All thirty-one NATO countries plus Sweden are reportedly gearing up to conduct the bloc's biggest military drills since the Cold War in early 2024. Sputnik reached out to Michael Maloof, a former security policy analyst with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to get a sense of the risks posed by the exercises.

British business media reported Monday that NATO plans to hold large-scale exercises across Germany, Poland and the Baltic countries between February and March of 2024, with the drills' pretext being to practice "repelling Russian aggression" against allies. The drills, dubbed Steadfast Defender 24, are set to involve up to 41,000 troops, 50 warships, and to feature between 500-700 air combat missions, according to sources familiar with the plans.

The exercises are the first of their kind since 2021, with the alliance previously mostly avoiding large-scale exercises in Russia's direct vicinity amid concerns about Moscow’s possible reaction amid repeated warnings by Russian Foreign Intelligence that some NATO countries may be preparing to transform the Ukrainian proxy conflict into a direct shooting war with Russia.

America's middle class is being systematically eviscerated.  When the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system during the pandemic, most Americans didn't realize what that would do to them.  That money certainly made the wealthy a whole lot wealthier, but it also dramatically increased the cost of living for the rest of us.  So now inflation has been rising much faster than paychecks have, and the cost of living has become exceedingly oppressive.  In fact, last year we witnessed the largest decline in real median household income in more than a decade.

The official tally is in and it is brutal: Americans suffered the biggest drop in household income in 2022 in a dozen years.

Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, a drop of 2.3 percent from the prior year, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

This is the biggest drop in household income since 2010, when it household income fell 2.6 percent. That means it is worse than the pandemic decline of 2.2 percent. It is the fourth worst year in records going back to 1985.

In 2010, the U.S. economy was just coming out of the horrible recession that we had just experienced in 2008 and 2009.

Those were not fun times.

A series of high-profile trials against ringleaders of the Capitol riot culminated last week in the sentencing of former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio to 22 years in prison. More than 1,100 people have been already charged, but the investigation into the riot is far from over, writes the BBC's Mike Wendling.

On 6 January 2021, Evan Neumann was near the front of the crowd that stormed into the US Capitol.

Wearing a red Maga hat and a gas mask, he assaulted at least four police officers, punching them and bashing them with parts of a metal barricade.

According to a criminal complaint, he swore at officers, called them "murderers" and shouted: "I'm willing to die, are you?"

Mr Neumann, 51, was eventually indicted on 14 counts related to the riot, but before he could be arrested, he had fled the US.

He later appeared on camera in Belarus, where he had just been granted political asylum. "I am very very grateful," he told Belta, the Belarussian state-owned news agency, "and it is bittersweet, like eating cranberries." He has denied the charges against him.

I can assure you, the COVID vaccine didn’t reduce the risk of a COVID death for the elderly or anyone else for that matter. It did the opposite.

Here are a few key arguments:

1. There are no papers that take this “gold standard” data on the most important population for the and use it to show that the vaccines worked.

2. “Experts” like UPenn Professor Jeffrey Morris are completely incapable of explaining how nursing homes like Apple Valley Village went from a 0 in 27 death rates before the shots to a 28 deaths in 90 infections just 4 weeks post-vaccine. It’s the same variant. How can it suddenly be more deadly?

3. Data published in a paper in JAMA showed that at 128 Veterans Health Administration community living centers, the infection fatality rate (IFR) increased by 28% in residents who opted for the booster shots. While the increase was not statistically significant because the death numbers were too low, the trend was clearly in the wrong direction.

4. I just finished analyzing each of the 15,197 nursing homes providing data to the CDC. It turns out that for every nursing home where there was an IFR mortality improvement, there were 6.6X where the rates were worse by a comparable amount. This is an utter disaster for the narrative. If the vaccines worked, it should have been the other way around. This is why all the pro-vaccine advocates avoid this data at all costs. A 6.6 odds of getting worse isn’t likely to have happened by chance (1126 homes vs. 169 homes).

5. There is nothing wrong with the data. The data was used in a peer-reviewed paper published in JAMA, but that paper didn’t look at the IFR at all.

6. The data is aligned with the first-hand anecdotes. For example, at Apple Valley Village the people who worked there saw a massive number of deaths right after the vaccines rolled out: the largest number of deaths in their history: 50 people in January 2021 which is roughly 1 out of every 3 residents in a single month. In a normal January, they will get just 5 deaths. How do “they” explain that? Apple Valley Village isn’t returning any phone calls. They don’t want to talk about it. I wonder why? Neither does anyone else. Professor Morris doesn’t want to talk about it at all.

In a significant development on Monday, four Californians, including a prison inmate, admitted to charges of conspiracy and aggravated identity theft.

Their admission comes in connection with their involvement in a fraudulent scheme that swindled nearly $25 million in Covid-19 relief funds from the California Employment Development Department (EDD).

The group, comprising of one inmate and three Los Angeles residents, exploited the pandemic situation to their advantage. They used the personal identification details of numerous individuals to lodge fraudulent unemployment insurance claims, thereby amassing a fortune.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) identified the mastermind behind the operation as Telvin Breaux, a 32-year-old inmate at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi. Breaux orchestrated the entire operation from his prison cell, with the assistance of his accomplices - Fantasia Brown, 35, Shanice White, 29, and Holly White, 29.

The head of the medical service of the Far-Right unit Da Vinci’s Wolves of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Alina Mykhailova, spoke about the difficult situation and, even more surprisingly, admitted to huge losses on the front.

“We are suffering great losses. There is no romance in this. What is happening at the front now is something you will not read in the news,” she said in an interview with Ukrainian media on September 12.

Mykhailova added that for the first time in her life, she was ready to give up absolutely everything and talk to anyone so that her battalion would survive. She also admitted that there is no prospect of a Ukrainian victory in the near future.

“The population is very calm with statements that today or tomorrow there will be victory. It will not happen today, nor tomorrow, nor, unfortunately, in a year,” Mykhailova, who is also a deputy in the Kiev City Council, concluded.

Since the beginning of June, the Ukrainian military has been conducting a counteroffensive in Donetsk, Artyomovsk and Zaporozhye with NATO-trained brigades and Western military equipment. However, they have achieved no success.

Although Mykhailova did not give a casualty figure, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently revealed that the counteroffensive has stalled and led to over 75,500 Ukrainian casualties – shocking for only four months of active combat. Many American and European journalists and military experts also argue that Kiev’s counteroffensive failed and noted the effectiveness of Russian defences.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley pointed out on September 10 that Ukraine may only have about 30-45 days of fighting left. However, despite this small timeframe left in the regular fighting season and the huge losses suffered by Kiev, the US and NATO are not fazed and continue to send more military shipments and money into the financial blackhole that Ukraine has become.

The Ukrainian military will be unable to advance any further from their already paltry gains once the season changes. Ukraine and the West have exhausted their ammunition stockpile, and they cannot get supplies quickly enough. Effectively, the Ukrainians cannot do much at this point, even if they want to.

Joe Biden has a long history of making racist remarks.

But the media’s given Biden a pass every time until now.

And now a key Democrat was left in silence after hearing this racist Joe Biden remark.

Republican presidential candidate Larry Elder is desperately trying to boost his name recognition to garner enough support in the polls to qualify for the GOP debates.

As such, Elder will appear on any media outlet that will have him.

That led to Elder appearing on Charlamagne Tha God’s nationally syndicated radio program “The Breakfast Club” which is normally a mandatory stop for any aspiring Democrat politician because of the large audience of black voters that the show reaches.

Charlamagne asked Elder – who is one of the most prominent black conservatives in America – if Elder ever experienced a racial “wake-up call” where Elder supposedly realized white people made him feel inferior because he is black.

Elder dismissed the question as nonsense saying he obviously has known his whole life that he is black and turned it around on Charlamagne asking if he experienced a wake-up call about Joe Biden after an infamous 2020 interview where Biden said if Charlamagne had any more questions for him about his record as opposed to Donald Trump’s then Charlamagne wasn’t a real black man.

Webmaster addition:

 The Biden administration plans to spend $100 million in an effort to aid America’s electric car drivers by repairing and replacing thousands of chargers people use for their vehicles.

 Oprah Winfrey addressed the intense backlash she faced for creating a fund which was meant to help the victims of the Maui wildfire.

A male was caught on video brutally body-slamming a female on a parking lot surface in Auburn, Alabama, over the weekend after she tried to end her attacker's beatdown of another male.

What are the details?

Cellphone video captured the incident during which two college-age males were fighting in a parking lot in the 700 block of West Magnolia Drive on Sunday, WRBL-TV reported.

One male gained control in the fight, pinning down the other male and repeatedly punching him in the face and head, the station said, adding that the pinned-down male soon stopped fighting back.

A female soon tried to stop the beatdown by pushing the male who was punching the other male in the head, WRBL said.

With that, the male who'd been dominating the fight picked up the female by her waist with his right arm, spun her backward in mid-air, and slammed her on the parking lot surface, the station said.

Democrats and prominent media outlets claimed Tuesday that a senior FBI official has undermined the credibility of two IRS whistleblowers. But upon closer examination, that's not what happened at all.

Last week, Thomas Sobocinski, the FBI special agent in charge of the Baltimore Field Office, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in a closed-door meeting. Transcripts of his testimony then leaked, and Hunter Biden's top defenders — Democrats and the legacy media — tried hard to spin it.

• The New York Times: "F.B.I. Agent Undercuts Claims of Political Interference in Hunter Biden Inquiry
• The Washington Post: "Senior FBI agent disputes some whistleblowers’ claims about Hunter Biden probe"
• Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.): "Only hours after Republicans launched their impeachment stunt it's already falling apart as the stories of two of their 'whistleblowers' start to unravel."

Sobocinski, according to the Post and Times, denied that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss — now a special counsel — told investigators he lacked authority to charge the first son outside of his jurisdiction.

Specifically, IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley alleges that Weiss told FBI and IRS investigators in a meeting last October that he was not the "deciding official on whether charges are filed." Sobocinski, who attended that meeting, told House investigators he did not remember Weiss saying that.

As you might expect, leftists got their panties in a bunch over law enforcement posing for photos Wednesday morning around captured illegal alien fugitive Danelo Cavalcante, a convicted killer who escaped from prison two weeks ago.

Video of law enforcement readying their pose begins around the 1-minute mark:

Danelo Cavalcante captured after escape from Pa. prisonyoutu.be

Talking heads on WTXF-TV narrated the pose in the above video and seemed a bit taken aback.

"Well, that's interesting," a male on-air personality said as video played. "I don't know that I've ever seen anything like that."

"Where they're posing for a photo?" a female on-air personality asked.

Given that yesterday was the anniversary date of the 9/11 attacks, I would be remiss if I failed to point out why there was so much anger and rage among foreigners toward the United States in the years leading up to those attacks. 

After all, don’t forget what U.S. officials and their interventionist cohorts steadfastly maintained in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: that the terrorists just hated America for its “freedom and values.”

That was a lie — and U.S. officials and their interventionists cohorts knew that it was a lie. 

The reason that foreigners bore such deep anger and rage toward the United States was because of the U.S. government’s deadly and destructive interventionist antics in the Middle East after the ostensible end of the Cold War.

Those interventionist antics included the intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage-treatment plants in the Persian Gulf War, where the U.S. government was claiming that Saddam Hussein was a “new Hitler,” notwithstanding the fact that he had been a partner and ally of the U.S. government during the 1980s. 

The intentional destruction of those water-and-sewage treatment plants followed a Pentagon study that concluded that the destruction of those plants would help spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi populace.

The New York Times picked September 11th as an opportune day to publish an essay praising “President Joe Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia exchang[ing] a warm handshake” at last week’s G20 summit, and celebrating the possibility of the U.S. giving formal security guarantees to Riyadh in exchange for Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic ties with Israel.

Plenty is missing from the essay, including any discussion of how a security commitment might compel U.S. soldiers to fight on behalf of Saudi Arabia, a country whose de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, was responsible for ordering the operation that killed Washington Post columnist Jamal Khahoshoggi and has overseen a brutal war in Yemen. The U.S. government also continues to withhold an unredacted memo detailing ties between 9/11 hijackers and Saudi Arabia.

But perhaps even more noticeably, the Times failed to acknowledge the potential financial conflicts of interest between the essay writer’s employer and the essay’s arguments for security guarantees that would be highly beneficial to Saudi Arabia.

During the Cold War there were similar dangerous moments, but John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, as well as Ronald Reagan and Michael Gorbachev, managed to avoid the worst-case scenario. George H.W. Bush talked in 1990 about a “Europe whole and free” and a new “security architecture from Vancouver to Vladivostok,” while Boris Yeltsin, during his 1992 address to the joint chambers of Congress, exclaimed, “God bless America.”

So, what went wrong? Why are we talking about nuclear war again? According to Washington, Putin and his desire to restore the Soviet empire are to blame. Moscow points the finger back at Washington for its vision of a unipolar world order under the U.S. hegemony.

Below is my brief take, which I would be happy to debate with those who see it differently. Perhaps during such exchanges, we could come up with some ideas for avoiding our mutual extinction.

UPDATE: The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has updated the number of those killed as a result of an explosion at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel to five.

Four Palestinians were killed and at least 19 others were wounded when an explosive device blew up among protestors at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.

The origin of the device and the reason for the explosion remain unknown, but earlier in the day, several Palestinians were wounded by Israeli military gunfire near Al-Malaka area, east of Gaza City.

The explosion also took place in Al-Malaka, the Palestinian name of an Israeli military base near the Gaza fence. 

One of those killed is Baraa Wael al-Zurd. 

Al-Zurd was the first name of those killed to be announced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, before the number of casualties was updated to four. 

 Apple is set to host specialized entrepreneur training camps that bars applicants based on their race and sex. To participate, organizations must have “black, Hispanic/Latinx, or Indigenous” members in both leadership and on staff.

 Democrats concede off-air that they believe President Joe Biden is too old to seek another term in the White House, according to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

The Biden administration "won't hesitate" to impose more sanctions on Russia and North Korea if they conclude any new arms deals, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller issued the warning at a briefing in response to questions about the meeting in Russia between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"We have taken a number of actions already to sanction entities that brokered arms sales between North Korea and Russia and we won't hesitate to impose additional actions if appropriate," Miller said.

It was troubling that Russia and North Korea are discussing increased cooperation that could violate U.N. Security Council resolutions, he said.

"When you see what looks to be increased cooperation and probably military transfers, that is quite troubling and would potentially be in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions," Miller said.

"I don't know really what their issue is."

That's how the world's richest man describes the apparent 'beef' that the Biden administration has with him (apart from him calling them on their bullshit and enabling a free-speech platform for others to discuss non-approved narratives).

Specifically, Elon Musk told the panel on the 'All-In' Podcast Summit yesterday:

"...there does seem to be some significant increase in the weaponization of government and really sort of misuse of prosecutorial discretion in many areas... I think this is really a dangerous thing for there to be partisan politics with government agencies.”

"Elon, does the Biden administration have it out for you, and why?" All-In host entrepreneur David Sacks asked Musk.

"Ha. What ever gave you that idea?" Musk joked.

“I don't think the whole administration has it out for me,” he added.

 “But I think there’s probably aspects of the administration... or aspects of interests aligned with President Biden who probably do not wish good things for me.”

In July of last year as the hype surrounding the covid pandemic was finally dying out I published an article about a barely publicized project called the “Council For Inclusive Capitalism.”

The group, headed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild who now seems to be the public face of the notorious Rothschild dynasty, is the culmination of decades of various globalist agendas combined to represent the ultimate proof of “New World Order” conspiracy.

Remember when people used to say that global governance by elitists was a paranoid fantasy? Well, now the plan is an openly admitted reality.

The CIC is intimately tied to institutions like the World Economic Forum, the UN and the IMF, but it is primarily an attempt to link all these organizations more closely to the corporate world in an open display of collusion. The group pushes the spread of what they call “Stakeholder Capitalism” – The idea that international corporations have a responsibility to participate in social engineering, and that they are required (in the name of the greater good) to manipulate civilization through economic punishments and rewards.

We witnessed this agenda in action during the covid lockdowns and the rush to enforce vaccine passports. These efforts would not have been possible without the participation of major corporate chains working hand-in-hand with national governments and the World Health Organization. Luckily, the strategy failed as local governments and the public fought back.