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Best of the Web: Lithuania's blockade of Kaliningrad receives no support from West, Russia prepares 'practical' response

John Helmer
Dances With Bears
Wed, 22 Jun 2022 12:00 UTC
lithuania
© John Helmer
The action the Lithuanian government implemented over the weekend to stop Russian trains carrying sanctioned cargos into Kaliningrad is regarded in Moscow as a long anticipated move, prompted among Lithuanian officials by the British government. The initial Lithuanian embargo action has been followed by a second one this week extending the blockade to trucks and road transport. Neither action has been publicly announced by the Lithuanian government.

The first news came from Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad, following a notice sent to him by Lithuanian officials. That notice has not been published.

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauseda (lead image) has said nothing.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte announced through the British Broadcasting Corporation that the blockade was not a blockade because only some cargoes were halted, and because "Lithuania is complying with the sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russia for its aggression and war against Ukraine " . She also told the British state radio "it was important not to overreact".

Comment: In a rather prescient article published less than a week ago, St. Petersburg sets the stage for the War of Economic Corridors, Pepe Escobar wrote that "wars from now will be fought about: transportation corridors - and not territorial conquest."

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Jet3

Ukraine urging US to furnish 'fire parity' with Russia as its military position deteriorates in the East


RFE/RL
Fri, 24 Jun 2022 20:20 UTC
azov surrender azovstal ukraine russia
© Sputnik/Russian Defence MinistryUkrainian soldiers of the Azov battalion who have surrendered at the Azovstal steel plant walk on a road in the Russia-controlled port city of Mariupol, Donetsk People's Republic.
Ukraine's top general has told his U.S. counterpart that his country desperately needs "fire parity" with Russia to "stabilize" the difficult situation in the east, where Kyiv's forces have suffered setbacks against Moscow's troops backed by powerful artillery bombardments.

"We discussed the operational situation and the delivery flow of international technical assistance," General Valeriy Zaluzhniy wrote in an online posting after holding a phone call on June 24 with General Mark Milley, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Comment: RT reports on why the increasing frantic requests:
Up to 2,000 Ukrainian troops, nationalists and foreign fighters have been surrounded by the Russian forces and the Donbass militias, Moscow claimed on Friday. The forces were encircled in two neighboring towns in the Lugansk People's Republic.

Four Ukrainian battalions. as well as an artillery unit are among those trapped, the Defense Ministry announced. The encircled forces also include around 120 fighters from the notorious Ukrainian 'Right Sector,' a neo-Nazi group of up to 80 foreign fighters, according to the ministry.

The troops have been surrounded in the towns of Gorskoye and Zolotoye, located south of the major cities of Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, which have recently become one of the major targets for both sides amid the continued fighting for the territory of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics.

The Russian military has also claimed that the trapped units have lost over 60% of their strength. According to the defense ministry, 41 Ukrainian soldiers encircled in the area have surrendered. The Defense Ministry has also published a video supposedly showing those who have laid down their arms.

The head of the Ukrainian Gorskoye military administration, Aleksey Babchenko, confirmed to the Ukrainian media on Friday that the town has been fully seized by the Russian forces and the Donbass militias.

Sergey Gaidai, who Ukraine calls the head of the "Lugansk Oblast," has also said on Telegram that the Ukrainian forces might soon retreat from Lisichansk since their defensive positions had been destroyed by the Russian forces and there is "little sense" in staying.

The Russian Air Force has also successfully hit a Ukrainian artillery battery equipped with the US-made M777 howitzers in the Kharkov region. Earlier, Washington vowed to supply 90 such artillery pieces to Kiev, according to a May report by the New York Times.

The news comes just days after the Russian military claimed to have killed hundreds of Ukrainian troops in a strike on a shipbuilding plant in the Ukrainian port of Nikolaev. Last week, the defense ministry also claimed to have killed scores of Ukrainian officers after striking a compound where a meeting of commanders of several Ukrainian units was taking place.


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Attention

Powell's warning: 'Surprises could be in store' on inflation

Victoria Guida
Politico
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 10:49 UTC
Powell
© forbesimg.com/damimageserveFederal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell vowed to do whatever it takes to tackle inflation but admitted he can't control some cost spikes, including the most politically sensitive one — prices at the pump.

Powell told the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday he doesn't expect gas or grocery prices to go down as a result of the Fed's campaign of rate hikes, which are designed to dampen spending but can't help fix insufficient supply.

"There's really not anything that we can do about oil prices. They're set at the global level."

Fuel prices have soared since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, adding to inflation woes that could lead to significant electoral losses for Democrats this year. In a bid to address Americans' anxiety, President Joe Biden called for a three-month pause on the federal gasoline tax, though it stands almost no chance of passage in Congress.

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Handcuffs

Everybody's guilty: To the police state, we're all criminals until we prove otherwise

John W. Whitehead, Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00 UTC
jail bars
© Unknown/KJN
"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught."
Hunter S. Thompson
The burden of proof has been reversed. No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we're presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head. Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which "we the people" are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state's abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights:

Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people "suspected" of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
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Mr. Potato

Joe Biden accidentally flashes press conference cheat sheet: 'YOU take YOUR seat'

Madeleine Hubbard
Just the News
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 20:11 UTC
biden cheat sheet press conference
© Jim Watson/AFP via Getty ImagesJoe Biden, Washington, D.C., June 23, 2022
The instructions also tell Biden: "YOU thank participants" and "YOU depart"

President Joe Biden on Thursday accidentally displayed an official White House card with specific instructions telling him, "YOU take YOUR seat," and other similar reminders.

Biden, 79, flashed the card to the cameras while at a meeting with wind industry executives. He spoke for nearly eight minutes at the event despite the fact that the sheet also instructed him to speak for two minutes.
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Calendar

Did SARS-CoV-2 originate in Wuhan in 2019 or earlier elsewhere?

John Collis
The Daily Sceptic
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 07:00 UTC
wuhan
© UnknownWuhan Institute of Virology
What is the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated earlier than December 2019 in Wuhan, and what are the implications of that for our understanding of the pandemic?

The purpose of this article is to provoke discussion about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 by collating a range of evidence from countries around the world - the U.K., France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the U.S., Brazil and China.

The following table summarises at a glance the information presented in this article. (N.B.: 'Reliability' in the right-hand column is an assessment of how likely the evidence is, in this author's view, to show the presence of SARS-CoV-2.)

Comment: Author discusses new details, synchronicities and plausible conclusions as to COVID's origins and timeline of infection from an integrated global perspective.

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Bad Guys

Jacques Baud: "The goal is not to help Ukraine, but to fight Putin"

Jacques Baud
The Postil
Wed, 01 Jun 2022 19:41 UTC
ukraine war
This interview comes to us through the kind courtesy of the Swiss journal, Zeitgeschehen im Fokus. In it, Jacques Baud brings us up-to-date on the Ukraine situation, while providing us with great insights, in his usual, inimitable way. He is in conversation with Thomas Kaiser. [Note: This English translation of the original German interview has been exclusively updated by Jacques Baud. Translated from the German by N. Dass.]

Thomas Kaiser-Zeitgeschehen im Fokus (TK): You cannot recognize Switzerland in a certain sense. Everything that was of importance to the state is being thrown away, almost hand-over-fist. What's your view?

Jacques Baud (JB): We are indeed in a state of hysteria; and it is unbelievable how people forget the fundamental principles of the rule of law. This is a fundamental problem — you forget your own foundations, your own identity. Regardless of who is fighting each other, it is not our fight, and it is an advantage not to be involved in the fight, because that creates the opportunity to develop better solutions and help defuse the problem.

TK: A neutral state could make a positive contribution here?

JB: Yes, but that is exactly what Switzerland is not doing. It behaves as if it were a party in this conflict. This prevents Switzerland from finding a balanced, objective and impartial solution. This is a key point, nota bene for the international community as a whole, not only for Switzerland. The difference is only that Switzerland should be neutral.

TK: How is that relevant?

JB: This neutrality could be exploited, not to take sides, but to help solve the problem, regardless of who is guilty or innocent. These are different things. It's like an arbitrator. He is not supposed to be a party. We have forgotten that. It doesn't matter what the referee thinks about a participant, whether he finds him sympathetic or not, he must keep the same distance from both participants. Switzerland should be in this situation, but it does take advantage of it. I don't mean financially, of course, but intellectually, legally and morally. The problem is that Switzerland forgets that it is not a warring party in this conflict.

Comment: Baud is insightful as ever. For some of his previous analyses, see:

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Arrow Down

Energy sanctions hurt Europe more than Russia

Noah Carl
The Daily Sceptic
Sun, 19 Jun 2022 20:59 UTC
Zapolyarnoye gas field russia
© Wikipedia - Government.ru Novy Urengoy CC BY 3.0Zapolyarnoye gas field
For Europe, the merits of sanctioning Russian energy were always questionable. After all, cheap energy is essential to the running of the economy, and Russia was Europe's single biggest source. Not only that, but alternative sources - like Saudi Arabia - are not obviously more 'moral' than Russia. (The Saudis have been bombing Yemen for the last seven years.)

However, Europe went ahead with sanctions, and since February there has been a dramatic decline in Russian oil imports. Where do things stand now?

Inflation in the EU is running at 9% - the highest on record. And while this trend began before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it has certainly been exacerbated by sanctions. As the Economist notes, the "root cause" of Europe's inflation is "a severe energy-price shock". In Britain, where inflation is about equal to the European average, there are already warnings of possible blackouts this winter.

Comment: When a bunch of lying, delusional psychopaths are put into positions of power, this is the expected outcome. One would think the Fall of Rome would have been enough of a warning.

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Eye 2

Big Pharma set to control entire food supply

Greg Reese
Forbidden Knowledge Tv
Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00 UTC
Monsanto Corporation
During the 1990s, Monsanto Corporation's devastating attack against farmers; their genetically-modified Frankenfoods and their neurotoxic pesticides inspired people to push government into legislating certification standards for foods.

But thanks to Big Pharma, Bill Gates and pop culture media brainwashing, Monsanto still stands strong and is ready to take complete control of your food supply with the help of the same powerful families and foundations who already control the money and the energy.

Their plans to do so are comprehensively laid out in a recent report published at Corey's Digs.

The indoor vertical farming industry, which is a highly-innovative and efficient method is being funded by Bill Gates and pushed by the World Economic Forum as a replacement to conventional outdoor farming.


Comment: For much more context on the above story, see:

New controlled food system is now in place and they will stop at nothing to accelerate their control

"Farm to Fork": How the EU and the Davos cabal plan to control agriculture

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Pirates

Justin Trudeau informs his subjects: 'You have no right to self defense'

Leo Hohman
LeoHohmann.com
Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00 UTC
Justin Trudeau


Joe Biden has used similar rhetoric; the globalists need a disarmed populace before they can fully implement the Great Reset and global totalitarianism

Justin Trudeau is telling his people that under Canadian law there is no such thing as the right to self defense, at least not if you are using a firearm as your defense mechanism of choice.

He said firearms are strictly for hunting and competition sporting events. That's it. Listen to him communicate this message in the video below and then we will compare it to recent statements made by Joe Biden in a country that has a much stronger tradition of firearms ownership:

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