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ECOWAS fiery talk towards Niger loses edge after Biden talks with its president

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture
Sun, 30 Jul 2023 12:00 UTC
ecowas
FILE PHOTO: Biden's little chat with Tinubu says a lot about the realities of what is going to happen and what can happen on the ground.
Three interesting facets of news over Niger appear to be doing the rounds. Firstly, that a terrorist group in Nigeria has openly appealed to the Nigerian President - who also happens to be the ECOWAS leader - to avoid at all costs a military intervention in Niger; secondly, that Joe Biden took the initiative to meet the same gentleman Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the corridors of the United Nations, hinting that huge amounts of U.S. investment could be directed towards Nigeria if Tinubu played ball; and thirdly, that just recently, the stakes were raised in Niger when its junta announced that it had invited the armies of both Mali and Burkina Faso onto its soil to help defend themselves against an "intervention" which ECOWAS has threatened was on the cards only days earlier.

But Biden's little chat with Tinubu says a lot about the realities of what is going to happen and what can happen on the ground as clearly his administration does not want another proxy war between East and West on its hands before the re-election run up next year. The question of whether the U.S. would support ECOWAS militarily has been answered by Biden's bribe to the Nigerian president. It's not going to happen.

Comment: In the following article Valdai Club Director, Timofey Bordachev further explicates how the West's failed proxy-war efforts in Ukraine has made even the most willing vassals question whether hedging their bets with the West is the best course of action: The West's attempt to create a Ukrainian scenario in Niger is faltering.

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Footprints

Western nations 'trying to slow march of history'


RT
Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:43 UTC
lavrov
© Sergey Guneev/SputnikRussian FM Sergey Lavrov
The US and its allies seek to dominate others and extract a tribute from humanity, Russia's top diplomat has warned...

The US and its allies will cause more trouble in the future as they cling to a unipolar world that allows them to exploit other nations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has predicted.

Current Western foreign policy "is aimed at slowing down the march of history" and will "result in new confrontations, new difficulties for the international community," the senior Russian official warned in an address on Friday. It will be "up to diplomats to untangle those situations."

Lavrov was speaking to students at MGIMO, the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, a leading Russian university from which the Foreign Ministry recruits many of its employees. He briefed the audience on the current state of world affairs and what the students in attendance can expect working in the Russian diplomatic corps.

The minister reiterated Moscow's position that Western nations are a major source of instability, claiming that "they want to literally rule the world, to impose their unipolar world order ... to continue extracting tribute from humanity."

Comment: Russia will not do to the US what the US is doing to itself.

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Arrow Up

Rise of BRICS 'devastating' for US - congresswoman


RT
Fri, 01 Sep 2023 07:58 UTC
MTGreene
© Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/AFPUS Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks at a press conference
U.S. Capitol Building • May 18, 2023
The group can bypass the dollar, chipping away at Washington's economic dominance, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said...

As BRICS gains momentum, the US economy becomes weaker because the members of the grouping can circumvent American sanctions and trade in their own currencies, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Thursday.

Speaking to her constituents in Georgia, the Republican congresswoman lashed out at the administration of US President Joe Biden, which she said is turning a blind eye to the rise of BRICS - an economic group which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa and accounts for more than a quarter of global GDP.

The Republican firebrand claimed that Washington is "doing... nonsense" - including providing all kinds of support to Ukraine which is locked in a conflict with Russia.
"There are other countries in the world, powerful countries, organizing together because they are tired of the United States.

"In this sense, the BRICS countries are making serious trade agreements where they are saying: we'll buy from you, you'll buy from us, we don't care about US sanctions and we'll sell to one another, buy and sell in our own currency, not the US dollar. This is one of the most devastating things that can happen to all of us.

"As BRICS becomes more powerful, the US dollar gets weaker. And you know what happens to all of us? We're going to go broke."
The congresswoman added that this dynamic will negatively affect the retirement plans and personal savings of ordinary Americans:
"What is going to happen to our children, when the US dollar means nothing anymore, because Russia, and China, and India with its huge population of billions of people have more buying power in their own currencies than we do? This is a very serious concern."
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Calendar

Happenings await

James Howard Kunstler
Clusterfuck Nation
Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00 UTC
pitchfork
© action-intell.com"Grab yer pitchfork! Got some rectifyin' to do!"
"Even Americans who have no particular interest in freedom and independence in democracies worldwide, should be satisfied that we're getting our money's worth on our Ukraine investment."
— Sen. Richard Blumenthal
The Labor Day weekend looms like a gateway into an autumn hell-scape of political psychodrama, so enjoy those last clam rolls of the season before the zeitgeist darkens and events pound the shore like so many waves of hurricane surf. Further inland, where the Swamp lies burbling and skreeking, unseen hands work overtime to falsify reality in a leaderless nation. Everybody feels the unbearable tension of things as yet unhappened.

"Joe Biden" has LARPed his way to the final act of his performance. The evidence of his high crimes, and the covering-up of those high crimes by our lawless law officialdom, is piled high enough to eject him into the swales of infamy. We know exactly how the Ukraine grift went down — the documentation is stark and florid — as is the rest of family's bribery operations in other lands not necessarily friendly to our own land. So, add treason to bribery and there you have the complete kit of perfidious treachery against the nation.
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Propaganda

Why isn't the media giving Biden's lies the Trump treatment?

Mark Hemingway
The Federalist
Sat, 02 Sep 2023 14:46 UTC
joe biden
© Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Cropped/ CC BY-SA 2.0Joe Biden
One of the distinguishing features of Trump's presidency was an aggressive press corps that felt obligated to call out Trump's 'lies' — so why won't they apply this same standard to Biden who is inarguably a world-class liar?

In August of 2016, The New York Times did something rather unprecedented — the paper ran a front-page editorial by columnist Jim Rutenberg that stopped just short of openly saying the media should openly oppose Donald Trump, regardless of journalistic ethics.

According to Rutenberg, journalists who believed Trump was "racist and nationalist" would have to "throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century. ... You would move closer than you've ever been to being oppositional."

Now, Rutenberg was greatly flattering himself and his journalistic peers by pretending that any vestigial attempts at objectivity in the American media were anything more than farce, and all but the most blinkered Americans knew it. Still, the shift in tone during the Trump years was palpable. Perhaps the most visible sign was the media's eagerness to call Trump a liar and to specifically call out his supposed "lies," even to his face in real-time if necessary. The resulting coverage was something to behold. A Washington Post media column from 2019 took a rhetorical victory lap and rounded up just a few of the then-recent headlines about Trump's presidency:
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Bullseye

Rush to accept Ukraine into EU could spell 'disaster' - Austrian FM


RT
Fri, 01 Sep 2023 12:43 UTC
Schallenberg
© Lisa Leutner/AP.FILE PHOTO: Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg. Fast-tracking membership for Kiev would imply some candidates are "more equal than others," Alexander Schallenberg has warned.
The EU cannot afford to prioritize Ukraine's accession to the bloc while neglecting other long-standing candidacies, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg warned on Friday.

Speaking on Politico's EU Confidential podcast, Schallenberg said that while he believes Ukraine and neighboring Moldova belong in the "European family," the EU must carefully consider its enlargement policy.

"We can't have Ukraine on the fast-track and the other countries on the service line. That will be a geostrategic disaster," the minister claimed. Referencing George Orwell's dystopian novel 'Animal Farm', Schallenberg stressed that the EU should avoid a system in which some countries "are more equal than others."


Comment: In some ways the EU is founded on a system where some are more equal than others, some benefit from the alliance more than others, such as the northern European nations.


Comment: A number of officials and respected individuals have come out recently to warn that NATO and the EU are sowing the seeds for their own destruction:

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Briefcase

Judge rules Kari Lake lawsuit seeking mail-in ballot signatures will go to trial


Truth Press
Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:01 UTC
kari lake
Arizona Republican candidate Kari Lake announced an upcoming trial date in a lawsuit to acquire mail-in ballot signatures nearly a year after the November 2022 midterm election.

"We are scheduled for a 2-day trial set for September 21 & 25th," Mrs. Lake wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, over the weekend.

"I will never stop fighting for Honest & Transparent Elections."

Comment: See also:

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Stop

Trump says fear-mongering about new COVID variants a 'lunatic' ploy to rig 2024 election

Tom Ozimek
The Epoch Times
Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:01 UTC
donald trump tarmac
© Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesFormer President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after being booked at the Fulton County jail on 13 charges related to the 2020 election, in Atlanta, Ga. on Aug. 24, 2023.
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused "left-wing lunatics" of fear-mongering about new COVID-19 variants in order to justify the reintroduction of their left-wing lockdown and mandate policies, which included the use of drop boxes and mail-in ballots in 2020, in a bid to rig the 2024 election.

President Trump made the remarks in a video posted on Aug. 30 on Truth Social, saying that his message should serve as a warning to every COVID-19 "tyrant" who not only wants to "take away our freedom" but who would be playing into the hands of those wanting to exploit COVID-19 restrictions to interfere in next year's election.

"The left-wing lunatics are trying very hard to bring back COVID lockdowns and mandates with all of their sudden fear-mongering about the new variants that are coming," President Trump said in the video.

Comment: See also:

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Bad Guys

Secretive Covid disinformation unit worked with security services

Investigations team
The Telegraph
Fri, 01 Sep 2023 18:00 UTC
phone
A government unit accused of seeking to suppress free speech during the pandemic worked with Britain's intelligence agencies, senior civil servants have confirmed.

Documents submitted to the Covid inquiry and marked "official sensitive" reveal that the "UK intelligence community" has been involved in the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) since it was founded in 2019.

The unit was set up by ministers to tackle disinformation - false information that is deliberately spread - and initially focused on foreign interference in the European elections.

Comment: From the Times article Disinformation unit 'tried to stifle Covid lockdown critics':
The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) leads the government's response to "disinformation threats" online and collects personal data to help to explain online disinformation narratives. But a report says that it was used to curb critics of lockdown and the mass vaccination of children.

Documents revealed under freedom of information and data protection requests showed that the activities of prominent critics of Covid policies were secretly monitored, The Daily Telegraph said.

The Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office actively looked for content online it considered to be misinformation. It passed monitoring reports to the CDU and has admitted it made requests for social media posts to be taken down, according to Big Brother Watch.

...

Requests for content to be removed are fast-tracked at social media companies. One of Kingsley's tweets from December 2020, in which she said it would be "unforgivable to close schools", was said to have been passed to the CDU. Ministers denied asking for posts by the three to be removed.

The government also ran a Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum attended by civil servants and large technology companies such as Facebook and Google to discuss how to limit the spread of disinformation. The BBC reportedly attended, but in an observer capacity.

...

A government spokesperson said: "The unit's purpose is to track narratives and trends using publicly available information online to protect public health and national security.

"It has never tracked the activity of individuals and has a blanket ban on referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms. None of the people named in this report were ever referred to social media platforms by the government and any claim otherwise is objectively false."


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Eye 2

Best of the Web: US returning nukes to UK base reveals desperation behind NATO's standoff strategy - Retired US Air Force Lt. Col


Sputnik
Sat, 02 Sep 2023 08:48 UTC
F-35A US jet
© F-35 Joint Program OfficeAn F-35A releases ordnance during a dual capable aircraft (DCA) test flight in the skies above Edwards Air Force Base, California, on February 6, 2020.
The US deployment of F-35s and nuclear weapons to the UK is being cast as a response to tensions with Russia, but is in fact a consequence of long-established US plans to revive a Cold War-era strategy of nuclear standoff as a way to assert US power, a former Pentagon analyst and US Air Force commander told Sputnik.

A US newspaper has revealed the Pentagon's plans to return US-owned nuclear bombs to the United Kingdom after a 15-year absence, with $50 million set aside for new support facilities at RAF Lakenheath north of London. The switch will parallel the replacement of aging F-16 Falcon aircraft with newer F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, stealthy jets cleared to carry B61-12 variable-yield nuclear bombs.

According to a Congressional budget request for next year, the funds will help build a 144-bed dormitory that will "house the increase in enlisted personnel as the result of the potential surety mission" - a Pentagon jargon term for the handling of nuclear weapons, according to experts.

Comment: A growing number of retired Western officials are speaking out against the growing desperation of the West and how it threatens to destablise the world:


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