.
Why is Biden still even-allowed to be making such decisions as this at this stage, in the first place… and where is the outgoing VP to whisper “…are you out of your mind”, in his good ear. 
Why? Is he allowed to make decisions as earth shattering as these , lately beguiling ?
There are, certainly, rational reasons for holding them to the aforementioned, and none of those reasons seem to make any sense.
So what gives?
Again the ‘Atlantic’ is a good source, it is most what can be considered an example of faked news:
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Merkel: I mistook Trump for ‘someone completely normal’
Memoir of former German chancellor recalls US president’s soft spot for tyrants and apparent fascination with Putin
11:21 EST Thursday, 21 November 2024
Angela Merkel’s first mistake with Donald Trump, she says in her keenly awaited new memoir, was treating him as if he were “completely normal”, but she quickly learned of his “emotional” nature and soft spot for authoritarians and tyrants.
In extracts from her more than 700-page tome, Freedom, published in the German weekly Die Zeit, the former German chancellor says she initially misread Trump during their first meeting in 2017 in the Oval Office, where he attempted to humiliate her by refusing to shake her hand before the cameras.
“Instead of stoically bearing it, I whispered to him that we should shake hands again,” she writes. “As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I forget that Trump knew precisely what he was doing … He wanted to give people something to talk about with his behaviour, while I had acted as though I were having a conversation with someone completely normal.”
The book, which Merkel has been working on since she left office in 2021, has been kept under close wraps ahead of its publication date next Tuesday. It covers her upbringing in communist East Germany, her unlikely rise within the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and her 16 years in power in which she became known as the queen of Europe and “leader of the free world” – a label once used exclusively for US presidents.
Now unbound by diplomatic niceties, Merkel sizes up Trump as “emotional” and driven by grievance and neediness, in contrast to her “factual” approach. “It seemed that his main aim was to make the person he was talking to feel guilty … At the same time I had the impression … that he also wanted the person he was talking with to like him.”
Rather than trying to build bridges with traditional allies, Merkel writes, “Trump was apparently fascinated with the Russian president”, and she notes that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits had him in their thrall”.
On the flight home after their first talks, a deflated Merkel concluded that Trump “looked at everything like the real estate developer he was before he entered politics” – as a zero-sum game. “For him, all countries were rivals in which the success of one meant the failure of another. He didn’t think that prosperity could be increased for all through cooperation.”
Only weeks later, Trump informed her that the US would leave the Paris climate accord – a crushing setback on which she sought the advice of Pope Francis.
“Without naming names, I asked him how he would approach fundamentally opposed opinions within a group of important personalities,” she writes. “He understood immediately and said simply: ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’ I like this image.”
The contentious relationship with Merkel seems to have haunted Trump, who was still speaking about her on the campaign trail three years after she left office. “They [the Germans] didn’t love me because I said you gotta pay,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania this month, apparently referring to defence spending within Nato. “I said to Angela: Angela, you haven’t paid.”
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Merkel notes that Trump targeted her and Germany in his successful 2016 campaign, claiming that her welcoming in of more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016 had “ruined” the country and accusing Berlin of unfair trade policies and free-riding on US military investment.
In what she admits will be a belated endorsement, written before this month’s US election, Merkel declares: “I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris … defeats her competitor and becomes president.”
History also had other plans for Vladimir Putin, another figure still shaping the world in her absence. Although Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker, found him to be manipulative and vindictive, she concedes that the Russian president had a few valid arguments in his notorious anti-western diatribe at the 2007 Munich security conference.
“There were some points that I did not regard as completely absurd. As we know, there was never any evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq,” she writes, referring to the US justification for regime change.
“I too had criticised the fact that there had been no progress on updating the treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe (CFE)”, which “should have been adapted after the dissolution of the Warsaw pact, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accession of eastern European countries to Nato”.
Merkel chides eastern European leaders in particular for in her view pretending that their giant neighbour could simply be sidelined. “You could find all of this childish and reprehensible, you could shake your head. But it wouldn’t make Russia disappear from the map.”
Angela Merkel chooses privacy over publicity as she celebrates turning 70
Merkel indicates that Putin’s fear Kyiv could join Nato after she left office helped pave the way for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Without specifying when he made the comments, Merkel says Putin had told her: “You won’t be chancellor for ever. And then they’ll be a Nato member. And I want to prevent that.”
Merkel left office still popular with a majority of Germans but her legacy has been tarnished by accusations that she failed to face up to Moscow’s aggressive intentions against Ukraine while making her own country too reliant on Russian gas. Critics also apportion blame for the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party to Merkel’s liberal asylum policy a decade ago.
She has largely remained out of the spotlight since stepping down as chancellor but will be making a series of appearances in Germany and abroad in the coming weeks to promote the book.
As we face a second Trump presidency, our reporters have never been more passionate about exposing threats to our democracy and holding power to account in America. Our country is in urgent need of free, trustworthy journalism – especially with a president-elect who has repeatedly called the press “the enemy of the people” and has said journalists should be “thoroughly scrutinized” and “pay a big price” for their work.
Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US
Before going hung ho on Freud, the thing most unfamiliar to the public is the lower bar, the Jungian devolution into the realm of higher level symbolism
How does that play into the expectations that some people are waking up to in conjunction to a reductionist Freudian theory? The Higher symbolic content reverses the framing within which a formal recognition can be placed outside the frames of reference, the bracketed signs that may carry the public away, on misapplied cues, in an untimely manner which begs substratum’s of fixed ideas. The frames under which such deifications became frozen, like freezes touting an aged contentious material, like freezes attached to art deco buildings in the form of kneeling angels, have simply lost their appeal to fate.
The modern Bahais scrapers of skies, glass walled reflecting clarity from yet a higher source, albeit lower into the realm of the hypothesis of reverse engineering to the original motifs of myth and allegory, seek to complete that circular revolution that the west has realized from the interior of that theatre of the absurd , that the deeper levels of structural hierarchy can afford.
Such variables as alienation, the contentious preoccupation of what’s inside as opposed to outside, get twisted around, and what on a modular level turns out to be a mode of configured triangulated functional deception that nature, as simulated necessity bring about.
The source can not be disclosed, for it presents ‘facts’ which are not available to the naked eye.
Not sure whether words used, nor but is an expression of approximate delineation.
For these reasons the feeling for unnecessary concern with how things turn out in spite of what has been trumped up for a requisite pronouncement of ‘fake’ news, is not valid.
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Errata: sorry all, the above makes little sense, and will edit it after getting in LA, but on the level that I was trying to express what comes from an interior understanding , will try a follow up , after editing it. Sorry for that .
The following excerpt from CNN appears to counterbalance the sitting duck status of current global efforts to maintain relative power equilibrium , for appearance’s sake, at least.
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Russia will keep testing new ballistic missile, Putin says
5:51 AM EST November 23, 2024
President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia will continue to test and start mass-producing the hypersonic ballistic missile that it fired at Ukraine Thursday.
The experimental strike Thursday marked a decisive moment in Moscow’s war and capped off a dramatic week that has transformed the conflict. The firing of the missile came after the White House authorized Ukraine to fire its long-range missiles into Russia.
I n a televised meeting with the leadership of Russia’s defense ministry, Putin claimed the missile could not be intercepted by air defenses and said Russia will begin serial production of the new weapon.
“There are currently no means of countering such a missile, no means of intercepting it, in the world. And I will emphasize once again: We will continue testing the latest system,” Putin said.
Putin added Russia was developing “several similar systems” for further testing.
“Based on the test results, these weapons will also go into production. That is, we are developing a whole line of medium- and shorter-range systems,” he said.
Putin’s comments come a day after Russia fired the “Oreshnik” missile – which contains multiple warheads – at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack, saying in a video posted on Telegram that “today, our crazy neighbor has once again shown who he really is and how he despises dignity, freedom and human life in general.”
Zelensky said Friday that Ukraine was holding meetings with its allies about developing “new air defense systems” in response to the new threat from Russia.
Two US officials and one Western official told CNN that the “experimental” ballistic missile carried multiple warheads, in what may be the first time such a weapon has been used in war.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a key ally of Ukraine, said the conflict was “entering a decisive phase.”
NATO and Ukraine are due to hold talks next week following Russia’s firing of the experimental missile.
CNN’s Sophie Tanno contributed to this report.
© 2024 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.
Quoting the Children’s News Network again… yikes
Some peeps never gonna learn, never ever no matter what.
Blind system-trust just cannot be beaten out of some people by any number of hard truth-encounters.
There must be some credible reason for that’s beyond reasonable by now….
Just saying
Bro you keep quoting WSJ and CNN and other pure shitrags. That’s on you, no one else.
Yes and all the other 98 % who voted for him. Guess majority relies, no worries about Democracy.
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New develpments
Ukraine Opens Talks With Trump Team on Halting War With Russia
Top Zelensky aide arrives in Washington amid uncertainty about president-elect’s intentions
Follow the WSJ in Apple News
WASHINGTON—Ukrainian officials are holding high-level talks with the incoming Trump administration, seeking to narrow wide differences on achieving a settlement of Kyiv’s war with Russia even before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met Wednesday with Keith Kellogg, Trump’s choice as special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, and Mike Waltz, the incoming national-security adviser, according to a Trump transition official and several people familiar with the discussions.
Vice President-elect JD Vance joined in the discussions.
Kellogg has signaled support for the Biden administration’s efforts to rush weapons to Ukraine, saying it will give Trump leverage with Moscow in negotiating a settlement. But the Trump team has shown little interest in offering Ukraine membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Zelensky has said he considers a vital security guarantee against future Russian aggression.
Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s closest adviser, is visiting Washington to forge relationships with Trump aides, according to people familiar with the planning. He met with the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Florida earlier Wednesday. Worn down by waging the nearly three-year war against Russia, Ukraine plans to communicate its readiness for peace.
“But that needs to be a sustainable peace,” said a person familiar with Kyiv’s thinking. “An unstable, temporary peace doesn’t serve U.S. or Ukrainian interests.”
Zelensky has recently signaled Ukraine could agree to a cease-fire if Ukraine were permitted to join NATO. Kyiv would seek to win back Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia through diplomatic pressure, he said, rather than force, as he has long insisted.
Zelensky said NATO membership would need to be offered to unoccupied parts of Ukraine for Kyiv to consider ending what he called the “hot phase of the war.” While Ukraine would continue to claim the whole of its territory, Zelensky suggested in a recent interview on Sky News that Kyiv would seek to “get them back in a diplomatic way.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Tuesday that Kyiv would reject any security guarantees other than NATO membership. “We won’t accept any alternatives, surrogates or substitutes,” Sybiha wrote, in a letter to the 32 members of NATO.
Trump advisers have discussed peace plans that would recognize Russia’s seizure of roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory and that would close the door, for now, on Kyiv’s bid to join NATO.
“The Ukrainians are laying out their maximalist position going into possible talks,” said Lucian Kim, an Ukraine analyst at International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization. “They may, in fact, recognize that NATO membership isn’t right around the corner. But why should they concede that before negotiations have even started?
Kellogg’s own position on paving the way for talks to halt the war is nuanced. He and another veteran of the first Trump administration proposed suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Ukraine earlier this year to persuade Kyiv to join peace talks with Russia. This week he said that President Biden’s expediting of arms shipments strengthens Trump’s negotiating position with Moscow.”
People who read and quote MSM, do not have minds.
They may have souls. Then again, they also may not.
.
So you’re saying that One cannot read/share main-stream news articles without being detached to its contents… or is that just you?
.
Detachment… mastery of the mind. ; )
I mean that every word ever written or spoken in MSM is psychological propaganda intentionally designed to subvert and replace the mind with …nonsense, lies, falsity, a fake reality, propaganda.
I can’t even imagine consooming that shit anymore. Because I have a mind, that mind naturally repels what for it would be anathema and toxic deathpoison.
…and some minds can read such msm-lies without feeling nauseous about it… I know I can and do.
One cannot refute that which One is not aware of, let alone knows if it even exists.
Spoken like a true sith lord.
1 Like
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…or just not a weak-willed normie… 
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Propaganda or not nearly, facts speak for themselves,
What’s new can spiral up or down, depending how things turn out. The Asssad dynasty tumbling can become very significant, for it weakens the Iran-Russia-Syria alliance which covertly upheld the status quo in the Middle East.
The second, even more significant three way meet between Zelensky-Trump-Marcon, speaks clearly of the comings of an early springtime melting of the frozen steppes of the eastern front. The thawing can be conceivable as the trigger which turns around the whole scope of this current NWO enormity.
Trump’s role may shift from a Wilsonian rapprochement toward the goulash mix that so far has been fixed in ideological standstill, based on the premise that small causes can result in unexpected effects
A waiting attitude is wether how the subsidiary support of Al Quida
and Hamas can get the same message,
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Knees flash: Assad&family are in Moscow, Russia is giving them asylum.
Tech billionaires are getting their chance to shape Washington. Here’s what they’ll do with it.
A new cadre of Silicon Valley CEOs and billionaires is descending on the capital — with very well-telegraphed ideas about how they can do everything better.
Washington is about to confront a cabal of outsiders — the tech billionaires, investors and Silicon Valley celebrities like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, whose ideas are suddenly central to the Trump transition.
Sometimes, outsiders are a true unknown, and it’s a puzzle for the capital to suss out what they want from politics, how they’re planning to approach it and what even inspired them to get involved in the first place.
Not this time.
Unlike wealthy power players of another generation, whose ideas and influence were often cloaked and exercised through backroom deals, these tech moguls tend to talk about their policy preferences in public … a lot.
Whether on podcasts, lengthy posts on X and Substack, or through influential self-published manifestos, the tech characters now heavily involved in President-elect Donald Trump’s transition have a clear track record of demands, expectations and ideas, all delivered with the classic Silicon Valley confidence that they can run the government better than the government itself.
The picture that emerges is one of a sweeping deregulatory agenda touching everything from crypto to artificial intelligence to fields like the defense industry and health technology.
Their goals might not be uniform, but on the whole they see their innovations as dragging a moribund America into the future, with the government’s role either to help them do it or get out of the way entirely.
Andreessen — founder of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, or a16z for short — is best known in tech-policy circles for his 5,000-plus-word “techno-optimist manifesto,” which made a searing case that regulators bent on stifling industry are killing America’s entrepreneurial spirit. In it, he nodded to an eclectic pantheon of heroes including free market economist Friedrich Hayek, transhumanist theorist Ray Kurzweil and Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Now he’s started to lay out even more specific policy thoughts: Today Andreessen appeared on the podcast of Free Press founder Bari Weiss, envisioning Trump’s second term as a direct rebuke to what he views as a hostile, anti-tech Biden administration.
“When we endorsed Trump, we only did so on the basis of tech policy,” Andreessen said. “The crypto war, we were on the receiving end for four years and it was incredibly brutal, incredibly destructive; AI, we had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying and we came out basically deciding that we had to endorse Trump.”
This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO’s afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here.
Andreessen claimed that representatives of the Biden administration said that they would work to close off AI development and research to smaller actors, citing safety concerns — a life-or-death scenario for Andreessen, whose entire career and fortune are built on investing in startups. (White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson denied that assertion, telling POLITICO “President Biden’s landmark executive order on A.I. explicitly calls for increasing competition in the sector” and that the administration “worked with companies of all sizes to deepen U.S. leadership in AI.”)
That focus on opening up the economic playing field to all comers is what unites Andreessen and the more politically outspoken startup ecosystem with “Big Tech,” the established giants like Google and Microsoft, which have traditionally sought to stay politically neutral but have plenty to gain from a GOP-led deregulatory agenda.
Both sides said as much in a preelection blog post jointly written by Andreessen, his founding partner Ben Horowitz and Microsoft chair Satya Nadella, who wrote of a “policy opportunity for AI startups” that includes investment in AI resources, support for open-source development and a skeptical eye toward new regulation of the technology.
The trio said new tech regulations should be evaluated by how much they would benefit start-ups. “Regulation should be implemented only if its benefits outweigh its costs,” the trio wrote, elaborating that “In accounting for costs, policymakers should include an assessment of possible costs associated with unnecessary bureaucratic burdens to startups.”
That skeptical, pro-growth approach to government action dovetails nicely with the mission of Musk and entrepreneur (and former GOP presidential primary candidate) Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE, a committee outside government that will identify and recommend opportunities for Trump and Congress to downsize the federal government.
Its goal, they say, is to aggressively “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.”
With Musk allies interviewing candidates for positions at departments as disparate as State and Defense, as The New York Times reported on Friday, tech moguls could have allies in place no matter where their increasingly powerful tools overlap with policy.
One example of how the tech right’s sweeping deregulatory agenda tends to encompass, well, everything, is energy. Many right-leaning tech thinkers see boosting America’s energy output as an imperative for reducing the cost of living, powering AI development and competing with China — and they’ve made common cause with mainstream Republicans to pump up growth by maxing out energy production.
David Friedberg, a venture capitalist and co-host of the “All In” podcast, said on an episode Friday that “More electricity means more automation means more AI means more things are being done … in factories, are being done by machines. … The regulatory structure prohibits our ability to actually expand electricity production capacity.”
So, to review: Crypto foes like Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler are out; podcasters/VCs/Trump allies like venture capitalist and Musk pal David Sacks are in. Biden environmental regulations perceived as blocking America’s energy production are out; more fossil fuel production as well as new energy sources like nuclear and geothermal are in. Safety-first AI regulations are out; competition among AI startups is in.
As ambitious as the tech right’s goals are, they might meet resistance to some extent even from … within the tech right.
One of the big arguments is emerging around antitrust: Vice President-elect JD Vance, a Peter Thiel protege, has supported the antitrust crusade waged against Big Tech by Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Some in the tech world have also cheered these developments, viewing the tech giants as complacent, excessively social justice-oriented dinosaurs that need to be brought to heel.
Trump has already tapped Vance ally and Big Tech foe Gail Slater to oversee the Department of Justice’s antitrust efforts, seen as a nod in favor of antitrust enforcement and setting up potential conflict within the administration.
But Khan and her view of how government should relate to industry are extremely unpopular with other large parts of the tech world, including venture capitalists who have widely derided her and the Biden administration for policies they say make the economy less dynamic by freezing mergers and acquisitions. At a San Francisco conference of the tech right DFD covered earlier this year, the atmosphere palpably chilled when her name was invoked.
There’s also immigration, which could be a point of tension between the tech right and the MAGA right, with the tech world largely supporting increased immigration for high-skilled workers. But as POLITICO’s Brendan Bordelon reported earlier this month, that view clashes with the MAGA call for a widespread crackdown on all immigration. Will Musk prevail, or Trump adviser Stephen Miller? When it comes to achieving their priorities in Washington, Silicon Valley mavens could find themselves face-to-face with a very familiar dynamic from the private sector: What the boss says, goes.
On one hand, “if [Trump is] surrounded by deregulatory tech types, then his administration will probably favor a deregulatory agenda, simply by osmosis,” Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the center-left think tank the Center For New Liberalism and author of the Infinite Scroll Substack, told POLITICO.
“But his one consistent point is that he really, really hates immigration and trade. … That’s the obvious point of tension,” he noted, warning that the Silicon Valley right is placing a major bet on its ability to guide the president-elect in their preferred direction, and that “a trade war is bad for tech, as is a broad crackdown on legal immigration…
How the Trump administration’s policies are shaped from technological change.
Next: Zelenskyy is critical of Hungarian president’s stance on the emerging state of affairs.
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Translation:
“Biden doesen’t wish to go down in history as the president who led mankind into oblivion”
and
“This is the Advent, we should believe in miracles”
(This piece is from the current opinion column of the daily newspaper ‘National News’
The funniest thing to me is that average, everyday poor and middle-class Christians love Trump. They really do.
A guy who is a long-time establishment New York billionaire.
A guy who openly said he isn’t a Christian.
A guy who openly and un-appologetically made fun of people for their physical disability.
A guy who cheated on hit third wife with a prostitute (in their own home while his child was there).
A guy who brags about not paying taxes.
A guy who flew on Epstein’s pedo-plane and bragged that he was great friends with Epstein.
A guy who has been sued many times by women claiming he sexually assaulted them.
A guy who, when he was president, let Hillary go and didn’t investigate a single corrupt traitor ‘swamp creature’.
A guy who brags about how being rich means that women will let him do anything he wants including grab them by the pussy.
…and that’ just a short list of some of the things we know about. Imagine the things we don’t know about.
But like I said, this is all a performance for the naive masses, to keep them mesmerized, emotionally invested and coming back to legitimize the illegitimate federal system with their support. A show and theater. A reality TV show performed by an actual reality TV show actor.
Perhaps, but there may be an other even less attractive corroded faux-silver lining on the other side, that claims differently, and that may be the reason addressed the American people to choose between the lesser of two evils.
The excerpt from the above quoted opinion, tryes to make that clear.
Choosing to freely pick and vote for/support the lesser of TWO EVILS is still… freely CHOOSING EVIL.
Why would a non-evil person choose to support evil, even if there may be a worse evil out there? Madness.
Rejecting the false dichotomy and artificial setup is obviously the more logical and morally proper decision. Anyone who cannot grasp this is simply brainwashed by the system.