Badlands News Brief
Badlands News Brief
FEMA's Broke. Ukraine is Collapsing. The EU is Doomed.
The News Cycle is almost impossible to track these days. At least, to do so fully.
That’s where we come in.
In the Badlands News Brief, the Badlands Media team hand pick news items of interest from the previous days to give you an overview of the biggest goings-on relevant to the Truth Community with some Badlands flavoring to help wash it down.
Now, onto the news from Thursday, October 3 …
Mayorkas warns FEMA doesn't have enough funding to last through hurricane season
The Federal Emergency Management Agency can meet immediate needs but does not have enough funding to make it through the hurricane season, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters Wednesday.
The agency is being stretched as it works with states to assess damage from Hurricane Helene and delivers meals, water, generators and other critical supplies. The storm struck Florida last week, then plowed through several states in the Southeast, flooding towns and killing more than 160 people.
Mayorkas was not specific about how much additional money the agency may need, but his remarks on Air Force One underscored concerns voiced by President Joe Biden and some lawmakers earlier this week that Congress may need to pass a supplemental spending bill this fall to help states with recovery efforts.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting," Mayorkas said. “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season."
Hurricane season runs June 1 to Nov. 30, but most hurricanes typically occur in September and October. — ABC News
Our Take: Polycrisis is the WEF’s theme of the year for 2024. It’s crazy how good those benevolent globalists are at predicting world events. It’s almost like they’re planning.
Mayorkas is claiming poverty for FEMA, a massive agency with a massive budget, which is bringing multiple crises into focus. The complete mismanagement of the US border; the reallocation of FEMA funding — meant for disaster relief — to offset the budget shortfall from mismanaging the border; the lack of appropriate resources to manage the actual disaster of Hurricane Helene. These are intimately interconnected crises that are entirely the result of Biden/Harris policy.
Now consider that they’re colliding with: (1) the energy crisis resulting from draining the strategic petroleum reserves and hamstringing US energy production; (2) the supply chain crisis which is about to blow up via the port strike; (3) the Middle East crisis which is getting a windfall while Americans suffer; (4) the economy; and more.
If you let them break the law in a crisis, they will create a crisis to break the law. This isn’t a new tactic. Ancient Roman philosopher Cicero wrote about it, most notably in De Legibus: ‘In times of war, the law is silent.’
Similarly, but without Cicero’s concern for the inevitable abuses, Machiavelli gave the practice a glowing endorsement in The Prince: ‘A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.’
When they create multiple crises to break the law in rapid succession — when they create a polycrisis or, a crisis cascade, h/t
— and then they demand struggling Americans give them more money, it’s almost like we’re watching a movie meant to shake people awake. —SC pilot flying volunteer supply and rescue missions ordered out of Lake Lure under arrest threat
When Jordan Seidhom woke up Saturday morning, he saw a Facebook post that tens of thousands of people were commenting on and sharing. A family was stranded on a mountain in Banner Elk, North Carolina.
They ran out of water a day earlier and just enough food to last less than two days.
Seidhom, the former head of the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit, knows a thing or two about finding people. He researched the mountain chain where the family was located and found a place to land on his mapping software.
He loaded bottled water and food into his helicopter and headed toward Banner Elk.
“I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” Seidhom told Queen City News Chief Investigator Jody Barr. — Queen City News
Our Take:
Stories like this one are being reported all over social media. There are subversive individuals in the government—seemingly at all levels—trying to prevent good people from risking their lives to save others. Here's another one from Tim Kennedy, a veteran of the 7th Special Forces Group.
It is difficult, in this moment, to find the words to describe what kind of miscreant you must be to threaten to arrest a guy flying his own helicopter into dangerous floods to rescue people who desperately need help—especially when that guy happens to be a former cop and volunteer firefighter—and the government, itself, is doing very little to assist them.
From my own personal experience(s), I know that there are plenty of good people at all three levels of government. So let's just be generous, and say [hypothetically] that 99% of all government employees are "very good" people, and only 1% are bad. What does it say about our government if that 1% can wield enough power to implement this much evil and chaos, and the other 99% is seemingly powerless to stop them?
So then let's say [hypothetically] that the number of "very good" people in the government is significantly less. What does that then say about the quality of our government? At what percentage does the situation become unacceptable? How much corruption and wickedness are we expected to endure before we seek to alter or abolish/replace it? (As specified in the Declaration of Independence.)
Any way you cut it, the time has come for a true political reckoning of biblical proportion in this country. Not one that is achieved through violence or coercive manipulation, as our beloved establishment loves to do, but one that is consecrated in the unifying catharsis of cold resolute justice. Bringing this oligarchy down will be the thing that brings our country together. And we bring them down by exposing their indecencies, in full and on the record, so that it can be recorded for all time in the histories, before they face whatever consequences await them.
For those trapped in the affected areas: may God be with you. Help is coming:
(Good men still exist.)
Hang in there. We are all praying for you. —
U.S. Port Workers Agree to End Their Strike
U.S. dockworkers agreed to return to work after port operators sweetened their contract offer, ending a three-day strike that threatened to disrupt the American economy.
The breakthrough Thursday came after port employers offered a 62% increase in wages over six years, according to people familiar with the matter.
The agreement ends a strike that had closed container ports from Maine to Texas and threatened to disrupt everything from the supply of bananas in supermarkets to the flow of cars through America’s factories.
The new offer, up from an earlier proposed raise of 50%, came after the White House privately and publicly pressed the large shipping lines and cargo terminal operators who employ the longshore workers to make a new offer to the union.
President Biden applauded the agreement, saying in a statement, “Collective bargaining works, and it is critical to building a stronger economy from the middle out and the bottom up.”
The International Longshoremen’s Association and port operators, in a joint statement, said they had reached a tentative agreement on wages and union members would return to work. They said the agreement would extend the prior contract, which expired at the start of this week, through Jan. 15, 2025 while the two sides negotiate on other issues, including automation on the docks. — WSJ
Our Take: The Regime got quite the scare there.
Still, a few interesting things came out of the Port Strike Scenario.
As we've discussed over the last week and change, Americans have been made more aware than they have been in some time that reliance on foreign trade has turned the US into a passthrough economy.
We're a net exporter to the tune of a nearly $700 Billion deficit, which is absolutely shameful for the country that revolutionized the manufacturing process and was once known for producing the best products in the world, not to mention energy.
Energy, trade and jobs are three of the major legs of the table Trump is campaigning on, and they happen to be the areas the current communist regime is weakest on.
Thing is, people don't care until they do. It's the classic 'fu*k around and find out' template.
Either way, from where I'm sitting, it looks like DJT has ANOTHER massive problem in the offing he has ready-made solutions for circa January 2025.
The 'Good' Reset is still a go. —
Ukrainian Lines Collapsing In East With World's Attention On Middle East War
Moscow’s wide-reaching offensive in eastern Ukraine has continued making steady gains, as looming major war between Israel and Iran has largely taken over the news cycle and daily headlines.
Currently Russian forces have advanced to merely within a few a few kilometers of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistical hub in the region. As we've highlighted before, the collapse of Pokrovsk will likely portend a Russian takeover of the whole of Donetsk.
On Wednesday the Ukrainian army announced that it has fully withdrawn from the eastern town of Vuhledar, describing that it abandoned the area after being almost fully encircled, and coming under heavy Russian artillery bombardment.
"The High Command gave permission for a maneuver to withdraw units from Vuhledar in order to save personnel and military equipment and take up a position for further operations," a Ukrainian unit deployed there said in a Telegram post.
It cited specifically the "threat of encirclement" and heavy troop losses, and there are reports that Russian forces had already taken control of Vuhleda by the time the Ukrainian announcement was made.
Vuhleda is a significant achievement, and suggests Russia forces will continue to plow through Ukrainian defenses, given it was dubbed a "fortress" city given its long having heavily-fortified surroundings and being in an upland position. — ZeroHedge
And …
Ukrainian agents tried to kidnap child from Russia – FSB
An officer of Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) has tried to use his agency’s resources to kidnap his own son from Russia, the FSB security service has claimed.
The Russian service reported on Thursday that it had caught HUR agents illegally crossing the border from Lithuania to Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad.
“A secondary goal of the operation was the kidnapping and cross-border smuggling of an underage Russian citizen, who is the son of an HUR staff member,” the statement said.
Footage released by the FSB showed the arrest of a car driver. A child, who appears to be in his early teens, was taken out of the vehicle in the process. People involved in the operation confirmed on camera that they were tasked with a kidnapping on Russian soil. — RT
Our Take: The deranged imbeciles who rule over the West have reached the peak of their stupidity, as everything that they hold dear (vile and rampant degeneracy, laced with death and human suffering) collapses around them. Watching them cling to their precious levers of power is quite amusing, but also pathetic.
Watch this video of Ukrainian thugs trying to kidnap the child of a Russian intelligence officer:
That video of Eastern European scumbags trying to steal a child as an official act of war is the perfect embodiment of the modern Deep State. It is everything that Washington DC has come to represent. The stain that these reprobates have put on our country can never be forgiven. There is no reconciliation to be had with such evil.
One side will win, and the other side will be utterly annihilated.
The DC/NATO/Israeli Nazis have become so desperate that they are now bombing the [Russian] nuclear power plant in Kursk.
Back on Labor Day, during my in-depth rant on the Kursk incursion that I gave on Badlands Daily, I explained to CannCon that the intended objective of the Kursk invasion was to reach the nuclear power plant and destroy it, hoping that the subsequent fallout would make a vast region of Russia uninhabitable.
Here is a map showing the Ukrainian invasion in Kursk, alongside a satellite image showing the miles of trenches that the Russians dug to defend the power plant:
What people don't understand is that the Russians aren't just fighting a war right now. They are using this opportunity to innovate the next generation of combined-arms doctrine for maneuver warfare. Reports say that they have been tinkering with different tactics of using infantry and drones together to eliminate armor (tanks/artillery/armored personnel carriers) in the most efficient manner possible.
According to Sputnik, this video shows, "A German Leopard 2A6 tank, destroyed in the Russian special military operation, was delivered to Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, in the Ural region [of Russia].
Research and Production Corporation "Uralvagon
zavod" is one of the largest manufacturers of military equipment in Russia, producing tanks as well as tank support combat vehicles and armored engineering vehicles."
"After conducting detailed analysis, an expert assessment will be given of the military-technical capabilities of various systems and the destroyed tank as a whole," the enterprise's press service said.
So the Russians have captured a German (NATO) tank, and plan to study it to better understand how to destroy it more efficiently. Not only is NATO wasting money, resources, and lives on this doomed war effort, but they are also giving their mortal enemy every opportunity to research and develop the best techniques to kill NATO soldiers.
At this point, it is hard to say which entity is more woefully inept, the EU or NATO? —
Trifecta of challenges unravel for Harris, White House ahead of Election Day
A compounding series of challenges are converging all at once for the White House — port workers are striking, fighting in the Middle East is escalating and Hurricane Helene has ravaged parts of the Southeastern U.S., all while a month away from Election Day.
The issues unraveling both domestically and internationally are putting Vice President Harris to the test as she spends the final weeks of her campaign trying to convince voters that the current administration should not be punished at the polls in November.
The unfortunate timing of the events has the potential to jolt the presidential race just over a month out, though the neck and neck contest has seen little movement in recent polls over a plethora of other issues.
As the nation braces for the homestretch of the 2024 presidential race, Harris and former President Trump are nearly tied nationally and in the pivotal swing and battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election. Harris is leading Trump by 4.6 percentage points nationally, according to Decision Desk HQ/ The Hill’s aggregation of polls. — The Hill
And …
A trio of crises threatens to upend the race 5 weeks before Election Day
A trio of emergencies has all struck just five weeks ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Violence in the Middle East, a dockworkers strike, and Hurricane Helene could all impact the polls, experts told BI.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be forced to reckon with the crises in the final days of their campaigns. — Business Insider
Our Take: As our fearless editor
pointed out, the four am talking points, ostensibly from the Harris campaign, were released — and now several legacy media headlines are ‘reporting’ essentially the same thing.The port strike, the hurricane, and the Middle East are converging on Harris at a pivotal moment in the campaign, according to the latest narrative drop.
While these talking points appear on the surface to throw shade on Harris, this lands as just another campaign contribution.
From the Hill piece:
‘Strategists think the way she handles these three crises is a critical opportunity for voters to see her at work and get to know her — something she’s had an abbreviated amount of time to do since she became the nominee in August.’
The piece goes on to quote a former Obama campaign manager, ‘There’s no better argument for her capability than proving she’s already handling the toughest challenges of leadership under intense scrutiny.’
The Business Insider piece quotes a different Obama-era figure, Peter Loge, ‘The Biden-Harris administration would be wise to project calm competence in the weeks ahead, according to Loge. Meanwhile, he said he expects the Trump campaign to continue its messaging promoting Trump as the candidate of strength and Harris as the candidate of weakness.’
In this totally organic story development, Team Obama is framing up domestic policy, foreign policy, and crisis management, and telling readers where to focus their attention.
What luck for Harris: Wednesday evening, reporting broke that the port strike has been suspended until January.
Thankfully, a majority of voters are smart enough to realize that Harris is a disaster on all three fronts.
Final thought: They’re still reporting the race as neck and neck despite Harris losing support across all key demographics. Where is new support for Harris coming from at this point? Serious question. —
EU ‘could die’ – Macron
The EU economy needs to become more competitive with the US and China or it “could die,” French President Emmanuel Macron stated at the Berlin Global Dialogue event on Wednesday.
According to Macron, the 27-nation bloc is falling behind Washington and Beijing, both having outstripped the EU in economic output and investment.
He warned that the European Union is in a very precarious situation and could face problems if it fails to deepen its single market and to resolve “fragmentation.”
“The EU could die, we are on a verge of a very important moment,” the French president said.
“Our former model is over – we are over-regulating and under-investing. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda we will be out of the market.”
The French president also warned that if the EU failed to urgently reform regulations the bloc would be forced to implement a rescue plan in five to ten years’ time. — RT
And …
EU should ‘prepare for war’ with Russia – new Defense Commissioner
The EU and Russia could face one other on the battlefield in less than a decade, MEP Andrius Kubilius, the newly appointed EU Commissioner for Defense and Space said this week. The former Lithuanian prime minister has been known for his hardline stance on relations with Moscow.
The bloc must ramp up its defense production and stock up reserves to be able to “defend itself,” said Kubilius, who is currently a member of the European People’s Party group in the EU Parliament, which presented its strategic paper on defense on Wednesday.
“If you want peace, prepare for war,” the MEP said, commenting on his group’s initiative calling for a “European Defense Union” and encouraging investments in the “defense technology of the future.”
“We must be ready to meet Russia militarily in six to eight years,” Kubilius maintained. “The EU, in complementing NATO and together with its Member States, must boost defense production, stock up reserves and continue helping Ukraine,” he added.
According to the MEP, Brussels’ adversaries were “watching … closely” whether the bloc was going to “succeed or fail” in this endeavor. — RT
Our Take: Clearly, the EU is in an existential struggle for its very survival—as they explicitly state. Though, I don't view this struggle as some economic impasse, or some earnest inflection point. Let's not allow Monsieur Enculé (I've decided that's his TrumpaMania stage name) to pretend to elucidate the troubles afflicting Europe in a feigned moment of sobriety during an otherwise humiliating display of "failed leadership."
Let's just call the EU what it is: a menagerie of wannabe aristocrats, desperately trying to LARP the 1815 Treaty of Vienna—when, after finally defeating Napoleon and ending the French Revolution, the disgraced aristocrats of Europe convened to lick each other's wounds and brainstorm how best to restore their dominion over the masses. They decided to restore the monarchies of Europe, developing systems to persecute and oppress free-thinkers that included blacklists that were distributed to every university and newspaper in Europe. (The targets became unemployable, and, ironically, were forced to emigrate to America—which only made America that much more based.)
While this new generation of degenerate rulers may lack the ingenuity and cunning that their predecessors possessed, they certainly match their total lack of moral character and extraordinary perversion. European aristocrats proved themselves to be profane imbeciles, as they regularly married and fornicated with their sisters and cousins so often that many of their descendants eventually were too inbred to function.
The most notorious family to fall victim to this idiocy—who also attended the 1815 Treaty of Vienna meeting—was the Habsburgs, otherwise known as the House of Austria. After taking over the Holy Roman Empire, and marrying into nearly every royal court in Europe, the Habsburg sought to preserve the "greatness" of their bloodline by marrying within their family. (Honestly, I think they were just looking for a justification for sleeping with their sisters.) Their inbreeding got so bad that they all developed what became known as the "Habsburg jawline," which is just a nice way of saying that they were all missing a few chromosomes.
Dashing.
So now the descendants(?) of these inbred swine are mad because their little tea-party of tyranny is coming to an end. They would be better off professing now that they have intentionally destroyed Europe through subversive policies, because if this all happened on accident (the decline/collapse of European society) then they have only proven that centuries of inbreeding truly does lead to severe cognitive retardation.
In closing, I would like to overstate that the European Union has proven itself to be an even more egregious disaster than the Habsburgs' genetic sequencing.
And on that note, I will leave you with a word from the great Nigel Farage on the European Union. —
BONUS ITEMS
U.S. and Microsoft seize dozens of domains tied to Russian hacking group
U.S. authorities have seized dozens of internet domains used by Russian intelligence agents and their proxies to steal valuable information from U.S. government computers and email accounts, the Department of Justice revealed Thursday.
In a warrant unsealed this week, the department accused the "Callisto Group," a unit under Russia's FSB security service, of orchestrating an "ongoing and sophisticated spear phishing campaign" aimed at gaining unauthorized access to the computers and email accounts of victims.
The warrant alleged that Russian-directed cybercriminals pilfered "valuable information and sensitive United States government intelligence."
Targets included former U.S. intelligence employees, former and current Department of Defense personnel, Department of State employees, Department of Energy staff, U.S. military contractors and U.S.-based companies.
The Justice Department seized 41 internet domains and coordinated the takedowns with tech giant Microsoft, which seized an additional 66 unique domains operated by the same group. — CBS News
Prosecutors request indefinite delay in trial for Trump assassination attempt suspect Ryan Routh
Federal prosecutors requested an indefinite delay Wednesday in scheduling the trial for the man charged in an apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at his Florida golf course last month, citing a massive amount of evidence they've gathered in the 17 days since Ryan Routh's arrest.
In a filing Wednesday afternoon requesting Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon officially designate Routh's case as "complex," prosecutors revealed new details about the scope of evidence they've amassed as they try to further gain insight into Routh's actions leading up to his suspected attempt to kill Trump.
"Over the past two weeks, the United States has interviewed hundreds of witnesses," prosecutors said in the filing. "It has also executed 13 search warrants in Florida, Hawaii, and North Carolina, and seized hundreds of items of evidence, including multiple electronic devices."
Investigators reportedly have more than 100 outstanding subpoena returns in connection with the investigation, the filing states, and they estimate they have "thousands of videos to review" from the large volume of electronic devices seized thus far. — ABC News
"Wolves In MAGA Hats": Assange Details CIA's War Against Him In First Remarks Since Gaining Freedom
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this week traveled to Strasbourg, France for his first ever public remarks since gaining his freedom in June, after his many years-long ordeal in the Ecuadorian Embassy and then Belmarsh Prison in London. His speech was given Tuesday before the legal affairs and human rights committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The assembly subsequently issued a formal resolution recognizing Assange as a 'political prisoner' and highlighted the chilling effect on journalism worldwide that his case caused. The US government spent years pursuing his extradition, and at one point there were even alleged assassination plans hatched by US operatives.
Among the more interesting and illuminating parts of his speech included a detailed retelling of how the CIA waged war against him personally, especially under the Trump administration, given that "Trump appointed two wolves in MAGA hats. Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Congressman and former arms executive as CIA director and William Barr, a former CIA officer as US attorney general." Assange further talked about how the CIA has infiltrated European governments and institutions via sophisticated software later exposed by WikiLeaks, and how this unleashed further government retribution against him and whistleblowers. His full speech is below. — ZeroHedge
We hope you enjoyed this brief look back at the major news items you might have missed in this ever-escalating and ever-accelerating news cycle as the Information War continues to rage on around us.
As always, if you have any thoughts on these news items or the MANY others swirling in the digital ether, drop into the comments below to share them with your fellow Badlanders.
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People all over this country are becoming galvanized by their desire to help their neighbors. This is more powerful because they are not doing this “instead” of the government but “in SPITE” of the government. SPITE toward the government may be the cure for mankind. Build trust with the people who share your neighborhood. 💗
I feel sad for the people suffering from the Hurricane because the media framed Trump as our enemy. So now the sleepers of America are forced to suffer at the hands of the very people they think they want to reelect. It's absolutely mind blowing to actually see the Harris Walz signage on people's yards. The-Ukraine storyline keeps getting more pathetic... like our current status here in the states. I know it has to be like this so people can see...but it's getting where I don't know if I can continue reading anything about politics without losing my sanity. But knowing God's got me, has me leaning longer in prayer!