Category Archives: propaganda

War Certainly Is A Racket

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By Iain Davis

Source: Off-Guardian

In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler’s seminal book “War Is A Racket” warned of the dangers of the US military-industrial complex, more than 25 years before the outgoing US President Eisenhower implored the world to “guard against” the same thing.

One of the most decorated soldiers in US military history, Butler knew what he was talking about, famously writing that war is “…conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

While he lamented the loss of his fallen comrades and despite the gongs he received for defending his country, Butler came to understand that he was actually a “high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” Later, the historian Antony C. Sutton proved that Butler was right.

When the US administration of George Bush passed its Foreign Operations Appropriation Law in 1991, it ended all US credit to the former, thriving socialist republic of Yugoslavia. At the time the perception on the Hill was that Yugoslavia was no longer required as a buffer zone between the NATO states and their former Warsaw Pact adversaries, so its independent socialism was no longer tolerated.

The US military industrial complex, that Butler and Eisenhower told everyone to tackle, effectively destabilised the entire Balkan region, destroyed hitherto relatively peaceful countries and then fuelled the resultant wars with its pet Islamist terrorists. Ably assisted by the World Bank and the IMF.

So-called “assistance,” via the Train and Equip Program, gave US taxpayers the opportunity to funnel $500M to private security contractors like DynCorp. DynCorp put taxpayer’s money to use, seemingly by training terrorists and child trafficking to paedophiles.

The US and its Western allies’ military industrial complex pulled off more or less the same trick in Iraq, Libya and nearly in Syria. In hindsight this doesn’t appear to have been a very good idea. That is, if you think wars are fought for the reasons we are told.

Having bombed Iraq into the stone age, to stop its regime producing the WMDs it didn’t have, the US then “rescued” the country, from the horrific violence and starvation sanctions the US government itself visited upon the Iraqi people, by establishing the US led coalition’s puppet Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) government. Once installed, the CPA did things like award US engineering firm Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) a ‘sole source contract’ to fix and operate all of Iraq’s oil wells.

That US Vice President Dick Cheney, who lied passionately about Iraqi WMD, was also in receipt of an annual $2M stipend from KBR was just a coincidence. As was the massive boost to the value of his Halliburton shareholdings as a direct result of the war he was instrumental in starting.

When the former UK Prime Minister Teresa May OK’d missile trikes upon Syrian civilians, the fact that her husband made millions out of it, as his investments in missile manufactures went through the roof, was also just a coincidence. In no way did she personally profit from killing children and the fact that her family continues to make a fortune by killing more children in Yemen does not undermine Theresa’s very public profile as a champion of good causes. Although, it appears, not killing children isn’t one of them.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when, once again, we discover that war, far from an impediment to business, actually improves operational margins, increases production, boosts markets and offers white collar criminal enterprises industrial scale profits.

Sure, people, including children, die in huge numbers but so what? Where there’s muck there’s brass. War certainly is a racket.

It turns out that Ukraine has been buying Russian fuel from the EU member state Bulgaria throughout the Ukraine War. An odd oversight for alleged combatants in a war. It is similar to the Ukrainian government’s decision to allow the continuing transit of Russian gas from Gazprom to EU markets through its resident pipelines.

The Russian energy giant Lukoil, whose former CEO Ravil Maganov accidentally fell out of a window a few months ago—a common problem for the wrong Russian executives—has been shipping Russian oil to its refinery in the Bulgarian port city of Burgas. The Burgas refinery is the only one in Bulgaria and the largest in the Balkans. From there the refined gas-oil (red diesel) is exported to Russia’s supposed enemy, Ukraine.

This was all being done in secret, says the Russian MSM, although this is just perception management, pro-war propaganda. There has also been a lot of nonsense written by the Western MSM, alleging that Bulgaria has been illicitly circumnavigating EU “sanctions.” Regardless of the fact that this too is monumental tripe.

There isn’t anything “secret” about it. In truth, the door was left open for Russia and Bulgaria to continue this trade, at least until the end of 2024, because the EU inserted a loophole to ensure that they could. Presumably, the Russian government knew nothing about the massive oil shipments, which is why it remained a “secret,” according to Russian MSM.

Given that the “secrecy” narrative is total claptrap, why would both the Western and the Russian MSM want to peddle essentially the same disinformation? Let’s spend a moment to reflect upon the EU’s non-sanction sanctions shall we?

It means that third party non-EU trading nations, like Kazakhstan for instance, can ship Russian oil to the EU unhindered by the inconvenience of alleged sanctions. The sanctions are for reordering global energy flows, not ending them.

While the switch-over has plunged European citizens into an energy crisis, that’s OK. It is essential for the future of the planet that Europeans are convinced to accept ever increasing energy prices. Otherwise they might not welcome the transition to the “sustainable energy” that will make their lives much worse.

Red diesel in Ukraine is used for industrial and heavy machinery, in agriculture and manufacturing for example. It is also used for, oh I don’t know, fuelling tanks and armoured personnel carriers, mobile artillery units and stuff like that.

Stories from European news outlets that Bulgaria provides nearly 40% of Ukrainian military fuel are all nonsense because reasons. Officials have denied the evidence, such as confirmation from the former Bulgarian President, so it isn’t “officially approved” evidence. Consequently, it can safely be discounted by anyone gullible enough to do so.

Don’t forget, according to Western and Russian MSM outlets, it’s all a secret. Which may come as a relief to some, because otherwise the Russian government would have been colluding with the EU to ensure that the Ukrainian military could stay in the fight wouldn’t it?

Recently, despite apparently running out of weaponry, if you believe Western propaganda that is, Russia has launched a massive missile strike on Ukraine, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. According to Russian MSM this is part of the Russian governments efforts to undermine Ukraine’s “military capabilities.”

The fact that it ensures that Ukraine will need to be rebuilt by borrowing enormous sums from international financiers, with the diligent assistance of Gazprom investors BlackRock, is not relevant. So ignore this too please.

Gazprom sells gas to Moldova which is now going to provide gas to Ukraine via the Ukrainian transit gas pipelines that Russian bombing has accidentally missed entirely. The Moldovan government is keen to stress that this is not the gas it buys from Gazprom but is rather the gas it buys from somewhere else it hasn’t specified despite admitting that it is completely reliant upon Russian energy.

If the energy and the fuel from countries like Moldova, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan is used by the Ukrainian government’s military, which it won’t under any official circumstances whatsoever, and Gazprom gas helps keep Ukrainian’s lights on, despite the missile strikes, it looks like the Russian government’s objective is to keep Ukraine at war while hobbling it just enough to ensure it can’t win.

This can’t be true because NATO appears to be doing exactly the same thing and Russia and NATO are enemies. Although NATO’s not quite enough assistance differs from the Russian governments not quite enough aggression, it essentially amounts to the same thing.

The piddly number of tanks offered to Ukraine by its NATO “partners,” the reluctance from NATO to give Ukraine military aircraft and the tepid reception for Ukraine’s more recent pleas to join NATO, appears to signal that NATO isn’t prepared to provide, or perhaps isn’t capable of providing, the military support Ukraine would need for victory. But it is seemingly willing to give it just enough old used scrap to keep it loosing.

This means Ukrainians, the new Russian populations in the Donbas, and troops on both sides, though primarily the Ukrainians, will continue to die while the geopolitical landscape continues to shift around them. Meanwhile the military industrial complex and the billionaires it enriches, such as Elon Musk, are making a fortune. When the conflict is concluded, multinational corporations on both sides will be awarded the contracts to rebuild the stuff their government partners have just destroyed.

Butler wrote:

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted.

While some might think it wise to add politician’s to that list, for some unfathomable reason, far more people seem to think this is a good point but that it isn’t a serious proposal. Why not? Do they not get it, do they not understand what Butler, Eisenhower, Sutton and many more like them have been trying to tell them for nearly a century?

What is it about the military industrial complex that they assume to be inevitable? Why on Earth do they think it is a “necessary evil?”

It is only necessary because millions, perhaps billions, of us accept that war is the “failure” of foreign policy and diplomacy, instead of understanding the obvious fact that it is the extension of foreign policy. As we are seeing right now with the warmongering posturing of the West and China, war is the intended product of foreign policy and sledgehammer diplomacy.

Wars don’t just “happen” by accident. They are planned, engineered and delivered as required. Our’s and our children’s deaths mean nothing to the people who we allow to lead us into war. They don’t have skin in the game but they should and we have the power to make sure that they do. All we have to do is refuse to fight. It really isn’t rocket science. Obedience is not a virtue.

But we won’t because we continue to fall for the same old lies, time and time again. We continue to imagine, like amnesiac slaves, that we can only be led to a better future by following another bunch of parasitic criminals.

Around and around we go: blowing up and starving children to death, condemning pensioners to freezing fuel poverty and accepting that we might just have to sacrifice ourselves and our loved ones along the way.

When the warmongers next press gang our sons and daughters into dying for their ambitions, we will again say it is in a good cause: for the defence of our country, our culture or our way of life.

It isn’t, it never was and it never will be as long as we continue to go along with it.

A Cover Up Of Epic Proportions Is Happening In East Palestine, Ohio

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By Michael Snyder

Source: The Economic Collapse

If you want a perfect example of how corrupt our system of government has become, just look at the massive cover up that is going on in East Palestine, Ohio right now.  Federal, state and local officials are telling the public that everything is just fine when everything is obviously not just fine.  On February 3rd, a 50 car Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine.  5 of the cars were carrying vinyl chloride which is an extremely hazardous substance that has been proven to cause several types of cancer.  Unfortunately, with the approval of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a decision was made on February 6th to conduct a “controlled burn” of the wreckage.  They knew that burning the vinyl chloride would create vast amounts of phosgene gas.  By now, most of you already know that phosgene gas was actually used as a chemical weapon in World War I.  The cloud of toxic chemicals that was created by the “controlled burn” was so large that it could literally be seen from space, and the long-term health problems that are being caused all over the east coast could stretch on for decades.

But Ohio Governor Mike Dewine doesn’t want to be blamed.

He is telling everyone from East Palestine to go back to their homes, and he insists that the water in the area is “safe to drink”…

Do you believe him?

For those that are gullible enough to believe him, I have just one question for you…

Does this water look safe to drink to you?

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance wanted to see this for himself.

So he went down to a local creek in East Palestine, and this is what he discovered…

Sadly, it isn’t just the water in East Palestine that has been polluted.

50 miles away in Pittsburgh, the water is exhibiting similar qualities…

https://twitter.com/taylorjo86/status/1626263076906450945

But the head of the Environmental Protection Agency says that there is nothing to be concerned about at all.

In fact, he says that he would actually “allow his own children to drink and bathe in public water” from East Palestine…

The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency has said he would allow his own children to drink and bathe in public water near the site of a train derailment and chemical spill in Ohio, so long as it had been tested and deemed safe by officials.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited the site of the East Palestine derailment on Thursday, seeking to reassure skeptical residents that the water is fit for drinking and the air is safe to breathe.

Nobody wants to see your children do that Michael Regan.

But we would love to see you down a tall, cool glass of tap water from a home right in the middle of East Palestine.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration is going to work relentlessly to downplay the severity of this crisis because they know that if they admitted the truth it would make them look bad to the voters.

And there is a presidential election coming up in less than two years.

Incredibly, the White House has even turned down a formal request for disaster relief for East Palestine…

The White House explained why it turned down Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s request for disaster relief this week in the aftermath of a derailment of a train hauling toxic chemicals.

A Biden administration official told Fox News Digital that it has provided extensive assistance to surrounding communities following the chemical release earlier this month in eastern Ohio. However, the official said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency that usually provides relief to communities hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters, isn’t best equipped to support the state’s current needs.

I was floored when I saw that.

We have just witnessed one of the greatest environmental disasters in the entire history of our country, and the Biden administration is not even willing to grant a request for disaster relief?

Ultimately, this is all about protecting the asses of the politicians and protecting the asses of the executives and shareholders of Norfolk Southern.

To the elite, it really doesn’t matter if the poor people of East Palestine all get cancer and die.

What matters is controlling the narrative, and up to this point the corporate media is doing a wonderful job of helping them do it.

Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.

The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.

World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.

The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.

The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.

These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.

Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

New Cold War Propaganda: About China’s Spy Balloon and the US Spy Planes that have Violated the Airspace of Sovereign Nations

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Washington’s political establishment says China was spying on US sovereign territory with what China has called their ‘weather balloon.  China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesperson issued a statement:

The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure

However, the Western mainstream-media has been non-stop with the hysteria on China’s “spy balloon” invading US sovereign territory, but when it comes to the US government and its Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) who has consistently invaded the airspace of many sovereign countries, it is barely mentioned and forgotten.  The bottom line is that the China balloon story is all about war propaganda.  The US and its allies are setting the stage for another war, this time against China. 

The Associated Press (AP) ‘China balloon: Many questions about suspected spy in the sky’ reported on what the Pentagon has claimed regarding China’s spy balloon, “The Pentagon says the balloon, which is carrying sensors and surveillance equipment, is maneuverable and has shown it can change course. It has loitered over sensitive areas of Montana where nuclear warheads are siloed, leading the military to take actions to prevent it from collecting intelligence.”  Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary said, “the balloon was not a military or physical threat” and that “once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”  

CNN also jumped in on the propaganda bandwagon and published ‘What is a suspected Chinese spy balloon doing above the US?’, and surprisingly asked a legit question, “Don’t spies use satellites now?”  But CNN switched back to  its propaganda mode when they reported on what Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer had said, “Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then, the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries.”  So, the US has used these types of balloons in the past, “But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion.  Or at least until now.”  They mention the advancement of “miniaturization of electronics” which complements the idea of “floating intelligence platforms.”  Layton said that “Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch.”  An article published by The Washington Post ‘How do stratospheric Balloons Work? Here’s a Visual Guide’ said that “Experts in national security and aerospace said the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitudes balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting, telecommunications and scientific research.”   

The Democrats and Republicans are united against a common adversary and that is China.  They say how dare the Chinese Communist Party release a surveillance balloon on our sovereign territory and defy international law.  Well, it is true that a foreign object that invades a sovereign country’s airspace  does violate international law, but for decades, the US has invaded the sovereign airspace of many countries around the world including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, and others. 

So let’s go back to November 11th, 1984, the United Press International (UPI) headlined with ‘Nicaragua said U.S. spy planes Sunday broke the sound…’ reported that “Nicaragua said U.S. spy planes Sunday broke the sound barrier twice over the country, causing minor damages and fueling the leftist Sandinista government’s fears of an American invasion.”  The SR-71 or its more accurate name, “The SR-71 “Blackbird” is used for “strategic reconnaissance” or in other words, to spy on its adversaries.  The SR-71 Blackbird is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a heavyweight in the MIC was identified by the Sandinistas during the time of the Iran-Contra affair “Within two hours of each other, what the Nicaraguans identified as a U.S. SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ jets flew over Managua and other cities, breaking the sound barrier with a loud boom.”                  

Another incident happened on December 5th, 2011, this time in Iran. Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was noticed in the city of Kashmar, located in northeastern Iran and was seized by a cyberwarfare unit from Iranian forces.  The Cyberwarfare unit gained control of the UAV spy drone and landed the plane although the western media reported that the spy plane was shot down.  The Obama regime initially denied Iran’s claims but later admitted that the aircraft that was supposedly shot down, was a US drone.  Iran did file a complaint to the United Nations over the US violating its airspace shortly after.  The RQ-170 Sentinel Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is described in Airforce-technology.com as “a high altitude and long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed and manufactured by Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the United States Air Force (USAF)” and that “The UAV can capture real-time imagery of the battlefield and transfer the data to the ground control station (GCS) through a line of sight (LOS) communication data link.”  It was also used against various countries, “The low-observable design enables the aircraft to fly on the borders of Iran, China, India and Pakistan for capturing real-time information regarding missile tests, telemetry and multispectral intelligence.”

On July 21st, 2019, Venezuela’s airspace was also violated by the US military as Reuter’s headlined with ‘U.S. says Venezuelan plane aggressively shadowed a U.S. military aircraft’ not mentioning that it was a spy plane, “The U.S. military on Sunday accused a Venezuelan fighter aircraft of “aggressively” shadowing a U.S. Navy EP-3 Aries II plane over international airspace, in yet another sign of the increasing hostility between the two nations.”  Keep in mind that that Obama had imposed sanctions against Venezuela, “The encounter between the U.S. and Venezuelan planes occurred on Friday, the same day that the Trump administration announced it was sanctioning four top officials in Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency.”  The US military had issued a statement about the incident and said that “it had determined the “Russian-made fighter aggressively shadowed the EP-3 at an unsafe distance in international airspace for a prolonged period of time, endangering the safety of the crew and jeopardizing the EP-3 mission.”  So, what was that mission?  To spy on Venezuela’s oil fields?  This was during the time when the Trump regime’s hostilities towards the Maduro government was at an all-time high,  “U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly used sanctions in an effort to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose 2018 re-election has been deemed illegitimate by the United States and most Western nations.”  The EP-3 stems from the P-3 Orion.  The P-3 Orion is an anti-submarine and surveillance aircraft also developed by Lockheed Martin in the 1960’s for the US Navy.  The EP-3 known as ARIES (Airborne Reconnaissance Integrated Electronic System) has specific capabilities that can intercept various signals.  It is an aircraft that is operated by naval personnel with specific skills that includes cryptographers, technicians and even linguists to translate intercepted messages in foreign languages. 

Online news website ‘The Drive’ is one of the internet’s main sources for news, features and guides about modern automotive culture and other technologies has a section called ‘The War Zone’ published an article titled ‘The U.S. Army’s Newest Spy Plane in Action in Africa and Latin America’ admits that “After almost getting canned in 2012, the enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System is now snooping abroad.”  “Rules for thee, and not for me” is the US model, so “snooping abroad” is I guess justified.  According to The Drive:

The first version of the U.S. Army’s newest spy plane is in action in Africa and Latin America. At the same time, the service is finishing tests of three additional sub-variants in Arizona.  On March 12, 2017, Scout Warrior first reported these overseas deployments. The War Zone subsequently learned only some of the four signals intelligence-focused versions of the Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (EMARSS-S) were snooping abroad.

In an Email, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Sean Smith confirmed this particular model was supporting U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) operations. “There are no other EMARSS variants fielded or deployed at this time,” he added.  Despite its name, the EMARSS-S has a suite of signal-snooping gear to track and listen in on enemy communications, as well as the ability to record full-motion video during the day or at night. Each aircraft also has work stations connected to the controversial Distributed Common Ground System – Army (DCGS-A) intelligence data network, which is supposed to help collect, compile, and distribute information rapidly across units

Not only do they openly admit that the US has spy planes in Africa and Latin America, to them it makes perfect sense! 

Sending the aircraft to work with AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM makes perfect sense for early deployments. The regions these commands work are relatively low threat environments for American aircraft, but offer no shortage of work tracking drug smugglers, terrorists, and insurgents in remote areas

Let me get this straight, they are using spy planes “to track drug smugglers, terrorists, and insurgents”?  Call me cynical but “tracking drug smugglers, terrorists and insurgents” is only a half-truth.  Maybe in a small number of cases they have tracked real drug smugglers and others, but the US government has been involved in drug smuggling operations in the past, just ask the CIA.  As for tracking terrorists, the US government and the intelligence community has supported terrorists in the Middle East and Latin America for decades and as for tracking insurgencies of let’s say, in Iraq, it is usually against US and NATO occupiers, so who are they fooling? 

In Central and South America and Africa, Army spy planes such as the RC-12X Guardrail Common Sensor (GRCS) and EO-5C Airborne Reconnaissance Low – Multisensor (ARL-M) already fly routine missions, in cooperation with other aircraft and personnel from the U.S. Air Force, American law enforcement agencies, local security forces, and private contractors. After 9/11, the Pentagon found renewed interest in monitoring terrorist groups and potential hotspots in Africa with a similar mix of assets

To the US establishment, any form of spying on its territory is considered a declaration of war, but any violation of airspace of their perceived enemies anywhere in the Global South is justified because the US government can do whatever they want and bypass international law.  The Chinese spy balloon story is to create fear that an enemy is collecting data on its nuclear missile sites and on the American people.  Now they are accusing China of spying on Latin America with another balloon which asks the obvious question, why?  China has a good relationship with most of Latin America.  The US establishment, the MIC and the mainstream media are all pushing for a new war with a nuclear power that has a formidable military that would fight any foreign invasion on its territory.  China is not interested in becoming a global empire, it is the US who wants to remain a global empire.  It’s all war propaganda, nothing more, and nothing less.             

A Star is Born!

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com


“Everything that can be engineered is being engineered dishonestly.” —Truman Verdun

If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-fraying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine… and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany… say, what…?!?

    Weird, a little bit.  A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany’s industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

     For a year before the op, “Joe Biden” and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about “ending” the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe’s remaining sole oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

    In June of 2022, under cover of an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea, US Navy divers attached mines to the Nord Stream pipelines. The mines had triggers that could be activated remotely at any time of choosing, and that moment came on September 26… kaboom. Ms. Nuland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated publicly. Naturally, the US blamed Russia. America’s news media — catamite of the Intel Community — amplified the charge, despite the absurdity of Russia blowing up its most lucrative source of export revenue. The New York Times has so far made no mention of Mr. Hersh’s recent update of the Nord Stream sabotage.

     Germany, too, hardly made a peep, nor did the rest of Western Europe, which now faces a future that looks, energy-wise, like a return to the Fourteenth Century. Maybe they’re all jaded with modern life, all that tiresome bathing and malingering in the brightly-lit cafes. Under the sagacious guidance of the WEF they were all going “green,” anyway — but was that green like the heart-shaped leaves of the linden tree or green like the moldy veins in Roquefort cheese? I guess they’ll find out.

     Luckily, America had the Chinese balloon to distract them, and then “Joe B’s” State-of-the-Union extravaganza where the nation learned that we are living in the most extraordinary economic boom since the days of Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin. The perpetually-vacationing Leader of the Free World has apparently made America great again, despite the dastardly plots and ongoing insurrections of his far-right, white supremacist adversaries. Did the annual SOTU smell a little bit like a reelection pitch, though? I hope so.

     Speaking of insurrection, the House commenced hearings this past week, debuting with the Oversight Committee’s witness panel of Twitter execs who carried out a years-long censorship campaign against the First Amendment in cahoots with the FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, DOS, DHS… well you get the picture. A more arrogant crew of dedicated fascists would be hard to find in any other corner of the world today, except perhaps Canada, than the likes of Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and James Baker, former chief counsel of the FBI. They “moderated” speech on the chat app for the good of the American people, you understand, lest the public succumb to “misinformation” — otherwise known as reality.

     One reality being that the sedulously-repressed news of Hunter Biden’s crime-stuffed laptop represented interference in the 2020 election. James Baker told the committee he could not recall at the time (October 2020) whether he spoke to anyone back in his old haunts at the FBI about the matter — though there is no question that, as chief counsel, he knew the agency had possession of the laptop since 2019, and what was in it. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) warned the four former Twitter employees that “this is the investigation part, later comes the arrest part.” Let’s hope so on that one, too.

     Meanwhile, the House Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a lively colloquy with four “experts” including former FBI agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and one Elliot Williams, former DOJ Assistant AG and currently shill for DC Lawfare tank the Raban Group. The theme, generally, was the change-in-mission in the FBI-DOJ nexus from law enforcement to harassment of US citizens who oppose Democratic Party policy.

     Most instructive in Thursday’s session, though, was the political debut of Rep. Danial Sachs Goldman (real name), newly elected member for New York’s Tenth District (which encompasses Wall Street). Among other distinctions, Mr. Goldman is an heir to the Levi-Strauss blue jeans fortune, and was lead counsel during the 2019 impeachment hearings against Donald Trump in the House Intelligence Committee. This vicious prick, an apt replacement for the inveterate liar and seditionist, Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), put on a florid demonstration of hectoring witnesses, cutting them off, and re-directing the committee’s attention at every opportunity to the so-called “insurrection” at the Capitol of 1/6/20.

      Mr. Goldman is a man to watch, especially as the House actually does give its complete attention later this year to the 1/6/20 matter and the true facts behind the FBI’s engineering of the event, including the nefarious actions of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Capitol Police. When it comes, I can’t wait to watch Mr. Goldman unwind like one of those cheap counterfeit Rolex watchers that peddlers hawk on Wall Street’s sidewalk.

Worst Ever State of the Union in US History

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: The Stephen Lendman Blog

With lines scripted for him to recite via teleprompter, crib notes, and an earpiece for instructions, the fake Biden mumbled and bumbled through the regime’s Tuesday state of the union (SOTU) address for 72 painful-to-hear minutes.

It came at a time when undemocratic Dems are waging war at home on Americans targeted for elimination by kill shots and abroad against militarily, morally and ethically superior Russia — what risks humanity-destroying nuclear war if push things too far.

The fake Biden is an embarrassment to what leadership is supposed to be, what’s absent with undemocratic Dems in charge — especially with an imposter, a detached from reality buffoon in the White House.

This year’s SOTU came at a time of hegemon USA’s war against invented enemy Russia, a must-win conflict it’s losing to a superior foe.

Throughout the post-WW II period, the empire of lies and mass-deception always picked fights with militarily inferior nations free from its control — until overstepping by challenging Russia belligerently in support of Nazi-infested Ukraine, a major strategic blunder for which it’s paying dearly. 

Separately in response to international community calls for the Biden regime to aid rescue work in earthquake-devastated northern Syria by lifting illegally imposed sanctions, interventionist Blinken’s so-called spokesman, Price, showed contempt for its people in need by the following perversion of reality remarks, saying:

“It would be…counterproductive for us to reach out to a government” on the US target list for regime change for not subordinating its sovereignty and rights of its people to a higher power in Washington.

And this perversion of reality from Price, falsely claiming that the empire of lies and forever wars on invented enemies provided “more humanitarian assistance to the people of Syria than any other country (sic)” — a bald-faced Big Lie by a regime waging all-out war on nations free from its diabolical control.

Following Obama/Biden regime aggression against Syria in 2011, the empire of lies continued waging war on the country and its people by hot and other means.

At this time, hegemon USA illegally controls about one-third of Syrian territory, including its oil-rich areas and most fertile agricultural land.

Hegemon USA’s so-called 2020 Caesar Act is all about wanting 17 million Syrians starved into submission for failure of Damascus to bend to the will of the empire of lies and forever wars.

At the time of its enactment into US law, Syrian envoy to Russia, Riyad Haddad, explained that threatened US sanctions under the measure “not only target Syria, they directly or indirectly jeopardize all its allies and are also aimed against Persian Gulf countries, so that none of these countries dares to invest in” the Syrian Arab Republic.

“And each party that will say it wants to invest, must get permission from the US.”

The measure is similar to US state terror and illegal sanctions war on Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries free from its control, what aims to inflict enormous harm on their people.

At this time, US hostility toward sovereign independent nations is a sideshow compared to its aggression against Russia, what poses an ominous risk of humanity-destroying nuclear war.

As in virtually all his public remarks, the fake Biden’s SOTU trampled on truth by a litany of pre-scripted bald-faced Big Lies.

It’s how the empire of lies operates on the world stage, treating truth and full disclosure of major issues as mortal enemies. 

On March 11, 2022, the fake Biden called tanks to Nazi-infested Ukraine “WW III.”

Launched preemptively by the empire of lies against nonthreatening Russia, it’s been raging long before the fake Biden “announc(ed) that (hegemon USA) will be sending ‘Abram’ tanks to Ukrain(ian)” Nazis days earlier.

Will F-16 or other US warplanes follow — for Russia to target and destroy in flight?

The Russian Federation controls Ukrainian airspace and offshore waters.

Its high-precision hypersonic missiles can target and destroy anything threatening its security.

Sounding detached from reality and delusional, the fake Biden ignored reality about more monster than nation-state USA.

He ignored how Russia is outgunning, outmaneuvering, outwitting and defeating Nazi-infested Ukraine and the empire of lies at the same time.

And at a time of perpetual wars by hot and/or other means on invented enemies, soaring inflation and deepening economic weakness, the fake Biden pretended that Americans never had things better than since undemocratic Dems usurped power in 2020 by brazen election rigging.

And once again he ignored that what’s called covid is seasonal flu renamed, that kill shots are designed to destroy health, that democracy in the US/West exists in fantasy form alone — the real thing not tolerated at home or abroad.

What he called “the great American story” is a humanity-destroying monster.

Tucker Carlson is an exception to dominant fourth estate rubbish.

Commenting on the fake Biden’s Tuesday night SOTU before delivered, he said:

“(I)t would take a lot of brass to stand up on live television and claim that the (empire of lies and forever wars) is better off than it was when you took over” when reality is worlds apart different.

As long as undemocratic Dems run things, the ominous risk of nuclear war will threaten humanity’s survival.

Carlson correctly expected not “a single honest word” from the White House imposter in his SOTU address.

Instead of truth and full disclosure, he recited a litany of bald-faced Big Lies about all things domestic and geopolitical.

He didn’t run for president.

He was installed unelected to serve wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively at the expense of peace and beneficial social change.

At the same time, the regime he represents is waging war on Russia and losing badly to its military and tactical superiority.

On the home front, real inflation as calculated pre-1990 is 16.2%.

Most jobs created are rotten part-time ones paying poverty or sub-poverty wages with few or no benefits.

What the fake Biden called “near record low unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers” is pure fiction.

At a time when the nation’s industrial base operates in low-wage countries, he lied claiming that the empire of lies “created 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years (sic).”

He compounded his Big Lie by falsely claiming that “we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs (sic).”

He turned truth on its head and trampled on it by falsely blaming Russia for made-in-the-USA inflation, a fake pandemic and perpetual war-making on invented enemies.

Virtually every positive claim he made was a bald-faced Big Lie — reflecting his detachment from reality.

The empire of lies and perpetual wars on invented enemies is declining because of its imperial arrogance, its endless wars against invented enemies, and unwillingness to change its wicked ways.

The fake Biden is symbolic of hegemon USA’s nonexistent exceptionalism, its illusory moral superiority and fantasy military supremacy.

It’s the same dynamic that doomed other empires in world history.

The long ago founded US republic no longer exists, replaced by the imperial state and ruinous military Keynesianism while vital homeland needs go begging.

China, Russia and other independent nations are rising in preeminence on the world stage at a time of hegemon USA’s fall from grace with no prospect of turning things around.

The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists.

A humanity-destroying monster replaced it.

If not effectively challenged and changed, US-launched nuclear war may kill us all.

A Final Comment

The fake Biden lied and mass-deceived by pretending to represent “all Americans.”

He was installed unelected to wage perpetual wars by hot and/or other means on invented enemies to serve wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively.

The regime he represents is an unparalleled menace to humanity at home and worldwide.

As long as it’s empowered, we’re more greatly endangered than ever before in world history because of its contempt for peace in favor of perpetual war-making on invented enemies.

CIA Agent Cloaks Lockdown Propaganda in Concern for China

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By Debbie Lerman

Source: Brownstone Institute

On January 24, 2023, Dr. Michael V. Callahan published an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “The Indirect Ways the U.S. Can Help China Avoid Covid Catastrophe.”

If we assume this was written by a prominent doctor at a Harvard-affiliated hospital – an academic professional who bases his opinions on sound medical principles and scientific knowledge – it makes no sense at all. In fact, it is an embarrassment to the writer and the institution he represents.

If, however, we realize that this is just the latest in the quarantine-until-vaccine propaganda campaign of a CIA agent and top biosecurity cabal member, everything suddenly makes perfect sense. In fact, many of the points in the article map beautifully onto Robert Blumen’s helpful Covid propaganda grid.

The following are the medical and scientific fictions (or, if you prefer, lies) supposedly advocated by infectious-disease-physician Callahan, followed by an explanation of why CIA-agent/biosecurity-propagandist Callahan would want to promulgate them:

Fiction #1: Zero Covid works

Callahan opens his article with a bold statement: “China rolled back its longstanding pandemic strategy ‘zero Covid,’ which had protected the country for nearly three years.” As many, including myself, have noted, there is no evidence – except the repeated statements of people like Callahan and the lockdown-narrative-promoting mainstream press – for the fact that the “zero Covid” strategy protected anyone from anything. 

Callahan, who has worked for the intelligence community in Asia, knows (as we all should) that information from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not reliable, to say the least. Therefore, there is no reason to think he believes the CCP’s absurd claims that there were no Covid deaths in China for three years thanks to lockdowns.

So why is this his lede? Because the biosecurity propaganda machine has to maintain the illusion that lockdowns, at least to some degree, are effective, and that ending them is somehow undesirable.

Fiction #2: China’s Lunar New Year is a very scary time

Callahan returns to a favorite trope of the quarantine-until-vaccine cabal from exactly three years ago: the Lunar New Year in China. Due to “enormous” travel, “densely packed transit systems, winter conditions and multigenerational gatherings,” Callahan tells us “the Lunar New Year is a common tabletop simulation for training public health officials.” What about the real world? Do we have any proof that it was disastrous in 2020, as mainstream media warned, or will be disastrous in 2023? 

Furthermore, if Lunar New Year travel in 2020 already exported Covid far and wide (we know that by the time lockdowns were initiated in China on January 23, 2020, the virus had already spread to nearly every Chinese province, and many other countries) – what use were lockdowns in one or two specific areas for containing its worldwide spread? And if it spread everywhere, including in China, despite lockdowns, how can we believe the zero deaths for three years narrative?

Fiction #3: the most dangerous subvariant

Ever since Delta, variants and subvariants have provided a never-ending source of fear mongering for the quarantine-until-vaccine junta. In his op-ed, Callahan makes an unsubstantiated claim that the “subvariant XBB1.5” is “the most infectious to date.” There is no reference, so I’m not sure where the information is from. I found one doctor in North Carolina saying it “seems to be the most infectious” with no meaningful data to support the claim. A WHO official says it’s the “most transmissible” (again, no numbers or data) but adds “there’s no indication it makes people more sick than previous subvariants.” 

As has been true for SARS-CoV-2 and every one of its mutations, and as is true for every infectious disease humanity has ever encountered: If it’s not very lethal to most people, it can infect the entire world’s population while causing very little serious disease or death. 

Dr. Callahan knows this. Propagandist Callahan is using the tried and true biodefense network’s tactic of constantly citing high case numbers (regardless of illness or death) to send the media and public into paroxysms of panic.

Fiction #4: vaccines work

Next, Callahan says the United States has a high vaccination rate using “highly protective vaccines.” If he means against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, Callahan might be able to dig up some evidence (though it is highly contestable). But if he means against this subvariant, he has zero evidence, and he knows it.

Fiction #5: some vaccines (ours) are better than others (theirs)

“Domestically made Chinese vaccines,” according to Callahan, “may provide less lasting protection against the virus and its variants.” 

Since he says “may,” this is clearly just a hypothesis. Since we know our vaccines provide at most a few months of protection from the original strain (again, a contestable statement) and none from any variant or subvariant thereafter, the meaning of “less lasting protection” basically is “less than zero,” which again makes no sense.

However, as a member of the quarantine-until-vaccine biosecurity network, Callahan is using this piece of propaganda to bolster the case that lockdowns and vaccines work.

How anyone can believe such preposterous fiction is a mystery.

Postscript: a very scary non-fiction

The vast expansion of surveillance in general, and biosurveillance in particular, is one of the biosecurity community’s biggest achievements during Covid, and Callahan manages to include a plug for more:

In December, at least one online pharmacy in China began selling the Covid drug Paxlovid, made by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, directly to patients. The pharmacy shipped Paxlovid to any Chinese person with a positive coronavirus test. If the Beijing government were to tie the government’s home test result reporting system to the commercial Paxlovid home delivery providers, many lives could be saved.

If anyone is wondering why it’s important to debunk and expose all of the fictions and propaganda of the Covid biosecurity agenda, this tiny window into the terrifying vision they have for our future is the answer.

The West Is Incentivizing Russia To Hit Back

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Well the omnicidal war sluts won the debate over sending tanks to Ukraine, so now it’s time to start arguing for sending F-16s.

In an article titled “Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies,” Reuters reports the following:

“Ukraine will now push for Western fourth generation fighter jets such as the U.S. F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister said on Wednesday.

Ukraine won a huge boost for its troops as Germany announced plans to provide heavy tanks for Kyiv on Wednesday, ending weeks of diplomatic deadlock on the issue. The United States is poised to make a similar announcement.

Just in time for the good news, Lockheed Martin has announced that the arms manufacturing giant happens to be all set to ramp up production of F-16s should they be needed for shipment to Ukraine.

“Lockheed Martin has said that it’s ready to meet demands for F-16 fighter jets if the US and its allies choose to ship them to Ukraine,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports. “So far, the US and its allies have been hesitant to send fighter jets to Ukraine due to concerns that they could be used to target Russian territory. But the Western powers seem less and less concerned about escalation as the US and Germany have now pledged to send their main battle tanks.”

The New York Times has a new article out titled “How Biden Reluctantly Agreed to Send Tanks to Ukraine,” subtitled “The decision unlocked a flow of heavy arms from Europe and inched the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.” It’s authors David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper write:

President Biden’s announcement Wednesday that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine came after weeks of tense back-channel negotiations with the chancellor of Germany and other European leaders, who insisted that the only way to unlock a flow of heavy European arms was for the United States to send tanks of its own.

His decision, however reluctant, now paves the way for German-made Leopard 2 tanks to be delivered to Ukraine in two or three months, provided by several European nations. While it is unclear whether it will make a decisive difference in the spring offensive that President Volodymyr Zelensky is now planning to take back territory seized by Russia, it is the latest in a series of gradual escalations that has inched the United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with Russia.

When even the myopic empire simps at The New York Times are acknowledging that western powers are escalating aggressions in a very dangerous direction, you should probably sit up and pay attention.

In a recent article for Responsible Statecraft titled “Mission Creep? How the US role in Ukraine has slowly escalated,” Branko Marcetic outlines the ways the US empire has “serially blown past their own self-imposed lines over arms transfers,” over and over again relenting to war hawks and requests from Ukrainian officials to supply weapons which it had previously refrained from supplying for fear that they would be too escalatory and lead to hot warfare between nuclear superpowers. Marcetic notes the way previously unthinkable aggressions like NATO spy agencies conducting sabotage operations on Russian infrastructure are now accepted, with more escalations being called for as soon as the previous one was made.

Toward the end of his article, Marcetic drives home a very important point which needs more attention: that the western alliance has established a policy of continually escalating every time Russia doesn’t react forcefully to a previous western escalation, which necessarily means Russia is being actively incentivized to react forcefully to those escalations.

“By escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the U.S. and NATO have created an incentive structure for Moscow to take a drastic, aggressive step to show the seriousness of its own red lines,” Marcetic writes. “This would be dangerous at the best of times, but particularly so when Russian officials are making clear they increasingly view the war as one against NATO as a whole, not merely Ukraine, while threatening nuclear response to the alliance’s escalation in weapons deliveries.”

“Moscow keeps saying escalatory arms transfers are unacceptable and could mean wider war; US officials say since Moscow hasn’t acted on those threats, they can freely escalate. Russia is effectively told it has to escalate to show it’s serious about lines,” Marcetic added on Twitter.

A good recent example of this dynamic is the recent New York Times report that the Biden administration is considering backing a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea, which many experts agree is one of the most likely ways this conflict could lead to nuclear warfare. The article reports that the Biden administration has assessed that Russia is unlikely to reciprocate an escalatory aggression, but the basis for that assessment apparently comes from nothing other than the fact that Russia hasn’t done so yet.

“Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin,” the Times quotes a RAND Corporation think tanker as saying in explanation for the Biden administration’s belief that it can get away with backing a Crimea offensive. But as Dave DeCamp explained at the time, that’s not even true; Russia did significantly escalate its aggressions in response to strikes on Crimea, beginning to target critical Ukrainian infrastructure in ways it previously had not.

So Russia has in fact been escalating its aggressions in response to attacks on Crimea; it just hasn’t been escalating them against NATO powers. As long as Russia is only escalating in ways that hurt Ukrainians, the US-centralized power structure does not regard them as real escalations. The take-home message to Moscow being that they’re going to get squeezed harder and harder until they attack NATO itself.

And of course that won’t de-escalate things either; it will be seized on and spun as evidence that Putin is a reckless madman who is attacking the free world completely unprovoked and must be stopped at all cost, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon. Russia would of course be aware of this obvious reality, so the only way it takes the bait is if the pain of not reacting gets to a point where it is perceived as outweighing the pain of reacting. But judging by its actions the empire seems determined to push them to that point.

It really is spooky how much de-escalation and detente have been disappeared from public discourse about Russia. People genuinely don’t seem to know it’s an option. They really do think the only option is continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship, and that anything else is obsequious appeasement. They think that because that’s the message they are being fed by the imperial propaganda machine, and they’re being fed that message because that is the empire’s actual position.

I’ve been warning about the increasing risk of nuclear armageddon for as long as I’ve been publicly engaged in political commentary, and people have been calling me a hysterical idiot and a Putin puppet the entire time even as we’ve moved closer and closer to the exact point I’ve been screaming about at the top of my lungs all these years. Now there’s not a whole lot closer it can get without being directly upon us. I deeply, deeply hope we turn this thing around before it’s too late.