbery-focused Special Investigations Section was embroiled in so many shootouts that it was branded the "death squad." And its CRASH team was broken up in 2000 after a member — who had been caught stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and replacing it with Bisquick pancake mix — flipped on his colleagues in what became known as the Rampart scandal.More recently, in Baltimore, all eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force were charged in 2017 and convicted of crimes including robbing drug dealers, stealing cash and filing bogus overtime claims. And in 2021, Springfield, Massachusetts responded to a Justice Department report about abuses by its narcotics bureau by shifting the team's focus to firearms.Police chiefs say elite teams are popular and effectiveMany police leaders and criminologists say specialized units do work that other officers can't. Uniformed officers conducting patrols or responding to 911 calls don't have the time or tools to surveil gangs and gather information on the flow of drugs and guns, they say, and it takes dedicated officers to take criminal networks down.Tyre Nichols's death is far from the only instance where what should have been a routine traffic stop turned violent. In May 2020, Atlanta police threatened college student Messiah Young with a handgun before arresting Young and his passenger. The officers were fired. This photo is a still pulled from body camera footage.Associated PressThe units can also be politically popular. "Police departments say these units are created in response to community demand for specialized policing," said Jorge Camacho, a former New York prosecutor now with Yale Law School.The Los Angeles Police Department's robbery-focused Special Investigations Section was embroiled in so many shootouts that it was branded the "death squad." And its CRASH team was broken up in 2000 after a member — who had been caught stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and replacing it with Bisquick pancake mix — flipped on his colleagues in what became known as the Rampart scandal.Meanwhile, police chiefs contend they are essential to fighting crime."It works. They make a lot of good cases, a lot of good arrests. Put a lot of bad people away to help solve the issue," Florida's Orange County Sheriff John W. Mina, who previously led the Orlando Police Department, told CNN last year.Street crime squads are popular among politicians who say only aggressive policing will reduce violent crime. New York Mayor Eric Adams reintroduced the city's controversial street crime units last year. Here, Adams points to a chart of gun violence he said shows his policies are working.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe popularity of these units among some elected officials, criminologists, and law enforcement can sometimes shield them from scrutiny, allowing abusive practices and corruption to fester. Police leaders had been receiving complaints about the Gun Trace Task Force for years before it was disbanded in 2017, The Baltimore Sun reported, including a 2015 tip from a local reporter that the task force's leader, Wayne Jenkins, was robbing people. Until his arrest on racketeering charges in 2017, Jenkins was widely considered "a rising talent," the Sun wrote, "with an uncanny knack for delivering the goods."There's not a clear explanation for why so many elite units go bad. In interviews with Insider, experts suggested that a confluence of mission overreach, militarized training, inadequate supervision, racism, and other factors could be to blame.Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department. U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. August 10, 2016U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights DivisionA recent report from the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, castigated U.S. police academies' "paramilitary approach" to training for prompting police officers to view community members "as the enemy." Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, said lowering the ratio of officers to supervisors within elite units could begin to address some of their issues."When you have these young, aggressive, proactive cops all together, with no controls, what do you think is going to happen?" Alpert said. "These units need more supervision, more control."Camacho said that part of the problem is that when all police have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."You have a bunch of officers with a mandate to look at homicide," he said, prompting them to be "hyper-vigilant." "They view anything as an indicator of violent crime," he added, "and respond accordingly.""There is no hunting like the hunting of man"Even after decades of elite units being shut down over abuses, cities have continually found ways to resurrect them. In New York, one notorious police unit has twice been disbanded only to come back from the dead.The cyclical saga of the Street Crime Unit is a prime example of how even after egregious incidents, such squads are often reconstituted under a different name, even as their mission and tactics remain the same.Established in 1971, by the late 1990s, the NYPD's Street Crime Unit was "known as the commandos" of the department, "an elite squad of nearly 400 officers," a New York Times reporter wrote in 1999, "dispatched into menacing neighborhoods each night to chase down rapists, muggers and dangerous fugitives, and above all, to get illegal guns off the streets."They wore t-shirts with a Hemingway quote: "Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, shown here leaving a press conference after a federal judge ruled the department's use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, later consulted on the formation of Memphis's Scorpion squad.Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesThe unit made up less than 2% of the force but seized 40% of the illegal guns confiscated by the NYPD. In the late 1990s, the Street Crime Unit tripled in size, amid a panic over a rising number of homicides. Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani preached a "broken windows" policing doctrine that advocated zero tolerance toward even minor offenses.In a city grappling with violent crime, authorities touted the Street Crime Unit as a bright spot."I wish I could bottle their enthusiasm and make everyone take a drink of it," then-NYPD commissioner Howard Safir told the New York Daily News in 1998. But on February 4, 1999, four members of the Street Crime Unit fired 41 bullets at 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo while he was standing in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building, after the officers said he reached into his pocket as if to draw a firearm. Diallo was unarmed and reaching for his wallet, multiple investigations into his killing later found. The officers were acquitted of criminal charges and temporarily reassigned to desk duty.The police killing sparked a maelstrom of accusations that the Street Crime Unit's pervasive violence, particularly against poor, Black and brown New Yorkers, had gone ignored for years. Investigation of the Springfield, Massachusetts Police Department's Narcotics Bureau. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney's Office District of Massachusetts. July 8, 2020United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office District of MassachusettsUproar over Diallo's death — and a class-action lawsuit challenging the department's use of stop-and-frisks, which plaintiffs said was a form of illegal racial profiling — forced the NYPD to disband the Street Crime Unit in 2002.In spirit, though, the Street Crime Unit continued. Many of its officers were absorbed into new plainclothes units, called anti-crime units, that were charged with the same mission of preventing violent crime. And their tactics spread: NYPD officers made more stop-and-frisks in the early 2000s than they had in the 1990s, a second class-action lawsuit, filed in 2008, alleged. The ranks of anti-crime units grew to nearly 600 officers by 2020.  "The problem on a most basic, fundamental level is that the leadership of most departments does not want to deal with the Constitution," New York civil rights attorney Jonathan Moore, who sued the city over stop-and-frisk, told Insider.The purpose of stopping so many New Yorkers for patdowns was explicitly racial, then-state senator Eric Adams testified in federal court in 2013. An analysis by The Intercept found that plainclothes officers, including members of the anti-crime units, were responsible for or involved in 31% of police shootings since 2000, despite composing only 2% of the police force. The anti-crime units were involved in notorious police killings, including the fatal 2018 shooting of Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill man, in Brooklyn; the fatal 2006 shooting of Sean Bell; and, in 2014, the death by suffocation of Eric Garner, whose last words, "I can't breathe," have become an emblem of protests against police brutality.  Amid the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, another police commissioner decided to shut down the units. The NYPD "can move away from brute force," then-commissioner Dermot Shea said at the time.But less than two years later, now-Mayor Adams brought back the controversial squads, this time rebranded Neighborhood Safety Teams, amid a panic over rising crime rates and a deadly attack in 2022 on two police officers. A member of Chicago's Special Operations Squad making an arrest in 2005, two years before the unit was broken up amid allegations of corruption.Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis via Getty ImagesAdams promised not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But he also said the squads were necessary in order to disrupt "the flow of guns in our cities."Their early record has not been promising. Most of the arrests made by the Neighborhood Safety Teams have nothing to do with guns, City & State reported. The most frequent type of arrest their officers have made is for possession of a fake ID.Elite police squads get rebranded after controversies New York is far from the only place where notorious squads have been disbanded and reformed. The New Haven Police Department dissolved its Street Interdiction Squad in 2007 amid a theft and bribery scandal, then reconstituted it two years later. Miami resurrected its Street Narcotics Unit under a new moniker, but was forced to dissolve it in 2013 under fire from the Department of Justice, which partially blamed it for a spate of police shootings. Experts say cities that stand up street crimes units risk replacing one kind of violence with another. Such units bring "a new level of aggression and threat to the community," said Maurice Hobson, a professor at Georgia State University who has written a book about Atlanta's Red Dog unit. After Atlanta shut the unit down, the city also created a new specialist team to take its place: the APEX unit. (In 2021, the unit was rebranded as the Titan unit.) "From people in the community, the only change when the APEX unit came out was they changed their uniforms," said Tiffany Roberts, the policy director for the Southern Center for Human Rights. The death of Tyre Nichols has prompted others to come forward with claims of mistreatment at the hands of the Scorpion unit. Maurice Chalmers-Stokes, 19, told Memphis media that he was thrown into a fence last fall by a group of officers, including one of the cops accused of killing Nichols. He is suing the city, and fighting charges for possessing a stolen gun that police say they found on him in that interaction.NPR reported that four of the five officers charged in Nichols's death, who had two to six years of experience, had been disciplined by the Memphis police. One of the officers, Demetrius Haley, was disciplined in 2021 for not reporting an incident where a colleague — who resigned — yanked a woman from a car and dislocated her shoulder.Haley was also named in a 2016 lawsuit filed by a plaintiff who said that Haley was one of the corrections officers who abused him at a Shelby County jail. The case was dismissed. Moore, who worked on the New York City stop-and-frisk case, said part of the issue with elite units is that some of them are stretched too thin. But he said no matter how many supervisors are on the job, street-crime teams often do what politicians and policymakers want them to do."Leadership does not want these officers to have their hands tied," he said. "They want them to go out and be aggressive."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

How The "Unvaccinated" Got It Right Authored by Robin Koerner via The Brownstone Institute, Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert. It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and understanding of human behavior. Some time ago, Scott turned those skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility on the politics and culture of our country. Like many other commentators, and based on his own analysis of evidence available to him, he opted to take the Covid “vaccine.” Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in which he declared, “The unvaccinated were the winners,” and, to his great credit, “I want to find out how so many of [my viewers] got the right answer about the “vaccine” and I didn’t.”  “Winners” was perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: he seemingly means that the “unvaccinated” do not have to worry about the long-term consequences of having the “vaccine” in their bodies since enough data concerning the lack of safety of the “vaccines” have now appeared to demonstrate that, on the balance of risks, the choice not to be “vaccinated” has been vindicated for individuals without comorbidities. What follows is a personal response to Scott, which explains how consideration of the information that was available at the time led one person – me – to decline the “vaccine.” It is not meant to imply that all who accepted the “vaccine” made the wrong decision or, indeed, that everyone who declined it did so for good reasons.  Some people have said that the “vaccine” was created in a hurry. That may or may not be true. Much of the research for mRNA “vaccines” had already been done over many years, and corona-viruses as a class are well understood so it was at least feasible that only a small fraction of the “vaccine” development had been hurried. The much more important point was that the “vaccine” was rolled out without long-term testing. Therefore one of two conditions applied. Either no claim could be made with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine” or there was some amazing scientific argument for a once-in-a-lifetime theoretical certainty concerning the long-term safety of this “vaccine.” The latter would be so extraordinary that it might (for all I know) even be a first in the history of medicine. If that were the case, it would have been all that was being talked about by the scientists; it was not. Therefore, the more obvious, first state of affairs, obtained: nothing could be claimed with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine.” Given, then, that the long-term safety of the “vaccine” was a theoretical crapshoot, the unquantifiable long-term risk of taking it could only be justified by an extremely high certain risk of not taking it. Accordingly, a moral and scientific argument could only be made for its use by those at high risk of severe illness if exposed to COVID. Even the very earliest data immediately showed that I (and the overwhelming majority of the population) was not in the group. The continued insistence on rolling out the “vaccine” to the entire population when the data revealed that those with no comorbidities were at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID was therefore immoral and ascientific on its face. The argument that reduced transmission from the non-vulnerable to the vulnerable as a result of mass “vaccination” could only stand if the long-term safety of the “vaccine” had been established, which it had not. Given the lack of proof of long-term safety, the mass-“vaccination” policy was clearly putting at risk young or healthy lives to save old and unhealthy ones. The policy makers did not even acknowledge this, express any concern about the grave responsibility they were taking on for knowingly putting people at risk, or indicate how they had weighed the risks before reaching their policy positions. Altogether, this was a very strong reason not to trust the policy or the people setting it. At the very least, if the gamble with people’s health and lives represented by the coercive “vaccination” policy had been taken following an adequate cost-benefit benefit, that decision would have been a tough judgment call. Any honest presentation of it would have involved the equivocal language of risk-balancing and the public availability of information about how the risks were weighed and the decision was made. In fact, the language of policy-makers was dishonestly unequivocal and the advice they offered suggested no risk whatsoever of taking the “vaccine.” This advice was simply false (or if you prefer, misleading,) on the evidence of the time inasmuch as it was unqualified. Data that did not support COVID policies were actively and massively suppressed. This raised the bar of sufficient evidence for certainty that the “vaccine” was safe and efficacious. Per the foregoing, the bar was not met.  Simple analyses of even the early available data showed that the establishment was prepared to do much more harm in terms of human rights and spending public resources to prevent a COVID death than any other kind of death. Why this disproportionality? An explanation of this overreaction was required. The kindest guess as to what was driving it was “good-old, honest panic.” But if a policy is being driven by panic, then the bar for going along with it moves up even higher. A less kind guess is that there were undeclared reasons for the policy, in which case, obviously, the “vaccine” could not be trusted.  Fear had clearly generated a health panic and a moral panic, or mass formation psychosis. That brought into play many very strong cognitive biases and natural human tendencies against rationality and proportionality. Evidence of those biases was everywhere; it included the severing of close kin and kith relationships, the ill-treatment of people by others who used to be perfectly decent, the willingness of parents to cause developmental harm to their children, calls for large-scale rights violations that were made by large numbers of citizens of previously free countries without any apparent concern for the horrific implications of those calls, and the straight-faced, even anxious, compliance with policies that should have warranted responses of laughter from psychologically healthy individuals (even if they had been necessary or just helpful). In the grip of such panic or mass formation psychosis the evidential bar for extreme claims (such as the safety and moral necessity of injecting oneself with a form of gene therapy that has not undergone long-term testing) rises yet further. The companies responsible for manufacturing and ultimately profiting from the “vaccination” were given legal immunity. Why would a government do that if it really believed that the “vaccine” was safe and wanted to instill confidence in it? And why would I put something in my body that the government has decided can harm me without my having any legal redress? If the “vaccine”-sceptical were wrong, there would still have been two good reasons not to suppress their data or views. First, we are a liberal democracy that values free speech as a fundamental right and second, their data and arguments could be shown to be fallacious. The fact that the powers-that-be decided to violate our fundamental values and suppress discussion invites the question of “Why?” That was not satisfactorily answered beyond, “It’s easier for them to impose their mandates in a world where people do not dissent:” but that is an argument against compliance, rather than for it. Suppressing information a priori suggests that the information has persuasive force. I distrust anyone who distrusts me to determine which information and arguments are good and which are bad when it is my health that is at stake – especially when the people who are promoting censorship are hypocritically acting against their declared beliefs in informed consent and bodily autonomy. The PCR test was held up as the “gold standard” diagnostic test for COVID. A moment’s reading about how the PCR test works indicates that it is no such thing. Its use for diagnostic purposes is more of an art than a science, to put it kindly. Kary Mullis, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the PCR technique risked his career to say as much when people tried to use it as a diagnostic test for HIV to justify a mass program of pushing experimental anti-retroviral drugs on early AIDS patients, which ultimately killed tens of thousands of people. This raises the question, “How do the people who are generating the data that we saw on the news every night and were being used to justify the mass “vaccination” policy handle the uncertainty around PCR-based diagnoses?” If you don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question, your bar for taking the risk of “vaccination” should once again go up. (On a personal note, to get the answer before making my decision about whether to undergo “vaccination,” I sent exactly this question, via a friend, to an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. That epidemiologist, who was personally involved in generating the up-to-date data on the spread of pandemic globally, replied merely that s/he works with the data s/he’s given and does not question its accuracy or means of generation. In other words, the pandemic response was largely based on data generated by processes that were not understood or even questioned by the generators of that data.)  To generalize the last point, a supposedly conclusive claim by someone who demonstrably cannot justify their claim should be discounted. In the case of the COVID pandemic, almost all people who acted as if the “vaccine” was safe and effective had no physical or informational evidence for the claims of safety and efficacy beyond the supposed authority of other people who made them. This includes many medical professionals – a problem that was being raised by some of their number (who, in many cases, were censored on social media and even lost their jobs or licenses). Anyone could read the CDC infographics on mRNA “vaccines” and, without being a scientist, generate obvious “But what if..?” questions that could be asked of experts to check for themselves whether the pushers of the “vaccines” would personally vouch for their safety. For example, the CDC put out an infographic that stated the following. “How does the vaccine work? The mRNA in the vaccine teaches your cells how to make copies of the spike protein. If you are exposed to the real virus later, your body will recognize it and know how to fight it off. After the mRNA delivers the instructions, your cells break it down and get rid of it.” All right. Here are some obvious questions to ask, then. “What happens if the instructions delivered to cells to generate the spike protein are not eliminated from the body as intended? How can we be sure that such a situation will never arise?” If someone cannot answer those questions, and he is in a position of political or medical authority, then he shows himself to be willing to push potentially harmful policies without considering the risks involved. Given all of the above, a serious person at least had to keep an eye out for published safety and efficacy data as the pandemic proceeded. Pfizer’s Six-month Safety and Efficacy Study was notable. The very large number of its authors was remarkable and their summary claim was that the tested vaccine was effective and safe. The data in the paper showed more deaths per head in the “vaccinated” group than “unvaccinated” group. While this difference does not statistically establish that the shot is dangerous or ineffective, the generated data were clearly compatible with (let us put it kindly) the incomplete safety of the “vaccine” – at odds with the front-page summary. (It’s almost as if even professional scientists and clinicians exhibit bias and motivated reasoning when their work becomes politicized.) At the very least, a lay reader could see that the “summary findings” stretched, or at least showed a remarkable lack of curiosity about, the data – especially given what was at stake and the awesome responsibility of getting someone to put something untested inside their body. As time went on, it became very clear that some of the informational claims that had been made to convince people to get “vaccinated,” especially by politicians and media commentators, were false. If those policies had been genuinely justified by the previously claimed “facts,” then determination of the falsity of those “facts” should have resulted in a change in policy or, at the very least, expressions of clarification and regret by people who had previously made those incorrect but pivotal claims. Basic moral and scientific standards demand that individuals put clearly on the record the requisite corrections and retractions of statements that might influence decisions that affect health. If they don’t, they should not be trusted – especially given the huge potential consequences of their informational errors for an increasingly “vaccinated” population. That, however, never happened. If the “vaccine”-pushers had acted in good faith, then in the wake of the publication of new data throughout the pandemic, we would have been hearing (and perhaps even accepting) multiple mea culpas. We heard no such thing from political officials, revealing an almost across-the-board lack of integrity, moral seriousness, or concern with accuracy. The consequently necessary discounting of the claims previously made by officials left no trustworthy case on the pro-lockdown, pro-“vaccine” side at all. To offer some examples of statements that were proven false by data but not explicitly walked back: “You’re not going to get COVID if you get these vaccinations… We are in a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” – Joe Biden; “The vaccines are safe. I promise you…” – Joe Biden; “The vaccines are safe and effective.” – Anthony Fauci. “Our data from the CDC suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, do not get sick – and it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.” – Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in… in serious condition and many on ventilators.” – Justice Sotomayer (during a case to determine legality of Federal “vaccine” mandates)… … and so on and so on. The last one is particularly interesting because it was made by a judge in a Supreme Court case to determine the legality of the federal mandates. Subsequently, the aforementioned Dr. Walensky, head of the CDC, who had previously made a false statement about the efficacy of the “vaccine,” confirmed under questioning that the number of children in hospital was only 3,500 – not 100,000. To make more strongly the point about prior claims and policies’ being contradicted by subsequent findings but not, as a result, being reversed, the same Dr. Walensky, head of the CDC, said, “the overwhelming number of deaths – over 75% – occurred in people that had at least four comorbidities. So really these were people who were unwell to begin with.” That statement so completely undermined the entire justification for the policies of mass-“vaccination” and lockdowns that any intellectually honest person who supported them would at that point have to reassess their position. Whereas the average Joe might well have missed that piece of information from the CDC, it was the government’s own information so the presidential Joe (and his agents) certainly could not have missed it. Where was the sea change in policy to match the sea change in our understanding of the risks associated with COVID, and therefore the cost-benefit balance of the untested (long-term) “vaccine” vs. the risk associated with being infected with COVID? It never came. Clearly, neither the policy positions nor their supposed factual basis could be trusted. What was the new science that explained why, for the first time in history, a “vaccine” would be more effective than natural exposure and consequent immunity? Why the urgency to get a person who has had COVID and now has some immunity to get “vaccinated” after the fact? The overall political and cultural context in which the entire discourse on “vaccination” was being conducted was such that the evidential bar for the safety and efficacy of the “vaccine” was raised yet further while our ability to determine whether that bar had been met was reduced. Any conversation with an “unvaccinated” person (and as an educator and teacher, I was involved in very many), always involved the “unvaccinated” person being put into a defensive posture of having to justify himself to the “vaccine”-supporter as if his position was de facto more harmful than the contrary one. In such a context, accurate determination of facts is almost impossible: moral judgment always inhibits objective empirical analysis. When dispassionate discussion of an issue is impossible because judgment has saturated discourse, drawing conclusions of sufficient accuracy and with sufficient certainty to promote rights violations and the coercion of medical treatment, is next to impossible. Regarding analytics (and Scott’s point about “our” heuristics beating “their” analytics), precision is not accuracy. Indeed, in contexts of great uncertainty and complexity, precision is negatively correlated with accuracy. (A more precise claim is less likely to be correct.) Much of the COVID panic began with modeling. Modeling is dangerous inasmuch as it puts numbers on things; numbers are precise; and precision gives an illusion of accuracy – but under great uncertainty and complexity, model outputs are dominated by the uncertainties on the input variables that have very wide (and unknown) ranges and the multiple assumptions that themselves warrant only low confidence. Therefore, any claimed precision of a model’s output is bogus and the apparent accuracy is only and entirely that – apparent.  We saw the same thing with HIV in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Models at that time determined that up to one-third of the heterosexual population could contract HIV. Oprah Winfrey offered that statistic on one of her shows, alarming a nation. The first industry to know that this was absurdly wide of the mark was the insurance industry when all of the bankruptcies that they were expecting on account of payouts on life insurance policies did not happen. When the reality did not match the outputs of their models, they knew that the assumptions on which those models were based were false – and that the pattern of the disease was very different from what had been declared. For reasons beyond the scope of this article, the falseness of those assumptions could have been determined at the time. Of relevance to us today, however, is the fact that those models helped to create an entire AIDS industry, which pushed experimental antiretroviral drugs on people with HIV no doubt in the sincere belief that the drugs might help them. Those drugs killed hundreds of thousands of people.  (By the way, the man who announced the “discovery” of HIV from the White House – not in a peer-reviewed journal – and then pioneered the huge and deadly reaction to it was the very same Anthony Fauci who has been gracing our television screens over the last few years.) An honest approach to data on COVID and policy development would have driven the urgent development of a system to collect accurate data on COVID infections and the outcomes of COVID patients. Instead, the powers that be did the very opposite, making policy decisions that knowingly reduced the accuracy of collected data in a way that would serve their political purposes. Specifically, they 1) stopped distinguishing between dying of COVID and dying with COVID and 2) incentivized medical institutions to identify deaths as caused by COVID when there was no clinical data to support that conclusion. (This also happened during the aforementioned HIV panic three decades ago.) The dishonesty of the pro-“vaccine” side was revealed by the repeated changes of official definitions of clinical terms like “vaccine” whose (scientific) definitions have been fixed for generations (as they must be if science is to do its work accurately: definitions of scientific terms can change, but only when our understanding of their referents changes). Why was the government changing the meanings of words rather than simply telling the truth using the same words they had been using from the beginning? Their actions in this regard were entirely disingenuous and anti-science. The evidential bar moves up again and our ability to trust the evidence slides down.  In his video (which I mentioned at the top of this article), Scott Adams asked, “How could I have determined that the data that [“vaccine”-sceptics] sent me was the good data?” He did not have to. Those of us who got it right or “won” (to use his word) needed only to accept the data of those who were pushing the “vaccination” mandates. Since they had the greatest interest in the data pointing their way, we could put an upper bound of confidence in their claims by testing those claims against their own data. For someone without comorbidities, that upper bound was still too low to take the risk of “vaccination” given the very low risk of severe harm from contracting COVID-19. In this relation, it is also worth mentioning that under the right contextual conditions, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Those conditions definitely applied in the pandemic: there was a massive incentive for all of the outlets who were pushing the “vaccine” to provide sufficient evidence to support their unequivocal claims for the vaccine and lockdown policies and to denigrate, as they did, those who disagreed. They simply did not provide that evidence, obviously because it did not exist. Given that they would have provided it if it had existed, the lack of evidence presented was evidence of its absence. For all of the above reasons, I moved from initially considering enrolling in a vaccine trial to doing some open-minded due diligence to becoming COVID-“vaccine”-sceptical. I generally believe in never saying “never” so I was waiting until such time as the questions and issues raised above were answered and resolved. Then, I would be potentially willing to get “vaccinated,” at least in principle. Fortunately, not subjecting oneself to a treatment leaves one with the option to do so in the future. (Since the reverse is not the case, by the way, the option value of “not acting yet” weighs somewhat in favor of the cautious approach.) However, I remember the day when my decision not to take the “vaccine” became a firm one. A conclusive point brought me to deciding that I would not be taking the “vaccine” under prevailing conditions. A few days later, I told my mother on a phone call, “They will have to strap me to a table.”  Whatever the risks associated with a COVID infection on the one hand, and the “vaccine” on the other, the “vaccination” policy enabled massive human rights violations. Those who were “vaccinated” were happy to see the “unvaccinated” have basic freedoms removed (the freedom to speak freely, work, travel, be with loved ones at important moments such as births, deaths, funerals etc.) because their status as “vaccinated” allowed them to accept back as privileges-for-the-“vaccinated” the rights that had been removed from everyone else. Indeed, many people grudgingly admitted that they got “vaccinated” for that very reason, e.g. to keep their job or go out with their friends. For me, that would have been to be complicit in the destruction, by precedent and participation, of the most basic rights on which our peaceful society depends. People have died to secure those rights for me and my compatriots. As a teenager, my Austrian grandfather fled to England from Vienna and promptly joined Churchill’s army to defeat Hitler. Hitler was the man who murdered his father, my great-grandfather, in Dachau for being a Jew. The camps began as a way to quarantine the Jews who were regarded as vectors of disease that had to have their rights removed for the protection of the wider population. In 2020, all I had to do in defense of such rights was to put up with limited travel and being barred from my favorite restaurants, etc., for a few months.  Even if I were some weird statistical outlier such that COVID might hospitalize me despite my age and good health, then so be it: if it were going to take me, I would not let it take my principles and rights in the meanwhile. And what if I were wrong? What if the massive abrogation of rights that was the response of governments around the world to a pandemic with a tiny fatality rate among those who were not “unwell to begin with” (to use the expression of the Director of the CDC) was not going to end in a few months?  What if it were going to go on forever? In that case, the risk to my life from COVID would be nothing next to the risk to all of our lives as we take to the streets in the last, desperate hope of wresting back the most basic freedoms of all from a State that has long forgotten that it legitimately exists only to protect them and, instead, sees them now as inconvenient obstacles to be worked around or even destroyed. Tyler Durden Mon, 02/06/2023 - 00:00.....»»

Nikki Haley rose from running the accounts at her family's clothing boutique to becoming the ambassador to the UN. Nikki Haley speaks to guests at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting on November 19, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada.Scott Olson/Getty Images Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is planning to run for president in 2024. That would pit her against former President Donald Trump, whom she previously said she'd back. The GOP star served six terms in state office before becoming the ambassador to the UN. Nikki Haley plans to announce a 2024 presidential run on February 15, a spokesperson confirmed to Insider.Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) speaks during a campaign event for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin (L) (R-VA) July 14, 2021 in McLean, Virginia. Youngkin is running against former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.Win McNamee/Getty ImageFormer South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley plans to run for president in 2024 and is set to announce her bid on February 15 in Charleston, reported The Post and Courier.Her communications director told Insider's Cheryl Teh on Tuesday evening that The Post and Courier's reporting is "accurate."Haley's coming announcement would make her the second Republican to declare their bid for the White House, after former President Donald Trump announced his run in November.It would also come after Haley said in 2021 that she would back Trump again and wouldn't challenge her former boss in a 2024 race.But Haley has been hinting at a presidential run in recent weeks, saying she could potentially be America's new leader while speaking in a January interview on Fox News."Yes, we need to go in a new direction," Haley said. "And can I be that leader? Yes. I think I can be that leader."On the other hand, Trump has said "it would be very disloyal" if Haley, who served as the US ambassador to the UN under him, ran against him.A representative for Haley did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment for this story.Haley started her career in commerce and accounting before she moved into politics.Rep. Nikki Haley with her family after winning the GOP vote in the gubernatorial primary for South Carolina, on Tuesday, June 8, 2010.Rich Glickstein/The State/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesHaley was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in 1972 in Bamberg, South Carolina, to two immigrants from Punjab, India.Her father, a professor at Punjab Agricultural University, and her mother, who earned a law degree in India, moved to South Carolina in 1969, where they both had extensive teaching careers at local institutions.Haley's mother also started a gift and clothing boutique, Exotica International, in 1979, per South Carolina daily The Times and Democrat. When she was 13, Haley started helping with accounting at Exotica, and later returned to the company as chief financial officer after she graduated from Clemson University, per the Seattle Times. From 1998 to 2004, Haley was named as a board member of the chambers of commerce in Orangeburg County and Lexington, as well as the president of the National Association of Women Business Owners.Haley is married to National Guardsman Michael Haley, who served as an officer in Afghanistan. They have a daughter, Rena, and a son, Nalin.In 2004, she was elected to South Carolina's House of Representatives, where she served three terms.Nikki Haley as South Carolina State Representative for the state's 87th district in 2009.Tim Dominick/The State/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesHaley came in second in the primaries when she initially ran for South Carolina's House of Representatives in 2004, but won in a runoff after her incumbent opponent, Larry Koon, couldn't secure a majority. She ran uncontested in the general election afterward.During her first term, Haley was elected as the chair of the freshman caucus and later became majority whip in the state's general assembly.Serving three terms in total, she pushed to lower taxes and education reform, according to her voting history.Haley made history as South Carolina's first female governor in 2011.South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, surrounded by three former governors, some family members of the slain nine and many legislators, signs the bill to remove the Confederate flag.Tim Dominick/The State/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)Haley was elected the governor of South Carolina in 2010 with endorsements from former presidential candidate Sen. Mitt Romney and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.At 32, she was the youngest governor in the country when she took office in January 2011, and made history as South Carolina's first female governor. She was also the state's first Asian-American governor, and would go on to serve three terms in total.As governor, Haley pledged to crack down on illegal immigration in South Carolina, signing a bill that required police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop and suspect of being in the US illegally.She also signed a state law in 2016 banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.Haley made national headlines in 2015 after she visibly choked up in her response to the Charleston shooting, in which nine African Americans at a Bible study were shot dead by a white supremacist.The then-governor called for the confederate flag to be removed from state capitol grounds."This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state," she said at the time, signing a law to remove the battle flag shortly after.As the Black Lives Matter movement grew in 2015, Haley also spoke out against what she said was a "shameful" image problem with minority voters in the GOP. "The problem for our party is that our approach often appears cold and unwelcoming to minorities," she said.Haley later was criticized for saying in 2019 that the confederate flag was seen in South Carolina as a symbol of "service, sacrifice, and heritage," and that the Charleston shooter had hijacked its meaning. She tweeted at the time that her comment had been mischaracterized.She was appointed as the US ambassador to the United Nations by Trump in 2016.Nikki Haley, Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN during a Security Council Meeting.Luiz Rampelotto/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesIn January 2017, then-President Donald Trump nominated Haley to become the US ambassador to the United Nations. CNN reported that Haley had originally been considered for Secretary of State, but that she declined Trump's offer, telling him he could "find someone better."As the ambassador to the UN, Haley kept in line with Trump's pro-Israel stance, backing his bid to withhold food aid to Palestine in 2018 and warning other countries not to condemn his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.She was also tough on North Korea and Russia, playing a vocal role in UN sanctions against Kim Jong Un's regime and later accusing Moscow of covering up violations of those sanctions.Haley stepped down as ambassador four weeks before the 2018 November midterms, surprising some White House officials, CNN reported.However, Trump said Haley had informed him six months earlier of her intention to "take a break" and resign. He praised Haley in his remarks, saying she "has been very special to me" and lauding her as "somebody that gets it."Haley's political relationship with Trump has historically been tumultuous at best.US President Donald Trump announces that he has accepted the resignation of Nikki Haley as US Ambassador to the United Nations, in the Oval Office on October 9, 2018 in Washington, DC. President Trump said that Haley will leave her post by the end of the year.Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesHaley's history with Trump, however, has not been so smooth.When she endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016 against then-GOP frontrunner Trump for the White House, he tweeted that the people of South Carolina were "embarrassed" by her."Bless your heart," she tweeted in response.Haley slammed Trump at a Rubio campaign event, saying she would "not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK.""That is not a part of our party, that's not who we want as president, we will not allow that in our country," she said then.When Rubio dropped out of the race, Haley voiced support for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. After  Trump later won the GOP nomination, she said she would vote for him, but that she was "not a fan."While she initially criticized Trump's 2015 proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US, calling it "unconstitutional" and "just wrong," Haley in 2017 defended his decision to block travelers from six Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, saying it wasn't an outright Muslim ban."What the president is doing, everybody needs to realize that what he's doing is saying: 'Let's take a step back. Let's temporarily pause,'" she said.After the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol, Haley said she felt Trump had "let us down.""He went down a path he shouldn't have, and we shouldn't have followed him, and we shouldn't have listened to him. And we can't let that ever happen again," she told Politico.In particular, she vehemently disapproved of how Trump failed to protect his former vice president, Mike Pence, telling Politico she was "so triggered" by his words against Pence that she had to turn off her TV."When I tell you I'm angry, it's an understatement," said, per the outlet.A month after the riots, Haley wrote in an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal that she believed Trump's policies made the US "stronger, safer, and more prosperous," but that she still judged him for his actions after the election.Meanwhile, Trump has appeared less perturbed by rumors of Haley's 2024 run than he has by the looming threat of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' bid. DeSantis has not declared his run yet, but he has hinted that he might.Trump said Haley had called him to discuss her potential run, and said she "should do it," per CNN."I talked to her for a little while, I said: 'Look, you know, go by your heart if you want to run,'" he said.A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Johnstone: Let's Nuke The World Over Who Governs Crimea Authored by Caitlin Johnstone, Critics of the US empire have spent months compiling mountains of evidence showing that the empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine. Supporters of the US empire have spent months posting dog memes and accusing strangers of being paid by Putin. It’s clear who’s in the right. So does everyone else in the world get a vote on whether their lives should be risked in an offensive to control who governs Crimea? Or will the Biden administration just be making that call on behalf of all living creatures? It’s so crazy how the fate of everyone alive and everyone who could potentially be born in the future is riding on the way two governments choose to navigate a conflict in Ukraine, just because those two governments have most of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s like two people in a bar getting into a brawl that kills everyone in their city. Nobody else in the world gets a vote on the decisions being made that could kill everyone alive and end humanity forever; just a few people within those two governments and their militaries. ❖ The US empire is telling Moscow “I’m the craziest motherfucker around, I’ll keep ramping up the brinkmanship looking you right in the eye and daring you to use nukes,” while telling the rest of the world “I am the voice of sanity that you should all look to for leadership.” One of the empire’s faces is the virtuous upholder of freedom and democracy, while the other face puts on an intimidating show of viciousness like a prisoner biting off someone’s cheek in the prison yard. At least one of those faces is necessarily lying. ❖ Literally the only reason mainstream westerners are fine with the US empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia is because most don’t understand it, and those who do understand it don’t think very hard about it. They avoid contemplating what nuclear war is and what it would mean. Whenever I touch on this subject I get a bunch of replies like “Yeehaw! That’s right bitch, we’re standing up to Putin!” They’re not approaching the subject with anything like the gravity they would if they understood what’s happening and had seriously thought about what could be. They don’t understand how horrifyingly dangerous it is that the empire is considering backing a Crimea offensive, and they haven’t sincerely contemplated what it would be like for every living creature to die horribly and for no one else to ever be born again for all of time. Whatever position you have on this whole conflict, you should be approaching the possibility of nuclear annihilation with the most profound solemnity imaginable, because it is without exaggeration the single worst thing that could possibly happen. Take it seriously, or be silent. ❖ If a nuclear war between Russia and NATO erupts, the answer to the question “Was it worth it?” will be a decisive “No.” Not just for people like me, but for everyone, no matter how sympathetic they are to the western power structure and no matter how much they hate Russia. If their answer isn’t “no” immediately, it will be their answer in a matter of hours. If people don’t immediately understand the horror that’s been unleashed upon our world and how nothing could possibly have been worth it, they will understand it in short order. ❖ The term Mutually Assured Destruction was first coined by Hudson Institute’s Donald Brennan in 1962, but he used it ironically, spelling out the acronym “MAD” in order to argue that it’s insane to hold weapons that can cause armageddon. These games of nuclear chicken are insane. The argument for nukes is that the threat of their use wards off the large-scale conventional wars we saw in WWI and WWII, but that only works if the fear of their use deters conventional attacks. The US empire is getting more and more brazen with its proxy warfare against Russia. It used to be undisputed conventional wisdom that hot warfare against Russia must be avoided at all costs because they’re a nuclear superpower. Now the idea of backing full-scale offensives to carve off pieces of the Russian Federation is gaining widespread mainstream traction. This disintegrates the uneasy stability that MAD is theoretically supposed to create, because MAD assumes the other side won’t be crazy enough to launch conventional offensives against a nuclear superpower due to fear of rapidly spiraling escalation into full-scale nuclear war. If you’ve got two people pointing pistols at each other, an exchange of gunfire might be avoided for fear of retaliation. But if one of the gunmen breaks the standoff by walking toward the other holding a knife in his other hand, odds are the other guy pulls the trigger. ❖ I hate it when I get people saying “I hope we do nuke ourselves off the map, we’re horrible.” It’s not okay for a few idiots to be playing games with every life on this planet. Just because you’re unhappy with life here doesn’t mean all the innocents around the world are, doesn’t mean the animals are, the bugs, the trees. Your disaffected feelings are not a valid reason not to fight this thing tooth and claw. Keep your omnicidal ideations to yourself. ❖ Westerners frame the idea of nations like Russia and China “attacking their neighbors” as though that’s somehow less moral than the US attacking nations on the other side of the planet who cannot possibly pose any threat to US national security. At least Russia can make an argument that its invasion of Ukraine was in its national security interests due to US/NATO militarization there, and China could make similar arguments if it ever attacks Taiwan. US wars are done solely to defend US planetary domination, not the US. ❖ Liberals are all about examining privilege except when it comes to western privilege. Then they’re more than happy to blow up everything and everyone for their belief in their inherent ideological superiority and their right to rule over every single country on earth. ❖ Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer designating the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment as a “dangerous organization.” To be clear, nothing has actually changed about the Azov Regiment. It’s still the same people with the same ideology. All that changed is the Official Narrative. For years and years, up until just last year, the mass media had no problem acknowledging that Ukraine has a Nazi problem and calling Azov neo-Nazis what they are. All that changed is we moved into an information ecosystem of aggressive war propaganda. No amount of PR rebranding will magically transform Azov neo-Nazis into wholesome moderates. You can change Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC, but it’s still the same stuff in the bucket. *  *  * My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 Tyler Durden Mon, 01/23/2023 - 02:00.....»»

2022 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2021, we said that the year would be a very tough act to follow as "the sheer breadth of narratives, stories, surprises, plot twists and unexpected developments" made 2021 the most memorable year yet in our brief history, and that it would be an extremely tough act to follow. And yet despite the exceedingly high bar for 2022, not only did the year not disappoint but between the constant news barrage, the regime shifts, narrative volatility, market rollercoasters, oh and the world being on the verge of a nuclear Armageddon for much of the year, the past year was the most action, excitement, and news (including fake news)-packed yet. Where does one even start? While covid - which was the story of 2020 - finally faded away from the front page and the constant barrage of fearmongering coverage (with recent revelations courtesy of Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" showing just how extensively said newsflow was crafted, orchestrated and -y es - censored by the government, while a sudden U-turn by China in its Covid Zero policy prompting a top Chinese research to admit that the "fatality rate from the omicron variant of the virus is in line with the flu"), and the story of 2021 was the scourge of soaring inflation (which contrary to macrotourist predictions that it would prove "transitory" just kept rising, and rising, and rising, until it hit levels not seen since the Volcker galloping inflation days of the 1980s)... ... then the big market story of 2022 was the coordinated central bank crusade to put the inflation genie back into the bottle and to contain soaring prices (which were no longer transitory, especially after Putin launched his "special military operation" in Ukraine which we will discuss shortly)... ... even if it meant crushing the housing market... ... sparking a global recession, or as Goldman calls it a "broad-based but necessary slowdown in global growth"... ... and leaving millions out of work (the BLS still pretends hundreds of thousands of workers are being added to payrolls even though as we all know - as does the Philadelphia Fed - that is a lie, and the real employment number has not changed since March)... ... not to mention triggering the worst bear market in both stocks and bonds since the global financial crisis. Yes, less than a year after the S&P hit a record just above 4800 in January of this year, both global stock and bond markets have cratered, and in a profound shock to an entire generation of "traders" who have never lived through a hiking cycle and rising inflation, for the first time since 2008 no central banks are riding to the market's rescue. Meanwhile, with a drop of more than 20% in 2022 translating into a record $18 trillion wipeout, the MSCI All-Country World Index is on track for its worst performance since the 2008 crisis, amid the Fed's relentless rate hiking campaign. Add bond market losses - because in 2022 everything was sold - and you get a staggering $36 trillion in value vaporized, which in absolute terms is nearly double the damage from the Lehman failure and the global financial crisis. None of this should come as a surprise: the staggering liquidity injections that started in 2020, continued throughout 2021 and extended into the first half of 2022 before gently reversing as QT finally returned; the final tally is that after $3 trillion in emergency liquidity injections in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic to "stabilize the world", the Fed injected another $2 trillion in the subsequent period, most of which in 2021, a year where economists were "puzzled" why inflation was soaring (this, of course, excludes the tens of trillions of monetary stimulus injected by other central banks as well as the boundless fiscal stimulus that was greenlighted with the launch of helicopter money). And then, when a modest $500 billion in Fed balance sheet liquidity was withdrawn... everything crashed. This reminds us of something we said two years ago: "it's almost as if the world's richest asset owners requested the covid pandemic." Well, last year we got confirmation for this rhetorical statement, when we calculated that in the 18 months after the covid pandemic hit, the richest 1% of US society saw their net worth increase by over $30 trillion, which in turn officially made the US into a banana republic where the middle 60% of US households by income - a measure economists use as a definition of the middle class - saw their combined assets drop from 26.7% to 26.6% of national wealth, the lowest in Federal Reserve data, while for the first time the super rich had a bigger share, at 27%. Yes, for the first time ever, the 1% owned more wealth than the entire US middle class, a definition traditionally reserve for kleptocracies and despotic African banana republics. But as the Fed finally ended QE and started draining its balance sheet in 2022, the party ended with a thud, and this tremendous wealth accumulation by the top 1% went into reverse: indeed, just the 500 richest billionaires saw their fortunes collapse by $1.4 trillion with names such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Masa Son and Larry Page and Sergey Brin all losing more than a third (in some cases much more) of their net worth. This also reminds us of something else we said a year ago: "this continued can-kicking by the establishment - all of which was made possible by the covid pandemic and lockdowns which served as an all too convenient scapegoat for the unprecedented response that served to propel risk assets (and fiat alternatives such as gold and bitcoin) to all time highs - has come with a price... and an increasingly higher price in fact. As even Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett admits, Fed's response to the the pandemic "worsened inequality" as the value of financial assets - Wall Street -  relative to economy - Main Street - hit all-time high of 6.3x." In other words, for all its faults, 2022 was a year in which inequality finally reversed - if only a little - and as Michael Hartnett said in one of his final Flow Shows, "Main St finally outperformed Wall St significantly in 2022" as the value of financial assets relative to the economy slumped from 6.3x to 5.4x. Sadly, we doubt that this will cheer anyone up - be it workers - who have seen their real, inflation-adjusted earnings decline for a record 20 consecutive months (or virtually all of Joe BIden's presidency)... ... or investors who have seen crushing losses across all industries, with the exception of the one sector we have been pounding-the-table-on bullish on since the summer of 2020: energy (with our favorite stock, Exxon, blowing away the competition with its nearly triple digit return YTD). There is some good news for jittery bulls looking ahead at 2023: statistics show that two consecutive down years are rare for major equity markets — the S&P 500 index has fallen for two straight years on just four occasions since 1928, and they usually marked market crashes or social cataclysms -  the Great Depression, World War II, the 1970s oil crisis and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The scary thing though, is that when they do occur, drops in the second year tend to be deeper than in the first. And with Joe Biden at the helm, betting on a second great depression may be prudent. Even if that sounds hyperbolic, when it comes to markets the big question for 2023 is simple: have markets bottomed or is there much more room to fall, in other words, are we facing a hard or soft landing. And speaking of Joe Biden at the helm, another glaring risk factor for 2023 is - of course- nuclear war. Because while the great inflation fight and Biden bear market were the defining features of 2022 from an economic and capital markets standpoint, the biggest event in terms of geopolitical and social importance was the war between Russia and Ukraine. While one could write - pardon the pun - the modern day equivalent of "war and peace" on the causes behind the war in Ukraine, for the sake of brevity we will merely note that a conflict that had been simmering for years if not decades... ... finally got its proverbial spark in February when - encouraged by NATO to join the military alliance in an act that Russia had repeatedly warned would be casus belli against Ukraine - Putin ordered a "special military operation" against Ukraine, sending Russian troops to invade the country because, as he subsequently explained, "if Russia did not do this now, it itself would be invaded by neighboring NATO countries a few years later." And speaking of what else Putin said in the lead up to the Ukraine war, the following snapshots reveal much of the Russian leader's thinking about the biggest geopolitical conflict since World War II. And while the geopolitical implications of the war are staggering and long-reaching, the single most important consequence to the world, and especially Europe, is the threat of persistent energy shortages over the coming years as Russian energy output has been sanctioned and curtailed for the foreseeable future... ... in the process sending energy prices in Europe and elsewhere soaring, and pushing inflation sharply higher. Which is especially ironic, because the same central banks we showed above that are hiking rates like crazy in hopes of containing inflation are doing precisely nothing to address the elephant in the room, namely that inflation is not demand-driven (which the Fed can control by adjusting the price of money) but entirely on the supply-side. And since the Fed can't print oil or gas, all that central banks are doing is executing Vladimir Putin's indirect bidding and pushing the world into a global recession if not all out depression as they hope to crush enough energy demand to lower prices in a world where energy supply is also much lower. What they forget is that this will lead to tens of millions of unemployed people, and while that is not a major issue yet, something tells us that the coming mass layoffs - both in the US and around the globe - and not just in tech but across all industries, will be the story of 2023. One final thing worth mentioning in the context of the Ukraine war is what it means strategically for the future of the world, and here we would argue that some of the best analysis belong to former NY Fed repo guru, Zoltan Pozsar whose periodic dispatches throughout 2022 (all of which are available to professional subscribers), and whose year-end report on the fate of Bretton Woods III, the petrodollar, the petroyuan and petrogold, are all must-read for anyone who hopes to be ahead of the curve in today's rapidly changing world. Away from Inflation and the Ukraine war, the next most important topic in the past year, were the revelations from the Twitter Files, exposed by the social medial company's new owner, Elon Musk, who paid $44 billion so that the world can finally see first hand just how little free speech there really is in the so-called land of the free and the home of the First Amendment, and how countless three-lettered, deep-state alphabet agencies - and the military-industrial complex - will do anything and everything to control both the official discourse and the unofficial narrative to keep their preferred puppets in the White House, and keep those they disapprove of - censored and/or locked up, both literally and metaphorically... or simply designate them "conspiracy theorists." None other than Matt Taibbi wrote the best summary of what the Twitter Files revealed, namely America's stealthy conversion into a crypto-fascist state where some unelected government bureaucrat tells corporations what to do: This last week saw the FBI describe Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger and me as “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole aim” is to discredit the agency. That statement will look ironic soon, as we spent much of this week learning about other agencies and organizations that can now also be discredited thanks to these files. A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report. I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow. One happy-ish thought at month’s end: Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one? I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years. Well said Matt, and we say this as one of the first media outlets that was dubbed "conspiracy theorists" by the authorities, long before everyone else joined the club. Oh yes, we've been there: we were suspended for half a year on Twitter for telling the truth about Covid, and then we lost most of our advertisers after the Atlantic Council's weaponized "fact-checkers" put us on every ad agency's black list while anonymous CIA sources at the AP slandered us for being "Kremlin puppets" - which reminds us: for those with the means, desire and willingness to support us, please do so by becoming a premium member: we are now almost entirely reader-funded so your financial assistance will be instrumental to ensure our continued survival into 2023 and beyond. The bottom line, at least for us, is that the past three years have been a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which resembles the dystopia of 1984 more and more each day, and we have since taken measures. Two years ago, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn't our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us for good. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year. Meanwhile, for all those lamenting the relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog, why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political "narrative" has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past three years showed conclusively why that is the case: in a world where markets gyrated, and "rotated" from value stocks to growth and vice versa, purely on speculation of how big the next stimulus out of Washington will be, now that any future big stimulus plans are off the table until at least 2024 thanks to a divided Congress, and the Fed is still planning on hiking until it finally crushing inflation, we would like to remind readers of one of our favorite charts: every financial crisis is the result of Fed tightening, and something always breaks. Which brings us to the simplest forecast about the coming year: 2023 will be the year when something finally breaks. As for more nuanced predictions about the future, as the past three years so vividly showed, when it comes to actual surprises and all true "black swans", it won't be what anyone had expected. And so while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some accelerated closure, dramatic changes in 2022 persisted and new sources of global shocks emerged, and will continue to manifest themselves in often violent and unexpected ways - from the ongoing record polarization in the US political arena, to "populist" upheavals around the developed world, to the gradual transition to a global Universal Basic (i.e., socialized) Income regime, to China deciding that the US is finally weak enough and the time has come to invade Taiwan. As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website - which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from either Putin or the KGB either, sorry CIA) and has never spent one dollar on marketing - a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine. Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we - and others who do not comply with the established narrative - have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, it is clearly a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from "dangerous, fake information." It's also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website. In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to only accelerate in the coming year - Elon Musk's Twitter Files revelations notwithstanding, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2022 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch with a ten foot pole, both out of fear of repercussions and because the MSM has now become a PR agency for either a political party or some unelected, deep state bureaucrat, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an information vacuum (in less than a decade, Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter will seem like one of the century's biggest bargains) and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which established media outlets refuse to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory "fake news" condemnation. We are grateful that our readers - who hit a new record high in 2022 - have realized that it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn't "fake news." * * * And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 14-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year. In 20th spot with just over 510,000 views, was one of the seminal market strategy reports of 2022 by the man who has become the most prescient and accurate voice on Wall Street, former NY Fed repo guru Zoltan Pozsar, whose periodic pieces previewing the post-war world - one where Bretton Woods III makes a stunning comeback, where the petrodollar dies, and is replaced by the Petroyuan - have become must-read staple fare for Wall Street professionals. In "Wall Street Stunned By Zoltan Pozsar's Latest Prediction Of What Comes Next", Zoltan offered his first post-Ukraine war glimpse of the coming "Bretton Woods III" world, "a new monetary order centered around commodity-based currencies in the East that will likely weaken the Eurodollar system and also contribute to inflationary forces in the West." Subsequent events, including the growing proximity of Russia, China and various other non-G7 nations, coupled with stubborn inflation, have gone a long way to proving Zoltan's thesis. The only thing that's missing is the overhaul of the world reserve currency. In 19th spot, some 526,000 learned that amid the relentless crackdown against free speech by a regime which Elon Musk's Twitter Files have definitively revealed is borderline fascist (as in real fascism, not that clownish farce which antifa thugs pretend to crusade against) Zero Hedge was among the first websites to be targeted by the CIA when that deep state mouthpiece, the Associated Press, said that "intelligence officials accused a conservative financial news website [Zero Hedge] with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda." As we explained in "Now We've Done It: We Pissed Off The CIA" - the 19th most viewed article of 2022 - we have done no such thing but as the AP also revealed, the real motive behind the hit piece is that "Zero Hedge has been sharply critical of Biden and posted stories about allegations of wrongdoing by his son Hunter." Of course, only a few weeks later we would learn that reports of wrongdoing by "his son Hunter" as unveiled in the infamously censored laptop story fiasco, were indeed accurate (despite dozens of "former intel officials" saying it is Russian disinfo) but since only "Kremlin propaganda" sites dare to attack Joe Biden while the MSM keeps deathly silent, nobody in the so-called "free press" bothered to mention it. Incidentally, since the CIA did a full background check on us and republishing some pro-Russian blogs was the best they could find, we are confident that  On the other hand, since being designated a pro-Russian operation meant that we have been blacklisted by most advertisers, we are increasingly reliant on you, dear readers (and not Vladimir Putin) for support, and we would be extremely grateful to everyone who can sign up for our premium product to support us into 2023 and onward. In 18th spot, and suitably right below our little tete-a-tete with the CIA, was the disclosure of a huge trove of corruption Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell." In April, with over 568,000 page views, readers learned that "450GB Of 'Deleted' Hunter Biden Laptop Material To Be Released Within Weeks." The ultimate result was the long overdue confirmation by the mainstream press (NYT and WaPo) that the Biden notebook was indeed real (again, despite dozens of "former intel officials" saying it is Russian disinfo) but since the state-corporatist apparatus had already achieved its goal, and suppressed and censored the original NYPost reporting just ahead of the 2020 presidential election and Biden had been elected president, few cared (just a few months later, thanks to Elon Musk and the Twitter files would we learn just how deep the censorship hole went, and that it involved not only the US government, the Democratic Party, the FBI, but also the biggest tech and media companies, all working together to censor anything that they found politically unpalatable). Yes, 2022 was also a midterm year, and with more than 617,000 views, was our snapshot of what happened on Nov 8 when in a carbon copy of 2020 it initially seemed like Republicans would sweep Congress as we described in the 17th most popular article of 2022, "Election Night Results: FL "Catastrophic" For Dems, Vance Takes OH, Fetterman Tops Oz"... but it was not meant to be and as the mail-in votes crawled in days and weeks later, the GOP lead not only fizzled (despite a jarring loss among Florida Hispanics), but in the end Democrats kept the Senate. Ultimately the result was anticlimatic, and with Congress divided for the next two years, governance will be secondary to what the Fed will do, which in our humble view, will be the big story of 2023. For all the political, market and central bank trials and tribulations of 2022, one could make the argument that the biggest story of the past year was Elon Musk's whimsical takeover of twitter, which started off amicably enough as laid out in the 16th most popular article of 2022 (with more than 627,000 page views) "Buffett Says "Musk Is Winning...It's America" As TWTR Board Ponders Poison Pill", then turned ugly and hostile, transitioned into a case of buyer's remorse with Musk suing to back out of the deal only to find out he can't, and culminated with the release of the shocking Twitter Files, Musk's stunning expose of the dirt and secrets of how the world's most popular news outlet had effectively become a subsidiary not only of the Democratic party but also of the FBI, CIA and various other deep state alphabet agencies, validating once again countless "conspiracy theories" and confirming once and for all that any outlet that still dares to oppose the official party line is the biggest enemy of the deep state. And speaking of the deep state, we had a glaring reminder in September why one should be very careful when crossing the US secret police FBI when pro-Trump celeb pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell was intercepted by the Feds during a hunting trip and had his cell phone seized as described in "FBI Tracks Down Mike Lindell On Hunting Trip, Surrounds His Car And Seizes Cell Phone". That this happened to one of the most vocal critics of the 2020 election just two months before the midterms, was surely a coincidence, as over 625,000 readers obviously concluded. 2022 was not a good year for markets, and certainly wasn't good for retail investors whose torrid gains from the meme stock mania of 2021 melted down almost as fast as the Fed hiked rates (very fast). But not everyone was a loser, and one story stood out: that of 20-year-old student Jake Freeman (who together with his uncle) bought up a substantial, 6.2% stake in soon-to-be-broke retailer Bed Bath and Beyond, and piggybacking on the antics of one Ryan Cohen, quietly cashed out after making a massive $110 million by piggybacking on one of the most vicious short/gamma squeezes in recent history. The "Surreal Story Of A 20-Year-Old Student Who Acquired 6% Of Bed Bath & Beyond, And Made $110 Million In 3 Weeks" was the 14th most read article of 2022. The 13th most read story of 2022 with over 668,000 reads was the bizarre interlude involving superstar-trader and outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, and his bizarre attack by a "right wing" progressive as described in "Paul Pelosi Undergoing Brain Surgery Following 'Brutal' Attack; Suspect Identified." While authorities have struggled to craft a narrative that the attacker, nudist transient David Depape of Berkeley, was a pro-Trumper and the attack was politically motivated, the evidence has indicated that he suffered from serious mental illness and drug addiction and lacked any coherent political ideology; some have even claimed that there was a sexual relationship between him and Pelosi, a theory that could be easily disproven if only the police would release the bodycam footage from the moment of the arrest. Unfortunately, San Fran PD has vowed to keep it confidential. Depape's trial is set to be 2023's business, so expect more fireworks. 2022 was also a year in which Europeans realized how brutally expensive electricity can be when the biggest commodity, nat gas and oil supplier to Europe, Russia, is suddenly cut off. And judging by the 668,500 people who read "How In The Name Of God": Shocked Europeans Post Astronomical Energy Bills As 'Terrifying Winter' Approaches" and made it into the 12th most popular article of the year, the staggering number were also news to our audience: indeed, the fact that Geraldine Dolan, who owns the Poppyfields cafe in Athlone, Ireland, and was charged nearly €10,000 for just over two months of energy usage, was shocking to everyone. To be sure, there were countless other such stories out of Europe and with the Russia-Ukraine war unlikely to end any time soon, Europe's commodity hyperinflation will only continue. Adding insult to injury, Europe is on a fast track to a brutal recession, but the ECB remains stuck in tightening mode, perhaps because it somehow believes that higher rates will ease energy supplies. Alas that won't happen and instead the big question for 2023 will be whether Europe is merely hit with a recession or if instead the ECB's actions escalates the local malaise into a full-blown depression. Earlier we said that one of the most prophetic voices on Wall Street in 2022 (and prior) was that of Zoltan Pozsar, who laid out his theory of a Bretton Woods III regime in the days immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Well, just one month later we saw the first tentative steps toward just such a paradigm shift when in April the Russian central bank offered to buy gold from domestic commercial banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram; by doing so the Bank of Russia both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar. We described this in "A Paradigm Shift Western Media Hasn't Grasped Yet" - Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities", an article red 670,000 times making it the 11th most popular of the year. This concept of "petrogold" was also the subject of extensive discussion by Pozsar who dedicated one of his most recent widely-read notes to the topic; if indeed we are witnessing the transition to a Bretton Woods 3 regime, 2023 will see a lot of fireworks in the monetary system as the dollar's reserve status is challenged by eastern commodity producers. The 10th most popular article of 2022, with 686K views was a reminder of just how much "the settled science" can change: as described in "You Murderous Hypocrites": Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests 'Amnesty' For Pandemic Authoritarians, many were shocked when after pushing for economy-crushing lockdowns, seeking to block children from going to school (and stunting their development), and even calling for the incarceration or worse of mask, vaccine and booster holdouts, the liberal left - realizing that it was completely wrong about everything to do with covid, a virus with a 99% survival rate - suddenly and politely was hoping to "declare a pandemic amnesty." Brown Professor Emily Oster - a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned - wrote "we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward." The response from those who lost their small business, wealth, or worse, a family member (who died alone or from complications from the experimental gene therapy known as "vaccines" and "boosters") was clear and unanimous; as for those seeking preemptive pardons from the coming tribunals, their plea was clear: “We didn't know! We were just following orders."  And from one covid post we segue into another, only this time the focus is not on the disease but rather the consequences of mandatory vaccines: over 730K readers were shocked in February when a former finance professional discovered a surge in "excess mortality", or unexplained deaths among otherwise healthy young adults, yet not linked directly to covid (thus leaving vaccines as the possible cause of death), as we showed in "Long Funeral Homes, Short Life Insurers? Ex-Blackrock Fund Manager Discovers Disturbing Trends In Mortality." This wasn't the first time we had heart of a surge in excess mortality: a month earlier it was the CEO of insurance company OneAmerica to observe that the death rate for those aged 18-64 had soared by 40% over pre-pandemic levels (this was another post that received a lot of clicks). While the science is clearly not settled here - on either covid or the vaccines - the emerging trend is ominous: at this rate the excess deaths associated with covid (and its vaccines) will soon surpass the deaths directly linked to covid. And anyone who dares to bring this up will be branded a racist, a white supremacists, or a fascist, or all three. One of the defining features of 2022 was the record surge in the price of food. And while much of this inflation could be attributed to the trillions in helicopter money injected over the past three years, as well as the snarled supply chains due to the war in Ukraine, a mystery emerged when one after another US food processing plant mysteriously burned down. And with almost 800,000 page views, a majority of our readers wanted to know why "Another US Food Processing Plant Erupts In Flames", making it the 8th most read post of the year. While so far no crime has been alleged, the fact that over 100 "accidental fires" (as listed here) have taken place across America's food facilities since the start of 2021, impairing the US supply chain, remains one of the biggest mysteries of the year. While some will argue that runaway inflation was the event of 2022, we will counter that the defining moment was the war between Ukraine and Russia, which broke out in February after what the Kremlin said was a long-running NATO attempt to corner Russia (by pushing Ukraine to seek membership in the military alliance), forcing it to either launch an invasion now, or wait several years and be invaded by all the neighboring NATO countries. Still, many were shocked when Putin ultimately gave the order to launch the "special military operations", as most had Russia to merely posture. But it was not meant to be and nearly 840K readers followed the world-changing events on February 2 when "Putin Orders "Special Military Operation" In Ukraine's Breakaway Regions." The war continues to this day with no prospects of peace or even a ceasefire. And from one geopolitical hotspot we go to another, namely China and Taiwan, which many expect will be the next major military theater at some time in the near future when Beijing finally invades the "Republic of China" and officially brings it back into the fold. Thing here got extra hot in early August when Democrat Nancy Pelosi decided to make an unexpected trip to the semiconductor-heavy island, sparking an unprecedented diplomatic escalation, with many speculating that China could simply fire at Nancy's unsanctioned airplane. In the end, however, as nearly 950,000 found out, the situation fizzled as "China Summoned US Ambassador Overnight, Says Washington "Must Pay The Price"." Since then Pelosi's political career has officially ended, and while China has not yet invaded Taiwan, it is only a matter of time before it does. While Covid may have been a 2021 story, that was also the year when nobody was allowed to talk about the Chinese pandemic. Things changed in 2022 when liberal censorship finally crashed under its own weight, and long overdue discussions of Covid became mainstream. nowhere more so than on Twitter where Elon Musk fired all those responsible for silencing the debate over the past three years, and of course, the show of the always outspoken Joe Rogan, where mRNA inventor Robert Malone, gave a fascinating interview to Joe Rogan which aired on New Year's Eve 2022 and which took the world by storm in the first days of the new year. It certainly made over 908,000 readers click on "COVID, Ivermectin, And 'Mass Formation Psychosis': Dr. Robert Malone Gives Blistering Interview To Joe Rogan." The doctor, who had been suspended by both LInkedIn and Twitter, for the crime of promoting "vaccine hesitancy" argued that if the risks of vaccines are not discussed, informed consent is not possible. As Malone concluded "Informed consent is not only not happening, it's being actively blocked." Luckily, now that Elon Musk has made it possible to discuss covid - and so much more - on twitter without fears of immediate suspension, there is again hope that not only is informed consent once again possible, but that the wheels of true justice are starting to steamroll liberal censorship. A tragic and bizarre interlude took place in early July when "Former Japanese PM Abe Shot Dead During Speech, "Frustrated" Assassin Arrested", a shocking development which captured the attention of some 927,000 readers.  While some expected the assassination to be a Archduke Ferdinand moment, coming at a time of soaring inflation around the globe and potentially catalyzing grassroots anger at the ruling class, the episode remained isolated as it did not have political motives and instead the killer, Yamagami, said that he killed the former PM in relation to a grudge he held against the Unification Church, to which Abe and his family had political ties, over his mother's bankruptcy in 2002. That's the good news. The bad news is that with the fabric of society close to tearing across most developed nations, it is only a matter of time before we do get a real Archduke 2.0 moment. Just days after Rogan's interview with Malone (see above), another covid-linked "surprise" emerged when Projected Veritas leaked military documents hidden on a classified system showing how EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct illegal gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. But while US infatuation with creating viral bioweapons is hardly new (instead it merely outsourced it to biolabs in China), one of the discoveries revealed in "Ivermectin 'Works Throughout All Phases' Of COVID According To Leaked Military Documents" - the third most popular post of 2022 with 929K page views, is that the infamous "horse paste" Ivermectin was defined by Darpa as a "curative" which works throughout all phases of the illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response. Of course, had that been made public, it would have prevented Pfizer and Moderna from making tens of billions in revenue from selling mRNA-based therapies (not vaccines) whose potentially deadly side effects we are only now learning about (as the 9th most popular post of 2022 noted above confirms). The fake news apparatus was busy spinning in overtime this past year (and every other year), and not only when it comes to covid, inflation, unemployment, the recession, but also - or rather especially - the Ukraine fog of propaganda war. A striking example was the explosion of both pipelines connecting Russia to Europe, Nord Stream I and II, which quickly escalated into a fingerpointing exercise of accusations, with Europe blaming Putin for blowing up the pipelines (even though said pipelines exclusively benefit the Kremlin which spent billions building them in the recent past), while the Kremlin said it was the US' fault. This we learned in "EU Chief Calls Nord Stream Attack "Sabotage", Warns Of "Strongest Possible Response", which was also the 2nd most read article of the year with just over 1,050,000 page views. In the end, there was no "response" at all. Why? Because as it emerged just two months later in that most deep state of outlets, the Washington Post, "Evidence In Nord Stream Sabotage Doesn't Point To Russia." In other words, it points to the US, just as professor Jeffrey Sachs dared to suggest on Bloomberg, leading to shock and awe at the pro-Biden media outlet. The lesson here, inasmuch as there is one, is that the perpetrators of every false flag operation always emerge - it may take time, but the outcome is inevitable, and "shockingly", the culprit almost always is one particular nation... Finally, the most read article of 2022 with nearly 1.1 million page views, was "White House Says Russian Forces 20 Miles Outside Ukraine's Capital." It cemented that as least as far as ZH readers were concerned, the biggest event of the year was the war in Ukraine, an event which has set in motion forces which will redefine the layout of the world over the next century (and, if Zoltan Pozsar is right, will lead to the demise of the US dollar as a reserve currency and culminate with China surpassing the US as the world's biggest superpower). Incidentally, while Russian forces may have been 20 miles outside of Kiev, they were repelled and even though the war could have ended nearly a year ago and the world would have returned to some semblance of normalcy, it was not meant to be, and the war still goes on with little hope that it will end any time soon. And with all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2023, and the next decade? We don't know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don't try, despite repeat baseless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the "smartest people in the room" who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2022 (when the entire world realized just how clueless the Fed had been when it called the most crushing and persistent inflation in two generations "transitory"), which destroyed the reputation of central banks, of economists, of conventional media and the professional "polling" and "strategist" class forever, not to mention all those "scientists" who made a mockery of both the scientific method and the "expert class" with their catastrophically bungled response to the covid pandemic. We merely observe, find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it. We do know, however, that with central banks now desperate to contain inflation and undo 13 years of central bank mistakes - after all it is the trillions and trillions in monetary stimulus, the helicopter money, the MMT, and the endless deficit funding by central banks that made the current runaway inflation possible, the current attempt to do something impossible and stuff 13 years of toothpaste back into the tube, will be a catastrophic failure. We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone's guess. But, as we have promised - and delivered - every year for the past 14, we will be there to document every aspect of it. Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2023, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2022 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day - usually with a cynical smile (and with the CIA clearly on our ass now) - helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that defines every aspect of our increasingly broken economic, political and financial system. Tyler Durden Sat, 12/31/2022 - 11:05.....»»

A step-by-step instruction video demonstrates how Russian soldiers can arrange to surrender to Ukraine via drone. A still from an instructional video issued by the Armed Forces of Ukraine on December 12, 2022, showing Russian soldiers how to surrender to a drone.General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/Facebook Ukraine has released an instruction video for Russian soldiers on surrendering to a drone. It's part of the "I Want to Live" hotline, which entices Russians to stop fighting in Ukraine. The video suggests that surrendering via drone may become increasingly common.  Ukraine's army issued an instruction video on Monday with a step-by-step guide for Russian soldiers on how to surrender to one of its drones.The video comes as part of Ukraine's "I Want to Live" project, a hotline that encourages Russians who are reluctant to fight in Ukraine to surrender.The video, which is narrated in Russian, shows three men in uniform and white armbands in a trench within a snowy landscape. From there, they are led to Ukrainian captivity by a small red quadcopter. The footage suggests that the role of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, on the Ukrainian battlefield is rapidly expanding, even to the sensitive area of surrender. The video claims that the goal is to make the capture process safer.  Surrendering soldiers are instructed to contact the "I Want to Live" hotline to arrange the time and place of the meeting ahead of time. "Once verified, go to the place at the exact time indicated," the video says. Given the short flight time of a drone, the video notes, "the accuracy and timeliness of arrival is critical."Once in place, soldiers are told to wait for the drone to appear — or for further instructions. "Seeing the drone in the field of view, make eye contact with it," the video instructs. Soldiers should then raise their arms and signal they're ready to follow.After that the drone will move up and down a few meters, before heading off at walking pace in the direction of the nearest representatives of Ukraine's army, it says. A still from an instructional video issued by the Armed Forces of Ukraine on December 12, 2022, showing Russian soldiers how to surrender to a drone.General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/FacebookThe video also warns that the drone's battery may run low, in which case it will head back to base and the soldiers should stay put and await a fresh one.That one, too, should be met with eye contact and arms raised, it says. The video shows the three uniformed men finally meeting with Ukrainian soldiers with arms raised, whereupon they lie face down on the ground in order to be searched. "Russian soldiers, keep this instruction for yourself," the video advises. "Distribute it among your colleagues and acquaintances. Save more lives.""I Want to Live" was launched in September, just before Putin announced the partial mobilization of reservists — an unpopular move that called up an estimated 300,000 Russians not in active service to join the war in Ukraine. Ukraine claims the service has received thousands of enquiries from Russians. Insider was unable to verify the number. In an earlier interview with the Kyiv Post, the project's spokesperson, Vitaliy Matvienko, explained that Russians can even contact the hotline pre-emptively, to register an intention to surrender ahead of being physically sent to Ukraine.The project says that those who surrender will be greeted under the terms of the Geneva Convention, which guarantees the safety of noncombatants. In late November, Ukraine's Ministry of Defence shared drone footage showing a man in a Russian soldier's uniform walking with arms raised — an example, it said, of a drone mediating a surrender.In November, Russia's Ministry of Defense said that it had also used drones to transmit text messages enticing Ukrainians to surrender, state news agency TASS reported, though it is unclear how successful the initiative has been.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Cancel Culture's War On History, Heritage, & The Freedom To Think For Yourself Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute, “All the time - such is the tragi-comedy of our situation - we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible… In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” - C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the very act of thinking for ourselves is not just outlawed but unthinkable. We are being shunted down the road to that dystopian future right now, propelled along by politically correct forces that, while they may have started out with the best of intentions, have fallen prey to the authoritarian siren song of the Nanny State, which has promised to save the populace from evils that only a select few are wise enough to recognize as such. As a result, we are being infantilized ad nauseum, dictated to incessantly, and forcefully insulated from “dangerous” sights and sounds and ideas that we are supposedly too fragile, too vulnerable, too susceptible, or too ignorant to be exposed to without protection from the so-called elite. Having concluded that “we the people” cannot be trusted to think for ourselves, the powers-that-be have taken it upon themselves to re-order our world into one in which they do the thinking for us, and all we have to do is fall is line. Those who do not fall in line with this government-sanctioned group think—who resist, who dare to think for themselves, who dare to adopt views that are different, or possibly wrong or hateful—are branded as extremists, belligerents, and deplorables, and shunned, censored and silenced. The fallout is as one would expect. Cancel culture - political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance - has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint. In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom (of religion, speech, assembly, press, redress, privacy, bodily integrity, etc.) but only when it favors the views and positions they support. The latest victim of this rigid re-ordering of the world into one in which vestiges of past mistakes are scrubbed from existence comes from the New York Department of Education, which has ordered schools to stop using Native American references in mascots, team names and logos by the end of the current school year or face penalties including a loss of state aid. Citing concerns about racism and a need to comply with the state’s Dignity for All Students Act, which requires schools to create environments free of harassment or discrimination, New York officials are telling communities—many of which are named after Native American tribes—that longstanding cultural associations with their towns’ Indian namesakes are offensive and shameful. More than 100 schools in 60 school districts across New York State have nicknames or mascots that reference Native Americans. The cost to divest their communities of such branded names and images will be significant. One school district estimates that the cost to remove its Indians imagery from the gym floor alone will be upwards of $60,000. This drive to sanitize New York schools of “offensive” Native American logos and imagery comes on the heels of iconoclastic campaigns to rid the country of anything and anyone that may offend modern-day sensibilities. Monuments have been torn down, schools and streets have been renamed, and the names of benefactors stripped from prominent signage in the quest for a more enlightened age. These are not new tactics. Since the days of the Byzantine Empire, when “Emperor Leo III ordered the destruction of all Christian images on the grounds that they represented idolatry and were heretical,” political movements have resorted to destroying monuments, statues and imagery of the day as a visual means of exerting their power and vanquishing their enemies. We have been caught in this intolerant, self-righteous, destructive, mob-driven cycle of book-burning, statue-toppling, history-erasing iconoclasm ever since. As art critic Alexander Adams explains: “Iconoclasm is an activity evenly distributed between both left and right of the political spectrum, mainly at the extreme ends… The intolerant ideology, which refuses to accept the co-existence of alternative views, takes the stance that…the ideals within the art are no longer utterable or supportable: they are actually injurious and dangerous to the vulnerable… The political activist reserves to himself the right to retrospectively edit our history for his satisfaction by removing monuments, those fixtures of civic life, embedded in the memories of generations… Iconoclasm is an expression of domination and a demonstration of willingness to act—illegally and unethically—to impose the will of one group over an entire population. It asserts control over all aspects of society… The campaigner argues that public art, accumulated piecemeal over 1,000 years of history, must reflect our society and values today—even if that means altering or erasing stories of the values our past society expressed via its monuments, or suppressing evidence of how we arrived at our current situation… The iconoclast believes that it is only the values of today that count—that it is only her values that count. She takes it upon herself to correct history through monstrous acts of egotism. That correction, when it involves destruction, permanently alters the cultural legacy. It shrinks the breadth of human experience available to the generations which follow ours.” In such a world, there can be no debate, no journey to understanding, no chance to learn from one’s mistakes or even make mistakes that are uniquely your own; there is only obedience and compliance to the government, its corporate overlords and the prevailing mob mindset. Censorship, cancel culture, political correctness, woke-ism, hate speech, intolerance: whatever label you assign to this overzealous drive to sanitize the culture of anything that might be deemed offensive or disturbing or challenging, be assured they are sign posts on a one-way road to graver dangers marked by “suppression, persecution, expulsion and the massacring of people.” Whether those smashing monuments and erasing history are doing so for noble purposes or more diabolical reasons, the end results are the same: criminalization, confiscation, imprisonment, exile and genocide. “Look at mobs which gather to smash monuments,” says Adams. “These monuments may be the statues of deposed dictators who terrorized populations, causing untold death and suffering. They may be monuments to fallen soldiers who died defending causes that are no longer fashionable. The mob’s anger is the same. The viciousness and triumphant celebrations are the same. Only the causes differ in seriousness, topicality and justification.” Adams continues: “The Civil War statue destroyers think they are assaulting the posterity of slave owners, but they themselves are in the grip of ideological fervor. They are unaware that they are running a biological code, hardwired in their brains by evolution and activated by political extremists. The activists of today heedlessly erase history they haven’t yet learned to read. They act as the hammer that extremists use to deface the cathedrals and museums our ancestors built.” What’s different about this present age, however, is the use of technology to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” demonize and destroy those whose viewpoints run counter to the cultural elite. “In the last few years,” writes Nina Powers for Art Review, “what is understood to be contentious has become increasingly broadly defined… The range of what counts as acceptable gets smaller and smaller… [W]e thus find ourselves… in the midst of a new culture war in which the freedom to think, feel and express ourselves comes at the risk of economic impoverishment, social ostracism and mob justice.” Where this leads is the stuff of dystopian nightmares: societies that value conformity and group-think over individuality; a populace so adept at self-censorship and compliance that they are capable only of obeying the government’s dictates without the ability to parse out whether those dictates should be obeyed; and a language limited to government-speak. This is what happens when the voices of the majority are allowed to eliminate those in the minority, and it is exactly why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. Freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society. The alternative, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, is a world in which individuality and the ability to think for oneself independent of the government and the populace are eradicated, where even the word “I” has been eliminated from the vocabulary, replaced by the collective “we.” As Anthem’s narrator Equality 7-2521 explains, “It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.” As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are not merely losing the ability to think critically for ourselves and, in turn, to govern our inner and outer worlds, we are also in danger of losing the right to do so. The government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers is just the beginning. Tyler Durden Thu, 11/24/2022 - 23:50.....»»

Trump announced that he's running for president in 2024. Insider previously spoke with Cruz, Rubio, and others who had front-row seats to his rise. Donald Trump defeated 16 Republicans en route to winning the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. History books would be written very differently had that not happened.Marianne Ayala/InsiderThe most famous escalator ride in American political history was almost an elevator ride. Donald Trump's operatives couldn't decide whether to send him down the escalator to announce his presidential candidacy or have him take the elevator instead. They landed on the escalator, and that moment would set in motion a 13-month ride that would ultimately ensconce him atop the GOP as its 2016 standard-bearer.On Tuesday, Trump officially announced his 2024 presidential bid, marking the start of yet another race in his storied political career. Seventeen Republicans aspired to be president of the United States during the 2016 election cycle, one of the most unorthodox and unconventional the country had ever seen. Only one emerged from the pileup — Trump — who would learn he was the nominee on the Trump Tower elevator he almost descended on back on announcement day.During those tumultuous months from June 2015 to July 2016, the Republican Party establishment's reluctant journey to accepting a reality-TV celebrity as their presidential nominee laid bare deep ideological and cultural divisions within their ranks. Traditional Republicans found themselves outflanked by an insurgent former lifelong Democrat whose impulses and approach conflicted with their own. But by the time of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland five years ago this week, running from July 18 through the 21st, Republicans who did not support Trump fell in line.In interviews with nearly two dozen people — including several 2016 Republican candidates, party officials, and both GOP and Democratic campaign operatives — Insider collected never-before-reported recollections from Trump's hostile takeover of the GOP. The story that follows covers the Trump Tower escalator ride that was mocked from all directions and yet started everything; the Trump official behind renting a crowd for the big campaign announcement speech; and Melania Trump's plagiarism of Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech eight years earlier.These 2016 insiders also described how the Trump team prepared for the first GOP debate in Cleveland by hanging with a member of Aerosmith and how his campaign polled Ivanka Trump as a vice-presidential candidate amid the RNC's last-minute gambit to dump Trump.The human drama of the Republican primary campaign has been all but forgotten, replaced by what came after: Trump versus Hillary, Russian hackings, WikiLeaks, and the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape — and the four ensuing wild years that roiled the nation and the world.But for any of that to happen, Trump must first become the leader of the GOP. What you are about to read is the oral history of that story.Chapter 1: The escalatorFor 29 years before his fateful escalator ride, Trump toyed with the idea of running for president. This time he was serious. Aides carefully planned and scripted the event and his remarks; Trump improvised.Corey Lewandowski, Trump campaign manager: We had a number of variables which we had to factor in, which was either come down the elevators in the back of the room and have him walk out through a blue curtain and onto the stage, or come down into the lobby, come down that now famous escalator ride, and then go up onto the stage. But what our goal was, was making him look as presidential from the very onset, which means the American flag behind him, the stage was exactly how we wanted it, with a podium, with the same type of microphone that presidents traditionally use.The most famous escalator ride in US political history.Christopher Gregory/Getty ImagesDonald McGahn, Trump campaign counsel: I was at the top. He went down. And I remember seeing the crowd go nuts.Adrienne Elrod, Hillary for America director of strategic communications: We all kind of stopped what we were doing and chuckled at the fact that this is happening. And we all kind of said, "Yeah, he's going to be in the race for about six weeks. He'll use this to make some more money and grow the Trump brand and try to launch a new television show."Sarah Isgur, deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina: What a weird thing for the advance team to think was OK — like him standing on this escalator.Tim Miller, communications director for Jeb Bush: I thought it was a ridiculous show.Corey Lewandowski: We had people who were on the periphery of the campaign and thought they were campaign strategists who wanted to have elephants and monkeys and donkeys running through Trump Tower.Donald McGahn: There was a lot of building security checking each other's credentials, because we had different levels of credentials. It took them a while to realize there was a hierarchy of credentials. There were security guards telling other security guards to move.Corey Lewandowski: There were five different sets of credentials and all-access to media and volunteers. They all had the wrong date printed on it. They all said June 16, 2016. So we had to send this poor woman by the name of Joy out to Brooklyn at, like, 3 o'clock in the morning to get these reprinted, because we knew that if it wasn't perfect we'd be chastised.Josh Schwerin, Hillary for America national spokesman: He was not a serious person at that point. There had been debate of will-he-won't-he for a really long time. It didn't seem like a serious thing.Sarah Isgur: I remember thinking: "Man, I'm surprised he couldn't even get people there. That seems insane."Amanda Carpenter, communications director for Ted Cruz: It seemed strange. I was watching the coverage of "Oh, did they pay people to show up? Who were these people?"Corey Lewandowski: That's a Michael Cohen special. Michael Cohen decided that he was going to go hire one of his buddies and pay his buddy without getting any campaign approval. You know, $50 for every person to come in, to stand in Trump Tower.I literally spent the entire day of Trump's announcement screaming at TV executives. Tim MillerMichael Cohen, Trump personal attorney: Trump hired David Schwartz to coordinate the campaign launch, which he did professionally. Any allegation of payments to actors is an absolute lie that was promoted by Corey Lewandowski.David Schwartz, partner at Gotham Government Relations: We were hired to put that entire event together. That event was really our brainchild: The most famous escalator ride in the history of politics was that one. Bottom line is, we had thousands of people there, and then the press accused us of hiring thousands of actors. Based on the fee that I got, that would not have been a good business decision on anyone's part. The reality is we hired 50 people, some of whom were part-time actors I found out later on. But we hired 50 people to help coordinate an event that brought in thousands of people. There were people at the door that couldn't get in. That night, all of the sudden, I got accused of hiring thousands of actors.Tim Miller: So Trump is going to speak, and Sean Hannity was going to give Trump Jeb's slot that night, because they announced the same day. So I'm standing outside Bed Bath & Beyond in Miami, shouting at Hannity, like, "What the F is your problem?" F this and F that. "How can you give this guy our slot?" Then I remember going in to shop and coming out and yelling at some other anchors. I literally spent the entire day of Trump's announcement screaming at TV executives.Corey Lewandowski: He did not deliver one word of the speech as it was written. We provided the speech to every media outlet and said, "Remarks as prepared by Donald Trump for his announcement speech." There were some media outlets that actually just printed them verbatim. Probably had egg on their face afterward. Because as we know, Donald Trump went on to speak extemporaneously for 45 minutes and talk about some of the individuals coming across the border that were never in the original speech. And I assume some are good people.Trump promised to make America great again and vowed to take on the growing might of China in a speech launching his run for the presidency in 2016. He made his way to the stage as Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" played.Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty ImagesAmanda Carpenter: I was, like, "OK, well, at least he's talking about mostly our type of issues. People will realize he's a clown. And then this whole thing will melt like cotton candy. And we'll be back to maybe a Jeb, Rubio, Cruz race."Lindsey Graham, GOP senator and 2016 presidential candidate: I thought his announcement was pretty extreme. I thought the rhetoric around his announcement and some of his policy positions would make it almost disqualifying.Chapter 2: Early disastersA month after his campaign announcement, at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, Trump attacked Sen. John McCain. The Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam. "He's not a war hero," Trump told the moderator Frank Luntz. "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured." It proved to be the first of a series of moments early on when it looked like Trump's campaign was over before it had even really begun.Marco Rubio, GOP senator and 2016 presidential candidate: Look, everybody — every traditional observer of politics — thought his campaign was dead when he said the things he said about John McCain.GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the US Capitol in July 2015, days after Trump said the Vietnam POW was "not a war hero."Andrew Harnik/AP PhotoCorey Lewandowski: We had a whole day planned in Iowa that day. I remember it very vividly. I waited for Mr. Trump to walk off the stage, and I said, "I'd like to speak to you." He said, "I was pretty good, right?" I said, "Sir, could I speak to you over here for a second, please?" We went into a locker room, which is where the referees or umpires, depending on the sport, would get dressed in that gymnasium. And I said: "Sir, by all accounts, John McCain is a war hero. You need to apologize." He said, "Yeah, no apologies."Marco Rubio: That was a pretty early sign that the dynamics of American politics have changed. Part of it is just the way the public now consumes political news. It's very different than 20 years ago. It's covered more like entertainment or sports, and less like public policy. It was a perfect forum for a candidate with a message and the experience that he had.I called my wife just as we were getting onto the plane. I said, 'Hey, baby, I'm coming home.' She said, 'Oh, the day is over?' I said, 'No, no — the campaign is over.' She said, 'What do you mean?' I said: 'It's over. We're done.' Corey Lewandowski, Trump campaign managerCorey Lewandowski: I called my wife just as we were getting onto the plane. I said, "Hey, baby, I'm coming home." She said, "Oh, the day is over?" I said, "No, no — the campaign is over." She said, "What do you mean?" I said: "It's over. We're done."We flew from Iowa back to New Jersey, and this guy Dave picked us up in the car and we drove over to Mr. Trump's home. As we walked in the door, Mrs. Trump was waiting for us. She said: "You're right. John McCain isn't a war hero. What he has done for the veterans has been shameful." In the meantime, I'd been getting phone calls from every major political pundit and conservative talk-show host except Rush Limbaugh. They were all telling me that Donald Trump had to apologize — that his race was over if he didn't apologize immediately.Michael Cohen: Melania played a very limited role during the campaign not believing Donald would actually win. However, when directly asked for her opinion on a matter by Donald, she offered it readily.Chapter 3: The DebatesOn August 6, inside Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, 10 Republican presidential candidates took part in the first debate. Trump was a neophyte to debates, and his team was more interested in hanging out with the Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry than prepping, auguring the alchemy of entertainment and politics that would define the Trump era. If Trump was a made-for-television candidate, he benefited from the unconventional nature of that cycle's nearly dozen debates, spanning from August 2015 to March 2016.Corey Lewandowski: We had a little bit of downtime before we went over to the arena. We landed the plane in Cleveland, and we got a phone call from Don McGahn, who was then our general counsel. "Hey, Aerosmith is close by. Do you mind if they bring their tour bus over and party with us for a little while?" We said, "100% — bring Aerosmith over!"Donald McGahn: Close, but that's a little off.Corey Lewandowski: So we sat there with Aerosmith about an hour before the debate, swapping stories of Aerosmith as opposed to doing debate prep.Steven Tyler of Aerosmith listens from the audience during the first official 2016 Republican presidential debate in Cleveland.Brian Snyder/ReutersDonald McGahn: It wasn't the whole band. It was Joe Perry. He was intrigued by the emerging Trump phenomenon. Remember, this was before there were any primary debates, and it was all new to everyone. Stuff that would be from Mars on any other campaign was perfectly normal for the Trump campaign.By this point, Trump was getting ready for the debate, so Joe had to wait a little bit. On the way out the door, Trump says something about "rock stars have all the ladies," which apparently Perry got mad at, because he's been married for decades and takes all that stuff pretty seriously. After the debate, if you watch the film, Joe goes up on stage and finds Trump and proceeds to tell him that he's married and he doesn't sleep around.The subtext is that Steven Tyler already had tickets to the debate through some other wing of Trump Org. Joe didn't want to be upstaged — wanted to meet with Trump rather than just go to the debate. Apparently, there's a whole internal Aerosmith thing among the political persuasion of the band.After the first debate, the prime-time contests took on a familiar pattern, with Trump becoming their draw and center of gravity.Marco Rubio: The first time I got on the debate stage, there were, like, 100 people on stage. So it was a very unique race, because you had so many different people running.Rand Paul, GOP senator and 2016 presidential candidate: I blame as much as anything the media. The media organizes the debates.Sarah Isgur: It wasn't a debate. You were debating yourself. How could you use your time as effectively, and where can you jump in on a question that wasn't to you?The top-polling 2016 Republican presidential candidates in August 2015 at their first official debate in Cleveland. From left: Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Trump, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and John Kasich.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesCorey Lewandowski: Let me just remind you, Trump had never been on the debate stage. And he was going up against a Princeton-educated debate champion in Ted Cruz, and career politicians and executives who've done this their entire life. So we spent time talking to Mr. Trump about some of the possible questions that would come up. We wrote one-liners on every candidate, just so he would have a quick retort if he wanted that.Rand Paul: It's hard to have much exchange when you don't get much time. It's unfair the way the debates are set up. They really make it impossible for the underdog to have much of a chance.Lindsey Graham: I never got on the big stage. That's frustrating. I was never able to poll well enough.Sean Spicer, chief strategist and communications director for the Republican National Committee: You're sitting there and watching Trump say, "Yeah, I don't know." And you think, "OK, that would have been a death knell for anybody else. It would have been, like, 'Boom — you're out.'"Josh Hawley, GOP candidate for Missouri attorney general: The one debate I remember, he starts by attacking Rand Paul. "I don't know why Rand Paul is even on the stage." I remember thinking, "I can't believe he's saying this stuff out loud." You can understand why people are watching the debates. Because you wonder, "Well, what's gonna happen next?"Rick Gates, deputy Trump campaign chairman: Donald Trump had this amazing ability to size people up — a "Little Marco" — in literally a one- or two-word phrase that so encapsulated who they were that people said: "This guy is absolutely right. He's telling us the truth." So it was almost impossible to compete with Donald Trump in that regard.Corey Lewandowski: Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face. And we just kept punching people in the face.Tim Miller: If you're designing a candidate to do a poor job of being the one to go head-to-head with Trump, it would be Jeb. He was an easy punching bag because of his family. He's not an alpha type on a debate stage.—NTA by Mic (@NavigatingTrump) March 4, 2016Josh Schwerin: The most memorable debate experience? I was on the road, and it was the one where Trump and Rubio got into an argument about hand size, which I then had to brief President Clinton on. Which was one of the more awkward moments in my life, I would say. We were in Louisiana. He didn't at first believe me that this was the topic of a debate. I had to show him the CNN headline. I tried to not add any commentary and just let him read it for himself. Because it was not the most comfortable conversation to have with the former president of the United States. He was amused, but also really aghast that this is what they had devolved to.The evening after the Cleveland debate, with exhaustion setting in, Trump ignited another controversy when he phoned into "CNN Tonight" with Don Lemon and said that the Fox debate moderator Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever." Kelly had aggressively questioned Trump about his past comments about women, and his post-debate commentary would only further solidify the narrative that Trump had a problem with sexism.Sean Spicer: I think she thought that was going to be the gotcha moment.Corey Lewandowski: I remember getting a phone call that Friday night. I was in my apartment in New York at, like, 9 o'clock — we were supposed to be traveling to South Carolina the next day — from a guy by the name of Erick Erickson. And he says, "I just listened to the interview, and I've got teenage daughters and a wife, and Donald Trump is no longer invited to my event, because it was such an egregious thing to do."I didn't even know what the hell he was talking about. I said, "What happened?" I call Mr. Trump, and he says: "Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I said something." I again tell him it was one of these things where his campaign was over. And he just doubled down on it. He powered through it. And once again, 48 hours later, we were into a new news cycle.At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, the candidates faced off in another marathon debate, during which Trump attacked Rand Paul's height and Carly Fiorina blasted Trump for mocking her appearance in an interview with Rolling Stone a few days before the debate. ("Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!") "I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said," Fiorina would say that night to raucous applause.Sarah Isgur: We were landing — this was back when not every airplane had WiFi. And so I was landing and getting WiFi back, and that's when I saw it. And, I mean, she knew immediately that was the best opportunity we'd ever had. Like the thing sucking up all the oxygen just gave us an oxygen mask.Tim Miller: Carly did a good job.Sarah Isgur: Trump realized the mistake he had made. That's why he never touched her again.Chapter 4: Republicans cannibalize themselvesIn the months-long lead-up to February's Iowa caucuses, the massive Republican field continued to jockey for position, and Trump continued to suck most of the oxygen out of the room and vacuum up earned media. By the end of 2015, the oxygen deprivation had winnowed the field by five candidates. The candidates who remained were trapped in something like a prisoner's dilemma in which they turned fire on everyone else but Trump. Meanwhile, the former celebrated neurosurgeon Ben Carson began to gain traction among social conservatives nationwide, particularly in Iowa. During a rally in Fort Dodge, Trump went after his future Cabinet appointee, reenacting Carson's teenage tribulations — ridiculous mock knife fight, anyone? — purely for laughs. Trump's team planned it on the plane, and it led to an awkward exchange in the motorcade afterward.—Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) November 13, 2015Corey Lewandowski: Mr. Trump says to Mark, the head of the Secret Service detail: "Hey, Mark. How did we do?" And Mark says, "Very good, sir!" And Mr. Trump says, "Do you have any advice?" And Mark says, "Just one, sir."I'm like, "You gotta be shitting me. This guy has been on the job a hot second and he's already giving the candidate advice? He's the fucking Secret Service guy!" And Mark, who's a great guy and I have enormous respect for, says: "Sir, please don't have anybody come up on the stage and stab you. We have to shoot them!"Then Trump goes, "Oh, Mark — the guy was 80."And Mark goes: "No, don't. Please. Here is my only advice. Please don't ask anyone to come up on the stage." And I said: "OK, like, I agree with you, head of Secret Service detail protection, let's not have anyone come up on the stage."February 2016 opened with Ted Cruz mounting a surprise win in Iowa and Trump complaining that the election was rigged.Newt Gingrich, former House speaker and 2012 GOP presidential candidate: Trump could never perform a classic Iowa campaign. First of all, it's not who he is. It's inconceivable he was going to go to small towns three times. But how could you create a replacement campaign? I called him one afternoon and said: "What you have to do is get on Facebook every day. People have to feel that you're in their living room or their kitchen every day. Then the familiarity will lead them to decide." I must have said that to him in October. And at Christmas, we were at my wife's sister-in-law's. He calls and says: "This is Donald. We just finished taping 58 Facebook videos."Sean Spicer: I had breakfast one morning with Corey. He was very clear that the expectations were that Trump needed to win Iowa. He was going all in, doing anything he could.Corey Lewandowski: Cruz's campaign was so focused, they put all their eggs in the Iowa basket. Then at the very end of the night of the Iowa caucus, they sent out a mass distribution that said, "Ben Carson is getting out of the race — vote for Ted Cruz." We believe that those votes went from Dr. Carson to Ted Cruz, and that is ultimately what led Donald Trump to finish second in the Iowa caucus.Marco Rubio: It was obvious he was doing it differently than everybody else was.Corey Lewandowski: There was a brief period of time where Marco Rubio started to go after Donald Trump and attack him. And you actually saw a movement in the polls, but what did Marco's team do? They started hearing from their donors, and their donors said: "This is beneath you. You should not be talking about the size of Mr. Trump's hands. This is not becoming of a presidential candidate."Marco Rubio: He has a real understanding of the media ecosystem and what feeds it—what it is the media wants to report on and getting narratives across. And that was probably underappreciated when everybody was kind of running traditional political campaigns and he was running a 21st-century, modern version of what we have. And it worked.The ensuing four weeks — starting with the Iowa caucuses at the beginning of February 2016 — saw the remaining Republican challengers cannibalize each other instead of Trump. Taking out the top guy after the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz, was too lofty a goal for Chris Christie in early 2016. So the straggling two-term governor of New Jersey settled on taking out the first-term senator from Florida, portraying Rubio as too green to be president. Meanwhile, Trump aides worried their candidate's obsession over not coming in first in Iowa could spell the end of his campaign.Mike DuHaime, senior strategist to Chris Christie: So it was on the plane ride back from Iowa to New Hampshire, it was really the governor himself and basically said: "This is what we have to do. Now is the time to take on Marco."Corey Lewandowski: I called the grown children — Don, Eric, and Ivanka — told them what was happening, brought Mr. Trump in, and, over a meal of McDonald's in the back room of our Manchester office, told him that if he wants to continue to bitch about the results in Iowa and not lay out his vision for what he wanted to achieve for America to the people in New Hampshire, this race was over. It was a very candid conversation; it was just he and I in the room. He listened intently. You walked out of that room. He went to a town-hall meeting with CNN that afternoon and Manchester. He came and ran a positive message.Then he went to a shift change at the Manchester police department, where he talked about supporting the men and women in law enforcement. And we campaigned in New Hampshire on Thursday and Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, and on Monday. And on Tuesday, Donald Trump won the state of New Hampshire by 17 points, with 35%, in the 17-way primary. It was a complete blowout, the biggest blowout in the primary's history.With the field on the verge of collapsing, the GOP establishment's favorite son, Jeb Bush, sensed opportunity — albeit briefly. They pinned their hopes on the candidate's mother, the former first lady.Tim Miller: There was a small window where we felt, like, "Mrs. Bush is coming up, somebody is going to take some momentum here out of New Hampshire." That's not Cruz or Trump. It'll either be us or a Kasich or Rubio. We thought maybe we can kind of channel this and have a McCain-like 2008 sort of bump.Our internal numbers were going up a little bit right around the time when Mrs. Bush came to visit us. And it was just lovely, and she's just so charming and wonderful and aligned and blunt. And I remember briefing her for — she was interviewing with Norah O'Donnell. I was pretty clear, and I asked her what she was going to say if she was asked about them. I asked her her thoughts about Cruz and Trump, and she gave her very candid negative assessments of both of them. After each sort of rant she went on, she then looked at me and said, "But I'm not going to say that."Former first lady Barbara Bush introduces her son Jeb Bush at a town-hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire, in February 2016.Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesCorey Lewandowski: We could attack Jeb for being a fake rich guy. Because he wasn't as rich as Trump. And then we could attack him for being a career politician. And then we can attack him for being low energy. He became an easy target for us because he had never had a tough battle.Christie dropped out after Trump won New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Bush's campaign never got going. He suffered perhaps most from a viral video after he told a New Hampshire audience on February 4, 2016, to "please clap."Tim Miller: The "please clap" thing is Ashley Parker's fault. I never will forgive her for that. She was the one who tweeted it out first and made everybody go back and find it and make it seem cringe.It was like a totally normal human response to an awkward audience moment that he was trying to let it go ahead. And then it got turned around on the internet to seem like he's begging people to clap for him. Like: 'Please clap for me, please clap for me. I'm so sad. I'm in last place.' Such is life. Tim MillerAshley Parker, reporter at The New York Times: I made it the kicker of my story. Once I tweeted it out, it just took on a totally unexpected life of its own.Tim Miller: It was like a totally normal human response to an awkward audience moment that he was trying to let it go ahead. And then it got turned around on the internet to seem like he's begging people to clap for him. Like: "Please clap for me, please clap for me. I'm so sad. I'm in last place." Such is life.Ashley Parker: It was sort of a poignant moment and a telling moment, in certain ways, but I think some of this got lost in the meme. It was also a lighthearted moment.All told, 12 Republican candidates started out in February. By the time Super Tuesday rolled around, on March 1, 2016, the field stood at five. Amid the South Carolina primary, holed up at a Hilton Garden Inn, the Bush campaign compiled speeches for dropping out and forging deeper into other states' nominating contests. Surrounded by the Bush family, the New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, and staffers, the son and brother of two former presidents dropped out of the race. He was the 2016 campaign's original front-runner with a nearly $100 million war chest.Rob Portman, GOP senator from Ohio: The Republican primary was a surprise for people because most of us thought Jeb Bush came into it with the most mainstream Republican support.Tim Miller: There were a couple of folks around Jeb who wanted him to keep going, and he called us back in and said: "You know, this is, I can't, can't do it. I can't move forward. So we have to, you know, we have to do this." He was all business. And he looked at me and says, "I've got it." And we went over the speech, you know, just like we would have with any other speech. He was wistful, obviously, and a little sad, but very businesslike. Like, this happened, he gave it his all, and he recognized staying in was only going to make things more likely at that point for Trump.Discarded lawn signs for Jeb Bush and Ben Carson lie on the ground outside a polling station in Columbia, South Carolina, on February 20, 2016.Joshua Roberts/ReutersMarco Rubio: Generally I was happy when people dropped out, because that meant, you know, one less candidate out there and a pool of voters that were now available to go after. Unfortunately for me, they didn't drop out soon enough.Chapter 5: Trump takes control: Super Tuesday, Indiana's decisive primaryIn March, as the contest narrowed, Trump went on a tear on Super Tuesday, winning Virginia, Vermont, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Alabama, setting up a battle royal between Trump, Cruz, and Kasich in Indiana's May primary.Rick Gates: By March, clearly he was the front-runner, and he was gaining delegates. But at the same time, you could see the party apparatus starting to work against him.Lindsey Graham: I endorsed Ted Cruz. I ran out of people to endorse. I was sort of the Dr. Kevorkian of endorsing. Everybody I endorsed politically died.Amanda Carpenter: It was essentially coming down to a Cruz-Trump race, and Kasich was refusing to get out. People like John Boehner and others were signaling that they weren't going to help Cruz and consolidate the field. They were just saying, "Well, we'll just nominate Trump and let him lose."Tim Miller: Jeb endorsed Cruz pretty quickly after he dropped out. Gave Marco Florida all to himself. I went to work for a super PAC that spent millions of dollars attacking Trump in Florida. Like, what more did you want from us?Mike DuHaime: Mitt Romney was potentially the most influential endorsement during that cycle. He was the previous nominee, and he had this massive fundraising network. So the thought was that if Mitt endorsed somebody, that person could become the one who could coalesce people. He never did.Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican presidential nominee: There's really no reason for me to add to that story.Tim Miller: There's an alternate history where Trump gets treated like a joke from the start. There's another alternate history where all of the campaigns attack him and treat him seriously from the start and he never really takes off. We'll never know. I do think that in both of those alternative histories, he could've gotten killed in the crib.A London pub set up cardboard cutouts of the faces of Ted Cruz, Trump, and Marco Rubio in March 2016 as part of an informal survey for customers to log which they disliked the most.Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty ImagesIn the early spring of 2016, the Trump campaign began to make some changes atop its organizational chart, hiring Paul Manafort, the veteran delegate wrangler of RNC conventions who'd turned into a jet-setting shadowy political operative for foreign autocrats.Rick Gates: Paul Manafort was brought in at the end of March. Trump had been advised to meet with Paul because Paul knew how to deal with conventions. The media had been reporting that the Republican convention was going to be contested. So you needed somebody to understand the nuances of how a contested convention works.The first call he made was to Jim Baker, the broker of the last contested convention. We had a secret meeting with Baker at the Jones Day law firm, our lawyer at the time. He and Trump had a fantastic meeting. Baker was as smooth as he typically is, and Trump was very interested in Baker's experience.The second call, which I thought was interesting, was to Dick Cheney. Cheney had agreed to support Trump, but he wanted to do it from behind the scenes. He wanted to be helpful for the party and support the nominee, but clearly he was not comfortable yet to move all into Trump's camp, given his relationship with the Bush family.Another interesting call was to Marco Rubio. Paul got Marco on the phone, and Rubio said he would look at how Trump was going to run his campaign, and, at the appropriate time, he might be willing to support him. Paul hung up and started smirking. I said, "What's going on?" He goes, "Marco used to be my driver at the 1996 Republican convention."At a hastily arranged event in Indianapolis, in a last-stand effort ahead of Indiana's decisive primary and following Trump's big wins in five East Coast states, Ted Cruz announced that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate if he emerged from the GOP primary with his party's nomination. It was an odd, awkward event that featured a botched handshake between the two.Sarah Isgur: The most important thought was, who can actually beat Trump at this point? He was underperforming with women. Cruz wasn't women's favorite candidate either. So if women in the middle of the Republican Party were up for grabs, maybe Carly could help with that.Jeff Roe, campaign manager for Ted Cruz: They had a really good rapport, and it was a man-bites-dog publicity event. So we thought it would be newsworthy, and that's how it came together.Adrienne Elrod: By that point, we realized it was over, and we started planning for the general election.Amanda Carpenter: I like Carly and respect her a lot, but it was just a play. You just tried to signal that we would be serious about things: "Look, we would bring a woman onto the ticket." I mean, it was kind of a last-ditch attempt.Nothing fancy to explain there: We fumbled for a moment, and it makes for an amusing video after the fact. Ted CruzJeff Roe: What's funny is we practiced the handshake.Sarah Isgur: Oh, my God. My memory is that not only did they practice the handshake, we made them practice the handshake. They balked at us and said that we were idiots for making them practice. They did it in a way teenagers will do something, like rolling their eyes. And then to have them do the most awkward, whatever that was, in the world.Jeff Roe: It's always awkward when candidates do the victory wave. We freaking practiced it, and they still screwed it up.Ted Cruz: Nothing fancy to explain there: We fumbled for a moment, and it makes for an amusing video after the fact.Jeff Roe: They really liked each other, legitimately liked each other. So it was what it was, a guy running for president who announced his VP before he got the nomination. It's going to be a little funky. If we could get conservatives to unite against Trump, then this could be a thing. It wasn't, "Oh, isn't this kind of funny?" We did not treat it as being funny.Lindsey Graham: I think it had slipped away by then.Days later, during an event on May 2, Fiorina fell through the stage while campaigning with Cruz.Sarah Isgur: I was doing something on my phone. They were, like, "Carly just fell!"Jeff Roe: I think she stepped off the thing. It's better from the camera angle than it was in real life. But the camera angle looks bad.Sarah Isgur: I was, like, "Oh, my God."One of the most pivotal endorsements during the final days of the GOP nominating contest was still up for grabs. On April 29, 2016, in a radio interview in Indianapolis, Gov. Mike Pence, himself running for reelection, endorsed Cruz to appease his socially conservative base. But Pence also threaded the needle with kind words about Trump. "I'm not against anybody, but I will be voting for Ted Cruz in the Republican primary," Pence said in an interview with WIBC's Greg Garrison. Trump won despite Pence's endorsement.Rick Gates: That night we set up a rally inside Trump Tower for Trump to kind of do his victory party. But we didn't say anything about being the presumptive nominee. We didn't take any liberties. We just stayed in our lane, and we knew at some point Cruz is going to have to drop out. We didn't know he was going to drop out that night.Jeff Roe: We stayed in a hotel. I cannot remember the name of the hotel, and, unbelievably, there was a dog show there. So we stayed up there the whole weekend, and we made our decision with these dogs barking next to us the whole damn time.Ted Cruz: When I was giving my speech and I said the words "We're suspending the campaign," a woman in the crowd let out a wail. It was piercing. I almost broke down. I finished the speech, and one of the things I'm still frustrated to this day is that I wanted to stay out there and thank the hundreds of volunteers who were there that night who were grieving. And I couldn't. I couldn't hold back the tears. There was an army of TV cameras there, and I'll be damned if I was going to let the media turn Lyin' Ted into Cryin' Ted. I had to leave the room because I simply couldn't hold back. I'm grateful that Heidi spent probably an hour just hugging everyone and saying thank you. I wish I had the strength to do that. I didn't. But Heidi did it for us. That piercing cry from the woman in the crowd. I'll never forget.Rick Gates: We found out that Cruz had dropped out after Trump had gone through the hallway to the elevator. It was Melania and Trump and myself and Paul in the elevator. And it was just utter silence. Paul turned to Trump and said, "Do you now know that you're one of two people who is going to be the next president of the United States?"Sarah Isgur: I was listening to the "Hamilton" soundtrack just over and over and over on the bus with my headphones on with the senior Cruz team and Cruz and Heidi and Carly. I wish I had had a better mood, attitude, whatever you want to call it. But you just worked your heart out and lost, and now you don't have time off. You're just back doing it for someone else. I say all that because when he lost, I was in sort of a historical, pensive mood. I remember wondering who had run against Hitler in Germany and thinking those people deserve more credit in history. Because you can know what the threat is and you can give everything you've got and still lose.Mike DuHaime: There were too many people who wanted to beat Trump but didn't have the courage to get behind any one person, because they didn't want to offend either us or Jeb or Marco or Cruz. So it was just too little too late.Ultimately, Pence, despite not endorsing Trump, became Trump's pick for the vice-presidential nomination — because of "divine intervention."Trump walks with Mike Pence on stage during a July 2016 campaign event in New York to announce Pence as Trump's running mate.Evan Vucci/AP photoRick Gates: Unbeknownst to Trump, we polled Ivanka to understand where she was. We didn't think that he was necessarily seriously going to move forward with it. But Paul thought we got to at least test it, because you never know, everything else about this race has been different. So why not? Let's look at this, you know, in totality. She had pretty good name recognition for that part. But at the end of the day, even she knew that she was not wanting to be the candidate. And so we moved on very quickly.Trump wanted to bring on somebody that was his friend, that he could work with as vice president, that he was able to communicate with very easily. And so this idea of Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich kind of being among the front-runners was absolutely accurate. But in the background we were looking at people like Mike Pence, Joni Ernst, and Bob Corker who might bring some significant role or resource to the campaign in order to help Trump win.So they came up with a short list very early on, and we reached out to the candidates individually. One of the first candidates was Mike Pence. He was the first VP candidate we met with at Bedminster. I was put in charge of vetting for Pence along with the lawyer A.B. Culvahouse. I staffed that meeting. This is the first time that Trump was physically meeting Mike Pence. And I think it's humorous in the sense that up to this point, Trump thought that Pence was not doing well in his governor's race. Trump felt like if he wasn't winning the governorship of Indiana, how in the world would he be able to help Trump as a vice-presidential candidate?And I say to this day, it was just divine intervention on how everything worked out for the first time they had met. Pence was ultimately selected. And we had a scenario where we met at Bedminster for the first time, Pence and his wife, Karen, and daughter Charlotte were there. And it was Trump and myself in the room. And Trump immediately started the meeting looking at Pence's daughter, Charlotte, and saying, "Charlotte, you know, your dad supported Ted Cruz in Indiana, not me." And it broke the ice and it was great. And to Mike's credit, he said, "Yes, Mr. Trump — uh — that was my fault." And it immediately just kind of got them into a position of really getting to know each other. And the visit was not without its challenges, because they are two very different people.Chapter 6: The RNC, July 2016Their presidential dreams crushed, a handful of Trump's 2016 rivals had by this point quit fighting and pledged allegiance to the seemingly inevitable nominee. But there were holdouts, like Rubio, Cruz, and Graham, who were still refusing to bend the knee. The climax came in Cleveland.Marco Rubio: I didn't go to the convention because I was running for reelection. I had announced late, so I needed every day I could spare in Florida.Tim Miller: I ended up not going to Cleveland. I drove to Richmond and got blackout drunk with my friend.Melania Trump at the end of her speech on the opening day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016.Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesRick Gates: On the first night of the convention, Melania did a fantastic job in the speech. And then about an hour and a half later, we start getting calls about the speech and about how it may have had information in it from a speech that Michelle Obama gave. And then, obviously, people started digging into the two speeches, and then they started comparing it.My wife calls me about an hour later, I think just a little after midnight, and says, "You're being blamed for it." And I was in a complete state of shock, because none of us had seen the speech until just before she gave the speech. And the way that the process worked, it was fed into a system run by the RNC where they would typically check for grammatical mistakes, but they never checked for content — obviously a correction that was made after that night. But at that point, nobody had thought to check Melania's speech because she had taken the team of speechwriters and done it. And what we found out after the fact was that there was an individual who had been guided by the speech firm that had given ideas and previous examples of speeches, and the speechwriter that helped him a lot, he was not political in nature and so, from what we now know, taken some of those aspects of the speech and included it, unbeknownst to Melania. And I don't think it was a deliberate intent, but obviously it created such a stir.Entering the convention, candidates who vociferously opposed Trump during the primary had to decide how to handle the convention optics. Former candidates such as Fiorina took a different tack than former candidates such as Cruz.Sarah Isgur: Carly couldn't endorse Trump and she couldn't not endorse him. I think that the phrase that was used was "You don't show up to someone's birthday party and talk about what a son of a bitch they are."Amanda Carpenter: I was working for CNN, and I had an inkling that Cruz was going to do something. I thought, another good, last-ditch attempt to try to at least signal opposition to what was going to happen.Rick Gates: We had negotiated with Cruz that he would be able to speak but that he would need to come out and say he was endorsing Donald Trump, which up until that moment he hadn't committed to. We asked for a copy of the speech in advance, but he didn't give it to us. We felt Cruz was going to renege on his commitment, which you naturally would assume.There was a lot of jockeying at the last minute. Jared and I were at the hotel with Trump in his suite. We're on the phone with Paul, who was over at the convention center. Nobody wanted Cruz to speak except for Paul, who thought it would be a disaster if he didn't, since we had committed to it. But Trump refused to allow him to speak, and so we were working out how we were going to tell Cruz this.Ted Cruz: The purpose of the speech was to lay out a path that I hoped then-candidate Trump would follow. A path to unifying conservatives. A path to honoring the promises that we had been making to the American people. What I said in the speech is vote for candidates who you trust to defend freedom and to defend the Constitution. And that is very much what I hoped Donald Trump would do. At the time I didn't know if he would or not. There were reasons to have concerns. I did have concerns.Amanda Carpenter: It was all pretty high-level, high-stakes theatrics going on — on everyone's part.Rick Gates: So we go over to the convention center in the motorcade. We have Trump in a holding room, and he's watching the proceedings on TV. He asked me where the rest of the family is. We had a family box, which we called the VIP box, in the corner of the convention center, looking directly onto the stage. Trump said: "'We'll check it out. Let's go."So we walk through the halls, and everybody's shouting "Trump! Trump! Trump!" He's building momentum. I'm thinking, this is way early for him to come down into this area, before Pence comes out to speak. And then he just kind of moseys out of the room right around the corner, because the stairs lead down into the box. He gets into the stairwell, and he turns to me and says, "Watch this."Ted Cruz: I didn't know it was coming. I had no idea. It didn't occur to me that that would be the campaign's reaction. Given that, for any nominee, the objective typically is to unify the party and win in November.Amanda Carpenter: I just remember how loud the boos were. And how I was worried for Heidi, watching her just kind of whisked out.Ted Cruz: If you look at what I said in the speech, the words were virtually identical to what Ted Kennedy said about Jimmy Carter and to what Ronald Reagan said about Gerald Ford. Neither one of them, at their respective conventions, endorsed the nominee. And the reason I know it was identical is I had both of those speeches in front of me when I was writing it and very deliberately used the same language.Amanda Carpenter: I didn't think anybody was in real danger, but just watching everything that happened at Trump rallies and the violence outside the convention, it was uncomfortable.Sean Spicer: Trump owned the moment. He gets stuff in a way that I don't think people appreciate in terms of — what's the right word? — pageantry. It's like showbiz, in the sense that he knows how to make a presentation.Trump's takeover of the GOP would culminate in a dark, authoritarian speech that would presage much of his reign over the country and, years later still, his party. "I alone can fix it," he infamously claimed.Rick Gates: Trump was very involved in writing the speech. We had created a framework for it. But as with every speech, he put his words to it, he put his rhythm, his content, to a large extent. It was a speech that I think resonated with a lot of people at that time. It was one that showed the issues with America, the problems that we were having, based on, in his view, failed leadership, across not just Democratic administrations but Republicans too. He felt very particular about immigration, about China, about making sure that America could be the best country it could be. And he had a different idea of how to do that. And so in laying that out in the speech — and it was a long speech, longer than we had anticipated, but it needed to show Americans — not just Republicans, but all Americans — what was wrong and how we could potentially fix it. And so it kind of codified both those dark moments of where you feel like there's no hope or optimism to feeling very optimistic by the end. And you could sense that he poured everything he had into that speech.The balloon drop after Trump formally accepted the GOP's 2016 presidential nomination in Cleveland. He'd go on to defeat the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, that November and serve a single term as president of the United States.Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesLindsey Graham: I thought it was a pretty good speech. But I never thought he could win. I really didn't. I thought we would lose big. So what the hell do I know?Rick Gates: I'll never forget it, because he was also involved in the actual walk out and how he was going to do it. And just the way that the optics were very important for him. And it was going to either create a momentum booster, which is exactly what you want out of a convention, because at the end of the day, a convention is an event where you get to control the entire script, you don't have a bunch of people criticizing you or weighing down on it, you can certainly try, but at the end of the day, the majority of Americans are seeing exactly what you put on prime time. That 7-to-10-p.m. slot is the most important time of any convention, Republican or Democrat. And so with Trump that night, giving that speech, if he did it, it ultimately gave us a 10-point boost.Donald McGahn: The thing I remember the most are the number of people who still opposed Trump at that point and who were not at all enthusiastic about him. But then after he won, they were the first people in line saying, "I was with you the whole time, and I should get a job." That's the biggest thing I remember about the convention: the lack of honest support Trump was getting, even then.Rick Gates: When we first started planning the convention, it turns out that the RNC had hired a production team, that part of their team had been involved in "The Apprentice." So Trump, he has a style of getting to know everybody who works under him. At the convention, during the walk-through, Trump saw a director he knew, and they connected right away. This individual had a sense of what Trump would like, and he presented an overall plan. Trump loved it. We had to change a few things along the way at Trump's request, but this idea that you create the optic of somebody coming out in this kind of silhouette way through the middle doors — it was almost like a rock concert more than a convention, and people reacted that way. I'll never forget people texting me and emailing me, like, "I've never seen a walk out like that, not ever."Sarah Isgur: By that point, not only has Trump taken over the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party has responded to him as well. So he has had a huge effect on the Democratic Party. Think of it like evolution. There's this thing called Red Queen theory, where parasites actually affect the evolution of their hosts. The two will keep evolving to get advantage over one another. So it really matters what advantage the parasite gets next time, because that's how the host is going to evolve next time.John Cornyn, GOP senator from Texas: Every day was a surprise. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Sergei Shoigu was once touted to be Russia's next prime minister — until a series of problems in the Ukraine war made him a target of scathing criticism. Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) shows mushrooms to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during his vacation in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia, in August 2017.Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images Russia's Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, is a close ally and friend of Vladimir Putin. He had a steady ascent through Russia's elite, and was considered a possible Putin successor. But as Russia's invasion of Ukraine faltered and stalled, he became a lightning rod for criticism. This is Sergei Shoigu, Russian President Vladimir Putin's right-hand man.Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu.Contributor/Getty ImagesAs Russia's Minister of Defense, he is responsible for its invasion of Ukraine.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu hold a meeting at the Kremlin, in Moscow on February 14, 2022.Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty ImagesBut the stark failures of the Russian army there have undermined his decades-long ascent to the top rungs of power.Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (L) seen during the Navy Day Parade in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on July, 31 2022.Contributor/Getty ImagesShoigu was born in 1955 in the remote town of Chadan in Siberia. The Soviet Union was a world power and the Cold War just beginning.A man outside the former central temple for Buddhists of Tuva, near the settlement of Chadan, in Russia's Tuva region.Ilya Naymushin/ReutersThe town is close to the Mongolian border.Shoigu's mother was Russian but born in Ukraine, while his father was Tuvan — an ethnic group that is indigenous to Siberia.Source: The Moscow Times   Unlike other people in Putin's inner circle, Shoigu was not educated in St. Petersburg or Moscow.Russian President Vladimir Putin accompanied by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (second from left), Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (third from left), and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (third from right), waits for a meeting in Sochi, Russia on February 14, 2019.Sergei Chirikov/AFP via Getty ImagesIn 1977, Shoigu graduated from the Krasnoyarsk Polytechnic Institute in Siberia with a degree in civil engineering. He went on to work on a variety of major construction projects in the region."Shoigu is the only figure within Russian President Vladimir Putin's inner circle who isn't either an old KGB buddy or an old friend from St. Petersburg," Mark Galeotti, who heads the Russia-focused consultancy Mayak Intelligence, told Insider. Putin was born and studied in St. Petersburg and spent much of his early career there.Source: The Kyiv PostDespite being Russia's Defense Minister, Shoigu never served in the military.Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during military exercises in the Pacific Ocean on July 16, 2013.Alexei Nikolsky/AFP via Getty ImagesHe wears awards on his uniform that look like combat medals, despite his lack of battlefield experience.Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu salutes soldiers and participants during a military parade in Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2015.Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesShoigu's official profile lists a string of presidential and state awards for his time in government, while his Russian-language Wikipedia page lists more than 70 separate honors.They include medals from his own defense ministry for implementing policies there, and also mass awards marking events like the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg.Radio Free Europe, the US-funded outlet, reported last year that Shoigu has a fascination with medals, and implemented hundreds of new ones for the Russian military, many of which are not to do with combat. After working in various roles for construction companies in Siberia, Shoigu moved to Moscow in 1990 to lead the state's committee for construction and architecture.Sergei Shoigu explains the nature of the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station in Cheryomushky, Russia on August 19, 2009.Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty ImagesSource: The Moscow TimesIn 1991, while he was there, the Soviet Union collapsed, plunging Russia into a period of instability and unrest.The front page of The New York Times on December 26, 1991.National Security ArchiveOut of the chaos, Russia gained its first president — Boris Yeltsin, a personal friend of Shoigu. He was soon promoted to lead the newly-established Russian Rescue Corps.Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin shakes hands with Sergei Shoigu during an awards ceremony on October 27, 1999.ReutersIn the Russian Rescue Corps, Shoigu was responsible for the rescue and disaster response system, The Moscow Times reported.His career there soon took off.In his role, Shoigu would be the first to appear at any major or minor disaster sites, presenting himself as a hero.Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and then-Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu visit the site of a Polish aircraft crash near Smolensk airport, on April 10, 2010.Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images"He had a big PR team, let's be perfectly honest," Galeotti told Insider.He stayed on the job for 21 years, even after Russian President Vladimir Putin took over from Yeltsin.Source: The Moscow TimesWhen Putin rose to power in 1999, the two became very close.Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Sergei Shoigu in Moscow, Russia, on September 21, 2009.Alexey Druzhinin/AFP via Getty ImagesShoigu's successful record and large public profile seemed to appeal to Putin.In 1999, he picked Shoigu to be one of the leaders of his party, United Russia, giving him the opportunity to build a political base.Thirteen years later, in 2012, Putin promoted Shoigu briefly to be the governor of the Moscow region, and from there to run the defense ministry.This gave Shoigu a role on the world stage and a central place in Russia's clashes with the West.Sources: Database of Free Russia Forum, Foreign AffairsShoigu and Putin would often be photographed together. They took regular vacations in the Siberian woods, where they would go fishing or hiking.Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) accompanied by Sergei Shoigu gestures as he fishes in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia, on August 3, 2017.Alexey Nikolsky/SPutnik/AFP via Getty ImagesTheir most recent vacation together appears to have been in March 2021.Source: The KremlinAs the president of the Russian Geographical Society, Shoigu would also indulge Putin's interest in the outdoors.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a vacation in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia, on August 26, 2018.Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images"Putin and Shoigu are both throwbacks to Soviet times. They regard themselves as 'muzhiks' (real Russian men) who love sports and hunting," British magazine The Spectator observed in 2015.This interest may have taken a surreal, even macabre turn.Russian investigative news outlet Proekt reported in April that Putin has taken up bathing in blood extract from severed deer antlers as a form of alternative medicine. The bath is believed to improve the cardiovascular system and rejuvenate the skinThe unusual remedy was a suggestion made by Shoigu, the report said. Source: The New York Times Shoigu likes to play hockey. He also enjoys carpentry and has shown some of his work to Putin.Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attends a hockey game in Moscow, Russia, on April 20, 2018.Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty ImagesSources: MK.RU, ReutersAt one point in his career, Shoigu was touted to be the next prime minister.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu rest during a holiday in Siberia on March 21, 2021.Alexey Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty ImagesIn the early days of his role as minister of defense, Shoigu was considered the second most popular public figure in the country and was even touted as Putin's potential successor.Source: The Daily BeastShoigu is said to have a lavish lifestyle and owns a large mansion outside of Moscow estimated to be worth around $18 million.Russian President Vladimir Putin toasts Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the Kremlin in Moscow on December 28, 2017.Kirill Kudryavtsev/Poo/AFP via Getty ImagesThe investigative team of jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny photographed Shoigu's home using high-tech drones in 2015.Shoigu presides over a culture of corruption and embezzlement in the Russian military, according to some reports. An investigation by the independent Russian news outlet The Insider in 2019 claimed that he earned 6.5 billion rubles ($101.9 million) from deals with the ministries of defense and emergency situations.(The Insider is a separate publication from Insider.)Shoigu was behind the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 and was also one of the architects of Russia's intervention in Syria one year later.Russian President Vladimir Putin talks to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a military parade in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on July 25, 2021.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty ImagesSource: CNBC, Los Angeles TimesOne day after Russia's invasion, Shoigu was personally sanctioned by the West.Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu (C) speaks as he virtually attends the Summit of Collective Security Treaty Organisation on May 24, 2022.Russian Foreign Ministry Press / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesOther members of Putin's inner circle who were sanctioned alongside Shoigu included Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov and Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov.Source: Department of State, PoliticoSeveral days before Putin's full-scale invasion in February, Shoigu met with British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and denied Russia was planning to attack Ukraine.Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov in Moscow, Russia, on February 27, 2022.ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty ImagesThis was despite Western intelligence services publishing extensive evidence of Russian troops amassing near Ukraine's borders, and claims from figures including President Joe Biden that an invasion was inevitable.Source: ReutersBut when Russia did invade on February 24, it did not pan out the way the Kremlin had planned.An abandoned Russian vehicle in a retaken area near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on September 30, 2022.Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP via Getty ImagesRussia seemed to expect it could take Ukraine's capital Kyiv in a matter of days, but failed to do so.For months, their forces have struggled in the face of a staunch Ukrainian resistance that continues to receive more heavy weaponry from Western allies.Russia's partial mobilization in October was also a sign that Shoigu's military was suffering from a severe lack of manpower.The failures in Ukraine have led to claims of a rift between Shoigu and Putin.Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at his Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, on October 28, 2022.Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/AFP via Getty ImagesOne month after Russia's invasion, there was "persistent tension" between the two friends after it emerged that Shoigu and his subordinates were sugar-coating reports of the war for Putin, The New York Times reported at the time.In March, Shoigu wasn't seen in public for 12 days, prompting concerns over his whereabouts, The Guardian reported.In August, Putin started to bypass Shoigu, further embedding himself into the war's strategic planning efforts, The Telegraph reported.Source: Insider Other prominent figures in the Kremlin have openly attacked Shoigu, including Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin.Yevgeniy Prigozhin at a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2016.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty ImagesYevgeniy Prigozhin, who founded the Wagner Group paramilitary, confronted Putin about the mismanagement of the war in Ukraine last month, two US officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.Prigozhin later denied that he had spoken to Russia's president and said he has no right to criticize Russia's army.Kirill Stremousov, a pro-Russia Ukrainian politician who was installed as Putin's puppet leader in the occupied Ukrainian region of Kherson, recently suggested Shoigu should consider killing himself over Russia's recent military losses.Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Russian-backed Kherson administration, is pictured in his office on July 20, 2022.STRINGER/AFP via Getty ImagesSource: Insider"Shoigu is willing to basically be Putin's bulletproof vest," said Galeotti, the Russia analyst.Russian President Vladimir Putin looks at Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a military parade in Pskov, Russia, on March 1, 2020.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images"He is soaking up all the criticism that, otherwise, people might start leveling towards Putin as commander in chief," Galeotti said.  Shoigu has remained quiet despite the growing criticism...Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Sochi, Russia, on December 4, 2019.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images"He's been much less evident now," Galeotti told Insider."He knows that, when he goes into public, he either has to reassure people that everything's going fine, which is an increasingly untenable position to hold, or he'd have to acknowledge things are going badly, which would potentially sound like criticism of the commander in chief," he added.... and Putin has shown no signs that he may fire him.Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu walks in the Taiga in Siberia, on September 26, 2021.Alexey Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty ImagesGaleotti told Insider that it is difficult for Putin to fire Shoigu because it is "a card he can only play once." "If Putin absolutely felt that the situation demanded it, I imagine he would be willing to sacrifice Shoigu," he said."However, given that it's obviously not going to have any substantive impact on the progress of the war ... it will be harder avoid the suspicion that it's not because of Shoigu, but because of Putin."Shoigu was last seen at a meeting with Putin, which was broadcast on state television on October 28.Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (R).Maxim Shemetov via ReutersShoigu told Putin that his goal to send 300,000 of Russia's reservists to fight in Ukraine, which he announced in October, "has been completed," Reuters reported.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

The KGB morphed Putin into a master manipulator and played a key role in his rise to power and his approach to the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with the Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin in Saint Petersburg on October 9, 2022.Gavriil Grigorov/Getty Images Putin's time in the KGB helps explain his worldview and brutal approach to warfare, ex-spies say. A former KGB agent told Insider the biggest thing Putin learned from the Soviet spy agency was "how to lie." A career CIA officer said Putin's ruthless tactics in Ukraine are part of a "KGB/terrorist mindset." Russian President Vladimir Putin has the world on edge. He's waging the first major war in Europe since 1945 that's sparked a global energy crisis and fears of a nuclear conflict. As Western intelligence agencies vie to stay two steps ahead of the Russian leader and get inside his head, peering into Putin's KGB past can offer clues on what he may do next. Long before he was a world leader, Putin was a mid-level KGB officer stationed in Dresden, East Germany towards the end of the Cold War. The official narrative on this period of Putin's life suggests it was an uneventful stint in a backwater, a long way from the action in Berlin. But ex-spies and Russia experts told Insider that Putin's time in the KGB — the Soviet Union's primary and much-feared security agency — played an instrumental role in shaping his mindset. "Putin's KGB background tells us a lot about how he thinks and how he sees the war. He is a creation of the KGB, and the KGB was a terrorist organization," John Sipher, a former CIA officer who served in Russia, told Insider. "It was all about keeping the leadership in power at all costs. It killed any domestic opposition to the [Communist] Party and used subversion abroad."Under Putin's leadership, the Russian military has routinely targeted civilian areas in Ukraine and been widely accused of committing numerous war crimes — including torture, rape, and mass killings. Russian forces have engaged in sabotage and damaged crucial infrastructure as part of an effort make life miserable for Ukrainians, break their resolve, and squeeze Kyiv into capitulating to Putin's demands.From Chechnya to Syria and now Ukraine, the Russian leader has shown a willingness to devastate cities and kill scores of civilians with indiscriminate strikes. Sipher, who worked for the CIA's clandestine service for nearly three decades, said Russia's indiscriminate warfare against Ukraine is part of a "KGB/terrorist mindset.""The Russian services have long spent far more of their time on things like disinformation, sabotage, deception, agitation, and assassination," Sipher said, adding, "What we have seen from Putin over the past 20 years are these same asymmetric attacks. Like a terrorist group that can't take on enemies directly, he looks for weaknesses to exploit, and soft targets to attack."'How to lie'Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin presents an award to a local police officer at a Russian military base in the mountains of the Botlikh region, Dagestan in August 1999.Associated PressThe KGB's recruits were imbued with a deep sense of patriotism.  Jack Barsky, an ex-KGB spy who was a sleeper agent in the US during the Cold War, told Insider that being a KGB agent meant being a servant. "You were not in charge. You executed based on what people told you. I did too. [Putin] rose above that," Barsky said. "The mindset when you become a member of the KGB — it wasn't just a career thing, it was also a patriotic thing. Vladimir Putin thinks of himself as a super patriot of Russia," said Barsky, who remained in the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually consulted the FBI and NSA after being exposed in the 1990s as a former undercover agent, operating without diplomatic cover."I was driven by high motives. I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best for society," Putin once said of his decision to join the KGB. Few concrete details are known about Putin's work in Dresden, where he was stationed from 1985 to 1990, but the Russian leader and those close to him have often presented it as inconsequential. "East Germany wasn't where you do a lot of espionage," Barsky said, underscoring that Putin was operating in a country friendly to the Soviet Union at the time. Work in East Germany largely involved collaborating with the Stasi, the ruthless secret police for the German Democratic Republic, and recruiting assets, he said.What Putin did in the KGB was "very similar" to the work of "the fellow who recruited me while I was a student at university," Barsky said. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy's book, "Mr. Putin," suggests that he was most likely involved in an array of recruitment operations while in Dresden, and may have even traveled to West Germany undercover at times. Putin was a "really good networker," Barsky said, adding, "When the Soviet Union fell apart, he had a great network amongst ex-KGB agents.""Those were the ones that rose to power — mostly economically, but also politically — because they knew how the capitalist-type world functions," Barsky went on to say, "And so that's how [Putin] rose to power."To be in the KGB meant to live a life of deception on some level. Toward the end of his service in Dresden, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin famously confronted a crowd of angry protestors outside of his office building. The crowd was seemingly looking for members of the Stasi, and Putin's German made him a potential target. "When they aggressively asked who he really was, Putin responded that he was 'a translator,'" Hill and Gaddy wrote. "Putin lied his way out of trouble."Barsky's mission involved far more extreme acts of deception — living under false identity and attempting to blend into American society to make contact with high-level decisionmakers in the US. Born Albert Dittrich in East Germany in 1949, Barsky spied in the US for a decade and built an entirely new life in the process. "I was a well-kept state secret as an illegal undercover agent," Barsky said, "They picked me because they had reason to believe I'm very adaptable and I can make good decisions on my own — and I'm not afraid to make decisions. There's a list of character traits that they were looking for in candidates for this kind of a job."In 1988, the KGB ordered Barsky to come home. But he defied the Soviet spy agency and risked a potentially deadly retaliation to stay in the US. Barsky exploited Soviet fears of AIDS, falsely telling his handlers that he'd contracted it. The lie worked and Barsky was able to remain in the US, living a relatively normal American live until his cover was blown in the 1990s and the FBI approached him.The "biggest thing" that Putin learned during his time in the KGB is "how to lie," Barsky said, "Well, I did too."The Ukraine war has seen Putin and his propagandists make a series of assertions — ranging from plausible to preposterous — to justify Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. This includes baselessly claiming that Ukraine is ruled by neo-Nazis, despite the fact Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost family during the Holocaust.The Russian government has pushed conspiracy theories since the war began, making groundless claims about staged atrocities and dirty bombs, among other bogus assertions. In many cases, these outlandish claims have been parroted by far-right US politicians and media figures like Tucker Carlson of Fox News.  Indeed, Putin's career has been typified by spreading disinformation aimed at sowing discord and confusion among Moscow's enemies. When Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, it initially sent in masked troops in unmarked uniforms. Putin at first denied that the mysterious soldiers — dubbed the "little green men" — were Russian military, claiming they were "local self-defense forces." The Russian leader later admitted that the masked men were Russian troops.'Scare and manipulate'Russian President Vladimir Putin seen on Victory Day in central Moscow, Russia, on May 9, 2022.Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via REUTERSWhile most intelligence services focus on collecting information and sharing their findings with policymakers, for the KGB "intelligence collection was always a distant second to active covert measures designed to weaken an opponent from within (think the 2016 elections)," Sipher said.In the early days of the Ukraine invasion, Russia sought to topple Ukraine's elected leaders with a combination of covert operations and a massive show of force. Nearly nine months later, with the war in Ukraine going poorly for Russia, its approach to the conflict continues to follow this track. Putin's KGB past plays into his preference for hybrid warfare — blending conventional and unconventional tactics, said Angela Stent, a top Russia expert who served in the Office of Policy Planning at the State Department and later as a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council."[Putin] was a case officer in Dresden, so he wasn't involved directly in military operations," but "deception" — taking actions that you can never quite pin on one single actor — is part of his and Russia's playbook, Stent told Insider in an interview.Russia is suspected of being behind attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in late September, as Moscow vies to weaponize energy supplies and drive up costs for its Western adversaries. Putin has simultaneously leveled nuclear threats, reminding the world he controls thousands of warheads — the largest arsenal on the planet. Though these threats are largely believed to be part of an effort to dissuade the West from continued support for Kyiv, Western officials — including CIA Director William Burns — have expressed concern that Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine if he feels pushed into a corner.Russian forces have suffered staggering losses in Ukraine, with casualties estimated to be as high as 90,000, and Putin has taken a series of escalatory steps in a desperate effort to turn the tide. He declared a partial military mobilization to address Russia's manpower problems, sending poorly trained conscripts to the frontline. The Russian leader also illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions, even though Russian forces do not fully occupy these territories. Ukraine's forces have pushed back the Russians in key areas in the east and south as part of a counteroffensive, which includes parts of the territories Putin now claims as part of Russia.But Putin is seemingly determined to continue the war no matter the costs. Hill, who also served as the top Russia expert on the National Security Council under the Trump administration, recently told Politico that Putin's KGB experience is central to his refusal to back down in Ukraine despite major losses. "Whenever he has a setback, Putin figures he can get out of it, that he can turn things around. That's partly because of his training as a KGB operative," Hill said, adding, "He says there are always problems in an operation, there are always setbacks. Sometimes they're absolute disasters. The key is adaptation.""Putin still thinks he's got more game to play," Hill said.Facing an increasingly grim situation and with winter around the corner, the Russian military in recent weeks has taken to raining down missiles on crucial infrastructure across Ukraine. Kyiv in recent days has faced blackouts and much of the city temporarily lost access to water. "[Putin] knows he can't win on the battlefield and he is in a weak position," Sipher said, "He has a number of escalatory actions he can take short of using a nuclear weapon. We can expect more cyber attacks, threats, support for violent groups in the West, and actions like bombing the underwater pipeline. He is seeking to send a signal to Western leaders to remind them he can cause economic and political pain." "Rather than having a sensible military and diplomatic strategy, [Putin] is killing civilians and threatening nuclear war as an effort to scare and manipulate Western leaders," Sipher said.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Putin's comments came days after the Russian central bank said the mobilization of men, to fight in the war, could hit the economy. #centralbank #mobilization #ukraine #putin #war.....»»