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- Where were you on March 9, 2022, when President Biden signed the death warrant on American freedom? On that day, in a hushed ceremony at the White House without the approval of Congress, the states or the American people, Biden signed into law Executive Order 14067. Buried in his order are a few paragraphs, titled Section 4. The language in Section 4 makes Order 14067 the most treacherous act by a sitting president in the history of our republic. That’s because Section 4 sets the stage for legal government surveillance of all U.S. citizens, total control over your bank accounts and purchases and the ability to silence all dissenting voices for good. In this new war on freedom, they aren’t coming for your guns. No, they’re thinking much bigger than that. They’re coming for your money. ~ James Rickards, DailyReckoning.com
- Three months since its worldwide release, Christopher Nolan’s film about the creator of the atomic bomb, “Oppenheimer,” has yet to be seen in the only country where the weapons were dropped: Japan. The Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, which represents Japan’s hibakusha (victims of the World War II bombings), also declined to comment. “We haven’t seen the movie,” said a spokeswoman. Hollywood movies are typically released without incident in Japan, though there are exceptions. “Unbroken,” a 2014 film depicting the real-life story of Louis Zamperini, a prisoner of war tortured by a sadistic Japanese camp commander, was stopped in its tracks by a campaign by the Japanese right-wing media. It was eventually screened at art house cinemas.
- FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, testifying in his own defense at his fraud trial on Friday, said a “lot of people got hurt” when the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed last year, but insisted he did not defraud anyone or steal billions of dollars from customers. Bankman-Fried fielded questions from his own lawyer in his first day of testimony with jurors present, admitting to making “mistakes” such as not putting in place a risk-management team while also seeking to lay blame on Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of his crypto-focused Alameda Research hedge fund who was a key witness for the prosecution.
- A former professional boxer and death-row inmate accused of a 1966 quadruple murder in central Japan is innocent, his elderly sister said Friday, in the first hearing of his retrial that is likely to lead to his exoneration. Iwao Hakamata, 87, was exempted from attending the retrial at the Shizuoka District Court, as his mental state has deteriorated after spending nearly half a century behind bars before new evidence led to his release in 2014.
- Ibram X. Kendi, the controversial author of How to Be an Antiracist, has been revealed as not only a hustler of horrid ideas but also a poor businessman. Kendi was appointed the head and founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research in 2020 following the aptly named “summer of love,” which saw riots in most major cities over calls for “racial justice.” Now, Boston University is committing mass layoffs of employees, as the Center has lost the $43 million that was donated to it at its opening. There have also been several complaints about management practices. The Center is laying off much of its staff as it switches to a new model that it hopes will keep it alive. It is another profound case of fiat academia being inefficient and unproductive, as well as peddling half-baked half-dead ideas. Kendi’s general philosophical thesis could be summed up simply as “Everyone is racist, and that extends to all of society. History can be understood as a white supremacist culture getting better at hiding its underlying racism.” ~ David Brady Jr, The Mises Institute
- Cambodia’s Virachey National Park is one of the last remaining areas of relatively untouched natural beauty in the fast-developing Mekong Region. “Logging and poaching is an issue but the park has a way of protecting itself,” Thon Soukhoun, who has been a ranger since the forest became a national park in 1993, said. But as nations in Southeast Asia race to decarbonize their energy sectors, partly through climate finance, Cambodia is risking this regional biodiversity hot spot for renewable energy. This has sparked a debate about the environmental costs of renewable energy. Conservationists fear government plans for hydropower dams in Virachey will jeopardize hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of conservation funding from Britain for the sake of “clean” energy, the very definition of which they challenge.
- Not long ago at the height of fear over the global pandemic the US underwent a change that many people argued would never happen. For years I have heard people say that authoritarian controls in America are “tinfoil hat conspiracy theory” and doom mongering – All the prepping, all the talk of community organizing, all the guns and the gear and the training were for nothing. Then…the covid agenda hit like a freight train. Our constitutional rights were no longer set in stone, but mere guidelines that government officials could bend or break in the name of “public health safety.” Laws no longer had to be passed through a series of checks and balances; mandates could be implemented as if they were laws without public oversight and enforced unilaterally. ~ Brandon Smith, Alt-Market.us
- A study of DNA sequences taken from ancient human remains across Eurasia has detected several genes linked to microbes. The progress of human civilization owes much to farm animals. However, there is a darker side: these animals are linked to significant health crises in our history. Science has firmly established that when humans began domesticating animals, they unintentionally facilitated the emergence of diseases such as the plague and louse-borne relapsing fever (LBRF). Over time, experts have speculated that the creation of expansive pastoral societies by Eurasian hunter-gatherers roughly 12,000 years ago increased the chances of zoonotic disease transmission. Recent advances in ancient DNA analysis have allowed a team led by geogeneticist Martin Sikora at the University of Copenhagen to explore this theory. They identified numerous microbial genes in 1,313 ancient human samples from across Eurasia.
- Researchers excavating an archaeological site where an impressive palace is believed to have stood in the late third century found the partial remains of a cockroach that conceivably gave Himiko, a legendary queen of early Japan, a fright. The find, at the Makimuku ruins in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, caused a stir because it constitutes the world’s oldest known example of a German cockroach (Blattella germanica) and raises the possibility the insect is native to Japan rather than being a relative newcomer. The queen is thought to have died around the year 247. Her reaction to a cockroach scurrying in her palace would probably have been the same as a person today finding one in their home, the researchers said. The excavation work is being undertaken by a team from Nara Women’s University and the Osaka Museum of Natural History.
- Mouse embryos have been grown on the International Space Station and developed normally in the first study indicating that it could be possible for humans to reproduce in space, a group of Japanese scientists said. The researchers — including professor Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi’s Advanced Biotechnology Center and a team from the Japan Aerospace Space Agency (JAXA) — sent frozen mouse embryos on board a rocket to the ISS in August 2021.
- Sixty-one years ago this month, between mid-late October of 1962, the world bated its breath as the nuclear superpowers approached the precipice of a third and likely final world war in humanity’s history. Concerned by the deployment of US nuclear missiles in Turkiye and the global strategic imbalance caused by the USSR’s lack of long-range missiles capable of reaching US soil, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made the audacious and highly risky decision to try to secretly deploy more than 160 nuclear weapons in Cuba – then a newfound Soviet ally. US intelligence found out about the attempted deployment, triggering the two-week standoff. War was averted thanks to a masterclass of personalized back-and-forth diplomacy between Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy, with the leaders sending each other a series of letters, and ultimately finding mutual readiness to compromise. In exchange for an ironclad commitment by the US not to invade Cuba, and to quietly remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkiye, the USSR agreed to withdraw and never again station nuclear weapons on the Caribbean Island. Sixty years later, the roles reversed, with NATO expanding up to Russia’s borders, and the US building nuclear-capable anti-missile launch sites in Eastern Europe. Amid intelligence reports of Ukrainian plans to attack the Donbass, and NATO statements that it would not entertain Russian concerns about Ukrainian membership in the Western alliance, Moscow made a final diplomatic overture to prevent escalation – sending a pair of comprehensive draft treaty proposals to Washington and Brussels in December 2021 designed to ease tensions. NATO and the US rejected the draft treaties, ultimately sparking a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and slowly escalating tensions by delivering evermore advanced weapons to the country, including long-range artillery, depleted uranium tank shells, cluster bombs and cruise missiles which can hit targets deep inside the Russian hinterland. The Ukrainian crisis has served to dramatically escalate strategic tensions between the nuclear superpowers, with the US conducting a large scale explosion at a nuclear testing ground in Nevada as Russia moved to pull out of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last week.
Rose Rambles... 