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The Mother of All Limited Hangouts

elon
© AP Photo / Jae C. HongElon Musk
The Mother of All Limited Hangouts has begun. Yes, I'm talking about the "Covid Twitter Files," which are finally being released to the public, in almost textbook limited-hangout fashion. I'll get into that in just a minute, but first, let's review what a "limited hangout" is, for those who are not familiar with the term.

The way a limited hangout works is, if you're an intelligence agency, or a global corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those things are starting to come to light such that you can't just deny that you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you're doing) to distract people's attention from the rest of the story. The part you release is the "limited hangout." It's not a lie. It's just not the whole story. You "hang it out" so that it will become the whole story, and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.

Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA who went on to become a critic of the Intelligence Community, described the tactic this way in 1978 ...
"... a favorite and frequently used gimmick of clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."
All right, so, you're probably asking, if the "Covid Twitter Files" are a limited hangout, what's the whole story that they're distracting us from?

Let me try to refresh your memory.

Bad Guys

Media reports NATO member Türkiye sending banned cluster bombs to Ukraine

cluster munitions decommission
© John MacDougall / AFPA worker leans on cluster munitions at a decommissioning facility in Germany.
Türkiye has been supplying Kiev with weapons that are banned in many countries, sources told Foreign Policy magazine

Ukraine has been receiving consignments of controversial cluster munitions from Türkiye, Foreign Policy magazine has reported. Kiev had been asking Washington for the Cold-War-era weapons for months.

The shipments have been taking place since November, current and former US and European officials told the outlet. It was unclear how many of the munitions had been received, or whether they had yet been used on the battlefield.

The weapons in question are called dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICMs. They were designed during the Cold War era, when NATO was planning to deploy them against a large-scale Soviet invasion of Europe. The rounds are filled with dozens of submunitions, intended to strike personnel and light-armored targets, scattering over a large area for increased lethality.

Russian Flag

Moscow gets the last laugh: 'Nothing that our adversaries predicted has happened'

Putin
© Sputnik / Sergey GuneevRussian President Vladimir Putin
Sanctions and international pressure have failed to seriously harm Russia's economy, President Vladimir Putin has said

None of the gloomy forecasts the West made about Russia's fate in 2022 have come to pass, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the government on Wednesday as he commented on the West's failure to disrupt the national economy.

"Nothing that our adversaries predicted has happened to us," Putin said as he thanked the government for its effective work throughout 2022, which helped Russia withstand international pressure amid unprecedented sanctions imposed by the US and its allies. "In no small way, that was the result of the government's work," he added.

Comment: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Russia has taken the lesson to heart in putting itself on an independent economic footing, being one of the few countries in the world capable of autotarky. It has all the resources it needs to provide for its population and still be able to export the excess.


Penis Pump

Macron speaks of 'Putin paradox', claims he's not unpleasant but is trying to restore Russian empire

putin i macron
© Sputnik via AFPPutin and Macron are seated far apart in the Kremlin on February 7, 2022, 13 days before their phone call.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is not an "unpleasant" man, Emmanuel Macron has said, but that cannot be an excuse for launching a "war" on Ukraine. The French president made the bizarre remark during an appearance on Saturday at Les Rencontres du Papotin, a TV program hosted by a group of journalists with autism.

Macron was grilled by the journalists on assorted issues, including his ties with Putin.

"When you meet him like that, he's not unpleasant. That's the paradox," Macron stated, adding that "there is nothing to justify starting a war."


Comment: Someone as duplicitous and compromised as Macron probably never could understand one of the world's greatest leaders. Especially with fallacious reasoning as that stated above.


Comment: Meanwhile back in France, over 52% of its citizens are calling for a 'social explosion' of protests in response to the direction Macron is taking their country.


Star of David

New Israeli security minister to ban Palestinian flags from flying in public

israel and palestine flags
© Jamal Awad Flash90
Israel's controversial public security minister has told police to forbid the display of Palestinian flags in public.

"It can't be that lawbreakers wave terror flags, incite and support terror, and therefore I have ordered that terror-supporting flags be removed from the public space. Identifying with a terrorist and with harming IDF soldiers is not protected under freedom of speech," the Otzma Yehudit party leader said on Sunday.

"Minister Ben Gvir sent the police commissioner's office an order stating that all police officers of any rank are authorised in the course of police work to pull down flags of the Palestinian Authority," a statement from the minister's office read.

Mr Ben Gvir claimed the instruction "relies on the fact that displaying a [Palestinian] flag is a form of supporting terror," referring to the flag's origina as a flag of the PLO.

War Whore

Sweden aims to reactivate civil conscription to shore up defences

swedish soldier
© Shutterstock
Sweden's government says it is taking steps to reintroduce conscription of civilians for its emergency services in the latest move by the Nordic nation to shore up its defence capabilities since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Monday that the civil service will start preparations for the move this week.

"We're going back to a situation where we have a formalised civil duty," Kristersson said at a news conference alongside Defence Minister Pal Jonson and Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin.

Bohlin said the scheme will focus on deploying appropriately trained civilians within the municipal rescue services and bolstering their capabilities to respond in a state of emergency or to any potential attack.

Question

Best of the Web: U.S. Government Identified as Original Source of Lab Leak Theory. What's Really Going On?

mask
Where did the lab leak theory come from? Who first promoted the idea and why? The answer to this question is surprising - and may be the key to unlocking the mystery of the origin of COVID-19.

The first known mention of the idea that the coronavirus may have originated in a Chinese lab appeared on January 9th 2020 in a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA). This was just days after the virus had first entered public consciousness, and at the time, no deaths had yet been reported and few people were worrying about the virus - including, it seems, the Chinese, who were claiming it wasn't even clear whether it was spreading between humans.

Seemingly unhappy about the lack of alarm, RFA ran a comment from Ren Ruihong, former head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, who said she was confident it was spreading between humans. She also asserted it was a "new type of mutant coronavirus", and immediately, without pausing for breath, raised the possibility it was a result of a Chinese biological attack on Hong Kong using a virus developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Arrow Up

Best of the Web: Why the CIA attempted a 'Maidan uprising' in Brazil

Lula in Brazil
© The Cradle
The failed coup in Brazil is the latest CIA stunt, just as the country is forging stronger ties with the east

A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.

On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva.

According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation - which bears visible signs of hasty planning - now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.

Stock Down

Goldman Sachs sets date for biggest layoff since '08 Great Recession

Goldman Sachs logo
Goldman Sachs will begin laying off more than 3,000 employees this Wednesday, cutting costs ahead of what the company expects to be a weak start to the year, Reuters reported Monday.

The layoffs are anticipated to begin Wednesday, focusing primarily on its investment banking team, and would be the largest cuts at the investment firm since 2008, according to Reuters. The bank added more than 10,000 employees following a pandemic-induced boom in mergers and acquisitions, a market that has since slumped as central banks worldwide raised interest rates in 2022, according to CNN.

After banks conducted mergers and acquisitions with a record-setting total value of $5.9 trillion in 2021, the industry has since fallen by more than a third, to just $3.66 trillion through Dec. 20, 2022, Reuters reported. Despite the aggressive cuts however, the company anticipates that its mergers and acquisitions business will recover in the latter half of 2023.

Mail

Abbott hands Biden letter blasting border visit as 'two years too late'

bidenAbbott
© AP/Joel Martinez/Getty Images/KJNUS President Joe Biden • Texas Governor Greg Abbott
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Sunday handed President Biden a letter in which he criticized the president's visit to the southern border town of El Paso.

The governor was greeting Biden on the tarmac when he handed him the letter, which began with Abbott writing:
"Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late. Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners who lives have been destroyed by your border policies."

Abbott claimed in the letter that downtown El Paso had been "sanitized of the migrant camps" that he said had overrun the city in an attempt by the administration to "shield" Biden from "the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis."

Abbott wrote:
"This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted."
The governor, who has consistently criticized the Biden administration for the migration crisis, accused the president again in the letter for emboldening drug cartels that are bringing fentanyl across the border, an issue consistently brought up by Republicans when criticizing border policies.

Abbott lays out five policy areas he wants Biden to address that include complying with the statues mandating that "various categories of aliens 'shall' be detained" to stop "unlawfully paroling aliens en masse," and to fully enforce Title 42, the Trump-era policy that allows for migrants to be quickly expelled at the border without asylum processing.

Abbott also suggested taking steps to prosecute illegal entry between ports and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove immigrants in the country illegally, immediately resuming construction of the border wall in Texas, and designate Mexican drug cartels "as foreign terrorist organizations."

Abbott wrote before listing the criteria:
"When you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do."

Comment: Why did Biden bother. This was more pathetic than Kamala's one-stop, four hour photo op.