Addressing a ceremony at the Daejeon national cemetery to commemorate the anniversary of West Sea Defense Day, Yoon declared that South Korea would "drastically strengthen our three-axis system in the face of North Korea's nuclear and missile advancements and provocations and will further solidify security cooperation with the United States and also trilaterally with the United States and Japan." His remarks followed North Korea's claim that it had successfully simulated cruise missile attacks and an underwater nuclear drone launch.

 Valerie Plame Wilson landed herself in hot social media water when she tweeted out a link to a story titled "America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars" on Thursday without any commentary to explain why she was sharing it.

The article, published in The Unz Review, was published Tuesday by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA case officer and Army intelligence officer. Subtitled "Shouldn't they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?," Giraldi argued that American Jews are pushing for war in the Middle East and pointed to Iran in particular, which he said "does not conceivably threaten the United States."

American Jews, according to Giraldi, are faking the threat and dragging politicians and the media down with them. American Jews with an attachment to Israel, he added, should not be allowed anywhere near positions where they might deal with Middle East policy because it would be a "conflict of interest."

The Wagner PMC which is fighting for the city of Bakhmut warned that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have trained about 200 thousand reservists and received a large amount of military equipment from NATO. The Ukrainian military is expected to attempt large-scaled offensive operations on the Donbass front lines, including in Bakhmut. The head of the Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin urged the Russian Defense Ministry to join forces, because the “Bakhmut meat grinder” can only work well in case of full cooperation.

“Ukrainians have received a large number, a very large number of various NATO equipment, various armored vehicles, tanks, Leopards, <…> and have prepared reserves of about 200 thousand people,” Prigozhin said.

According to Yevgeny Prigozhinm, up to 80,000 Ukrainian servicemen are concentrated in the Bakhmut region, including in Konstantinovka, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Chasov Yar, Seversk and Druzhkivka.

US weapons abroad are being relocated in line with Washington’s new strategic priorities. According to recent reports, the US will send old and outdated attack aircraft to the Middle East, replacing the modern and advanced aircraft that are currently stationed in the region. The goal is to transfer the most efficient military equipment to Europe and the Pacific, where it can eventually be used against Russian and Chinese forces – which are currently the main concerns for the US government.

The data was shared in an article published by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on March 21. According to information obtained by the authors, there is a plan to redistribute the planes in April. It is planned that aircraft of the type A-10, an older and less efficient model, will be sent to American bases in the Middle East. WSJ sources inform that the Pentagon considers such planes to be strong enough to protect US interests in the Middle East, therefore there is no need for more modern and equipped jets.

“The imperative is to get the most suitable aircraft to the Pacific for the higher threat challenges (…) The A-10 is still relevant to the mission CENTCOM (United States Central Command) flies over the Middle East”, Larry Stutzriem, a retired Air Force major general, told WSJ.

More than a dozen state financial officers are writing to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to call on the bank to root out any internal political or anti-religious bias that may result in adverse decisions against clients of the nation’s largest bank.

The letter addressed to Dimon was signed by a group of 14 Republican state auditors, controllers, and treasurers who wrote to "convey our concern that the bank is engaged in what appears to be politically motivated de-banking of certain industries, individuals, and groups."

"In light of this concern, we urge Chase to immediately take steps to identify and address internal drivers of political or anti-religious bias that could undermine its fiduciary obligations and impair the freedom of its customers to access financial services without fear of discrimination," the group wrote.

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report. Unsurprisingly alarming, the report aimed to turn up the heat on governments, the business world, and every one of us to do more about the energy transition. Decarbonization, the report said, had to move faster and more dramatically. Yet that wasn’t the only document that made the headlines this week. Shell also released a report in which it detailed two different scenarios for the future to 2050. In those scenarios, the supermajor’s analysts pitted energy security against the energy transition – something the IPCC reports have never done. 

The choice between energy security and decarbonization is not one that tends to attract a lot of attention. It is a sensitive topic because it exposes the shortcomings of low-carbon energy. Yet, as Europe found out last year, it may be wise to discuss this topic before we splash $110 trillion on the energy transition.

In one of its scenarios, dubbed Archipelagos, Shell paints a familiar picture of the world of the future, at least politically. With a focus on energy security rather than decarbonization, the Archipelagos scenario describes a world similar to 19th-century Europe, where spheres of interest shift and nations ally with a view to energy security and resilience.

At a congressional hearing on Thursday, Democratic Representative Cori Bush of Missouri expressed her disapproval of Republicans' interpretation of the Second Amendment.

She argued that they prioritize "toys" over lives and favor the U.S. having an even higher share of the world's gun supply. In her words, this is a "perverted view of the Second Amendment."

"We will not succumb to the nihilist, insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment. We will not allow the apologists for gun violence to win. We will double down on a public health response to the public health emergency that is gun violence in our country," the lawmaker declared.

Webmaster addition: She actually admitted it. They are afraid of an insurrection!

At Thursday's House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government hearing, witnesses testified to the chilling effects of the Biden Administration's actions on parents' fundamental rights.

In October 2020, at the National School Boards Association's request, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to use the same tools they use to fight domestic extremism to handle the "increase in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school board members." This letter remains in effect, despite the Association's subsequent apology for their involvement in its issuance. Nicole Neily, President of Parents Defending Education, said, "No one who has been involved in the genesis of this letter has been held accountable…We demand to know how our tax dollars were used against us."

The original 2020 Covid-19 was not natural and was always a bioweapon!
Professor Francis A. Boyle is here to detail why Covid-19 is an offensive biological warfare weapon!
The Chinese Wuhan BSL4 lab is China’s Fort Detrick.
The FDA helped develop the Covid-19 biowarfare agent and is also involved in approving the clot shot vaccines for public consumption.
The Wuhan BSL4 previously published on their website that they successfully aerosolized viruses.
The only reason to aerosolize a virus is to use it as a weapon.
American intelligence services knew from the very beginning that Facui and Collins funded the creation of Covid-19!
mRNA technology was paid for, financed, and envisioned by the Pentagon’s DARPA.

What has just taken place in Moscow is nothing less than a new Yalta, which, incidentally, is in Crimea. But unlike the momentous meeting of US President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in USSR-run Crimea in 1945, this is the first time in arguably five centuries that no political leader from the west is setting the global agenda.

It’s Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin that are now running the multilateral, multipolar show. Western exceptionalists may deploy their crybaby routines as much as they want: nothing will change the spectacular optics, and the underlying substance of this developing world order, especially for the Global South.

What Xi and Putin are setting out to do was explained in detail before their summit, in two Op-Eds penned by the presidents themselves. Like a highly-synchronized Russian ballet, Putin’s vision was laid out in the People’s Daily in China, focusing on a “future-bound partnership,” while Xi’s was published in the Russian Gazette and the RIA Novosti website, focusing on a new chapter in cooperation and common development.

The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after, the Western media are at it again.

This week, March 20, saw the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war launched on Iraq. The war resulted in over one million deaths and a decade of brutal military occupation. It spawned sectarian civil war, millions of displaced and destitute, and terrorism that engulfed the entire Middle East, as well as large swathes of Africa and Asia. Iraq and several other ancient nations have been destroyed because of the Anglo-American war. And it was a war based on flagrant American and British lies over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war on Iraq, which was also supported by NATO partners, should be an occasion for proper accounting with Nuremberg-standard war crimes prosecutions of American and British political and military figures. Persons such as George W Bush, the former U.S. President, and Tony Blair, the ex-British premier, should be facing jail time for capital crimes. The current U.S. President Joe Biden should also be in the dock since his role as a senior Senator at the time was crucial in enabling the war. Also up for indictment are several Western media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post which promulgated the lies that made the case for war.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq for regime change coincides with the 12th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Syria for regime change. March 2003 and March 2011 have a great deal in common, but that is not where the story begins.

The destruction of two nations, sitting side by side in the Middle East, began in 1996 with the strategy paper called “A Clean Break”, written by the man known as “The Architect of the Iraq War”.

“A Clean Break” was authored in part by Richard T. Perle, an American Jew from New York. Being born a Jew is not paramount to this story, but being an Israeli agent is. There should be a test when working on sensitive and top-secret plans for the U.S., that your allegiance is sworn to the U.S. and no other country on earth. Perle was an American, but his allegiance lay elsewhere.

French president Emmanuel Macron has declared he will govern France like Jupiter, the Roman king of the gods, shortly after officials told the media his thought process was “too complex” for journalists to understand.

Summoning over 900 politicians from both houses of the French parliament to a rare Congress at the palace of Louis XIV – the ‘Sun King’ – in Versailles, he threatened to overrule lawmakers with a referendum if they try to frustrate the “reforms” he wishes to impose on the legislature. Such assemblies are usually reserved for times of national crisis.

Reuters reports him as saying he desires to reign as a “Jupiterian” president – “a remote, dignified figure, like the Roman god of gods, who weighs his rare pronouncements carefully”.

Brannon tweeted about the Anarchist tattoo she noticed on the neck of the “Trump supporter” who asked the “Q-Anon Shaman” to prove he wasn’t wearing a wire.  He “joined in jumping an cheering” with the crowd of actual Trump supporters,” she reported. But then, something caught her eye, “I noticed his circle-A tattoo—the classic symbol prominently associated with Antifa and anarchists,” she tweeted.

He knew I noticed, then put his hoodie up,” she wrote.

Oops! And just like that—when Brannon noticed the Anarchist neck tat, he quickly hid it by pulling up his hoodie.

Russian forces destroyed a Ukrainian army’s fuel depot in the Zaporozhye Region over the past day during the special military operation in Ukraine, Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov reported on Thursday.

"In the area of the settlement of Zaliznichnoye in the Zaporozhye Region, a depot storing fuel and lubricants of the Ukrainian army’s 65th mechanized brigade was destroyed," the spokesman said.

In the past 24 hours, operational/tactical and army aviation, missile troops and artillery of the Russian group of forces struck 76 Ukrainian artillery units at firing positions, manpower and equipment in 114 areas, the general specified.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has admitted that his country's army is currently unable to launch a counteroffensive in the east, explaining this by a lack of necessary weapons, according to his interview with Japan's largest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun.

"We can't launch it [a counteroffensive] yet. Without tanks, artillery and [American multiple rocket launchers] HIMARS, we cannot send our brave soldiers to the front lines," the Ukrainian leader said. He also pointed to the serious shortage of ammunition, stressing that Kiev was currently awaiting deliveries from partners.

When touching upon the possibility of resuming peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, Zelensky opined that "absolutely no conditions have been formed for this."

The US still contends with the consequences of invading Iraq 20 years ago

… there is [sic] not many who would come to the defense of this and think that this was a wise intervention that, again, I mean, I think mostly because there are two sides to the case.

 One which is there was no justification for doing it all in the first place, or, which is one kind of critique and the other is that well, there was a justification, but only if you were capable of making sure that what came after was not worse than what happened before and the combination of the two makes this pretty flawed.

Jim Steinberg, Former US Deputy Secretary of State

Days after hosting CIA-bankrolled anti-Iran rabble-rousers in Paris last November, French President Emmanuel Macron quite animatedly labeled violent riots in Iran as a whimsical “revolution”. 

"Diplomacy is talking with people you disagree with and trying to do something useful,” he said at the time, not knowing or not wanting to know that the real revolution was brewing at home.

For the past three months, anti-government protests have gripped France over Macron’s controversial move to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, reminding many of the yellow vest movement, an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of global socio-economic movements.

In recent days, protests in France have gathered momentum, with millions of people taking to the streets across the country, demanding the ouster of Macron’s unpopular government.

Iran may be about to get hit.  Three Strato-tankers just went airborne over Iraq.  LIVE UPDATES BELOW . . .

-USAF KC135R 60-0365

-USAF KC135R 62-3533

-USAF KC135T 58-0069

Putting that much air refueling capability into action signifies a big air operation is about to take place.  Something big is happening.

Kosovo will respect its international obligations and implement the measures agreed last week as part of a deal aimed at normalising relations with Serbia, Prime Minister Albin Kurti told lawmakers on Thursday.

Last Saturday, Pristina and Belgrade verbally agreed to implement a Western-backed plan on how to improve ties in the wake of a war in the late 1990s and decades of tense relations. Normalising relations is a condition both Balkan countries must meet to speed up their path to joining the European Union.

"If we want to be treated as a state and be recognised as such, I cannot avoid the obligations from the international treaties that we have agreed," Kurti told lawmakers as he explained the plan in parliament for the first time.

Palestinian prisoners suspended on Wednesday night a hunger strike that was planned to start today after the Israel Prison Services (IPS) conceded to their demands and stopped all punitive and arbitrary measures against them, the official news agency WAFA reported.

The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said in a brief statement that the prisoners decided to suspend the hunger strike after the IPS decided, following a long meeting with representatives of the prisoners, to cancel all punitive measures imposed against them called for by Israeli Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

The prisoners have declared a mutiny against prisoner rules since February 4, following the implementation of repressive measures against them.

BP has pumped oil worth £15.4bn in Iraq since 2011 when it began production in the country for the first time in nearly four decades, new analysis shows.

The new information comes on the 20-year anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, which was judged to be illegal by the UN. However, neither US president George W Bush nor British prime minister Tony Blair, the leaders who prosecuted the war, have been subjects of a criminal investigation. 

The invasion began in March 2003 and unleashed a catastrophic humanitarian disaster with an estimated 655,000 Iraqis killed in the first three years of conflict, or 2.5% of the population. 

It was widely denounced as a war for oil on the part of the US and UK: Iraq holds the world’s fifth largest proven oil reserves. Iraq had no connection to the September 11th terrorist attacks which had taken place 18 months before and initiated the so-called “War on Terror”. 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to increase the flow of water along the Tigris River to drought-stricken Iraq for one month following a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani, Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Tuesday, 22 March.

Erdogan stated that he was aware of the “urgent need for water” in war-scarred Iraq and that “The issue of water will hopefully be resolved.”

“For one month, we have taken the decision to increase the volume of water flowing along the Tigris River,” Erdogan stated in a joint media appearance with Sudani.

We have been discussing a comprehensive effort by the Biden Administration to blacklist or censor citizens accused of “disinformation” or “misinformation.” This effort includes dozens of FBI agents and other agency employees who worked with social media companies to bar or suspend accounts.  It also included grants to academic and third party organizations to create blacklists or pressure advertisers to withdrew support for conservative sites. Now, another such grant through the National Science Foundation has been identified, which gave millions to professors to develop a misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.” The tool will help fight “skepticism” and reinforce “trust” in what the government and the programmers define as true or reliable viewpoints.

The National Science Foundation reportedly awarded grants in 2021 and 2022 for more than $5.7 million for the development of Course Correct to allow media and government officials to target misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. In addition, a Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act-funded NSF grant supported the application of Course Correct to mental health issues.

The system would use machine learning and other means to identify social media posts pertaining to electoral skepticism and vaccine hesitancy, including flagging at-risk online communities for intervention. Sound familiar?

This is very similar to the effort on the other grants through offices like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Webmaster addition: All of this is a violation of the First Amendment!

Nearly two million Ukrainians – mostly women, children and the elderly – are pouring out of their country, becoming refugees in surrounding European countries, mostly Poland. Some of these refugees are finding their way to Israel, but like many issues in that country, controversies have followed.

The first flights carrying Ukrainians eligible for immigration to Israel arrived Mar. 6, from Moldova, Poland and Romania. They were assisted logistically and financially by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

The market’s in a highly unstable state right now. These violent swings show the inadequacy of the standard models that the Fed and other mainstream analysts use.

The Fed assumes so many things about markets that are simply false, like that markets are always efficient, for example. They’re not. Under volatile conditions like these they gap up and down — they don’t move in rational, predictable increments like the “efficient-market hypothesis” supposes.

The problem is that the Fed’s models are empirically false.

Studies have proven how faulty their models are. The Fed has the worst forecasting record in the world. It’s basically been wrong every year since 2009.

Equilibrium models like the Fed uses basically say the world runs like a clock and occasionally it gets knocked out of equilibrium. And all you have to do is tweak policy or manipulate some variable to push it back into equilibrium.

It’s like resetting a clock. That’s a shorthand way of describing what an equilibrium model is. They treat markets like they’re some kind of machine. It’s a 19th-century, mechanistic approach.

But traditional approaches that rely on static models bear little relationship to reality.

"I’m not defending TikTok as a company, I’m defending my entire generation," said 19-year-old Harvard freshman, Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who founded a group in 2020 called TikTok for Biden (now called Gen Z for Change, having been formally incorporated as a political nonprofit).

"If they went ahead with banning TikTok, it would feel like a slap in the face to a lot of young Americans," he added. "Democrats don’t understand the political consequences this would have."

As the Biden administration considers banning the Chinese-owned short-form video platform with some 150 million U.S. users, young progressive activists and the older Democratic strategists trying to reach them are worried that the officials making the decision — very few of whom likely regularly use TikTok — have no idea how central the platform is to the lives of many in a generation that is just coming of age politically.

Gen Z — the teens and 20-somethings born after 1996 — skew overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic. Their stronger-than-expected turnout in the 2022 midterms was partially credited with salvaging what otherwise might have been a disastrous election for the Democratic Party. -NBC News

Update(20:00ET): US forces occupying Syria's northeast are in a high state of alert, and there are reports of ongoing gunbattles with Iran-backed militias into the night hours. It's being widely acknowledged as the most serious fighting involving American forces there since 2019, with some of the latest rocket launches targeting Omar oil field, which has long been held by US and Kurdish forces.

"The conflict in northeast Syria escalated on Friday as Iran-backed militias launched a volley of rocket and drone attacks against coalition bases after American reprisals for a drone attack that killed a U.S. contractor and injured six other Americans," The New York Times reports late in the day Friday.