Bad news. The day before yesterday, we had confirmation of 3 new variants of concern in the US. As of yesterday, we now have 4. Three of the 4 variants have just been confirmed in the last month. The new one yesterday is the South African variant.

What does this mean for

Last week, @CleCityCouncil started reviewing Mayor Frank Jackson’s proposed city budget for 2021. There was robust discussion, and Documenters were there to cover it. Here’s a thread of what we learned last week about the #CLEBudget

First, it helps to know where we are in the budget process. From today through Feb. 24, the council will meet about the General Fund budget. The council will then agree on a budget with their changes (if any); 15 days after doing so, they can vote to make the budget official.

In other words, there’s still time to use your voice! The #refundcleveland tool can help. Create the #CLEBudget you want and send it to your council member. Click “Change the Budget” on the homepage and follow the on-screen instructions from there.

Want to know the budget basics? Our #CLEBudget primer details the timeline, different types of budgets and the funds involved, and defines budget-related terms. It can be a helpful guide during City Council’s discussions.

And don’t forget: all these meetings are livestreamed on City Council’s YouTube channel. They’re slated to start at 9 a.m. every business day from today through the 24th. You can also follow along with #CLEDocumenters live-tweet threads and

The crisis in the NHS is overwhelming this week. It has reminded me of conversations I had with my late father on how to manage within the state sector. I think they're worth sharing.

My father worked for the nationalised electricity industry from the late 1940s to late 1980s. He spent much of that time as a fairly senior engineer. He was committed to what he did. He believed electricity supply was a human right. And he sought to delver it.

He left the industry and retired when he realised that privatisation challenged what the believed in. The priority was no longer supply. It was, instead, profit. He had a clear example of the difference this made. It was about emergency management.

In his day the state electricity boards ensured that they had all the capacity they needed to manage emergencies to keep supply going as well as possible, come what may. It meant there was excess capacity. But it wasn't wasted - maintenance and training was done instead.

Privatisation saw that excess as waste, and it went. It was assumed contracts could buy in support when needed. My father believed that was dangerous - because when demand was strongest the most inexperienced people would be put to work on the job.

1. I am in the process of recovering four years of destroyed Twitter posts from my recent hack. Most related to an organization of rogue CIA agents doing election hacking, drug running, and dark weapons trading in a group led by AG Bill Barr. Other have call this the Enterprise.

2. The Enterprise is run Bill Barr himself and organized 800 ex-CIA agents and 300 ex-Soviet KGB Generals into a junta of 1,100 Frank Guistra partners in a sort of law firm of international crime. Iran Contra drug running was the first major operation in 1980. by the Enterprise.

3. Chip Tatum, a CIA pilot, flew Bill Barr, then a CIA attorney for George Bush, to Central America for Iran Contra banking and money laundering operations talks about this extensively in him book about his close friend, Robert Mueller, entitled, "The Mule".

4. A fundamental premise of my work over the last four years is to focus on this core Iran Contra, "Enterprise" group, to follow election hacking, dark weapons trade, drug running, and money laundering. Here are some video notes capture on the web from shows I did in 2016.

5. You can see in these 2016 show notes how my focus was on a USAID funded Serbian election flipping, subversive group called OTPOR. This group received subversion funds for election flipping through KKR, a joint venture of David Petraeus and Henry Kissinger.

Macron on tensions with Russia: “We continue sometimes to fight against an ideology or an organisation that no longer exists with a geopolitical logic that no longer exists and that has continued to fracture Europe.”

And on Nato: “Nobody can tell me that today’s Nato is a structure that, in its foundations, is still pertinent. It was founded to face down the Warsaw Pact. There is no more a Warsaw Pact.”

In other words, the partly confrontational policy of the West towards Russia is anachronistic.

Yet the "geopolitical logic" of today's more confrontational policy towards Russia has nothing to do with the Warsaw Pact or the Cold War. It's not true that the West is caught in anachronistic thinking.

Sanctions and the renewed focus of Nato on territorial defense was a response towards Russian aggression against Ukraine: Putin started a war of aggression against Ukraine and has annexed parts of the country, with over 13.000 people killed.

OK. I have seen a lot of attempted dunking on Texas...red state bad, bad government, etc...because of the electricity issue in this record cold. So, I am going to do a thread here. I am no engineer, but I want to point out some obvious facts. 1/n

This is a natural disaster of large proportions. At no time in recorded have this many Texas counties been below freezing for so long...ever. We are prepared for short stints, not an ice age. It snowed on Galveston island and much of the state is covered in snow and ice.

This chart shows electricity production since Feb 4. Note the large share from wind prior to the cold snap. Texas typically does not use as much electricity in winter, so gas plants are typically offline and have smaller reserves of gas.

But as the cold hit, renewable production fell by as much as 93%. Gas plants fired up and easily met the ERCOT stress test levels initially, but electricity quantity demanded was rising, so was gas for heating. Eventually, there were shortages of gas that led to a drop in prod.

Why shortages? Because gas producers were contractually obligated to export gas all the while residential heating demand was rising as well...hence Gov Abbot's order. It provides more cover for force majeure contract breakage.