An interesting situation in Georgia (the country in the Caucasus region, not the U.S. state). Many of its people don’t want to know who is paying to influence them. From Stephen Karganovic at strategic-culture.su:

Time will tell what measures the Georgian authorities will employ to ensure the integrity of their country, Stephen Karganovic writes.

Extraordinary events are taking place in the streets of Tbilisi. Normally, agitated crowds should be demanding increased transparency in public affairs and access to all the facts they need to efficaciously exercise their civic duties. In Georgia, they want the opposite. The agitated crowd’s vociferous demand is for the facts to be withheld from them.

They are vigorously opposed to Parliament’s intention to enact a legal mechanism that would provide for the registration of foreign agents operating within the country. The legislation now before the Georgian Parliament, which a comfortable majority of the deputies support, would make available to the demonstrators and to all citizens of Georgia information about foreign financing sources of the “non-governmental organisations” that proliferate in Georgia. In that small country targeted for regime change by the collective West there are currently about 20,000 “NGOs,” a remarkable statistic by any measure. The demonstrators however adamantly refuse to know and they oppose that their fellow citizens should be allowed to find out what entities from abroad supply money and logistical assistance to those “NGOs.” Consequently, what they are actually opposing is public disclosure of the agenda those organisations promote and serve.

In simple terms, the demonstrators are saying, “Do not turn on the lights. We prefer to wander in the darkness and as in the current geopolitical confrontation our country is being strong-armed to take a stance disadvantageous to it we prefer that the Georgian government and the public should also roam in complete darkness.”

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Element 79 can provide some peace of mind in these troubled times, and it may be quite handy some day. From Douglas French at mises.org:

Economics trumps sentimentality, and gold’s elevated price has some people raiding the family jewelry box to pay bills. “Young people are not wearing grandma’s jewels. Most of the young people, they want an Apple watch. They don’t want a pocket watch,” Tobina Kahn, president of House of Kahn Estate Jewelers told Bloomberg. “Sentimental is now out the door.”

When times are tough, treasures change hands, the late Burt Blumert, once a gold dealer and Mises Institute Board Chairman, used to say. “Prices are high, and I need cash,” Branden Sabino, a thirty-year-old information technology worker said, adding that with the cost of rent, groceries, and car insurance rising, he doesn’t have any savings. He sold a gold necklace and a gold ring to King Gold and Pawn on Avenue 5 in Brooklyn. “People are using gold as an ATM they never had,” said store owner Gene Furman.

At King Gold, fifty-five-year-old Mirsa Vijil pawned a bracelet to pay her gas bill. “Gold is high,” she said, adding she’d never pawned her jewelry before but will do it again if she needs to.

Adrian Ash, director of research at online gold investment service BullionVault says there is twice as much selling as a year ago on BullionVault’s platform. “People are very happy to take this price.”

“It’s very busy and we are getting more calls than ever before about clients wanting to bring in their jewels,” Kahn said. “I’m telling the clients to bring them in now, as we are at unprecedented levels.”

So while there is plenty of liquidating to pay the bills, demand at the United States Mint is tepid, with sales in March the worst since 2019 for its American Eagle gold coin.

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Invariably when governments engage in morally abhorrent acts, they have to stop people from communicating about or protesting those acts. From Jonathan Cook at unz.com:

The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed

As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden.

The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone.

Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.

This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US.

According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police.

In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”

One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space.

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The U.S. only mustered eight other nations to vote with it against the Palestinians’ bid for UN membership. Whatever you think of the UN, it shows the U.S. waning leadership and influence. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

In a clear rejection of US policies and leadership in the Middle East, the UN general assembly voted overwhelmingly to back the Palestinian bid for full UN membership. The western media have mostly ignored Friday’s balloting since the widely-anticipated results represent another black eye for Washington. But the outcome of the vote is a blow to the Biden administration’s failed Gaza policy as well as a clear indication that America’s blanket support for Israel’s genocide is increasing Washington’s isolation and irrelevance.

The assembly vote was 143 to 9, which means that US diplomatic influence has eroded to the point where the White House could barely coerce 9 of their most-loyal vassal states to reject the motion. It is imperative that people fully grasp the meaning of this vote, which suggests that the so-called “Rules-Based Order” is a withering fraud that grows more anemic by the day. Additionally, the vote provides compelling evidence that the American Century is officially over and that the vast majority of the world’s nations are no longer willing to comply with Washington’s self-serving edicts.

Naturally, Israel’s envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, used the opportunity—not to express his remorse at being a participant in his nation’s sadistic rampage in Gaza—but to scold the other members of the assembly for acting courageously on a matter of principle. Without a trace of irony, Erdan accused the other members of “shredding the UN charter with your own hands. Yes, yes, that’s what you’re doing. Shredding the UN charter.”

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Words mean what the government says they mean, not what you thought they meant. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Where is the “border”.

As it turns out, it isn’t where the United States ends – and Mexico begins. Kind of like the Fourth Amendment doesn’t mean:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” 

Which has no such meaning – as a practical matter – because the courts have ruled the Fourth means the government can subject anyone who happens to be out driving to a search, just because he is out driving. Because requiring him to stop, present his identification and allow a government enforcer to look him and his vehicle over isn’t “unreasonable” or even a “search” if it is “brief” and the government has a “compelling” interest in (ostensibly) preventing “drunks” from driving.

And also because – by dint of having a driver’s license – he has given his “implied consent” to be searched.

Never mind that he consented to no such thing.

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Those who give up shame are usually the ones who have the most reason to be ashamed. Case in point: Hillary Clinton. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

“I gave up shame years ago.” Those words from actor John Lithgow appear to have been taken to heart by Hillary Clinton who has severed any sense of self-awareness or shame in her public comments. Lithgow, who played Bill Clinton in Broadway production of Hillary and Clinton, appears to have inspired the subject of his play. In a recent interview, Hillary Clinton heralded the prosecution of former president Donald Trump in Manhattan as “election interference” by keeping “relevant information” from voters before an election. For those of us who criticized Clinton for the funding of the infamous Steele dossier, it was a perfectly otherworldly moment.

In the interview, Clinton went after the Supreme Court for delaying a trial of Trump despite the push by Special Counsel Jack Smith for a verdict before the election. She then left many in disbelief with the following statement:

“And the one going on now currently in New York is really about election interference. It is about trying to prevent the people of our country from having relevant information that may have influenced how they could have voted in 2016 or whether they would have voted.”

In the same election, it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that lied about funding the Steele dossier and then hiding the funding as a legal expense through then Clinton General Counsel Marc Elias.

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Ukraine may well capitulate by the end of the summer. From Ian DeMartino at sputnikglobe.com:

With Russia liberating village after village and Ukraine seemingly unable to secure a defensive line ahead of the onslaught, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter predicts that the conflict will end this summer, in line with the timeline established by the Russian Ministry of Defense at the start of this year.

On Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that Russia liberated Novokalinovo in the Donetsk People’s Republic and Kiselevka and Kotlyarovka in the Kharkov region, the latest in a string of villages to fall, this rapid deterioration of the frontline was the result of the consistent work of Russian forces to grind the Ukrainians down until they had no reserves to stabilize the front line.

“As we speak, the attritional warfare model has Ukraine losing around 1,500 troops a day. This number is going up now because Russia’s expanded its operations into the Kharkov region. So, you can expect this number [to] easily top 2,000 a day,” Ritter told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Friday.

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The markets are elitist, immoral, and political. In other words, they’re no longer markets. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

Bonds

I’ve touched upon this subject in my subscription newsletter, but I had no plans to write anything more until I got a note from a friend, mentioning a particular investment analyst and his views on investing over the next few years. I had to agree that it was brilliant analysis, but at the same time I knew that I’d never do anything about it, because I simply can’t bring myself to put money into “the markets” anymore.

As a young man I spent time learning the nuts and bolts of investing: Price to earning ratios, book values, charting, puts, calls, covered positions, and so on. And when I had extra money, I tended to put it into the markets and use my tools. But I can no longer do that, and I think explaining why may be useful.

There are three reasons for this conviction of mine, and so I’ll list them below. But I’m listing them in reverse order, because reason number one stands above the others: By itself it would prevent me from investing in the usual way. I think all three reasons are strong, but reason number one is pivotal.

Reason #3

Reason number three is simply that the markets no longer make sense. In fact, I’ve now taken to calling them “exchanges,” not wishing to denigrate the concept of markets.

The technical tools the eager young men and women of previous generations used no longer hold. They were never perfect, of course, but now they are superfluous: What central banks and governments buy go up, and that’s almost the end of it. There are complexities and complications, of course (corporate buy-backs are second-order effects of zero-bound interest rates rather than direct actions), but the essence of the matter is clear enough.

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The article says the FBI would go after Trump supporters. If he got elected, would Trump do anything about it? From Revolver at revolver.news:

The FBI is at it again, going after US citizens with a little help from Speaker Johnson and the rest of Congress, who voted to extend the FBI’s 702 FISA powers. Remember, these are the same powers they used illegally against President Trump and his team without ever facing the consequences. Now, they’re back in action, ready to crank up the wiretaps, all thanks to our “captured” lawmakers. As a matter of fact, about 20 minutes before becoming Speaker, Mike Johnson was against the FBI’s warrantless wiretaps. But that stance took a quick turn after the feds got him alone in a locked room and really worked him over.

The Hill:

But as Speaker, Johnson has done a full 180, opposing a new warrant requirement for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — and infuriating Judiciary members who feel that requirement is crucial for preventing Justice Department abuses.

“These were views that the Speaker deeply held, like, 20 minutes ago,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said Wednesday shortly before leading an effort to tank a procedural vote that would have kicked off debate on the broader FISA reform bill.

Johnson isn’t disguising the change of tune, saying the reversal is a simple function of learning more about the program as Speaker and deciding it’s vital to national security — and that his earlier criticisms were off target.

“When I was a member of Judiciary, I saw all of the abuses of the FBI — there were terrible abuses, over and over and over,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol on Wednesday evening.

“And then when I became Speaker, I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective,” he continued, using an abbreviation for sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

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