Category Archives: Governments

Zelensky Admits Ukraine Already Ran Out Of Ammo, by Andrew Korybko

U.S. taxpayers have been soaked for $100 billion plus and Ukraine has no ammo. Makes it kind of hard to fight a war. From Andrew Korybko at theautomaticearth:

The US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) began reporting more accurately on the military-strategic dynamics of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine since the start of the year, but the true test of their comparatively improved integrity will be whether they raise awareness about Zelensky’s latest damning admission. In an interview with Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, he candidly told his interlocutors that “We do not have ammunition. For us the situation in the East is not good.”

This is a major revelation for several reasons. First, it proves that Russia is winning NATO’s self-declared “race of logistics” in the sense that its armed forces still have ammo to continue fighting while the West’s Ukrainian proxies already ran out of that which their patrons provided over the past year. Second, the aforesaid aid that was already extended to this crumbling former Soviet Republic exceeds $100 billion, which makes Russia’s leading position in this “race of logistics” all the more impressive.

Third, Zelensky’s admission adds credence to what the Washington Post recently reported regarding how poorly Kiev’s forces are faring in this conflict, especially its “severe ammunition shortages” that one of its sources spoke about. Fourth, the preceding points drastically decrease the chances that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will achieve much of anything and actually make it increasingly likely that such a move would be an epic mistake that could ultimately lead to a decisive Russian breakthrough.

Continue reading

US resumes theft of Syrian oil hours after merciless attack on occupation bases, by News Desk at The Cradle

Trump came right and said it when he was president. The U.S. stays in Syria, uninvited and despised, for the oil. That’s kind of a consolation prize for mission (regime change) never accomplished there. From the News Desk at thecradle.co:

Dozens of fuel tankers filled with Syrian oil were smuggled by US occupation troops to their bases in northern Iraq

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/syria-1.jpg

(Photo Credit: AFP)

On 25 March, the US army smuggled at least 80 fuel tankers loaded with hundreds of tons of stolen Syrian oil from the country’s resource-rich Jazira region to their bases in Iraq.

The tanker trucks were taken out of Syria as part of a 148-vehicle convoy that crossed the illegal Al-Walid border crossing early on Saturday, according to local sources that spoke with SANA.

Other vehicles in the US convoy included refrigerated trucks and armored vehicles, the sources say.

Washington’s latest oil theft operation took place just hours after their occupation bases at Conoco and Al-Omar oilfields in northeast Syria were pummeled by missile and drone strikes in retaliation for a US airstrike earlier on Friday in Deir Ezzor governorate that left several Syrians dead.

According to field sources that spoke with Al Mayadeen, the occupation base at Conoco field was hit with over 15 missiles. Speaking with Al Jazeera TV, a US official said one of the bases was hit by “eight rockets.”

US media quoted the Pentagon as saying the attacks left several casualties. However, no further details were provided.

No group has taken responsibility for the daring attack, which marked the third successful armed operation against US troops in Syria within 24 hours.

Commenting on Friday’s airstrikes — launched from the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar — US President Joe Biden said his country is prepared to “act forcefully to protect our people,” adding that the US “does not seek conflict with Iran.”

Saturday’s oil theft operation marked the third time US troops have plundered Syria’s resources since the country was hit by a devastating earthquake on 6 February.

Washington maintains approximately 900 troops in Syria, primarily split between the Al-Tanf base and the country’s northeastern region. Their occupation is illegal under international law as it was carried out without government approval.

Though US troops – accompanied by fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – initially occupied large swathes of Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS, the official rationale for the occupation changed once ISIS was largely defeated.

In infamous comments made in 2019, former US President Donald Trump said: “We’re keeping [Syria’s] oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”

According to an investigation by The Cradle, dozens of tankers pass through illegal crossings between Iraq and Syria every week in convoys accompanied by US warplanes or helicopters.

Continue reading

PSYOP-23 Bird Flu Edition: Here They Go Again! By The Second Smartest Guy in the World

In the global war on germs, there’s always a germ that can stoke fear, just as there’s always a terrorist in the global war on terrorism to stoke terror. From the Second Smartest Guy in the World at secondsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com:

The criminals that brought us the PSYOP-19 “pandemic” and associated slow kill bioweapon injections have been diligently seeding a trio of “viral” PSYOP-23 followup scenarios.

They can go with the Marburg option:

2nd Smartest Guy in the World

PSYOP-23: Seeding Marburg Virus As The Next Global “Pandemic”

The Mockingbird MSM outlets have just been tapped on their proverbial shoulders to ramp up the “pandemic” outbreak fear mongering. This substack has previously covered potential virus outbreak narratives ranging from Monkeypox to Ebola to Marburg: With all of the various other psyops currently in play, and the growing backlash to all things DEATHVAX™ and…

Read more

a month ago · 154 likes · 67 comments · 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Or the ebola option:

2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Ebola Outbreak Update: WHO calls for more international aid to prevent Ebola from spreading beyond Uganda

This substack has been closely monitoring the Ugandan Ebola outbreak as a possible setup for the next “pandemic” with the caveat that unlike PSYOP-19 if this virus were to in fact become a bonafide outbreak, then the global death rate would this time around actually increase significantly…

Read more

5 months ago · 78 likes · 17 comments · 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Or they may just deploy the latest H5N1 bird flu program.

Geert Vanden Bossche, who predicted antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), turbo cancers and surging mortality from the C19 DEATHVAX™, has also been warning about the leaky “vaccines” incessently administered to chickens such that they would develop a super strain H5N1 (SS-H5N1).

These One World Government criminals and their partners in crime like the WHO, UN, WEF, CIA, DoD, Pentagon, Gates, et al. want to induce SS-H5N1 not only as justification to destroy millions upon millions of chickens, thus putting further pressure on food supply chains (PSYOP-FAMINE and PSYOP-HYPERINFLATION), but to have SS-H5N1 transmit more efficiently to humans.

Continue reading

Carbon War ‘Net Zero’ Would Starve Half the Planet, Experts Say, by Gerald Celente

Remember when the idealists wanted to feed the world? Now they want to kill it. From Gerald Celente at trendsinthenews.substack.com:

That victory Dutch farmers just won in provincial elections might have saved the world

NOTE TO READERS: The following is one of the dozens of articles found in last week’s issue of The Trends Journal. Consider subscribing here for in-depth, independent geopolitical and socioeconomic trends and trend forecasts that you won’t find anywhere else.


That victory Dutch farmers just won in provincial elections might literally save the world.

After massive demonstrations against government targeting of nitrogen fertilizers to fulfill a UN zero carbon agenda, the BBB (BoerBurgerBeweging or “Farmer-Citizen Movement”) party picked up a significant bloc of senate seats.

It was a major rejection of Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s environmental policies, as Reuters reported in “Dutch farmers’ protest party scores big election win, shaking up Senate.”

According to a final tally reported by Eva Vlaardingerbroek on 19 March, the number of seats gained was 17, more than enough to turn back environmental directives that would destroy the Dutch farming sector. 

But the significance is far greater than just farmer livelihoods in the Netherlands.

Nitrogen fertilizers are crucial to sustaining the world’s food supply, and banning their use as part of “net-zero” carbon goals could literally starve half the world.

That’s the warning of a new report called “Challenging ‘Net Zero’ with Science,” compiled by two longtime pre-eminent climates scientists, William Happer, Professor of Physics, Emeritus, of Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science, Emeritus, of MIT.

Continue reading

Patrick Lawrence: Biden and the ICC: ‘A New Level of Farce’

There are two magical phrases in the world of Joe Biden and his ilk: Orange Man Bad and Putin Bad. Now the International Criminal Court has pronounced the latter. Give it time and it may pronounce the former as well. From Patrick Lawrence at scheerpost.com:

International Criminal Court building (2016) in The Hague. OSeveno, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many things to say about the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges that the Russian president directed the abduction and deportation of thousands of  children from eastern Ukraine in the early months of the intervention that began a year ago. Let us settle on three of these things. 

Straight off the top, the ICC’s action announced on March 17 is ridiculous in any number of ways. Its  legality is questionable at the very least. Its premise appears to bear no relationship with reality; it will have no appreciable effect. It is a political gesture dressed up as law and, as a political gesture dressed up as law, it is sheer propaganda, nothing more. 

If an institution such as the ICC behaves ridiculously in these ways, it is not doing its credibility a great deal of good. To ask what use the ICC serves, despite its elevated purpose when it was founded 25 years ago, seems to be a good question.  

There is a history behind this kind of conduct. This is the second thing to say about what the ICC has just done. If we study this history even briefly, we are likely to be upset, because this history indicates that the many international institutions to which humanity has looked as a source of impartial order for the past 70–odd years do not work as intended. And they were fated not to work as intended so long as the United States insists, as it has since the 1945 victories, on global dominance. This is a case of either/or: We can have a stable world order on the basis of the U.N. Charter or other such instruments of international law, or we can have the American imperium, but we cannot have both. 

Continue reading

The EU’s censorship regime is about to go global, by Norman Lewis

Big Tech has climbed into bed with the EU to kill the last vestiges of free speech in Europe. It may spread to the rest of the world. From Norman Lewis at spiked-online.org:

The authoritarian Digital Services Act means the death of free speech online.

The EU’s censorship regime is about to go global

Not many people know that 16 November 2022 was the day that freedom of speech died on the internet. This was the day the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into law. Under the DSA, very large online platforms (VLOPs) with more than 45million monthly active users – like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – will have to swiftly remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. Or they will face fines of up to six per cent of their annual global revenue. Larger platforms must be DSA compliant by this summer, while smaller platforms will be obliged to tackle this content from 2024 onwards.

The ramifications of this are immense. Not only will the DSA now enforce the regulation of content on the internet for the first time, but it is also set to become a global standard, not just a European one.

In recent years, the EU has largely realised its ambition to become a global regulatory superpower. The EU can dictate how any company worldwide must behave if it wants to operate in Europe, the world’s second-largest market. As a result, its strict regulatory standards often end up being adopted worldwide by both firms and other regulators, in what is known as the ‘Brussels effect’. Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy law which came into force in May 2018. Among many other things, it requires individuals to give explicit consent before their data can be processed. These EU regulations have since become the global standard, and the same could now happen for the DSA.

Continue reading

The Iran-Saudi deal: A bid to end endless war, by F.M. Shakil

Sunni and Shia will probably wage on-again off-again war until the end of time, but the Iran-Saudi deal looks like the start of a substantial off-again period. From F.M. Shakil at thecradle.co:

The Beijing-brokered rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh is expected to have significant implications for peace and prosperity in and around West Asia, given the considerable influence the two nations wield in the region.

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Pakistan-KSA-2-1.jpg

Photo Credit: The Cradle

The China-mediated Saudi-Iran peace agreement, inked on 10 March in Beijing, marks a significant geopolitical shift with far-reaching implications for the Persian Gulf and Iran’s neighboring countries. For decades, Saudi Arabia and Iran have been engaged in ideological and economic competition on the territories of their neighbors, causing regional tensions to escalate.

If the agreement is successful and relations between Riyadh and Tehran improve as envisioned, tensions will likely begin to significantly subside in the Persian Gulf, Levant, and further afield in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan. The former, long concerned about its security and energy supply vulnerabilities, will potentially benefit from improved relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which could help address its oil and gas crises.

Similarly, Afghanistan, whose Taliban-led government is still struggling to gain international recognition and is in dire need of reconstruction and investment initiatives, may also benefit from the kingdom’s rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

Persian Gulf States

An early litmus test for the Saudi-Iranian reconciliation will be its impact on Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, where a perceived proxy war has wreaked havoc on their respective economies and in their public spheres.

Continue reading

Syrians Have Every Right To Attack US Occupiers: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, by Caitlin Johnstone

So-called terrorists defend their home country and attack an occupying power. And violence waged by the occupying power isn’t terrorism, it’s noble and just. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The western world is solemnly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion by blindly following the US into more conflict and militarism while repeating all the same kinds of mass media malpractice.

If you think it’s a coincidence that the western world suddenly got superduper interested in China’s human rights record right when China began threatening US planetary domination, then you’re a bootlicking moron who deserves to be shamed in public.

leaked 2017 State Department memo explicitly acknowledged that it’s US government policy to ignore the human rights violations of US-aligned nations while attacking them in nations like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Stop buying into this performance.

China has been sorting out China’s internal affairs for thousands of years; they don’t suddenly need help from a bunch of white stuffed shirts in Washington, London and Canberra just because a few sociopathic think tankers say so. Leave China’s issues to the Chinese to address.

People who live in the Middle East have every right to attack the occupying forces there whose presence they oppose, and those occupying forces do not have any legitimate right to retaliate.

Continue reading

Is a full-blown global banking meltdown in the offing? By Satyajit Das

It’s not looking too good. From Satyajit Das at newindianexpress.com:

If everything is fine, then why have US banks borrowed $153 billion at a punitive 4.75% against collateral at the discount window, a larger amount than in 2008/9?

A New Banking Crisis?

Financial crashes like revolutions are impossible until they are inevitable. They typically proceed in stages. Since central banks began to increase interest rates in response to rising inflation, financial markets have been under pressure.

In 2022, there was the crypto meltdown (approximately $2 trillion of losses).

The S&P500 index fell about 20 percent. The largest US technology companies, which include Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, lost around $4.6 trillion in market value  The September 2022 UK gilt crisis may have cost $500 billion. 30 percent of emerging market countries and 60 percent of low-income nations face a debt crisis. The problems have now reached the financial system, with US, European and Japanese banks losing around $460 billion in market value in March 2023.

While it is too early to say whether a full-fledged financial crisis is imminent, the trajectory is unpromising.

***

The affected US regional banks had specific failings. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (“SVB”) highlighted the interest rate risk of financing holdings of long-term fixed-rate securities with short-term deposits. SVB and First Republic Bank (“FRB”) also illustrate the problem of the $250,000 limit on Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) coverage. Over 90 percent of failed SVB and Signature Bank as well as two-thirds of FRB deposits were uninsured, creating a predisposition to a liquidity run in periods of financial uncertainty.

Continue reading

Daniel Ellsberg Calling on Us to Stop Nuclear War, by Marjorie Cohn

A man who’s done what Daniel Ellsberg has done deserves our attention, especially since he’s apparently not going to be around much longer. From Marjorie Cohn at consortiumnews.com:

Daniel Ellsberg at a protest against the Iraq war in San Francisco, where he was arrested. (Steve Rhodes/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The legendary Daniel Ellsberg has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In a March 1 email to friends, Dan wrote, “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live … it might be more, or less.” He will turn 92 on April 7.

Dan displayed uncommon courage in 1971 when he publicized the 7,000-page top-secret Pentagon Papers while working at the Rand Corporation. As a consultant to the Department of Defense, Dan drafted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war.

In his book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Dan wrote that the Pentagon Papers exposed the “secrets five presidents had withheld and the lies they told” about U.S. decision-making in Vietnam“This truth telling set in motion a train of events, including criminal White House efforts to silence or incapacitate me.” The government’s illegal efforts to silence Dan resulted in the dismissal of the charges against him and his codefendant Anthony Russo. “Much more important,” Dan noted, “these particular Oval Office crimes helped topple the president, an act that was crucial to ending the war.”

In 2014, Dan gave a keynote speech at the 45th reunion of the Stanford Anti-Vietnam War movement. At the reunion, he explained how the United States came dangerously close to using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War. In 1965, the Joint Chiefs recommended to President Lyndon B. Johnson that U.S. forces hit targets up to the Chinese border. Dan thought their real aim was to provoke China into responding and then the U.S. would cross into China and demolish the communists with nuclear weapons.

Now, Dan is urging the world to again avoid nuclear annihilation.

Continue reading