The New York Times editorial board called on President Biden to suspend his campaign after his shaky debate performance against former President Trump on Thursday.
“Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance of taking on this threat of tyranny and defeating it. His argument rests largely on the fact that he beat Mr. Trump in 2020,” the board wrote. “That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.”
The 81-year-old Biden appeared on the Atlanta, Ga., debate stage with a hoarse voice and a slight cough. The issue of his age and mental competency has been a sore point for his campaign and the debate was seen as an opportunity to show the country he is still fit to serve.
His performance sparked widespread fear among Democrats, and reignited the conversation about whether Biden should step down and allow someone else to take on Trump.
Biden’s campaign and the White House have said he’s not going anywhere. The Times said it was obvious Biden is not the man he was four years ago, calling him “the shadow of a great public servant.”
“He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans,” the Times said. “More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.”
“There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden,” the board said.
Still, if Biden does not drop out, the board said it would endorse him over Trump.
Calling for a new nominee this late in the campaign is a decision not to be taken lightly but it reflects the seriousness of Trump’s threat to American democracy, the board argued.
Similarly, The Economist said that Biden should step aside and make room for someone new, reiterating its statement from November 2022, when the outlet said Biden should not seek reelection. On Friday, the Economist argued his “last and greatest public service” should be suspending his campaign.
After Biden’s misstep on Thursday, he held a campaign stop in North Carolina where he sought to tame the panic. He delivered a more energized speech Friday, but the Times argued its not enough to save him.
“Mr. Biden answered an urgent question on Thursday night. It was not the answer that he and his supporters were hoping for. But if the risk of a second Trump term is as great as he says it is — and we agree with him that the danger is enormous — then his dedication to this country leaves him and his party only one choice.”
Suspending his campaign, the Times said, is “the best service that Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.”
The Supreme Court ruled that there are limits on charging January 6 rioters with obstruction, in a case that will impact former President Trump’s 2020 federal election interference case.
The 6-3 decision could upend hundreds of cases stemming from the January 6 riot, including Donald Trump‘s election fraud trial.
The court’s ruling makes it harder for January 6 defendants to be charged with obstructing an official proceeding – which carries up to 20 years in prison.
That is among the four charges facing former President Donald Trump in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal case.
The decision is poised to upend hundreds of cases stemming from the January 6 riot, including Donald Trump ‘s election fraud trial
At least 152 people have been convicted of obstructing an official proceeding, according to the Associated Press, a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
In all, the charge has been brought against about 350 people accused of trying to prevent Congress certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The case was brought by former Boston police officer Joseph Fischer who was indicted on seven charges following the 6 riot including one count for anyone who ‘corruptly … obstructs, influences and impedes any official proceeding.’
Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion Friday, limited the ‘obstruction of Congress’ charge that has been used by the federal government to prosecute January 6 defendants.
Roberts called that law – which carries a 20-year prison sentence – ‘one of the more severe potential punishments.’
A broad interpretation of the law ‘would also criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists to decades in prison,’ Roberts continued.
On average, the sentence for obstruction for those rioters already found guilty was 28 months, according to a Washington Post database.
A group of top Democratic donors and strategists is pooling resources into a new political action committee to help fund an alternative candidate to President Joe Biden should he withdraw from the presidential race, according to a report from the New York Times.
The fund, coined the Next Generation PAC, is aiming to raise as much as $100 million to help support a candidate who replaces Biden at the top of the ticket, according to the outlet. If Biden doesn’t drop out of the race, the money would then be used to fund down-ballot candidates.
The Next Generation PAC is being spearheaded by Mike Novogratz, a cryptocurrency investor who previously backed Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) in the Democratic primary, the outlet reported. The group has not yet filed federal paperwork, but PAC officials have reportedly told donors it hopes to raise between $50 million and $100 million.
People connected to the Biden campaign have heard of the possible stealth project and have attempted to convince those involved not to join, according to the outlet.
If the PAC manages to raise large sums, it could benefit Vice President Kamala Harris if she replaces Biden as the nominee, especially as some major donors have remained skeptical about her at the top of the ticket.
The Next Generation PAC comes as some donors begin to question Biden’s strength to campaign against former President Donald Trump let alone the ability to carry out another four years in office. Those concerns were exacerbated after last week’s debate, during which Biden had multiple verbal slip-ups and repeatedly lost his train of thought.
His performance has prompted some major donors to consider pouring their resources into down-ballot races rather than the White House, according to reports. Others have even gone so far as to threaten to withhold funds from the Democratic Party altogether unless Biden steps down.
Gideon Stein, a donor with deep connections to the Democratic Party, said his family would withhold roughly $3.5 million in planned donations to nonprofit and political organizations involved in the presidential race unless Biden withdrew, according to the New York Times. Abigail Disney, the heiress of the Disney family fortune, also said Biden’s campaign and committees supporting the president “will not receive another dime from me until they bite the bullet and replace Biden at the top of the ticket,” the outlet reported.
“Biden is a good man who has served his country well, but the stakes are far too high to allow timidity to determine our course of action,” she wrote in a statement.
However, Biden has insisted he will not be dropping out, arguing his worse-than-expected performance was due to his busy travel schedule and intense preparation for the debate. The White House has also denied reports that the president is having conversations about whether to withdraw from the race.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first sitting House Democrat to call on Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race on Tuesday and was quickly followed by Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Seth Moulton (D-MA). Former Rep. Tim Ryan also came out on Tuesday to call on Harris to step up as the party’s 2024 nominee, calling Biden’s debate performance “deeply troubling” and evidence that the party must move forward.
It cannot be called “deep” once everyone knows that it exists; and the fact that it exists is obvious from the fact that Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have been in charge of much of anything, least of all his own brain, ever since being sort-of elected president. Just yesterday we found out that he thinks that he is a black woman and, as such, is proud to have served under a black president. Clearly, someone else is in charge, and this fact is floating right there on the surface, not someplace deep.
It’s not a state because states are run by public persons who are sometimes even chosen in a national election. That’s not the case in the US, where the decision is made by a tiny contingent within some “swing state” (but really by political machinations that happen behind the scenes). Nor is this the case in most of the EU, where leaders are chosen as a result of similarly opaque parliamentary machinations. But however these public officials are chosen (by the Deep State, no doubt!) they are public and their positions are official, and that is what makes a state a state and not some sort of shady mafia organization. “Take me to your leader!” arriving space aliens typically demand, and if the answer is, “Well, we could take you to Joe Biden, but his brain is on the blink, causing him to think that he is a black woman, and beyond that we really don’t know who our leader or leaders are” then the aliens would surely be miffed. As we should be.
Some people declare that they know exactly who comprises the Deep State: it is the CIA and the FBI, plus lots of other Washingtonian alphabet soup, or it is the Bilderberg Club, or the Elders of Zion, or Reptiloids from planet Nibiru. That sort of nonsense always draws an audience or idle gawkers. But it is an essential element of their genre that the people who secretly run the US, the EU and a longish list of other puppet states keep their identities secret. How would they be supposed to secretly run things if everyone knows who they are? Ergo, secret rulers are secret. I hope that this isn’t too huge a leap of logic for my readers to make.
There are, however, some facts we can deduce about the Unknown Grandfathers (let’s start calling them that, since, as we have already established, they are neither deep nor a state). And the most important of these facts is that they are old. That is why they cling onto similarly young and agile characters, such as Joe Biden (81), Mitch McConnell (also 81 and also suffering from brain crashes), Nancy Pelosi (83 and no longer in control of her false teeth), Dianne Feinstein (was 90 and, thank God, finally gone). There is an entire list of them, care of the NYT. It reads like a tale from the crypt.
Why do the Unknown Grandfathers cling to these obsolete characters whose last original thought occurred a couple of decades ago at least, if they ever had one? Because caution, laced with paranoia, is typical of old people. They simply can’t trust anyone much younger than they are. And so they continue to propel into office those whose minds are sufficiently ossified to be physically unable to produce any big surprises as far as great new ideas or sudden policy changes. They are threatened by the young and the intelligent and are comforted by those who are old and borderline senile — just like they are! It makes them tired and confused to listen to young, energetic, fast-talking characters such as Tulsi Gabbard or Vivek Ramaswamy. They prefer someone from their own cohort or perhaps just a bit younger to pretend to make policy decisions — someone who reads haltingly from a piece of paper or recites same old lines they memorized a long time ago.
This does not apply to those who have no authority whatsoever to make policy decisions — the various political stooges in the European Union, South Korea, Japan and a couple of remnants of the former British Empire. These stooges can be quite a bit younger; just look at Kaya Callous, the fresh new face of EU diplomacy now that Jopez Bordello is being put out to pasture.
The Euro-stooges have no choice but to repeat the same old anti-Russia, pro-war, pro-Israel, anti-China tropes. Those who get into office by some semblance of a democratic process, such as Giorgia Meloni of Italy, are quickly threatened into towing the party line — sending weapons to the Ukraine. Viktor Orbán is currently testing the limits of what is allowed by flying to Moscow, meeting with Putin and repeatedly using that streng verboten word — peace! As a final insult, they all have to speak English because the Unknown Grandfathers are all Anglos and they don’t do foreign languages. And so, in spite of the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU, just to soothe the spirits of the Unknown Grandfathers, most of the insipid blather coming out of Brussels happens to be in English.
Being old and senile, the Unknown Grandfathers are unable to accept certain facts: that the military means of maintaining dollar hegemony and robbing the rest of the world no longer work; that Russia, as a nuclear-armed superpower, cannot be defeated; that China, being the world’s most powerful economy, cannot be defeated either, and that the majority of the world has worked out ways to circumvent the authority of the Unknown Grandfathers, avoid their toxic currencies and to generally ignore them. Furthermore, the majority of the world knows that they are old and senile, that their power is inexorably slipping away and that the intelligent thing for everyone to do about them is to simply wait until most of them die.
Which they will. They may extend their lives in various expensive ways, be they regular transfusions with the blood of children or expensive, experimental animatronics, but they are mortal just like everyone else, while their Unknown Heirs are either too stupid and degenerate to take over the operation or smart enough (and degenerate) to jump clear of it ahead of time.
Four additional states will follow Kansas’s lead by filing large-scale lawsuits against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. These states allege that the company misled the public regarding the safety and efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine.
During a press conference in Topeka, alongside Deputy Attorney General Fran Oleen and Assistant Attorneys General Kaley Schrader and Melanie Jack, Kobach detailed the allegations lodged against Pfizer.
“Kansas is filing a civil suit against the Pfizer Corporation under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act, seeking enhanced civil monetary penalties, damages, and injunctive relief for misleading and deceptive statements made in marketing its COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer also violated previous consent judgments with the state of Kansas, in which Pfizer promised never to use deceptive information to market their products,” said Kobach.
The complaint, lodged today in Thomas County District Court, accuses Pfizer of misleading Kansans about the vaccines’ risks, including potential harm to pregnant women and the risk of myocarditis. The suit further alleges that Pfizer falsely claimed its vaccine was effective against COVID variants, despite evidence to the contrary.
This is the last in a series explaining our current unstable financial environment. Our economies have turned to conservation and de-development, which has been unrealistically financialized. The fix is easy. Walk this back. Because the moral stink will follow us for 100 years.
Ever asked yourself why 20 million have poured through the Southern border in the last three and a half years? Oh, I know, in search of economic freedom, oppression by their home governments, or oligarchs, drugs, death squads, crime etc. Same with Africa. But again, why do they risk so much to leave homelands that almost certainly, most of them love. The idea of ‘place’ is not an idea, it is a deep attachment, physical, emotional and sensate that trumps reason. You have to kill a lot of your natural self to leave, to risk your life and that of your children to escape to the cold grey north and never return. The fear alone would overwhelm all but the strongest.
They are leaving because they must.
But why now? It’s been bad forever. In South and Central America, between the descendants of the Conquistadors and the Commies, everyone has been ground beneath the heel of the oppressor for 20 generations. Because activist charities pay for these long trains of migrants? Because the left in Europe and Democrats have declared the border open?
No. Well yes, and no, those latter are just the mechanisms. And they have been deliberately constructed.
Mostly they are coming because Black Rock, the UN, the WEF are grabbing their lands, the more fertile the better, driving them from those lands and sticking them into tenement cities where they have to scratch like chickens for a living. Agenda 2030 is ravening under the radar in the US and Canada, where “civil society” in the pay of the government and environmental NGOs funded by oligarchs, is taking as much land and as many resources as possible out of the productive economy and shoving it into the land banks of BlackRock.
In the south, it’s not surreptitious. It is state policy to destroy their lives, to take their ancestral lands, whether it’s 40 acres or a half acre and leave them begging by the side of the road.
This piece was removed from the UN website within a day
Climate Change is a complex financial mechanism which under the guise of “saving the planet”, is meant to save the predator class.
Which is not only morally bankrupt, but is dealing with a level of government and corporate debt that they know they cannot sustain. In the healthiest economy in the world, the US, all profits now are coming from either some mechanism of government subsidy – the $6 Trillion of the Covid catastrophe – or Collateralized Default Obligations. For instance right now Penguin is in court attempting to buy Random House. Why? Because they can borrow money to do that, buy back some of their stock and pay their shareholders. It will mean middle managers will lose their jobs, and marginal books will not be published, but the ravening maw of Jamie Diamond and Larry Fink will be satiated. For the moment. There is no other reason. Growth, real growth has stalled in every single enterprise.
This is how it works at the top of the class pyramid:
Last week on my island we were treated to the spectacle of well-heeled, highly educated, well-spoken older men and women arguing that the impoverished elderly, the young, and families starting out should not have housing because of climate change. Our island is 74 square miles with 10,000 residents. That means we have one resident per five acres.
Our government, the trust, had proposed the use of accessory buildings, brought up to code, for long-term rentals.
The extreme form of land conservation we practice has meant that housing prices have skyrocketed, so only the rich and the well-pensioned can afford to live here. A thousand or so working age people manage to make a living, generally via remote work. We have no staff for the schools, hospitals, businesses, restaurants. They cannot afford to live here.
About 200 people on our islands, mostly in their 70s and 80s, tightly aligned with the hysterical wing of the environmental movement work the process to stop any growth. Every new resident who pulls a permit is visited and threatened by a by-law officer. The woman who instigated this specific weapon, a former enviro bureaucrat from LA, demanded full time by-law officers for years until she won, after which she fought for aggressive enforcement.
With this one act, she set islanders against each other, creating conflict where there was none. This too is deliberate. A community divided is easily controlled.
Ring any bells?
At the same time, in our vast swaths of upland forests, the UN organization Transitions is slowly accreting that land. For who? We don’t really know. Transitions is everywhere, in the US, in Canada, in every country in Europe. It is where you live. It is one of the many prongs of Agenda 2030. Everywhere, it invades local governments and acts to suppress economic activity.
Transitions also trades carbon credits. For who? Who do you think?
Therefore Transitions, which has a rainbow-colored smiley PR face, is in that business. Buying land to transfer it to international organizations and mega-rich families so they can make money on our forests. But not us. We can’t. We can’t even thin them to prevent catastrophic forest fire.
Those contracts must be interesting, not that anyone can see them. The first thing they do is act as whacking big first-time tax deductions. The second thing they do is act as an annual tax deduction because those trees are eating CO2. Very clever. International interests buy our land (and yours) and use it to not pay taxes. While banking some of the most valuable assets on the planet.
Multiply this 100,000 times, and you will see just a very tiny piece of the vast tapestry, the puzzle, of the Climate Change/Agenda 2030 plan that will shut down economic activity everywhere.
imagine these people embedded in every single industry. Because they are. Canada has enough oil and gas to supply the world for the next five hundred years. We have all the rare earth minerals required by electric cars and every green invention. We, the most highly educated work-force in the world, have developed hundreds of mitigations that prevent knock-on effects for the mining we do. Mining is the most productive engine of the economy. Its job multiplier is 7, and all seven jobs are high-paying jobs. Mining means rural counties and townships can thrive, pay for their schools, their healthcare.
Every farm, every ranch, every rural business, every logging operation, every developer, every contractor and builder, every grocery chain, every surprisingly successful business has an activist cadre assigned to it. All that activist does is strategize on how to destroy that business. And they are paid, through environmental organizations funded by BlackRock.
Tucker Carlson ran a piece two years ago about an Amish cattle farmer, the most successful in his region, super-green, who doesn’t use fertilizer or even gas, who was visited and shut down by an armed gang of government thugs.
This is how they operate. Find the most successful in any sector or sub-sector, attack and destroy. No one must accrete enough financial or community-based power to fight back.
From his perch overlooking the global community, UN Secretary General António Guterres has warned that the world is on the “highway to climate hell.” The president of the United States has likewise threatened that denying the impacts of climate change means condemning Americans to “a dangerous future.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry has scorned unnamed demagogues slowing the process of decarbonization.
Overblown rhetoric from the political class is nothing new. But now, the politicians have a fresh cheering section: a cohort of scientists who have set aside rational deliberation about methodology and findings in favor of empathic allyship with advocate researchers. A leading climate psychologist, for example, has argued that those not afflicted with climate anxiety must be in denial, leaning on faulty “rationalisations against existential terror of annihilation.”
Such arguments suggest that a fair amount of propaganda has made its way into the scientific method—and perhaps in no venue more clearly than the Planetary Boundaries framework.
Advocates have positioned the framework as a functional approach to organizing society within the (perceived) limits of Earth’s ecology and human ingenuity. Although wrapped in a façade of technical exercise, the framework is scaffolded by the values and assumptions of the model creators. More than an impartial application of science, it serves as a vehicle for political messaging while maintaining an air of objectivity. By understanding where it came from, we can see the path back to scientific integrity and rational deliberation.
The Planetary Boundaries enterprise
On the surface, Planetary Boundaries and its various derivatives seem scientific. They appear in notable scientifically-oriented journal outlets like Nature and Science, and they tend to involve lots of complicated calculations and formulas.
The framework posits nine thresholds under which “humanity can operate safely.” These range from climate change to ocean acidification to rates of biodiversity loss. If any of the boundaries (or perhaps some of the boundaries) are transgressed (for some unknown amount of time) the earth will no longer be safe (at some unknown point in the future).
There is some logic here, but the framework is inherently arbitrary. It conflates regional and global scales, which artificially constrains policy options and presents in technocratic form a moral philosophy for social and economic development. Planetary boundaries embed the ideas of tipping points, tipping elements, and tipping cascades, which also suffer from muddle; indeed, there is “no rapidly approaching planetary cliff.”
The idea of Planetary Boundaries first appeared in 2009 in the journal Ecology & Society as a “proof of concept paper.” The paper’s lead author, Johan Rockström, had joint association with the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) supported by the Swedish government.
The framework follows an “overshoot and collapse” trajectory. This means that a variable of interest—say pollution—increases beyond some limit in a system’s capacity, at which point the whole system collapses. In this way, Planetary Boundaries is a restatement of neo-Malthusian ideas of physical limits to the growth of humanity. In fact, the author team explicitly situated its framework as a follow-on to the Limits to Growth modeling exercise developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the Club of Rome, a group of elite entrepreneurs and scientists concerned that population growth would necessarily lead to ecological problems.
Yet framing population as a problem has never gone well for society. The publication of the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and broader efforts by the neo-Malthusian community on both sides of the Atlantic helped fuel fears that population growth would lead to catastrophe and set the stage for various population control measures around the world, including forced sterilization.
More recently, the Club of Rome (with the Stockholm Resilience Center and a few others) took up the Planetary Boundaries cause in an explicit campaign, called Earth4All, to transform the global economic system to provide an “equitable future on a finite planet” through wealth redistribution, “stabilizing the world’s population,” and degrowth. Meanwhile, another body, the Earth Commission, which Rockström co-directs, has busied itself with developing ever more boundaries humans should not cross.
And it is this morally vexed storyline at the heart of the rallying cry for a safe and just planet that has inspired crowds to march.
Cascades of Capture
Despite the chilling relationship between planetary boundaries, neo-Malthusianism, and population control, the concept has been happily taken up by a range of groups working to transform institutions like health, banking, and finance towards the Earth’s Commission’s ideals.
These institutions tend to zero in on one of the two forces neo-Malthusians have seen as sources of impending doom: population and economy.
I’ll start with concerns about population growth which underpins the concept of “planetary health.”
The original use of the term “planetary health” is attributed to Friends of the Earth in 1980, who amended the World Health Organization’s 1946 definition of health so that that “health is a state of complete physical, mental, social and ecological well-being and not merely the absence of disease—that personal health involves planetary health.”
The term then became popularized in 2015 by a joint project betweenThe Lancet, an elite health science publication, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The project asserts that “we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realize economic and development gains”—an idea also explicitly included in the Planetary Boundaries framework.
Richard Horton, Editor in Chief of The Lancet, has since made it his mission to “develop the idea of planetary health—the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend.” His ideas are embodied in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, which aims to support “radical civilisational transformation” and create a “safe and just space for humanity, respecting planetary boundaries.”
Horton celebrates the work of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in calling on medical professionals to join the cause and “inject moral force into the political debate on climate action.” In writing about an influential journal article on ocean circulation, XR’s Roger Hallam said “repressed scientist” who say that the planetary situation “‘kind of scary’” are “like saying Auschwitz was ‘kind of unpleasant’.”
The problem in the simile should be apparent. The Holocaust produced millions of deaths of documented deaths at the hands of a formal genocide government policy. The research Hallam was critiquing used a computer model to estimate ocean cycling 2,800 “model years” into the future to say something about tipping in the present. But Hallam’s extreme view is supported by a science-like narrative of an earth on the brink of collapse that is legitimized by The Lancet’s advocacy-oriented editor.
If you think the problem is just academic journals and advocates, think again. In an IPCC report from 2022, the authors used the term to describe the result of resilient development.
The IPCC’s footnotes demonstrate, however, the term’s ambiguity.
Planetary health is defined as “a concept based on the understanding that human health and human civilization depend on ecosystem health and the wise stewardship of ecosystems.”
Ecosystem health is defined as “a metaphor used to describe the condition of an ecosystem, by analogy with human health.”
That is, “planetary health” is what results from the kind of development that writers of the IPCC report like and what they like is the Planetary Boundaries worldview.
Now, to banking and finance- important institutions in economic growth.
The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) is a coalition of central banks that pressures the banking sector and its regulators into meeting Paris Agreement goals. NGFS directly invokes the idea of Planetary Boundaries in its development of scenarios for use in bank stress-testing.
The NGFS scenario narratives (below left) get their names from an article by the Planetary Boundaries authors that appeared in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) in 2018. The article has one of the highest attention scores—that is, it was mentioned a lot in the news, blogs, and policy documents—in all of science. In the article, the authors set out two trajectories for humanity: a stabilized Earth and the Hothouse Earth which is “likely to be uncontrollable and dangerous to many.” It poses severe risks, the authors continue, “for health, economies, political stability (especially for the most climate vulnerable), and ultimately, the habitability of the planet for humans.” An image from the PNAS article (below right) was used in the NGFS scenarios technical documentation illustrating the fingerprints of Planetary Boundaries in the development of the scenarios (I added the pink circles in the images below). NGFS also uses the planetary boundary framework in the development of scenarios central banks can run to assess nature-related economic and financial risk.
Planetary boundaries is also the guiding framework for the Science Based Targets Network—an initiative combining the Earth Commission with the founders of the Science Based Target Initiative. The latter (SBTi) is itself wrapped up in a complicated network of coalitions that has been the source of much ire for U.S. legislators concerned with potential antitrust violations occurring in ESG and sustainable investing activities.
And so, it is from here that we find leading advocacy organizations promulgating ideas of systemic financial risk caused by climate change and policy entrepreneurs under the auspices the Financial Stability Board building a case for corporate disclosure on the foundation of Planetary Boundaries.
A 12-year-old schoolboy has been investigated by counter-extremism officers after he declared there ‘are only two genders’.
The child made a video, posted online, in which he also stated: ‘There’s no such thing as non-binary’.
And in response to school bullies who mistakenly believed he supported transgender ideology, he said: ‘[I’m] gay not queer.’
Originally a homophobic slur, trans activists claim the word ‘queer’ now describes people who don’t adhere to ideas of sex or gender.
But the school told the boy’s mother they would refer him to Prevent, the Home Office programme that attempts to stop people becoming terrorists, amid fears he could be at risk of being radicalised by the far-right.
The Mail is aware of the boy’s identity but has agreed not to disclose it, and has also viewed the social media posts.
The boy’s mother was visited by Prevent and Northumbria Police officers this week, in a meeting she described as ‘an interrogation’.
Officers listed a string of allegations to illustrate the boy was at risk of radicalisation.
The boy’s mother said: ‘We think that he was targeted as the children believe gay people agree with trans ideology.
‘He made a video which I uploaded to YouTube where he said there ‘are only two genders’ and ‘I’m gay not queer’.
‘The school phoned up and were incensed by it. They said that they would refer him to Prevent for that video.
‘They said that he was at risk of radicalisation – not that he had been, but was a risk when he gets to 13 and is entitled to his own social media accounts.
As conquerors of Egypt, Roman historian totally misconstrued Cleopatra. She was neither a seductress nor even particularly beautiful. She took the throne at 17 with her half brother (and husband) Prolemy XIII, who was 10. .
A Greek politician named Pothinus, serving as advisor to Ptolemy, and her half brother turned the Egyptian Greeks against Cleopatra for being allegedly pro-Rome.* This forced her to flee to Syria to try to raise an army. Meanwhile Pompei, one of the three Roman proconsuls Pompei fled to Egypt owing to a dispute with with the other two, Julius Caesar and Crassus. After Pothinus decapitated Pompeii, Caesar was also dispatched to Egypt to sanction Prothinus for killing a Roman citizen in cold blood.
When Caesar declares that Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII will rule jointly, he triggers an insurrection (which comes to be known as the Alexandrian wars) against Caesar’s army. After Ptolemy accidentally drowns in the Nile. Cleopatra marries a second brother, Ptolemy XIV. After the latter also disappears, she becomes Caesars mistress and bears him a son she names Caesarion.
Caesar (who already has a wife) establishes Cleopatra and his son in a villa outside Rome. He also outrages much of the Roman population by building a statue of Cleopatra as Isis in a Roman temple. A short time later, he was assassinated, and Cleopatra fled to Egypt.
After a succession feud developed between Octavian (who became Augustus Caesar) and Mark Anthony over who would succeed Caesar, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra become lovers and she gives birth to twins named Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. Mark Anthony then returns to Rome, where he marries Octavia (Octavian’s sister).
Five years later, when Mark Anthony is trying to raise money for his war against Octavian, he also marries Cleopatra and she agrees to supply him with money and troops provided he declares her queen of Sinai, Judea, Cypress and Arabia and makes Caesarion her regent in Egypt.
After Cleopatra has a third child, Ptolemy, by Anthony, he declares her queen of these four territories, as well as Libya; his son Alexander Helios king of Armenia, Media and Parthia; his daughter Cleopatra Selene queen of Libya; and his son Ptolemy king of Phoenicia.
Defeated by Octavius at the naval battle of Actium, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra retreat to her palace in Alexandria. As Octavius marches on the city, she rejects his demands that she turn over Mark Anthony and kills herself (either by drinking poison or self-induced snake bite.
*The Ptolemies had no army and could only stay in power with Roman military support.
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