Jeremiah Babe, 9/28/23
"All Hell's Breaking Loose
And It's Only Going To Get Worse"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, September 28, 2023
"Breaking! Ukraine Surrendering By The Thousands, NATO Desperate To Keep War Going"
Full screen recommended.
Redacted, 9/28/23
"Breaking! Ukraine Surrendering By The Thousands,
NATO Desperate To Keep War Going"
"New reports show Ukrainian forces are laying down their western weapons and surrendering by the thousands using an emergency radio frequency. The surrendered forces are being fed and given medical attention and they're handing over vital troop movement data to Russian forces. This is the end."
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Look Out Below"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 9/28/23
"Look Out Below"
"Look at all the economic news that we have right now. We are seeing things in a very precarious spot. People have their fear gauge at the highest level ever. So many are worried that things are going to fall off a cliff."
Comments here:
"Down to Kosovo"
"Down to Kosovo"
All empires are equal... but some are more equal than others.
by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman
"Ooh, I wanna take you down to Kosovo
We’ll kick some butt, then we’ll take it slow
That’s where we want to go, way down to Kosovo."
~ Parody of ‘Kokomo’ by the Beach Boys
Paris, France - "Stop the clocks…Brooks Robinson has died. Yesterday was a day of mourning in Baltimore. Black crepe hung from mansions in Mount Vernon square. Keening in Dundalk. A raucous wake down in Fells Point bars. MLBnews: "Brooks Robinson, legendary O's third baseman, dies at 86. Beloved Hall of Famer was one of the greatest defenders in baseball history, winning 16 Gold Gloves."
We remember the late ‘50s. An aged aunt would watch the O’s on TV while listening to the play-by-play commentary on the radio. “The radio gives you better coverage,” she explained. And whenever the Os were losing, she counted on the third baseman. “Brooks is my man,” she’d say. Often, or so it seemed to us, Brooks would save the day. But those were winning days. For the O’s. For Baltimore. And for America, and “the West,” too.
Kicking Butt: Here’s the latest news from France. Bloomberg: "French Ambassador exits Niger after standoff with military junta." Even just a few years ago, France would have sent in the gendarmes, who would have kicked some African butts…passed around some francs to the local strongmen…and set things in order. No more. Now it withdraws.
But it is not just France that is losing its empire; it is “the West.” The BRICs are rising. The yuan is being used in place of the dollar. And though the US can still kick butt…the butts don’t stay kicked for long.
Europeans were the first to get the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. One of those benefits, if you can call it that, was increased firepower. They used it to shoot their way into control of much of the entire world. The US was late to the blast-fest – having been restrained by the wisdom of its founding fathers and preoccupied by its own North American conquests. But by the end of the 19th century, it had the world’s largest economy…and troops on the other side of the Pacific.
Many colonial possessions were granted independence after WWII…often disastrously…but “the West” was still the world’s leading power group. After the Soviet Union gave up the fight, in 1991, it was unchallenged. But those days are gone. Brooks is gone. No one saves the day.
The ‘experts’ – foreign policy scholars…diplomats…retired generals…and geostrategy buffs – have taught us so much about the Ukraine; if they continue, soon we will think it is north of Japan…and is the birthplace of country western music. These ‘experts’ convinced the US to commit more than $100 billion to the war. Now, it appears that no victory is possible. As Yogi Berra would say, “it’s déjà vu all over again.”
A Whole New Quagmire: In last weekend’s New York Times word mulch, Tom Friedman explained that he visited Kyiv for three days. He was seeing what the Kyiv leadership wanted him to see and attending a conference of people who have the same shallow ideas he has. Now an expert himself, his doubts are gone. The scales lifted from his eyes; where he once saw darkly now he sees the truth clearly, face to face. And like the catastrophic campaign in Iraq, it is really very simple: it is a fight between good and evil, right versus wrong.
Or, maybe not. Here’s Bill Kristol, raising money for a group called “Republicans for Ukraine:” “When America arms Ukraine, we get a lot for a little. Putin is an enemy of America. We’ve used 5% of our defense budget to arm Ukraine, and with it, they’ve destroyed 50% of Putin’s Army. We’ve done all this by sending weapons from storage, not our troops. The more Ukraine weakens Russia, the more it also weakens Russia’s closest ally, China. America needs to stand strong against our enemies, that’s why Republicans in Congress must continue to support Ukraine.”
Sounds more like geo-politics than good vs. evil. And here’s Mitch McConnell, explaining why aid to the Ukraine really has little to do with democracy or justice: "American support for Ukraine is not charity. It’s in our own direct interests – not least because degrading Russia helps to deter China."
Again, question marks are desperately needed. How did Russia become an enemy of the US? What are we deterring China from? Why? And is Russia really being “degraded?” If Russians are to be worse off, how will Americans be any better off?
More Equal than Others: But maybe everyone now knows how the Great Game is played. No question marks needed. No need to speculate about Putin’s security concerns…nor about the encroachment of NATO…nor about the coup d’etat orchestrated by the CIA and Victoria Nuland.
Last week, Joe Biden gave a remarkable speech to the UN. He told the assembled notables such a series of whoppers we half expected his pants to catch fire. He made it known that America was in full support of “sovereignty,” “territorial integrity” and “a world governed by basic rules that apply equally to all nations.” He went on to characterize the Russo-Ukrainian war as Russia’s “war of conquest.”
How the delegates must have chuckled to themselves. They knew full well that Russia couldn’t even conquer neighboring Ukraine much less anything else. And of all the UN’s 193 members none violated the basic rules more often or more flagrantly than the US. In the 21st century alone, US soldiers intervened – often with remotely-launched drones – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria. It also sponsored dozens of ‘regime change’ efforts – including at least one this year, in which the elected and popular president of Pakistan, Imran Khan, was replaced in a coup d’etat. His sin? He was too “aggressively neutral” on the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Maybe the UN members also recalled the US-led attack on Serbia in 1999. It did so, with Russian backing, to support the Kosovans’ struggle for independence. But what had happened to its high regard for “independence” when Russia came to the aid of Donbas separatists, in the Russian-speaking area of Eastern Ukraine, 25 years later? Yeah…take us back to Kosovo…that’s where we want to go. Sure."
o
Joel's Note: "Readers of these pages will have noticed the aforementioned BRICS nations are adding letters faster than the LGBTQIA2S++ coalition. Only, unlike the latter acronym, the geopolitical bloc actually has a lot in common.
At its most recent meeting, in South Africa, the BRICS nations welcomed half a dozen new members – Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia and Argentina. Astute geographers will notice that these countries have certain sea lane advantages. (Special thanks to our friend Byron King – a retired senior naval officer – for pointing this out!)
With Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, the BRICS+ nations essentially have control over the vital Strait of Hormuz, one of the so-called “choke points” for much of the world’s oil supply. With Egypt and Ethiopia (and, by extension, Eritrea), they’ve more or less got the Red Sea and Suez Canal covered. And by adding Argentina into the mix, along with South Africa, the BRICS control both Cape Horn, the passage around the bottom of the Americas, and the Cape of Good Hope, around the southern tip of Africa. What does this mean for trade routes? For global supply lines? For naval seaways?
We spoke yesterday with BPR’s Investment Director, Tom Dyson, who has a keen interest in shipping stocks…"Another reason I really love the tankers is because it is one of the few industries that benefit from disruption and chaos, which suits me. So for example, in a war, anytime war breaks out, tankers do well. Anytime there's just any chaos or disruption or foreclosures or geopolitical stuff, the tankers do well. They benefit from chaos, because as soon as you have to shift the routes around, you end up having to take the cargoes further and the ships become scarce again."
We’ll publish our full Private Briefing with Tom for BPR members this weekend… when we’re back down at the fin del mundo. If you’re not already a member, but want to join us, feel free to choose a plan that works for you, here…"
"Is World War III About To Start? Part II: Are The Military-Industrial Complex & Deep State Driving Us To War?"
"Is World War III About To Start? Part II:
Are The Military-Industrial Complex & Deep State Driving Us To War?"
by Richard C. Cook
Read Part 1 of this series here.
"Why is the U.S. refusing to call a halt to the Ukraine madness? Why can’t an era of “Peaceful Coexistence” in Europe and the world be declared or at least sought? How about détente with Russia? With Russia and China? What is wrong with that?
We’ll start peeling the onion by looking at the U.S. military-industrial complex. Of course, President Eisenhower warned us against the MIC over 60 years ago in his “Farewell Address” of January 20, 1961. Among other remarks he said: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.
The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov.
Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce.
We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.
Added to the above are members of Congress who vote on military budgets and make the laws that protect the MIC from accountability, lobbyists who pressure those members to cast votes favorable to their MIC clients, private sector financial service employees who handle the retirement accounts of the MIC multitude, foreigners who are employed at overseas bases, and various scoundrels and hangers-on. I would include in the latter category the multitude of MIC cheerleaders from Hollywood who produce trashy spectacles like "Top Gun."
On top of everything else, there are millions of retirees drawing annuities in excess of what most working-class Americans earn, many of these retirees double - or triple-dipping with lucrative jobs in business or government.
Each of the above individuals supports multiple family members, workers, and vendors within the civilian economy who, with the ripple effect and velocity of money, keep entire towns, cities, states, regions, and industries afloat. An example is building the F-35 that has workers assembling it in 350 congressional districts. It is probably no exaggeration to say that given the vast exiting of civilian U.S. factories and jobs over the last half-century to cheap-labor countries abroad, the MIC is probably the principal economic engine of the U.S. as a whole.
So are we going to tell what adds up to tens of millions of people, sorry, your services are no longer needed? Good luck with that. And isn’t it obvious that all these people, especially the higher echelons, are going to do everything within their power to persuade us that their jobs are so essential that without them we will shortly be overwhelmed and eaten alive by every “enemy” on the planet?
If you doubt what I am saying, ask any retired colonel or general who has hired himself out as a talking head to CNN or MSNBC. It’s also why DoD has formally declared Russia and China our two “adversaries,” because, after all, you have to point the finger at someone and blame them for your own dysfunctional society.
But as I witnessed personally in my NASA days, many MIC personnel never do a lick of honest work, or are mainly occupied with paper shuffling or other busywork, especially with work-at-home now the vogue, with many spending their days surfing the internet, or worse, while drawing a level of pay that puts most civilian workers in the shade.
Not to mention stay-at-home mothers, teachers and caregivers, first responders, law enforcement personnel, food service employees, or the unemployed, underemployed, or homeless. Yet many of these people, while working hard for low pay, if any, have a sense of fulfillment and self-worth that surpasses the swarms of MIC bureaucrats who can’t help but feel degraded in their superfluous and often pointless vocational stagnation.
Is all this enough to create an imperative for World War III? You tell me. It certainly has to be a contributing factor. Plus it saps the nation’s natural strength. We could even say that the U.S. war machine is a cancerous tumor that has metastasized throughout the entirety of American society, polluting and corrupting every aspect of life, including the body politic, the environment, the entertainment industry, the mass media, education, scientific research, etc.
It was the military, for example, that supported planning for the U.S. lockdowns during the COVID so-called pandemic, as documented by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in his monumental indictment of Big Pharma/MIC collusion in his book "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health."
A subset of the question whether the MIC could drive us to war for its own selfish reasons is whether a president, a political party, or the Deep State itself could use the MIC to generate a war to save their own sorry asses at a time of scandal or possible election loss, along the lines of the movie "Wag the Dog?"
We’ll leave that an open question for now. At least Tucker Carlson seems to think so in his forecast that the Biden administration will spark a hot war with Russia before the 2024 election. Of course, we can’t know what they are really planning, because they hide behind billions of classified documents and imprison those who dare to lift the veil of secrecy. We are vaguely aware that the top dogs have their own “continuity of government” plans with hidden bunkers, an “underground Pentagon,” caches of MREs that can last decades, etc. Just don’t ask to see any of this.
Every war the U.S. has fought since Korea, including the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been an MIC bonanza. Then there’s the simple fact that if you are an individual possessing a weapon of any kind, whether a military pistol or an ICBM, despite the protocols that govern their use, you still fantasize about using that weapon on somebody. This alone creates a societal imperative towards war. Plus I have had the wife of an MIC worker tell me straight up that she favored war because otherwise how would their family eat?
Another way to look at it is that we have a deeply entrenched system of military socialism. I happen to think it’s very corrupt, very inefficient, and very dangerous.
Is Brics+ Vs. The West Deciding The Parameters Of The Conflict? This brings us to the subject of economics. The national level of expenditure on the MIC and its role as the central tent pole of the U.S. economy certainly point to economic motives in any stampede to war. But wealth depends on resources and their exploitation. In fact, the seizure of the world’s resources had become a finely-honed specialty of the European powers, with the U.S. joining in the later stages, during the entire era of colonization. Even today, the populations of former Western colonies continue to work the farms, plantations, mines, and transport facilities of Western owners.
Of course, the Europeans and Americans have been justifying their expropriation of the resources of other countries for centuries by virtue of ideologies like “right of conquest,” “survival of the fittest,” “white man’s burden, etc.,” always proclaiming shock at native resistance. During the 19th century, such resistance was decisively subdued by the invention of the Maxim machine gun.
The U.S. gained early experience in grabbing the land and its bounty through dispossession of Native Americans and the massive growth of slave-worked plantation agriculture. Westward expansion brought the taking of land for gold and silver prospecting. By the time the U.S. began to gain colonies, the rich soil of Hawaii offered wealth to pineapple growers. A prime motive of the Spanish-American War was confiscation of Cuban sugar plantations. In Central America it was bananas and coffee. In Chile it was copper.
At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. bankers lent money to the British to aid them in fighting the Boers in order to secure the incredible deposits of diamonds and gold beneath the surface in South Africa. We also know that U.S. bankers saw a great business opportunity in the chance to lend money to Britain and France in order for them to prosecute World War I against Germany. After that war, the Rockefeller oil empire began its expansion into the Middle East. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is suspected to have baited Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor because there was nothing better than a good war to boost employment after failing to create a full-employment economy during the Great Depression. When the “War on Terror” commenced, the chief topic on the agenda at President George W. Bush’s staff meetings was the takeover of Iraq’s oil fields.
Today, the MIC has one overriding mission: protect the overseas interests of big U.S. banks, investment and hedge funds, and multinational corporations. The biggest U.S. defense firm is Lockheed, which itself is largely owned by three giant hedge funds: State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock. The CIA is there to control foreign governments, overthrow them as needed, and keep foreign leaders and journalists on the payroll while quaking with fear for their careers or even lives. The paradigm is most egregious in Europe, which the Anglo-Americans view as vassals, with the E.U. a policeman. NATO is an enforcement mechanism for U.S./U.K. control, not to defend against Russia, which today has no discernible interest in political control over Europe, even if it were capable of making such a move, which it isn’t.
Rather than defend against a non-existent Russian threat, the West would love to get its hands on Russian oil, gas, and mineral resources, as it began to do in the 1990s before Putin took over and fostered a nationalistic revival. The U.S. had long been targeting the Caspian Basin and Central Asia, which now seemed vulnerable with the separation from Russia of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. These countries are still in play for the West, as are the microstates of the Caucasus.
The 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup in Ukraine was partly for acquisition of Ukrainian land and resources, including the fertile farmland of the steppes. Big players are Cargill, ADM, and BlackRock, along with numerous E.U. companies. Despite global warming and professions of getting rid of fossil fuels, trying to get hold of hydrocarbons worldwide remains a matter of Western urgency.
But with the current situation, another dimension is “dollar hegemony.” This brings us to BRICS. Perhaps the biggest threat to Western economic imperialism is the formation of the economic compact consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. As the Ukraine conflict deepens, BRICS expansion has become of particular importance to Russia, as it is obviously a means of outflanking the West and beating it at its own geopolitical game.
At the South African BRICS summit of August 22-24, 2023, six new nations were added: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina, leading to BRICS+. Added to the earlier rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the effects of BRICS and its expansion are seismic. Additional nations that have expressed an interest in BRICS are Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and at least a dozen others.
The potential of BRICS is the inclusion of half or more of the world’s population. BRICS economies had overtaken G-7 economies by 2012, and the gap between BRICS and G-7 economies is widening irreversibly.
GDP is not a viable measure of economic performance for “reserve currency” nations like the U.S. that can print money “out of thin air.” But there is a linear relationship between real goods production and energy. Thus a much more reliable economic performance evaluation can be inferred from electricity generation, as the following chart illustrates:
• The BRICS economies overtook G-7 economies in 2012, with the gap increasing steadily since.
• G-7 economies have not witnessed any growth since the 2008-2009 “Great Financial Crisis.”
• G-7 economies have shrunk by 6 percent since their peak in 2007.
• BRICS economies were 50 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.
• BRICS+ economies (BRICS plus six candidate countries) were 60 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.
The graph also explains why the BRICS nations are not pursuing aggressive policies, despite Western propaganda, as they view time as being on their side. Naturally they refuse the “reserve currency” prerogative which allows G-7 countries to siphon hard earned wealth from the rest of the world. The most worrying aspect for the U.S. is the obvious intention of BRICS to foster trade exchanges in local currencies, bypassing the primacy of the dollar, and secondarily the Euro.
According to Stephen Jen, CEO of Eurizon SLJ Capital Ltd. and former IMF/Morgan Stanley economist, “The dollar share in foreign reserves has lost about 11 percent since 2016. The decisive event has been Western sanctions and the freezing of Russia’s dollar reserves.” He adds: “Taking purchasing power into account the BRICS nations currently account for 32 percent of global economic output, compared to 30 percent covered by the G7 countries.” This differential is bound to worsen as new nations are added to BRICS.
As BRICS, ASEAN and other countries increasingly trade in national currencies in lieu of Western reserve currencies, this results in weakening of those Western currencies, as evidenced by the drop in their purchasing power, aka inflation. Over time, the standards of living commensurate with the production of tradable goods will result in growing poverty in the U.S. and the EU that will result in social instability. But the damage will fall largely to the lower income echelons, resulting in growth in an already unsustainable wealth disparity, with the GINI factor for wealth distribution in the U.S. reaching 0.85 in 2020.
This explains several observations:
Why BRICS do not find it necessary to issue a new currency: Trade in national currencies will bring an end to the wealth siphoning mechanism of U.S. dollar hegemony.
Why Russia and China are trying to maintain non-confrontational policies despite provocations: As trade away from the U.S., UK, and EU increases with growing use of national currencies, political instability, particularly in the most de-industrialized Western nations, will result. Social discontent and political instability can already be witnessed throughout the West. This will only increase as impoverishment spreads due to depreciating currencies, leading to eventual implosion of the neoliberal political system. Thus Russia, China, and other sovereign nations have adopted a policy of “wait it out” rather than risk a kinetic war which would result in the deaths of millions. Nevertheless, these countries are embarking on an accelerated program of military development, along with strengthened alliances, in case war is inevitable.
Why the West is embarking on highly aggressive policies: The neoliberal cabals in control of the West realize that the changes occurring in the world, particularly as regards the monetary and financial global architecture, spell their doom, and hence are increasingly acting hysterically, fomenting conflict and chaos wherever they can.
It is dollar hegemony, dating back to the World War II-era Bretton Woods Agreements and the Nixonian removal of the international currency gold peg, that has allowed the U.S. to attempt overcoming its massive trade deficit and its public debt at $33.1 trillion and growing. Only by selling trillions of dollars of Treasury bonds to foreign countries, especially China, Japan, and Korea, has the U.S. been able to straddle the globe with the hundreds of military bases and other facilities it relies on to secure a world order friendly to its interests. For decades, foreign countries have needed dollars to trade in petroleum and other commodities. But with BRICS, that imperative may end sooner rather than later. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has said this will never happen, but other policy makers are seeing the writing on the wall.
Are the prospects of BRICS so serious that the U.S. could launch World War III against its main powers, Russia, China, and now Iran, as a last-ditch act of desperation as its entire world order veers toward collapse? It hardly bodes well that these three nations, along with North Korea, have been identified by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee as the new “axis of evil.” She speaks for much of the U.S. political class."
Hat tip to ZeroHedge for this material.
"Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/28/23"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/28/23
"The S&P 500 Could Be Cut In Half In Short Order;
Bank of America Is In Trouble"
Comments here:
"Helpless People"
"Helpless People"
“Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch television or punch buttons on a keypad.
Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there isn’t any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we’ve been trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage.
Helpless people can be counted upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They’re like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don’t have minds of their own, they are predictable, they won’t surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic patent - or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.”
- John Taylor Gatto,
Sadly, this website is gone. And so it is…
o
Big Brother & The Holding Company,
"Heartache People"
"What World Do We Want To Live In? There Is A Choice"
"What World Do We Want To Live In?
There Is A Choice"
by John Wilder
"Every man dies. Not every man really lives."
- William Wallace
"It’s been said that every man dies in a strange country. It’s not original to me, but it does contain a lot of wisdom. As our country is aging, it is changing. I’m just hoping it has better knees than I do. But to illustrate the point, let’s take Pa Wilder:
When Pa Wilder was born, the income tax wasn’t even a decade old. The meaning of a “state” was stronger then than now, though it was subsidiary after the Civil War. Pa was born, grew up, and died living almost all of his time within a 30-mile radius, except for an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe from 1942-1945.
When Pa Wilder passed away, the world had gone from the biplanes of World War I to a fully inhabited space station and regular flights to orbit, and occasional flights to the Moon. The dollar had gone from gold to gimmick, and the question of freedom had gone from “why can’t I?” to “may I, please?”
The world Pa lived in growing up was one that was difficult. If you had a child and couldn’t afford it, you had to find someone to raise it for you. It is undoubtedly a fact that people died of starvation in the United States, and some certainly died because they didn’t have any money.
After the war, though, his generation had optimism. It looked like there was nothing that mankind couldn’t do. The atom had been split. Rockets had touched space. The largest rivers had been dammed and tamed and the only foe to be concerned about was the Soviet Union, and it looked like all of those people ate a diet of potatoes, onions, sawdust, and sadness. A 1950s Hungarian joke went something like this: “Definition of socialism: the incessant struggle against conditions that would not exist in any other system.”
The family had primacy. And culture was built on the idea of that family, and policies at the local, state, and national levels were built around supporting the family and keeping it strong. It worked pretty well. Was there a cultural prohibition against being a tool? Sure. Was there an upper limit on the things that women could do in society? Yeah, certainly there were few CEOs at the time that were women, and there were demarcations between jobs women would normally do, and jobs that men would normally do. Men got the jobs that had higher stress, higher danger, and sure, higher pay. Women got the jobs that conserved the culture, raised the young, and, yup, didn’t pay nearly as well. It was a bargain made not to punish women or men, but as a nod to societal stability based on family hierarchy.
This is the America that was, and more than a few people on the Right look to this as the model of a successful society that creates the ability for mankind to make good on the promise of individual freedom, individual responsibility, a role for religion and celebration of individual success. It is a world where equal chance based on merit is the goal, and winners of fair competition get the rewards.
This goal is soundly rejected by the Left. They look for a model of America that can never be. Their world is an entirely made-up concept of what they think the world should be. What do they think?
• Like Lake Woebegone, all children in their Leftist Utopia are above average.
• Diversity is actually a strength.
• Every deviance in sexuality is celebrated.
• Every outcome is equal, regardless of effort, talent, or merit.
• People have whatever they want, regardless of if they work or not.
• Society owes it to everyone to take from the successful and make them the same as anyone else – equity is the goal.
Whereas I can love the ideas they have as ideas, the truth is that the world cannot be that way. Some children are below average. People who live and work with people that aren’t from their culture typically have lower trust, disharmony, “cultural tension” and conflict.
Oops. Turns out that if you worship the Moon God Gorto and think child sacrifice is okay, Baptists might not be the best folks for the cubicle next to you. And most people won’t applaud if you have sex during Thanksgiving at the table – I won’t explain how I know this.
And outcomes aren’t equal. There are winners, and there are losers. Merit matters. Talent matters. Work matters. If we remove the competition between winning and losing, and celebrate every loser like a winner? You get a society of losers. You get a culture of losers. And who else but a loser would demand what Elon Musk has without doing what Elon Musk has done? It’s a culture that is built on envy of what others accomplish and greed for what others have.
It is a culture that celebrates and encourages failure. Even Leftists admit it. I had a discussion with an acquaintance. He’s a leftist. My conjecture was this, “So, should we wait a few years to start your socialist empire until we have a cancer cure and maybe some better technology? I mean, if you look at Socialist cultures, they aren’t really good at creating things.” “You’re right, it would be better to wait a few years.”
Sure, there’s been corruption since the first human, but not every society is the same. And societies like the 1950s in America had less corruption than any communist society, ever. And, I would argue that society was far less corrupt than society today. The outcomes were better – in most places, a locked door wasn’t required. The outcomes of society have drifted negatively in many ways. You could name them, so I won’t go into what would be a very, very long list.
There’s more to this, but now, the Left is attempting to drive this world towards a future that is based on nothing but a theory that is no more sophisticated than a three-year-old’s version of what the world should be. Is it any wonder that as we get closer to those fever dreams, things get worse? As that author I can’t remember who said, we all die in a strange country. I’m just hoping that it stops sucking."
"Adventures With Danno, 9/28/23"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 9/28/23
"Stocking Up On These Items At
Kroger Before They're Gone!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are stocking up on some of these sale items before they are gone. Kroger is having a .99 cents sale on many items this week, and we are taking advantage of this rare occasion!"
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o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 9/27/23
"I Went To Russia's Largest Food Expo:
World Food Moscow 2023"
'WorldFood Moscow is the international autumn food and drink exhibition. It is a professional platform where food manufacturers and related services providers meet with buyers from retail, wholesale, food industry, as well as distributors and exporters of food and drinks."
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"Alert! Mushroom Cloud In Uzbekistan; Moscow Prepares Nuclear Shelters; Stocks Crash!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/27/23
"Alert! Mushroom Cloud In Uzbekistan;
Moscow Prepares Nuclear Shelters; Stocks Crash!"
Comments here:
"Doug Casey on the Silent Depression and Current Economic Realities"
"Doug Casey on the Silent Depression
and Current Economic Realities"
By International Man
"International Man: Wall Street Silver, a financial analyst on Twitter, highlights that during the Great Depression, the average home cost 3x the average income. Today, it costs 8x as much. In the 1930s, the average car cost about 46% of a year’s earnings. Today, they eat up 85% of the annual average wage. Rent, which previously claimed just 16% of yearly income, now demands a staggering 42%. By these metrics and others, the average person is in a worse position than during the Great Depression, the most challenging economic period in the last 100 years. What is your take?
Doug Casey: It’s not written in stone anywhere that life is going to be easy. But with the accession of capitalism, life has gotten better and better for the average guy for many generations. Perhaps prosperity has spoiled the average guy, transforming him into an undeserving idiot who thinks socialism works and a welfare state can give everybody something for nothing. As a consequence, the rate of improvement in the average standard of living has been slowing down. I believe it’s going to go into reverse. There are some very disturbing things happening across many fronts.
The State - I’m referring to the institution itself - is at the root of all of them. It’s constantly inserting itself into civil society through its taxes and regulations. And, most of all, it’s destruction of the currency, which is popularly called "inflation."
Inflation makes it much harder for the average guy - who tries to produce more than he consumes and save the difference - to get ahead. That’s because his savings, which are almost always in the national currency, are being destroyed before his very eyes. Since the average guy has no financial sophistication, he doesn’t know the cause of inflation, and he’s not sure how to deal with it. He’s being forced to become a speculator to outrace inflation. But he doesn’t have the tools to do so effectively. He inevitably confuses speculation with gambling and winds up losing even more.
International Man: We’re living through a more dire period than the 1930s by several key metrics. How come no media outlet and no politician is talking about it? They’re silent on this topic. That’s led some analysts to dub it the Silent Depression. Do you think there is an ongoing depression that isn’t being acknowledged?
Doug Casey: You’re quite correct; it’s been a Silent Depression - so far. But it’s real, and it’s growing. As I’ve said for years, it will eventually be known as The Greater Depression. It will be much worse, longer lasting, and much different from the unpleasantness of 1929 to 1946.
Franklin Roosevelt, who was certainly one of the two worst presidents in American history, is famous for having said, "All we have to fear is fear itself." It’s actually a stupid and dishonest aphorism. In the face of all the actions he took, which were uniformly disastrous, he should have said, "Be afraid. Be very afraid". But, however honest, that wouldn’t have been politic. It underlines the fact that politics is a confidence game. It’s a question of telling the big lie loud enough and from enough sources, enough times. Then, people who aren’t critical thinkers will believe it.
We have very few big news outlets now, and they’re all hooked together philosophically. The talking heads on TV and the writers in newspapers and magazines have all gone through the same school system. They all associate with each other, going to the same clubs, parties, and restaurants. They all believe the same things, sharing the same world views and ideology. Just as important, they’re all hooked up to the government, which is populated by exactly the same type of people.
In today’s world, you dare not say anything that runs counter to what these people believe about things like Covid, the climate, or the war in the Ukraine. If you do, you’re likely to be "cancelled," fired, or even framed like Julian Assange or Russel Brand.
It used to be safe to talk about "the weather and the state of the roads." No longer. Talking about the weather might lead to non-PC views about Climate Change. You better not even talk about the roads and driving, since that could lead to an unpleasant discussion about fossil fuels and EVs. It’s actually very funny. You best be a quiet little lamb and shut up.
Frankly, I don’t even like to talk about the economy anymore. Because in today’s irrational and hysterical world, if you predict a depression, you might be accused of destroying confidence.
Many people idiotically believe, as FDR said, that the economy rests on confidence. They think we live in the world of Wiley Coyote, where he can run off the top of a cliff and not start falling until he realizes that there’s no ground below him.
As I said, someone who predicts a depression might be accused of causing it. I increasingly feel like staying silent about what’s going on, simply as a matter of self-preservation. Other people may, too. As Voltaire said, it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. It’s one more way we’re evolving into a police state.
International Man: It’s increasingly hard for the middle class to make ends meet. Many have taken to social media to explain how impossible it has become to pay for the same groceries they’ve always bought amid rising prices. Many of these people are making more than $100k a year and have never been in such a situation. What is really going on here?
Doug Casey: The middle class is disappearing before our very eyes. Of course, this was not only predicted but advocated by Lenin. He said that the middle class would be ground between the millstones of taxation and inflation. Generally speaking, all Statists - whether they be communists, Nazis, socialists, progressives, or Wokesters - hate the middle class.
What makes the middle class great is that they’re creative and entrepreneurial. They like to control their own lives. They’re the most productive and independent people in society. They don’t generally boss other people around, and they don’t like to be bossed around. That’s why the ruling classes want to get rid of the middle class. They’d rather just have lower-class proles - workers who do what they’re told. They think the "elite" - with the right views and the right friends - should be on top - the kind of people that populate the World Economic Forum.
The ruling elite - they’re actually no more than parasites - want to make it hard for the middle class, eliminating them if possible. They mock the bourgeoisie as deplorables because they scrimp and save to elevate themselves.
They claim to love the proles, the lower classes, however. They’re not a threat because they’re buried in apathy and despair. The elite are despicable, but they’re nonetheless gaining ground because nobody speaks out against them; it’s dangerous to challenge power. The middle class isn’t challenging their "betters" partly out of ignorance, partly out of brainwashing, and partly out of fear.
International Man: Where do you see this trend headed in the coming months?
Doug Casey: The US government is running embedded deficits of $2 trillion per year, and that number is going to go much higher if only because interest alone is $1 trillion per year. Plus, the Jacobins who currently control the government want much, much more spending.
The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is closing in on 8% in some parts of the country. No wonder people can neither buy nor sell houses. At the same time, it’s likely that we’re going to see a wave of bank failures as interest rates rise with inflation. Ever fewer people will be able to make their payments, whether it be their massive student loans, their massive credit card debt, their car payments, or their mortgage payments.
That’s before unemployment starts going from the reported 3% or 4%, where it is now, to 5% or 10%, then to 15% or more. (May 2023 ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment increased to 24.7% from 24.6% on top of U.6 increasing to 6.7% from 6.6%.)
International Man: What advice do you have for those worried about rapidly rising prices?
Doug Casey: This is advice that is hard to put into practice, but you should actually learn something about real economics, and learn something about finance and the way markets work. That will help you. But it’s not an instant fix. It takes time and diligence. So most people won’t do it.
Practical advice for the average guy? I’d say the soundest thing you can do - other than buying precious metal coins and Bitcoin - would be to get a copy of a book which came out years ago by a friend of mine named John Pugsley. It’s called "The Alpha Strategy."
It basically suggests that the way to beat inflation, in a practical, common-sense way, is not to save in dollars but to save with real material things - food that you can store, light bulbs that you can put away, tools that you can use. You buy when they’re on sale. When you buy them in bulk, they’re cheaper yet. You store them away. The book has a long list of items you might not think of.
It’s convenient to already have items, so you aren’t constantly running down to the store. And you aren’t taxed on the gain in value that they will present as prices rise. If things really get bad, you’ll have things that may be unavailable, unlike paper currency or, worse yet, CBDCs, which will be in oversupply.
Remember that the depression may be "silent" now; it’s not going to stay that way. We’re well into the Greater Depression, and in a depression, everybody loses. The winner is just the person who loses the least."
o
Very strong language alert!
George Carlin, "The American Dream"
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Jeremiah Babe, "Where Are We Heading? They're Coming For Your Money!"
Jeremiah Babe, 9/27/23
"Where Are We Heading? They're Coming For Your Money!"
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Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "My Orchid Spirit (Extragalactic)"
Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "My Orchid Spirit (Extragalactic)"
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"In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of 3 billion Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, 2 trillion galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us."
- "Dr. Leonard McCoy"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga). The spider-shaped gas cloud on the left is actually an emission nebula labelled IC 417, while the smaller fly-shaped cloud on the right is dubbed NGC 1931 and is both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula.
About 10,000 light-years distant, both nebulas harbor young, open star clusters. For scale, the more compact NGC 1931 (Fly) is about 10 light-years across.”
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" I do not question the presence of intelligent life on other planets;
but I do question its existence on this one."
- Dr. Ivan Desantis
Gerald Celente, "America: The Deplorable State Of Affairs"
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal
"Judge Andrew Napolitano,
America: The Deplorable State Of Affairs"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Bank Gets Rid of All Cash"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly PM 9/27/23
"Bank Gets Rid of All Cash"
"It has started. A bank is gotten rid of all cash transactions. You cannot get cash in the branch and you cannot deposit cash. This is the end of normal banking as we know it."
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"15 Items That Will Face Shortages This Winter"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 9/27/23
"15 Items That Will Face Shortages This Winter"
"It's not just you - everyone is seeing shelves getting emptier in the second half of 2023, and that trend will only intensify as we head towards the end of the year. Our supply chains are in a much more vulnerable state than most people realize. From cyberattacks to labor and component shortages, the production of several items has been disrupted this year, and now popular cleaning products, smartphones and even laxatives are becoming harder to find.
This month, Clorox, the maker of the popular cleaner, and the owner of several brands has suffered a massive cyberattack last month, which severely damaged its internal systems and is causing production and shipment delays right now. The company said it "has recently begun to experience an elevated level of consumer product availability issues" given that it is processing orders at a slower-than-normal rate. Not only consumers are facing empty shelves, but many companies who use its products are also experiencing shortages. In addition to its vast collection of household goods, Clorox serves commercial industries, including hospitals, schools, and businesses. The brand did not say when the operational problems might be resolved, or how long it will take to get its systems back to normal. A representative said the company is seeing multiple items across its portfolio of products in short supply at U.S. stores.
Moreover, it looks like we're going to witness yet another year of Christmas Tree shortages, and growers are highlighting that six to seven-foot tall trees will be the hardest to find. This may be a shocker but the reason why it's getting more difficult to find Christmas trees dates back to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This holiday season, there will be fewer trees entering the market because farmers couldn’t afford to plant as many new Christmas trees during that recessionary period, explained Jordan Bishop, founder and CEO of Yore Oyster. “There’s been a lot of talk about how Christmas trees will be more expensive this year,” Bishop said. “And it’s not only due to inflation but also due to these larger macroeconomic effects that stretch back 15 years.” Christmas trees of that size take about 15 years to grow, he added, so the impact of the financial crisis began being felt in 2022 and will continue to worsen in 2023 and 2024, Bishop predicts.
If you're tired of leaving the store empty-handed, this video will help you to know which essential supplies are already sold out and which ones are likely to disappear from sight in the coming weeks and months. With multiple shortages hitting thousands of stores, and rampant cases of respiratory infections rising across the globe, things can get really chaotic for retailers and grocers over the next couple of months.
At this point, let's just pray that another global pandemic doesn't occur because things could go south very rapidly. Our food systems are still trying to recover, manufacturing activity has been slowing down for months, and several industries are still struggling to source the products they need. In other words, if another big crisis hits supply chains, we will be far more unprepared to handle the situation this time around. That's why preparedness and emergency stockpiling have never been more important."
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"Russia Puts Advanced Sarmat Nuclear Missile System On ‘Combat Duty’"
"Russia Puts Advanced Sarmat
Nuclear Missile System On ‘Combat Duty’"
"Moscow has put into service an advanced intercontinental ballistic missile that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said would make Russia’s enemies “think twice” about their threats, according to reported comments by the head of the country’s space agency. Yuri Borisov, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said Sarmat missiles have “assumed combat duty”, according to Russian news agency reports.
“The Sarmat strategic system has assumed combat alert posture,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted the Roscosmos chief as saying. “Based on experts’ estimates, the RS-28 Sarmat is capable of delivering a MIRVed warhead weighing up to 10 tonnes to any location worldwide, both over the North and South Poles,” TASS said in its report.
Putin said in February that the Sarmat – one of several advanced weapons in Russia’s arsenal – would be ready for deployment soon. In 2022, some two months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Putin said the Sarmat would “reliably ensure the security of Russia from external threats and make those, who in the heat of aggressive rhetoric try to threaten our country, think twice”.
The Sarmat is an underground silo-based missile that Russian officials say can carry up to 15 nuclear warheads, though the United States military estimates its capacity to be 10 warheads. Known to NATO military allies by the codename “Satan”, the missile reportedly has a short initial launch phase, which gives little time for surveillance systems to track its takeoff.
Weighing more than 200 tons, the Sarmat has a range of some 18,000km (11,000 miles) and was developed to replace Russia’s older generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs) that dated from the 1980s. Russia test-fired the Sarmat missile in April 2022 in the Plesetsk region of the country, located some 800km (almost 500 miles) north of Moscow, and the launched missiles hit targets on the Kamchatka peninsula, in Russia’s far east region."
o
RS-28 Sarmat
15 warheads per missile, 11,000 mile range, hypersonic speed of 15,880 mph.
One Sarmat can destroy an area the size of Texas or France.
Do we really want to do this? Pray to God we don't...
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"Is World War III About To Start? Part I: Drift Toward War"
"Is World War III About To Start?
Part I: Drift Toward War"
by Richard Cook
"It is likely that billions of people around the world view the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war being waged by the U.S. against Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to aid Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for as long as it takes,” without defining what the end state might be. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to mean a fight “to the last Ukrainian.”
Anyone with a discernible pulse is aware of the danger that the conflict could escalate into a conflagration large and destructive enough to morph into World War III. The threshold would likely be crossed once nuclear weapons were unleashed. The military doctrines of all nuclear powers stipulate that such an attack would justify an in-kind response, though without always ruling out the same for lesser provocations of a potentially existential nature.
President Biden has said “the world faces the biggest risk of nuclear Armageddon since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.” The context of Biden’s statement came a month earlier on September 21, 2022, when Putin warned the West he was not bluffing when he said he would be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia against what he said was “nuclear blackmail.” Earlier, in an April 21, 2021, speech, Putin said:
"We really do not want to burn bridges. But if someone mistakes our good intentions for indifference or weakness and intends to burn or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russia’s response will be asymmetrical, swift, and tough. Those behind provocations that threaten the core interests of our security will regret what they have done in a way they have not regretted anything for a long time."
Another to speak of nuclear war has been former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the Russian Security Council and one of Putin’s top advisers. Commenting on Ukraine’s highly touted but now failed 2023 “spring offensive,” Medvedev said in July 2023 that if Ukraine succeeded in taking Russian sovereign territory - including Crimea plus the four Donbass oblasts (regions) annexed by Russia last year - Russia “would have to use nuclear weapons by virtue of the Russian Presidential Decree.” This decree stated that any assault on Russian territory justified a nuclear response.
On Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2023, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “The drums of nuclear war are beating once again. Mistrust and division are on the rise. The nuclear shadow that loomed over the Cold War has re-emerged.” One who has predicted world war has been UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace. On May 19, 2023, he warned “that the UK could enter a direct conflict with Russian and China in the next seven years and has called for an increase in military spending to counter the potential threat.” Speaking to London’s Financial Times, Wallace said “a conflict is coming with a range of adversaries around the world.”
More recently, independent commentator Tucker Carlson, who has said the U.S. is intentionally seeking war with Russia, remarked in a September 2023 interview on The Adam Corolla Show that the Biden administration would attempt to stay in power by starting a “hot war” with Russia before the 2024 election. Carlson argued that the U.S. was “already at war” with Russia in Ukraine. He added, “I don’t think we’ll win it.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s new generation of Sarmat ballistic missiles, capable of carrying ten or more nuclear warheads, have been deployed for combat duty.
Of course we now must wait and see if recent action by House Republicans to launch an impeachment inquiry against Biden, along with his worsening senility, put enough of a crimp in his style to force a postponement of any irretrievable decisions.
But feeding into Carlson’s fears are statements by U.S. Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in a September video clip supporting Ukrainian strikes against Russian territory. Nuland said that one “axis” of U.S. strategy is to “put some of Russia’s most precious assets at risk.”
This comes as the U.S. is planning to send long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to Ukraine, with Germany promising Jupiter missiles, and as the UK plans to send RAF fighters to the Black Sea. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said in June 2023 that use of Western-supplied weapons to launch such attacks” would mean the full involvement of the United States and the United Kingdom in the conflict.”
So was Biden correct? Is nuclear Armageddon looming? Or is “brinkmanship” today merely “bluffmanship?”
75 Years Of Conflict: Of course, potential nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, especially in its previous iteration as the Soviet Union, is nothing new. World War II was scarcely over before figures like Winston Churchill and U.S. banker Bernard Baruch began raising alarms about the existence of an “Iron Curtain” across Europe and the start of a “Cold War.”
But even before World War II began, the Roosevelt administration accepted the recommendation of studies by the Council of Foreign Relations, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, that the U.S. should aim for postwar global military domination. Note that there was nothing in the U.S. Constitution that even remotely supports such a goal. The closest the U.S. might have come was the myth of “Manifest Destiny” that once supplied the ideology for coast-to-coast expansion; i.e., “from sea to shining sea.”
At the end of World War II, with the British Empire crumbling and Europe in ruins, there were two clear victors: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The accepted logic of U.S. planners now dictated that the latter must go.
Stalin is said to have asked to join the newly-formed NATO but was rebuffed. He responded by forming the Warsaw Pact. The post-war standoff had begun and, 75 years later, has not ended. With the Soviets being accused of fomenting leftist revolutions around the world, the U.S. military has been laying plans for a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange ever since. While the military sought an advantage favorable to a nuclear first strike, the everyday working objective toward the Soviets was “containment.” Meanwhile, the U.S. began its own long history of generating coups friendly to its interests with the CIA’s overthrow of governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.
In 1956, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proclaimed a U.S. policy of “brinkmanship.” Speaking of the potential for nuclear war in a Life magazine interview, he said, “If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.” In 1961, President John F. Kennedy seemed to have stared down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the planned installation of nuclear weapons in Cuba. Unknown publicly, JFK had already pulled U.S. nukes out of Turkey.
Nor are proxy wars anything new. They began with the Korean War. Of course, there were U.S. “boots on the ground,” but North and South Korea also fought against each other with Russia/China and the U.S./UN having the backs of each respectively. The Vietnam War was fought with U.S. troops and weapons aiding the South Vietnamese against the Russian-backed Hanoi regime and its ally, South Vietnam’s Viet Cong. The Korean conflict became a stalemate; Vietnam, a debacle.
But change was in the wind. JFK moved to revolutionize the discourse with his now-famous proposal for world peace delivered at American University on June 10, 1963. In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and proposed a new era of “Peaceful Coexistence” with the West. In the early 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger sought détente with the Soviets along with their epochal opening to China.
Rapprochement with the Soviets was sabotaged by the Reagan military build-up in the 1980s and the lies of Soviet supremacy promulgated by the Committee on the Present Danger. The U.S. was also creating the Mujahedeen to attack the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. This was part of Reagan’s engagement in his own proxy wars - called the “Reagan Doctrine” - against leftist regimes in Asia, Africa, and Central America, with U.S.-supported “death squads” in El Salvador and elsewhere.
It was under Reagan that the faction known as the “Neocons” began their infiltration of the national security apparatus. These included “Trotskyite” intellectuals from New York like Irving Kristol; alumni of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s staff like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle; “Team B” CIA analysts empowered by short-term Director George H.W. Bush, leading to the future prominence of Bob Gates; icons of the military-industrial complex like “Father of the H-Bomb” Edward Teller; Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who’d been joined at the hip to each other and to President Gerald Ford; Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence William Casey; and many future dark personages like John Bolton.
It was Casey who famously said at one of Reagan’s early staff meetings, “We will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believes is false.” This statement defined perfectly the future program of what we call today the “Deep State” and its mass media megaphone, especially outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.
One of the first major Neocon projects - Iran-Contra - devolved into scandal, with Reagan and Vice-President Bush both claiming ignorance under the “plausible deniability” fiction. Another was Reagan’s pet project - the Strategic Defense Initiative - lampooned as “Star Wars.”
Purporting to be offended by the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff, whereby peace was assured only by the logic of “Mutually-Assured Destruction,” Reagan proposed an armada of “defensive” weapons in space. The military-industrial complex seized on Star Wars as a cornucopia of lucrative research and development projects that ended when space shuttle Challenger blew up. The space shuttle was being converted to a testing platform for space weaponry, as I saw personally at NASA when I worked there in 1985-1986. One of the war planners’ bright ideas was to send the president to orbit in the space shuttle, from which he could safely direct military operations.
But the Star Wars project, which was not revived until the 21st century, nevertheless witnessed vast planning of space battle stations, nifty theoretical space weaponry like the X-ray laser and devices later called “rods from God,” and cost-benefit studies that included calculations of how many tens of millions of Americans could die in a space-based nuclear war against the Soviets while still allowing the U.S. to claim victory.
Meanwhile, it was after the horrendous exposures of CIA assassinations, media subversion, poisoning of subjects with LSD, and other misdeeds arising from the Church Committee hearings in 1975, that the CIA began to retreat into the shadows. Under Reagan came authorization of the National Endowment on Democracy, whose signature mission became “color revolutions” and later the “Arab Spring.” Amid the horrors, though, Reagan was yet able to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, rolling back the number of nuclear weapons for the first time.
But things took a decided turn for the worse under President George H.W. Bush with the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine that reformulated the old CFR plans for global U.S. military dominance and contained the ominous warning that Russia was the only nation on earth with the power to destroy the U.S. By now, the U.S. had begun its next phase of global conquest with Bush’s war against Iraq—Desert Storm. The goal was total military colonization of the Middle East, with the “Greater Israel” project so near and dear to the hearts of the Neocons an obvious beneficiary. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-6, with the U.S. arming both sides, doubtless had the same underlying purposes.
The oddity in the designation of Russia as the worst of enemies named in the Wolfowitz Doctrine was that a year earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed, ceasing to exist in 1991, with U.S. hawks declaring that the Cold War was over and that the U.S. had won. Their corollary was that the Reagan military build-up had forced the Soviet economy into receivership because they couldn’t keep up with U.S. military spending.
But in a December 17, 2022, interview on the online news platform, The Duran, Jack F. Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, said that “the idea that we spent them to defeat was absolutely wrong.” He said the U.S. “did not win the Cold War.” He said the Soviet Union broke up because the Cold War was over by 1989 and that it was local nationalism that tore it apart. He added that the end of the Cold War was “negotiated as equals.”
But here was the rub: the Wolfowitz Doctrine proved that it wasn’t “communism” that the U.S. wanted to defeat, as Russia was no longer a communist state. Matlock said that Gorbachev had abandoned communism in his UN speech of December 7, 1988. Nor was the U.S. really pushing for “democracy.” Overnight Russia had become more democratic than many of the authoritarian regimes the U.S. had been supporting around the world for decades, such as those in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Rather it was Russia as a geopolitical enemy that the U.S. was targeting; meaning, in Russia’s eyes, its very existence as a territory, a state, and a civilization.
In order to promote peace with the West, Gorbachev had agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany as one nation and part of NATO, given U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s agreement that NATO would not advance “one inch eastward” from the German border. This pledge was violated by the next three presidents - Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. Veteran U.S. statesman George Kennan opposed the expansion of NATO, while Ambassador Matlock called it “a great tragedy.”
Meanwhile, 9/11, the Neocons’ “new Pearl Harbor,” produced the “War on Terror,” the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the military doctrine of Full-Spectrum Dominance, and the assaults on Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Libya. The ideological focal point was demonization of all things Islam. The rationale? “They hate our freedoms.”
But the 9/11 Truth Movement began to poke holes in the official conspiracy theory of terrorists with box cutters that over time became gaping abysses. The anti-Islam narrative began to wear thin when stacked up against U.S. military overkill, the CIA’s torture chambers, the useless expenditure of trillions of dollars shooting at goat herders, the absence of any evidence of WMDs in Iraq or co-conspirators anywhere, and Israel’s endless strife with the Palestinians.
Now Russia itself had begun to make a stand. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin challenged the attempt by the U.S. to achieve hegemony through creation of a “unipolar” world “in which there is one master, one sovereign.” He said, “at the end of the day this is pernicious.”
There was never any indication that Putin, in making his Munich declaration or afterwards, had any intention of restoring the Soviet “empire.” But he was absolutely determined to preserve Russia’s sovereignty and security despite the declared intention of factions in the West to break up Russia’s territory and gain control of its resources. He had also lamented the fact that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, 25 million ethnic Russians had been left out of what was now a unified and strengthening nation-state, blending a multiplicity of races, languages, and religions.
The “War on Terror” ended up being a tragic failure. So now the Western mainstream media jumped at their next big chance by depicting Putin as the bad guy du jour, even more “authoritarian,” and “evil” than either Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. But they would have done the same had Donald Duck been president of Russia - a nasty, duck-billed, feathered tyrant who was attacking democracy, freedom, human rights, and, yes, the “New American Century” the Neocons had dreamt up.
Ukraine - The Crossroads: Now the U.S., with the Neocons firmly entrenched in the State Department and elsewhere, surrounded Russia with military bases and attacked its perimeter with color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, following on the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. President Barack Obama then situated the Aegis Missile Defense System in Poland and Romania with the potential to activate missiles that could reach Moscow with nuclear warheads in six minutes. Talk was current of a possible “decapitation” strike against the Russian leadership.
Finally, in 2014, with “cookies” Victoria Nuland and Vice President Joe “Burisma” Biden in charge, the U.S. fomented a coup in Ukraine with the aid of paid snipers to drive out a president friendly toward Russia and his replacement with a NeoNazi junta that put Ukraine on a war footing. In response, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, where Sevastopol is the home of its Black Sea fleet, with 85 percent popular approval, while the eastern Ukrainian Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, ethnically-Russian, declared independence.
Finally, after eight years of Ukrainian provocations, the death from Ukrainian shelling of more than 10,000 Donbass civilians, and the treachery of Germany and France in failing to uphold the Minsk agreements they had guaranteed, Russia entered Ukraine with its military forces in February 2022. The conflict was on, a conflict that Russia is winning. U.S.-led sanctions against Russia failed to bring down its economy or force regime change against Putin. But each Ukrainian setback on the battlefield has been followed by more weapons and money supplied to the Volodymyr Zelensky regime by the U.S., UK, Germany, France, and other NATO members.
But who was calling the shots? In March 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators reached agreement on a tentative settlement at meetings in Istanbul. UK prime minister Boris Johnson then rushed to Kiev to induce Zelensky to tear up the agreement and continue the war. Western escalation has included billions of dollars worth of heavy tanks and other weapons to Ukraine, along with cluster munitions and depleted uranium projectiles. There have been drone attacks on Russia itself and on Crimea. But the Ukrainian counteroffensive has collapsed, with speculation increasing of a major Russian counterattack, possibly even cutting Ukraine off from the Black Sea.
We have now come full circle. Warnings from Washington continue that Putin had better not go nuclear, which can be read as inviting him to do so. This is obviously a new phase of brinkmanship that could give the U.S. a pretext for themselves moving to nuclear war. Meanwhile, the U.S. understands that it could in no way challenge Russia in a conventional war even with the entire NATO alliance being activated. Even then, divisiveness within NATO and the absence of sufficient military force anywhere in Europe make this impossible at present. Veteran military analyst Scott Ritter writes in Sputnik News on September 21, 2023, that even were the U.S. to activate its entire military force stationed in Europe against Russia, it would be defeated within one to two weeks of intensive combat. The only alternative would then be to activate a gigantic airlift of additional forces into Europe with U.S. cargo planes sitting ducks for destruction en route. Impossible.
There are now signs that the U.S. may be pressuring Ukraine to agree to a cease-fire, with a “freeze” along the lines of the decades-old Korean settlement. But all this would do would be to “kick the can down the road” - possibly until after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, likely to be preceded by elections in Ukraine in March. There are no signs that the U.S. is ready to concede a Russian victory involving the redrawing of the European security apparatus with Russia a respected party. The Ukrainian government speaks of a “long-term” conflict lasting decades. So there is no way to aver that the war in Ukraine is ending or to speculate about the next phase. So, is a nuclear World War III a possibility?"
"Next: Part II Are the Military-Industrial Complex and Deep State Driving Us to War?"
Hat tip to ZeroHedge for this material.
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