Category Archives: Propaganda

Ukraine’s Endgame, by James W. Carden

Posted on March 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

Best case for Ukraine it ends up another U.S. dependency, a relationship from which the U.S. will gain nothing. From James W. Carden at theamericanconservative.com:

The Biden administration is setting the Ukrainians up for a state of permanent dependency.

The one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion today, and President Joe Biden’s surprise five hour trip to Kiev on Monday, should be occasion to raise some uncomfortable, indeed, unpopular questions, as to what exactly Ukraine—a beneficiary of, among many other things, over $100 billion in U.S. aid—has been seeking to achieve in the nine years since the Maidan revolution.

From the time Ukraine declared independence on August 24, 1991, until the Maidan coup of February 2014, Ukraine was essentially a binational kleptocracy that used its position as a buffer state, particularly in its role as a transit hub for Russian natural gas to Europe, to the advantage of its kleptocratic elite—a coterie of deeply compromised politicians and former Soviet-era functionaries-turned-oligarchs.

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The tension between the Russian East and Galician West came to a head during the Maidan protests when then-president Viktor Yanukovych, a politician from eastern Ukraine, sought to leverage Ukraine’s unique geographic position during the country’s E.U. accession bid—a bid against which Russia, with long and deep economic ties to Ukraine, furiously objected.

Yanukovych squeezed both sides, and in the end, the economic deal offered by the E.U. paled in comparison to the one offered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin. And so, Yanukovych, avaricious, yes, but also wary of upsetting his restive neighbor to the East, went with the deal, worth some $15 billion, offered by the Russians.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Covid ‘Not Deadly Enough’ to Justify Risk of Fast-Track Vaccines, Chris Whitty Told Government, by Will Jones

Posted on March 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

In one twelve-day period, common sense was stood completely on its head in Britain and around the world. From Will Jones at dailyskeptic.org:

COVID-19 was not dangerous enough to justify cutting short vaccine trials as the vaccine had to be “very safe”, Chris Whitty advised the Government in the early weeks of the outbreak, it has emerged.

Writing on WhatsApp on February 29th 2020, the Chief Medical Officer told Government figures: “For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.”

The estimate of 1% turned out to be an overestimate, as the infection fatality rate in Europe and the Americas was found to be 0.3-0.4%.

Chief Scientist Patrick Vallance agreed with this advice and wrote that existing drugs should be relied on instead: “Agree, existing drugs best things to try for this outbreak. Accelerate vaccine testing where we have good candidates for future, and prepare for manufacturing capacity for longer term.”

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Posted in Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology

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As Bakhmut Falls, US May Turn From Ukraine, Starting With Pipeline Story, by Joe Lauria

Posted on March 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

If the U.S. can blame Ukraine for the Nordstream pipelines sabotage, it may be able to start backing away from Ukraine. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

If the Donbass city of Bakhmut falls to the Russians the U.S. may need to save face in order to reverse course in Ukraine, writes Joe Lauria.

On its face, The New York Times article yesterday, “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say,” appears intended to exonerate both the U.S. and Ukrainian governments from any involvement in the destruction last September of the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany.  

The thrust of the Times article is that Ukrainians unaffiliated with the Kiev government were the ones who did it, according to the newspapers often cited, unnamed “U.S. officials.” 

But a closer examination of the piece reveals layers of nuance that do not dismiss that the Ukrainian government may have had something to do with the sabotage after all. 

The story quotes anonymous European officials who say a state had to be involved in the sophisticated underwater operation.  The Times goes out of it way to say more than once that that state was not the United States.  And while the second paragraph of the story says categorically that the state is not Ukraine either, the article then leaves the door open to possible Ukrainian government involvement:

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains. They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services. [Emphasis mine.]

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

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Wall Street Journal: “US Is Not Yet Ready for Great Power Conflict” Yet Still Plots Against China, by Yves Smith

Posted on March 8, 2023 | 1 comment

The U.S. hasn’t won a war since WWII against second string opponents. China is first string, but there are U.S. neocons who are pushing for war. From Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com:

A vivid scene came in my first year Harvard MBA course, Business, Government and the International Economy, taught in my section by George C. Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. George Lodge said he still remembered the day in 1968 when he realized there were limits to US power, that we could not fight a war on poverty, send a man to the moon, and fight a ground war in Asia at the same time.

The lack of that insight still seems widespread inside the Beltway, with belief in American omnipotence renewed by the fall of the USSR and then the further decline of Russia in the 1990s. A story initially published with a page-wide banner headline, The US is Not Yet Ready for the Era of “Great Power’ Conflict With China and Russia, curiously omits that it is the US that has been fomenting these clashes. And even though the URL banner on the article proper reads, The US is Not Yet Ready for the Era of “Great Power’ Conflict with China and Russia, the piece treats Russia dismissively, in passing, and treats escalating with China as a perfectly reasonable thing to do, not just now. We’ll turn to Russia in due course, particularly in light of Ukraine deciding Monday to try to break into the Bakhmut cauldron.

If you read the article carefully, you’ll see the reverse, that any meaningful improvement in US preparedness against China is based on hopium, like the US developing, manufacturing, and deploying new weapons that are on the drawing board or in early stages. Similarly, it fails to admit a huge weakness in the US dealing with China: that our Navy is badly overinvested in the floating pork known as aircraft carriers. Informed observers like Scott Ritter have said China has the capability to take them out without too much difficulty if they get within menacing range. Sinking only one aircraft carrier would result in roughly 6000 deaths, a humiliation the US would not tolerate. Ritter has long worried that our response would be to fire a tactical nuke at the Chinese hinterlands. Ritter is certain that China would immediately light up the entire US West Coast.

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

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Secret Surveillance Video Dismantles January 6 Narrative, by Julie Kelly

Posted on March 8, 2023 | 1 comment

This is a good summary of the surveillance video that’s been released so far, and it takes a lot less time to read than watching the video would take. From Julie Kelly at amgreatness.com:

Clips aired during Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday night demonstrate how the January 6 select committee doctored surveillance video.

ox News host Tucker Carlson aired the first set of previously-unseen surveillance video captured by Capitol police security cameras on January 6, 2021 that undermines several aspects of the reigning narrative about what happened that day.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last month gave Carlson’s team “unfettered” access to 41,000 hours of footage the government kept hidden from the American public and individuals charged in the Justice Department’s unprecedented and ongoing investigation into the events of January 6. Capitol Police and the Justice Department designated the recordings as “highly sensitive” material in March 2021; the trove remains under tight protective orders and defendants must agree to strict rules before gaining access to clips entered as evidence against them.

Capitol Police turned over to the FBI roughly 14,000 hours of video covering the hours of noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6 but the full 24-hour reel has been in the hands of House Democrats for two years—reportedly the footage that Carlson’s team was authorized to view.

Carlson exposed falsehoods that bolster key animating aspects of January 6 including the movements of Jacob Chansley; the activity of still-uncharged agitator Ray Epps; the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick; alleged “reconnaissance tours” conducted by House Republicans the day before; the “escape” of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.); and the overall deceptiveness of the January 6 Select Committee. “Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection,” Carlson explained. “In fact, it demolishes that claim. And that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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The “Meritocracy” Was Created by and for the Progressive Ruling Class, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on March 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

The meritocracy has nothing to do with actual merit. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

The American Left has decided that the so-called meritocracy is a bad thing. In a typical example from the Los Angeles Times this week, Nicholas Goldberg points to a number of issues exploring how merit is not actually the key to power and riches in America:

The United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. The story goes that if you work hard and play by the rules, especially with regard to education, you can compete, rise and succeed here. . . . But Americans are realizing that’s not always the case. The playing field just isn’t level.

Goldberg claims that the much-lauded meritocracy is less about merit and more about controlling access to elite institutions. It’s hard to argue with some of this. It’s easy to see the lie behind the claims of meritocracy when we look to the very top of the artificial hierarchy. It’s likely not a mere coincidence people like George W. Bush and Al Gore—a son of a US president and a son of a US senator, respectively—went to elite Ivy League schools. All of Al Gore’s four children, and one of Bush’s, went to Harvard. To think that these seven people got into these schools because they had more “merit” than all the rejected applicants requires gargantuan levels of credulousness.

Much of the Left’s rhetoric against the meritocracy has been in the service of justifying racial preferences and standardized testing in university admissions. Defenders of the status quo have subsequently fallen all over themselves to support the supposed meritocracy of the government-university complex. For example, Victor Davis Hansen, in a meandering and unconvincing article, recently attempted to blame the United States’ repeated foreign policy failures on an alleged decline of meritocracy. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz insists that today’s law schools are full of mediocrities—unlike when he and his friends filled elite universities with untrammeled brilliance.

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Posted in Academia, Government, Politics, Propaganda, Society

Doug Casey on the Rise of “Climate Brats” and Other Useful Idiots

Posted on March 8, 2023 | 2 comments

The useful idiots are destroying their own futures. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Climate activists

International Man: Webster’s Dictionary defines a useful idiot as a “naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda.”

Lenin is thought to have originated the phrase when referring to communist sympathizers in the West.

What is your take on this term? Is it still applicable today?

Doug Casey: Today’s make-believe democracies are overflowing with useful idiots. They latch on to one lame-brained notion after another, perhaps to give meaning to their confused and pointless lives. They’re a bit like cats chasing the red dot from their master’s laser pointer. The Ukraine, Covid, sex perversions, Trump, racism, climate change—it’s one thing after another.

Climate change is one of the central scams being promoted by the World Economic Forum as part of their Great Reset. It seems everything that comes out of the WEF—I can’t think of any exceptions — is antithetical to the traditional values of Western Civilization, prominently including free markets and personal liberty.

We’ve discussed the COVID hysteria and what looks like World War III starting in the Ukraine. But the biggest thing, with the longest legs, is climate change. Full disclosure: I believe in climate change. The climate has been changing constantly since the world came together about four and a half billion years ago. And it’ll continue to change.

The problem, however, isn’t climate change itself but the process of indoctrinating the public, especially young people, with the belief that humanity is destroying Mother Earth.

They’re given snippets of science, like the fact that the world has been generally warming since the mid-19th century. Well, sure, it has because the planet went through what’s known as the Little Ice Age from the 16th through the 19th centuries. It has cyclically been warming for the last 150 years. As a matter of fact, the world has been warming since the end of the last Great Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.

The “global warming” people have found a great excuse for changing not just the economy but the way literally everything works. My view is that they’re basically anti-human—they actually hate and fear people. It’s why Yuval Noah Harari, the mincing court intellectual of the WEF, often refers to them as “useless eaters.” He may be right. But what’s insane is that someone like him could gain the power to make serious decisions.

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Posted in Collapse, Economics, Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Government, Horseshit, Politics, Propaganda, Science

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: What Dan Ellsberg Means

Posted on March 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

Daniel Ellberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, is dying. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

The term “Fourth Estate” had taken on the dust of a neglected antique before the release of the Pentagon Papers. Afterwards it seemed possible to think again of the press as the independent pole of power required by a working democracy. 

Dan Ellsberg at a press conference in New York City, 1972. (Bernard Gotfryd, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. A mutual friend, Rob Johnson, the executive director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, in New York, proposed to introduce us several times but the occasion never presented itself. It does not matter. I know Dan Ellsberg as one knows someone by way of the work he or she has done, and what that work has meant in one’s life.

Another friend, a dear one, wrote a note from Gadsden, Alabama, last Thursday with the subject line, “Ellsberg dying.” This was thoughtful, as this friend unfailingly is, because Twitter has censored my account and I cannot read anything on it unless someone sends an item I am able to open. Ellsberg broke the news first to friends and supporters, among them ConsortiumNews, and then decided to share it on his Twitter account after someone had leaked it. “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.” 

[Related: Daniel Ellsberg’s Not Yet Goodbye]

In the letter, Ellsberg recounts his experiences during and since the Pentagon Papers period — the antiwar work, the work against nuclear weapons:

“When I coped the Pentagon papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would have gladly accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action — in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses — did have an impact on shortening the war.”

And, addressing all of us forthrightly:

“It is long past time—but not too late—for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will, as long as I am able, to help in these efforts….”

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How Could Western Intelligence Have Got It Wrong, Again? They Didn’t. They Had Other Purposes, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on March 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

The intelligence agencies no longer provide intelligence, they supply “narrative support.” From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation.

Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst, writes “I no longer hold clearances and have not had access to the classified intelligence assessments. However, I have heard that the finished intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers continues to declare that Russia is on the ropes – and their economy is crumbling. Also, analysts insist that the Ukrainians are beating the Russians”.

Johnson responds that – lacking valid human sources – “western agencies are almost wholly dependent today on ‘liaison reporting’” (i.e., from ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services), without doing ‘due diligence’ by cross-checking discrepancies with other reporting.

In practice, this largely means western reporting simply replicates Kiev’s PR line. But there does occur a huge problem when marrying Kiev’s output (as Johnson says) to UK reports – for ‘corroboration’.

The reality is UK reporting itself is also based on what Ukraine is saying. This is known as false collateral – i.e., when that which is used for corroboration and validation actually derives from the same single source. It becomes – deliberately – a propaganda multiplier.

In plain words however, all these points are ‘red herrings’. Bluntly, so-called western ‘Intelligence’ is no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, it has become the tool to falsify a nuanced reality in order to attempt to manipulate the Russian psyche towards a collective defeatism (in respect not just to the Ukraine, but to the idea that Russia should remain as a sovereign whole).

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US Foreign Policy Goes “Woke”? By Philip Giraldi

Posted on March 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

Not content to wreck the U.S., the wokesters are searching abroad for countries to destroy. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.

And the United States continues to be at it, meddling in what was once regarded as something like a war crime, though it now prefers to conceal what it is up to by preaching “democracy” and wrapping the message in “woke-ish progressivism” at every opportunity. An interesting recent trip by a senior government official that was not reported in the mainstream media suggests that the game is still afoot in Eastern Europe. The early February visitor was Samantha Power, currently head of USAID, and a familiar figure from the Barack Obama Administration, where she served as Ambassador to the United Nations and was a dedicated liberal interventionist involved in the Libya debacle as well as various other wars started by that estimable Nobel Peace Prize recipient after he had received his award. The Obama attack on Syria has been sustained until this day, with several American military bases continuing to function on Syrian territory, stealing the country’s oil and agricultural produce.

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