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US authorities allegedly sought backdoors into Telegram’s encryption.

Here’s a headline that surfaced on the internet this week: “US government tried to spy on people…” (…somebody, who happens to be the Telegram founder, “claims”.)

What a shocker. Is this really newsworthy? Actually yes – because here, we’re seeing the opposite of clickbait – a subdued, to put it generously, headline in legacy US media, in an attempt to report about some of the things Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said during his interview with Tucker Carlson.

But behind this headline lies a pretty explosive, even if not surprising story – of how countries (in reality, more likely than one, but in this case, one is named) view the backbone of internet safety and integrity, namely – reliable, secure encryption.

Long story short – they view it as the enemy.

Durov, a Russian now in possession of multiple passports, based in Dubai, UAE, and often apparently butting heads with snooping efforts from governments (including Russian) revealed during the interview how the government in Washington one time tried to “break into Telegram,” as he put it.

But really, doing this successfully, given the nature of the encrypted app, would have meant not just breaking “into” – but, breaking Telegram.

Durov spoke specifically about the spy agency activities when, according to him, they tried to recruit an engineer working for his company as obviously well-positioned to write encryption backdoor code (malware by any other name) the purpose of which would be to – well, break Telegram.

The last time he was in the US, Durov told Carlson, he was accompanied by a Telegram employee, “an engineer (…) and there was an attempt to secretly hire my engineer behind my back by cyber security officers or agents.”

What might the US agencies’ goals have been, Durov was asked.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Biden’s Inflation Narrative Dies as Price Growth Rises to a Seven-Month High

April 11, 2024

Biden’s Inflation Narrative Dies as Price Growth Rises to a Seven-Month High

“…we can expect the administration and the regime in general to continue gaslighting the public and claiming that greedy capitalists cause inflation.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest price inflation data, CPI inflation in March rose to a seven-month high, and price inflation hasn’t proven nearly as transitory as the regime’s economists have long predicted.

According to the BLS, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rose 3.5 percent year over year during March, without seasonal adjustment. That’s the thirty-seventh month in a row of inflation well above the Fed’s arbitrary 2 percent inflation target.

Month-over-month inflation was flat with the CPI rising by 0.4 percent from February to March, with seasonal adjustment. Month-to-month growth had also been 0.4 percent from January to February.

The ongoing price increases largely reflect growth in prices for food, services, electricity, and shelter.

For example, prices for “food away from home” were up 4.2 percent in March over the previous year. Gasoline prices rose 1.3 percent over the period, but electricity surged to 5.0 percent. Prices for “services less energy services” rose 5.4 percent, year over year, while shelter rose 5.7 percent over the period.

Some specific categories were well above even this in year-over-year price inflation. For example:

Car insurance prices: up 22.2%
Car repair prices: up 11.6%
Transportation prices: up 10.7%
Hospital services prices: up 7.5%
Homeowners’ prices (“Owners’ equivalent rent”): up 5.9%

Removing volatile energy and food prices from the index, we find price inflation nonetheless remains stubbornly high. So-called core CPI growth remains almost double the “two-percent target”—at 3.8 percent—keeping price inflation growth near thirty-year highs. In other words, core CPI is a long way from returning to “normal.” Moreover, March’s month-over-month increase remains at 0.4 percent, which is the largest increase recorded in any month since April 2023.

Biden Blames Corporate Greed

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey on the Imminent Bankruptcy of the US Government

November 15, 2023

Doug Casey on the Imminent Bankruptcy of the US Government

International Man: Everyone knows that the US government has been bankrupt for many years. But we thought it might be instructive to see its current cash-flow situation.

The US government’s budget is the biggest in the history of the world and is growing at an uncontrollable rate.

Below is a chart of the budget for the most recent fiscal year, which had a deficit of nearly $1.7 trillion.

Before we get into the specific items in the budget, what is your take on the Big Picture for the US budget?

Doug Casey: The biggest expenditure for the US government are so-called entitlements. It’s strange how the word “entitlements” has been legitimized. Are people really entitled to the government paying for their health, retirement, and welfare? In a moral society, the answer is: No. Entitlements destroy personal responsibility, legitimize theft, destroy wealth, and create antagonisms.

The fact is that once people have an “entitlement,” they come to rely on it, and you can’t easily take it away. The Chinese call that breaking somebody’s rice bowl. In the case of the American welfare state, it’s more a question of breaking a whipped dog’s doggy bowl. It’s a shame because many have come to rely on their mother, the State, not entirely through their own fault. The US has become pervasively corrupt.

The World Economic Forum (WEF)—a pox upon them—isn’t entirely incorrect when it arrogantly calls most people “useless mouths.” An increasing number produce absolutely nothing but only consume at the expense of others. Courtesy of the State.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

March 9, 2022

October 29, 2023

March 9, 2022

Where were you on March 9, 2022, when President Biden signed the death warrant on American freedom?

On that day, in a hushed ceremony at the White House without the approval of Congress, the states or the American people, Biden signed into law Executive Order 14067.

Buried in his order are a few paragraphs, titled Section 4. The language in Section 4 makes Order 14067 the most treacherous act by a sitting president in the history of our republic.

That’s because Section 4 sets the stage for legal government surveillance of all U.S. citizens, total control over your bank accounts and purchases and the ability to silence all dissenting voices for good.

In this new war on freedom, they aren’t coming for your guns. No, they’re thinking much bigger than that.

They’re coming for your money.

And it’s already started. These efforts are stepping up and taking on a nefarious tone that also involves surveillance and loss of our freedoms under the guise of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), or Biden Bucks as I call them.

If you had asked me about this two years ago, I would have said the U.S. is taking a rather studious approach to it. It was too important to not be involved in, but the U.S. did not seem to be in any hurry to actually implement it.

There were studies, and I would have said my estimate at the time would have been, “OK, China has it. Europe, maybe another year. The U.S. might be three or four years down the road because the dollar’s too important. They don’t want to race into it. They want to get it right. There are a lot of ways to mess it up.”

But that’s changed under Joe Biden.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Myth of the Invincible Dollar

October 15, 2023

The Myth of the Invincible Dollar

I write a lot about the national debt.

And most people don’t care.

That’s because there’s a widespread belief that the dollar is invincible.

It isn’t.

The prevailing attitude is that the US government can borrow and spend indefinitely. After all, it hasn’t caused a problem so far. But a long fuse can burn for a long time before it finally reaches the powder keg.

I don’t know how long we have before the debt bomb explodes, but I do know we get closer and closer every day. And sadly, very few people care enough to address the problem.

The recent government shutdown drama is a case in point.

A stopgap spending deal swept the shutdown threat out of the headlines, but it’s still there lurking in the shadows of the halls of Congress. If lawmakers don’t figure something out by Nov. 17, the government will be forced to shut down.

There isn’t much talk about a shutdown right now, but when people do discuss the possibility, they almost always focus on the mythical crisis that shuttering the federal government might cause. That sidesteps the real problem — out of control government spending.

Conventional wisdom is that Congress needs to do whatever it takes to avoid a shutdown. If that means maintaining spending at current levels or even increasing spending, so be it. The handful of intransigent members of Congress who want to hold out for spending cuts are always cast as the bad guys in this kabuki theater. As economist Daniel Lacalle put it in a recent article published by Mises Wire, “The narrative seems to be that governments and the public sector should never have to implement responsible budget decisions, and spending must continue indefinitely.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Desperation Creeps In

August 5, 2023

Desperation Creeps In

“There is only one way to explain this shambles: Every one of these crises traces back to the Democratic Party’s obsession with taking and holding power more or less indefinitely to suit its hubristic, end-of-history “narrative” of righteous liberal triumph.” — Patrick Lawrence

That silence you hear these dog days of a wilting empire is the calm before the storm and everybody knows it. “Joe Biden’s” final desperate ploy against the menace of Donald Trump looks about on par with the Ukraine spring offensive, hardly even worth a “hey, nice try.”

So, the best they could do was to charge Mr. Trump with objecting vocally to an election that looked as rotten as Hunter’s uncapped teeth? We all saw what happened overnight November 3 and 4, 2020: what the numbers looked like in the swing precincts at midnight and the magic mathematics that swapped tens of thousands of votes over from the Trump column to the Biden column (say, whu?) … the shutdown of the Fulton County State Farm Arena due to a supposedly leaking toilet and the ensuing monkey business with rolly-bags full of ballots under the tables captured by the closed-circuit cameras… the miraculous wee-hour harvest of ballots in Milwaukee… US Postal Service truck full of completed ballots out of Bethpage, Long Island, that turned up in Philadelphia… Mark Zuckerberg’s $419-million-dollar operation using two front orgs, the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) to staff precinct election boards with party shills and buy votes… the thumb drives and modems in the vote-counting machines….

Special Counsel Jack Smith may find it difficult to prove that expressing an opinion about all that is some kind of crime. Meanwhile, he’s turned Mr. Trump into the poster boy for the many other aggrieved victims of a government weaponized against its own people…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Judge Bars Biden Officials, Agencies From Contacting Social Media Companies

July 5, 2023

Judge Bars Biden Officials, Agencies From Contacting Social Media Companies

In an order fittingly issued on Independence Day, a federal judge in Louisiana has forbidden multiple federal agencies and named officials from having any contact with social media companies with the intent to moderate content.

The preliminary injunction arises from a suit filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with individuals that include two leading critics of the Covid-19 lockdown regime — Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya — and Jim Hoft, who owns the right-wing website Gateway Pundit.

“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote US District Judge Terry A. Doughty. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”

The dozens of people and agencies bound by the injunction include President Biden, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, the Treasury Department, State Department, the US Election Assistance Commission, the FBI and entire Justice Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, who are among the originators of the Great Barrington Declaration that denounced the lockdown regime, have been victims of social media censorship. For example, the pair says their censorship-triggering statements included assertions that “thinking everyone must be vaccinated is scientifically flawed,” questioning the value of masks, and stating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine immunity.

While the case is dominated by Covid-19 censorship, it also encompasses the Justice Department’s efforts to suppress reporting about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Doughty gave credence to that accusation.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Fake News Curated by the Deep State: Government Spin Doctors Control the News Cycle

April 5, 2023

Fake News Curated by the Deep State: Government Spin Doctors Control the News Cycle

“We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”—Former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg

Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we?

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination. These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous and the obviously click-baity to the satirical and politically manipulative.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the government and corporate media’s carefully curated apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s own role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.

Why?

Because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. They don’t want us to be more discerning when it comes to what information we digest online. They just want us to be leery of independent or alternative news sources while trusting them—and their corporate colleagues—to vet the news for us.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Comer Launches Probe into State Department’s Alleged Funding of Group Blacklisting Conservative Media ‘Under the Guise of Combatting Disinformation’

February 25, 2023

Comer Launches Probe into State Department’s Alleged Funding of Group Blacklisting Conservative Media ‘Under the Guise of Combatting Disinformation’

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, delivers remarks during a hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, on Feb. 01, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) sent a letter on Thursday to the U.S. State Department demanding records and a briefing by the agency regarding its alleged funding of a “disinformation tracking group” that is blacklisting conservative-leaning news outlets.

The letter (pdf) cites as evidence the Washington Examiner’s series of investigative reports uncovering the State Department’s alleged partnership with activist organizations, specifically one “foreign organization,” to “suppress lawful speech and defund disfavored news outlets under the guise of combatting disinformation.”

“The Committee is disturbed by recent reporting that taxpayer money ended up in the hands of a foreign organization running an advertising blacklist of organizations accused of hosting disinformation on their websites, including several conservative-leaning news organizations,” Comer wrote.

The letter goes on to detail the Washington Examiner’s findings.

According to the outlet, major ad companies look to “nonpartisan” groups that claim to detect and fight “disinformation” online to help determine which news outlets and websites they should avoid.

Some of these “disinformation monitors,” the Washington Examiner went on to explain, “are compiling secret blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech.”

One such group is British Global Disinformation Institute (GDI), which has compiled a “dynamic exclusion list” of 2,000 websites and rates those outlets based on their “alleged disinformation ‘risk’ factor,” according to the Washington Examiner.

GDI’s website further explains its purpose. Calling itself an “independent, non-profit, open source, intelligence hub,” GDI “tracks disinformation and extremism across platforms online” to “serve a broad array of governments, NGOs [non-governmental organizations], online platforms, and media.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Most Egregious Mistake

January 28, 2023

The Most Egregious Mistake

The U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood…

It is the miscalculation of this era – one that may begin the collapse of dollar primacy, and therefore, global compliance with U.S. political demands, too. But its most grievous content is that it corners the U.S. into promoting dangerous Ukrainian escalation against Russia directly (i.e. Crimea).

Washington dares not – indeed cannot – yield on dollar primacy, the ultimate signifier for ‘American decline’. And so the U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

The Biden Team cannot withdraw its fantastical narrative of Russia’s imminent humiliation; they have bet the House on it.

Yet it has become an existential issue for the U.S. precisely because of this egregious initial miscalculation that has been subsequently levered-up into a preposterous narrative of a floundering, at any moment ‘collapsing’ Russia.

What then is this ‘Great Surprise’ – the almost completely unforeseen event of recent geo-politics that has so shaken U.S. expectations, and which takes the world to the precipice?

It is, in a word, Resilience.

The Resilience displayed by the Russian economy after the West had committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia. The West bore down on Russia in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war – and with real military war as the follow-through.

Yet, Russia has survived, and survived relatively handsomely. It is doing ‘okay’ – maybe better, even, than many Russia insiders were expecting. The ‘Anglo’ Intelligence services however, had assured EU leaders not to worry; it’s ‘slam dunk’; Putin cannot possibly survive. Rapid financial and political collapse, they promised, was certain under the tsunami of western sanctions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

THE TWITTER FILES: Clandestine Government Agency Edition

December 25, 2022

THE TWITTER FILES: Clandestine Government Agency Edition

After writing quite the pre-Christmas reflection Friday, night, Journalist Matt Taibbi has decided to grace us with a Christmas Eve edition of THE TWITTER FILES – which he says details “Twitter’s relationship to other government agencies – including some that don’t like to see their name in print much.”

Continued;

2. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.”

3.They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?

4.The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

5.The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state governments.

6.Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying.

7.A chief end result was that thousands of official “reports” flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.

8.On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming conference:

…click on the above link to read the rest…

US Government in Full Scale Implosion Because of Corruption – Catherine Austin Fitts

December 21, 2022

US Government in Full Scale Implosion Because of Corruption – Catherine Austin Fitts

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of The Solari Report and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), says the U.S. government is so fraudulent that it will self-destruct much sooner than later. CAF predicts, “If you look at FTX, my question is how much of the money sent to Ukraine got laundered right back for the (2022 midterm) election? So, to me, Ukraine is not a destination point, it is a through put point. . . . At this point, and I hate to say it, but we are in full scale implosion. The corruption is that bad. That’s why I am telling you what we need is sovereignty. The federal government is not going to deliver. . . . The financial coup has reached a point where if you want sovereignty, the only person who can deliver that is your state governor and your legislature. . . . If you’ve got a great state AG, if you have great legislature, if you have a great governor, you better start supporting them. They are the people that can protect your sovereignty. You need governmental sovereignty if you are going to have individual sovereignty, and you better do it now. You have no time to be entertained by Joe Biden, Trump and Hunter Biden.”

The federal government corruption was turbocharged in 2019. CAF says, “While everyone was focusing on the teenage sex life of the Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh, the House, the Senate, the White House, Democrat and Republican, both sides of the aisle got together and approved Statement 56 of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) which said they could keep secret books. That was everybody—together. So, there is no Right vs Left. There is no Trump vs Biden…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Everything Is a Weapon: The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare on the Nation

June 10, 2022

Everything Is a Weapon: The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare on the Nation

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video

The U.S. government is waging psychological warfare on the American people.

No, this is not a conspiracy theory.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Biden administration will pay farmers more money not to farm

April 5, 2022

The Biden administration will pay farmers more money not to farm

Large black land farm in Eastern Arkansas with plowed field laying fallow. Seed and grain silos in background with sheds and farm equipment.

iStock/Warren_Price

The goal is to add 4 million acres of farmland to the Conservation Reserve Program, which takes land out of production to blunt agriculture’s environmental impact.

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would expand a program that pays farmers to leave land fallow, part of a broader, government-wide effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The new initiative will incentivize farmers to take land out of production by raising rental rates and incentive payments.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was created in 1985 to incentivize landowners to leave some of their marginal land unplanted, a plan meant to protect the environment by reducing agricultural runoff into streams and rivers, preserving wildlife habitats, and preventing erosion. Today, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) “rents” about 21 million acres of farmland from landowners, typically for 10 years at a time—a tiny fraction of the total land farmed nationwide. In recent years, the number of acres enrolled in CRP has fallen, possibly because USDA’s rental payments have not been competitive with the open market, Chuck Abbott reported for FERN News.

The new announcement is a bid to incentivize farmers to enroll 4 million more acres of land in the program to total 25 million acres, the current program limit. “Sometimes the best solutions are right in front of you,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a press release.

“A huge amount of money was essentially paid and then lost when those acres go back into farming.”

All told, the increased rental rates and expanded incentive payments—which pay farmers extra for growing buffer strips and promoting wildlife habitats—will increase CRP spending by about 18 percent, totaling $300 million or more in annual spending.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stockman: “We’re Not Useful Idiots!”

February 17, 2022

Stockman: “We’re Not Useful Idiots!”

Honest injun. We’re not useful idiots here at Contra Corner!

Actually, we thought it up all by our lonesome! Well, we’ll grant we did have a fair amount of help from Google, which insofar as we know works for the CIA, not the Russian SVR (foreign intelligence service).

In any event, at the very center of the crisis is the Washington claim that the rule of law and the sanctity of sovereign borders are on the line in Ukraine and that, therefore, Russia must not be allowed to encroach a single inch into sacrosanct Ukrainian territory.

That is to say, it is not a matter of America’s national security interest in the precise Ukrainian geography, which happens to lie cheek-by-jowl on Russia’s border, but the very governance of the entire planet: Conform to the “rule of law” as articulated by Washington or get sanctioned, outlawed, pariah-ed, and even invaded, if worst comes to worst.

We hear this refrain repeatedly from Secy Blinkey and national security advisor Snake Sullivan. But we find ourselves doubled over with laughter each time, knowing practically by heart the list of coups, regime change plots, invasions and occupations Washington has foisted upon other sovereign nations over the last 70 years.

For want of doubt, however, we recently Googled in pursuit of the exact list and came up with a systematic study by a young scholar named Lindsey A. O’Rourke. Here’s her summary conclusion:

Between 1947 and 1989, the United States tried to change other nations’ governments 72 times; That’s a remarkable number. It includes 66 covert operations and six overt ones.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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“…we can expect the administration and the regime in general to continue gaslighting the public and claiming that greedy capitalists cause inflation.”

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