President Biden has just unveiled a new $2.3 trillion "infrastructure" plan, but a shockingly large portion of this bill is actually unrelated to infrastructure.

The plan includes massive subsidies for corporations as well as state and local governments, and comes right after the administration's proposed increase in the corporate tax rate, which would raise the rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.

There's $300 billion for manufacturing, $100 billion for electric utilities, $100 billion for broadband, $174 billion for electric vehicles, and a whole lot more. A significant portion of this spending is directed at subsidizing big corporations.

Mahmoud Ezzat, a top leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, is believed to have incited violence following the ouster of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

An Egyptian court on Thursday sentenced 76-year-old Muslim Brotherhood leader Mahmoud Ezzat to life in prison on terrorism charges, according to the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper. Ezzat was convicted on terrorism charges related to violence after the military ousted former Islamist-aligned Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

Ezzat was arrested in Cairo in August of last year, with police reportedly finding encrypted software in his apartment that he had used to communicate with other Brotherhood members both domestically and abroad. The authorities previously believed he had fled the country.

A return to fierce fighting in Eastern Ukraine would amount to a crisis on Russia's doorstep, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman has said, arguing that Moscow could be forced to intervene to prevent such a situation worsening.

Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that there had been a series of worrying escalations in recent days between Kiev's forces and separatist militants in the Donbass. "The situation on the contact line in Ukraine is extremely unstable," he said. "The dynamics of the development of this state of affairs, and the behavior of the Ukrainian side, creates the danger of a resumption of full-scale hostilities."

The Kremlin spokesman added that such an outbreak would pose a threat to the security of Russia, and that it would contemplate taking steps to prevent this, "in the event hostilities resume." If this were to happen, Peskov said, "no country in the world would stand aside. And all countries, including Russia, would take measures to prevent such tragedies from happening again."

The WEF's promotion of a Chinese 'smart face mask' that tracks every breath its wearer takes is further evidence that the changes to Western society over the last 12 months of Covid are intended to be permanent.

"It's only for when you pop into Tesco's to do your weekly shop, what's your problem with that, you selfish 'right-wing' libertarian?" That's how the introduction of mandatory face-masks was sold to us in Britain last summer, by its virtue-signalling, "Look at me, I'm such a good citizen" supporters.

Masks would be temporary - restricted to shops - and as soon as the Covid threat had passed they would be dispensed with, like social distancing. Anyone who said these measures were designed to be permanent - and were part of the global elite's plan to keep the plebs muzzled up forever - was dismissed as a 'crank' and 'a conspiracy theorist'.

Well, nine months on, and where are we?

The UK government has issued a 'road map' for taking us - with the speed of a 150-year-old Galapagos Island tortoise on sleeping tablets - out of lockdown. But there's no mention of when masks and social distancing will be dispensed with.

Could that be because there's no intention of masks and social distancing ever being dispensed with? It certainly appears that way.

Norway's prime minister, Erna Solberg, has been fined 20,000 kroner (£1,713) after breaking coronavirus social-distancing rules when organising a family gathering to celebrate her birthday.

The matter came to light in a report by the public broadcaster NRK, which triggered a police investigation.

The two-term leader has apologised several times for organising the event for her 60th birthday with 13 relatives at a mountain resort in late February, despite a government ban on gatherings of more than 10 people.

The Democrats' obsession with seizing Americans' guns while tolerating violent crime in the name of "equity" should have made it clear that safety wasn't their driving consideration. President Joe Biden just made it obvious.

In announcing a series of "commonsense" [sic] executive measures, and the nomination of a former ATF agent turned gun-grabbing activist on Thursday, the White House said they were meant to address a "gun violence public health epidemic." This comes after a year of unprecedented government infringement on civil rights in the name of public health in the form of coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions.

Of course, Democrat governors and public officials were exempt from those, as were people celebrating the Biden-Harris election, or rioting in the name of fighting another "public health epidemic," racism.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for waging another "arduous march" to fight severe economic difficulties, for the first time comparing them to a 1990s famine that killed hundreds of thousands.

Kim had previously said his country faces the "worst-ever" situation due to several factors, including the coronavirus pandemic, U.S.-led sanctions and natural disasters last summer. But it's the first time he publicly drew parallel with the deadly famine.

North Korea monitoring groups haven't detected any signs of mass starvation or a humanitarian disaster. But Kim's comments still suggest how seriously he views the current difficulties — which foreign observers say are the biggest test of his nine-year rule.

"There are many obstacles and difficulties ahead of us, and so our struggle for carrying out the decisions of the Eighth Party Congress would not be all plain sailing," Kim told lower-level ruling party members on Thursday, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

"I made up my mind to ask the WPK (Workers' Party of Korea) organizations at all levels, including its Central Committee and the cell secretaries of the entire party, to wage another more difficult 'arduous march' in order to relieve our people of the difficulty, even a little," Kim said.

The Deep State just sent a declaration of war to American Patriots. This time, at least, they had the courtesy to all sign it.

On Wednesday afternoon, a collection of more than one hundred former government officials published an open letter to Congress demanding an "independent and bipartisan national commission" to "investigate" the January 6 disturbance at the U.S. Capitol.

Dear Members of Congress,

We are former senior national security, military, and elected officials who have represented or served Democrats, Republicans, or administrations of both parties. We write to encourage this Congress to establish an independent and bipartisan national commission to investigate the January 6th assault of the U.S. Capitol Complex and its direct causes, and to make recommendations to prevent future assaults and strengthen the resilience of our democratic institutions.

We also write to you with great urgency in light of what we collectively see as an exigent and growing threat. The events of January 6th exposed severe vulnerabilities in the nation's preparedness for preventing and responding to domestic terrorist attacks. The immediate security failings that permitted a lethal breach of the Capitol Complex by armed extremists raise serious questions and demand immediate solutions.

But January 6th was also the result of complex national security threats. These include coordinated disinformation campaigns, nontransparent financing of extremist networks, potential foreign influences, and white supremacist violent extremism, which the Department of Homeland Security identified in an October 2020 report as among "the most persistent and lethal threat[s] in the Homeland." As FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to you recently, "January 6th was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it's not going away anytime soon." Understanding how these forces culminated in an attack on the infrastructure of our democracy is critical to preventing future attacks. [letter continues below]

The whole world is watching with bated breath to see whether Ukraine and Russia will go to war over Donbass like many fear might be about to happen due to recent events. I asked earlier this week whether "Vaccines Are The Real Driving Force Behind The Latest Donbass Destabilization", pointing out the grand strategic interest that the US has in provoking a crisis that would put unprecedented political pressure on the EU to not buy Russia's Sputnik V like the bloc's top members are reportedly considering at the moment, but there's more to it than just that at the comparatively lower strategic levels.

Ukraine wants war with Russia due to a combination of domestic and international factors, including its ruling elite's desire to distract from a slew of domestic crises. These include its efforts to stamp out the increasingly popular opposition through a series of witch hunts, attract emergency Western financial aid to facilitate their struggling economy's recovery, and perhaps become important enough to the West that they can finally receive much-needed vaccines for their population that they've hitherto been denied for inexplicable reasons. Moreover, the powerful influence of ultra-nationalist (fascist) militias can't be discounted either.

On the foreign front, the US certainly never tires of causing trouble for Russia however and wherever it can. In the present context, any "continuation war" in Donbass could in theory impose unexpected financial costs on the country, among other potential consequences like serving as a pretext for more sanctions against it. Broadly speaking, the US might also hope that it can manipulate the optics of the conflict that it's arguably trying to provoke in order to pressure Germany to pull out of its agreement to finish the Nord Stream II pipeline, however far-fetched that outcome might be in reality.

In June of 2014, a group of American researchers published an article in the American Journal of Public Health, pointing out that:

"Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq."

To be sure, each of these wars was duly explained and justified to the American public and for all those Americans who believe that their government would never deceive them, each war was defensible and fought for a good reason.

Today we're being fed justifications for escalating hostilities against Russia, China and Iran: they're bad actors, they defy our 'rules-based' global utopia, they have a bad human rights record, they're communists or undemocratic or anti-LGBT or whatever else might work to generate consent for another big war. However, the fact that one nation initiated more than 80% of all wars in the last seventy years does require an explanation, which I submit below (originally published in 2011):

Deflationary gap

Although I studied economics at the university, I don't recall coming across the subject of deflationary gap. The textbooks I still have don't mention it, and a search on the internet yielded close to nothing on the subject. Wikipedia doesn't even have an entry for deflationary gap. Answers.com provides a single vague sentence about it.

That's strange, for we're talking about a systemic flaw of the capitalist economic system that predictably corrodes the democratic framework of society and leads to the rise of fascism and militarism.