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Flashlight

Best of the Web: Goldman warns of blackout risk for European industry this winter

industry waterfront
© Peter Boer/Bloomberg
Europe's soaring energy markets are exposing the risk of power blackouts this winter, especially if freezing weather worsens the region's already exceptionally low natural gas inventories, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

While higher gas prices can trigger supply and demand adjustments to offset the tight market, these are largely already priced in, Goldman analysts including Samantha Dart said in a note. As a result, a colder-than-average winter would mean Europe needing to compete with Asia for supplies of liquefied natural gas, driving prices even higher.

And there's a "non-negligible risk" that LNG directed to Europe won't be enough to prevent a depletion of gas inventories by the end of winter, especially if weather is cold in both Europe and Asia, the analysts said.

Network

Best of the Web: Israel boasts to New York Times about how it assassinated Iranian scientist using 'A.I.-Assisted Killer Robot'


Comment: They're so supremely confident these days, unassailable in their position as 'Rulers of the World', that they can gloat about their crimes...


Mohsen Fakhrizadeh
© Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesMohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran’s nuclear program, kept a low profile, and photographs of him were rare. This photo appeared on martyrdom posters after his death.
Iran's top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before his day began.

That afternoon, he and his wife would leave their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran, where they planned to spend the weekend.

Iran's intelligence service had warned him of a possible assassination plot, but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off.

Convinced that Mr. Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and plots that he no longer paid them much attention.

Despite his prominent position in Iran's military establishment, Mr. Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. He craved small domestic pleasures: reading Persian poetry, taking his family to the seashore, going for drives in the countryside.

And, disregarding the advice of his security team, he often drove his own car to Absard instead of having bodyguards drive him in an armored vehicle. It was a serious breach of security protocol, but he insisted.

So shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 27, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan, his wife in the passenger seat beside him, and hit the road.

iran map
© Jugal K. Patel

Comment: Black Mirror, brought to you by Mossad.




Phoenix

Best of the Web: The so-called 'cradle of the revolution' against Assad has been liberated - the West's campaign to topple him is all but over

Syrian flag
© Vanessa Beeley
After three years of a fragile ceasefire and a campaign of assassinations of Syrian government 'loyalists' by embedded fundamentalist armed groups, the Syrian flag has once more been raised in Daraa Al Balad.

Western media persists in portraying the emergence of extremist armed groups in Daraa, south of Damascus, as the "cradle of the revolution" to overthrow the Syrian government. The reality is that Daraa was the touchpaper lit by hardline Libyan mercenaries imported into the city prior to 2011.

From Daraa, the "revolutionary" flames fanned by the US, UK and Israeli-led coalition headquartered in Jordan, funded by Gulf-state blood money, would engulf Syria for ten long years. In Daraa, the CIA/MI6-backed Muslim Brotherhood extremist gangs fronted the orchestrated uprising, power multiplied by Libyan arms and terrorist factions and given credibility by the colonial media complex spearheaded by the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera.

Eye 2

Best of the Web: Indictment of Clinton lawyer proves 'Russiagate collusion' hoax originated with her

clinton
The 26-page indictment of former cybersecurity attorney and Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann by special counsel John Durham is as detailed as it is damning on the alleged effort to push a false Russia collusion claim before the 2016 presidential campaign. One line, however, seems to reverberate for those of us who have followed this scandal for years now: "You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag."

That warning from an unnamed "university researcher" captures the most fascinating aspect of the indictment in describing a type of Nixonian dirty tricks operation run by — or at least billed to — the Clinton campaign. With Nixon, his personal attorney and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) paid for operatives to engage in disruptive and ultimately criminal conduct targeting his opponents. With Clinton, the indictment and prior disclosures suggest that Clinton campaign lawyers at the law firm of Perkins Coie helped organize an effort to spread Russia collusion stories and trigger an investigation.

USA

Best of the Web: Tucker Carlson: Mark Milley committed treason, and others were implicated

Tucker Carlson
© Richard Drew/APTucker Carlson

Milley colluded with China, our chief military rival, to undercut the elected president of the United States


There's something about the term "deep state" that sounds paranoid, even nutty. As of just a few years ago, you mostly heard the phrase from relics on the far-left, the kind of people who lecture you about the United Fruit Company and the toppling of Mosaddegh. The term, then and now, suggests that our democracy is fake. Elections and domestic politics are a sideshow. No matter who you vote for, in the end, the same people still run everything. That's a pretty dark understanding of the American system. If you're a normal person who grew up here, it's the last thing you want to believe about your country. It seems crazy.

Comment: Meanwhile Trump believes this is a fabricated story, read more about his take here.


Bullseye

Best of the Web: Today's cowardly liberal comedians loved Norm MacDonald: Why can't they be funny like him?

Norm MacDonald death comedy
© RevolverComedian Norm MacDonald
Norm MacDonald was fearless. He always believed that 'a joke should catch someone by surprise, it should never pander.' As The Atlantic recently noted:
[Norm] hated comedy that pandered to a like-minded crowd, once saying in an interview that stand-ups should hunt for laughter, not applause. "There's a difference between a clap and a laugh. A laugh is involuntary, but the crowd is in complete control when they're clapping. They're saying, 'We agree with what you're saying; proceed!'" he said. "But when they're laughing, they're genuinely surprised. And when they're not laughing, they're really surprised. And sometimes I think, in my little head, that that's the best comedy of all."
Norm MacDonald was, in other words, the absolute opposite of what passes for a comedian today. And since today's comedians are some of the least funny to ever bear that name, that means Norm MacDonald is firmly entrenched as quite possibly the funniest comic of all time.

USA

Best of the Web: Why the US and UK shafted France for Australian nuclear submarines deal

nuclear submarines aukus
© Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Biden announced the nuclear submarine deal on Wednesday during a news conference with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, left, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain.
The United States and Australia went to extraordinary lengths to keep Paris in the dark as they secretly negotiated a plan to build nuclear submarines, scuttling France's largest defense contract and so enraging President Emmanuel Macron that on Friday he ordered the withdrawal of France's ambassadors to both nations.

Mr. Macron's decision was a stunning and unexpected escalation of the breach between Washington and Paris, on a day that the two countries had planned to celebrate an alliance that goes back to the defeat of Britain in the Revolutionary War.

Yet it was driven by France's realization that two of its closest allies have been negotiating secretly for months. According to interviews with American and British officials, the Biden administration had been in talks since soon after President Biden's inauguration about arming the Australian navy with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines that could patrol areas of the South China Sea and beyond that Beijing is trying to dominate with its own military forces.

But one thing was standing in their way: a $60 billion agreement that called for Australia to buy a dozen far less sophisticated, and far noisier, conventionally-powered submarines from France.

Comment: With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Once again, the preeminence of Anglo-Saxon identity rises above all other considerations.

It's a Big Club, France (and Germany, and other 'Western' nations)... but YOU AINT IN IT!

See The Anglopshere by Srdjan Vucetic to understand why Australia has ALWAYS sided with the US/UK in geopolitics.


Eye 1

Best of the Web: Italy to mandate ALL workers show 'green pass', failure to do so will result in suspension from work, fines for businesses

school italy vaccine passport
© GettySchool staff in Italy are already required to show a so-called "green pass"
Italy is to make it compulsory for all workers to have a Covid "green pass" - proof of vaccination, a negative test or recovery from the virus.

The measures are a first for Europe and some of the strictest in the world.


Comment: Italy may be 'the first' to enforce these restrictions but the threat is looming over citizens throughout the EU, however there are other countries, like Sweden and Denmark, which are in the process of dropping all restrictions.


Anyone without a pass will reportedly face suspension from work and may have their pay stopped after five days.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Covid-19/11




Bullseye

Best of the Web: Social Justice and the Emergence of Covid Tyranny

opening door
Signs of incipient totalitarian impulses have been evident since the rise of political correctness.1 Yet, warnings from those who saw the character of contemporary "social justice" went largely unheeded. Nevertheless, even before degenerating into "wokeness," social justice bore the seeds of civilizational decline and the simultaneous rise of social and political tyranny. The weaponization of mostly feigned fragility by snowflake totalitarians has been marshaled to abrogate the rights of those deemed offensive, injurious, and even "dangerous." It also has evinced "paralogistic discourse," or "[d]iscourse that is out of touch with reality, involving illogical, fallacious, unwarranted premises and conclusions."2 Such thinking is characteristic of societal hysteria.3 This weaponization escalated, germinating "cancel culture," the buds from which neo-Stalinist purges have since blossomed.

As I was first to point out, social justice amounts to "practical postmodernism."4 The relativism, subjectivism, and antiobjectivity of postmodern theory, as well as the priority it places on language, have been harnessed by social justice activists and their followers and put to political ends. Social justice ideology claims that "narratives," "my truth," and language trump or produce reality. In terms of transgender ideology, this means that declaring one's gender, or mere (re)naming, supersedes and cancels biology. In terms of critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement, it means that personal stories of oppression overwrite evidence, statistics, and the arc of history. Given that appeals to objective criteria are banished, when backed by the requisite power, such claims are necessarily authoritarian. Without objective criteria, there is no court of appeal other than power, and thus such "truths" are deemed incontrovertible.5 The legal ramifications of practical postmodernism have been nothing less than astonishing.

The policies of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) accelerated the already prevalent upward movement of unqualified persons, those who have achieved important positions thanks to affirmative action and adherence to political ideology. DEI (or DIE) metastasized throughout the culture at large, with signs of the upward mobility of the unqualified seen in government, academia, and the corporate world. On Twitter, the accounts of unremarkable activists and otherwise unaccomplished leftists are granted the official blue checkmark of authority and significance.

Historically, the upward movement of the unqualified has been a harbinger of increasing authoritarianism; the unqualified favor authoritarianism, which protects their unearned status, and authoritarianism selects the unqualified, who become avid loyalists of the authoritarian regime.6 Thus, the upward movement of the unqualified should be taken as a telltale sign.

Comment: For more on Political Ponerology see:


Better Earth

Best of the Web: Ozone hole above Antarctica is one of the largest ever, it's still growing, and may be linked to the COOLING stratosphere

Ozone hole
FILE PHOTO: Ozone hole September 2021: This year's Antarctic ozone hole is already among the 25% largest in recorded history and is still growing.
A giant ozone hole has opened up over Antarctica this year. Already larger than the entire ice-covered continent, the ozone hole has surpassed the size of 75% of ozone holes measured since 1979 and is still growing. Scientists believe climate change might be the cause.

The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, is frequently described as the world's great success story in battling human-caused destruction of the environment. The agreement banned harmful chlorofluorocarbons and other substances known to destroy the protective ozone layer, which absorbs damaging ultraviolet UV radiation coming from the sun. The concentrations of the damaging substances in the atmosphere have leveled off since the protocol came into force and are slowly decreasing, providing the foundation for the layer's gradual healing. But worsening climate change is now slowing down the recovery.

Comment: 'Unprecedented' heatwaves may be occurring, but this is in tandem with extreme drought, epic flooding, alongside a variety of other unusual phenomena, including Earth's weakening magnetic field, none of which were forecast by those pushing the 'climate crisis' agenda. Moreover, even the ideologically blinded climate scientists have had to admit recently that extreme cold snaps are increasing, with numerous studies showing that our planet is, overall, cooling, and that we appear to be entering an ice age.

During the last little ice age, sunspot numbers decreased significantly, and it's likely that the real driver to the changes we're seeing on our planet today, and on others, is again due to waning solar activity as we enter a grand solar minimum.

See also: And check out SOTT radio's: