America’s ruling class is pushing a chaos agenda. From James Howard Kunstler at dailyreckoning.com:
If you think about it at all, can you come up with any good reasons why our country has involved itself in the Ukraine war? To defend democracy, many say? An emptier platitude does not exist in the vast slippery lexicon of spin.
To thwart Russia’s imperial overreach? You apparently have no clue about Ukraine’s history, ancient or modern. To incite an overthrow of the wicked Putin by his own people? The Russian president is more popular there now than even John F. Kennedy was here in 1962.
Oh, I know, I’m just parroting Russian propaganda by saying that. Isn’t that what they always say when you confront them with an uncomfortable truth about the war in Ukraine?
Meanwhile, Western “intelligence” sources and their mainstream media mouthpieces have been saying for about a year now that Russia was running out of ammunition. Well, they still have plenty of it, as the Ukrainians can painfully attest.
It’s actually the Ukrainians who are running out of ammo, which is why the U.S. and its NATO allies are looking under the couch cushions for any spare ammo they can find to send them.
Was there ever a doubt that there would be a bailout? From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
Treasury/Fed/FDIC issue joint statement with Tough Love for investors in failed banks.
We started hearing this yesterday from “sources” cited by Bloomberg. And this morning, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen got on TV and repeated the general principle, without details. Now we got it officially, in a joint announcement by Yellen, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg. The bailout of uninsured depositors has arrived, so now all depositors of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which was shut down today, will be made whole, not just insured depositors. The banks that are still standing can borrow from the Fed under a new facility. But investors in failed banks are on their own.
“After receiving a recommendation from the boards of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, and consulting with the President, Secretary Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors. Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13,” the statement said.
The Fed will pay for it at first. The Fed will print the needed funds to cover the deposits and give it to the FDIC (and the proceeds from asset sales will chip in to cover the losses). “No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.”
Later, the FDIC will charge other banks for those losses it incurred from bailing out uninsured depositors. And maybe the Fed will eventually get is money back from the FDIC? The statement said: “Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”
The U.S. is no longer the unchallenged king of the hill. From George D. O’Neill, Jr., at theamericanconservative.com:
As we witness the collapse of various mainstream narratives, especially those surrounding the U.S./NATO war with Russia in Ukraine, Americans should begin to reassess their understanding of U.S. national leadership. Most American citizens have no notion of the great disparity between what their government does overseas and the stories they hear from its mouthpieces. As a result, Americans unwittingly support all sorts of foreign operations with little or no understanding of what is actually going on. For years, they have been misled by a non-stop propaganda campaign that is only now beginning to crumble.
We are experiencing the death throes of the United States’ unipolar hegemony over large parts of world. Until citizens begin to realize the magnitude of their government’s policy deceptions, it will become increasingly difficult to understand the United States’ changing global position and adjust to the effects of the growing negative perception of our country held by many people around the world.
Since World War II, and particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was the dominant and unrivaled world power. Instead of being a peacekeeper and honest “world’s policeman,” the U.S. has increasingly been a destabilizing bully. Many leaders worldwide have been reluctant to speak up about the increasingly destructive nature of U.S. foreign policy for fear of being punished. But as U.S. stature and power declines, large parts of the world have been seeking arrangements to protect themselves from U.S. predation.
Most Americans do not understand why such realignments are occurring, thanks to a constant stream of propaganda about America being the “most generous,” the “exceptional nation,” a “nation that sets aside its interests for the benefit of the world,” an “important source of good” around the globe as the “protector of the rules based order,” always shouldering the heavy responsibility to protect the international system and weak nations from bad actors, ad nauseam. According to a number of sources, U.S.-caused wars have been directly responsible for the deaths of more than 10 million people since World War II. The neoconservatives will scoff at these facts and their sources, but most of the rest of the world believes this to be true.
Regardless of whether Seymour Hersh’s account or the far less believable New York Times’ account of the Nordstream pipeline sabotage is correct, the implications for Europe, Ukraine, and the U.S. are dire. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
In September 2022, the Nord Stream gas pipelines exploded in one of the most spectacular political and environmental acts of terrorism in history.
In the days immediately following the attack, which cut Germany and Europe off from its gas supply and released enormous amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere, the West immediately pronounced judgement against Russia. “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage,” said a senior European environmental official. US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm immediately said that it “seems” Russia is to blame.
But investigations by Sweden, Denmark and Germany, countries close to the explosion site, were slow to report and unable to arrive at conclusions. Then, on December 21, 2022, The Washington Postreported that, after months of investigation, there is nothing to suggest that Russia was responsible. The Post article interviewed “23 diplomatic and intelligence officials in nine countries” who said that “[t]here is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage.” It reports that “even those with inside knowledge of the forensic details don’t conclusively tie Russia to the attack.” The Wall Street Journalreports that there is a “growing sense among investigators in the U.S. and Europe that neither Russian-government nor pro-Russian operatives were behind the sabotage.”
It’s nice the Twitter revelations pulled back a bit of the curtain, but it barely debts the complex. From C.J. Hopkins at consentfactory.org:
I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)
Censorship protects the bubble-wrapped cohort when what’s needed is a lot of pins. From Thomas Buckley at mises.org:
Incredulity. Astonishment. Disgust. Anger.
It is these feelings—amongst others—that describe the general reaction to the revelations of the Twitter Files and other egregious episodes of Big Tech censorship of the electronic public square.
The implicit deal with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. is very simple: we will look at your ads if you give us a service for free. The deal did not include censorship.
But what is society to expect when those doing the censorship seem to see absolutely nothing wrong with it, and that it didn’t even occur to them that what they were engaged in—often at the specific request of governmental agencies—was at all a problem?
For a generation that has grown up with speech codes, enforced nicety, automatic deference to the feelings of others, and has been swaddled in bubble wrap against the vagaries of life, censoring of speech is not only not an ethical leap, it is the right thing to do.
Couple that with a permanent, purposeful self-infantilization that makes them defer to (or incoherently rage at for NOT censoring speech) anyone they perceive to be a grown-up—such as former FBI bigwig James Baker at Twitter—and the stage is not only set, but the terrifying end of the play writes itself.
The U.S. government launched a incredibly flimsy story from a select few house organs to divert attention from Seymour Hersh’s story. From The Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:
Western news outlets pompously claim to be pinnacles of journalism and defenders of public interest and democracy. They are nothing but the propaganda ministry for Washington – the Empire of Lies.
The New York Times and other Western news media ran with clumsy and blatantly diversionary claims this week, which in the end only serve to draw even more attention to the guilt of the United States in blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Not only is the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden even more indictable over the criminal act; the absurd cover-up attempt this week exposes the Western media as nothing but a ministry of propaganda masquerading as journalism.
Four weeks ago, the eminent independent American journalist, Seymour Hersh, published a blockbuster investigative report that revealed how President Biden and senior White House staff ordered the explosive detonation of the natural gas pipelines connecting Russia to the European Union via the Baltic Sea and Germany. The legendary Hersh has an impeccable record of groundbreaking stories, from the My Lai massacre committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1968 to the Abu Ghraib prison torture in Iraq under American occupation to the operation of ratlines to funnel weapons and mercenaries from Libya to Syria to fight Washington’s proxy war for regime change in Damascus.
How long before we’re forced to take drugs and vaccines? From Karen Hunt at off-guardian.org:
“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
It all started back in the 1950s with “these drugs will make you feel better, just try them.” And people did.
Over the years it morphed into “WE RECOMMEND these drugs if you don’t want to be sick, depressed or dead.” Almost everyone listened and accepted that drugs were the answer and there was no way to live without them.
Over the past three years it’s been “YOU MUST TAKE these drugs or else you endanger your own life and the lives of those around you.” By this point, people were so conditioned to take drugs that they thought nothing of submitting to an experimental mRNA gene therapy that the experts promised would keep them “safe”.
Within the next couple of years, it will be “YOU ARE REQUIRED to take these drugs by law and if you don’t, you will go to prison for endangering the planet.” Having been consistently brainwashed for all these years, most people will unquestioningly comply. Those who don’t, will be informed on by neighbors, coworkers, even their own family members, for the safety of the planet.
The crew and passengers of the S.S. Minnow, the ill fated boat in Gilligan’s Island, blew up the Nordstream pipelines. From Larry Johnson at sonar21.com:
In theory, a covert operation is supposed to be elegant, sophisticated and smart. But that is not the case with the United States these days. Ham-fisted and clumsy are more apt descriptors.
Yesterday’s simultaneous release of a new account of who destroyed the Nordstream pipeline in the New York Times, Die Zeit and a London paper placing the blame on shadowy pro-Ukrainians was not a coincidence. This was a coordinated information operation and the media reaction to this news is quite telling. The same news outlets that strenuously ignored Sy Hersh’s explosive, detailed revelation that it was a U.S. operation with help from Norway stumbled over themselves to breathlessly report that an unidentified pro-Ukrainian group was the guilty party.
Die Zeit provided the most hilarity with their fantastic tale of six people on a private yacht carrying out the deed. Looks to me like Die Zeit was channeling a Gilligan’s Island episode. We had Ginger and Mary Ann, accompanied by the Professor, the Skipper, Thurston Howell and Gilligan. They set to sea with a 1000 pounds of high explosive and used their snorkel gear to plant the charge. I bet you it was Ginger and Mary Ann who planted the bomb, of course, was built by the crafty Professor.
Here’s a winning strategy. Increase the load on the electric grid with electric cars while plugging the infrastructure into intermittent wind and solar power and letting its infrastructure go to pot. From Milton Exrati at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:
As more and more irritated customers become certain that power shortages and blackouts have become more common, the electric grid’s problems receive more attention. They should. Shortages and blackouts have in fact become much more common than they once were. The electric power grid has become increasingly fragile and considerably less reliable. This is especially troubling because, at the same time, Washington and several states plan to burden it further with electric cars and an increase in the use of electric appliances.
In part, the power problem reflects the increased reliance on inherently intermittent wind and solar sources. But this straightforward fact of life is only part of the story behind the electric grid’s problems. Matters are much more complicated.
Evidence of failure is irrefutable and has sometimes appeared with great drama. A 2021 cold snap in Texas, for example, led to widespread blackouts and the death of 250 people. California has for years regularly imposed rolling brownouts and blackouts on utility customers. Just this past Christmas season, unusually cold weather across the country prompted utilities from Massachusetts and New York across the Midwest and into the south to beg their customers to turn down their thermostats and delay their use of appliances. Millions lost power for days in North Carolina and Tennessee. Downed power lines caused some of the problems, but in many cases electric utilities simply had to cut off power to some in order to a total crash of their systems. The incidence of prolonged blackouts for all reasons has doubled since 2013.
The green lobby, predictably, blames the problem on how climate change has created more severe weather. The fossil fuel industry and its allies in Congress, equally predictably, blame the problem on the unreliability of wind and solar. No doubt there is truth on both sides, though many of these points are debatable. One point, however, is not subject to cavil—that the wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine. Even in the face of this reality, these problems would seem to be something engineers could find solutions and investments could implement. But there is a complication, because most of the country uses regional transmission organizations (RTOs) to buy and sell power.
