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Major Ukrainian Official Warns: Biden’s Sanctions Are Not Hurting Russia At All

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/sanctions-russia.jpg" /></div>
According to Alexey Ryabchin, adviser to the head of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine, America’s sanctions are not doing anything to hurt Russia. As we read in <a href="https://ukraina.ru/news/20220411/1033742065.html">Ukraina</a>:
<blockquote readability="23">
It is impossible to cause economic damage to Russia as long as its energy resources are bought in Europe, Alexey Ryabchin, adviser to the head of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine, said on the air of the Ukraine 24 TV channel
Russia receives about three-quarters of its income from energy exports to the EU countries through the sale of oil and one-quarter from gas supplies.
“The fact that Russia received $30 billion in monthly income from gas trade with Europe completely eliminates the sanctions imposed by these (European) countries,” Ryabchin said.
Due to the sanctions imposed against Russia by the US and EU countries, the exchange rate of the national currency of the Russian Federation for some time fell to about 120 rubles per US dollar, but in April it stabilized to the February level.
</blockquote>
 
 
source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2022/04/11/major-ukrainian-official-warns-bidens-sanctions-are-not-hurting-russia-at-all/">https://shoebat.com/2022/04/11/major-ukrainian-official-warns-bidens-sanctions-are-not-hurting-russia-at-all/</a>

armageddon Major Ukrainian Official Warns: Biden’s Sanctions Are Not Hurting Russia At All

According to Alexey Ryabchin, adviser to the head of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine, America’s sanctions are not doing anything to hurt Russia. A...

Ukrainian Neo-Nazis Use Orphanage As Training Center For Child Soldiers

<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" readability="33"><a href="https://shoebat.com/2022/04/11/ukrainian-neo-nazis-use-orphanage-as-training-center-for-child-soldiers/children-nazis-in-ukraine/" rel="attachment wp-att-145326"><img alt="" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-145326" class="size-large wp-image-145326" height="659" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" src="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/children-nazis-in-ukraine--1024x659.jpg" srcset="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/children-nazis-in-ukraine--1024x659.jpg 1024w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/children-nazis-in-ukraine--300x193.jpg 300w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/children-nazis-in-ukraine--768x494.jpg 768w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/children-nazis-in-ukraine--1536x989.jpg 1536w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/children-nazis-in-ukraine-.jpg 2038w" width="1024" /></a>
Two Ukrainian girls holding weapons, saying “Slava Ukraina” (Glory to Ukraine)
</div>
Ukrainian neo-Nazis — members of the Azov Battalion — were using an orphanage as a training center for child soldiers, according to <a href="https://www.pravda.ru/news/politics/1697530-v_mariupole_banderovcy/">Pravda</a>:
<blockquote readability="30">
It turned out that in Mariupol there was an orphanage “Pilgrim”, the children from which for eight years were supervised and “educated” by “Azov” (the organization is banned in the Russian Federation).
The “educational work” was as follows: the boys were trained in military affairs, and snipers were made from girls. In a word, they put on stream the production of a sort of “Hitler Youth”.
And these same teenagers, after the start of hostilities, in addition to the fact that they fought together with Azov, they, on the orders of their own curators, set fire to peaceful houses !
By the way, the Russian military discovered a kindergarten in the Kherson region, where the Marines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been stationed since 2014. Ukrainian soldiers equipped firing positions, and also underwent special engineering training directly inside the kindergarten. In addition, objects for the creation of IEDs were found.
</blockquote>
According to <a href="https://donbasstoday.ru/naczionalisty-iz-azova-ispolzuyut-sirot-dlya-boevyh-dejstvij/">Donbass Today</a>:
<blockquote readability="12">
In Mariupol there was an orphanage “Pilgrim”, the children from which were supervised by “Azov” for 8 years, the correspondent of ” Donbass Today ” reports.
The curatorship consisted in the fact that girls were made into snipers, and boys were taught the art of war.
</blockquote>
In Ukraine there is a phenomenon of children being indoctrinated with fanatical nationalism. There was a recent video showing a compilation of various of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, many of whom are children and youths, praising Bandera, one of the founders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) which butchered Polish people in the 1940s. (The picture above is from this video). In between the clips are dispersed two videos, one of a Ukrainian woman crying how the world wants peace and a man calling Russia’s accusations of nazism in Ukraine “fairy tales.” (Put the CC on for the video):
[embedded content] 
 
 
source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2022/04/11/ukrainian-neo-nazis-use-orphanage-as-training-center-for-child-soldiers/">https://shoebat.com/2022/04/11/ukrainian-neo-nazis-use-orphanage-as-training-center-for-child-soldiers/</a>

armageddon Ukrainian Neo-Nazis Use Orphanage As Training Center For Child Soldiers

Two Ukrainian girls holding weapons, saying “Slava Ukraina” (Glory to Ukraine) Ukrainian neo-Nazis — members of the Azov Battalion — were...

Hubble probes extreme weather on ultra-hot Jupiters

In studying a unique class of ultra-hot exoplanets, NASA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers may be in the mood for dancing to the Calypso party song “Hot, Hot, Hot.”
That’s because these bloated Jupiter-sized worlds are so precariously close to their parent star they are being roasted at seething temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to vaporize most metals, including titanium. They have the hottest planetary atmospheres ever seen.
In two new papers, teams of Hubble astronomers are reporting on bizarre weather conditions on these sizzling worlds. It’s raining vaporized rock on one planet, and another one has its upper <a href="https://phys.org/tags/atmosphere/">atmosphere</a> getting hotter rather than cooler because it is being “sunburned” by intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from its star.
This research goes beyond simply finding weird and quirky planet atmospheres. Studying <a href="https://phys.org/tags/extreme+weather/">extreme weather</a> gives astronomers better insights into the diversity, complexity, and exotic chemistry taking place in far-flung worlds across our galaxy.
“We still don’t have a good understanding of weather in different planetary environments,” said David Sing of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, co-author on two studies being reported. “When you look at Earth, all our weather predictions are still finely tuned to what we can measure. But when you go to a distant exoplanet, you have limited predictive powers because you haven’t built a general theory about how everything in an atmosphere goes together and responds to extreme conditions. Even though you know the basic chemistry and physics, you don’t know how it’s going to manifest in complex ways.”
In a paper in the April 6 journal Nature, astronomers describe Hubble observations of WASP-178b, located about 1,300 light-years away. On the daytime side the atmosphere is cloudless, and is enriched in silicon monoxide gas. Because one side of the planet permanently faces its star, the torrid atmosphere whips around to the nighttime side at super-hurricane speeds exceeding 2,000 miles per hour. On the dark side, the silicon monoxide may cool enough to condense into rock that rains out of clouds, but even at dawn and dusk, the planet is hot enough to vaporize rock. “We knew we had seen something really interesting with this silicon monoxide feature,” said Josh Lothringer of the Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
In a paper published in the January 24 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Guangwei Fu of the University of Maryland, College Park, reported on a super-hot Jupiter, KELT-20b, located about 400 light-years away. On this planet a blast of ultraviolet light from its <a href="https://phys.org/tags/parent+star/">parent star</a> is creating a thermal layer in the atmosphere, much like Earth’s stratosphere. “Until now we never knew how the host star affected a planet’s atmosphere directly. There have been lots of theories, but now we have the first observational data,” Fu said.
By comparison, on Earth, ozone in the atmosphere absorbs UV light and raises temperatures in a layer between 7 to 31 miles above Earth’s surface. On KELT-20b the UV radiation from the star is heating metals in the atmosphere which makes for a very strong thermal inversion layer.
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Evidence came from Hubble’s detection of water in near-infrared observations, and from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s detection of carbon monoxide. They radiate through the hot, transparent <a href="https://phys.org/tags/upper+atmosphere/">upper atmosphere</a> that is produced by the inversion layer. This signature is unique from what astronomers see in the atmospheres of hot-Jupiters orbiting cooler stars, like our Sun. “The emission spectrum for KELT-20b is quite different from other hot-Jupiters,” said Fu. “This is compelling evidence that planets don’t live in isolation but are affected by their host star.”
Though super-hot Jupiters are uninhabitable, this kind of research helps pave the way to better understanding the atmospheres of potentially inhabitable terrestrial planets. “If we can’t figure out what’s happening on super-hot Jupiters where we have reliable solid observational data, we’re not going to have a chance to figure out what’s happening in weaker spectra from observing terrestrial exoplanets,” said Lothringer. “This is a test of our techniques that allows us to build a general understanding of physical properties such as cloud formation and atmospheric structure.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/hubble-probes-extreme-weather-on-ultra-hot-jupiters">https://www.infowars.com/posts/hubble-probes-extreme-weather-on-ultra-hot-jupiters</a>

news Hubble probes extreme weather on ultra-hot Jupiters

In studying a unique class of ultra-hot exoplanets, NASA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers may be in the mood for dancing to the Calypso pa...

The Fed Can’t Fix The Economy, But It Can Break It

<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/structure-federal-reserve-system.htm" target="_blank">The Federal Reserve states</a> that it “conducts the nation’s monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the U.S. economy.”
However, let’s look at how well the Fed has done that job since its founding in 1913.
<h4>Economy and Long-Term Interest Rates</h4>
Since 1913, the US unemployment rate has ranged from 2.5 percent in the early 1950s to 25.0 percent during the Great Depression. Inflation has ranged from positive 24 percent to negative 16 percent. Inflation is currently 7.9 percent, well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. While the Fed has some influence over money supply, they have no control over money demand or how money is spent, which has a significant impact on employment and inflation.
The Fed’s goal to “moderate long-term interest rates” below free market levels is a form of price fixing. Since price fixing never works for long, it is no wonder the Fed has been unsuccessful in this goal. Since 1913, ten-year Treasury rates have ranged from 0.5 percent in 2020 to 16 percent in 1981. Interest rates have been much more volatile than before the Fed, as shown below.
<h6>Source: Chart courtesy of <a href="https://www.multpl.com/10-year-treasury-rate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">multpl.com</a>, with annotations by <a href="http://bullandbearprofits.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BullAndBearProfits.com</a>.</h6>
<h4>Money Supply and Short-Term Interest Rates</h4>
Maybe the Fed can’t control the economy, but at least they can control the money supply and short-term interest rates, right? Think again.
The Fed controls the monetary base, which is currency plus bank deposits at the Fed. But the popular M2 money supply measure is 3.6 times larger than the monetary base, and the broader money supply is driven by the desire of commercial banks to lend and of people to borrow from them. The Fed has no control over that.
The Fed also controls the federal funds rate, which is the interest rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend to each other overnight. But as shown below, the Fed follows market-driven interest rates, such as the two-year Treasury rate (red line), when setting the federal funds rate (black line), since they have no way of knowing where rates should be.
<h6>Source: Chart courtesy of <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FRED</a>, with annotations by <a href="http://bullandbearprofits.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BullAndBearProfits.com</a>.</h6>
<h4>The Fed’s Real Purpose</h4>
The Fed’s real purpose is to enable banks to make loans by creating money out of thin air and then to bail them out when their loans go bad. It has been successful in that goal, as we saw with the <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Banking_crisis#Great_Recession" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bank bailouts during the Great Recession</a>.
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As Murray N. Rothbard <a href="https://mises.org/library/economic-depressions-their-cause-and-cure">explained</a>:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote" readability="10">
Banks can only expand comfortably in unison when a central bank exists, essentially a governmental bank, enjoying a monopoly of government business, and a privileged position imposed by government over the entire banking system.
</blockquote>
The Fed’s other main purpose is to help the US government borrow. They have been very successful at this, as the government debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio has more than tripled in the past forty years to over 120 percent.
<h4>The Fed Succeeds in Lowering Living Standards</h4>
Two of the main negative consequences of Fed money creation are inflation and the boom-and-bust business cycle, both of which lower living standards significantly. Inflation raises living costs and erodes savings, while the business cycle wastes scarce resources by encouraging their allocation to bad investments.
Since the Fed’s founding in 1913, the US dollar has lost 97 percent of its purchasing power. Furthermore, Fed policies helped engineer the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008–09.
<a href="https://mises.org/wire/ludwig-von-misess-circulation-credit-theory-trade-cycle">Austrian business cycle theory</a> explains how the business cycle is caused by banks creating money out of thin air, which leads to an unsustainable boom that eventually turns into a bust. The bust happens because the newly created money does not generate the scarce resources (land, labor, and capital) needed to complete all the projects businesses have undertaken with the newly created money.
As Ludwig von Mises <a href="https://mises.org/library/human-action-0">explained</a>:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote" readability="10">
The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion.
</blockquote>
<h4>Fed Predictions</h4>
After reviewing the Fed’s failures, let’s see how successful Fed leaders have been at predicting the economy.
Alan Greenspan was Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006. He presided over the 1987 stock market crash, the S&L (savings and loan) crisis, the early 1990s recession, the late 1990s tech bubble, the early 2000s recession, and the early to mid-2000s housing bubble. Naturally, the press called him “maestro” for his work at the Fed.
Near the peak of the tech bubble in January 2000, Greenspan bragged about engineering a long economic expansion that he saw no signs of ending. As <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2000/200001132.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">he said</a> shortly before the NASDAQ stock index collapsed 80 percent and the early 2000s recession started: “There remain few evident signs of geriatric strain that typically presage an imminent economic downturn.”
In response to the recession he did not see coming, Greenspan slashed the federal funds rate from 6.50 percent in 2000 to 1.00 percent in 2003, which helped fuel the housing bubble. Then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Reception" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Greenspan encouraged homeowners to take out adjustable-rate mortgages in early 2004</a>, just before he raised the fed funds rate to 5.25 percent over the next two years, which triggered the housing bust.
In 2007, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWBT00756820070913" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Greenspan said this</a> about banks lending to subprime borrowers: “While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late … I really didn’t get it until very late in 2005 and 2006.”
At least <a href="https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/alan-greenspan-635.php" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Greenspan has been honest</a> about the Fed’s inability to forecast the economy:
“People don’t realize that we cannot forecast the future. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome.” Greenspan <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Reception" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">also admitted</a> that the market is much larger and more powerful than the Fed: “The market value of global long-term securities is approaching $100 trillion [so these markets] now swamp the resources of central banks.”
Ben Bernanke was Fed chairman from 2006 to 2014, so he presided over the Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the 1930s up to that time.
In 2002, in a speech titled “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here,” <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernanke_doctrine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bernanke bragged</a> that the Fed’s legal right to create money out of thin air would prevent deflation: “The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost … under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and, hence, positive inflation.” Naturally, given the Fed’s ability to control the economy, “it” did happen in 2009, with prices falling 2 percent in the wake of the Great Recession.
In 2006, <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20060320a.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bernanke dismissed the inverted yield curve</a>, which is known by virtually all economists to be one of the best predictors of a recession: “I would not interpret the currently very flat yield curve as indicating a significant economic slowdown to come.” In June 2008, seven months into the Great Recession, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-quotes-2010-12?r=US&IR=T#jan-10-2008-14" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bernanke said</a>: “The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”
Janet Yellen was Fed chair from 2014 to 2018, so she had less time to cause major damage. But true to form, she <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/17/janet-yellen-5-quotes-you-should-know-from-the-out.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">stated she had no idea</a> the housing bust would lead to a major recession: “I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”
Jerome “Jay” Powell has been Fed chairman since 2018. He helped invert the yield curve in 2019 and has presided over the covid crash and recession, as well as the highest inflation rates in forty years.
In early November 2021, when inflation was over 6.0 percent, Powell and the Fed were <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/with-bond-buying-taper-bag-fed-turns-wary-eye-inflation-2021-11-03/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">still calling inflation “transitory”</a> and caused by covid and not the 40 percent increase in the money supply. By March 2022, with inflation rising 7.9 percent, Powell finally raised the fed funds rate by 0.25 percent, with plans to raise rates up to 2.75 percent by the end of 2023. Ominously, given his forecasting track record, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-jerome-powell-alan-blinder-economy-inflation-7dfbb4006575d0cc9920bbc1103154d1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Powell thinks he can raise rates that aggressively and achieve the elusive “soft landing”</a> of slowing inflation without driving the economy into a recession, despite the already flattening yield curve.
<h4>Conclusion</h4>
The Federal Reserve cannot control the economy or even the money supply and interest rates. And Fed leaders clearly cannot predict the economy, even though the media and Wall Street hang on their every word. But the Fed can lower living standards by destroying the value of the dollar and causing the boom and bust cycle. Economic theory and economic history have proven that government central planning does not work in creating stability or prosperity. That includes centrally planned monetary policy.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/the-fed-cant-fix-the-economy-but-it-can-break-it">https://www.infowars.com/posts/the-fed-cant-fix-the-economy-but-it-can-break-it</a>

news The Fed Can’t Fix The Economy, But It Can Break It

The Federal Reserve states that it “conducts the nation’s monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-t...

Macron and Le Pen’s inevitable face-off exposes a major shift in French politics

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FHd_s4ool7stUacqrPXi-UqJXZ4=/0x94:3798x2082/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23380534/1390702909.jpg" /></div>
Sunday’s first-round French presidential election follows days of <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/french-election-le-pen-narrows-gap-on-macron-in-tighter-race">chaotic, rollercoaster polling</a>. Incumbent Emmanuel Macron’s once-comfortable lead over right-wing politician Marine Le Pen all but vanished going into the contest on April 10. While the results won’t reveal France’s next leader just yet, the election and the campaign leading up to it have exposed seismic shifts in France’s political culture that the establishment has yet to reckon with.
The run-up to the first-round elections wasn’t the first indication of that shift — far from it, according to some observers — though the level of political volatility it revealed was unexpected. Initially, “the general thought was, this is going to be a really boring election, and Macron is going to win,” Mabel Berezin, the director of Cornell University’s Institute for European Studies, told Vox in an interview Friday. That couldn’t be further from the current situation. “I’ve never seen an election change as quickly as this one has,” Berezin said.
France’s elections are divided into two rounds: The first round selects the two frontrunners, and the second selects the winner, who has a five-year mandate to govern. “There’s a lot of candidates in the first round,” explained Susi Dennison, the director of the European power program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The idea of the system is that you vote with conviction in the first round, and then you vote strategically in the second round.” What that means is French voters typically cast their ballot for the candidate they really want in the first round, and against the candidate whom they don’t want in the second.
“What is becoming sort of complicated about the election this time around, and what is sort of frustrating a lot of voters in France, particularly those on the left — because there has been, at least until [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon started pulling forward, no real candidate on the left that had any prospect of getting through to the second round — is that I think a lot of people feel that they’re being forced to vote tactically in the first round,” Dennison said. Mélenchon is a member of the National Assembly with the La France Insoumise party, a left-wing populist party. Because traditional left parties like the Greens and the Socialist party aren’t polling high, some voters who might choose those candidates in the first round <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/10/millions-of-french-people-set-to-vote-in-first-round-of-elections">might feel they have no alternative to Macron</a> and <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/france-election-president-2022-abstention-what-if-nobody-came/">that it’s not worth turning out to vote</a>.
“That’s almost dangerous in the current environment, because the more that you take away from those candidates with a real chance of going forward, the more opportunity that you give to the more extreme, anti-system candidates that are coming forward,” Dennison said.
But, Berezin said, it’s nearly impossible to predict what Sunday’s results will be based on the data during the campaign: “It’s that unstable, that volatile .... [the numbers are] just changing too much in weird ways.”
<h3>This election solidifies the shift away from France’s traditional politics</h3>
What this election can tell us, though, is much more about shifts in the country’s political trends and values, as well as how the French public sees the failure of the ruling class overall.
Macron, the young former banker who promised a change in French politics, has proven to be a fairly traditional, center-right politician — despite vowing to be neither right nor left when he formed his own party, La République En Marche, and won the 2017 elections. And although his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has earned praise from the French public, he’s largely unpopular with the country’s more left-leaning population.
Dennison told Vox this frustration is a key factor in the chaotic polling leading to the first-round elections. While Sunday’s outcome likely portends a Macron-Le Pen matchup in the second round and then an overall Macron victory, if the French tradition of the cordon sanitaire — the unwritten policy of blocking off right-wing candidates for France’s highest office — holds true, that’s not a foregone conclusion.
“If you see <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/06/melenchon-macron-le-pen-france-left-runoff/">Macron vs. Mélenchon</a> [in the second round], then I think that things might go the other way, and you might see a kind of pushback against Macron with all of the voters who aren’t anti-system, anti-globalization as Mélenchon is, but want the opportunity to vote for someone other than Macron, and show him that there is an alternative,” she said. “I think there is a huge sense of frustration among people, that Macron is basically the only option that they’re being given. There’s a deep level of unhappiness, particularly with his promise to be neither left nor right, but ultimately having become a very clear center-right representative.”
Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party (previously called National Front) was founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She is therefore considered a high-profile right-wing leader who, like her father, has run in prior presidential elections. She’s steadily gained traction since her first contest in 2012, <a href="https://www.gouvernement.fr/en/final-results-of-the-first-round-of-the-2017-presidential-election-drawn-up-by-the-constitutional">coming in second to Macron</a> in the first round of the 2017 elections, with 20.75 percent of the vote to his 23.39 percent. Le Pen <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/7/15571666/french-elections-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen-front-national-vote-win">bombed in the second round</a>, after a disastrous performance in a televised debate with Macron and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/02/marine-le-pen-francois-fillon-phrases-may-day-speech">a plagiarism scandal</a> sank her polling numbers.
But she’s been a force in French and European politics, both as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and part of the French National Assembly. And, as a potential frontrunner in the first-round elections, her party — once on the political fringes — is now shockingly close to power.
That’s due to a combination of factors, both Dennison and Berezin said. Besides the lack of viable left-wing candidates other than the dark horse Mélenchon — who was closely trailing Le Pen in the days leading up to the election and could grab some of her votes Sunday — Le Pen is sincerely politically adept and considered almost a populist chameleon.
“Marine Le Pen has worked very hard to say, ‘I’m not just a crazy, right-wing politician’” since she was “very definitely trounced” in the second round of the 2017 elections, Berezin said. “She’s very good at recalibrating. She did a terrible job on television in a debate with Macron about EU policy, and at that time she wanted to leave the EU, like Britain did. She’s the kind of person who can look around and say, ‘Oh, maybe that wasn’t such a good deal.’”
Le Pen has pivoted her position that France should leave the EU, given how painful Brexit has been, and focused more on what France’s role in the EU should be, <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-marine-le-pen-jaroslaw-kaczynski-europe-far-right-parties-coalition/">even attempting to build a coalition with other right-wing leaders, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán</a>. “Le Pen has stayed around, and has been consistently recalibrating, and rethinking and, moving in different directions,” Berezin said.
<h3>Many French people don’t feel represented by government — and that could be a problem for Macron</h3>
Most pertinently for the present climate, Berezin said, Le Pen has been focusing on domestic economic issues. “She’s been talking about purchasing power,” focusing on “people in the outskirts of France, people who have to pay more for gas — that is a powerful message.” That kind of economic message resonates outside France, too, due to rising prices both from global inflation and, in the case of gas and other fossil fuels, attempts to divest from Russian oil due to its invasion of Ukraine.
Macron’s been dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic for the past two years and trying to assert France’s place in the 21st century global order — lately, through diplomatic efforts concerning the Ukraine war. In those efforts, critics contend, he comes off as too focused on international problems and blind to the issues which affect French people the most.
“[Macron] is criticized for not engaging enough on the domestic challenges in France, and this kind of adds to the sense of him being disconnected from real French people, and what life is like, and really not knowing how they’re going to pay the bills at the end of the month,” Dennison said. “It’s something that he comes under a lot fire from the other candidates for, but I think it’s also something that drives this sense of frustration with people feeling that they’re being offered no alternative to him, that he simply doesn’t recognize the realities of their lives.”
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/macron-faces-tough-fight-france-votes-sunday-2022-04-10/">Early results on Sunday did indeed project a Macron-Le Pen match up</a> — the predicted outcome after a rollercoaster of a campaign — with Macron getting between 28.1 percent and 29.5 percent of the vote, to Le Pen’s 23.3 percent to 24.4 percent. But although the prediction ended up coming true, that second-time pairing makes it clear that France’s traditional parties have all but imploded, and it’s not clear what — if anything — party leaders intend to do about it.
“One of the big questions for me is, ‘What happens to Les Republicains [France’s traditional center-right party] as a party?’” Dennison told Vox. And there’s a similar question for the Socialist Party: How can parties on the left coalesce, draw voters, and sustain both relevance and political power if they can’t agree on a strong candidate to back?
“I think that’s the big conversation that really needs to be had after these elections, the left needs to get more serious about that,” Dennison said.
Macron and Le Pen will face off again on April 24; some of his first-round rivals from both the left and the right have called on their supporters to rally around Macron and block a Le Pen presidency.
“So that France does not fall into hatred of all against all, I solemnly call on you to vote on April 24 against the far-right of Marine Le Pen,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said Sunday. Dennison, too, predicted on Sunday morning that voters would choose Macron in the second round: “Despite the frustration with [Macron], he’s still seen as a safer option than Le Pen.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/4/10/23019045/macron-le-pen-france-presidential-election-first-round">https://www.vox.com/2022/4/10/23019045/macron-le-pen-france-presidential-election-first-round</a>

vox Macron and Le Pen’s inevitable face-off exposes a major shift in French politics

Sunday’s first-round French presidential election follows days of chaotic, rollercoaster polling . Incumbent Emmanuel Macron’s once-comfort...

Jack Posobiec Temporarily Banned on Twitter for Calling Disney “Groomers”

Twitter temporarily locked out Human Events editor Jack Posobiec for accusing Disney of being a hotbed of “groomers.”
“Get it before it’s banned,” Posobiec wrote on Twitter on April 6, sharing an image of a “Boycott Groomers” T-shirt featuring the Disney logo.
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Twitter then froze Posobiec’s account on Sunday, saying he had violated its policy on “hateful conduct.”
“You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” Twitter told Posobiec.
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img alt="" src="https://cms.thepostmillennial.com/content/images/2022/04/photo_2022-04-10-08.39.52.jpeg" /></figure>
This comes shortly after Posobiec published screenshots from Disney’s <a href="https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/04/09/numerous-disney-employees-call-out-companys-radical-opposition-to-floridas-anti-grooming-bill/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">internal messaging board</a> showing numerous employees voicing their support for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R-Fla.) Parental Rights in Education bill that bans schools from teaching sexual identity and gender topics to K-3rd grade children.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" readability="3.6912751677852">
Here are a few. Sounds like workers just wanting to do their jobs. <a href="https://t.co/XiUdASFE7X">pic.twitter.com/XiUdASFE7X</a>
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) <a href="https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1510301540661268481?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2022</a></blockquote>
Posobiec said in a <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-jack-posobiec-temporarily-locked-out-of-twitter-for-calling-disney-groomers" target="_blank">statement</a> to The Post Millennial that the move by Twitter is clear “retaliation” for leaking the screenshots undermining Disney’s corporate stance against the Florida bill.
“Elon Musk recently commented that corporations dictate policy on Twitter through ad dollars,” Posobiec said. “So it comes as no surprise Twitter will censor you for criticizing one of the largest media companies in the world.”
<div class="VAyBOItz"><a href="https://www.patriotcollectibles.com/" target="_blank"><img src="https://api.directus.libertycdn.com/uploads/_/originals/SilverCoin-hero-385.jpg" /></a></div>
“This is clear retaliation for me leaking the internal employee forums at Disney showing many of their workers support the Florida anti-grooming bill,” he added.
Twitter lockouts usually last 12 hours but it’s unclear just how long Posobiec’s account will be frozen.
<hr class="wp-block-separator" />
<a href="https://battleplan.news/watch?id=625190950fd512633c595fa8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Dark Side Of Disney</a>
 
 
source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/jack-posobiec-temporarily-banned-on-twitter-for-calling-disney-groomers">https://www.infowars.com/posts/jack-posobiec-temporarily-banned-on-twitter-for-calling-disney-groomers</a>

news Jack Posobiec Temporarily Banned on Twitter for Calling Disney “Groomers”

Twitter temporarily locked out Human Events editor Jack Posobiec for accusing Disney of being a hotbed of “groomers.” “Get it before it’s ...