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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/11/13/the-atlantic-is-a-shitty-propaganda-rag-run-by-elitist-wankers/

The Atlantic Is A Shitty Propaganda Rag Run By Elitist Wankers

The Atlantic, which is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and run by neoconservative war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg, has published a pair of articles that are appalling even by its own standards.

Virulent Russiagater Anne Applebaum argues in “Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy” that the US and its allies should escalate against Russia with full confidence that Putin won’t respond with nuclear weapons.

“Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them,” Applebaum writes.

But throughout her own essay Applebaum also acknowledges that she does not actually know the things she is claiming to know.

“We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war,” she writes. “We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.”

“I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can,” says Applebaum after confidently asserting that more western aggression would actually have deterred Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

These are the kinds of things it’s important to have the highest degree of certainty in before taking drastic actions which can, you know, literally end the world. It’s absolutely nuts how western pundits face more scrutiny and accountability when publicly recommending financial investments than when recommending moves that could end all terrestrial life.

On that note it’s probably worth mentioning here that Applebaum’s husband, European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski, recently made headlines by publicly thanking the United States for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

The Atlantic has also published an article titled “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” subtitled “It never should have begun.” Its author, Ian Bogost, argues that the recent management failures in Twitter and Facebook mean the days of just any old schmuck having access to their own personal broadcasting network are over, and that this is a good thing.

Bogost’s piece contains what has got to be the single most elitist sentence that I have ever read:

“A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset.”

Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences. That’s why the official authorized commentariat have been the most vocal voices calling for internet censorship and complaining about the rise of a more democratized information environment. These elitist wankers have been fuming for years about the way the uninitiated rabble have been granted the ability to not just talk, but to talk back.

Hamilton Nolan of In These Times posted a recent observation on Twitter which makes the perfect counter to The Atlantic’s snooty pontifications.

“The best thing Twitter did for journalism was to show everyone there are thousands of regular people who are better writers than most professionals which is why the most mediocre famous pundits have always been quickest to dismiss it as a cesspool,” Nolan writes, adding, “Best thing Twitter did for the world in general was to allow anyone to yell directly at rich and powerful people, which drove many of them insane, including the richest guy on earth.”

Of course the imperial narrative managers at The Atlantic would be opposed to normal people getting a voice in public discourse. When your job is to control the narrative, the bigger a monopoly you hold over it the better.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57339.htm

America’s Hubris is Stunning and a Threat to World Peace

In a wide-ranging interview with Finian Cunningham, former US military intelligence analyst Scott Ritter calls out a complex of American-made problems threatening world peace.

The Ukraine war is just one symptom of a bigger disease. The war in Ukraine began with the 2014 US-backed coup d’état in Kiev and the weaponizing by the United States and NATO of an anti-Russian regime over eight years.

“Absurd disconnect” in US foreign policy, “extraordinary provocations” toward Russia, the “scam” of nuclear weapons and US military defense doctrine, and the “stunning hubris” of American national myth-making propaganda invoking a “God-given right to control the world”. This is the scope of US problems that threaten world peace.

Former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter served as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s following the First Gulf War. He controversially challenged the official US and British narrative back then claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Those claims were later exposed as lies and fabrications but they were used to launch the Second Gulf War in 2003. A criminal war with massive repercussions that still haunts today.

In this interview, Ritter calls out the absurdity of the United States voicing concerns about the danger of nuclear conflict with Russia while at the same time fueling a war in Ukraine on Russia’s doorstep.

“One has to question who is the power seeking to turn this into a nuclear conflict. Because I don’t think it’s Russia.”

He says the US has abandoned diplomacy and respect for other nations. “We view Russia as a defeated enemy from the Cold War… we want to dictate to Russia” and others.

Ritter compares the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the present tensions and dangers between the United States and Russia. He says it’s like comparing a knife fight with a machine-gun battle in the present. “We had a handful of nukes back then which would have destroyed cities. We now have nation-destroying nuclear arsenals that would end the planet”.

Ritter says the US leadership no longer fears or respects Russia as the John F Kennedy administration and previous administrations did. The “stunning hubris” in Washington makes the danger of war spinning out of control.

He also calls out the policy of ambiguity about under what circumstances the US would use nuclear weapons as a form of “terroristic” behavior. Unlike Russia or China, the US deliberately refuses to adopt a sole-use purpose for defense and deterrence. This preemptive-use option is a form of blackmail on the rest of the world. Ultimately, the logic being used is: “Do what we say or we’ll nuke you.”

Ritter says a major structural problem is the money-making scam of the US nuclear and military-industrial complex where American politicians are bought and paid for to lobby for military profits; and therefore never adopt a more sane, peace-making and democratic policy in the interests of the majority of American citizens. If the United States were to align its policy with that of Russia and China, that is, to adopt a sole-use purpose of defense then that would transform international relations, lower tensions and make eventual disarmament possible. But ironically the United States is a hostage of its own nuclear blackmail against the world. It can’t adopt a more sane, peaceful policy because of the propaganda narrative of depicting the world as full of enemies and because of the vested interests of the military-industrial complex and its politicians in Washington.

Ritter warns that America has to shed its supremacist thinking in the same way it has struggled for generations to overcome systematic racist attitudes. “Until we stop viewing ourselves as the 'exceptional people' and start viewing ourselves as just another person, there isn’t going to be peace and harmony in the world.”

30 minute video at article

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https://peakoil.com/geology/remember-peak-oil-it-never-went-away

Remember Peak Oil? It Never Went Away

Remember peak oil? We recently wrote that it’s back but according to one of the original “peak oilers,” Richard Heinberg, author of the 2005 Peak Oiler classic “The Party’s Over, Peak Oil Is Back,” it never really went away.

According to the analysis done in the ’50s by geophysicist King Hubbert, peak oil was supposed to be happening about now, when production of oil would reach its maximum rate and then start its inexorable decline. In her excellent post—”What is Peak Oil? Have we Reached It?“—Katherine Gallagher described what might happen as peak oil bites:

“A drop in oil supply would lead to a spike in oil and fuel prices, which would affect everything from the agriculture industry to the transportation industry to the technology industry. The consequences could be as serious as widespread famine as food supplies dwindle or a mass exodus from metropolitan areas as the oil supply drops. At its worst, peak oil could lead to massive public unrest, geopolitical upheaval, and the unraveling of the fabric of the global economy.”

Balfour & Associates

We previously showed this dire rendering of Hubbert’s Peak from 2005, which puts us in the middle of confusion and heading into a period of chaos followed by collapse. It didn’t quite happen this way, thanks to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and other unconventional oil sources like the Alberta oil sands. But according to Heinberg, author of the 2005 Peak Oiler classic “The Party’s Over, Peak Oil Is Back,” in fact, it never really went away.

In Resilience, Heinberg noted that fracking may have sent production soaring but the wells declined rapidly, and the boom was financed with cheap money. But it did let us worry about other things, like climate change. If there was any discussion of peak oil, it was a worry about peak demand rather than supply, where nobody wants the stuff because we have electrified everything.

But the European energy crisis caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine has put the supply question back on the table. Heinberg reminds us of the key points about our dependence on energy:

• Energy is the basis of all aspects of human society.
• Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in the human population, economic activity, and material consumption.

This is ground covered by Vaclav Smil in his book “Energy and Civilization: A History,” writing: “To talk about energy and the economy is a tautology: every economic activity is fundamentally nothing but a conversion of one kind of energy to another, and monies are just a convenient (and often rather unrepresentative) proxy for valuing the energy flows. “

Smil also introduced us to the economist and physicist Robert Ayres, who wrote that fossil fuels didn’t enable the economy; they are the economy. “The economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”

Or, as I interpreted it in my book, “Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle“: “The purpose of the economy is to turn energy into stuff.” Following those trains of thought, one concludes that with no oil we have no economy.

Heinberg then pointed to new research and concludes that we passed peak conventional oil in 2005 and that “tight” oil from shale and fracking, along with unconventional sources like tar sands and extra-heavy oil, are not far behind. Will this lead to chaos and collapse, or can we have gradual and smooth decarbonization of our economies?

“That depends partly on whether countries dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. If the world gets serious about limiting global warming, then the downside of the curve can be made steeper through policies like carbon taxes. Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy.”

But as Heinberg concluded, these measures will not be enough to dig us out of our coming crises. “Keeping the situation from devolving further will take more than just another fracking revolution, which bought us an extra decade of business-as-usual,” he said.

In what sounds like me calling for sufficiency—or what others call degrowth—he concluded:

“This time, we’re going to have to start coming to terms with nature’s limits. That means shared sacrifice, cooperation, and belt tightening. It also means reckoning with our definitions of prosperity and progress, and getting down to the work of reconfiguring an economy that has become accustomed to (and all too comfortable with) fossil-fueled growth.”

In the 1970s, reducing energy consumption was all about energy independence from foreign sources. In the 2000s, it was about peak oil. From the 2010s to the present, it has been about climate change. Throw in new research on particulate pollution and we have the new four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, climate change, peak oil, and cancer....