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Ruth King

Biden Administration Kills Israel-to-Europe Gas Pipeline by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18232/israel-europe-gas-pipeline

Biden’s decision — reportedly coordinated with Turkey but reached without consulting Israel, Greece or Cyprus, the main countries involved in the project — undercuts three of the strongest American allies in the Mediterranean region.

EastMed’s cancellation — variously described as a “disastrous decision,” a “strategic mistake” and an act of “appeasement” of Erdoğan — represents a major geopolitical victory for the Turkish strongman.

The EastMed pipeline has been in the works for more than a decade. The Israel-Greece-Cyprus project — joined by Bulgaria, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia — has long been seen as a way to diversify natural gas supplies to Europe.

The Turkish government has always insisted that Israeli gas can only be sold to Europe through Turkey.

“The Americans do not want the pipeline because Ankara might ‘get angry.'” — Theofrastos Andreopoulos, defense analyst, defensenet.gr.

“If Erdogan perceives the non-paper as some form of appeasement by Washington, he will simply double down on his gunboat diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean and play the role of spoiler in the region.” — Richard Goldberg, a member of the U.S. National Security Council during the Trump administration.

Is the Biden administration truly concerned about climate change, or does it want to prevent Israel from becoming a strategically important supplier of natural gas to Europe?

“The reversal on the EastMed pipeline becomes only more hypocritical and offensive given the fact that President Biden continues to clear the path towards completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.” — U.S. Representatives Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) and Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“This is a disastrous decision that imperils European security and opens the door for further Russian energy hegemony in European gas markets. It should be reversed.” — Ariel Cohen, veteran energy analyst, The Hill.

“Turkey is not looking to participate in Eastern Mediterranean initiatives, it wants to dominate them. Ankara’s goal is not one of cooperation but of regional primacy if not hegemony.” — Endy Zemenides, Executive Director, Hellenic American Leadership Council.

The Biden administration has abruptly withdrawn American support for the Eastern Mediterranean (EastMed) pipeline, a project aimed at shipping natural gas from Israel to European markets. The White House said the project was antithetical to its “climate goals.”

Biden Unleashes Dog-Role-Playing Fetishist On Key Nuclear Post His sexual fetishes include tying up his partner while he eats dinner and watches Star Trek.Jeremiah Poff

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/biden-unleashes-dog-role-playing-fetishist-key-jeremiah-poff/

The Biden administration’s new top dog at a key nuclear energy agency is an MIT-trained engineer whose sexual fetishes include tying up his partner while he eats dinner and watches Star Trek.

Sam Brinton was appointed to serve as deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy at DOE last month after serving a stint at the gay and transgender suicide prevention organization the Trevor Project.

Besides working at the Trevor Project, Brinton also holds a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had previously advised former President Donald Trump on nuclear waste matters.

Deputy assistant secretaries at Cabinet agencies are typically under-the-radar political appointments that do not require Senate confirmation. But Brinton’s garnered attention on social media after the popular Twitter account LibsofTikTok tweeted a picture of Brinton standing over three men role-playing as dogs.

The image went viral and brought attention to Brinton and the Biden administration’s decision to install the outspoken activist and nuclear waste expert to the Energy Department role.

Brinton has a history of promoting sexual fetishes and kinks related to animal role-playing. A post in the student newspaper at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 2017 says the nuclear waste expert held a discussion on kinks and sex education at the campus.

“Throughout the entire talk, Brinton was open about his experiences, the kinks he partakes in, and the nature of his relationships,” the article reads. “He left us with countless anecdotes, like how he enjoys tying up his significant other like a table, and eating his dinner on him while he watches Star Trek.”

The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

One Super Bowl, Two National Anthems? The uses and misuses of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/one-super-bowl-two-national-anthems-bruce-bawer/

His mother was a white girl who’d been abandoned by her black baby daddy before the infant’s birth. She gave the child up for adoption, and he found a home with a white couple who’d lost two sons because of heart defects. By all accounts they were loving parents. Yet six years ago, during a pre-game performance of the national anthem, their adopted son, who’d become a NFL quarterback, introduced the toxic business of “taking a knee” as a protest against the purported oppression of black people by white Americans. With that one action, Colin Kaepernick unleashed a whirlwind of mischief that inflicted very real and substantial damage upon his country’s precious, hard-won social cohesion, thereby ensuring that he would go down in history not as an athlete but as an activist with a thoroughly destructive legacy.

If the impact of Kaepernick’s actions extended to every corner of American society, their first impact was on his own sport. As “taking the knee” became popular in the world of football – professional, college, and high-school alike – boys and men who’d learned to regard one another as teammates, as brothers, now saw themselves as irremediably divided by skin color. This sense of racial division was exacerbated just this past February 1, when Brian Flores, a former coach who is both black and Hispanic and who was fired last month by the Miami Dolphins after two successful seasons on the job, filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL alleging racism in the “hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.”

Trump Really Was Spied On Durham says techies linked to the Clinton campaign had access to White House and Trump Tower internet data.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-really-was-spied-on-2016-clinton-campaign-john-durham-court-filing-11644878973?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Special Counsel John Durham continues to unravel the Trump-Russia “collusion” story, and his latest court disclosure contains startling information. According to a Friday court filing, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign effort to compile dirt on Donald Trump reached into protected White House communications.

The filing relates to Mr. Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign while he worked for the Perkins Coie law firm. Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show secret internet communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information solely as a good citizen—failing to disclose his ties to the Clinton campaign. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

The indictment revealed that Mr. Sussmann worked with “Tech Executive-1,” who has been identified as Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar Inc. The indictment says Mr. Joffe used his companies, as well as researchers at a U.S. university, to access internet data, which he used to gather information about Mr. Trump’s communications.

Mr. Durham says Mr. Joffe’s “goal” was to create an “inference” and “narrative” about Mr. Trump that would “please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at [Perkins Coie] and the Clinton Campaign.”

A plague of phony experts and elites Totalitarian ideas are now out in the open Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/plague-phony-experts-elites-anthony-fauci-canada/

Quick: what do you think when someone tries to convince you of something by prefacing their remarks with the phase “Experts say”?

I think of that rude, two-word imperative of Germanic origin that ends in “You.”

As Laplace said in another context, it is par expériences nombreuses et funestes that I have this almost Pavlovian reaction.

The “experts,” alas, are not expert, i.e, “possessing a high degree of skill in or knowledge of” a certain subject.

For proof of my contention I offer the name of Anthony Fauci or the organization that glories in the acronym CDC, that is, the Centers for Disease Control. They are both a bit like Michael Avenatti, once championed everywhere as a genius and presidential material, but now universally exposed and discredited. Remember last year when the public health “experts” said that it was dangerous for people to gather in crowds, but entirely OK if the gathering was for the purpose of promoting Black Lives Matter? Fun times.

In the coming months, as the Democrats loosen the preposterous, virtue-signaling, counterproductive mask mandates, requirements to display your “vaccination status,” etc., just remember that it is not because “the science” has changed. The data never supported those draconian expedients. What’s changed are the polls, and the Dems are nervously eying the 2022 midterm elections. They are right to be nervous.

But I digress. The plague of experts we face is akin to the plague of locusts, vividly recounted in Book 10 of Exodus. “And the locusts went up over all the land… very grievous were they; For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened,” and so on. The key thing to appreciate, however, is the link between experts and another short word beginning with the letter “e,” “elites.”

ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE A YEAR AGO?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/15/are-you-better-off-than-you-were-a-year-ago/

Turn the clock back a year. President Joe Biden, just weeks after taking office, was pitching his American Rescue Plan, saying that “It’s big, and it’s bold. And it’s a real answer to the crisis we’re in.”

Biden promised that the $2 trillion spending spree would “generate more growth, higher incomes, a stronger economy, and our nation’s finances will be in a stronger position.” We’d be at “full employment by the beginning of next year.”

Well, here it is. Next year. And nothing Biden promised has come to pass. By most measures, in fact, we’re worse off than we were before Biden “rescued” us.

The economy is growing more slowly than expected. Incomes are being eaten up by rising inflation. Optimism is below where it was during the height of the pandemic in 2020. The nation’s finances are in far worse shape, with the national debt up $1.8 trillion since Biden took office. We’re still nearly 3 million jobs shy of the previous peak. Oh, and COVID deaths under Biden now top 430,000 – more deaths than happened while Donald Trump was president.

Let’s go through some of the specifics of how we’re worse off than a year ago.

The Ugly Vilification of ‘Freedom’ By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-ugly-vilification-of-freedom/

Pundits are attempting to cast the fundamental value as a ‘far-right’ code word, reinventing the notion of liberty itself.

T he Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently set out to explain why the word “freedom” has become a “useful rallying cry” for protesters in the trucking convoy. Freedom, it added, “has become common among far-right groups, experts say.”

It’s worth noting here that the addendum “experts say” is perhaps the laziest scam run by contemporary political journalism. It is little more than columnizing by proxy, or what Kyle Smith calls, “opinion laundering.” Journalists scan the websites of think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities to find some credentialed ideologue who will repeat every tedious bit of liberal conventional wisdom the reporter already believes. While we may need experts to explain quantum computing or synthesize complex mathematical data for us, we hardly need them to smear political adversaries. Reporters are already aficionados in that field.

Take Gary Mason, a national affairs columnist at the Globe and Mail, who contends that truck-protest supporters such as Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre “have weaponized” the word “freedom” — a “word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the U.S.”

The problem isn’t merely that Mason insinuates that anyone using the rhetoric of liberty is on the “far right,” or that he doesn’t seem to comprehend the difference between negative and positive liberties. Mason takes the authoritarian position — shared by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who says that protesting truckers hold “unacceptable views” — that speech is no longer a genuine liberty if it is used for allegedly “selfish, malicious purposes.”

Biden’s Department Of Homeland Security Announces It Will Investigate Thought Crimes By: Jim Hanson

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/14/bidens-department-of-homeland-security-announces-it-will-investigate-thought-crimes/

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that outlined their thought crime agenda.

The Biden administration has been steadily ratcheting up its abuse of power to attack political enemies and criminalize dissent. The egregious overcharging and heinous treatment of January 6 detainees in the DC gulag is one painful example. But it’s making even more dangerous moves toward creating thought police. And they are bold enough to announce it publicly.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin on Feb. 7, 2022 that outlined their thought crime agenda. It states, “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM).”

“False or misleading narratives” could very well be used to describe the entire programming schedule of CNN and MSNBC. They even have a TLA (three-letter acronym) for the problem, so you know we’re deep into a bad government solution.

Electronic Voting Machine Problems Media Report Major Problems With Electronic Voting

Below are quotes from revealing major media articles and links to an excellent documentary exposing serious problems with electronic voting machines. These weaknesses allow any foreign power like Russia and even powerful domestic groups to easily manipulate vote tallies.
 
Though some of these articles are several years old, many electronic voting machines being used now are 10 years old or more. Below these quotes, excerpts from an excellent article describe vital problems that have existed within the elections system for many decades.
 
Though one party may benefit more than others, this is not a partisan issue. We invite all who care about democracy to work towards fair elections which truly reflect the will of the people. For how you can make a difference, see the “What you can do” section at the end.
 
Major Media Articles Reveal Major Electronic Voting Machine Problems

MSNBC – A 2011 article titled “It only takes $26 to hack a voting machine” states, “Researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have developed a hack that, for about $26 and an 8th-grade science education, can remotely manipulate the electronic voting machines used by millions of voters all across the U.S. The electronic hacking tool consists of a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8. Together with the $15 remote control, which enabled the researchers to modify votes from up to a half-mile away, the whole hack runs about $26.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44706301/ns/technology_and_science-security – 9/28/2011
 
Christian Science Monitor – A 2015 article states, “Computer security experts have warned for years that some voting machines are vulnerable to attack. In Virginia, the state Board of Elections decided to impose an immediate ban on touchscreen voting machines used in 20 percent of the state’s precincts. When state auditors investigated [they found that] while using their smartphones, they were able to connect to the voting machines’ wireless network, which is used to tally votes. Other state investigators easily guessed the system’s passwords — in one case, it was ‘abcde’ — and were then able to change the vote counts remotely without detection.”
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/16/399986331… – 4/16/2015

Washington Post – An article titled “A Single Person Could Swing an Election” describes the test of a team of cybersecurity experts. The article states, “The experts … concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR200606… – 6/28/2006

Stick with sanctions in Iran BY Lawrence J. Haas

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/594104-stick-with-sanctions-in-iran

“Society is in a state of explosion,” an official from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned in a leaked seven-page state document that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently reported on, and “social discontent has risen by 300 percent in the past year.”

Iran’s clerical army has good reason to be worried. Rising public discontent, officials acknowledge, is driven by its sinking economy, which has been battered by tough U.S. sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program as well as Tehran’s economic mismanagement.

All of which raises an important question or two for Washington: Why push so hard for an agreement that would revive the 2015 global nuclear deal with Iran and lift those crippling sanctions? Why not let the sanctions, which seem to be threatening the stability of Iran’s dangerous theocracy, keep working?

The talks over reviving the 2015 deal — officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, from which President Trump withdrew the United States in 2018 — resumed last week in Vienna, and U.S. and other officials suggest that a deal may be in sight.

The Biden administration certainly seems eager for that to happen. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed waivers last week that will lift some sanctions on Iran’s “civilian” nuclear program, enabling foreign countries and companies to work on civilian projects at various Iranian nuclear sites.

U.S. officials say that the waivers do not represent up-front concessions to Tehran as part of the Vienna negotiations. “We did NOT provide sanctions relief for Iran and WILL NOT until/unless Tehran returns to its commitments under the JCPOA,” State Department spokesman Ned Price tweeted.