It’s about time. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
There has been a surge in protests and strikes around the world, primarily focused on economic hardships, skyrocketing inflation, political turmoil, and geopolitical issues.
Recent protests have emerged in France, Greece, Great Britain, Israel, Venezuela, South Korea, Moldova, and Portugal. While some of these demonstrations have been peaceful, others have resulted in clashes with law enforcement.
One of the most troubling countries is France, where protests flared up last week after President Emmanuel Macron circumvented Parliament by passing unpopular pension reform that raises the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
BREAKING: Trash cans in France are being set on fire. French social media is leading this trend to light garbage on fire.
The French know how to protest. 🔥 It must smell awful now, even more so than usual.
Ideas are the foundation of the brain standard, one of which is that only individuals have rights. This cuts through the collectivist dreck that passes for thought among most of the world’s so-called intellectuals. The variations of collectivism all disguise nothing more than brute force hiding behind propaganda. Their inevitable failures stem from their essential flaw: those that control the collective claim rights that negate those of the individual.
There are grounds for hope. From the ruins of impending collapse there will be some who reject collectivism and are committed to rebuilding on a foundation of individual rights. How they will protect those rights and whatever territories they stake out are what theoretical physicists sometimes call “engineering problems.” One advantage they’ll have, though, as the brain standard constituency—they’ll be smarter than their adversaries. Attention, imagination, and intelligence will be keenly focused on building from the ruins and protecting what they’ve built.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine someone invents a cheap, portable device that defends its bearer and his or her property from all violence from all sources, but has no offensive capability. The device is so cheap that virtually everyone can buy it, and charities are set up to donate it to those who can’t. The device is universally available and creates a world without violence.
How would such a world function? People would have to produce to survive, but absent mutual agreement no one would have an enforceable claim on anyone else’s production. There would be no coercive transfers of money or property. Disputes would be settled by negotiation and mediation. A body of civil law similar to English common law would develop. Surely such a society would figure out a way to deal with nonviolent crime.
The negation of violence would eliminate government’s nominal rationale: protecting citizens from violence. In the absence of government (and its violence), individuals and society as a whole would be free to advance as far as their capabilities will take them.
This extreme hypothetical offers a stark contrast with the absence of anything resembling freedom anywhere in the world today. Government and collectivism are top-down codependents based on violence and coercion. Their current manifestations are replaying the dreary and what should be the common knowledge lesson of history: they inevitably fail, often after a great deal of bloodshed.
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In the current jockeying among collectivist governments for the things over which they jockey, Russia’s and China’s are doing a better job than the U.S.’s. The former are the co-leaders of the Eurasian alliance and represent substantial politic and economic power. The latter is bankrupt, embroiled in yet another war it won’t win, and stands accused of sabotaging its most important European ally’s oil pipelines. At home, the U.S. government and its fellow travelers are in thrall to brain-dead ideologies that hasten the country’s disintegration.
Call it the good side of government lies. From J.B. Shurk at americanthinker.com:
In the digital public square of social media, I have seen a noticeable uptick in biting memes and political cartoons calling out the U.S. government for its constant lies. In one example, a cyber-billboard screams, “I don’t know if I’m being distracted by vaccine deaths so I don’t notice inflation, or if inflation is the distraction to Ukraine money laundering, or if Ukraine is a distraction for rampant pedophilia, or if pedos are distracting me from election fraud.” Clearly, that was produced before the great balloon scare gripped the nation. Ah, but no sooner had China Joe proven once again how unsecured our open borders are by allowing a Chinese surveillance balloon to float above the continent’s nuclear silos than I ran into a cartoon divided into four squares in which the same man was being hypnotized — first by a dangling coronavirus in 2020, then an mRNA “vaccine” shot in 2021, then a Ukraine flag in 2022, and finally an extraterrestrial spaceship in 2023. Well done, meme masters and internet freethinkers! Actually, corrupt Senator Harry Reid had started to play the UFO card a decade ago, so perhaps this cycle is just starting up once again. Uff da.
If you want to know what’s really going on within a society, you don’t run to the national newspapers or interview people with titles. You get out and talk to the people nobody else would dare seek. In the Internet Age, you look at what’s being said by ordinary people on unremarkable chatrooms whose opinions are routinely overlooked. What I see today is a bubbling movement of frustration and anger that is as acidic as anything I’ve come across. Americans are furiously mad — but noticeably not in despair. People are not throwing their hands up in desperation; they’re venting their rage at a corrupt system of government that has gotten out of control. They’re not hiding in the shadows, whispering in hushed tones; they’re screaming at the top of their lungs, just daring the Big Tech censors to blot out their (un)free speech. They’re not allowing the State’s “politically correct” priests and purveyors of officially sanctioned disinformation to shame them into silence; they’re laughing in the spin doctors’ faces and calling out the government’s mass propaganda for what it is. That’s refreshing!
The U.S. engaged in an act of war not just against its putative enemy—Russia—but also against its supposed ally—Germany. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
If Putin and senior Russian officials had said what Biden and senior US officials have been saying about how much they hate the Nord Stream pipelines and how great it is that they were bombed, every member of the western political/media class would blame Russia for the bombing, and we would never hear the end of it.
FLASHBACK: BIDEN:“If Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine — then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it”
According to @SecBlinken, the Nord Stream pipeline bombing “offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.” Too bad that this tremendous opportunity for DC bureaucrats will come at the expense of everyone else, especially this coming winter. pic.twitter.com/T2eacQUuBF
At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:
“Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165
Russia would stand nothing to gain by bombing its own pipeline whose gas flow it could control on its own end, while US officials are openly acknowledging that the US benefits from it directly. It’s just so silly how imperial spinmeisters are falling all over themselves to dismiss a claim they all privately know is true because it’s so glaringly obvious.
We’ve known it’s coming for many years. Sooner or later we’ll have to take up arms against the scum who presume to rule us. From T.L. Davis at theburningplatform.com:
I don’t usually title a piece before I write it, preferring to let the piece speak for itself, but I wanted to keep myself on track with this one. As the title suggests, on which hill do we die? We all die, it’s just a matter of how much pain and anguish goeth before the end.
The only thing more emotionally difficult than watching the perfection of the United States die such a horribly corrupt and meaningless death was watching my father die of cancer. I don’t usually get into personal issues here, or talk much about my family; it’s just not relevant. But this time, in anticipation of death, both of myself and my nation, I’ll go outside that restriction.
My father was a farm boy, just a rural kid who watched in amazement his father work long, hard, endless years to build something out of the soil. He was plucked from that pastoral existence to shoot Koreans, or, more likely, Chinese, across the frozen plains of Korea. He was a machine gunner and spent a year and a half on the front lines, earning him a quick discharge. I don’t know how he lived through that, most didn’t.
Some violence and death is more acceptable than other violence and death. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
One man gets beaten to death by government workers and riots ensue in several cities. Thousands of people are poisoned to death by the government at the behest of the corporations who control it and there’s hardly a protest. Those that did occur were also actually peaceful. The CDC was not firebombed. Fauci wasn’t attacked in the streets. The legions of people who willingly served as the enforcers of “lockdowns,” “mask” mandates and so on haven’t had to face angry mobs demanding justice.
It’s an interesting incongruity, isn’t it?
Almost as if – per Orwell’s Two Minutes’ Hate – the government encourages (and certainly doesn’t do much to stop) certain outpourings of rage. Perhaps for just that reason; i.e., to harmlessly defuse what might otherwise be dangerously percolating anger that could threaten the government.
The beatdown administered to Tyre Nichols was gratuitous, savage and – ultimately – murderous. So also – and more so – the way an entire nation was beaten down.
In Nichols’ case, it was five against one. Those odds are pretty good – relative to having the entire apparatus of the government-corporate nexus deployed against each and every one of us.
It is without a doubt the biggest scam in history, what the aristocracy has going with the U.S. government. From John Rubino at rubino.substack.com:
Most people (especially most Americans) still seem to view the events of the past half-century as more or less random. Booms and busts erupting out of nowhere, impoverishing all but a handful of lucky elites. Political crises that end up dividing rather than uniting. Wars that cost fortunes and resolve nothing. Everything is bad, and nothing is related to anything else.
But of course that’s not true. Each of the above events serves the same purpose: to enrich a modern aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. And the endgame is looking even worse.
To see the scam play out, let’s go back to 1995. Two decades previously, in 1971, the US and by extension the world had ditched sound, gold-backed money in favor of “fiat” currencies that their governments, via their central banks, could create in infinite quantities out of thin air. The result was spiking inflation and exchange rate chaos in the 1970s and soaring government deficits in the 1980s.
By the 1990s it had become clear to the people running major governments and big corporations that unsound money would lead to unsustainable debt, which in turn would destabilize the financial world and bring about a hyperinflationary depression followed by a French Revolution-style reckoning for those responsible.
That generation’s elites were thus left with two choices: Return to the gold standard and avoid monetary collapse — but at the cost of giving up the ability to create money at will. Or use their fictitious currencies to steal as much real wealth as possible from the peasants and let future elites deal with the eventual collapse.
Delusions flourish that we live in enlightened times and that as a species we have sufficiently advanced beyond the grievous limitations that haunt our past.
Ignorance, illiteracy, pestilence, famine, and the consequences of natural disasters were all at far greater levels at any point in time prior to this moment, with perhaps the exception of the first—ignorance—which is now intentionally inflicted upon the masses who are too complacent, distracted, or lazy to adjust their behavior toward remediation.
This may be because prior to ubiquitous cynicism and sarcasm polluting western societies, serious people of the past acknowledged their ignorance whereas today they take great pride in not remedying it. Instead, they embrace it with arrogance and certitude.
Wars, tribalism, greed, the lust for power, the corruptibility of humans, and the desire to control and dominate others may never cease to be our most significant menaces.
The justification for conquest, dominance, rape, and plunder, in the name of myth, superstition, family legacy, personal ego, or revenge, for monarchs or gods or secular humanism, science, and reason, or borne of those realist terms that might makes right, there is no period of our history not marred with interspecies conflict.
Perhaps every generation throughout modernity with any modicum of technological or scientific advancement, artistic or cultural transformation, or philosophical conversion betrayed a similar arrogance and pride in evolution. For progressives, the inverse is necessarily true to justify their cause—the incessant claims that we have not progressed at all and things are always behind the curve of their passions.
The CIA is addicted to regime change. However, what worked in the Ukraine hasn’t worked in Brazil . . . so far. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:
The failed coup in Brazil is the latest CIA stunt, just as the country is forging stronger ties with the east.
A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.
On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.
According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.
That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance, Pozsar states that “the multipolar world order is being built not by G7 heads of state but by the ‘G7 of the East’ (the BRICS heads of state), which is a G5 really but because of ‘BRICSpansion’, I took the liberty to round up.”
He refers here to reports that Algeria, Argentina, Iran have already applied to join the BRICS – or rather its expanded version “BRICS+” – with further interest expressed by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Indonesia.
The powers that be certainly deserve an insurrection. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:
“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.” — Alvin Toffler
Insurrections galore spark off all of a sudden, and 2023 was just born days ago! Want to know why? Because the business model of the global economy is broken and the supposed remedy for that is centralized control of populations and super-strict regulation of all their activities — that is, techno-tyranny (with Marxist characteristics, as the Chinese like to put it). Not everybody wants to ride that bus, and so an epic economic problem becomes an arduous political struggle, here and elsewhere in the world.
A great mob of many thousands went apeshit in Brazil over the weekend in that country’s weird, geographically isolated capital, Brasilia, a horror of 1960s-style Modernist city planning. They stormed the national congress and trashed the offices within to protest the fishy election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over the former incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. As in our own country, the quarrel was over the mysterious behavior of voting machines and the unwillingness of election officials or courts to verify the results. The New York Times offered a thumbnail of Mr. Bolsonaro, who is sitting out the current action in Florida:
The resulting picture showed an elected leader, first as a congressman and then as president, who has built a narrative of fraudulent elections based on inaccuracies, out-of-context reports, circumstantial evidence, conspiracy theories and downright falsehoods — much like former President Donald J. Trump.”
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