Category Archives: Governments

The UN Discusses Darkening The Skies to Combat Climate Change, by Igor Chudov

Posted on March 2, 2023 | 2 comments

Yes, an idea this dumb really is under consideration. From Igor Chudov at igorchudov.substack.com:

Will Bill Gates succeed with his new plan?

A new report from the UN was just published. It proposes and discusses ways to cool our planet by restricting sunlight and darkening our skies.

Source: UNEP Document

What is this about? Why block sunlight, of all things? Let me explain.

The UN is worried about climate change. As the efforts to reduce CO2 emissions are faltering, the UN is looking for more ways to cool the Earth. The UNEP’s report details ideas called “Solar Radiation Modification,” the gist of which is to reflect sunlight and prevent it from heating the surface of our planet.

Here are the main ideas that the UN will consider:

  • Injecting reflective nanoparticles/sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere (stratospheric aerosol injection)
  • Brightening of low clouds over the ocean by seeding ocean clouds with submicron salt particles
  • Using space mirrors, that is, many giant mirrors launched into outer space to reflect sunlight.

The UN explains that should the “global stakeholders” decide to proceed, the skies could be darkened within only a few years:

SRM is the only option that could cool the planet within years. To be effective at limiting global warming, SRM would need to be maintained for several decades to centuries, depending on the pace of emissions reductions and carbon removal.

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Posted in Environment, Geopolitics, Governments, Horseshit, Robert Gore, Technology

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Secession Is Inevitable. War to Prevent It Is Optional. By Ryan McMaken

Posted on March 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

Eventually parts of what we know as the United States are going to go their separate ways. Nothing lasts forever. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

Never is a very, very long time in politics. Yet whenever the topic of secession or so-called national divorce comes up, how often do we hear that “secession will never happen.” It’s difficult to tell if people using the term “never” actually mean it. If they mean “not in the next ten or twenty years,” that’s plausible. But if they truly mean “not in the next 100 (or more) years,” it’s clear they’re working on the level of absolutely pure, unfounded speculation. Such statements reflect little more than personal hopes and dreams.

Experience is clear that the state of most polities often changes enormously in the span of a few decades. Imagine Russia in 1900 versus Russia in 1920. Or perhaps China in 1930 versus China in 1950. If someone had told the Austrian emperor in 1850 that his empire would be completely dismembered by 1919, he probably would have refused to believe it. Few British subjects in 1945 expected the empire to be all but gone by 1970. In the 1970s, the long-term survival of the Soviet Union appeared to be a fait accompli. For a visual sense of this, simply compare world maps from 1900 and 1950. In less than the span of a human lifetime, the political map of the world often changes so as to be unrecognizable.

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Posted in Governments, History, Politics, Secession

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SCOTT RITTER: Reimagining Arms Control After Ukraine

Posted on March 1, 2023 | 1 comment

It’s hard to imagine reinstating arms control with Russia, when the Russians justifiably believe the U.S. Government wouldn’t observe an agreement to save its life. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:

Having used arms control to gain unilateral advantage over Russia, the cost to the U.S. and NATO in getting Moscow back to the negotiating table will be high.

Checking out the rise and fall of nuclear warheads over the years of the nuclear arms race at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota, 2017. (Wayne Hsieh, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

U.S.-Russian arms control is in a state of extreme distress.

The U.S. withdrawal from the foundational Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002 undid the functional and theoretical premise of mutually assured destruction (MAD) that provided logical equilibrium to the fundamentals of nuclear deterrence theory.

Similarly, the Trump administration’s precipitous termination of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 2019 attacked both elements of the “trust but verify” maxim that governed issues of compliance verification that made arms control viable in the first place.

The last remaining arms control agreement that places limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of both the U.S. and Russia is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

Signed in 2010, and extended for five years in 2021, the treaty will expire in 2026. It places restrictions on the number of deployed nuclear warheads each side is permitted to have (1,550), as well as vehicles (missiles, bombers, submarines) to deliver these warheads (700).

Equally important to the numerical caps is the compliance verification regime mandated by the treaty, which includes the right of each side to conduct up to 18 on-site inspections per year. Up to 10 of these inspections can be done at operational bases where nuclear delivery systems are based. Inspectors there can visually confirm the presence of nuclear warheads by randomly selecting missiles for inspection. 

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No, “Covid” STILL doesn’t come from a lab, by Kit Knightly

Posted on March 1, 2023 | 1 comment

Maybe a flu virus was repackaged as Covid. If it was, it blows the mainstream narratives to shreds. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:

The big Covid news the last couple of days has been that the US Department of Energy, via the Wall Street Journal, has claimed that a laboratory leak is the “most likely” origin of “Covid”.

Citing “new evidence”, a DoE panel has amended their assessment from 2021, essentially switching “we don’t know” to “it probably came from a lab”.

This is just the latest step in the lab-leak theory’s remarkable journey from fringe idea to mainstream position, or from “conspiracy theory to government debate”, according to Forbes’ article timelining the whole process.

You know what OffG thinks of the lab-leak theory, we did a fact-check on it back in 2021, and then addressed it again in 2022: “Lab leak” theory makes no sense, and only reinforces the mainstream narrative.

Further, it can now be used as fuel for the “new cold war” narrative.

The US can blame China for creating the virus, while China can either claim it was natural or that the US released it in an act of “bio-terrorism”.

Both sides will claim the other side’s vaccines don’t work, but that theirs do. And, make no mistake, both sides will still very much want to vaccinate everyone.

In some ways this is a symptom of the failure of the Covid narrative. The greatest propaganda push of all time ran out of steam just two years in, and is suddenly fighting defensively simply to hold itself together. Because the “lab leak” debate is very much a fallback position. A retreat in good order, protecting – at all costs – the fundamental lie of “Covid”, viz – there was no new disease.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Horseshit, Medicine, Propaganda

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The Phone Call, by William Gudal

Posted on March 1, 2023 | 1 comment

It would take about 30 seconds to make the world a lot better place than it is now. From SLL contributor William Gudal:

Somewhere in the Ukraine the phone rings:

“Hello, Volodymyr here”

“Hi Mr. President, Joe Biden speaking”

“So good to hear from you. It’s been days”

“It’s over”

“We have a poor connection”

“Volo, so you do not misunderstand, no more money, nor more armaments. We stand ready to help you with the transition to neutrality.”

“But . . . “

“It will all work out, Bye”

One phone call lasting less than one minute changes the world for the next 25 years. The carnage stops. The world economy abruptly changes. NATO goes home and resumes its customary barracks role, training for phantom aggression that will never come. Russia rightfully retains its warm water port on the Black Sea. The US is forced to deal with an economic competitor on a more level playing field. The danger of nuclear catastrophe lessens. Sino- Russian dialogue adjusts to a diminished likelihood of US invasion. Inexpensive energy returns to Europe. The madness of the US neocon/neo liberal dream of dismantling Russia is deferred to another day. The altar boys of Europe gain some self-respect. Money is reallocated to a frighteningly long list of US domestic needs. Germany avoids being suckered once again into a war not of its making.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, War

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It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

It becomes easier to understand when you remember that the mass media is a wholly subsidiary of the military-industrial complex. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

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Public vs. Private: Managing Perceptions of the War in Ukraine, by Ted Snider

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

They say something different in private than they do in public. They must be politicians. From Ted Snider at libertarianinstitute.org:

“I want Russia to be defeated in Ukraine,” French President Emmanuel Macron publicly told the media. But it’s not what he privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He also said that now is not the right time for dialogue with Moscow and that France is ready to sustain “a longer conflict.” That’s not what he told Zelensky either.

“America…will stand with you as long as it takes,” President Biden publicly promised Ukraine in his State of the Union Address. But it’s not what his administration privately told Zelensky.

“The war I know about is not the war you are reading about,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said recently.

Managing public perception about the war to control the narrative and maintain support seems to have required a divorce between what NATO officials are telling Ukraine privately and what they are telling the public they are telling Ukraine.Biden’s public mantra has been “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” and “will stand with you as long as it takes.” Privately, neither seems to be true.

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JFK’s Remarkable Peace Speech that Sealed His Fate, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Deep State doesn’t take kindly to politicians who actually take peace seriously enough to strive for it. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

The deep animosity against Russia and China that the U.S. national-security establishment has inculcated in the American people brings to mind the remarkable speech that President Kennedy delivered on June 10, 1963, at American University that sealed his fate.

Just imagine what would happen to any American who today dares to say good things about Russia and China. The Russia haters and the China haters will heap condemnation and calumny on them. The haters will accuse them of being “Putin lovers” who support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the case of China, they will accuse them of being communist sympathizers who support China’s military expansionism. 

No, there is no room in America for positive sentiments toward Russia and China. Through the power of indoctrination, the Pentagon and the CIA have succeeded in inculcating a mindset of deep hostility all across America toward both Russia and China.

Of course, they did the same thing back in the Cold War era, perhaps even more so given that, during that time, both Russia and China were communist regimes. Throughout the Cold War decades, Americans were indoctrinated in the same way that Americans today are indoctrinated. They were taught to hate and fear the Russian Reds and the Chinese Reds and, for that matter, the North Korean Reds, the Cuban Reds, the Vietnamese Reds, the Chilean Reds, the Guatemalan Reds, and, well, all the Reds in the world, including those who were inside the United States. 

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The stage is set for Hybrid World War III, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Russians and Chinese see quite clearly that they stand in opposition to the U.S., and they are determined to build something different and what they regard as better than the American model. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you’re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by selected stops and enlightening conversations, crystallizing disparate vectors one year after the start of the accelerated phase of the proxy war between US/NATO and Russia.

That’s how Moscow welcomes you: the undisputed capital of the 21st century multipolar world.

A long, walking meditation impregnates on us how President Putin’s address – rather, a civilizational speech – last week was a game-changer when it comes to the demarcation of the civilizational red lines we are all now facing. It acted like a powerful drill perforating the less than short, actually zero term memory of the Collective West. No wonder it exercised a somewhat sobering effect contrasting the non-stop Russophobia binge of the NATOstan space.

Alexey Dobrinin, Director of the Foreign Policy Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Russia, has correctly described

Putin’s address as “a methodological basis for understanding, describing and constructing multipolarity.”

For years some of us have been showing how the emerging multipolar world is defined – but goes way beyond – high speed interconnectivity, physical and geoeconomic. Now, as we reach the next stage, it’s as if Putin and Xi Jinping, each in their own way, are conceptualizing the two key civilizational vectors of multipolarity. That’s the deeper meaning of the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership, invisible to the naked eye.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics

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America Goes to War, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on February 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

It would be a consolation, perhaps, for the senseless idiocy, if America actually won the wars it went to, but it doesn’t. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

Constantly without regard for any real national interest

At last week’s Rage Against the War Machine peace rally in Washington there was no shortage of speakers who denounced the Biden Administration’s hypocritical foreign policy, which essentially judges any violent action undertaken by the United States and its friends as good by definition while anything done by rivals or competitors, sometimes conveniently referred to as “enemies,” as “evil.” In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia, where the US is engaged in proxy warfare, speakers were able to cite and compare the formidable list of America’s armed interventions worldwide since World War Two ended. Neither Russia nor any other nation comes anywhere near the United States in terms of constant bellicosity, conflicts which hardly ever reflect any real vital national interest or imminent foreign threat. Throw into the hopper the 800-plus US military bases scattered around the world and a growing defense budget larger than those of the next nine nations combined, including China and Russia, and the reader will obtain some idea of the real problem: the United States has become a nation that is best described as a warfare state. That is where the tax money goes to disproportionately and the corruption it feeds produces a willingness to engage in “one more war” on the part of the coddled, protected and richly remunerated political class which in turn supports the carnage by overwhelming majorities.

Several speakers last week also cited as the real problem the media, which once upon a time sought to expose lies and subterfuges by government but now has become a partner with the White House in shaping and promoting a preferred narrative. It should also be pointed out that that media is overwhelmingly Democratic in terms of its ownership and sympathies, so much so that it collaborated in efforts to label Donald Trump and his staff as “Russian agents.”

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