Western sanctions are preventing Russian inspectors from doing their jobs under the START treaty, Moscow says.

Moscow has informed Washington of a "temporary withdrawal" from the inspection regime under the START nuclear disarmament treaty, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Monday.

Citing provisions in the document for "exceptional circumstances," Russia claims Western sanctions have prevented its inspectors from performing their duties, thus giving their US counterparts an unfair advantage. Once the principle of parity and equality is restored, the previous arrangements will resume, the statement added.

Moscow cited "anti-Russian unilateral restrictive measures" imposed by the US and its allies, such as visa restrictions on Russian inspectors and a ban on Russian aircraft in US and EU airspace. These restrictions effectively make Russian inspections under the treaty impossible, while the Americans "do not experience such difficulties."

One of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on consumers is the branding of consumer products, a practice created almost entirely in the US, achieving significance only from an overwhelming flood of abusive psychological propaganda and advertising. In probably no other place did American corporations and ad agencies apply Bernays' psychiatric propaganda methods of public manipulation with more bloodthirsty determination than in their creation of the fiction of branding, and in no other country are brands treated with the reverence they are in the US.

In real life, a brand is nothing. It is only a name that has no value other than for product identification. Any value is in the product itself, but the large firms have spent literally tens of billions of dollars to convince Americans and the world otherwise. Everything we have been told and taught about brands is a lie, what someone called "meticulous landscaping" of the consumer environment. To a consumer, there is no value in a brand. The relation between a product and its brand is identical to that of a steak and its sizzle, but the brand has been cleverly drilled into our minds as the definitive element containing utility and value. Just as these same firms concluded many decades earlier that if people would pay for sizzle there was no need to provide the steak, they later correctly concluded that if customers would pay for a brand there was no need to provide a product, at least not of any commensurate value. The sizzle has no value; its only function is to stimulate our emotions to desire. Similarly, a brand has no value, but branding has been abused to serve only as a kind of psychological deceit.

It is a story well-known and often told that in areas of the US all tomatoes from all farms in a large geographical area are delivered to the same factory, where they are all mixed together, washed, cooked and put into cans. On the morning shift, the cans are affixed with a low-price generic label for one customer, while in the afternoon the same tomatoes from the same farms in the same cans on the same production line will have another firm's "premium" label pasted on them, and appear on supermarket shelves at 150% to 200% of the price of those from the morning shift. The magic of branding.

To most large multinational companies today, this is the real value of a "brand" - the power to give consumers the same or less, but charge much more. We have been trained through fear and uncertainty to believe that a lower-price product is substandard or perhaps even toxic, and our uncertainty pushes us to the "premium" brands even though there is nothing premium about them except the price. So-called "luxury" products are even worse. Marketers boast that companies like LV and Apple can charge two or three times the price of another product equal in quality in every way, so you can see why these firms spend so much money on "branding": it gives them the ability to charge more and more while giving customers less and less.

Florida state attorney Andrew Warren vowed he is "not going down without a fight," after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended him on Thursday.

The big picture:

Warren, the twice-elected state attorney for Hillsborough County, refused to enforce the state's 15-week abortion ban and condemned laws criminalizing gender-affirming health care.

• DeSantis responded with an executive order suspending Warren for "incompetence and willful defiance."

What he's saying:

"Ron DeSantis is trying to overthrow democracy in Florida. His plot to suspend me blatantly violates the most fundamental basis of our democracy — your vote."

• "DeSantis is trying to take away my job for doing my job. He came down to Tampa, to Hillsboro County, to illegally remove me as part of some political circus."
• "Ron DeSantis doesn't get to hand-pick Flordia's state attorneys. You, the people do. We've all seen the consequences of politicians who think they're above the law and can do whatever they want. That's why DeSantis and his abuse of power must be stopped."
• "I refuse to let this man trample on your freedoms — to speak your mind, to make your own health care decisions and to have your vote count."

This is a list of just the docs my doctor friend in Canada heard about passively. In the past 30 years, he's never heard of a single death like this. Not one. Now there are 14.

Executive summary

A doctor friend in Canada heard about 14 deaths of Canadian doctors over the last 9 months. He's been in practice for 30 years. He's never heard of any such deaths before. Zero. Why is he now all of a sudden hearing of so many deaths, and these deaths are all happening very soon after vaccination.

The fact checkers assure us all that this is simply coincidence. The Canadian doctors continue to believe what they are told to believe. I predict the next shots will be even worse.

Sadly, I don't think the Canadian doctors are ever going to figure this out.

Chris Pratt took to Instagram to remind his critics that The Terminal List boasted '1.6 billion minutes of streams'

Chris Pratt had the last laugh after "woke critics" on "Rotten Tomatoes" certified his new Amazon Prime show, The Terminal List, as "rotten."

The show follows Pratt's character, Navy SEAL commander James Reece, who is determined to find out who killed his platoon and get revenge.

While critics were not pleased with the production, many fans immediately came to Pratt's rescue, with the audience score on the review site coming in as 94% "fresh."

In a brazen move, the Wanted star took to his Instagram story, sharing a report that suggested the actor defied "woke critics."

Amnesty International said on August 7 it "deeply regrets the distress and anger" caused by a report accusing Ukraine of exposing civilians to Russian fire.

The August 4 report said the Ukrainian military is endangering civilians by basing themselves in residential buildings, schools, and hospitals and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas.

The head of Amnesty's Ukraine office resigned in protest, accusing the rights organization of parroting Kremlin propaganda.


President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the rights group had tried to "amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim."

"We fully stand by our findings," the rights group said, but it stressed that "nothing we documented Ukrainian forces doing in any way justifies Russian violations."

"This does not mean that Amnesty International holds Ukrainian forces responsible for violations committed by Russian forces, nor that the Ukrainian military is not taking adequate precautions elsewhere in the country," it said.

Over 1,000 New York City police officers have filed to leave the department in 2022, raising doubts about the city's ability to maintain a substantive police force and maintain safety and security.

Former NYPD detective Jason Caputo and Blue Lives Matter NYC founder Joe Imperatrice weighed in on the law enforcement exodus on Fox & Friends First Monday, arguing that incentives for working with The Big Apple's police force no longer exist.

"You're losing qualified [people], you're losing experience, you're losing so much when it comes to that kind of stuff," Caputo told guest host Ashley Strohmier.

The former detective's comments come a month after he left his 18-year service and as others partaking in the exodus leave before receiving full pensions.

Charges that a real investigation is being blocked.

The head of the preeminent scientific journal The Lancet's COVID-19 origins Commission is 'convinced' that the virus came out of a lab and says that a real investigation is being blocked.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs told Current Affairs that he is "pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US lab biotechnology" and has warned that ongoing research could lead to another pandemic outbreak.

We hope you have enjoyed the show. We're sorry but it's time to go.

Is humanity waking up yet?

The alarm clocks are firing off unpleasant noises everywhere and they're being summarily dismissed as "disinformation" by those triggering them. That loud digital beeping noise doesn't stop, that blaring throbbing obnoxious one that nobody ever selects on their phones because they'd prefer a wake-up experience that didn't sound like the warning of an imminent nuclear holocaust to start their day.

But these civilizational alarms can't be selected or shut off. Only the snooze button gets pressed by a snoozing population, awaiting the next alarms. The mechanistic droning sounds grind into the frequencies of the natural order, screaming that all is not well. The already wakened vigorously shake the comatose, still trapped in the matrix.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) released new data about the growing dangers for children from predators on the internet.

"The scary reality of online exploitation is that rates of crime are continually growing," said NCMEC on Sunday. "In 2020, NCMEC saw a 97.5 percent increase of online enticement reports & in Dec. 2021, our CyberTipline surpassed 100 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation."