Listen to a reading of this article:
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A hostile military alliance expanding to Russia’s borders isn’t a provocation, sending weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters backed by US intelligence isn’t a proxy war, those Nazis aren’t Nazis, you’re being censored for your own good, trust the media, the government is your friend.
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It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.
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Joe Biden doing a live infomercial for Javelin missiles while everyone who voted for him worries about women’s reproductive rights is the most Joe Biden thing that has ever happened.
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Once you see that both mainstream US parties are part of a single oligarchic power structure it stops looking like a battle between opposing parties and looks more like one giant bully standing in front of voters saying “Let me hit you with my left fist or I’ll hit you with my right.”
What is the correct response when that happens? What’s the correct response when a mainstream political party keeps communicating that they’ll never do anything to help you but you need to support them anyway or they’ll let their friends in the other mainstream political party take away your rights? Is it to say “Ah well the left fist won’t hurt as much so that’s clearly the lesser evil,” or is it to take on an oppositional relationship with the tyrant who keeps punching you with both fists year after year?
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Learning about what’s wrong with the world is like watching a marathon of shitty Scooby Doo episodes from the sixties, except it’s way more repetitive and predictable, and the villain under the mask is always the US empire.
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Western media keep shrieking about Russia’s nuclear threats as though it was some kind of secret that Russia will use nukes if it feels its existence is threatened, and as though western powers wouldn’t nuke Russia for the same reason.
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This is the American way of life the US government spends so much effort starting wars and toppling governments to promote.https://t.co/4RQqCUACQy
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 1, 2022
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The only argument against the observation that the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure could easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost diplomatic concessions is “Actually Putin would have invaded anyway because he’s a cartoon supervillain who does evil things for no reason.”
War is all the worst things that can happen to a person multiplied by the population you target. When you refuse diplomacy, you are condemning whole cities to unimaginable suffering.
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Nobody actually believes “tankies” are dangerous, some people just have a deep psychological need for the US empire’s fiercest critics to be wrong because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie.
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There’s a lot in the news right now but none of it is as important as the fact that we’re being shoved toward nuclear war for no good reason by a few idiots who want to rule the world.
Again, the real risk of nuclear war is not that any side will deliberately start one but that the explicit agreement in “Mutually Assured Destruction” will be set into motion by a nuke being deployed by accident, miscommunication, miscalculation or malfunction as things escalate. During the last cold war such accidental nuclear exchanges came all too close to happening multiple times. The more tense the nuclear standoff gets, the greater the likelihood of such an event occurring:
We survived the last cold war not by skill or by competence, but by sheer dumb luck. There’s no logical reason to assume we’ll get lucky again.
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So yeah, just so we’re clear, the US empire is rapidly restructuring the systems people look to for information about the world in order to ensure iron-fisted control over our dominant narratives while it scrambles to subvert its rivals in cold war maneuverings and secure unipolar planetary hegemony.
The primary purpose of expanding censorship and propaganda on subjects like Ukraine, Russia, Covid, extremism etc is not to control the narrative about those subjects specifically, but to expand and normalize censorship and propaganda. Narrative control is an end in itself, and it’s the absolute highest priority because all the empire’s power is built upon it.
Few seem to understand that the oligarchic empire seeks narrative control as an end in itself. They’re not always necessarily increasing censorship and propaganda about a given topic because of that topic; it’s often mainly because they want to normalize and expand censorship and propaganda. Certainly there are narratives right here and now that the empire would rather we believe, but that’s of secondary strategic importance to ensuring ongoing and continually expanding control over all narratives around the world into the future.
Not all powerful people support the same narratives, but all powerful people seek narrative control. Narrative control is power. Any manipulator understands this, from the most powerful oligarchs right down to the narcissistic gossip queen at the office.
Any manipulator of any level spends an extraordinary amount of energy working to dominate the stories people tell about them and about others. This is because they know humans are storytelling creatures, and if you can control the stories they tell, you control the humans. This is most especially true of the globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States; its narrative control via corporate news media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley is completely unparalleled and historically unprecedented.
Censorship, propaganda, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation are just different aspects of narrative control. Nobody does this as well as the US-centralized empire and its managers. Nobody ever has.
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35 responses to “The Most Joe Biden Thing Ever: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
It seems quite appropriate for Biden to be pitching a weapon that does its job as well as he does his. Modern Russian armor was developed to repel the kind of antitank weapons that are the first and second generation Javelins now being dumped on the hapless Ukronazis. There are many reliable accounts of Russian tanks taking multiple direct Javelin hits without significant damage. The NATO countries are also by and large cleaning out their arsenals and billing Kiev for mountains of barely functional outdated hardware. And the bulk of foreign weapons deliveries are being destroyed by Russian missile strikes as soon as they arrive in what some term “country 404,” using Internet shorthand for “not found.”
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Today’s insane media coverage of the Russian SMO in Ukraine reminds me most strongly of how London newspapers of 1914 reported the German advance through Belgium. Every paper carried story after story of Belgian heroism, Belgian victories, German savagery, German failure, and England’s steely resolve to thwart the bestial Hun. And every story was a deliberate falsification, published to build public support for a senseless war that turned out to be the beginning of the end of western civilization. Today’s rabid Russophobia mirrors the mad hatred of all things German of the Great War in its mindless intensity as well. The most demoralizing aspect of that earlier war is that it took place when socialism, Marxism, anarchism were at their strongest, but when the call to arms came, workers everywhere abandoned their ideals and rushed in their millions to sign on to kill their foreign comrades.
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Now we have come full circle in the war of lies, and all for the same cause, because powerful men cannot stand the idea of sharing the wealth of the planet equitably. Now we face the very real likelihood that soon enough –six months to two years by the WW1 timetable- there may be little more to share but radioactive ashes. And it’s hard to picture a more fitting fate for such an incurably aggressive primate species. The planet will recover, as it always does from extinction events. In time it will again be filled in abundance with teeming life, with no “intelligent” creatures to miss or mourn evolution’s most destabilizing innovation since oxygen producing bacteria.
@SVAY: Well, my reply has been instantly memory-holed. So instead of mentioning that Hong-Kong only had 313 cases and 3 deaths yesterday and all the rest of it, I’ll just post some other links showing that contrary to the MSM bullshit*, there’s a lot more to the Covid vax than meets the eyes. Death is only one aspect:
Israeli Study finds 25% increase in Heart-Related Emergency Calls for People aged under 40 since mass Covid Injection Campaign began
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/05/05/israeli-study-increase-heart-related-emergency-calls/
Iceland: Stillbirths and Neonatal Deaths increased by 80% in 2021
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/05/05/iceland-stillbirths-and-neonatal-deaths-increase/
FOI reveals Pfizer and Medicine Regulators hid the dangers of Covid-19 Vaccination during Pregnancy because Study found it increases risk of Birth Defects & Infertility
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/05/05/pfizer-hid-dangers-covid-vaccination-pregnancy/
*Examples of past MSM bullshit = don’t wear a mask, wear a mask, two, three, the jab will protect you and stop transmission, well it might not, well it probably won’t, well it doesn’t. It’s a fact that there’s never been as many Covid cases as since the beginning of vaccination and this alone should make us think twice, along with the fact that there’s a lot of things we’re not told and that we read here and there where they don’t seem to matter to censors, like 94% of the Covid dead have comorbidities of which they would have died shortly anyway, 78% are obese, the average death age with Covid is 82 yo (above average lifespan), the 475 kids who have died of Covid worldwide had comorbidities, people under 50 risk more from the jab than from the disease itself etc. (reliability of PCR tests…)
Better think twice before mandating mass vaccination. Unless of course there’s money and power in it… ;o)
PS: And disinformation is at unheard of levels! I heard Bill Maher say on Joe Rogan’s 12 April podcast: “Vaccines will prevent you from dying”. And his general stance was that one size fits all remedies like the Covid vaccines are not a panacea! And he’s a journalist! And he can still come up with the bullshit that Covid will keep you alive while it’s been obvious for months that vaccinated people die of Covid too and even in a lot of places that most of the dead had been vaccinated. Objection your honor! Since most people have been vaccinated, it’s normal that the ones who die have been vaccinated. Overruled! The aim of the vaccine is to prevent you from catching the sucker and above all from hospitalization and death if you do. Well, it doesn’t! This is a fact! And it’s got a lot of adverse effects, which you would expect from stuff which has been warp-sped into mass consumption while cheap early treatments successfully used for ages for pulmonary diseases were banned but Remdesivir, which was also experimental was used and killed 25% of the guys to whom it was administered. I could go on for ages. This is the scam of the century, period!
PPS: These guys’ Bible-inspired philosophy is not really my cup of tea but I leave shooting the messengers when there’s interesting things in the message to sophists. And there are interesting things in their data:
https://healthimpactnews.com/2022/4113-fetal-deaths-in-vaers-following-covid-19-vaccines-not-including-those-murdered-alive-to-develop-the-vaccines/
What I’ve learned so far in this pandemic is you can easily crush science, and keep it crushed. I mean it was more 4 months ago that we learned that a 10 Sigma event occured in the US in 2021, and we are still not allowed to talk about it.
https://www.kusi.com/there-was-an-unexpected-40-increase-in-all-cause-deaths-in-2021/
A 10 Sigma event is not a once blue moon type thing, it is something you would only expect to see once every other Big Bang.
As a result of all the “RANDOM AND UNFORSEEN” death in 2021, Big Insurance is going to get burned for $10 of billions, and that’s going to piss them off, but more importantly, a golden opportunity is also beckoning for them to sue for hundreds of billions the one defendent who actually has that kind of money, the US government.
It is going to get interesting.
Can the insurance giants take on both the US government and Big Pharma, and drive home the final nail in Covid Narrative? I don’t know. I think it will all come down to which side Wall Street lays the majority of their money on. They are going to play both sides, that much is certain, but there will be aggregate position at some point.
Or maybe the media pull an about face, and start reporting scientific facts and data.
Bwwwaaaa…………
@MAX: You probably posted the wrong link because in this one a doctor only explains that there was a 40% all cause mortality in 2021. She says it could be the vaccine or perhaps climate change and I think it’s definitely climate change.
Just like if we’re a few friends having drinks in a bar and one leaves without paying his bill, it’s climate change, if a dog bites you because you bump him on the head, it’s climate change, if your wife files for divorce because you’ve been cheating on her, it’s definitely climate change.
And people sending this doctor hundreds of hate tweets after she tweeted about this increase is definitely climate change too!
Change to a climate of hate from brainwashed morons if you ask me :o)
And/or Big Pharma trolls :o)
Yeah I thought the climate change remark was brilliant. What’s great about the Death of Sarcasm, you can use it anytime you want without the pro-narrative crowd noticing.
Chris Martenson covered this a month ago, and he had to use similar intellectual ninja moves to beat the censors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__wIceF_hw&t=551s
Yeah, good old Chris Martenson. The heaviest I ever got downvoted r collapse, was on a thread where I linked to him. I was well over minus 100 (in total) by the end of it.
What was Chris’s crime? He supported a promotional video put out by El Salvador’s government, that urged people to get healthy, drink orange juice, do yoga, take your vitamins and try meditating on occasion for better overall mental health.
All this meant he was virulent anti-vaxxer. As was I, especially because I kept urging people not to dismiss the possibility that Vitamin D might be a vitamin.
Other studies, including at least one from Israel, found a greater risk of myocarditis from COVID than from COVID vaccines.
https://theconversation.com/myocarditis-covid-19-is-a-much-bigger-risk-to-the-heart-than-vaccination-174580
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Mask wearing: I didn’t follow what the MSM, politicians and so on were saying too much (they’re pretty appalling when it comes to subjects they should know something about, never mind a novel virus). I was following what Nature, Science, JAMA, the BMJ, etc. were saying quite closely. Opinions differed at the start of the pandemic, but the general consensus there now seems to be that masks help protect the wearer and others, but not by a huge amount.
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“the jab will protect you and stop transmission”
I don’t doubt that various idiots were saying stuff like that. But most of the clinical trials didn’t even look to see if the vaccines were preventing infection or transmission. They did say the vaccines reduce symptomatic infections by x%, severe cases by y%, and deaths by z%, which very much implies that some nonetheless got symptomatic infections, some got severe cases, and some died. I don’t believe I came across a single claim in my main sources (above) that they’d prevent all deaths, illnesses or infections. On the contrary, I read many an article about the lack of a vaccine or drug that would do that, and ideas for going about finding or developing one.
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The initial Wuhan strain wasn’t nearly as contagious and wotnot as later strains, especially the Omicrons. Given that the vaccines were approved on the basis of reducing symtpomatic cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, it’s not surprising that infections continued, and increased as the virus mutated into more infectious forms. However, countries with high vaccination rates, like here and New Zealand, have been getting off lightly with regard to deaths and hospitalisations compared to those with lower rates of vaccine uptake, leading me to think they are worthwhile, though by no means perfect. (No vaccines are perfect, but the smallpox and polio jabs, for example, come close, one disease having been eradicated, and the other very nearly.)
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“475 kids who have died of Covid worldwide”
I don’t know where you’ve found that number. UNICEF says
“Of the over 13,400 deaths reported in those under 20 years of age, 58 per cent occurred among adolescents ages 10–19, and 42 per cent among children ages 0–9.”
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/covid-19/
(And if reported deaths are a half or a third of the total, those numbers probably need doubling or tripling.)
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Of course you can doubt all that, and I expect The Exposé has numerous articles giving different figures and information, but I don’t go there to read about recent research into energy storage or soil degradation, I go to phys.org, MIT Technology Review, and so on. I’ll stick with my usual sources for research into COVID, and occasionally look at The Exposé when you post links to it (I checked out one of those a few days ago, and I wasn’t at all impressed after I’d dug into it a bit).
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As for Bill Maher, it beats me why you give him as an example of disinformation. His name rang a bell, and I looked him up on Wikipedia, which impies he’s a comedian who dabbles in journalism. Whichever he is, jounalist or comedian, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightes that he said something less than accurate about COVID. I’m far more concerned by things like the WHO insisting “COVID is not airborne” for ages than by what some comic jouno I’ve barely heard of said. But yes, there has been a huge amount of misinfo, disinfo and BS spouted about COVID, whichever way you look at it – though I suspect we’ll continue to disagree about which bits count as facty and which bits as crap!
““the jab will protect you and stop transmission”
I don’t doubt that various idiots were saying stuff like that”.
Among those “various idiots” was a guy called Joseph Robinette Biden who happened to have been elected president of the US of A.
Even “fact-checkers” had to swallow it :o)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/fact-check-biden-said-vaccinated-people-cant-spread-covid-19-is-that-right/ar-AAPBmfV
I did know he said something along those lines, and it didn’t surprise me in the slightest. He can’t be trusted to tell the truth on subjects he’s well-informed about, and I’m sure I don’t need to recite examples. I think he studied stuff like history, politics, and law at university, which isn’t generally how you learn much about viruses, vaccines, and so on. For all I know he thinks viruses are a type of bacteria, and vaccines kill them directly. I certainly wouldn’t go to him for any kind of scientific information about COVID.
He’s the epitome of an idiot, not to mention the leader, or at least figurehead, of the Empire as it gears up for its final inglorious defeat. I only hope the defeat comes without too much trauma for the rest of us, though trauma there’s certainly going to be.
For anyone interested, here is what would happen to Great Britian should WWIII break out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDTk7LKPJDU
The sun would never set on the British Isles again! Lmao …
The Poseidon is a helluva weapon. Think what it would do to that skinny panhandle we have down there called Florida. See ya!
You know I called Putin a dumbass for 10 years, because once the ’72 ABM Treaty* was abrogated by my country in 2002, and we proceeded to start marching toward the Russian borders with clear intention of getting our SM III Block2A’s within boost phase intercept range of their ICBM fields, which meant of course we needed to set up shop in Ukraine to properly place the boot firmly on the Russian neck, I thought the Vlad the Skeddadler and the Russian Federation needed to taking this shit seriously and draw a line in the sand somewhere in Eastern Europe, and they especially needed to start building a few ballistic missile submarines, because the two they had were two leftover pieces of shit that rarely if ever left port.
Hardly a credible deterrence, two submarines that don’t sub, and if the Russians didn’t have a credible deterrence, so much for the reason we are all still here, Mutual Assured Destruction.
But I give the Russkies credit. They didn’t have the defense budget, hell it was bouncing around near the Zero Bound at the time, so they needed think outside the box. And they did.
So Vlad the MORON, which was what I called you at least 150 times back in the day, I apologize. You followed some pretty radical advice from some faction in your military superstructure, and it paid off. You got nuclear deterrence on the cheap. Well done.
This does not mean I have completely changed my opinion of you, that you are a treasonous neo-liberal sell-out to your people. That remains to be seen. There is something about a President claiming to be leading a sacrificial Spartan lifestyle on behalf of their people, while at the same time, cavorting about with $6,000 Rolexes on their wrists, that does not compute.
*Most important document ever signed by humans. We let the Genie out the bottle at Los Alamos in ’45, no doubt about that, but as long as we kept anti-ballistic missiles off the nuclear chess board, the genie had a tether.
But my country has long sought the ability to win the Big One, the Super Bowl of Wars, so we cut the tether in 2002 to gain the upper hand, and the Genie has been on the loose ever since.
Day walk, Xi’an city wall. Quick and beautiful. 30 minutes of excellence. As usual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2rH76vJLuo
So Ms. Johnstone, I have 40 hours in with Max now. Been everywhere. Tier 1-6 cities, all aspects, Tier 16 cities, which the Chinese jokingly refer to as all those cities outside the top six Tiers, so roughly cities with populations in the 700,000 to 1.2 million range, all aspects, and the villages, both the villages out in the boonies still serving as farmer centrals, and the ones that have been turned into tourist traps.
And there a lot of those. Quaint and mixed-modern tourist destinations that serve also, as regions in which the Chinese upper middle-classes can build their second homes, most of them modest by McManshion standards but nice, nonetheless.
How many virtual miles do I have in? Well, Max walks fast, seems tireless, is always willing jog to get somewhere quicker, so I would say at least 60. Now, how much visual landscape have I taken in as camera pans up, down, right, left and from all vantage points high and low? I don’t know, but certainly it must be in the many hundreds of square miles by now.
Yet in all that time, I have not seen enough garbage on the ground to fill up a tall kitchen bag.
Clearly, central command in Beijing has outlawed garbage.* It’s that simple. There was a time, not so long ago, where the ex-pat China vloggers I’ve followed over the years would occasionally list littering as one of the drawbacks of living in China. But those days are over.
What is China doing? Nobody knows. The closest anyone has ever come, in my opinion, to defining what “the system” is and what might called is Yves Smith, who simply calls the whole experiment, China Incorporated.
Is there any Socialism going on there? I would say fuck yeah, for the most part that is all that is going on. If everybody works for the well-being of the nation-state, including the banks, corporations, and especially government, everybody benefits. And this means, in China’s case, if they don’t change course, all 1.4 billion Chinese citizens will be leading what could considered by any reasonable metric, comfortable middle class lives by no later than 2035.
And if you take climate change and getting their asses nuked by America out of the equation, I would bet my afterlife on that.
Of course, I can’t make such a wager. Climate change is not only real it is out-of-control, and so is my country. So if China is actually still around 2035 it will a come as something of a surprise.
*Outlawed the shipment of garbage from the United States as well . Banned our number one container export, waste, more than 80% of which was going to China with much of it pure poison, back in 2017. Which coincidentally, is right around the time the US starting getting a REALLY nasty attitude toward all things China.
Note: What is central command doing with in Shanghai? Attempting to crush the last major neo-liberal bastion in China is my guess. If it’s about Covid, well central command is either stupid beyond measure or they know something about Covid varients that we don’t know.
The US and its Nato cronies will continue to scream like infants while Putin restructures the world order. We should all hope when Putin is done the world will be better off. If we are still alive.
Ukrainians seem to like the idea of fighting Russians there so we don’t have to fight them here so I suppose that’s ok. But, since they think guys that have swastikas tattooed on them are cool, I think they should have to do it on their own.
Well, they pretty much are doing it on their own with a few mindless idiots from other countries who are “fighting for democracy”. The flow of arms is so that Ukraine will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, when common sense would tell them to just stop and go back to the negotiating table they have left so often, under the orders of scum like Victoria Nudelman. The Minsk Accord was workable and -elensky agreed to it with some EU countries as guarantors … he broke every agreement he made. And he has just done it again, backing out of the negotiated agreements after pressure from NATO.
I’m almost starting to feel sorry for him … he is so far out of his depth he is drowning. That would be a better end than the one that is in store for him: if he surrenders the Nazis will top him, and if he doesn’t, Russia will destroy what’s left of Ukraine because it will stop the Western rearmament by any means possible. He will then face Russian courts for all of his many sins.
Who’d be the puppet leader of an ex-Soviet country on behalf of the West? It’s a death sentence.
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/thought-for-food?s=w
Economist, Michael Hudson (who accidentally wrote the cookbook for the petro-dollar, “Super Imperialism”, just in time for Nixon and Kissinger to use it) has a new interview out, about…
MICHAEL HUDSON… So, basically the oil companies and the US are going to let the third-world countries go into a crisis. If they default on their bonds, then the United States and the bondholders get to treat Latin America like they treated Argentina or Venezuela and grab whatever assets they have outside of their country. Like Venezuela had investments in the United States and gold that it left in the Bank of England that were grabbed.
There’s going to be a huge asset grab. That is supposed to be how this unfolds, and the most obvious assets to the grabbed are going to be in Latin America and Africa. Maybe some Asian deficit countries. So, this is the weakest link, and that’s why there’s this fight within the IMF at the upcoming meetings, to create these special drawing rights to give them money on the condition that there is a class war.
So, what we’re seeing, really, isn’t a war between NATO and Russia. It’s a class war of the neoliberals against labor across the world to establish the power of finance over labor.
AARON MATÉ: And so, do you think that there’s a threat of an even worse hunger crisis in this world, one that we’re not talking about and should be preparing for it?
MICHAEL HUDSON: A threat? That’s the objective! Yes, of course. That’s what they’re aiming at. If you read what Klaus Schwab says at the World Economic Forum, he said there are 20 percent too many people in the world, especially in the Global South. This is what all the big foundations are for.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/05/michael-hudson-talks-with-katie-halper-and-aaron-mate-about-the-broader-ramifications-of-the-us-nato-conflict-with-russia.html
What we are seeing in the world now is a global shock to oil prices, fertilizer prices and food staple prices, as Professor Hudson points out. Countries in “the global south” will not be able to feed their citizens and also make debt-payments, so they will be forced into default and the $US empire will set about to take their assets, whether owned by the countries or their wealthy elites.
Professor Hudson projects that the IMF will give out SDRs (special drawing rights), IMF-money to compliant regimes, which will be required to carry out “class warfare”, to strip their citizens of the food they need to live,and their nationalized industries, like Venezuela’s oil industry.
Those countries which do not comply will be in default, and will be subject to the direct predation of the $US empire.
That appears to be the plan. It has worked before, but this deflationary-asset-grabhas not really been run since the Asian Economic Crisis.
The world is “Multipolar” now.
What we already see from Russia and China, as well as other major countries like India, Iran, Brazil and likely Turkey and South Africa, is the preparation to formalize a parallel global trade system, which will allow countries to repudiate $US debts to the IMF and western banking, and to militarily resist assaults and invasions upon national assets, like oil fields.
Russia and China will not hold default on $US loans against countries in this new arrangement, and will recognize their ownership of their nationalized assets, like Peru’s lithium mines. It appears that the critical mass exists to create this parallel global trade regime outside of the $US wealth-extraction-system.
If this system is able to persist, after being tried in some asset-wars, where the western empire attempts to grab things like oil-wells and mines, then the $US empire will be forced into collapse. This is not in the distant future, but in the next few years.
History shows that when people do not have enough food, they are much more warlike as populations. Rulers have typically turned hungry populations to war against other hungry populations, which protects the (winning side) rulers from their hungry subjects.
It seems likely that some of this will be tested in America and other western countries, to get more emotional fervor for the WAR! narrative, which is already being pumped. We should find ways to avoid becoming desperately hungry. It will help us to think more clearly and have more freedom to make our own choices.
Personally, I think it is time for massive global debt-forgiveness at all levels and a fresh economic start, without widespread debt slavery. We need to fashion an efficient economy to meet the needs of real people everywhere, or a lot of smaller systems which can trade fairly with each other.
This will be bad for all “assets” which pay out interest and dividends, bad for retirement plans, but mostly bad for global financial elites.
Sergey Glazyev, a Russian economist, tasked to roll-out the global financial alternative system has this:
For those who still don’t understand
https://thesaker.is/sergey-glazyev-for-those-who-still-dont-understand/
Naked Capitalism doesn’t give a link to the video, saying something about being unable to embed it.
This link works, though it may not be the entire interview. Michael starts at around 24:33 (already cued to that time):
https://youtu.be/OdlGDSnCqz0?t=1473
Related news:
1/ Henry Kissinger once said: “Whoever controls the food supply controls the population”.
2/ Bill Gates, number one WHO funder and chief vaccinator, has now also become the number one US farmland owner.
3/ Joe Biden says there are going to be food shortages because of Putin.
4/ US railways have cut down the volumes of fertilizer they carry because of staff shortages due to “problems with the unions”, jeopardizing the next crop.
Are we moving toward a food for the vaxxed system?
Let’s hope not because it appears the vaccine is now public enemy number one:
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/05/04/covid-vaccine-kills-more-than-it-saves/
Then again, if the idea is depopulation, we’re doing fine. However, more and more people seem to be getting hip to that:
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/05/04/74million-unvaccinated-231million-not-boosted-usa/
Cruel world… :o)
On the other hand, from a couple of months ago,
“Hong Kong is paying a heavy price for the vaccine hesitancy among its older residents, as a comparison with New Zealand underscores. Both countries minimized COVID-19 cases until the Omicron variant spread in February, but are now enduring big surges. Although New Zealand’s deaths from COVID-19 have remained flat—at 65 for the whole pandemic as of 7 March—Hong Kong’s have skyrocketed, with the weekly average nearing 200 per day, among the world’s highest recorded fatality rates. The key difference seems to be vaccination: New Zealand authorities say 100% of residents 75 and older are fully vaccinated (and 96% of those ages 12 and up), but in Hong Kong only about 30% of those 80 and older have received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. (The figure is 70% for all adults and children ages 3 and up.)”
https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.adb1942/full/_20220311_nib_hongkongcovid_graphs.svg (graph)
from ‘Death disparity underscores power of vaccines’ (second article)
https://www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-hong-kong-s-high-covid-19-death-rate-biden-s-test-and-treat-and
.
or see
https://www.ft.com/content/6e610cac-400b-4843-a07b-7d870e8635a3
(also nearly two months ago)
“Every country in the region has faced a rude awakening after two years of minimal Covid transmission but, unlike Hong Kong, most have been spared a wave of severe illness after using the time bought by zero-Covid to vaccinate large swaths of their vulnerable population.
As of Sunday, Hong Kong had registered 3,993 Covid deaths — three-quarters of which occurred in the previous 12 days. The territory’s seven-day rolling average of new Covid deaths has reached 284, or 38 fatalities per million residents, the highest such rate recorded anywhere in the world during the pandemic.”
@SVAY: See reply above for more writing space.
I guessed you’d have some response! I’ll have a look.
Caitlin,
I admire your persistence in the uncompromising search for the truth.
Please see my article, https://thisisyourworld.net/alternative-accounts-of-the-russian-ukraine-conflict-introduction/, on thisisyourworld.net.
Would you be kind enough to link to our website?
Roger Nowosielski
Editor, Views from Abroad
nowosielskiz@yahoo.com
strike 1: “I’ve long refrained from commenting on the Russian-Ukraine conflict.”
strike 2: “if we’re to count February 24 as the starting point of open hostilities.”
strike 3: “ “ (quote about the 14,000 dead in Donbass, which isn’t there)
strike 4: “ “ (quote about Ukraine wanting to acquire nuclear weapons, which also isn’t there)
So do you get paid by the word or do you fill out a time card?
Unipolar narrative control requires unipolar hegemony, which the US never completely had and is going to steadily have less of, particularly as China and India ramp up. And narrative control is necessary but not sufficient. The US is not going to narrative control Russia, China, India, etc.. That takes hard power the US doesn’t have, and the disparity will only increase. I think as the US grasp slips, its grasping will become steadily more unhinged. It seems the eventual use of nuclear weapons is a matter of time, and as you point out it will like as not be accidental. Assuming a limited enough use to leave civilization sufficiently intact, it seems an immediate consequence will be an exodus from high profile cities and political pressure for protection. The only way to protect against nuclear weapons is to eliminate them, but this is like expecting an addict to hand over a loaded syringe, so the process will have to be bottom up if it is to occur. It might be best to start thinking in these terms.
“Humans are storytelling animals, so if you can control the stories you can control the humans.”
– Can’t count the number of times you’ve said it Caitlin, but it can’t be said enough, and thanks to your patient persistence, it is sinking into our consciousness a little deeper each time.
“If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.”
You’re in fine form, Cait, making me chuckle over unfunny shit. Ruh Roh, beg to dif on the Scoobs, when Warhol’s soup cans and the Velvet Underground are relegated to the dustbin of history, scholars will study Scooby Doo. I heard Gonzalo Lira inferring that the difference between him and Ukrainian Nazis is that they’re nuts and have swastika tattoos. He spoke of the triumph and sorrow of young men. Seemed creepy, I’ll take the young tankies any day. Although, the founding fathers and Marx were pre-science and led to massive suffering. If the founding fathers were so brilliant, they’d have joined the first peoples in tents instead of spawning the evil empire. I actually like Peter Joseph’s thinking on system theory. We rely far too much on the selfishness vs. comradeship paradigm. So far, population outpaces resources, habitat is destroyed, the planet cooks, and ruling classes always seem to oppress the masses. Economic theory hasn’t helped, maybe we should look to ancient religious scrolls.
Julius Caesar was good at it though with writing his famous Commentarii de Bello Gallico, the one and only report about the glorious way he carried out his war in Gaul, for which you had to take his word. “My husband is very clever, he says it himself” kind of stuff. But it was not challenged until the XIXth century after Napoleon had also made sure that couriers galloped to Paris following each of his victories to inform the press of the self-aggrandizing details that would make good copy.
At least, they engaged in battles and won them though against people they painted as barbaric in the first case and oppressed by the pre-revolutionary “old regimes” of Europe led by the Holy Roman Empire in the second, whatever the reality was beyond those claims, which remains controversial to this day.
The only thing Biden has in common with them is arrogance. How doesn’t Vlad Depp (no connection to Johnny Depp but short for deplorable) understand that the people who’ve just been booted out of Afghanistan in a week by cavemen and goat herders have the best weaponry in the world that will take down the dumb Russian army any time they choose?
Err… In Mariupol for instance where Nato personnel just had to ask for UN mediation to try and escape death by starvation after running out of ammo in Azovstal’s hell hole?
“My husband is very clever and well armed, he says it himself!”.
It’s incredible to see the Empire of Lies’ total detachment from reality! Its chieftains and hagiographers survive in a dream of grandeur like the outdated French aristocrats about to be terminated with extreme prejudice (or put out of their miseries, as you choose) by the guillotine.
These guys are ready to get wiped out like the most civilised Chinese dynasty, the Ming, was brought down by the barbaric Manchus who themselves withered and died at the hand of the Albion made “opium crisis” that decimated their political elites, police and military.
When the All Blacks perform their famous haka, at least you know they’ve got something to show to back their threat. Biden’s haka looks more like the ramblings of a paper tiger who was at school with Ramesses II.
Q: What’s the difference between NATO and Nazi?
A: Numerologically, none.
.
Nato’s terrorist branch, Gladio, which was behind the 70s Years of Lead in Italy – in a double-crossing game with the Red Brigades, the P2 (for Propaganda Due) Lodge including folks from the Italian secret services to the Vatican via mafia bankers -, sheltered by Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal after they were expelled from Italy and linked to the former French OAS (that tried to kill De Gaulle), the former Greek colonels’ regime and the Turkish Grey Wolves (who attempted to assassinate Pope John-Paul II) is definitely of fascist persuasion – which is probably why they found themselves besieged with the Ukronazis in Azovstal.
Michael Peck: “However many ICBMs Russia has, what matters is that Britain has four Vanguard-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, each armed with up to 16 American-made Trident II missiles equipped with multiple nuclear warheads. That arsenal is probably sufficient to turn Russia into a nearly pre-industrial state.”
“Probably sufficient” to “nearly” do the job?
Don’t worry Mr. Peck, your Vanguards have more than enough firepower to kill every last Russian on the Eurasian landmass. All you gotta do it vaporize their nuclear power plants and the rising thermal plumes containing the nuclear remnants of the cores and spent fuels will do the rest of the work.
Kindergarten!
Lmao … That’s right Michael, you Brits you can end the world anytime you want. Ain’t that something? But, so can the French right across the channel. That’s the power of having a ballistic missile submarine, and rest assured, as we speak, the US has 7 of them – BIG ONES!* – patrolling the various Arctic seas just to the North of Russia.
They’ve moved into what’s called first-strike range Mike. That’s how this escalation shit works. What’s your area of expertise again? Let’s see here … hmm … defense issues and military technology? Interesting.
Enemy tsumani’s rolling right over Great Britian and wiping out poor little Ireland, which is not even a part of the grande geo-political game. How unfortunate. How unfair!
*Our Ohio-class boomers have 24 Tridents to your 16, aaaand, we have the new ones, whereas you’ve got the old ones. And our Tridents are extra MIRVed! So, a big thumb to nose and finger waggle to you from this side of the pond.
And the new US Tridents have the ‘super-fuze’, enabling one warhead to take out one hardened Russian missile silo, instead of the three that would have been needed before to be reasonably sure of doing the job.
“The upgrade — part of the Obama administration’s $1 trillion modernization of America’s nuclear forces — allows Washington to destroy Russia’s land-based nuclear weapons, while still retaining 80 percent of U.S. warheads in reserve. If Russia chose to retaliate, it would be reduced to ash.
https://fpif.org/these-nuclear-breakthroughs-are-endangering-the-world/
also
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-super-fuze-the-big-upgrade-americas-nuclear-arsenal-22765
https://fas.org/blogs/security/2017/03/super-fuze/
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/
Yup, the super-fuze tripled America’s first strike capability overnight. Much has been made of the Russian wonder weapons, the hypersonics and the Poseidon torpedoes and so on, but those are, at this moment in geologic time, counter-strike weapon systems.
Andrei Martyanov says that the Pentagon is “butt hurt” because they have no conception of what it is like to fight – and win – a war against professional army in this new high tech environment, whereas the Russians have had to fight four (or five*) of them in just last two decades, and clearly, they’ve been getting better and better at it, and as a result, are now, THE BEST.
I agree. The Russian Federation is currently the number one nation-state on the planet when it comes to fighting conventional wars against competent opposition, and this is making the Pentagon jealous. But in my opinion, the real “butt hurt” the Pentagon is feeling is a result of the fact that with resurgence of Russia’s ability to launch a viable counter-strike in the midst of their death throes, it means the US can no longer claim it has “Nuclear Primacy.”
In other words, gone are the days when we had the nuclear boot on the Russian’s throat. Nope, when it comes to war, nuclear or otherwise, Russia is no longer a near peer rival, they are our peer.
*Georgia probably doesn’t count. So call it four.
And the radiation won’t know where the border is, so America’s nukes might destroy civilization without Russia doing a thing.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is currently at 100 seconds to midnight, but it’s reset every year, the last time being January 20 this year. I wonder where it’d be now if they reset it every month?