Apr 172021
 


Edvard Munch Spring 1889

 

The Eruption of the Refugee Crisis and the Push for Vaccine Passports (MPN)
And Now Proof: Covid Vaccines Are More Dangerous Than Covid (Denninger)
Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were A “Huge Mistake” (ET)
De-escalate Before Ukraine Conflict Turns Into Nuclear Holocaust- Gabbard (RT)
How Putin’s “Saber-Rattling” Forced A Biden Summit (ZH)
Russia Blocking Of Black Sea Would Be ‘Unjustified’ – NATO (Y!)
Biden Isn’t Ending The Afghanistan War, He’s Privatizing It (GZ)
Journalists Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Embrace a New One (Greenwald)
Liz Cheney Was Top Peddler Of Debunked ‘Russian Bounties’ Story (ZH)
Rachel Maddow is Bill O’Reilly (Taibbi)
US Corporate Media Is Guilty Of The Exact Same “Interference” As Russia (Tracey)
Joe Biden’s Demonic Phase (Jim Kunstler)
Hunter Biden on Burisma, Don Jr., and Cooking Crack (DB)
Govt’s Won’t Let Bitcoin Take On State-issued Currencies – Jim Rogers (Kitco)
The Echoes Of China’s Financial Crisis Are Being Heard (SMH)

 

 

 

 


A sailboat shielded by clouds, Chios Island, Greece. @avgoustidisermis

 

 

“..the architects of the biosecurity state..”

The Eruption of the Refugee Crisis and the Push for Vaccine Passports (MPN)

The controversy erupted on Twitter even as the 32,000-foot-high plume of smoke from Saint Vincent’s La Soufrière volcano was still rising in the sky. The firestorm on American social media platforms over reports that only those vaccinated against COVID-19 would be allowed to evacuate the eastern Caribbean island sheds light on the architects of the biosecurity state who have descended on Saint Vincent & the Grenadines (SVG) to explore the limits of mandatory public health protocols in the midst of a natural disaster now projected to “last months.” Global organizations, NGOs, and members of the scientific community are coordinating emergency response efforts in Saint Vincent. Power outages, no clean water, and continued volcanic eruptions have rendered parts of the island virtually uninhabitable, plunging Vincentians who have managed to escape into a condition of quasi-statelessness where notions of human rights and civil liberties become malleable.

“Refugees are in a position of complete vulnerability,” says Dr. Diego Garcia Ricci, from the Ibero-American University in Mexico City, speaking to MintPress. The constitutional law professor and data privacy expert addressed some of the issues surrounding the plight of refugees as biometric data like retinal scans, fingerprinting and even gender, become a pillar of identity documentation and incipient travel requirements in the wake of the pandemic. “While biometrics can be useful for identification purposes, mistakes do happen,” Garcia Ricci warns. Most at risk from these mistakes, abuse and racial profiling arising out of biometric digital identity systems are those whose need for the ‘state’ is made indispensable by virtue of being rendered stateless. Free agents with no agency are prime targets for global entities like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which claims to speak for close to 80 million forcibly displaced people.

Vincentians who are unable or refuse to leave the island are likely to be reclassified as “internally displaced persons” or IDPs, another kind of refugee as defined by the UNHCR. Such classifications are part of a vast structure of laws and guidelines enshrined in the archives of supranational state entities like the European Commission and the United Nations, based on the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which establishes international rules governing the treatment and rights of refugees, whose numbers have nearly doubled since 2012, ballooning from 45.2 million “displaced” to 79.5 million as of the last count.

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“In healthy adults and especially healthy children they should be prohibited outright as they are, on the math, more dangerous than the virus.”

And Now Proof: Covid Vaccines Are More Dangerous Than Covid (Denninger)

I suspected the data would be forthcoming showing this given the VAERS reports and now we have it:

I Using an electro nic health records network we estimated the absolute incidence of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) in the two weeks following COVID-19 diagnosis (N=513,284), or influenza (N=172,742), or receipt of the BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccines (N=489,871).


The incidence of portal vein thrombosis (PVT) was also assessed in these groups, as well as the baseline CVT incidence over a two-week period. The incidence of CVT after COVID-19 diagnosis was 39.0 per million people (95% CI, 25.2–60.2). This was higher than the CVT incidence after influenza (0.0 per million people, 95% CI 0.0 – 22.2, adjusted RR=6.73, P=.003) or after receiving BNT162b2 or RNA-1273 vaccine (4.1 per million people, 95% CI 1.1 – 14.9, adjusted RR=6.36, P<.001).

Wait a second…. you said the vaccines are more dangerous yet the data says that Covid-19 is ten times as dangerous as the vaccine for the same condition. So how can the title of this article be correct? Simple: For every reported infection somewhere around ten are not reported. Either they’re completely asymptomatic (about 30%) or mild enough that the person in question does not identify it as potentially Covid-19 and thus does not get tested. Yet both of the latter confer immunity just as does a symptomatic case. Further, you’re not guaranteed to get the disease. You are guaranteed to take the risk if you get the shot. Therefore we must adjust for the risk of contracting the disease which is not certain; you may have already had it and not know it and, in addition, you may have cross-reactive immunity.

Therefore the shot is close to or even more-dangerous than the disease. The baseline for approval of any therapy is that it must be much less dangerous than the disease itself. When it comes to vaccines the usual expectation is that it should 100x or more safer to get the shot than the disease, simply on the basis that you are not guaranteed to get the disease irrespective of how bad it is. If the disease is particularly lethal either generally or to you then a risk that is material for the vaccine is acceptable. What’s even worse is that this risk is basically identically in both mRNA and viral-vector (e.g. J&J) formulations; they both cause the same result in the same percentage of recipients, yet the FDA is still allowing the mRNA vaccines to be administered!

Covid-19, in non-morbid (young, but not exclusively so) people, only kills about 1/50,000 times — so if the shot gets you 1/250,000 times it’s a bad risk since a huge percentage of infections are not medically known as they are clinically significant and you are not guaranteed to be infected at all since you may have already had it and not known it or be resistant due to a previous infection with some other coronavirus and thus not at risk of developing clinical disease. These shots are not approvable on the math for other than materially-morbid individuals. In healthy adults and especially healthy children they should be prohibited outright as they are, on the math, more dangerous than the virus.

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“When you have people too scared to go to the emergency room when they’re literally having a heart attack, that didn’t happen in a vacuum..”

Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were A “Huge Mistake” (ET)

Standing behind the desk in his office in Tallahassee, DeSantis leafed through a folder of praise he’s received from around the nation and across the globe. Hanging on the walls around the relatively small space was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as well as the uniform the governor wore as the captain of the Yale baseball team. When asked why he chose Lincoln, DeSantis said the president is the best example of a leader who had to make difficult decisions in a time of crisis. When asked why some of the leaders today have continued with lockdowns even with ample evidence of their ineffectiveness, the governor theorized that the people involved have committed too much to the narrative and have made it impossible to change course.

“You have a situation where if you’re in this field, the pandemic, that’s something that you kind of prepare for and you’re ready for. And a lot of these people muffed it,” he said. “When push came to shove, they advocated policies that have not worked against the virus but have been very, very destructive. They are never going to admit they were wrong about anything, unfortunately.” Elected leaders aren’t the only ones to blame, according to the governor. The media and big tech companies played a major role in perpetuating fears about the virus while selectively censoring one side of the mitigation debate. DeSantis said the media and tech giants stood to benefit from the lockdown as people stayed home and consumed their products.

“It was all just to generate the most clicks that they could. And so that was always trying to do the stuff that would inspire the most fear,” DeSantis said. Two weeks after the interview, an undercover video recorded by Project Veritas showed a technical director at CNN talking about the boost the network received due to its pandemic coverage. “It’s fear. Fear really drives numbers,” CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester said. “Fear is the thing that keeps you tuned in.” The fear-mongering worked, DeSantis said, pointing to CDC statistics showing that 4 out of 10 American adults delayed or avoided getting urgent or routine medical treatment in June 2020. The agency’s report said that the pattern may have contributed to the excess deaths reported during that period, due to preventable illnesses and injuries going untreated.

Emergency room doctors had reported that fewer people were coming in with cardiac-related chest pains while more were coming in with late-stage appendicitis, something that is usually caught much earlier. The pandemic has also led to a sharp decrease in cancer screenings and detections. “When you have people too scared to go to the emergency room when they’re literally having a heart attack, that didn’t happen in a vacuum,” DeSantis said.

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“..the American people must decide if they’re willing to go to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine. If not – the rhetoric must be toned down.”

De-escalate Before Ukraine Conflict Turns Into Nuclear Holocaust- Gabbard (RT)

Unless the world wants to see loved ones “burned alive in a nuclear holocaust,” politicians should cut out the “macho” act and begin to deescalate. That’s according to former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a US Army veteran. Speaking to Tucker Carlson on Fox News on Thursday, Gabbard said the American people must decide if they’re willing to go to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine. If not – the rhetoric must be toned down. “Such a war would come at a cost beyond anything we can really imagine,” she told Carlson. “This is something that will directly impact…every single one of your viewers.” “It is a war in which there are no winners,” she added.

The conflict in Donbass started in 2014, when two pro-Russia breakaway republics unilaterally declared independence from Kiev. While a peace deal was agreed upon later that year, both sides regularly report ceasefire violations. Much of the region is now split into the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. According to Kiev, both of the unrecognized states are controlled by Russia, which the Kremlin denies. Moscow says both Donetsk and Lugansk are part of Ukraine. Fears of a full-scale war have been growing in recent weeks. Media reports have revealed a build-up of both Russian manpower and equipment, particularly on the Crimean peninsula and by the eastern Ukrainian frontier. This came after news of increased shelling of Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region by Kiev’s forces, and revelations that the Ukrainian Army was increasing its number of troops in the area.

Kiev is supported by the US, which has provided money, equipment and expertise. However, Washington has not given Ukraine the status of a full ally. According to Gabbard, it would be a disaster if a war kicks off in Ukraine. In particular, she highlighted the “thousands of nuclear weapons” Moscow and Washington have aimed at each other, warning that “hundreds of millions” could die and suffer if a war kicks off.

Tulsi Gabbard
https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1383022106779267076

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Uhhh, no. Putin is not eager to meet with Biden, Lavrov et al have made that plenty clear: such ameeting would only be used to make Putin look bad, or worse. And no, it’s not saber-rattling when you respond to 10s of 1000s gathering on your border.

How Putin’s “Saber-Rattling” Forced A Biden Summit (ZH)

[..] given Biden’s recent offer to sit down with Putin for a bilateral summit this summer, which is still on the table, it appears Ukraine’s leadership has been effectively sidelined. As one FT piece underscored this week, Putin’s troop build-up has succeeded in pressuring the Biden administration for a coveted summit to decide the future of Ukraine. “The summit format will also please the Kremlin by effectively cutting Kyiv out of any negotiations, and allow Putin to project the image of two global superpowers deciding the future fate of the conflict,” FT observed. Here’s more from FT… “If Vladimir Putin’s decision to deploy tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine’s border in the past few weeks was driven primarily by a desire to get the west’s attention, he did not have to wait too long for his reward.

Hours after his defense minister on Tuesday admitted Russia had mobilised two armies and three paratroop divisions to positions close to the conflict-wracked frontier, US President Joe Biden phoned the Kremlin with an offer of a bilateral summit: a long sought-after prize for Putin who craves a seat at the world’s highest negotiating table. …Those 50,000 extra soldiers, scores of tanks and other heavy weaponry spooked Kyiv and other European powers, and sparked a hurried response from Nato and the US amid fears over a potential outbreak of fighting between the two countries.” This wasn’t a stand-alone assessment, given also this week BBC came to a similar conclusion.

The BBC commentary underscored that the Russian troop build-up was never ultimately about some kind of hyped “invasion” of Ukraine – as Kiev officials have been shouting – but instead about bringing massive leverage to bear in forcing Biden’s hand. To the chagrin of the West’s Russia hawks, the BBC essentially pointed to a major diplomatic victory and ‘checkmate’ of sorts for the Russian side… The build-up has been impossible to ignore: thousands of Russian troops deployed towards Ukraine; US warships reportedly heading for the Black Sea and Russia’s foreign ministry warning them off “for their own good”. As the hostile rhetoric and military moves around Ukraine have intensified, Western politicians have begun fearing an open invasion and urging Russia’s Vladimir Putin to “de-escalate”.

Russia has refused: the defense ministry this week insisted its moves were in response to “threatening” Nato exercises in Europe. Then Mr Putin got a phone-call from the White House. And then, noted the BBC, Biden suggested a near-future face-to-face summit with Putin, which gives Russia the edge given it was the US side that first proposed it: “In Putin’s game of brinkmanship, Biden blinked first,” argues journalist Konstantin Eggert, after Joe Biden made his first call to the Kremlin and proposed meeting Mr Putin “in the coming months”. It’s just weeks after the US president agreed with an interviewer that Russia’s leader was “a killer”. President Biden’s new move is now a new topic of debate – disaster prevention or a mistaken concession – but in the run-up to a summit, the risk of major military action by Russia certainly fades.

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Well, the US stated again that it doesn’t recognize the present status of Crimea, maybe that’s enough to make it justified.

Russia Blocking Of Black Sea Would Be ‘Unjustified’ – NATO (Y!)

Russian plans to block parts of the Black Sea would be “unjustified”, NATO said Friday, calling on Moscow “to ensure free access to Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, and allow freedom of navigation”. Russian state media have reported that Moscow intends to close parts of the Black Sea to foreign military and official ships for six months. Such a move could affect access to Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, which is connected to the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait, on the eastern tip of the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. The move has triggered concerns in the United States and the European Union.

Russia’s “ongoing militarisation of Crimea, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov are further threats to Ukraine’s independence, and undermine the stability of the broader region,” a spokeswoman for NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. Blocking the Black Sea would “be an unjustified move, and part of a broader pattern of destabilising behaviour by Russia,” she added. NATO called on Russia to “de-escalate immediately, stop its pattern of provocations, and respect its international commitments”. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby noted that Russia was justifying plans to block the Black Sea until October on the grounds that it is preparing military exercises.

“Russia has a history of taking aggressive actions against Ukrainian vessels and impeding international maritime transit in the Black Sea, particularly near the Kerch Strait,” he told reporters. “It’s just the latest example of its ongoing campaign to undermine and destabilise Ukraine,” he added, reaffirming Washington’s “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. “We call on Russia to cease its harassment of vessels in the region, and reverse its build-up of forces along Ukraine’s border and occupied Ukraine.”

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“Over 18,000 Pentagon contractors remain in Afghanistan..”

Biden Isn’t Ending The Afghanistan War, He’s Privatizing It (GZ)

Over 18,000 Pentagon contractors remain in Afghanistan, while official troops number 2,500. Joe Biden will withdraw this smaller group of soldiers while leaving behind US Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives — privatizing and downscaling the war, but not ending it.

On April 14, President Joe Biden announced that he would end the U.S.’s longest war and withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. Over 6,000 NATO troops will also be withdrawn by that time. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said during his remarks from the White House Treaty Room, the same location from which President George W. Bush had announced the war was beginning in October 2001. “We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan and it’s time to end the forever war.”

Biden’s claim that he is ending the forever war is misleading. As The New York Times reported, the United States would remain after the formal departure of U.S. troops with a “shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations Forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives.” Their mission will be to “find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic state threats, current and former American officials said.” The Times further reported that the United States maintains a constellation of air bases in the Persian Gulf region as well as in Jordan, and a major air headquarters in Qatar, which could provide a launching pad for long-range bomber or armed drone missions into Afghanistan.

Matthew Hoh, a disabled combat veteran who resigned from the State Department in 2009 in protest of the war, stated that a genuine peace process in Afghanistan is “dependent upon foreign forces leaving Afghanistan.” Further, Hoh said that, “Regardless of whether the 3500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

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Clickbait.

Journalists Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Embrace a New One (Greenwald)

The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then-candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s refusal to punish Russia and his casting doubt on the truth of the story was more proof that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) demanded that, in response, the U.S. put Russians and Afghans “in body bags.”

What was missing from this media orgy of indignation and militaristic demands for retaliation was an iota of questioning of whether the story was, in fact, true. All they had was an anonymous leak from “intelligence officials” — which The New York Times on Thursday admitted came from the CIA — but that was all they needed. That is because the vast majority of the corporate sector of the press lives under one overarching rule: When the CIA or related security state agencies tell American journalists to believe something, we obey unquestioningly, and as a result, whatever assertions are spread by these agencies, no matter how bereft of evidence or shielded by accountability-free anonymity, they instantly transform, in our government-worshipping worldview, into a proven fact — gospel — never to be questioned but only affirmed and then repeated and spread as far and wide as possible.

That has been the dynamic driving the relationship between the corporate press and the CIA for decades, throughout the Cold War and then into the post-9/11 War on Terror and invasion of Iraq. But it has become so much more extreme in the Trump era. As the CIA became one of the leading anti-Trump #Resistance factions — a key player in domestic politics to subvert the presidency of the 45th President regarded by media figures as a Hitler-type menace — the bond between the corporate press and the intelligence community deepened more than ever. It is not an exaggeration to call it a merger: so much so that a parade of former security state officials from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS and others was hired by these news outlets to deliver the news. The partnership was no longer clandestine but official, out in the open, and proud.

The first goal this story served was to weaponize it in the battle waged by pro-war House Democrats and their neocon GOP allies to stop Trump’s withdrawal plan from Afghanistan. How, they began demanding upon publication of the CIA/NYT story, can we possibly leave Afghanistan when the Russians are trying to kill our troops? Would that not be a reckless abdication to the Kremlin of this country that we own, and would withdrawal not be a reward to Putin after we learned he was engaged in such dastardly plotting to kill our sons and daughters?

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“Cheney was persistent in pushing the story, much to the frustration of colleagues and even allies on Capitol Hill..”

Liz Cheney Was Top Peddler Of Debunked ‘Russian Bounties’ Story (ZH)

As Democrats seized on a now-debunked New York Times report that the Kremlin placed bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan – blaming President Trump for deliberately downplaying the aggression to appease ‘Lord Putin’ (as the story goes) – Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) punched right, peddling the fabricated bounties story to any and all who would listen, according to The Federalist. Fast forward ten months later, and the Daily Beast reports that a senior administration finally admitted: “The United States intelligence community assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and perhaps earlier. “Low to moderate confidence” is another way of saying “unproven and potentially false, “in part because it relies on detainee reporting,” which is often unreliable.


Yet, Cheney pounced in an effort to undermine then-President Trump, while using the fake news to also lobby for a prolonged military presence in the region as the Trump administration was pulling troops out of Afghanistan. More via The Federalist: “Two days later, Politico, in an article titled, “Cheney takes on Trump,” wrote, “in her latest rebuke of Trump, Cheney openly questioned whether the president was aware of reports that the Russians offered Afghan militants bounties to kill U.S. troops and demanded the administration take a more aggressive posture toward the Kremlin. Cheney was persistent in pushing the story, much to the frustration of colleagues and even allies on Capitol Hill as she continued an inner-party crusade against the president in an election year from her position as House conference chair.”

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The rest is behind a Substack paywall.

Rachel Maddow is Bill O’Reilly (Taibbi)

If you’d told me back in 2005, when I first met Rachel Maddow, that the lightning-quick, ultra-smooth broadcaster would someday supplant Bill O’Reilly as the #1 name in cable news, I wouldn’t have been surprised, at all. But I’d have been shocked if you told me she got to the top by being Bill O’Reilly. With Maddow in the lead role, MSNBC has become Fox, but somehow more craven, jingoistic, and shameless. If you don’t believe it, compare their narratives side by side, and see if you can spot a real difference between Bush-era Fox and Maddow’s MNSBC broadcasts from this past week. On February 16, 2001, six months before 9/11, O’Reilly said on Fox, “You know, I don’t take Saddam Hussein all that seriously anymore, as far as a world threat.” He added, “Maybe I’m wrong and naive here. Should we be very frightened of this guy?”

Within two years, O’Reilly reversed course. He launched himself into an incredible 16-year run as the #1-rated star on cable by playing Madame DeFarge for the Bush/Cheney War on Terror. His show became a nighty fireside chat in which citizens tuned in to fulminate over stories of Saddam’s boundless evil, denounce traitorous unbelievers, and engage in McCarthyite interrogations of the insufficiently patriotic. He moved the factual record by himself. On December 6, 2002, he told his audience: “I can’t, in good conscience, tell the American people that I know for sure that [Saddam] has smallpox or anthrax or he’s got nuclear or chemical and that he is ready to use that.” But two months later, on February 17, 2002, he was saying, “According to the U.N., he’s got anthrax, VX gas, ricin, and on and on.”

Two weeks after that, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted, O’Reilly was saying things like, “This guy we know has anthrax and VX and all this stuff.” He furthermore announced that “Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can’t do that, just shut up,” adding that “Americans, and indeed our allies, who actively work against our military once the war is underway will be considered enemies of the state by me.” By the runup to the invasion, O’Reilly was berating anyone who even tried to suggest the WMD case was not airtight, or had the temerity to suggest that Saddam Hussein was not the equal of Hitler. “Whoa, whoa. It’s not Hitler?” he snapped in one broadcast. “What’s the difference?”

Want to know how seven in ten Americans during the war came to believe that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9/11? In part, because people like O’Reilly regularly said things like, “Saddam Hussein… I believe is involved with this World Trade Center and Pentagon bombing,” and “I believe that you’re going to find out that money from Iraq flowed in and helped [9/11] happen.” O’Reilly eventually got around to putting his “spotlight” on anyone who didn’t publicly back the invasion effort. He even took on Pope John Paul II, saying, “And then the pope sits in Rome and says, gee, this is terrible, but does not throw his moral authority behind removing this dictator.”

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The media has more incentive.

US Corporate Media Is Guilty Of The Exact Same “Interference” As Russia (Tracey)

[..] there was nothing new about the suite of anti-Russia charges promulgated Thursday by the US federal government, and parroted as usual with maximum credulity across the US media ecosystem. The charges were again predicated on the idea that Russian “interference” and/or “influence” is an extremely foreboding test for the survival of US Democracy. Taking bold action, the Treasury Department levied sanctions against a bunch more Russians for their claimed nefarious behavior in carrying out this interference/influence — a fulfillment of Joe Biden’s oft-stated campaign pledge that under his watch, Russia would finally “pay a price” for allegedly engaging in such activities. Donald Trump, it was thought, had been appallingly lax in his resolve to confront this threat; now, a new sheriff is in town.

Leaving aside the question of whether it’s prudent to assume that Janet Yellen is suddenly in possession of a foolproof methodology for attributing the provenance of “cyber operations” to specific foreign individuals and nation-states, it’s worth emphasizing what exactly is being alleged in the statement. The Treasury Department document reads: “Outlets operated by Russian Intelligence Services focus on divisive issues in the United States, denigrate US political candidates, and disseminate false and misleading information.” Noting that these same characteristics could be just as easily applied to US corporate media outlets is so blindingly self-evident as to almost be redundant. Were there not “outlets” during the 2020 election that were “focused” on “denigrating” Donald Trump? Or for that matter, Joe Biden?

Do “divisive issues” not tend to be “focused on” by these same outlets as a basic precept of their core business model? Controversy = clicks/views, which equals revenue. Everyone knows this. Yet when scary Russian outlets are said to employ this same logic in their own content-production enterprises, it magically becomes dangerous enough to justify all manner of punitive government and corporate action. Including but not limited to: censorship purges, tighter regulation of online speech, and, as Biden announced Thursday, sanctions and expulsion of diplomats. “Disseminating false and misleading information”? The entire US media just got caught “disseminating” a fake story about Russians putting bounties on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan. If you’re truly concerned about the dissemination of “false and misleading information” having deleterious effects on the health of US political culture, your first target should be CNN.

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“..the US has absolutely nothing to gain from continuing to antagonize Russia..”

Joe Biden’s Demonic Phase (Jim Kunstler)

The lesson there is that the US has absolutely nothing to gain from continuing to antagonize Russia, and that the mentally weak Joe Biden is merely projecting the picture of a weakened and confused USA by keeping it up. Of course, a closer read might be that these hijinks are meant to distract from the more serious and consequential breakdown in relations between the US and China, currently engineered by the blundering team of Sec’y of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who went to Alaska recently to tell the Chinese delegation that they were morally unworthy of conducting trade negotiations, thereby torpedoing the trade negotiations that they went to Alaska to conduct. Smooth move fellas.


Unlike Russia, with its eleven time zones, which actually does not want or need any more territory, China is surely making hegemonic moves all over the place, not just around Hong Kong and Taiwan but in Africa and South America, while it strives to build the world’s largest navy, exports gain-of-function viruses, replaces the US in space exploration, and excels at weaponizing computer science. China’s weaknesses are a lack of sufficient domestic oil supply and food, which its current moves aim to correct. It was on its way to turning the US into a raw materials and food-crop colony when Mr. Trump came along and tried to put a stop to that. And now Ol’ Joe has cancelled that action — after being on the receiving end of Chinese financial largesse in four years out-of-office. Nothing to see there, folks, says Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice, while in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with its trove of incriminating memoranda.

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Glenn Greenwald: In this interview with @thedailybeast, this statement from Hunter Biden about his emails and laptop is a complete lie. No intelligence agency, let alone all of them, concluded it was a Russian operation, but you wouldn’t know that from the DB article:

Hunter Biden on Burisma, Don Jr., and Cooking Crack (DB)

Jong-Fast asks Biden when he realized that the former president and his son were fixated on him. “That was right around when I started to get sober and clean… It was only then did I realize the level of their obsession because long enough to look up from whatever drink or drug I was just pursuing at the moment. And it seemed like that every word out of the president’s mouth was some kind of demeaning or just horrible insult towards me,” he answers. “Do you think they did it because they wanted you to kill yourself?” Jong-Fast replies. “As a person in recovery, one of the things that I have truly tried to come to grips with is that the world actually does not revolve around me,” Biden says. “I mean, usually it doesn’t. But on this, I feel that it does,” Jong-Fast says.

“I don’t think that they thought that they would necessarily convince anyone not to vote for my dad because I’m an addict. I think there’s far, far too many people—I mean, everyone I know knows someone that they love—that suffer from addiction,” Biden says. “I think that they thought that they would be able to distract my dad enough that he wouldn’t be able to focus on the campaign… But it had the exact opposite effect… They obviously don’t know what it’s like to be a part of a family, at least this family.” Jong-Fast also asks Biden about the leaked emails that caused such a stir at the end of the campaign. He claims he had no idea what she’s talking about. The email from an executive at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, thanking Biden for “the opportunity to meet your father and spend some time with him”?

“I truly don’t know the origin of a lot of this stuff,” Biden replies. The email titled “expectations,” which involved details for how much he might get paid by China’s largest private energy company? “I literally don’t know what you’re even referring to. Is it from me?” Biden answers. “You know, I mean, there is a intelligence report from, from all of our intelligence agencies that has come to the conclusion that this was a Russian operation.”

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“This is a good time to be old. ”

Govt’s Won’t Let Bitcoin Take On State-issued Currencies – Jim Rogers (Kitco)

Money will become more and more digitized, according to Jim Rogers, investor, best-selling author, and co-founder of the Quantum Fund, but the question is whether or not non-government issued digital currencies will prevail. “If cryptocurrencies become successful, most governments will outlaw it, because they don’t want to lose their monopoly, every government in the world is working on computer money now, including the U.S. The Chinese are there already. I can’t imagine that the governments are going to say ok, this is our crypto money, or you can use their crypto money, that’s not the way governments work, historically,” Rogers told Michelle Makori, editor-in-chief of Kitco News.

Read more …

“Lai was charged, found guilty of corruption (and bigamy!) and was executed in January.”

The Echoes Of China’s Financial Crisis Are Being Heard (SMH)

In the late 1990s China experienced a massive bad debt crisis – there are estimates that more than half of its state-owned enterprises( SOEs) were insolvent in the mid-1990s – with the non-performing loans within the balance sheets of China’s four major banks thought to be between a quarter and a third of their total assets. The government reacted to the emergence of that destabilising mountain of bad debts by recapitalising the state-owned banks; carving out their non-performing loans and handing them over to four new asset management companies to manage them out of the system over time. Huarong was one of those asset managers, established to acquire and then manage the bad loans made by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

The Huarong predicament and the context of the swelling tide of SOE-related defaults highlight not just dangerously and system-threatening excessive leverage and poor allocation of capital within the heart of China’s economy but significant, indeed egregious, governance failures. Now the company set up to manage bad debts is itself apparently teetering on the verge of bankruptcy due to its own non-performing loans and will either be restructured or fail. While it is not a bank it is a substantial financial institution, with about $340 billion of assets and net assets of about $32 billion. Embarrassingly for the Chinese authorities, although it listed In Hong Kong in 2015, it is a state-controlled enterprise. The Ministry of Finance owns a majority of its shares.

The company got itself into trouble, it seems, by expanding beyond its charter as a manager of banks’ bad debts into quasi banking activities itself; lending to property developers, setting up securities trading businesses and essentially playing in the shadows of the system that the tightly-regulated banks have been forbidden to enter.It was able to do so because its former chairman, Lai Xiaomin, was by his own admission subjected to absolutely no oversight and was able to treat Huarong as his own plaything. When he was arrested in 2018 he admitted taking more than $350 million of “bribes” over the previous decade and was found to have about $50 million of cash stashed in an apartment he called “The Supermarket.” Lai was charged, found guilty of corruption (and bigamy!) and was executed in January.

Read more …

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle April 17 2021

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 51 total)
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  • #73316

    Edvard Munch Spring 1889   • The Eruption of the Refugee Crisis and the Push for Vaccine Passports (MPN) • And Now Proof: Covid Vaccines Are More
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 17 2021]

    #73318
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    “This is a good time to be old. ”

    I couldn’t agree more…

    #73320
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    …of course, I thought of many different scenarios of being old…closer to death comes to mind…

    #73321
    absolute galore
    Participant

    Ah. “The Scream.” Poor Edvard Munch. He’s not unlike a decent actor who gets famous for starring in a popular tv sitcom and can never break away from that public association.

    Of all the nonsense and insanity that has defined politics in the last decade, the B.S. about Russia, combined with our complete loss of diplomatic skills, is both the most frustrating and the most utterly irresponsible and dangerous. Not to mention we squandered a golden opportunity to de-escalate world tensions by working together in some kind of capacity. Instead, we drove them toward China and Iran. Tricky Dick looks pretty damn good from this perspective; certainly in a different stratosphere than Comatose Joe.

    #73322
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    @absolute galore

    I liked your comment very much…

    #73323
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    • And Now Proof: Covid Vaccines Are More Dangerous Than Covid (Denninger)

    The subtitle of that article is “for the nonmorbid.” Denninger concludes that “the FDA must immediately revoke the EUAs for all of them in any person who does not have a pre-existing morbidity that materially raises their risk above baseline…” He also calls for antibody tests before vaccination to check for existing immunity (which would change the risk-benefit analysis for the individual since the potential benefits of the vaccine would be reduced, while all the risks of the vaccine would remain.)

    To this I will add the following conclusions that can be drawn from CDC data about the vaccines (details appear in the comments to yesterday’s Covid Rattle):

    Vaccinated people who later come down with a symptomatic case of Covid tend to have more severe infections than those who are not vaccinated.

    The younger people (under 60) have a disproportionately larger share of the number of breakthrough cases.

    #73324
    John Day
    Participant

    Night before last, in page 2 of comments (like page 2 of Google search) Mdamski posted:

    What is Parasitic Drug (Ivermectin) Poisoning?

    “Poisoning by use of ivermectin is well documented. Most cases of adverse reaction result due to overdose of the product, and toxicity due to sensitivity because of a genetic mutation, MDR1 (multi-drug resistance gene), specific to certain breeds. This medication is given orally (tablets, treats, liquids, pastes), by injection, and as a topical solution against mites. Signs of poisoning are many and include blindness, tremors, and uncoordinated movements as a result of nerve and brain toxicity . There is no treatment for the poisoning; supportive measures are the only care available (though in cases of oral administration inducing of vomiting and active charcoal use are often done). Early and aggressive supportive care allows for a good prognosis for recovery.

    “Ivermectin is used in the treatment of parasitic diseases, one of the most well known being heartworm disease. Ivermectin belongs to the avermectin family of drugs and has been approved for multiple uses. Toxicity has been documented, with adverse effects due to the cross between the blood brain barrier.”

    Salt is a poison if you ingest too much too fast. And people wonder why I distrust experts.

    BACK to the present… The side effects above are analogous to the main side effect of ivermectin, as it is usually employed: DEAD WORMS COME OUT YOUR BUTT

    The weird effects are from when you take ivermectin for microfilarial worms, which have insinuated themselves into every pore of your being, and die there…

    Ladies and Gents, “Filariasis” : https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/filariasis/#:~:text=Filariasis%20is%20an%20infectious%20tropical,the%20bite%20of%20a%20mosquito.

    Go without fear!

    🙂

    #73325
    John Day
    Participant

    Well, on closer inspection, I see that quote may refer specifically to side effects in breeds of dogs.

    YMMV.

    The more famous side effects of ivermectin in humans are from killing the parasites, though.

    Stromectol-Man

    #73326
    zerosum
    Participant

    As usual TAE finds many
    Truthsayers?

    “Are we prepared to see our loved ones burn alive in a nuclear holocaust in a war with Russia over Ukraine? If not, cut out the macho saber rattling and deescalate before it’s too late”. – Tulsi Gabbard

    Who is doing the saber rattling?
    Why are they doing the saber rattling?
    The poor don’t have a saber.
    Why are “The news media” complicit?
    Why is Tulsi Gabbard talking about saber rattling to “the news media”?
    ——
    Again
    truthsayers

    “Biden’s Claim to be Ending America’s Longest War Misleading “

    Biden’s Claim To Be Ending America’s Longest War Misleading


    By Jeremy Kuzmarov – April 15, 2021

    Special Forces, Pentagon Contractors and Intelligence Operatives and mercenaries Will Remain

    Matthew Hoh, a disabled combat veteran who resigned from the State Department in 2009 in protest of the war, stated that a genuine peace process in Afghanistan is “dependent upon foreign forces leaving Afghanistan.” Further, Hoh said that, “Regardless of whether the 3500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

    1. Many of the contract workers in Afganistan have signed contracts which go to the year 2023 and beyond. So if all these contract workers leave Afganistan, the US, Government will have to negotiate some sort of settlement with the contract workers who will expect their contracts to be honored.
    2. Really informative article it is, I am pretty much sure that Pentagon will never depart from Afghanistan, because its biggest buffer state, and it touches its outskirts to major opponents of Pentagon, like Russia, Iran China. It touches oil and mineral rich central Asia, South Asia and so on.
    Uncle Sam also covets Afghans mineral wealth. A 2007 United States Geological Service survey discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium, which is used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and blackberries. An internal Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

    In 2001, when the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan, it was in the process of expanding its military infrastructure in Central Asia. Afghanistan provided a key way-station to this new “oil dorado,” which holds as much as 200 billion barrels of oil—about ten times the amount found in the North Sea, and a third of the Persian Gulf’s total reserves.

    Afghanistan was further valued at the time as a key location for an oil pipeline that would transport Central Asian oil to the Indian Ocean while bypassing Russia.
    As a previous CAM article documented, the current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani is largely a creation of the United States. Its military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. This support is going to continue—unless Congress cuts it off—alongside large-scale U.S. foreign aid programs that amount to nearly one billion per year.

    The U.S. wants to keep Ghani in power, or replace him with another proxy that can help it win the geopolitical competition with Russia and China, which is little different from the 19th century “great game” between Great Britain and Russia.

    As long as the U.S. empire remains intact, the war as such will go on, and on—and on.
    ———–
    Again
    truthsayers

    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-spread

    Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One
    The most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate.
    – Glenn Greenwald

    When the CIA or related security state agencies tell American journalists to believe something, we obey unquestioningly, and as a result, whatever assertions are spread by these agencies, no matter how bereft of evidence or shielded by accountability-free anonymity, they instantly transform, in our government-worshipping worldview, into a proven fact — gospel — never to be questioned but only affirmed and then repeated and spread as far and wide as possible.

    That has been the dynamic driving the relationship between the corporate press and the CIA for decades, throughout the Cold War and then into the post-9/11 War on Terror and invasion of Iraq. But it has become so much more extreme in the Trump era. As the CIA became one of the leading anti-Trump #Resistance factions — a key player in domestic politics to subvert the presidency of the 45th President regarded by media figures as a Hitler-type menace — the bond between the corporate press and the intelligence community deepened more than ever. It is not an exaggeration to call it a merger: so much so that a parade of former security state officials from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS and others was hired by these news outlets to deliver the news. The partnership was no longer clandestine but official, out in the open, and proud.

    In late June, this alliance of pro-war House Democrats — funded overwhelmingly by military contractors — and the Liz-Cheney-led neocon wing announced amendments to the military budget authorization process that would defund Trump’s efforts to withdraw troops from either Afghanistan or Germany (where they had been stationed for decades to defend Western Europe against a country, the Soviet Union, that ceased to exist decades ago). They instantly weaponized the NYT/CIA story as their primary argument.
    Over and over, the union of pro-war Democrats and Cheney-led neocon Republicans steamrolled the anti-war faction of left-wing and right-wing war opponents (led by Congressmembers Ro Khanna (D-CA), Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL)), and repeatedly used the Russia bounty story to justify continuation of the longest war in America’s history.

    ———-

    #73327
    Dimitri
    Participant
    #73328
    Germ
    Participant
    #73329
    Germ
    Participant

    “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

    Contrary to What Biden Said, U.S. Warfare in Afghanistan is Set to Continue

    #73330
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    “This is a good time to be old.”… until you look in the mirror of your heart and bemoan being too physically frail to help. Like a friend said yesterday, “Ah, if I could just be 75 again! I’d show people a few things.”

    It is never a good time to be old unless one is impatient to discover what afterlife might exist… and one can do that at any age. No need to wait for old age. James Dean comes to mind.

    I take no comfort knowing I am likely to be dead when the worst dying begins. It ails me, thinking of my offspring and how little I can do for them. Being not yet 75 myself, and notoriousaly spry, I am doubling down on making myself as strong and able as my seven decades allow, so I can make one last sprint and be of some use to those born after I was.

    %^&

    As for Tricky Dicky: he would be just as bad or worse. He is the guy who took us off the gold standard after perpetuating the war in Nam which sorely exacerbated the bleeding of gold from our treasury. The times were simply more in our favor back then, is all. Richard Milhouse Nixon was a paranoiac narcissistic freakwad who sounded, at age 60 (1973) as senile as Biden does now at age 78.

    Both men never met a Pentagonal penis they wouldn’t fellate if the price was right.

    %^&

    Regarding Afghanistan: those private contractors will soon be fleeing with what’s left of their shredded buttocks. We want the lithium but we can’t maintain our foothold over there to get it. Any foreign troops that keep a grip on those ore deposits will be multi-nationalcorporatist contracters and they probably won’t fight for shit once the going gets rough, which is imminent. Whatever help Russia/China are/aren’t giving the Taliban is likely to increase now that Pakistan has given us the kiss-off.

    Russia, Pakistan Agree to Boost Military Cooperation Against Terror, Sea Piracy

    Russia to boost ties with Pakistan, supply military gear

    Russia to Provide Weapons to Pakistan in Bid to Fight Terrorism

    It remains to be seen if the crackwhores in D.C. are insane enough to push Russia beyond the brink.

    “In the brink of an eye, the blink of a flash…”

    Some Stop the Bomb poem from ancient days’ old college friend.

    %^&

    I dunno, but it seems to me that to stop crypto-currency, governments pretty much have to stop the internet or get their quantum computing game into high gear (like China). They can reduce it, shut down sites, but the idea is afoot. Functionally, it’s a kind of shadow-banking, and shadow-banking is big and growing despite government crackdowns. Not that all “black market” currencies will technically be blockchain-based, but the cryptic aspect will prevail. I foresee currency based on networks of trust rather than suspicion coming to the fore. Trust is a rare commodity and so makes a decent “standard” on which to base a currency.

    Hawala banking

    As for genuine global reserve currency: after the fall of the US dollar, I doubt we’ll see a global reserve currency again. It was a freakish beast to start with, an absurd notion and an evil influence: ‘I trust your money not you’ can never be the basis of a stable society. It is one thing to trust a legal tender more than the jerk next door; it is another thing to place more trust in money than human cooperation, which is what we’ve done… on a global scale.

    But the illusion of globalism will persist longer than the US$, and some attempt to create a universal currency will be made, and maybe even briefly succeed before reality tires of pretending we know what we’re doing.

    #73331
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    It takes a special kind of moron to fight a war (cold war) after it’s over. You’re only fighting yourself, some Tyler Durden fever dream where you wake up broke and bloody.

    #73332
    Noirette
    Participant

    War Drums tak tak tak then halt boom soft … tone down…

    Biden assures Ukraine of the US’ unquestioned support for Ukr.’s territorial integrity (meaning to the-take Crimea and DLPR), following Zelensky’s 24 March near declaration of war, and the massing of troops, Russian, Ukrainian, on the two sides of the contact line.

    Biden calls Putin, 13 April, and proposes to ease tensions, discuss all kinds of issues, problems, hopin’ to create “a stable relationship” – say, to meet personally at a summit (subsequently announced to be held in Vienna in July.) The two US warships, prev. ordered to enter the Balck Sea, change tack and scoot back.

    Then Biden announces new sanctions on Russia! (They don’t seem to be terribly impactful.) Putin closes the Kerch Straits to warships for 6 months.

    On the face of it, within the usual proceedings and confines of diplomatic relations, this makes absolutely no sense. It looks like Biden is parroting stuff that he is ordered to do, and that different factions push him to and fro and backwards.

    Not so (excepting Joe’s mindless stumbling reading-aloud from the teleprompter.)

    First, we can think of Corp. Prez. who has lowly minions working on competition moves (lowering x prices, opening up a new franchise, etc.), and a high-level mandate to negotiate, with the two being considered separate strategic arms.

    …. A better image might be an old-school Headmaster who punishes a recalcitrant pupil – as Those are the Rules and We Must Follow Them – and who simultaneously proposes a grand meeting between the pupil, his parents, the savvy psych., the mediator, himself and his trusted deputy, to “sort it all out once and for all.” (This imagined scene is set in Great Britain.)

    This fits very precisely with the hallucinating China-US summit in Anchorage, 21 March, where, as I pointed out, the first image of the vid illustrates a dire, in your face, insult to the Chinese – the locale looking like a shoddy job done by a careless boy-scout team, set up in a cellar.

    Then, Blinken blasts off by insulting China and bringing up human rights abuses (err, only the supposed Chinese ones.)

    Exactly the same approach as Biden, above. Assuming an authority, a dominant position, that the US does not hold, and is proscribed in Int’l relations if one wants to negotiate.

    Recall: the Gorby – Reagan ‘friendship’ — Bush Junior seeing Putin’s soul — Trump’s attempt to ‘ally’ at least somewhat with Russia to prevent further soldering of a China-Russia alliance — …

    #73333
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    While I think the attempt to disrupt NordStream is serious, I believe the rest is just distracting nonsense, albeit with the strategic benefit of finding just how far Putin can be pushed these days.

    They know now. They can back off and pretend to have made a point while the dismantling of the covid machinery continues. This also is a losing proposition they’re trying to back off of without appearing totally incapable. This is proving difficult, but they have Joe to throw to the wolves when needed, and Trump’s long shadow to hide behind for awhile until it becomes too obvious that even deluded old Trump was more right about covid more often than the official narrative.

    But they’ve stacked the timber atop the kindling atop the tinder. It only wants a match, and there are rogues who might light that bonfire just to see it burn. They could do it in the name of Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah. Or Mother Ukraine. Or just to collect insurance on whatever.

    #73334
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    Pentagon: Unclear if Contractors Will Leave Afghanistan

    I think the Taliban and their cohorts are giving us fair warning to avoid major humiliation when Afghan’s acknowledged and de facto leaders make that call to Putin and ask for Russian support. This isn’t 1981. The Soviets not only left Afghanistan 29 years ago, they fell apart around the same time: the USSR is no more. Afghanistan knows the Great Game better than anyone, their land being the primary stadium for those tourneys. Now it’s time for them to be Russia’s friend. For awhile, maybe a few decades even, they’ll be treated fairly.

    I think the 18K contractors are currently having often angry discussions over French cognac and Kashmiri hash about their chances of being hired by Russia or China to exploit Afghani resources. They know those chances are zip, and if by some miracle they are hired, they’ll be left to hang out to dry as an example to other wannabe corporate armies.

    The Age of Corporations is almost done. They have parasitically killed off their government hosts in the West, with the Asian hosts also in major but not necessarily immediately terminal decline. Fascism still has legs in Asia.

    In Russia, corporations are required to function if they want to survive because Putin has no illusions about how power is maintained and has a VERY firm grip on the military (and the press, when necessary). In Russia, national identity is ancient, with a deep alliance between church and state that has been rebuilt with care after both church and state publicly demonstrated in the same century how much they need each other. In Russia, they have Russian folk songs going back 1,000 years.

    In the USA, we have Yankee Doodle Dandy, churches as vapid and corrupt as can be, and a military that has a strangehold on the corporations that have a stranglehold on USA elections. A ring of tigers who have each other by the tail and think that means cooperation and competence. They’ll all go down together, as we see happening, although churches will grow strong soon as nuclei for building social trust and solidarity against the inevitable mob-brewed gangsterism.

    Russia has this:

    Blessing of Nature

    In America, the closest thing we have to this are the bedraggled powwows of the indigenes we almost wiped out:

    Powwow

    I want to start a cross-Xtian/Amerindian church thingie. Something that might see my grandkids through social eruption. If it could relocate them* to Russia, that would be as good as I might hope for.
    *(churches are good at that stuff)

    #73335
    cloudhidden
    Participant

    Canada suspends it’s military training mission in Ukraine. Covid is the excuse.
    More likely preparing to get out of Dodge.
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-training-mission-canadian-forces-covid-pandemic-1.5991602
    Comments on that page are not pleased with Canada’s involvement there.

    #73336
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    “You have a situation where if you’re in this field, the pandemic, that’s something that you kind of prepare for and you’re ready for. And a lot of these people muffed it,” he said. “When push came to shove, they advocated policies that have not worked against the virus but have been very, very destructive. They are never going to admit they were wrong about anything, unfortunately.” (Florida gov Desantis)

    HIs voice is hardly small potatoes. I can’t stand the bastard but that’s neither here nor there. You can see the populist rise beginning in earnest.

    #73337
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @ cloudhidden

    “Canada suspends it’s military training mission in Ukraine. Covid is the excuse.”

    That is too sweet. We can’t fight a war because we might get sick.

    You know, people forget, but regimes do collapse. Fauci, for example, is likely to find himself on the sands of San Clemente beach, passing time with a metal detector, searching for Nixon’s ghost, wishing he could go out to eat without wearing a mask because otherwise he’d be laughed at or even lynched.

    #73338
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    Someobody probably already shared this. Anyway, it caught my eye. The shit is seriously hitting the fan. This guy provides easily understood, quotable, and paraphraseable soundbites that are b opund to go viral.

    Exclusive Vaccine Focus at Expense of Therapeutics Killed Up To 85% — Peter McCullough MD Testifies to HHS Committee

    #73339
    Bill7
    Participant

    “..The World Health Organisation changed its definition in 2008 to exclude the criterion of ‘enormous numbers of deaths and illness’. In other words, the definition of a pandemic is ultimately a matter of interpretation. There is no data that currently supports the claim there is a pandemic in Britain at this moment, and whether any data ever did is doubtful..

    The scientific process has happened in reverse. Starting in January last year, the existence of a deadly new pandemic, unlike anything previously confronted, was conjectured on the basis of terrifying rumours and unreliable reports from China, not scientifically established facts.

    and:

    “..the most important evidence for the existence of the pandemic is its external signifiers, especially face masks, this mass psychological theatre.

    Here again, the conjecture of the pandemic itself justified the imposition of the mandate, and nothing else: no evidence supports the thesis that masks have any positive medical effect and the more plausible scenario is their medical effect is negative. Nonetheless the Gates Foundation-funded behavioural psychologists of Sage and their equivalents in other countries argued that mandating them was necessary(‘because most people still did not feel sufficiently threatened’).

    The vague objective of an incomprehensible ambition, opposed against a nightmare, discloses a more concrete aim: control..”

    A very convenient pandemic

    Tip of the hat again to Germ, for the fine link.

    #73340
    absolute galore
    Participant

    @madamski I’m aware of what a terrible president Nixon was, although it was inevitable that the U.S. would come off the gold standard, since continual growth or die was already built into our economic DNA, and we would have blown by peak gold pretty quickly.

    In any case, being POTUS seems to require many negative traits. I was just saying in terms of holding his own with world leaders, Nixon at least behaved somewhat like an adult with a brain cell or two. Biden is a sentimental old fool who apparently now actually believes the little folksy bs he spins. I mean, I looked into his eyes and said we understand each other, he’s a killer, he has no soul, etc. Even Reagan wouldn’t say those lines in a movie. And everyone looked and acted older back in the day–weird how that works. Plus Biden has access to better meds to keep up appearances. God help us.

    #73341
    WES
    Participant

    Bill7:

    I don’t suppose the WHO issuing pandemic bonds had anything to do with changing their criteria for pandemics?

    #73342
    WES
    Participant

    Now we know who officially stopped President Trump from declassifying documents.
    None other than Bill Barr.
    Clearly Barr was working for the deep state.
    That is why Julian remains behind bars.
    Trump had nothing to do with jailing Julian.
    Deep state joe is keeping Julian in jail till he dies.

    #73343
    WES
    Participant

    I have noticed recently there seems to be a number of so called “data breaches” that are being weaponized against certain individuals, particularly President Trump supporters.

    I am beginning to suspect that these “data breaches” are probably the work of government insiders who have access to the NSA’s data collection. Likely the same people who targeted President Trump.

    After all none of these people were ever punished for illegally accessing the NSA’s data, so why would they stop now? This just goes to show you how respect for the constitution has eroded beyond repair.

    #73344
    WES
    Participant

    I have noticed that one is not allowed to point out the irony that after being vaccinated, the vaccinated still must wear masks, stay socially distance, and remained in lockdown, nor that they need to be re-vaccinated.

    #73345
    zerosum
    Participant

    Truth telling
    new word -military contractors
    old word – mercenaries
    A mercenary, sometimes known as a soldier of fortune, is an individual who takes part in military conflict for personal profit,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mercenaries

    This is a list of mercenaries. It includes foreign volunteers, private military contractors, and other “soldiers of fortune”.

    Without the web you would never know who they were. Interesting reading.

    #73346
    chettt
    Participant

    The notion that Nixon somehow chose to take us off the gold standard seems pretty revisionary to me. At best you could say that Nixon just officially put the marker on the grave on an entity that had died at least a decade earlier. Pretending worked in everyone’s interest and no one really complained until De Gaulle got greedy and forced a change in the game. The dollar standard arose not because every wanted it, nor because the US was imposing it; no, the dollar standard arose because there was no other alternative in the bipolar world of the time.
    The notion that the US forced the world to accept the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is equally absurd. No one, no country, no group “decided”, there was just no other alternative. If it were that easy then we would surely be using SDR or some other device as our reserves.
    As ugly as the USD may be, it’s still the prettiest of the bunch.

    #73347
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @ absolute galore

    “I was just saying in terms of holding his own with world leaders, Nixon at least behaved somewhat like an adult with a brain cell or two. Biden is a sentimental old fool who apparently now actually believes the little folksy bs he spins. ”

    Yes, the polish is gone. They used to be able to act as if they somewhat knew what they were doing. It was a pleasant illusion while it lasted.

    #73348
    WES
    Participant

    After the Japanese PM’s disastrous visit, I wonder if any other foreign leader will bother to visit joe and kamala?

    Reminds me of sparkle sock’s disastrous foreign visits. Now nobody asks him to visit them now either!

    When sparkle socks visited India, the local people first thought he was making fun of them. Later they realized that he was just an idiot!

    #73349
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @ chett

    The USA enforced the petrodollar militarily, not the gold standard. Fact remains that Nixon pulled the plug on the gold standard. It was not the only choice available. As for deGaulle’s “greed”: greedy or not, he was no sucker. 1965 was when USA made it plain it intended to escalate the war in Nam, borrowing money to do so. The last thing the French were going to do was help the USA wage a war in a colony they’d relinquished in 1954.

    As for us being “the prettiest of the bunch”: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I don’t see it. I see a nation and an idea both squandered along the usual lines.

    #73350
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @ WES

    “I have noticed that one is not allowed to point out the irony that after being vaccinated, the vaccinated still must wear masks, stay socially distance, and remained in lockdown, nor that they need to be re-vaccinated.”

    No one has stopped me. But then, I’m used to people rolling their eyes when I speak my mind.

    #73351
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    Yes, the polish is gone. They used to be able to act as if they somewhat knew what they were doing. It was a pleasant illusion while it lasted.

    I think that right now we’re in a similar situation in that regard as the post-Brezhnev USSR. The ruling WWII-era gerontocracy didn’t want anything to change, so twice they installed men who had one foot in the proverbial grave with predictable results. Now our Boomer gerontocracy doesn’t want anything to change (there are only so many Xers and Millennials who are willing to be as pliant as Obama), so they keep shoe-horning in these people who are obviously ill (Hillary) or going senile (Trump and Biden). We really pushed the envelope with Biden though, didn’t we?

    #73352
    absolute galore
    Participant

    @ WES

    “I have noticed that one is not allowed to point out the irony that after being vaccinated, the vaccinated still must wear masks, stay socially distance, and remained in lockdown, nor that they need to be re-vaccinated.”

    There have been a number of links here on TAE to Tucker Carlson doing just this. Although he did also report that Chelsea Clinton tried to get zuckerberg to shut down Carlton’s Facebook show. Carlson has a weird laugh but I thought his takedown of Bill Gates’s “Sun Dimming” project was pretty good. Favorite line: “A guy who cuts his hair with garden shears is trying to control the solar system.”

    #73353
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    …so they keep shoe-horning in these people who are obviously ill (Hillary) or going senile (Trump and Biden). We really pushed the envelope with Biden though, didn’t we?

    Judging a nation’s people is relatively easy; look at who they choose for leadership…
    Using that measure, the U.S. hasn’t looked good for decades…and the present and near future aren’t looking very good either…
    I’d like to know who is running the country; it sure as hell ain’t Joe…

    #73354
    WES
    Participant

    During my travelling days, I remember all the times of being tortured by CNN while waiting at airports.
    I am happy to see CNN has lost well over half of their viewers since helping Binden win residency of the white house.
    Reaping what they sowed!
    It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of dipsticks!
    CNN’s ratings are a proxy for the CIA.

    #73355
    WES
    Participant

    V. Arnold:

    Obama is running joe. Obama also chose kamala too.
    This is Obama’s third term.

    #73356
    WES
    Participant

    galore:

    Gates is one evil dude. The more we find out, the more evil is revealed.

    #73357
    Dave Note
    Participant

    Dmitry Orlov still has the home court advantage in analyzing the UkroNazi situation.

    Putin is a cool customer, his feathers don’t ruffle easily and he has a plan B,C,D….for diplomatic occasions of any sort.

    Old White Joe Bedpan can’t even buy a Clue if his life depended on it.

    The ‘Summit’ with Putin and the sad pathetic US sock muppet will be craptistic in all it’s splendid glory.

    I wonder who get to jam their arm up Joe’s butt to make it look like his lips are moving?

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