In a Republican administration the leftist media would be going bananas asking why the Federal Trade Commission is requiring Twitter to notify them of which journalists have had access to internal communication files.  Alas, with a Democrat administration in office, the FTC demand is not an issue.

It would appear the mechanisms of government are aligned to fight back against any sunlight that might be provided upon the government manipulation of the social media platform.

In a profound display of institutional hubris, the U.S. government claims they are concerned about user privacy as the justification for their involvement.

In addition to the U.S. government demanding to know who may have reviewed the Twitter company communication with the U.S. government, the FTC is also looking for a deposition from Twitter CEO Elon Musk about the status of the company.

(Via Wall Street Journal) – WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.

(more…)

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell delivers testimony today before the Senate Banking and Finance Committee.  During his statements Powell says, “The latest economic data have come in stronger than expected, which suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates is likely to be higher than previously anticipated.” Powell continued, “If the totality of the data were to indicate that faster tightening is warranted, we would be prepared to increase the pace of rate hikes.“… “We will continue to make our decisions meeting by meeting.” …  “Although inflation has been moderating in recent months, the process of getting inflation back down to 2% has a long way to go and is likely to be bumpy.”

Everything about the testimony to the Senate, and almost everything within the questioning as presented, ignores the key and central component that inflation is being driven by energy policy.   The scale of the pretending around this issue is jaw dropping.

Western governments, including the U.S. through Joe Biden, have limited and curtailed the production and exploitation of Oil, Coal and Natural Gas.  At the core of the inflation within those same governments, this is the issue at hand.  Energy prices have skyrocketed, driving the cost of everything through the roof.  The central banks are raising interest rates in an attempt to shrink the economy to match the drop in energy production.   This is their monetary policy (interest rates) attempting to support economic policy (Green New Deal / Build Back Better).

There are no lines for consumers in the U.S and Europe of people buying durable goods, electronics or shopping for non-essential items.  Prices on the products within the durable goods economy are not being driven by excess consumer demand.  There are not 25% more people buying lemons and milk than this time last year.  The prices for goods in general, and for essential goods specifically, have risen as an outcome of the input costs around energy skyrocketing.

(more…)

Coming out of the pandemic related disruption, the larger story of U.S. manufacturing has been an odd blend of good data and bad data depending on the sector.  While some manufacturing was growing as a result of clearing supply chains, other sectors of manufacturing remained soft.

In total, the full supply chain rebound should have completed around the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter of 2022.

However, simultaneous with the correction within the supply chain(s), consumer purchase activity began contracting.

The consumer pullback led to very weak holiday sales last year, and a combination of increased inventories of finished goods.

Keep in mind that Maersk overseas shipping noted significant drops in orders for the movement of material in the third quarter of last year.  Considering the lag, the previously noted inventory buildup in combination with the drops in unit sales of durable goods, would generally mean lower manufacturing purchase order activity Q4 (’22) and Q1 (’23).   This reality is reflected in the actual data as reported by The Wall Street Journal:

(Via WSJ) – […] New orders for manufactured goods contracted for the sixth straight month through February, according to surveys by the Institute for Supply Management. Manufacturing output is down 1.7% from its postpandemic peak in May 2022, according to a three-month moving average of Federal Reserve data. And the Commerce Department’s measure of civilian capital equipment orders, excluding aircraft—the building blocks of business—was down 3.4% in January from its recent high in November 2021, after adjusting for inflation.

(more…)

On March 2, 2023, the people in control of the Joe Biden administration officially announced that government control of internet content was now officially a part of the national security apparatus. [White House Link] If you have followed the history of how the Fourth Branch of Government has been created, you will immediately recognize the intent of this new framework.

The “National Cybersecurity Strategy” aligns with, supports, and works in concert with a total U.S. surveillance system, where definitions of information are then applied to “cybersecurity” and communication vectors.  This policy is both a surveillance system and an information filtration prism where the government will decide what is information, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, then act upon it.

In part, this appears to be a response to the revelations around government influence of social media, the Twitter Files.  Now we see the formalization of the intent. The government will be the arbiter of truth and cyber security, not the communication platforms or private companies.  This announcement puts the government in control.

All of the control systems previously assembled under the guise of the Dept of Homeland Security now become part of the online, digital national security apparatus. I simply cannot emphasis enough how dangerous this is, and the unspoken motive behind it; however, to the latter, you are part of a small select group who are capable of understanding what is in this announcement without me spelling it out.

(more…)

He’s not called China Joe for nothing.  This is quite a considerable amount of U.S. tech products delivered to blacklisted Chinese companies.  It would be interesting to trace the multinational kickbacks to the Biden administration.

March 3 (Reuters) – The Biden administration approved 192 licenses worth over $23 billion to ship U.S. goods and technology to Chinese companies on a U.S. trade blacklist in the first quarter of last year, according to a document released by a U.S. congressional committee on Friday.

The 192 licenses granted were out of 242 license applications decided between January and March 2022, a chart showed, and 115 of those approved contained controlled technology. Nineteen, or 8 percent of the total number of applications, were denied, and 31 were returned without action.

Republican Representative Michael McCaul, chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, released the license numbers on Friday after revealing at a hearing on Tuesday that more than $23 billion worth of licenses were approved for suppliers to companies on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “entity list” in the first quarter of 2022.

In a statement on Friday, McCaul called the approvals unacceptable. “This critical U.S. technology is going to the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance and military efforts,” he said. (read more)

Beijing knows they can purchase U.S. political outcomes. At this point the pretending is embarrassing.

(more…)

Matt Taibbi has done another extensive review of Twitter data in File Release #17 HERE. This information release focuses on the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an internal sub-agency within the State Department as constructed by the Obama administration.

As noted by Taibbi, the GEC was funded mostly from the Pentagon and the financial outlays were to various leftist organizations who constructed the Trump-Russia narrative.

The outcome of the original deception created a need for the illusion of “foreign influence agents” in U.S. social media, specifically in this instance, Twitter.  The GEC was created as a targeting system to label any voice adverse to the Obama interests as a “foreign actor.”

Generally speaking, the GEC network identified usernames and social media account information they deemed adversarial to the Obama administration, then told Twitter to take down the accounts.  The people working within GEC were political activists, financed through government agencies by the very taxpayers’ they were targeting.  Ironic, no?

I strongly urge deep weed political walkers to review the entire outline – SEE HERE.  However, in the bigger picture I would not the motive that pixel-focused Matt Taibbi cannot see.

(more…)

Much has been made today surrounding a Senate hearing where Attorney General Merrick Garland was grilled about a host of issues highlighting the political weaponization of the DOJ.  Many ‘right side’ articles are noting Garland came across as weak, unsteady and nervous as he attempted to obfuscate specific examples and larger points of criticism.

Unfortunately, almost everyone is missing something. AG Merrick Garland has a control operative behind him.  That person is the uber political Deputy AG Lisa Monaco. AG Garland isn’t the one calling the shots on these specific examples being cited, DAG Monaco is.   Watch this questioning from the perspective that Monaco, not Garland, is the one calling the shots on the weaponization specifics. WATCH:

The Washington Post article being cited by Hawley is HERE.  In the article excerpt below, insert the name “Monaco” to replace the word “prosecutors” and everything else makes sense, including the stumbling ineptitude of Garland – who was installed specifically because he was, like Biden, a controllable puppet.

[…] Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

(more…)

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was in Beijing for a state visit with Chairman Xi.  Belarus is not a member of NATO and borders both Ukraine and Russia. Together both leaders, Xi and Lukashenko, affirmed their support for a peace proposal to end the war in Ukraine.

You would think that Lukashenko violated a war commandment from NATO, the World Economic Forum and the Western alliance when you read the apoplexy from the media describing how he stood next to Chairman Xi during his Chinese leader’s first comments in public about China’s peace proposal.

When you look at the big picture, you realize how strongly the western alliance needs to maintain a NATO expanded war with Russia as the only possible path forward.  Anyone like Viktor Orban (Hungary) or Alexander Lukashenko (Belarus) who propose anything, except expanded war with Russia, are immediately attacked by the entire apparatus of western media.

It’s a remarkable dynamic to watch.

WASHINGTON DC – […] “The China-Belarus friendship is unbreakably strong,” Xi Jinping told Lukashenko, the first European head of state to be given a state visit since the Chinese leader secured a norm-breaking third term last year. “China and Belarus are the joint guarantors of international justice.” His remarks were reported by Chinese state media Xinhua.

[…] During Lukashenko’s visit, the two countries signed bilateral agreements on trade, industry, agriculture, customs, technology, public health, tourism, sports and regional government cooperation.

Lukashenko said he “fully supports” China’s position paper on resolving the Ukraine crisis, unveiled last week.

Xi also offered his first remarks on Ukraine since the announcement of the paper, which has been called into question by the EU and the U.S., though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was open to considering some parts of Beijing’s proposals.

(more…)

“Gain of function” is the innocuous sounding term for the manipulation of a toxic virus to make it more toxic.  Gain of function is essentially the weaponization of a virus to make it more lethal and explore the consequences of the biological outcome.  Because there are risks this type of research could produce a dangerous pandemic virus that would escape the biolab environment, “gain of function” research was previously banned.

As the COVID-19 pandemic (SARS-CoV-2) now appears to have originated as an outcome of “gain of function” research, White House spokesperson for strategic policy, John Kirby, is asked if Joe Biden supports that type of biological experimentation.  Kirby delivers a lot of words, but eventually admits, yes, the White House supports experiments with viruses to make them more dangerous.  WATCH:

(more…)

After the western alliance previously swore that NATO would not put any member NATO state on the doorstep of Russia, a promise that was weak and viewed by many as false – ultimately influencing the decision by Russia, NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said today that Ukraine will be joining NATO as soon as the conflict is concluded.

Now, given that statement, why would Russia even fathom entering any type of peaceful resolution to the conflict.  In essence, Stoltenberg has just turned the conflict in Ukraine into a zero-sum issue for Russia.  The only way Russia can keep NATO away from its border is to win violently against Ukraine.  WATCH (00:42 prompted):

Do you really believe the United States would be okay with Russia establishing forward military bases in Mexico or Canada?  Why should Russia permit U.S. and NATO military bases on its borders?

We almost went to war when Russia was assisting Cuba with weapons and missiles, and the U.S. will not permit any Russian interests in North America.  Why should Russia accept U.S. interests on their doorstep?

(more…)