"24 Things That I Think That I Think About How The War In Ukraine Is Going"

"24 Things That I Think That I Think 

About How The War In Ukraine Is Going"

by Michael Snyder

"What we are watching happen in Ukraine should deeply sadden all of us, because it didn’t have to happen. It should have been so easy for global leaders to sit down and come up with a plan that would have satisfied everybody, but it is too late for that at this point. Now that Ukraine has been invaded, there is no turning back. The world will never be the same after this, and everybody around the planet should be crying out for peace. Because now that World War 3 has begun, all of us are in danger. If nuclear missiles start flying back and forth, hundreds of millions of people will end up dead.

I have been voraciously following coverage of the war in Ukraine, and both sides are definitely trying to make themselves look as good as possible. As a result, social media and major news outlets are being flooded with photos and videos that are supposedly from the war. In some cases they are accurate, but in other cases they are not. In fact, some of the most viral material has already been proven to be completely fake, and you need to be careful because in many instances viral videos are actually being used to raise money for fake charities.

With so much fraudulent propaganda being pumped out, it can be difficult to separate truth from fiction. With that being said, the following are 24 things that I think that I think about how the war in Ukraine is going…

#1 Russia has captured more territory every single day of the war so far. Everyone pretty much agrees on that. But everyone also pretty much agrees that the Russians are moving much slower than Vladimir Putin would like.

#2 I think that Putin believed that taking Ukraine would be a fairly easy task. Unfortunately for him, that has proven not to be true.

#3 If Putin knew how difficult the war would be, I don’t think that he would have been so eager to pull the trigger.

#4 But Putin can’t turn back now, because that would represent an absolutely humiliating defeat and it would mean accepting Ukraine as a member of NATO and having NATO missiles on Ukrainian soil from this point forward.

#5 Initially, the Russians were trying to conduct the war in a way that minimized civilian casualties, because they wanted to try to win over the hearts and minds of Ukrainian citizens. Needless to say, that isn’t going to happen.

#6 Many of the major cities in Ukraine have either been totally encircled or are in the process of being totally encircled. Even without using nuclear weapons, the Russians could completely flatten every one of those cities using conventional weapons. But the Russians don’t want to kill millions of civilians, and so they will essentially be laying siege to these areas until they eventually fall.

#7 As the war goes on, I think that Ukrainian forces will be squeezed into tighter and tighter pockets that are completely cut off from one another. In many cases, Ukrainian forces will find themselves totally surrounded in core urban areas. If they do not surrender, the Russians will just keep hammering them day after day with targeted strikes.

#8 It appears that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is either extremely courageous or he is flat out lying to us. If he is still in Ukraine, and that is a big if, then I have to applaud his courage and bravery. So many others would have fled in the face of a Russian invasion, but if he has chosen to stay and fight then his people are right to regard him as a hero. But if he has already left Ukraine and is just acting as if he has stayed behind to fight, then that is the opposite of courage.

#9 It is odd that the Russians haven’t been able to find Zelensky yet, because they have definitely been hunting for him.

#10 Zelensky is trying really hard to drag western powers into the war. He is begging Joe Biden to establish a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, but Biden understands that this would mean direct military conflict with the Russians.

#11 The EU has announced that they will be providing fighter jets to Ukraine. This is an extremely dangerous thing to do, because Putin has warned that those that provide military equipment to Ukraine will be targeted.

#12 I don’t know why the EU believes that fighter jets will make much of a difference, because most of the military airfields under Ukraine’s control have already been destroyed.

#13 The entire world was shocked when Putin put his strategic nuclear forces on alert over the weekend. Putin definitely escalated things dramatically by making this move, but hopefully it will get people to understand that we really could end up with a nuclear war at the end of all this.

#14 Now that western powers have weaponized SWIFT, I think that there will be a mass exodus to China’s version. Most people have not even heard of CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) until now, but this crisis is going to make it a lot more prominent.

#15 I would love it if the “peace talks” between Russia and Ukraine brought an end to the shooting. Unfortunately, to me it appears that Ukraine is simply using those talks as a stalling tactic. Zelensky still seems to think that western powers can be dragged into the conflict, and so he is trying to buy as much time as possible.

#16 When Zelensky signed an application for Ukraine to become a member of the European Union on Monday, that was another clear sign that he has no intention of turning Ukraine into a “neutral country” like the Russians are demanding.

#17 If Zelensky cannot get anyone to come help Ukraine, he will lose this war.

#18 But even if Russia wins the battle for Ukraine, it will be considered a pariah state from now on, and being cut off from the west will be very painful.

#19 I think that Richard Moore, the chief of MI6, certainly revealed a lot when he tweeted this… “With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights. So let’s resume our series of tweets to mark #LGBTHM2022.”

#20 One member of the Ukrainian Parliament has her own spin on what this war is really all about, and it is definitely raising a lot of eyebrows.

#21 I think that this war is going to make the global energy crisis much worse.

#22 I think that this war is going to make the global food crisis much worse.

#23 I think that the things that western powers are doing to punish Russia will really hurt the Russians.

#24 But I also think that the Russians have more than 1,000 different ways of hurting us without even using nukes.

Even if a ceasefire in Ukraine is announced tomorrow, the U.S. and Russia will be bitter enemies from this point forward because of everything that has transpired. There will never be peace between our two nations again, and that makes me very sad. I don’t consider the Russian people to be my enemies, and I know that most of them do not consider the American people to be their enemies. But our two governments absolutely hate one another, and now we have stumbled into a war that almost all of us did not want.

If our leaders continue to behave irrationally, will we eventually see nuclear weapons get used? Vladimir Putin essentially threatened to use them when he put his nuclear forces on alert over the weekend. And day after day, U.S. and EU officials just continue to escalate matters.

What we really need right now are leaders with cool heads that are determined to find a way out of this mess. Because if a way out cannot be found, the consequences will be unimaginable for all of us."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"The US, EU and Nato Just Committed Suicide"

"The US, EU and Nato Just Committed Suicide"

by Bob Moriarty

"Power is something that very few people understand. Certainly none of the ignorant and corrupt fools at the helm of the US government, the EU and Nato understand it. I’m going to ask my readers to learn to think for themselves on a vital issue. I will ask a simple question and I want you to reflect on the answer. Don’t worry about being wrong; no one I have ever asked has gotten it dead right.

What is unlimited power? If someone gave you an envelope with a slip of paper in it that reflected unlimited power, just what would that document say? What is unlimited power? Since I know and you don’t, I’ll clue you in. Unlimited power is the ability to pull a gun out of your holster, walk up to someone and shoot them in the head with no consequences. Of course there are lots of variations on the same concept but it is the ability to kill someone who has done nothing to you and not pay a price.

We actually have a small group of people that we can identify that have unlimited power and use it all the time. They are young; stupid enough to not have fear and believe killing people who are not your enemy is a great idea. We call them the military and train them to kill on command.

I was an F-4B pilot in Vietnam and could casually kill people from thousands of feet and basically feel nothing. I grew up watching John Wayne war movies. Being a Marine fighter pilot was the ultimate wet dream for a young man. Alas, the Marines had little in the way of fighter missions in Vietnam. The Air Force and Navy had all the air-to-air missions. Actually being a Marine F-4 pilot wasn’t very dangerous, my squadron, VMFA-542 lost a single aircraft in a tour of a year and the plane’s own ordinance shot the plane down.

So everyone wanted to be a fighter pilot and you couldn’t stay in the squadron for your full thirteen months. My CO wanted to transfer me to the grunts as a ground Forward Air Controller but the whole reason I became a pilot was to avoid walking around on the ground carrying a rifle and sleeping on dirt. So I got transferred into the O-1 Birddog in Quang Tri. The Marines had about ten airplanes and while I was there for seven months I was the maintenance test pilot, the training office and was flying 1-3 combat missions a day.

Readers need to understand this. In any war about 90% of the people fighting on our side are never in any risk. The grunts have the most killed and injured then the chopper pilots. I was not a Remington Raider fighting a war with a typewriter, I wasn’t a supply clerk, and I wasn’t even a cannon cocker. I was a warrior and the cutting edge of the sword.

The Marine Corps had the only Airborne FACs in the war that had all been fixed wing pilots in A-4s, F-4s and A-6s before going to Birddogs. When I flew my little single engine high wing Cessna aircraft into battle, I owned the entire battlefield. I talked to the grunts that only called us when they were in trouble. I talked to the chopper drivers who took them in and out, I controlled arty and air strikes. I made the decision as to who lived and who died on every mission I flew. There were over seven hundred total, that was a record. I had unlimited power and used it.

There is a basic problem with power, even unlimited power. I learned that in Vietnam. As a FAC, I covered chopper inserts into LZs that we wanted to control. We might have a Marine company loaded into a dozen or so CH-46s. The Birddog pilots would carpet-bomb the LZ in advance, and then provide fixed wing and gunship support as the CH-46s landed. One or two would always get shot down. The Marines would take the hill and for the next month or so send out patrols to where the NVA were suspected of hiding.

Over that month ten or twenty Marines would die and a bunch more would be injured. Then we would bring the CH-46s in to pick up the Marine company and bring them back to the Dong Ha combat base. These were always considered to be great victories on our part. The Division would report to Westmoreland about how many NVA were killed and so many weapons captured. Of course as soon as the Marines left the NVA marched right back in and took over the Marine bunkers and fighting position.

Then a month later we would repeat the exercise in every detail. Same hill, same Marine company, same number of choppers shot down and Marines killed. Do that three or four times and you begin to realize how the whole war was fake and nothing but a series of lies.

Even unlimited power has limits. Trudeau and Freeland discovered that a week ago. Trudeau has been lying about the nature of the protests for weeks and between dumb and dumber they thought they could get away with invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time in history. And it is interesting that they believed that a protest from ordinary Canadian citizens wanting nothing more than a dozen or fifteen other countries have determined was perfectly reasonable.

So Freeland told the banks to start seizing the bank accounts of Canadians who had donated funds to what was a perfectly legal and peaceful protest. People who had donated as little as $50 had their entire bank accounts seized and no legal way to challenge the theft.

Remember when I said that even unlimited power has limits? When the banks started locking down accounts, everyone who had ever contributed a cent to the protestors went down to the bank and demanded their money back. All banks have a simple business model. They borrow short and lend long.

If the best run and most financed bank in the world has a bank run, they close the doors. Well, the entire banking system in Canada froze and the real reason Trudeau and Freeland did a 180 degree turn overnight was because they were told by the banks that unless Trudeau wanted to kill the entire economy of Canada, they had to cut out the stupid sh*t.

While Putin has been made out to be the villain in the latest stupidity on the part of Nato and the US, if Russia is a swamp, Ukraine is a cesspool of corruption and bribes and operates as a sock puppet for the Big Guy who is happy as long as he gets his 10% cut.

Putin demanded two things. One was the US/Nato honor the written agreement they made thirty years ago. Putin doesn’t want nuclear weapons on his neighbor’s front porch. JFK wanted the same thing in 1962 and that certainly seems reasonable to me. And two, he wanted Ukraine to honor their written agreement that they would talk with the breakaway republics directly in accordance with the Minsk II agreement they signed in 2016. If the US/Nato and Ukraine didn’t honor what they agreed to in writing and Ukraine continued to shell Donbass, he would attack Ukraine.

The reason the entire world has their panties in a wad is that a world leader said he was going to do something and then he did it. The US/Nato, the EU, Japan, even Finland couldn’t come to grips with the concept of a leader doing exactly what he said he was going to do.

The constant barrage of pure propaganda is trying to convince the world that Putin is evil because he wants a secure border. Given that Biden thinks that you don’t need borders any longer it is easy to see why Americans are so clueless. But will someone tell me how the Swiss think that having a secure border is a dangerous idea?

A dangerous idea that easily could start a nuclear war would be the act of war of invoking total sanctions on Russia. For a simple practical reason. When you fire a weapon, any weapon, there is blowback. Russia supplies 9% of the world’s oil and a massive amount of the natural gas for Europe. If Germany can’t get Russian gas or oil because of sanctions or tossing Russia out of the SWIFT banking system you might as well close most of your economy down. Can Europeans really afford $200 a barrel oil because if they can’t pay for Russian fuel, that’s what it is going to cost. Food prices will go through the roof because Russia also supplies much of the fertilizer to the world. American farmers are already feeling the pinch. Inflation is about to go into overdrive.

Putin wants secure borders. Personally I’d f**king give it to him. The US/Nato started this war. And frankly the smartest national leader America has today is dumber than a box of rocks. When the war ends, I sincerely hope that those responsible face war crimes trials.

And by the way, Putin has said that if the SWIFT system is cutoff to Russia, it would be an act of war and he would respond. He has nuclear missiles and hypersonic missiles on the rails. You never know with that f**ker, he might just do exactly what he said he would do.

This is the most important turning point in Western History. It would be a great time for some leaders to stand up and be counted. Putin isn’t the enemy."

- http://www.321gold.com/

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Related, highly recommended:

"From the Black Sea to the East Med, Don't Poke the Russian Bear"

"World War III Beginning Stages Now"

"World War III Beginning Stages Now"

by Martin Armstrong

"I have been warning the West should not mess with Putin. It is so obvious that the West has made the same fatal mistake as that of Rome. It has weakened its economy with COVID and it is so obsessed with trying to force Russia and China to comply with their Climate Change directives set out by the UN, that they have lost sight of the fact that there is no qualified leadership in any of the major countries and they have weakened their entire military establishment demanding vaccines or you are out.

Even during the debate between Biden and Trump, he actually admitted he would stop Fracking on Federal Land, and said he was going to end the oil industry in addition to joining the UN’s Paris accord “to force China to comply” which confirms everything I have been getting from sources that the Globalists needed to remove Trump to use American power against China and Russia. Now here we are and make no mistake about it – this is all for climate change.

If there was ever a PERFECT time for World War III – this is it.

I have been warning that if China and Russia combined, the West will be defeated. Reliable sources have confirmed that China has entered into a “friendly” relationship with North Korea for mutual benefit. North Korea has one of the largest armies since 2018, it stands at 1,469,000.00. North Korea has been also demonized by the West so they too have a grudge match that has never been settled. With rising shortages of food, the North has never been the breadbasket of Korea and that also provides an incentive to join a triumvirate against the West with Russia and China. Cyclically, North Korea could even start its aggression by January 2023 at the latest.

Additionally, Putin has just dramatically just upped the stakes ordering Russian nuclear deterrent forces put on high alert today because of the boasting of the West and the “aggressive statements” by leading NATO powers. Lost in all of this is the fact that Putin has also made a direct threat to Europe that if Sweden and Finland join NATO there will be “detrimental military and political consequences.” Sweden has closed its air space to all Russian flights.

Putin is playing chess while the rest of the world was playing checkers. When America wages war, they seek to destroy all the infrastructure, take down the power grid, and destroy the water supply. US troops then move in as more of a mop-up operation. The West is judging Putin by the same way the US wages war and they are so wrong. Putin is not using that strategy of a video game for he wants to take Ukraine intact for it also has the richest land in the world for food production – hence Stalin stole all the food and killed 7 million by starvation.

Putin is NOT backing away from resistance, he is encircling it the classic way war is traditionally fought – you laid “siege” to the city by surrounding it, and starvation forces their surrender. That often takes time, but you then have the city and the people. You do not raze it to the ground and kill everyone. Anyone who has studied ancient war strategies should see what Putin is doing and the Western press is either deliberately putting out propaganda, or they are complete idiots.

Putin seeks to install a new government with minimal casualties to civilians. Every dead civilian creates a blood enemy of their survivors. But the US way means it then costs billions in aid to rebuild what they destroyed – i.e. Iraq. Putin is NOT using that strategy and the Western press is judging him by American standards of destroying everything and winning in a few days.

Putin is not seeking to destroy the Ukrainian Army. He wants to capture it and once a new government is installed, they will then become allies. This is the very strategy of Alexander the Great. He conquered the known world, but those who were once his enemy joined his army. In Babylon, he defeated Darius III but he left the infrastructure intact and he installed Persian satraps (governors) who poured what would have been Darius’s taxes into Alexander’s coffers. This is the strategy of Putin – not to obliterate his enemy and then pour billions in to restore it. Putin has wiped out the air force and owns the skies over Ukraine. He could annihilate the country in less than 3 days, but he is not doing that to the West’s befuddlement.

Moreover, the real concern is that Putin has NOT sent in his hard-core troops. Only about 30% of the troops on the border were sent into Ukraine. The majority of the troops are there to take Europe if they are foolish enough to walk into this mess. Putin is obviously playing chess and he is very good at it while Biden has to change his diapers. Putin’s reputation until this moment has always been as a shrewd ex-KGB man. He understood the Obama game of putting a pipeline through Syria to cut off Russian gas to Europe. He moved decisively into Syria and then escalated forces there shutting down Obama’s strategy. Assad refused it and this has been the entire pretend reason why the Obama Administration wanted to invade Syria. The reason for the refusal was to protect the interests of Assad’s long-time ally, Russia, which is Europe’s biggest natural gas supplier based upon all the data.

Clearly, Obama had targeted Russia from the outset. There was a meeting between Obama and Putin at the United Nations where Putin tried to get Obama to side with Syria against ISIS. Obama rejected the proposal. So when Russian forces entered Syria on the ECM turning point to the day, it was an ominous event. Russia was not only backing the Assad regime, but it was also backing the Iranian pipeline.

However, Ukraine has also been used as a pawn against Putin just as NATO has constantly moved eastward ever closer to Russia. Kyiv has been so corrupt that few are willing to blame anyone other than Putin. Ukraine has failed as a pawn and despite promises the US would support it, it did not send military troops. More broadly, the use of Ukraine has been at the expense of the European security architecture that America spent 75 years building and maintaining. Why do you think Putin has now put his defensive nukes on standby?

Zelensky has been handing our AK47s to civilians. Zelensky is telling residents to make Molotov cocktails and firebombs to help fight back in Kyiv as Russian forces close in on the capital city. This is insane and he clearly wants to use dead civilians for dramatic footage. This is outrageous for civilians who are not trained with such weapons and would then be easily killed by professional soldiers. Putin is fully aware of what Zelensky is doing and he somehow hopes that dramatic footage will force Europe and America to send in troops.

Additionally, Zelensky has done what Saddam Hussein was doing. Putting heavy weapons surrounded by civilians. This is also intended to ensure that as many civilians are killed once more to paint the Russians as evil. Putin knows this and so far he has adopted the siege strategy. The internet is NOT down in Ukraine. We have people there and I personally have friends in Kyiv.

So while the Western Press is demonizing Putun and Russians, they are indeed just playing checkers and are not opening their eyes. Just as Sparta attacked Athens and turned to the Great enemy Persia for support, Putin has the backing of China and nobody seems to be bothered by the sudden turn of China to embrace North Korea. Hello! Our press is so corrupt that they cannot see past their nose. There is something much larger in play here and they better wake up."

-https://www.armstrongeconomics.com

“The Fourteenth Book..."

“The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can A Thoughtful Man Hope For Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

"The Next Empire"

"The Next Empire"

by Jeff Thomas

"Throughout history, political, financial, and military leaders have sought to create empires. Westerners often think of ancient Rome as the first empire. Later, other empires formed for a time. Spain became an empire, courtesy of its Armada, its conquest of the New World, and the gold and silver extracted from the West. Great Britain owned the 19th century but lost its empire due largely to costly wars. The US took over in the 20th century and, like Rome, rose as a republic, with minimal central control, but is now crumbling under its own governmental weight.

Invariably, the last people to understand the collapse of an empire are those who live within it. As a British subject, I remember my younger years, when, even though the British Empire was well and truly over, many of my fellow Brits were still behaving in a pompous manner as though British "superiority" still existed. Not so, today. (You can only pretend for so long.)

But this does suggest that those who live within the present empire - the US - will be the last to truly understand that the game is all but over. Americans seem to be hopeful that the dramatic decline is a temporary setback from which they will rebound. Not likely. Historically, once an empire has been shot from its perch, it’s replaced by a rising power - one that’s more productive and more forward thinking in every way. Yet the US is hanging on tenaciously, and like any dying empire, its leaders are becoming increasingly ruthless, both at home and abroad, hoping to keep up appearances.

Warfare is often the death knell of a declining empire - both in its extreme financial cost and in its ability to alienate the peoples of other countries. In the new millennium, the US has invaded more countries than at any other time in its history and appears now to be in a state of perpetual warfare. This is being carried out both militarily and economically, as the US imposes economic sanctions on those it seeks to conquer. This effort has become so threatening to the world that other major powers, even if they do not have a history of being allies, are now coming together to counter the US.

The US is encouraged in its effort by an unnatural alliance between the countries of Europe. Although Europe is made up of many small countries, often with dramatically differing cultures, who have bickered with each other for centuries, the European Union has cobbled them together into an ill-conceived "United States of Europe."

Although the relatively new EU is already clearly stumbling and is on the verge of fragmenting, their leaders are desperately attempting to hold the unlikely alliance together with the help of the US. Meanwhile, the other major powers of the world are going full steam ahead to ensure that, when the US and EU reach their Waterloo, the rest of the world will carry on independently of the dying empire.

They are not merely waiting along the sidelines for the collapse to come, awaiting their turn at the top of the pecking-order. They are actively preparing their position to, as seamlessly as possible, take the baton at a run.

The End of Dollar Hegemony: Since the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the US dollar has reigned supreme as the world’s default currency. In 1944, the US held more gold than any other country, but in 1971, the US went off the gold standard, and since then, the dollar has been a fiat currency. The US has become increasingly cavalier in its abuse of the dollar—often at the expense of other countries.

Russia and China dealt with the latest round of strong-arm tactics by the US to adhere to the petrodollar by creating the largest energy agreement in history. This and all trade between the two countries will be settled in the ruble and the yuan. Russia has since been active in creating agreements with other fuel customers, also bypassing the petrodollar.

In creating these agreements, the Asian powers have unofficially announced the demise of the petrodollar. For decades, the US has applied its muscle to other countries, using the petrodollar. So, the Sino-Russian agreement stands, not only to end the petrodollar monopoly, but to create a decline in US power over the world, generally.

A New SWIFT System: Presently, the vast majority of economic transfers in the world pass through the SWIFT system, located in Brussels but controlled by the US. In recent years, the US has barred, or threatened to bar, other countries from the SWIFT system, effectively making it impossible for banks to transfer money and, by extension, causing the collapse of their banking systems. Russia has responded by creating its own SWIFT system. It’s entirely likely that, if Russian trading partners, such as Iran, are barred from the use of the Brussels SWIFT (or even threatened to be barred), Russia would extend the use of its SWFT to them.

The creation of a second worldwide SWIFT would effectively remove the SWIFT threat from the US bag of tricks as an economic weapon. As long as Russia provides an effective money transfer service and does it without the intimidation that the US employs, it’s predictable that other countries would flock to the new system, in preference to SWIFT. Once other countries are fully on board, the US would have no choice but to interface with the new system or lose trade with those countries.

A New Central Bank: In recent decades, China and Russia have been expanding their economic powers dramatically and have periodically complained that their seats at the IMF table are unrealistically low, considering their importance to world trade. In 2014, China officially replaced the US as the world’s largest economy, yet the IMF has consistently sought to minimize China’s place at the table.

It would seem that the West believes that it’s holding all the cards and that the Chinese and other powers must accept a poor-sister position, if they are to be allowed to sit at the IMF table at all. The West somehow does not seem to recognize that, if frozen out, the other powers have the ability to create alternatives. As with the SWIFT system, the Asian powers have reacted to US overreach, not by going away licking their wounds, but by creating a second IMF.

The Russian State Duma (the lower house of the Russian legislature) have now created the New Development Bank. It will have a $100 billion pool, to be used for the BRICS countries. Its five members will contribute equally to its funding. It will be centered in Shanghai, India will serve as the first five-year rotating president, and the first chairman of the board of directors will come from Brazil. The first chairman of the board of governors is likely to be Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. It’s therefore structured to be truly multinational. In creating all of the above entities, the BRICS will, in effect, have created a complete second economic world.

In the latter days of the British Empire, we Brits seemed to be under the illusion that, even as our power base crumbled, we might somehow retain control by threats and bluster. The UK was utterly wrong in this and only succeeded in alienating trading partners, colonies, and allies by doing so.

The same is happening again today. China, Russia, and the rest of the world, when faced with American threats and bluster, will not simply fold their tents and accept that the US must be obeyed. They will, instead, create alternatives. And they are doing so exceedingly well and quickly. At this point, the overreach of the US is not only enabling other powers to rise, it is forcing their hand to literally create the next full-blown empire."

- internationalman.com

"When..."

“When did the future switch from 

being a promise to being a threat?”

- Chuck Palahniuk

Must Watch! Tucker Carlson, “This Is Moral Blackmail"

Full screen recommended.

Tucker Carlson, “This Is Moral Blackmail"

"Russia Sanctions Sure To Create Painful & Unexpected Ripple Effects"

Full screen recommended.

Wealthion, "Russia Sanctions Sure To Create 

Painful & Unexpected Ripple Effects"

"Bank Run Sweeps Across Russia As Fears Of A Bank Meltdown Continue To Rise"

Full screen recommended.

"Bank Run Sweeps Across Russia As 

Fears Of A Bank Meltdown Continue To Rise"

by Epic Economist

"Bank runs are sparking panic in Russia as citizens fear that a banking system meltdown occurs. Sanctions from the West have tied the hands of Russia’s central bank, leaving the agency without any power to prevent a catastrophic run on the ruble and consequently lead to the crash of the currency. The U.S., the U.K., and Canada all imposed sweeping restrictions on the Russian central bank to impede the agency from deploying its nearly $630 billion in international reserves to mitigate the impact of other Western sanctions, which include blocking some private Russian banks from SWIFT – a system that allows thousands of global financial institutions to communicate and authorize payments.

The exclusion from SWIFT has shaken Russia’s financial markets, leaving international traders, domestic investors, and bank customers extremely worried about the potential of sudden currency debasement. As markets opened this morning, millions of people started to rush to local ATMs to withdraw their money before they lost access to their savings. Over the weekend, local reports described that people were queuing in huge lines in a desperate attempt to take their money out of the system, but there simply wasn’t enough cash to meet the demand.

Given that demand for dollars is spiking, on Friday some lenders were reportedly selling dollars for more than a third higher than the market’s closing, and well past the level of 100 rubles per dollar. Yesterday, Commercial bank Tinkoff announced an exchange rate of 164 to the dollar for ruble sellers, and 92 for buyers — a massive spread that suggests people’s savings in the Russian currency will effectively halve in value.

For now, the situation remains completely unstable, and further sanctions and restrictions on the central bank can only make conditions worse, said Alexandra Suslina, a budget specialist at the Moscow-based Economic Expert Group. Suslina added that even though authorities can expand the domestic money supply, considering the rise in bank activity and ATM withdrawals, many people won’t be able to get their money out. “No cash machine is designed for the lines that will appear at sanctioned banks in the coming days,” she continued.

With all things considered, it’s clear that the Russian currency has fallen into a death spiral: Rising inflation will encourage people with rubles to convert those rubles into dollars, gold, or any other asset with a more stable value, consequently pushing the value of the ruble even lower. Moreover, commodities also faced a bumpy start this week as investors struggled to evaluate the impact of the latest sanctions in the flows of energy, metals, and crops. But another worrying prospect that hasn’t received much attention just yet is what is going to happen to the Western financial system as a result of the sudden expulsion of Russia - and its billions of dollars - from the global monetary system.

Credit Suisse monetary guru Zoltan Pozsar highlighted that by sanctioning the Russian central bank and the transfer agents for Eurobonds, then Russia will default on all foreign debt immediately. And if Russia tries to find a back door through China, the U.S. government will likely fine or sanction Chinese banks, which in turn, would prompt Chinese authorities to halt exports headed to America, collapsing our domestic supply chains.

Furthermore, Pozsar cautions that "if things escalate, it’s hard not to see a direct impact on the U.S. dollar given Russia’s vast financial surpluses and where those surpluses are deployed”. Or as he sums up: it doesn’t matter who will go down first, everyone will go down either way. In essence, a freeze in banking activity can lead to billions in missed payments, and the inability to receive payments through SWIFT can freeze the flow of goods, services, and commodities like gas or neon, hitting U.S. businesses particularly hard.

And in a snap of fingers, the situation can turn for the worst on the Western side: Now more than ever, we should keep an eye on press releases from the Fed announcing either rate hikes or more liquidity injections. Regardless of what the next move will turn out to be, the outcome is going to be the same: roaring inflation. And when our currency starts to crash down just like the ruble, you can rest assured that bank runs will sweep across America and push financial markets down the abyss."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "The Debt Market Superbubble Just Went Into Hyperdrive And Beyond"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/28/22:

"The Debt Market Superbubble Just 

Went Into Hyperdrive And Beyond"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Biden Crossed a Red Line on Saturday"

"Biden Crossed a Red Line on Saturday"

by Jim Rickards

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its sixth day as talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegates took place in neighboring Belarus today. Ukraine has reportedly demanded an immediate ceasefire. There’s been no formal announcement yet. Either way, the U.S. and the West have escalated the sanctions regime against Russia. Joe Biden crossed a critical red line on Saturday, and the world will never be the same.

Biden and other Western powers agreed to kick certain Russian banks out of the SWIFT message system. This is like cutting off oxygen to someone in intensive care. What is SWIFT? SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Contrary to what you may hear, SWIFT is not a financial institution and it’s not a payment channel. It’s a message system.

But the messages are of the utmost importance. It’s how one major bank confirms to another major bank that a large payment is being made by specifying the sender, receiving bank, amount, currency, date and other details. Once the message is sent, the receiving bank becomes the legal owner of the amount in question. The actual payment may go through various payment systems such as Fedwire, but that’s mechanical. The SWIFT message is what sets the legally binding terms for both sides.

The Worst Liquidity Crisis Ever? The only major country that has been “deSWIFTed” in the recent past was Iran in 2011 and that was devastating to their economy. The Russian economy will slowly suffocate without access to SWIFT. Still, Biden went further. They not only kicked Russian commercial banks out of SWIFT, but also kicked the Central Bank of Russia out of the system except for certain transactions that may be approved on a case-by-case basis.

Here’s what Biden’s team of amateurs don’t understand. Every payment, every trade, has two sides. When you blow up one side (Russia) you also blow up the other side (world banking system). Linkages are dense and immensely scaled. For example, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warns that the ban would hinder Europeans’ ability to recover payments on nearly $30 billion in debt owed them by various Russian entities. This will spill over into a global liquidity crisis within days. Count on it. It could be the worst liquidity crisis ever.

Is that what Biden wants? He may get a global depression before he knows it. Be careful what you wish for. Here’s something else to consider: If you look at the memberships of the EU, NATO and the SWIFT executive committees there's a huge degree of overlap. Now that SWIFT has kicked out Russian banks, I'm not sure that Russia will care about legalistic distinctions. They'll see SWIFT as NATO. Then there’s the China question…

Will China Invade Taiwan? The Russian invasion of Ukraine has naturally led to speculation about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. What both invasions would have in common is a perception of weakness on the part of Joe Biden and the United States.

The way you deter war is through strength, not weakness. After the U.S. surrender and chaotic exit in Afghanistan, the world realized that Biden was weak and his team was incompetent. Putin and Russia raced to take advantage of that in Ukraine. Will Taiwan be next? My guess is probably not. Biden’s weakness may be something the two situations have in common, but there are critical differences.

Ukraine was a land invasion by Russia, which has a border with the target. Taiwan would be a massive amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Strait. China has no prior experience in amphibious warfare and such invasions are extremely difficult to execute. Just look at D-Day, Inchon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa if you want to see how difficult they are to plan, carry out and win. The U.S. does not have a formal treaty with Taiwan, but policymakers expect that the U.S. Seventh Fleet would intervene to at least slow any Chinese attack. And Taiwan has a far more capable and well-equipped military than Ukraine. That said, an invasion cannot be ruled out.

It’s All About the Semiconductors: The main economic impact would be in semiconductors. Taiwan is the largest single source of semiconductors in the world, including the most sophisticated chips of the 5-nanometer design. Taiwan is also working toward production of 3-nanometer chips. China would love to capture that technology and the fabrication plants that go with it, but they won’t. If an invasion began, Taiwan would destroy all of that capacity before the Chinese could get to it. If Taiwan didn’t, the U.S. would. This is why Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel are building multibillion-dollar fabrication plants in the U.S.

These will take several years to build, but when they’re done that new semiconductor capacity will be beyond the reach of the Chinese Communists. This bird will have flown. Still, there’s a global semiconductor shortage today even without a war. Rumors of a war in the Taiwan Strait will just make matters worse. But the good news is that an imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unlikely. Unfortunately, I have to conclude on an ominous note…

“Don’t Go There”: World War III may be a lot closer than you realize. I’ve studied nuclear war fighting since the 1960s, including major scholarly works such as "On Thermonuclear War" (1960) by Herman Kahn.

There’s a lot of learning on the topic, but all of the studies boil down to the same warning: Don’t go there. What this means is that nuclear war is not a place where anyone begins an attack and it’s not a place where anyone wants to end up. But it can happen anyway.

The process by which nuclear war happens is called escalation. Two nuclear powers start out with a grievance of some kind. The grievance may be played out using proxy powers such as Vietnam in the 1960s and Afghanistan in the 2000s. One side escalates the conflict by doing something unexpected or extreme. The other side does not stand still; they take an extreme retaliatory action. The first actor then retaliates to the retaliation and so on. Now we have a dynamic where two sides are climbing the escalation ladder.

“The Escalatory Dynamic Has Begun”: Again, it’s important to emphasize that neither side really wants a nuclear war, but once they start climbing the ladder, it’s hard to stop. Eventually one side pushes the other so far that the only response is to use nuclear weapons. At that point, you’re no longer just escalating; you’re at the brink of a nuclear launch. To make matters worse, the other side sensing that their opponent may go nuclear will be under pressure to go nuclear first in order to avoid being hit themselves. This then goes into another branch of theory involving first-strike, second-strike, counterforce and counter-value strategies, etc.

I don’t have to do a deep dive on these theories in order to make the point that a nuclear war doesn’t begin with a nuclear attack. It begins with small steps that spin out of control. To make the point about escalation, just two days after NATO activated its response force, Putin activated the Russian nuclear forces by putting them on full alert.

We haven’t seen the Western military response yet, but it would come as no surprise if the U.S. put their nuclear forces on high alert also. The escalatory dynamic has begun. We’ll see where it ends up. Smart citizens should prepare for the worst. Let’s pray it doesn’t happen."

- dailyreckoning.com

"Financial System Shutting Down As Bank Runs Escalate; Bank Insolvency Danger; Debt Default"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, PM 2/28/22:

"Financial System Shutting Down As Bank Runs Escalate; 

Bank Insolvency Danger; Debt Default"

Musical Interlude: Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Near the cluster center, roughly 250 million light-years away, is the cluster's dominant galaxy NGC 1275, seen above as a large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as gas and galaxies fall into it. The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies, also cataloged as Abell 426, is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster spanning over 15 degrees and containing over 1,000 galaxies. At the distance of NGC 1275, this view covers about 15 million light-years.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110712.html

The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "Sunset"

"Sunset"

"Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors

which it passes to a row of ancient trees.

You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,

one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,

not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,

not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing

that turns to a star each night and climbs –

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)

your own life, timid and standing high and growing,

so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

"It's Human Nature..."

“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something we usually do even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.”

- “Meredith Grey”, “Gray’s Anatomy”

If so, we've certainly got all we want...

"The Blame Game"

(Scenic view of sunflower field in Lviv, Ukraine.)

"The Blame Game"

by Bill Bonner

Youghal, Ireland - "It’s Putin’s fault. Shutdowns were necessary to save lives. Shutdowns caused supply chain disruptions. So, the Covid – a virus – caused today’s inflation; the feds are blameless. And last week, the Russians invaded Ukraine. So now we have another crisis. We have to keep printing money to fight the Russians and the supply chain disruptions.

Inflation? It’s Putin’s fault. Amy Bell at the Financial Times: "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered hopes of a strong global economic recovery from coronavirus, at least in the short term."

Another headline at the FT: "Ukraine conflict disrupts grain trade and provokes fears of global food shortages."

And here’s another: "Conflict Raises Possibility Of Stagflation"

When we left you on Friday morning, Russian troops were said to be advancing on Kyiv. The government there, headed by a Mr. Zelensky, was handing out guns – AK47s, with instructions to defend the capital. Surely, the Ukrainians were nervous. But there was nervousness all around. The Russian stock market lost a third of its value on Thursday. Lukoil CEO Vagit Alekperov lost $13 billion, according to Bloomberg’s handy billionaire index.

Incredible Claims: One of the problems with foreign policy is that it is too foreign. No one really knows what is going on at home, let alone abroad, especially not the ‘experts.’ Hillary Clinton, for example, was quick to seize the opportunity. The Russian invasion was a “state of emergency for democracy,” she said, and a time for “rebuilding our credibility.”

Uh oh. ‘Credibility’ is almost always cited just before a major foreign policy blunder. While she was Secretary of State, under Barack Obama, Ms. Clinton approved bombing raids on 7 different countries, largely because US ‘credibility was at stake.’

The emergency then was ‘terrorism.’ Ms. Clinton didn’t speak any of the many languages of the countries she bombed. Nor did she know their histories, cultures, religions, economies… or anything else. They are too ‘foreign.’ Any real knowledge would have caused her to think twice… to consider the ambiguities, the nuances. But the mob wanted blood. The foreigners made good ‘targets’… and they kept Ms. Clinton in the public eye – readying her for the election of 2016.

Like the Middle East, the situation in the Ukraine may not yield readily to simple-minded analysis by the patriotic masses or foreign policy ‘experts.’ There’s always more to the story. And they don’t want to know it. But what a marvelous opportunity to strut your stuff. Hillary is back in the news with her opinions. So are America’s retired generals, drawing on their experiences from America’s 20-year debacle in Afghanistan, where they repeated the Soviet Union’s mistakes.

Self-Harm Ahead: The Biden Administration, a light to the civilized world, expressed outrage on Thursday. And then it seemed to realize that Russia is the major source of strategic metals – such as titanium – on which much of modern industry relies. For their part, its European allies merely looked at their thermostats and hoped Russian gas would keep making its way into their furnaces and power plants.

Within hours, the emergency – like a snow squall – seemed to pass. The very next day the price of oil – thought to be most sensitive to the Russian menace – dropped… and prices for Russian stocks rose 45%. There was talk of a negotiated settlement. And on Friday, in the US, the Dow shot up more than 800 points.

This morning, the press reports that the Russian invasion seems to have ‘stalled.’ But the sanctions, including blocking Russian banks from the international money exchange system known as SWIFT, have gone ahead. Foreigners are now forbidden from trading in Russian equities. Russian assets are falling again. US stocks are headed down too. The US will probably not be harmed, in any plausible way, by what is going on in the Ukraine. But the war will give it plenty more opportunities to harm itself."

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

The Daily "Near You?"

Port-of-spain, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Thanks for stopping by!

"Courage..."

"Courage isn't having the strength to go on -

it is going on when you don't have strength."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

○

"The Countdown To Nuclear War Has Begun"

"The Countdown To Nuclear War Has Begun"

by Michael Snyder

“It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury 

of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands 

of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.” 

- Mikhail Gorbachev

"Way too many people out there are treating the war between Russia and Ukraine as a form of entertainment. Here in the western world, we like to make a game out of almost everything, but this isn’t a game. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it marked the start of World War 3, and it also initiated the countdown to nuclear war. What we should be rooting for is an end to the shooting in Ukraine and for governments on both sides of the conflict to do all they can to de-escalate the situation. But instead, each new day brings more escalations. For example, on Sunday EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced that EU nations would be providing fighter jets directly to the Ukrainian military…

European Union countries will soon send fighter jets to Ukraine at the Kyiv government’s request to help it counter the Russian air and land assault, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Sunday, according to the AFP news service. “We’re going to provide even fighting jets. We’re not talking about just ammunition. We are providing more important arms to go to a war,” Borrell said at a news conference.

This is the first time in history that the EU has ever done anything like this. And apparently it was supposed to happen very rapidly. In fact, one EU official said that some of these fighter jets would be flying in the skies of Ukraine “within the hour”… "The military transfer appeared imminent, according to Alexandre Krauss, a senior advisor to the EU Parliament. “Flying in #Ukraine skies within the hour,” Krauss tweeted at 3:38 p.m. ET, citing Borrell’s announcement."

I don’t know how those fighter jets are possibly going to do any good, because the Russians have already attacked and disabled all of the major military airfields held by Ukraine. In addition, a lot of Ukraine’s trained military pilots are already dead. So who is going to fly those fighters? Will European nations be supplying the pilots as well? If so, that would mean that Europeans would be engaged in direct conflict with the Russians, and that would be a massive escalation.

In any event, Vladimir Putin has pledged that anyone that supplies military equipment to Ukraine will be targeted. Is Putin bluffing. Maybe. But of course many had assumed that he was bluffing about invading Ukraine as well.

On Sunday, we also learned that Putin has now put his strategic nuclear arsenal on high alert… "In a dramatic escalation of East-West tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian nuclear deterrent forces put on alert Sunday in response to what he called “aggressive statements” by leading NATO powers.

The move means Putin has ordered Russia’s nuclear weapons prepared for increased readiness to launch, raising the threat that the tensions could boil over into a nuclear war. In giving it, the Russian leader also cited hard-hitting financial sanctions imposed by the West against Russia, including Putin himself."

Obviously, Putin did this to send a message to the U.S. and other western powers. But this is a massive escalation as well. Threatening to use nuclear weapons against somebody else is something that should not be done.

When she was asked about Putin’s move, this is how White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded… "White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to put Russia’s deterrence forces, which includes nuclear arms, on high alert are part of a wider pattern of unprovoked escalation and “manufactured threats” from the Kremlin.

“This is really a pattern that we’ve seen from President Putin through the course of this conflict, which is manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression — and the global community and the American people should look at it through that prism,” Psaki told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week.” Additionally, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday that Putin’s move was “yet another escalatory and totally unnecessary step,” a senior administration official said Sunday.

This is the closest that we have been to nuclear war in decades. (See also "Belarus Votes to Change Constitution & Deploy Nuclear Weapons") Did you ever imagine that we would be talking about such a thing in early 2022?

And just like the EU sending fighters to Ukraine, what Putin has just done is being called “unprecedented”… "Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington nonprofit group, said Putin’s action is a modern first. “This is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era,” Kimball said Sunday. “There has been no instance in which a U.S. or a Russian leader has raised the alert level of their nuclear forces in a middle of a crisis in order to try to coerce the other side’s behavior.”

It may be tempting to believe that Putin would never actually use such weapons, but a former U.S. ambassador to Russia is warning that we should be taking this very seriously…"Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia McFaul: “The people who know Putin the best - people I know in Russia - are worried about his recent nuclear statement. The people who know him the least are saying it’s cheap talk.”

At a moment like this, we need global leaders to act with cool heads. But every day both sides are making more alarming moves. Short of actually sending forces into Ukraine, western leaders are trying to think of everything that they can do to punish Russia, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko insists that this is “pushing Russia into a Third World War”…

‘Now there is a lot of talk against the banking sector, gas, oil, SWIFT,’ Lukashenko said. ‘It’s worse than war. This is pushing Russia into a Third World War. We need to be restrained here so as not to get into trouble. Because nuclear war is the end of everything.’ Sadly, Lukashenko is quite correct. We need to be very, very careful at this moment in history, because a nuclear war really would mean the end of the world as we know it.

In anticipation of such a scenario, FEMA has apparently issued some new guidelines. According to these new guidelines, if a nuclear explosion happens you should wear a mask and try to maintain social distancing… “A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning,” reads the page, which was updated on Friday. “Fallout is most dangerous in the first few hours after the detonation when it is giving off the highest levels of radiation. It takes time for fallout to arrive back to ground level, often more than 15 minutes for areas outside of the immediate blast damage zones.

FEMA recommends the following steps to prevent ‘significant radiation exposure,’ which include “Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household,” and “If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not part of your household.”

For years, I was mocked for repeatedly warning that we were on a road to war with Russia. Nobody is mocking anymore, because now a potential war with Russia is front page news. At this point, all of us should be doing all that we can to try to prevent this from becoming a nuclear conflict. Because if nuclear missiles start flying, hundreds of millions of people will die."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

“What Are The Facts?"

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

- Robert A. Heinlein

○

“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones.”

- Carl Sagan

○

And always remember...

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,

however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes"

Hey, who lied and told you any of this was easy?

"The World Economy Is A Very Unsafe Place - Several Bank Warnings"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly, 2/28/22:

"The World Economy Is A Very Unsafe Place - 

Several Bank Warnings"

"How It Really Is"

- https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Jim Kunstler, "Don’t Look Now"

"Don’t Look Now"

by Jim Kunstler

"Did “Joe Biden’s” handlers actually want to start World War Three? They are the same posse who contrived the Russian Collusion hysteria of 2016-19, then launched Covid-19 - and the even more deadly mass “vaccination” response to it - and have now successfully goaded Russia into cleaning up the international hub of grift and mischief known as Ukraine. One thing established for sure as fact: the “Joe Biden” family received plenty of cash off that grift wagon, and those “handlers” have neatly ring-fenced it from official scrutiny. Where does that leave the so-called president of the US in the current crisis?

The scant news coming out of Ukraine is so infected with propaganda that it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on there these early days of the Russian invasion. Some interested parties say that Russia is getting its ass kicked by a Ukrainian resistance. More temperate reports suggest that Russian forces are proceeding methodically to capture and neutralize Ukraine’s meager military assets. Apparently, Ukraine and Russia are holding a diplomatic parlay today at the Belarus border. You might style that as “peace talks,” but who knows? There are no real functioning international news agencies anymore.

The current CIA-approved narrative wants you to believe that Vlad Putin seeks to reassemble the old Soviet Union and will move next to capture the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. I doubt this since all those countries have their own cultures rather emphatically hostile to Russia and required onerous operating subsidies from Moscow back in the Soviet day. Ukraine will surely be enough of a burden for Russia going forward.

An alternate narrative to the CIA’s scare story would follow the Occam’s Razor rule that the simplest explanation is probably the truth - namely, that there was no other way to stop Ukraine’s shelling and mortar attacks against the ethnic Russian population in the Donbas which, by the way, was carried out with US-gifted armaments. And there was no other way to disabuse the USA from the idea that Ukraine should join NATO and thereby become a missile launching base on Russia’s border.

Western Civ’s response so far is to cut off its nose to spite its face. A sidebar to the CIA-approved narrative is that the West should shut-down Russia’s export economy in response to their action in Ukraine. Of course, the EU members know that they can’t take a pass on Russian oil and natgas, unless they want to eat cold bratwurst and linguini in the dark. But this reality hasn’t stopped the USA from militating for that. Likewise, shutting Russia out of the SWIFT money transfer system will only achieve chaos in global trade and international banking - but chaos is what you get with “Joe Biden’s” Party of Chaos running things.

These are the folks who worked tirelessly to drive America insane since 2016 and now they’re capping their “hat-trick” of mind-f**kery with the specter of World War Three. Notice how neatly their engineered mass formation psychosis segued from Trump/Russia to Covid-19 and now the threat of going nuclear over Ukraine. My theory of the case would be as follows: America’s Deep State provoked Russia in Ukraine to cover up its own massive crimes against American citizens which now verge on being fully exposed.

The timing on Ukraine couldn’t have been more seemingly fortuitous. America - indeed the whole world -has awakened to the apparent reality that mass vaccination is killing off a lot of people before their time. The news is out, coming not from the public health bureaucracy but from such unexpected sources as actuaries in the insurance industry who collate quarterly death rates and morticians observing unusual morbid oddities in the bodies they prepare for burial. This comes at the very same time as reports that the CDC deliberately falsified Covid-19 death and injury statistics, both for the disease itself and for the mRNA “vaccines.” The FDA is also implicated in approving falsified “vaccine” trial data. One result of all that is the crash of Moderna and Pfizer stocks, as the geniuses on Wall Street suss out the mountain range of litigation that looms in the distance.

But they must know - and hundreds of appointed and elected officials must know - that the blowback from Covid-19 doesn’t stop with mere civil lawsuits but extends to criminal cases of supreme consequence: deliberate mass murder, extending to the highest levels of officialdom in many countries. To this day the CDC and state health departments are pushing “vaccines,” despite massive mounting evidence that the shots cause organ damage and mess up immune systems at a rate, and to a degree, astronomically above any previous vaccines. They must know that the official standard-of-care using remdesivir and intubation was overwhelmingly likely to kill hospital in-patients. They must know that early treatment protocols using cheap off-label drugs were highly effective and that banning early treatment - to maintain Emergency Use Authorization for killer “vaccines” - amounted to mass homicide.

It will get harder and harder to ignore widespread untimely death going forward as the “vaccines” work their vicious hoodoo on the boosted population, and even the most obdurately spellbound “vaccine” cheerleaders will have to endure such surges of cognitive dissonance that heads are sure to explode. So, the Ukraine invasion was the best means at hand to cover-up all that, and the longer the US government can feed that monster, and keep it going, the more they can shift the focus off the monumental frauds and homicides they carried out and will be criminally liable for.

Secondarily to all that, of course, is the emerging picture of pervasive corruption and crime among the three-letter agencies that special counsel John Durham is getting ready to feed to the dumpster fire of institutional failure that US politics has become. Ukraine is a manageable localized problem in a distant part of the world and Russia is going to manage it. The American crisis of confidence in its own operating system is something else."

- https://kunstler.com/

"The Tragedy..."

"The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting 

each other instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals."

- Edward Abbey