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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57377.htm

The Fate of Humanity

The Near Term

The fate of humanity in the immediate future will be determined by the undeclared but entirely real war between the American Empire and Russia and China. Both gigantic and exceedingly powerful nations are perceived and treated as enemies, one already engaged in proxy war with America in Ukraine, and the other menaced and provoked by American policy on Taiwan.

The risk of truly cataclysmic war is greater in Ukraine, as it has been contemptuous of peace negotiations, and The Empire and its EU/NATO allies have supplied great quantities of weapons that permit Ukraine to continue to fight despite horrific losses. From all indications, including bellicose official statements, it is clear that America and the EU/NATO want the conflict to go on indefinitely, and they assume that is possible when it isn’t.

Russia, having for decades declared its determination not to allow hostile forces to be stationed on its borders, offered a proposal for mutual security arrangements that would satisfy both itself and Ukraine, that was ridiculed and rebuffed by The Empire. It therefore forestalled a massive attack by Ukrainian forces on the Lugansk/Donetsk Russian ethnic areas they had bombed and damaged severely for eight years by mounting what Putin called a Special Military Operation to defend those areas.

The short term goals of that operation had some success but were answered by a great escalation of force by Ukraine, backed and funded by The Empire and its allies. This changed the game for Russia which then moved to retrench and augment its forces, and is said to be about to mount a massive offensive, assisted by the massive, widespread destruction of Ukraine’s electrical and power generation capacity, to end resistance and the war.

Supposing this to be true, the question is how The Empire and its allies will respond. Two obvious possibilities are that they will assist Ukraine’s defensive retreat and capitulation, which would mean great loss of face and humiliation; or that America will enter the war and face Russia with NATO troops, and perhaps its own. This would mean an end to controlled proxy war, and escalation to a general one. It is at least possible that in the face of all-out Russian offensive, The Empire would fold at the prospect of the terrific cost in blood and dollars opposition would entail, but it seems unlikely, given its monomaniacal obsession to destroy Russia, and the stridency of its vow to see Ukrainian “victory”.

If, through raw stupidity or blinding hubris, the American Empire triggers a massive European war—which is what it would be, if American troops and weaponry were committed—it is impossible to predict how great a conflagration could result. Once war is initiated, it carves incomprehensible patterns, far beyond the capacity of man to fathom. The atmosphere of buried hostility that surrounded the complex knot of trivial miscalculations and resulting disasters that led to WWI provides a fine illustration of this. Nations, lost in their fog of propaganda and pride, can’t anticipate consequences, and they operate from an arrogance that is only much later drowned in blood.

There is no reason to expect the American Empire to learn from its many failures and defeats, particularly since all those appalling debacles worked to enrich the War Machine, which is the Oz behind the curtain of The Empire. None of the American Wars, from Korea on, was solely about winning on the battlefield. The larger purpose, behind the jingo propaganda, was to make huge amounts of money for the War Machine, the toxic brain worm that has run The Empire for all of our lifetimes.

In the event of open war between The Empire and Russia, which both will see as an existential battle for survival, there can be no upper limit to violence beyond which neither will go. That insures that if one side is suffering intolerable damage and is in mortal peril of losing the war for its life, it will almost certainly resort to using the most potent weapons it has, which are nuclear.

The consequences of Nuclear War for humanity are incalculable, and there is no point in speculating about them. What is certain is that the catastrophe would be on a scale never experienced in the history of our species, and that the impact on mankind and the natural world could mean extinction of life on earth.

Nuclear War cannot be considered as a one-off event that, when terminated itself, has no continuing consequences. The end of a Nuclear War, regardless of what remains of life when war ceases, will be only the beginning of a cascading series of disasters it will have triggered. These, too, are unimaginable, but the principle of cause and effect means they are inevitable. If remnant human and other life persists after such a war, its effects on the physical world will efficiently complete life’s mass extinction.

It is possible that none of this doomsday scenario will occur. Governments, even empires, can be capable of sound, sensible decisions, particularly to avert their own destruction. The normal pattern though, as history shows, is for them to take such action after, rather than before, disaster. Yet, it remains possible.

History teaches that momentum in events has enormous power, the power of inertia, described in the Laws of Motion. The plans of men in power are hesitant, or impulsive, and usually poorly reasoned. There has often been a horrifying inevitability about the eruption of wars that shows how little control nations have over their destinies. This is as true for other governments as it is for empires. In the present case, that means that a resolution cannot be devised that does not involve some compromise by all parties, The Empire and Ukraine, and Russia. Whether this is a real possibility will depend on their capacity to comprehend what the refusal to find a solution acceptable to both parties portends.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/12/01/straight-talk-without-mincing-words/

Straight Talk Without Mincing Words

I greatly admire Russia’s Sergey Lavrov:

For service he renders to his nation. 

For his remarkable knowledge and insight about all things historical and geopolitical.

For supporting the rule of law.

And for his straight talk public remarks — polar opposite forked-tongue double-talk by his US/Western counterparts.

Nobody’s perfect.

Whenever he refers to Western officials as “colleagues,” I cringe, knowing that they’re mortal enemies of peace, equity, justice, the rule of law and all things Russia.....

....And in Nov. 2020, Trump won. The other guy lost.

Yet the loser is illegitimately in office by brazen election-rigging, the winner a private citizen seeking reelection in 2024.

On Wednesday, commenting on the issue of global security at a time when it’s greatly jeopardized by hegemon-USA-dominated NATO — a war-making alliance unrelated to national defense of its member-states — Lavrov said the following:

As Russia under Vladimir Putin’s leadership “assume(d) its legitimate place in the international arena, (hegemon USA has gone all-out) to destroy fundamental tools for ensuring global security and stability” — perpetual wars on invented enemies by hot and/or other means its tactics of choice.

Lavrov and other Russian officials know that after hegemon USA’s 2014 coup in Kiev, the empire of lies and NATO vassals have been at war on the Russian Federation — what greatly escalated after its liberating SMO began in self-defense.

“The war unleashed by the collective West against Russia impacted strategic stability, among other things,” Lavrov stressed, adding:

“Ukraine and its citizens are being used as expendables.”

US/Western regimes “flood(ed) Ukraine with modern weapons” to wage perpetual war on Russia.

The empire of lies installed political nobody Zelensky in office as a subservient puppet to serve US/Western interests — no matter the human cost and transformation of Ukraine into a barren wasteland.

And US-installed NATO puppet, Stoltenberg, claims that the road to peace in Ukraine depends on perpetual war on Russia.

According to Lavrov, support for war by the US-dominated West reveals that what its ruling regimes call “universal human values (is) Western claptrap.”

They never had any intention of “establishing equitable relations with our country.”

Their hostile to peace and the rule of law agenda is worlds apart from pursuing equity and justice on the world stage.

For Russia, it’s vital “to avoid clashes between nuclear powers, even with use of conventional weapons,” said Lavrov.

For hegemon USA dominated Western regimes, what’s crucial to recognize and observe they ignore.

“This speaks volumes about their true motives, including their policy on Ukraine.”

They’re “literally (waging forever war) against the Russian Federation.”

At this time, a “challenging junction in world history” exists. 

“Clearly, business as usual with Westerners is a thing of the past.” 

It’s gone and won’t be restored.

The same reality applies to the US/West’s unipolar moment, replaced by multilateralism.

“For a long time,” the self-styled master of the universe USA has been operating exclusively by its own rules — in flagrant breach of international law at the expense of peace and rights of other nations.

For decades, US-dominated NATO maintained the pretense of operating as a defensive alliance.

After Soviet Russia and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, “the (invented) rationale for NATO’s existence came to an end,” Lavrov explained.

Instead of ending what, in fact, has been a war-making alliance all along, it expanded to include more member-states.

“Containing (nonthreatening) Russia” by weaponizing Ukraine for perpetual US/NATO war on the country began after the Obama/Biden regime’s 2014 coup in Kiev.

At a NATO summit in Madrid last June, “talk about its ‘defensive nature’ ” was conspicuously absent.

Instead, US-dominated NATO regimes “claim that security in the Euro-Atlantic region is inseparable from security in the Indo-Pacific region,” Lavrov stressed, adding:

“Now NATO will put up a ‘defense’ in the South China Sea region.”

“The expansionist globalism displayed by this aggressive bloc (and threat it poses to everyone everywhere) is unprecedented in history.”

“I’m convinced that most nations are perfectly aware of the threats posed by NATO policies and are aware that once Western (regimes) realize that they had lost their leading positions in the world, NATO would start acting rashly and irresponsibly.”

“These assessments will determine positions of most countries when discussing the future of global security.”

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/hows-the-war-on-truth-going/

How’s the War on Truth Going?

“I have had enough of this insanity and lack of national media attention or regulatory attention to this clear and present danger and tragedy.” — Ed Dowd

Barreling down to Christmas and the bitter butt end of a bad year, a primal fear of the deepening darkness makes people desperate — another reminder that human nature has not changed so much in ten thousand years, despite the discoveries of Prozac and plant-based meat. Yet Freud was right: death has its attractions for tormented minds. Thus, our nation appears to hasten to its own funeral.

       Can anyone actually grok how “progressive” thinking works these days? This faction now in charge of so many things has decided in the starkest terms that freedom of speech has got to go. For some years, the Party of Chaos had achieved such exquisite control of all national debate by seizing the dials and toggles of social media that they made reality itself their hostage.  The truth was only what they said it was, and anyone who said otherwise got banished, cancelled, and even destroyed.

     There seemed to be no way to overcome this death grip on the process of consensus, the formation of a coherent collective idea about what is going on in the world. And so, any number of scams could be run on the people of this land. The Woke-Jacobins could rig elections in plain sight. They could surreptitiously suspend due process of law when it suited them. They could send national police thugs to your door at five-o’clock in the morning with riot guns, body armor, flash bangs, and bogus warrants. They could take your livelihoods, your freedom to move about, your childrens’ minds and bodies, and your dignity. Finally, they could take your life with false vaccines — and, unlike the Nazis in 1944, get the private sector to dispose of the corpses.

     And now a struggle ensues over the relationship between the truth and the making of a consensus. Elon Musk bought Twitter — the horror! — and methodically set about to liberate this new digital “public square” from insidious and nefarious manipulation. It’s not a trifling matter, of course, but it’s amusing to watch Elon play with our nation’s overlords; and even more entertaining to see these tyrants strain and bluster to justify their war against free speech. How did the cognitive elite, America’s thinking class — the law professors, the editors and pundits, the public intellectuals, the managers of most everything — ever find themselves so self-owned in idiocy?

     I wish I’d been a fly-on-the-wall in that meeting mid-week between Elon Musk and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple — the very same week that Apple disabled the Air-drop function on iPhones in China (slyly, by means of a new OS update), making it more difficult for street protesters to coordinate their movements against CCP lockdowns. Rumors were flying days before that the Lords of Tech would pull on Twitter the same kind of treatment they dealt to Parler two years ago, a then-rising rival app for Internet chatter that threatened to open up free debate. Apple and Google took Parler out behind the woodshed and shot it in the head — and nobody could do a damn thing about it. I have a hunch that Elon explained a few things to Tim Cook that made him think twice about another move like that.

  Twitter is different than the upstart Parler was. Twitter was already established as the authorities’ official arbiter of approved thought in America. Under the old boss, Jack Dorsey, Twitter accomplished its thought-management ends with a staff of a thousand mini-Stalins rooting out anything that smelled like opposition to the official narratives. (Elon fired the whole lot of them in short order.) It has been revealed since then that Twitter carried out censorship at the aggressive prompting of US Deep State officialdom — the nagging, twanging, and strong-arming by bureaucrats from many federal agencies. Who knows (not yet, anyway) how many Twitter censors were actually put in-place by the government?

       So now, one big truth has come nakedly into the open: the Left is at war with the First Amendment to the Constitution. Free speech, they say repeatedly now, makes our democracy unsafe. It can’t be allowed. They say that because they don’t have a better argument. The safety talking-point is a shopworn cliché from their grab-bag of Woke shibboleths that the public is sick of hearing. Anyone with half a brain can see how transparently dishonest and stupid it is. It’s not going over well, even among a people so sorely gaslighted as the USA in late 2022.

       Speaking of what is safe and what is not safe, one of the main deceptions the past three years has been the suppression of information about the Covid-19 “vaccines” that were foisted on the population — for many, made a requirement to earn a living. The pre-Musk Twitter worked strenuously to bury any data and all news that suggested the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were disabling and killing people. The tension between truth and lies has now reached a breaking point, with so many suspicious “all-causes” deaths coming to the public’s attention. This is what the authorities are really afraid of: that the people will learn their government has carried out — by epic incompetence or true malice — something that looks like an attempted genocide.