The Associated Press [HERE] and more importantly the U.S. Intel Community outlet, the Washington Post [HERE], are beginning to change direction in their narration of the war in Ukraine.

Both sources of information are starting to position Eastern Ukraine as a lost cause, with the Washington Post giving specific examples of conscripted Ukraine fighters who are abandoning the effort in the donbas region.  As noted, “after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions. The volunteers were civilians before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, and they never expected to be dispatched to one of the most dangerous front lines in eastern Ukraine.”

The Ukraine commander, Serhi Lapko and one of his lieutenants, Vitaliy Khrus, “retreated with members of their company this week to a hotel away from the front. There, both men spoke to The Washington Post on the record, knowing they could face a court-martial and time in military prison.”  Together, Lapko and Khrus describe the essential elements of a fragmented Ukraine fighting force up against a committed Russian military advance.

Even the Washington Post admits the Ukraine central government is desperate to push morale boosting propaganda which seems constructed from the efforts of the U.S. State Dept, specifically the intelligence community within it. “Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea.”

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North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson had a few things to say about protecting our schoolchildren and preserving our second amendment rights.   During a well-received NRA speech, Robinson was swinging big truth timber. {Direct Rumble Link}  ENJOY:

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In his weekly monologue today, Neil Oliver discusses the strutting peacocks at Davos who think they are masters of the universe controlling the outcomes of the sheeple masses beneath them.  However, as Oliver also notes, only the brainless frogs will sit in the pot – the rest of us, but far the majority, have no time for these insufferable schemes and dictates.

The pretense of the Potemkin village can only be maintained as long as good, moral and virtuous people extend the graciousness of patience and play along with the pretending.  Whether the Davos crowd want to admit it or not, the ranks of the grace-filled are diminishing, and the ranks of the vulgarian hoard are swelling.  We are all becoming increasingly hardened, deliberate and refusing to pretend. The control mechanisms are starting to falter, and the messaging hits deaf ears.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – The usual suspects have been in Davos again, at the World Economic Forum overseen by Klaus Schwab – the few hundred of the most unimaginably rich gathered in one place to fantasise together about what the several billions of us ought to be forced to do in order to make those billionaires’ lives better.

Those poor billionaires – for whom everything on Earth might finally be perfect, if only someone would invent the vacuum cleaner big enough to suck every last one of us peasants, inconsequential specks of dust that we are, into outer space once and for all.

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If you were to read the play-by-play of information in the U.K. Telegraph [SEE HERE], you could get whiplash from the diametrically opposed narratives coming from both sides in the propaganda war.

On one hand the western narrative is that Russia is losing, getting weaker, running out of money and weapons.  On the other hand, France and Germany are asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to release all of the captured soldiers he is gathering, while western media claim all the Ukraine retreats are “strategic”.  It would appear the Monty Python knight has lost all his appendages and is yelling, “come back coward, I’ll bite your kneecaps.”

(Via Telegraph) – Russia said its forces were in full control of the Ukrainian town of Lyman, a railway hub in the Donetsk region, on Saturday in a gain that would help set the stage for the next phase of the Kremlin’s offensive in the eastern Donbas.

Ukrainian and Russian forces had been fighting for Lyman for several days. The town lies 40 km (30 miles) west of Severodonetsk, the largest Donbas city still held by Ukraine but now under heavy assault from Russian forces.  The governor of Luhansk region, which along with Donetsk makes up the Donbas, said on Friday that Russian troops had entered Severodonetsk.

The Russian gains indicate a shift in momentum in the war. (read more)

Meanwhile the U.S. State Department, the actual combatant command center for the U.S. proxy war, along with internationally aligned diplomatic corps and the U.S. intelligence apparatus, are continuing to push the propaganda as if we cannot see how clearly staged it is.

Indeed, with the Pentagon preferring a ceasefire and peaceful negotiations while the State Dept demands more war, these are very remarkable times on the other side of the looking glass.

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Tucker Carlson accurately puts the spotlight on former presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren, as he outlines the destructive nature of the Joe Biden economic and energy policies.  Warren is an academic. Everything Warren has created and advocated comes from theory and academics.  Senator Warren has never built anything, created anything, or worked on a system to contribute anything.  Elizabeth Warren is 100% an academic and activist wonk, just like Barack Obama.

Tucker is right to focus on Warren because as we have outlined previously, control over energy policy and economic influence was the price candidate Warren demanded in 2020 for going along with the plan to install Joe Biden.  Her endorsement came with the demand that she be allowed to take her energy and economic theories and put them into actual economic policy for the Biden administration.  Tucker’s the first person I have seen to connect the two.  WATCH:

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In order to keep control over the literal application of her theory, Warren had demands for the businesses and companies that operate within the economy.  That’s why she is desperate to build mechanisms inside government policy where approvals and/or disapprovals take place.   Tucker got this monologue correct.

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Have you ever seen egg prices at $1 per egg range, or $12/doz?  Hold on a few months and perhaps you will.  That is the context for the scale of food price increases the USDA is now starting to predict.  The highest predicted change in food costs in well over 40 years, that’s the USDA warning in their revised May “Food Price Outlook”. [DATA HERE]

This month the USDA just re-re-revised the forward price outlook, and things are grim.  It likely doesn’t come as a surprise to many CTH readers because we have been discussing the convergence of events since October of 2021, when we first were able to predict Wave-1 (Dec/Jan), and Wave-2 (March/Apr) inflation.  However, the underlying data for Wave-3 is double the prior two phases.

Keep in mind the data is national & skewed toward low estimations as represented by (+).

When the USDA predicts egg prices increasing by 19.5 to 20.5% (from where those prices are now), there will be regions with much higher retail increases than estimated.

Just two months ago, USDA had egg inflation at 2.5%-3.5% range, year over year.  Again, that’s the scale of change; from a 3.5% forward outlook to a 20.5% forward outlook effective right now.

Food at home (grocery store) prices: up 7% to 8% in this monthly review, versus the April outlook of a rise of 5% to 6%. That means the USDA is predicting the highest grocery store price rise since 1980 when prices rose 8.1% (prices rose 7.2% in 1981).  There is no reason to think the USDA forecast will not rise again in June.

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Closing arguments have wrapped up in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. The jury is now deliberating.  In an unusual twist, trial Judge Christopher Cooper said if a verdict arrives today, he will withhold reading the outcome until Tuesday due to prior commitments.

Despite the evidence that Michael Sussmann lied to FBI officials about the reason for him bringing the Clinton campaign manufactured false information about a Trump-Russia connection via Alfa-Bank in Trump Tower, it is highly unlikely Sussmann will be found guilty.  The reason is simply that regardless of whether he told FBI officials the material came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign; the FBI knew Sussmann was an operative of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  It’s an issue of materiality.

Top leadership at the FBI concealed Sussmann as the Alfa-Bank source from the FBI investigators who were given the information.  Whether Sussmann lied about bringing the false evidence on behalf of the Clinton campaign was immaterial to how the evidence was handled.  Again, as CTH has said for the past two years, the background of Durham investigating the ‘outsiders’ is filled with pretending.  Even Andrew McCarthy, a defender of the institutions, outlined the FBI playing pretend as a “bad look.”

The New York Post has a solid article outlining all the pretending – “What we learned at the trial this week is that, notwithstanding Baker’s insistence that he believed Sussmann’s cover story, FBI headquarters officials fully realized they were acting on highly political information and took steps to conceal that fact.

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In a disturbing twist to the Buffalo supermarket shooting that left ten people dead and three more wounded, a report is now surfacing that at least one retired federal agent was in contact with the shooter during his planning and was sent a message of intent 30 minutes before the attack began.

New York – Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist’s plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News.

Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.

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The FBI conduct in the events of the Olympic gymnasts being repeatedly raped by Larry Nassar is one of the most blood-boiling examples of FBI corruption and criminal conduct in modern times.  No one has ever been held accountable.

Even after another DOJ re-review of the admitted lies told by the FBI agents in the case, the result today is nothing… Whoopsie, mistakes were made.  Move along folks, move along.  Nothing to see here…. Just, move along.   Infuriating.

WASHINGTON – Two former FBI agents accused of mishandling sex-abuse allegations against former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar will not be charged with a crime, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

In a statement, officials said that after a “careful re-review of evidence,” the department “is adhering to its prior decision not to bring federal criminal charges,” adding: “This does not in any way reflect a view that the investigation of Nassar was handled as it should have been, nor in any way reflects approval or disregard of the conduct of the former agents.”

John Manly, a lawyer for many of Nassar’s alleged victims, called the decision “incomprehensible” and said the FBI agents “violated their oaths of office and colluded in the cover up of the worst sexual assault scandal in the history of sports.” (more)

In July 2021 the DOJ OIG produced an absolutely damning Inspector General investigation of FBI conduct in the rape and sexual assault of U.S. Gymnasts, revealing how FBI agents facilitated Nassar’s sex crimes by taking no action despite numerous witness statements to them.

Worse yet, the FBI never reported the sexual assaults to local law enforcement… and to top it off, the rank and vile FBI agents lied during the investigation of their conduct, and the DOJ under AG Bill Barr, and now under AG Merrick Garland, refused to prosecute the FBI liars. (more…)

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) originally calculated the first quarter economy at a scale of -1.4% growth. The BEA revises that figure downward today with more data showing a contracted level of consumer spending [DATA HERE].  The economy contracted by -1.5% in the revised numbers.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the dollar value of all goods and services produced in the economy, minus the dollar value of goods and services we import. The percentages discussed are percentages of change over time.

♦ What changed in this revision to make the economy worse?

(1) U.S. inflation was revised upward (prices increased); (2) the estimate of calculated inventories was lowered; (3) the estimate of consumer spending was raised (inflation issue); which leads to (4) a massive drop in the calculation of disposable incomes.  [See the Change Table]

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