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https://www.minds.com/CorbettReport/blog/do-not-go-back-to-sleep-this-is-not-the-end-1334727022018039814

Do NOT Go Back to Sleep! This is NOT the End!

Remember the end of The Return of the Jedi? It's something I've referenced a few times because it's a handy cultural signifier for a certain idea.

For those who don't know, here's the gist: Darth Vader is dead. The Empire has fallen. The Rebels have won! Time to party! Cut to a montage of the Ewoks dancing around Darth Vader's funeral pyre and joyous festivities being held across the galaxy.

. . . But we viewers know that this isn't really the end of the story. The battle has been won, but the war between good and evil has not been decided forever. It would be far too naïve of us to believe that.

Indeed, it's hard not to be reminded of that Darth Vader funeral party when looking at the recent signs that the scamdemic narrative is falling apart:

• England is dropping its mask requirements and "health pass" mandates;
• Biden's big biz vaxx mandate has been shot down by the Supremes and withdrawn by OSHA;
• The largest convoy in history is taking place in protest of the Canadian mandates;
• A major Danish Newspaper is apologizing for its uncritical COVID coverage;
• etc., etc.

If you're looking for it, the good news is everywhere right now. So, time for the Ewok dance party, right?

Well, hold on to your light saber, young paduwan. This battle is not over yet. You see, the would-be societal controllers have not given up the fight yet, and some of the rollback of the scamdemic restrictions that is happening right now could be part of a deception that is in fact furthering their agenda of control.

Different people have different names for this deception. Dave Cullen of Computing Forever calls it "Two Steps Forward and One Step Back." Over at Revelations Radio News, Tim and Andrew have attempted to warn their listeners about "The Strategic Rug Pull." Whatever you call it, the concept isn't difficult to grasp if you know how the Powers That Shouldn't Be operate.

In a nutshell, the danger is that if the "authorities" begin to relax the draconian controls that have been put in place in the name of the COVID-1984 scamdemic, the population might believe that they have won. That it's over. That they can stop worrying about the descent into tyranny. Meanwhile, the real work of hardwiring the infrastructure of the biosecurity state can continue on behind the scenes, unhindered by opposition from erstwhile freedom activists.

I went over a case study of this very phenomenon in the most recent edition of New World Next Week. As Americans will know by now, there is reason to celebrate: the Supreme Court has shot down the illegal and unconstitutional mandate requiring businesses with more than 100 employees to force their employees to get vaxxed (or to submit to weekly testing). And, in another seemingly positive follow-up, The US Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has withdrawn the "emergency temporary standard" (ETS) codifying that mandate.

Yay! Time for the Ewok dance party!

. . . Until you read the fine print, that is. You'd have to persist past the headline and the opening blather of the MSM coverage of the story to discover that this is not the end of the war. As I pointed out on New World Next Week, the OSHA press release on the ETS withdrawal explicitly concedes that although they are withdrawing the temporary standard, they are only doing so in order to prepare a permanent rule:

"Although OSHA is withdrawing the vaccination and testing ETS as an enforceable emergency temporary standard, the agency is not withdrawing the ETS as a proposed rule. The agency is prioritizing its resources to focus on finalizing a permanent COVID-19 Healthcare Standard."

What? They are finalizing a permanent "Healthcare Standard" for COVID-19? What does that mean? What does that entail?

Too bad for you if you want more info on that. You certainly won't find an answer to those questions in the press release itself.

If you do persist in digging through the OSHA website, you will find a statement from U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh on the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month. In the statement, Walsh confirms that he is "disappointed in the court’s decision" and reaffirms that "OSHA stands by the Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard as the best way to protect the nation’s workforce from a deadly MacGuffin that is infecting more than 750,000 Americans each day and has taken the lives of nearly a million Americans." (OK, I changed one word in that quotation. I'll let you follow the link to find out which one.) The statement ends with the threat that "OSHA will do everything in its existing authority to hold businesses accountable for protecting workers."

If you want the really ominous news, though, you'll have to leave the OSHA website entirely and head on over to The National Law Review, which informs its readers about the ETS withdrawal before adding some highly relevant information:

"In the same announcement, OSHA clarified that the text of the ETS will remain in place to solicit additional comments from the general public so that, according to OSHA, the agency can 'prioritiz[e] its resources to focus on finalizing a permanent COVID-19 Healthcare Standard.' If OSHA follows this path, the final rule will be published no later than May 5, 2022." [Emphasis mine.]

Yes, folks, the "withdrawal" of this ETS turns out to be a charade after all. The text will "remain in place" while they "solicit additional comments from the general public" so that they can finalize the rule and enact it in May.

Yay? Nay. Cancel the dance party.

This is the quintessential demonstration of the One Step Forward Two Steps Back Rug Pull.

Sadly, it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how this exact type of distraction operation can be used in any number of situations to lull the public into letting their guard down on a key agenda item.

For the hard of thinking, let me be clear what I am saying here: successes, however minor and fleeting, are still good things. They should be celebrated and encouraged . . . but not at the expense of our eternal vigilance against the forces of control.

The freedom convoy in Canada is a good thing. Can it be corrupted and co-opted? Of course. Can agents provocateurs go in and provoke acts of violence or destruction in the name of freedom lovers? Of course. Will the entire spectacle cement in the minds of some that our fundamental freedoms are the government's to give or to take away and that our only option is to ask them for our rights back? Of course.

But absolutely any movement or protest or idea in the world can be spun to portray freedom-lovers as violent, dangerous or silly people by those who control the mass media. The point is that we know people who are supporting the convoy for the right reasons. We know that there is a tidal shift in public opinion happening in Canada right now and the political puppets are working so hard to demonize it (or run away from it) precisely because it can represent a "storming of the Bastille" moment for a genuine freedom movement. And we can bypass the mass media control and directly influence the public's understanding of these events for ourselves.

Even the fact that OSHA is having to use a strategic withdrawal tactic demonstrates that they know they don't have the support of the public on this issue. They have to resort to subterfuge and underhanded tactics because if what they were doing were widely known the public would not stand for it.

So yes, these are steps in the right direction and we should encourage freedom fighters and activists in their efforts. . . .

But let's hold off on that dance party for now. There's still a lot of work to be done.

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/81670/ron-paul-were-all-canadian-truckers.html

"We're All Canadian Truckers Now!"

We all remember where we were when the Berlin Wall came down. While it may have seemed that communist rule would go on forever, when the people decided that they had enough suddenly the wall fell. Just like that.

Thus it is after two years of Covid authoritarianism that in Canada the largest truck convoy in history has smashed through the Berlin Wall of tyranny. I have watched as the Canada I once respected as a haven for antiwar Americans in the 1960s turned into one of the most repressive countries on earth. I wondered how a freedom-loving people could allow themselves to be abused by these mini-Stalins without a peep.

But then Canada stood up and showed the rest of the world that freedom can triumph over tyranny if the people demand it. As I say, no army can stop an idea whose time has come.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had been basking in his ability to terrorize the population in the name of fighting a virus. He was so confident in his seemingly unlimited power that he felt he could ridicule any Canadian with different views. The prime minister said in a recent interview that unvaccinated Canadians were “extremists,” “misogynists,” and “racists.”

When the Canadian truckers stood up to his tyranny and began their historic convoy to Ottawa, he thought he could continue ridiculing people. The truckers and their supporters were just a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views,” he confidently claimed. For Trudeau, love of liberty is just an “unacceptable view.”

Less than a week later, as tens of thousands of trucks began entering the capital with millions of supporters behind them, the “brave” Canadian prime minister had fled the city and shuffled off to an undisclosed location.

As Elon Musk Tweeted, “It would appear that the so-called ‘fringe minority’ is actually the government.”

The Canadian mainstream media is obviously just as obedient to the regime as ours. They ignored the Freedom Convoy for as long as possible. There was almost no reporting. Then, when it became impossible to ignore, they began to attack and ridicule instead of trying to report it accurately. It was disgusting and almost comical to see a “reporter” from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation suggest that the Canadian Freedom Convoy was cooked up by Putin and the Russians!

Thousands of trucks have arrived in Ottawa. They demand an end to covid tyranny. They are backed by millions of citizens, who braved the Canadian winter at night to cheer the truckers on.

This protest is so important because it’s not limited to Canada. The truckers are being supported worldwide, and a similar convoy is being planned from California to Washington, DC. In a US where grocery store shelves are increasingly bare, the truckers have more leverage than the powers-that-be would like to admit.

If I were prime minister of totalitarian Australia or New Zealand – or most anywhere in Europe – I would be getting pretty nervous right now. Just as the Covid tyranny descended across the globe in a seemingly coordinated fashion, now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Canadian truck drivers. Let’s all do whatever we can to help the freedom movement continue to gather steam!

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-revolt-begins/

The Revolt Begins 

The Canadian trucker rebellion, rolling east across the vast, frozen Canadian prairie, blew into the country’s Woked-up capital city, Ottawa, like the scalding wrath of history, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to skulk off punkishly under cover of night — after bad-mouthing the big-rig invaders as “a fringe minority” in a nation of otherwise obedient hypnotics sleepwalking into Big Pharma’s spike-protein fun-factory of all-causes early death.

The news media is working super-hard to avoid reporting the event, of course. Canada’s leading paper, The Toronto Star, put up a peevish little item complaining that a protester hung an upside-down maple leaf flag on a statue of national hero Terry Fox (a cancer-stricken athlete who ran across most of the country on a prosthetic leg in 1981 to raise cancer-awareness). The paper also mentioned that “[a] discordant symphony of truck horns blared across downtown Ottawa as demonstrators geared up for their second full day on local streets.” Beyond that, the paper lost interest.

Canada under the Trudeau government has been more restrictive on Covid-19 than the Big Gorilla to its south, with the population compliantly following all the insane, economy-wrecking rules, until a recent mandate to vaxx-up every last trucker in the land finally sparked-off a revolt. Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party failed to win a parliamentary majority in last September’s federal election, and he heads a flimsy coalition potentially facing a no-confidence vote that would drive the PM out of office.

For now, the truckers seem determined to stick around and disrupt the Canadian capital. Their estimated 50,000 rigs could surround the city and create siege conditions, where food supplies and other goods won’t get in, starving the government into surrendering on its mandates and restrictions. So far, the local Ottawa police have stood by with a very light hand, and there are rumors that they are on the same page as the truckers against federal overreach.

Will Mr. Trudeau resort to using the military to break up the revolt? Good luck with that. Like virtually every other “advanced” nation, Canada depends on trucks and truckers to move everything needed for everyday life. The truckers can just say no… we don’t feel like working this month. No poutine or Cornish pasties for you, Ottawa! Then what? Throw them all in jail? How will that help move stuff from Point A to Point B? It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction.

The Canadian revolt appears to be inspiring similar operations in the US, where a movement has started for a massive trucker convoy from California to Washington, DC — the swampy pivot-point of Covid tyranny under the phantasm known as “Joe Biden” — as a very general way of saying we’ve had enough of being pushed around by political grifters and their bureaucratic subalterns.

The Covid-19 saga gets darker every day, while the official alibis, cover-stories, and disinfo ops bend ever deeper toward an arc of criminality. The US government has lied about every plot-line in the two-year horror show. In fact, a conscientious observer would have to conclude the following: That the government’s highest-paid employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, led surreptitiously in the creation and release of a bioweapon; that he and his cohorts, along with the pharma companies, and other interested parties such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, enabled the release of so-called “vaccines” (genetic treatments) that were at least as deadly as the disease itself; that as a result of the shots many people of all ages will die before their natural time; that the process is already underway as documented in the all-causes death data tallied by insurance companies; that the same government officials maliciously suppressed viable, inexpensive, FDA-approved treatments for Covid-19 in order to herd the populace into receiving dangerous “vaccines”; that said officials have worked strenuously to muddle and fake the statistics that would show who is actually dying of what; and that the entire fiasco appears to have been ginned up in order to systematically control the population in ways contrary to our natural rights while killing off a substantial number of us.

Let the trucks roll from Fresno to DC if they still want to play rough. Think the “Joe Biden” gang will try to divert attention by starting a war in Ukraine? They don’t dare. Think the financial markets will tank? Well, of course they will, no matter what, because the markets and the money are detached from reality. Face it: what America needs most of all is to reconnect with reality, and you can be sure that the process will be uncomfortable, having sojourned so far from it for so long. (“Let’s Go, Brandon!”) And Let’s go, Canadian truckers!

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56973.htm

U.S. Says ‘Wants Peace Not War’ as It Arms Ukraine to the Teeth

American Secretary of State Antony Blinken is shuttling across Europe this week vowing that Washington “desperately wants peace not war” with Russia. This touchy-feely sentiment comes amid reports of additional American and British weapons supplies heading to the NATO-backed Kiev regime.

Ukraine has already been massively weaponized by the United States since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 brought to power a Neo-Nazi regime obsessed with antagonizing Russia. The Biden administration has boosted inventories for anti-tank missiles and other lethal weaponry with plans for further increases. Now it emerges that additional supplies are on the way from both the U.S. and Britain. Britain is to send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine along with “military advisors”.

Moscow this week condemned the increased flow of weapons to Ukraine, saying it is recklessly stoking already fraught tensions. The new supply of anti-armor missiles from the U.S. and Britain – reported only days after high-level talks on regional security between Russian and NATO officials were conducted last week – would seem to be one more proof that the Western powers are secretly pushing for war with Russia despite rhetoric appealing for a diplomatic solution.

The frenzy for warmongering seems to have taken over any reasoned dialogue or obligation to diplomacy and international law. Washington and its European allies are whipping up the hysteria of alleged Russian invasion plans for Ukraine. Blinken flew to Kiev on Wednesday claiming that Russia was ready to invade Ukraine “imminently”. The American foreign minister then flew to Berlin to meet with German, British and French counterparts to discuss ratcheting up further economic pain on Russia over its alleged “aggression”. The German government announced this week it was prepared to halt the Nord Stream 2 gas project “if Russia invaded Ukraine”.

The New York Times reported claims that Russia was closing down its embassy staff in Kiev and speculated that the move was a portent of Moscow’s anticipation of war. Russia dismissed the report as groundless and said its consular staff was working as normal in Ukraine. The Ukrainian foreign ministry also appeared to corroborate Russia’s claims.

Russia has repeatedly rejected allegations of an invasion plan. It says that troop movements within its borders are its internal business that requires no explanation. Even the New York Times which has been pushing the invasion narrative admitted this week that American intelligence claims of Russian troop build-up on the border with Ukraine have not materialized.

Moscow says that the military build-up is actually by the Ukrainian armed forces supported by U.S., British, Canadian and other NATO military advisors. Russia maintains that the allegations of a Russian invasion are a cover for the NATO-backed Kiev regime to launch an offensive against the ethnic Russian population of Southeast Ukraine, who have been fighting a civil war with Kiev forces since 2014 when the CIA fomented a coup d’état.

Blinken is due to meet with Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Friday. The Kremlin has said that it expects a legal, written response from the United States regarding the security proposals that Moscow presented last week to American and NATO officials. Those proposals included a commitment from the U.S. and NATO to desist from further eastward expansion and for withdrawal of existing offensive weaponry from Eastern Europe.

American and European NATO allies have already verbally dismissed Russia’s security proposals as “non-starters”. They stated that Russia does not have a veto on NATO deployments. This is a high-handed and provocative rebuff to Russia’s concerns over the threatening encroachment of offensive military forces on its borders.

The United States and its partners seem to be deliberately kicking Russia’s existential concerns into the long grass. Not reciprocating promptly to the security guarantees that Moscow explicitly delineated last week shows that the U.S.-led NATO bloc is menacingly playing for time to wear down Russia’s resolve.

Antony Blinken has made lame excuses for not responding to Russia’s strategic security proposals by saying that the United States needs to first consult with other NATO allies and partners. Washington is making out that it is constrained by an obligation to seek consensus and consultation. Moscow is being told that it will have to put its security concerns on hold while the U.S. confers with its European counterparts. Who knows when that nebulous process will end?

Curiously, there was no such need for “consultation” by Washington when it decided to dramatically pull out of Afghanistan last year. After 20 years of grinding, futile war, the Biden administration did not bother to inform other NATO members about the sudden military withdrawal. Indeed, European appeals for a slower withdrawal were pointedly ignored by Washington which had decided unilaterally to close down operations in Afghanistan.

The notion that the United States indulges consensus and consultation among NATO members is an absurd delusion. Washington, as the presumed hegemonic power, decides alone when and when not to go to war, and its NATO subordinates fall into line like the good little flunkeys that they are.

The militarization in Ukraine is being led by the United States, along with its trusty British bulldog. The conclusion is that Washington has decided to ramp up the push for war against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy – and using a twisted narrative about Russian aggression and invasion. The rebuffing of a historic security detente with Moscow is being disguised by the facade of Washington appearing to be chivalrous and courteous to purportedly find a consensus with allies.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/01/30/msm-pundits-push-idea-that-criticizing-us-policy-on-russia-makes-you-a-russian-agent/

MSM Pundits Push Idea That Criticizing US Policy On Russia Makes You A Russian Agent

One thing I’ve been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.

Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequently criticizing the Biden administration’s hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been seeing things like Anderson Cooper innocently musing that “It is striking how neatly Kremlin propaganda seems to dovetail with Carlson’s talking points” and this CNN segment from December with Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and tinfoil hat Russiagater Julia Ioffe wondering aloud about why Russian state media seem to be so fond of Carlson. By mid-January, Democratic Party operatives were openly demanding that Carlson be investigated for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States,” tweeted former DNC official Alexandra Chalupa, best known for colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 on opposition research against Donald Trump.

The accusations and insinuations increased, eventually leading to Carlson outright denying being a Russian agent in a recent interview with The New York Times saying, “I’ve never been to Russia, I don’t speak Russian. Of course I’m not an agent of Russia.”

As you would expect, this denial was then spun by the same demented mainstream pundits who’ve spent the last five years being wrong about Russia as evidence that Carlson is a Russian agent.

“Tucker Carlson told The New York Times he’s not a Russian agent amid controversy over his pro-Kremlin stance,” blares a headline by Business Insider.

“What would a Russian agent say if asked if they were a Russian agent?” tweeted former FBI special agent Clint Watts in response to Carlson’s denial.

“Tucker Carlson Denies Being Russian Agent After Taking Kremlin’s Side,” says a viral tweet by former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi.

“Narrator: After he helped destroy American Democracy, it turned out he was, indeed, a Russian agent … though a rather silly one,” added MSNBC’s cartoonish “intelligence” expert Malcolm Nance.

“Tucker Carlson is walking proof that you don’t need to be an agent to be a useful idiot,” former FBI agent Peter Strzok told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, apparently less willing to commit to the bit than his FBI peers.

“Why hasn’t Tucker Carlson registered as a foreign agent?” reads a viral tweet from the notorious Lincoln Project.

I’ve never gotten used to the insane McCarthyite accusations which US liberals will hurl without a second thought at anyone who disagrees with them. Every time it happens it startles and alarms me, and this latest trend of claiming that opposition to US military posture toward a nuclear superpower constitutes evidence of being a treasonous foreign intelligence operative is a marked uptick in the madness.

I’m highlighting this deranged behavior not to defend the odious Carlson, but to point out that it works very much in the US empire’s favor to have a bunch of influential narrative managers aggressively manufacturing the consensus that anyone who criticizes America’s posture toward Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.

The mass media, whose primary job is to propagandize the masses and who have an extensive history of lying to the public to manufacture consent for war, are not pushing the belief that Tucker Carlson is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. They are pushing the belief that anyone is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. That’s the message that people are receiving from this line that’s being pushed by narrative managers and ex-federal agents. Anyone who is successfully indoctrinated with this belief will become inoculated against wrongthink about that nation because they will reflexively distrust the motives of anyone who says anything that differs from the officially authorized line.

That’s the real value of this framing for the imperial propagandists. They don’t care about Tucker Carlson, who serves their agendas more often than not. They care about making sure that current and future establishment narratives about Russia will be swallowed hook, line and sinker by the mainstream public without the slightest twinge of gag reflex. You don’t even need to silence dissent if you can simply render it impotent.

It’s worth considering the possibility that all the artificially manufactured Russia hysteria we’ve seen over the last five years has been geared toward building public support for the exact escalations we are seeing today. After all, it says a lot that Russiagate began with unevidenced claims by US intelligence agencies who have an extensive track record of lying, resulted in the reignition of a new cold war against a nation long targeted for destruction by the US intelligence cartel, and now there are tons of weapons being flown in to Ukraine and US troops are being moved to Eastern Europe in response to a threat we’ve still seen no evidence is actually real.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can control what people believe about a certain thing, then you can control what they will do and what they will allow in response to that thing. Controlling people’s beliefs about reality is controlling their reality. If you can convince people that anyone who disputes what you’re saying about a government you don’t like is suspicious and not to be trusted, then you can keep them believing everything you say about that government.

It’s clear that it is very, very important to the narrative managers that we believe what we are told about Russia. Now we’re just waiting to find out toward what specific end that agenda is being driven.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan22/skittish1-22.html

No Wonder the Market Is Skittish

1. Every time the Federal Reserve began to taper quantitative easing / open spigot of liquidity over the past decade, reduce its balance sheet or raise rates from near-zero, the market plummeted ("taper tantrum") and the Fed stopped tightening and returned to easy-money expansion.

2. Now the Fed is boxed in by inflation--it can't continue the bubblicious easy-money policies, nor does it have any room left to lower rates due to its pinning interest rates to near-zero for years.

3. So market participants (a.k.a. punters) are nervously wondering: can the U.S. economy and the Fed's asset bubbles survive higher rates and the spigot of liquidity being turned off?

4. The market is also wondering if the economy can survive the pricking of the "everything" asset bubbles in stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. as interest rates rise and liquidity is withdrawn. What's left of "growth" once the top 10% no longer see their wealth expand every month like clockwork?

5. The unprecedented expansion of asset valuations driven by expansions of credit and liquidity (i.e. low-cost credit chasing scarce assets) has greatly increased the wealth of the top 10% (especially the wealth of the top 0.1% and top 1%). Since the top 10% collect about half of all income and account for roughly half of all consumer spending, the "wealth effect" generated by ever-rising asset valuations has underpinned "growth" in both asset purchases and consumption.

If assets actually decline in value and the wealth effect reverses (i.e. punters feel poorer), then what will drive expansion of capital and spending going forward?

6. The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury have institutionalized moral hazard, the disconnect of risk and consequence, for America's financial elite: rather than force those who gambled and lost to absorb the losses in 2008-09, the Fed and Treasury bailed out the too big to fail, too big to jail financial elite, establishing an unspoken policy of encouraging the wealthiest individuals and enterprises to borrow and gamble freely, knowing they could keep any winnings (and pay low or no taxes on the gains) and transfer any losses to the Fed and/or taxpayers.

7. This institutionalization of moral hazard combined with zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and an open spigot of liquidity has driven wealth and income inequality to extremes that are economically, politically and socially destabilizing. Insider trading in the Fed and Congress has finally leached out into the public sphere, and the cozy enrichment of the already super-wealthy has now reached extremes that invite destabilizing blowback.

8. As noted here recently, inflation is now embedded due to structural, cyclical changes in supply chains and the labor market: rather than importing deflation, global supply chains now import inflation (higher costs) and scarcities. After being stripmined of $50 trillion over the past 45 years, labor has finally gained some leverage to claw back a bit of the purchasing power that has been surrendered to corporations and finance over the past two generations.

9. Inflation spirals out of control if the cost of credit (interest rates) don't rise to reward capital with inflation-adjusted income: if inflation is 6% annually, a bond paying 1% loses 5%. This is not sustainable, for it distorts the pricing of risk.

10. As rates rise, lower-risk bonds become more attractive than risky stocks, and capital leaves stocks for income-producing securities. Rising rates are historically bad for stocks, so what will keep stock markets lofting higher if rates rise, liquidity is reduced and capital exists risky stocks?

11. The stock market is overvalued by traditional measures of value, and any mean reversion will lower the market significantly. So what's left to push risk assets higher? The only answers with any substance are: A) rising profits due to companies having pricing power in an inflationary environment and workers getting more purchasing power so they can afford to pay higher prices and B) massive inflows of global capital due to perceptions of lower risk and higher returns in U.S. dollar denominated assets. If neither transpires, there's no real support for stocks to continue lofting ever higher.

12. The equity, real estate and bond markets all rode the coattails of the Fed's ZIRP and easy-money liquidity tsunami for the past 13 years. As those subside, what's left to drive assets higher? It's an open question, and so skittishness is rational and prudent.

In summary: by rewarding financialization and the largest concentrations of capital at the expense of labor, small business and productivity, the Federal Reserve and federal / state governments have made the economy and society precariously dependent on asset bubbles, corruption (pay to play politics) and financial trickery. The only real foundation for growth is to widen the distribution of gains in productivity, shift the gains from capital to labor and reward small-scale investment in productivity gains rather than funnel all the gains into asset bubbles and financialized casinos that enrich the top 0.1% at the expense of the nation and its people.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-narrow-escape-tyranny-war-freedom-not-over/5768427

We Have Had a Narrow Escape from Tyranny but the War on Freedom Is Not Over

On January 23 I reviewed on this website Kees Van Der Pijl’s new book, States of Emergency. Van Der Pijl answers the question so many people have of why and how a fake “deadly pandemic” was orchestrated with worldwide participation in the fraud.

He shows that the event was long in the making by a global elite consisting of philanthropists such as Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, elite organizations such as the World Economic Forum, tech companies and multi-billionaire owners, Fauci at NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO, pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists, and elite organizations and groups created for the purpose of concentrating power and advancing and protecting the global elites’ rule by using fear to condition the masses to being controlled and deprived of a voice and alternative explanations. I had been thinking along these lines, but lacked Van Der Pijl’s detailed knowledge of the personalities, organizations and groups and the interactions and cooperation between them. He gives us the story. It was an elaborate exercise in massive deception and censorship that was able to discredit the world’s most renowned medical scientists and to elevate pure fiction to fact and public policy.

We owe it to ourselves to read States of Emergency in order to come to terms with the fact that we are ruled by people devoid of integrity to whom truth is an inconvenience and who are concerned solely with their control and power.

We need to read the book also to understand how things really work, how decisions are really made, how careers are made and ended by whether or not you serve the narrative and how well, how regulatory agencies such as FDA, NIH, CDC, WHO are in fact marketing departments for Big Pharma, how politicians’ positions are dictated by the sources of their campaign funds, why universities and the media must function as Ministries of Propaganda for the ruling elites and their narratives, how Fauci and Big Pharma control content in medical journals via grants to medical researchers. Van Der Pijl writes that pharmaceutical industry research grants make the industry the co-author of many articles and that more than half of all The Lancet‘s revenues come from pharmaceutical companies orders of reprints of articles supportive of their products. Van Der Pijl writes “According to the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, who had 20 years of experience, it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the published clinical research.”

Video: Big Pharma Imposed the “Vaccine” and “Digital Certificate”: “Undisclosed Contract” with EU. Members of the European Parliament Press Conference

The gullible, patriotic American who reads this book will have his eyes opened and become a new person. Van Der Pijl has written the book that can save Americans from their insouciance.

In October 2019 just prior to unleashing the “pandemic” on the world, what was about to happen was first tested in a simulation. The participants were: the Bloomberg-financed Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the CDC, the (American trained) head of the Chinese health authority, a former deputy director of the CIA, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and so on.

The participants were primarily concerned with protecting the planned deception from being exposed. They relied on social media and the presstitutes to control the narrative and censor the truth. They considered whether to close the Internet altogether, but were assured that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google would only allow news in keeping with the narrative and flood the Internet with information that confirms the narrative while discrediting and blocking the truth. Admiral Stephen Redd of the US Public Health Service thought that people on social media with “negative beliefs,” that is, those who took issue with the narrative, should be tracked down by intelligence services. Singapore’s finance minister said dissidents should be arrested and brought to justice. The head of the Chinese health authority worried that suspicion might arise that the virus originated in a laboratory. Johnson & Johnson wondered if the deaths and injuries in the vaccine trials should be suppressed in order to prevent public suspicion of the poorly tested vaccine.

The participants claim they were just playing a germ game, but the simulation ensured that all was in place to control the explanation prior to the release of the “pandemic.”

The research basis of Van Der Pijl’s book is massive and the information earth-shattering. I intend to return to this book in future articles. But don’t wait on me. Buy the book and read it once, twice, three times. Civil liberty in the US cannot survive if people are too lazy to inform themselves.

When the US government ceased meaningful regulation on the basis of Alan Greenspan’s assertion that “markets are self-regulating” and ceased to enforce its anti-trust laws, massive economic concentration resulted, producing individuals whose wealth greatly exceeded the budgets of public health agencies and even some countries. This gave single individuals enormous power over governments. Van Der Pijl writes that from 2004 onwards, just the annual health grants of the Gates Foundation alone exceeded the annual budget of the World Health Organization. Gates Foundation directors are executives from Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Bayer Health Care Services, companies whose stocks are owned by the Gates Foundation. This is just a tiny indication of the power that wealth concentration has given a handful of individuals over government policy.

Van Der Pijl believes that the elite’s use of an orchestrated “pandemic” to solidify their control was too ambitious and has failed. What his optimism overlooks is the possibility that another more dangerous virus will be set upon us and the fear created will sap all resistance. The Covid attempt almost succeeded, especially in Australia, Canada, Austria, Italy, and Germany. In the US it was blocked by the judiciary and by governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis. A second run at the unorganized and uninformed peoples of the world could succeed.

Is this an indication that a more deadly coronavirus is about to be released, one for which all treatments have been banned? See this.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/biden-spits-putin-request-security/5768401

Biden Spits on Putin’s Request for Security

“The main issue is our clear position on the unacceptability of further NATO expansion to the East and the deployment of highly-destructive weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

Washington delivered a slap in the face to Moscow on Wednesday when U.S. ambassador John Sullivan provided a written response to Russia’s proposals for security guarantees. The missive was given to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko who did not reveal the contents but passed them on to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for analysis. Lavrov, in turn, issued a statement on Thursday morning confirming our worst suspicions that the Biden administration has shrugged off Russia’s reasonable demands choosing instead to intensify the provocations that are likely to trigger a war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. This is an excerpt from an article at Tass News Agency:

“The United States and NATO don’t seem to have taken Russia’s concerns on security guarantees into account when drawing up responses to Moscow’s proposals, nor did they demonstrate any willingness to do so, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

“The numerous statements that our colleagues made yesterday make it clear that as for the major aspects of the draft agreements that we earlier presented to other parties, we can’t say that they took our concerns into account or showed any readiness to take our concerns into consideration.” (Tass News Agency)

Peskov is right, on the core issues the US either issued no clear response or refused to comply. In effect, the US response was designed to look like Washington was honestly negotiating when in fact, they were merely reinforcing their original position. The US response is essentially a defense of Washington’s commitment to rule the world by force and to ignore the legitimate demands of weaker states to provide even minimal security for their people. If the US and NATO are allowed to pursue their present course of action, Russian cities and towns will be within 7 to 10 minutes of nuclear missiles located in nearby Romania and Poland. Russia’s are being asked to live with a nuclear dagger pointed at their throats. This is Biden’s idea of global security. Is it any wonder why Putin does not agree? Here’s part of what Lavrov said on Thursday:

“There is no positive reaction on the main issue in this document. The main issue is our clear position that further NATO expansion to the east and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation are unacceptable.”

Lavrov has summed it up perfectly. While Sullivan was delivering his response to Grushko, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued a statement saying the Alliance “will not compromise” on potential expansion into Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics, as this clashes with the NATO’s principles.” Stoltenberg’s statement removes any doubt that NATO will not only continue its eastward expansion onto Russia’s doorstep, but feels thoroughly justified in doing so. As we noted earlier, NATO’s response confirms that Washington is still committed to its overarching plan to rule the world by force regardless of how ordinary people are impacted by the policy.

Moscow to Washington: “Remove the Nukes on Our Doorstep and Stop the Eastward Push”

On Thursday morning, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev reiterated the recently-verified claim that NATO’s eastward expansion violates the promises of US officials to Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“They promised not to expand NATO, but didn’t keep their promise,” Medvedev said speaking with the Russian media. “They say that ‘we did not sign anything.’ But we all know well who and when granted to whom such promises, such assurances….. They failed to keep their promises. They are now encroaching on our state borders.”

The steady eastward movement of troops, the buildup of lethal military hardware, and the deployment of nuclear weapons all pose an existential threat to Russia that suffered horrific losses in World War 2. The Biden administration seems to believe their sinister plan is working since people in the west generally believe reports in the media that the fake threat of “Russian invasion” is an honest account of what is actually going on the ground. But there is no threat of a Russian invasion; the story was stitched together to divert attention from Russia’s security demands which are both reasonable and appropriate. Once again, the media is shaping a narrative to fit the policy which is the very description of state propaganda.

In an effort to further downplay the importance of Moscow’s requests, US officials characterized their written response not as “a formal document but a set of ideas for further discussion.” What this means is that Washington does not feel that that Russia is its equal so it does not feel required to enter into a treaty agreement with them. Keep in mind, this response does not in any way meet the basic requirements that were clearly outlined by Putin repeatedly in December when he said thatRussia wanted a written, legally-biding treaty that could not be sloughed off by countries that prefer to conduct an impulsive, self-aggrandizing, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants foreign policy that has left great swathes of the Middle East and Central Asia in an utter shambles. Indeed, this may not be a “formal document”, but it is clear that there will be a formal document or there will be no agreement and no peace. The choice is Washington’s.

On the issue of nuclear missile sites in Poland and Romania, as well as, the development of military bases in Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated that Washington was still open to discussion.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that if Russia were to approach this seriously, and in a spirit of reciprocity, with the determination to enhance collective security for all of us, there are very positive things in this document that should be pursued,” he said.

“Positive things”, says Blinken?

There are no “positive things” in the American response. The response is a flagrant and contemptible rejection of Moscow’s core demands on NATO expansion and the deployment of nuclear missiles to locations on Russia’s border. To understand what a fraud the Biden administration is engaged in, please, take a look at this brief excerpt from the draft treaty that Russia presented to NATO and Washington.

The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them……

The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.

Article 7

The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories.” (“Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” Official Russian State Document, December 17, 2021)

Is there anything ambiguous in the language of this document?

No, there isn’t.

The US was asked to respond in writing to these explicit demands. No one is in the slightest bit interested in Blinken’s vague pontifications on “positive things”. It’s completely irrelevant. What Putin wants to know is whether US nukes are going to remain 7 minutes flight-time from Moscow and whether a hostile foreign army is going to be hunkered down in nearby Ukraine. He wants to know whether Washington plans to put a gun to Russia’s head in order to increase its power in the region. That’s what he wants to know, and that’s what this foreign policy debacle is all about.

What Blinken’s response tells us is that the provocations are going to continue unabated whether they ignite a war or not. Even as we speak, the US is sending more lethal weaponry and troops to the Ukrainian theater while other NATO allies promise to assist in the effort. It is madness.

At the same time, President Joe Biden is threatening to impose “direct personal sanctions” on Putin if the Russian president takes action to defend the Russian-speaking people in East Ukraine. The threat was issued just hours after the State Department told Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov that he “would have to leave the US by April if Moscow fails to meet certain demands made by Washington.” While these may seem like trivial developments, the two incidents help to illustrate how relations between the two nations are fast deteriorating increasing the prospect of a tragic miscalculation that could precipitate a bloody and protracted conflagration.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/old-man-look-at-your-life/

Old Man, Look at Your Life….

Rock’n’roller Neil Young’s conniption over having to share the Spotify platform with Joe Rogan affords a glimpse into the glutenous mire that is a mind bethinking itself “progressive” these drear days of American unraveling. For those of you not tuned in: Joe Rogan is a comedian and martial arts maven who runs the most popular podcast in the world, renowned for long-form interviews (three hours sometimes!) often with high-powered intellectuals. A month ago, he interviewed the mRNA developer Dr. Robert Malone, who has become an outspoken opponent of the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccines,” and of the US-led world pandemic policy in general under Dr. Anthony Fauci, going as far as to call for an immediate end to the world-wide vaxxing program because, Dr. Malone says, the vaxxes don’t work and they kill and disable people. Hearing that, Mr. Young called for Joe Rogan to be cancelled for spreading “misinformation.”

It’s worth paying attention to just how disordered Mr. Young’s thinking is because it summarizes everything that has gone awry on the political Left: He is wrong two ways: 1) morally, and 2) on the facts of the matter — which is as wrong as you can be. Like virtually everyone on the Democratic Party / Woke / Progressive axis, he is obviously in favor of suppressing free speech. Since when did that become okay for old hippies?

If I remember correctly (cuz I was there) the youth movement of the 1960s was all about freedom to say pretty much anything, except yell “fire” in a crowded theater — based on the idea that ordinary people were equipped to sort out the truth. During the War in Vietnam, we hippies were especially averse to the official lying that emanated from the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House under both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. We founded “alternative” newspapers in defiance of the establishment’s propaganda. We applauded Daniel Ellsberg’s purloined Pentagon Papers, revealing the mendacity of the war effort. Altogether, this activity made it more difficult for the government to prosecute that war, and to defend the strategy behind it.

Today the Left is not only all-in on speech suppression, but also censorship of print and broadcasting, and is especially avid for the diverse punishments of cancellation — ruining careers, reputations, livelihoods, and families of anyone who opposes Woke right-think. Alternate views are not tolerated, labeled “unacceptable” (Mr. Young put it exactly that way), and flagged as “misinformation” (ditto Mr. Young). It’s gotten to the point where the word misinformation has acquired a distinct odor that signals bad faith in everyone who flogs it. These days, the charge of misinformation is deliberate misinformation.

Today, the Left is all-in for FBI home invasions, DOJ malicious prosecutions, CIA manipulations of public opinion, a fake president fronting for an unseen cabal, and a news media that wouldn’t know the actual shape and substance of reality if it jumped up and bit Jim Acosta on the lips. Ideas and principles don’t really matter to the Left; they’re just window-dressing for their sole interest, which is pushing other people around, in a word: coercion. That is the moral quagmire the Left is in and, having captured so many institutional transmitters of our polity, that is the nature of the evil they represent.

On the facts of Dr. Malone’s public statements about Covid-19 public health policy and the “vaccines,” Neil Young doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just dead wrong, uninformed, possibly ignorant. The vaxxes have been a disaster from the start and the damage gets worse every week that the insane policy of coercing more vaxxes goes on. The vaxxes are a false magic talisman for a psychotic cargo cult of disordered minds who cannot face the actual quandaries in this momentous Fourth Turning of our foundering civilization — namely, our dwindling energy resources, the economics based on them, the malfunctioning operations of money, our over-investments in techno-complexity, and the out-of-scale dynamics of just about everything in daily life.

Fortunately, enough Americans now see through this matrix of bad faith and mendacity that the opposition is poised to wipe up the floor with the Left in next November’s election. The Left has screwed things up so completely that the end of Covid will expose every broken thing on the landscape — and now it’s up to others to try to repair it all, if possible. One thing is certain to happen a little less than a year from now, the day a new Congress is sworn in: “Joe Biden,” if he is still alive, and still in office, will be impeached. And unlike his several predecessors — Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump — “Joe Biden” will be convicted in the Senate, too, and of serious crimes against his country, not just trivialities because the evidence is there. He’ll be convicted of the very things spelled out in the constitution: treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The laptop computer belonging to the Biden family bag-man, Hunter Biden, is not only still in the negligent possession of the FBI, but many faithful copies of its hard-drive were mindfully distributed to safe hands outside the agency. The email, contracts, and memoranda on it contain a clear record of bribery from foreign nations and money laundering to conceal the trail of all that grift. “Joe Biden’s” deliberate open border policy, and the purposeful transport of unvetted illegal aliens from scores of foreign countries to cities all over the USA, certainly represents an arrant and treasonous failure to uphold the law. It remains to be seen what kind of fiasco his misadventures in Ukraine may foment, but we’ll know presently.

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http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-russias-red-line/

Russia’s Red Line

It is absolutely necessary that Moscow holds the line for the sake of a new security order in Europe and a sustainably stable world order in our time.

They must understand,” Sergei Lavrov said in one of his many public statements last week, “that the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.”

The Russian foreign minister has repeated this thought almost ad infinitum lately. He speaks, of course, of the Biden administration and the diplomats who bear its messages to others.

Here is another of Lavrov’s recent utterances:

“We are very patient… we have been harnessing [burdens] for a very long time, and now it’s time for us to go.”

I do not know quite what Lavrov means by “harnessing burdens.” I suspect it is a translation problem, and he said something closer to “bearing burdens.” But it is perfectly clear what he means when he says it is time for Russia to go: He means it is time to advance beyond the status quo, move on from post–Cold War security arrangements that have allowed NATO, in the name of the Atlantic alliance, to aggress toward the Russian Federation’s western borders more or less at will since the Soviet Union met its end.

All that Lavrov, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have said and done since the Ukraine crisis re-erupted late last year indicate one simple, hard-as-granite reality. In consequence of the many pointedly provocative moves the West, notably the U.S. and Britain, have made in Ukraine over the past year, our planet now has a brand-new red line etched upon it.

I hope Russia draws it in the deepest scarlet. As a diplomatic tactic, red lines are not very often advisable: They tend to paint the painter of the line into a corner. This one is absolutely necessary if we are to see a new security order in Europe. A new security order in Europe is essential if we are to achieve a sustainably, stable world order in our time.

We read here and there of comparisons between the Ukraine crisis and the crisis across the Taiwan Strait that the U.S. has similarly conjured of late. Russia is to Ukraine as China is to Taiwan, this sort of thing. Geopolitics is not so simple. But while this obscures some things, it illuminates others. Russia does not want to “invade” Ukraine any more than China wants to reassert its legitimate sovereignty over Taiwan by force.

Beijing’s red line on any suggestion of independence for Taiwan is in my view the severest red line any nation has drawn in our time. Only the dumbest of the dumb in Washington — on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon — refuse to understand this.

Beijing’s Line of Red

Mao Zedong declares the founding of the modern People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. (Orihara1, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

China’s red line is as old as the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan after Mao took Beijing in October 1949. While it does not want a messy, internationally costly conflict across the Taiwan Strait now, which is wise, this is not to say the line on the sovereignty question is any the less red.

It is the same, but also different in the Ukraine case. The last thing the Kremlin wants is to assert sovereignty over the corrupt, crawling-with-Nazis scene in Ukraine. But Moscow has made it plain just in the last month or so that its red line is no more negotiable than China’s in the Taiwan case. 

Let Russia’s be very red, then. Let it glow in the dark.

Why do I say this? It is simple: This latest round of the Ukraine crisis, which began when the U.S. cultivated and ultimately directed the 2014 coup in Kiev, makes it clear that Washington and London, with the Continent’s capitals ambivalently in tow, are not going to stop aggressing eastward to Russia’s frontier until they are made to stop — at a red line.

By appearances, it seems that U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the covert ops people in Washington do not understand this. Biden, in his blurry speeches and public pronouncements, and Blinken, in his numerous diplomatic encounters, make it very plain they will never consider a declaration limiting NATO’s expansion, or any other circumscription of Ukraine’s future relationships with NATO and more broadly the Western alliance.

At the Blinken–Lavrov exchange in Geneva last Friday, our guitar-strumming secretary failed to give his counterpart written responses to Moscow’s request for formal commitments on Ukraine and the larger question of security arrangements in Eastern Europe. Instead, he promised Washington would deliver these sometime this week. We must await this.

Not hopefully, I must quickly add. I see little to no chance the U.S. and NATO, which also received Russia’s proposals in a separate draft agreement last month, will advance matters on any of these questions regardless of what Washington puts on paper this week.

Does this mean the U.S., the U.K. and NATO don’t see the red line? Don’t they understand, in the way Lavrov uses this word, that accepting the new red line “is the key to everything?”

Biden, true enough, is a step away from assisted living, if he does not already require it behind the White House’s windows. Blinken, equally so, is somewhere between a Schlemiel (the klutz who knocks over a bottle of wine at table) and a Schlimazel (he into whose lap the wine spills).

Biden, Blinken, and golf caddies such as NATO Secretary–General Jens Stoltenberg: It is impossible to accept that they do not know well what Moscow has just done, the depth and hue of line it has drawn. The only exception here is Boris Johnson. Britain’s latest Old Etonian prime minister, who seems to have stepped out of a Monty Python skit, may indeed be too stupid to know what time it is.

Now we can judge the current impasse between the Anglosphere portion of the West and Russia for what it is. Washington, London, and Brussels see the red line as clearly as anyone else and, resisting the reality of our moment, fight a rearguard action against what it means for Europe’s “security architecture.”

A Provocation Too Far

They know they cannot win a war against Russia on Ukrainian soil. And they will not fight one, accordingly, unless a grave mistake is made. As Scott Ritter just wrote in Consortium News, and Marshall Auerback earlier argued in The Scrum, Ukraine shapes up as a provocation too far for Washington, London and Brussels. It’s Kiev as Waterloo. It’s the end of Western expansionism.

Last week the U.S. delivered the first shipment of $200 million worth of weapons it has promised Ukraine. Britain is as we speak airlifting troops and materiel from depots in England and Scotland. And the White House is talking about deploying troops to Eastern Europe.

This is on top of all the other assistance these two nations have provided Kiev in recent years — since the 2014 coup, indeed. What about this, one may ask.

My answer: This is about maintaining tension and danger at the highest possible pitch for as long as possible. This circumstance, if one steps back to consider it, meets all the West’s core objectives. The last time this happened, readers take note, it went on for four decades. It is a depressing thought but in all likelihood what we are in for. They don’t call it Cold War II for nothing.

There is — who could miss it? — the information war the West, the U.S. and Britain well in the lead, are running on the Ukraine crisis. For its breadth and relentlessness, it may well be unmatched. The thought that Russian troops on Russian soil are aggressing but American and British personnel in Ukraine are just doing the right thing has been with us for many months.

In the last week we have read that Russia has sent out-of-uniform soldiers or mercenaries into Ukraine, has intelligence operatives preparing a false-flag op against the people in Donbas it supports, and, as of Sunday, is getting ready to install a former legislator from the same party as the ousted Viktor Yanukovych as a puppet president in an elaborate coup operation of its own.

I will never quite get over how clumsy and rubbishy the propaganda issuing from Western intelligence agencies usually is.

The Info Op

This info op appears to serve three purposes. In no particular order, these are to blur causality so as to cast Russia as responsible for this crisis, to maintain public fear and ignorance in the West and to keep all options open in the very unlikely event war breaks out.

Think about this last: Ghost stories about Russian spooks readying to blow up power grids, communications towers and water supplies effectively licenses the madmen in Kiev or covert operatives from the West to spark a conflict and point all fingers at Moscow.

In the matter of causality, here is a paragraph from a Reuters piece published Monday afternoon:

“Russia denies planning an invasion. But, having engineered the crisis by surrounding Ukraine with forces from the north, east and south, Moscow is now citing the Western response as evidence to support its narrative that Russia is the target, not the instigator, of aggression.”

The first sentence of this paragraph is correct. Everything else in it is utterly false, perpendicular to the truth. It is essential to pay attention to these things: It is this kind of lying that allowed Cold War I to go into the history books as somehow the result of Russia’s malign intent – Russia, which had just lost 20 million to 27 million people and whose economy was a shambles.

Is there anything good to say about the Ukraine crisis as we enter another week of it? Not much, even if the West proves wise enough to stay clear of a war it cannot possibly win. But there are a few things to watch.

One, I hope Russia holds to its red line and in time succeeds in forcing a redrawing of the security map along its western border and into Europe. Two, so long as Biden–Blinken insist on a sanctions regime to end all sanctions regimes if Russia “invades” Ukraine, we will see increasing disunity in the Atlantic alliance. The more of this the better. 

The Germans and French want no part of this Anglo–American circus, if you have not noticed. Germany, it is worth noting, refused Britain air rights for its weapons transports. Berlin and Paris may not be run by philosopher-kings, but a more independent Continent within the Western alliance is without question net positive, as argued previously in this space on numerous occasions.

A final thought in this connection. Among those be-all, end-all sanctions is one that would suspend Russia from the financial settlement system known as SWIFT. I read now that the U.S. is stepping back from this one because it would prompt Moscow and Beijing to accelerate plans already in motion to develop a system independent of SWIFT and not subject to Washington’s geopolitical whims.

For once they are getting smart down there inside the Beltway. That is exactly what it would do.

The coalescing of non–Western powers, far from least Russia and China, is a reality well beyond the course of the Ukraine crisis and this or that sanction. The relentless campaigns against the Chinese and Russians in the two-front Cold War these past few years have done a great deal to encourage unity between the two. This will not reverse under any circumstance.

Disunity in the West, unity in the non–West. It is wane and wax. Maybe it is red lines — Moscow’s, China’s — that make the difference between the one and the other.

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/81630/dc-asks-shoppers-to-start-rationing-food-is-this-just-the.html

DC Asks Shoppers to Start Rationing Food: Is This Just the Beginning?

It’s begun.

We’ve kept our fingers on the pulse of supply chain issues for years now here at The Organic Prepper. Just last week we wrote about all of the impending supply chain issues which were plaguing America. Shortly after that piece was published we saw further edicts be given which banned particular Canadian truckers from coming across the border.

Say goodbye to your maple syrup.

And lo and behold, after massive inflation games, after tampering with the free market, after the deliberate creation of supply chain issues, now we have Washington DC running short on food. What’s the solution to these food shortages?

Why, telling people to not buy as much, of course.

That’s exactly what DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management is now asking residents to do, as they face a problem with keeping their grocery store shelves stocked. Self-imposed rationing is the solution.

You have to love the notion that “there is no need to buy more than you normally would.” There’s just a nationwide supply chain issue, right? It surely won’t make it so that you won’t be able to buy what you need? And is there not a taint of “the government will take care of you here” as well? Aren’t these the same people who are deliberately causing these problems?

This is becoming all too common.

Bare grocery stores are becoming more and more common throughout America at the moment. Keep tabs on your own supermarket. What have you seen over the past few months? What have you found is difficult to find at the moment? There are very few who could likely say their grocery store shelves remain the same as always.

There’s a reason that Americans throughout the country are posting pictures online of barren stores, food items spaced out to give the illusion of stocked shelves, and posters of food being where soup should be.

Farmers are being paid to not produce, are being ordered to dump their product to rot on the side of the road, meat is being regulated out of existence, people are being banned from trucking food into the country, and food processing plants are coercing people out of their jobs (and then facing inexplicable labor shortages).

America seems to now be facing a food shortage.

What did you expect?

But what comes next?

I don’t think it’s too far of an assumption to think that this is only going to spread. Like it or not, what happens in the cities trickles down into the rest of the country. The cities are the fulcrum. Critical race theory, removal of statues, the notion that the world’s last bastion of freedom is a terrible place – all of this started in the cities – and has now found its way through small-town Americana.

Policies spread, and as those who believe these ideas flee the mess they’ve created, do you really think they’ll abandon all of their convictions as they go? Or will they take their politics with them?

Food shortages will be no different.

(All the more reason to check out our free QUICKSTART Guide on getting your food preps in order.)

This is all the more reason that you need to begin prepping your food storage now rather than later. Because what do we see throughout history? What happens when a nation begins to have a hard time finding food? Just ask folks in Greece and Venezuela.

For starters, you’ll begin to see rationing.

I believe this rationing will likely be store-induced first. Consider stores that sell ammunition. Many of them have rationing policies in place for how many boxes you can buy. Has it always been this way?

Consider the toilet paper scare of 2020. Stores throughout America had self-imposed rationing restrictions on how many packages of this 2020’s currency one could purchase. As things continue to get worse though – and as Americans become dulled to the idea of rationing by store policies – the government will step in.

In World War 2, Americans were issued ration cards for a wide variety of goods. Gasoline, sugar, flour – all of them became government-controlled. No ration card, no product. It’s very easy to see how this could become the logical consequence of all this.

After all, DC is already taking the first steps. And a society that is becoming more and more cashless makes rationing even easier.

You’ll see the demonizing of “hoarders.”

America has been assaulted with propaganda of late “othering” large segments of society. And it’s been working. We’ve witnessed in the past where preppers were vilified, and you’ll only continue to see more of this kind of nonsensical talk in the future as well.

Those who keep a ready supply of food in their pantry – as humanity has done throughout all of history (recent times being the exception) – will now be deemed “selfish” and looked down upon by society. How this will play out ever since 2020 caused prepping to become mainstream is yet to be determined.

Will Americans play along with this? I think enough will to make a (negative) difference.

Confiscation.

We already have “legalized” theft on the books. (Unsurprisingly, it’s an Executive Order.) There are those who believe that an emergency makes stealing OK, and should such an emergency be declared (perhaps due to “misinformation“?), there will be people in uniforms who show up at your door to take what you have worked and paid for. Allegedly, this will be “to give to the collective.”

As Animal Farm (and all of totalitarian history details), some animals are more equal than others, and what was stolen from you will largely go to those in power. You will live in squalor as those in political office use their German shepherds to ensure they (and their dogs) live in luxury.

 

Russian children in 1921 after the Soviets took control.

Josef Stalin in 1921.

Keep your eyes peeled.

We’ve already witnessed government confiscation here in America before. And history can easily repeat. Keep your eyes peeled, America. Watch what is happening around you.

One person prepping within a community is the easy target when these types of policies become enforced. But imagine if that one person has influenced their entire neighborhood to get more prepared....

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/authoritarian_madness_the_slippery_slope_from_lockdowns_to_concentration_camps

Authoritarian Madness: The Slippery Slope from Lockdowns to Concentration Camps

“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”— Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited

In the politically charged, polarizing tug-of-war that is the debate over COVID-19, we find ourselves buffeted by fear over a viral pandemic that continues to wreak havoc with lives and the economy, threats of vaccine mandates and financial penalties for noncompliance, and discord over how to legislate the public good without sacrificing individual liberty.

The discord is getting more discordant by the day.

Just recently, for instance, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, lock up the unvaccinated and use the military to determine who gets to be “free.”

These tactics have been used before.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

For a glimpse at what the future might look like if such a policy were to be enforced, look beyond America’s borders.

In Italy, the unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and could face suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France will ban the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who has not complied with the vaccine mandate could face fines up to $4100. Police will be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which has adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—are being forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports have surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China has constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:

“Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political prisoners—German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats—as well as Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of ‘asocial’ or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?

Connect the dots.

You don’t have to be unvaccinated or a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is not about COVID-19. Nor is it about politics, populist movements, or any particular country.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

The slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

Claudio Ronco, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew and a specialist in 18th-century music, recognizes the signs. Because of his decision to remain unvaccinated, Ronco is trapped inside his house, unable to move about in public without a digital vaccination card. He can no longer board a plane, check into a hotel, eat at a restaurant or get a coffee at a bar. He has been ostracized by friends, shut out of public life, and will soon face monthly fines for insisting on his right to bodily integrity and individual freedom.

For all intents and purposes, Ronco has become an undesirable in the eyes of the government, forced into isolation so he doesn’t risk contaminating the rest of the populace.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The world has been down this road before, too.

Others have ignored the warning signs. We cannot afford to do so.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

“Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, life was good.

Life is good in America, too, as long as you’re able to keep cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, while distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Indeed, life in America may be good for the privileged few who aren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, but it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

Which brings me back to the present crisis: COVID-19 is not the Holocaust, and those who advocate vaccine mandates, lockdowns and quarantine camps are not Hitler, but this still has the makings of a slippery slope.

The means do not justify the ends: we must find other ways of fighting a pandemic without resorting to mandates and lockdowns and concentration camps. To do otherwise is to lay the groundwork for another authoritarian monster to rise up and wreak havoc.

If we do not want to repeat the past, then we must learn from past mistakes.

January 27 marks Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a day for remembering those who died at the hands of Hitler’s henchmen and those who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Yet remembering is not enough. We can do better. We must do better.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the world is teetering on the edge of authoritarian madness.

All it will take is one solid push for tyranny to prevail.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/01/26/free-americans-from-tyranny/

Free Americans from Tyranny

Democracy in America was always pure fantasy from inception — except for the privileged few.

The supreme law of the land never deterred the US ruling class from serving its own interests at the expense of most others.

We the people always meant the rich, well-born and able, others ill-served, exploited and abused.

Elections when held are farcical. Two right wings of one-party state take turns running things.

Ordinary people have no say over how they’re governed — never did, surely don’t today.

Over time, tyranny gained traction to where it’s the law of the land in different forms — notably political and all things related to healthcare.

It’s why the latter should be called the sickness industry because wellness isn’t profitable.

According to bioethicist Donald Light: 

“(N)ew prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved.” 

“That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years” — unless no alternative options exist.

“(E)ven (when) even properly prescribed…(a)bout 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the US and Europe.” 

They cause “an epidemic of… hospitalizations…” In the US, it’s about 6.6 million annually.

The above casualty count, as well as other data on injuries and deaths from legal drugs, were before seasonal flu was renamed covid with the worst of diabolical aims in mind.

Since mass-jabbing began in December 2020, the casualty count has been off the charts.

Based on officially reported US and European data, over five million adverse events occurred in little over a year from kill shots alone, including tens of thousands of deaths.

Because officially reported numbers represent a tiny fraction of harm to health from mass-jabbing, the death toll alone likely tops one million in the US/West.

Numbers of kill shot illnesses, serious ones and disabling injuries may be tens of millions.

Who’s keeping count? The official toll in the US/West is way understated.

MSM even suppress what’s officially reported.

It’s in support of promoting maximum harm to maximum numbers of people with mass-extermination of unwanted segments of society worldwide in mind, along with elimination of what remains of greatly eroded freedoms.

Established last year, Make Americans Free Again (MAFA) is a grassroots group with a “simple and easily understandable campaign platform,” stating:

“I (we) want the freedom to accept or reject any and all medical treatments, including (jabs), for myself and my minor children.” 

“The state and federal government, employers, merchants, groups, schools, institutions, and other entities should not be able to force me or my minor children to receive any medical intervention, including (jabs for any purpose), without my express permission.”

“I (we) furthermore demand that full disclosure of the risks and benefits of any medical intervention, including screening tests, drugs, devices, surgeries, and (jabs) be required by law to be provided to any consumer prior to the delivery of services.”

No exceptions to the above should exist. None should be tolerated.

We alone have sovereignty over our own bodies — what no ruling authorities may legally overrule.

MAFA is led by Pamela Popper.

She founded and heads Wellness Forum Health.

“The company offers educational programs to both consumers and providers that facilitate informed medical decision-making, diet and lifestyle intervention, and improved long-term health outcomes.”

Popper also “serves on the Physician’s Steering Committee and the President’s Board for the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington.”

A public policy expert, she supports the universal right of informed and voluntary consent on all things health related — including the right of everyone to choose their healthcare providers and treatment protocols.

At this time, Popper is involved in challenging the illegality of draconian flu/covid related mandates — what never should have been instituted in the first place anywhere.

It’s crucial to rescind ones in place to restore freedom of choice on all things health related.

The alternative is medical tyranny — enforced by political means to inflict maximum harm on maximum numbers of people domestically and worldwide.

Kill shots and all else flu/covid represent the mother of all diabolical state-sponsored scams.

Most of the medical and scientific community, along with dominant MSM, were co-opted, bribed, pressured, and at times threatened to support what demands exposure and denunciation.

Based on years of research and writing, Popper slammed “incompeten(t) big medicine, big food, big pharma,” and MSM.

What’s going on “isn’t new,” she explained. “It’s just a (much) bigger (and more destructive) version of” what gone on for years.

When the US/West and elsewhere was turned on its head in early 2020, most people were initially fooled, myself included.

Popper awakened to the scam in March 2020, she said, weeks before my own awakening.

She erred in one respect. What’s going on is an invented pandemic, not a real one, except for jabbed individuals.

They comprise the vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks and other serious health issues caused by kill shots.

Covid is seasonal flu renamed, what shows up annually like clockwork.

Not until 2020 was it accompanied by state-sponsored, MSM proliferated hyperventilating.

Until the world was turned on its head over two years ago, little more occurred than low-key reminders to get annual flu shots.

Left unexplained is their potential harm while providing little or no protection.

Everything changed dramatically once flu/covid mass-jabbing began a little over a year ago — notably unprecedented numbers of casualties.

As long as mass-jabbing continues, the toll will continue to rise exponentially — on the phony pretext of claiming that draconian policies are beneficial, notably kill shots designed to destroy health.

Committed resistance is the only option — including by mass-street protests and lawsuits against what no one should tolerate.

Defeating the most diabolical scheme of all-time is crucial to accomplish this year as soon as possible.

With enough determined people willing to put their bodies and spirit on the line, dark forces behind what’s going on can be beaten.

“Live Free or Die.”

The state of New Hampshire’s official motto is the only acceptable option. No other exists.

Patrick Henry enunciated it in his March 1775 address to colonial Virginia’s legislature, saying:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” 

“Forbid it, Almighty God!”

“I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”