*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:The U.S. economy is already deteriorating due to the humongous fiscal and monetary cliffs. These cliffs are now being compounded by the war in Eastern Europe and near record-high inflation. And, the Fed’s “PUT” is much lower and smaller in size than Wall Street believes.
..... The bottom line is this: the view of Pento Portfolio Strategies is that the Fed will now be forced to tighten monetary policy into one of the greatest decelerations of economic growth and earnings ever.
Fact: inflation around the world is on the rise.
And as predicted, so are the calls on central banks to quickly intervene in an attempt to wrestle inflation back to some agreed-upon target level. Indeed, there exist among mainstream economists a quasi-unanimity that this is the proper policy route to follow: several increases in the rate of interest should eventually have an impact on those interest-sensitive components of aggregate demand to finally slow down economic activity in the hope that inflation will somehow float back to its target of, say, two per cent, at a minimal cost to society as a whole.
But heterodox economists know the rest of the story all too well: interest rates won't rise once or twice, but multiple times as central banks find themselves on the quest of what I called the Holy Grail: the search of that natural or neutral rate of interest, said to be up to 2.75% in both Canada, and the United States. This means up to possible 10 increases in interest rates. In this respect, central banks will never give up on the notion that somehow inflation is somehow related to monetary policy, and stand ready to increase rates as high as they need to be, as only monetary policy is able to bring inflation down to target.
...... Why does this matter? It matters if interest rates on corporate debt were to rise sharply at the same time as the profitability of these companies were to fall. That would create the conditions for bankruptcies and debt defaults ricocheting across the corporate sector and provoking financial market crash and an economic recession. The identification of fallen angels as well as zombie companies reveals that risk is now much higher than previously thought.
Rising debt will not be enough to cause a slump; it also requires falling profitability of capital invested. In a recent paper, Argentine economists Grana and Aquina show that 1) these zombie firms have increased in number since the 1980s and 2) the cause is not the rising cost or the size of their debt but because these firms have much lower rates of profit from production, forcing them to borrow more. So zombies and fallen angels have a Marxist, not a Minskyean cause.
And as we review the current state of the major economies amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the conditions for this corporate meltdown are rising significantly.
Other Charts: (source links: one, two, three&four, five)
In the postwar period, it has become increasingly clear that economic growth has not only brought greater prosperity. The other side of growth, in the form of pollution, contamination, wastage of resources, and climate change, has emerged as
Against the mainstream theory’s view on the economy as a balanced and harmonious system, where growth and the environment go hand in hand, ecological economists object that it can rather be characterized as an unstable system that at an accelerating pace consumes energy and matter, and thereby pose a threat against the very basis for its survival.
Biden must now be honest about electric vehicles. They grossly violate basic environmental justice principles and are anything but fair to the poor of the world who suffer and die so that wealthy western elites can virtue signal with their electric vehicles.
COVID Fare:
SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank
Other Fare:
Contrarian Perspectives
Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
Farber: Jen Psaki Is Annoyed At You
That thing Jen Psaki does, where she diverts her gaze, looks down at her papers, removes eye contact from the person asking the question— that bothers me no end. Passive aggressive, micro-annihilating.
Unsustainability Fare:
COVID Fare:
Girardot: Most Already Had Robust Immunity - Past Corona Infections Had Already Acted As Universal Vaccines
el gato malo: homogenizing herd level antigenic fixation
antigenic fixation is a well studied issue, especially around influenza. how it came to have the oddly religion invoking name of “original antigenic sin” (OAS) is anyone’s guess, but it probably gives you some sense of how long this field of study has been going on.
i have spent a fair bit of time looking at it from the individual level and as a process mediated and accelerated by covid vaccines.
i think we’re well past the preponderance of evidence standard here and have strong reason to believe that covid vaccines have led to omicron as an OAS variant by creating an evolutionary gradient that selected for it.
but there are some reasons to be particularly worried about how this will affect the future at a societal/herd immunity level that we have not explored and i think we need to, because this antigenic fixation generated by the widespread application of a badly leaky or even infection amplifying vaccine is quite different that what occurs in nature.
Dear Sir Chris Whitty,
Please could you explain why you believe the following paragraph taken from the attached document to be true:
"NHS England and NHS Improvement have always been clear that staff have a professional duty to get vaccinated and it remains our best line of defence against COVID-19 and as such, we encourage NHS employers to continue engaging with and supporting their staff to inform their decisions in order to drive vaccine confidence, protect themselves and everyone else."
What is the scientific and medical basis behind this?
Point 1:
We know that the vaccines are no longer effective against either catching Covid or transmitting it. The confidence in the vaccine has already been lost. Why are you using emotive language such as "professional duty" to insist staff get vaccinated, even when they have made an educated and informed choice?
Point 2:
Having spoken to many people within the community, I know that they are not safe for everyone. Many young patients and staff have had reactions and side-effects to the vaccines and then caught Covid anyway. Why do you want to put staff through this type of pain with an experimental vaccine which does have some safety concerns and we absolutely do not yet understand the long-term effects.
Point 3:
Science and Medicine is about doing no harm. Yet throughout this pandemic, through perhaps your instruction, so much collateral harm has been done to the many, including my staff. The anxiety and fear that was promoted has caused many mental health issues, especially in the young. To have or to not have the vaccine has also caused anxiety and separations between family and friends.
Point 4:
The collateral damage in every sense whether it be for well-being, economic or relationships between people has been huge and will not be easy to repair. The harm that has been done via the handling of Covid is greater, I believe, than the harm from the virus itself.
Please would you at least reflect on where we are now and stop trying to exert your control over the population. You do not know everything about medicine, science or people's health, so please stop acting as though you do and mandating a vaccine that has clearly not worked. The way that groups of scientists have defended the efficacy of these vaccines is unbelievable and you have lost trust in the very people who had the utmost admiration for you, pre-pandemic.
***** Heying: What If We’re Wrong, redux
In light of ever more frequent reveals about the lack of efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines, and, in contrast, the evidence for efficacy and safety of Ivermectin as an early treatment for Covid, this week I am posting an essay that I wrote ten months ago. ....
Bates: How the 2020 Pandemic will end
She’s a queen— an irate queen. The country is in a free-fall under her filthy king and she remains irritated that anybody questions anything. Pelosi has the same demon. Female agita. “Stop annoying me, peons.”
I have discovered that the “small things” are never small, they are absolute indicators.
Jen Psaki is an advanced professional narcissist who holds people, their words, their questions, their experiences, in contempt.
Unsustainability Fare:
Costello: Robust
In the last few years, we found, and now seemingly look to explore to the point of exhaustion, the present corporate globalization system is not very robust. Centrally controlled and structured systems, dependent on certain essential elements, all have design weaknesses. When challenged by acute and hard change, they are not robust.
Looking across history, the failure of long established, powerful centralized systems seemingly occurs overnight. This experience cuts across cultures, including the two millennia Imperial Chinese system, the Classical Maya period, France's Ancien Regime, Tsarist Russia, and most recently the Soviet Union. The list is endless, the specifics of their collapse somewhat diverse, but one thing all have in common, central control’s inability to respond to changing circumstances.
... Control of centralized civilizations is always exercised by a small political class, whose power is completely reliant on limited resource and knowledge channels. If any essential channel is upset, the system finds it difficult or simply unable to respond. System design is completely wired to be reliant on a few things, a severe limiting of any essential element causes system malfunction.
Historically, centralized political systems seemingly collapsing overnight, were actually in decline for years, decades, even centuries. The decline is the incapacity for change in response to an evolving environment. Things just continue to work until they no longer can.
The collapse of the insect population could unravel ecosystems. Scientists wonder if robots and drones could stop the gap.
Nate Hagens Vid Fare:
Energy Blind | Part 01 of 05 | The Great Simplification Animated Series
The Human Superorganism | Part 02 of 05 | The Great Simplification Animated Series
COVID Fare:
I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; new addition: Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut on twitter; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; new addition: Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut on twitter; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts
Analysis:
Girardot: Most Already Had Robust Immunity - Past Corona Infections Had Already Acted As Universal Vaccines
Novel Virus Myth - Overwhelming proof that cross-immunity existed widely before the arrival of SARS-COV-2 - Vaccines were absolutely unwarranted
This is not the first time the favorable conclusions of a report ignored the data in a report. The Pfizer documents seem to show they were all just going through the motions, all for show.
Deaths of under 75s in England. What do they tell us about COVID and COVID vaccines?
.... All in all, it is not unreasonable to suggest that already roughly twice as many people have died as a result of interventions, including mass vaccination, as have died from COVID.
Here is a summary of the argument that these injections induce an autoimmune response against the cells which fuse with the lipid nanoparticles (LNP) that carry the mRNA transcript encoding the Spike protein.
- Spike-protein encoding genes are wrapped in lipid nanoparticles (LNP)
- LNPs are injected into a human
- LNPs enter the bloodstream
- Bloodstream spreads LNPs throughout the body
- Cells fuse with LNP & make the Spike protein – the antigen
- Cells then present the antigen via MHC I í! Train killer T-cells
- Killer T-cells circulate around the body and destroy any cell that is presenting the Spike protein antigen
This is the critical final step:
- Before your cells fused with LNPs, they were healthy
- After vaccination, killer T-cells now perceive those healthy cells as infected – requiring destruction
This is the definition of an autoimmune response - the host immune system turns on its own healthy cells.
Unfortunately for us, this is just one of the consequences of these injections…
The Trojan Horse
....
Putting it all together
The injections being ‘offered’ to the population under the guise of protection from severe SARS-CoV-2, are not merely vaccinations.
These are gene-sequences which have been placed inside lipid nanoparticles designed to maintain its stability and integrity in bodily secretions, the bloodstream, and the intracellular fluid.
Whether or not you want to believe that these injections were designed exclusively for the production of Spike protein, is actually irrelevant.
What matters is that the design is identical to gene-therapy. These injections have the capacity to deliver patented chimeric genes into the nucleus of your cells. Once a sufficient amount of these genes accumulate in and around the nucleus, it is only a matter of time before one or more copies can integrate into your genome.
- The Lipid Nanoparticle is the Trojan Horse
- Spike-protein is the Greek Army
- Your body is the City of Troy
Is there evidence for genetic fuckery?
Funny you should ask. Yes....
.... Their findings are astounding:
...
This is textbook gene-editing.
The more I dig into this, the argument that these are unintended consequences of rapid vaccine development sound increasingly obtuse. ....
...
In Summary:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein contains an artificial sequence which is a 100% match to a patented technology, which encodes a human DNA mismatch repair protein.
Need I say more?
Implications
There are several physiologic, pathologic, and ethical considerations here.
- Why are we injecting people with genes that disrupt DNA repair?
- Will these disruptions lead to cancers? If so, at what rate?
- How was a private company allowed to patent a sequence identical to a human protein? Or indeed any living protein? It is illegal.
- Was the fact that this sequence is also a match for a synthetic sequence, the loophole that allowed it to occur?
- On what basis are we allowed and encouraged to call these vaccines?
- Why are we injecting children with this?!
The long-term consequences are unknown & uncertain.
The arrogance of man knows no bounds. The potential damage is likewise unlimited.
el gato malo: if covid vaccines work then why haven't they worked?
the highest vaxxed states in the US did not see reductions in hospitalizations. but they did see a rise in all cause deaths.
yes, i realize this is take number 2,741 on what has become a well explored issue, but as this covid season comes to an end in northern new england, i thought it would be fitting to check in one more time especially as many studies like THIS are out admitting that none of the NPI’s like lockdown, masking, distancing, school closure, etc worked but taking the (unsubstantiated) view that “vaccines did work” as a sort of assumptive premise and,
this looks like a deeply fraught assumption and one we need to get on top of if we wish to stop making the same mistakes over and over.
the societal data is simply not backing up the “covid vaccines stopped deaths and spared hospitals” narrative.
we’ve seen this all over the world and it’s apparent in the US as well.
..........
more than anything, this and all the endless failure of the NPI’s is all just bringing us back to the simple refrain that many of us were singing all along:
virus gonna virus.
it’s an aerosol RTI. more or less nothing we have done has had any real effect on spread and this was known, enshrined in 100 years of data driven pandemic guidelines, and did not change. it was glaringly obvious by even april of 2020 to anyone who cared to look.
vaccines were supposed to be a game changer. they weren’t.
vaccines did not help either in terms of either spread or severity.
....
the study data on which these shams were approved will be coming out in coming months. it’s going to become crystal clear how badly we were mislead and how the study design and results were rigged and how corners were cut. this has been one of the greatest blunders in public health history and a fiasco for regulators and governments.
the simple fact is that the instant these vaccines were seen to be non-sterilizing, their administration should have been halted.
...
the VAERS spike alone should have ended this instantly and would have for any other vaccine in history had it produced even 1/100th this signal. (and this is, of course, just a tiny fraction of what really happened. VAERS reporting is massively incomplete (90-99% underreporting) it’s just an alarm bell, not a counting system.)
el gato malo: homogenizing herd level antigenic fixation
why covid vaccine driven OAS may be much more dangerous than what we have seen in flu
antigenic fixation is a well studied issue, especially around influenza. how it came to have the oddly religion invoking name of “original antigenic sin” (OAS) is anyone’s guess, but it probably gives you some sense of how long this field of study has been going on.
i have spent a fair bit of time looking at it from the individual level and as a process mediated and accelerated by covid vaccines.
i think we’re well past the preponderance of evidence standard here and have strong reason to believe that covid vaccines have led to omicron as an OAS variant by creating an evolutionary gradient that selected for it.
but there are some reasons to be particularly worried about how this will affect the future at a societal/herd immunity level that we have not explored and i think we need to, because this antigenic fixation generated by the widespread application of a badly leaky or even infection amplifying vaccine is quite different that what occurs in nature.
................ you saw how quickly omicron chased the vaccination campaigns. my strong suspicion is that this was not a coincidence. it was driven BY the selective pressure of the vaccines that took what looks to be a throwback variant that did not evolve from delta but rather diverged from it all the way back at the original pre-alpha ancestor and surged it to sudden global prominence.
.... you have far more hosts in which to have random chances occur, all selecting for a mutation that attacks one specific weakness and that weakness is in most of the population, so once it’s out, there is no stopping it.
ouch.
and if this fixation prevents the hosts from developing strong new immunities based on these novel pathogens, this becomes iterative. you get wave after wave of pandemics until you wipe out the susceptible population.
boosters won’t help, they certainly have not so far. they may well make it worse and drive further fixation. you really cannot live in a constantly immuno-activated state in any event. it’s not good for you and the side and adverse effects will really pile up.
new vaccines may not work either. if an actual pathogen cannot drive immune adaptation, there is little reason to suspect that a vaccine can.
this could be a devilish issue with no solution that seems obvious (at least to me).
so let’s once more be clear: there is a lot here that we still do not know and this is not a proven hypothesis, but this does appear a serious potential issue.
i’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything like it before in human evolutionary history.
this could be with us for for a long time and these pandemics will spread far faster and further than they would otherwise and make it into everyone’s problem, vaxxed or not.
Walter Chesnut: @Parsifaler is posting a lot on vaccines and cancer. This is just one thread.
It was an impressive demo done in July, 2020 showing the CO2 levels inside a mask quickly rise to levels that were too high to measure. I believe the demo overstated the harm. Here's the full story.
Commentary:
You won't be surprised by the level of ignorance and dogma in the response.
Please could you explain why you believe the following paragraph taken from the attached document to be true:
"NHS England and NHS Improvement have always been clear that staff have a professional duty to get vaccinated and it remains our best line of defence against COVID-19 and as such, we encourage NHS employers to continue engaging with and supporting their staff to inform their decisions in order to drive vaccine confidence, protect themselves and everyone else."
What is the scientific and medical basis behind this?
Point 1:
We know that the vaccines are no longer effective against either catching Covid or transmitting it. The confidence in the vaccine has already been lost. Why are you using emotive language such as "professional duty" to insist staff get vaccinated, even when they have made an educated and informed choice?
Point 2:
Having spoken to many people within the community, I know that they are not safe for everyone. Many young patients and staff have had reactions and side-effects to the vaccines and then caught Covid anyway. Why do you want to put staff through this type of pain with an experimental vaccine which does have some safety concerns and we absolutely do not yet understand the long-term effects.
Point 3:
Science and Medicine is about doing no harm. Yet throughout this pandemic, through perhaps your instruction, so much collateral harm has been done to the many, including my staff. The anxiety and fear that was promoted has caused many mental health issues, especially in the young. To have or to not have the vaccine has also caused anxiety and separations between family and friends.
Point 4:
The collateral damage in every sense whether it be for well-being, economic or relationships between people has been huge and will not be easy to repair. The harm that has been done via the handling of Covid is greater, I believe, than the harm from the virus itself.
Please would you at least reflect on where we are now and stop trying to exert your control over the population. You do not know everything about medicine, science or people's health, so please stop acting as though you do and mandating a vaccine that has clearly not worked. The way that groups of scientists have defended the efficacy of these vaccines is unbelievable and you have lost trust in the very people who had the utmost admiration for you, pre-pandemic.
***** A Midwestern Doctor: Adverse Reactions to COVID Vaccines I Have Come Across
I have spent the last year working to document this. It is a lot to take in but I feel it needs to be said.
Introduction
When the COVID vaccines were being developed, I felt the mRNA ones would be pushed through to open up the mRNA market (as Pharma has a dire need to develop new medications and the potential mRNA market is worth trillions), and necessary safety checks would be skipped to make sure mRNA vaccinations came into use. I was initially worried they would prolong the epidemic (as they would prevent people from developing proper immunity to the virus and encourage mutations of the virus) and I had a fear in the future they could lead to significant neurological, autoimmune, fertility and cancer related issues (for example a concerning letter had been published regarding potential effects on fertility). Once I was able to examine Pfizer’s trial, and observed the high rates of acute reactions they were willing to admit occurred (approximately 4x those of the influenza vaccine), I realized those potential issues were much more probable (especially as members of the trial in private groups reported adverse events that did not appear in the trial report) and I ruffled a lot of feathers as I told colleagues I knew to avoid them.
Succinctly, I (and others) felt there would likely be a significant number of people developing these chronic health issues, but the number would be small enough to sweep it under the rug. When parts of Pfizer’s IND application to the EMA (Europe’s FDA) were leaked there were numerous red flags that jumped out to me. The most notable was Pfizer being allowed to skip performing the normally required animal studies on Fertility, Genotoxicity (cancer potential), and Autoimmunity studies of their drug. I took this as a tacit admission Pfizer knew there would be very concerning results if these studies were conducted, so the best option they had was to never “do” them.
Before the vaccine rollout began, I also noticed that in addition to the full throttle promotion of the vaccine in the media, many outlets stated the vaccine may briefly make you feel awful, but not to worry about it. Given that I have never seen that message provided in the past for any other vaccine, this rang an alarm bell for me, and I had an expectation the vaccine would probably have a chronic side effect profile similar to Gardasil (which was previously regarded by many to the most harmful and unnecessary vaccine on the market).
As many of my friends are in Medicine, I was able to observe the roll out from day 1 and noticed the toxicity was worse than reported by Pfizer’s study but in line with my expectations. I immediately noticed that most of my acquaintances who had significant acute reactions had had COVID prior to the vaccine. Similarly, as had been reported by Pfizer, reactions to the second shot were almost always much more severe than the first (this still holds true with the booster in turn producing an even worse reaction). As the common element between the vaccine and a COVID infection were spike proteins, this led me to wonder if the spike protein was allergenic (making COVID largely an allergic disease) or it was cumulatively creating a coagulation of the blood (and other fluids in the body) that eventually hit a threshold people could not handle. My current hypothesis is that both are occurring and exacerbating the other, although there are many other potential mechanisms for spike protein toxicity.
Once the vaccine was release to the general public, I began seeing patients appear for various acute autoimmune and neurological conditions (I would classify as “moderate”) immediately following vaccination at a much higher rate than I had expected. Each time they told me the other doctors they saw either insisted the reaction was either not linked to vaccination, or the fact they had the reaction was a really good sign, because if they ended up getting COVID the adverse event would have been much much worse. Shortly after, I then began having friends contact me inquiring if the vaccine could cause a fatal heart attack or stroke, something I had not anticipated would occur.
This set off major alarm bells and I tried to warn my coworkers, who would not listen, and repeated the arguments they and others had told my patients. Before long, I realized even if I was powerless to change anything I had a duty to bear witness to what was occurring and document what I encountered. ..................
***** Heying: What If We’re Wrong, redux
In light of ever more frequent reveals about the lack of efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines, and, in contrast, the evidence for efficacy and safety of Ivermectin as an early treatment for Covid, this week I am posting an essay that I wrote ten months ago. ....
We live in the era of big-S Science. Big-S Science is funded by powerful organizations—both public and private—and used for political ends by different powerful organizations—both public and private. Big-S Science is often conclusion-driven, rather than hypothesis-driven. Big-S Science has an interest in having its conclusions simply accepted, its policies complied with, its inner workings simultaneously ignored and trusted by an unwitting populace. Big-S Science would really rather that the citizenry not be capable of assessing any of its claims.
Luckily for Big-S Science, many Westerners, at any rate, seem to have abdicated responsibility for doing any scientific thinking for ourselves. It is almost a point of honor among many of the erudite class, the coastal elites, the liberal intelligentsia, that they can’t really do math.
Nobody admits proudly to being illiterate, but innumerate? Isn’t that cute. Even Barbie says that math is hard! And really aren’t we all innumerate, kind of? Well no. We’re not. Only a tiny fraction of people on Earth does such advanced math that the rest of us can’t keep up, but basic numeracy should be an expectation of being an adult. So, too, should basic scientific literacy (for lack of a more elegant term) be an expectation of being an adult.
.... If you are inclined to “go along,” you don’t belong in science. If you are inclined to bark at people to #FollowTheScience, you don’t belong in science. If you are inclined to say things like “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science,” as Fauci did in June of 2021, you have revealed yourself as a petty tyrant—or, in his case, not petty at all, more’s the pity for all of us—and as the very antithesis of science.
Without further ado, then, here is this piece from May 2021, unaltered, although I would write it somewhat differently today. This is in part because I no longer see any evidence for most masks being an effective tool against this virus. More saliently, though, I might be even more direct now, because while at the time I was trying to speak just at the edge of what people could hear—to be at the edge of the Overton window, still viewable from those inside—as it turns out, I’m not sure that anyone who needed to hear it did, and we continue to need the message now more than ever. ....
What If We’re Wrong
What if the Earth isn’t the centre of everything? What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys, or were single-celled organisms? What if the continents move?
These questions were once beyond the pale. They were not to be discussed in polite society, were outside the frame of the Overton window. None of that made them untrue, however, or unimportant.
Every idea that we now understand to be true was first realized by a human mind, unknown to anyone else. Before that moment, nobody in our species had had the thought. Our lack of knowledge limited us. And yet before any human had the thought, it was nevertheless true. ...
How this will end, and it may not be this year or next, is that Covid-19
is going to follow the path of the three previous coronaviruses that we
have to deal with year in and year out. So long as there are humans on
the Earth there’s going to be Covid-19. Covid will lose its ability to
cause severe disease, not because the virus changes but because we gain
immunity via vaccines or from prior infections, and that we’ll have
ever-improving tools like antivirals and monoclonal antibodies. For the
next couple of seasons Covid may still have an outsized influence but
it’s increasingly going to be decoupled from hospitalizations and become
more like the other coronaviruses.
.... This pandemic will end eventually. It might be in 2022. It might be in 2025. But it also might go on for 20 years. A lot of bats are leaving caves and biting the people cutting down their forests.
... To summarize, the world is into its third year of the Covid pandemic. The virus is under no
evolutionary pressure to become less virulent. There is no evidence
that the latest editions — the three Omicron variants — are any less
virulent than their predecessors. SARS-CoV-2 mutates every other time it
passes from one host to another. As it gathers mutations some may
produce a milder Covid while others may produce a stronger Covid. Some
will evade earlier vaccines and acquired immunity.
... The world’s response to climate change is shaping up to be a much
greater failure than the US response to Covid. Climate change is presently on track to extinguish all humans from the Earth
and very little — almost nothing — has been done to awaken to that
threat. If there is a silver lining here, maybe it will be that wake-up
call.
C19 Vaccine in Context
Ancient ritual death lotteries are now called atrocities, not because we know they had no effect in sating a vengeful god, but rather because the moral calculus results in the conclusion that participation in a death lottery is the immoral act of murder.
C19 VACCINE IS A DEATH LOTTERY
...
The exact percentage of people who will have serious adverse reactions or die from the C19 vaccine will not be known until all the data is tallied. The trials did not use a random sample of people of all the types that exist in society. Thus, the mass vaccination is acting in place of a robust set of trials that would otherwise have occurred.
In the moral calculus, percentages do not matter. Many have died from the C19 vaccine and many more will die from the C19 vaccine. That is all that needs to be known. Thus, the C19 vaccine mandates are, by definition, a death lottery.
C19 VACCINE MANDATES ARE, THEREFORE, IMMORAL
those of us who have been paying close attention to the propaganda narrative these past two years may be forgiven for suspecting that the purpose of this sudden, all-consuming interest in Ukraine is, mainly, to distract us from the ever-rising toll of those “vaccines,” and other evidence of lethal fraud throughout the COVID crisis.
That’s more than probably the case, since “our free press,” for months before this second crisis started, had already been attempting to distract us from the likelihood that all the “sudden deaths” anomalously spiking this past year have resulted largely from the worldwide “vaccination” program. Thus, as I’ve observed in prior updates, the global media cartel has trotted out all sorts of feeble “explanations” as to why so many people have been dropping dead before their time: genetic heart problems (to “explain” why so many young people have, since January, 2021, been dying suddenly), referees’ whistles (to “explain” why so many athletes have, since January 2021, been dying suddenly mid-game), pizza margherita (an idiotic theory out of Italy, “explaining” why so many Italians have, since January, 2021, been dropping dead from heart attacks, or strokes, blood clots or cardiac arrest), and so on—feeble theories based on “scientific” studies that were surely funded for the propaganda purpose of enabling headlines meant (implicitly) to tell us all that, no, it’s not the “vaccinations” that are killing and disabling people all around us, every day, but, always, something else.
Here are dozens of such disinformative “news” items, compiled by Jeff Childers, and published on his blog, Coffee & Covid, on February 18:
— “Why People at Risk of Heart Disease May Want to Avoid Fish Oil,” HealthLine, May 3, 2021.
— “How Environmental Noise Harms the Cardiovascular System,” The Scientist, June 2, 2021.
— “What to know about birth control and blood clots,” Medical News Today, July 16, 2021.
— “Why has heart attack become so prevalent in young people?,” Times of India, September 6, 2021
— “Young adult cannabis consumers nearly twice as likely to suffer from a heart attack, research shows,” CNN, September 8, 2021.
— “Physical activity may increase heart attack risk, study suggests,” The Irish Times, September 20, 2021.
— “Mystery rise in heart attacks from blocked arteries,” Times UK, September 20, 2021
— “This Blood Type Puts You at Risk for Heart Disease,” ETNT Health, October 12, 2021 (note: it’s all types but O)
— “The Little-Known Heart Attack Killing Young Women,” WedMB, October 25, 2021.
— “There May Be a ‘Best Bedtime’ for Your Heart,” WebMD, November 9, 2021.
— “Extreme Heat Events Jeopardize Cardiovascular Health, Experts Warn,” ScienceDaily, November 18, 2021
— “Tis the Season: the ways cold weather can affect your body — from winter vagina to blood clots,” The Sun, November 27, 2021
— “Daily Aspirin Linked to Increased Risk of Heart Failure,” WebMD, November 30, 2021.
— “Wearing This Increases Your Blood Clot Risk, Experts Say: The condition kills someone every five minutes, a recent study reveals,” Best Life, December 4, 2021 (wearing a plaster cast or brace for “several days”)
— “Harsh Winter can Increase Heart-Related Complications: Experts warn in new study,” The Indian Express, December 6, 2021
— “Heart attack: Does skipping breakfast increase your risk?,” Express, December 12, 2021
— “How Worried You Should Be About Having a Heart Attack on Your Peloton,” Men’s Health, December 13, 2021
— “Up to 300,000 people facing heart-related illnesses due to post-pandemic stress disorder, warn physicians,” Evening Standard, December 14, 2021.
— “Science Reveals How Red Meat Harms the Heart,” WebMD, December 29, 2021.
— “Bing Watching TV Linked to Higher Blood Clot Risk,” WebMD, January 21, 2022.
— “Chemical in plastics and personal care products linked to heart disease,” Harvard Health Journal, January 1, 2022.
— “Blood Clots: The Popular Breakfast Food That Could Enhance The Risk Of Blood Clotting,” various, January 22, 2022.
— “Now even sticking to medics’ alcohol guidelines is bad for your health! Risk of heart problems could be increased if you drink less than NHS weekly units, study suggests,” Daily Mail UK, January 28, 2022.
— “Death during sex isn’t just something that happens to middle-aged men, new study finds,” The Conversation, February 1, 2022.
— “Energy bill price rise may cause heart attacks and strokes, says TV GP,” Wales Online, February 3, 2022.
— “Heart Attacks: What Does Age Have to Do With It?,” HealthLine, February 9, 2022.
— “Yes, Even Runners (and Triathletes) Get Heart Disease,” Triathlon Magazine, February 11, 2022
— “From Broken-Heart Syndrome to Cardiovascular Diseases, Your Heart Health Needs Extra Care Post-Covid,” Economic Times, February 9, 2022
— “New Study Reveals Shocking Benefit of ‘Heart Attack’,” REVYUH, February 16, 2022
— “Does an Aspirin a Day Keep Heart Disease Away? It Depends,” Michigan Health, February 16, 2022
— “Doctors Say Broken Heart Syndrome is Real, and it Can Be Deadly,” WHNT, February 16, 2022
— “Lonely older women at greater risk of heart attack, study shows,” London Times, February 17, 2022
Co-VID Fare:
Tweets & Quotes of the Week:
Bourla: It was counterintuitive because Pfizer was mastering or let's say we had very good experience and expertise with multiple technologies that could give a vaccine…mRNA was the technology that we had less experience with, only two years working on this. And actually, MRNA was a technology that never delivered a single product until that day. Not vaccine, not any other medicine, so it was very counterintuitive.
Anecdotal Fare:
What exactly is suddenly killing the young who've been injected with no history, no meds, and no previous illness?
link
COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:
*** Tucker: Forget About Covid, They Say
Did Russia bomb a maternity clinic?
A German journalist dissects the video, and finds that it's just one more propaganda fantasy (like those Iraqi soldiers dumping 300+ babies out of incubators after the invasion of Kuwait)
eugyppius: Womp womp. The last two years have been nothing but the triumph of theory over evidence.
Tucker: Rationality is back! In that sense, it’s good to forget about Covid if it means living life normally and behaving with clarity about what does and does not work to mitigate a virus. The Democrats decided that the hyper-restrictionist ways were risking political fortunes. Hence, the line and the talking points needed to change.
Coquin de Chien: In March 2020, those strong in contrarianism started the covid era as individuals, lonely and singular, speaking against the government sponsored paradigm. They laid the foundation for others to feel safe in speaking out. Aggregate contrarianism grew and is still growing. Contrarians will continue to challenge governments and media until truth displaces propaganda and prevarication in the mainstream. And we all know what truth will set you.
Rogers: Nullius in verba which means “take nobody’s word for it.” Secondary sources are not a valid epistemology. One must read original source documents. Examine data and evidence. Draw your own conclusions. Think for yourself. Escape information bubbles and transcend dogma. Morality and ethics are vital. Skepticism, disinterestedness, transparency, and rigorous debate are the hallmarks of good science. Reductionism, censorship, and conflicts of interest are fatal to good science.
Anecdotal Fare:
What exactly is suddenly killing the young who've been injected with no history, no meds, and no previous illness?
The global "vaccination" drive is taking a far larger toll than COVID ever did, or ever could
link
COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:
*** Tucker: Forget About Covid, They Say
Rationality is back! In that sense, it’s good to forget about Covid if it means living life normally and behaving with clarity about what does and does not work to mitigate a virus. The Democrats decided that the hyper-restrictionist ways were risking political fortunes. Hence, the line and the talking points needed to change.
.... Who precisely benefits from this method of being “over Covid?”
Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:
[such an excellent excellent editorial, by far the best I've read]
Perfectly Lawful and Legal and Unfortunate
When the old Russian Federation broke up, and Russia released the Ukraine as an independent country it came with the proviso that if there was evidence of criminality, genocide, international threats to Russia on Ukrainian soil, etc. Russia could come back in and secure the situation. This is part of Russia’s obligation to the rest of the world as well as a matter of Russian security. So, Ukraine was free to be its own country, with the understanding that they were going to be good little international citizens. And if they got out of hand, Russia would come back in and clean things up. Following Ukrainian independence in 1991, the Usual Suspects piled on. It was like a gold rush. Drug smuggling. Human trafficking. Arms sales. Counterfeiting. Organ harvesting. Oil privateering.
Every sordid nasty dirty business in the world was imported to Ukraine, by all the Agencies, the “US Corp”, the DOD, the Mobs of various nations, and associated corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton and on and on and on. All the Dirty Deal Guys showed up like gangbangers. And everyone including Russia just shook their heads. It was business as usual for the Ollie Norths of the world.[..] So, Russia invoked its treaty proviso and came in to clean the situation up and as Vladimir Putin said, “take the garbage out” — not because they wanted to spend all that money and risk their lives and take all the abuse that the propaganda machine can throw — but because otherwise, they’d have all those stockpiles of chemical and biological weapon on their back door step, along with all the other nastiness that was already going on.
... Tough as it is, say, aye, Vladimir Putin. Thank you, Russia. And to the people of Ukraine, we know you are, for the most part, innocent victims of the oligarchs and their western Sugar Daddies. Make it easy on yourselves. Stay home and step back. Let Russia clean out the Vermin for you. You’ll be glad you did. If the US/Ukrainian oligarchy had been allowed to continue, the vicious animals would have come in and used a pretext to engage in war on your beautiful land. They would have done what they did in Iraq and polluted it will dirty bombs and dirty artillery shells and ruined your land for farming for generations
Much wants more and loses all
.... Ukraine has been exploited by Western companies for thirty long years. All those contacts with democracies and capitalism did not benefit the country at all. It only benefited a handful of people, who fled Ukraine before the hostilities, leaving the rank and file behind. Rumour has it that President Zelensky is kept in the American embassy in Warsaw though we are all made to believe that he remains in Kiev. How much would you bet on President Zelensky residing in Kiev, a city that is about to be soon encircled? The West could have further exploited Ukraine and teased Russia but it simply overplayed its hand.
As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here. The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization” and “denazification”).
For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective (translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man
Alexander Dubrovsky. He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this “completely new page in the art of war.”
Cutting through the fog, no one could realistically expect any breakthrough out of the meeting between Foreign Ministers Lavrov and Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya – as much as Turkey may have played a constructive role.
The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. The only tactic in town is stalling. Operation Z – or “the war” – could be stopped with a simple phone call from the Comedian in Kiev. ....
The unrepentant hegemon that gave us this disaster to begin with. They want to be in the clear. They don’t just desire to be exonerated; they don’t want to be judged at all. They want to be unaccountable. The best path toward that end is to foster public amnesia.
... There is a vast machine extant that desperately wants everyone to forget. Not even forgive, just forget. Don’t think about the old thing. Think about the new thing instead. Don’t learn lessons. Don’t change the system. Don’t uproot the bureaucracies or examine why the court system failed us so miserably until it was too late. Don’t seek more information. Don’t seek reforms. Don’t take away powers from the CDC and NIH, much less Homeland Security.
... What changed pandemic panic to a new calm is the force of public opinion. God bless the protestors, polls, and truckers. That is a great improvement but there is a long way to go to rekindle the love of liberty that can protect us next time. It’s not about left and right. We need a new understanding of public health, bodily autonomy, and essential liberties.
Some people want global amnesia and otherwise no change in the regime, no follow-up, no investigations, no connecting dots, no justice, no answers to burning questions.
... The remnants of restrictions, mandates, and impositions are there to serve as a reminder of the prevailing ruling-class attitude toward their policy choices. There are no regrets. They have done everything right. And they still have their thumb on you.
This is a scandal of immense proportions that warrants an immediate investigation.
Crispin-Miller: Looks like the next "pandemic" will be coming from Ukraine (and it'll all be Putin's fault!)
In their duet on Monday, Victoria Nuland and Marco Rubio laid the (propaganda) groundwork for another plague (and war)
... That’s one way to look at it. The other is this: That back-and-forth was staged, to set us up for the next “pandemic”—this one to be blamed on Russia, just as the last one was on China (only). According to this view, Nuland and Rubio were acting just as you’d expect, she as a neocon fanatic, and ruthless propaganda operative, he as a diehard “ant-communist” (“Russia,” in his mind, being “communist,” just as “Putin,” in his mind, is Stalin). Thus Nuland’s visible ”discomfort” at having to “admit” the presence of those bio-labs was all an act, and so, perhaps, was Rubio’s amazement, as their duet served the dual purpose of (a) laying the groundwork for the next global “virus” panic (hemorrhagic fever, anyone?), and (b) blaming it on Putin/Stalin, so that the Russia-hatred can continue through the next barrage of bio-fascist “measures” (enabling us to tell ourselves that we—like the Ukrainians!—revere democracy, while Russia is totalitarian, though the “democracies” today are looking, and behaving, more and more like Nazi Germany).
Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:
GeoPolitical Fare:
***** Cook: Russia-Ukraine War: A Different Invasion, the West’s Same ‘Madman’ Script
***** Cook: Russia-Ukraine War: A Different Invasion, the West’s Same ‘Madman’ Script
How convenient for western leaders that every time another country defies the West’s projection of power, the western media can agree on one thing: that the foreign government in question is led by a madman, a psychopath or a megalomaniac.
At a drop of a hat, western leaders are absolved of guilt or even responsibility for the terrible events that unfold. The West remains virtuous, simply a victim of the world’s madmen. Nothing the West did was a provocation. Nothing they could have done would have averted the disaster.
eugyppius: Ukraine and the Global American Empire
Since 2014, the Ukraine has been experiencing a quiet civil war, between the Ukrainian majority in the west, and a Russian minority concentrated in the east. The ethnic Ukrainian side in this conflict has been co-opted by the supranational global imperial monolith. This is the cadre of western elites that determines political, medical and cultural orthodoxy across the world. They control not only all major political parties in most western countries, but also global international consortia from the United Nations to the World Economic Forum to the European Union to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Their goal is to further squeeze Russia by turning Ukraine – including the Russian-speaking eastern regions – into another political constituent of American globalism.
To the Russians – many Russians – this is unacceptable. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the globalists descended upon Russia to rape and pillage. In the years after 2000, NATO expansion was used to hem in Russia along the Baltic. These were hard years, but Russia finally reasserted its sovereignty. Since then, the western globalists have considered unaligned Russia to be their enemy, and they have adopted Ukraine as a convenient proxy against her. Ukraine is useful for this purpose, because it has considerable strategic significance, whether as a gateway to Russia through the open Ukrainian plains, or as a staging ground for American missiles.
..... However much the globalists like the idea of encircling Russia with NATO, in their saner moments they’re not actually willing to risk nuclear war to defend the easternmost reaches of Europe. For the globalists, Ukraine was just a pawn. After they finish throwing their tantrum, they’ll go pick another proxy fight somewhere else, and ruin some other country
.... Western media and politicians don’t want to explain the cause of the Ukrainian war, because it is a defeat that they brought upon themselves. This is why they have chosen instead to portray Putin as some kind of crazy lunatic, in the mould of a Kim Jong-un or a Saddam Hussein. That is precisely wrong: Those are unpredictable tin-pot dictators who command paper-tiger armies. The Russians are a nuclear-armed global force, and the Ukrainian war is not something that Putin himself dreamed up yesterday. It surely enjoys substantial support within the Russian political and military establishment.
So, now that I’ve angered some of you: Nothing in the above is at all original; a lot of people (from John Mearsheimer to Noam Chomsky to a late 1990s Joe Biden) have made similar observations. I think there is little room for original thought, when it comes to the major events of global politics. Most of what is happening becomes obvious, as soon as you step outside the crazy media framing and observe things as they are.
Wildermuth: Black Sun Rising
... What’s happening in Ukraine is horrifying, and so is also what is happening to the rest of our minds. It’s not new, of course: since the birth of mass media, capitalists and the governments they control have experimented with ways to manufacture the “consent of the governed.” It used to be newspapers, then television networks, and now social media. Each taught us not just what to think, but how to think, what kinds of narratives to tolerate, what kinds of narratives to fear.
... Man has created some terrifying truths, the worst of which is not war itself, but our justifications for war. The other side is always evil, and therefore our side is always good. No complexity can arise from such a false belief in truth, only obedience, patriotism, and bloodshed. Nuance is a threat, as is any attempt to understand the other side. To de-escalate a conflict is to betray the truth, the nation, the people, the cause.
... What Ukraine has been doing would otherwise count as crimes against humanity. What Russia is doing does as well. There’s no side to take here between them, but our social media mind has taught us all we must take sides.
Chris Hedges: Worthy and Unworthy Victims
Short answer: the Ukrainians will.
Long answer: let me walk you down a very short memory lane, merely 16 days long, starting from February 22, 2022. On that day, the majority of Ukrainian forces were massed deep inside the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics—the two statelets populated by Russians, many of them Russian passport-holders. The Ukrainian forces were within striking range of their capital cities and (as recently obtained official documents prove) were planning an all-out attack on them. That would have been an act of genocide which Russia would have had no choice but to try to stop.
Since the Ukrainian regime does not dare to do anything major without first receiving an “all clear” signal from Washington, this attack would have been on strategy with Washington’s goals, which, perfectly clearly, were to mire Russia in a Ukrainian civil war. This war would in turn provide the rationale for international isolation which would crush Russia’s economy and force it to once again provide its natural resources to the West for almost nothing. Were this plan to fail, the West would collapse.
The way it looks now, this plan is failing. I will return to this subject in a little while; by then the situation will have become clearer to a few more people. As people go through the inevitable denial-anger-bargaining sequence, it is best to hang back until the bargaining part is reached; only then does reasoned discussion become possible. ...
... Thus, the Ukrainian regime blithely trod across a very well established Russian red line that was guaranteed to trigger a military response. Given the vast disproportion in military strength, this was a delusional, suicidal move.
To top all of this off, at the Munich security conference held this February the (former?) Ukrainian president Zelensky professed his desire to develop nuclear weapons with which to attack Russia. Note that the Ukraine had sufficient nuclear materials, technologies and knowhow, inherited from the USSR, to rush through such a development program, especially if with US help. Although this would directly violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (“non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons”), he did not get any pushback from the assorted Western luminaries assembled there. Thus the Ukrainian regime thus did everything necessary to fashion itself into an immediate existential threat to Russia, sealing its fate....
A rare must-see panel discussion has been sponsored by Consortium News bringing together geopolitical heavyweights to offer their 'outside-the-establishment norm' perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the state of play in Europe and among NATO powers.
********** Lawrence: "The casualties of empire."
Americans are high among them.
The following commentary, which first appeared in Consortium News, concerns primarily what we Americans have done to ourselves as we have allowed propagandists in the administration, the national-security state, and the press to turn our discourse into a froth of hysteria about matters most of us know little to nothing of. I am not alone in remarking I have seen nothing like this collective derangement in my lifetime—in my case a lifetime spanning many dreadful years of the Cold War decades.
Americans are high among them.
The following commentary, which first appeared in Consortium News, concerns primarily what we Americans have done to ourselves as we have allowed propagandists in the administration, the national-security state, and the press to turn our discourse into a froth of hysteria about matters most of us know little to nothing of. I am not alone in remarking I have seen nothing like this collective derangement in my lifetime—in my case a lifetime spanning many dreadful years of the Cold War decades.
In the course of writing this piece I described what Russia calls its “special operation” in Ukraine. I termed it an intervention and judged it “regrettable but necessary.” These terms turned the heads of various readers. Here I will explain my choice of words.
Perfectly Lawful and Legal and Unfortunate
When the old Russian Federation broke up, and Russia released the Ukraine as an independent country it came with the proviso that if there was evidence of criminality, genocide, international threats to Russia on Ukrainian soil, etc. Russia could come back in and secure the situation. This is part of Russia’s obligation to the rest of the world as well as a matter of Russian security. So, Ukraine was free to be its own country, with the understanding that they were going to be good little international citizens. And if they got out of hand, Russia would come back in and clean things up. Following Ukrainian independence in 1991, the Usual Suspects piled on. It was like a gold rush. Drug smuggling. Human trafficking. Arms sales. Counterfeiting. Organ harvesting. Oil privateering.
Every sordid nasty dirty business in the world was imported to Ukraine, by all the Agencies, the “US Corp”, the DOD, the Mobs of various nations, and associated corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton and on and on and on. All the Dirty Deal Guys showed up like gangbangers. And everyone including Russia just shook their heads. It was business as usual for the Ollie Norths of the world.[..] So, Russia invoked its treaty proviso and came in to clean the situation up and as Vladimir Putin said, “take the garbage out” — not because they wanted to spend all that money and risk their lives and take all the abuse that the propaganda machine can throw — but because otherwise, they’d have all those stockpiles of chemical and biological weapon on their back door step, along with all the other nastiness that was already going on.
... Tough as it is, say, aye, Vladimir Putin. Thank you, Russia. And to the people of Ukraine, we know you are, for the most part, innocent victims of the oligarchs and their western Sugar Daddies. Make it easy on yourselves. Stay home and step back. Let Russia clean out the Vermin for you. You’ll be glad you did. If the US/Ukrainian oligarchy had been allowed to continue, the vicious animals would have come in and used a pretext to engage in war on your beautiful land. They would have done what they did in Iraq and polluted it will dirty bombs and dirty artillery shells and ruined your land for farming for generations
Much wants more and loses all
.... Ukraine has been exploited by Western companies for thirty long years. All those contacts with democracies and capitalism did not benefit the country at all. It only benefited a handful of people, who fled Ukraine before the hostilities, leaving the rank and file behind. Rumour has it that President Zelensky is kept in the American embassy in Warsaw though we are all made to believe that he remains in Kiev. How much would you bet on President Zelensky residing in Kiev, a city that is about to be soon encircled? The West could have further exploited Ukraine and teased Russia but it simply overplayed its hand.
***** Curtin: On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss
Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”
It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.
It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).
My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.
The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:
Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)
Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.
.... In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.
In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.
The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows....
.. The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:...
... In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece. ...
... Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.
.... “Thuggishness” of Putin? “Barbarism” of Russian forces amidst reports in The Financial Times yesterday that less than 400 Ukrainian civilians had thus far died in the war as it passed into its eleventh day, whereas by this point in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians had been wantonly slaughtered by the incoming waves of American troops destroying everything in their path to Baghdad. These generalizations about Russia’s President and his forces could just as easily have been issued by Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld in their glory days, those unprosecuted, untouched war criminals.
Doctorow: You won’t know what hit you and why
The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed last Tuesday that Ukrainian authorities destroyed inventories of plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and other deadly pathogens in illegal US biowarfare laboratories in Ukraine operated and funded by the US Department of Defense to prevent them from falling into Russian hands. US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland confirmed the reports. These laboratories are in violation of Article I of the UN Biological Weapons Convention.
..... Dumbshit Americans do not understand that “their government,” actually the government of the greed and power driven elite governing group, is a criminal enterprise.
The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything.
By now what we may call a Triple Threat has been established as the catalyst anticipating the launch of Operation Z.
- Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.
- U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Confirmed, tersely, by none other than the Sinister Cookie Distributor neocon wife in the uber-neocon Kaganate of Nulands, who described them as “biological research facilities”. ”
- An imminent attack on Donbass with massive civilian deaths. It could have been in March, according to documents seized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Or even in late February, according to SVR intelligence, which was monitoring the line of contact on a minute-by-minute basis. This is what eventually prompted Operation Z as a Russian version of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”).
So after years of CIA-instigated shouts of “conspiracy theory!” and less than zero “fact checkers” activity, it turns out “it was all happening in Ukraine”, as divine messenger Maria Zakharova once again pointed out: “We have found your own products. We have found your biological material.”
The first-class investigative work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva on Pentagon bioweapons was fully vindicated.
Based on documents received from Ukrainian biolab employees, the Russian ModD revealed that research with samples of bat coronavirus, among other experiments, were conducted in a Pentagon-funded biolab.
The purpose of all this research – which included another Pentagon project to study the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries – was “to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”
In trademark pysop mode, everything was turned upside down by the United States government: those evil Russkies could take control of biological samples, so any “accident” involving biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine would have to be blamed on Russia.
The White House, in yet another flagrant display of unredeemable stupidity, accused Russia of “false claims” and China of “endorsing this propaganda”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came up with the adult perspective: “The whole world will be interested to know what exactly the American bio-laboratories in Ukraine were doing.”
Down on the ground
Meanwhile, defying the fog of war while being targeted by Kiev’s free distribution of weapons without any measure of control, civilians on the path of Operation Z confirmed over and over again that Azov neo-Nazis prevent them from escaping encircled towns and villages. These Banderastan fanatics are the shock troops transforming Ukraine into a large Idlib – according to His Master’s Voice’s plan.
Neo-Nazis are doing exactly what ISIS/Daesh did in Syria: hiding behind civilians taken as hostages. Azov are the white clones of ISIS/Daesh. After all they learned their tactics from the same masters....
As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here. The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization” and “denazification”).
For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective (translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man
Alexander Dubrovsky. He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this “completely new page in the art of war.”
Cutting through the fog, no one could realistically expect any breakthrough out of the meeting between Foreign Ministers Lavrov and Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya – as much as Turkey may have played a constructive role.
The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. The only tactic in town is stalling. Operation Z – or “the war” – could be stopped with a simple phone call from the Comedian in Kiev. ....
... U.S. intelligence analysts last week were alarmed when they obtained intelligence showing that Russian Chemical and Biological Weapons units were activated and moving into Ukraine. These analysts knew nothing of what the Department of Defense had been doing in Ukraine in terms of funding military bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine. Without that knowledge, they concluded that Russia was preparing to use chemical and/or biological weapons. Understandable, but wrong.
The Russian units were deployed to secure those bioweapons labs. And in the process of securing them they have recovered a treasure trove of documents showing the United States has violated the international accord governing Chemical and Biological Weapons.
Greenwald: Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has "Biological Research Facilities," Worried Russia May Seize Them
The neocon's confession sheds critical light on the U.S. role in Ukraine, and raises vital questions about these labs that deserve answers.
.... Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”
Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.
But Rubio's clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach”
....Still on the subject of biological weapons being prepared in Ukraine under United States funding and guidance, Russian experts were on television this morning explaining how leaks from these labs have been monitored over the past few years. In one such case, 450 Ukrainian civilians were said to have died from biological agents that contaminated their residential block. This number, you will note, is higher than the total number of civilian deaths in the ongoing “barbaric” Russian operation in Ukraine as reported in The Financial times
An attempt to triangulate something approximating truth about Ukraine and Biolabs
Crispin-Miller: The Nazis in Ukraine are just as real, and dangerous, as those "vaccines"
Here we are again, struggling to inform the hypnotized of facts that, though they need to know them, they don’t want to; only now it isn’t scientific data that they angrily blow off, though it could save their lives, but facts of recent history that they indignantly dismiss, though it could save us all from nuclear annihilation.
Here we are again, struggling to inform the hypnotized of facts that, though they need to know them, they don’t want to; only now it isn’t scientific data that they angrily blow off, though it could save their lives, but facts of recent history that they indignantly dismiss, though it could save us all from nuclear annihilation.
Did Russia bomb a maternity clinic?
A German journalist dissects the video, and finds that it's just one more propaganda fantasy (like those Iraqi soldiers dumping 300+ babies out of incubators after the invasion of Kuwait)
Can't they find any REAL atrocities committed by the Russians in Ukraine?
A badly hurt "Ukrainian" child who's actually a Syrian
geo-vid:
*** Gonzalo Lira: Zelensky, Hunter Biden — and Their Sugar Daddy, Kolomoisky
Orwellian Fare:
***** Hopkins: Revenge of the Putin-Nazis!
... I’m referring, of course, to Putin’s inexplicable and totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a totally peaceful, Nazi-free country which was just sitting there minding its non-Nazi business, singing Kumbaya, and so on, and not in any way collaborating with or being cynically used by GloboCap to menace and eventually destabilize Russia so that the GloboCap boys can get back in there and resume the Caligulan orgy of “privatization” they enjoyed throughout the 1990’s.
No, clearly, Putin has just lost his mind, and has no strategic objective whatsoever (other than the total extermination of humanity), and is just running around the Kremlin shouting “DROP THE BOMBS! EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES!” all crazy-eyed and with his face painted green like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now … because what other explanation is there?
Or … OK, sure, there are other explanations, but they’re all just “Russian disinformation” and “Putin-Nazi propaganda” disseminated by “Putin-apologizing, Trump-loving, discord-sowing racists,” “transphobic, anti-vax conspiracy theorists,” “Covid-denying domestic extremists,” and other traitorous blasphemers and heretics, who are being paid by Putin to infect us with doubt, historical knowledge, and critical thinking, because they hate us for our freedom … or whatever.
Let’s take a quick look at some of that “Russian disinformation” and “propaganda,” purely to inoculate ourselves against it. We need to be familiar with it, so we can switch off our minds and shout thought-terminating clichés and official platitudes at it whenever we encounter it on the Internet. It might be a little uncomfortable to do this, but just think of it as a Russian-propaganda “vaccine,” like an ideological mRNA fact-check booster (guaranteed to be “safe and effective”)!
..... And that’s the important thing, after all. If we’re ever going to defeat these Putin-Nazis, and the imaginary apocalyptic plague, and Trump, and terrorism, and domestic extremism, and climate change, and racism, and whatever, we need to keep the Western masses whipped up into a perpetual state of utterly mindless, hate-drunk hysteria like an eternal episode of the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984.
... Welcome to the new reality … a “reality” in which “history has stopped [and] nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” Yes, I know you are sick of me quoting Orwell, but, given the circumstances, I cannot help it. Just reflect on how seamlessly GloboCap segued from the Apocalyptic Pandemic narrative back to the Putin-Nazi narrative, which had seamlessly replaced the War on Terror narrative in the Summer of 2016, and how instantly the New Normals switched from hating “the Unvaccinated” to hating the Russians, and then scold me again for quoting Orwell.
Look, I hate to disappoint Edward Norton and millions of other fanatical liberals, but the USA is not going to war with Russia, or not intentionally in any event. Russia has ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads on them. This isn’t a rerun of World War II. And it isn’t World War III, or the Cold War redux. That is not what is happening in the Ukraine.
What is happening in Ukraine is, Russia is not playing ball. For some reason, it does not want to be destabilized, and restructured, and privatized by GloboCap. It is acting like a sovereign nation state … which it is, and isn’t, which paradoxical fact GloboCap is trying to impress on Russia, just as countries throughout the global-capitalist empire impressed it on us for the past two years, as Trudeau impressed it on those protesters in Ottawa when he cancelled their rights and went full-fascist.
What is happening is, Russia is rebelling against GloboCap, and, unlike the other rebellious parties that GloboCap has been dealing with recently, Russia has thermonuclear weapons.
Lawrence: "All illusions lost."
We continue to watch with grave concern as a propaganda operation probably without precedent engulfs Americans (and others) as the Ukraine crisis unfolds. Not in our lifetimes have we witnessed so grotesquely successful an effort to distort events and, most notably, the leader of another nation.
... I’m referring, of course, to Putin’s inexplicable and totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a totally peaceful, Nazi-free country which was just sitting there minding its non-Nazi business, singing Kumbaya, and so on, and not in any way collaborating with or being cynically used by GloboCap to menace and eventually destabilize Russia so that the GloboCap boys can get back in there and resume the Caligulan orgy of “privatization” they enjoyed throughout the 1990’s.
No, clearly, Putin has just lost his mind, and has no strategic objective whatsoever (other than the total extermination of humanity), and is just running around the Kremlin shouting “DROP THE BOMBS! EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES!” all crazy-eyed and with his face painted green like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now … because what other explanation is there?
Or … OK, sure, there are other explanations, but they’re all just “Russian disinformation” and “Putin-Nazi propaganda” disseminated by “Putin-apologizing, Trump-loving, discord-sowing racists,” “transphobic, anti-vax conspiracy theorists,” “Covid-denying domestic extremists,” and other traitorous blasphemers and heretics, who are being paid by Putin to infect us with doubt, historical knowledge, and critical thinking, because they hate us for our freedom … or whatever.
Let’s take a quick look at some of that “Russian disinformation” and “propaganda,” purely to inoculate ourselves against it. We need to be familiar with it, so we can switch off our minds and shout thought-terminating clichés and official platitudes at it whenever we encounter it on the Internet. It might be a little uncomfortable to do this, but just think of it as a Russian-propaganda “vaccine,” like an ideological mRNA fact-check booster (guaranteed to be “safe and effective”)!
..... And that’s the important thing, after all. If we’re ever going to defeat these Putin-Nazis, and the imaginary apocalyptic plague, and Trump, and terrorism, and domestic extremism, and climate change, and racism, and whatever, we need to keep the Western masses whipped up into a perpetual state of utterly mindless, hate-drunk hysteria like an eternal episode of the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984.
... Welcome to the new reality … a “reality” in which “history has stopped [and] nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” Yes, I know you are sick of me quoting Orwell, but, given the circumstances, I cannot help it. Just reflect on how seamlessly GloboCap segued from the Apocalyptic Pandemic narrative back to the Putin-Nazi narrative, which had seamlessly replaced the War on Terror narrative in the Summer of 2016, and how instantly the New Normals switched from hating “the Unvaccinated” to hating the Russians, and then scold me again for quoting Orwell.
Look, I hate to disappoint Edward Norton and millions of other fanatical liberals, but the USA is not going to war with Russia, or not intentionally in any event. Russia has ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads on them. This isn’t a rerun of World War II. And it isn’t World War III, or the Cold War redux. That is not what is happening in the Ukraine.
What is happening in Ukraine is, Russia is not playing ball. For some reason, it does not want to be destabilized, and restructured, and privatized by GloboCap. It is acting like a sovereign nation state … which it is, and isn’t, which paradoxical fact GloboCap is trying to impress on Russia, just as countries throughout the global-capitalist empire impressed it on us for the past two years, as Trudeau impressed it on those protesters in Ottawa when he cancelled their rights and went full-fascist.
What is happening is, Russia is rebelling against GloboCap, and, unlike the other rebellious parties that GloboCap has been dealing with recently, Russia has thermonuclear weapons.
Lawrence: "All illusions lost."
'Discerning Vladimir Putin,' Part 2.
We continue to watch with grave concern as a propaganda operation probably without precedent engulfs Americans (and others) as the Ukraine crisis unfolds. Not in our lifetimes have we witnessed so grotesquely successful an effort to distort events and, most notably, the leader of another nation.
This is Part 2 of “Discerning Vladimir Putin,” an essay we determined to publish in part as a modest counter to the mis– and disinformation published daily in our major newspapers and broadcast on our major networks. We offer these concluding pages in the same spirit.
Rigger: A Minority Report
... Leading the way, the femme fatale of Canada, the popinjay of perfection, Jussie Trudette and his team, who have bravely survived a despicable attempt by unclean hairy white supremacists (driving horribly polluting large vehicles) to force them into a bouncy castle, might just have the answer with a new bill under proposal:
... The wording of the bill is extraordinary. If you’re worried that someone might, at some unspecified time in the future, promote hate in some unspecified way, then report them to the authorities!
CaitOz Fare:
***** Umm… Are We The Baddies?
...The hypocrisy, dishonesty and phoniness of this whole song and dance about Ukraine is one of the most distasteful things that I have ever witnessed. Rather than engaging in click-friendly Instagram activism with blue and yellow profile pics making risk-free criticisms of a foreign leader in a far off country who has nothing to do with us, perhaps we would be better served by a bit more introspection, and by a somewhat more difficult stance: intense scrutiny of the corruption and abuses running rampant in our own society.
The war is not going well for Kyiv, and it would be unreasonable to expect that to change. As a vastly superior military force overwhelms the US client state, reality is in the process of crashing down hard in the face of western liberals who bought into the war propaganda that the brave, sexy comedian was leading an upset victory to kick Putin’s ass out of Ukraine.
Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.
...... That’s a whole lot of potential benefit to the US empire just for losing Ukraine. Kind of like sacrificing a pawn to get the queen in chess.
.... But chess is all about out-maneuvering your opponent to leave them nothing but bad options to choose from, and in the end leaving the king with no safe moves. The drivers of empire would have known that, as the late Justin Raimondo explained all the way back in 2014 for Antiwar, Putin could not afford to lose Ukraine to the west without losing crucial support in Russia. Combine that with increased attacks on Donbas separatists and the west’s adamant refusal to make even the most meaningless concessions like guaranteeing they wouldn’t add a nation to NATO who they had no intention of adding anyway, and you can understand if not support Putin’s drastic course of action.
...... And it’s entirely possible that this was all planned years in advance. Is it a coincidence that before this started we were bombarded with shrieking anti-Russia narratives for five years, all of which were initiated by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies and none of which have ever been substantiated with hard evidence?
..... We should not have to live this way. We should not have to see the horrors of war inflicted upon humanity with the risk of total nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads every minute of every day, all for some dopey grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths who can’t just let humanity be.
Western powers insisted that they were trying to prevent this war while doing everything possible to ensure that it happened. Now they say they are trying to end this war while doing everything possible to ensure it continues.
❖
Putin: Don’t cross this red line or it will mean war.
Westerners: He’s probably bluffing. Cross that red line.
Putin: *starts a war*
Putin: Now don’t cross this other red line or it will mean nuclear war.
Westerners: He’s probably bluffing. Cross that red line.
Just your regular reminder that the US empire (A) had solid intelligence that this war was coming, (B) knew they could prevent it by making very reasonable, low-cost concessions like promising not to add a nation to NATO that they didn’t want to add anyway, and (C) chose not to.
❖
Again: pouring weapons into Ukraine is not how you save lives. You save lives by accepting Russia’s conditions. Pouring weapons into Ukraine is how you try to draw Moscow into a long, bloody insurgency like the US did in Afghanistan and Syria which will cost thousands more lives.
❖
Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the western empire is responsible for the western empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for choosing to invade, the western empire is responsible for choosing the actions which led to that decision. Not complicated.
It’s the Russian people’s job to hold their leaders to account, and it’s our job to hold our leaders to account. The western empire could end this anytime and pursue de-escalation and detente. It’s choosing not to. That choice is costing lives and leading us toward nuclear war.
We’re risking a very fast, very radioactive World War 3 to defend the “democracy” of a nation whose government bans opposition parties, imprisons political opponents, shuts down opposition media, and takes all its orders from Washington due to a US-backed coup in 2014.
“Defending Ukrainian democracy” makes as much sense as “Defending Mongolian seaports”.
❖
People tend to overestimate the power of the US war machine and underestimate the power of the US propaganda machine.
❖
Choose one:
A) It’s a coincidence that we were bombarded by hysterical anti-Russia narratives for five years before this started.
B) Bogus Russia scandals were cooked up by US intelligence to start manufacturing consent for a confrontation with Russia to preserve US unipolar hegemony.
It’s an objectively good thing if more attention is brought to that
urgent problem by someone saying “Oh you’re upset about this war? Wait
til you hear about what your own government has been doing.” Any attempt
to interfere in their pointing this out is facilitating mass murder.
❖
I don’t understand the common sentiment on the left that we need to spend a lot of energy criticizing Putin for this war in the same way we criticize our own rulers for their warmongering. Like even forgetting about all the things western powers did to give rise to the war in Ukraine, what specifically is the argument here? That the English-speaking world doesn’t have enough criticism of the Russian invasion, and has too much criticism of NATO aggression? That if more antiwar lefties scream about Putin he’ll go “Ah shit I pissed off a few fringe westerners, let’s cancel the war you guys”? It just doesn’t seem like those who make such claims have thought very hard about the position they’re trying to advance.
Our voices can do far more good criticizing the actions of our own governments, which receive barely any criticism, than those of someone else’s government which gets tons. It also can’t be denied that there’s a major propaganda push to manufacture consent for dangerous agendas which pre-date the invasion by many years. Is my voice better used opposing those dangerous agendas, or in helping to facilitate them by saying the same things everyone else is already saying?
Putin is bad! Putin is bad and his war is very bad!
There. I did the thing. Can anyone tell me what I just accomplished, apart from greasing the wheels for new cold war escalations? Did I plow any new ground? Expand awareness in any new direction? What specific good did I do?
None that I can see.
The fact that the Russian people are doing a better job of holding their government to account with massive antiwar protests than people in western nations have says terrible things about us and our obsequiousness to our warmongering masters. If you can’t criticize your government, you are more obedient than Russians living under Putin.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Wildermuth: What’s happening in Ukraine is horrifying, and so is also what is happening to the rest of our minds. It’s not new, of course: since the birth of mass media, capitalists and the governments they control have experimented with ways to manufacture the “consent of the governed.” It used to be newspapers, then television networks, and now social media. Each taught us not just what to think, but how to think, what kinds of narratives to tolerate, what kinds of narratives to fear.
Hanania: I can't believe our policy is literally "crash the Russian economy, hope the current gov disappears, then by magic something better comes along and leaves Ukraine." This war has shown how much people rely on emotion rather than reason, even among those who I thought knew better.
Greenwald: It's vital that nobody be exposed to any dissent or questioning. As with COVID, it all must be banished from the internet - and is being, not only by Big Tech but upon orders from EU Governments. Does that make you suspicious at all about whether you're being told the full truth?
Ritter: The more the United States struggled with the reality of a Russian nation unwilling to allow itself to be once again constrained by the yoke of carpetbagger economics disguised as “democracy” that had been prevalent during the Yeltsin era, the more the dogma of “Putinism” took hold in the very establishments where intellectual examination of complex problems was ostensibly transpiring — the halls of academia which in turn produced the minds that guided policy formulation and implementation. Outliers like Jack Matlock, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen were cashiered in favor of a new breed of erstwhile Russian expert, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, Fiona Hill and Anne Applebaum. Genuine Russian area studies was supplanted by a new field of authoritarian studies, where the soul of a nation that once was defined by the life and works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Lenin, Stalin, Sakharov, and Gorbachev was distilled into a shallow caricature of one man — Putin.
Nekrasov: There are still many different camps in Russian society. But Putin’s approval ratings have risen since the beginning of the war and despite the sanctions. This does not mean that all Russians support this war. Most of my friends are against it. The liberal intelligentsia, my environment, so to speak, is against it. Many are trying to leave Russia. But the majority supports the government. Why? For them, this war is a form of resistance. And that must sound shocking to most in Europe.
Vid Fare:
Clare Daly
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
This is something of a problem with forecasting as a general matter. But although forecasting almost anything worth debating is difficult, war is probably in its own special category....
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
Hanania: Why Forecasting War is Hard
..... Now I think you can see why forecasting the outcome of a war is so difficult. My process in this conflict has involved looking at a lot of maps, reading a lot of articles and Twitter threads, seeing various arguments, and deciding “This looks right, this looks wrong, this looks probably true but not nearly as important as the author implies. This author seems credible but is saying crazy things, while this one seems crazy but is making sense.” I don’t have the time to look into every plausible theory of how the war will end or what the determining factor will be. Maybe it’s all about tires. Or a thousand other things.
My method of forecasting generally involves seeking out a few big facts that others are ignoring or downplaying. Here are the ones that jump out at me regarding the eventual outcome in Ukraine....
4. Pundits and analysts seem to be in denial...
........... That's more or less what we have. It doesn't prove that evil leaders never suffer from brain damage but the case of Mussolini tells us that dictators are not necessarily insane or evil in the way comics or movie characters are described. Rather, they are best described as persons who suffer from a "narcissistic personality disorder" (NPD). That syndrome describes their vindictive, paranoid, and cruel behavior, but also their ability to find followers and become popular. So, it may be that the NPD syndrome is not really a "disorder" but, rather, something functional for becoming a leader.
Full Fare:
There lies the problem: even in a democracy, a politician's first priority is being elected and that's a very different skill than that needed for leading a country. An NPD-affected ruler may not be necessarily evil, but he (very rarely she) will be almost certainly incompetent. It happens not just in politics, but also in business. I could also cite the names of some scientists who seem to be affected by NPD. They are often incompetents, but they may achieve a certain degree of success by means of their social skills that allow them to accumulate research grants and attract smart collaborators. (Fortunately, they can't jail and torture their opponents!)
The problem with this situation is that, everywhere in the world, NPD-affected individuals aim at obtaining high-level government positions and often they succeed. Then, ruling a whole country gives them plenty of chances to be not just incompetents, but the kind of person that we describe as "criminally incompetent."
Full Fare:
Short answer: the Ukrainians will.
Long answer: let me walk you down a very short memory lane, merely 16 days long, starting from February 22, 2022. On that day, the majority of Ukrainian forces were massed deep inside the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics—the two statelets populated by Russians, many of them Russian passport-holders. The Ukrainian forces were within striking range of their capital cities and (as recently obtained official documents prove) were planning an all-out attack on them. That would have been an act of genocide which Russia would have had no choice but to try to stop.
Since the Ukrainian regime does not dare to do anything major without first receiving an "all clear" signal from Washington, this attack would have been on strategy with Washington's goals, which, perfectly clearly, were to mire Russia in a Ukrainian civil war. This war would in turn provide the rationale for international isolation which would crush Russia's economy and force it to once again provide its natural resources to the West for almost nothing. Were this plan to fail, the West would collapse.
The way it looks now, this plan is failing. I will return to this subject in a little while; by then the situation will have become clearer to a few more people. As people go through the inevitable denial-anger-bargaining sequence, it is best to hang back until the bargaining part is reached; only then does reasoned discussion become possible.
While the Ukrainian regime was frustrated in its efforts to join NATO by the fact that it does not control its own territory, it in fact surrendered the Ukraine to NATO forces, allowing NATO to order its military around and turning itself over to NATO's use, thus bringing NATO within striking range of Moscow and driving NATO's expansion east along the same route used by previous Western invaders—Napoleon and Hitler. Thus, the Ukrainian regime blithely trod across a very well established Russian red line that was guaranteed to trigger a military response. Given the vast disproportion in military strength, this was a delusional, suicidal move.
To top all of this off, at the Munich security conference held this February the (former?) Ukrainian president Zelensky professed his desire to develop nuclear weapons with which to attack Russia. Note that the Ukraine had sufficient nuclear materials, technologies and knowhow, inherited from the USSR, to rush through such a development program, especially if with US help. Although this would directly violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ("non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclearweapons"), he did not get any pushback from the assorted Western luminaries assembled there. Thus the Ukrainian regime thus did everything necessary to fashion itself into an immediate existential threat to Russia, sealing its fate.
The Russian response, nicknamed "Operation Z" from the letter "Z" painted on Russian armor involved in it, has two objectives: demilitarization and denazification. The demilitarization part is simple: completely destroy the Ukraine's military capability (much of it inherited from the USSR) and refashion it into a militarily neutral confederation of semi-sovereign statelets, its security provided for by Russia. Just as everyone should have expected, the conscription-based Ukrainian military, armed with well-worn Soviet-era weaponry, with its morale somewhere down around its ankles, proved no match to the fully modernized and rearmed Russian military and is being systematically destroyed, with the surrendering soldiers being fed, bandaged up and sent home.
Thus, the demilitarization is going swimmingly and as of this writing what's left of the Ukrainian regime no longer poses a military threat to anyone except its own population, which is still being terrorized by Ukrainian Nazis. And that brings us to Part II: Denazification, which is much more complicated and requires a more thorough explanation. Many people are currently scratching their heads, trying to imagine what it could possibly be, and I am happy to be able to offer an explanation.
* * *
Some day, after the embers have cooled, I might offer a more thorough ethnographic analysis of the Ukrainian Nazi phenomenon. For now, here is a short description. A part of the Russian population was stuck behind various enemy lines for three long centuries in what is now Western Ukraine. Disconnected and cast adrift, badly mistreated by its new colonial masters, this population steadily degenerated. It was not helped by widespread idiocy caused by iodine deficiency: the soils of the region lack the iodine necessary for normal human development. It was largely illiterate and its language drifted away from mainstream Russian and formed a separate set of often mutually incomprehensible village dialects. Then, in 1818, Alexei Sosnovsky formalized his native Sumy Region dialect in a book he published in St. Petersburg, titled "A Grammar of a Little Russian Dialect." It was as much a description as a concoction (I could write "A Grammar of a Western Virginian Dialect" if somebody paid me enough) but it was then used to make largely spurious claims about a separate Ukrainian national identity. And the only reason this national identity took shape was because of unceasing efforts by Western powers to cleave this region away from Russia for geopolitical reasons.
Thus we had a ne'er-do-well population that was used to being discriminated against, despised and excluded by every occupying power they came into contact with, permanently angry at the world and hell-bent on revenge but perpetually too weak and disorganized to carry it out. And then came their finest hour when Hitler's legions rolled in. The Ukrainian nationalists swiftly fashioned themselves into Hitler's little helpers and carried out a series atrocities against their neighbors—the Poles and the Jews especially—that shocked even the German Nazis. They would cut women's breasts off and salt the wounds; they would cut people's bellies open and stuff them full of pig feed, then let ravenous pigs feast on their entrails; they would nail children's tongues to tabletops and let them dangle—all to hoots of delight from their fellow-villagers whose wretched, twisted dreams of bloody revenge had finally come true.
And then the Red Army rolled in and their orgy of hate ended ignominiously. But it didn't end completely. Within the USSR, Ukrainian nationalism was driven underground but never quite extinguished. Meanwhile, the US and the Canadians took in, coddled and nurtured some of the worst Nazi war criminals, bringing up several generations of Ukrainian nationalists who have been conditioned and brainwashed to glorify in murder and mayhem, fetishize Nazi symbols and unify around their hatred of all things Russian. After the Ukraine gained its independence from the USSR three decades ago, these trained Nazi cadres were reintroduced into Ukrainian society, promoted with lavish grants of money, given steadfast political support, and now form the core of the (former?) Ukrainian regime. Their power swelled drastically after the violent coup of 2014 and for the past 8 years they have been able to terrorize and brainwash the entire Ukrainian population, most of which can be characterized as almost but not exactly Russian.
This point requires some elaboration as well. According to Putin's hardheaded belief, the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people. There is plenty of evidence to back up this claim. The linguistic barrier is nonexistent: the vast majority of Ukrainians speak better Russian than Ukrainian (which most of them have learned to fake as a matter of political expediency) and within a single generation they become indistinguishable from other Russians. Culturally, there is a great deal of unity, with all the same Russian and/or Ukrainian pop stars touring both Russia and the Ukraine and with the uniquely Ukrainian cultural elements limited to ethnic outfits, elements of cuisine and a few poems and folk songs. But when it comes to what the Russians call "cultural code" there is something vital that the Ukrainians are missing: the key element of "all for one and one for all" that is an essential element of the Russian psyche.
This lack is easily explained: while for the Russians their unity has paved their path to greatness, for the Ukrainians unity has not had any benefits at all—except, of course, for unity with Russia. While unified with Russia, the Ukraine became the most prosperous and industrialized country in Europe, producing such high-tech items as jet aircraft, rocket engines, large marine diesels, helicopter engines and much else. While unified with itself the Ukraine steadily degenerated into a deindustrialized, rapidly depopulating, decrepit, violent, criminalized shadow of its former self. This lack of internal unity is pernicious and works fractally throughout society: Ukrainian regions are loathe to work together toward a common purpose; even Donetsk and Lugansk, facing a unified enemy, refused to unify politically. Ukrainian neighbors don't particularly trust or help each other. There is no known method for reversing this trend toward social disunity and dissolution. The Ukrainians can easily be absorbed by Russia, but only as individuals and families!
And that brings us up to date. Right now, streams of Ukrainian refugees are flowing both to Russia and to the European Union. The Ukrainian military has been largely destroyed already and the rest of it should be finished within days. Surrendering Ukrainian conscripts are being fed and sent home. But then there are the Nazis. Some number of what Donald Rumsfeld would have called "dead-enders" are massed on the border of the Donbass, still sporadically shelling residential districts as they have been doing for 8 years (old habits die hard) while bleeding out themselves under Russian fire. When it comes to the Nazis, the Russians do not take prisoners, and so they fire back until the ammo runs out, then drop their weapons and try to run away. Some more dead-enders are holed up within cities and towns, which the Russian troops surround but mostly leave alone to avoid harming civilians. The Russian troops try to organize evacuations, which the dead-enders do their best to thwart. To keep things interesting, the Nazis stage sporadic provocations, then blame them on the Russians, and Western press serves these up with great gusto as a distraction from their own dismal news. This situation can persist for quite some time but it cannot go on forever. Over time, more and more civilians will dodge Nazi bullets to make it to the Russian side while the Nazis bleed out, run off or go into hiding. And then there will be peace.
Which brings us to denazification: how will that go. There are three phases; two of them are taking place right now, and one will take place once peace is established on the entire territory of the former Ukraine. Phase 1 is to physically kill the Nazis; the Russian military is taking care of that, with hundreds of dead Nazis accumulating daily. Phase 2 is to have the Nazis run off to the European Union: if they like their Nazis, they can have their Nazis. It would be a supreme irony if it ends up that Germany is forced to organize concentration camps for Nazis and to herd all of these loose Ukrainian war criminals into them.
And then there is Phase 3: taking care of those Nazis, near-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers and various assorted criminal types who stay and go into hiding, trying to blend in with the civilian population. Well, the civilian population is sure to remember who held them hostage and tortured them while the Russians tried to organize humanitarian corridors for them to escape or to deliver humanitarian aid to keep them fed! All that's needed will be to offer a financial reward to anyone who reports them. In many cases that won't even be needed: we live in the age of Big Data and the Russians are recording every phone call and every text message. All the Nazis have been pinned down to a location, voice-printed and their photos have been fed into face recognition software. Quoting George W. Bush, "they can run, but they can't hide."
For now, I will let the topic of the former Ukraine sit in the Russian oven until it is fully baked. Then it will need to sit on the window sill until it has cooled and is ready to carve up and serve. Until then I will switch to topics I find more interesting and vital, such as structural (non-monetary) inflation, why half the world is unified with Russia, and what are the new, stupendous reasons for Russia to be very grateful to the West. I'll start on these starting next week.
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