Feb 092024
 


Edward Hopper Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks 1924

 

Tucker Carlson: The Putin Interview (ZH)
Tucker Carlson’s Moscow Tour Sparked Major Buzz in US, Russia – Peskov (Sp.)
Hillary Clinton Kicked Off Years of Anti-Russia Hysteria (Miles)
“My Memory Is Fine” Biden Fumes, Before Proving it’s Not (ZH)
‘Too Old And Feeble’: No Charges For Biden (ZH)
Zaluzhny Removed as Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief (Sp.)
Zelensky Was Warned Of Riots If He Sacked Top General (RT)
Ukrainian Suffering Severe Shortage of Infantry, as Morale Plummets (Sp.)
Capitol Hill Bipartisan Bill Falls Apart (Manley)
Threats Of Open Border Chaos Turn Into Rumors Of ‘Executive Action’ (ZH)
US Blocks Yemen-Saudi Peace Deal (Antiwar)
The EV Transition Is Coming Undone (JoNova)
Why Medvedev Is Free to Go Full ‘Born to Be Wild’ (Pepe Escobar)
EU Fears Trade War With Trump But Biden Wrecked Its Economy (Sp.)
Trump Pleased After SCOTUS Ballot-Ban Hearing Ends (ZH)
Every Child Is A Whole Universe (CD)

 

 

 

 

Vote

 

 

RFK

 

 

 

 

Ursula
https://twitter.com/i/status/1755270763056156863

 

 

Malema

 

 

 

 

Tucker was not prepared for Putin taking control of the interview. But he did.

Tucker Carlson: The Putin Interview (ZH)

The trigger for the Ukraine war: “Initially, it was the coup in Ukraine that provoked the conflict… They launched the war in Donbas in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it all started.” Getting to the meat of the Ukraine war, Putin told Carlson that “The former Russian leadership assumed that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and therefore there were no longer any ideological dividing lines. Russia even agreed voluntarily and proactively to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and believed that this would be understood by the so-called civilized West as an invitation for cooperation and association.” “We were promised no NATO to the east, not an inch to the east, as we were told. And then what? They said, well, it’s not enshrined on paper, so we’ll expand.”

“That is what Russia was expecting, both from the United States and this so-called collective West as a whole. There were smart people, including in Germany, Egon Bahr, a major politician of the Social Democratic Party, who insisted in his personal conversations with the Soviet leadership on the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that they knew security systems should be established in Europe. Help should be given to unified Germany, but a new system should be also established to include the United States, Canada, Russia and other Central European countries. But NATO needs not to expand. That’s what he said. If NATO expands, everything would be just the same as during the Cold War, only closer to Russia’s borders. That’s all. He was a wise old man, but no one listened to him. In fact, he got angry once. If, he said, you don’t listen to me, I’m never setting my foot in Moscow once again. Everything happened just as he had said.”

Vladimir Putin: I already said that we did not refuse to talk. We’re willing to negotiate. It is the western side, and Ukraine is obviously a satellite state of the US. It is evident. I do not want you to take it as if I am looking for a strong word or an insult. But we both understand what is happening. The financial support. 72 billion U.S. dollars was provided. Germany ranks second, then other European countries come. Dozens of billions of U.S. dollars are going to Ukraine. There’s a huge influx of weapons. In this case, you should tell the current Ukrainian leadership to stop and come to a negotiating table, rescind this absurd decree. We did not refuse.

Tucker: Sure, but you already said it. I didn’t think you meant it is an insult because you already said correctly, it’s been reported that Ukraine was prevented from negotiating a peace settlement by the former British Prime Minister acting on behalf of the Biden administration. So, of course they’re a satellite. Big countries control small countries. That’s not new. And that’s why I asked about dealing directly with the Biden administration, which is making these decisions, not President Zelensky of Ukraine.

Surrender

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“Does Carlson need some sort of protection of ours? I do not think so. I think he is capable of standing up for himself..”

Tucker Carlson’s Moscow Tour Sparked Major Buzz in US, Russia – Peskov (Sp.)

The arrival of US journalist Tucker Carlson in Moscow, along with his subsequent interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has caused a major commotion in the US and Russia, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, noting the anticipation and thorough analysis that is expected to surround this interview.[..] “Carlson’s persona, his arrival in Russia and the interview with Putin is an event that has stirred up much public attention not only in the United States, but also in our country, to be fair. This attention is sometimes, let us say, extraordinary. Obviously, this is an interview that is anticipated. [And] obviously, this is an interview that will be read and analyzed for more than [just] one day,” Peskov told reporters.

The spokesman emphasized that any interview with the head of state, particularly with a foreign representative, is a major event. Peskov further stated that Moscow does not have any specific expectations regarding the reaction to Putin’s interview with Carlson. However, he highlighted the importance of diverse international reactions, noting that they should have a presence in some form. “Does Carlson need some sort of protection of ours? I do not think so. I think he is capable of standing up for himself. Despite the not-so-sane voices in the United States, there are also some sane voices out there. Hence, we will stay tuned. We believe it is vital that as many individuals worldwide as possible become familiar with the perspective and outlook of the Russian leader,” Peskov remarked.

Tucker terror

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They were getting along fine. But Hillary needed someone to blame her loss on.

“..The only way to secure peace and prevent World War III may lie in electing, or reelecting, a president unbeholden to the US’ political and foreign policy establishment…”

Hillary Clinton Kicked Off Years of Anti-Russia Hysteria (Miles)

Hostility towards Russia has grown steadily in US media discourse since former President Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. The businessman’s triumph was a seismic moment in politics which, along with Brexit in the United Kingdom, fundamentally reshaped the political conversation in the West.Now, with US-Russia relations at their lowest point since the Cold War, observers are taking a look back to understand how Russophobia grew to such epic proportions in the Western world. Security analyst Mark Sleboda joined Sputnik’s Fault Lines program Wednesday to examine the media response to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and host Jamarl Thomas noted the influence of one person in particular in fueling anti-Russia hysteria.

“This all goes back to Hillary Clinton if I’m being honest,” said Thomas as Sleboda noted that Russophobia limited Trump’s options in diplomacy with Russia during his presidency. “The Democratic position [was that] it was Vladimir Putin who took Donald Trump under his wing and carried him, like the footprints thing, where Jesus carried the person when they only saw one set of footprints and that Putin is the reason that Trump got in office.” “And Hillary Clinton breathlessly told everybody this in fact, that’s what she ran on after the fact she lost,” Thomas added. “That was one of the things that she basically blamed. Democrats believe it to this day and they believe it because from their point of view, there was no way that this incompetent man beat our most qualified woman in the history of women in regards to politics,” the host pointed out. “That skew is there because Hillary Clinton seeded the population with that nonsense. It’s unfortunate, to be honest,” Thomas insisted.

Sleboda agreed with the assessment, adding, “there’s no question she [Clinton] was a big player. “I mean, and she didn’t stop at slurring Donald Trump, of course,” Sleboda noted. “She slurred members of her own party who were – Tulsi Gabbard – who were running for president, as a Russian agent simply because Tulsi Gabbard had positions on foreign policy that were critical of existing US foreign policy, including on events that led up to this conflict in Ukraine.” “So, Hillary Clinton is just so pro-hegemon, you know, US playing the role of world hegemon that she’s willing to slur even members of her own party,” the analyst concluded, “as being Putin’s puppets, much less, of course, Donald Trump.”

Democrats have increasingly favored accusing their political opponents of ties to Russia since 2016, when members of the Hillary Clinton campaign devised the tactic as a way to explain the candidate’s unanticipated loss to Donald Trump in that year’s presidential election. Within 24 hours of her [Clinton’s] concession speech, [Campaign manager Robby] Mook and [John] Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up, according to an account by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. “For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” Senator Bernie Sanders has also engaged in the McCarthy-esque argument. “Who’s paying you?” the Vermont politician who aligns with the Democratic Party angrily asked when confronted by a former campaign chief over his vote to arm Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

As relations between the US and Russia sink even lower amid the United States’ failed effort to defeat Russia in the US-backed proxy war in Ukraine, one increasingly senses that liberals have picked up the “neo-McCarthyist” mantle of demonizing Russia, as host Melik Abdul pointed out. The only way to secure peace and prevent World War III may lie in electing, or reelecting, a president unbeholden to the US’ political and foreign policy establishment.

Hillary
https://twitter.com/i/status/1755568411990470778

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“..Biden also bizarrely claimed that he had vowed to be a “president” for everybody “whether they were from a red state or a green state.”

“My Memory Is Fine” Biden Fumes, Before Proving it’s Not (ZH)

In less than 15 minutes, President Biden proved Special Counsel Robert Hur right and confirmed all concerns about his fitness for office. As we detailed earlier, Hur wrote in his report that he would not suggest bringing charges against the president for his mishandling of classified documents because, “Biden will likely present himself to the jury, as he did during his interview with our office, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The president, having ‘seen dead people’ numerous times this week, was apparently displeased with the report, and decided the correct course of action was a (rare) press conference to set the world straight on his mental acuity. It did not go well. He welcomed the special counsel’s decision not to bring charges: “The bottom line is the matter is now closed,” Biden asserted, with respect to the report.But, then proceeded to throw his staff under the bus:

“I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,” he said. “Things that appeared in my garage, things that came out of my home, things that were moved, were moved not by me, but my staff, but my staff,” he continued. Then he took issue with the special counsel report’s questioning his mental acuity around the timing of his son’s death, and angry-old-man mode was unleashed: “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it was none of their damn business,” Biden thundered. Biden started to say he wore his son’s rosary every day since the day Beau died, but stopped, when he appeared to forget where the rosary came from. “Every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him, attended by friends and family and the people who loved him,” Biden continued, after a pause. “I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1755784945371398528

The mumbling continued as opened up the press conference to questions – not a great idea in hindsight. Constantly defending himself against allegations of failing memory, Biden appeared to snap when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Biden, “How bad is your memory?” “My memory is so bad I let you speak,” Biden said. “My memory is fine. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president.” Doocy pressed, pointing to the Special Counsel’s description of Biden as an “elderly, well-meaning man.” “I am well-meaning. And I’m an elderly man. And I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden reacted. “I’ve been president – I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation.” Biden’s rage reached its zenith when a CNN reporter began to ask a question about the American people’s concerns about his mental state (a perspective that is widely held according to many polls). “

The American people have been watching and they have expressed concerns about your age,” the reporter said. “That is your judgement! That is your judgement! That is not the judgement of the press!” Biden shouted back at her. Biden also bizarrely claimed that he had vowed to be a “president” for everybody “whether they were from a red state or a green state.” And then, as his piéce de resistance, after initially walking out, the president called Israel’s response in Gaza “over the top” and then mistakenly referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the President of Mexico. “Initially, the president of Mexico — Sisi — did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.” He did not correct himself. Watch the full (15 minutes from start to finish) shitshow here:

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Meanwhile, where are the nuclear codes?

‘Too Old And Feeble’: No Charges For Biden (ZH)

The latest evidence of a two-tiered justice system and Democrats apparently above the law comes in a report released Thursday afternoon by the special counsel investigating President Biden’s mismanagement of classified documents, which decided against charging the president.”Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” according to a special counsel’s final report. In the report, special counsel Robert Hur wrote, “Biden will likely present himself to the jury, as he did during his interview with our office, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Despite the president’s mishandling of classified documents about foreign policy and the military and pages and pages of entries about national security, the special counsel concluded: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. “We reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” This report was released one year after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur as the special counsel to oversee the investigation into classified documents discovered at the president’s office and Deleware’s home in late 2022.

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Mere days ago, Syrsky said he didn’t want the job. The US are pushing. I saw things on both Zerohedge and Moon of Alabama about a 29 year old deputy battalion commander named Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn. They’re not the same person. Syrsky is 58. He’s Russian-born and has a brother who lives in Russia.

Zaluzhny Removed as Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief (Sp.)

The general’s ouster comes after months of intrigue between himself and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who slammed the commander for revealing that Kiev’s summer 2023 counteroffensive had ended in failure. Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny has left his post as the Ukraine’s top general, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov has announced. “General Valery Zaluzhny had one of the most difficult tasks – to lead the Armed Forces of Ukraine during the Great War with Russia,” Umerov wrote in a social media post Thursday evening. “But war does not remain the same. War changes and demands change. Battles of 2022, 2023 and 2024 are three different realities. 2024 will bring new changes for which we must be ready. New approaches, new strategies are needed,” he added.

“Today, a decision was made on the need to change the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. I am sincerely grateful to Valery Fedorovych for all his achievements and victories,” Umerov wrote. Earlier in the day, Zaluzhny and Zelensky published photos to their respective social media confirming that they had met. “I have just met with the supreme commander. We had an important and serious conversation. A decision was made about the need to change approaches and strategy. I am grateful to all those close to me, to the team at the General Staff, the Defense Ministry, the president of Ukraine,” Zaluzhny wrote. In a video address Thursday evening, Zelensky confirmed that Zaluzhny had been dismissed, and announced that he would be replaced as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces by Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrsky, a Russian-born officer who has served as commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces since 2019.

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“.. if Zelensky wants a “reset,” then he should start with himself and other officials in his government, Poroshenko added…”

Zelensky Was Warned Of Riots If He Sacked Top General (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has yet to sack the country’s commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny because the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) warned him that such a move could lead to unrest, sources told Ukrainska Pravda newspaper. The paper reported on Wednesday that it had been planned to make Zaluzhny’s dismissal public on Friday, February 2, but the move was delayed because of the advice coming from the SBU. According to sources, the agency told its staff to be ready for riots in the Ukrainian capital Kiev if the general, who remains popular with both the public and soldiers, were removed. The SBU also contacted some of the military commanders, asking them to keep an eye on their troops and make sure none of them leave their positions, they added.

Reports of tensions between Zelensky and Zaluzhny have been circulating for months, with the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year believed to have worsened relations. In mid-January, Bloomberg reported that the falling out between the pair happened after the president was angered by the general describing the situation on the battlefield with Russia as “a stalemate.” Zaluzhny later retracted his comments, but “stresses have remained despite official assertions that the leadership is unified,” the newspaper said. Rumors that the commander-in-chief was about to be removed emerged in late January, coming from both military and political sources. However, they were denied by both the president’s office and the defense ministry.

On Friday, the Washington Post reported that Zelensky’s administration had informed the White House that the decision had been made to dismiss Zaluzhny. The Biden administration officials accepted the move, neither supporting nor opposing it, the newspaper’s sources said. Zelensky publicly addressed the situation for the first time in an interview with Italy’s RAI TG1 news channel on Saturday, saying that he’s planning “a replacement of a series of state leaders, not just in a single sector like the military.” According to the president, a “reset” is needed because “if we want to win, we must all push in the same direction, convinced of victory.”Earlier this week, former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko suggested that Zaluzhny should be left in charge of the military. And if Zelensky wants a “reset,” then he should start with himself and other officials in his government, Poroshenko added.

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“You can feel that people are morally and physically exhausted..”

Ukrainian Suffering Severe Shortage of Infantry, as Morale Plummets (Sp.)

Ukrainian troops are experiencing an acute shortage of infantry, the military is physically exhausted, and its morale is falling, US newspaper The Washington Post reported, citing soldiers and commanders of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Ukrainian military believes the shortage of personnel could have a domino effect, especially in winter, when weather conditions are difficult. “You can feel that people are morally and physically exhausted,” the publication quoted a Ukrainian commander, who identified himself as Sergei, as saying. Battalion commander Alexander told the publication that no one is joining the army, because “the state has failed to explain to them that they should go there.”

A lack of ammunition and weapons is also a problem for Ukrainian troops. According to one commander, his unit had received only 10 shells for two howitzers. The reports of acute troop shortages come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is reportedly preparing to replace his military chief, General Valery Zaluzhny. The question of how many new soldiers Ukraine needs to mobilize has been among the major stumbling blocks between the two. Zaluzhny previously told Zelensky that Ukraine needs nearly 500,000 new troops, but the latter privately and publicly pushed back on that figure. The draft law on mobilization was supported by Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in the first reading on Wednesday. Unlike a previous version, it does not provide for the conscription of disabled people, but it significantly tightens the process itself.

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“..we’ve got to stop lumping all of this stuff together. I can tell you that the people do not want, in my district, to continue funding this Ukraine war with no accountability, no plan to victory..”

Capitol Hill Bipartisan Bill Falls Apart (Manley)

Lawmakers in DC released a large bipartisan bill on Sunday. That bill aimed to reform immigration policy in a decade with $20 billion (out of $118 billion in total for funding for Ukraine and Israel). On Wednesday the US Senate blocked the bill, but is open to hearing a revised version of the legislation which includes Ukraine and Israel aid but not immigration reform. On Wednesday, Gerry Wilkins, a political consultant and candidate for US House Alabama District 6, spoke with Sputnik’s Fault Lines. Wilkins said that US voters in Alabama aren’t interested in aiding Ukraine with “no accountability, no plan to victory”. “I think Speaker Johnson has a very difficult time ahead. When you look at the majority in the House. But he does need to bring a standalone Israel bill, a standalone border security bill. And we’ve got to stop lumping all of this stuff together. I can tell you that the people do not want, in my district, to continue funding this Ukraine war with no accountability, no plan to victory,” Wilkins explained.

“That’s just a nonstarter for people in Alabama, especially when we have an invasion going on at the southern border.” The political consultant sounded off the steps that he would like the US government to take in addressing security at the US-Mexico border, including an end to what is called “catch and release”—a system in which an illegal immigrant is released to the community while they await hearings in immigration court instead of detaining them. “We need to reimplement the stay in Mexico policy,” Wilkins urged. “We need to end catch and release. We need to activate the National Guard at all of our border states. And we need to put a stop to this. And we have the technology to do it. And then we need to go after these cartels that are perpetrating this human trafficking and this fentanyl that is just pouring into our country.”

Wilkins then reaffirmed that there is a strong allyship between the US and Israel which has been active since the Vietnam War. Despite a difference in politics between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the US has continued to funnel billions of dollars to aid Israel in their conflict at the Gaza Strip.But now, half of US adults believe Israel has “gone too far” in their military campaign in Gaza as the death toll has risen to 27,000 people, with two-thirds of those victims being women and children. “So clearly, you know, Israel is a separate issue from Ukraine. And I’m completely in support of helping Israel, they’re our greatest ally in the Middle East, their strategic importance to us. So, I do think that needs to be a priority for us,” he said.

“And I also understand those that are concerned about the fiscal component to it, because, I mean, goodness, we’re approaching $35 trillion national debt right now. And every dollar we’re spending, we’re borrowing. So it’s clearly an issue we have to address. And we have a very tight majority. And there’s different opinions on this, but I think there are ways to navigate it,” Wilkins added.“And the fact that they’re trying to say, this is a border bill when they want to send another $68 billion to Ukraine. It’s ridiculous,” the analyt emphasized.

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“Perhaps the administration realizes that passing legislation on border security attached to Ukraine and Israel aid is a no-go, while actively fighting Texas over keeping the border open is not a good look…”

Threats Of Open Border Chaos Turn Into Rumors Of ‘Executive Action’ (ZH)

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre warned that unless the $118B ‘bipartisan’ border security bill (which allocates more than $75 billion for Ukraine and Israel) isn’t passed, there will be chaos at the southern US border.”Because congressional Republicans are choosing partisan politics over our national security and refusing to pass the bipartisan national security agreement that includes significant border reforms and funding, over the coming weeks, ICE will be forced to reduce operations because of budget shortfalls,” she said on Air Force One, The Politics Brief reports. “We have asked Congress for additional funding and resources, and every time Congress has provided less than we asked for, or most recently, completely ignored our supplemental request.” Likely sensing that nobody is buying what they’re selling, NBC News reported Wednesday night – citing anonymous sources (of course) that the Biden administration is now considering taking executive action to deter illegal immigration across the southern border.

Perhaps the administration realizes that passing legislation on border security attached to Ukraine and Israel aid is a no-go, while actively fighting Texas over keeping the border open is not a good look. And of course, NBC wants us to know that “the plans have been under consideration for months.” So, why force Congress to cough up billions for foreign countries first before playing that card then? Why not keep the border closed three years ago, instead of nuking Trump-era policies and announcing that the US was open to any and all? “The unilateral measures under consideration might upset some progressives in Congress, the officials said, but they noted that Democratic mayors who have asked for more help from the federal government to handle the influx of migrants in their cities would be pleased. The measures are still being drafted and are not expected to take place any time soon.

Biden faces growing political backlash, some of it from members of his own party, over his handling of the border as he campaigns for re-election. He plans to cite the Republican turnabout on the bipartisan border legislation as proof that for political reasons the GOP does not really want to solve the problem. But he is still vulnerable on the issue, trailing his likely 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, by more than 30 points on securing the border and controlling immigration, according to a new NBC News poll released this week.” -NBC News. “It’s a plan B,” said an anonymous official.

Sheriff
https://twitter.com/i/status/1755621635665658220

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“..the council does not have much influence and is known in Yemen as the “government of hotels” since many of its members are in exile..”

US Blocks Yemen-Saudi Peace Deal (Antiwar)

The US is purposely blocking a Yemen peace deal that was negotiated between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. The US decision to re-designate the Houthis as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” will block the payment of public sector workers living in Houthi-controlled Yemen, who have gone without pay for years. The payment of civil workers has been a key demand of the Houthis and is part of the first phase of the peace deal. The Houthis had asked for the salaries to be paid for using oil revenue that goes to the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, whose leaders are mainly based in Saudi Arabia. It’s unclear if the Saudi side agreed to the Houthi demand or if they decided to pay the salaries using other means.

The first phase of the peace deal would also fully open Yemen’s airports and sea ports that have been under blockade since 2015, another aspect of the deal that will be complicated by the new US sanctions, which will go into effect later this month. A US official told the Times that the US would only allow the payment of Yemeni civil salaries if the Houthis choose the path of “peace” and stop attacking shipping in the Red Sea. But the Houthis, who govern the most populated area of Yemen, have been clear the operations will only stop once the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza ends. Instead of pressuring Israel to stop its onslaught, President Biden launched a new war against the Houthis, which has dramatically escalated the situation.

The Houthis are now targeting American and British commercial shipping, and there’s no sign they will back down. Since January 12, the US has launched at least 18 rounds of missile strikes on Houthi-controlled Yemen. President Biden has acknowledged the strikes are not “working” since they haven’t stopped Houthi attacks. But he vowed to continue bombing Yemen anyway. The US supported a Saudi/UAE-led coalition in Yemen in a brutal war that killed at least 377,000 people between 2015 and 2022. More than half of those killed died of starvation and disease caused by the bombing campaign and blockade.

A truce between the Saudis and Houthis has been held since April 2022, but a formal peace deal hasn’t been signed. Despite the new US bombing campaign, the Saudis and Houthis appear determined not to restart the war. When President Biden launched his bombing campaign in Yemen, Saudi Arabia urged the US to “avoid escalation.” This week, a Houthi official said the Yemeni group was ready to formally make peace with the Saudis. “Sanaa is prepared for peace with Riyadh despite the challenges posed by the US and its associated Yemeni groups,” said Hussein al-Ezzi, the Houthi deputy foreign minister. Some members of the US and Saudi-backed Yemeni presidential council are calling for a ground campaign against the Houthis. But the council does not have much influence and is known in Yemen as the “government of hotels” since many of its members are in exile.

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“..the UK Lords are calling for the government to counter the misinformation campaign filled with “mistruths”. The industry must be at deaths door.”

The EV Transition Is Coming Undone (JoNova)

Last year the acceleration in EV sales stopped accelerating. The industry was still growing they said, just not quite as fast. Now, so soon, the sales are actually falling. In the UK, EV sales dropped off a cliff, falling 25% last month. Perhaps it was just a bad month? But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined, and for the last two quarters. Ominously, this is happening despite government decrees insisting every new car sold in 2035 will be an EV. Sales are supposed to be launching into orbit. Something is very wrong. Meanwhile Hertz has taken yet another step away from their EV quest — after announcing they were selling off a third of their EV fleet at bargain basement prices, now they are cancelling plans to buy 65,000 Polestars. This was a $3 billion deal, and to let them out of it, Polestar has, by golly, demanded Hertz give them the right to buy back the old Polestars that Hertz wants to sell — that way Polestar can keep the older models off the secondhard market and stop the value from falling the same dire way the secondhand Teslas have.

Polestar is a Volvo spin off company, and now we understand why last week Volvo announced it would stop funding Polestar and reduce its shareholding. They knew what was coming. Not to put too fine a point on the state of the EV market, but Ford is losing $38,000 per EV. This means the more EVs they sell, the poorer the company gets. They made $10 billion dollars in profits last year, yet the balance sheet shows they lost about $5 billion just on EVs. This puts them in the bizarre position that they could theoretically give away the entire EV production line and boost company profits by 50%. It’s that bad… Indeed it’s so truly awful, that the UK Lords are calling for the government to counter the misinformation campaign filled with “mistruths”. The industry must be at deaths door.

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“..the inevitable conclusion is that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad levels..”

Why Medvedev Is Free to Go Full ‘Born to Be Wild’ (Pepe Escobar)

It’s now crystal clear how Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis. Meanwhile, the “no compromise” in Ukraine is deeply determined by geoeconomics: the EU desperately needs access to Ukraine’s lithium for the “decarbonization” scam; the vast mineral wealth; the rich black-earth soil (now mostly property of BlackRock, Monsanto and co.); the sea routes (assuming Odessa does not revert to its status of “Russian city”); and most of all, the ultra-cheap workforce. Whatever happens next, Baab’s diagnosis for the EU and Germany is gloomy: “The European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed as a peace project.” After all now it’s the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis that “sets the tone.”

And it gets worse: “We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States, but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis.” So as we crisscross Medvedev, Ishchenko and Baab, the inevitable conclusion is that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad levels. “Peace” negotiations are absolutely out of the question – certainly not before the November elections in the U.S..

Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe” – perhaps not “the first since the fall of the Roman Empire”: after all, several civilizations collapsed across Eurasia since the 4th century. What is blatantly clear is that the collective West as we know it is fast flirting with a one-way ticket to the dustbin of History. And that brings us to the genius of Shelley encapsulated in one of the most devastating sonnets in the history of literature, Ozymandias, published in 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Read more …

“..Biden’s years of experience as a politician means he knows “what you have to do to prevent the world from going to war.”

EU Fears Trade War With Trump But Biden Wrecked Its Economy (Sp.)

EU officials are reportedly drawing up a contingency plan for Donald Trump’s return to power. An anonymous official familiar with the preparations told Bloomberg that the European Commission is working on an “impact assessment” of the consequences of a potential Trump win, based on the candidate’s threats to slap the bloc with a series of tough new trade-related restrictions designed to address the perceived unfair treatment of American businesses, and Brussels’ supposed softness on China. The Trump team’s proposed measures include a 10 percent tariff on European goods, designed to boost US manufacturing, plus a response to European digital services taxes targeting American tech giants, and other measures meant to balance the lopsided trade relationship with the EU, with whom the US has had a deficit topping $200 billion for over three years running.

In response, Brussels is reportedly considering steps to try to assuage Trump’s hostility, including a “charm offensive” by senior officials reaching out to his team and expressing readiness to “work with” the Republican. But others seemed resigned to worsening ties, with German financial giant Deutsche Boerse warning that only “strong checks and balances” would be able to prevent Trump from making a pig’s breakfast of the transatlantic economic relationship. This sentiment was echoed by European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde last week. Lagarde warned that Europe should prepare for “threats” to Europe’s economy if Trump returns to power. “Let us prepare for potential tariffs, for potential harsh decisions that would be unexpected. Let us be strong at home,” she urged, suggesting that Brussels could prepare for Trump’s comeback by more closely integrating its single market regime (which would further strip bloc members of any semblance of economic sovereignty).

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the leader of Europe’s largest industrial economy, came out publicly in support of Biden’s reelection last spring, saying “the current president is better, so I want him to be re-elected,” and that Biden’s years of experience as a politician means he knows “what you have to do to prevent the world from going to war.” Trump, by contrast, according to Scholz, “stands for a great division in the country,” and “if all people are only against each other, then there cannot be a good future.” Leaving aside the fact that the planet is now far closer to a global conflagration than it was in January 2021, due in no small part to the Biden administration’s efforts to set Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and the Korean Peninsula on fire, European officials’ hopes about Biden restoring the pre-Trump transatlantic economic relationship haven’t exactly panned out, either.

While European businesses were harmed by the Trump tariffs, which ranged from steel and aluminum to washing machines, cosmetics, clothing and food, the Biden administration’s push to kick off a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and a subsequent spike in energy costs, have had a far greater impact on the bloc’s economic prospects, leaving it slipping in and out of recession for nearly two years now. Furthermore, while the Biden White House did resolve a longstanding dispute over subsidies to US and European civilian airliner manufacturing, and suspended Trump’s steel tariffs, European officials and businesses couldn’t help but notice the Biden administration’s $390 billion Build Back Better ‘green’ subsidies package, which has incentivized dozens of major European companies to relocate to the US.

Read more …

“Why should a single state get to decide who gets to be the President of the United States?” asked Justice Elena Kagan. “That means is quite extraordinary.”

Trump Pleased After SCOTUS Ballot-Ban Hearing Ends (ZH)

The justices were largely skeptical of Colorado’s arguments. Murray was repeatedly grilled by justices about why Section 3 of the amendment should apply to the presidency when that office isn’t explicitly listed in the provision Several of the justices also expressed concern that allowing Colorado to ban Trump from the ballot could result in retaliatory efforts by other states to keep a Democrat off the ballot under the same provision Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the point that Trump, who’s been criminally charged over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, isn’t accused of insurrection in that case, even though the Justice Department could have done so. Notably, the so-called ‘liberal’ justices were just as sceptical as the ‘far-right’ ones.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked Mr. Murray about the lack of uniformity this decision could create. “Why should a single state get to decide who gets to be the President of the United States?” asked Justice Elena Kagan. “That means is quite extraordinary.” Trump was pleased with the arguments, calling it a “beautiful thing to watch in many respects.” The former president, who listened to the oral arguments on cable news from his Mar-a-Lago club, spoke to the press in Florida. “I thought it was a very beautiful process,” he said. “I hope that democracy in this country will continue because right now we have a very, very tough situation with all of the radical left ideas.”

Gorsuch

Thomas

Read more …

Amen.

Every Child Is A Whole Universe (CD)

This is a letter to all the mothers and caregivers. There’s that sensation you know, when you hold a warm, little baby, listening to their soft breaths and feel the tiny heartbeat like a butterfly in their chest. Or when you smooth down your child’s hair after they’ve first shuffled out of bed and look into their eyes, wondering what new connections will spark today in that little head. Like you, we have known joy and delight beyond words in those simple actions of mothering and care. Yet, underneath it all, there is an unspoken terror that comes from also knowing this: every single thing depends on that fragile butterfly beating in their chest and on the bright sparks lighting up in their head. You know this, too. Everything depends on keeping them safe. This basic truth has drawn us two together, over and again through the years.

When some would tell us that our identities—Palestinian and Israeli—should make us enemies, we have known that another identity binds us together. We are both mothers, dedicated to keeping our children and all children safe and assured of a future. Every child is a whole universe. The life-giving work we do, as mothers and caregivers, to nurture and protect our children is just as immense and powerful, and it binds us together. Beyond that, we have also understood mothering as a collective calling, open to all, regardless of their own individual identity. All it takes is a willingness to put care and meeting the needs of the most vulnerable at the heart of our actions. In our politics, it’s an approach that can guide us to champion policies that protect and nurture people—and to reject policies that kill and destroy.

That’s why we must not turn away from the horror that has gripped Gaza. Women and families there are suffering through an onslaught of violence launched by the Israeli government—an assault that has already taken more than 26,637 Palestinian lives, nearly 40% children. More Palestinian children were killed in just three weeks than all children who were killed annually in every global conflict since 2019. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called Gaza a “graveyard for children.” Many of the children who survive are now without a mother or father. You can look at the brutal, ever-climbing numbers. Or you can try to imagine the agony of even one Palestinian mother who can’t possibly know when death might come for her child from the sky.

Even before this war, a ten-year-old child in Gaza would have already lived through four Israeli military campaigns. Their childhood would already have been marked by years of blockade and military occupation, a childhood spent in an open-air prison deprived of adequate food, electricity, clean water and the freedom to move. Women and families of Israel are mourning for those killed on October 7th and calling out for the return of the hostages, including their kidnapped children, young and grown. The ongoing bombardment by the Israeli government also puts their loved ones in danger and is destroying the prospects for a sustainable peace that could keep all Israelis and Palestinians safe. You can look at the brutal, ever-climbing numbers. Or you can try to imagine the agony of even one Palestinian mother who can’t possibly know when death might come for her child from the sky.

Every child is a whole universe. The life-giving work we do, as mothers and caregivers, to nurture and protect our children is just as immense and powerful, and it binds us together. That is why we must stand in defense of all children. We must stand in solidarity with all mothers and caregivers who struggle amidst war and disaster to keep children safe and healthy, in body and spirit. We must stand with all mothers and caregivers whose children today are missing, in horrific peril, or worse, whose children’s lives have been cut viciously, unimaginably short by violence that labeled them as disposable. One of us—Yifat—leads the organization MADRE, which has partnered with Aisha for years to promote women’s health and safety in Palestine. Aisha, trained as a midwife, has been a lifeline for mothers and pregnant women in the West Bank, who struggle to access prenatal and maternal care through the maze of Israeli military checkpoints that block their movement. Today, as settler violence surges, people are afraid to leave their homes—making women even more vulnerable.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Toucan

 

 

Cut glass
https://twitter.com/i/status/1755519573128798585

 

 

 

 

Mermaid’s purse
https://twitter.com/i/status/1755578110957830220

 

 

Hypnotizing

 

 

Elk

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Home Forums Debt Rattle February 9 2024

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 77 total)
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  • #152236

    Edward Hopper Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks 1924   • Tucker Carlson: The Putin Interview (ZH) • Tucker Carlson’s Moscow Tour Sparked Major Buzz in
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle February 9 2024]

    #152237
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Saving the Elk herd is awesome…….

    #152238
    aspnaz
    Participant

    ‘Asylum seekers’ appear to think they will be voting in the 2024 election and say Joe Biden has their vote.

    I hope so, the sooner the USA goes round the U-bend the better life will be for the rest of us. It will also help Europe to recover, ridding themselves of their current corrupt politicians and reestablishing true politics where the people in parliament are answering to the people rather than to global interests.

    #152239
    aspnaz
    Participant

    @Statista

    Why beer? Why not Pepsi, Coke or any of the other drinks consumed by many more people? I am surprised by the beer result, given that I have absolutely no idea how making beer could introduce microplastics, given that beer is water, malt, sometimes rice, and yeast. Cleaning of brewery equipment cannot introduce microplastics, so where does it come from, given that most beer is in glass bottles, then we have tin cans, then we have stainless-steel kegs. So where is beer getting these micro-plastics? I make beer and I do not use any plastics in making the beer, i use stanless steel. The only time I use plastics is in the tubing used to deliver the beer to the tap, but this does not apply to glass bottles and cans.

    I call bullshit on this data.

    #152240

    The main thing I get from reading the reactions to the Tucker/Putin thing -I read many- is how polarized our world has become. We think we know that, but we don’t really, it’s always more the next day. Carlson only spreads lies and conspiracy theories, and Putin is only a blood thirsty war criminal. There is no grey area anywhere in sight. How we are ever going to breach the divide, you tell me.

    In the light of how the other side of the divide ignores, and instantly pardons, anything Biden does or says, it is pretty insane how two intelligent men are so lightly pushed aside.

    #152241
    aspnaz
    Participant

    When an entire herd of elk fell through thin ice, these brave people raced to save them all. It happened in Wyoming.

    Great job. Now will they rescue their country?

    #152242
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “These people know no shame & their lies no limits.”

    Yes, don’t stop protesting and removing them until every single one of them is a janitor.

    “Julius Malema has repeatedly called for the genocide of the 4 million Whites living in South Africa.”

    I’d say “Yes, but that’s because they’re white” but that seems over the top.

    “• Tucker Carlson: The Putin Interview (ZH)

    So I guess the reverse leaked transcript was fake? I mean quite possibly those tings were said, but not in the Tucker interview? Yes and as they say, the Right are bunch of children wet behind the ears and naively believed it ‘cause it existed. Confirmation bias.

    Meme going around:

    Barbara Walters + Putin = Hero
    Stephanopolis + Putin = Hero
    Mike Wallace + Putin = Hero
    Larry King + Putin = Hero
    Matt Lauer + Putin = Hero
    Megan Kelly + Putin = Hero
    Tucker Carlson + Putin = Treason

    Some exceptions are more exceptional than others. Trouble with no “Objective reality” but that all things are now “Have Context”. Perhaps as God, we should evaluate all context, measure each grain of sand. But we can’t. This is what happens the minute we start with context and leave “objective” facts.

    ““..The only way to secure peace and prevent World War III may lie in electing, or reelecting, a president unbeholden to the US’ political and foreign policy establishment…”

    Running down today’s news, Nikki Hillary just lost to “None of the Above” in Nevada. Suuuuuuuure she was the #2 candidate everywhere else. I am a coincidence theorist and that is not suspicious at all. She herself just said the election(primary) was rigged! I’m only agreeing with her.

    “• Hillary Clinton Kicked Off Years of Anti-Russia Hysteria (Miles)

    Who? The only person Americans hate more than Nikki. She never told the truth since Watergate, which is WHY everyone hated her in all 50 states. Because she is the nation’s foremost election denier, ever, and we don’t do that. Yet the Media were all totally fooled. Uh, maybe not.

    Hillary clip: ” Tucker has been fired so many times.” Jimmy Fallon: “Tucker is unemployed, ha ha…”

    Tucker makes 250 million views. He is most probably a billionaire now, like Joe Rogan. But the POINT is, these minions cannot CONCEIVE of doing your JOB, instead of WHAT YOU ARE TOLD, by a Multi-national corporation of Insider Billionaires. #Resist! ONLY the approval of others, and not just ANY other, but specific AUTHORITY, has value. Without their corporate support, you are nothing. Now “Do What You’re Told”. “Yes, Master.”

    Hillary clip: again, Tucker’s X, Putin’s lies, Republicans throw in their lot. Okay, do you have any specific names, events, or examples? No. It’s all in a big wash, an aggregate of “We all know.” HOW do you know, if there are no specific events? If there were events, name them. Then of course, the projection of how she thinks they want to be unbound by laws, that must be it.

    “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

    This is also fabricated, as the removal of documents and the mishandling stretches back to his Senate days. But we all knew that. I know there are better videos out there, but since we all deal with it hourly, narcissistic sociopaths, it crosses the feed over and over again.

    “You have to explain why lying is lying. In a three step process: 1. Fake Ignorance 2. Use dummy rhetoric and circle talk 3. Self victimize.”

    Exhausting. And really stupid and childish. You think I don’t know who ate the cake? You think if you use words I’ll somehow forget? Like I don’t know who I am? Like I don’t know what just happened? What are you, FIVE? I’m the one who just brought it up TO YOU, so you KNOW I know what happened.

    That leaves only one thing: the consequences are not NEARLY high enough. No one likes to lay down consequences, punish, harm, and/or impoverish people, send them to jail, lose their jobs, whatever, but what choice do you have? I can’t have you out here profiting from 900,000 serial felonies like you’re Wells Fargo or something. That would be ridiculous and it doesn’t work.

    There’s a reason there’s 3x punitive damages, all the way back to the Bible. It’s because that’s the level at which you think it overcomes the lower risk of getting caught. Americans are infants. But we’re not the only ones. Everyone outside of BRIICS behave this way. It’s coming to attention which is a good start, but it’s still getting worse in practice. You slow. Then you stop. Then you reverse.

    “The mumbling continued as opened up the press conference to questions”

    Yes, it’s like Trump and the White Hats are running the country. What’s happening?

    We’re getting kicked out of the Middle East. We may be voluntarily leaving Syria, etc (Too much risk for bombing Iran).
    The last Blue holdouts have flipped because I THINK we’re wildly overcounting the immigration instead of undercounting it all these years.
    We are not sending weapons to Ukraine.
    There are no longer any weapons for us to die on behalf of London and do empire, even if we wanted.
    The WEF is exposing itself.
    Jamie Dimon and Wall Street are helping, not only by exposing the WEF/Davos and telling them to knock it off, but by refusing to help with anything.
    All the lawsuits a child would know can’t work, brought by people so illegally that a child would know they can’t succeed, are more than failing, they are exposing these people, judges, and methods to the public eye.
    Every case that’s important wins.
    Every case that would continue it in the news cycle loses so it can be headlines tomorrow, most often with amazing personal connections and quotes.
    Every case brought is a parallel to something happening with the Democrat elite.
    Biden and the Democrats are destroying the economy on their watch, against their base, in order to spend on Empire, and have lost all support even among young people, perhaps forever.
    Biden specifically makes mistakes each day, and whatever mistake gets in the news, he repeats until the news gets bored with it. Tripping. Missing names. Whatever.
    Everyone know Biden isn’t running anything, so real worker bees like Nuland and Blinken are exposed.
    “while actively fighting Texas over keeping the border open is not a good look…”
    Biden faces growing political backlash, some of it from members of his own party, over his handling of the border”
    • EU Fears Trade War With Trump But Biden Wrecked Its Economy (Sp.) That is, Biden has also destroyed our main competition, the EU.

    And Trump himself? The DoJ just arrested a huge but relatively low-level mass bribery scheme otherwise known as “Business as usual” for the “Moral sort” there. Where? NYC? In what category? Real Estate construction. His smallest level personal pet peeve.

    It’s okay if you don’t think so, but I find it hard to add anything to my wish list here.

    We already TRIED just telling them like normal people. For 50 years. That didn’t work. Yet just a few years of this seems to be working great, such that even college kids – the world’s dumbest cadre – are waking up and flipping on them. And everyone is like “Stop!!! This is bad!!!” HOW is it bad??? Don’t stop: keep going.

    “• Zaluzhny Removed as Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief (Sp.)

    I think Syrsky was the one the troops all hated because he’s a bastard. Have to follow this story, but great for morale. Not only DID change horses in a disaster, not only DID get rid of a general we all loved, but ALSO put in the guy we hate most.

    “Ukrainian troops are experiencing an acute shortage of infantry, the military is physically exhausted, and its morale is falling, US newspaper The Washington Post reported,”

    Why am I reading this? You never told the truth before, why start today?

    “that the Biden administration is now considering taking executive action to deter illegal immigration across the southern border.”

    What the h—l are you talking about? What the actual h—l does that sentence even mean? Even to the writer?

    “The Biden Administration”...but not Biden?
    “He’s now considering” …but he never considered before? What changed?
    “Taking executive action …Newsflash: EVERY action by Biden is an “executive” action. You morons.
    I think they are implying – without either asking, knowing, or saying – an “executive ORDER” …which also has no basis, merit or difference. Biden’s “Executive order” is that “Employees should enforce the law”??
    “To deter” …To Deter? That means, “Convince others not to start and try it.” We’re not “Deterring” we are ARRESTING felonies as established by the U.S. Congress by passing a 100 year law. We are “enforcing”.
    So you’re vowing here NOT to arrest felons, even if you DO take “Executive action”, which no one is suggesting you will?

    And you wonder why I hate the media and call them crayon-munchers. You’re fired! Fired, Fired, Fired! I’d fire everyone in your department, everyone in your college, all your Deans, every Professor, right back to your Mom and Dad in the night in that dive bar in Hoboken if I could.

    For the love of GOD and Jesus, learn to write a sentence like a 4th grader. I’d say “words exist” but you see when words don’t exist, THOUGHTS don’t exist, and these people have become a-Rational. Like babies going “Goo goo ga ga.” WHAT DO YOU MEAN???

    Wray + Sheriff Wray is saying this is a direct, high level national security event, leading to widespread terrorism, so he is applying exactly ZERO agents in stopping it. Maybe by sending them to the border? That’s what the FBI does. That’s their mandate: HELP crimes, ESPECIALLY Federal and national security ones. CAUSE terrorism. Make it up and pay people to do it if necessary, like Michigan.

    “The US is purposely blocking a Yemen peace deal that was negotiated between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia,
    Which leads to “The Houthis are now targeting American and British commercial shipping, and there’s no sign they will back down.”

    #Winning. Peace is breaking out all over and must be stopped!

    “But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined,”

    Was that when California said you’re not allowed to charge your cars? Especially in wildfire/escape situations?

    Speaking of: Global Warming says CA will be a desert; it will never rain again. How’s that working out for you? What? More rain than ever? So much you could drink for 20 years? And you’re STILL complaining? 1) All the water you prayed for today 2) Global Warming isn’t real, or doesn’t cause deserts so you’re saved forever. Can’t please some people.

    “The European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed as a peace project.”

    Hmmm. Good point. And the other lists are just “Collateral”. The EU needs collateral. And WHY do they need collateral? The only people that need that are 1) over indebted. 2) About to collapse 3) Totally broke 4) have no other options, like e.g. “Work”. You could still “Do work” and “Have voluntary exchange.” I’m not making this up, that’s possible. But you’d have to “Buy with cash”, from the “Work” you “sold.” Does not compute I know, but there are books on it to help.

    “Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe”

    Yes, and they keep going, voluntarily, harder and harder every day. Against all their own people who would happily do all that “work” for them. Still make them money while they party in Monaco. No. They will DEI on this hill!!!!

    “$390 billion Build Back Better ‘green’ subsidies package,

    Yes, and we know since the US has bought more Russian oil than ever, and Exxon is a top ESG company, that the “Green” they mean is all the Green they give billionaires in free taxpayer money. Like Walmart, Amazon, GE do. Taking money directly from taxpayers and giving directly to corporations and bonuses? That’s “Capitalism”! We cut out the middle man! You don’t even have to create a product nor hire people. It’s almost like the corporations and government are one entity!

    “Trump Pleased after SCOTUS Ballot-Ban Hearing Ends (ZH)

    This was absolutely savage in so many ways. They can’t even get an illiterate communist like Katanji on board. Here’s just one, and bear with me as every single level of this is insane: Colorado’s lawyer argues, that it is, and has to be, that the INSTANT President “Commits an insurrection” he is disbarred. That’s because otherwise you’ve have to “Convict” him, or at least um, “Charge” him? With anything? No. So at 3:01pm January 6, the President is no longer the President.

    Supreme Court: So, um, I’m wondering, what happens to all the officials below him? Are they supposed to follow the President’s orders then? If they do, are they ALSO insurrectionists? How do they know any of this even happened, since there was no impeachment? If they follow his orders, then WHICH orders? If they follow them, are they also instantly disbarred from office without process? Which ones?

    Yes, um, so the instant ANYONE – at all, in their little heads – at any time, for any reason just “SUPPOSES” the President MIGHT have done something illegal…they have to stop obeying all orders that very minute, forever. Of course the guy NEXT to him will disagree and KEEP following orders…Like a d—n insurrectionist!!! — and you have to grab your sidearm and shoot him right there in the 3rd cafeteria in Ft. Leonard Wood, right next to the dishwasher and the potato peeler. Because OF COURSE you would. That’s #Logic.

    Go on…the Supreme Court says…tell me, describe how this legally works in great excruciating detail….

    And oh no sir…that wasn’t either the WORST argument, nor the stupidist. They spend all day covering maybe 10% of how incredibly un-legal, a-Logical, ethically impossible, and practically unworkable, each and every word of every sentence is. Right back to the day you were sadly born.

    This is why I love the Supreme Court, although I have to disagree with how they “Just Make S—t Up” all the time, ‘cause they wanted, for no reason: They deal with the high-level intellectual theory stuff that’s interesting to me, and are allowed to just follow it out instead of “Jack” gets/does not get “This bag of beans”. And the other stuff is “not my problem.”

    “Every Child Is A Whole Universe (CD)

    Yes, and the children of America too. Abused every day for being born here.

    How any elk survive being so stupid is beyond me. I’ve seen this in deer too. But they do their thing and are still here! Must work for them somehow. The men as well, in a t-shirt and I’m sure they know ice, but being busy get 4 men AND an elk on the same 6foot section? Well, they were right: it didn’t collapse. And the humans would just go back to the truck and warm up, but really…

    #152243
    aspnaz
    Participant

    Raúl Ilargi Meijer said

    There is no grey area anywhere in sight. How we are ever going to breach the divide, you tell me.

    You are not. There is no rescuing the USA. It will descend, it will be nothing for 100 years, then it will start to come back. When I say it will be nothing, I mean it will be like Canada, for 100 years, all the clever people will leave, then there will be a commodity gold-rush and people will start searching the USA for commodities, then it will start to come back, something like the gold-rush days.

    The problem with the USA is that it is a jungle, it is a fuck-you society, where the well-to-do don’t give a shit about the poor, the reason being that there are loads of poor people. As a result the people do not unite to fight the government, instead they write comments on the internet.

    Without something to unite the people and motivate them to action, there is no saving the country.

    #152244
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Great job. Now will they rescue their country?

    …on a not small scale, they did rescue a very important part of our country…

    #152245
    aspnaz
    Participant

    Although Putin was definitely the star of the interview, Tucker Carlson should be credited with both providing the opportunity for the rest of us to see Putin’s viewpoint, but also for letting Putin talk. The whole show would have been impossible with any mainstream interviewer, that Tucker was willing to let Putin speak without, for the most part, any interuption, is to his credit. He did not insist that his ego get satiated on stupid shite, he let us see what Putin wanted to give.

    That is the sign of a good journalist; he pushed Putin just enough to get the real stories and opinions out of him. Any more would have been too much, any less would have been boring. So Putin was the star, but TC was definitely the enabler. Well done to both.

    #152246
    aspnaz
    Participant

    V. Arnold said

    …on a not small scale, they did rescue a very important part of our country…

    I am an animal lover and would have been out there helping them. But this is a political blog, so pulling it back to the subjects on which we tend to focus. But understand your feelings on this, it was a good thing that they did, too few do such acts these days.

    #152247
    aspnaz
    Participant

    Dr D said

    Americans are infants. But we’re not the only ones. Everyone outside of BRIICS behave this way.

    They are like devices in an electronic circuit, releasing energy at the wrong time. I will stop there with the electrical analogy, but is is as if they are living in a time lag, as if they are living using past rules without realising that those rules have since changed. It is a kind of “out-of-sync” problem. What can you do; their egos tie them to the past, they want a job where they are all powerful, but those days are gone and they are still waiting to discover that the world has changed.

    #152248
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Vote rigging, ballot stuffing

    The RINOS haven’t done a goddamn thing about the built in fraud in the ‘election system’ from 2020

    A extra heaping helping in 2024

    “Asylum seekers’ appear to think they will be voting in the 2024 election and say Joe Biden has their vote”

    .

    #152249
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #152250
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Limeyland, they’ve really losttheirshit, like Big Time

    Full Orwell

    .

    #152251
    Oroboros
    Participant

    As the World Turns

    Horror of Horrors

    Madison High School students in Houston protest cellphone ban Monday morning

    ‘Treating us like prisoners’: Students at Madison High School protest against new cellphone ban policy

    It’s worse than being a student in Gaza

    .

    #152252
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    [picking up from the close of yesterday]

    @aspnaz

    “My main take from the Putin interview is that he loves his country, is immensely proud of his country, its history and culture and is both proud and determined to move his country forward to be a winning player in the world. Quite a refreshing performance given the hatred that spews forth from western politicians lost in their own minds, not having any direction or meaning to their lives..”

    I fully agree with your take on the Putin interview, especially your first paragraph. Tucker did a good job, asking the hard questions forthrightly, and Putin was as brilliant as usual (and expected) in answering forthrightly as well. I think everyone knows that the West has not just lost it’s demented and senseless war, but has lost its way altogether, and Putin was both sympathetic and yet unflinchingly firm in answering that the West is responsible for finding its own way back if it can. Russia stands ready to cooperate, within the boundaries of its peoples’ legitimate interests, but it is up to the West to come to its own senses.

    It was a great interview, truly great, and there is much more to be read into it and gleaned from it. I think it will be turned to as a source of information about the real current world situation many many times by many many many people, as we continue in our attempt to stumble through the dark toward a better (or at least survivable) near and distant future. We’re going to need some help.

    #152253
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Aspnaz: well, you’ve got an aggregate. It’s very hard, or you can’t predict the individuals from that end. Worse, “America” is “whatever is on TV” which every man here agrees is a lie. So we’re resuming how each individual will respond, based on a data set of lies? You see why we’re not getting anywhere.

    It’s hard enough here as when speaking to individuals, you find they are “Getting along” testing out whoever they are talking to and matching up with them like a chameleon, no backbone. But they ARE both 1) Care 2) avoid a fight 3) test the waters. Second, we have people who say “This s–t is f—-d”, great, but don’t know what to do about it, where it came from, why it exists, what we should do. This is the intent and these are the people they are going to pitch for their Hegelean “Solution”. It’s not working.

    Third, what is now a minority of reality-deniers, who cannot tolerate or absorb any thing that is said by anyone. Often even their own people, as they purity spiral into smaller and smaller fits of insanity. They seek longingly to identify the highest “Authority” — that is, whoever is MOST likely to club them senseless — and AVOID them, obey them, not to get hit. This is learned behavior of a lifetime of ceaseless, irrational abuse by violent narcissistic sociopaths, as enshrined in Schools, particularly, but everywhere else too, and especially, perhaps overwhelmingly for girls, whose reality is popularity, and whose “in group” is now “whoever is online”.

    This is why they haunt the world like a lion, roaming to and fro looking for that very, very rare type: heartless, female sociopaths who love violence. The few they can discover are sent right to the top, like Nikki Hillary. But it’s to sell to these women and girls, half the voting block, more obedient, loving abuse, defending their abusers, which generally men won’t.

    BUT: look at the basis of their power and control over the reality-deniers, who not just being pejorative, are demographically IN FACT women, and white, affluent liberal women almost exclusively, ’cause if you think you’re snowing poor back church-going women or newly-immigrated Catholic Hispanic, mother-of four women, you’re mistaken.

    What runs their power? Past abuse. Yes. But 1) Popularity. And 2) Power. Whatever is popular, and whoever won’t BEAT me, is who’s in charge. And? Does that not seem pretty easy to overcome to you?

    Right now they are discovering they are less and less popular. Their star is falling each and every day. Disney. Trans. Bud. Movies. Facebook. They are very, very sensitive to this, as their power but also their whole IDENTITY is founded on popularity. Of course having support and popularity matter for men too, but it’s like a 90/10 split. 90% of “Womaning” is being popular, that is, supported and included by other women, so no question they have to be sensitive to it. And they know their popularity is fading everywhere, they look stupid, but they don’t know where to monkey-branch next yet. And when they do it will be “Everybody knows” and “Of course no one ever believed in Eugenics/continental drift/creationism” although of course they all did. Fine.

    The other part is even easier. Right now they’re all just ADVERTISING. Exposing. If Congress gains POWER, and Americans gain social POWER they will instantly, instinctively obey and become that. Obviously, that’s just “societies”. But let’s take the craziest example: suppose the military just stood up, arrested Milley, Austin, and Biden, tossed out half of Congress, and ran martial law during new, actually real, elections. What would happen, what would they do?

    They would f-ing OBEY. Because THAT’S WHO THEY ARE. They OBEY authority. Minions. They follow whoever beats them LEAST, like all abused children of adult alcoholics. That’s ALL OF AMERICA, although a lot of us have different reactions to Daddy always beating the s–t out of us, every day in a new gaslighting way. Some 1/3rd of us tell him to go f himself and we’ll take the consequences unto death. …But some don’t, and I understand that. Some navigate and negotiate, and some just Stockholm. We’re talking about this third, remaining category, mostly women. …And again, statistically, I’m not trying to be pejorative or slanderous here. Many women ALSO tell them off and hit back, but overwhelmingly most don’t.

    So we only have two steps remaining to winning, and therefore winning the feminized, and/or ACTUALLY female PMC’s AWFL class: one, popularity, which is eroding hourly. Two: the minute “MAGA” as it were, but “Rule of law” in fact, claims POWER, every PMC and Middle Manager will snap to like the useless, spineless, brown-circle licking, twat weasels they are. And does Congress look like they’re turnign the bend on that?

    We’ve marched through all these months, 6, 10 years, and now no Mitch McConnel, no McCarthy, No Schumer, no – no one can get through the usual Uniparty “compromise” written by DEI foreign corporations against the interests of the United States. Like I said, you have to SLOW. THEN you stop. THEN you reverse. We slowed, and we may not have stopped but we’re close.

    When they CLAIM power — which they can do today, but every day we’re winning, exposing Biden, why bother? — then this 20% AUTHORITY holdouts will flip overnight. Or 80% will. That leaves like 5% that the PMCs will THEMSELVES attack. Because they can NOT tolerate the slightest diversity. ALL PMCs have to be lock-step. They key is to flip the maximum PMCs that day. The 5% PMCs then will be “Oh so last week” Ugh! They’re still wearing belly shirts with the FLOWER appliques on them. Everybody knows it’s gypsy-skirts this year. Boom, gone.

    But you’re watching this right in front of you, progressing year after year, yet have no faith anything’s happening? Under Clinton, he could bomb 3 countries, do coke, run drugs, pay cartels, attack Russia, kill unions, hand our entire Defense R&D to China, screw students, fly on Lolita monthly, pay Wall St, and everyone hadn’t the slightest THOUGHT that THIS WAS EVEN WRONG??? That’s power. We’re a long way from those days and it took a lot of work to get here.

    But now that DAILY, everything Clinton took for granted is exposed, front page, in the light, and rejected, people fighting and not following orders, somehow this is WORSE? Somehow having totally exposed the whole enemy forces, who are now sniped daily, we’re weaker and reclaiming our country LESS? That can’t be.

    Now, as expected, it sucks, it took forever, and even 10+ years longer than we thought, but we’re revealing, exposing, winning more each day. Like Russia in Avdiivka, so long as we’re taking new meters each day, why change? It’s working, hold your horses and work the plan. We’ve only got one chance at this.

    Back to the individuals, down here, each individual is no longer obeying. They are discarding parties and trying to apply to practicalities: what’s going to give them stability with whoever. Chickens, perhaps. Music. Leave politics out of it, although that’s slow and still at the 90% rate. People are cautious and trying to speak by saying solutions what we can agree on. That will work no matter how it goes, but it would re-form the atomized individual level. The same thing is occurring in families, dating, companies, etc. So broad as possible but very, very tiny and very chaotic. Nevertheless that has to be the high water mark, by definition. At maximum atomization, by definition you then have to and must re-form into structures and groups again. And the Communist Revolution handbook was to PICK WHICH structures, and pick WHICH people (i.e violent psychopaths). But they missed the window. They are NOT controlling the re-forming of matter from social plasma. Sorry that’s not fast enough for you and there are no Headlines for “Library Reading Group Calls Truce and Starts Meeting Again.” But it is. It took 10-20 years to breed this Millennial generation to get here and it’ll take 10-20 years to get them back out.

    But they missed it. They lost. And right now we’re confirming they’ve lost even down at the individual level. Should any of us live that long.

    #152254
    aspnaz
    Participant

    D Benton Smith said

    We’re going to need some help.

    I am very glad to see that there is something that we can agree on; it was a brilliant interview, both parties played their roles excellently. I am sorry that you didn’t get the “come to Jesus” moment that you were hoping for – nothing wrong with hoping – but I was always doubtful about that, given that Putin is a rock, he does not appear to me to do anything exciting, yet that aspect of him is in itself quite exciting.

    I was blown away at his memory of history, as an old geezer I cannot remember anything, so it is good to see that I am inferior to my peers; always good to be shown up.

    #152255
    Dr. D
    Participant

    America is not a Fuck you society. It’s just so large you can only care about very specific people close to you. We care about the people further away, but it’s instantly hard or impossible to do anything about it. And those #Helping “those others” far away have historically been the worst of all, for all 250 years. That’s true of the money too, as we are by MULTIPLES the most generous nation on earth, and our wealthy the most generous of all. There are endless Asian billionaires yet America was the top donator to Boxing Day tsunami. It was ASIA who said “Fuck you”. As the caring comes back at the atom level it also reforms to the aggregate as well, but these things take time.

    America is incredibly large, incredibly diverse, and incredibly small and local. It’s extremely hard to aggregate and discuss these things even with good intent, and headlines are by definition the opposite of that. I’m down here, and it’s happening.

    #152256
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Apple Pro Vision Goggles

    The Mark of the Beast

    “Only the rich will travel and the poor will use VR headsets”

    As if the Sheeple weren’t already disoriented enough

    Gasoline on the BarBq

    It’s a Kult

    #152257
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Apple Pro Vision Goggles

    Lao-Tzu

    “Never Be Here Now”

    #152259
    Clueless Honky
    Participant

    “They were getting along fine. But Hillary needed someone to blame her loss on.”

    As if that was all that there was to it.

    Let’s not forget Hillary’s answer to the question asked during one of only three nationally televised debates between her and Trump. The question was “what is the first thing you would do in office?”

    Here answer: “I would declare a No-Fly Zone over Syria”.

    Really? Each candidate probably only got ~45 minutes of straight prime-time speaking directly-to-the-people in these 3 debates, and to the specific question of what is most important to her, Hillary answered, in effect, I want to immediately start a hot war with Russia .

    Numerous generals were interviewed on record admitting that yes, declaring a No-Fly Zone over Syria would be tantamount to declaring an active, hot war with Russia.

    Russia has one naval base outside of former Warsaw Pact countries. It is in Syria. There was no way Russia was going to let the US continue it’s lineage of Regime Change operations by adding Syria to the list.

    To pretend that war with Russia hasn’t been baked into the cake of US Foreign Policy would be being blind to one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle of our modern world.

    Hillary didn’t blame Russia because she was desperate for an excuse for losing to Trump. She blamed Russia so that Trump would be forced to continue escalating tensions with Russia, for fear of being seen as “Putin’s bitch”, or some-such. That was the narrative, right?

    Remember, Trump’s first impeachment was for “bribing” Zelensky for dirt on Burisma and the Bidens, by threatening to delay shipments of arms to Ukraine – arms which Obama had refused to deliver to Ukraine for fear of being too much of a provocation against Russia.

    Oh. The irony in it all.

    #152260
    zerosum
    Participant

    Are there a news media doing honest reporting of Tucker’s interview with Putin?
    Yes. A transcript without opinions.

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/02/ukraine-sitrep-finally-a-wonder-weapon-that-does-what-it-promised-to-do/comments/page/4/#comments

    Tucker’s interview transcript.
    ……. READ IT. ….

    Tucker: Thank you, Mr. President.

    Posted by: Surferket | Feb 9 2024 7:27 utc | 319
    ————

    #152262
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #152263
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    @ ASPNAZ

    I, too, thought it odd that soda was not included in the micro plastics list, considering that it is sold in plastic bottles and cans. However, as to the beer question, I can point you in what I believe is the right direction.

    Aluminum beverage cans are not just aluminum. Carbonated beverages are weakly acidic — they contain carbonic acid. Also, pure aluminum reacts with water: “ Aluminum metal rapidly develops a thin layer of aluminum oxide of a few millimeters that prevents the metal from reacting with water. When this layer is corroded a reaction develops, releasing highly flammable hydrogen gas.” Read more: https://www.lenntech.com/periodic/water/aluminium/aluminum-and-water.htm#ixzz8RFwa14er

    Of course, aluminum cans are less than 1 mm thick.

    Both beverage cans and the steel cans used for canned food are lined with plastic resins to prevent the food/beverage from coming into contact with the metal. Several years back, there was a big hubbub about BPA (bisphenol-A)— and folks found out that the resins in canned foods contained BPA. The can manufacturers reformulated their plastic resins to not include BPA, instead using substances with near-identical properties that were lightly tested so that these was no official evidence that the new substances behaved in the human body in a near identical fashion to BPA. (The new resins likely are just as detrimental as BPA, which is why I see the label “BPA-Free” as a crock.).

    One of these days I’m going to have to get back into the habit of making beer, so that I can enjoy one in the evening without the micro plastics, etc. A stainless steel keg would be a good way to avoid the most tedious and time intensive part — bottling.

    Food stored in glass bottles will contain fewer micro plastics, but the lids of the bottles are still lined with plastic resins — whether they are beer bottles or pasta sauce jars. (Unless they use French canning jars.). Personally, I’ve been using Tattler canning lids for nearly 20 years now. They are reusable, made of plastic #5. Perhaps, I will collect French canning jars from thrift stores and try that some time — then there would be no plastics in the process.

    #152264
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    @ oroboros
    Madison High School students in Houston protest cellphone ban Monday morning
    That is HILARIOUS!

    It is the fault of the adults who have allowed the teens to be deluded up into believing that a smartphone connection is a “human right.”

    I hear regularly from my teens that their peers are often surreptitiously phone-scrolling in class when they should be doing schoolwork. One of my teens does not have a smartphone because I recognize that he does not have the self-discipline to put it away when it is not time for it to be out, and I suspect that he might not graduate from high school if he had his own smartphone. (He believes that this is highly unjust. I plan to give him a smartphone for his 18th birthday, one week before high school graduation.) At the same time, the high school district is in love with QR codes, and has partnered with Canadian firm GoFan, insisting that all high school ticketed events must be sold through GoFan (no more paper tickets, no cash at the door, GoFan receives $1 for EVERY ticket sold,) and all who attend these events must present a smartphone as their “ticket.” There are no provisions made for students (or others, such as grandparents,) who do not possess smartphones, nor for folks who do not have bank accounts linked to online payment apps, or do not have credit cards. I guess they figure anyone can purchase, at the very least, a prepaid Visa card — even high school students?

    #152265
    tboc
    Participant

    Posted for information and educational purpose as defined under Fair Use

    #152266
    tboc
    Participant

    Maybe

    #152267
    zerosum
    Participant

    One more time.
    https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/putin-carlson-interview-full-transcript
    Putin-Carlson interview: Full transcript
    Discuss!

    EDWARD SLAVSQUAT
    FEB 8, 2024

    Hello friends,

    Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin went live about an hour ago. You can watch the full thing on Tucker’s website.

    Your correspondent will share his thoughts on this discussion later. Maybe on Saturday. Until then, here is the transcript (the real one, not the fake one that was floating around). Share your impressions in the comments section. Please be nice to each other, though! Okay that’s all for now more later have a nice day. — Riley

    —————

    #152268
    tboc
    Participant

    Nope. Copy and paste from MOA to Word print as pdf should you prefer text to video. PDF would be 173 KB +-. Include Fair Use language should you send it across the inner tube.

    #152269
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    Putin said something that was very very profound and at the same time crucially practical, but to get it you have to stand back and look at the entire interview as a whole, because he didn’t just enunciate the whole like some sort of pedantic pronouncement of wisdom. Instead he demonstrated the wisdom (and advice) over and over and over again in the way he provided information and the way he conducted himself during the talk. HE WALKED THE WALK as a demonstration of the core message that he wanted to impart

    First of all, note that Putin established from the very beginning (insistently, like he wanted an honest answer), whether or Tucker was there for a serious conversation or was the interview was just something that Tucker was producing for consumption by a video audience back in America.

    Also recall what Putin did whenever Tucker pressed him about what other world leaders had said in various private and public meetings in their important geopolitical conversations with him in the past. In every case Putin answered that he could only speak for himself, as a party to the conversation in question, but as for what the OTHER party had said (or meant, or intended, or believed) that Putin considered it to be entirely inappropriate for him, Putin, to speak for them. If Tucker wanted to know what they said or meant then he should go talk to them and let them speak for themselves. That was essential. If you need to know what someone really thinks or wants then you must talk to THEM, directly.

    The advice on how to get that information from that other party was explicit. His advice was to go ask them and persuade them to tell you. You must engage and exchange information with them. When people have issues with each other then they must communicate, negotiate, TALK with each other until that issue is satisfactorily resolved.

    And always know that all issue always get resolved, one way or another. If one party to the conflict refuses to negotiate, or even talk, then they will be left behind and the issue will be resolved by others, if they can and as best they can. Maybe they will fail and maybe they will succeed, but in either case they will be doing it solo, on their own, because the other side refuses to honestly negotiate any other possible course of action.

    In this specific case, in the Russia vs Collective West War for axample, the issue has been resolved distinctly in Russia’s favor, and the West is the one being left behind. Although Russia remains ready and willing to talk if and when some trustworthy representative of the West is willing to come to the table and start talking, it’s up to the West alone whether or not to engage in dialogue.

    I believe that Tucker interviewing Putin is the official opening round of that dialogue.

    AND BY THE WAY! Isn’t it fascinating that Tucker has been “outed” as an asset of at least a “faction” of the Central Intelligence Agency? Wowser! Putin called him out on it, and Tucker confirmed the accusation by strongly and insistently pleading the case for that New York Times Reporter that Russia just arrested for being a CIA spy (caught red handed receiving classified Russian defense information).

    Tucker HAD to have know that he was blowing his own cover, and thereby throwing away an enormous reputation that he had spent a lifetime building (and worth uncountable millions of dollars) as a fully disclosed and trustworthy free agent who was neither beholding to nor taking orders from any institution or undisclosed special interest. Poof! Gone. No more Mr. Nice Guy Who Doesn’t Lie. Well, Tucker old son, withholding from your audience that you are a CIA asset is a lie. Revealing that lie voluntarily strikes me as a VERY high price to pay, yet he paid it willingly. VERY interesting.

    Hence forward we must regard Tucker Carlson not as a mere star reporter, but as a PLAYER. Will he be a trustworthy one, like Putin has been? Well, so far so good, mostly. I don’t have TOO much to complain about how he has done up to this point because I know that it is a tough game that he has chosen to play. Us too. Just as with Vladimir Putin, Tucker is what he is and it is now up to us to TALK WITH HIM to find out exactly what that is.

    #152270
    Oroboros
    Participant

    @phoenixvoice

    Glad to bring you a laugh, as an old geezer present day youth ‘kulture’ might as well be from another galaxy from my day.

    Next level in school will be the mandatory Apple 3-D Vision Goggles to completely unanchor them from Reality

    .

    #152271
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Old School Virtual Reality a la Escher

    .

    #152272
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    It must be nigh on to impossible for foreigners to assess the character of Americans. All that they’re got to go on is movies (flattering fake), news (even more fake) and the Internet (fakest of all.)

    Yeah, we are a nation of ignorant gullible fools, but we’re also a nation wherein those ignorant gullible fools will rush to the aid of anyone needing help. On FOUR occasions, many years apart, I have been life threateningly injured and awakened to find total strangers doing their best to save my life. I’ve paid it forward on several occasions too. So have most Americans. Good people, for the most part. Just like you.

    #152273
    Oroboros
    Participant

    From Larry Johnson

    Tucker – Putin interview

    .

    Just some general comments

    “Now we saw and heard the real deal. This was no AI fake. It was pure Carlson and Putin. Let me offer a couple of observations (but I’m more interested in what you think). First, Putin came across as relaxed, likable and extremely competent. He spoke for two hours giving out substantive details without having to look at a note. Can you imagine Biden or Kamala Harris being able to pull that off? I can’t.

    Second, Putin’s body language was open and accepting. He did not cross his arms or legs. He mirrored Tucker’s body language, which is an intelligence trade craft in talking with people. Third, Putin showed emotion at appropriate times and did an effective job of laying out Russia’s red lines.

    He effectively made the point that Russia is open for negotiations but that Ukraine’s Zelensky has banned anyone from his side entertaining talks.”

    https://tuckercarlson.com/the-vladimir-putin-interview/

    #152274
    Oroboros
    Participant

    A comment from Larry’s blog on Tucker-Putin interview

    Jacques
    13 minutes ago

    “Overall, what stands out from what Putin said is his comprehensive approach to world affairs, in contrast to the reductionist, myopic perception of issues practiced by the vast majority in the West. I’ve read that Kissinger once asked some Chinese official what he thought of the French Revolution. “Too early to tell,” was the answer. The way Putin approaches issues is similar. There was a clear disconnect between the sort of talk Tucker expected and what Putin delivered.

    This was particularly obvious in Putin’s remarks about the changes in the world, the rising economic power of places like India, Indonesia. Regardless of whether one agrees with him, his approach seems way more profound, judicious, and visionary than the disjoint way of thinking we see from occidental leaders and their sycophants.

    What’s becoming increasingly clear is that our biggest enemy is ourselves, our atrophied intellectual abilities, hubristic conviction of western exceptionalism and the ensuing entitlement to rule the world, and in many cases plain stupidity.”

    #152275
    jb-hb
    Participant

    Robin Hood – steals from the rich, gives to the poor. Hated by Ayn Rand. The darling of communists, inversionists, revolutionaries, deconstructionists, postmodernists?

    You would think so. He “inverts the pyramid,” does he not?

    But Robin Hood is aristocracy – but also the lowest-low-level aristocracy. The type that knows the name of every individual, the names of their children, under his protection and rule. The sort of low level English lord that gets his own hands dirty, plows his own lands, fights his own fights if there is a disagreement. He’s naturally a force of tradition and moderation, the connective tissue between leadership and the people – the one with his finger on the pulse of common life.

    FIRST, the natural and right order is usurped, overthrown, inverted. Wrongness becomes the “rules based order” of the land. There is no way for Robin to integrate his duties, his identity with this wrongness. What-should-be has been flipped on its head. Inside of kingship sits the opposite of everything it means. Monarchy has been skinned and evil John has donned it as a meatsuit saying “I’m that thing you love”

    Robin Hood is incredibly instructive — how does a decent man do right, with meaning, in an inverted world? Human beings are cooperative – practically everything of value we might do, we do with other people, but when “other people” gets inverted, there’s nowhere to plug in, nowhere to interface. You’ve got a 110 power plug on all your power tools, you’re ready to fix things, build things, and there’s nothing but damn euro outlets everywhere. Fuck you, competency. Fuck you, decency. Fuck you and your integration, congruency. Stand there in the middle of the room, power cord in hand, like a useless asshole. Nowhere to go, nothing to do.

    Is this not our story today? How many decent men and women, unplugged for how long? Not purely economically. Culturally. And to be Lord Robin of Loxley WAS to be deeply congruent, integrated, roots deep in the earth RIGHT in one’s existence.

    Any person of wealth or power, forced to run, their wealth and lands taken from them, homeless, would usually be a tale of woe. Misery. Scenes of the formerly rich person cowering in a makeshift hut in the woods in winter. Certainly modern re-imaginings have sometimes tried a dark, edgy, miserable Robin Hood, but this is NOT Robin Hood, is it?

    Robin Hood IS inversion after all. The world has barrel-rolled 180 degrees, and then within the barrel, Robin smirks and rotates ANOTHER 180 degrees.

    THEY have inverted everything by putting on the skin of the thing, insisting on all the same names while doing and constituting their opposite. Robin becomes “Outlaw” but does his own 180 degrees rotation inside this skin as well. This is the only way for him to stand right side up inside his inverted world.

    The Errol Flynn Robin Hood is to this day the best version, because Errol Flynn really GETS it. Integral to the nature of Robin Hood is an over-the-top joy, enjoyment, merriment, humor. Robin Hood’s acts of resistance are often material and practical – he DOES give significant riches back to the poor. But he always finds ways to do it as a joke, as deflating merriment against phonies. Almost always with extreme and humiliating levels of competence – his swordplay, his archery, his clever stratagems. Merriment and competence.

    One gets the sense he would have never been such a joker, never performed at such levels, were it not for his world being turned upside down. Becoming Robin Hood means unleashing a kind of savagery, but a savagely amped-up humor and competency. He does not, like a WW2 Yugoslavian resistance fighter, ambush and massacre occupation soldiers in hopes of provoking harsh reprisals against the populace, to further their cause. He surely COULD. He demonstrates his ability to come and go almost at will, showing up where he should not, close to whoever he wishes, able to escape against all odds.

    Part of the Robin Hood mythos is that he does occasionally get too puffed-up himself and gets deflated. Humiliated. How does he triumph after this happens? He does triumph in these scenarios. He pulls himself together and then… wins AS A JOKER. As he does this, he makes fun of, deflates his opponents perhaps, but seems only to have this ability when he willingly deflates himself, makes himself a figure of fun as well. As if he’s powered by mirth and loses power whenever he approaches serious self-righteousness.

    What is The King’s Forest? Consider on a symbolic basis:

    It’s where Robin Hood goes to live – with his merry men. Moreover, it is where he lives MERRILY while being uncatchable.

    It’s out of bounds – anyone who hunts there, depending on the story, is subject to death or perhaps having your hand chopped off.

    The local Miller gets caught by the Sherriff emerging from The King’s Forest with a brace of rabbits. Off with your hand it shall be.

    “But sheriff sir, my family was starving” Don’t care
    “But sheriff sir, this sort of thing was allowed to our fathers” Don’t care
    “But Sherriff sir, the King’s Forest is to preserve the big game for the King for when he wants to have a hunt, but I’m catching rabbits” Don’t care.
    “But Sherriff sir, how can I be a productive Miller for the village with one arm?” Don’t care
    “But Sherriff sir, my children – if they don’t starve – would be the millers for the next generation. And my grandkids after that. Been Millers for our lord and village for generations, we have” Don’t care

    Don’t worry, Robin Hood has an incredibly clever plan to save the Miller, who will go on to be a Merry Man in The Forest. The miller will transform from a miserable oppressed man on the verge of having his hand chopped off to a merry man, feasting in the forest, playing elaborate, clever jokes on evil men.

    Perhaps during swordplay, the Sherriff and Robin Hood are able to discuss.

    “Robin, why all this trouble for a damn miller. he’s nothing. What the hell man?”
    “He’s my sworn man.”
    “but he’s nothing. I don’t get it”
    “he is MY SWORN MAN, man. We swore OATHS to each other” (picture unshakeable, totally immutable things. The Moon. Mountain Ranges. Major rivers. The changes of the seasons. etc)
    Sherrif: does not compute.
    Don’t worry man, you won’t NEED to compute. You’ll just be tricked, humiliated, shown to be less competent, and be part of a really great joke.

    The forest is forbidden on pain of death or incapacitation. The forest is where men go to be free and merry.

    (while the world is 180 degrees inverted, the forest is an additional 180 degrees inverted – not a miserable wilderness, but pure awesomeness) And where they cannot be caught. And from where they spring their jokes, their raids. It is where others must pass through, sticking to cleared trails, but cannot seem to avoid having a toll taken.

    Isn’t it interesting that when Robin overcomes the oppressive powerful, the phonies, the rich, he makes them go with him to his merry banquet IN the forest? They are not tortured, executed, ejected, tied up… no, they are forced to join him in merriment! Made to partake of the forest. (It was so awful!!! Right?)

    This is all centered around things having been made deeply wrong through a usurper. Things are made right by the true and right King returning. This is a common tale – the most universally known version today being Lord of the Rings. Something is so deeply integral in rightness/wrongness with this usurper/true king trope.

    There are some dumb Hollywood versions that try to make Robin Hood integral to bringing the King back or overthrowing Prince John or what have you – try to somehow make ROBIN the point of everything. Some sort of big pivotal moment like every recent Hollywood superhero movie – big portal, giant light pillar going up into the sky, boy this could be the end of the city/country/world/solar system/universe/multiverse. It’s Eeeeeeeverything and then we close the portal or whatever. Yawn.

    But no. Robin Hood falters whenever he gets too puffed up and serious. He is not the CAUSE of the change in his world. Robin Hood has all sorts of varied humorous adventures, he re-distributes what he can back to the poor, just keeps doing his thing, and then one day, suddenly, Richard III The Lionheart is there. Flings back his cloak, his knights fling back their cloaks to see the 3 golden lions, the Crusader’s tabards. Robin – thief, anarchist, inverter, jokester, revolutionary, instantly kneels. All of his gang instantly kneel. In reverence. The Return Of The King is not the return of a man, a preferred leader, let’s spend 5 bil and “glue this thing together” etc. It is the return of rightness, of connectedness, congruence. The moment of revealed glory, the moment of reverence, and the moment of re-integration are one.

    #152276
    John Day
    Participant

    Thousand Year Gaze https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/thousand-year-gaze

    The Carlson-Putin interview, a little over 2 hours, is here, and was watched over 60 million times in the first 6 hours or so. https://tuckercarlson.com/the-vladimir-putin-interview/
    ​Carlson, sitting in the Kremlin, then in his hotel room, reflects on the interview for 9 minutes here: https://twitter.com/WeAreWoke1776_3/status/1755875183762579502

    ​Post-filtering of the content for American consumption does not reflect what I saw and heard, not at all, but has some factoids:
    Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview: 9 takeaways​ , POLITICO watched the 2-hour love-in with the Russian president so you don’t have to.
    https://www.politico.eu/article/9-takeaway-vladimir-putin-interview-tucker-carlson/
    ​ If I might make the suggestion, I will say that the only independent action is to watch the 2 hour+ interview yourself. Hit the pause button. Have dinner. Come back to it when you can. The pace is different from American media, which is a big part of the message.
    Vladimir Putin begins with a 30 minute explanation of Russian history, beginning with the Baptism of Prince Vladimir in 988, which was followed by the baptism of his noble-class and the people of Rus. This is the context within which Vladimir Putin sees Russia and his own place in ongoing Russian history. Russia is a “Civilizational State”, as is China, as is Iran. This does not directly translate to the 5-year-plan mentality of western financial capitalism, a contextual framework which Putin would not engage, to the recurring frustration of Carlson. Putin returned repeatedly to the spiritual ties which compose Russian society, the respect for Islamic and Buddhist cultures within Russia, and he closed on a note of spiritual healing between Russia and what is currently “Ukraine”. This reflects a patience spanning generations, a very long view, a politely diplomatic view.
    ​ Putin left numerous things politely unsaid. He would not make any potentially fractious assertions, which could be used as political ammunition against Russia.
    ​ From my own perspective, the “problems” in Ukraine/Galicia began when Germany carved that area out to provide coal and grain to Germany during WW-1, after defeating Russian/Bolshevik forces, continued during WW-2, including the Holodomor, when Stalin sold the food grain to (necessarily) build Russian war industry, starving Ukrainians to death​. This tribal animosity was ​further cultivated by the CIA after WW-2​, through activation of Galician sleeper-​cells, left over ​Galician Nazis, who were ​deployed in an insurgency against the USSR in the 1950s. Many of them died and some ​were brought to to the US and Canada. The 2008 Ukrainian ​failed-coup, and the 2014 ​successful coup, were part of a long, ongoing plan to divide ancient Russia against itself.
    ​ That is my baseline read, from which I hear and interpret Putin’s history lesson.
    ​ The other thing Putin left politely unsaid​, though repeatedly asked “why” by Carlson, was that neoliberal financial capitalism needs to consume Ukraine and Russia or collapse into itself, because it is an expansionist financial structure which consumes “assets” like Ukrainian farmland, mines and industry, having already consumed those in the US and EU.
    ​ Putin spoke repeatedly of “objective changes” in the world, which he sees being opposed in a futile way by western political structures, which are neocolonial, though he does not say that. He does point repeatedly to the destruction of long term western “interests”, such as the weaponization of the $US against Russia for a short term gain, which was actually a short term loss for the US, and for Europe, and has begun to loss of global reserve currency status for the $US, now in progress.
    The “objective changes” taking place are those of cooperation between countries, rather than colonial extraction of natural resources from colonized peoples. Putin points out that this model has progressed already to consuming the industrial bases of the US and UK, and is destroying European industrial profitability through cutting off inexpensive natural gas, forcing Europe to pay 7 times as much for liquified natural gas, largely from the US. This is self-consuming short-termism. He points out that several pipelines through Ukraine and Poland could be opened, and that one of 4 Nordstream pipelines could also be opened again.

    #152277
    John Day
    Participant

    The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning​ , One man’s thought has become pivotal in China’s new political and cultural crackdowns. That man is not Xi Jinping.
    This article by N.S. Lyons was originally published on Palladium Magazine on October 11, 2021.
    ​ One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.​
    ​ She wasn’t alone. Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,” or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to “resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s impressionable youth.​..
    ​..Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
    ​ But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.​ Wang Huning much prefers the shadows to the limelight. An insomniac and workaholic, former friends and colleagues describe the bespectacled, soft-spoken political theorist as introverted and obsessively discreet. It took former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s repeated entreaties to convince the brilliant then-young academic—who spoke wistfully of following the traditional path of a Confucian scholar, aloof from politics—to give up academia in the early 1990s and join the Chinese Communist Party regime​…
    ​..Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.​ A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.”​…
    ​..A position referred to in Chinese literature as dishi: “Emperor’s Teacher.” Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.
    ​ But what is singularly remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court philosopher to not just one, but all three of China’s previous top leaders, including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society.”​ In the brutally cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat.​..
    ​..While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along with numerous essays.​..
    ​..While other Chinese teenagers spent the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) “sent down to the countryside” to dig ditches and work on farms, Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard labor.
    ​ When China’s shuttered universities reopened in 1978, following the commencement of “reform and opening” by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Wang was among the first to take the restored national university entrance exam, competing with millions for a chance to return to higher learning. He passed so spectacularly that Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of China’s top institutions, admitted him into its prestigious international politics master’s program despite having never completed a bachelor’s degree.​
    ​ The thesis work he completed at Fudan, which would become his first book, traced the development of the Western concept of national sovereignty from antiquity to the present day—including from Gilgamesh through Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx—and contrasted it with Chinese conceptions of the idea.​..
    ​..But Wang was also beginning to pick up the strands of what would become another core thread of his life’s work: the necessary centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to political stability.
    ​ Wang elaborated on these ideas in a 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” which would become one of his most cited works. In it, he argued that the CCP must urgently consider how society’s “software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). While seemingly a straightforward idea, this was notably a daring break from the materialism of orthodox Marxism.​..
    ​..Meanwhile, he believed that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most recent structure,” he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.
    ​ That, he said, was untenable. Warning that “the components of the political culture shaped by the Cultural Revolution came to be divorced from the source that gave birth to this culture, as well as from social demands, social values, and social relations”—and thus “the results of the adoption of Marxism were not always positive”—he argued that, “Since 1949, we have criticized the core values of the classical and modern structures, but have not paid enough attention to shaping our own core values.” Therefore: “we must create core values.” Ideally, he concluded, “We must combine the flexibility of [China’s] traditional values with the modern spirit [both Western and Marxist].”​ …
    ​..Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
    ​ What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
    ​ Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
    ​ But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
    ​ “The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality.​..
    ​..Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.
    ​ Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.
    ​ He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state.​..
    ​..This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.​..
    ​..China’s own emerging contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning.​..
    ​..Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.​..
    ​..But Wang is unlikely to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
    “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth.​..
    ​..Most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.​ Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.”
    ​ The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme​…
    ​..As young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market​…
    ​..Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat.”​…
    ​..In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis.​.. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” asked one typically viral post on social media.​..
    ..They ​would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
    ​ From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.
    ​ It is in this context that Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over.
    ​ According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.”​ Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
    ​ This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”​ … It’s why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers.​ It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government has announced “excessively high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”
    ​ And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened.​..
    ..Our world is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them.​ [Russia and Iran are each differently-different.]
    https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning-3b0

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