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- Mercenarism (the state of an individual participating in an armed conflict on the side of a foreign state which that person is not originally from for monetary reward) is illegal in France under Law 2003-340 of April 14, 2003…The Criminal Code (Article 436-1) provides punishment of up to five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros…Creating and/or running an organization which recruits, hires, equips or provides military training to mercenaries is punishable by imprisonment of up to seven years and a fine of 100,000 euros.
- Tucker Carlson: Non-profits if you really think about it, “NGOs”, or whatever you call them, come define our country. They have more power than the congress, I’m not sure they’re working always for the public good and they don’t have to pay any taxes at all, which makes them twice as powerful as everyone else. So why do we have that system? I don’t understand. How about the system where everybody pays the same tax, same tax rate, everybody. Keep it low, rich people can’t get out of it…Non-profit thing is one of the biggest scams I’ve ever seen…
- Several asylum seekers, primarily from Syria and Afghanistan, have left the central German state of Thuringia after local authorities imposed tough controls on how refugees can spend their benefits, Bild reported on Saturday. Under rules introduced in December last year, asylum claimants are issued with pre-paid payment cards instead of cash handouts, as a means of preventing them from abusing the system and taking money out of the state. The card is only credited if the claimant appears in person at a local office, and remains in their assigned district. Shopping is allowed wherever Mastercard is accepted, but the card only works in the region specified by a personalized map, making it impossible for refugees to make transfers to their home countries.
- The Central African Republic is ready to host a Russian base, Fidel Ngouandika, an advisor to the president of the African country, told the African Initiative news agency. Fidel Ngouandika said that the existing infrastructure in Berengo permits the deployment of up to 10,000 servicemen. “We would like Russia to build a base in CAR,” he said. “The government has already provided a plot of land in Berengo, a place 80 kilometers west of the country’s capital, Bangui. “The purpose of the Russian military presence in CAR is to train our soldiers,” he said. “We are 1,000% committed to Russia and we believe that Russia should stay with us. If Russia abandons us today, we will be eaten up by Western states that have done nothing for our country since our independence.”
- A video from inside North Korea shows two teenagers being publicly sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for watching Korean TV dramas, a rare glimpse into Kim Jong Un’s reclusive state that comes as its neighbor reports a soaring number of defectors since 2021. In this video, two 16-year-olds in gray jumpsuits are seen standing in front of hundreds of students in a stadium, with uniformed officers criticizing them for not “deeply reflecting on their mistakes.” Videos or photos like this are rare for people outside North Korea, as residents are not allowed to leak any evidence of life to other countries. Travelers are also required to follow designated routes, and places where photography is allowed are severely restricted.
- Films such as ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Star Wars’ often portray the oldest characters as the wisest, but new research suggests that the theory doesn’t apply in the real world. Dr Judith Gluck, a psychologist at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, has conducted a review of past studies linking age and wisdom and found that “statistical relationships” between the pair are “not strong”. “While many people associate wisdom with advanced age, becoming wise clearly requires more than ‘just’ growing old.” Dr Gluck argues that people do not become wise over time and are actually shaped by “life experiences”. She said: “Life experiences, rather than time, are instead what results in wisdom development, but then these aren’t unique to people of old age. “Accumulated life experience is an important foundation for wisdom, but not all highly wise individuals are old, and many old individuals are not particularly wise.”
- Russia’s electronic warfare units are so widespread, they may be causing havoc with GPS signals in nearby countries, according to a report. The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, said that recent disruptions to GPS signals in Poland and the Baltic area have sparked rumors about the use of Russian electronic warfare systems nearby. The US-based think tank cited reports about high levels of GPS interference in Poland on January 10 and 16, and in the south Baltic Sea between December 25 and 27. Polish media said that the interference affected aircraft GPS systems, but that flights were not impacted because air traffic control enabled navigation through alternative systems. There was also speculation the interference could’ve been caused by secret NATO exercises or by Russian electronic warfare units in Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave on the Baltic coast, said the ISW.
- Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of taking an irresponsible approach to artificial intelligence after committing to building a powerful AI system on a par with human levels of intelligence. The Meta chief executive has said the company will attempt to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system and make it open source, meaning it will be accessible to developers outside the company. The system should be made “as widely available as we responsibly can”, he added. In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said it was clear that the next generation of tech services “requires building full general intelligence”. The potential emergence of AGI has alarmed experts and politicians around the world who fear such a system, or a combination of multiple AGI systems, could evade human control and threaten humanity.
- Thanks to the internet and (shrinking) press freedoms, legacy media outlets no longer have a monopoly on information and narratives. Case in point, during a WEF discussion at Davos entitled “Defending Truth,” Wall St. Journal EIC Emma Tucker lamented this loss of control over ‘the facts,’ as Modernity.news reports. “I think there’s a very specific challenge for the legacy brands, like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal,” Tucker said, adding “If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.” “If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact,” she continued, adding “Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.” ~ Tyler Durden
- A 2022 poll found 43% of Americans think a civil war is a least somewhat likely in the next decade. But here’s what few people realize: The intensity of our division springs from a federal government operating far beyond the limits of the Constitution — fueling a fight for control over powers that were never supposed to exist at the national level. To put it another way, if the federal government were confined to its actual granted authorities, federal elections would be of little interest to the general public, because the outcome would be largely irrelevant to their everyday lives. America’s founders drafted the Constitution with great trepidation. Having just escaped British tyranny, the people of the separate states that would comprise the proposed union were wary of centralizing too much power at the federal level, and thus sowing the seeds of a new tyranny. ~ Brian McGlinchey
- A new study published by Johns Hopkins own Bloomberg School for Public Health outlines the action items on the billionaire-funded gun control lobby’s wish list and makes the claim that those specific gun control provisions are crucial to stopping an armed insurrection in the United States. The policy recommendations made by the study include regulating the public carry of firearms, prohibiting “paramilitary” activity, enacting unconstitutional red flag laws that remove due process, and finally (and maybe most sinisterly) repealing state-level preemption laws. In the study, the authors reference a study titled “Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence.” Conducted in 2022, the study features a statistic that half (50.1%) of survey participants agreed that “in the next few years there will a be a civil war in the United States.” This statistic is featured prominently within the Johns Hopkins study. ~ Gun Owners of America
- While one reason for the visit was to present a further aid package for Ukraine, he would also make clear the Slovakian positions diverging from Ukraine’s wishes, the premier said. “I will tell him that we will block and veto Ukrainian accession to NATO, because it would be nothing but the basis for a third world war,” Fico said. Slovakia, which has been a member of NATO since 2004, was long one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters in its defensive campaign against the full-scale Russian invasion launched in February 2022. However, when Fico’s left-wing nationalist government took over last October, it decided to no longer supply Kiev with weapons, though Bratislava continues to send mine-clearing systems and diesel generators in the event of Russian attacks on power plants, for example.
- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to spend more this year than ever before — $8.6 billion — as wider health funding for the lowest income countries stutters after the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2024 budget agreed by the foundation’s board is up 4% on last year and $2 billion more than in 2021. In a statement, the foundation said global health budgets were in decline overall and contributions to health in the lowest-income countries were stalling.
- Traces of cocaine have been discovered during a narcotics analysis of bathrooms inside Sweden’s parliament, according to a report by the Aftonbladet tabloid. “In all the samples we received, we found cocaine,” hospital chemist Anders Helander, who performed subsequent analysis on the samples, said according to Aftonbladet. The newspaper added that the drug was found in bathrooms predominantly used by lawmakers from four political parties: the Social Democrats, Sweden Democrats, Left Party and the Liberals.
- Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has voiced concern that Donald Trump’s plan for swiftly ending the conflict between Kiev and Moscow might not take Kiev’s interests into account. In an interview with the UK’s Channel 4 News on Friday, Zelensky was asked to comment on the former US president’s repeated claim that if he returns to the White House following this year’s election, he will end the fighting between Russia and Ukraine in just 24 hours. The reporter then asked the Ukrainian leader if he wanted to invite Trump to arrive in Kiev in person to explain his plan. “Yes, please, Donald Trump, I invite you to Ukraine, to Kiev. So, if you can stop the war during 24 hours I think it will be enough to come, on any day,” he said.
- In the fiscal year of fear, from April 2022 to April 2023, Americans threw a whopping $11 billion at survival gear, proving that so-called ‘doomsday prepping’ has moved from the backyards of the paranoid to the Pinterest boards of mainstream America. A third of the population now proudly wears the prepper badge, although their efforts pale in comparison to those of the world’s billionaires. These folks aren’t just stocking up on canned beans; they’re dropping hundreds of millions on bunkers that could rival a luxury resort, private islands that James Bond villains would envy, and “survival condos” that make you question if they’re prepping for the apocalypse or planning the world’s most exclusive underground party.
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Rose Rambles... 