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https://mate.substack.com/p/in-ukraine-a-proxy-war-on-the-planet

In Ukraine, a proxy war on the planet

As the Ukraine crisis causes global havoc, US officials won't negotiate with Russia to end the fighting -- and are even willing to "countenance" mounting hunger as a result.

In 2015, one year after a US-backed coup ushered in a US-friendly, far-right-dominated government in Kiev, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer issued a stark warning. "The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path," he said. "And the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked."

Mearsheimer's cause for concern was what he identified as a US-led campaign to convert Ukraine into a NATO proxy on Russia's border. The events since have proved him to be both tragically prescient, and understated.

In using Ukraine to "fight Russia over there", as Adam Schiff put it in January 2020, the US has not only sacrificed countless Ukrainian lives. Four months into Russia's invasion, the Biden administration is signaling its willingness to sacrifice the rest of the planet, particularly the most vulnerable areas.

In an article headlined "Ukraine War Pushes Millions of the World’s Poorest Toward Starvation," the Wall Street Journal summarizes the impact of the Ukraine war on global hunger:

The World Food Program says that increases in the cost of food and fuel since March have pushed an additional 47 million people into acute food insecurity, when a person is no longer able to consume enough calories to sustain her life and livelihood, taking the total to 345 million people world-wide. Of those, some 50 million are living on the edge of famine.

In the energy crisis that has followed Russia's invasion, the New York Times adds, "the poorest and most vulnerable" have felt "the harshest effects." In Asia and Africa, the International Energy Agency recently warned that "higher energy prices have meant an additional 90 million people in Asia and Africa do not have access to electricity."

By invading Ukraine rather than exhausting all diplomatic solutions, Russia bears obvious responsibility for the crisis. Ukraine’s grain exports, which feed multiple countries, have plummeted. Russia has denied blocking Ukrainian grain, instead faulting Kiev's extensive mining of its Black Sea ports. Ukraine has refused to de-mine those ports on self-defense grounds, claiming that doing so could invite further Russian incursions. Turkey, which has been brokering talks between the two sides, has just announced a pending deal to break the impasse.

But even if the Turkey-backed deal is implemented, a major cause of the food crisis will remain. The US-led sanctions regime against Russia has blocked international payments for Russian goods and necessary export licenses, including food shipments. As the New York Times notes, "[s]oaring fertilizer prices, driven by sanctions on Russia and Belarus, along with high global energy prices, are broadening the scope of food shortages by making it more expensive to produce and transport food around the world."

The head of the African Union, Macky Sall, has linked US sanctions to the continent's food shortages. "Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat," Sall warned in June. "And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertilizer. The situation was bad and now it has become worse, creating a threat to food security in Africa."

Rather than seek a diplomatic solution in Ukraine that could end the war and its worldwide deprivations, the US has shunned talks with Russia and made clear that it is even willing to tolerate global starvation.

Citing interviews with the White House, the Washington Post reports that Biden "officials have described the stakes of ensuring Russia cannot swallow up Ukraine — an outcome officials believe could embolden Putin to invade other neighbors or even strike out at NATO members —as so high that the administration is willing to countenance even a global recession and mounting hunger." (emphasis added)

Left unquestioned is why a group of officials in Washington have arrogated themselves the right to "countenance" a global recession and mounting hunger – including pushing millions toward famine -- on behalf of the rest of the planet.

Because the Biden administration is willing to countenance hunger, Africa is now being pushed into what a recent New York Times article describes as a major "dilemma." African countries who seek to accept Russian grain imports, the Times notes, "potentially face a hard choice between, on one hand, benefiting from possible war crimes and displeasing a powerful Western ally, and on the other, refusing cheap food at a time when wheat prices are soaring and hundreds of thousands of people are starving."

Under policies set by Washington, it is apparently a "dilemma" for Africa to have to choose between feeding hundreds of thousands of people or risk "displeasing" its "powerful Western ally," — which would presumably prefer that they starve.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-lockdowns-unearthed-american-cultural-rot/

The Lockdowns Unearthed American Cultural Rot

The Great Santini is a compelling cinematic character sketch of Bull Meechum, a fictional American fighter jet pilot during peacetime: a warrior without a war and therefore a misfit in polite society. At the movie’s end, Bull is killed when his jet catches fire during a practice flight. Before his aircraft crashes, Bull skillfully, heroically maneuvers the plane away from peoples’ homes, saving lives. 

At the conclusion of Bull’s graveside memorial service, his fellow fighter pilot, Col. Virgil Hedgepath, concisely eulogizes his larger-than-life colleague by saying, “I’ll like the world less without Bull. It’ll be a duller, more colorless place.”

After seeing how so many people have overreacted during the pandemic, I’ll also like the world less: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe, but especially the US, because I’ve seen American Coronamania up close. I say this sincerely and literally, without intending any of Col. Hedgepath’s tribute.

• Many Americans have shown that they’re gullible group-thinkers who lack critical thinking skills. 

It was obviously scientifically unsound to begin, even for “for two weeks,” locking down hundreds of millions of healthy people—for the first time in history—in response to a respiratory virus, to mask an entire population, to test, on a mass scale, healthy people—with a method that delivered 90% false positives—and to require young, healthy people to take unnecessary, often damaging shots, when the virus threatened only a small, clearly identifiable, older, unhealthier slice of the population. 

The media’s fearmongering and the internal inconsistencies, arbitrariness and cynical opportunism of the government’s lockdowns, masks, testing and “vaccine” edicts couldn’t have been more obvious. Some, like me, said so. But a majority embraced and aggressively promoted this lunacy. 

• Many Americans are mentally ill. 

Many Americans are detached from reality. It was clear in March, 2020 that over 99.7% of Americans under 65 were at no risk of Coronavirus-driven death. Yet, many irrationally supported closing down society, hid behind leaky masks, obsessively washed their hands well after the surface spread myth had been debunked, ordered groceries, elatedly posted Facebook photos of cards showing that they took unneeded, experimental injections, and hectored everyone else to inject. A previously veiled epidemic of American mental illness has been laid bare. Residual mask-wearing likely correlates with, and reveals, the 20% of Americans who’ve been swallowing tons of antidepressants and/or anti-anxiety meds for the past several decades. 

Per Psychologist Mattias Desmet, mass psychosis swept the US, Canada and Europe because many people lacked a life purpose and close social connections. Coronamania gave them a cause in which to believe and an anti-virus tribe to which to belong. 

Americans didn’t consider that restructuring daily life and the economy to placate the mentally ill is not ultimately doing that cohort, or the society at large, a favor. We can feel sorry for the mentally ill, but sane adults should govern. 

• Americans have no tolerance for rational discourse. 

I could find no one who would engage in a sustained discussion in which they would justify their pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-injection position by answering basic questions while citing basic facts. This absence of inquiry and the brainwashed intolerance for dialogue enabled and sustained Coronamania. 

This should be the new American lawn sign: “Debate Has No Home Here.” 

• Most Americans can’t withstand peer pressure. 

Many who perceived Coronamania’s disconnection from reality withheld their opinion because they were afraid of being disliked. The desire for social approval shapes liberal behavior. The Emperors—Fauci, Birx and their cronies—clearly Wore No Clothes but zero liberals were willing to say so; it was the worst instance of groupthink in history. The “progressive” mob cheered smug fools like Colbert and Kimmel—who haughtily promoted the harmful shots—because they were afraid that their peers might cast a side-eye at them if they had the temerity to question the pop culture narrative. Many Americans are sheep with a mean streak.

Coronamania has shown, once again, that the minority is often right. Most Americans supported the lockdowns, masks, tests and vaxxes. None of these measures has helped. Each has caused much harm. 

• Americans are headline readers of cheesy and plainly biased news sources, and they readily internalize slogans and labels. 

Most Americans derive their mistaken worldviews from Twitter, YahooNews, GoogleNews, HuffPost, TV network news, the NY Times, CNN and NPR. During Coronamania, they have trusted these absurdly biased fearmongers and ignored what their own eyes should have told them. Many bought the “Crush the Curve” and “We’re all in this together” propaganda. Further, they believed in the shots simply because they were called “vaccines” and were hyped as “safe and effective.” 

Many still uncritically believe the litany of media-fed Coronamania lies. They naively assume that because someone appears on a screen under the aegis of some media brand, they’re telling the truth.

• Americans are virtue signalers. 

We’ve become a culture in which being “nice” means acting as if you care about people when you really don’t. Doing so enables people to feel better about themselves. 

Americans like to think they’re helping others, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience themselves. For example, many who professed to care about old people have seldom visited them in nursing homes. 

Throughout Coronamania, the virtue signalers didn’t consider the costs to other peopleof the WEF Lockdowns, Mask Theater, Testfest or Vaxx-a-thon. Laptoppers didn’t care what lockdowns and vaxx mandates did to blue collar workers, business owners or people trying to find work or have a social life. 

They probably never knew that the Covid response has directly cost the government over $50,000 per family; far more, even adjusted for inflation, than the cost of America’s involvement in World War II. The respective returns on investment are not comparable. 

Today’s young people, afraid of a virus, would have cowered in fear of the Nazis and Japanese; if the young people of the 1940s had a 2020 mindset, Europe. Asia and America would have easily been conquered. If 18th Century Americas were as timid as today’s Americans, British monarchs would still rule us. Invading Normandy during WWII or battling barefoot in the snow during the Revolutionary War? No way. Somebody might get hurt or sick, or even die. Those who fought in such wars were much younger, had many more vital years to lose and were far more likely to die than were those infected with SARS-Cov2.

• Many Americans are politically tribal demagogues and closet authoritarians. 

Not only did the majority demonstrate an unawareness of science and risk assessment and a child-like faith in government and media; they vilified those who saw that Coronamania was a politically opportunistic scam. The media also aggressively censored Scamdemic critics in order to justify such chicanery as mail-in voting and vaxx passports. Coronamania exposed the “liberal” drive to control other people. 

Democrat pols and partisans exploited the fear and latent authoritarianism of their rank and file. We who perceived the lockdown, mask, testing and vaxx scams won’t forget that many labeled us “Grandma Killers,” stole irreplaceable experiences from America’s youth in order to win an election and sought to take away the livelihoods of those who sensibly refused to inject. 

• Americans arrogantly and foolishly think humans can control everything, including the transmission of a submicroscopic airborne virus, the likes of which have always existed. 

How many lockdown supporters could have explained the underlying rationale for lockdowns? Did they think that a virus would simply get frustrated at being walled off from humans and permanently vanish into the ether? It made no sense. But neither the bought media nor most people ever asked such basic questions.

• Americans have an abiding, misplaced faith in anything medical. 

Med/Pharma is the dominant American religion; Americans believe in it more fervently than they believe in God. Med/Pharma is far better funded than all of the US churches, mosques, synagogues and temples combined. Med/Pharma endlessly dips its big bucket into a vast, deep river of dollars derived from medical insurance and massive government subsidies. 

With its over-reliance on ventilators and ineffective anti-virals and its suppression of simpler, more effective and affordable remedies, the medical industry mismanaged the Covid response. Covid was simple-mindedly seen as only a medical problem; the social, psychological and economic effects of the Coronamania “public health” interventions were ignored. Americans, including Trump, foolishly trusted a small group of highly overrated, narrowly focused, politically motivated, fame-tripping MDs to govern, and transmogrify, a germophobic nation. 

• American wealth often does not reflect skill or hard work. 

The Scamdemic economy has been a clear example of crony capitalism and overspending on medical testing and treatments. The test administrators and vaxx manufacturers and distributors, and the media that promoted the vaxxes, made tens of billions of dollars without taking any risks, because the government funded vaxx research and promotion/coercion. Ultimately, the vaxx developers demonstrated no special skill. The jabs have already failed and appear to have caused many deaths and other injuries. The worst effects are likely yet to come.

Moreover, Net retailers and big box stores have profited wildly as small, independent merchants were shut down. Government workers, including teachers, stayed home for a year or two. Not only were they fully paid, they also accrued pension credits.

• Americans are passive and conflict-averse. 

Many Americans believed the government because, well, they were the government, and were therefore official and legitimate. Because bureaucrats wore business attire— plus scarves—and stood behind seal-bearing podiums, people thought the bureaucrats wouldn’t lie; but they did lie, repeatedly. The Faucist clown show continues, with the Misinformer-in-Chief now ludicrously crusading against “misinformation,” at least when he’s not too sick—after being quadruple-jabbed and double-Paxlovid-ed—to appear in public. 

Some citizens were astute enough to detect the lockdowns’ and shots’ craziness but were too timid to protest. Too few workers were willing to use their bargaining power and tell their employers that they wouldn’t inject an experimental substance to thwart an illness that did not threaten them. If only 20% of people in a given line of work had stood their anti-jab ground, the mandaters would have been defeated and humiliated. 

• Americans are terrified of death, even to the point of wrecking the lives of many others in an ineffective response to a very slight threat to themselves.

Old, unhealthy people sometimes die. It’s how life is. If you weren’t old or unhealthy, Covid presented functionally zero risk. Americans need to stop insincerely acting as if death at any age is unacceptable, acknowledge the challenges that extended old age presents and do the best with their vital years. And lose some weight.

• Americans lack basic pattern recognition and an awareness of history or basic science.

Many Americans ignored obvious, early survival statistics showing that the virus only threatened those who were already not long for this world.

Those who trusted the government’s, media’s and Pharma industry’s representations regarding Coronavirus stats or the shots either never knew about or have forgotten such expert-driven misadventures as the Vietnam War, the carb-heavy food pyramid, and the wide array of wonder drugs and wonder chemicals that have caused vast environmental harm and been the subjects of many class-action lawsuits because those substances ended up killing or permanently harming people. Anyone who has paid attention during the past sixty years knows that the “experts” have often been very wrong. The CDC/NIH, et al. deserved none of the deference they received. 

• Americans have a very short-term orientation and short memories. 

They didn’t see the vast harm that the lockdowns, school closures or vaxxes would plainly cause. The Covid overreaction has sharply increased depression, overdoses, weight gain, social division and educational inequality and has caused impoverishing inflation and even starvation abroad. These effects will last indefinitely. 

Many Americans will conveniently forget that Coronamania worsened each of these problems. I won’t. 

• Americans are unwilling to admit they were wrong. 

The lockdowns/school closures, masking, testing and vaxxing were all clearly ineffective and deeply damaging. Many who stridently supported these measures are still in denial about these measures’ failure. For example, disregarding very high pre-vaxx survival rates, those who became infected after injecting seem programmed to recite that, without the shots, their illnesses would have turned out much worse. 

Others, channeling St. Peter, now, or will soon, falsely deny their prior support for the above-listed interventions. Jersey switching. 

Still others are taking refuge in the bankrupt position that no one could have known the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots wouldn’t work and would cause far more harm than good. It was obvious from Day 1 that this would be so. 

No one I know has admitted that they were gullible and didn’t rationally evaluate, in March 2020, the Coronavirus response, or that politics or peer pressure muddled their thinking. None has expressed contrition for the vast, deep harm his or her Coronamania complicity caused.

I like America much less than I did 27 months ago. It has been, and will be, hard to take seriously, to trust the judgment or to value the character of, people who have exhibited the traits listed above. On the third Independence Day since Coronamania began, “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” is another empty slogan.

.....

http://endoftheamericandream.com/everything-is-dying-we-are-witnessing-mass-extinctions-on-an-unprecedented-scale-but-most-people-dont-understand-what-is-happening/

Everything Is Dying: We Are Witnessing Mass Extinctions On An Unprecedented Scale, But Most People Don’t Understand What Is Happening

We were warned that if we stayed on the path that we were on that we would eventually see mass extinctions all over the globe.  Unfortunately, nothing was done and now it is already happening.  The creatures that inhabit our oceans are dying off.  The insects are dying off.  The birds are dying off.  All around us there is death on a massive scale, but most people don’t understand what is taking place.  We all stay in our own little protected bubbles, and we all keep listening to the corporate media tell us that everything is going to be just fine.  But the truth is that everything is not going to be just fine, because we are literally destroying the Earth and everything in it.

I wish that I could get more people to understand.

The food that we eat, the water that we drink and the air that we breathe have all become highly toxic.

But you don’t see the microplastics, the pesticides or the trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs that you are constantly ingesting, and so you don’t think about them.

And that is extremely unfortunate.

Our oceans are literally being filled up by billions upon billions upon billions of extremely small bits of plastic, and the damage that these “microplastics” are causing is truly cataclysmic.

As a result of our rampant polluting, approximately 90 percent of all plankton has now “vanished”…

An Edinburgh-based research team fears plankton, the tiny organisms that sustain life in our seas, has all but been wiped out after spending two years collecting water samples from the Atlantic.

The landmark research blames chemical pollution from plastics, farm fertilisers and pharmaceuticals in the water. Previously, it was thought the amount of plankton had halved since the 1940s, but the evidence gathered by the Scots suggest 90% has now vanished.

And without those food chains, most life in our oceans will perish.

At this point we are being warned that “humanity will not survive the extinction of most marine plants and animals”…

The scientists warn there are only a few years left before the consequences become catastrophically clear when fish, whales and dolphins become extinct, with grave implications for the planet. In the report, the researchers from the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey Foundation (Goes) state: “An environmental catastrophe is unfolding. We believe humanity could adapt to global warming and extreme weather changes. It is our view that humanity will not survive the extinction of most marine plants and animals.”

But the vast majority of our food doesn’t come from the oceans.

So we will be okay, right?

I wouldn’t count on it, because our insects are rapidly disappearing as well.

In fact, biologist Dave Goulson says that studies have shown that approximately 75 percent of all insects have been wiped out over the past 50 years…

Estimates vary and are imprecise, but it seems likely that insects have declined in abundance by 75% or more since I was five years old. The scientific evidence for this grows stronger every year, as studies are published describing the collapse of monarch butterfly populations in North America, the demise of woodland and grassland insects in Germany, or the seemingly inexorable contraction of the ranges of bumblebees and hoverflies in the UK.

We are dependent on insects in a multitude of various ways.

For example, we need them to pollinate many of our most important crops…

Bees get a lot of the focus and the attention when it comes to pollination, but there’s a whole array of insects that provide that pollination service. In fact, three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants and about a third of the world’s food crops depend on pollinators at some stage. And so it’s not just bees …. Flies are huge pollinators. That includes the midges that pollinate the cocoa crop that chocolate comes from. And there are wasps as well. Wasps are major pollinators. Again, another insect that’s widely disliked but actually crucial for our environment.

Scientists tell us that almost all of the insects will be gone by the end of this century.

If that were to happen, would humanity be able to survive?

By the way, our birds are going extinct too.

According to one study, 30 percent of all the birds in North America are already gone…

North America’s birds are dying. Declared a man-made epidemic by a report in Science, approximately 100 bird species are recognized as endangered or threatened, with some estimates stating that about 30 percent of North America’s bird population has disappeared over the past half century. This amounts to 3 billion birds total.

That is extremely alarming, but things are even worse in other parts of the globe.

In fact, researchers are warning us that a “catastrophic decline of vulture populations” on the other side of the planet could cause disease to spread like never before…

A catastrophic decline of vulture populations in Africa and Asia is causing alarm among researchers, who fear that a “cascade” effect could lead to the spread of deadly old and new diseases, including plague, anthrax, and rabies.

For thousands of years, the birds have been synonymous with death and gluttony. “Where the corpse is, vultures will gather,” Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew 24. But in reality, the birds serve us in ways that we are only just beginning to understand – helping to keep ecosystems and pathogens in check.

All of the creatures that live around us matter.

Even the vultures.

Sadly, their numbers have already declined by up to 90 percent in some parts of Africa…

Because of the centuries of bad press, experts say that African vultures have never been a well-funded research area like elephants or rhinos. But work by a handful of naturalists in Kenya offers clues about the consequences of their decline.

A paper published earlier this year found that, over the last 40 years, vulture numbers have fallen by 88 percent in Kenya, Some birds of prey – like the augur buzzard and long-crested eagle – also plummeted by more than 90 percent.

Of course we are systematically killing ourselves as well.

One recent study discovered that more than 80 percent of children and adults in the U.S. have glyphosate in their urine…

More than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults in a US health study contained a weedkilling chemical linked to cancer, a finding scientists have called “disturbing” and “concerning”.

The report by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that out of 2,310 urine samples, taken from a group of Americans intended to be representative of the US population, 1,885 were laced with detectable traces of glyphosate. This is the active ingredient in herbicides sold around the world, including the widely used Roundup brand. Almost a third of the participants were children ranging from six to 18.

Each year, close to 300 million pounds of glyphosate is used in the United States.

We know that it is being sprayed on the food that we eat, but most of us never think about it because we can’t see it.

And so we keep feeding a substance that we know causes cancer to our children on a daily basis…

In 2019, a study by the Environmental Working Group revealed that the chemical was present in 17 of 21 oat-based cereal and snack products at levels considered unsafe for children. This was the same year when Sheppard co-authored a study linking glyphosate to higher rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; another 2019 study, this time by the University of Washington, found that glyphosate exposure greatly increases the risk of cancer. In addition, the World Health Organization also studied glyphosate and determined that it “probably” causes cancer.

Honestly, at this point we are probably too stupid to survive as a society for too much longer.

We know that we are literally poisoning ourselves, but we just keep doing it.

One of the overall major themes of my work is that time is running out for humanity.

What I have covered in this article is just the tip of the iceberg.

Sadly, most people don’t want to hear “doom and gloom” like this even though nobody can dispute that this is really happening.

So if you don’t like this sort of “doom and gloom”, just go ahead and stick your head back in the sand.

But no matter how much you may try to ignore reality, the mass extinctions that have begun are only going to intensify in the years ahead.