The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives recently authorized formation of a new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Peering into the murky Chinese origins of COVID-19, especially any connection to U.S. government funding, will be a top priority. And that’s as it should be.  

Dr. Anthony Fauci will no doubt be a star witness. The former director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases at the NIH says he would welcome an invitation to testify on his role during the pandemic. Lawmakers should note, however, that in his recent deposition in the continuing case of The State of Missouri, et al. v Joseph Biden et al in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Fauci responded to questions by saying that he could not recall… 174 times. New congressional inquiries might refresh his memory. 

However, the subcommittee must concentrate more on “The Science” than on Dr. Fauci. Throughout the pandemic, federal officials who claim to represent “The Science” gave mixed messages. This left citizens eager to follow “The Science” frightened and confused.  

Take, for instance, the issue of masking and mask mandates. The mixed messages had a tremendous effect on all Americans, especially schoolchildren.   

Two weeks after the state of Texas filed a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration from ignoring a federal immigration law that prevents illegal immigrants from residing in the US if they're likely to rely on taxpayer-funded programs, a group of 20 Republican-led states, spearheaded once again by Texas AG Ken Paxton - have sued the administration again.

This time, the 20 states and America First Legal, have claimed in the suit that the Department of Homeland Security effectively created a visa program without congressional approval by "announcing that it will permit up to 360,000 aliens annually from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to be 'paroled' into the United States for two years or longer and with eligibility for employment authorization."

The lawsuit claims that DHS exceeded congressional limits on parole authority - and that the agency can only issue parole on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the agency did not have the authority to authorize the program, and ignored the mandatory notice-and-comment rulemaking requirement detailed in the Administrative Procedure Act, Just the News reports.

Since President Joe Biden took office, more than 4 million illegal migrants have entered the United States, with a record 2.4 million doing so in fiscal year 2022 alone. The crisis shows no sign of abating, with roughly 216,000 migrants crossing the border in December 2022, an 11% increase over the November totals.

That surge was largely driven by an influx of Cuban and Nicaraguan migrants, which the Biden administration took to indicate that its parole program for Venezuelans was succeeding, given the decline of migrants from that country. Migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti would benefit from the expanded parole process. -JTN

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Tuesday that Germany and its allies are “fighting a war against Russia” in rare candid remarks about the Western role in the conflict.

Baerbock made the comments at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, while discussing the criticism her government has faced for its hesitancy to send tanks, although that impasse has been broken as Berlin confirmed Wednesday it will send its Leopard 2 tanks.

“And therefore, I’ve said already in the last days — yes, we have to do more to defend Ukraine. Yes, we have to do more also on tanks,” Baerbock said. “But the most important and the crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe, because we are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other.”

The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds.

One of the key pillars keeping the dollar in place as the world reserve is its petro-status, and this factor is often held up as the reason why the Greenback cannot fail. The other argument is that the dollar is backed by the full force of the US military, and the US military is backed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve – In other words, the dollar is backed by…the dollar; it’s a very circular and naive position.

These sentiments are not only pervasive among mainstream economists, they are also all over the place within the alternative media. I suspect the main hang-up for liberty movement analysts is the notion that the globalist establishment would ever allow the dollar or the US economy to fail. Isn’t the dollar system their “golden goose”?

The answer is no, it is NOT their golden goose. The dollar is just another stepping stone towards their goal of a one-world economy and a one-world currency. They have killed the world reserve status of other currencies in the past, why wouldn’t they do the same to the dollar?

Globalist white papers and essays specifically outline the need for a diminished role for the US currency as well as a decline in the American economy in order to make way for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a new global currency system controlled by the IMF. I warned about this years go, and my position has always been that the derailment of the dollar would likely start with the end of its petro status.

Yellen wanted this to be the best of all possible worlds, but the best world she could conceive of was terrible.

In June 1996, Janet Yellen — then a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, later chair of the Fed herself, and currently secretary of the Treasury — wrote an extraordinary memo to then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Anyone who wants to understand how the world works should read it, and thank Tim Barker, a historian who obtained it via the Freedom of Information Act.

What makes the memo so telling is threefold.

First, while expressed in abstruse technical language, it shares a perspective with the most radical left-wing critiques of capitalism. Yellen goes 90 percent of the way to proclaiming, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Second, Yellen is not, of course, calling for a proletarian revolution. Rather, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “vulgar Marxist rhetoric is not untypical of internal documents in the government,” just “with values reversed.” In Yellen’s case, she is making the case for, as she writes, the positive “impact of heightened job insecurity.” A rise in worker insecurity in the mid-1990s meant everyone was too scared to ask for raises, which meant businesses wouldn’t need to hike prices, which meant even with the falling unemployment at the time, the Fed didn’t need to raise interest rates to slow the economy and throw people out of work.

Third, Yellen is not a monster. Indeed, from the perspective of regular Americans, she’s about as good as it gets at the summit of power. The problem, for those of us down here on the ground, is her overall worldview. She might personally want things to be nicer but is certain the science of economics places incredibly sharp limits on the possible, and all we can do is try to make small improvements within those limits.

A new study released this week by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has concluded that America's defense industry is "not adequately prepared" for "a protracted conventional war" with an enemy with a large military like China.

The findings were the result of a war games simulation which also relied heavily on observations and statistics being gained from the Ukraine-Russia war, and Washington's ongoing military support role to Kiev.

Information from the Ukraine war led CSIS to find that the US would rapidly deplete its munitions, particularly long-range, precision-guided ones - in merely less than a week of a hot war with China in the Taiwan Strait.

Webmaster addition: So why are we giving away all the weapons to Ukraine?!?

I took a drive down Mission street and saw tent after tent, person after person sleeping on the sidewalk.

The Tenderloin & SOMA were the same.

FiDi didn't have any tents (probably because the high-end property managers send in power washers at night).

It was beyond sad. 

Everywhere people were congregating, the surrounding area was littered with trash.

People were emptying bins onto the ground and rifling through them.

When I walked to my car a very large man came uncomfortably close to me, talking to himself in an angry, booming voice. 

“I said babe, that’s the car. So, I immediately call the police, 911.”

While on the phone, Wiggins says, the teens started “literally shooting, the passenger is shooting at us, because they seen, they ran the stop sign, they seen me go through. They like ‘yea she following us.’”

Wiggins said that’s when she started firing her own gun back at the fleeing suspects before the teens crashed the stolen SUV head-on into a car on Kings Lane.

U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.

Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.

Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.

“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”

Israeli military raids on Palestinian communities have continued to escalate in magnitude and violence during the first month of 2023, said Palestinians in different parts of the occupied West Bank.

Since the beginning of 2023, Israeli forces have escalated their military raids into the Palestinian cities, towns and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, often confronted by young Palestinians. In various areas, Palestinians began to confront Israeli raids with firearms, especially in the northern occupied West Bank.

The Israeli escalation claimed the lives of some 230 Palestinians throughout 2022, including 53 victims of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip in August.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees named eight commissioners who will review President Joe Biden’s National Defense Strategy and provide recommendations for its implementation.

But the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which is tasked with “examin[ing] the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS,” according to the Armed Services Committees, is largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.

The potential conflicts of interest start at the very top of the eight-person commission. The chair of the commission, former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.

“Iridium and its Board members follow Iridium’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and all rules and regulations applicable to dealings with the U.S. government,” Iridium spokesman Jordan Hassin told Responsible Statecraft.

Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwar's Dave DeCamp explains:

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.

Israeli far-right minister Itamar Ben Gvir has said he will ignore Jordan and continue storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third-most important site in Islam.

Ben Gvir sparked a diplomatic storm between Israel and its Arab allies and neighbours when the extremist politician stormed the compound earlier in January.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited King Abdullah in Amman on Tuesday to reassure the monarch that the status quo at the Jerusalem holy site, which Jordan is the custodian of, will be maintained.

Ben Gvir said that despite the promises Netanyahu made to the king, he will continue to raid the holy site.

"I do not conduct my policy regarding the Temple Mount according to the policy of the Jordanian government," he told the Israeli Kan broadcaster.

On the afternoon of January 10, Van Bawi Mang, a member of an armed resistance group fighting against the Myanmar military, was resting in his barracks at a camp on the country’s northwestern border with India when a loud explosion jolted him back to the reality of war.

He scrambled into a nearby ditch as jet fighters flew overhead, glass shattering with the reverberation of the falling bombs.

The People’s Liberation Army has ramped up combat patrols around Taiwan to deter Taipei from boosting defence ties with Washington, but observers warned Beijing’s increasing intimidation could cause backlash.

The PLA has sent more than 400 aircraft sorties and 80 vessels to carry out operations near Taiwan since Washington approved increased military aid for the island late last month, according to data released by Taiwan’s defence ministry.

The situation began to escalate on December 25, when 71 aircraft and seven vessels from the PLA’s Eastern Theatre Command, which oversees the Taiwan Strait, kicked off a joint combat operation in the air and waters around Taiwan.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday one of its hypersonic-missile carrying frigates had conducted “hypersonic missile exercises” in the western part of the Atlantic Ocean.

The frigate Admiral Gorshkov tested the strike capabilities of Russia’s much-hyped Zircon hypersonic missile in the western Atlantic Ocean, according to a statement released by the ministry, using “computer simulation” exercises.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the development of the hypersonic Zircon (or Tsirkon) missiles back in 2019 when he said the missiles have a top speed of mach 9 (or nine times the speed of sound) and have a range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). The missiles, Putin said, “can hit navy or land targets.”

“In accordance with the training situation, the frigate practiced arranging [a] Tsirkon hypersonic missile strike against a maritime target at a distance over 900 kilometers away,” Russia’s defense ministry said in its statement about the exercise.

It did not say it had launched a missile.

Yes, ChatGPT understands code, can write code, and can even help developers debug their code. This was previously unthinkable, and compared to previous AI text generation tools ChatGPT just seems to get it.

Billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons are on the negotiating table between Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and Afghanistan’s Taliban government, according to at least one insider.

Presidentish Joe Biden’s bungled bugout from Afghanistan resulted in a windfall for the new radical Islamic government, including artillery, attack helicopters, and thousands of HUMVEES, machine guns, radios — all left behind as our orderly withdrawal degenerated into a rout.

The Department of Defense estimates the total value of the gear Biden left behind at a whopping $7.12 billion, and now Putin is reportedly offering to buy whatever he and the battered Russian Army need.