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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-air-coming-out/

The Air Coming Out

Has the illustrious Dr. Fauci not just plumb shot his wad now?  Made himself — how do you put it delicately — something less than…uh… helpful… in the public health sphere? Worn out his welcome, a little bit? We have been a kind and generous nation through our history, after all, patient to a fault with all sorts of public rascals. I’m sure you would agree: an apology and discreet withdrawal from the scene might buy him a few years of elder peace at some ocean or desert retreat, dandling the grand-kids on his tender lap, even while the prosecutors construct their case… and by then, of course, the spike proteins moiling in the conus arteriosus of his shriveled heart — gift of his own marvelous science project — will have worked their hoodoo and punched his ticket to the great gain-of-function Palookaville up yonder.

Or is he, rather, begging for the rope at the end of the lamp-post now (along with a few thousand other public figures around the world)?  I mean… moving the goal-posts yet again the other day right there on CNN with the ever-glowering Kate Bolduan, saying it was “not a matter of if but when” conscience would provoke him, Dr. Fauci, a.k.a. The Science, to declare the already-vaxxed, even the multi-vaxxed and once-boosted, unvaxxed! The horror! I’d calculate that the internet campaign to purchase the aforesaid rope would take about ten seconds flat, including the log-in.

It’s beginning to look like Americans have had enough of this monkey business, losing their livelihoods, their futures, their reasons to live. And now this malignant dwarf of a government witch-doctor wants to come for their children? Homey don’t play that. And, by the way, Omicron is no Darth Vader and Dr. Fauci is no Obi-Wan Kenobi. Omicron is a punk-ass computer iteration of the original “SARS CoV-2” computer model of a frightful pandemic agent engineered to drive the Western advanced nations batshit crazy (literally) so as to distract them from the criminal ineptitude of their financial managers. And now that the virus narrative is unspooling it’s showtime for the terminal financial follies of the age.

How long could the folks over in accounting hold back the tides of default and bankruptcy? How many millions of fingers would you have to find to plug all the holes in that dike? For many years — probably as many as Kate Bolduan has been scowling — the damage has accrued as the industrial nations grappled with the conundrums of wealth production vis-à-vis the decline of primary energy resources, and they are fresh out of tricks. All that legerdemain with the suppression of interest rates and self-dealing in bonds, gaming the equity markets with surrogate shadow-bidders, playing hide-the-salami in structured investment vehicles and special purpose entities, and kiss-the-lizard with collateralized debt obligations, leveraged ETFs, credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, commodity swaps, currency swaps, binary options, subprime this-and-that, National League RBI futures, gentlemen’s bets and side-bets on bets, and plain old thieving bought the advanced nations a few decades of breathing room before the whole reeking scaffold of folly groaned and blew.

CBS-News reports this morning that “household wealth has surged an astonishing $36 trillion.” Our Federal Reserve says so in a 205-page statistics dump. Oh, really? Do you know what that is? It’s called air. Something you can see clean through because the thing that is supposed to be there is not there, namely, what money is supposed to represent. This is the financial narrative, cousin to the virus narrative — making manifest the non-manifest… a ghost story around civilization’s campfire. Any minute now, the air is going to come out of the family rooms in these hypothetical millions of suddenly rich households and the people within will suffocate financially. The New York Times will report them as Covid-19 deaths, I’m sure.

The now-notorious Chinese real estate giant Evergrande missed the coupon payments on its bonds the other day. Evergrande builds sixty-story apartment towers made (mostly) of sand. Somehow, the bag-holders even in China, where buying real-estate has enjoyed the rush of novelty in recent years, begin to scent the odor of failure in that bloated corpus of fraud. Who among the twelve regional Federal Reserve bank presidents here in the USA happened to short those bonds, I wonder, and is the Biden family operation sitting on any of that paper? Hunter would be dumb enough to take bundles of it in lieu of cash payment for, ahem, services rendered. Does Evergrande’s distress set off a financial contagion in China now, and does it spread around the world like a novel coronavirus?

Anyway, there’s enough foul air coming out of America’s own overleveraged house of financial horrors and Europe is a veritable Hindenburg of flammable gas waiting for a mere spark of static electricity to go kerblooey — even while it ramps up an epic persecution of its unvaxxed populace, at Christmas-time no less. What geniuses!

The authorities everywhere in Western Civ are suddenly short on legitimacy and at every level of every department and agency. What happens when nobody believes any of their bullshit anymore? I’ll tell you what happens: Hillary Rodham Clinton gives a “Master Class in Resilience” on YouTube. (Check out the “trailer” for it here.) Weep along with the old gal as she marinates in her special puddle of narcissism. She’s aiming to come back into the arena, you see, just as the phantom president “Joe Biden” fades into the woodwork, moaning as he vaporizes like Jacob Marley in chains.  And so HRC seizes opportunity, emerging like Rodan the Flying Reptile from her smoldering volcano of political slumber. She wants to share with you the heartwarming victory speech she failed to deliver in November of 2016, when Russia cheated her of her grand prize. She’s as sincere and authentic as a loaf of Velveeta. Her stepping on stage like this signals the end of something big. Batten down your Christmas tree. It’s going to be a bumpy ride into the holiday.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/12/10/as-fascism-casts-off-its-disguises/

As Fascism Casts Off Its Disguises

The US government has won its appeal against a lower British court’s rejection of its extradition request to prosecute Julian Assange for journalistic activity under the Espionage Act. Rather than going free, the WikiLeaks founder will continue to languish in Belmarsh Prison where he has already spent over two and a half years despite having been convicted of no crime.

“As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government’s long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it,” writes Glenn Greenwald. “Assange’s representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today’s victory for the U.S. means that Assange’s freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.”

“Mark this day as fascism casts off its disguises,” tweeted journalist John Pilger of the ruling.

This ruling which allows the US to continue working to extradite a journalist for exposing US war crimes comes on the final day of Washington’s so-called “Summit for Democracy“, where the US Secretary of State made a grandiose show about how press freedom “plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told” and said “The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world.”

This ruling also comes on UN Human Rights Day.

This ruling comes on the same day as two journalists formally received the Nobel Peace Prizes they’d been rewarded and demanded protections for journalists in their acceptance speech.

This ruling comes as the US government pledges hundreds of millions of dollars in support for “independent media” around the world in coordination with British state media.

This ruling comes after it was revealed that the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and assassinate Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy after the 2017 Vault 7 releases embarrassed the agency.

This ruling comes after it was revealed that CIA proxies spied on Assange and his lawyers at the Ecuadorian embassy, thereby making a fair trial in the United States impossible.

This ruling comes after it was revealed that the US prosecution relied on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester.

This ruling comes after recent investigative reports on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes reminded us why it’s so important for the press to be able to conduct critical natsec journalism on the most powerful military force ever assembled.

The facts are in and the case is closed: the US and its allies do not care about press freedoms beyond the extent that they can be used to conduct propaganda. The way journalists who offend the powerful are dealt with by the US government and the way they are dealt with by the Saudi monarchy differ only in terms of speed and messiness.

The masks are crumbling. Even when he is silenced, immobilized, locked up and hidden from public view, Julian Assange continues to shine a light on the abusive mechanisms of power. He is arguably exposing them more now than ever before.

As fascism casts off its disguises, it becomes more and more important to highlight the hypocrisy, fraudulence and depravity of the people who rule our world.