Day: February 15, 2023

(Natural News) A noted Republican senator who is laser-focused on rooting out government corruption is demanding an inspector general reopen an investigation into potential corrupt collusion between Amazon and the Pentagon over a defense contract worth billions, citing newly discovered evidence warranting such action.

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee in a chamber controlled by Democrats, wants the Defense Department Office of Inspector General (DOD OIG) to reopen a previous investigation after claiming that a former DoD official, Sally Donnelly, did not disclose a potential conflict of interest to the previous investigators during an ethics probe involving the contract.

The inspector general published its final report on April 13, 2020, which said, “We determined that Ms. Donnelly did not violate any ethical agreements and obligations regarding Office of Government Ethics financial disclosures, [and] did not give preferential treatment to Amazon officials or restrict access to [Defense] Secretary [James] Mattis for other industry leaders.”

But, as Breitbart News reports:

Grassley says Donnelly did not disclose to the DOD OIG exactly who purchased her consulting firm just prior to beginning her employment at the DOD, which he argues was relevant to the DOD OIG’s investigation and could have affected its findings.

Grassley wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the DOD Inspector General Sean O’Donnell on October 24, 2022, asking them to reopen the investigation.

“The American people must have confidence that their government isn’t plagued by conflicts of interest and that the decisions made by government officials are done for the people and their best interests, not the financial interests of government officials,” Grassley wrote.

Grassley previously laid out his evidence in an Oct. 24, 2022 letter, which Breitbart News summarized:

Just before entering the DOD in 2017, Donnelly sold her consulting firm SBD Advisors, according to her publicly available financial disclosure forms. However, Donnelly never revealed on her forms or in public reporting exactly who had purchased her firm. According to Grassley, Donnelly never told the DOD OIG who purchased her firm either.

After pressing the DOD OIG for the Purchase and Sale Agreement for Donnelly’s company, Grassley found that the DOD OIG only had a copy with the identity of the purchaser’s name redacted, and that the DOD OIG had argued to him that the identity of the purchaser was not relevant to their investigation. Grassley said he finally obtained an unredacted copy of the Purchase and Sale Agreement in October 2022 — long after the DOD OIG ended its investigation — which revealed that an entity named VMAP Investor, LLC (VMAP) had purchased her firm. The “AP” in VMAP are the initials of its part-owner, Andre Pienaar.

The Iowa Republican is arguing that information would certainly have been important to the DOD OIG’s initial probe. That’s because Pienaar isn’t just the CEO and founder of C5 Capital, a client of Donnelly’s, but at the time he was dating and later married the Amazon Web Services executive who was in charge of the company’s bid at the time to obtain the lucrative contract — Teresa Carlson.

During her employment at DOD, Grassley said that VMAP made a number of $390,000  payments to Donnelly for the purchase of her company.

“Knowledge of the entity that purchased her firm is relevant and central to the question of whether a conflict of interest existed and could have substantively affected the protocols required to wall off Sally Donnelly from potential and actual conflicts of interest while employed at DoD,” wrote Grassley. “Based on information collected for this investigation, the DoD OIG’s conclusion concerning Ms. Donnelly’s lack of financial connection to C5 appears to be inaccurate. Indeed, two senior C5 officials, including the founder of C5 Capital, were involved in the purchase of SBD Advisors LLC–connections that existed while Donnelly was at DoD and received payments from the sale of her company.”

This is all in relation to a contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or more commonly by its acronym, JEDI, which was announced officially in the fall of 2017, during then-President Donald Trump’s first year in office. The program sought to move the gargantuan amount of data possessed by the DOD to a single cloud, and as massive as the project would be, proponents said, it would “allow the Pentagon to be able to share and analyze data more quickly, and give warfighters on the ground more information about incoming threats at greater speed,” according to Breitbart News. Critics, however, countered that the Pentagon’s information should be spread out over several clouds and not be limited to one that could be vulnerable.

At $10 billion, the project was extremely lucrative. But shortly after companies began making bids, it became apparent that the DOD appeared to be fashioning the program around Amazon.

“Amazon had already secured a contract in 2013 to provide cloud services to the CIA, and if the tech giant also procured the DOD contract, it stood to gain a significant edge in the cloud computing and services industry,” Breitbart News reported. After the Pentagon announced in September 2017 it would go with Amazon, other companies that had bid on the project — Microsoft and Oracle — filed complaints.

But in the end, Donnelly was cleared and is now back at work in the Pentagon under the Biden regime; the DOD canceled the JEDI project in July 2021.

Sources include:

CNBC.com

Breitbart.com

(Natural News) European Union nations have spent hundreds of billions of euros and dollars paying out subsidies to citizens in an effort to help them pay for sky-high energy bills after insane EU policies left the continent dependent on unreliable and insufficient ‘green energy’ sources.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, EU countries and especially Germany grew reliant on Moscow’s fossil fuel energy because the country did not want to tap its own resources out of fear of appearing hypocritical while it built windmill and solar panel farms. But after the invasion, the EU followed the United States’ lead and imposed sanctions on Russia, including bans on purchasing cheap Russian natural gas. That left the entire continent dependent again on its own inadequate power generation resources, which in turn led to sky-high prices for a declining supply of energy.

“European countries have forked out over £700bn (€792bn) to shield businesses and households from soaring gas prices since the start of the energy crisis, according to the latest research from Bruegel,” OilPrice.com reported this week. “The think tank has calculated that since September 2021, the EU has now earmarked or spent €681bn in energy crisis spending, while the UK has allocated €103bn and Norway just over €8bn. Germany was by far the biggest spender, splashing out nearly €270bn since September 2021.”

That is a dramatic increase in expenditures since the previous report three months prior when Bruegel calculated a €706bn total while nations were struggling to provide enough heat during winter, with Russia having cut off gas supplies last fall. In fact, Russia reduced flows through its Nordstream 1 pipeline and ended flows into many countries simultaneously as NATO increased military and financial aid to Ukraine.

“Bruegel urged governments to shift towards more targeted support, prioritizing lower income levels as countries start running out of fiscal space to maintain such broad funding,” OilPrice.com continued. “Funding has chiefly focused on non-targeted measures such as VAT cuts on petrol or retail power price caps. However, the think-tank argued that dynamic needed to change over the coming months.”

This exorbitant spending has certainly taken a huge toll out of government budgets and may even be affecting other line items related to ‘green’ transformations. In Germany, for instance, sales of electric vehicles tanked after the government ended most subsidies for EVs — perhaps because of the added expenditure of subsidizing electric bills.

“Sales of fully electric vehicles (EVs) fell 13.2% in January compared to January 2022, Germany’s Motor Transport Authority reports. Sales of hybrids declined 6.2%. This compares to an increase of 3.5% in the number of new gasoline-powered cars sold, and a modest decline of 1.2% for diesel,” Zero Hedge reported this week, citing a Wall Street Journal analysis.

“The main explanation is the end of Berlin’s subsidies for EVs and hybrids at the new year. Until December the subsidy had offered up to €9,000 split between consumer and producer for EVs with a net list price below €40,000. Hybrids in that price range received €6,750. Berlin has ditched the subsidy for hybrids entirely, and cut the payout to €4,500 for EVs below €40,000,” the report added.

The Russian shutdown of energy last fall, at the time, was a “shocking development” and a massive blow to the European continent, which has spent the past 10-15 years moving away from reliable fossil fuels and nuclear power in lieu of unreliable and much more expensive “green” energy: Wind, solar, and hydrogen.

The pipeline shutdown came as European nations were scrambling to top off natural gas storage centers ahead of winter and attempting to forecast what Putin may or many not do in the coming weeks as the ‘energy war’ continues.

The rush to ‘clean’ energy using all-electric infrastructure is a disaster in the making. The world simply cannot function — economies cannot grow — at this state in our development without fossil fuels.

Sources include:

OilPrice.com

NaturalNews.com

WSJ.com

(Natural News) A former counselor and case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital is speaking out. Jamie Reed, (42) says, “what’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.”

For almost four years, she worked at the Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Disease, giving counsel to HIV-positive, young adults who identified as transgender or gender nonconforming. She relayed compassion to the youth, having questioned her gender identity several times throughout her adolescence. However, when she took up the job as case manager at the new Transgender enter at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, she began seeing the operation for what it really was: an abusive, predatory operation that confused youth, destroyed their identity, while chemically castrating and physically mutilating their bodies.

Transgender Clinics facilitate mass abuse, lifelong damage to adolescents

The sole purpose of the Transgender Clinic was to treat, treat, treat kids with gender dysphoria as soon as possible. The treatments were not centered on helping the child realize and accept their true birth gender. The treatments were designed to chemically alter their birth gender and cause further confusion about who they really are.

Jamie Reed brought into the Clinic around a thousand distressed young people. Immediately, they were handed hormone prescriptions that caused further distress, never addressing the underlying psychological and emotional issues that the teens faced. Jamie saw with her eyes the side effects and “life-altering consequences” of these prescriptions. In many cases, the youth were permanently sterilized.

“I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there,” Jamie writes. “By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”

Jamie witnessed an explosion in new gender dysphoria cases after 2015. More teenage girls were coming to the clinics declaring themselves “transgender” and demanding immediate testosterone treatments. Jamie said there was a “lack of formal protocols for treatment.” The counselors on the floor were ignored and the physician co-directors became the sole authority, affirming gender dysphoria and pushing puberty blockers on children.

When she started at the center, she received about ten calls per month. By the time she left, the number of kids seeking puberty blockers and synthetic hormones exploded to 50 – 70 cases per month. Jamie said many of their underlying health conditions were ignored, from depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity, and autism.

Transgender Clinics do not provide adequate informed consent, prey on vulnerable youth with lies and mutilation

When Jamie questioned the use of hormones and surgery for any child, she was quickly derided by her peers as being a “transphobe.” These case workers and therapists only had to see patients once or twice before they gave the green light for a full transition of the patient’s anatomy. The directors created letter templates that made it easier for the therapists to recommend a full gender transition. Once the endocrinologist received the letter of recommendation, they were forced to prescribe synthetic hormones to begin the patient’s transition. The Center did not provide adequate informed consent about the hormone treatments, about the lifelong impacts of infertility and the mood changes that disrupt everyday life.

One of their “treatments” for boys is bicalutamide. This drug feminizes their bodies and causes breast growth. It also causes liver toxicity that can be life threatening. The testosterone “treatment” for girls thins the vaginal tissues and can cause the vaginal canal to rip wide open, causing life threatening bleeds and warranting emergency surgeries. Most young girls who are given testosterone end up on blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and usually develop sleep apnea, and diabetes.

Many of the teens that came into the Transgender Clinic were already self-diagnosing themselves with psychiatric problems that they didn’t actually have, whether it be Tourette syndrome, tic disorders, bipolar disorder, multiple personalities, etc. The doctors at the clinic privately recognized that these false self-diagnoses were due to social contagion, social pressures, social conditioning, and emotional issues that sought to be validated and psychological hysterias and childhood experiences that sought to be affirmed.

Jamie also saw an influx of young patients who were deeply disturbed, who had suffered through several childhood traumas. Instead of addressing the actual issues that these children were going through, the therapists often gave the green light for gender transitions as the solution to all their problems.

“Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide,” the Center claims on their website. This message alone proves that these Transgender Centers are violently coercive. The Centers condemn patients to psychological demise and certain death if they do not go through with puberty blockers, synthetic hormones and surgeries.

This is a hopeless message. This is medical malpractice. This is a blatant and coercive lie!

Sources include:

TheFP.com

StLouisChildrens.org

NaturalNews.com

(Natural News) When 29-year-old Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, finally escaped the human trafficking syndicate that bought her as a child for $200, she thought she would find freedom in the United States. What she found instead was a different kind of hell in the form of the leftist “woke” revolution.

In her new book “While Time Remains,” Park, who attended Columbia University, reveals the utter shock she felt upon learning that her uppity leftist classmates somehow saw themselves as “victims.”

“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed?” It doesn’t even compute,” Park told the New York Post about her experience at Columbia.

“I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”

(Related: The University of Florida College of Medicine is pushing woke CRT and other anti-white propaganda on students.)

If leftists completely take over America, it will become no better than North Korea

By pronouns, Park is of course talking about the transgender cult and its endless merry-go-round of “gender identities” and other such nonsense. That some Americans consider not being referred to by their preferred pronouns as “oppression” came as a serious shock to Park.

One of only 200 North Koreans currently living in the U.S., Park officially became an American citizen last year after eight years of living in the country with her family. She first escaped North Korea in 2007 and has since become a target for Pyongyang.

In her home country, Park has been censured and labeled a “poisonous mushroom” and a “human rights propaganda puppet.” Park has responded to these allegations by stating that she is glad the authoritarian regime “feel[s] threatened” by her voice.

Before attending Columbia, Park thought she found freedom in the U.S. After three years of study there, however, she discovered that modern America is simply a different kind of hell from the one she escaped.

This hell is governed by Marxist revolutionaries who want to stamp out the freedom that Park and hundreds of millions of others hold dear and replace it with the kind of tyranny she thought she would never again have to face.

“I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom, and found it,” Park’s book reads. “I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to my new home … I want us – need us – to keep the darkness at bay.”

“I need your help to save our country, while time remains.”

In 2015, Park wrote her debut novel, “In Order to Live,” which compares the environment at Columbia to that of North Korea. She described Columbia as a “pure indoctrination camp,” which is not what she expected.

Instead of being taught to think critically, Park says she was “forced to think” a certain way by Columbia’s left-wing faculty members. Park also criticized her fellow classmates, stating that they are “brainwashed like North Korean students are.”

“I never understood that not having a problem can be a problem,” she wrote. “They need to make injustice out of thin air or a problem out of nowhere, because they haven’t experienced anything like what other people are facing in the world.”

In North Korea, Park says, citizens are divided up into 51 different classes based on their bloodlines. Those whose blood is “tainted” or whose ancestors were “oppressive” are denigrated and pushed to the bottom – sound familiar?

“That’s how the regime divided people,” she adds. “An individual doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective.”

More related news can be found at Wokies.news.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

NaturalNews.com