Tag Archives: consequences

Europe´s mad ban on Russian oil, by Jorge Vilches

Posted on May 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

Has anyone in Europe really thought through what a ban on Russian oil would mean for Europe? From Jorge Vilches at thesaker.is:

Ursula von der Leyen

Cognitive scientists would concur in that the current performance of European leadership could be diagnosed as either myopic ignorance or — most probably — full intellectual blindness. In the case of so far happy-go-lucky Ursula von der Leyen there is no doubt it´d be the latter… but only if we first dismiss her warm on-the-record support for Bundeswehr colonial policies and military involvement… plus her praise of Third Reich famous general Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, Commander of the Führer Headquarters. But leaving that possible Nazi whiff aside, full ´intellectual blockage´ is the only kind way to dare explain a most strategic project as foolish and doomed to fail as banning Russian oil sales worldwide. Why so you may ask ? Ref #1 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/20/vond-j20.html

asymmetrical retaliation

The short answer is massive — ´Russian´ massive – unmitigated “asymmetrical non-military retaliation” through surgical and divisive optional sales of natural gas – and other key commodities – just leaving EU sanctioned Russian oil for sale to and re-sale by third parties. And, oh yes, weaponization is not limited to any particular means as various European war schools should have internalized already. War means war and pretty much anything is fair game. But apparently, it´d be as if through the centuries, uppity European leaders – most especially German, French, Swedish, British and Poles — have not learned a single thing despite the über-high costs already paid for by their nations large-caliber warfare experiences most especially with Russia. By the way, the UK also has the additional ( unsolvable? ) burden of its current Brexit ballast… Ref # 2 https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/eu-proposes-ban-russian-oil-imports

 

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Posted in Business, Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Trade, War

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Bonfire of the Governments, Part One, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 16, 2022 | 42 comments

bonfire-wallpaper-hq

Expect chaos to continue making new highs.

When Machiavelli wrote The Prince he had Vladimir Putin in mind. The president of Russia has adroitly sought, maintained, and used power, the theme of Machiavelli’s masterpiece (see “The Black Belt Strategist,” Robert Gore. SLL, July 19, 2018). That he is an amoral snake is both true and laughable as a criticism coming from the amoral snakes who populate Western power structures. Nobody who slithers to the top of those pits is anything other than an amoral snake. Western snakes hate Putin because he’s repeatedly outsnaked them.

Call Putin a rattlesnake for he clearly rattled before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That he was ignored is a worrisome indication of the epistemological breakdown that grips the West. Its leaders are unable to grasp that Putin meant what he said because they rarely mean what they say. Facts are not facts and the truth is whatever narrative they’re promoting at the moment. It’s become axiomatic that power flows from control of the narrative.

Until it doesn’t. Power flows from understanding reality and making use of what it can offer. If narratives were power, Ukraine’s army would be in Moscow by now. We haven’t seen this kind of excessive excrement from governments and their media minions since . . . Covid. Narratives are for simple-minded sheep and the wolves who devour them.The propaganda is devoid of any mention of: the 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup against a democratically elected government; rampant corruption within the Ukrainian oligarchy; Ukranian payola to American political figures (e.g., the Bidens and Clintons); widespread neo-Nazi infestation of Ukraine’s military and government; their eight-year war on its Russian-heritage citizens in eastern Ukraine; the government’s willful failure to adhere to the Minsk accords that were meant to resolve that conflict, or the latest—U.S. supported bioresearch labs in Ukraine.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Media, Military, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Technology, Trade, Tyranny, War

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The Monstrous Flow of Free Money and the Shortages, by Wolf Richter

Posted on September 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

The insane fiat debt binge since the Covid outbreak began is causing massive distortions in the economy and financial system. There will be consequences. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Free money destroyed the pricing mechanism, and demand has soared despite much higher prices.

The shortages are not at Costco or Safeway, though they too might run out of a few weird items here and there. But other retailers are complaining about them, including apparel retailers and shoe retailers – yup, it took five weeks for my running shoes to arrive after I ordered them online, when normally I’d get them in a day or two.

There are shortages cropping up in different types of equipment and appliances and electronics. There are reports of shortages of certain types of fasteners and all kinds of doodads that you’d normally take for granted.

The shortages are all over the auto industry, driven by the global semiconductor shortages that keep getting dragged out and are now expected to abate maybe, hopefully, possibly in 2022.

It isn’t that there aren’t any new vehicles out there, but there are not enough of them. Inventories have been depleted in a historic manner. And customers are buying vehicles as soon as they come off the car carrier, or they order them and wait patiently till they arrive.

There are now huge storage areas around auto manufacturing plants were automakers store vehicles that are essentially ready to go but are still missing a component or two because some chips couldn’t be made, and when those components arrive, they’ll be installed and the vehicles will then be sent to dealers.

These semiconductor and component shortages have shut down auto assembly plants in the US and around the world for weeks at a time, all year long.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Governments, Technology, Trade

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Our Rulers Have All The Power And None Of The Responsibility, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on July 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Power without responsibility will always be a recipe for disaster and horror. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

As the world burns, as ecosystems die off, as the insects vanish, as the forests disappear, as soil becomes rapidly less fertile, as extinction takes over, as the oceans gasp for air and become lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, it is interesting how often you hear the sentiment that this is the result of some flaw in humanity for which we all share equal guilt.

To hear people talk about it, you’d think we all had some say in the way our society is organized, the way food, goods and energy are distributed, the kinds of vehicles which dominate our civilization, the way our planet is being stripped bare to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires.

And of course, we don’t. We’ve never gotten to vote on how corporations behave in our world. We never got a vote on which technologies would be suppressed and which would be subsidized and backed by wars and military scams. We never got a vote on the US war machine becoming the worst polluter of any institution on earth. We never got a vote on whether a tree should be cut down for profit or left standing for the benefit it provides to our ecosystem.

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Thoughts On The Iraq Invasion, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Nothing rewards failure quite like politics, and in the US, nothing rewards failure quite like spectacular and deadly errors in foreign and military policy. Witness Iraq. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

It has now been eighteen years since the Iraq invasion, and I’m still not done raging about it. Nobody should be.

The reason it’s so important to stay enraged about Iraq is because it’s never been addressed or rectified in any real way whatsoever. All the corrupt mechanisms which led to the invasion are still in place and its consequences remain. It isn’t something that happened in the past.

The Iraq invasion feels kind of like if your dad had stood up at the dinner table, cut off your sister’s head in front of everyone, gone right back to eating and never suffered any consequences, and everyone just kind of forgot about it and carried on life like it never happened. The US-centralized empire is full of willful amnesiacs pretending they don’t remember Iraq because it’s currently politically convenient, and we must not let them do this. 

No institutional changes were made to ensure that the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn’t be repeated. It’s one of those big, glaring problems people just decided to pretend is resolved, like racism

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Imperialism, Military, Politics, Propaganda

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Lockdowns are destroying America, by Tucker Carlson

Posted on August 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economy, Government, Media, Medicine

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‘China Lied, People Died?’ Look Who’s Talking! by Thomas Knapp

Posted on April 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

All governments lie, and sometimes their lies kill people. The US government is certainly no exception. From Thomas Knapp at antiwar.com:

“The costs of the pandemic keep piling up,” writes Marc Thiessen at the Washington Post. “Somebody has to pay for this unprecedented damage. That somebody should be the government of China.”

And why, pray tell, should China’s government be punished? For “intentionally lying to the world about the danger of the virus, and proactively impeding a global response that might have prevented a worldwide contagion.”

Sounds fair, doesn’t it? If a government lies and people die as a result, that government and its functionaries should be held responsible, right? Good enough for me.

But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so if we’re having Peking Duck this week, I’d like to know when Thiessen plans to cough up his share of US government’s tab.

As a speechwriter for US president George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the first decade of this century, Thiessen was directly responsible for pushing lies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Posted in Government, Morality, Propaganda

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