(FREE) PAINE IN THE MORNING: What you need to know this Tuesday – February 28, 2023

Here’s what you need to know today, Tuesday – February 28, 2023.

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Weaponizing Everything, Including Lawyers And Balloons: China’s 1999 Manual For Defeating America – During its North American aerial odyssey, The Big Chinese Balloon passed within intel-gathering distance of ICBM silo fields, strategic bomber bases, key global logistics hubs (Charleston for example), and major Army and USAF headquarters.

The balloon wasn’t just blowing in the wind. Its calculated military itinerary tells reasonable Americans and Canadians—reasonable being a qualifier that excludes media influencers and politicians bribed or blackmailed by communist China—that the balloon was spying on critical North American defense installations. – READ MORE

Western Leaders Privately Admit Ukraine Can’t Win The War – Western leaders privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine can not win the war against Russia and that it should begin peace talks with Moscow this year in exchange for closer ties with NATO.

The private communications are at odds with public statements from Western leaders who routinely say they will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes until it achieves victory on the battlefield. – READ MORE

Where Did All the Workers Go? Labor Shortages Continue to Bedevil the Economy – While the statistics may be unsettling, there’s still no underlying pathology that could account for the deaths due to vaccines. So the Federal Reserve and insurance companies are looking for more mundane reasons.

The biggest problem — as it was in December — is that no one can agree on a solid number of missing workers. This is particularly vital for the Federal Reserve, which must set monetary policy based on a fairly accurate count of those workers who are employed or unemployed. – READ MORE

Wall Street investors snatching up single-family homes and taking over rental market – An ongoing shortage of housing will make it easier for banks and other Wall Street investors to take control of the market for single-family rental homes, National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Institutional investors, such as banks and other large investors, are on track to own 40% of single-family rentals in the U.S. by 2030, MetLife Investment Management predicted, according to CNBC. An ongoing shortage of single-family homes in the U.S. would normally limit growth potential for Wall Street firms looking to buy single-family rentals, but it is also making it easier for them to tighten their grip on the market, Yun told the DCNF. – READ MORE

Washington State Dems Want ‘Minority Report’ Commission to Destroy Conservative Wrong-Think – The regime is not pleased. Therefore, Washington State Democrats, led by Gov. Jay Inslee, proposed a new law to root out and smother the opinions, thoughts, and ideas of people who engage in wrong-think, to stop “early signs of radicalization.” And when they find them, to “develop a public health-style response.”

Welcome to the Washington State Democrats’ proposed Minority Report Commission, where people drunk with power propose to kill ideas before someone does something “radical,” such as writing their legislators, protesting at school board meetings, disobeying vaccine mandates, refusing to wear masks, or objecting to sexualizing school children. – READ MORE

U.N. Demands ‘Global Guidelines’ on Internet Speech to Silence ‘Insects Thriving in the Dark’ – The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), an agency best known for maintaining a list of humanity’s most valuable cultural heritage sites, demanded the establishment of “global guidelines for the regulation of social media” in a conference on Wednesday to address alleged “disinformation.”

Participating in the conference, based in Paris, were Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – a convicted felon who spuriously referred to his opponent Jair Bolsonaro as a “pedophile” in an online podcast during last year’s presidential race – and Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist who faced government persecution for allegedly reporting disinformation online under former President Rodrigo Duterte. – READ MORE

No News Is Not Good News: Google Blocks News Content for Some Canadians – In response to the “Online News Act” legislation that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in April, Google is currently testing blocking access to news content for some Canadian users.

Reuters reports that the “Online News Acts” will require platforms like Google and Facebook to compensate news publishers for their content. The tech giant acknowledged that the tests “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees.” and affect a random sample of about four percent of Canadian users. – READ MORE

Censors Use AI To Target Podcasts – With the total credibility collapse of legacy media over the last 15 years, people around the world turned to social media for news and discussion. When social media then began censoring the most pressing topics, such as Covid-19, people increasingly turned to podcasts. Physicians and analysts who’d been suppressed on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and who were of course nowhere to be found in legacy media, delivered via podcasts much of the very best analysis on the broad array of pandemic science and policy.

Which brings us to the new report from Brookings, which concludes that one of the most prolific sources of ‘misinformation’ is now – you guessed it – podcasts. And further, that the underregulation of podcasts is a grave danger. –READ MORE

SCOTUS Says Domestic Spying Is Too Secret To Be Challenged in Court – Abusive government behavior has again been found to be too sensitive to national security to face legal challenges in the court system. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court’s dismissal of the Wikimedia Foundation’s lawsuit against a National Security Agency surveillance program revealed a decade ago by Edward Snowden. With “state secrets privilege” barring litigation, that leaves upcoming congressional debates over renewal of the law authorizing the program as the only recourse for civil liberties advocates.

“The U.S. Supreme Court today denied the Wikimedia Foundation’s petition for review of its legal challenge to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) ‘Upstream’ surveillance program,” Wikimedia announced February 21. “Under this program, the NSA systematically searches the contents of internet traffic entering and leaving the United States, including Americans’ private emails, messages, and web communications. The Supreme Court’s denial leaves in place a divided ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which dismissed Wikimedia’s case based on the government’s assertion of the ‘state secrets privilege.'” – READ MORE

Report: NYC Auctions $224 Million in COVID Supplies for $500K – New York City officials auctioned $224 million worth of COVID-19 medical equipment for just $500,000, including never-used ventilators as scrap metal.

Much of the supplies are brand new and unopened, receiving a return of five cents on the dollar in taxpayer money. Many items have failed to attract buyers, according to The City. – READ MORE

“We’re Dying Slowly”: East Palestine Residents Report Bizarre Health Issues After Toxic Train Derailment – Residents of East Palestine, Ohio have been reporting bizarre symptoms following the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern train derailment and subsequent toxic explosion, the NY Post reports.

“Doctors say I definitely have the chemicals in me but there’s no one in town who can run the toxicological tests to find out which ones they are,” said 40-year-old Wade Lovett, whose high-pitched voice now sounds as if he’s been inhaling helium. – READ MORE