They are these:

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.

2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.

3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil.

4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest.

5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes.

6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons.

7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big.

8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause.

9. Our cause is sacred.

10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

SVB Financial Group's announcement that it needed to sell billions of dollars of assets to make its customers whole continued to send Wall Street into panic mode.

Several news outlets, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that the financially-strapped bank was considering a potential sale to a larger institution.

On Friday morning, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation shut down the bank and appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as the receiver. 

There was a line of about 50 people deep Friday morning, waiting in the rain at the Menlo Park branch of Silicon Valley Bank, trying to withdraw their money.  Instead, they were met with FDIC representatives.

"We have more than $250,000 with SVB," said Yegor Anchyshkin, co-founder and CEO of Instock.Com. "I am pretty concerned."

In the previous issue of Ke Aupuni Update (February 25) I spoke of the tragic 130-year long disconnection from the rest of the Pacific Island nations. This is particularly lamentable since Pasifika, not America, is our real, natural family. We have begun the process to be reunited with our Pacific family.
 
Living in Hawaii, we donʻt realize how deeply colonized and enslaved we are by the American system, until we visit other Pacific Island nations.
In the rest of our Pacific family, governments and the peoples are shedding the adverse aspects of colonial ways and actively engage in applying what is called the “Pacific Way” to address local, regional and even global issues.
What is this Pacific Way? Itʻs doing things in ways that are mutually respectful, inclusive, consultative, consensual, flexible and allow for compromise. The Pacific Way is a set of ideas, visions and processes that are dynamic, renewing itself under new contexts while simultaneously grounded to the core values of the native culture.
Simply put, its doing things island style.

Botswana is pushing for a larger share of diamonds mined by the De Beers consortium, President Mokgweetsi Masisi said on Thursday. Masisi’s government and the company have been trying to negotiate a new deal for five years, and the president now thinks Botswana can make more money cutting and refining its own stones.

Botswana’s diamond industry is completely controlled by Debswana, a joint venture of the government and De Beers. Although both parties own an equal stake in the venture, 75% of Debswana’s diamonds go to De Beers, while a quarter go to the Okavango Diamond Company, a diamond trader owned by the government.

De Beers sources rough diamonds from Botswana, which sell for a lower price than polished diamonds or jewelry. Masisi said that he wants the Okavango Diamond Company to receive a larger cut of these diamonds from the Debswana deal, which the state-owned firm can then refine and sell for a higher price.

On March 11, terrorists believed to be members of ISIS attacked a group of civilians who were collecting truffles near Khanaser town in the southern countryside of Aleppo in Syria’s central region.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the terrorists “slaughtered” three of the civilians, all young men, and abducted 26 others, including women. The London-based monitoring group said that the attack took place near a position of Iranian-backed forces, who maintain a large presence on the strategic road leading to Khanaser and from there to Aleppo city.

ISIS cells in central Syria escalated their attacks against government forces and civilians in the region in the last few months.

Just a day earlier, a pro-government fighter was killed and ten civilians were wounded in two separate attacks that took place near the town of Kobajjep in the western countryside of Deir Ezzor and in the area of al-Bruk in the governorate’s southern countryside. Both attacks were blamed on ISIS.

Webmaster addition: Funny how ISIS shows up when the US needs to justify keeping troops in Syria, isn't it?

The real goal of the Ukrainian attack in the Russian border region of Bryansk was revealed. At least one man was killed, at least one child was wounded, at least one house was burned in a small village of Sushany, all these crimes were committed so that Ukrainian TikTok warriors could film a seconds-long video on the Russian territory. LINK

“As a result of the actions of a sabotage group in the village of Lyubechane, Klimovsky district, the driver of a car was killed, a boy born in 2012 was injured. Currently, the child has been taken to the Bryansk regional hospital, his life is not in danger,” the governor of the Bryansk region officially confirmed.

Soon after the attack took place, the so-called “Russian Volunteer Corps” (a unit within the Armed Forces of Ukraine) published a video near the entrance to the Lubansky medical and obstetrical station in the village of Lyubchany in the Bryansk region.

Webmaster addition: They killed those people for a TikTok video?!?

Amid the wave of loud claims on the upcoming Ukrainian offensive on Crimea, the Kiev officials do not hide the Nazi nature of their goals. Adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine turned to direct threats to the citizens of the Russian peninsula.

The tourist season in Crimea this year will be “hot,” said Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, in his recent interview.

“Ukraine will explain that it needs to be treated not with respect, but with great fear,” he claimed.

Tucker Carlson sits down with Redacted Host Clayton Morris for a wide ranging interview about the January 6th video controversy, the state of journalism, personal attacks and much more.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky requested on Friday the "comprehensive processing" of an online petition to rename the Russian Federation to simply 'Moscow,' after the bill passed the 25,000 signatures needed to force the Ukrainian government to respond.

The petition, started in November, argued that the entirety of Russia should be renamed Moscow because "the historical name of Russia is Muscovy...'Russia' has existed for only 301 years, the name change gave ground for further encroachment on the history of Kyivan Rus'," according to petition author Valeriya Shakhvorostova.

Webmaster addition: If you win the war, Zel, you can call it anything you want! Just remember to use the correct pronouns!

The Diocese of San Diego is facing yet another lawsuit regarding clerical sexual abuse cases, this time from its own insurance company.

On Friday, March 3, the Catholic Mutual Relief Society of America, also known as Catholic Mutual Group, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the San Diego diocese, accusing it of violating the terms of its policies. The insurance company claims it is not legally bound to continue paying settlements the diocese reaches with victims of clerical sex abuse.

According to the lawsuit, Catholic Mutual Group accused the diocese of knowing that numerous members of its clergy “had proclivities toward sexual abuse of children such that coverage is precluded.”

The first part of Trudeau’s tweet read: “When women and girls are empowered, entire families, communities, and societies succeed. So today, as we mark #IWD2023 and celebrate the incredible women and girls in our lives, let’s keep working to build a more equal and equitable future.”

Trudeau seemingly felt the need to add a reference to transgenderism in another tweet that he added to the thread, saying: “And with a disturbing rise in anti-transgender hate here in Canada and around the world recently, I want to be very clear about one more thing: Trans women are women. We will always stand up to this hate – whenever and wherever it occurs.”

Excess mortality in Germany 2020–2022 is a preprint by Christof Kuhbandner (a psychologist at Regensburg) and Matthias Reitzner (a statistician at Osnabrück) that applies sophisticated actuarial analysis to the publicly available all-cause mortality data provided by the German government. It turns out that when you account for historical mortality trends, the virus no longer looks so dangerous, and the vaccines no longer look so great.

From the abstract:

In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.

What happened in April 2021 was the beginning of mass vaccination across Germany.

Here’s an overview of mortality deficit or excess by age bracket:

Energy Crisis? Food crisis? Industrial collapse? Supply chains disruptions? Fractured Communications? Cyber-attacks? Black-outs? Hyper-inflation? Climate change? Wars, civil conflicts, and more plandemics, culminating in human misery…

Yes.

It’s all manufactured.

It’s all part of the plan to destroy civilization as we know it, to replace it with the  4th Industrial Revolution robots and humanoids – acting on AI-generated electronic commands and surviving on programmable digital central bank currencies (DCBC).

If we keep sitting at the sideline, watching, instead of doing something to stop this insanity, this crime of biblical proportions, it indeed will happen. Humanity and what’s left of Mother Earth will be ready for the abyss.

Shortages create inflation – and if inflation doesn’t occur naturally, it is manufactured. Media propaganda talking full-time of inflation gives industrial and service conglomerates a free pass to increase prices. Nobody questions whether its justified. The media says there is inflation – so, price increases are indeed of the order.

Many of the crises are not even happening in reality; most of them just in the media. By 24/7 endless propaganda. And by Artificial Intelligence (AI)-induced appearances.

America’s top medical schools, worried they have too few minority students, are doing something about it.

They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence.

Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

Of course, the universities won’t admit what they are doing – and certainly not why. All they will say is that their new standards add “equity” and “lived experience.”

Unfortunately, adding those factors inevitably lessens the weight given to others.

The harsh reality is medical schools are downplaying academic achievement and MCAT scores, which give the best evidence of how well students are prepared for medical school. The MCAT is specifically tailored for that purpose. In addition to a section on critical reasoning (similar to the SATs), it examines students on biology and biochemistry, organic chemistry, the physics of living systems, and the biological and psychological foundations of behavior. It’s easy to see how those relate directly to higher education in medical science. Yet med schools want to downplay them and add inherently subjective criteria like “lived experience.”

Good old Hanoi Jane is at it again.  The pro-communist activist is famous not simply for her anti-war stance (which could be argued as justifiable), but also for actively propagandizing for the North Vietnamese.  Not only that, but she has a rather vicious history of calling for the deaths of people she disagrees with.  Part of her activism in Vietnam included her arguments that American POWs held by the VC be tried and executed for war crimes:

Fast forward decades later and Jane Fonda hasn't changed; her provocateur methods continue, probably because she has never faced consequences.  While the far-leftist position of The View is no secret, even the regular members of the show had to pull Fonda back from the brink after a discussion on state laws blocking abortion, in which she was asked what could be done other than protest...

She responded: "Well, murder..." 

There are some that say not much was learned or gained from the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government this past week as politicians sparred over the meaning of the release of the Twitter Files.  Democrats in particular seemed adamant that they would not discuss the actual contents of the files or their implications.  Their apparent goal?  To disrupt exploration of the information and to attack the messengers.

There might not have been many new revelations coming from the subcommittee, but what the public did learn was that the political left is extremely hostile to facts, evidence and the truth.  If you didn't already know that by now, the hearing with Matt Taibbi made it abundantly clear.  

Leftist members of the committee proceeded into a tirade when Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify on their participation in the publishing of the files, attacking everything from their credentials to their intentions, and even demanding they reveal information on their private sources.  Here is the real information the Dems did not want to talk about:

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Zaluzhny, in hot pursuit, announced the data on the night (from March 8 to 9) strike. According to him, 81 missiles were fired at Ukrainian targets by the Russian side, including Kh-47 Kinzhal, X-22, Kh-101 / Kh-555, as well as 8 Geran UAVs. He also boasted that allegedly independent anti-aircraft gunners shot down 34, and 8 “did not reach their goals as a result of organized opposition.”

Ukro-pravdoruby Zaluzhny do not believe. They believe that the independent air defense was able to chalk up only “dummy” and “Gerani” missiles. For obvious reasons, neither Zaluzhny nor Zelensky will provide details. But, judging by the mood in ukrnet, real despondency reigns on Bankovaya.

Later, the speaker of the Potryanyh Forces of Ukraine , Ignat, spoke . In particular, he said: “This was the first time – at night 6 Kinzhal missiles were fired at Ukraine.

“Daggers” are much more dangerous than other Russian missiles. They are capable of flying at hypersonic speeds, which are 10 times the speed of sound, and can maneuver in flight. It is virtually impossible for air defense systems to shoot down the Kinzhal, since the missile rises up 20 km, and then dives at a great speed on the target,” Ignat explained and added that in his memory “there has never been such a dangerous arrival.”

Webmaster addition: The US and NATO have nothing that can stop the Kinzhal. 

The Department of Defense confirmed this week that advanced bombs are operational in Ukraine. The Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range (JDAM-ER) can hit targets 50 miles away. The Pentagon’s confirmation comes after President Joe Biden ordered the Pentagon to transfer "precision aerial munitions" to Kiev in December.

On Monday, U.S. Air Force Gen. James Hecker, head of US Air Forces in Europe,  told reporters that the JDAM-ER was operational in Ukraine. "Recently, we’ve just gotten some precision munitions [to Ukraine] that had some extended range and go a little bit further than the gravity drop bomb and has precision [guidance]," Hecker said. 

Webmaster addition: Too bad trains here in the US are not as well designed!

Russia is accelerating its exports of diesel to Saudi Arabia by both direct shipments and ship-to-ship transfers, Reuters reported on Friday, quoting trade sources and shipping data from Refinitiv.

Using STS loadings, Russia is shortening the routes for tankers headed to Africa and Asia after Moscow is now banned from exporting fuels to the EU.

Two cargoes of diesel loaded in the Primorsk port on the Baltic Sea in Russia have been transferred on another tanker heading to Saudi Arabia’s port of Ras Tanura, per shipping data from Refinitiv cited by Reuters. The data also showed that another cargo loaded from the Black Sea port of Tuapse used ship-to-ship loading to another tanker that had already discharged the fuel at the Jizan port in Saudi Arabia. Both STS loadings took place near the Greek port of Kalamata, according to Refinitiv’s data.  

The Covid Origins Act of 2023, sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN), passed by a vote of 410 to 0, after clearing the Senate by unanimous consent last week.

Webmaster addition: Frankly, the unanimity of the Congressional vote worries me. I am wondering if this "revelation" is intended to stop with China, as part of a plan to sell the people on the idea of yet another war, while keeping the financial and managerial links back to the US hidden.

As lines (real and virtual) full of anxious depositors grew last week outside of Silicon Valley Bank branches around the world, and reassurances of "liquidity" were gushed from the C-Suite, three individuals within the firm were perhaps less troubled than those seeking their hard-earned cash back from the soon-to-be-failed bank.

12 days ago (on Feb 27th), Gregory Becker, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, sold $3.6 million worth (11%) of his shares...

Daniel Beck, the CFO, sold 32% (around $600,000) of his holdings...

And finally, CMO Michelle Draper sold 28%...

If AI isn't self-aware of the fact it is nothing but an exploitive tool of the powerful, then it's worthless.

The latest wave of AI tools is generating predictably giddy exaltations. These range from gooey, gloppy technocratic worship of the new gods ("AI will soon walk on water!") to the sloppy wet kisses of manic fandom ("AI cleaned up my code, wrote my paper on quantum physics and cured my sensitive bowel!")

The hype obscures the fundamental reality that all these AI tools are nothing but labor-saving mechanisms that cut costs and boost profits, the same goal the self-serving corporate-dominated system has pursued obsessively since "shareholder value" ("an entity's greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders") gained supremacy over the economy and society.

This can be summarized as "society exists to maximize the profits of corporations." From this perspective, all the AI tools in the world are developed with one goal: cut labor costs to boost profits. Euphoric fans claim these labor-saving mechanisms will magically transform society to new levels of sticky-sweet wonderfulness, but this "magic" is nothing but hazy opium-den fantasies of profiteering cartels and monopolies doing good by doing well.

Meanwhile, the Central State, a.k.a. The Savior State, is mesmerized by the prospect of new AI tools to control the restive herd. What better use of nifty new AI than to identify who needs a cattle prod to keep them safely in line, or who needs to be sent to Digital Siberia to keep their dissenting voice safely stifled?

You're perfectly free to scream and shout as loudly as you want, here on the empty, trackless tundra of Digital Siberia.

Yesterday afternoon, after the equity market close, USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle revealed that $3.3 billion of its $40 billion reserves were tied up in now-failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Specifically, on March 9, Circle initiated a wire transfer to remove its funds from SVB as the FDIC-insured bank was about to shut operations. However, two days later, on March 11, Circle confirmed that the wire transfers were not wholly processed, with $3.3 billion of USDC reserves still with SVB.

According to the latest survey carried out by The Economist and YouGov, a majority of U.S. adults now think that Covid originated in a laboratory in China, whether intentionally or as a chance mutation.

“This company is a merchant bank with a deposit base that Wall Street has mistakenly been concerned by,” Cramer said in the clip.

Cramer touted the fact that the bank was “less dependent upon private equity and venture capital offerings.”

He said the stock was the “fourth-worst performer of 2022” though it was worth buying because “being a banker to these immense pools of capital has always been a very good business.”

Webmaster addition: Cramer is in a great position to do a "bump and dump." He personally buys a stock that's low, talks it up on his show, and people who watch his show buy the stock. That drives the stock price up, and Cramer sells at the peak!

Folks, this is a big deal. In Congressional testimony (March 8-9) Dr Robert Redfield, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control during the Covid pandemic, told Congress that Dr. Fauci financed the gain-of-function research that made the virus so contagious, that the virus was not natural and was engineered in a lab, and that Fauci excluded him from meetings and decisions because he, Redfield, was disturbed about what was going on.

There is no doubt of Fauci’s guilt, but with Democrats controlling the White House and Senate, Fauci cannot be held accountable.  The mass murderer is free while Trump supporters who attended a rally are in prison. This is what Democrat rule means.  Americans who vote Democrat vote for a Third Reich regime.

My personal opinion is that the virus was released not accidentally in China but intentionally by Washington. On top of 9/11 as an inside job we have the Covid pandemic as an inside job.

Read this and watch the short segments of testimony.