Listen to a reading of this article:
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None of the world’s worst people are in prison. Most of them are fabulously wealthy and widely esteemed. Our systems are not set up to reward beneficial action and punish wrongdoing; at the scale that really matters, they are set up to do the exact opposite.
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One of the main reasons it was necessary to rehabilitate the popularity of George W Bush was because otherwise it would be harder to get future presidents to do the kinds of things he did.
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Dave Weigel retweeting a sexist joke has ignited more mainstream controversy about the Washington Post than the fact that the Washington Post lies about every US war and is solely owned by a plutocratic intelligence contractor whose interests diametrically oppose the public’s.
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You can learn more about US foreign policy from a casual glance at a list of the world’s largest proven oil reserves than you can from a lifetime of consuming mainstream news media.
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So to be clear, emails were leaked showing a major British media figure conspiring with an intelligence operative to subvert everyone to the left of Tony Blair, those emails were independently verified by that media figure, and in response to this you’re meant to get mad at Russia.
I have no idea who Grayzone’s source was, but if Russian hackers are indeed exfiltrating authentic documents about the powerful and leaking them to the public I say bully for them. It’s not like we can get information about their dirty secrets ourselves.
Authenticated private communications obtained by hacking are more trustworthy than public communications, not less. The latter only shows you what the speaker wants people to hear; the former shows you who they really are, and what they’re really about.
Mason’s leaked emails show him speaking with an intelligence contractor about using PayPal deplatforming to subvert empire-critical voices. Now two more have been deplatformed: Wyatt Reed and Jackson Hinkle. Empire managers know exactly what they are doing. This is a coordinated attack.
In less than 45 days, PayPal has banned @MintPressNews , @Consortiumnews , @calebmaupin & now @wyattreed13 , @jacksonhinklle + more in a witch-hunt against antiwar journalists and outlets.
GoFundMe took down our fundraisers.
The sanctions regime is targeting its own citizens.
— Mnar Adley (@MnarMuh) June 9, 2022
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Every government is comparable to Nazi Germany except the racist genocidal imperialist government who recruited Nazis after WWII and is currently arming Nazi factions to help it dominate the world.
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A liberal will make fun of a conservative for doing stupid bullshit “to own the libs” and then immediately turn around and advocate World War Three to own Putin.
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Liberals are fascistic tyrants and conservatives are whiny little bitches who run around looking for excuses to get offended.
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The progressive Democrat strategy of slowly changing the system from within only makes sense if you (A) pretend you’ve got several centuries to gradually push for drastic revolutionary changes that are urgently needed right now and (B) pretend the system isn’t expressly rigged against change.
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Royal families are just the descendents of whoever was murderous enough to take the throne from whoever had it before.
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US intelligence is balls deep in Ukraine on every conceivable level and the imperial war machine is trying to pretend it doesn’t know exactly what’s happening in its own proxy war.
Despite the flow of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine, U.S. intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about the country’s war strategy and know far more about Russia’s military, according to officials. https://t.co/Pa5WzGuAOC
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 9, 2022
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I still haven’t found the right words to adequately express my disdain for people who act like they’re brilliant up-punching anti-establishment critical thinkers and spend all their time mindlessly regurgitating CIA lines about China.
Europeans set sail to conquer and colonize populations around the world. China built a wall. These are two very different cultures and values systems. The western assumption that China wants to take over the world and give us all social credit scores is based on pure projection.
This assumption is also premised on the absurd belief that Beijing has been watching the US empire rapidly burn itself out with its role as unipolar hegemon and thinking “Hey, that looks awesome! Let’s definitely do that!”
The belief that China wants to conquer and colonize a bunch of white foreigners is about as well-founded as the old belief that black people were trying to move into white neighborhoods to have sex with white men’s wives. Not everyone wants what you have, dudes. You’re not that enviable.
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Empire apologists love conflating criticism of US malfeasance and recklessness in Ukraine with criticism of Ukrainians. I see it every single day. It lets them feel like they’re sticking up for the little guy instead of the very biggest guy. Pretending criticism of the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth is actually criticism of the victims of a brutal war reverses the real dynamic that’s happening where they’re actually siding with the most powerful empire in history.
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We all kind of know our situation is unsustainable. On some level we all know it, whether we admit it or not. That’s why post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows have done so well. But people can’t face it directly, so they just distract themselves with nonsense and shriek about Xi and Putin.
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30 responses to “Study US Foreign Policy By Looking At Oil Reserves: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
The origin of PayPal (beginning in 1998) was long-suspected as being nothing more than a front for oligarchs trying to transfer money across borders (mainly, at the time, out of tumultuous ex-Soviet breakaway states) to Western safehavens and to finance U.S./U.K. political foreign policy bribery.
When one looks at the connections of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin (two of its initial co-founders) and how they are contractors with the MIC death machine up to their necks (Thiel, of course, now behind Palantir; and Levchin, a Ukraine foreign national acting endlessly like a CIA cheerleader circa 1975 on any astroturfed website Washington pulls out of its a$$): the ethics behind PayPal were clearly not just some innocuous idea to revolutionize consumer economic mobility.
The current PP talking head in charge is a guy named Dan Schulman. Sat on the boards of: AmEx as well as the telecom giants Verizon and Virgin Mobile. However, of course(!): he’s sermonizing everybody about (what is often white male kink addict) “gender identity” thesedays while…just so happening to march along-to a world view Dick Cheney would agree 1000% with! Exact. Same. Script. from the idiots usurping Western democracy all the time without fail.
Apologies for going off topic, but wanted to pass this along. Caitlin mentioned on Twitter she was blocked by Nina Jancowicz. I have a read only account, never posted a thing, so took a look at Nina’s postings. Most recent is announcing she has had a baby boy, and is on maternity leave.
Now remember her resignation from the Ministry of Truth/DGB a few weeks ago? She was already planning maternity leave, which would have taken her out of the public eye for several weeks anyway. Now suspect her “resignation” was to calm down the angry response to the formation of the DGB, and she will resurface elsewhere after her leave, very quietly. With our luck a spot where she can do even more damage.
Demonrats vs Racialcons=one Party Rule.
No one willingly decides to learn to live with less. This must always be forced upon us. The process is often painful and messy. Some will not meekly or willingly comply. Welcome to our new reality. Everyone disatisfied, unhappy or dead.
I wish I had an Emperor like Emperor Xi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSJNbbhPyNA
I also wish I had a one party system that gave a shit about my country, but it doesn’t. All ever wanted since I was a kid was to ride a bullet train from my home town of Buffalo to New York City. To catch a Yankee game. Have a hot dog. Return home in time Hogan’s Heroes.
But alas, it was not to be. I must accept that in my remaining years it will be my fate to live vicariously through China, which now has 40,000 kilometers of high speed rail and has standardized the process of the build-out to such an extent, there is little doubt in my mind they will have 200,000 miles of HSR before my poor dumb country gets around to laying down a line from Tampa to Orlando.
The President has spoken.
[President of the CFR, Richard N. Haass]
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A Ukraine Strategy for the Long Haul
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-06-10/ukraine-strategy-long-haul
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I can’t decide whether this is a perfect definition of stupidity or insanity.
Is it possible that it’s both at once?
Yes.
What is even scarier to me…it seems to be contagious.
The OPEC oil reserve estimates are lies. In the late 1980s, the organization changed its rules to assign each member a “production” (should be “extraction”) quota based on their reserve estimates. Almost overnight, OPEC reserve estimates doubled or even tripled. Since then, they have continued to publish the same figures year after year. Their REAL reserves are closely guarded secrets, not to be shared even with their closest allies. And for a good reason: after years of extraction those reserves are smaller than the published figures.
Venezuela doesn’t have “300 billion” barrels of anything, except for Nicolás Maduro’s ego. What it really has is a large quantity of very low-quality hydrocarbons, barely useful even as boiler fuel. To turn this stuff into anything that might be useful requires extensive processing and upgrading–meaning massive quantities of water and energy, and creating equally massive quantities of waste products. The energy required to process just one barrel of this “oil” is almost equal to the energy content of the “oil” itself after processing.
None of this, of course will stop the “rich” industiralized countries from claiming as theirs the resources on another (susally poorer) country’s territory. There is no way to convince them of how mistaken they really are; they have to learn the hard way. And that “hard way” is already becoming much harder.
Do you have sources for the quality of Venezuelan oil?
The tar sand “oil” reserves of Venezuela are very similar to those in Canada in both quanity and quality.
https://www.u3explore.com/reports/comparison-of-venezuelas-faja-petrolifera-del-orinoco-and-the-alberta-oil-sands-challenges-in-eor-method-selection
Oil production from the tar sands in Canada is expected to reach 3.5 mbpd by the end of this year, which is more than oil powerhouses like Iran and Kuwait currently produce.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6
The future of energy is not in wind and solar, such “renewables” can only help at the tip of the margins, but in the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela, and in coal liquefaction.
That’s the unfortunate reality of modern civilization. It is based oil and oil alone, and that means if humans want to keep on keeping on in this current arrangement, they’re going to have to get dark and dirty.
We are approaching the end of an era. Mankind will eventually enbrace nuclear power when it becomes painfully obvious.
And how long will it take to become painfully obvious that nuclear waste will kill us???
Indeed are US interests deep in to The Ukraine. Also UK interests. That is going past due.
Once the Russian Armed Forces are finished in the east of The Ukraine, they will proceed to remove what foreign investments remain elsewhere.
The loss of this Ukraine Proxy War marks the decline of US-NATO-UK power, a cognitive dissonance event for those who turn away from outcomes in Afghanistan.
On the collapse of US power . . . https://les7eb.substack.com/p/ukraine-notes-the-long-proxy-war?s=w
“Liberals are fascistic tyrants and conservatives are whiny little bitches who run around looking for excuses to get offended”.
With all due respect, it seems to me liberals excel in both areas: fascistic tyranny AND whiny cancel culture.
The conservatives’ problem, as I see it, is more in their delusions about God and communism which form a prism distorting their reality. When I come across a right-wing article and the guy starts telling me I shouldn’t ignore the word of God, I think “Who? Do we have any rational approach to that shit?”
We don’t. This alone should win him a straitjacket. At that point, I stop reading his article. And then there are those who fantasize about the bloodthirsty murderers of the Chinese Communist Party swimming in shoals across the ocean with knives between their teeth to come and slit their throats while they’re asleep.
Those have not been caught by the thorn of their preacher’s pulpit when they were kids but made it all the way to the bottom of Joseph McCarthy’s whisky bottle and morphine syringe.
Got stuck there and can’t get over it. Of course, the Vietnam war and its dreaded “charlies” didn’t help…
China lifted a quarter of its population out of poverty and created a middle-class during the quarter of a century in which the US drove a quarter of its population into poverty and destroyed its middle-class but that’s not due to the greed of US capitalists seeking cheaper labour in China to increase profits. That’s due to the “heinous” nature of the CCP.
That’s actually where their McCarthyism meets the religious fanaticism of their puritan upbringing. The CCP has replaced Satan in the mind of those who never bothered to read Marx or the Bible anyway. Satan is an energy-saving ersatz, the perfect voodoo doll into which you can stick pins to your soul’s content while yelling in a trance: “Vade retro Satanas” – possibly brandishing a dollar bill with “In God we trust” written on it, like a silver cross to a vampire, to emphasize your point.
Of course, like God, nobody’s ever seen Satan, so the CCP is as good an avatar for it as anything, especially since these guys have never seen the CCP either.
This hysterical projection should win them a straitjacket too – which would make two for those who believe both in God and in the satanic CCP: one for weekdays and one for Sundays.
And they don’t seem to be able to escape it. Even Trump, who sounds like he’s got the spiritual life of a lamppost, managed to integrate into his White House staff a female televangelist, proponent of “prosperity theology” (at least Trump’s idol, Mammon, was on the picture), to guide him as his personal pastor through the maze of Wall Street’s interests to the promised Syrian oil fields. I’m asking you… How can anyone take these lunatics seriously?
A person doesn’t necessarily have to be mentally ill, a ‘lunatic’, to have beliefs, such as in the supernatural. Everyone has beliefs of some sort. It’s difficult to take in reality without processing through filters. It’s likely that a lot of the pundits on both right and left believe primarily in getting paid by inciting their bases.
@James: of course everyone, including me, has beliefs that vary from day to day, most of them fleeting superstitions (as John Lennon wrote, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”: less pain, less God :o) but it’s hysterically pushing these shaky beliefs on people as certitudes (or “God’s word”) that I assimilate to entitled lunacy. As this psychoanalyst famously said, “If you speak to God, you’re religious. If God speaks to you, you’re schizophrenic”. As for your last sentence, I think you’re… right on the money :o)
Conservatives are racist fascists who think every problem can be solved by shoving a gun in someone’s face and ignoring the world beyond reach of a bullet.
Catlin, you are by far the best commentator on the real situation in America and the world. I read all of your emails and save them. Will get books soon.Thanks!
It never took a genius to figure out where the US was going to raise shit next: look at a world map, which countries are rich in oil and other natural resources and…voila! But I think, and truly hope, that this ‘strategy’ is starting to backfire.
Liberals are fascistic tyrants and conservatives are whiny little bitches who run around looking for excuses to get offended.
Yep, the world has definitely turned upside down
Eric Zuesse makes a rational case that “NATO member” Turkey cooperating better with Russia than with the US, in Turkish national interests, opens the door to the fall of the western empire, as the threat of NATO to support the petrobuck Empire is hobbled by more than ineptitude, but by actual internal resistance.
The $US is supported by fear of US military/NATO reprisals and by Oil being sold in $US only.
Those can both go away rapidly now. Russia and China can do that. Turkey looks inclined to help, Iran is up for it. India is interested in what’s in it for India, and so on.
This is a critical summer, as western finance and the IMF try to pull the assets-trap shut on all the debtor countries who can’t make payments and also feed their citizens.
https://southfront.org/the-american-empire-is-being-defeated-asia-will-lead-the-future/
“US intelligence is balls deep in Ukraine on every conceivable level and the imperial war machine is trying to pretend it doesn’t know exactly what’s happening in its own proxy war.”
My contention is, that it is possible the US “imperial war machine” is actually at a loss as to what exactly is going on at the front, because it doesn’t have any operatives that want to get anywhere near it.
For the time honored reason that said operatives are not willing to die like sacrificial lambs for a “cause” that was lost several months ago.
They fear the Russian Tos-1s is what’s going on. Once those motherfuckers appeared on the scene any notions of couragous on-the-ground reporting – or intelligence gathering! – immediately went out the window.
Better to win a nicely orchestrated propaganda war from a safe place far to the West of the Dneiper. Better pay, better grub, certainly better living conditions, and who knows, if you play your cards right, perhaps some share of the post-war glory should there be any.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUsJ3rLNF34
I am willing to bet 250 that the dude cranking the barrel up and down totally resents the director’s demand that he needs a goddamn action shot.
If lieu of there being no dummy shells to fire into the make believe.
Good to see these guys having some fun.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/cVNVTTfVX7hf/
Whatever you think of the “enemy,” or their overall “performance” in this war up until this date, one thing that cannot be said, is Russian helicopter gunship pilots are not among the bravest warriors of all time.
From the start of this war, they were flying what were tantamount to suicide missions day after day for well over a month.* Even if the Stinger really is a piece of shit weapon system, it doesn’t mean it can’t score a lucky kill, and every time those Russian lads flew over those Ukie controlled treelines, there were sure to see multiple Stingers coming up at em.
But those days are over. Now it’s sit back and do some fancy flying behind the lines while the artillery finishes off what’s left of the Ukraine Army.
*Thanks to Vlad’s opening strategy of advance into the unkown by battalion and get your asses shot up, to put the scare into the sovereign government of the Ukraine, all in an attempt to facilitate a process that would lead to an early negotiated peace.
Lmao!!! That was a mistake Vlad. Of all people, you should’ve known better. There are but a few sovereign governments left on this planet, and Ukraine sure as shit ain’t one of them.
Isn’t it a miracle that such a poor observer of geopolitics, according to your analysis of his “mistakes” – including not having noticed that the latest Ukrainian governments had come into power following a US-backed coup combined with US aid, biolab cooperation, military assistance and arms deliveries -, managed to maintain himself in power for over two decades with an approval rate unheard of in the West and to keep the masters of the universe at bay all this time? That’s probably why he’s so religious! :o)
Like with Afghanistan, the only “plan” the politicians have is to win the next election.
It is precisely this sort of politicians who are a PITA…
US think tanks have been forever predicting that the US will run out of oil real soon.
US could have cut oil consumption 10 times you know, instead of consuming 10 times more than most other people. Better technology should give us some other advantage besides military advantage. The 800+ bases take a lot of oil to maintain. We could cut oil consumption simply by reducing the number of the US military bases to 80. The math is that straightforward, but of course instead in the US they cut down the amount of math they teach in schools instead .
We could consume 10 times less junk and junk food, but that could make us happier and healthier, and this is not what corporate rulers want. Because! healthcare is one of the largest remaining industries in the US.
Finance and Real Estate, Healthcare, and the Military Industrial Complex are major US industries, not necessarily in that order.
Agree.