Bonfire of the Governments, Part One, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 16, 2022 | 36 comments

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Expect chaos to continue making new highs.

When Machiavelli wrote The Prince he had Vladimir Putin in mind. The president of Russia has adroitly sought, maintained, and used power, the theme of Machiavelli’s masterpiece (see “The Black Belt Strategist,” Robert Gore. SLL, July 19, 2018). That he is an amoral snake is both true and laughable as a criticism coming from the amoral snakes who populate Western power structures. Nobody who slithers to the top of those pits is anything other than an amoral snake. Western snakes hate Putin because he’s repeatedly outsnaked them.

Call Putin a rattlesnake for he clearly rattled before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That he was ignored is a worrisome indication of the epistemological breakdown that grips the West. Its leaders are unable to grasp that Putin meant what he said because they rarely mean what they say. Facts are not facts and the truth is whatever narrative they’re promoting at the moment. It’s become axiomatic that power flows from control of the narrative.

Until it doesn’t. Power flows from understanding reality and making use of what it can offer. If narratives were power, Ukraine’s army would be in Moscow by now. We haven’t seen this kind of excessive excrement from governments and their media minions since . . . Covid. Narratives are for simple-minded sheep and the wolves who devour them.

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The propaganda is devoid of any mention of: the 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup against a democratically elected government; rampant corruption within the Ukrainian oligarchy; Ukranian payola to American political figures (e.g., the Bidens and Clintons); widespread neo-Nazi infestation of Ukraine’s military and government; their eight-year war on its Russian-heritage citizens in eastern Ukraine; the government’s willful failure to adhere to the Minsk accords that were meant to resolve that conflict, or the latest—U.S. supported bioresearch labs in Ukraine.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Media, Military, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Technology, Trade, Tyranny, War

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Somehow

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

h/t The Burning Platform

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Posted in Horseshit, Medicine, Propaganda

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US Recklessly Eyes China as Target in Economic War, by Joe Lauria

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

If the U.S. sanctions China in the same way it has sanctioned Russia, it will be doubling down on stupidity. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

Western officials say Russia is asking China for military help — denied by Beijing — in what is clearly an effort to build a case to include China in its economic war against Moscow, writes Joe Lauria.

Biden-Xi video summit on Friday. (White House)

The United States is setting up China as a second target of its intense economic war against Russia in what could have cataclysmic effects on the world economy, including the West.

The U.S. could not impose the most stringent sanctions on Moscow without the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the U.S. is trying to link China to the war.

Washington’s move to frame Beijing emerged Monday when unnamed U.S. officials told its allies that Russia had asked China for military aid in Ukraine. Reuters reported: “The message, sent in a diplomatic cable and delivered in person by intelligence officials, also said China was expected to deny those plans, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”  China indeed denied it.

Importantly, Reuters added: “The U.S. government offered no public evidence to back its assertions of China’s willingness to provide such aid to Russia.”

On that same day Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, led a delegation to Rome to meet with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese politburo. After the meeting, an unnamed senior U.S. official in Rome told reporters: “We have deep concerns about China’s alignment with Russia at this time, and the national security adviser was direct about those concerns and the potential implications and consequences of certain actions.”

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Wagging the Ukrainian and Irish Dogs, by Declan Hayes

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

How to sort facts and reality from lies and propaganda. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.org:

How are we, who are denied credible, alternative news sources, supposed to divine between right and wrong, between truth and propaganda.

Londoner Robert Stuart has spent quite a few years documenting his Fabrication in BBC Panorama’s Saving Syria’s Children blog which details the alleged collusion of the BBC and rogue British Army elements in a false flag chemical attack in Syria perpetrated, he alleges, to get Britain to join the USA in bombing Damascus back to the Stone Age.

Though Stuart’s site is well worth exploring, it is important here because Stuart’s critics, the BBC included, have not been able to find even the smallest chink in his work. Until Stuart’s work is discredited, the man on the Clapham omnibus would have to conclude that the BBC, the British security services, the Muslim Brotherhood and their casts of crisis actors colluded to propel Britain into war against Syria and were, therefore, by definition, guilty of crimes against the peace, the very crimes Hitler’s top brass swung for at Nuremberg.

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Ukraine crisis accelerating rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies, by Kit Knightly

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

The globalist totalitarians are going for the big enchilada: central bank digital currencies. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:

A joint project between the Central Bank of Canada and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be researching the possibility of an entirely digital Canadian dollar, it was announced yesterday.

The digital dollar would be a state-issued cryptocurrency, or “central bank digital currency” (CBDC). (For more detail on CBDCs and how they work, you can read our previous article here.)

It’s not just Canada – countries from all around the world appear to be accelerating the research and implementation of CBDCs as we enter the second quarter of 2022.

In our New Years post, OffG hypothesized that the introduction of central bank digital currencies would be a major news thread of 2022, and that prediction looks to be coming true before winter has even turned into spring.

CBDC pilot schemes were already active in the Bahamas and Nigeria before the end of 2021, and Jamaica is rolling out their own later this year after a pilot scheme last year.

Dozens of others are not far behind, including the US, UK and the entire Eurozone. Sweden’s “e-Krona” is currently in the testing phase. Joe Biden has called research into CBDCs a matter of “highest urgency”.

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All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

Is the unipolar world already a thing of the past? From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

The “rules-based international order” – as in “our way or the highway” – is unraveling much faster than anyone could have predicted.

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system.

Saudi Arabia – perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU – is advancing the coming of the petroyuan.

India – third largest importer of oil in the world – is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism.

Riyadh’s oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals – Japan, South Korea, EU – will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.

Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: “If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns.”

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How Healthcare Became Sickcare, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

Sickcare is big business. Patients are both the customers and the products. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The financialization of healthcare started two generations ago and is now in a run-to-fail feedback loop of insolvency.

Long-time readers know I have been critical of U.S. healthcare for over a decade. When I use the term sickcare this is not a reflection on the hard work of frontline caregivers–it is a reflection of the financialization incentives that have distorted the system’s priorities and put it on a path to insolvency.

To describe how Healthcare became Sickcare, I’m sharing the perspective of an Insider. The financialization of healthcare started two generations ago and is now in a run-to-fail feedback loop of insolvency. As I have often said, Sickcare will bankrupt the nation all by itself. Here is the Insider’s essay:

*           *           *

As your readers try to make sense of the American health system and its response to COVID, they may benefit from a brief summary of the system’s current business model from someone on the inside.

It’s my hope that it will help them make sense of what is going on around them.

I read, see, and hear others inside the system scared for their livelihoods if they speak out and I’m ashamed of myself, as my livelihood no longer depends on my silence.

So I’m sharing this to speak for those who can’t.

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Iraq War Lesson: the seduction may be sweet but the hangover is hell, by Peter Van Buren

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

As the U.S. has repeatedly demonstrated, it’s a lot easier to invade a country than it is to get out. From Peter Van Buren at responsiblestatecraft.org:

As with Iraq, there seems to be a coordinated mainstream media effort to drag America into a new war. Don’t let them.

Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of Iraq War 2.0 — the one we fought over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. What have we learned over the almost two decades since?

While the actual Gotterdammerung for the new order took place just six months ago in Afghanistan as the last American troops clambered aboard their transports — with Washington seeming to abandon American citizens, a multi-million dollar embassy, and the Afghan people to their fates. The Afghan War did not begin under false pretenses as much as it began under no pretenses. Americans in 2001 would have supported carpet bombing Santa’s Workshop. Never mind we had been attacked by mostly Saudi operators, the blood letting would start in rural Afghanistan and the goal was some gumbo of revenge, stress relief, hunting down bin Laden in the wrong country, and maybe nation building, it didn’t matter.

But for  Iraq, there had to be a seduction. There was no reason to invade it, so one had to be created. The Bush administration tried the generic “Saddam is pure evil” approach, a fixture of every recent American conflict. He gassed his own people, so it went (also tried later in Syria with Assad.) Also, Saddam was looking to move on NATO ally Turkey (substitute Poland in 2022.) But none of these stuck with the American public, so a narrative was cut from whole cloth: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction — WMDs, chemical and biological, soon enough nuclear. He was a madman who Had. To. Be. Stopped.

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The Dominance Of The U.S. Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes, by QTR Fringe Finance

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. dollar’s days as the reserve currency are numbered. From QTR Fringe Finance at zerohedge.com:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I wrote an article arguing that the economic sanctions we have cast upon in Russia, due to its invasion of Ukraine, likely mark the beginning of a period where China and Russia would bifurcate the global monetary system, leading them to eventually challenge the U.S. dollar’s reserve status.

Now, Saudi Arabia is joining the fray, further threatening to tip the balance of the global monetary scales that have kept the U.S. dollar afloat for decades.

The fact that predictions of a “new economy” and “new monetary system” only exist on fringe blogs like mine and haven’t gone mainstream given the current economic situation with Russia (even amidst our abuses of printing the dollar over the last several decades) is baffling to me.

As I noted to Andy Schectman in a recent podcast, our quality of life in the United States and our nation’s entire economy is an elephant balancing, on one leg, on the toothpick of the U.S. dollar’s reserve status.

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The West’s Russia Sanctions Could Lead to Many Unpredictable and Unpleasant Outcomes, by Brendan Brown

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Unpredictable and unpleasant outcomes” is a nice way of saying the West has shot itself in the foot. From Brendan Brown at mises.org:

Global supply shocks are historically rare events. All the more extraordinary to have two such shocks in quick succession—the second arriving even before the first has entirely faded away. That is what the world now experiences in the form of the Great Pandemic followed by the Great West-Russia economic war. The most visible symptom of the supply disruption is the sky-high price of energy and a range of other commodities.

What Is the Effect of Sanctions?

The waging of a long and all-out military war usually, if not always, exerts a toll in terms of surging prices. But what about economic war waged through Western sanctions by states not simultaneously engaged in direct military conflict? The laboratory of history for such warfare is small. Indeed, there is no experience with which usefully to compare the West’s economic war against Russia in the present. There are grounds to think that there will be serious long-term price-inflation-fueled damage on the perpetrators. (The consequences of price increases for the country on the receiving end of sanctions is a subject for another day).

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These Charts Show Russia’s Invasion Choking World Of Natural Resources, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

When it comes to natural resources, Russia has the world by the balls. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

For weeks, we’ve detailed how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked one of the most significant commodity shocks the world has ever experienced. It even supersedes changes to commodity markets in the 1970s and involves every commodity from grain to fertilizer to crude to metals.

In a series of charts (provided by Bloomberg), we will show just how the Ukrainian conflict and Western sanctions on Russia are choking the world’s supply of natural resources, driving up prices.

Russia is a top exporter of many commodities.

Here is the share of Russian exports for each region of the world. The U.S. and allies implementing bans on Russian crude and other commodity exports have disrupted global trade and unleashed supply constraint fears (here’s why banning Russian crude imports is risky).

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