Category Archives: Politics

Financial Harakiri, by Joel Bowman and Bill Bonnor

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Joel Bowman and Bill Bonnor take on the world’s idiots and their idiocies. Unfortunately they can’t address them all, but they do a pretty good of shredding the ones they confront. From Bowman and Bonnor at bonnorprivateresearch.substack.com:

Plus money caves, egg donors, peak humanity, mass suicide and assorted other bunk and baloney…

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Buenos Aires, Argentina…

Our first stop in Buenos Aires was a “cave.” We needed the local money.

You can change your money in a bank and get 190 pesos per dollar.  Or, you go into a shop that pretends to be a real estate agent…or an electronics store…and you get 372 pesos per dollar

You go up to the shop. The door is locked. You ring the buzzer…and the door opens. A handsome young man, tattooed and swarthy, sits behind a glass divider.  You tell him how much money you want to change. He quotes a rate. You accept.  And then, come the piles of cash.

The largest note he has is a 1,000 peso bill. So, if you are changing 500 US dollars, you end up with 186 pieces of paper. The whole transaction is so fast and easy, you have a hard time keeping up with the math. But you are soon walking out of the shop with your pockets stuffed with cash, trying to look inconspicuous.  

Meanwhile, we turn back to the news…

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime, Governments, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology

Tagged

Facing Defeat, Kiev Regime in Desperate Bid to Expand War Regionally and Embroil Neighbors, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

If Zelensky could provoke Russia into attacking one small Eastern European country, he’d have the NATO led war he’s always wanted. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Zelensky’s racket is coming to an end as Russian forces push on with decimating what’s left of the NATO proxy war machine.

Moldavian President Maia Sandu made explosive claims this week that Russia was conspiring with Serbian, Belorussian and Montenegrin agents to overthrow her government.

Sandu is a Western darling, so her flimsy allegations received a lot of airplay from Western media outlets.

The accusations provoked consternation in Serbia and Montenegro whose governments rejected any such involvement and demanded Moldavia provide details to back up the claims. Respective ambassadors have been summoned to explain the unprecedented tensions.

For its part, Moscow dismissed the alleged plot to destabilize the government in Chisinau as “unfounded and unsubstantiated”. Russia countered that the real motive was for Kiev to expand the war to embroil neighbors.

Such a reckless, incendiary move by the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime would fit its unsavory record for delinquent conduct, from demanding ever-more lethal weapons from its NATO backers, to staging false-flag massacres in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, to its use of “nuclear terrorism” by firing rockets at Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporozhye.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics, Propaganda, War

Tagged

NEVER BEFORE SEEN VIDEO: Nancy Pelosi’s Filmmaker Daughter Alexandra Pelosi Caught on Tape REFUTING J6 NARRATIVE – Admitting Jan. 6 Protests Not an Insurrection, DC Courts Too Biased, by Jim Hoft

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

This is awkward for the Pelosis . . . and for the fiction that the January 6 defendants are getting any kind of impartial justice. From Jim Hoft at thegatewaypundit.com:

Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra Pelosi is producing an HBO documentary about the January 6, 2021, protests and riot in Washington DC.

In October 2022, CNN released never-before-seen footage of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — the two people who refused to call in the National Guard prior to that day and during the rioting.

The footage was filmed by Nancy’s daughter Alexandra. Nancy’s son-in-law was outside during the protests filming the “insurrection.”

Never mind all the skipped over moments and footage–like when police started launching flashbangs into the crowd a little after 1pm–you decide how authentic this appears to be https://t.co/brgM5bLFI0

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) October 13, 2022

Nancy had a camera crew at the US Capitol as if she knew it was going to be a historic day.  It was quite the coincidence.

As it turned out, January 6 was a historic day.  It was also well-planned and staged.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Horseshit, Politics

Tagged ,

Seymour Hersh’s Trinity of Truth, by Scott Ritter

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster article will have three major consequences. From Scott Ritter at scottritterextra.com:

In the Christian faith, God comes in the form of three persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Together, these three beings form the Trinity.

In a recent interview with the German writer Fabian Scheidler, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh discussed his bombshell article that appeared in his inaugural posting on Substack, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline”.

When Scheidler thanked Hersh for his courageous reporting, the veteran reporter shot back, “What’s so courageous about telling the truth? We’re supposed to tell the truth!”

I’ve known Sy Hersh for coming on a quarter century. While I was too young to experience first-hand the impact of his reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, I had a front row seat to the masterful job he did in bringing to light the horrible facts about what the United States was doing in the Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq.

Legendary status isn’t given—it is earned. And Sy Hersh has earned the absolute right to be called the GOAT when it comes to investigative journalism. He is, simply put, the best.

I’ve read nearly everything Sy Hersh has written, and am able to put his considerable journalistic output in its proper historical perspective. It is therefore that I feel very comfortable in concluding that, in terms of its potential for bringing about tectonic geopolitical change, Sy’s Nord Stream reporting is his most important work ever.

The GOAT has produced what I call the Trinity of Truth.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Media, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged

toughening up the buttercups, by el gato malo

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Shielding people from adversity, failure, and pain shields them from growing up. From el gato malo at borquagato.substack.com:

it is not the people who are sick, it’s the society

when i was a child, we had an expression:

“toughen up, buttercup.”

such sentiments seem out of keeping with “modern” ideas of childhood and child rearing and even adulthood, but i suspect that this is the source of serious problems and not the pathway past them.

when i was a gatito “so why don’t you cry about it?” was a common retort to the whiny kid, the complainer, the mewling malcontent. was it nice? perhaps not. was it kind? well not precisely. but was it needed? i would argue yes. was it vital to raising real and competent humans? yes, very probably. and is it not the unkindest cut of all to allow our progeny to sidestep the struggles that imbue strength and grow up into sissified wussballs? well yes, i suspect it really, truly is.

and many are starting to notice. and i think perhaps its time we all did.

Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin

Myself, and many others, are fed up with normal human experiences being turned into psychiatric disorders. This is a human rights issue. Resist6:58 PM ∙ Feb 17, 2023175Likes22Retweets

so let’s be clear, i’m not saying there is no such thing as mental illness or that some people and especially some children may require more than typical levels of help. of course there are.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Education, Government, Morality, Politics, Psychology

Tagged

Do Techno Posers Have the Skills to Pay the Bills? By MN Gordon

Posted on February 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

Do former Twitter censors who’ve been fired have any useful and remunerative skills in the real world? From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Sometimes things must get worse before they get better.  To completely remodel a kitchen, for instance, you must first demo and gut the old one.  These initial steps backward can be demoralizing.

But there’s no way around it.  And with perseverance and an ample budget, the ultimate result is usually a big improvement.

Similarly, remodeling a tired company requires making short term sacrifices for long term gains.  The initial efforts can produce ugliness.  And with the lives and livelihoods of employees on the line, the decisions can be emotional.  Yet sometimes it must be done.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency.”  If you recall, the company RIFed 11,000 workers in November 2022.  The scuttlebutt is that more layoffs are coming.

Currently, the prospect of imminent layoffs is triggering uncertainty about what projects will go forward, what will be cancelled, and who will be working on them.  This has created an interim situation where some Meta employees are getting paid to do zero work.  Strangely, for Meta to become more efficient, it must first be less efficient.

Still, Zuckerberg is clear on his objective.  In Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call on February 1, the CEO noted:

“We’re working on flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster, as well as deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive.”

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Media, Politics

Tagged

Implications of US Destruction of Nordstream 2 Pipeline, by Graham E. Fuller

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. government’s desperate quest to maintain the U.S.-led unipolar world order will fail. From Graham E. Fuller at consortiumnews.com:

With a new Great Wall between Russia and the West, Graham E. Fuller wonders what kind of role lies ahead for either the U.S. or Europe on the international scene.

China’s embassy in Berlin, January 2010. (Jochen Teufel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The disturbing and detailed reportage by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh on Washington’s sabotage of the Russian Nordstream 2 gas pipeline to Germany now provides new perspective on the momentous series of geopolitical trends that began with the war in Ukraine.

My own assessment of the Russian invasion written one year ago offered an analysis that was, and still is, markedly at variance with the Washington-dominated narrative of the course of Ukraine events.

A few thoughts from then:

—I condemned the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, and indeed of any government that launches a war (President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq included).

—My belief that the Russian invasion was nonetheless far from “unprovoked” but rather quite clearly provoked by Washington in its longstanding willful insistence on pushing NATO’s armed alliance ultimately right up to the very borders of Russia, where ancient Kievan/Russian cultural roots are deeply linked with early Russian/Orthodox Slavic civilization.

Yet Washington denies the validity of any Russian “sphere of influence” in Ukraine while the U.S. itself still maintains its own strong sphere of influence throughout Latin America — witness the Cuban missile crisis. (And can you imagine a Chinese military base in Mexico to bolster Mexican sovereignty?)

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Imperialism, Politics, Propaganda, War

Tagged , ,

A US-Led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ Foreshadows the Splintering of NATO, by Mike Whitney

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

How long before European countries decide they no longer want to be part of an American empire? The Nord Stream bombings clearly demonstrate the empire has gone off the rails. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline was a gangster act that reveals the cancer at the heart of the “rules-based order”. How can there be peace and security when the world’s most powerful nation can destroy the critical infrastructure of other countries without deliberation or judicial proceedings? If Hersh’s report can be trusted—and I think it can—then we must assume that senior-level advisors in the Biden administration as well as the president himself deliberately perpetrated an act of industrial terrorism against a long-term friend and ally, Germany. What Biden’s involvement in the act implies, is that the United States now claims the right to arbitrarily decide which countries may engage in commerce with which others. And, if for some reason, the buying and selling of energy supplies conflicts with Washington’s broader geopolitical objectives, then the US believes it has the right to obliterate the infrastructure that makes such trade possible. Isn’t this the rationale that was used to justify the blowing up of Nord Stream?

Sy Hersh has done the world a service by exposing the perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage. His expose not only identifies the people involved but also infers that they should be held accountable for their actions. But while we don’t expect any thorough investigation in the near future, we do think the magnitude of the attack has been a “wake up” call for people who cling to the belief that the Unipolar model can produce morally-acceptable outcomes. What the incident shows is that unilateral action inevitably leads to criminal violence against the weak and defenseless. Biden’s covert operation hurt every man, woman and child in Europe. It’s a real tragedy. Here’s a quote from a recent interview with Hersh:

“I think this story has the same potential for destroying the ability of our president to rally the American people behind the war because it shows something that is so dark and so Unamerican. You know, this isn’t us. We’re not talking about us. This is a bunch of intelligence officers and CIA people….” Seymour Hersh 2:29 min

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Politics, Propaganda, War

Tagged

Murdoch Propaganda Pushes Australia To Double Its Military Budget For War With China, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Australia has the same relationship with the U.S. as Europe does: vassal. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

In the latest escalation in Australia’s increasingly forceful campaign to manufacture consent for war with China, the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia has aired a jaw-droppingly propagandistic hour-long special which advocates a dramatic increase in the nation’s military spending.

Australians are uniquely vulnerable to propaganda because our nation has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, the lion’s share of it by Rupert Murdoch, who has well-documented ties to US government agencies going back decades. The propaganda campaign against China has gotten so aggressive here in recent years that I’ve repeatedly had complete strangers start babbling at me about the Chinese threat in casual conversation, completely out of the blue, within minutes of our first meeting each other.

The Sky News special is one of the most brazenly propagandistic things I have ever witnessed in any news media, with its opening minutes featuring footage of bayonet-wielding Chinese troops marching while ominous cinematic Bad Guy music plays loudly over the sound of the marching. In its promotional clip for the special, Sky News Australia tinged all footage pertaining to China in red to show how dangerous and communist they are. These are not decisions that are made with the intention of informing the public, these are decisions that are made with the intention of administering war propaganda.

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Military, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

Unchastened by Russiagate, the NY Times Doubles Down in Its Special Counsel Coverage, by Aaron Maté

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Being one of the government’s main propaganda organs means you never have to admit to a lie, you just go on to new ones. From Aaron Maté at realclearwire.com:

Special Counsel John Durham, leading a multi-year probe of how U.S. intelligence officials conducted the Russia investigation, has yet to issue his final report. But according to the New York Times, Durham has already come up empty.  

Durham’s team, the Times declared in a widely circulated Jan. 26 article, has gone “unsuccessfully down one path after another” and ultimately “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.”  The three bylined reporters, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner, base their conclusion on a “monthslong review,” including interviews “with more than a dozen current and former officials.”  

Yet a review of the trio’s reporting shows that the Times is still engaging in the same journalistic behavior that has made the paper a reliable disseminator of discredited innuendo about a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. By omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts, the Times article does not set the record straight. Instead, it attempts to write off the Durham probe before its findings have been released, and whitewashes Russiagate’s key actors in the FBI and Clinton campaign long after they have been exposed.  

The article fits into a larger pattern of malfeasance in the Times’ Russiagate coverage, which RCI has documented and the Columbia Journalism Review recently highlighted at length. RCI found, among other shortcomings, a failure to correct clear errors, the use of misleading language to minimize and sanitize the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and the refusal to acknowledge broader missteps, especially those involving anonymous sources who turned out to be deceitful. The Times’ failures are especially consequential because of the newspaper’s unique role in framing broader news narratives. That its Russiagate reporting shared journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, underscores a media dysfunction that extends beyond this single influential organization. 

Continue reading

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, Investigations, Media, Politics

Tagged ,