Libertarian Leanings

Greatest Threat to Global Security...

...is Climate Change.  So says the UN Chronicle:

Climate change is transforming the way we think about security. "This will not be the first time people have fought over land, water and resources, but this time it will be on a scale that dwarfs the conflicts of the past", said the Congolese representative at the UN Security Council debate in April 2007. The French called it the "number one threat to mankind".

[...]

Anyone still convinced that climate change is purely an environmental problem should read the report published on 16 April by the Military Advisory Board, a group of highly respected retired Admirals and Generals in the United States. During these retired military officers' careers, they have stood face to face with everything, from containment and deterrence of the Soviet nuclear threat during the cold war to the more recent struggle against terrorism and extremism. And yet they categorically state in their report that projected climate change poses a serious threat to America's national security. They say it is "a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world". In other words, an unstable climate will create the very kind of tensions and conflicts that the Security Council deals with, day in and day out, yet more frequent and even more severe.

Though the UN report is years old, the threat remains current.  Fortunately we now have president who is willing to take action!  The Babylon Bee reports:

U.S.—After declaring global warming to be the number one security threat facing the United States, President Biden deployed thousands of troops to Texas and other states covered in farmland to eliminate flatulent cows.

[...]

"Moo," said one dangerous cow in East Texas, unaware that her terrorist plot to attack the United States with burps and farts was about to come to an end. "Moooooo!"

Read the rest here.

But the real news is even worse...

1/ THIS IS NOT OKAY.@cdcgov just posted its myocarditis/pericarditis update. They are now admitting that post-second dose risk in people under 25 could be over 200x the background rate (and that’s not accounting for underreporting).

But the real news is even worse... pic.twitter.com/dP1IH5ZLqs

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 23, 2021

Central Banks to Keep Buying Gold

The following article was provided by Stefan Gleason, of MoneyMetals.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The move away from the Federal Reserve Note as the global reserve currency of choice has continued in recent years, with fresh developments increasing the greenback’s stiff competition.

This has led to massive central bank buying of gold, and that trend appears set to continue in 2021. According to a recent report from the World Gold Council, 21% of global central banks plan to purchase gold this year.

Why Do Central Banks Keep Buying?

There are a variety of reasons for central banks to buy and hold gold.

The yellow metal’s reputation as a portfolio diversifier and its role as a safe-haven asset are well known and discussed.

But gold’s ability to improve risk-adjusted returns while also serving as an important form of collateral are less talked about topics that may be just as important.

The World Gold Council’s survey also indicated that no central bank has plans to sell its gold reserves this year, having fallen from a 4% reading last year.

“This year’s survey continues to highlight significant interest in gold amongst central banks, with the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic underscoring the importance of maintaining liquid, uncorrelated assets in a reserve portfolio.

“Inflation has also resurfaced as an investment consideration and may inform central bank asset allocation in the coming years. We believe that central banks will continue to be net buyers of gold, albeit at somewhat lower volumes than those of the previous decade.”

Gold’s strong performance during the Covid-19 epidemic is likely to become the top reason for central bank buying this year.

Here are key reasons why global monetary planners are accumulating gold:

1. Gold is a great diversifier. It is uncorrelated to stocks or bonds and can add much needed portfolio diversification to a portfolio while also providing credibility.
   
   
2. Gold is reliable and trusted. Gold has been a reliable store of wealth and protector of value for centuries – and that reputation is unlikely to change anytime soon. Adding gold can lend credibility to a central bank and its currency.
   
   
3. Gold is an inflation fighter. With inflation now clearly on the rise, it is more important than ever to own assets that may outperform as prices rise. With the Federal Reserve and other global central banks holding rates at or near zero while printing money each month, the need for an inflationary hedge has never been more pressing.
   
   
4. Gold has zero counterparty risk. The gold market is global, and the metal carries zero counterparty risk. It cannot go bankrupt, default, or otherwise screw its owners. Gold is recognized and valued all over the globe and is always accepted as payment.
   
   
5. Gold can be used for interventions. Gold is the ultimate currency, and having a gold holding as part of central bank reserves provides central planners a powerful tool to intervene in the markets for whatever purposes.

The key takeaway: If gold is being accumulated by the largest, most powerful financial institutions on Earth, shouldn’t you do so also?

Stefan Gleason is President of Money Metals Exchange, the company recently named "Best Overall Online Precious Metals Dealer" by Investopedia. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason is a seasoned business leader, investor, political strategist, and grassroots activist. Gleason has frequently appeared on national television networks such as CNN, FoxNews, and CNBC and in hundreds of publications such as the Wall Street Journal, TheStreet, and Seeking Alpha.

Georgia Audit Lawyer Demands Full Investigation

A major ballot audit is going on in Fulton County, Georgia.  Atlanta-based attorney Bob Cheeley told Just the News editor-in-chief John Solomon that the election management irregularities are "horrendous" and cut against "the basic principle of our democracy."

Cheeley is among the investigators approved by a Georgia court to audit the 2020 absentee ballots of Fulton County, Ga., a county critical to Joe Biden's historic 2020 win of Georgia that helped propel him to the White House.

Just the News in recent weeks revealed what appear to be major data discrepancies in Fulton's accounting of its absentee ballot numbers. Cheeley told Solomon on Tuesday that he and his team are working to "allow the truth to come out."

Cheeley called attention to what appeared to be instances of double-counting and double-scanning of ballots within Fulton's data, something he said "violates the basic principle of our democracy" and "smacks at the very heart of our democracy by undermining the will of the people."

He also pointed to extensive notes by an election monitor hand-picked by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; those notes revealed the inspector's belief that "massive" election issues were playing out in Fulton County before and during the 2020 election, including double counting and serious chain-of-custody and security issues surrounding absentee ballots.

Read the rest here.

Wild Night for Hunter at the Chateau Marmont

And Joe may have picked up the tab?

It’s May 2018, and Robert Hunter Biden is trawling through his favorite Los Angeles escort sites. He orders “Yanna,” a 24-year-old Russian native from Emerald Fantasy Girls.

“Russian, Green Eyes, Thin Brunette, an elite courtesan,” is Yanna’s pitch, along with a menu of sex acts.

“Hi, My name is Rob. I’m staying at Chateau Marmont. Are you available now?”

Yanna goes to the cottage. He smokes crack, they drink vodka, have sex, make porn. He balances a line of M&Ms on his erect penis and takes photographs of it.

All of these messages, all of these pictures, are saved on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he treats like a diary, storing every e-mail and text conversion, his financial records, and his copious selfies. A year later, Hunter will forget the laptop at a Delaware repair shop, and it will end up in the hands of the FBI — and The Post.

Clapton — Caught In The Crossfire

 

Putin's Puppet Was Who?

A 1.715 million barrel per day drop in U.S. oil production, the direct result of Biden’s policies, has been filled by oil imports from Russia.

Within months of President Joe Biden halting the Keystone Pipeline, pausing new oil and gas leases on federal lands, and imposing further restrictions on U.S. oil companies, U.S. oil imports from Russia set a new record in March.

[...]

“Last month we saw a record 5.75 million barrels of Russian crude discharged in the US, and we’re projecting a further record this month of 7.5mn bbls,” ClipperData, a commodity intelligence company that monitors cargo shipments worldwide, reported this month.

Biden’s agenda is harming the American producer while “buttressing the Iranian and Russian industries,” Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, said in a statement. He has “tipped us into oil dependence on Russia just a year after complete independence,” providing “a geopolitical gift” to the Kremlin.

Read the rest here.

Critics of the Move Are Calling This a Voter Purge

Critics of the move are really trying to retain a source of potential fraudulent Democrat votes.  The headline: Georgia Secretary of State to remove 100K names from state voter rolls. 

According to Channel 2 in Atlanta, most of the more than 100,000 poised to being removed from the list have submitted change of address forms to the post office or mail sent to their listed residences were returned. More than 18,000 were removed because they are deceased. 

"These people don't live in Georgia anymore," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the news outlet. "Then you have 18,000 people who passed. So they are not going to be voting anymore. You need to have accurate voter rolls and proper list maintenance. It also helps your county election directors." 

Gerald Griggs with the Atlanta NAACP said, "We already have lawyers on standby, I am on standby, just in case we have to file litigation. So we are going to be watching this, and we will respond if we believe voters have been disenfranchised."

Georgia has recently joined with 30 other states to be part of the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, according to the outlet, which, according to Raffensperger, "will allow them to update the registration status of people who move out of state on a monthly basis, instead of every two years."

I wonder which cadavers the Atlanta NAACP will represent should they choose to litigate.

Massive Election Integrity Problems in Atlanta

Back in January Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger went on "60 Minutes" to assure the nation and the world that Georgia's November 2020 election was safe, secure, and honest, and that the vote counts were accurate. 

Meanwhile back in reality,

A contractor handpicked to monitor election counting in Fulton County wrote a 29-page memo back in November outlining the "massive" election integrity failures and mismanagement that he witnessed in the Atlanta-area's election centers.

The bombshell report, constructed like a minute-by-minute diary, cited a litany of high-risk problems such as the double-counting of votes, insecure storage of ballots, possible violations of voter privacy, the mysterious removal of election materials at a vote collection warehouse, and the suspicious movement of "too many" ballots on Election Day.

"This seems like a massive chain of custody problem," the contractor Carter Jones warned in the memo delivered by his firm Seven Hill Strategies to Raffensperger's office shortly after the election.

That glaring notation was written around 4:00 p.m. on Election Day, when Jones observed absentee ballots arriving at the county's central absentee scanning center at Atlanta's State Farm Arena "in rolling bins 2k at a time."

"It is my understanding is that the ballots are supposed to be moved in numbered, sealed boxes to protect them," he wrote, noting these ballots weren't.

He also feared the flow of absentee ballots seemed too voluminous. "Too many ballots coming in for secure black ballot boxes," he observed.

Read the rest here.

Scientific Principles And Unprincipled Scientists

Nothing has demonstrated the political hijacking of "science" like the Wuhan virus pandemic.  Take the recent letter from a group of scientists urging that investigations into the origins of the virus also consider that it could have originated in the laboratory.

Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely” [(4), p. 9]. Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident (4). Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report's consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility (5).

As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.

Now it turns out, the scientists had been keeping mum since 2020.

Fears of being “associated with Trump” kept scientists from speaking out about a possible lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2020, according to at least one researcher now calling for a probe into the possibility.

Alina Chan, a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, admitted to staying mum this week while speaking to NBC News about COVID-19’s origins.

“At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins,” she said Wednesday.

No public health considerations, not until Trump was safely out of office, and sufficient time had past.  What if Trump had won re-election?  Would our profiles in scientific courage have ever said what they actually thought, or would they have just gone along forever, covering for China?  And doing that on the pretext of opposing racism.  Are there such things as "scientific principles" when scientists seem to have no principles of their own, or refuse to stand for the ones they have?  The stories keep changing — masks, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, lockdowns — all driven by politics.  Anti Trump politics.

Update:  A story about a possible high level Chinese defection raises the issue of biological warfare research in Wuhan.

Wuhan Again

Without naming Dong, the pro-Trump web site Red State reported June 4 on a high-level defection from China, saying the Defense Intelligence Agency had received information from him that Beijing is covering up biological warfare research at the Wuhan lab, and advanced its story to question the integrity of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Sources say the level of confidence in the defector’s information is what has led to a sudden crisis of confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, adding that U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) personnel detailed to DIA have corroborated very technical details of information provided by the defector,” it said.

Is the coronavirus a result of that research?