Global
Above photo: President Maduro speaks to a massive crowd at Miraflores Palace on the anniversary of a failed Guaido coup. From Orinoco Tribune.
Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself the president of Venezuela a year ago but despite multiple coup attempts, he never took power and his support there rapidly disappeared. Now, with his foreign tour concluding, Guaidó’s support is shrinking around the world as well. Rather than looking presidential, he appears clownish. Rather than developing new plans to try to topple President Maduro, he is left without any concrete promises from European governments, which have been more resistant than the United States toward imposing more sanctions despite Guaidó‘s pleading for support.
This weekend, Pete Buttigieg told supporters that he became a viable candidate for president “on the strength of our vision” and “the urgency of our convictions.” Such rhetoric fits snugly into a creation myth about his campaign that Buttigieg has been promoting since early 2019.
Summing up the gist of that myth, Buttigieg began this year by standing at a whiteboard and looking into a camera while he talked about the genesis of his run for the presidency. “We launched as an exploratory committee, not even a full year ago, with a few volunteers, zero dollars in the bank,” he said -- and “without the personal wealth of a millionaire or a billionaire.”
Last Monday a United States Air Force Bombardier E11A communications and intelligence gathering jet was either shot down or crashed in a remote mountainous region of Afghanistan. Almost immediately a story sourcing Taliban officials ran on Iranian State television claiming that the dead had included Michael D’Andrea, the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.)’s special Iran task force, which goes by the name Iran Mission Center.
U.S. forces were hampered by weather, Taliban gunfire and terrain from reaching the site of the crash for more than 24 hours, and the lack of any kind of definitive commentary from Washington gave the story legs. Given the news vacuum on the story, the Iranian account was picked up throughout the Middle East, to include photos allegedly taken of the downed plane and of burned corpses. Russian Media also featured the story and it was eventually even reported, though with some editorial skepticism, by the Independent and Daily Mail in the United Kingdom.
According to its website, “Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s mission is
to enrich and connect our community through intimate and
transformative musical experiences which exemplify and foster artistic
excellence, education and innovation.” Based on its Jan. 17 Baroque
Brass III performance at The Huntington, which included works by
Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Scarlatti, Bach, etc., lucky listeners could add,
to coin a term, “transport-ative” to LACO’s mission statement. In that
the ensemble’s conservatory-trained players transport world weary
audiences far from the workaday domain of routine daily existence,
with all its cares and woes, to a more serendipitous, sonorous higher
realm of bliss.
The evening opened with a quartet enticing German composer Johann
Melchior Molter’s serene 1696 “Symphony in C Major” out of their
brass instruments, setting the stage, so to speak, of a tranquil night
with an exceedingly peaceful six minutes. The four musicians - three
men, one woman - clad in elegant black outfits, played horns and
trumpets, issuing a clarion call for calm in our whirligig, troubled
According to its website, “Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s mission is
to enrich and connect our community through intimate and
transformative musical experiences which exemplify and foster artistic
excellence, education and innovation.” Based on its Jan. 17 Baroque
Brass III performance at The Huntington, which included works by
Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Scarlatti, Bach, etc., lucky listeners could add,
to coin a term, “transport-ative” to LACO’s mission statement. In that
the ensemble’s conservatory-trained players transport world weary
audiences far from the workaday domain of routine daily existence,
with all its cares and woes, to a more serendipitous, sonorous higher
realm of bliss.
The evening opened with a quartet enticing German composer Johann
Melchior Molter’s serene 1696 “Symphony in C Major” out of their
brass instruments, setting the stage, so to speak, of a tranquil night
with an exceedingly peaceful six minutes. The four musicians - three
men, one woman - clad in elegant black outfits, played horns and
trumpets, issuing a clarion call for calm in our whirligig, troubled
Satire by comedian Mona Shaikh and Ed Rampell-
The Evangelical magazine Christianity Today's editor rebuked the president in a December op-ed entitled "Trump Should Be Removed From Office." In the interests of equal time we give the devil his due with an editorial response from a periodical on the other side of the fiery aisle:
Trump Should Reign for 1,000 Years
In our founding parchments, Lucifer explains that Satanism Tonight Dispatches will help diabolical Satanists interpret one-sided fake news in a manner that reflects their deep, utter lack of faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our Lake of Fire. It requires ranting and raving. And if anybody knows about witch-hunts, it’s us!
A new freely downloadable book
I would like to announce the publication of a book, which deals with the world's failure to adequately address the existential danger of catastrophic climate change. The book consists mainly of book chapters and articles that I have previously published, although a considerable amount of new material has been added. It can be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:
Greta Thunberg's speeches at Davos, 2020
Speaking fearlessly to billionaires and heads of state like a new Joan of Arc, Greta said:
With all the media excitement focused on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, it comes as no surprise that some recent additional insights into how the United States became a torture regime have been largely ignored. It has been known for years that the George W. Bush Administration carried out what most of the world considers to be torture. Acting as if it really cared about illegal activity, the White House back at that time found two malleable Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Busby who would be willing to come up with a defense of torture. They discovered somewhere in their law books that it was possible to do anything to a suspect as long as it did not bring about organ failure. That became the bottom line for interrogations, though in practice some prisoners died anyway, which might be considered the ultimate organ failure. The only one who was subsequently punished over the illegal torture program was former C.I.A. employee John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on it.
There has been an epidemic of inflammatory diseases that has paralleled the epidemic on iatrogenic immune stimulation with vaccines.
Extensive evidence links vaccine-induced immune overload with the epidemic of type 1 diabetes.
More recent data indicates that obesity, type 2 diabetes and other components of metabolic syndrome are highly associated with immunization and may be manifestations of the negative feedback loop of the immune system reacting to the immune overload.
The epidemic of diabetes/pre-diabetes appears to be accelerating at a time when the prevalence of obesity has stabilized, indicating that the negative feedback system of the immune system has been overwhelmed.
The theory of vaccine induced immune overload can explain the key observations that have confounded many competing hypotheses.
The current paper reviews the evidence that vaccine-induced immune overload explains the disconnect between the increase in pre-diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver at a time when the obesity epidemic is waning in children.
Introduction