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https://edwardcurtin.com/night-for-day-or-day-for-night-in-the-heart-of-darkness/

Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air”
– Lord Byron, “Darkness”

Overheard in a coffee shop: A woman and a man are sitting together at a table.  She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book.  Looking at the screen, she says to him, “I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial to full, and the full eclipse lasts just 3-4 minutes.”

The man replies: “And if you’re lucky, the partial eclipse lasts more than 70 to 80 years, because then the full eclipse is forever.”

She acts as if she doesn’t hear him, as if his sardonic humor has nothing to do with her death anxiety or with the media’s celebration of the darkness visible of the total solar eclipse due to occur on April 8^th across North America that the media is calling “eclipse mania,” while failing to mention they are promoting it as such.

It is strange how today people revel in the darkness even while fearing it.  Sunsets are far more popular than sunrises, even while death is the great bogeyman and birth deserves cigars and champagne.  Crowds regularly gather in the evenings, cell phone cameras raised, to laud the death of the light that they embalm on their dinguses (i.e.gadgets, just as the atomic bomb was nicknamed “The Gadget”), trying to freeze time, even as they celebrate the death of another day.  This twisted relationship to day and night, life and death, darkness and light is perhaps best summoned up in a few lines of poetry from Rainer Maria Rilke from his Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.

We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.

And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar eclipse is the next great big thing to see.  A plunge into the heart of darkness that is apposite to the dark heart of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless power, craven terror, and pride in killing.  It is uncanny how the darkness of social life today is reflected in the promotion of a natural event as if it were a must-see film that has just won the Academy Award.  As Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness: “Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

And we will die in a flicker if the dark-hearted leaders of this country continue to push against Russia in Ukraine for the nuclear war that they previewed in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is understandable why in retrospect the great Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s first report from Hiroshima was so widely censored and why he was for many years portrayed as a communist dupe, even as twenty years later his honest reports from Vietnam were so important for those interested in the truth that the mainstream media blacked them out.  The exposure of America’s ongoing war crimes was for decades blamed on communist influence, just as today it is blamed on Russian propaganda.

But now it’s time for a flick to give us crocodile tears from the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, with that must-see Academy Award winning film, Oppenheimer.  The imprisoned and executed German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison before he was executed by Hitler for opposing Hitler’s mass atrocities, called such subtle self-glorification “cheap grace.”  It is grace we bestow on ourselves, forgiveness without requiring repentance, feats of self-glorification mastered by Hollywood.

A biopic of one man with all his complicated and twisted personality and scientific brilliance is a far cry from Wilfred Burchett’s article, The Atomic Plague: “I write this as a warning to the world.”  But then the Academy Awards’ ongoing support for Ukraine in its U.S. proxy war against Russia – a war rooted in the 2014 U.S. engineered coup and NATO’s encircling of Russia – is just the opposite: a provocation that makes nuclear war much more likely.  It’s a sick celebrity game.

The creation of the atomic bomb and its use on the Japanese was demonic – pure evil.  Robert Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure as Kai Bird, the coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, claimed last year in The New York Times. As I wrote in “Trinity’s Shadow,” he was “complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future.” Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical and big tech industries, or the CIA, to regulate themselves.  Anyone who would give the name “Trinity” to the site where the first bomb was exploded had a twisted mind.

Oppenheimer, which excludes scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate with flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, recently opened in Japan. The New York Times published a piece about the opening that contains various Japanese reactions, including one from Yujin Yaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, that accurately raises a fundamental issue: the film “celebrates a group of white male scientists who really enjoyed their privilege and their love of political power. We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what it says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in the U.S (and elsewhere).”

Exactly. The issue is political, not aesthetic.  Why it is good to see some flickering images and not others?  Why is night for day and the blocking out of the sun by an eclipse so good but the reminder that we are on the edge of a nuclear eclipse because of the policies of our dark-hearted leaders is not?

We live in very dark times.  There is no need to watch the sun being extinguished and day turn to night in the heart of an immense darkness.  Kurtz’s dying words as recalled by Marlowe at the end of The Heart of Darkness – ‘The horror! The horror!’ are not words we want to utter as we realize we too have gone mad in our souls because we looked the wrong way as the nukes were in their flight.

Chase the light!  As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic lessons in filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing. . . .”

It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.

So if we are to celebrate the dawn of a new day on earth, paradoxical and contradictory as it might sound, we do need to look into the darkness – the heart of the darkest and demonic crimes committed by our heartless leaders – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Gaza, the escalating and expanding war in the Middle East, and the U.S proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, to name a few.

And if the contemplation of the eclipse of the sun disturbs you enough to impel you to do so, a quick peek won’t hurt.

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https://alt-market.us/globalists-claim-mass-immigration-helps-the-us-economy-heres-why-thats-a-lie/

Globalists Claim Mass Immigration Helps The US Economy – Here’s Why That’s A Lie

 

I have said it many times in the past but I think it bears repeating once again: If you want to understand why world events happen the way they do, you must understand the goals and influence of globalist institutions. You must accept the fact that these people create most of the national and international disasters you and I have to deal with on a regular basis and oftentimes they create these disasters deliberately.

Yes, I know, there are plenty of skeptics out there that think all geopolitics and crisis events are random or a product of bureaucratic stupidity; and those people are wrong. They have no idea what they’re talking about because they’re basing this conclusion on assumptions rather than facts and research. Make no mistake, there’s a good reason why it feels like the whole world has gone crazy all at once.

The primary purpose of the globalists is to erase national borders and homogenize all countries and cultures under one economic and governmental system. They have openly admitted to this plan on numerous occasions. One of the most revealing quotes on the agenda comes from Clinton Administration Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, who stated in Time magazine that:

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority… National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

He adds in the same article a lesser known quote:

“…The free world formed multilateral financial institutions that depend on member states’ willingness to give up a degree of sovereignty. The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much duty a nation can charge on imports. These organizations can be seen as the protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united world.”

The people who push for this agenda are generally members of a number of globalist organizations, from the Council on Foreign Relations to the Tavistock Institute to the World Economic Forum to the IMF or World Bank, not to mention the Bank for International Settlements and the Council For Inclusive Capitalism. However, these think-tank groups are only part of the bigger picture. They are supported by some of the largest banking and investment corporations in the world, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, HSBC, Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.

If you want to know why mass illegal immigration is a growing crisis at this time and why the current government has been actively trying to enforce an open border police in the US, simply look into the financial aspects of pro-illegal immigration lobbying groups and think tanks pushing open borders messaging into the mainstream. You will find many of these banks and investment funds connected to them in one way or another.

For example, the list of companies backing the Governor of New York’s plan to subsidize illegal aliens entering the state is very revealing. If they’re allowed to continue offering incentives to illegals then those people will continue trying to come to the US; this isn’t complicated. The conspiracy is out in the open.

Admitting To The Agenda, Then Painting It As A Positive

For the first few years of Joe Biden’s presidency, he and his cohorts attempted to deny there was any mass illegal migration problem at all. However, when media coverage (mostly independent) began to expose the enormous caravans of illegals overwhelming border towns like El Paso, Texas, he was forced to acknowledge that the crisis was in fact a crisis.

But, if you thought that forcing Biden to admit to the migrant disaster was going to force him to do something about it, you were sorely mistaken. The reason mass immigration exists right now is exactly because the Biden Administration and globalist institutions are offering free handouts to “asylum seekers.” All they have to do to stop the rising tide of illegals is to stop offering them free stuff. Clearly, the political elites have no intention of doing this.

Instead, government officials, think-tanks and the media have decided that since they’re now pressed to admit that mass immigration and open borders are real, they’re going to spin the crisis as if it’s actually a good thing for America.

In a narrative similar to the one used by EU officials to justify their support of the invasion of Islamic fundamentalists from 2014 onward, American elites claim that western nations are “desperate for a younger population” which can fill the “needs of the labor market.” They claim than mass migrations into the west are “good for the economy.”

This was also the primary message of a World Economic Forum conference on migration and labor held in March. The globalist organization discussed how open borders and mass immigration could be framed as a “positive” in terms of economic advantages. And the talking points derived from WEF events always find their way into the corporate media. The main takeaway? Protectionism (of national borders) is bad and countries that engage in it will be at an economic disadvantage.

Since last month there’s been a hailstorm of establishment media articles and news reports suggesting that mass immigration will boost GDP and make America stronger. These assertions are all built on a single line from a single report from the Congressional Budget Office which states:

“In our projections, the deficit is also smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 (EDITOR’S NOTE: Do they mean 2023?) is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise. We are continuing to assess the implications of immigration for revenues and spending.”

Bloomberg recently published an article boasting that this line from the CBO report shows that the rising fears among Americans over illegal immigration are unfounded. They question why the migrant crisis is a top issue going into the 2024 elections and cite a number of major banking institutions that have adjusted their US fiscal outlook into the positive because of the CBO’s data point and higher immigration. Bloomberg quotes the HSBC:

“Immigration is not just a highly charged social and political issue, it is also a big macroeconomic one,” Janet Henry, global chief economist at HSBC Holdings Plc, wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. No advanced economy is benefiting from immigration quite like the U.S., and “the impact of migration has been an important part of the U.S. growth story over the past two years.”

Firstly, let’s clarify something in terms of the CBO’s theory – The US deficit has fallen in direct correlation to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. It’s more expensive to borrow for everyone, including the government, which makes it more expensive to spend. Because of far higher interest payments the US is now adding over $1 Trillion every 100 days to the national debt. That’s unprecedented.

Any spending cuts can be directly attributed to higher interest rates, NOT immigration. The CBO mentions this fact very quickly in the same report, without elaborating on why they think immigrants add value. But let’s consider the GDP claim for a moment; why would the CBO expect higher immigration to add $7 trillion to the GDP in the next ten years?

Illegal Immigrants Are A Net Negative – We Don’t Need Them

They say it’s about more people working, but what about more people taking welfare and other subsidies? Neither the CBO (nor the media) make any distinction between legal migrants and illegal migrants when it comes to economic effects.

Legal migrants usually have careers, business plans, skill sets and their own money coming into the US. Most illegals have nothing – Little education, no substantial skill sets, no money and no plan other than to get free handouts wherever possible. We have seen the proof of this in places like New York and Washington DC, where a tiny percentage of migrants bused into the cities have absolutely crushed their welfare infrastructure.

It’s estimated that the net lifetime cost of each illegal immigrant for the American taxpayer is over $68,000. While some illegals do end up paying taxes, their overall cost is far higher than the amount they pay in.

The jobs market has been inflated by trillions in Federal Reserve stimulus and most of the jobs created are low wage retail and service positions that will disappear in a couple years anyway. The CBO notes in the same report that unemployment is set to increase in 2024, but the media overlooked that little tidbit of information.

Migrants are not needed to keep the labor market going. In fact, as jobs numbers inevitably plummet due to higher interest rates illegals will only add to jobless levels and poverty levels in the US, further dragging the economy down.

Not to mention, the American housing market has suffered an oppressive spike in prices, with home costs and rents in many places doubling. This is caused in part by the millions of migrants entering the country each year looking for housing and getting help from US government programs to secure that housing. Get rid of the illegals and I guarantee rent costs will go down quickly.

Almost all of the projected GDP gain from illegal immigrants comes from their wages which go into their pockets (the same wages they send back to their families in their home countries). There is no direct GDP gain from illegals in terms of benefits to the overall economy. That said, the CBO may also be accounting for another factor which many Americans are unaware of – Government spending being added to GDP.

As I’ve noted in the past, a large portion of GDP calculated by state governments and the federal government comes from spending. The more the government spends the higher GDP climbs. It doesn’t matter if that money was wasted, it is still counted as rising economic activity.

So, if the US is adding 2-3 million illegals per year to the population and the government is spending thousands in tax dollars per year on each illegal through various subsidies, that will amount to billions per year in extra GDP. And the more they allow illegals to enter the country unchecked the more GDP can grow exponentially. Is that good for the economy? No. It’s going to destroy the economy and we are already seeing the effects, but the government and the media can spin it to look like it’s a positive.

The head of the CBO is a Republican but he’s also a former member of the IMF, so it’s not surprising he would paint mass immigration as a positive. The globalists want to end national sovereignty and the fastest way to do that is to create open border conditions, kill domestic economies, erase western culture and then swoop in with a “global solution” after the dust settles. This is the plan; to destabilize the US economic system, not save it. And, illegal immigrants are a useful tool for that end game.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/vectoring-dangerously/

Vectoring Dangerously

If your situational awareness is well-tuned, you can put together a political weather report from the swirl of events that otherwise seem to confound the degenerate simps who pretend to report the news. Events are tending in the direction of self-reinforcing, ramifying chaos, and the people running the show are obviously insane as they do everything possible to hurry chaos along.

     Case in point: Antony Blinken, our Secretary of State, who announced yesterday that Ukraine will get rushed into NATO ASAP. Do you understand that would mean a direct, automatic, peremptory declaration of war against Russia, requiring all of NATO — that is, their combined militaries — to go kinetic inside Ukraine and theoretically inside Russia, too, (a move that has not worked out well for anyone in all of history), because Article Five of the NATO charter states that an armed attack against one is an attack against all, and must be answered with counter-attack? Thus, you see, Mr. Blinken just announced World War Three.

      You might also consider that NATO does not have the capacity to fight that war. The European members don’t have sufficient troops and equipment, or financial reserves for that matter. And there is, of course, America’s under-recruited DEI army of transsexuals and video-gamers, with equipment that has already proven inadequate on-the-ground in Ukraine, and a logistical route for delivery of all that which runs 5,000 miles across an ocean and then another continent. . . whereas our opponent (Russia) is right next door to the battlefield and churning out munitions like there is no tomorrow (which there might well not be for all concerned). Even Adolf Hitler, the last fool to attempt a conquest of Russia, wouldn’t like those odds.

     And why would Russia desist from firing hypersonic missiles at Berlin, Paris, London, New York and. . . ? You get the idea. In which case the USA, backstopping NATO, would lob swarms of our nuclear missiles into Russia. . . and the whole shootin’ match ends up twenty minutes later a smoldering, civilization-ending mess. Smooth move, Tony Blinken. In political weather terms, this is like an arctic shear cutting across the northern hemisphere.

       At the same time, you might notice a financial la Nina forming out over the salty sea. Gold chugged up above $2,300-an-ounce the past ten days, a record. That’s a coded message from Reality Central. My de-coder ring says it means the bond market is about to fall on its ass, taking the dollar down with it, which would swiftly domino into the way-overpriced equity markets, and Gawd knows what kind of maelstrom all the derivatives flotsam would get sucked into. Notice, too that Bitcoin goes up $3,000 one day and down $2,000 the next. Kind of sketchy. But that’s just my take. If you have one, I’d like to hear it. In any case, it looks like stormy financial weather which, if nothing else, is not exactly an advantageous accompaniment to a world war. In fact, it could beat a path quickly to something like empty supermarket shelves — and you know what they say about a population being a few missed meals away from anarchy.

      Then there’s the immense cluster of twisters moving ominously across the planet in the form of the Covid vaccination dysregulated immunity fiasco I wrote about in last Friday’s blog (This Is Not an April Fool’s Gag), as predicted by virologist Dr. Vanden Bossche. Translation: a lot of people getting sick and dying because their mRNA shots and boosters have so screwed-up their immune systems that they are sitting ducks for an emergent variant of Covid gestating in the vaxxed population. By the way, there is apparently a gross breakdown in medical services world-wide now, especially a shortage of doctors and nurses. Now you’re starting to see some serious stormy weather: a war, a financial train wreck, and a global public health disaster all at once.

      While all that is churning things up, the next round of Trump trials are set to kick off in Alvin Bragg’s New York and Fani Willis’s Fulton County (Atlanta), GA. Both cases have publicly wrecked themselves. In the New York case, you have the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, Loren Merchan, 37, a Democratic Party consultant who has multi-million-dollar contracts with Rep. Adam Schiff, the nation’s leading RussiaGate hoaxer, and working partner of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, a chief witness in the matter of a hush-money payment made to porn-star Stormy Daniels (hush money, you might note, not being illegal). Any political motivation to see in that cast of characters? And that is apart from the sheer bullshit nature of the case, as packaged for Mr. Bragg by US Attorney Matthew Colangelo, who was swapped out of the Main DOJ HQ in Blobville to the office of Soros-connected DA Bragg in Manhattan specifically to engineer a political prosecution.

      The Fani Willis case down south, another political prosecution by a loudmouth “Get Trump” DA, now goes forward with a compromised government attorney who has demonstrably committed enough offenses against the law to merit disbarment. Her lover and, until recently, “special prosecutor,” Nathan Wade, on top of probably perjuring himself about his financial entanglements with DA Willis, was just cited for contempt in his own divorce case (failure to pay child support). Note, too, that the idiotic substance of the case — a racketeering charge for conspiring to voice opinions about the veracity of the 2020 election — was likewise constructed by Lawfare ninjas in Washington DC (my guess, by Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, and Norm Eisen), and mentored to Willis & Wade in a series of meetings held in the White House office of Veep Kamala Harris (with Lawfare ninjas improperly not logged-in — also my guess).

      If the blob’s desired outcome, a conviction, comes to pass, and Mr. Trump is hauled off to Riker’s Island, say, to mingle with X-hundred homicidal mutts, and, say, for some reason he does not come out of there alive. . . well, say hello to an extra-especially bad set-up for civil disorder in the home of the brave — while we do World War Three, financial pandemonium, and Vaccine death. It’s a lot to take in, I know. But it’s all really right out there, and it’s all vectoring right at us. Just so you know.