Navigating Contrived Catastrophes

  As the article below explains,most current crisis are manufactured and deserve little attention. But behind these smoke screen crisis loom real ones. The ones we should be dealing with and are not.

  The energy crisis is one. In spite of all our efforts, renewables have gone from 2% to about 5% of our energy needs. Whatever we do, we will remain dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Worse, our prosperity depends on oil and there is no simple solution to reduce significantly its share. This should be our first priority.

 The risk of nuclear war is another one. I do not believe the risk of nuclear winter is real. It is based on erroneous calculations made in the 1960s about the amount of dust blown in the stratosphere and blocking the sun. Still, hundreds of 10 megaton bombs exploding simultaneously would completely obliterate the world as we know it. With or without nuclear winter, our current modern civilization would be history. This should be the second priority.

  The social implications of the 21 century technologies we are currently developing on top of 19 century institutions is a slow brewing crisis which has the potential to destroy our society slowly from the inside. Education, democratic institutions, work,  family, almost everything is facing existential crisis. All this can wait a little. Certainly longer than our energy or nuclear crisis, but eventually...  

Authored by Terrence Keeley via RealClear Wire,

“Nothing so focuses the mind,” Samuel Johnson once wrote, “as the sight of the gallows.” Perhaps this explains why political leaders repeatedly fabricate existential crises in lieu of governing responsibly. Without the sword of Damocles overhead, policymakers just can’t seem to get the adulation they so desperately crave.

Take the fake debt ceiling crisis.

The U.S. federal debt cap was first enacted in 1917 when our national debt stood at $5.7 billion. Congress has since raised it more than 90 times with broad bipartisan support. There is ZERO chance they won’t do so again, yet we are told we must quiver and quake until they do. For some reason, a $31.4 trillion limit just isn’t enough to run the greatest country on earth properly.

Or better yet, consider the much-ballyhooed “Net Zero by 2050” time bomb. There was no science behind its selection of the 1.5 degree above pre-industrial temperature target. It was intentionally contrived so politicians and pundits could insist we spend hundreds of trillions of dollars reconfiguring every personal and industrial process to mute it, possibly by a degree or two. Anthropogenic activities are clearly taxing our air, water, and lands. Depending upon tradeoffs like affordability and reliability (and what China, India, and Russia decide to do), less carbon-intensive energy sources may well be preferable, too. Convincing our younger generation they will all die unless the globe urgently reduces its net carbon footprint to zero is another matter altogether. Being more mindful about our consumption patterns while preparing our communities for the probability of more violent weather would be too simple. Better to scare everyone out of their wits so we can get on with doing witless things.

Great societies thrive on consistent policy competence. Failing ones lurch from crisis to crisis. Contriving catastrophic scenarios all but ensures hysteria will supplant sober, reasoned analysis.  

Some will argue extreme threats are needed to force modest, salutary changes. After all, a handful of U.S. debt ceiling votes brought about useful policy changes, like the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings breakthrough and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Similarly, threats of impending climate doom have led many individuals and corporations to examine their energy use, seek cleaner alternatives, and eliminate unnecessary waste.

But have these modest advances been worth the price of the abject delirium that has accompanied them? And are recurrent, contrived catastrophes somehow producing better policy outcomes?

Evidently not. Three essential U.S. social programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – are barreling along towards insolvency. Just as the retirement age in France must rise to reflect longer life expectancies and taxation tipping points, so too must U.S. retirement programs respect demographic realities. Maintaining peace through strength in an increasingly dangerous world requires that the U.S. spend more on defense, not less. Unless the current debt ceiling crisis leads to an honest reckoning about our most urgent tax and spending priorities, heightened hysteria serves no useful end. Worse, all the faux debt ceiling dynamics convince politicians they’ve somehow done their jobs when instead, they’ve abrogated them entirely.

Similarly, we speak about an “energy transition,” but no realistic projection of future fossil fuel consumption shows any meaningful decline in the century to come. Rising populations, improved living standards, reliability needs for the three billion humans who are still energy insecure, and the first order demands of national security reveal oil and gas will remain crucial sources of our energy mix for as far as the eye can see. The most logical response would be to prioritize energy reliability while recalibrating our emissions mitigation spending towards more climate adaptation priorities. Why spend $100 trillion or more on something that has been entirely contrived and is all but certain to fail when you can spend $50 trillion or less on something that would demonstrably save human lives while improving their livelihoods?

History is festooned with countless ruses about the end of time, some more disruptive than others. They include those of French Bishop Martin of Tours in 375 A.D., and Jim Jones in 1967. Many thousands believed the so-called Y2K cliff would crash every computer, triggering global economic ruin and the rise of the Antichrist. Yet, remarkably, here we all still are, higher in number than ever.

In time, trillions of dollars of investment products now priced against Net Zero 2050 deadlines will need to be abandoned. Similarly, the U.S. debt ceiling will be lifted multiple times before responsible members of both parties finally put our tax and spending trajectories into sustainable balance. Panic, like blackmail, compromises sensible thinking. Calm acceptance of measurable risks and their reasonable mitigation are the essence of wise decision-making.

The next time a politician tells you Armageddon is nigh, remind them it’s their only job to make sure it isn’t. If you’ve got the patience for it, you can also show them how easy it would be to avoid.

“Plug and Play” Guides US Domestic and Foreign Policy – and It’s Not Working

  Another great article on how our governments have become engines of waste and incompetence with a trend clearly in the wrong direction. 

 To learn how empires are not conquered from the outside but rot from the inside, you can read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but it's a big book. The alternative is to just read the news!

“Plug and Play” Guides US Domestic and Foreign Policy – and It’s Not Working

By Karen Kwiatkowski

February 16, 2023

The Lockheed Martin USN Freedom Class ships, “plug and play” multi-use vessels costing half a billion each – first launched in 2006 – are all being decommissioned.  The weird thing is that one was just delivered less than six months ago, and as of August 2022, Lockheed was sending out the propulsion fixes for the rest of them, presumably to get them to the scrapyards.

This microdot of news flew under my radar, and it confirms what we already know about the US MICIMATT – it’s not just what we do and how we do it, it’s what’s allowed to be talked about.  These ships were all named after major US cities; a couple of mayors reacted with sadness.  Not disgusted at the insanity and waste, or dumfounded by the government process, just sad that a brand new $500 million ship with their town’s name on it is being junked.

“Plug and play,” as transmogrified by the crony capitalists and government bureaucrats, not only doesn’t work – it is a real danger to every American, and by extension the rest of the world.  In the marketplace, plug and play is efficient, flexible, and smart.  Upgrading, fixing, and modifying mission capability of products via open architecture software and hardware makes sense. The market likes the sim card model – rapid recognition and correction of problems, responding to consumer demand for performance, efficiency and cost – these are key to business success.  Plug and play has raised the bar of market performance, along with customer expectations.

Enter the US government, whose direct spending equates to 35% of the GDP – not counting moneys flowing from government to social security, poverty assistance, medicare, and government retirement programs that are also “spent” in our consumer oriented economy.

Government takes working business concepts like plug and play, and then eliminates every factor – manufacturer liability, market discipline, rapid customer feedback, and business risk – that made the concept effective. The government/political acquisition system then adds in guaranteed profit.  It ensures no one – in Congress, in the government, or in the country – has the slightest idea of the actual “price” of anything.

The way the government does ships and airplanes and bombs is also how it does modern “vaccines.” It indemnifies the contractors for accident, error and malfeasance, lawsuits, pays far above market for development and production, and then mandates “its citizens” utilize the product. The US government kindly includes – for defense, big pharma, big agriculture, big finance, etc – a vast array of propaganda to convince politicians, critics and taxpayers of many things that are simply not true.  State propaganda, delivered directly by government agencies and through state-connected companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and all US media corporations, is not just predictable, it is a dedicated part of the acquisition cycle.

Whether in the “this changes everything” B-21 bomber or for the failed Freedom Class ships, plug and play is problematic, for reasons mentioned above. The concept extends to US foreign policy as well. The apparent NATO “defense” program for Ukraine, consisting of all kinds of various equipment and weaponry from dozens of countries being scooped up and shipped to a muddy medieval battlefield hoping for the best, is a Vickie Nuland-style plug and play.  Her personal involvement in picking and choosing the “right” leaders in Kiev over the past decade is another example.  And that was only one of dozens of color revolutions and coups the US has fomented, as official US foreign policy. If we just plug in and remotely control another country’s government, that’ll work, right?

Designer RNA delivered into a human or animal system via patented lipid nanoparticles, by Pfizer’s own admission, is medical plug and play. There has been a long marriage between defense and pharmaceutical industries, and just like in a human marriage, these institutions are starting to look alike.

Bill Gates and Tony Fauci both seem to have become skeptics now, too late to save trillions in lost global productivity due to government lockdowns and mandates, countless families and communities and churches permanently damaged and divided, and too late to prevent the actual loss of life from the mandated practices, injections and policies.  The same system that produces lousy ships and useless airplanes also kills entire sectors of the economy, and human beings by the millions, with zero accountability, and not a single public hanging – as we now see three years post COVID.  Every risk and negative consequence socialized, every deep state criminal lauded and rewarded.

Our money is next, because a Federal Reserve CBDC is plug and play at its finest.  If the price of money – or how it is used – needs to be changed, this can be managed centrally and rapidly, with a software update.

And our cars. The State extremely interested in centrally and remotely managing our locations and our movements, whether via GPS tracking we can’t turn off one phones and in our vehicles, or insane federal pressure and subsidy for all-electric vehicles.

Unacceptable Jessica’s has been writing about how both state and federal governments are sharing data to criminalize the COVID unvaccinated. How?

… [T]hey can’t just change the definition, can they? Well, the definition for ‘vaccine’ has been officially re-defined 3 times for the sake up upholding the COVID mandates so why not the word criminal, as well?

Remember, this is being done because people chose natural immunity (or religious exemptions, or what have you) over being injected with experimental injectable products that:

• • have lamentable safety profiles
  • are ineffective at preventing transmission
  • are associated with higher rates of COVID and immune compromisation
  • are based on not one, but two entirely novel (to humans at mass scale in context of viral pathogen) technologies that utilize the introduction of the coding template of foreign genetic material from a pathogen by lipid nanoparticle carriers with known toxicity profiles.

Jessica Rose explains how government systems and agencies redefine what is and is not criminal – as needed – and use their data systems to destroy livelihoods, as well as individual agency and liberty. Authoritarian plug and play – be plugged in or you will not play – extends to any area where the state is concerned about citizen opposition and disobedience to unconstitutional overreach.

It is us against them, make no mistake. The DoT is now investigating Elon Musk for violating viral and bacteria import procedures that could, in theory, endanger a lab worker – while remaining silent, reliable, stand-up guys for the entire array of FDA, CDC, and HHS lies, risk, danger and death associated with government “gain of function” research, funded by their bureaucrats secretly and in direct opposition to the wishes of a sitting US president.

 

Here’s another example of deep state plug and play:  A handful of neocons and Joe Biden walk into a bar – no wait, that’s a different story.  A handful of neocons and Joe Biden decide to attack the energy supply of a fellow NATO member, secretly, and commit an act of war against Russia, all without sharing a whisper of it with Congress. They knew it was not only unconstitutional but an act of war when they thought it up, and when they did it – but this is the plug and play mentality that guides our late stage US imperial decision-makers.

It will be easy, they said.  It will be efficient, completely controllable, a remote “update” to our foreign policy, they said.

The US government is not in trouble because Joe Biden suffers Stage 6 dementia.  It is in trouble because – instead of the best and brightest, or even the worst and stupidest – the deep state is completely populated with human mynah birds – incessantly repeating things they hear – mimicking the real world of soldiers, engineers, designers, thinkers, builders and creators, and citizens – without the slightest bit of understanding or context.

Why would anyone consider themselves the subject of, or subject to, such a government?

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Where Is This "Climate Crisis" That Activists Keep Talking About?

 If you are old enough to remember about the weather and climate warnings over a few decades then you know that Global Warming is little more than a cult.

 Whatever warming we have currently is cyclical and represent no danger whatsoever in the short term.

 In the long term, richer populations will be much better equipped to manage whatever consequences there may be than impoverished ones.

Where Is This "Climate Crisis" That Activists Keep Talking About?

Climate change hysteria has been an ongoing point of social contention since at least the 1980s.  For the past 40 years, western countries have been relentlessly bombarded with global warming propaganda and predictions of an environmental cataclysm.  Many people spent their formative childhoods and school years being indoctrinated with tales of oblivion - A world in which the oceans rise hundreds of feet and land masses are swallowed by the waves.  A world in which exponentially rising temperatures create havoc with the weather as millions die from hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and drought.  

As many of us now know, all of these claims ended up being false.  The glaciers and polar ice caps never melted.  The land is not covered by the seas.  The only famine today is a result of economic disaster, not climate disaster.  And, most endangered species have not disappeared from the planet.  But, climate scientists chasing billions of dollars in funding from governments and globalist think tanks still say the weather Apocalypse is coming; they were wrong for 40 years, but we should trust them now.  The "debate is over" they say, and we must defer to the "experts."

But where is the evidence of this climate crisis that these well funded scientists and activists keep talking about?  Where are the weather effects?  One can see the very tangible results of our ongoing economic crisis; inflation and high prices, floundering consumers relying on credit cards, mass layoffs in the tech industry spreading to other sectors, etc.  People are experiencing the downturn and they can witness the consequences for themselves.  If the climate cult wants people to take them seriously, they will have to show some kind of visible proof that global warming is real and a legitimate threat.  

The problem is, they have no proof, and so they are forced to dishonestly connect every single bad weather event to "climate change" as a means to frighten the public.  Let's look at the real weather data and see if supposedly dangerous man-made carbon emissions are somehow contributing to weather calamity.  

The US is often cited as a primary carbon polluter (even though nations like China produce 30% of global carbon emissions while the US produces only 14%).  Let's look at a track record of US weather data and see if we can find signs of impending disaster.  If the problem is global, then it should certainly be visible in US weather as much as any other country.  

How about hurricanes?  Every time a hurricane hits the Gulf Coast the mainstream media rants about climate change as the cause.  But has there been a significant increase in hurricanes in the US?  No, there has not according to long term data.  Storms are forming at a rate consistent with the historic record. 

   

What about major flooding events?  Has there been more downpours and raging rivers?  No, there has not.  Flooding events are not happening at a greater frequency or severity today than they have in past decades.  Even climate scientists are forced to admit that US and global flood damage has been in decline for decades.  Data of damage as a proportion of GDP shows this.

Does this mean we are facing increasing drought conditions?  Surely, global warming is causing significant damage through loss of rainfall?  Nope, that's not happening either.  The worst droughts in recent US history occurred in the 1930s and 1950s. 

Maybe we can see a noticeable shift in tornadoes and sever weather inland?  Are there more deadly tornadoes today than decades ago?  No, there are not.  In fact, dangerous tornadoes have been declining.  

Climate change hysteria often relies on the theory of temperature "tipping points" as a basis for their arguments.  Official temp data only goes back to the 1880s, giving us a tiny window to view climate and compare data from today with the data from the past.  According to the NOAA, global temps have risen less than 1°C in 100 years.  They assert that it only takes a 1.5°C increase to trigger a "tipping point" event that could destroy the Earth as we know it.  There is no evidence to support tipping point theory, nor is there a historic precedent.  Certainly there is no evidence in the weather, and skeptics are having a difficult time finding any indications that a catastrophe is on the horizon.

If anything, the data proves that man-made carbon emissions have no effect on weather events.  So, if we are on the verge of global warming annihilation, it's not because human industry caused it.  

The truth is, climate change has become a religious ideology, an extension of Earth worship based on faith rather than facts.  And like every religion, the climate cult needs an Apocalypse mythology, an end of the world image to keep the flock in line.  Every decade they conjure up new tales of inevitable destruction unless we follow their rules and bow to their whims.  It is a sad attempt to co-opt science as a tool for zealotry. 

How the West brought economic disaster on itself (Video - 38’)

   A very clear interview to highlight the economic suicide of Europe. 

   Europe simply does not have the strength to fight both Russia and the Energy war. 

 

French Historian: World War III Has Already Begun

  Emmanuel Todd is a brilliant and well respected historian in France and what he is saying is obvious: The war in Ukraine although still a proxy war is already without doubt a world war. 

  The Ukrainian army will be crushed before the Summer and in any case incapable to use effectively the new tanks and likely fighter jets that will arrive around that time. This means NATO crews and pilots on the ground... 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News.,

A French historian who accurately predicted the fall of the Soviet Union over a decade in advance says that World War III has already begun as a result of the conflict in Ukraine.

The comments were made by Emmanuel Todd, one of France’s leading intellectuals, during an interview with the Le Figaro newspaper.

“It is evident that the conflict, initially a limited territorial war, has evolved into a global economic confrontation between the whole West on one side, and Russia, backed by China, on the other. It has become a world war,” Todd said.

Todd added that “the resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the U.S. imperial system toward the abyss” and that Biden must “hurry” to rescue a “fragile” America.

According to the historian, U.S. control of the world financial system is at risk because the Russian economy’s resistance to sanctions is pushing “the American imperial system” toward the precipice,” with Russia still able to rely on China for monetary backing.

Todd says America “cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go,” because it has no exit strategy and the stakes are too high.

“This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other,” said the intellectual.

Todd is a widely respected figure, having accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union 14 years before it happened.

As we highlighted last month, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church cautioned that any attempt to “destroy Russia” by “madmen” trying to impose their values will lead to “the end of the world.”

“We pray to the Lord so that he enlightens those madmen and helps them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world,” said Patriarch Kirill.

Elon Musk also recently warned that “most are oblivious to the danger” of a new global conflict.

Donald Trump also recently cautioned, “We’re on the brink of World War 3,” and in a campaign video last week asserted, “If I were president, the Russia Ukraine war would never have happened … never in a million years.”

Is The Red Scare Going Blue? Why Are Democrats Suddenly Defending McCarthyism?

  Our 4th turning crisis is accelerating fast. I expect the fireworks to start in late Spring, early Summer... 

 Whatever is left of democracy in 2024...

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the New York Post on the growing attacks on those who are challenging the alleged abuses by the FBI and the censorship system on social media.

Here is the column:

“The Democratic Party [is] the bedfellow of international communism.”

Those words from Sen. Joe McCarthy captured the gist of the Red Scare and the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics. The Democrats this week appear to have taken up the same cudgel in labeling opponents and critics Russian sympathizers and fellow travelers in opposing government involvement in a massive censorship system.

The Red Scare is back and it is going blue.

I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy.

The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints. In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialists, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse.

This view was amplified by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who became persona non grata for her anti-war sentiments in Congress. She was later labeled a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton, who has refused to support that scurrilous claim against a former member.

For years, the Democrats pushed a Russian collusion theory that collapsed. It was later disclosed that the Clinton campaign hid and then lied about funding the infamous Steele Dossier. Nevertheless, people like Carter Page were falsely accused of being Russian agents and critics of the investigation labeled as Russian apologists. Ironically, the FBI was warned that the dossier appeared to be the result of Russian disinformation and relied on a presumed Russian agent.

If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by some.

Soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers.

She exclaimed, “I mean, look at this, I mean, all three of those politicians are Putin apologists. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard loves Putin.” (For the record, she also attacked me as not being “a real lawyer.”)

What was most striking is the level of attacks on those seeking an investigation into possible FBI abuses. The Democratic Party was once the greatest defender of free speech, the greatest critic of corporate power, and the greatest skeptic of the FBI. It is now opposing the investigation into the FBI’s involvement in a massive corporate-run censorship system.

In the 1950s, it was easy for politicians to avoid discussing underlying views by just labeling their opponents as fellow travelers. We are watching the same use of personal attacks today as a way to evade the troubling disclosures in the Twitter Files.

While some like McCaskill yell “Russians!” others use more modern labels, such as “conspiracy theorists.” That notably includes the FBI itself.

When criticized for the role FBI agents played in secretly targeting citizens for censorship, the FBI called critics “conspiracy theorists . . . feeding the American public misinformation.” It is something that you might expect from a pundit or politician. It is far more menacing when this attack comes from the country’s largest law enforcement agency.

Where the Hoover FBI would call dissenters “Communist sympathizers,” the Wray FBI labels them “conspiracy theorists.”

Alternatively, various Democrats portrayed anyone criticizing Twitter for censorship as supporting insurrections against the government. Member after member suggested that seeking to investigate the government’s role in censorship was to invite or even welcome another Jan. 6.

Thus, when Thomas Baker, a former FBI agent, testified on his extensive writings about changes in the FBI, he was attacked by freshman Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) who asked him if he had any experience investigating extremist groups. He didn’t get the answer he hoped for. When Baker responded, “Yes,” and tried to explain his prior experience, Goldman immediately cut him off and accused him of trying to sell a book.

For my part, I got off light. I was not accused of being a Russian mole or fellow traveler of insurrectionists. After responding to a question on the specific content of the files (released and confirmed by Twitter itself), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), denounced me for offering “legal opinions” without actually working at Twitter. It is like saying that a witness should not discuss the content of Pentagon Papers unless one worked at the Pentagon. (By the way, the content of the Pentagon papers as well as the Twitter Files are facts. The implication of those facts are opinions. I was asked about both the factual content of the files and their constitutional implications).

It is all tragically familiar. The effort this week was to attack witnesses rather than address what appears to be the largest censorship system in the history of this country. It is, of course, ironic that those seeking to check such government-supported censorship are the ones being called Putin lovers. Putin loves censorship and likely stands in awe at the success of the left in using the FBI and corporations to regulate speech on social media.

Putin and other authoritarian countries have long feared the Internet and social media. They have struggled to gain the very level of censorship carried out by Twitter and other executives with the support of politicians and pundits.

We now know that members like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) secretly sought censorship of critics, including a columnist. Their success would make Putin blush.

However, Democrats have insisted that freedom is tyranny.

Columnist and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian when he previously dismissed calls for free speech in social media and warned that censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

He then added bizarrely of uncensored social media: “That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”

Indeed, it is a nightmare, but a familiar one.

With tanks on the way, Nato is inching toward full-scale war with Russia

  As Russia is massing an overwhelming force at the border with Ukraine, the tone in the West is becoming more ominous. Are we on the verge of "no return" decisions? 

Source: middle east eye

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Almost as soon as major Nato countries, led by the US, promised to supply Ukraine with battle tanks, the cry went up warning that tanks alone would be unlikely to turn the war’s tide against Russia. 

The subtext – the one western leaders hope their publics will not notice – is that Ukraine is struggling to hold the line as Russia builds up its troop numbers and pounds Ukrainian defences. 

A permanent partition of Ukraine into two opposed blocs – one more pro-Russian, the other more pro-Nato – is looking ever more likely.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has not been shy in telling the West what he expects next: fighter jets, especially US-made F16s.

Kyiv is keen to break what western media have termed a “taboo” by getting Nato aircraft directly involved in the Ukraine war. There is a good reason for that taboo: the use of such jets would let Ukraine expand the battlefield into Russian skies, and implicate Europe and the US in its offensive. 

But why assume the West’s taboo on supplying combat jets is really any stronger than its former taboo on sending Nato battle tanks to Ukraine? As one European official observed in a Politico article: “Fighters are completely unconceivable today, but we might have this discussion in two, three weeks.” 

And sure enough, within days, Zelensky’s office said there had been “positive signals” from Poland about supplying Ukraine with F16s. French President Emmanuel Macron also refused to rule out the possibility of contributing combat jets. 

Upping the stakes

There is a logic to how Nato is operating. Step by step, it gets more deeply immersed in the war. It started with sanctions, followed by the supply of defensive arms. Nato then moved to issuing more offensive weapons, in aid so far totalling some $100bn from the US alone. Nato is now supplying the main weapons for a land war. Why should it not join the battle for air supremacy next?

Or as Nato’s head, Jens Stoltenberg, recently observed, echoing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Weapons are the way to peace.” 

But the reverse is more likely to be true. With each additional step they take, the more the parties involved risk losing if they back down. The longer they refuse to sit and talk, the greater the pressure to keep fighting. 

That no longer applies just to Russia and Ukraine. Now, Europe and Washington also have plenty of skin directly in the game.

Late last month, in what sounded like a Freudian slip, Germany’s foreign minister, Anna Baerbock, stated at a Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg: “We are fighting a war against Russia.” Days earlier, Ukraine’s defence minister made much the same point: “We [Ukraine] are carrying out Nato’s mission today, without the loss of their blood.”

According to many analysts, a few dozen Nato tanks are unlikely to be a game changer. And if as seems likely, Russia is able to disable them through drone strikes, the US and its junior partners will face a stark choice: accept humiliation at Moscow’s hands and abandon Ukraine to its fate, or up the ante and move the battle to the skies over Ukraine and Russia. 

Where this risks leading was underscored by international scientists last month. They warned that the Doomsday Clock had moved to 90 seconds to midnight, the nearest point humankind has come to global catastrophe since the clock was established in 1947. The primary reason, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is the threat of the war in Ukraine leading to a nuclear exchange. 

Unexpectedly, the only prominent dissent from western leaders has come from Donald Trump, the former US president. He wrote on social media: “FIRST COME THE TANKS, THEN COME THE NUKES. Get this crazy war ended, NOW.” 

Rejecting 'humiliation'

The cause for alarm, again unacknowledged by western leaders and western media, is that Russia has very strong reasons – from its perspective – to believe its current struggle is existential. It was never going to allow Ukraine to become a forward military base for Nato on its doorstep, with the fear that western nuclear missiles might be stationed there. 

New tidbits of information that emerge of what has been going on behind the scenes tend to reinforce Russia’s narrative, not Nato’s. This week former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said mediation efforts between Moscow and Kyiv he had led at the start of the war, ones apparently making progress, were “blocked” by the US and its Nato allies.

The more weapons the US and Europe send to Ukraine, and the more they refuse to pursue talks, the more Moscow will be convinced it was right to fight and must keep fighting. Ignoring that fact, as the West did in the build-up to Russia’s invasion and continues to do now, does not make it any less true.

Even Boris Johnson, Britain’s former prime minister who has every reason to paint himself in a flattering light in relation to Ukraine, last week implicitly undermined the claim that Nato did nothing to provoke Russia. Recollecting a conversation with Vladimir Putin shortly before the invasion, he framed it in terms of the Russian president’s concerns about Nato expansion. 

Johnson told a BBC documentary: “[Putin] said, ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join Nato anytime soon… What is anytime soon?’ And I said, ‘Well it’s not going to join Nato for the foreseeable future.’” 

Coverage of the exchange has been dominated by Johnson’s suggestion that Putin threatened him with a missile strike – a claim Russia denies. Instead, a Downing Street readout from the time of that conversation only confirms that Johnson did “underscore” Ukraine’s right to membership. 

But in any case, one has to wonder why Moscow would believe Johnson’s evasive, half-hearted assurances on Nato expansion - especially following more than a decade of broken promises by Nato, as well as covert operations on the ground that moved Kyiv away from neutrality towards becoming a member by stealth. 

And that is not even to highlight credible reports that Johnson, presumably acting on behalf of Washington, scuppered efforts towards a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early stages of the war. 

In a similar vein, Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said in the same BBC documentary that at the end of a meeting with Russia’s military head, Valery Gerasimov, the general told him: “Never again will we be humiliated.” 

It is hard to see how what happened before the invasion or since – from Nato creeping ever nearer to Russia’s border, to its fighting an undeclared proxy war in Ukraine officially designed to “weaken” Russia – has not been intended precisely to humiliate Moscow.

Business booming

The West’s original justification for arming Ukraine was supposedly to support Kyiv’s struggle for sovereignty. But paradoxically, the more Nato, or more precisely the US, becomes the arbiter of what Ukraine needs, the less sovereignty Ukraine enjoys – including the right to decide when it most makes sense to sue for peace.

The New York Times reported matter-of-factly last November that western militaries, especially the US, increasingly view Ukraine as a testing ground for new military technologies. 

According to the Times, Ukraine has been serving as a laboratory for “state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come”. These tests are viewed as vital to preparing for a future confrontation with China. 

An increasingly pertinent question is: who in western capitals now has an interest in the war actually ending?

Ukraine’s subservience to the US – its loss of sovereignty – was underscored last month when Zelensky appealed to major US corporations to seize business opportunities in Ukraine, “from weapons and defence to construction, from communications to agriculture, from transport to IT, from banks to medicine”. 

While declaring that “freedom must always win”, Zelensky noted that US financial giants BlackRock, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were already doing deals for Ukraine’s reconstruction. A cynic might wonder whether Ukraine’s destruction is becoming a feature, more than a bug, of this war.  

But Ukraine is not the only major player losing control of events. The more Russia is forced to see its fight in Ukraine in existential terms, as Nato weapons and money pour in, the more European leaders should be concerned about existential dangers ahead – and not just because the threat of nuclear war looms ever larger on Europe’s doorstep.

The type of western, especially US, provocations that triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are simmering just below the surface in relation to China – a region Nato now perversely treats as within its “North Atlantic” mission. The Ukraine war looks like it may serve as a prelude to, or dry run for, a confrontation with China. 

Worried that fallout from the Ukraine war will suck them in, European states are putting in larger orders than ever for weaponry – much of it from the US, where business is booming for arms manufacturers. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defence spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, told Yahoo News late last year. 

Meanwhile, Europe’s biggest source of energy supplies, from Russia, has been cut off – quite literally in the case of mysterious explosions that blew up the Russian pipelines supplying gas to Germany. Now Europe has had to turn to the US – which declared itself officially “gratified” by the explosions – for far more expensive shipments of liquified natural gas.

And with European industries stripped of cheap energy supplies, they now have every incentive to relocate outside Europe, not least to the US. Warnings of Germany’s imminent deindustrialisation are to be found everywhere. 

US primacy

The Biden administration cajoled Berlin into supplying tanks. But now, with German armour about to rumble towards Russia for the first time since Nazi forces slaughtered millions of Soviet soldiers eight decades ago, relations between the two are certain to fracture even more deeply. 

The European peace dividend, touted so loudly through the 1990s, has evaporated. Everything US and European leaders have done over the past 15 years, and since Russia’s invasion, looks as though it was, and is, designed to scupper any hopes of a regional security framework capable of embracing Russia. The goal has been to keep Moscow excluded, inferior and embittered. For that reason, the current war looks more like the culmination of post-Cold War planning – again a feature, not a bug.

The return of a geopolitical siege mentality will serve the same purpose as demands for austerity and belt-tightening have done: it will justify the redistribution of wealth from western populations to their ruling elites. 

Writing back in 2015, seven years before the invasion, it was already clear to British scholar Richard Sakwa that a US-dominated Nato was using Ukraine as a way to deepen, rather than resolve, tensions between Europe and Russia. “Instead of a vision embracing the whole continent, [the European Union] has become little more than the civilian wing of the Atlantic security alliance,” he wrote.

Or as one writer summed up one of Sakwa’s key conclusions: “The prospect of greater European independence worried key decision-makers in Washington, and Nato’s role has been, in part, to maintain US primacy over Europe’s foreign policy.”

That cynical approach was encapsulated in a pithy comment from Victoria Nuland – Washington’s perennial meddler in Ukrainian politics – during a secretly recorded conversation with the US ambassador to Kyiv. Shortly before US-backed protests would oust Ukraine’s Russia-sympathising president, she declared: “F*ck the EU!"

Washington’s fear was, and is, that a Europe not entirely dependent militarily and economically on the US – especially the industrial powerhouse of Germany – might stray from a commitment to a unipolar world in which the US reigns supreme. 

With European autonomy now sufficiently weakened, Washington appears more confident that it can rally its Nato allies, once Russia is isolated, for another great-power engagement against China. 

As the war grinds on, it is not just Ukraine, but Europe that will pay a heavy price for Washington’s hubris.

"Welcome To The Endgame" - Rubino Warns "Everyone's About To Realize There's No Fix For This"

  If you are not hypnotized by the current UFO / balloon mania, you will quickly realize that all is not well under the sun. Deficits are also ballooning faster than China can inflate balloons as tensions get hotter day by day. The two are unfortunately not unrelated.  

  Let's hope the coming conflict will not be nuclear although I do not see how this is avoidable since the outcome will quickly become existential for all the participants.

By Greg Hunter’s USWatchdog.com,

Analyst and financial writer John Rubino says we are in a “debt and death spiral” that will force dramatic changes on the world. 

Rubino explains, “The debt spiral part of this means things from here continue to get worse and worse for the big currencies of the world until they die..."

"  In other words, until people lose faith in them, refuse to use them and hold them anymore until their value falls to their intrinsic value, which is zero. That manifests to hyperinflation.  The value of the currency falls as opposed to the things you buy with it...

Things feel basically okay for a long time as long as governments could force interest rates down to really low levels.  The side effects of that are massive money creation and, eventually, inflation.  That’s what we are dealing with now.  So, here we go.  Welcome to the end game for the world’s big currencies.”

Rubino contends things have gotten so out of control that there is no stopping what is coming.  Rubino says, “We are in the part of the cycle now where things just get worse, and there is nothing we can do about it..."

"  You are going to see companies that have borrowed huge amounts of money to buy back their stock, and now they see their interest costs explode.  Governments around the world have the same problem, and there is nothing central banks can do about this.  The next stage of this is when everybody realizes that there is no fix.  Daddy is not going to come home and take care of all of this, and there is no adult supervision. 

The financial markets are basically on their own with so much debt that there is nothing left to do.  You either have mass bankruptcies or inflate away the currencies of the world, and we’re there—finally.  2023 is going to be an amazing year... and we make the decision about what kind of a crisis we fall into. 

We have a 1930’s style deflationary depression, which is what happens if we keep raising interest rates.  Or, a Weimar Germany kind of hyperinflation, which is what happens if we try to inflate our way out of our current debt problems. And that’s it.  This is not something on the distant horizon anymore.  It’s something right here staring us in the face.”

Rubino talks about the threat of global nuclear war and contends our extreme financial problems will seem timid if the nukes fly. 

In the nuclear war scenario, the global population could get cut in half with “radiation and starvation.” 

Rubino also talks about ways to be more resilient, and that starts with shedding as much debt as you can.  It also includes food, water, cash, defensive investments and precious metals.

Rubino thinks the economy is so weak, with so many different financial bubbles, that one bubble pop could bring the entire system down rapidly.  Rubino says look out for big European banks to go insolvent as a warning sign of trouble if the trillion-dollar derivative complex blows up.

 

The New Normal: Death Spirals And Speculative Frenzies

  Another way to put it nicely: "It does not mater how fast you run if you boarded the wrong train!" And unfortunately, we are all aboard the wrong train. Central Banks will soon inflate the money supply into irrelevance. This is unavoidable. It has happened countless times in the past and this time will not, cannot be different. It is not a curse, just the fact that once you go down the slippery slope of easy money, the end game is always the same. Dollars, Pesos and Denarius make no difference. 

 From Nixon's 1971 "temporary" end of convertibility to Reagan's 1981 "Good Morning America!" Reaganomics pile of debt, wars and empire have brought bankruptcy closer than ever. That, more than anything is the real reason behind the current world tensions. We'll be lucky if this house of cards stands until 2024...      

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems.

The vapid discussions about "soft" or "hard" landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic's encounter with the iceberg was "soft" or "hard:" either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies.

Death Spirals are the inevitable result of entrenched interests clinging on to the status quo and thwarting any adaptation or evolution that might threaten or diminish their share of the swag--and that includes any real change because any consequential modification has the potential to upset the gravy train.

The status quo "solution" is to borrow and blow whatever sums are needed to satisfy every entrenched interest. Filling the federal slop-trough for all the hogs now requires borrowing a staggering $1.4 trillion every year, and billions more in municipal, county and state bonds (borrowing money via selling bonds) on the local level.

This borrow and blow strategy avoids any uncomfortable discipline and difficult trade-offs: everybody gets everything they demand.

This strategy looks "unsinkable" until the iceberg looms dead ahead. History suggests that fiscal and political discipline is eventually imposed by the real world in one fashion or another when diminishing returns enter a Death Spiral.

Any limit on debt is of course "impossible," just as it was "impossible" for the Titanic to sink. But history is rather implacable in this regard. The self-serving hubris of "impossible" limits on largesse tend to collapse on contact with currency devaluation, structural inflation or a systemic crisis of legitimacy that sweeps away the entire worm-eaten facade of stability.

In other words, the entrenched interests benefitting from the status quo will continue to do what worked in the past until it all implodes. The pain of discipline and modest sacrifices is too great to bear, so let's collapse the entire system.

Autocracies excel at Death Spirals because they eliminate dissent, transparency and competing nodes of power. Nobody's left to push back on disastrous policy decisions, so autocratic regimes race toward the iceberg at full speed.

Rather than invest in real long-term solutions, everyone is in the casino, buying options that expire in a few hours. Rather than invest for an entire quarter--whew, three whole months!--speculators now consider a week an unbearably long time to hold a trade.

Speculative frenzies create their own Death Spirals, as gamblers front-run the "guaranteed" bailout of speculators by central banks. This is the consequence of moral hazard being elevated to "guaranteed": there is no need to actually wait for the inevitable central bank bailout of bets gone bad, we can place bets before the bailout because we know it's as assured as the sun rising tomorrow morning.

Nice, except central banks and bailouts also reach diminishing returns and enter Death Spirals. Doing more of what's failed seems to work once, then twice, if you give it enough juice, but the third time is iffy and the fourth time collapses the speculative casino that the status quo was trying to save.

No one who benefits from the Moral Hazard Casino Economy believes it's no longer sustainable. All the gamblers, big and small, are confident the Federal Reserve and other central banks can cover any losses and make good whatever befalls the casino. The hubris of the punters, big and small, is essentially infinite.

I'll get out before the house of cards collapses, everyone tells themselves. In the meantime, I'm going to front-run the inevitable bailout of this speculative frenzy.

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems. Death Spirals and speculative frenzies have now been completely normalized. We can't imagine any other way to operate. But this New Normal won't last as long as punters believe. Doing more of what worked in the past is only accelerating the casino's demise.

This is HORRIBLE by Clayton Morris (Video - 22')

  What is happening in Ukraine is criminal and NATO is complicit. 

  It is hard at this stage to envision that the war will not slide into something more terrible.