The Biden administration has cancelled a meeting between the United States and Saudi Arabia that was previously under review, the news platform Semafor reported on Tuesday, citing a letter from the American embassy in Riyadh.

The meeting that was reportedly cancelled was the US-GCC Working Group on Iran, which would have focused on integrated air and missile defence.

"The Embassy of the United States of America presents its compliments to the Gulf Cooperation Council Secretariat and hereby informs the Gulf Cooperation Council that United States officials will not be able to participate in the planned meetings of the United States - Gulf Cooperation Council Working Group on Iran Integrated Air and Missile Defense."

The cancelling of the meeting appears to be a major follow-through of the administration's announcement earlier on Tuesday, when national security spokesman John Kirby said the US would be reviewing its relationship with Saudi Arabia, following a decision by Opec+ to cut the production of oil by two million barrels a day.

Things are not going well for the "rules-based" empire of lies.
Recessions, debt, energy crisis, inflation and wars... somehow it is all related, and it is related at a global level, impacting nearly all economies and markets. It all seems to be going rather badly for the "rules based global order," or as some prefer to call it, "the empire of lies."

Shock, after shock, after shock...

Last week, on Oct. 6, Kristalina Georgieva, IMF's Managing Director gave a speech at the Georgetown University in Washington where she explained that the global economy, which was expected to recover strongly after the Covid 19 pandemic, experienced a "shock, after shock, after shock" instead, that it is now experiencing a "fundamental shift," and that this shift could create a "dangerous new normal." Georgieva thinks this can only be mitigated by "countries working together."

We're winning in Ukraine! Or maybe not.

Part of the problem is the "senseless war" in Ukraine. For weeks now, as the groupthink went, the war has turned in the west's favor and Ukraine has been winning. Nobody even bothers pretending any more that this war is between Russia and Ukraine: it is now overtly discussed as the war between Russia and the collective west. NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made this plain in yesterday's press conference: "If Putin wins, that is not only a big defeat for the Ukrainians, but it will be the defeat, and dangerous, for all of us." But not to worry, said Stoltenberg, "Ukraine has the momentum," and "President Putin is failing in Ukraine."

Last week, US 4-star General Jack Keane went on Fox Business to boast about Bidden administration's awesome "investment" in Ukraine:

We have a $6 trillion budget... we've invested, and I mean, invested, $66 billion in Ukraine this year and that is like, 1.1% [of the budget] ... So for $66 billion what we're getting is Ukraine doing the fighting, they are literally destroying the Russian Army on the battlefield.

About 30% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure has been damaged after two consecutive days of Russian missile attacks, the country's Energy Minister German Galushchenko has told CNN. Moscow called the strikes on Monday and Tuesday a response to Ukrainian "terrorist attacks" on Russian soil.

The top Ukrainian official said on Tuesday that his country for the "first time from the beginning of the war" experienced large-scale Russian attacks on infrastructure, according to the US news channel.


He assessed that Europe suffered, too, by proxy, because Kiev had to suspend the export of electricity. Ukraine "helps European countries to save on Russian gas and coal" and wants to "reconnect quickly from the other sources," Galushchenko stated.

The minister claimed that the Ukrainian energy system remained stable but urged other nations to expedite sending to Kiev air defense systems, to protect its infrastructure from further attacks.

"We send this message to our partners: we need to protect the sky," he was quoted as saying.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister has admitted that Kiev is behind sabotage operations in Russia, many of which which have killed innocent civilians.

Dmitry Kuleba was speaking with a person he believed to be a former American ambassador to Moscow, according to Russian pranksters with a history of targetting senior political figures.

"Well, if you were to ask me who blows up things in Crimea or Belgorod, then speaking privately, as much privacy we can have in a Zoom call, I'd tell you, yes, that was us," the top Ukrainian diplomat was shown saying in footage, which was released on Thursday.

Europe's escalating economic, financial and geopolitical crises are putting increasing pressure on the whole EU project. They're also unmasking the exalted "European unity" for the utter farce that it is. It's become clear that like most other things in the empire of lies, that unity is exactly its opposite as allies turn against allies.

Destroying Germany's economic lifeline

Someone blew up Nord Stream pipelines bringing in cheap, abundant natural gas from Russia to Germany. German economy depended on this resource for nearly 60% of its industrial production. As Zoltan Pozsar suggested, $2 trillion of German value depended on $20 billion of Russian gas.

We can't be sure who blew up the pipelines, but the most likely suspects are all Germany's supposed friends and allies: the US, UK, Poland, Sweden and Denmark. Of course, we are not talking about those nations' legitimate government structures, but rather, the deep state elements within. One thing that is not in doubt however, is that Germany, not Russia, will sustain by far the greatest damage from the sabotage. That was fully well appreciated by all protagonists of this drama, implying that it was a deliberate and premeditated attack on Germany.

Adding insult to injury

For years, the US had pressured Germany to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to cut its dependency on Russian gas. To persuade German leaders, their U.S. counterparts promised to replace Russian gas with American LNG shipments. As we now know, Germany's "friends and allies" took advantage of German compliance by delivering natural gas at extortionate prices. According to an energy investment banker Laurent Segalen, US gas suppliers could load a large LNG tanker in the US at a cost of about $60 million per shipment. The cargo could then be sold for up to $275 million in Europe, thanks to the massive price disparity between the US and European markets: in the US, Natural Gas trades at less than $7/mBtu (million British thermal units) while Dutch TTF futures recently traded at over $60/mBtu.

Last month one of the key architects of this catastrophe, Berlin's hapless Economy minister, Robert Habeck publicly complained about the situation in interview to German media. Only yesterday, French economy minister Bruno Le Maire chimed in: "We cannot accept that our American partner sells its LNG four times the price at which it sells it to its own industries." But these lamentations come far too late to mitigate the extreme damage to European economies.

Let's start with Pipelineistan. Nearly seven years ago, I showed how Syria was the ultimate Pipelineistan war.

Damascus had rejected the - American - plan for a Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline, to the benefit of Iran-Iraq-Syria (for which a memorandum of understanding was signed).

What followed was a vicious, concerted "Assad must go" campaign: proxy war as the road to regime change. The toxic dial went exponentially up with the instrumentalization of ISIS - yet another chapter of the war of terror (italics mine). Russia blocked ISIS, thus preventing regime change in Damascus. The Empire of Chaos-favored pipeline bit the dust.

Now the Empire finally exacted payback, blowing up existing pipelines - Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Steam 2 (NS2) - carrying or about to carry Russian gas to a key imperial economic competitor: the EU.

We all know by now that Line B of NS2 has not been bombed, or even punctured, and it's ready to go. Repairing the other three - punctured - lines would not be a problem: a matter of two months, according to naval engineers. Steel on the Nord Streams is thicker than on modern ships. Gazprom has offered to repair them - as long as Europeans behave like grown-ups and accept strict security conditions.

We all know that's not going to happen. None of the above is discussed across NATOsan media. That means that Plan A by the usual suspects remains in place: creating a contrived natural gas shortage, leading to the de-industrialization of Europe, all part of the Great Reset, rebranded "The Great Narrative".

Meanwhile, the EU Muppet Show is discussing the ninth sanction package against Russia. Sweden refuses to share with Russia the results of the dodgy intra-NATO "investigation" of itself on who blew up the Nord Streams.

At Russian Energy Week, President Putin summarized the stark facts.

Question: The main question worrying the whole world - will there be a nuclear war?

Sergey Lavrov: President of Russia Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that in our nuclear doctrine we envisage only response measures designed to prevent the destruction of the Russian Federation by direct nuclear strikes or strikes by other weapons that threaten the very existence of the Russian state. This is an exhaustive answer.

I hope those who constantly speculate on the topic of a nuclear war and Russia's "provocations" with WMD are aware of their responsibility.

Question: There is a lot of speculation, indeed. The Americans keep making their calculations - who will die first, who will die second, how many people will perish in the first and second days and in a month. Do we make similar calculations? Will anyone survive? Do we proceed from the assumption that it can be stopped? It feels like everything has already happened and there remains only one thing to do - press the button. We have seen everything else.

Sergey Lavrov: I would advise the Americans and their satellites, as well as our analysts and political scientists involved in such "exercises" to display maximum responsibility in their public statements.

Biden administration gave millions in tax dollars to groups after election, records show. Election Integrity Partnership says it had 35% success rate getting tech platforms to label, remove or restrict content.

A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.

The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment's prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.

This isn't the biggest news of the week but it may turn out to be so if I'm right about what this means and where it leads. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard formally left the Democratic Party in a public announcement this morning on Twitter.

Here's Gabbard's full statement:

I can no longer remain in today's Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are...

...hostile to people of faith & spirituality, demonize the police & protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.

I believe in a government that is of, by, and for the people. Unfortunately, today's Democratic Party does not. Instead, it stands for a government of, by, and for the powerful elite. I'm calling on my fellow common sense independent-minded Democrats to join me....

...in leaving the Democratic Party. If you can no longer stomach the direction that so-called woke Democratic Party ideologues are taking our country, I invite you to join me.

Germans should stop whining and be prepared with sweaters and candles this winter in case of blackouts amid the energy crisis, according to politician Wolfgang Schäuble.

In an interview on Tuesday with Bild-TV, the former finance minister and president of the German government said Germans should "just put on a sweater, or maybe a second sweater" in the event of a freezing-cold winter.

"You don't have to whine about it, you have to recognize that a lot of things can't be taken for granted," he told the news channel.