SC276-1

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57424.htm

Col. MacGregor: The GATHERING Storm in Ukraine Spells Doom for the West

The crisis of American national power has begun. America’s economy is tipping over, and Western financial markets are quietly panicking. Imperiled by rising interest rates, mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries are losing their value. The market’s proverbial “vibes”—feelings, emotions, beliefs, and psychological penchants—suggest a dark turn is underway inside the American economy.

American national power is measured as much by American military capability as by economic potential and performance. The growing realization that American and European military-industrial capacity cannot keep up with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and equipment is an ominous signal to send during a proxy war that Washington insists its Ukrainian surrogate is winning.

Russian economy-of-force operations in southern Ukraine appear to have successfully ground down attacking Ukrainian forces with the minimal expenditure of Russian lives and resources. While Russia’s implementation of attrition warfare worked brilliantly, Russia mobilized its reserves of men and equipment to field a force that is several magnitudes larger and significantly more lethal than it was a year ago.

Russia’s massive arsenal of artillery systems including rockets, missiles, and drones linked to overhead surveillance platforms converted Ukrainian soldiers fighting to retain the northern edge of the Donbas into pop-up targets. How many Ukrainian soldiers have died is unknown, but one recent estimate wagers between 150,000-200,000 Ukrainians have been killed in action since the war began, while another estimates about 250,000.

Given the glaring weakness of NATO members’ ground, air, and air defense forces, an unwanted war with Russia could easily bring hundreds of thousands of Russian Troops to the Polish border, NATO’s Eastern Frontier. This is not an outcome Washington promised its European allies, but it’s now a real possibility.

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s hamfisted and ideologically driven foreign policymaking and execution, contemporary Russia has skillfully cultivated support for its cause in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The fact that the West’s economic sanctions damaged the U.S. and European economies while turning the Russian ruble into one of the international system’s strongest currencies has hardly enhanced Washington’s global standing.

Biden’s policy of forcibly pushing NATO to Russia’s borders forged a strong commonality of security and trade interests between Moscow and Beijing that is attracting strategic partners in South Asia like India, and partners like Brazil in Latin America. The global economic implications for the emerging Russo-Chinese axis and their planned industrial revolution for some 3.9 billion people in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are profound.

In sum, Washington’s military strategy to weaken, isolate, or even destroy Russia is a colossal failure and the failure puts Washington’s proxy war with Russia on a truly dangerous path. To press on, undeterred in the face of Ukraine’s descent into oblivion, ignores three metastasizing threats: 1. Persistently high inflation and rising interest rates that signal economic weakness. (The first American bank failure since 2020 is a reminder of U.S. financial fragility.) 2. The threat to stability and prosperity inside European societies already reeling from several waves of unwanted refugees/migrants. 3. The threat of a wider European war.

Inside presidential administrations, there are always competing factions urging the president to adopt a particular course of action. Observers on the outside seldom know with certainty which faction exerts the most influence, but there are figures in the Biden administration seeking an off-ramp from involvement in Ukraine. Even Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a rabid supporter of the proxy war with Moscow, recognizes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand that the West help him recapture Crimea is a red line for Putin that might lead to a dramatic escalation from Moscow.

Backing down from the Biden administration’s malignant and asinine demands for a humiliating Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine before peace talks can convene is a step Washington refuses to take. Yet it must be taken. The higher interest rates rise, and the more Washington spends at home and abroad to prosecute the war in Ukraine, the closer American society moves toward internal political and social turmoil. These are dangerous conditions for any republic.

From all the wreckage and confusion of the last two years, there emerges one undeniable truth. Most Americans are right to be distrustful of and dissatisfied with their government. President Biden comes across as a cardboard cut-out, a stand-in for ideological fanatics in his administration, people that see executive power as the means to silence political opposition and retain permanent control of the federal government.

Americans are not fools. They know that members of Congress flagrantly trade stocks based on inside information, creating conflicts of interest that would land most citizens in jail. They also know that since 1965 Washington led them into a series of failed military interventions that severely weakened American political, economic, and military power.

Far too many Americans believe they have had no real national leadership since January 21, 2021. It is high time the Biden administration found an off-ramp designed to extricate Washington, D.C., from its proxy Ukrainian war against Russia. It will not be easy. Liberal internationalism or, in its modern guise, “moralizing globalism,” makes prudent diplomacy arduous, but now is the time. In Eastern Europe, the spring rains present both Russian and Ukrainian ground forces with a sea of mud that severely impedes movement. But the Russian High Command is preparing to ensure that when the ground dries and Russian ground forces attack, the operations will achieve an unambiguous decision, making it clear that Washington and its supporters have no chance to rescue the dying regime in Kiev. From then on, negotiations will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

( Excellent video interview with Col MacGregor in You Tube link at article address )

....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57421.htm

Fatal Faith's

Is this, our lifetime, the critical moment when the survival of life on earth will be determined; or just another of the ongoing crises that have always defined human existence?  For a great majority of people it’s the latter: a time like any other.  To most people, beset as they are with daily struggles, the question doesn’t even occur.  One of the mixed mercies of human limitation is their blindness to what threatens them and the capacity to ignore it. 

But assume that it is.  Assume that in our time the future of life will be decided.  This idea, as Dr. Johnson said of the prospect of being hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully.  If we imagine this is where we are—that whether human life continues truly does depend on us now—then all would agree that it’s imperative to abandon the hypocritical bullshit that prevents us from acting to preserve it.  Humanity has never had to face the certainty its actions will determine whether life continues, and has never had to make ultimate choices irrevocably.  Suppose that now it does. 

Beneath and behind the cowardly sophistry that has prevented humanity from acting for its own survival, there are two powerful conceptual anchors that support our refusal to accept the iron fact of finity and prevent our acting rationally.  They provide both cover and tacit permission for our self-elected suicide. 

The first—longest enduring, and deepest—is the absolutism of organized religion; not of one religion, but all religions, religion itself.  We understand why they exist.  Awareness of finity, that  fear we feel of our inevitable mortality, in addition to the random miseries living entails, create a desperate yearning for protection, hope, and safety every human experiences.  Since life provides no such dispensation, a magic answer had to be devised.  All religion originates in this need and is an attempt to address it. 

Humanity in the mass found relief in religion; it assuaged the eviscerating hopelessness and mollified the inescapable dread mortality imposes.  It’s psycho-spiritual gift has come at great cost, however.  In insisting upon godly direction of Man’s destiny, religion allowed him to obliquely offload responsibility for his actions onto deity.  The notion that “Man proposes and God disposes” has been used not just to provide a fantasy heaven, but as an excuse for the horrors Man inflicts on his own kind. 

The appalling tragedies Man has perpetrated on himself and the living world through the ages, have found ultimate excuse and explanation in the Will of God.  Religions have provided historic justification for Man’s long saga of cruelty and murder of his own.  This is not because gods are portrayed as malevolent, but rather as omnipotent and incomprehensible.  Man is not ultimately in charge of himself and his actions.  God is.  Religion requires Man to conform to a destiny he is unable to understand.  Deus lo vult! 

Although science has so long and so thoroughly exposed all religions for the specious, infantile fantasies they are, weak Man continues to use God myths to justify his brutality, and to elude, in his own mind, responsibility for the disasters he has planned and executed that are leading him and the living world to an end. 

The second categorical imperative of human policy is Capitalism.  It has been said that it’s easier for men to envision the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.  Because it has proven the best means to amass the wealth that insures power and privilege, it is the ruling economic system of the world, and all business of significance is conducted through Capitalism.  It is absolute. 

Economics—a “social science”—has no more relation to ethics than chemistry has to politics.  It is simply the study of the way people contrive to exchange goods and services.  Its “laws” or, more accurately, practices, are not subject to ethical strictures or regulated by social effects.  Economic systems simply enable servicing of the needs and wants of Mankind, and Capitalism is one of them. There is nothing inevitable and numinous about its so-called “laws”.  They are a human created collection of rules that serve the interests of money power; in other words, stories.  

In spite of that fact, Capitalism, the most powerful engine of wealth generation in history, has assumed a mythic character of permanence, an aura of inevitability, that has raised humanity’s belief in it to the level of a sanctified religion.  The fact is, that human-created economic systems work as money power wishes them to work, but are riddled with cruelties and failures, and are subject to change if and when humanity demands it. 

For the same reason religions continue their hold on the vast majority of humanity, Capitalism is virtually invulnerable to honest criticism.  It has been portrayed as somehow holy, and ultimately necessary for the survival of humanity.  Nothing could be more false and ridiculous.  Ages of lying indoctrination and relentless force-feeding of dishonest propaganda by the money power has rendered it unchallengeable as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

The combined power and dominating influence of these forces—religion and Capitalism—which virtually all mankind upholds and fiercely defends—is rapidly destroying the physical bases of human life and the prospect of any possible future for Mankind. 

To return to our premise, if this is the age in which survival of our

species will be determined, which seems certain, then unless the tyranny of these deeply evil belief systems is broken there is no hope for Mankind.  Perhaps, the sense that any possible future is ours to determine, if widely disseminated, will provide the moral  strength to break free and live?  The choice is ours to make.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-season-is-here/ 

The Season is Here 

Of course, the newspaper USA Today chose transgender activist Leigh Finke for its Women of the Year award because in the USA of the here-and-now (today, for instance), boundaries are a thing of the past, and if a woman of the year happens to come with the “package” that signifies male-of-the-species, you’d better ignore that incongruity and go along with the gag — or prepare for the punishments that will rain down until your morale improves.

     The transgender movement has crystalized into the Party of Chaos’s favored instrument for enforcing its ethos of unreality on a population obdurately stuck on thinking in categories, on making hateful distinctions between things. Better to live in a protective miasma of undifferentiated sensation than a cruel state based on pattern recognition where one is incessantly prompted to understand how objects and life-forms around us differ, where things begin and end, and what all that means relative to your own supposed amorphous existence.

      Mattias Desmet, Belgian author of the 2022 book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, proposed that a political faction subject to “mass formation psychosis” — the group hysteria that sets the scene for tyranny — would demand that the public swallow a cavalcade of increasingly absurd ideas in order to soften up their brains, so as to make it easier for leaders (influencers) to push them in any desired direction. I would propose that we have probably achieved peak brain-softening in this land.

     The only thing left to challenge is the distinction between being alive or dead, which is exactly what you would get in Zombieland, a place that the Party of Chaos (and its mentors in the World Economic Forum) long to take you to, where you will have nothing and be happy! And never think a hateful thought, or any thought not pre-cooked for you and served up by The Party like so much dim sum. Choose that or it’s the nothingness and bliss of the grave. It’s all the same to the Party leaders. Voila: the totalitarian nirvana!

     Folks are beginning to grok how all this works after a years-long epic mind-fuck by the increasingly malevolent permanent bureaucracy running a nation on the glide-path to destruction. Not a few people around America still-capable of independent thought are less than avid for liquidation. And certainly not willing to be absorbed into the amoeba-like blob of redundant, undifferentiated protoplasm that a totalitized population must be in the end-state of political Wokery.

     Now, in the spring of ’23, Woke is suddenly mutating into a general wake-up call. The animals are stirring from their long sleep of compliance as ruin stalks the land. The season of concentrating the mind is here. When it becomes a matter of sink-or-swim, people once again remember the difference between being dead or alive. The test is on.

     Expect three evolving dynamics to define our country’s zeitgeist in the stirring months to come. First, the collapse of our lunatic project for using Ukraine to destabilize Russia, an enterprise so feckless it could have only been conceived by the dead-of-brain. Our geniuses of foreign affairs screwed the pooch on this one. It’s almost too obvious that they never cared about the people of that sore-beset land. Notice, they do not even use the word “peace” in any of their confabulations about what’s going on there, because it is the opposite of what they seek, which is…chaos unending.

     Thus, others will end this vainglorious project for us — namely, our antagonist there, Russia — and the regime of “Joe Biden,” for the second time in its mortifying two years-plus of rule, will be left holding its limp, generative member in its collective hand, another humiliation for our over-reaching imperial soldiery — and the deluded empty suits commanding it. Will they be able to pretend this time, as they did in Afghanistan, 2021, that there’s nothing to see here, folks? Just a blizzard of press-releases declaring “mission accomplished” or some-such other craven bullshit? I don’t think so. The reaction may be enough to bum-rush “Joe Biden” and Company out of office. His grotesque family rackets (including the Ukraine grifts) will finally and magically come to the public’s attention, and that’ll be all she wrote for “JB”— except for the historians waking from their own long catatonic spells to record the disaster they will swear they couldn’t see coming.

     Next, we will go through the tipping-point where a critical mass of the population — not just in America, but throughout Western Civ, and even beyond — realizes that they have been poisoned and injured by the mRNA “vaccines” they were so eager to line up for. It will produce a special sort of collective agony centered around a raging despair that leads with astonishing speed to prosecutions. The torpor and uncertainty of the past three years evaporates and the machinery of law actually starts cranking again, and in the right way — not as a mere instrument of coercion and intimidation, but to actually seek justice.

    Third will be the transformation of a raging inflation into a ruinous debt deflation that leaves Americans, one way or another, with no money. At the same time, the people will wake to the wrecking of their energy and food supply. A line will appear drawn in the ground from sea to shining sea, as by a cosmic power, and everybody… the formerly Woke, the unvaxxed, the penitent and unrepentant, the middle and lower orders especially, who suffer most harshly… will find themselves all on one side of that line in opposition to the wicked who have brought a hard rain upon them. And there you will finally see the beginning of your long-promised hope and change. No need even to wait for it. At long last, it’s upon us.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/25/syrians-have-every-right-to-attack-us-occupiers-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

Syrians Have Every Right To Attack US Occupiers: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The western world is solemnly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion by blindly following the US into more conflict and militarism while repeating all the same kinds of mass media malpractice.

❖

If you think it’s a coincidence that the western world suddenly got super–duper interested in China’s human rights record right when China began threatening US planetary domination, then you’re a bootlicking moron who deserves to be shamed in public.

A leaked 2017 State Department memo explicitly acknowledged that it’s US government policy to ignore the human rights violations of US-aligned nations while attacking them in nations like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Stop buying into this performance.

China has been sorting out China’s internal affairs for thousands of years; they don’t suddenly need help from a bunch of white stuffed shirts in Washington, London and Canberra just because a few sociopathic think tankers say so. Leave China’s issues to the Chinese to address.

❖

People who live in the Middle East have every right to attack the occupying forces there whose presence they oppose, and those occupying forces do not have any legitimate right to retaliate.

Every American who is killed or injured by those opposing US military occupations was killed or injured because the US empire put them there. What happens to them is the empire’s fault, not the fault of those rightfully resisting a hostile occupation.

Claims that attacks on US occupiers in Syria are “backed” by Iran should never be taken on blind faith, but to be clear it is entirely legitimate for Iran to involve itself in this conflict. Iran is an ally of Syria and is in Syria with the Syrian government’s permission; neither of these things are true of the US. Perhaps more importantly, Iran is in the Middle East, and therefore has infinitely more legitimacy than the US in making the Middle East its business.

❖

Even if everything US pundits and politicians are saying about TikTok is true (and of course it isn’t), it’s still far less scary than what the US government does to us with American apps, and it’s still far less scary than giving the White House massive new censorship powers. If you live anywhere under the thumb of the US empire, then any information-gathering or censorship policies the US government sets for itself have real relevance to your life, because the US government has actual power over you. The Chinese government does not. This is obvious to anyone who doesn’t have soup for brains.

It’s crazy how the First Amendment explicitly says “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech or freedom of the press, and yet congress is preparing to do literally exactly that with all American TikTok users.

It’s also crazy that US congressmen who don’t understand any technology more advanced than a shovel and think the internet comes from magic beans are making decisions about online platforms that affect everyone.

❖

The problem is not that Australia’s corrupt media are saying the nation will have to follow the US into war with China, the problem is that they’re almost certainly correct. This means Australians must demand we immediately exit our alliances with the US that would lead to this. They’re not being dishonest when they say we’ll have to follow if the US goes to war against China, they’re being dishonest in their failure to immediately begin asking “Okay, so how do we GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS BAT SHIT INSANE SITUATION RIGHT THIS VERY INSTANT?”

Because that’s the only sane response to finding out that your nation will have to go to war with its primary trading partner to facilitate some dopey agendas cooked up in Washington, Arlington and Langley: asking how the fuck do we get ourselves the fuck out of this situation? What do we need to do? What alliances need to be shredded? Whose offices do we need to storm and whose desks do we need to pound on? Failure to ask these questions is malpractice. Because going to war with China will destroy our country. Absolutely destroy it. It cannot happen.

The Australian media aren’t criminal in telling us the US is going to drag us into a war of unimaginable horror, the Australian media are criminal for telling us we just need to accept that and get comfortable with the idea. Fuck you. No. Get us out of this World War III trap immediately.

Never in history has hard-hitting, adversarial journalism been so urgently needed in Australia as it is right now, and never in history have the Australian media been less fit for the job.

If you’re wondering why I’ve been writing so much about my home country lately instead of focusing on the hub of the empire in the US like I usually do, that’s why. It’s because our worthless, bootlicking press aren’t doing their fucking jobs right when it’s most urgently important that they do.