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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56194.htm

Coup, Coup, Kachoo...

Contrary to the bleatings of rabid Never Trumpers, Democrat drum majors, and neurasthenic pundits, the Butthead Circus of camo wanks, Halloweening morons, and feeble-minded Q Anon dead-enders, the bumbling vandalism and imbecile thuggery at the Capitol had no resemblance whatever to an actual coup.

See Websters, Coup d’Etat : “A sudden, decisive action in politics effecting a change of government illegally or by force”.
 
The precise definition, likely unfamiliar to most Americans, is not a subject of confusion to our government.  Coups, it can be said, are us.  Our government runs them all the time.  They are, with unilateral and undeclared war, its favorite ‘diplomatic’ endeavor.  It was late to adopt the tactic but strove to perfect subversion and destruction of regimes beyond what was thought possible.
 
In our early days, invasions and occupations were all America required in its own hemisphere, long before we had deemed it necessary to manage the entire world for our Capitalists’ profit. Inspired by British and French examples, it was clear to the U.S. that killing inferior races was fine where profit justified it.  As the world then was up for rape and domination, we joined the fest in Central America, the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, while finally completing the casual extermination of our own native peoples.
 
After WWI, invasion of nations to steal resources fell somewhat out of favor in the world, which was awkward.  If war and murder were out, then Capitalism—a euphemism for our government—had to find an alternative.  It gambled that the next best thing to conquest was corruption, which proved to be cost effective besides, always a critical factor to us.  You just pull the Marines out of Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and the Philippines, and install a dirty elite to hand you the country for a tiny cut of the gross.  It was much cheaper than murdering thousands of people.

This new kind of soft coup worked well in most places, most of the time.  You had to have a slush budget to control press and education but that was peanuts compared to garrisoning combat outfits.  Where the program hit the skids was in countries where, against all odds, a small dedicated cadre of courageous idealists somehow defied propaganda and moral pollution and resolved to die rather than whore themselves to the Gringo and his lackeys.
 
In Nicaragua, Sandino’s guerrillas fought their pimp United Fruit Co. government and U.S. troops to a standstill.  When we couldn’t kill or capture him, we paid to get him betrayed and murdered by the brute, Somoza, of whom Roosevelt famously said, “I know he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.
 
After WWII, hopes for world peace through self-determination of nations ended the era when America could openly rape and loot weak states with no repercussions, even when hidden behind our hired slut elites.  They began being seriously menaced by their own people which interfered annoyingly with corporate cash flow.
 
England had ripped Iran’s oil off for decades when a proud old aristocrat pol nationalized it and ran the coward Shah out with the dithering Brits, who came whining to the flexing CIA.  Ike said go, and in a bollixed farce—the first by those hugely over-rated, ham-handed bunglers—it doled out wheelbarrows of cash, brought Mossadegh down, and set the preening, brutal Shah up as chief whore for the new majority owners, American Oil.
 
With ever fiercer demands for national autonomy and an end to U.S. Capitalist piracy, it was felt that, we had to put teeth in the program.  The way to get “plausible deniability”, was to train native murderers as “security forces”.  This was clear when we nearly botched a coup against popular Guatemalan Socialist, Jacobo Arbenz, for lack of a killer unit.  Threats of invasion and bribes won the army and he was ousted for our chosen dictator.  United Fruit won, and America lost face forever in Guatemala.
 
By the 60s it was clear that you didn’t always need a new, dirty government, you could just destabilize some states to create chaos.  In independent Congo, we bought the assassination of people’s hero, Patrice Lumumba, left power up for grabs, and hired the sick winner of the bloodbath that followed as our guy.
 
It got yet tougher to subvert countries in the 70s but our tactics were improving.  When Socialist Salvador Allende won election in Chile and began running it for the people, Kissinger’s CIA buckled down.  We cut off essential exports, jammed the banking system, bribed union leaders, jawboned crooked generals, and armed traitors inside.  In the end the coup went off well and our “partners” killed him.  We made our deal with General Augusto Pinochet, America’s fave dictator with the Shah for a time, as vicious a psychopath as Heinrich Himmler ever aspired to be.
 
That brings us to 50 years ago and rather than belabor the point by listing dozens more of our coups, some bloodier, clumsier, stupider than others, the prosecution rests.  What happened at the Capitol was a tantrum of the rabble not remotely resembling an effort to take over the country, QED.  Americans are self-absorbed, and much given to exaggeration.  And very fearful…
 
Well, we have much to be fearful about.  But it isn’t a Trumpian coup.  And it isn’t Russia or China.  Or Iran…  Or Communists, or Socialists, or Antifa, or Proud Boys, or BLM, or Q Anon…
 
What should fill you with terror, shake your soul, give you night sweats and hurt your heart, is the appalling truth that we are all  trapped in a system that cares nothing for its people or the world they inhabit, and that that people, facing looming manmade and natural catastrophe, hasn’t the courage and wisdom to save itself.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan21/reversal-fortune1-21.html

2021: If It Wasn't For Bad Luck, We Wouldn't Have No Luck At All

In our self-deluded hubris, we reckon we've moved beyond the influence of fortune, a.k.a. Lady Luck: our technologies are so powerful and our monetary policies so godlike that nothing as random as luck could ever crush our limitless expansion.

Thus does hubris beg for a comeuppance: the greater the hubris, the greater the reversal of fortune, the greater the confidence in our godlike powers, the greater the collapse of our prideful faith in technology and economic policies.

So we've enshrined our hubris-soaked happy story: the virus will naturally weaken, vaccines will conquer the Covid virus in short order, and by opening the monetary spigots and flooding the global economy with trillions in newly created currencies, we'll unleash the greatest boom in history, because it's so righteously "green."

We seem to have forgotten that to elicit a laugh, tell God your plans. We confused a sustained run of good fortune with godlike powers that are impervious to mere luck.

Unfortunately for all the true believers in our vaunted technology and human agencies, luck still matters, and after 50+ years of under-appreciated, fabulously good fortune, we're in the first at-bat of a sustained reversal of fortune, for as noted here many times, the way of the Tao is reversal: good luck doesn't last forever, nor is it some birthright of technologically advanced civilizations.

Are we ill-prepared for seven lean years of increasingly bad luck? Absolutely. Whatever technology can't resolve, trillions in newly issued currency will: either the magic of technology will work miracles, or the magic of limitless free money will work whatever miracles are left after technology wipes up the spot of bother.

If you wanted to script an unprecedented collapse of faith in the false gods of technology and money-printing, you'd outline exactly what transpired in 2020: a reckless dismissal of the pandemic followed by a monumental financial crash that opened the floodgates of free money, which triggered a massive "recovery" rally in risk assets, driving gamblers' confidence to new heights of fantasy.

All hail our new secular gods, the Federal Reserve, the most powerful force in the Universe!

Then you'd release miraculous vaccines that promised a permanent resolution to the pandemic and a measured return to the carefree pre-pandemic orgy of debt-based consumption. (Never mind the doubts of some experts about the vaccine protocols: Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed (Forbes.com) by William A. Haseltine)

Then you'd script the opening inning of the tragi-comedy unfolding in 2021: rather than fading as so many were pleased to confidently predict, the Covid virus has made remarkable gains in function, becoming more contagious and more elusive as multiple variants emerge globally.

Rather than conquering the virus, we're unable to even keep pace. The variant ravaging Britain was finally identified in late December, and subsequent sequencing of previously collected samples indicates that it emerged (or arrived) in September. In the meantime, this variant (and other mutations with similar characteristics) have spread around the world with business travelers, tourists, etc. One or more of these variants may reduce the efficacy of the much-hyped vaccines. It's all in this report from the New York Times:

As Coronavirus Mutates, the World Stumbles Again to Respond (New York Times)

Everything that was supposed to work smoothly due to our oh-so-advanced technological and administrative prowess in now either in doubt or in shambles. Consider the potential for less than 95% efficacy in the vaccines due to the interactions and mutually reinforcing dynamics of 1) vaccine hesitancy in those who understand the conventional processes of testing vaccines best, i.e. healthcare professionals; 2) the potential for consequential numbers of those who receive the first shot of vaccine failing to come back for the second shot due to unpleasant experiences after the first shot or other conditions such as being overworked, evicted, etc., and 3) variants further reducing the efficacy of the vaccines in unpredictable ways.

So let's say the efficacy drops from the promised 95% to 65%. Are you in the 2/3 camp who are protected by the vaccine from serious illness (though you may be a carrier and infect others, a possibility that was not tested by the trials protocols), or are you in the 1/3 camp who for whatever reason is no longer protected by the vaccine?

Since we're chasing a fast-mutating virus, there may not be a fast, accurate way to identify who's fully protected and who isn't. Since this may be unknowable, everyone will have to continue the behavioral methods of limiting exposure and transmission of the virus. In which case the vaccines will have accomplished very little in terms of returning the world to the pre-pandemic glory days of 2019.

If we have indeed begun a sustained reversal of fortune, it might be prudent to consider the possibility we're only in the first inning of a sustained run of back luck. We might want to consider learning a new theme song for 2021, Albert King's Born Under a Bad Sign (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): "If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all."

The cycles of human history are amenable to a reversal of fortune: please consider historian Peter Turchin's three indicators of systemic disorder: check, check and check.

Suppressing discussions about the potentially lavish banquet of consequences set by a reversal of fortune won't actually change the outcome of the next eight innings, it will only serve to increase the odds of catastrophically consequential decisions being made by those at the top of the hubris-heap.