He exudes the charisma of a vacuum cleaner salesman who uses cocaine and alcohol to get the most out of himself. The presidential candidate is waving around wildly with a chainsaw. The man wants to use this to saw apart the political caste on the Rio de la Plata. Fake dollar bills with the face of this very presidential candidate, Javier Milei, rain down on his cheering fans.

Milei wants to abolish the Argentine national currency and introduce the US dollar instead and at the same time “blow up” the Argentine central bank. Milei performs a wild dervish dance on stage when it is clear that he has won the election by a landslide, ten percent ahead of his rival from the Peronist party. “The Wig” (La Peluca), as Milei is called by his fans because of his wild rocker hair, never minces his words and uses sub-proletarian jargon to rant against anyone whom he doesn’t like. The Argentinian Pope Francis is also disqualified as an “emissary of evil” by Milei. The “wig” enjoys an almost inexplicable immunity and jester’s licence in the country.

The last presidential election in Argentina was at least not boring at any stage because of this Latin American version of a buffoon. In Argentina, too, you score points by attacking the ruling caste of politicians with hateful tirades.

But while we in the northern hemisphere are still complaining at a very high level, the Argentinians have had nothing to laugh about or bite about for a long time.

The annual inflation rate is an incredible 145 percent.

In a key procedural vote on Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked passage of a bill providing more military aid for Ukraine after Democrats at the last minute scuttled talks to include border security measures in the package – knowing full well that their refusal to compromise would doom the legislation. In doing so, congressional Democrats unintentionally revealed that maintaining an open U.S.-Mexico border is even more important to them than defending Ukraine against Russia.

In late October, President Joe Biden sent a supplemental funding request to Congress asking for $105 billion to help Ukraine and Israel in their respective conflicts with Russia and Hamas, as well as some defense funding for Taiwan. Although House Republicans had already passed a standalone bill sending assistance to Israel, Biden threatened to veto it unless Ukraine funding was attached.

While Congress has already allocated about $113 billion to Ukraine, the White House has said that money will run out by the end of December. But many Republicans, particularly in the House, are wary of signing off on additional funding without more robust oversight mechanisms to ensure that the money isn’t being lost to waste and fraud.

New data from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) indicates a significant increase in heart issues among pilots, with heart failure spiking nearly 1,000% in 2022. Lieutenant Ted Macie, an active-duty officer with the U.S. Navy Medical Service Corps, raised concerns about the health risks associated with the COVID-19 shots, including heart-related ailments. The data, obtained from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, shows drastic spikes in various diagnoses for serious medical issues, prompting questions about the potential impact of the COVID-19 vaccine on the health of service members.

In addition to serious cardiovascular issues, the Pentagon saw significant spikes in numerous ailments well beyond their five-year averages including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%). Heart-related ailments have soared over the past 5 years as well including hypertension (36%), ischemic heart disease (69%), pulmonary heart disease (62%), heart failure (973%), cardiomyopathy (152%), and other non-specified heart diseases (63%).

Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said on Thursday that 66 US military personnel have been injured in a spree of attacks on bases in Iraq and Syria.

The vicinity of the US Embassy in the specially protected Green Zone in the center of Baghdad has come under rocket fire, a source in the Iraqi security forces told local media.

The source said explosions were heard near the embassy.

"Explosions were heard near the US embassy in Baghdad and alarm sirens were activated inside the building. According to preliminary information, several rockets were fired in the vicinity of the embassy," the source said.

Planes of the Israeli Air Force delivered an air strike on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central part of the Gaza Strip early on Friday, Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television said.

According to the report, IDF fighter jets delivered a massed air strike on the healthcare facility, located in the city of Deir al Balah.

The Ukrainian government on Thursday requested emergency assistance from Poland, Romania, and Slovakia as freezing temperatures caused a shortage of power in the electrical grid, the state utility Ukrenergo has said.

Demand for electricity grew higher than what the Ukrenergo grid could support as snow fell in Kiev and the thermometers dropped to -4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit). The company said it would import power from Ukraine’s neighbors.

“From 11:00 to 19:00, emergency imports of electricity from Slovakia, Romania, and Poland will be used to balance the energy system,” said a message Ukrenergo sent to customers across the country.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin threatened to send Americans to "fight Russia" if lawmakers do not approve more aid for Ukraine, media personality Tucker Carlson said via X (formerly Twitter).

"We’ll send your uncles, cousins and sons to fight Russia," Carlson quoted Austin as saying during a classified briefing to the House of Representatives earlier this week.

Questioned by billionaire businessman Elon Musk on the veracity of Austin’s threat, the former Fox News host emphasized that the report was true. "[Austin] really did. Confirmed," Carlson underscored.

The Biden administration held classified briefings with members of Congress to inform them about the situation in Ukraine, in an effort to rally support behind the supplemental funding request with aid for Ukraine.

The Defense Department has warned that the United States risks running out of resources to support Ukraine and backfill its own defense stocks without further congressional action.

Webmaster addition: This amounts to blackmail. Let us spend your money buying weapons, or we'll drop your family into the combat zone!

The Zionist occupation forces continued on Wednesday their attacks against the Palestinians and demolished a number of homes and facilities in the city of Quds and the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

According to the Palestinian News Agency “Wafa”, the Zionist enemy forces demolished, Wednesday afternoon, part of the house of a citizen in the town of Silwan, south of the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque, and facilities in the town of Hizma in occupied Quds.

Local sources said that demolition crews in the occupation municipality in Quds demolished the walls of the house of Al-Maqdisi Haitham Jalajel in the Al-Bustan neighborhood in the town of Silwan manually, with cradle holders and a small bulldozer.

But Jones says his most accurate prediction was around a decade ago when he read the "Rockefeller Foundation Operation Lockstep report," which he says:

"described using a virus to bring in world government, a world medical ID, which they would then build a social credit score off of...

...that they would make people wear masks for fear, shut down sporting events and things like that... and basically phase in this new tyranny."

These warnings, among other things, were the reason, Carlson argues, why Jones was so widely deplatformed.

"Fundamentally, Alex Jones is right about a lot of things. And in fact, that's why they don't like him."

Biden is hoping for one more term as President. And declining oil prices might help him get re-elected.

The bonds of European countries are among the most overbought following the global rally in fixed income, and are therefore most susceptible to a correction.

Yields have fallen almost everywhere since October. Oversold conditions led to a reversal in the bond selloff, further galvanized by central bankers from the Federal Reserve to the ECB tempering their hawkishness based on their view that inflation is probably back under control.

The biggest drops in yields, after Brazil, have been in Italy, Ireland and Austria. Germany and France have also seen large declines, greater than in the US or the UK.

Burdensome permitting processes and the need for extra grid connections and power capacity are slowing down the installation of EV charging stations across Europe, threatening the EU’s ambition to rely on transport electrification as a pillar of its net-zero target.  

The EU adopted early this year legislation to make all new cars and vans registered in Europe zero-emission from 2035. The European Commission has also just proposed an action plan for grid investments across the bloc, aiming to upgrade grids, strengthen energy infrastructure, and allow faster access for renewables to the grids. 

Despite the EU ambitions and the EU-wide legislation, local-level regulations and requirements to have a charging point hooked up to the grid sometimes takes years, and the delays have become longer in recent years, energy companies and industry associations tell Reuters. 

“Although the work of installing a fast and ultra-fast charging point requires only two to three weeks of work, due to different administrative requirements in Spain, the complete process ... can last from one to two years,” Spanish energy firm Repsol told Reuters.  

The red tape in Germany, Europe’s largest car market, is similarly burdensome, industry sources say. 

Deep in a Cambodian old-growth forest, Buddhist "ecology monks" wrap trees in saffron clerical robes before ordaining the trees into the Buddhist faith.

The practice is an example of "forest activism" that spread to Cambodia after Thai monks in the 1990s began ordaining trees as they would a new monk.

Ordained trees become sacred and protected from illegal logging because harming an ordained monk is taboo in the Buddhist religion.

The recognition that religion can be a powerful tool when applied to selling the global warming narrative has been gaining traction at the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), where faith has traditionally been kept at arm's length.

The release of more video and cell phone tapes from January 6 by new House Speaker Mike Johnson shows further evidence of a setup by the Feds that their so-called insurrection was staged.

All sides will acknowledge the fact that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to have extra security on January 6.

However, there is a bigger question that no one, Left, Right or Center, seems to be asking:

Why?

Why wouldn’t Pelosi want to be sure that “Democracy was secure” so that Vice President Mike Pence could certify the Electoral College vote? Making sure that the Capitol was safe and sound would mean that Joe Biden’s presidency would be assured. After all, the election of 2020 was “the most secure in American history,” so why wouldn’t you want that obvious fact certified and rubber-stamped by Congress?

The only obvious answer to why Pelosi wanted to guarantee a riotous breach of the Capitol was what she knew would be the actual results of the Electoral College vote if the process were allowed to run its course. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, among others, had previously made noise about challenging election results in several swing states. And despite what many have debated, there was tangible potential for Pence to delay the certification for a couple of weeks to look into the evidence of significant vote-tampering and fraud.

The rise of generative AI applications like ChatGPT, Midjourney or Bard already leads to increased demand in the world's data center network due to its sometimes hefty requirements for the underlying large language models.

This computing demand will only increase in the upcoming years, necessitating the building of new data centers and expanding the capacities of existing ones.

As Statista's Florian Zandt shows in the following chart, based on 2022 data collected by commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield, the race between the global superpowers China and the United States also extends to data centers.

Immigrants who illegally cross the border into Arizona are being handed $5,000 in good-as-cash gift cards, along with cell phones and costly plane tickets, all of which are being paid for by the American taxpayer, according to Arizona Sheriff Mark Lamb.

“I was absolutely in shock when these agents came forward,” said Mr. Lamb. “I had known we handed out free cell phones and plane tickets, but to give out $5,000 Visa gift cards to people who break our laws and come into our country illegally when the average American is struggling to pay their bills is just tough to swallow.”

“People need to know the truth and let their representative lawmakers hear about it. This needs to end,” added Mr. Lamb.

The House of Representatives on Dec. 6 voted to pass a bill that will block a proposed rule by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to effectively mandate that most cars produced in the United States be fully electric by 2032.

The bill, H.R. 4468, dubbed the Choice in Automobile Retail Sales Act of 2023, passed the House by a 221–197 vote. That included total GOP support; Democrats, meanwhile, sought to have the bill sent back to committee.

The bill would block an EPA rule that would require roughly 68 percent of cars manufactured in the United States be fully electric by 2032. The rule has won the support of President Joe Biden's administration.

Republicans have rallied against the proposed standards, which they say are unrealistic and threaten to undermine consumer freedom—as well as to increase U.S. dependence on China.

Around 90 percent of the rare earth minerals used to create electric vehicles (EVs) are sourced from the top U.S. adversary.

In a landmark ruling, a Japanese court has convicted a non-profit executive of facilitating illegal overseas organ transplants for Japanese citizens.

On Nov. 28, the Tokyo District Court sentenced 63-year-old Hiromichi Kikuchi, chairman of the Association for Patients of Intractable Diseases, a non-profit organization. Kikuchi received an eight-month prison term and a fine of 1 million yen (around $6,800) for arranging organ transplants abroad for two Japanese citizens without government approval. His organization, which has been working with transplant patients for over fifteen years, is now under scrutiny.

The case, the first of its kind in Japan, has prompted widespread media coverage and heightened concerns over illegal organ transplants.

Mr. Kikuchi's conviction shows Japan's efforts to crack down on organ trafficking and forced organ harvesting. The transplants that led to his arrest took place in Belarus in 2022. However, the case has drawn attention to the grim reality of forced organ harvesting in China, as Mr. Kikuchi admitted that the vast majority of the transplants he has orchestrated since 2007 involved organs from China.

The one thing progressive corporate media and the radical left in the White House cannot stand is Elon Musk deepening his ties with the Department of Defense from rocket launches to providing the military with high-speed internet beamed from low-Earth orbit. 

According to Bloomberg, Musk's satellite internet service called "Starlink" successfully completed a nine-month pilot test in the harsh, snowy environment in the Arctic.

Brian Beal, principal engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory's Integrated Capabilities Directorate, stated that StarLink was a "reliable and high-performance communications system in the Arctic, including on-the-move applications." 

Beal said the test ended in June and evaluated Starlink's usefulness for high-speed internet in remote areas that can be set up in minutes.

Ireland’s “Hate Speech Bill” or The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 is a radical update to Irish hate crime law. It is a blueprint for authoritarianism, threatening jail time for the possession of memes and even reversing Ireland’s constitutionally guaranteed presumption of innocence – you are presumed guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.

Interest in the revised hate speech laws has been spurred by recent rioting in Dublin following the stabbing of three children and an early childhood worker outside of a school last month.

Australian media outlet Defence Connect reported that the riots prompted Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar to encourage a review of Ireland’s hate speech legislation. “I think it’s now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted us, that our incitement hatred legislation is just not up to date,” Varadkar said.

“It’s not up to date for the social media age, and we need that legislation through. And we need it through in a matter of weeks because it’s not just the platforms that have a responsibility here, and they do, it’s also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up hatred and violence. We need to be able to use laws to go after them individually.”

It's not just the US that retaliates against credit agency downgrades: China - which is almost as authoritarian as the US but at least does not pretend to be some beacon of democracy or virtue - does too, only in China's case Moody’s, which on Tuesday downgraded the outlook for China’s A1 long-term local and foreign-currency issuer rating to negative from stable, had a pretty good idea what would happen after its action became public and advised staff in China to work from home ahead of its cut to the outlook for the country’s sovereign credit rating.

According to the FT, some Moody’s department heads in the country told associates on Friday that non-administrative staff in Beijing and Shanghai should not go into the office this week, they said.

“They didn’t give us the reason . . . but everyone knows why,” said one China-based Moody’s employee, referring to the request to work from home. “We are afraid of government inspections.”

In 1992, comedian George Carlin noted that after the Cold War politicians in Washington were always declaring war on things at home, “We got a war on poverty, the war on crime, war on litter, the war on cancer, the war on drugs.” Carlin believes politicians never declared a war on homelessness because “there is no money to make in this problem.”

However, since George W. Bush’s war against terrorism there has been a three-legged stool to the pro-war coalition: ideologues (neo-conservatives and liberal internationalists), greedy war pigs who benefit financially from these conflicts, and a silent majority of patriotic Americans who are well-intentioned but are only now beginning to accept that these forever wars are not serving their or national interest.

It is likely that many of these patriots are never going to be anti-war, but they are certainly against taxpayer’s money being spent for losing wars while the war pigs have powerful incentives to prolong these wars for as long as possible.

Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist who serves as the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said Monday that the IMF wants to see countries implement punishing new carbon taxes to “fight climate change.”

She delivered her dire message at the United Nations COP28 climate summit, where globalists in attendance flew in on jets and you can bet they are being chauffeured around in luxury automobiles and dining on the finest cuts of beef and other delicacies.

“We are very keen to give the biggest possible incentive for decarbonization, which is putting a price on carbon,” Georgieva said at the summit in the United Arab Emirates. “That price needs to go up, up, up if we are to speed up decarbonization.”

The IMF boss also tried to justify carbon taxes by saying they would raise revenues for governments.

Webmaster addition: My concern is what government does with that revenue!

Getting SSSS on your boarding pass means you are under FBI investigation and they are tracking and surveilling you.

The US government loves to use this tool against journalists they dislike.

In recent months, ominous signs have emerged, painting a bleak picture of the economy as it heads into what appears to be a looming recession. One striking concern is the prolonged dip in manufacturing new orders, which have lingered at recessionary levels for a troubling 14 consecutive months.

A badly burned toddler screaming for the mother he doesn’t know is dead – and screaming because doctors do not have enough painkillers to relieve his suffering. An eight-year-old boy whose brain is exposed as bombing damaged parts of his skull. A teenage girl, her eye surgically removed, because every bone in her face is smashed. A three-year-old double amputee, whose severed limbs are laid out in a pink box beside him.

And in the background is the stench of rotting flesh as maggots “creep out of untreated wounds”.

This is the daily reality at the European Hospital inside the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, as described by veteran British war surgeon Tom Potokar, who works for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

While the United Nations warns that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “apocalyptic”, the Israeli military has expanded a ferocious ground campaign from the north of the besieged territory into the south, where an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced.

The US military said Thursday that it would conduct flight operations in Guyana amid tensions between the Caribbean nation and its neighbor Venezuela over the disputed Guayana Esequiba region.

Guayana Esequiba is an oil-rich region that makes up about two-thirds of the territory of the state of Guyana, which gained independence from Britain in 1966. In 1899, an American-British tribunal ruled that the territory belonged to the UK, a position that was rejected by Venezuela.

Venezuela, the UK, and then-British Guiana reached a new agreement in 1966, known as the Geneva Agreement, to reach a mutually satisfactory solution to the dispute. The International Court of Justice opened a case into the dispute in 2018, but a decision is still expected to be years away.

Tensions have risen in recent years over the dispute as more oil discoveries in Guayana Esequiba continue to be made. The American energy giant ExxonMobil discovered massive oil reserves off the coast of Guyana in waters claimed by Venezuela and has been involved in a major offshore drilling project.