"If the Fed is serious about fighting inflation, and I do not believe it is, it’s going to have to fight a lot harder than it has. Interest rates need to go up much higher than anybody thinks, but that alone is not going to do the trick. We also have to see a big contraction in consumer credit and lending standards rising so consumers can’t keep spending… Consumers are running up credit card debt. That is inflationary. That is an expansion of the supply of credit.”

It gets worse when the Fed has to save the economy again. Schiff predicts, “I think the Fed is going to have to throw in the towel on the inflation fight because it will be fighting something it fears more, which is a complete economic collapse… The federal government may be legitimately forced to cut Medicare and Social Security instead of illegitimately cutting it through inflation… We have this collapsing standard of living, but think about it as a tax. This is what Americans are paying. This is the price of big government… Higher prices are the price we pay for big government, and inflation is a tax. Instead of raising our taxes, they are just printing money, and that devalues the money we have.”

Legitimizing the settlements delivered the message that the more the Palestinian Arabs murder Israelis in order to force the Jews from the entire land, the more Israel will embed itself in the entire land. The Security Council promptly had a hissy fit. So did the US State Department, which said it was “deeply troubled.”

But the Security Council statement that America supported wasn’t “deeply troubled” by the Palestinian Arab terror attacks in Jerusalem over the previous few weeks, in which 10 Israelis were murdered. It wasn’t “deeply troubled” by the PA’s unremitting incitement to murder Israeli Jews and steal their land in an Islamic holy war.

Four days after the nine outposts were legalized, the Biden administration crossed a new red line when it arrogantly presumed to tell Israel how to run its domestic affairs. Not only did it criticize Israel’s contentious judicial reforms, but it also issued a veiled but unmistakable threat. Israel’s judicial reforms have absolutely nothing to do with America. They have no bearing on the Middle East conflict. They are an internal Israeli issue.

Biden said: “If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, it would end the war. If Ukraine stopped defending itself against Russia, it would be the end of Ukraine.” But this merely appropriated the well-known saying: “If the Palestinians stopped attacking Israel, it would end the war; but if Israel stopped defending itself against the Palestinians, it would be the end of Israel.” Yet while America believes this about Ukraine, it clearly doesn’t believe it about Israel.

"If you have interest rates rising, and rates are going to be going up because the Fed cannot stop this kind of inflation, then, you’ve got war. You have untold billions of dollars being shipped into Ukraine, which is absurd. This is what you have. You also have to look at what Janet Yellen said, and she was concerned with the tons of new debt coming out. You are exceeding the balance sheets of the Primary Dealers."

"To be a Primary Dealer, you have to be able to guarantee you will be able to buy X amount of debt. If you can’t sell it, what happens? The bank is stuck with the debt, and then they go bust. So, we have a real problem here. They cannot continue to issue this kind of debt in perpetuity. They have been borrowing money since WWII with no intention of paying anything off. How do you continue to fund a government if there are no buyers for the debt? This is on a global scale.”

So, war checks all the boxes? Armstrong says, “Absolutely. They get to default on all this debt, which is the real objective. That’s why (Klaus) Schwab is out there saying you’ll own nothing and be happy. He’s trying to make it sound like they are doing this for you. We are going to default on all debt and relieve you of all your debt. This is because they are going to wipe out everything. Pension funds will be all gone."

"That’s why they are coming out with guaranteed basic income to replace your pension. They’ve got this all worked out. That’s what the end goal is here because they cannot continue to function this way. They cannot continue to borrow whatever they need with no intention of ever paying it back.”

“We need to seriously consider developing our own nuclear capabilities if such a response is insufficient,” Chung Jin Suk said on Monday, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap, in reference to the country’s so-called ‘Kill Chain’ first-strike system.

The ‘Kill Chain’ military protocol was designed as a deterrent to North Korean nuclear threats, and involves pre-emptive strikes against nuclear missile silos and Pyongyang’s senior leadership if an imminent nuclear launch is detected. The system was initiated a decade ago, but has received a renewed impetus under President Yoon Suk-yeol, who took office last May.

Countries should also uphold the consensus that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the initiative reads, adding that the nuclear powers should strengthen dialogue and cooperation to mitigate the risk of a nuclear stand-off. The document went on to stress the need to take the “legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously,” while respecting their sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The program paper also made an appeal to resolve international disputes exclusively through diplomacy. “War and sanctions are no fundamental solution to disputes; only dialogue and consultation are effective in resolving differences,” it said, adding: “abusing unilateral sanctions… does not solve a problem, but only creates more difficulties and complications.”

But the company forecast more muted earnings for the current fiscal year than anticipated, spooking investors. Walmart’s shares fell 2 percent in early trading. The results from Home Depot and Walmart suggested that the resilience of consumers may be starting to crack, as inflation and rising interest rates squeeze household budgets.

The $1.5 million figure provided to the Journal on Wednesday only covers the cost of the four AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles used to shoot down the ‘UFOs’ over Alaska, Lake Huron, and the Yukon region in Canada, excluding funds spent by the Coast Guard, Navy, and National Guard in searching for the debris.

One of the missiles failed to hit its target, requiring another $400,000 Sidewinder to send the unidentified object plummeting into one of Michigan’s Great Lakes. The string of shootdowns came after a Chinese high-altitude balloon entered US airspace in late January, which was also downed by a US fighter jet.

It is morally right and strategically sound for us to assist in a Russian defeat in Ukraine, but the British Army must be restocked with replacements for the huge amounts of equipment it has sent there. That is not presently happening, nor is the Treasury making the necessary provisions for that to happen in the future. With 6,000 shells being fired by Ukraine each day, we in this country are down to less than a week’s supply. Jens Stoltenberg, head of NATO, recently said that Ukraine is using shells at a far faster rate than our ability to replenish.

It is situations like this that Ben Wallace had in mind when he recently admitted the British Army has been ‘hollowed out and underfunded’ in recent years, a truly extraordinary statement for a serving defence secretary to have made in public. It echoes the statement last month of a ‘senior American general’ – and by all accounts it was a very senior American general – to the effect that the British Army was ‘no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force’.

Historically many of our post-war crises have come out of an ever clearer blue sky. Few predicted Kim Il-sung’s invasion of South Korea in 1950, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Falklands invasion, Saddam’s assault on Kuwait, or the attack on the Twin Towers. ‘Surprises happen so often in history,’ Paul Wolfowitz, the former US deputy secretary of defense, remarked after 9/11, ‘that the surprising thing is that we’re still surprised by them.’ Having a reserve of heavy artillery and shells is the minimum needed to respond to such surprises.

For those of you that have not been paying attention, the apocalyptic alliances that we have been anticipating for years have now formed. It is going to be the US and Europe on one side, and Russia and China will be on the other. All of the marbles are at stake, and both sides have plenty of nuclear weapons.

In my entire lifetime, the United States has never been closer to an apocalyptic war than it is right now. If our leaders were smart, they would be looking for a peaceful way out of this mess while it is still possible. But instead, Joe Biden just continues to [talk] about how it is important for us to back the war in Ukraine for as long as necessary… It appears that we could end up fighting Russia and China at the same time, and that sort of a nightmare scenario will not be good for any of us.

The Japanese Defense Ministry on Wednesday pointed out a major obstacle to Kishida visiting the Ukrainian war zone: Japan’s pacifist constitution technically does not allow the Self-Defense Forces to provide military protection for traveling dignitaries, even the prime minister.

The G-7 nations will discuss their concerns about Russia, which Japan is still technically at war with. The two nations never formally concluded World War II, in part due to some lingering territorial issues. Japan once again brought up the disputed Northern Territories (which Russia calls the Kuril Islands) immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine. Japan announced on Wednesday it will guarantee a $5 billion World Bank loan to Ukraine, with an offer to step in and make the payments if Kyiv cannot. Tokyo added half a billion dollars in financial support on top of the loan.

The deployment will more than quadruple the US military presence on the island, according to the Journal. According to the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center, there were 23 American soldiers in Taiwan as of autumn 2022.

These Americans have been acting as advisers and trainers for the US weapons and equipment sent to Taipei. The new troops will also train the Taiwanese in tactics “to protect against a potential Chinese offensive,” according to unnamed US officials.

There were also Taiwanese troops in the US, with “a contingent” training alongside the Michigan National Guard in the north of that state, the Journal reported. When reached for comment, the Pentagon said only that the US “commitment to Taiwan is rock-solid.”

Susan Hough, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey, said that in many cases, people end up living next to fault zones for resource reasons. “If you are living along the base of the mountains, there may be more water there,” Hough said.

The skyrocketing credit card balance has coincided with an increase in the interest rates paid on such debt, crunching household budgets as high inflation eats away at the savings that many amassed during the pandemic. Americans are falling behind in Biden’s economy with low-paying jobs, 40-year-high inflation, and a loss in the value of their net assets due to inflation pushing prices to record highs.

As a last resort, Americans turn to their credit cards to get by, hoping they will be able to pay them off next month. This cycle is maddening for Americans who work hard and can’t seem to get ahead. Now, they are falling behind. It’s a key reflection of the health of the American consumer. The debt on credit card continues to tell us that the American consumer is tapped and spent.

And yet at a time like that, instead of refocussing and rebuilding the American economy and prosperity for middle class people, instead of focusing on securing our own border, which is absolutely out of control, where a tsunami of trespassers continue to pour into this country… instead we are projecting overseas.

But should we really be surprised by Francis’s position? This is the Pope who takes every opportunity to declare the Bible is wrong, after all. He kicked off his papacy by declaring evolution and the big bang theory were real.

This is the pope who informed his flock that “relationships with Jesus are dangerous and harmful.” Breaking with centuries of Christian tradition, Pope Francis sparked fears that he is an illegitimate pope with a sinister agenda when he told a crowd of 33,000 pilgrims in St Peter’s Square in Rome that “a personal, direct, immediate relationship with Jesus Christ” must be avoided at all costs.

In 2017, Pope Francis called for a “one world government” and “political authority”, arguing that the creation of the one world government is needed to combat issues such as “climate change.” Speaking with Ecuador’s El Universo newspaper, the Pope said that the United Nations does not have enough power and must be granted full governmental control “for the good of humanity.” This includes Americans, he stressed, who according to the pope must be ruled by a world government “for their own good.”

In 2019, Pope Francis signed a historic covenant with leaders of the world’s major faiths, pushing us much closer to a one-world religion, one of the major goals of the New World Order. According to the document produced by Pope Francis and published on the Vatican’s official website, all religions must be considered equal, and Islam is as acceptable to God as Christianity. He then shocked the Christian world by hosting Islamic prayers and Quran recitals in the Vatican.

1. “The US has used Ukraine to prepare for a large war. They have publicly admitted that.” This is, in fact, implicit if not official policy articulated by the Biden administration. The president himself declared early last year that Putin “cannot remain in power,” a threat of forced regime change if there ever was one. Biden kicked off the week by visiting the capital of Ukraine, a literal war zone with no US military presence, as if to claim the conflict is as much ours as it is Ukraine’s (and it is, given that we’re footing about two-thirds of Ukraine’s defense cost).

2. “The West is guilty of escalation.” Since well before Russia invaded Ukraine, Washington has promoted the expansion of new member nations to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, an alliance that exists in its present form for the express purpose of intimidating Russia. What started out as a warning to the Soviet Union that the US would defend its European allies against military aggression is now a vanity project for both of our political parties to look like heroes by further alienating the Kremlin from the rest of the developed world.

3. “They [the West] want to have a strategic defeat of Russia. …It means they want to have no more, anything to do with Russia. They want to have a global resistance against Russia.” What part of that contradicts anything the Biden administration, most of Congress, and virtually every former military official on cable news has said? They all say it.

Assume that right now Russia were to retreat from Ukraine and declare a truce. Who’s going to be the first to propose that the US and Europe resume regular trade and cooperation to stabilize Russia’s economy and its standing in the world? None of them will. They all expect a lasting minimizing of Russia, preferably without Putin in the picture.

Say whatever you want about Putin, he’s not irrational.