Debt Rattle December 6 2021
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December 6, 2021 at 11:03 pm #94526slimyalligatorParticipant
‘The “Golden Years” are when your Doctors steal your gold’ is an old saying in my neck of the woods, which needs to be updated.
On the sentimental side, I am one of 4 kids my parents successfully and healthily raised to adulthood without health insurance in the late 1950’s -1960’s. Hell, you would sit in a waiting room equipped with ashtrays for hours and you paid what you could. In the late 1970’s, the community along with some wealthy donors built the Doctor H.A Tattersall community health center in Mountainhome PA. The tradesmen and many others donated their time and money.December 6, 2021 at 11:34 pm #94527boscohorowitzParticipantPut this in your stocking and stuff it. I dare ye:
December 6, 2021 at 11:35 pm #94528Veracious PoetParticipantIt was the day before Xmas and one of the kitchen girls came out and said to the owner that she had just finished stuffing the turkey! No sooner had she said it, she turned beak red, after realizing what she had just said!
Cogent comment on the times we live in…
Where there is no shame & anything goes!
Where children are able to search for porn on Google before they learn to tie their shoes 😐
Where the institution of marriage + family is a curse that men only agree to during mind altering events (falling in love/lust), while masses of depraved child EGOs riotously parade their debauchery & stick it in your face…And let you smell what they consider wrong.
Where Namby-Pamby CULTS spawn legions of low IQ “leaders” that spread lies & propaganda against the Infinite’s “Real Reality”…
Where those of Us few that notice the toxic sludge tsunami rolling over all humanity (excluding those living behind walls & armed security) spend our precious energy chatting each other up in a virtual reality, that roll over into nothingness the following day 😐
There is no doubt a generational reset barreling down up Us, I just hope it’s not an extinction level event…
Does anyone really see a way out of this madness that doesn’t involve mass causalities?
Perhaps that’s why the CCP/NIH/Pharma teamed up to begin with? Planning/executing/hoping that a surreptitious culling would contain the inevitable cra$h?
Woefully, with psychopaths running the show, a controlled demolition is a fools’ illusion, that unforeseen black swan events out of left field are inevitable…
Moreover, regrettably we live in an age populated with fools, idiots, malcontents & cowards to a level never seen before (peace in our time), manifesting disasters that will soon eclipse anything, anyone, anywhere is prepared to survive ~ Even TPTB CULT of money, power, prestige & CONTROL.
Buckleup kiddos…
December 6, 2021 at 11:57 pm #94529my parents said knowParticipantWES- you have a book inside of you.
December 6, 2021 at 11:59 pm #94530WESParticipantSlimyAlligator:
I had never heard of that explanation before! Learn something new every day! Thanks for sharing it!
December 7, 2021 at 12:01 am #94531WESParticipantBosco:
I don’t think my Xmas stocking could handle them! Pretty wild!
December 7, 2021 at 1:26 am #94532ctbarnumParticipant‘ Sorry to all. I am not thinking clearly.”
You’re not alone. A lot of us are having a difficult time thinking clearly, including myself. But then, we are the sane ones in the bunch. Kunstler has a good essay about Detmer’s interview about mass psychosis and our predicament today. I’ll be trying to get around my half-sister’s place in SW Virginia for a few days to get some peace of mind in the wilderness there.
“The descent was provoked by the existential anxiety over the collapse of techno-industrial economies and the end of progress as-we’ve-known-it. (Have you noticed: it was the self-styled “progressives” who went the craziest?) As Dr. Desmet lays it out, the disconnectedness of contemporary life, its lack of meaning or purpose for many, leads to unendurable anxiety. All that inchoate fear seeks desperately to attach itself to some real object, some thing or some force that can be comprehended, fought, and triumphantly overcome. Finding such a target produces an intoxicating sense of communal connection, purpose, and meaning, driving actions that are often crazy and also absolutely impervious to rational debate.
The angst in America was well established by 2016. A beaten-down middle-class suspected that left-of-center politicians did not have their interests at heart after years of off-shoring their jobs, and they managed to elect their avatar, Donald Trump, over the obviously unsympathetic globalist, Hillary Clinton — who snootily tagged her opposition “the deplorables.” Even so, the polls had her ahead by a mile. Then, by some weird twist of fate, she lost a few crucial counties in midwestern states she hadn’t bothered to visit, and was reportedly too plastered after midnight on election night to come down and console the troops at campaign headquarters. The shocking election outcome instantly deranged the nation’s entire managerial class and its thinking-out-loud interlocutors in the news media and on campus.”
And we haven’t been the same since. It has only gotten crazier. When and the flash point where we hit peak crazy, I don’t know. Once the COVID narrative is crushed, the establishment might begin acting as a rat backed into a corner. That might be peak crazy, but who knows.
December 7, 2021 at 1:29 am #94533ctbarnumParticipantSpelled Desmet incorrectly in the link, but I haven’t edited a link yet..lol. Still, it’s a good talk. Our “leaders” and their sheep have too much confirmation bias going on to let their insanity go.
December 7, 2021 at 2:19 am #94534December 7, 2021 at 2:23 am #94535sumac.carolParticipantBosco thank you for the Christmas Cheer!
In Canada, injunctions are not being granted by courts in relation to vax mandates. Sadly, what’s happening south of our border does not seem to be catching on here.
Federal Court Denies Injunction to Suspend Federal Government’s Supplier Mandate
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/injunction-vaccine-policy-1.6230400
December 7, 2021 at 2:45 am #94536V. ArnoldParticipantPut this in your stocking and stuff it. I dare ye:
Ak Dan Gwan Chil
Bosco, thanks so much for that incredible music…
Have never heard anything like it…December 7, 2021 at 2:48 am #94537HenryParticipant@maxwell-quest cool chart made a couple of tweaks:
December 7, 2021 at 2:49 am #94538HenryParticipant@maxwell-quest sorry silly thing did not work, tried to add arrows for tree of the boxes.
December 7, 2021 at 4:13 am #94539John DayParticipantI spent a a lot of time editing and excerpting today, and there’s a picture “inside the box”
https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/12/reality-flails-narratives.htmlGail Tverberg, Is it possible that the world is approaching end times? (This approach may recruit a new group of readers for this important perspective.)
I frequently write that the world economy is, in physics terms, a dissipative structure that is powered by energy. It can grow for a time, but eventually it reaches limits of many kinds. Ultimately, it can be expected to stop growing and collapse.
It seems to me that the world economy is showing signs that it has reached a turning point. Economic growth stopped in 2020 and is having trouble restarting in 2021. Fossil fuel energy of all types (oil, coal and natural gas) is in short supply, relative to the world’s huge population. Ultimately, this inadequate energy supply can be expected to pull the world economy toward collapse.The world economy doesn’t behave the way most people would expect. Standard modeling approaches miss the point that economies require adequate supplies of energy products of the right kinds, provided at the right times of day and year, if they are to keep from collapsing. Shortages are not necessarily marked by high prices; prices that are too low for producers will bring down the energy supply quickly. A collapse may occur due to inadequate demand…
We are not used to living in a world where very little that is published by the Mainstream Media makes sense. But when we live in a time where no one wants to hear what is true, the system changes in a bizarre way, so that a great deal that is published is false.Economists have chosen instead to make models that assume no limits are ahead. They seem to assume that all problems will be fixed by innovation, substitution and the pricing mechanism. They produce forecasts suggesting that the economy can grow endlessly in the future. Based on these forecasts, they provide input to models that reach the conclusion that amazingly large amounts of fossil fuels will be extracted in the future. Based on these nonsensical models, our problem is not the near-term limits that we are reaching; instead, our chief problem is climate change. Its impacts occur mostly in the future
.A corollary to this belief system is that it is we humans who are in charge and not the laws of physics. We can expect governments to protect us. We don’t need any outside help from a literal Higher Power who created the laws of physics. We need to listen to what the authorities on earth tell us. In fact, in troubled times, governments need more authority over their citizens. The many concerns regarding COVID-19 make it easy for governments to increase their control over citizens. We are told that it is only by following the mandates of governments that we will get through this strange time…
In fact, we are colliding with resource limits, right now. This seems to be what produced the bizarre situation experienced in 2020…
As time went on, it became very clear that the true nature of the COVID-19 epidemic was being hidden from citizens. It was, and is, not a terribly dangerous illness if it is treated properly with any number of inexpensive medications including aspirin, ivermectin, antihistamine and steroids. In fact, the severity of the disease could also be lessened by taking vitamin D in advance. There really was not a great deal of point to the vaccines, except to enrich the vaccine manufacturers and those who would benefit from the sale of the vaccines, including Anthony Fauci and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It also became clear that the vaccines don’t really do what a person might expect a vaccine to do. They do tend to stop severe illness, but taking vitamin D in advance would provide pretty much the same benefit. They don’t stop COVID-19 from circulating because vaccinated people can still catch COVID-19. The vaccines seem to have any number of side effects, including raising the risk of heart attacks.
The historical period most similar to the current period, in terms of shortage of energy supply, is that between World War I and World War II. At that time, the Jews were persecuted. Now, there is an attempt to divide the world into Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, with the Unvaccinated persecuted. When the economy cannot produce enough goods and services for all members of the economy, the economy seems to divide into almost warring parts….
Europe is the part of the world where the push for vaccinations is now highest. It is also in terrible shape with respect to energy supply. By ostracizing the unvaccinated, European countries can attempt to cut back their economies to the size that their energy supply will support, without admitting the real problem…
It is disturbing to think that we may be living near the end of the world economy, but there is an upside to this situation. We have had the opportunity to live at a time with more conveniences than any other civilization. We can appreciate the many conveniences we have.
We also have the opportunity to decide how we want to live the rest of our lives. We have been led for many years down the path of believing that economic growth will last forever; all we need to do is have faith in the government and our educational institutions. If we figure out that this really isn’t the path to follow, we can change course now. If we want to choose a more spiritual approach, this is a choice we can still make.
December 7, 2021 at 4:15 am #94540John DayParticipantThe Ethical Skeptic presents a well developed, detailed, graphically supported and logical case that SARS-CoV-2 actually escaped from a Chinese lab in early 2018, spread and mutated more slowly than announced, was kept as a mystery, though Chinese (and other) people were hospitalized a lot in 2018 and 2019. Chinese SARS-CoV-2 cases were actually in a final third-wave peak when “discovered” in Wuhan in late 2019.
Due to natural immunity, China was able to have great success with lockdowns, as it would have had with doing nothing at all.
The rest of the world was misled, but found ways to make political lemonade out of the lockdown-lemon. Regions of Asia and Oceana, like India and Australia, actually had a lot more herd immunity by 2020, which was explained and dealt with in different ways.
The saga of the lost Omicron variant is also investigated in detail. This variant has a last common ancestor with other COVID strains a long time ago, which could (barely) have happened if it derived from an initial lab leak in March 2018, but it may well have been released later, even intentionally, due to its specific engineered characteristics. It is not more deadly, but quite different, and does evade the antibodies to January 2020 spike protein very effectively.
If this virus is actually spread more through (Gross!) aerosolized fecal particles, then a mode of spread to whitetail-deer is readily explained, and also some of the early patterns of mass epidemics in the US. Mapping graphs explain this.China’s CCP Concealed SARS-CoV-2 Presence in China as Far Back as March 2018
The Twilight of the Narrative, Posted on the Seneca Effect blog
… One of the main changes wrought by the internet is the shattering of “grand narratives”…
As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed.
This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of them…
Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations.
It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? …
The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created…
The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold the government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government…
Whatever the ethical dimensions of these issues, what lies beneath is the fact that the media companies are no longer viable businesses capable of existing without government support. Because they are now reliant on government money, their function as the fourth estate that holds government to account has also all but disappeared. That’s a problem for them but it’s also a problem for the government. The “official narrative” is transmitted through the legacy media. If the legacy media goes away, so does the narrative… The government needs the media as much as the media needs the government.
I would argue that the public also needs the media. It needs the media to act as its representative. That was the whole point of the Fourth Estate arrangement. The public paid for the media and that meant the media had an incentive to represents the readership’s interests. But that is all gone now…
“The system” can no longer control the discourse the way it previously could. This is not a trivial matter. It leads us back to one of Plato’s most dangerous ideas which is the Noble Lie… We could soften it by calling them myths or ideals but the effect is the same. The myths and ideals are the glue that holds things together and, according to Plato, without them society will disintegrate.
Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis…
As a result, a large proportion of the population no longer has any faith whatsoever in the system. That holds true no matter who is in power. The dominant narrative is now nothing more than the story told by those in power.
In Australia and much of Europe and Canada, we are just now catching up with the US. Here in Melbourne, more than a hundred thousand people marched against the government last weekend. The Premier’s response was to write them off as “thugs” and “extremists”. It reminded me an awful lot of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment. When politicians no longer feel like they need to accommodate the interests and opinions of a substantial proportion of the population you know the narrative is already fractured…
The same goes for the demonstrators in Europe who are simply ignored by the mainstream media. Because the public discourse no longer pretends to reflect reality, nobody really believes in it including the people who nominally go along with it. Deep down they also must know that it is fake…
We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late…
Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.
https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-twilight-of-narrative-why-truth.html#comment-formDecember 7, 2021 at 4:16 am #94541John DayParticipantJim Kunstler picks up the narrative thread..
For instance, a new study and warning from the American Heart Association concluded that mRNA vaccines dramatically increase risk of developing heart disease between 11 and 25 percent. Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on anyone attempting to transmit this news on its sacred app. Unsafe to whom, or what? Why, to the sacred narrative, of course, which is that the USA must be kept in a never-ending paranoid uproar over Covid — certainly until at least past the 2022 elections, in order to maintain all the emergency mail-in ballot provisions that enable voting fraud…
Meanwhile, the emerging reality of Omicron is that it has a much lower transmission coefficient than its predecessor, the Delta variant, and produces only mild symptoms of illness…
Anyway, two federal judges rendered decisions striking down Acting President Fauci’s vaccine mandates. The second ruling, penned by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana’s Western District, featured a particularly lusty and detailed diagnosis of the mandate’s constitutional impropriety, and extended the injunction against vax mandates to all fifty states.
This leaves the USA in a distinctly exceptional position among the other nations within the loose confederation of Western Civ. Thanks to manifestations of sanity on the federal bench, the vax mandates appear DOA here now, while Austria and Germany have rushed into full-blown psychotic fugues over Omicron, announcing harsh punishments for their unvaxxed…
The Covid psychosis is just a reassignment of the Trump derangement, which was provoked by the generalized anxiety about collapsing industrial societies. The reasons for the collapse are not hard to grok: a declining resource base, especially affordable, economically plausible oil, a financial system purposefully detached from on-the-ground material reality, and sets of grossly foolish over-investments in complexity…
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/fury-rising/Do you know why there isn’t an EUA [emergency use authorization] for fluvoxamine? Steve Kirsch
The drug works. Amazingly well. Better than anything else against COVID when given early. So why isn’t there an EUA?
The Pfizer 6-month trial showed no all-cause mortality benefit; in fact, if anything, it showed that the vaccine killed more people than it saved. Sure, one COVID life was saved per 22,000 fully vaxed, but the all-cause mortality strongly favored the placebo (21 died in vaccine group vs. 17 in placebo). Doctors rush to recommend it. Nobody is skeptical.
Fluvoxamine on the other hand actually demonstrated a 12 times reduction in all-cause mortality in the Phase 3 trial. It really saved lives and the difference was dramatic in the clinical trial: “There was one death in the fluvoxamine group and 12 in the placebo group for the per-protocol population (OR 0·09; 95% CI 0·01–0·47).” But the NIH ignored the drug and didn’t even mention this astonishing result on the NIH treatment guidelines. The study wasn’t even mentioned at all in the guidelines. It was like it never happened...
Why isn’t there an EUA for fluvoxamine? The reason is simple. We tried. And after 6 weeks of waiting, we were told that to get an EUA for a repurposed drug, you have to partner with a drug company in the EUA application. Because no drug company will partner with us, even if we pay all the filing costs, there won’t be an EUA. Ever.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/do-you-know-why-there-isnt-an-euaDecember 7, 2021 at 4:17 am #94542John DayParticipantNow or Never, The Great Transition Must Be Imposed, Alastair Crooke Thanks Eleni in colonial Athens for this series of stories.
Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse…
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time…
Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly)…
It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets…
…Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again…
There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence...
As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.
Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.
It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets…
Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.
The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose...
Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist…
This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically...
These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job)...
But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?December 7, 2021 at 4:18 am #94543John DayParticipant‘Ideological Fanaticism’: The Folly of Seeing Human Systems as Hardware
It seems that the ‘politics of fear’ may be ‘crossing the aisle’. But, in this shift, Big Tech cannot ride so easily to the Establishment’s rescue. With the vaccine meme, it has been relatively routine for the Tech social media to censor and delete all contrarian opinion, whether credentialed or not; but when it comes to inflation, ‘fact-checking’ becomes not just redundant, but counter-productive, for the ‘facts’ are visible with every purchase made. And every consumer can attest that prices are rising well above 6.2% …
On the whole, the ‘meme-politics of lockdown and vaccine mandates’ may be fading, but the inflation meme and the economic aftermath meme has only just begun.
….this dualistic way of ratiocination runs through all of western modernity. Tech vaccines are the solution to the Covid virus. And, forced (human) separation is good for placing the malware into quarantine. The real-economy is the hardware that Central Bank ‘software’ will protect against recessionary pathogens. The Davos’ Re-Set will upload new global software for a ‘fairer, greener future’. A fourth Industrial Revolution is the digital technological management that will clean out Climate malware. Etc, etc.
In reality, all these are highly complex network systems, not susceptible to dualistic intervention. They work – if they work – as organic wholes. At best, we face systemic instability, as a result of these naïve ‘software’ interventions. At worst, systemic collapse.‘Ideological Fanaticism’: The Folly of Seeing Human Systems as Hardware
U.S. Supremacy by Any Other Name
Great Power competition it turns out, is nothing other than the globalist, U.S.-centred, rules based world order. The U.S. abstains from ‘transforming’ (i.e. colour revolutionising) the CCP, because it can’t; that tool still applies to lesser fish (i.e. Nicaragua)…
All energy is directed to keeping the creaking system aloft (whether the EU’s, or the American ‘rules of the road’), rather than finding real solutions. Cleavages open, that cannot be politically contained; resentments bubble away; crises are managed, not resolved; time is played for; reform is incremental and then, suddenly, unilateral; and, in the end, stasis reigns. It is called Merkelism in Europe (after the German Chancellor)…
On the other hand, bad as this is (given the economic crises facing us), its greater ‘sin’ (as articulated by Sullivan) is his demand for global ‘rules’, whose scaffold is simply “the interests and values of the U.S. and its allies and partners”. Sullivan says that the U.S. no longer seeks to transform China’s system (that is good), but insists that China operate within an ‘order’ built around U.S. interests and values – tout court. And, as Sullivan indicated, U.S. diplomatic effort is to be directed at coercing Chinese compliance to this system. Nowhere are the costs to allies mentioned, who would have to forego their relations with China or Russia, in order to please Biden.
The bigger ‘sin’, quite simply, is that the time for such haughty ambitions has passed. The world balance has changed qualitatively, and not just quantitatively. Both China and Russia – the other two components to General Milley’s tri-partite world – have said it plainly enough: They refuse lectures by the West.Alastair Crooke points out that American politicians are in the very long established habit of taking cheap little actions (like the War in Grenada) for immediate political gain, while ignoring critical long term implications and erosion of political relationships and strategic advantages. Russia and China do not suffer such short-termism.
Losing Militarily & Strategically, in Order to ‘Win’ Politically (but Ephemerally)
In the wake of the Kabul withdrawal débacle, the U.S. administration is in a tearing hurry to give Biden the semblance of foreign policy success.Losing Militarily & Strategically, in Order to ‘Win’ Politically (but Ephemerally)
December 7, 2021 at 4:19 am #94544John DayParticipantChina also has very real political and economic stresses and looming financial default. China will need a face-saving war of national unity behind Xi and the CCP when the financial house of cards collapses, or they will face a power transition.
Former Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe warns China in a global forum that militarily attacking Taiwan would inevitably trigger war with Japan (territorial waters) and thence with the US, and be economically ruinous.
A CCP official replied to insult Abe personally, but the message was clear, and “unofficially official”. It is the case that no power alliance can allow Taiwanese chip manufacturing to fall exclusively into the hands of an adversary. It is completely critical to any advanced economy. This would be a major war. It would have to be. Thanks Kimo.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/12/02/commentary/japan-commentary/shinzo-abe-beijing-message/There is a lot of complexity as NATO , Russian-Ukrainians, and Ukrainian power elites jockey for any kind of strategic advantage, which would make a move favorable. Russia much prefers that things calm down, prefers to prevent an attack on the Donbass by Ukraine/NATO, and must keep Ukraine/NATO from having a beguiling military advantage. Turkey’s Erdogan plays a very risky and fancy global power game.
In a Friday phone call Russian President Vladimir Putin told his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan that Ukraine is using Turkish-made drones against pro-Russia separatists in the war-torn Donbass region. Putin put the Turkish leader on notice over the “destabilizing” activity of the continued drone transfers from Turkey to Ukraine.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/putin-denounces-ukraines-use-turkish-drones-erdogan-callThese are Mach-9 hypersonic “Zircon” anti ship missiles with 600 mile range, in fixed positions on remote islands. Russia does not announce plans, just facts-in-existence.
This gives Russia a moderating position between the US/Japan and China, not in the Taiwan Straits, but the oceans around northern Japan. It also affords some further protection to the Russian east coast. It would exclude hostile military ships within striking range.
Russia Deploys Anti-Ship Missiles Near Japan On Disputed Kuril Islands
The status of ownership of the islands, which Russia de facto currently controls and has small bases on, is still unresolved since the end of WWII as a treaty regarding their status is still being negotiated.
On Thursday the Russian Defense Ministry announced the military has stationed its Bastion coastal missile defense system on a remote part of the island chain near Japan, identified as the island of Matua. These are considered “shore-based anti-ship missile systems” – seen as also potentially threatening to Japan’s Western allies, given for example US warships have recently traversed nearby waters.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-deploys-anti-ship-missiles-near-japan-disputed-kuril-islandsDecember 7, 2021 at 4:21 am #94545John DayParticipantRussia is primed for a Persian Gulf security ‘makeover’ , Pepe Escobar
Russia is the one state with the necessary clout, tools, sweeteners and relationships to nudge the Persian Gulf into a new security paradigm
…Essentially, Moscow is reviving the Collective Security Concept for the Persian Gulf Region, an idea that has been simmering since the 1990s. Here is what the concept is all about.
So if the US administration’s reasoning is predictably short-term – we need Iranian oil back in the market – the Russian vision points to systemic change.
The Collective Security Concept calls for true multilateralism – not exactly Washington’s cup of tea – and “the adherence of all states to international law, the fundamental provisions of the UN Charter and the resolutions of the UN Security Council.” …
Geopolitically, Russia holds the definitive ace: it maintains good relationships with all actors in the Persian Gulf and beyond, talks to all of them frequently, and is widely respected as a mediator by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and other GCC members.
Russia also offers the world’s most competitive and cutting edge military hardware to underpin the security needs of all the parties...
And that brings us to the essential Pipelineistan angle, which in the Russia–Iran case revolves around the new, multi-trillion dollar Chalous gas field in the Caspian Sea…
Chalous, in fact, will enable Iran – with Russian input – to become a major gas exporter to Europe, something that Brussels evidently relishes. The head of Iran’s KEPCO, Ali Osouli, expects a “new gas hub to be formed in the north to let the country supply 20 percent of Europe’s gas needs.”
According to Russia’s Transneft, Chalous alone could supply as much as 52 percent of natural gas needs of the whole EU for the next 20 years.
Chalous is quite something: a twin-field site, separated by roughly nine kilometers, the second-largest natural gas block in the Caspian Sea, just behind Alborz. It may hold gas reserves equivalent to one-fourth of the immense South Pars gas field, placing it as the 10th largest gas reserves in the world.
Chalous happens to be a graphic case of Russia-Iran-China (RIC) geoeconomic cooperation. Proverbial western speculative spin rushed to proclaim the 20-year gas deal as a setback for Iran. The final breakdown, not fully confirmed, is 40 percent for Gazprom and Transneft, 28 percent for China’s CNPC and CNOOC, and 25 percent for Iran’s KEPCO.
Moscow sources confirm Gazprom will manage the whole project. Transneft will be in charge of transportation, CNPC is involved in financing and banking facilities, and CNOOC will be in charge of infrastructure and engineering.
The whole Chalous site has been estimated to be worth a staggering $5.4 trillion...
Crucially, Moscow also reiterated its full support for Tehran’s position during the current JCPOA round in Vienna, as well as in other Iran-related issues reaching the UN Security Council.
The fine print on all key Chalous aspects may be revealed in time. It’s a de facto geopolitical/geoeconomic win-win-win for the Russia, Iran, China strategic partnership.
https://thecradle.co/Article/columns/4179Ray McGovern speculates about Biden-Putin talks tomorrow.
Nobody knows, and we won’t really know. We’ll have to watch for actions.
(China is invisibly sitting next to Russia. They do not have identical interests, but a lot of overlap, these days.)December 7, 2021 at 5:51 am #94546Veracious PoetParticipantWow, all this transnational existential hyperbole, when right here at home (USA) we have civilization breaking paradigms unfolding…
Like how is it possible, with all of the hard facts concerning the disastrous roll-out of the mRNA concoctions, that We are still looking down the barrel of the .gov gun, with “parents” offering up their children to the altar of medical experimentation?
How is Fauci still taken seriously, not in handcuffs, the BIG pharma pollution in our national health agencies NOT a national crisis?
How is it that partisan politics are allowed to run roughshod on the rule-of-law, using the alphabet agencies as defacto enforcement thugs for the DnC?
What fallout are we really looking at concerning the theft of the 2020 national elections in vidid detail, where people are left to believe a colour revolution coup d’etat has seized control of our nations’ levers of power?
How close are We to a genuine disruption in just-in-time supply chains failing?
Just how long will these misfits be taken seriously?
I realize the simple answer is mass formation psychosis into CULTS, but it certainly seems we approaching a black swan event, a breaking point…
I guess we’ll have to wait until our backs are up-against-the-wall & the clock has run out ~ But Americans are too volatile, too freedom minded, far too violent, to go quietly into the night like New Zealand, Australia, Austria & the EU is presently doing.
Will the oligarchs get their reset after all?
December 7, 2021 at 8:26 am #94547TAE SummaryParticipant* Pro-vaxxer: A person that supports vaccinations and mandatory vaccination laws
– I don’t always get vaccinated but when I do I get twelve doses* Big Pharma: We may be sterilizing an entire generation, but don’t worry, their kids will be just fine
* How Pfizer rapes countries: Get them drunk with fear, get them behind closed doors, threaten them, silence them, then stick it to them
* Fauci Grammar: He cannot make declarative statements but is real good at imperatives, questions and commands
* FDA Streamlines Omicron Approval
– Steamline v.: To construct or design in a form that offers the least resistance
– FDA renames current variant to Ogasmicron in honor of spasmodic profits* Bitcoin is the oxygen mask; US Treasury Crypto Dollar will be the ventilator
* Famous Defenses:
– Harvey Weinstein: I represent movies. Any attack on me is an attack on movies.
– Bernie Madoff: I represent high finance. Any attack on me is an attack on high finance.
– Captain Edward Smith: I represent the seamanship. Any attack on me is an attack on the seamanship.December 7, 2021 at 9:26 pm #94602TheTrivium4TWParticipant@Dr. D, thanks for that Huxley quote. It is added to my list of quotes, which include plenty from Fabian Socialist Aldous Huxley (Wedgewoods, Daltons, Darwin, Huxley)…
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
~Aldous Huxley“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
~Aldous Huxley“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
~Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley – The Ultimate Revolution ‘Brave New World’ (Berkeley Speech 1962) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WaUkZXKA30
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and SCHOOLTEACHERS”… Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution…”
~Aldous Huxley‘Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.’
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World“Medical science has made such fantastic progress that there are barely any healthy people left.”
~Aldous Huxley“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited“If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled”
-Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley – The Ultimate Revolution ‘Brave New World’ (Berkeley Speech 1962)
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