Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made the unexpected announcement Wednesday that she would be resigning from government after eight years in the role.

Why it matters: Sturgeon has been a champion of the Scottish independence movement.

ElonElon Musk compares the modern day to fall of Rome and rise of Islamic arts and sciences, stating their separated societies allowed human progress to continue

Billionaire Elon Musk gave briefs remarks at the World Government Summit warning attendees to avoid excessive cooperation, warning it could pose an existential threat.

The 2023 World Government Summit is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on Feb. 13-15. Musk delivered the speech remotely via video call.

After the so-called "Chinese spy balloon" passed over the US last week and was shot down, the US claimed that multiple "UFO's" have since appeared in its airspace, as well as above Canada.

Without blaming these so-called UFOs on a certain country, the US has continued to shoot them down, arousing mystery and suspicion over their origin. Whatever their origin and purpose, the (intended) end result for Washington will be increased mass fear, a boost in military spending, further escalated tensions with both China and Russia and the manufactured compliance of Washington's allies. The rest of 2023 is going to be a bumpy year.

As argued in an earlier piece, Biden is not like Trump, he is much worse. Trump's was a mercantilist presidency owing to his business-like and transaction-based mindset, and his decisions were not militaristic at root. Trump disliked China for economic and commercial reasons, while he also took pragmatic positions on negotiating with Russia and North Korea. This pragmatic stance earned him the contempt of the US establishment, who sought to undermine him where possible, blocking his withdrawal from Syria or playing down his rhetoric on NATO.

"The Chinese spy balloons are most likely an op to pull the civil/military's collective chain."
— Thomas L. Thomas

Didn't you get the feeling this weekend that we're living in HG Wells' classic tale of the earth invaded by sinister alien spacecrafts? Our government is playing the story like a bassoon concerto. "American officials do not know what the objects were, much less their purpose or who sent them," The New York Times reported, poaching a line from every horror movie of the 1950s. When do the giant ants show up on Fremont Street in Las Vegas?

Looks like they'll keep up the suspense as long as possible, too.

Oh, we can't retrieve that thing up in Alaska due to white-out weather conditions... Oh, that other thing — the eight-sided silver tic-tac — it fell into Lake Huron, glug glug... and that first one, the big balloon payload, lies deep in Davy Jones' Locker now. You'll have to stand by, folks....

Let's face it, all the other mindfucks set in motion by the folks-in-charge are not just losing their mojo — they're generating a lot of nasty blow-back in the way of widespread distrust of authority and institutional collapse. Even Woked-up Democrat voters begin to suspect that the vaxxes they greeted like a holy deliverance might not be so good for you after all. I'm waiting for Rob Reiner's head to explode when he starts to notice how many young SAG-AFTRA members are waking up dead in West Hollywood.

As I noted in a previous article, the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealed in a recent interview that in March of last year Western leaders blocked a draft peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

There seems to be some disagreement over exactly what he said, as the interview was in Hebrew. Based on the English subtitles on YouTube, I quoted him as saying, "They blocked it." But others insist he said, "They broke off negotiations." Either way, he clearly implied that the West stymied negotiations that might have led to a peace deal.

What's more telling is the reason he gave as to why the West did so, namely "to keep smashing Putin". This tallies closely with Roman Romanyuk's account of why Western leaders opposed negotiations in April:

"Behind this visit and Johnson's words lies much more than a simple reluctance to engage in agreements with Russia. The collective West, which back in February suggested that Zelenskyi surrender and run away, now felt that Putin is actually not as all-powerful as they imagined him to be. Moreover, right now there was a chance to "press him". And the West wants to use it."

As Caitlin Johnstone points out, it also lines up with what the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on April 20th last year:

"Following the NATO foreign ministers' meeting, it was the impression that ... there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don't care much about the situation in Ukraine."

We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science. The world will never be the same.

It's been a week since Seymour Hersh released his Substack exclusive about How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. The mainstream German press have responded with uniform scepticism. Most reports followed the example of the wire services, in leading with the blanket denials of American officials and noting that the story was well-received in Moscow. A few operations, like the state media outlet Tagesschau, attempted a more comprehensive debunking, in this case by asking experts to pick holes in the details of Hersh's story - with less than impressive results. The other major tactic has been to attack Hersh's credibility, along similar lines as the American press. The latest headline here is that Bob Woodward thinks Hersh's story is bunk, and because Woodward is also a famous American journalist, that means checkmate for Hersh, or something.

The biggest development is an interview that Hersh gave to the Berliner Zeitung. It was published yesterday and contains many new details. For example, Hersh tells his interviewer that the plan was to detonate "eight bombs ... near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic sea," of which only "six...went off." This is the first confirmation we've had anywhere of an obvious point, namely that the operation wasn't fully successful, and that this is the only reason that Pipe B of Nord Stream 2 escaped intact. He's also more explicit on the involvement of Denmark and Sweden, saying "I was told that they did what they did [to facilitate the planting of explosives] and they knew what they were doing and they understood what was going on, but maybe nobody ever said 'yes.'"

'If Joe Biden decides not to run, Kamala Harris will become the next nominee of the Democratic Party,' Brazile said

Donna Brazile, former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris will not be replaced on the 2024 ticket, amid growing concerns that a candidacy could hamper Democrat's 2024 aspirations.

During an appearance on ABC's This Week, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie questioned Harris' future if President Joe Biden decides to seek re-election, as members of her own party doubt the strength of a potential candidacy.

"While her poll numbers may not reflect her true popularity, I can guarantee you Kamala Harris will not be replaced on the party's ticket. And I can also guarantee you, if Joe Biden decides not to run, Kamala Harris will become the next nominee of the Democratic Party," Brazile replied.

A guide for handicapping the next big "event".

Happy Valentine's Day to my substack subscribers.

The purpose of this post is two-fold. First, I want to give my subscribers a heads-up that tomorrow (Feb. 15, 2023) I'll be releasing a new video, "Why Is the Federal Reserve Provoking a Financial Crisis?" I'm shooting for noon eastern time, but we'll see how the timed-publication feature on YouTube works out.

As usual, the video will be mirrored on Bitchute and Odysee, but I'll probably put it out on Rumble too, since there's a decent chance that the custom thumbnail image (different than the above) and/or the content itself will get censored. We'll see. If YouTube takes a video down after it's been mirrored elsewhere, do the mirrored clones get taken down too? I doubt it, but I don't know that. So Rumble is my insurance policy since I manually upload select things there and deliberately avoid mirroring.

I'll write a separate substack post for the video that amplifies the description box on YouTube etc. I'll provide the video links in tomorrow's substack post.

"Why Is the Federal Reserve Provoking a Financial Crisis?" is a hoss, clocking in at 46+ minutes. I put more work than usual into this one, including a complete transcript that I straight-typed (almost 7000 words). I also put together time-stamped chapter/topic markers, which will appear — in theory — in the description boxes.

This video builds on and extends the explosive (but largely overlooked AFAIK) analysis done by Chris Whalen, "Is JPMorgan Chase Insolvent?" But I take the analysis quite a bit further than Chris did, in large part because he published his comparatively shorter piece a few days before the F.D.I.C. released its Quarterly Banking Profile for 3Q2022 , which contained some eye-popping tells that didn't reach Whalen's eyes in time.

The second purpose of this post is to amplify a topic that I touch on in the video, and that's what Klaus Schwab and his platoon of corporate brown nosers at the World Economic Forum might have in store for us. As it turns out, they've provided some big clues, which I'll get to in a minute. To lay some groundwork for that discussion, though, let me say more about the video.

Karl Lauterbach calls long school closures a 'big mistake' but said that caution meant the country suffered fewer deaths.

Some Covid restrictions were "idiocy" and lengthy school closures were an "unnecessary mistake", Germany's lockdown chief has admitted.
Karl Lauterbach, who became the face of the pro-lockdown movement, said some regulations went too far.

"Much of what we did was right, but what was idiocy was the things like jogging with masks, or rules for outdoors. Those were excessive," Mr Lauterbach said.

Mr Lauterbach, of Olaf Scholz's ruling Socialist party, also conceded that too little attention had been paid to the wellbeing of children, describing school closures as "a big mistake".

Germany was praised for its handling of the pandemic by heavily restricting people's contacts and closing schools and kindergarten for weeks on end.

JPMorgan Chase announced an agreement with the Ukrainian government to coordinate between $20 billion and $30 billion in funds for the war-torn nation's reconstruction.


Executives from the largest bank in the United States met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his staff in Kiev.

Zelensky was presented with a New England Patriots jersey emblazoned with the number 91, signifying the year Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, Fox Business reported.