I Feel Like A DGB Goon Showed Up At Scott Ritter's Door With Some Unpleasant Conversation...,

unz  |  Scott Ritter(5:20 mark)– “The idea that the Ukrainian military has been eliminated as an effective fighting force is a flawed concept, and unless Russia broadens its special military operation– probably to the point of changing it form a special military operation to a war which includes the totality of Ukrainian battle-space–(then) this is a conflict that is dangerously close to becoming unwinnable by Russia which means that while they can complete their objectives in the east with 200,000 troops, they aren’t able to prevent Ukraine from rearming and reequipping when Ukraine is being provided with tens of billions of dollars of equipment by NATO —Whenever you provide your enemy with “safe space” to rebuild military capability, you’re never going to win. … 

Yes, Russia is winning in the east which is what they said their objective was all along. And they are accomplishing that. That is the special Military Operation. But now we’re talking about “war”, and I don’t think Russia has made that transition yet. This is a defacto proxy war between the west and Russia using Ukrainian forces as NATO’s sword. The object of this is to “bleed Russia dry”. And if Russia doesn’t change the dynamic, Russia will be bled dry.” Zelensky has indicated that he’s willing to mobilize a million people, at a time when the west is ready to provide the funding and equipment to turn those million men into a real military threat. 

So, I see what has been happening in the last few weeks as being decisive. 

The military aid the west is providing is changing the dynamic and if Russia doesn’t find a way to address this meaningfully, and to eliminate it as a military capability… then the conflict will never end.” (“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube)

It's Not Just Fauci: Power-Sunstein An AssClown Two-Fer That Doesn't Bode Well....,(REDUX from 3/8/21)

WaPo |  Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the Democrats were doing.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance.

If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. 

Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist. 

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.” 

Out of curiosity, I checked the Democratic National Committee’s website this week. Some of the headlines were: “Trump abuses role as commander-in-chief in latest lie.” “Tom Perez on Trump’s executive order to sabotage Americans’ health care.” “Trump’s lapdog Pence must return wasted taxpayer dollars.” 

That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies” and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff when it has been made so redundant.

Ukrainians In The Russian Meat Grinder: Attack, Dig-In, Then DIE...,

readingjunkie | Here’s the thing, as correctly observed by CNN, the Ukrainian strategy of holing up in densely populated cities and using human shields is very effective. There is also enough passive and sometimes even active loyalty from the civilian population for this strategy to work without significant backlash. So why are Ukrainians suddenly doing the opposite? Why not get out of the kill zone in the Donets basin and retreat to more defensible positions? Furthermore, why is the West enabling this strategy by funneling billions of dollars of equipment into a meat grinder where most of it is just destroyed immediately? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to retreat, even if this means abandoning their equipment?

Refusing to capitulate to Russia is morally indefensible, but from a pragmatic point of view, it would make sense, if there was a chance of the situation improving. If the Ukrainian army were to escape from Donbass, that would presumably give the Zelensky government more bargaining power at the negotiation table. But instead they’re sitting in their fortifications and being destroyed wholesale.

Without artillery support in good quantity the Ukrainian military has no chance to hold the line and to stop Russian moves. Any unit which attempts is hold the line will simply be mauled by Russian artillery until it is no longer able to fight. That is happening now. As the Ukrainians have orders not to leave or move their defense lines they either have to give up or die defending them.

By giving ‘hold the line’ orders the Ukrainian leadership is contributing to the Russian demilitarization of the Ukraine.

It is the ‘west’ that is preventing Zelensky from suing for peace.

The ‘west’ has fallen for its own propaganda. It believes that the Russian troops near Kiev were defeated by Ukrainian forces. In reality they retreated in good order after the diversion they constituted was no longer needed. The ‘western’ fairytale that they were ‘defeated’ gave hope that Russia could be ‘weakened’, as the U.S. Secretary of State said.

The war will hardly ‘weaken’ Russia. But the war will destroy the Ukrainian military and many, many of its men.

So no matter which way you look at this situation, it seems unsustainable, both for Ukraine and for NATO. While the writers at Moon of Alabama are probably correct that there is downward pressure on Kiev to keep their forces committed in Donbass, there is another possible explanation. Here’s my theory on what is happening.

Russia is using their contract soldiers, and spent years rotating them all through large-scale training exercises, including the exercise they just finished in February. Thanks to this, they rolled into this war with a warm start, as opposed to a cold one. They can perform adequately on a strategic and operational level. Tactical inadequacies in the face of a real-life enemy could be quickly corrected.

As for the Ukrainian side, it looks like they are a NATO-quality force rebuilt from the ground up after their serious failures in 2014-15. As individuals and small units, they can hold their own against their Russian and often win, especially with the added advantage of being on the defensive. The problem is that so far they have never demonstrated the ability to push back Russian forces and retake ground. And no, recapturing terrain that the enemy voluntarily abandoned doesn’t count. Ukrainians recapturing suburbs around Kiev was a victory in the same sense as water filling a bowl. Wars are won by shaping the battlefield to your advantage and forcing the enemy to conform to it. Flowing into channels the enemy created for you is the opposite of winning.

Eight years was enough time to build a huge army almost from scratch, but it was not enough time to properly train them to function at anything higher than a battalion level, and I think we are seeing that deficiency play out in Donbass. In previous months they couldn’t maneuver to exploit Russian mistakes and tactical defeats, and now they can’t maneuver to escape destruction. Aside from losing a huge number of their vehicles, they don’t have the doctrine and cohesion to move 40-100 thousand men to safety.

The logistical complexity of uprooting and moving that many people is enormous and there is also the morale factor. Standing your ground is one thing, but if these soldiers moved westward in a clear retreat, there would be an overwhelming urge to desert and go home, and that’s what many of them would probably do.

Ukrainians can’t capitulate, they can’t retreat, so all they can do is stay where they are and die. Rather than conserve their resources, Kiev is doing the opposite and sending a continuous stream of additional men and equipment to be destroyed in the Donbass pocket.

How Do You Feel About Being A Subject Of "The Bad Guys?"

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud,” according to Orwell. In which case we’ve been totalitarian since at least 2001

TAE  |  I’ve been wondering for a long time why Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor in 1999, and I can’t find much information on it. Yeltsin was a US asset, and sold out his country to the CIA and a bunch of CIA-asset homegrown oligarchs. I’ve always suspected that when Yeltsin left, he felt a lot of regret for what he had done to Russia, and that maybe appointing Putin was his way to try and make up for that. I see people saying that Yeltsin thought Putin was pliable, but I think perhaps he knew exactly how Putin thought.

A “detail”: remember that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, male life expectancy for a period of time feel from a very steep cliff. And nothing Yeltsin did provided a solution to that crisis. Then, in August 1999, he appointed Putin as his prime minister, and didn’t leave a year later as planned, but 4 months later, in December. His chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev , who had hired Putin as his deputy in 1997, wrote his resignation speech:

Mr Yumashev was entrusted with writing Yeltsin’s resignation speech. “It was a hard speech to write. It was clear the text would go down in history. The message was important. That’s why I wrote the famous line ‘Forgive me’. “Russians had suffered such shock and stress during the 1990s. Yeltsin had to speak about this.”

Back to today. All economic -and other- sanctions against Russia since Putin first became president have led to one thing only: the country has dramatically increased its self-sufficiency. And in the process has upgraded its weapons arsenal to a level that no western country even comes close to, including the US, for maybe 10% of what the same US has spent on its own arsenal.

Russia’s latest generation of hypersonic missiles, against which no country has any defense, are far superior to what anybody else possesses. When they said recently they could take out a specific building in Kyiv if they wanted, they were not exaggerating. So yeah, look for Biden and Blinken and NATO et al to soon start using that superiority as a reason to incite more war vs Moscow.

A war they could never win, but that’s not the point any longer. One might argue of course that it never was after the advent of nuclear weapons. The whole point of NATO today, its raison d’être, is that it can create chaos wherever it goes and looks. It’s no longer capable of defending anyone from the Russian threat, but then that threat hasn’t been there for many years.

And NATO wants to continue existing, as does the Pentagon, and Boeing and Raytheon, it’s all about money, so they have to make up a threat, aided by their media brethren. That‘s why you see, from time to time, reports about Putin having yet another person “poisoned”, why governments in countries like the UK and Germany go along with the narrative, and why media in all other vassal states parrot these stories.

Russia only sprung into action when the west tried to take away their sole warm water port, Sevastopol in Crimea. An election was held, and 97% of mostly Russians voted to be part of Russia. Yeah, that upset NATO and the other usual suspects, but that doesn’t make Russia an aggressor.

Russia has no reason to “invade” Ukraine. They don’t need even more territory, they’re already by far the largest nation on earth. Moreover, they don’t have the military to occupy large swaths of land. They only have the capacity to protect their own.

Thing is, they really got that down. So the only thing NATO can do, in its quest to prove it has reason to exist, is to create chaos, as I said before. But there is a problem with consciously creating chaos between nuclear powers, instead of maintaining communication channels, as the US and USSR always did during the Cold War. Do we all understand this means we are in a worse situation today than back then?

And that some fool could actually fire a nuclear missile because of that? Me, I’m not so sure anymore. Between the Covid virus and the US cancel culture, there are not that many western people paying attention to warmongers and NATO aka warheads. Not a good idea.

 

U.S. Dollar Hegemony Ended Last Wednesday

popularresistance |  Margaret Flowers: You’re listening to Clearing the FOG, speaking truth to expose the forces of greed, with Margaret Flowers. And now I turn to my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is the president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term, Economic Trends, ISLET. He’s a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. He’s also the author of numerous books and recently updated his book, “Super Imperialism: The economic strategy of American Empire.” Thank you for taking time to speak with me today, Michael.

Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.

MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has benefited the wealthy class in the United States?

MH: Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a deficit, instead of being a creditor.

Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism, when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States. And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.

This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer, keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries.

And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia. So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.

MF: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. So, are we seeing then other countries starting to disinvest in US dollars? You’ve written about how the treasury bonds that these central banks buy up have been basically funding our domestic economy. Are they starting to shed those bonds or what’s happening?

The Coming Surge In Food Prices Will Devastate The Poor

TAC  |  s a twenty-something living in Washington, you have to find ways to cut costs. A lot of people here go without cable. Others sell their cars and rely on public transport. I like television and the open road, so I gave up food instead.

I eat the same thing every week. It’s a joke around the office. On Saturday, I’ll buy chicken breasts, ground turkey, sweet potatoes, asparagus, protein bars, eggs, and wheat bread at the supermarket. If I play my cards right, I can walk out of the store having paid less than $60. For five days’ worth of food, that’s not bad. I cook some of it Sunday and the rest on Wednesday night. I hate it, but it’s been pretty good on my waistline.

Even on the Club Fed diet, I’m feeling the pinch of rising food prices. Bread has become more expensive in the past three months. Eggs have, too. Buying store-brand chicken is like buying Ibérico ham.

I’ll survive. I can always cut cable. For wannabe proles in the laptop class, the rise in food prices has been at most an inconvenience. But the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the coming disruptions in global food markets will immiserate the actual working class in this country and may kill thousands of the world’s poor.

Well before war broke out in Ukraine, prices in the food industry were surging. U.S. food prices rose a whopping 7.5 percent between 2021 and 2022. Indexed global food prices hit an all-time high last month.

The causes are familiar. Supply-chain disruptions have slowed production and slashed supply. The sight of barren grocery shelves has incentivized consumers to buy in bulk, sending aggregate demand skyward. Labor-retention issues and slumping workforce participation rates have reduced output and further cut supply. Labor issues have reached a point where meatpacking companies like Tyson plan to automate their processing plants to weather labor shortages.

At the same time, the prices of industry inputs like oil, animal feed, and fertilizer have soared. The price of urea—a popular, highly soluble nitrogen-based fertilizer—nearly doubled at the pivotal New Orleans port last year. In input-dependent industries like agriculture, where producers net only 15 percent of final retail cost, consumers inevitably bear most of the increase in input costs.

The effects of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed against the Russian government and economy threaten to accelerate these trends. Russia is the world’s leading producer of wheat; Ukraine is fifth. Together, they are responsible for some 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports. War will almost certainly disrupt planting season in both Russia and Ukraine.

Why Did Neftali Bennett Have To Urgently Pay V.V. Putin A Visit?

gilbertdoctorow  |  In recent days, in what is surely a coordinated action by NATO and European authorities acting hand in glove, Russian news broadcasters have been taken off servers in Europe and effectively made inaccessible to the entire European public.  This modern day “jamming” concerns not just RT or Sputnik, the best known state owned voices of Russia because they broadcast in English and other languages that we all know, but virtually every news outlet based in Russia, public and privately owned, and broadcasting in the Russian language.

In this regard, EU Member States are waging an Information War of greatest significance that is absolutely not mentioned, let alone discussed in Western media, whether mainstream or otherwise. The victim is the European public, which, if bad turns to worse, will not know what hit them and why when cruise or hypersonic missiles descend on NATO bases or infrastructure. This enforced silence prevents Western civil society from taking any steps to save its own neck in what have become wartime conditions on the Continent.

The blockage is not uniformly enforced at all times, so that some Russian print and video producers can be accessed at one moment or another before going black.

In particular, one vitally important 3.30 minute video of Russian military spokesman Igor Konoshenkov yesterday and this morning remains accessible on youtube. I will detail below what he was saying, because the messenger and the message concern whether you and I will live to see another day.

Konoshenkov’s points in this video were the following:

1) Russia has now destroyed the entire Ukrainian air force that remained within the confines of Ukraine

2) There are also Ukrainian fighter jets that left the country and are now parked in Romania and other neighboring countries. If these planes are allowed by local authorities to take off from Romania, etc. and enter Ukrainian air space, Russia will consider the country from which they took off as a co-belligerent and will take appropriate action against them. The subtext is that Russia is ready to make missile strikes against NATO airfields that transgress the rules of war.

3) Russia is now about to destroy all military industrial complex factories in Ukraine and has formally warned all employees of these factories to leave the premises and stay away

4) Russia has received documentation from Ukrainian health authorities on the production of biological weapons  (anthrax, Siberian plague and much more) by Ukrainian labs in Kharkiv and elsewhere in cooperation with the United States. Stocks of such weapons were being stored in direct violation of international conventions.  On 24 February, in advance of the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, the Ukrainian health authorities destroyed these illicit biological weapons. However, Russia has obtained the official documentation certifying this destruction of what should never have been there. Moscow is now studying this documentation, which indicates United States participation in the development of the biological weapons and will publish the incriminating documents, starting from yesterday.

5) Russia has also obtained documentation proving that Ukraine, in cooperation with the United States, was since the presidency of Petro Petrushenko, actively developing nuclear weapons, including “dirty” nuclear devices using readily available fuel from its reactors.  Such activity was going on in the Zaporozhye nuclear plants, and it is very likely that the fire reported at a ‘training unit’ adjacent to an active reactor two days ago related to destruction of incriminating papers, if it was not otherwise a ‘false flag’ operation to allege a Russian attack on the power station, in violation of international law.

There Is No ‘Russian Invasion’ Of Ukraine

johnhelmer |  In the Foreign Ministry’s new paper for the State Department, delivered on Thursday afternoon and then published on the Ministry website,   there is a restatement of the Russian proposals for security in Europe which the US refuses to address. There is also nothing new in the threat: “In the absence of the readiness of the American side to agree on firm, legally binding guarantees to ensure our security from the United States and its allies, Russia will be forced to respond, including through the implementation of military-technical measures.”

President Vladimir Putin said the same thing to the assembly of the Russian officer corps on December 21. “Is anyone unable to grasp this? This should be clear…I would like to emphasise again: we are not demanding any special exclusive terms for ourselves. Russia stands for equal and indivisible security in the whole of Eurasia. Naturally, as I have already noted, if our Western colleagues continue their obviously aggressive line, we will take appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures and will have a tough response to their unfriendly steps.”

Putin’s point was repeated by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva on January 10, following his talks with his State Department counterpart, Wendy Sherman.  For more detail on those talks, read this.

What is meant by “military-technical measures” is Russia’s black box defence. This is not the place – it will not be the place – to read what this will be. Anglo-American think-tankers are paid by their governments to guess what is inside the box, as is the new source for analysis of Russia in the Anglo-American media, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service.

Three things are certain about what is inside the black box. The first is spelled out emphatically in yesterday’s Foreign Ministry paper: “There is no ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine, as the United States and its allies have been officially declaring since last autumn, and there are no plans for it.”  This rules out a land force invasion of Ukraine, as well as aerial bombing, missile and drone strikes launched from Russian territory.

The second sure thing about the black box defence is that it is black: it will be a surprise.

The third thing is, as Putin said last December, it will be “reciprocal”. This  means the Americans and their European allies are already using comparable measures in their attacks on Russia directly and in the Donbass. Reciprocal in this Russian vocabulary may mean comparable; it does not mean symmetrical along the Russian land border with the Ukraine; offshore, in the Black and Azov Seas; in the airspace above the Donbass or in the cyberspace .

The Russian paper was handed to US Ambassador John Sullivan at the Foreign Ministry and then posted publicly. The ministry website, mid.ru, was then incapacitated for more than an hour. The official English translation will follow during Friday.

“The package nature of Russian proposals has been ignored, from which ‘convenient’ topics have been deliberately chosen. They, in turn, have been ‘twisted’ in the direction of creating advantages for the United States and its allies. This approach, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of American officials, reinforces reason for doubt that Washington is really committed to correcting the situation in the field of Euro-security.”

The paper then itemizes the specific security measures and treaty articles which have been tabled by the Russian side since December, and which the US and NATO replies have so far ignored. For analysis of each of the booby traps contained in the US paper released in Spain a fortnight ago, read this.

Twice the new Foreign Ministry paper uses the term “concrete”. The first is to signal that this remains to be provided in the papers sent to Moscow by the US and NATO so far. “We expect concrete proposals from the members of the alliance on the content and forms of legal consolidation of the rejection of further expansion of NATO to the east.”

In the second application of the term “concrete”, the paper says: “the United States and its allies should abandon the policy of ‘containing’ Russia and take concrete practical measures to de-escalate the military-political situation, including in line with paragraph 2 of Article 4 of our draft treaty.”

Article 4 says, not only that NATO will not include Ukraine and Georgia as members, but that even if formal membership is ruled out, there will be no US military bases in non-member states, no military infrastructure (arms stockpiles, for example), and no “bilateral military cooperation” targeted at Russia.

Among other concrete issues required for negotiation, the Russian paper identifies “heavy” (nuclear) bomber flights close to Russian airspace, combat vessels in the Black and Baltic Seas, the Aegis Ashore missiles batteries in Romania and Poland, and intermediate and short-range nuclear missiles.

For a Russian analysis of Russia’s black box options, published at the end of January in Vzglyad, read this.

 

 

Before Brandon Became A Senile Bag Of Botox He Was Widely Considered A Moron...,

NYTimes |  President Biden said on Friday that the United States has intelligence showing that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made a final decision to reject diplomatic overtures and invade Ukraine, in what Mr. Biden said would be a “catastrophic and needless war of choice” in Eastern Europe.

Speaking from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, Mr. Biden said “we have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days,” adding that “we believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”

Asked whether he thinks that Mr. Putin is still wavering about whether to invade, Mr. Biden said, “I’m convinced he’s made the decision.” Later, he added that his impression of Mr. Putin’s intentions is based on “a significant intelligence capability.”

Still, Mr. Biden implored Russia to “choose diplomacy.”

“It is not too late to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table,” Mr. Biden said, referring to planned talks between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister on Thursday. “If Russia takes military action before that date, it will be clear that they have slammed the door shut on diplomacy.”

In the hours before Mr. Biden’s late afternoon remarks, Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine called for mass evacuations in two contested regions of the country, claiming, with little evidence, that Ukraine’s military was about to launch a large-scale attack there, an assertion that appeared intended to provoke Russian military intervention.

The ominous messaging of the rebels in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk was loudly echoed by Moscow, raising fears that Russia was setting the stage for an imminent invasion that could ignite the biggest conflict in Europe in decades.

The call by the Russian-backed separatists for evacuations came as they blamed Ukraine for an array of provocations, including shelling along the front lines between Ukraine and the separatist forces, and an explosion involving an empty car that pro-Moscow news outlets said belonged to the head of the region’s security services.

Mr. Biden, who had just concluded a video call with a dozen Western leaders, rejected the claims as lies intended by Mr. Putin to inflame the situation on the ground and provide a pretext for war — something the United States and other European leaders had been warning about for weeks.

He cited the bombing of a Ukrainian kindergarten as a Russia-backed provocation. And he pointed to Russian separatist accusations that Ukraine was planning to launch a major offensive attack as evidence of Russian efforts to justify military action with misinformation.

“There is simply no evidence to these assertions, and it defies basic logic to believe the Ukrainians would choose this moment, with well over 150,000 troops arrayed on its borders, to escalate a yearlong conflict,” Mr. Biden said.

The president’s comments are the clearest indications of just how close the world may be to the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. He took the highly unusual course of specifically predicting the time frame and parameters of the invasion, despite the risks that he could be proved wrong.

Dual Citizens Don't Predicate U.S. National Security Policy On The Interests Of American Citizens

johnhelmer |  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed publicly in Geneva on Friday, January 21, that he will not negotiate a no-war agreement with the Russians because he cannot. This is already understood by the Russians; by the French and Germans; and by several senior officials of the Biden Administration.

The evidence of Blinken’s incapacity is in the words he says.

It was during the last world war, when US policymakers had next to no intelligence on how their German counterparts were thinking and what they were intending, that a group of American sociologists were engaged by the War Department, as the Pentagon was called then, to do what was called content analysis of German propaganda. One of the sociologists, a Russian émigré Nathan Leites, went on to apply the same method to Soviet publications in order to uncover what Leites called the operational code of the Politburo. That was in 1951. It was immediately used by US negotiators during the Korean War armistice negotiations which began in July of that year and ran for two years. By then Leites had produced a sequel, A Study of Bolshevism. Both were paid for and published by RAND, the think-tank created in 1945 by the US Air Force, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and the War Department.

Since then the method has not been used on US Government officials, at least not by RAND nor publicly by any American sociologist.

When the RAND method is used to analyze what Blinken told the US press, following his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, it is revealed that Blinken has no intention whatever of negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Russians on any terms. According to the scientific method devised by the best and brightest Americans for dealing with their enemies, it’s now clear from Blinken’s own words that he is unable to understand what Russians tell him. In the mind behind the words there is only one compulsive idea – attack, punish, destroy Russia.

The State Department has published the transcript of Blinken’s statement and answers to questions at his press conference.

*****************************

The late senator John McCain described Blinken as not only unqualified but dangerous to America.

CSPAN – McCain on Blinken nomination fo Deputy Secretary of State.

 

Pine Island Capital Partners.

Blinken directed some of the most murderous initiatives of the Obama era: Libya, Syria, and Gaza. But worse, he then cashed-in with John Thain (of the gold-plated Merrill office with the $90K rug who insisted on $20 billion in bonuses from the government bail-out of the bankrupt firm) on this Private Equity/SPAC designed to cash-in on Blinken and Lloyd Austin’s connections, especially to skim Covid relief monies.

This murderous greed-head is a complete horror-show — emblematic of why the voters have deserted the shamelessly corrupt Democrats in droves. Blinken and Austin are transparently ginning-up this “crisis” in order to personally profit from arms sales by needlessly militarizing Eastern Europe against a non-existant “invasion” threat from Russia — who will act to protect the large Russian populations stranded in the former SSR’s by the disorderly breakup of the Soviet Union from being liquidated.

It’s disgusting, really.

Greed Made America A Poor Country

eand.co  |  It is impossible — flatly impossible — for the average American to make ends meet. I can tell you that as an economist, one of the only really good ones America’s ever had. Americans grew poor because their economy failed them. But a poor society can’t afford many things. Things which matter. Like democracy, truth, reason, goodness, decency.

Societies faced with sudden descents into poverty implode into authoritarianism, just the way America is. Greed broke America in this larger, truer sense.

But Americans don’t really understand it yet, I think, just how extreme and out of control greed really is in America — and how, paradoxically, it left society poor. Too poor to afford to even be a functioning country or democracy anymore, in the end, and so America’s just imploding now.

Let’s do a little math first, to prove the point that it’s impossible to make ends meet, and then I’ll teach you a little bit about how what’s normal in America is completely and totally abnormal in the rest of the entire world, more or less.

The median American income is about $35K. That is what millions of Americans earn. For a “household,” meaning in economic statistics, a family of four, it rises to about $60K.

It is impossible, and I mean impossible, to live on that level income. That is a median income more suited to a poor country than a rich one. But let’s prove it.

Rent? The average rent for an apartment was $1124 in 2021. That’s $14,000. That’s half of the average person’s income eaten up by rent alone. Now we have…all the other expenses of life. Let’s start with the other big one in America: healthcare. The average cost for a family paying for healthcare was almost exactly the same: $1152. Bang. Another $14K. That’s the average American’s entire income gone, on just rent and healthcare.

But maybe you object — my employer pays for my healthcare. Or maybe I don’t even want healthcare (LOL, you mean you can’t afford it, I get it, we’ll come back to that). Sure — it’s not going to make much difference in the end. The average American spends about $1200 “out-of-pocket” even if they’re insured by their employer — let’s call it $1500, because that’s surely an underestimate. That leaves us with maybe about 14K of income per year for the average person — and we still haven’t gotten to most bills.

You need a car in America, to get much of anywhere. You need insurance for it. The average monthly car payment is $600. Let’s call insurance another $100. That’s $700…a month. Or $8400 per year. Suddenly, we’re left with about $5K to cover everything else you need in life.

Water, electricity, gas to put in the car. Internet. A mobile phone. The average water bill’s around $100 per month — bang, another $1200 gone — and now we’re down to just about $3800. Internet and a phone? Call them another $100 per month. Now we’re down to $2600. Electricity? Another $100 per month. Now we’re down to just $1400. Average annual cost of gas to put in that car? It’s about $1100.

Now you’ve got just $300 left.

But you still have to feed and clothe yourself. Your kids. Pay for random stuff like maybe a toy here and there, a treat. I’m sure I’ve left plenty of stuff out that isn’t remotely a luxury — like paying off student loans.

The point I’m trying to make should be crystal clear by now — not least because you’re probably living it. Making ends meet in America is flatly impossible. It cannot be done. My lovely wife’s income is so low that it doesn’t even cover her expenses — car, travel, a hotel every now and then because she’s asked to work overtime regularly.

The economic effect of all this is somewhere between a joke and an embarassment. I’m subsidising this world-famous billion dollar institution which pays its “administrators” millions, because my wife isn’t even paid enough to cover her basic living expenses. Think of how ridiculous that is. The reason those administrators earn millions is because I’m effectively paying them to employ my wife — after they get a cut of overcharging Americans for operations and medicine. But this story isn’t personal — it’s social. Those economics — people can’t make ends meet — are absolutely fatal for a society.

Brandon's Karenwaffen NeoVaccinoidal Schismogenesis

theatlantic |  To understand how ideologically scrambling the Omicron wave has been, consider this: Some 2022 Democrats are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.

In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true—for most vaccinated non-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats.

But Democratic talking points about the severity of COVID and the need for commensurate caution remain valid and not only for the sick and elderly. Ironically, they are especially true for the unvaccinated—a disproportionately Republican group that has seen their hospitalization rates soar this winter to all-time highs. About 9,000 Americans are dying of COVID every week. Preliminary state data suggest that more than 90 percent of today’s deaths are still among unvaccinated people. This year, COVID is on pace to kill more than 300,000 unvaccinated people who would, quite likely, avoid death by getting two or three shots.

Read: Should I just get Omicron over with?

The messiness of Omicron data—record-high cases! but much milder illness!—has deepened our COVID Rashomon, in which different communities are telling themselves different stories about what’s going on, and coming to different conclusions about how to lead their lives. That’s true even within populations that, a year ago, were united in their desire to take the pandemic seriously and were outraged by those who refused to do so.

A virus that seems both pervasive and mild offers an opening to people who are, let’s call them, “vaxxed and done.” The attitude of the VADs is this:

For more than a year, I did everything that public-health authorities told me to do. I wore masks. I canceled vacations. I made sacrifices. I got vaccinated. I got boosted. I’m happy to get boosted again. But this virus doesn’t stop. Year over year, the infections don’t decrease. Instead, virulence for people like me is decreasing, either because the virus is changing, or because of growing population immunity, or both. Americans should stop pointlessly guilting themselves about all these cases. In the past week, daily confirmed COVID cases per capita were higher than the U.S. in Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Denmark, France, the U.K., Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and even Australia, one of the most COVID-cautious countries in the world. As the coronavirus continues its unstoppable march toward endemicity, our attitude toward the virus should follow a similar path toward stoicism. COVID is becoming something like the seasonal flu for most people who keep up with their shots, so I’m prepared to treat this like I’ve treated the flu: by basically not worrying about it and living my life normally.

It’s hard to put a number on how many people are in this group, but we have some hard data to prove that their ranks are growing. This past December, airports processed twice as many travelers compared with the same period in 2020, despite many flights being canceled. On several days, TSA-checkpoint numbers exceeded their totals from pre-pandemic 2019. This is not the picture of a country that is hunkering down for Omicron. It is the limited snapshot of a mostly vaccinated population with millions of people who are eager to move on.

I have a lot of sympathy for this group’s case, especially as it relates to schools. The risk of COVID to vaccinated teachers and even unvaccinated students seems lower than we initially thought. Meanwhile, the costs of remote schooling seem higher than we feared. The White House and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona have come out strongly in support of keeping schools open. Other Democratic leaders, like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are fighting reluctant teachers to keep school in person. Even among pro-vaccine Americans, a growing number of people seem to be saying they are done with remote school as a baseline COVID policy.

The Role Of Mutually Transgressive Abjection In The American Apocalypse

notesfromdisgraceland |  The abject hovers at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].

The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].

When the mass of the excluded increases to a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.

This makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.

Objectifying minorities has been institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white underclass in the second half of the 20^th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.

To a large extent, the Right wing has stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably together with their discontent.

Social outcasts and minorities are relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get reintegrated within the context of modern developments.

In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.

The emergence of 21^st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the modern populist abject gambit.

Strangely, I'm At Ease With The Karenwaffen Boosting Itself To Death....,

NYTimes | With Omicron sweeping the world at alarming speed, governments are scrambling to figure out how to contain it in the face of significant public pressure against reimposing harsh restrictions on daily life, curbing holiday celebrations and deepening the economic pain wrought by two years of pandemic.

A new British report shows that booster doses are less effective against Omicron than previous variants, and their effectiveness wears off faster — within 10 weeks. Vaccine makers are trying to adjust their shots to target Omicron.

In addition to concerns that a fourth shot in less than a year could actually weaken immunity, some experts said Israel’s government had still not made the most of other options, such as vaccinating more of the unvaccinated or giving a third shot to about a million eligible citizens who have so far not received one.

Along with the generally sparse knowledge about Omicron, the effect of a fourth dose against the new variant is also unknown. But the country’s medical experts point to waning immunity in those 60 or older, who were the first to receive the third shot starting in August.

Israeli researchers from the Health Ministry and several academic institutions presented data to the advisory team that made the recommendation for the fourth shot on Tuesday. The presentation, obtained by The Times, showed a doubling of the rate of infection from Delta among the 60-plus age group within four or five months of the third shot.

There was no clear indication of reduced efficacy against severe illness.

Israel has confirmed a few hundred cases of Omicron, but officials say the new variant is much more widespread, and could overtake Delta as the dominant variant in the country within two or three weeks.

Polarization And Tipping Points

scienceblog  |  As polarization has escalated in the U.S., the question of if and when that divide becomes insurmountable has become ever more pressing. In a new study, researchers have identified a tipping point, beyond which extreme polarization becomes irreversible.

The researchers employed a predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, to reveal what can happen when the country faces an attack by a foreign adversary or a global pandemic.

“Instead of uniting against a common threat,” said lead author Michael Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences, “the threat itself becomes yet another polarizing issue.”

“Polarization and Tipping Points” published Nov. 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The model allows researchers to study the effects of party identity and political intolerance on ideological extremism and partisan division.

“We found that polarization increases incrementally only up to a point,” Macy said. “Above this point, there is a sudden change in the very fabric of the institution, like the change from water to steam when the temperature exceeds the boiling point.”

The dynamics resemble what physicists call “hysteresis loops.”

“We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue,” said co-author Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center (NeST) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  “If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”

The work builds on an earlier general model Szymanski developed to study the interactions of legislators in a two-party political system. Although the model isn’t specifically tuned to distinctive practices, customs, and rules of the U.S. Congress, it was trained using data, and previous research comparing model outcomes to 30 years of Congressional voting records demonstrated strong predictive power. In one finding from that work, the model accurately predicted the shift in polarization in 28 of 30 U.S. Congresses.

American Youth Senses The Darkness Just Around That Signpost Up Ahead...,

hks.harvard  | More than half of young Americans feel democracy in the country is under threat, and over a third think they may see a second U.S. civil war within their lifetimes, according to the 42nd Harvard Youth Poll, released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) on Wednesday. 

The poll also found approval of President Biden has plummeted, and a majority of respondents are unhappy with how the president and Congress are doing their jobs. In addition, many of the respondents feel strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are worried about the threat of climate change. Half of all respondents also said they struggled with feelings of hopelessness and depression. 

The Harvard Youth Poll—which is conducted twice a year, in fall and spring, and has run for over 20 years—captured responses on these topics and others from 2,109 people between the ages of 18 and 29, from across the country. Students from the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP) organized the survey, under the supervision of John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP. 

“After turning out in record numbers in 2020, young Americans are sounding the alarm. When they look at the America they will soon inherit, they see a democracy and climate in peril—and Washington as more interested in confrontation than compromise,” Della Volpe said. “Despite this, they seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.”

Jing-Jing Shen, a Harvard College undergraduate and the HPOP student chair, said, “Right now, young Americans are confronting worries on many fronts. Concerns about our collective future—with regard to democracy, climate change, and mental health—also feel very personal.” Shen noted, however, that “young people have come to even more deeply value their communities and connections with others” in this challenging time.

The survey found a striking lack of confidence in U.S. democracy among young Americans. Only 7% view the United States as a “healthy democracy,” and 52% believe that democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.” This concern is echoed in the fact that 35% of respondents anticipate a second civil war during their lifetimes, and 25% believe that at least one state will secede.

Why Aren't These Negroes Stealing Anything Useful?

nbcnews |  More than a dozen people stormed a Louis Vuitton store in a Chicago suburb and were caught on surveillance footage grabbing bags and wiping shelves clear, according to police.

The theft took place at the store located in the Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, Illinois, on Wednesday around 3:30 p.m., police said.

The footage shows the suspects, wearing masks and hooded sweatshirts, burst into the store and spread out, filling their arms with bags and other goods before dashing out.

Police said the 14 suspects all escaped the scene in three separate vehicles waiting for them. As of Friday, the Chicago Police Department recovered one of the three vehicles allegedly used in the theft: a Dodge Charger reported stolen in October out of Chicago, Oak Brook police said. 

No injuries were reported and no weapons were displayed. 

Oak Brook police said in an update Friday that the merchandise taken was worth an estimated $120,000. 

"We are still developing and working several leads to identify the offenders involved in our incident," Oak Brook police said Friday.

 

Flash-Mobbing Negroes Are Why You Can't Have Nice Things This Christmas!!!

reuters |   Police in California on Sunday were seeking about 80 suspects who they said swarmed into a Bay Area Nordstrom department store in a coordinated robbery, ransacking as much as they could carry and fleeing in cars they had parked outside.

Three people were arrested at the scene of the "organized theft" reported shortly before 9 p.m. local time on Saturday in suburban Walnut Creek, about 15 miles (25 km) east of Oakland, police said.

"The remaining participants in this criminal mob fled from the area in cars at high speeds," Walnut Creek police said in a statement on Sunday.

The robbery followed another brazen mob-heist of high-end stores on Friday night in San Francisco's Union Square, about 25 miles (40 km) to the west.

Video posted by a KNTV television reporter showed several people running out of the store with merchandise and climbing into about 25 parked cars that ringed the building and jammed traffic on the streets.

"It was crazy for a second," said Brett Barrette, a manager of a restaurant across the street, who told KPIX-TV that the thieves wore ski masks and were armed with crow bars and weapons. "All the guests inside were getting concerned."

Police said the suspects assaulted two Nordstrom employees and pepper-sprayed another. They said they are reviewing surveillance footage in an effort to identify them.

Good News Everybody - ALL Libraries And Bookstores Are Safe From Them!!!

 

Neo-vaccinoid Neurotic Pediatrician Wants Mandate For Children

slate |  Why do you think there’s this disconnect that might exist between what a vaccinated parent is willing to do for themselves and what they might be willing to do for their kid?

One is that you feel a sense of responsibility to your children that sometimes feels harder than to yourself, because you’ve been taking risks with yourself your whole life. You’ve probably made some reasonably risky decisions in your 20s, both with respect to sexual activity and perhaps with substances—you’re used to understanding tradeoffs. With kids however, we’re much more restrictive. And we feel that we could be blamed. The dangers seem much bigger and the benefits sometimes pale in comparison.

Of course, weighing benefits and risks of vaccines is nothing new. That’s why families turn to their pediatricians for advice. For years, doctors have tried to increase vaccination rates and fight hesitancy. Did this same struggle occur with earlier vaccines?

When the varicella vaccine got approved in the ’90s, lots of parents were like, “Why should I vaccinate my kid against chicken pox? It’s a nothing big, minor illness. Everybody gets it.” And for a lot of people, that’s true. But when adults get chicken pox, it’s massively bad. Plus, some number of babies died every year of varicella infection. It wasn’t huge numbers, but they were real numbers.

And just a couple of years after we really started vaccinating kids, in the early 2000s, zero babies died of chicken pox. That’s a huge win, given that zero babies are immunized against chicken pox. You can’t get it until you’re 1 year of age. But by vaccinating children, we’ve protected everyone. And now today we have like 86 percent of eligible children vaccinated, and chicken pox has largely gone away.

You wrote about your experience as a young pediatrician, vaccinating kids with the varicella vaccine against chicken pox. How did you break through to skeptical parents?

I think it’s time and effort and it’s building up trust. I would talk about risk and benefits. In fact, this is part of what we do with everything. When parents are like, “I want an antibiotic for my kid’s ear infection,” I talk about these are the benefits of it and these are the risks.
It’s negotiation. It’s making sure people feel heard, making sure that you understand what they’re going through, that it’s not unreasonable and trying to find a solution that works.

In your writing about varicella, I noticed that you said in 2008, only about 34 percent of eligible adolescents were fully immunized. And by 2018, about 90 percent of kids have been vaccinated. That seems both great, and made me think: Are we talking about immunizing kids against COVID on a decade long timeframe? Is it going to take us 10 years?

Unless we have mandates, yeah, I think it is because, and, to be honest with you, we won’t get all the way there without mandates. Let’s be clear too. I can’t win 90 percent as a pediatrician. I just own that. It’s not going to happen. You need these to become so expected that the school system’s requiring it. The default has to be “vaccinated,” so that most people will do it.