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Best of the Web: Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary

Matt Taibbi
TK News by Matt Taibbi
Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00 UTC
the twitter files
For those who haven't been following, a compilation of one-paragraph summaries of all the Twitter Files threads by every reporter. With links and notes on key revelations

It's January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven't from the beginning, I've written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who've found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I've included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

In order, the Twitter Files threads:
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Colosseum

Best of the Web: Central banks buy gold at fastest pace in 55 years as nations prepare to ditch the dollar

Harry Dempsey
Financial Times
Thu, 29 Dec 2022 12:00 UTC
gold
© UnknownFILE PHOTO
Central banks are scooping up gold at the fastest pace since 1967, with analysts pinning China and Russia as big buyers in an indication that some nations are keen to diversify their reserves away from the dollar.

Data compiled by the World Gold Council (WGC), an industry-funded group, has shown demand for the precious metal has outstripped any annual amount in the past 55 years. Last month's estimates are also far larger than central banks' official reported figures, sparking speculation in the industry over the identity of the buyers and their motivations.
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Magnify

Best of the Web: Iran: Women, Life, Freedom...and NATO

Ariana Mohammadi
The Cradle
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC
iran woman protest
© The Cradle
A superpower in decline still retains a vast appetite for irregular, proxy warfare to slow down the imminent multipolar order. Iran, Russia, China are its big targets and all tools will be employed.

To maintain its global hegemony in the face of a rapidly emerging multipolar world, the US seeks to restrict the redistribution of power in all regions where its clout is foundering.

While Washington can no longer afford the high costs of engaging in direct, hot wars, its military-industrial complex - the powerhouse of the US economy - is likewise unable to afford disengaging from global conflict. Therefore, US military strategy has shifted from waging war to taking its war to its adversaries, via proxies.
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Better Earth

Best of the Web: Dugin: Russia needs to win Ukraine war to birth multipolar world - US needs to win Ukraine war to maintain unipolar world


RT
Fri, 30 Dec 2022 22:10 UTC
Aleksandr Dugin
© RTRussian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin
The West is clinging to the impossible dream of hegemony, Russian philosopher tells RT

The conflict in Ukraine is the world's "first multipolar war," in which Russia is fighting for the right of every civilization to choose its own path while the West wishes to maintain its totalitarian hegemonic globalism, Aleksandr Dugin told RT in an exclusive interview on Friday.

Multipolarity is "not against the West as such," Dugin said, but "against the claim of the West to be the model, to be the unique example" of history and human understanding. The current Russophobia and hatred of Russia, he argued, are a relic of Cold War thinking and the "bipolar understanding of the architecture of international relations."

When the Soviet Union self-destructed in December 1991, it left the "global Western liberal civilization" in control of the world, Dugin noted. This hegemon is now refusing to accept the future in which it would be "not one of the two, but one of [the] few poles," put in its proper place as "just a part, not the whole, of humanity."


Comment: Dugan: Wise words within a wiser perspective.

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Snowflake

Best of the Web: Storm wallops Tahoe region with over 4 feet of snow in spots

David Curran
SF Gate
Mon, 02 Jan 2023 12:26 UTC
The Palisades ski area by
The Palisades ski area by Lake Tahoe in California says it has set a new record for the most snowfall it has received in a 12 hour period, peaking at 7 inches per hour.
The atmospheric river that just slammed the Bay Area and the Lake Tahoe region left some massive snowfall numbers in its wake. And with another major storm on the way, the region could be closing in on last winter's snowfall total by the end of this week.

Tahoe Weather reports that some areas got up to 4 feet of snow in the storm with one resort, Heavenly Valley, getting 53 inches over the New Year's weekend. Kirkwood Meadows was not far behind with 47 inches.

"January is starting out with nearly 50% of the average for the entire monthly already" Tahoe Weather tweeted.


Comment: This latest dump comes just days after another had hit the region, see: Storm brings fresh snow to Mammoth Mountain, California - up to 3 feet deep

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MIB

Flashback Best of the Web: A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA

Jeremy Kuzmarov
Covert Action Magazine
Fri, 01 Oct 2021 19:18 UTC
Obama speech CIA langley
© politico.euObama speaks at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Despite his liberal pretensions, Obama's foreign policy was dreamed up at Langley — which should not have been surprising given his background

In the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing the CIA and other U.S. agencies to support rebels in Syria seeking to oust Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad — a nationalist who had allied with Iran and stood up to U.S. proxy Israel.[1]

Costing more than $1 billion, Operation Timber Sycamore evolved into the largest covert operation since the arming of mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

U.S. Special Forces under Timber Sycamore again trained Islamic fundamentalists, this time in Jordan, who again carried out a reign of terror.[2]
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Info

Best of the Web: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate

David Zweig
The Free Press
Mon, 26 Dec 2022 19:53 UTC
face mask
© Johannes Eisele via Getty ImagesA face mask is seen in front of the New York Stock Exchange on May 26, 2020.
By the time reporter David Zweig got to the 10th floor conference room at Twitter Headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, the story of the Twitter Files was already international news. Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Leighton Woodhouse, Abigail Shrier, Lee Fang and I had revealed evidence of hidden blacklists of Twitter users; the way Twitter acted as a kind of FBI subsidiary; and how company executives rewrote the platform's policies on the fly to accommodate political bias and pressure.

What we had yet to crack was the story of Covid.

David has spent three years reporting on Covid — specifically the underlying science, or lack thereof, behind many of our nation's policies. For years he had noticed and criticized a bias not only in the mainstream media's coverage of the pandemic, but also in the way it was presented on platforms like Twitter.

We couldn't think of anyone better to tackle this story. — BW

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power — especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views — and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries' responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.

But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary.
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Eye 2

Best of the Web: Pure evil: Canada's expanding euthanasia laws are making the unthinkable thinkable again

Vanessa Beeley
UK Column
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 19:52 UTC
screenshot euthanasia advertisement
© Two Men AdvertisingScreenshot from La Maison Simons video that praises euthanasia as a choice
"Much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable." Julian Huxley, brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley and president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-62), said this when he founded and was Director-General (1946-48) of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation). The mandate for the new organisation was set out clearly in Huxley's 1946 UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:
The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it — education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war [...] in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarise all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organisation. [Emphasis added]
What Huxley was describing was a stark vision of the post-war future. It is a future that is now upon us with the post-Covid-19 Great Reset that is being formulated by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum oligarchy. Huxley advocated that "genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness" were a "dead weight" for the human species and an obstacle to real progress:

Comment:

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Newspaper

Best of the Web: 3 dead in Paris after shooting at Kurdish centre in suspected 'racist attack' by 69-year-old recently released on bail


France24
Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:33 UTC

Comment: Racist, or tribal, or 'deep state wet-works' to maintain a 'strategy of tension'?...


paris police
© Getty
A 69-year-old gunman opened fire at a Kurdish cultural centre and a hairdressing salon in Paris on Friday, killing three people and injuring three others, witnesses and prosecutors said.

The shots shortly before midday (1100 GMT) caused panic in rue d'Enghien in the trendy 10th district of the capital, a bustling area of shops and restaurants that is home to a large Kurdish population.

Witnesses told AFP that the gunman, described by police as white, a French national and previously charged with racist violence, initially targeted the Kurdish cultural centre before entering a hairdressing salon where he was arrested.

Of the three wounded people, one is in intensive care and two are being treated for serious injuries, officials said.

Comment: And at the end of October in the UK: Man petrol bombs UK's migrant centre then commits suicide - recent footage shows 1000 migrants arrive at England's shore in just ONE day

This incident shares a number of with others from recent years: the attacker is known to authorities; politicians seek to associate the attacks with the 'far-right', as well as a number of other perspectives that just so happen to question or run contrary to the agenda of the authorities: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Weapons of Mass Migration: Interview with Michael Springmann on Europe's Migrant Crisis

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Snowflake Cold

Best of the Web: Record-breaking cold, life-threatening wind chills plunge 150 million Americans into deep freeze

Steven Yablonski , Scott Sistek
Fox Weather
Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:32 UTC
nnnnnnnnn
A bitter and potentially deadly blast of arctic air is continuing to charge its way across the U.S., dropping wind chills to as low as between negative 50 and negative 70 degrees across the northern Plains, and 30 below zero in the Midwest, triggering rare Hard Freeze Warnings along the Gulf Coast, and helping to fuel a monster blizzard that will bring those frigid temperature across the Great Lakes and into the Northeast.

"Behind this storm is where it's cold," FOX Weather meteorologist Britta Merwin said. "Look at Denver right now. A feels-like temperature of negative 34 degrees. So, if you're waking up in Chicago at 27 (degrees) and feeling like it's cold, there's a whole new reality coming your way. Behind this cold front, it gets dangerous."

The dangerously cold arctic air began its week-long journey by surging to the south out of Canada last weekend, dropping low temperatures Monday morning to negative 20 degrees and lower across northern Montana.

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