This Is The Uniparty 'Reveal': Speaker Johnson To Pass $95.3 Billion Foreign Aid Package Using Democrats
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This Is The Uniparty 'Reveal': Speaker Johnson To Pass $95.3 Billion Foreign Aid Package Using Democrats

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is scrambling - both to keep his job, and to pass several bills to devote billions in US taxpayer funds to foreign entanglements that Johnson's conservative base has little-to-no appetite for. The bills would provide around $60.8 billion for Ukraine, $26.4 billion for Israel, and $8.1 billion for Ukraine. Meanwhile, following Republican outcry - Johnson included a fifth bill which would revive the Secure Border Act - so US border security is essentially an afterthought.

In order to appease said base, Johnson - who faces a growing threat of removal by House conservatives - has added a US border security measure to the package, which he told lawmakers the House would vote on Saturday night. The $95.3 billion package includes three aid bills to send funds to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, after claiming that the situation in Ukraine was at a tipping point, and the "axis of evil" of Russia, China and Iran are coordinating to help Russia to push further into Europe, like Hitler.

Seriously? 

"To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys," said Johnson, the Washington Times reports.

The Ukraine aid would be provided as a loan, but with provisions allowing for the loan to be canceled.

A fourth bill would allow the use of seized Russian assets for aid, and sanctions for Russia, China and Iran. It also includes the language of a House-passed bill requiring TikTok to divest from China, a proposal that stalled in the Senate.

A fifth, separate bill includes core components of the House GOP’s Secure the Border Act. -Washington Times.

Far-right conservatives in the House balked at the new plan, calling the border language “watered down” and demanding it to be attached to Ukraine aid.

Conservatives slam

Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) called it a "joke," arguing that Johnson is more worried about Ukraine than the US-Mexico border - which the speaker had previously promised to pair together.

"He certainly doesn’t want to try to use border security because I guess he’s afraid it might mess up Ukraine," Good added.

Rep. Thomas Massie said on X that Johnson "plans to pass the rule for the $100 billion foreign aid package using Democrats on the Rules Committee," adding "This is the Uniparty "reveal.""

The Secure Border Act - passed by the House but shut down in the Democrat-led, open-border Senate, would restart the construction of Donald Trump's southern border wall, and would include other measures to stem the flow of migrants.

Momentum Builds for Ouster

According to The Hill, momentum is "growing quickly" to oust ('vacate') Johnson if he moves to alter the 'motion to vacate' rule as part of the above package. The move would raise the threshold for forcing a vote on a motion to vacate - which can currently be called by a single lawmaker. This would reverse an agreement struck between former GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy (CA) and conservatives in January of last year as a condition of their support for his leadership.

Johnson denied that he's considering such a modification, however he told CNN on Wednesday that the ouster mechanism "has been abused in recent times," adding that "maybe, at some point, we change that."

The denial has done little to mollify the conservatives, who huddled with Johnson for a long and tense discussion on the chamber floor Thursday — a meeting that featured plenty of yelling. Afterward, some of the conservatives said they’re ready to support a motion to vacate if Johnson endorses the rule change making it harder to launch that very process. 

“It’s a red line for me, for sure,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) told reporters after the gathering broke up.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who led the effort to oust McCarthy from the Speakership in October, would not commit to supporting Johnson’s removal over the rule change but suggested that it could be the last straw for him.

“I think a motion to vacate is something that could put the conference in peril, and Ms. Boebert and I were working to avoid that,” Gaetz said. “Our goal is to avoid a motion to vacate. But we are not going to surrender that accountability tool, particularly in a time when we are seeing America’s interests subjugated to foreign interests abroad.” -The Hill

The controversy comes as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has repeatedly threatened to drop a motion to vacate on Johnson over his willingness to negotiate deals with Democrats on key issues such as federal spending, government surveillance, and most recently - Ukraine aid.

"He’s serving Ukraine first and America last, and that would be the worst thing to do," said Greene. "I can’t think of a worse betrayal ever to happen in United States history. And here’s what’s really ironic: the constitutional attorney, Mike Johnson, is literally betraying the American people in order to keep his grip of power on the Speakership."

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Federal Judge Clears Facebook's Zuckerberg Of Personal Liability In 25 'Social Media Addiction' Cases
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Federal Judge Clears Facebook's Zuckerberg Of Personal Liability In 25 'Social Media Addiction' Cases

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge has ruled Meta Platforms, Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not face personal liability in 25 legal complaints alleging his social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, have harmed children.

Meta is facing dozens of separate legal complaints alleging the company failed to sufficiently warn adolescent users about the potentially addictive nature of their social media platforms. Those various complaints were consolidated into a multi-district litigation (MDL) currently being handled by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Twenty-five of the complaints sought to hold Mr. Zuckerberg personally liable for the harm allegedly caused by his social media platforms, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a ruling on Monday granting his motion to dismiss the cases.

Plaintiffs in the cases had argued that Mr. Zuckerberg had a specific duty to disclose to users the potentially addictive nature of his platforms due to his public stature as the head of Meta and his public statements. The plaintiffs asserted Mr. Zuckerberg repeated partial representations of Meta’s safety practices through numerous public appearances. The plaintiffs argued Mr. Zuckerberg’s alleged failure to make more fulsome public claims about his company made him liable for fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation by omission.

But Judge Rogers said the plaintiffs could not rely on Mr. Zuckerberg’s comparative knowledge about Meta’s products to establish he personally owed such a duty to each plaintiff.

Such a ruling, she said, would create “a duty to disclose for any individual recognizable to the public.”

“The Court will not countenance such a novel approach here,” she wrote.

Judge Rogers ultimately dismissed plaintiffs’ claims of fraudulent misrepresentation by omission or nondisclosure under Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin state laws. She further dismissed plaintiffs’ claims of negligent misrepresentation by omission that was cited under the laws of Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Plaintiffs Can Amend Claims Against Zuckerberg

Judge Rogers’ decision clears Mr. Zuckerberg of personal liability in these cases for the time being. In her Monday decision, the federal judge granted the plaintiffs a limited opportunity to revise their claims against the billionaire social media mogul.

“Given the insufficient briefing, the Court cannot conclude that plaintiffs’ nascent theory of corporate officer liability is fatally flawed,” Judge Rogers wrote.

The federal judge said the plaintiffs in the 25 complaints that sought to hold Mr. Zuckerberg personally liable could file one consolidated addendum revising their existing allegations and laying out any additional allegations they may try to assert against Mr. Zuckerberg in his role as Meta CEO.

While Mr. Zuckerberg is currently clear of any personal liability in the MDL lawsuit, his company remains a defendant in the ongoing litigation.

In addition to naming Meta Platform’s Inc. as a defendant, the plaintiffs’ claims also seek to hold Meta’s payment processing wing Meta Payments Inc. liable. WhatsApp, an instant messaging and calling application owned by Meta is also listed as a separate defendant in the case.

The sprawling litigation goes beyond Meta to target other apps that are not owned by Mr. Zuckerberg.

TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance are also listed as defendants, as are Alphabet (which operates the Google search engine and YouTube), Snap Inc. (which operates Snapchat), the Discord instant messaging and call service, and the online gaming platform Roblox.

The lawsuits say the children suffered physical, mental, and emotional harm from social media use, including anxiety, depression, and even suicide. The various complaints seek damages and a halt to harmful practices allegedly adopted by the defendant technology companies.

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AI, Gold, & Nuclear War
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AI, Gold, & Nuclear War

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

So-called artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm. Meanwhile, gold has shot up like a rocket over the past couple of months.

In mid-February, gold was trading at $1,990. Two months later, gold is trading above $2,400 — a $410 gain in just two months.

So here’s a question:

Is there a connection between AI and gold?

It seems like an odd question.

But as it turns out, the answer is yes. And surprisingly, there has been for decades. It involves the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, the KGB was deeply concerned about the possibility of a nuclear first strike by the United States. At the time, Yuri Andropov was head of the KGB.

Andropov’s fear of a nuclear first strike by the U.S. was based in part on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s plan to install Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Those missiles could be armed with nuclear warheads and could strike the Soviet Union within minutes of being launched. This put Soviet nuclear forces on a hair-trigger alert. They adopted a “launch on warning” posture.

This means that as soon as credible evidence of a planned first strike was discovered, the Soviet Union would launch its own first strike to avoid destruction of its forces.

The irony was that the U.S. had no actual plans to launch a first strike, but the Soviet Union didn’t know that. Reagan’s speeches about the “evil empire” did nothing to calm Soviet concerns.

AI and Nuclear Readiness

In response, the Soviets developed a primitive (by today’s standards) AI system called VRYAN. That’s a Russian acronym for: sudden nuclear missile attack.

VRYAN took about 40,000 military, economic and political inputs and computed the relative strength of the Soviet Union compared with the United States expressed as a percentage output. The model used a value of 100% for equivalence of the USSR to the U.S.

The Soviet leadership was comfortable that the U.S. would not launch a nuclear first strike if the USSR could maintain a value of 60%, although they viewed 70% as providing a more comfortable margin.

A VRYAN output of 40% was considered the critical threshold at which the U.S. might feel it could launch a first strike with acceptable risk that the Soviets would not be able to mount a successful second strike.

VRYAN output values were in steady decline in the dangerous period from 1981–1984 (in 1984, the VRYAN output had declined to 45%).

The VRYAN AI system relied on by the KGB and the Soviet Politburo was an important factor in the Soviet decision in 1981 to vastly increase intelligence collections aimed at detecting U.S. preparations for a first strike.

Close Call

This intelligence collection effort was complicated to the point of extreme danger by the fact that the U.S. and NATO were conducting a war game in late 1983, code-named Able Archer 83. This war game was to practice a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

It turned out that the U.S. was rehearsing a nuclear first strike at the same exact time that the KGB was looking for evidence of a nuclear first strike. Able Archer 83 provided the KGB with more than enough reason to suspect the U.S. was indeed preparing for a first strike under cover of a war game.

VRYAN’s AI output on relative U.S. strength was compounded by massive U.S. intelligence failures regarding Soviet intentions. U.S. intelligence analysts assumed that the future would resemble the past, and that Soviet alerts were really propaganda designed to halt the U.S. deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

U.S. intelligence analysts were also guilty of what’s called mirror imaging: the belief that because you know your own intentions, your opponents must share your view. In this case, the U.S. assumed that because they had no intention to launch a first strike, the Soviets must have understood that intention and would therefore have no cause for concern.

In fact, the Soviets had the opposite view based in part on VRYAN AI output.

The world came extremely close to World War III and a nuclear holocaust as a result of this sequence of events and misperception of intentions. It was only when one U.S. general decided not to escalate in the face of Soviet first strike preparations that both sides deescalated, and the crisis eventually receded.

The information above wasn’t fully understood by either side at the time of the escalation. On the U.S. side, it wasn’t until the 1990 publication of a study entitled The Soviet War Scare by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) that something like the full story was revealed.

Nuclear War Threats: Good For Gold

This study was originally classified above TOP SECRET. Most citizens assume that TOP SECRET is the highest level of classification. But there are secret access codes that limit circulation of certain documents even among those cleared with TOP SECRET access.

In the case of The Soviet War Scare, those restrictions had the code names UMBRA, GAMMA, ININTEL, NOFORN, NOCONTRACT, ORCON. I can’t discuss my own TOP SECRET clearances, but I can inform you that very few intelligence operatives would have been able to view the PFIAB report based on those restrictions.

So what does all this have to do with gold?

Buried inside The Soviet War Scare was this passage about the U.S. assessment of KGB collection requirements related to a potential nuclear war:

VRYAN Collection Requirements – Throughout the early 1980s, VRYAN requirements were the No. 1 (and urgent) collection priority for Soviet intelligence… They were tasked to collect:… monitoring of the flow of money and gold on Wall Street as well as the movement of high-grade jewelry, collections of rare paintings and similar items. (This was regarded as useful geostrategic information.) (Emphasis added)

And there it is! The U.S. assessed that the KGB tracked the movement of gold as a leading indicator of nuclear attack.

I didn’t find this completely surprising. From 2004–2010, I was co-director of a CIA effort called Project Prophesy that looked at capital markets activity as an early warning of an enemy attack.

Gold was one of the valuable assets that was on our list of items to track. The idea was that if a general or political leader had advance information about an attack, they’d convert their wealth to gold in safekeeping in order to financially survive the fallout.

The bottom line is that this intelligence reporting and AI system are not ancient history. Today, the world is closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Able Archer scare in 1983. Gold is once again on the move, having risen from $1,830 per ounce on Oct. 5, 2023, to over $2,400 today. That’s a 31% gain in six months.

Is this a coincidence? Hardly. A close correlation of huge gains in gold with serious threats of nuclear war is exactly what one should expect.

Unfortunately, those threats of nuclear war are not going away soon. One need only look at the Iranian attack on Israel this past weekend and the possibilities of further escalation.

There are also situations in Ukraine, Russia, NATO, Gaza, the Red Sea and the Suez Canal revealing that the world is a more dangerous place than it has been for decades.

That’s bad news for the world but good news for gold investors. The rally we’ve seen in the past six months is just getting started.

Tyler Durden Wed, 04/17/2024 - 16:20
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Democracy Dies In Primaries
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Democracy Dies In Primaries

Authored by Nick Troiano via RealClear Wire,

Hillary Clinton recently told voters unhappy with the two 2024 presidential candidates this year: “Get over yourself.” With that comment, she not only dismissed the tens of millions of voters who had no say in choosing Biden and Trump, but also the two-thirds of voters overall who are frustrated with a rematch they do not want.

There’s an exhausted majority of voters eager for something different, yet our broken system simply doesn’t allow it. Look no further than No Labels, whose attempt to field a bipartisan presidential ticket collapsed because no candidate was willing to be a “spoiler” in an election system that disadvantages, even prevents, new competition.

The real problem isn’t who we’re electing, it’s how we’re electing them. 

Not only did the vast majority of us have no say in choosing the two presidential candidates, a similarly tiny fraction of voters is deciding most of Congress. So far in 2024, nearly a third of U.S. House seats have already been decided by only 3% of eligible votes in the eight states that have held primaries for offices other than the presidency. In 2022, 8% of voters elected 83% of Congress.

Primaries have long been low-turnout affairs dominated by the extremes of both parties. But shockingly, millions of voters don’t have the right to vote in them – even though their taxpayer dollars fund them. In 22 states this year, 23.5 million independent voters are disenfranchised by closed primaries for president or state offices. 

Nationwide, there are more independents than Democrats or Republicans. Nearly half of veterans identify as politically independent, as do a majority of young people. Because of our primary system, we’re telling those who fought for our country and those who are the future of our country that their voices don’t matter.

The reason our elected leaders don’t seem to represent us is because, quite literally, most of us don’t elect them. 

How do we fix this broken system? With two powerful changes: One, allow all eligible voters – including independents – to cast ballots for any candidate, regardless of party, in every taxpayer-funded election. Two, require candidates to secure a majority of votes to win an election. 

Consider how the 2024 election might have been different had these principles been in effect. First, had the GOP required a majority winner in the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump might not have become the nominee with only a plurality (45%) of the vote. Second, without Trump’s victory that year, there would likely be no Biden rematch in 2024, and therefore no efforts to run candidates like Dean Phillips off primary ballots. Third, majority-winner elections using ranked choice voting would level the playing field for independent and third party candidates rather than dismissing them out of hand as spoilers.

Primary elections have evolved dramatically over the past century – leaving behind party bosses nominating candidates in private, smoke-filled rooms to embrace the ballot box. It’s time to continue that great American tradition. 

Nearly half a dozen states have already adopted some version of these two principles for either their presidential or statewide elections – a move that is supported by nearly three in four voters nationwide.

In 2020, Alaska voters approved an all-candidate primary that advances four candidates to the general election, where an instant runoff produces a majority winner. In 2022, this reform led to the election of a conservative governor, moderate Republican senator, and moderate Democratic representative in 2022 – all on the same ballot. Overall, the state saw a 60% increase in the number of voters who cast ballots in competitive elections where their vote actually mattered.

California’s top-two primary system – enacted more than a decade ago under then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – has also infused more competition into its elections than would otherwise exist, meaning more Californians are casting meaningful votes.  

This fall, citizen initiatives to open primaries are underway in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota because voters want a functional, representative government.

The way we “get over” the frustrations of our current presidential rematch is by following the example of voters in these states who are demanding a better system that lives up to our nation’s ideals as a Democratic republic. 

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"The Vessel" Hudson Yards Sculpture To Reopen With New Suicide Prevention Safeguards
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"The Vessel" Hudson Yards Sculpture To Reopen With New Suicide Prevention Safeguards

The Vessel, a popular attraction in Manhattan's Hudson Yards, is set to reopen after closing in 2021 due to multiple suicides.

The beehive-like structure will now feature steel barriers on most upper levels to enhance safety, while the top level will stay closed, and the first two floors will remain fully accessible, according to the Gothamist.

These enclosures, designed to be cut-proof and weather-resistant, aim to prevent further tragedies after the reopening.

The sculpture, featuring approximately 2,500 steps and 80 landings, debuted in 2019 as part of the new Midtown West development. Shortly after its opening, a 19-year-old named Peter DeSalvo III died by suicide at the site.

Over the following 18 months, three more suicides occurred, including that of a 14-year-old boy in 2021, leading developers to close the stair access.

Related Companies spokesperson Kathleen Corless told the New York Times that the attraction will reopen after installing "floor-to-ceiling steel mesh" on several staircases. The company aims to maintain the distinctive appeal that has attracted millions worldwide, while enhancing safety, she said. 

"As one climbs up Vessel, the railings stay just above waist height all the way up to the structure’s top, but when you build high, folks will jump," Audrey Wachs told the New York Times. 

"It had designed safety barriers and expressed frustration with the developers’ resistance to installing them," an employee of Heatherwick Studio added.

Peter DeSalvo Jr., the father of the first person to die by suicide, told The New York Times: "All the deaths, including that of our son, could have been prevented if they had adequate safeguards."

Initially closed early in 2021, the report said that the Vessel had briefly reopened with new safety measures like suicide prevention signs and increased security, yet it closed again following another incident.

A specific reopening date has not been announced by Hudson Yards management. We're hoping it doesn't coincide with the next massive market crash...

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