The F-35 Lightning II is meant to be the crown jewel of America’s airborne fleet. Each of these next-generation fighter jets has a price tag that runs upward of $80 million, even before factoring in costs like maintenance. According to manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the F-35 “is more than a fighter jet, it’s a powerful force multiplier.” And now one of them has potentially crashed in a field in South Carolina.

That’s about par for the course for the F-35. Since it was first pitched in the early 1990s, a host of catastrophes, setbacks and cost overruns have made the F-35 the object of mass ridicule outside the Pentagon. For all its flaws, and despite it being the most expensive weapons system ever developed, there’s no danger that the program will be scrapped anytime soon. And honestly, that makes the F-35 the greatest tangible metaphor for U.S. military spending ever to exist.

Lockheed Martin says a new five-year deal to sustain the F-35 fleet won’t be reached by the end of this year. The Pentagon says it might not happen at all. 

“For the F-35 program, and its continually expanding fleet, the process to put such a contract in place is complex, and we will take the time necessary to get it right. If we are unable to do so, we will move forward with another way to meet warfighter sustainment requirements. In the meantime, we continue to provide support through our existing contracts,” F-35 Joint Program Office spokesperson Russ Goemaere told Defense One in a statement.

Lockheed had long provided spare parts and sustainment services for the Pentagon’s F-35 under a succession of annual cost-plus-incentive contracts. In September 2021, DOD and Lockheed finalized a sustainment contract for fiscal 2021 to 2023 that included a mix of cost-plus-fixed-fee, and cost-plus and fixed-price incentive fees. But since 2019, company officials have been working to persuade DOD that it should move to five-year performance-based logistics, or PBL, contracts, under which the company would be paid to produce outcomes, not provide quantities of parts and services.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused protesters against his rule of “joining forces with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Iran,” as he set off for a visit to the US on Monday. 

As the right-wing leader departed from Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, hundreds of protestors chanted: “Go and don’t come back."

Mass protests have gripped Israel for eight months following Netanyahu’s move to overhaul the judiciary and significantly water down its oversight power. 

Protestors have promised to follow Netanyahu wherever he goes on his overseas trips.

After shipping some $45 billion in military equipment to Ukraine, the Biden Administration is bringing Ukrainian President Zelensky back to Washington to beg for more money. But with the war going badly for Ukraine and strong US opposition to spending more on the effort, it looks to be an uphill battle.

What if I told you one in 50 people who took a new medication had a “medically attended adverse event” and the manufacturer refused to disclose what exactly the complication was — would you take it?

And what if the theoretical benefit was only transient, lasting about three months, after which your susceptibility goes back to baseline?

And what if we told you the Food and Drug Administration cleared it without any human-outcomes data and European regulators are not universally recommending it as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is?

That’s what we know about the new COVID vaccine the Biden administration is firmly recommending for every American 6 months old and up.

The push is so hard that former White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha and CDC head Mandy Cohen are making unsupported claims the new vaccine reduces hospitalizations. long COVID and the likelihood you will spread COVID.

None of those claims has a shred of scientific support.

In fact, if the manufacturers said that, they could be fined for making false marketing claims beyond an FDA-approved indication.

The questions surrounding Moderna’s new COVID vaccine approved this week are still looming.

Pfizer’s version, approved this week as well, also has zero efficacy data and has not been tested on humans at all. We only have data about antibody production from 10 mice.

The FDA, or Moderna (frankly, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes), should disclose what happened to the patient who took the new vaccine and had a complication that required medical attention.

The public has a right to know.

The last time the Biden administration approved and recommended a novel COVID bivalent booster, last fall, with no human-outcomes data, it was an epic fail.

Only 17% of Americans took it (and some of those were forced to do so by their employer or school).

A study conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration has shown that the risk of myocarditis following mRNA COVID vaccination is around 133x greater than the background risk in the population.

This means Covid vaccination increases the risk of suffering myocarditis, an autoimmune disease causing inflammation of the heart, by 13,200%.

Source

The study, conducted by researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as well as from several U.S. universities and hospitals, examined the effects of vaccination with products manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

The study’s authors used data obtained from the CDC’s VAERS reporting system which were cross-checked to ensure they complied with CDC’s definition of myocarditis; they also noted that given the passive nature of the VAERS system, the number of reported incidents is likely to be an underestimate of the extent of the phenomenon.

1626 cases of myocarditis were studied, and the results showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech product was most associated with higher risk, with 105.9 cases per million doses after the second vaccine shot in the 16 to 17 age group for males, and 70.7 cases per million doses after the second shot in the 12 to 15 age group for males. The 18 to 24 male age group also saw significantly higher rates of myocarditis for both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s products (52.4 and 56.3 cases per million respectively).

The price of yellowcake – uranium concentrate used in nuclear generation – has surged to the highest level in 12 years as nuclear once again becomes a desirable form of energy generation.

The FT reports that yellowcake prices have gained 12% over the past month alone, hitting $65.50 per pound, which is the highest since 2011, before the Fukushima disaster.

The price rise is driven by a change in sentiment towards nuclear as governments realize wind and solar can’t do the job on their own because the grid needs dispatchable electricity.

“You have a focus on energy security colliding with a focus on clean energy,” the CFO of Cameco, the second-largest uranium producer in the world, told the FT.

The uranium market has been depressed since the Fukushima disaster, which means not a lot has been invested in production capacity growth. Now, it seems that things are changing fast. And this might mean a shortage.

That old advertising brochure dating from around the early 1960s encapsulates the arrogance of billionaires and their companies that think they are the hand of God, that they are the truth and the science, and that we should all be in awe of the technology they produce.   

Facilitated by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they uproot highly productive traditional agriculture, saying it is deficient. They poison the soil, the food, the waterways and people. But that’s not enough. They pirate, own and genetically engineer the seeds. The chemicals and engineering do not result in more or better food. Quite the opposite. Diets have become narrower, and the nutritional content of many food items has progressively diminished (see McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods). Moreover, food secure regions have become food insecure.   

But it goes beyond this. Consider the amount of killer-chemicals that the likes of Union Carbide’s promised techno-utopian consumer society (Union Carbide produced numerous other similar brochures to the one presented above, promoting the role of science and technology across all sectors) has gifted to humanity in everyday products from shampoos to toys, pans, packaging, sofas and tins.   

It is notable that glyphosate, the world’s most used agricultural herbicide, began life as an industrial chelator of minerals in metal pipes to prevent blockages and deterioration. It now ensures mineral depletion/nutrient deficiencies in the human body. Glyphosate affects human soil – the gut microbiome – which directly feeds the major organs. Little wonder we witness a proliferation of illness and disease.   

But forget about what has become modernism’s spiralling public health crisis – don’t forget to take that money-spinning experimental booster jab because, remember, they said that they really care about you and your health.  

Meanwhile, bioscience parks across the world expand and promise an even more marvellous techno-dystopia than the one already created. They are working on injecting you with nanotechnology to ‘cure’ you of all the diseases that the modernist type of thinking, products and technology created in the first place – or on manipulating your DNA-physiology to hook you up to the internet (of things). The patents are there – this is not speculation. 

The leaders of the Group of 20 nations have agreed to a plan to eventually impose digital currencies and digital IDs on their respective populations, amid concern that governments might use them to monitor their people’s spending and crush dissent.

The G20, which is made up of the world’s leading rich and developing nations and is currently under India’s presidency, adopted a final declaration on the subject over the weekend in New Delhi.

The group announced last week that they had agreed to build the necessary infrastructure to implement digital currencies and IDs.

While the group said that discussions are already underway to create international regulations for cryptocurrencies, it claimed that there was “no talk of banning cryptocurrency” at the summit.

Many critics are concerned that governments and central banks will eventually regulate cryptocurrencies and then immediately replace them with central bank digital currencies (CBDC), which lack similar privacy and security.

Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that discussions are underway to build a global framework to regulate crypto assets because they believe that cryptocurrencies can’t be regulated efficiently without total international cooperation.

First published on July 2023

Click Video below and click to enlarge.

Video is in English

Toyota Motor showed off a prototype of its new gigacasting equipment that can make a third of a car body in about three minutes, a development that will be key to its plans to ramp up electric-vehicle production profitably in the coming years.

The machine at the Japanese automaker's Myochi plant released a plume of white smoke as it ran during a recent demonstration for journalists. Molten aluminum poured in was rapidly cooled from 700 C to 250 C, solidifying into a single die-cast piece making up the entire rear third of the vehicle chassis. This is normally built from 86 parts in a 33-step process that takes hours.

Toyota aims to exploit such advances to halve production processes, plant investment and manufacturing preparation lead time, all to aid in its quest to sell 3.5 million electric vehicles a year by 2030.

Gigacasting will be used to make the front and rear sections of a new electric model due out in 2026.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) created the systems that permit intelligence weaponization.  The SSCI is the organizational institution that supports the Fourth Branch of Government, the intelligence branch.  Keep in mind, the SSCI previously created a bipartisan “Restrict Act,” to deal with what they deemed dangerous information on the internet (under auspices of TikTok ban).  SSCI Chairman Mark Warner is the current enabler of the continued weaponized intel operations.

In this video segment below, notice how Chairman Warner leads off his remarks.  Two flares triggered.  First, you can tell by his response, that President Trump’s “classified documents” were exactly what we thought they were; evidence against those who constructed the Trump-Russia claims from inside govt.  Second, notice how Warner now wants to block any President from controlling intelligence as defined by the Fourth Branch.  This stuff is getting brutally obvious.  WATCH:

“I’ve got bipartisan legislation that would reform the whole classification process. We way overclassify. We, frankly, should have a process in place so that no president or vice president ever takes documents after they leave office.” 👀

US President Joe Biden will urge the UN to expand the Security Council to water down Russia and China's influence in the body, the Western press says. Could Biden succeed?

Joe Biden "will take a look at the architecture of the Security Council," US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby announced ahead of the UN General Assembly meeting.

Still, the British media assumes that the US president will advocate adding new members to the United Nations Security Council in order to weaken Russia and China's role. Reportedly, Biden wants to add India, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and Japan to the international body.

Currently, the Security Council has 15 members: five of them are "permanent" (P5) and enjoy veto powers (Russia, China, France, the UK, and the US); and 10 are "non-permanent," with five of them being elected each year by the General Assembly for a two-year term.

Over the years, the Clinton family’s “charity” work has run afoul of investigators and whistleblowers alike over suspected schemes ranging from the alleged theft of disaster relief funds for Haiti to shady political pay-to-play deals.

The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) has announced plans to launch a "Ukraine Action Network," ostensibly to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Ukrainians amid the West’s ongoing proxy war against Russia in the troubled Eastern European country.

The campaign, set to be formally unveiled Tuesday at the CGI’s annual conference in New York, is said to be the outcome of a collaborative effort between former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenskaya that began a year ago.

The Ukraine Action Network is expected to help “mobilize existing CGI partners, as well as new leaders from around the world, to create and finance new commitments for Ukrainians.” The details of the program, including which “Ukrainians” specifically are expected to benefit, have yet to be elaborated.

The Clintons shut down the CGI component of their Clinton Foundation non-profit in 2017, firing dozens of employees and shuttering the CGI’s New York office after donations by businesses and foreign nations dried up following Mrs. Clinton’s surprise loss in the 2016 presidential election.

The Clintons revived the CGI in 2022, with thousands of donors and hundreds of partnering organizations announcing the launch of over 140 different projects at last year’s conference.

Update (1705ET): As expected, Democrats are in fits over House Republicans' stopgap funding bill, also known as a Continuing Resolution (CR).

According to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the bill is a "Freedom Caucus wish list" and a "hard-right screed" that has no chance in the Senate.

According to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the GOP short-term funding bill is a "right wing wishlist that they want to jam down the throats of the American people," which is "unreasonable, unacceptable and laughable."

*  *  *

Rep. Kevin 'secret concessions' McCarthy (R-CA) is facing perhaps the biggest challenge of his eight months as House Speaker; avoiding yet another government shutdown with a fractured caucus (ouch!).

Southern California drivers are feeling the squeeze of high gas prices yet again.

On Monday morning, the price of a regular gallon of gas averaged about $5.92 in the Los Angeles area, according to AAA.

That’s a 5-cent increase from the day before and nearly 40 cents more than a week ago.

For comparison, the national average is $3.88 per gallon.

Prices are high now, but they may be headed for a gradual decline as fall approaches, according to AAA.

What’s keeping them elevated for now is high oil costs, as prices “have jumped several dollars to hover around $90 per barrel,” AAA said.

 “Oil costs are putting upward pressure on pump prices, but the rise is tempered by much lower demand,” AAA spokesperson Andrew Gross said in a statement. “The slide in people fueling up is typical, with schools back in session, the days getting shorter, and the weather less pleasant. But the usual decline in pump prices is being stymied for now by these high oil costs.” 

Thousands of climate activists flooded the streets of Midtown, Manhattan on Sunday, initiating Climate Week ahead of the UN General Assembly in New York City.

Demonstrators held signs saying "End Fossil Fuel Use,""Declare a Climate Emergency" and "I didn't vote for fires and floods." The protesters implored US President Joe Biden and global leaders phase out fossil fuels, emphasizing their role in exacerbating climate change.

President Biden is among the world leaders set to attend the United Nations General Assembly, which is scheduled to formally open on Tuesday.

"We hold the power of the people, the power you need to win this election," said Emma Buretta, 17, of Brooklyn of the youth protest group Fridays for Future. "If you want to win in 2024, if you do not want the blood of my generation to be on your hands, end fossil fuels." 

Webmaster addition: Wow! Just look at all those professionally printed signs and t-shirts! There is big money behind the climate hysterics!

On Sunday, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen plan to visit the Italian island of Lampedusa where thousands of migrants arrived this week from Tunisia.

Meloni said in a video posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday evening that Italy needs the EU's help to handle the emergency.

"The migratory pressure Italy has been experiencing since the beginning of the year is unsustainable," said the far-right politician. As images of chaotic conditions on the island spread, she is under pressure to deliver on a campaign promise to end migration.

As winter approaches and the scale of Kiev’s losses in its failing counteroffensive emerges, Ukraine’s transgender military spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo has deftly avoided the topic and instead delivered a cringeworthy threat-laden rant on social media.

The one-time American political campaigner and newfound “Face of free Ukraine” struggled to contain her hatred for Russia and all things Russian. In a particularly energetic monologue, she said “propagandists” (meaning journalists who don’t toe Kiev’s narrative line on the conflict) would be “hunted down,” and made to “pay” for their refusal to agree with the Kiev regime’s worldview, apparently a war crime in the court of Ashton-Cirillo’s imagination.

Amidst her over-the-top promises of “gnashing of teeth and foaming at the mouth” to come, it’s worth pointing out that in many ways this person defines the many moral contradictions of the West’s proxy war. This theatrically presented individual is routinely rolled out by the Kiev regime, presumably in an attempt to underline Ukraine’s apparent acceptance of transgender people. In this, Vladimir Zelensky’s PR priority to virtue signal to the West trumps reality: his country has a track record of oppression against LGBTQ rights, detailed in multiple human rights reports published prior to the start of Russia’s military operation in February 2022. In an apparent effort to memory-hole that history, Kiev is now parading one of the world’s best-known transgender personalities, a personality who seems all too happy to deliver the threats of a regime capable of deploying a well-resourced and deadly security service to kill, maim, and terrorize its political opponents at home and abroad.

Former US President Donald Trump is reportedly set to address current and former members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in Detroit instead of participating in the upcoming Republican primary debate.

An insider with the Trump reelection campaign relayed to US media that the former commander-in-chief is looking to speak with a crowd of current and former union members, as well as blue-collar workers in the plumbing and electrical industries.

However, early reports of the speaking event have not been warmly accepted by the UAW union, whose president issued a statement noting Trump is part of the problem the agency is trying to combat.

“Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” UAW President Shawn Fain said told US media.

The announcement comes as polling earlier showed how US public confidence in the armed forces fell to a 26-year low.

A cash bonus program for reenlisting soldiers was suspended as the US Army exceeded its retention targets, although it still expects to fall short of its annual recruitment goal.

The temporary discontinuation of the program was publicized with immediate effect on September 12 in an internal Army Military Personnel Center message. The suspension comes several months after the service announced in April they had met their yearly target, retaining more than 55,000 soldiers who had been scheduled to retire.

The initiative, officially known as The Selective Retention Bonus Program, offers bonuses up to tens of thousands of dollars for soldiers in specialized areas who choose to reenlist.

The temporary suspension of the program will last through the end of the Army’s fiscal year on September 30, when a new bonus program will be announced. Until then, soldiers may be eligible for other benefits upon reenlistment, including specialized courses or career training.

The announcement marks the fourth year in a row that retention goals were exceeded, but falling enlistment means the US Army continues to bleed soldiers. A shortfall of 15,000 new recruits against a target of 60,000 last year generated significant headlines. The Army is set to announce slightly higher numbers this year but is still expected to fall well short of this year’s target of 65,000 recruits.

However, it begs the question -- why are all these food processing plant fires, train derailments, arson-instigated forest fires, factory explosions happening in the first place?

There are several possible answers to this question:

1. Biden's enemies overseas are conducting sabotage operations in the United States, preparing the battlefield for future conflict on our soil.
2. Biden is involved with his CCP masters enabling the destruction of the United States. The Biden administration has said nothing about these statistically impossible under normal circumstances events.

IF AMERICANS DON'T THINK THE WAR IS ALREADY HERE THEY ARE MISTAKEN.

The war is here, and it's going to get much worse.

You can thank a stolen election which installed a Manchurian candidate in The White House for that, and the betrayal of our nation by many of those who wear our uniform, or work in our national security apparatus.

We are under attack and have a long road ahead of us to save the republic.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday insisted the Ukrainian counteroffensive will continue despite the upcoming change in weather, which US officials have said will impede Ukraine’s ability to continue the assault.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said last week that Ukraine only has between 30 and 45 days of “fighting weather” left as fall is approaching, meaning colder and wetter conditions that will make it harder for armored vehicle assaults.

“We need to liberate our territory as much as possible and move forward, even if it’s less than [half a mile or] a hundred [yards] we must do it. we can’t lose time,” Zelensky said when asked about the weather on “60 Minutes.”

“Forget about the weather, and the like. In places that we can’t get through in an armored vehicle — let’s fly. If we can’t fly — let’s send drones. We mustn’t give Putin a break,” he added.

Faced with the wave of regime changes in French-speaking Africa, the French media are stunned. They can’t explain the rejection of France.

The old refrains about colonial exploitation are unconvincing. For example, Paris is exploiting Niger’s uranium, not at market price, but at a ridiculously low one. However, the putschists have never raised this argument. They’re talking about something else entirely. Accusations of Russian manipulation are no more credible. Firstly, because Russia doesn’t seem to be behind the putschists in Mali, Guinea, Burkina-Faso, Niger or Gabon, but above all because the evil far predates their arrival. Russia only arrived in Africa after its victory in Syria, in 2016, whereas the problem dates back to at least 2010, if not 2001.

As always, what makes the situation unreadable is forgetting how it came about.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States assigned a role in Africa to its vassal, France. The aim was to maintain the old order there, while waiting for AfriCom to settle in, and for the Pentagon to extend to the dark continent the destruction of political institutions it was already carrying out in the "wider Middle East". [1] Gradually, Republican politics gave way to tribal politics. From one point of view, this was an emancipation from heavy French aid; from another, it was a formidable step backwards.

On his personal Telegram account, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a short video (see at the foot of this page) of his visit to troops in Bakhmut in the company of his chief of staff.

He is seen there with “white führer” Andriy Biletsky, military leader of the Ukrainian “integral nationalists”. According to the latter, Ukraine’s mission is "to spur the white races of the world towards a final crusade...against the Semite-led Untermenschen [sub-humans]".

“Integral nationalism” is an ideology devised by the Ukrainian Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973), modeled on the tenets of French national Charles Maurras, and rooted in the hatred of Jews and Russians. Serving at first as a Reich secret agent, in the course of World War II Dontsov became one of the main planners of the final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy questions, exploiting his managerial position at the Reinhard Heydrich Institute in Prague. He was not tried at Nuremberg, but was picked up and groomed by the CIA. Contrary to what his Wikipedia entry falsely indicates, he did not die in Canada, but in the U.S. location of South River, New Jersey.

After founding the Azov regiment and suffering a defeat at Mariupol, Andriy Biletsky set up a mechanized infantry unit, the 3rd assault brigade - currently the main Ukrainian unit engaged in the Battle of Bakhmut.

Russian forces conducted a long-range strike on Ukrainian warehouses storing Western-supplied weapons, including long-range missiles and depleted uranium shells, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

In a statement on Monday, the ministry said the military had conducted an overnight high-precision attack on Ukrainian facilities using air-launched assets and drones. The strikes targeted “the Kiev regime’s sites storing Storm Shadow cruise missiles, depleted uranium ammunition,” the statement said.

The ministry added that the barrage and the drone raid also hit Ukraine’s signals intelligence centers and facilities that train sabotage groups. “The strike’s objective has been achieved. All facilities have been hit,” it added.

Bulgarian farmers have taken to the streets in protest, causing blockades at dozens of highways and border crossings on Monday. They are voicing their discontent with the government’s decision to lift the ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

The protest follows unsuccessful attempts to resolve the matter through negotiations with the government. Professional associations are actively participating in this widespread demonstration, with 26 joining the cause.

The protest is slated to continue with a mass rally in the capital, Sofia, scheduled for Tuesday. National authorities have called on participants to adhere to the law.