[T]he U.K. and Germany have banned hydraulic fracturing, letting their rich gas shale resources go to waste. Meantime, the Netherlands is shutting down Europe's biggest gas field.

In short, all of Europe's green chickens are coming home to roost. Several U.K. retail electricity providers have collapsed in recent weeks because of the surging price of gas. Energy experts warn that some German power suppliers are in danger of going insolvent. Germany's electricity prices, which were already the highest in Europe because of heavy reliance on renewables, have more than doubled since February.

Skyrocketing power prices have caused U.K steel makers to suspend production. A former energy adviser to the U.K. government warned last week that the country's energy shortage this winter could prompt a "three-day working week"—a reference to the coal and rail worker strike in 1974 that caused the government to ration energy for commercial users.

The European Steel Association has warned that the Continent's producers are becoming globally uncompetitive. Fertilizer producers, which use gas as a feedstock, are raising a fuss. 

It's not just about staying warm and being able to turn the stove on.  Steel production?  Like, what Germany uses to make those nice cars they make?  Bye-bye.  Fertilizer production?  Like what's used in agriculture, you know, to grow food?  Well, go without, do the Somalia thing and feel the fourth world.  Carbon dioxide production?  Sorry, Germany, no beer.

It's bad.  Take a look:

Europe's gas crisis is already bigger than the US 1970s oil shock: Rabobank pic.twitter.com/giBpgwyCMZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 26, 2021

"Who the hell do they think they are?" Codevilla wondered.  "We belong to ourselves, not to them."  In effect, Codevilla left the key at the back door.

Know your rights, recognize the foes of freedom, and never hesitate to call out ruling-class frauds for what they are.  That's how the "country class" can push back. (read more)

• COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
• Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
• Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus and constitute a form of medical theater.
• Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
• The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, even though natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
• Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV-2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
• There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (“neural lace”) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
• Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
• The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.

But that was just not enough, they desperately needed another angle to distract from this obvious catastrophe.

This photo was like a gift from heaven for the spin masters and it launched a thousand ships of outrage.

AOC, fresh from her MET Gala catastrophe, used Twitter to virtue signal and to denounce the Border Patrol’s actions.

“It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is President, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants. Immigration should not be a crime, and its criminalization is a relatively recent invention. This is a stain on our country.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., echoed AOC’s sentiment in her Twitter post

“These are human rights abuses, plain and simple. Cruel, inhumane, and a violation of domestic and international law,” Omar said in the post. “This needs a course correction and the issuance of a clear directive on how to humanely process asylums seekers at our border.”

Kamala Harris on Friday was also outraged; she said the situation brought to mind how such tactics have been “used against the Indigenous people of our country, [have] been used against African Americans during times of slavery. Human beings should not be treated that way”

Joe Biden carried the baton in the outrage fest by condemning the U.S. Border Patrol, calling the behavior of agents on horseback “outrageous” and vowing they will face consequences for their actions. 

“It’s horrible what you saw. To see people like they did, with horses, running them over, people being strapped, it’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences,” said Biden. 

The toadies in mainstream media were relieved that they no longer had to focus on another of Biden’s failures. They gleefully dedicated hours outraging about ‘systemic’ racism and ‘institutionalized’ xenophobia.

There was also a promise by officials to launch a ‘full-scale’ investigation into what has taken place at the border.

Finally, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that Border Patrol agents will no longer be permitted to use horses to guard the border in Del Rio, Texas after “horrific” photos emerged.

As the cacophony of outrage was getting louder Paul Ratje, the photographer who took the image of Border Patrol, set the record straight.

He said that some of the Haitian men upon seeing the border agents began to run, and tried to go around the horses. But said that he and his colleagues did not witness Border Patrol agents using whips on any of the migrants.

The border agents, too, denied that they used whips while dealing with migrants.

It appears that the reins used to give subtle directions or cues to horses were confused with whipping. Since the photo was capturing the horse in motion, the rein was in the air and that appeared like a whip being directed at the fleeing Haitian migrant.

Alas, the lie had already travelled around the world and back again while the truth was lacing up its boots. The lie was shouted from the top of the mountain through a megaphone while the facts were merely whispered.

Do not be surprised if the media lackeys now compliment the [illegitimate] Harris-Biden administration for their compassion and bringing a stop to the inhumane practice of whipping, despite knowing the facts.

Do not be shocked if the folks in the mainstream media begin their next news cycle with ‘even if this story has proved to be inaccurate, we need to continue with our conversation about systemic racism’

Do not be astonished if the Border patrol agents are [identified] as supporters of President Trump.

Do not be astounded if politicians and media personnel knowingly repeat this lie.

The question remains why does this happen over and over again?

The story could have been debunked by calling any of the border officials or the photographer, but facts are no longer their goal.

The root cause of these repeated failures is the news organizations no longer consider reporting facts to be their function. They work for the Democrat party and will do everything in their power to help the Democrats and push their narrative. There is no difference between the Democrats in active politics and Democrats in the media pretending to be objective agents.

When they discover a photo of what looks like border patrol agents whipping fleeing Haitian immigrants, they are so overcome by a desire for it to be true that they abandon all journalistic due diligence and gleefully carry the story.  In their minds, the story is about right-wing racist white supremacist Texan border patrols officers brimming with such bigotry that they yearn to relive and re-enact the era of slavery.

The situation is so bad that the people working for the mainstream media know that they will be handsomely protected, awarded, rewarded and promoted for a lie that promotes the Democrat agenda while they could be punished for carrying facts that present President Trump or the Republicans favorably.

This isn’t a mistake, this was purposeful. The idea of pushing this narrative may have even been the result of active collaboration between the Biden people and personnel in the mainstream media.

This story is merely a symptom of the grave illness of collusion between the mainstream media and the Democrat establishment that has afflicted Washington for decades.

There is no cure for this illness simply because Washington doesn’t see it as an ailment. They feel they are on the right side of history; spinning or falsifying is perfectly fine since they are working for ‘the cause.’  They are proud to be propagandists, hence any course correction is quite out of the question.

The citizen looking for fact based information hence has no option but to presume every story to be false until proven true. (read more)

When it comes to the president’s handling of the immigration crisis at the border, only 29% of the state’s Latino voters indicated their support while 52% said they disapprove (with the rest undecided). The survey was conducted Sept. 7-14, before more than 15,000 Haitian immigrants amassed under the Del Rio International Bridge, creating a new humanitarian crisis with immigration facilities already stretched beyond capacity.

The shift in voting patterns is already having an impact. Earlier this year, Rep. Filemon Vela, who represents Texas’ 34th Congressional District, which includes the city of Brownsville, abruptly announced his retirement. In 2020, he won reelection by nearly 14 percentage points in a seat generally considered safe for Democrats.

But national Republicans identified Vela as a target after Biden won the district by just four points, down from the 21.5-point Clinton margin. Five Republicans and four Democrats are now running to replace Vela in what promises to be a sharply contested campaign.

Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, the two other Democratic congressmen who represent the Rio Grande Valley, are fighting to keep their seats while taking different approaches to the immigration crisis, even though both strongly campaigned for Biden last year.

Cuellar, who has regularly bucked his party’s leadership over the years, has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s more lenient immigration policies, repeatedly blasting the administration for creating “incentives” for immigrants to make the dangerous journey to the United States instead of instituting “uncomfortable” but effective deportation policies.

The 16-year House veteran was the first lawmaker to provide photos of overcrowded detention facilities in Donna, Texas, when the administration was instituting a media blackout earlier this year. He also led calls for Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s point person on immigration, to visit the border months before her trip to Central America in June.

Last week, Cuellar waded into the debate over whether Border Patrol agents in Del Rio were using their horse reins as whips against Haitian immigrants, defending their efforts to stop illegal crossings while acknowledging that all immigrants must be treated humanely. Appearing on “CNN Newsroom” last Tuesday, Cueller was asked about the photos of border agents chasing migrants on horses – and one that a host said appeared to be using a “rope or a lasso.”

He quickly came to the agents’ defense. “Certainly, we got to make sure we treat all the immigrants with respect and dignity, but I will say this: Border Patrol has had those horse brigades for a while. They’ve had them for a while, number one. Number two, they don’t carry whips, and they do not carry lassos.”

“Should those be used, even if it is a rein?” the CNN host asked.

“If there was a problem, it should be investigated, and I think that’s it,” Cuellar responded. “But we cannot paint the Border Patrol with the same type of paintbrush. What are they supposed to do, just stand there and let everybody come in? They’re supposed to be enforcing the law.”

After the images surfaced, creating an uproar among civil rights leaders, the Homeland Security Department launched an investigation. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced last Wednesday that agents in Del Rio would no longer use horses to try to prevent illegal crossings.

Cuellar has represented South Texas for his entire career, either in the state legislature or in Congress. He won reelection last year by a whopping 20 points but faced a serious challenge during the primary, besting a more liberal candidate by just 3.6 percentage points. The same Democratic challenger, Jessica Cisneros, is running against him again. Republicans suggest that Cuellar is in a lose-lose situation, barely fending off a primary opponent in 2020 and facing a rematch because his immigration views aren’t liberal enough for the Democratic Party even if they represent his district as a whole.

Vicente Gonzalez appears to be even more vulnerable than Cuellar. He won reelection by just 2.9 points last fall after topping his GOP rival in 2018 by 19.6 points. Despite that shift, Gonzalez has mainly defended the administration’s immigration policies, praising Harris’ plan to address the root causes of immigration as “a holistic approach” to “create conditions for people to want to stay in their native countries.”

“We had a good meeting a few weeks ago with the vice president, and I think she has a very good plan to get to the root causes, which will be the only way to ultimately curb the mass migration,” he told CNN in early June. “If we don’t address the root causes, all we’re doing is putting a Band-Aid on it on our border.”

Over the last two weeks, as the Haitian immigration crisis overwhelmed resources in Del Rio, Gonzalez has steered clear of the controversy, refraining even from tweeting about it. But during a Fox News appearance last Thursday, host Neil Cavuto pressed him on Biden’s decision to stop allowing the agents to use horses to control the border. Gonzalez called it a “very complex and tough situation that we have to investigate.”

“We certainly need to find an orderly way to deal with the crisis,” he added. “I’m not for just releasing people into the country. We need to have a vetting process before they get here.”

A member of the moderate Problem Solvers Caucus, Gonzalez has pushed back against progressives’ calls to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But he has not joined Cuellar in forcefully criticizing Biden’s approach even as he’s decried the way it has enriched Mexican drug cartels.

Since Biden took office [illegitimately], Gonzalez laments, those cartels are taking advantage of immigrants, charging each of them $6,000 to get to the U.S. border, and raking in more than $1.3 billion in the first few months of this year alone.

The three-term Texas Democrat has so far unsuccessfully tried to persuade the [illegitimate] Biden administration to back his idea to establish a processing center for asylum seekers on the Mexico-Guatemala border where immigrants could apply for asylum and fly to the United States only if and when they qualify.

President Trump secured an agreement with Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to use their militaries to prevent caravans from continuing into the United States, but when COVID hit, he used an obscure health measure, known as Title 42, to deport immigrants immediately without due process for their asylum requests in the name of public health. Biden is under fire from the left for continuing to use the policy to deport thousands of immigrants while releasing others into the U.S. who have requested asylum.

Those deciding to make the dangerous journey north are only coming from certain impoverished pockets of several Central American countries, Gonzalez has asserted. Because of this, the United States needs to make “surgical, thoughtful, intelligent investments that create jobs, create security, that invest in agricultural projects, manufacturing and tourism and ideas that create better jobs for people to want to stay,” he argued.

He didn’t mention that the Obama administration’s attempt to address root causes by sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Central America – an effort Biden led — had virtually no impact on the continued exodus north.

Gonzalez was far more critical of Trump’s immigration policies. Last year, he called on the administration to suspend its COVID immigration restrictions that were dramatically reducing the number of illegal border crossings but swelling border camp populations in Mexico.

“Imagine these people who have gone through a 2,000-mile trek and are now in a one-acre plot of land — thousands of them. Certainly, it’s an easy place for viruses to spread,” he told The Hill newspaper.

“Mexico could probably do more too because I went over there, and it was a mess. It’s not like detention centers on this side, as much as we complain about them. They’re living in squalor — tents on the ground and dirt. Now there’s a place for them to plug in their phones and some port-a-potties, but it’s really bad,” he added.

With the ongoing border crisis continuing to be a drag on Biden’s poll numbers nationwide, Republicans are keeping close track of every statement Cuellar and Gonzalez make on the issue. If their districts keep trending purple next year, Republicans could see a path to retaking the House majority straight through the border territory. No matter the outcome, Democrats will have to invest far more resources than usual to keep these seats in their column next year. (read more)

Is it the ensuing chaos from such policies, which prompted a group of Haitian migrants in federal custody, fearing deportation, to forcibly to take control of a bus that was transporting them to San Antonio, and escape?

Or, zooming out from the Haitian encampment, is it the record numbers of illegal immigrants being arrested along the southwest border, which is on track to exceed 1.6 million this fiscal year, a new all-time record?

According to the White House, it’s none of these things. The real problem at the border, it seems, are the horses.

I’m not kidding. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who performatively decried images of mounted Border Patrol agents confronting illegal immigrants in Del Rio as “horrible and horrific,” announced last Thursday that Border Patrol agents will no longer be allowed to use horses in Del Rio.

Why? Because activists in the corporate press pushed a false narrative that the mounted agents were “whipping” migrants. They weren’t, they were using split reins to control their horses and keep migrants from getting too close to the animals, as is standard practice.

But it doesn’t matter. Narrative triumphed over reality. Images of mounted Border Patrol agents trying to deter Haitians from illegally crossing the border triggered a moral panic in Washington.

Rep. Maxine Waters declared that it was worse than slavery. A contingent of the Congressional Black Caucus marched down to the White House and issued a set of demands, including the banishment of horses from the border. Rev. Al Sharpton showed up in Del Rio (where he was reportedly shouted down by protesters).

What had been a migrant crisis of the administration’s own making was transformed, overnight, into a race issue. In the end, the race hustlers got the horses banned.

What will banning horse patrols accomplish? Nothing, of course. It will only hamper the Border Patrol, which ingeniously uses horses to patrol dense riverbanks in rough country, where SUVs and ATVs often can’t go. (For more on the horse patrols, check out this short video by Kelsey Harkness of the Daily Signal.)

To understand why the White House would ban horse patrols, you have to understand that the administration’s entire approach to the border is pure theater. They are concerned with optics, not reality.

So, for example, when images of a sprawling migrant encampment under a bridge in South Texas begin to dominate the news cycle, the overwhelming imperative is to clear the camp by any means available, even if it sows chaos and confusion, and even if it means telling bald-faced lies about what’s happening there.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas kept insisting last week that the border was closed and that those who cross illegally will be deported. But of the 15,000 Haitians who were encamped under the bridge as of the previous Saturday, only about 1,400 have been deported. As of this writing, about 3,800 people remain at the camp, which means about 9,800 have been released into the United States since Saturday.

Most of these people are being released with a “notice to report,” which is not the same as a “notice to appear” before an immigration judge, but a directive that the migrant, on his own initiative, contact an immigration office within 60 days to request a court date. If that’s what the Biden administration means when it says it’s securing the border, then I’ve got some horsewhips to sell them.

Of course, the [illegitimate] Biden administration isn’t securing the border and has no interest in doing so. For Democrats and the White House, the appalling migrant encampment in Del Rio is a problem only because it exposes, to a gaping world, how out of control the southwest border really is.

That Biden’s own policies created that encampment, and will doubtless create others, does not factor into the administration’s thinking. The important thing, the overwhelming imperative, is to get those images out of the news cycle — not to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande.

Keep that in mind the next time you see the outrage machine fired up in Washington over the border. The point is not to control the border, but to manage the images coming from it. If that means getting rid of the horses, then the horses have to go. (read more)

A “correction” at the bottom of the new version reluctantly admitted that there was no “conclusive evidence that migrants were struck with the reins” as previously asserted.

NYTimes correction:

Original:"The images of agents on horseback chasing, & in some cases using the reins of their horses to strike at running migrants…"

Now:"Images of Border Patrol agents on horseback waving their reins while pushing migrants back…"https://t.co/oOMUkbZFAd pic.twitter.com/Ged8q0eR6F

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) September 27, 2021

The original author of the article, Michael Shear, has touted knowledge of the border before and even co-authored a book on the subject titled “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” but when it came to vetting the verifiably false narrative about the whipping, the New York Times reporter failed.

Instead, he bought into the viral lies about Border Patrol agents “whipping” Haitian migrants at the Southern U.S. border that became more amplified by the White House, Democrats, and other corporate media outlets. Even Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who initially defended the actions of Border Patrol agents, later claimed he was “horrified by what I saw” and promised an investigation into the alleged incident. (read more)

“Everybody in this country and around the world should be up in arms about the fact that we have an immigration system that operates as such a black box,” immigration attorney Wade McMullen told the AP. McMullen works with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.

It’s unclear how many migrants have been deported and how many were released into the U.S., according to the AP. Immigration officials increased deportation flights to Haiti after they couldn’t find enough transportation companies to provide buses for the migrants.

Some Haitians who were sent back to the country said they lost their chance at the American dream, Reuters reported on Tuesday. Several of the deportees said they weren’t told where they were going when they boarded the flights and many of them haven’t lived in Haiti since they were teenagers. (read more)

BREAKING: Acc to law enfcmt in RGV Texas, BP agents advised latest Intel from cartels: after Biden response to horse patrol, cartels ordered their smugglers to force BP to react/appear to use excessive force & record. Cartels will push to media to force more agents off the line.

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) September 27, 2021

American Greatness and the Daily Wire both have good summaries of what is going on here.

What we can conclude from this is that this crisis is not over.  It's going to get bigger, actually, not just because tens of thousands of new migrants have joined the migrant pipelines, but because Joe Biden has demonstrated that creating a racial incident diversion to cut attention from the mass crisis itself, is just perfect for disarming their enemy the Border Patrol and taking it out of commission.  Why use costly, unpredictable migrants to divert Border Patrol attention when the easier thing is to just attack them and call it a racial incident?  In the past, it was about this.

CBP says this has become more than a humanitarian crisis, now it's a national security crisis. Morgan says transnational criminal organizations took advantage when 50% of Border Patrol resources were diverted to help with large number of apprehensions.

"They're using families and kids as a diversion to get the bad people and the drugs into our country and it's happening every single day. And those drugs and those criminals their finding their way into every town and city in this country," said Morgan.

According to CBP, 750,000 pounds of hard narcotics were seized at the border in 2019. Their data also shows there were 16,000 criminal immigrants apprehended and almost 3,000 weapons. That number is only what was caught, Morgan said.

Now they can see that it's a lot easier.

They can see that Biden is ignorant about horse work in rough terrain, captive to the ravings of the left, and quick to issue verdict first, trial later, same as the Queen of Hearts.  That's perfect.