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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-mark-of-the-beast/

The Mark of the Beast

So, you’re feeling down and blue about the Woke Luciferian madness shading our American life under its baleful bat-wings? A lot of my friends and loved ones are down and blue. At this darkest of dark hours, I have some advice for you. Say ‘okay’ to whatever shade the universe is throwing on you. Rise! Go with it. Run with it and mount it. Ride it until you exhaust the beast that has made itself your enemy. Ride it until it goes to ground and whimpers. Because that is how it ends and you get your life back.

The frightful swans, black, white, and gray, are circling in the sky like those old air-traffic jams above the runways of O’Hare in bad weather. They are looking to land, and as they do, they will change everything. Enough people around the country will finally get their minds right. They will come back to themselves wondering… where have I been? This is what is coming at us (let’s count the ways):

The Covid-19 spell breaks. The beast thought it was a good idea to deprive millions of their livelihoods just to get its way and force them to submit to a medical experiment conceived in the utmost bad faith. You say your “vaccine” is defeating the plague that you schemed to create and beset the world with? We know exactly what you did. We know that most of the people getting sick now are the “vaccinated.” Look what happened in Israel. Too far to see? Look right here in Vermont. Your “vaccine” makes people sick. Soon, it will be self-evident everywhere that this “vaccine” is just another side of your boutique sickness.

Meanwhile, you’ve cleverly destroyed medicine itself by forcing the firings of nurses, doctors, and the people who clean up the hospitals. The people will not forgive you for this reckless and craven stupidity. And, of course, nobody knows the long-term effects of your jabbing spree. Has every vaxed-up person got a controlled demolition underway in their organs and blood vessels? Why are there suddenly a striking number of heart attacks and strokes tallied in Great Britain? Concerning, ya think? They’re counting, at least. In America, we’re not even tracking. This now-sinister enterprise called “The Science” doesn’t really want to see any numbers, and if any happen to come up, its minions like to play games with the math, which can tell any story they want it to.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere an energy crisis is upon us — but you knew it was there all along, or you should have known. Things don’t work well when the fossil fuels get scarce or pricey or have to come from so far away that getting them is beyond your control. When these things happen, everything you need costs more and some things quit working altogether.

The EU bureaucrats thought they would force a dozen countries to go “green” by sheer force of will. They thought that blocking the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — designed to bring Russian natgas to the West — was a good idea. “Joe Biden’s” first act in office was to shut down work on the Keystone pipeline. Look now, there’s color in the treetops and the temperatures are falling. That frost on the pumpkin isn’t so charming when there’s also frost inside your windowpanes. The lights may be going out in your house, but that will finally switch on the light in your brain. You’ve been played.

The global economy of interdependent super-systems is breaking apart. It seemed like a good idea at the time when the beast put it together… the Lexus and the Olive Tree and all that reassuring bullshit… and now times have changed. Now the supply lines are choking on their own hyper-complexity as each nation in the global “community” has to contend with its own bad decisions and the fragilities they have exposed. Chinese factories don’t work so well without Australian coal. Here’s an idea: maybe someday Australia will get back to work and learn how to make something with its own coal. (America, are you alert?)

The beast has decimated small business everywhere, leaving the people at the mercy of gigantic chain stores — with their dying business model — and now they can’t get any stuff because it comes from so far away, and the ships transporting it can’t dock because there’s nobody to unload it and there aren’t enough truck drivers to take it anywhere, all because of the beast’s reckless and craven stupidity. Let me light your fire, America: think about making your own stuff again, maybe not as much as before, but, honestly, we don’t need ten-foot-tall inflatable Santas and a lot of other plastic crap.

Sooner or later the capital markets are going to see how badly the beast has been playing them and the shock will make them roll over. The markets will reach a painful insight: that there is, after all, a direct relationship between capital and what people do on-the-ground in their daily lives — either honestly and earnestly making things, and usefully serving their fellow human beings, or else becoming a multitude of Hunter Bidens, moving from one grift to the next in a haze of drugs, making nothing of value and serving no one. That clarifying bolt of insight will, alas, leave a lot of people broke and just a little farther along, as the old gospel song goes, they will understand why.

We’re in for another wave of invasion down on the US-Mexican border. This one, with hundreds of thousands marching north, will make the previous episode at Del Rio, Texas, look like a mere yoga class in comparison. Is there any doubt that this is happening because the figures behind the phantom “Joe Biden” want it to happen? The “optics” are already atrocious, but how do you think it will play with ever more Americans thrown out of work, and the prices of food, home heating, and gasoline surging upward, and as citizens are hassled at every turn to show their vaccine papers (while the border-jumpers get free bus tickets to Oshkosh, Bangor, and Spokane, along with a package of re-settlement goodies paid for with tax dollars)? It might be enough to even awaken the Woke. Played again!

How do you like your FBI and DOJ turning on the citizens of this land, you mothers of and fathers of schoolchildren getting the Woke business from the cadres of Saul Alinsky, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama? How dare you foment domestic terrorism in the town offices where the school boards meet? Were you just sucking it up before, all these months, while your kids were subjected to the Drag Queen Reading Hour and the malicious inanities of anointed MacArthur Fellow Ibram X. Kendi? Now is your time to rise and respond.  No, Merrick Garland, you depraved little prick, we will not stand this anymore. We rise against you! We dare you to send your goons in!

Are you ready, perhaps for war? Other nations may be, sensing America’s signal weakness. How would you rate our most recent military performance in Afghanistan? Does it give you a warm inclusive feeling to know that our top brass ordered flight suits for pregnant pilots? And that they are on vigilant watch to prevent any white privilege from contaminating our tactics and strategy? Things are heating up and pulsing red in the Strait of Taiwan. Will China dare to seize the island as they dared to seize Hong Kong a year ago? We probably won’t have to wait for long to find out.

Daunting times for sure. But they are our times and we must own them. A lot of this is truly beyond our control, but not what happens here in our country among ourselves. And one thing you can begin to do right away, right now, is to defy the regime that affects to be running your lives. We may even, very suddenly as events unspool, arrive at a surprising consensus that we need to get rid of it.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/10/08/anyone-whod-support-going-to-war-over-taiwan-is-a-crazy-idiot/

Anyone Who’d Support Going To War Over Taiwan Is A Crazy Idiot

Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s really bringing out the crazy in people.

The mass media have been falsely reporting that China has been encroaching on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretched into the even more ludicrous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In reality Chinese planes simply entered an arbitrarily designated area hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Identification Zone”, which has no legally recognized existence and contains a significant portion of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the US and its allies have been constantly sailing war ships into disputed waters to threaten Beijing.

As Moon of Alabama reports, US warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to the press about the already public information that there are American troops in Taiwan training the military there, citing “concern” about the danger posed by China.

Now headlines are blaring about President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life.” Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just visited Taipei to advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to shoulder” with Taiwan against China. The CIA has announced the creation of a new spy center that will focus solely on China, which CIA Director William Burns says will “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century: an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.

A recent poll says that now more than half of Americans would support sending US troops to defend Taiwan from an invasion by the mainland, plainly the result of the aggressive propaganda campaign that has greatly escalated public hysteria about China. In Australia the mass media are cranking out unbelievably insane 60 Minutes episodes ridiculously pushing the idea that China may attack Australia and that Australians should be willing to go to war to protect Taiwan. I’ve been having many disturbing interactions with people online who emphatically support the idea of the US and its allies going to war with China over Taiwanese independence.

This is clearly nuts, and anyone who buys into this line of thinking is a brainwashed fool.

This isn’t some kind of complicated anti-imperialist issue, and it has nothing to do with which side you take in the debate over what government Taiwan belongs under. The US and its allies engaging in a full-scale war with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan is a prospect that should be vehemently opposed out of simple, garden variety self-preservation.

Obviously if Beijing decides to launch a military assault on Taiwan in its bid to reunify China that would be a terrible thing which would cause a lot of suffering. I don’t think that will happen unless western powers push Taipei into declaring independence or otherwise upset the delicate diplomacy dance in some major way, but if it does happen under any circumstances that would be awful.

But Taiwanese independence is not worth fighting a world war that could kill millions, and potentially billions if things go nuclear. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.

War proponents will reference Hitler, as they literally always do whenever there’s talk of war against someone the United States doesn’t like, arguing that China taking Taiwan would be like the Nazis invading Poland after which they’ll just keep invading and conquering until they are stopped. But there’s no evidence that China has any interest in invading Japan, much less Australia, still less everyone else, or that it has any ambitions on the world stage beyond reunification and securing its own economic and security interests.

The idea that China wants to take over a bunch of foreign lands, make you live under communism and give you a social credit score is the same kind of foam-brained bigoted othering which told previous generations that Black men want to take over your neighborhood so they can have sex with your wives. It’s the sort of belief that can only find purchase in an emotionally primitive mind that lacks the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand that not everyone wants what you have.

The jarring amount of pushback I’ve been getting for my very sane and moderate position that we should not be willing to start World War Three between nuclear powers over Taiwanese independence makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war. All the big brave warrior men bloviating about the need to stand up to China know they’ll never find themselves on the front line of that conflict because they’re too old, but they’ll happily send my kids and the kids of countless of other mothers to go and fight in it. It’s like a video game or a movie to them.

Propaganda has made us so compartmentalized and detached from the realities of the horrors of war. If people could really see what war is and what it does, truly grok deep down in their guts how their own governments are inflicting those horrors on people right now, they’d fall to their knees in anguish and never again advocate for such things. No sane person would support a war of this scale if they truly understood what it would mean.